Well professor if you look at statistics from ANY time period, for ANY country in the world, the rich ALWAYS have more surviving children than the poor.
It's interesting you should mention that. Because it's not true of any first world country today. Also, the article mentions that it was not true for the Samurai ruling class in Japan, or the Chinese Qing-dynasty. This makes me question your ability to (a) read, (b) think, and (c) know when you've lost an argument.
Also I'm surprised that an "economics historian" thinks you can "save" your way into an economic boom. Perhaps he also thinks he can "save" enough to retire a millionaire.
Saving allows you to plan. It allows you to buy stuff when it's cheap, and sell stuff when it's expensive. It allows you to invest, and therefore to create new business of value to society at large. The debt-based society we currently live in is a recent invention, and if you had read the article (or at least the slashdot summary of it), you would have known that saving must be compared to subsistence-living, not to our current economy. But I already know you don't read, so....
Let's totally disregard the fact that the industrial revolution meant that the same or less quantity of workers could produce more, higher quality, and standardized products.
You don't need to totally disregard it to be unhappy with that as the only explanation. If you had read the fucking article, you would have known why the author wasn't happy with it. I'm going to tell you anyway, although I know it's pointless to argue with you: the higher productivity could just as well have made more people able to survive, and everybody would be back at subsistence-living. This didn't happen, therefore increased productivity is not a sufficient explanation, although it's a required part of the explanation.
Uhm, you are taking away the "social" aspect of social networking, and making it into a blog. I can't predict the future, and I certainly can see this happen. After all, a "blog" is what used to be called a regularly updated personal homepage. But if blogging now suddenly gets named "social networking", well what phrase would you use in the future to describe what we nowadays call "social networking"?
The cruise-ships don't stop in the Amazonian jungle because they are ocean-going giant ships, not river-going small boats. Besides, if they made regular stops at "unknown" tribes, the tribes wouldn't be "unknown" anymore. I'm sure there is regulation to stop that sort of thing. But these tribes are certainly interesting enough for average tourists to want a visit, if it could be done within the same budget, safety-constraints, and comfort-level.
Sure, you could argue the same thing against us: the cruise-space-colonies doesn't visit us because we live inside an "uncomfortable" gravity-well, and besides, there are conservationists wanting us to stay "untouched" by space-tourism. Even if that is true, where are their researchers, explorers, and missionaries? More importantly, where are their BIC-lighters (the preferred fire-making instrument by 10 out of 10 aboriginal stone-age tribesmen with NO direct contact with our civilization)? Where are their empty coke-bottles? And where are their noisy planes and other signs that they are there?
I fail to see how we can NOT be interesting. You'd have to explore pretty many planets with life to start getting bored by new alien life-forms. And besides, if it's that many planets with life for them to explore, why have none of them contacted us?
Yes, it's digital, but where you get base three from, I have no idea. Conventionally, it's considered base six (intra-character-gap, letter-gap, word-gap, sentence-gap, dit, dah), although I'm sure it's possible to come up with a contrived explanation of why it's base three, or seven, or five, or whatever...
Yes, the alphabet is Huffman encoded. That doesn't mean that morse code is "compressed". Morse code is designed for humans, not computers, and has very low entropy compared to e.g. gzip-compressed text sent with an obvious binary encoding. Any listener will immediately be able to distinguish morse-code from noise, and so should just about any automated listener too. If you've ever used a phone modem or a fax machine, you'll notice that the sound this makes through the phone line is much harder to distinguish from random noise.
Also, the text sent in morse-code is typically not compressed (apart from ad-hoc compression, such as CQ, SOS, etc..., which is not that much different from SMS-speak, such as "r u ok")
Sure, there exists tribes in the Amazon who can't be described as great explorers and conquerors. Then again, most of the earths population does not consist of this kind of tribe. It only takes on expansionist tribe to expand across the rest of the earth. In earths history we have had several expansive tribes, and most of earths population now belongs to one of them, not to these rare exceptional tribes in the Amazon.
Your argument that every planet in the universe would be inhabitated with people just like this strange Amazon tribe, seems pretty unlikely. Even if there are 1e9999999 such planets, it only takes one to colonize the rest of the universe, assuming sufficient technology.
Also, you claim that space-travel is somehow "uncomfortable" is completely ridiculous. Humans have pretty much left nature behind, and instead lives in places specially constructed to be more comfortable to them. One popular form of vacation is to live entirely inside a travelling ocean-going vessel, called a cruise-ship. The people aboard these, do not find them uncomfortable. As technology gets better, so will comfort-level, regardless of whether your arcology is a space-ship, or you are a planet-surface-dweller.
