Computers, may trade faster, smarter, whatever, the question is do they actually add any real value to the economy, or just skim off the top from the actual people that produce the goods and services. I think it is the latter, like human stock brokers, but much better at it. Do we really need a better parasite?
Have you, or anyone (or organization) you know actually collected the statistics between the correlation of cheating on a spouse and cheating their employers. I assure you insurance companies have, those statistics for traffic accidents. There is a big difference between making some random assertion and actually having some real proof to back it up.
I have a question? If you are married and your partner refuses to have sex with you on a regular basis, or uses sex to get you to do things for them, are they in violation of that contract? Since you cannot go to someone for that service.
This is nonsense, you cannot force someone to love you, or find you attractive, no matter what the law says. That is the real reason that adultery is bad, because it hurts the other person, it shows that you do not love them, and that hurts. The reason it is not enforced in Virgina is it would be ridiculous to do so.
Having sex with someone else is immoral if you are married or not, if you are in a relationship, which is understood to be exclusive. I do not think it is any worse morally to cheat if you are just in a relationship, or married.
Not sure what you mean here, if person A wants C to happen, and person B wants does not want C to happen, how can you have a society where both A and B get what they want?
And you are right I don't probably don't want that society since I stated before:
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
No it doesn't are descendants will be warped to an unimaginable degree, if we survive long enough.
I think we actually agree, in our given state we cannot, we will need to change, for me change is the only certainty in the universe, even if the universe stopped changing that would be a change. I do not know by how much we need to change to live in a perfect world, but we should strive to make our world better bit by bit, and eventually we may get there, if there is such a thing as a perfect world, but at least we may live in a better world.
The society is where everyone gets what they wants, there can be no losers, no chance of failure, (by definition you would not get what you want). How can you win, if no one loses, or if you had no chance of losing, why is winning so great.
We could each live in our on individual matrix, where we are superman/woman. But if you never lost, or even needed to try, where would the joy in achievement be. And we would be unaware of actual reality, to me that would be very sad.
The question was: could we, or are descendants live in a perfect world.
Our descendants may well not be human, eventually probably not, just like we are not amoeba, but that does not change the fact that they may live in a "perfect" world.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
Doesn't sound that bad to me. I think I could make it work.
To me, I get the most joy out of things that I have put real effort into achieving. Imagine you where allowed to run a marathon in the Olympics, but you where the only one allowed to use a car. Yes you would win, but so what, you had a massively unfair advantage. But if you trained hard and managed to win in a fair competition, then you should rightly feel proud of your achievement.
An obvious one is our individuality. No matter how "perfect" we become, as long as we're separate from each other in thought, then there will be conflict of interests between us.
Another is our ignorance, especially of future consequences of complex actions and systems. I think we'll get much better at it, but it will still be possible to be surprised by things not working to expectations.
The question is why could this not possibly change, over thousands if not millions of years? I agree is not going to change anytime soon, but what is the reason that it could never happen?
If they couldn't reasonably determine whether child labor was used to manufacture their batteries, neither could the companies that they're accusing.
Simply not true, If a person spends even $1000 on consumer electronic item, it is not reasonable that they go out and fly to the Congo and check on the production line (that is if I could even find out where the items where sourced), that expense is completely out over the top. Where as if you are spending millions if not billions on a supplier the it totally reasonable for a company to occasionally send out a inspector to check. If fact if I when in and asked to inspect these facilities I assume I would be laughed out of the place, where as an apple employee would not.
In fact I would say it probably is unreasonable for each consumer to spend more than a few minutes checking up on these things, imagine the time wasted if every person who bought a phone, spent an hour on checking the source of every component.
You may say that amnesty international is much larger than an individual consumer and you would be right, but there resources are limited and they have to choose out of all the "injustices" which they investigate. The eventually they go to investigating this, once established however that is a different matter. Also I would not be surprise if most of the cell phones are privately owned.
But did they stop buying iPhones after they made their accusations? And what about all the other devices they use which depend on cobalt from these same sources? It seems implausible that they would have stopped buying smartphones, tablets, and laptops altogether, which is what they would need to do to avoid any risk of contamination by child-labor-mined cobalt.
