I review books that I have read from Amazon. My reviews are skewed because I only buy books that I'm probably going to like. If I review a piece of crap, I rate it one star, but then I avoid that genre/author. I also write and some of my books are on Amazon. I can do a better job reviewing books in my genre because I understand what makes a good story in that genre. When I buy a book I look at the reviews and the inside random reading. The reviews are actually more useful. I can get an idea of the what the story is about from the reviews, not just a dumb rating.
AGW? No problem. Just raise taxes - that will fix it. Although some people think that reducing energy consumption to stone age levels would be a fine alternative.
What cop? An automated speed trap camera gives a ticket to an autonomous car. The passenger is not in control. One of the two automated systems is in error. Is there any kind of justice involved here at all? The entire concept of justice implies some sort of free will to make a choice of good vs bad decision. There is no operating free will here. What will a rational judge do? He'll assign it to a debugging group to determine liability, if any.
I can see it now: the road maintenance robots lower the speed limit to 25 on a stretch of road. Their comm access is not working, so the the highway comm net does not update the vehicle's GPS system, which thinks this is a 55 MPH zone. Traffic all rolls by at 55. They all get tickets for speeding. The unions call for a boycott on road maintenance, which causes more 'bots to be purchased. Politicians pass a law mandating fines for road crews that do not post accurate speed limits, a standards body to determine safe limits, and a mandate to cops to enforce them. Every so often there is a snafu and a huge pile-up on the highway. People decide to learn to drive again and my old Ford becomes a concourse antique.
Why not use graphics patterns, like Windows 8, to generate very long passwords that do not have to be remembered or typed into a keyboard? It would not be hard to circle all the colors in a picture in spectrum order. The reduction of these finger strokes would yield a lot of data and that, together with a decent binary hash code, becomes the working password.
The Ford Sync system in my 2013 car is pretty useless now. It freezes, gets stuck, crashes, and othewiser fairly represents the usual Microsoft barrel-of-monkeys design. It has an inhuman interface. It refuses to take the most fundamental command, "F*ck off". The artificial female voice sounds like the mother-in-law in a bad TV series.
And we're supposed to let this thing drive us around?
Threaten to tax the blue sky and the same 23% will claim the sky is pink. The issue is about taxes, not climate. There is no logical connection between taxes and climate except in the minds of the warmists.
We have about 380 ppm CO2. It's been 3 or 4 times higher in other eras. The heat trapping effect does not work like a greenhouse, it's logarithmic and has mostly saturated out at this level. Heat trapping is primarily by water vapor and methane, both of which are far more important in heat balance that CO2. CO2 is balanced by uptake in rocks and sea water so the "tipping point", if any, is not a knife edge effect.
Global warming can be verified if those screaming bloody murder would bend their efforts to putting up another Geosat in polar orbit so decent measurements can be made. No, they want a tax instead. That's where I draw the line. The tax will accomplish nothing as far as weather mod goes and it will kill the economy.
All we have now is noisy, partial data, unverifiable, possibly flawed, climate models, and politicized "scientists" many of whom have no qualifications relevant to climate change.
The issue in Massachusetts, which has government provided universal health care, is that patient assisted suicide is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than treating a really sick patient. There will be pressure to let patients die. No problem, except that a patient in great distress is hardly a good judge of his or her recovery possibility. Also, by withholding pain meds (which they do) a patient can be too easily driven to sign the suicide form.
I hope the law guards this slippery slope adequately.
How do you know the signal is degrading vs a dozen other things that could be different? Walk around the house with your cell phone and map out the actual signal strength. Take notes. Check again next year, same weather.
I think it's profoundly insightful. Practically nothing matters until it connects causally to non local and irreversible events. It isn't so much that the universe simulates lazy evaluation - we simple discovered yet another fundamental principle. Like chaos theory, fractal coastlines, the surprising complexity of the mass behavior of simple things...
Annealing is another manifestation of an effect that masks the individual perturbations of atoms or enumerated data. That's a kind of masking. Why shouldn't quantum indeterminacy have a similar effect?
The beauty of physics is that it isn't an isolated philosophy, but that it discovers deep structures that appear over and over in reality and can be actually tested.
Viewing the universe as a simulation is potentially useful. Like SUSY or Brane Theory, each view makes some objects stand out for study. Whether they are "real" is not the point. They are useful for finding further insights. Physicists are explorers in a multiplex terrain.
Having assumed just such responsibilities in the past, I can guess what's in store for you and how to come out a winner.
