Should I be telling them that they are not really libertarian?
yes
They are no different than rich kids wearing Che shirts who think they are communists while they enjoy their life of starbucks, designer clothes, affluence, and consumerism.
The idea of an invisible hand controlling the free market has been around long before Ayn Rand. This particular metaphor was introduced by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Even with government interference (both good and bad) the invisible hand of the free market is at work. This isn't Ayn Rand lunacy. This is just economics.
With a Republican-controlled legislature, a Republican executive, and many conservatives in our judiciary, why the hell don't we have free markets in Texas? Isn't it the very core of economic-conservative theory that the invisible hand of the free market determines who gets what resources? Doesn't the free market have the ability to direct resources to where they can most efficiently be used?
Republicans claim to be in favor of free markets. For the most part they are interested in lining their own pockets even at the expense of free markets. Even most democrats claim to be in favor of regulated *mostly* free markets, but too are in the business of selling us out to corporations in exchange for personal gain.
Just because our current politicians make their living by undermining a free market, does not mean a free market is not a worthy goal. If Tesla (and all car companies) were able to sell cars without going through a middle man dealership, this would constitute a free-er market, and be better for consumers.
Neither is faster or slower. Quantum computers are faster at solving certain types of problems (BQP problems), and will become many orders of magnitude faster as they are able to control entanglement between more qubits and solve larger scale version of the same sorts of problems.
This should still faster than running your program on a classical computer for the whole time you were in line, provided your particular problem was suitable for solving on a quantum computer in the first place.
Yes electrical signals are transient in nature. They are the sorts of things that freezing (and many other things would definitely interfere with). However it seems that while these signals are definitely part of the state of your consciousness, they are probably not the whole state or even a critical part of the state. For instance when you get severely electrocuted (e.g. struck by lightning) and survive, you're mental state is definitely altered (e.g. some memory loss, disorientation, etc), but not so altered that it is unrecoverable (i.e. you don't start over as a baby with no memories at all). This seems to indicate that much of you're mental state is fairly nonvolatile (e.g. stored in neuronal connections). Getting electrocuted might be like a computer rebooting after not being shutdown properly.
>Added thought: What makes anyone think the future would want them?
That is a very real possibility, but all it takes is for 1 person with the right technology at any point in the future to want to bring you back (provided the freezing actually works).
As humans it is what we are best at. If you look at how dominant our species has been graphed with how much we fuck with nature, there is a pretty strong correlation.
I am not saying we should fuck with nature every chance we get, but rather that we should keep trying to do it in a way that is for our own good, rather than in ways that might cause us to get fucked back.
A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out.
Why would resistance to herbicide be disadvantageous? Obviously it might turn out to be, but why would anyone just assume that? If anything I would be tempted to assume the opposite.
Thanks for the insight, Brooks from Shawshank Redemption, but some people don't actually mind change, new knowledge, luxuries made possible by technology, and different cultures (especially ones in the future). Who knows maybe a 21th century human might get some novelty points with the opposite sex in the future. Or maybe they can just give you one of their brain implants to quickly bring you up to speed like in the Matrix.
And if you will remember from the same movie, Red went from "Hope is a dangerous thing" to learnign from Andy that "hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."
Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier?
Why would we assume it is going to be expensive forever? Presumably technology could make such a thing possible and eventually inexpensive.
Or why would anybody go through the effort of reviving anybody, when the world is over-populated in the first place?
Why do we need to be revived into bodies that take up the same amount of space and resources? Why would it still be the case that we are stuck on earth?
And third, why would anybody reasonably want to be unfrozen, when the world is massively changed and everybody they knew and cared about is gone?
Why would anybody want to exist? It's part of our programming as products of evolution. Even if everyone I knew was gone, I'd still enjoy being alive, especially if I got to see what the future was like. It's not like I am incapable of forming new relationships. If I absolutely hated it, I could refreeze myself or commit suicide.
There are a few SF books that use long-term "storage" as punishment for the criminal, and they have it right.
How is it punishment if you are not even conscious during that time? It would be like going to sleep one day and waking up 1000 years in the future. This is not the same as serving a 1000 year prison sentence.
Wow a million neanderthals that want to do work in exchange for money? How is this different than 7 billion homo sapiens wanting the same thing?
A million neanderthals would be a drop in the bucket. If all were reanimated in the US, our population would go up by 0.3%, and the world's would go up by 0.014%
I don't think anyone has enough money to pay for something 1000 years after the start of services being provided. You'd basically be repaying a loan that has been collecting interest for 1000 years. That's assuming everyone who gets frozen can be reanimated and has enough money to actually pay. If only 50% of the people can be re-animated, then that means each reanimated person needs to pay twice as much to cover the cost.
