Re Jews - Germany wasn't democratic either. It was a coup by one of the elected parties. The Nazi party only won the election, but didn't have majority support.
Sure oppression of groups does exist. But the point is, we are talking about representative vs. direct democracy (why would this come up otherwise?). And in that sense, there is _no_ evidence that people are worse than their leaders or some minority elite. In fact, the evidence is more like the opposite. I would say, the history shows repeatedly, the more inclusive the government is (i.e. more democratic), the less people try to opress someone, because that's usually tool of rulers to misdirect people from other problems (like the ruler himself).
I am sorry, but how are these democratic societies? And if they are not, how do you know (if they can't freely voice their opinion) that the majority agrees with the oppression, and it's not just fear of authorities and some oppressive minority? From that list, only U.S. is democratic, and atheists in U.S. are hardly "oppressed".
California has been running an ongoing experiment with direct democracy for many years, and here IMHO it's mostly been an abysmal failure.
I think they are running the experiment close to 100 years now. I wouldn't call one of the most developed states in the US a failure.
I am not sure what the details of California system and problems are (it's very hard to find facts, as opposed to various opinions), but to me it seems that the problem stems from bad interaction of direct and representative democracy, that is politicians want to spend but people limited that in referendum.
You can start with educating me. Who is the majority? Can you name the people who make it?
That's the problem. The majority in "tyranny of majority" doesn't in fact exist. People differ in their opinions, but in majority of cases, on average, they agree with each other. And that's why the whole concept of "tyranny of majority" is silly.
think such an interpretation of democracy will ultimately work against the very notion of "society". It will tend to eliminate all types of social welfare
And yet, in Switzerland nothing of the sort is happening. Maybe you should look at the real world before making any predictions?
I would love if all the people who scream "tyranny of the majority" would define the majority. Who is it? The reality is in direct democracy, the majority is very fluid. You lose some, and you win the most, on average. And this in fact improves social contract better than having a 2-party system, which emphasizes differences rather than common interests. Direct democracy can be actually improve social contract, and this was confirmed empirically.
Those people, who you are afraid, are also less likely to vote and even if they do, their "confused" vote won't cause the problem, because if you don't know, you're as likely to vote yes or no for any given proposal (there is even a theorem on that - contrary to popular belief, voting result is higher than average decision-making ability, and may be even higher than of any individual, due to central limit theorem). That is, unless there is someone manipulating them.. but then I would argue what you fear is not that some people are stupid, but that there are manipulators. In that case, I don't see how restricting those who are not manipulators from power is going to be of any help.
What I personally like is to save interesting pages to disk. You may dismiss it as a strange obsession, but archiving information I have read or seen is important to me.
Therefore, I hate any AJAX magic that prevents browser from saving the actual content of the page! I have to say though, now it works quite well. So please, if you implement AJAX magic in the future, keep in mind that some people might still want to save the discussion as a _document_.
I actually had no idea people denied there was an ice age to begin with.
They are! We know that ice ages existed, because we can estimate climate sensitivity from a giant experiment with adding CO2 to our planet's atmosphere that we undertake now! However, some people deny that this experiment is being done, or its result, therefore, logically, they have to deny the ice ages too.
Actually, I thought about it, and I still wonder. Is it really just quadratic? I think you don't need just to entangle only pairs of qubits; you need to entangle any subset.
You're right, thanks, that's a good point; it makes the QC a bit more promising than I thought. However, I thought about engineering challenges in general. Even having each qubit interconnected with each other brings engineering problem for each new qubit. While in normal computers, to create a computer with 2*X bits when you can create computer with X bits is already solved problem for all X.
I agree with others who disagree with the meetings. We are _not_ children. When we see a roadblock, we act. If there is a risk that people are going to step over each other, setup a dashboard with who works on what.
In my view, the SCRUM meetings are stupid (but then - I haven't done whole lot of them). In general, I prefer a bigger meeting after longer period of time, or meeting/talking to others as required. Shorter meetings more frequently are an oxymoron. By definition, they will have to deal with things on more detailed level, because they are more frequent, yet there is less time for details.
I think they are useful for managers, though. They can have a better feeling that they know what everyone is doing, and they can see how complicated things really are. But more productivity? I am skeptical.
I am a layperson, though I studied quantum computers a bit at the university, and (years ago) I came to conclusion that quantum computers do not scale as well as normal computers. That's what will make them impractical.
