Hmmm. I'm not calling you a hypocrite (at least, not yet) but you'd be up in fucking arms if somebody violated the GPL, right? But not Apple's ToS -- that doesn't apply to criminals. It's just words on a page that a criminal has to scroll past to get to the "I Accept" button so that he can start cracking the device that he just agreed not to crack. You make some (weak) rationalizations for why it's ok for criminals to break the ToS, but you just highlight the real problem. Here's a clue: You can't maintain one ethical standard for hackers and a different standard for everybody else, dude. Not if you want to be taken seriously, anyway.
But defense contracting would be a bit of a shift in how they like to do business, and I'm not sure a positive one. Alternately, they could just repurpose the acquired tech and expertise towards Google's own robotics projects, and dump the military clients. That would be leaving quite a bit of money and existing business on the table, though, not to mention possibly annoying some politically powerful folks.
Boston Dynamics *is* a defense contractor, so by extension Google is one too, now. I am going to try to remain optimistic about the positive effects that Google can have on human advancement. Science and engineering seem to leap forward much farther and much, much faster when they are deployed in the service of armed conflict. Companies like Planetary Resources, Armadillo Aerospace, and SpaceX are going to have to be able to defend their extra-terrestial ventures, and NASA has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that robotic missions in space are far more cost-effective in terms of results than manned missions. The minute Planetary Resources starts exploiting the asteroid belt, they are likely going to need a way to defend against claim jumpers, and I'm hoping that by hoovering up all these robotic companies,Google is positioning itself to defend these companies in their (hopefully) peaceful occupation and exploitation of the solar system.
I think there's a big future for a testing company, like Underwriter's Labs is for physical goods, to do just that. Anyone big or small can send them code to review, and pay a fee, and they'll certify the resulting binary as trouble-free, at least to level of confidence you's expect from a good app store or distro (acknowledging that sufficiently clever malware can hide anywhere, but forcing it to be really clever would probably fix 99% of the problem),
This. So what if some company certifies the code as non-toxic? For every legit code certifying company that goes online, there will be a hundred phishing sites popping up over-night to take advantage of it. The problem is not toxic code --- the problem is the toxic levels of foolishness and naivete of the vast majority of users on the net.
Just because you can't prevent anyone from doing something (murder, rape or holding a speech) doesn't make it a "right".
Try arguing your "right to life" with a hungry lion, rights only exists between entities that recognize those rights. If your government doesn't recognize freedom of speech, the difference between having it and not having it is entirely philosophical.
Hmmm. Excellent post. But I'm having trouble reconciling these two assertions.
From the point of view of a warlord, superior military force confers the right to murder and rape. Indeed, it confers any right the warlord chooses to assert. Ditto your hungry lion -- his right to eat me stops at the muzzle of my rifle.
It would seem to me that you need something more than just the other party recognizing that you have rights. You have to be able to successfully assert those rights. In French, it is "preter main forte" or "show the strong hand." In English, it would be "might makes right."
I always chuckle when I hear people say 'if I die...", when the correct wording is "when I die...". The exact circumstances vary from person to person, but the end result is always the same.
And I always cringe when somebody makes an assertion that is counter to my experience and to my intuition. I think about death fairly often, dude, and so do *a lot* of other people. I like to participate in activities -- skydiving, motorcycle racing, and stunt flying, just to enumerate what I did this weekend -- which could reasonably be expected to be fatal if not done correctly or well. I like to think that my parachute is going to open *every time* I exit the aircraft, that there is no debris that found its way onto the track at the apex of a blind turn that is going to cause me to high-side at a buck fifty, or that I'm not going to pull so many negative g's that I red-out and auger in, so that my death remains firmly in the hypothetical. I want "if" and not "when" to remain the correct way for me to phrase thoughts about dying for many, many, decades to come. I will happily concede your point that dying is inevitable, but for some of us, getting close to death is pleasurable, and we would like to dance with it for as long as humanly possible. Yeah, we are probably not going to die of "natural causes" but we will be part of the tiny fraction of humanity that gets to at least have some say in the time and manner of our demise. Unlike Scott Adams' father, whose time and manner of death was dictated by the fiscal self-interest of the medical facility that was prolonging his life for financial gain.
So you get to starve to death or dehydrate.
Excuse me if I don't consider death by organ failure over several days as "quickly". I don't think anyone would call that humane.
We would put down a dog in that condition. Not let it starve or die by dehydration.
"No heroic methods." That is the magic incantation that let's you die with dignity. At least in jurisdictions that allow advance healthcare directives, anyway. Run, do not walk, to your nearest legal professional and execute an advance healthcare directive, if you want to be able to die with dignity. If you don't live in a jurisdiction that allows advance healthcare directives, move to one that does. Period. BTW, morphine takes the edge off -- if you specifically allow the use of palliative measures in your directive, you can die with dignity and do it painlessly as well.
Do not make medical decisions about which drug to take by yourself, it's a bad idea.
Hmmm. Bad medical decisions that *you* make stop when your heart stops. The alternative is for some other person to make medical decisions on your behalf. This other person is immune to the consequences of a badly grokked medical decision, which leaves him free to continue dispensing bad advice. How is this not a bad thing, as well? Is there a middle course between these two choices?
From what I can determine, in all cases it is used to augment your ability to communicate and/or navigate. Why is wanting either of these pathetic in *any* circumstance?
Don't be naive. Do you really think that some clever sociopath is *not* going to figure out how to exploit his/her augmented ability to "communicate and/or navigate" to enhance their ability to fuck with people? C'mon. By your line of reasoning, a gun just augments our ability to throw things. Why is there no downside to throwing things harder and with more accuracy? I suppose you live in a (fantasy) land where armed robberies never happen?