Projects stretch out to infinity and budgets shrink to negative numbers. There are several internecine wars over the allocation of responsibilities and technical domains. There does not seem to be much correlation between technical skill and pay. Good people leave and the resumes HR sends you are hilarious. The ass-kissers have already found a new ass and it isn't yours. Management has handed you a list of non-negotiated goals that include making water into wine and feeding the masses with one loaf of bread.
If you can form and spread a reasonable vision that can be sold to your people and management alike, and then organize that chaos into a something no worse than a John Cage recital, you will have your pay and your promotion. What you should be bargaining for right now is the freedom to act and the recognition of what really needs to be done.
Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine your brain and your DNA scanned into a computer. This is used to generate a simulated you. This simulated you is placed in a simulated room in which all the known laws of physics are simulated to a high degree of precision.
You are placed in an identical, but real, room. The two rooms are connected via a terminal (or, in the copy's case, a simulated terminal).
You and the simulated you can ask for any scientific equipment that can fit into the room. Both of you can conduct whatever experiments you like. The only requirement is a unanimous agreement between you, your copy and those running the experiment as to which of you is physical and which is virtual.
If no observation, experiment, or set of experiments, exists that can prove which is real, then you cannot prove what is "real" - there'd be nothing so unique to reality that would allow you to unquestionably establish that something belongs to reality and not to something else. If, however, you CAN through experimentation reach a unanimous verdict, then an objective reality is provable.
It is my opinion that it is the first case that would turn out to be true.
No such completely open ended experiment is possible. If it were, any new scientific observation of a previously unknown phenomenon could not be properly modeled on the simulated side and produce the same result as on the real side. In fact, if the results do differ, you have proof of objective reality, or at least that both sides are simulated differently. The simulation cannot have universal knowledge beyond that of its creators. Call that a reasonable postulate.
These arguments are in the same vain as the arguments for Bell's hypothesis.
Are you assuming slashdot still brings in enough traffic to make money?
Instead of attempting to name and shame companies, perhaps instead we should try to find a mega-corp that actually does fairly and honestly pay its full tax bill. How about a bit of positive reporting?
No corporation ever pays what you would consider a fair share. GE paid zero last year. If the CEO cannot find a way to minimize taxes, the shareholders will fire him or her.
There is the natural war between taxpayers and governments. A loophole is a discovery by a taxpayer that the tax law has an exploitable weakness, jut like software, just like biological defenses. Live with it or simplify the tax code.
AGW proponents want us to change transportation, construction, agriculture, etc, making almost everything in life more expensive.
It's odd that so few/.ers seem to know this, but "going green" is actually much cheaper than business as usual. Amory Lovins has been demonstrating this for decades already. RMI makes most of its money by consulting with the likes of 3M, IBM, the Pentagon, etc. on how to save TONS of money by investing in efficiency.
It's time to put this myth to bed, once and for all. Going "green" is NOT more expensive, it's actually much cheaper. And this is why more and more companies are ALREADY investing in this area.
The real issue isn't "going green", it's government dictating the terms of your business and personal life. There is a serious rationality gap between any increase in CO2 and global warming. Stretch that further to "climate change". Now munge it out of shape to "cap & trade". It becomes obvious that we are dealing with politically motivated and intellectually deficient actions.
No one needs to be coerced to save money, only informed about the practical means to do it.
Can anyone think of anything equivalent to this in history? Where people were under extensive surveillance? What happened?
There has to be a crunching point for things like this, society is meant to limp forward gradually. Hopefully it will get better after it gets worse...
East Germany's GRU comes to mind. The dossiers on every private citizen made this intolerable and invasive tyranny rather resilient to civil protest.
Suso is right - it's too dangerous. Better to bring the big rocks to the L5 point and refine them using solar energy, then bring down the refined metals and leave the water and hydrogen at the L5 for fuel. Eventually that could create an L5 colony.
Anything in near Earth space or any of the dynamically stable equilibrium points are subject to perturbation, so there will be a cost of surveillance and correction. However, creating a colony that can survive a planetary disaster would be wise.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding the value of gold as a currency vs. "fiat money", please read:
www.snowflakehell.blogspot.com May 23, 2010, "The Decline of Money"
I review books that I have read from Amazon. My reviews are skewed because I only buy books that I'm probably going to like. If I review a piece of crap, I rate it one star, but then I avoid that genre/author. I also write and some of my books are on Amazon. I can do a better job reviewing books in my genre because I understand what makes a good story in that genre. When I buy a book I look at the reviews and the inside random reading. The reviews are actually more useful. I can get an idea of the what the story is about from the reviews, not just a dumb rating.
