I agree. Broadcast TV is overdue for a shakeout. The current "deal" is simply a bad one, life is too short to put up with the crap. Even with a *very* modest value for your free time, buying a well-equipped mythbox and save an hour a day is a fantastic deal, even if you ignore the annoyance-factor of ads.
Even if you value your wake freetime at only say $5/hour, that's still over 1500$ a year saved, assuming only a single person uses and watches the mythbox. For a couple, like me and my wife, the thing is essentially paid back in 4 months -- even being a high-end luxury-version.
And that's *before* you consider the comfort-functions, like being able to say: I kinda like series "whatever", make sure always to have 3-4 fresh episodes of it stored if I'm in the mood to watch such, or being able to say: Kindly never record anything with Jim Carey in it thankyouverymuch -- indeed, if a show comes where he's in it, change the channel for me. *g*
Sure I did. Show me another car with those specs, with an engine, transmission and carriage produced by VW (which owns Skoda) for anything less than say $17000. This car cost $14000. It's great value for money.
Okay, so I've only driven 10K miles with it until now, if it's really great value I can only say in a number of years. But I consider it rather likely it'll run problem-free atleast 100K miles, perhaps 150K.
Certainly. Sure, you're safer than the guys in the 1ton cars if you're the only one driving a 2ton car. In a potential crash, their smaller car will suffer twice the deceleration that yours will. (simple physics: the force is identical on both cars, half weigth thus gives twice the deceleration) So you can say you've bougth a "safe car"
But the safety is on the cost of the others, the day everyone has a 2ton car you're not much safer than with everyone driving a 1ton car. (I say "not much" because the increased *size* does help, without hurting the others like weigth do, because more size means a longer deceleration)
Luckily most safety-features don't hurt others. The others on the road are no less safe (infact more, because you're less likely to crash with them) if your car has ABS, Active stability-control, Anti-spin, load-limiting and pre-tensioned seatbelts, airbags, crash-safe fueltank, emergency-door-unlock system, electric and fuel cut at the source in the event of a crash, heated mirrors, tracking curve-ligths, child-seat-directly-fastened-to-frame, high brake-ligth, washers on the backwindow and the ligths, fogligths, and around a gazillion other dogadgets.
The interesting thing is that 10-15 years ago you couldn't get a car equipped like that for *any* price. Today ? I'm actually listing features of my $14000 Skoda Fabia. Not exactly a top-of-the-line car.
We don't. A good system would be something akin to the following:
Voter votes on some sort of machine. Machine counts vote internally, and also prints a paper with the same vote, giving this to the voter.
The voter looks at the paper, verifies it says what he wants it to say, thereafter the paper goes in a sealed box, like votes do today.
When the election is over, results based on the machine-count can quickly be produced. A random selection of the machines can then be checked for correctness by the simple expedient of opening the sealed boxes and manually counting the votes therein, verifying that the result matches that from the machine.
This is dead simple, yet it's something that no currently used electronic-voting system does. One has to wonder why. It's as if they've gone to great lengths to ensure that no independent data exists by which one could verify the accuracy of the machine.
I would argue that with such a system, there's not even really any need to see the sourcecode of the machine, or examine it particularily closely. The only thing that *really* matters is that it reliably prints easily readable, easily countable receipts.
I think you give him way too much credit. Just because he was involved in ethernet doesn't mean he has a clue. In 1995 he predicted the internet would catastrophically collapse in 1996, or he'd eat his words. (to his credit, he then did, literally)
Yes, in principle you are rigth. I'm sure there exist some role where todays operating-systems are less than optimal. But I am also sure that you're talking about something different than Bob Metcalfe is. Look:
Bob Metcalfe recently gave a TV interview in which he stated that current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated clunkers that wont be able to adequately handle the coming of "video internet" and suggests that new operating systems need to be developed to take hold in a few years.
So, the context is that Linux and Windows are not able to adequately handle the coming of this "video internet" thing, so new operating-systems need to "take hold". I somehow doubt that by this he means that a dozen huge streaming-hosters will change the OS on their boxen. The statement sounds rather different than saying: "A handful of speizialiced high-bandwith streaming hosters migth benefit from a speical purpose OS" which sounds more like what you're saying.
