Wow, I didn't know this. That unpublished level with the "twist" really does sound interesting. But I don't think the problem is that there is something outrageous about civilians being mortal, especially if killing one instantly gets the "game over" screen. No, I think it's that there is a lesson that war-glorification games don't want the players to learn: civilians are actually the vast majority of modern war casualties. The perfectly ordinary waging of war, even when care is taken, will still probably result in killing more civilians than bad guys. If they were made mortal and the fighting scenes resemble real modern wars, then players would be finding bleeding, crying, crawling children with massive burns, every twentieth time they fired a rocket launcher inside a populated area. Poorly-built houses would collapse on the families inside. That's how war games would have to look. Clearly nobody wants that in a game. But the reason isn't the fact that players would deliberately kill the civilians. That could be easily prevented by a "game over". Maybe too many civilian deaths would lock you out of certain urban environment missions. No, war games need to make players think that they're doing something awesome. There is a segment of the population who pictures war as awesome, and these people will be appeased by games that glorify it instead of revealing its sickening reality. Then again, maybe there is a small subset of these people who would still find this war stuff is awesome even if there were burned, crawling children and weeping parents, and it's true, nobody wants to see someone enjoying that as a part of a "game". But remember that we still live in the amazing times when the mention of undisputed facts about civilian deaths is done only by protesters and other marginalized people. Some undisputed facts are just too inconvenient when we want to live with our delusions, so they become unmentionable. And game publishers certainly have no incentive to mention these. Quite to the contrary, they would rather show the people back home an unrealistic and glorified picture of war so that ignoring the reality becomes even easier. (Wow, I didn't think the post would end here when I started, but I think I'm on to something.)
From what I understand, all the Pu238 really does is generate heat, which is used to power spacecraft. Aren't there designs for tiny fission reactors which will accomplish the same thing using enriched Uranium (of which we have plenty)? Wouldn't this be an excellent substitute? I don't think it's a safety issue: If they blow up on launch, it's still less radiation spilled than Pu238 logs that we use now, and if they melt down in deep space, it's not our problem.
If you read Turing's original article, you'd see that he imagined the test very differently from this. He didn't come from the ADD era of instant messaging. He was picturing a conversation about the symbolic value of a certain element in a piece of literature. The test isn't any worse now, it's just that people chat like bots. I don't understand why they don't ask about the last book the other has read, and ask them to describe it, and follow up with an open-ended question about a specific point in the description. The present generation of Chatbot would be completely lost in that case.
How did that Icelandic rock (mentioned in title) get to Greenland (summary)? Is the submitter perhaps afflicted with geographasia americana, whose symptoms include thinking that distinct countries/provinces are the same thing?
Sure, crackability is a selling point that will result in a more units sold, with sales profit increase of x dollars. But an oft-cracked tablet that let's people do what they want means that they won't do things the way we're telling them to, which would have earned us y dollars. For now, pretty clearly x y, or at least I think so. That makes the answer to the question "no".
Ebony is one of the slowest growing woods in the world, and it's absolutely central to the incredibly fragile and unique Madagascar ecosystem. As long as there is a illegal market in it, somebody will have the incentive to permanently destroy that ecosystem. What's worse, too few will have the incentive to start sustainable ebony plantations. Somebody needs to close the loopholes, flash some badges and make the punishment hurt, or we will completely destroy Madagascar's forests before we transition to sustainable ebony. We need strict laws if we are to make the transition now.
I can understand why people complain about documentation regarding older instruments, but if there were no such requirement, anybody could just say "Oh, this guitar? Yeah, it's old, the laws don't apply to it!" - which would be a gigantic loophole. Authorities need to have the right to say "Prove that it's old". It sounds like this system needs streamlining, but it's absolutely right that we have it in place.
By the way, I own a bass guitar with an ebony fingerboard and I'm certainly not an opponent of musicians who want the finest instruments. But I'm also an environmentalist, and I don't want musicians to be responsible for destroying the third world that they never visit.
Everyone is free to express time in terms of GMT: You, your business contacts, your boss, etc. If you find it useful, do it! Many people already do. The vast majority of people have never been inside an airplane and have no need for such silliness.
It's about time that the mouse was introduced to living room gaming. Today's wireless laser mice have the makings of an excellent controller not just for games, but also for living room media interfaces. And seriously, where are the downsides?
If this were for an American spy agency, maybe that would be enough. But when I think about how I have ten times this much data in my Gmail, and that Gmail isn't limited to only the US, I suspect that Google has a lot more storage space than this. Of course it's probably all very decentralized.
Probably not bots, but dating websites have been known to deliberately make fake profiles to social engineer more payments from customers. Why not just stick to OkCupid, which is free and doesn't place any restrictions on messaging?
