What will be more interesting is whatever people come up with to deal with the misery this will create.
Beer. Lots and lots of beer.
I think your take on the patent makes sense, but it certainly isn't what I got from reading the claims alone. I would argue that while the claims as written do cover what you're describing they are vastly too broad, and cover pretty much any refactoring sequence where there is the possibility of reversion based on a metric, whether or not the refactored code is saved.
Incredibly enough what is quoted in the summary is actually the first claim. It looks like the abstract is just about identical, so it may be an oversight on the part of the/. editors, who in the past have routinely mangled patent stories so badly as to make one suspect they love the patent system so much that they can't find anything truthful to say about it that looks bad. But in this case they've done the right thing, and the claims are actually as dumb as the summary makes them sound.
If you're going to comment on a patent, read the patent first.
Actually I'm amazed and delighted that quite possibly for the first time in the history of/. we have a patent story that doesn't mis-identify an application as a grant, and that actually quotes the claims!
Who says there's no such thing as progress?
And the comments have been relatively germane: the patent describes the process of implementing a refactoring, evaluating it (possibly before compilation) and reverting it if it does not pass one or more measures of goodness (time and potentially others.) Everyone who has ever refactored anything has done this.
This is not "debugging by trial and error" but it certainly is "refactoring followed by (possibly pre-compilation) evaluation against some measure of goodness followed by reversion of the refactoring on that basis."
So here's a question: if I create an experimental branch in my local git repository, start a refactoring, decide the cyclomatic complexity of my refactored solution is too high when I get half-way through, and revert by simply dropping the branch without ever committing, would I be violating this patent (if it were granted)? Because I've certainly done that many, many times, as has pretty much everyone else who's ever refactored anything.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd go 100% eco with a gerbil in a wheel or a hand crank if the demand doesn't exceed 4mW.
Not to be pedantic (well, ok, in fact to be ultra-pedantic... so pedantic I find it necessary to point out how pedantic I'm being, and you can't get much more pedantic than that) there's nothing especially 'eco' about gerbils or hand cranks. 'Natural' maybe, but nature is full of incredibly wasteful processes (evolution itself, for example).
I'd like to see us break this bizarre association people have between the industrial use of the most wasteful processes on the planet (natural ones) and ecologically friendly technology.
So at 4 mW (yeah, I got the joke, I just decided to use it to make my incredibly pedantic point) you'd be better off from an ecological perspective going with a radioisotope generator. Salvage some 241Am out of a bunch of smoke detectors and you'd be good to go, and eco-friendly as can be.
It sounds like they had Bradleys and dismounts nearby, and they probably should have been sent in to deal with the situation.
Although there may be some context missing, there doesn't seem to be a "situation" to deal with, at least until the Americans in the helicopter gunship start firing on the Iraqis, some of whom are apparently exercising their natural right to keep and bear arms. The Americans seem to be acting fundamentally on an emotional desire to kill.
From the point of view of economics, this is not entirely surprising. War itself, and therefore all military decision making, is a fundamentally emotionally-driven enterprise. As any economist will tell you, war is irrational: it is amongst the least effective, least efficient means of solving human problems, and anyone who choses a less effective, less efficient solution out of the range of available alternatives is pretty much a text-book definition of "irrational" in an economist's view.
The very existence of military action is fundamentally based on thinking like, "I'll buy this one! It costs more and doesn't work as well! But it has pretty colours and makes me feel good!"
To understand the military mind you really just have to understand the mind of an impulsive girl shopping for shoes she doesn't need, can't afford, and that are so uncomfortable she can't actually wear them for more than a few minutes at a time. Economically, that is indistinguishable from the political choice to use the military when any other solution is available.
Again, these guys may well have screwed up and may well be deserving of punishment.
