So it's not illegal to do a DMCA takedown on a recording/stream of someone mentioning something protected by copyright? (eg: You just said the name of a famous fantasy novel trilogy involving people of lesser stature, you also quoted four lines of a poem found in the trilogy. You owe me money now since you've caused irreparable damage to the owner's copyright!)
Also: irrationality is detrimental to the health of an organism. Acting irrationally is not optimal behavior, although I have the suspicion that some irrationality plays an important part in problem solving strategies. Guess and test problem solving tends not to be productive in a continuous problem space since, since they have essentially infinite permutations. Irrationality allows one to pick values at random and test them to look for patterns. From there you find the closest value to what you want and permute the input up and down and go on from there.
What I meant by sane is: in order to be considered mentally healthy, an individual is required to exhibit irrationally optimistic behavior, often to the point of their own detriment.
Sanity is a relative term at best, and is often totally arbitrary.
I did make the mistake of mixing vernacular and jargon in my earlier post
I haven't seen "A for Andromeda", so I'll take you at your word, and comment on the series, since I think the premise is utterly absurd.
The idea that an extraterrestrial civilization would send out a "tough love" kind of virus, in order to teach us a lesson in cooperation, is incredibly naive. Firstly: if contact with an alien civilization is made, it's likely to be accidentally picking up a private signal on our part, and we'll probably NEVER understand the signal in itself. It's overwhelmingly probable that it would have totally indecipherable content, no matter that we could figure out that the signal is not from natural emission.
Secondly: Why the hell would another civilization, with superior technology to us want to help us at all? We're essentially shaved apes with thermonuclear weapons! We aren't much smarter than the animals we dominate. Our only real advantage over other animals is our ability to communicate through complex language, and even then we really suck at it. We can't agree on most things, and those of us who do seem to only be like minded due to meme viruses that pretty much break the useful parts of our minds regarding making advances to the human race (religion anyone?)
Thirdly: What do we have to contribute to a galactic society that they can't just take from observing our broadcasts? We pretty much have nothing to offer. We're insanely optimistic. In fact, we have to be irrationally optimistic in order to not be labeled severely depressed. Depressed people see the out of control nature of the universe and what happens to them, and realize that any event they do have control over are insignificant to the universe and 99.9999% of the people on earth, so they despair at the knowledge of their own impotence. This is logical, but bad for mental health. How fucked up are we that we need to think that we matter in order to keep from killing ourselves.
In all it's a crazy idea that any extraterrestrial civilization would ever want to contact us, much less carry us along, other than for pure altruism. And from all the study I've done of humans, the correlation between size of a society and altruism has a negative correlation as a society grows.
Just a few thoughts about the above description of "A for Andromeda". I'm going to look for it now and see if I'm just a bloviating dick.
You could also use them to spread plague. Although, using infected trained rats as a vector for an ancient disease probably counts as biological warfare.
That sounds elegant, but you gotta remember that Inter-Process Communication between human brains is so bad it's laughable. a hundred million fragments of Jobs, never able to connect into anything even slightly resembling who he really was.
I don't really see the difference between us driving the mammoth to extinction and the bison to extinction (If we did.)
We killed them for food, their skin and other materials, and as a right of passage. Money was used in the bison trade to obtain things that weren't available there already. I'm pretty sure primitive H. Sapiens Sapiens, and H. Sapiens Neanderthalis, both made things out of mammoths that they traded for things they couldn't make themselves. Like sex......Except for the Neanderthal furries. Those were pretty weird.
While I appreciate the jest, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have mattered if the mammoth tasted like boiled gymshorts. They were FUCKING HUGE, and edible. Think about your least favorite food.... Now imagine that was basically the only food around, but in portions that weighed THREE FUCKING TONS. It's basically the only thing to eat, and if you don't like it, you can go without, get sickly, and die.
What if biodiesel users implemented a more viscous oil? Would that help? I'm honestly curious.
Wouldn't a higher viscosity oil dilute less quickly, making it last longer? Or would it still cause problems by not lubricating the engine enough, and letting heat build up from friction anyway, since the oil doesn't move as quickly?
Biodiesel is much better for the air. While it certainly does produce CO2 in nearly the same amounts per unit burned, it is unlikely to contain sulfur in measurable amounts. How much sulfur is in deep fryer oil, or sewage? Practically none, since it's poisonous. People don't eat it in more than trace amounts.
So while Biodiesel is still not great for greenhouse emissions (unless it's balanced. Plant a tree dammit!), it's great for the breathing air of critters like us, compared to petroleum derived diesel. And if you clean it so it burns better in your engine, it's going to be much lower in particulate emissions as well.
