Really, saying "I need X" is false without further clarification.
Now, "If I want to live, I need water" is true. But just "I need water" isn't.
Being pedantic aside, the problem with marketing is that it can (and does) blur the line between information and fraud. If you explicity stated, "Buy Alco brand Q-tips, and attractive women (or men) will sleep with you!", you would be committing fraud. (Well, if anyone actually believed you, and it wasn't obvious to a reasonable observer that you were being facetious.) By merely showing adds where a not-particularly attractive person uses one's product, and then suddenly has a more attractive mate, you've covered yourself legally, if not exactly morally.
That being said, with alcohol it might actually work. (Although in that case it's getting your target to use enough of the product that they think you're attractive enough, but that's enough debate entirely.)
The current system (letting nepotically chosen subordinates with no experience in their field) doesn't seem to be working out that well, either. At least with a computer program, you can examine the criteria and decide if it makes sense.
It something like triaging patients in a mass casualty - in the case of limited resources and nearly unlimited casualties, you spend the doctors & nurses time where it will do the most good. Saving a 5 year old with massive head trauma may make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but if that time costs the lives of three adults... well, it's never an easy choice to make, and sometimes it would be easier to let a computer make these kinds of harsh decisions.
It's not about predicting the disasters per se, but about modeling the best way to respond to the disasters.
In other words, it's concerned with how you get drinking water to the Superdome long enough to get everyone out; it's not concerned with determining where the hurricane lands to begin with.
How do you know that you don't have more than five senses, and only five of them are being mimicked right now?
We don't know. But like intelligent falling, it's a theory I'm not going to seriously consider unless I see evidence that the current theory (we're actually in the world we see, not brains in a jar) is incorrect.
And, no, 'evidence' collected by persons under the influence of psychoactive medication doesn't count.
Just because homosexuality isn't mentioned in the Gospels does not mean it isn't anywhere in the Bible nor does it change the Bible's view on the issue.
Now, if you said God's view on the issue, it would be arguable. Or Jesus', the apostles, Saul/Paul, or any other figure. But the Bible is a book, and a book with many authors. A book may present a point of view, but it doesn't have one itself.
As far as the second two quotes - well, hence the comment about pork. I still don't understand why anyone claiming to be a Christian pulls anything out of Leviticus - if you want to quote it, then follow all of it.
Oh, is that a nylon/cotton blend you're wearing?
As far as Paul went - as much as I hate using wikipedia, this is the only site I can find that discusses the issue with the translation from Greek - namely, why didn't Paul use the common Greek word for homosexual. (Not even mentioning Paul's sometimes self-contradictory views on other subjects, from circumsion to marriage & Gentiles following Levitical law.)(Caveat : the last Christian church I attended only accepted parts of the New Testament as inarguable - the Gospels & Acts, specifically. Everything else was up for debate.)
The American legal system seems to have long ago abandoned the idea of 'intent' for 'what it stated, as interpreted by the more pedantic lawyer on the case.'
This is the Elder Scrolls VI (or maybe VII.) Being able to make a truly photo-realistic real-time rendered image is impressive, true... and it's not that big a step to make it in stereo vision, one for each eye.
But having a direct neural interface, that can mimic all five senses at once, is another thing altogether.
(Not to mention being able to do it for hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom might be spaced out all over the world, with no appreciable lag... Oh, and having many separate strong AIs all running on the same hardware...)
That might work for a Montana militia type group - one could probably convince a fair number of people who consider themselves proud Americans to work against their current government if, say, they were big on civil liberties and disliked the current direction of the country.
But most of the terrorist groups the US seems concerned with today wouldn't appeal to the interest of a vast majority of Slashdot's readership. Unless, of course, there was a great deal of money involved.
At close to $40 a head you'd think that the Census Bureau could send someone out to buy each of us lunch and do personal interviews with everyone.
Now, I'm not entirely defending the $40 a head figure, it is kind of high. But considering there is a constitutional obligation to try to count everyone, the people who won't return the form (or answer the door, or the phone) are what costs so much. Three or four trips to a particular house (even by someone making minimum wage and driving a government vehicle) starts to add up. Those people, and those who would try to fill out multiple forms, are the reason it can't be done just by mail.
The simple solution - an ammendment to the Constitution, making the census a purely voluntary thing. Too lazy to fill out the 'number of people living in your house & yearly household income' sheet? Then your state loses representatives & federal money.
