Most ecologists I've read the work of have said that the more interactions, the more stable. This is because the models that work best - nonlinear dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions - are only stable if you have large numbers of Strange Attractors.
Daisyworld is the best example. As you increase daisy species from two to 200, stability goes up exponentially. Provided, and this is important, three conditions are met.
First, each component must possess a negative feedback loop. It can possess positive feedback as well, but it must have negative feedback.
Second, for all species A, there must exist at least one species B with whom at least one form of resource consumption or other pressure is in a closed loop.
Third, you need large numbers. Simulations of a goldfish pond filled with five examples each of a hundred species won't be stable.
You can simulate twenty, two hundred or two thousand species on your computer and get absolutely stable (albeit chaotic) results, if you do it right - i.e.: the way you'd get in a naturally balanced forest, for example.
What the researchers have shown is that you can make this entire dynamic violently unstable by reducing scale, breaking cycles or doing other stupid things. That chaotic systems aren't self-restoring if they're messed up.
The BBC was interviewing this interesting guy, Dr David Kelly, who said there weren't. The Guardian was running articles on CIA attempted coups launched via the weapons inspector teams. The Independent was skeptical of the claims, as weapons inspectors had found nothing and President Bush was making shrill claims he couldn't back.
Most of the media covered the Plame affair, with clear and open coverage of the fact that no yellowcake had been bought or shipped to Iraq.
I'd say most of the free media were very, very doubtful of the claims.
You imagine they're policed because they don't say what you want them to say. Sure, go ahead, create your own social network. Won't make the inaccurate any more honest. Won't help break down barriers. But if that's what you want to do, go for it.
Dressing up doesn't mean a statement is right or wrong. The statement being right makes it right. Facts really are immutable, there is only one universe and we're all in it. We do not live in alternative realities.
The church made claims about reality that were falsified. As per William of Occam, we can reject them. That means those statements were wrong. It doesn't mean reality is whatever you want it to be. If it was, then they couldn't have been wrong.
This is so obvious.
You have no magic wishes and cannot mutate reality to conform to your desires. I know this because there is only the one reality. One set of facts. One world. One reality. You can have as many opinions on all of that as you like, but you cannot change a single fact. You can lie, cheat and steal, but you can't tell reality what to do.
The fact that the church got one thing right, over 2,000 years, is hardly a surprise. I Ching has a better score. Not is it a surprise that criticizing a speaker rather than critiquing the argument is the strategy of choice in those who prefer to make up their own facts.
You are either the customer or the product. Open source relies on that, users mean development. In FB's case, they don't exploit the product internally but resell it.
As for the sig, it's not all snark that's the problem, but the good sort is rare. You must seek it with thimbles, you must seek it with care, you must pursue it with forks and hope. But most snarks are not like that and will not offer you tea, for most snarks are a boojum, you see.
Facebook provides a service, not a product. For a product, you're not responsible for use, only for the product being fit for purpose. For a service, you are responsible for use.
SaaS is a very dangerous strategy that leaves you open to liabilities that would not otherwise apply. You are responsible for conduct outside your control. It's how any service is.
Have you never tipped a waiter less for ingredients he didn't make or choose, for the cooking errors of others, or for slowness caused by their boss ranting? You'd be one of very few who didn't blame someone for the faults of others, if you said that you confined the decision to service under his control alone.
The Guardian publishes corrections, as do the BBC. The Guardian is also notable for providing OpEd space for politically opposed views, and the BBC even ran interviews with highly controversial figures fundamentally opposed to the BBC's mere existence.
The Independent is pretty good, too.
If you don't have outlets of this calibre, ask why. Why PBS isn't equal. Why local newspapers are being dominated by a few overlords. What happened to the controls meant to prevent bias by size.
Publishers reject books all the time. That's not censorship, that's a business decision. Nobody censored J. K. Rowling, yet her Harry Potter novels were rejected by something like 30 publishers.
Science never predicted global cooling. Do not confuse science fact with Internet mythology.
The predictions put forward by the international committee were probabilities of varying outcomes. It is very hard for a probability to be wrong the way you describe. However, they underestimated global warming, it's far worse than forecast.
But you don't care, you're wrapped up in partisan fantasies and care nothing for facts that contradict them.
There are fantasists on both sides, I reject all of them. They don't think, listen, read or do, they just worship in the temple of ignorance.
Join the club, but don't blame a free press for it and don't blame sides selectively. Blame all who are guilty or none.
You say votes are being found days after, in South Carolina they found hundreds stuffed behind office furniture in Republican administrative buildings, plus a box found behind a fire escape, in 2000. Curiously, you only go for the side you don't like.
