Shouldn't we be spending more time and money fighting the cause of the problem than individual symptoms? Fight the causes of global warming--too many people burning too many hydrocarbons. And of course the "too many people" bit is also responsible for groundwater toxification, deforestation, resource wars, overfishing, traffic jams, etc.....
As for illegitimate methods, is Visa, or any of the other cc companies, a big enough customer for Google that they would risk the possible backlash and negative publicity to pull it?
Uh, I'm going to stop using Visa because of this? I stopped driving (mostly), for ethical reasons. But to stop using credit cards is far more difficult.
This reminds me of a line in Schindler's List (fantastic movie--you shouldn't be allowed to vote if you haven't seen it (that and Babylon 5)). I can't remember the context--perhaps a Jewish family is being forced to move from their posh house downtown to an all-Jewish community in another part of town. They are, of course, desolate to be leaving their beautiful home, and one of them says something along the lines of "We have really hit rock bottom. How could anything be worse than this?"
Greed? What's greedy is liberals like you can't get people to donate money to your causes, so you use the political system to steal money for you. I work hard for my money, you do not. If i want to give you money, its my perogative. Unless your a liberal, then you make a law to get money for you.
Greed: constantly working to trade favours with friends (oil companies, logging companies, drug companies,.....), letting them run rampant over the lives of not just Americans but everyone in the world just to pad their pockets, constantly striving to destroy preservation laws (endangered species, prohibitions on roadbuilding, motor vehicle use, logging, drilling, mining) in order to pay off bribes or make powerful friends, destabilising the middle east in order to shore up an economy based on a failing model of free fossil fuel energy--an economy whose main beneficiaries are friends and family of the ruling class...
Liberals stealing money from the hard-working people for "our causes"? Causes like giving the hard-working people affordable health care, affordable transportation, getting money away from the top 1% and into the economy, making sure that all citizens can get an education in order to teach our proudly illiterate Republican rednecks a little about rhetoric, grammar, and spelling? Yup, damn liberals, trying to make this a country to be proud of rather than just being proud of whatever crap happens to be in place because they were taught not to judge but just to blindly laud all that is American. Damn liberals.
Terror? I'm about to delete all the personal email off my laptop because citizens of the USA can no longer enter their own country without their personal computers being subject to search and seizure without probable cause. As of October the FBI will no longer need a court order to investigate someone. People have been abducted, held without trial, tortured and raped under the supervision of our government. I can't even carry a pair of tweezers on an airplane anymore because the terrorists running this country have worked so hard to make us fear everything, in order to trick or cow us into surrendering what we used to think of as rights in their greed for power. And on and on...
I remember the USA claiming that Iraq had no right to nuclear weapons, and I see some justification for that claim--if nobody had such powerful weapons we would all be better off, although perhaps if everyone had them we would be better off than if just some people did. Of course, the evidence that Iraq had WMDs was fabricated by our government. Why?
Has US public education fared well under Bush? No Child Left Behind has resoundingly failed. Americans have the most backward sexual education of any rich nation--by far! Our science education is a laughingstock all over the world. Cuts to funding of higher education and basic research do not argue for Bush trying to keep the country safe from ignorant citizens, which are the greatest threat to any "democracy".
Bush thinks he is doing good--as has every leader from Wangchuck to Hitler. The measure of whether you are doing good is not whether you think you are doing good, but whether the people live better, fuller, healthier, richer lives. Bush has pretty resoundingly failed on every measure I can think of. "The liberals" are not perfect, but they are vastly better.
Does the president have to know everything? I don't think Carter is eligible for re-election, and he was the last of his kind. If a president has advisors whom he trusts, and if he chose them well, and if he keeps tabs on what they're doing and gives them good high-level direction, that isn't such a bad thing. Consider Bush: IQ of about 4, and yet staggeringly effective at pushing his culture of greed, terror, ignorance, and whatnot, simply because he chose people who could be effective on his behalf. Not a bad system, if you're a good judge of character and if your heart is in the right place.
I'm not saying Obama's heart is in the right place. I don't really know; signs point to him not being a total disaster, and at least he obviously has a brain. I do know that McCain is at least as bad as Bush, completely obsessed with power, wealth, and the destruction of his sworn foes the Democrats and anything they stand for, good or bad.