I'm not sure what "deserving of punishment" means--it's one of those emotional things that people say, that seems to me to mean nothing more than "it would make me feel good if these people were hurt." It is in fact the kind of emotional, non-logical thinking that creates wars in the first place (war is of course entirely irrational, as any economist will tell you: wars are necessarily started for purely emotional reasons in all cases, as there are always alternatives that will better-satisfy their purported objectives, and no rational person would ever choose a less efficient, less effective means of achieving a goal when more efficient, more effective alternatives exist.)
That point aside, I'm pretty sure that begging to be allowed to engage people who are lifting and carrying a wounded man into a van that has a couple of children visible in the window, and then firing on them and killing them while wounding the children, does count as a "screw up".
So I'm really not sure what you're uncertain about. Did you watch the video? Did you see and hear them do exactly what I described above? What part of that doesn't look like a screw up to you?
Which gets back to the difficulty of making robots appear human. Its the same problem, magnified 1000 times by the fact that, in essence, you have to pack the equivalent of a millions of "control-points" into the robots face.
You're thinking about this like a software guy, not a hardware guy. The human face doesn't have that many control points. It has a relatively small set of muscles and a bunch of connective tissue with known (albeit nonlinear) properties.
The problem is that much of what humans do with facial expression is "non-functional" in the sense that it doesn't involve any practical intent or communication. We blink, we chew our lips, we move our muscles simply because stillness is fatiguing. I'm betting that with a relatively small amount of attention to such "non-functional" movements we'll see adequately canny robot faces in fairly short order, particularly given the huge range of perfectly acceptable facial behaviour that humans actually have.
I get the sense that no one complaining here has ever dealt with a person whose face is partially paralyzed, or burned, or what-have-you. Anyone who has knows that you get past those aspects very quickly, and simply start seeing the person. But I'm sure the same people complaining here will still be complaining about the uncanny aspect of robot faces long after a wealth of empirical data has shown that the average person can't tell the difference without already knowing the object they are dealing with is a robot.
Guy creates functionality I've been using in Java for 8 years; film at 11.
I think there was something lost in editing the summary. It should have read:
There's no other platform in the world that an ignorant newb like me knows about that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close.
Besides Java, C++ is a fully portable language when run against any of the many excellent platform-independent toolkits out there. I've used both Qt and wxWidgets extensively and "Thou shalt have no #ifdefs" is part of the coding standard.
The thing that's AMAZING is not that some newb can write platform-independent code for a pretty trivial game, but that anyone in this day and age is still restricting themselves to platform-specific code. For really high performance stuff I can see the point, but that is tiny fraction of all code that gets written, and developers should be as a matter of course learning languages and platforms that are inherently portable.
Being tied to a specific OS is stone age thinking.
Ask an AI if the stove is hot. It should respond "I don't know, where is the stove?" Rather AI would try and make an inference based on known data.
The "intelligence" in artificial intelligence is essentially Platonic or Cartesian in conception, a consquence of AI research being dominated by mathematicians (and worse yet, philosophers) rather than scientists. Scientists know we learn can almost nothing from sitting in a cave and thinking, and we can learn almost anything from interacting with the world. But mathematicians and philosophers continue to push failed models of intelligence that completely ignore the true source of all knowledge: our ability to act on the world and observe the consequencs of our actions.
And AI without effectors is an AI without semantics, because the foundations of meaning are in action and consequence, not inference.
It is April fools day in some parts of the world now.
Fortunately it isn't in the US yet, and I'm on vacation tomorrow and so will get to miss the boring tired old/. April 1st dementia that wasn't very funny the first time and has become vastly less funny as it gets repeated without variation or originality year after year after year.
What, a 15% increase in focus on actual outcomes rather imputed intent based on extremely abstract (and in fact utterly impossible) hypothetical situations? What would that be useful for, exactly?
The questions the ask are full of magical reasoning: someone walks over a bridge you "know to be unsafe". What on earth does "unsafe" mean in this context and with what degree of certainty to you "know" it to be so? Does "unsafe" mean "everyone who walks over the bridge will die? Apparently not, because the magical question stipulates that it is crossed safely. So maybe this is just showing up a more literal frame of mind, that rejects the obviously bogus set-up information in favour of the factual outcome information.
