How in the hell are the survivors (who would be practically random) going to know...
1) that such a thing exists 2) where (exactly) it is 3) how to get there (and back) without dying of something in the process (exposure, starvation, ocean storms, etc) 4) (assuming generations later) how to read the content labels, instructions, etc...?
It's a nice gesture and all for nearly any other scenario, but a *lot* of assumptions would have to be made for this to be viable in a no-shit doomsday scenario. At one point in human prehistory, it was estimated that a small extinction event reduced us to around 100k people, globally. That's a pretty scattered dispersion, and assuming a similar number of survivors in some future doomsday scenario, the odds are almost lottery-sized against putting it to use.
I'm not saying they should give up (far from it, actually) - I just think that maybe, just maybe they should expand on the idea a bit, and consider a few factors that seem awfully important when planning for a global doomsday scenario.
Uh... you know *why* Iran wants nukes, right? It is precisely because a nearby military rival has them.
...the same "nearby military rival" that Iran has repeatedly threatened to wipe out of existence. If anything, it's a huge argument against ever letting Iran get hold of the effing things.
Did you move the slider at all? It is in fact noteworthy that the page shows Israel has nearly doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal since worldwide arsenals peaked in '86.
Given the neighborhood and Iran's intent to make their own nukes, can you blame them?
Likewise, it's worth noting that Israel is *not* a member of the NPT.
...so who would they sell the tech to? Sometimes it makes no sense to bother with something when you're not liable to violate its precepts.
The tiny fraction can still wipe out the human race
Maybe, but that would depend on the location, timing and distribution of those explosions. If the balloon went up in 1987, yeah, the human race would pretty much be fscked. Nowadays, I'm not so sure that would be a given, considering that a not-insignificant percentage of those weapons would be destroyed in their silos, are undergoing maintenance at any given time, would fail to detonate completely or cleanly, or a whole host of other factors (and if either the US or Russia abstain from the exchange, then all bets are off as to the doomsday factor entirely.)
c. U2 is a "dad band", in that it really only appeals to people who are in the 40+ age bracket. This also happens to be what iDevices are increasingly seen as "dad-tech", something your dad tells you is the "best choice for everything" which you know is obviously wrong but fuck it, you'll take the free phone anyway since he's paying for it.
As one of those folks in the 40+ age bracket...
1) Back when us old farts were teenagers, U2 was considered somewhat revolutionary (and in a way they were). The music itself? Compared to the mass of dreck we had thrust upon our ears via radio in the 1980s? It wasn't half bad, but there was better out there (you just had to really go look for the good shit, in an age where the HTTP protocol didn't exist and the Internet was unknown to 99.99999% of the planet. This meant buying a shitload of blank cassettes, a wide circle of friends, and having a boom box with cassette-to-cassette recording capability.)
2) I once felt the same way towards my old man's 60's/70's Psychedelic/ProgRock collection (played on reel-to-reel no less!) that you feel towards a 1980's has-been band. However, my ears, like the rest of me, grew up - I inherited his collection, and after a cursory listen-through, am ripping the hell out of some of those reels to the audio-in on my home desktop machine (Thank Heavens for Audacity on Linux...) Good news, though! Old stuff, new stuff, in-between stuff... it doesn't matter to me any more; I find good stuff in every era, to the point where I have 78 RPM 'vinyl' with stuff I've ripped to FLAC. Mind you, I'm typing this as some rather kickass German industrial rock is pumping into my headset. Before that, The Temptations' Power was playing. Jazz musicians call it the act of having 'Big Ears', where you find and love good music from practically every genre. Someday, you'll get that too.
3) One fine day, *your* kids will point at your current favorite tech and laugh their asses off, as surely as I once laughed my ass off at inheriting my parents' old Amstrad 2286 (complete with maths co-processor!) and its dot-matrix printer... in 1997. Deny it all you want, I don't mind... I know different.;)
They did this on their own time and own dime....Riiiiight?
Well, *someone* has to find a safe hiding place for all the Senators and Fortune 100 CEO's... you don't think they have time to find that on their own, do you?
Same here (I have Windows 7 parked on a small VM for Windows-only stuff that I still find useful, but opening that VM gets rarer and rarer these days...)
