It *would* have become a free, democratic nation if we hadn't originally spruned Castro's overtures of friendship. Then he was, essentially, forced to turn to either Russia or China...and Russia offered him more. (Remember Castro was a graduate of, I believe, Harvard. He *expected* to normalize relations with the US quickly. But he was also a pragmatist, and looked for support where he could get it after we rebuffed him.)
As to Batista's friends who held that property...they deserved much worse. Land grants by a dictator are a poor basis for claims to recompense when someone else comes to power. (Is Castro a dictator? I don't know. Definitely not to the same extent that Batista was. Batista was vile.
Accepting all that you have said, it's not at all clear why the figure to which the child bonds would need to be an actual other human. It would need to *appear* to be an actual other human, but that's a different matter. (And I'm not certain for how many years it would need to appear to be an actual other human.
Also, children raised in Kibbutzim became reasonable adults, so an actual parental figure is less necessary than you are supposing. (They generally decide to raise their own kids differently, so the second generation would have more normal interactions.) That the parental figures would need to care for the children is unquestionable. That they would need to "love" the children requires careful definition. Remember that what one knows is derived from what one can perceive. I believe that you are actually talking about perceived reaction patterns, but formulating it differently.
Children don't inherently know about reproduction, or that they are (normally) the results of their parents reproducing. That they are being raised by a synthetic governess shouldn't cause any real problem in and of itself...possibly outside of raising their standards to a humanly impossible level WRT, e.g., patience.
Sorry, there are lots of tidally locked bodies in our system, Luna would be called a planet if we were at all objective. It's tidally locked (to Earth). Mercury is tidally locked...it's a resonant lock, but it's still a lock. And Mercury *IS* called a planet.
Still, any planets that are tidally locked will be very close to some larger body. If they're close to the sun, then they'll be out of the liquid water zone. If they're close to something else, then I don't see why that should exclude them as a home for life.
Well, the chance of a star having planets is a lot larger than that, but I'm not sure how many of them would have liquid water. (N.B.: I'm counting Europa as a planet with liquid water.)
I think that a lot of the chances are a lot bigger than you estimated. OTOH, you left out a lot of things that would make life unlikely.
One interesting question is "How important were tides to the development of life?" We don't know.
Another interesting question is "Would the Earth have drifting continents if the proto-moon hadn't smashed into the proto-earth?" I don't think we know the answer to that one, either. But drifting continents were probably necessary to avoid either Snoball-Earth or it's opposite (see Venus for an exaggerated example).
If the moon is necessary, then the "others out there" get a lot less likely. Probably simple life could develop without the moon...but could multicellular life? (OTOH, some of the theories for the origin of life make even the most primitive life dependent on tides...and solar tides are less than half as strong as the lunar tide.)
Still, perhaps this is merely an argument that most life will be found living around red dwarfs. They would have a much stronger solar tide at the distance where water is liquid.
It's worse than you imply. The incentives that exist are AGAINST the drug companies inventing cures, and in FAVOR of creating treatments that don't cure.
Think about that for awhile.
I don't know just HOW the situation should be changed, but it drastically needs to be changed.
Why not? I hear this tale of "the small inventor", but I've never met one...except on the net.
It is my hypothesis and belief that patents generally do more harm than good. (I'll grant you that they do some good.) I also believe that monopolies are inherently untrustworthy.
It's also my contention that few things are patented by the first person to invent them. In software I would assert that a "patentable concept" is *never* patented by the first person to implement it. I can't prove it, but you can't prove the contrary, either. If there's a large up-front cost to building an implementation, then I can see a limited role for patents, but I still don't believe that they should prohibit independent invention (which is necessary, since patents are by design [of the lawyers] incomprehensible garbage that reveal, i.e. make patent, nothing). Perhaps it should be illegal to copy a patented item via reverse engineering without a license. That much might be fair, though even then I'm not sure.
Here's a legitimate use of patents: The patent-holder and his licensors have the sole right to sell his device for use by the federal government. And also are exempted from paying federal income tax on the share of their profits attributable to the patented invention. Rather like "Exclusive purveyor of Lemon Curd sweetening to the Queen".
So as I was trying to figure out why you were supporting such stupid ideas...I saw you id... PatentMagus (1083289). Well, that explains it. You're probably a patent troll, but almost certainly somebody currently getting fat off of other people's work.
