To be fair there is an actual correlation between the two since storing information (increasing Shannon entropy) does generally require making something physically more ordered (decreasing thermodynamic entropy) so its not quite as silly as it seems but the relationship is probably far weaker than generally assumed and may not exist at all outside of deliberate actions by technologically advanced and intelligent species like us. You cpuld argue that building houses and cities decrease thermodynanic entropy as well but the impact on the entropy of the universe is miniscule. We really dont have any evidence that the link between these kinds of entropy exist further than hard disk platters and optical disks. It is useful to imagine it does and apply information theory to our observations of other things but to easily do we tend to jump from "this is a practically useful metaphor" to "this is how the universe actually behaves" without realising what a massive leap that really is.
You want sentencing influenced by a notoriously inaccurate score from a database that gives the wrong person with extreme regularity run by private corporations who have proven over and over that they have absolutely zero incentive to improve anything ? Seriously. One study suggested as many as 1 in 5 Americans have been blacklisted for debts committed by a completely different person.
We've been doing it over 2000 years. What do you think things like 'character witnesses' and 'mitigating circumstances' are for ? Courts consider those exactly to allow for appropriate compassion in sentencing.
Three of the most egregious political scandals in modern history happened under republican presidents. Nixon saw more scandals than you've seen pornhub videos. Reagan had some truly terrible ones - Iran Contra was nothing short of committing high treason against the united states and he only escaped the death penalty by virtue of a willing fallguy (Oliver North). Shrub got your Afghanistan and Iraq which is an ongoing travesty that has cost well over 6 trillion dollars so far (almost half the entire US debt was spent on those wars in other words).
That's just a fact. Nobody is saying democrats are perfect or never have scandals but comparitively speaking, they've simply not been as egregious or on the same scale. Clinton got his dick sucked sure, but nobody died. Obama's IRS targetted right-wing groups - an action that makes perfect sense actually, if you're going to profile organisations like to cheat on their taxes then organisations opposed to paying taxes would be at the top of the list by virtue of their own public statements - and inconvenienced a lot of people (about 20% as much as racial profiling tends to inconvenience blacks and muslims - yet that is roundly supported by the same people who opposed this - in fact many of the victims of the IRS scandal are STILL vocally supportive of racial profiling) - it was bad, but, and this is important - nobody died.
The worst scandal you can actually point at a democrat in the last hundred years actually is probably Obama's drone program, which is in fact killing lots of innocent people. But the conservatives never take him to task over that since they started the program and sure as hell want to continue it next time they have the whitehouse. The criticism for that has largely come from the left actually. That has killed some people - lets be extremely generous and say 2000 or so. That's less than one tenth of what Nixon's Vietnam scandal killed, less than one fifteenth of what Reagan killed with the Iran Contra scandal (a number that is STILL busy going up) and about 1% of what Shrub killed with his bogus wars.
Basic relativity. Time and Space are two aspects of the same one thing - spacetime. Nothing has JUST a position and direction in space, it also has a direction in time. In Newtonian physics you have a point in space. In Einsteinian physics you have an event in space time. It's not just a position but also a moment.
Some of the nicest titties are pearshaped, but I've always been partial to teardrop shaped myself. So tits-up and pearshaped sounds like a pretty good state of affairs to me.
> so why people keep mixing several theories together, is beyond me
I can tell you that. It's because the only difference between the written down formula for Shannon Entropy and the written down formula for thermodynamic entropy is a single - sign. Which led people to believe that the one is merely an inversion of the other. Unfortunately this is an extremely silly conclusion - because although the formulas look the same on paper, they aren't representing the same things. The symbols re the same - but they are not symbols for the same things. The conflation of Shannon entropy with Thermodynamic Entropy is only marginally less silly than somebody arguing that carbon dioxide is 2 Oxygen atoms travelling at light speed because C is also the symbol for the speed of light.
The only OS that has an asshole correlation is netBSD. Thats because only a true dyed in the wool asshole could tollerate Theo De Raadt. Windows is also developed by complete assholes but they are assholes to their users not with their users.
If you're going to say that - well Britain ruled Normandy for centuries as well. That was a tit-for-tat back and forth conquest between relatively equally military-powered and wealthy nations. It was idiotic but it wasn't unfair in the same way colonialism was. Evidenced by the fact that the hundred years war took 103 years to finish without producing a clear winner - during which time Normandy passed between British and French rule dozens of times.
>You should make reparations for all perceived and actual harm done by them, according to your ideology, this is fair.
