You read a post on Slashdot and you didn't understand it.
The proposal is not that if a person commits a crime and pays X amount for it then if a company commits the same crime they should pay X multiplied by the difference in their income, which is what you're arguing against in your example of speeding tickets.
This is in relation to the kinds of crimes that (generally) companies commit, and is arguing that if a large company commits that crime then it should pay a larger fine than if a smaller company commits the same crime.
It is possible that the scale of the crime has been included in the size of the fee, but if so it's a pretty ridiculous standard to begin with. "Hundreds of thousands of customer records" is pretty vague, but let's assume records for 250,000 people. That means a fine of $100 a person. That's not nothing, but it doesn't really cover the potential damage they may have caused. And furthermore in this case, although we are presuming the employees did not sell the data as part of a corporate directive, the fact that they were able to do so indicates some pretty serious lack of oversight and security, and some portion of the fee ought to be related to that. And _that_ part of the fee ought to reflect the size of the company involved.
$25 million could easily bankrupt a small company, but AT&T will hardly notice it amidst the yearly revenue of $132 billion and net income of over $6 billion. So the fine works out to about 0.4% of their yearly profit. In 2011 the average American household had $12,800 of discretionary income available, about the best equivalent to corporate profit i can think of. In which case if an average American committed the same crime the "expected" fee would be $51.20. That's not even a speeding ticket, that's about a parking ticket level of fine.
That's the long way of putting it, but yes. If the rainfall patterns stay the same as they are now vegetation will continue to grow in those same areas and the carbon will (on average) remain out of circulation. If the rainfall patterns continue to change the new vegetation in the affected areas won't get enough water and will die/not regrow in the new season and the carbon will quickly return to the environment. Like i said, the not so good side of things.
According to a recent study the total amount of vegetation in the world has gone up over the last decade. This is mainly due to tree planting efforts in China, changing rainfall patterns allowing more growth in new areas and (probably) the increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The not so good side of things is that the plants aren't taking up all the extra CO2, it's still going up just at a somewhat slower rate, and if rainfall patterns continue to change a lot of that new growth could end up dying off.
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" is a much more recent SF book (2006) that examines some of the possible implications of driverless cars, drones, and wearable computers.
Agreed, i'm usually ready to extol the virtues of Heinlein, but fix-up novels are not a thing he did.
As stated, the key elements of "fix-up novel" is that you fix-up something that wasn't a novel, and at the end of it you have a novel. If you just put a bunch of separate short stories together into a book without editing them at all then you've neither done any fixing-up nor ended up with a novel, regardless of whether the stories are all set in the same universe or not.
The _real_ grey area is serials. Some (eventual) novels were written with the intent to be a single story but were serialized in magazines as chapters/short stories. In some cases it's probably hard to tell the difference without knowing what the author was thinking at the time.
I'm confused, because it's really too bad that she never wrote a sequel to Beggars in Spain. And it's _really_ too bad that she never wrote a sequel to that theoretical sequel. I'm sure they would have worked out all their differences and everyone and everything would be happy and wonderful at the end of it!
"The program accepts fewer than nine percent of more than 1,200 applicants, which places the acceptance level at about a hundred, so they're bad at math, too."
Does this joke depend on some fact in TFA? (Which i am unable to read at work.) Are they actually supposed to be accepting some number that is significantly higher or lower than 100? As it is that statement stands out as a total non-sequitur.
Radio Shack serves a need, it just doesn't serve it very well. I needed a 6' USB extension cable last weekend on short notice. I checked at Radio Shack, Staples and Office Depot. If i remember correctly the prices were:
Radio Shack: $35
Staples: $25
Office Depot: $20
I'm probably wrong about the specifics, but that was the general range. Meanwhile i could go online and get a cable from Monoprice for $3-4, and, rather insultingly, Office Depot's online store had one for $5-6.
If Radio Shack had a cable for about $10 i probably would have given up and bought it there just for the convenience, even though i still would have considered that price gouging. But paying an order of magnitude more was just out of the question. This ought to have been exactly the case where Radio Shack came to the rescue, but instead they were the worst of the bunch.