Real coders prefer a sugar high, or maybe potato chips.
AGW? No problem. Just raise taxes - that will fix it. Although some people think that reducing energy consumption to stone age levels would be a fine alternative.
What cop? An automated speed trap camera gives a ticket to an autonomous car. The passenger is not in control. One of the two automated systems is in error. Is there any kind of justice involved here at all? The entire concept of justice implies some sort of free will to make a choice of good vs bad decision. There is no operating free will here. What will a rational judge do? He'll assign it to a debugging group to determine liability, if any.
I can see it now: the road maintenance robots lower the speed limit to 25 on a stretch of road. Their comm access is not working, so the the highway comm net does not update the vehicle's GPS system, which thinks this is a 55 MPH zone. Traffic all rolls by at 55. They all get tickets for speeding. The unions call for a boycott on road maintenance, which causes more 'bots to be purchased. Politicians pass a law mandating fines for road crews that do not post accurate speed limits, a standards body to determine safe limits, and a mandate to cops to enforce them. Every so often there is a snafu and a huge pile-up on the highway. People decide to learn to drive again and my old Ford becomes a concourse antique.
Why not use graphics patterns, like Windows 8, to generate very long passwords that do not have to be remembered or typed into a keyboard? It would not be hard to circle all the colors in a picture in spectrum order. The reduction of these finger strokes would yield a lot of data and that, together with a decent binary hash code, becomes the working password.
Why not buy the secret to keeping baked goods forever from the inventor of the Twinkie, now they are bankrupt?
The Ford Sync system in my 2013 car is pretty useless now. It freezes, gets stuck, crashes, and othewiser fairly represents the usual Microsoft barrel-of-monkeys design. It has an inhuman interface. It refuses to take the most fundamental command, "F*ck off". The artificial female voice sounds like the mother-in-law in a bad TV series.
And we're supposed to let this thing drive us around?
Ooooh! Real data! We don't do data. This is slashdot. We do innuendo. Flame on!
Ford Sync in my new car freezes regularly (thanks Microsoft) and refuses to accept a perfectly ethical command like "Damn Bill Gates to Hell."
Now I have to contemplate the revenge of Gates or his successor who can order the car to damn me to Hell?
Threaten to tax the blue sky and the same 23% will claim the sky is pink. The issue is about taxes, not climate. There is no logical connection between taxes and climate except in the minds of the warmists.
We have about 380 ppm CO2. It's been 3 or 4 times higher in other eras. The heat trapping effect does not work like a greenhouse, it's logarithmic and has mostly saturated out at this level. Heat trapping is primarily by water vapor and methane, both of which are far more important in heat balance that CO2. CO2 is balanced by uptake in rocks and sea water so the "tipping point", if any, is not a knife edge effect.
Global warming can be verified if those screaming bloody murder would bend their efforts to putting up another Geosat in polar orbit so decent measurements can be made. No, they want a tax instead. That's where I draw the line. The tax will accomplish nothing as far as weather mod goes and it will kill the economy.
All we have now is noisy, partial data, unverifiable, possibly flawed, climate models, and politicized "scientists" many of whom have no qualifications relevant to climate change.
The issue in Massachusetts, which has government provided universal health care, is that patient assisted suicide is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than treating a really sick patient. There will be pressure to let patients die. No problem, except that a patient in great distress is hardly a good judge of his or her recovery possibility. Also, by withholding pain meds (which they do) a patient can be too easily driven to sign the suicide form.
I hope the law guards this slippery slope adequately.
How do you know the signal is degrading vs a dozen other things that could be different? Walk around the house with your cell phone and map out the actual signal strength. Take notes. Check again next year, same weather.
"Probably the only solution is some kind of IVR [wikipedia.org] administering an audio CAPTCHA [wikipedia.org] before allowing a phone to ring."
That solution would work with a few tweaks.
"History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.'"
Uh... can you name a few thousand? How about ten?
I think it's profoundly insightful. Practically nothing matters until it connects causally to non local and irreversible events. It isn't so much that the universe simulates lazy evaluation - we simple discovered yet another fundamental principle. Like chaos theory, fractal coastlines, the surprising complexity of the mass behavior of simple things...
Annealing is another manifestation of an effect that masks the individual perturbations of atoms or enumerated data. That's a kind of masking. Why shouldn't quantum indeterminacy have a similar effect?
The beauty of physics is that it isn't an isolated philosophy, but that it discovers deep structures that appear over and over in reality and can be actually tested.
