Right now there is again massive erasure of parts of Egyptian history, due to... let's put this politely... "religious pressures" bin-laden style. Apparently the fact that Egypt was a very nice place before some religious idiot conquered it and started the destruction of everything of value or recognition. But then again, the damage Egypt's doing to it's history pales in comparison to what it's neighbours are doing, with the major exception of Israel.
Orwell's loss of history was no accident. Not carelessness. It was a deliberate attack on it, to make it fit particular viewpoints.
A contemporary example would be the re-representing of the "founding fathers" as secular individuals.
In Soviet Russia it was the brutal repression of all knowledge of the state that went immediately before it. All history was but a "detail" not to be given much attention. All you needed to know about history is that it lead to the "great leader" taking control.
Historically many more states destroyed their history than preserved it. Ancient Egypt suppressed large parts of it's past. So did the Jewish kingdoms. The same goes for China. The Roman empire didn't repress history, but the Vandals and Visigoths (who were "democratic") did. All islamic states have massively repressed large parts of their history and have tried (and sometimes succeeded) in repressing external records of their history, and they're still doing it today. E.g. the ancient destruction of the (then Roman Catholic) library of alexandria, and more recent the destruction of a historical account of a trip through Persia by an Iranian agent. Perhaps the most well known destruction of history was the destruction of the Buddha's of Afghanistan. All muslim territory, except one part of a single city has only non-muslim historical sites. Mecca itself is the remains of a mostly Jewish traders' town. Saudi Arabia is teeming with mostly Jewish and Christian remains of city-states, forts, marketplaces and city walls, all knowledge of which is brutally repressed. So are countries like Egypt and Sudan, in fact the whole of Northern Africa is. Nearly all landmarks in Turkey are christian in origin, with the few remaining secular (the blue "mosque" was designed by a jew, modeled after the biggest christian church in existence), a fact that you best keep to yourself in Turkey.
Data loss will, like in the states before us, not be an accident. It will be deliberate destruction, like in Orwell's books.
It just takes a certain kind of person AND a certain kind of state to preserve anything of value in the first place.
Obviously when talking about the effects of a correlation, one assumes (correctly) that all the work of proving a significant correlation is done. This is part of the question.
Your critique in the first paragraph is like saying 1+1 is not 2 since you can never be sure that the two "1"'s mean the same thing.
Then you start pulling ever more far-fetched "problems" out of your ass. You know what all your objections have in common ? If they were true, there wouldn't have been a correlation in the first place. Of course the correlation IS THERE, so that should tell you that those objections are wrong. They are also irrelevant since they are attempts to change the question, they are not critiques at the method used to arrive at the answer.
As to your third paragraph about "other factors", I left that one open. It is indeed possible that in Africa, environmental conditions are different resulting BOTH in lower intelligence AND gene differences, but that intelligence is partially independant of the genes. Perhaps the social structure or culture of black africa is partially to blame.
That, of course doesn't change anything about the conclusion.
You will never match a similar aged black person in an endurance run. It will simply never happen, the cooling system of whites' bodies is several percentage points less efficient than that of a black person, resulting in VERY unequal performance in a (long) race.
But, if you put a random white guy against a random black guy in an intelligence test, the chances of the black guy winning are 1 in 200. Likewise, do the same with an ethnic european and an ethnic japanese and the chances of the european winning is about 1 in 7.
I know this goes against your political viewpoint, and is supposedly "racist". It is also the truth. I suggest you go and blame gaia, nature or whoever is responsible for evolution according to your beliefs, and leave me alone.
That google link of yours points to (unrealistic) treatises on morality. And yet you accuse me of going off-topic... It is beyond obvious that the only problem you have with this is that it disagrees with your political persuasion. You refuse to discuss science, because that would immediately undermine your political viewpoint. The truth, to be exact, would immediately undermine your political viewpoint. I don't give a shit about any morality when talking science, and I don't care, at all, about your morality.
Let's just let people judge whether or not evolution behaves like it's model, genetic algorithms, or not.
You claim that they behave totally different. That's like saying gravity follows your equations some of the time and my equations some of the time. Obviously such a thing is beyond ridiculous.
This type of thing is the typical defense of political whacko's who don't agree with science : science somehow doesn't apply "in this case". There is "nothing that compares to MY ideology". That sort of arguments.
Sorry to kill your holy cow : evolution, and natural selection : 1) works by selectively massacring inferior species. This is the basic principle of operation, that can never be changed 2) preventing (1) is possible, but represents an economic cost, that will raise when those "would-have-been-killed-individuals" reproduce. It will keep rising, and it will become ever more necessary to save those individuals, since the quality of their genes will rapidly deteriorate over even just a few generations. The cost will rise, not only with the numbers of "saved" individuals, but also with the severity of the problems, both of which will only rise, without limit. No matter how rich any person, group, company, state, eventually they will fail to pay the price, resulting in the very-short-term extinction of all the offspring of the "saved" individuals, and those individuals themselves.
In other words, preventing natural selection from taking a life will most likely result in a mass-extinction later. 3) the eventual result of evolution is that a single species will be the only one left, as no other species can compete with it. This is the outcome that is aimed for. Furthermore, even though great diversity is created during the "startup phase" of the algorithm, that diversity is quickly eradicated once the algorithm runs into the limits imposed by the environment. The number of species drops extremely, and the differences between the remaining individuals shrink dramatically. They will keep shrinking, ever more dramatically, until the individuals are basically clones of one another.
Citation needed. I know evolution says only the most adaptable, fittest, or strongest specimens within a species are supposed to survive but can you point out where evolution says only one species will survive? That theory, that only the fittest survive, also overlooks some things. Such as mutual survival.
So wait... the fact that an optimization algorithm will... you know... optimize things (yielding the 1 optimal solution eventually) needs a citation but the "fact" that if that same algorithm "overlooks some things" there will be "mutual survival" (word invented just for this post ? I'm honored)
Well here's your citation for an optimization function yielding 1 response : every last textbook on genetic (or any other, for that matter) algorithms.
I might also citate the conditions for only 1 course of action being optimal, in which case the mass-extinction procedure would be, you know, the "right" thing to do (again assuming "atheist" morality, considering nothing except optimality, since in any human being actually alive this would certainly NOT be the right thing to do)
The condition for there being 1 single optimal lifeform is...... that the "state space" of our universe has a geometric shape (of any dimensionality) in which there exists a "shortest path" between 2 points.
Again this can be found in any AI textbook since it's quite an essential part of the whole field.
Now let's analyse the problem that genetic algorithms "overlook some things", which is true. So what happens if they do ? Well those species that it "overlooks" never get born in the first place. They never get created.
Nothing changes for the species that do exist : they still have to compete, and they will still be eliminated one-by-one until the optimal one remains.
Biodiversity in a genetic algorithm search increases "exponentially" when "energy" (the potential for creating new offspring) is abundant, and the optimal solution is far, far away.
Once the algorithm decides on the general idea it's going to follow, this exponential growth becomes linear growth for a fraction of the time, in which it "fills up the sidelines" (ie. the algorithm has hit some absolute limits, but does not yet fill the "biosphere" 100%).
Once creating offspring becomes a zero-sum game, in which you can only have a kid if you kill another lifeform first, biodiversity exponentially decreases, and VERY soon only a few solutions (at best, you see it dropping to 1 solution in at least half the cases) remain. From that point on there will be a linear reduction in the biodiversity until only one solution remains and there are no beneficial mutations left.
As can be easily seen on human population growth curves (and biodiversity curves) for earth, the era of exponential growth has closed : we have hit some absolute limits on our growth, but not yet all of them : there is still room to expand, but not "everywhere". Some borders are closed already.
Now follows a period of increased turbulence, in which the species (people, animals,...) fight for access to the remaining open borders in the solution space. Pretty soon these "settlers" will also hit absolute walls. ("pretty soon" means, say "somewhere between 1800 AD and 11800 AD").
After the period we live in ends, with the linear growth in human population and biodiversity, the zero-sum direct-competition game will start (and in many places, it's already raging). The only way to prosper will become killing and raiding others.
That fase will decide a "winner" race. Certainly amongst humans a single race will not just dominate, but exterminate all other races. This will certainly happen before another 50.000 or so years pass (and may happen very fast, as in fact it's already started and it could easily, at any point, accelerate and "finishing up" in a few years)
My statistics are only correlation... not causation.
There are 3 options, in the case of correlation. A -> B B -> A C -> A & C -> B
Now let's translate, in the different options :
1) Either races are not equal in intelligence directly due to their genes 2) or some races are more intelligent than others and as a result have modified their genes to bring out this advantage even more 3) there is some factor that cause both intelligence differences and genetic differences.
Option 2 is clearly not in the realm of possibility. So it's either 1 or 3. Both 1 and 3 would be considered racist, one of them can be concluded to be true if there is correlation.