Finally, assuming that the aliens would want to meet humans, is not arrogant. Humans seek out interesting stuff whenever we see it, whether it's in space, in the deep sea, in caves, or in the jungle. Most of these places are uncomfortable, but we accept low comfort in order to learn and explore. If an alien species is not interested in learning and/or exploring, they are most likely not intelligent either.
It is when we unconditionally love not just our parents and children and pets but all life that we can make a claim to being civilized.
No, you confuse being civilized with being the Christian God. If you start loving the virus that give you HIV, the poisonous snake that bit you in the leg, or the tiger that bit you in the throat, you are dead. Being civilized just means that you conform to the (rather arbitrary) norms of a given civilization. Even here on earth, that means rather different things in different civilizations.
There are tribes on this earth that believe young boys need to suck the dicks of their elders in order to get the "life force" themselves, so they can progress from boys to men. Such a ritual is not considered civilized in the western world, but if you try to stop it in this tribe, I can assure you, that they will not view you as very civilized.
Re:Advanced Intelligence May Just Be Embarrassed
on
The Fermi Paradox is Back
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't see why they would be embarrassed. When a baby craps in his pants, are you embarassed for the baby? When you see dogs marking their territories with pee, and humping human legs, are you embarrassed about the dog? Rabbits puke their partially digested food, and eats it again. Cows do the same, but unlike rabbits, the food never exits their mouth. Fleas puts their eggs in horse-shit. Are you embarrassed about that? When you see a blue-green algae in the microscope using it's flagella to swim towards the light, are you embarrassed about their primitive behaviour? That humans broadcast infomercials, reality TV, and porn, would to aliens be just as embarassing to them, as it is to us that salmons have to go up the same river as they were born, to lay their eggs.
Lets assume the aliens are one or more singularity leaps beyond us. They may not even realize the distinction in "intelligence" between us and a lobster as anything significant (just like we rarely bother to distinguish between the "intelligence" of a lobster and a tuna). Our cars and planes and computers is surely a fascinating example of an extended phenotype, but it doesn't really tell them that we are intelligent, does it? Even if they are able to observe that we have a primitive auditory and visual communication system, it will to them be as unevolved as ants exchanging pheromones to communicate. There is no way they would be able to exchange ideas with us, even if they mastered our language perfectly.
Technically, it's not a paradox. You put in some currently acceptable scientific hypotheses, and extrapolate, and come to a result that so far hasn't been observed. While I agree it's puzzling, it's not in any way a paradox in the traditional sense of the word.
One pretty obvious explanation is that the input hypotheses are wrong, or the deduction is flawed. Another is that the intelligent aliens are far in between. We can't observe them because they are too far away. Another is that the aliens are simply not detectable to us. They can be intelligent, but not have invented radio yet, or they can have surpassed us to the extent that they do not rely on radio, or use radio-transmissions that are directed, or undistinguishable from random noise.
Given sufficiently advanced technology, they can have uploaded themselves into sub-Planck-scale supercomputers, be the size of a galaxy, live in hostile (to us) environments like the inside of a star, or emigrated to their own universe, that they designed themselves to be more suitable for them. All of this is speculation of course, as even on earth, intelligent life is incredibly rare (humans have existed for only 250000-300000 years, and only emitted radio signals for about 100 years or so. The earth is at least 4500000000 years old.
Even on earth we can see a tendency towards higher entropy in our radio-transmissions detectable from space. Low-power wireless networks, such as cell-phones replace traditional broadcasting. Spread-spectrum devices replace FM and AM. Highly compressed digital signals replace morse-code and voice.
Some of that is technological. If you are on a cable modem then any upstream bandwidth has to be basically carved out of the downstream bandwidth. Providers tweak their upstream caps as low as possible to free up as many timeslices as possible for download content. You may argue with this (I know I do), but it's the way the technology works. If you wanted more upstream bandwidth, you'd have to take a hit to your downstream bandwidth (which is the number the cable company actually advertises when trying to get you to buy their service).
In that case it's not technological, but exploitational. If I want higher upstream bandwidth (which is the limiting factor for what I need bandwidth for anyway, I have to pay my ISP for higher download bandwidth as well. Currently, I can download things about 5 times faster then I can upload things. If I could get 50/50, I would be happy with the cheapest option. I'm sure this is true for many customers, as many customers are using bandwidth mostly for file-sharing.
Your consumption of stuff is not the problem, global consumption of fossil fuel is the problem. Whether you yourself are buying products or services that contribute to this, or are enabling others to do it, is immaterial. As long as your actions helps create value, and thus enabling someone to pay oil-companies (and gas- and coal-companies) for their products, you are still contributing to CO2-emissions. Sure, it's better to stuff money in your mattress than to spend them on plane-tickets, but if you absolutely don't want to contribute anything to CO2-emissions, you'd better not help anyone else get rich either.
