Suppose we find trilobite skeletons on Mars... and the next day an alien ship enters our system. In his work, those two are contradictory events. They cannot happen in the same universe.
You didn't understand a single word of the article, did you?
Everything he discusses, he discusses in terms of probabilities. The discovery of trilobite-complexity fossils on Mars would not rule out the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, it would make the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations slightly more likely.
What it would do is eliminate a lot of early candidates for the Great Filter, resulting in a probability shift toward the Great Filter being still in our future. However, there would remain a lot of candidates for the Great Filter in our past, so it wouldn't conclusively establish that the Great Filter is our future; it would just mean a probability shift in that direction.
The "Great Filter" is DISTANCE. It takes a LONG TIME and a LOT OF ENERGY to travel from one solar system to the next.
Not, as Bostrom discusses at some length, on the geological time scales relevant to this discussion.
If it is easy for life to evolve and develop space travel, then the galaxy should be full of planets that beat Earth to the punch not by thousands of years or by millions of years, but by billions of years. That should be more than enough time to colonize the galaxy, even as big as it is.
They're hiding - For whatever reason they feel the need to not say, "hi". While this is possible, it also assumes that every race which has reached this point before us is doing so. Again, if we use what we know to base our assumptions on (ourselves), getting a group of more than 10 people to agree on any large decision is neigh impossible, and you expect that every member of every race out there is agreeing to keep mum?
It may not be necessary for every individual, or even every independently evolved technological civilization, to agree to keep mum.
For all we know, there is a 10-billion-year-old Secret Galactic Government out there that has the ability and for whatever reason the will to keep us in the dark, and is somehow stifling any signal (including travel) before it reaches Earth. Bostrom himself says, "I don't see how we can conclusively rule out this possibility."
Of course, if there is a 10-billion-year-old Secret Galactic Government conspiring to hide the truth from us, it's undoubtedly controlled by Jews.;-)
Why should people with genetic predisposition to health problems be entitled to affordable insurance? Let them die, and get those inferior genes out of the gene pool. Darwinism at work.
Better yet: Perform mandatory genetic testing at birth, and if they have problems, kill them. Then insurance companies won't have to worry about them.
So when i pirate this quality content, are they going to try sue me? after all marketing is the entire point of this.
Probably. Remember adcritic.com?
For those who don't: It was a website that hosted television commercials and allowed users to comment on them. However, they didn't have permission from the copyright holders of the commercials.
The copyright holders sued and shut the site down.
Interestingly, YouTube today is host to tons of television commercials apparently without any problem. Maybe the ad agencies have rethought their position.
Since 9/11, every goddamned thing is considered terrorism. Shoot a gun downtown? Terrorism. Drink someone's milkshake? Terrorism. Ship cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. Yep, terrorism.
What about cheating on my income taxes? Is that terrorism? I need an answer today. Thank you.
So the government is highjacking DNS. Can't users fix that simply by editing their hosts file? Granted, nontechnical users would need a little help with that, but it's not difficult.
Could we by analogy compare this to paying a movie-goer to take notes during the movie, and provide a very detailed summary to a company planning on selling said summary?
A detailed summary of a movie is not copyright infringement. Such summaries are published all the time. Look up any popular movie in Wikipedia and you'll probably find a detailed summary.
What's the point of a secret patent? Isn't the point of patents to prevent infringement of the creator's intellectual property? How can somebody else possibly avoid infringing on that intellectual property if the fact that somebody owns that intellectual property is a secret?
And does this open the door to lawsuits in which the defendant had no possible way of knowing that they were doing anything wrong? Scary.
You have to be a government entity to claim entrapment, and that's only in criminal cases.
The same principle also applies in civil cases. If the plaintiff intentionally induced the defendant to commit the act for which the plaintiff is now suing, the court is going to take a very dim view of the suit.