Economic migration (which is the migration of people due to expectation of producing (and consuming) more in the new location) is a disaster. Generally those that due it fare relatively well compared to the general population. So their absence lowers average productivity. Furthermore they are generally worse than the average productivity in their new location (at least for 1 or 2 generations), so they lower the average productivity in their new community as well.
You *might* say that economic migration has at least the benefit of "closing the gap", but there are many indications this is not true, that in fact economic migrations WIDEN the gap between rich and poor countries.
And btw, we have found many genes that relate to intelligence. Certainly extremes have been found (for example the gene coding for nerve isolation, the genes coding for the "bridge" in our brains, the genes... all have been found. Their absence or even minor modification will take care of lowering iq by a full 50 points at least). More subtle genes have also been found, but are... more subtle.
If this was the case, how do you explain the fact that independent of some large-scale environmental insults which left temporary reductions in species there has generally been ever increasing numbers of species filling ever greater numbers of evolutionary niches.
How do I explain this "fact" ? First of all your "fact" is wrong. One might notice how fast non-researched facts get quoted when they fit political opinion on slashdot.
But I will refute your fantasy (it's not a fact) simply by stating that evolution increases the number of species for a very long time. It will start slowing down once you get near the "natural selection" part really kicking in. Then you will get a mass-dieoff massively reducing the number of independant species, which will leave a vacuum for the remaining "more fit" species to fill up. After the dieoff less species will be left.
So your fact predicts a monotonously increasing number of species. I predict regular mass-dieoffs. We're being scientific here, so let's look up what happened in reality:
Note the regular cliffs, with several distinct cliffs eliminating over 50% of all species alive.
Note also the exponential slope upwards (the "trendline"). It doesn't take a genius to understand that this cannot last. That is because evolution is still an accelerating process, that's improving species at ever-increasing rates (note that the wikipedia article states that the mass-extinction events are a necessity for this process, or at the least very useful). But once it gets close to optimality you will see the number of species drop of drastically.
Take a genetic algorithm and observe what happens:
Clearly we are on the slope in the lower left corner, meaning that, currently, huge "fitness variations" are "allowed" (do not immediately result in an extinction), but the lowest survivable bound on efficiency is rapidly ramping upwards. Today, you can be half as efficient as another human being and nobody cares (though there are limits, even today. The excessive cost of some treatments is already moving : "welfare" states prohibit those (life-saving) treatments, e.g. holland. Other nations, like America, are restricting them to richer individuals due to market forces, but at least they're not illegal. So if you're really ill, at least in America you get a chance, whereas in Europe many diseases are death senteces, point). Within 100.000 years 10% less fit than the best adapted human being will be a death sentence. Within a few million years 0.1% less fit than the optimal human being will be a death sentence.
Pretty soon (meaning "at best another 100.000 years from now") many species will start failing to improve themselves fast enough, meaning they will be quickly drowned out by species that reproduce faster, if they're lucky enough to not outright starve to death.
And your other "fact" is also... equally false:
Granted, humans are now doing a bang-up job of wiping them out, but we will either learn how to stop doing that, and thus su
Note again, how this obvious lie is perfectly in line with your political viewpoint, and blatantly contradicts science. You expect this to somehow not matter, since you present your political viewpoint (which is less realistic than that of the average creationist I might add) as fact.
What is your point exactly ? You seem to be arguing that all races are equal and then you drop this:
I"m not saying there may not be significant genetic differences between the races.
Let's agree that there is at least one significant difference between the races : skin color. And are others, as you say, and truly sorry, intelligence differences are amongst the bigger differences. Races are genetically different, and by quite a margin.
In reality there is no real question within scientific circles, but everybody who dares to say it, gets clobbered:
You can also see the political reaction : ad-hominems. People attack science because it clashes with "progressive" ideals. The reaction of anyone who claims to accept science as truth would obviously be entirely different, or at least : they wouldn't shoot the messenger.
Unfortunately science has long since stopped supporting the prevailing political view of the world that most people in America have, to say nothing of Europeans warped views. In economics, biology, medicine,... especially "progressive" ideology gets clobbered. It is in fundamental conflict with evolution*, with economics**. Physics***, and Psychology : Modern progressive ideals are based on the ideas of the noble savage (the idea of fundamental innocence of human beings, which unfortunately is... non-existent), and the fundamental "goodness" of the human race, which everybody interprets as "having the same morals as me". Obviously the mere fact that there exists more than one religion is a contradiction with that theory.
When science, independent critical examination yields results that fail to live up to the political view, the pattern is the same everywhere. Video games cause violent behavior (in 23% of humans) and so does TV, but computer games are worse than TV in causing violent behavior : http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html. Again, amongst psychologists this result is not, at all, in dispute. Another extremely disputed psychological result is that threatening kids with punishment is the *best* incentive possible for them to learn, and far outweighs the advantages offered by a capable teacher, or good books. Or put another way : if you are forced to learn, you will learn. If you merely have the option, you won't learn (again this is true for a majority of people, not for every last person).
Contrary to "atheist", science is *NOT* in fact atheist. It is agnost, and it will never change that position.
Furthermore, science cannot replace religion in the thinking of people. All science is based on maths, and math has been proven to both leave a large class of problems absolutely unanswered, and another, even bigger class of problems are prohibitively difficult to solve (e.g. NP-complete problems), and will forever remain so.
* obviously protective nature policies are simply another factor in evolution, they cannot do what progressives expect them to do : stop evolution in it's tracks (which is what needs to happen in order to "preserve" e.g. a national park). The depopulation of yellowstone park for example, is not something that we can prevent.
Furthermore, you hear a lot about evolution, except there's one tiny little part of that theory that no progressive will ever mention : natural selection. Death. Death of everyone and anyone that's not good enough. Death that comes unpredictably, because we have little idea about the factors that are "being optimized" at the moment (and a less-than-polite person would change "being optimized" into "being genocidally implanted", since that would be close to the method gaia uses to do so)
So you're going to join a prehistoric agrarial society then ?
You forget that utilitarian approaches in both case are a necessity. We cannot calculate the most trivial of things with quantum mechanics, or even Bohr's model is not solvable (currently) for anything more complex than a SINGLE helium atom. Even Einstein's view of the world is too difficult to calculate for everything. Actually even Newton's gravity law is too complex to calculate (google "three body problem", the solar system alone has over 50.000 distinct bodies... we can't solve Newton's equations for 3 bodies, do you seriously think we use either quantum mechanics or even einstein ?)
Likewise evolution posits a model that is too complex to evaluate even in trivially simple cases, since determining what exactly "properties" are is too complex, and hence Mendel's laws are of limited use in the real world. Some things magically behave like Mendel predicted, most things... don't. In fact the large majority doesn't.
Unfortunately we know that Mendel's laws are... ridiculously simple compared to "the truth". They do not take into account transcription factors and genes (e.g. they provide no way to model the quantity of ribosome output genes produce, they do not take into account the timing, they do not take into account...)
Even if we were to include these transcription factors (which are instructions for the cell nucleus to change the "details" of the transcription process for this specific gene : timing, triggering, quantity,...) there's a... bit of an issue... interaction between the chemical products themselves. Interaction between proteins is so hugely complex, even though all components are known, we know basically nothing about it. We certainly can't predict 2 proteins will interact.
The most powerful supercomputers are just becoming (barely) able to model the interaction of (simple) proteins with themselves (as long as it's purely a mechanical interaction, no chemistry involved : ie. it may change shape, it may not form any new bonds). Seeing what molecule a gene would produce if transcribed is just barely joining the realm of what is possible, for simple cases.
So both evolution theory, and even Newton's laws are too complex to be used outside of "positive" experiments.
The correct solution would be... well I don't know... perhaps to wait a hundred years for computers to catch up with basic theories ?
Add to that the fact that science is being increasingly politicized. Even though we know little about specific genes, it is beyond trivial to arrive at the inevitable conclusion : races are different.
And they are different in a very racist way : no way an (average) white person can keep up with the (average) black person in a race. In fact "whites" are the slowest people on the planet. On the other hand they are by far the tallest. But, on average, the white person will have a full 20 points of IQ advantage on the black guy (and yellow skins will have another 5-6 points on the white guy, if you remove Chinese from the yellow skins the remainder will have a full 10 points on the average white guy). Arabs are a little bit smarter than the average black guy (about 5 points), but still seriously dumber than the average yellowskin.
The thing that most drives this attitude is the disconnect from government. Where the government is the enemy, something that should be fought against, rather than the idea that you are the government and it is something that you need to do you part in controlling it. The idea of disconnections from government is driven by the rich and greedy, basically corporations that do not want the majority of people attempting to control their government rather they oppressed masses either accept being downtrodden as their lot in life or they fight against their own government and are killed or imprisoned.
Heh the only thing that's happened is that both the country and in individual cities increased massively. It started with about 2 million people.
A US senator and congressman used to represent about 20.000 people. The average state congressman represented a few thousand at most.
