This may just be my own unqualified opinion on the subject but it seems like nothing turns people in to a pack of complete idiots faster than anonymity.
Agreed -- which is the primary case for pseudonymity.
I agree that there is plenty of value in real names on the internet when someone is actually going to offer something in their official professional capacity or area of expertise. When some dude starts spouting medical advice, and you can found out that he's using his real name AND is a doctor, maybe that can change your judgment.
But maybe that doctor also wants to offer other opinions on topics related to medical science, but maybe the issues are more controversial or perhaps he wants to say some things that he's not ready to stake his reputation on.
If he posts anonymously, you can't judge his opinion better than any other wacko on the internet.
But if he has a durable pseudonym, people can go back and look at previous posts. If he has a record of saying reliable things about medical topics, maybe he does know something.
Or, if he wants to go posting on a chef site, he can adopt a different pseudonym, and again people can judge his reputation based on previous contributions. Regardless of whether he has "credentials," he can develop an online reputation for saying things that other actual experts agree with.
We do this all the time in real life -- we speak differently to the boss compared to our coworkers, to the old ladies at church compared to the guys at the bar, to our kids compared to a partner in the bedroom. If all of those are connected and mushed together into one "real-life" identity, it makes it nearly impossible to have the multitude of different types of interactions we do in the real world. This is one of the major problems with social networks like Facebook, which try to insist that you be a real person and that you are the same person to all people. (Zuckerberg is on record as saying that people who want to have different online identities must be inherently dishonest.)
But that's just not like things are in the real world. In the real world, you build up your reputation at the bar based on previous behavior, and a pseudonym online can approximate something like that.
Just talk to people and you will se the same thing. Be it in a meeting, in a pub or wherever.
That's somewhat true. Although, I know I "cheated" here by reading TFA, but the summary is actually quite bad in this case. For example, the first half of TFA talks a lot about sexism issues in commenting and other things.
So it happens in the real world. It has happend since ages. Why would it surprise anybody that it happens on the Internet?
Well, as TFA points out, one thing that is different about the internet is that the more disconnected (and often anonymous) nature of internet commenting tends to lead people to have fewer inhibitions when commenting -- probably more so than even in a pub (to take your example) for many people.
It's not exactly a new observation, but it is something that potentially makes this interaction a little different. If people assume that commenters are authoritative and "like them" on the internet, then jerks and trolls who post nasty things -- like, say, racist comments on a story -- might gain a wider audience, who then feel justified in their own latent racism.
We can see these dynamics in action, for example in scandals in the past few years where the news has drawn attention to huge numbers of racist comments or tweets that might follow a somewhat inocuous event. (I recall a Hispanic kid singing the national anthem dressed in traditional Mexican clothing at a major national sports event bringing out a flurry of racist comments, for example -- even though the kid was born in the U.S., and I believe his father was in the U.S. military or a veteran or something.)
As I said, TFA focuses on sexism a bit rather than racism, but it's a similar issue. We all know that people are more likely to be jerks on the internet, particularly if they think they are relatively anonymous. However, if other people still read these jerks' comments as authoritative and "like them," it may reinforce opinions and ideas that are actually less mainstream or which would be kept out of normal "civil" discourse.
On the other hand, one might argue that such revelations also often show opinions that are "not poticially correct" but people nevertheless hold -- so such extreme comments may also show a little more about what some people "really think" but normally wouldn't say. Whether or not that balances the trolls and flamers is another question -- but the point is that the internet does actually change these interactions in interesting ways, and TFA talks about some of them.
As a result, it's expensive as bloody hell to society, leading to a *deficit* in high-quality medical care socialist countries.
I agree with most of what you said, however this simply is not true. When you take a one-year snapshot and look at smokers -- yes, they cost more on average.
But if you look at lifetime total expense, smokers cost less because they die significantly earlier. Yes, a year or two of treatments for lung cancer can be expensive, but then many smokers die. Meanwhile, the healthy runner who needs a number of joint replacements, has a few random cancers in his 70s, and then spends the last 15 years in assisted care due to dementia can cost many times more.
Bottom line -- smokers may LOOK like a net deficit in the annual snapshot. But if you stopped ALL smoking today (somehow), you'd save money for a few years, and then 10-20 years down the road, all your socialist health costs would skyrocket... because the darn people didn't die.
It's not a nice way to think about the argument, and most researchers stay away from this argument, because it seems to run counter to the anti-smoking campaigns most governments like these days. But there are plenty of studies out there which look at total life expenses and how smokers are cheaper. Spend some time looking, and you'll find them.
The question is how many years of useless sucking on social security.
Why didn't you say you were a willfully ignorant sociopath to start with? Those people using the benefits they paid for are still buying cars, computers, and day-to-day goods. You know....putting money into the economy while no longer competing with younger workers for jobs.
Umm, no. Your logic doesn't make sense. I'm not a "sociopath" (or at least I don't think so), and I'm all in favor of valuing elderly people and their social contributions, but a NET monetary one is generally NOT one of them.
It's not like all of their assets magically disappear if they die at 60 or 65 or 70 or whatever. No -- that money, which was produced through ADDED value to society through working is passed on to others when they die -- either to specific heirs or to taxes toward society's benefit in general.
And guess what -- OTHER people will then use that money, either directly in spending or investments or whatever. You don't need to prop up an 85-year-old to allow him to click on Amazon -- he can die, pass on the money to grandkids, and they can spend it just as easily.
So, what really matters is when an older person stops making a net positive contribution, which is generally around retirement. Sure, older people do often continue to do some stuff, like providing some help with childcare for grandkids or whatever, and some continue to do a lot of stuff in retirement -- but the majority stop actually generating net positive productivity at that point.
I'm NOT at all saying that they should "go ahead and die" or whatever. There are many reasons to value them as family members and other resources, but the simple fact is that most people past retirement cease to add net MONETARY value to society. Thus, from an economic standpoint, they are draining resources.
And that's why those who die young (whether from smoking, obesity, disease, whatever) are generally -- purely from an ECONOMIC balance sheet -- less of a drain on society than those who live into old age. Seriously -- there are a LOT of studies out there that show this, if you care to look. It's a little morbid, but it's the truth.
You're fortunate you don't have whatever it is that gives people a thrill from gambling. For those people, the worst thing that could happen is to win the first time. It ruins lives. I've seen it.
Yeah, I know it ruins lives. And I WAS excited by the win. I think I played another few dollars until the logic set in and I thought about the odds rationally and realized I was incredibly lucky to end up that far ahead so quickly... So I stopped. It's not that there wasn't a thrill. It's not that I have never fantasized about what it would be like to win the lottery either. But I also analyze it rationally, and for me, that rational analysis wins out.
I still maintain that by not buying a ticket my odds of winning are not significantly reduced.
Precisely true. I've won $175 in lottery money from scratch tickets, but I've never bought one.
Instead, some of my relatives have taken to giving a few of these as gifts at Christmas. I think it's ridiculous, but whatever. So, over the past few years, I've won something like 5 or 6 tickets for a total of $175, including one ticket that got me $50 and another that got me $100.
No one else in the family has ever won more than $20-25 on a single ticket, despite some of them buying scratch tickets on a regular basis.
So yeah, I'd say your statement is definitely true. I've never bought a ticket, and I've had bigger winnings than the people I know who buy them regularly. I don't think I'm "lucky" (whatever that means, though this past year these people bought me EXTRA tickets because they're convinced I am)... it's just random chance.
Of course, I'm also the guy who only once gambled in a casino, and it was when my Dad took me to one and gave me $20 "to get started." I went to a slot machine, after spending about $5, I hit $75. I cashed out, paid my Dad back his $20 and kept the remainder. Never played again... have no desire to.
I guess the moral of my story is -- if possible, gamble with other people's money. It's been "lucky" for me, anyway.:)
(P.S. I'm not trying to smug here. I have no issue with people who have enough money gambling for entertainment. People spend stupid amounts of money on all sorts of stuff for "entertainment," whether it's hundreds of dollars on tickets to a sporting event, a concert, an opera, whatever. Whatever floats your boat. I just personally don't find the entertainment value of tickets that interesting.)
