Your life will be over-digitized (or whatever the right verb) only you allow it so.
This has nothing to do with over-digitization. This is about hipsters trying to rationalize their attention-seeking bullshit and intelligent entrepreneurs making shitloads of money off them.
The fact that a USB 'typewriter' (effectively a keyboard shaped like a typewriter) is described as 'a clever way to bridge the typewritten and digital world' is the most obvious sign that it is about appearance, not substance; about form, not function.
Claiming certainty about some person's opinions or feelings which you know nothing of is an indication that you are not beyond self-deception.
I'm basing this on science: the science referenced in the Wikipedia page (although the science is not uncontested). You have not provided any sources.
I don't care if you think the small amount you actually throw in is sizable
You fail at reading. You said 'none of your money' which is 0%. I said: 'a sizable part of my money', where the exact percentage is none of your business but trivially more than 0%. QED. Thank you for playing.
The result is that the ones driving the choices that generate cost are nearly fully insulated from the consequences of their individual bad decisions
Although there is some degree of insulation in even a well-working democracy, the nature of most of the insulation is centered around the types of decisions being made. Deciding whether to buy fucking dinner is a very different decision than deciding to spend money on fundamental research or improving the infrastructure of a country. Hell, tons of managers in companies are insulated from the consequences of their own bad decisions and those decisions are puny compared to the ones taken on a national level. But I take it you have an alternative form of 'government' where 'cost is pooled' and everybody making decisions directly feels the effects of those decisions? Enlighten me.
It is a classic tragedy of the commons situation.
No. Nobody contributes to the commons in the traditional tragedy.
This leads to a strong incentive to consume more food since cost of one's choices are nearly detached.
Only if your friends are assholes. My friends have done and will do the opposite: when they know the cost is shared they hold back and order less than they would have otherwise, because none of them want to burden the group with an expensive choice. I'm not saying everybody is like that, just that your claim that it is a strong incentive is unproven and not as true as you think it is. People behave differently when other people are looking over their shoulder and even more differently when they like them.
The end result is that everyone wants government to increase spending on the things that they want.
But even more than that, they want it to stop spending money on the things they don't want altogether. If you're all paying for dinner together and one of the people orders something very expensive, the other people will dislike that action and condemn it. This again results in a group of people spending money more frugally as every choice made must be defensible for the entire group or at least slip through the cracks.
The idea of proper representative government is that they take all the preferences (likes and dislikes) of the people into account and make a decision that benefits the entire people the most according to the best of their knowledge.
There is no such thing as an efficient national level government.
Baseless and very untrue claim. I don't care what you 'buy'. I care about proper arguments. BTW: Your claim smells like you are under the impression that there is a fundamental difference between levels and that there is some level on which it does work, which is a classic cop-out (and which is futile to bring up -- please don't embarrass yourself).
Inefficiency is not a bit you set.
That is in no way a sensible reply to what I said. Be an adult and admit when you're wrong instead of squirming like this.
I'll just point out that my prior postings are the meaningful contribution you claim doesn't exist.
"I don't buy it" is not a meaningful contribution.
Finally, note that: - your 'definition' of charity has been su
Let me up the ante: Would it still feel the same if when you made a charitable 'donation' it would effectively cost you nothing?
Yes.
You're lying. Mostly to yourself.
I am implying that you pay an insignficant amount of taxes compared to the budgets of the governments which tax you
Irrelevant. You said "none of your money". A very sizable part of my money goes into taxes and is subsequently spent by my government. I want and expect them to spend it well and efficiently.
I am implying that all governments are unreliable
I'm sorry you live in a country with such a shitty government, but you shouldn't extrapolate your situation to everywhere else.
I think cronyism is quite a thing in both public and private sectors.
Good, the next step is understanding that broadly stating that 'governments' are unreliable or incapable of spending money in the right way is just scapegoating and pointing in the wrong direction. The point here is that all institutions are unreliable to some extent. They all require a structure that mitigates as much of it as possible (checks and balances and what have you). None of them, private or public, are inherently incapable of working properly.
