Others have already addressed many of your claims, but I do have one thing to add:
And then the BIOS randomly got courrupted so he bought another computer and has spent with those two computers plus various repair bills (power cord broke, tray-loading CD drive broke, etc) he could have bought a Mac that would have lasted him.
The bottom line Macs are just as crappy as crappy PCs using Vista, go look at the specs for the low end Mini and MacBook, then compare them to low end PCs, they are just as crappy, and inadequate to run the basic OS faster than molasses in January. My old iBook (for example) came with 512Mb of RAM and ran damn slow. There was a second or so lag between switching apps, and switching between Firefox and iTunes would cause the music to stop, and give me that damnable beachball. Apple wanted around $300 to upgrade it to 1GB of RAM (which is the bear minimum you needed for Jaguar to run faster than a 486). After upgrading, it was fine. But to buy it from Apple (pretending I'm not tech savvy) would have cost around $2k for a 800Mhz computer with 1GB of RAM, which was higher than a comparable Wintel box. About 3.5 years later the HDD died completely, at least as far as OS X was concerned, it ran Yellow Dog Linux and the PPC port of Ubuntu just fine (sans driver problems).
Then I got a baseline MacMini (x86) as a media box, it was crap. Rosetta made everything MUCH slower, and thanks to the crappy aesthetics it was near impossible to stick in my own RAM without giving Apple around a $500 mark up. The single core processor was already outdated, and the 1GB of ram was also bad, mostly because of Rosetta. It was a terrible experience, and the last Mac I'll ever buy (I know it isn't just a Mini problem, my girlfriends MacBook ran slow, even with better hardware (Core Duo 1.37Ghz, 2Gb of RAM). I went and got a $700 HP laptop with the same specs as her MacBook, and running Vista is was noticeably more zippy (still blaming Rosetta, and bad planning for the Intel switch).
It also kernel panicked about as much as every computer I've owned since XP SP1. So that is a myth.
My girlfriends MacBook Pro also died. As did a couple other friends computers. We also forget about Apple's old curse with bad mainboards (yes, ancient history).
My anecdotal evidence says that Macs are just as susceptible to error as PCs. I personally prefer OS X over Windows, but claiming it is more secure, or more stable is a bit of a reach. It boils down to taste. Right now I would say that Vista, OS X, and Ubuntu are in a dead heat as far as stability and ease of use goes. It all boils down to what you want, what you expect, and what you grew up with. OS snobbery is just stupid.
It also is the dietary trend of the day. Its is absolutely bizarre how many people have food allergies these days, when I was in college 3-4 years back, around 1/3rd of everyone claimed to be allergic to something interesting. Most of them were gluten, though there were people with "meat" allergies, wheat allergies, pineapple allergies... Where the hell did these people come from, a quick scan of history shows this is all very recent. Its gotten to the point where going out to eat with people is a remarkable act of planning, since no one can eat anything. I generally shrug, tell them to go bugger off, and grab a cheeseburger and a nice beer.
Its like this silly "aspergers" and "adult ADD" trend, where the hell were these people in any time before the last 20 years?
Its like people forgot that the whole point was to relax and enjoy life.
That and you can have my cheese when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Whats up with this trend of dead apostrophes* of late?
Is this a new internet meme I'm not aware of?
Don't include an apostrophe unless your planning on actually following it up, unless your goal is to make the reader stare at the bottom of your post for 5 minutes scratching their head.
Or completely attributable to... oh... completely normal differences in taste.
I love the books, I like the movies (except the second one), but for completely different reasons. The books are rich and full of texture and context, unlike about any other book in a fictional universe ever written (outside of perhaps the huge span of Dune books), and more so, it was exceedingly well written by a man who had an obvious love of language (all of them). The movies, on the other hand, were rather well done (especially if you take them as unique and not based on anything else, context free), and very very pretty and epic. If you never read LoTR you'd probably like the movies, so I don't see what makes them so bad.
They could have turned out like the Dune moves... think about that. Though I admit to liking the David Lynch/De Laurentiis one, though it has nothing to do with Dune whatsoever. And I mostly like it because of the cheese value... Dune translated via Flash Gordan and Barbarella. Highly amusing.
How many movies have you seen that actually translated the book properly? I can think of only one, off hand ("No Country for Old Men"), the rest have been far worse failures than LoTR. Think of Blade Runner, it is an awesome movie, a classic even, and has NOTHING to do with Philip K. Dick's far more awesome novelette.
Sorry for rambling, need more (less?) coffee... But the gist is that the movies are decent if you take them as stand alone from the books.
I'd like to see a robot experience getting bit by a bullet ant and actually feeling that pain, or experiencing the colour green the way we do. Robots and computers can never experience green. Ever. No really. Really really. Look up 'qualia' on Wikipedia...
Don't get me wrong (sorry to reply to you again), I don't think strong AI is possible, but... I probably don't experience pain, or the color green the same way you do. Millions of people are color blind and don't even experience the color green, and some people can't see any color. As humans, are experience are different from individual to individual based on lots of factors, we are not universal.
Also "qualia" is HOTLY contested within the AI/philosophy of mind field, you can't state it as a fact. Its another non-measurable, unprovable blik that really adds nothing to the discussion. Its unfalsifiable, and therefore lacks any truth value.
Where the hell is the soul, can I see it, feel it, measure it? Can I prove its existence in any meaningful way (outside of "faith", which is a rather meaningless epistemological tool)? No? Therefore the concept brings absolutely nothing to the discussion.
