It's really hard to tell if this is a troll or not. The opinion's within the realm of possibility, but the "OMG my precious karma pity me plz!" thing and the accusing random people of being terrorists seems to indicate troll. Fantastic if it's a troll, kinda humorless if it's real.
Anyway, just to keep up appearences:
"I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." -Bush
"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency." -IAEA spokesman
I don't know why this shit even causes "a stir" anymore. I mean, they've got a damn website for this kinda decentralized astroturfing, you can go there and see what they're sending out this week and papers still print them. I mean, if we're that stupid, we deserve to be turfed like fucking Jimmy Hoffa.
Well, yeah. Just being a gun nut doesn't get you out of liberal-space anymore. I mean, hell, look at Howard Dean. He's practically Charlton fucking Heston and they keep complaining he's too liberal to get elected.
Clearly, we've stumbled upon some sort of reflex action here. If you're ever unsure of whether/. is brain-dead or anything, just mention sex and tits. Even if/. is unconsious, you should get 40-50 replies within 10 minutes.
They didn't argue anything about the state constitution in California, anyway, they were arguing that, since California's state department had declared that punch-card ballots were bad and should be replaced by better machines, holding an election while half the state was using "good" machines and the other half "bad" ones would be unfair. And they lost because the 9th circuit, unlike the SCOTUS, didn't feel it was their privilege to fuck with state election law. Both perspectives were reasonably valid and nonpartisan. Even the shots the 9th took at the SCOTUS were more professional contempt than partisanship.
Individual rights is what they're chartered to do. They don't consider militias or state governments to be individuals. Been that way since 1920. That's just their interpretation, and they're free to interpret how they will. Fortunately, we have the NRA, which is big on both of those ammendments, to handle those for us, freeing up the ACLU to handle the tougher stuff.
Not quite. I'm pretty sure the only thing still keeping them from building up a military is their constitution, (which we wrote for them, admittedly) and the "no wars allowed" clause thereof. That's what the Treaty of San Francisco was for, it gave them back full sovereignty. And besides, right now, Japan's defense budget is right behind us, Russia, and France. I don't think that implies any prohibition against military buildups. We do have protection treaties, but we've got those with everybody with a McDonald's.
It's not that the two of them are peace-loving either, it's just that they have the same attitude as everybody else: it's not worth the trouble to spend 60 goddamn percent of your time on weaponry. For us, it could be, but for Germany, it's way easier to just wait a decade while whatever the US army's come up with leaks down the line to the Volkswagen engineering department. If you're not going to beat the US, there's no point.
Why the hell would you kill yourself? So you don't remember anything, that's not hard to deal with. Even if your brain somehow fucked itself up enough that your thought processes are completely alien, it's kinda bastardly to expect that new guy to kill himself just because he's not you anymore.
As for vegetablehood, I wouldn't want anybody wasting electricity or bed space on me, but it's not like it hurts me if some of my crazier family members feel the need to keep my empty husk running until it falls apart.
Can we not build machines that are stronger than us? Cars that move faster than us? Planes that fly better than us?
God. That made me laugh so hard I got spit up my nose. Just the realization that people can actually do that "we not" rhetorical question thing in real life is gonna have me giggling for the rest of the week. Christ. I'm gonna be springing that shit on people now. "You wanna go for Chinese?" "Did we not have Chinese on Tuesday?" Jesus that's gonna be annoying.
It doesn't help that halfway through I started visualizing Brian (as in "The Life of") doing his prophet rant.
Brian: "Can we not build machines that are stronger than us? Cars that move faster than us? Planes that fly better than us?"
Crowd: "Here, now, Planes that fly better than us? People can't fly at all!" Brian: "Uh... Well, since the planes can do it... Uh, then they kinda have to be better than us, right?" Crowd: "Ah, but 'better' indicates that both subjects have some capacity to..." Brian: "Look, I'm done, alright? That was it. I have to go..."
Anyway, I agree with your actual point, but I think the way you went into computational superiority contradicts the good point you get close to with go. Most go engines cheat. As in, look at a book of situations and adapt them rather than work it out from scratch. This doesn't require all that much intelligence on the programmer's part, at least not in terms of understanding the problem. With that strategy, it's not unresonable to wade right in without really understanding what a good go game is.
