He makes up facts, and cites figures that are false.
If that's so, then it should be easy to provide evidence to the contrary. That's how it works.
He buys into and furthers the position of radical left wing organizations that a) accept moral relativism as a guiding principle
So he buys into things you don't believe in?
Furthermore, he associates with the left wing? That MUST be a dead giveaway of a person you should not believe.
I buy into moral relativism as my life's guiding principle and I'm left-leaning in my political affilitations. I find it insulting that you'd ignore my arguments based on knowing all that.
Chomsky has a visceral hatred of the US Military and the US goverment
So, if a person is known to oppose a certain group of people it invalidates his arguments against them?
His so called "visceral hatred" means nothing if he can provide evidence and argue logically. In fact, his "hatred" (="political passion" to some) makes him dig deeper into the deep, dark secrets than an average Joe Sixpack. That makes him a better source - not worse.
Of course there will be some cooperation required between the different DNS roots if their customers are going to be happy.
Didn't AOL try locking their userbase into AOL chatroom-sandbox and it worked for a while?
A common mistake
on
True Names
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
when humans create a machine intelligence that is smarter than we are
I wonder why this same mistake comes up time after time in sci-fi.
Having superior raw intelligence doesn't mean anything performancewise. Yeah, you might be able to carry out a perfect logical deduction in a nanosecond but that doesn't make you creative or give you the intuititive ability us humans have to skip over irrelevant facts.
At least the original Star Trek got it right when Spock uttered the most insightful line in the whole series: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end."
It's easy and cheap to manufacture (hell, you can make it yourself out of aluminum and iron rust; getting a magnesium initiator might be a bit more difficult), you can burn through several drives at once and total destruction of data is guaranteed.
Just make sure you ignite the stuff outside. Thermite will burn through a reinforced concrete floor and you cannot put out the flame. It'll burn underwater, under a pile of sand and in vacuum.
I bought X-files 2nd season a while ago but was thoroughly disappointed in it. The package was nice and audio and visual quality was good, but the "usability" of the disc set was abyssmal.
First of all, when you start watching an episode you're forced to watch the equivalents of the "FBI warning" in at least four languages. After the episode ends, you get to see another four warnings before you get back to the main menu.
The main menu is my second gripe. I like to watch TV DVDs like I listen to music. I play them in the background, mostly listening and occasionally watching. What I don't want to do is to click through menus every time an episode ends. I want the all episodes to play consequently without any interaction from me. Unfortunately the X-files collection doesn't let you do that. After watching the episode (and the damn warnings) you have to travel all the way back to the main menu and click on the next episode (and watch the warnings again).
I just read a book about the history of the making of the atomic bomb (a rushed project if there ever was one) and one of the leading ideas was: if you have a reasonably foolproof design and a promising but more uncertain design, build both.
As the result both gun- and implosion fission weapon designs were built. The gun mechanism was foolproof whereas the implosion was more effective. And both worked.
Basic science tends to produce practical results only after about a decade. We sure could use some kind of a solution right now.
They mysteriously lose contact when they arrive at the moon.
Uh, I don't think so or we're talking about some other Clementine probes...
"The Clementine Lunar Image Browser (CLIB) is available. Version 1.5 allows access to over 170,000 Clementine images and includes a new interface that allows the user to zoom in to any location on the moon. The full version, due in 1995, will serve all 1.8 million images as well as their associated data."
Yeah, I know it's Boeing and that Boeing makes planes.
But these are the planes the airlines buy. My point was that they should not buy this new stuff (because it has "the net") but to improve the existing fleet.
I don't want to hear what was left out of the book or see/hear about how certain parts of the book were portrayed.
That's why I've been avoiding all the trailers and commercials and told my friends who'll see the movie before me that I'll tear them a new goatse.cx sized asshole if they tell me anything about the movie.
The universe and the net will die similarly
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
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· Score: 1
Spam is like enthropy. It can decrease only locally, but on a global scale it's always increasing.
The net will also die like the universe. The latter one is moving inexorably towards a "heat death" when all of the temperature differences in the universe have evened out and neither heat engines nor anything else can continue to operate for lack of available energy supplies. The former will die because all useful information has been drowned in the "enthropy", that is, spam.
my computer is still really responsive, almost like there is no file transfer at all.