Also I recommend reading up on "p-zombies", and other such old topics of philosophy of mind. It isn't good practice, generally, to call up a bunch of unsubstantial, non-observable claims in discussions such as this. I generally hate the idea of p-zombies, Turing machines, and such (measuring intelligence as a mere I/O blackbox; "if it acts as such, it is as such" ignoring qualia and internal experience), but they serve a purpose, they keep things on a Strictly observable (i.e. meaningful) level. Yes, you run into the chinese room problem, but it is still useful.
If I program an inanimate object to react as though it HAD relatable experience of cognition, how could you ever prove it didn't? If I programmed a box to give output as if it had a soul, could you tell the difference?
Yet I seem to think that "free will" is an illusion, that we livein a deterministic usiverse; there is no such thing as random.
Not a big fan of modern physics then? Once you hop down to a quantum level most effects become probabilistic (constrained random), and this isn't (most theories say) because of the lack of information, but is just how things are. Thus if we rewound the universe back to the big bang and let it play out again we'd end up with a very different place (possibly morphologically the same on a broad level, but locally different). If I had a large computer with infinite state knowledge, it still wouldn't be able to predict the future over long periods of time, as probabilistic effects would cause some drift.
This still makes the idea of free will rather problematic. Sure, you could pull the "observer dependent" aspect of quantum effects out of your ass, but realistically it would still be a poor crutch, since we don't really have a definition of observer, and nothing in what we have implies a conscious observer.
I personally don't think the question is even answerable. And even if it was it wouldn't matter since the at least the assumption of freewill is so embedded into our cognition to make it not matter whether we academically believe it or not. It isn't possible to live life AS IF you didn't have free will, on some level you will still act as if you did.
As I said, I don't think that this is the best plan. If you asked me what was, I'd probably write 10,000 words which amount to me saying "I don't know, something other than we have now". Judging from some of the people I know, we at least have to streamline what we have now, because right now our system is pretty much a complete failure where it counts (unexpected catastrophic illness, and long term chronic illnesses that preclude working for a living wage).
I don't think Obama will fix that.
If the government came up with a public heathcare scheme, I don't think it would be that catastrophic, since if it gets bad (like our public school have), then private industry can still step in. Actually if it is at all like many places, Government healthcare will be the option for the poor, and the lower middle class, while people with a bit more money opt for faster more personalized service via private insurance. It would be more a safety net, and a supplement to your normal insurance for most of us.
As stated, though, I have no clue.
. Voters in Arizona tend to be American. Many of the school kids are children of immigrants, and many of those illegal immigrants. An older American voter may not have the same emotional commitment to local education that he would have if it were his own grandchildren or the grandchildren of other people of similar culture who were attending the schools. How will these younger naturalized immigrant voters feel about paying for the healthcare of older Americans 30 years from now - especially with the divisive effects of a national focus on multi-culturalism as opposed to assimilation?
Part of our problem is a large population of elderly people who don't see the point in paying. Actually the AZ education is a hugely complicated mess, its hard to pin down any single reason for it failing so badly. Part of it is voters voting for fake conservatives who rip money from the schools for other pet projects (and calling it eliminating pork, though we still see no benefits from it) which hurt actual performance and thus the desire to help it along with some cash (this is the viscous cycle). Some of it is the huge glut of non-English speaking children holding back progress for everyone. Some of it is No Child Left Behind, and our own acceptance of a fatally flawed standardized test, which killed our curriculum ("teach the test"). Some of it is the general incopitance of teachers who think entertainment is 50% of the equation, and self-esteem is the other %50. And again, a large part of it is huge population growth, with no increase in funding stretching the infrastructure too far. Etc... Its a complicated beast.
Though, to be honest, I haven't seen any proof that private schools have any better performance (at least in this state). I'm sure some of the upper crust ones might, but I wholly doubt that the vast majority of them are much better. (A quick Googleing says there is a very minor to nonexistent difference in performance). I don't think that just saying "free market" will solve all of our problems, either though.
Wasn't holding up LotR as "gritty realism", though that would be rather silly. I was holding it up as what most modern fantasy tries to shamelessly copy. I'm okay with some copying (it is rather hard to do something new), but a lot of it is nothing but rehashes of the theme, and not written nearly so well. So generally about 100 pages into a fantasy book, I throw it aside and reread LotR.
I agree that there has to be some negative to balance the positive... I sometimes even like books that are more negative than positive. But they have to -have- the positive.
I can see this. Sometimes I like reading something wholly negative, though, it is done well. I'm probably not reading it for escapism though if it has that quality, so I'd agree that it would be a failure at being "light enjoyable reading".
I loved Potter and hated Narnia, but I can't see how 'gritty realism' would help either of them.
From the review, and some further browsing of the Amazon reviews it doesn't seem like the authors goal is trying to "help" them, but rather make a comment about the tropes of the genre, and attack the wish-fulfillment aspects of most fantasy. Which probably lead it to completely fail as a fantasy novel, but then again it, perhaps, shouldn't have been advertised as such. It seems more like criticism, and metafiction using fantasy, rather than a book make to be read as such.
Basically there was three types of review on Amazon, people who ranked it negative because it wasn't escapism (which is sort of against the point), people who ranked it positive because it was adult and had an aspect of "naughty stuff my parents wouldn't like"(I don't know when sex, drugs, and ennui became adult), and people who liked it because of its value as a critique on books like Harry Potter (basically they liked the nonfiction value).
But of course, her stuff wasn't 'fantasy', just fiction.
I would disagree, but mostly for snarky troll value.
Actually I never stated where I stand on this issue, just that the analogy was flawed, and also floating around an inaccurate premise.