Right now there is no senator or congressman that represents less than 100.000 people. Needless to say, during the same time, an individual opinion became at least 100 times less important.
Every year it becomes 1.47% less important. The effect is cumulative. So in 10 years it loses about 10%. In the last century one person's opinion became 4 times less important.
But it's mainly minority growth that's driving the mass politics (huge amounts of people with a predefined and unchanging political opinion). Right now about 25% of voters are fixed, and cannot reasonably be said to have an individual political opinion, that number will be -at least- 50% by 2050.
This is the inevitable result of population increase, nothing more.
Anything short of a lethal virus, chemical weapon, or fissionable material is fit for use by the average citizen, as far as I'm concerned.
Lethal viruses are -not- censored. Not in the US, not even in Europe. This has only been abused 2 or 3 times in 50 years and is critical to university research. You basically have to ask the CDC to send you some, and provide some justification (they merely store it, you could literally state that you want to kill your mother in law, and they'll still send you the viruses you request). Heh, in the US the taxpayer even pays for the stamp and the packaging of potential lethal weapons.
Fissionable material is censored above quantities of about 100gr.
There are other hugely dangerous substances basically for sale. Hydrogen cyanide gas can be bought in any western - and eastern - city, as ironically it's necessary for food preparation in factories. Don't tell the terrorists. LD50 (the dose that 50% of people die off) is a few mg, method of delivery is merely contact with the skin. It's method of preparation, though very easy, is being kept secret. Even though every chemist will be able to come up with a method. It can remain airborne for 15 minutes in a sort of emulsion with the right mix. Both these formulas you will not find in any chemistry book, despite the first being very uncomplicated. Especially preparing it from another -less dangerous- form of cyanide is very trivial indeed.
But you do agree that at least one thing should be censored.
Your posts continually reveal further depths of moral bankruptcy and abject toadying to the lowest forms of parasitic usurping political scum. You have no place in this country, this world, this life. Your ugly idiocy befouls all that is good in mankind. I loathe your very essence and wish your evil spirit complete and eternal annihilation.
And you use imperfections in one thing (the US), to equate them with the utter abominations on the other side.
The US is not a "totally free" society by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn't mean it isn't a whole lot more free than any other society in the world, including the EU, any of it's members and certainly including the abominations like islamic governments, dictatorships and communist governments.
Worse you use the imperfections in the US government, equate it to the massive oppression of religion, personal deification, and blatant thuggery of the states that really, really do need to be changed... you use these imperfections to... fight the ONE government that is the most free in the world.
In effect, you're fighting FOR religious oppression, dictators and demagogues.
You are not on the side of freedom. You are merely painting a thin layer of lies over your hatred of freedom and democracy. In reality you are fighting one of the most important pro-freedom forces in the world, helping the many anti-freedom forces in the world.
Do you seriously expect anyone to buy that you do this because you're pro-freedom ?
You know I have a question for you. I wonder about it, really.
Given your stance on censorship, and the general "progressive" (heh) stance on gun ownership. Do you believe in gun ownership ? Do you believe in assault weapon ownership ?
Any and all gun bans are a sort of "physical censhorship", or at least you can see where the comparison comes from. So I wonder.
There is a difference between non public or under a NDA than censored. For example, is an author's work that he never published censored? No. Its simply not published. While nuclear blueprints would certainly be non-published, and in the contract to which you sell your soul to a country when you become a government officer, they may forbid you to release such documents. That is not censorship, that is just not publishing them.
There's only a difference between non-public/nda/non-published and sensor as long as there are no leaks and no traitors. After that, it's censorship.
Unless you'd agree that under your definition of censorship killing off wikileaks.org would not be censorship. Once the information is out, it requires censorship to bring it back in. Contrary to what idiots will claim, this has a good chance of success.
Also, in the case of a scientific discovery, it may become dangerous and worthy of being out of "easy" reach of the average joe.
And for your comment on flaw finding, you assume that the average person can simply find a flaw by looking at detailed blueprints that an entire team of architects could not find.
Really ? 9/11 rewrote the book on fire safety. It would be trivial to use what was learned in that incident to bring down countless buildings, none of which are going to be rebuilt because of the new information being available.
This is an example of information that is dangerous, since it can easily be used to bring down many buildings without much warning, yet it is information that only became dangerous after a demonstration (it has something to do with asbestos and insolution installations). It used to be public information, in fact it used to be touted to anyone who wanted to hear it.
No, no, no. How do ISPs need to know what websites I am visiting? They don't. All that can easily be done anonymously.
Ever notice how cisco has "LAWFUL INTERCEPT" software for it's routers ? Juniper has the feature involved on all it's devices.
Read the docs.
Show me a case in which one single lunatic has brought down a massive amount of people due to the lack of censorship.
I only need to find stuff that could have been prevented by censorship. And finding one is not that difficult.
Thank god there WAS censorship on delivery systems (as in many people have been asked to keep certain kinds of gas dispensers secret, and they have mostly complied. As a result a few really simple tricks that could have put the death toll in the thousands were not known to the attackers)
Besides, let's not pretend it is difficult to make the western "freedom fighting" progressives shut up about something : simply kill a few.
There used to be quite a ruckus about the massacres, paedophilic acts, wars, thefts, raids and other crimes comitted by the founder of a certain religion. All it took was shooting a few journalists and now these followers of a man that's a paedophilic massacrer and thief are never again asked about which parts, exactly, of his behavior they follow. Especially since they have made it abundantly clear that the paedophilic acts ARE being followed.
Even mentioning them can get you in prison in Europe for "disturbing racial harmony" or some such idiocy. The same is happening in America.
By that standard, there are exactly... 0... people who don't live under tyranny.
By that standard the US govt is tyrannical, the EU is tyrannical, and the rest of the world... well you know the answer to that.
Since the US government in practice is not a tyranny, but there are governments that are (e.g. all muslim governments, dictatorships,...). So your standard is of little use.
That's the problem. Some censorship is critical to national security, or other types of security. Right now nuclear devices are too hard to build for any single idiot. Fusion research may change that. Would you want THOSE plans public ? Or censored ? Should the U.S. publish nuclear transports so that the next time some "allah"-massacrers feel like attacking something they can really do some damage ? Perhaps the plans to the brooklyn bridge should be made public, including a little booklet "blow these 2 bars up if you want to make sure lots of people die" ? Perhaps skyscraper plans, in order to encourage "flaw finding" in skyscrapers like in software programs. The next time muslims feel like massacring they could bring down a few 100 buildings instead of 2, by exploiting these "security holes" ?
In DNA manipulation, some procedures aren't all that difficult, even to do in your own garage. Preparing a bioweapon isn't hard (it's not killing yourself in the process and delivering the weapon that are the problematic parts), perhaps it should be published how it's done, with extra emphasis on those parts where the terrorists that have tried had real trouble with (e.g. an ineffective delivery device for sarin gas was the only thing that prevented the tokyo subway from being filled with that gas. Can't have that... let's publish a few DIY plans).
Child porn stimulates abusing children sexually for financial gain. Censorship can prevent the financial gain, thereby lowering child abuse. Of course this is a good thing.
Let's face it, censoring some things should be done. Basically anything that crosses a certain threshold of criticality and cannot easily be modified should be a secret, and it should be a crime to divulge such information to anyone who does not need to know. Everything from building weaknesses to certain scientific results...
And obviously a country's government gets to spy on "transit" traffic. Even ISP's, which are private companies, get to do that (and they *have* to, at least somewhat, if they want to keep the network operating).
Whether censorship is allowed or not, should depend on the intention of the censorship. Whether spying is allowed, should depend on the intention (certainly there can be little argument that there's nothing against defensive spying). Censorship to prevent crimes from creating truly major consequences should be done.
If we don't... all it takes is 1 (ONE) lunatic. And I do believe we have more supply than just one.
Romans were not polytheists. Not by a long shot. Yes if you look at the pantheon you would get that impression. But the pantheon was an expression of unity, not a tribute to the gods. On the contrary, Romans were an alliance of monotheist faiths and ideologies that "shared" (parts of) their mythology.
Any individual roman would worship Poseidon. Or Hera. Or Jupiter. Mostly the lines between the different religions were the same as lines between families.
However by the time Christianity started spreading in the Roman empire, one religion was much, much more popular than all others : the belief in "the republic", "the senate", and the modus operandi of the roman empire : conquer lands, then give out the land to the soldiers that helped conquer it.
Christianity became the huge success that it remained for at least 1500 years due to the massive failures and faultlines that occured in that religion after Caesar became, well, Caesar. After the failure of the republic became evident, when the fog settled on the attempts to restore the republic (I think Caesar was not lying, at all, when he said he wanted to restore the power of the senate, he just couldn't make it happen, only the later emperors actively sabotaged the senate)
Romans, AD 200, people were secular, lived under secular law and a secular state, and most were non-believers. Gods were invoked, like today, at the circus, and at the racetrack. When someone was lucky in a business transaction, he thanked "a god". More in the way that "lady luck" is thanked at casino's and that "lady justitia" will catch the culprit. People say this. In contemporary books, you will still find references aplenty to mars, god of war, athena, cupid, and most of all aphrodite. Do these people maintain the rites of these Gods ? No, if they maintain any rites they're Christians or Jews.
