If you're fighting for principles, you don't align yourself with people of radically opposed principles because that's not going to help you accomplish anything. So we're either faced with the idea that the Wikileaks party feels that its principles are closer to the Hunters and Fishers and the white nationalists than either major party or the Greens.
The other possibility is that they're not fighting for principles.
Sooner or later some evil person is going to figure out a way to biologically/mechanically enhance a human being into a "supersoldier," in a way that will compromise the long term health or well being of he human being.
Then everybody else is going to do the same awful thing, just to compete. Because they 'have to.'
They don't need technlogy for that. Being trained to kill and then being put in situations where violence is demanded is harmful to the long term health of humans.
This is actually bad news for Monsanto. It means that farmers will be fighting weeds that can't be controlled with glyphosate, so they won't be using Roundup to fight them and they won't find RR1 seeds to be a smart buy.
They're probably doing the opposite. Hundreds of people with no real need to have admin privileges have them, which makes it impossible for the people whose job it is to manage the system to do so. So they may not even be planning to lay anybody off, just take away their admin rights, put some automation in place to make it efficient for the actual IT staff to do their job more effectively and let the people who formerly had admin rights get on with their real jobs.
Quite right, except that it wouldn't actually be centralized. Firstly they would (potentially) be independent of the power distribution company, and secondly if most people are supplying for their own average power demand then the total amount of power flowing long distances over the grid would be much lower, and with it the distribution losses. Moreover a halfway decent grid would be extremely resistant to power outages - there's no reason a neighborhood couldn't keep operating indefinitely without access to outside electricity, so long as everyone was a little more careful to avoid major peaks.
Consider this - if I install a solar array to supply my average consumption it will pay for itself in 5-10 years, and then provide another 10-20 years of free power. I can then take the savings from those free years and build a second array so that I'm getting a monthly check comparable to my original bill. I can then take those checks and... you see the pattern. It lets "little people" get in on the power generation game. And so long as the "big people" aren't permitted to cut better deals with the distribution company that will strongly foster distributed generation. Sure the "big people" can probably generate power more cheaply than the "little people" and make more profit, but so long as personal power generation systems can do better than break even the little people will just keep nibbling away at the pie, and making for a much more continuous spectrum between the "little" and "big" power producers.
The net result - a power grid that's *extremely* resistant to disruption, and larger power generation facilities that lack any monopoly/regulatory advantage and have to actually compete on an even keel with everyone else, and can individually succeed or fail on their own merits without significantly affecting the grid as a whole. And that's a system where everybody wins (except the monopolists). Tell me this: Why is it possible today for me to install a personal power generation system that will completely pay for itself in five years and then keep delivering free energy for decades to come? That's a symptom of some grade A jumbo market inefficiencies right there.
I don't agree with your argument in this way: If the power distribution company isn't forced to buy your excess power, they'll buy the cheapest available power, which will come from the lowest-cost generators, who will always be industrial-scale operations.
Any system that is intelligent needs to base its intelligence on more fundamental units of thought than words. It needs to build these models on the fly and adapt them to new information as opposed to being programmed in. And back to the top of this thread, we don't really understand how that works in natural intelligence yet, so it's unlikely AI is going to pull it off anytime soon.
AI may be achieved by finding ANY efffective method to model and react to the real world. It isn't necessary for a computer to do something by the same or even similar methods as people for it to be just as effective or more so. In the same way, you don't have to know how a crosscut saw works to devise a means to cut wood.
If you eliminate the centralized generation on the grid, nobody is going to be able to pull power from the grid unless you come up with a system where you pay me when you use my gas.
(quoting myself because of an afterthought)
And if you do that, you make a niche for people who are in the business of converting gas to electricity for the purpose of putting it on the grid for sale. The people running these businesses will locate where land and gas access are cheapest, which is the same place you would locate centralized facilities. So they would be de-facto centralized generation facilities.
If you eliminate the centralized generation on the grid, nobody is going to be able to pull power from the grid unless you come up with a system where you pay me when you use my gas.
Ward Churchill was brought to public attention because of making controversial comments, but the University defended his right to make whatever controversial opinion comments he wanted. He was fired for academic research misconduct including plagiarism and falsification of evidence.
Many regard the trial that ensued as a vindication of Churchill's conduct. It was not that. He alleged and the jury believed that his firing would not have occurred if he hadn't also made unpopular political comments. But they did not consider whether or not he had engaged in the misconduct which in fact he had. He plagiarized parts of his work and outright made up evidence to support his thesis of an intentional use of smallpox in the genocides of American Indian tribes. Whether or not he would have been fired for such offenses, had his poltical comments about 9/11 not been inflammatory, he should have been fired for such misconduct. It is the professor's job to teach by his own example how to do academic research, and he was a bad example.
