> In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.
In reality, there's more to life than being 'at optimal productivity level' all the time. Work to live, not the other way round. If you have an awesome party on your birthday but are a little less productive the day after, then the world can just suck it up. I'm not saying you should drive while (severely) sleep deprived, it's just that there are many things in life that are worth a little sleep deprivation. Just make sure you understand the consequences of sleep deprivation and use that knowledge to act responsibly.
> In the more immediate, what does this do to your liver?
Well I guess that is what the research is for, right?
> Longer term, what impact might this have on other insect populations?
Well, since mosquitos can also feed on animals, most of them will never come in contact with the poison. I don't know how this will affect their natural predators (eating multiple poisoned mosquitos might have a negative effect on them, depending on the poison), but I assume they will investigate that too before they start handing out the stuff to everyone everywhere.
> And will this impact negatively effect human populations?
Well I guess that is what the research is for, right?
> This approach is dangerous.
Maybe. If we don't research we'll never find out. The whole thing would be dangerous if we were to give this stuff to everybody before having some idea to what the answers to your questions might be. But since thas hasn't been the way to do these things in science for some decades now, your whole post seems somewhat overrated, this last bit in particular.
> If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.
Huh? You're not making any sense now. People a thousand years ago would find our machines magical too, but if we were to clone one of those people and raise them like a normal person in our time, there is no reason why such a person wouldn't accept (and understand) technology like everybody else does. Likewise, although your hypothetical neanderthal may have below-average intelligence, there is no reason to believe he would would worship our technology any more than a person with Down syndrome. If we assume he'd merely have below average intelligence without being retarded, the cloned neanderthal would probably own an iPod and enjoy it very much, even though he could never understand how it works (just like most humans).
How you view technology has to do with your culture, not with the time period your DNA comes from.
> But if you harvest the CO2 from fossil fuels, and do it right, you could blow these tester's minds when they find you have 300 million year old whiskey!
Surely this problem can easily be solved by mixing the fossil-fuel CO2 with post 1950s CO2 until you have the desired Carbon-14 concentration.
I like where this is going. Someone should create a "2000 year old" whiskey and claim it was made by Jesus himself, then market it as 'Holy Spirit'.
> That's the part that always confused me - if you're not allowed to grow it large-scale, where does all the "product" in the shops come from? Are there legalised farms as well, or something?
It's a "don't ask, don't tell" kinda thing. Everybody knows for a fact that coffee shops are breaking the law to get their "product" (it is impossible not to) but the police kinda ignore it. I for one would support real legalization instead of the 'gedoogbeleid' we have now, if only because it would make the law a little less insane.
> you feed plausible-looking but wrong information down the leaking conduit for as long as possible.
I assume it would be quite tricky to generate even a few gigabytes of plausible-looking 'data related to design and electronics systems' even if you had a whole day to prepare, and we are talking about multiple terabytes here, and while you are busy preparing the wrong information, the spies are still downloading the correct stuff. So unless you live in a movie where stuff that normally takes days can be done in 5 minutes when our protagonists start randomly pushing buttons on their keyboard with pretty pictures appearing on the screen accompanied by uninformative beeping sounds, it would probably be best to simply terminate the connection and start improving your security, look for backdoors that might have been installed, and so forth.
> There is a connection. Both (brains and quanti) are the only source of 'true' randomness (or new information).
Don't be ridiculous. The brain is NOT a good source of 'true' randomness. The neurons behave according to well-defined rules, and many areas of the brain are quite predictable. Complex != random.
> From a purely evolutionary perspective, it really does equate to "OK."
Evolution is a mindless process, it has no perspective. Nor does it have a purpose, needs, wants, hopes and dreams. Most importantly, it doesn't have a goal. Saying 'from a evolutionary perspective' is about as insightful as saying 'from gravity's perspective' or 'from a cake's perspective'.
> Organisms die. Others survive. Get over it.
I wont stop you from laying down and starving to death, but personally, I'd rather live. Sure, organisms die, but I don't want to be one of those particular organisms for at least another few decades. Why should we accept death by drowning when we can do something to change it?
> It's only bad if you really think humans are a special part of the universe, rather than what they really are: just one little tiny product of an infinitely random spectacle.
