I'd think it is much more about religiously beleifs of the early American settlers. Plenty of cultlures, both ancient and modern, have been much more relaxed about portraying sex than the USA. Plenty are still around, so it doesn't seem to be a trait promoting survival/reproduction which would make it Darwinian.
That doesn't mean that adultary or the like is more socially accepted there.
Casualties have got bigger because populations and wars have got bigger.
However, none of the things you list are new. Many of the casualties in WWII were not in fighting, but military forces massacring civilians. That is isn't new, it has been around as long as human history.
During Hannibal's fighting against Rome, in some battles Roman soldiers were being killed more quickly than British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme. All they had were pointed bits of metal.
A more disciplined, technological force inflicting huge casualties on a numerically superior foe isn't new. The Romans did that a lot. Before there was the gun humans still happily killed each other, sometimes wiping out whole rival civilisations.
None of this is new, but the scale has increased, up until WWII (although I don't think in this context conflating holocaust victims with war casualties make sense). Since then though, the scale has been smaller, there has been a lot of effort to develop more accurate technologies to reduce civilian casualties. There will, of course, always be civilian casualties and the cost of war should always be carefully considered.
However, war will always happen. So what do you do, give you soldiers and your side the best possible chance of survival with equipment like this, or send them into battle without it, knowing some are going to die needlessly, but thinking "hey, at least people back home will appreciate the cost of war now"?
That isn't very relevant to losing the war polically. That is when the populace of the country waging the war are sufficiently anti-war that the politicians have to bring it to an end. The classic example is Vietnam, the US inflicted far more casulties than it suffered, but the war became so unpopular in the US they had to pull out.
Unless the rest of the world can put enough political pressure on the US to make it change it's mind, historically almost impossible, it doesn't matter what the rest of world thinks in terms of losing the war polically.
Things like remote soldiers are aiming to cut down on US casulties, and so help ease that pressure back home.
The sort of planning and cunning you are talking about is at a strategic level. The robots are operating at a tactical level.
The ability to plan a good air defense system, or come up with the idea of dropping a dead guy in the water near the coast with fake plans, isn't relevant when knocking down the door of a building that may be filled with armed opposition.
Asimov just wanted to write Sci-Fi stories that avoid the cliche of square jawed human heros blow away evil robots (the irony of the I Robot film). So he came up with the laws. They also let him write neat logical puzzle type stories where the laws lead to uninteaded consequences, including the robots sometimes doing 'bad' things.
The laws were created as a dramatic and plot device. I'm sure he had plent of concept of human history and where technological inovation came from, but he was writing about his own fictional world.
China's affairs are their own. Everyone dies - even dynasties. Let them take the best from western culture and evolve their own ideals about liberty and freedom.
Right, so we should just let them get on with torturing and persecuting people, because it is happening in another country?
I don't think we should cut China off, carrot and stick with trade may be one of the best ways to get them to improve their human rights record.
As for trade and the middle class, I'm not sure its mere existence will accomplish anything. Financially comfortable people under a totalitarian regime may be more willing to put up with the political oppression. Plus trade and capitalism don't necessarily lead to it, they can equally well lead to just a few very wealth people.
The point isn't that MRI tells you lying is harder than telling the truth, the point is that lying is measurably harder than telling the truth. The MRI can measure for a specific person saying a specific thing if they are lying.
Originally Caesar was Julius Caesar's name, nothing more. It was later taken by his grand-nephew, Octavius the first Emperor, and later became a title.
You seem to be thinking of Consuls, the highest executive office in the Roman republic. The Caesers after Julius where Emperors, and ruled an empire, not a replublic.
Just because a private industry could do something doesn't mean it will. Or it will provide it for everyone, or at a low enough cost.
The free market (which is never really free as in an economic textbook, because it relies on some assumptions not true in real life) isn't a panacea. It may not be profitable for anyone to provide connections to some people, but it is still desirable that people have connections.
Even worse, there may be only one provider someone could use (that not really free market). Government getting involved isn't automatically a mistake or bad thing, although it should have careful consideration.
