But how do you deal with the varying road surfaces? Studs are a little scary on a non-snow or ice covered road.
Mine are road-legal studs, protruding only 1.2mm from the surface of the knobs. On tarmac the rubber will be in contact with the road, making me able to drive and brake almost as normal. I allow for a little longer brake distance. I wouldn't do wheelies on ice or lean down too far, but the grip on ice is more than enough for normal driving. Curves are comparable to riding on gravel. Brake distance increases to about double, so you have to allow for that. Overall I'm impressed with the traction I get, and for the daily commute it's all I need.
3) Those who apply for an extension get one for 10 years. We could make it 5 if you like. The cost - $1 million per work. If you don't apply and pay the money, it goes into the public domain.
That is appealing to me, but would probably not fly with the big companies. American laws are relatively cheap to buy.
It's a long time since i read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, but IIRC he argues that a mandatory renewal in order to keep rights would be a huge improvement on the current situation even if the cost were $100 or free. The gist is that it would make available and save a lot of art that would otherwise be lost forever.
For instance it's not feasible to contact the participants in a movie/descendants of same to obtain permission for transferring old decaying cellulose films to a digital format, and a lot of movies from the 50's are decaying beyond recovery because of this.
Sheet music that didn't sell well, but can be useful for researchers and others can not be distributed because it's very difficult to even determine who the current rights holder is, let alone contact that person and get permission for a work they have never heard about. They might not even know that their grandfather wrote music.
If it were possible for Disney to keep making money on the soon-to-be centennarian mouse while requiring everyone to actually make a trivial effort to keep the rights to works they actually make money from we'd be a long way ahead of where we are now. You could even do something like making the fee non-trivial, but reimbursable on proof of actual profit from the work.
If you want traffic improvement, 1) get left lane laggards to drive properly and not slow down faster traffic 2) get everyone to be expeditious when intersection lights turn green 3) teach people not to contribute to traffic compression waves by over decelerating and then under accelerating
4) jail truck drivers who idle in a single lane road until there's a 150m gap, then close the distance and repeat. 5) teach people to actually accelerate and merge from on-ramps.
But that's just for the cold. Snowy days like today in PA really put a cramp in riding.
Get yourself a suitable bike and tyres, and you're good to go:)
I live in Norway. I bought a used Yamaha WR250R, put studded knobbies on it, and started winter riding on it a few weeks back. With these tyres slippery roads are no problem for a non-novice driver, in fact my very first winter trip on this bike was in a veritable snow storm with the roads covered by 15-20cm of fresh snow. Gravel, trail or dirt track experience is a bonus, but not necessary. I have ridden a manual Vespa with studless winter tyres for several winters as well, it's doable.
While not common among motorcyclists even in Norway, there are quite a few that ride all seasons. Many prefer smaller street legal dual sports like the DRZ 400S, WR250R and Honda CRF250L/Rally. Adventure-style bikes like the TransAlp, Africa Twin and BMW GS bikes are also very well suited.
I'm sure you can get someone to produce studded tyres in PA as well, if you're interested drop me an email (guess my gmail address from my username) and I'll provide details:)
I don't think they're intellectually incapable as such, I have the impression that most drove responsibly alone. Pretty much all the really reckless driving I saw was showing off or egging each other on and nobody had the social maturity to stand up and be the uncool party pooper.
Probably not intellectually incapable, but I think that the many young drivers greatly overestimate their own abilities. Including when they're driving alone.
To use myself as an example: at 19 I had lightning reflexes and good technical driving abilities, but to think back at how I sometimes drove then (including driving alone) gives me the shudders nowadays (I'm 40). If something unexpected had happened I could have killed myself or someone else due to sheer inexperience. Maybe luckily for me, something unexpected happened while driving at only 50 km/h which caused me to not be able to brake to a stand-still in a moment of inattention, and I hit the car in front of me. Entirely my fault, no injuries to anyone, but substantial material damages. It made me realise how much one needs to expect the unexpected when driving in traffic.
So, nowadays, I'm a very careful driver. I believe that between my 20 years experience and my previously mentioned (but diminishing as the years go by) technical driving abilities I'm at a peak of my lifetime safe-driver-factor. Still, contrary to most men, I consider myself only an average driver. It goes downhill from here, and I'll drive accordingly. My insurance is very, very cheap, and in my case I think it matches the risk:)
And, I have onions on my belt, or something. Sorry for the rambling.
Unless you have a reasonable expectation that someone is about to step in front of your car, the speed limit in such areas is still whatever is posted. If they wanted a lower speed limit, they'd post one.
