I have no difficulty accepting your wording, but I submit that it's purely a linguistic change. If human beings did not overwhelmingly love money, it would not be a universal solvent. And if rubber could resist hydrochloric acid, it would be a suitable material for making containers for hydrochloric acid. But it isn't.
Everything gets monetized, and thus spoiled, in due course. Take something about as far from the Web or computing as you can imagine: athletics (in the sense of "track and field"). When I was young, I followed athletics religiously and I recall reading Herb Elliott's book "The Golden Mile" which was published in 1960, immediately after he won the Olympic 1500 metres in a new world record time. Elliott told, among other things, how he was nearly disqualified for "professionalism" after he was quoted speaking well of a soft drink - although no payment was involved. When Elliott broke the 4-minute mile at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, tens of thousands of fans packed in to watch. But he actually had to pay for a ticket to get in, because if he got in free that would have been "like payment".
Then, in the 1970s, things swung to the opposite extreme. Professionalism was permitted, and within a few years athletics was cursed with drug-taking, which has haunted it ever since. Whereas a man or woman seeking to be the best in the world would usually scorn to use drugs or any other artificial aid, a professional sportsperson seeking to earn huge sums of money was often much more amenable. Nowadays it's hard to believe in any sporting hero or heroine, as outstanding performance raises such a strong suspicion of drug-taking or some other form of cheating.
Money is a universal solvent. There is hardly any human value that it cannot corrode and, given enough time, dissolve.
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues who invented and developed the Web took the deliberate decision to give it away to the world, free of charge or any encumbrance. This was partly because they believed its growth would be limited if it were proprietary or if it cost anything. Instead, they sacrificed what could have been many billions of dollars - why would Bill Gates or any of the leaders of Microsoft, for example, be rewarded any more generously than those who gave the world the Web? Although the Internet (and before it the ARPAnet) existed for decades before the Web, it never became a mass medium. First the Web made the Internet accessible and easily usable, and then Web browsers and protocol stacks became available for Windows. The combination of Windows and the Web transformed the world, and today it is very hard to say which is more important or plays a bigger role. Personally, I would choose the Web, as I use Linux to access it and so I don't need Windows. But there is no alternative to the Web.
So I resent and strongly reject any suggestions that the Web was a money-making project. Quite the opposite is the case.
Working at DEC in 1992-3, I never saw anything like that. The Alpha computers I used were exactly like their VAX predecessors except that they ran a whole lot faster. No unreliability, no overheating. Perhaps your experience was running Ultrix, which was always an unhappy compromise - like all proprietary version of Unix.
My assessment, as a 20-year DEC employee, was that Alpha was perhaps the greatest hardware achievement the company ever brought off.
Exactly so. For years I used to wonder which was more important: hardware or software. It was after the Alpha debacle that I came to understand that neither is very important compared to marketing.
I have always suspected that Itanium was merely a piece of FUD intended to discourage users from buying Alpha systems - which actually worked, and performed extremely well. (First time I tried out an Alpha running VMS, I ran a standard benchmark. Every time I ran the benchmark I just saw the command prompt come up immediately. Eventually I realised that the benchmark was running to completion faster than the terminal could move its carriage mechanism).
The plain truth is that Intel spends 4 times as much on R&D as AMD generates in revenue.
The plain truth is that there is no necessary correlation between spending on R&D and useful results. It is an unfortunate modern delusion that spending vast amounts of money is somehow meritorious in itself. You see government officials doing it all the time. "We have spent $50 billion of [your] money on this, so congratulate us on a job well done!"
The decision demonstrates considerable ignorance on a number of levels. "Phonograph" is a common noun, but more to the point there are more phonographs than one. In common parlance, the term "Internet" refers to the one and only Internet. True, you can have separate internets and lowercase them if you wish (and it even seems desirable to distinguish them from the Internet). In the term "Internet Protocol(s)", the capital letters are also fully justified by the fact that IP(s) are proper names.
As for the Web, it is obviously and even more emphatically one and unique. Otherwise Tim Berners-Lee would not have chosen to call it "the World Wide Web". Since he also chose to give it away free, rather than sucking vast profits from it, I think we can afford to honour his decision - the more so as it is eminently logical and sensible. If anyone has not read TBL's own explanation, see https://www.w3.org/People/Bern...
