And that one there shows that the Nobel peace prize means NOTHING.
Hey that is not fair, for years Kissenger systematically carpet bombed civilians in countries that were not a threat to the US at all (Laos, Cambodia)... and then he stopped.
That means he single handedly stopped a horrific, unjust and criminal war. If that doesn't deserve a peace prize, it certainly deserves some kind of prize.
And since it's impossible to settle, it's a total waste of time to even think about it.
That argument could be used to discourage all fiction, from books to films, and also vast swathes of philosphy including all of metaphysics and a good part of all the other disciplines. You have no imagination. Not only is it a lot of fun to think about interesting questions and go over potential answers in one's mind, it has also been long established that this is a healthy and useful activity that leads to a better understanding of the world.
How can you even live without occasionally considering some questions where a definite answer is impossible to establish? This in itself is an unanswerable question and one I find myself considering very often while reading comments like yours.
Only if you have absolutely no clue about what is left and what is right.
I was basing that statement on the commonly held definitions as summed up in this wikipedia article. To better understand why you are confused about this from living in the US, the section 'Contemporary usage in the United States' describes the usage you are used to in context.
It is also recommended that you read the rest of the article, which describes what the terms actually mean to the majority of the world. These are subjective terms however so you are not categorically wrong, just informationally challenged.
That is only one of the costs, there may be other costs as well, like productivity losses from the illneess, or generally less productivity from less efficient division of labor.
There are other costs, a lot of them. Probably the biggest one is the effect it has on education. Problems in education knock on into problems for the whole of society in the future not least economically. Criminality is also a major cost.
Keeping people fed the one of the primary purposes of a state - let's face it USA, if you can't even stop your own people from starving you are a failure and should give up. Maybe ask Canada if they need a giant new province. Anyone advocating taking food away from starving people is evil. There are evil people posting in this thread. They do not appear to be able to feel shame.
This conversation is about marijuana. Your refences to alcohol, meth and 'drugs' in general suggest that you make no distinction between these substances and marijuana. The is an overwhelming body of evidence that suggest that marijuana is different to these other substances, in terms of its psychological, social and health effects. Ignoring this and lumping them all together suggests to me that you are serving an agenda rather than attempting to actually add information to the discussion.
It is also worth mentioning, with all this Tesla fire hype: Recalling parts for safety reasons in the automotive industry is the rule not the exception. Almost every model from every car manufacturer has had some parts or systems recalled. Fire is the cause of a significant percentage of recalls. It is hard to get exact numbers as each country has it's own database. I looked at the US one quickly for an example. Selected a random model and year (Aluma 2009), and sure enough there were three recalls for that year alone. The first one i clicked had the text "THIS DEFECT COULD RESULT IN A FIRE.".
Given the percentage of the vehicle fleet that is made of Teslas, this is not really relevant news.
There is another aspect that limits this sort of machine learning, the need for direct positive/negative feedback. Games that don't have a score counter are pretty much unlearnable. Obviously you can base the feedback on something else like level reached but in some games, like kings quest for example, a neural network will not be able to figure out when it is doing well and when it isn't. Often a separate heuristic AI is needed just for this.
What other industry would you expect this idea to come from? Agriculture?
Sure, the idea is bloody obvious at this stage, why couldn't a farmer come up with it? My father was a builder and he came up with a lot of good ideas outside of his field. Of course he didn't have enough money to patent or market them.
Can someone mod this shill as a troll I have no points atm
Software whose installers are downloaded to local storage, run locally, and have no dependencies on web services, is never missed. It just works.
Given that the nonsense it is replying to is marked +3 insightful, I think this one deserves some mod points too. Are there seriously people who just up and deleted winamp off their machines because AOL told them to?
IRA, Hizbollah and Hamas are all nationalistic organisations in countries that are under intense external pressure, either politically, militarily or economically, to such an extent that the general population are suffering. The same was true of Germany in the 1930's. While I agree with the points you make I feel that most discussions on this topic miss the most important point of all. Yes democracy can throw up some problem leaders, but ignoring the circumstances that lead up to each of these cases is failing to learn lessons from history. While it is possible that removing the treaty of Versailles may not have prevented the nazis' rise to power, it seems almost certain that Hamas would never have been elected without the Israeli blockade and attacks. It also seems hard to imagine the IRA getting any power in a world where Ireland was not subject to brutal repression for a couple of centuries.
Democracy is not the problem, it is imperialism that is the problem. Desperate people act desperately, and voting is no exception.
The definition of a liberal is someone who doesn't care what the law is, as long as it is mandatory. Nanny states, government censors and controls. Ew, yuck.
liberal /lib()rl/
adjective
adjective: liberal
1.
open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.
"they have more liberal views toward marriage and divorce than some people"
favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms.
