I can't help but be reminded of a Theo de Raadt quote (though it was technically about BSD licenses): "We prefer 'free, do as you like, incorporate it into a baby mulching machine if that turns your crank.'"
I would say bad luck. After all, wouldn't the best strategy be, if you knew an attack were to occur, to fortify the position? Aircraft carriers = more interceptors = less Japanese planes making it to the ships.
No, because in my scenario, it doesn't make any more cancer cells than were there before (i.e. it doesn't increase the rate of mutation, or cause the mutated cells to reproduce faster), it just skews their placement.
Imagine a simple two sided scenario.
No naturally occuring cancer cells. No phone induced cancer cells. = No cancer cells.
One naturally occuring cell, zero phone cancer cells = one cancer cell, "randomly" placed.
One cancer cell divides into two. The one closer to the cell phone on the right, is stronger than the one on the left according to this hypothesis. The immune system manages to kill the one on the left, the right one is too strong. = One cancer cell, further right than initially
Repeat a million times = cancer on the side of the phone.
So, this hypothesis is consistent with a one sided cancer without having cell phones cause cancer. They might cause cancer to "move". Maybe one common mutation in brain cancer cells is a love for electromagnetic fields. Who knows?
I don't believe the theory that FDR knew beforehand (maybe that _an attack_ would happen, but not pearl harbor specifically), for the simple reason that there would be more logical ways to respond to that information. You could have the japanese attack without losing a tremendous amount of the pacific fleet. For example, give warning that an attack was coming, very quietly to the commanders in hawaii. They could even stage a manuever that day, which would have sailors at battle stations without tipping our hand (as far as the broken codes, intercepted messages, etc).
Basically, your post ignores some of the most import advances in the last 30 years of AI research, so it is hard to find credible. Here's a hint, hardly anyone uses rule based AI anymore. In fact, the exact behavoir you describe (drawing inferences) is the very basis for an expert system i.e. using an array of different facts and combining them to reason a conclusion. The only "rules" involved are universally laws of logic (e.g. if a is a subset of b, and b is a subset of c then a is also a subset of c, etc). Many expert systems are even capable of dealing with statistical logic (e.g. 49% of people are female, and 40% of people are brown haired, so given that A is a person, there's a 19.6% chance that A is a brown haired female).
You might say this is still not the same way human do it. We just _know_ these basic facts. Well no, we don't, we are taught them by our surroundings, often from _other people_.
No, goofball. The world is a complicated place. Just because you don't understand how it works, doesn't mean you have a flawed experiment.
Just because we don't know _why_ this happens doesn't mean the sample was biased. For example, it could be that for some reason, cancer cells are more likely to survive in strong cellular signals (unlikely, I know, but not impossible). Overtime, the ones closer to the phone would maybe live, and the ones farther away die-- one sided, but without the phone causing a one sided cancer. A flawed study is possible, but not the only possibility.
Well, they do have a similar solution for maintaining compatibility with the older systems, IIRC.
Apple considers their core competency to be making package deals. They make software and they make hardware, but they want them only to go together. They don't want to support someone else's platform for business reasons not engineering ones.
Sure, if you argue in complete disregard for historical evidence. This is what Karl Marx predicted would happen as an eventual result of industrialization. However, it did not. What happened is that _fewer_ people lived in poverty, because enhanced efficiency led to more wealth in general (the dynamic mechanism is complicated, but one way to look at it is, the poor don't get poorer overnight and instead "buy in" to the system). If you take this to a limit, like you did, where all work is done by robots, you realize that we will _all_ be better off. No one will work, we'll all own robots and so we will receive the benefits of post-industrial society without having to work.
I know computer people have always looked down on business, but the truth is a good business/economics program is no easier than computer science. Yes, there are "soft" programs at your local community college that are easier than learning how to program, because they are oriented at things people have more intuitively and have more leeway in-- people skills, pre-management science management, etc. However, a good business program that involves in depth economic theory (lots of math), statistical analysis (lots of math, algorithms), accounting (lots of math, algorithms), financial analysis and management (lots of math, all sorts of fuzzy logic models, incredibly complex systems modelled and then solved using algorithms like simplex) and management science (guess what, lots of math, lots of stats, and a lot of very interesting problems). Good business programs are built on science, not conjecture, which makes them every bit as real and hard to fake as computer science.
