Re:Math is "Free", MY LILY-WHITE ASS.
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Open Source Math
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I'm not going to disagree with the "laid open" part, but the "free of charge" nonsense is just typical marxist university professor hypocrisy.... God in Heaven, I despise university professors.
You don't say? Well, who would have guessed.
So, according to you, are all university professors 'Marxists'? Does that mean that if you are an accomplished academic, who has learned to think critically and employ the scientific method, then you are by necessity also a Marxist? Which in turn must mean that there are very good, logically sound reasons to be a communist or socialist, right? Well, it certainly makes sense to me.
The big 'why' here is not why American companies have a hard time in China, but why people on Slashdot just swallow this sort of FUD hook, line and sinker.
American companies have a hard time in China because they are not Chinese - it's as simple as that, really. Perhaps you are not aware, but European companies have always had a hard time getting in to the American market, just for comparison. Or the japanese market, the Malaysian market etc. There is nothing strange in it, it is a different culture, different laws, and it is far away. People will always be a bit sceptical about foreigners and foreign companies - add to that the fact that America does not have the best reputation in the world; certainly not in China.
Apart from that, the Chinese have a huge confidence in themselves nowadays, and you can see why: their economy is rocketing and they feel they have good reason to believe they will soon be stronger than the Americans anyway. When America was booming, a while back, it was the same - Americans wanted American goods, like everybody else in the world, and foreign companies were met with a 'Yeah, come and take US on' from American companies. It was very hard to get into America, and it has nothing to do with America 'poisoning' foreign companies in any way.
The big 'why' is 'why the hell do Americans believe in this kind of stupid conspiracy theory?' - I think it is because it is hard to face up to the fact that America is falling back in the competition. But that is the wrong way - like children saying 'he was cheating' when they lose a game. If that is the best America can do, then China deserves to win.
On the other hand, there aren't really many reasons why the US shouln't give the control over to an independent, international body.
It is good to see a pragmatic attitude in this matter - however, a truly pragmatic view would also include the fact that this seems to be an actual issue, even if there are no good technical or administrative reasons for changing things. The American government's stance demonstrates that they, at least, have strong reasons for not wanting to give away this control - so, they are not being pragmatic about it either.
Another fact worth considering is that it is technically easy to implement an alternative to the current root DNS servers etc; most of us could do it in a matter of a few hours if we had the HW. If that were to happen, it is possible it would hurt e-commerce, globalisation and other things - those most likely to feel the pain would be those who are most dependent on doing business on the internet. I suspect that this is mostly companies in the US. It ought to make the US more willing to consider an internationalisation of the internet governance; at least that seems to the most pragmatic view of things.
I think I'd rather have the $1million, convert it to Euros, and move to Denmark.
Well, perhaps you should think again. Denmark is no longer the fairy tale country of blessed, mild summers and beautiful, white winters.
Firstly, they don't use Euros in DK, but 'Kroner' (~'Crowns') - the Danes have been rather ambivalent about joining the EU, and even though they might as well be part of the Euro, they aren't. The Danish krone is rather firmly pegged to the euro, so the exchange rate stays more or less the same (ie. Denmark has no actual freedom in that respect), but you still have to change your money, so trade to and from Denmark is more expensive.
Secondly, although $1M is a lot of money, Denmark is an expensive country. Cars, houses, petrol, food, electricity etc is a lot more expensive than in the US (or that is my impression - I don't know American prices). 1 liter of petrol is about $2 if I am not much mistaken and cars are at least twice as expensive as in UK. The social security used to be very good, but it is falling apart now through mismanagement and lack of leadership and visions from the government (which BTW has been very far from socialist for many years - perhaps there's a connection)
Thirdly, the Danes themselves have changed; or perhaps it is just the political or cultural climate. Once, in the 70es and 80es, they were famed for being openminded and tolerant, but in recent years Denmark has become notorious for it intolerance, xenophobia and narrowmindedness; a number of extreme laws have been passed which could arguably be seen as racist. The message is: if you look or speak like a stranger, don't go there. Of course, now this policy is coming back to bite them - there is already a lack of people to fill the jobs available, and there is not going to be enough young Danes to take care of the aging population in the coming years. And now, who wants to come to Denmark, to be pariahs, pay ridiculously high taxes and get less and less social security in return?
In case you wonder: Yes, I am Danish; I haven't lived there for some years, but even here in London you can still follow what happens in Denmark.
The average power emitted in a single shot is about 10 kilowatts at 100 hertz
Since 100 Hz works out at a wavelength of about 3000 km, we are hadly talking about microwaves in the usual sense. However, 3000 km is about 1 nanoparsec if I am not mistaken, so perhaps we are talking of nanowaves? It all just depends on the perspective, I suppose.
I have always had the expectation that laws should be reasonable and understandable to ordinary people; naive perhaps, but there you are. Of course, sometimes a law has to be very technical because of the nature of the subject matter, but it should still be something most people would probably find reasonable if they had the required technical knowledge. And while I can't see much merit in gambling as such, I can easily see - and understand, even - that many people are attracted to it and are going to do it anyway; so what it the sense in a law like this one?
