Aside from that "Social Reaction" ought not define the merits of an action.
Where did I say that? I simply observed that the analogy fails because the reactions aren't similar enough. You extrapolated that to mean that one was good and the other was not, not me.
In America, the grey area the Google cache is operating in is pretty white, as they are protected by the DMCA. Yes, protected; the DMCA has several provisions in it and they aren't uniformly evil. (I'd actually hate to see this one go, it protects not just Google but your ISP and a number of other parts of the network that need to be able to not care which of the terabytes they are transmitting are infringement.)
If Italy doesn't have something similar, then I'd say at the very least, a lawsuit and subsequent actions are plausible. Lawmakers are about twenty years behind the times by my estimate and they won't start really realizing what the net means for another decade at least.
Due to the chaotic nature of the sound coming out, I doubt you could make the fan reliable enough. For instance, you can't even hold the speed constant due to unavoidable and unpredictable variations in voltage; you can keep the speed changes below human detection but one of the primary uses of interferometry is increased sensitivity and that's not a mathematical artifact of no interest to humans, it's real.
If the cancellation isn't almost entirely dead on, it will do one or both of "make the sound louder" and "make the sound annoying in new and spectacular ways", with exciting new rising and falling whines and phasing effects that would be the envey of many a techno DJ.
Basically, you can't guess the frequencies coming out of the fan a priori accurately enough for cancellation purposes. Darn near any other purpose you could feasibly want to know the frequency distribution of the fan for, but not that one. It's a hard problem.
Are you referring to the US who have been shamelessly taking credit for beating the nazis for 60 years and going?
I don't know. Does having the number one military in the world count as having "no force"?
This really isn't an opportunity to score cheap political points. I'm making empirical observations in the realm of game theory; forcing your political opinions inappropriately into the mix makes you look irrational and incapable of holding an adult conversation... at best.
You are, fortunately for you, in good company.
Kennedy then showed that you can have will AND force, yet decide not to go to war and yet still have a strong bargaining position.
See, you've rather missed the point. Suppose Kennedy didn't have force. In that case, he never would have had the opportunity to "choose" not to go to war. The enemy would simply have chosen for him.
Having force doesn't mean you have to use it. But if you don't have it, it does mean you don't have the option, and you are at the mercy of those who do. (Or, in the case of the continent I mentioned, you are stuck negotiating only with carrots and not with sticks, and regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the respective positions, that's not a strong position.)
The base problem with this article is the author actually believes you can put a dollar value on life.
Actually, that's not what he bases his article on and I see a lot of people making this same mistake.
What the dollar value quoted in the article is based on, if you read carefully, is actual scientific study of how people value their own lives. It is apparently a reasonably stable number (anything that limited to a single factor of magnitude in this context sounds stable to me).
In other words, people strongly believe that their life has a value and they will make decisions based on that value.
You can correctly observe that this doesn't prove they are correct, or a number of other things, but the empirical fact is that people consistently behave as if the life they live has a concrete value. If they believed it had infinite value, they would always take any degree of safety over money... but they don't. Neither do you, unless you have not ridden any motor vehicles lately or done a number of other things that are more dangerous then other activities.
Um, TheFlyingGoat, that's not the author's opinion, that's an empirical observation of what people do. While you are welcome to question the reasoning or the rationality, if you want to question the reality, you'd better produce your own study that contradicts it.
They also fail to take into account that the safety increase is not just for that individual, but also for everyone they care about.
No, the surveyed people fail to take that into account, on average.
I think you need to learn more about econometrics and how science works before firing your mouth off. Why not challenge the satire, which you're supposed to do anyhow, or take the time to actually learn what science has produced, instead of thinking you're so smart that you know better? You aren't smarter then science and you don't know better. You're just flat wrong.
You say that like it's a joke, but there's nearly an entire continent right now that thinks it can devote nearly 0% of its resources to its military, yet field a respectable diplomat team... apparently without the slightest clue that without anything to back up those diplomats (neither will nor force), they can accomplish virtually nothing that wouldn't have happened anyhow.'
If such people would "play games" (actually, "simulations"), they might learn how impotent that combination is. Instead, they persist in self-delusion (facilitated by a healthy dose of taking inappropriate credit), and wonder why those they despise for having military might and will do so much better then them in the real world.
(Note I say this independent of which side's policies you agree with; no will + no force = no bargaining position, except the threat of talking your opponent to death; this is basically empirical fact, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the bargainers. The "bad guys" have won a lot of negotiations throughout history.)
Yeah, and guess how much of that time was comfortable for current homo sapiens.
You're talking about the only macroscopic species that has tropical jungle dwellers and Eskimos, who can freely breed with each other.