"liberal citizenship laws"synonyms: tolerant, unprejudiced, unbigoted, broad-minded, open-minded, enlightened; Morepermissive, free, free and easy, easygoing, libertarian, indulgent, lenient
"the values of a liberal society"
antonyms: narrow-minded, bigoted
(in a political context) favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.
"a liberal democratic state"synonyms: progressive, advanced, modern, forward-looking, forward-thinking, progressivist, enlightened, reformist, radical More"a liberal social agenda"
antonyms: reactionary, conservative
noun
noun: liberal; plural noun: liberals
1.
a person of liberal views.
People who spout garbage in public and have no idea what they are talking about. Ew, yuck.
Winamp... I don't understand why people think it is going to suddenly disappear. I haven't needed to update winamp in years, I only have a newer version because I sometimes lose the installer. What exactly is going to change that will make me need a new music player? My music is still all in mp3 format, I don't use any of winamp's online services. The program is finished and complete. I don't need support from AOL and I never did. In a few years there will be new developments and winamp will slowly become obsolete, but those same new developments will result in new software being developed that caters to them. I really don't see the problem here. Winamp will be able to play me mp3s until I no longer need to listen to them or my OS no longer has windows 7 compatibility mode.
"Smoking is different, when used properly and as intended, your smoking harms the person next to you" - Not proven, if you want to take it on faith you can believe what you want but studies have failed to prove this conclusively
Secondly, when used properly and as intended, firearms harm something, somewhere, maybe not a person, maybe not next to you, but their uses are somewhat limited.
While I am posting on this topic I would also like to point out that this has nothing to do with second amendment freedoms. These weapons can be produced at will by private citizens. This means if it comes to a revolution (and honestly, I don't know what you are all waiting for), they can be produced at the time when needed. At this point the government is going to kill you on sight anyway, so whether you are breaking gun printing laws or not is irrelevant.
If anything, 3d gun printing makes the second amendment obsolete. If 3d guns were any good (currently they aren't but maybe one day), the need to keep arms would no longer exist, people would only need to have 3d printers in every house and could make the guns the day before the revolution starts.
"At higher energy levels, an EMP can cause more widespread damage including to aircraft structures and other objects."
What is this about? I looked into it and it is actually something the media is copy pasting from wikipedia. The original quote from wiki also includes the extra words "At higher energy levels, an EMP event such as a lightning strike can cause more widespread damage to aircraft structures and other objects."
Can someone who knows the science explain this to me? Can an EMP weapon actually damage the structure of an aircraft? Obviously 'other objects' is just stupid no matter how you look at it, my farts can damage 'other objects'.
My guess is that switching from Skype to any other a/v chat medium is almost trivial at this point, and certainly not worth replacing your hardware to avoid.
Actually the opposite is true, it is not even close to trivial. Yes I can download aand install a new voip program with a couple of clicks. The issue is contacts. I can't use the new program to call any of my old skype contacts. I have been dealing with the same issue for years now with instant messaging services. My current solution is to use pidgin and simply have an account on every IM network I ever used in the past. Many of my friends are still on msn and icq. I can't simply tell everyone they have to change services, well I can, but they won't do it. After I stopped using facebook I lost contact with a large number of important internet contacts who refuse to use any other means of communication. Skype would be the same situation again.
Many of these people are skype users because I encouraged them to start using the service back when it didn't suck. For me to come along now and say that they have to stop using it and start using something else will make them trust my recommendations less, making the whole process harder each time.
Having said that, I would still like to know what the alternatives are, and I haven't seen many people mentioning any so far in this thread. Anyone got good suggestions?
On the subject of language pedantry: Why do so many people use out of the box when they actually mean outside the box? The two phrases mean almost the opposite thing. thought it was an Americanism at first but if so you would expect a reference to it on wikipedia which is the primary US encyclopedia.
I'm not a conspiracy advocate. I think 19 guys from mostly Saudi Arabia flew airplanes into buildings.
You think they told everyone about it first? Because otherwise IT WAS A CONSPIRACY.
conspiracy
plural noun: conspiracies
1. a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
I am so sick of the word conspiracy being used to mean 'things that crazy people who are wrong believe in'. The correct word for that is delusion.
delusion
plural noun: delusions
1. an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.
Stop using these words as though they are synonymous
Slashdot Mirror
And Henry Kissinger.
And that one there shows that the Nobel peace prize means NOTHING.
Hey that is not fair, for years Kissenger systematically carpet bombed civilians in countries that were not a threat to the US at all (Laos, Cambodia)... and then he stopped.
That means he single handedly stopped a horrific, unjust and criminal war. If that doesn't deserve a peace prize, it certainly deserves some kind of prize.
And since it's impossible to settle, it's a total waste of time to even think about it.