Personally, I'd like to investigate the morality of researchers who pretend to investigate moral reasoning by using extremely abstract, underspecified, self-contradictory hypotheticals as the basis for their work.
You must have mistyped something, as you didn't follow this up with any interesting question, but rather with a hypothetical scenario that has so many bells and whistles it is completely useless for anything other than pointless wanking. Depending on the precise construal that individuals put on the various open-ended and unspecified aspects of your extremely abstract and under-specified, complex hypothetical they will respond in completely different ways even if they happen to share identical value systems.
I'd love to see an intersting question. Incredibly complex, extremely abstract, hypotheticals masquerading as concrete thought experiments do not count as such.
Which is why Dutch fatality rates are a factor of two lower than American ones.
I can see that now. Thanks for explain. It just makes so much sense! Dutch fatality rates are so much lower than American ones because they do exactly what you say won't increase safety, and really, who am I to argue with your fantasies when all I have on my side is emprical reality?
Sane drivers know this, reduce their speed, and then -- making wild hand-waving guesses, here -- wind up with about the same overall level of "dangerousness" as when driving on uncluttered roadways.
One could hardly ask for a better contrast between the scientific, empirically-focused world view and the anti-scientific fantasy-focused world view you espouse than the fact that in the very article you cite there is mention of emprical data from the Netherlands that suggests the exact opposite of your fantasies: self-explaining roads reduce fatalities.
But please, don't let mere fact interfere with your gut feel of what ought to be true!
It makes me sick watching it happen and knowing there is nothing we can do about it.
Others have responded at length, but I want to point out that there is only one thing stopping you or anyone else from doing something about it: fear. You may fear losing your job or your social standing... some guy a few comments down thinks that any sort of opposition to the government at all risks turning the US into Rawanda, and suggests that farmers living on a razor-thin margin were better revolutionaries than modern Americans because they were so poor that least disruption of the social order would result in mass starvation. I'm not sure I follow his logic: it just looks like an abject coward trying to fabricate a justification for his actions.
The Founders of the United States did not behave reasonably: they were fired by a powerful philosophy that said any restriction on their own liberties was unacceptable (restricting the liberties of women, the poor and people with somewhat darker skins than their own was ok.)
So remember, "there is nothing we can do" just means is "there is nothing we have the guts to do." You can change your country and the world. But it won't be comfortable. It won't be safe. It might not work out the way you hope and dream. But getting up out of your armchair is infinitely superior to laying back and claiming "there is nothing we can do."
The Internet is an invention of the USA, so why shouldn't we have control over it, you eurotrash piece of shit?
DARPA created the Internet, so why shouldn't they have control over it?
More to the point, a very small number of individuals at DARPA created the Internet, so why shouldn't they have control over it?
In fact, only some PARTS of those individuals created the Internet, so why shouldn't those parts have control over it?
But wait, HUMANS created the Internet, so why shouldn't we all have control over it?
Why exactly are you picking one particular level of abstraction out of the infinite multitude of possible ones and declaring that it is the only one that we should all pay attention to? What makes the nation-state your entity-of-choice with regard to causal efficacy and moral supremacy? It seems pretty arbitrary to me.
And yet the very notion of "non-baryonic matter" challenges laws as fundamental and thoroughly-established as laws of gravitation
Since we already know lots about non-baryonic matter it's a little hard to see how the very notion challenges any laws of physics. Massive neutrinos, for example, are non-baryonic matter, and dark matter too. They exist. They don't account for the greater part of the dark matter that is inferred from observations, but they do exist.
The question I have is why so many people are so antagonistic to the very notion of dark matter, routinely calling the people who suggest it as an obvious and minimal move to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies (one type of dark matter, possibly baryonic) to the dynamics of galactic clusters (another type of dark matter) to the large-scale motion of the universe (possibly another type of dark matter) "arrogant" and the like.