That statement should disqualify you from driving a car. While pedestrians are supposed to behave, it's YOUR responsibility to make sure that you never drive in a way that makes it possible for you to run over a pedestrian (or hit other cars, for that matter). It's also insane to insist on driving at the speed limit regardless of circumstances. You're still responsible for being able to stop for *anything* that happens to suddenly be in the road, including a kid running after his ball. You're not "allowed" to run over the kid just because you adhered to some maximum speed limit posted.
No, you shouldn't need a "reasonable expectation" to behave like a mindless robot when it comes to speed limits. Sure, the speed limit posted is a *maximum speed limit*, and it's illegal to exceed it. It's not a mandatory minimum speed. You don't have to "expect" that someone will be stepping into the road, you are expected to be able to stop for whichever hindrance might possibly come into your way.
Oh hell, why am I wasting time. It's not "OK" to hit someone at 25 mph. To wrap it up, I hope you didn't mean what you wrote:)
If you did mean it as stated, I'm out of the discussion. Have a nice day.
Driving in high heeled shoes sound so awesomely stupid that it's kind of impressive in its own way. For the sake of the future of humanity I seriously hope that's a very rare cause of accidents indeed.
I arrive at my car wearing stiff MC racing boots every other day, swapping between vehicles at kindergarten. If I actually drove a car wearing them I should lose my driving license, as should anyone doing something similarly stupid behind the wheel. If anyone in a similar situation don't apply one of the obvious solutions they are unfit to conduct a motor vehicle, and should take the bus instead.
A superbeing may not have an inherent capability to communicate with us (for instance, they may not have vocal cords), but they should be able to figure it out. The next question is whether we'd accept the artificially generated noises from an energy being who is trying to vocalize as actual communication.
This is a very interesting subject, albeit on the verge of philosophy; but a significant difference between us and animals is that humans are capable of abstracting communication beyond the physical transport, whereas animals are restricted to their evolved means of communication.
The cliché is a sequence of prime numbers, which would be a red flag for determining that a sentient being must be the originator. From there it would be possible to establish a dialogue of "challenges and responses" which could be used to establish semantics and syntax for communication. In addition a superbeing capable of observing the Earth and all its comminucations would probably be able to infer understanding of our languages from simply correlating the massive corpus of our public communications with other observable happenings in our community. Whether or not they would have anything to say to us that would be meaningful for us is another question entirely:)
Our lack of ability to converse with ants involves at least our inability to understand/replicate ant pheromones and the presumed inability of the ants to form abstract thoughts and thus understand whatever we had to say. The first would be mitigated if the ants were capable of bootstrapping communications from simple math fundamentals, the second issue makes successful communication essentially meaningless. On the other hand, maybe a simple pheromonal instruction that says "go there" would be hugely beneficial to ants, but so would dropping a pile of sugar beside their mound be.
I would think that our ability to abstract, and to comprehend much of the processes that occur around us, would enable a superbeing to impart more useful information to us than we are able to communicate to ants. But this is still pure speculation; all bets are off when it comes to what the concerns and interests of a being vastly more advanced than us might be.
I'm not sure what you're driving at. [...] There is likely more than one possible path.
You should be aware that Empiric has a very specific agenda in discussions of this type. Arguing with him (or her) is pointless, as he would have to abandon his entire belief system to accede even one single aspect of your argument. He will, however, go to any length to discredit you and your standpoint.
After posting the previous post I've seen some of your other contributions to this discussion. Don't bother replying to mine, you won't get a response from me, as I already regret the wasted energy of replying to you in the first place. Thank you.
"Since then he has gone from defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters."
It's quite cool that he's actually a real life former good guy turned aspiring supervillain:) (I know, he's probably a jerk. But that's a requirement for being a supervillain, so who can blame him)
Because otherwise, people who don't understand how something as complex as a multinational trade agreement is negotiated and written, let alone actual international trade, will start screaming about nothing.
Your "nothing" certainly means something to at least one party in the negotiations, or it wouldn't be a part of them. It might be "nothing" they decide to sacrifice on behalf of unknowing third parties, which the third party would see as a problem had they known about it.
I certainly am not competent enough to understand multinational trade agreements, nor do I have to be. I'm very good at designing and querying databases, but for understanding multinational trade agreements I would rather rely on a pletora of experts to sort out these matters for me and present the ramifications in laymans terms, after which democratic input could determine what is acceptable and what's not. All experts will have biases, but I also get to evaluate which experts to trust based on their public discourse. A primary condition for this is of course that complete information about the process is available, which it isn't.
Public negotiations would naturally also be a faulty process, as it ultimately depends on the opinion of lay people assuming a democratic input. As it stands it depends solely on the interests of the economic elite (through political pressure from corporations), which often doesn't coincide with the interests of most of us. Whether you find this problematic or not depends on your affiliation.