The same was true in the Roman Empire AD 200 or-so.
Christianity replaced the secular "roman republic" ideology. Not the many religions that the Roman republic allied with one another.
The Romans that persecuted Christians were atheists. They maintained no rites, and pushed for secular ways in all things, law and conviction, global and local.
You forget to mention that there are basically 2 principles you need to know in order to learn both java and C# in a VERY fast way : 1) memory allocation principles 2) scripting languages (and if you want to really excell) 3) generating code
1 will be more (much more) than adequately covered in any C++ course. C++ is like a "galactic conquest kit (some assembly required)" of programming languages. It can do anything. Anything any other language can do, can be done in C++. Java is more an "IKEA" language, compared to C++'s "metal shop". Everything "typical" is done for you in Java, but you have to add a few screws here and there. But getting a chair that's really "your kind of chair"... not going to happen. And a less-than-average C++ programmer is going to be a good C# and Java programmer. Generics are lacking in Java, and that's being polite.
2 will be covered with something like perl or python. Especially if you cover list comprehensions (compare them to SQL for example)
And if you are a good programmer, but you want to be the best one in the state, you'll need to add 3 to your repertoire. LISP is a good language to learn to see these principles in action. Imho linux shell is also a good language for this. Or using linux shell to generate configuration files. That sort of thing.
The important thing is not to force each language and use the "lowest common denominator" but really learn a language in order to appreciate it's differences from the others. You can write procedural programs in each of these languages trivially. DON'T. If you learn C++, use template metaprogramming and multiple inheritance (of templated classes, passing through template parameters up the inheritance chain). Use operator overloading for everything from combining 2 lists, write the complex number class everyone writes. Write a sparse matrix class if you're up to it. Learn boost. Learn ANTLR...
I realise these are not many good problems for these solutions. The point is to learn to use them, get a feel for what they can do.
Use C# for what it's good for : use all the features of C# 3.0. Use the UI designer, get to know it's advantages.
With java you want to use it's libraries. Use a few contraint satisfaction libraries. Write a J2EE application, say the bookstore bullshit. Admire the endless exceptions of the typical server.
And spend the rest of your education learning maths. Algebra, as much as possible. Theoretical logic. Only when those 2 subjects are sufficiently covered start with analysis. Don't forget to get at least an introductory class about numbers (e.g. when/why do multiplications fail on calculators and computers, what are fixed points of matrices ? What happens when floating point numbers differ too much in matisse from the solution of the calculation you're making,...)
The more algebra and logic you know, the easier algorithms will become.
The solution is to not override the market. In reality what happened is that the US asked the world a question : "will you let us loan more ?", and the world responded, for the first time ever with "no" (well, for the first time since 1930 or so).
In effect, Obama is forcing the issue, upping the bet. The government still had credit so he's giving government credits (50% to his cronies and pet projects first obviously) to unworthy, untrusted borrowers.
Needless to say, the next big event is the world losing confidence in the US govt's ability to pay back. Unless Obama changes tactics, that's not going to take that long.
The solution would be to take the answer for what it is, and to fix the problem : let the houses default, let the prices drop, let people pay off loans, as to demonstrate to lenders that they're still trustworthy.
And everything will be fine once again.
Why pretend to be capitalist, and then when the system shows you a real problem (like in this case "americans borrowed too much to be realistically able to pay it back"), borrow so much more to... does anyone know what the intention of bailouts are ?
The solution to having borrowed too much is NOT to borrow more, someone inform mr. Obama.
Any person of a mystical persuasion can tell you that there are other planes of existence that we have trouble measuring, but they impact ours.
So can any drug addict. This reasoning sounds a lot like the "lucas argument" in maths. Perhaps google it.
Also keep in mind that there isn't a single human who can argue in favor of these "planes" one billionth as stubbornly as a well-chosen markov chain can.
Humans ("of the correct persuasion" has always been an addendum to that line of reasoning) are special. They are magical being capable of overcoming the physical limits that apply to everything else. Right...
You're the type of person that believes politicians raise taxes to help us...
Once a large enough starts preaching something like that, though, it tends to blow up rather badly in all our faces.
How about you don't dismiss all religions of the past, but instead follow one, knowing that science will tell you what the different religions do : a certain religion built america, and is the source (quite literally) of rights and of all of the VERY rare states that aren't totalitarian... another religion built the middle east. Visit the place once, especially the poorer parts. A word of caution is in order : a single look upon the poorer parts of Dubai will make any moral human being loose any and all respect for the supposed "beauty" of that city.
How about you treat religions for what they are : collections of habits, truth and mythology that together serve to build & continue a society of humans.
The whole point of different religions is that they're different. You should read about evolution once or twice. The reality is, quite simple, not that there is a "common truth" to all religions, but rather that one religion is more effective than others. That religion, no matter how peaceful it may appear, it may even genuinly want and strive for peace, nor how violent it's tactics, even if they commit jihadi massacres regularly, only one will be left for the future.
The only truth that an effective religion, no matter which one, provides is that doing what it says, by following it's dogma, you will make that religion more successfull (mostly by being successfull yourself, but there are exceptions)
These patterns of actions, these dogmas that drive people to act in certain ways are what forms societies, and cultures.
Take away the religion, and the society will vanish. Take away, or change the society enough and the religion will suffer. These two effects, after an initial push, tend to feed on one another, causing predictable events to occur with ever increasing speed until... well until the thing that happens to everything involved in any "ever increasing" thing.
That's always the case. People like to act as if "not choosing" is somehow a new option, yet it is merely one choice among many, with it's own implications, moral and practical, good and bad.
Believing that just changing what worked for 2000 years in a random way and expect everything to be just fine is perhaps just a bit arrogant.
Don't you believe in evolution (of memes, in this case) ? The only reason that Christianity is still around (and actually somewhat resembles it's original form, or at least much more so than buddhism or islam) is a sign that it must be an ideology that clearly guarantees survival and kids for it's adherents. This ideology got people through the hardest parts of history.
Furthermore, atheism failed that particular test, during that time in the desert (not that you should care, but Israel only became a desert after the muslims took it over, there were many pieces of lush forest available in Jesus' time and long after), as history relates, there was no shortage of atheists. In the christian case these people were not prosecuted by religious people (contrast with e.g. the islamic or buddhist cases where jihad and enslaving (not all that different concepts, really) had to do with disappearing atheists).
In the christian case, however this disappearance is interesting since it was atheists who prosecuted christians. These were not just a little bit discriminatory, but regularly massacred religious believers (the Romans, which brings the question why they did this... which is imho not sufficiently answered).
You see in the christian case you see a very, VERY bad crisis (economic, military, social,... everything combined : the "fall") and somehow the number of atheists dropped (very close) to zero in a period that can't have been much longer than a single human life.
I know people like to describe religions like failed "random" make-belief games, built for social opression (and one religion is called "oppression" in arabic, and incidentially is very oppressive, so perhaps some are. Then again, that particular religion started out on Roman aid, and it's still critically dependant on western aid. If they have any success here, that aid will stop, and so will the religion, just like last time). But religions are as subject to evolution as our genes are.
Therefore it's a VERY safe bet that there are extremely few randomly chosen things in any given religion. That, on the contrary, a huge amount of details of the dogma have been given extreme amounts of thought time and have been corrected over literally thousands of years.
Isn't it a tiny little bit arrogant that, after 20 years of watching tv you "know better" ?
Then again, most religions have been in periods of massive persecution by atheists. Especially the largest group of atheists ever to walk this earth were VERY bad in religious persecution : the communists. They literally slaughtered millions (mostly christians and muslims) to rid them of "the opiate of the masses", the death toll that ensued was even worse than the death toll of the muslim jihad (which was, at the very least, 300 million people, mostly black christians and hindus, more likely the total is 1 billion). Lots of people died, but not the religion.
Perhaps if one considers the atheist birthrates, it is hardly surprising that "public" atheism has never lasted more than a few decennia, never a century, even under the most extreme of persecutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there are many repressed parts of Egyptian history, so perhaps the biblical standpoint isn't at all that stupid.
We know they literally tried to erase parts of their history, for example the fact that a woman once ruled Egypt :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatshepsut#Changing_recognition
Right now there is again massive erasure of parts of Egyptian history, due to ... let's put this politely ... "religious pressures" bin-laden style. Apparently the fact that Egypt was a very nice place before some religious idiot conquered it and started the destruction of everything of value or recognition. But then again, the damage Egypt's doing to it's history pales in comparison to what it's neighbours are doing, with the major exception of Israel.
Orwell's loss of history was no accident. Not carelessness. It was a deliberate attack on it, to make it fit particular viewpoints.
