Because #3, Judaism is not "big". The numbers just aren't there.There are more Sikh than there are Jews. But hey, you hear a lot more about the Jews than you do about the Sikh, so obviously it's the more major religion, right? Go on, look it up.
And, just to explain the joke: if you were to propose "the top 5 theories" of abiogenesis, a number of very vocal Americans would assume that included their personal pet theory of creationism. Just like they assume that Judaism is religion #3 on the charts, they assume creationism has more of a following than it really does. Get it?
So I read through the whole transcript. There's a lot of fluff in there and lip-service about reform and oversight. Which, hey, is better than coming out swinging claiming that the NSA can do no wrong, which is kinda what we got at the start. The good news is that he understands that we do need people investigating terrorism and that there is a valid reason to keep a leash on those spooks.
Of the ACTUAL changes he's proposing: -National security letters should not be indefinite ("unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy"). Despite the major cop-out, this is a good thing. -Asking congress to make an oversight panel in FISC. Which, you know, is asking someone else to watch over your department. -Treat foreigners like real people. Hey, that's nice. -Outsourcing the master database to a third party.
Wait, what was that last one?
I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.
Well that's a gooooowwwaaaitaminute... That just means someone other than the government is holding EVERYONE'S DATA...
replaced by one in which the providers, or a third party, retain the bulk records, with government accessing information as needed.
HOLY FLIPPING BALLS! What the fuck are you thinking!? You're outsourcing the fucking keys the freaking kingdom to a "third party"!?!?!? Hey, I hear India will do it on the cheap. Maybe China will undercut them.
On the other hand, any third party maintaining a single, consolidated database would be carrying out what's essentially a government function, but with more expense, more legal ambiguity, potentially less accountability, all of which would have a doubtful impact on increasing public confidence that their privacy is being protected.
No fucking shit sherlock. So then why are you doing that?
There are many theories on how the universe and life began. I for one have no issue being taught the top 5 theories where there are differing opinions, order the teachings randomly, but pass along who believes what and why they believe it. Allow the student to draw their own conclusions. They'll be stronger for it.
Right so: Membrane first, protein first, nucleic acids first, Earth origin, extraterrestrial origin, and maybe slipping in volcanic vents somewhere in there. That sounds like a pretty good top 5 list of current working theories. Notice that "god did it" is NOWHERE near the top 5 theories of how it happened.
It's like how most of America think the "big three" religions are the Christians, the Muslims, and the Jews.
Do I believe Darwin's theory? Sure I do. Do I believe in the lessons in the Bible? Sure I do.
That's good. That's really really good. That makes you a sane and rational person. Realize that the people behind the creationist movement and the ID movement are not like you. They believe in the Bible. Full stop. Everything else must conform to rule 1. To hell with the lessons of the bible, if the bible says 6 days, it was 6 days. That's a fact and you will have to pierce that veil of true belief to make them see otherwise. And any attempt to do so will make you a tool of Satan.
It's COLD FJORD! WOOOOO the apologists shills came out to play! How many people are employed behind this account anyway? Do you guys have to sign it out so you don't step on each others toes or do you have one guy in charge of actually hitting submit?
From the perspective of today it is difficult to imagine the turbulence that the US was undergoing at the time. It started with the Civil Rights movements...
Not really. The nice thing about history is that you can go learn it. Quick checklist: Staunch conservatives fearing that the hippies are taking over, the red scare, racist in power fearing an uprising of blacks. No, it's pretty easy to imagine. But let's think about that: "It started with the Civil Rights movement".... Turbulence... Was it a matter of "national security" that Hoover fought against civil rights? Is that what you're saying?
Not all those who dissented were peaceful or innocent, some were deadly violent.
Correct, the Black Panthers for example. Oh wait, there is strong evidence that the group was radicalized by the FBI so they could justify busting their organization. Don't get me wrong. The cop-killers that came into that organization were bad people, but the FBI poked the bear hoping for a response.
They tore down the social fabric without anything sturdy enough to replace it.
Uh-huh. "social fabric". And that somehow excuses Hoover illegally imprisoning people? Working to keep the blacks from having a vote? Undercutting the political movement against a the clusterfuck that was Vietnam.
Listen, Hoover THOUGHT he was helping America. I don't think he was a comic book villain. But he was simply wrong. He thought that keeping blackie down, beating down the hippies, and fighting communism was the best thing for the USA. He was wrong. Blacks are people too. The hippies had a more accurate political worldview. The spread of communism was not something worth fighting. It imploded upon itself. Capitalism won because it was simply better.
And this is the kicker: Hoover was getting in the way of democracy. While we were fighting for it overseas, Hoover was undercutting the political voice of a large swath of Americans back home. The hippies, the war protestors, the blacks, the women, they all deserved to have their voice heard. They deserved to organize. They did not deserve to be the target of a political smear campaign by the FBI. Unless they did something illegal. Then hey, ARREST THEM. Even then, dude, Martin was arrested a lot. Some of the laws are bullshit.
You should be thankful if you don't see days like that again in the US.
You mean like having staunch conservatives in power sending troops on long pointless wars while their domestic surveillance runs a dragnet on all communication rounding up and intimidating the war protestors? Yeah, that'd be terrible. So, as an aside, what are your views of occupy wall street?
In short, the situation at the time did not warrant Hoover's abuses.
No, he's fucking bartering foreign intel [theguardian.com] to foreign countries.
"Edward Snowden has offered to help Brazil investigate US spying on its soil in exchange for political asylum,"
Yeah dude, read it again. He has no bartering power concerning the leaked intel, because he no longer has any control over it. It's in the hands of journalists. He cannot use it to barter. He is not using intel to barter with Brazil for asylum. He is offering to WORK for Brazil and ANALYZE. You know, like his old job. Come on, reading comprehension. Try it.
Heroes like Daniel Ellsberg
. . . You haven't been keeping up with the news have you? Daniel the motherfucking hero Ellsberg had a reddit ask-me-anything. He's a full supporter of Snowden and says Snowden is doing the exact same sort of thing that he himself did back in the day. The title is "I am Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden is my hero. AMA"
Or are you one of those "nobody should be spying on anyone" people?
