Perhaps there is no such thing as choice. What if you make your choice based on circumstances beyond your control?
We make all our choices based on external stimuli, which are largely beyond our control. Of all the philosophical nonsense that's bandied about, the whole "fate vs free will" debate is the most exasperating. "Free will" is an artifact of the limits of our perception, and nothing more. Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic. The only time it's labelled "free will" is when the decision system is too complex for anyone to predict the outcome. Dropping a hot potato isn't called "free will" because we understand the grossly simple neurological mechanism that causes it. Dropping a puppy off a cliff is seen as "free will" because there's no telling what twisted up crazy logic went into that decision. In both cases, though, it is a logical necessity that some deterministic mechanism precipitated both end results. Even the theist cop-out of "the ghost in the machine", i.e. the immaterial soul, doesn't really escape the problem. All things happen because of something else. Even the "ghost" argument requires that outside stimulus trigger an analysis based on pre-existing stored information.
So enough with the "free will" crap already. It's like arguing about how much longer the upper line in this optical illusionappears to be
There are no populations of brown recluse spiders living in California.
"no populations" != "no spiders"
Only a handful of specimens (less than 10) have ever been collected in California
That's because there are no populations to collect from, just onesies and twosies that don't live very long. And when people get spider bites, they don't generally collect the spider, and once the necrosis starts, it's usually too late to look for it.
and usually there is some connection between the spider and a recent move or shipment from the Midwest.
And spiders that hitch a ride in a moving box then bite people in California don't count as spiders, or don't count as bites? I understand that you've been waiting for the opportunity to go off on this rant for quite a while, but you're tilting at windmills here. No one in TFA or the comments said there was an established population of brown recluse spiders in California.
Most interesting, is there are NO BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS IN CALIFORNIA!
Untue. You even say so yourself in your very next sentence:
People will argue that there are, and they know someone whose been bitten, but loxosceles reclusa has only been found a handful of times in California in the last 50 years, all of the cases were isolated, and all were traced to shipments from outside the state.
Do not confuse "has established populations in California" with "is sometimes found in California". The former is false. The latter is established fact. Now, The fact that the brown recluse likes to spin webs in cardboard boxes should send up a giant neon sign that says
THE BROWN RECLUSE ENTERS CALIFORNIA IN MOVING VANS
The fact the few such spiders have been verified is more a testament to the fact that few spider bite victims capture their assailants for analysis than anything else. The reason so many such bites are reported in California is because every jackass and his dog in flyover country wants to move to California after watching the Rose Parade on New Year's Day and seeing that it's 70 degrees and sunny. Every time someone moves from southern Missouri to [Oakland|Los Angeles|ZIP=9[0-5]\d{3}], there's another potential (one to several) brown recluses in California.
In other words, the researchers were wayyyy ahead of slashdot.
...except that since they haven't been running this test for 40 years, they don't know what a current 60 year old would have tested at age 20; and since they can't see the future, they don't know what a current 20 year old will test at age 60. What they have is a projection from which they base their assumption, which then shows a convergence. I don't doubt that there's some age related decline, I just doubt they have enough information after a 7 year study to point at specific ages with a resolution of 1 year. In fact the study is very careful about just that: they merely note that there is so far a noteworthy clustering around age 22, 27, and 37 for these three metrics.
Intel licensed x86 to AMD originally because Intel was unable to keep up with demand.
AMD was a second source for the 8086 and 8088 because IBM demanded two sources, not because Intel couldn't make enough.
AMD refused to stop making x86's, and sued Intel to keep the right to do so.
AMD actually LOST that case,
AMD was the one who challenged the x86 license cancellation and won the case in arbitration, and after numerous appeals it was upheld b the California Supreme Court.
They renewed the license in 2001.
AMD has now breached the license.
Given that the licensing agreement isn't public, your analysis is clearly pulled straight from your rectum.
Intel has no responsibility to keep AMD in business.
The amusing thing about cross licensing agreements is that they cross. You can't really cancel half a contract. If Intel forces AMD out of the x86 CPU market... then Intel is out of it too, unless they intend to use something other than EMT64, which is a licensed implementation of AMD's proprietary AMD64.
Natural law is against being a failure like AMD.
Oh, I see. Your an Intel fanboy. That explains it.
Uh well technically the whole show is based off of the Mexican serial La Fea Mas Bella.
Well no shit. That's the acknowledged premise of the show, that it's an anglicized re-presentation of the original spanish-language shows. The ripping off of plot ideas from weak american movies is a failing of the writing, which is a completely un-fucking related issue.