I think you're presupposing that all possible things someone can spend money on have the same CO2-emission potential. $1 worth of burnt coal (in the form of electricity) produces X amount of CO2.
Yes. This is, in general, my presuppotion (wow, I learned a new word today). Sure, you can actively spend your money on burning coal for energy you don't need. But assuming you spend money for only things you want or need (food, clothing, housing, transport, various luxury items), I believe it more or less averages out. Our economy is more or less based on energy (energy is used in production of just about any product or service (including food, clothing, housing, transport, and various luxury items). Energy can theoretically be created by more CO2-emission-reduction-friendlier ways than burning fossil fuels, but in reality, it's hard to choose this. When you connect to the electric grid, a certain percentage will be created by burning fossil fuels. Even if you buy your own wind-mill, it's hard to control whether the energy used in the production of it (and the production and transport of the materials needed) comes from "clean" energy. Government regulation of the energy market (e.g. by simply not allowing fossil fuel power plants) would work, but that is not something you can do by being a conscientious buyer.
Actually, given the premise that consumption in general is the cause of CO2 emissions, the most efficient way of reducing emissions would be to earn a living and then not spend any of it.
Even if you are stuffing all your money into your mattress, you are still doing something that creates value. Your employer will benefit from your work, and the state will take a certain percentage as taxes. By being unemployed and living from welfare, you make sure that you aren't contributing to anyone, instead, figuratively speaking, you are stealing other peoples tax money.
The problem with this strategy is, unfortunately, that the government creates as much money as they want. If money is taken out of circulation, they can just add more in to replace it and keep the cycle of consumption going.
Assuming you keep working, and thus actual work is being done, yes. If everybody was on welfare, such a strategy from the government would fail, and simply reduce the value of all money. See third world countries, Germany during and after WW1, etc...
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1, Insightful
His selling strategy thus is:
Cracking DRM is another burden, which keeps a few more people from copying.
Cracking DRM has been made illegal, which keeps another few more from copying.
Our DRM solution costs less than the losses due to illegal copying.
Unfortunately this results in (for me, and many others, I would guess)
Cracking DRM is a burden. I prefer to download it already cracked. This means that the company gets zero income from me instead of one purchase (and the silly dream they have that I would buy several version of each product for each device I have is completely unrealistic)
Nobody is going to find out if I'm cracking DRM for personal use. This legislation is as silly as legislation against oral and anal sex (which I believe some US states have).
DRM costs a lot more than the losses due to customers abandoning the music/film business totally. I haven't bought a record in years, and the main reason is that illegal downloads is more convenient. If the music business can't compete with this convenience, there's little reason for me to give them my money as well.
Oh, and by the way. I'm not arguing my points on a moral basis. Of course you should buy your copyrighted intellectual property from the legal copyright holders. What I'm saying is simply what I do!
Seems like if you deliberately spend money on things that are less polluting than the mainstream offerings, you're helping to make that industry more economically viable. For example: if you buy residential wind turbines, the company that makes them will profit. Yes, some of that money will probably be spent on things that cause pollution, like employee salaries or airline tickets, however it will also be spent on improving and marketing a product that can reduce pollution dramatically.
Ok, so assume that my spending on WindTurbineInc finally allows them enough money for the R&D-department to come up with some profitable model. If it's profitable, it usually means their customers are making money by buying their power too. Which means that their customers now have more money to spend. See above.
No institution or individual can ever have zero negative impact on the environment, but they can have a greater positive impact, so that their damage is offset overall. The question becomes, is a supposedly "green" institution really helping the environment more than they're hurting it?
I'm not arguing against going "green". Being "green", in the way that you don't e.g. pollute farmland with nuclear waste products, is certainly something individuals, and individual companies can do, that will make a difference, both locally and globally. What I'm arguing against is the assumption that when you locally minimize both CO2-emissions and expenses, you will also globally reduce CO2-emissions. The reason I argue against that, is because our economy is so intertwined with fossil fuels, that any spending you do (including savings in a bank) will result in increased CO2-emissions by either you or someone else.
I agree with your general sentiment, though. The key is being critical and informed about where your money goes. When you spend money, it doesn't just disappear - it goes on to pay for things that may be destructive or immoral, and couldn't happen without your money.
In that case you misunderstood me. While I agree that ethical spending is important, for the environment as well as international worker rights, my argument was that when it comes to reducing CO2-emissions, it just doesn't work. Ok, paying somebody to actively remove CO2 from the air, and put it into the rock below the seabed, might work. But beyond that, the most efficient way of reducing CO2-emissions is to not earn a living.
Actually, the whole "economic and environmental" sense-argument is completely bollocks. At least when it comes to reduction CO2-emissions. If a thing (such as an electric car, or efficient solar cells) saves you money, and reduces your consumption of fossil fuel, you will end up with more money. This money must somehow be used, and in order to show you that it really doesn't matter much where you choose to spend it, I will consider some alternatives:
You take an extra vacation, and the plane spews lots of CO2 into the atmosphere.