Slashdot was telling me just a couple months ago that "farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut" and "farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago". Since Slashdot is never wrong, clearly farmers don't use high-tech equipment. So how can they be struggling to repair it?
Looks like another example of how _some_ of Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas, such as those in Worlds in Collision, were actually plausible and scientifically interesting, at least at a basic level. It's too bad he felt it was necessary to sabotage himself by compressing all of his ideas together into an implausibly complex series of events taking place over an implausibly short timeline in order to make a kind of historical conspiracy theory.
I still suspect the reviewers were bribed somehow, or perhaps tested the game before it got radically dumbed down, just before release?
I think the glowing reviews of Civ5 are explainable without resorting to bribery or shenanigans by the developer as the cause.
I am a long term but relatively moderate Civ player. I've been playing since the first Civilization and have played all of them since then. Including Civilization: Call to Power and Call to Power 2, plus Alpha Centauri. And all of the Master of Orion games (including 3, regrettably) Master of Magic, and GalCiv and GalCiv2.
I am not an expert however. I can't beat any of them at the highest difficulty settings, with the exceptions of the original MoO, mainly due to Sulla's recaps and videos.
When the initial Civ5 news stories came out i was wary about how the one unit per tile thing would work, however when i first got the game i have to admit i quite liked it. It was simple and easy to get into and it was very pretty. And i've always liked one city challenges, it it made those really easy!
It took time to realize that perhaps it made one city challenges _too_ easy, and did so at the cost of making other styles of play (anything involving more than three or four cities) prohibitively difficult/unrewarding. Doing the tactical combat was kind of fun at first, it took a little while for the problems with the combat to become more clear. I did notice the dearth of interesting buildings and how long they took to complete much earlier, but i didn't really make the connection to 1UPT until it was pointed out by Sulla and others. I'm sure those problems were immediately apparent to the real experts, but for the rest of us it took a little while.
Reviewers generally don't have that much time to invest in playing a game for review. They saw the pretty and got to experience the first dozen or so hours where it was fun and easy, but with enough choices available that it seemed to present the kind of strategic depth that would allow for a great deal of replay. They never got to the point of realizing that most games end up being the initial rush to build your first two or three cities and then just sitting back and hitting "next turn" a lot.
So they gave their reviews and left it to the Civ community to do the in-depth analysis and rip it a new one.
But those initial reviews were probably correct for a lot of people. Civ5 _is_ a great game for people who want to put in a few dozen hours without facing a serious challenge and then move on to the next game. Or people who like dumping in a lot of time into a game that's at least moderately entertaining in order to pick up achievements. (I confess that i got sucked into that for longer than i should have.)
Uh, backing down when threatened with violence does not make one like a troll. It might be cowardly or it might be sensible, but it certainly isn't troll-like. It's the people who _threaten_ violence who are usually the trolls, since they don't have valid arguments to back up their stance.
Someone threatening violence if a debate takes place isn't "things getting interesting", it's someone trying to shut down a debate they can't win within the context of the debate.
Most sensible geeks get incensed when the government passes a law about "Doing X, but on a computer/the internet" or when a company tries to patent "Doing X, but on a computer/the internet". We quite rightly point out that there are already laws or patents covering the same thing and doing it on a computer or the internet doesn't make it magically special.
Well this is part of why the government sometimes keeps trying to pass "Doing X, but on the internet" laws. Because some jerk is always willing to try getting away with something and then when they get caught argue "but it was on the internet, so it doesn't count!"
Andy taught him about gaming by making him play and master all of the old video games and gaming systems in the exact order they were actually released.
Part of that sentence is definitely wrong and part of it is definitely misleading. Because he skipped straight from the Atari 2600 to the NES, and then to the Super NES, and then to the N64. No Coleco, no Genesis, etc. So not all the consoles, and from what i can tell not even all the games for each console. And i can't see any indication that they're being played strictly in order either.
So it's a heavily curated list of games, which is a good thing because the full list would be impossible to do, and it seems to be in strict chronological order in terms of consoles but only vague order within each generation.
This from Jason Cornwell, who decided to "allow" us to write shorter emails by "allowing" us to use a tiny little non-resizable compose window in Gmail.