Sure, you'll get the sympathy of those on your side. You're a tribe and tribes don't give a shit about facts. The left have done the same in the past, maybe they're doing it now. Curiously, I have no sympathy for the one-sided being on the wrong side. I reject lawbreaking by any side, but I've no sympathy for thieves who get broken into. Be fair, be honest or be abused by someone. If karma's a birch, if you reap what you sow, that's your issue. Not mine.
And, yes, truth is facts. Indeed, the only truth is facts. Everything else is subjective opinion.
Are you scared of those facts? If not, then work out how to distinguish fact from opinion. Opinions are personal, facts are not. Comment is, and should remain, free. Facts are immutable.
I don't distinguish left or right, libertarian or authoritarian in that. One law, for rich and poor alike, for politicians, media and individuals alike. No immunity, no exceptions.
If you think that facts favour the left, question why you're on the right.
There's too much information. Nobody can know everything. Yes, I've tried.
That means you rely on the solution in the Byzantine General's Problem. As long as 50%+1 of people are telling the factual truth (regardless of opinion) on any given topic, you don't need to know everything. Enough people know each fact to ensure that you can rely on those facts.
If disinformation exceeds that, you might as well give up. You can rely on nothing and no-one. Nobody, not even a survivalist, can survive for long like that and progress is impossible. That is not a life worth living.
That's simple. The fundamental rule has always been that facts are universal, opinion is personal. Virtually every respectable media outlet has a version of that doctrine.
You can say what you like, think what you like, feel what you like, but you can choose only these. You cannot choose a different set of facts.
No, that doesn't stop you writing fantasy or fiction. As the late, great Terry Nation once said, if on your world rocks can talk, then that is fact. On that world, rocks talk.
It does not stop caricatures. Britain has incredibly strong libel laws, but TW3, Spitting Image and HIGNFY are not just applauded by those they put down, the famous and powerful were/are integral to them.
All it stops is malicious, twisted Misty Mountains nastiness. Gollum! That doesn't take a Ministry of Truth, any Bagginses will do.
First, make the trader liable for problems at their end.
Second, the U.S. is over a decade behind Europe on this technology, meaning hackers have had ten years to figure out problems. It's the equivalent of running Windows XP or an unpatched Windows 7 on a modern network.
Third, why the hell is anyone expecting a trader to understand network security? These systems should be proof against even ingenious idiots. Plug it all in and it works, autoconfiguring. No default passwords, no default security holes, just something that works. Are the credit card companies and banks really this incompetent?
I have the negatives, they're all medium and in good condition. Decent quality, too. What I don't want to do is lose any information, as anything lost due to damage to those negatives is lost forever. I've a decent, if not great, scanner - an old V600 - which will do 24-bit. Some of the negatives are simply too big to scan at that quality, at the resolution at which there are sufficiently few grains showing for me to be sure there's new information.
Once it's scanned, there's probably ways to reduce the image. I can't imagine the full dynamic range the scanner can handle appears on the film, it's far too old for that, and almost certainly no new significant information is added long before the resolution I'm using.
My collection is a few tens of thousands of photographs from three families dating from 1880 or so to 1980. A proper scan that gets out the greatest amount of actual information has yielded an average of about a gigabyte per photograph, so far. That's a lot of information. So my pathetically small collection holds about ten or so terabytes of data.
I've absolutely no idea how I'm going to store that kind of volume of data, it's not like Google will offer.
But I bet you a dozen doughnuts that there are thousands of families in the same boat, who have vast collections of negatives that they'll destroy because they don't have room and don't see an immediate value in.
I also bet that if those thousands of families could be persuaded to get those images scanned, if they'd be willing to contribute to the cost of the collating and storage costs, that it would seriously change the way the past is seen by historians, family history fans and archivists.
And I'd bet that such an archive would have a profoundly greater impact than the NYT archive would.
It won't happen because those aforementioned families will be stubborn and prefer destruction over conservation, because none of the cloud vendors would be interested in helping disseminate information of individually uncertain value, and because most people see history as someone else's problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Maths is exactly what the universe speaks. Dig beneath matter and energy, and you'll find maths alone, the most fundamental form of the universe.
Most ecologists I've read the work of have said that the more interactions, the more stable. This is because the models that work best - nonlinear dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions - are only stable if you have large numbers of Strange Attractors.
Daisyworld is the best example. As you increase daisy species from two to 200, stability goes up exponentially. Provided, and this is important, three conditions are met.
First, each component must possess a negative feedback loop. It can possess positive feedback as well, but it must have negative feedback.
Second, for all species A, there must exist at least one species B with whom at least one form of resource consumption or other pressure is in a closed loop.