All ongoing posts will be the back and forth on this concept.
I think it will be two for, followed by three against.
Seriously, the problem here isn't just the prosecution - the fact that he lost his job because he was charged for a crime he was later found innocent of gets me almost as riled up.
And yeah, C&C had Engineers. You could take over buildings with them, as long as the building health was below 50%. Otherwise, they would damage the building.
IIRC, the original C&C just required one engineer, regardless of the status of the building. That was later balanced (in Red Alert) to one engineer damaging a structure, and heavily damaged structures being capturable.
Let's take an extreme example : racially (or any other type of bigotry) inspired violence.
If you put blinders on the government to the point where agents aren't allowed to identify race, much of the violence against the civil rights movement would be without context.
As for collecting it in a census, it's a bit more of a stretch...
This to me seemed like an awful simplification of Christianity (read: "Cafeteria Christianity"), where one could pick and choose which books in the Bible to trust, based on one's own biases.
So, the Catholic church was allowed to make that decision once, and anyone who wishes to claim to be a follower of Jesus has to listen to what they decided in about 300 AD?
(For the record, I was raised Catholic, left that church, and joined another which recognized only the four Gospels & Act as canon, the rest were relegated to the same status the Gnostic texts hold for Catholics.)
That's incorrect. There are details in practice, and symbols, which differ, but the philosophical meaning behind those is the same. This has already been exhaustively studied.
While I can see that the Buddhist (or Hinduist) one-who-is-many of Brahma might be compatible with the Catholic three-who-are-one of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I fail to see how the idea of reincarnation is merely a symbol present in most Eastern religions, or the one-time-pays of western religions being merely a detail in practice.
For the record, no, I am not an athiest attempting to claim that all religion is crap. I'm a former follower of one religion, and now follower of another, who doesn't see that the differences between all of these paths are merely trivial.
For example, when you compare what different practitioners of different religions say on "the beyond" and related subjects, you find that, although the religions they practice are one very different from the other, after years of following to the letter the precise practices taught by that religion, the conclusions they all reach are the same, they are expressed in very similar terms, they draw the exact same picture of what reality "in itself" is like, etc.
...
So, yes, it's on the atheist hands to provide the extraordinary evidence allowing us to dismiss this enormous corpus of repeatable, reproducible experiences as useless.
There's a big difference between useless and wrong. The problem with the commonality of results between different religious philosophy is that many of the stated assumptions of these different belief structures are not compatible. While the Buddhist & Trappist monks may reach the same conclusion on what is required of us, they can't both be correct.
So, yes, if you take the type of person who is likely to be attracted to a life of contemplation & meditation, and allow them to do so, they're often going to reach the same result. But which is the simpler theory - they are all being affected by various external supernatural agencies, or the structure of the human mind tends to the same result from different starting conditions?
In any case, I'm always a bit skeptical when I see studies with sample sizes in the thousands. It's not financially efficient to conduct real studies this size, so they tend to be hashing together data from sources collected for other purposes. Such studies have their place, of course. They also have their limitations.
I depends on what exactly the study is aimed for. You can take 2400 randomly selected registered Democrats, nationwide, and say with a 2% margin of error that 47% percent want candidate A, 43% want candidate B, and 10% don't care. That's pretty simple, and going for a smaller margin of error seems like a waste of resources.
But what if the group funding the study wants to know who is the preferred candidate among young Hispanic males, or any other demographic group? You could select those out of your original survey group, but then the margin of error is going to be rather larger.
I'm not going to touch the rest of your comment, but I felt I had to reply to this. If you mean that humans kill things in order to survive, that's true. Then again, so does every other animal on earth. If you mean that humans are programmed to enjoy killing other humans, you're wrong. Take a look at how most people will fight (without weapons) unless they've taken a lot of martial arts training. The instinctual fighting method most humans use is very rarely fatal, and even still, most people have a hard time going that far with it. Which is to be expected - very few pack animals will fight for dominance to the death. It takes training to learn to kill one's own species.
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Wait, am I being glib?
Now, "If I want to live, I need water" is true. But just "I need water" isn't.