1) Long term memory and personality is stored in the physical structure of the brain rather than the electrical signals themselves
Electrical signals *are* physical. They certainly aren't metaphysical.
So, my response is this: Prove the first 4 assumptions valid, and maybe we'll talk. Take a healthy rat, train it on a maze, freeze it for a few months, revive it, put it through the maze again. If it performs on par with how it did before it was frozen at least you've demonstrated the survival of gross motor skills, long term memory, etc, etc.
I don't think anyone is claiming that it can be done now. If it could, presumably you could just be prevented from dying in the first place and would not need to be frozen. The whole point of freezing you is that we *don't* know how to do any of this stuff (possibly including freezing), and maybe someone in the future will have the technology and desire to undo all the damage and reanimate you. No one should be doing this without knowing this is a longshot.
Most libertarians are stupid. Most leftists are stupid. Most people in general are stupid. You can't evaluate the merits of an ideology based on it's dumbest adherents.
There are lots of laws that supposedly exist to prevent indentured servitude. Depending on who you ask these laws are either essential or completely worthless since we already live in a society funded by wage slavery. As a libertarian I would argue that we can suspend those laws, assuming they work, if and only if we are able to also suspend the laws that give the powerful an unfair advantage.
The answer to the problem of the wealthy buying politicians to get preferential treatment is not poor people forming a coalition to collectively also buy politicians. The answer is to somehow prevent politicians from being bought. Rich people have more money, it's a losing game anyway.
Also, Foxconn's suicide rate is 0.020% which is lower than the rest of China. Yes the have a lot of suicides in absolute terms, but they are a large company. For comparison the suicide rate in the US is 0.012%.
Most people realize that human beings *shouldn't* be property. This is a normative statement. This doesn't not mean a human being *can't* be property (a descriptive statement), as witnessed by history.
Slave owners can be harmed just like anyone else. Murderers can be harmed by being caught and put in jail. The question is not whether they are harmed, but whether this harm is a result of an unjust action.
You should be allowed to harm other people if your actions are not unjust. It is your right to cancel you're cable tv subscription even though it harms the cable company. This harm is not unjust.
if people do one wrong frequently and get the other right, it's probably a matter of the first being a faulty tool or a faulty culture has built uop around it. Either way, it''s an argument in favor of using the tool people get right.
Yes I agree the culture is faulty, but I don't think that's necessarily a reason to abandon XML over trying to fix the culture. Even if everyone only used JSON for new projects, there is still a lot of XML out there that should be used correctly. We should be encouraging people to use every tool correctly.
That's because JSON is a format for data exchange and you're trying to shoehorn presentation into it. If you want presentation, map it to HTML/CSS. Again, it's about using the right tool rather than sledgehammering gnats.
HTML and XML are basically the same scheme. Even if I use CSS to do the display part, the HTML/XML needs to hold the data of the document. Yeah I used bold and italics tags in there, but even if I wanted to use CSS to do bold and italics, I would need for those special text sections to have their own classes/ids in order to modify them with CSS. That data needs to be stored somehow, and in this case I think XML is a better storage mechanism than JSON, even though JSON can do it.
As for the first part, I was talking about http (a simple representation for a simple data structure) and you replied with JSON (a less simple representation appropriate for a more complex data structure) for some reason.
You said:
Exactly. I'm absolutely certain that if you try to use that as an http request, it will fail (sure enough: 501 Method Not Implemented).
in response to the JSON I posted... so I thought you were trying to use the JSON as an HTTP header.
If only that was followed. I frequently see the John for where there is certainly NOT a list and never will be a list. That's because XML is quite ambiguous about that in practice. Note how JSON effectively conveys list vs simple data and string vs. numeric unambiguously.
Yes people use XML in a way that makes it a pain to deal with. In this example I agree people are more likely to do <name>John</name> than "name" : ["John"], but that is sort of incidental. People *could* do the JSON wrong too. They just don't. That's not a problem with XML but rather they way people use it (i.e. bad traditions, or lack of good traditions).
But there is stuff that looks nicer in xml than JSON, like text formatting.
Slashdot Mirror
Should I be telling them that they are not really libertarian?
yes
They are no different than rich kids wearing Che shirts who think they are communists while they enjoy their life of starbucks, designer clothes, affluence, and consumerism.
Even slavery wasn't really slavery, because the slaves had the freedom to choose not to be slaves by escaping from the south to the north.
The idea of an invisible hand controlling the free market has been around long before Ayn Rand. This particular metaphor was introduced by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Even with government interference (both good and bad) the invisible hand of the free market is at work. This isn't Ayn Rand lunacy. This is just economics.