A good idea, especially since the Moon has a two-week rotation. (by the way, many early drawings of lunar colonies did have underground living featured prominently. There was even a (IMHO dumb) idea to use nuclear weapons to carve out the caves with.
That all said, I think your body (or at least mind) would be in for a shock if you stepped outside on midnight colony time to see the sun high in the sky. But then, folks who live within the Arctic Circle have to put up with seasonal day/night cycle shifts that have some weeks in total darkness during winter (and the opposite in summer). They seem to adapt well enough (though to be fair, they still can rely on a 24-hour rotational cycle no matter where the sun is at any given moment.)
Seriously - people aren't as fragile as TFA surmises. In the spelunking world, cavers have discovered that after a few weeks without a day/night reference, their circadian cycles stretched out to a 24/24 cycle. In the case of a newly-minted Martian, it won't go that extreme, which means that at least within the timeframe of an exploratory journey, it would be no big deal, and they can adjust between the two on the way there and back (there's plenty of time on the journey to do that.)
Long term is a bit more difficult to predict, but only in how it affects the body overall. It would certainly adjust and stay adjusted, but I can guess (with no evidence either way) that the effect would be no different than Daylight Savings Time cycles would have on the typical adult here on Earth.
Anyone can mine quotes, but unless you provide the context for each, you have no strength in your argument.
I did. I provided the book, chapter and verse for each, and you can read all the context you need.
Fair enough - you did cite the sources. That said, you still have a problem (which you have not resolved), and I should've pointed it out earlier: none of what you quoted is contradictory or an endorsement of what you intimate.
Mark 10:21 was a challenge to a wealthy man, who subsequently failed said test. Luke 14:26 is a statement as to how you should prioritize Christianity over the objections/demands of anyone else, including your own family. 1 Timothy 2:12 is your closest to an actual argument, but it only concerns the role of women in the church itself (and the reason why, for instance, there are no female priests in the Catholic Church). 1 Peter 2:18 was written when slavery was common, and yet it held/holds true - it also aligns perfectly with the Gospels, in which all Christians are to love their enemies, be kind to those who harm you, work the extra mile, etc.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum: All of what you quoted can be followed without contradiction *or* violation.
Here's the fun part - applying it to robots; the first two are superfluous, since robots have no property rights or family, though the lessons could still apply. The third fails because gender in that context is a human-specific thing, and so robots could simply relegate that as a human-only thing. The fourth is the only relevant verse you provided, and I'd damned sure want a robot to hold to it.
Nice try on the pre-emptive "cherry pick" charge BTW, but the burden is now on you to prove that I did such a thing.;)
One would hope that a good manager would have enough practical and direct experience in writing software to at least come up with a half-decent estimate, no?
Most shops I've seen lately have the scrum masters spend a part of a planning session simply asking individual contributors "Here's a rough outline of the proposed project [...] now how long do you think doing that will take", and they come up with an estimate adjustment from there... most of the time, it's fairly close. PMs pad things a little of course, but the results tend to be fairly close.
YMMV of course... depends on who is posting the final estimates - is it devs, or is it the MBAs.
Funny how all Christians claim that their path is the original path, and everybody else has perverted it, yet they all pick and choose the pieces they want to believe in.
I never said that 'my' path is the "original path" - I said that humankind has perverted the original ideal; nobody escapes this statement.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations.
It's not as simple as you surmise. As a Christian, I don't perceive that God stops by and literally vocalizes "...dude, you need more beer in the fridge! No, I'm okay, it's just that this week was a monster what with the whole planetary re-org over by Praxis IV, but you don't want to hear about that, promise. So how about those Trail Blazers last week?" Instead, the communication that does occur is a lot more ephemeral and IMHO a form of meta-communication, and it doesn't even involve presence at times.
If you think about it, communicating with the Almighty is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize - some never do. Human technology simply does not have the means to record the common, everyday stuff that most folks experience in their lifetime, and saints/prophets/saviors/miracles are very few and far between. It took Mother Teresa a very long time before she came to the realization, and if anybody deserved to have a straight-up chat with Him while she was in this world...
I do agree though - anyone who tells me "God spoke to me last night, and said..." is going to be met by me with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damned block of it.
TL;DR - not every Christian walks around claiming to have a two-way communication line open to the Divine. I daresay the majority of us claim no such thing.