I'm not saying it applies in this case, because I don't know how much "inducement" went on, but the principle is there.
i can only pray that they get their asses burned when they try to take someone to court from this thing
I'm not satisfied to wait for that. That spyware trick is criminal, at least in some states. The odds of seeing anybody actually prosecuted for this stunt are damn close to zero, but it's what should happen.
If it were true, does it occur to anyone that a simple perpetual motion machine might not be a good thing? If it were possible using readily available parts to produce a machine that produced more energy than it took in, and hence possible to generate unlimited amounts of energy, it would only be a matter of time before some psycho produced a blast that would rival the Chicxulub meteorite.
If reality is perception, and the basis of perception is memory and you can alter memory, are you changing your personal reality and in effect, changing who you are?...is effectively erasing those events from memory the best solution?
The events aren't erased from memory. The subject can still recall and describe the event. However, certain stress/trauma symptoms are reduced.
I'd put it in the same category as other psychoactive drugs that address emotional problems. Now there are those who say that any such drugs that may lead to emotions being other than what they would "naturally" be somehow undermines the user's individuality, but I certainly don't feel that way.
I don't know anything about Swedish law (except that Pirate Bay seems to get away with anything they want), but if the blog host is making reasonable good faith efforts to remove inappropriate comments and missed one, it seems morally reprehensible to hold him responsible.
I bet with the same methodology I could take the price variation of potatoe per tons, take only the cent (fractional aprt) and find a corelation with major earth event.
Sure. Check for correlation with seismic behavior. Check for correlation with the price of oil. Check for correlation with the price of tea in China. Check for correlation with periods of high reports of UFO sightings or claims of paranormal activity. Check for correlation with the results of sporting events. Check for correlation with Powerball numbers. Check for correlation with 1000 different events, and odds are good that you'll find ten that correlate at the 99% level of confidence, and one that correlates at the 99.9% level of confidence.
Just because somebody writes "You can't sue us" in their Terms of Service or EULA or whatever doesn't mean you can't sue them. This is especially the case if they know that a lot of incoming mail gets lost, and don't disclose this fact when they sell e-mail services.
But can someone more legally inclined tell me why his response shouldn't be "because I'm innocent until proven guilty"?
He isn't being asked to provide evidence that he didn't do what he's accused of doing. There is nothing to "prove" here, as there is no dispute over the facts of what he did. He's simply being given an opportunity to provide a justification for his contemptuous behavior toward the judge.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't understand a single word of the article, did you?
Everything he discusses, he discusses in terms of probabilities. The discovery of trilobite-complexity fossils on Mars would not rule out the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, it would make the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations slightly more likely.
What it would do is eliminate a lot of early candidates for the Great Filter, resulting in a probability shift toward the Great Filter being still in our future. However, there would remain a lot of candidates for the Great Filter in our past, so it wouldn't conclusively establish that the Great Filter is our future; it would just mean a probability shift in that direction.
Not, as Bostrom discusses at some length, on the geological time scales relevant to this discussion.
If it is easy for life to evolve and develop space travel, then the galaxy should be full of planets that beat Earth to the punch not by thousands of years or by millions of years, but by billions of years. That should be more than enough time to colonize the galaxy, even as big as it is.
It may not be necessary for every individual, or even every independently evolved technological civilization, to agree to keep mum.
For all we know, there is a 10-billion-year-old Secret Galactic Government out there that has the ability and for whatever reason the will to keep us in the dark, and is somehow stifling any signal (including travel) before it reaches Earth. Bostrom himself says, "I don't see how we can conclusively rule out this possibility."
Of course, if there is a 10-billion-year-old Secret Galactic Government conspiring to hide the truth from us, it's undoubtedly controlled by Jews.
When the Spurs beat my beloved Suns, I kicked my dog. Clearly, for the sake of my dog, it should be illegal for the Spurs to win.
Why should people with genetic predisposition to health problems be entitled to affordable insurance? Let them die, and get those inferior genes out of the gene pool. Darwinism at work.