That argument could be used to discourage all fiction, from books to films, and also vast swathes of philosphy including all of metaphysics and a good part of all the other disciplines. You have no imagination. Not only is it a lot of fun to think about interesting questions and go over potential answers in one's mind, it has also been long established that this is a healthy and useful activity that leads to a better understanding of the world.
How can you even live without occasionally considering some questions where a definite answer is impossible to establish? This in itself is an unanswerable question and one I find myself considering very often while reading comments like yours.
But you can't be bothered helping me in my ignorance by explaining the facts, or linking another source.
Only if you have absolutely no clue about what is left and what is right.
I was basing that statement on the commonly held definitions as summed up in this wikipedia article. To better understand why you are confused about this from living in the US, the section 'Contemporary usage in the United States' describes the usage you are used to in context.
It is also recommended that you read the rest of the article, which describes what the terms actually mean to the majority of the world. These are subjective terms however so you are not categorically wrong, just informationally challenged.
There are no 'leftists' in US politics. You only have extreme right and moderate right, and there are very few of the latter.
That is only one of the costs, there may be other costs as well, like productivity losses from the illneess, or generally less productivity from less efficient division of labor.
There are other costs, a lot of them. Probably the biggest one is the effect it has on education. Problems in education knock on into problems for the whole of society in the future not least economically. Criminality is also a major cost.
Keeping people fed the one of the primary purposes of a state - let's face it USA, if you can't even stop your own people from starving you are a failure and should give up. Maybe ask Canada if they need a giant new province. Anyone advocating taking food away from starving people is evil. There are evil people posting in this thread. They do not appear to be able to feel shame.
This conversation is about marijuana. Your refences to alcohol, meth and 'drugs' in general suggest that you make no distinction between these substances and marijuana. The is an overwhelming body of evidence that suggest that marijuana is different to these other substances, in terms of its psychological, social and health effects. Ignoring this and lumping them all together suggests to me that you are serving an agenda rather than attempting to actually add information to the discussion.
It is also worth mentioning, with all this Tesla fire hype: Recalling parts for safety reasons in the automotive industry is the rule not the exception. Almost every model from every car manufacturer has had some parts or systems recalled. Fire is the cause of a significant percentage of recalls. It is hard to get exact numbers as each country has it's own database. I looked at the US one quickly for an example. Selected a random model and year (Aluma 2009), and sure enough there were three recalls for that year alone. The first one i clicked had the text "THIS DEFECT COULD RESULT IN A FIRE.".
Given the percentage of the vehicle fleet that is made of Teslas, this is not really relevant news.
In contrast, teenagers that break windows with a total worth of $550 get felony jail time.
Now this is how you enhance Red Dwarf style.
Yes, this is the video I was hoping for when I clicked the stupid one above
There is another aspect that limits this sort of machine learning, the need for direct positive/negative feedback. Games that don't have a score counter are pretty much unlearnable. Obviously you can base the feedback on something else like level reached but in some games, like kings quest for example, a neural network will not be able to figure out when it is doing well and when it isn't. Often a separate heuristic AI is needed just for this.
...the people pushing the conspiracy narrative have their own political reasons for pushing it...
So we shouldn't believe in conspiracies because they are all part of a big conspiracy to get us to believe in conspiracies?
People conspire every day, it is a provable fact. Let's not buy into the whole tinfoil hat stereotype too hard.
What other industry would you expect this idea to come from? Agriculture?
Sure, the idea is bloody obvious at this stage, why couldn't a farmer come up with it? My father was a builder and he came up with a lot of good ideas outside of his field. Of course he didn't have enough money to patent or market them.
Can someone mod this shill as a troll I have no points atm
So missed. :-(
Software whose installers are downloaded to local storage, run locally, and have no dependencies on web services, is never missed. It just works.
Given that the nonsense it is replying to is marked +3 insightful, I think this one deserves some mod points too. Are there seriously people who just up and deleted winamp off their machines because AOL told them to?
IRA, Hizbollah and Hamas are all nationalistic organisations in countries that are under intense external pressure, either politically, militarily or economically, to such an extent that the general population are suffering. The same was true of Germany in the 1930's. While I agree with the points you make I feel that most discussions on this topic miss the most important point of all. Yes democracy can throw up some problem leaders, but ignoring the circumstances that lead up to each of these cases is failing to learn lessons from history. While it is possible that removing the treaty of Versailles may not have prevented the nazis' rise to power, it seems almost certain that Hamas would never have been elected without the Israeli blockade and attacks. It also seems hard to imagine the IRA getting any power in a world where Ireland was not subject to brutal repression for a couple of centuries.
Democracy is not the problem, it is imperialism that is the problem. Desperate people act desperately, and voting is no exception.
On the subject of stupid/corrupt officials, just a translation for those who don't already know:
Radical sympathiser (Governmentish)
Noun
A person that disagrees with our right to absolute power over everything.