Most economist accept that the private sector fails to provide some goods and services (merit goods and public goods). The debate is exactly what falls into those categories, and that can change over time with the market and technology.
So, from the economic standpoint, there are some areas of business the governemnt is "supposed" to be going into, where the private sector won't supply at all, enough or at the right price, or consumers won't buy despite it being in their own interest and the public good.
From the politcal side, if a government is a democracy, they were clear when they were elected they were going to get into a certain business, and they go elected, they should be getting into it. Will of the people and all that.
Blanket statements like "the government is not supposed to be going into business" don't mean a whole lot.
Re:Betamax gets the last laugh
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Try cleaning your DVD player. If that doesn't help and brand new discs still skip, try replacing it.
I guess you don't watch VHS either, since that mostly gives you less. OK, you have to go through the intro on some DVDs (with some players), but the best you can do on VHS is fast forward through stuff at the begining, which isn't instant.
Beyond that DVDs give you way more control than VHS does. I don't care about digital or analog as such myself, but I do care about image and sound quality and DVD is so far ahead of VHS it isn't funny.
clearly the result of some TV exec saying, "I know, let's mix genres and we'll have something new and fresh!"
I love it when people say "clearly" something or other is true when they are flat out wrong. Joss Whedon, the series creator, has talked several times about the origins of Firefly and why he went for western in space.
I hoped it would stay true to the ideas of the stories. Not be another generic action movie with bad robots and the cliches that Asimov was trying to avoid.
Not much, but are there any 40GB storage players which do that? I've got the iRiver 40GB and it does about 14 hours with vbr MP3 and OGG.
That's plenty for me to listen to it in the car, at work, in the gym and in the car again. Then charge up over night.
Plus, don't have to carry disks around. I guess if you have a smaller collection and spend long periods of time where you can't ge the mains (like camping or something) the new mini-discs would have more appeal.
And I think that this idea that the only way to make sure a country isn't going to stab us in the back is to make sure it is a republic comes straight out of a 15 years obsolete line of thinking that says that anything that isn't a democracy is going to be much more vulnerable to falling into the USSR's camp.
The thinking seemed to be that what you really wanted was a good old fascist dictatorship. The US was more than happy to help destabilse democratic socialist governments, or ally with fascist regimes that overthrew them (e.g. Iran, Argentina, Chile).
Re:I do not pay much attention to Joel Spolsky
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 1
Trust me, people such as Linus, Larry Wall, and Tim O'Reilly are damned smart.
Just becuase some smart people adopted Linux early does not mean adopting Linux early is a sign of being smart. I mean, I assume you adopted Linux early, but you include such an obvious logical fallacy as this, so right now I'm not impressed with your smarts. Unless your a troll, in which case it was well done.
And if you think that Windows has a future (as Joel apparently does), then you are probably an idiot.
If you think it doesn't you are living in a fantasy. Even if Linux is very succesful, it isn't going to make windows go away. Linux will be doing very well to be in competition on the desktop, which is still light years from Windows vanishing.
Indeed, if you think that Windows has a future, then why are you reading and posting to Slashdot at all?
Maybe becuase Slashdot has lots of non-OS related stuf? Maybe becuase while there are some Slashdotters who are rabidly anti-MS, it isn't a hive mind? Maybe quite a few windows users and coders also post here?
You do know they are only banned in state schools, right? And only girls wear them? Just how much damage do you think these French Muslim schoolgirls are going to do?
The U.S. government worked with Saddam to keep Iran, a rabidly anti-U.S. country, from becoming too powerful.
And why was Iran rabidly anti-US? Perhaps becuase the US had backed the Shah's brutal regime after it had helped overthrow the elected government? This isn't meant as anti-US, I'm from the UK and the UK helped too.
For the sake of expediency the US has allied itself with brutal regimes in South America, the Middle East and Asia. The legacy of this is the people who suffered (and still suffer) under such regiems don't think kindly of the US and certainly don't beleive claims it is interestead in protecting anything outside it's own interests. When the regiems topple, the replacements are often made up of their previous victims.