Also part of the problem with public schools is that people have gutted them, and then used the consequences of that to claim that they are a failure and that they should be further gutted. At least this is true in my state (AZ), which has the worst public education in the country (well, 48-49th worst). This also ignores the fact that they weren't failures for a hundred or so years up until the modern age.
For the record I'm against the Obama health care package, though for pretty much the opposite reasons as the "ZOMG socialism!" crowd. I have something against mandating me giving money to corporations, which is what his plan does sans the "public option", which, if you've noticed, isn't happening, nor is it even talked about. Though I do feel that our current system is broken beyond repair, and whatever Obama doesn't probably won't break it much more than it already is (nor improve it).
The sig is still valid, no matter how I feel about whatever partisan speaking point is being bandied about to whip up my fellow plebes at this moment. I'm fine with us being more European, I don't see this going against much of any principle. I also don't think our founding fathers were big fans of libertarianism or Ayn Rand for obvious reasons. I don't think they viewed the ideological simplification of "the free market" as a trump for human worth, dignity, and the general well being of Americans.
Also in the quote (and most of Abbey's works): country != my particular political philosophy that all others should adhere to for fear of being branded "unamerican", or "socialist", or "fascist". A country is nothing more than a broad collection of individual people sharing a varied mesh of common values and passions, and common land and resources. If you read Abbey, you'd realize he probably wouldn't think much of either the people for Obama's plan, or those screaming "socialist" at it.
In my view, we need to defend our country from Libertarians, Ayn Randroids, the political correct left, well meaning people who "know better", the coastal elite, and the prideful ignorant "Joe the Plumbers". We must protect it from lobbyists and the christian right, from politicians who take money from corporations, who represent corporations, from anyone that holds mere economy, or political ideology higher than the people and land. First and foremost we must protect it from anyone who thinks they are right. Anyone who thinks that their point of view is the only view that should be appreciated.
I rant, I apologize for it. I'm sick of people somehow thinking where you stand on a mere political debate actually has any bearing on anything that actually matters, much less the character of the person.
My personal take on the matter is give us true public health care, and instead of taxing anyone, cut the defense budget by an equal amount, reallocating that money to something meaningful and important. While we're at it chop the defense budget further, putting 90% of it into health, education, and museums, things that actually improve peoples lives, and increase the over all happiness.
If we can't defend our country for a mere couple tens of billions, perhaps we should stop pissing people off.
Who reads fantasy for 'gritty realism'? Sounds like it'd just be a major drag, to me.
I do. I can't stand most fantasy. Most fantasy is formulaic and boring, with flawless Mary Sue protagonists, evil empires, and powerful artifacts. Every time I try to read modern fantasy, I give up and read Tolkien instead. That and the stupid 400 book trilogies, which require you to go read them all in order, all of which are nothing but a cliche cross between Lord of the Rings and DnD.
Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter was a good exception (its sequal less so), it was dark, it was adult, it was strange mash between "fairy oriented" fantasy, steampunk, and punk rock. Very unique. I suppose I look for something different in fiction than most people though, I don't want escapism, I want a puzzle, something interesting and novel. I want something that makes me think at the end, something that I might learn something from. yes, I mostly read nonfiction, and more "philosophical" fiction, like Camus, Kafka, and Dostoevsky, or books that are actually written well, with phrases that make me pause and smile at the word selection (like Cormac McCarthy).
I suppose it all is a matter of personal choice, but this review actually made me want to read the book, in spite of the negative tone. I'm turned off a bit by selecting Harry Potter (which is synonymous with meaningless escapism), and Narnia (which is nothing but a way of selling religion to children), but I'm guessing from the review that this is more in the spirit of irony, than fan service/marketing. This is hopeful, since the author might actually be clever.
This is really, really far future then, because even the technology shown in Star Trek doesn't go this far (their replicators work at the molecular level). In fact, each level you go down (molecular -> atomic -> subatomic) is going to require far more technology and energy to achieve.
Agreed, but I'm thinking try to simplify things a bit, making the devices just "push button and get stuff out", which is the only real way that this would work for the original analogy. If we have a universal assembler, but need rough raw materials for it, we still would have need for a commodity based economy. Yes, I used a very rough (and dumbish) justification.
As for energy, we're certainly not "awash" in it, or else we wouldn't be thinking about launching space-based power stations.
I was thinking solar... And being that we most certanly won't be as Earth-locked as we are now, we could have space based solar arrays, or such. Either that or we'd have a decent fission system that can convert some array of matter into energy. Again, half-assed way of keeping things simple with a silly hand-waving explanation.
(unless we make them too smart and they rebel against us)... Unless AIs become not only really advanced, but someone also gain the properties of creativity and inventiveness that seem to be a trait of humans only at this point, that's something that will always need the intelligence of a human.
You forget that pesky Butlerian Jihad... We can't make thinking machines, that is why we have Mentats.
So, it won't play on unauthorized hardware, meaning hardware without an encrypted audio stream. Sure, you still have the analogue "hole", but generally that means a drop in fidelity, which is pretty much killing all the nice parts of digital files (infinite copying with no degradation). I'm guessing the main attack on it will killing the shoddily implemented key system, or weak encryption.
And of course, this assembler would probably require a lot of energy, another thing that is scarce.
This is the far SciFi future here, I'm guessing energy would be rather cheap, I mean we're awash in it right now. As for resources, imagine it it worked on a quantum or atomic level and not a molecular one. Energy would be easier then, stick in some hydrogen, make some energy rich element from it, stick it in your Mr. Fusion, and poof, free energy. Sure, we run into some thermodynamics no-no's, but we move the point of scarcity far off.