I cannot help feeling that the rush to lowercase these terms reflects little more than fashion. There is a trend to lowercase words and phrases that obviously should be capitalized, including proper names. We should not allow that modish trend to lead us astray, as we are more interested in the true meaning of words than in their superficial appearance.
Bottom line: if you aren't paying for a product, then you are the product. Don't think for a moment that Microsoft, the most avaricious and commercially shrewd corporation in the USA (and that's saying a lot) has decided to give away the "upgrade" free without doing some sums that show a BIG profit in the long term.
Well, I'm 67 so I expect a certain falling off in memory. Added to which, I have always been scatter-brained. But yes, I think I can say my mental faculties seem more or less undiminished... perhaps aided by reading, writing, chess, Sudoku, crosswords, and the like. I'm even thinking of taking up programming again. 8-)
Yes, I ask the question about sleep mainly because I know of exactly zero humans who have ever managed to achieve that whole 8-hours-of-sleep shit on any regular basis, and yet we seem to survive and thrive.
I have aimed for, and usually achieved, an average of eight hours of sleep every night for the past 20-25 years. (Before that I was a salaried employee and had to commute, which does make it almost impossible to get enough sleep).
Human beings are phenomenally adaptable, and can put up with amazing deprivations while continuing to function (more or less). But lack of sleep can be more of a mental handicap than mild drunkenness, and there is a lot of evidence that it's bad for your health. Unfortunately modern "civilization" distorts natural living patterns horribly, and sleep deprivation is just one way. Lack of exercise and artificial eating and drinking patterns are equally harmful.
Point being that nutrition "experts" have a long proud history of being completely full of shit. They'll even admit it. But that was before. They're right this time.
Actually, nutritional advice began very slowly and badly in the 18th century (and earlier), reached a pretty high level or accuracy in the first half of the 20th century, and then went all to hell in the 1960s and 1970s. Probably because of the influence of money and power.
The first scientific research on nutrition was funded by industrialists who basically wanted to know what to feed their workers to get the maximum work for the minimum cost, without the workers dying too young or being unable to breed and raise their own replacements. In the 18th century steam engines were the latest and greatest technology, and a lot of good science was being done on the physics of heat engines and thermodynamics. So the nutritional investigators burned various foods in a little furnace and measured the heat given off: calories! (actually kilocalories, but it's the idea that matters). Guess what they recommended as the very best possible food? Sugar! Pure energy, none of those wasteful extras like protein or fat or fibre or vitamins and minerals. I don't think anyone who adopted that diet would have thrived.
In 1863 - while the American Civil War was in full swing - a London funeral director named William Banting wrote and distributed his "Letter on Corpulence" which you can easily find in full on the Web. I strongly recommend reading it; it is quite short and to the point. To quote Wikipedia, "Banting [re]counted all of his unsuccessful fasts, diets, spa and exercise regimes in his past, then described the dietary change which finally had worked for him, following the advice of a physician. His own diet was four meals per day, consisting of meat, greens, fruits, and dry wine. The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, saccharine matter, starch, beer, milk and butter. Banting’s pamphlet was popular for years to come, and would be used as a model for modern diets". Banting's successful diet would be quite acceptable to most of today's low-carb high-fat (LCHF) or Paleo nutritionists and is quite close to Atkins too.
Until WW2 and later, everyone knew that Banting's advice was correct. For health, eat meat, fish, green vegetables, a little fruit and dry wine; if you want to get fat, eat bread, pastry, cake, potatoes, pasta and other starchy and sugary foods. Then, in the 1960s, a new wave of nutritionists seemed to decide that fame and fortune lay in contradicting everything their predecessors had said, and turning it on its head. And the obesity and sickness that continues today set in.
Well I haven't eaten what is normally known as "breakfast" for about 7 years. (Of course, as it is technically defined as when you "break your fast", your first meal of the day is breakfast even if eaten at 10 pm). For what it's worth, I have noticed absolutely no ill effects of any kind.
Instead, following the recommendation of a growing number of nutritionists and doctors, I eat two meals a day at approximately noon and 6 pm. That's ample for someone of my age (late 60s) and conveniently allows for an 18-hour semi-fast between dinner and the following day's lunch. (I don't count coffee with lashings of double cream, although strictly it has quite a few calories).