Humans may not be special, but neither is the rest of the universe, so why SHOULDN'T we try to change the universe? We may be 'tiny products of an infinitely random spectacle' (is the universe infinitely random? I hope not!) but few things on our planet can resist us, so hell yes, lets use our power to change this rock to a better place for us. Fuck the natural changes in the climate, they are, after all, 'just one little tiny product of an infinitely random spectacle'.
> Oddly, "researchers" haven't chosen to simple ASK women about their choices
If they had, there would be a post just like yours except that it would be complaining that the women might have given socially acceptable answers instead of what they really thought. People tend to lie about their thoughts and motivations to be accepted by others.
> I defend the right to bare arms and resolve conflicts like this in duels. Easy, clean and permanent. Lawsuit my ass, duels are the new problem solver. If it worked for guys like eastwood, bronson or ledger (solving matters the painfull way), should work now.
You're an idiot. What does being the better duelist have to do with being right or wrong? "This little girl claims she was raped by this police officer, let's give them both a gun and let Odin decide who is right"? Going from a system where the guy with the best lawyer wins to a system where the best dueller wins hardly seems like an improvement to me.
> A: *IN* the human body? Well, men can have a maximum of two (one in the rear, one in the mouth), while women can have at most three (rear, mouth, vaginal).
If goatse taught me anything it's that you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking more than one 'unit' per orifice wouldn't fit...
> I guess this was a very poor example - maybe Stephen Wolfram should have chosen a question which *doesn't* already produce an excellent result on google?
> Also, until you can claim to solve the halting problem in real life (as opposed to a "theoretical device"), don't go around claiming that the brain is turing-complete. It isn't, and cannot be - not in this universe, anyway.
The halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines. Claiming 'the brain is not turing-complete because it cannot solve the halting problem' makes no sense.
Does it matter? GP could also have have been tricked to click a link that leads to the same page as the popup. Disallowing popups would not have saved him in that situation. The problem is not allowing popups, the problem is that his browser was not secure.
> Jumping from one uninspectable, unmodifiable proprietary PDF reader to another is not wise.
I don't have the time, the knowledge, and the motivation to inspect and modify my PDF reader. Few people do.
> Pick a free software PDF reader for all of your computers so you can see what it will do, change it to meet your needs, and share your improvements with the community.
Keep in mind that the vast majority is not going to read the source code. 'You can read the source' is irrelevant 99% of the time; if I would read the source of every program/OS to check for bugs before I started using it, I could start using linux in a decade, and maybe even run a browser a few years later. Sure, others could read the source for me, but only very populair open source projects will have enough readers for the advantage of the 'many eyes' to become significant. Most 'yet another open source ' projects will only have the source read by a very small number of people; such software will not be significantly more 'inspected' than closed source software.
Simply define the size of the 'size header' as sizeof(pointer)? Using strlen on a system where a '16bit string' (I assume you refer to a 65536 byte string) is laughably small is laughably slow.
First we have situation A (the curing of formerly depressed individuals), where according the GP no moral/ethical issues worth discussing apply. Then you add a Bad Thing to A, yielding situation B (the curing of formerly depressed individuals and putting a switch in their brains to turn them into mind controlled soldiers). You then try to convince GP that he should embrace the moralists whining about A, because B, which does not apply, is bad.
How exactly does that argument make sense? Should we discuss the moral implications of me eating a carrot because the consumption of a carrot may also involve me shooting you with a gun? 'In another word, would you like to get shot?' To me you make no sense at all.
> Another behaviour by default that C got wrong is initialisation: by default your variables are not initialised so if you forget to initialise your variables your program may act randomly which is a pain to debug, the correct default would be to have all variables initialised by default but with the option to let variables non-initialised which can be useful as a performance optimisation.
C did NOT get it 'wrong'. C just gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. You are free to write you own version of C that protects you from yourself (tweaking an open source C-compiler to initialise all variables by default (to what value?) should take you a few hours at most, and most of that time will go to finding the right source file to edit...), but I like it when C obliterates my foot every now and then. Alternatively you could write a program that goes through your code to look for situations where variables that may be uninitialised are used (I believe Java does this) and whines about it.
Slashdot Mirror
> In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.
In reality, there's more to life than being 'at optimal productivity level' all the time. Work to live, not the other way round. If you have an awesome party on your birthday but are a little less productive the day after, then the world can just suck it up. I'm not saying you should drive while (severely) sleep deprived, it's just that there are many things in life that are worth a little sleep deprivation. Just make sure you understand the consequences of sleep deprivation and use that knowledge to act responsibly.