You really think it will be that long? China could totally sink the dollar with one word...but it would hurt their own investments. Still, China could easily survive that. I'm not at all sure that the US could. (China owns a HUGE amount of US debt. They could sink the dollar [probably to 1/10 of it's current value] either by selling that debt, or by calling it in for payment.) The scary thing is, they may just be waiting for the oil countries to decide to figure the debts owed them in euros rather than dollars.
Unfortunately there are people in the US who thing it's a good thing. If one controls major media channels, one can foster a lot of agreement with a totally insane idea, if it's one that instinctively satisfying. And one can't deny that "See, I'm strong. Watch me prove it by beating this guy up." is instinctively satisfying. Stupid, though.
OTOH, *most* people that I personally know think the war is stupid, unwarranted, unwise, etc. They differ in their reasons, but they tend to agree on that. This isn't a random sample, of course, so any conclusions about mass public opinion would be unwarranted. OTOH, I don't trust the results of polls. You never see exactly what questions were asked, and you don't know how the results were manipulate...or how many polls were conducted before they found one that they were willing to publish. And, possibly, the results were total fabrication. (Yeah, I'm cynical. Lying new media is part of what made me that way.)
The US has become corrupted during the long struggle against "The Red Menace!", and the sooner we stop being the "top nation" the better. Our ideals (as stated in the constitution & bill of rights) are great, but it's been multi-decades since we've even attempted to live up to them. I hope that a graceful transition to someone less corrupt can be managed. (The time of transition is fraught with danger.)
I take it you don't remember when the same things were said about the Japanese? It was said up until around 1980 (perhaps a bit earlier), when people discovered how much superior Toyota's were to GM cars. (A silly reason, but that's the apparent cause for people changing their minds.)
Perhaps Lenovo will be the new Toyota...but probably it'll be something else. (Lenovo owes too conspicuously to IBM.)
Well, it may be a troll, but it's also true. I happen to think that the physics approach is ultimately superior...but I'll easily grant that full realization of it's capabilities is far off. And is likely to arrive by starting with the biological approach and adding techniques for manipulating additional elements.
Socialism works just fine in the real world. Communism doesn't scale, but it works "ok" at a local level. (Nobody's been fool enough to try it on a national level.)
China is historically more capitalist than the US has ever been. There was a brief pause after the trauma of the Japanese invasion when Mao took over, but it seems to me that they're heading back to more normal times. (Of course, for China normal times means "We are the only important country. Everyone outside is a barbarian." And it includes a very strong central government. Expect a new Emperor soon (possibly with a different name).
But this "normal China" is profoundly insular, not just ego-centric, but almost autistic. I can't really see the Chinese push into space as harmonious with their long term view. Nano-tech, though... they might do really well in nano-tech. (Remember, China may be insular, but it's also much of humanity. [Don't recall the exact percentages...and it changes from year to year anyway.])
It seems reasonable to expect China will become a dominant technological power in the near future...but possibly not in all fields.
Depends a lot on your techniques. Neanderthals seem to have liked to get in close to the game and thrust with spears, even when they had safer option. For them strength had real advantages. (And reconstructions seem to show that they *were* stronger than Cro-Magnons were.) There's little evidence that they were less intelligent, but they do appear to have been more conservative, in the true sense of "keeping things the same".
You don't need to wait for those. By the time the computers arrive there'll be LOTS of jobs that they could do. E.g., given a genome and a blood sample, predict the best drug to use to treat disease X.
(Yeah, we don't have the database that program would need yet. But it's already being worked on.)
You can also use them to do ray tracking in a changing 3-D environment. (Think realistic games. Lots of people will pay for that one.)
Not so. The old management bought the product. On the way out they tried to tell the incoming management that this didn't include the kind of enforcement rights the new management wanted. The new management refused to believe them... or at least that's what they claim.
A heart wringing tale of the wronged inventor. I'm sure it's happened. I'm also sure that much more often someone puts his heart and soul into building a small business, and then a patent troll steals it.
Yes, steals. That's the only appropriate word. Perhaps it's because he doesn't have enough cash to defend himself. (Borland nearly went broke defending itself against invalid patent claims. And Borland was both relatively large and hugely popular.)
