What's interesting is that you don't see the different between reality and a simulation.
Surprisingly, simulations do actually lower the bar to people using violence. There's plenty of evidence to show this. Simulations provide experience and they help you, mentally, to cross the bridge to doing something from not doing something by getting you used to the idea that in some circumstances the simulation is permissable. Indeed, its increasingly common to use simulations to help people overcome phobias. Shrinks use VR stuff to help people get past fears of everything from heights to snakes.
I don't aim my H&K-91 in COD4 at [DMZ]Turkeyburger and think of actually killing the dweeb sitting behind his keyboard. At the same time I don't take personal offense at [DMZ]Turkeyburger killing me. It's a frigging game!
No, but, if you had an H&K-91 in your hand, and, you felt the situation were appropriate, you could in fact be more likely to pull the trigger, while, without your simulation training, you might not pull the trigger at all.
In the old, old days, the US Army used round targets to train shooters. It was found after World War I and into World War II that one of the biggest problems an infantry man had was that, he or she wouldn't fire back at the enemy. It turns out that actually a fairly significant portion of the soldiers would not actually shoot another person, even when they were being shot at themselves. So, to get soldiers used to the idea of shooting other people, among other things, targets shaped like people were introduced, to help future soldiers overcome the idea of shooting someone. This actually led to a measurable effect on the amount of soldiers shooting. So, obviously, even if the simulation change of a paper target type can make a difference, one might think a more immersive simulation would too.
The West did not boycott the 1980 Olympics. Rather, the USA did under President Jimmy Carter. This was an entirely unpopular decision within the USA, and even his right wing political opponent, Ronald Reagan, condemned it.
How interesting it is that we have warnings about violent content on slashdot when the lion's share of we readers play plenty of first person shoot-em-ups.
Well, I think the USA should just launch a massive nuclear attack on Russia and China, right -after- the Olympics is over. I argue thus:
a. The attack on Georgia is utterly terrible, and the Georgians fought in Iraq for us and so we should fight for them.
b. The USA is doomed anyway. The Chinese have more people. Our leadership is inept.
c. A great way to reduce greenhouse gasses. If you kill 5 billion people in an all out nuclear war, then, the earth would be spared all the ravages of that evil CO2... at least after all the forests stop burning.
d. Cools the planet. Everyone knows that nuclear winter would reverse the horrific ravages of global warming, benefiting coastal people everywhere.
Really, why wouldn't we want to have a nuclear war ?
Ok? The idea is for the entire world to be entertained at which should be a truce among the nations of the world bringing its best athletes to the tables. Putting on a good show for the olympics is part of the drill.
I'm always looking for a good shot at China but I think this time around we should cut these people a break. They've done a good job with the Olympics so far.
Actually, if there's a conspiracy, its this whole business of hydrazine being supposedly unsafe. Since I've been using hydrazine scalp cream, I've regained a full head of hair and my private assets have significantly increased in size. It's only because George Bush wants everyone to go bald, that the satellite was shot down.
(organized or structured) violence without additional violence, not the least of which are economic measures (e.g., sanctions, embargo) that can wipe out a country's entire infrastructure and ability to fight (or do much of anything) more effectively than combat.
Sanctions are a form of war. Let's not forget that. For sanctions to work, you have to have guys with guns making sure that a country doesn't get anything. I believe the operative word is called "Siege warfare".
The whole reason we say interstellar distances are too vast is because we don't live long enough relative to the travel time. But, if someone could live to be 2000 years old, or ten times that, then, taking a long trip from star to star becomes a reasonable, if long, thing to do.
First off, let's forget that the idea of a capitalist economy is, well, improvement through -competition-. Once we take that off the table, we still are left to wonder why a firm would want to prohibit a discarded worker from working for a competitor. If the worker was not good enough to be retained, then, wouldn't you want them to bumble on at a rival?
In any case, I think there's a consensus enough among even the most radically left and radically right people that anti-compete laws are fundamentally wrong. The left can argue in favor of worker's rights, the right can argue in favor of individual economic rights, and both can set aside the dogma in favor of the political reality that in a labor climate where a lot of mobility is required, it makes good sense to allow employees to be mobile anywhere. What politician in his or her right mind would stand up to defend a law that effectively excludes someone from getting a job? I've had my share of flamewares with the far left,but I'd be proud to side with them on this issue. It's good for -everybody-.
