Sure you can determine the state of a particle. You can do something that will change its state in a predictable way. Then the other particle, which you haven't changed, changes at the same time.
Which brings us to the question of Relativity: Since there is no such thing as simultaneous time in the universe, per Einstein - that is, what's simultaneous from one perspective is sequential from another - when does the untouched-but-entangled particle change state to match the one we've acted on in a determinative way?
Let's say you are Evil P(ublic|rivate) Entity (EPE), and you've got the run of Google's wardriving results. So you know that there's an access point called "BigDaddy" with a MAC of 99:99:99:99:99:99:99:00 located roughly at Secor and Alexis in Toledo. What can you do with this knowledge? What can you correlate it with?
Since EPEs exist to do evil, please give a scenario where this datum enables their core mission. If you can't, this is all pretty silly, isn't it?
News flash: Research reveals every conscious experience is accompanied by identifiable neuro-chemical event types in the brain. Therefore we must suspect that there is in reality no experience. Everything claimed as experience, and all evidence from it, is clearly neuro-chemical illusion, possibly of some evolutionary advantage to the organism - that is, presuming we should even conclude from our now totally-discredited "evidence" that there's such a thing as an "organism."
I once asked a surgeon friend, "Do some of your patients report floating out of their bodies during surgery and witnessing the events happening while they're under deep anesthetic?" His answer: Yes. All long-practicing surgeons have received such accounts from their patients. They're the sort of thing you just have to ignore. Okay, reports of floating out of the body and seeing angels, that's easy to discount. But what do we do with the many, many times where someone reports floating out of their body and looking down on the surgery on that body, with accurate accounts of things in the room that couldn't be seen from any other perspective than up at the ceiling?
I haven't been there, haven't done that. But it puts the current researchers' claims into doubt. Occam's razor suggests that both ketamine and near-death reveal the same reality, rather than the same illusion.
What does the law say about direct quoting? In Canada (or the US) if I were to write "Mr. Rat Dog has claimed that Cowboy Neal engages in illegal acts with nefarious porpoises" and it is in fact the case that such an allegation has been made, am I engaging in libel merely by stating that fact? Granting for argument that a footnote does not have the same immediacy (and thus the same potency) as a hyperlink (it takes a far more trouble to follow it up), neither has the immediacy of simply stating the fact that the claim has been made - perhaps with a full (insofar as fair use allows) quoting of the claim.
Since we're facing a real possibility of insurrection from the tea party secessionists, let's encourage them to refuse to answer the ethnicity question on the census. Then we can do a sort for all those who've failed to answer that question, and march 'em to the FEMA camps!
So, I'm planning to download the Ubuntu Beta ISO image, and install it (possibly in VirtualBox)
Be ready to customize your xorg.conf if you get dropped into 800x600. 10.04 and VirtualBox aren't entirely happy together yet (see http://forums.virtualbox.org). You can also get a kernel error if you don't patch one of the VB source files before compiling VB's kernel modules.
Once beyond that, I don't mind the button placement at all. Over the years of using Linux, I've often used themes with various button placements. Takes me no time to get used to such changes, at all. The brain stores such stuff by context. "If it looks generally like this, the buttons must be there." Since I'm running this instance on a Win7 host (an eee1001p I keep Win on for the oddball Windows program that's not happy under wine) keeping the X windows decidedly different than the Win windows, when both are open at once, keeps the context clear for other operations in them too.
On the other hand, if Canonical goes through with the reported suggestion of removing the right-side scroll bars from stuff, I'll be royally pissed. That's far more basic to functionality - actually removing a control - than just bouncing the buttons from one side to the other.
The article says nothing about this proposal being in consideration of the nation's new health care plan. What's the logic that it would be? It makes sense in connection with immigration control and jobs. But the liberals don't care much if illegal immigrants get health care - which most of them could get under their home countries' national plans anyhow (Mexico has one), so it's not what they come here for. And the tea partiers don't think the trade off between a strong national id and freedom is worth it, even to help keep the immigrants out.
News flash. Unemployment is high. A kennel in Snohomish just posted a Craigslist ad for a minimum-wage part-time dogshit-shoveler, and got > 250 resumes in response. People really, really would like every one of those jobs back from the paperless immigrants. And that's why this national id thing - which even a liberal-leaner like me is against - is likely to fly in this climate. Health care plans are hardly a factor here.