The answer is I don't know, all I was saying is once they found out, if they continued to purchase these phones it would then they would be hypocritical. Now there maybe people in the organization that continue to buy these phones, personally, it does not necessarily make the the whole organization hypocrites, just like if one of a shops staff does drugs, doesn't mean the shops supports drugs. It would be probably enough for them as an organization to publish as list of "moral" cell phones, and encourage there staff to use them.
It is not hypocritical to do so if they could not reasonably determine if child labor went into the production of the cell phone. It is quite reasonable for them to have iPhones, do a study find out if child labor was used and then not purchase any more phones from those manufactures until the address the issue.
Just like if any of those companies made reasonable efforts to ensure they where child labor free, and where deceived it would not be those companies fault, however once they knew continuing to those products would be immoral.
We don't live in a fantasy world, but there is no reason that we should stop trying to improve our world, just because it is a lot better than 100 years ago.
What are these hard limits you speak of? I don't know any, is there a reason we cannot evolve to be perfect. Will we ever get to a perfect world (whatever that is, I don't even have a definition of that) probably not, should we stop trying to improve our lives, just because we can't attain perfection, NO.
I agree with grandparent, that complaining technology has made our lives worse is a bit over the top. But that doesn't mean we should stop discussing it, and being careful that our rights are not eroded by it.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
I have lobbied no one, spent zero dollar, seen 0 senators. Actually that is my first post on the internet about it. I have not even stated that GM is bad, but once again if a significant portion of people want this, then it should not be up to the companies to decide, whether that information should be hidden. I do not even know if a significant portion of consumers want this.
The point is valid, if you use a computer to for you livelyhood, aka you die if you don't use it and Microsoft is the only supplier you can use, then yes you are a slave to Microsoft.
And although Greenpeace have influence, I am sure that they are dwarfed by the marketing budget of monsanto.
Labeling serves the purpose of choice, the consumer has the right to choose to buy or not to buy something based on whatever the hell they want. They can choose based on country it was made in, or whether or not the company name contains an "e", or the logo is pretty, that is their business. Companies use this to their advantage all the time. If a significant proportion of the population care GE products are in there goods then it should not be up to the company, or the government to say if it is reliant. If it is a stupid choice so be it, they can buy more expensive products for no good reason.
You could easily argue that the government force companies should place all there products in plain packaging as to not unduly influence the consumer, under the same premise consumers are stupid, they need protecting from themselves.
first an asteroid is a concentrated impact not a spread out one. Are you suggesting we are aiming these nukes? all we see is some funny light readings we have absolutely no idea what to shoot at, in a very large target.
Where there is a way of clearing the incoming object or absorbing the impact is irrelevant, since the nukes wouldn't even get close.
I really can't picture anything, however if it it could be a swam of self repairing replicating object, that may just move out of the way if an object gets near enough. If they get hit they just get replaced, with negligible effort. Even if the sphere was just out side the star it would be dealing with much more from just the star regularly. Further out it would have to deal with more incoming objects. Even if you assume that someone how this swam couldn't trivially deal with a nuke, The missiles sent to a star 1,500 light years away would have to have some pretty serious kinetic energy built up. The actual nuclear payload would be irrelevant.
Knowledge is built on knowledge, you could not have the plane without the engine, you could not have the engine without metallurgy. Yes we no longer have the concord, basically because it wasn't useful enough for enough people, We don't have really efficient cars because oil was cheap enough, and we do lose some knowledge over time as well. But in general our knowledge is growing, and that growth is likely to be exponential. Baring that we are close to knowing everything we can possibly know, which seems unlikely give the relative youth of our civilization. How many hundreds of thousands of years did it take us to move from using sticks like monkeys to the bows and arrows? With the internet we entering a phase in which we can now share knowledge with the entire world, and if we can overcome our greed, and stop claiming ideas as private possessions, we can start come up with inventions, that can harness the potential of billions of people not just a few people chatting in an office somewhere.