> In the more immediate, what does this do to your liver?
Well I guess that is what the research is for, right?
> Longer term, what impact might this have on other insect populations?
Well, since mosquitos can also feed on animals, most of them will never come in contact with the poison. I don't know how this will affect their natural predators (eating multiple poisoned mosquitos might have a negative effect on them, depending on the poison), but I assume they will investigate that too before they start handing out the stuff to everyone everywhere.
> And will this impact negatively effect human populations?
Well I guess that is what the research is for, right?
> This approach is dangerous.
Maybe. If we don't research we'll never find out. The whole thing would be dangerous if we were to give this stuff to everybody before having some idea to what the answers to your questions might be. But since thas hasn't been the way to do these things in science for some decades now, your whole post seems somewhat overrated, this last bit in particular.
> For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.
Actually that's exactly what makes it 'work'. I agree with your point, but the placebo effect kinda undermines your example.
> If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.
Huh? You're not making any sense now. People a thousand years ago would find our machines magical too, but if we were to clone one of those people and raise them like a normal person in our time, there is no reason why such a person wouldn't accept (and understand) technology like everybody else does. Likewise, although your hypothetical neanderthal may have below-average intelligence, there is no reason to believe he would would worship our technology any more than a person with Down syndrome. If we assume he'd merely have below average intelligence without being retarded, the cloned neanderthal would probably own an iPod and enjoy it very much, even though he could never understand how it works (just like most humans).
How you view technology has to do with your culture, not with the time period your DNA comes from.
> But if you harvest the CO2 from fossil fuels, and do it right, you could blow these tester's minds when they find you have 300 million year old whiskey!
Surely this problem can easily be solved by mixing the fossil-fuel CO2 with post 1950s CO2 until you have the desired Carbon-14 concentration.
I like where this is going. Someone should create a "2000 year old" whiskey and claim it was made by Jesus himself, then market it as 'Holy Spirit'.
> That's the part that always confused me - if you're not allowed to grow it large-scale, where does all the "product" in the shops come from? Are there legalised farms as well, or something?
It's a "don't ask, don't tell" kinda thing. Everybody knows for a fact that coffee shops are breaking the law to get their "product" (it is impossible not to) but the police kinda ignore it. I for one would support real legalization instead of the 'gedoogbeleid' we have now, if only because it would make the law a little less insane.
> you feed plausible-looking but wrong information down the leaking conduit for as long as possible.
I assume it would be quite tricky to generate even a few gigabytes of plausible-looking 'data related to design and electronics systems' even if you had a whole day to prepare, and we are talking about multiple terabytes here, and while you are busy preparing the wrong information, the spies are still downloading the correct stuff. So unless you live in a movie where stuff that normally takes days can be done in 5 minutes when our protagonists start randomly pushing buttons on their keyboard with pretty pictures appearing on the screen accompanied by uninformative beeping sounds, it would probably be best to simply terminate the connection and start improving your security, look for backdoors that might have been installed, and so forth.
> There is a connection. Both (brains and quanti) are the only source of 'true' randomness (or new information).
Don't be ridiculous. The brain is NOT a good source of 'true' randomness. The neurons behave according to well-defined rules, and many areas of the brain are quite predictable. Complex != random.
'Quanti' isn't even a word.
> From a purely evolutionary perspective, it really does equate to "OK."
Evolution is a mindless process, it has no perspective. Nor does it have a purpose, needs, wants, hopes and dreams. Most importantly, it doesn't have a goal. Saying 'from a evolutionary perspective' is about as insightful as saying 'from gravity's perspective' or 'from a cake's perspective'.
> Organisms die. Others survive. Get over it.
I wont stop you from laying down and starving to death, but personally, I'd rather live. Sure, organisms die, but I don't want to be one of those particular organisms for at least another few decades. Why should we accept death by drowning when we can do something to change it?
> It's only bad if you really think humans are a special part of the universe, rather than what they really are: just one little tiny product of an infinitely random spectacle.