"It would be a shame if your nice [online] storefront got broken into and wrecked. Yeah, we sold you that front door and lock. Well, you should know there's a little problem we've discovered with it. We could fix it for you, for a price. Or you might expect to find a couple of guys have opened that lock at night and run through your place with wrecking bars, one of these mornings."
Classic protection racket. My Italian relatives would totally approve.
All communications and media rely on public right of way, whether to string lines or transmit over radio frequencies. Even paper transmissions rely on public roads, and often the public postal system. There is nobody in any media who is not in implicit partnership with the government. There is no stance the government can take that does not end up favoring some players, and some strategies, over others. So it is best that the government make its decisions out in the open, rather than pretend it's not a player. And it's best that the government try to favor the broad interests of the people, rather than the entrenched interests of existing media.
Existing media interests have been stalling on providing broad band net access, despite other countries showing that the road forward is wide open, and within our economic means. The government is attempting here to tilt the field more towards the public's interest in having true broadband access. It is legitimate to view this as as much a right as the right to receive mail, phone calls, the newspaper, and over-the-air broadcasts. It involves public rights of way just as much as those others do. It cannot be done but by government partnership. And the government, as a partner, needs to speak for its owners, us.
Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals, is crucial to seeking a complete picture of the state of climate science.
Ceoyouo confuses the camps. The "scientists" who say we need gray literature are those who produce the gray literature. The gray literature is almost entirely supportive of the denialist political camp. The UN would panel, if it leaves out the gray literature, will most likely end up fully supporting the IPCC's reports, aside from the small corrections already noted as necessary such as the estimate of the speed of glacial melting in the Himalayas, which in that case crept in from gray literature itself (although from bad pop reporting rather than denialist pseudo-science).
So: The IPCC would prefer to exclude gray literature, and regrets it wasn't 100% successful in its prior attempt to do so (e.g. the Himalayan thing). Those opposed to the IPCC, most of whom haven't been able to publish in peer-reviewed journals, insist that their gray literature - largely papers published by think tanks funded by oil interests, outside of the recognized scientific press - should be taken into account. They believe that the peers who peer review are all in on the conspiracy, so that any limitation to peer-reviewed literature misses the "truth" of how nearly everyone in academia is part of a vast effort to bring One World Government, an agenda which includes fostering panic and fear so that the population turns over control of the economic system to bureaucrats, whom it is presumed most scientists have a deep, instinctual, natural love of.
What do you say, scientists? I know a few of you are reading this. You love bureaucrats, don't you? Ha.
I haven't seen a chiropractor in years. Not because it doesn't work, but because it does. Seeing how big an effect it made for me, I learned to adjust my own spine. That wasn't easy. I can get it wrong. It's a very specific adjustment required, not just some random act for a presumed placebo effect.
And that makes sense. We're physical beings. The alignment, balance, symmetry of ourselves as physical bodies - of course that makes a difference, sometimes a big one, in our health. The anti-chiropractic camp would ask us to believe, what?, that we're pure spiritual essence, to which the body is so secondary even in regards to the body's own health that only our mental attitude - as adjusted of course by whatever drugs an orthodox physician might decide to prescribe - makes an "objective" difference in healing? But mental attitude is the essence of "subjective," not objective. Objectively, that body is what we are, and various bodywork therapies, including chiropractic, approach the body with the respect it's due.
They made a huge boo-boo by having a PR guy tell people they have no underground piping that could carry contaminated water
It wasn't a PR guy. It was one of their chief engineers. And it was also their top executive for the plant. In sworn testimony. On several occassions. To both state regulators and state legislators. In a state where, when Entergy bought the plant, Entergy agreed contractually that the state legislature's approval would be required - unlike in any other state - for Entergy to renew the plant's license.
Also, Entergy plans to spin off this and several other plants into a new corportion that will carry billions in debt, and free Entergy from most future financial responsibility for any cleanup of the plant. There's a decommissioning fund, but since the stock market crashed it's way underfunded, and depends on some decades of extraordinary investment appreciation if it's to recover - which the NRC seems unconcerned about.
I'm pro-nuclear power. But Entergy hires chief engineers who are either incompetent or liars - or who've never reviewed a full schematic of their plant.
Yeah. Anything more than 30% (or less) is sufficient to control a large public corporation. The majority of stock in a corporation like Google is held by mutual funds, who do not typically actively engage in corporate control. So 30% is more than 60% of the stock held by individuals, who are more likely to claim a voice in corporate governance. IOW, they're keeping total control, for all practical purposes.
Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader. It's increasingly a "lifestyle" paper. It sees its crucial missions as propping up the real estate market in NYC (with fascinating articles like the one suggesting that since banks aren't lending, maybe you young people can borrow the half-million for a starter apartment from your folks), and pretending to be liberal while propping up most of the neocon fantasies about an American new world order (even before cheerleading Iraq, it was responsible for the absurd Whitewater charges).
I like half their editorial columnists. They have a couple of good economic writers. And I'm entertained by the lifestyle and real estate fluff. Plus at least their front page is by their own writers rather than the AP - which continues a rapid descent in quality too. And some of their NYC coverage is unavailable elsewhere - although only of interest to people with lives or roots in the city.
That's a good, concise, accurate overview of both the review and the pile-on "discussion" here. And it gets beaten down as a troll. What's amazing is that, if you're literate and over 30, you've read some of Jaron's stuff by now. While it's hit-and-miss, the hits are amazing. I know some top, absolutely brilliant people (separate groups in both neuroscience and music) who know him well personally, and are strongly impressed by him. If you can read, say, 10 of his essays and not be richly rewarded by 2 or 3 absolutely-original ideas embedded in them, you plainly have neither talent nor taste for ideas. Which describes the average person of any time period. Nothing to be ashamed of. Please put your blinders on, your head down, and trudge on with your life.
Funny thing. I have municipal water and sewer. They built all the plumbing from my house to the reservoir and treatment plant. I pay them every month based on metered gallons used.
Now why am I doing this? I can collect rainwater for free! I have a yard where I can dig a hole and shit! I must be a moron to be paying these guys who put the plumbing in every month.
Jaron has a real knack for heading off in the right direction. He's also good at seeing beyond the scope of conventionally-worn blinders - in a number of fields. He's got great intuition on which way the truest future lies, and little patience for those who plod along with less vision - or even desire for vision - even where they are people who count as brilliant within the confines of neuroscience, or computer science, or a single genre of music.
That said, he's also a good hand at writing for a popular audience. But he deflates a lot more bullshit than he puts out. That earns him a lot of retaliatory swipes - like the snidely negative book review that counts as the text for discussion here. Isn't there a sample chapter up somewhere we can more profitably discuss? Need we be derivative even in our criticism?
It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can’t adequately judge all possible moves, with the result that our choices are based on imperfect, sometimes impoverished, information.
Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.
So you judge all possible moves and make one based on... what? Can each move be cleanly ranked on the value of the odds of the outcomes that might follow from it, against some distinct set of measures that fully define a creature's goals, satisfactions and fears? Doesn't it require a particularly impoverished set of goals to do any such calculation as to the odds of their satisfaction following certain moves by oneself? Given the hypothesized more intelligent mind, whose pleasures in walking a Parisian boulevard might, this article also suggests, be far beyond our own in complexity, why should we presume that its satisfactions, like its pleasures, might also be far beyond our own? If the range of desirable goals becomes correspondingly more complex with a more complex brain - which is obviously the case when comparing Mozart or Einstein with the amoeba or your local gas station clerk - then the solution of the problem of the optimal path to what correspondingly becomes less certain.
If your choice of roads merely consists of one where you eat and one where you starve, it's pretty easy to model that under an assumption of determinism. But if on one road you perform a powerful piece of music, on another make an incredible scientific breakthrough, and on another simply watch a beautiful sunset - and you've got a mind fully capable of this range and far more - assuming that all these roads leave you well-fed, well-fucked, and pleased with the outcome, being smart doesn't so much simplify the solution of what to do as vastly complicate the choices to solve among. This "problem" isn't at all advanced by considering the free will implied by it an "illusion."
If your hosting provider wants the log files, they don't need root, just a copy of the files. Give them a user-level login, and put a copy of the files where that user can see them.
The outage already happened, right? They don't need the current logs as they happen, just the logs for the outage period.
This is as stupid as the "news" a month back claiming a pet dog used the same environmental resources as a large SUV. The problem was, multiplying the claims for agricultural land used to feed one dog by the number of dogs gave as a result that 10% of our agriculture is feeding dogs. Why is that obviously wrong? Because the whole pet food industry accounts for less that 1/10 of 1% of the value of agricultural production.