Why not? building the infrastructure to build a large project seems a logical step. You need to collect the matter somehow. I possible solution would be place self replicating machines around that the star, that collected energy. Once enough energy was collected, replicate disperse repeat. So your initial build is effectively a holly Dyson sphere. This solution would also deal with impacts asteroids and stuff since it could be essentially self healing.
Note: I did fail Dyson Sphere construction 101 at Uni so what would I know.
A nuke would not be very destructive at all, our sun is 1,300,000 times larger than the earth (so about 11911 times the surface area) a dyson sphere is larger than the star. When they say we have enough nukes to destroy the earth many times over they don't mean blow it into tiny pieces just destroy all life on earth.
Also a structure that size would have to withstand large astronomical objects hitting it from time to time. if a large 16km asteroid it the earth it would be equivalent to a 200 Million megaton impact(http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q975.html) the biggest nuke ever made is only 50 megatons, that is 4 million times more. Even a 75 meter asteroid has a 100 Megaton impact. Basically if we could send a nuke that far into space the kinetic energy would probably be more than the explosion. And an object that size would be already dealing with things much bigger than a nuke on a regular basis.
That's right they add value, the point is however, you use the public domain, add some value, make some profit return added value back to the public domain. So more value can be added by someone else. Instead these companies feel that once they have added any value it now belongs to them basically for ever, ok 75 years after the artist dies, until that gets extended again.
IP is an imaginary asset constructed by law, with physical assets such as buildings, and automobiles someone actually has to come and take it. But with intellectual property all they have to do is say, naa we don't think those laws are right, and your intellectual property vanishes in a puff of logic.
The US is playing a very dangerous game shifting all its actual production overseas, and relying so heavily on its ownership of intellectual property. What would happen, if tomorrow China said we don't believe in your imaginary property. The US could not invade, it can barely manage in Afghanistan, how would it fair against a nuclear power like China.
Factoring primes is not known to be "hard" that is there is no such proof. It is just believed to be "hard" since we have come up with an algorithm to do it. Even if there is no efficient algorithm to factor primes it maybe that we can use inventions like quantum computers to possibly solve it.
That is not to say there is no unanswerable questions but we definitely don't no yours is one.
Perhaps it is, but there is bias everywhere, in teaching both for and against men, but as usual probably does not apply to white men:
Microaggression is a term coined by psychiatrist and Harvard University professor Chester M. Pierce in 1970 to describe insults and dismissals he said he had regularly witnessed non-black Americans inflict on African Americans.[1][2][3][4] In 1973, MIT economist Mary Rowe extended the term to include similar aggression directed at women; eventually, the term came to encompass the casual degradation of any socially marginalized group, such as the poor and the disabled
The thing is just because someone came up with a theory does not actually mean it applies or has a significant impact. I personally haven't seen any more aggression to women, in CS than men, possibly even a bit less. As for sexual objectification that will always happen, men find women attractive, women find men attractive, sometimes the feeling is not mutual, currently that attraction it is essential to the survival of our species. This will happen in every industry, not just IT, so why is the imbalance more pronounced than say doctors? My experiences are however irrelevant, they could be biased, or blind to the occurrences.
My stance is not that there is no barrier to entry for women, there may well be one, but we should first objectively investigate why there is a one, not to blindly try to make the statistics 50/50 just because we think there might be a significant barrier. We may well end up placing barriers to entry for men, who are skilled at and want to do the job, while paying women are not as skilled at and do not enjoy the work as much. Getting a lower quality level of staff as a result.
Selection or insertion sort is much easier to understand, bubble is a bad non-obvious solution to the problem, bubble sort is used by people who like to show that the know what they are doing but really don't. Given a sorting problem people will usually find the smallest then next smallest and so on. If you give someone the task to write a sorting algorithm and they come up with bubble sort, you can be pretty sure they looked it up in a book.
I actually find merge sort easier to understand than bubbles sort, but I am strange, and love recursion.
Slashdot Mirror
Computers, may trade faster, smarter, whatever, the question is do they actually add any real value to the economy, or just skim off the top from the actual people that produce the goods and services. I think it is the latter, like human stock brokers, but much better at it. Do we really need a better parasite?