Tell me about it.
I had a dual P3 with SCSI drives, but these drives were so noisy that one day I got fed up with the noise and sold them off and bought 7200 rpm ATA100 IDE drives instead.
For a while I enjoyed the near silence of the new drives but soon the disappointing performance hit home. The computer simply choked on the heavy I/O during compilation.
Now I'm back with a single 18 GB 15 krpm SCSI drive. Yeah, it's small and rather noisy and but at least the I/O isn't a performance bottleneck anymore.
and if those interests are determined genetically, similar genes.
That's a big "if" you've got there.
Obviously genes may have a role in determining what kind of tasks people find interesting, but I'd argue that this is simply due to the enhanced raw ability. In general, people find interesting only the tasks they're good at.
It's the old debate whether the environment or the endogenic factors such as genes dictate how we'll turn out as human beings. In the case of diseases that have a clear genetic origin the negative effects of inbreeding have been well established. I would, however, tend to believe that for very high level functions such as career interests and social skills, the environment will play much more important role than the genes alone.
My point is that I would be very careful in generalising any concepts from physiology (such as inbreeding) to psychology or sociology. Previous attempts such as the frenology do not bode well for this development.
That's three russian solutions, of which none is sure.
What do you mean these solutions are not sure? Are you a technical expert on the matter or just bashing the Russian space technology and expertise?
If it's the latter one, I'd strongly suggest you consider the fact that Soviet Union/Russia is the only country that managed to maintain a working space station in orbit for decades, provided most of the low-cost heavy lifting for ISS building and is currently edging ahead of NASA and ESA when it comes to commercialising space and good PR.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's perfectly OK in my book.
What I don't like to see is an outright rejection of ideas based on the person who presented them.
Well, what you know. And I thought Philosophy was about thinking for yourself.
If that's so, then it should be easy to provide evidence to the contrary. That's how it works.
He buys into and furthers the position of radical left wing organizations that a) accept moral relativism as a guiding principle
So he buys into things you don't believe in? Furthermore, he associates with the left wing? That MUST be a dead giveaway of a person you should not believe.
I buy into moral relativism as my life's guiding principle and I'm left-leaning in my political affilitations. I find it insulting that you'd ignore my arguments based on knowing all that.
So what would you like? A hive-mind singing praises to the unbound capitalism, blind patriotism and civil obedience?
Having radically different, even insulting opinions freely expressed IN PUBLIC is a sign of a healthy society.
So, if a person is known to oppose a certain group of people it invalidates his arguments against them?
His so called "visceral hatred" means nothing if he can provide evidence and argue logically. In fact, his "hatred" (="political passion" to some) makes him dig deeper into the deep, dark secrets than an average Joe Sixpack. That makes him a better source - not worse.
Didn't AOL try locking their userbase into AOL chatroom-sandbox and it worked for a while?
I wonder why this same mistake comes up time after time in sci-fi.
Having superior raw intelligence doesn't mean anything performancewise. Yeah, you might be able to carry out a perfect logical deduction in a nanosecond but that doesn't make you creative or give you the intuititive ability us humans have to skip over irrelevant facts.
At least the original Star Trek got it right when Spock uttered the most insightful line in the whole series: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end."
AFAIK, the Russians were smart enough not to have a pure oxygen atmosphere in their capsules...
It's easy and cheap to manufacture (hell, you can make it yourself out of aluminum and iron rust; getting a magnesium initiator might be a bit more difficult), you can burn through several drives at once and total destruction of data is guaranteed.
Just make sure you ignite the stuff outside. Thermite will burn through a reinforced concrete floor and you cannot put out the flame. It'll burn underwater, under a pile of sand and in vacuum.
I bought X-files 2nd season a while ago but was thoroughly disappointed in it. The package was nice and audio and visual quality was good, but the "usability" of the disc set was abyssmal.
First of all, when you start watching an episode you're forced to watch the equivalents of the "FBI warning" in at least four languages. After the episode ends, you get to see another four warnings before you get back to the main menu.