Well, okay. Changing my words to enable a (feeble) reductio ad absurdum, and then asserting I represent some "corner" of your carefully arranged delusion regarding Apple pretty much puts you firmly in fanboi status. For the record, I was bashing people who buy Apple products, not Apple products. Steve Jobs is lauded as a marketing genius -- he figured out how to sell smart machines to well-heeled idiots. A high school buddy of mine, Steve Goldberg, was the product line VP of the only real failure Apple ever launched, the Lisa. His analysis: Apple tried to push a system on its specs and the people who were supposed to buy them said, "Huh?" and immediately lost interest. Looking at the demographics of Apple's target markets, it's pretty easy to deduce Jobs' genius -- market the computer as if it was part of some desirable life style, like it was just another status symbol like a high-end car, or a high-end watch, or a high-end girlfriend, and you will have people lining up for days to buy them. People buy Apple products because Jobs managed to create the illusion that owning one is actually desirable and (like an expensive watch or high-maintenance girlfriend) difficult to replace. Dell, HP, Digital, Compaq -- they could only dream of the lock-in achieved by Jobs, but their target demographic was very much different. That demographic pretty much cared about things like performance per dollar, ROI, and scalability, and not so much about how pretty it was or how dumbed-down the interface was. A much tougher demographic to please than Apple's. There's genius in finding the barrel with all the fish in it to shoot, and that's exactly what Jobs did.
A morality play, indeed, and a book-long meditation on duty. RAH wrote ST largely because he was paranoid about communism. He felt betrayed by Eisenhower's parting shot at the military-industrial complex that, from RAH's POV, was our last bulwark against the Sovs. (Which is probably why he threw his support to Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 -- like Goldwater, he felt a nuclear war with the USSR was winnable and we might as well get it over with while we still had a slight advantage in nukes.) Check out his speech at the 1960 WorldCon, where ST won the Hugo, if you are in any measure unsure on this point. As far as the movie goes, Heinlein was *never* interested in presenting a balanced view of anything -- there is absolutely nothing thematically ambiguous in any of his corpus. I think this is why Verhoeven chose ST -- he was looking for a vehicle for an anti-fascist satire, and the crypto-fascist utopian society depicted in ST was *perfect*. And for what it is worth, ST was aimed at teenagers, not adults -- which is probably why so many adults are confused by it. Interestingly enough, Putnam actually refused to market it as a juvenile.
And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.
What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.
Well, that's a great shame. Whoever wrote the article on Wikipedia made no attempt to explain it in layman's terms. I give you:
In quantum gravity, the Wheeler–DeWitt equation[1] describes the quantum version of the Hamiltonian constraint using metric variables. Its commutation relations with the Diffeomorphism constraints generate the Bergmann-Komar "group" (which is the Diffeomorphism group on-shell, but differs off-shell).
Years of study no doubt required in order to even attempt to understand what that's all about!
Actually, a pair of undergraduate classes in abstract and linear algebra thirty years ago is all that I'm going on, and it seems adequate to get the gist of the Wikipedia article. Admittedly, I had to look up Bergmann-Komarr (I'm not a physicist; the dynamical evolution of Einstein's differential equations describing GR have only a limited, abstract appeal to me!) , but abstract groups in general, along with commutations, diffeomorphisms, and Hamiltonians were covered at the freshman level. So months, not years.:)
The ACLU and medical professionals don't think there's anything voluntary about receiving medical treatment, and that medical ethics override other concerns.
What about cases where the patient is under a doctor's care as the result of publicly visible, *voluntary* behaviors? I can't really feel solidarity with some overweight person who smokes complaining that her medical information is being disclosed to some third party. Unhealthy behavior should be discouraged, and a good way to do that is to punish these people in the pocket book by maintaining a database of people with unhealthy behaviors so that insurance companies can shift the risk of those unhealthy behaviors unto the shoulders of those that deserve it. Those of us who try to stay healthy should not have to bear the financial burden when some chain-smoking junk food junkie's coronary arteries eventually seize up and her lungs shut down. My insurance company created a tiered system where they charge smokers much higher premiums than they charge for non-smokers. Ditto for BMI. People who refuse to maintain reasonable height-weight proportionality should have to pay more for health insurance than the rest of us. I have to get swabbed and weighed once a month to prove I'm not smoking anymore and am maintaining a healthy weight, but it saves me over $2000 per year in premiums.
More to the point, I think I have the absolute right to determine *for myself* that the people I put trust in (teachers, bus drivers, cops, firemen, bankers, janitors, housekeepers) are not abusing the medications that have been prescribed to them -- a publicly accessible medical database would go a long way in making that possible.
Its FAR more frustrating that rather than trying to -fix- the edge cases Asimov uncovered with the 3 laws (later 4 laws), we've decided to just go full steam ahead without any laws at all with robots designed for the sole purpose of killing us.
Well, we've had lethal robots that meet this definition since the first time an anarchist connected an alarm clock to bundle of dynamite and hid it in the luggage compartment on a train. A human-class AI must have the capacity to kill, or it wouldn't be human-class. It also must have the capacity to make decisions based on probabilistic outcomes, and evaluate those outcomes against some nominal goal and change its behavior based on that assessment -- the same way humans do.