And, like it or not, we have a system in which choosing anyone besides one of those two is almost the same as not voting. (Of course, voting is almost the same as not voting, as various Diebold employees have pointed out...).
No. It's his job to know how to make a good decision. If he is under the delusion that he knows something, he's less likely to hire, or listen to, a clever advisor.
Why is it not OK for a presidential candidate to admit that he doesn't know something? I'm sick to death of people who think they have to pretend to know everything all the time.
Not that McCain is worth the electrons I just encoded his name with, but in my book he scored one point for being aware of his ignorance. Seems a nice change from Republican policy. And Democratic policy, for that matter, although they are on average approximately 23% less ignorant than Republicans...
They are called personal CHOICES because you get to choose them. If you are ignorant (we're all ignorant of most things), then CHOICE becomes fairly meaningless.
Hypothetically, imagine that they disclose this to Microsoft, who quickly and effectively fix it (hypothetically, remember). Nobody is the wiser, and everybody keeps running Windows. The next exploit is found by a real bastard, who compromises 10% of the world's Vista servers, steals 10^7 credit card numbers, and buys an SUV.
Imagine now that they disclose it to the world as a whole. Some develop exploits, some install security patches, some get badly burned and tell their friends. A painful lesson will be remembered better than a security patch, and publicised more widely. Because of the pain and anguish caused by a few exploits, universities institute education policies, institutions look for heterogeneous environments, people become far more cautious around Microsoft, and the next exploit doesn't wreak so much havoc.
A "personal choice" only has meaning if you have some knowledge of the alternatives and their consequences. This is much like the doctrine that prevents children from signing legal documents. But rather than defining "children" as those younger than some age, it makes more sense to define them as those ignorant of something. It is understanding, not age, that makes us into adults. So in most areas we are all children.
A lot of guesses about the equivalent FLOPS of a human brain have centered around naive counting of cells and comparing that with the rather slow switching speed (about 10Hz IIRC). Some estimates came out at about 1 TeraFLOPS but that seems ridiculously small in light of what humans can do that computers still struggle with.
If you want to simulate a neuron down to the quantum level with transistors, it will take quite a few. Is this necessary? Nobody knows. Is it fundamental to the computation taking place that a neuron is a leaky integrator, or that the synaptic gap transmits signals chemically rather than electronically? Is a signal encoded by individual spike timings, or by rate, or by some amalgim? Sure, it takes many transistors to simulate all of those things, but the underlying computation may be much simpler. For sure, something like a center-surround cell in the retina uses a whole lot of neurons as inputs, and produces a result that a pretty modest pocket calculator could embarass.
The brain is amazing. But we do not know how computation takes place in there (or we'd have built something at least as good by now). We don't even have a definition for what constitutes "how the brain behaves"--if you make your black box around a single neuron you define "how the brain works" in one way, but if your black box is outside the perception->action loop of perceiving a Necker cube, there's a completely different set of behaviours to emulate. And if the black box surrounds a whole man, well, we all know how simple they are. Women are a different matter...;)
True, my thoughts yield a result that on the surface looks a little too close to the nitwit Republican agenda. You'll just have to pray that this slashdot thread doesn't make it onto Fox;) Still, it sounds like you are not reading very carefully. The liberals spew that your health is a fundamental human right, whereas in truth your health will always be something that you can to a large extent choose. When it is a choice, don't ask society to bail you out of a poor decision. But when your health is beyond your control, then I hope for a society that will watch your back. That's kind of what civilisation is for.
Of course, they don't talk about how there's a growing sect of people, including medical professionals, who believe the FDA's lax stance on food additives cause chronic diseases like the one I have.
You're still talking about a disease that you could hardly have known how to prevent, which I thought I'd addressed. Again: The causes of many diseases are understood, and many of them can be avoided by choice. If you smoke, I don't want to pay for your lung cancer treatment. If you do not exercise, I don't want to pay for your heart disease treatment. You have made a conscious decision that catapults you from low risk of those diseases to very high ones. If you, being of sound mind, consciously choose to cut off your foot, don't look to me to buy you a new one.