Using a broad definition of mental illness, it's fair to say mentally retarded people and people with Alzheimers, schizophrenics, people with brain injuriies, bipolar and depressed people and autistics, narcissists and psychopaths are all mentally ill and none of them has cause to find the others included in that broad category.
But including a poltical outlook in that category is questionable for several reasons. I think it's possible for a person to be conservative because of a mental illness, but the evidence for it being typically learned and culturally reinforced is massive.
Fuel cells benefit from scale too. Whatever you use, it must be sufficient to handle your peak energy usage condition. That means you probably need a system that handles about about 5 times your average load, or you will experience brownouts or carefully schedule your power use to reduce your peaks. A centralized system only has to plan for about 60 or 70% above average loads. So if they were using the same kind of system (say hundreds of units identical to the one you might have at home, you'd need about 8kW of generator capacity to account for your home if the generator is located at a centralized utility and about 25kW of generator capacity if the generator is located at your home -- with no external electrical feed.
I think I would need a 25KW unit just to power my house. Saying a 25kW unit can power 5 houses doesn't account for the peak-to-average ratio, which is huge for a single house but much lower for a city.
They're also assuming I can get gas to my home as cheaply as the utility company can get gas to its centralized plant, which is far from true.
I'm an atheist and I do collect god stories. I think they are interesting windows on how people think and give interesting clues about the common origins of certain groups.
I think everyone harbors 'intelligent design sympathies' as you put it. The deists believe the soul and intelligence is other worldly and wholly separate from the physical. Where-as the atheists seem hell bent on the idea that intelligence and self awareness are illusions or somehow not real. Both refuse to believe that the mind, understanding and all spirituality is actually a part of this real and physical world. Of all the complex and seemingly intractable questions about the universe we have, the most complex, most unbelievable question we face is the thing that is closest to home. The fact that the human mind exists at all is so unfathomable that in all of human history no one has even remotely began to explain how it could possibly exist.
I'm an atheist and I think that a mind and understanding and all spirituality (a word I don't normally use becasue emotion is what is really meant) are part of the real and physical world.
And I think there is nothing unbelievable or weird about my mind. I'm an animal. Animals react to and are aware of their surroundings in order to better propagate their species. Complex awareness arises from improved utility over primitive awareness.
Some modern theoretical physics attempts to explain how the universe works with logical models. That's science. Other modern theoretical physics is too divorced from data to be called anything but math.
Language seems to be the burden of proof required for an AI system, and has been so since the days of Turing. Language is by itself a representation of symbolic logic, and the most common bunk of proof is that transitive logic fails in symbolic logic.
That's where you're wrong. Natural language is not a representation of symbolic logic. It's a representation of human perception, thought and social interaction, which do not work by formal logic at all. Language is an organic and dynamic product of biology and society. Formal logic, in all its forms, is a product of mathematics, which is a tiny subset of all that is human thought.
According to an NAS study, they're something like 85% reliable. The problem with an 85% reliable test is that it will produce a lot of false positives and false negatives. People you should have hired will be screened out and people you shouldn't have hired will be accepted. Older-fashioned methods work better. Interview the person, the family members, long time acquaintences and co-workers. Ask open-ended questions about the person's relationships, how they work with others, how they view authority, what they do in the community, etc. You'll discover anything that's relevant before long.
Subjecting people to lie detectors is all about threats and intimidation. They probably deter more bad people from even applying than they screen out in the test, but they also deter good people who have no confidence in polygraphs. But those people are also detered by the prospect of somebody prying into their life like they do in DOD type security screenings.
More to the point, many of the decent wage earning jobs that didn't used to require a college degree now do and many more are simply gone, moved to Mexico or China or Pakistan or some other place on the other side of the world. And the wages for the jobs that are left haven't kept up with inflation. Not even for lawyers.
Your local judge also lacks the means to independently verify that your local police seek warrants, tell the truth about the evidence they have that supports probable cause, etc.
It doesn't make sense to compare a government agency to a single doctor or lawyer. It would make sense to compare them to another organization of comparable size. Of course, I don't think their size is necessarily appropriate.
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If you're fighting for principles, you don't align yourself with people of radically opposed principles because that's not going to help you accomplish anything. So we're either faced with the idea that the Wikileaks party feels that its principles are closer to the Hunters and Fishers and the white nationalists than either major party or the Greens.