BTW, does anyone else have problems with the notion that Fringe is "Sci-fi"? To my mind, paranormal investigations are anti-sci-fi.
A friend of mine expressed annoyance that "fringe science" isn't a specialty at all, but rather an excuse that allows ignorant writers to fill the script full of bullshit pseudoscience, saving them from the hassle of having to Google real science facts. He describes the main character as "the man who knows everything, but remembers nothing".
Family Guy was never funny. It's just the same five jokes over and over, which might be a laugh if you were an idiot.... but I guess if you can laugh at the same five jokes for a whole season, you can do the same for multiple seasons.
If I remember correctly Lost was originally intended for 5 seasons, so extending it 1 season really doesnt do that much to it...
The problem with Lost has been that JJ Abrams (in typical "jeenius" fashion) decided to solve the story arc length problem by never actually crafting a story arc to begin with. Basically, he thought it'd work to just have the story create itself, by just making stuff up as he went along. Unfortunately, failing to plan a cohesive story arc is not a viable plan, and just leaves you with a big pile of nonsensical garbage.
But that describes all his works, to some degree. I'd have to say that he pretty well proves once again that nepotism trumping writing skill in the entertainment industry is a pretty pervasive problem; that having your father be a well known producer makes up your complete lack of ability.
When you get your big break and your work finally has some real dollar value, should large corporates be entitled to move in and use your work for free?
We should all be entitled to use the work for free. Copyright isn't about securing a living for creative folks, it's about giving them a time limited incentive to create, at the end of which, the work adds to the public domain. If you leave that last bit off, the entire freakin' purpose of the copyright clause is being omitted.
someone like that not receiving any royalties (even if they are dead, the royalties being left to whomever they willed it to or whatever) isn't fair.
I wonder, how many times does it have to be pointed out that the copyright clause isn't about "fair" or authors "getting their due"? It's right there in the bloody constitution. It's about being just enough enticement to encourage people to create these works in the first place so as to enrich the public domain to the maximum degree. If Emily-dang-Dickenson wrote 1800 poems without making money off but a few, then obviously the enticement was adequate.
but look at after 9/11. Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan.
As someone who spent 2 years not scorching the earth in Afghanistan, I can tell you you're incorrect. Perhaps you were just engaging in hyperbole, but for the most part what we do there is convince the locals to shoot at Taliban/al Qaeda (or at least rat them out to us), because there aren't enough of us to be everywhere. "Scorched earth" policy is something we haven't had the luxury of pursuing since WW2. There's a reason we're not getting our asses handed to us like the Russians did, and that's because our first choice is to make allies of the locals, rather than "conquering" them.
I like to look around the table and try to estimate the cost in salary and benefits of the particular meeting. With a VP, a handful of directors and several managers, a one-hour meeting easily costs the company a few thousand dollars.
We need to invent a big ol' tote board sign wired to a prox card reader at each seat. When you sit down the board logs you in and starts adding your hourly rate second by second to a giant total on the board, so these management fuckers can see how much they're costing the company as they talk about synergizing their core competencies.
I think "non-obvious" is the better test. Wishing there was some easy way to get fuckers to pay attention in meetings is nothing new. Programming a computer to limit their access to stuff during meetings is hardly a stroke of genius.
In Afghanistan? The only three things we could be sure of being resupplied with regularly in the field were ammunition, MREs, and batteries. Everything (night sights, NVG) ran on either AA or CR123A batteries. AA's are all over the place over there. Our company got 'em by the freakin' pallet load.
I wasn't able to record anything to share with others when I was in; while I don't want to detract from his experience, I do selfishly want to share in it. Also, the mother involved would like to see such things.
Posterity and those not in the moment with you are also a consideration, after all;)
I know what you mean. I did the "sitzkrieg" in Desert Storm and have exactly one picture. 10 years later, I went back on active duty and deployed to Afghanistan. Two yearlong tours later... I had exactly three pictures, all taken by someone else who later emailed them to me. Never occurred to me to take "posterity" pictures. I was issued a camera for taking intel photos on occasion, but never ended up with any of my own. Like others have advised, I'd personally suggest getting him a small camera that runs on AA's. Lots of stuff runs on AA's, so they're not too hard to find. If he's a corpsman, he's gonna spending a lot of time in the field. Afghanistan was the polar opposite of Desert Storm for me. DS we sat around with nothing to do for months. Afghanistan we didn't stop moving for more than a couple days every couple weeks. Never really had time to play with gadgets.
