Point of fact: They did put up with it, until the US told them not to in exchange for some hard cash. However, this business relationship didn't last very long...
Why were there not A-A batteries by the whitehouse already?
Well, there were AA batteries in Genoa because of fears of exactly a Sep 11 scenario.
These and other inconvenient facts show that Bush was lying when he said that they had no idea that aircraft would be used as terrorist weapons like they were on Sep 11.
. And if Saddam Hussein wanted to he could feed every single person in Iraq for 1000 years... It's like two children fighting over a doll, at the end it just gets torn in half.
I don't want to come off as bashing you, because clearly your heart is in the right place - but I believe you are incorrect on that point. Iraq's internal food production is not sufficient to meet the needs of the population (and I suspect sanctions on machine parts may have something to do with this). Hence the oil-for-food agreement - if there were no need for imports there would be no oil-for-food programme - you can bet your life on that.
And poor nutrition is - of course - by far not Iraq's only pressing problem. They have few working ambulances. They have a shortage of basic medical equipment and materials like aneasthetics, as I expect you know.
Why then do the US and Britain repeatedly state that the sanctions do not ban the import of food and medicines? In the strictest sense they are not lying - but they are employing one of the cruellest deceptions imaginable. Medicine is not banned under the sanctions de jure, but de facto - in other words, the United Nations has refused applications to import medicines and medical equipment - sometimes citing "dual use" considerations.
The point is that Saddam Hussein - evil though he undoubtedly is - could not legally meet these needs even if he wanted to. The United Nations committee on Iraq sanctions - dominated by the US - has consistently denied applications for exemptions to the trade sanctions, which must be individually applied for, and which, even if successful, may take weeks to be granted.
I would like to see how an American would feel if the US - an undoubtedly dangerous nuclear state - had basic medical items sanctioned by the United Nations under "dual use" considerations. A foundational moral principle - that if an action is right for the US to do it must be right for any other state to do in equivalent circumstances - seem to be disregarded by many US "hawks". And of course "hawks" is a very relative term, since even most "doves" in the US congress will slavishly toe the Washingtonian line in the big picture (The honorable Barbara Lee excepted.)
Much more information on the sanctions is available, for example, here.
Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
Might they not have been solved with open peer review?
I wrote a story for kuro5hin.org about why closed source electronic voting is a Bad Thing[tm]. I don't wish to repeat myself.
It's inevitable that the vast majority of submissions will get rejected, however good. Reason #1, 2 and 3: there are too many. Reason 4: Different editors, different preferences. Reason 5: They are human, they are fallible. Reason 6: Number of submissions can be used as a crude barometer of community interest. Reason 7: No-one is putting a gun to their head and forcing them to break a story first - it's their perogative to wait a bit, change their minds, wait for confirmation, etc.
I'm curious as to your opinion on laws on fraud, in particular financial fraud, which is not always easy to pin down. Do you think that the kind of shenanigans that Enron failed to pull off should be legal, or not? If so, do you concede that much of the motivation for financial regulations are intended to (a) prevent and penalise fraud, and (b) create the kind of stable business environment that fraud and shady business practices are not conducive to?
To bring in the previous topic, burying an extremely important provision in a mass of legalese can be regarded as fraud. For example, the intellectual property agreement that I unwittingly signed when starting my PhD as part of matriculation, is believed by the student's union to be legally groundless, and allegedly the university has received legal advice to the same effect (which is why they've changed their procedures on IP agreements for new students).
The prevention of immoral and/or destabilising fraud and deception is an important motivation for regulation. I therefore find it interesting that libertarian-leaning folks always seem to concentrate on governmental force and never say a word about fraud (which would not be construed by a reasonable person as akin to physical force, except metaphorically) - except to pay token lip-service to punishment of fraud.
Interesting. Do you have a link for that? I'm a vegan and pro-wind power, so I'd like to read more on that debate.
I'm a little suspicious, as well. Here in the UK one of the most prominent anti-wind groups is funded by... *gasp*... the nuclear industry. That sort of thing does tend to make one a little cynical.
The difference though is that cars are inherently useful. Solving a game is not inherently useful, and it is quite doubtful that this brute force study of a game will advance the study of actual intelligence one nanometer.
Now the question is can an algorithm that converges *faster* be found.
Yes, simply include the lookup table in the algorithm. O(1).
