It's often useful to interpret present conditions in the context of past events. If you find that European History has no relevance to your current situation or your future plans, then I hope that works out well for you. But please don't make any important decisions that might affect me.
Oh, and stay away from me at cocktail parties. I'm sure that a conversation that never strayed from the intricacies of video game programming would be almost instantly tiresome.
Not to mention fundamental principles of game theory that you should know, and probably basic principles of AI that you should know, and probably other things as well.
Yeah, it's defintely like that... only different. In fact, it's almost as if there's a lot of places I'd love to visit, even though I wouldn't want to live there. In fact, I'm quite happy with where I currently am--except for the part where the Louvre, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Northern Lights aren't within walking distance of my home.
Maybe you can afford to be smug, in your topologically-convenient universe, but the rest of us still have to deal with the fact that there's more to life than what we can walk to in an hour, or a day!
Or maybe I should just adopt the Buddhist approach and renounce all desire. That way, I won't be dissappointed that I never got to see Mt. Kilimanjaro up close.
Also, I really enjoyed the way you sidestepped the ethical and moral questions ("Are we within our rights, as a sovereign nation?" and "Is Saddam's evil worth going to war against?"), and chose to focus exclusively on the material question. Very subtle, and very clever.
For a moment, you almost had me believing that if I could only justify going to war over oil, then I'd be fine, since oil is the only reason for this war.
But that, of course, is simplistic and naive. And you never did answer my original question: how would you opt out of a world where Saddam is not nuking and poisoning his neighbors?
Not to mention the fact that you ignored all my other questions, too. I expect you'll also ignore this one: How much money do you spend on petrochemical byproducts and oil-based technologies, compared to how much you spend on furthering alternative technologies?
I'll bet you pay more in taxes to government-subsidized research in this area, than you pay out of your own pocket. If I'm mistaken, could you please let me know how you like your hybrid or electric automobile? I've always wanted to know what they feel like to drive. Optionally, you can give some sort of testimonial on the benefits of cycling or walking to work.
Because, of course, the primary motivation--if not in fact the only motivation--for this conflict is oil.
And because, even if there are other reasons for engaging in this conflict, any war that serves our material interests is automatically evil, regardless of its other potential and actual benefits.
Finally--and obviously!--we should take immediate steps to cut ourselves off from whatever resources currently prop up our civilization. After all, once our infrastructure collapses, we'll surely be motivated to find replacement technologies. And the urgent need for a new infrastructure will certainly motivate us to ensure that the new technologies are developed carefully, responsibly, and with a great sensitivity to their long-term impact on our society and our environment.
Overall, yours is an admirable plan. Shame on me for living in my imagination, instead of in the real world. Please rest assured that I have learned my lesson, and no longer deserve the stereotype of "blowhard chicken hawk" with my "warmongering bravado".
I pay taxes, don't I? But yes, if this war was being funded directly out of citizen's pockets, instead of through taxation, I'd consider my $1,000 well-invested.
Meanwhile, how many tax-funded services would you be willing to pay for directly? How many of these services would you be willing to opt out of, if your budget didn't allow for regular payments? How many of these services is it possible to opt out of--can you not use the highway system if you don't like how much it costs, or if you can't afford it this month?
And according to the "pay or opt out" approach, how should we handle this war with Iraq? If you don't pay, should we exile you to a parallel universe where Saddam is free to nuke or poison every neighbor he can get his hands on? Where Iraq becomes the resort location for terrorist training camps? Or, since that's not possible, should we simply put up with your lifelong complaint that it was a waste of your tax dollars?
Tell you what: let's vote on it. You vote for voluntary subscriptions to community services (instead of mandatory taxes), and I'll vote for whatever policies I think best serve my country, my community, and myself. See you at the polls!