Passing laws that people can't respect, the result is that the law will be treated with contempt; look at the alcohol prohibition in the US in the beginning of last century. It played into the hands of criminal gangs in two ways - firstly, since selling alcohol was illegal, it meant gangsters had a monopoly, secondly, since people felt contempt for the law, they were more tolerant of the gans, and less in favour of helping the police. Don't bring justice into disrepute.
The thing to realize, especially if you are American, is that 'The US controlling [whatever]' does not mean 'You, the average American, controlling or even benefitting from [whatever]'. The present government is not your friend, unless you are very rich or ultra religious.
We shouldn't have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy
This is probably the most disgusting piece of sleazy hypocrisy I have seen come out of any of the foul orifices of any government official for a long time. What he is saying is something like 'We redefine privacy to mean that only the government and a bunch of companies know everything about you' - IOW 'We don't care about your perceived rights - here suck on this dummy'.
I am no privacy and anonymity fanatic, but at the end of the day, privacy has to mean at least that: 'privacy - the right to have secrets'. There are many cases where it may make sense to share your personal information with others, but the choice should always be yours, and nobody else should have a legal right to know against your will. The right to privacy is a simple consequence of the right to self-determination - the right to make your own decisions. If we lose that, what have we got left?
...PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges...
I'm not sure I like that one too much. Finegrained security models have always been a bloody nightmare, one way or another, and very often don't get used/are switched off, resulting in the opposite effect of that intended. Look to Vista to see why it sn't a good idea - users feel their are being bugged by constant dialog boxes asking them to confirm that it is OK to do trivial tasks, or asking for administrator passwords etc. People just want to get on with life, so this is a huge irritation - it may be true that all you need is to spend a little time and effort on setting it up, but people in general are not security minded and meticulous. This is, by the way, why Windows became so popular despite the huge problems with security and stability - a PC was almost an appliance that allowed you to use the internet and write documents, you just turned it on and used it.
Vista isn't the only example of finegrained security, only the latest and perhaps the one that has succeeded in pissing off most people. Oracle has it's own, very finely grained model, which I have never seen used seriously; and then there is RACF on IBM's mainframes, not a joy to work with either, IMO.
I think the basic UNIX security model is just about as much as most people want to bother with.
It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off
Risky? What risk? There can be just about two outcomes: we find proof of intelligent life or we don't. Which one is the risky one?
Apart from that, isn't that characteristic of all pioneering efforts - that it costs you something and may never pay off? And, correct me if I am wrong, but isn't pioneering what Americans pride themselves of? Or are you guys only bean-counters nowadays?
We always hear this argument 'money that could be better spent on solving so-and-so problem' - well, even if we didn't spend the money on SETI or other basic research, it wouldn't go to getting rid of poverty, disease or hunger; or protecting the environment or any of the other huge problems we are facing in the world today (and even more tomorrow). Because, in order to solve these problems, the world needs leaders with the will to do it and to stay the course even when it turns out to be less than popular. If we had the will to do so, we could solve all the problems in the world more or less today - we really could, but we don't, and what a bloody shame that is. In the meantime, why not SETI or any of the other basic research projects?
I think they over-interpret their findings. I can see that they have given a reasonably reliable demonstration of the phenomenon 'cognitive dissonance' in monkeys; after all, it only means that once you've made a decision, you are likely to make the same decision again. This makes sense in the real world, of course - we make a decision, find that it works well enough, and in the future we don't need to spend time and effort on making that decision again. Otherwise we waste time that could be used on finding food, having sex and other things that promote the survival of the species.
But talking about 'moral integrity' and 'global self-worth' is far-fetched. For one thing, I can't see that it is necessary to explain it any further than I have outlined above. I think there may be reasons to believe that animals other than humans have something like a sense of morality and self-worth, but this has nothing to do with it. I wish researchers (or perhaps it is the reporter?) would stop this kind of nonsense - it makes people lose respect for the genuine and valuable research that goes on into understanding the other animals on the planet, because they get associations of bunnies in waist-coats drinking tea.
This planet orbits within the 'habitable zone,' where water could presumably exist, but it's probably another gas giant like Saturn, so any liquid water would have to be on a moon. There's still a big gap between this planet and the outermost planet where no planets have been detected yet, so there could yet be a rocky planet in the system.
Rocky planets are usually found closer to the star than the gas giants - the heat from the the young star will make lighter elements evaporate, you see. So if this planet is a gas giant, it is not likely that they will find a rocky planet in the gap. Fortunately liquid water doesn't have to be on a rocky surface, there are such things as clouds. On the other hand, one thing that does seem to be important for the development of life as we know it is plate tectonics. Perhaps something with a similar effect could exist in the atmosphere of a gas planet.
Very interesting, intellectually, but good food is simple: start with good ingredients, don't overcook, and eat in moderation. The last one is important - if you eat until you are close to vomiting, it doesn't matter whether the meal was of good quality. The old saying 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' means exactly that.
No 1 is the kind of thing that sounds good, but which no American government will ever propose, unless they are certain that it will not get through Congress. America may not have state driven, law based censorship, but that's because it isn't needed when there is already 'institutional censorship': the twisted minds of the religious establishments and the press take care of that.
