The question is not and will never be about what is "ethical", "just", or "right". All the law is concerned with, in its petty little scope, is what's legal.
And this is why there is a role for less-lethal weapons (the Russians' fentanyl aerosol, tasers, pain rays, LRAD's, whatever) in police actions. But these things have never really shown up on a battlefield as weapons of war: it's generally easier to make someone dead than to make them alive but unable to make you dead.
I'm actually very opposed to warfare, and am pointing out that if you're not prepared to have at least some loss of life you shouldn't be going to war in the first place.
I didn't make my argument fully because I was at work and my simulation finished running, but my intent was to criticize the attitude that there can be clinical less-lethal wars: war, almost universally, has been about trying to do something and "neutralizing" the folks who want to stop you. That's almost exclusively done by making them dead (or afraid of being dead).
Yes, if you've got an absolutely overwhelming technological advantage you can get away with being less lethal, but that sort of thing isn't a war -- it's more of a police action. (Look at the weapons we've used in Iraq, where the US has an overwhelming technological and material advantage -- still, most of what we're doing there is "find the bad guys and kill them", the war bit, combined with "try to rebuild some semblance of a working society and make people like us".)
War is about murdering the other people and breaking their equipment before they use their equipment to murder you. If you're using a laser, or a bullet, or a missile, or any of a myriad of weapons against a boat or an airplane, then it had damn well better pose enough of a threat to you that you are perfectly okay with everyone on it dying, and perhaps maybe even want to kill them. This isn't a "less-lethal" weapon (and I agree with your assessment of tasers and microwave pain rays); it's a "you, over there, die" weapon.
I'm quite critical of the US military contracting industry and of US military policy, but saying "this weapon is bad because it might kill people" is a little disingenuous. It's a weapon; it's for murdering people. If you don't think something's important enough to kill anyone who gets in the way of it, it's not worth going to war over, since that's what war is.
What Machiavelli talked about was how to achieve and hold power. That requires the people's support. But a Machiavellian, like any true politician, does it for his own sake, not for theirs -- and Machiavelli thus talked about how to reconcile this fundamental selfishness with the need to keep the people's support.
The problem comes when there is a distinction between enacting policies that benefit the people, and feigning to so just in order to get their support while actually not having their best interests at heart. This is why transparency in governance is the ultimate enemy of politicians and yet the only thing that gives government a shade's chance of actually serving the public.
They've not been that way for a long time, if you get ones that have x60-class (560, 660, etc.,) GPU's rather than the 580/680 class ones. They may not run all your games on ultra at 1920x1080 with FSAA on, but is that really that big of a deal?
I'm sitting here with one in my lap right now, actually. It's barely warm, not that heavy, not that big (it's small enough that I plug it into a real monitor when I'm at home), the battery lasts a long time, and it still runs games quite well. No, it's not a beast with multiple high-end GPU's in SLI, but I can't afford one of those anyway.
I'm typing on a machine I bought a week ago -- an Asus G46. It's a 14" machine that is a bit overbuilt (important to me because I want something durable), but still clocks in at about 5 pounds. The CPU is a 3GHz dual-core i5, which is really not so bad; the GPU is a GTX660M, which runs anything I have thrown at it at very high FPS. (I actually don't have games installed yet that will really stress it, but people's reviews rate it very highly.) It runs quite cool; the cooling system on the thing is quite beefy, and exhausts out the back so you don't bake yourself. The battery lasts for 5-6 hours when not running the 660M.
It cost about $900.
No, it's not as powerful as the dual GTX580 beasties, but I don't need it to be.
The one drawback is the screen -- it's only 1366x768, which is not the best for a 14" panel, but when I'm at home I have a 1080p monitor anyway.
Well, this last month some people went to the Internet and said "Give us money, and we will make you a spiffy game, and will sell it DRM-free. We'll need about a million bucks."
The Internet gave them $4 million, so much money that they had to scramble to find ways to spend all of it to make their game spiffier.
There's a jurisdictional question: can the French government punish a French citizen for simply being part of the same organization as a non-Frenchman who breaks French law?
There are ways to generalize these specialized skills, though.