Fair enough. All of my job-hopping was a result of walking into a very volatile job market at an entry level. At first I figured I'd start out as a temp, then earn a permanent position. After a while it became clear that most of the IT departments in my area had a very different idea about temps: they're cheaper than full-time employees, and if you purge them every six months, you never have to worry about the headhunter's fee for making them perm. Then there was the company that hired me perm, and within a year they'd cut their staff from forty down to ten, and moved from San Jose, CA, to Spokane, WA. After that was the perm job where I got laid off in one of the many layoff waves that plagued every company in our sector. They just kept reducing staff, and replacing expensive, experienced techs with cheap, entry-level monkeys.
My worst nightmare during this period was walking into an interview with a manager who didn't "get it" and would dismiss me out of hand for my job-hopping, rather than actually interviewing me and getting some idea of my actual skills, attitudes, and desires (namely, for a stable, long-term job where I'd actually have time to make meaningful contributions to the company).
With network TV, you pay for shampoo, and the shampoo manufacturer pays for your TV programs.
With "perfect" cable TV, you pay for shampoo, and you also pay for your TV programs, but at least you don't have to watch shampoo commercials.
With "typical" cable TV, you pay for shampoo, and programs, and you still get shampoo commercials.
You can't expect to fix the whole problem at once, but viewer-supported cable programming is a step in the right direction.
If this works, and becomes widely adopted, it could shift the whole paradigm for television programming. In time, viewers and cable stations would renegotiate the arrangement to be more efficient and profitable for all parties concerned.
In the mean time, threatening to cancel a show would be a great market metric. If nobody offers to save it, you probably weren't picking up any viewers for it to begin with. And that, of course, is bad business in the first place.
You would be amazed to see how many people have years of experience, but never more than 12 months at any one place. What assurances do I have that such people are not simply hopping from one contract to the next, leaving behind a trail of destruction?
No, I wouldn't be amazed at all. It's a bit naive to think that sort of work history has been anything but typical in some sectors--for years, now. If you want assurances, interview them hard, and check their references. Meanwhile, how about giving us some assurances that you're committed to long-term loyalty to your employees, and won't lay us off next Christmas to appease your new CEO, who's making arbitrary budget cuts to line his own pockets.
Fair enough. In the Hyperion example, only some of the characters were "incomprehensible"--i.e., significantly inhuman. But these were not the central characters, and in fact the central characters (who were human-like) spent most of the story trying to comprehend the inhuman characters.
I'll agree that good scifi doesn't have to have "human" characters, so long as it is, as you put it "full of humanity".
Re:Something from nothing?
on
Shapes of Time
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· Score: 2
So, in short, phenomena are "meaningless", except in the presence of an observer who assigns some arbitrary and personal "meaning" to them? The only problem with this interpretation is that it is quite unclear about which assigned "meaning" is valid. For example, Xtians and Evolutionists assign conflicting and often mutually exclusive "meanings" to the same inherently meaningless phenomena, and there's no practical way to determine which of them is "correct". Neither of them is talking about what actually is, after all--only about what it means, subjectively, to them.
Written content that follows a standard outline and organization scheme can be read out loud by text-to-voice systems. Well, even nonstandard written content can be read aloud, but it's much harder for the blind person's reader app to maintain the organizational structure and the development of ideas if the content isn't well-prepared and standards compliant.
Apparently, well-organized text content is the first and most important step to accessibility to the visually impaired.
So that would be why you'd want to design a well-written site if you need it to be accessible to blind people.
The irony is that for most web developers, such a site would be much easier and less time-consuming to design, implement, and maintain.
Because, of course, companies that focus exclusively on short-term returns have consistently demonstrated that this approach is best for their employees, customers, and long-term viability.
Reality changes too quickly...
Last time I checked, reality was actually pretty stable over the long term.
...for planning to be anything but an exercise in fantasy beyond about, say, five years.
The Apollo program was a ten-year plan, and it worked as advertised. Or are you a Moon Hoaxer?
Long-term planning goes on all the time. Good long-term planning, less often. But that doesn't make the idea of long-term planning foolish in every case.
STS and ISS aren't basic scientific research...
I don't really know enough about these projects, or what you mean by "basic scientific research", to respond to this, except to say that I expect that they're more likely infrastructure--a foundation on which basic research can be built. They could also, in the context of a long-term plan, be effective practice for even more extreme endeavors. Whether or not that qualifies as your "basic research", I don't know.