If sewage derived biodiesel is scalable, (and it looks like it might be), this could mean the end to all the shit we put up with going to war for petroleum.
I'd say a large part of America simultaneously believes birds aren't dinosaurs, and that birds didn't evolve from them, since they feel in their gut that life as we know it today is the exact same as it was when created by god 6000 years ago when the earth wasn't around, but the ocean was.
He obviously was not an expert, seeing as how asinine and totally wrong his concept of prior art was.
By the logic he used, (I know that batteries generally are unpatentable due to universality) a Duracell AA battery wouldn't count as prior art for an Energizer C battery, since they don't fit in the same devices, even though the do the exact same thing, with the exact same technology and materials with the only difference being size and manufacturer.
Lawrence Krauss wrote an op-ed pce in 2009 saying that the first humans on Mars should be older or elderly people.
The reasoning is that, since the elderly have very limited longevity they would be more willing to take the risk of a Mars mission, and be more accepting of the inevitable damage caused by weightlessness and the high exposure to radiation endemic to long duration space flight.
Since we have some medical techniques that can mediate radiation exposure (at least to some extent), and since reproduction isn't a going factor in the elderly, they would be the best pioneers for the exploration of Mars
Bill Clinton's Head in a Jar: "Hey, sugar cookie. You know, legally, nothing I can do counts as sex anymore." Gerald Ford's Head in a Jar: "I apologise for his rudeness, ma'am. He gets this way around meaty-looking women."
I did a total reversal on this several years ago. I'm 22 now, but when I was in high school, my parents got blackberries with gps. There was an app that pinged back the geocoordinates at regular intervals when a specified SMS was received as well as immediate updates when I logged into them. I set the SMS up to be innocuous, like "I just fed the dog" or whatever. Whenever they were going out with friends, I'd SMS them to start up the tracker, and feed the coordinates into google maps, and know exactly where they were.
It was a pretty sweet deal. I gotta lot of 1:1 secret bouncy funtime with my gfs/bfs those years due to my careful planning, and ability to always track where my parents were and their ETA to home.
I've known a lot of couples who were less fertile than average and had trouble conceiving. Their main remedy was to try "Timing it" with temperature monitoring and having sex then. This makes no sense to me. Sure time it, and be sure to have sex on ovulation day, but won't odds increase a helluva lot more if the couples just have sex as often as they can manage? Most males in their 30s can ejaculate at least once a day. And while I do understand that sometimes women get sore if their plumbing is "overworked" I'm sure that a weekly recovery cycle is more than sufficient for healthy people. If they want to have a kid so badly, having a lot more sex can only help their odds of conception, so why only try once a month on ovulation day?
I'm speaking out of what I know about friends who tried conceiving. I don't know if holding off to just once a month on ovulation day is a widespread practice. If it is, it seems illogical to me.
How about: Both Apple and Samsung get nothing since they can't come to an agreement. In other words: Neither Apple, nor Samsung can now use rounded rectangles, glass screens, or shiny black finish. Since you can't play nice or be fair, nobody wins.
I'd say it's more like loading corn-cobs and a manual on how to operate a projector into a semi truck, and expecting it to magically become a fully functional and staffed movie theater with the films ready to roll.
This brings up the problem of incompleteness and ontology. You can code every last bit of information that could be found in a car, but can you use that information alone to extract every possible use for a car? You still use your brain to process meaning and application even when you already have complete knowledge. That's how new things come about. If I knew absolutely everything to possibly know about let's say: a piece of piano wire, it still wouldn't contain any application of the piano wire further along than what's already been done with it, and included in the knowledge given. But given the knowledge of a piano wire you can infer that you can use it as a varmint snare. Or any number of an arbitrarily large amount of things you can do with it.
How would you encode how to make use of something, if there are nearly infinite ways to make use of something beyond it's conventional purpose?
Just saying.... I think that first off, the knowledge obtained (essentially a long list of understood attributes for a given object) would be plenty useful on it's own. Secondly, I'm pretty sure that (if you assume one can obtain knowledge, but not know how to use it) if you include a package of uses, it would be incredibly limited in relation to the actual possible applications of said knowledge.
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So it's not illegal to do a DMCA takedown on a recording/stream of someone mentioning something protected by copyright? (eg: You just said the name of a famous fantasy novel trilogy involving people of lesser stature, you also quoted four lines of a poem found in the trilogy. You owe me money now since you've caused irreparable damage to the owner's copyright!)
