The problem is that you end up hiding what it can and can't do.
All the user sees is that it does what they want... until it doesn't. That's when the bad things happen. When a tool doesn't let the users do what they want it to do, and it hides its internal behavior so they can't see how to make it do what they need it to do, they end up doing things like trying random variations until it gets it right.
Or maybe they overlooked that the command was interpreted incorrectly and move to the next task.
Systems like this improve best case performance, but they can introduce nightmarish worst case scenarios.
RMS didn't invent the collaborative software culture. He's just the leader of a sect of it.
He invented the tool that helped that culture survive today. He invented it, because the collaborative software culture existence was threatened. And he's the leader of the relevant sect of that culture.
There was never a threat to the concept that people exchanging ideas freely could do interesting things with computers. It's a very compelling concept that creates a sense of community.
Let's take a step back here and remind ourselves of the threat that started the crusade. RMS was using a printer with a buggy driver and was angry that the source was not made available so that he might fix it himself. As a result of this inconvenience, he started a movement that declared it a moral imperative that similar inconveniences be prevented, regardless of the other inconveniences this might cause.
I appreciate the GPL as a mechanism for the promotion of collaboration, but I can't stand people who try to tell other people what their problems are.
RMS didn't invent the collaborative software culture. He's just the leader of a sect of it.
My broad-brush observation is that a purist who manages to win over everyone is a hero and a purist who doesn't manage to win over everyone is just a dick.There are vastly more of them in the second category.
My version says "rims," as does Wikipedia's. But Olivier agrees with you. Might there be different versions?
There are three versions. The first was abridged and contained a number of errors. I've heard the theory that it may have been transcribed by someone watching the play and some lines may have been misheard. For example, there are a couple of lines that read, "So frown'd he, when, in an angry parle, He smote the sledded polacks upon the ice." As given, this line seems to indicate that the Hamlet's father defeated an army of Polish on sleds after an attempt at reconciliation. However, this line is frequently edited to say "sledded pole-ax" where sledded means weighted, like a sledge hammer. This reading makes a little more sense, since the other one jumps from Hamlet's father in a parle, to smiting the Polish, whereas the second reading has Hamlet's father showing an act of authority and force in the midst of the parle.
Reading a couple of things, I see you're right that the alimony debt wouldn't be handled with the rest of his debts.
Still my understanding is that under bankruptcy, the bankruptcy court will use whatever assets he has to pay off his ex-wife first, with other debts being resolved after that.
I'm guessing that if he didn't have enough to pay her, that they would take whatever he has and garnish his future earnings to cover the rest, but any other debts that stand in the way of the alimony payments being made could be eliminated.
I admit it's silly, but I can't shut up the thought in the back of my head that maybe the earth only continues to exist in branches where the start up of the LHC is delayed.
On the other hand, I'm sure that he could have left any time he liked if he either paid up or filed for bankruptcy allowing his ex-wife's claim to be settled alongside his other debts.
IANAL, but I'm guessing his legal theory was that if he didn't have the money to pay, the court order was invalid as it was formed under false pretenses. I'm not sure I buy that. If immediately prior to the beginning of divorce proceedings, he has $5m and then before those proceedings are complete, he claims to have pissed all of that money away, I think at the very least he owes her some portion of what he has left. And his failure to deliver at least that is clearly a continued violation of the court order.
If we're dealing with a question with clear, attainable conditions for compliance then I'm okay with a judge deciding to this sort of thing, subject to all of the usual mechanisms for higher review.
The insurance companies can, will, and do account for that. This stuff isn't hard to model. The basic idea is that you have a hazard rate per mile driven. More miles driven means more hazard. However, that hazard rate doesn't have to be the same for all drivers. The hazard rate they'll use to model your cost will be based on the experience of drivers in your same risk class, i.e. pretty low.
I am not a property/casualty actuary, but I am an actuary.
It's the same way it is in real life. You can scream and rant and rave that at people that they're interpreting the rules the wrong way, but they're under no obligation to agree with you.
The opposing position to your argument is that while the official rules of the arena do not restrict PvP combat, they also do not enforce it and they do not prevent the player community from developing and enforcing their own rules of engagement within the formal construct of the official rules. You're free to argue that this is a bad interpretation of the rules, but they're equally free to ignore you, and in the absence of the intervention of a higher authority, the majority wins.
