I was a lowly Phys. undergrad at the time and I wasn't taking enough high level for course for C.Sc. to be a minor for me. Not that classes in AI or O/S would have helped for that. A Distributed Systems class might have been useful if they offered one and numerical analysis (in Fortran, of course) didn't really turn my crank. I had helped my sister a little with her engineering N/A course work enough to know that I could pick it up easily enough if I needed to.
As for the guy who snidely commented that the guy knew it would take 10 to 20 years. Yeah, maybe. And maybe it would have made a good cross-discipline PhD thesis too. More than likely he was too caught up in his revolutionary (wrong) immunological theories on AIDS that he was going to present at a conference, and which I explained nobody would accept (though admittedly my argument was based on economics, business behaviour, and politics). So it's not totally surprising he wasn't too receptive to my constructive suggestion.:-)
Well "Kill us all" was overkill, but the German Schwartzwald was dying. What happened is that they took steps to limit air pollution from vehicles and industrial sources. They fixed the cause of the problem. Imagine that!
The thing in the 70s with oil was market manipulation by the suppliers of course, and the latest price spike was manipulation of the commodity and futures markets by institutional investors. The price of crude dropped back down because the economic slowdown dropped consumption faster than they could compensate (making the game a losing proposition) and the credit crisis forced them to pull the money out to re-adjust their leverage position. The peak oil thing will happen of course - it has to with a non-renewable resource for which consumption in generally increasing - but it's still a ways away. We'll probably get another round of market manipulation again before it happens for real.
Yes, but 20 years ago a computer network was not a hypothetical then-impossible idea. Before the first computer network existed, people understood what technological barriers they would have to overcome to create one, and they already knew how to split a task into multiple parts on separate processing units. It was an engineering problem. It was the engineering problem that your professor was stuck on.
Agreed.
Call me when the major obstacle to any of these Futurist predictions is the amount of effort required, not that we fundamentally have no idea how to accomplish the task.
When it comes to downloading a human consciousness into a machine, I think you are absolutely correct. It's not clear that we will have the capacity of instrumenting and measuring all the variables in the instantaneous state of a brain that makes an individual - you, me, or Ray Kurzweil - and replicate it/convert it to run on a completely different medium. That assertion has more than a bit of "OMG Ponies!" wish fulfilment in it.
When it comes to taking the general intelligence capability of a human and producing a synthetic computer-based analog, it is an engineering problem. First a reverse-engineering problem in determining how the brain does what it does to enable consciousness, and then a process change and die shrink. Neurons are pretty coarse and slow things when it comes to their interconnects and we should be able to do a lot better. With the advantage of faster signal transmission and shorter signal paths, that should give the re-architected "brain" a big speed advantage over our current ones. As for the "software", you could raise the first generation the old-fashioned way in real time (with the processor running at a "degraded speed") for the first few years, and then once you've got consciousness, socialization, and imprinting/attachment to humanity ingrained, let them go into turbo mode for computer-based education. For that first iteration you create as close a model of the human brain as you can, and then you see what simplifying assumptions you can make and still have it work.
The big bottleneck for your virtual scientists at that point will be running physical experiments. Not everything can be gedanken experiments - sometimes you need Large Hadron Colliders that take decades to be built. But for small scale science like molecular biology where a lot can be increasingly simulated? Look out.
Now don't get me wrong, there are some tremendous engineering problems there, with enough intermediate steps that it makes my clustered protein modeling example look like child's play. But it is my reasoned opinion that the project is no less an engineering problem than going from 16 MHz 386's and 10Mb coax Ethernet to 2+GHz quad cores, fiber-based gigabit Ethernet, and middleware for clustered systems with hundreds or thousands of cores.
It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer.
That seems like a pretty big assumption to me. Mechanically the entire system seems vaguely similar to a computer,...
No, the pretty big assumption is that it's not. The fact is that scientific investigation has a pretty darn good history at being successful in defining models that accurately describe and predict the world around us. The assumption that the brain isn't a biological computer is due to hand-waved religious traditions that go back thousands of years before anything like complexity and chaos theories and molecular biology were developed. Whenever religious "explanations" of life have gone head to head with rationalist scientific analysis, the latter has been demonstrably better at coming up with reliable predictive models and explanations. So while I'm not a betting man, I'm pretty sure the book odds are seriously in favour of some variant of software/neural net on a biological computer as opposed to a primitive nebulous concept of a soul, reincarnated or not.