If I thought the other ISPs have an ounce of respect for our privacy, I'd start seeing the tradeoff you mention. But actually, I think Google is more prepared to protect my privacy than, say, AT&T.
Jobs has certainly been a brilliant CEO for Apple, but I think their biggest wins have been from their good design and their cheap but decent supply chain. It's not clear to me just how much Jobs had to do with that. Jonathan Ive had the lead on the design, and maybe it was Tim Cook all along who played hardball with Foxconn and Intel to squeeze out those healthy profit margins. I sure hope so. I don't want Apple products to become just ordinary now that mere mortals are in charge.
Good point. Or it could have to do with the hormonal soup that the fraternal twins were exposed to in utero. (Same soup ~ more similar autism expression)
A simple regression should settle whether this theory has legs: We all know that autism diagnoses are exploding. If this is the driving force of the explosion, then families who are nowhere near technical fields should see their autism rates stay at the historical average. Is that happening? This is the first and obvious question. If it is not happening, if autism rates are going up among all demographics, then the "more interbreeding geeks" explanation is just clearly wrong.
Yeah, that's how I read it too. I get pissed off when scientific ideas, even improbable ones, get dismissed though an ad hominem attack on the scientist. Either we're talking about evidence and so science, or we're just reading the tabloids. The distinction should remain clear.
Isn't it cool that we're working on launching an infrared telescope into space, which might discover that there are lots of such things all over the place? Oh wait, congress is suddenly saying that we can't afford it, even though it costs less than the air conditioning budget for 60 days of the Iraq occupation. (link)
Since there is no rail link between Alaska and the rest of North America (see here), this seems like an incredibly unwise project. And if the Russians are waiting for Americans to complete the rail link on their side of the tunnel so that it connects with the US network, then they're seriously overestimating us. Doing so would probably cost more than the tunnel itself, and would be a political non-starter for at least three different reasons (cost being the primary one).
I doubt that this would make shipping cheaper than it is now. In fact, I expect it to be far more expensive than the current cargo ships. One big difference is that it will be a lot faster and it will route around the unionized dock workers. Regarding speed and tonnage capacity, a lot depends on the rest of the North American railway net, which would need serious upgrading to accommodate all the new cargo. As it stands now, the idea of building a railroad link between Alaska and Canada is being "studied". (link) So long as that remains, this would be the ultimate tunnel to nowhere.
If these guys want total lawlessness, free access to guns and zero government services, shouldn't they just move to Somalia? Isn't that the ultimate libertarian paradise? Or is the problem that other "libertarians" are there already? I know this sounds like a troll (ok, it is to some extent) but I'm genuinely curious why this isn't seriously being considered. If a bunch of milky libertarians really did move there and defended a chunk of territory, Somalia might actually be the one place in the world that would benefit from their arrival.
We're not even having the same conversation
on
The Post-Idea World
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
People are just doing their own shit. There can't be era-defining ideas because all the different little conversations we're having don't even connect anymore. For an idea to make an impact on society, we first need a society that's more or less on the same page. That's what's missing. Sure, the internet makes everything easier, including the communication of ideas. Just look at fora.tv or bigthink or TED. You can fill every free minute listening to brilliant people talk about some pretty deep ideas. But what you can't expect is that these ideas will be a part of some larger social conversation. They happen off to the side somewhere. My academic friends and I give a fuck, but not many other people do. Or maybe they do, but they have no idea that I do too, because nobody can assume anymore that the people standing around the watercooler read the same "ideas" books, saw the same "ideas" discussion - or even the same news program. Only events are a part of our common culture, so you can talk to anyone about Breivik, or dumping Bin Laden's body in the sea, or the future of the Euro. But there are very few ideas in general social circulation, apart from maybe stuff about Keynsian interventions and other macroeconimic stuff. These are big ideas for sure, but nobody I know (myself included) feels like they have any solid understanding of what's involved. Macroeconomics looks like voodoo, so it's hard to talk about while feeling like you're having an informed conversation.
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars. There was relativity, Communism, anarchism, feminism/sufferage, the uncertainty principle, Bauhaus functionalism and a dozen other art "schools" organized around ideas, the incompleteness theorem, Freud, social Darwinism, logical positivism... and I really could go on and on. And cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it, and it was in your face, because people took it as obvious that these aren't just ideas. Each one you accept gives you an obligation to act, and these actions were impossible to miss for anyone who lived in a major European or North American city. Things really are quite different now. Big ideas are still being thought, but somewhere out of sight. Which means that they don't get a chance to get "big" in the same way they used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at this useful primer about faster than light travel and what it would mean for modern physics. It sure would be interesting. No, amazing!
Ah wait, it was just your mom.
