The main reason our particular species of green goo hasn't overtaken the planet, for example, is that we find lots of other species cute and so we've made a conscious decision not to exterminate them. And even then we lost (and are still losing) quite a few other interesting and useful parts of the biosphere, as we pass through the dangerous "apes with tools" phase on the way in between "apes" and "apes with tools and self-restraint".
What if "bacteria with tools" turn out to be just as big a step above bacteria? Evolution has surely found a pretty good local optimum for bacteria, but intelligent invention may still be able to find a non-local improvement. Apes evolved to be successful omnivores for a very long time, but that didn't mean it wasn't a huge change when some of them started equipping themselves with spears, bows and arrows, guns...
"I, PAUL REVERE, of Boston, in the colony of the Massachusetts Bay in New England; of lawful age, do testify and say; that I was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren, of said Boston, on the evening of the 18th of April, about 10 o'clock; when he desired me, ''to go to Lexington, and inform Mr. Samuel Adams, and the Hon. John Hancock Esq. that there was a number of soldiers, composed of light troops, and grenadiers, marching to the bottom of the common, where there was a number of boats to receive them; it was supposed that they were going to Lexington, by the way of Cambridge River, to take them, or go to Concord, to destroy the colony stores.''
The stores being referred to here are guns, gunpowder, and shot. And their suppositions turned out to be correct: Gage and his troops were indeed heading to seize and destroy those stores.
Moving past your mistakes of fact and on to your mistake of philosophy: facts only have to hurt you if you let them. Learning unexpected new truths, and more importantly figuring out which biases had led you to believe old falsehoods, are good things. The less you fight the process, the less it hurts.
For those who don't know the jargon, "allopathic" is a homeopath's word. "Homeo"= same, "Allo"= other. So real doctors are "allopaths" because they treat diseases with something other than what homeopaths think causes the disease.
Homeopaths actually regard this as a pejorative, which tells you just how fucking dumb this shit is.
When I sit too close or too far or too off-center when watching my 2D films, everything is affected by trapezoidal distortion. People look too skinny or too fat, parallel lines stop being parallel... And 3D problems still apply too. Arguably the upper limit of "parallax problems" is "parallax tells my brain that all the close objects on-screen and all the distant objects on-screen are all the same distance from me."
On the other hand, I don't intend to get a 3D TV any time soon either. But I will be happy that all this stereo optical footage exists for when they finally perfect on-retina projectors.;-)
I wonder what would happen if someone pointed out to the rank-and-file TeaPartiers that paying the same amount of tax and getting reduced public services is in fact a tax increase.
Nope - it's a tax decrease. Spending less without reducing tax rates leaves the taxes on you the same, but it reduces the taxes on your kids.
It's also the best kind of tax decrease: one which applies to everyone, rather than one which only applies to everyone who can offshore their profits. When the government tries to raise tax revenues by 60% to match their spending, do you think you're going to be able to shelter a five figure salary from that? I doubt it. But a seven figure investment income, that's much more mobile.
Oh wait, did I say 60%? Turns out that revenues unexpectedly failed to jump as much as we told them to, as if the money was just vanishing from the country somehow. We're going to have to keep bumping rates up until we're back even. Buying "troubled assets" from their otherwise wealthy owners isn't free!
Freedom of speech wasn't an afterthought. The trick is that, in order to understand how freedom of speech was guaranteed to begin with, you have to deliberately reject a misunderstanding that is at the foundation of hundreds of thousands of pages of US laws and regulations.
"Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?" - Alexander Hamilton
The Bill of Rights' whole existence was subject to this debate. One side thought that, without any extra, spelled-out-for-the-slow-children protections for basic human rights, the government would have been more likely to violate those rights. Another side thought that the Bill of Rights would be misleading, confusing people into thinking that the federal government was to be empowered to do anything that wasn't covered by a short list of enumerated limits, rather than understanding that the federal government was to be limited from doing anything that wasn't covered by a short list of enumerated powers.
Sadly, in hindsight both sides were obviously correct.
corrupting local persons into subverting the local government. He would be arrested in any country for that.
Really? My country subverts its local government every two years. Some of the bastards get to go four or even six years with minimal danger of being kicked out, but even during that time we're allowed to rant about how much they should be kicked out.
That makes for a much more accurate way of judging how large and popular an opposition is, in fact: you let it oppose. It does seem less stable to have a bunch of people freely questioning your power, but as a lot of countries are currently finding out, in the long run it's safer than bottling those questions up until a sudden preference cascade topples you.
Upon succefsfully returning with the time traveler to his home era, I difcovered that farming, which ufed to employ the vast majority of my countrymen, is now accomplifhed by mechanical clockworks under the supervifion of only a few percent of the populace! Surely the vaft majority of people in the colonies are now out of work!