To reiterate: I want to live in a society that supports those who take basic care of themselves but are unlucky. Choose not to live reasonably healthily and you should not expect society to pay for your poor choice.
...until we tried to decide whether it would be based on KDE or Gnome. It would of course come to a vote, run by an impartial committee of QT developers, and we'd never quite figure out why there were more votes for KDE than there are Linux users.
Touchy, aren't we? Yes, when I posted I was speaking to you specifically, about your own concerns, and not discussing a general phenomenon. Everything is about you. Really.
Some health problems are not the victim's fault. Others are. Actually, I guess that depends on whether you believe in free will, but answering that in the negative is not generally constructive.
It seems quite reasonable to me that people should pay more for health insurance if they choose risky behaviours. Smoking and lack of exercise come to mind immediately--don't tell me that those aren't choices. Many health problems (heart disease, some diabetes, various cancers, most obesity, high blood pressure, mild (and sometimes even severe) depression, and a host of others), are very strongly linked to lifestyle choice, and so I have a hard time believing that they are generally not the fault of the victim. Of course, there's the question of education...
I would also like to pay less than people who drive frequently, since I am at much less risk from traffic accidents than they are. However, society at large created a situation in which most people have to drive a lot, so it seems reasonable that society should bear (distribute) the cost of that mistake.
It is of course difficult to measure to what exact extent an individual's decisions affect his health, but it's not hard to get a general idea--a correlation between lifestyle choice C and risk of disease D might be suggestive.
In an ideal world, insurance would accurately and fairly determine what diseases the client chose to risk and what were beyond his control. I realise that trusting an insurance company is one step down from trusting the government, but I am only smart enough to discuss a principle, not an implementation.
You raise a very good point, but I'd like to try a different angle on it. Health insurance (like any insurance) is a gamble by the insurance company, but since they play averages they are guaranteed to win in the long run.
Now, if an insurance business has a better idea of your risk level, it can adjust your rate appropriately, so that its chance of having to pay for you is just slightly lower than the amount it's making from you. Your behaviour affects your rate. This makes sense, in a way.
So the more information your insurer has about you, the more each person is bearing his own risk, and the less he is bearing the risks of those around him. Literally, society is bearing less of the cost of individuals who behave dangerously.
Republicans love that kind of thing. They like the idea of personal responsibility (or at least they used to before they truly went off the deep end, and there's still a lot of that left). Socialists like a society that takes care of its weak/stupid/careless/etc--in a sense, society accepting responsibility for its members. So the more information your insurance company has about you, the more Republican (in the sense of personal responsibility) society becomes.
Would you like to keep your good-driver discount? What's wrong with your health insurer charging more to your neighbour, who is an obese smoker, than to you, who work hard and spend money to stay healthy? I'm not sure where I stand on hereditary disease--maybe "full benefits until you have kids" or something would be reasonable, if society decided that it would be better off with fewer, healthier individuals.
Of course, as I alluded to above, the responsibility for risky behaviours in individuals is partly that of the individual and partly that of the society. Sadly, the people who have decided to make it impossible to healthily commute in LA are not the people who bear the costs to society of a few million morbidly obese Californians.
Isn't that what government is supposed to be good for? Um, yeah, well, democracy, eh?
Boulder has all of those (and more; see above). And they work, to an extent. There are more bikers here than in most cities in the US. But for every biker I see running errands or commuting, I see at least 50 cars, and that's in the summer in perfect weather. In the winter (even on the warmer days) the bike roads are plowed and de-iced along with the car roads, but there are many hundreds of cars per bike.
Also, please remember that little chicken-and-egg problem that we've all been bemoaning.
Moreover, (1) live near the highest point in town, (2) do all your grocery shopping at the lowest good grocery store in town, (3) do your errands by bike (which sort of goes without saying, I guess...).
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Shouldn't we be spending more time and money fighting the cause of the problem than individual symptoms? Fight the causes of global warming--too many people burning too many hydrocarbons. And of course the "too many people" bit is also responsible for groundwater toxification, deforestation, resource wars, overfishing, traffic jams, etc.....
Oh, I see. So it's sort of like checking email?
As for illegitimate methods, is Visa, or any of the other cc companies, a big enough customer for Google that they would risk the possible backlash and negative publicity to pull it?