Well, even for other reasons than catching plagarism, making students explain code is a good idea. Firstly, it builds up their communications skills. Secondly, it catches shotgun debugs (I'll just twiddle everything around until it works). Thirdly, students shouldn't write "crazy code" that they can't explain. If they can't explain it, it isn't maintainable. Nobody is going to want to see that in real life. Teach them while they are young. Fourthly, it catches code that accidentally get right, as in, they misunderstand some concept, but manage a working solution anyway. Next time they won't be as lucky and by not making them explain code, you miss a chance to correct their error which wouldn't show up in your test cases.
If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries.
The whole reason you can get paid six figures to program is that not that many people know how to do it. If everyone who played games instead spent their time working as a programmer, programmers would get paid about $7 an hour.
It. won't. happen. The law basically exists to shield politicians from criticism. They can now dispatch lawyers at will to harass you. Sure, years down the roads a court will find that your speech was constitutionally protected, but by then, you'll probably have not a cent left to your name.
I've _never_ met a serious libertarian with those views. I don't recall the party having a platform plank about making attempted murder or felony reckless endangerment legal. Similarly, most libertarians have any answer to pollution. Pollution taxes.
For some reason, people laugh it off everytime it is presented, but think about this. If you save $5 (before taxes) for every gallon of oil your company dumps down the drain and then you are taxed $6 for every gallon of oil dumpage, why would you as a reasonable human being continue to dump oil?
I guess the reason nobody takes it seriously is that republicans want to "protect business" (by transferring costs from business to the citizenry in general) and the democrats are too caught up in their "evil business" thought (of course they'll dump the oil even though it costs them a $1 per gallon more than the other options -- they're EVIL).
While I agree with you on Somalia, your interpretation of Vietnam needs some very interesting interpretations of the facts to work.
Yes, Nixon did cite progress in peace negotiations as a reason for withdraw. However, this was because it was a reason that he could use without too much of a political hit. We had failed to really accomplish our objectives in Vietnam and there were more casualties every day. More than we had anticipated. We might not have been losing the war, but winning it looked impossible.
As far as your interpretation of Iraq: how long does it take to train a solider to the level of pre-war Iraqi forces? Not very. Even the Iraqi army, pre-war, wouldn't have been able to stop the insurgency.
I think the problem with Iraq is that we are fighting a highly unpopular (there and here) war, in a heavily armed country (look at gun ownership per capita in Iraq and consider that a large percent of those weapons are AKs), in urban battlefields, with borders that are proving near impossible to control.
Regardless of whether or not Mars is experiencing global warming, there might or might not be global warming on earth. Furthermore, the global warming might be caused by any number of natural or unnatural factors. Just because there is global warming on mars, does not mean that any global warming we experience here is natural.
The point is that if you don't spend the 2%, you don't GET the 30%. The problem is that people, including business people are too short sighted. At most, they are concerned with the bottom line one or two periods ahead. Even if over the span of five years, a "green building" will save the company money, you won't see it, because in the short run, it'll make the company appear worse than the competition, stock prices drop, etc etc. So, by mandating an increase in efficiency (which is technological feasible) we force everybody to do what, in the long run will be better for everyone both economically and ecologically. China, without accepting Kyoto, will be less likely to modernize, because Chinese firms are competing with other still non-modern Chinese firms. This is good for us, because it keeps them behind the curve.
You don't have to standardize the API. The API is just a library of commonly used classes, etc. Microsoft holds the patents on very few of the processes embodied in the API (and the vast majority of those live in the Microsoft namespace and are rarely touched). You can't patent something like an array, or converting from one character representation to the other. So, microsoft's patent portfolio would be useless to block, for example, mono development. They aren't using microsoft's copyrighted code. The only trademarked namespace is the above mentioned one (because it is the company's name). So what IP, exactly, would enable Microsoft to block further development of something like mono? I'm sure novell's lawyers thought about it long and hard, and they happen to have degrees in this sort of thing.
Furthermore, permitting interoperability is an exception in the current patent and DMCA regime.
In summary, it is indeed patented, but also standardized. As a result, licenses must be given on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner. That means they can't decide who gets to have a license and the license terms have to be the same for everyone. Furthermore, they have to follow ISO and ECMA's licensing rules, which prevents overly constrictive licensing. Furthermore, the companies involved have agreed to provide the licenses on a royalty free basis. That's right, they can't even charge a billion dollars for it.