Third, you need large numbers. Simulations of a goldfish pond filled with five examples each of a hundred species won't be stable.
You can simulate twenty, two hundred or two thousand species on your computer and get absolutely stable (albeit chaotic) results, if you do it right - i.e.: the way you'd get in a naturally balanced forest, for example.
What the researchers have shown is that you can make this entire dynamic violently unstable by reducing scale, breaking cycles or doing other stupid things. That chaotic systems aren't self-restoring if they're messed up.
The BBC was interviewing this interesting guy, Dr David Kelly, who said there weren't. The Guardian was running articles on CIA attempted coups launched via the weapons inspector teams. The Independent was skeptical of the claims, as weapons inspectors had found nothing and President Bush was making shrill claims he couldn't back.
Most of the media covered the Plame affair, with clear and open coverage of the fact that no yellowcake had been bought or shipped to Iraq.
I'd say most of the free media were very, very doubtful of the claims.
You imagine they're policed because they don't say what you want them to say. Sure, go ahead, create your own social network. Won't make the inaccurate any more honest. Won't help break down barriers. But if that's what you want to do, go for it.
And doubtless the Pope will claim 1+1=2.
And?
Dressing up doesn't mean a statement is right or wrong. The statement being right makes it right. Facts really are immutable, there is only one universe and we're all in it. We do not live in alternative realities.
The church made claims about reality that were falsified. As per William of Occam, we can reject them. That means those statements were wrong. It doesn't mean reality is whatever you want it to be. If it was, then they couldn't have been wrong.
This is so obvious.
You have no magic wishes and cannot mutate reality to conform to your desires. I know this because there is only the one reality. One set of facts. One world. One reality. You can have as many opinions on all of that as you like, but you cannot change a single fact. You can lie, cheat and steal, but you can't tell reality what to do.
The fact that the church got one thing right, over 2,000 years, is hardly a surprise. I Ching has a better score. Not is it a surprise that criticizing a speaker rather than critiquing the argument is the strategy of choice in those who prefer to make up their own facts.
That's what the OP implied, it's also the only way Facebook could censor.
https://www.theguardian.com/bo...
Whether you agree with Dr Zuckerberg or not, it's interesting what she has discovered in the way of misinformation and the practices.
You are either the customer or the product. Open source relies on that, users mean development. In FB's case, they don't exploit the product internally but resell it.
As for the sig, it's not all snark that's the problem, but the good sort is rare. You must seek it with thimbles, you must seek it with care, you must pursue it with forks and hope. But most snarks are not like that and will not offer you tea, for most snarks are a boojum, you see.
There is no procedure known to man, short of a Class III certificate, that could positively identify a person to the standards you describe.
I would have to disagree.
Education, real education, increases ability, freedom and resilience against the effects of age and cynicism.
Entertainment does none of that.
Education rewires the brain, entertainment exploits it.
Education can be found anywhere, but particularly in the novel situation. Entertainment can only be found in the familiar.
Real education is rare. Entertainment is common.
Social media should probably be banned.
People should have personal peer-to-peer web servers that provide such functionality.
The last person to live to be capable of that died in 1829.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Facebook provides a service, not a product. For a product, you're not responsible for use, only for the product being fit for purpose. For a service, you are responsible for use.
SaaS is a very dangerous strategy that leaves you open to liabilities that would not otherwise apply. You are responsible for conduct outside your control. It's how any service is.
Have you never tipped a waiter less for ingredients he didn't make or choose, for the cooking errors of others, or for slowness caused by their boss ranting? You'd be one of very few who didn't blame someone for the faults of others, if you said that you confined the decision to service under his control alone.
The Guardian publishes corrections, as do the BBC. The Guardian is also notable for providing OpEd space for politically opposed views, and the BBC even ran interviews with highly controversial figures fundamentally opposed to the BBC's mere existence.
The Independent is pretty good, too.
If you don't have outlets of this calibre, ask why. Why PBS isn't equal. Why local newspapers are being dominated by a few overlords. What happened to the controls meant to prevent bias by size.
Publishers reject books all the time. That's not censorship, that's a business decision. Nobody censored J. K. Rowling, yet her Harry Potter novels were rejected by something like 30 publishers.
I dunno, Genevieve von Petzinger has a very nice channel on mesolithic rock art.
Science never predicted global cooling. Do not confuse science fact with Internet mythology.
The predictions put forward by the international committee were probabilities of varying outcomes. It is very hard for a probability to be wrong the way you describe. However, they underestimated global warming, it's far worse than forecast.
But you don't care, you're wrapped up in partisan fantasies and care nothing for facts that contradict them.