The idea that you have to eat every few hours or you run out of blood sugar and faint has certainly been debunked. And anyway, it makes no sense. After a decent meal, it takes the food over an hour even to be liquidized in your stomach - before it can move on to digestion proper - and then your guts take 12-24 hours to extract most of the nutrients. So it's fairly obvious that you are getting nutrients drip-fed into your blood all that time. And indeed, it's very easy and painless to fast for 24-72 hours, because by the time the food in your intestines has been thoroughly absorbed, your body has automatically and transparently shifted to burning body fat. When I fast, I sometimes feel mild hunger pangs a couple of times the first day, but from the second morning a different (and very enjoyable) state sets in: no hunger, no indigestion, no feeling of fulness at all. It's almost as if you were without a digestive system for the time being, which gives it and you a rest. Incidentally, this is an ideal state to be in if you want to get a lot of work done without interruptions. If you can get into flow, you can work steadily for hour after hour without getting any hassle from your body.
What most of us mistake for hunger is a conditioned reflex, which we have set up to hit us at "mealtimes". Real hunger manifests as tiredness, and may be hard to recognize at first if you are not used to it.
Why do you think Microsoft, of all corporations, would be interested in spending time and money on improving a program that gives users valuable services free of charge?
"Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine Corps has discovered half their computers unexpectedly can't remotely upgrade to Windows 10, slowing their transition to what they expect to be a much more secure operating system".
Is that what they expect? Hahahahahahahaha! Do they have any idea what the word "secure" means?
If that accusation ever came from a lawyer or a judge, I'd say that's the pot calling the kettle black.
Actually, the legal profession is even more guilty than IT. Because lawyers and judges stand to earn vastly more money when the public at large doesn't understand their guild secrets. Whereas there is nothing in particular to stop the ordinary citizen from learning as much as he or she wants to about computers.
And yet "a jury of your peers" must surely demand some understanding of the domain of expertise and the issues being tried. I don't think the phrase originally meant "a bunch of perfectly average 'normals' too dumb or lacking in initiative to get out of jury service".
Reminds me of Tom Clancy's novel "Rainbow Six", in which a small clique of conspirators plot to slash the global population so they can rule over a pristine world with more natural resources for themselves. In that novel the terrorists arrange to distribute a specially tailored virus at the Olympic Games. While lethal to anyone who has not previously been inoculated against it, the virus has a latency period of three weeks or so, allowing visitors to the Olympics to reach their homes all around the world before they fall sick - and transmit the virus to everyone around them. Luckily natural pathogens are self-limiting to a greater or lesser extent.
While the doctor's motives may be the best, his suggestion is completely impractical. It takes years to prepare a city to host the Olympics, and most of the preparations (such as stadiums and housing) cannot be moved elsewhere at short notice.
Let's say I perceive the future somehow and tell you who is your future wife.
You have already departed from my scenario, which is much simpler. As soon as you know who will be my future wife, my choice is known. There is no need for you to inform me, or to complicate matters.
As for the multiverse, it is a fascinating topic for SF authors to explore. But as a physical theory it has the drawback of being unfalsifiable as well as unverifiable. Philosophically, I believe it is hardly more than a word game.
I feel ashamed to think of all the years when I went on believing there was some distinction between predestination and free will. In fact, I'm now sure it's just a matter - once again - of us being fooled by our own language.
Imagine the universe from a God's eye point of view. Think of it as a four-dimensional space, with one dimension being time. (Physics suggests there are probably a lot more dimensions, but this simple model is sufficient). Now when (apologies for the meaningless use of "when", as time is a dimension within the universe) God creates the universe, it is complete: it contains, in His mind, everything that will ever happen. (Please note that this mental experiment does not depend at all on the existance of God). What does this do to free will? Well, it obviously destroys it completely. Imagine the Mississippi River, which notoriously meanders and turns back on itself for hundreds of miles. It creates curves, which become oxbow lakes, and then disappear again. Do you think the river has free will? Or could all of its elaborate changes be predicted, with enough knowledge of the physics and the initial conditions? Yet maybe if you were the river, you might like to think you had free will.