This is much closer to human thought than the total self-knowledge Deep Blue or something would have. A human brain doesn't even have to be smart enough to understand itself. It just has to know how to cheat well enough to fake like it's calculating the motion of the ball and the forces on muscles before catching it. It's not like there's a calculus module in your ass somewhere, you're guesstimating based on "intelligence" harvested from the behavior of your environment. It's not bottom up reasoning, it's comparison abstracted enough that the problems you get from not knowing why get lost in the noise.
Basically, knowing how something works before you design it is actually meaningless in this situation. It's not even helpful. The intelligence the machine has isn't coming from you, it's coming from, not even necessarially learning, just the availability of relevant information.
Personally, I'm down with Leibniz, but the argument does depend on you actually knowing all the qualities of whatever you're dealing with. You have to depend on the people figuring out how to back up your head to be smart.
Analogy: You buy a catfish and a goldfish, and you put them in bowls next to each other. You tape a few hours of Goldfish swimming around. Then Goldfish bites it. You stick a TV with Goldfish's tape on it next to Catfish's tank. Catfish thinks Goldfish has been brought back to life from the tape you made. Catfish is a goddamn moron.
If I get a chance to back myself up, I'll be looking for a good argument on why Acme BackupTM's belief that they're actually backing me up doesn't depend too much on their own ability to determine what is and is not me. Not that I wouldn't spring for the cyberpunk-rock points anyway, but I'd be planning for the day that my backup loads up/.++ and reads that some punk patent clerk just proved he's a videotape. Not that I'd imagine my backup would be too devestated by that, but I hope he'd at least go beat the crap out of the Acme Backup salesman's backup.
God, this kinda shit is just painful to write a legible sentence about. This must be why the lawyers are so interested. "... then the first backup of the second defendant's third backup's backup met with the third backup of the first defendant's second backup. Now keep in mind that the first defendant had not yet collected the memories of his third backup's 16th backup's third backup, who was..." Opens up whole new dimensions of inpenetrability.
They only scour the world so they can trick you into thinking they really look like that. They could just Photoshop up locals, but it's way easier to convince you that Sweeden is full of mythical elvish babes than to convince you that they live in Iowa, you just never notice them.
Initial contract? You mean the one where FDR (back when they were called Brown & Root) let them build the Marshall Ford Dam on land they didn't own? Or the one where President Johnson paid them back for buying him into the Senate by letting them pillage the fuck out of both sides in Vietnam while inexplicably turning them into a completely rendundant contracted backup for the Army Corps of Engineers? Or the one where Cheney got them a loophole in Reagan's sanctions against Libya so Quadaffi could pay them $20 billion to build the Great Man-Made River Project?
Re:It?s a matter of semantics
on
Pirate Hunter
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· Score: 1
That policy was written on the door when you came in, Helter. They even wrote down a nice scale on the door showing exactly how much someone at your income level would have to pay. Even if you happened to go in without having the chance to read the scale and the policy, they have it written on the placemat and the waiter reads it to you before you order. Just because this restauraunt has the best food and the cleanest dishes doesn't mean you can't go right across the street to another one.
You might find the system to be stupid and wrong-headed, and you're completely right to complain about it, but it's not theft. It's perfectly possible to be born in the US and leave for someplace with a friendlier tax system without paying for any kind of progressive policy at all.
Re:It?s a matter of semantics
on
Pirate Hunter
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· Score: 1
You're perfectly free to not make ridiculous ammounts of money, you know. You've decided that it's better to be rich and taxed than broke and tax-free, and you're quite right. But if you've changed your mind for some reason, feel free to quit your job whenever you're ready.
Re:It?s a matter of semantics
on
Pirate Hunter
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· Score: 1
That's actually a pretty funny idea. Disney Hannibal Lechter. That would kick ass. He could do a little song about stapling somebody's intestines to the ceiling. And he could have a little crazy dog for his sidekick. Kinda like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac only without the good writing.