I just can't stand blanket contempt for any group, self-selecting or not, without regard for the fact that not all people within that group have the same circumstances.
Yes I agree that the use of mercenaries systematically creates bad results. But I hate the idea of assuming that all people who sign into a bad system signed into it for bad reasons.
You could say that I hate misdirected hate. Any form of contempt should be focused as tight as a laser beam, both to avoid any damage to bystanders and to maximize its potential for incinerating the target.
My understanding is that they recruit from soldiers who've finished a tour of duty by offering them higher pay and what at least might sound like a sweeter gig. I have no personal knowledge of this, that's only what I remember reading.
From that perspective, I can't blame the people recruited that way for joining a bad organization. I think you could call them sell-outs or something similar, but my point was that I believe that to claim that a particular human life is beyond sympathy is a foolish thing to say when you know nothing about that particular human.
I think that's a bit glib. At least a significant portion of the Blackwater people, at least the ones actually on the ground, are just former soldiers who traded up to an employer who would give them better body armor.
Now if you're explicitly talking about someone who is willing to fight for anyone who pays enough money, no questions asked, then of course they don't deserve any sympathy. But I don't think there are really that many people like that.
Entropy has to be measured in terms of a distribution of possible messages and fidelity of the reproduction of the message.
Over the distribution of possible photographs, reproduced with high fidelity relative to human vision, the entropy of an image is much higher than textual descriptions of problems. However, if you accept an equivalence relation among images with the same compositional elements, the entropy of an image is much lower.
Think of it in terms of the deep connection between Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. The Kolmogorov complexity of a given object is dependent on the language you're describing the object in, but that dependence falls out when you consider the domain specific information embedded in different languages to begin with.
If your job is producing images for ads for family vacations, then the entropy you produce is going to follow the complexity of describing the family and describing the background of the image. Small differences between models and backgrounds can be safely ignored. Information that is common among all family vacation ads can also be ignored (e.g. they're all smiling, the models are all modestly attractive people, the backdrop follows a fairly limited distribution of locale types, etc.).
Basically you want to look at the minimum amount of information that would be needed for someone with your domain specific knowledge and resources to reproduce your work. THAT is the fundamental metric.
That's what I meant when I said the law has to objectively resolve disputes with subjective components. Intent is subject to interpretation, and the law specifies mechanisms for testing for intent.
What is and isn't illegal is simply the first question. The second question is, how should mitigating factors be considered in answering the first question? The third question is, how is a violation punished? The fourth question is, to what extent should mitigating factors be considered in determining the intensity of punishment used?
A system that doesn't attempt to consider all elements of the case is tyranny.
So how do you weigh all of the pertinent considerations against each other? Is one of them always most important? Or maybe one of them should only be important when it crosses a certain threshold.
The whole point is that the legal system is an attempt by humans to establish methods for making good guesses which take into account as many relevant factors as is possible. Since they're at best good guesses (and sometimes bad guesses) bad results do sometimes occur. However, it's better than the binary alternatives of either not punishing any crimes or punishing all suspects.
Have you heard the expression "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins"? Well I imagine if that were put into law the process would go something like this:
Legislator 1:I want to ban people hitting other people's faces with their fists.
Legislator 2: What about a light tap with a closed fist as a sort of, "Go get 'em champ!" endearing sort of thing? Do you really think that should be illegal?
Legislator 1: Sure, I buy it. We could put an exemption for that.
Legislator 3: I'm more worried about people hitting other people in the face with things other than fists.
Legislator 1: Like what?
Legislator 3: Well this guy slammed a door on my brother's face and broke his nose.
Legislator 2: Ouch...
Legislator 1: Sure that should be illegal too.
Legislator 2: Wait, what if it wasn't on purpose? What if, like, you were holding a door open for someone and then slipped and slammed the door in their face?
Legislator 1: Well that wouldn't count.
Legislator 3: You would still be responsible for being clumsy.
Legislator 1: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You should have to at least pay for medical bills or something, but it's not like we're going to lock people up in jail over that.