There are fantasists on both sides, I reject all of them. They don't think, listen, read or do, they just worship in the temple of ignorance.
All propaganda is wrong, as are those who believe that that is all there is to life, or that real victory is controlling others.
They have never censored, just as Fox News has never censored.
What you're objecting to is not censorship, but preference.
Facebook is entitled to an opinion other than yours.
Join the club, but don't blame a free press for it and don't blame sides selectively. Blame all who are guilty or none.
You say votes are being found days after, in South Carolina they found hundreds stuffed behind office furniture in Republican administrative buildings, plus a box found behind a fire escape, in 2000. Curiously, you only go for the side you don't like.
Sure, you'll get the sympathy of those on your side. You're a tribe and tribes don't give a shit about facts. The left have done the same in the past, maybe they're doing it now. Curiously, I have no sympathy for the one-sided being on the wrong side. I reject lawbreaking by any side, but I've no sympathy for thieves who get broken into. Be fair, be honest or be abused by someone. If karma's a birch, if you reap what you sow, that's your issue. Not mine.
And, yes, truth is facts. Indeed, the only truth is facts. Everything else is subjective opinion.
Or the person or the politics of the time.
Are you scared of those facts? If not, then work out how to distinguish fact from opinion. Opinions are personal, facts are not. Comment is, and should remain, free. Facts are immutable.
I don't distinguish left or right, libertarian or authoritarian in that. One law, for rich and poor alike, for politicians, media and individuals alike. No immunity, no exceptions.
If you think that facts favour the left, question why you're on the right.
There's too much information. Nobody can know everything. Yes, I've tried.
That means you rely on the solution in the Byzantine General's Problem. As long as 50%+1 of people are telling the factual truth (regardless of opinion) on any given topic, you don't need to know everything. Enough people know each fact to ensure that you can rely on those facts.
If disinformation exceeds that, you might as well give up. You can rely on nothing and no-one. Nobody, not even a survivalist, can survive for long like that and progress is impossible. That is not a life worth living.
That's simple. The fundamental rule has always been that facts are universal, opinion is personal. Virtually every respectable media outlet has a version of that doctrine.
You can say what you like, think what you like, feel what you like, but you can choose only these. You cannot choose a different set of facts.
No, that doesn't stop you writing fantasy or fiction. As the late, great Terry Nation once said, if on your world rocks can talk, then that is fact. On that world, rocks talk.
It does not stop caricatures. Britain has incredibly strong libel laws, but TW3, Spitting Image and HIGNFY are not just applauded by those they put down, the famous and powerful were/are integral to them.
All it stops is malicious, twisted Misty Mountains nastiness. Gollum! That doesn't take a Ministry of Truth, any Bagginses will do.
First, make the trader liable for problems at their end.
Second, the U.S. is over a decade behind Europe on this technology, meaning hackers have had ten years to figure out problems. It's the equivalent of running Windows XP or an unpatched Windows 7 on a modern network.
Third, why the hell is anyone expecting a trader to understand network security? These systems should be proof against even ingenious idiots. Plug it all in and it works, autoconfiguring. No default passwords, no default security holes, just something that works. Are the credit card companies and banks really this incompetent?
I have the negatives, they're all medium and in good condition. Decent quality, too. What I don't want to do is lose any information, as anything lost due to damage to those negatives is lost forever. I've a decent, if not great, scanner - an old V600 - which will do 24-bit. Some of the negatives are simply too big to scan at that quality, at the resolution at which there are sufficiently few grains showing for me to be sure there's new information.
Once it's scanned, there's probably ways to reduce the image. I can't imagine the full dynamic range the scanner can handle appears on the film, it's far too old for that, and almost certainly no new significant information is added long before the resolution I'm using.
My collection is a few tens of thousands of photographs from three families dating from 1880 or so to 1980. A proper scan that gets out the greatest amount of actual information has yielded an average of about a gigabyte per photograph, so far. That's a lot of information. So my pathetically small collection holds about ten or so terabytes of data.
I've absolutely no idea how I'm going to store that kind of volume of data, it's not like Google will offer.
But I bet you a dozen doughnuts that there are thousands of families in the same boat, who have vast collections of negatives that they'll destroy because they don't have room and don't see an immediate value in.
I also bet that if those thousands of families could be persuaded to get those images scanned, if they'd be willing to contribute to the cost of the collating and storage costs, that it would seriously change the way the past is seen by historians, family history fans and archivists.
And I'd bet that such an archive would have a profoundly greater impact than the NYT archive would.
It won't happen because those aforementioned families will be stubborn and prefer destruction over conservation, because none of the cloud vendors would be interested in helping disseminate information of individually uncertain value, and because most people see history as someone else's problem.