Being pedantic aside, the problem with marketing is that it can (and does) blur the line between information and fraud. If you explicity stated, "Buy Alco brand Q-tips, and attractive women (or men) will sleep with you!", you would be committing fraud. (Well, if anyone actually believed you, and it wasn't obvious to a reasonable observer that you were being facetious.) By merely showing adds where a not-particularly attractive person uses one's product, and then suddenly has a more attractive mate, you've covered yourself legally, if not exactly morally.
That being said, with alcohol it might actually work. (Although in that case it's getting your target to use enough of the product that they think you're attractive enough, but that's enough debate entirely.)
It something like triaging patients in a mass casualty - in the case of limited resources and nearly unlimited casualties, you spend the doctors & nurses time where it will do the most good. Saving a 5 year old with massive head trauma may make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but if that time costs the lives of three adults... well, it's never an easy choice to make, and sometimes it would be easier to let a computer make these kinds of harsh decisions.
In other words, it's concerned with how you get drinking water to the Superdome long enough to get everyone out; it's not concerned with determining where the hurricane lands to begin with.
Is there really any way to prove they weren't?
Which I guess means that it's about 20% of being able to mimic 20% of human senses.
Hell, I won't even taken them from my own family members.
We don't know. But like intelligent falling, it's a theory I'm not going to seriously consider unless I see evidence that the current theory (we're actually in the world we see, not brains in a jar) is incorrect.
And, no, 'evidence' collected by persons under the influence of psychoactive medication doesn't count.
As far as the second two quotes - well, hence the comment about pork. I still don't understand why anyone claiming to be a Christian pulls anything out of Leviticus - if you want to quote it, then follow all of it.
Oh, is that a nylon/cotton blend you're wearing?
As far as Paul went - as much as I hate using wikipedia, this is the only site I can find that discusses the issue with the translation from Greek - namely, why didn't Paul use the common Greek word for homosexual. (Not even mentioning Paul's sometimes self-contradictory views on other subjects, from circumsion to marriage & Gentiles following Levitical law.)(Caveat : the last Christian church I attended only accepted parts of the New Testament as inarguable - the Gospels & Acts, specifically. Everything else was up for debate.)
Actually using human brains to do the processing would probably be a bigger feat than just fitting more gates on an IC.
The American legal system seems to have long ago abandoned the idea of 'intent' for 'what it stated, as interpreted by the more pedantic lawyer on the case.'
But having a direct neural interface, that can mimic all five senses at once, is another thing altogether.
(Not to mention being able to do it for hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom might be spaced out all over the world, with no appreciable lag... Oh, and having many separate strong AIs all running on the same hardware...)
Okay, yeah, I've got nothing to say to that. I think I'm just going to go sit in my corner & cry about the state of the world.
But most of the terrorist groups the US seems concerned with today wouldn't appeal to the interest of a vast majority of Slashdot's readership. Unless, of course, there was a great deal of money involved.
Now, I'm not entirely defending the $40 a head figure, it is kind of high. But considering there is a constitutional obligation to try to count everyone, the people who won't return the form (or answer the door, or the phone) are what costs so much. Three or four trips to a particular house (even by someone making minimum wage and driving a government vehicle) starts to add up. Those people, and those who would try to fill out multiple forms, are the reason it can't be done just by mail.
The simple solution - an ammendment to the Constitution, making the census a purely voluntary thing. Too lazy to fill out the 'number of people living in your house & yearly household income' sheet? Then your state loses representatives & federal money.
As for collecting it in a census, it's a bit more of a stretch...
So, the Catholic church was allowed to make that decision once, and anyone who wishes to claim to be a follower of Jesus has to listen to what they decided in about 300 AD?
(For the record, I was raised Catholic, left that church, and joined another which recognized only the four Gospels & Act as canon, the rest were relegated to the same status the Gnostic texts hold for Catholics.)
was a mildly interesting probability problem.
For the record, no, I am not an athiest attempting to claim that all religion is crap. I'm a former follower of one religion, and now follower of another, who doesn't see that the differences between all of these paths are merely trivial.
So, yes, if you take the type of person who is likely to be attracted to a life of contemplation & meditation, and allow them to do so, they're often going to reach the same result. But which is the simpler theory - they are all being affected by various external supernatural agencies, or the structure of the human mind tends to the same result from different starting conditions?
Then you're obviously not really an enthusiast.
But what if the group funding the study wants to know who is the preferred candidate among young Hispanic males, or any other demographic group? You could select those out of your original survey group, but then the margin of error is going to be rather larger.