Also, a "I made a vague description of the invention and filed it first" doesn't imply that anyone else even KNEW about the patent. Or understood that it applied to what they were doing. So you can't say that the second party didn't really invent it. In fact, given the kind of vague garbage that patents generally consist of, I deny that the first party actually invented it unless they can produce a working model created before they encountered the second party's work.
There's no indication of a significant difference in the wetware, there's just more of it and it is arranged somewhat differently.
Do you realize how wrong that statement is? There is a tremendous difference in quality (not quantity) between a normal animal, like a young Chimpanzee, and a young human with about the same mental volume. (OK. Make it a young gorilla.) The difference is that humans are wired to communicate symbolically with GRAMMAR!! Chimpanzees can "sort of" learn grammar. But they don't become fluent in it beyond the very basic levels. (And this tells us just WHERE the software needs to be improved.)
Humans, isolated, aren't that much more intelligent than a chimpanzee. In some ways they are less intelligent. (This is an assertion that can't be checked, sorry, but the only ways of checking it are all immoral.) Chimpanzees have lots of stuff "pre-specified" that we would need to learn from scratch. The normal word for an isolated human infant (6 mo.s) in a jungle is "dead". The normal word for an isolated chimp (6 mo.s) is "scared". But humans are designed to latch onto ANY society that they find themselves in. If a human happens to get adopted by a social animal, then the human will convert itself, as nearly as possible, into a normal member of THAT society. (Rare, but examples do exist in history.) This is a hint that with proper initial programming, an AI wouldn't need to be THAT intelligent to adapt itself to simplified symbolic communication. And a society, properly structured, can learn a LOT more than an individual can. Something 1/10th the intelligence of a human, but with less self assertiveness and the ability to communicate 100 times as fast (or more?) might well be able to form societies that were more intelligent than the average human...possibly much more intelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why have we so consistently over the last several decades acted in ways that *destabilize* the Cuban government?
Sorry, your hypothesis doesn't match observed data.
It *would* have become a free, democratic nation if we hadn't originally spruned Castro's overtures of friendship. Then he was, essentially, forced to turn to either Russia or China...and Russia offered him more. (Remember Castro was a graduate of, I believe, Harvard. He *expected* to normalize relations with the US quickly. But he was also a pragmatist, and looked for support where he could get it after we rebuffed him.)
As to Batista's friends who held that property...they deserved much worse. Land grants by a dictator are a poor basis for claims to recompense when someone else comes to power. (Is Castro a dictator? I don't know. Definitely not to the same extent that Batista was. Batista was vile.
That only requires changes in our local laws, not that we interfere inside their country.
Accepting all that you have said, it's not at all clear why the figure to which the child bonds would need to be an actual other human. It would need to *appear* to be an actual other human, but that's a different matter. (And I'm not certain for how many years it would need to appear to be an actual other human.
Also, children raised in Kibbutzim became reasonable adults, so an actual parental figure is less necessary than you are supposing. (They generally decide to raise their own kids differently, so the second generation would have more normal interactions.) That the parental figures would need to care for the children is unquestionable. That they would need to "love" the children requires careful definition. Remember that what one knows is derived from what one can perceive. I believe that you are actually talking about perceived reaction patterns, but formulating it differently.
Children don't inherently know about reproduction, or that they are (normally) the results of their parents reproducing. That they are being raised by a synthetic governess shouldn't cause any real problem in and of itself...possibly outside of raising their standards to a humanly impossible level WRT, e.g., patience.
You are merely describing how sophisticated the robot would need to be, and what it would need to look like.
Sorry, there are lots of tidally locked bodies in our system, Luna would be called a planet if we were at all objective. It's tidally locked (to Earth). Mercury is tidally locked...it's a resonant lock, but it's still a lock. And Mercury *IS* called a planet.
Still, any planets that are tidally locked will be very close to some larger body. If they're close to the sun, then they'll be out of the liquid water zone. If they're close to something else, then I don't see why that should exclude them as a home for life.
Well, the chance of a star having planets is a lot larger than that, but I'm not sure how many of them would have liquid water. (N.B.: I'm counting Europa as a planet with liquid water.)
I think that a lot of the chances are a lot bigger than you estimated. OTOH, you left out a lot of things that would make life unlikely.
One interesting question is "How important were tides to the development of life?" We don't know.