There is no contradiction here. We feel as if we have free will, yet our actions are mostly quite predictable. Ask yourself, "who is it that has free will?" Isn't it a rather old-fashioned picture that comes to mind, of a little person or imp sitting inside your head, choosing and making decisions for you? But even introspection shows (as David Hume testified) that there is no such little imp of identity. Our actions arise from the state of the whole organism from moment to moment. And if there seems to be an element of freedom, of indeterminacy, to them that may be because so very much of our thinking is unconscious.
Those "dammed terrorists" are not using drones because Obama used them first, they would use them anyway.
If the US government had not designed, built, and deployed drones on the massive scale that it did, the state of the art in drone manufacture would not be nearly as far advanced as it is. Can you list any sophisticated technical innovations that have been introduced by terrorists, before any government had done so? After the USA developed practical, working nuclear weapons it became orders of magnitude easier for anyone else to do so - other nations, or terrorists, or even harmless individuals who were merely interested in the challenge. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The same applies, but even more so, to drones - which are much smaller, cheaper, and easier to build.
Do you honestly believe that the air of the USA would be as thick with privately-owned drones as it is today, if the government had not beaten a path by showing that drones could be made and used, and by giving them "the oxygen of publicity" on a massive scale?
Are you suggesting that Obama should not use drones, because that would be so unfair?
No. Although the way he does use drones is not just unfair, but illegal and immoral. I was sarcastically suggesting that the US government might complain how unfair it is for terrorists to start doing what the US government itself has been doing for years.
'Noting that drones are cheap, portable and useful, PAX's Wim Zwijnenburg warns that "Terrorists and armed militia groups are already using consumer drones in conflict situations" -- for example, in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the Ukraine -- "and it is likely only a matter of time before they use them to carry out attacks in Europe or the U.S."'
Funny that, isn't it? What goes around, comes around. Militarists and secret police have drones designed to their specification, so that Mr Obama can draw up lists of people who are to die without trial, warrant, or warning from the comfort of his residence. And then - waddya know - those damned terrorists are using drones themselves. It's so unfair!
But that's how huge organizations like governments rock. Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics:
"The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies".
Slashdot Mirror
I have no difficulty accepting your wording, but I submit that it's purely a linguistic change. If human beings did not overwhelmingly love money, it would not be a universal solvent. And if rubber could resist hydrochloric acid, it would be a suitable material for making containers for hydrochloric acid. But it isn't.
Everything gets monetized, and thus spoiled, in due course. Take something about as far from the Web or computing as you can imagine: athletics (in the sense of "track and field"). When I was young, I followed athletics religiously and I recall reading Herb Elliott's book "The Golden Mile" which was published in 1960, immediately after he won the Olympic 1500 metres in a new world record time. Elliott told, among other things, how he was nearly disqualified for "professionalism" after he was quoted speaking well of a soft drink - although no payment was involved. When Elliott broke the 4-minute mile at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, tens of thousands of fans packed in to watch. But he actually had to pay for a ticket to get in, because if he got in free that would have been "like payment".
Then, in the 1970s, things swung to the opposite extreme. Professionalism was permitted, and within a few years athletics was cursed with drug-taking, which has haunted it ever since. Whereas a man or woman seeking to be the best in the world would usually scorn to use drugs or any other artificial aid, a professional sportsperson seeking to earn huge sums of money was often much more amenable. Nowadays it's hard to believe in any sporting hero or heroine, as outstanding performance raises such a strong suspicion of drug-taking or some other form of cheating.
Money is a universal solvent. There is hardly any human value that it cannot corrode and, given enough time, dissolve.
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues who invented and developed the Web took the deliberate decision to give it away to the world, free of charge or any encumbrance. This was partly because they believed its growth would be limited if it were proprietary or if it cost anything. Instead, they sacrificed what could have been many billions of dollars - why would Bill Gates or any of the leaders of Microsoft, for example, be rewarded any more generously than those who gave the world the Web? Although the Internet (and before it the ARPAnet) existed for decades before the Web, it never became a mass medium. First the Web made the Internet accessible and easily usable, and then Web browsers and protocol stacks became available for Windows. The combination of Windows and the Web transformed the world, and today it is very hard to say which is more important or plays a bigger role. Personally, I would choose the Web, as I use Linux to access it and so I don't need Windows. But there is no alternative to the Web.
So I resent and strongly reject any suggestions that the Web was a money-making project. Quite the opposite is the case.
