Indeed. Horizontal transfer is of considerable importance in deep history. We owe the very success of early life to those promiscuous pinko prokaryotes. If life had all been tight-assed access-controlled information-hoarding zealots with their fancy 'nuclei' and compartmentalized machinery, I doubt they'd have gotten very far in the early days...
And what the hell is a 'fish gene' anyway? We're talking strings of 2 bit characters. For all the reams and reams of 'junk' / 'non-coding' DNA out there (the noble Norway Spruce has more than 6 times as many base pairs as a human), I'm expected to believe that some subset of a fish is actually unique? That every part of a fish genome has some ethereal 'fish-ness' to it?
... which I should mention isn't to necessarily disparage the visual media. I'm actually starting to get more and more excited about sf movies because the budgets and technologies have advanced to the point where what once could only be described, we can now portray visually in a convincing way. I'm actually pretty excited for elysium – even though the world and concepts are veritably ancient in written fiction – because they seem to actually have a decent large-scale orbital going on. A kind of Greg Bear, Ian Banks-style world, with a little earth-side dystopia / class-warfare thrown in for good measure. Kind of a cute deus ex HR tie in too...
Nah - really new things have always, and probably will always remain in books. I have literally never seen anything in a sci-fi movie that hasn't been hashed out countless times, and in greater detail, in books – often very old books...
Though I'm not an American, I think there's a strong case for the not-oft-discussed 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
i.e., the constitution guarantees you certain rights, but just because it isn't listed in there doesn't mean it isn't your right – and I'd imagine most people, given the option, would choose to retain the right to privacy.
Of course it's not at all clear how one is supposed to go about retaining said rights in practice – but is worth remembering that your nation was founded with the explicit caveat that the constitution only places specific guarantees on your rights, and not boundaries.
Indeed. The stupidity arguments do the greatest disservice to would-be detractors of his policies, because to ascribe his actions to incompetence severely limits your ability to criticize the intent behind the actions. Bush accomplished an enormous amount during his tenure, with direct and consistent benefits for his own class (the super rich). A few more of his successes:
- killed the inheritance tax
- dramatically expanded the military budget and gained a foothold in the middle east
- rolled back social services
- doubled the national debt (aka, the mechanism by which tax dollars are rendered directly to private investors, absent any service)
- appointed young right wing radicals to the supreme court, ensuring decades of reactionary right-wing activist legislation (e.g., money = speech)
Bush had a minor speech deficiency and largish ears. I don't see why that's taken as the most obvious explanation for his policies when his track record shows such clear and consistent self-interest...
ftfy. Otherwise spot on. If I could find Hamilton's transcripts from the early meetings, there are a lot of choice quotations from those supposedly noble founding fathers and their wonderful intentions...
It is, of course, a difficult subject to study – since the super-rich have no interest in putting themselves under the public microscope. There have been indirect attempts, however, for instance: Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior" (see popularaccounts if you don't have PNAS access).
As to the all-too-familiar cries of "conspiracy theory! conspiracy theory!" – you ought to find a less tired and trite means of arbitrarily forcing closure on discussion. Considering 'conspiracy theories' have routinely been borne out in history (e.g., COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, and oh let's see - warrantless blanket surveillance?), the knee-jerk reaction that conspiracy theories are inherently ridiculous is itself a tremendous ideological victory.
The irony is that people who cry "conspiracy theory!" are actually proposing something much more ridiculous: That the very small collection of men who own and control most of the world do not meet and discuss their interests behind closed doors, and do not leverage their tremendous wealth and power to further their personal interests. That the consistent policies of governments from every stripe over decades and decades to extend corporate power and the preeminence of property rights above all other rights (including national sovereignty, in the case of free trade agreements) has somehow been a coincidence – with no influence from the power holders who benefit from these decisions.
Truly the reactionaries and nay-sayers propose the wildest theories of all...