No 2 - that is a bit silly, isn't it? Freedom of speech doesn't make you money; I'm not going to argue that, it just seems obvious to me. Free trade may be good business for society and for consumers, but freedom of speech just means you don't go to jail for airing the wrong opinions.
No 3: In the light of 1 and 2, why should they? The reality is that China is set to overtake the West in all areas, economically, politically, militarily, no matter what the US does, and we are all going to try to emulate them, whatever they are going to be like at that time. You may hate the thought of it, but it will happen. We in the West have grown old and set in our ways, and China is suddenly emerging from it's teenage years and growing up; they will take over after us, unless we can radically rejuvenate and adapt to the new reality - and that certainly doesn't call for the Cold War mindset.
Freedom is important, and freedom of speech is perhaps as important as the freedom to pursue your own happiness, but it has little to do with 'prosperity', it is important for political reasons. Politics is about making laws and governing a nation - freedom of speech is important in order to make democracy work, to ensure that people have the facts about what goes on, so they can make an informed decision on election day. Freedom of speech should not be an excuse for lying and cheating, or for promoting useless, mind-bending crap like Fox News.
And no, the future of the world is not at stake, at least not when it comes to freedom of speech. The sun will rise and set all the same, whether the internet is crammed with censorship or not. Get real, man.
This, I feel, is exactly why medical research - and research in general - shouldn't be privately funded.
A private company's main interest is to make money; nothing surprising there, that is what they are all about. So they will research the things that allow them to make the most money, which is not always what the world needs. Hence you can bet that there is a lot of research into fighting chronic diseases, which typically can't really be cured, but which can be made less troublesome, or cancer, which is still in many ways an uncurable disease; you can make the tumours go away, but the body produces new cancer cells all the time - it's just that in most cases our immune system handles it. And the medicine is hugely expensive - not necessarily justifiably so, but then there is the psychological side of it: everybody is terrified of cancer, so most people find it reasonable even to pay >$100K a year for treatment per patient.
Meanwhile there is a huge array of diseases that have been underfunded and understudied, simply because there is no money in them. Malaria, for example - it could probably be cured, but the patients are mostly poor people in Africa, and to make matters worse, once they are cured, they won't need the medicine again. On top of that, it is quite likely that an effective medicine would not be hugely expensive. Compare with penicillin - it's very cheap and easy to produce. Antibiotics are in general fairly cheap and you tend to lose your income base, because the patients get cured of their infections. Too little profit there; and as a result we now have the panic over the superbugs - it could easily have been avoided.
I'm not saying there should be no private medical research, but there should be much more public research - perhaps an order of magnitude more. This would be able to target the big, debilitating diseases that are ignored at the moment, and it would give the private companies some real competition to think about, to the benefit of all - well, possibly not the shareholders in the medical industry, but they don't seem to be starving, really.
the unique and opaque culture of the Chinese government bureaucracy, complete with back room deals, shifting political allegiances, corruption, the gulag, and all the intrigues that accompany any non-representative government
Wow, somebody has really got his jongoistic balls in a twist.
Back room deals? Shifting political alliances? Corruption? Intrigues? What's so unique about that? Don't you have it in America? Don't make me laugh. As for the 'gulags' - for one thing it is a Russian phenomenon; for another, I think the US have their own, what with Guantanamo, torture prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and their extraordinary renditions. The Chinese prisons are not holiday centres; but they are not death camps either. I can understand why they are somewhat basic - China still has lots of more important problems than trying to make criminals comfortable.
No mate, for pompous bullshit, look no further than to your own writings.
First of all one has to realise that this has been translated from Chinese - the Chinese language has a grammatical structure that is somewhat different from English and other Indo-European languages. In Chinese it is completely natural to build up sentences like this, as long 'rotes' or lists of 'items', and quite often what we think os as verbs can be left out. On top of that, in Chinese culture it is common to use expressions, metaphors etc that seem rather florid to a Westerner; thus texts translated from Chinese may appear rather stilted and uncomfortable to us. Once you take this into account, I think you will see that there is very little in the way of bullshit here.
This is a common problem when trying to cross culture barriers - you will se that even between American and British. To an American the British often seem stiff and snobbish, and believe you me, when we in Europe hear American politicians speak, we have to adjust our mindset quite a bit, because to us it sounds like so much bollocks. However, if one listens to the content and tries to catch the meaning rather than just airing one's prejudice, it often makes sense, even to a European.
It could have generated some good fun for a change.
This has happened on several occasions in other countries - in UK the 'Monster Raving Loony Party' run for election every time, I think, and in Denmark there's somebody that tries it on from time to time. Once, about ten years ago, a Danish comedian got elected to parliament on promising that he would ensure that cyclists would always have the wind in the back and similar. He was not a bad politician either, when it came to that.
The article you refer to doesn't really address the essence in what I said, though - animals do this kind of abstraction all the time, and the abstraction of small, natural numbers from instances of small sets of objects is not really different from the abstraction involved in going from 'that yellow apple', 'that red apple', 'that green apple',... to 'apple' in general. The ability to recognise a particular item of food as something like all the other items of food one has experienced, requires the ability to perform an abstraction. And as Bertrand Russell points out - it is bloody amazing that anybody can do it, considering how much it takes to pin out the details in what it involves.