Labor will be the prime scarcity. Sure our assembler can make just about anything, but who is going to clean our toilets or fix our health? I'm guessing the economy will become a labor barter system, as opposed to a system based on actual goods.
One of the rich would probably have his universal assembler assemble universal assemblers and give them away, or trade them for the only thing that would be worth anything anymore: labor. All it takes is one decent person getting one, and they become viral. Unless someone built UARM (universal assembler rights managment) into them keeping them from building further assemblers, of course, but then again the SciFi version of a Linux hacker will hop in and remove it, completely destroying the world's economic base (outside of labor).
I'm also guessing that in this world, outside of pure labor, individually crafted goods would be worth much more than assembled clones. Sure, you could make a free copy of a pot with your assembler, or you could clean someone's toilet for them to actually throw a completely unique pot.
2) Individuals are not the same, and some are worth substantially more than others.
How do you measure the value of an individual? Quite frankly, I would measure value using money, since health care is paid for with money, and people with more money generally contribute more to the total health care funding than those without.
Huh? Your confusing two concepts, monetiary worth, and human worth. Money has nothing to do with the former, and these terms are not connected or related in any way. I know a lot of worthless people worth a whole bunch, and a whole bunch of worthy people worth very little. All having a ton of money means is that your better at acquiring money, which really means squat in the grand scheme of things.
To be completely clear, I cannot actually judge the worth of any individual, and neither can you, especially with such a arbitrary metric as how much money someone managed to stick in their mattress over their life. Is Paris Hilton worth more than some dirt farmer in Appalachia? What about Bernie Madoff? I'd put individual worth more in the area of "what have you done to enrich the lives of others, and have a positive long term influence on society" over, "how have you treated people like objects to increase the size of your coffers".
But what about all the other computer manufactures? Actually, your analogy is flawed, it would be like the government founding a mainframe company in the 1970s, not socializing a single company. You do know that in countries with public health care there still exists private insurance companies, and private doctors, right?
You also realize that the "everyone uses Microsoft products, thus I am punished for using Linux or OS X" argument is fatally flawed too, right? If I get a shunt through Government health care, it will do the same thing as a shunt sold to me by Megacorp A's insurance. Just because more people have Megacorp A's products shoved down their throat doesn't make the alternatives less applicable. You can't even say that this hurts innovation, since in my experience (switching back to OSs) OS X has generally more innovative 3rd party development than Microsoft does.
I read that quote a bit different than you did. I saw it as a clumsy attempt to say "It will help poor people", or whoever the demonized disenfranchised group is of the moment. (Not so) Long ago it was black people, then it was white trash and the mythical welfare mom, and now its illegal immigrants and Hispanics in general. Whoever we erroneously classify as "public leaches" who we are so much better than because of uber Protestant work ethic.
Which is odd, since most of the uninsured poor people I know worked harder than most of the people who think their lazy ne'er-do-wells. And sadly most of them became poor because of chronic health problems.
And how many of those Americans actually know anything about the bill? Outside of the silly "Death Panel" and "OMG socialism!" FUD? Watching the news, and reading the paper, there is very little actually said about the contents of the bill, just a bunch of ignorant partisan mouth noises.
I'm a rather well informed individual, and I can find pretty much no source which objectively explains the bill to non-lawyers and non-wonks. Sure, lay people can just RTFB, but how many people can actually make any sense of it, or keep track of the constant changes, and consequences of debates?
Hell, even reading this single/. discussion I haven't actually seen anyone debating the actual specifics of this debate without resorting to arguing about socialism, or corporatism (neither of which are immediately applicable arguments).
Doubtful. If the average person has a decent music collection, sticks all their photos on the HDD, downloads a couple movies, and installs some modern games they will beat 100GB rather quickly. The average user isn't a drooling yokel anymore, there are tons of computers in colleges being used as.. ahem... media centers, and tons of youngish people who grew up with computers who want to use them as media centers now.
I'd say the average person isn't going to have a full a TB of actual data, but one standard deviation up you'll find its pretty plausible. 4TB perhaps not, yet. But once the media collector types start grabbing/ripping bluray movies, I'd say it would be pretty east to approach this.
4TB might be a bit high for the forseeable future, but the for some values of average 1TB+ is already plausible. People are increasingly using their PCs for media devices, and a movie library eats up space dramatically, especially when you start ripping bluray movies. Gamers might be approaching the point where 1TB is limiting too.
Right now between all the 5 or so drives I'm using (in 3 devices, with one USB backup) I'm hovering at around 2.something TB of total storage space. And I don't use any of my computers as a full time media device, even. Granted the mythical Joe Sixpack isn't going to be using this much storage, but people with any tech savvy can easily.
I think it is equally harmless to suggest people to try the real thing. If they like music they could be missing something under the false assumptions that it's 'too late' or 'too difficult'. Like I did during so many year (although me finally picking the guitar is not related with Guitar Hero games).
This is true, but a lot of people throw out the "waste of time, learn to play a damn guitar" as a holier than thou statement, and generally stated with complete ignorance of the irony contained in it (i.e. they play racing game, or RTS and FPS instead of doing it in real life).
I'd rather not pick up a guitar because I tried it for awhile, and found it not to my tastes. Guitar Hero/Rock Band is still fun, and as an added benefit I get to keep my finger tips.
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Others have already addressed many of your claims, but I do have one thing to add:
And then the BIOS randomly got courrupted so he bought another computer and has spent with those two computers plus various repair bills (power cord broke, tray-loading CD drive broke, etc) he could have bought a Mac that would have lasted him.