...they're massively expensive engineering and operational efforts.
The best things in life may be free, but a lot of the really good stuff is pretty expensive. The Hoover Dam. The MRI scanner. The Internet. &c. Just because it's expensive, that doesn't mean it's useless. Although, as I did point out, the current projects all seem pretty aimless, and I'd rather not see the money spent at all, than to keep spending it they way we are right now. Meanwhile, it's been pointed out numerous times that there's no real shortage of resources. In that sense, these projects aren't very expensive at all.
NASA is never going to do anything with space but use it as a taxpayer funded playground to conduct a small number of experiments. They have no motivation to do anything that would actually make space useful...
Who's this "they" you're talking about? Do you know any NASA employees? Have you actually spoken to them about their work, and why they do it, and what they hope for from the future? I'll bet you'd discover that the vast majority of NASA personnel, from the director level on down to the receptionists, are highly motivated to do useful things "with space". Certainly all the NASA employees I've met are not tiresome bureaucratic drones whose imaginations are so stunted that they can't think of anything better to do than waste your money. You don't have a monopoly on wisdom, common sense, professionalism, or enthusiasm, you know. And by the same token, isn't it a bit naive to expect that NASA should be magically free of PHBs and bureaucracy, simply because your romantic notion of "space" is offended by such things?
All this adds up to: "If you put research in the private sector, anything that does not have an obvious, short-term ROI gets abandoned".
And note that this ROI is relevant only to the private company conducting the research. The benefits to anybody besides stockholders and employees (if such benefits really exist) are completely accidental. Most of them, in fact, are probably viewed as "expenses" that should be reduced.
Our current space program missions should all be planned stepping stones on the way to asteroid mining, colonization of the solar system, and beyond... this aimless thrashing in Earth orbit is pointless. They should either get serious about some long-term planning, or skip it altogether and throw the money at climate research, or alternative power, or oceanic exploration, or whatever.
Every coder without a sense of humor - and that is a lot of them...
"Programmers don't have a sense of humor."
"Yes they do! Witness the popularity of Monty Python among that set!"
"Exactly!"
"What, you're saying Monty Python isn't funny?"
"No, I'm just saying that programmers are so humor-deficient that they need to be (almost literally!) beaten about the head with extreme amounts of funny--and a laugh track to clue them in to the true significance of the sensation they're experiencing."
That's true, but now that Hollywood has run out of original stories, the mean time between remakes of the same old shit will only get shorter and shorter. We're waaay overdue for another attempt at the "pregnant Arnold" concept.
Concede my capacity as a moral agent? What are you talking about?
It seems as though you've gotten two different issues confused: legal insanity, which is an artifice devised to set some sort of coherent boundaries on the criminal justice system; and mental/emotional therapy, which is an array of methods for helping people cope--not with moral quandries, but actual pathologies.
I thought this conversation was about therapy... which, you say, "is crap". I hope that works out well for you. My own experience with the profession is that it can be rigorous, honest, properly ethical, and scientifically sound. Your mileage, obviuously, has varied. But your continued ranting will do little to change my mind about the value of the second opinion, the expert opinion, the outside viewpoint... Especially when it comes to questions of perception--you can't seriously believe that an unhealthy mind is best qualified to judge its own health, can you?
Also, can we dispense with the whole "'normalcy' is just whatever society forces on you" argument? It's thoroughly incompatible with your idea of an independent moral framework, by which any individual's actions may be correctly judged as right or wrong.
Re:What about bitter/loner Sims?
on
Virtual Simerica
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· Score: 2
I do not dispute what you have said. But it's a two-way street. Loners have a lot invested in rejecting society, and may find it satisfying to imagine that society hates them more than it actually does. Except in extremis, society seems to operate more with a callous disregard for whatever doesn't fit, than with a conscious and directed hatred. It seems as if the Unabomber wasn't hated so much as ignored... until he started killing people, that is.
"While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business..."
Since, you know, Salon's core business has nothing at all to do with trading stock.