And the explanation why we can do it just like that is that our brains are neural nets, and this is the kind of things neural nets can do.
It isn't surprising that monkeys can understand an abstraction like 'numbers' - a brain is a neural network, and neural nets are 'abstraction engines' by definition. Consider the nature of abstractions: an abstract concept is one that describes a set of properties that are common to a class of objects. A number, for example, is the property that is common to all sets that are isomorphic in the category of sets (to spell it out: what is common to 'five apples', 'five oranges', 'five cows',...? The number 5, of course). And what is it a neural net does? It learns to recognise patterns that are shared by all the 'objects' it 'sees' (if you will excuse the metaphor) - in other words, it creates an abstraction.
The numbers 1 and 0, although fundamental to our numerical notation, are not really 'interesting' in nature - 0 is simply 'nothing' and 1 is 'anything', they sort of fade into the background. Being able to recognise other, small numbers can be useful, however. Two fruits is one for me and one for you; if you have four children, but can only see three, then you should go looking for the last one, etc etc.
This is the way evolution works - nothing evolves with any purpose; things evolve because there are new traits that turn out to be beneficial in the given environment. And then, down the line, it sometimes also turns out that a trait that evolved at some point in the past allows the organism to do something entirely new in a new environment. So the monkeys didn't evolve to benefit from written language, it turned out that this is one of the things their brains can learn. The real question here is: Why did brains evolve - and that all starts with biofilms;-)
This article is crap - however, the idea is not entirely hot air, even though it is being touted as 'the next, big thing', which I very much doubt it will be. I think the 'semantic web' is trying to solve a non-existent problem; we're not suffering from 'information overload' - the net has just been filled up with useless rubbish, like adverts, SPAM, entertainment and adverts. And did I mention adverts? Fortunately it is not necessary to 'manage' any of that - all you need is to be able to avoid it, which existing SPAM filters and ad-blockers already do reasonably well.
Apart from that, I think using a tool like the one proposed (however vapidly) in the article presents it's own dangers. Letting a machine manage and 'understand' information that is important to you is not wise. Think of the spellchecker deathtrap: You misspell words in such a way that they become correctly spelled words with another meaning - like 'them' vs 'then', or 'than', or 'there' vs 'their'. Sometimes you stumble over texts where the author has clearly relied on the spellchecker without proofreading it afterwards, and the meaning has become garbled, or even worse, it has changed to something the author didn't intend, but which seems plausible enough. Just imagine if you were an amateur ornithologist who collects some articles mentioning 'cock pheasants' and 'blue tits' - and suddenly your collection of articles is tagged 'pornography'. Perhaps not the most catastrophic of scenarios, but certainly an example of the kind of surprises you can expect from the 'semantic web'.
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors
Interesting hyposthesis, but it doesn't hold water IMO. As far as I can see, religion doesn't lead to ethics; there are clear indications in much current research, that most apes (of which we are one species) and even other social mammals have a certain level of what you could call ethics, or at least proto-ethics, such as a sense of fairness. Nobody has found anything resembling religion in other animals than humans - perhaps not surprising, since religion is a fairly complex and abstract notion, whereas things like sense of fairness are simple.
Also, the reality is that religion is very often used as an excuse for NOT being ethical; it may not be unreasonable to go as far as saying that religion in general tends to limit ethical behaviour - "Heretics/unbelievers are not as good as us" is a very common argument why it is OK to treat them badly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the purpose of copyright to protect the author's right to copy the material so that people are only allowed to read it, but not to make copies of it? If copyright meant 'not allowed to see', how would people read books?
Unfortunately, this is how many people tend to develop in their profession. They learn something, get their exams, think that now they know it all, so they can dispense with all the hard stuff, like thinking. It's not just lawyers, but I do believe they are among the worst; perhaps it is because law is a subject that you can learn without necessarily having to have a lot of creative talent, analytical skill, empathy or any insight into anything at all. Not to say that all lawyers are like that, but there's a lot of that kind.
Do you mean to imply that these things are NOT crimes already? Seems strange, to say the least.
Never mind, though. I have stopped using credit cards years ago, and I am thinking about not having a debit card either and instead buy one of these prepaid 'credit cards' for when I want to buy something online; the disadvantages of using plastic cards are many, and the genuine advantages seem smaller and smaller every day. When you use a card, you have to pay a fee - or the shop does, which amounts to the same thing in the end - and you have all the problems with identity theft; plus the bank not only gets the handling fee from all transactions, they also save money on not having to physically handle the cash. IOW, you get all the disadvantages, they get all the advantages.
On the other hand, if you always use cash, you pay no handling fee. You may get mugged in the street and lose your money, but then you could lose your plastic cards in the same way; and nobody can take away the cash in your pocket over the internet. Your credit card info can get stolen without you even knowing and you can suddenly not only lose what's in your bank account, but the thief may also put you in debt far beyond what money you actually own.
I am not sure that Swedes would agree that their country is 'a Socialist state'; but then of course, they are only Swedes, so what do they know. How exactly do you reach the conclusion that Sweden is a socialist state? Or perhaps to you 'Socialist' means anything that isn't as radically in the pockets of rich people as the Good Ole US of A?