I am, in fact, doing just that - and petitioning my government to extract more, including from those of my peers who think that inheriting from the atrocities our ancestors committed should not mean they ought to return at least some of the stolen goods and money to those it was stolen from.
Most people don't blame today's Germany for the holocaust. Because Germany made a serious effort to right the wrong. They punished the surviving guilty - as recently as 2007 they handed a suspected NAZI collaborator over to Israel for trial. There can't be very many still alive now though, but each one that was found was tried and punished. They paid reparations... in fact they are STILL paying reparations. They apologised. They fundamentally structured their society to make it impossible for it to ever happen again - completely changing many things to achieve this.
They are the one place - that handled this the RIGHT way. That's why they are basically forgiven. Every other beneficiary of atrocity tried to shirk responsibility. Failed to pay reparations, failed to restructure their society - denies responsibility. Thats why nobody else gets forgiven.
>Speaking as someone who was born in Canada and now lives in the US, why would we want citizenship in Britain?
Nobody said you had to TAKE it. Only that you should be able to get it if you want it. That's actually the counterargument to those who panic. The countries that do this do not get a major influx. They can count the number of requests a year on their fingers. And the better the former colony is doing, the fewer they get from it. It's right and just for the option to exist, but few people would use it.
The problem with your argument is that it's a myth disputed by empirical fact. Fact: immigrants are overwhelmingly a boon for an economy and create far more jobs than they take. Freeloaders are, in fact, largely a myth anyway - people tend to want to do something with their lives. They don't immigrate to get welfare, they immigrate to get the opportunity to do more with their lives (oftentimes - by getting to have lives when where they are coming from is a place you can be bombed easily).
The freeloader myth is simply not based in fact. There may be some - but they are so extraordinarily rare in any population that they simply don't affect the numbers. Look at the current cases in the USA where states made welfare dependent on drug tests - all fueled by the fear of free-loaders. Interestingly their stupidity has given us empirical numbers to test their theory against now. Kansas instituted the policy quite recently. So far they have tested 300 people. Zero positive results. Not one person tested was using drugs. But that's a smallish number. Florida has been doing it a lot longer, let's see what their findings look like. Just over 2800 people tested so far. Number of positive tests ? 11.
11 out of 3000 is just not statistically significant.
>In which country did Britain kill 70% of women and 90% of children a few decades post WW2?
You can't read. It happened a few decades PRIOR to world war 2. The country was South Africa and the genocide happened in the Boer war concentration camps (Hitler stole that idea from Kitchener). In all it is estimated that some 27000 women and children were killed - out of a total population of about 50000, which consisted of 70% of the women and about 90% of the children (who obviously had a higher fatality rate in those atrocious conditions). Many estimates suggest that, had the camps never happened, there would be around 200-million Afrikaners today. There are 5 million.
Oh there is plenty to be said about them. Like that they are just an excuse for atrocity and that the single best thing we can do to improve humanity's future is to utterly eradicate the concept of culture from our existence.
>The history of species has been that of violence and war. Horrible, but true.
Indeed it was. What I dispute is the assumption that this history must inevitably be it's future as well. I think we can do better than we did before. History only repeats itself in two cases - when people are ignorant of it and when people believe it's inevitable. The point of knowing history is not to INSIST it repeats, it's to PREVENT it from repeating.
>Does Spain offer most of latin and south America citizenship? Does Japan offer Korean's citizenship? Does Portugal offer Brazilian's citizenship?
Yes to all. And they aren't overwhelmed. It turns out most people don't want to leave their homes - especially for a place on the other side of the world. They get maybe 5 or 6 requests a year. Japan actually gets a bit more because they also offer automatic citizenship to anybody with Japanese ancestry no matter how many generations ago that was. Clearly they feel you can be REWARDED for who your ancestors were. Kind of goes against your beliefs I guess.
>You have a rather arbitrary definition of end of colonialism. Nothing arbitrary about it. You can't say colonialism ended prior to the last colony that wanted independence getting it. The period between world war 2 and 1994 basically consisted of the former colonies fighting decades-long wars of independence and gradually one by one getting it. Not a single one of them had their countries handed back to them voluntarily. They all had to fight bloody and brutal wars against the occupations to end it. The last one to succeed was in 1994.
Yes, that event ended within living memory. The last British colony didn't become independent until 1994 you ignorant fuck.
It also is not about blaming anybody. It's not a matter of whose responsible. It's about fixing the problem. It's about a moral duty to help fix the problem when you inherited the profits from causing it. Not about blaming you for the cause. To reuse my own analogy: it's not accusing you of arson, it's asking you to help put the fire out because your grandfather stole all the extinguishers and you inherited them.