Religion, in general though, is not just about 'who created who', but comprises an entire moral, philosophical, historical, and metaphysical structure.
This is true... and in this case, if robots are going to have any sort of religion, Christianity ain't a bad way to go (mind you: I mean it as originally proposed, not as perverted by humanity since.)
On the other hand, Isaac Asimov covered this very nicely in I, Robot (in the book, not the abortion of a movie.) The specific short story within the book is here.
I agree, but only insofar as they really screwed the pooch on how they ran this.
A more intelligent method would be to give the ISPs a choice:
* treat all inbound/outbound user traffic equally (excluding obvious DDoS or similar), and retain full immunity from lawsuits caused by user activity (basically become a full common carrier).
-or-
* do what you want insofar as traffic shaping, but know that you do so without any DMCA Safe Harbor protection, and get no immunity from lawsuits or crimes caused by user activity. Why? Because if you modify/inspect user traffic, you gain and share a measure of legal responsibility for it.
You give the ISPs that choice. They can change their minds once every three years, but otherwise they should get those two choices, and no other. I'm willing to bet that the ISPs would rush to become common carriers in a heartbeat, since there's no way they could collude with every copyright holder on the planet to avoid lawsuits.
What they have now is the top of a very slippery slope... and I don't care what party runs the government, either of them will happily abuse the privelege farther on down the road as things get more burdensome.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me or has affected ignorance become fashionable of late?
I blame Beta.
On a more reality-based note...
How in the hell are the survivors (who would be practically random) going to know...
1) that such a thing exists ...?
2) where (exactly) it is
3) how to get there (and back) without dying of something in the process (exposure, starvation, ocean storms, etc)
4) (assuming generations later) how to read the content labels, instructions, etc
It's a nice gesture and all for nearly any other scenario, but a *lot* of assumptions would have to be made for this to be viable in a no-shit doomsday scenario. At one point in human prehistory, it was estimated that a small extinction event reduced us to around 100k people, globally. That's a pretty scattered dispersion, and assuming a similar number of survivors in some future doomsday scenario, the odds are almost lottery-sized against putting it to use.
I'm not saying they should give up (far from it, actually) - I just think that maybe, just maybe they should expand on the idea a bit, and consider a few factors that seem awfully important when planning for a global doomsday scenario.
Uh... you know *why* Iran wants nukes, right? It is precisely because a nearby military rival has them.
...the same "nearby military rival" that Iran has repeatedly threatened to wipe out of existence. If anything, it's a huge argument against ever letting Iran get hold of the effing things.
Did you move the slider at all? It is in fact noteworthy that the page shows Israel has nearly doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal since worldwide arsenals peaked in '86.
Given the neighborhood and Iran's intent to make their own nukes, can you blame them?
Likewise, it's worth noting that Israel is *not* a member of the NPT.
...so who would they sell the tech to? Sometimes it makes no sense to bother with something when you're not liable to violate its precepts.
The tiny fraction can still wipe out the human race
Maybe, but that would depend on the location, timing and distribution of those explosions. If the balloon went up in 1987, yeah, the human race would pretty much be fscked. Nowadays, I'm not so sure that would be a given, considering that a not-insignificant percentage of those weapons would be destroyed in their silos, are undergoing maintenance at any given time, would fail to detonate completely or cleanly, or a whole host of other factors (and if either the US or Russia abstain from the exchange, then all bets are off as to the doomsday factor entirely.)
In that case, I humbly suggest they do a trial run at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, where no zombie would think to look for fresh brain matter.
c. U2 is a "dad band", in that it really only appeals to people who are in the 40+ age bracket. This also happens to be what iDevices are increasingly seen as "dad-tech", something your dad tells you is the "best choice for everything" which you know is obviously wrong but fuck it, you'll take the free phone anyway since he's paying for it.
As one of those folks in the 40+ age bracket...
1) Back when us old farts were teenagers, U2 was considered somewhat revolutionary (and in a way they were). The music itself? Compared to the mass of dreck we had thrust upon our ears via radio in the 1980s? It wasn't half bad, but there was better out there (you just had to really go look for the good shit, in an age where the HTTP protocol didn't exist and the Internet was unknown to 99.99999% of the planet. This meant buying a shitload of blank cassettes, a wide circle of friends, and having a boom box with cassette-to-cassette recording capability.)
