Okay, well, the root post of this discussion - the one I first responded to, said:
Conway's game of life creatures became sentient. They discovered they are made of cells. They said "Look, THE INFINITESIMAL CELL is always created from NOTHING. If things happens FROM NOTHING, there is NO NEED FOR A CREATOR, so THERE IS NO CREATOR, and besides NOBODY ever witnessed something different THAN THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES. How smart are we?"
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
My response was to that scenario. If you're going to stop engaging with that scenario, do so explicitly, rather than trying to sneak in assumptions that are impossible in that scenario just to score points.
Convict him, put him in prison, let him start serving out his sentence, vacate conviction based on venue.
Re-charge him in the proper venue, put him in jail without bail, let him stew for a few years. Then try him again, convict him again, put him in prison for a year or so again. Then vacate THAT conviction based on another technicality.
Then re-charge him again, put him in jail without bail again, let him stew for a few more years while you set up a third trial. Then try him again, convict him again, put him in prison for awhile again, then vacate THAT conviction...
I wonder how long you could play judiciary ping-pong with someone you REALLY didn't like?
Not if he gave them free willl, meaning even the ability to do things that were "outside" of the creator's will/temperament.
Can you explain what that means within the context of "THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES", please? Because otherwise you are making zero sense whatsoever.
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
Well, what else were they supposed to do? They're DETERMINISTIC. Their entire existence is based on THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES, right?
So if the guy at the PC is butthurt, maybe he should have picked different rules or different initial conditions, right? Because once you hit 'run' you can't really blame the process for giving you its output.
Because those are the only two possible choices we could make here.
Unfortunately, yes. "Over-regulated bureaucratic tyranny" and "Unregulated plutocratic tyranny" are both strong attractors in our economic phase-space. Any attempt to compromise between them is basically flipping a coin to see which one you wind up with - and if the coin lands on-edge you wind up with an over-regulated bureaucratic tyranny serving unregulated plutocratic masters.
I'm saying people will generally treat Boxer B as if he never fought, compared to how they treat Boxer A.
Maybe you treat your friends, your allies, and your heroes like their effort matters, but for everyone else, the Fundamental Attribution Error is the fallback of choice.
When you are depressed you are supposed to have lower mental activity, and yet some of the most brilliant people have been known to be clinically depressed [citation not needed]. So then, if depression sometimes comes with brilliance, what gives?
Here's a weird analogy that seems roughly accurate:
Being depressed is like being perpetually out of gas. You just can't *do* anything.
Now, your average person's brain is a typical Honda 90 horsepower engine. Good gas mileage, terrible performance.
Your average genius's brain is like a Ferrari V8 - super-high performance, but at the cost of needing a LOT more fuel.
If everyone's getting the same amount of emotional 'fuel' from their friends, family, culture, society etc., who's going to run out first?
You clearly have a knack for doing outrageous, dangerous, or even illegal things and getting away with them, while others would get pinched.
What do you attribute that to? Why do you think you've managed to violate so many laws, customs, and mores and get away with it, compared to your average resident of San Quentin?
And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.
- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.
See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.
Wait, the internet is back to being like a truck? I thought it was a series of tubes.
what if I told you that they don't even do most of the spying via these phone records, the real surveillance was all being done with satellites and radar, including a technology called TAMI or Thought Amplifier and Mind Interface, which was patented in 1974, and deployed in all radar in 1976? Today they are using this during black operations to extract your thought, passcodes, images, and sound from your mind, humming to the tune of 1.4 terabytes per second, and this is all being stored in bits and pieces in the DODs databases.
What if I told you that the mechanism you've described is physically impossible at the ranges you've described? Would you invoke some kind of captured alien technology to double-down on your claim?
You should watch "Mirage Men". The sorts of crazy that you're propagating has been proven, time and again, to come from the very government offices you're claiming are reading our thoughts.
Also, let's say you're somehow right, there's physical laws we don't know about, and this sort of Fortean weirdness is possible.