We have an excellent theory of gravity that has withstood every experimental test in every situation, both strong-field and weak-field, short distances (Terrestrial corrections to GPS signals) and large distances (lensing). Furthermore, the hypothesis that there is dark matter is entirely consistent in precise numerical detail with general relativity and observations. That is, dark matter doesn't just explain things in a vague and hand-waving kind of way, it does so in a way that can be shown to be numerically consistent. That in itself is a test of GR too, and the way that MOND was eliminated from serious consideration: the dynamics of the Bullet Cluster are not consistent with MOND, but are consistent with GR plus dark matter.
So anyone attacking the dark matter hypothesis has to argue that there is some exotic phenomenon that just happens to be precisely consistent with GR plus dark matter, but is something completely different from GR plus dark matter. That is a rather fine-tuned sort of explanation. It could happen, but I'm not hopeful.
Dark matter as it stands is an extremely, possibly even overwhelmingly, likely hypothesis that is consistent in considerable numerical detail with GR and every empirical observation that has been made. You would have to be an idiot to call anyone who assumed it without further question "arrogant", unless you have an equally robust hypothesis to put up against it.
The real question for the dark matter hypothesis is the one you've alluded to in your final paragraph: what kind of elementary particles--if any--is the dark matter at various scales made of? That is where one of the leading edges of particle physics is right now. It is a thankless and difficult task, and the people pursuing it deserve more than to be called arrogant by know-nothings.
so much for those in command whose culture values wisdom and patience.
Chinese culture values wisdom and patience the way Canadian culture values lacrosse. If you didn't know anything about what Canadians actually do, but just read the official literature, you'd think lacrosse was a big deal. It's our national sport! Officially.
If instead you behaved like an scientist, and looked at the empirical reality of what we do, you'd find this other game called hockey... And then there's this "curling" stuff...
If you look at actual Chinese history, including recent history, you'll find a culture that values violence, genocide, class hatred, race hatred, torture, imperialism and oppression on a scale that puts it well up with the historical realities of the United States, England and Spain. The difference is that while those other countries have somewhat toned down their bad behaviour in the past fifty years, China is ramping up.
I distinctively remember such treaties being signed in the Gorbachev era.
Sure, this is just Obama following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately he is in other respects, too, like the massive deficits that Reagan created both via sending bloated budgets to Congress and failing to veto pork in Congressional bills that crossed his desk.
I can't really see why Republicans hate Obama so much. I understood why they hated Clinton: he was a deficit fighter who actually brought Federal spending under control, leading to the kind of smaller government that Republicans hate. But Obama, with his huge deficits, sweetheart deals for particular industries, and nuclear weapons reductions, seems to be taking his plays straight from the Republican book, sadly enough.
We all understand what is going on here, The Won is on record saying the US should be nuke free (stupid!) and is using the Russians as an excuse to go in a direction he already wants to go.
This is actually another example of Obama's bipartisan agenda. He is after all following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan on this issue, so I assume we'll be hearing soon from Republicans everywhere about what a great day for America this is.
China can have all the root servers they want - just don't configure your server to poll them.
Actually China is demonstrably incapble of having any working root servers at all. A DNS server that returns incorrect information is not a "root" server, if by "root" you mean "authoritative source of DNS information that resolves domain names properly."
It's really too bad that China is incapable of hosting DNS root servers. Hopefully by the end of the 21st century China will be a little less backward and isolated from the rest of the world, which would benefit greatly from interaction with so many people from such diverse cultural and political backgrounds.
Slashdot Mirror
What will be more interesting is whatever people come up with to deal with the misery this will create.
Beer. Lots and lots of beer.
I think your take on the patent makes sense, but it certainly isn't what I got from reading the claims alone. I would argue that while the claims as written do cover what you're describing they are vastly too broad, and cover pretty much any refactoring sequence where there is the possibility of reversion based on a metric, whether or not the refactored code is saved.
