There may be some confusion here, as I don't see your use of the term "A NOD to the Greeks and Romans" anywhere in the thread.
In any case, I only asked out of curiosity. I would readily agree that all western democracies are the intellectual heirs of ancient Athens, and that the US system bears various similarities to those of ancient Greece and Rome.
That is not the same thing as being in any sense based on The Republic. The Republic does not describe the Greek political order as it was. The Republic spends quite a lot of time roundly trashing democracy in particular, which Plato thought was a terrible idea. Most of The Republic is given over to describing the flaws of existing systems. The proposed system Plato finally recommends, a rigid caste-based society under a philosopher king, has not been consciously attempted by anyone I'm aware of. Nor for that matter, thought to be a good idea by much of anyone since Plato. The pitfalls of other systems are well identified though, and these are what make The Republic worthwhile.
"we all know how political ideologies based on The Republic have played out."
Who has claimed (with any credence) to base their ideology on The Republic?
In any case, the descriptive part is fine; he lays out the pitfalls of various political orders quite well. But the proscriptive bit is cr*p. It just amounts to saying that he should be king, but with plenty of fantasized detail about how his minions ought to be organized.
"The United States, is NOT a democracy, Austrailia, is NOT a democracy, etc..etc... If you question my vocabluary, look it up."
I am sorry if I hurt your feelings with the "internet trolls" comment, but that is indeed who I have seen this "The US is not a democracy" meme from in the past. If you would like people to correct your errors more politely, you might refrain from challenging them to "look it up". I did look it up, in my dictionary and now on the page you have provided. You are correct that definition 1 of democracy on that page includes both direct and representative democracies. So does every other definition on the page and in my printed dictionary. I still find no definition that supports your contention that the US "is NOT a democracy". That statement is not "imprecise"; it is incorrect.
You vehemently mis-correct others with such emphatic language, and you're upset that you get a snarky response pointing out your error? Grow up.
"The notion that the civil rights of any minority are subject to revocation at the whim of 50%+1 of the vote is scary."
This is always the case in any kind of democracy. In many systems, the majority has established various roadblocks that prevent 50%+1 from doing anything too rashly. But if 50%+1 really want to do it and remain committed, either they can or it isn't democracy.
I contend that while slim majorities do plenty of stupid, fickle things, the average opinion of the majority over the long term is far more benevolent than it is typically given credit for.
I have a vast number of criticisms of the US system of government, and several of them are similar to what I take yours to be. But when you begin a sentence "America fails because..." I must question your premise. What criteria are you using that doesn't rate the US an extreme success compared to other historical examples? My criteria might be median standard of living or individual freedom, by which the US is certainly imperfect, but "fails"? I think not.
Your definitions are not the ones in the dictionarNor are they in common usage by anyone but internet trolls who love to say "Gotcha! The US is a Republic, not a Democracy!". It is both.
A Democracy can be direct, as you describe, or representative, as the US and every one of significant size is.
A Republic is a nation whose head of state is not a monarch; a useful distinction a few hundred years ago, not so much today.
"Google can do whatever it likes, just like yourself at _your_ home, _your_ company. It's Congress that cannot prohibit i with any law."
Obviously, this is correct. Legally, Google can do what they like. On the other hand, I see a bunch of people pointing this out, but nobody actually saying otherwise.
The interesting question, it would seem, is not what Google legally may do, but what one thinks they ought to do.
Well, I do think SETI is without value. Which does put it above many things we spend money on that actually make life worse for the world at large. But "not evil, just pointless" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. The point of noting that it's not my money is that I won't be protesting in the streets if someone else spends their money on it. I will however, consider them an idiot.
A free market is free from regulations the person calling it free doesn't like.
It has regulations needed to prevent people abusing it in any obvious way you point out, but for semi-mystical reasons, these won't add up to the same regulations the person doesn't like. The regulations they don't like are assumed to have been imposed by mischievous gremlins just to make trouble, and not for any useful purpose.
"If you destroy currency you are removing it from circulation, which will cause prices to go down due to deflation.
If you truly want to waste money, you should buy something of value to others and destroy that thing."
Not at all. Either way, you remove value from the world. Whether in the form of a physical object of a particular value, or in the form of cash (a physical representation of abstract value), your destructive act has the same effect on the wider economy. Which is to say, not much unless it's an awful lot of money - value is constantly being created at a fantastic rate.
