You're trying to sidestep the issue: it remains a fact that you wrote that we only have the information coming from Kiev, when in fact plenty of stories quote NATO. Whether NATO is trustworthy or doctored the photos of Russian tanks and troops streaming across the border in many stories like http://ww2.nationalpost.com/m/... is completely irrelevant to whether your statement is a lie or not!
It's silly to expect sanctions to accomplish much.
After WWII, the US should have had Patton march east and take care of uncle Stalin.
There was a second chance much more recently to decisively deal with the Russian problem. A bit less than ten years ago, this paper http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar... identified the US as having achieved nuclear primacy (a shorter version can be found printed in Foreign Affairs of that year). It would have been possible at the time for the US to get away with a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia. With most silos and mobile launchers on Russian territory located, a counterforce preemptive nuclear attack by the US would have resulted in the only real retaliation to be from submarine launches, which would have been few enough not to overwhelm missile defense.
The paper generated controversy and there were counterpoints from other academics and some in the military, but there was also a lot of support expressed. In any case, it's at least plausible that the US could have taken the first shot and saved an order of magnitude more pain, suffering, and deaths in the future than it would have generated. No doubt Russia's military build-up in the last decade takes this scenario out of the realm of possibility, and given the evil the russkies are doing and the tons more they've yet to perpetrate, it's a damn shame.
I expect to be modded down, as many here won't understand a sentiment generated by having survived the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. No, things haven't changed. The bear's beastly character is immutable, a fundamental aspect of it that can't be tamed or cured by diplomacy, education, or civilization.
The BBC and many other outlets have published NATO confirmations that at least 1000 Russian soldiers have entered Ukraine in this invasion. This directly contradicts your ludicrous claim, but you already knew that.
So the technically trained, in your opinion, make for better leaders of society? Ironic, given the Slashdot story not so long ago about how a very high proportion of China's totalitarian rulers are engineers.
I take the opposite stance, as expressed by William F. Buckley's well-known quote: "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
Your post only shows that you're too stupid to understand that average can refer to mean, median, or any other central tendency metric (not to mention that, since intelligence is roughly normally distributed, mean and median in this particular case happen to be the same).
Gotta love it when someone tries to show how smart they are by criticism, only to crash and burn, the way you did with this post.
Apologies in advance if this was answered in TFA, but are they planning to provide lossless formats as an option? I'm hoping to avoid having to rip my large CD collection to FLAC due to the amount of time that would take, and would gladly pay decent prices to a service or sale that offers lossless. Recommendations are welcome.
The ban on DDT, which you quote as a success story, is the main reason that malaria still kills millions today. Despite your defense of nuclear power, you still managed with that comment to jump onto the environmentalist propaganda bandwagon.
This should concern everyone, because this attitude reflects itself in the products.
We have now had an entire generation of programmers raised on walled garden apps, cookie-cutter scripting libraries, and above all a wave of cheap VC funding and hardware. How many people are left out there that can build the likes of Bittorrent, Bitcoin, a language like C, a game like Elite, or even a site like Slashdot? How many people, young people, are there who can write an OS kernel, design a basic circuit, and at a more pertinently serious level, reliably write software to implement mathematical encryption algorithms.
Reading this I'm inclined to believe that recent meme post about how the programming/silicon valley community has been taken over by "brogrammers", "hipsters" and "neckbeads", which to my mind are simply constitute cultural re-skinnings of the infamous Visual Basic programmers of old.
I worry that the unglamorous, mostly uncompensated, and largely intellectually driven practice of pure software programming and creation has been left behind in recent years. I personally have noticed little progression and indeed in many areas a general regression in the quality and reliability of software since approximately 2006/7.
While I would attribute this to my general "civilization is in decline" zeitgeist worries, my frustrations with software, UIs, and websites in particular has undoubtedly increased manifestly in the last 2-3 years or so. Maybe I'm just getting old -- or maybe programmers really are getting worse.
The same scientists publish things such as proof that testosterone levels vary by race ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ) then create a politically correct shitstorm when someone dares note that this has behavioral implications. How ridiculous can this get?
Many of those problems will not be resolved. The most important one, and one that will always be worse in the case of 3D printing compared to traditional mass manufacturing methods, is the extreme energy inefficiency. For example, when printing with plastic, a 3D printer uses 50-100 times more electricity than an injection molding machine making the same part, not to mention that it wastes a lot of material left in the print bed that's not recyclable as feed for the printer because its properties have been corrupted. Home and office use should also be discouraged because of the emittance of ultrafine particles. Want your place of living/work's air even more polluted? Source for these: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/3d...