>Sins of the fathers much? It's unreasonable to expect that someone bears responsibility for actions they aren't willingly complicit with, let alone events before their lifetime.
Again - it's not about responsibility. You keep arguing that you didn't start the fire - but nobody is accusing you. We just asked that you helped put it out. If there is ever a time to worry about whether any of the arsonists are still alive and can be charged, that time won't come until AFTER we stop the fire. The fire is still burning. People are still dying. Nobody is blaming you for starting it, but since you inherited a lot of profit from the arson, and all the stolen fire extinguishers, - is it so much to ask that you help put it out ?
>Nah that's like the "reparations" garbage. You can't hold people responsible for the sins of their ancestors. Normal people who haven't been brainwashed into being guilty for simply being alive will reject that nonsense.
Nobody is holding anybody "responsible". We know YOU didn't start the fire. We aren't suggesting YOU be charged with arson. Hell we don't want anybody charged. We just asked you to help us put the fire out because it's still burning.
>But not after the conquered country gains independence.
At most you can say - not for those born more than a given number of generations AFTER that happens. The gaining of independence does not undo the conquest, it merely ends it.
It's not a matter of whose to blame. You keep arguing that you shouldn't be charged with arson because it was your great grandfather who set the fire. But nobody is suggesting you be charged. We just asked you to help put the fire out because it's still fucking burning down the house around us all.
A couple of not-very-original insults without even a bit of wit to make them funny - absolutely no counter-argument, evidence or logical response.
A textbook example of an ad hominem attack. I take it you're a rightwing conservative based on the phrases you chose and thought were insulting. Which is quite ironic because frankly conservatives tend to be ignorant and idiotic. The only really interesting thing you said about me was to question my intelligence which, interestingly, is exactly what I feel about conservatives. The difference is - I respond with facts, statistics, science and empirical evidence in a framework of logical argument. Your response ends at the insult.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair there is an actual correlation between the two since storing information (increasing Shannon entropy) does generally require making something physically more ordered (decreasing thermodynamic entropy) so its not quite as silly as it seems but the relationship is probably far weaker than generally assumed and may not exist at all outside of deliberate actions by technologically advanced and intelligent species like us.
You cpuld argue that building houses and cities decrease thermodynanic entropy as well but the impact on the entropy of the universe is miniscule.
We really dont have any evidence that the link between these kinds of entropy exist further than hard disk platters and optical disks. It is useful to imagine it does and apply information theory to our observations of other things but to easily do we tend to jump from "this is a practically useful metaphor" to "this is how the universe actually behaves" without realising what a massive leap that really is.
You want sentencing influenced by a notoriously inaccurate score from a database that gives the wrong person with extreme regularity run by private corporations who have proven over and over that they have absolutely zero incentive to improve anything ? Seriously. One study suggested as many as 1 in 5 Americans have been blacklisted for debts committed by a completely different person.
We've been doing it over 2000 years. What do you think things like 'character witnesses' and 'mitigating circumstances' are for ? Courts consider those exactly to allow for appropriate compassion in sentencing.
Criminal.gender = criminal.birthgender XOR criminal.identifiedgender
Three of the most egregious political scandals in modern history happened under republican presidents. Nixon saw more scandals than you've seen pornhub videos. Reagan had some truly terrible ones - Iran Contra was nothing short of committing high treason against the united states and he only escaped the death penalty by virtue of a willing fallguy (Oliver North). Shrub got your Afghanistan and Iraq which is an ongoing travesty that has cost well over 6 trillion dollars so far (almost half the entire US debt was spent on those wars in other words).
That's just a fact. Nobody is saying democrats are perfect or never have scandals but comparitively speaking, they've simply not been as egregious or on the same scale. Clinton got his dick sucked sure, but nobody died. Obama's IRS targetted right-wing groups - an action that makes perfect sense actually, if you're going to profile organisations like to cheat on their taxes then organisations opposed to paying taxes would be at the top of the list by virtue of their own public statements - and inconvenienced a lot of people (about 20% as much as racial profiling tends to inconvenience blacks and muslims - yet that is roundly supported by the same people who opposed this - in fact many of the victims of the IRS scandal are STILL vocally supportive of racial profiling) - it was bad, but, and this is important - nobody died.