If your relatives were tortured and killed by people who came into power through a US supported coup of an elected government, would you think kindly of the US? Or maybe your country has never been free, and the US helps to keep it that way becuase the current governemnt supports it, support the US then?
The US currently supports countries like Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia (a country with morality police), governments deeply unpopular with their people. You think this isn't going to come around and cause them problems in the future?
Sometimes you do have to choose the lesser of two evils, but I fear that governments (not just the US) seldom factor in the future cost of such things and the cost to be paid later.
Stuff like similar pyramids in Egypt and South America
That's becuase if you are going to build a big structure with stone the best way is make it wider at the bottom.
It's like saying people on different continents built houses, so they must have come from the same culture. This isn't from the fringes of science, it's from the bookstore. The nearest it comes to creadability was when they swiped the idea for the AvP film.
I did hear some interesting theories, apparently based on DNA studies of indigenous people on islands of the cost of South America and some archeological finds, that the first peoples to settle in the americas were not the people now know as native amaericans.
They were nergoid rather then mogoloid, and thought to have come across the sea rather than the land bridge. The theory went that the Native American's ancestors had gone south and driven out and killed the first wave on inhabitants, a few of whom survied on the islands.
I don't know enough about archeology to have an informed opinion on how likely it is, but it was interesting. Certainly more plausable than the supposed wacky white "mound builder" culture ideas.
That data can then be turned into invoices and sent to ISP's and their customers.
Isn't that going to require it to be very accurate at identifying song? Particularly not getting false poisitives, and sending a bill when no download occured?
I've not heard of any song identifying technology that is close to accurate enough to this. As I said in another post I've used MusicBrainz and that isn't close.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely Darwinian?
I'd think it is much more about religiously beleifs of the early American settlers. Plenty of cultlures, both ancient and modern, have been much more relaxed about portraying sex than the USA. Plenty are still around, so it doesn't seem to be a trait promoting survival/reproduction which would make it Darwinian.
That doesn't mean that adultary or the like is more socially accepted there.
No, it has a new set of drawbacks that imperfect filters stop people getting information on, say, health issues, or places with names like Middlesex.
A large problem with filters is how badly they work.
Casualties have got bigger because populations and wars have got bigger.
However, none of the things you list are new. Many of the casualties in WWII were not in fighting, but military forces massacring civilians. That is isn't new, it has been around as long as human history.
During Hannibal's fighting against Rome, in some battles Roman soldiers were being killed more quickly than British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme. All they had were pointed bits of metal.
A more disciplined, technological force inflicting huge casualties on a numerically superior foe isn't new. The Romans did that a lot. Before there was the gun humans still happily killed each other, sometimes wiping out whole rival civilisations.
None of this is new, but the scale has increased, up until WWII (although I don't think in this context conflating holocaust victims with war casualties make sense). Since then though, the scale has been smaller, there has been a lot of effort to develop more accurate technologies to reduce civilian casualties. There will, of course, always be civilian casualties and the cost of war should always be carefully considered.
However, war will always happen. So what do you do, give you soldiers and your side the best possible chance of survival with equipment like this, or send them into battle without it, knowing some are going to die needlessly, but thinking "hey, at least people back home will appreciate the cost of war now"?
That isn't very relevant to losing the war polically. That is when the populace of the country waging the war are sufficiently anti-war that the politicians have to bring it to an end. The classic example is Vietnam, the US inflicted far more casulties than it suffered, but the war became so unpopular in the US they had to pull out.
Unless the rest of the world can put enough political pressure on the US to make it change it's mind, historically almost impossible, it doesn't matter what the rest of world thinks in terms of losing the war polically.
Things like remote soldiers are aiming to cut down on US casulties, and so help ease that pressure back home.
The sort of planning and cunning you are talking about is at a strategic level. The robots are operating at a tactical level.