Re:There is a big difference
on
Pirate Hunter
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· Score: 1
What about the ones that burn your wife and rape your XP?
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Hence all the secrecy. If everybody knew NASA had aliens locked in a lab building babes for them, we'd all want in.
It's really hard to tell if this is a troll or not. The opinion's within the realm of possibility, but the "OMG my precious karma pity me plz!" thing and the accusing random people of being terrorists seems to indicate troll. Fantastic if it's a troll, kinda humorless if it's real.
Anyway, just to keep up appearences:
"I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." -Bush
"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency." -IAEA spokesman
He's sexy in California, they have different rules out there.
I don't know why this shit even causes "a stir" anymore. I mean, they've got a damn website for this kinda decentralized astroturfing, you can go there and see what they're sending out this week and papers still print them. I mean, if we're that stupid, we deserve to be turfed like fucking Jimmy Hoffa.
Well, yeah. Just being a gun nut doesn't get you out of liberal-space anymore. I mean, hell, look at Howard Dean. He's practically Charlton fucking Heston and they keep complaining he's too liberal to get elected.
Clearly, we've stumbled upon some sort of reflex action here. If you're ever unsure of whether /. is brain-dead or anything, just mention sex and tits. Even if /. is unconsious, you should get 40-50 replies within 10 minutes.
So, what, NAMBLA is conservative now?
They didn't argue anything about the state constitution in California, anyway, they were arguing that, since California's state department had declared that punch-card ballots were bad and should be replaced by better machines, holding an election while half the state was using "good" machines and the other half "bad" ones would be unfair. And they lost because the 9th circuit, unlike the SCOTUS, didn't feel it was their privilege to fuck with state election law. Both perspectives were reasonably valid and nonpartisan. Even the shots the 9th took at the SCOTUS were more professional contempt than partisanship.
Well, it's not so much what you said as it is the complete opposite of what you said.
Individual rights is what they're chartered to do. They don't consider militias or state governments to be individuals. Been that way since 1920. That's just their interpretation, and they're free to interpret how they will. Fortunately, we have the NRA, which is big on both of those ammendments, to handle those for us, freeing up the ACLU to handle the tougher stuff.
You could mount the sharks on the Humvees...
Well, it's probably more named for the flying version from Star Blazers, but same deal.
Not quite. I'm pretty sure the only thing still keeping them from building up a military is their constitution, (which we wrote for them, admittedly) and the "no wars allowed" clause thereof. That's what the Treaty of San Francisco was for, it gave them back full sovereignty. And besides, right now, Japan's defense budget is right behind us, Russia, and France. I don't think that implies any prohibition against military buildups. We do have protection treaties, but we've got those with everybody with a McDonald's.
It's not that the two of them are peace-loving either, it's just that they have the same attitude as everybody else: it's not worth the trouble to spend 60 goddamn percent of your time on weaponry. For us, it could be, but for Germany, it's way easier to just wait a decade while whatever the US army's come up with leaks down the line to the Volkswagen engineering department. If you're not going to beat the US, there's no point.
Why the hell would you kill yourself? So you don't remember anything, that's not hard to deal with. Even if your brain somehow fucked itself up enough that your thought processes are completely alien, it's kinda bastardly to expect that new guy to kill himself just because he's not you anymore.
As for vegetablehood, I wouldn't want anybody wasting electricity or bed space on me, but it's not like it hurts me if some of my crazier family members feel the need to keep my empty husk running until it falls apart.
God. That made me laugh so hard I got spit up my nose. Just the realization that people can actually do that "we not" rhetorical question thing in real life is gonna have me giggling for the rest of the week. Christ. I'm gonna be springing that shit on people now. "You wanna go for Chinese?" "Did we not have Chinese on Tuesday?" Jesus that's gonna be annoying.
It doesn't help that halfway through I started visualizing Brian (as in "The Life of") doing his prophet rant.Anyway, I agree with your actual point, but I think the way you went into computational superiority contradicts the good point you get close to with go. Most go engines cheat. As in, look at a book of situations and adapt them rather than work it out from scratch. This doesn't require all that much intelligence on the programmer's part, at least not in terms of understanding the problem. With that strategy, it's not unresonable to wade right in without really understanding what a good go game is.