Eskimos dwell at the bottom of our range, but I'd lay money we could go up another ten or twenty average degrees on the tropical side (albeit possibly with a generation or two of adaptation). (Also note that doesn't mean the entire globe going up 20 degrees, just a particular habitat.)
It seems to me there's a dual standard for prior art: If you want to invalidate a patent, you must show that someone did essentially the exact thing covered in the patent. This is generally quite hard, because generally the patent will have enough detail that everything anyone comes up with is just a little bit off.
On the other hand, when it comes time to enforce the patent, anything that looks vaguely like the patent is forbidden.
So, you could build a Direct-To-CD system with technology pre-dating the patent that isn't quite like the one in the patent, and even if you could prove that system was used for that purpose before the patent was filed, it would not invalidate the patent if shown as prior art. On the other hand, try to use that system today and you'll get sued.... you might win, but you'll probably lose.
Someday, I hope to see a defense to the tune of "I was using this system before the patent" for a system like the one described in the previous paragraph, and see what happens to the patent then when the two conflicting standards both come into play at once.
(Of course, there's a reason the patents are broad: A narrow view of these patents would be almost impossible to infringe, rendering the Patent Office nearly meaningless, and that's anathema to a bureaucracy.)
No it's not. (Complete with actual pictures, too.)
This is why I don't put much stock in your rather popular argument; it's based on misinformation and often flat-out lies about the dangers of fission, based on 1950s horror movies and decades of public ignorance.
It's just radiation, you know, a natural thing we're all exposed to all the time, not a malicious, intelligent, life-destroying golem. It's time we outgrew our childish fears and starting examing the actual, you know, facts.
...until some clever dude with a 747 decides it'd be fun to aerosolize that 1kg in an explosion.
And we hold our breath in anticipation as....
absolutely nothing happens.
People, it may be "radioactive waste", but it's only radioactive waste! 1 kg is not a significant amount delivered that way.
You are just perpetuating those downright evil myths about radioactivity and radioactive waste that is preventing all rational progress in this area. To hear people talk, radioactive waste is billions or trillions of times more toxic then the nasties routinely produced by, hell, farting!, and will magically seek you out and jump you in the night, probably targetting Your Children for extra special treatment.
It's just a moderately nasty form of waste; there's other forms which are much worse, pound for pound. It's not even close to "the most toxic substance on Earth". Radioactivity is just radioactivity, not a malicious force intelligently hellbent on seeking out and destroying all humans.
We will have to wait for our robotic overlords for that day.
You can equally sensibly interpret the submitter's statement as an observation that we are not evolved for the civilization we live in, because in terms of "number of generations" since civilization (especially 20th and 21st century civilization), it hasn't been anywhere near enough, plus there has been a "lack" of selection pressures in many cases.
(It's not quite that bad because our civilization has evolved to match us, but it's still not perfect; for instance, you can blame "lack of willpower" for the current obesity problem all you want, but in a very real way the blame lies equally on the fact that many common body metabolisms and brains are not adapted for the food in our civilization.)
I'm reading the book right now. I'm about 2/3s of the way through, so I haven't seen everything you're referring to but my memory is significantly fresher.
- The studio asked Leonard Nimoy if he would consider plastic surgery to have his ears pointed for the show. He refused.
The ears were quite painful, but this was a joke. Nimoy actually seriously considered it briefly, before realizing it was a joke as the jokester kept making it sillier and sillier.
- The saucer section was said to be designed to separate from the rest of the ship. (Though this wasn't shown until either one of the TNG episodes or a TNG movie. I'm getting old, so I can't remember which.:-) )
Yep, the design goes back to TOS. It actually happened in both the Pilot episode of TNG, and the movie Generations, twice (in the movie, "once" in time, due to Another Fucking Time Travel Plot).
How fortunate, then, that Solar Sails rely on Newtonian-style momentum-based physics, and the "laws" of thermodynamics don't apply. (And how unfortunate for the misguided author of that paper.)
(Note: "don't apply" here means simply that we aren't dealing with heat, not that Solar Sails somehow violate those laws.)
Note that I now don't respect not because you don't have your multiplication tables memorized, but that you feel ignorance is something that needs to be defended, rather then corrected. One of my favorite aspects of the (true) hacker community is how little this "defense by appeal to mediocrity" is tolerated.
I agree. It ought to be called Quantum Intrusion Detection, because that's what it is. It doesn't encrypt, nor does it protect anybody from intercepting the message.
All it can do is tell you if your message is being intercepted. Now, this is useful information, since you might decide to quickly stop transmitting, and if you're fast enough on the draw and using conventional encryption on top of your Quantum Intrusion Detection, then you'll probably not give enough data to the intruder for them to feasibly decrypt anything.
