Why wouldn't company A and company B both make the independent rational decision to not invent a cure and to indefinitely sell treatment? Isn't that also likely? Even if they did capture the market for the cure, that market would evaporate (more or less) once everybody was cured.
Re:This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
on
Matrix Decision Making
·
· Score: 1
Furthermore:
God is Stupid
Because he can be "tricked" by a simple 2x2 matrix calculation.
Me to god: h4r h4r n00b STFU
Re:This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
on
Matrix Decision Making
·
· Score: 1
No, you are wrong. If you happen to be an idiot is it easy to believe unbelievable things.
Thus concludes the lesson: God is Evil and wishes you to be an Idiot. Now donate to my campaign bitch.
Re:This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
on
Matrix Decision Making
·
· Score: 2, Funny
oh sorry, i made a mistake in my chart:
---------------------True--------False Wager for X------Not crushed--You look like a massive idiot because you are afraid of a giant boulder materializing from thin air and crushing you in a grisly death
Re:This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
on
Matrix Decision Making
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Or similar to that:
For simplicity let's call X, the proposition that: "A boulder will materialize out of thin air in exactly 1 second and will fall on your head crushing you to death" ---------------------True--------False Wager for X------Not crushed--status quo Wager against X----Crushed----status quo
Now, it is just as likely that a boulder will instantly materialize out of thin air and crush you in a grisly death, as God exists (well, it's actually probably more likely).
So are you sitting around with a gigantic helmet on your head? Why not? Aren't you scared by the horrible horrible crushed-in-grisly-death-by-uncaring-boulder-of-non -perceptible-yet-righteous-doom?
ARE YOU TEMPTING FATE MORTAL!?
Re:This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
on
Matrix Decision Making
·
· Score: 2, Funny
So it seems that you should always wager for God, right? Not so fast:
------------------- God_is_Good ---- God_is_Evil Wager for God: ------ Gain all - Become Undead Minion? Wager against God: - Status quo ------ Misery
Basically only an Evil (or at least malicious) God is going to punish you for not believing in things which are unprovable (God having MADE you in the first place).
So, do you really want to accept that God is Evil? And if God is Evil, what exactly are you going to gain?
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 2x2 Matrix? Ted Stroehmann: Yeah, sure, 2x2 Matrix. Yeah, the decision making strategy. Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 1... by... 1... Matrix. Ted Stroehmann: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going. Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a book store, you see 2x2 Matrix sittin' there, there's 1x1 Matrix right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man? Ted Stroehmann: I would go for the 1x1. Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 1x1 Matrix. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 2x2 Matrix folk. Ted Stroehmann: You guarantee it? That's -- how do you do that? Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 1x1 matrix, we're gonna send you an extra 1x1 matrix free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B". Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 0x0. Then you're in trouble, huh?
No because probably a good amount of liberals think the government should be spending money to do that itself and then providing those drugs itself for cheap or free. I'd have to say I agree with the argument as far as public health goes. There are lots of things that involve heavy initial investment for which there isn't necessarily a large opportunity for profit (for instance, studying the bad health affects of junk foods isn't something that the junk food industry or cholesterol lowering drug pharmaceuticals are going to invest in). Why spend all that money on something new when you can take an existing drug, change it ever so slightly and squeeze another 5 years of profits out of it? If all else fails simply brand everything as Generic Anxiety Disorder and pump out some drug for that.
Isn't this basically what CACert is all about? I would think if you got a CACert by proving your identity to local CACert agents, you could then just use your private key and somebody elses public key to essentially encrypt and "sign" pieces of digital identity for another party to discover. This could work very well with websites as you could basically give the website SSL key the right to view a few things about you without having to fill it in all the time.
So at some point my computer started emitting a irritating buzzing sound, that I finally narrowed down to the video card fan (after painstakingly unplugging EACH fan to find out).
Ok, so I hop on google and discover that these things happen and that a decent solution is to peel back a simple label that covers the axle, and drop a few drops of machine oil in. Easy enough.