Okay, that's not 100% true. You can switch to "full-screen" mode, which enlarges it to a size that is neither all of the screen nor even just all of the window. But it does "kindly" grey out all the GUI elements that the "full-screen" window isn't covering up and disallows you from interacting with them without minimizing the window.
But i guess it make senses. If he can just make Gmail unappealing enough then of course we'll all switch to Inbox, right?
*sigh* Someone doesn't understand the Singularity theory. Based on the title i'm guessing it's the professor, but since i can't actually read the article at work it's possible it's the Slashdot editor who conflated lack of AI with lack of Singularity.
The basic premise of the Singularity is that over historic time periods the rate of knowledge acquisition of the human race has increased at a geometric rate.
The reason this has happened is because acquiring knowledge allows us to develop tools that allows us to build upon the pre-existing knowledge to make new discovers that allow better tools, and so on. (Although it's far from a perfect simulation, anyone who's ever played Civilization or any similar strategy game should know that process by heart.)
There are two possible outcomes to this progression, either we hit some rate limiting factor sometime in the "near" future, or the rate of knowledge acquisition over time will approach a mathematical singularity, at which point we will be discovering things so fast that our current minds can not comprehend what will happen. Obviously proponents of the Singularity believe that it is the second possibility that will happen.
However the theory of the Singularity makes no prescriptions about _how_ we will obtain that rate of knowledge. Certainly Artificial Intelligence is one such way. However direct augmentation of our brains is another possibility. Whether that will be via cybernetic implants, biomedical alterations, genetic tinkering, or something else we haven't, and possibly can't, think of is impossible to say at this point.
Up until now of course tools have allowed us to indirectly augment out brains. Writing lets us record information. The internet lets us retrieve information. Now Watson helps us interpret that information. Yes Watson isn't doing anything, Watson is just a tool we use. But tools that help us accomplish things we couldn't before are exactly what moves us along the path towards the Singularity.
As has been pointed out, there was just recently news about replicating a worm's mind in a mechanical body. Yes it's very interesting, but no, it isn't a perfect recreation of an actual brain. But maybe when that paper gets scanned into Watson 2.0 it will make some connection to some other paper on artificial neurons or some such and Watson will let the authors know that they really ought to talk to each other. And boom, we're suddenly creating real artificial minds. Or maybe something else happens. The whole point is we don't know what the next step will be, we're just observing a trend.
If you want to argue against the Singularity you can't just pick a hole in the prospects for AI. You need to explain why the current trend in knowledge acquisition won't continue.
So sarcasm aside, it sounds like you're annoyed that people got diverted from talking about the science to discuss the politics of a shirt? In fact you were so concerned about the issue you decided to write a post diverting us from talking about the science to discuss the politics of discussing the politics of a shirt. After all, it's of dire importance we raise awareness about people trying to raise awareness about the shirt since none of the people complaining about it were kind enough to complain about it here first where we would be aware of it.
Well speech is free, and it's not like we can't discuss both issues (or all three issues?) And I am glad you care enough about justice in these kinds of social issues to fight for your beliefs!
Sand has a lot of uses but it's non-renewable. There's no way (yet) to manufacture it. If you mine the beaches you ruin the environment and end up with eyesores. The same thing happens if you go to your local desert and mine there. It is possible to strip mine a desert, take all the sand and sandstone, and then put a layer of sand back on top. That leaves the landscape looking mostly the same, albeit a bit lower in elevation than it was before, but it takes a _lot_ of work. I've heard of people doing massive underwater operations to strip mine the seabed of sand so that none of the easily visible above-water environments are damaged.
Saying "if X were [easier/better/safer/whatever] we would already be doing X" is vastly overestimating human intelligence and insightfulness. We often fail to recognize the true value of certain inventions or techniques until well after their invention, and often choose to use non-optimal methods for what seemed like good reasons at the time.
A tongue-in-cheek but still insightful article about the subject (#1 and #3 are particularly relevant to this discussion.) http://www.cracked.com/article...
In the experiment, physicists slammed a beam of high-energy electrons, left over from other experiments, into an aluminum target to see what would come out.
Let's all share! What do _you_ do with all those left over high-energy electrons you've always got lying around?