The patent is talking about using a precompiler so you can have your cake and eat it too.
Any of the common tools for measuring cyclomatic complexity would seem to me to qualify as an instance of a "precompiler" in the relevant respect.
The patented stuff is the "claims".
Incredibly enough what is quoted in the summary is actually the first claim. It looks like the abstract is just about identical, so it may be an oversight on the part of the /. editors, who in the past have routinely mangled patent stories so badly as to make one suspect they love the patent system so much that they can't find anything truthful to say about it that looks bad. But in this case they've done the right thing, and the claims are actually as dumb as the summary makes them sound.
If you're going to comment on a patent, read the patent first.
Actually I'm amazed and delighted that quite possibly for the first time in the history of /. we have a patent story that doesn't mis-identify an application as a grant, and that actually quotes the claims!
Who says there's no such thing as progress?
And the comments have been relatively germane: the patent describes the process of implementing a refactoring, evaluating it (possibly before compilation) and reverting it if it does not pass one or more measures of goodness (time and potentially others.) Everyone who has ever refactored anything has done this.
This is not "debugging by trial and error" but it certainly is "refactoring followed by (possibly pre-compilation) evaluation against some measure of goodness followed by reversion of the refactoring on that basis."
So here's a question: if I create an experimental branch in my local git repository, start a refactoring, decide the cyclomatic complexity of my refactored solution is too high when I get half-way through, and revert by simply dropping the branch without ever committing, would I be violating this patent (if it were granted)? Because I've certainly done that many, many times, as has pretty much everyone else who's ever refactored anything.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd go 100% eco with a gerbil in a wheel or a hand crank if the demand doesn't exceed 4mW.
Not to be pedantic (well, ok, in fact to be ultra-pedantic... so pedantic I find it necessary to point out how pedantic I'm being, and you can't get much more pedantic than that) there's nothing especially 'eco' about gerbils or hand cranks. 'Natural' maybe, but nature is full of incredibly wasteful processes (evolution itself, for example).
I'd like to see us break this bizarre association people have between the industrial use of the most wasteful processes on the planet (natural ones) and ecologically friendly technology.
So at 4 mW (yeah, I got the joke, I just decided to use it to make my incredibly pedantic point) you'd be better off from an ecological perspective going with a radioisotope generator. Salvage some 241Am out of a bunch of smoke detectors and you'd be good to go, and eco-friendly as can be.
It sounds like they had Bradleys and dismounts nearby, and they probably should have been sent in to deal with the situation.
Although there may be some context missing, there doesn't seem to be a "situation" to deal with, at least until the Americans in the helicopter gunship start firing on the Iraqis, some of whom are apparently exercising their natural right to keep and bear arms. The Americans seem to be acting fundamentally on an emotional desire to kill.
From the point of view of economics, this is not entirely surprising. War itself, and therefore all military decision making, is a fundamentally emotionally-driven enterprise. As any economist will tell you, war is irrational: it is amongst the least effective, least efficient means of solving human problems, and anyone who choses a less effective, less efficient solution out of the range of available alternatives is pretty much a text-book definition of "irrational" in an economist's view.
The very existence of military action is fundamentally based on thinking like, "I'll buy this one! It costs more and doesn't work as well! But it has pretty colours and makes me feel good!"
To understand the military mind you really just have to understand the mind of an impulsive girl shopping for shoes she doesn't need, can't afford, and that are so uncomfortable she can't actually wear them for more than a few minutes at a time. Economically, that is indistinguishable from the political choice to use the military when any other solution is available.
Again, these guys may well have screwed up and may well be deserving of punishment.
I'm not sure what "deserving of punishment" means--it's one of those emotional things that people say, that seems to me to mean nothing more than "it would make me feel good if these people were hurt." It is in fact the kind of emotional, non-logical thinking that creates wars in the first place (war is of course entirely irrational, as any economist will tell you: wars are necessarily started for purely emotional reasons in all cases, as there are always alternatives that will better-satisfy their purported objectives, and no rational person would ever choose a less efficient, less effective means of achieving a goal when more efficient, more effective alternatives exist.)