The bottom line Macs are just as crappy as crappy PCs using Vista, go look at the specs for the low end Mini and MacBook, then compare them to low end PCs, they are just as crappy, and inadequate to run the basic OS faster than molasses in January. My old iBook (for example) came with 512Mb of RAM and ran damn slow. There was a second or so lag between switching apps, and switching between Firefox and iTunes would cause the music to stop, and give me that damnable beachball. Apple wanted around $300 to upgrade it to 1GB of RAM (which is the bear minimum you needed for Jaguar to run faster than a 486). After upgrading, it was fine. But to buy it from Apple (pretending I'm not tech savvy) would have cost around $2k for a 800Mhz computer with 1GB of RAM, which was higher than a comparable Wintel box. About 3.5 years later the HDD died completely, at least as far as OS X was concerned, it ran Yellow Dog Linux and the PPC port of Ubuntu just fine (sans driver problems).
Then I got a baseline MacMini (x86) as a media box, it was crap. Rosetta made everything MUCH slower, and thanks to the crappy aesthetics it was near impossible to stick in my own RAM without giving Apple around a $500 mark up. The single core processor was already outdated, and the 1GB of ram was also bad, mostly because of Rosetta. It was a terrible experience, and the last Mac I'll ever buy (I know it isn't just a Mini problem, my girlfriends MacBook ran slow, even with better hardware (Core Duo 1.37Ghz, 2Gb of RAM). I went and got a $700 HP laptop with the same specs as her MacBook, and running Vista is was noticeably more zippy (still blaming Rosetta, and bad planning for the Intel switch).
It also kernel panicked about as much as every computer I've owned since XP SP1. So that is a myth.
My girlfriends MacBook Pro also died. As did a couple other friends computers. We also forget about Apple's old curse with bad mainboards (yes, ancient history).
My anecdotal evidence says that Macs are just as susceptible to error as PCs. I personally prefer OS X over Windows, but claiming it is more secure, or more stable is a bit of a reach. It boils down to taste. Right now I would say that Vista, OS X, and Ubuntu are in a dead heat as far as stability and ease of use goes. It all boils down to what you want, what you expect, and what you grew up with. OS snobbery is just stupid.
It also is the dietary trend of the day. Its is absolutely bizarre how many people have food allergies these days, when I was in college 3-4 years back, around 1/3rd of everyone claimed to be allergic to something interesting. Most of them were gluten, though there were people with "meat" allergies, wheat allergies, pineapple allergies... Where the hell did these people come from, a quick scan of history shows this is all very recent. Its gotten to the point where going out to eat with people is a remarkable act of planning, since no one can eat anything. I generally shrug, tell them to go bugger off, and grab a cheeseburger and a nice beer.
Its like this silly "aspergers" and "adult ADD" trend, where the hell were these people in any time before the last 20 years?
Its like people forgot that the whole point was to relax and enjoy life.
That and you can have my cheese when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Whats up with this trend of dead apostrophes* of late?
Is this a new internet meme I'm not aware of?
Don't include an apostrophe unless your planning on actually following it up, unless your goal is to make the reader stare at the bottom of your post for 5 minutes scratching their head.
Or completely attributable to... oh... completely normal differences in taste.
I love the books, I like the movies (except the second one), but for completely different reasons. The books are rich and full of texture and context, unlike about any other book in a fictional universe ever written (outside of perhaps the huge span of Dune books), and more so, it was exceedingly well written by a man who had an obvious love of language (all of them). The movies, on the other hand, were rather well done (especially if you take them as unique and not based on anything else, context free), and very very pretty and epic. If you never read LoTR you'd probably like the movies, so I don't see what makes them so bad.
They could have turned out like the Dune moves... think about that. Though I admit to liking the David Lynch/De Laurentiis one, though it has nothing to do with Dune whatsoever. And I mostly like it because of the cheese value... Dune translated via Flash Gordan and Barbarella. Highly amusing.
How many movies have you seen that actually translated the book properly? I can think of only one, off hand ("No Country for Old Men"), the rest have been far worse failures than LoTR. Think of Blade Runner, it is an awesome movie, a classic even, and has NOTHING to do with Philip K. Dick's far more awesome novelette.
Sorry for rambling, need more (less?) coffee... But the gist is that the movies are decent if you take them as stand alone from the books.
I'd like to see a robot experience getting bit by a bullet ant and actually feeling that pain, or experiencing the colour green the way we do. Robots and computers can never experience green. Ever. No really. Really really. Look up 'qualia' on Wikipedia...
Don't get me wrong (sorry to reply to you again), I don't think strong AI is possible, but... I probably don't experience pain, or the color green the same way you do. Millions of people are color blind and don't even experience the color green, and some people can't see any color. As humans, are experience are different from individual to individual based on lots of factors, we are not universal.
Also "qualia" is HOTLY contested within the AI/philosophy of mind field, you can't state it as a fact. Its another non-measurable, unprovable blik that really adds nothing to the discussion. Its unfalsifiable, and therefore lacks any truth value.
Huh?
Where the hell is the soul, can I see it, feel it, measure it? Can I prove its existence in any meaningful way (outside of "faith", which is a rather meaningless epistemological tool)? No? Therefore the concept brings absolutely nothing to the discussion.