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I'm not going to disagree with the "laid open" part, but the "free of charge" nonsense is just typical marxist university professor hypocrisy.... God in Heaven, I despise university professors.
You don't say? Well, who would have guessed.
So, according to you, are all university professors 'Marxists'? Does that mean that if you are an accomplished academic, who has learned to think critically and employ the scientific method, then you are by necessity also a Marxist? Which in turn must mean that there are very good, logically sound reasons to be a communist or socialist, right? Well, it certainly makes sense to me.
The big 'why' here is not why American companies have a hard time in China, but why people on Slashdot just swallow this sort of FUD hook, line and sinker.
American companies have a hard time in China because they are not Chinese - it's as simple as that, really. Perhaps you are not aware, but European companies have always had a hard time getting in to the American market, just for comparison. Or the japanese market, the Malaysian market etc. There is nothing strange in it, it is a different culture, different laws, and it is far away. People will always be a bit sceptical about foreigners and foreign companies - add to that the fact that America does not have the best reputation in the world; certainly not in China.
Apart from that, the Chinese have a huge confidence in themselves nowadays, and you can see why: their economy is rocketing and they feel they have good reason to believe they will soon be stronger than the Americans anyway. When America was booming, a while back, it was the same - Americans wanted American goods, like everybody else in the world, and foreign companies were met with a 'Yeah, come and take US on' from American companies. It was very hard to get into America, and it has nothing to do with America 'poisoning' foreign companies in any way.
The big 'why' is 'why the hell do Americans believe in this kind of stupid conspiracy theory?' - I think it is because it is hard to face up to the fact that America is falling back in the competition. But that is the wrong way - like children saying 'he was cheating' when they lose a game. If that is the best America can do, then China deserves to win.
On the other hand, there aren't really many reasons why the US shouln't give the control over to an independent, international body.
It is good to see a pragmatic attitude in this matter - however, a truly pragmatic view would also include the fact that this seems to be an actual issue, even if there are no good technical or administrative reasons for changing things. The American government's stance demonstrates that they, at least, have strong reasons for not wanting to give away this control - so, they are not being pragmatic about it either.
Another fact worth considering is that it is technically easy to implement an alternative to the current root DNS servers etc; most of us could do it in a matter of a few hours if we had the HW. If that were to happen, it is possible it would hurt e-commerce, globalisation and other things - those most likely to feel the pain would be those who are most dependent on doing business on the internet. I suspect that this is mostly companies in the US. It ought to make the US more willing to consider an internationalisation of the internet governance; at least that seems to the most pragmatic view of things.
I think I'd rather have the $1million, convert it to Euros, and move to Denmark.
Well, perhaps you should think again. Denmark is no longer the fairy tale country of blessed, mild summers and beautiful, white winters.
Firstly, they don't use Euros in DK, but 'Kroner' (~'Crowns') - the Danes have been rather ambivalent about joining the EU, and even though they might as well be part of the Euro, they aren't. The Danish krone is rather firmly pegged to the euro, so the exchange rate stays more or less the same (ie. Denmark has no actual freedom in that respect), but you still have to change your money, so trade to and from Denmark is more expensive.
Secondly, although $1M is a lot of money, Denmark is an expensive country. Cars, houses, petrol, food, electricity etc is a lot more expensive than in the US (or that is my impression - I don't know American prices). 1 liter of petrol is about $2 if I am not much mistaken and cars are at least twice as expensive as in UK. The social security used to be very good, but it is falling apart now through mismanagement and lack of leadership and visions from the government (which BTW has been very far from socialist for many years - perhaps there's a connection)
Thirdly, the Danes themselves have changed; or perhaps it is just the political or cultural climate. Once, in the 70es and 80es, they were famed for being openminded and tolerant, but in recent years Denmark has become notorious for it intolerance, xenophobia and narrowmindedness; a number of extreme laws have been passed which could arguably be seen as racist. The message is: if you look or speak like a stranger, don't go there. Of course, now this policy is coming back to bite them - there is already a lack of people to fill the jobs available, and there is not going to be enough young Danes to take care of the aging population in the coming years. And now, who wants to come to Denmark, to be pariahs, pay ridiculously high taxes and get less and less social security in return?
In case you wonder: Yes, I am Danish; I haven't lived there for some years, but even here in London you can still follow what happens in Denmark.
The average power emitted in a single shot is about 10 kilowatts at 100 hertz
Since 100 Hz works out at a wavelength of about 3000 km, we are hadly talking about microwaves in the usual sense. However, 3000 km is about 1 nanoparsec if I am not mistaken, so perhaps we are talking of nanowaves? It all just depends on the perspective, I suppose.
I have always had the expectation that laws should be reasonable and understandable to ordinary people; naive perhaps, but there you are. Of course, sometimes a law has to be very technical because of the nature of the subject matter, but it should still be something most people would probably find reasonable if they had the required technical knowledge. And while I can't see much merit in gambling as such, I can easily see - and understand, even - that many people are attracted to it and are going to do it anyway; so what it the sense in a law like this one?