And why suddenly, do you care whether it is a contradiction to simultaneously spend money while abstaining from some means to take money?
You are twisting my words (and reality) into a non-discussion. The point was and is that the same entity makes the decisions on on what to 'spend money' themselves or which causes receive tax breaks. If they are unreliable as you seem to believe, they are so for both cases. Cronyism in the second case leads to giving tax breaks to their friends.
If it [makes the world a better place], no matter how glorious or base the motivations, no matter how large or small the sacrifice or contribution, it is charity and is a good thing.
Yeah, no. I'm sorry, but you don't get to change the definition of charity to fit your narrative. Giving a homeless guy 5 bucks is charity, but it's far from a given that it will make the world a better place.
I'd like to reiterate that we're discussing how charitable behaviour is influenced if you give people something significant and tangible in return (specifically: money). You have failed to provide any meaningful contribution on this specific subject, which is terribly disappointing.
Would it really feel the same if it only cost you half and the other taxpayers the other half?
Absolutely not. Charity is first and foremost about making the world a better place not bullshit feelings.
You're clearly not getting it. The point was not the 'feeling' part, but the 'nothing [tangible] in return' part. Let me up the ante: Would it still feel the same if when you made a charitable 'donation' it would effectively cost you nothing? I'd like to reiterate that we're discussing how charitable behaviour is influenced if you give people something significant and tangible in return (specifically: money).
I think your boxes could be checked off, but was it charity? No.
Yes, it was. Stupid and misguided, but charity nonetheless. Doing things which you believe will make the world a better place doesn't mean they actually will. There are still Christian charities that try to 'cure' gayness. But more importantly here: this is completely besides the fucking point. I'd like to reiterate that we're discussing how charitable behaviour is influenced if you give people something significant and tangible in return (specifically: money).
Well, does it feel any better when none of your money is at stake and it is all taxpayer money apportioned out by a corruptible legislature?
Are you implying I don't pay taxes? Are you implying that all governments are unreliable and will always fail at spending money because they are 'corruptible'? Do you really think private organisations are not 'corruptible'? You think cronyism isn't a thing in those? Do you not realize what a contradiction in terms it is to imply that a government can't be trusted to spend money, but can be trusted to subsidize private entities?
Contrary to popular belief you can't actually buy the truth.
Have you ever done something for someone just because you thought they deserved or needed it? Did it make you feel good? Would you have felt the same if they paid you for it?
Isn't giving to charity supposed to be spending your time or other resources and getting nothing but a good feeling and hope for a better world in return? Would it really feel the same if it only cost you half and the other taxpayers the other half?
Also: I don't think you understand what austerity means.
No. That is dreadful code either way. The right answer for output in any serious application is to use a template engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The right answer for input is validation of user input ASAP and sanitization on database entry.
A good language should be designed in such a way that the simple way is the safe way, and make you be more explicit if you want something else.
Don't be silly. If you don't know what the fuck you are doing, you shouldn't be programming as you will find a way to fuck up regardless of the language. echo does exactly what it should do. Reading a variable from the POST array does exactly what it should do. Not understanding how HTML works and 'not paying attention' is not an excuse for not properly escaping values.
But please, enlighten everybody what you consider a 'good language' and how it prevents this problem.
It's OK to give millions to green energy companies to subsidize renewable energy, but not to give tax relief to philanthropists to subsidize their improvements of housing, health, and education.
There is a big difference there. Note that you mentioned a very explicit and singular goal in the first half, but needed to use a list in the second half. The point of the first half is to bootstrap renewable energy, not to give money to energy companies. On a side note: There are many ways to increase adoption of renewable energy, but for some parts big entities are required (it's pretty hard to subsidize wind power parks and fundamental solar R&D through individual citizens). That is not to say that I agree with subsidies to energy companies.