Actually, the benefits would be so vast as to outweigh the demise of the internet as we have it today. It wouldn't be just scheduling traffic, but any sort of system of resource allocation, reverse engineering complex systems of any kind. The really interesting question would be if a potential solution had utility in the physical sciences. If math worked that way, that would be one thing, but if the math actually gave us a model that was applicable to the physics, then it would be something of the ultimate jackpot.
Yep... Bin Laden is about to be upstaged by a supercollider. The whole war on terror to avenge the destruction of the a few buildings in NYC will seem moot after a couple of european scientists accidentally suck the entire state into a black hole.
Ouch! This argument works there as well. Do you still think it is "dumb" to insist on things that society had the foresight to put into law?
At the end of the day, if people work less, they get less. So, if Apple employees succeed, and Apple people wind up working less, what do you think happens to the company? Have a look at General Motors.
If you had a proof that P=NP, you could still rewrite FACTOR to take advantage of it. In my own quest to make FACTOR, I turned it into a travelling salesman problem. this is no big deal... you can use a solution to an NP-Complete problem to solve anything, its just going to be a slow way to do it.
But, I was thinking in terms of attacking digital signatures in particular. SSL works, IIRC, by two levels of keys. There's an public key for the AEP/DES whatever encrypted payload that follows. Your SSL certificate is actually the other side of that key, so it follows that the public key part of the packet you are trying to crack is going to live a long time... hence the paranoia on RSA key sizes. So, if you can FACTOR in polynomial time, you can certainly attack the key exchange signature, and at that point fetch the key for the rest of the message, alter it, change it, or merely create your own messages with the same key.
So, that pretty much would kill of HTTPS. Similarly, using digital signing for files would also quickly falter. Microsoft's whole Authenticode scheme would crumble and you could never have provably unaltered Active X control or even a plug in of any kind for any browser...
And, of course, if P=NP, then one has to imagine that there might be a new wave of assaults on even non-public key crypto. AES, AEP, old DES, all those different algorithms, would fall under attack and quite frankly I think you could make a single computer program that act as a sort of a driver which decrypts any kind of message.
That ultimately would leave us, for security, with, don't use electronic communications, use a one-time pad, or, security through obscurity by hiding the algorithm.
I RTFA. At this point, we're hanging all of our eggs into the encyrption basket. If someone proves P=NP and breaks SSL, the whole internet is hosed. Now again, why are we telling people that this stuff is safe, when -we- know that it is not?
1. The internet will have to balkanized into those countries that have laws to go after hackers and those who do not. 2. Consumers will eventually only choose content that is actually hosted by their ISPs because that will be the only content that is safe. 3. ISPs will increasingly look to disallow traffic coming from "non-trusted" ISPs in order to protect themselves.
Basically, you don't have to have everyone in a class file a class action lawsuit for it be presented, but now everyone at Apple is now tagged as a slacker because a few people that were unhappy and yet too lazy to find jobs elsewhere decided to bring the whole house down. Of course, the employee s might get a free soda or a coffee extra out of the suit, but the lawyers are going to walk away rich out of money that could have gone towards more R&D, headcount, or, earnings per share. So, to make up the slack from the lawsuit, the Apple employees are simply going to have to work -even harder-.
you were a hardened skeptic that global warming is measureably being caused by man-made CO2 emissions.
Actually, I flip flop on the issue. First I thought it was crap. Then, I listen to the proponents of global warming, read up on climate modelling and what they are trying to do, and I did some simple calculations of my own and yes, the increase of CO2 in the air is reasonably caused by man and some increase in temperature can be expected from it. The question really is, how much, of both.
What really struck me though, is that, something in space could be screwing with the earth's climate, coupled with that paper from the guy from MIT who hoped there was no life on Mars, because if there was, it was a sign of some future disaster about to hit humanity that has wiped out all life in the galaxy. A few scary science shows about the earth getting roasted by a supernova, then, reading about the lack of sunspots and now, well, I'm actually thinking man is pretty small in all of this. With that said, i do think we need to manage the atmosphere and so some carbon regulation is inevitable. But, I don't think we need the draconian solutions envisioned by the greens. Instead, we're looking at more baby steps and using the fossil fuels we have to power the economy sufficiently to develop a transportation system based on some form of energy that man stores.