Intel's shifted business strategies to building embedded-and-above chips like Atom, and is so eager to do so that they've done something that's almost unheard of in Intel's history: they've farmed out production to another company (TSMC [forbes.com]). Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.
You make that assumption while stating no supporting evidence and I'm not completely convinced. OK, recent increase (since the 130nm transition) in power density has been a significant factor and it's possible they could be running out of new ideas to deal with it after trying stuff like SOI.
I think a strong argument also can be made that AMD are farming out their fabs because they couldn't get enough credit in the current environment to fund the next fab generation. They therefore could only fund it by allowing a huge equity buy-in to an external investor (Middle Eastern as it turns out). Economics as much as, if not more than, physics is what's driving this shift.
My gut feel is that AMD would have much preferred to keep vertical integration to continue to go toe-to-toe with Intel on the top performance end, but they couldn't afford it. I think they chose to focus on their biggest asset and product differentiator, IP and silicon design because the economic situation forced them to. I'm sure they would prefer to remain competitive with Intel on the high margin top end than to cough up that market without a fight. By spinning out the fabs to a third party however, that third party can continue to sell fab production to other clients long after the fab becomes obsolete for producing mainstream general-purpose processors. Extending the fab lifetime means a longer time horizon for recuperating the ever-increasing capital costs of new fabs
Intel on the other hand has enough cash on hand that they can continue to play the fab game for their top end, while farming out the chip-making where for the part of their product line that doesn't require a bleeding edge process. At least for now.
20 years ago, I had a disagreement with my then biophysics prof when I advocated the use of large networks of PC clusters for studying protein folding and interactions. His line of argument was effectively that I had a lack of understanding of what the problem is, and how much effort is required. Today companies like Zymeworksspecialize in performing that kind of work for pharmaceutical companies on a contract basis. They use quantum chemistry simulations running on small clusters of commodity hardware to do it. Yeah, computing speed has gone through a few orders of magnitude from the 16 MHz 386's of the time to the 2GHz quad cores of today. Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.
20 years ago I remember watching a show that was one of the first sounding the alarm about Climate Change. Back then I was cautiously sceptical because of the crudeness of the models possible with the computing power then available; these days, I'm convinced. It's good to be sceptical, but it's also good to remember that there's more than one way to skin a cat.
When it comes to Arthur C. Clarke quotes, I like the following one at least as much:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The one likely exception to that is that we probably won't ever come up with a way to travel faster than light. Otherwise, there's a lot more I told you so's coming down the pipe. 'Cause, no offense meant, but you probably don't even have the success record and credibility of "a distinguished but elderly scientist".
The law already covers that without getting into "hate" crimes. A punch thrown in a drunken bar brawl that results in a death would typically be considered manslaughter. A pre-meditated assault that leads to a death would typically be considered murder. I have no problem with this concept. If you engage in a pre-meditated assault and/or murder you should be punished more severely than someone who snaps for whatever reason (the classic find the wife in bed with another man scenario comes to mind) and carries out such an act without pre-meditation. There is no reason to add further penalties because of the views of the perpetrator and to do so suggests to me that my life is worth less if I'm murdered for my property than if I'm murdered for my skin color.
I'll try one last time. When you commit murder for a wrong against you (or because you stand to profit by it), you are saying that you don't recognize the authority of the state to govern you. You are an anarchic barbarian or bandit at the gate.
When you commit violence on someone else because they violate your personal laws and beliefs that are not recognized by the state, you are declaring yourself not just above the law, but the creator of law. Unlike a vigilante who might only enforce existing laws not being enforced due to corruption, you are not just judge, jury and executioner, you are declaring yourself king and tyrant. It seems entirely appropriate to me for the people to further condemn that additional usurpation of their collective authority.
Stop complaining corporates know what's best for you. Well not all, but Steve Jobs ran [sic] corporation does.
Well, you appear to be speaking ironically. However Pixar's successful track record in making hugely popular family-friendly and adult-friendly movies indicates that (as far as judging the appeal and appropriateness of content goes) there's actually a good basis of truth in your statement, no matter how ironically it was intended.