It's a Turing Oracle problem. There's no way to know all the things a system can do without testing every possible situation.
It's impossible to make a bugproof program of any real use, or any nontrivial complexity.
Also: irrationality is detrimental to the health of an organism. Acting irrationally is not optimal behavior, although I have the suspicion that some irrationality plays an important part in problem solving strategies. Guess and test problem solving tends not to be productive in a continuous problem space since, since they have essentially infinite permutations. Irrationality allows one to pick values at random and test them to look for patterns. From there you find the closest value to what you want and permute the input up and down and go on from there.
What I meant by sane is: in order to be considered mentally healthy, an individual is required to exhibit irrationally optimistic behavior, often to the point of their own detriment.
Sanity is a relative term at best, and is often totally arbitrary.
I did make the mistake of mixing vernacular and jargon in my earlier post
I haven't seen "A for Andromeda", so I'll take you at your word, and comment on the series, since I think the premise is utterly absurd.
The idea that an extraterrestrial civilization would send out a "tough love" kind of virus, in order to teach us a lesson in cooperation, is incredibly naive. Firstly: if contact with an alien civilization is made, it's likely to be accidentally picking up a private signal on our part, and we'll probably NEVER understand the signal in itself. It's overwhelmingly probable that it would have totally indecipherable content, no matter that we could figure out that the signal is not from natural emission.
Secondly: Why the hell would another civilization, with superior technology to us want to help us at all? We're essentially shaved apes with thermonuclear weapons! We aren't much smarter than the animals we dominate. Our only real advantage over other animals is our ability to communicate through complex language, and even then we really suck at it. We can't agree on most things, and those of us who do seem to only be like minded due to meme viruses that pretty much break the useful parts of our minds regarding making advances to the human race (religion anyone?)
Thirdly: What do we have to contribute to a galactic society that they can't just take from observing our broadcasts? We pretty much have nothing to offer. We're insanely optimistic. In fact, we have to be irrationally optimistic in order to not be labeled severely depressed. Depressed people see the out of control nature of the universe and what happens to them, and realize that any event they do have control over are insignificant to the universe and 99.9999% of the people on earth, so they despair at the knowledge of their own impotence. This is logical, but bad for mental health. How fucked up are we that we need to think that we matter in order to keep from killing ourselves.
In all it's a crazy idea that any extraterrestrial civilization would ever want to contact us, much less carry us along, other than for pure altruism. And from all the study I've done of humans, the correlation between size of a society and altruism has a negative correlation as a society grows.
Just a few thoughts about the above description of "A for Andromeda". I'm going to look for it now and see if I'm just a bloviating dick.
we have always been at war with eastasia
You could also use them to spread plague. Although, using infected trained rats as a vector for an ancient disease probably counts as biological warfare.
That sounds elegant, but you gotta remember that Inter-Process Communication between human brains is so bad it's laughable. a hundred million fragments of Jobs, never able to connect into anything even slightly resembling who he really was.
I don't really see the difference between us driving the mammoth to extinction and the bison to extinction (If we did.)
We killed them for food, their skin and other materials, and as a right of passage. Money was used in the bison trade to obtain things that weren't available there already. I'm pretty sure primitive H. Sapiens Sapiens, and H. Sapiens Neanderthalis, both made things out of mammoths that they traded for things they couldn't make themselves. Like sex......Except for the Neanderthal furries. Those were pretty weird.
While I appreciate the jest, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have mattered if the mammoth tasted like boiled gymshorts. They were FUCKING HUGE, and edible. Think about your least favorite food.... Now imagine that was basically the only food around, but in portions that weighed THREE FUCKING TONS. It's basically the only thing to eat, and if you don't like it, you can go without, get sickly, and die.
What if biodiesel users implemented a more viscous oil? Would that help? I'm honestly curious.
Wouldn't a higher viscosity oil dilute less quickly, making it last longer? Or would it still cause problems by not lubricating the engine enough, and letting heat build up from friction anyway, since the oil doesn't move as quickly?
Regarding Emissions:
Biodiesel is much better for the air. While it certainly does produce CO2 in nearly the same amounts per unit burned, it is unlikely to contain sulfur in measurable amounts. How much sulfur is in deep fryer oil, or sewage? Practically none, since it's poisonous. People don't eat it in more than trace amounts.
So while Biodiesel is still not great for greenhouse emissions (unless it's balanced. Plant a tree dammit!), it's great for the breathing air of critters like us, compared to petroleum derived diesel. And if you clean it so it burns better in your engine, it's going to be much lower in particulate emissions as well.