Bullfighting is well established and widely accepted also. Does that make it okay?
In Spain, yes. In India, no.
I'm not sure whether this morality means that any change to a law or its interpretation is always wrong (after all, clearly either the change will permit something that isn't accepted or it will suppress something that is accepted!), or whether it means that any such change is always right (after all, after the change, the new law will be the accepted law!). Either way it seems like a pretty optimal morality to use for avoiding going to jail and a tautologically worthless morality to use for designing or evaluating law.
It's at the heart of every bubble, and it always seems to work, right up until the point when some of its most fervent proponents realize they've become the Biggest Suckers.
And it doesn't have any "gotcha" clauses changing its effects on vs. off US soil.
The reason the US Constitution doesn't always apply off US soil is the same reason why it doesn't always apply on US soil: it's just a piece of paper which doesn't enforce itself. And if you can phrase your excuses for contradicting it in ways people want to believe ("Liberals, the Commerce Clause means we get to buy everyone puppies!" "Conservatives, none of that due-process, no-torture stuff applies to terrifying foreigners!"), then you don't need to worry about anyone else enforcing it either.
If I'm kept in the dark about the details of important actions committed by my government, what hope do I have to ever make a truly informed decision when it comes time to vote?
In such a situation the only safe rule possible is to never vote for an incumbent. Decent rule in most other situations, too.
ironic that not the free market, but REGULATION is what's fixing that crap.
Ideologue much? As you just finished pointing out, video is ever-increasingly being transmitted over media that isn't subject to this regulation! Congress is just now getting around to trying to fix a decades-old problem while ignoring its modern manifestation.
Me, I'm just glad that all my TV and computer systems come with mute buttons. I'm sure I have the Federal Department of Muting to thank for that, right?
How close we get to thermodynamic limitations? We're still many orders of magnitude away from that; even doubling every year wouldn't get us there in one decade. Landauer's bounds on the theoretically possible seem to be much "looser" from a human perspective than Carnot's were. (and they seem to have more loopholes)
Movies would become copyable! You'd be able to go right over to Google, type "avatar torrent", and get millions of hits pointing you at places where you could download Avatar without paying its producers a dime!
So what if the studios have to make it harder for those of us who are willing to pay them? Surely not getting as much of our money is a small price to pay, as long as they're successfully preventing nightmarish copyright infringement such as I described above. Why, the only conceivable excuse for giving up on DRM would be if, for some strange reason, it doesn't actually work.
He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.
5 days, he says, but without assuming inefficiency, so let's call it a millenium to be conservative.
That's as much energy as is produced by our star in half of a millisecond.
By the time our heirs are crowded enough here that seeding civilization around other stars looks sensible, sending those seeds will also look easy.
But by that time TFA is no more relevant than Stross' calculations. The first starfarers will think it's cute that we expected them to want to all climb back down a deep gravity well after they get there. As if we were fish futurists, imagining how useful lungs and legs would be for getting to another pond where we would dispose of them again.
You're conflating two very different ways to screw up a series.
A: If you extend it so far that you have to pad it out with boring subplots and unlikeable characters, then that's not so bad - just fast forward through the tedious stuff and enjoy the exceptions. Babylon 5 Season 5 was no worse than Season 1 in that regard; in both cases you can pretty much skip the non-Londo-and-G'Kar stuff and you're still good.
B: If you extend the story in such a way that it changes the background or themes from the first story for the worse, then that's much more awful. Starting with a Neo who says "I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people a world you don't want them to see." and inexplicably transitioning to "I'm mopey." doesn't just make a bad second movie, it makes the first movie worse. Following Newt's rescue in Aliens with her pointless death in the Alien3 backstory turns Ripley from a hero into a tragic farce. And following up "They Have A Plan" with "But The Writers Can't Think Of A Good One" was just sad. Here the best way to go really is to just pretend that the sequel/prequel stories didn't exist.
I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.
Your failure of imagination is more complete than that. Ubuntu's (or your own distro's) repository doesn't even have to accept your app for your app to benefit from Ubuntu's repository management! Users can also add whatever third-party repositories they want, giving them easy access to, dependency checking for, and updates of software that hasn't been accepted into their core distribution.
This functionality exists in practically every Linux package manager, because if you're designing a software update tool to benefit your users rather than to benefit your company, it's plainly obvious that you don't want to lock them out of updating even non-company-approved software.
We could always replace the removed lunar mass with something that Earth has a surplus of. I suggest using people who can't do back-of-the-napkin arithmetic.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true of both aether and dark energy... but at one point it was also true of Neptune and neutrinos.
It's also not quite as true as it used to be of dark matter.