Also I recommend reading up on "p-zombies", and other such old topics of philosophy of mind. It isn't good practice, generally, to call up a bunch of unsubstantial, non-observable claims in discussions such as this. I generally hate the idea of p-zombies, Turing machines, and such (measuring intelligence as a mere I/O blackbox; "if it acts as such, it is as such" ignoring qualia and internal experience), but they serve a purpose, they keep things on a Strictly observable (i.e. meaningful) level. Yes, you run into the chinese room problem, but it is still useful.
If I program an inanimate object to react as though it HAD relatable experience of cognition, how could you ever prove it didn't? If I programmed a box to give output as if it had a soul, could you tell the difference?
Yet I seem to think that "free will" is an illusion, that we livein a deterministic usiverse; there is no such thing as random.
Not a big fan of modern physics then? Once you hop down to a quantum level most effects become probabilistic (constrained random), and this isn't (most theories say) because of the lack of information, but is just how things are. Thus if we rewound the universe back to the big bang and let it play out again we'd end up with a very different place (possibly morphologically the same on a broad level, but locally different). If I had a large computer with infinite state knowledge, it still wouldn't be able to predict the future over long periods of time, as probabilistic effects would cause some drift.
This still makes the idea of free will rather problematic. Sure, you could pull the "observer dependent" aspect of quantum effects out of your ass, but realistically it would still be a poor crutch, since we don't really have a definition of observer, and nothing in what we have implies a conscious observer.
I personally don't think the question is even answerable. And even if it was it wouldn't matter since the at least the assumption of freewill is so embedded into our cognition to make it not matter whether we academically believe it or not. It isn't possible to live life AS IF you didn't have free will, on some level you will still act as if you did.
As I said, I don't think that this is the best plan. If you asked me what was, I'd probably write 10,000 words which amount to me saying "I don't know, something other than we have now". Judging from some of the people I know, we at least have to streamline what we have now, because right now our system is pretty much a complete failure where it counts (unexpected catastrophic illness, and long term chronic illnesses that preclude working for a living wage).
I don't think Obama will fix that.
If the government came up with a public heathcare scheme, I don't think it would be that catastrophic, since if it gets bad (like our public school have), then private industry can still step in. Actually if it is at all like many places, Government healthcare will be the option for the poor, and the lower middle class, while people with a bit more money opt for faster more personalized service via private insurance. It would be more a safety net, and a supplement to your normal insurance for most of us.
As stated, though, I have no clue.
. Voters in Arizona tend to be American. Many of the school kids are children of immigrants, and many of those illegal immigrants. An older American voter may not have the same emotional commitment to local education that he would have if it were his own grandchildren or the grandchildren of other people of similar culture who were attending the schools. How will these younger naturalized immigrant voters feel about paying for the healthcare of older Americans 30 years from now - especially with the divisive effects of a national focus on multi-culturalism as opposed to assimilation?
Part of our problem is a large population of elderly people who don't see the point in paying. Actually the AZ education is a hugely complicated mess, its hard to pin down any single reason for it failing so badly. Part of it is voters voting for fake conservatives who rip money from the schools for other pet projects (and calling it eliminating pork, though we still see no benefits from it) which hurt actual performance and thus the desire to help it along with some cash (this is the viscous cycle). Some of it is the huge glut of non-English speaking children holding back progress for everyone. Some of it is No Child Left Behind, and our own acceptance of a fatally flawed standardized test, which killed our curriculum ("teach the test"). Some of it is the general incopitance of teachers who think entertainment is 50% of the equation, and self-esteem is the other %50. And again, a large part of it is huge population growth, with no increase in funding stretching the infrastructure too far. Etc... Its a complicated beast.
Though, to be honest, I haven't seen any proof that private schools have any better performance (at least in this state). I'm sure some of the upper crust ones might, but I wholly doubt that the vast majority of them are much better. (A quick Googleing says there is a very minor to nonexistent difference in performance). I don't think that just saying "free market" will solve all of our problems, either though.
Wasn't holding up LotR as "gritty realism", though that would be rather silly. I was holding it up as what most modern fantasy tries to shamelessly copy. I'm okay with some copying (it is rather hard to do something new), but a lot of it is nothing but rehashes of the theme, and not written nearly so well. So generally about 100 pages into a fantasy book, I throw it aside and reread LotR.
I agree that there has to be some negative to balance the positive... I sometimes even like books that are more negative than positive. But they have to -have- the positive.
I can see this. Sometimes I like reading something wholly negative, though, it is done well. I'm probably not reading it for escapism though if it has that quality, so I'd agree that it would be a failure at being "light enjoyable reading".
I loved Potter and hated Narnia, but I can't see how 'gritty realism' would help either of them.
From the review, and some further browsing of the Amazon reviews it doesn't seem like the authors goal is trying to "help" them, but rather make a comment about the tropes of the genre, and attack the wish-fulfillment aspects of most fantasy. Which probably lead it to completely fail as a fantasy novel, but then again it, perhaps, shouldn't have been advertised as such. It seems more like criticism, and metafiction using fantasy, rather than a book make to be read as such.
Basically there was three types of review on Amazon, people who ranked it negative because it wasn't escapism (which is sort of against the point), people who ranked it positive because it was adult and had an aspect of "naughty stuff my parents wouldn't like"(I don't know when sex, drugs, and ennui became adult), and people who liked it because of its value as a critique on books like Harry Potter (basically they liked the nonfiction value).
But of course, her stuff wasn't 'fantasy', just fiction.
I would disagree, but mostly for snarky troll value.
Actually I never stated where I stand on this issue, just that the analogy was flawed, and also floating around an inaccurate premise.