No no, I fully support foreign espionage, AGAINST OUR ENEMIES. During WAR. The NSA broke NAZI cryptos. They helped win the war. Now the war is over. And unless we do something really dickish, like breaking international law and spying on allies, then war will most likely not resume. Yay living in a MAD world.
You seriously think revealing methods and intel on how we spy on other countries doesn't do us any harm? Really?
I think that when the US government is caught doing something illegal they need to be punished least they disregard all respect for the rule of law. They need to be taught that they have to respect the law. That respecting the law will encourage others to respect the law. I think that exposing criminality is the first step to helping the criminal be a better person/nation. Seriously, we CAN'T be the bad guys.
I hope you get a chance to read this before it disappears off the site
Moderation is not the same as censorship. I will always be able to find this post and rub it in your face years later.
How come just about every politician ends up doing nothing effective against the espionage departments?
Typically because the espionage departments performed espionage upon said politicians and knows where he buried the bodies.
But, just to throw the apologists a bone, it's possible that after looking under the hood he discovered all the good and wonderful things the NSA was doing and the very real threats that they've averted. Or, you know, that's what the NSA told him. They've been caught lying to superiors, I wouldn't put it below them.
I remember Obama speaking against Bush's wire tapping
Me too. I also remember October 2008 when he VOTED to give the telcom companies retroactive immunity from being sued for helping with Bush's illegal wiretapping program. Oh, did you miss that during the campaign trail? It was pretty indicative of where he stood on the subject. (but hey, it's Oct 2008, who else am I going to vote for, Palin?)
maybe only deterred him from firing Hoover... who was using the FBI to do what the NSA does now but limited to political figures... and maybe a few communists
And Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, journalists/athletes critical of the Vietnam war, the black panthers, individual students not even associated with groups, Albert Einstein, the KKK, etc (that list is actually really blood huge).
Hoover's FBI engaged in political smear campaigns, giving false report the the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, oh, and an assassination. Seriously, learn some history.
Now, I don't think that the NSA is currently up to the sort of abuse that Hoover was involved in. Lying to the media, lying to congress, spying on their girlfriends, illegal domestic dragnets, internationally illegal espionage? They've been caught red handed. And no-one is in jail yet. Or even charged. That's a pretty serious breakdown of the rule of law.
But hey, it's not as bad as Hoover's FBI. Yet. That we know of.
No, I believe that gmuslera was referring to Obama. During the campaign trail he was in support of protecting whistleblowers and transparency. During his presidency he's decided that the espionage act from 1914 was suddenly very useful for prosecuting whistleblowers.
But yeah, Snowden is on that list.
He's bartering this foreign info ("give me amnesty in your country and I'll tell you how they're spying on you" All he needs is a sleazy late night commercial to go with it)!
I believe he gave the info to journalists who are choosing what to reveal about these transgressions. But hey, whatever keeps up the spin of the fox-news induced dreamstate you have about Snowden's motivations. Let me guess, you're still wondering how a "mere contractor" could have had access to all this data?
because he is doing real damage to this country
Such as? Go ahead, please list the ways he's damaging this country.
Yeah, I get that feeling too. The luster is fading on the Google. It used to be that Google was the hip new kid on the scene showing up the old and crufty beast that was Microsoft, and was more open and cheap than Apple. Even though they had almost entirely different fields of interest.
Then for a while they had more money than they knew what to do with. They dominated online ads, and made bank alongside everyone throwing money at them.
There was that minority that rallied against the targetted ad panopticon and the fanboys that twisted everything from "don't be evil" to "maybe you shouldn't be searching for that" into the most ludicrous insults against Google. But everyone has their detractors, and the fact that they were so zealous and twisting made me believe even more in Google's efforts.
Now? They're old business, and don't exactly have any cool new products coming out. They royally suck at customer service, because we are not the customers, we are the product. Hey, that's great when they're giving it out for free and doing their best to make good products to attract users. But now that they have the users... I'm not seeing the effort to appease them.
Google Glass was a good idea that the populous decided they wanted none of. It could have been revolutionary, but society says "no". Hey, sometimes you're too far ahead of the curve. It happens.
They need that self-driving car to hit the market to stay relevant as a tech company.
You have an automatic advantage in many technical fields in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe and most of Eastern Europe and probably other places as a white male.
Except when it comes to academia. Also any business looking to avoid a diversity suit, which is usually larger corporations rather than small business. There were a lot of scholarships I had to pass over. And there's a significant push to get women into STEM fields. These are good things as they get people into STEM fields, but it's certainly not fair. On the other hand, there's still a fair amount of racism/sexism in small business which make it easier for the typical white male to land a job. There are a lot of small businesses out there and some of them are simply never going to hire someone who can't laugh at a dick joke or gives any hint that they'd sue for anything.
"People of east Asian descent" are often the first/second generation of wealthy engineers, doctors, and the upper class fleeing from Mao's communist China reformations. It was communism, they literally took all the stuff from the previous ruling class and gave it to the state (who ostensibly used it for the good of the masses). A lot of people fled that scenario. Likewise, the USA is a superpower and attracts a lot of talent. That's one of the ideas behind H1B1 visa's right? They'll stay and be productive members of society. Hence we have this stereotype about Asians. Wait, what? Am I supporting a stereotype? No, like most stereotypes there are reasons that they're often true, but like all stereotypes, you can't assume it's universally true. That makes you an asshole.
White men are a tiny minority of the world's population, and even in the United States do not represent the majority of users of computer software.
And yet white men are, or at least were, the majority of the world's population of computer software developers. Just because they can use a computer, doesn't mean they can code. Really, it's like saying that white males are a minority of people who sit in chairs and so we should have more diversity when it comes to chair makers.
What I'm saying is that we're not measuring talent correctly.
No, it's actual racism/sexism in small companies that's the problem. It's less of an issue at large corporations that get sued on a regular basis for this sort of thing.
Well, I mean, identifying quality coders is also something that HR generally sucks at, but that's an aside to the race issue.
Beyond this, think about how software can benefit from different perspectives and ideas from different cultures and backgrounds... we all should know by now that the best software comes out of as many competing ideas as possible. And not necessarily one idea will win. Many times several (and a lot of times two) ideas are equally as good.