Furthermore, these boxes typically do next to *nothing* to their streams, talking say one incoming udp-stream and sending copies of the data therein to say 10.000 "listeners" requires a lot of bandwith, but the computation is trivial. Even with no special-purpose hardware or OS a slow desktop-machine of today can easily fully saturate multiple hundred-mb links doing such a job. So even for these savings would be miniscule, if at all applicable. If your business-costs are 80% bandwith, 15% administration and 5% hardware, there's little savings to be had from say halving your HW-budget. Especially if this means using special-purpose hard-to-find-experts software instead of off-the-shelf-linux capable-admins-easy-to-find.
In short: There's very little content in what Metcalfe is saying, and what little there is is very likely simply wrong. Oh, and welcome to my friends-list btw, I treasure reasoned disagreement.
Current OSes thus have a simple solution to QoS: Throw enough resources at the problem, and it will work for the lower bandwidths.
Yes. And that is working remarkably well. It's sort of like the "TCP-offload" network-cards. For most applications they are total non-starters, because you pay such a high price for special-purpose chips, relative to general-purpose chips that it is cheaper to use a overpowered general-purpose for the job than it is to use an adequately powered special-purpose chip. Additinally, the general-purpose chip is more flexible, because it can do *other* stuff besides tcp.
Assuming he's talking of OSes for devices people have in their own homes, this is a total non-issue. People have typically, not one, but instead 2-3 or more orders of magnitude more cpu-power than they conceivably need to process all incoming daa any way they care to.
A typical internet-user in an industrial country has a Ghz cpu spending 99% of it's time waiting on data arriving over a dinky little 700 kbps DSL-line, or even over a modem. (modems are still much more common than are multimegabit links to homes)
Changing the OS of that computer is *not* the rigth spot to start if you want "video internet" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. After you've got lines capable of delivering more data than the typical computer/OS can reasonably handle. Then we can talk. But I strongly suspect this will never be the case, I see no trend in networking-capacity to the home growing faster than horsepower in home-machines.
the US is not a single nation, but a confederation of semi-independent states.
Thank you for stating the blindingly obvious.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know that only one election in the US works as you describe
It's PROBABLY a safe assumption that any foreigner who knows your election-system well enough to give a reasoned critique of it is aware of this fact. Your other elections have other problems, as I'm sure you're aware of. (I'm not saying it's perfect in other countries by the way, just that lots of other countries have systems that are a lot *better*)
I'm also very well aware that the states choose the electors -- but I'm aware of something more, that you seem to be missing. I'm aware of *why* they (well, many of them anyway) choose them the way they do. (i.e. 45% of the votes == 100% of the influence) It's no accident. They do so because this amplifies the importance of their state. Winning a large swing-state is terribly important in a presidential election, so they can expect a lot of attention and quiet a few advantages. Winning 14 rather than 13 electoral candidates from Florida wouldn't by far have the same importance, so changing to such a system would have the effect of giving Florida less attention and less importance.
District-elections are actually worse, though for other reasons. If you did so to avoid the evils of political parties you've failed miserably. The actual effect, as anyone can observe, is that you've got just *two* political parties of importance, and that politics are forbidden while regionality is allowed.
To put it simply, imagine there existed two political movement, one say "Green" movement that had oh around 5% of the people US-wide as members. And one say "Texas" party that had 50% of the votes in Texas, and no single vote elsewhere. Both get the same number of votes. Guess which party gets represented.
Yes, sure, you'll say this is a feature, not a bug. And I understand where you're coming from. There is *some* truth to that statement. However it also has the effect of essentially banishing politics. You've got two parties. Two very similar parties by European standards. Both close to the middle, only sort of a bit to the rigth and a bit to the left of the middle.
By the way, it's possible to combine the two. The parliament of Norway, for example, is elected by proportional representation from districts. So, say the district "Sogn og Fjordane" will send 11 people to parliament. But *these* are proportional to the votes in "Sogn og Fjordane". Which also cuts back on the centralisation-tendencies you rigthly critize.