Working at DEC in 1992-3, I never saw anything like that. The Alpha computers I used were exactly like their VAX predecessors except that they ran a whole lot faster. No unreliability, no overheating. Perhaps your experience was running Ultrix, which was always an unhappy compromise - like all proprietary version of Unix.
My assessment, as a 20-year DEC employee, was that Alpha was perhaps the greatest hardware achievement the company ever brought off.
Exactly so. For years I used to wonder which was more important: hardware or software. It was after the Alpha debacle that I came to understand that neither is very important compared to marketing.
I have always suspected that Itanium was merely a piece of FUD intended to discourage users from buying Alpha systems - which actually worked, and performed extremely well. (First time I tried out an Alpha running VMS, I ran a standard benchmark. Every time I ran the benchmark I just saw the command prompt come up immediately. Eventually I realised that the benchmark was running to completion faster than the terminal could move its carriage mechanism).
The plain truth is that Intel spends 4 times as much on R&D as AMD generates in revenue.
The plain truth is that there is no necessary correlation between spending on R&D and useful results. It is an unfortunate modern delusion that spending vast amounts of money is somehow meritorious in itself. You see government officials doing it all the time. "We have spent $50 billion of [your] money on this, so congratulate us on a job well done!"
The decision demonstrates considerable ignorance on a number of levels. "Phonograph" is a common noun, but more to the point there are more phonographs than one. In common parlance, the term "Internet" refers to the one and only Internet. True, you can have separate internets and lowercase them if you wish (and it even seems desirable to distinguish them from the Internet). In the term "Internet Protocol(s)", the capital letters are also fully justified by the fact that IP(s) are proper names.
As for the Web, it is obviously and even more emphatically one and unique. Otherwise Tim Berners-Lee would not have chosen to call it "the World Wide Web". Since he also chose to give it away free, rather than sucking vast profits from it, I think we can afford to honour his decision - the more so as it is eminently logical and sensible. If anyone has not read TBL's own explanation, see https://www.w3.org/People/Bern...
I cannot help feeling that the rush to lowercase these terms reflects little more than fashion. There is a trend to lowercase words and phrases that obviously should be capitalized, including proper names. We should not allow that modish trend to lead us astray, as we are more interested in the true meaning of words than in their superficial appearance.
Bottom line: if you aren't paying for a product, then you are the product. Don't think for a moment that Microsoft, the most avaricious and commercially shrewd corporation in the USA (and that's saying a lot) has decided to give away the "upgrade" free without doing some sums that show a BIG profit in the long term.
Well, I'm 67 so I expect a certain falling off in memory. Added to which, I have always been scatter-brained. But yes, I think I can say my mental faculties seem more or less undiminished... perhaps aided by reading, writing, chess, Sudoku, crosswords, and the like. I'm even thinking of taking up programming again. 8-)
Yes, I ask the question about sleep mainly because I know of exactly zero humans who have ever managed to achieve that whole 8-hours-of-sleep shit on any regular basis, and yet we seem to survive and thrive.
I have aimed for, and usually achieved, an average of eight hours of sleep every night for the past 20-25 years. (Before that I was a salaried employee and had to commute, which does make it almost impossible to get enough sleep).
Human beings are phenomenally adaptable, and can put up with amazing deprivations while continuing to function (more or less). But lack of sleep can be more of a mental handicap than mild drunkenness, and there is a lot of evidence that it's bad for your health. Unfortunately modern "civilization" distorts natural living patterns horribly, and sleep deprivation is just one way. Lack of exercise and artificial eating and drinking patterns are equally harmful.
Point being that nutrition "experts" have a long proud history of being completely full of shit. They'll even admit it. But that was before. They're right this time.
Actually, nutritional advice began very slowly and badly in the 18th century (and earlier), reached a pretty high level or accuracy in the first half of the 20th century, and then went all to hell in the 1960s and 1970s. Probably because of the influence of money and power.
The first scientific research on nutrition was funded by industrialists who basically wanted to know what to feed their workers to get the maximum work for the minimum cost, without the workers dying too young or being unable to breed and raise their own replacements. In the 18th century steam engines were the latest and greatest technology, and a lot of good science was being done on the physics of heat engines and thermodynamics. So the nutritional investigators burned various foods in a little furnace and measured the heat given off: calories! (actually kilocalories, but it's the idea that matters). Guess what they recommended as the very best possible food? Sugar! Pure energy, none of those wasteful extras like protein or fat or fibre or vitamins and minerals. I don't think anyone who adopted that diet would have thrived.