That point aside, I'm pretty sure that begging to be allowed to engage people who are lifting and carrying a wounded man into a van that has a couple of children visible in the window, and then firing on them and killing them while wounding the children, does count as a "screw up".
So I'm really not sure what you're uncertain about. Did you watch the video? Did you see and hear them do exactly what I described above? What part of that doesn't look like a screw up to you?
WikiLeaks commented that there was a possibility that at least one person had a weapon.
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
Which gets back to the difficulty of making robots appear human. Its the same problem, magnified 1000 times by the fact that, in essence, you have to pack the equivalent of a millions of "control-points" into the robots face.
You're thinking about this like a software guy, not a hardware guy. The human face doesn't have that many control points. It has a relatively small set of muscles and a bunch of connective tissue with known (albeit nonlinear) properties.
The problem is that much of what humans do with facial expression is "non-functional" in the sense that it doesn't involve any practical intent or communication. We blink, we chew our lips, we move our muscles simply because stillness is fatiguing. I'm betting that with a relatively small amount of attention to such "non-functional" movements we'll see adequately canny robot faces in fairly short order, particularly given the huge range of perfectly acceptable facial behaviour that humans actually have.
I get the sense that no one complaining here has ever dealt with a person whose face is partially paralyzed, or burned, or what-have-you. Anyone who has knows that you get past those aspects very quickly, and simply start seeing the person. But I'm sure the same people complaining here will still be complaining about the uncanny aspect of robot faces long after a wealth of empirical data has shown that the average person can't tell the difference without already knowing the object they are dealing with is a robot.
Guy creates functionality I've been using in Java for 8 years; film at 11.
I think there was something lost in editing the summary. It should have read:
There's no other platform in the world that an ignorant newb like me knows about that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close.
Besides Java, C++ is a fully portable language when run against any of the many excellent platform-independent toolkits out there. I've used both Qt and wxWidgets extensively and "Thou shalt have no #ifdefs" is part of the coding standard.
The thing that's AMAZING is not that some newb can write platform-independent code for a pretty trivial game, but that anyone in this day and age is still restricting themselves to platform-specific code. For really high performance stuff I can see the point, but that is tiny fraction of all code that gets written, and developers should be as a matter of course learning languages and platforms that are inherently portable.
Being tied to a specific OS is stone age thinking.
Ask an AI if the stove is hot. It should respond "I don't know, where is the stove?" Rather AI would try and make an inference based on known data.
The "intelligence" in artificial intelligence is essentially Platonic or Cartesian in conception, a consquence of AI research being dominated by mathematicians (and worse yet, philosophers) rather than scientists. Scientists know we learn can almost nothing from sitting in a cave and thinking, and we can learn almost anything from interacting with the world. But mathematicians and philosophers continue to push failed models of intelligence that completely ignore the true source of all knowledge: our ability to act on the world and observe the consequencs of our actions.
And AI without effectors is an AI without semantics, because the foundations of meaning are in action and consequence, not inference.
It is April fools day in some parts of the world now.
Fortunately it isn't in the US yet, and I'm on vacation tomorrow and so will get to miss the boring tired old /. April 1st dementia that wasn't very funny the first time and has become vastly less funny as it gets repeated without variation or originality year after year after year.
Very useful feature that
What, a 15% increase in focus on actual outcomes rather imputed intent based on extremely abstract (and in fact utterly impossible) hypothetical situations? What would that be useful for, exactly?
The questions the ask are full of magical reasoning: someone walks over a bridge you "know to be unsafe". What on earth does "unsafe" mean in this context and with what degree of certainty to you "know" it to be so? Does "unsafe" mean "everyone who walks over the bridge will die? Apparently not, because the magical question stipulates that it is crossed safely. So maybe this is just showing up a more literal frame of mind, that rejects the obviously bogus set-up information in favour of the factual outcome information.