It's clear that Salon's problem all along has been that they saw their magazine as a vehicle to valuate their stock, rather than as a good or service to be exchanged for fair value. It's also clear that they still believe this is the case.
Slashdot Mirror
It's often useful to interpret present conditions in the context of past events. If you find that European History has no relevance to your current situation or your future plans, then I hope that works out well for you. But please don't make any important decisions that might affect me.
Oh, and stay away from me at cocktail parties. I'm sure that a conversation that never strayed from the intricacies of video game programming would be almost instantly tiresome.
Not to mention fundamental principles of game theory that you should know, and probably basic principles of AI that you should know, and probably other things as well.
Yeah, it's defintely like that... only different. In fact, it's almost as if there's a lot of places I'd love to visit, even though I wouldn't want to live there. In fact, I'm quite happy with where I currently am--except for the part where the Louvre, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Northern Lights aren't within walking distance of my home.
Maybe you can afford to be smug, in your topologically-convenient universe, but the rest of us still have to deal with the fact that there's more to life than what we can walk to in an hour, or a day!
Or maybe I should just adopt the Buddhist approach and renounce all desire. That way, I won't be dissappointed that I never got to see Mt. Kilimanjaro up close.
Also, I really enjoyed the way you sidestepped the ethical and moral questions ("Are we within our rights, as a sovereign nation?" and "Is Saddam's evil worth going to war against?"), and chose to focus exclusively on the material question. Very subtle, and very clever.
For a moment, you almost had me believing that if I could only justify going to war over oil, then I'd be fine, since oil is the only reason for this war.
But that, of course, is simplistic and naive. And you never did answer my original question: how would you opt out of a world where Saddam is not nuking and poisoning his neighbors?
Not to mention the fact that you ignored all my other questions, too. I expect you'll also ignore this one: How much money do you spend on petrochemical byproducts and oil-based technologies, compared to how much you spend on furthering alternative technologies?
I'll bet you pay more in taxes to government-subsidized research in this area, than you pay out of your own pocket. If I'm mistaken, could you please let me know how you like your hybrid or electric automobile? I've always wanted to know what they feel like to drive. Optionally, you can give some sort of testimonial on the benefits of cycling or walking to work.
Because, of course, the primary motivation--if not in fact the only motivation--for this conflict is oil.
And because, even if there are other reasons for engaging in this conflict, any war that serves our material interests is automatically evil, regardless of its other potential and actual benefits.
Finally--and obviously!--we should take immediate steps to cut ourselves off from whatever resources currently prop up our civilization. After all, once our infrastructure collapses, we'll surely be motivated to find replacement technologies. And the urgent need for a new infrastructure will certainly motivate us to ensure that the new technologies are developed carefully, responsibly, and with a great sensitivity to their long-term impact on our society and our environment.
Overall, yours is an admirable plan. Shame on me for living in my imagination, instead of in the real world. Please rest assured that I have learned my lesson, and no longer deserve the stereotype of "blowhard chicken hawk" with my "warmongering bravado".
I pay taxes, don't I? But yes, if this war was being funded directly out of citizen's pockets, instead of through taxation, I'd consider my $1,000 well-invested.
Meanwhile, how many tax-funded services would you be willing to pay for directly? How many of these services would you be willing to opt out of, if your budget didn't allow for regular payments? How many of these services is it possible to opt out of--can you not use the highway system if you don't like how much it costs, or if you can't afford it this month?
And according to the "pay or opt out" approach, how should we handle this war with Iraq? If you don't pay, should we exile you to a parallel universe where Saddam is free to nuke or poison every neighbor he can get his hands on? Where Iraq becomes the resort location for terrorist training camps? Or, since that's not possible, should we simply put up with your lifelong complaint that it was a waste of your tax dollars?
Tell you what: let's vote on it. You vote for voluntary subscriptions to community services (instead of mandatory taxes), and I'll vote for whatever policies I think best serve my country, my community, and myself. See you at the polls!
I wonder what drugs Bach was on when he wrote "The Well-Tempered Clavier"...
Seven levels, indeed.