In 1863 - while the American Civil War was in full swing - a London funeral director named William Banting wrote and distributed his "Letter on Corpulence" which you can easily find in full on the Web. I strongly recommend reading it; it is quite short and to the point. To quote Wikipedia, "Banting [re]counted all of his unsuccessful fasts, diets, spa and exercise regimes in his past, then described the dietary change which finally had worked for him, following the advice of a physician. His own diet was four meals per day, consisting of meat, greens, fruits, and dry wine. The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, saccharine matter, starch, beer, milk and butter. Banting’s pamphlet was popular for years to come, and would be used as a model for modern diets". Banting's successful diet would be quite acceptable to most of today's low-carb high-fat (LCHF) or Paleo nutritionists and is quite close to Atkins too.
Until WW2 and later, everyone knew that Banting's advice was correct. For health, eat meat, fish, green vegetables, a little fruit and dry wine; if you want to get fat, eat bread, pastry, cake, potatoes, pasta and other starchy and sugary foods. Then, in the 1960s, a new wave of nutritionists seemed to decide that fame and fortune lay in contradicting everything their predecessors had said, and turning it on its head. And the obesity and sickness that continues today set in.
Well I haven't eaten what is normally known as "breakfast" for about 7 years. (Of course, as it is technically defined as when you "break your fast", your first meal of the day is breakfast even if eaten at 10 pm). For what it's worth, I have noticed absolutely no ill effects of any kind.
Instead, following the recommendation of a growing number of nutritionists and doctors, I eat two meals a day at approximately noon and 6 pm. That's ample for someone of my age (late 60s) and conveniently allows for an 18-hour semi-fast between dinner and the following day's lunch. (I don't count coffee with lashings of double cream, although strictly it has quite a few calories).
The idea that you have to eat every few hours or you run out of blood sugar and faint has certainly been debunked. And anyway, it makes no sense. After a decent meal, it takes the food over an hour even to be liquidized in your stomach - before it can move on to digestion proper - and then your guts take 12-24 hours to extract most of the nutrients. So it's fairly obvious that you are getting nutrients drip-fed into your blood all that time. And indeed, it's very easy and painless to fast for 24-72 hours, because by the time the food in your intestines has been thoroughly absorbed, your body has automatically and transparently shifted to burning body fat. When I fast, I sometimes feel mild hunger pangs a couple of times the first day, but from the second morning a different (and very enjoyable) state sets in: no hunger, no indigestion, no feeling of fulness at all. It's almost as if you were without a digestive system for the time being, which gives it and you a rest. Incidentally, this is an ideal state to be in if you want to get a lot of work done without interruptions. If you can get into flow, you can work steadily for hour after hour without getting any hassle from your body.
What most of us mistake for hunger is a conditioned reflex, which we have set up to hit us at "mealtimes". Real hunger manifests as tiredness, and may be hard to recognize at first if you are not used to it.
Wooooooooooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Estonian movies - just what I've been waiting for!
DARPA doesn't tell you how to conduct you research, it either funds you or does not.
Yeah - just like Monsanto.
I can't help finding it slightly ironic that this academic study was apparently funded by the US federal government.
"Our thanks to... DARPA (contract W31P4Q-13-C-0055/983-3) and the National Science Foundation (grant 1500086) for research support".
Why do you think Microsoft, of all corporations, would be interested in spending time and money on improving a program that gives users valuable services free of charge?
"Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine Corps has discovered half their computers unexpectedly can't remotely upgrade to Windows 10, slowing their transition to what they expect to be a much more secure operating system".
Is that what they expect? Hahahahahahahaha! Do they have any idea what the word "secure" means?
http://techrights.org/2015/06/...
If that accusation ever came from a lawyer or a judge, I'd say that's the pot calling the kettle black.
Actually, the legal profession is even more guilty than IT. Because lawyers and judges stand to earn vastly more money when the public at large doesn't understand their guild secrets. Whereas there is nothing in particular to stop the ordinary citizen from learning as much as he or she wants to about computers.
And yet "a jury of your peers" must surely demand some understanding of the domain of expertise and the issues being tried. I don't think the phrase originally meant "a bunch of perfectly average 'normals' too dumb or lacking in initiative to get out of jury service".