The worst scandal you can actually point at a democrat in the last hundred years actually is probably Obama's drone program, which is in fact killing lots of innocent people. But the conservatives never take him to task over that since they started the program and sure as hell want to continue it next time they have the whitehouse. The criticism for that has largely come from the left actually. That has killed some people - lets be extremely generous and say 2000 or so. That's less than one tenth of what Nixon's Vietnam scandal killed, less than one fifteenth of what Reagan killed with the Iran Contra scandal (a number that is STILL busy going up) and about 1% of what Shrub killed with his bogus wars.
Yeah... that's gonna suck for legitimate maintenance.
Basic relativity. Time and Space are two aspects of the same one thing - spacetime. Nothing has JUST a position and direction in space, it also has a direction in time. In Newtonian physics you have a point in space. In Einsteinian physics you have an event in space time. It's not just a position but also a moment.
Some of the nicest titties are pearshaped, but I've always been partial to teardrop shaped myself. So tits-up and pearshaped sounds like a pretty good state of affairs to me.
> so why people keep mixing several theories together, is beyond me
I can tell you that. It's because the only difference between the written down formula for Shannon Entropy and the written down formula for thermodynamic entropy is a single - sign. Which led people to believe that the one is merely an inversion of the other.
Unfortunately this is an extremely silly conclusion - because although the formulas look the same on paper, they aren't representing the same things. The symbols re the same - but they are not symbols for the same things.
The conflation of Shannon entropy with Thermodynamic Entropy is only marginally less silly than somebody arguing that carbon dioxide is 2 Oxygen atoms travelling at light speed because C is also the symbol for the speed of light.
>I prefer the idea that time is suppository shaped.
Actually... this is more like buttplug shaped.
The only OS that has an asshole correlation is netBSD. Thats because only a true dyed in the wool asshole could tollerate Theo De Raadt. Windows is also developed by complete assholes but they are assholes to their users not with their users.
If you're going to say that - well Britain ruled Normandy for centuries as well. That was a tit-for-tat back and forth conquest between relatively equally military-powered and wealthy nations. It was idiotic but it wasn't unfair in the same way colonialism was. Evidenced by the fact that the hundred years war took 103 years to finish without producing a clear winner - during which time Normandy passed between British and French rule dozens of times.
>You should make reparations for all perceived and actual harm done by them, according to your ideology, this is fair.
I am, in fact, doing just that - and petitioning my government to extract more, including from those of my peers who think that inheriting from the atrocities our ancestors committed should not mean they ought to return at least some of the stolen goods and money to those it was stolen from.
Most people don't blame today's Germany for the holocaust. Because Germany made a serious effort to right the wrong. They punished the surviving guilty - as recently as 2007 they handed a suspected NAZI collaborator over to Israel for trial. There can't be very many still alive now though, but each one that was found was tried and punished. They paid reparations... in fact they are STILL paying reparations. They apologised. They fundamentally structured their society to make it impossible for it to ever happen again - completely changing many things to achieve this.
They are the one place - that handled this the RIGHT way. That's why they are basically forgiven. Every other beneficiary of atrocity tried to shirk responsibility. Failed to pay reparations, failed to restructure their society - denies responsibility. Thats why nobody else gets forgiven.
>Speaking as someone who was born in Canada and now lives in the US, why would we want citizenship in Britain?
Nobody said you had to TAKE it. Only that you should be able to get it if you want it. That's actually the counterargument to those who panic. The countries that do this do not get a major influx. They can count the number of requests a year on their fingers. And the better the former colony is doing, the fewer they get from it. It's right and just for the option to exist, but few people would use it.
The problem with your argument is that it's a myth disputed by empirical fact. Fact: immigrants are overwhelmingly a boon for an economy and create far more jobs than they take. Freeloaders are, in fact, largely a myth anyway - people tend to want to do something with their lives. They don't immigrate to get welfare, they immigrate to get the opportunity to do more with their lives (oftentimes - by getting to have lives when where they are coming from is a place you can be bombed easily).
The freeloader myth is simply not based in fact. There may be some - but they are so extraordinarily rare in any population that they simply don't affect the numbers. Look at the current cases in the USA where states made welfare dependent on drug tests - all fueled by the fear of free-loaders. Interestingly their stupidity has given us empirical numbers to test their theory against now.
Kansas instituted the policy quite recently. So far they have tested 300 people. Zero positive results. Not one person tested was using drugs.
But that's a smallish number. Florida has been doing it a lot longer, let's see what their findings look like. Just over 2800 people tested so far. Number of positive tests ? 11.
11 out of 3000 is just not statistically significant.
>In which country did Britain kill 70% of women and 90% of children a few decades post WW2?
