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  1. Re:Interesting Idea on MIT Finds 'Grand Unified Theory of AI' · · Score: 1

    this AI model seems to be nothing more than something out of hilbert and whitehead program, really lousy as demoed by godel, but so very attractive to the common positivist

    for a little deeper treatment, I guess goethe on euler is appropriate

  2. Re:Endless vs. infinite on MIT Finds 'Grand Unified Theory of AI' · · Score: 2, Insightful

    a common treatment of the universe is finite, but unbounded

  3. Re:Bad news on Demand For Unmanned Aircraft Outstripping Their Capabilities · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the roman catholic church way back when did some good work on what is a just war. the considerations they used still pop up in debate. but i once asked a gung-ho solider if he had heard of the concept and he had not, but i am sure he was also a gung-ho Christian

    here is a trivial link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_War

    A reasonable person however would distinguish between justice and morality, IMO.

    some reasonable moralities do however categorically disapprove of atrocities.

  4. Re:Confusicanism's perspective on censorship on A Look Into China's Web Censorship Program · · Score: 1

    kind of like in the usa?

    it is pretty easy to conclude the feds do not have the mandate of heaven

    you might figure that china has a republic, but the usa has a constitutional republic. we really have not favored kings for some time. what we do have is the freedom to do some effective political organizing and vaguely reasonable elections. If we lose either of those it is a different story, but at the moment, if things are bad enough, there will be population-driven changes. Maybe not good changes, but changes. and i am an optimist.

    in china, if it is no longer a republic, this becomes one of the cases where china breaks up, a possibility I expect the current leadership keeps in mind.

  5. Re:Confusicanism's perspective on censorship on A Look Into China's Web Censorship Program · · Score: 1

    there was about 20 years, probably in the 1400's, when the vatican was completely accepting of confusianism. one could think china was soon to be Christian. some european nasties screwed it up on purpose.

  6. Re:WTF? Just ask the patient. on Could Colorblindness Cure Be Morally Wrong? · · Score: 1

    this lady who is worried is a common kind of philosophical disaster. we have all sorts of instrumentalities and using them or not is not usually considered a moral issues. most people treat them as the same sort of thing as natural senses. and if you are a platoist, you do not think any of your senses or instruments have much to directly say about reality. (sense-certainity vs sense-conception) but you might think well of three-d vision since it seems to have some sort of nice mapping to reality.

  7. Re:Theory vs. Reality on Can Ubuntu Save Online Banking? · · Score: 1

    i am not much of a security expert. here is how i see it. I control very little. everything can and eventually will be owned. for instance, how much physical security do you really have for your electronics? is your bank above board? (my bank is extremely financially stressed, so it is interesting to speculate on all sorts of dimensions.) Consider your HMO. (A long time ago I heard quotes from malpractice attorneys that it was common for medical records to be doctored. oops, i did not intend the pun.)

    so one of the problems with the comments is that the cd or netbook is from the bank.

    my contribution to the discussion is that i need a system that securely logs everything.

    I will observe that I had some security issues in 2009 and spent thousands of dollars attempting to improve things. It really did not do enough good. but i suppose as the threat environment becomes worse and worse, there will be some money to be made. pooh, at this point, i figure the anti-virus stuff is pretty much a scam, but they make money.

     

  8. Re:what happens if you drive without car insurance on House Passes Massive Medical Insurance Bill, 219-212 · · Score: 1

    not really. i googled washington bill gate proof of insurance and there seems to be quite a bit on the disposition of the tickets in court, but either i cannot get the full articles to display or they cost money. If you are interested in the chief reaming the cop, I did not see anything relevant, within the limits of the search. the whole thing was a bit of a local sensation and i suppose i saw coverage in the seattle times originally. incidently, the police chief was very open about it. it was on the proof of insurance issue. the chief figured the world's richest man was good for any damage he caused, and so he did not need insurance. this was an argument that was not universally accepted.

    bill beat both tickets.

  9. Re:Non story on Bill Gates May Build Small Nuclear Reactor · · Score: 1

    "Do not feed the trolls" and its abbreviation DNFTT redirect here. For the Wikimedia essay, see "What is a troll?".

    In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response[1] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[2]

    I note that an attack on bill gates on slashdot is never off-topic.