Uh, I'm going to stop using Visa because of this? I stopped driving (mostly), for ethical reasons. But to stop using credit cards is far more difficult.
Let zem eet Keeeeek!
Interesting definition. Calling her attractive is sort of like calling a blowup doll attractive.
This reminds me of a line in Schindler's List (fantastic movie--you shouldn't be allowed to vote if you haven't seen it (that and Babylon 5)). I can't remember the context--perhaps a Jewish family is being forced to move from their posh house downtown to an all-Jewish community in another part of town. They are, of course, desolate to be leaving their beautiful home, and one of them says something along the lines of "We have really hit rock bottom. How could anything be worse than this?"
Greed? What's greedy is liberals like you can't get people to donate money to your causes, so you use the political system to steal money for you. I work hard for my money, you do not. If i want to give you money, its my perogative. Unless your a liberal, then you make a law to get money for you.
Greed: constantly working to trade favours with friends (oil companies, logging companies, drug companies, .....), letting them run rampant over the lives of not just Americans but everyone in the world just to pad their pockets, constantly striving to destroy preservation laws (endangered species, prohibitions on roadbuilding, motor vehicle use, logging, drilling, mining) in order to pay off bribes or make powerful friends, destabilising the middle east in order to shore up an economy based on a failing model of free fossil fuel energy--an economy whose main beneficiaries are friends and family of the ruling class...
Liberals stealing money from the hard-working people for "our causes"? Causes like giving the hard-working people affordable health care, affordable transportation, getting money away from the top 1% and into the economy, making sure that all citizens can get an education in order to teach our proudly illiterate Republican rednecks a little about rhetoric, grammar, and spelling? Yup, damn liberals, trying to make this a country to be proud of rather than just being proud of whatever crap happens to be in place because they were taught not to judge but just to blindly laud all that is American. Damn liberals.
Terror? I'm about to delete all the personal email off my laptop because citizens of the USA can no longer enter their own country without their personal computers being subject to search and seizure without probable cause. As of October the FBI will no longer need a court order to investigate someone. People have been abducted, held without trial, tortured and raped under the supervision of our government. I can't even carry a pair of tweezers on an airplane anymore because the terrorists running this country have worked so hard to make us fear everything, in order to trick or cow us into surrendering what we used to think of as rights in their greed for power. And on and on...
I remember the USA claiming that Iraq had no right to nuclear weapons, and I see some justification for that claim--if nobody had such powerful weapons we would all be better off, although perhaps if everyone had them we would be better off than if just some people did. Of course, the evidence that Iraq had WMDs was fabricated by our government. Why?
Has US public education fared well under Bush? No Child Left Behind has resoundingly failed. Americans have the most backward sexual education of any rich nation--by far! Our science education is a laughingstock all over the world. Cuts to funding of higher education and basic research do not argue for Bush trying to keep the country safe from ignorant citizens, which are the greatest threat to any "democracy".
Bush thinks he is doing good--as has every leader from Wangchuck to Hitler. The measure of whether you are doing good is not whether you think you are doing good, but whether the people live better, fuller, healthier, richer lives. Bush has pretty resoundingly failed on every measure I can think of. "The liberals" are not perfect, but they are vastly better.
Does the president have to know everything? I don't think Carter is eligible for re-election, and he was the last of his kind. If a president has advisors whom he trusts, and if he chose them well, and if he keeps tabs on what they're doing and gives them good high-level direction, that isn't such a bad thing. Consider Bush: IQ of about 4, and yet staggeringly effective at pushing his culture of greed, terror, ignorance, and whatnot, simply because he chose people who could be effective on his behalf. Not a bad system, if you're a good judge of character and if your heart is in the right place.
I'm not saying Obama's heart is in the right place. I don't really know; signs point to him not being a total disaster, and at least he obviously has a brain. I do know that McCain is at least as bad as Bush, completely obsessed with power, wealth, and the destruction of his sworn foes the Democrats and anything they stand for, good or bad.
And, like it or not, we have a system in which choosing anyone besides one of those two is almost the same as not voting. (Of course, voting is almost the same as not voting, as various Diebold employees have pointed out...).