You buy some luxury item such as a new spiffy computer, whose construction used a lot of energy, which eventually means consumption of fossil fuel.
You buy some luxury item whose construction is energy-efficient, such as fashion clothing. The rich designers and marketers get even more money to spend on things that will eventually lead to CO2-emissions.
You put your money in a bank. The bank now has more capital to use for investments, some of which will lead to CO2-emissions.
You buy a service instead of goods, such as sex from prostitutes. The prostitutes will now have more money to spend, or at least their pimp will have more money to spend, etc, and some of this money will eventually go to things that will lead to CO2-emissions
You give your money to a friend. See above.
You deliberately buy things that aren't as cost-effective as other stuff, but that reduces CO2-emissions. Unfortunately your money aren't "lost", someone will get rich, such as the bank, or the company CEO, so even this method isn't 100% convincing to me.
There is only one way you as an individual can be 100% sure that you actually make a lasting contribution to reduced CO2 emissions: Don't earn that money! This means that you step down working, and chooses a simpler life-style. Even better would be to stop working at all, and live completely from welfare, because in that case you will also drain the economic resources of people around you. So people, if you are an environmentalist, don't get solar cells, get poor!
In exactly which way does templates NOT increase executable size?
The C++ standard library consists almost entirely out of header files, that must be instantiated before they can be used. Just because you are used to assume that iostreams deals with char's, doesn't mean that this isn't hidden behind umpteen layers of template hell in the C++ header files. And given that gcc doesn't do explicit template instantiation very well (at least the last time I bothered to check), I'll bet that these instantiations does not exist in any dynamically linked library, but must exist separately for every single program written in C++.
There's an infinte amount of applications for computers and processing power, but there's a finite amount of information the eye can see. A 1920x1080 picture covers about 20 degrees FOV with perfect picture for someone with 20-20 sight, which is more than you can see with your typical LCD/Plasma screen/couch distance.
I do not agree that a full HD picture is "perfect". I can easily view the difference between a book printed with 1000 dpi and a document printed on a cheap printer with 300 dpi. My monitor has about 75 dpi. Let's say 1000 dpi is enough for everybody, and move on to field of vision. 20 degrees is not enough for everybody. For VR applications, you will need at least 180 degrees, but let's take the maximum possible, 360 degrees, as our goal. This will give you a multiplier of : 360/20 * 1000/75 = 240, which means that a resolution of 460800x259200 should be enough for "everybody", assuming you are satisfied with a flat picture. With two such monitors you can get a stereographic picture, but if you are going for true holographic effects, this resolution needs a third number for depth, e.g. 460800x259200x1000 (I don't think our depth-perception is so good that you need more than 1000 different depth-"pixels").
Another alternative would be to have better integration directly into the optical nerve, where you could exploit the fact that the eye can't see all this at the same time, anyway.
I just want to point out, that lack of a "formal introduction", is not the same as lack of identity. Even if you haven't been formally introduced, you can still point to "that red-haired guy over there", and recognize him the next time you see him. And by noticing the label "value_added", I can remember you for future conversations.
Personally I feel 1920x1200 is enough, I don't need that huge a workspace and it's highly unlikely above-1080p will become common in the next decade or two.
Also, I believe 640kB ought to be enough for everyone, and that the world at most needs, perhaps five computers.
We are all more or less anonymous here on slashdot. Very few people know who hides behind a username. The problem with ACs isn't their anonymity, it's their lack of identity. It's the same thing people are discussing about certain muslim women covering their face. Not only are they anonymous (most everyone in a big city is, even if they tell you their name (which could be fake)), but they also lack an identity. If you met her later, you wouldn't be able to tell if it was the same woman, or somebody else. This makes people feel uneasy about talking to such a person, even if she is a nice religious woman, and not a bank-robber (although bank-robbers have been known to use burkas as well).
It is no doubt that anonymity, and certainly, lack of identity, leads to antisocial behaviour. If people are to be held responsible for their actions, they need to be recognized by the people around them. That's why every discussion group on the Internet is full of people behaving antisocially, from flamers to trolls to crackpots, most of those people would have shut their mouth if it wasn't for the fact that they are anonymous. People who also choose to lack an identity (such as AC) are usually even worse, and seldom worth listening to.
There is nothing wrong about being scared of anonymity. What is funny about the Fox 11 coverage isn't that they claim anonymous Internet users can behave badly. What is funny is that they compare this to actual real-world terrorism, which, to take it mildly, is quite a different matter.
As an intern at a company where I have the potential to do damage if I wanted. What the heck were they thinking to give that data to him?