Passing laws that people can't respect, the result is that the law will be treated with contempt; look at the alcohol prohibition in the US in the beginning of last century. It played into the hands of criminal gangs in two ways - firstly, since selling alcohol was illegal, it meant gangsters had a monopoly, secondly, since people felt contempt for the law, they were more tolerant of the gans, and less in favour of helping the police. Don't bring justice into disrepute.
The thing to realize, especially if you are American, is that 'The US controlling [whatever]' does not mean 'You, the average American, controlling or even benefitting from [whatever]'. The present government is not your friend, unless you are very rich or ultra religious.
We shouldn't have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy
This is probably the most disgusting piece of sleazy hypocrisy I have seen come out of any of the foul orifices of any government official for a long time. What he is saying is something like 'We redefine privacy to mean that only the government and a bunch of companies know everything about you' - IOW 'We don't care about your perceived rights - here suck on this dummy'.
I am no privacy and anonymity fanatic, but at the end of the day, privacy has to mean at least that: 'privacy - the right to have secrets'. There are many cases where it may make sense to share your personal information with others, but the choice should always be yours, and nobody else should have a legal right to know against your will. The right to privacy is a simple consequence of the right to self-determination - the right to make your own decisions. If we lose that, what have we got left?
...PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges...
I'm not sure I like that one too much. Finegrained security models have always been a bloody nightmare, one way or another, and very often don't get used/are switched off, resulting in the opposite effect of that intended. Look to Vista to see why it sn't a good idea - users feel their are being bugged by constant dialog boxes asking them to confirm that it is OK to do trivial tasks, or asking for administrator passwords etc. People just want to get on with life, so this is a huge irritation - it may be true that all you need is to spend a little time and effort on setting it up, but people in general are not security minded and meticulous. This is, by the way, why Windows became so popular despite the huge problems with security and stability - a PC was almost an appliance that allowed you to use the internet and write documents, you just turned it on and used it.
Vista isn't the only example of finegrained security, only the latest and perhaps the one that has succeeded in pissing off most people. Oracle has it's own, very finely grained model, which I have never seen used seriously; and then there is RACF on IBM's mainframes, not a joy to work with either, IMO.
I think the basic UNIX security model is just about as much as most people want to bother with.
It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off
Risky? What risk? There can be just about two outcomes: we find proof of intelligent life or we don't. Which one is the risky one?
Apart from that, isn't that characteristic of all pioneering efforts - that it costs you something and may never pay off? And, correct me if I am wrong, but isn't pioneering what Americans pride themselves of? Or are you guys only bean-counters nowadays?
We always hear this argument 'money that could be better spent on solving so-and-so problem' - well, even if we didn't spend the money on SETI or other basic research, it wouldn't go to getting rid of poverty, disease or hunger; or protecting the environment or any of the other huge problems we are facing in the world today (and even more tomorrow). Because, in order to solve these problems, the world needs leaders with the will to do it and to stay the course even when it turns out to be less than popular. If we had the will to do so, we could solve all the problems in the world more or less today - we really could, but we don't, and what a bloody shame that is. In the meantime, why not SETI or any of the other basic research projects?
I think they over-interpret their findings. I can see that they have given a reasonably reliable demonstration of the phenomenon 'cognitive dissonance' in monkeys; after all, it only means that once you've made a decision, you are likely to make the same decision again. This makes sense in the real world, of course - we make a decision, find that it works well enough, and in the future we don't need to spend time and effort on making that decision again. Otherwise we waste time that could be used on finding food, having sex and other things that promote the survival of the species.
But talking about 'moral integrity' and 'global self-worth' is far-fetched. For one thing, I can't see that it is necessary to explain it any further than I have outlined above. I think there may be reasons to believe that animals other than humans have something like a sense of morality and self-worth, but this has nothing to do with it. I wish researchers (or perhaps it is the reporter?) would stop this kind of nonsense - it makes people lose respect for the genuine and valuable research that goes on into understanding the other animals on the planet, because they get associations of bunnies in waist-coats drinking tea.
This planet orbits within the 'habitable zone,' where water could presumably exist, but it's probably another gas giant like Saturn, so any liquid water would have to be on a moon. There's still a big gap between this planet and the outermost planet where no planets have been detected yet, so there could yet be a rocky planet in the system.
Rocky planets are usually found closer to the star than the gas giants - the heat from the the young star will make lighter elements evaporate, you see. So if this planet is a gas giant, it is not likely that they will find a rocky planet in the gap. Fortunately liquid water doesn't have to be on a rocky surface, there are such things as clouds. On the other hand, one thing that does seem to be important for the development of life as we know it is plate tectonics. Perhaps something with a similar effect could exist in the atmosphere of a gas planet.
Very interesting, intellectually, but good food is simple: start with good ingredients, don't overcook, and eat in moderation. The last one is important - if you eat until you are close to vomiting, it doesn't matter whether the meal was of good quality. The old saying 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' means exactly that.
A beautiful dream, but a bit far out.
No 1 is the kind of thing that sounds good, but which no American government will ever propose, unless they are certain that it will not get through Congress. America may not have state driven, law based censorship, but that's because it isn't needed when there is already 'institutional censorship': the twisted minds of the religious establishments and the press take care of that.