The satellite data show no temperature rise at all since 1970s.
Actually, there is a slight rise in the satellite data, until very recently, but now, temperatures are actually falling.
But, even if the satellite aren't calibrated, they serve as certainly a more consistent baseline as to atmospheric temperatures of the planet than a collection of thermometers in random places, and so are way more useful for monitoring trends going forward.
Of course these plumes could have a huge impact on ocean currents and that could screw up the climate. Look at what La Nina and El Nino do!
See, I don't see it as censorship per se. What's really happening is that we've long encoded scientific knowledge into the calculus and to a point we've moved beyond that into pure computer models, and our models are telling us some pretty disturbing things about the environment. Intuitively, I don't believe in these models at all, but, by the same token, I don't think we should adopt the skeptic's approach and simply ignore them. Rather, I think researchers need to refine these models so that they are more encompassing, not less, and that, if we have, more example, Hansen saying his model is the "last word", then, its easy enough to topple him - just make a better model. So, the answer is out there for skeptics - its just they have to quit being so lazy and get to work.
Your Republicans have violated every right they've touched
Keep and bear arms? There, I falsified that for you.
there's nothing left to steal.
What exactly are they "stealing". You know, just because some people work harder and more smartly and get ahead does not mean that they stole it.
The fact is, if anyone in Washington DC has done anything to meaningfully help the working man in the last 20 years, it has been George W Bush. Under George W Bush, the real price of commodities has gone up in the last few years, putting more money into the pockets of the family farmer, the miner and the lumberjack. Everyone who gets their hands dirty working the land to get some resource out of it is doing better than any in any recent administration. Similarly, as much as Democrats bash Bush on "jobs flying overseas", nobody has done more to keep jobs at home by devaluing the dollar than George Bush. Do check the trade statistics. Under Bush, US EXPORTS ARE AT RECORD LEVELS. That's jobs at home dude and ultimately a permanent and fair balance with the rest of the planet so that we can trade as partners in peace.
Your Democrats will completely fuck that up. Obama wants to curtail free trade, but jack up the value of the dollar. So, he's going to piss off his allies and make us even more dependent on the 3rd world while driving out every kind of production out of the USA. No wonder Democrats are getting so much money from foreigners - they've proven themselves traitors so many times that they can credibly say that they will sell the country out to make their rich stock go up.
Is that, by associating you with your bag selection, the store can actually better know in advance how many bags it needs to buy. If you did bring your bags, the store would know it, and could then send you stuff to thank you for your environmental savvy, and then based on data mining, show you some of the promotional items you might be interested.
We all laugh at the IBM Patent, but they are going to make a ton of money off of it.
Lawyers as a whole, and judges in particular, think that they can "cut to the chase" of a problem and dig into the details of any field by analyzing every activity with respect to the law. So they never grasp the technology per se as much as they extract talking points with which to argue their side. Judges just tend to go with whoever makes the better argument. Expert witnesses and consultants are brought in to boost the credibility of the lawyers and their talking points, not, to help aid in any real understanding.
The ocean is riddled with these geological vents heating the sea water at the bottom to more than 700 degrees, all coming out of molten magnum plumes that are miles high wide, and deep, and you don't know how many they are that, there might be a lot, and you are telling me that my Dodge pickup is the thing that's melting the ice caps... just let me get that straight? Maybe there's some effect from the CO2, but I would think that giant molten magma plumes conducting heat to the oceans might, just might, have more to do with heating.
Sea monsters, for unknown reason, are related to cows and dogs and thus we can -easily- domesticate them. A generation from now, every child will want and have a pet sea monster. There will be shelters of abandoned sea monsters and giant mounds where the kids that got a sea monster for christmas but didn't really understand the commitment go. PETA will protest, for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
What's interesting is that you don't see the different between reality and a simulation.