Learning speed can now be objectively measured, which opens a whole new scientific basis for studying AI.
Uh, no. The lookup table does not need to learn, therefore it is fastest. Does this mean it is more intelligent? Maybe, maybe not, but that's not a very important question anyway, since narrow domains like Chess and Awari don't have much to do with true AI (IMO). This result is irrelevant to true AI, which is so far largely a pipe dream.
True, but it's always a dilemma when writing to officials or politicians - their time is limited, and if you're too verbose they might just not bother.
I think keeping the length about the same but adding a couple of references would have helped though.
The problem as I see it is that there are very few truly original, groundbreaking, fundamentally new ideas in computer science. Very very many incremental advances, yes, but perhaps not very many truly original inventions.
Heck, I could cite one PhD thesis in comp sci that is based on an essentially obvious idea, and several such peer-reviewed papers, straight off the bat, and I'm sure I could find others. That doesn't necessarily mean they're not valid research - they may be very valid and important - but they're just exploring the consequences, advantages and disadvantages of pretty obvious incremental advances. (I wouldn't want to offend the people by naming them, but I'm quite serious.)
I'd even go on the record as saying my (as yet unpublished) ideas on OODB schema evolution are all fairly obvious - although not to quite the same extent, as no-one else appears to have thought of them in the last ten years.
Suggestion: You could browse at threshold 1, and only view a story when there's at least 30 comments.
That at least cuts out the very worst of/. comments (at the expense of a few interesting ones, but c'est la vie.) I hardly ever see any of that offensive tripe with this strategy, and when I do, and if they're really bad, they usually are logged in so they go on my Foes list and I never see them again.
You lose your cut of the profit, yes. But if I tell a fan that The Two Towers is absolute rubbish and he shouldn't bother seeing it, and he doesn't, I also deprive New Line of some profit.
What's the difference? Why is downloading stealing but expressing my opinion not stealing?
The sensible answer is that arguing based on loss of profit is whiny nonsense.
The original post seemed to be assuming that the number of intelligent people is staying the same while the number of stupid people is increasing. Now, that's quite an assumption, and certainly not one that I'd agree with.
Furthermore, I was not alive 25 years ago, so I certainly could not "directly observe" the ratio of intelligent people to non-intelligent people there.
As another poster said - hang on, where is the source code? Or is this just media cluebies who don't know their RAM from their HDDs saying "They're releasing source code!"
Right. Carrying on spouting your establishment economics nonsense. Meanwhile, the rest of us can shake our heads and note that no-one has perfect access to all relevant information nor perfect rationality. And no, equal access to information doesn't help if everyone's "equal access" doesn't give them any information.
Exactly. Let's go back the original justification for patents: to provide an incentive to invest in developing original new ideas which would otherwise lack profitability because they're easy for competitors to replicate once developed. This in turn supposedly provides society with inventions, like new drugs, that it otherwise wouldn't have been profitable to research and bring to market.
So... this "innovation" certainly is easy to replicate, but as for originality - WTF? Are the PTO seriously trying to tell us that this "innovation" is so original that, if it hadn't been for patent incentives, no-one else would have thought of it?
It is said that there are now more people alive than have ever been alive in history (put together?) - well if this is the case, then the ratio of high minded and truly intellectual thinkers is much lower now than it has been.
And you know this how - or did you just pluck that "fact" right out of your arse?
Written like a true foaming-at-the-mouth right-winger.
The reaons that Law Enforcement Officers now wear body-armor is because the criminal now has accesss to high-powered weaponry that is the equal to or better than what the Law Enforcement Officers are using.
Strangely enough, here in the UK we don't have this escalation problem, for the most part. I wonder why? Could it be due to our lack of a gun culture?
why else would the Houston Police Department arrest people if there wasn't a complaint made and evidence found to support the complaint??
Because the office in charge is a nut. Even other police officers say he is a nut.
Yes, this story isn't particularly interesting, because it's just evidence of one over-promoted nut, not evidence of anything institution-wide.
Uh, I was under the impression that punishment for a crime was supposed to be a deterrent.
Listen, if I could be sure that I wouldn't get punished in any way, shape or form, I would happily run a public http server with ripped Hollywood movies on it. Deterrence works on me (although I don't agree with the law, but that's irrelevant) - I don't know about you.