Merely stating that some racial subgroup is prone to some stereotype is not and should not be a crime.
Well I think the standard defense against slander would be applicable. It wouldn't be a crime if you can show some solid statistical evidence defending your claim that was published in peer reviewed journals. I would also allow exemption for academic research because otherwise you've got a chicken and egg problem.
Otherwise I would be free to proclaim that my experience is that slashdot posters with eastern European and central Asian sounding pseudonyms steal babies for the purposes of child pornography and child molestation. Seems like a catchy troll post to use for the next year or two, no? Or maybe instead that your people tear them apart at the full moon.
Why? How does denying the Holocaust harm anyone? Why should someone be rendered destitute because they choose to believe that the Holocaust never happened in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
Because that's usually only one step in turning "The Holocaust" into a conspiracy by Jews to distract from the fact that they control the world and should be overthrown. It's hard to scapegoat them while they're recognized as victims.
Jews have a culture which respects learning and encourages that pursuit, which means that they will naturally have a competitive advantage in an information economy against your average person/industrial cog who is either ambivalent or outright hostile to book l'arnin'. There's also certain aspects of their religion which facilitate the mistreatment of people outside that religion, but then that's been true of most religions at one point or another. I respect them for the former, and decry the latter behaviour if I see it. They have also historically had a fairly insular culture (probably encouraged by centuries of religious persecution). The three together make them natural targets for prejudice and antipathy. Generally though, when one group of people spread lies about another people, it's rarely in the best interest of the people being lied about and usually to their detriment one way or another. As I said, quantifying it with a dollar value can be hard, but proving that there's been a lie, not so much.
Being murdered because your gay is not worse than being murdered because your ex-lover couldn't stand to see you with someone else.
Yes it is, for a reason very related to your argument above about how lying about the Holocaust isn't a crime. It's inconsistent for you to hold that position as you describe it, and then argue the above statement as well. There is a fundamental qualitative difference in acting violently against someone who you perceive to have wronged you personally directly, versus someone who has never harmed you in any way.
It's further along the path of insanity to be willing to commit violence against someone who has done you no wrong just because of who they are, rather than because of something they have done to you. The latter are a greater risk to members of society. It's a comparable difference in risk to the populace and risk of recurrence as there is for someone who will kill someone else in a fit of passion, vs. someone who pre-plans a murder. Assaulting "uppity" well-dressed blacks or guys just for walking down the street holding hands? That shows a deeper and more dangerous sociopathy than your average mugger or punch thrown in a drunken bar brawl.
Apparently it was neither but Linus Pauling instead. I like the quote but can't say much for your research, which doesn't augur well for having good ideas:-).
My Motorola SLVR/L7 made it through 5 minutes in the washing machine before I tried to make a call and realized what I had done. It's also been dropped a number of times, including today. It still works. My Palm III broke within a week when I accidentally dropped it on the floor while sitting on the toilet (i.e. less height than the phone). Guess which brand I would buy again? If Moto ever makes an unlocked, thin, Android-based phone, you'll find me in the checkout line.
Well, I think that there's already well-accepted laws (libel and slander laws) on the books to rein in certain types of speech which (deliberately or maliciously) attack individuals with lies. That's an accepted legal principle that few people would argue with. Well thought out and drafted "hate speech" laws just generalize those same concepts to identifiable groups, as opposed to just individuals. I think if it was made clear in the "hate" laws that the same existing underlying judicial principle was being applied to groups, and that previous existing libel and slander case law should be used as guidelines for determining culpability in "hate speech" cases, then it would be a lot harder to argue against those laws as an attack on free speech.
The difference of course is that slander and libel laws are part of civil law and hate speech laws are part of criminal law. However I think that there is a strong argument that the damage and scale of the activity, against a large group of people as opposed to an individual, is:
harder to measure monetarily and not possible to redress through fines paid to the victims of the crime because of issues of distribution,
more likely to result in physical harm against an individual as a result of the hate speech than slander or libel would.
In the first case, a proper evaluation of damages against a Holocaust denier or a similar hate speech proponent would render them destitute. At that point there's nothing to stop them from continuing their attacks. In fact, if part of their message was the existence of a controlling conspiracy by the target group (which is often the case) that result would just reinforce their beliefs of conspiracies against them by the target of their lies.