...but yet still has the gall to make laws in secret?
On a side note: the whole idea of secret laws is a bit scary. Not only do they enable governments to abuse their powers, it seems that the entire concept is specifically designed to allow just that. "We find you threatening, and we don't need no stinking reasons. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."
What am I missing here? Where is Cold Fjord when I need him to enlighten me?
Yeah right, I'm going to convert my entire library to a proprietary format that nobody uses.
Well, *you* obviously aren't since you apparently are opposed to it for undisclosed reasons. If you were to do so you'd find that the process requires only a trivial amount of user interaction, and the output would be of high quality functionally equivalent to the original for regular reading.
I do the opposite; I regularly buy Kindle books and effortlessly strip the DRM and convert them to epub for reading on a Kobo. I would say that a maintained calibre library is essential for archival purposes no matter which device you're currently using.
For whatever it's worth, I avoid the Kindle because of its closed nature and semi-walled garden, but I have no trouble recommending the models for their excellent hardware at a low price if the person don't care about its limitations. I suppose Amazon has catched on to the nature of my usage by now, as I never even open the books in their software after purchase, I only download and convert them.
Luckily most people seem to have catched on to the fact that the street address is the easiest way to share your location, but I occasionally still get people insisting that "No, no, you don't need the address, it's easy to find, you just...".
Why smart phones still aren't able to simply send and parse plain text ICBM addresses (without elevation) in an SMS in a unified manner is beyond me. Come on, how often would an SMS contain a match to the pattern/-?\d{1,2}\.\d{4,9}, ?-?\d{1,2}\.\d{4,9}/ that is not a GPS location?
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling?
It has already been established that any physiological impact from consumer electronics EM radiation is extremely unlikely. Interest groups decline offers to "prove" affliction because they have experienced that it won't give the results they want, instead it consistently proves that *actual EM radiation* has nothing to do with any reaction the subjects may have.
As with other phobias the impact to health and well-being is likely very real, excluding the attention seekers. "Being mean" and condescending to afflicted people is not constructive. While many of them might be more gullible than the average population for being taken in in the first place, rationality nonetheless stops once real phobia sets in.
I fully believe that anxiety and more severe negative impacts are very real for a lot of those who think they are afflicted. I also believe that it would be better for everyone to recognise this as a psychological issue rather than a physiological one. These people have *real* problems for imagined reasons.
Apart from everything else the "awareness drives" are bad; causing unnecessary anxiety and inconvenience for a lot of people that "don't know anything about technology, but better safe than sorry, right?". Not to mention the people around them who are inconvenienced to a lesser or greater degree by having to accommodate the "afflicted" ones.
There is no more "more information" in a human body than there is in a mass of single celled organism of equivalent mass. Indeed on the scale of DNA (usually the source of this "misconception": that DNA is a measure of information), each cell of a single celled organism may have MORE DNA "information" than the human genome does.
I don't think you understand what "informaton" in this setting means. Hint: Altoug DNA information would probably qualify in a very roundabout way (as would the the information pertaining to a detailed description of a hen's egg), the informaton they're concerned about here is a lot more fundamental, and exists at a far lower level than DNA. We're talking wich particular types of fundamental particles went into the thing, and indeed which particular particles went in and what particular quantum properties *they* had.
Most scholars believe there was "a jesus" (some real historical person) independently of any faith, and that he was in fact crucified by the Romans. Any anecdotes about his life is mostly hearsay, though.
The problem is that there is another very negative element too: Collective vengence. The social desire to see those who offend society made to suffer. Worse, this can be counterproductive to the rehabilitation role: Programs aimed at educating prisoners are widely seen as 'soft on crime,' while there is widespread support for any policy that increases the difficulty released prisoners face in finding housing and employment.
As a Norwegian, that seems insane to me. We have some of the nicest prisons in the world, and inmates are given the opportunity to get an education. We also have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at around 20%. The authorities have a stated goal to reduce recidivism by providing opportunities for reform in prison. This includes hard criminals like perpetrators of gang-related killings, robbers who have shown willingness to kill police officers in shoot-outs, and drug related crimes, which are among the worst when it comes to recidivism. Although some employers and neighbourhoods frowns on ex-convicts, they generally have lots of opportunities to reinstate themselves in society. You're less likely to be considered for a trusted position, but it even happens that former convicts get one of those with the employers full knowledge of their past (depending on the nature of their crimes and the position).
The punishment constitutes loss of freedom and communication rights - nothing more. The conditions in prisons are good (Halden Prison and Bastøy Prison are some of the "best", but the penal philosophy is the same for all of them), because they're not supposed to make you suffer physically or psychiologically. The political right wing (which even many US Democrats would probably still call liberal bleeding-heart commies) occasionally bleats about reforms to make punishment harsher, but nobody is really serious about it, since the existing system just works too well at turning criminals into productive members of society.