You're missing the point. $2 is worthless to me. I can't buy a coffee (one I would drink) with $2, someplaces you won't even get a soda with it, and maybe would get me breakfast if I ate a donut but if I'm honest I have trouble thinking of a single restaurant I'd actually eat at with something on the menu for $2 or less.
No, $2 isn't "worthless" to you. It's worth precisely $2. You may not be able to buy much with it by itself, but if you're at a store trying to pay for your new tablet with cash and you only have $298 in your wallet instead of the $300 price, well, that $2 could cause you some annoying inconvenience, at a minimum.
Of course, if I only made minimum wage I might really care about those $2, but I don't
And this is the real problem. The amount people spend on lottery tickets per year seems inversely proportional to their income (to a point). It's not that a $2 ticket is going to be a huge inconvenience on you or even many lower-class people.
The problem is when the person who already has trouble making rent and having enough money to buy food for the kids this week decides to take $50 from their paycheck and buy extra lottery tickets this week. Or when they spend that money on scratch tickets in hopes that they'll get more back this week (which occasionally happens).
In other words, it's not the $2. But all money adds up with other money. The problem is not *a* $2 ticket, it's the people who end up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on lottery tickets every year (and there are more of those people out there than you might think), when they could be putting that money toward paying off debt or saving for retirement or just building up an emergency fund.
There was a recent case of a normal weight woman getting a fecal transplant from an obese donor, and now this woman has become obese but not changed her diet and lifestyle.
Yeah, I'd say a conclusion from this one case study is pretty darn premature. Here's the actual paper.
Both the woman and her daughter (the donor) were borderline overweight (~BMI 26) before the transplant. Both the mother AND the daughter gained significant weight after the transplant (30-35 lbs. each).
By your logic, we could also attribute the daughter's weight gain to the fact that she donated stool -- which wouldn't make any sense, but is also consistent with the data.
I don't know where you get that she had "not changed her diet and lifestyle." That's not mentioned in the study. All it says is that the woman unintentionally gained a lot of weight (as did her daughter), and she apparently had tried to control it but was unsuccessful. Lots of people in their early 30s start to gain weight.
Also, I should note that the condition she was treated for caused severe digestive discomfort. Many of those symptoms lessened after treatment. Could it have been that suddenly she started eating more because it no longer made her feel terrible?? (And it looks like her daughter joined her in the new binge, if her weight change shows anything....)
Anyhow, I have no idea what this one case study shows. But (1) the woman was borderline overweight before the treatment, (2) both she and her daughter the donor experienced similar weight gain, which could point to a common shift in dietary eating habits in the household -- perhaps to foods that were more caloric but would previously have caused the mother digestive distress, and (3) she had a condition that would have made eating too much unenjoyable, but that disease was mostly cured.
Suggestive? Perhaps. But I wouldn't conclude too much on the basis of this case study, unless there's information that's not in the official published account that could establish better causality.
Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge. This is what always happens; people don't understand how science works or how scientists think and communicate. When the scientist says 'To the best of current knowledge, eating eggs is probably bad for you, although we really haven't researched that enough' it translates into 'Science says egg is bad for you'.
To be fair, there are PLENTY of scientists and studies which actively promote their results by emphasizing aspects that go beyond a reasonable interpretation of the data. It may be less common in "hard science" fields, but in "soft sciences" and things like nutritional studies, you'll often see "Discussion" sections at the end of the paper that claim, on the basis of some questionable stats and a sample group of 12, that they have discovered eggs are bad for you, found a cure for cancer, and suggest possible locations for the body of Jimmy Hoffa.
Okay, I exaggerate a bit. But I've literally had this exact conversation about an egg study in the past couple years with a vegetarian friend who started posting alarmist things on social media concerning eggs -- according to this recent study she read, eggs really WERE bad for you, and in her vegetarian diet, this seemed to be something to worry about since she tended to depend on eggs as a protein source.
Anyhow, I went and looked first at the press release she linked to. Not only the university promoting the study but the researchers themselves were quoted as saying almost verbatim, "There's been some question about this in the past, but we've shown here that eggs really are bad for you." Sure, there was some minor disclaimer at some point saying, "Further research is needed," etc., but the folks doing this study clearly had an agenda, which became clear when you read their paper.
I don't know what the agenda was -- maybe the director of the study is a militant vegan and hates the egg industry, or maybe they became convinced that eggs were terrible years ago and are fighting to hold onto their hypothesis, or maybe they just don't like eggs.
Or maybe, like many researchers, they just need grant money to keep their jobs or get tenure, and they want to draw attention to their work.
Regardless, the study clearly was full of holes, both from statistical perspective and a design perspective. The sample size was small. They didn't try to control for most obvious confounding variables (like, for example, what else did the people eat in their diets -- it wasn't even mentioned). Etc.
Look -- I agree with you that media reports tend to exaggerate science and often don't hedge as much as real scientists do. What you fail to account for is that some scientists often want their work to get attention (or are really proud of their pet theory or whatever), so while they may hedge officially in a sentence here or there, they may also be happy to have their results as broadly interpreted and cited as possible. And when they write up a press release or are interviewed, yes, they'll say "We still need further research," but they'll go on to provide all sorts of sweeping conclusions that their research may "suggest." It's no wonder then that media sources get confused.
(Again, I'm NOT saying all scientists are like this. But if you start reading things like discussion sections in nutrition papers, you'll quickly realize that (1) humans are complex systems, so designing a good experiment and analyzing the data fairly can be really hard, but (2) that often doesn't stop researchers from overstating the possible importance of their results significantly.)
The Turing Test is a thought experiment. It's just saying "if you can talk to this, and can't tell if it's a person or a computer, then it doesn't matter: it's intellegent." It's not a method for a scientific, practical process.
If that's true, then why did Turing claim in his original paper that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool humans and "pass the test" 30% of the time? Why state such a specific prediction for a test that was not intended to be practical and only a "thought experiment"?
It's just something to think about when considering what might constitute intelligence.
Why can't it be both? In Turing's time (and still today) there were (and are) people who think real strong human-like AI is impossible. In order to evaluate "intelligence," though, we need a standard test that we could agree on. Turing attempted to roughly define the outlines of such a test, which also involved a lot of philosophical debate. On the other hand, he predicted within 50 years of his paper that computers would be around which could pass this test, which suggests that he thought it was in fact a practical (if a little vague) way of gauging progress in AI.
It is not a test of whether an AI can fool an average person, but whether it can fool an expert.
You are not allowed to redefine the test just because it makes you more comfortable to do so. The original paper simply said "A man, a woman, and an interrogator". It did not qualify that interrogator as an expert, but simply the one who poses the questions (thus, an interrogator)
You are correct that the original test did not specify an AI expert as interrogator. On the other hand, read the types of dialogue Turing offers as examples. It's very clear that he is imagining "interrogators" (note that word -- it implies someone with a strong drive to ask probing questions) who are not only quite intelligent but also keep asking very probing questions designed to test the intellect of the person/thing on the other side.
The standard is clearly NOT, "Gee, can I have a nice small talk conversation?" Instead, the "interrogator" uses questions varying from computational problems to chess problems to questions about composing a sonnet to detailed discussion of subtle linguistic meanings in English, related in abstract ways to classic literature.
That doesn't sound like your "average Joe" interrogator to me. Does it to you? I'm sure Turing didn't expect all his interrogators to be so intelligent, but they were clearly expected (based on his sample dialogues) to understand how to probe intelligence at a pretty sophisticated level.
Re:TL;DR People doesn't understand the Turing test
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Replacing the Turing Test
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The pronoun disambiguation is a good test, because AI does that poorly, and humans do it well. But that is not a replacement for the Turing Test, that IS the Turing Test.
