If there where several countries in Europe occupied by Iran, with drone-strikes and a decade-long war, and then some terrorist-attack succeeded in blowing up a police-station where local people where being recruited to help the occupants, do you suppose some people would celebrate that ?
If someone, in that situation, set off a bomb on a vegetable-market in Bagdad, do you suppose someone might cheer ?
Sounds to me like you're agreeing vigorously: extremists willing to use violence exist in both christianity and islam, but are more prevalent in islam.
The statistics obviously differ by region. In the middle-east, where there's basically civil war, there's a shitload of terrorism carried out by muslims - some of those are for political reasons, and some for religious reasons.
But we already knew that living in a war-zone is dangerous, and that's not terribly relevant if you live in North-America or Europe, like most Slashdot-commenters do.
In Europe, the most common type of terrorist-attack is one motivated by separatism. Islamist attacks are a valid concern even here, but they're a tiny concern. How many people did islamists kill in USA over the last 5 years ?
True. But it's also true that the average muslim is considerably more conservative than the average christian. Infact if a christian held views as medieval as those of the average muslim, we'd call him an extremism: his position really would be extreme in the christian church.
For example, the pope was an extremist. His views where more extreme than the views of 95% of catholics, and 97% of christians.
I don't think we'll hit a singularity, no. But yes, I think that we'll see a lot of progress, more than we have in the previous 50 years.
You're right that a lot of things happened even 1913-1963. Now you do the same thing for 1713-1763. I think you'll find you agree with my claim that progress is speeding up. Precisely how -much- it speeds up, we can debate.
Transportation is *tons* faster. No, not *every* type of transport over *every* conceivable route, but on the average, things have improved a lot. Roads have improved quite a bit, and air-travel have become extremely much cheaper, thus while 50 years ago people would spend 15 hours driving Stavanger to Trondheim, today they take a plane instead and spend one hour in the air, and a total of perhaps 2 - 3 hours city-centre to city-centre.
Yes, planes existed 50 years ago too, but their cost was extremely much higher thus the average person used them much more seldom.
Similarly, yes you could place a phone-call to USA from Norway 50 years ago too, just like you can today. But it's the same story: the price has dropped by 2-3 orders of magnitude thus what was a rare luxury is today something you can do for hours every day without even noticing the financial hit, if you're so inclined.
Energy ? I get 4 megawatt-hours for a days pay. How much energy did you get for a days pay 50 years ago ? Furthermore, I can do much more with that energy since my car, my house and my appliances are *much* more energy-effective.
I think the trend is to overestimate the short-term changes, while underestimating long-term actually.
And long-term gets shorter all the time. We've made more technological progress in the last 50 years than we did in the 100 before that, or the 200 before those, or the 500 before. (i.e. 1963-2013 has seen more technological progress than 1163 - 1663 did.
Nope. The sequence is kilo mega giga peta exa. exabytes in base-2 is 2^60 which is 1152921504606846976 or 15.292% more than the base-10 equivalent. If you had that, and downgraded to a base-10 drive, you'd be giving up 13.26% of your drive-capacity. (while if you upgraded, you'd gain 15.292%
I do see doctors performing legal procedures being forced to live at secret addresses. I do see bombs being used against medical clinics.
I do think the mindsets are similar - the main difference is that the fundamentalists are a tiny minority of christians, while they are a small minority of muslims.
Trying to bomb people into becoming less extremist is a lot like trying to put out a fire with gasoline, though.
True to a point, but there's some valid counter-arguments.
Life evolves. This includes AIs. Since every item, mechanical or biological break down sooner or later, given time the life we will have is that which is capable of producing new life, or repairing the old one, faster than things break down.
Creating new life, or repairing old life, requires resources, at a minimum energy and whatever substance the intelligence is hosted in. Could be silicon, could be carbon, but it's a fair bet that it'll be -something-
Neither energy, nor matter is available in unlimited amounts, thus there'll be competition for both. You can have a intelligence that voluntarily give up both, in favor of someone else -- but if so, that intelligence would quickly find itself extinct. If human beings stopped defending ourselves against others species attempt at eating us, we'd all be dead in a week tops.