Back to the main point: In the second half the tax 'relief' for citizens donating to charity is s very unguided way to spend money and it requires a lot of vetting as to what constitute charitable organizations. The latter explains why there is a lot of fraud and basic malpractice in this area (small 'charities' but even big NGOs don't always spend money on charitable things). It is so broad that it is nigh impossible to control properly. Personally, I'd rather see my taxes spent by a democratically controllable (well-functioning!) government entity on specific goals than on supporting a system where all kinds of people try to get a piece of the cake by getting that charity status.
There is a point to be made that some governmental entities perform badly, but that is a different problem. To say that 'the government' shouldn't do anything because it has failed in some things in the past is nothing but suggesting a workaround. Instead of fixing the pothole (dysfunctional government), you try finding ever more innovative ways to drive around it (let citizens and businesses solve it). Yes, you still shouldn't drive into the pothole and driving around it is not a bad idea for the near future. The difference lies in whether you argue that driving around it will always be better or that in principle driving straight ahead is better.
Let's face it-- this is projection. We know that we don't do much to help others, so let's denigrate the philanthropist because I'm sure in their hearts, they're as repulsive as we are.
Let's face it, this is a stupid baseless ad hominem. I think the Gates Foundation is great and I honestly believe their founders would have done what they do without tax breaks. In fact, it always (literally!) brings tears to my eyes when I see the quintessential list of how much the billionaires spend on charity and see Gates so very very high at the top.
First, charity is something you want to subsidize.
No. Determining whether organizations are actually charities and deciding to allow spending an uncontrolled amount of taxation income on them is far less efficient than just determining what causes are worth pursuing and collectively spending the taxation income on it (except then people see it as 'wasteful government spending' instead of the collective charity it is -- remember at this point that subsidies are also government spending).
But the above is besides the point. The point is that the more you further the thought that money is the main motivator, the more it becomes the main motivator. People start thinking that if they are not monetarily incentivized to do something, they shouldn't do it at all. There is a fairly famous experiment in which people were told to perform a task and afterwards report on how much they liked doing the task. Those that were paid a small amount reported liking the task less than the ones who did not get paid.
The thought 'Yeah, I'm doing it for the people. Also, it makes for a nice tax deduction!' actually takes away part of the gratification you feel on account of the altruistic part of it, making you less prone to be altruistic in the future.
Look, I'm not saying that money isn't a motivator, as your sibling posters seem to have thought. I'm well aware of the power of dangling a dollar in front of somebody, but if that is what you do to motivate people, you end up with dollar-chasing people. We already have more than enough of those, if you ask me.
Bill Gate's foundation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and may save millions in the future.
And without tax breaks this would have never happened, right? Yes, fuck intrinsic altruism and basic fucking humanity, we need to make everything about money and how to motivate people with it.
Yes, if I understand it correctly, the idea is that a holographic universe has a 2-dimensional (spatial) substrate and has a vastly lower potential information content than one with a 3-dimensional substrate, which means that a 3-dimensional projection of a 2-dimensional substrate (which is what our universe would be if the holographic principle holds) has to 'cut corners' in some way.
I have to say that I'm not sure if we are advanced enough to detect such cutting of corners. In fact, given that we are still pretty much stuck on our home planet and trying to solve a number of issues trivial on a universal scale, I think we are not advanced enough.
There are many ways in which the Chinese Room fails miserably (other than the cop-out 'It makes you think about something'): In its basic form it's unable to acceptably answer questions such as "What did I say ten seconds ago?" (a simple lookup table or rule book does not track state and such is required) The standard reply to that is something like: "Oh, well, then we'll just add a notepad on which the guy can scribble." The more elements you add like this, the closer you get to the complexity required for intelligence and the weaker the "but it doesn't understand what it's doing"-crap becomes. If you start requiring sensory inputs like audio and all the other things that inform our feeling and notion of 'understanding' the thought experiment fails utterly. It's just painful how awful the Chinese Room is as a thought experiment.