Yeah, because I love my source code to be sprinkled with Engrish. Nothing better than having competing standards! Screw your uniformity, bring on the chaos!
Which is that few people need to be "in charge" of a company while many need to be doing the work.
Oh really? That's how it currently is with most companies but not all. I imagine it's that way because they're run by sociopaths who clawed their way to the top at the expense of others and actively work on being the wealthiest person in the room.
With fewer people needed for such a position and many needed for the lower positions there's less competition for upper management and much more for lower
*cough*BULLSHIT*cough* There is a very tiny pool of potential CEOs that the board (consisting entirely of other CEOs) is willing to consider. How many people do you think would be willing to lead Microsoft if it, and the paycheck and stock options, was offered to them?
And yes the goal is a work free utopia, we'll get there
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, "work free" means that no one can afford anything, even the cheapest of flatscreen TVs.
Well I believe the idea would be that Shannon and his basic work on information theory made inroads to the study of complexity. And the common and flawed argument that the anti-science crowd throws about is that various parts of biology, or in this case the most basic forms of life, are irreducibly complex. And that it's SOOOOO rare of a chance that these amino acids and whatnot would randomly bump into each other to form a self-reproducing molecule that's it's an absurd theory.
So it's important to understand what the term "complex" means in a technical sense and how complex systems can arise from simpler things.
Before you can answer "Why not elsewhere?" You need to figure out how it began here.
No you don't.
Explaining the creation of organic molecules in an early earth atmosphere is one thing. Even getting to the point of self-replicating molecules is not too terribly difficult. Getting from self-replicating molecules to even the simplest life
Self-replicating molecules IS the definition of life. At least, you know, it's good enough for me. If you start down the path of arguing what is and isn't alive, you just end up in a philosophical dead end.
anything we say about alien planet atmosphere sparking life is pure conjecture.
It's conjecture, but it's not pure conjecture. It's an informed and rational estimation given a small but not insignificant amount of data on the subject. The probability that the conjecture is true is low, but not zero. It takes a mountain of effort to raise that probability, and it never gets to 100% for anything, but sometimes it's worth it and all in all I'm a fan of efforts trying to peer past the veil of uncertainty.
As for these inquisitive young minds, let's say we whet their appetite by these stories, what happens when what we've told them is shown to be untrue? We end up with a bunch of cynical adults who don't trust science, which leads to all sorts of problems (climate change and evolution are prime examples of this).
Those are words of wisdom. Which is why you never sell anything as hard-set fact. These are dreams and conjecture. Do alien atmospheres spark the seeds of life? They may. If you're uncomfortable with that uncertainty, then science might not be for you. But I'll light my sparks with dreams that might come true. (Along with a good sci-fi book. Have you read Paolo Bacigalupi's Calorie Man series? Good stuff)
Well yes, but the frequency at which life arises in the universe may well make the duration that life sustains itself look like a tiny and temporary blip.
Except that most people consider plants, fungus, and bacteria to be alive. I think the term you're looking for is "sentient", which means something else.
My question though is at what point those molecules become alive?
When they bump into each other and form something that reproduces itself. Abiogenesis. After that happens evolution kicks in and they're on the course towards launching rockets towards Earth and killing us all.
When do they start reproducing
Good question. Once you get the primordial soup, they bump around randomly until they form things of interest. Cell membranes are easy. Lipids naturally cling to each other and make little bubbles. There's a tough call about which part of the next process came first and how they made the other half: Proteins or nucleic acids? They kind of make each other. Like I said, this is a good question.
or even get the will/understanding the need to reproduce/split to survive?
I don't think that bacteria particularly have/need any amount of willpower or understanding to reproduce, split, and/or survive. They just need to do it. We personify these things a lot as a teaching aide, like saying the river water WANTS to flow to the sea, but they're just dumb cells.
How does that transformation occur that takes this energy from lightning or whatever and converts it to life?
Oh, that's easy: the energy from lightning converts some common chemicals into some other chemicals. Specifically, methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2) or carbon monoxide (CO), and phosphate (PO43-) get electrocuted and can turn into, among other things, amino acids. These chemicals are the basic building blocks of life and the idea is that if you bump them together enough that they'll form into something that reproduces. That's the definition of life.
Our planet is a data point of one, from which useful questions can be raised like: Why not elsewhere? The fact that Venus and Mars aren't teeming with life tells us things about where life cannot arise. (Or at least hasn't in the past few billion years)
They have to keep releasing these type of wildly speculative stories to keep interest up in science and technology. Because children have the right to dream fantastic dreams of the future and giving them meaningful goals and quests to set them upon is a duty of the current generation. Plus it's fantastically more productive than building hype about what the latest pop-star wore and whose baby she's carrying.
And yeah, reminding people about how cool science is really does help focus them on what's important and keep the research grant taps from shriveling up into nothing.
When the units in question are volts, then a positive feedback loop gets you max voltage. It's useful for turning floating values into discrete on/off values. It doesn't necessarily cause oscillations, that would take some additional factors to react to the output. Which is what you get when you fuck up in control systems. Because the whole thing has feedback known as "reality" and your opamp is trying to react to it.
Negative feedback tries to stay at a target. The more it deviates, the more it fights against it.
When the units are dollars a positive feedback loop is just called cumulative interest.
When the units are knowledge, a positive feedback loop is learning, or learning how to learn, or getting smarter.
... it will avoid purchases of rare earth minerals and metals, such as tantalum, sourced from high conflict areas such as...
...China? Because, you know, they're fighting over those exact resources. It's just an economic battle rather than involving slave labor. Although I'm not sure you can say that the Chinese factory workers are all that much better off.
We're headed down the freeway. Up ahead I see some teenagers standing on an overpass holding something large and watching cars pass underneath. I recognize a potential dropped rock and change lanes to get away from it. Will the computer do that?
No, and most drivers won't either. And this is a pretty WTF example. Are teenager casually murdering commuters an issue where you drive?
and change lanes to get away from it.
Yeah, that'll fix it.
I'm almost home. I see the neighbor kid playing basketball in his driveway. He shoots. He misses. I know as soon as he misses that there is a good chance the ball will roll out into the street, and knowing how oblivious the neighbor kid is I can expect him to follow. Will the computer know this?