(Off to the gulag with greenrd for comitting a thoughtcrime! *ahem*)
I agree with you to an extent about lack of prevention. But one of the most important steps that can be taken to reduce crime is reduce poverty and social exclusion and hopelessness, and that goes beyond a police officer's mandate just slightly...
Statistically, a high proportion of this 5% of criminals that are "career criminals" will be psychopaths. Prison is supposed to serve three main purposes: deterrence, protecting society from the criminal, and rehabilitiation (i.e. converting criminals into non-criminals - you may laugh, but that's the theory). But for psychopaths (short definition: people who have absolutely no conscience - although they can fake it imperfectly when they want to), all the evidence suggests that prison has absolutely no deterrent effect and no rehabilitative effect.
Unfortunately the law currently views psychopaths by default as sane - this is good in a way because they are then held responsible for their own actions, but also bad in way because they can't be locked up indefinitely unless they commit a really serious crime. What's more, a lot of psychopaths go undiagnosed because they tend to be quite adept at fooling people into thinking they've turned over a new leaf and "gone straight".
Todays society and econmy needs constant growth to survive. Without a growth of GDP, people will loose their jobs, poverty will increase etc etc.
Indeed - quite a telling indictment of capitalism, no?
It doesn't make rational sense that we should have to keep on growing the world economy beyond the capacity of the earth to bear it, just to feed everyone. It's only a system built on greed and selfishness that makes things this way.
That's why developers should never look for existing patents. You can only be held liable for "wilful infringement" if you know about the existing patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Point of fact: They did put up with it, until the US told them not to in exchange for some hard cash. However, this business relationship didn't last very long...
Well, there were AA batteries in Genoa because of fears of exactly a Sep 11 scenario.
These and other inconvenient facts show that Bush was lying when he said that they had no idea that aircraft would be used as terrorist weapons like they were on Sep 11.
Given that, your question is a very good one.
I don't want to come off as bashing you, because clearly your heart is in the right place - but I believe you are incorrect on that point. Iraq's internal food production is not sufficient to meet the needs of the population (and I suspect sanctions on machine parts may have something to do with this). Hence the oil-for-food agreement - if there were no need for imports there would be no oil-for-food programme - you can bet your life on that.
And poor nutrition is - of course - by far not Iraq's only pressing problem. They have few working ambulances. They have a shortage of basic medical equipment and materials like aneasthetics, as I expect you know.
Why then do the US and Britain repeatedly state that the sanctions do not ban the import of food and medicines? In the strictest sense they are not lying - but they are employing one of the cruellest deceptions imaginable. Medicine is not banned under the sanctions de jure, but de facto - in other words, the United Nations has refused applications to import medicines and medical equipment - sometimes citing "dual use" considerations.
The point is that Saddam Hussein - evil though he undoubtedly is - could not legally meet these needs even if he wanted to. The United Nations committee on Iraq sanctions - dominated by the US - has consistently denied applications for exemptions to the trade sanctions, which must be individually applied for, and which, even if successful, may take weeks to be granted.
I would like to see how an American would feel if the US - an undoubtedly dangerous nuclear state - had basic medical items sanctioned by the United Nations under "dual use" considerations. A foundational moral principle - that if an action is right for the US to do it must be right for any other state to do in equivalent circumstances - seem to be disregarded by many US "hawks". And of course "hawks" is a very relative term, since even most "doves" in the US congress will slavishly toe the Washingtonian line in the big picture (The honorable Barbara Lee excepted.)
Much more information on the sanctions is available, for example, here.
Might they not have been solved with open peer review?
I wrote a story for kuro5hin.org about why closed source electronic voting is a Bad Thing[tm]. I don't wish to repeat myself.
To attempt to rebut it would lend it too much credence by association. ;-)
You're a whiner who can't spell.
It's inevitable that the vast majority of submissions will get rejected, however good. Reason #1, 2 and 3: there are too many. Reason 4: Different editors, different preferences. Reason 5: They are human, they are fallible. Reason 6: Number of submissions can be used as a crude barometer of community interest. Reason 7: No-one is putting a gun to their head and forcing them to break a story first - it's their perogative to wait a bit, change their minds, wait for confirmation, etc.
Do I need to go on? I think not.
To bring in the previous topic, burying an extremely important provision in a mass of legalese can be regarded as fraud. For example, the intellectual property agreement that I unwittingly signed when starting my PhD as part of matriculation, is believed by the student's union to be legally groundless, and allegedly the university has received legal advice to the same effect (which is why they've changed their procedures on IP agreements for new students).