As far as whether money spent on SETI is "wasted", the point is not whether any good thing (like feeding the builders kids) comes out of it. The point is whether *more* good things would come out of spending that money on some other thing. That same builder could get paid, and feed his kids, building something in support of some more worthy cause. Is there a more worthy cause? Well, I think so, but it isn't my money.
"Research is almost always valuable, even if it turns up nothing."
For one thing quite a bit of research is utter garbage that neither proves nor disproves anything except that a particular researcher can't set up a good experiment; a fact of rather small value.
But more generally, there are always far more interesting research questions than we (as a society) can afford to pursue. That a particular program will learn "something" is too low a bar to decide which ones are worthwhile.
It is only reasonable to estimate SETI's chance of finding something, and the usefulness of that find, multiply the two together, and ask how much it's worth to spend on it. The answer obviously depends on your estimates. Mine come out to not very much.
"If we find no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence in our search we will know more than we did before about the abundance or scarcity of intelligence in our galaxy."
No, we won't. We have no way to judge the accuracy of our search technique.
I mean, I couldn't make head nor tails of the summary either, but is your need to troll so strong you must go to meaningless articles, invent a tangentially related position no one has advanced, and incredulously question it?
The first step in getting help is admitting you have a problem.
Next to the weight of the cable, the elevator is not worth mentioning. Geosynchronous orbit is a very long way.
Re:Exhaustive Search is not realistic
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
You do not need to store, (or even consider) every ending position.
At some intermediate position, you determine that you can force victory if you make a particular move. There is no need to ever consider any other move proceeding from that position.
"probability states that it would be worthwhile putting one of a thousand guns to your head, where only one was loaded, and pulling the trigger if the reward was a million dollers upon survival."
That's entirely dependent on what you consider your life to be worth in dollars. My life is worth more than a billion dollars to me, so that bet is not worthwhile.
Obviously not. This isn't a matter of how you "view" it or feel about it. The law offers a variety of options for forming institutions, you are free to choose the one you want. If the owners wish to "be the company" and not be taxed as separate entities, they may form a partnership. If they have chosen to form (or invest in) one of the various forms of corporation instead, it's a bit silly to then complain that there are both advantages and disadvantages to this. You want to "Be the company" when that's good for you, and not when it's bad for you? Sorry.
Seriously, you'll be in trouble if something (*anything*) comes up on your screen that makes you say "oops" and hit the back button? That's freaky, you probably should stay off the internet entirely in that case.
But at the least, quit wasting everyones time and encouraging self-censorship on the assumption that everyone elses work has such whacked standards. I hate "NSFW"; mark stuff that deserves it "UpsettinglyGrossPorn" if you want to provide some helpful distinction, but "NSFW" is so vauge and broad that half the time I can't figure out what I was being warned about. Heck, in this case, I'm not sure if you mean the non-illustrated ads for some sex toy company, or the ones for American Apparel with scantily clad models.
"A legal notice, prepared so as to be admissible in a court proceeding, becomes a document of the court."
True, but this isn't, because there is no court proceeding; this is just a letter from someone who happens to be a lawyer. The author does indeed hold copyright, so the proper way to stop publication is to sue anyone who does. Since the copyright is unregistered, they can't get legal costs, only actual damages, in this case nothing. They could mount an expensive lawsuit for no money, just to get an injunction to force the letter to be taken down. But they'd lose, because it's obviously fair use.
You originally claimed a difference based on the composition of the cable - the special silver cables some guy had made. That's BS, which I note you are no longer defending.
Twist your speaker cables around cables carrying a different signal, and you may certainly get interference, but I'm not sure why you would ever do that. Under normal circumstances, noticeable interference is unlikely, but could happen, so shielded cables are a fine idea. Anyone talking if "well" shielded is suspicious though. Wrapping your cables in tinfoil will shield them perfectly for pennies a foot; manufacturers claiming to do anything more than build that into the cable construction are just justifying a ripoff.
"also the ends of the wire.. the sharp edges of the cliped wire can cause reflection - sound familure.. yes it applies to speaker cables too"
Uh, no it doesn't sound familiar. It sounds like deep la-la-land BS. It doesn't even sound close enough that I can entirely parse it. Is this some misunderstanding of a bad analogy about capacitive interference (e.g. on an unterminated ethernet segment)? I'm grasping at straws here. "Reflection"? Of What?!?