In QC, unlike in normal computers, every qubit needs to be interlinked with all other qubits, otherwise the superposition won't work. In normal computers, once you can create a computer with X bits, creating a computer with X*2 bits is pretty easy, just build X twice (and add an address line). With quantum computers, creating a computer with even X+1 qubits from computer of X qubits can be hard, because you need to entangle the extra bit with all others. So the QC will scale only logarithmically to normal computer, and that will make it impractical (respectively, any advantage will be nullified by this problem).
At least that's what I think; I would like to hear a debunking argument.
This is exactly the post I have been looking for. I think it's a net positive actually. It makes the world a global village, and most people to realize how pointless the war actually is.
Simple (in ideal world): FDA is employed and controlled by the citizens, so it cannot be paid by the producers it can control. So it's not operating on a free market basis - if it would, then it could sell its services to anyone, and would come into conflict of interest.
I am confused. I know for a fact that I had trouble learning German at school because I have trouble remembering/repeating a sound, but I can remember written words much better. We had a teacher who started in conversational style, and I was unable to catch up. Once they started putting things down onto paper, it became much easier (German has regular pronounciation, mind you).
I wonder how is this (albeit anecdotal) evidence going together with that research.
I am not sure how hashing log entries in sequence is going to help. If you were to tamper the logs, you could still recalculate the hashes since the first entry you modified.
However, if you would add a hardware device, through which all the log entries would be filtered, and this hardware device would have a read-only register containing the last (chained) hash, then it could be made secure.
If you're worried about the long term effects of global warming you'd be better spending your money on researching and developing Geo-engineering mega-projects because that is the only cost effective way you are going to prevent the worst effects. Yeah, the risks are large and the costs are non-trivial, but they are tiny compared to the costs of moving away from a fossil fuel economy at the rate that averting global warming would take.
I think you are very wrong. You have to consider the energy costs, not monetary costs. Adaptation costs energy. You can take this energy from fossil fuels, but here you are assuming that the energy cost of adaptation for extra carbon from these fuels (for its whole lifetime) will be less than the actual energy that you will get from them. If not, then it's just cheaper to switch to carbon-neutral energy source. And I think this is a very strong assumption, and in fact economic analyses show that the trying to adapt to global warming is more costly than trying to mitigate it. Also, considering that eventually you will have to adapt to carbon-neutral sources anyway, why not do it now and avoid waste of energy?
Yeah, the risks are large and the costs are non-trivial, but they are tiny compared to the costs of moving away from a fossil fuel economy at the rate that averting global warming would take.
I think you are very wrong. You have to consider the energy costs, not monetary costs. Adaptation costs energy. You can take this energy from fossil fuels, but here you are assuming that the energy cost of adaptation for extra carbon from these fuels (for its whole lifetime) will be less than the actual energy that you will get from them. If not, then it's just cheaper to switch to carbon-neutral energy source. And I think this is a very strong assumption, and in fact economic analyses show that the trying to adapt to global warming is more costly than trying to mitigate it.
Non-dictatorship criterion is an artifact of the theorem's assumptions that preferences are ordered sets. There are voting methods (range voting) that do not use ordered preferences, but numerical values, and they don't suffer from "dictatorship" problem. In these methods real preferences of a person can be arbitrarily distant (by any metric) from the voting result. By definition, there has to be a set of people most close to the result, but that doesn't mean that any of them is a "dictator".
In my opinion, the name of the criterion is wrong, and I suspect Arrow called it that way for political reasons.
The problem with crony capitalism (which is ultimately what OWS is about) is the fault of corrupt politicians in DC, who listen to the voices of corporations instead of the people.
So you believe that you can have high levels of social inequality, but low government corruption? In my opinion this is very naive, but I would like to know how you justify that belief.
This sums up nicely what is wrong today. No actual work has to be done, market will solve all our problems.
No need to plan - the invisible hand will do that. No government interventions into economy neccessary - the markets will stabilize themselves. No need to innovate - the market will pay the qualified people if it feels there is not enough of them. No need to have any regulations about consumer products - the market competition will take care of that. No need to check the politicians - they are competing with each other.
In short, people don't want to do anything, and rely on markets to "solve" the problem. The speculative finance bubbles and really short-term thinking in economy managed by MBAs, this is where it got us.
Slashdot Mirror
Re Jews - Germany wasn't democratic either. It was a coup by one of the elected parties. The Nazi party only won the election, but didn't have majority support.