Better yet: Perform mandatory genetic testing at birth, and if they have problems, kill them. Then insurance companies won't have to worry about them.
Probably. Remember adcritic.com?
For those who don't: It was a website that hosted television commercials and allowed users to comment on them. However, they didn't have permission from the copyright holders of the commercials.
The copyright holders sued and shut the site down.
Interestingly, YouTube today is host to tons of television commercials apparently without any problem. Maybe the ad agencies have rethought their position.
FTFY
What about cheating on my income taxes? Is that terrorism? I need an answer today. Thank you.
So the government is highjacking DNS. Can't users fix that simply by editing their hosts file? Granted, nontechnical users would need a little help with that, but it's not difficult.
A detailed summary of a movie is not copyright infringement. Such summaries are published all the time. Look up any popular movie in Wikipedia and you'll probably find a detailed summary.
Why does a professor have a copyright on his lectures, anyway?
When I was working for a software developer and wrote code, I didn't get a copyright on the code. My employer owns the code the code that I wrote.
The same way my employer paid me to create code, the school pays the professor to create and deliver lectures.
If anybody owns a copyright on those lectures, shouldn't it be the school?
What's the point of a secret patent? Isn't the point of patents to prevent infringement of the creator's intellectual property? How can somebody else possibly avoid infringing on that intellectual property if the fact that somebody owns that intellectual property is a secret?
And does this open the door to lawsuits in which the defendant had no possible way of knowing that they were doing anything wrong? Scary.
The same principle also applies in civil cases. If the plaintiff intentionally induced the defendant to commit the act for which the plaintiff is now suing, the court is going to take a very dim view of the suit.
I'm not saying it applies in this case, because I don't know how much "inducement" went on, but the principle is there.
I'm not satisfied to wait for that. That spyware trick is criminal, at least in some states. The odds of seeing anybody actually prosecuted for this stunt are damn close to zero, but it's what should happen.
If it were true, does it occur to anyone that a simple perpetual motion machine might not be a good thing? If it were possible using readily available parts to produce a machine that produced more energy than it took in, and hence possible to generate unlimited amounts of energy, it would only be a matter of time before some psycho produced a blast that would rival the Chicxulub meteorite.
The events aren't erased from memory. The subject can still recall and describe the event. However, certain stress/trauma symptoms are reduced.
I'd put it in the same category as other psychoactive drugs that address emotional problems. Now there are those who say that any such drugs that may lead to emotions being other than what they would "naturally" be somehow undermines the user's individuality, but I certainly don't feel that way.
I don't know anything about Swedish law (except that Pirate Bay seems to get away with anything they want), but if the blog host is making reasonable good faith efforts to remove inappropriate comments and missed one, it seems morally reprehensible to hold him responsible.
That's not police misconduct. It's legislative misconduct.
No.
They sell them for peanuts in Hong Kong and China in order to compete with the thriving bootleg market there.
Sure. Check for correlation with seismic behavior. Check for correlation with the price of oil. Check for correlation with the price of tea in China. Check for correlation with periods of high reports of UFO sightings or claims of paranormal activity. Check for correlation with the results of sporting events. Check for correlation with Powerball numbers. Check for correlation with 1000 different events, and odds are good that you'll find ten that correlate at the 99% level of confidence, and one that correlates at the 99.9% level of confidence.
Just because somebody writes "You can't sue us" in their Terms of Service or EULA or whatever doesn't mean you can't sue them. This is especially the case if they know that a lot of incoming mail gets lost, and don't disclose this fact when they sell e-mail services.
He isn't being asked to provide evidence that he didn't do what he's accused of doing. There is nothing to "prove" here, as there is no dispute over the facts of what he did. He's simply being given an opportunity to provide a justification for his contemptuous behavior toward the judge.
This could have some interesting practical joke potential. Gift somebody some clothes, keep a remote control for yourself...