Nah. Both sides want the same thing – socialism to cover the diseconomies (pollution, resource depletion, large-scale infrastructure, financing police to protect property and put down dissenters, etc.), capitalism to cover the profits, and heck, a little more socialism to cover corporate welfare (subsidies, dirt cheap leases of public property and the natural resources they contain, huge tax breaks, publicly funded research, bailouts, etc.).
The elites don't want pure capitalism or pure socialism (and they sure as hell don't want anything resembling democracy or anarchism – which are really quite similar philosophically, we just forget that no one has ever actually attempted democracy). The elites trot out these platonic systems because they have ideological benefits, encouraging people to accept certain outcomes as natural, necessary, or obvious. The presentation of a capitalist-socialist dichotomy, and the indoctrination of socialism as 'evil' provides justification to deregulate, and to roll-back social services, while the veneer of democracy ensures the appearance of legitimacy, and a mechanism for taxation (socialism by any other name...) to support corporate welfare.
It is a safe bet, in US politics (and many other arenas), that wherever R & D are viewed as discrepant, there is an ideological motive behind the dichotomy itself, and both parties would sooner trade sides entirely than abandon the dichotomy itself. 'Circus and bread' exists as much, or more, in the realm of discourse as it does in events...
Free land and resources – Just kill whoever lives there now!
Free labour – Just kill them if they don't work!
Freedom from accountability – Just keep those filthy bastards whose lives you destroyed away from you so you don't have to look in their eyes!
Freedom from conflicting ideologies – Witch hunts for everyone!
And nothing much has changed on any of those fronts, realistically.
The US has always been the land of the free. There just happen to be a whole lot more *other* people living there too...
Where do you find 1 million gainful jobs to replace all of the inefficient human labor they're replacing?
That's what prison is for. Capitalism requires increasing use of force as the capital gradient (i.e., income disparity) steepens. The real 'invisible hand' where potential differences are concerned is always a rectifying force. The rich exploit workers to become richer so they can afford robots to replace the workers. Displaced workers, at a sufficient volume and level of desperation will eventually act to redistribute those ill-gotten gains – unless they are either put down or locked away first. The legal system is very well constructed and elaborated for this purpose. For example, in many places you can be fined for being homeless – and if you can't pay the fine, they'll put you in jail. It doesn't matter that jails are expensive. Even if those costs weren't defrayed by the public, the elites will always find the capital (or other incentives) to maintain the structural violence necessary to protect their treasure.
It is a basic philosophical question. Computers do not "think," they do not "understand,"
You're correct that it's a longstanding question, but then you perversely state a specific answer to that question as though it had been somehow resolved... A computer is no more or less deterministic and materially constrained than a brain is – unless you subscribe to some brand or other of mysticism. The real question is something to the effect of 'what is it about the particular organization of logical operations and noise instantiated in a human brain that produces 'thinking?' We don't have any kind of answer to that question – but it follows that if this organization were known, then it ought to 'think' regardless of its particular idiosyncratic physical instantiation.
And they are very happy that you believe and parrot that idea. In fact, they've spent considerable effort (and have been largely successful) in trying to convince us that capitalism as an economic system is the very reason and progenitor of what little democratic success we have had. This, however, is in marked departure from the fact that capitalist interests have at every step resisted as strongly as possible any drift towards democratic reforms (suffrage, workers' rights and safety, corporate liability, public health and social servies, environmental regulation, etc.). The fact is that capitalism requires a state that nurtures its interests, and defends its inequities using an exclusive claim to "legitimate" violence. Capitalism could not sustain itself without these structural supports. In general, the fact that anyone believes there is a distinction to be made between economic and political systems is itself a great victory for our glorious leaders – devoted students of Bernays to the last.
Actually, they have much the same problem with what's being done today – only the problem is much much worse. Schneier (as often) had a recent commentary on this.
Short story: there is simply too much data, and no magical "find the suspicious subgraph" algorithm actually exists. Of course I'm not suggesting this as a justification for the practice – it makes it much more frightening in some ways – but I'm not so sure the modern agencies are that different from the stasi with respect to the information overload problem...