"You might think that mice and rats would be basically the same when it comes to these kinds of things" [About training the two species]
It doesn't seem like it makes much sense to believe that rats and mice are different enough for one species to be measurably smarter than the other, but not to also believe that they're different enough to have different behavior patterns and responses to various stimuli.
Please don't take this wrong, but i took a quick look at your comment history and between that and what you've posted here you're sounding an awful lot like a friend i used to know. At first i thought she was just a little odd, but it turned out that she actually had some serious problems and some pretty bad stuff ended up happening because of it. If you really believe the things you're saying i think you should really consider talking to someone. I expect you'd be resistant to the idea of going to a psychiatrist, but perhaps you have friends or family you can discuss these concerns with?
"A new prosthetic system allows amputees to feel familiar sensations and also, somewhat unexpectedly, reduces their phantom pain."
This seems like one of those things that people might very reasonably not think of ahead of time but which seems blindingly obvious in retrospect. It would probably be expected that if you managed to reattach a severed limb that there wouldn't be any phantom pain afterward. ("Real" pain during the healing process yes, and perhaps lingering aches as one might have with any injury, but not phantom pain.) You'd also expect the same to hold true if you managed to grow a new arm and attach it properly.
But a simple prosthetic isn't enough to prevent or cure phantom pain. So one would expect that at
_some_ point in the process between no nerve connections with a peg leg (or equivalent) and full connection with a regrown/reattached limb that the phantom pain would disappear. I guess they just encountered that point earlier than they might have expected.
You originally said "And children tend to do much better with two parents actively involved in raising them to adulthood, everything else equal." and "I would suggest that children should be a choice made by a man, and a woman together in mutual agreement whenever possible."
When it was pointed out that two women or two men could be the two parents who are actively involved in raising the children, your argument gradually morphed into "Lesbians have no ability to relate to male children in a way a dad can. Gay dads have no ability to relate to girls on their period for the first time."
This is called "moving the goalposts."
(And as an aside, you also said "THIS is sociological issues, and while not unique to Gay / Lesbian couples, affects all of them." Which is entirely untrue. Some gay couples have only male children, and some lesbian couples have only female children. And given the way in which such couples have children it is even pretty trivial to choose the genders of their children if they wish. I'm not saying they should, just that your argument that it affects "all of them" is totally unfounded.")
However to address those shifty goalposts, as far as i can tell you are basing this argument entirely on personal experience. I'm sorry if you felt your childhood was less than ideal because you didn't have a male role model, but that doesn't apply to everyone else.
I'm male and i definitely related far more closely to my mother than i did to my father, perhaps because my dad spent so much time at work. (He spent plenty of time with us during the periods when he was home so it's not like we felt neglected. I was quite happy with my childhood and as far as i know the same is true of my sister. However there's no denying that having to work to support your family means spending less time with that family.) My sister on the other hand was always arguing with my mom (and our mom told us that she always argued with her mom, and her mom told her that...) so it always seemed to me that she related much more to our dad.
Meanwhile i can't really tell any substantive differences between the son of my lesbian friends and the son of my heterosexual sister and brother-in-law. The first likes sports and video games. The second, last i checked, was into monster trucks and princesses. They're both _far_ more rambunctious than i remember being as a child (though clearly there could be some bias/rose colored glasses there) and both seem quite happy and well adjusted.
Maybe some differences will appear once they reach puberty, but i never had the "birds and the bees" talk with either of my parents. I learned all that stuff from sex ed classes at school and the internet, so i don't see why having a parent of the "appropriate" gender really matters. I honestly don't think it would have made a difference if both my parents had been women. Perhaps a girl would feel differently about having two male parents, but i can't really say anything in regards to that.
You say you think children deserve what's "best". How is not being born at all better than being born to parents of the "wrong" gender? Do you think any woman in a same-sex relationship who gets pregnant ought to immediately go get in abortion?
In short, everything i've observed has shown me that actual children of actual same sex couples can be just as happy and well adjusted as the actual children of actual heterosexual couples. That certainly isn't "proof", but it seems to me that it is a far more compelling argument than your theoretical opinions about people that you don't seem to have any actual experience with.
Slashdot Mirror
You read a post on Slashdot and you didn't understand it.