With a Republican-controlled legislature, a Republican executive, and many conservatives in our judiciary, why the hell don't we have free markets in Texas? Isn't it the very core of economic-conservative theory that the invisible hand of the free market determines who gets what resources? Doesn't the free market have the ability to direct resources to where they can most efficiently be used?
Republicans claim to be in favor of free markets. For the most part they are interested in lining their own pockets even at the expense of free markets. Even most democrats claim to be in favor of regulated *mostly* free markets, but too are in the business of selling us out to corporations in exchange for personal gain.
Just because our current politicians make their living by undermining a free market, does not mean a free market is not a worthy goal. If Tesla (and all car companies) were able to sell cars without going through a middle man dealership, this would constitute a free-er market, and be better for consumers.
All the code is open source. You are free to remove any NSA backdoors you find.
Why actually fix something when you can just add more duct tape and zip ties to what you already have...
Neither is faster or slower. Quantum computers are faster at solving certain types of problems (BQP problems), and will become many orders of magnitude faster as they are able to control entanglement between more qubits and solve larger scale version of the same sorts of problems.
This should still faster than running your program on a classical computer for the whole time you were in line, provided your particular problem was suitable for solving on a quantum computer in the first place.
If we assume the NSA has a backdoor to any computer system it wants, then there is no chance for any kind of privacy no matter what we do.
I suspect this is not the case.
Until you are not an anonymous coward, STFU
Yes electrical signals are transient in nature. They are the sorts of things that freezing (and many other things would definitely interfere with). However it seems that while these signals are definitely part of the state of your consciousness, they are probably not the whole state or even a critical part of the state. For instance when you get severely electrocuted (e.g. struck by lightning) and survive, you're mental state is definitely altered (e.g. some memory loss, disorientation, etc), but not so altered that it is unrecoverable (i.e. you don't start over as a baby with no memories at all). This seems to indicate that much of you're mental state is fairly nonvolatile (e.g. stored in neuronal connections). Getting electrocuted might be like a computer rebooting after not being shutdown properly.
>Added thought: What makes anyone think the future would want them?
That is a very real possibility, but all it takes is for 1 person with the right technology at any point in the future to want to bring you back (provided the freezing actually works).
So in short....Don't dare to f*** with nature...
As humans it is what we are best at. If you look at how dominant our species has been graphed with how much we fuck with nature, there is a pretty strong correlation.
I am not saying we should fuck with nature every chance we get, but rather that we should keep trying to do it in a way that is for our own good, rather than in ways that might cause us to get fucked back.
A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out.
Why would resistance to herbicide be disadvantageous? Obviously it might turn out to be, but why would anyone just assume that? If anything I would be tempted to assume the opposite.
Thanks for the insight, Brooks from Shawshank Redemption, but some people don't actually mind change, new knowledge, luxuries made possible by technology, and different cultures (especially ones in the future). Who knows maybe a 21th century human might get some novelty points with the opposite sex in the future. Or maybe they can just give you one of their brain implants to quickly bring you up to speed like in the Matrix.
And if you will remember from the same movie, Red went from "Hope is a dangerous thing" to learnign from Andy that "hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."
She has lots of sex.
Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier?
Why would we assume it is going to be expensive forever? Presumably technology could make such a thing possible and eventually inexpensive.
Or why would anybody go through the effort of reviving anybody, when the world is over-populated in the first place?
Why do we need to be revived into bodies that take up the same amount of space and resources? Why would it still be the case that we are stuck on earth?
And third, why would anybody reasonably want to be unfrozen, when the world is massively changed and everybody they knew and cared about is gone?
Why would anybody want to exist? It's part of our programming as products of evolution. Even if everyone I knew was gone, I'd still enjoy being alive, especially if I got to see what the future was like. It's not like I am incapable of forming new relationships. If I absolutely hated it, I could refreeze myself or commit suicide.
There are a few SF books that use long-term "storage" as punishment for the criminal, and they have it right.
How is it punishment if you are not even conscious during that time? It would be like going to sleep one day and waking up 1000 years in the future. This is not the same as serving a 1000 year prison sentence.
Wow a million neanderthals that want to do work in exchange for money? How is this different than 7 billion homo sapiens wanting the same thing?
A million neanderthals would be a drop in the bucket. If all were reanimated in the US, our population would go up by 0.3%, and the world's would go up by 0.014%
I don't think anyone has enough money to pay for something 1000 years after the start of services being provided. You'd basically be repaying a loan that has been collecting interest for 1000 years. That's assuming everyone who gets frozen can be reanimated and has enough money to actually pay. If only 50% of the people can be re-animated, then that means each reanimated person needs to pay twice as much to cover the cost.