Now go get me a Prick/E-7 and a box of grid squares. (:
Sure, just fill out an ID-10-T form and get me the keys to the impact area first. I don't have a Prick/E-7, but I think I know where there's a Prick/E-8. Someone told me they saw one behind the 1st Sergeant's desk the other day.
We actually got the FNG to go look behind the desk once.... ah, good times.
Oh, I see where you're having trouble. Having them come from "writing" would mean that they come from law. "Natural rights" means that they are discoverable through the natural interaction of individuals. Even in pre-civilization societies, if someone was murdered, the murderer was himself killed by the group if there was no valid extenuating circumstance. Basic morality is biological, having evolved as a means of enhancing the survivability of the cooperative individual and his genes. People that work together live longer and reproduce more effectively. This is what happens in the small-group dynamic. When the groups get larger and more complex, power dynamics tend to subvert some of these rights. In a very large group, those in power tend to stomp those rights quite thoroughly. This is why the founding fathers' approach after the american revolution was so novel. They established a system whereby those basic rights of the individual would be explicitly protected from infringement. The system has been largely ass-raped into submission by a lot of incremental encroachment (and a little bald-faced grabass dictator behavior) but the principle is still given token recognition.
Like the one my mom was on, where the guy claimed he blew.15+ into the breathalyzer only because of corn flake mash caught in his dental work had fermented....
Only people on juries are those too stupid to get out of jury duty (or actually want to do it... as in do gooders anxious to lock you away).
or people like me, who work for a government entity, and get paid to serve on a jury just as I do at my regular job. The only difference is that the courthouse is 5 miles closer, and I have to be there an hour later. You think I'm not going to show up for that, particularly if I have the chance to get on a jury and potentially fuck up some asshole prosecutor's drug-war witch hunt?
Unless he's a liberal, then he'll invent some new rights and say the Constitution "evolved";)
FWIW, the 9th Amendment makes it abundantly clear that there are plenty of rights not specifically enumerated in the constitution, and their absence or presence in the bill of rights has no bearing on their protection under the constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps there is no such thing as choice. What if you make your choice based on circumstances beyond your control?
We make all our choices based on external stimuli, which are largely beyond our control. Of all the philosophical nonsense that's bandied about, the whole "fate vs free will" debate is the most exasperating. "Free will" is an artifact of the limits of our perception, and nothing more. Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic. The only time it's labelled "free will" is when the decision system is too complex for anyone to predict the outcome. Dropping a hot potato isn't called "free will" because we understand the grossly simple neurological mechanism that causes it. Dropping a puppy off a cliff is seen as "free will" because there's no telling what twisted up crazy logic went into that decision. In both cases, though, it is a logical necessity that some deterministic mechanism precipitated both end results. Even the theist cop-out of "the ghost in the machine", i.e. the immaterial soul, doesn't really escape the problem. All things happen because of something else. Even the "ghost" argument requires that outside stimulus trigger an analysis based on pre-existing stored information.
So enough with the "free will" crap already. It's like arguing about how much longer the upper line in this optical illusion appears to be
There are no populations of brown recluse spiders living in California.
"no populations" != "no spiders"
Only a handful of specimens (less than 10) have ever been collected in California
That's because there are no populations to collect from, just onesies and twosies that don't live very long. And when people get spider bites, they don't generally collect the spider, and once the necrosis starts, it's usually too late to look for it.
and usually there is some connection between the spider and a recent move or shipment from the Midwest.
And spiders that hitch a ride in a moving box then bite people in California don't count as spiders, or don't count as bites? I understand that you've been waiting for the opportunity to go off on this rant for quite a while, but you're tilting at windmills here. No one in TFA or the comments said there was an established population of brown recluse spiders in California.
Most interesting, is there are NO BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS IN CALIFORNIA!
Untue. You even say so yourself in your very next sentence:
People will argue that there are, and they know someone whose been bitten, but loxosceles reclusa has only been found a handful of times in California in the last 50 years, all of the cases were isolated, and all were traced to shipments from outside the state.
Do not confuse "has established populations in California" with "is sometimes found in California". The former is false. The latter is established fact. Now, The fact that the brown recluse likes to spin webs in cardboard boxes should send up a giant neon sign that says
THE BROWN RECLUSE ENTERS CALIFORNIA IN MOVING VANS
The fact the few such spiders have been verified is more a testament to the fact that few spider bite victims capture their assailants for analysis than anything else. The reason so many such bites are reported in California is because every jackass and his dog in flyover country wants to move to California after watching the Rose Parade on New Year's Day and seeing that it's 70 degrees and sunny. Every time someone moves from southern Missouri to [Oakland|Los Angeles|ZIP=9[0-5]\d{3}], there's another potential (one to several) brown recluses in California.