In the second case, that's because an individual who has been slandered has fewer contacts with others than a large group of people like blacks or gays, and thus the likelihood of physical harm resulting to individuals in the target group is much higher.
On the other hand, I'm starting to think that defining certain types of assaults and violent attacks as "hate crimes" isn't the appropriate way of dealing with that situation. I think the way to deal with it is to declare people who perform "hate crimes" as criminally insane, an ongoing danger to the public, and keep them locked up until they are "cured".
Well, if you're moderately well off, you can farm out your taxes to a tax accountant who is more familiar with tax law, leaving you to pursue what you're really good at. Division of labour in the fine industrial tradition. However sometimes those accountants get excessively creative in finding "loopholes" that don't exist because by doing so they can claim to have saved you lots of money and ensure your continued use of their services. At least, until you get audited. Sometimes that creativity is knowingly encouraged by the customer, and sometimes it's the accountant that takes advantage of a clueless customer.
For instance, I know of a small business owner who owed thousands of dollars in sales taxes because the accountant had failed to account for them properly and pay them. Had the accountant properly reported the business' profit position, including the sales tax, the business owner would have closed up shop earlier, losing the accountant his job. Proving intent on the part of the accountant in a court of law would have been too iffy to make it worth risking additional money on lawyers, so the business owner was on the hook for the unpaid taxes.
It's like any of those "if it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't true" deals, but it's hard for people to know if it really is too good to be true, or else they wouldn't have hired a (tax) accountant for their expertise.
Somebody who is arguing about the non-existence of 9000 year-old trees is as likely to be a Biblical literalist as a climate change denier, although there's probably a good deal of overlap between the two (assuming the climate change denier isn't being paid off by the fossil fuel industry).
You think Merlot is bitter? As compared to what, a Sauternes? Because I consider Merlot pretty smooth and mellow, at least compared to a Cabernet-Sauvignon.
e.g. surpluses and shortages are symptoms of price controls and nothing else
Yeah, sure. That's why boom and bust cycles also occured when the economy was less regulated than it has been since the second half of the 20th Century. Long-term surpluses and shortages often are caused by price controls as you put it. Shortages can also happen when there are high barriers to entry due to capital costs and supplier collusion if the set of market suppliers is small. However short-to-medium term surpluses and shortages happen at least as often because demand agents are not always rational, public consumption is strongly influenced by confidence in the economy, and there can be many factors that significantly delay changes in supply to match changes in demand (i.e. aforementioned capital costs for new plant, training period for hiring additional staff, arranging additional suppliers of raw materials, budgetary cycles, etc.)
It makes sense when you use it with abbreviations for a limited set of predefined types in procedural languages. When you're dealing with object oriented programming with multiple large class libraries which need separate namespaces to avoid class name conflicts, and lots of your variables are objects that are class instantiations, it loses a lot of its effect in clarifying code. You're better off using longer more descriptive variable names.
There is *no* shortage of general practitioners in actual fact, on a broad basis. Every time I look for a doctor in a new area, I find hundreds of family and general practices that are accepting new patients. (These are listed in the insurance provider directory.)
So, as seems to be usual case here on slashdot, you are saying that your personally limited anecdotal evidence trumps the information provided by administration officials who presumably have country-wide statistics on rural and urban demographics and trends at their disposal. Sure.
When was this? Flats like this should be non-smoking now, and only smokers don't understand people that don't like smoke.
If a locale has had a heavy smoker, the smell is insidious and getting rid of it incredibly difficult. You can paint over it and the nicotine and other poisons will bleed through the fresh paint. My sister moved into an apartment that was like that. We cleaned the walls with heavy cleansers and shampooed the carpets. A day later the smell started to come back. A week later we washed the walls again because of the yellow gunk oozing through the walls. Then we painted over it. It still took 6 months for the cigarette smell to become nearly unnoticeable. You think student housing is going to be that diligent? Fat chance. They would wash the walls at most once, paint over, and the smell and allergens would linger for years, maybe decades.