Legislator 2: What if it's a windy day and the wind blows the door closed and it breaks someone's nose and the guy thinks that it was you slamming the door?
Legislator 1: Well if it was really the wind and not you, then you aren't responsible.
Legislator 3: Wait, how do you prove it was the wind?
Legislator 1: Well......And so on and so forth.
The moral of this story is that we don't just throw out old laws because we don't want to go through the trouble of hashing out all of the minutia in them over again. The law is never going to be not complex, because the essential logic that it needs to express is complex.
So long as the concerns that motivated the original law are still essentially valid (which, of course, is not always true), then it's generally better to amend the existing law and build off the work that has already been done, rather than attempt to rewrite them completely.
The law has the difficult task of objectively resolving disputes with subjective elements. When you think about it, that's a problem roughly equivalent to Hard AI. Over many centuries, law has developed heuristics for dealing with this problem. If you take the time to learn about them, you'll find that although they don't produce justice with algorithmic certainty, they do tend to produce reasonable results more often than not.
Another measure of intelligence is how far you go before you burn out.
Mentally, I'm more of the sprinter type. I have an extremely varied range of knowledge, and I'm very proud of that, but I still envy the things that people with more endurance than me can achieve. There are definitely trade-offs between the two.
John Stuart Mill made the argument that such a view is ultimately demeaning to men and women alike.
When you suggest it is good and proper to limit the scope of concerns of certain groups of people, you're doing a great disservice to the immense range of capability of the human race, which my experience has shown to have no restrictions beyond those that we ourselves place on it.
I believe in the concept that a husband and wife should be a team, but the details of any such arrangement should be worked out based on the needs and skills of each couple, rather than by preassignment of culturally constructed roles.
Slashdot Mirror
Mathematics is about studying the implications of ideas. In that sense, pure mathematics has more in common with literature than with science.
You could say that mathematics is concerned with expressing objective concepts while literature is concerned with expressing subjective concepts.
The problem is that you end up hiding what it can and can't do.
All the user sees is that it does what they want... until it doesn't. That's when the bad things happen. When a tool doesn't let the users do what they want it to do, and it hides its internal behavior so they can't see how to make it do what they need it to do, they end up doing things like trying random variations until it gets it right.
Or maybe they overlooked that the command was interpreted incorrectly and move to the next task.
Systems like this improve best case performance, but they can introduce nightmarish worst case scenarios.
The lawyers know that any argument that has a chance of winning over a judge or jury has value for their client. I can't blame them for that.
Litigation never ends. Ever.
I haven't read the story but I guarantee that this argument was a product of the Lawyer's Algorithm, which is as follows:
List all objections to the matter at hand
While true {
List all conceivable objections premised on the prior objections being rejected
}
RMS didn't invent the collaborative software culture. He's just the leader of a sect of it.
He invented the tool that helped that culture survive today. He invented it, because the collaborative software culture existence was threatened.
And he's the leader of the relevant sect of that culture.
There was never a threat to the concept that people exchanging ideas freely could do interesting things with computers. It's a very compelling concept that creates a sense of community.
Let's take a step back here and remind ourselves of the threat that started the crusade. RMS was using a printer with a buggy driver and was angry that the source was not made available so that he might fix it himself. As a result of this inconvenience, he started a movement that declared it a moral imperative that similar inconveniences be prevented, regardless of the other inconveniences this might cause.
I appreciate the GPL as a mechanism for the promotion of collaboration, but I can't stand people who try to tell other people what their problems are.
RMS didn't invent the collaborative software culture. He's just the leader of a sect of it.
My broad-brush observation is that a purist who manages to win over everyone is a hero and a purist who doesn't manage to win over everyone is just a dick.There are vastly more of them in the second category.
Here's another lesson, kids. Always remember to close your tags.
My version says "rims," as does Wikipedia's. But Olivier agrees with you. Might there be different versions?
There are three versions. The first was abridged and contained a number of errors. I've heard the theory that it may have been transcribed by someone watching the play and some lines may have been misheard. For example, there are a couple of lines that read, "So frown'd he, when, in an angry parle, He smote the sledded polacks upon the ice." As given, this line seems to indicate that the Hamlet's father defeated an army of Polish on sleds after an attempt at reconciliation. However, this line is frequently edited to say "sledded pole-ax" where sledded means weighted, like a sledge hammer. This reading makes a little more sense, since the other one jumps from Hamlet's father in a parle, to smiting the Polish, whereas the second reading has Hamlet's father showing an act of authority and force in the midst of the parle.