Yes, it assumes all people are oblivious idiots.
In fact, I see the kid running towards the street, but he is hidden behind a parked van and will not actually be visible in the street until he's in the street directly in front of me. Will the car track him all the way from the upper end of his driveway?
Yes, if you saw it, the car saw it. It has just as much memory as you do and can calculate when the rogue object will cross it's path.
I'm passing an intersection and there are two people standing on the corner. They are in a position where they might step into the crosswalk. Can the computer read those people's body language to predict that they will or won't step off the sidewalk in front of me?
Yes, in terms of body language being "Moving into the intersection".
There are any number of fuzzy logic problems that the computer will be better by using actual data rather than guessing games played by humans. By and far the ability of a computer to simply pay attention all the time in all directions will makes cars safer for everybody.
Any accidents that occur with self-driving cars, initially, I'm sure will be because of human drivers not doing what they should be doing.
Even if the self-driving cars have accidents it will be because the humans, who are not doing anything have done it wrong. And the NTSB is correct for their blanket finding of "pilot error" on every airplane crash, right?
No. The intent of that statement was that idiots will do something wrong and crash into self-driving cars. That would be an accident involving self-driving cars. And most of the time it IS pilot error. Welcome to the future where the weakest link is the human mind.
like a piano falling out of the sky landing directly on a car in traffic.
Yes, when I drive, that's exactly what I fear most.
Well the first thing that came to your head was teenagers with rocks. It's really not that far off.
Oh, right. Damn, that's a pretty good comeback. Yeah, I dunno how I missed that one.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs that I'm at +5 insightful for that comment when there's such a glaring logical hole there. I guess that there's a trend with Slashdot moderators that simply votes for anything that's pro-open source and anti-proprietary. This is the echo chamber my friends. And as big of a bitch as it is to admit it, yeah, BSD went closed source into OSX, and Apple then made contributions to Clang and LLVM. It's an example of code going into that black hole of the soulless corporation with perilous licenses and somehow coming out the other side to actually help us out.
Ah yes, all those people running BSD... All those people. Which, hey, if you include Apples OSX, is a hell of a lot of people. So yes, let us bask in all that effort that Apple has done for the open source community.
Very few [open/free] projects are that good.
Well with that sort of QUANTITY, you can't expect them all to be stellar.
The only thing you achieve is that your code is used in less places.
But those are places that you can actually use rather than the proprietary walled garden constrictive license which make for the sort of thing where you don't actually own the things you own. It also makes for a platform which is dead in the water and has no legs. And it's usually expensive.
I don't care if a few businessmen shy away from the code I throw out there under an free license. They most certainly wouldn't have helped me.
Whoa there. I think you're getting the idea of a minimum wage mixed with the idea of a guaranteed income. Your argument is about a minimum wage. That if a business can't afford to pay their employees a living wage then it's not worth it to society for that business to exist.
With a guaranteed income, the threat of dying in a ditch is removed. It's no longer a burden to the business that they must provide a living wage to their employees. People are working for surplus, because they want more, because they're greedy. If we switch to a guaranteed income, then the business's should be free to pay as little as they want since anything they pay their employees is simply gravy on top of their living wage. And everyone gets that. Even the rich. Now, a whole hell of a lot of people will simply be content and won't go to work. That'll drive up the cost of labor for shit jobs, which will further help the lower class. At least, those who want to work. The hope here is that people will be free from being wage-slaves and go do something more productive with their lives.
They are very different approaches and which you think is a better probably depends more on your philosophical outlook on human nature more than economical experiments of the past. I mean, really, this is the sort of post-scarcity scenario where we literally have enough to simply hand out food to whoever wants it.
We'll hit global peak oil sometime in there. It's not like all the cars will stop running tomarrow. It's more like oil will get so expensive that people start taking the bus, train, bike. You know, like it did in 2007. That squeeze popped the housing bubble, everyone got poor, had to use the bus anyway, and oil prices returned to sane levels. Plus everyone started digging into any sort of oil potential when it was looking like $100/barrel was coming. Yay improperly damped systems. And while the US might have hit peak oil a while ago, global peak oil is certainly a ways out. 50 years sounds optimistic.
If things don't change that could break globalization. It'll be a hard lesson to people that they can buy a shirt for $0.50 cents in Bangladesh, sell it here for $10, and still lose money. But of course things will change. Maybe the slow boats will switch the nuclear. Who knows. Maybe solar powered lighter-than-air hydrogen-based sky truckers will save the day.
The battlefield for the first-world nations will be vastly more automated. A tipping point will come when they want their machines to operate without satellite coverage and a greater degree or autonomy will be introduced. That or mobile connectivity will reign supreme next to air superiority.
Well see a continued gradual improvement in robotics. What they can do NOW is amazing. Give it 50 years and I imagine they'll be novelty competitors in the Olympics. Even in 50 years, it won't be cost effective to have a personal android maid. That's called a roomba. It doesn't do windows.
More and more jobs will be automated. Like factory jobs, then clerical jobs, the office worker and low-end technical jobs will fade. Like how we no longer have mail rooms at the office, we will no longer have HR departments. Problem with your paycheck? log in and fill out the complaint form.
China will suffer setbacks and undergo more change. Everyone knows China is coming online and turning into a super-power. But I think they'll have to go through some growing pains before they rival the USA. They'll develop a middle class. They'll clean up their factory lands. They'll have to decide what "legal" actually means. India is lagging behind China but will have the opportunity to during these stumbles. Europe will continue to consolidate into a single power. Africa will still be a clusterfuck.
Like how we dealt with black's rights, and women's right and are now dealing with gay's rights, I see we'll deal with the rights of artificial beings. AI's in university servers. They'll break that Turing test in the court room and we'll see how it goes. Mostly though, AI and computers will be still be tools. Google's overmind might know more about you than you do and have the omniscience of a god, but it won't have any over-arcing goals other than fetching you pictures of cats on the Internet.
We'll have to deal with our bodies and DNA being open to public scrutiny to anyone with a buck. Hello GATAGA.
People will still be greedy selfish assholes most of the time, but the exceptions will make it all worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because #3, Judaism is not "big". The numbers just aren't there.There are more Sikh than there are Jews. But hey, you hear a lot more about the Jews than you do about the Sikh, so obviously it's the more major religion, right?