No. It's his job to know how to make a good decision. If he is under the delusion that he knows something, he's less likely to hire, or listen to, a clever advisor.
Even Jimmy Carter didn't know everything.
...or just as alien from the usual content of the Senate meetings--and just as opaque--the actual laws that the senators vote on...
Why is it not OK for a presidential candidate to admit that he doesn't know something? I'm sick to death of people who think they have to pretend to know everything all the time.
Not that McCain is worth the electrons I just encoded his name with, but in my book he scored one point for being aware of his ignorance. Seems a nice change from Republican policy. And Democratic policy, for that matter, although they are on average approximately 23% less ignorant than Republicans...
So why didn't they close all the windows, turn it off, turn it on again, and reopen all the windows (possibly with the aid of a convenient elbow)?
They are called personal CHOICES because you get to choose them. If you are ignorant (we're all ignorant of most things), then CHOICE becomes fairly meaningless.
Hypothetically, imagine that they disclose this to Microsoft, who quickly and effectively fix it (hypothetically, remember). Nobody is the wiser, and everybody keeps running Windows. The next exploit is found by a real bastard, who compromises 10% of the world's Vista servers, steals 10^7 credit card numbers, and buys an SUV.
Imagine now that they disclose it to the world as a whole. Some develop exploits, some install security patches, some get badly burned and tell their friends. A painful lesson will be remembered better than a security patch, and publicised more widely. Because of the pain and anguish caused by a few exploits, universities institute education policies, institutions look for heterogeneous environments, people become far more cautious around Microsoft, and the next exploit doesn't wreak so much havoc.
A "personal choice" only has meaning if you have some knowledge of the alternatives and their consequences. This is much like the doctrine that prevents children from signing legal documents. But rather than defining "children" as those younger than some age, it makes more sense to define them as those ignorant of something. It is understanding, not age, that makes us into adults. So in most areas we are all children.
A lot of guesses about the equivalent FLOPS of a human brain have centered around naive counting of cells and comparing that with the rather slow switching speed (about 10Hz IIRC). Some estimates came out at about 1 TeraFLOPS but that seems ridiculously small in light of what humans can do that computers still struggle with.
If you want to simulate a neuron down to the quantum level with transistors, it will take quite a few. Is this necessary? Nobody knows. Is it fundamental to the computation taking place that a neuron is a leaky integrator, or that the synaptic gap transmits signals chemically rather than electronically? Is a signal encoded by individual spike timings, or by rate, or by some amalgim? Sure, it takes many transistors to simulate all of those things, but the underlying computation may be much simpler. For sure, something like a center-surround cell in the retina uses a whole lot of neurons as inputs, and produces a result that a pretty modest pocket calculator could embarass.
The brain is amazing. But we do not know how computation takes place in there (or we'd have built something at least as good by now). We don't even have a definition for what constitutes "how the brain behaves"--if you make your black box around a single neuron you define "how the brain works" in one way, but if your black box is outside the perception->action loop of perceiving a Necker cube, there's a completely different set of behaviours to emulate. And if the black box surrounds a whole man, well, we all know how simple they are. Women are a different matter... ;)
Remember Hari Seldon!
That's a hint that the way of the future is, as always, hybrid technology. I for one welcome our new cyborg overlords.
True, my thoughts yield a result that on the surface looks a little too close to the nitwit Republican agenda. You'll just have to pray that this slashdot thread doesn't make it onto Fox ;) Still, it sounds like you are not reading very carefully. The liberals spew that your health is a fundamental human right, whereas in truth your health will always be something that you can to a large extent choose. When it is a choice, don't ask society to bail you out of a poor decision. But when your health is beyond your control, then I hope for a society that will watch your back. That's kind of what civilisation is for.
Of course, they don't talk about how there's a growing sect of people, including medical professionals, who believe the FDA's lax stance on food additives cause chronic diseases like the one I have.
You're still talking about a disease that you could hardly have known how to prevent, which I thought I'd addressed. Again: The causes of many diseases are understood, and many of them can be avoided by choice. If you smoke, I don't want to pay for your lung cancer treatment. If you do not exercise, I don't want to pay for your heart disease treatment. You have made a conscious decision that catapults you from low risk of those diseases to very high ones. If you, being of sound mind, consciously choose to cut off your foot, don't look to me to buy you a new one.