Reading a couple of things, I see you're right that the alimony debt wouldn't be handled with the rest of his debts.
Still my understanding is that under bankruptcy, the bankruptcy court will use whatever assets he has to pay off his ex-wife first, with other debts being resolved after that.
I'm guessing that if he didn't have enough to pay her, that they would take whatever he has and garnish his future earnings to cover the rest, but any other debts that stand in the way of the alimony payments being made could be eliminated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide
I admit it's silly, but I can't shut up the thought in the back of my head that maybe the earth only continues to exist in branches where the start up of the LHC is delayed.
Bats eat bugs. I don't like bugs.
Fuck bugs. Save the bats.
On the other hand, I'm sure that he could have left any time he liked if he either paid up or filed for bankruptcy allowing his ex-wife's claim to be settled alongside his other debts.
IANAL, but I'm guessing his legal theory was that if he didn't have the money to pay, the court order was invalid as it was formed under false pretenses. I'm not sure I buy that. If immediately prior to the beginning of divorce proceedings, he has $5m and then before those proceedings are complete, he claims to have pissed all of that money away, I think at the very least he owes her some portion of what he has left. And his failure to deliver at least that is clearly a continued violation of the court order.
If we're dealing with a question with clear, attainable conditions for compliance then I'm okay with a judge deciding to this sort of thing, subject to all of the usual mechanisms for higher review.
The insurance companies can, will, and do account for that. This stuff isn't hard to model. The basic idea is that you have a hazard rate per mile driven. More miles driven means more hazard. However, that hazard rate doesn't have to be the same for all drivers. The hazard rate they'll use to model your cost will be based on the experience of drivers in your same risk class, i.e. pretty low.
I am not a property/casualty actuary, but I am an actuary.
Well I thought you were funny.
It's the same way it is in real life. You can scream and rant and rave that at people that they're interpreting the rules the wrong way, but they're under no obligation to agree with you.
The opposing position to your argument is that while the official rules of the arena do not restrict PvP combat, they also do not enforce it and they do not prevent the player community from developing and enforcing their own rules of engagement within the formal construct of the official rules. You're free to argue that this is a bad interpretation of the rules, but they're equally free to ignore you, and in the absence of the intervention of a higher authority, the majority wins.
I just can't stand blanket contempt for any group, self-selecting or not, without regard for the fact that not all people within that group have the same circumstances.
Yes I agree that the use of mercenaries systematically creates bad results. But I hate the idea of assuming that all people who sign into a bad system signed into it for bad reasons.
You could say that I hate misdirected hate. Any form of contempt should be focused as tight as a laser beam, both to avoid any damage to bystanders and to maximize its potential for incinerating the target.
I do not admire Blackwater in any shape or form.
My understanding is that they recruit from soldiers who've finished a tour of duty by offering them higher pay and what at least might sound like a sweeter gig. I have no personal knowledge of this, that's only what I remember reading.
From that perspective, I can't blame the people recruited that way for joining a bad organization. I think you could call them sell-outs or something similar, but my point was that I believe that to claim that a particular human life is beyond sympathy is a foolish thing to say when you know nothing about that particular human.
I think that's a bit glib. At least a significant portion of the Blackwater people, at least the ones actually on the ground, are just former soldiers who traded up to an employer who would give them better body armor.
Now if you're explicitly talking about someone who is willing to fight for anyone who pays enough money, no questions asked, then of course they don't deserve any sympathy. But I don't think there are really that many people like that.
Entropy has to be measured in terms of a distribution of possible messages and fidelity of the reproduction of the message.
Over the distribution of possible photographs, reproduced with high fidelity relative to human vision, the entropy of an image is much higher than textual descriptions of problems. However, if you accept an equivalence relation among images with the same compositional elements, the entropy of an image is much lower.
Think of it in terms of the deep connection between Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. The Kolmogorov complexity of a given object is dependent on the language you're describing the object in, but that dependence falls out when you consider the domain specific information embedded in different languages to begin with.