Also part of the problem with public schools is that people have gutted them, and then used the consequences of that to claim that they are a failure and that they should be further gutted. At least this is true in my state (AZ), which has the worst public education in the country (well, 48-49th worst). This also ignores the fact that they weren't failures for a hundred or so years up until the modern age.
For the record I'm against the Obama health care package, though for pretty much the opposite reasons as the "ZOMG socialism!" crowd. I have something against mandating me giving money to corporations, which is what his plan does sans the "public option", which, if you've noticed, isn't happening, nor is it even talked about. Though I do feel that our current system is broken beyond repair, and whatever Obama doesn't probably won't break it much more than it already is (nor improve it).
The sig is still valid, no matter how I feel about whatever partisan speaking point is being bandied about to whip up my fellow plebes at this moment. I'm fine with us being more European, I don't see this going against much of any principle. I also don't think our founding fathers were big fans of libertarianism or Ayn Rand for obvious reasons. I don't think they viewed the ideological simplification of "the free market" as a trump for human worth, dignity, and the general well being of Americans.
Also in the quote (and most of Abbey's works): country != my particular political philosophy that all others should adhere to for fear of being branded "unamerican", or "socialist", or "fascist". A country is nothing more than a broad collection of individual people sharing a varied mesh of common values and passions, and common land and resources. If you read Abbey, you'd realize he probably wouldn't think much of either the people for Obama's plan, or those screaming "socialist" at it.
In my view, we need to defend our country from Libertarians, Ayn Randroids, the political correct left, well meaning people who "know better", the coastal elite, and the prideful ignorant "Joe the Plumbers". We must protect it from lobbyists and the christian right, from politicians who take money from corporations, who represent corporations, from anyone that holds mere economy, or political ideology higher than the people and land. First and foremost we must protect it from anyone who thinks they are right. Anyone who thinks that their point of view is the only view that should be appreciated.
I rant, I apologize for it. I'm sick of people somehow thinking where you stand on a mere political debate actually has any bearing on anything that actually matters, much less the character of the person.
My personal take on the matter is give us true public health care, and instead of taxing anyone, cut the defense budget by an equal amount, reallocating that money to something meaningful and important. While we're at it chop the defense budget further, putting 90% of it into health, education, and museums, things that actually improve peoples lives, and increase the over all happiness.
If we can't defend our country for a mere couple tens of billions, perhaps we should stop pissing people off.
Who reads fantasy for 'gritty realism'? Sounds like it'd just be a major drag, to me.
I do. I can't stand most fantasy. Most fantasy is formulaic and boring, with flawless Mary Sue protagonists, evil empires, and powerful artifacts. Every time I try to read modern fantasy, I give up and read Tolkien instead. That and the stupid 400 book trilogies, which require you to go read them all in order, all of which are nothing but a cliche cross between Lord of the Rings and DnD.
Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter was a good exception (its sequal less so), it was dark, it was adult, it was strange mash between "fairy oriented" fantasy, steampunk, and punk rock. Very unique. I suppose I look for something different in fiction than most people though, I don't want escapism, I want a puzzle, something interesting and novel. I want something that makes me think at the end, something that I might learn something from. yes, I mostly read nonfiction, and more "philosophical" fiction, like Camus, Kafka, and Dostoevsky, or books that are actually written well, with phrases that make me pause and smile at the word selection (like Cormac McCarthy).
I suppose it all is a matter of personal choice, but this review actually made me want to read the book, in spite of the negative tone. I'm turned off a bit by selecting Harry Potter (which is synonymous with meaningless escapism), and Narnia (which is nothing but a way of selling religion to children), but I'm guessing from the review that this is more in the spirit of irony, than fan service/marketing. This is hopeful, since the author might actually be clever.
This is really, really far future then, because even the technology shown in Star Trek doesn't go this far (their replicators work at the molecular level). In fact, each level you go down (molecular -> atomic -> subatomic) is going to require far more technology and energy to achieve.
Agreed, but I'm thinking try to simplify things a bit, making the devices just "push button and get stuff out", which is the only real way that this would work for the original analogy. If we have a universal assembler, but need rough raw materials for it, we still would have need for a commodity based economy. Yes, I used a very rough (and dumbish) justification.
As for energy, we're certainly not "awash" in it, or else we wouldn't be thinking about launching space-based power stations.
I was thinking solar... And being that we most certanly won't be as Earth-locked as we are now, we could have space based solar arrays, or such. Either that or we'd have a decent fission system that can convert some array of matter into energy. Again, half-assed way of keeping things simple with a silly hand-waving explanation.
(unless we make them too smart and they rebel against us)... Unless AIs become not only really advanced, but someone also gain the properties of creativity and inventiveness that seem to be a trait of humans only at this point, that's something that will always need the intelligence of a human.
You forget that pesky Butlerian Jihad... We can't make thinking machines, that is why we have Mentats.
So I can't have your car, but I can have some free lead? Sounds like socialism to me.
So, it won't play on unauthorized hardware, meaning hardware without an encrypted audio stream. Sure, you still have the analogue "hole", but generally that means a drop in fidelity, which is pretty much killing all the nice parts of digital files (infinite copying with no degradation). I'm guessing the main attack on it will killing the shoddily implemented key system, or weak encryption.
And of course, this assembler would probably require a lot of energy, another thing that is scarce.
This is the far SciFi future here, I'm guessing energy would be rather cheap, I mean we're awash in it right now. As for resources, imagine it it worked on a quantum or atomic level and not a molecular one. Energy would be easier then, stick in some hydrogen, make some energy rich element from it, stick it in your Mr. Fusion, and poof, free energy. Sure, we run into some thermodynamics no-no's, but we move the point of scarcity far off.