The proposal is not that if a person commits a crime and pays X amount for it then if a company commits the same crime they should pay X multiplied by the difference in their income, which is what you're arguing against in your example of speeding tickets.
This is in relation to the kinds of crimes that (generally) companies commit, and is arguing that if a large company commits that crime then it should pay a larger fine than if a smaller company commits the same crime.
It is possible that the scale of the crime has been included in the size of the fee, but if so it's a pretty ridiculous standard to begin with. "Hundreds of thousands of customer records" is pretty vague, but let's assume records for 250,000 people. That means a fine of $100 a person. That's not nothing, but it doesn't really cover the potential damage they may have caused. And furthermore in this case, although we are presuming the employees did not sell the data as part of a corporate directive, the fact that they were able to do so indicates some pretty serious lack of oversight and security, and some portion of the fee ought to be related to that. And _that_ part of the fee ought to reflect the size of the company involved.
$25 million could easily bankrupt a small company, but AT&T will hardly notice it amidst the yearly revenue of $132 billion and net income of over $6 billion. So the fine works out to about 0.4% of their yearly profit. In 2011 the average American household had $12,800 of discretionary income available, about the best equivalent to corporate profit i can think of. In which case if an average American committed the same crime the "expected" fee would be $51.20. That's not even a speeding ticket, that's about a parking ticket level of fine.
That's the long way of putting it, but yes. If the rainfall patterns stay the same as they are now vegetation will continue to grow in those same areas and the carbon will (on average) remain out of circulation. If the rainfall patterns continue to change the new vegetation in the affected areas won't get enough water and will die/not regrow in the new season and the carbon will quickly return to the environment. Like i said, the not so good side of things.
China Helps Reverse Global Forest Loss, With a Little Bit of Luck
According to a recent study the total amount of vegetation in the world has gone up over the last decade. This is mainly due to tree planting efforts in China, changing rainfall patterns allowing more growth in new areas and (probably) the increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The not so good side of things is that the plants aren't taking up all the extra CO2, it's still going up just at a somewhat slower rate, and if rainfall patterns continue to change a lot of that new growth could end up dying off.
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" is a much more recent SF book (2006) that examines some of the possible implications of driverless cars, drones, and wearable computers.
Agreed, i'm usually ready to extol the virtues of Heinlein, but fix-up novels are not a thing he did.
As stated, the key elements of "fix-up novel" is that you fix-up something that wasn't a novel, and at the end of it you have a novel. If you just put a bunch of separate short stories together into a book without editing them at all then you've neither done any fixing-up nor ended up with a novel, regardless of whether the stories are all set in the same universe or not.
The _real_ grey area is serials. Some (eventual) novels were written with the intent to be a single story but were serialized in magazines as chapters/short stories. In some cases it's probably hard to tell the difference without knowing what the author was thinking at the time.
I'm confused, because it's really too bad that she never wrote a sequel to Beggars in Spain. And it's _really_ too bad that she never wrote a sequel to that theoretical sequel. I'm sure they would have worked out all their differences and everyone and everything would be happy and wonderful at the end of it!
"The program accepts fewer than nine percent of more than 1,200 applicants, which places the acceptance level at about a hundred, so they're bad at math, too."
Does this joke depend on some fact in TFA? (Which i am unable to read at work.) Are they actually supposed to be accepting some number that is significantly higher or lower than 100? As it is that statement stands out as a total non-sequitur.
Radio Shack serves a need, it just doesn't serve it very well. I needed a 6' USB extension cable last weekend on short notice. I checked at Radio Shack, Staples and Office Depot. If i remember correctly the prices were:
Radio Shack: $35
Staples: $25
Office Depot: $20
I'm probably wrong about the specifics, but that was the general range. Meanwhile i could go online and get a cable from Monoprice for $3-4, and, rather insultingly, Office Depot's online store had one for $5-6.
If Radio Shack had a cable for about $10 i probably would have given up and bought it there just for the convenience, even though i still would have considered that price gouging. But paying an order of magnitude more was just out of the question. This ought to have been exactly the case where Radio Shack came to the rescue, but instead they were the worst of the bunch.
Slashdot was telling me just a couple months ago that "farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut" and "farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago". Since Slashdot is never wrong, clearly farmers don't use high-tech equipment. So how can they be struggling to repair it?