Have you, or anyone (or organization) you know actually collected the statistics between the correlation of cheating on a spouse and cheating their employers. I assure you insurance companies have, those statistics for traffic accidents. There is a big difference between making some random assertion and actually having some real proof to back it up.
I have a question? If you are married and your partner refuses to have sex with you on a regular basis, or uses sex to get you to do things for them, are they in violation of that contract? Since you cannot go to someone for that service.
This is nonsense, you cannot force someone to love you, or find you attractive, no matter what the law says. That is the real reason that adultery is bad, because it hurts the other person, it shows that you do not love them, and that hurts. The reason it is not enforced in Virgina is it would be ridiculous to do so.
Having sex with someone else is immoral if you are married or not, if you are in a relationship, which is understood to be exclusive. I do not think it is any worse morally to cheat if you are just in a relationship, or married.
Not sure what you mean here, if person A wants C to happen, and person B wants does not want C to happen, how can you have a society where both A and B get what they want?
And you are right I don't probably don't want that society since I stated before:
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
No it doesn't are descendants will be warped to an unimaginable degree, if we survive long enough.
I think we actually agree, in our given state we cannot, we will need to change, for me change is the only certainty in the universe, even if the universe stopped changing that would be a change. I do not know by how much we need to change to live in a perfect world, but we should strive to make our world better bit by bit, and eventually we may get there, if there is such a thing as a perfect world, but at least we may live in a better world.
The society is where everyone gets what they wants, there can be no losers, no chance of failure, (by definition you would not get what you want). How can you win, if no one loses, or if you had no chance of losing, why is winning so great.
We could each live in our on individual matrix, where we are superman/woman. But if you never lost, or even needed to try, where would the joy in achievement be. And we would be unaware of actual reality, to me that would be very sad.
The question was: could we, or are descendants live in a perfect world.
Our descendants may well not be human, eventually probably not, just like we are not amoeba, but that does not change the fact that they may live in a "perfect" world.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
Doesn't sound that bad to me. I think I could make it work.
To me, I get the most joy out of things that I have put real effort into achieving. Imagine you where allowed to run a marathon in the Olympics, but you where the only one allowed to use a car. Yes you would win, but so what, you had a massively unfair advantage. But if you trained hard and managed to win in a fair competition, then you should rightly feel proud of your achievement.
An obvious one is our individuality. No matter how "perfect" we become, as long as we're separate from each other in thought, then there will be conflict of interests between us.
Another is our ignorance, especially of future consequences of complex actions and systems. I think we'll get much better at it, but it will still be possible to be surprised by things not working to expectations.
The question is why could this not possibly change, over thousands if not millions of years? I agree is not going to change anytime soon, but what is the reason that it could never happen?
If they couldn't reasonably determine whether child labor was used to manufacture their batteries, neither could the companies that they're accusing.
Simply not true, If a person spends even $1000 on consumer electronic item, it is not reasonable that they go out and fly to the Congo and check on the production line (that is if I could even find out where the items where sourced), that expense is completely out over the top. Where as if you are spending millions if not billions on a supplier the it totally reasonable for a company to occasionally send out a inspector to check. If fact if I when in and asked to inspect these facilities I assume I would be laughed out of the place, where as an apple employee would not.
In fact I would say it probably is unreasonable for each consumer to spend more than a few minutes checking up on these things, imagine the time wasted if every person who bought a phone, spent an hour on checking the source of every component.
You may say that amnesty international is much larger than an individual consumer and you would be right, but there resources are limited and they have to choose out of all the "injustices" which they investigate. The eventually they go to investigating this, once established however that is a different matter. Also I would not be surprise if most of the cell phones are privately owned.
But did they stop buying iPhones after they made their accusations? And what about all the other devices they use which depend on cobalt from these same sources? It seems implausible that they would have stopped buying smartphones, tablets, and laptops altogether, which is what they would need to do to avoid any risk of contamination by child-labor-mined cobalt.
