Thanks for the note on Löb's Theorem. Yes, this is why I can use the term "reason" correctly regarding issues of God. I'm not trying to prove God; that would necessarily involve me trying to prove myself, and would involve my theorem trying to prove itself.
Rather, I am applying reason to a set of givens (which include experiences I have had, and experiences recorded by others) and to proves (which in this case, is the question of what is human or not).
Not that my reasoning is perfect or infallible. But it's better than not trying to use reason at all.
It isn't just the community that defines what is right and wrong.
The Nazi community defined that Jews were subhuman.
Our community defined that barely-preborn or just-born children are subhuman (and we're about to do so again, via the FOCA).
There is a more absolute definition of right and wrong than that -- but I'm not allowed to say, or the thought-police censors known as "slashdot moderators" will tag me as flame bait, overrated, or some such.
Note that such censorship is not based on the value of the thinking that goes into the comment, but just based on their own gut reaction, because they don't like it. Oh, well.
Here goes -- Right and Wrong is defined by the one who created the entire system we live in. He has admin and ownership rights, and gets to define that. Our best interpretations of who he is, and what he has defined, come through our rational analysis of when we run into those rules, as well as our rational analysis of his direct interventions of the system. In my case, my rational analysis indicates a probability that the Christian Bible is correct. Others, with different data, or different levels of ability to reason, may conclude differently. But there is only one "right" answer, and some peoples' answers are going to be closer to the "right" answer than others.
So I'd say that the Christian Trinitarian God defines right and wrong. And he defines that there are no subhumans.
Of course, if you RTA, he didn't break the law. Moreover, he told Microsoft about the company and the patent in writing, possibly depending on the fact that such writing tends to get ignored.
Moreover, it appears that he allowed his company to lapse (but probably not the incorporation to lapse, since lawyers advise against it), and had basically shut it down due to a complete lack of profits.
Microsoft is trying to make it appear that he broke the law, to cover the fact that they really did break the law. They took his work, and used it without agreed-upon compensation. Now, I too do not hold patents to be natural law. They are only a construct of the current system that we are in, historically designed to profit powerful companies like Microsoft and other King's Friends. But they are a part of our current law, and Microsoft makes heavy use of them. And Microsoft did break the law, stealing his work without agreed-upon compensation, long before Mr. M. ever applied for employment there.
I'd say that this one needs to go for full damages. Possibly triple, if the jury concludes that Microsoft has a history of criminal and corrupt behavior (though that would be harder to prove.) Hmmm... I wonder if there could be a class-action lawsuit by those whose work was stolen (including GNU and WordPerfect and Apple and others) against Microsoft. Go through their code and show that the majority of their work was stolen.
Nah. That'd take an insider to prove it. And then Microsoft would scream bloody murder, even if they had themselves authorized the insider's access.
Nonsense. Humans have the advantage of endurance. Our aboriginals literally can run/walk prey to the point of fatigue, and then attack them when they're weak. Not too different than wolves. We are built to go long times at a moderately fast pace, as opposed to short times at a super fast pace.
The article is simply noting that there is a difference between known risks and unknown risks, and not all risks that we classify as "known" are actually known.
Let me give you a prime example that my brother ran into as he was working towards a PhD in Atomic Physics, which is quite ironic.
When you combine data sets in order to get averages, standard deviations, and the like, there is one set of equations that you should use if you know the size of each data set.
There is entirely a different set of equations that you should use, if you *don't* know the size of each data set.
Typically, only the second of these is published as "the rule for combining data sets", probably because the first case is trivial. But because only the second of these is published, often researchers combine data sets of known size using the wrong set of equations. There errors typically aren't all that large (though they can be). That was where my brother ran into the problem, chasing down errors that shouldn't have shown up.
Right there is a risk that is classified as known, which is actually unknown.
Now, the original article is claiming that we are ignoring secondary probabilities of error. For numerical calculations, that is quite normal, since the magnitude of r^2 is much less than the magnitude of r, for small r. But for theoretical conclusions, it is not always valid. Sometimes very distinct features are brought out by the 2nd-order calculations (such as the charge/mass ratio of a unitary spin black hole).
Indeed, the fact that we are ignoring this, is itself an error in theory.
It was similar flaws in theory that led to launching the Challenger (first order approximation: we haven't lost a shuttle yet, therefore it is safe.) Not only that, but the problem is endemic with government-sponsored research. LHC is government-sponsored. Therefore, my own first-order approximation is that the LHC is subject to the same flaws in groupthink as NASA.
Wrong. Almost all countries have extremely restrictive immigration and labor laws.
The net effect of this is to allow free trade for corporations, while restricting trade for laborers, thus transferring wealth from laborers to corporations (from the poor/weak to the rich/powerful members of the societies).
First, let me note that I have read the book, and I take exception to some of the things in the book. I'll throw my exceptions at the end, for those who don't want to bother with them.
You seem to be comparing Michael Dell to John Galt, or the two or three other main characters (president of the railroad, president of the copper company... I don't remember.)
You forget that there were more character sketches in the book than those three.
There were those who ran companies, but were all the time on the dole of one kind or another, or who did not pay their workers justly, or who did not pay attention to how they were doing a job. Those people were taken for fraud by the president of the copper company (who was simply doing his best to destroy their wealth), and were in turn defrauding their governments.