I have a good friend who recently got his PhD in experimental particle physics. His name will be on the paper that announces the discovery of the Higgs boson; he did a bunch of database work writing code that makes some bits of the ATLAS analysis project go. (His PhD was on analyzing the compatibility of the ATLAS data with particular supersymmetric models.)
Nobody in industry gives a shit about the Higgs boson or supersymmetry. But what *can* this fellow do? He can figure out what complicated data mean -- "quantitative analysis" may be the fancy term -- and enlist the help of computers to do the statistics required. This skill is as useful for particle physics as it is for a bunch of other things. Just today he accepted a job at Intel, who is willing to pay him a bunch of money to tell them what their data actually mean.
It's around and people think about it, but it's not what I would call "promising" I suppose, simply because it can predict gravity -- or many other things, just because it has so many free parameters. But it could be an answer, too.
I mentioned lattice quantum gravity as a fairly well-constrained thing: people are doing simulations on supercomputers as we speak to understand its properties and to see if it correctly reduces to GR in the classical limit.
This doesn't mean that they're wrong; it means that the region of their applicability is bounded. Dealing with such bounds wasn't done in any formal way in Newton's time, but now we have an entire field of study, of "effective field theories", that are a rigorous way to understand how a complicated model behaves in some limit or other. (The example I am most familiar with is "chiral perturbation theory", which consists of pretending the world is made of protons, neutrons, and pions at low energy, knowing full well that those guys are made of quarks once you squint hard enough but not caring. It turns out that chiral perturbation theory is very useful and powerful.)
QM and *special* relativity get along just fine. When you combine them in a simple way you get predictions like antimatter, the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, and so on. If you do this in a more detailed way, using quantum field theory, you get the fantastically accurate predictions of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of quantum chromodynamics that can't be solved with pen and paper but which still gives accurate predictions when done on supercomputers, and so forth.
And there's nothing forbidding QM from playing nice with general relativity, either; we just don't know how it works yet. There are some models, like lattice quantum gravity, that seem quite promising.
That's what I'd remembered -- 25, 64, and 200. My friend who shot Kodachrome right up until the end said that 200 was crap, though.
Not at all disputing that Kodachrome images kick ass; some of his colors look absolutely lovely. Also not disputing that old photographic equipment and methods do just fine much of the time; I'm carting around a manual-focus manual-iris 400mm f/6.3 with me to work and shooting the birds in the park I walk through with it.
... a vacuum cleaner is a simple device. It does a thing: it sucks up dirt. All of the fancy engineering bits are just there so that it can suck dirt better (which, incidentally, is why it requires electricity, although you can also buy battery-operated vacuum cleaners!) There are lots of sorts of vacuum cleaner, but they're all designed so that they do what you want better.
The problem with Microsoft's console isn't that it has to be plugged in all the time; it's that this requirement is there for the benefit of someone other than the customer.
The new digital DSLR sensors are very, *very* good. They were already awfully good for a while; now they're head and shoulders above film in so many areas.
I have a camera with a sensor that's a quarter-frame compared to film, called the Four Thirds format. Modern sensors of this size are quite good, but I have one of the old "crappy" ones (back before Panasonic figured out how to make decent ones), and even so I can make 16x20" prints off of it at ISO 800 that look great. I don't even think they *make* ISO 800 Kodachrome, do they? Yes, low-light sensitivity isn't the final story in imaging, but for people who shoot wildlife (which tends to move around a lot and requires telephoto lenses with apertures like f/5.6 at the best) it's important. This, remember, is with an old, bad-for-its-time quarter-frame sensor.
As for resolution, a Nikon D800 will give you about 100 line pairs per mm of resolution, but it crucially retains almost full MTF close to that frequency for black and white detail, by the nature of the digital sampling involved. (Color detail is less than that, because of Bayer filtration, but it is in any event not worse than half of Nyquist, and often much better.) Kodachrome, on the other hand, doesn't: the measured contrast decreases smoothly with frequency, and is quite low (Kodak cites MTF at 100 lp/mm=0.001) by 100 lp/mm.