A far more interesting thought experiment is the China Brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... That actually challenges your notion of what understanding and consciousness consist of. The China Brain also runs into the issues of input and output in the sense that if you require it to be hooked up to an android (for instance), it cannot function properly as the processing is way too slow for a lot of the brain to work meaningfully. You have to require time to slow down significantly or have to consider it to be really, really stupid (really 'slow'). It can meaningfully dream and reason within its knowledge, however.
On a sidenote: the subheader in TFA is 'Alan Turing and the Chinese Room', which leads the uninformed to think Turing has something to do with the Chinese Room. The author could have and should have gone with 'Alan Turing and John Searle' or 'The Turing test and The Chinese Room'. It may not be intentional, but it sure is misleading.
I'm not even aware of any proper alternative (besides Outlook, which is obviously shit).
I moved from Eudora to Thunderbird and have been looking for something else because of this news, but it seems there is absolutely nothing. Recommendations welcome.
Technically, what they say is interesting to themselves. They've just stopped caring whether anyone else thinks the same.
Not trying to get anyone here to develop a habit, but it always seemed to me that cocaine is a drug that would help shy and anxious people and would turn already confident people into overconfident assholes. Sort of like alcohol, I guess.
What a terrible clusterfuck this 'revamp' is. 1. Only half of the settings are 'ported'. The other half (including Crossfire) can only be found when pressing 'additional settings', which opens (a stripped version of) the old AMD Catalyst Control Center. Shit, I get that some projects require having legacy code and new code next to each other, but for a tool that does fuck-all and is produced by a multinational company it is inexcusable. 2. The UI is a classic 'looks shiny, works like crap' with a myriad of 100% custom touch sized interface elements in grey and grey strewn across an anemically small window with multiple navigational blocks and random bits of hidden functionality. I'm surprised they didn't replace all text buttons with grey meaningless icons. 3. It is unstable as fuck. 4. It has fucking ad banners and social media crap rammed in there. 5. It has custom fucking animations of UI elements and weird 'read more...' links.
The only good thing about this bit of software is that they actually named it AMD Settings (and/or Radeon Settings), which at the very least reflects its function. Other than that it is a downgrade (which is saying a lot, considering that the previous version was the CCC!).
For Windows, there are some systray icon based applications that provide such information. Alternatively (again, in Windows), the Resource Monitor provides detailed info on disk activity.
I'm not really sure whether I prefer a dedicated hardware disk activity notification over a software implementation, but I sure as hell regularly check disk activity on all my Windows devices.
On Android, I used to use CoolTool for having information on the state of the system but it was too much of a battery and memory hog to keep using it. I miss it, though. That feeling of 'WTF is going on' is just so unnecessary.
Relevant quotes: "The de-Baathification law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns. [...] It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers. [...] Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military. [...] 'The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam. They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.'"
And the kicker, for slight comedic relief: "When U.S. officials demobilized the Baathist army, they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs"
Which (and that was my point) means it does make sense to talk about graphite vs. carbon, even if they get the word 'atom' wrong.
No, it doesn't. 'Graphite vs. amorphous (or non-crystalline) carbon' is fine. 'Graphite vs. carbon' is nonsensical.
Also, the whole point was that they got the word atom wrong. Neither OP nor I ever implied that the distinction between graphite and amorphous carbon is irrelevant here. Please keep your straw men to yourself.
You missed the point. Graphite is a molecular structure, not a type of atom.
TFA has it like this: "The battery is based on the same lithium ion chemistry used in cellphone batteries today but gets its advantage from atoms of graphite bonded to the anode, Huawei said on Friday at an industry conference in Japan."
It is still unnecessarily misleading and badly written, but in that sentence they are probably (or hopefully) referring to the thickness of the layer of graphite.
Slashdot Mirror
Your life will be over-digitized (or whatever the right verb) only you allow it so.
This has nothing to do with over-digitization. This is about hipsters trying to rationalize their attention-seeking bullshit and intelligent entrepreneurs making shitloads of money off them.
