You're having a hard time understanding the concept that more nuclear weapons, in the hands of more countries, makes it all the more likely that somebody will do something stupid.
No, actually I'd agree with that statement. But "hey you guys keep not having them while we keep having them" is no more realistic than "okay, we'll give up ours while you guys keep yours".
However great it would be for fewer countries to have them, the pretence that the other countries don't need them for deterrence but that we do because otherwise people might threaten *US* (OMG)... it's silly, it's absurd, it's self-serving and it's not going to convince anyone. I don't have a good solution but I don't see the point of pretending not to recognise hypocrisy when it's staring me in the face.
Let me help you out: nuclear disarmament is impossible, because there is no way any one nation can be absolutely assured that all other nations are simultaneously dismantling their stockpiles. To dismantle your own missiles and assume another nation was good to their word and actually taking their missiles apart would be insanity.
Right, so the US has nuclear weapons now and won't disarm because then it'd be at the mercy of the countries that still have them. Equally, Korea wants to have nuclear weapons because otherwise it's at the mercy of the countries that already have them. The reasoning is identical.
As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others.
It doesn't really work that way. To the extent that that R&D is paid for from the revenues made by selling to the US Government, you'd be double counting. To the extent that it's paid for from revenues made by selling to other governments, you'd be counting non-US military spending.
(Which isn't to deny that it's hypocritical to cry foul when other countries to the same things we do - it's pretty obvious that anyone the US or its allies (or other powerful countries) may one day see an interest in fighting with will want to be sufficiently armed to deter that which means being able to deliver a sufficiently destructive payload a sufficient distance. This is just reality. Everyone knows that the USSR wasn't attacked despite attrocities to equal anyone else's because they DID have weapons of mass destruction on a scale nobody would want to face and that Iraq wouldn't have been attacked if they had been in that position too. Again, reality.)
So if you had billions of dollars, you would not be interested in making more money, you would give it all away??
He didn't say he didn't see this as a way of making money. Quite the opposite : "I'd still charge plenty for my service and I'm fairly certain I'd still get a ton of customers."
Maybe his plan wouldn't make him money (failed businesses are hardly uncommon) but your claim that he wouldn't be trying to make more money looks like something you just made up. How about discussing the actual flaws in the product he proposes?
What I wish these extremist nuts would understand is that the theory of evolution does not, ipso facto, rule out the possibility of a supernatural creator.
Obviously true, in the same way that finding out that mommy and daddy bought all those presents for you does not, ipso facto, rule out the possibilty of Santa Claus. However at that point if you really want to hang onto your fantasies then Ockham sharpening his razor becomes the stuff of nightmares. Best not to let it get that far.
Now, what they're doing is fine and legal in their jurisdiction, that's their trump card, and it would befine if TPB was only accessible to residents of that jurisdiction. But it isn't, TPB is operating outside of their jurisdiction, that's that a problem.
It might be a 'problem' if the information is illegal elsewhere but the only thing that should be relevant here is whether it's legal in the jurisidction they operate in (I'm not well enough informed to have an opinion on that, fortunately there's a court considering it so we just have to wait and see what their ruling is).
The principle you seem to want to apply would lead to people anywhere in the world being subject to prosecution for having pictures of scantily clad people (her face is showing!) on a web site that's available in Saudi Arabia or for carrying truthful information about the Chinese governement.
If the US (or other) government want to restrict availability of the Pirate Bay web site in their own country then they need to put measures in place to block it.
To claim that man has contributed to global warming is a reasonable statement. But, now we need to determine HOW MUCH he has contributed.
Why? So we can decide whether to feel guilty or not? The big questions are whether and what we can do about it and whether we should do them. If global warming is a problem for us and there is an available course of action to mitigate the effects then it would be pretty stupid to refuse to take it on the grounds that the problem isn't entirely (or even at all) our fault.
How do you test a lie detector? For it to work you have to have someone ACTUALLY LYING, not saying something contrary to the truth, but actually trying to be secretly untruthful.
It's not that hard. You have two teams of volunteers. Team A interview members of team B and have to obtain certain pieces of information. Members of team B are asked to lie about certain things to members of team A and will get an additional reward if team A believe them. The people monitoring know what the lies are and who's telling them, and have access to the detector (Nobody in team A or B need access to the detector or to know it exists, nobody in team A needs to be told there will be lies; the sole function of the teams is to provide someone to be lied to and someone to tell the lies).
How would you feel if you were resurrected by some other primates as one of a handful of your kind 50,000 years hence?