The ability to plan a good air defense system, or come up with the idea of dropping a dead guy in the water near the coast with fake plans, isn't relevant when knocking down the door of a building that may be filled with armed opposition.
Asimov just wanted to write Sci-Fi stories that avoid the cliche of square jawed human heros blow away evil robots (the irony of the I Robot film). So he came up with the laws. They also let him write neat logical puzzle type stories where the laws lead to uninteaded consequences, including the robots sometimes doing 'bad' things.
The laws were created as a dramatic and plot device. I'm sure he had plent of concept of human history and where technological inovation came from, but he was writing about his own fictional world.
China's affairs are their own. Everyone dies - even dynasties. Let them take the best from western culture and evolve their own ideals about liberty and freedom.
Right, so we should just let them get on with torturing and persecuting people, because it is happening in another country?
I don't think we should cut China off, carrot and stick with trade may be one of the best ways to get them to improve their human rights record.
As for trade and the middle class, I'm not sure its mere existence will accomplish anything. Financially comfortable people under a totalitarian regime may be more willing to put up with the political oppression. Plus trade and capitalism don't necessarily lead to it, they can equally well lead to just a few very wealth people.
The point isn't that MRI tells you lying is harder than telling the truth, the point is that lying is measurably harder than telling the truth. The MRI can measure for a specific person saying a specific thing if they are lying.
It's funny to read that old thread, all the people prediciting how it wouldn't succeed.
Good thing nobody takes business advice from Slashdot.
You're a little of base there.
Originally Caesar was Julius Caesar's name, nothing more. It was later taken by his grand-nephew, Octavius the first Emperor, and later became a title.
This Wikipedia article has some info.
You seem to be thinking of Consuls, the highest executive office in the Roman republic. The Caesers after Julius where Emperors, and ruled an empire, not a replublic.
Just because a private industry could do something doesn't mean it will. Or it will provide it for everyone, or at a low enough cost.
The free market (which is never really free as in an economic textbook, because it relies on some assumptions not true in real life) isn't a panacea. It may not be profitable for anyone to provide connections to some people, but it is still desirable that people have connections.
Even worse, there may be only one provider someone could use (that not really free market). Government getting involved isn't automatically a mistake or bad thing, although it should have careful consideration.
Supposed to according to whom? Libertarians?
Most economist accept that the private sector fails to provide some goods and services (merit goods and public goods). The debate is exactly what falls into those categories, and that can change over time with the market and technology.
So, from the economic standpoint, there are some areas of business the governemnt is "supposed" to be going into, where the private sector won't supply at all, enough or at the right price, or consumers won't buy despite it being in their own interest and the public good.
From the politcal side, if a government is a democracy, they were clear when they were elected they were going to get into a certain business, and they go elected, they should be getting into it. Will of the people and all that.
Blanket statements like "the government is not supposed to be going into business" don't mean a whole lot.
Try cleaning your DVD player. If that doesn't help and brand new discs still skip, try replacing it.
Your experience is pretty atypical.
I guess you don't watch VHS either, since that mostly gives you less. OK, you have to go through the intro on some DVDs (with some players), but the best you can do on VHS is fast forward through stuff at the begining, which isn't instant.
Beyond that DVDs give you way more control than VHS does. I don't care about digital or analog as such myself, but I do care about image and sound quality and DVD is so far ahead of VHS it isn't funny.
clearly the result of some TV exec saying, "I know, let's mix genres and we'll have something new and fresh!"
I love it when people say "clearly" something or other is true when they are flat out wrong. Joss Whedon, the series creator, has talked several times about the origins of Firefly and why he went for western in space.
I hoped it would stay true to the ideas of the stories. Not be another generic action movie with bad robots and the cliches that Asimov was trying to avoid.
I find Google very useful, I don't want it made less useful becuase of some stupid lawsuit.
Not much, but are there any 40GB storage players which do that? I've got the iRiver 40GB and it does about 14 hours with vbr MP3 and OGG.
That's plenty for me to listen to it in the car, at work, in the gym and in the car again. Then charge up over night.