There are other problems as well, including cultural ones. From the article: 3D printing might someday encourage a new kind of pollution: rapid garbage generation. Engineers being trained to respect their raw materials are taught "Think twice, cut once." When people get ahold of easy production tools, however, it’s easy to not heed that wise old adage.
Like we don't have enough of a throw-away culture as it is.
3D printing should only be used to manufacture objects which cannot be made by other methods.
Right after posting, I realized that my mention of bounded rationality might be misinterpreted to mean that I was referring to a subset of the population who would be "too dumb" to reliably use a consequentialist approach. But that is not the case; it applies to everyone, albeit to a different degree. Bounded rationality was seriously approached first in the field of economics, but it's scope is far larger. From neuroscience we see ever more how deep the integration between reasoning and emotions is (for example, Damasio's somatic markers). From cognitive psychology we see that the brain is so constrained by its finite processing speed (as a result of the biological pressures of its caloric cost and its size requiring hips so wide for childbirth that, were they any wider, humans could not walk upright) that it uses fallible heuristics as information processing optimizations. In this context, value ethics and deontology ethics have significant practical advantage over the more analytical consequentialism ethics because values and rules (principles), and not only because they're easier to process (less time, effort, and caloric expenditure), but also because, once taught and instilled, they have a more direct connection to an emotional response, which gives them more power when an individual is trying to make a choice where ethics conflict with other considerations.
Funny enough, the value- and rule-based approaches can themselves be justified by consequentialism, for reasons of pedagogy, and because humans are boundedly rational. It can be impractical due to finite reasoning ability and time constraints to carry out a full analysis of every ethical situation one encounters, and thus applying consequentialism directly may be too burdensome. Many would, as a result, not have the impetus and discipline to apply such an approach to ethics consistently. The first two approaches, on the other hand, are simpler to apply, and thus easier to teach, easier to demonstrate and market by anecdotes and role models, and easier to keep in mind and apply consistently. Thus, on the whole over a population, they are likely to result in producing more of the consequences of ethical behavior than actual consequentialism ethics.
Currently we do have auto-stereoscropic displays (no glasses), but they only account for stereopsis, not accommodation (different focal distances for the eye). In current 3D displays, the 3D cue of stereopsis conflicts with the information from accommodation to a flat plane, and the 3D effect is significantly diminished (and can even cause discomfort or headaches). With an ultra high pixel density display base, lightfield displays become practical, and they can reproduce both stereopsis and different focal depth per image element. Current prototypes I've seen at SIGGRAPH have been very low resolution, as you need a patch of 2D pixels under each microlens (lightfield displays are based on a microlens array with multiple pixels under each lens). I imagine a 1920x1080 microlens array with 32x32 pixels under each microlens. If the display is also high-dynamic range and with extended color gamut, it would be the ultimate visual equivalent to a window into other worlds.
On the contrary, all I did is take his comment at face value and derived a corollary from it. I'm not mischaracterizing the expressed position; it actually is unreasonable via reductio ad absurdum. To argue otherwise, you ought to present something more substantive than "gross oversimplification".
who unfortunately has succumbed to some pretty weird ideas in his old age
How can you make such an inappropriate comment? It's suitable for politics, not supposedly rational discussion.
It's really simple, if you look at it from the point of view of stochastic search algorithms. If you significantly weaken selection pressure (as we've done and will continue to do increasingly) while mutation and crossover continue to randomize the gene pool, the average fitness of a population by any given metric will fall over time (because the gene pool is very far from random, and individuals are on average closer to some (local) maximum of the current fitness function than a set random samples would be). There's just no way around it. If there's no natural selection, then there's a clear case to be made for artificial selection. I equate eugenics with selective breeding in the most general sense. It doesn't require genocide, and it doesn't require preventing anyone from reproducing -- it only requires encouraging reproduction for some portion of the population. While that still is distasteful for some, I'm still waiting for an alternative proposal for the very long term.
Parent's post is one of those that sounds nice, but is factually incorrect, so please mod it down. Many prominent biologists are supporters of eugenics. This includes the co-discoverer of DNA structure himself, the famed James D. Watson, who in recent years became more public about his support for eugenics: http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N46/4... The more you dig around (start with wiki articles on the subject), the more like him you find. Parent poster didn't do his research, preferring to post what fit his ideological preconceptions instead.
You should learn to read. SCOTUS specifically said it has to be a closely knit ownership structure with a history of religious beliefs against abortion. Just like aereo, this is a narrow ruling.
Slashdot Mirror
You're trying to sidestep the issue: it remains a fact that you wrote that we only have the information coming from Kiev, when in fact plenty of stories quote NATO. Whether NATO is trustworthy or doctored the photos of Russian tanks and troops streaming across the border in many stories like http://ww2.nationalpost.com/m/... is completely irrelevant to whether your statement is a lie or not!