No 2 - that is a bit silly, isn't it? Freedom of speech doesn't make you money; I'm not going to argue that, it just seems obvious to me. Free trade may be good business for society and for consumers, but freedom of speech just means you don't go to jail for airing the wrong opinions.
No 3: In the light of 1 and 2, why should they? The reality is that China is set to overtake the West in all areas, economically, politically, militarily, no matter what the US does, and we are all going to try to emulate them, whatever they are going to be like at that time. You may hate the thought of it, but it will happen. We in the West have grown old and set in our ways, and China is suddenly emerging from it's teenage years and growing up; they will take over after us, unless we can radically rejuvenate and adapt to the new reality - and that certainly doesn't call for the Cold War mindset.
Freedom is important, and freedom of speech is perhaps as important as the freedom to pursue your own happiness, but it has little to do with 'prosperity', it is important for political reasons. Politics is about making laws and governing a nation - freedom of speech is important in order to make democracy work, to ensure that people have the facts about what goes on, so they can make an informed decision on election day. Freedom of speech should not be an excuse for lying and cheating, or for promoting useless, mind-bending crap like Fox News.
And no, the future of the world is not at stake, at least not when it comes to freedom of speech. The sun will rise and set all the same, whether the internet is crammed with censorship or not. Get real, man.
This, I feel, is exactly why medical research - and research in general - shouldn't be privately funded.
A private company's main interest is to make money; nothing surprising there, that is what they are all about. So they will research the things that allow them to make the most money, which is not always what the world needs. Hence you can bet that there is a lot of research into fighting chronic diseases, which typically can't really be cured, but which can be made less troublesome, or cancer, which is still in many ways an uncurable disease; you can make the tumours go away, but the body produces new cancer cells all the time - it's just that in most cases our immune system handles it. And the medicine is hugely expensive - not necessarily justifiably so, but then there is the psychological side of it: everybody is terrified of cancer, so most people find it reasonable even to pay >$100K a year for treatment per patient.
Meanwhile there is a huge array of diseases that have been underfunded and understudied, simply because there is no money in them. Malaria, for example - it could probably be cured, but the patients are mostly poor people in Africa, and to make matters worse, once they are cured, they won't need the medicine again. On top of that, it is quite likely that an effective medicine would not be hugely expensive. Compare with penicillin - it's very cheap and easy to produce. Antibiotics are in general fairly cheap and you tend to lose your income base, because the patients get cured of their infections. Too little profit there; and as a result we now have the panic over the superbugs - it could easily have been avoided.
I'm not saying there should be no private medical research, but there should be much more public research - perhaps an order of magnitude more. This would be able to target the big, debilitating diseases that are ignored at the moment, and it would give the private companies some real competition to think about, to the benefit of all - well, possibly not the shareholders in the medical industry, but they don't seem to be starving, really.
the unique and opaque culture of the Chinese government bureaucracy, complete with back room deals, shifting political allegiances, corruption, the gulag, and all the intrigues that accompany any non-representative government
Wow, somebody has really got his jongoistic balls in a twist.
Back room deals? Shifting political alliances? Corruption? Intrigues? What's so unique about that? Don't you have it in America? Don't make me laugh. As for the 'gulags' - for one thing it is a Russian phenomenon; for another, I think the US have their own, what with Guantanamo, torture prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and their extraordinary renditions. The Chinese prisons are not holiday centres; but they are not death camps either. I can understand why they are somewhat basic - China still has lots of more important problems than trying to make criminals comfortable.
No mate, for pompous bullshit, look no further than to your own writings.
First of all one has to realise that this has been translated from Chinese - the Chinese language has a grammatical structure that is somewhat different from English and other Indo-European languages. In Chinese it is completely natural to build up sentences like this, as long 'rotes' or lists of 'items', and quite often what we think os as verbs can be left out. On top of that, in Chinese culture it is common to use expressions, metaphors etc that seem rather florid to a Westerner; thus texts translated from Chinese may appear rather stilted and uncomfortable to us. Once you take this into account, I think you will see that there is very little in the way of bullshit here.
This is a common problem when trying to cross culture barriers - you will se that even between American and British. To an American the British often seem stiff and snobbish, and believe you me, when we in Europe hear American politicians speak, we have to adjust our mindset quite a bit, because to us it sounds like so much bollocks. However, if one listens to the content and tries to catch the meaning rather than just airing one's prejudice, it often makes sense, even to a European.
It could have generated some good fun for a change.
This has happened on several occasions in other countries - in UK the 'Monster Raving Loony Party' run for election every time, I think, and in Denmark there's somebody that tries it on from time to time. Once, about ten years ago, a Danish comedian got elected to parliament on promising that he would ensure that cyclists would always have the wind in the back and similar. He was not a bad politician either, when it came to that.
The article you refer to doesn't really address the essence in what I said, though - animals do this kind of abstraction all the time, and the abstraction of small, natural numbers from instances of small sets of objects is not really different from the abstraction involved in going from 'that yellow apple', 'that red apple', 'that green apple', ... to 'apple' in general. The ability to recognise a particular item of food as something like all the other items of food one has experienced, requires the ability to perform an abstraction. And as Bertrand Russell points out - it is bloody amazing that anybody can do it, considering how much it takes to pin out the details in what it involves.