We're going to see more and more of this shit. Everyone will be competing to get their 15 minutes of fame by claiming that X - something that annoys them, like PHP or, evidently, dogs - is the major overlooked factor in destroying the Earth's climate. Because they know our press is so stupid in basic scientific literacy that they'll jump at the chance to put a headline over the claim, since we're all bound to read it just in case there's a there there.
On the one hand malicious hackers should be killed. On the other, many of the most capable of them are believed to be closely tied to the Russian and Chinese (and Nigerian) governments, encouraged for both their ability to bring in monies, and for cooperation in state cyber-espionage goals. So the only usable model for international intervention may be the one currently used against Qaida in Pakistan - sending in American drones. Except Russia and China (and Nigeria) have rather more use for their hackers than the current Pakistani government has for its Qaida/Taliban ops centers. So they might just be a little touchy about drones taking out buildings in their big cities.
Odds are Google isn't sending much info about you downstream - probably none at all. They're in the business of selling ads. The metric on ads is response - whether measured by click-throughs, or resulting sales-per-dollar-invested in the advertising campaign. Google isn't in the business of selling their data on you. They're in the business of selling advertisers advertising services which may be far more efficient in effectively reaching productive customers than any other place the advertisers can spend their money. That means Google want to hoard their information on you. If they let the advertiser know anything about you, the advertiser can cut Google out - or sell your information onwards to someone else who will cut Google out. Google depends on the advertisers having no fucking idea who you are. All they need to know is that if they pay Google to reach 1000 people, that 1000 people will contain more good prospects than anyone but Google can deliver for them.
It's a fair bet that Google is tightly tied into the NSA infrastructure, so if your searches show Qaida-like patterns you do have a problem. But it's an even better bet Google isn't going to tell any of its advertising customers anything specifically about you at all. That Google alone knows who you are is the source of their profitability.
That's like when the space aliens take us up in their ships at night to do the cavity search, right? Most of use don't remember it - or at most have some weird, distorted dream-like images from it - and it doesn't particularly hurt there in the morning.
There may even be a tie-in. If you arrived here from an alien civilization, and wanted to contact the very nexus of intelligence on this planet, would your on-board AI send you to the White House (well, you might be curious about those signals you've picked up suggesting Obama is an alien)? the UN (yeah, right)? or... Google HQ (bingo! most connected place on the planet)?
Could Google and the space aliens already be cooperating on your proctology?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can determine the state of a particle. You can do something that will change its state in a predictable way. Then the other particle, which you haven't changed, changes at the same time.
Which brings us to the question of Relativity: Since there is no such thing as simultaneous time in the universe, per Einstein - that is, what's simultaneous from one perspective is sequential from another - when does the untouched-but-entangled particle change state to match the one we've acted on in a determinative way?
Let's say you are Evil P(ublic|rivate) Entity (EPE), and you've got the run of Google's wardriving results. So you know that there's an access point called "BigDaddy" with a MAC of 99:99:99:99:99:99:99:00 located roughly at Secor and Alexis in Toledo. What can you do with this knowledge? What can you correlate it with?
Since EPEs exist to do evil, please give a scenario where this datum enables their core mission. If you can't, this is all pretty silly, isn't it?
News flash: Research reveals every conscious experience is accompanied by identifiable neuro-chemical event types in the brain. Therefore we must suspect that there is in reality no experience. Everything claimed as experience, and all evidence from it, is clearly neuro-chemical illusion, possibly of some evolutionary advantage to the organism - that is, presuming we should even conclude from our now totally-discredited "evidence" that there's such a thing as an "organism."
I once asked a surgeon friend, "Do some of your patients report floating out of their bodies during surgery and witnessing the events happening while they're under deep anesthetic?" His answer: Yes. All long-practicing surgeons have received such accounts from their patients. They're the sort of thing you just have to ignore. Okay, reports of floating out of the body and seeing angels, that's easy to discount. But what do we do with the many, many times where someone reports floating out of their body and looking down on the surgery on that body, with accurate accounts of things in the room that couldn't be seen from any other perspective than up at the ceiling?
I haven't been there, haven't done that. But it puts the current researchers' claims into doubt. Occam's razor suggests that both ketamine and near-death reveal the same reality, rather than the same illusion.
What does the law say about direct quoting? In Canada (or the US) if I were to write "Mr. Rat Dog has claimed that Cowboy Neal engages in illegal acts with nefarious porpoises" and it is in fact the case that such an allegation has been made, am I engaging in libel merely by stating that fact? Granting for argument that a footnote does not have the same immediacy (and thus the same potency) as a hyperlink (it takes a far more trouble to follow it up), neither has the immediacy of simply stating the fact that the claim has been made - perhaps with a full (insofar as fair use allows) quoting of the claim.