To be fair: part of your problem is you're simply too large. The EU is quite a bit larger than the US (population some 405 million) and have *HUGE* democratic problems, bigger than yours even, I hesitate to call the EU democratic at all.
In theory, when smaller groups of people are electing the representative, they're able to get to know the candidates better and be able to make a better choice since they have more to go on than the superficial crap the media reports.
This ain't just theory. I can report from first hand experience that it is definitely the case.
I come from Norway. A country whose population counts as "tiny" by US standards, about 4.5 million people in total. Furthermore, we've got 3 administrative levels, the country is divided in 19 territories ("fylke") each of which is further subdivided into "kommune", in total there's around 400 kommune in Norway.
If you're math-savvy you'll see that this leads to an average kommune-size of about 10.000 people. And an average fylke-size of around 200.000 people.
In any kommune but the very largest (say Oslo) it's trivial to go talk to any politician you care to have a word with, you need merely enter the building and knock on the apropriate door. Only you probably wouldn't need to because there's a fair chance you'd know the person anyways. Given that top politicians tend to be a lot more active in their communities than average people it's not a stretch to say that most voters (or atleast those that care to) have some personal idea who the person is, independent of what any media say.
The current mayor in Eid (pop: ca 5.500) for example, do I know who I voted for ? Hell yes -- he lives in my street, I've been helping him redoing his roofing, he's helped me put up a low wall in my garden, his second child was for a long time the best friend of my brother. I've been skiing with him, been to his birthday-party etc.
So yeah, I know him. More important still: I know him well enough that you can bet I'd tell him if he came up with some idea that I considered terminally stupid.
Amazingly this works up to a point even in the national elections. Offcourse I don't claim to know every member of parliament personally (indeed I've met only a handful of them), but I *do* claim that any Norwegian that cares to have a chat with any member of parliament can generally do so, with exceptions for the top-brass, those are too busy to be reached directly unless you've got some sort of "important" reason.
You completely misses my point: How exactly are rural states better represented when Florida sends 27 Republicans than they would be if Florida instead sent representatives proportional to the actual votes (What a concept !) (say 12 Republicans, 11 Democrats, 2 liberals, 2 green f.ex)
Exactly none of my points had anything at all to do with the balance between the states. That's a complely different issue.
For your information: most countries, including those with vastly superior election-systems to the US ones choose to give rural states with low population some overrepresentation compared to densely populated states.
could mean that violent revolution is justified even with a system that -- on the surface -- seems democratic and fair.
From the rest of your comment, I assume you're talking of the US system.
I can assure you that for anyone not born, raised and indoctrinated in the USA your system seems neither particularily democratic, nor fair in the sligthest. Infact it's pretty close to the least fair imaginable system that can still claim to be "democratic"
I'll give a few examples. There's literally dozens, but Slashdot ain't the rigth venue for a deeper discussion.
One: If the citizens of say Florida vote (invented numbers) 40% Democrat, 35% Republican, 15% Green, 10% Others, how is it "fair" that the people of Florida then send 27 members of the Electoral College from the Democratic party ? Fair would be to divide the members as the votes are divided. Giving someone with 40% of the votes 100% of the influence is not my idea of "fair".
Two: If you live in the state above, and are aware of the aproximate likely distribution, how can you vote anything except Democrat/Republican and not have your vote wasted ? The real question, for many of the voters is not "Which party do you prefer?" but instead: "Which of the two large ones do you dislike the least?"
Third: If you live in a state where it's very very obvious that say the Republicans will win, then you are indeed free to vote for whomever you prefer, since your vote doesn't matter anyway!
Basically *all* election-systems are more "fair" than the ones you use. Furthermore, your current system favours the two parties currently in power. And the only ones who can (peacefully) change your system are those two parties.
Thus you've got the fox guarding the henhouse: The only two parties with a fair chance of changing the election-system are the only two parties with no interest whatsoever in doing so, since it'd lead to less influence for themselves.
It's not a language game. It's a logical game.
Yes. But it's a very simple one. Trivial even. The *only* complicating thing is that you nest it deeply, requiring a recurcive processing to decode it.