Fwiw, the Good Doctor changed the Three Laws to include a fourth law, which he called the "Zeroth Law" and introduced in Robots and Empire
0. A robot must not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
The edge case he needed to fix was resolving conflicts where the death of a human or humans was necessary for the greater good. I think he realized that his pacifist take on conflict resolution as embodied in the original Three Laws was too much even for *his* fans' credulity.:)
But -- it also helped bridge the uncanny valley between his robots and the rest of humanity. Giskard and R. Daneel Olivaw became far more "human" after Asimov introduced the Zeroth Law, where their actions were not constrained by the inherent pacifism of the original Three Laws.
My impression after reading the article is that this allows for easier predictions of the outcomes of particle interactions, like you might show with Feynman diagrams (particle decay, collisions that produce different particles, etc). Basically, the kinds of things that we'd study in a particle accelerator (so, quantum interactions, rather than classical ones).
The problem with Feynmann diagrams is that they require a bit of mathematical trickery to actually work, so they are *at best* a flawed tool. In fact, the Standard Model itself is an incomplete (gravity, anybody?) flawed tool, for this and other reasons. Don't want to rain on the parade (as a mathematician, I'm excited by any interesting application of math to the real world) but this simply sweeps a large chunk of the renormalization problem under the rug, and doesn't address any of the other, very serious issues with SM. For what it is worth, the writing is on the wall for SM -- unless we see some genuinely interesting physics occurring at energies we can observe, I think SM is going to have to be abandoned for a less flawed, more fruitful model.
Who cares? You're never going to actually drive it that fast.
Bullshit. You, sir, have apparently never been to a track day. I may not hit 200mph, but I regularly get my Ducati 1098 (another example of Italian looks-good-goes-fast technology) to a buck eighty-five. There are three pro tracks within a two-hour ride (one is only forty-five minutes away) from my house that have track days nearly every weekend of the year. For a fee ranging from $40 to about $150 per day, I can drag a knee at 120mph and tuck in for a speed run on the straight-away for hours on end. There are plenty of racing venues that cater to well-heeled speed freaks so we can ride fast in a controlled, reasonably safe environment for a trivial amount of scratch. So fuck you, coward -- too bad you will never get to enjoy the thrill of piloting an exquisitely engineered machine at the edge of its performance envelope. That takes money and balls, two (three?) things you obviously lack.
Tyson, entertaining and astute as he is, seems to be missing the historical point. Musk is following in the footsteps of Astor, Harriman, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the rest of the robber barons of the late 19th century, by building out a self-financing sustainable infrastructure for his industrial ambitions. And make no mistake, he may be a neo-industrialist, but he is still an industrialist, with all the negative baggage that goes along with it. And like his 19th century predecessors, Musk will eventually need resources that he doesn't already command. The robber barons of the 19th century created manifest destiny out of whole cloth to enlist the help of the US government in removing obstacles -- natives, geography, competing commercial interests, pretty much anything that stood in the way -- of pillaging the continent for its natural resources. Unlike his predecessors, though, Musk seems to be angling only for financial support from the US government in the form of guaranteed lift contracts once he's got a heavy lift capacity established. What Tyson seems to be saying is that Musk can't do it alone; nobody can do it without some kind of major (read: US) governmental support. The only governmental support Musk and his fellow neo-industrialists are likely going to need is somebody to scrape the claim jumpers off their asteroids and orbital habitats. That is going to require an armed force, and I'm certain there exist any number of polities on this planet willing to loan him theirs in return for a slice of Musk's pie in the sky.
I certainly don't see any reason for America or anybody else for that matter to go to war over this mess. There certainly is no reason to even seek UN approval for going there either, of course why does anybody need "UN approval" for going to war in the first place?
Well -- nice red herring, but this isn't about why there is a conflict in Syria, or obtaining approval to do something about it.. This is about the use of WMDs. Whatever side you come down on in the conflict in Syria, the use of WMDs trumps your ideological bias. The message has to be clear, immediate, and overwhelming -- if you deploy WMDs, you will be denied existence. Whether that message is delivered by a single nation,or a collection of nations is also a red-herring -- as long as it is delivered in an open, transparent way, it doesn't matter who delivers it.
And what's old got to do with it? You telling me older actors can't act? Or we should be worried because he might fall over and die any day? Seriously? John Hurt looks like a doctor. I know the BBC thinks it needs young actors for the doctor, but lets be real, the best doctors (IMO) were the older dudes.
Nice (old) strawman. Old actors can indeed act. Usually better than younger ones. But acting ability is not the primary focus for casting a role. I preferred Tom Baker when I was a (much) younger fan, not because he was a better actor than Hartnell, Troughton or Pertwee, but because he was the first doctor I could relate to age-wise. With that said, eye candy seems to be *way* more important now to content producers and sponsors.than acting ability or credibility in a role. Look what happened when Pierce Brosnan got the nod for Bond. He was the perfect fit for the role, eagerly anticipated by the fans, and an excellent actor, but he tanked almost as quickly as his predecessor, Timothy Dalton. Market demographics being what they are, I expect the next (last?) doctor to be well south of 25 with flawless skin, six-pack abs, and more than a little light on his feet, to broaden his appeal. Advertisers/sponsors will want an actor in the role who can appeal to the 18-25 demographic, because that is the target demographic they must appeal to -- the one with the most disposable income.
Um, the "rule book" is something along the lines of the laws and regulations of where they do business.
Course, the basic rule is to hide whatever you can from the refs, no matter what the "sport"...
Indeed. But you can also work the refs. This is a viable strategy, as well, especially if used in tandem with your basic rule of deception. A ref that is willing to look the other way is just as valuable as one that has been deceived. Changing the rules is also another viable strategy, one that seems to be favored by large corporatioins, if the amount of money they spend to influence lawmakers is any indication.
>Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality,
Nature is a system that favors the win at all costs.The winners (in wars) are the ones that write the history books. The winners in games are the ones the viewers. The winners in finance are the ones that make the most money. You are going to have a hard time changing the system because being the winner is what most people want.
Nature does not favor winning at all cost and usually is just the opposite. It is the cooperative or symbiotic relationship that prospers.
The writers of history have nothing to do with nature. Nor do the winners in games or finance. As for that being what people want, well what happened to Enron? What happened to Lance Armstrong? What happened to the Romans? All those embraced winning at all cost and all were toppled.
Society tolerates winning at all cost only to a point, then like bullying, they rise up against it. That is where anti-trust laws came from in business and anti-doping laws in sports and even the Geneva convention in war. Eventually, civilized people settle on rules of fair play.
So does nature. The giant redwood does take all of the nutrients in the forest, just those it needs. Same for the fox or a bear. In our own bodies, we call cells that take too much cancer and cut them out. Why? because even those those cells are the fittest, they destroy the body. In nature, if the animal at the top of the food chain eats all the food, the animal dies, too. So, in nature, a proper balance is maintained (unless man does something to upset it, like introduce a non native species or change the habitat or environment).
Not even Darwin believed in survival of the fittest. He used that expression only twice in the entire On the Origen of the Species. He actually proposed cooperation as the better model using human beings as the example since we were not the fastest or strongest nor did we posses the sharpest claws or teeth. Instead in cooperating we were successful in dominating the planet.
So, even in nature, the win at all cost model does not win.
Almost, but not quite. Nature is not about competing organisms or communities of organisms. It is about competing strategies. Nature indeed rewards winning strategies and punishes losing strategies, but the organism or community of organisms that employ them are just along for the ride. But nature is mutable; it is just the current context in which a given strategy or strategies are evaluated. If the context is allowed to change, then there is a new set of criteria against which strategies are evaluated, and if the strategy doesn't change, the organism or community of organisms employing that strategy might not make it into the next generation, which is the only criteria against which any strategy can be judged. In that sense, nature is indeed winner-take-all, and neatly explains what happened to Enron and the Roman civilization.. Thus, I would posit that preventing the context change becomes a viable strategy. The rise of human civilization is all about controlling nature, controlling the context in a way that preserves whatever strategy that is currently being used. The Romans failed to prevent a context change forced on them by the Visigoths, and so did Enron, a context change forced on them by having to live by the rules that they were discovered violating. What happened to Lance Armstrong can be read the same way: Armstrong's strategy of performance enhancing drugs was successful until other riders forced a context change on him, forcing him to compete on their terms, not on his terms.
In finance, large corporations saw what happened to Enron, and are working very hard to make sure that the context change that killed Enron won't be allowed to happen to them. They are doing this by making sure they have control over the mechanism that controls the context in which they operate. In the US, that means successfully influencing lawmakers th
I support the right to bear arms, as well as the right for a woman to have an abortion. I support the Death Penalty (in some circumstances), and I also support assistance for those that need it. I support gay marriage, and I also support the Free Market. I support the freedom OF religion, as well as the freedom FROM religion.
Strange. I don't seem to fit into either category.
People are different - politicians or no, you're going to have liars and hypocrites along with those that actually try to make the world a better place. The problem is that the actual JOB of being a politician puts you in a position to be surrounded by a toxic environment the from before you actually get elected. That kind of toxicity is tough to wash off, and the deeper you get immersed into the political culture, the harder it is to reverse course. The path of least resistance involves letting other people make decisions for you, and those people have no scruples.
I share your political opinions (except perhaps on the death penalty; might be interesting to debate that with you, since we seem to be on the same page otherwise.) Granted, in the US's federated republican from of democracy, where people elect representatives to make policy decisions on their behalf, the democratic process has been hijacked by narrow special interests. In federal republics like the US, corruption can and will set in, because these representatives have to first get elected, and then remain in office long enough to be effective. The first rule of politics in the US is "get re-elected" and that is the source of the toxic culture you speak of.
Fortunately though, getting elected and remaining in office are issues that are entirely distinct from the process of creating the policies that will guide the society into the future. People like you and I who defy easy categorization often are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils on election day, effectively disenfranchising us, but you and I can still have a direct voice in the democratic process, because (at least in the US) we also have the initiative, the referendum, and the recall.
As you indicate, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall are not on the path of least resistence. They may not represent the minimum energy state of the system, but they do exist and are available to those of us who are a) aware of them, and b) willing to invest the time and money necessary to exploit them.
Real coffee aficionados say that it's not the grinding that's the problem - it's the roasting. Green, unroasted beans keep for a long time. Once you roast them, though, they're only good for a few days, whether you grind them first or later.
Personally, I'm yet to be convinced. I buy beans and grind them... but I'm pretty sure that's just because I buy beans and like grinding them (it's a good ritual). I've not noticed much difference in the taste.
Yes, but if you want to preserve your coffee in quantity, keeping a a sack of beans around is probably not the best way.:) Try a simple ice-drip -- brewed coffee gets it flavor from oils extracted from the bean during the brewing process, but not all oils contribute equally to the flavor. Coffee goes bad in much the same way that butter and cooking oil go bad -- coffee will go rancid because it contains oils that degrade when exposed to heat and oxygen. The ice-drip brewing process removes most of those oils, and the result is a brew that will keep almost indefinitely in your 'fridge. You can nuke it or steam it up a bit if you like it hot. I host cuppings at a local coffee market, and people invariably are surprised when I tell them that delicious cuppa they just rated as excellent had been sitting in my 'fridge for a year. It definitely helps me sell ice-drip systems.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. I'm not calling you a hypocrite (at least, not yet) but you'd be up in fucking arms if somebody violated the GPL, right? But not Apple's ToS -- that doesn't apply to criminals. It's just words on a page that a criminal has to scroll past to get to the "I Accept" button so that he can start cracking the device that he just agreed not to crack. You make some (weak) rationalizations for why it's ok for criminals to break the ToS, but you just highlight the real problem. Here's a clue: You can't maintain one ethical standard for hackers and a different standard for everybody else, dude. Not if you want to be taken seriously, anyway.