A contemporary example would be the re-representing of the "founding fathers" as secular individuals.
In Soviet Russia it was the brutal repression of all knowledge of the state that went immediately before it. All history was but a "detail" not to be given much attention. All you needed to know about history is that it lead to the "great leader" taking control.
Historically many more states destroyed their history than preserved it. Ancient Egypt suppressed large parts of it's past. So did the Jewish kingdoms. The same goes for China. The Roman empire didn't repress history, but the Vandals and Visigoths (who were "democratic") did. All islamic states have massively repressed large parts of their history and have tried (and sometimes succeeded) in repressing external records of their history, and they're still doing it today. E.g. the ancient destruction of the (then Roman Catholic) library of alexandria, and more recent the destruction of a historical account of a trip through Persia by an Iranian agent. Perhaps the most well known destruction of history was the destruction of the Buddha's of Afghanistan. All muslim territory, except one part of a single city has only non-muslim historical sites. Mecca itself is the remains of a mostly Jewish traders' town. Saudi Arabia is teeming with mostly Jewish and Christian remains of city-states, forts, marketplaces and city walls, all knowledge of which is brutally repressed. So are countries like Egypt and Sudan, in fact the whole of Northern Africa is. Nearly all landmarks in Turkey are christian in origin, with the few remaining secular (the blue "mosque" was designed by a jew, modeled after the biggest christian church in existence), a fact that you best keep to yourself in Turkey.
Data loss will, like in the states before us, not be an accident. It will be deliberate destruction, like in Orwell's books.
It just takes a certain kind of person AND a certain kind of state to preserve anything of value in the first place.
Obviously when talking about the effects of a correlation, one assumes (correctly) that all the work of proving a significant correlation is done. This is part of the question.
Your critique in the first paragraph is like saying 1+1 is not 2 since you can never be sure that the two "1"'s mean the same thing.
Then you start pulling ever more far-fetched "problems" out of your ass. You know what all your objections have in common ? If they were true, there wouldn't have been a correlation in the first place. Of course the correlation IS THERE, so that should tell you that those objections are wrong. They are also irrelevant since they are attempts to change the question, they are not critiques at the method used to arrive at the answer.
As to your third paragraph about "other factors", I left that one open. It is indeed possible that in Africa, environmental conditions are different resulting BOTH in lower intelligence AND gene differences, but that intelligence is partially independant of the genes. Perhaps the social structure or culture of black africa is partially to blame.
That, of course doesn't change anything about the conclusion.
You will never match a similar aged black person in an endurance run. It will simply never happen, the cooling system of whites' bodies is several percentage points less efficient than that of a black person, resulting in VERY unequal performance in a (long) race.
But, if you put a random white guy against a random black guy in an intelligence test, the chances of the black guy winning are 1 in 200. Likewise, do the same with an ethnic european and an ethnic japanese and the chances of the european winning is about 1 in 7.
I know this goes against your political viewpoint, and is supposedly "racist". It is also the truth. I suggest you go and blame gaia, nature or whoever is responsible for evolution according to your beliefs, and leave me alone.
That google link of yours points to (unrealistic) treatises on morality. And yet you accuse me of going off-topic ... It is beyond obvious that the only problem you have with this is that it disagrees with your political persuasion. You refuse to discuss science, because that would immediately undermine your political viewpoint. The truth, to be exact, would immediately undermine your political viewpoint. I don't give a shit about any morality when talking science, and I don't care, at all, about your morality.
Let's just let people judge whether or not evolution behaves like it's model, genetic algorithms, or not.
You claim that they behave totally different. That's like saying gravity follows your equations some of the time and my equations some of the time. Obviously such a thing is beyond ridiculous.
This type of thing is the typical defense of political whacko's who don't agree with science : science somehow doesn't apply "in this case". There is "nothing that compares to MY ideology". That sort of arguments.
Sorry to kill your holy cow : evolution, and natural selection :
1) works by selectively massacring inferior species. This is the basic principle of operation, that can never be changed
2) preventing (1) is possible, but represents an economic cost, that will raise when those "would-have-been-killed-individuals" reproduce. It will keep rising, and it will become ever more necessary to save those individuals, since the quality of their genes will rapidly deteriorate over even just a few generations. The cost will rise, not only with the numbers of "saved" individuals, but also with the severity of the problems, both of which will only rise, without limit. No matter how rich any person, group, company, state, eventually they will fail to pay the price, resulting in the very-short-term extinction of all the offspring of the "saved" individuals, and those individuals themselves.
In other words, preventing natural selection from taking a life will most likely result in a mass-extinction later.
3) the eventual result of evolution is that a single species will be the only one left, as no other species can compete with it. This is the outcome that is aimed for. Furthermore, even though great diversity is created during the "startup phase" of the algorithm, that diversity is quickly eradicated once the algorithm runs into the limits imposed by the environment. The number of species drops extremely, and the differences between the remaining individuals shrink dramatically. They will keep shrinking, ever more dramatically, until the individuals are basically clones of one another.
Citation needed. I know evolution says only the most adaptable, fittest, or strongest specimens within a species are supposed to survive but can you point out where evolution says only one species will survive? That theory, that only the fittest survive, also overlooks some things. Such as mutual survival.
So wait ... the fact that an optimization algorithm will ... you know ... optimize things (yielding the 1 optimal solution eventually) needs a citation but the "fact" that if that same algorithm "overlooks some things" there will be "mutual survival" (word invented just for this post ? I'm honored)
Well here's your citation for an optimization function yielding 1 response : every last textbook on genetic (or any other, for that matter) algorithms.
I might also citate the conditions for only 1 course of action being optimal, in which case the mass-extinction procedure would be, you know, the "right" thing to do (again assuming "atheist" morality, considering nothing except optimality, since in any human being actually alive this would certainly NOT be the right thing to do)
The condition for there being 1 single optimal lifeform is ... ... that the "state space" of our universe has a geometric shape (of any dimensionality) in which there exists a "shortest path" between 2 points.
Again this can be found in any AI textbook since it's quite an essential part of the whole field.
Now let's analyse the problem that genetic algorithms "overlook some things", which is true. So what happens if they do ? Well those species that it "overlooks" never get born in the first place. They never get created.
Nothing changes for the species that do exist : they still have to compete, and they will still be eliminated one-by-one until the optimal one remains.
Biodiversity in a genetic algorithm search increases "exponentially" when "energy" (the potential for creating new offspring) is abundant, and the optimal solution is far, far away.
Once the algorithm decides on the general idea it's going to follow, this exponential growth becomes linear growth for a fraction of the time, in which it "fills up the sidelines" (ie. the algorithm has hit some absolute limits, but does not yet fill the "biosphere" 100%).
Once creating offspring becomes a zero-sum game, in which you can only have a kid if you kill another lifeform first, biodiversity exponentially decreases, and VERY soon only a few solutions (at best, you see it dropping to 1 solution in at least half the cases) remain. From that point on there will be a linear reduction in the biodiversity until only one solution remains and there are no beneficial mutations left.
As can be easily seen on human population growth curves (and biodiversity curves) for earth, the era of exponential growth has closed : we have hit some absolute limits on our growth, but not yet all of them : there is still room to expand, but not "everywhere". Some borders are closed already.
Now follows a period of increased turbulence, in which the species (people, animals, ...) fight for access to the remaining open borders in the solution space. Pretty soon these "settlers" will also hit absolute walls. ("pretty soon" means, say "somewhere between 1800 AD and 11800 AD").
After the period we live in ends, with the linear growth in human population and biodiversity, the zero-sum direct-competition game will start (and in many places, it's already raging). The only way to prosper will become killing and raiding others.
That fase will decide a "winner" race. Certainly amongst humans a single race will not just dominate, but exterminate all other races. This will certainly happen before another 50.000 or so years pass (and may happen very fast, as in fact it's already started and it could easily, at any point, accelerate and "finishing up" in a few years)
Oh and, in case you were wondering, if one ra
My statistics are only correlation ... not causation.
There are 3 options, in the case of correlation.
A -> B
B -> A
C -> A & C -> B
Now let's translate, in the different options :
1) Either races are not equal in intelligence directly due to their genes
2) or some races are more intelligent than others and as a result have modified their genes to bring out this advantage even more
3) there is some factor that cause both intelligence differences and genetic differences.
Option 2 is clearly not in the realm of possibility. So it's either 1 or 3. Both 1 and 3 would be considered racist, one of them can be concluded to be true if there is correlation.
Economic migration (which is the migration of people due to expectation of producing (and consuming) more in the new location) is a disaster. Generally those that due it fare relatively well compared to the general population. So their absence lowers average productivity. Furthermore they are generally worse than the average productivity in their new location (at least for 1 or 2 generations), so they lower the average productivity in their new community as well.
You *might* say that economic migration has at least the benefit of "closing the gap", but there are many indications this is not true, that in fact economic migrations WIDEN the gap between rich and poor countries.