Go on, look it up.
And, just to explain the joke: if you were to propose "the top 5 theories" of abiogenesis, a number of very vocal Americans would assume that included their personal pet theory of creationism. Just like they assume that Judaism is religion #3 on the charts, they assume creationism has more of a following than it really does. Get it?
So I read through the whole transcript. There's a lot of fluff in there and lip-service about reform and oversight. Which, hey, is better than coming out swinging claiming that the NSA can do no wrong, which is kinda what we got at the start. The good news is that he understands that we do need people investigating terrorism and that there is a valid reason to keep a leash on those spooks.
Of the ACTUAL changes he's proposing:
-National security letters should not be indefinite ("unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy"). Despite the major cop-out, this is a good thing.
-Asking congress to make an oversight panel in FISC. Which, you know, is asking someone else to watch over your department.
-Treat foreigners like real people. Hey, that's nice.
-Outsourcing the master database to a third party.
Wait, what was that last one?
I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.
Well that's a gooooowwwaaaitaminute... That just means someone other than the government is holding EVERYONE'S DATA...
replaced by one in which the providers, or a third party, retain the bulk records, with government accessing information as needed.
HOLY FLIPPING BALLS! What the fuck are you thinking!? You're outsourcing the fucking keys the freaking kingdom to a "third party"!?!?!? Hey, I hear India will do it on the cheap. Maybe China will undercut them.
On the other hand, any third party maintaining a single, consolidated database would be carrying out what's essentially a government function, but with more expense, more legal ambiguity, potentially less accountability, all of which would have a doubtful impact on increasing public confidence that their privacy is being protected.
No fucking shit sherlock. So then why are you doing that?
There are many theories on how the universe and life began. I for one have no issue being taught the top 5 theories where there are differing opinions, order the teachings randomly, but pass along who believes what and why they believe it. Allow the student to draw their own conclusions. They'll be stronger for it.
Right so:
Membrane first, protein first, nucleic acids first, Earth origin, extraterrestrial origin, and maybe slipping in volcanic vents somewhere in there.
That sounds like a pretty good top 5 list of current working theories. Notice that "god did it" is NOWHERE near the top 5 theories of how it happened.
It's like how most of America think the "big three" religions are the Christians, the Muslims, and the Jews.
Do I believe Darwin's theory? Sure I do. Do I believe in the lessons in the Bible? Sure I do.
That's good. That's really really good. That makes you a sane and rational person. Realize that the people behind the creationist movement and the ID movement are not like you. They believe in the Bible. Full stop. Everything else must conform to rule 1. To hell with the lessons of the bible, if the bible says 6 days, it was 6 days. That's a fact and you will have to pierce that veil of true belief to make them see otherwise. And any attempt to do so will make you a tool of Satan.
It's COLD FJORD! WOOOOO the apologists shills came out to play!
How many people are employed behind this account anyway? Do you guys have to sign it out so you don't step on each others toes or do you have one guy in charge of actually hitting submit?
From the perspective of today it is difficult to imagine the turbulence that the US was undergoing at the time. It started with the Civil Rights movements...
Not really. The nice thing about history is that you can go learn it. Quick checklist: Staunch conservatives fearing that the hippies are taking over, the red scare, racist in power fearing an uprising of blacks. No, it's pretty easy to imagine.
But let's think about that: "It started with the Civil Rights movement".... Turbulence... Was it a matter of "national security" that Hoover fought against civil rights? Is that what you're saying?
Not all those who dissented were peaceful or innocent, some were deadly violent.
Correct, the Black Panthers for example. Oh wait, there is strong evidence that the group was radicalized by the FBI so they could justify busting their organization. Don't get me wrong. The cop-killers that came into that organization were bad people, but the FBI poked the bear hoping for a response.
They tore down the social fabric without anything sturdy enough to replace it.
Uh-huh. "social fabric". And that somehow excuses Hoover illegally imprisoning people? Working to keep the blacks from having a vote? Undercutting the political movement against a the clusterfuck that was Vietnam.
Listen, Hoover THOUGHT he was helping America. I don't think he was a comic book villain. But he was simply wrong. He thought that keeping blackie down, beating down the hippies, and fighting communism was the best thing for the USA. He was wrong. Blacks are people too. The hippies had a more accurate political worldview. The spread of communism was not something worth fighting. It imploded upon itself. Capitalism won because it was simply better.
And this is the kicker: Hoover was getting in the way of democracy. While we were fighting for it overseas, Hoover was undercutting the political voice of a large swath of Americans back home. The hippies, the war protestors, the blacks, the women, they all deserved to have their voice heard. They deserved to organize. They did not deserve to be the target of a political smear campaign by the FBI. Unless they did something illegal. Then hey, ARREST THEM. Even then, dude, Martin was arrested a lot. Some of the laws are bullshit.
You should be thankful if you don't see days like that again in the US.
You mean like having staunch conservatives in power sending troops on long pointless wars while their domestic surveillance runs a dragnet on all communication rounding up and intimidating the war protestors? Yeah, that'd be terrible. So, as an aside, what are your views of occupy wall street?
In short, the situation at the time did not warrant Hoover's abuses.
No, he's fucking bartering foreign intel [theguardian.com] to foreign countries.
"Edward Snowden has offered to help Brazil investigate US spying on its soil in exchange for political asylum,"
Yeah dude, read it again. He has no bartering power concerning the leaked intel, because he no longer has any control over it. It's in the hands of journalists. He cannot use it to barter. He is not using intel to barter with Brazil for asylum. He is offering to WORK for Brazil and ANALYZE. You know, like his old job.
Come on, reading comprehension. Try it.
Heroes like Daniel Ellsberg
. . . You haven't been keeping up with the news have you?
Daniel the motherfucking hero Ellsberg had a reddit ask-me-anything. He's a full supporter of Snowden and says Snowden is doing the exact same sort of thing that he himself did back in the day.
The title is "I am Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden is my hero. AMA"
Or are you one of those "nobody should be spying on anyone" people?
No no, I fully support foreign espionage, AGAINST OUR ENEMIES. During WAR. The NSA broke NAZI cryptos. They helped win the war. Now the war is over. And unless we do something really dickish, like breaking international law and spying on allies, then war will most likely not resume. Yay living in a MAD world.