The other possibility is that they're not fighting for principles.
You mean like what Bradley Manning did, right?
Sooner or later some evil person is going to figure out a way to biologically/mechanically enhance a human being into a "supersoldier," in a way that will compromise the long term health or well being of he human being.
Then everybody else is going to do the same awful thing, just to compete. Because they 'have to.'
They don't need technlogy for that. Being trained to kill and then being put in situations where violence is demanded is harmful to the long term health of humans.
This is actually bad news for Monsanto. It means that farmers will be fighting weeds that can't be controlled with glyphosate, so they won't be using Roundup to fight them and they won't find RR1 seeds to be a smart buy.
They're probably doing the opposite. Hundreds of people with no real need to have admin privileges have them, which makes it impossible for the people whose job it is to manage the system to do so. So they may not even be planning to lay anybody off, just take away their admin rights, put some automation in place to make it efficient for the actual IT staff to do their job more effectively and let the people who formerly had admin rights get on with their real jobs.
I think it will always cost something to buy a generator and that the cost of that generator will be a little less than proportional to capacity.
Quite right, except that it wouldn't actually be centralized. Firstly they would (potentially) be independent of the power distribution company, and secondly if most people are supplying for their own average power demand then the total amount of power flowing long distances over the grid would be much lower, and with it the distribution losses. Moreover a halfway decent grid would be extremely resistant to power outages - there's no reason a neighborhood couldn't keep operating indefinitely without access to outside electricity, so long as everyone was a little more careful to avoid major peaks.
Consider this - if I install a solar array to supply my average consumption it will pay for itself in 5-10 years, and then provide another 10-20 years of free power. I can then take the savings from those free years and build a second array so that I'm getting a monthly check comparable to my original bill. I can then take those checks and... you see the pattern. It lets "little people" get in on the power generation game. And so long as the "big people" aren't permitted to cut better deals with the distribution company that will strongly foster distributed generation. Sure the "big people" can probably generate power more cheaply than the "little people" and make more profit, but so long as personal power generation systems can do better than break even the little people will just keep nibbling away at the pie, and making for a much more continuous spectrum between the "little" and "big" power producers.
The net result - a power grid that's *extremely* resistant to disruption, and larger power generation facilities that lack any monopoly/regulatory advantage and have to actually compete on an even keel with everyone else, and can individually succeed or fail on their own merits without significantly affecting the grid as a whole. And that's a system where everybody wins (except the monopolists). Tell me this: Why is it possible today for me to install a personal power generation system that will completely pay for itself in five years and then keep delivering free energy for decades to come? That's a symptom of some grade A jumbo market inefficiencies right there.
I don't agree with your argument in this way: If the power distribution company isn't forced to buy your excess power, they'll buy the cheapest available power, which will come from the lowest-cost generators, who will always be industrial-scale operations.
Any system that is intelligent needs to base its intelligence on more fundamental units of thought than words. It needs to build these models on the fly and adapt them to new information as opposed to being programmed in. And back to the top of this thread, we don't really understand how that works in natural intelligence yet, so it's unlikely AI is going to pull it off anytime soon.
AI may be achieved by finding ANY efffective method to model and react to the real world. It isn't necessary for a computer to do something by the same or even similar methods as people for it to be just as effective or more so. In the same way, you don't have to know how a crosscut saw works to devise a means to cut wood.
If you eliminate the centralized generation on the grid, nobody is going to be able to pull power from the grid unless you come up with a system where you pay me when you use my gas.
(quoting myself because of an afterthought)
And if you do that, you make a niche for people who are in the business of converting gas to electricity for the purpose of putting it on the grid for sale. The people running these businesses will locate where land and gas access are cheapest, which is the same place you would locate centralized facilities. So they would be de-facto centralized generation facilities.
If you eliminate the centralized generation on the grid, nobody is going to be able to pull power from the grid unless you come up with a system where you pay me when you use my gas.
Ward Churchill was brought to public attention because of making controversial comments, but the University defended his right to make whatever controversial opinion comments he wanted. He was fired for academic research misconduct including plagiarism and falsification of evidence.
Many regard the trial that ensued as a vindication of Churchill's conduct. It was not that. He alleged and the jury believed that his firing would not have occurred if he hadn't also made unpopular political comments. But they did not consider whether or not he had engaged in the misconduct which in fact he had. He plagiarized parts of his work and outright made up evidence to support his thesis of an intentional use of smallpox in the genocides of American Indian tribes. Whether or not he would have been fired for such offenses, had his poltical comments about 9/11 not been inflammatory, he should have been fired for such misconduct. It is the professor's job to teach by his own example how to do academic research, and he was a bad example.