And the explanation why we can do it just like that is that our brains are neural nets, and this is the kind of things neural nets can do.
It isn't surprising that monkeys can understand an abstraction like 'numbers' - a brain is a neural network, and neural nets are 'abstraction engines' by definition. Consider the nature of abstractions: an abstract concept is one that describes a set of properties that are common to a class of objects. A number, for example, is the property that is common to all sets that are isomorphic in the category of sets (to spell it out: what is common to 'five apples', 'five oranges', 'five cows', ...? The number 5, of course). And what is it a neural net does? It learns to recognise patterns that are shared by all the 'objects' it 'sees' (if you will excuse the metaphor) - in other words, it creates an abstraction.
;-)
The numbers 1 and 0, although fundamental to our numerical notation, are not really 'interesting' in nature - 0 is simply 'nothing' and 1 is 'anything', they sort of fade into the background. Being able to recognise other, small numbers can be useful, however. Two fruits is one for me and one for you; if you have four children, but can only see three, then you should go looking for the last one, etc etc.
This is the way evolution works - nothing evolves with any purpose; things evolve because there are new traits that turn out to be beneficial in the given environment. And then, down the line, it sometimes also turns out that a trait that evolved at some point in the past allows the organism to do something entirely new in a new environment. So the monkeys didn't evolve to benefit from written language, it turned out that this is one of the things their brains can learn. The real question here is: Why did brains evolve - and that all starts with biofilms
This article is crap - however, the idea is not entirely hot air, even though it is being touted as 'the next, big thing', which I very much doubt it will be. I think the 'semantic web' is trying to solve a non-existent problem; we're not suffering from 'information overload' - the net has just been filled up with useless rubbish, like adverts, SPAM, entertainment and adverts. And did I mention adverts? Fortunately it is not necessary to 'manage' any of that - all you need is to be able to avoid it, which existing SPAM filters and ad-blockers already do reasonably well.
Apart from that, I think using a tool like the one proposed (however vapidly) in the article presents it's own dangers. Letting a machine manage and 'understand' information that is important to you is not wise. Think of the spellchecker deathtrap: You misspell words in such a way that they become correctly spelled words with another meaning - like 'them' vs 'then', or 'than', or 'there' vs 'their'. Sometimes you stumble over texts where the author has clearly relied on the spellchecker without proofreading it afterwards, and the meaning has become garbled, or even worse, it has changed to something the author didn't intend, but which seems plausible enough. Just imagine if you were an amateur ornithologist who collects some articles mentioning 'cock pheasants' and 'blue tits' - and suddenly your collection of articles is tagged 'pornography'. Perhaps not the most catastrophic of scenarios, but certainly an example of the kind of surprises you can expect from the 'semantic web'.
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors
Interesting hyposthesis, but it doesn't hold water IMO. As far as I can see, religion doesn't lead to ethics; there are clear indications in much current research, that most apes (of which we are one species) and even other social mammals have a certain level of what you could call ethics, or at least proto-ethics, such as a sense of fairness. Nobody has found anything resembling religion in other animals than humans - perhaps not surprising, since religion is a fairly complex and abstract notion, whereas things like sense of fairness are simple.
Also, the reality is that religion is very often used as an excuse for NOT being ethical; it may not be unreasonable to go as far as saying that religion in general tends to limit ethical behaviour - "Heretics/unbelievers are not as good as us" is a very common argument why it is OK to treat them badly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the purpose of copyright to protect the author's right to copy the material so that people are only allowed to read it, but not to make copies of it? If copyright meant 'not allowed to see', how would people read books?
Unfortunately, this is how many people tend to develop in their profession. They learn something, get their exams, think that now they know it all, so they can dispense with all the hard stuff, like thinking. It's not just lawyers, but I do believe they are among the worst; perhaps it is because law is a subject that you can learn without necessarily having to have a lot of creative talent, analytical skill, empathy or any insight into anything at all. Not to say that all lawyers are like that, but there's a lot of that kind.
Do you mean to imply that these things are NOT crimes already? Seems strange, to say the least.
Never mind, though. I have stopped using credit cards years ago, and I am thinking about not having a debit card either and instead buy one of these prepaid 'credit cards' for when I want to buy something online; the disadvantages of using plastic cards are many, and the genuine advantages seem smaller and smaller every day. When you use a card, you have to pay a fee - or the shop does, which amounts to the same thing in the end - and you have all the problems with identity theft; plus the bank not only gets the handling fee from all transactions, they also save money on not having to physically handle the cash. IOW, you get all the disadvantages, they get all the advantages.
On the other hand, if you always use cash, you pay no handling fee. You may get mugged in the street and lose your money, but then you could lose your plastic cards in the same way; and nobody can take away the cash in your pocket over the internet. Your credit card info can get stolen without you even knowing and you can suddenly not only lose what's in your bank account, but the thief may also put you in debt far beyond what money you actually own.
Sweden is a Scandinavian socialist state
I am not sure that Swedes would agree that their country is 'a Socialist state'; but then of course, they are only Swedes, so what do they know. How exactly do you reach the conclusion that Sweden is a socialist state? Or perhaps to you 'Socialist' means anything that isn't as radically in the pockets of rich people as the Good Ole US of A?