Sure oppression of groups does exist. But the point is, we are talking about representative vs. direct democracy (why would this come up otherwise?). And in that sense, there is _no_ evidence that people are worse than their leaders or some minority elite. In fact, the evidence is more like the opposite. I would say, the history shows repeatedly, the more inclusive the government is (i.e. more democratic), the less people try to opress someone, because that's usually tool of rulers to misdirect people from other problems (like the ruler himself).
I am sorry, but how are these democratic societies? And if they are not, how do you know (if they can't freely voice their opinion) that the majority agrees with the oppression, and it's not just fear of authorities and some oppressive minority? From that list, only U.S. is democratic, and atheists in U.S. are hardly "oppressed".
California has been running an ongoing experiment with direct democracy for many years, and here IMHO it's mostly been an abysmal failure.
I think they are running the experiment close to 100 years now. I wouldn't call one of the most developed states in the US a failure.
I am not sure what the details of California system and problems are (it's very hard to find facts, as opposed to various opinions), but to me it seems that the problem stems from bad interaction of direct and representative democracy, that is politicians want to spend but people limited that in referendum.
You can start with educating me. Who is the majority? Can you name the people who make it?
That's the problem. The majority in "tyranny of majority" doesn't in fact exist. People differ in their opinions, but in majority of cases, on average, they agree with each other. And that's why the whole concept of "tyranny of majority" is silly.
Maybe because in average, in majority of cases, you will actually agree with the majority?
think such an interpretation of democracy will ultimately work against the very notion of "society". It will tend to eliminate all types of social welfare
And yet, in Switzerland nothing of the sort is happening. Maybe you should look at the real world before making any predictions?
I would love if all the people who scream "tyranny of the majority" would define the majority. Who is it? The reality is in direct democracy, the majority is very fluid. You lose some, and you win the most, on average. And this in fact improves social contract better than having a 2-party system, which emphasizes differences rather than common interests. Direct democracy can be actually improve social contract, and this was confirmed empirically.
Those people, who you are afraid, are also less likely to vote and even if they do, their "confused" vote won't cause the problem, because if you don't know, you're as likely to vote yes or no for any given proposal (there is even a theorem on that - contrary to popular belief, voting result is higher than average decision-making ability, and may be even higher than of any individual, due to central limit theorem). That is, unless there is someone manipulating them.. but then I would argue what you fear is not that some people are stupid, but that there are manipulators. In that case, I don't see how restricting those who are not manipulators from power is going to be of any help.
What I personally like is to save interesting pages to disk. You may dismiss it as a strange obsession, but archiving information I have read or seen is important to me.
Therefore, I hate any AJAX magic that prevents browser from saving the actual content of the page! I have to say though, now it works quite well. So please, if you implement AJAX magic in the future, keep in mind that some people might still want to save the discussion as a _document_.
Yes: http://www.hercules-390.org/
But IBM won't allow to run z/OS (the operating system usually used) on it.
I actually had no idea people denied there was an ice age to begin with.
They are! We know that ice ages existed, because we can estimate climate sensitivity from a giant experiment with adding CO2 to our planet's atmosphere that we undertake now! However, some people deny that this experiment is being done, or its result, therefore, logically, they have to deny the ice ages too.
Actually, I thought about it, and I still wonder. Is it really just quadratic? I think you don't need just to entangle only pairs of qubits; you need to entangle any subset.
You're right, thanks, that's a good point; it makes the QC a bit more promising than I thought. However, I thought about engineering challenges in general. Even having each qubit interconnected with each other brings engineering problem for each new qubit. While in normal computers, to create a computer with 2*X bits when you can create computer with X bits is already solved problem for all X.
I agree with others who disagree with the meetings. We are _not_ children. When we see a roadblock, we act. If there is a risk that people are going to step over each other, setup a dashboard with who works on what.
In my view, the SCRUM meetings are stupid (but then - I haven't done whole lot of them). In general, I prefer a bigger meeting after longer period of time, or meeting/talking to others as required. Shorter meetings more frequently are an oxymoron. By definition, they will have to deal with things on more detailed level, because they are more frequent, yet there is less time for details.
I think they are useful for managers, though. They can have a better feeling that they know what everyone is doing, and they can see how complicated things really are. But more productivity? I am skeptical.
I am a layperson, though I studied quantum computers a bit at the university, and (years ago) I came to conclusion that quantum computers do not scale as well as normal computers. That's what will make them impractical.