The definition of a liberal is someone who doesn't care what the law is, as long as it is mandatory. Nanny states, government censors and controls. Ew, yuck.
liberal
/lib()rl/
adjective
adjective: liberal
1.
open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.
"they have more liberal views toward marriage and divorce than some people"
favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms.
"liberal citizenship laws"synonyms: tolerant, unprejudiced, unbigoted, broad-minded, open-minded, enlightened; Morepermissive, free, free and easy, easygoing, libertarian, indulgent, lenient
"the values of a liberal society"
antonyms: narrow-minded, bigoted
(in a political context) favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.
"a liberal democratic state"synonyms: progressive, advanced, modern, forward-looking, forward-thinking, progressivist, enlightened, reformist, radical More"a liberal social agenda"
antonyms: reactionary, conservative
noun
noun: liberal; plural noun: liberals
1.
a person of liberal views.
People who spout garbage in public and have no idea what they are talking about. Ew, yuck.
Who's going to really whip the Llama's ass now?
Winamp... I don't understand why people think it is going to suddenly disappear. I haven't needed to update winamp in years, I only have a newer version because I sometimes lose the installer. What exactly is going to change that will make me need a new music player? My music is still all in mp3 format, I don't use any of winamp's online services. The program is finished and complete. I don't need support from AOL and I never did. In a few years there will be new developments and winamp will slowly become obsolete, but those same new developments will result in new software being developed that caters to them. I really don't see the problem here. Winamp will be able to play me mp3s until I no longer need to listen to them or my OS no longer has windows 7 compatibility mode.
Exactly, we should also legalise rape and murder, because criminals don't follow those laws either.
Yeah, they would have been so much better off if he was legally able to carry the gun.
Hey I just noticed that brasnacte actually contradicted you before you even posted, and you quoted the contradiction. I am impressed.
Informative? Really?
"Smoking is different, when used properly and as intended, your smoking harms the person next to you" - Not proven, if you want to take it on faith you can believe what you want but studies have failed to prove this conclusively
Secondly, when used properly and as intended, firearms harm something, somewhere, maybe not a person, maybe not next to you, but their uses are somewhat limited.
While I am posting on this topic I would also like to point out that this has nothing to do with second amendment freedoms. These weapons can be produced at will by private citizens. This means if it comes to a revolution (and honestly, I don't know what you are all waiting for), they can be produced at the time when needed. At this point the government is going to kill you on sight anyway, so whether you are breaking gun printing laws or not is irrelevant.
If anything, 3d gun printing makes the second amendment obsolete. If 3d guns were any good (currently they aren't but maybe one day), the need to keep arms would no longer exist, people would only need to have 3d printers in every house and could make the guns the day before the revolution starts.
"At higher energy levels, an EMP can cause more widespread damage including to aircraft structures and other objects."
What is this about? I looked into it and it is actually something the media is copy pasting from wikipedia. The original quote from wiki also includes the extra words "At higher energy levels, an EMP event such as a lightning strike can cause more widespread damage to aircraft structures and other objects."
Can someone who knows the science explain this to me? Can an EMP weapon actually damage the structure of an aircraft? Obviously 'other objects' is just stupid no matter how you look at it, my farts can damage 'other objects'.
My guess is that switching from Skype to any other a/v chat medium is almost trivial at this point, and certainly not worth replacing your hardware to avoid.
Actually the opposite is true, it is not even close to trivial. Yes I can download aand install a new voip program with a couple of clicks. The issue is contacts. I can't use the new program to call any of my old skype contacts. I have been dealing with the same issue for years now with instant messaging services. My current solution is to use pidgin and simply have an account on every IM network I ever used in the past. Many of my friends are still on msn and icq. I can't simply tell everyone they have to change services, well I can, but they won't do it. After I stopped using facebook I lost contact with a large number of important internet contacts who refuse to use any other means of communication. Skype would be the same situation again.
Many of these people are skype users because I encouraged them to start using the service back when it didn't suck. For me to come along now and say that they have to stop using it and start using something else will make them trust my recommendations less, making the whole process harder each time.
Having said that, I would still like to know what the alternatives are, and I haven't seen many people mentioning any so far in this thread. Anyone got good suggestions?
On the subject of language pedantry: Why do so many people use out of the box when they actually mean outside the box? The two phrases mean almost the opposite thing. thought it was an Americanism at first but if so you would expect a reference to it on wikipedia which is the primary US encyclopedia.
I'm not a conspiracy advocate. I think 19 guys from mostly Saudi Arabia flew airplanes into buildings.
You think they told everyone about it first? Because otherwise IT WAS A CONSPIRACY.
conspiracy
plural noun: conspiracies
1. a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
I am so sick of the word conspiracy being used to mean 'things that crazy people who are wrong believe in'. The correct word for that is delusion.
delusion
plural noun: delusions
1. an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.
Stop using these words as though they are synonymous