You seriously think revealing methods and intel on how we spy on other countries doesn't do us any harm? Really?
I think that when the US government is caught doing something illegal they need to be punished least they disregard all respect for the rule of law. They need to be taught that they have to respect the law. That respecting the law will encourage others to respect the law. I think that exposing criminality is the first step to helping the criminal be a better person/nation. Seriously, we CAN'T be the bad guys.
I hope you get a chance to read this before it disappears off the site
Moderation is not the same as censorship. I will always be able to find this post and rub it in your face years later.
How come just about every politician ends up doing nothing effective against the espionage departments?
Typically because the espionage departments performed espionage upon said politicians and knows where he buried the bodies.
But, just to throw the apologists a bone, it's possible that after looking under the hood he discovered all the good and wonderful things the NSA was doing and the very real threats that they've averted. Or, you know, that's what the NSA told him. They've been caught lying to superiors, I wouldn't put it below them.
I remember Obama speaking against Bush's wire tapping
Me too. I also remember October 2008 when he VOTED to give the telcom companies retroactive immunity from being sued for helping with Bush's illegal wiretapping program. Oh, did you miss that during the campaign trail? It was pretty indicative of where he stood on the subject. (but hey, it's Oct 2008, who else am I going to vote for, Palin?)
maybe only deterred him from firing Hoover... who was using the FBI to do what the NSA does now but limited to political figures... and maybe a few communists
And Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, journalists/athletes critical of the Vietnam war, the black panthers, individual students not even associated with groups, Albert Einstein, the KKK, etc (that list is actually really blood huge).
Hoover's FBI engaged in political smear campaigns, giving false report the the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, oh, and an assassination.
Seriously, learn some history.
Now, I don't think that the NSA is currently up to the sort of abuse that Hoover was involved in. Lying to the media, lying to congress, spying on their girlfriends, illegal domestic dragnets, internationally illegal espionage? They've been caught red handed. And no-one is in jail yet. Or even charged. That's a pretty serious breakdown of the rule of law.
But hey, it's not as bad as Hoover's FBI. Yet. That we know of.
No, I believe that gmuslera was referring to Obama. During the campaign trail he was in support of protecting whistleblowers and transparency. During his presidency he's decided that the espionage act from 1914 was suddenly very useful for prosecuting whistleblowers.
But yeah, Snowden is on that list.
He's bartering this foreign info ("give me amnesty in your country and I'll tell you how they're spying on you" All he needs is a sleazy late night commercial to go with it)!
I believe he gave the info to journalists who are choosing what to reveal about these transgressions. But hey, whatever keeps up the spin of the fox-news induced dreamstate you have about Snowden's motivations. Let me guess, you're still wondering how a "mere contractor" could have had access to all this data?
because he is doing real damage to this country
Such as? Go ahead, please list the ways he's damaging this country.
Yeah, I get that feeling too. The luster is fading on the Google. It used to be that Google was the hip new kid on the scene showing up the old and crufty beast that was Microsoft, and was more open and cheap than Apple. Even though they had almost entirely different fields of interest.
Then for a while they had more money than they knew what to do with. They dominated online ads, and made bank alongside everyone throwing money at them.
There was that minority that rallied against the targetted ad panopticon and the fanboys that twisted everything from "don't be evil" to "maybe you shouldn't be searching for that" into the most ludicrous insults against Google. But everyone has their detractors, and the fact that they were so zealous and twisting made me believe even more in Google's efforts.
Now? They're old business, and don't exactly have any cool new products coming out. They royally suck at customer service, because we are not the customers, we are the product. Hey, that's great when they're giving it out for free and doing their best to make good products to attract users. But now that they have the users... I'm not seeing the effort to appease them.
Google Glass was a good idea that the populous decided they wanted none of. It could have been revolutionary, but society says "no". Hey, sometimes you're too far ahead of the curve. It happens.
They need that self-driving car to hit the market to stay relevant as a tech company.
You have an automatic advantage in many technical fields in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe and most of Eastern Europe and probably other places as a white male.
Except when it comes to academia. Also any business looking to avoid a diversity suit, which is usually larger corporations rather than small business. There were a lot of scholarships I had to pass over. And there's a significant push to get women into STEM fields. These are good things as they get people into STEM fields, but it's certainly not fair. On the other hand, there's still a fair amount of racism/sexism in small business which make it easier for the typical white male to land a job. There are a lot of small businesses out there and some of them are simply never going to hire someone who can't laugh at a dick joke or gives any hint that they'd sue for anything.
"People of east Asian descent" are often the first/second generation of wealthy engineers, doctors, and the upper class fleeing from Mao's communist China reformations. It was communism, they literally took all the stuff from the previous ruling class and gave it to the state (who ostensibly used it for the good of the masses). A lot of people fled that scenario. Likewise, the USA is a superpower and attracts a lot of talent. That's one of the ideas behind H1B1 visa's right? They'll stay and be productive members of society. Hence we have this stereotype about Asians.
Wait, what? Am I supporting a stereotype? No, like most stereotypes there are reasons that they're often true, but like all stereotypes, you can't assume it's universally true. That makes you an asshole.
White men are a tiny minority of the world's population, and even in the United States do not represent the majority of users of computer software.
And yet white men are, or at least were, the majority of the world's population of computer software developers. Just because they can use a computer, doesn't mean they can code. Really, it's like saying that white males are a minority of people who sit in chairs and so we should have more diversity when it comes to chair makers.
What I'm saying is that we're not measuring talent correctly.
No, it's actual racism/sexism in small companies that's the problem. It's less of an issue at large corporations that get sued on a regular basis for this sort of thing.
Well, I mean, identifying quality coders is also something that HR generally sucks at, but that's an aside to the race issue.
Beyond this, think about how software can benefit from different perspectives and ideas from different cultures and backgrounds... we all should know by now that the best software comes out of as many competing ideas as possible. And not necessarily one idea will win. Many times several (and a lot of times two) ideas are equally as good.
Yeah, because I love my source code to be sprinkled with Engrish. Nothing better than having competing standards! Screw your uniformity, bring on the chaos!