In other words, the researchers were wayyyy ahead of slashdot.
...except that since they haven't been running this test for 40 years, they don't know what a current 60 year old would have tested at age 20; and since they can't see the future, they don't know what a current 20 year old will test at age 60. What they have is a projection from which they base their assumption, which then shows a convergence. I don't doubt that there's some age related decline, I just doubt they have enough information after a 7 year study to point at specific ages with a resolution of 1 year. In fact the study is very careful about just that: they merely note that there is so far a noteworthy clustering around age 22, 27, and 37 for these three metrics.
You are apparently ignorant of history.
You apparently can't even be bothered to read the wikipedia entry on AMD.
Intel licensed x86 to AMD originally because Intel was unable to keep up with demand.
AMD was a second source for the 8086 and 8088 because IBM demanded two sources, not because Intel couldn't make enough.
AMD refused to stop making x86's, and sued Intel to keep the right to do so. AMD actually LOST that case,
AMD was the one who challenged the x86 license cancellation and won the case in arbitration, and after numerous appeals it was upheld b the California Supreme Court.
They renewed the license in 2001. AMD has now breached the license.
Given that the licensing agreement isn't public, your analysis is clearly pulled straight from your rectum.
Intel has no responsibility to keep AMD in business.
The amusing thing about cross licensing agreements is that they cross. You can't really cancel half a contract. If Intel forces AMD out of the x86 CPU market... then Intel is out of it too, unless they intend to use something other than EMT64, which is a licensed implementation of AMD's proprietary AMD64.
Natural law is against being a failure like AMD.
Oh, I see. Your an Intel fanboy. That explains it.
who moderated this fool up so high?
Uh well technically the whole show is based off of the Mexican serial La Fea Mas Bella.
Well no shit. That's the acknowledged premise of the show, that it's an anglicized re-presentation of the original spanish-language shows. The ripping off of plot ideas from weak american movies is a failing of the writing, which is a completely un-fucking related issue.
BTW, does anyone else have problems with the notion that Fringe is "Sci-fi"? To my mind, paranormal investigations are anti-sci-fi.
A friend of mine expressed annoyance that "fringe science" isn't a specialty at all, but rather an excuse that allows ignorant writers to fill the script full of bullshit pseudoscience, saving them from the hassle of having to Google real science facts. He describes the main character as "the man who knows everything, but remembers nothing".
Who said anything about South Park?
Family Guy was never funny. It's just the same five jokes over and over, which might be a laugh if you were an idiot.... but I guess if you can laugh at the same five jokes for a whole season, you can do the same for multiple seasons.
If I remember correctly Lost was originally intended for 5 seasons, so extending it 1 season really doesnt do that much to it...
The problem with Lost has been that JJ Abrams (in typical "jeenius" fashion) decided to solve the story arc length problem by never actually crafting a story arc to begin with. Basically, he thought it'd work to just have the story create itself, by just making stuff up as he went along. Unfortunately, failing to plan a cohesive story arc is not a viable plan, and just leaves you with a big pile of nonsensical garbage.
But that describes all his works, to some degree. I'd have to say that he pretty well proves once again that nepotism trumping writing skill in the entertainment industry is a pretty pervasive problem; that having your father be a well known producer makes up your complete lack of ability.
When you get your big break and your work finally has some real dollar value, should large corporates be entitled to move in and use your work for free?
We should all be entitled to use the work for free. Copyright isn't about securing a living for creative folks, it's about giving them a time limited incentive to create, at the end of which, the work adds to the public domain. If you leave that last bit off, the entire freakin' purpose of the copyright clause is being omitted.
someone like that not receiving any royalties (even if they are dead, the royalties being left to whomever they willed it to or whatever) isn't fair.
I wonder, how many times does it have to be pointed out that the copyright clause isn't about "fair" or authors "getting their due"? It's right there in the bloody constitution. It's about being just enough enticement to encourage people to create these works in the first place so as to enrich the public domain to the maximum degree. If Emily-dang-Dickenson wrote 1800 poems without making money off but a few, then obviously the enticement was adequate.
You can't just murder them over something as transient as a rape
on the contrary, you can respond with deadly force for pretty much any kind of physical assault--- and it's self defense, not murder.
but look at after 9/11. Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan.