In any case, sharp edges of cables will have no effect on electrical signals passing near (not even though!) them.
"Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't 'VPN' in and of itself a broken concept based on the Microsoft view of networking?"
A) No. It's a perfectly fine concept, regularly used quite successfully. I don't get the assumption that because something is the MS way of doing things it must be unworkably broken. Based on this article, the MS way of doing things is how almost everybody gets almost everything done. There may well be *better* ways, but the MS way can't very well be "broken" if it's what everyone uses.
B) Who cares? If I want to connect to work, I can use VPN, or I can wait until my employer converts to the Linux "view of networking". Whether VPN is stupid or not is irrelevant; it's what I need to use.
The "connected or not" was in reference to speaker cables. A lousy connection at the end can make for poor conductivity, which will indeed degrade the sound. I mentioned it, because my main point is against any difference based on something other than raw conductivity.
"yes you can tell the difference between good and cheap cables"
Between two cables of the same conductivity? No. You cannot. Nobody ever has in a double blind test with ears or oscilloscope. Based on my reasonably good understanding of physics, I cannot imagine what property (other than conductivity) of silver vs. copper one could possibly detect by measuring a signal that had passed though each.
Because formation of a civil society is a trade off. Corporations can't just do whatever they want. In exchange, corporations can exist. We let the owners of an institution almost entirely off the hook from any responsibility for what that institution does, or what debts it incurs. Nobody has any personal liability deriving from most things a corporation does, which is a fabulously useful thing in terms of ever getting even good things done, but don't you think it's reasonable for society to expect some trade-off in return. Is it really such an odious responsibility that we forbid corporations from firing people for stupid reasons, like being black or old?
Slashdot Mirror
There may be some confusion here, as I don't see your use of the term "A NOD to the Greeks and Romans" anywhere in the thread.
In any case, I only asked out of curiosity. I would readily agree that all western democracies are the intellectual heirs of ancient Athens, and that the US system bears various similarities to those of ancient Greece and Rome.
That is not the same thing as being in any sense based on The Republic. The Republic does not describe the Greek political order as it was. The Republic spends quite a lot of time roundly trashing democracy in particular, which Plato thought was a terrible idea. Most of The Republic is given over to describing the flaws of existing systems. The proposed system Plato finally recommends, a rigid caste-based society under a philosopher king, has not been consciously attempted by anyone I'm aware of. Nor for that matter, thought to be a good idea by much of anyone since Plato. The pitfalls of other systems are well identified though, and these are what make The Republic worthwhile.
"we all know how political ideologies based on The Republic have played out."
Who has claimed (with any credence) to base their ideology on The Republic?
In any case, the descriptive part is fine; he lays out the pitfalls of various political orders quite well. But the proscriptive bit is cr*p. It just amounts to saying that he should be king, but with plenty of fantasized detail about how his minions ought to be organized.
"The United States, is NOT a democracy, Austrailia, is NOT a democracy, etc..etc... If you question my vocabluary, look it up."
I am sorry if I hurt your feelings with the "internet trolls" comment, but that is indeed who I have seen this "The US is not a democracy" meme from in the past. If you would like people to correct your errors more politely, you might refrain from challenging them to "look it up". I did look it up, in my dictionary and now on the page you have provided. You are correct that definition 1 of democracy on that page includes both direct and representative democracies. So does every other definition on the page and in my printed dictionary. I still find no definition that supports your contention that the US "is NOT a democracy". That statement is not "imprecise"; it is incorrect.
You vehemently mis-correct others with such emphatic language, and you're upset that you get a snarky response pointing out your error? Grow up.
"The notion that the civil rights of any minority are subject to revocation at the whim of 50%+1 of the vote is scary."
This is always the case in any kind of democracy. In many systems, the majority has established various roadblocks that prevent 50%+1 from doing anything too rashly. But if 50%+1 really want to do it and remain committed, either they can or it isn't democracy.
I contend that while slim majorities do plenty of stupid, fickle things, the average opinion of the majority over the long term is far more benevolent than it is typically given credit for.
I have a vast number of criticisms of the US system of government, and several of them are similar to what I take yours to be. But when you begin a sentence "America fails because..." I must question your premise. What criteria are you using that doesn't rate the US an extreme success compared to other historical examples? My criteria might be median standard of living or individual freedom, by which the US is certainly imperfect, but "fails"? I think not.