Which is that few people need to be "in charge" of a company while many need to be doing the work.
Oh really?
That's how it currently is with most companies but not all. I imagine it's that way because they're run by sociopaths who clawed their way to the top at the expense of others and actively work on being the wealthiest person in the room.
With fewer people needed for such a position and many needed for the lower positions there's less competition for upper management and much more for lower
*cough*BULLSHIT*cough*
There is a very tiny pool of potential CEOs that the board (consisting entirely of other CEOs) is willing to consider. How many people do you think would be willing to lead Microsoft if it, and the paycheck and stock options, was offered to them?
And yes the goal is a work free utopia, we'll get there
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, "work free" means that no one can afford anything, even the cheapest of flatscreen TVs.
Forming a hypothesis could be considered the first step of science.
Did they crank-up a Bunsen burner and cook some chemicals?
That's been done.
Why does #1 have to come before #2?
Well I believe the idea would be that Shannon and his basic work on information theory made inroads to the study of complexity. And the common and flawed argument that the anti-science crowd throws about is that various parts of biology, or in this case the most basic forms of life, are irreducibly complex. And that it's SOOOOO rare of a chance that these amino acids and whatnot would randomly bump into each other to form a self-reproducing molecule that's it's an absurd theory.
So it's important to understand what the term "complex" means in a technical sense and how complex systems can arise from simpler things.
You watchin' boy?
Before you can answer "Why not elsewhere?" You need to figure out how it began here.
No you don't.
Explaining the creation of organic molecules in an early earth atmosphere is one thing. Even getting to the point of self-replicating molecules is not too terribly difficult. Getting from self-replicating molecules to even the simplest life
Self-replicating molecules IS the definition of life. At least, you know, it's good enough for me. If you start down the path of arguing what is and isn't alive, you just end up in a philosophical dead end.
anything we say about alien planet atmosphere sparking life is pure conjecture.
It's conjecture, but it's not pure conjecture. It's an informed and rational estimation given a small but not insignificant amount of data on the subject. The probability that the conjecture is true is low, but not zero. It takes a mountain of effort to raise that probability, and it never gets to 100% for anything, but sometimes it's worth it and all in all I'm a fan of efforts trying to peer past the veil of uncertainty.
As for these inquisitive young minds, let's say we whet their appetite by these stories, what happens when what we've told them is shown to be untrue? We end up with a bunch of cynical adults who don't trust science, which leads to all sorts of problems (climate change and evolution are prime examples of this).
Those are words of wisdom. Which is why you never sell anything as hard-set fact. These are dreams and conjecture. Do alien atmospheres spark the seeds of life? They may. If you're uncomfortable with that uncertainty, then science might not be for you. But I'll light my sparks with dreams that might come true. (Along with a good sci-fi book. Have you read Paolo Bacigalupi's Calorie Man series? Good stuff)
Well yes, but the frequency at which life arises in the universe may well make the duration that life sustains itself look like a tiny and temporary blip.
Except that most people consider plants, fungus, and bacteria to be alive. I think the term you're looking for is "sentient", which means something else.
My question though is at what point those molecules become alive?
When they bump into each other and form something that reproduces itself. Abiogenesis. After that happens evolution kicks in and they're on the course towards launching rockets towards Earth and killing us all.
When do they start reproducing
Good question. Once you get the primordial soup, they bump around randomly until they form things of interest. Cell membranes are easy. Lipids naturally cling to each other and make little bubbles. There's a tough call about which part of the next process came first and how they made the other half: Proteins or nucleic acids? They kind of make each other. Like I said, this is a good question.
or even get the will/understanding the need to reproduce/split to survive?
I don't think that bacteria particularly have/need any amount of willpower or understanding to reproduce, split, and/or survive. They just need to do it. We personify these things a lot as a teaching aide, like saying the river water WANTS to flow to the sea, but they're just dumb cells.
How does that transformation occur that takes this energy from lightning or whatever and converts it to life?
Oh, that's easy: the energy from lightning converts some common chemicals into some other chemicals. Specifically, methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2) or carbon monoxide (CO), and phosphate (PO43-) get electrocuted and can turn into, among other things, amino acids. These chemicals are the basic building blocks of life and the idea is that if you bump them together enough that they'll form into something that reproduces. That's the definition of life.
Our planet is a data point of one, from which useful questions can be raised like: Why not elsewhere? The fact that Venus and Mars aren't teeming with life tells us things about where life cannot arise. (Or at least hasn't in the past few billion years)
They have to keep releasing these type of wildly speculative stories to keep interest up in science and technology. Because children have the right to dream fantastic dreams of the future and giving them meaningful goals and quests to set them upon is a duty of the current generation. Plus it's fantastically more productive than building hype about what the latest pop-star wore and whose baby she's carrying.
And yeah, reminding people about how cool science is really does help focus them on what's important and keep the research grant taps from shriveling up into nothing.
Nothing more, nothing less.
When the units in question are volts, then a positive feedback loop gets you max voltage. It's useful for turning floating values into discrete on/off values. It doesn't necessarily cause oscillations, that would take some additional factors to react to the output. Which is what you get when you fuck up in control systems. Because the whole thing has feedback known as "reality" and your opamp is trying to react to it.
Negative feedback tries to stay at a target. The more it deviates, the more it fights against it.
When the units are dollars a positive feedback loop is just called cumulative interest.
When the units are knowledge, a positive feedback loop is learning, or learning how to learn, or getting smarter.
... it will avoid purchases of rare earth minerals and metals, such as tantalum, sourced from high conflict areas such as...
...China? Because, you know, they're fighting over those exact resources. It's just an economic battle rather than involving slave labor. Although I'm not sure you can say that the Chinese factory workers are all that much better off.
We're headed down the freeway. Up ahead I see some teenagers standing on an overpass holding something large and watching cars pass underneath. I recognize a potential dropped rock and change lanes to get away from it. Will the computer do that?
No, and most drivers won't either. And this is a pretty WTF example. Are teenager casually murdering commuters an issue where you drive?
and change lanes to get away from it.
Yeah, that'll fix it.
I'm almost home. I see the neighbor kid playing basketball in his driveway. He shoots. He misses. I know as soon as he misses that there is a good chance the ball will roll out into the street, and knowing how oblivious the neighbor kid is I can expect him to follow. Will the computer know this?