Thus you're wrong. However a intelligence is constructed, it'll need energy. "food" if you like. And it'll be limited in what it can do, by the availability of "food". (though of course the 'food' can be any source of energy, such as sunlight or radiation or wind or whatever)
you might say the human race today "eats" oil, atleast we consume energy in the form of oil in order to support our activities. That we feed the oil to our cars, rather than to our biological bodies doesn't really make much of a difference. (cars are detatchable better-legs anyway)
Not at all. BankID, the dominant form of bank-authenthication in Norway issues OTP-calculators to everyone, including average private people with a perfectly ordinary account.
As an alternative, they have a solution where the SIM-card in your mobile-phone is used by an app to authenthicate you.
In both cases the same thing is true: logging in to your bank requires knowledge of your passphrase -- but *also* physical possession of a object - so a phisher would need to get both somehow, in order to be able to impresonate you.
It might not make phishing impossible, but it does make it a lot more difficult.
What gets me, is that this has been known "forever", aslong as there's been a solid theory of capitalism, atleast.
The solution, of course, is to set a fair price on the externalities. What that price is, and how to practically evaluate, collect and distribute that money, is a difficult problem, however notice that even if the money is collected in a highly inefficient manner, it is still frequently better than the alternative.
If you want to do something that gains you $50M while costing every human being $0.05 - then the overall loss is $300M. If there was a tax on your pollution to the tune of $250M, then you'd conclude it's not worth it since the taxes are higher than your gains.
In this case, no taxes are collected, and no deal is made - but nevertheless the tax-code was useful: it prevented $300M worth of harm from taking place.
Notice that even mostly-squandered taxes is a win from the perspective of everyone-but-you.
Let's say instead you want to do something that gains you $100M, while costing the rest of humanity $25M. We tax your activity at $50M, and the inefficiency of bureacracy means half of the collected taxes are completely wasted.
End result: With the tax you gain $50M and everyone else breaks even. Without the tax, you gain $100M, and everyone else is down $25M. -- thus the tax, despite being 50% wasteful, is a net-gain for everyone except you.
Of course we do ! Any savings from cheaper power goes directly into your pocket, while the extenal costs are shared with 7 billion people.
That's the problem with externalities. If I can make a deal that is a win of $10 million for me -- but that cauces a loss of $0.05 for every human being on the planet, then it's a huge win for me, so barring laws stopping me, I'll likely say yes. Meanwhile, the deal creates $10M of value, and does $350M worth of damage, thus for humanity as a whole, the deal is a huge loss.
Externalities is one of the biggest problems with capitalism. It explains why rational players can end up making decisions that are a net loss overall.
Yes, but the FIDE-incident seems to be the only one mentioned there where a serious attempt was undertaken to develop a communication-protocol designed to be non-noticeable.
They should ask stage magicians or "psychics" about it, it's *really* hard to notice that someone is receiving information from a random person among the spectators if the signaling is subtle enough.
Perhaps this happens all the time -- it's just that when it's reasonably well-done, it's seldom discovered.
Yes, we've been lucky. There's been quite a few incredibly close calls.
It's just that 99.35% is such a insanely high score. In the 70 years it's been maintained, it's never been lower than 11:43, i.e. 98.9%
This pretty clearly indicates that the scale isn't 0 to midnight, the actual scale they actually use, instead, is something like 11:40 to 12:00, thus our current score is 75% on the actually used scale.
It's all "think of a number you like" anyway. You choose 8000 - but why ? We're talking "doomsday" here, and humanity hasn't been capable of creating doomsday for more than 70 years.
The doomsday clock is maintained since 1947 - by the bulletin of the atomic scientists board -- this too clearly implies that they're primarily dealing with nuclear apocalypse type doomsday, so 70 years is clearly the right timeframe.
5 minutes to midnight on a 70-year-timeframe would mean that they expect there to be a greater than 50% chance of doomsday in the next half year.
My first thought was that it's not sufficient to search the -contestants- when there's spectators present, any of whom may be conspiring with the contestant. It's not as if having a "spectator" make barely-perceptible signalling in order to communicate information to a player is a new way of cheating.
At a guess, spectators could freely have any kind of comms-gear whatsoever. This hardly qualifies as "a mystery"
Personally, I think they should use math. If a reviewer reviews 50 video-games in a year on a 1-10 scale, insist that the rankings follow a bell-curve.
Or simple ask them to -sort- the games according to quality, rather than score them.
True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.
Basically, by using a clock they claim to be using a 0-1440 scale and that the present value is 1435, but in actual reality, they're only using the last ten minutes of that scale, so the actual scale is 0-10 with a current value of 5.