A "GM crop," taken generically, is not more likely to become a monoculture. However, the policies and intentions of the purveyors of GM crops are quite directly geared toward monocultures, both in the pursuit of the one-true-crop in contrast to a diversified genetic portfolio, and in the efforts to ensure that the seed for year N comes from the lab, rather than from breeding at N-1.
This is yet another mistaken correspondence between the technology and the industry. The technology itself entails rather little. Starting from GM, you could just as readily construct arguments for either an increase or a decrease in the likelihood of monocultures. The industry however, has constrained the application of the technology in such a way that monocultures are not just a likely outcome, but an engineered and intended one.
Actually – the productive members of society are not the wealthy, they are the labourers (you know - all those poor people who actually DO something?). Taxation to fund public services is, if anything, a rectifying current away from rewarding parasites at the cost of honest workers.
It's also worth pointing out that the protection of property is also carried out using tax dollars – and without that threat of force, the level of inequality we currently maintain would be unsustainable. Neocons and other sociopaths, unsurprisingly, want only those public services which benefit them, but not the public services that benefit others. But the fact is that these two sides have to be balanced. If you take away all public services, labour laws, and other progressive social policies, people will become desperate and eventually they will kill and eat you, no matter how many private goons your illegitimate wealth can buy you...
Anyone found the actual source paper? The doi in the nature summary is broken, and a search for the listed author on PNAS doesn't pull up anything at all. Similarly, a search for anterior cingulate doesn't show anything recent that's even remotely related. I'd like to take a closer look at the stats here...
I'd agree with your assessment. My comment was directed mostly at the 'in defence of Assad' tenor of many of the postings I'm seeing – as though the other players had anything to do with an objective appraisal of the man and his responsibilities. In the context of war and other atrocities, relativism and talk of 'lesser evils' is, I think, a counterproductive mode of thinking. Of course, I'll freely admit that I don't have a solution to offer as far as the practicalities of resolving the situation are concerned. It seems that the window for a functional and humane transition of power has passed, and the destabilization has made room for all sorts of undesirable factions to make local power grabs...
I think it's difficult to argue that Assad is the "lesser of two evils". People seem to have a very short attention span for the history here. The facts on the ground are that Assad was murdering unarmed civilian protesters for quite some time before they got fed up and started fighting back. Now it's a war, and war is ugly on all sides. I won't dispute that there's likely to be war criminals on both sides (even if we keep to the facile "two-sides" narrative), but people seem to forget that the "who started it" question isn't always unanswerable. If you believe a government has the right to murder it's citizens for protesting, then you have friends in every nation's leaders (west included) – but no friends with any nation's people. If people are upset enough with your rule that you need to kill them to stay in power – then you have lost legitimacy. Full stop. Who replaces Assad is an orthogonal issue to the fact that he is not a legitimate leader. To say otherwise is to authorize a very ugly future should you ever wish to protest your own government.
Yup. When textbook vendors are pitching books for a course, I pretty much stop listening as soon as they start rambling on about all the digital bullshit. I sure as hell don't mention any of it to my students or recommend that they look at or sign up for any of it. Unfortunately, this kind of temporary license push for e-texts piggy-backs on the trend for education to be simply 'credentials for a fee'. Many of the students don't care about the material and wouldn't dream of keeping the text as a reference. You're lucky if they even bought the text, and luckier still if they wait until the end of term to sell it again. So the publishers, already living large off of the cash cow of academia (annual updates to core science texts? the fuck?), are simply adapting to the emerging niche of student apathy. Don't be surprised if they're soon selling even shorter term-licenses. Anything to make sure they get paid *every single time* a pair of eyeballs looks at their repetitive, inbred, regurgitated material. But I'm not bitter or anything...
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Horizontal transfer is of considerable importance in deep history. We owe the very success of early life to those promiscuous pinko prokaryotes. If life had all been tight-assed access-controlled information-hoarding zealots with their fancy 'nuclei' and compartmentalized machinery, I doubt they'd have gotten very far in the early days...