They were thinking that they (a) were fulfilling some bureaucratic requirement for offsite backups, (b) were saving money by doing it in the cheapest way possible, and (c) would always have some intern to blame if something bad happened. This is pretty typical of middle-management thinking in just about any large company or (I guess) government institution.
I personally am scared enough if I am logged on as administrator in the production system.
Why? If you have to be logged in as administrator in order to perform your administrator duties, that's what you do. There's nothing to be scared of. Just try to avoid mistakes, and even if you happen to make a "catastrophic" mistake, it usually only costs money, and not even your own, but the companys. It's not like you have as much responsibility as e.g. a bus-driver, who can kill dozens of people through a simple mistake.
Poor Jason, but why even let you have that much responsibility?
Again, this is the norm for big companies. When you reach higher in the hierarchy, you get to create slogans (vision/mission statements they are usually called), seach and replace names of departments and products in documents used for ISO-9000 certification, make slides about the importance of worker safety while reducing time alloted to just about every task done at the company (without changing the tasks), and stuff like that. After all, some people have to carry out actual work, and this usually involves a high degree of responsibility, even if the people carrying it out are lower in the hierarchy.
I'm perfectly capable of having a logic-based argument with someone who isn't an assumptive asshole.
Sorry, you've just proven otherwise. You are the one who are retreating to name-calling here, whereas the grandparent was the one who were discussing rationally.
You just compared all people of a faith to the most zealous Linux nuts. That's not a logic-based statement.
Actually, it is. Both groups are unable to look at a certain issue (their faith) using logic instead of indoctrination. Comparing linux zealotism to religion is perfectly adequate
Not everyone is Pat Robertson, just like not every Muslim is going to blow themselves and a bus full of children up.
And your point is what? That christians who aren't Pat Robertson or terrorists are still rational about issues surrounding their faith? Sorry, you've just failed logic.
I see where you're coming from. And I'm not saying you are wrong. But if you don't think it's possible to win, no matter how much resources you put into it, why bother going in there in the first place?
Oh, I remember now, revenge... What a great idea to start a war for, punishing the people in a whole country for the actions of perhaps 20 men, most of them from some other country which was never invaded.
Sure. But the romans wrote most of that history. Besides, the Romans had a pretty unique way of governing their newly conquered territories; they were all considered part of Rome, and subject to the same laws, which compared to their contemporaries, were pretty civil. US never tried to make Iraq (or Afghanistan (or Vietnam (or Korea))) the 51. state, even though the people there would probably appreciate it a lot more than what US actually did. But I digress..
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting you should mention that. Because it's not true of any first world country today. Also, the article mentions that it was not true for the Samurai ruling class in Japan, or the Chinese Qing-dynasty. This makes me question your ability to (a) read, (b) think, and (c) know when you've lost an argument.
Saving allows you to plan. It allows you to buy stuff when it's cheap, and sell stuff when it's expensive. It allows you to invest, and therefore to create new business of value to society at large. The debt-based society we currently live in is a recent invention, and if you had read the article (or at least the slashdot summary of it), you would have known that saving must be compared to subsistence-living, not to our current economy. But I already know you don't read, so....
You don't need to totally disregard it to be unhappy with that as the only explanation. If you had read the fucking article, you would have known why the author wasn't happy with it. I'm going to tell you anyway, although I know it's pointless to argue with you: the higher productivity could just as well have made more people able to survive, and everybody would be back at subsistence-living. This didn't happen, therefore increased productivity is not a sufficient explanation, although it's a required part of the explanation.
Thanks, Captain Obvious!
Uhm, you are taking away the "social" aspect of social networking, and making it into a blog. I can't predict the future, and I certainly can see this happen. After all, a "blog" is what used to be called a regularly updated personal homepage. But if blogging now suddenly gets named "social networking", well what phrase would you use in the future to describe what we nowadays call "social networking"?
The cruise-ships don't stop in the Amazonian jungle because they are ocean-going giant ships, not river-going small boats. Besides, if they made regular stops at "unknown" tribes, the tribes wouldn't be "unknown" anymore. I'm sure there is regulation to stop that sort of thing. But these tribes are certainly interesting enough for average tourists to want a visit, if it could be done within the same budget, safety-constraints, and comfort-level.
Sure, you could argue the same thing against us: the cruise-space-colonies doesn't visit us because we live inside an "uncomfortable" gravity-well, and besides, there are conservationists wanting us to stay "untouched" by space-tourism. Even if that is true, where are their researchers, explorers, and missionaries? More importantly, where are their BIC-lighters (the preferred fire-making instrument by 10 out of 10 aboriginal stone-age tribesmen with NO direct contact with our civilization)? Where are their empty coke-bottles? And where are their noisy planes and other signs that they are there?