I know X
You know that (I know X)
I know that (You know that (I know X))
Each statement is trivial. It's only complicated because it's deeply nested.
People they have no problems keeping track of who knows what in everyday life, even several levels deep. Remember, language facility != mind.
Actually I'm pretty sure that ain't true. People very very rarely bother going deeper than two levels deep: What I know, and what you know that I know. (For example: I've seen you, but you're not aware that I saw you)
"I think that's basically due to our limited stack-size:-))."
I've had this argument before on slashdot, but I don't think it's relevant in this discussion. I don't believe that the mind is a turing machine.
Obviously not purely: A pure turing-machine trivially cannot have free will. (since it's deterministic) However I see no indication that the mind could not be perfectly simulated by a turing-machine plus a genuine RNG.
I'm just talking about self-awareness, not awareness of self-aware others. I don't think being aware of self-aware others is a necessary part of being self-aware. Whose operative test is this anyway?
Doesn't matter. But if there exists, and in your opinion, can exist no test that answer the question: "is object X self-aware", then it follows that it's meaningless to talk about anything or anyone (other than possibly yourself inside your own mind) being self-aware. So, by that token, this robot, and any future one will not be self-aware, since no self-aware objects can be shown to exist. You've just defined "self-aware" out of science and into metaphysics.
"intuition" is not an answer -- it's just means "no answer". It's equivalent to saying: "self-awareness is whatever I call self-awareness" which doesn't answer anything. "globodykdak is whatever I inituitively perceive as globodykdak" does this tell you anything about globodykdaks ?
"outside any bound rules" is also ill-defined. (or if you think differently: tell me how you define it.) the problem is that there obviously *are* rules, for any intelligence, including yours. For starters, even neurons have to observe the rules of physics. Aditionally to this you come with rules that help ensure your survival. These rules have been collected by trial and error over millennia.
Personally I consider "self-aware" not really meaningful. Everyone seems to agree that it's something terribly important, yet they don't agree what it even is. This tells me something.
It's sorta like in the city of Bergen: Everyone agrees that the city is surrounded by 7 mountains. Only, if you ask which ones, you'll get different ones listed, but each person will list exactly 7. (there's a total of maybe 9 or so that'll get mentioned by someone, and a core of like 5 that everyone will have on their list).
Yet, if you suggest that the number 7 perhaps ain't terribly important, we could settle for either the 5 that everyone has on their list, or the 9 that someone has on their list, everyone disagrees. NO they shout, there HAS to be exactly 7.
Ok, so "self-awareness" ain't exactly like that, but it's a bit like that. Nobody agrees what it is. Nobody can give any predictions based on this theory of "self-awareness", it's also not falsifiable. As such, it's all much more metaphysics than of any real importance.
Why should anyone care if other people are "really" self-aware, or if they're only "faking it" ? Doest it make a difference ? Which ?
This all just sounds clever if you never stop to think about it, actually it's not clever at all.
Your never-ending-chain is nothing more than a trivial game with language, exploiting the fact that humans are notoriously bad at de-nesting deeply recurcive expressions. Most people have a problem instantly parsing sentences like: "Do you know that I know that he knows that we know that Alice is actually a boy ?"
I think that's basically due to our limited stack-size:-)).
Your hall of mirrors definition also fails the operative test: using this definition, how do you recognize self-awareness in others ? You can't know if they're actually aware, or if they just claim so. A trivial program of the type: if input="are you aware" then print "yes" is obviously (by most peoples understanding) not in any sense self-aware. Yet, it responds like you do.
No. Recognizing oneself in a mirror is not as you claim, a necessary condition for being self-aware. If it was, then all blind people would not be self-aware.
Yes. But it should always be accompanied by a written complaint. Otherwise the bank will only see one more IE-user, and thus think they're doing the rigth thing. Or even worse, they see that you used to be a Safari-user, but after they started demanding IE, you "changed" (you didn't, but they don't know that!) so obviously the change was no problem for you.