And what the hell is a 'fish gene' anyway? We're talking strings of 2 bit characters. For all the reams and reams of 'junk' / 'non-coding' DNA out there (the noble Norway Spruce has more than 6 times as many base pairs as a human), I'm expected to believe that some subset of a fish is actually unique? That every part of a fish genome has some ethereal 'fish-ness' to it?
Sometimes... Sometimes I don't understand people.
Just revoke them as soon as you hand them over, issue a new key and wait for the next request... Rinse. Repeat.
... which I should mention isn't to necessarily disparage the visual media. I'm actually starting to get more and more excited about sf movies because the budgets and technologies have advanced to the point where what once could only be described, we can now portray visually in a convincing way. I'm actually pretty excited for elysium – even though the world and concepts are veritably ancient in written fiction – because they seem to actually have a decent large-scale orbital going on. A kind of Greg Bear, Ian Banks-style world, with a little earth-side dystopia / class-warfare thrown in for good measure. Kind of a cute deus ex HR tie in too...
Nah - really new things have always, and probably will always remain in books. I have literally never seen anything in a sci-fi movie that hasn't been hashed out countless times, and in greater detail, in books – often very old books...
Though I'm not an American, I think there's a strong case for the not-oft-discussed 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
i.e., the constitution guarantees you certain rights, but just because it isn't listed in there doesn't mean it isn't your right – and I'd imagine most people, given the option, would choose to retain the right to privacy.
Of course it's not at all clear how one is supposed to go about retaining said rights in practice – but is worth remembering that your nation was founded with the explicit caveat that the constitution only places specific guarantees on your rights, and not boundaries.
Indeed. The stupidity arguments do the greatest disservice to would-be detractors of his policies, because to ascribe his actions to incompetence severely limits your ability to criticize the intent behind the actions. Bush accomplished an enormous amount during his tenure, with direct and consistent benefits for his own class (the super rich). A few more of his successes:
- killed the inheritance tax
- dramatically expanded the military budget and gained a foothold in the middle east
- rolled back social services
- doubled the national debt (aka, the mechanism by which tax dollars are rendered directly to private investors, absent any service)
- appointed young right wing radicals to the supreme court, ensuring decades of reactionary right-wing activist legislation (e.g., money = speech)
Bush had a minor speech deficiency and largish ears. I don't see why that's taken as the most obvious explanation for his policies when his track record shows such clear and consistent self-interest...
Better source.
Correction - it was Madison (terrible fucking website) who took notes, not Hamilton....
White men only.
ftfy. Otherwise spot on. If I could find Hamilton's transcripts from the early meetings, there are a lot of choice quotations from those supposedly noble founding fathers and their wonderful intentions...
A little dated, but still on point: Parenti on Right-wing judicial activism...
It is, of course, a difficult subject to study – since the super-rich have no interest in putting themselves under the public microscope. There have been indirect attempts, however, for instance: Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior" (see popular accounts if you don't have PNAS access).
As to the all-too-familiar cries of "conspiracy theory! conspiracy theory!" – you ought to find a less tired and trite means of arbitrarily forcing closure on discussion. Considering 'conspiracy theories' have routinely been borne out in history (e.g., COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, and oh let's see - warrantless blanket surveillance?), the knee-jerk reaction that conspiracy theories are inherently ridiculous is itself a tremendous ideological victory.
The irony is that people who cry "conspiracy theory!" are actually proposing something much more ridiculous: That the very small collection of men who own and control most of the world do not meet and discuss their interests behind closed doors, and do not leverage their tremendous wealth and power to further their personal interests. That the consistent policies of governments from every stripe over decades and decades to extend corporate power and the preeminence of property rights above all other rights (including national sovereignty, in the case of free trade agreements) has somehow been a coincidence – with no influence from the power holders who benefit from these decisions.
Truly the reactionaries and nay-sayers propose the wildest theories of all...