    I did not look closely, but it looks to me the cite had your quote. the cite certainally had something real close to it and they had the video. I did note the idea that vaccines reduces fertility rates was discussed. out of my field, but it looked like that on one hand, women's education is well demonstrated to reduce fertility, vaccines are not so demonstrated, except maybe for one well-litigated WHO sterilization scam

  10. negative moderation total on Bill Gates May Build Small Nuclear Reactor · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    on my display, the parent has a negative mod total.
    I am surprised this is possible.

    I wonder if the mod history on the comment show multiple negative mods on a zero mod comment.

    It appears there are people with mod points who read zero mod stuff and do negative mods on them.

  11. Re:and yet on Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste · · Score: 2, Interesting

    indians are working hard on thorium cycle stuff. they figure enough thorium for 155k years. nice deals with the russian, so we can see some international interest here.

    a useful question about solar installations is whether they are just batteries

  12. Re:what happens if you drive without car insurance on House Passes Massive Medical Insurance Bill, 219-212 · · Score: 1

    on the bond for insurance, I lived in Washington state very recently. there the bond requirement is 10k.

    Bill Gates story. So Bill had a hot car and tended to drive very fast. A local cop nailed him and among other things gave bill a ticket for no insurance. The poor cop's chief reamed the guy really badly. Bill apparently did his best to stay out of it, but had the bond posted rather quickly.

  13. Re:But how does this reflect poorly on America? on Switzerland Passes Violent Games Ban · · Score: 1

    oregon has physician assisted suicide. if you cannot afford medical care, the state will pay for your suicide, and no statistics are kept. Oregon's health care plan has been cited as a model for obamacare.

    I believe this was heavily litigated. I think all the way to the us supreme court.

    washington state also has legal physcians assisted suicide. again no statistics.

    I live in oregon, and not long ago, in washingtom.

  14. Re:A false choice, of course... on Health Care Reform · · Score: 1

    fox is just another mass media thing. These have some common properties.

    The essential property is that two sides out of many are selected to be chosen among. Whatever side you commit to, you lose. but if you are fervent and committed, you get to pat yourself on the back for your efforts when you lose.

    as an aspect of this, every few years I might see something that is both true and relevant on media, even fox. but it somehow pops up and is never seen again.

    in the case of health care, I recall seeing a sort of creepy republican named rove on fox actually spend a few minutes with reilly? talking about how the health bill would actually work. He did not do ideology crap, he did not use perjogatives. devastating, and true, and relevant. and this stuff was never seen again. if you like palin, you would think death panel.

    so what is the real deal. we are in a depression, right on the edge of a breakdown crisis. So if you try to health reform, you get austerity. and people die. when the ... did this, we called it a crime against humanity and hung some doctors on the panel of experts.

    so you also get tyranny, as in the perpetuality clause protect the "panel of experts" section

    you get violations of the constitution all over the place. some states are pissy about about an apparent requirement that everyone buy insurance from private companies. the panel of experts is a violation of separation of powers. killing off constituents is a general welfare violation

    at this point, we are dealing with presidential thuggery

    I guess obama is saying vote for the bill because if it does not pass, his presidency is destroyed. this is, in the end, the best reason to reject the bill.

  15. Re:A high speed railway on China To Connect Its High-Speed Rail To Europe · · Score: -1, Troll

    so, compare us wages for making a ton of steel to the cost of shipping a ton of steel from china to us.

    about the same

    figure it is about illegal to do physical production in the us

    a lot of missing the point in these posts

    first of all, this stuff was signed off in late october, which happened to be within a few days of when the us economy became unrecoverable by domestic means

    now I occasionally read quotes from one of the two russian signers of the deal

    so, he would be happy yo do a link to the us and in fact is planning on it and implementing stuff with this in mind

    so some guy says high speed for rail does not make sense. something about wasting energy. I guess that is why there is no domestic us air freight. ah well. I guarantee you that the russian guy pushing this wants high tech high energy development. He is not some eco-fascist.

    and development is where the rail comes in. everyone sensible in the region is going for high tech development corridors along the right of way

    and there are plans to extend into africa

    as far as paying, the russians agreed to let the chinese have part ownership, which between the two people is unique in human history. there are all sorts of development deals on both sides, for instance, the russians are supplying the chinese with nuclear power plants. there is nothing simple here.

    anyway, in late october, international relationships starting shifting. it was obvious to anyone paying attention and what it meant was a major topic of discussion in the corridors at international meetings. I do not know how it will turn out, but figure that if you are actually hearing about it, it cannot be stopped.

    that is I think good news.