Personally, I'd like to investigate the morality of researchers who pretend to investigate moral reasoning by using extremely abstract, underspecified, self-contradictory hypotheticals as the basis for their work.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong.
.. by fascist nutjobs.
He proposed the following interesting question.
You must have mistyped something, as you didn't follow this up with any interesting question, but rather with a hypothetical scenario that has so many bells and whistles it is completely useless for anything other than pointless wanking. Depending on the precise construal that individuals put on the various open-ended and unspecified aspects of your extremely abstract and under-specified, complex hypothetical they will respond in completely different ways even if they happen to share identical value systems.
I'd love to see an intersting question. Incredibly complex, extremely abstract, hypotheticals masquerading as concrete thought experiments do not count as such.
Number 2 works, but it doesn't increase safety.
Which is why Dutch fatality rates are a factor of two lower than American ones.
I can see that now. Thanks for explain. It just makes so much sense! Dutch fatality rates are so much lower than American ones because they do exactly what you say won't increase safety, and really, who am I to argue with your fantasies when all I have on my side is emprical reality?
Sane drivers know this, reduce their speed, and then -- making wild hand-waving guesses, here -- wind up with about the same overall level of "dangerousness" as when driving on uncluttered roadways.
One could hardly ask for a better contrast between the scientific, empirically-focused world view and the anti-scientific fantasy-focused world view you espouse than the fact that in the very article you cite there is mention of emprical data from the Netherlands that suggests the exact opposite of your fantasies: self-explaining roads reduce fatalities.
But please, don't let mere fact interfere with your gut feel of what ought to be true!
It makes me sick watching it happen and knowing there is nothing we can do about it.
Others have responded at length, but I want to point out that there is only one thing stopping you or anyone else from doing something about it: fear. You may fear losing your job or your social standing... some guy a few comments down thinks that any sort of opposition to the government at all risks turning the US into Rawanda, and suggests that farmers living on a razor-thin margin were better revolutionaries than modern Americans because they were so poor that least disruption of the social order would result in mass starvation. I'm not sure I follow his logic: it just looks like an abject coward trying to fabricate a justification for his actions.
The Founders of the United States did not behave reasonably: they were fired by a powerful philosophy that said any restriction on their own liberties was unacceptable (restricting the liberties of women, the poor and people with somewhat darker skins than their own was ok.)
So remember, "there is nothing we can do" just means is "there is nothing we have the guts to do." You can change your country and the world. But it won't be comfortable. It won't be safe. It might not work out the way you hope and dream. But getting up out of your armchair is infinitely superior to laying back and claiming "there is nothing we can do."
The Internet is an invention of the USA, so why shouldn't we have control over it, you eurotrash piece of shit?
DARPA created the Internet, so why shouldn't they have control over it?
More to the point, a very small number of individuals at DARPA created the Internet, so why shouldn't they have control over it?
In fact, only some PARTS of those individuals created the Internet, so why shouldn't those parts have control over it?
But wait, HUMANS created the Internet, so why shouldn't we all have control over it?
Why exactly are you picking one particular level of abstraction out of the infinite multitude of possible ones and declaring that it is the only one that we should all pay attention to? What makes the nation-state your entity-of-choice with regard to causal efficacy and moral supremacy? It seems pretty arbitrary to me.
And yet the very notion of "non-baryonic matter" challenges laws as fundamental and thoroughly-established as laws of gravitation
Since we already know lots about non-baryonic matter it's a little hard to see how the very notion challenges any laws of physics. Massive neutrinos, for example, are non-baryonic matter, and dark matter too. They exist. They don't account for the greater part of the dark matter that is inferred from observations, but they do exist.
