I find myself thinking about this in the same way I poke at a bad tooth to find out all the grimy horror.
If I write and record my own music myself would I have to pay Soundexchange to play it on my own internet radio station then sign up with them to get back half the money?
I guess I'll have to scale down for the simple minded since I can see you've never heard of Proof by Contradiction -reductio ad absurdum. You start by assuming that what you want to test is true then deduce something completely absurd from that to prove it false. In this case it would be creating a computer which can do infinite calculations in finite time.
"Not really." The point wasn't whether it did binary arithmetic but rather that it could be emulated in some way as part of a computational device. It's matter arranged in an interesting way which allows various kinds of computation, not some magical soul container, good enough for you?
The General who made the choice to obey orders does not ever need to be in front of the public explaining his choice. He follows the Commander In Chief.
I only said "general" because it was the first rank I could think of which I thought would be a decent example of where buck might stop for a big decision. Lets say the Commander In Chief is the one who decided to break the law in some significant way or that the Commander In Chief could not be contacted in time.
He follows orders and so long as he was following those orders (and he damned well better except in circumstances we've NEVER seen as a human species) he never needs to defend his actions.
actually no, there you are extremely wrong and the fact that they never hammered that one into soldiers is worrying. If you're ordered "round up all those villagers, put them in that barn and set fire to it" or "Take this thumb screw and this car battery and... etc" then you have a duty(not a right) to disobey those orders. Otherwise you can be held accountable, tried and executed. Of course if the system is really rotten already then chances are you will just be shot for not obeying orders so it's a catch 22. "I was just following orders" will not defend you if you were ordered to commit war crimes. And we have seen this as a human species. It's called the Nuremberg Defense. All US military personnel are supposed to receive annual training in the Law of Armed Conflict which details this.
you'd die and kill to protect me? I'd find that surprising since I'm not an American. I'm more likely to be some of the "collateral damage".
Kinda surprises me that we don't see more leaked info from anon disgruntled employees. Would I be correct in in assuming that once something has reached the public that it loses it's "trade secret" status and can be used by anyone. they'd have to be careful of watermarks etc though.
Might you be able to give me a link to a better explanation? The wiki didn't really explain why there's a difference between a profit you make from something you build yourself which makes your life easier or saves you time and the profit you make from using a buisness method which does the same thing.
So if I profit(time saved by moving faster can be invested otherwise and so can lead to a profit) from my homebrew segway or other patented item then I've broken the law? Wow, American patent law is utterly broken...
Oh there are Special Circumstances. Times when actions not normally allowed must be taken. Drop a daisy cutter on the town to stop a viral outbreak, shoot the suspect who you think is about to set off a bomb, tap the phone of the guy you suspect has access to some terrible weapon. There need to be mechanisms to decide when it was justified to break the law.
But when it's all over, the disease is contained, the bomb plot finished or foiled, the suspect found guilty or exonerated it all needs to be draged into the light.
The general who decided to break a law and bomb the town should have to stand before the people and show that what they did saved lives. Not investigated by a closed military court where his mate from boot camp is the judge and his golf friends are the jury.
The cop who shot the suspected bomber should stand before a public court, not a closed internal police investigation. Everyone should see the evidence, let the members of the society that's being protected decide if they are willing to accept such actions for the sake of more safety or if they can't tollerate them.
Let the agent who tapped the phones of suspects stand up and explain exactly why what he was doing was so important that he was willing to break the law. If the people decide if he was ultimatly justified.
But instead we get closed hearing, classified documents and amnesties for politicians friends. There needs to be strict short limits for how long government documents can be kept secret with careful controls on extensions. If some operation needs to be kept secret for more than a few years or months then let them explain why to the supreme court (closed court sessions like this should be kept to a minimum).
I got my current girlfriend (of 18 months now) after writing a little java app to help her do her thesis. I offered to help her out when she mentioned she'd spent the day trying to use word or excel or something to make an app for the data gathering aspect of her thesis.
it was just a simple "display item 1, display item 2, take input, output right/wrong, answer and time taken to a log" apparently her professor liked it and asked me if I'd mind doing a slightly altered version for another psychology student who was doing a similar project.
So worth the half hour or so messing around coding. What took longer was finding out what she actually needed it to do, she kept assuming that certain parts would be a lot of trouble when really it was all pretty simple.
I never really understood the business method patent thing. can I build a copy of a patented item if I want? Isn't it only illegal if I try to sell that item?
a company isn't selling it's business method. So unless it's a consultancy firm which makes it's money restructuring other businesses...
and research funded by companies is little better. Would you trust a study funded by the tobacco industry which showed cigarettes to be harmless? Or a study funded by microsoft which showed FOSS to be full of bugs, viruses and child porn.