Surprisingly, simulations do actually lower the bar to people using violence. There's plenty of evidence to show this. Simulations provide experience and they help you, mentally, to cross the bridge to doing something from not doing something by getting you used to the idea that in some circumstances the simulation is permissable. Indeed, its increasingly common to use simulations to help people overcome phobias. Shrinks use VR stuff to help people get past fears of everything from heights to snakes.
I don't aim my H&K-91 in COD4 at [DMZ]Turkeyburger and think of actually killing the dweeb sitting behind his keyboard. At the same time I don't take personal offense at [DMZ]Turkeyburger killing me. It's a frigging game!
No, but, if you had an H&K-91 in your hand, and, you felt the situation were appropriate, you could in fact be more likely to pull the trigger, while, without your simulation training, you might not pull the trigger at all.
In the old, old days, the US Army used round targets to train shooters. It was found after World War I and into World War II that one of the biggest problems an infantry man had was that, he or she wouldn't fire back at the enemy. It turns out that actually a fairly significant portion of the soldiers would not actually shoot another person, even when they were being shot at themselves. So, to get soldiers used to the idea of shooting other people, among other things, targets shaped like people were introduced, to help future soldiers overcome the idea of shooting someone. This actually led to a measurable effect on the amount of soldiers shooting. So, obviously, even if the simulation change of a paper target type can make a difference, one might think a more immersive simulation would too.
The West did not boycott the 1980 Olympics. Rather, the USA did under President Jimmy Carter. This was an entirely unpopular decision within the USA, and even his right wing political opponent, Ronald Reagan, condemned it.
How interesting it is that we have warnings about violent content on slashdot when the lion's share of we readers play plenty of first person shoot-em-ups.
Everyone wants everyone else to set aside their personal feelings and agree with them, but no one wants to do that with their own.
Well, didn't work in Georgia, did it?
Well, I think the USA should just launch a massive nuclear attack on Russia and China, right -after- the Olympics is over. I argue thus:
a. The attack on Georgia is utterly terrible, and the Georgians fought in Iraq for us and so we should fight for them.
b. The USA is doomed anyway. The Chinese have more people. Our leadership is inept.
c. A great way to reduce greenhouse gasses. If you kill 5 billion people in an all out nuclear war, then, the earth would be spared all the ravages of that evil CO2... at least after all the forests stop burning.
d. Cools the planet. Everyone knows that nuclear winter would reverse the horrific ravages of global warming, benefiting coastal people everywhere.
Really, why wouldn't we want to have a nuclear war ?
Ok? The idea is for the entire world to be entertained at which should be a truce among the nations of the world bringing its best athletes to the tables. Putting on a good show for the olympics is part of the drill.
I'm always looking for a good shot at China but I think this time around we should cut these people a break. They've done a good job with the Olympics so far.
Actually, if there's a conspiracy, its this whole business of hydrazine being supposedly unsafe. Since I've been using hydrazine scalp cream, I've regained a full head of hair and my private assets have significantly increased in size. It's only because George Bush wants everyone to go bald, that the satellite was shot down.
Why guarantee a loss of life (through conventional combat) when it can be avoided?
Because its better to have a few more people get killed in a shoot em up than it is for an entire country to be ruined for a generation.
(organized or structured) violence without additional violence, not the least of which are economic measures (e.g., sanctions, embargo) that can wipe out a country's entire infrastructure and ability to fight (or do much of anything) more effectively than combat.
Sanctions are a form of war. Let's not forget that. For sanctions to work, you have to have guys with guns making sure that a country doesn't get anything. I believe the operative word is called "Siege warfare".
The whole reason we say interstellar distances are too vast is because we don't live long enough relative to the travel time. But, if someone could live to be 2000 years old, or ten times that, then, taking a long trip from star to star becomes a reasonable, if long, thing to do.
First off, let's forget that the idea of a capitalist economy is, well, improvement through -competition-. Once we take that off the table, we still are left to wonder why a firm would want to prohibit a discarded worker from working for a competitor. If the worker was not good enough to be retained, then, wouldn't you want them to bumble on at a rival?
In any case, I think there's a consensus enough among even the most radically left and radically right people that anti-compete laws are fundamentally wrong. The left can argue in favor of worker's rights, the right can argue in favor of individual economic rights, and both can set aside the dogma in favor of the political reality that in a labor climate where a lot of mobility is required, it makes good sense to allow employees to be mobile anywhere. What politician in his or her right mind would stand up to defend a law that effectively excludes someone from getting a job? I've had my share of flamewares with the far left,but I'd be proud to side with them on this issue. It's good for -everybody-.