The fact that a USB 'typewriter' (effectively a keyboard shaped like a typewriter) is described as 'a clever way to bridge the typewritten and digital world' is the most obvious sign that it is about appearance, not substance; about form, not function.
and peacemakers repeatedly exposed their country to danger, and thereby fell under Germany's boot
Can you give some examples of that? I've never heard this before.
Claiming certainty about some person's opinions or feelings which you know nothing of is an indication that you are not beyond self-deception.
I'm basing this on science: the science referenced in the Wikipedia page (although the science is not uncontested). You have not provided any sources.
I don't care if you think the small amount you actually throw in is sizable
You fail at reading. You said 'none of your money' which is 0%. I said: 'a sizable part of my money', where the exact percentage is none of your business but trivially more than 0%. QED. Thank you for playing.
The result is that the ones driving the choices that generate cost are nearly fully insulated from the consequences of their individual bad decisions
Although there is some degree of insulation in even a well-working democracy, the nature of most of the insulation is centered around the types of decisions being made. Deciding whether to buy fucking dinner is a very different decision than deciding to spend money on fundamental research or improving the infrastructure of a country. Hell, tons of managers in companies are insulated from the consequences of their own bad decisions and those decisions are puny compared to the ones taken on a national level.
But I take it you have an alternative form of 'government' where 'cost is pooled' and everybody making decisions directly feels the effects of those decisions? Enlighten me.
It is a classic tragedy of the commons situation.
No. Nobody contributes to the commons in the traditional tragedy.
This leads to a strong incentive to consume more food since cost of one's choices are nearly detached.
Only if your friends are assholes. My friends have done and will do the opposite: when they know the cost is shared they hold back and order less than they would have otherwise, because none of them want to burden the group with an expensive choice.
I'm not saying everybody is like that, just that your claim that it is a strong incentive is unproven and not as true as you think it is. People behave differently when other people are looking over their shoulder and even more differently when they like them.
The end result is that everyone wants government to increase spending on the things that they want.
But even more than that, they want it to stop spending money on the things they don't want altogether. If you're all paying for dinner together and one of the people orders something very expensive, the other people will dislike that action and condemn it. This again results in a group of people spending money more frugally as every choice made must be defensible for the entire group or at least slip through the cracks.
The idea of proper representative government is that they take all the preferences (likes and dislikes) of the people into account and make a decision that benefits the entire people the most according to the best of their knowledge.
There is no such thing as an efficient national level government.
Baseless and very untrue claim. I don't care what you 'buy'. I care about proper arguments.
BTW: Your claim smells like you are under the impression that there is a fundamental difference between levels and that there is some level on which it does work, which is a classic cop-out (and which is futile to bring up -- please don't embarrass yourself).
Inefficiency is not a bit you set.
That is in no way a sensible reply to what I said. Be an adult and admit when you're wrong instead of squirming like this.
I'll just point out that my prior postings are the meaningful contribution you claim doesn't exist.
"I don't buy it" is not a meaningful contribution.
Finally, note that:
- your 'definition' of charity has been su
Let me up the ante: Would it still feel the same if when you made a charitable 'donation' it would effectively cost you nothing?
Yes.
You're lying. Mostly to yourself.
I am implying that you pay an insignficant amount of taxes compared to the budgets of the governments which tax you
Irrelevant. You said "none of your money". A very sizable part of my money goes into taxes and is subsequently spent by my government. I want and expect them to spend it well and efficiently.
I am implying that all governments are unreliable
I'm sorry you live in a country with such a shitty government, but you shouldn't extrapolate your situation to everywhere else.
I think cronyism is quite a thing in both public and private sectors.
Good, the next step is understanding that broadly stating that 'governments' are unreliable or incapable of spending money in the right way is just scapegoating and pointing in the wrong direction. The point here is that all institutions are unreliable to some extent. They all require a structure that mitigates as much of it as possible (checks and balances and what have you). None of them, private or public, are inherently incapable of working properly.
And why suddenly, do you care whether it is a contradiction to simultaneously spend money while abstaining from some means to take money?