But note that if you want the protection of encryption so the intruder doesn't get plaintext, you still need to use conventional encryption.
Also note that some wild-eyed Slashdot types who's understanding of technology is buzzword-deep sometimes make the claim that Quantum Computing might crack Quantum Encryption. Nope, because "Encryption" isn't. And the very nature of the Intrusion Detection is that you can't get around it, no matter how clever you are.
The worst part of this stupid naming is that some day we probably really will have some sort of encryption that uses QM, and then what we will call that?
Anyways, it is apparently far too late to do anything about this misnomer, but it's one of the most pernicious misnomers I've seen in modern times. Whoever named this technology should have their relevant degrees stripped.
Re:Gotta love the 21th Century
on
Nano Body Building
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You miss the point completely. The point is that if a pill could indeed do those things, then who cares? Arguing "well what if the pill can't do those things?", while a potentially interesting and fruitful discussion on its own, does nothing to answer my post, which assumes that a pill can do those things from the get-go.
When a post has the form "If A, then B", it accomplishes nothing to argue "What if not A?"; this is why a logical implication is considered true automatically if the antecedent is false. If not A, then logically, my post is sound anyhow!
OK, IAAP (I am a physicist) and I'll tell you flat out that second order effects only become really significant when the radiation is VERY powerful, and can cause nasty showers.
I'll give you the same line: Which part of "sometimes" don't you understand? I was specifically thinking of space travel, not people on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from that "Social Reaction" ought not define the merits of an action.
Where did I say that? I simply observed that the analogy fails because the reactions aren't similar enough. You extrapolated that to mean that one was good and the other was not, not me.
In America, the grey area the Google cache is operating in is pretty white, as they are protected by the DMCA. Yes, protected; the DMCA has several provisions in it and they aren't uniformly evil. (I'd actually hate to see this one go, it protects not just Google but your ISP and a number of other parts of the network that need to be able to not care which of the terabytes they are transmitting are infringement.)
If Italy doesn't have something similar, then I'd say at the very least, a lawsuit and subsequent actions are plausible. Lawmakers are about twenty years behind the times by my estimate and they won't start really realizing what the net means for another decade at least.
Due to the chaotic nature of the sound coming out, I doubt you could make the fan reliable enough. For instance, you can't even hold the speed constant due to unavoidable and unpredictable variations in voltage; you can keep the speed changes below human detection but one of the primary uses of interferometry is increased sensitivity and that's not a mathematical artifact of no interest to humans, it's real.
If the cancellation isn't almost entirely dead on, it will do one or both of "make the sound louder" and "make the sound annoying in new and spectacular ways", with exciting new rising and falling whines and phasing effects that would be the envey of many a techno DJ.
Basically, you can't guess the frequencies coming out of the fan a priori accurately enough for cancellation purposes. Darn near any other purpose you could feasibly want to know the frequency distribution of the fan for, but not that one. It's a hard problem.
Compare the social reaction you'll get for "Bobby's in jail for dealing drugs" to "Bobby's in jail for downloading music."
Rightly or wrongly, they're not comparable in current society, so I think your analogy is inapplicable.
Are you referring to the US who have been shamelessly taking credit for beating the nazis for 60 years and going?
I don't know. Does having the number one military in the world count as having "no force"?
This really isn't an opportunity to score cheap political points. I'm making empirical observations in the realm of game theory; forcing your political opinions inappropriately into the mix makes you look irrational and incapable of holding an adult conversation... at best.
You are, fortunately for you, in good company.
Kennedy then showed that you can have will AND force, yet decide not to go to war and yet still have a strong bargaining position.
See, you've rather missed the point. Suppose Kennedy didn't have force. In that case, he never would have had the opportunity to "choose" not to go to war. The enemy would simply have chosen for him.
Having force doesn't mean you have to use it. But if you don't have it, it does mean you don't have the option, and you are at the mercy of those who do. (Or, in the case of the continent I mentioned, you are stuck negotiating only with carrots and not with sticks, and regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the respective positions, that's not a strong position.)
The base problem with this article is the author actually believes you can put a dollar value on life.
Actually, that's not what he bases his article on and I see a lot of people making this same mistake.
What the dollar value quoted in the article is based on, if you read carefully, is actual scientific study of how people value their own lives. It is apparently a reasonably stable number (anything that limited to a single factor of magnitude in this context sounds stable to me).
In other words, people strongly believe that their life has a value and they will make decisions based on that value.