The prevention of immoral and/or destabilising fraud and deception is an important motivation for regulation. I therefore find it interesting that libertarian-leaning folks always seem to concentrate on governmental force and never say a word about fraud (which would not be construed by a reasonable person as akin to physical force, except metaphorically) - except to pay token lip-service to punishment of fraud.
I'm a little suspicious, as well. Here in the UK one of the most prominent anti-wind groups is funded by... *gasp*... the nuclear industry. That sort of thing does tend to make one a little cynical.
Yes, simply include the lookup table in the algorithm. O(1).
Learning speed can now be objectively measured, which opens a whole new scientific basis for studying AI.
Uh, no. The lookup table does not need to learn, therefore it is fastest. Does this mean it is more intelligent? Maybe, maybe not, but that's not a very important question anyway, since narrow domains like Chess and Awari don't have much to do with true AI (IMO). This result is irrelevant to true AI, which is so far largely a pipe dream.
I think keeping the length about the same but adding a couple of references would have helped though.
Heck, I could cite one PhD thesis in comp sci that is based on an essentially obvious idea, and several such peer-reviewed papers, straight off the bat, and I'm sure I could find others. That doesn't necessarily mean they're not valid research - they may be very valid and important - but they're just exploring the consequences, advantages and disadvantages of pretty obvious incremental advances. (I wouldn't want to offend the people by naming them, but I'm quite serious.)
I'd even go on the record as saying my (as yet unpublished) ideas on OODB schema evolution are all fairly obvious - although not to quite the same extent, as no-one else appears to have thought of them in the last ten years.
That at least cuts out the very worst of /. comments (at the expense of a few interesting ones, but c'est la vie.) I hardly ever see any of that offensive tripe with this strategy, and when I do, and if they're really bad, they usually are logged in so they go on my Foes list and I never see them again.
What's the difference? Why is downloading stealing but expressing my opinion not stealing?
The sensible answer is that arguing based on loss of profit is whiny nonsense.
Or, in other words, doesn't it only rely on FUD and ignorance to have any effect?
Furthermore, I was not alive 25 years ago, so I certainly could not "directly observe" the ratio of intelligent people to non-intelligent people there.
So... this "innovation" certainly is easy to replicate, but as for originality - WTF? Are the PTO seriously trying to tell us that this "innovation" is so original that, if it hadn't been for patent incentives, no-one else would have thought of it?
And you know this how - or did you just pluck that "fact" right out of your arse?
Written like a true foaming-at-the-mouth right-winger.
The reaons that Law Enforcement Officers now wear body-armor is because the criminal now has accesss to high-powered weaponry that is the equal to or better than what the Law Enforcement Officers are using.
Strangely enough, here in the UK we don't have this escalation problem, for the most part. I wonder why? Could it be due to our lack of a gun culture?
why else would the Houston Police Department arrest people if there wasn't a complaint made and evidence found to support the complaint??
Because the office in charge is a nut. Even other police officers say he is a nut.
Yes, this story isn't particularly interesting, because it's just evidence of one over-promoted nut, not evidence of anything institution-wide.
Listen, if I could be sure that I wouldn't get punished in any way, shape or form, I would happily run a public http server with ripped Hollywood movies on it. Deterrence works on me (although I don't agree with the law, but that's irrelevant) - I don't know about you.
(Off to the gulag with greenrd for comitting a thoughtcrime! *ahem*)
I agree with you to an extent about lack of prevention. But one of the most important steps that can be taken to reduce crime is reduce poverty and social exclusion and hopelessness, and that goes beyond a police officer's mandate just slightly...
Unfortunately the law currently views psychopaths by default as sane - this is good in a way because they are then held responsible for their own actions, but also bad in way because they can't be locked up indefinitely unless they commit a really serious crime. What's more, a lot of psychopaths go undiagnosed because they tend to be quite adept at fooling people into thinking they've turned over a new leaf and "gone straight".
Indeed - quite a telling indictment of capitalism, no?
It doesn't make rational sense that we should have to keep on growing the world economy beyond the capacity of the earth to bear it, just to feed everyone. It's only a system built on greed and selfishness that makes things this way.
It's a crazy system, yes. I never said it wasn't.