Reminds me of Tom Clancy's novel "Rainbow Six", in which a small clique of conspirators plot to slash the global population so they can rule over a pristine world with more natural resources for themselves. In that novel the terrorists arrange to distribute a specially tailored virus at the Olympic Games. While lethal to anyone who has not previously been inoculated against it, the virus has a latency period of three weeks or so, allowing visitors to the Olympics to reach their homes all around the world before they fall sick - and transmit the virus to everyone around them. Luckily natural pathogens are self-limiting to a greater or lesser extent.
While the doctor's motives may be the best, his suggestion is completely impractical. It takes years to prepare a city to host the Olympics, and most of the preparations (such as stadiums and housing) cannot be moved elsewhere at short notice.
Let's say I perceive the future somehow and tell you who is your future wife.
You have already departed from my scenario, which is much simpler. As soon as you know who will be my future wife, my choice is known. There is no need for you to inform me, or to complicate matters.
As for the multiverse, it is a fascinating topic for SF authors to explore. But as a physical theory it has the drawback of being unfalsifiable as well as unverifiable. Philosophically, I believe it is hardly more than a word game.
I feel ashamed to think of all the years when I went on believing there was some distinction between predestination and free will. In fact, I'm now sure it's just a matter - once again - of us being fooled by our own language.
Imagine the universe from a God's eye point of view. Think of it as a four-dimensional space, with one dimension being time. (Physics suggests there are probably a lot more dimensions, but this simple model is sufficient). Now when (apologies for the meaningless use of "when", as time is a dimension within the universe) God creates the universe, it is complete: it contains, in His mind, everything that will ever happen. (Please note that this mental experiment does not depend at all on the existance of God). What does this do to free will? Well, it obviously destroys it completely. Imagine the Mississippi River, which notoriously meanders and turns back on itself for hundreds of miles. It creates curves, which become oxbow lakes, and then disappear again. Do you think the river has free will? Or could all of its elaborate changes be predicted, with enough knowledge of the physics and the initial conditions? Yet maybe if you were the river, you might like to think you had free will.
There is no contradiction here. We feel as if we have free will, yet our actions are mostly quite predictable. Ask yourself, "who is it that has free will?" Isn't it a rather old-fashioned picture that comes to mind, of a little person or imp sitting inside your head, choosing and making decisions for you? But even introspection shows (as David Hume testified) that there is no such little imp of identity. Our actions arise from the state of the whole organism from moment to moment. And if there seems to be an element of freedom, of indeterminacy, to them that may be because so very much of our thinking is unconscious.
Those "dammed terrorists" are not using drones because Obama used them first, they would use them anyway.
If the US government had not designed, built, and deployed drones on the massive scale that it did, the state of the art in drone manufacture would not be nearly as far advanced as it is. Can you list any sophisticated technical innovations that have been introduced by terrorists, before any government had done so? After the USA developed practical, working nuclear weapons it became orders of magnitude easier for anyone else to do so - other nations, or terrorists, or even harmless individuals who were merely interested in the challenge. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The same applies, but even more so, to drones - which are much smaller, cheaper, and easier to build.
Do you honestly believe that the air of the USA would be as thick with privately-owned drones as it is today, if the government had not beaten a path by showing that drones could be made and used, and by giving them "the oxygen of publicity" on a massive scale?
Are you suggesting that Obama should not use drones, because that would be so unfair?
No. Although the way he does use drones is not just unfair, but illegal and immoral. I was sarcastically suggesting that the US government might complain how unfair it is for terrorists to start doing what the US government itself has been doing for years.
There are also other (apparently unanticipated) kinds of blowback, such as http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
'Noting that drones are cheap, portable and useful, PAX's Wim Zwijnenburg warns that "Terrorists and armed militia groups are already using consumer drones in conflict situations" -- for example, in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the Ukraine -- "and it is likely only a matter of time before they use them to carry out attacks in Europe or the U.S."'
Funny that, isn't it? What goes around, comes around. Militarists and secret police have drones designed to their specification, so that Mr Obama can draw up lists of people who are to die without trial, warrant, or warning from the comfort of his residence. And then - waddya know - those damned terrorists are using drones themselves. It's so unfair!
But that's how huge organizations like governments rock. Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics:
"The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies".