Ah, Switzerland... The population of New York City, spread across the area of Maryland, where social stratification is hidden by a stigma against looking too rich or looking too poor.
Doesn't sound much different from U.S. Anyway, I think there is evidence that small countries are more business friendly, because their only chance to be successful is to attract trade (or finance). Larger countries can't rely entirely on that, because they have too large population to be supported only by trade. So successful smaller countries generally do have lower taxes than successful large countries.
You're missing the other observed evidence of a direct democracy: ancient Athens, where playwrights swayed politics more easily than politicians did.
Comparing anything ancient to today is not meaningful. Even though this is commonly said, it should also be said the system that ancient Athens had was way superior to anything else of that era. Also, if someone needs to resort to manipulation, that's already a victory. To manipulate masses is always more expensive than having direct control (by force) over them. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's because you never lived in totalitarian regime. I also take offense when someone talks about "ruling mob", completely ignoring the real problem, i.e. those who actually do the manipulation. They are the problem, not the people! You can manipulate almost anyone, high IQ or not, any magician can attest to that.
You're also assuming a requirement of absolute morality, where whatever you want is morally right. In your example, it depends entirely upon what expert visited your home and what your actions are in response to their suggestions are. If an interior decorator came and suggested you change the color scheme of your kitchen, you are certainly free to do so or not, as you like. If the expert is a serial killer suggesting good ways to torture victims, I don't believe you should be allowed to follow his suggestions.
No, that's wrong. I only assume there are subjective morals and the democracy is a good way to agree on common morality. It's you who imposes absolute morality onto others in saying that other people should not be allowed to listen to serial killers.
At the level of the United States government, every decision affects millions of people. The simple choice to reject an expert's opinion in favor of a celebrity's (for instance) has consequences far more serious than the color of your dishes. Yes, the expert opinions are wrong on occasion, but I believe that happens less often than the naive and easily-swayed opinions of the ruling mob.
Well, what evidence do you have, apart from "I believe"? There is for example a study from CATO institute that statistically shows that people are more able to limit politicians' spending that politicians do themselves. Similar studies have been done in Switzerland on cantonal level and confirm this finding. It's not a coincidence that the most successful countries in the world are usually also the most democratic (i.e. USA on local level and Switzerland).
I think you miss the point of (semi)direct democracy. The point is more power to the people who can keep politicians in democratic countries in check. In Switzerland, you can observe this directly - because people can decide things, politics is much less controversial. And as I said, if anything, there is evidence that the masses are actually more conservative than politicians.
And at last, there exist interesting proposals to solve the "expert" problem. My favorite is that you select a handful of people from population randomly (k
A direct democracy, swayed easily by the latest celebrity gossip and completely ignoring the general consensus of the relevant scientific communities?
Is it? Empirically, if anything, direct democracies are actually more conservative than representative democracies. You know, politicians tend to give money to their friends in business, but from time to time this actually produces useful results. I am a big fan of direct democracy, and the conservativism of general population is the biggest problem.
But maybe you were just swayed by the gossip, ignoring the evidence (i.e. Switzerland).
Anyway, your argument is also morally wrong. Would you argue that if I invite an expert to my home (for example an architect), I have to obey his suggestions? Or can I decide that myself? If the latter, why shouldn't the general public have this freedom? (But again, don't worry. People in democracy actually listen to the experts too much, that's part of the reason why we have economic crisis...)
Is the argument then supposed to be that the abuse is intrinsically linked to the products? I have a hard time imagining you'll be able to pull that argument off.
First of all, I think the OCWS crowd wants return to social democracy as it existed or exists in the west (even in America, 50s and 60s with 90% highest tax bracket could be considered social democratic), which, not capitalism, was probably the most successful system tested on national scale.
There is a distinction between secret and obscure, because there is a distinction between the system and the key. It's hidden in the methods you can apply to attack the security. The security methods differ in system if you can apply different attacks differently. They differ only in key if all the potential attacks (or their effectivness) are the same. In other words, a system is a class of ways how to do security, which are all resistant the same to all possible attacks; they are distinguished by the specific keys.
Exactly. The "obscurity" is related to the system of security you use. The key point in "security by obscurity is bad" is when you developed a system yourself or with just a few people, it may have more flaws in it than if you open it for the whole world to see. It's the openness (and usage of the system by others) that gives additional assurance that the design is reliable.