So I detach the fan and start looking at it and can't really find what they are talking about, but you know, it looks like I can just pull it apart. So I try to pull it apart and it is designed sort of weird but I apply enough force and pull the bitch apart in the process breaking these little rivit thingies. Well fuck. I turn it around and discover there was the freaking label staring me in the face. I peel it back easily to expose the axle.
With that fan fucked (well, it DID actually go back on and "sorta" work), I got a new video card fan. This fan didn't fit very well because the stupid plastic pegs that attach it to the video card were too thick. So I had to get a pair of pliers and squeeze those bastards down. I finally got the new fan on the video card (in the process leaving circular indents in my thumbs and loss of sensation that lasted several DAYS). Why the hell do they not make these freaking things STANDARD SIZES for fucks sake.
Moral of the story: Build a couple of machines for geek cred but when you grow up, realize that groveling on the floor losing freaking dust speck sized screws (you do know there are 4+ types each with their own purpose and subtle difference only detectable by scanning electron microscope right?), getting cut on sharp pieces of case metal, is just Not Fucking Worth It.
Next machine I buy will probably be a name brand. After all, even if you build your own machine, you won't be able to sell it without a hassle because newbies won't freakin understand your homemade specs, but will understand a name like "Dell FooBar 2000".
"I would think tactics and strategies are very closely tied to the morals faced in wars"
Except my point was that strategies are lines and nameless boxes on paper or translucent overlays in a sterile computer graphic environments and as such simple familiarity with them (as through video games or texts) will NOT provoke as visceral a reaction as actually seeing events on the ground.
I'm not saying we should remain ignorant of military strategy, I'm saying that merely being conversant in military strategy will not lead to the same type of gut reactions that actual events experienced by soldiers on the battlefield will. And "no plan survives initial contact" right?
Ok, but to me the more interesting moral question is not whether this or that tactic or strategy is best, or really understanding tactics or strategies at all, but rather the innate moral issues experienced by soldiers. When the public votes to go to war, or votes with its opinion about the progress of war, I would hope it is not from the standpoint of second guessing military strategies and tactics (which we employ keen minds to study already) but rather the moral issues.
"realistic military games actually educate the gamers on what warfare is like"
Either that or:
realistic military games actually educate the gamers on what realistic military GAMES are like.
From everything I read and hear, knowing how to actually fight effectively is much less important to a soldier than being able to persist in miserable conditions while witnessing (and occasionally causing) massive destruction. It is more important to be able to withstand seeing piles of charred civilian corpses than it is to, say, know of all the accessories to your favorite Heckler and Koch submachine gun.
What do you think the public's response to war will be if they are presented war as a clean and sterile game with a "Quit" button?
What do you think the public's response to war will be if they are presented war as a linear and unending series of grotesque scenes of carnage?
He sold it to Lion's Gate. What do you want him to do, buy a lot of film, do all the transcoding himself and then drive around in a van and give them to theaters? You know, distributors DO have a purpose (well at least until digital distribution and advertising become the mainstream).
You mean the guy who did not feel compelled to give ANY reason to Congress to not hand over memos they requested? Apparently Ashcroft does even HAVE to invent bogus reasons.
Speaking of TV...it's interesting how we can define "generations" as much by the media they consume[d] as by their age range. Since TV is more or less linear, and one-way, TV generations stratify easily. I can relate to you if you watched G.I. Joe, but I'm pretty lost if you were a generation that watched Howdy Doody.
What is interesting is I think with the advent of digital media we are reaching an event horizon in which media is not one-way...it can be consumed, but then altered and reproduced again. Evidence of this is fan pages about almost everything everywhere, fan-fiction and fan-made videos, music mashups (where two independent songs are combined into one new song), video mashups, and the crazy ass non-sense flash movies that are out there (an entire art field itself).
Will this definition of "generation" even mean anything to kids that were raised with immediate access to ALL media from ALL times?
Ok, I'll give in...my secret dream is that sometime in the future every citizen is given a large ergonomic knob. They can turn this knob to any date/time they want and experience all media from that time. They can watch current daily TV from that date (that is if the TV was invented), they can listen to current radio of that date, they can look at billboards and see current advertisements of that date... etc.