Your definitions are not the ones in the dictionarNor are they in common usage by anyone but internet trolls who love to say "Gotcha! The US is a Republic, not a Democracy!". It is both.
A Democracy can be direct, as you describe, or representative, as the US and every one of significant size is.
A Republic is a nation whose head of state is not a monarch; a useful distinction a few hundred years ago, not so much today.
"Google can do whatever it likes, just like yourself at _your_ home, _your_ company.
It's Congress that cannot prohibit i with any law."
Obviously, this is correct. Legally, Google can do what they like. On the other hand, I see a bunch of people pointing this out, but nobody actually saying otherwise.
The interesting question, it would seem, is not what Google legally may do, but what one thinks they ought to do.
WTF are you talking about?
Violating a theaters rules gets you kicked out.
Inciting a panic in which people are trampled to death gets you convicted of manslaughter and you spend many years in jail.
Well, I do think SETI is without value. Which does put it above many things we spend money on that actually make life worse for the world at large. But "not evil, just pointless" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. The point of noting that it's not my money is that I won't be protesting in the streets if someone else spends their money on it. I will however, consider them an idiot.
Chances that that intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe: near certainty.
Chances that SETI will find any: pretty small.
Chances that there is intelligence close enough that we could exchange any communication during the lifetime of one of our species: practically zero.
"The sooner science finds it, the better."
Why? What possible benefit in knowing a radio-transmitting culture existed around a star impossibly far away sometime before the rise of dinosaurs?
SETI has a very small chance to find something of little apparent value.
A free market is free from regulations the person calling it free doesn't like.
It has regulations needed to prevent people abusing it in any obvious way you point out, but for semi-mystical reasons, these won't add up to the same regulations the person doesn't like. The regulations they don't like are assumed to have been imposed by mischievous gremlins just to make trouble, and not for any useful purpose.
"If you destroy currency you are removing it from circulation, which will cause prices to go down due to deflation.
If you truly want to waste money, you should buy something of value to others and destroy that thing."
Not at all. Either way, you remove value from the world. Whether in the form of a physical object of a particular value, or in the form of cash (a physical representation of abstract value), your destructive act has the same effect on the wider economy. Which is to say, not much unless it's an awful lot of money - value is constantly being created at a fantastic rate.
As far as whether money spent on SETI is "wasted", the point is not whether any good thing (like feeding the builders kids) comes out of it. The point is whether *more* good things would come out of spending that money on some other thing. That same builder could get paid, and feed his kids, building something in support of some more worthy cause. Is there a more worthy cause? Well, I think so, but it isn't my money.
"Research is almost always valuable, even if it turns up nothing."
For one thing quite a bit of research is utter garbage that neither proves nor disproves anything except that a particular researcher can't set up a good experiment; a fact of rather small value.
But more generally, there are always far more interesting research questions than we (as a society) can afford to pursue. That a particular program will learn "something" is too low a bar to decide which ones are worthwhile.
It is only reasonable to estimate SETI's chance of finding something, and the usefulness of that find, multiply the two together, and ask how much it's worth to spend on it. The answer obviously depends on your estimates. Mine come out to not very much.
"If we find no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence in our search we will know more than we did before about the abundance or scarcity of intelligence in our galaxy."
No, we won't. We have no way to judge the accuracy of our search technique.
Who are you arguing with?
I mean, I couldn't make head nor tails of the summary either, but is your need to troll so strong you must go to meaningless articles, invent a tangentially related position no one has advanced, and incredulously question it?
The first step in getting help is admitting you have a problem.
Next to the weight of the cable, the elevator is not worth mentioning. Geosynchronous orbit is a very long way.
You do not need to store, (or even consider) every ending position.
At some intermediate position, you determine that you can force victory if you make a particular move. There is no need to ever consider any other move proceeding from that position.
"Who cares how /low/ one's UID is. All that matters was if it was created on the Multia or not ;)"
Bah! What an arbitrary criteria.
Clearly, what matters is whether your UID is PRIME!
That's the cost of an employees life to employer, as determined by the law.
The value of my life to me, as determined by me... well, it's going to be a bit more.
"probability states that it would be worthwhile putting one of a thousand guns to your head, where only one was loaded, and pulling the trigger if the reward was a million dollers upon survival."