Of course there are a few wackos, like Anders Behring Breivik, for which the regular system doesn't work well. For the likes of him we have 'indefinite detention', our strongest punishment, which is something like life _with_ the possibility of parole. It is still very probable that he'll spend his entire life in prison since an absolute requirement for release is that he's deemed safe by psychologists and other professionals, which doesn't seem likely to happen based on his currently reported statements and behaviour.
It was about having a completely different mindset when you approach the computer, as compared to BASIC programmers.
Yes, I'm aware of that, I was just trying to be funny. My point is that in any case you'll have to learn new concepts as you go. A case in point: when most programmers approach SQL they try to fit all logic in loops and control structures. Then they discover cursors, and are happy. Afterwards they are amazed that I can rewrite their code to a simpler version which runs 450x faster (one real-world example, the original cursor was written by a senior developer to boot).
Most languages have their own tricks and ways of doing them, and an experienced developer will pick up/understand a lot of them, but you have to start somewhere.
At the time Dijkstra said that I suppose most people who could do *any* programming at all were a bit older than the kids we're talking about here:) Kids aren't likely to get stuck in a bad pattern just because that was the first thing they learnt, they are pretty flexible when it comes to acquiring new concepts. BASIC is as good as any language to teach the most fundamental concepts of linear programs and control structures. I would try to avoid the GOTOs, though, as modern languages do the same things in a better way.
Anyway, I intend to introduce my kids (twins just turned two) to programming, but I'll probably wait a few years before I try to pique their interest. If they're not interested I won't push them. When I do, I'll probably start with something that yield physical results, such as Mindstorms or something that creates lights or motion that are easy to grasp. The choice of language is really not important at this point. Logo is actually a pretty decent language for this purpose, the turtle graphics (which I suppose is integral to this usage of the language, and I hope it still has it) is good for introducing input and results. It's also one of the languages of choice for our local "teach the kids coding" non-profit, and I also know that they use Kay's work in their teaching.
Anyway, to start with I believe it's important that the kids learn the most basic of concepts (linear execution of simple statements, then maybe some control structures), and then hopefully they'll ask the question: "what if I want to change this so it does B instead of A?". At the point when they ask "how do trip planners find the fastest route between two arbitrary points" I'll start introducing them to Dijkstra and his magic:)
They would strategize only parking their cars pointing downhill.
I was lucky to be parked on a small hill last summer when my battery suddenly died. Got it started, and took care to park on hills until I got to the hardware store to get a new one:)
With a well maintained engine you can engage the clutch in first gear at less than walking speed and have it start easily.
In Norway stick shifts are very common, to the point that almost all new models still have the option, at least in the low to middle price ranges. Even expensive, non-performance cars are usually available with manual transmission. My next car will certainly be a stick shift.
It can be easily argued that CS requires a different style of play than CoD or BF. If it's not your thing then it's not your thing but to act like all shooters are the same game isn't insightful.
It can be easily argued that Canadian football requires a different style of play than American football. If it's not your thing then it's not your thing but to act like all football is the same game isn't insightful.
Actually to people who aren't all wrapped up in it it really IS the same game.
Yes, that's true, but the thing that makes GP a troll in this situation is that his lack of insight is completely uninteresting. His post is completely useless.
For the record, knitting is just banging two metal sticks together with some curled-up thread mashed in. I don't know anything about it, but knitting is stupid, and there can be no relevant difference between different kinds of knitting since "it takes 'true mastery' to even find any kind of difference". I include weaving, sewing and embroidery in the set {differend kinds of knitting}, by the way, since they all look the same to me.
I can't give anyone a non-GPL licence to this work, which is what they were demanding.
IANAL, but are you sure this is the case? I believe that in my country (Norway) at least, you're still the sole proprietor of your IP. You can sign an exclusivity contract, which of course puts restrictions on what you can do with your IP, but it can't put any liability on you for rights you've granted in the past (although an already contracted exclusivity can be transferred). Did they want to gain exclusive rights to code you'd already published under the GPL?
Under our laws, (again I believe that) that would make no sense. If there was a mechanism by which the license for a piece of code could be retroactively retracted most O project would have had huge problems. A license is different from a contract, and a license can't preclude other uses in the manner that a contract can. Even ignoring that, however, you would still be able to apply as many licenses a you want to your code. Does the GPL preclude that you grant, for instance, a BSD or Apache license for code which you wrote yourself?
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But how do you deal with the varying road surfaces? Studs are a little scary on a non-snow or ice covered road.