Using a broad definition of mental illness, it's fair to say mentally retarded people and people with Alzheimers, schizophrenics, people with brain injuriies, bipolar and depressed people and autistics, narcissists and psychopaths are all mentally ill and none of them has cause to find the others included in that broad category.
But including a poltical outlook in that category is questionable for several reasons. I think it's possible for a person to be conservative because of a mental illness, but the evidence for it being typically learned and culturally reinforced is massive.
Fuel cells benefit from scale too. Whatever you use, it must be sufficient to handle your peak energy usage condition. That means you probably need a system that handles about about 5 times your average load, or you will experience brownouts or carefully schedule your power use to reduce your peaks. A centralized system only has to plan for about 60 or 70% above average loads. So if they were using the same kind of system (say hundreds of units identical to the one you might have at home, you'd need about 8kW of generator capacity to account for your home if the generator is located at a centralized utility and about 25kW of generator capacity if the generator is located at your home -- with no external electrical feed.
I think I would need a 25KW unit just to power my house. Saying a 25kW unit can power 5 houses doesn't account for the peak-to-average ratio, which is huge for a single house but much lower for a city.
They're also assuming I can get gas to my home as cheaply as the utility company can get gas to its centralized plant, which is far from true.
I'm an atheist and I do collect god stories. I think they are interesting windows on how people think and give interesting clues about the common origins of certain groups.
I think everyone harbors 'intelligent design sympathies' as you put it. The deists believe the soul and intelligence is other worldly and wholly separate from the physical. Where-as the atheists seem hell bent on the idea that intelligence and self awareness are illusions or somehow not real. Both refuse to believe that the mind, understanding and all spirituality is actually a part of this real and physical world. Of all the complex and seemingly intractable questions about the universe we have, the most complex, most unbelievable question we face is the thing that is closest to home. The fact that the human mind exists at all is so unfathomable that in all of human history no one has even remotely began to explain how it could possibly exist.
I'm an atheist and I think that a mind and understanding and all spirituality (a word I don't normally use becasue emotion is what is really meant) are part of the real and physical world.
And I think there is nothing unbelievable or weird about my mind. I'm an animal. Animals react to and are aware of their surroundings in order to better propagate their species. Complex awareness arises from improved utility over primitive awareness.
Some modern theoretical physics attempts to explain how the universe works with logical models. That's science. Other modern theoretical physics is too divorced from data to be called anything but math.
Language seems to be the burden of proof required for an AI system, and has been so since the days of Turing. Language is by itself a representation of symbolic logic, and the most common bunk of proof is that transitive logic fails in symbolic logic.
That's where you're wrong. Natural language is not a representation of symbolic logic. It's a representation of human perception, thought and social interaction, which do not work by formal logic at all. Language is an organic and dynamic product of biology and society. Formal logic, in all its forms, is a product of mathematics, which is a tiny subset of all that is human thought.
I think NSA are looking for spies more than they're looking for terrorists.
According to an NAS study, they're something like 85% reliable. The problem with an 85% reliable test is that it will produce a lot of false positives and false negatives. People you should have hired will be screened out and people you shouldn't have hired will be accepted. Older-fashioned methods work better. Interview the person, the family members, long time acquaintences and co-workers. Ask open-ended questions about the person's relationships, how they work with others, how they view authority, what they do in the community, etc. You'll discover anything that's relevant before long.
Subjecting people to lie detectors is all about threats and intimidation. They probably deter more bad people from even applying than they screen out in the test, but they also deter good people who have no confidence in polygraphs. But those people are also detered by the prospect of somebody prying into their life like they do in DOD type security screenings.
This comment is offensive to retarded people. They shouldn't be tainted with the same brush as jackbooted thugs.
More to the point, many of the decent wage earning jobs that didn't used to require a college degree now do and many more are simply gone, moved to Mexico or China or Pakistan or some other place on the other side of the world. And the wages for the jobs that are left haven't kept up with inflation. Not even for lawyers.
Your local judge also lacks the means to independently verify that your local police seek warrants, tell the truth about the evidence they have that supports probable cause, etc.
How hard is it to figure out that a call is originating or terminating in the USA?
It doesn't make sense to compare a government agency to a single doctor or lawyer. It would make sense to compare them to another organization of comparable size. Of course, I don't think their size is necessarily appropriate.