That's an easy one. You don't want to be spied upon, so odds are your daugther also don't want to be spied upon. End of case. If there's some real reason that you need to know where she is, how about calling her up and just asking ?
Yes, she migth lie. But then you've got other problems anyway. Besides, if your daugther *want* to trick you there'd be nothing stopping her from leaving her phone at her best friend while herself heading somewhere else anyway.
Here's a hint for you Mr. Germany: take an English class and re-read what I wrote.
You must be American. Get a clue. It's always amusing when Americans ask others to learn languages, given that a fair portion of you don't even seem to be able to handle your own mother-tongue (witness the editors and submissions on this site!).
You're not elitist in the sligthest by the way. Anyone who is not as *amazingly* clever and intelligent as you obviously are (do you happen to master your 4th language better than I handle english, by the way, or are you just attacking wherever you feel you have the upper hand ?) should be disallowed to drive, and indeed "eliminated from the gene-pool" alltogether.
Quite a lot even. It's sort of a running joke in Norway that "60 minutes" is allocated a 50-minute program slot by us, because it's an/american/ hour -- which apparently consists of 10 minutes more comercials than we get. (the 50 minutes by us also includes comercials, I'm guessing the actual program itself is maybe 40 minutes)
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you value your wake freetime at only say $5/hour, that's still over 1500$ a year saved, assuming only a single person uses and watches the mythbox. For a couple, like me and my wife, the thing is essentially paid back in 4 months -- even being a high-end luxury-version.
And that's *before* you consider the comfort-functions, like being able to say: I kinda like series "whatever", make sure always to have 3-4 fresh episodes of it stored if I'm in the mood to watch such, or being able to say: Kindly never record anything with Jim Carey in it thankyouverymuch -- indeed, if a show comes where he's in it, change the channel for me. *g*
Okay, so I've only driven 10K miles with it until now, if it's really great value I can only say in a number of years. But I consider it rather likely it'll run problem-free atleast 100K miles, perhaps 150K.
But the safety is on the cost of the others, the day everyone has a 2ton car you're not much safer than with everyone driving a 1ton car. (I say "not much" because the increased *size* does help, without hurting the others like weigth do, because more size means a longer deceleration)
Luckily most safety-features don't hurt others. The others on the road are no less safe (infact more, because you're less likely to crash with them) if your car has ABS, Active stability-control, Anti-spin, load-limiting and pre-tensioned seatbelts, airbags, crash-safe fueltank, emergency-door-unlock system, electric and fuel cut at the source in the event of a crash, heated mirrors, tracking curve-ligths, child-seat-directly-fastened-to-frame, high brake-ligth, washers on the backwindow and the ligths, fogligths, and around a gazillion other dogadgets.
The interesting thing is that 10-15 years ago you couldn't get a car equipped like that for *any* price. Today ? I'm actually listing features of my $14000 Skoda Fabia. Not exactly a top-of-the-line car.
Voter votes on some sort of machine. Machine counts vote internally, and also prints a paper with the same vote, giving this to the voter.
The voter looks at the paper, verifies it says what he wants it to say, thereafter the paper goes in a sealed box, like votes do today.
When the election is over, results based on the machine-count can quickly be produced. A random selection of the machines can then be checked for correctness by the simple expedient of opening the sealed boxes and manually counting the votes therein, verifying that the result matches that from the machine.
This is dead simple, yet it's something that no currently used electronic-voting system does. One has to wonder why. It's as if they've gone to great lengths to ensure that no independent data exists by which one could verify the accuracy of the machine.
I would argue that with such a system, there's not even really any need to see the sourcecode of the machine, or examine it particularily closely. The only thing that *really* matters is that it reliably prints easily readable, easily countable receipts.
Bob Metcalfe recently gave a TV interview in which he stated that current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated clunkers that wont be able to adequately handle the coming of "video internet" and suggests that new operating systems need to be developed to take hold in a few years.
So, the context is that Linux and Windows are not able to adequately handle the coming of this "video internet" thing, so new operating-systems need to "take hold". I somehow doubt that by this he means that a dozen huge streaming-hosters will change the OS on their boxen. The statement sounds rather different than saying: "A handful of speizialiced high-bandwith streaming hosters migth benefit from a speical purpose OS" which sounds more like what you're saying.