Mine are road-legal studs, protruding only 1.2mm from the surface of the knobs. On tarmac the rubber will be in contact with the road, making me able to drive and brake almost as normal. I allow for a little longer brake distance. I wouldn't do wheelies on ice or lean down too far, but the grip on ice is more than enough for normal driving. Curves are comparable to riding on gravel. Brake distance increases to about double, so you have to allow for that. Overall I'm impressed with the traction I get, and for the daily commute it's all I need.
3) Those who apply for an extension get one for 10 years. We could make it 5 if you like. The cost - $1 million per work. If you don't apply and pay the money, it goes into the public domain.
That is appealing to me, but would probably not fly with the big companies. American laws are relatively cheap to buy.
It's a long time since i read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, but IIRC he argues that a mandatory renewal in order to keep rights would be a huge improvement on the current situation even if the cost were $100 or free. The gist is that it would make available and save a lot of art that would otherwise be lost forever.
For instance it's not feasible to contact the participants in a movie/descendants of same to obtain permission for transferring old decaying cellulose films to a digital format, and a lot of movies from the 50's are decaying beyond recovery because of this.
Sheet music that didn't sell well, but can be useful for researchers and others can not be distributed because it's very difficult to even determine who the current rights holder is, let alone contact that person and get permission for a work they have never heard about. They might not even know that their grandfather wrote music.
If it were possible for Disney to keep making money on the soon-to-be centennarian mouse while requiring everyone to actually make a trivial effort to keep the rights to works they actually make money from we'd be a long way ahead of where we are now. You could even do something like making the fee non-trivial, but reimbursable on proof of actual profit from the work.
If you want traffic improvement,
1) get left lane laggards to drive properly and not slow down faster traffic
2) get everyone to be expeditious when intersection lights turn green
3) teach people not to contribute to traffic compression waves by over decelerating and then under accelerating
4) jail truck drivers who idle in a single lane road until there's a 150m gap, then close the distance and repeat.
5) teach people to actually accelerate and merge from on-ramps.
But that's just for the cold. Snowy days like today in PA really put a cramp in riding.
Get yourself a suitable bike and tyres, and you're good to go :)
I live in Norway. I bought a used Yamaha WR250R, put studded knobbies on it, and started winter riding on it a few weeks back. With these tyres slippery roads are no problem for a non-novice driver, in fact my very first winter trip on this bike was in a veritable snow storm with the roads covered by 15-20cm of fresh snow. Gravel, trail or dirt track experience is a bonus, but not necessary. I have ridden a manual Vespa with studless winter tyres for several winters as well, it's doable.
While not common among motorcyclists even in Norway, there are quite a few that ride all seasons. Many prefer smaller street legal dual sports like the DRZ 400S, WR250R and Honda CRF250L/Rally. Adventure-style bikes like the TransAlp, Africa Twin and BMW GS bikes are also very well suited.
I'm sure you can get someone to produce studded tyres in PA as well, if you're interested drop me an email (guess my gmail address from my username) and I'll provide details :)
I don't think they're intellectually incapable as such, I have the impression that most drove responsibly alone. Pretty much all the really reckless driving I saw was showing off or egging each other on and nobody had the social maturity to stand up and be the uncool party pooper.
Probably not intellectually incapable, but I think that the many young drivers greatly overestimate their own abilities. Including when they're driving alone.
To use myself as an example: at 19 I had lightning reflexes and good technical driving abilities, but to think back at how I sometimes drove then (including driving alone) gives me the shudders nowadays (I'm 40). If something unexpected had happened I could have killed myself or someone else due to sheer inexperience. Maybe luckily for me, something unexpected happened while driving at only 50 km/h which caused me to not be able to brake to a stand-still in a moment of inattention, and I hit the car in front of me. Entirely my fault, no injuries to anyone, but substantial material damages. It made me realise how much one needs to expect the unexpected when driving in traffic.
So, nowadays, I'm a very careful driver. I believe that between my 20 years experience and my previously mentioned (but diminishing as the years go by) technical driving abilities I'm at a peak of my lifetime safe-driver-factor. Still, contrary to most men, I consider myself only an average driver. It goes downhill from here, and I'll drive accordingly. My insurance is very, very cheap, and in my case I think it matches the risk :)
And, I have onions on my belt, or something. Sorry for the rambling.
Unless you have a reasonable expectation that someone is about to step in front of your car, the speed limit in such areas is still whatever is posted. If they wanted a lower speed limit, they'd post one.
That statement should disqualify you from driving a car. While pedestrians are supposed to behave, it's YOUR responsibility to make sure that you never drive in a way that makes it possible for you to run over a pedestrian (or hit other cars, for that matter). It's also insane to insist on driving at the speed limit regardless of circumstances. You're still responsible for being able to stop for *anything* that happens to suddenly be in the road, including a kid running after his ball. You're not "allowed" to run over the kid just because you adhered to some maximum speed limit posted.