So the study is flawed. It assumes that closed system has the same quality as the open system, which is exactly what is asserted not to be true.
I don't believe it will. Quantum bits just don't scale as well as normal bits, because they must be entangled. That's the problem.
If I have a working n (normal) bits, it's quite easy to make 2*n bits (just produce the same thing twice and add some circuitry). But with quantum bits, if you have n qubits working, even n+1 qubits is an engineering challenge and 2*n qubits is a major research effort.
And because it scales so badly, it won't become practical. So, your quantum computer broke the crypto on 300 bits? No problem - we just double the number on conventional computer (which is easy) and you're screwed.
Incidentally, it also happens during natural disasters and such. Good to know that Yahoo's spam filters are that unreliable.:-)
Seriously, this was probably a (feeble) attempt at censorship. I remember, when I was a kid, when they televised the famous student protest in 1989 in Czechoslovakia, they said "the picture is only black & white because the camera didn't work properly". I think everybody (including my father) knew at that point that it's not true, they just didn't want to show colored pictures because they didn't want people to see how the students were beaten. This is the same thing.
The only reason why to think about climate engineering is to fix the problem caused by current "unintended climate engineering", i.e. the global warming due to accumulation of CO2. And unfortunately, climate engineering, as any large scale project, needs a lot of energy.
Where are we going to take the energy? We have basically 2 options: - Use a carbon-based source. Then this doesn't make sense, because if you actually calculate it, you will find out that to fix the amount of CO2 released by geoengineering you need to release more CO2 than you will fix. Even if you wouldn't, you still need to release CO2 from the energy source somewhere, at some point, so this is in fact always less efficient than not using that energy at all. - Use a renewable source. Then this doesn't make sense either, because we can do that now and forget about the problem.
So simply, either way you look at it, it's better to stop releasing the CO2 in the first place rather than trying to finance (energetically) an adhoc solution for unintended CO2 released.
IMO, the only thing that Lisp and its offspring are good for is implementing other languages. If the data and algorithms in your problem don't map directly onto a tree made of singly linked lists visited with recursion, Lisp's idiosyncrasies just get in the way of what you're trying to do.
Isn't that's precisely what you want from the scripting language, to be good at building DSLs? I think Lisp syntax helps in that excellently.
I won't argue other points though. Maybe if Guile had as a good tutorial and cater to practicality and learning curve like Python does (Lisp hackers seem to prefer generality to practicality), there would be more people using it.
Heh, I will never forget it, and I live in Czech Republic. I was about to be called by my American coworkers to attend a meeting, but instead I got an IM with "meeting canceled - there was an earthquake". It was weird, but we did have the meeting in the end.
Maybe the spoiler will spoil a bad story, but it won't spoil a good story. Because most of the stories are bad, we still need spoiler warnings.
Interesting example where the spoilers are really bad is magic. But for example Penn & Teller often do include spoilers in their magic, and it doesn't make it any less appealing. I guess this debate will never be decided.
I thought one of the quotes from one of the "guards" in the linked article, was very interesting. ..
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona.
Or not. To me, it looks like a good old "I didn't want to really hurt anyone, it was all good fun" excuse for bullying.
There are two other answers to the second questions:
1. The exact answer would depend on the distribution of those random numbers, but I guess you could create a large random number from some distribution rather than trying to multiply that much random numbers. I also think you could use normal distribution for the draw from the central limit theorem as a pretty good approximation.
2. If such a hypothetical language would support exponentiation and natural logarithm operations, you could convert the problem to adding these numbers.
Yes, probably. But it seems a bit silly that there is this new super-duper business model and still, things are not available for anyone, anytime (which is one of the main complaints for the current copyright system). Why, anyway? I still hope they will re-release them, though.
I missed the previous two bundles, but I would still like to buy them. Does anyone know if they are still available? I purchased this one, and hoped there will be a link to older ones, but no.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confused. The Minecraft world actually *is* blocky, so it's rendered exactly as it should look like.
Ah, Switzerland... The population of New York City, spread across the area of Maryland, where social stratification is hidden by a stigma against looking too rich or looking too poor.
Doesn't sound much different from U.S. Anyway, I think there is evidence that small countries are more business friendly, because their only chance to be successful is to attract trade (or finance). Larger countries can't rely entirely on that, because they have too large population to be supported only by trade. So successful smaller countries generally do have lower taxes than successful large countries.