Actually, this places it in almost the _exact same_ legal position as Java. Java is a standard, but Sun holds many patents on java technology. They've agreed to let anybody have a license, and not to charge royalties on people who build their own VMs.
Also, sorry for the double post, but it is worth noting that the CLI is, a standard. That's right, the bytecode is protected similarly to C#. So they standardized the wheel, pedals, engine, frame, gas tank, seats, and everything else... to sucker you into getting locked into one namespace which is essentially the air conditioner.
Who says C# has to target.NET? It could just as easily target all those java vms you are talking about. Heck, you could even make native code with it. Modern languages are seperate from their host platforms. That's why we have ironpython, jpython, java to natice code compilation, and gcc which can target many different instruction sets with many different languages.
On a somewhat similar note, I think technology is making the nation state more and more irrelevant. What are becoming more and more important are communities people choose to join, instead of mostly being born into.
Think about it. The web allows you to share information with people around the world, regardless of whether the information is artistic collaboration or state secrets. Anonymyzing layers and encryption provide the protection. Technology helps _avoid_ surveillance as much as the other posters pointed out that it helps to surveil. Soon, electronic money will become more foolproof and more widely established, so that it will become less coupled to the highly regulated and watched credit system. This could make taxation an incredibly difficult challenge for nations.
Most importantly, techonology has the ability to rid us of scarcity , and thus the control our nations hold over us as allocators of goods. Without getting into economic-political rhetoric, let me note that even free markets allocate scarcity, and scarcity can drives any group to war.
You see this all the time in the vicinity of colleges too. People are hanging out, on basically social occasions, but with gear in tow. I honestly don't think it is such a bad thing. It eliminates the need for tons of polite small talk, which no one really liked to start with, and you might just figure out that you have mutual interests.
Two people go to work on a group project for calculus, bringing laptops in tow to type up the report, use mathmatica, etc. Everyone is awhile they take a break. On one break, person A loads up some foo. Person B says "Oh, you're taking foo-ology? I'm a foo-ology major!" Person A: "Me too, what do you think of Prof Bar?"
Slashdot Mirror
I can't help but be reminded of a Theo de Raadt quote (though it was technically about BSD licenses):
"We prefer 'free, do as you like, incorporate it into a baby mulching machine if that turns your crank.'"
I would say bad luck. After all, wouldn't the best strategy be, if you knew an attack were to occur, to fortify the position? Aircraft carriers = more interceptors = less Japanese planes making it to the ships.
No, because in my scenario, it doesn't make any more cancer cells than were there before (i.e. it doesn't increase the rate of mutation, or cause the mutated cells to reproduce faster), it just skews their placement.
Imagine a simple two sided scenario.
No naturally occuring cancer cells. No phone induced cancer cells. = No cancer cells.
One naturally occuring cell, zero phone cancer cells = one cancer cell, "randomly" placed.
One cancer cell divides into two. The one closer to the cell phone on the right, is stronger than the one on the left according to this hypothesis. The immune system manages to kill the one on the left, the right one is too strong. = One cancer cell, further right than initially
Repeat a million times = cancer on the side of the phone.
So, this hypothesis is consistent with a one sided cancer without having cell phones cause cancer. They might cause cancer to "move". Maybe one common mutation in brain cancer cells is a love for electromagnetic fields. Who knows?
I don't believe the theory that FDR knew beforehand (maybe that _an attack_ would happen, but not pearl harbor specifically), for the simple reason that there would be more logical ways to respond to that information. You could have the japanese attack without losing a tremendous amount of the pacific fleet. For example, give warning that an attack was coming, very quietly to the commanders in hawaii. They could even stage a manuever that day, which would have sailors at battle stations without tipping our hand (as far as the broken codes, intercepted messages, etc).
Basically, your post ignores some of the most import advances in the last 30 years of AI research, so it is hard to find credible. Here's a hint, hardly anyone uses rule based AI anymore. In fact, the exact behavoir you describe (drawing inferences) is the very basis for an expert system i.e. using an array of different facts and combining them to reason a conclusion. The only "rules" involved are universally laws of logic (e.g. if a is a subset of b, and b is a subset of c then a is also a subset of c, etc). Many expert systems are even capable of dealing with statistical logic (e.g. 49% of people are female, and 40% of people are brown haired, so given that A is a person, there's a 19.6% chance that A is a brown haired female).
You might say this is still not the same way human do it. We just _know_ these basic facts. Well no, we don't, we are taught them by our surroundings, often from _other people_.