Since we're facing a real possibility of insurrection from the tea party secessionists, let's encourage them to refuse to answer the ethnicity question on the census. Then we can do a sort for all those who've failed to answer that question, and march 'em to the FEMA camps!
Is Beck a double agent?
Be ready to customize your xorg.conf if you get dropped into 800x600. 10.04 and VirtualBox aren't entirely happy together yet (see http://forums.virtualbox.org). You can also get a kernel error if you don't patch one of the VB source files before compiling VB's kernel modules.
Once beyond that, I don't mind the button placement at all. Over the years of using Linux, I've often used themes with various button placements. Takes me no time to get used to such changes, at all. The brain stores such stuff by context. "If it looks generally like this, the buttons must be there." Since I'm running this instance on a Win7 host (an eee1001p I keep Win on for the oddball Windows program that's not happy under wine) keeping the X windows decidedly different than the Win windows, when both are open at once, keeps the context clear for other operations in them too.
On the other hand, if Canonical goes through with the reported suggestion of removing the right-side scroll bars from stuff, I'll be royally pissed. That's far more basic to functionality - actually removing a control - than just bouncing the buttons from one side to the other.
The article says nothing about this proposal being in consideration of the nation's new health care plan. What's the logic that it would be? It makes sense in connection with immigration control and jobs. But the liberals don't care much if illegal immigrants get health care - which most of them could get under their home countries' national plans anyhow (Mexico has one), so it's not what they come here for. And the tea partiers don't think the trade off between a strong national id and freedom is worth it, even to help keep the immigrants out.
News flash. Unemployment is high. A kennel in Snohomish just posted a Craigslist ad for a minimum-wage part-time dogshit-shoveler, and got > 250 resumes in response. People really, really would like every one of those jobs back from the paperless immigrants. And that's why this national id thing - which even a liberal-leaner like me is against - is likely to fly in this climate. Health care plans are hardly a factor here.
"It would be a shame if your nice [online] storefront got broken into and wrecked. Yeah, we sold you that front door and lock. Well, you should know there's a little problem we've discovered with it. We could fix it for you, for a price. Or you might expect to find a couple of guys have opened that lock at night and run through your place with wrecking bars, one of these mornings."
Classic protection racket. My Italian relatives would totally approve.
Yup. To get this posted here, then not keep your fucking form up, or even put a notice at the top of it that you're not accepting it ... total douche.
All communications and media rely on public right of way, whether to string lines or transmit over radio frequencies. Even paper transmissions rely on public roads, and often the public postal system. There is nobody in any media who is not in implicit partnership with the government. There is no stance the government can take that does not end up favoring some players, and some strategies, over others. So it is best that the government make its decisions out in the open, rather than pretend it's not a player. And it's best that the government try to favor the broad interests of the people, rather than the entrenched interests of existing media.
Existing media interests have been stalling on providing broad band net access, despite other countries showing that the road forward is wide open, and within our economic means. The government is attempting here to tilt the field more towards the public's interest in having true broadband access. It is legitimate to view this as as much a right as the right to receive mail, phone calls, the newspaper, and over-the-air broadcasts. It involves public rights of way just as much as those others do. It cannot be done but by government partnership. And the government, as a partner, needs to speak for its owners, us.
Ceoyouo confuses the camps. The "scientists" who say we need gray literature are those who produce the gray literature. The gray literature is almost entirely supportive of the denialist political camp. The UN would panel, if it leaves out the gray literature, will most likely end up fully supporting the IPCC's reports, aside from the small corrections already noted as necessary such as the estimate of the speed of glacial melting in the Himalayas, which in that case crept in from gray literature itself (although from bad pop reporting rather than denialist pseudo-science).
So: The IPCC would prefer to exclude gray literature, and regrets it wasn't 100% successful in its prior attempt to do so (e.g. the Himalayan thing). Those opposed to the IPCC, most of whom haven't been able to publish in peer-reviewed journals, insist that their gray literature - largely papers published by think tanks funded by oil interests, outside of the recognized scientific press - should be taken into account. They believe that the peers who peer review are all in on the conspiracy, so that any limitation to peer-reviewed literature misses the "truth" of how nearly everyone in academia is part of a vast effort to bring One World Government, an agenda which includes fostering panic and fear so that the population turns over control of the economic system to bureaucrats, whom it is presumed most scientists have a deep, instinctual, natural love of.