It was my understanding the term "Generation X" was taken from the book "Generation X" by Douglas Coupland (in which he chronicles the lives of some prototypical gen-x-ers, including himself). Even though being non-conformist (or at least a-conformist) was fundamental to the "Gen X" mystique, I do find a pervasive and eerily ubiquitous set of characteristics that describe this generation (I'm on the tail end by accounts). A sense that everything interesting has been done before and a wish to live in a more interesting time while harboring an antogonism towards the past. A sense of antagonism against traditional goals of even monetary success or fame. A stifling apathy and skepticism of everything including self. I see these ringing in Office Space, Fight Club (both share a personality-duality/dream-state; in Fight Club the alter ego's goal is to destroy the Museum of History, and to start history from scratch) to Cobain's journals where he writes that, paraphrasing, "it is a generally held belief that everything interesting has already been done. But I think it might still be fun to pretend" and "it is the age of rehashing". Of course I suppose you could trace the roots of this Gen X attitude to the disillusionment of the massive outbreak of divorces and broken families after the 60s. I don't know what else could make these feelings and experiences as pervasive as they seem to be.
I really think this is an area that is open for some massive academic mining.
Well, I can sort of attribute it to the centralization of media, and basically the resignation of the RIAA (and MPAA too) to fundamentally foster and generate new and orginal music. I closely associate the punk/alt music movement with the "beat" movement (you can think of the 90s grunge/gen-x as just a reincarnation of beat), and even before that the Goliards. I could sum up these movements as: youthful authenticity. "Cool" is out of the question as it is something hand-fabricated for popular consumption these days. Everything un-cool becomes cool at a later point. It may be that we have reached a stage of postmodernism and spectacle that "authenticity" is no longer feasible, especially from youth. Maybe we are all going to die from irony like suffocating on oxygen.
Slashdot Mirror
"at some point game graphics will look as good as real life."
Yeah, because I see dozens of corpses every day in REAL LIFE, and *gee* it gets boring after a while.
Not to argue necessarily with your point but:
Why wouldn't company A and company B both make the independent rational decision to not invent a cure and to indefinitely sell treatment? Isn't that also likely? Even if they did capture the market for the cure, that market would evaporate (more or less) once everybody was cured.
Furthermore:
God is Stupid
Because he can be "tricked" by a simple 2x2 matrix calculation.
Me to god: h4r h4r n00b STFU
No, you are wrong. If you happen to be an idiot is it easy to believe unbelievable things.
Thus concludes the lesson: God is Evil and wishes you to be an Idiot. Now donate to my campaign bitch.
oh sorry, i made a mistake in my chart:
---------------------True--------False
Wager for X------Not crushed--You look like a massive idiot because you are afraid of a giant boulder materializing from thin air and crushing you in a grisly death
Or similar to that:
n -perceptible-yet-righteous-doom?
For simplicity let's call X, the proposition that: "A boulder will materialize out of thin air in exactly 1 second and will fall on your head crushing you to death"
---------------------True--------False
Wager for X------Not crushed--status quo
Wager against X----Crushed----status quo
Now, it is just as likely that a boulder will instantly materialize out of thin air and crush you in a grisly death, as God exists (well, it's actually probably more likely).
So are you sitting around with a gigantic helmet on your head? Why not? Aren't you scared by the horrible horrible crushed-in-grisly-death-by-uncaring-boulder-of-no
ARE YOU TEMPTING FATE MORTAL!?
So it seems that you should always wager for God, right? Not so fast:
------------------- God_is_Good ---- God_is_Evil
Wager for God: ------ Gain all - Become Undead Minion?
Wager against God: - Status quo ------ Misery
Basically only an Evil (or at least malicious) God is going to punish you for not believing in things which are unprovable (God having MADE you in the first place).
So, do you really want to accept that God is Evil? And if God is Evil, what exactly are you going to gain?
That is similar to my strategy:
"Choose the option whose deadline has not been passed in the time you have spent deciding between the two."
That's even easier and relieves me of worrying about whether I should have picked the other one.
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 2x2 Matrix?