Furthermore, these boxes typically do next to *nothing* to their streams, talking say one incoming udp-stream and sending copies of the data therein to say 10.000 "listeners" requires a lot of bandwith, but the computation is trivial. Even with no special-purpose hardware or OS a slow desktop-machine of today can easily fully saturate multiple hundred-mb links doing such a job. So even for these savings would be miniscule, if at all applicable. If your business-costs are 80% bandwith, 15% administration and 5% hardware, there's little savings to be had from say halving your HW-budget. Especially if this means using special-purpose hard-to-find-experts software instead of off-the-shelf-linux capable-admins-easy-to-find.
In short: There's very little content in what Metcalfe is saying, and what little there is is very likely simply wrong. Oh, and welcome to my friends-list btw, I treasure reasoned disagreement.
Yes. And that is working remarkably well. It's sort of like the "TCP-offload" network-cards. For most applications they are total non-starters, because you pay such a high price for special-purpose chips, relative to general-purpose chips that it is cheaper to use a overpowered general-purpose for the job than it is to use an adequately powered special-purpose chip. Additinally, the general-purpose chip is more flexible, because it can do *other* stuff besides tcp.
Assuming he's talking of OSes for devices people have in their own homes, this is a total non-issue. People have typically, not one, but instead 2-3 or more orders of magnitude more cpu-power than they conceivably need to process all incoming daa any way they care to.
A typical internet-user in an industrial country has a Ghz cpu spending 99% of it's time waiting on data arriving over a dinky little 700 kbps DSL-line, or even over a modem. (modems are still much more common than are multimegabit links to homes)
Changing the OS of that computer is *not* the rigth spot to start if you want "video internet" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. After you've got lines capable of delivering more data than the typical computer/OS can reasonably handle. Then we can talk. But I strongly suspect this will never be the case, I see no trend in networking-capacity to the home growing faster than horsepower in home-machines.
Thank you for stating the blindingly obvious.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know that only one election in the US works as you describe
It's PROBABLY a safe assumption that any foreigner who knows your election-system well enough to give a reasoned critique of it is aware of this fact. Your other elections have other problems, as I'm sure you're aware of. (I'm not saying it's perfect in other countries by the way, just that lots of other countries have systems that are a lot *better*)
I'm also very well aware that the states choose the electors -- but I'm aware of something more, that you seem to be missing. I'm aware of *why* they (well, many of them anyway) choose them the way they do. (i.e. 45% of the votes == 100% of the influence) It's no accident. They do so because this amplifies the importance of their state. Winning a large swing-state is terribly important in a presidential election, so they can expect a lot of attention and quiet a few advantages. Winning 14 rather than 13 electoral candidates from Florida wouldn't by far have the same importance, so changing to such a system would have the effect of giving Florida less attention and less importance.
District-elections are actually worse, though for other reasons. If you did so to avoid the evils of political parties you've failed miserably. The actual effect, as anyone can observe, is that you've got just *two* political parties of importance, and that politics are forbidden while regionality is allowed.
To put it simply, imagine there existed two political movement, one say "Green" movement that had oh around 5% of the people US-wide as members. And one say "Texas" party that had 50% of the votes in Texas, and no single vote elsewhere. Both get the same number of votes. Guess which party gets represented.
Yes, sure, you'll say this is a feature, not a bug. And I understand where you're coming from. There is *some* truth to that statement. However it also has the effect of essentially banishing politics. You've got two parties. Two very similar parties by European standards. Both close to the middle, only sort of a bit to the rigth and a bit to the left of the middle.
By the way, it's possible to combine the two. The parliament of Norway, for example, is elected by proportional representation from districts. So, say the district "Sogn og Fjordane" will send 11 people to parliament. But *these* are proportional to the votes in "Sogn og Fjordane". Which also cuts back on the centralisation-tendencies you rigthly critize.
To be fair: part of your problem is you're simply too large. The EU is quite a bit larger than the US (population some 405 million) and have *HUGE* democratic problems, bigger than yours even, I hesitate to call the EU democratic at all.