The main reason our particular species of green goo hasn't overtaken the planet, for example, is that we find lots of other species cute and so we've made a conscious decision not to exterminate them. And even then we lost (and are still losing) quite a few other interesting and useful parts of the biosphere, as we pass through the dangerous "apes with tools" phase on the way in between "apes" and "apes with tools and self-restraint".
What if "bacteria with tools" turn out to be just as big a step above bacteria? Evolution has surely found a pretty good local optimum for bacteria, but intelligent invention may still be able to find a non-local improvement. Apes evolved to be successful omnivores for a very long time, but that didn't mean it wasn't a huge change when some of them started equipping themselves with spears, bows and arrows, guns...
And yet, you almost always win more than the people who are playing...
"I, PAUL REVERE, of Boston, in the colony of the Massachusetts Bay in New England; of lawful age, do testify and say; that I was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren, of said Boston, on the evening of the 18th of April, about 10 o'clock; when he desired me, ''to go to Lexington, and inform Mr. Samuel Adams, and the Hon. John Hancock Esq. that there was a number of soldiers, composed of light troops, and grenadiers, marching to the bottom of the common, where there was a number of boats to receive them; it was supposed that they were going to Lexington, by the way of Cambridge River, to take them, or go to Concord, to destroy the colony stores.''
The stores being referred to here are guns, gunpowder, and shot. And their suppositions turned out to be correct: Gage and his troops were indeed heading to seize and destroy those stores.
Moving past your mistakes of fact and on to your mistake of philosophy: facts only have to hurt you if you let them. Learning unexpected new truths, and more importantly figuring out which biases had led you to believe old falsehoods, are good things. The less you fight the process, the less it hurts.
Explained most beautifully here:
Your thesis is that Bitcoin values will go up too much, which will mean that Bitcoin values will go down too much.
You've *almost* made it to a proof-by-contradiction; the only remaining step is to actually notice the contradiction...
When I sit too close or too far or too off-center when watching my 2D films, everything is affected by trapezoidal distortion. People look too skinny or too fat, parallel lines stop being parallel... And 3D problems still apply too. Arguably the upper limit of "parallax problems" is "parallax tells my brain that all the close objects on-screen and all the distant objects on-screen are all the same distance from me."
On the other hand, I don't intend to get a 3D TV any time soon either. But I will be happy that all this stereo optical footage exists for when they finally perfect on-retina projectors. ;-)
I wonder what would happen if someone pointed out to the rank-and-file TeaPartiers that paying the same amount of tax and getting reduced public services is in fact a tax increase.
Nope - it's a tax decrease. Spending less without reducing tax rates leaves the taxes on you the same, but it reduces the taxes on your kids.
It's also the best kind of tax decrease: one which applies to everyone, rather than one which only applies to everyone who can offshore their profits. When the government tries to raise tax revenues by 60% to match their spending, do you think you're going to be able to shelter a five figure salary from that? I doubt it. But a seven figure investment income, that's much more mobile.
Oh wait, did I say 60%? Turns out that revenues unexpectedly failed to jump as much as we told them to, as if the money was just vanishing from the country somehow. We're going to have to keep bumping rates up until we're back even. Buying "troubled assets" from their otherwise wealthy owners isn't free!
Freedom of speech wasn't an afterthought. The trick is that, in order to understand how freedom of speech was guaranteed to begin with, you have to deliberately reject a misunderstanding that is at the foundation of hundreds of thousands of pages of US laws and regulations.
"Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?" - Alexander Hamilton
The Bill of Rights' whole existence was subject to this debate. One side thought that, without any extra, spelled-out-for-the-slow-children protections for basic human rights, the government would have been more likely to violate those rights. Another side thought that the Bill of Rights would be misleading, confusing people into thinking that the federal government was to be empowered to do anything that wasn't covered by a short list of enumerated limits, rather than understanding that the federal government was to be limited from doing anything that wasn't covered by a short list of enumerated powers.
Sadly, in hindsight both sides were obviously correct.
corrupting local persons into subverting the local government. He would be arrested in any country for that.
Really? My country subverts its local government every two years. Some of the bastards get to go four or even six years with minimal danger of being kicked out, but even during that time we're allowed to rant about how much they should be kicked out.
That makes for a much more accurate way of judging how large and popular an opposition is, in fact: you let it oppose. It does seem less stable to have a bunch of people freely questioning your power, but as a lot of countries are currently finding out, in the long run it's safer than bottling those questions up until a sudden preference cascade topples you.
Oh, yeah, and that "freely" thing is nice too.
Upon succefsfully returning with the time traveler to his home era, I difcovered that farming, which ufed to employ the vast majority of my countrymen, is now accomplifhed by mechanical clockworks under the supervifion of only a few percent of the populace! Surely the vaft majority of people in the colonies are now out of work!
In Spain, yes. In India, no.