None of it ever ended. You have never had privacy. The 4th amendment doesn't mean shit to these losers. They are watching you in your home right now, listening to everything you think and do. Time to start from scratch.. and we need a new investigation to find out how far this really goes.
If anything you're saying were true, starting from scratch would be IMPOSSIBLE. The moment anyone even THOUGHT of a solution, the very thought would be thrown into that DOD database and people would move to stop it, BEFORE THE THOUGHT COULD EVEN BE COMMUNICATED.
If you're right, then those evil government mind-readers must WANT you to say what you just said, because if you didn't, they would have read your intent to post this message and moved to stop you.
Please follow through the implications of your own claims more thoroughly, and ask yourself "if this was true, would the world look like this?".
URANIUM FISSION accidents are expensive. There are plenty of fail-safe, non-weaponizable options for nuclear power that we could adopt at scale within a decade, if people would stop being afraid of the word "nuclear".
Whatever you love doing, do more of it. Then just be sensitive, and maybe a little aggressive, about pursuing leads that naturally arise from your avocation
> This one premise, though, has shown zero chance of happening. Those in congress critical of the NSA's behavior mostly seem interested in using it as an attack chip for the republican party in the next couple elections, and so leaving the power in the executive plays to their needs.
I would support Beta 100% if they gave me the ability to moderate posts "+1 Depressing".
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, well, the root post of this discussion - the one I first responded to, said:
Conway's game of life creatures became sentient.
They discovered they are made of cells.
They said "Look, THE INFINITESIMAL CELL is always created from NOTHING. If things happens FROM NOTHING, there is NO NEED FOR A CREATOR, so THERE IS NO CREATOR, and besides NOBODY ever witnessed something different THAN THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES. How smart are we?"
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
My response was to that scenario. If you're going to stop engaging with that scenario, do so explicitly, rather than trying to sneak in assumptions that are impossible in that scenario just to score points.
Warning: you're just going to make people double down on their previously-held belief:
http://synapse.princeton.edu/~...
Then it wouldn't be Conway's Game of Life, would it?
Hmm. Overly-cynical thought:
Convict him, put him in prison, let him start serving out his sentence, vacate conviction based on venue.
Re-charge him in the proper venue, put him in jail without bail, let him stew for a few years. Then try him again, convict him again, put him in prison for a year or so again. Then vacate THAT conviction based on another technicality.
Then re-charge him again, put him in jail without bail again, let him stew for a few more years while you set up a third trial. Then try him again, convict him again, put him in prison for awhile again, then vacate THAT conviction...
I wonder how long you could play judiciary ping-pong with someone you REALLY didn't like?
Not if he gave them free willl, meaning even the ability to do things that were "outside" of the creator's will/temperament.
Can you explain what that means within the context of "THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES", please? Because otherwise you are making zero sense whatsoever.
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
Well, what else were they supposed to do? They're DETERMINISTIC. Their entire existence is based on THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES, right?
So if the guy at the PC is butthurt, maybe he should have picked different rules or different initial conditions, right? Because once you hit 'run' you can't really blame the process for giving you its output.
Because those are the only two possible choices we could make here.
Unfortunately, yes. "Over-regulated bureaucratic tyranny" and "Unregulated plutocratic tyranny" are both strong attractors in our economic phase-space. Any attempt to compromise between them is basically flipping a coin to see which one you wind up with - and if the coin lands on-edge you wind up with an over-regulated bureaucratic tyranny serving unregulated plutocratic masters.
Good luck!
So, you are saying boxer B never fought?
I'm saying people will generally treat Boxer B as if he never fought, compared to how they treat Boxer A.
Maybe you treat your friends, your allies, and your heroes like their effort matters, but for everyone else, the Fundamental Attribution Error is the fallback of choice.
A fight is not defined by the outcome but by the effort.
No it isn't. Not to people outside the fight, anyway.
When you are depressed you are supposed to have lower mental activity, and yet some of the most brilliant people have been known to be clinically depressed [citation not needed]. So then, if depression sometimes comes with brilliance, what gives?