You can correctly observe that this doesn't prove they are correct, or a number of other things, but the empirical fact is that people consistently behave as if the life they live has a concrete value. If they believed it had infinite value, they would always take any degree of safety over money... but they don't. Neither do you, unless you have not ridden any motor vehicles lately or done a number of other things that are more dangerous then other activities.
Um, TheFlyingGoat, that's not the author's opinion, that's an empirical observation of what people do. While you are welcome to question the reasoning or the rationality, if you want to question the reality, you'd better produce your own study that contradicts it.
They also fail to take into account that the safety increase is not just for that individual, but also for everyone they care about.
No, the surveyed people fail to take that into account, on average.
I think you need to learn more about econometrics and how science works before firing your mouth off. Why not challenge the satire, which you're supposed to do anyhow, or take the time to actually learn what science has produced, instead of thinking you're so smart that you know better? You aren't smarter then science and you don't know better. You're just flat wrong.
You say that like it's a joke, but there's nearly an entire continent right now that thinks it can devote nearly 0% of its resources to its military, yet field a respectable diplomat team... apparently without the slightest clue that without anything to back up those diplomats (neither will nor force), they can accomplish virtually nothing that wouldn't have happened anyhow.'
If such people would "play games" (actually, "simulations"), they might learn how impotent that combination is. Instead, they persist in self-delusion (facilitated by a healthy dose of taking inappropriate credit), and wonder why those they despise for having military might and will do so much better then them in the real world.
(Note I say this independent of which side's policies you agree with; no will + no force = no bargaining position, except the threat of talking your opponent to death; this is basically empirical fact, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the bargainers. The "bad guys" have won a lot of negotiations throughout history.)
Yeah, and guess how much of that time was comfortable for current homo sapiens.
You're talking about the only macroscopic species that has tropical jungle dwellers and Eskimos, who can freely breed with each other.
Eskimos dwell at the bottom of our range, but I'd lay money we could go up another ten or twenty average degrees on the tropical side (albeit possibly with a generation or two of adaptation). (Also note that doesn't mean the entire globe going up 20 degrees, just a particular habitat.)
It seems to me there's a dual standard for prior art: If you want to invalidate a patent, you must show that someone did essentially the exact thing covered in the patent. This is generally quite hard, because generally the patent will have enough detail that everything anyone comes up with is just a little bit off.
On the other hand, when it comes time to enforce the patent, anything that looks vaguely like the patent is forbidden.
So, you could build a Direct-To-CD system with technology pre-dating the patent that isn't quite like the one in the patent, and even if you could prove that system was used for that purpose before the patent was filed, it would not invalidate the patent if shown as prior art. On the other hand, try to use that system today and you'll get sued.... you might win, but you'll probably lose.
Someday, I hope to see a defense to the tune of "I was using this system before the patent" for a system like the one described in the previous paragraph, and see what happens to the patent then when the two conflicting standards both come into play at once.
(Of course, there's a reason the patents are broad: A narrow view of these patents would be almost impossible to infringe, rendering the Patent Office nearly meaningless, and that's anathema to a bureaucracy.)
Chernobyl is a wasteland
No it's not. (Complete with actual pictures, too.)
This is why I don't put much stock in your rather popular argument; it's based on misinformation and often flat-out lies about the dangers of fission, based on 1950s horror movies and decades of public ignorance.
It's just radiation, you know, a natural thing we're all exposed to all the time, not a malicious, intelligent, life-destroying golem. It's time we outgrew our childish fears and starting examing the actual, you know, facts.
...until some clever dude with a 747 decides it'd be fun to aerosolize that 1kg in an explosion.
And we hold our breath in anticipation as....
absolutely nothing happens.
People, it may be "radioactive waste", but it's only radioactive waste! 1 kg is not a significant amount delivered that way.
You are just perpetuating those downright evil myths about radioactivity and radioactive waste that is preventing all rational progress in this area. To hear people talk, radioactive waste is billions or trillions of times more toxic then the nasties routinely produced by, hell, farting!, and will magically seek you out and jump you in the night, probably targetting Your Children for extra special treatment.
It's just a moderately nasty form of waste; there's other forms which are much worse, pound for pound. It's not even close to "the most toxic substance on Earth". Radioactivity is just radioactivity, not a malicious force intelligently hellbent on seeking out and destroying all humans.
We will have to wait for our robotic overlords for that day.
You can equally sensibly interpret the submitter's statement as an observation that we are not evolved for the civilization we live in, because in terms of "number of generations" since civilization (especially 20th and 21st century civilization), it hasn't been anywhere near enough, plus there has been a "lack" of selection pressures in many cases.