Looks like another example of how _some_ of Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas, such as those in Worlds in Collision, were actually plausible and scientifically interesting, at least at a basic level. It's too bad he felt it was necessary to sabotage himself by compressing all of his ideas together into an implausibly complex series of events taking place over an implausibly short timeline in order to make a kind of historical conspiracy theory.
I still suspect the reviewers were bribed somehow, or perhaps tested the game before it got radically dumbed down, just before release?
I think the glowing reviews of Civ5 are explainable without resorting to bribery or shenanigans by the developer as the cause.
I am a long term but relatively moderate Civ player. I've been playing since the first Civilization and have played all of them since then. Including Civilization: Call to Power and Call to Power 2, plus Alpha Centauri. And all of the Master of Orion games (including 3, regrettably) Master of Magic, and GalCiv and GalCiv2.
I am not an expert however. I can't beat any of them at the highest difficulty settings, with the exceptions of the original MoO, mainly due to Sulla's recaps and videos.
When the initial Civ5 news stories came out i was wary about how the one unit per tile thing would work, however when i first got the game i have to admit i quite liked it. It was simple and easy to get into and it was very pretty. And i've always liked one city challenges, it it made those really easy!
It took time to realize that perhaps it made one city challenges _too_ easy, and did so at the cost of making other styles of play (anything involving more than three or four cities) prohibitively difficult/unrewarding. Doing the tactical combat was kind of fun at first, it took a little while for the problems with the combat to become more clear. I did notice the dearth of interesting buildings and how long they took to complete much earlier, but i didn't really make the connection to 1UPT until it was pointed out by Sulla and others. I'm sure those problems were immediately apparent to the real experts, but for the rest of us it took a little while.
Reviewers generally don't have that much time to invest in playing a game for review. They saw the pretty and got to experience the first dozen or so hours where it was fun and easy, but with enough choices available that it seemed to present the kind of strategic depth that would allow for a great deal of replay. They never got to the point of realizing that most games end up being the initial rush to build your first two or three cities and then just sitting back and hitting "next turn" a lot.
So they gave their reviews and left it to the Civ community to do the in-depth analysis and rip it a new one.
But those initial reviews were probably correct for a lot of people. Civ5 _is_ a great game for people who want to put in a few dozen hours without facing a serious challenge and then move on to the next game. Or people who like dumping in a lot of time into a game that's at least moderately entertaining in order to pick up achievements. (I confess that i got sucked into that for longer than i should have.)
That's incorrect. The A-Team were Social Justice Warriors. MacGuyver was a Social Justice Engineer.
Uh, backing down when threatened with violence does not make one like a troll. It might be cowardly or it might be sensible, but it certainly isn't troll-like. It's the people who _threaten_ violence who are usually the trolls, since they don't have valid arguments to back up their stance.
Someone threatening violence if a debate takes place isn't "things getting interesting", it's someone trying to shut down a debate they can't win within the context of the debate.
Most sensible geeks get incensed when the government passes a law about "Doing X, but on a computer/the internet" or when a company tries to patent "Doing X, but on a computer/the internet". We quite rightly point out that there are already laws or patents covering the same thing and doing it on a computer or the internet doesn't make it magically special.
Well this is part of why the government sometimes keeps trying to pass "Doing X, but on the internet" laws. Because some jerk is always willing to try getting away with something and then when they get caught argue "but it was on the internet, so it doesn't count!"
Andy taught him about gaming by making him play and master all of the old video games and gaming systems in the exact order they were actually released.
Part of that sentence is definitely wrong and part of it is definitely misleading. Because he skipped straight from the Atari 2600 to the NES, and then to the Super NES, and then to the N64. No Coleco, no Genesis, etc. So not all the consoles, and from what i can tell not even all the games for each console. And i can't see any indication that they're being played strictly in order either.
So it's a heavily curated list of games, which is a good thing because the full list would be impossible to do, and it seems to be in strict chronological order in terms of consoles but only vague order within each generation.
This from Jason Cornwell, who decided to "allow" us to write shorter emails by "allowing" us to use a tiny little non-resizable compose window in Gmail.