Indeed. Here's an excerpt from Turing's original paper that described the "imitation game," replying to a possible objection that his test would not be able to be used to gauge true understanding as a human might:
Probably [the objector to the test] would be quite willing to accept the imitation game as a test. The game (with the player B omitted) is frequently used in practice under the name of viva voce to discover whether some one really understands something or has "learnt it parrot fashion." Let us listen in to a part of such a viva voce:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.
Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
And so on, What would Professor Jefferson say if the sonnet-writing machine was able to answer like this in the viva voce? I do not know whether he would regard the machine as "merely artificially signalling" these answers, but if the answers were as satisfactory and sustained as in the above passage I do not think he would describe it as "an easy contrivance."
THAT is the sort of standard of AI that Turing was envisioning could be passed in his "test." It isn't a computer pretending to be a non-responsive teenager with an attitude problem who doesn't really speak the same language as the interrogator (as some chatbots might claim).
It's an idea of AI as something that could debate word replacement in a Shakespearean sonnet, would understand and be able to process poetic scansion, understand the subtle word meanings and connotations in language, and be able to synthesize these various things together while applying such concepts to evaluations of classic literary references.
Turing's test then assumes an AI competent enough to have a flawless conversation on the level of a bright university student or even a colleague of Turing's. Now, granted, we might find the literature quiz a little unnecessary, but in a more general sense this example gets at the idea of probing the AI's understanding of concepts, connecting disparate uses of things together (like a literary character to an abstract concept to a matter of style or poetic form), and in general a fluent and adaptive recognition of linguistic meaning.
I think we would all agree that the various chatbots that have claimed in recent years to have "passed the Turing test" are NOWHERE near this level.
This is the kind of standard Turing himself explicitly mentioned in his original article on the test. And frankly, if I encountered an AI that could have a conversation this fluid and wide-ranging (even if not on literature specifically) in flawless English, I'd be happy to declare it "intelligent." But we don't have anything close to that -- and pretending the "Turing test" is obsolete and needs to be more strict is misunderstanding the ridiculously high expectations Turing himself set out many decades ago.
Please read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because "rights" are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution does NOT mean they aren't real or don't exist.
And it doesn't mean they do exist, either.
Absolutely true. But in federal law, by default, they exist until proven otherwise (at least according to the pre-1937ish Constitution).
I have no right to drive without a license.
Actually, you do, according to FEDERAL law (again, going with the pre-1937ish Constitution). The 9th and 10th amendments say that regulation of rights not enumerated are reserved to states or to individuals. The STATES may regulate your right to drive. The federal government does not get to regulate that right.
By your logic, I'd have the right to drive without a license because the Constitution does NOT mention it.
Precisely right, since regulating driving or transportation is not an enumerated power of the federal government (pre-1937). Nowadays, and for the past 75 years or so, SCOTUS has just rolled over and let the federal government pretty much do what it wants, so the federal government is effectively no longer bound by enumerated powers. But back when it was, from the perspective of the FEDERAL government, they could not regulate your right to drive... only states or local governments.
The fact is that there were sensible gun laws for 200 years before the "2nd Amendment" movement started in the late '70s.
I'm assuming you mean the 1970s. 200 years before that was the 1770s. Please cite a federal law from the 1770s that qualifies as one of your "sensible gun laws." Or, well, for it even to be relevant to thsi conversation, it must post-date the enactment of the current Constitution, so cite one after 1789, I suppose.
Feceral law has always been pretty severely restricted in terms of gun regulation. (Note, for example, SCOTUS's overruling of the Brady Bill's requirements for state and local governments to conduct background checks -- those are reegulations that get to be determined by STATES, not by the federal government, according to the 10th amendment.) STATE laws were always allowed to regulate that right, since states are by default granted regulatory powers not assigned tot he federal government.
What SCOTUS did in recent years was to INCORPORATE an explicit federal right into state and local law, a trend that it has gradually been doing with the Bill of Rights for the past 150 years or so. Before, only the federal government was bound to respect the 2nd amendment; now states and local governments must too. Just like state and local governments now must obey the 1st or 5th or whatever amendments too (which wasn't always the case -- for example, there were states in the U.S. that had official established religions).
(For the record, I think we need lots of better gun regulation. I'm fully in favor of strict training requirements etc. to own such a weapon. But that has no bearing on the legal arguments here, which you're grossly misrepresenting.)
As far as I can tell, the vernacular usage of enormity to which you refer is a rather recent addition to the definition, and first came into usage during the media coverage of Bush Jr's lavish inauguration, during which reporters referred to the "enormity" of the proceedings.
Perhaps you might just try a basic internet search and you might find out how wrong you are.
Your "incorrect" usage was first recorded in the late 1700s and in recent decades constitutes roughly 75% of all occurrences of the word. This prescriptivist battle was likely lost more than a half-century ago. Heck, I remember Obama using the "wrong" meaning (i.e., hugeness) in his inaugural address.
I only use the word to mean a "great evil," but pretending that it only means that or that the "hugeness" thing is a recent phenomenon is just living in denial of the facts... Which happens to most people who nit-pick grammar. I long ago realized all I can do is police my own usage, and the rest of the world is likely ignorant of these distinctions... Worse, many of these distinctions never occurred in natural language anyway but were made up by some silly person in the 1800s (though not the present case of "enormity").
Does that apply to the Supreme Court's "right to personal gun ownership"? Because it didn't exist until SCOTUS said it did.
Please read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because "rights" are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution does NOT mean they aren't real or don't exist. On the contrary, the Constitution was written with the exact opposite default position: if the Constitution doesn't explicitly say the federal government is allowed to do something (including restricting or regulating your rights), it by default does not have that power. Or at least that was roughly the way case law interpreted things until somewhere around 1937-1942.
SCOTUS also said owning slaves was ok. just because SCOTUS says something does not make it constitutional
Huh?
Umm, when SCOTUS said owning slaves was Constitutional, it WAS clearly constitutional. You know, they actually added a Constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery (the 13th) about 75 years after the Constitution first came into effect. Until then, it definitely was constitutional and was explicitly part of the negotiations that went into drafting the original Constitution.
Every person involved was already paid. The Grip and such got paid cash on the day they worked. Stealing it after hurts nobody who "worked" on it.
To this, I offer the following parable:
There once was a man who wanted to open a series of restaurants. He hired an architect, interior designers, and a team of construction contractors to build the first restaurant. After a year of planning and building, the restaurant was finished.
The man went on Slashdot and then did read posts by AK Marc and martin-boundary and others, who told him that "every person involved was already paid."
So the man decided not to open his restaurant. Burglars came and stole the food. Squatters came and took up residence in the building. But the man was unconcerned, since "every person involved was already paid."
At the end of the year, the man went to his accountant. Lo, his accountant was not pleased. "Why didst thou spend thy money upon this restaurant?" saith the accountant.
The man saith unto his accountant, "'Every person involved was already paid.' AK Marc and martin-boundary hath told me so. Thus I decided customers were not necessary and figured the project was finished."
But the account then pointed out that the man had not been paid. And lo, the man was sore aggrieved. Thenceforth, he built no more restaurants, and construction business dried up in town. His architect and his designers and his construction workers lost their jobs and never were paid again.
But, as the Slashdot posters had said:
Stealing it after hurts nobody who "worked" on it.
But the workers were quite confused, since they lost their jobs.
Here endeth the lesson.
(P.S. In case this is too unclear to the dense posters and mods who rated such comments highly -- yes, for a particular movie project, the people who "worked" on it were already paid. But the corporations and investors who paid all of them were depending on future profits to make back their initial capital outlay. If they don't receive enough profits, they will stop funding future projects, and "the grip and such" will likely not get as much work. You may or may not think this is a bad idea -- and I'm NOT defending the current copyright system by any means -- but pretending that "every person involved was already paid" and there will be no future impact on their lives is just ridiculous.)