As for dynamic range, at base ISO that D800 sensor will give you something stupid like 14 stops of dynamic range, measured in some sane way (difference between clip point and level where SNR at some fairly high frequency falls to 0 dB, or somesuch). Even the new Four Thirds sensors (the little quarter-frame ones) give something like 12 stops. Can Kodachrome do this, and do it with no color shift?
This is a good point, and is why I really support pay-per-byte internet pricing, so long as and only so long as the rates are sensible and connected to cost (as with electricity) rather than punitive (like cellphone overages).
Prices are the way that the economy communicates abundance and scarcity; unmetered internet service encourages people to treat bandwidth as an unlimited resource and consume it as such. Perhaps this is somewhat close to true sometimes (home connections), perhaps it is less true otherwise (4G connections), but if bandwidth isscarce, people's usage patterns need to reflect that, and prices are the signal that makes this happen.
It's not discriminatory. It's charging people what they cost.
Is it discriminatory that a big person has to pay more than a small person for food, or clothing? Is it discriminatory that it costs more to produce gluten-free bread, so people with celiac disease have to pay more for a sandwich? Is it discriminatory that I, born with eyeballs the wrong shape, have to pay for lenses so I can see? No -- it's only tailors, bakers, and opticians wanting to get paid for their work.
If there were a way to pay fair market value for a DRM-free recording (meaning: one where I can go mplayer GOT-S1E01.mkv and have it work) of the show, then fewer people would pirate it.
People pirate it because the only way to watch it legally is to subscribe to HBO. Their business model induces the piracy.
Their people are that brainwashed, and the government probably knows better but playing along with the illusion is a route to power there so folks do it. And, while NK would be absolutely flattened in a war, Seoul is within artillery range of the border, and would sustain a huge amount of damage in the opening minutes of the war.
Slashdot Mirror
Are these other tax sheltering techniques legal?
The question is not and will never be about what is "ethical", "just", or "right". All the law is concerned with, in its petty little scope, is what's legal.
And this is why there is a role for less-lethal weapons (the Russians' fentanyl aerosol, tasers, pain rays, LRAD's, whatever) in police actions. But these things have never really shown up on a battlefield as weapons of war: it's generally easier to make someone dead than to make them alive but unable to make you dead.
I'm actually very opposed to warfare, and am pointing out that if you're not prepared to have at least some loss of life you shouldn't be going to war in the first place.
I didn't make my argument fully because I was at work and my simulation finished running, but my intent was to criticize the attitude that there can be clinical less-lethal wars: war, almost universally, has been about trying to do something and "neutralizing" the folks who want to stop you. That's almost exclusively done by making them dead (or afraid of being dead).
Yes, if you've got an absolutely overwhelming technological advantage you can get away with being less lethal, but that sort of thing isn't a war -- it's more of a police action. (Look at the weapons we've used in Iraq, where the US has an overwhelming technological and material advantage -- still, most of what we're doing there is "find the bad guys and kill them", the war bit, combined with "try to rebuild some semblance of a working society and make people like us".)
Well, we have a congresscritter who thinks that magazines are the things that come out of the end of the gun, so you're ahead of the curve.
War is about murdering the other people and breaking their equipment before they use their equipment to murder you. If you're using a laser, or a bullet, or a missile, or any of a myriad of weapons against a boat or an airplane, then it had damn well better pose enough of a threat to you that you are perfectly okay with everyone on it dying, and perhaps maybe even want to kill them. This isn't a "less-lethal" weapon (and I agree with your assessment of tasers and microwave pain rays); it's a "you, over there, die" weapon.
I'm quite critical of the US military contracting industry and of US military policy, but saying "this weapon is bad because it might kill people" is a little disingenuous. It's a weapon; it's for murdering people. If you don't think something's important enough to kill anyone who gets in the way of it, it's not worth going to war over, since that's what war is.
What Machiavelli talked about was how to achieve and hold power. That requires the people's support. But a Machiavellian, like any true politician, does it for his own sake, not for theirs -- and Machiavelli thus talked about how to reconcile this fundamental selfishness with the need to keep the people's support.