Nah. Both sides want the same thing – socialism to cover the diseconomies (pollution, resource depletion, large-scale infrastructure, financing police to protect property and put down dissenters, etc.), capitalism to cover the profits, and heck, a little more socialism to cover corporate welfare (subsidies, dirt cheap leases of public property and the natural resources they contain, huge tax breaks, publicly funded research, bailouts, etc.).
The elites don't want pure capitalism or pure socialism (and they sure as hell don't want anything resembling democracy or anarchism – which are really quite similar philosophically, we just forget that no one has ever actually attempted democracy). The elites trot out these platonic systems because they have ideological benefits, encouraging people to accept certain outcomes as natural, necessary, or obvious. The presentation of a capitalist-socialist dichotomy, and the indoctrination of socialism as 'evil' provides justification to deregulate, and to roll-back social services, while the veneer of democracy ensures the appearance of legitimacy, and a mechanism for taxation (socialism by any other name...) to support corporate welfare.
It is a safe bet, in US politics (and many other arenas), that wherever R & D are viewed as discrepant, there is an ideological motive behind the dichotomy itself, and both parties would sooner trade sides entirely than abandon the dichotomy itself. 'Circus and bread' exists as much, or more, in the realm of discourse as it does in events...
No, no - you've got it all backwards.
Free land and resources – Just kill whoever lives there now!
Free labour – Just kill them if they don't work!
Freedom from accountability – Just keep those filthy bastards whose lives you destroyed away from you so you don't have to look in their eyes!
Freedom from conflicting ideologies – Witch hunts for everyone!
And nothing much has changed on any of those fronts, realistically.
The US has always been the land of the free. There just happen to be a whole lot more *other* people living there too...
Where do you find 1 million gainful jobs to replace all of the inefficient human labor they're replacing?
That's what prison is for. Capitalism requires increasing use of force as the capital gradient (i.e., income disparity) steepens. The real 'invisible hand' where potential differences are concerned is always a rectifying force. The rich exploit workers to become richer so they can afford robots to replace the workers. Displaced workers, at a sufficient volume and level of desperation will eventually act to redistribute those ill-gotten gains – unless they are either put down or locked away first. The legal system is very well constructed and elaborated for this purpose. For example, in many places you can be fined for being homeless – and if you can't pay the fine, they'll put you in jail. It doesn't matter that jails are expensive. Even if those costs weren't defrayed by the public, the elites will always find the capital (or other incentives) to maintain the structural violence necessary to protect their treasure.
It is a basic philosophical question. Computers do not "think," they do not "understand,"
You're correct that it's a longstanding question, but then you perversely state a specific answer to that question as though it had been somehow resolved... A computer is no more or less deterministic and materially constrained than a brain is – unless you subscribe to some brand or other of mysticism. The real question is something to the effect of 'what is it about the particular organization of logical operations and noise instantiated in a human brain that produces 'thinking?' We don't have any kind of answer to that question – but it follows that if this organization were known, then it ought to 'think' regardless of its particular idiosyncratic physical instantiation.
And they are very happy that you believe and parrot that idea. In fact, they've spent considerable effort (and have been largely successful) in trying to convince us that capitalism as an economic system is the very reason and progenitor of what little democratic success we have had. This, however, is in marked departure from the fact that capitalist interests have at every step resisted as strongly as possible any drift towards democratic reforms (suffrage, workers' rights and safety, corporate liability, public health and social servies, environmental regulation, etc.). The fact is that capitalism requires a state that nurtures its interests, and defends its inequities using an exclusive claim to "legitimate" violence. Capitalism could not sustain itself without these structural supports. In general, the fact that anyone believes there is a distinction to be made between economic and political systems is itself a great victory for our glorious leaders – devoted students of Bernays to the last.
Actually, they have much the same problem with what's being done today – only the problem is much much worse. Schneier (as often) had a recent commentary on this.
Short story: there is simply too much data, and no magical "find the suspicious subgraph" algorithm actually exists. Of course I'm not suggesting this as a justification for the practice – it makes it much more frightening in some ways – but I'm not so sure the modern agencies are that different from the stasi with respect to the information overload problem...