Well my mother did have a fall a few years ago while running to catch the bus. It caused a broken nose as well, as a deviated septum that aggravated her snoring. They told her they would need to re-break the nose to fix it, so she decided to not get it done. But that's just harder to diagnose because any nasal injury gets really inflamed and blocks the nasal passages. I'm pretty sure that if you had a broken ankle and went to the hospital Emergency and that they would X-ray it and set it properly. When she had another another fall recently, she had a concussion and hurt her wrist. They X-rayed the wrist (and fortunately found no breaks in spite of some osteoporosis).
OK, but it still comes down to: if your friend had an allergy to the smoke, he needed to remove himself from exposure to the allergen. What was the doctor supposed to do? There isn't a pill that his doctor could give him that would cure the problem. At "best", the doctor might prescribe corticosteroids that would suppress the immune system, mask the problem until it got a lot worse, and put him at risk of other infections.
If the university housing bureaucracy wouldn't let him move, that's the problem and not whether the medical system was public or private. It's unlikely a note from the doctor would have made much difference, there or in the USA. Of course he could have threatened to sue the university in the USA's lawsuit happy environment, but that also could have just gotten him fired if he hadn't been able prove he had a medical disability caused by the smoke. And good luck to a grad student affording a lawyer on that kind of income. So your anecdote, while a good hard luck story, when looked at in more detail does little to support your prejudice against a public health system.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a lowly Phys. undergrad at the time and I wasn't taking enough high level for course for C.Sc. to be a minor for me. Not that classes in AI or O/S would have helped for that. A Distributed Systems class might have been useful if they offered one and numerical analysis (in Fortran, of course) didn't really turn my crank. I had helped my sister a little with her engineering N/A course work enough to know that I could pick it up easily enough if I needed to.
As for the guy who snidely commented that the guy knew it would take 10 to 20 years. Yeah, maybe. And maybe it would have made a good cross-discipline PhD thesis too. More than likely he was too caught up in his revolutionary (wrong) immunological theories on AIDS that he was going to present at a conference, and which I explained nobody would accept (though admittedly my argument was based on economics, business behaviour, and politics). So it's not totally surprising he wasn't too receptive to my constructive suggestion. :-)
Well "Kill us all" was overkill, but the German Schwartzwald was dying. What happened is that they took steps to limit air pollution from vehicles and industrial sources. They fixed the cause of the problem. Imagine that!
The thing in the 70s with oil was market manipulation by the suppliers of course, and the latest price spike was manipulation of the commodity and futures markets by institutional investors. The price of crude dropped back down because the economic slowdown dropped consumption faster than they could compensate (making the game a losing proposition) and the credit crisis forced them to pull the money out to re-adjust their leverage position. The peak oil thing will happen of course - it has to with a non-renewable resource for which consumption in generally increasing - but it's still a ways away. We'll probably get another round of market manipulation again before it happens for real.
Agreed.
When it comes to downloading a human consciousness into a machine, I think you are absolutely correct. It's not clear that we will have the capacity of instrumenting and measuring all the variables in the instantaneous state of a brain that makes an individual - you, me, or Ray Kurzweil - and replicate it/convert it to run on a completely different medium. That assertion has more than a bit of "OMG Ponies!" wish fulfilment in it.
When it comes to taking the general intelligence capability of a human and producing a synthetic computer-based analog, it is an engineering problem. First a reverse-engineering problem in determining how the brain does what it does to enable consciousness, and then a process change and die shrink. Neurons are pretty coarse and slow things when it comes to their interconnects and we should be able to do a lot better. With the advantage of faster signal transmission and shorter signal paths, that should give the re-architected "brain" a big speed advantage over our current ones. As for the "software", you could raise the first generation the old-fashioned way in real time (with the processor running at a "degraded speed") for the first few years, and then once you've got consciousness, socialization, and imprinting/attachment to humanity ingrained, let them go into turbo mode for computer-based education. For that first iteration you create as close a model of the human brain as you can, and then you see what simplifying assumptions you can make and still have it work.
The big bottleneck for your virtual scientists at that point will be running physical experiments. Not everything can be gedanken experiments - sometimes you need Large Hadron Colliders that take decades to be built. But for small scale science like molecular biology where a lot can be increasingly simulated? Look out.