Okay, that's not 100% true. You can switch to "full-screen" mode, which enlarges it to a size that is neither all of the screen nor even just all of the window. But it does "kindly" grey out all the GUI elements that the "full-screen" window isn't covering up and disallows you from interacting with them without minimizing the window.
But i guess it make senses. If he can just make Gmail unappealing enough then of course we'll all switch to Inbox, right?
*sigh* Someone doesn't understand the Singularity theory. Based on the title i'm guessing it's the professor, but since i can't actually read the article at work it's possible it's the Slashdot editor who conflated lack of AI with lack of Singularity.
The basic premise of the Singularity is that over historic time periods the rate of knowledge acquisition of the human race has increased at a geometric rate.
The reason this has happened is because acquiring knowledge allows us to develop tools that allows us to build upon the pre-existing knowledge to make new discovers that allow better tools, and so on. (Although it's far from a perfect simulation, anyone who's ever played Civilization or any similar strategy game should know that process by heart.)
There are two possible outcomes to this progression, either we hit some rate limiting factor sometime in the "near" future, or the rate of knowledge acquisition over time will approach a mathematical singularity, at which point we will be discovering things so fast that our current minds can not comprehend what will happen. Obviously proponents of the Singularity believe that it is the second possibility that will happen.
However the theory of the Singularity makes no prescriptions about _how_ we will obtain that rate of knowledge. Certainly Artificial Intelligence is one such way. However direct augmentation of our brains is another possibility. Whether that will be via cybernetic implants, biomedical alterations, genetic tinkering, or something else we haven't, and possibly can't, think of is impossible to say at this point.
Up until now of course tools have allowed us to indirectly augment out brains. Writing lets us record information. The internet lets us retrieve information. Now Watson helps us interpret that information. Yes Watson isn't doing anything, Watson is just a tool we use. But tools that help us accomplish things we couldn't before are exactly what moves us along the path towards the Singularity.
As has been pointed out, there was just recently news about replicating a worm's mind in a mechanical body. Yes it's very interesting, but no, it isn't a perfect recreation of an actual brain. But maybe when that paper gets scanned into Watson 2.0 it will make some connection to some other paper on artificial neurons or some such and Watson will let the authors know that they really ought to talk to each other. And boom, we're suddenly creating real artificial minds. Or maybe something else happens. The whole point is we don't know what the next step will be, we're just observing a trend.
If you want to argue against the Singularity you can't just pick a hole in the prospects for AI. You need to explain why the current trend in knowledge acquisition won't continue.
So sarcasm aside, it sounds like you're annoyed that people got diverted from talking about the science to discuss the politics of a shirt? In fact you were so concerned about the issue you decided to write a post diverting us from talking about the science to discuss the politics of discussing the politics of a shirt. After all, it's of dire importance we raise awareness about people trying to raise awareness about the shirt since none of the people complaining about it were kind enough to complain about it here first where we would be aware of it.
Well speech is free, and it's not like we can't discuss both issues (or all three issues?) And I am glad you care enough about justice in these kinds of social issues to fight for your beliefs!
Sand has a lot of uses but it's non-renewable. There's no way (yet) to manufacture it. If you mine the beaches you ruin the environment and end up with eyesores. The same thing happens if you go to your local desert and mine there. It is possible to strip mine a desert, take all the sand and sandstone, and then put a layer of sand back on top. That leaves the landscape looking mostly the same, albeit a bit lower in elevation than it was before, but it takes a _lot_ of work. I've heard of people doing massive underwater operations to strip mine the seabed of sand so that none of the easily visible above-water environments are damaged.
...wait, we are talking about Minecraft, right?
Saying "if X were [easier/better/safer/whatever] we would already be doing X" is vastly overestimating human intelligence and insightfulness. We often fail to recognize the true value of certain inventions or techniques until well after their invention, and often choose to use non-optimal methods for what seemed like good reasons at the time.
A tongue-in-cheek but still insightful article about the subject (#1 and #3 are particularly relevant to this discussion.)
http://www.cracked.com/article...
In the experiment, physicists slammed a beam of high-energy electrons, left over from other experiments, into an aluminum target to see what would come out.
Let's all share! What do _you_ do with all those left over high-energy electrons you've always got lying around?