The place I never want anyone else is inside my own mind. If that can't be private what can be? If you're going to reach into my mind for evidence then why not just pump me full of truth serum and ask your questions?
If mind reading becomes common in trials then someone will work out how to erase specific events from your memory, imagine being tried for a murder you commited but which you have no memory of having commited.
"I can lift things with my mind!" "Then just stand behind this barrier and lift that pile of peas over there one at a time into the cup over there." "Ummmm.... it isn't working because the spirits don't like to be tested!"
"I can see the future" "Right, go sit in the box, tommorrow the computer is going to show you a random symbol, draw it for us" "But but but... no fair!"
Predicting the future. Sounds so neat, the human brain being a nice little computer which predicts things hours, days or even weeks in advance. problem is it's impossible. Ya you can make fairly good predictions a little into the future (that rock will hit that car in a few seconds) and be almost certain you're correct. But small changes lead to big differences, a speck of dirt in the eye and someones actions for the rest of the day can differ. You can guess based on the past (James walked into work every day around 9 for the last year, he'll probably do the same tomorrow)but this isn't a prediction. It's a guess. A daydream. But the kind of computational power it would take to predict something like a house fire or someone being killed by a falling rock say a week in advance even with almost perfect knowledge of the position and velocity of every leaf and speck of dirt within a million miles of earth far outstrips the human brains abilities a trillion times over and in any case these things cannot be truely predicted becase of good old quantum physics.
I'm going to start with assuming that a small portion of the population has psychic ability. Now there are 6 billion people on this world. How many of them would you assume have such abilities? 1, 10, 100, thousands, millions? Of all those people there is going to be at least one, just 1 who is also a real scientist who cares less about a quiet life and more about discovering by what mechanisms their abilities work and who is not afraid to submit to detailed testing under the watchful eyes of scientists and professional illusionists for the sake of this.
Some would care less about money and instead be avid hackers who want to work out how to build a machine which can use the same mechanisms as their telekinesis to do cool stuff. This has not happened. I see no homebrew "telekinetic hack" for your computer or even crude attempts at this.
The human brain is a complex computer made of carbon,nitrogen,oxygen and a mix of other materials.(unless you're going to claim that souls come into this somewhere and it's all about gods and magic.) Now if accept that it means that you could build a computer which emulates the human brain at some point in the future. Now if you assume that there is some way for the human brain to see the future then that means you could build a computer which does the same thing which leads to all kinds of interesting paradoxes and infinite computing in finite time which is all kinds of messed up.
It's like the question of "has RSA been widely compromised". I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has in fact. But have random hacker groups achived the same thing? The answer could be yes, for all I know millions of coders have worked out how to break it and are all reading my https sessions. But that way of thinking leads to madness since it would only take one person, just one who is an honest man or an academic at heart and is willing to claim the smaller publicly visible prize rather than grabbing everything from bill gates bank account.
You make a good point about history. Although the fact that it's rare for people to be discriminated against at all based on their hair colour may be due in large part to the fact that it can be changed so easily.
And you still fail to read. People are generally ok with job ads with a line "applicants must be willing to dye their hair black". Why is this OK but skin isn't? They're equally important.
Changing your skin color isn't.
That's why I said "If tomorrow someone developed a method as easy and cheap as hair dye to change your skin colour" READ!
Your hair doesn't define your race, your skin color does. Do you see the problem here or are you still choosing to remain ignorant?
"Red hair is most commonly found at the western fringes of Europe. It is associated particularly with those in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England." "Based on recent genetic information carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago" So if I specified that applicants must not have blonde or red hair I'd be cutting out europeans than people of any other descent.
Well the sun is a hellish inferno of radiation as it stands, dumping a million tonnes of the nastiest crap we can find into it would be like spitting into niagara falls.
I'm aware of Confirmation bias and it may be a factor but I honestly have never been turned away when dressed like that even when I had no ID(and was 17) or was drunk.
Slashdot Mirror
I find myself thinking about this in the same way I poke at a bad tooth to find out all the grimy horror.
If I write and record my own music myself would I have to pay Soundexchange to play it on my own internet radio station then sign up with them to get back half the money?
I guess I'll have to scale down for the simple minded since I can see you've never heard of Proof by Contradiction -reductio ad absurdum.
You start by assuming that what you want to test is true then deduce something completely absurd from that to prove it false.