The answer is I don't know, all I was saying is once they found out, if they continued to purchase these phones it would then they would be hypocritical. Now there maybe people in the organization that continue to buy these phones, personally, it does not necessarily make the the whole organization hypocrites, just like if one of a shops staff does drugs, doesn't mean the shops supports drugs. It would be probably enough for them as an organization to publish as list of "moral" cell phones, and encourage there staff to use them.
It is not hypocritical to do so if they could not reasonably determine if child labor went into the production of the cell phone. It is quite reasonable for them to have iPhones, do a study find out if child labor was used and then not purchase any more phones from those manufactures until the address the issue.
Just like if any of those companies made reasonable efforts to ensure they where child labor free, and where deceived it would not be those companies fault, however once they knew continuing to those products would be immoral.
We don't live in a fantasy world, but there is no reason that we should stop trying to improve our world, just because it is a lot better than 100 years ago.
What are these hard limits you speak of? I don't know any, is there a reason we cannot evolve to be perfect. Will we ever get to a perfect world (whatever that is, I don't even have a definition of that) probably not, should we stop trying to improve our lives, just because we can't attain perfection, NO.
I agree with grandparent, that complaining technology has made our lives worse is a bit over the top. But that doesn't mean we should stop discussing it, and being careful that our rights are not eroded by it.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
I have lobbied no one, spent zero dollar, seen 0 senators. Actually that is my first post on the internet about it. I have not even stated that GM is bad, but once again if a significant portion of people want this, then it should not be up to the companies to decide, whether that information should be hidden. I do not even know if a significant portion of consumers want this.
The point is valid, if you use a computer to for you livelyhood, aka you die if you don't use it and Microsoft is the only supplier you can use, then yes you are a slave to Microsoft.
And although Greenpeace have influence, I am sure that they are dwarfed by the marketing budget of monsanto.
Quick research greepeace total spending 2014: 80 million in 2014
http://www.greenpeace.org/inte... and currency conversion
Monsanto selling and administrative expenses 2.5 billion
http://www.monsanto.com/invest...
Greenpeace may well spreed FUD but so do Monsanto and Monsanto have a lot more money to do it.
Labeling serves the purpose of choice, the consumer has the right to choose to buy or not to buy something based on whatever the hell they want. They can choose based on country it was made in, or whether or not the company name contains an "e", or the logo is pretty, that is their business. Companies use this to their advantage all the time. If a significant proportion of the population care GE products are in there goods then it should not be up to the company, or the government to say if it is reliant. If it is a stupid choice so be it, they can buy more expensive products for no good reason.
You could easily argue that the government force companies should place all there products in plain packaging as to not unduly influence the consumer, under the same premise consumers are stupid, they need protecting from themselves.
first an asteroid is a concentrated impact not a spread out one. Are you suggesting we are aiming these nukes? all we see is some funny light readings we have absolutely no idea what to shoot at, in a very large target.
Where there is a way of clearing the incoming object or absorbing the impact is irrelevant, since the nukes wouldn't even get close.
I really can't picture anything, however if it it could be a swam of self repairing replicating object, that may just move out of the way if an object gets near enough. If they get hit they just get replaced, with negligible effort. Even if the sphere was just out side the star it would be dealing with much more from just the star regularly. Further out it would have to deal with more incoming objects. Even if you assume that someone how this swam couldn't trivially deal with a nuke, The missiles sent to a star 1,500 light years away would have to have some pretty serious kinetic energy built up. The actual nuclear payload would be irrelevant.
Knowledge is built on knowledge, you could not have the plane without the engine, you could not have the engine without metallurgy. Yes we no longer have the concord, basically because it wasn't useful enough for enough people, We don't have really efficient cars because oil was cheap enough, and we do lose some knowledge over time as well. But in general our knowledge is growing, and that growth is likely to be exponential. Baring that we are close to knowing everything we can possibly know, which seems unlikely give the relative youth of our civilization. How many hundreds of thousands of years did it take us to move from using sticks like monkeys to the bows and arrows? With the internet we entering a phase in which we can now share knowledge with the entire world, and if we can overcome our greed, and stop claiming ideas as private possessions, we can start come up with inventions, that can harness the potential of billions of people not just a few people chatting in an office somewhere.