"You might think that mice and rats would be basically the same when it comes to these kinds of things" [About training the two species]
It doesn't seem like it makes much sense to believe that rats and mice are different enough for one species to be measurably smarter than the other, but not to also believe that they're different enough to have different behavior patterns and responses to various stimuli.
Please don't take this wrong, but i took a quick look at your comment history and between that and what you've posted here you're sounding an awful lot like a friend i used to know. At first i thought she was just a little odd, but it turned out that she actually had some serious problems and some pretty bad stuff ended up happening because of it. If you really believe the things you're saying i think you should really consider talking to someone. I expect you'd be resistant to the idea of going to a psychiatrist, but perhaps you have friends or family you can discuss these concerns with?
And if i'm just feeding a troll... oh well.
"A new prosthetic system allows amputees to feel familiar sensations and also, somewhat unexpectedly, reduces their phantom pain."
This seems like one of those things that people might very reasonably not think of ahead of time but which seems blindingly obvious in retrospect. It would probably be expected that if you managed to reattach a severed limb that there wouldn't be any phantom pain afterward. ("Real" pain during the healing process yes, and perhaps lingering aches as one might have with any injury, but not phantom pain.) You'd also expect the same to hold true if you managed to grow a new arm and attach it properly.
But a simple prosthetic isn't enough to prevent or cure phantom pain. So one would expect that at _some_ point in the process between no nerve connections with a peg leg (or equivalent) and full connection with a regrown/reattached limb that the phantom pain would disappear. I guess they just encountered that point earlier than they might have expected.
You originally said "And children tend to do much better with two parents actively involved in raising them to adulthood, everything else equal." and "I would suggest that children should be a choice made by a man, and a woman together in mutual agreement whenever possible."
When it was pointed out that two women or two men could be the two parents who are actively involved in raising the children, your argument gradually morphed into "Lesbians have no ability to relate to male children in a way a dad can. Gay dads have no ability to relate to girls on their period for the first time."
This is called "moving the goalposts."
(And as an aside, you also said "THIS is sociological issues, and while not unique to Gay / Lesbian couples, affects all of them." Which is entirely untrue. Some gay couples have only male children, and some lesbian couples have only female children. And given the way in which such couples have children it is even pretty trivial to choose the genders of their children if they wish. I'm not saying they should, just that your argument that it affects "all of them" is totally unfounded.")
However to address those shifty goalposts, as far as i can tell you are basing this argument entirely on personal experience. I'm sorry if you felt your childhood was less than ideal because you didn't have a male role model, but that doesn't apply to everyone else.
I'm male and i definitely related far more closely to my mother than i did to my father, perhaps because my dad spent so much time at work. (He spent plenty of time with us during the periods when he was home so it's not like we felt neglected. I was quite happy with my childhood and as far as i know the same is true of my sister. However there's no denying that having to work to support your family means spending less time with that family.) My sister on the other hand was always arguing with my mom (and our mom told us that she always argued with her mom, and her mom told her that...) so it always seemed to me that she related much more to our dad.
Meanwhile i can't really tell any substantive differences between the son of my lesbian friends and the son of my heterosexual sister and brother-in-law. The first likes sports and video games. The second, last i checked, was into monster trucks and princesses. They're both _far_ more rambunctious than i remember being as a child (though clearly there could be some bias/rose colored glasses there) and both seem quite happy and well adjusted.
Maybe some differences will appear once they reach puberty, but i never had the "birds and the bees" talk with either of my parents. I learned all that stuff from sex ed classes at school and the internet, so i don't see why having a parent of the "appropriate" gender really matters. I honestly don't think it would have made a difference if both my parents had been women. Perhaps a girl would feel differently about having two male parents, but i can't really say anything in regards to that.
You say you think children deserve what's "best". How is not being born at all better than being born to parents of the "wrong" gender? Do you think any woman in a same-sex relationship who gets pregnant ought to immediately go get in abortion?
In short, everything i've observed has shown me that actual children of actual same sex couples can be just as happy and well adjusted as the actual children of actual heterosexual couples. That certainly isn't "proof", but it seems to me that it is a far more compelling argument than your theoretical opinions about people that you don't seem to have any actual experience with.