Let me preface this (as i always have to do here) by saying that the current copyright system is broken, the stupid copyright extensions that businesses have pushed through are ridiculous, material should go into the public domain much sooner (the original U.S. 1790 Copyright Act's idea of 14 years seemed plenty), etc.
But just because we recognize that copyright is fundamentally broken and business models may need to change does NOT mean we should mod up any completely nonsensical pro-piracy argument that anyone writes here.
And that's what this is -- a "+5 Insightful" comment that fails basic logic.
That argument makes little sense. Of course people get paid for their work. The TBP operates in the pipeline _after_ people already got paid. Movies or whatnot don't get made without people getting paid. The carpenters who build sets and models get paid. The costume designers get paid. The extras get paid, the camera people, etc.
WHO PAYS THESE PEOPLE? and WHY?
Seriously. Are you (and the mods who bumped this up) so completely ignorant of basic business practices that you don't understand the concept of laying out capital with the expectation of future return?
Let's say you go to work to write some code, say, and people pay your salary. After you're done writing that code, does everyone at the business throw a giant party and say, "Huzzah! We're all paid! We don't need no stinkin' customers to buy anything! Yeah!"
No.
What happens with most business models is that at some stage someone (usually with more resources than your average worker) has to lay out money in advance and go into "debt" on a particular project. Why do they do this? Because they need to pay people who generally can't afford to sit around and wait to get paid until the project is done (i.e., most workers).
It's best to think of piracy as a form of spoilage. The example is harvesting apples. That's a lot of work, and the pickers must get paid, but once the apples are put in storage, some percentage of the apples will spoil.
What the heck are you talking about? When exactly do the people who paid the pickers get paid?? When they sell the apples. After the apples are picked, everyone can't just declare "Huzzah! Everyone has been paid! Let's all go home!"
The people who have NOT been paid yet are the people who funded the whole enterprise in the first place. And guess what? If those people don't make a profit, they stop growing apples. They close up shop. Those pickers who were "already paid" lose their jobs.
Look, any comparison to copyright/intellectual property is already flawed. But in some ways, it works like most businesses -- somebody (usually "investors" or "the boss" or whoever) puts out money in advance with the expectation that they get a return. If they don't get a return, they stop funding businesses like that.
Say you're building a commercial building. You hire an architect, engineers, and a number of construction workers of various kinds. They all "get paid" at the end of the week or at the end of the job. Various people may outlay money in such a project in advance other than you -- the construction company owner, for example, might bid on the job. He still needs to pay his workers usually weekly or biweekly, but his construction company may not get paid until the job is complete. Then he can balance the books.
Similarly, you -- the guy who had the idea of building the building or invested in it -- put out a lot of money up front. When do you get paid? Perhaps it takes 10 years of rent payments from future tenants to get your money back. But after those 10 years, you earn a profit for the rest of the life of the building.
All of those costs are built-in. Those construction workers, etc. are all paid by someone else who is waiting for a return on his money.
When you pay for something by credit card, the merchant pays 3% or more for accepting the card. This means they have to pass the cost onto you in the form of higher prices.
Yes. But if they're like most merchants in the world (with the exception of some gas stations and a random shop here and there), they pass that cost onto YOU too, even if you don't use a credit card.
Its Machiavellian in its brilliance, you're robbing yourself of 3% in order to give yourself 1% and you're so enamoured with it, you're trying to do this as much as possible.
Umm, well again if it's like most merchants in the world, you and I pay the same price if I pay by credit card and you pay by cash.
The difference is that they're "robbing" 2% from me, while they rob 3% from you.
Thus, I win if I use the card in the current system.
Convince more merchants to offer cash discounts or convince so many people to stop using cards that most merchants want to charge a fee. Then we can talk about how people are stupid for using credit cards to get rewards. Until you do so, refusing to use a card is just letting the card companies take MORE money from you.
Not only that, but playing against other players, most people who play chess for recreation don't seem to know about an passant, anyway. So, let's call it's chess 2.0. Streamlined for the modern audience.
Uh, I know you're joking here, but it's ironic given that en passant was actually originally introduced to the game as part of an attempt to "streamline" chess and make it faster paced and less tedious. Pawns were allowed to advance two spaces on their first move instead of just one (which gets the game going faster), and en passant was the obvious countermove necessary to prevent those pawns from getting an undue advantage (and more likely to get to the other side where they will be promoted and delay the game more).
It happened once. 15 years ago. Stop recycling it.
True. But if you read the link, it also happened during public hysteria worked up over a campaign to "name and shame" sex offenders in the past. TFA here is proposing to do this on a much grander scale. Therefore it's a pretty relevant example of the kinds of things that public hysteria over this issue can do if it's not handled well.
I'm a home owner but I don't think there is such a huge gap between owning and renting.
Short-term (less than 5 years or so)? Not a big gap. Long-term? Absolutely. Run the numbers. There may be a few markets in the U.S. where it makes sense to rent, or if you're a person who definitely plans to make big moves at least every 5 years or so. If you plan to stay in the same area for a decade or more, though, owning almost always wins out bigtime.
A lot of older owners are faced with having to sell their homes after retirement and moving somewhere cheaper when they would rather stay where they are. It's more like a safety net and less like a nest-egg, frankly.
Well, that's because many people own "too much home," and the vast majority of people are very poor about planning appropriately for retirement expenses. I don't think this says as much about home ownership in general as about those who buy homes they can't sustain in the long-term and/or don't plan appropriately for retirement. (Sure, there are some states/areas where property taxes suddenly jump or whatever, and people can't afford to continue living where they are, but that's certainly not everywhere.)
Also, there's the not so insignificant issue of needing more space when you have kids, but not as much when you're an old couple living by yourself. That's more difficult to plan for, particularly if you have a large family -- in that case, you probably should have planned ahead to move into a smaller home when the kids move out, unless you have enough money saved to keep up the big home through old age.
Lastly, when downsizing, you most certainly have a "nest egg" if you can sell your big home and completely pay off the new home you're going to live through retirement in COMPLETELY right away (with no mortgage). That's the whole point of having a nest egg. If you were a renter and didn't save, you would still have to shell out big monthly payments for all of your retirement years... whereas even if you have to downsize, these homeowners probably don't. (Aside, of course, from regular homeowning expenses, which are not insignificant, as you point out, but they're generally nowhere near as much as rental costs once you have the mortgage paid off.)
This can be beneficial, unless house prices are as inflated as they are now. We're at the point where you'd have to rent for over 30 years now to break even.
I'd really be interested in seeing where that's true. The average break-even point for renting vs. owning is probably 5-7 years in most areas. Some areas it may be as little as 2-3 (if rents are really high), other places it may be as much as 10 years or a little more (if rents are really low, but prices are high).
Rental markets generally adjust to housing prices over time, so it's unlikely that you could have a long-term sustainable market where you'd need to take a lot more than 10 years to break even unless it was somewhere where no one EVER sells real estate. (Such things do exist, such as in old Italian cities like Rome, where it's next to impossible to buy anything, since properties have been in the same family for centuries... but it's extremely rare in the U.S.)
And even if housing prices are inflated, interest rates are still quite low now (but may start rising). Which means that you may still be able to get an interest rate that roughly tracks inflation over the long term. Effectively, that means you're not really "paying interest" but getting a "zero interest" loan on a huge sum of money for 30 years (since you get to pay later in constant payments, which will be cheaper as inflation makes the dollars worth less). Rents, on the other hand, will rise with inflation.
Take this into account, and I sincerely doubt you'll find many places where renting makes sense for much more than 10 years.
You recall correctly; Pluto hasn't even made it half a lap around the sun since we discovered it.
It was discovered in 1906, 108 years ago
WTF MODS? This gets "+5 informative"??
Pluto was discovered in 1930, as anyone could verify anywhere. Jesus Christ. This is NOT an obscure fact, particularly for anyone who knows anything about the solar system. I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and I've seen a lot of crap, but I'm seriously thinking of leaving now. News for "nerds" my ass.