Another interesting question is "Would the Earth have drifting continents if the proto-moon hadn't smashed into the proto-earth?" I don't think we know the answer to that one, either. But drifting continents were probably necessary to avoid either Snoball-Earth or it's opposite (see Venus for an exaggerated example).
If the moon is necessary, then the "others out there" get a lot less likely. Probably simple life could develop without the moon...but could multicellular life? (OTOH, some of the theories for the origin of life make even the most primitive life dependent on tides...and solar tides are less than half as strong as the lunar tide.)
Still, perhaps this is merely an argument that most life will be found living around red dwarfs. They would have a much stronger solar tide at the distance where water is liquid.
It's worse than you imply. The incentives that exist are AGAINST the drug companies inventing cures, and in FAVOR of creating treatments that don't cure.
Think about that for awhile.
I don't know just HOW the situation should be changed, but it drastically needs to be changed.
Why not? I hear this tale of "the small inventor", but I've never met one...except on the net.
It is my hypothesis and belief that patents generally do more harm than good. (I'll grant you that they do some good.) I also believe that monopolies are inherently untrustworthy.
It's also my contention that few things are patented by the first person to invent them. In software I would assert that a "patentable concept" is *never* patented by the first person to implement it. I can't prove it, but you can't prove the contrary, either. If there's a large up-front cost to building an implementation, then I can see a limited role for patents, but I still don't believe that they should prohibit independent invention (which is necessary, since patents are by design [of the lawyers] incomprehensible garbage that reveal, i.e. make patent, nothing). Perhaps it should be illegal to copy a patented item via reverse engineering without a license. That much might be fair, though even then I'm not sure.
Here's a legitimate use of patents: The patent-holder and his licensors have the sole right to sell his device for use by the federal government. And also are exempted from paying federal income tax on the share of their profits attributable to the patented invention. Rather like "Exclusive purveyor of Lemon Curd sweetening to the Queen".
So as I was trying to figure out why you were supporting such stupid ideas...I saw you id... PatentMagus (1083289). Well, that explains it. You're probably a patent troll, but almost certainly somebody currently getting fat off of other people's work.
You really think it will be that long? China could totally sink the dollar with one word...but it would hurt their own investments. Still, China could easily survive that. I'm not at all sure that the US could. (China owns a HUGE amount of US debt. They could sink the dollar [probably to 1/10 of it's current value] either by selling that debt, or by calling it in for payment.) The scary thing is, they may just be waiting for the oil countries to decide to figure the debts owed them in euros rather than dollars.
Unfortunately there are people in the US who thing it's a good thing. If one controls major media channels, one can foster a lot of agreement with a totally insane idea, if it's one that instinctively satisfying. And one can't deny that "See, I'm strong. Watch me prove it by beating this guy up." is instinctively satisfying. Stupid, though.
OTOH, *most* people that I personally know think the war is stupid, unwarranted, unwise, etc. They differ in their reasons, but they tend to agree on that. This isn't a random sample, of course, so any conclusions about mass public opinion would be unwarranted. OTOH, I don't trust the results of polls. You never see exactly what questions were asked, and you don't know how the results were manipulate...or how many polls were conducted before they found one that they were willing to publish. And, possibly, the results were total fabrication. (Yeah, I'm cynical. Lying new media is part of what made me that way.)
The US has become corrupted during the long struggle against "The Red Menace!", and the sooner we stop being the "top nation" the better. Our ideals (as stated in the constitution & bill of rights) are great, but it's been multi-decades since we've even attempted to live up to them. I hope that a graceful transition to someone less corrupt can be managed. (The time of transition is fraught with danger.)
I take it you don't remember when the same things were said about the Japanese? It was said up until around 1980 (perhaps a bit earlier), when people discovered how much superior Toyota's were to GM cars. (A silly reason, but that's the apparent cause for people changing their minds.)
Perhaps Lenovo will be the new Toyota...but probably it'll be something else. (Lenovo owes too conspicuously to IBM.)
Well, it may be a troll, but it's also true. I happen to think that the physics approach is ultimately superior...but I'll easily grant that full realization of it's capabilities is far off. And is likely to arrive by starting with the biological approach and adding techniques for manipulating additional elements.
It's not a long time ago if one of the people quashed was your friend, relative, or neighbor. Or even a "friend of a friend".
..."
"Paranoia strikes deep,
Sorry, that link does not show Islam circumnavigating the world.