I fail to see how we can NOT be interesting. You'd have to explore pretty many planets with life to start getting bored by new alien life-forms. And besides, if it's that many planets with life for them to explore, why have none of them contacted us?
Yes, it's digital, but where you get base three from, I have no idea. Conventionally, it's considered base six (intra-character-gap, letter-gap, word-gap, sentence-gap, dit, dah), although I'm sure it's possible to come up with a contrived explanation of why it's base three, or seven, or five, or whatever...
Yes, the alphabet is Huffman encoded. That doesn't mean that morse code is "compressed". Morse code is designed for humans, not computers, and has very low entropy compared to e.g. gzip-compressed text sent with an obvious binary encoding. Any listener will immediately be able to distinguish morse-code from noise, and so should just about any automated listener too. If you've ever used a phone modem or a fax machine, you'll notice that the sound this makes through the phone line is much harder to distinguish from random noise.
Also, the text sent in morse-code is typically not compressed (apart from ad-hoc compression, such as CQ, SOS, etc..., which is not that much different from SMS-speak, such as "r u ok")
Sure, there exists tribes in the Amazon who can't be described as great explorers and conquerors. Then again, most of the earths population does not consist of this kind of tribe. It only takes on expansionist tribe to expand across the rest of the earth. In earths history we have had several expansive tribes, and most of earths population now belongs to one of them, not to these rare exceptional tribes in the Amazon.
Your argument that every planet in the universe would be inhabitated with people just like this strange Amazon tribe, seems pretty unlikely. Even if there are 1e9999999 such planets, it only takes one to colonize the rest of the universe, assuming sufficient technology.
Also, you claim that space-travel is somehow "uncomfortable" is completely ridiculous. Humans have pretty much left nature behind, and instead lives in places specially constructed to be more comfortable to them. One popular form of vacation is to live entirely inside a travelling ocean-going vessel, called a cruise-ship. The people aboard these, do not find them uncomfortable. As technology gets better, so will comfort-level, regardless of whether your arcology is a space-ship, or you are a planet-surface-dweller.
Finally, assuming that the aliens would want to meet humans, is not arrogant. Humans seek out interesting stuff whenever we see it, whether it's in space, in the deep sea, in caves, or in the jungle. Most of these places are uncomfortable, but we accept low comfort in order to learn and explore. If an alien species is not interested in learning and/or exploring, they are most likely not intelligent either.
No, you confuse being civilized with being the Christian God. If you start loving the virus that give you HIV, the poisonous snake that bit you in the leg, or the tiger that bit you in the throat, you are dead. Being civilized just means that you conform to the (rather arbitrary) norms of a given civilization. Even here on earth, that means rather different things in different civilizations.
There are tribes on this earth that believe young boys need to suck the dicks of their elders in order to get the "life force" themselves, so they can progress from boys to men. Such a ritual is not considered civilized in the western world, but if you try to stop it in this tribe, I can assure you, that they will not view you as very civilized.
I don't see why they would be embarrassed. When a baby craps in his pants, are you embarassed for the baby? When you see dogs marking their territories with pee, and humping human legs, are you embarrassed about the dog? Rabbits puke their partially digested food, and eats it again. Cows do the same, but unlike rabbits, the food never exits their mouth. Fleas puts their eggs in horse-shit. Are you embarrassed about that? When you see a blue-green algae in the microscope using it's flagella to swim towards the light, are you embarrassed about their primitive behaviour? That humans broadcast infomercials, reality TV, and porn, would to aliens be just as embarassing to them, as it is to us that salmons have to go up the same river as they were born, to lay their eggs.
Lets assume the aliens are one or more singularity leaps beyond us. They may not even realize the distinction in "intelligence" between us and a lobster as anything significant (just like we rarely bother to distinguish between the "intelligence" of a lobster and a tuna). Our cars and planes and computers is surely a fascinating example of an extended phenotype, but it doesn't really tell them that we are intelligent, does it? Even if they are able to observe that we have a primitive auditory and visual communication system, it will to them be as unevolved as ants exchanging pheromones to communicate. There is no way they would be able to exchange ideas with us, even if they mastered our language perfectly.
Technically, it's not a paradox. You put in some currently acceptable scientific hypotheses, and extrapolate, and come to a result that so far hasn't been observed. While I agree it's puzzling, it's not in any way a paradox in the traditional sense of the word.
One pretty obvious explanation is that the input hypotheses are wrong, or the deduction is flawed. Another is that the intelligent aliens are far in between. We can't observe them because they are too far away. Another is that the aliens are simply not detectable to us. They can be intelligent, but not have invented radio yet, or they can have surpassed us to the extent that they do not rely on radio, or use radio-transmissions that are directed, or undistinguishable from random noise.