Simple rules that produce fascinatingly complex behaviors, to me, is more geeky than complex rules that produce fascinatingly complex behaviors. YMMV.
But defense contracting would be a bit of a shift in how they like to do business, and I'm not sure a positive one. Alternately, they could just repurpose the acquired tech and expertise towards Google's own robotics projects, and dump the military clients. That would be leaving quite a bit of money and existing business on the table, though, not to mention possibly annoying some politically powerful folks.
Boston Dynamics *is* a defense contractor, so by extension Google is one too, now. I am going to try to remain optimistic about the positive effects that Google can have on human advancement. Science and engineering seem to leap forward much farther and much, much faster when they are deployed in the service of armed conflict. Companies like Planetary Resources, Armadillo Aerospace, and SpaceX are going to have to be able to defend their extra-terrestial ventures, and NASA has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that robotic missions in space are far more cost-effective in terms of results than manned missions. The minute Planetary Resources starts exploiting the asteroid belt, they are likely going to need a way to defend against claim jumpers, and I'm hoping that by hoovering up all these robotic companies,Google is positioning itself to defend these companies in their (hopefully) peaceful occupation and exploitation of the solar system.
Vaidman, is that you?
I think there's a big future for a testing company, like Underwriter's Labs is for physical goods, to do just that. Anyone big or small can send them code to review, and pay a fee, and they'll certify the resulting binary as trouble-free, at least to level of confidence you's expect from a good app store or distro (acknowledging that sufficiently clever malware can hide anywhere, but forcing it to be really clever would probably fix 99% of the problem),
This. So what if some company certifies the code as non-toxic? For every legit code certifying company that goes online, there will be a hundred phishing sites popping up over-night to take advantage of it. The problem is not toxic code --- the problem is the toxic levels of foolishness and naivete of the vast majority of users on the net.
Just because you can't prevent anyone from doing something (murder, rape or holding a speech) doesn't make it a "right".
Try arguing your "right to life" with a hungry lion, rights only exists between entities that recognize those rights. If your government doesn't recognize freedom of speech, the difference between having it and not having it is entirely philosophical.
Hmmm. Excellent post. But I'm having trouble reconciling these two assertions.
From the point of view of a warlord, superior military force confers the right to murder and rape. Indeed, it confers any right the warlord chooses to assert. Ditto your hungry lion -- his right to eat me stops at the muzzle of my rifle.
It would seem to me that you need something more than just the other party recognizing that you have rights. You have to be able to successfully assert those rights. In French, it is "preter main forte" or "show the strong hand." In English, it would be "might makes right."
I always chuckle when I hear people say 'if I die...", when the correct wording is "when I die...". The exact circumstances vary from person to person, but the end result is always the same.
And I always cringe when somebody makes an assertion that is counter to my experience and to my intuition. I think about death fairly often, dude, and so do *a lot* of other people. I like to participate in activities -- skydiving, motorcycle racing, and stunt flying, just to enumerate what I did this weekend -- which could reasonably be expected to be fatal if not done correctly or well. I like to think that my parachute is going to open *every time* I exit the aircraft, that there is no debris that found its way onto the track at the apex of a blind turn that is going to cause me to high-side at a buck fifty, or that I'm not going to pull so many negative g's that I red-out and auger in, so that my death remains firmly in the hypothetical. I want "if" and not "when" to remain the correct way for me to phrase thoughts about dying for many, many, decades to come. I will happily concede your point that dying is inevitable, but for some of us, getting close to death is pleasurable, and we would like to dance with it for as long as humanly possible. Yeah, we are probably not going to die of "natural causes" but we will be part of the tiny fraction of humanity that gets to at least have some say in the time and manner of our demise. Unlike Scott Adams' father, whose time and manner of death was dictated by the fiscal self-interest of the medical facility that was prolonging his life for financial gain.
So you get to starve to death or dehydrate. Excuse me if I don't consider death by organ failure over several days as "quickly". I don't think anyone would call that humane.
We would put down a dog in that condition. Not let it starve or die by dehydration.
"No heroic methods." That is the magic incantation that let's you die with dignity. At least in jurisdictions that allow advance healthcare directives, anyway. Run, do not walk, to your nearest legal professional and execute an advance healthcare directive, if you want to be able to die with dignity. If you don't live in a jurisdiction that allows advance healthcare directives, move to one that does. Period. BTW, morphine takes the edge off -- if you specifically allow the use of palliative measures in your directive, you can die with dignity and do it painlessly as well.
Do not make medical decisions about which drug to take by yourself, it's a bad idea.
Hmmm. Bad medical decisions that *you* make stop when your heart stops. The alternative is for some other person to make medical decisions on your behalf. This other person is immune to the consequences of a badly grokked medical decision, which leaves him free to continue dispensing bad advice. How is this not a bad thing, as well? Is there a middle course between these two choices?
From what I can determine, in all cases it is used to augment your ability to communicate and/or navigate. Why is wanting either of these pathetic in *any* circumstance?