You're missing the other observed evidence of a direct democracy: ancient Athens, where playwrights swayed politics more easily than politicians did.
Comparing anything ancient to today is not meaningful. Even though this is commonly said, it should also be said the system that ancient Athens had was way superior to anything else of that era. Also, if someone needs to resort to manipulation, that's already a victory. To manipulate masses is always more expensive than having direct control (by force) over them. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's because you never lived in totalitarian regime. I also take offense when someone talks about "ruling mob", completely ignoring the real problem, i.e. those who actually do the manipulation. They are the problem, not the people! You can manipulate almost anyone, high IQ or not, any magician can attest to that.
You're also assuming a requirement of absolute morality, where whatever you want is morally right. In your example, it depends entirely upon what expert visited your home and what your actions are in response to their suggestions are. If an interior decorator came and suggested you change the color scheme of your kitchen, you are certainly free to do so or not, as you like. If the expert is a serial killer suggesting good ways to torture victims, I don't believe you should be allowed to follow his suggestions.
No, that's wrong. I only assume there are subjective morals and the democracy is a good way to agree on common morality. It's you who imposes absolute morality onto others in saying that other people should not be allowed to listen to serial killers.
At the level of the United States government, every decision affects millions of people. The simple choice to reject an expert's opinion in favor of a celebrity's (for instance) has consequences far more serious than the color of your dishes. Yes, the expert opinions are wrong on occasion, but I believe that happens less often than the naive and easily-swayed opinions of the ruling mob.
Well, what evidence do you have, apart from "I believe"? There is for example a study from CATO institute that statistically shows that people are more able to limit politicians' spending that politicians do themselves. Similar studies have been done in Switzerland on cantonal level and confirm this finding. It's not a coincidence that the most successful countries in the world are usually also the most democratic (i.e. USA on local level and Switzerland).
I think you miss the point of (semi)direct democracy. The point is more power to the people who can keep politicians in democratic countries in check. In Switzerland, you can observe this directly - because people can decide things, politics is much less controversial. And as I said, if anything, there is evidence that the masses are actually more conservative than politicians.
And at last, there exist interesting proposals to solve the "expert" problem. My favorite is that you select a handful of people from population randomly (k
A direct democracy, swayed easily by the latest celebrity gossip and completely ignoring the general consensus of the relevant scientific communities?
Is it? Empirically, if anything, direct democracies are actually more conservative than representative democracies. You know, politicians tend to give money to their friends in business, but from time to time this actually produces useful results. I am a big fan of direct democracy, and the conservativism of general population is the biggest problem.
But maybe you were just swayed by the gossip, ignoring the evidence (i.e. Switzerland).
Anyway, your argument is also morally wrong. Would you argue that if I invite an expert to my home (for example an architect), I have to obey his suggestions? Or can I decide that myself? If the latter, why shouldn't the general public have this freedom? (But again, don't worry. People in democracy actually listen to the experts too much, that's part of the reason why we have economic crisis...)
No, I think he means we would have a distributed democratic authority to do that decision.
I question that there is a better system!
Is the argument then supposed to be that the abuse is intrinsically linked to the products? I have a hard time imagining you'll be able to pull that argument off.
Well, that argument does exist, it's called TINA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Alternative.
First of all, I think the OCWS crowd wants return to social democracy as it existed or exists in the west (even in America, 50s and 60s with 90% highest tax bracket could be considered social democratic), which, not capitalism, was probably the most successful system tested on national scale.
Second, socialism (= worker ownership of capital) has been tested, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooperative_Corporation, and it seems to lead to more productivity than the actual capitalism.
I think Nazi Germany is a good example of a country which managed to keep the status quo for a long, long time..
There is a distinction between secret and obscure, because there is a distinction between the system and the key. It's hidden in the methods you can apply to attack the security. The security methods differ in system if you can apply different attacks differently. They differ only in key if all the potential attacks (or their effectivness) are the same. In other words, a system is a class of ways how to do security, which are all resistant the same to all possible attacks; they are distinguished by the specific keys.
Exactly. The "obscurity" is related to the system of security you use. The key point in "security by obscurity is bad" is when you developed a system yourself or with just a few people, it may have more flaws in it than if you open it for the whole world to see. It's the openness (and usage of the system by others) that gives additional assurance that the design is reliable.