And btw, we have found many genes that relate to intelligence. Certainly extremes have been found (for example the gene coding for nerve isolation, the genes coding for the "bridge" in our brains, the genes ... all have been found. Their absence or even minor modification will take care of lowering iq by a full 50 points at least). More subtle genes have also been found, but are ... more subtle.
If this was the case, how do you explain the fact that independent of some large-scale environmental insults which left temporary reductions in species there has generally been ever increasing numbers of species filling ever greater numbers of evolutionary niches.
How do I explain this "fact" ? First of all your "fact" is wrong. One might notice how fast non-researched facts get quoted when they fit political opinion on slashdot.
But I will refute your fantasy (it's not a fact) simply by stating that evolution increases the number of species for a very long time. It will start slowing down once you get near the "natural selection" part really kicking in. Then you will get a mass-dieoff massively reducing the number of independant species, which will leave a vacuum for the remaining "more fit" species to fill up. After the dieoff less species will be left.
So your fact predicts a monotonously increasing number of species. I predict regular mass-dieoffs. We're being scientific here, so let's look up what happened in reality :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
Oops, seems your fact is not a fact at all, but rather something you made up to support your political view.
Here's a graph of "biodiversity" :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_blank_01.png
Note the regular cliffs, with several distinct cliffs eliminating over 50% of all species alive.
Note also the exponential slope upwards (the "trendline"). It doesn't take a genius to understand that this cannot last. That is because evolution is still an accelerating process, that's improving species at ever-increasing rates (note that the wikipedia article states that the mass-extinction events are a necessity for this process, or at the least very useful). But once it gets close to optimality you will see the number of species drop of drastically.
Take a genetic algorithm and observe what happens :
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fx_files/15164/20/happyCurve.png
Clearly we are on the slope in the lower left corner, meaning that, currently, huge "fitness variations" are "allowed" (do not immediately result in an extinction), but the lowest survivable bound on efficiency is rapidly ramping upwards. Today, you can be half as efficient as another human being and nobody cares (though there are limits, even today. The excessive cost of some treatments is already moving : "welfare" states prohibit those (life-saving) treatments, e.g. holland. Other nations, like America, are restricting them to richer individuals due to market forces, but at least they're not illegal. So if you're really ill, at least in America you get a chance, whereas in Europe many diseases are death senteces, point). Within 100.000 years 10% less fit than the best adapted human being will be a death sentence. Within a few million years 0.1% less fit than the optimal human being will be a death sentence.
Pretty soon (meaning "at best another 100.000 years from now") many species will start failing to improve themselves fast enough, meaning they will be quickly drowned out by species that reproduce faster, if they're lucky enough to not outright starve to death.
And your other "fact" is also ... equally false :
Granted, humans are now doing a bang-up job of wiping them out, but we will either learn how to stop doing that, and thus su
Note again, how this obvious lie is perfectly in line with your political viewpoint, and blatantly contradicts science. You expect this to somehow not matter, since you present your political viewpoint (which is less realistic than that of the average creationist I might add) as fact.
Let's look at the same graph
What is your point exactly ? You seem to be arguing that all races are equal and then you drop this :
I"m not saying there may not be significant genetic differences between the races.
Let's agree that there is at least one significant difference between the races : skin color. And are others, as you say, and truly sorry, intelligence differences are amongst the bigger differences. Races are genetically different, and by quite a margin.
In reality there is no real question within scientific circles, but everybody who dares to say it, gets clobbered :
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html
You can also see the political reaction : ad-hominems. People attack science because it clashes with "progressive" ideals. The reaction of anyone who claims to accept science as truth would obviously be entirely different, or at least : they wouldn't shoot the messenger.
Unfortunately science has long since stopped supporting the prevailing political view of the world that most people in America have, to say nothing of Europeans warped views. In economics, biology, medicine, ... especially "progressive" ideology gets clobbered. It is in fundamental conflict with evolution*, with economics**. Physics***, and Psychology : Modern progressive ideals are based on the ideas of the noble savage (the idea of fundamental innocence of human beings, which unfortunately is ... non-existent), and the fundamental "goodness" of the human race, which everybody interprets as "having the same morals as me". Obviously the mere fact that there exists more than one religion is a contradiction with that theory.
When science, independent critical examination yields results that fail to live up to the political view, the pattern is the same everywhere. Video games cause violent behavior (in 23% of humans) and so does TV, but computer games are worse than TV in causing violent behavior : http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html. Again, amongst psychologists this result is not, at all, in dispute. Another extremely disputed psychological result is that threatening kids with punishment is the *best* incentive possible for them to learn, and far outweighs the advantages offered by a capable teacher, or good books. Or put another way : if you are forced to learn, you will learn. If you merely have the option, you won't learn (again this is true for a majority of people, not for every last person).
Contrary to "atheist", science is *NOT* in fact atheist. It is agnost, and it will never change that position.
Furthermore, science cannot replace religion in the thinking of people. All science is based on maths, and math has been proven to both leave a large class of problems absolutely unanswered, and another, even bigger class of problems are prohibitively difficult to solve (e.g. NP-complete problems), and will forever remain so.
* obviously protective nature policies are simply another factor in evolution, they cannot do what progressives expect them to do : stop evolution in it's tracks (which is what needs to happen in order to "preserve" e.g. a national park). The depopulation of yellowstone park for example, is not something that we can prevent.
Furthermore, you hear a lot about evolution, except there's one tiny little part of that theory that no progressive will ever mention : natural selection. Death. Death of everyone and anyone that's not good enough. Death that comes unpredictably, because we have little idea about the factors that are "being optimized" at the moment (and a less-than-polite person would change "being optimized" into "being genocidally implanted", since that would be close to the method gaia uses to do so)
So you're going to join a prehistoric agrarial society then ?
You forget that utilitarian approaches in both case are a necessity. We cannot calculate the most trivial of things with quantum mechanics, or even Bohr's model is not solvable (currently) for anything more complex than a SINGLE helium atom. Even Einstein's view of the world is too difficult to calculate for everything. Actually even Newton's gravity law is too complex to calculate (google "three body problem", the solar system alone has over 50.000 distinct bodies ... we can't solve Newton's equations for 3 bodies, do you seriously think we use either quantum mechanics or even einstein ?)
Likewise evolution posits a model that is too complex to evaluate even in trivially simple cases, since determining what exactly "properties" are is too complex, and hence Mendel's laws are of limited use in the real world. Some things magically behave like Mendel predicted, most things ... don't. In fact the large majority doesn't.
Unfortunately we know that Mendel's laws are ... ridiculously simple compared to "the truth". They do not take into account transcription factors and genes (e.g. they provide no way to model the quantity of ribosome output genes produce, they do not take into account the timing, they do not take into account ...)
Even if we were to include these transcription factors (which are instructions for the cell nucleus to change the "details" of the transcription process for this specific gene : timing, triggering, quantity, ...) there's a ... bit of an issue ... interaction between the chemical products themselves. Interaction between proteins is so hugely complex, even though all components are known, we know basically nothing about it. We certainly can't predict 2 proteins will interact.
The most powerful supercomputers are just becoming (barely) able to model the interaction of (simple) proteins with themselves (as long as it's purely a mechanical interaction, no chemistry involved : ie. it may change shape, it may not form any new bonds). Seeing what molecule a gene would produce if transcribed is just barely joining the realm of what is possible, for simple cases.
So both evolution theory, and even Newton's laws are too complex to be used outside of "positive" experiments.
The correct solution would be ... well I don't know ... perhaps to wait a hundred years for computers to catch up with basic theories ?
Add to that the fact that science is being increasingly politicized. Even though we know little about specific genes, it is beyond trivial to arrive at the inevitable conclusion : races are different.
And they are different in a very racist way : no way an (average) white person can keep up with the (average) black person in a race. In fact "whites" are the slowest people on the planet. On the other hand they are by far the tallest. But, on average, the white person will have a full 20 points of IQ advantage on the black guy (and yellow skins will have another 5-6 points on the white guy, if you remove Chinese from the yellow skins the remainder will have a full 10 points on the average white guy). Arabs are a little bit smarter than the average black guy (about 5 points), but still seriously dumber than the average yellowskin.
Try and defend that to a democrat.
Can you please point me in the direction of meaning in your post ?
Sure a little conspiracy theory statement ... but is there ANY indication of a point anywhere ?
You accuse me of getting paid for posting on slashdot. Heh. Could you please point out a company that does that ?
There's just so much wrong with your post I hardly know where to begin.
If the government were to manufacture things that would constitute unfair competition. The government, after all, doesn't play fair. Never does.
I doubt more tax equals more prosperity. The difference between capitalist and communist society could be modeled as a difference in tax policy.
All I'm advocating is that we make case-by-case judgments on whether the government should do something and pick the more rational choice.
And who, exactly, should judge this ? The government ?