This ain't just theory. I can report from first hand experience that it is definitely the case.
I come from Norway. A country whose population counts as "tiny" by US standards, about 4.5 million people in total. Furthermore, we've got 3 administrative levels, the country is divided in 19 territories ("fylke") each of which is further subdivided into "kommune", in total there's around 400 kommune in Norway.
If you're math-savvy you'll see that this leads to an average kommune-size of about 10.000 people. And an average fylke-size of around 200.000 people.
In any kommune but the very largest (say Oslo) it's trivial to go talk to any politician you care to have a word with, you need merely enter the building and knock on the apropriate door. Only you probably wouldn't need to because there's a fair chance you'd know the person anyways. Given that top politicians tend to be a lot more active in their communities than average people it's not a stretch to say that most voters (or atleast those that care to) have some personal idea who the person is, independent of what any media say.
The current mayor in Eid (pop: ca 5.500) for example, do I know who I voted for ? Hell yes -- he lives in my street, I've been helping him redoing his roofing, he's helped me put up a low wall in my garden, his second child was for a long time the best friend of my brother. I've been skiing with him, been to his birthday-party etc.
So yeah, I know him. More important still: I know him well enough that you can bet I'd tell him if he came up with some idea that I considered terminally stupid.
Amazingly this works up to a point even in the national elections. Offcourse I don't claim to know every member of parliament personally (indeed I've met only a handful of them), but I *do* claim that any Norwegian that cares to have a chat with any member of parliament can generally do so, with exceptions for the top-brass, those are too busy to be reached directly unless you've got some sort of "important" reason.
Exactly none of my points had anything at all to do with the balance between the states. That's a complely different issue.
For your information: most countries, including those with vastly superior election-systems to the US ones choose to give rural states with low population some overrepresentation compared to densely populated states.
From the rest of your comment, I assume you're talking of the US system.
I can assure you that for anyone not born, raised and indoctrinated in the USA your system seems neither particularily democratic, nor fair in the sligthest. Infact it's pretty close to the least fair imaginable system that can still claim to be "democratic"
I'll give a few examples. There's literally dozens, but Slashdot ain't the rigth venue for a deeper discussion.
One: If the citizens of say Florida vote (invented numbers) 40% Democrat, 35% Republican, 15% Green, 10% Others, how is it "fair" that the people of Florida then send 27 members of the Electoral College from the Democratic party ? Fair would be to divide the members as the votes are divided. Giving someone with 40% of the votes 100% of the influence is not my idea of "fair".
Two: If you live in the state above, and are aware of the aproximate likely distribution, how can you vote anything except Democrat/Republican and not have your vote wasted ? The real question, for many of the voters is not "Which party do you prefer?" but instead: "Which of the two large ones do you dislike the least?"
Third: If you live in a state where it's very very obvious that say the Republicans will win, then you are indeed free to vote for whomever you prefer, since your vote doesn't matter anyway!
Basically *all* election-systems are more "fair" than the ones you use. Furthermore, your current system favours the two parties currently in power. And the only ones who can (peacefully) change your system are those two parties.
Thus you've got the fox guarding the henhouse: The only two parties with a fair chance of changing the election-system are the only two parties with no interest whatsoever in doing so, since it'd lead to less influence for themselves.
I know X
You know that (I know X)
I know that (You know that (I know X)) Each statement is trivial. It's only complicated because it's deeply nested.
People they have no problems keeping track of who knows what in everyday life, even several levels deep. Remember, language facility != mind.
Actually I'm pretty sure that ain't true. People very very rarely bother going deeper than two levels deep: What I know, and what you know that I know. (For example: I've seen you, but you're not aware that I saw you)
"I think that's basically due to our limited stack-size :-))."
I've had this argument before on slashdot, but I don't think it's relevant in this discussion. I don't believe that the mind is a turing machine.
Obviously not purely: A pure turing-machine trivially cannot have free will. (since it's deterministic) However I see no indication that the mind could not be perfectly simulated by a turing-machine plus a genuine RNG.