Labor will be the prime scarcity. Sure our assembler can make just about anything, but who is going to clean our toilets or fix our health? I'm guessing the economy will become a labor barter system, as opposed to a system based on actual goods.
One of the rich would probably have his universal assembler assemble universal assemblers and give them away, or trade them for the only thing that would be worth anything anymore: labor. All it takes is one decent person getting one, and they become viral. Unless someone built UARM (universal assembler rights managment) into them keeping them from building further assemblers, of course, but then again the SciFi version of a Linux hacker will hop in and remove it, completely destroying the world's economic base (outside of labor).
I'm also guessing that in this world, outside of pure labor, individually crafted goods would be worth much more than assembled clones. Sure, you could make a free copy of a pot with your assembler, or you could clean someone's toilet for them to actually throw a completely unique pot.
Agreed, no one has any rights but Americans, and no one deserves to be treated reasonably (or decently) except American citizens.
Sarcasm there, Mods.
2) Individuals are not the same, and some are worth substantially more than others.
How do you measure the value of an individual? Quite frankly, I would measure value using money, since health care is paid for with money, and people with more money generally contribute more to the total health care funding than those without.
Huh? Your confusing two concepts, monetiary worth, and human worth. Money has nothing to do with the former, and these terms are not connected or related in any way. I know a lot of worthless people worth a whole bunch, and a whole bunch of worthy people worth very little. All having a ton of money means is that your better at acquiring money, which really means squat in the grand scheme of things.
To be completely clear, I cannot actually judge the worth of any individual, and neither can you, especially with such a arbitrary metric as how much money someone managed to stick in their mattress over their life. Is Paris Hilton worth more than some dirt farmer in Appalachia? What about Bernie Madoff? I'd put individual worth more in the area of "what have you done to enrich the lives of others, and have a positive long term influence on society" over, "how have you treated people like objects to increase the size of your coffers".
Not the parent, but I can kill your argument very quickly:
"Yeah, that's what I thought you would say." = strawman.
But what about all the other computer manufactures? Actually, your analogy is flawed, it would be like the government founding a mainframe company in the 1970s, not socializing a single company. You do know that in countries with public health care there still exists private insurance companies, and private doctors, right?
You also realize that the "everyone uses Microsoft products, thus I am punished for using Linux or OS X" argument is fatally flawed too, right? If I get a shunt through Government health care, it will do the same thing as a shunt sold to me by Megacorp A's insurance. Just because more people have Megacorp A's products shoved down their throat doesn't make the alternatives less applicable. You can't even say that this hurts innovation, since in my experience (switching back to OSs) OS X has generally more innovative 3rd party development than Microsoft does.
I read that quote a bit different than you did. I saw it as a clumsy attempt to say "It will help poor people", or whoever the demonized disenfranchised group is of the moment. (Not so) Long ago it was black people, then it was white trash and the mythical welfare mom, and now its illegal immigrants and Hispanics in general. Whoever we erroneously classify as "public leaches" who we are so much better than because of uber Protestant work ethic.
Which is odd, since most of the uninsured poor people I know worked harder than most of the people who think their lazy ne'er-do-wells. And sadly most of them became poor because of chronic health problems.
And how many of those Americans actually know anything about the bill? Outside of the silly "Death Panel" and "OMG socialism!" FUD? Watching the news, and reading the paper, there is very little actually said about the contents of the bill, just a bunch of ignorant partisan mouth noises.
I'm a rather well informed individual, and I can find pretty much no source which objectively explains the bill to non-lawyers and non-wonks. Sure, lay people can just RTFB, but how many people can actually make any sense of it, or keep track of the constant changes, and consequences of debates?
Hell, even reading this single /. discussion I haven't actually seen anyone debating the actual specifics of this debate without resorting to arguing about socialism, or corporatism (neither of which are immediately applicable arguments).
Doubtful. If the average person has a decent music collection, sticks all their photos on the HDD, downloads a couple movies, and installs some modern games they will beat 100GB rather quickly. The average user isn't a drooling yokel anymore, there are tons of computers in colleges being used as.. ahem... media centers, and tons of youngish people who grew up with computers who want to use them as media centers now.
I'd say the average person isn't going to have a full a TB of actual data, but one standard deviation up you'll find its pretty plausible. 4TB perhaps not, yet. But once the media collector types start grabbing/ripping bluray movies, I'd say it would be pretty east to approach this.
4TB might be a bit high for the forseeable future, but the for some values of average 1TB+ is already plausible. People are increasingly using their PCs for media devices, and a movie library eats up space dramatically, especially when you start ripping bluray movies. Gamers might be approaching the point where 1TB is limiting too.
Right now between all the 5 or so drives I'm using (in 3 devices, with one USB backup) I'm hovering at around 2.something TB of total storage space. And I don't use any of my computers as a full time media device, even. Granted the mythical Joe Sixpack isn't going to be using this much storage, but people with any tech savvy can easily.
I think it is equally harmless to suggest people to try the real thing. If they like music they could be missing something under the false assumptions that it's 'too late' or 'too difficult'. Like I did during so many year (although me finally picking the guitar is not related with Guitar Hero games).
This is true, but a lot of people throw out the "waste of time, learn to play a damn guitar" as a holier than thou statement, and generally stated with complete ignorance of the irony contained in it (i.e. they play racing game, or RTS and FPS instead of doing it in real life).
I'd rather not pick up a guitar because I tried it for awhile, and found it not to my tastes. Guitar Hero/Rock Band is still fun, and as an added benefit I get to keep my finger tips.