Actually, the benefits would be so vast as to outweigh the demise of the internet as we have it today. It wouldn't be just scheduling traffic, but any sort of system of resource allocation, reverse engineering complex systems of any kind. The really interesting question would be if a potential solution had utility in the physical sciences. If math worked that way, that would be one thing, but if the math actually gave us a model that was applicable to the physics, then it would be something of the ultimate jackpot.
Yep... Bin Laden is about to be upstaged by a supercollider. The whole war on terror to avenge the destruction of the a few buildings in NYC will seem moot after a couple of european scientists accidentally suck the entire state into a black hole.
Ouch! This argument works there as well. Do you still think it is "dumb" to insist on things that society had the foresight to put into law?
At the end of the day, if people work less, they get less. So, if Apple employees succeed, and Apple people wind up working less, what do you think happens to the company? Have a look at General Motors.
If you had a proof that P=NP, you could still rewrite FACTOR to take advantage of it. In my own quest to make FACTOR, I turned it into a travelling salesman problem. this is no big deal... you can use a solution to an NP-Complete problem to solve anything, its just going to be a slow way to do it.
But, I was thinking in terms of attacking digital signatures in particular. SSL works, IIRC, by two levels of keys. There's an public key for the AEP/DES whatever encrypted payload that follows. Your SSL certificate is actually the other side of that key, so it follows that the public key part of the packet you are trying to crack is going to live a long time... hence the paranoia on RSA key sizes. So, if you can FACTOR in polynomial time, you can certainly attack the key exchange signature, and at that point fetch the key for the rest of the message, alter it, change it, or merely create your own messages with the same key.
So, that pretty much would kill of HTTPS. Similarly, using digital signing for files would also quickly falter. Microsoft's whole Authenticode scheme would crumble and you could never have provably unaltered Active X control or even a plug in of any kind for any browser...
And, of course, if P=NP, then one has to imagine that there might be a new wave of assaults on even non-public key crypto. AES, AEP, old DES, all those different algorithms, would fall under attack and quite frankly I think you could make a single computer program that act as a sort of a driver which decrypts any kind of message.
That ultimately would leave us, for security, with, don't use electronic communications, use a one-time pad, or, security through obscurity by hiding the algorithm.
I RTFA. At this point, we're hanging all of our eggs into the encyrption basket. If someone proves P=NP and breaks SSL, the whole internet is hosed. Now again, why are we telling people that this stuff is safe, when -we- know that it is not?
1. The internet will have to balkanized into those countries that have laws to go after hackers and those who do not.
2. Consumers will eventually only choose content that is actually hosted by their ISPs because that will be the only content that is safe.
3. ISPs will increasingly look to disallow traffic coming from "non-trusted" ISPs in order to protect themselves.
Basically, you don't have to have everyone in a class file a class action lawsuit for it be presented, but now everyone at Apple is now tagged as a slacker because a few people that were unhappy and yet too lazy to find jobs elsewhere decided to bring the whole house down. Of course, the employee s might get a free soda or a coffee extra out of the suit, but the lawyers are going to walk away rich out of money that could have gone towards more R&D, headcount, or, earnings per share. So, to make up the slack from the lawsuit, the Apple employees are simply going to have to work -even harder-.
Dumb.
you were a hardened skeptic that global warming is measureably being caused by man-made CO2 emissions.
Actually, I flip flop on the issue. First I thought it was crap. Then, I listen to the proponents of global warming, read up on climate modelling and what they are trying to do, and I did some simple calculations of my own and yes, the increase of CO2 in the air is reasonably caused by man and some increase in temperature can be expected from it. The question really is, how much, of both.