You are twisting my words (and reality) into a non-discussion. The point was and is that the same entity makes the decisions on on what to 'spend money' themselves or which causes receive tax breaks. If they are unreliable as you seem to believe, they are so for both cases. Cronyism in the second case leads to giving tax breaks to their friends.
If it [makes the world a better place], no matter how glorious or base the motivations, no matter how large or small the sacrifice or contribution, it is charity and is a good thing.
Yeah, no. I'm sorry, but you don't get to change the definition of charity to fit your narrative. Giving a homeless guy 5 bucks is charity, but it's far from a given that it will make the world a better place.
I'd like to reiterate that we're discussing how charitable behaviour is influenced if you give people something significant and tangible in return (specifically: money). You have failed to provide any meaningful contribution on this specific subject, which is terribly disappointing.
Would it really feel the same if it only cost you half and the other taxpayers the other half?
Absolutely not. Charity is first and foremost about making the world a better place not bullshit feelings.
You're clearly not getting it. The point was not the 'feeling' part, but the 'nothing [tangible] in return' part.
Let me up the ante: Would it still feel the same if when you made a charitable 'donation' it would effectively cost you nothing?
I'd like to reiterate that we're discussing how charitable behaviour is influenced if you give people something significant and tangible in return (specifically: money).
I think your boxes could be checked off, but was it charity? No.
Yes, it was. Stupid and misguided, but charity nonetheless. Doing things which you believe will make the world a better place doesn't mean they actually will. There are still Christian charities that try to 'cure' gayness.
But more importantly here: this is completely besides the fucking point.
I'd like to reiterate that we're discussing how charitable behaviour is influenced if you give people something significant and tangible in return (specifically: money).
Well, does it feel any better when none of your money is at stake and it is all taxpayer money apportioned out by a corruptible legislature?
Are you implying I don't pay taxes? Are you implying that all governments are unreliable and will always fail at spending money because they are 'corruptible'? Do you really think private organisations are not 'corruptible'? You think cronyism isn't a thing in those? Do you not realize what a contradiction in terms it is to imply that a government can't be trusted to spend money, but can be trusted to subsidize private entities?
Contrary to popular belief you can't actually buy the truth.
Have you ever done something for someone just because you thought they deserved or needed it? Did it make you feel good?
Would you have felt the same if they paid you for it?
Isn't giving to charity supposed to be spending your time or other resources and getting nothing but a good feeling and hope for a better world in return?
Would it really feel the same if it only cost you half and the other taxpayers the other half?
Also: I don't think you understand what austerity means.
No. That is dreadful code either way.
The right answer for output in any serious application is to use a template engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The right answer for input is validation of user input ASAP and sanitization on database entry.
A good language should be designed in such a way that the simple way is the safe way, and make you be more explicit if you want something else.
Don't be silly. If you don't know what the fuck you are doing, you shouldn't be programming as you will find a way to fuck up regardless of the language.
echo does exactly what it should do.
Reading a variable from the POST array does exactly what it should do.
Not understanding how HTML works and 'not paying attention' is not an excuse for not properly escaping values.
But please, enlighten everybody what you consider a 'good language' and how it prevents this problem.
They are implemented, that's the point. What I'm saying to do is implement them more.
Let me guess: You're some kind of well-paid manager somewhere.
See also the reply to your sibling poster.
Now, regarding this:
It's OK to give millions to green energy companies to subsidize renewable energy, but not to give tax relief to philanthropists to subsidize their improvements of housing, health, and education.
There is a big difference there. Note that you mentioned a very explicit and singular goal in the first half, but needed to use a list in the second half. The point of the first half is to bootstrap renewable energy, not to give money to energy companies. On a side note: There are many ways to increase adoption of renewable energy, but for some parts big entities are required (it's pretty hard to subsidize wind power parks and fundamental solar R&D through individual citizens). That is not to say that I agree with subsidies to energy companies.