What do you say, scientists? I know a few of you are reading this. You love bureaucrats, don't you? Ha.
I haven't seen a chiropractor in years. Not because it doesn't work, but because it does. Seeing how big an effect it made for me, I learned to adjust my own spine. That wasn't easy. I can get it wrong. It's a very specific adjustment required, not just some random act for a presumed placebo effect.
And that makes sense. We're physical beings. The alignment, balance, symmetry of ourselves as physical bodies - of course that makes a difference, sometimes a big one, in our health. The anti-chiropractic camp would ask us to believe, what?, that we're pure spiritual essence, to which the body is so secondary even in regards to the body's own health that only our mental attitude - as adjusted of course by whatever drugs an orthodox physician might decide to prescribe - makes an "objective" difference in healing? But mental attitude is the essence of "subjective," not objective. Objectively, that body is what we are, and various bodywork therapies, including chiropractic, approach the body with the respect it's due.
It wasn't a PR guy. It was one of their chief engineers. And it was also their top executive for the plant. In sworn testimony. On several occassions. To both state regulators and state legislators. In a state where, when Entergy bought the plant, Entergy agreed contractually that the state legislature's approval would be required - unlike in any other state - for Entergy to renew the plant's license.
Also, Entergy plans to spin off this and several other plants into a new corportion that will carry billions in debt, and free Entergy from most future financial responsibility for any cleanup of the plant. There's a decommissioning fund, but since the stock market crashed it's way underfunded, and depends on some decades of extraordinary investment appreciation if it's to recover - which the NRC seems unconcerned about.
I'm pro-nuclear power. But Entergy hires chief engineers who are either incompetent or liars - or who've never reviewed a full schematic of their plant.
This is quite plainly a coup against democracies worldwide. Those attempting it should be jailed and prosecuted. If that action proves untenable, President Obama has a clear option for dealing with the US members of such conspiracies.
Yeah. Anything more than 30% (or less) is sufficient to control a large public corporation. The majority of stock in a corporation like Google is held by mutual funds, who do not typically actively engage in corporate control. So 30% is more than 60% of the stock held by individuals, who are more likely to claim a voice in corporate governance. IOW, they're keeping total control, for all practical purposes.
Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader. It's increasingly a "lifestyle" paper. It sees its crucial missions as propping up the real estate market in NYC (with fascinating articles like the one suggesting that since banks aren't lending, maybe you young people can borrow the half-million for a starter apartment from your folks), and pretending to be liberal while propping up most of the neocon fantasies about an American new world order (even before cheerleading Iraq, it was responsible for the absurd Whitewater charges).
I like half their editorial columnists. They have a couple of good economic writers. And I'm entertained by the lifestyle and real estate fluff. Plus at least their front page is by their own writers rather than the AP - which continues a rapid descent in quality too. And some of their NYC coverage is unavailable elsewhere - although only of interest to people with lives or roots in the city.
That's a good, concise, accurate overview of both the review and the pile-on "discussion" here. And it gets beaten down as a troll. What's amazing is that, if you're literate and over 30, you've read some of Jaron's stuff by now. While it's hit-and-miss, the hits are amazing. I know some top, absolutely brilliant people (separate groups in both neuroscience and music) who know him well personally, and are strongly impressed by him. If you can read, say, 10 of his essays and not be richly rewarded by 2 or 3 absolutely-original ideas embedded in them, you plainly have neither talent nor taste for ideas. Which describes the average person of any time period. Nothing to be ashamed of. Please put your blinders on, your head down, and trudge on with your life.
Funny thing. I have municipal water and sewer. They built all the plumbing from my house to the reservoir and treatment plant. I pay them every month based on metered gallons used.
Now why am I doing this? I can collect rainwater for free! I have a yard where I can dig a hole and shit! I must be a moron to be paying these guys who put the plumbing in every month.
Jaron has a real knack for heading off in the right direction. He's also good at seeing beyond the scope of conventionally-worn blinders - in a number of fields. He's got great intuition on which way the truest future lies, and little patience for those who plod along with less vision - or even desire for vision - even where they are people who count as brilliant within the confines of neuroscience, or computer science, or a single genre of music.