What really struck me though, is that, something in space could be screwing with the earth's climate, coupled with that paper from the guy from MIT who hoped there was no life on Mars, because if there was, it was a sign of some future disaster about to hit humanity that has wiped out all life in the galaxy. A few scary science shows about the earth getting roasted by a supernova, then, reading about the lack of sunspots and now, well, I'm actually thinking man is pretty small in all of this. With that said, i do think we need to manage the atmosphere and so some carbon regulation is inevitable. But, I don't think we need the draconian solutions envisioned by the greens. Instead, we're looking at more baby steps and using the fossil fuels we have to power the economy sufficiently to develop a transportation system based on some form of energy that man stores.
The satellite data show no temperature rise at all since 1970s.
Actually, there is a slight rise in the satellite data, until very recently, but now, temperatures are actually falling.
But, even if the satellite aren't calibrated, they serve as certainly a more consistent baseline as to atmospheric temperatures of the planet than a collection of thermometers in random places, and so are way more useful for monitoring trends going forward.
Of course these plumes could have a huge impact on ocean currents and that could screw up the climate. Look at what La Nina and El Nino do!
See, I don't see it as censorship per se. What's really happening is that we've long encoded scientific knowledge into the calculus and to a point we've moved beyond that into pure computer models, and our models are telling us some pretty disturbing things about the environment. Intuitively, I don't believe in these models at all, but, by the same token, I don't think we should adopt the skeptic's approach and simply ignore them. Rather, I think researchers need to refine these models so that they are more encompassing, not less, and that, if we have, more example, Hansen saying his model is the "last word", then, its easy enough to topple him - just make a better model. So, the answer is out there for skeptics - its just they have to quit being so lazy and get to work.
How could you tell, if you borrowed the notebook, took out the drive, used an adapter to mount the drive another computer, and dd'd it.
Your Republicans have violated every right they've touched
Keep and bear arms? There, I falsified that for you.
there's nothing left to steal.
What exactly are they "stealing". You know, just because some people work harder and more smartly and get ahead does not mean that they stole it.
The fact is, if anyone in Washington DC has done anything to meaningfully help the working man in the last 20 years, it has been George W Bush. Under George W Bush, the real price of commodities has gone up in the last few years, putting more money into the pockets of the family farmer, the miner and the lumberjack. Everyone who gets their hands dirty working the land to get some resource out of it is doing better than any in any recent administration. Similarly, as much as Democrats bash Bush on "jobs flying overseas", nobody has done more to keep jobs at home by devaluing the dollar than George Bush. Do check the trade statistics. Under Bush, US EXPORTS ARE AT RECORD LEVELS. That's jobs at home dude and ultimately a permanent and fair balance with the rest of the planet so that we can trade as partners in peace.
Your Democrats will completely fuck that up. Obama wants to curtail free trade, but jack up the value of the dollar. So, he's going to piss off his allies and make us even more dependent on the 3rd world while driving out every kind of production out of the USA. No wonder Democrats are getting so much money from foreigners - they've proven themselves traitors so many times that they can credibly say that they will sell the country out to make their rich stock go up.
Is that, by associating you with your bag selection, the store can actually better know in advance how many bags it needs to buy. If you did bring your bags, the store would know it, and could then send you stuff to thank you for your environmental savvy, and then based on data mining, show you some of the promotional items you might be interested.
We all laugh at the IBM Patent, but they are going to make a ton of money off of it.
Lawyers as a whole, and judges in particular, think that they can "cut to the chase" of a problem and dig into the details of any field by analyzing every activity with respect to the law. So they never grasp the technology per se as much as they extract talking points with which to argue their side. Judges just tend to go with whoever makes the better argument. Expert witnesses and consultants are brought in to boost the credibility of the lawyers and their talking points, not, to help aid in any real understanding.
The ocean is riddled with these geological vents heating the sea water at the bottom to more than 700 degrees, all coming out of molten magnum plumes that are miles high wide, and deep, and you don't know how many they are that, there might be a lot, and you are telling me that my Dodge pickup is the thing that's melting the ice caps... just let me get that straight? Maybe there's some effect from the CO2, but I would think that giant molten magma plumes conducting heat to the oceans might, just might, have more to do with heating.
Sea monsters, for unknown reason, are related to cows and dogs and thus we can -easily- domesticate them. A generation from now, every child will want and have a pet sea monster. There will be shelters of abandoned sea monsters and giant mounds where the kids that got a sea monster for christmas but didn't really understand the commitment go. PETA will protest, for sure.