A "GM crop," taken generically, is not more likely to become a monoculture. However, the policies and intentions of the purveyors of GM crops are quite directly geared toward monocultures, both in the pursuit of the one-true-crop in contrast to a diversified genetic portfolio, and in the efforts to ensure that the seed for year N comes from the lab, rather than from breeding at N-1.
This is yet another mistaken correspondence between the technology and the industry. The technology itself entails rather little. Starting from GM, you could just as readily construct arguments for either an increase or a decrease in the likelihood of monocultures. The industry however, has constrained the application of the technology in such a way that monocultures are not just a likely outcome, but an engineered and intended one.
Actually – the productive members of society are not the wealthy, they are the labourers (you know - all those poor people who actually DO something?). Taxation to fund public services is, if anything, a rectifying current away from rewarding parasites at the cost of honest workers.
It's also worth pointing out that the protection of property is also carried out using tax dollars – and without that threat of force, the level of inequality we currently maintain would be unsustainable. Neocons and other sociopaths, unsurprisingly, want only those public services which benefit them, but not the public services that benefit others. But the fact is that these two sides have to be balanced. If you take away all public services, labour laws, and other progressive social policies, people will become desperate and eventually they will kill and eat you, no matter how many private goons your illegitimate wealth can buy you...
Anyone found the actual source paper? The doi in the nature summary is broken, and a search for the listed author on PNAS doesn't pull up anything at all. Similarly, a search for anterior cingulate doesn't show anything recent that's even remotely related. I'd like to take a closer look at the stats here...
I think the poster is confusing "illegal" with "will get you arrested"...
I'd agree with your assessment. My comment was directed mostly at the 'in defence of Assad' tenor of many of the postings I'm seeing – as though the other players had anything to do with an objective appraisal of the man and his responsibilities. In the context of war and other atrocities, relativism and talk of 'lesser evils' is, I think, a counterproductive mode of thinking. Of course, I'll freely admit that I don't have a solution to offer as far as the practicalities of resolving the situation are concerned. It seems that the window for a functional and humane transition of power has passed, and the destabilization has made room for all sorts of undesirable factions to make local power grabs...
I think it's difficult to argue that Assad is the "lesser of two evils". People seem to have a very short attention span for the history here. The facts on the ground are that Assad was murdering unarmed civilian protesters for quite some time before they got fed up and started fighting back. Now it's a war, and war is ugly on all sides. I won't dispute that there's likely to be war criminals on both sides (even if we keep to the facile "two-sides" narrative), but people seem to forget that the "who started it" question isn't always unanswerable. If you believe a government has the right to murder it's citizens for protesting, then you have friends in every nation's leaders (west included) – but no friends with any nation's people. If people are upset enough with your rule that you need to kill them to stay in power – then you have lost legitimacy. Full stop. Who replaces Assad is an orthogonal issue to the fact that he is not a legitimate leader. To say otherwise is to authorize a very ugly future should you ever wish to protest your own government.
Physical texts always come with that stuff too. Definitely not unique to digital.
Yup. When textbook vendors are pitching books for a course, I pretty much stop listening as soon as they start rambling on about all the digital bullshit. I sure as hell don't mention any of it to my students or recommend that they look at or sign up for any of it. Unfortunately, this kind of temporary license push for e-texts piggy-backs on the trend for education to be simply 'credentials for a fee'. Many of the students don't care about the material and wouldn't dream of keeping the text as a reference. You're lucky if they even bought the text, and luckier still if they wait until the end of term to sell it again. So the publishers, already living large off of the cash cow of academia (annual updates to core science texts? the fuck?), are simply adapting to the emerging niche of student apathy. Don't be surprised if they're soon selling even shorter term-licenses. Anything to make sure they get paid *every single time* a pair of eyeballs looks at their repetitive, inbred, regurgitated material. But I'm not bitter or anything...