Here's a weird analogy that seems roughly accurate:
Being depressed is like being perpetually out of gas. You just can't *do* anything.
Now, your average person's brain is a typical Honda 90 horsepower engine. Good gas mileage, terrible performance.
Your average genius's brain is like a Ferrari V8 - super-high performance, but at the cost of needing a LOT more fuel.
If everyone's getting the same amount of emotional 'fuel' from their friends, family, culture, society etc., who's going to run out first?
Can you please convince ESR to change his name to Eric CloseParens? It's been bugging me for like, decades.
especially when the current method of revealing software trade secrets is "right-click, select 'decompile'".
So what happens when the flywheel shatters at high speed?
You clearly have a knack for doing outrageous, dangerous, or even illegal things and getting away with them, while others would get pinched.
What do you attribute that to? Why do you think you've managed to violate so many laws, customs, and mores and get away with it, compared to your average resident of San Quentin?
And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.
- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.
See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.
Wait, the internet is back to being like a truck? I thought it was a series of tubes.
Do you think that people who disapprove of science are going to let their kids watch a science show?
...I'm being trolled, right?
what if I told you that they don't even do most of the spying via these phone records, the real surveillance was all being done with satellites and radar, including a technology called TAMI or Thought Amplifier and Mind Interface, which was patented in 1974, and deployed in all radar in 1976? Today they are using this during black operations to extract your thought, passcodes, images, and sound from your mind, humming to the tune of 1.4 terabytes per second, and this is all being stored in bits and pieces in the DODs databases.
What if I told you that the mechanism you've described is physically impossible at the ranges you've described? Would you invoke some kind of captured alien technology to double-down on your claim?
You should watch "Mirage Men". The sorts of crazy that you're propagating has been proven, time and again, to come from the very government offices you're claiming are reading our thoughts.
Also, let's say you're somehow right, there's physical laws we don't know about, and this sort of Fortean weirdness is possible.
None of it ever ended. You have never had privacy. The 4th amendment doesn't mean shit to these losers. They are watching you in your home right now, listening to everything you think and do. Time to start from scratch .. and we need a new investigation to find out how far this really goes.
If anything you're saying were true, starting from scratch would be IMPOSSIBLE. The moment anyone even THOUGHT of a solution, the very thought would be thrown into that DOD database and people would move to stop it, BEFORE THE THOUGHT COULD EVEN BE COMMUNICATED.
If you're right, then those evil government mind-readers must WANT you to say what you just said, because if you didn't, they would have read your intent to post this message and moved to stop you.
Please follow through the implications of your own claims more thoroughly, and ask yourself "if this was true, would the world look like this?".
Nuclear accidents are expensive.
Stop that.
URANIUM FISSION accidents are expensive. There are plenty of fail-safe, non-weaponizable options for nuclear power that we could adopt at scale within a decade, if people would stop being afraid of the word "nuclear".
Whatever you love doing, do more of it. Then just be sensitive, and maybe a little aggressive, about pursuing leads that naturally arise from your avocation
But first, read this article: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/12/rejection-via-advice.html
Which times? How do you tell?
Sometimes when bad things happen, the problem is that the world isn't fair.
How do you tell which is which? Or is the just-world fallacy just a nice, comforting way for lucky people to feel better about themselves?
No, but I reached "beam of pure anti-matter" and started reading it in Richard O'Brien's voice.
just stop pointing your camera at me. I don't care if it's showing a red light or not. She was being obnoxious, and wouldn't stop when asked.
I thought the article said she wasn't recording, just showing it to someone else?
> This one premise, though, has shown zero chance of happening. Those in congress critical of the NSA's behavior mostly seem interested in using it as an attack chip for the republican party in the next couple elections, and so leaving the power in the executive plays to their needs.
I would support Beta 100% if they gave me the ability to moderate posts "+1 Depressing".
While we're waiting for fusion to take off, two or three good-sized Thorium reactors should handle the power needs just fine.