As an alternative to just being dead? I'll take the resurrection. Presumably I could still kill myself again later if it wasn't working out, so what is there to lose?
if you are willing (and able) to scientifically analyse what human will (free or otherwise) really is, and what are the boundaries of its freedom. If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever
Why?
As far as I can tell, "free will" means that your decision making processes aren't interfered with by outside influences other than through standard interfaces. Classical example would be e.g. no gods or magicians are reaching in and using their amazing powers to override your thought processes.
Someone whose actions were somehow being manipulated by electrodes implanted in their brain would have their free will reduced. More prosaically, you might consider someone whose drink has been spiked without their knowing it, thus impairing their ability to make decisions, to be "less free willed" than they would otherwise be.
I can't see that randomness has anything to do with free will by any sensible meaning of the term. A person with a random number generator in their head isnâ(TM)t any more 'free' than someone without one.
it is reasonable to make the financial recompse for a crime more than what the thing is worth at retail
Although there are circumstances in which copyright infringement can amount to a crime, nobody has alleged that such is the case here. This is a purely civil matter.
Given that the most promising research to-date on life-extension (resveratrol and caloric restriction) can produce about a 40% increase in maximum lifespan at best, how do you estimate that we can achieve a lifespan of 1,000 years (about a 10-fold increase in current maximum lifespans)?
If you had 60 secs to get a college student excited about wanting to study and research life extension, what would you say besides the obvious 'live-forever' meme?
"Just think how much money you could charge for it".
So why would geeks, even those that never put on a tinfoil hat, demand full disclosure, especially in a market place where we have the option to simply not spend the money. In this case, if there are significant security issues with the iphone, don't buy one. It sounds trite, and everyone always complains about the philosophy, but it works. 1. Without full disclosure, your options for determining whether there are security risks preventing you from buying one are more limited than they would otherwise be.
2. If you mean "don't buy one if you think lack of full disclosure is itself a problem" then that seems equivalent to demanding full disclosure.
Translation: We have a pile of bullshit we're trying to sell, so we'll log into Slashdot as AC's and try a little astroturfing. An as agent of the shill consortium I can confirm that this is exactly right. Yesterday we got our check for $600 million. We considered running the experiment. We considered instead using the cash to lobby big business and government. We considered spending it on a big party. Then we realised that all the big players with REAL influence are on Slashdot. So we hired an army of shills to spread the message with their evil talk of "mainstream science". But with your keen insight you saw straight through us. Foiled again:(
People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption.
Nonsense. People haven't "learned to avoid natural selection", they've been subject to it. In the short term natural selection has favoured these "unsustainable approaches" which have helped in providing decent life expectancy and thus breeding opportunities for billions of people, in the long term natural selection may not favour this approach (by definition, it won't if they are in fact unsustainable). That's natural selection at work. There is no avoiding it.
Well, if you RTFA, one could infer that referring to the garage as the Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage could be construed as threatening to university president Zaccari. 1. That's pretty weak.
2. If you really think someone is making death threats, you don't send them a letter expelling them ("that'll stop him killing me!"). You call the police.
It's pretty obvious that the university officials are being disingenuous here. I'm quite happy to assume stupidity rather than malice in most cases but there are limits.
If you thought that illegal activity wasn't going to be prosecuted because it was difficult to determine which computer behind a NAT did the sharing, this should come as a wake-up call. How so? The very premise of this proposed legislation is that file sharers are unlikely to be prosecuted. Hence the need to open up alternatives to prosecution.
Incidentally, it's unlikely that this particular proposed alternative will help. Alleged filesharers already get sued and it's no big deterrent. It's unlikely that the state footing the bill will change that. It's just a waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere.
if you want people to listen to you you need to look like a success. The article certainly makes it sound like he was listened to. As far as I can tell they went out of their way to invite him there so that they could listen to him, and then they listened to him, and then voted in favor of his position. So I think your theory is at best incomplete.
Not conforming to a dress code, that I'm sure they informed him about makes him just seem rude. Why do you feel that there was a dress code, and why are you sure that they informed him about it? As far as I can tell it's just as plausible that they invited him to speak and he asked them if his planned gear was okay and they said "sure". If you have reason to suppose otherwise then it would be interesting to hear it.
If your choices are predicable by formula, then I don't think you can call it free will. There are three basic possibilities of how your choices can work:
(1) Deterministic - theoretically predictable by formula by someone with perfect understanding of your workings and all relevant variables.
(2) Truly Random - as likely to try to eat the monitor as to type on the keyboard.