Humans may not be special, but neither is the rest of the universe, so why SHOULDN'T we try to change the universe? We may be 'tiny products of an infinitely random spectacle' (is the universe infinitely random? I hope not!) but few things on our planet can resist us, so hell yes, lets use our power to change this rock to a better place for us. Fuck the natural changes in the climate, they are, after all, 'just one little tiny product of an infinitely random spectacle'.
Yay achievements.
Girls feel pain?!
Are you suggesting information about the law be kept from jurors, lest they misapply it?
> Oddly, "researchers" haven't chosen to simple ASK women about their choices
If they had, there would be a post just like yours except that it would be complaining that the women might have given socially acceptable answers instead of what they really thought. People tend to lie about their thoughts and motivations to be accepted by others.
I feel the need to point out that not every father is a loony, even if yours was.
Oops. I fail :/
> I defend the right to bare arms and resolve conflicts like this in duels. Easy, clean and permanent. Lawsuit my ass, duels are the new problem solver. If it worked for guys like eastwood, bronson or ledger (solving matters the painfull way), should work now.
You're an idiot. What does being the better duelist have to do with being right or wrong? "This little girl claims she was raped by this police officer, let's give them both a gun and let Odin decide who is right"? Going from a system where the guy with the best lawyer wins to a system where the best dueller wins hardly seems like an improvement to me.
> A: *IN* the human body? Well, men can have a maximum of two (one in the rear, one in the mouth), while women can have at most three (rear, mouth, vaginal).
If goatse taught me anything it's that you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking more than one 'unit' per orifice wouldn't fit...
> I guess this was a very poor example - maybe Stephen Wolfram should have chosen a question which *doesn't* already produce an excellent result on google?
How about 'Vi or emacs?' ?
> Also, until you can claim to solve the halting problem in real life (as opposed to a "theoretical device"), don't go around claiming that the brain is turing-complete. It isn't, and cannot be - not in this universe, anyway.
The halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines. Claiming 'the brain is not turing-complete because it cannot solve the halting problem' makes no sense.
Does it matter? GP could also have have been tricked to click a link that leads to the same page as the popup. Disallowing popups would not have saved him in that situation. The problem is not allowing popups, the problem is that his browser was not secure.
> Jumping from one uninspectable, unmodifiable proprietary PDF reader to another is not wise.
I don't have the time, the knowledge, and the motivation to inspect and modify my PDF reader. Few people do.
> Pick a free software PDF reader for all of your computers so you can see what it will do, change it to meet your needs, and share your improvements with the community.
Keep in mind that the vast majority is not going to read the source code. 'You can read the source' is irrelevant 99% of the time; if I would read the source of every program/OS to check for bugs before I started using it, I could start using linux in a decade, and maybe even run a browser a few years later. Sure, others could read the source for me, but only very populair open source projects will have enough readers for the advantage of the 'many eyes' to become significant. Most 'yet another open source ' projects will only have the source read by a very small number of people; such software will not be significantly more 'inspected' than closed source software.
Simply define the size of the 'size header' as sizeof(pointer)? Using strlen on a system where a '16bit string' (I assume you refer to a 65536 byte string) is laughably small is laughably slow.
Depends on your language. In Java, his example would blow up as he claims it should (by throwing a NullPointerException).
First we have situation A (the curing of formerly depressed individuals), where according the GP no moral/ethical issues worth discussing apply. Then you add a Bad Thing to A, yielding situation B (the curing of formerly depressed individuals and putting a switch in their brains to turn them into mind controlled soldiers). You then try to convince GP that he should embrace the moralists whining about A, because B, which does not apply, is bad.
How exactly does that argument make sense? Should we discuss the moral implications of me eating a carrot because the consumption of a carrot may also involve me shooting you with a gun? 'In another word, would you like to get shot?' To me you make no sense at all.
> Another behaviour by default that C got wrong is initialisation: by default your variables are not initialised so if you forget to initialise your variables your program may act randomly which is a pain to debug, the correct default would be to have all variables initialised by default but with the option to let variables non-initialised which can be useful as a performance optimisation.
C did NOT get it 'wrong'. C just gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. You are free to write you own version of C that protects you from yourself (tweaking an open source C-compiler to initialise all variables by default (to what value?) should take you a few hours at most, and most of that time will go to finding the right source file to edit...), but I like it when C obliterates my foot every now and then. Alternatively you could write a program that goes through your code to look for situations where variables that may be uninitialised are used (I believe Java does this) and whines about it.