Wow, I didn't know this. That unpublished level with the "twist" really does sound interesting. But I don't think the problem is that there is something outrageous about civilians being mortal, especially if killing one instantly gets the "game over" screen. No, I think it's that there is a lesson that war-glorification games don't want the players to learn: civilians are actually the vast majority of modern war casualties. The perfectly ordinary waging of war, even when care is taken, will still probably result in killing more civilians than bad guys. If they were made mortal and the fighting scenes resemble real modern wars, then players would be finding bleeding, crying, crawling children with massive burns, every twentieth time they fired a rocket launcher inside a populated area. Poorly-built houses would collapse on the families inside. That's how war games would have to look. Clearly nobody wants that in a game. But the reason isn't the fact that players would deliberately kill the civilians. That could be easily prevented by a "game over". Maybe too many civilian deaths would lock you out of certain urban environment missions. No, war games need to make players think that they're doing something awesome. There is a segment of the population who pictures war as awesome, and these people will be appeased by games that glorify it instead of revealing its sickening reality. Then again, maybe there is a small subset of these people who would still find this war stuff is awesome even if there were burned, crawling children and weeping parents, and it's true, nobody wants to see someone enjoying that as a part of a "game". But remember that we still live in the amazing times when the mention of undisputed facts about civilian deaths is done only by protesters and other marginalized people. Some undisputed facts are just too inconvenient when we want to live with our delusions, so they become unmentionable. And game publishers certainly have no incentive to mention these. Quite to the contrary, they would rather show the people back home an unrealistic and glorified picture of war so that ignoring the reality becomes even easier. (Wow, I didn't think the post would end here when I started, but I think I'm on to something.)
From what I understand, all the Pu238 really does is generate heat, which is used to power spacecraft. Aren't there designs for tiny fission reactors which will accomplish the same thing using enriched Uranium (of which we have plenty)? Wouldn't this be an excellent substitute? I don't think it's a safety issue: If they blow up on launch, it's still less radiation spilled than Pu238 logs that we use now, and if they melt down in deep space, it's not our problem.
What am I missing?
If you read Turing's original article, you'd see that he imagined the test very differently from this. He didn't come from the ADD era of instant messaging. He was picturing a conversation about the symbolic value of a certain element in a piece of literature. The test isn't any worse now, it's just that people chat like bots. I don't understand why they don't ask about the last book the other has read, and ask them to describe it, and follow up with an open-ended question about a specific point in the description. The present generation of Chatbot would be completely lost in that case.
How did that Icelandic rock (mentioned in title) get to Greenland (summary)? Is the submitter perhaps afflicted with geographasia americana, whose symptoms include thinking that distinct countries/provinces are the same thing?
Sure, crackability is a selling point that will result in a more units sold, with sales profit increase of x dollars. But an oft-cracked tablet that let's people do what they want means that they won't do things the way we're telling them to, which would have earned us y dollars. For now, pretty clearly x y, or at least I think so. That makes the answer to the question "no".
Ebony is one of the slowest growing woods in the world, and it's absolutely central to the incredibly fragile and unique Madagascar ecosystem. As long as there is a illegal market in it, somebody will have the incentive to permanently destroy that ecosystem. What's worse, too few will have the incentive to start sustainable ebony plantations. Somebody needs to close the loopholes, flash some badges and make the punishment hurt, or we will completely destroy Madagascar's forests before we transition to sustainable ebony. We need strict laws if we are to make the transition now.
I can understand why people complain about documentation regarding older instruments, but if there were no such requirement, anybody could just say "Oh, this guitar? Yeah, it's old, the laws don't apply to it!" - which would be a gigantic loophole. Authorities need to have the right to say "Prove that it's old". It sounds like this system needs streamlining, but it's absolutely right that we have it in place.
By the way, I own a bass guitar with an ebony fingerboard and I'm certainly not an opponent of musicians who want the finest instruments. But I'm also an environmentalist, and I don't want musicians to be responsible for destroying the third world that they never visit.
Everyone is free to express time in terms of GMT: You, your business contacts, your boss, etc. If you find it useful, do it! Many people already do. The vast majority of people have never been inside an airplane and have no need for such silliness.
It's about time that the mouse was introduced to living room gaming. Today's wireless laser mice have the makings of an excellent controller not just for games, but also for living room media interfaces. And seriously, where are the downsides?
If this were for an American spy agency, maybe that would be enough. But when I think about how I have ten times this much data in my Gmail, and that Gmail isn't limited to only the US, I suspect that Google has a lot more storage space than this. Of course it's probably all very decentralized.
Probably not bots, but dating websites have been known to deliberately make fake profiles to social engineer more payments from customers. Why not just stick to OkCupid, which is free and doesn't place any restrictions on messaging?