I'm not sure whether this morality means that any change to a law or its interpretation is always wrong (after all, clearly either the change will permit something that isn't accepted or it will suppress something that is accepted!), or whether it means that any such change is always right (after all, after the change, the new law will be the accepted law!). Either way it seems like a pretty optimal morality to use for avoiding going to jail and a tautologically worthless morality to use for designing or evaluating law.
It's at the heart of every bubble, and it always seems to work, right up until the point when some of its most fervent proponents realize they've become the Biggest Suckers.
And it doesn't have any "gotcha" clauses changing its effects on vs. off US soil.
The reason the US Constitution doesn't always apply off US soil is the same reason why it doesn't always apply on US soil: it's just a piece of paper which doesn't enforce itself. And if you can phrase your excuses for contradicting it in ways people want to believe ("Liberals, the Commerce Clause means we get to buy everyone puppies!" "Conservatives, none of that due-process, no-torture stuff applies to terrifying foreigners!"), then you don't need to worry about anyone else enforcing it either.
The DeCSS case specifically was "settled" exactly the opposite way. Freedom of speech didn't do jack to help the glider or bnetd authors either.
If I'm kept in the dark about the details of important actions committed by my government, what hope do I have to ever make a truly informed decision when it comes time to vote?
In such a situation the only safe rule possible is to never vote for an incumbent. Decent rule in most other situations, too.
it's better not to piss of the legal authorities either
Generally when the legal authorities aren't supposed to force you to do something, they're not supposed to coerce you into doing it either.
ironic that not the free market, but REGULATION is what's fixing that crap.
Ideologue much? As you just finished pointing out, video is ever-increasingly being transmitted over media that isn't subject to this regulation! Congress is just now getting around to trying to fix a decades-old problem while ignoring its modern manifestation.
Me, I'm just glad that all my TV and computer systems come with mute buttons. I'm sure I have the Federal Department of Muting to thank for that, right?
How close we get to thermodynamic limitations? We're still many orders of magnitude away from that; even doubling every year wouldn't get us there in one decade. Landauer's bounds on the theoretically possible seem to be much "looser" from a human perspective than Carnot's were. (and they seem to have more loopholes)
Movies would become copyable! You'd be able to go right over to Google, type "avatar torrent", and get millions of hits pointing you at places where you could download Avatar without paying its producers a dime!
So what if the studios have to make it harder for those of us who are willing to pay them? Surely not getting as much of our money is a small price to pay, as long as they're successfully preventing nightmarish copyright infringement such as I described above. Why, the only conceivable excuse for giving up on DRM would be if, for some strange reason, it doesn't actually work.
stop trying to improve on what you have.
It's so cute when Luddites publish their half-baked philosophy on the internet. And they don't even notice the irony!
He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.
5 days, he says, but without assuming inefficiency, so let's call it a millenium to be conservative.
That's as much energy as is produced by our star in half of a millisecond.
By the time our heirs are crowded enough here that seeding civilization around other stars looks sensible, sending those seeds will also look easy.
But by that time TFA is no more relevant than Stross' calculations. The first starfarers will think it's cute that we expected them to want to all climb back down a deep gravity well after they get there. As if we were fish futurists, imagining how useful lungs and legs would be for getting to another pond where we would dispose of them again.
You're conflating two very different ways to screw up a series.
A: If you extend it so far that you have to pad it out with boring subplots and unlikeable characters, then that's not so bad - just fast forward through the tedious stuff and enjoy the exceptions. Babylon 5 Season 5 was no worse than Season 1 in that regard; in both cases you can pretty much skip the non-Londo-and-G'Kar stuff and you're still good.
B: If you extend the story in such a way that it changes the background or themes from the first story for the worse, then that's much more awful. Starting with a Neo who says "I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people a world you don't want them to see." and inexplicably transitioning to "I'm mopey." doesn't just make a bad second movie, it makes the first movie worse. Following Newt's rescue in Aliens with her pointless death in the Alien3 backstory turns Ripley from a hero into a tragic farce. And following up "They Have A Plan" with "But The Writers Can't Think Of A Good One" was just sad. Here the best way to go really is to just pretend that the sequel/prequel stories didn't exist.
I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.
Your failure of imagination is more complete than that. Ubuntu's (or your own distro's) repository doesn't even have to accept your app for your app to benefit from Ubuntu's repository management! Users can also add whatever third-party repositories they want, giving them easy access to, dependency checking for, and updates of software that hasn't been accepted into their core distribution.
This functionality exists in practically every Linux package manager, because if you're designing a software update tool to benefit your users rather than to benefit your company, it's plainly obvious that you don't want to lock them out of updating even non-company-approved software.
We could always replace the removed lunar mass with something that Earth has a surplus of. I suggest using people who can't do back-of-the-napkin arithmetic.