Back to the main point: In the second half the tax 'relief' for citizens donating to charity is s very unguided way to spend money and it requires a lot of vetting as to what constitute charitable organizations. The latter explains why there is a lot of fraud and basic malpractice in this area (small 'charities' but even big NGOs don't always spend money on charitable things). It is so broad that it is nigh impossible to control properly. Personally, I'd rather see my taxes spent by a democratically controllable (well-functioning!) government entity on specific goals than on supporting a system where all kinds of people try to get a piece of the cake by getting that charity status.
There is a point to be made that some governmental entities perform badly, but that is a different problem. To say that 'the government' shouldn't do anything because it has failed in some things in the past is nothing but suggesting a workaround. Instead of fixing the pothole (dysfunctional government), you try finding ever more innovative ways to drive around it (let citizens and businesses solve it). Yes, you still shouldn't drive into the pothole and driving around it is not a bad idea for the near future. The difference lies in whether you argue that driving around it will always be better or that in principle driving straight ahead is better.
Let's face it-- this is projection. We know that we don't do much to help others, so let's denigrate the philanthropist because I'm sure in their hearts, they're as repulsive as we are.
Let's face it, this is a stupid baseless ad hominem. I think the Gates Foundation is great and I honestly believe their founders would have done what they do without tax breaks. In fact, it always (literally!) brings tears to my eyes when I see the quintessential list of how much the billionaires spend on charity and see Gates so very very high at the top.
First, charity is something you want to subsidize.
No. Determining whether organizations are actually charities and deciding to allow spending an uncontrolled amount of taxation income on them is far less efficient than just determining what causes are worth pursuing and collectively spending the taxation income on it (except then people see it as 'wasteful government spending' instead of the collective charity it is -- remember at this point that subsidies are also government spending).
But the above is besides the point. The point is that the more you further the thought that money is the main motivator, the more it becomes the main motivator. People start thinking that if they are not monetarily incentivized to do something, they shouldn't do it at all. There is a fairly famous experiment in which people were told to perform a task and afterwards report on how much they liked doing the task. Those that were paid a small amount reported liking the task less than the ones who did not get paid.
The thought 'Yeah, I'm doing it for the people. Also, it makes for a nice tax deduction!' actually takes away part of the gratification you feel on account of the altruistic part of it, making you less prone to be altruistic in the future.
It is called the overjustification effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Look, I'm not saying that money isn't a motivator, as your sibling posters seem to have thought. I'm well aware of the power of dangling a dollar in front of somebody, but if that is what you do to motivate people, you end up with dollar-chasing people. We already have more than enough of those, if you ask me.
Bill Gate's foundation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and may save millions in the future.
And without tax breaks this would have never happened, right?
Yes, fuck intrinsic altruism and basic fucking humanity, we need to make everything about money and how to motivate people with it.
Yes, if I understand it correctly, the idea is that a holographic universe has a 2-dimensional (spatial) substrate and has a vastly lower potential information content than one with a 3-dimensional substrate, which means that a 3-dimensional projection of a 2-dimensional substrate (which is what our universe would be if the holographic principle holds) has to 'cut corners' in some way.
I have to say that I'm not sure if we are advanced enough to detect such cutting of corners. In fact, given that we are still pretty much stuck on our home planet and trying to solve a number of issues trivial on a universal scale, I think we are not advanced enough.
There are many ways in which the Chinese Room fails miserably (other than the cop-out 'It makes you think about something'): In its basic form it's unable to acceptably answer questions such as "What did I say ten seconds ago?" (a simple lookup table or rule book does not track state and such is required)
The standard reply to that is something like: "Oh, well, then we'll just add a notepad on which the guy can scribble."
The more elements you add like this, the closer you get to the complexity required for intelligence and the weaker the "but it doesn't understand what it's doing"-crap becomes. If you start requiring sensory inputs like audio and all the other things that inform our feeling and notion of 'understanding' the thought experiment fails utterly. It's just painful how awful the Chinese Room is as a thought experiment.