No, you shouldn't need a "reasonable expectation" to behave like a mindless robot when it comes to speed limits. Sure, the speed limit posted is a *maximum speed limit*, and it's illegal to exceed it. It's not a mandatory minimum speed. You don't have to "expect" that someone will be stepping into the road, you are expected to be able to stop for whichever hindrance might possibly come into your way.
Oh hell, why am I wasting time. It's not "OK" to hit someone at 25 mph. To wrap it up, I hope you didn't mean what you wrote :)
If you did mean it as stated, I'm out of the discussion. Have a nice day.
Driving in high heeled shoes sound so awesomely stupid that it's kind of impressive in its own way. For the sake of the future of humanity I seriously hope that's a very rare cause of accidents indeed.
I arrive at my car wearing stiff MC racing boots every other day, swapping between vehicles at kindergarten. If I actually drove a car wearing them I should lose my driving license, as should anyone doing something similarly stupid behind the wheel. If anyone in a similar situation don't apply one of the obvious solutions they are unfit to conduct a motor vehicle, and should take the bus instead.
A superbeing may not have an inherent capability to communicate with us (for instance, they may not have vocal cords), but they should be able to figure it out. The next question is whether we'd accept the artificially generated noises from an energy being who is trying to vocalize as actual communication.
This is a very interesting subject, albeit on the verge of philosophy; but a significant difference between us and animals is that humans are capable of abstracting communication beyond the physical transport, whereas animals are restricted to their evolved means of communication.
The cliché is a sequence of prime numbers, which would be a red flag for determining that a sentient being must be the originator. From there it would be possible to establish a dialogue of "challenges and responses" which could be used to establish semantics and syntax for communication. In addition a superbeing capable of observing the Earth and all its comminucations would probably be able to infer understanding of our languages from simply correlating the massive corpus of our public communications with other observable happenings in our community. Whether or not they would have anything to say to us that would be meaningful for us is another question entirely :)
Our lack of ability to converse with ants involves at least our inability to understand/replicate ant pheromones and the presumed inability of the ants to form abstract thoughts and thus understand whatever we had to say. The first would be mitigated if the ants were capable of bootstrapping communications from simple math fundamentals, the second issue makes successful communication essentially meaningless. On the other hand, maybe a simple pheromonal instruction that says "go there" would be hugely beneficial to ants, but so would dropping a pile of sugar beside their mound be.
I would think that our ability to abstract, and to comprehend much of the processes that occur around us, would enable a superbeing to impart more useful information to us than we are able to communicate to ants. But this is still pure speculation; all bets are off when it comes to what the concerns and interests of a being vastly more advanced than us might be.
I'm not sure what you're driving at. [...] There is likely more than one possible path.
You should be aware that Empiric has a very specific agenda in discussions of this type. Arguing with him (or her) is pointless, as he would have to abandon his entire belief system to accede even one single aspect of your argument. He will, however, go to any length to discredit you and your standpoint.
Just so you know what you're dealing with here :)
My sibling post
After posting the previous post I've seen some of your other contributions to this discussion. Don't bother replying to mine, you won't get a response from me, as I already regret the wasted energy of replying to you in the first place.
Thank you.
Unsurprisingly, Greenpeace has a statementabout him.
"Since then he has gone from defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters."
It's quite cool that he's actually a real life former good guy turned aspiring supervillain :)
(I know, he's probably a jerk. But that's a requirement for being a supervillain, so who can blame him)
Because otherwise, people who don't understand how something as complex as a multinational trade agreement is negotiated and written, let alone actual international trade, will start screaming about nothing.
Your "nothing" certainly means something to at least one party in the negotiations, or it wouldn't be a part of them. It might be "nothing" they decide to sacrifice on behalf of unknowing third parties, which the third party would see as a problem had they known about it.
I certainly am not competent enough to understand multinational trade agreements, nor do I have to be. I'm very good at designing and querying databases, but for understanding multinational trade agreements I would rather rely on a pletora of experts to sort out these matters for me and present the ramifications in laymans terms, after which democratic input could determine what is acceptable and what's not. All experts will have biases, but I also get to evaluate which experts to trust based on their public discourse. A primary condition for this is of course that complete information about the process is available, which it isn't.
Public negotiations would naturally also be a faulty process, as it ultimately depends on the opinion of lay people assuming a democratic input. As it stands it depends solely on the interests of the economic elite (through political pressure from corporations), which often doesn't coincide with the interests of most of us. Whether you find this problematic or not depends on your affiliation.
...but yet still has the gall to make laws in secret?