In this case it would be creating a computer which can do infinite calculations in finite time.
"Not really."
The point wasn't whether it did binary arithmetic but rather that it could be emulated in some way as part of a computational device. It's matter arranged in an interesting way which allows various kinds of computation, not some magical soul container, good enough for you?
or if you do look at them, do so under a false name.
The General who made the choice to obey orders does not ever need to be in front of the public explaining his choice. He follows the Commander In Chief.
I only said "general" because it was the first rank I could think of which I thought would be a decent example of where buck might stop for a big decision.
Lets say the Commander In Chief is the one who decided to break the law in some significant way or that the Commander In Chief could not be contacted in time.
He follows orders and so long as he was following those orders (and he damned well better except in circumstances we've NEVER seen as a human species) he never needs to defend his actions.
actually no, there you are extremely wrong and the fact that they never hammered that one into soldiers is worrying.
If you're ordered "round up all those villagers, put them in that barn and set fire to it" or "Take this thumb screw and this car battery and... etc" then you have a duty(not a right) to disobey those orders. Otherwise you can be held accountable, tried and executed. Of course if the system is really rotten already then chances are you will just be shot for not obeying orders so it's a catch 22. "I was just following orders" will not defend you if you were ordered to commit war crimes. And we have seen this as a human species. It's called the Nuremberg Defense. All US military personnel are supposed to receive annual training in the Law of Armed Conflict which details this.
you'd die and kill to protect me?
I'd find that surprising since I'm not an American. I'm more likely to be some of the "collateral damage".
Kinda surprises me that we don't see more leaked info from anon disgruntled employees.
Would I be correct in in assuming that once something has reached the public that it loses it's "trade secret" status and can be used by anyone.
they'd have to be careful of watermarks etc though.
Might you be able to give me a link to a better explanation?
The wiki didn't really explain why there's a difference between a profit you make from something you build yourself which makes your life easier or saves you time and the profit you make from using a buisness method which does the same thing.
You know you're free to view those patents anyway.
So if I profit(time saved by moving faster can be invested otherwise and so can lead to a profit) from my homebrew segway or other patented item then I've broken the law?
Wow, American patent law is utterly broken...
Oh there are Special Circumstances. Times when actions not normally allowed must be taken. Drop a daisy cutter on the town to stop a viral outbreak, shoot the suspect who you think is about to set off a bomb, tap the phone of the guy you suspect has access to some terrible weapon.
There need to be mechanisms to decide when it was justified to break the law.
But when it's all over, the disease is contained, the bomb plot finished or foiled, the suspect found guilty or exonerated it all needs to be draged into the light.
The general who decided to break a law and bomb the town should have to stand before the people and show that what they did saved lives. Not investigated by a closed military court where his mate from boot camp is the judge and his golf friends are the jury.
The cop who shot the suspected bomber should stand before a public court, not a closed internal police investigation. Everyone should see the evidence, let the members of the society that's being protected decide if they are willing to accept such actions for the sake of more safety or if they can't tollerate them.
Let the agent who tapped the phones of suspects stand up and explain exactly why what he was doing was so important that he was willing to break the law. If the people decide if he was ultimatly justified.
But instead we get closed hearing, classified documents and amnesties for politicians friends.
There needs to be strict short limits for how long government documents can be kept secret with careful controls on extensions. If some operation needs to be kept secret for more than a few years or months then let them explain why to the supreme court (closed court sessions like this should be kept to a minimum).
Otherwise you get stories like this:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/09/alharamain_lawsuit/print.html
It's starting again!
When I mistakenly used this phrase on slashdot it led to over a hundred posts of pure pedantry.
I got my current girlfriend (of 18 months now) after writing a little java app to help her do her thesis. I offered to help her out when she mentioned she'd spent the day trying to use word or excel or something to make an app for the data gathering aspect of her thesis.
it was just a simple "display item 1, display item 2, take input, output right/wrong, answer and time taken to a log" apparently her professor liked it and asked me if I'd mind doing a slightly altered version for another psychology student who was doing a similar project.
So worth the half hour or so messing around coding.
What took longer was finding out what she actually needed it to do, she kept assuming that certain parts would be a lot of trouble when really it was all pretty simple.
I never really understood the business method patent thing.
can I build a copy of a patented item if I want?
Isn't it only illegal if I try to sell that item?
a company isn't selling it's business method.
So unless it's a consultancy firm which makes it's money restructuring other businesses...
publicly-funded science is politicized science.
and research funded by companies is little better.