You can't read. It happened a few decades PRIOR to world war 2. The country was South Africa and the genocide happened in the Boer war concentration camps (Hitler stole that idea from Kitchener). In all it is estimated that some 27000 women and children were killed - out of a total population of about 50000, which consisted of 70% of the women and about 90% of the children (who obviously had a higher fatality rate in those atrocious conditions). Many estimates suggest that, had the camps never happened, there would be around 200-million Afrikaners today. There are 5 million.
>There is something to be said about cultures.
Oh there is plenty to be said about them. Like that they are just an excuse for atrocity and that the single best thing we can do to improve humanity's future is to utterly eradicate the concept of culture from our existence.
>The history of species has been that of violence and war. Horrible, but true.
Indeed it was. What I dispute is the assumption that this history must inevitably be it's future as well. I think we can do better than we did before. History only repeats itself in two cases - when people are ignorant of it and when people believe it's inevitable. The point of knowing history is not to INSIST it repeats, it's to PREVENT it from repeating.
>Does Spain offer most of latin and south America citizenship? Does Japan offer Korean's citizenship? Does Portugal offer Brazilian's citizenship?
Yes to all. And they aren't overwhelmed. It turns out most people don't want to leave their homes - especially for a place on the other side of the world. They get maybe 5 or 6 requests a year. Japan actually gets a bit more because they also offer automatic citizenship to anybody with Japanese ancestry no matter how many generations ago that was. Clearly they feel you can be REWARDED for who your ancestors were. Kind of goes against your beliefs I guess.
>You have a rather arbitrary definition of end of colonialism.
Nothing arbitrary about it. You can't say colonialism ended prior to the last colony that wanted independence getting it. The period between world war 2 and 1994 basically consisted of the former colonies fighting decades-long wars of independence and gradually one by one getting it. Not a single one of them had their countries handed back to them voluntarily. They all had to fight bloody and brutal wars against the occupations to end it. The last one to succeed was in 1994.
Yes, that event ended within living memory. The last British colony didn't become independent until 1994 you ignorant fuck.
It also is not about blaming anybody. It's not a matter of whose responsible. It's about fixing the problem. It's about a moral duty to help fix the problem when you inherited the profits from causing it. Not about blaming you for the cause. To reuse my own analogy: it's not accusing you of arson, it's asking you to help put the fire out because your grandfather stole all the extinguishers and you inherited them.
>Sins of the fathers much? It's unreasonable to expect that someone bears responsibility for actions they aren't willingly complicit with, let alone events before their lifetime.
Again - it's not about responsibility. You keep arguing that you didn't start the fire - but nobody is accusing you. We just asked that you helped put it out. If there is ever a time to worry about whether any of the arsonists are still alive and can be charged, that time won't come until AFTER we stop the fire. The fire is still burning. People are still dying. Nobody is blaming you for starting it, but since you inherited a lot of profit from the arson, and all the stolen fire extinguishers, - is it so much to ask that you help put it out ?
>Imagine me like the one lady Chicken in "Chicken Run" saying: "But I don't want to be a British citizen!"
So don't be. Nobody is saying you have to ACCEPT citizenship. Only that they shouldn't be allowed to deny it if you ask.
>Nah that's like the "reparations" garbage. You can't hold people responsible for the sins of their ancestors. Normal people who haven't been brainwashed into being guilty for simply being alive will reject that nonsense.
Nobody is holding anybody "responsible". We know YOU didn't start the fire. We aren't suggesting YOU be charged with arson. Hell we don't want anybody charged. We just asked you to help us put the fire out because it's still burning.
>But not after the conquered country gains independence.
At most you can say - not for those born more than a given number of generations AFTER that happens. The gaining of independence does not undo the conquest, it merely ends it.
It's not a matter of whose to blame. You keep arguing that you shouldn't be charged with arson because it was your great grandfather who set the fire. But nobody is suggesting you be charged. We just asked you to help put the fire out because it's still fucking burning down the house around us all.
A couple of not-very-original insults without even a bit of wit to make them funny - absolutely no counter-argument, evidence or logical response.
A textbook example of an ad hominem attack. I take it you're a rightwing conservative based on the phrases you chose and thought were insulting. Which is quite ironic because frankly conservatives tend to be ignorant and idiotic. The only really interesting thing you said about me was to question my intelligence which, interestingly, is exactly what I feel about conservatives. The difference is - I respond with facts, statistics, science and empirical evidence in a framework of logical argument. Your response ends at the insult.
Colour me neither amused nor impressed.