On a side note: the whole idea of secret laws is a bit scary. Not only do they enable governments to abuse their powers, it seems that the entire concept is specifically designed to allow just that. "We find you threatening, and we don't need no stinking reasons. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."
What am I missing here? Where is Cold Fjord when I need him to enlighten me?
Yeah right, I'm going to convert my entire library to a proprietary format that nobody uses.
Well, *you* obviously aren't since you apparently are opposed to it for undisclosed reasons. If you were to do so you'd find that the process requires only a trivial amount of user interaction, and the output would be of high quality functionally equivalent to the original for regular reading.
I do the opposite; I regularly buy Kindle books and effortlessly strip the DRM and convert them to epub for reading on a Kobo. I would say that a maintained calibre library is essential for archival purposes no matter which device you're currently using.
For whatever it's worth, I avoid the Kindle because of its closed nature and semi-walled garden, but I have no trouble recommending the models for their excellent hardware at a low price if the person don't care about its limitations. I suppose Amazon has catched on to the nature of my usage by now, as I never even open the books in their software after purchase, I only download and convert them.
Psychostick - Girl Directions
Luckily most people seem to have catched on to the fact that the street address is the easiest way to share your location, but I occasionally still get people insisting that "No, no, you don't need the address, it's easy to find, you just...".
Why smart phones still aren't able to simply send and parse plain text ICBM addresses (without elevation) in an SMS in a unified manner is beyond me. Come on, how often would an SMS contain a match to the pattern /-?\d{1,2}\.\d{4,9}, ?-?\d{1,2}\.\d{4,9}/ that is not a GPS location?
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling?
It has already been established that any physiological impact from consumer electronics EM radiation is extremely unlikely. Interest groups decline offers to "prove" affliction because they have experienced that it won't give the results they want, instead it consistently proves that *actual EM radiation* has nothing to do with any reaction the subjects may have.
As with other phobias the impact to health and well-being is likely very real, excluding the attention seekers. "Being mean" and condescending to afflicted people is not constructive. While many of them might be more gullible than the average population for being taken in in the first place, rationality nonetheless stops once real phobia sets in.
I fully believe that anxiety and more severe negative impacts are very real for a lot of those who think they are afflicted. I also believe that it would be better for everyone to recognise this as a psychological issue rather than a physiological one. These people have *real* problems for imagined reasons.
Apart from everything else the "awareness drives" are bad; causing unnecessary anxiety and inconvenience for a lot of people that "don't know anything about technology, but better safe than sorry, right?". Not to mention the people around them who are inconvenienced to a lesser or greater degree by having to accommodate the "afflicted" ones.
I can answer this with only high school biology.
No, you can't.
There is no more "more information" in a human body than there is in a mass of single celled organism of equivalent mass. Indeed on the scale of DNA (usually the source of this "misconception": that DNA is a measure of information), each cell of a single celled organism may have MORE DNA "information" than the human genome does.
I don't think you understand what "informaton" in this setting means. Hint: Altoug DNA information would probably qualify in a very roundabout way (as would the the information pertaining to a detailed description of a hen's egg), the informaton they're concerned about here is a lot more fundamental, and exists at a far lower level than DNA. We're talking wich particular types of fundamental particles went into the thing, and indeed which particular particles went in and what particular quantum properties *they* had.
I don't believe there ever was a jesus [...]
Most scholars believe there was "a jesus" (some real historical person) independently of any faith, and that he was in fact crucified by the Romans. Any anecdotes about his life is mostly hearsay, though.
The problem is that there is another very negative element too: Collective vengence. The social desire to see those who offend society made to suffer. Worse, this can be counterproductive to the rehabilitation role: Programs aimed at educating prisoners are widely seen as 'soft on crime,' while there is widespread support for any policy that increases the difficulty released prisoners face in finding housing and employment.
As a Norwegian, that seems insane to me. We have some of the nicest prisons in the world, and inmates are given the opportunity to get an education. We also have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at around 20%. The authorities have a stated goal to reduce recidivism by providing opportunities for reform in prison. This includes hard criminals like perpetrators of gang-related killings, robbers who have shown willingness to kill police officers in shoot-outs, and drug related crimes, which are among the worst when it comes to recidivism. Although some employers and neighbourhoods frowns on ex-convicts, they generally have lots of opportunities to reinstate themselves in society. You're less likely to be considered for a trusted position, but it even happens that former convicts get one of those with the employers full knowledge of their past (depending on the nature of their crimes and the position).
The punishment constitutes loss of freedom and communication rights - nothing more. The conditions in prisons are good (Halden Prison and Bastøy Prison are some of the "best", but the penal philosophy is the same for all of them), because they're not supposed to make you suffer physically or psychiologically. The political right wing (which even many US Democrats would probably still call liberal bleeding-heart commies) occasionally bleats about reforms to make punishment harsher, but nobody is really serious about it, since the existing system just works too well at turning criminals into productive members of society.