Yes, it assumes all people are oblivious idiots.
In fact, I see the kid running towards the street, but he is hidden behind a parked van and will not actually be visible in the street until he's in the street directly in front of me. Will the car track him all the way from the upper end of his driveway?
Yes, if you saw it, the car saw it. It has just as much memory as you do and can calculate when the rogue object will cross it's path.
I'm passing an intersection and there are two people standing on the corner. They are in a position where they might step into the crosswalk. Can the computer read those people's body language to predict that they will or won't step off the sidewalk in front of me?
Yes, in terms of body language being "Moving into the intersection".
There are any number of fuzzy logic problems that the computer will be better by using actual data rather than guessing games played by humans. By and far the ability of a computer to simply pay attention all the time in all directions will makes cars safer for everybody.
Any accidents that occur with self-driving cars, initially, I'm sure will be because of human drivers not doing what they should be doing.
Even if the self-driving cars have accidents it will be because the humans, who are not doing anything have done it wrong. And the NTSB is correct for their blanket finding of "pilot error" on every airplane crash, right?
No. The intent of that statement was that idiots will do something wrong and crash into self-driving cars. That would be an accident involving self-driving cars.
And most of the time it IS pilot error. Welcome to the future where the weakest link is the human mind.
like a piano falling out of the sky landing directly on a car in traffic.
Yes, when I drive, that's exactly what I fear most.
Well the first thing that came to your head was teenagers with rocks. It's really not that far off.
Oh, right. Damn, that's a pretty good comeback. Yeah, I dunno how I missed that one.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs that I'm at +5 insightful for that comment when there's such a glaring logical hole there. I guess that there's a trend with Slashdot moderators that simply votes for anything that's pro-open source and anti-proprietary. This is the echo chamber my friends. And as big of a bitch as it is to admit it, yeah, BSD went closed source into OSX, and Apple then made contributions to Clang and LLVM. It's an example of code going into that black hole of the soulless corporation with perilous licenses and somehow coming out the other side to actually help us out.
Ah yes, all those people running BSD... All those people.
Which, hey, if you include Apples OSX, is a hell of a lot of people. So yes, let us bask in all that effort that Apple has done for the open source community.
Very few [open/free] projects are that good.
Well with that sort of QUANTITY, you can't expect them all to be stellar.
The only thing you achieve is that your code is used in less places.
But those are places that you can actually use rather than the proprietary walled garden constrictive license which make for the sort of thing where you don't actually own the things you own. It also makes for a platform which is dead in the water and has no legs. And it's usually expensive.
I don't care if a few businessmen shy away from the code I throw out there under an free license. They most certainly wouldn't have helped me.
Whoa there. I think you're getting the idea of a minimum wage mixed with the idea of a guaranteed income. Your argument is about a minimum wage. That if a business can't afford to pay their employees a living wage then it's not worth it to society for that business to exist.
With a guaranteed income, the threat of dying in a ditch is removed. It's no longer a burden to the business that they must provide a living wage to their employees. People are working for surplus, because they want more, because they're greedy.
If we switch to a guaranteed income, then the business's should be free to pay as little as they want since anything they pay their employees is simply gravy on top of their living wage. And everyone gets that. Even the rich. Now, a whole hell of a lot of people will simply be content and won't go to work. That'll drive up the cost of labor for shit jobs, which will further help the lower class. At least, those who want to work. The hope here is that people will be free from being wage-slaves and go do something more productive with their lives.
They are very different approaches and which you think is a better probably depends more on your philosophical outlook on human nature more than economical experiments of the past. I mean, really, this is the sort of post-scarcity scenario where we literally have enough to simply hand out food to whoever wants it.
We'll hit global peak oil sometime in there. It's not like all the cars will stop running tomarrow. It's more like oil will get so expensive that people start taking the bus, train, bike. You know, like it did in 2007. That squeeze popped the housing bubble, everyone got poor, had to use the bus anyway, and oil prices returned to sane levels. Plus everyone started digging into any sort of oil potential when it was looking like $100/barrel was coming. Yay improperly damped systems. And while the US might have hit peak oil a while ago, global peak oil is certainly a ways out. 50 years sounds optimistic.
If things don't change that could break globalization. It'll be a hard lesson to people that they can buy a shirt for $0.50 cents in Bangladesh, sell it here for $10, and still lose money. But of course things will change. Maybe the slow boats will switch the nuclear. Who knows. Maybe solar powered lighter-than-air hydrogen-based sky truckers will save the day.
The battlefield for the first-world nations will be vastly more automated. A tipping point will come when they want their machines to operate without satellite coverage and a greater degree or autonomy will be introduced. That or mobile connectivity will reign supreme next to air superiority.
Well see a continued gradual improvement in robotics. What they can do NOW is amazing. Give it 50 years and I imagine they'll be novelty competitors in the Olympics. Even in 50 years, it won't be cost effective to have a personal android maid. That's called a roomba. It doesn't do windows.
More and more jobs will be automated. Like factory jobs, then clerical jobs, the office worker and low-end technical jobs will fade. Like how we no longer have mail rooms at the office, we will no longer have HR departments. Problem with your paycheck? log in and fill out the complaint form.
China will suffer setbacks and undergo more change. Everyone knows China is coming online and turning into a super-power. But I think they'll have to go through some growing pains before they rival the USA. They'll develop a middle class. They'll clean up their factory lands. They'll have to decide what "legal" actually means. India is lagging behind China but will have the opportunity to during these stumbles. Europe will continue to consolidate into a single power. Africa will still be a clusterfuck.
Like how we dealt with black's rights, and women's right and are now dealing with gay's rights, I see we'll deal with the rights of artificial beings. AI's in university servers. They'll break that Turing test in the court room and we'll see how it goes. Mostly though, AI and computers will be still be tools. Google's overmind might know more about you than you do and have the omniscience of a god, but it won't have any over-arcing goals other than fetching you pictures of cats on the Internet.
We'll have to deal with our bodies and DNA being open to public scrutiny to anyone with a buck. Hello GATAGA.
People will still be greedy selfish assholes most of the time, but the exceptions will make it all worth it.