If your job is producing images for ads for family vacations, then the entropy you produce is going to follow the complexity of describing the family and describing the background of the image. Small differences between models and backgrounds can be safely ignored. Information that is common among all family vacation ads can also be ignored (e.g. they're all smiling, the models are all modestly attractive people, the backdrop follows a fairly limited distribution of locale types, etc.).
Basically you want to look at the minimum amount of information that would be needed for someone with your domain specific knowledge and resources to reproduce your work. THAT is the fundamental metric.
There's one metric that can capture everything:
Bits of Shannon entropy processed per hour.
That's what I meant when I said the law has to objectively resolve disputes with subjective components. Intent is subject to interpretation, and the law specifies mechanisms for testing for intent.
What is and isn't illegal is simply the first question. The second question is, how should mitigating factors be considered in answering the first question? The third question is, how is a violation punished? The fourth question is, to what extent should mitigating factors be considered in determining the intensity of punishment used?
A system that doesn't attempt to consider all elements of the case is tyranny.
So how do you weigh all of the pertinent considerations against each other? Is one of them always most important? Or maybe one of them should only be important when it crosses a certain threshold.
The whole point is that the legal system is an attempt by humans to establish methods for making good guesses which take into account as many relevant factors as is possible. Since they're at best good guesses (and sometimes bad guesses) bad results do sometimes occur. However, it's better than the binary alternatives of either not punishing any crimes or punishing all suspects.
Have you heard the expression "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins"? Well I imagine if that were put into law the process would go something like this:
Legislator 1:I want to ban people hitting other people's faces with their fists.
Legislator 2: What about a light tap with a closed fist as a sort of, "Go get 'em champ!" endearing sort of thing? Do you really think that should be illegal?
Legislator 1: Sure, I buy it. We could put an exemption for that.
Legislator 3: I'm more worried about people hitting other people in the face with things other than fists.
Legislator 1: Like what?
Legislator 3: Well this guy slammed a door on my brother's face and broke his nose.
Legislator 2: Ouch...
Legislator 1: Sure that should be illegal too.
Legislator 2: Wait, what if it wasn't on purpose? What if, like, you were holding a door open for someone and then slipped and slammed the door in their face?
Legislator 1: Well that wouldn't count.
Legislator 3: You would still be responsible for being clumsy.
Legislator 1: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You should have to at least pay for medical bills or something, but it's not like we're going to lock people up in jail over that.
Legislator 2: What if it's a windy day and the wind blows the door closed and it breaks someone's nose and the guy thinks that it was you slamming the door?
Legislator 1: Well if it was really the wind and not you, then you aren't responsible.
Legislator 3: Wait, how do you prove it was the wind?
Legislator 1: Well... ...And so on and so forth.
The moral of this story is that we don't just throw out old laws because we don't want to go through the trouble of hashing out all of the minutia in them over again. The law is never going to be not complex, because the essential logic that it needs to express is complex.
So long as the concerns that motivated the original law are still essentially valid (which, of course, is not always true), then it's generally better to amend the existing law and build off the work that has already been done, rather than attempt to rewrite them completely.
The law has the difficult task of objectively resolving disputes with subjective elements. When you think about it, that's a problem roughly equivalent to Hard AI. Over many centuries, law has developed heuristics for dealing with this problem. If you take the time to learn about them, you'll find that although they don't produce justice with algorithmic certainty, they do tend to produce reasonable results more often than not.
You're confusing a marathon with a 100m dash.
Another measure of intelligence is how far you go before you burn out.
Mentally, I'm more of the sprinter type. I have an extremely varied range of knowledge, and I'm very proud of that, but I still envy the things that people with more endurance than me can achieve. There are definitely trade-offs between the two.
John Stuart Mill made the argument that such a view is ultimately demeaning to men and women alike.
When you suggest it is good and proper to limit the scope of concerns of certain groups of people, you're doing a great disservice to the immense range of capability of the human race, which my experience has shown to have no restrictions beyond those that we ourselves place on it.
I believe in the concept that a husband and wife should be a team, but the details of any such arrangement should be worked out based on the needs and skills of each couple, rather than by preassignment of culturally constructed roles.