Fair enough. All of my job-hopping was a result of walking into a very volatile job market at an entry level. At first I figured I'd start out as a temp, then earn a permanent position. After a while it became clear that most of the IT departments in my area had a very different idea about temps: they're cheaper than full-time employees, and if you purge them every six months, you never have to worry about the headhunter's fee for making them perm. Then there was the company that hired me perm, and within a year they'd cut their staff from forty down to ten, and moved from San Jose, CA, to Spokane, WA. After that was the perm job where I got laid off in one of the many layoff waves that plagued every company in our sector. They just kept reducing staff, and replacing expensive, experienced techs with cheap, entry-level monkeys.
My worst nightmare during this period was walking into an interview with a manager who didn't "get it" and would dismiss me out of hand for my job-hopping, rather than actually interviewing me and getting some idea of my actual skills, attitudes, and desires (namely, for a stable, long-term job where I'd actually have time to make meaningful contributions to the company).
Well, the cable system has some obvious flaws...
With network TV, you pay for shampoo, and the shampoo manufacturer pays for your TV programs.
With "perfect" cable TV, you pay for shampoo, and you also pay for your TV programs, but at least you don't have to watch shampoo commercials.
With "typical" cable TV, you pay for shampoo, and programs, and you still get shampoo commercials.
You can't expect to fix the whole problem at once, but viewer-supported cable programming is a step in the right direction.
If this works, and becomes widely adopted, it could shift the whole paradigm for television programming. In time, viewers and cable stations would renegotiate the arrangement to be more efficient and profitable for all parties concerned.
In the mean time, threatening to cancel a show would be a great market metric. If nobody offers to save it, you probably weren't picking up any viewers for it to begin with. And that, of course, is bad business in the first place.
No, I wouldn't be amazed at all. It's a bit naive to think that sort of work history has been anything but typical in some sectors--for years, now. If you want assurances, interview them hard, and check their references. Meanwhile, how about giving us some assurances that you're committed to long-term loyalty to your employees, and won't lay us off next Christmas to appease your new CEO, who's making arbitrary budget cuts to line his own pockets.
Fair enough. In the Hyperion example, only some of the characters were "incomprehensible"--i.e., significantly inhuman. But these were not the central characters, and in fact the central characters (who were human-like) spent most of the story trying to comprehend the inhuman characters.
I'll agree that good scifi doesn't have to have "human" characters, so long as it is, as you put it "full of humanity".
So, in short, phenomena are "meaningless", except in the presence of an observer who assigns some arbitrary and personal "meaning" to them? The only problem with this interpretation is that it is quite unclear about which assigned "meaning" is valid. For example, Xtians and Evolutionists assign conflicting and often mutually exclusive "meanings" to the same inherently meaningless phenomena, and there's no practical way to determine which of them is "correct". Neither of them is talking about what actually is, after all--only about what it means, subjectively, to them.
Written content that follows a standard outline and organization scheme can be read out loud by text-to-voice systems. Well, even nonstandard written content can be read aloud, but it's much harder for the blind person's reader app to maintain the organizational structure and the development of ideas if the content isn't well-prepared and standards compliant.
Apparently, well-organized text content is the first and most important step to accessibility to the visually impaired.
So that would be why you'd want to design a well-written site if you need it to be accessible to blind people.
The irony is that for most web developers, such a site would be much easier and less time-consuming to design, implement, and maintain.
"Dystopia", actually.
Can you give any examples of good SF where the characters are "mostly incomprehensible"?
Because, of course, companies that focus exclusively on short-term returns have consistently demonstrated that this approach is best for their employees, customers, and long-term viability.
Reality changes too quickly...
Last time I checked, reality was actually pretty stable over the long term.
The Apollo program was a ten-year plan, and it worked as advertised. Or are you a Moon Hoaxer?
Long-term planning goes on all the time. Good long-term planning, less often. But that doesn't make the idea of long-term planning foolish in every case.
STS and ISS aren't basic scientific research...