Don't be naive. Do you really think that some clever sociopath is *not* going to figure out how to exploit his/her augmented ability to "communicate and/or navigate" to enhance their ability to fuck with people? C'mon. By your line of reasoning, a gun just augments our ability to throw things. Why is there no downside to throwing things harder and with more accuracy? I suppose you live in a (fantasy) land where armed robberies never happen?
Well, okay. Changing my words to enable a (feeble) reductio ad absurdum, and then asserting I represent some "corner" of your carefully arranged delusion regarding Apple pretty much puts you firmly in fanboi status. For the record, I was bashing people who buy Apple products, not Apple products. Steve Jobs is lauded as a marketing genius -- he figured out how to sell smart machines to well-heeled idiots. A high school buddy of mine, Steve Goldberg, was the product line VP of the only real failure Apple ever launched, the Lisa. His analysis: Apple tried to push a system on its specs and the people who were supposed to buy them said, "Huh?" and immediately lost interest. Looking at the demographics of Apple's target markets, it's pretty easy to deduce Jobs' genius -- market the computer as if it was part of some desirable life style, like it was just another status symbol like a high-end car, or a high-end watch, or a high-end girlfriend, and you will have people lining up for days to buy them. People buy Apple products because Jobs managed to create the illusion that owning one is actually desirable and (like an expensive watch or high-maintenance girlfriend) difficult to replace. Dell, HP, Digital, Compaq -- they could only dream of the lock-in achieved by Jobs, but their target demographic was very much different. That demographic pretty much cared about things like performance per dollar, ROI, and scalability, and not so much about how pretty it was or how dumbed-down the interface was. A much tougher demographic to please than Apple's. There's genius in finding the barrel with all the fish in it to shoot, and that's exactly what Jobs did.
A morality play, indeed, and a book-long meditation on duty. RAH wrote ST largely because he was paranoid about communism. He felt betrayed by Eisenhower's parting shot at the military-industrial complex that, from RAH's POV, was our last bulwark against the Sovs. (Which is probably why he threw his support to Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 -- like Goldwater, he felt a nuclear war with the USSR was winnable and we might as well get it over with while we still had a slight advantage in nukes.) Check out his speech at the 1960 WorldCon, where ST won the Hugo, if you are in any measure unsure on this point. As far as the movie goes, Heinlein was *never* interested in presenting a balanced view of anything -- there is absolutely nothing thematically ambiguous in any of his corpus. I think this is why Verhoeven chose ST -- he was looking for a vehicle for an anti-fascist satire, and the crypto-fascist utopian society depicted in ST was *perfect*. And for what it is worth, ST was aimed at teenagers, not adults -- which is probably why so many adults are confused by it. Interestingly enough, Putnam actually refused to market it as a juvenile.
And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.
What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.
Well, that's a great shame. Whoever wrote the article on Wikipedia made no attempt to explain it in layman's terms. I give you:
Years of study no doubt required in order to even attempt to understand what that's all about!
Actually, a pair of undergraduate classes in abstract and linear algebra thirty years ago is all that I'm going on, and it seems adequate to get the gist of the Wikipedia article. Admittedly, I had to look up Bergmann-Komarr (I'm not a physicist; the dynamical evolution of Einstein's differential equations describing GR have only a limited, abstract appeal to me!) , but abstract groups in general, along with commutations, diffeomorphisms, and Hamiltonians were covered at the freshman level. So months, not years. :)
The ACLU and medical professionals don't think there's anything voluntary about receiving medical treatment, and that medical ethics override other concerns.
What about cases where the patient is under a doctor's care as the result of publicly visible, *voluntary* behaviors? I can't really feel solidarity with some overweight person who smokes complaining that her medical information is being disclosed to some third party. Unhealthy behavior should be discouraged, and a good way to do that is to punish these people in the pocket book by maintaining a database of people with unhealthy behaviors so that insurance companies can shift the risk of those unhealthy behaviors unto the shoulders of those that deserve it. Those of us who try to stay healthy should not have to bear the financial burden when some chain-smoking junk food junkie's coronary arteries eventually seize up and her lungs shut down. My insurance company created a tiered system where they charge smokers much higher premiums than they charge for non-smokers. Ditto for BMI. People who refuse to maintain reasonable height-weight proportionality should have to pay more for health insurance than the rest of us. I have to get swabbed and weighed once a month to prove I'm not smoking anymore and am maintaining a healthy weight, but it saves me over $2000 per year in premiums.
More to the point, I think I have the absolute right to determine *for myself* that the people I put trust in (teachers, bus drivers, cops, firemen, bankers, janitors, housekeepers) are not abusing the medications that have been prescribed to them -- a publicly accessible medical database would go a long way in making that possible.
Its FAR more frustrating that rather than trying to -fix- the edge cases Asimov uncovered with the 3 laws (later 4 laws), we've decided to just go full steam ahead without any laws at all with robots designed for the sole purpose of killing us.
Well, we've had lethal robots that meet this definition since the first time an anarchist connected an alarm clock to bundle of dynamite and hid it in the luggage compartment on a train. A human-class AI must have the capacity to kill, or it wouldn't be human-class. It also must have the capacity to make decisions based on probabilistic outcomes, and evaluate those outcomes against some nominal goal and change its behavior based on that assessment -- the same way humans do.