The thing that most drives this attitude is the disconnect from government. Where the government is the enemy, something that should be fought against, rather than the idea that you are the government and it is something that you need to do you part in controlling it. The idea of disconnections from government is driven by the rich and greedy, basically corporations that do not want the majority of people attempting to control their government rather they oppressed masses either accept being downtrodden as their lot in life or they fight against their own government and are killed or imprisoned.
Heh the only thing that's happened is that both the country and in individual cities increased massively. It started with about 2 million people.
A US senator and congressman used to represent about 20.000 people. The average state congressman represented a few thousand at most.
Right now there is no senator or congressman that represents less than 100.000 people. Needless to say, during the same time, an individual opinion became at least 100 times less important.
Every year it becomes 1.47% less important. The effect is cumulative. So in 10 years it loses about 10%. In the last century one person's opinion became 4 times less important.
But it's mainly minority growth that's driving the mass politics (huge amounts of people with a predefined and unchanging political opinion). Right now about 25% of voters are fixed, and cannot reasonably be said to have an individual political opinion, that number will be -at least- 50% by 2050.
This is the inevitable result of population increase, nothing more.
Anything short of a lethal virus, chemical weapon, or fissionable material is fit for use by the average citizen, as far as I'm concerned.
Lethal viruses are -not- censored. Not in the US, not even in Europe. This has only been abused 2 or 3 times in 50 years and is critical to university research. You basically have to ask the CDC to send you some, and provide some justification (they merely store it, you could literally state that you want to kill your mother in law, and they'll still send you the viruses you request). Heh, in the US the taxpayer even pays for the stamp and the packaging of potential lethal weapons.
Fissionable material is censored above quantities of about 100gr.
There are other hugely dangerous substances basically for sale. Hydrogen cyanide gas can be bought in any western - and eastern - city, as ironically it's necessary for food preparation in factories. Don't tell the terrorists. LD50 (the dose that 50% of people die off) is a few mg, method of delivery is merely contact with the skin. It's method of preparation, though very easy, is being kept secret. Even though every chemist will be able to come up with a method. It can remain airborne for 15 minutes in a sort of emulsion with the right mix. Both these formulas you will not find in any chemistry book, despite the first being very uncomplicated. Especially preparing it from another -less dangerous- form of cyanide is very trivial indeed.
But you do agree that at least one thing should be censored.
Your posts continually reveal further depths of moral bankruptcy and abject toadying to the lowest forms of parasitic usurping political scum. You have no place in this country, this world, this life. Your ugly idiocy befouls all that is good in mankind. I loathe your very essence and wish your evil spirit complete and eternal annihilation.
And you use imperfections in one thing (the US), to equate them with the utter abominations on the other side.
The US is not a "totally free" society by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn't mean it isn't a whole lot more free than any other society in the world, including the EU, any of it's members and certainly including the abominations like islamic governments, dictatorships and communist governments.
Worse you use the imperfections in the US government, equate it to the massive oppression of religion, personal deification, and blatant thuggery of the states that really, really do need to be changed ... you use these imperfections to ... fight the ONE government that is the most free in the world.
In effect, you're fighting FOR religious oppression, dictators and demagogues.
You are not on the side of freedom. You are merely painting a thin layer of lies over your hatred of freedom and democracy. In reality you are fighting one of the most important pro-freedom forces in the world, helping the many anti-freedom forces in the world.
Do you seriously expect anyone to buy that you do this because you're pro-freedom ?
You know I have a question for you. I wonder about it, really.
Given your stance on censorship, and the general "progressive" (heh) stance on gun ownership. Do you believe in gun ownership ? Do you believe in assault weapon ownership ?
Any and all gun bans are a sort of "physical censhorship", or at least you can see where the comparison comes from. So I wonder.
There is a difference between non public or under a NDA than censored. For example, is an author's work that he never published censored? No. Its simply not published. While nuclear blueprints would certainly be non-published, and in the contract to which you sell your soul to a country when you become a government officer, they may forbid you to release such documents. That is not censorship, that is just not publishing them.
There's only a difference between non-public/nda/non-published and sensor as long as there are no leaks and no traitors. After that, it's censorship.
Unless you'd agree that under your definition of censorship killing off wikileaks.org would not be censorship. Once the information is out, it requires censorship to bring it back in. Contrary to what idiots will claim, this has a good chance of success.
Also, in the case of a scientific discovery, it may become dangerous and worthy of being out of "easy" reach of the average joe.
And for your comment on flaw finding, you assume that the average person can simply find a flaw by looking at detailed blueprints that an entire team of architects could not find.
Really ? 9/11 rewrote the book on fire safety. It would be trivial to use what was learned in that incident to bring down countless buildings, none of which are going to be rebuilt because of the new information being available.
This is an example of information that is dangerous, since it can easily be used to bring down many buildings without much warning, yet it is information that only became dangerous after a demonstration (it has something to do with asbestos and insolution installations). It used to be public information, in fact it used to be touted to anyone who wanted to hear it.
No, no, no. How do ISPs need to know what websites I am visiting? They don't. All that can easily be done anonymously.
Ever notice how cisco has "LAWFUL INTERCEPT" software for it's routers ? Juniper has the feature involved on all it's devices.
Read the docs.
Show me a case in which one single lunatic has brought down a massive amount of people due to the lack of censorship.
I only need to find stuff that could have been prevented by censorship. And finding one is not that difficult.
Thank god there WAS censorship on delivery systems (as in many people have been asked to keep certain kinds of gas dispensers secret, and they have mostly complied. As a result a few really simple tricks that could have put the death toll in the thousands were not known to the attackers)
Besides, let's not pretend it is difficult to make the western "freedom fighting" progressives shut up about something : simply kill a few.
There used to be quite a ruckus about the massacres, paedophilic acts, wars, thefts, raids and other crimes comitted by the founder of a certain religion. All it took was shooting a few journalists and now these followers of a man that's a paedophilic massacrer and thief are never again asked about which parts, exactly, of his behavior they follow. Especially since they have made it abundantly clear that the paedophilic acts ARE being followed.
Even mentioning them can get you in prison in Europe for "disturbing racial harmony" or some such idiocy. The same is happening in America.
By that standard, there are exactly ... 0 ... people who don't live under tyranny.
By that standard the US govt is tyrannical, the EU is tyrannical, and the rest of the world ... well you know the answer to that.
Since the US government in practice is not a tyranny, but there are governments that are (e.g. all muslim governments, dictatorships, ...). So your standard is of little use.
That's the problem. Some censorship is critical to national security, or other types of security. Right now nuclear devices are too hard to build for any single idiot. Fusion research may change that. Would you want THOSE plans public ? Or censored ? Should the U.S. publish nuclear transports so that the next time some "allah"-massacrers feel like attacking something they can really do some damage ? Perhaps the plans to the brooklyn bridge should be made public, including a little booklet "blow these 2 bars up if you want to make sure lots of people die" ? Perhaps skyscraper plans, in order to encourage "flaw finding" in skyscrapers like in software programs. The next time muslims feel like massacring they could bring down a few 100 buildings instead of 2, by exploiting these "security holes" ?
In DNA manipulation, some procedures aren't all that difficult, even to do in your own garage. Preparing a bioweapon isn't hard (it's not killing yourself in the process and delivering the weapon that are the problematic parts), perhaps it should be published how it's done, with extra emphasis on those parts where the terrorists that have tried had real trouble with (e.g. an ineffective delivery device for sarin gas was the only thing that prevented the tokyo subway from being filled with that gas. Can't have that ... let's publish a few DIY plans).
Child porn stimulates abusing children sexually for financial gain. Censorship can prevent the financial gain, thereby lowering child abuse. Of course this is a good thing.
Let's face it, censoring some things should be done. Basically anything that crosses a certain threshold of criticality and cannot easily be modified should be a secret, and it should be a crime to divulge such information to anyone who does not need to know. Everything from building weaknesses to certain scientific results ...
And obviously a country's government gets to spy on "transit" traffic. Even ISP's, which are private companies, get to do that (and they *have* to, at least somewhat, if they want to keep the network operating).
Whether censorship is allowed or not, should depend on the intention of the censorship. Whether spying is allowed, should depend on the intention (certainly there can be little argument that there's nothing against defensive spying). Censorship to prevent crimes from creating truly major consequences should be done.
If we don't ... all it takes is 1 (ONE) lunatic. And I do believe we have more supply than just one.
But it's not out of control at all. It's doing exactly what it should do : prevent idiots from loaning money.
Romans were not polytheists. Not by a long shot. Yes if you look at the pantheon you would get that impression. But the pantheon was an expression of unity, not a tribute to the gods. On the contrary, Romans were an alliance of monotheist faiths and ideologies that "shared" (parts of) their mythology.
Any individual roman would worship Poseidon. Or Hera. Or Jupiter. Mostly the lines between the different religions were the same as lines between families.
However by the time Christianity started spreading in the Roman empire, one religion was much, much more popular than all others : the belief in "the republic", "the senate", and the modus operandi of the roman empire : conquer lands, then give out the land to the soldiers that helped conquer it.