Now don't get me wrong, there are some tremendous engineering problems there, with enough intermediate steps that it makes my clustered protein modeling example look like child's play. But it is my reasoned opinion that the project is no less an engineering problem than going from 16 MHz 386's and 10Mb coax Ethernet to 2+GHz quad cores, fiber-based gigabit Ethernet, and middleware for clustered systems with hundreds or thousands of cores.
No, the pretty big assumption is that it's not. The fact is that scientific investigation has a pretty darn good history at being successful in defining models that accurately describe and predict the world around us. The assumption that the brain isn't a biological computer is due to hand-waved religious traditions that go back thousands of years before anything like complexity and chaos theories and molecular biology were developed. Whenever religious "explanations" of life have gone head to head with rationalist scientific analysis, the latter has been demonstrably better at coming up with reliable predictive models and explanations. So while I'm not a betting man, I'm pretty sure the book odds are seriously in favour of some variant of software/neural net on a biological computer as opposed to a primitive nebulous concept of a soul, reincarnated or not.
You make that assumption while stating no supporting evidence and I'm not completely convinced. OK, recent increase (since the 130nm transition) in power density has been a significant factor and it's possible they could be running out of new ideas to deal with it after trying stuff like SOI.
I think a strong argument also can be made that AMD are farming out their fabs because they couldn't get enough credit in the current environment to fund the next fab generation. They therefore could only fund it by allowing a huge equity buy-in to an external investor (Middle Eastern as it turns out). Economics as much as, if not more than, physics is what's driving this shift.
My gut feel is that AMD would have much preferred to keep vertical integration to continue to go toe-to-toe with Intel on the top performance end, but they couldn't afford it. I think they chose to focus on their biggest asset and product differentiator, IP and silicon design because the economic situation forced them to. I'm sure they would prefer to remain competitive with Intel on the high margin top end than to cough up that market without a fight. By spinning out the fabs to a third party however, that third party can continue to sell fab production to other clients long after the fab becomes obsolete for producing mainstream general-purpose processors. Extending the fab lifetime means a longer time horizon for recuperating the ever-increasing capital costs of new fabs
Intel on the other hand has enough cash on hand that they can continue to play the fab game for their top end, while farming out the chip-making where for the part of their product line that doesn't require a bleeding edge process. At least for now.
20 years ago, I had a disagreement with my then biophysics prof when I advocated the use of large networks of PC clusters for studying protein folding and interactions. His line of argument was effectively that I had a lack of understanding of what the problem is, and how much effort is required. Today companies like Zymeworksspecialize in performing that kind of work for pharmaceutical companies on a contract basis. They use quantum chemistry simulations running on small clusters of commodity hardware to do it. Yeah, computing speed has gone through a few orders of magnitude from the 16 MHz 386's of the time to the 2GHz quad cores of today. Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.
20 years ago I remember watching a show that was one of the first sounding the alarm about Climate Change. Back then I was cautiously sceptical because of the crudeness of the models possible with the computing power then available; these days, I'm convinced. It's good to be sceptical, but it's also good to remember that there's more than one way to skin a cat.
When it comes to Arthur C. Clarke quotes, I like the following one at least as much:
The one likely exception to that is that we probably won't ever come up with a way to travel faster than light. Otherwise, there's a lot more I told you so's coming down the pipe. 'Cause, no offense meant, but you probably don't even have the success record and credibility of "a distinguished but elderly scientist".
I'll try one last time. When you commit murder for a wrong against you (or because you stand to profit by it), you are saying that you don't recognize the authority of the state to govern you. You are an anarchic barbarian or bandit at the gate.
When you commit violence on someone else because they violate your personal laws and beliefs that are not recognized by the state, you are declaring yourself not just above the law, but the creator of law. Unlike a vigilante who might only enforce existing laws not being enforced due to corruption, you are not just judge, jury and executioner, you are declaring yourself king and tyrant. It seems entirely appropriate to me for the people to further condemn that additional usurpation of their collective authority.
Well, you appear to be speaking ironically. However Pixar's successful track record in making hugely popular family-friendly and adult-friendly movies indicates that (as far as judging the appeal and appropriateness of content goes) there's actually a good basis of truth in your statement, no matter how ironically it was intended.