Would you trust a study funded by the tobacco industry which showed cigarettes to be harmless? Or a study funded by microsoft which showed FOSS to be full of bugs, viruses and child porn.
The place I never want anyone else is inside my own mind. If that can't be private what can be? If you're going to reach into my mind for evidence then why not just pump me full of truth serum and ask your questions?
If mind reading becomes common in trials then someone will work out how to erase specific events from your memory, imagine being tried for a murder you commited but which you have no memory of having commited.
tests aren't hard.
"I can lift things with my mind!"
"Then just stand behind this barrier and lift that pile of peas over there one at a time into the cup over there."
"Ummmm.... it isn't working because the spirits don't like to be tested!"
"I can see the future"
"Right, go sit in the box, tommorrow the computer is going to show you a random symbol, draw it for us"
"But but but... no fair!"
"the brain can work on problems in the "subconsious background" with only subtle clues."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-Ball_Computer
Predicting the future. Sounds so neat, the human brain being a nice little computer which predicts things hours, days or even weeks in advance.
problem is it's impossible.
Ya you can make fairly good predictions a little into the future (that rock will hit that car in a few seconds) and be almost certain you're correct.
But small changes lead to big differences, a speck of dirt in the eye and someones actions for the rest of the day can differ. You can guess based on the past (James walked into work every day around 9 for the last year, he'll probably do the same tomorrow)but this isn't a prediction. It's a guess. A daydream.
But the kind of computational power it would take to predict something like a house fire or someone being killed by a falling rock say a week in advance even with almost perfect knowledge of the position and velocity of every leaf and speck of dirt within a million miles of earth far outstrips the human brains abilities a trillion times over and in any case these things cannot be truely predicted becase of good old quantum physics.
http://xkcd.com/373/
I'm going to start with assuming that a small portion of the population has psychic ability.
Now there are 6 billion people on this world.
How many of them would you assume have such abilities?
1, 10, 100, thousands, millions?
Of all those people there is going to be at least one, just 1 who is also a real scientist who cares less about a quiet life and more about discovering by what mechanisms their abilities work and who is not afraid to submit to detailed testing under the watchful eyes of scientists and professional illusionists for the sake of this.
Some would care less about money and instead be avid hackers who want to work out how to build a machine which can use the same mechanisms as their telekinesis to do cool stuff.
This has not happened. I see no homebrew "telekinetic hack" for your computer or even crude attempts at this.
The human brain is a complex computer made of carbon,nitrogen,oxygen and a mix of other materials.(unless you're going to claim that souls come into this somewhere and it's all about gods and magic.) Now if accept that it means that you could build a computer which emulates the human brain at some point in the future. Now if you assume that there is some way for the human brain to see the future then that means you could build a computer which does the same thing which leads to all kinds of interesting paradoxes and infinite computing in finite time which is all kinds of messed up.
It's like the question of "has RSA been widely compromised". I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has in fact. But have random hacker groups achived the same thing? The answer could be yes, for all I know millions of coders have worked out how to break it and are all reading my https sessions. But that way of thinking leads to madness since it would only take one person, just one who is an honest man or an academic at heart and is willing to claim the smaller publicly visible prize rather than grabbing everything from bill gates bank account.
firefox has had plugins for this for some time, they just weren't there by default.
You make a good point about history.
Although the fact that it's rare for people to be discriminated against at all based on their hair colour may be due in large part to the fact that it can be changed so easily.
"_shouln't_have_to_"
And you still fail to read. People are generally ok with job ads with a line "applicants must be willing to dye their hair black". Why is this OK but skin isn't? They're equally important.
Changing your skin color isn't.
That's why I said "If tomorrow someone developed a method as easy and cheap as hair dye to change your skin colour"
READ!
Your hair doesn't define your race, your skin color does. Do you see the problem here or are you still choosing to remain ignorant?
"Red hair is most commonly found at the western fringes of Europe. It is associated particularly with those in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England."
"Based on recent genetic information carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago"
So if I specified that applicants must not have blonde or red hair I'd be cutting out europeans than people of any other descent.
Well if I was too drunk to remember... :D
Well the sun is a hellish inferno of radiation as it stands, dumping a million tonnes of the nastiest crap we can find into it would be like spitting into niagara falls.
I'm aware of Confirmation bias and it may be a factor but I honestly have never been turned away when dressed like that even when I had no ID(and was 17) or was drunk.
I have been turned away when dressed otherwise.
Pretty similar here, I'm european but tend to choose a character with dark skin tones simply because it tends to look better in my opinion.