To reiterate: I want to live in a society that supports those who take basic care of themselves but are unlucky. Choose not to live reasonably healthily and you should not expect society to pay for your poor choice.
...until we tried to decide whether it would be based on KDE or Gnome. It would of course come to a vote, run by an impartial committee of QT developers, and we'd never quite figure out why there were more votes for KDE than there are Linux users.
Shooting them is barbaric. The People prefer Madame la Guillotine.
Touchy, aren't we? Yes, when I posted I was speaking to you specifically, about your own concerns, and not discussing a general phenomenon. Everything is about you. Really.
Some health problems are not the victim's fault. Others are. Actually, I guess that depends on whether you believe in free will, but answering that in the negative is not generally constructive.
It seems quite reasonable to me that people should pay more for health insurance if they choose risky behaviours. Smoking and lack of exercise come to mind immediately--don't tell me that those aren't choices. Many health problems (heart disease, some diabetes, various cancers, most obesity, high blood pressure, mild (and sometimes even severe) depression, and a host of others), are very strongly linked to lifestyle choice, and so I have a hard time believing that they are generally not the fault of the victim. Of course, there's the question of education...
I would also like to pay less than people who drive frequently, since I am at much less risk from traffic accidents than they are. However, society at large created a situation in which most people have to drive a lot, so it seems reasonable that society should bear (distribute) the cost of that mistake.
It is of course difficult to measure to what exact extent an individual's decisions affect his health, but it's not hard to get a general idea--a correlation between lifestyle choice C and risk of disease D might be suggestive.
In an ideal world, insurance would accurately and fairly determine what diseases the client chose to risk and what were beyond his control. I realise that trusting an insurance company is one step down from trusting the government, but I am only smart enough to discuss a principle, not an implementation.
You raise a very good point, but I'd like to try a different angle on it. Health insurance (like any insurance) is a gamble by the insurance company, but since they play averages they are guaranteed to win in the long run.
Now, if an insurance business has a better idea of your risk level, it can adjust your rate appropriately, so that its chance of having to pay for you is just slightly lower than the amount it's making from you. Your behaviour affects your rate. This makes sense, in a way.
So the more information your insurer has about you, the more each person is bearing his own risk, and the less he is bearing the risks of those around him. Literally, society is bearing less of the cost of individuals who behave dangerously.
Republicans love that kind of thing. They like the idea of personal responsibility (or at least they used to before they truly went off the deep end, and there's still a lot of that left). Socialists like a society that takes care of its weak/stupid/careless/etc--in a sense, society accepting responsibility for its members. So the more information your insurance company has about you, the more Republican (in the sense of personal responsibility) society becomes.
Would you like to keep your good-driver discount? What's wrong with your health insurer charging more to your neighbour, who is an obese smoker, than to you, who work hard and spend money to stay healthy? I'm not sure where I stand on hereditary disease--maybe "full benefits until you have kids" or something would be reasonable, if society decided that it would be better off with fewer, healthier individuals.
Of course, as I alluded to above, the responsibility for risky behaviours in individuals is partly that of the individual and partly that of the society. Sadly, the people who have decided to make it impossible to healthily commute in LA are not the people who bear the costs to society of a few million morbidly obese Californians.
Isn't that what government is supposed to be good for? Um, yeah, well, democracy, eh?
...and "probable cause"--consorting with foreigners, who might even speak (gasp) French!
All shall bow to the mighty People's Democratic Republic of Jesusland!
Boulder has all of those (and more; see above). And they work, to an extent. There are more bikers here than in most cities in the US. But for every biker I see running errands or commuting, I see at least 50 cars, and that's in the summer in perfect weather. In the winter (even on the warmer days) the bike roads are plowed and de-iced along with the car roads, but there are many hundreds of cars per bike.
Also, please remember that little chicken-and-egg problem that we've all been bemoaning.
Why just senators/congressmen?
Moreover, (1) live near the highest point in town, (2) do all your grocery shopping at the lowest good grocery store in town, (3) do your errands by bike (which sort of goes without saying, I guess...).
Worked great for me!