That's entirely dependent on what you consider your life to be worth in dollars. My life is worth more than a billion dollars to me, so that bet is not worthwhile.
"Are the owners the company, or not?"
Obviously not. This isn't a matter of how you "view" it or feel about it. The law offers a variety of options for forming institutions, you are free to choose the one you want. If the owners wish to "be the company" and not be taxed as separate entities, they may form a partnership.
If they have chosen to form (or invest in) one of the various forms of corporation instead, it's a bit silly to then complain that there are both advantages and disadvantages to this. You want to "Be the company" when that's good for you, and not when it's bad for you? Sorry.
The internet may not be safe for your work.
Seriously, you'll be in trouble if something (*anything*) comes up on your screen that makes you say "oops" and hit the back button? That's freaky, you probably should stay off the internet entirely in that case.
But at the least, quit wasting everyones time and encouraging self-censorship on the assumption that everyone elses work has such whacked standards. I hate "NSFW"; mark stuff that deserves it "UpsettinglyGrossPorn" if you want to provide some helpful distinction, but "NSFW" is so vauge and broad that half the time I can't figure out what I was being warned about. Heck, in this case, I'm not sure if you mean the non-illustrated ads for some sex toy company, or the ones for American Apparel with scantily clad models.
"A legal notice, prepared so as to be admissible in a court proceeding, becomes a document of the court."
True, but this isn't, because there is no court proceeding; this is just a letter from someone who happens to be a lawyer. The author does indeed hold copyright, so the proper way to stop publication is to sue anyone who does. Since the copyright is unregistered, they can't get legal costs, only actual damages, in this case nothing. They could mount an expensive lawsuit for no money, just to get an injunction to force the letter to be taken down. But they'd lose, because it's obviously fair use.
You originally claimed a difference based on the composition of the cable - the special silver cables some guy had made. That's BS, which I note you are no longer defending.
Twist your speaker cables around cables carrying a different signal, and you may certainly get interference, but I'm not sure why you would ever do that. Under normal circumstances, noticeable interference is unlikely, but could happen, so shielded cables are a fine idea. Anyone talking if "well" shielded is suspicious though. Wrapping your cables in tinfoil will shield them perfectly for pennies a foot; manufacturers claiming to do anything more than build that into the cable construction are just justifying a ripoff.
"also the ends of the wire.. the sharp edges of the cliped wire can cause reflection - sound familure.. yes it applies to speaker cables too"
Uh, no it doesn't sound familiar. It sounds like deep la-la-land BS. It doesn't even sound close enough that I can entirely parse it. Is this some misunderstanding of a bad analogy about capacitive interference (e.g. on an unterminated ethernet segment)? I'm grasping at straws here. "Reflection"? Of What?!?
In any case, sharp edges of cables will have no effect on electrical signals passing near (not even though!) them.
"Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't 'VPN' in and of itself a broken concept based on the Microsoft view of networking?"
A) No. It's a perfectly fine concept, regularly used quite successfully. I don't get the assumption that because something is the MS way of doing things it must be unworkably broken. Based on this article, the MS way of doing things is how almost everybody gets almost everything done. There may well be *better* ways, but the MS way can't very well be "broken" if it's what everyone uses.
B) Who cares? If I want to connect to work, I can use VPN, or I can wait until my employer converts to the Linux "view of networking". Whether VPN is stupid or not is irrelevant; it's what I need to use.
The "connected or not" was in reference to speaker cables. A lousy connection at the end can make for poor conductivity, which will indeed degrade the sound. I mentioned it, because my main point is against any difference based on something other than raw conductivity.
"yes you can tell the difference between good and cheap cables"
Between two cables of the same conductivity? No. You cannot. Nobody ever has in a double blind test with ears or oscilloscope. Based on my reasonably good understanding of physics, I cannot imagine what property (other than conductivity) of silver vs. copper one could possibly detect by measuring a signal that had passed though each.
Because formation of a civil society is a trade off. Corporations can't just do whatever they want. In exchange, corporations can exist. We let the owners of an institution almost entirely off the hook from any responsibility for what that institution does, or what debts it incurs. Nobody has any personal liability deriving from most things a corporation does, which is a fabulously useful thing in terms of ever getting even good things done, but don't you think it's reasonable for society to expect some trade-off in return. Is it really such an odious responsibility that we forbid corporations from firing people for stupid reasons, like being black or old?