I'm not sure I buy that "China circumnavigated the world" idea. It's possible, but highly speculative.
It's true they sailed east to South America, and west to Africa...but that doesn't add up to a circumnavigation.
Socialism works just fine in the real world. Communism doesn't scale, but it works "ok" at a local level. (Nobody's been fool enough to try it on a national level.)
China is historically more capitalist than the US has ever been. There was a brief pause after the trauma of the Japanese invasion when Mao took over, but it seems to me that they're heading back to more normal times. (Of course, for China normal times means "We are the only important country. Everyone outside is a barbarian." And it includes a very strong central government. Expect a new Emperor soon (possibly with a different name).
But this "normal China" is profoundly insular, not just ego-centric, but almost autistic. I can't really see the Chinese push into space as harmonious with their long term view. Nano-tech, though... they might do really well in nano-tech. (Remember, China may be insular, but it's also much of humanity. [Don't recall the exact percentages...and it changes from year to year anyway.])
It seems reasonable to expect China will become a dominant technological power in the near future...but possibly not in all fields.
Because the CEO's that exist have raised barriers to entry. Think of interlocking patent pools, e.g.
Depends a lot on your techniques. Neanderthals seem to have liked to get in close to the game and thrust with spears, even when they had safer option. For them strength had real advantages. (And reconstructions seem to show that they *were* stronger than Cro-Magnons were.) There's little evidence that they were less intelligent, but they do appear to have been more conservative, in the true sense of "keeping things the same".
That's why I was kind of vague about exactly what they bought. It at least included the right to reprint some documentation and a sales network.
You don't need to wait for those. By the time the computers arrive there'll be LOTS of jobs that they could do. E.g., given a genome and a blood sample, predict the best drug to use to treat disease X.
(Yeah, we don't have the database that program would need yet. But it's already being worked on.)
You can also use them to do ray tracking in a changing 3-D environment. (Think realistic games. Lots of people will pay for that one.)
Not so. The old management bought the product. On the way out they tried to tell the incoming management that this didn't include the kind of enforcement rights the new management wanted. The new management refused to believe them ... or at least that's what they claim.
A heart wringing tale of the wronged inventor. I'm sure it's happened. I'm also sure that much more often someone puts his heart and soul into building a small business, and then a patent troll steals it.
Yes, steals. That's the only appropriate word. Perhaps it's because he doesn't have enough cash to defend himself. (Borland nearly went broke defending itself against invalid patent claims. And Borland was both relatively large and hugely popular.)
Also, a "I made a vague description of the invention and filed it first" doesn't imply that anyone else even KNEW about the patent. Or understood that it applied to what they were doing. So you can't say that the second party didn't really invent it. In fact, given the kind of vague garbage that patents generally consist of, I deny that the first party actually invented it unless they can produce a working model created before they encountered the second party's work.
There's no indication of a significant difference in the wetware, there's just more of it and it is arranged somewhat differently.
Do you realize how wrong that statement is? There is a tremendous difference in quality (not quantity) between a normal animal, like a young Chimpanzee, and a young human with about the same mental volume. (OK. Make it a young gorilla.) The difference is that humans are wired to communicate symbolically with GRAMMAR!! Chimpanzees can "sort of" learn grammar. But they don't become fluent in it beyond the very basic levels. (And this tells us just WHERE the software needs to be improved.)
Humans, isolated, aren't that much more intelligent than a chimpanzee. In some ways they are less intelligent. (This is an assertion that can't be checked, sorry, but the only ways of checking it are all immoral.) Chimpanzees have lots of stuff "pre-specified" that we would need to learn from scratch. The normal word for an isolated human infant (6 mo.s) in a jungle is "dead". The normal word for an isolated chimp (6 mo.s) is "scared". But humans are designed to latch onto ANY society that they find themselves in. If a human happens to get adopted by a social animal, then the human will convert itself, as nearly as possible, into a normal member of THAT society. (Rare, but examples do exist in history.) This is a hint that with proper initial programming, an AI wouldn't need to be THAT intelligent to adapt itself to simplified symbolic communication. And a society, properly structured, can learn a LOT more than an individual can. Something 1/10th the intelligence of a human, but with less self assertiveness and the ability to communicate 100 times as fast (or more?) might well be able to form societies that were more intelligent than the average human...possibly much more intelligent.