The main menu is my second gripe. I like to watch TV DVDs like I listen to music. I play them in the background, mostly listening and occasionally watching. What I don't want to do is to click through menus every time an episode ends. I want the all episodes to play consequently without any interaction from me. Unfortunately the X-files collection doesn't let you do that. After watching the episode (and the damn warnings) you have to travel all the way back to the main menu and click on the next episode (and watch the warnings again).
Just watch it happen.
Oh give me a break!
How hard can it be to find a computer with Word installed? Is buying the de facto standard word processor that much to be asked?
Most computers come with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. Getting the MS Office suite isn't that difficult (either legally or illegally).
The only reason you would NOT use MS Office is ideology.
If you want to suffer for free software, that's your prerogative but don't whine about it then!
I used to be a die-hard free software fanatic who wouldn't reply to html e-mails or e-mails that contained MS Office attachments.
Then I got a job and learnt that tolerance instead of shitty elitism is the way to go. Too bad RMS never learnt that.
I work in an MS shop and that means that a substitute that works just with "most" MS Office docs is not acceptable.
I just read a book about the history of the making of the atomic bomb (a rushed project if there ever was one) and one of the leading ideas was: if you have a reasonably foolproof design and a promising but more uncertain design, build both.
As the result both gun- and implosion fission weapon designs were built. The gun mechanism was foolproof whereas the implosion was more effective. And both worked.
Basic science tends to produce practical results only after about a decade. We sure could use some kind of a solution right now.
Uh, I don't think so or we're talking about some other Clementine probes...
"The Clementine Lunar Image Browser (CLIB) is available. Version 1.5 allows access to over 170,000 Clementine images and includes a new interface that allows the user to zoom in to any location on the moon. The full version, due in 1995, will serve all 1.8 million images as well as their associated data."
But these are the planes the airlines buy. My point was that they should not buy this new stuff (because it has "the net") but to improve the existing fleet.
I'd rather have the cash-starved airlines investing in the security and maintenance than this.
It's been a while since I've read something as insightful and thought provoking on Slashdot as this article was.
I don't want to hear what was left out of the book or see/hear about how certain parts of the book were portrayed.
That's why I've been avoiding all the trailers and commercials and told my friends who'll see the movie before me that I'll tear them a new goatse.cx sized asshole if they tell me anything about the movie.
The net will also die like the universe. The latter one is moving inexorably towards a "heat death" when all of the temperature differences in the universe have evened out and neither heat engines nor anything else can continue to operate for lack of available energy supplies. The former will die because all useful information has been drowned in the "enthropy", that is, spam.
And do you know who that will be blamed on? Right. It's the fault of the nasty internet pirates! So, we need even more protections.
Tell me about it.
I had a dual P3 with SCSI drives, but these drives were so noisy that one day I got fed up with the noise and sold them off and bought 7200 rpm ATA100 IDE drives instead.
For a while I enjoyed the near silence of the new drives but soon the disappointing performance hit home. The computer simply choked on the heavy I/O during compilation.
Now I'm back with a single 18 GB 15 krpm SCSI drive. Yeah, it's small and rather noisy and but at least the I/O isn't a performance bottleneck anymore.
I couldn't agree more. Your post is truly insightful in its uncompromising harshness.
I wish I had written it.
I also wish the monkey people would leave me alone.
That's a big "if" you've got there.
Obviously genes may have a role in determining what kind of tasks people find interesting, but I'd argue that this is simply due to the enhanced raw ability. In general, people find interesting only the tasks they're good at.
It's the old debate whether the environment or the endogenic factors such as genes dictate how we'll turn out as human beings. In the case of diseases that have a clear genetic origin the negative effects of inbreeding have been well established. I would, however, tend to believe that for very high level functions such as career interests and social skills, the environment will play much more important role than the genes alone.
My point is that I would be very careful in generalising any concepts from physiology (such as inbreeding) to psychology or sociology. Previous attempts such as the frenology do not bode well for this development.
What do you mean these solutions are not sure? Are you a technical expert on the matter or just bashing the Russian space technology and expertise?
If it's the latter one, I'd strongly suggest you consider the fact that Soviet Union/Russia is the only country that managed to maintain a working space station in orbit for decades, provided most of the low-cost heavy lifting for ISS building and is currently edging ahead of NASA and ESA when it comes to commercialising space and good PR.