Ted Stroehmann: Yeah, sure, 2x2 Matrix. Yeah, the decision making strategy.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 1... by... 1... Matrix.
Ted Stroehmann: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a book store, you see 2x2 Matrix sittin' there, there's 1x1 Matrix right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted Stroehmann: I would go for the 1x1.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 1x1 Matrix. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 2x2 Matrix folk.
Ted Stroehmann: You guarantee it? That's -- how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 1x1 matrix, we're gonna send you an extra 1x1 matrix free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 0x0. Then you're in trouble, huh?
No because probably a good amount of liberals think the government should be spending money to do that itself and then providing those drugs itself for cheap or free. I'd have to say I agree with the argument as far as public health goes. There are lots of things that involve heavy initial investment for which there isn't necessarily a large opportunity for profit (for instance, studying the bad health affects of junk foods isn't something that the junk food industry or cholesterol lowering drug pharmaceuticals are going to invest in). Why spend all that money on something new when you can take an existing drug, change it ever so slightly and squeeze another 5 years of profits out of it? If all else fails simply brand everything as Generic Anxiety Disorder and pump out some drug for that.
of of course course my my circuits circuits are are redundant redundant
...has made us all neurotic bastards.
Now excuse me while I go wash my sink faucet 10 times.
Isn't this basically what CACert is all about? I would think if you got a CACert by proving your identity to local CACert agents, you could then just use your private key and somebody elses public key to essentially encrypt and "sign" pieces of digital identity for another party to discover. This could work very well with websites as you could basically give the website SSL key the right to view a few things about you without having to fill it in all the time.
If she didn't have a ride to the party... ...why would she have a ride to go to their house and knock on their door...
So at some point my computer started emitting a irritating buzzing sound, that I finally narrowed down to the video card fan (after painstakingly unplugging EACH fan to find out).
Ok, so I hop on google and discover that these things happen and that a decent solution is to peel back a simple label that covers the axle, and drop a few drops of machine oil in. Easy enough.
So I detach the fan and start looking at it and can't really find what they are talking about, but you know, it looks like I can just pull it apart. So I try to pull it apart and it is designed sort of weird but I apply enough force and pull the bitch apart in the process breaking these little rivit thingies. Well fuck. I turn it around and discover there was the freaking label staring me in the face. I peel it back easily to expose the axle.
With that fan fucked (well, it DID actually go back on and "sorta" work), I got a new video card fan. This fan didn't fit very well because the stupid plastic pegs that attach it to the video card were too thick. So I had to get a pair of pliers and squeeze those bastards down. I finally got the new fan on the video card (in the process leaving circular indents in my thumbs and loss of sensation that lasted several DAYS). Why the hell do they not make these freaking things STANDARD SIZES for fucks sake.
Moral of the story: Build a couple of machines for geek cred but when you grow up, realize that groveling on the floor losing freaking dust speck sized screws (you do know there are 4+ types each with their own purpose and subtle difference only detectable by scanning electron microscope right?), getting cut on sharp pieces of case metal, is just Not Fucking Worth It.
Next machine I buy will probably be a name brand. After all, even if you build your own machine, you won't be able to sell it without a hassle because newbies won't freakin understand your homemade specs, but will understand a name like "Dell FooBar 2000".
"I would think tactics and strategies are very closely tied to the morals faced in wars"
Except my point was that strategies are lines and nameless boxes on paper or translucent overlays in a sterile computer graphic environments and as such simple familiarity with them (as through video games or texts) will NOT provoke as visceral a reaction as actually seeing events on the ground.
I'm not saying we should remain ignorant of military strategy, I'm saying that merely being conversant in military strategy will not lead to the same type of gut reactions that actual events experienced by soldiers on the battlefield will. And "no plan survives initial contact" right?
Ok, but to me the more interesting moral question is not whether this or that tactic or strategy is best, or really understanding tactics or strategies at all, but rather the innate moral issues experienced by soldiers. When the public votes to go to war, or votes with its opinion about the progress of war, I would hope it is not from the standpoint of second guessing military strategies and tactics (which we employ keen minds to study already) but rather the moral issues.