1) Long term memory and personality is stored in the physical structure of the brain rather than the electrical signals themselves
Electrical signals *are* physical. They certainly aren't metaphysical.
So, my response is this: Prove the first 4 assumptions valid, and maybe we'll talk. Take a healthy rat, train it on a maze, freeze it for a few months, revive it, put it through the maze again. If it performs on par with how it did before it was frozen at least you've demonstrated the survival of gross motor skills, long term memory, etc, etc.
I don't think anyone is claiming that it can be done now. If it could, presumably you could just be prevented from dying in the first place and would not need to be frozen. The whole point of freezing you is that we *don't* know how to do any of this stuff (possibly including freezing), and maybe someone in the future will have the technology and desire to undo all the damage and reanimate you. No one should be doing this without knowing this is a longshot.
What is the point of your life?
Most libertarians are stupid. Most leftists are stupid. Most people in general are stupid. You can't evaluate the merits of an ideology based on it's dumbest adherents.
There are lots of laws that supposedly exist to prevent indentured servitude. Depending on who you ask these laws are either essential or completely worthless since we already live in a society funded by wage slavery. As a libertarian I would argue that we can suspend those laws, assuming they work, if and only if we are able to also suspend the laws that give the powerful an unfair advantage.
The answer to the problem of the wealthy buying politicians to get preferential treatment is not poor people forming a coalition to collectively also buy politicians. The answer is to somehow prevent politicians from being bought. Rich people have more money, it's a losing game anyway.
Also, Foxconn's suicide rate is 0.020% which is lower than the rest of China. Yes the have a lot of suicides in absolute terms, but they are a large company. For comparison the suicide rate in the US is 0.012%.
Most people realize that human beings *shouldn't* be property. This is a normative statement. This doesn't not mean a human being *can't* be property (a descriptive statement), as witnessed by history.
Slave owners can be harmed just like anyone else. Murderers can be harmed by being caught and put in jail. The question is not whether they are harmed, but whether this harm is a result of an unjust action.
You should be allowed to harm other people if your actions are not unjust. It is your right to cancel you're cable tv subscription even though it harms the cable company. This harm is not unjust.
if people do one wrong frequently and get the other right, it's probably a matter of the first being a faulty tool or a faulty culture has built uop around it. Either way, it''s an argument in favor of using the tool people get right.
Yes I agree the culture is faulty, but I don't think that's necessarily a reason to abandon XML over trying to fix the culture. Even if everyone only used JSON for new projects, there is still a lot of XML out there that should be used correctly. We should be encouraging people to use every tool correctly.
That's because JSON is a format for data exchange and you're trying to shoehorn presentation into it. If you want presentation, map it to HTML/CSS. Again, it's about using the right tool rather than sledgehammering gnats.
HTML and XML are basically the same scheme. Even if I use CSS to do the display part, the HTML/XML needs to hold the data of the document. Yeah I used bold and italics tags in there, but even if I wanted to use CSS to do bold and italics, I would need for those special text sections to have their own classes/ids in order to modify them with CSS. That data needs to be stored somehow, and in this case I think XML is a better storage mechanism than JSON, even though JSON can do it.
As for the first part, I was talking about http (a simple representation for a simple data structure) and you replied with JSON (a less simple representation appropriate for a more complex data structure) for some reason.
You said:
Exactly. I'm absolutely certain that if you try to use that as an http request, it will fail (sure enough: 501 Method Not Implemented).
in response to the JSON I posted... so I thought you were trying to use the JSON as an HTTP header.
If only that was followed. I frequently see the John for where there is certainly NOT a list and never will be a list. That's because XML is quite ambiguous about that in practice. Note how JSON effectively conveys list vs simple data and string vs. numeric unambiguously.
Yes people use XML in a way that makes it a pain to deal with. In this example I agree people are more likely to do <name>John</name> than "name" : ["John"], but that is sort of incidental. People *could* do the JSON wrong too. They just don't. That's not a problem with XML but rather they way people use it (i.e. bad traditions, or lack of good traditions).
But there is stuff that looks nicer in xml than JSON, like text formatting.
<name>John <i>Italics <b>and Bold</b> </i> Smith</name>
looks a lot better than
{ "name" : [ {"text" : "John"}, {"i" : [ {"text" : "Italics" }, {"b" : [ { "text" : "and Bold" } ] } ] }, {"text" : "Smith"} ] }
I think each encoding has it's strengths and weaknesses.
heh heh heh hehe heh heh he heheh he