In QC, unlike in normal computers, every qubit needs to be interlinked with all other qubits, otherwise the superposition won't work. In normal computers, once you can create a computer with X bits, creating a computer with X*2 bits is pretty easy, just build X twice (and add an address line). With quantum computers, creating a computer with even X+1 qubits from computer of X qubits can be hard, because you need to entangle the extra bit with all others. So the QC will scale only logarithmically to normal computer, and that will make it impractical (respectively, any advantage will be nullified by this problem).
At least that's what I think; I would like to hear a debunking argument.
Sure, sure.. apparently not from Czech Republic, eh?
This is exactly the post I have been looking for. I think it's a net positive actually. It makes the world a global village, and most people to realize how pointless the war actually is.
Simple (in ideal world): FDA is employed and controlled by the citizens, so it cannot be paid by the producers it can control. So it's not operating on a free market basis - if it would, then it could sell its services to anyone, and would come into conflict of interest.
I am confused. I know for a fact that I had trouble learning German at school because I have trouble remembering/repeating a sound, but I can remember written words much better. We had a teacher who started in conversational style, and I was unable to catch up. Once they started putting things down onto paper, it became much easier (German has regular pronounciation, mind you).
I wonder how is this (albeit anecdotal) evidence going together with that research.
Some of us have been saying it for 30 years, going back to "copy protected" cassette tapes... and our voices are hoarse by now.
FTFY
I am not sure how hashing log entries in sequence is going to help. If you were to tamper the logs, you could still recalculate the hashes since the first entry you modified.
However, if you would add a hardware device, through which all the log entries would be filtered, and this hardware device would have a read-only register containing the last (chained) hash, then it could be made secure.
If you're worried about the long term effects of global warming you'd be better spending your money on researching and developing Geo-engineering mega-projects because that is the only cost effective way you are going to prevent the worst effects. Yeah, the risks are large and the costs are non-trivial, but they are tiny compared to the costs of moving away from a fossil fuel economy at the rate that averting global warming would take.
I think you are very wrong. You have to consider the energy costs, not monetary costs. Adaptation costs energy. You can take this energy from fossil fuels, but here you are assuming that the energy cost of adaptation for extra carbon from these fuels (for its whole lifetime) will be less than the actual energy that you will get from them. If not, then it's just cheaper to switch to carbon-neutral energy source. And I think this is a very strong assumption, and in fact economic analyses show that the trying to adapt to global warming is more costly than trying to mitigate it. Also, considering that eventually you will have to adapt to carbon-neutral sources anyway, why not do it now and avoid waste of energy?
Yeah, the risks are large and the costs are non-trivial, but they are tiny compared to the costs of moving away from a fossil fuel economy at the rate that averting global warming would take.
I think you are very wrong. You have to consider the energy costs, not monetary costs. Adaptation costs energy. You can take this energy from fossil fuels, but here you are assuming that the energy cost of adaptation for extra carbon from these fuels (for its whole lifetime) will be less than the actual energy that you will get from them. If not, then it's just cheaper to switch to carbon-neutral energy source. And I think this is a very strong assumption, and in fact economic analyses show that the trying to adapt to global warming is more costly than trying to mitigate it.
Non-dictatorship criterion is an artifact of the theorem's assumptions that preferences are ordered sets. There are voting methods (range voting) that do not use ordered preferences, but numerical values, and they don't suffer from "dictatorship" problem. In these methods real preferences of a person can be arbitrarily distant (by any metric) from the voting result. By definition, there has to be a set of people most close to the result, but that doesn't mean that any of them is a "dictator".
In my opinion, the name of the criterion is wrong, and I suspect Arrow called it that way for political reasons.
The problem with crony capitalism (which is ultimately what OWS is about) is the fault of corrupt politicians in DC, who listen to the voices of corporations instead of the people.
So you believe that you can have high levels of social inequality, but low government corruption? In my opinion this is very naive, but I would like to know how you justify that belief.
This sums up nicely what is wrong today. No actual work has to be done, market will solve all our problems.
No need to plan - the invisible hand will do that. No government interventions into economy neccessary - the markets will stabilize themselves. No need to innovate - the market will pay the qualified people if it feels there is not enough of them. No need to have any regulations about consumer products - the market competition will take care of that. No need to check the politicians - they are competing with each other.
In short, people don't want to do anything, and rely on markets to "solve" the problem. The speculative finance bubbles and really short-term thinking in economy managed by MBAs, this is where it got us.