No, goofball. The world is a complicated place. Just because you don't understand how it works, doesn't mean you have a flawed experiment.
Just because we don't know _why_ this happens doesn't mean the sample was biased. For example, it could be that for some reason, cancer cells are more likely to survive in strong cellular signals (unlikely, I know, but not impossible). Overtime, the ones closer to the phone would maybe live, and the ones farther away die-- one sided, but without the phone causing a one sided cancer. A flawed study is possible, but not the only possibility.
Well, they do have a similar solution for maintaining compatibility with the older systems, IIRC.
Apple considers their core competency to be making package deals. They make software and they make hardware, but they want them only to go together. They don't want to support someone else's platform for business reasons not engineering ones.
RISC can equal fewer transistors. It doesn't have to. It also tends to increase the "usage" each transistor gets, which leads to more heat/transistor.
Sure, if you argue in complete disregard for historical evidence. This is what Karl Marx predicted would happen as an eventual result of industrialization. However, it did not. What happened is that _fewer_ people lived in poverty, because enhanced efficiency led to more wealth in general (the dynamic mechanism is complicated, but one way to look at it is, the poor don't get poorer overnight and instead "buy in" to the system). If you take this to a limit, like you did, where all work is done by robots, you realize that we will _all_ be better off. No one will work, we'll all own robots and so we will receive the benefits of post-industrial society without having to work.
I know computer people have always looked down on business, but the truth is a good business/economics program is no easier than computer science. Yes, there are "soft" programs at your local community college that are easier than learning how to program, because they are oriented at things people have more intuitively and have more leeway in-- people skills, pre-management science management, etc. However, a good business program that involves in depth economic theory (lots of math), statistical analysis (lots of math, algorithms), accounting (lots of math, algorithms), financial analysis and management (lots of math, all sorts of fuzzy logic models, incredibly complex systems modelled and then solved using algorithms like simplex) and management science (guess what, lots of math, lots of stats, and a lot of very interesting problems). Good business programs are built on science, not conjecture, which makes them every bit as real and hard to fake as computer science.
Well, even for other reasons than catching plagarism, making students explain code is a good idea. Firstly, it builds up their communications skills. Secondly, it catches shotgun debugs (I'll just twiddle everything around until it works). Thirdly, students shouldn't write "crazy code" that they can't explain. If they can't explain it, it isn't maintainable. Nobody is going to want to see that in real life. Teach them while they are young. Fourthly, it catches code that accidentally get right, as in, they misunderstand some concept, but manage a working solution anyway. Next time they won't be as lucky and by not making them explain code, you miss a chance to correct their error which wouldn't show up in your test cases.
If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries.
The whole reason you can get paid six figures to program is that not that many people know how to do it. If everyone who played games instead spent their time working as a programmer, programmers would get paid about $7 an hour.
It. won't. happen. The law basically exists to shield politicians from criticism. They can now dispatch lawyers at will to harass you. Sure, years down the roads a court will find that your speech was constitutionally protected, but by then, you'll probably have not a cent left to your name.
I've _never_ met a serious libertarian with those views. I don't recall the party having a platform plank about making attempted murder or felony reckless endangerment legal. Similarly, most libertarians have any answer to pollution. Pollution taxes.
For some reason, people laugh it off everytime it is presented, but think about this. If you save $5 (before taxes) for every gallon of oil your company dumps down the drain and then you are taxed $6 for every gallon of oil dumpage, why would you as a reasonable human being continue to dump oil?
I guess the reason nobody takes it seriously is that republicans want to "protect business" (by transferring costs from business to the citizenry in general) and the democrats are too caught up in their "evil business" thought (of course they'll dump the oil even though it costs them a $1 per gallon more than the other options -- they're EVIL).
While I agree with you on Somalia, your interpretation of Vietnam needs some very interesting interpretations of the facts to work.
Yes, Nixon did cite progress in peace negotiations as a reason for withdraw. However, this was because it was a reason that he could use without too much of a political hit. We had failed to really accomplish our objectives in Vietnam and there were more casualties every day. More than we had anticipated. We might not have been losing the war, but winning it looked impossible.
As far as your interpretation of Iraq: how long does it take to train a solider to the level of pre-war Iraqi forces? Not very. Even the Iraqi army, pre-war, wouldn't have been able to stop the insurgency.