2) I once felt the same way towards my old man's 60's/70's Psychedelic/ProgRock collection (played on reel-to-reel no less!) that you feel towards a 1980's has-been band. However, my ears, like the rest of me, grew up - I inherited his collection, and after a cursory listen-through, am ripping the hell out of some of those reels to the audio-in on my home desktop machine (Thank Heavens for Audacity on Linux...) Good news, though! Old stuff, new stuff, in-between stuff... it doesn't matter to me any more; I find good stuff in every era, to the point where I have 78 RPM 'vinyl' with stuff I've ripped to FLAC. Mind you, I'm typing this as some rather kickass German industrial rock is pumping into my headset. Before that, The Temptations' Power was playing. Jazz musicians call it the act of having 'Big Ears', where you find and love good music from practically every genre. Someday, you'll get that too.
3) One fine day, *your* kids will point at your current favorite tech and laugh their asses off, as surely as I once laughed my ass off at inheriting my parents' old Amstrad 2286 (complete with maths co-processor!) and its dot-matrix printer... in 1997. Deny it all you want, I don't mind... I know different. ;)
Wait... I thought the first proper zombie movie was Romero's Night of the Living Dead, set in Pennsylvania.
Besides, you have Triffids... be happy with that.
--
(That reminds me - you also have Quatermass; when the frig is someone over there going to resurrect that series?)
They did this on their own time and own dime....Riiiiight?
Well, *someone* has to find a safe hiding place for all the Senators and Fortune 100 CEO's... you don't think they have time to find that on their own, do you?
Same here (I have Windows 7 parked on a small VM for Windows-only stuff that I still find useful, but opening that VM gets rarer and rarer these days...)
A good idea, especially since the Moon has a two-week rotation. (by the way, many early drawings of lunar colonies did have underground living featured prominently. There was even a (IMHO dumb) idea to use nuclear weapons to carve out the caves with.
That all said, I think your body (or at least mind) would be in for a shock if you stepped outside on midnight colony time to see the sun high in the sky. But then, folks who live within the Arctic Circle have to put up with seasonal day/night cycle shifts that have some weeks in total darkness during winter (and the opposite in summer). They seem to adapt well enough (though to be fair, they still can rely on a 24-hour rotational cycle no matter where the sun is at any given moment.)
Seriously - people aren't as fragile as TFA surmises. In the spelunking world, cavers have discovered that after a few weeks without a day/night reference, their circadian cycles stretched out to a 24/24 cycle. In the case of a newly-minted Martian, it won't go that extreme, which means that at least within the timeframe of an exploratory journey, it would be no big deal, and they can adjust between the two on the way there and back (there's plenty of time on the journey to do that.)
Long term is a bit more difficult to predict, but only in how it affects the body overall. It would certainly adjust and stay adjusted, but I can guess (with no evidence either way) that the effect would be no different than Daylight Savings Time cycles would have on the typical adult here on Earth.
Yeah... today just went real sour.
It had to happen sometime, I guess... doesn't make it any easier to accept, though.
And you are that wealthy man! You are most likely well within the 1% circle of privileged individuals on this planet
1%? Probably not. 5%? More likely.
Incidentally, what I do and give in both time and resources has never been disclosed, nor will it (also a Christian tenet, incidentally).
Anyone can mine quotes, but unless you provide the context for each, you have no strength in your argument.
I did. I provided the book, chapter and verse for each, and you can read all the context you need.
Fair enough - you did cite the sources. That said, you still have a problem (which you have not resolved), and I should've pointed it out earlier: none of what you quoted is contradictory or an endorsement of what you intimate.
Mark 10:21 was a challenge to a wealthy man, who subsequently failed said test. Luke 14:26 is a statement as to how you should prioritize Christianity over the objections/demands of anyone else, including your own family. 1 Timothy 2:12 is your closest to an actual argument, but it only concerns the role of women in the church itself (and the reason why, for instance, there are no female priests in the Catholic Church). 1 Peter 2:18 was written when slavery was common, and yet it held/holds true - it also aligns perfectly with the Gospels, in which all Christians are to love their enemies, be kind to those who harm you, work the extra mile, etc.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum: All of what you quoted can be followed without contradiction *or* violation.