Fwiw, the Good Doctor changed the Three Laws to include a fourth law, which he called the "Zeroth Law" and introduced in Robots and Empire
0. A robot must not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
The edge case he needed to fix was resolving conflicts where the death of a human or humans was necessary for the greater good. I think he realized that his pacifist take on conflict resolution as embodied in the original Three Laws was too much even for *his* fans' credulity. :)
But -- it also helped bridge the uncanny valley between his robots and the rest of humanity. Giskard and R. Daneel Olivaw became far more "human" after Asimov introduced the Zeroth Law, where their actions were not constrained by the inherent pacifism of the original Three Laws.
My impression after reading the article is that this allows for easier predictions of the outcomes of particle interactions, like you might show with Feynman diagrams (particle decay, collisions that produce different particles, etc). Basically, the kinds of things that we'd study in a particle accelerator (so, quantum interactions, rather than classical ones).
The problem with Feynmann diagrams is that they require a bit of mathematical trickery to actually work, so they are *at best* a flawed tool. In fact, the Standard Model itself is an incomplete (gravity, anybody?) flawed tool, for this and other reasons. Don't want to rain on the parade (as a mathematician, I'm excited by any interesting application of math to the real world) but this simply sweeps a large chunk of the renormalization problem under the rug, and doesn't address any of the other, very serious issues with SM. For what it is worth, the writing is on the wall for SM -- unless we see some genuinely interesting physics occurring at energies we can observe, I think SM is going to have to be abandoned for a less flawed, more fruitful model.
Who cares? You're never going to actually drive it that fast.
Bullshit. You, sir, have apparently never been to a track day. I may not hit 200mph, but I regularly get my Ducati 1098 (another example of Italian looks-good-goes-fast technology) to a buck eighty-five. There are three pro tracks within a two-hour ride (one is only forty-five minutes away) from my house that have track days nearly every weekend of the year. For a fee ranging from $40 to about $150 per day, I can drag a knee at 120mph and tuck in for a speed run on the straight-away for hours on end. There are plenty of racing venues that cater to well-heeled speed freaks so we can ride fast in a controlled, reasonably safe environment for a trivial amount of scratch. So fuck you, coward -- too bad you will never get to enjoy the thrill of piloting an exquisitely engineered machine at the edge of its performance envelope. That takes money and balls, two (three?) things you obviously lack.
Tyson, entertaining and astute as he is, seems to be missing the historical point. Musk is following in the footsteps of Astor, Harriman, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the rest of the robber barons of the late 19th century, by building out a self-financing sustainable infrastructure for his industrial ambitions. And make no mistake, he may be a neo-industrialist, but he is still an industrialist, with all the negative baggage that goes along with it. And like his 19th century predecessors, Musk will eventually need resources that he doesn't already command. The robber barons of the 19th century created manifest destiny out of whole cloth to enlist the help of the US government in removing obstacles -- natives, geography, competing commercial interests, pretty much anything that stood in the way -- of pillaging the continent for its natural resources. Unlike his predecessors, though, Musk seems to be angling only for financial support from the US government in the form of guaranteed lift contracts once he's got a heavy lift capacity established. What Tyson seems to be saying is that Musk can't do it alone; nobody can do it without some kind of major (read: US) governmental support. The only governmental support Musk and his fellow neo-industrialists are likely going to need is somebody to scrape the claim jumpers off their asteroids and orbital habitats. That is going to require an armed force, and I'm certain there exist any number of polities on this planet willing to loan him theirs in return for a slice of Musk's pie in the sky.
I certainly don't see any reason for America or anybody else for that matter to go to war over this mess. There certainly is no reason to even seek UN approval for going there either, of course why does anybody need "UN approval" for going to war in the first place?
Well -- nice red herring, but this isn't about why there is a conflict in Syria, or obtaining approval to do something about it.. This is about the use of WMDs. Whatever side you come down on in the conflict in Syria, the use of WMDs trumps your ideological bias. The message has to be clear, immediate, and overwhelming -- if you deploy WMDs, you will be denied existence. Whether that message is delivered by a single nation,or a collection of nations is also a red-herring -- as long as it is delivered in an open, transparent way, it doesn't matter who delivers it.
And what's old got to do with it? You telling me older actors can't act? Or we should be worried because he might fall over and die any day? Seriously? John Hurt looks like a doctor. I know the BBC thinks it needs young actors for the doctor, but lets be real, the best doctors (IMO) were the older dudes.
Nice (old) strawman. Old actors can indeed act. Usually better than younger ones. But acting ability is not the primary focus for casting a role. I preferred Tom Baker when I was a (much) younger fan, not because he was a better actor than Hartnell, Troughton or Pertwee, but because he was the first doctor I could relate to age-wise. With that said, eye candy seems to be *way* more important now to content producers and sponsors.than acting ability or credibility in a role. Look what happened when Pierce Brosnan got the nod for Bond. He was the perfect fit for the role, eagerly anticipated by the fans, and an excellent actor, but he tanked almost as quickly as his predecessor, Timothy Dalton. Market demographics being what they are, I expect the next (last?) doctor to be well south of 25 with flawless skin, six-pack abs, and more than a little light on his feet, to broaden his appeal. Advertisers/sponsors will want an actor in the role who can appeal to the 18-25 demographic, because that is the target demographic they must appeal to -- the one with the most disposable income.
Um, the "rule book" is something along the lines of the laws and regulations of where they do business.
Course, the basic rule is to hide whatever you can from the refs, no matter what the "sport"...
Indeed. But you can also work the refs. This is a viable strategy, as well, especially if used in tandem with your basic rule of deception. A ref that is willing to look the other way is just as valuable as one that has been deceived. Changing the rules is also another viable strategy, one that seems to be favored by large corporatioins, if the amount of money they spend to influence lawmakers is any indication.
>Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality,
Nature is a system that favors the win at all costs.The winners (in wars) are the ones that write the history books. The winners in games are the ones the viewers. The winners in finance are the ones that make the most money. You are going to have a hard time changing the system because being the winner is what most people want.
Nature does not favor winning at all cost and usually is just the opposite. It is the cooperative or symbiotic relationship that prospers.
The writers of history have nothing to do with nature. Nor do the winners in games or finance. As for that being what people want, well what happened to Enron? What happened to Lance Armstrong? What happened to the Romans? All those embraced winning at all cost and all were toppled.
Society tolerates winning at all cost only to a point, then like bullying, they rise up against it. That is where anti-trust laws came from in business and anti-doping laws in sports and even the Geneva convention in war. Eventually, civilized people settle on rules of fair play.
So does nature. The giant redwood does take all of the nutrients in the forest, just those it needs. Same for the fox or a bear. In our own bodies, we call cells that take too much cancer and cut them out. Why? because even those those cells are the fittest, they destroy the body. In nature, if the animal at the top of the food chain eats all the food, the animal dies, too. So, in nature, a proper balance is maintained (unless man does something to upset it, like introduce a non native species or change the habitat or environment).
Not even Darwin believed in survival of the fittest. He used that expression only twice in the entire On the Origen of the Species. He actually proposed cooperation as the better model using human beings as the example since we were not the fastest or strongest nor did we posses the sharpest claws or teeth. Instead in cooperating we were successful in dominating the planet.
So, even in nature, the win at all cost model does not win.
Almost, but not quite. Nature is not about competing organisms or communities of organisms. It is about competing strategies. Nature indeed rewards winning strategies and punishes losing strategies, but the organism or community of organisms that employ them are just along for the ride. But nature is mutable; it is just the current context in which a given strategy or strategies are evaluated. If the context is allowed to change, then there is a new set of criteria against which strategies are evaluated, and if the strategy doesn't change, the organism or community of organisms employing that strategy might not make it into the next generation, which is the only criteria against which any strategy can be judged. In that sense, nature is indeed winner-take-all, and neatly explains what happened to Enron and the Roman civilization.. Thus, I would posit that preventing the context change becomes a viable strategy. The rise of human civilization is all about controlling nature, controlling the context in a way that preserves whatever strategy that is currently being used. The Romans failed to prevent a context change forced on them by the Visigoths, and so did Enron, a context change forced on them by having to live by the rules that they were discovered violating. What happened to Lance Armstrong can be read the same way: Armstrong's strategy of performance enhancing drugs was successful until other riders forced a context change on him, forcing him to compete on their terms, not on his terms. In finance, large corporations saw what happened to Enron, and are working very hard to make sure that the context change that killed Enron won't be allowed to happen to them. They are doing this by making sure they have control over the mechanism that controls the context in which they operate. In the US, that means successfully influencing lawmakers th
I support the right to bear arms, as well as the right for a woman to have an abortion. I support the Death Penalty (in some circumstances), and I also support assistance for those that need it. I support gay marriage, and I also support the Free Market. I support the freedom OF religion, as well as the freedom FROM religion. Strange. I don't seem to fit into either category. People are different - politicians or no, you're going to have liars and hypocrites along with those that actually try to make the world a better place. The problem is that the actual JOB of being a politician puts you in a position to be surrounded by a toxic environment the from before you actually get elected. That kind of toxicity is tough to wash off, and the deeper you get immersed into the political culture, the harder it is to reverse course. The path of least resistance involves letting other people make decisions for you, and those people have no scruples.
I share your political opinions (except perhaps on the death penalty; might be interesting to debate that with you, since we seem to be on the same page otherwise.) Granted, in the US's federated republican from of democracy, where people elect representatives to make policy decisions on their behalf, the democratic process has been hijacked by narrow special interests. In federal republics like the US, corruption can and will set in, because these representatives have to first get elected, and then remain in office long enough to be effective. The first rule of politics in the US is "get re-elected" and that is the source of the toxic culture you speak of.
Fortunately though, getting elected and remaining in office are issues that are entirely distinct from the process of creating the policies that will guide the society into the future. People like you and I who defy easy categorization often are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils on election day, effectively disenfranchising us, but you and I can still have a direct voice in the democratic process, because (at least in the US) we also have the initiative, the referendum, and the recall.
As you indicate, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall are not on the path of least resistence. They may not represent the minimum energy state of the system, but they do exist and are available to those of us who are a) aware of them, and b) willing to invest the time and money necessary to exploit them.
Real coffee aficionados say that it's not the grinding that's the problem - it's the roasting. Green, unroasted beans keep for a long time. Once you roast them, though, they're only good for a few days, whether you grind them first or later.
Personally, I'm yet to be convinced. I buy beans and grind them... but I'm pretty sure that's just because I buy beans and like grinding them (it's a good ritual). I've not noticed much difference in the taste.
Yes, but if you want to preserve your coffee in quantity, keeping a a sack of beans around is probably not the best way. :) Try a simple ice-drip -- brewed coffee gets it flavor from oils extracted from the bean during the brewing process, but not all oils contribute equally to the flavor. Coffee goes bad in much the same way that butter and cooking oil go bad -- coffee will go rancid because it contains oils that degrade when exposed to heat and oxygen. The ice-drip brewing process removes most of those oils, and the result is a brew that will keep almost indefinitely in your 'fridge. You can nuke it or steam it up a bit if you like it hot. I host cuppings at a local coffee market, and people invariably are surprised when I tell them that delicious cuppa they just rated as excellent had been sitting in my 'fridge for a year. It definitely helps me sell ice-drip systems. :)