It's silly to expect sanctions to accomplish much.
After WWII, the US should have had Patton march east and take care of uncle Stalin.
There was a second chance much more recently to decisively deal with the Russian problem. A bit less than ten years ago, this paper http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar... identified the US as having achieved nuclear primacy (a shorter version can be found printed in Foreign Affairs of that year). It would have been possible at the time for the US to get away with a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia. With most silos and mobile launchers on Russian territory located, a counterforce preemptive nuclear attack by the US would have resulted in the only real retaliation to be from submarine launches, which would have been few enough not to overwhelm missile defense.
The paper generated controversy and there were counterpoints from other academics and some in the military, but there was also a lot of support expressed. In any case, it's at least plausible that the US could have taken the first shot and saved an order of magnitude more pain, suffering, and deaths in the future than it would have generated. No doubt Russia's military build-up in the last decade takes this scenario out of the realm of possibility, and given the evil the russkies are doing and the tons more they've yet to perpetrate, it's a damn shame.
I expect to be modded down, as many here won't understand a sentiment generated by having survived the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. No, things haven't changed. The bear's beastly character is immutable, a fundamental aspect of it that can't be tamed or cured by diplomacy, education, or civilization.
what we have is actually only quotes from Kiev
The BBC and many other outlets have published NATO confirmations that at least 1000 Russian soldiers have entered Ukraine in this invasion. This directly contradicts your ludicrous claim, but you already knew that.
So the technically trained, in your opinion, make for better leaders of society? Ironic, given the Slashdot story not so long ago about how a very high proportion of China's totalitarian rulers are engineers.
I take the opposite stance, as expressed by William F. Buckley's well-known quote: "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer.
Your post only shows that you're too stupid to understand that average can refer to mean, median, or any other central tendency metric (not to mention that, since intelligence is roughly normally distributed, mean and median in this particular case happen to be the same). Gotta love it when someone tries to show how smart they are by criticism, only to crash and burn, the way you did with this post.
Apologies in advance if this was answered in TFA, but are they planning to provide lossless formats as an option? I'm hoping to avoid having to rip my large CD collection to FLAC due to the amount of time that would take, and would gladly pay decent prices to a service or sale that offers lossless. Recommendations are welcome.
The ban on DDT, which you quote as a success story, is the main reason that malaria still kills millions today. Despite your defense of nuclear power, you still managed with that comment to jump onto the environmentalist propaganda bandwagon.
Nuclear desalination. It's even better than electricity generation, since you have no conversion losses.
We have now had an entire generation of programmers raised on walled garden apps, cookie-cutter scripting libraries, and above all a wave of cheap VC funding and hardware. How many people are left out there that can build the likes of Bittorrent, Bitcoin, a language like C, a game like Elite, or even a site like Slashdot? How many people, young people, are there who can write an OS kernel, design a basic circuit, and at a more pertinently serious level, reliably write software to implement mathematical encryption algorithms. Reading this I'm inclined to believe that recent meme post about how the programming/silicon valley community has been taken over by "brogrammers", "hipsters" and "neckbeads", which to my mind are simply constitute cultural re-skinnings of the infamous Visual Basic programmers of old. I worry that the unglamorous, mostly uncompensated, and largely intellectually driven practice of pure software programming and creation has been left behind in recent years. I personally have noticed little progression and indeed in many areas a general regression in the quality and reliability of software since approximately 2006/7. While I would attribute this to my general "civilization is in decline" zeitgeist worries, my frustrations with software, UIs, and websites in particular has undoubtedly increased manifestly in the last 2-3 years or so. Maybe I'm just getting old -- or maybe programmers really are getting worse.
-- ObsessiveMathsFreak
The same scientists publish things such as proof that testosterone levels vary by race ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ) then create a politically correct shitstorm when someone dares note that this has behavioral implications. How ridiculous can this get?
Ah, a classic. Probably the best sci fi movie until 1958's Forbidden Planet. And so much better than the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves.
[citation needed] or I call BS. There's no legal right in a civilized country to see X by going into someone's property, regardless of X.
All the other factions believe in some degree of community ownership of everything.
Since, by definition, everything can be substituted into the position of "everything", try the term "my wife" in there and let's see how you like it.
Many of those problems will not be resolved. The most important one, and one that will always be worse in the case of 3D printing compared to traditional mass manufacturing methods, is the extreme energy inefficiency. For example, when printing with plastic, a 3D printer uses 50-100 times more electricity than an injection molding machine making the same part, not to mention that it wastes a lot of material left in the print bed that's not recyclable as feed for the printer because its properties have been corrupted. Home and office use should also be discouraged because of the emittance of ultrafine particles. Want your place of living/work's air even more polluted? Source for these: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/3d...