Given sufficiently advanced technology, they can have uploaded themselves into sub-Planck-scale supercomputers, be the size of a galaxy, live in hostile (to us) environments like the inside of a star, or emigrated to their own universe, that they designed themselves to be more suitable for them. All of this is speculation of course, as even on earth, intelligent life is incredibly rare (humans have existed for only 250000-300000 years, and only emitted radio signals for about 100 years or so. The earth is at least 4500000000 years old.
Even on earth we can see a tendency towards higher entropy in our radio-transmissions detectable from space. Low-power wireless networks, such as cell-phones replace traditional broadcasting. Spread-spectrum devices replace FM and AM. Highly compressed digital signals replace morse-code and voice.
In that case it's not technological, but exploitational. If I want higher upstream bandwidth (which is the limiting factor for what I need bandwidth for anyway, I have to pay my ISP for higher download bandwidth as well. Currently, I can download things about 5 times faster then I can upload things. If I could get 50/50, I would be happy with the cheapest option. I'm sure this is true for many customers, as many customers are using bandwidth mostly for file-sharing.
Your consumption of stuff is not the problem, global consumption of fossil fuel is the problem. Whether you yourself are buying products or services that contribute to this, or are enabling others to do it, is immaterial. As long as your actions helps create value, and thus enabling someone to pay oil-companies (and gas- and coal-companies) for their products, you are still contributing to CO2-emissions. Sure, it's better to stuff money in your mattress than to spend them on plane-tickets, but if you absolutely don't want to contribute anything to CO2-emissions, you'd better not help anyone else get rich either.
Yes. This is, in general, my presuppotion (wow, I learned a new word today). Sure, you can actively spend your money on burning coal for energy you don't need. But assuming you spend money for only things you want or need (food, clothing, housing, transport, various luxury items), I believe it more or less averages out. Our economy is more or less based on energy (energy is used in production of just about any product or service (including food, clothing, housing, transport, and various luxury items). Energy can theoretically be created by more CO2-emission-reduction-friendlier ways than burning fossil fuels, but in reality, it's hard to choose this. When you connect to the electric grid, a certain percentage will be created by burning fossil fuels. Even if you buy your own wind-mill, it's hard to control whether the energy used in the production of it (and the production and transport of the materials needed) comes from "clean" energy. Government regulation of the energy market (e.g. by simply not allowing fossil fuel power plants) would work, but that is not something you can do by being a conscientious buyer.
Even if you are stuffing all your money into your mattress, you are still doing something that creates value. Your employer will benefit from your work, and the state will take a certain percentage as taxes. By being unemployed and living from welfare, you make sure that you aren't contributing to anyone, instead, figuratively speaking, you are stealing other peoples tax money.
Assuming you keep working, and thus actual work is being done, yes. If everybody was on welfare, such a strategy from the government would fail, and simply reduce the value of all money. See third world countries, Germany during and after WW1, etc...
Unfortunately this results in (for me, and many others, I would guess)
Oh, and by the way. I'm not arguing my points on a moral basis. Of course you should buy your copyrighted intellectual property from the legal copyright holders. What I'm saying is simply what I do!
Ok, so assume that my spending on WindTurbineInc finally allows them enough money for the R&D-department to come up with some profitable model. If it's profitable, it usually means their customers are making money by buying their power too. Which means that their customers now have more money to spend. See above.
I'm not arguing against going "green". Being "green", in the way that you don't e.g. pollute farmland with nuclear waste products, is certainly something individuals, and individual companies can do, that will make a difference, both locally and globally. What I'm arguing against is the assumption that when you locally minimize both CO2-emissions and expenses, you will also globally reduce CO2-emissions. The reason I argue against that, is because our economy is so intertwined with fossil fuels, that any spending you do (including savings in a bank) will result in increased CO2-emissions by either you or someone else.
In that case you misunderstood me. While I agree that ethical spending is important, for the environment as well as international worker rights, my argument was that when it comes to reducing CO2-emissions, it just doesn't work. Ok, paying somebody to actively remove CO2 from the air, and put it into the rock below the seabed, might work. But beyond that, the most efficient way of reducing CO2-emissions is to not earn a living.
There is only one way you as an individual can be 100% sure that you actually make a lasting contribution to reduced CO2 emissions: Don't earn that money! This means that you step down working, and chooses a simpler life-style. Even better would be to stop working at all, and live completely from welfare, because in that case you will also drain the economic resources of people around you. So people, if you are an environmentalist, don't get solar cells, get poor!
In exactly which way does templates NOT increase executable size?
The C++ standard library consists almost entirely out of header files, that must be instantiated before they can be used. Just because you are used to assume that iostreams deals with char's, doesn't mean that this isn't hidden behind umpteen layers of template hell in the C++ header files. And given that gcc doesn't do explicit template instantiation very well (at least the last time I bothered to check), I'll bet that these instantiations does not exist in any dynamically linked library, but must exist separately for every single program written in C++.