The problem goes even deeper than that: Large parts of the conservative right-wing religious voting-block has fundamental problems with *reality* as opposed to fiction.
Reality demonstrates clearly that their recommended policies (restrict access to information, abstinence-only, shame, restrictions on access to contraceptives...) do not work, and infact result in more teenage-pregnancies, and more abortions - the precise opposite of the result they claim to want.
Meanwhile free condoms, open and honest sex-ed, the pill for any female over 13 who wants it, and a culture where teenage sexuality is (by most anyway) an *accepted* part of growing up, demonstrably works.
The latter is important: If teenagers need to *fear* the reactions of their parents if they notice contraceptives - how likely are they to have condoms available ?
My (then) boyfriend started sleeping over when I was 15. My parents reaction to the start of our sexual relationship can be summarized as "I guess it's not needed to put out an extra mattress for when X sleeps over anymore huh ? Would you like me to arrange for a pill-prescription for you, or have you taken care of it?"
This thing is *also* not capable of hitting anything with reasonable precision, thus even if the answer to the previous two where "yes" it'd still not hit a barn without being lanuched inside it.
With cheap and guilt-free access to contraception that happens seldom, where anti-choicers don't run amok, there's also the option of abortion for the rare cases where birth-control fails. In contrast "purity balls" and bullshit like that don't work. USA is the outlier among first-world nations:
In USA, 22% of all 20-year-old females have given birth. The equivalent rate for Japan and Sweden are 2% and 3%. (and atleast for Sweden, most of -those- are conservative religious folks - drop that nonsense and the risk drops to sub-1% which is, if not ignorable, then atleast not a major reason for population-growth.
Slashdot Mirror
That's mostly about the setting.
If there where several countries in Europe occupied by Iran, with drone-strikes and a decade-long war, and then some terrorist-attack succeeded in blowing up a police-station where local people where being recruited to help the occupants, do you suppose some people would celebrate that ?
If someone, in that situation, set off a bomb on a vegetable-market in Bagdad, do you suppose someone might cheer ?
Sounds to me like you're agreeing vigorously: extremists willing to use violence exist in both christianity and islam, but are more prevalent in islam.
The statistics obviously differ by region. In the middle-east, where there's basically civil war, there's a shitload of terrorism carried out by muslims - some of those are for political reasons, and some for religious reasons.
But we already knew that living in a war-zone is dangerous, and that's not terribly relevant if you live in North-America or Europe, like most Slashdot-commenters do.
In Europe, the most common type of terrorist-attack is one motivated by separatism. Islamist attacks are a valid concern even here, but they're a tiny concern. How many people did islamists kill in USA over the last 5 years ?
Sometimes. But I don't hand the key to some Company. I keep it in my own pocket, under my control.
Did you have a point ?
True. But it's also true that the average muslim is considerably more conservative than the average christian. Infact if a christian held views as medieval as those of the average muslim, we'd call him an extremism: his position really would be extreme in the christian church.
For example, the pope was an extremist. His views where more extreme than the views of 95% of catholics, and 97% of christians.
Is there more extremists in Islam than in Christianity ? I think it's pretty clear that the answer is yes.
Are the extremsists, including violent ones who are willing to kill by the dozen among Christians ?
Yes. Fewer than among the muslims, but there sure are *some*. Breivik ring a bell ?
I don't think we'll hit a singularity, no. But yes, I think that we'll see a lot of progress, more than we have in the previous 50 years.
You're right that a lot of things happened even 1913-1963. Now you do the same thing for 1713-1763. I think you'll find you agree with my claim that progress is speeding up. Precisely how -much- it speeds up, we can debate.
Sure, but look at the average speed people, or goods, actually travel at, not what's in principle possible.
What did it cost to be on the 727 in 1963, relative to what it costs to be on a fast train today ?
Transportation is *tons* faster. No, not *every* type of transport over *every* conceivable route, but on the average, things have improved a lot. Roads have improved quite a bit, and air-travel have become extremely much cheaper, thus while 50 years ago people would spend 15 hours driving Stavanger to Trondheim, today they take a plane instead and spend one hour in the air, and a total of perhaps 2 - 3 hours city-centre to city-centre.
Yes, planes existed 50 years ago too, but their cost was extremely much higher thus the average person used them much more seldom.
Similarly, yes you could place a phone-call to USA from Norway 50 years ago too, just like you can today. But it's the same story: the price has dropped by 2-3 orders of magnitude thus what was a rare luxury is today something you can do for hours every day without even noticing the financial hit, if you're so inclined.