There are other problems as well, including cultural ones. From the article:
3D printing might someday encourage a new kind of pollution: rapid garbage generation. Engineers being trained to respect their raw materials are taught "Think twice, cut once." When people get ahold of easy production tools, however, it’s easy to not heed that wise old adage.
Like we don't have enough of a throw-away culture as it is.
3D printing should only be used to manufacture objects which cannot be made by other methods.
it's scope --> its scope
Right after posting, I realized that my mention of bounded rationality might be misinterpreted to mean that I was referring to a subset of the population who would be "too dumb" to reliably use a consequentialist approach. But that is not the case; it applies to everyone, albeit to a different degree. Bounded rationality was seriously approached first in the field of economics, but it's scope is far larger. From neuroscience we see ever more how deep the integration between reasoning and emotions is (for example, Damasio's somatic markers). From cognitive psychology we see that the brain is so constrained by its finite processing speed (as a result of the biological pressures of its caloric cost and its size requiring hips so wide for childbirth that, were they any wider, humans could not walk upright) that it uses fallible heuristics as information processing optimizations. In this context, value ethics and deontology ethics have significant practical advantage over the more analytical consequentialism ethics because values and rules (principles), and not only because they're easier to process (less time, effort, and caloric expenditure), but also because, once taught and instilled, they have a more direct connection to an emotional response, which gives them more power when an individual is trying to make a choice where ethics conflict with other considerations.
Funny enough, the value- and rule-based approaches can themselves be justified by consequentialism, for reasons of pedagogy, and because humans are boundedly rational. It can be impractical due to finite reasoning ability and time constraints to carry out a full analysis of every ethical situation one encounters, and thus applying consequentialism directly may be too burdensome. Many would, as a result, not have the impetus and discipline to apply such an approach to ethics consistently. The first two approaches, on the other hand, are simpler to apply, and thus easier to teach, easier to demonstrate and market by anecdotes and role models, and easier to keep in mind and apply consistently. Thus, on the whole over a population, they are likely to result in producing more of the consequences of ethical behavior than actual consequentialism ethics.
Currently we do have auto-stereoscropic displays (no glasses), but they only account for stereopsis, not accommodation (different focal distances for the eye). In current 3D displays, the 3D cue of stereopsis conflicts with the information from accommodation to a flat plane, and the 3D effect is significantly diminished (and can even cause discomfort or headaches). With an ultra high pixel density display base, lightfield displays become practical, and they can reproduce both stereopsis and different focal depth per image element. Current prototypes I've seen at SIGGRAPH have been very low resolution, as you need a patch of 2D pixels under each microlens (lightfield displays are based on a microlens array with multiple pixels under each lens). I imagine a 1920x1080 microlens array with 32x32 pixels under each microlens. If the display is also high-dynamic range and with extended color gamut, it would be the ultimate visual equivalent to a window into other worlds.
Following this line of argument, we end up with a descent into the trivial.
If they're "woman-slavers", as you claim, you're a "baby-killer".
Leave the name-calling out--it just reveals that you're not able to discuss this rationally.
On the contrary, all I did is take his comment at face value and derived a corollary from it. I'm not mischaracterizing the expressed position; it actually is unreasonable via reductio ad absurdum. To argue otherwise, you ought to present something more substantive than "gross oversimplification".
who unfortunately has succumbed to some pretty weird ideas in his old age
How can you make such an inappropriate comment? It's suitable for politics, not supposedly rational discussion.
It's really simple, if you look at it from the point of view of stochastic search algorithms. If you significantly weaken selection pressure (as we've done and will continue to do increasingly) while mutation and crossover continue to randomize the gene pool, the average fitness of a population by any given metric will fall over time (because the gene pool is very far from random, and individuals are on average closer to some (local) maximum of the current fitness function than a set random samples would be). There's just no way around it. If there's no natural selection, then there's a clear case to be made for artificial selection. I equate eugenics with selective breeding in the most general sense. It doesn't require genocide, and it doesn't require preventing anyone from reproducing -- it only requires encouraging reproduction for some portion of the population. While that still is distasteful for some, I'm still waiting for an alternative proposal for the very long term.
Parent's post is one of those that sounds nice, but is factually incorrect, so please mod it down. Many prominent biologists are supporters of eugenics. This includes the co-discoverer of DNA structure himself, the famed James D. Watson, who in recent years became more public about his support for eugenics: http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N46/4... The more you dig around (start with wiki articles on the subject), the more like him you find. Parent poster didn't do his research, preferring to post what fit his ideological preconceptions instead.
You should learn to read. SCOTUS specifically said it has to be a closely knit ownership structure with a history of religious beliefs against abortion. Just like aereo, this is a narrow ruling.
it's -> its