Viewing the universe as a simulation is potentially useful. Like SUSY or Brane Theory, each view makes some objects stand out for study. Whether they are "real" is not the point. They are useful for finding further insights. Physicists are explorers in a multiplex terrain.
I hear that someone is working on an aluminum brief case that carries itself. It is going to be called the Zero Higgs Haliburton.
Having assumed just such responsibilities in the past, I can guess what's in store for you and how to come out a winner.
Projects stretch out to infinity and budgets shrink to negative numbers. There are several internecine wars over the allocation of responsibilities and technical domains. There does not seem to be much correlation between technical skill and pay. Good people leave and the resumes HR sends you are hilarious. The ass-kissers have already found a new ass and it isn't yours. Management has handed you a list of non-negotiated goals that include making water into wine and feeding the masses with one loaf of bread.
If you can form and spread a reasonable vision that can be sold to your people and management alike, and then organize that chaos into a something no worse than a John Cage recital, you will have your pay and your promotion. What you should be bargaining for right now is the freedom to act and the recognition of what really needs to be done.
My old girl friend was a quantum object. She would, and she would not.
Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine your brain and your DNA scanned into a computer. This is used to generate a simulated you. This simulated you is placed in a simulated room in which all the known laws of physics are simulated to a high degree of precision.
You are placed in an identical, but real, room. The two rooms are connected via a terminal (or, in the copy's case, a simulated terminal).
You and the simulated you can ask for any scientific equipment that can fit into the room. Both of you can conduct whatever experiments you like. The only requirement is a unanimous agreement between you, your copy and those running the experiment as to which of you is physical and which is virtual.
If no observation, experiment, or set of experiments, exists that can prove which is real, then you cannot prove what is "real" - there'd be nothing so unique to reality that would allow you to unquestionably establish that something belongs to reality and not to something else. If, however, you CAN through experimentation reach a unanimous verdict, then an objective reality is provable.
It is my opinion that it is the first case that would turn out to be true.
No such completely open ended experiment is possible. If it were, any new scientific observation of a previously unknown phenomenon could not be properly modeled on the simulated side and produce the same result as on the real side. In fact, if the results do differ, you have proof of objective reality, or at least that both sides are simulated differently. The simulation cannot have universal knowledge beyond that of its creators. Call that a reasonable postulate.
These arguments are in the same vain as the arguments for Bell's hypothesis.
Are you assuming slashdot still brings in enough traffic to make money?
Instead of attempting to name and shame companies, perhaps instead we should try to find a mega-corp that actually does fairly and honestly pay its full tax bill. How about a bit of positive reporting?
No corporation ever pays what you would consider a fair share. GE paid zero last year. If the CEO cannot find a way to minimize taxes, the shareholders will fire him or her.
There is the natural war between taxpayers and governments. A loophole is a discovery by a taxpayer that the tax law has an exploitable weakness, jut like software, just like biological defenses. Live with it or simplify the tax code.
AGW proponents want us to change transportation, construction, agriculture, etc, making almost everything in life more expensive.
It's odd that so few /.ers seem to know this, but "going green" is actually much cheaper than business as usual. Amory Lovins has been demonstrating this for decades already. RMI makes most of its money by consulting with the likes of 3M, IBM, the Pentagon, etc. on how to save TONS of money by investing in efficiency.
It's time to put this myth to bed, once and for all. Going "green" is NOT more expensive, it's actually much cheaper. And this is why more and more companies are ALREADY investing in this area.
The real issue isn't "going green", it's government dictating the terms of your business and personal life. There is a serious rationality gap between any increase in CO2 and global warming. Stretch that further to "climate change". Now munge it out of shape to "cap & trade". It becomes obvious that we are dealing with politically motivated and intellectually deficient actions.
No one needs to be coerced to save money, only informed about the practical means to do it.
"Cooling business", indeed.
Can anyone think of anything equivalent to this in history? Where people were under extensive surveillance? What happened?
There has to be a crunching point for things like this, society is meant to limp forward gradually. Hopefully it will get better after it gets worse...
East Germany's GRU comes to mind. The dossiers on every private citizen made this intolerable and invasive tyranny rather resilient to civil protest.
Suso is right - it's too dangerous. Better to bring the big rocks to the L5 point and refine them using solar energy, then bring down the refined metals and leave the water and hydrogen at the L5 for fuel. Eventually that could create an L5 colony.
Anything in near Earth space or any of the dynamically stable equilibrium points are subject to perturbation, so there will be a cost of surveillance and correction. However, creating a colony that can survive a planetary disaster would be wise.