Slashdot Mirror
This may just be my own unqualified opinion on the subject but it seems like nothing turns people in to a pack of complete idiots faster than anonymity.
Agreed -- which is the primary case for pseudonymity.
I agree that there is plenty of value in real names on the internet when someone is actually going to offer something in their official professional capacity or area of expertise. When some dude starts spouting medical advice, and you can found out that he's using his real name AND is a doctor, maybe that can change your judgment.
But maybe that doctor also wants to offer other opinions on topics related to medical science, but maybe the issues are more controversial or perhaps he wants to say some things that he's not ready to stake his reputation on.
If he posts anonymously, you can't judge his opinion better than any other wacko on the internet.
But if he has a durable pseudonym, people can go back and look at previous posts. If he has a record of saying reliable things about medical topics, maybe he does know something.
Or, if he wants to go posting on a chef site, he can adopt a different pseudonym, and again people can judge his reputation based on previous contributions. Regardless of whether he has "credentials," he can develop an online reputation for saying things that other actual experts agree with.
We do this all the time in real life -- we speak differently to the boss compared to our coworkers, to the old ladies at church compared to the guys at the bar, to our kids compared to a partner in the bedroom. If all of those are connected and mushed together into one "real-life" identity, it makes it nearly impossible to have the multitude of different types of interactions we do in the real world. This is one of the major problems with social networks like Facebook, which try to insist that you be a real person and that you are the same person to all people. (Zuckerberg is on record as saying that people who want to have different online identities must be inherently dishonest.)
But that's just not like things are in the real world. In the real world, you build up your reputation at the bar based on previous behavior, and a pseudonym online can approximate something like that.
Just talk to people and you will se the same thing. Be it in a meeting, in a pub or wherever.
That's somewhat true. Although, I know I "cheated" here by reading TFA, but the summary is actually quite bad in this case. For example, the first half of TFA talks a lot about sexism issues in commenting and other things.
So it happens in the real world. It has happend since ages. Why would it surprise anybody that it happens on the Internet?
Well, as TFA points out, one thing that is different about the internet is that the more disconnected (and often anonymous) nature of internet commenting tends to lead people to have fewer inhibitions when commenting -- probably more so than even in a pub (to take your example) for many people.
It's not exactly a new observation, but it is something that potentially makes this interaction a little different. If people assume that commenters are authoritative and "like them" on the internet, then jerks and trolls who post nasty things -- like, say, racist comments on a story -- might gain a wider audience, who then feel justified in their own latent racism.
We can see these dynamics in action, for example in scandals in the past few years where the news has drawn attention to huge numbers of racist comments or tweets that might follow a somewhat inocuous event. (I recall a Hispanic kid singing the national anthem dressed in traditional Mexican clothing at a major national sports event bringing out a flurry of racist comments, for example -- even though the kid was born in the U.S., and I believe his father was in the U.S. military or a veteran or something.)
As I said, TFA focuses on sexism a bit rather than racism, but it's a similar issue. We all know that people are more likely to be jerks on the internet, particularly if they think they are relatively anonymous. However, if other people still read these jerks' comments as authoritative and "like them," it may reinforce opinions and ideas that are actually less mainstream or which would be kept out of normal "civil" discourse.
On the other hand, one might argue that such revelations also often show opinions that are "not poticially correct" but people nevertheless hold -- so such extreme comments may also show a little more about what some people "really think" but normally wouldn't say. Whether or not that balances the trolls and flamers is another question -- but the point is that the internet does actually change these interactions in interesting ways, and TFA talks about some of them.
As a result, it's expensive as bloody hell to society, leading to a *deficit* in high-quality medical care socialist countries.
I agree with most of what you said, however this simply is not true. When you take a one-year snapshot and look at smokers -- yes, they cost more on average.
But if you look at lifetime total expense, smokers cost less because they die significantly earlier. Yes, a year or two of treatments for lung cancer can be expensive, but then many smokers die. Meanwhile, the healthy runner who needs a number of joint replacements, has a few random cancers in his 70s, and then spends the last 15 years in assisted care due to dementia can cost many times more.
Bottom line -- smokers may LOOK like a net deficit in the annual snapshot. But if you stopped ALL smoking today (somehow), you'd save money for a few years, and then 10-20 years down the road, all your socialist health costs would skyrocket... because the darn people didn't die.
It's not a nice way to think about the argument, and most researchers stay away from this argument, because it seems to run counter to the anti-smoking campaigns most governments like these days. But there are plenty of studies out there which look at total life expenses and how smokers are cheaper. Spend some time looking, and you'll find them.
The question is how many years of useless sucking on social security.
Why didn't you say you were a willfully ignorant sociopath to start with? Those people using the benefits they paid for are still buying cars, computers, and day-to-day goods. You know....putting money into the economy while no longer competing with younger workers for jobs.
Umm, no. Your logic doesn't make sense. I'm not a "sociopath" (or at least I don't think so), and I'm all in favor of valuing elderly people and their social contributions, but a NET monetary one is generally NOT one of them.
It's not like all of their assets magically disappear if they die at 60 or 65 or 70 or whatever. No -- that money, which was produced through ADDED value to society through working is passed on to others when they die -- either to specific heirs or to taxes toward society's benefit in general.
And guess what -- OTHER people will then use that money, either directly in spending or investments or whatever. You don't need to prop up an 85-year-old to allow him to click on Amazon -- he can die, pass on the money to grandkids, and they can spend it just as easily.
So, what really matters is when an older person stops making a net positive contribution, which is generally around retirement. Sure, older people do often continue to do some stuff, like providing some help with childcare for grandkids or whatever, and some continue to do a lot of stuff in retirement -- but the majority stop actually generating net positive productivity at that point.
I'm NOT at all saying that they should "go ahead and die" or whatever. There are many reasons to value them as family members and other resources, but the simple fact is that most people past retirement cease to add net MONETARY value to society. Thus, from an economic standpoint, they are draining resources.
And that's why those who die young (whether from smoking, obesity, disease, whatever) are generally -- purely from an ECONOMIC balance sheet -- less of a drain on society than those who live into old age. Seriously -- there are a LOT of studies out there that show this, if you care to look. It's a little morbid, but it's the truth.
You're fortunate you don't have whatever it is that gives people a thrill from gambling. For those people, the worst thing that could happen is to win the first time. It ruins lives. I've seen it.
Yeah, I know it ruins lives. And I WAS excited by the win. I think I played another few dollars until the logic set in and I thought about the odds rationally and realized I was incredibly lucky to end up that far ahead so quickly... So I stopped. It's not that there wasn't a thrill. It's not that I have never fantasized about what it would be like to win the lottery either. But I also analyze it rationally, and for me, that rational analysis wins out.
I still maintain that by not buying a ticket my odds of winning are not significantly reduced.
Precisely true. I've won $175 in lottery money from scratch tickets, but I've never bought one.
Instead, some of my relatives have taken to giving a few of these as gifts at Christmas. I think it's ridiculous, but whatever. So, over the past few years, I've won something like 5 or 6 tickets for a total of $175, including one ticket that got me $50 and another that got me $100.
No one else in the family has ever won more than $20-25 on a single ticket, despite some of them buying scratch tickets on a regular basis.
So yeah, I'd say your statement is definitely true. I've never bought a ticket, and I've had bigger winnings than the people I know who buy them regularly. I don't think I'm "lucky" (whatever that means, though this past year these people bought me EXTRA tickets because they're convinced I am)... it's just random chance.
Of course, I'm also the guy who only once gambled in a casino, and it was when my Dad took me to one and gave me $20 "to get started." I went to a slot machine, after spending about $5, I hit $75. I cashed out, paid my Dad back his $20 and kept the remainder. Never played again... have no desire to.
I guess the moral of my story is -- if possible, gamble with other people's money. It's been "lucky" for me, anyway. :)
(P.S. I'm not trying to smug here. I have no issue with people who have enough money gambling for entertainment. People spend stupid amounts of money on all sorts of stuff for "entertainment," whether it's hundreds of dollars on tickets to a sporting event, a concert, an opera, whatever. Whatever floats your boat. I just personally don't find the entertainment value of tickets that interesting.)
You're missing the point. $2 is worthless to me. I can't buy a coffee (one I would drink) with $2, someplaces you won't even get a soda with it, and maybe would get me breakfast if I ate a donut but if I'm honest I have trouble thinking of a single restaurant I'd actually eat at with something on the menu for $2 or less.
No, $2 isn't "worthless" to you. It's worth precisely $2. You may not be able to buy much with it by itself, but if you're at a store trying to pay for your new tablet with cash and you only have $298 in your wallet instead of the $300 price, well, that $2 could cause you some annoying inconvenience, at a minimum.
Of course, if I only made minimum wage I might really care about those $2, but I don't
And this is the real problem. The amount people spend on lottery tickets per year seems inversely proportional to their income (to a point). It's not that a $2 ticket is going to be a huge inconvenience on you or even many lower-class people.
The problem is when the person who already has trouble making rent and having enough money to buy food for the kids this week decides to take $50 from their paycheck and buy extra lottery tickets this week. Or when they spend that money on scratch tickets in hopes that they'll get more back this week (which occasionally happens).
In other words, it's not the $2. But all money adds up with other money. The problem is not *a* $2 ticket, it's the people who end up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on lottery tickets every year (and there are more of those people out there than you might think), when they could be putting that money toward paying off debt or saving for retirement or just building up an emergency fund.
There was a recent case of a normal weight woman getting a fecal transplant from an obese donor, and now this woman has become obese but not changed her diet and lifestyle.
Yeah, I'd say a conclusion from this one case study is pretty darn premature. Here's the actual paper. Both the woman and her daughter (the donor) were borderline overweight (~BMI 26) before the transplant. Both the mother AND the daughter gained significant weight after the transplant (30-35 lbs. each).
By your logic, we could also attribute the daughter's weight gain to the fact that she donated stool -- which wouldn't make any sense, but is also consistent with the data.
I don't know where you get that she had "not changed her diet and lifestyle." That's not mentioned in the study. All it says is that the woman unintentionally gained a lot of weight (as did her daughter), and she apparently had tried to control it but was unsuccessful. Lots of people in their early 30s start to gain weight.
Also, I should note that the condition she was treated for caused severe digestive discomfort. Many of those symptoms lessened after treatment. Could it have been that suddenly she started eating more because it no longer made her feel terrible?? (And it looks like her daughter joined her in the new binge, if her weight change shows anything....)
Anyhow, I have no idea what this one case study shows. But (1) the woman was borderline overweight before the treatment, (2) both she and her daughter the donor experienced similar weight gain, which could point to a common shift in dietary eating habits in the household -- perhaps to foods that were more caloric but would previously have caused the mother digestive distress, and (3) she had a condition that would have made eating too much unenjoyable, but that disease was mostly cured.
Suggestive? Perhaps. But I wouldn't conclude too much on the basis of this case study, unless there's information that's not in the official published account that could establish better causality.
Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge. This is what always happens; people don't understand how science works or how scientists think and communicate. When the scientist says 'To the best of current knowledge, eating eggs is probably bad for you, although we really haven't researched that enough' it translates into 'Science says egg is bad for you'.
To be fair, there are PLENTY of scientists and studies which actively promote their results by emphasizing aspects that go beyond a reasonable interpretation of the data. It may be less common in "hard science" fields, but in "soft sciences" and things like nutritional studies, you'll often see "Discussion" sections at the end of the paper that claim, on the basis of some questionable stats and a sample group of 12, that they have discovered eggs are bad for you, found a cure for cancer, and suggest possible locations for the body of Jimmy Hoffa.
Okay, I exaggerate a bit. But I've literally had this exact conversation about an egg study in the past couple years with a vegetarian friend who started posting alarmist things on social media concerning eggs -- according to this recent study she read, eggs really WERE bad for you, and in her vegetarian diet, this seemed to be something to worry about since she tended to depend on eggs as a protein source.
Anyhow, I went and looked first at the press release she linked to. Not only the university promoting the study but the researchers themselves were quoted as saying almost verbatim, "There's been some question about this in the past, but we've shown here that eggs really are bad for you." Sure, there was some minor disclaimer at some point saying, "Further research is needed," etc., but the folks doing this study clearly had an agenda, which became clear when you read their paper.
I don't know what the agenda was -- maybe the director of the study is a militant vegan and hates the egg industry, or maybe they became convinced that eggs were terrible years ago and are fighting to hold onto their hypothesis, or maybe they just don't like eggs.
Or maybe, like many researchers, they just need grant money to keep their jobs or get tenure, and they want to draw attention to their work.
Regardless, the study clearly was full of holes, both from statistical perspective and a design perspective. The sample size was small. They didn't try to control for most obvious confounding variables (like, for example, what else did the people eat in their diets -- it wasn't even mentioned). Etc.
Look -- I agree with you that media reports tend to exaggerate science and often don't hedge as much as real scientists do. What you fail to account for is that some scientists often want their work to get attention (or are really proud of their pet theory or whatever), so while they may hedge officially in a sentence here or there, they may also be happy to have their results as broadly interpreted and cited as possible. And when they write up a press release or are interviewed, yes, they'll say "We still need further research," but they'll go on to provide all sorts of sweeping conclusions that their research may "suggest." It's no wonder then that media sources get confused.
(Again, I'm NOT saying all scientists are like this. But if you start reading things like discussion sections in nutrition papers, you'll quickly realize that (1) humans are complex systems, so designing a good experiment and analyzing the data fairly can be really hard, but (2) that often doesn't stop researchers from overstating the possible importance of their results significantly.)
The Turing Test is a thought experiment. It's just saying "if you can talk to this, and can't tell if it's a person or a computer, then it doesn't matter: it's intellegent." It's not a method for a scientific, practical process.
If that's true, then why did Turing claim in his original paper that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool humans and "pass the test" 30% of the time? Why state such a specific prediction for a test that was not intended to be practical and only a "thought experiment"?
It's just something to think about when considering what might constitute intelligence.
Why can't it be both? In Turing's time (and still today) there were (and are) people who think real strong human-like AI is impossible. In order to evaluate "intelligence," though, we need a standard test that we could agree on. Turing attempted to roughly define the outlines of such a test, which also involved a lot of philosophical debate. On the other hand, he predicted within 50 years of his paper that computers would be around which could pass this test, which suggests that he thought it was in fact a practical (if a little vague) way of gauging progress in AI.
It is not a test of whether an AI can fool an average person, but whether it can fool an expert.
You are not allowed to redefine the test just because it makes you more comfortable to do so. The original paper simply said "A man, a woman, and an interrogator". It did not qualify that interrogator as an expert, but simply the one who poses the questions (thus, an interrogator)
Well, please re-read the original paper.
You are correct that the original test did not specify an AI expert as interrogator. On the other hand, read the types of dialogue Turing offers as examples. It's very clear that he is imagining "interrogators" (note that word -- it implies someone with a strong drive to ask probing questions) who are not only quite intelligent but also keep asking very probing questions designed to test the intellect of the person/thing on the other side.
The standard is clearly NOT, "Gee, can I have a nice small talk conversation?" Instead, the "interrogator" uses questions varying from computational problems to chess problems to questions about composing a sonnet to detailed discussion of subtle linguistic meanings in English, related in abstract ways to classic literature.
That doesn't sound like your "average Joe" interrogator to me. Does it to you? I'm sure Turing didn't expect all his interrogators to be so intelligent, but they were clearly expected (based on his sample dialogues) to understand how to probe intelligence at a pretty sophisticated level.
The pronoun disambiguation is a good test, because AI does that poorly, and humans do it well. But that is not a replacement for the Turing Test, that IS the Turing Test.
Indeed. Here's an excerpt from Turing's original paper that described the "imitation game," replying to a possible objection that his test would not be able to be used to gauge true understanding as a human might:
Probably [the objector to the test] would be quite willing to accept the imitation game as a test. The game (with the player B omitted) is frequently used in practice under the name of viva voce to discover whether some one really understands something or has "learnt it parrot fashion." Let us listen in to a part of such a viva voce:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.
Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
And so on, What would Professor Jefferson say if the sonnet-writing machine was able to answer like this in the viva voce? I do not know whether he would regard the machine as "merely artificially signalling" these answers, but if the answers were as satisfactory and sustained as in the above passage I do not think he would describe it as "an easy contrivance."
THAT is the sort of standard of AI that Turing was envisioning could be passed in his "test." It isn't a computer pretending to be a non-responsive teenager with an attitude problem who doesn't really speak the same language as the interrogator (as some chatbots might claim).
It's an idea of AI as something that could debate word replacement in a Shakespearean sonnet, would understand and be able to process poetic scansion, understand the subtle word meanings and connotations in language, and be able to synthesize these various things together while applying such concepts to evaluations of classic literary references.
Turing's test then assumes an AI competent enough to have a flawless conversation on the level of a bright university student or even a colleague of Turing's. Now, granted, we might find the literature quiz a little unnecessary, but in a more general sense this example gets at the idea of probing the AI's understanding of concepts, connecting disparate uses of things together (like a literary character to an abstract concept to a matter of style or poetic form), and in general a fluent and adaptive recognition of linguistic meaning.
I think we would all agree that the various chatbots that have claimed in recent years to have "passed the Turing test" are NOWHERE near this level.
This is the kind of standard Turing himself explicitly mentioned in his original article on the test. And frankly, if I encountered an AI that could have a conversation this fluid and wide-ranging (even if not on literature specifically) in flawless English, I'd be happy to declare it "intelligent." But we don't have anything close to that -- and pretending the "Turing test" is obsolete and needs to be more strict is misunderstanding the ridiculously high expectations Turing himself set out many decades ago.
Please read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because "rights" are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution does NOT mean they aren't real or don't exist.
And it doesn't mean they do exist, either.
Absolutely true. But in federal law, by default, they exist until proven otherwise (at least according to the pre-1937ish Constitution).
I have no right to drive without a license.
Actually, you do, according to FEDERAL law (again, going with the pre-1937ish Constitution). The 9th and 10th amendments say that regulation of rights not enumerated are reserved to states or to individuals. The STATES may regulate your right to drive. The federal government does not get to regulate that right.
By your logic, I'd have the right to drive without a license because the Constitution does NOT mention it.
Precisely right, since regulating driving or transportation is not an enumerated power of the federal government (pre-1937). Nowadays, and for the past 75 years or so, SCOTUS has just rolled over and let the federal government pretty much do what it wants, so the federal government is effectively no longer bound by enumerated powers. But back when it was, from the perspective of the FEDERAL government, they could not regulate your right to drive... only states or local governments.
The fact is that there were sensible gun laws for 200 years before the "2nd Amendment" movement started in the late '70s.
I'm assuming you mean the 1970s. 200 years before that was the 1770s. Please cite a federal law from the 1770s that qualifies as one of your "sensible gun laws." Or, well, for it even to be relevant to thsi conversation, it must post-date the enactment of the current Constitution, so cite one after 1789, I suppose.
Feceral law has always been pretty severely restricted in terms of gun regulation. (Note, for example, SCOTUS's overruling of the Brady Bill's requirements for state and local governments to conduct background checks -- those are reegulations that get to be determined by STATES, not by the federal government, according to the 10th amendment.) STATE laws were always allowed to regulate that right, since states are by default granted regulatory powers not assigned tot he federal government.
What SCOTUS did in recent years was to INCORPORATE an explicit federal right into state and local law, a trend that it has gradually been doing with the Bill of Rights for the past 150 years or so. Before, only the federal government was bound to respect the 2nd amendment; now states and local governments must too. Just like state and local governments now must obey the 1st or 5th or whatever amendments too (which wasn't always the case -- for example, there were states in the U.S. that had official established religions).
(For the record, I think we need lots of better gun regulation. I'm fully in favor of strict training requirements etc. to own such a weapon. But that has no bearing on the legal arguments here, which you're grossly misrepresenting.)
As far as I can tell, the vernacular usage of enormity to which you refer is a rather recent addition to the definition, and first came into usage during the media coverage of Bush Jr's lavish inauguration, during which reporters referred to the "enormity" of the proceedings.
Perhaps you might just try a basic internet search and you might find out how wrong you are.
Your "incorrect" usage was first recorded in the late 1700s and in recent decades constitutes roughly 75% of all occurrences of the word. This prescriptivist battle was likely lost more than a half-century ago. Heck, I remember Obama using the "wrong" meaning (i.e., hugeness) in his inaugural address.
I only use the word to mean a "great evil," but pretending that it only means that or that the "hugeness" thing is a recent phenomenon is just living in denial of the facts... Which happens to most people who nit-pick grammar. I long ago realized all I can do is police my own usage, and the rest of the world is likely ignorant of these distinctions... Worse, many of these distinctions never occurred in natural language anyway but were made up by some silly person in the 1800s (though not the present case of "enormity").
Does that apply to the Supreme Court's "right to personal gun ownership"? Because it didn't exist until SCOTUS said it did.
Please read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because "rights" are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution does NOT mean they aren't real or don't exist. On the contrary, the Constitution was written with the exact opposite default position: if the Constitution doesn't explicitly say the federal government is allowed to do something (including restricting or regulating your rights), it by default does not have that power. Or at least that was roughly the way case law interpreted things until somewhere around 1937-1942.
SCOTUS also said owning slaves was ok. just because SCOTUS says something does not make it constitutional
Huh?
Umm, when SCOTUS said owning slaves was Constitutional, it WAS clearly constitutional. You know, they actually added a Constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery (the 13th) about 75 years after the Constitution first came into effect. Until then, it definitely was constitutional and was explicitly part of the negotiations that went into drafting the original Constitution.
Every person involved was already paid. The Grip and such got paid cash on the day they worked. Stealing it after hurts nobody who "worked" on it.
To this, I offer the following parable:
There once was a man who wanted to open a series of restaurants. He hired an architect, interior designers, and a team of construction contractors to build the first restaurant. After a year of planning and building, the restaurant was finished.
The man went on Slashdot and then did read posts by AK Marc and martin-boundary and others, who told him that "every person involved was already paid."
So the man decided not to open his restaurant. Burglars came and stole the food. Squatters came and took up residence in the building. But the man was unconcerned, since "every person involved was already paid."
At the end of the year, the man went to his accountant. Lo, his accountant was not pleased. "Why didst thou spend thy money upon this restaurant?" saith the accountant.
The man saith unto his accountant, "'Every person involved was already paid.' AK Marc and martin-boundary hath told me so. Thus I decided customers were not necessary and figured the project was finished."
But the account then pointed out that the man had not been paid. And lo, the man was sore aggrieved. Thenceforth, he built no more restaurants, and construction business dried up in town. His architect and his designers and his construction workers lost their jobs and never were paid again.
But, as the Slashdot posters had said:
Stealing it after hurts nobody who "worked" on it.
But the workers were quite confused, since they lost their jobs.
Here endeth the lesson.
(P.S. In case this is too unclear to the dense posters and mods who rated such comments highly -- yes, for a particular movie project, the people who "worked" on it were already paid. But the corporations and investors who paid all of them were depending on future profits to make back their initial capital outlay. If they don't receive enough profits, they will stop funding future projects, and "the grip and such" will likely not get as much work. You may or may not think this is a bad idea -- and I'm NOT defending the current copyright system by any means -- but pretending that "every person involved was already paid" and there will be no future impact on their lives is just ridiculous.)
Let me preface this (as i always have to do here) by saying that the current copyright system is broken, the stupid copyright extensions that businesses have pushed through are ridiculous, material should go into the public domain much sooner (the original U.S. 1790 Copyright Act's idea of 14 years seemed plenty), etc.