Plus, don't have to carry disks around. I guess if you have a smaller collection and spend long periods of time where you can't ge the mains (like camping or something) the new mini-discs would have more appeal.
And I think that this idea that the only way to make sure a country isn't going to stab us in the back is to make sure it is a republic comes straight out of a 15 years obsolete line of thinking that says that anything that isn't a democracy is going to be much more vulnerable to falling into the USSR's camp.
The thinking seemed to be that what you really wanted was a good old fascist dictatorship. The US was more than happy to help destabilse democratic socialist governments, or ally with fascist regimes that overthrew them (e.g. Iran, Argentina, Chile).
Trust me, people such as Linus, Larry Wall, and Tim O'Reilly are damned smart.
Just becuase some smart people adopted Linux early does not mean adopting Linux early is a sign of being smart. I mean, I assume you adopted Linux early, but you include such an obvious logical fallacy as this, so right now I'm not impressed with your smarts. Unless your a troll, in which case it was well done.
And if you think that Windows has a future (as Joel apparently does), then you are probably an idiot.
If you think it doesn't you are living in a fantasy. Even if Linux is very succesful, it isn't going to make windows go away. Linux will be doing very well to be in competition on the desktop, which is still light years from Windows vanishing.
Indeed, if you think that Windows has a future, then why are you reading and posting to Slashdot at all?
Maybe becuase Slashdot has lots of non-OS related stuf? Maybe becuase while there are some Slashdotters who are rabidly anti-MS, it isn't a hive mind? Maybe quite a few windows users and coders also post here?
You do know they are only banned in state schools, right? And only girls wear them? Just how much damage do you think these French Muslim schoolgirls are going to do?
The U.S. government worked with Saddam to keep Iran, a rabidly anti-U.S. country, from becoming too powerful.
And why was Iran rabidly anti-US? Perhaps becuase the US had backed the Shah's brutal regime after it had helped overthrow the elected government? This isn't meant as anti-US, I'm from the UK and the UK helped too.
For the sake of expediency the US has allied itself with brutal regimes in South America, the Middle East and Asia. The legacy of this is the people who suffered (and still suffer) under such regiems don't think kindly of the US and certainly don't beleive claims it is interestead in protecting anything outside it's own interests. When the regiems topple, the replacements are often made up of their previous victims.
If your relatives were tortured and killed by people who came into power through a US supported coup of an elected government, would you think kindly of the US? Or maybe your country has never been free, and the US helps to keep it that way becuase the current governemnt supports it, support the US then?
The US currently supports countries like Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia (a country with morality police), governments deeply unpopular with their people. You think this isn't going to come around and cause them problems in the future?
Sometimes you do have to choose the lesser of two evils, but I fear that governments (not just the US) seldom factor in the future cost of such things and the cost to be paid later.
Stuff like similar pyramids in Egypt and South America
That's becuase if you are going to build a big structure with stone the best way is make it wider at the bottom.
It's like saying people on different continents built houses, so they must have come from the same culture. This isn't from the fringes of science, it's from the bookstore. The nearest it comes to creadability was when they swiped the idea for the AvP film.
I did hear some interesting theories, apparently based on DNA studies of indigenous people on islands of the cost of South America and some archeological finds, that the first peoples to settle in the americas were not the people now know as native amaericans.
They were nergoid rather then mogoloid, and thought to have come across the sea rather than the land bridge. The theory went that the Native American's ancestors had gone south and driven out and killed the first wave on inhabitants, a few of whom survied on the islands.
I don't know enough about archeology to have an informed opinion on how likely it is, but it was interesting. Certainly more plausable than the supposed wacky white "mound builder" culture ideas.
That data can then be turned into invoices and sent to ISP's and their customers.
Isn't that going to require it to be very accurate at identifying song? Particularly not getting false poisitives, and sending a bill when no download occured?
I've not heard of any song identifying technology that is close to accurate enough to this. As I said in another post I've used MusicBrainz and that isn't close.