Of course there are a few wackos, like Anders Behring Breivik, for which the regular system doesn't work well. For the likes of him we have 'indefinite detention', our strongest punishment, which is something like life _with_ the possibility of parole. It is still very probable that he'll spend his entire life in prison since an absolute requirement for release is that he's deemed safe by psychologists and other professionals, which doesn't seem likely to happen based on his currently reported statements and behaviour.
It was about having a completely different mindset when you approach the computer, as compared to BASIC programmers.
Yes, I'm aware of that, I was just trying to be funny. My point is that in any case you'll have to learn new concepts as you go. A case in point: when most programmers approach SQL they try to fit all logic in loops and control structures. Then they discover cursors, and are happy. Afterwards they are amazed that I can rewrite their code to a simpler version which runs 450x faster (one real-world example, the original cursor was written by a senior developer to boot).
Most languages have their own tricks and ways of doing them, and an experienced developer will pick up/understand a lot of them, but you have to start somewhere.
At the time Dijkstra said that I suppose most people who could do *any* programming at all were a bit older than the kids we're talking about here :) Kids aren't likely to get stuck in a bad pattern just because that was the first thing they learnt, they are pretty flexible when it comes to acquiring new concepts. BASIC is as good as any language to teach the most fundamental concepts of linear programs and control structures. I would try to avoid the GOTOs, though, as modern languages do the same things in a better way.
Anyway, I intend to introduce my kids (twins just turned two) to programming, but I'll probably wait a few years before I try to pique their interest. If they're not interested I won't push them. When I do, I'll probably start with something that yield physical results, such as Mindstorms or something that creates lights or motion that are easy to grasp. The choice of language is really not important at this point. Logo is actually a pretty decent language for this purpose, the turtle graphics (which I suppose is integral to this usage of the language, and I hope it still has it) is good for introducing input and results. It's also one of the languages of choice for our local "teach the kids coding" non-profit, and I also know that they use Kay's work in their teaching.
Anyway, to start with I believe it's important that the kids learn the most basic of concepts (linear execution of simple statements, then maybe some control structures), and then hopefully they'll ask the question: "what if I want to change this so it does B instead of A?". At the point when they ask "how do trip planners find the fastest route between two arbitrary points" I'll start introducing them to Dijkstra and his magic :)
They would strategize only parking their cars pointing downhill.
I was lucky to be parked on a small hill last summer when my battery suddenly died. Got it started, and took care to park on hills until I got to the hardware store to get a new one :)
With a well maintained engine you can engage the clutch in first gear at less than walking speed and have it start easily.
In Norway stick shifts are very common, to the point that almost all new models still have the option, at least in the low to middle price ranges. Even expensive, non-performance cars are usually available with manual transmission. My next car will certainly be a stick shift.
It can be easily argued that CS requires a different style of play than CoD or BF. If it's not your thing then it's not your thing but to act like all shooters are the same game isn't insightful.
It can be easily argued that Canadian football requires a different style of play than American football. If it's not your thing then it's not your thing but to act like all football is the same game isn't insightful.
Actually to people who aren't all wrapped up in it it really IS the same game.
Yes, that's true, but the thing that makes GP a troll in this situation is that his lack of insight is completely uninteresting. His post is completely useless.
For the record, knitting is just banging two metal sticks together with some curled-up thread mashed in. I don't know anything about it, but knitting is stupid, and there can be no relevant difference between different kinds of knitting since "it takes 'true mastery' to even find any kind of difference". I include weaving, sewing and embroidery in the set {differend kinds of knitting}, by the way, since they all look the same to me.
That makes it clearer for me. Thanks for taking the time :)
I can't give anyone a non-GPL licence to this work, which is what they were demanding.
IANAL, but are you sure this is the case? I believe that in my country (Norway) at least, you're still the sole proprietor of your IP. You can sign an exclusivity contract, which of course puts restrictions on what you can do with your IP, but it can't put any liability on you for rights you've granted in the past (although an already contracted exclusivity can be transferred). Did they want to gain exclusive rights to code you'd already published under the GPL?
Under our laws, (again I believe that) that would make no sense. If there was a mechanism by which the license for a piece of code could be retroactively retracted most O project would have had huge problems. A license is different from a contract, and a license can't preclude other uses in the manner that a contract can. Even ignoring that, however, you would still be able to apply as many licenses a you want to your code. Does the GPL preclude that you grant, for instance, a BSD or Apache license for code which you wrote yourself?
Naturally I otherwise agree with your post :)