But just because we recognize that copyright is fundamentally broken and business models may need to change does NOT mean we should mod up any completely nonsensical pro-piracy argument that anyone writes here.
And that's what this is -- a "+5 Insightful" comment that fails basic logic.
That argument makes little sense. Of course people get paid for their work. The TBP operates in the pipeline _after_ people already got paid. Movies or whatnot don't get made without people getting paid. The carpenters who build sets and models get paid. The costume designers get paid. The extras get paid, the camera people, etc.
WHO PAYS THESE PEOPLE? and WHY?
Seriously. Are you (and the mods who bumped this up) so completely ignorant of basic business practices that you don't understand the concept of laying out capital with the expectation of future return?
Let's say you go to work to write some code, say, and people pay your salary. After you're done writing that code, does everyone at the business throw a giant party and say, "Huzzah! We're all paid! We don't need no stinkin' customers to buy anything! Yeah!"
No.
What happens with most business models is that at some stage someone (usually with more resources than your average worker) has to lay out money in advance and go into "debt" on a particular project. Why do they do this? Because they need to pay people who generally can't afford to sit around and wait to get paid until the project is done (i.e., most workers).
It's best to think of piracy as a form of spoilage. The example is harvesting apples. That's a lot of work, and the pickers must get paid, but once the apples are put in storage, some percentage of the apples will spoil.
What the heck are you talking about? When exactly do the people who paid the pickers get paid?? When they sell the apples. After the apples are picked, everyone can't just declare "Huzzah! Everyone has been paid! Let's all go home!"
The people who have NOT been paid yet are the people who funded the whole enterprise in the first place. And guess what? If those people don't make a profit, they stop growing apples. They close up shop. Those pickers who were "already paid" lose their jobs.
Look, any comparison to copyright/intellectual property is already flawed. But in some ways, it works like most businesses -- somebody (usually "investors" or "the boss" or whoever) puts out money in advance with the expectation that they get a return. If they don't get a return, they stop funding businesses like that.
Say you're building a commercial building. You hire an architect, engineers, and a number of construction workers of various kinds. They all "get paid" at the end of the week or at the end of the job. Various people may outlay money in such a project in advance other than you -- the construction company owner, for example, might bid on the job. He still needs to pay his workers usually weekly or biweekly, but his construction company may not get paid until the job is complete. Then he can balance the books.
Similarly, you -- the guy who had the idea of building the building or invested in it -- put out a lot of money up front. When do you get paid? Perhaps it takes 10 years of rent payments from future tenants to get your money back. But after those 10 years, you earn a profit for the rest of the life of the building.
All of those costs are built-in. Those construction workers, etc. are all paid by someone else who is waiting for a return on his money.
And by the way, for the three places in town I often go to where they actually offer a cash discount, I bring cash.
When you pay for something by credit card, the merchant pays 3% or more for accepting the card. This means they have to pass the cost onto you in the form of higher prices.
Yes. But if they're like most merchants in the world (with the exception of some gas stations and a random shop here and there), they pass that cost onto YOU too, even if you don't use a credit card.
Its Machiavellian in its brilliance, you're robbing yourself of 3% in order to give yourself 1% and you're so enamoured with it, you're trying to do this as much as possible.
Umm, well again if it's like most merchants in the world, you and I pay the same price if I pay by credit card and you pay by cash.
The difference is that they're "robbing" 2% from me, while they rob 3% from you.
Thus, I win if I use the card in the current system.
Convince more merchants to offer cash discounts or convince so many people to stop using cards that most merchants want to charge a fee. Then we can talk about how people are stupid for using credit cards to get rewards. Until you do so, refusing to use a card is just letting the card companies take MORE money from you.
Not only that, but playing against other players, most people who play chess for recreation don't seem to know about an passant, anyway. So, let's call it's chess 2.0. Streamlined for the modern audience.
Uh, I know you're joking here, but it's ironic given that en passant was actually originally introduced to the game as part of an attempt to "streamline" chess and make it faster paced and less tedious. Pawns were allowed to advance two spaces on their first move instead of just one (which gets the game going faster), and en passant was the obvious countermove necessary to prevent those pawns from getting an undue advantage (and more likely to get to the other side where they will be promoted and delay the game more).
It happened once. 15 years ago. Stop recycling it.
True. But if you read the link, it also happened during public hysteria worked up over a campaign to "name and shame" sex offenders in the past. TFA here is proposing to do this on a much grander scale. Therefore it's a pretty relevant example of the kinds of things that public hysteria over this issue can do if it's not handled well.
I'm a home owner but I don't think there is such a huge gap between owning and renting.
Short-term (less than 5 years or so)? Not a big gap. Long-term? Absolutely. Run the numbers. There may be a few markets in the U.S. where it makes sense to rent, or if you're a person who definitely plans to make big moves at least every 5 years or so. If you plan to stay in the same area for a decade or more, though, owning almost always wins out bigtime.
A lot of older owners are faced with having to sell their homes after retirement and moving somewhere cheaper when they would rather stay where they are. It's more like a safety net and less like a nest-egg, frankly.
Well, that's because many people own "too much home," and the vast majority of people are very poor about planning appropriately for retirement expenses. I don't think this says as much about home ownership in general as about those who buy homes they can't sustain in the long-term and/or don't plan appropriately for retirement. (Sure, there are some states/areas where property taxes suddenly jump or whatever, and people can't afford to continue living where they are, but that's certainly not everywhere.)
Also, there's the not so insignificant issue of needing more space when you have kids, but not as much when you're an old couple living by yourself. That's more difficult to plan for, particularly if you have a large family -- in that case, you probably should have planned ahead to move into a smaller home when the kids move out, unless you have enough money saved to keep up the big home through old age.
Lastly, when downsizing, you most certainly have a "nest egg" if you can sell your big home and completely pay off the new home you're going to live through retirement in COMPLETELY right away (with no mortgage). That's the whole point of having a nest egg. If you were a renter and didn't save, you would still have to shell out big monthly payments for all of your retirement years... whereas even if you have to downsize, these homeowners probably don't. (Aside, of course, from regular homeowning expenses, which are not insignificant, as you point out, but they're generally nowhere near as much as rental costs once you have the mortgage paid off.)
This can be beneficial, unless house prices are as inflated as they are now. We're at the point where you'd have to rent for over 30 years now to break even.
I'd really be interested in seeing where that's true. The average break-even point for renting vs. owning is probably 5-7 years in most areas. Some areas it may be as little as 2-3 (if rents are really high), other places it may be as much as 10 years or a little more (if rents are really low, but prices are high).
Rental markets generally adjust to housing prices over time, so it's unlikely that you could have a long-term sustainable market where you'd need to take a lot more than 10 years to break even unless it was somewhere where no one EVER sells real estate. (Such things do exist, such as in old Italian cities like Rome, where it's next to impossible to buy anything, since properties have been in the same family for centuries... but it's extremely rare in the U.S.)
And even if housing prices are inflated, interest rates are still quite low now (but may start rising). Which means that you may still be able to get an interest rate that roughly tracks inflation over the long term. Effectively, that means you're not really "paying interest" but getting a "zero interest" loan on a huge sum of money for 30 years (since you get to pay later in constant payments, which will be cheaper as inflation makes the dollars worth less). Rents, on the other hand, will rise with inflation.
Take this into account, and I sincerely doubt you'll find many places where renting makes sense for much more than 10 years.
You recall correctly; Pluto hasn't even made it half a lap around the sun since we discovered it.
It was discovered in 1906, 108 years ago
WTF MODS? This gets "+5 informative"??
Pluto was discovered in 1930, as anyone could verify anywhere. Jesus Christ. This is NOT an obscure fact, particularly for anyone who knows anything about the solar system. I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and I've seen a lot of crap, but I'm seriously thinking of leaving now. News for "nerds" my ass.