As someone who spent 2 years not scorching the earth in Afghanistan, I can tell you you're incorrect. Perhaps you were just engaging in hyperbole, but for the most part what we do there is convince the locals to shoot at Taliban/al Qaeda (or at least rat them out to us), because there aren't enough of us to be everywhere. "Scorched earth" policy is something we haven't had the luxury of pursuing since WW2. There's a reason we're not getting our asses handed to us like the Russians did, and that's because our first choice is to make allies of the locals, rather than "conquering" them.
I like to look around the table and try to estimate the cost in salary and benefits of the particular meeting. With a VP, a handful of directors and several managers, a one-hour meeting easily costs the company a few thousand dollars.
We need to invent a big ol' tote board sign wired to a prox card reader at each seat. When you sit down the board logs you in and starts adding your hourly rate second by second to a giant total on the board, so these management fuckers can see how much they're costing the company as they talk about synergizing their core competencies.
I think "non-obvious" is the better test. Wishing there was some easy way to get fuckers to pay attention in meetings is nothing new. Programming a computer to limit their access to stuff during meetings is hardly a stroke of genius.
Why, you think your mother has never had sex?
Military vehicles don't run 12V. They run 24-28V.
Batteries are hard to get, heavy, and expensive.
In Afghanistan? The only three things we could be sure of being resupplied with regularly in the field were ammunition, MREs, and batteries. Everything (night sights, NVG) ran on either AA or CR123A batteries. AA's are all over the place over there. Our company got 'em by the freakin' pallet load.
I wasn't able to record anything to share with others when I was in; while I don't want to detract from his experience, I do selfishly want to share in it. Also, the mother involved would like to see such things.
Posterity and those not in the moment with you are also a consideration, after all ;)
I know what you mean. I did the "sitzkrieg" in Desert Storm and have exactly one picture. 10 years later, I went back on active duty and deployed to Afghanistan. Two yearlong tours later... I had exactly three pictures, all taken by someone else who later emailed them to me. Never occurred to me to take "posterity" pictures. I was issued a camera for taking intel photos on occasion, but never ended up with any of my own. Like others have advised, I'd personally suggest getting him a small camera that runs on AA's. Lots of stuff runs on AA's, so they're not too hard to find. If he's a corpsman, he's gonna spending a lot of time in the field. Afghanistan was the polar opposite of Desert Storm for me. DS we sat around with nothing to do for months. Afghanistan we didn't stop moving for more than a couple days every couple weeks. Never really had time to play with gadgets.
Now go get me a Prick/E-7 and a box of grid squares. (:
Sure, just fill out an ID-10-T form and get me the keys to the impact area first. I don't have a Prick/E-7, but I think I know where there's a Prick/E-8. Someone told me they saw one behind the 1st Sergeant's desk the other day.
We actually got the FNG to go look behind the desk once.... ah, good times.
Oh, I see where you're having trouble. Having them come from "writing" would mean that they come from law. "Natural rights" means that they are discoverable through the natural interaction of individuals. Even in pre-civilization societies, if someone was murdered, the murderer was himself killed by the group if there was no valid extenuating circumstance. Basic morality is biological, having evolved as a means of enhancing the survivability of the cooperative individual and his genes. People that work together live longer and reproduce more effectively. This is what happens in the small-group dynamic. When the groups get larger and more complex, power dynamics tend to subvert some of these rights. In a very large group, those in power tend to stomp those rights quite thoroughly. This is why the founding fathers' approach after the american revolution was so novel. They established a system whereby those basic rights of the individual would be explicitly protected from infringement. The system has been largely ass-raped into submission by a lot of incremental encroachment (and a little bald-faced grabass dictator behavior) but the principle is still given token recognition.
(He was guilty as sin.)
Like the one my mom was on, where the guy claimed he blew .15+ into the breathalyzer only because of corn flake mash caught in his dental work had fermented....
Only people on juries are those too stupid to get out of jury duty (or actually want to do it ... as in do gooders anxious to lock you away).
or people like me, who work for a government entity, and get paid to serve on a jury just as I do at my regular job. The only difference is that the courthouse is 5 miles closer, and I have to be there an hour later. You think I'm not going to show up for that, particularly if I have the chance to get on a jury and potentially fuck up some asshole prosecutor's drug-war witch hunt?
Unless he's a liberal, then he'll invent some new rights and say the Constitution "evolved" ;)
FWIW, the 9th Amendment makes it abundantly clear that there are plenty of rights not specifically enumerated in the constitution, and their absence or presence in the bill of rights has no bearing on their protection under the constitution.
Not a lot of flaming skulls and roses painted on those bodies of the ladies at Victoria's Secret, eh?
They actually don't care if models have a small tattoo or two anymore. They just 'shop it out later, when they're already tweaking other stuff.