If sewage derived biodiesel is scalable, (and it looks like it might be), this could mean the end to all the shit we put up with going to war for petroleum.
But does it generate the same amount of bioelectricity as a "120 Volt Battery"?
I'd say a large part of America simultaneously believes birds aren't dinosaurs, and that birds didn't evolve from them, since they feel in their gut that life as we know it today is the exact same as it was when created by god 6000 years ago when the earth wasn't around, but the ocean was.
He obviously was not an expert, seeing as how asinine and totally wrong his concept of prior art was.
By the logic he used, (I know that batteries generally are unpatentable due to universality) a Duracell AA battery wouldn't count as prior art for an Energizer C battery, since they don't fit in the same devices, even though the do the exact same thing, with the exact same technology and materials with the only difference being size and manufacturer.
Lawrence Krauss wrote an op-ed pce in 2009 saying that the first humans on Mars should be older or elderly people.
The reasoning is that, since the elderly have very limited longevity they would be more willing to take the risk of a Mars mission, and be more accepting of the inevitable damage caused by weightlessness and the high exposure to radiation endemic to long duration space flight.
Since we have some medical techniques that can mediate radiation exposure (at least to some extent), and since reproduction isn't a going factor in the elderly, they would be the best pioneers for the exploration of Mars
Bill Clinton's Head in a Jar: "Hey, sugar cookie. You know, legally, nothing I can do counts as sex anymore."
Gerald Ford's Head in a Jar: "I apologise for his rudeness, ma'am. He gets this way around meaty-looking women."
You can use Prey to do it for free. It has SMS and web activation. And a stealth mode too, I think ;-)
You can tell me I'm greedy, right after you finish up chastising all the polygamists in Utah.
Or, alternatively, you could GO FUCK YOURSELF, puritanical prude.
I did a total reversal on this several years ago. I'm 22 now, but when I was in high school, my parents got blackberries with gps. There was an app that pinged back the geocoordinates at regular intervals when a specified SMS was received as well as immediate updates when I logged into them. I set the SMS up to be innocuous, like "I just fed the dog" or whatever. Whenever they were going out with friends, I'd SMS them to start up the tracker, and feed the coordinates into google maps, and know exactly where they were.
It was a pretty sweet deal. I gotta lot of 1:1 secret bouncy funtime with my gfs/bfs those years due to my careful planning, and ability to always track where my parents were and their ETA to home.
On an unrelated note about fertility:
I've known a lot of couples who were less fertile than average and had trouble conceiving. Their main remedy was to try "Timing it" with temperature monitoring and having sex then.
This makes no sense to me. Sure time it, and be sure to have sex on ovulation day, but won't odds increase a helluva lot more if the couples just have sex as often as they can manage? Most males in their 30s can ejaculate at least once a day. And while I do understand that sometimes women get sore if their plumbing is "overworked" I'm sure that a weekly recovery cycle is more than sufficient for healthy people. If they want to have a kid so badly, having a lot more sex can only help their odds of conception, so why only try once a month on ovulation day?
I'm speaking out of what I know about friends who tried conceiving. I don't know if holding off to just once a month on ovulation day is a widespread practice. If it is, it seems illogical to me.
How about: Both Apple and Samsung get nothing since they can't come to an agreement. In other words: Neither Apple, nor Samsung can now use rounded rectangles, glass screens, or shiny black finish. Since you can't play nice or be fair, nobody wins.
I'd say it's more like loading corn-cobs and a manual on how to operate a projector into a semi truck, and expecting it to magically become a fully functional and staffed movie theater with the films ready to roll.
This brings up the problem of incompleteness and ontology.
You can code every last bit of information that could be found in a car, but can you use that information alone to extract every possible use for a car? You still use your brain to process meaning and application even when you already have complete knowledge. That's how new things come about. If I knew absolutely everything to possibly know about let's say: a piece of piano wire, it still wouldn't contain any application of the piano wire further along than what's already been done with it, and included in the knowledge given. But given the knowledge of a piano wire you can infer that you can use it as a varmint snare. Or any number of an arbitrarily large amount of things you can do with it.
How would you encode how to make use of something, if there are nearly infinite ways to make use of something beyond it's conventional purpose?
Just saying.... I think that first off, the knowledge obtained (essentially a long list of understood attributes for a given object) would be plenty useful on it's own. Secondly, I'm pretty sure that (if you assume one can obtain knowledge, but not know how to use it) if you include a package of uses, it would be incredibly limited in relation to the actual possible applications of said knowledge.