I think the problem with Iraq is that we are fighting a highly unpopular (there and here) war, in a heavily armed country (look at gun ownership per capita in Iraq and consider that a large percent of those weapons are AKs), in urban battlefields, with borders that are proving near impossible to control.
Regardless of whether or not Mars is experiencing global warming, there might or might not be global warming on earth. Furthermore, the global warming might be caused by any number of natural or unnatural factors. Just because there is global warming on mars, does not mean that any global warming we experience here is natural.
The point is that if you don't spend the 2%, you don't GET the 30%. The problem is that people, including business people are too short sighted. At most, they are concerned with the bottom line one or two periods ahead. Even if over the span of five years, a "green building" will save the company money, you won't see it, because in the short run, it'll make the company appear worse than the competition, stock prices drop, etc etc. So, by mandating an increase in efficiency (which is technological feasible) we force everybody to do what, in the long run will be better for everyone both economically and ecologically. China, without accepting Kyoto, will be less likely to modernize, because Chinese firms are competing with other still non-modern Chinese firms. This is good for us, because it keeps them behind the curve.
I'm addicted to fire, electricity, housing, cooked food and sharpened metal tools.
Or maybe sometimes technology improves your life so you use it.
Addiction is when something makes your life worse, but you keep using it because you are irrationally drawn to it.
You don't have to standardize the API. The API is just a library of commonly used classes, etc. Microsoft holds the patents on very few of the processes embodied in the API (and the vast majority of those live in the Microsoft namespace and are rarely touched). You can't patent something like an array, or converting from one character representation to the other. So, microsoft's patent portfolio would be useless to block, for example, mono development. They aren't using microsoft's copyrighted code. The only trademarked namespace is the above mentioned one (because it is the company's name). So what IP, exactly, would enable Microsoft to block further development of something like mono? I'm sure novell's lawyers thought about it long and hard, and they happen to have degrees in this sort of thing.
Furthermore, permitting interoperability is an exception in the current patent and DMCA regime.
Please know what you are talking about before posting.
In summary, it is indeed patented, but also standardized. As a result, licenses must be given on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner. That means they can't decide who gets to have a license and the license terms have to be the same for everyone. Furthermore, they have to follow ISO and ECMA's licensing rules, which prevents overly constrictive licensing. Furthermore, the companies involved have agreed to provide the licenses on a royalty free basis. That's right, they can't even charge a billion dollars for it.
Actually, this places it in almost the _exact same_ legal position as Java. Java is a standard, but Sun holds many patents on java technology. They've agreed to let anybody have a license, and not to charge royalties on people who build their own VMs.
Also, sorry for the double post, but it is worth noting that the CLI is, a standard. That's right, the bytecode is protected similarly to C#. So they standardized the wheel, pedals, engine, frame, gas tank, seats, and everything else... to sucker you into getting locked into one namespace which is essentially the air conditioner.
Diabolical.
Who says C# has to target .NET? It could just as easily target all those java vms you are talking about. Heck, you could even make native code with it. Modern languages are seperate from their host platforms. That's why we have ironpython, jpython, java to natice code compilation, and gcc which can target many different instruction sets with many different languages.
.. for doing his job.
On a somewhat similar note, I think technology is making the nation state more and more irrelevant. What are becoming more and more important are communities people choose to join, instead of mostly being born into.
Think about it. The web allows you to share information with people around the world, regardless of whether the information is artistic collaboration or state secrets. Anonymyzing layers and encryption provide the protection. Technology helps _avoid_ surveillance as much as the other posters pointed out that it helps to surveil. Soon, electronic money will become more foolproof and more widely established, so that it will become less coupled to the highly regulated and watched credit system. This could make taxation an incredibly difficult challenge for nations.
Most importantly, techonology has the ability to rid us of scarcity , and thus the control our nations hold over us as allocators of goods. Without getting into economic-political rhetoric, let me note that even free markets allocate scarcity, and scarcity can drives any group to war.
You see this all the time in the vicinity of colleges too. People are hanging out, on basically social occasions, but with gear in tow. I honestly don't think it is such a bad thing. It eliminates the need for tons of polite small talk, which no one really liked to start with, and you might just figure out that you have mutual interests.
Two people go to work on a group project for calculus, bringing laptops in tow to type up the report, use mathmatica, etc. Everyone is awhile they take a break. On one break, person A loads up some foo. Person B says "Oh, you're taking foo-ology? I'm a foo-ology major!" Person A: "Me too, what do you think of Prof Bar?"