I do not agree that a full HD picture is "perfect". I can easily view the difference between a book printed with 1000 dpi and a document printed on a cheap printer with 300 dpi. My monitor has about 75 dpi. Let's say 1000 dpi is enough for everybody, and move on to field of vision. 20 degrees is not enough for everybody. For VR applications, you will need at least 180 degrees, but let's take the maximum possible, 360 degrees, as our goal. This will give you a multiplier of : 360/20 * 1000/75 = 240, which means that a resolution of 460800x259200 should be enough for "everybody", assuming you are satisfied with a flat picture. With two such monitors you can get a stereographic picture, but if you are going for true holographic effects, this resolution needs a third number for depth, e.g. 460800x259200x1000 (I don't think our depth-perception is so good that you need more than 1000 different depth-"pixels").
Another alternative would be to have better integration directly into the optical nerve, where you could exploit the fact that the eye can't see all this at the same time, anyway.
I just want to point out, that lack of a "formal introduction", is not the same as lack of identity. Even if you haven't been formally introduced, you can still point to "that red-haired guy over there", and recognize him the next time you see him. And by noticing the label "value_added", I can remember you for future conversations.
Also, I believe 640kB ought to be enough for everyone, and that the world at most needs, perhaps five computers.
We are all more or less anonymous here on slashdot. Very few people know who hides behind a username. The problem with ACs isn't their anonymity, it's their lack of identity. It's the same thing people are discussing about certain muslim women covering their face. Not only are they anonymous (most everyone in a big city is, even if they tell you their name (which could be fake)), but they also lack an identity. If you met her later, you wouldn't be able to tell if it was the same woman, or somebody else. This makes people feel uneasy about talking to such a person, even if she is a nice religious woman, and not a bank-robber (although bank-robbers have been known to use burkas as well).
It is no doubt that anonymity, and certainly, lack of identity, leads to antisocial behaviour. If people are to be held responsible for their actions, they need to be recognized by the people around them. That's why every discussion group on the Internet is full of people behaving antisocially, from flamers to trolls to crackpots, most of those people would have shut their mouth if it wasn't for the fact that they are anonymous. People who also choose to lack an identity (such as AC) are usually even worse, and seldom worth listening to.
There is nothing wrong about being scared of anonymity. What is funny about the Fox 11 coverage isn't that they claim anonymous Internet users can behave badly. What is funny is that they compare this to actual real-world terrorism, which, to take it mildly, is quite a different matter.
They were thinking that they (a) were fulfilling some bureaucratic requirement for offsite backups, (b) were saving money by doing it in the cheapest way possible, and (c) would always have some intern to blame if something bad happened. This is pretty typical of middle-management thinking in just about any large company or (I guess) government institution.
Why? If you have to be logged in as administrator in order to perform your administrator duties, that's what you do. There's nothing to be scared of. Just try to avoid mistakes, and even if you happen to make a "catastrophic" mistake, it usually only costs money, and not even your own, but the companys. It's not like you have as much responsibility as e.g. a bus-driver, who can kill dozens of people through a simple mistake.
Again, this is the norm for big companies. When you reach higher in the hierarchy, you get to create slogans (vision/mission statements they are usually called), seach and replace names of departments and products in documents used for ISO-9000 certification, make slides about the importance of worker safety while reducing time alloted to just about every task done at the company (without changing the tasks), and stuff like that. After all, some people have to carry out actual work, and this usually involves a high degree of responsibility, even if the people carrying it out are lower in the hierarchy.
It's not actually a job. It's just an internship.
Sorry, you've just proven otherwise. You are the one who are retreating to name-calling here, whereas the grandparent was the one who were discussing rationally.
Actually, it is. Both groups are unable to look at a certain issue (their faith) using logic instead of indoctrination. Comparing linux zealotism to religion is perfectly adequate
And your point is what? That christians who aren't Pat Robertson or terrorists are still rational about issues surrounding their faith? Sorry, you've just failed logic.
I see where you're coming from. And I'm not saying you are wrong. But if you don't think it's possible to win, no matter how much resources you put into it, why bother going in there in the first place?
Oh, I remember now, revenge... What a great idea to start a war for, punishing the people in a whole country for the actions of perhaps 20 men, most of them from some other country which was never invaded.
Sure. But the romans wrote most of that history. Besides, the Romans had a pretty unique way of governing their newly conquered territories; they were all considered part of Rome, and subject to the same laws, which compared to their contemporaries, were pretty civil. US never tried to make Iraq (or Afghanistan (or Vietnam (or Korea))) the 51. state, even though the people there would probably appreciate it a lot more than what US actually did. But I digress..