This is much closer to human thought than the total self-knowledge Deep Blue or something would have. A human brain doesn't even have to be smart enough to understand itself. It just has to know how to cheat well enough to fake like it's calculating the motion of the ball and the forces on muscles before catching it. It's not like there's a calculus module in your ass somewhere, you're guesstimating based on "intelligence" harvested from the behavior of your environment. It's not bottom up reasoning, it's comparison abstracted enough that the problems you get from not knowing why get lost in the noise.
Basically, knowing how something works before you design it is actually meaningless in this situation. It's not even helpful. The intelligence the machine has isn't coming from you, it's coming from, not even necessarially learning, just the availability of relevant information.
Personally, I'm down with Leibniz, but the argument does depend on you actually knowing all the qualities of whatever you're dealing with. You have to depend on the people figuring out how to back up your head to be smart.
/.++ and reads that some punk patent clerk just proved he's a videotape. Not that I'd imagine my backup would be too devestated by that, but I hope he'd at least go beat the crap out of the Acme Backup salesman's backup.
Analogy: You buy a catfish and a goldfish, and you put them in bowls next to each other. You tape a few hours of Goldfish swimming around. Then Goldfish bites it. You stick a TV with Goldfish's tape on it next to Catfish's tank. Catfish thinks Goldfish has been brought back to life from the tape you made. Catfish is a goddamn moron.
If I get a chance to back myself up, I'll be looking for a good argument on why Acme BackupTM's belief that they're actually backing me up doesn't depend too much on their own ability to determine what is and is not me. Not that I wouldn't spring for the cyberpunk-rock points anyway, but I'd be planning for the day that my backup loads up
God, this kinda shit is just painful to write a legible sentence about. This must be why the lawyers are so interested. "... then the first backup of the second defendant's third backup's backup met with the third backup of the first defendant's second backup. Now keep in mind that the first defendant had not yet collected the memories of his third backup's 16th backup's third backup, who was..." Opens up whole new dimensions of inpenetrability.
They only scour the world so they can trick you into thinking they really look like that. They could just Photoshop up locals, but it's way easier to convince you that Sweeden is full of mythical elvish babes than to convince you that they live in Iowa, you just never notice them.
Didn't George Carlin do a bit about punching guys named Chad?
But, apparently, they are "Property". Whatever that means.
Well, not so much moral as selfish.
Initial contract? You mean the one where FDR (back when they were called Brown & Root) let them build the Marshall Ford Dam on land they didn't own? Or the one where President Johnson paid them back for buying him into the Senate by letting them pillage the fuck out of both sides in Vietnam while inexplicably turning them into a completely rendundant contracted backup for the Army Corps of Engineers? Or the one where Cheney got them a loophole in Reagan's sanctions against Libya so Quadaffi could pay them $20 billion to build the Great Man-Made River Project?
That policy was written on the door when you came in, Helter. They even wrote down a nice scale on the door showing exactly how much someone at your income level would have to pay. Even if you happened to go in without having the chance to read the scale and the policy, they have it written on the placemat and the waiter reads it to you before you order. Just because this restauraunt has the best food and the cleanest dishes doesn't mean you can't go right across the street to another one.
You might find the system to be stupid and wrong-headed, and you're completely right to complain about it, but it's not theft. It's perfectly possible to be born in the US and leave for someplace with a friendlier tax system without paying for any kind of progressive policy at all.
You're perfectly free to not make ridiculous ammounts of money, you know. You've decided that it's better to be rich and taxed than broke and tax-free, and you're quite right. But if you've changed your mind for some reason, feel free to quit your job whenever you're ready.
Those poor, starving, fithy rich people.
That's actually a pretty funny idea. Disney Hannibal Lechter. That would kick ass. He could do a little song about stapling somebody's intestines to the ceiling. And he could have a little crazy dog for his sidekick. Kinda like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac only without the good writing.
What about the ones that burn your wife and rape your XP?