(3) Probabilistic - some things more likely than others but with a random element e.g. 90% chance I was going to write a post disagreeing with you, 9% chance I'd write a post agreeing with you, 1% chance I wouldn't respond at all.
Throwing in non-material components such as "souls" doesn't inherently increase the range of options - the soul must work deterministically, truly randomly, or probabilistically. If you think there's another possibility then please say what it is.
Truly Random doesn't match our perceptions. At least, not mine. Either Deterministic or Probabilistic could. I can't see anything more "free" about one than the other. Deterministic has a more pleasing sense of strong identity (I'd like to think there IS an answer to "what would you do in situation x", not just "it depends on a throw of the dice") but that doesn't mean it true of course.
Slashdot Mirror
You're having a hard time understanding the concept that more nuclear weapons, in the hands of more countries, makes it all the more likely that somebody will do something stupid.
No, actually I'd agree with that statement. But "hey you guys keep not having them while we keep having them" is no more realistic than "okay, we'll give up ours while you guys keep yours".
However great it would be for fewer countries to have them, the pretence that the other countries don't need them for deterrence but that we do because otherwise people might threaten *US* (OMG)... it's silly, it's absurd, it's self-serving and it's not going to convince anyone. I don't have a good solution but I don't see the point of pretending not to recognise hypocrisy when it's staring me in the face.
Let me help you out: nuclear disarmament is impossible, because there is no way any one nation can be absolutely assured that all other nations are simultaneously dismantling their stockpiles. To dismantle your own missiles and assume another nation was good to their word and actually taking their missiles apart would be insanity.
Right, so the US has nuclear weapons now and won't disarm because then it'd be at the mercy of the countries that still have them. Equally, Korea wants to have nuclear weapons because otherwise it's at the mercy of the countries that already have them. The reasoning is identical.
As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others.
It doesn't really work that way. To the extent that that R&D is paid for from the revenues made by selling to the US Government, you'd be double counting. To the extent that it's paid for from revenues made by selling to other governments, you'd be counting non-US military spending.
(Which isn't to deny that it's hypocritical to cry foul when other countries to the same things we do - it's pretty obvious that anyone the US or its allies (or other powerful countries) may one day see an interest in fighting with will want to be sufficiently armed to deter that which means being able to deliver a sufficiently destructive payload a sufficient distance. This is just reality. Everyone knows that the USSR wasn't attacked despite attrocities to equal anyone else's because they DID have weapons of mass destruction on a scale nobody would want to face and that Iraq wouldn't have been attacked if they had been in that position too. Again, reality.)
So if you had billions of dollars, you would not be interested in making more money, you would give it all away??
He didn't say he didn't see this as a way of making money. Quite the opposite : "I'd still charge plenty for my service and I'm fairly certain I'd still get a ton of customers."
Maybe his plan wouldn't make him money (failed businesses are hardly uncommon) but your claim that he wouldn't be trying to make more money looks like something you just made up. How about discussing the actual flaws in the product he proposes?
What I wish these extremist nuts would understand is that the theory of evolution does not, ipso facto, rule out the possibility of a supernatural creator.
Obviously true, in the same way that finding out that mommy and daddy bought all those presents for you does not, ipso facto, rule out the possibilty of Santa Claus. However at that point if you really want to hang onto your fantasies then Ockham sharpening his razor becomes the stuff of nightmares. Best not to let it get that far.
Now, what they're doing is fine and legal in their jurisdiction, that's their trump card, and it would befine if TPB was only accessible to residents of that jurisdiction. But it isn't, TPB is operating outside of their jurisdiction, that's that a problem.
It might be a 'problem' if the information is illegal elsewhere but the only thing that should be relevant here is whether it's legal in the jurisidction they operate in (I'm not well enough informed to have an opinion on that, fortunately there's a court considering it so we just have to wait and see what their ruling is).
The principle you seem to want to apply would lead to people anywhere in the world being subject to prosecution for having pictures of scantily clad people (her face is showing!) on a web site that's available in Saudi Arabia or for carrying truthful information about the Chinese governement.
If the US (or other) government want to restrict availability of the Pirate Bay web site in their own country then they need to put measures in place to block it.
To claim that man has contributed to global warming is a reasonable statement. But, now we need to determine HOW MUCH he has contributed.
Why? So we can decide whether to feel guilty or not? The big questions are whether and what we can do about it and whether we should do them. If global warming is a problem for us and there is an available course of action to mitigate the effects then it would be pretty stupid to refuse to take it on the grounds that the problem isn't entirely (or even at all) our fault.