Christianity became the huge success that it remained for at least 1500 years due to the massive failures and faultlines that occured in that religion after Caesar became, well, Caesar. After the failure of the republic became evident, when the fog settled on the attempts to restore the republic (I think Caesar was not lying, at all, when he said he wanted to restore the power of the senate, he just couldn't make it happen, only the later emperors actively sabotaged the senate)
Romans, AD 200, people were secular, lived under secular law and a secular state, and most were non-believers. Gods were invoked, like today, at the circus, and at the racetrack. When someone was lucky in a business transaction, he thanked "a god". More in the way that "lady luck" is thanked at casino's and that "lady justitia" will catch the culprit. People say this. In contemporary books, you will still find references aplenty to mars, god of war, athena, cupid, and most of all aphrodite. Do these people maintain the rites of these Gods ? No, if they maintain any rites they're Christians or Jews.
The same was true in the Roman Empire AD 200 or-so.
Christianity replaced the secular "roman republic" ideology. Not the many religions that the Roman republic allied with one another.
The Romans that persecuted Christians were atheists. They maintained no rites, and pushed for secular ways in all things, law and conviction, global and local.
You forget to mention that there are basically 2 principles you need to know in order to learn both java and C# in a VERY fast way :
1) memory allocation principles
2) scripting languages
(and if you want to really excell)
3) generating code
1 will be more (much more) than adequately covered in any C++ course. C++ is like a "galactic conquest kit (some assembly required)" of programming languages. It can do anything. Anything any other language can do, can be done in C++. Java is more an "IKEA" language, compared to C++'s "metal shop". Everything "typical" is done for you in Java, but you have to add a few screws here and there. But getting a chair that's really "your kind of chair" ... not going to happen. And a less-than-average C++ programmer is going to be a good C# and Java programmer. Generics are lacking in Java, and that's being polite.
2 will be covered with something like perl or python. Especially if you cover list comprehensions (compare them to SQL for example)
And if you are a good programmer, but you want to be the best one in the state, you'll need to add 3 to your repertoire. LISP is a good language to learn to see these principles in action. Imho linux shell is also a good language for this. Or using linux shell to generate configuration files. That sort of thing.
The important thing is not to force each language and use the "lowest common denominator" but really learn a language in order to appreciate it's differences from the others. You can write procedural programs in each of these languages trivially. DON'T. If you learn C++, use template metaprogramming and multiple inheritance (of templated classes, passing through template parameters up the inheritance chain). Use operator overloading for everything from combining 2 lists, write the complex number class everyone writes. Write a sparse matrix class if you're up to it. Learn boost. Learn ANTLR ...
I realise these are not many good problems for these solutions. The point is to learn to use them, get a feel for what they can do.
Use C# for what it's good for : use all the features of C# 3.0. Use the UI designer, get to know it's advantages.
With java you want to use it's libraries. Use a few contraint satisfaction libraries. Write a J2EE application, say the bookstore bullshit. Admire the endless exceptions of the typical server.
And spend the rest of your education learning maths. Algebra, as much as possible. Theoretical logic. Only when those 2 subjects are sufficiently covered start with analysis. Don't forget to get at least an introductory class about numbers (e.g. when/why do multiplications fail on calculators and computers, what are fixed points of matrices ? What happens when floating point numbers differ too much in matisse from the solution of the calculation you're making, ...)
The more algebra and logic you know, the easier algorithms will become.
The solution is to not override the market. In reality what happened is that the US asked the world a question : "will you let us loan more ?", and the world responded, for the first time ever with "no" (well, for the first time since 1930 or so).
In effect, Obama is forcing the issue, upping the bet. The government still had credit so he's giving government credits (50% to his cronies and pet projects first obviously) to unworthy, untrusted borrowers.
Needless to say, the next big event is the world losing confidence in the US govt's ability to pay back. Unless Obama changes tactics, that's not going to take that long.
The solution would be to take the answer for what it is, and to fix the problem : let the houses default, let the prices drop, let people pay off loans, as to demonstrate to lenders that they're still trustworthy.
And everything will be fine once again.
Why pretend to be capitalist, and then when the system shows you a real problem (like in this case "americans borrowed too much to be realistically able to pay it back"), borrow so much more to ... does anyone know what the intention of bailouts are ?
The solution to having borrowed too much is NOT to borrow more, someone inform mr. Obama.
Any person of a mystical persuasion can tell you that there are other planes of existence that we have trouble measuring, but they impact ours.
So can any drug addict. This reasoning sounds a lot like the "lucas argument" in maths. Perhaps google it.
Also keep in mind that there isn't a single human who can argue in favor of these "planes" one billionth as stubbornly as a well-chosen markov chain can.
Humans ("of the correct persuasion" has always been an addendum to that line of reasoning) are special. They are magical being capable of overcoming the physical limits that apply to everything else. Right ...
You're the type of person that believes politicians raise taxes to help us ...
Once a large enough starts preaching something like that, though, it tends to blow up rather badly in all our faces.
How about you don't dismiss all religions of the past, but instead follow one, knowing that science will tell you what the different religions do : ...
a certain religion built america, and is the source (quite literally) of rights and of all of the VERY rare states that aren't totalitarian
another religion built the middle east. Visit the place once, especially the poorer parts. A word of caution is in order : a single look upon the poorer parts of Dubai will make any moral human being loose any and all respect for the supposed "beauty" of that city.
How about you treat religions for what they are : collections of habits, truth and mythology that together serve to build & continue a society of humans.
The whole point of different religions is that they're different. You should read about evolution once or twice. The reality is, quite simple, not that there is a "common truth" to all religions, but rather that one religion is more effective than others. That religion, no matter how peaceful it may appear, it may even genuinly want and strive for peace, nor how violent it's tactics, even if they commit jihadi massacres regularly, only one will be left for the future.
The only truth that an effective religion, no matter which one, provides is that doing what it says, by following it's dogma, you will make that religion more successfull (mostly by being successfull yourself, but there are exceptions)
These patterns of actions, these dogmas that drive people to act in certain ways are what forms societies, and cultures.
Take away the religion, and the society will vanish. Take away, or change the society enough and the religion will suffer. These two effects, after an initial push, tend to feed on one another, causing predictable events to occur with ever increasing speed until ... well until the thing that happens to everything involved in any "ever increasing" thing.
That's always the case. People like to act as if "not choosing" is somehow a new option, yet it is merely one choice among many, with it's own implications, moral and practical, good and bad.
Believing that just changing what worked for 2000 years in a random way and expect everything to be just fine is perhaps just a bit arrogant.
Don't you believe in evolution (of memes, in this case) ? The only reason that Christianity is still around (and actually somewhat resembles it's original form, or at least much more so than buddhism or islam) is a sign that it must be an ideology that clearly guarantees survival and kids for it's adherents. This ideology got people through the hardest parts of history.
Furthermore, atheism failed that particular test, during that time in the desert (not that you should care, but Israel only became a desert after the muslims took it over, there were many pieces of lush forest available in Jesus' time and long after), as history relates, there was no shortage of atheists. In the christian case these people were not prosecuted by religious people (contrast with e.g. the islamic or buddhist cases where jihad and enslaving (not all that different concepts, really) had to do with disappearing atheists).
In the christian case, however this disappearance is interesting since it was atheists who prosecuted christians. These were not just a little bit discriminatory, but regularly massacred religious believers (the Romans, which brings the question why they did this ... which is imho not sufficiently answered).
You see in the christian case you see a very, VERY bad crisis (economic, military, social, ... everything combined : the "fall") and somehow the number of atheists dropped (very close) to zero in a period that can't have been much longer than a single human life.
I know people like to describe religions like failed "random" make-belief games, built for social opression (and one religion is called "oppression" in arabic, and incidentially is very oppressive, so perhaps some are. Then again, that particular religion started out on Roman aid, and it's still critically dependant on western aid. If they have any success here, that aid will stop, and so will the religion, just like last time). But religions are as subject to evolution as our genes are.
Therefore it's a VERY safe bet that there are extremely few randomly chosen things in any given religion. That, on the contrary, a huge amount of details of the dogma have been given extreme amounts of thought time and have been corrected over literally thousands of years.
Isn't it a tiny little bit arrogant that, after 20 years of watching tv you "know better" ?
Then again, most religions have been in periods of massive persecution by atheists. Especially the largest group of atheists ever to walk this earth were VERY bad in religious persecution : the communists. They literally slaughtered millions (mostly christians and muslims) to rid them of "the opiate of the masses", the death toll that ensued was even worse than the death toll of the muslim jihad (which was, at the very least, 300 million people, mostly black christians and hindus, more likely the total is 1 billion). Lots of people died, but not the religion.
Perhaps if one considers the atheist birthrates, it is hardly surprising that "public" atheism has never lasted more than a few decennia, never a century, even under the most extreme of persecutions.