The question I have is why so many people are so antagonistic to the very notion of dark matter, routinely calling the people who suggest it as an obvious and minimal move to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies (one type of dark matter, possibly baryonic) to the dynamics of galactic clusters (another type of dark matter) to the large-scale motion of the universe (possibly another type of dark matter) "arrogant" and the like.
We have an excellent theory of gravity that has withstood every experimental test in every situation, both strong-field and weak-field, short distances (Terrestrial corrections to GPS signals) and large distances (lensing). Furthermore, the hypothesis that there is dark matter is entirely consistent in precise numerical detail with general relativity and observations. That is, dark matter doesn't just explain things in a vague and hand-waving kind of way, it does so in a way that can be shown to be numerically consistent. That in itself is a test of GR too, and the way that MOND was eliminated from serious consideration: the dynamics of the Bullet Cluster are not consistent with MOND, but are consistent with GR plus dark matter.
So anyone attacking the dark matter hypothesis has to argue that there is some exotic phenomenon that just happens to be precisely consistent with GR plus dark matter, but is something completely different from GR plus dark matter. That is a rather fine-tuned sort of explanation. It could happen, but I'm not hopeful.
Dark matter as it stands is an extremely, possibly even overwhelmingly, likely hypothesis that is consistent in considerable numerical detail with GR and every empirical observation that has been made. You would have to be an idiot to call anyone who assumed it without further question "arrogant", unless you have an equally robust hypothesis to put up against it.
The real question for the dark matter hypothesis is the one you've alluded to in your final paragraph: what kind of elementary particles--if any--is the dark matter at various scales made of? That is where one of the leading edges of particle physics is right now. It is a thankless and difficult task, and the people pursuing it deserve more than to be called arrogant by know-nothings.
so much for those in command whose culture values wisdom and patience.
Chinese culture values wisdom and patience the way Canadian culture values lacrosse. If you didn't know anything about what Canadians actually do, but just read the official literature, you'd think lacrosse was a big deal. It's our national sport! Officially.
If instead you behaved like an scientist, and looked at the empirical reality of what we do, you'd find this other game called hockey... And then there's this "curling" stuff...
If you look at actual Chinese history, including recent history, you'll find a culture that values violence, genocide, class hatred, race hatred, torture, imperialism and oppression on a scale that puts it well up with the historical realities of the United States, England and Spain. The difference is that while those other countries have somewhat toned down their bad behaviour in the past fifty years, China is ramping up.
That's even dumber than the first question.
I'm expecting that next week we'll see some breathless idiot asking, "Waking up in the morning... is it morally justified?"
Slashdot: Questions for the Logically Disabled; Rhetoric that Doesn't Matter.
I distinctively remember such treaties being signed in the Gorbachev era.
Sure, this is just Obama following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately he is in other respects, too, like the massive deficits that Reagan created both via sending bloated budgets to Congress and failing to veto pork in Congressional bills that crossed his desk.
I can't really see why Republicans hate Obama so much. I understood why they hated Clinton: he was a deficit fighter who actually brought Federal spending under control, leading to the kind of smaller government that Republicans hate. But Obama, with his huge deficits, sweetheart deals for particular industries, and nuclear weapons reductions, seems to be taking his plays straight from the Republican book, sadly enough.
We all understand what is going on here, The Won is on record saying the US should be nuke free (stupid!) and is using the Russians as an excuse to go in a direction he already wants to go.
This is actually another example of Obama's bipartisan agenda. He is after all following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan on this issue, so I assume we'll be hearing soon from Republicans everywhere about what a great day for America this is.
China can have all the root servers they want - just don't configure your server to poll them.
Actually China is demonstrably incapble of having any working root servers at all. A DNS server that returns incorrect information is not a "root" server, if by "root" you mean "authoritative source of DNS information that resolves domain names properly."
It's really too bad that China is incapable of hosting DNS root servers. Hopefully by the end of the 21st century China will be a little less backward and isolated from the rest of the world, which would benefit greatly from interaction with so many people from such diverse cultural and political backgrounds.