Here's the fun part - applying it to robots; the first two are superfluous, since robots have no property rights or family, though the lessons could still apply. The third fails because gender in that context is a human-specific thing, and so robots could simply relegate that as a human-only thing. The fourth is the only relevant verse you provided, and I'd damned sure want a robot to hold to it.
Nice try on the pre-emptive "cherry pick" charge BTW, but the burden is now on you to prove that I did such a thing. ;)
One would hope that a good manager would have enough practical and direct experience in writing software to at least come up with a half-decent estimate, no?
Most shops I've seen lately have the scrum masters spend a part of a planning session simply asking individual contributors "Here's a rough outline of the proposed project [...] now how long do you think doing that will take", and they come up with an estimate adjustment from there... most of the time, it's fairly close. PMs pad things a little of course, but the results tend to be fairly close.
YMMV of course... depends on who is posting the final estimates - is it devs, or is it the MBAs.
(If it's the latter, run like hell.)
Funny how all Christians claim that their path is the original path, and everybody else has perverted it, yet they all pick and choose the pieces they want to believe in.
I never said that 'my' path is the "original path" - I said that humankind has perverted the original ideal; nobody escapes this statement.
Also, I noticed that in your haste to quote scripture, you made a rather large mistake.
Anyone can mine quotes, but unless you provide the context for each, you have no strength in your argument.
No, no self-respecting AI developer will use .NET. Get that thought out of your head right this instant.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations.
It's not as simple as you surmise. As a Christian, I don't perceive that God stops by and literally vocalizes "...dude, you need more beer in the fridge! No, I'm okay, it's just that this week was a monster what with the whole planetary re-org over by Praxis IV, but you don't want to hear about that, promise. So how about those Trail Blazers last week?" Instead, the communication that does occur is a lot more ephemeral and IMHO a form of meta-communication, and it doesn't even involve presence at times.
If you think about it, communicating with the Almighty is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize - some never do. Human technology simply does not have the means to record the common, everyday stuff that most folks experience in their lifetime, and saints/prophets/saviors/miracles are very few and far between. It took Mother Teresa a very long time before she came to the realization, and if anybody deserved to have a straight-up chat with Him while she was in this world...
I do agree though - anyone who tells me "God spoke to me last night, and said..." is going to be met by me with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damned block of it.
TL;DR - not every Christian walks around claiming to have a two-way communication line open to the Divine. I daresay the majority of us claim no such thing.
Religion, in general though, is not just about 'who created who', but comprises an entire moral, philosophical, historical, and metaphysical structure.
This is true... and in this case, if robots are going to have any sort of religion, Christianity ain't a bad way to go (mind you: I mean it as originally proposed, not as perverted by humanity since.)
On the other hand, Isaac Asimov covered this very nicely in I, Robot (in the book, not the abortion of a movie.) The specific short story within the book is here.
(remember when we had local dial up ISPs? That was awesome!)
...and then first-person shooters were invented, at which point dial-up immediately began to suck ass. :p
(I remember when a 180ms ping was something you *bragged* about...)
I agree, but only insofar as they really screwed the pooch on how they ran this.
A more intelligent method would be to give the ISPs a choice:
* treat all inbound/outbound user traffic equally (excluding obvious DDoS or similar), and retain full immunity from lawsuits caused by user activity (basically become a full common carrier).
-or-
* do what you want insofar as traffic shaping, but know that you do so without any DMCA Safe Harbor protection, and get no immunity from lawsuits or crimes caused by user activity. Why? Because if you modify/inspect user traffic, you gain and share a measure of legal responsibility for it.
You give the ISPs that choice. They can change their minds once every three years, but otherwise they should get those two choices, and no other. I'm willing to bet that the ISPs would rush to become common carriers in a heartbeat, since there's no way they could collude with every copyright holder on the planet to avoid lawsuits.
What they have now is the top of a very slippery slope... and I don't care what party runs the government, either of them will happily abuse the privelege farther on down the road as things get more burdensome.
Because I want to save a few warheads for parts of California (specifically Sacramento, parts of LA County...)
Do we have alcohol vending machines now?
Now? We used to have them in the USAF in the barracks. Beer only, but still, there it was.
They got rid of them in 1988-89 IIRc.
As long as you don't demand that one provide you with sex...
But then, that's a whole other ethical bucket of fish.