I'm just talking about self-awareness, not awareness of self-aware others. I don't think being aware of self-aware others is a necessary part of being self-aware. Whose operative test is this anyway?
Doesn't matter. But if there exists, and in your opinion, can exist no test that answer the question: "is object X self-aware", then it follows that it's meaningless to talk about anything or anyone (other than possibly yourself inside your own mind) being self-aware. So, by that token, this robot, and any future one will not be self-aware, since no self-aware objects can be shown to exist. You've just defined "self-aware" out of science and into metaphysics.
"outside any bound rules" is also ill-defined. (or if you think differently: tell me how you define it.) the problem is that there obviously *are* rules, for any intelligence, including yours. For starters, even neurons have to observe the rules of physics. Aditionally to this you come with rules that help ensure your survival. These rules have been collected by trial and error over millennia.
Personally I consider "self-aware" not really meaningful. Everyone seems to agree that it's something terribly important, yet they don't agree what it even is. This tells me something.
It's sorta like in the city of Bergen: Everyone agrees that the city is surrounded by 7 mountains. Only, if you ask which ones, you'll get different ones listed, but each person will list exactly 7. (there's a total of maybe 9 or so that'll get mentioned by someone, and a core of like 5 that everyone will have on their list).
Yet, if you suggest that the number 7 perhaps ain't terribly important, we could settle for either the 5 that everyone has on their list, or the 9 that someone has on their list, everyone disagrees. NO they shout, there HAS to be exactly 7.
Ok, so "self-awareness" ain't exactly like that, but it's a bit like that. Nobody agrees what it is. Nobody can give any predictions based on this theory of "self-awareness", it's also not falsifiable. As such, it's all much more metaphysics than of any real importance.
Why should anyone care if other people are "really" self-aware, or if they're only "faking it" ? Doest it make a difference ? Which ?
Your never-ending-chain is nothing more than a trivial game with language, exploiting the fact that humans are notoriously bad at de-nesting deeply recurcive expressions. Most people have a problem instantly parsing sentences like: "Do you know that I know that he knows that we know that Alice is actually a boy ?"
I think that's basically due to our limited stack-size :-)).
Your hall of mirrors definition also fails the operative test: using this definition, how do you recognize self-awareness in others ? You can't know if they're actually aware, or if they just claim so. A trivial program of the type: if input="are you aware" then print "yes" is obviously (by most peoples understanding) not in any sense self-aware. Yet, it responds like you do.
Like Iceland you mean ? Or Norway ?
Do those count as "advanced" ? They've only got like the highest GDP/capita in the world.
Yeah. Sounds a lot like modern consumer-america.
Yes. But it should always be accompanied by a written complaint. Otherwise the bank will only see one more IE-user, and thus think they're doing the rigth thing. Or even worse, they see that you used to be a Safari-user, but after they started demanding IE, you "changed" (you didn't, but they don't know that!) so obviously the change was no problem for you.
Yes, she migth lie. But then you've got other problems anyway. Besides, if your daugther *want* to trick you there'd be nothing stopping her from leaving her phone at her best friend while herself heading somewhere else anyway.
Actually with a modern hash (such as sha256) postfixing and prefixing will help exactly equally well.
You must be American. Get a clue. It's always amusing when Americans ask others to learn languages, given that a fair portion of you don't even seem to be able to handle your own mother-tongue (witness the editors and submissions on this site!).
You're not elitist in the sligthest by the way. Anyone who is not as *amazingly* clever and intelligent as you obviously are (do you happen to master your 4th language better than I handle english, by the way, or are you just attacking wherever you feel you have the upper hand ?) should be disallowed to drive, and indeed "eliminated from the gene-pool" alltogether.
That's easy -- just follow the unfathomable stink from whale-carcasses and cod-liver-oil.
I somehow doubt this is a coincidence.
Quite a lot even. It's sort of a running joke in Norway that "60 minutes" is allocated a 50-minute program slot by us, because it's an /american/ hour -- which apparently consists of 10 minutes more comercials than we get. (the 50 minutes by us also includes comercials, I'm guessing the actual program itself is maybe 40 minutes)