A far more interesting thought experiment is the China Brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That actually challenges your notion of what understanding and consciousness consist of. The China Brain also runs into the issues of input and output in the sense that if you require it to be hooked up to an android (for instance), it cannot function properly as the processing is way too slow for a lot of the brain to work meaningfully. You have to require time to slow down significantly or have to consider it to be really, really stupid (really 'slow'). It can meaningfully dream and reason within its knowledge, however.
On a sidenote: the subheader in TFA is 'Alan Turing and the Chinese Room', which leads the uninformed to think Turing has something to do with the Chinese Room. The author could have and should have gone with 'Alan Turing and John Searle' or 'The Turing test and The Chinese Room'. It may not be intentional, but it sure is misleading.
More importantly: security updates.
I'm not even aware of any proper alternative (besides Outlook, which is obviously shit).
I moved from Eudora to Thunderbird and have been looking for something else because of this news, but it seems there is absolutely nothing. Recommendations welcome.
Technically, what they say is interesting to themselves. They've just stopped caring whether anyone else thinks the same.
Not trying to get anyone here to develop a habit, but it always seemed to me that cocaine is a drug that would help shy and anxious people and would turn already confident people into overconfident assholes. Sort of like alcohol, I guess.
What a terrible clusterfuck this 'revamp' is.
1. Only half of the settings are 'ported'. The other half (including Crossfire) can only be found when pressing 'additional settings', which opens (a stripped version of) the old AMD Catalyst Control Center. Shit, I get that some projects require having legacy code and new code next to each other, but for a tool that does fuck-all and is produced by a multinational company it is inexcusable.
2. The UI is a classic 'looks shiny, works like crap' with a myriad of 100% custom touch sized interface elements in grey and grey strewn across an anemically small window with multiple navigational blocks and random bits of hidden functionality. I'm surprised they didn't replace all text buttons with grey meaningless icons.
3. It is unstable as fuck.
4. It has fucking ad banners and social media crap rammed in there.
5. It has custom fucking animations of UI elements and weird 'read more...' links.
The only good thing about this bit of software is that they actually named it AMD Settings (and/or Radeon Settings), which at the very least reflects its function. Other than that it is a downgrade (which is saying a lot, considering that the previous version was the CCC!).
For Windows, there are some systray icon based applications that provide such information. Alternatively (again, in Windows), the Resource Monitor provides detailed info on disk activity.
I'm not really sure whether I prefer a dedicated hardware disk activity notification over a software implementation, but I sure as hell regularly check disk activity on all my Windows devices.
On Android, I used to use CoolTool for having information on the state of the system but it was too much of a battery and memory hog to keep using it. I miss it, though. That feeling of 'WTF is going on' is just so unnecessary.
No sane man derides the ones he pities.
Don't run from the truth. It is weak.
Fuck your nerd-hate. You don't belong on Slashdot.
Also: Don't tell me what to do. You want to enjoy crap: fine. I don't have to.
One of the most interesting perspectives I've encountered is this one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Relevant quotes: "The de-Baathification law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.
[...]
It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.
[...]
Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military.
[...]
'The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam. They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.'"
And the kicker, for slight comedic relief: "When U.S. officials demobilized the Baathist army, they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs"
poor Bernie would be sedated in a looneybin somewhere
Why is that?
Yep, we can also add Buddhists to this list:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un...
Which (and that was my point) means it does make sense to talk about graphite vs. carbon, even if they get the word 'atom' wrong.
No, it doesn't.
'Graphite vs. amorphous (or non-crystalline) carbon' is fine. 'Graphite vs. carbon' is nonsensical.
Also, the whole point was that they got the word atom wrong. Neither OP nor I ever implied that the distinction between graphite and amorphous carbon is irrelevant here. Please keep your straw men to yourself.
You missed the point. Graphite is a molecular structure, not a type of atom.
TFA has it like this:
"The battery is based on the same lithium ion chemistry used in cellphone batteries today but gets its advantage from atoms of graphite bonded to the anode, Huawei said on Friday at an industry conference in Japan."
It is still unnecessarily misleading and badly written, but in that sentence they are probably (or hopefully) referring to the thickness of the layer of graphite.