Energy ? I get 4 megawatt-hours for a days pay. How much energy did you get for a days pay 50 years ago ? Furthermore, I can do much more with that energy since my car, my house and my appliances are *much* more energy-effective.
I think the trend is to overestimate the short-term changes, while underestimating long-term actually.
And long-term gets shorter all the time. We've made more technological progress in the last 50 years than we did in the 100 before that, or the 200 before those, or the 500 before. (i.e. 1963-2013 has seen more technological progress than 1163 - 1663 did.
Nope. The sequence is kilo mega giga peta exa. exabytes in base-2 is 2^60 which is 1152921504606846976 or 15.292% more than the base-10 equivalent. If you had that, and downgraded to a base-10 drive, you'd be giving up 13.26% of your drive-capacity. (while if you upgraded, you'd gain 15.292%
It does indeed get worse and worst with increasing size of the units.
The difference between 1 KB in base-10 and base-2 is 2.4%
The difference between 1MB in base10 and base2 is 4.9%
The difference between 1GB in base10 and base2 is 7.4%
The difference between 1TB in base10 and base2 is 10%
The difference between 1PB in base10 and base2 is 13%
The difference between 1EB in base10 and base2 is 15%
2.4% difference isn't a huge deal, but 15% difference is much more noticeable.
I do see doctors performing legal procedures being forced to live at secret addresses. I do see bombs being used against medical clinics.
I do think the mindsets are similar - the main difference is that the fundamentalists are a tiny minority of christians, while they are a small minority of muslims.
Trying to bomb people into becoming less extremist is a lot like trying to put out a fire with gasoline, though.
True to a point, but there's some valid counter-arguments.
Life evolves. This includes AIs. Since every item, mechanical or biological break down sooner or later, given time the life we will have is that which is capable of producing new life, or repairing the old one, faster than things break down.
Creating new life, or repairing old life, requires resources, at a minimum energy and whatever substance the intelligence is hosted in. Could be silicon, could be carbon, but it's a fair bet that it'll be -something-
Neither energy, nor matter is available in unlimited amounts, thus there'll be competition for both. You can have a intelligence that voluntarily give up both, in favor of someone else -- but if so, that intelligence would quickly find itself extinct. If human beings stopped defending ourselves against others species attempt at eating us, we'd all be dead in a week tops.
Thus you're wrong. However a intelligence is constructed, it'll need energy. "food" if you like. And it'll be limited in what it can do, by the availability of "food". (though of course the 'food' can be any source of energy, such as sunlight or radiation or wind or whatever)
you might say the human race today "eats" oil, atleast we consume energy in the form of oil in order to support our activities. That we feed the oil to our cars, rather than to our biological bodies doesn't really make much of a difference. (cars are detatchable better-legs anyway)
Not at all. BankID, the dominant form of bank-authenthication in Norway issues OTP-calculators to everyone, including average private people with a perfectly ordinary account.
As an alternative, they have a solution where the SIM-card in your mobile-phone is used by an app to authenthicate you.
In both cases the same thing is true: logging in to your bank requires knowledge of your passphrase -- but *also* physical possession of a object - so a phisher would need to get both somehow, in order to be able to impresonate you.
It might not make phishing impossible, but it does make it a lot more difficult.
What gets me, is that this has been known "forever", aslong as there's been a solid theory of capitalism, atleast.
The solution, of course, is to set a fair price on the externalities. What that price is, and how to practically evaluate, collect and distribute that money, is a difficult problem, however notice that even if the money is collected in a highly inefficient manner, it is still frequently better than the alternative.
If you want to do something that gains you $50M while costing every human being $0.05 - then the overall loss is $300M. If there was a tax on your pollution to the tune of $250M, then you'd conclude it's not worth it since the taxes are higher than your gains.
In this case, no taxes are collected, and no deal is made - but nevertheless the tax-code was useful: it prevented $300M worth of harm from taking place.
Notice that even mostly-squandered taxes is a win from the perspective of everyone-but-you.
Let's say instead you want to do something that gains you $100M, while costing the rest of humanity $25M. We tax your activity at $50M, and the inefficiency of bureacracy means half of the collected taxes are completely wasted.
End result: With the tax you gain $50M and everyone else breaks even. Without the tax, you gain $100M, and everyone else is down $25M. -- thus the tax, despite being 50% wasteful, is a net-gain for everyone except you.