(It's not quite that bad because our civilization has evolved to match us, but it's still not perfect; for instance, you can blame "lack of willpower" for the current obesity problem all you want, but in a very real way the blame lies equally on the fact that many common body metabolisms and brains are not adapted for the food in our civilization.)
I'll remember your post next time I try to explain to someone why the education system isn't doing its job...
I doubt it. His post wasn't in cartoon form.
I read the "Making of Star Trek" book,
:-) )
I'm reading the book right now. I'm about 2/3s of the way through, so I haven't seen everything you're referring to but my memory is significantly fresher.
- The studio asked Leonard Nimoy if he would consider plastic surgery to have his ears pointed for the show. He refused.
The ears were quite painful, but this was a joke. Nimoy actually seriously considered it briefly, before realizing it was a joke as the jokester kept making it sillier and sillier.
- The saucer section was said to be designed to separate from the rest of the ship. (Though this wasn't shown until either one of the TNG episodes or a TNG movie. I'm getting old, so I can't remember which.
Yep, the design goes back to TOS. It actually happened in both the Pilot episode of TNG, and the movie Generations, twice (in the movie, "once" in time, due to Another Fucking Time Travel Plot).
How fortunate, then, that Solar Sails rely on Newtonian-style momentum-based physics, and the "laws" of thermodynamics don't apply. (And how unfortunate for the misguided author of that paper.)
(Note: "don't apply" here means simply that we aren't dealing with heat, not that Solar Sails somehow violate those laws.)
Well, now I don't really respect you, either.
Probably not your desired goal.
Note that I now don't respect not because you don't have your multiplication tables memorized, but that you feel ignorance is something that needs to be defended, rather then corrected. One of my favorite aspects of the (true) hacker community is how little this "defense by appeal to mediocrity" is tolerated.
Oh, sorry, I mean "dependinizzle oizzle hoizzle yoizzle arizzle feelinizzle."
Pipizzle youizzle choicizzle oizzle texizzle througizzle. Iizzle's lightlizzle testeizzle, buizzle whizzle reallizzle careizzle? Iizzle's stilizzle thizzle shizniizzle.
Turnabout's fair play.
(Wonderful old saying. A little archaic, but with no real modern equivalent.)
In C, a "variable" is a box that contains things. The box is designed to only hold one kind of thing, so an "int" box can't hold a "char *".
In Python, a "variable" is just a "post-it note" that can be stuck onto a value. The post-it note "a" can be stuck on to anything:Nevertheless, Python is a strongly-typed language; this will raise an error:(If you're on a Unix system, you most likely have Python installed. Type "python" on the command line and try typing that in.)
Objects with different types are allowed to be equal, though there is some obvious danger with that. Here's a pathological case:This is bad, bad code in real life, but it proves the point.
Quantum intrusion detection ("cryptography" is a misnomer) doesn't have a key.
I agree. It ought to be called Quantum Intrusion Detection, because that's what it is. It doesn't encrypt, nor does it protect anybody from intercepting the message.
All it can do is tell you if your message is being intercepted. Now, this is useful information, since you might decide to quickly stop transmitting, and if you're fast enough on the draw and using conventional encryption on top of your Quantum Intrusion Detection, then you'll probably not give enough data to the intruder for them to feasibly decrypt anything.
But note that if you want the protection of encryption so the intruder doesn't get plaintext, you still need to use conventional encryption.
Also note that some wild-eyed Slashdot types who's understanding of technology is buzzword-deep sometimes make the claim that Quantum Computing might crack Quantum Encryption. Nope, because "Encryption" isn't. And the very nature of the Intrusion Detection is that you can't get around it, no matter how clever you are.
The worst part of this stupid naming is that some day we probably really will have some sort of encryption that uses QM, and then what we will call that?
Anyways, it is apparently far too late to do anything about this misnomer, but it's one of the most pernicious misnomers I've seen in modern times. Whoever named this technology should have their relevant degrees stripped.
You miss the point completely. The point is that if a pill could indeed do those things, then who cares? Arguing "well what if the pill can't do those things?", while a potentially interesting and fruitful discussion on its own, does nothing to answer my post, which assumes that a pill can do those things from the get-go.
When a post has the form "If A, then B", it accomplishes nothing to argue "What if not A?"; this is why a logical implication is considered true automatically if the antecedent is false. If not A, then logically, my post is sound anyhow!
There is an old saying: "You can't scam an honest man".
Now you understand why that is true.
OK, IAAP (I am a physicist) and I'll tell you flat out that second order effects only become really significant when the radiation is VERY powerful, and can cause nasty showers.
I'll give you the same line: Which part of "sometimes" don't you understand? I was specifically thinking of space travel, not people on Earth.