If I thought the other ISPs have an ounce of respect for our privacy, I'd start seeing the tradeoff you mention. But actually, I think Google is more prepared to protect my privacy than, say, AT&T.
Oh, you mean like redirecting all customers' voice and data traffic through the NSA, without any warrant or anything, and without telling the victims of the snooping, and all just because they were asked? Yeah, AT&T did that. You bet I trust Google more.
Jobs has certainly been a brilliant CEO for Apple, but I think their biggest wins have been from their good design and their cheap but decent supply chain. It's not clear to me just how much Jobs had to do with that. Jonathan Ive had the lead on the design, and maybe it was Tim Cook all along who played hardball with Foxconn and Intel to squeeze out those healthy profit margins. I sure hope so. I don't want Apple products to become just ordinary now that mere mortals are in charge.
Good point. Or it could have to do with the hormonal soup that the fraternal twins were exposed to in utero. (Same soup ~ more similar autism expression)
A simple regression should settle whether this theory has legs: We all know that autism diagnoses are exploding. If this is the driving force of the explosion, then families who are nowhere near technical fields should see their autism rates stay at the historical average. Is that happening? This is the first and obvious question. If it is not happening, if autism rates are going up among all demographics, then the "more interbreeding geeks" explanation is just clearly wrong.
Yeah, that's how I read it too. I get pissed off when scientific ideas, even improbable ones, get dismissed though an ad hominem attack on the scientist. Either we're talking about evidence and so science, or we're just reading the tabloids. The distinction should remain clear.
Isn't it cool that we're working on launching an infrared telescope into space, which might discover that there are lots of such things all over the place? Oh wait, congress is suddenly saying that we can't afford it, even though it costs less than the air conditioning budget for 60 days of the Iraq occupation. (link)
If you don't realize how much science advances from the data of space-based telescopes, you shouldn't be commenting on this topic.
Since there is no rail link between Alaska and the rest of North America (see here), this seems like an incredibly unwise project. And if the Russians are waiting for Americans to complete the rail link on their side of the tunnel so that it connects with the US network, then they're seriously overestimating us. Doing so would probably cost more than the tunnel itself, and would be a political non-starter for at least three different reasons (cost being the primary one).
I doubt that this would make shipping cheaper than it is now. In fact, I expect it to be far more expensive than the current cargo ships. One big difference is that it will be a lot faster and it will route around the unionized dock workers. Regarding speed and tonnage capacity, a lot depends on the rest of the North American railway net, which would need serious upgrading to accommodate all the new cargo. As it stands now, the idea of building a railroad link between Alaska and Canada is being "studied". (link) So long as that remains, this would be the ultimate tunnel to nowhere.
Best post I read today.
If these guys want total lawlessness, free access to guns and zero government services, shouldn't they just move to Somalia? Isn't that the ultimate libertarian paradise? Or is the problem that other "libertarians" are there already? I know this sounds like a troll (ok, it is to some extent) but I'm genuinely curious why this isn't seriously being considered. If a bunch of milky libertarians really did move there and defended a chunk of territory, Somalia might actually be the one place in the world that would benefit from their arrival.
People are just doing their own shit. There can't be era-defining ideas because all the different little conversations we're having don't even connect anymore. For an idea to make an impact on society, we first need a society that's more or less on the same page. That's what's missing. Sure, the internet makes everything easier, including the communication of ideas. Just look at fora.tv or bigthink or TED. You can fill every free minute listening to brilliant people talk about some pretty deep ideas. But what you can't expect is that these ideas will be a part of some larger social conversation. They happen off to the side somewhere. My academic friends and I give a fuck, but not many other people do. Or maybe they do, but they have no idea that I do too, because nobody can assume anymore that the people standing around the watercooler read the same "ideas" books, saw the same "ideas" discussion - or even the same news program. Only events are a part of our common culture, so you can talk to anyone about Breivik, or dumping Bin Laden's body in the sea, or the future of the Euro. But there are very few ideas in general social circulation, apart from maybe stuff about Keynsian interventions and other macroeconimic stuff. These are big ideas for sure, but nobody I know (myself included) feels like they have any solid understanding of what's involved. Macroeconomics looks like voodoo, so it's hard to talk about while feeling like you're having an informed conversation.
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars. There was relativity, Communism, anarchism, feminism/sufferage, the uncertainty principle, Bauhaus functionalism and a dozen other art "schools" organized around ideas, the incompleteness theorem, Freud, social Darwinism, logical positivism... and I really could go on and on. And cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it, and it was in your face, because people took it as obvious that these aren't just ideas. Each one you accept gives you an obligation to act, and these actions were impossible to miss for anyone who lived in a major European or North American city. Things really are quite different now. Big ideas are still being thought, but somewhere out of sight. Which means that they don't get a chance to get "big" in the same way they used to be.