So the study is flawed. It assumes that closed system has the same quality as the open system, which is exactly what is asserted not to be true.
I don't believe it will. Quantum bits just don't scale as well as normal bits, because they must be entangled. That's the problem.
If I have a working n (normal) bits, it's quite easy to make 2*n bits (just produce the same thing twice and add some circuitry). But with quantum bits, if you have n qubits working, even n+1 qubits is an engineering challenge and 2*n qubits is a major research effort.
And because it scales so badly, it won't become practical. So, your quantum computer broke the crypto on 300 bits? No problem - we just double the number on conventional computer (which is easy) and you're screwed.
Incidentally, it also happens during natural disasters and such. Good to know that Yahoo's spam filters are that unreliable. :-)
Seriously, this was probably a (feeble) attempt at censorship. I remember, when I was a kid, when they televised the famous student protest in 1989 in Czechoslovakia, they said "the picture is only black & white because the camera didn't work properly". I think everybody (including my father) knew at that point that it's not true, they just didn't want to show colored pictures because they didn't want people to see how the students were beaten. This is the same thing.
14 Apple engineers worked very hard to invent this.. rectangular dingus.
The only reason why to think about climate engineering is to fix the problem caused by current "unintended climate engineering", i.e. the global warming due to accumulation of CO2. And unfortunately, climate engineering, as any large scale project, needs a lot of energy.
Where are we going to take the energy? We have basically 2 options:
- Use a carbon-based source. Then this doesn't make sense, because if you actually calculate it, you will find out that to fix the amount of CO2 released by geoengineering you need to release more CO2 than you will fix. Even if you wouldn't, you still need to release CO2 from the energy source somewhere, at some point, so this is in fact always less efficient than not using that energy at all.
- Use a renewable source. Then this doesn't make sense either, because we can do that now and forget about the problem.
So simply, either way you look at it, it's better to stop releasing the CO2 in the first place rather than trying to finance (energetically) an adhoc solution for unintended CO2 released.
IMO, the only thing that Lisp and its offspring are good for is implementing other languages. If the data and algorithms in your problem don't map directly onto a tree made of singly linked lists visited with recursion, Lisp's idiosyncrasies just get in the way of what you're trying to do.
Isn't that's precisely what you want from the scripting language, to be good at building DSLs? I think Lisp syntax helps in that excellently.
I won't argue other points though. Maybe if Guile had as a good tutorial and cater to practicality and learning curve like Python does (Lisp hackers seem to prefer generality to practicality), there would be more people using it.
"With RPN, your parents can't understand what you're calculating!"
But your grandparents can..
Heh, I will never forget it, and I live in Czech Republic. I was about to be called by my American coworkers to attend a meeting, but instead I got an IM with "meeting canceled - there was an earthquake". It was weird, but we did have the meeting in the end.
Maybe the spoiler will spoil a bad story, but it won't spoil a good story. Because most of the stories are bad, we still need spoiler warnings.
Interesting example where the spoilers are really bad is magic. But for example Penn & Teller often do include spoilers in their magic, and it doesn't make it any less appealing. I guess this debate will never be decided.
I thought one of the quotes from one of the "guards" in the linked article, was very interesting. . .
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona.
Or not. To me, it looks like a good old "I didn't want to really hurt anyone, it was all good fun" excuse for bullying.
You joke, but "Poker and Armageddon: The Role of Bluffing in a Nuclear Standoff" was a great paper.
I thought kino.so is some kind of shared library..
There are two other answers to the second questions:
1. The exact answer would depend on the distribution of those random numbers, but I guess you could create a large random number from some distribution rather than trying to multiply that much random numbers. I also think you could use normal distribution for the draw from the central limit theorem as a pretty good approximation.
2. If such a hypothetical language would support exponentiation and natural logarithm operations, you could convert the problem to adding these numbers.
Any answer is correct. If 1 = 5, then the axiomatic system is inconsistent. Thus you can prove anything.
Yes, probably. But it seems a bit silly that there is this new super-duper business model and still, things are not available for anyone, anytime (which is one of the main complaints for the current copyright system). Why, anyway? I still hope they will re-release them, though.
I missed the previous two bundles, but I would still like to buy them. Does anyone know if they are still available? I purchased this one, and hoped there will be a link to older ones, but no.