Well I think the standard defense against slander would be applicable. It wouldn't be a crime if you can show some solid statistical evidence defending your claim that was published in peer reviewed journals. I would also allow exemption for academic research because otherwise you've got a chicken and egg problem.
Otherwise I would be free to proclaim that my experience is that slashdot posters with eastern European and central Asian sounding pseudonyms steal babies for the purposes of child pornography and child molestation. Seems like a catchy troll post to use for the next year or two, no? Or maybe instead that your people tear them apart at the full moon.
Because that's usually only one step in turning "The Holocaust" into a conspiracy by Jews to distract from the fact that they control the world and should be overthrown. It's hard to scapegoat them while they're recognized as victims.
Jews have a culture which respects learning and encourages that pursuit, which means that they will naturally have a competitive advantage in an information economy against your average person/industrial cog who is either ambivalent or outright hostile to book l'arnin'. There's also certain aspects of their religion which facilitate the mistreatment of people outside that religion, but then that's been true of most religions at one point or another. I respect them for the former, and decry the latter behaviour if I see it. They have also historically had a fairly insular culture (probably encouraged by centuries of religious persecution). The three together make them natural targets for prejudice and antipathy. Generally though, when one group of people spread lies about another people, it's rarely in the best interest of the people being lied about and usually to their detriment one way or another. As I said, quantifying it with a dollar value can be hard, but proving that there's been a lie, not so much.
Yes it is, for a reason very related to your argument above about how lying about the Holocaust isn't a crime. It's inconsistent for you to hold that position as you describe it, and then argue the above statement as well. There is a fundamental qualitative difference in acting violently against someone who you perceive to have wronged you personally directly, versus someone who has never harmed you in any way. It's further along the path of insanity to be willing to commit violence against someone who has done you no wrong just because of who they are, rather than because of something they have done to you. The latter are a greater risk to members of society. It's a comparable difference in risk to the populace and risk of recurrence as there is for someone who will kill someone else in a fit of passion, vs. someone who pre-plans a murder. Assaulting "uppity" well-dressed blacks or guys just for walking down the street holding hands? That shows a deeper and more dangerous sociopathy than your average mugger or punch thrown in a drunken bar brawl.
Wolfgang Pauli or Paul Dirac?
Apparently it was neither but Linus Pauling instead. I like the quote but can't say much for your research, which doesn't augur well for having good ideas :-).
My Motorola SLVR/L7 made it through 5 minutes in the washing machine before I tried to make a call and realized what I had done. It's also been dropped a number of times, including today. It still works. My Palm III broke within a week when I accidentally dropped it on the floor while sitting on the toilet (i.e. less height than the phone). Guess which brand I would buy again? If Moto ever makes an unlocked, thin, Android-based phone, you'll find me in the checkout line.
More like the DOS 2.1.1 of beers. No, wait.. that's Miller High-Life. A-B Budweiser must be DOS 3.0
Well, I think that there's already well-accepted laws (libel and slander laws) on the books to rein in certain types of speech which (deliberately or maliciously) attack individuals with lies. That's an accepted legal principle that few people would argue with. Well thought out and drafted "hate speech" laws just generalize those same concepts to identifiable groups, as opposed to just individuals. I think if it was made clear in the "hate" laws that the same existing underlying judicial principle was being applied to groups, and that previous existing libel and slander case law should be used as guidelines for determining culpability in "hate speech" cases, then it would be a lot harder to argue against those laws as an attack on free speech.
The difference of course is that slander and libel laws are part of civil law and hate speech laws are part of criminal law. However I think that there is a strong argument that the damage and scale of the activity, against a large group of people as opposed to an individual, is:
In the first case, a proper evaluation of damages against a Holocaust denier or a similar hate speech proponent would render them destitute. At that point there's nothing to stop them from continuing their attacks. In fact, if part of their message was the existence of a controlling conspiracy by the target group (which is often the case) that result would just reinforce their beliefs of conspiracies against them by the target of their lies.
In the second case, that's because an individual who has been slandered has fewer contacts with others than a large group of people like blacks or gays, and thus the likelihood of physical harm resulting to individuals in the target group is much higher.
On the other hand, I'm starting to think that defining certain types of assaults and violent attacks as "hate crimes" isn't the appropriate way of dealing with that situation. I think the way to deal with it is to declare people who perform "hate crimes" as criminally insane, an ongoing danger to the public, and keep them locked up until they are "cured".