That said, he's also a good hand at writing for a popular audience. But he deflates a lot more bullshit than he puts out. That earns him a lot of retaliatory swipes - like the snidely negative book review that counts as the text for discussion here. Isn't there a sample chapter up somewhere we can more profitably discuss? Need we be derivative even in our criticism?
So you judge all possible moves and make one based on ... what? Can each move be cleanly ranked on the value of the odds of the outcomes that might follow from it, against some distinct set of measures that fully define a creature's goals, satisfactions and fears? Doesn't it require a particularly impoverished set of goals to do any such calculation as to the odds of their satisfaction following certain moves by oneself? Given the hypothesized more intelligent mind, whose pleasures in walking a Parisian boulevard might, this article also suggests, be far beyond our own in complexity, why should we presume that its satisfactions, like its pleasures, might also be far beyond our own? If the range of desirable goals becomes correspondingly more complex with a more complex brain - which is obviously the case when comparing Mozart or Einstein with the amoeba or your local gas station clerk - then the solution of the problem of the optimal path to what correspondingly becomes less certain.
If your choice of roads merely consists of one where you eat and one where you starve, it's pretty easy to model that under an assumption of determinism. But if on one road you perform a powerful piece of music, on another make an incredible scientific breakthrough, and on another simply watch a beautiful sunset - and you've got a mind fully capable of this range and far more - assuming that all these roads leave you well-fed, well-fucked, and pleased with the outcome, being smart doesn't so much simplify the solution of what to do as vastly complicate the choices to solve among. This "problem" isn't at all advanced by considering the free will implied by it an "illusion."
If your hosting provider wants the log files, they don't need root, just a copy of the files. Give them a user-level login, and put a copy of the files where that user can see them.
The outage already happened, right? They don't need the current logs as they happen, just the logs for the outage period.
This is as stupid as the "news" a month back claiming a pet dog used the same environmental resources as a large SUV. The problem was, multiplying the claims for agricultural land used to feed one dog by the number of dogs gave as a result that 10% of our agriculture is feeding dogs. Why is that obviously wrong? Because the whole pet food industry accounts for less that 1/10 of 1% of the value of agricultural production.
We're going to see more and more of this shit. Everyone will be competing to get their 15 minutes of fame by claiming that X - something that annoys them, like PHP or, evidently, dogs - is the major overlooked factor in destroying the Earth's climate. Because they know our press is so stupid in basic scientific literacy that they'll jump at the chance to put a headline over the claim, since we're all bound to read it just in case there's a there there.
On the one hand malicious hackers should be killed. On the other, many of the most capable of them are believed to be closely tied to the Russian and Chinese (and Nigerian) governments, encouraged for both their ability to bring in monies, and for cooperation in state cyber-espionage goals. So the only usable model for international intervention may be the one currently used against Qaida in Pakistan - sending in American drones. Except Russia and China (and Nigeria) have rather more use for their hackers than the current Pakistani government has for its Qaida/Taliban ops centers. So they might just be a little touchy about drones taking out buildings in their big cities.
Odds are Google isn't sending much info about you downstream - probably none at all. They're in the business of selling ads. The metric on ads is response - whether measured by click-throughs, or resulting sales-per-dollar-invested in the advertising campaign. Google isn't in the business of selling their data on you. They're in the business of selling advertisers advertising services which may be far more efficient in effectively reaching productive customers than any other place the advertisers can spend their money. That means Google want to hoard their information on you. If they let the advertiser know anything about you, the advertiser can cut Google out - or sell your information onwards to someone else who will cut Google out. Google depends on the advertisers having no fucking idea who you are. All they need to know is that if they pay Google to reach 1000 people, that 1000 people will contain more good prospects than anyone but Google can deliver for them.
It's a fair bet that Google is tightly tied into the NSA infrastructure, so if your searches show Qaida-like patterns you do have a problem. But it's an even better bet Google isn't going to tell any of its advertising customers anything specifically about you at all. That Google alone knows who you are is the source of their profitability.
That's like when the space aliens take us up in their ships at night to do the cavity search, right? Most of use don't remember it - or at most have some weird, distorted dream-like images from it - and it doesn't particularly hurt there in the morning.
There may even be a tie-in. If you arrived here from an alien civilization, and wanted to contact the very nexus of intelligence on this planet, would your on-board AI send you to the White House (well, you might be curious about those signals you've picked up suggesting Obama is an alien)? the UN (yeah, right)? or ... Google HQ (bingo! most connected place on the planet)?
Could Google and the space aliens already be cooperating on your proctology?