How do you test a lie detector? For it to work you have to have someone ACTUALLY LYING, not saying something contrary to the truth, but actually trying to be secretly untruthful.
It's not that hard. You have two teams of volunteers. Team A interview members of team B and have to obtain certain pieces of information. Members of team B are asked to lie about certain things to members of team A and will get an additional reward if team A believe them. The people monitoring know what the lies are and who's telling them, and have access to the detector (Nobody in team A or B need access to the detector or to know it exists, nobody in team A needs to be told there will be lies; the sole function of the teams is to provide someone to be lied to and someone to tell the lies).
I'm sure there's lots of other variations too.
How would you feel if you were resurrected by some other primates as one of a handful of your kind 50,000 years hence?
As an alternative to just being dead? I'll take the resurrection. Presumably I could still kill myself again later if it wasn't working out, so what is there to lose?
if you are willing (and able) to scientifically analyse what human will (free or otherwise) really is, and what are the boundaries of its freedom. If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever
Why?
As far as I can tell, "free will" means that your decision making processes aren't interfered with by outside influences other than through standard interfaces. Classical example would be e.g. no gods or magicians are reaching in and using their amazing powers to override your thought processes.
Someone whose actions were somehow being manipulated by electrodes implanted in their brain would have their free will reduced. More prosaically, you might consider someone whose drink has been spiked without their knowing it, thus impairing their ability to make decisions, to be "less free willed" than they would otherwise be.
I can't see that randomness has anything to do with free will by any sensible meaning of the term. A person with a random number generator in their head isnâ(TM)t any more 'free' than someone without one.
it is reasonable to make the financial recompse for a crime more than what the thing is worth at retail
Although there are circumstances in which copyright infringement can amount to a crime, nobody has alleged that such is the case here. This is a purely civil matter.
Given that the most promising research to-date on life-extension (resveratrol and caloric restriction) can produce about a 40% increase in maximum lifespan at best, how do you estimate that we can achieve a lifespan of 1,000 years (about a 10-fold increase in current maximum lifespans)?
It's a big round number.
If you had 60 secs to get a college student excited about wanting to study and research life extension, what would you say besides the obvious 'live-forever' meme?
"Just think how much money you could charge for it".
Has any research been done on how extreme longevity affects a person psychologically?
I'm happy to be the psychological guinea pig if everyone else wants to hold off on longevity until my 1,000 years is up.
2. If you mean "don't buy one if you think lack of full disclosure is itself a problem" then that seems equivalent to demanding full disclosure.
I thought they were responsible for assigning IP blocks and deciding that ".museum" was a good idea. When did that become "overseeing the internet"?
Nonsense. People haven't "learned to avoid natural selection", they've been subject to it. In the short term natural selection has favoured these "unsustainable approaches" which have helped in providing decent life expectancy and thus breeding opportunities for billions of people, in the long term natural selection may not favour this approach (by definition, it won't if they are in fact unsustainable). That's natural selection at work. There is no avoiding it.
2. If you really think someone is making death threats, you don't send them a letter expelling them ("that'll stop him killing me!"). You call the police.
It's pretty obvious that the university officials are being disingenuous here. I'm quite happy to assume stupidity rather than malice in most cases but there are limits.
Incidentally, it's unlikely that this particular proposed alternative will help. Alleged filesharers already get sued and it's no big deterrent. It's unlikely that the state footing the bill will change that. It's just a waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere.
(1) Deterministic - theoretically predictable by formula by someone with perfect understanding of your workings and all relevant variables.
(2) Truly Random - as likely to try to eat the monitor as to type on the keyboard.
(3) Probabilistic - some things more likely than others but with a random element e.g. 90% chance I was going to write a post disagreeing with you, 9% chance I'd write a post agreeing with you, 1% chance I wouldn't respond at all.
Throwing in non-material components such as "souls" doesn't inherently increase the range of options - the soul must work deterministically, truly randomly, or probabilistically. If you think there's another possibility then please say what it is.
Truly Random doesn't match our perceptions. At least, not mine. Either Deterministic or Probabilistic could. I can't see anything more "free" about one than the other. Deterministic has a more pleasing sense of strong identity (I'd like to think there IS an answer to "what would you do in situation x", not just "it depends on a throw of the dice") but that doesn't mean it true of course.
So Mr Apple-Tree has an epiphany. That's right, the 'apples' are still free but people care about the derivatives. You're getting there.
That makes you a fan of a freak.