Well, if you're moderately well off, you can farm out your taxes to a tax accountant who is more familiar with tax law, leaving you to pursue what you're really good at. Division of labour in the fine industrial tradition. However sometimes those accountants get excessively creative in finding "loopholes" that don't exist because by doing so they can claim to have saved you lots of money and ensure your continued use of their services. At least, until you get audited. Sometimes that creativity is knowingly encouraged by the customer, and sometimes it's the accountant that takes advantage of a clueless customer.
For instance, I know of a small business owner who owed thousands of dollars in sales taxes because the accountant had failed to account for them properly and pay them. Had the accountant properly reported the business' profit position, including the sales tax, the business owner would have closed up shop earlier, losing the accountant his job. Proving intent on the part of the accountant in a court of law would have been too iffy to make it worth risking additional money on lawyers, so the business owner was on the hook for the unpaid taxes.
It's like any of those "if it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't true" deals, but it's hard for people to know if it really is too good to be true, or else they wouldn't have hired a (tax) accountant for their expertise.
Somebody who is arguing about the non-existence of 9000 year-old trees is as likely to be a Biblical literalist as a climate change denier, although there's probably a good deal of overlap between the two (assuming the climate change denier isn't being paid off by the fossil fuel industry).
Dang. And me with no mod points.
You think Merlot is bitter? As compared to what, a Sauternes? Because I consider Merlot pretty smooth and mellow, at least compared to a Cabernet-Sauvignon.
During the last BC provincial election, we missed switching to STV by 2% (58% voted in favour). We get another shot at it in a few weeks.
I'm sure the AMD execs would be like this dog
It makes sense when you use it with abbreviations for a limited set of predefined types in procedural languages. When you're dealing with object oriented programming with multiple large class libraries which need separate namespaces to avoid class name conflicts, and lots of your variables are objects that are class instantiations, it loses a lot of its effect in clarifying code. You're better off using longer more descriptive variable names.
So, as seems to be usual case here on slashdot, you are saying that your personally limited anecdotal evidence trumps the information provided by administration officials who presumably have country-wide statistics on rural and urban demographics and trends at their disposal. Sure.
If a locale has had a heavy smoker, the smell is insidious and getting rid of it incredibly difficult. You can paint over it and the nicotine and other poisons will bleed through the fresh paint. My sister moved into an apartment that was like that. We cleaned the walls with heavy cleansers and shampooed the carpets. A day later the smell started to come back. A week later we washed the walls again because of the yellow gunk oozing through the walls. Then we painted over it. It still took 6 months for the cigarette smell to become nearly unnoticeable. You think student housing is going to be that diligent? Fat chance. They would wash the walls at most once, paint over, and the smell and allergens would linger for years, maybe decades.
Well my mother did have a fall a few years ago while running to catch the bus. It caused a broken nose as well, as a deviated septum that aggravated her snoring. They told her they would need to re-break the nose to fix it, so she decided to not get it done. But that's just harder to diagnose because any nasal injury gets really inflamed and blocks the nasal passages. I'm pretty sure that if you had a broken ankle and went to the hospital Emergency and that they would X-ray it and set it properly. When she had another another fall recently, she had a concussion and hurt her wrist. They X-rayed the wrist (and fortunately found no breaks in spite of some osteoporosis).
OK, but it still comes down to: if your friend had an allergy to the smoke, he needed to remove himself from exposure to the allergen. What was the doctor supposed to do? There isn't a pill that his doctor could give him that would cure the problem. At "best", the doctor might prescribe corticosteroids that would suppress the immune system, mask the problem until it got a lot worse, and put him at risk of other infections.
If the university housing bureaucracy wouldn't let him move, that's the problem and not whether the medical system was public or private. It's unlikely a note from the doctor would have made much difference, there or in the USA. Of course he could have threatened to sue the university in the USA's lawsuit happy environment, but that also could have just gotten him fired if he hadn't been able prove he had a medical disability caused by the smoke. And good luck to a grad student affording a lawyer on that kind of income. So your anecdote, while a good hard luck story, when looked at in more detail does little to support your prejudice against a public health system.