  16. Re:html5 is a clear winner on A Skeptical Comparison of HTML5 Video Playback To Flash · · Score: 1

    there are some os issues. if you want openbsd and need flash, you pretty much have a double bind going. this is because the ports flash is old and gets complaints from all the web sites. yah, I guess you could put in linux emulation and a linux flash binary, but somehow I never got that to work. so I needed firmware and maybe that did not work right. but if i got flash installed, that is just another reason to not have security warm fuzzies.

    so i would be happy to see flash become irrelevant

  17. Re:Medical... on Why Are Digital Hearing Aids So Expensive? · · Score: 1

    whatever, but i asked this question to my audiologist years ago, venturing the opinion that it is software.

    she said it was software costs. she had a nice little windows program to adjust what the story poster might call the equalizers and test what I thought.

    just as a guess, proprietary everything down to pin connections.

    personally, I kind of like stallman.

  18. Re:I'm not clear on what their case is... on JPL Background Check Case Reaches Supreme Court · · Score: 1

    pooh, I could not reach an opinion, so it was late and I was bored and so I googled a bit.

    http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/03/scientists-case-on-background-ch.html

    it looks like this is a new 2007 rule stemming from a 2004 homeland security thingy. it is making long time employees upset.

    and among the scientists in the case are mars rover types, for which anyone might question the need for intrusive background checks

    and i notice they got an injunction, maybe easily and maybe sometime ago. now that great defender of the technology and exploration, the narcissist-in-chief, is raising a stink. Or at least his Holden creature. mars is said to be red, rather than green, so being interested in mars is probably a security negative right away.

  19. Re:Li is Right. on China Warns Google To Obey Or Leave · · Score: 1

    parent is not bad

    let us try this,

    national sovereignity is rare but important in modern history, say 1400 to present. chinese leadership certainly talks about protecting chinese national sovereignity and IMO their concerns are justified.

    so let us consider the idea that censorship protects sovereignity for china. Is Google doing evil in allowing censorship?

    a little more generally, if china is a republic, and we are a republic, what should govern our national relationships?

  20. Re:So, the Rich got richer this year... on Bill Gates No Longer World's Richest Man · · Score: 1

    depends on how you make it, IMO

    I know that some types think money is moral value free, but money is really just of no intrinsic value

  21. Re:Good. on EU Parliament Rejects ACTA In a 663 To 13 Vote · · Score: 1

    lol, I am not sure, but I think I remember that Bush used to talk about it a lot.

    maybe I should ask theo deraadt of openbsd

  22. Re:The 13 votes on EU Parliament Rejects ACTA In a 663 To 13 Vote · · Score: 1

    I agree with the parent formally, but I suspect from the topic context that he thinks the good of the overall society is the good of the speculators.

    but, let us note that a republic does not have to be a democracy and a democracy does not have to be a republic. this is pretty much an obvious statement. if obliged to chose, chose republic.

    oh well. Here is something recent on the topic from LaRouche. Note that the attention span required is extraordinary.

    www.larouchepac.com/node/13465

  23. Re:The 13 votes on EU Parliament Rejects ACTA In a 663 To 13 Vote · · Score: 1

    pardon me if I, thinking we are in a depression, figure you want to make it easy to past Obama austerity bills

    but we can look at the RNC under nixon. they would very aggressively challenge voters who demographically would vote dem. this often happened to be black folk and so the
    rnc is still prevented by court agreement from misbehaving in this way, a situation that they wish to change.
    so I guess you want to enable more vote interference.

  24. Re:Good. on EU Parliament Rejects ACTA In a 663 To 13 Vote · · Score: 1

    so, is europe part of the "free world"?

  25. Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni on Gas Wants To Kill the Wind · · Score: 1

    you might ask your friend something related to this:

    I saw just once saw a random guy look at world electricity consumption vs energy stored in the wind. He figured if we got all our electricity from the wind, there would not be any wind left. I suspect this argument is so simple. it cannot be spun,