The problem comes when there is a distinction between enacting policies that benefit the people, and feigning to so just in order to get their support while actually not having their best interests at heart. This is why transparency in governance is the ultimate enemy of politicians and yet the only thing that gives government a shade's chance of actually serving the public.
The Asus gaming laptops are pretty nice. They're not super-high-end, but they're quite nice, and not that expensive.
They've not been that way for a long time, if you get ones that have x60-class (560, 660, etc.,) GPU's rather than the 580/680 class ones. They may not run all your games on ultra at 1920x1080 with FSAA on, but is that really that big of a deal?
I'm sitting here with one in my lap right now, actually. It's barely warm, not that heavy, not that big (it's small enough that I plug it into a real monitor when I'm at home), the battery lasts a long time, and it still runs games quite well. No, it's not a beast with multiple high-end GPU's in SLI, but I can't afford one of those anyway.
Not so much.
I'm typing on a machine I bought a week ago -- an Asus G46. It's a 14" machine that is a bit overbuilt (important to me because I want something durable), but still clocks in at about 5 pounds. The CPU is a 3GHz dual-core i5, which is really not so bad; the GPU is a GTX660M, which runs anything I have thrown at it at very high FPS. (I actually don't have games installed yet that will really stress it, but people's reviews rate it very highly.) It runs quite cool; the cooling system on the thing is quite beefy, and exhausts out the back so you don't bake yourself. The battery lasts for 5-6 hours when not running the 660M.
It cost about $900.
No, it's not as powerful as the dual GTX580 beasties, but I don't need it to be.
The one drawback is the screen -- it's only 1366x768, which is not the best for a 14" panel, but when I'm at home I have a 1080p monitor anyway.
Well, this last month some people went to the Internet and said "Give us money, and we will make you a spiffy game, and will sell it DRM-free. We'll need about a million bucks."
The Internet gave them $4 million, so much money that they had to scramble to find ways to spend all of it to make their game spiffier.
There's a jurisdictional question: can the French government punish a French citizen for simply being part of the same organization as a non-Frenchman who breaks French law?
There are ways to generalize these specialized skills, though.
I have a good friend who recently got his PhD in experimental particle physics. His name will be on the paper that announces the discovery of the Higgs boson; he did a bunch of database work writing code that makes some bits of the ATLAS analysis project go. (His PhD was on analyzing the compatibility of the ATLAS data with particular supersymmetric models.)
Nobody in industry gives a shit about the Higgs boson or supersymmetry. But what *can* this fellow do? He can figure out what complicated data mean -- "quantitative analysis" may be the fancy term -- and enlist the help of computers to do the statistics required. This skill is as useful for particle physics as it is for a bunch of other things. Just today he accepted a job at Intel, who is willing to pay him a bunch of money to tell them what their data actually mean.
It's around and people think about it, but it's not what I would call "promising" I suppose, simply because it can predict gravity -- or many other things, just because it has so many free parameters. But it could be an answer, too.
I mentioned lattice quantum gravity as a fairly well-constrained thing: people are doing simulations on supercomputers as we speak to understand its properties and to see if it correctly reduces to GR in the classical limit.
Miniature giant space hamsters, actually. They're quite ferocious, and especially fond of eyeballs.
This doesn't mean that they're wrong; it means that the region of their applicability is bounded. Dealing with such bounds wasn't done in any formal way in Newton's time, but now we have an entire field of study, of "effective field theories", that are a rigorous way to understand how a complicated model behaves in some limit or other. (The example I am most familiar with is "chiral perturbation theory", which consists of pretending the world is made of protons, neutrons, and pions at low energy, knowing full well that those guys are made of quarks once you squint hard enough but not caring. It turns out that chiral perturbation theory is very useful and powerful.)
This isn't true.
QM and *special* relativity get along just fine. When you combine them in a simple way you get predictions like antimatter, the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, and so on. If you do this in a more detailed way, using quantum field theory, you get the fantastically accurate predictions of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of quantum chromodynamics that can't be solved with pen and paper but which still gives accurate predictions when done on supercomputers, and so forth.