I don't really know enough about these projects, or what you mean by "basic scientific research", to respond to this, except to say that I expect that they're more likely infrastructure--a foundation on which basic research can be built. They could also, in the context of a long-term plan, be effective practice for even more extreme endeavors. Whether or not that qualifies as your "basic research", I don't know.
The best things in life may be free, but a lot of the really good stuff is pretty expensive. The Hoover Dam. The MRI scanner. The Internet. &c. Just because it's expensive, that doesn't mean it's useless. Although, as I did point out, the current projects all seem pretty aimless, and I'd rather not see the money spent at all, than to keep spending it they way we are right now. Meanwhile, it's been pointed out numerous times that there's no real shortage of resources. In that sense, these projects aren't very expensive at all.
Who's this "they" you're talking about? Do you know any NASA employees? Have you actually spoken to them about their work, and why they do it, and what they hope for from the future? I'll bet you'd discover that the vast majority of NASA personnel, from the director level on down to the receptionists, are highly motivated to do useful things "with space". Certainly all the NASA employees I've met are not tiresome bureaucratic drones whose imaginations are so stunted that they can't think of anything better to do than waste your money. You don't have a monopoly on wisdom, common sense, professionalism, or enthusiasm, you know. And by the same token, isn't it a bit naive to expect that NASA should be magically free of PHBs and bureaucracy, simply because your romantic notion of "space" is offended by such things?
And note that this ROI is relevant only to the private company conducting the research. The benefits to anybody besides stockholders and employees (if such benefits really exist) are completely accidental. Most of them, in fact, are probably viewed as "expenses" that should be reduced.
Our current space program missions should all be planned stepping stones on the way to asteroid mining, colonization of the solar system, and beyond... this aimless thrashing in Earth orbit is pointless. They should either get serious about some long-term planning, or skip it altogether and throw the money at climate research, or alternative power, or oceanic exploration, or whatever.
"Programmers don't have a sense of humor."
"Yes they do! Witness the popularity of Monty Python among that set!"
"Exactly!"
"What, you're saying Monty Python isn't funny?"
"No, I'm just saying that programmers are so humor-deficient that they need to be (almost literally!) beaten about the head with extreme amounts of funny--and a laugh track to clue them in to the true significance of the sensation they're experiencing."
". . . "
"Shut up, you off-topic wankers!"
"Done and done!"
That's true, but now that Hollywood has run out of original stories, the mean time between remakes of the same old shit will only get shorter and shorter. We're waaay overdue for another attempt at the "pregnant Arnold" concept.
A film studio exec, huh? That just means he sucks cock professionally, not personally.
Clever. I will stand down, now :)
Concede my capacity as a moral agent? What are you talking about?
It seems as though you've gotten two different issues confused: legal insanity, which is an artifice devised to set some sort of coherent boundaries on the criminal justice system; and mental/emotional therapy, which is an array of methods for helping people cope--not with moral quandries, but actual pathologies.
I thought this conversation was about therapy... which, you say, "is crap". I hope that works out well for you. My own experience with the profession is that it can be rigorous, honest, properly ethical, and scientifically sound. Your mileage, obviuously, has varied. But your continued ranting will do little to change my mind about the value of the second opinion, the expert opinion, the outside viewpoint... Especially when it comes to questions of perception--you can't seriously believe that an unhealthy mind is best qualified to judge its own health, can you?
Also, can we dispense with the whole "'normalcy' is just whatever society forces on you" argument? It's thoroughly incompatible with your idea of an independent moral framework, by which any individual's actions may be correctly judged as right or wrong.
I do not dispute what you have said. But it's a two-way street. Loners have a lot invested in rejecting society, and may find it satisfying to imagine that society hates them more than it actually does. Except in extremis, society seems to operate more with a callous disregard for whatever doesn't fit, than with a conscious and directed hatred. It seems as if the Unabomber wasn't hated so much as ignored... until he started killing people, that is.
Since, you know, Salon's core business has nothing at all to do with trading stock.
It's clear that Salon's problem all along has been that they saw their magazine as a vehicle to valuate their stock, rather than as a good or service to be exchanged for fair value. It's also clear that they still believe this is the case.