"realistic military games actually educate the gamers on what warfare is like"
Either that or:
realistic military games actually educate the gamers on what realistic military GAMES are like.
From everything I read and hear, knowing how to actually fight effectively is much less important to a soldier than being able to persist in miserable conditions while witnessing (and occasionally causing) massive destruction. It is more important to be able to withstand seeing piles of charred civilian corpses than it is to, say, know of all the accessories to your favorite Heckler and Koch submachine gun.
What do you think the public's response to war will be if they are presented war as a clean and sterile game with a "Quit" button?
What do you think the public's response to war will be if they are presented war as a linear and unending series of grotesque scenes of carnage?
He sold it to Lion's Gate. What do you want him to do, buy a lot of film, do all the transcoding himself and then drive around in a van and give them to theaters? You know, distributors DO have a purpose (well at least until digital distribution and advertising become the mainstream).
"come up with ANOTHER bogus reason"
You mean the guy who did not feel compelled to give ANY reason to Congress to not hand over memos they requested? Apparently Ashcroft does even HAVE to invent bogus reasons.
Um...you mean...hackers...
Speaking of TV...it's interesting how we can define "generations" as much by the media they consume[d] as by their age range. Since TV is more or less linear, and one-way, TV generations stratify easily. I can relate to you if you watched G.I. Joe, but I'm pretty lost if you were a generation that watched Howdy Doody.
What is interesting is I think with the advent of digital media we are reaching an event horizon in which media is not one-way...it can be consumed, but then altered and reproduced again. Evidence of this is fan pages about almost everything everywhere, fan-fiction and fan-made videos, music mashups (where two independent songs are combined into one new song), video mashups, and the crazy ass non-sense flash movies that are out there (an entire art field itself).
Will this definition of "generation" even mean anything to kids that were raised with immediate access to ALL media from ALL times?
Think Meryl Streep with a chihuahua head.
Ok, I'll give in...my secret dream is that sometime in the future every citizen is given a large ergonomic knob. They can turn this knob to any date/time they want and experience all media from that time. They can watch current daily TV from that date (that is if the TV was invented), they can listen to current radio of that date, they can look at billboards and see current advertisements of that date... etc.
It was my understanding the term "Generation X" was taken from the book "Generation X" by Douglas Coupland (in which he chronicles the lives of some prototypical gen-x-ers, including himself). Even though being non-conformist (or at least a-conformist) was fundamental to the "Gen X" mystique, I do find a pervasive and eerily ubiquitous set of characteristics that describe this generation (I'm on the tail end by accounts). A sense that everything interesting has been done before and a wish to live in a more interesting time while harboring an antogonism towards the past. A sense of antagonism against traditional goals of even monetary success or fame. A stifling apathy and skepticism of everything including self. I see these ringing in Office Space, Fight Club (both share a personality-duality/dream-state; in Fight Club the alter ego's goal is to destroy the Museum of History, and to start history from scratch) to Cobain's journals where he writes that, paraphrasing, "it is a generally held belief that everything interesting has already been done. But I think it might still be fun to pretend" and "it is the age of rehashing". Of course I suppose you could trace the roots of this Gen X attitude to the disillusionment of the massive outbreak of divorces and broken families after the 60s. I don't know what else could make these feelings and experiences as pervasive as they seem to be.
I really think this is an area that is open for some massive academic mining.
Well, I can sort of attribute it to the centralization of media, and basically the resignation of the RIAA (and MPAA too) to fundamentally foster and generate new and orginal music. I closely associate the punk/alt music movement with the "beat" movement (you can think of the 90s grunge/gen-x as just a reincarnation of beat), and even before that the Goliards. I could sum up these movements as: youthful authenticity. "Cool" is out of the question as it is something hand-fabricated for popular consumption these days. Everything un-cool becomes cool at a later point. It may be that we have reached a stage of postmodernism and spectacle that "authenticity" is no longer feasible, especially from youth. Maybe we are all going to die from irony like suffocating on oxygen.
Wow, how amazingly insightful...does Slashdot have a trite moderation...