Of course we do ! Any savings from cheaper power goes directly into your pocket, while the extenal costs are shared with 7 billion people.
That's the problem with externalities. If I can make a deal that is a win of $10 million for me -- but that cauces a loss of $0.05 for every human being on the planet, then it's a huge win for me, so barring laws stopping me, I'll likely say yes. Meanwhile, the deal creates $10M of value, and does $350M worth of damage, thus for humanity as a whole, the deal is a huge loss.
Externalities is one of the biggest problems with capitalism. It explains why rational players can end up making decisions that are a net loss overall.
Yes, but the FIDE-incident seems to be the only one mentioned there where a serious attempt was undertaken to develop a communication-protocol designed to be non-noticeable.
They should ask stage magicians or "psychics" about it, it's *really* hard to notice that someone is receiving information from a random person among the spectators if the signaling is subtle enough.
Perhaps this happens all the time -- it's just that when it's reasonably well-done, it's seldom discovered.
Yes, we've been lucky. There's been quite a few incredibly close calls.
It's just that 99.35% is such a insanely high score. In the 70 years it's been maintained, it's never been lower than 11:43, i.e. 98.9%
This pretty clearly indicates that the scale isn't 0 to midnight, the actual scale they actually use, instead, is something like 11:40 to 12:00, thus our current score is 75% on the actually used scale.
It's all "think of a number you like" anyway. You choose 8000 - but why ? We're talking "doomsday" here, and humanity hasn't been capable of creating doomsday for more than 70 years.
The doomsday clock is maintained since 1947 - by the bulletin of the atomic scientists board -- this too clearly implies that they're primarily dealing with nuclear apocalypse type doomsday, so 70 years is clearly the right timeframe.
5 minutes to midnight on a 70-year-timeframe would mean that they expect there to be a greater than 50% chance of doomsday in the next half year.
My first thought was that it's not sufficient to search the -contestants- when there's spectators present, any of whom may be conspiring with the contestant. It's not as if having a "spectator" make barely-perceptible signalling in order to communicate information to a player is a new way of cheating.
At a guess, spectators could freely have any kind of comms-gear whatsoever. This hardly qualifies as "a mystery"
Personally, I think they should use math. If a reviewer reviews 50 video-games in a year on a 1-10 scale, insist that the rankings follow a bell-curve.
Or simple ask them to -sort- the games according to quality, rather than score them.
True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.
Basically, by using a clock they claim to be using a 0-1440 scale and that the present value is 1435, but in actual reality, they're only using the last ten minutes of that scale, so the actual scale is 0-10 with a current value of 5.
The problem goes even deeper than that: Large parts of the conservative right-wing religious voting-block has fundamental problems with *reality* as opposed to fiction.
Reality demonstrates clearly that their recommended policies (restrict access to information, abstinence-only, shame, restrictions on access to contraceptives...) do not work, and infact result in more teenage-pregnancies, and more abortions - the precise opposite of the result they claim to want.
Meanwhile free condoms, open and honest sex-ed, the pill for any female over 13 who wants it, and a culture where teenage sexuality is (by most anyway) an *accepted* part of growing up, demonstrably works.
The latter is important: If teenagers need to *fear* the reactions of their parents if they notice contraceptives - how likely are they to have condoms available ?
My (then) boyfriend started sleeping over when I was 15. My parents reaction to the start of our sexual relationship can be summarized as "I guess it's not needed to put out an extra mattress for when X sleeps over anymore huh ? Would you like me to arrange for a pill-prescription for you, or have you taken care of it?"
Moral Panic is just that: panic.
No. No.
Glad to clear that up for you.
This thing is *also* not capable of hitting anything with reasonable precision, thus even if the answer to the previous two where "yes" it'd still not hit a barn without being lanuched inside it.
With cheap and guilt-free access to contraception that happens seldom, where anti-choicers don't run amok, there's also the option of abortion for the rare cases where birth-control fails. In contrast "purity balls" and bullshit like that don't work. USA is the outlier among first-world nations:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_tee_pre_sha-health-teenage-pregnancy-share
In USA, 22% of all 20-year-old females have given birth. The equivalent rate for Japan and Sweden are 2% and 3%. (and atleast for Sweden, most of -those- are conservative religious folks - drop that nonsense and the risk drops to sub-1% which is, if not ignorable, then atleast not a major reason for population-growth.