Why not? building the infrastructure to build a large project seems a logical step. You need to collect the matter somehow. I possible solution would be place self replicating machines around that the star, that collected energy. Once enough energy was collected, replicate disperse repeat. So your initial build is effectively a holly Dyson sphere. This solution would also deal with impacts asteroids and stuff since it could be essentially self healing.
Note: I did fail Dyson Sphere construction 101 at Uni so what would I know.
A nuke would not be very destructive at all, our sun is 1,300,000 times larger than the earth (so about 11911 times the surface area) a dyson sphere is larger than the star. When they say we have enough nukes to destroy the earth many times over they don't mean blow it into tiny pieces just destroy all life on earth.
Also a structure that size would have to withstand large astronomical objects hitting it from time to time.
if a large 16km asteroid it the earth it would be equivalent to a 200 Million megaton impact(http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q975.html) the biggest nuke ever made is only 50 megatons, that is 4 million times more. Even a 75 meter asteroid has a 100 Megaton impact. Basically if we could send a nuke that far into space the kinetic energy would probably be more than the explosion. And an object that size would be already dealing with things much bigger than a nuke on a regular basis.
also from here http://www.space.com/51-astero... asteroids can reach up to 940 km across, not 16km.
That's right they add value, the point is however, you use the public domain, add some value, make some profit return added value back to the public domain. So more value can be added by someone else. Instead these companies feel that once they have added any value it now belongs to them basically for ever, ok 75 years after the artist dies, until that gets extended again.
IP is an imaginary asset constructed by law, with physical assets such as buildings, and automobiles someone actually has to come and take it. But with intellectual property all they have to do is say, naa we don't think those laws are right, and your intellectual property vanishes in a puff of logic.
The US is playing a very dangerous game shifting all its actual production overseas, and relying so heavily on its ownership of intellectual property. What would happen, if tomorrow China said we don't believe in your imaginary property. The US could not invade, it can barely manage in Afghanistan, how would it fair against a nuclear power like China.
Factoring primes is not known to be "hard" that is there is no such proof. It is just believed to be "hard" since we have come up with an algorithm to do it. Even if there is no efficient algorithm to factor primes it maybe that we can use inventions like quantum computers to possibly solve it.
That is not to say there is no unanswerable questions but we definitely don't no yours is one.
Perhaps it is, but there is bias everywhere, in teaching both for and against men, but as usual probably does not apply to white men:
Microaggression is a term coined by psychiatrist and Harvard University professor Chester M. Pierce in 1970 to describe insults and dismissals he said he had regularly witnessed non-black Americans inflict on African Americans.[1][2][3][4] In 1973, MIT economist Mary Rowe extended the term to include similar aggression directed at women; eventually, the term came to encompass the casual degradation of any socially marginalized group, such as the poor and the disabled
The thing is just because someone came up with a theory does not actually mean it applies or has a significant impact. I personally haven't seen any more aggression to women, in CS than men, possibly even a bit less. As for sexual objectification that will always happen, men find women attractive, women find men attractive, sometimes the feeling is not mutual, currently that attraction it is essential to the survival of our species. This will happen in every industry, not just IT, so why is the imbalance more pronounced than say doctors? My experiences are however irrelevant, they could be biased, or blind to the occurrences.
My stance is not that there is no barrier to entry for women, there may well be one, but we should first objectively investigate why there is a one, not to blindly try to make the statistics 50/50 just because we think there might be a significant barrier. We may well end up placing barriers to entry for men, who are skilled at and want to do the job, while paying women are not as skilled at and do not enjoy the work as much. Getting a lower quality level of staff as a result.
Selection or insertion sort is much easier to understand, bubble is a bad non-obvious solution to the problem, bubble sort is used by people who like to show that the know what they are doing but really don't. Given a sorting problem people will usually find the smallest then next smallest and so on. If you give someone the task to write a sorting algorithm and they come up with bubble sort, you can be pretty sure they looked it up in a book.
I actually find merge sort easier to understand than bubbles sort, but I am strange, and love recursion.