And there's nothing forbidding QM from playing nice with general relativity, either; we just don't know how it works yet. There are some models, like lattice quantum gravity, that seem quite promising.
That's more than a decade ago. But, in the Slashdot of yore, nobody could do math, so it's all good.
That's what I'd remembered -- 25, 64, and 200. My friend who shot Kodachrome right up until the end said that 200 was crap, though.
Not at all disputing that Kodachrome images kick ass; some of his colors look absolutely lovely. Also not disputing that old photographic equipment and methods do just fine much of the time; I'm carting around a manual-focus manual-iris 400mm f/6.3 with me to work and shooting the birds in the park I walk through with it.
... a vacuum cleaner is a simple device. It does a thing: it sucks up dirt. All of the fancy engineering bits are just there so that it can suck dirt better (which, incidentally, is why it requires electricity, although you can also buy battery-operated vacuum cleaners!) There are lots of sorts of vacuum cleaner, but they're all designed so that they do what you want better.
The problem with Microsoft's console isn't that it has to be plugged in all the time; it's that this requirement is there for the benefit of someone other than the customer.
The new digital DSLR sensors are very, *very* good. They were already awfully good for a while; now they're head and shoulders above film in so many areas.
I have a camera with a sensor that's a quarter-frame compared to film, called the Four Thirds format. Modern sensors of this size are quite good, but I have one of the old "crappy" ones (back before Panasonic figured out how to make decent ones), and even so I can make 16x20" prints off of it at ISO 800 that look great. I don't even think they *make* ISO 800 Kodachrome, do they? Yes, low-light sensitivity isn't the final story in imaging, but for people who shoot wildlife (which tends to move around a lot and requires telephoto lenses with apertures like f/5.6 at the best) it's important. This, remember, is with an old, bad-for-its-time quarter-frame sensor.
As for resolution, a Nikon D800 will give you about 100 line pairs per mm of resolution, but it crucially retains almost full MTF close to that frequency for black and white detail, by the nature of the digital sampling involved. (Color detail is less than that, because of Bayer filtration, but it is in any event not worse than half of Nyquist, and often much better.) Kodachrome, on the other hand, doesn't: the measured contrast decreases smoothly with frequency, and is quite low (Kodak cites MTF at 100 lp/mm=0.001) by 100 lp/mm.
As for dynamic range, at base ISO that D800 sensor will give you something stupid like 14 stops of dynamic range, measured in some sane way (difference between clip point and level where SNR at some fairly high frequency falls to 0 dB, or somesuch). Even the new Four Thirds sensors (the little quarter-frame ones) give something like 12 stops. Can Kodachrome do this, and do it with no color shift?
This is a good point, and is why I really support pay-per-byte internet pricing, so long as and only so long as the rates are sensible and connected to cost (as with electricity) rather than punitive (like cellphone overages).
Prices are the way that the economy communicates abundance and scarcity; unmetered internet service encourages people to treat bandwidth as an unlimited resource and consume it as such. Perhaps this is somewhat close to true sometimes (home connections), perhaps it is less true otherwise (4G connections), but if bandwidth isscarce, people's usage patterns need to reflect that, and prices are the signal that makes this happen.
Wait, airlines have to get permission to set up a particular fare structure?
It's not discriminatory. It's charging people what they cost.
Is it discriminatory that a big person has to pay more than a small person for food, or clothing? Is it discriminatory that it costs more to produce gluten-free bread, so people with celiac disease have to pay more for a sandwich? Is it discriminatory that I, born with eyeballs the wrong shape, have to pay for lenses so I can see? No -- it's only tailors, bakers, and opticians wanting to get paid for their work.
If there were a way to pay fair market value for a DRM-free recording (meaning: one where I can go mplayer GOT-S1E01.mkv and have it work) of the show, then fewer people would pirate it.
People pirate it because the only way to watch it legally is to subscribe to HBO. Their business model induces the piracy.
Their people are that brainwashed, and the government probably knows better but playing along with the illusion is a route to power there so folks do it. And, while NK would be absolutely flattened in a war, Seoul is within artillery range of the border, and would sustain a huge amount of damage in the opening minutes of the war.