Now, I would contend that in the current environment of the last 50 years in the US, that almost all successful corporations (and definitely their CEOs) fall into the latter category, not the first. Michael Dell claims that he earned what he has. I would disagree. If you start looking at his employees, and start seeing the value that they put into the company, and the value that they got out, I think you will quickly discover that Dell did not earn what he has. He simply justifies having what he has.
There is a big difference, because Value Recieved = Value Produced + Value Taken from Others. Most interactions involve trading, and most trading outrageously benefits the more powerful party.
Now, you can throw into the equation the amount of money "earned" from government contracts -- all of that money is stolen money, according to Atlas Shrugged. Now, some would claim that "tax zeroing" would not be stolen money (taking contracts that equal the loss on taxes paid out). However, that ignores the value recieved from the government in terms of protection recieved. Most of the costs of government go to protection in one form or another, and the value of that goes not to producers (income earners), but to owners. So almost all taxes, if paid in contract fee-for-service, would actually be paid by owners. Michael Dell is an owner, much more than a producer.
And so on.
- - - - - -Review of Ayn Rand Below - - - - - -
Now, I read Atlas Shrugged, because someone called me a John Galt. To some extent, they were right. I found it impossible, for a time, to work with society, so I internalized my efforts. After a time, I again found it possible, and returned my efforts to working within society.
Now... my opinion on Ayn Rand, is that she was a Communist Agent Provacateur. That is, she was attempting to get the nobility of America to crush the poor, enough that it would stimulate a Red Oktober type event.
I say this, because her philosophy ignored enough factors, that it was actually aimed in that direction. If you compare her work to that of Friederich Hayak, she willfully ignores everything in terms of JUSTICE (not social justice) to the weak, that she actually is advocating a situation that Hayak deplores.
Then, if you look at her personal relationships, you see that she is not for justice in that sense, either. Her morals, if anything, seem to match those of communists and spies. Her writing matches.
Which is, in turn, another problem that I have with Atlas Shrugged. She is a dirty writer, and I don't feel cleaner after I have read her work. Nor do I feel intellectually stimulated. Her philosophy, as I said before, is full of holes. I prefer Hayak, personally.
So as far as reading Atlas Shrugged, I don't advise it for others.
Actually, I rather suspect that society is destroyed by competition, not built by it. The competition is supposed to eliminate that which is no longer needed, in one of the least painful ways possible. In other words, a kinder, gentler destruction.
But if you take it too far, then everything gets destroyed at once by competition. Take Rwanda or Bosnia, for example. That's the Darwinist Religion at its worst.
But to get something like Amazon-dot-com going, it took people working together while the payoff was still questionable. That's co-operation.
Just wanted to keep our definitions clear. It's easier to navigate social interactions when language is well-defined.
... this is an appropriate time for a class-action lawsuit. Such a lawsuit could also entail discovery of the number of people who demanded their data be deleted... and for whom that was not done.
Just a point... have you ever returned your CFL lightbulbs for warranty replacement? Umm... and did you make sure to follow the postal regulations for shipping hazardous materials?
Did you make sure to get the Circuit City Extended Warranty for your Christmas gifts?
Did you make sure to check whether Circuit City was even there this month?
So unlocking the iPhone invalidates a bunch of nonsense that is only worth whatever the company wants it to be worth, later, minus whatever penalty they want to apply to you, to "discourage frivoulous complaints"...
And you still have a problem with invalidating a warranty?
Sure, if you define "fun" as "a smooth learning curve", then you can make fun games automatically.
But not all of the fun is in the learning. Some fun is in tweaking humor. Some fun is in triggering a person's likes and dislikes (Nethack, ponies). Some fun is created by changing the venue (is it a space game? a historical shoot-em-up? A politics game?
Yes, there are underlying patterns to a lot of games. But simply limiting our definition of "fun" to "learning" and "follows the pattern" reminds me of the automatic novel generations in Orwell's 1984.
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
I work for a fortune-500 concrete company. I have a coworker who had worked in Accounting/Management with just a high-school education. He applied for a job here, and got one in the QC department. They took him over to the cylinder break machine, showed him how it worked, and asked him to start doing break tests.
He said "no."
They said, "I'm sorry, is there a problem?"
He said "there are thinkers, and there are drones. You want me to be a drone. I'm a thinker."
So they said, "just a second", and immediately moved him to management.
Say what?
It was entirely based on that personality test of refusing to work that they moved him to management -- that, combined with his basic acknowledgement of a 2-class system, and his claim that he was in the upper class.
I'm going to point this out: from what I have seen, this story is typical of economies worldwide.
World Stock Markets, FALL! FALL FAR! KEEP GOING! GO AWAY!
You are also forgetting that we are living in the bursting of the largest credit bubble in human history. So every dollar taken in taxes right now is *not* an additional expenditure now.
Rather, every dollar taken in taxes right now is a dollar that will not be spent in a different way, now.
Now, where that is nonapplicable, is in the fact that a lot of dollars are spent in "investment", and those dollars are evaporating at an amazing rate. In other words, if you leave the dollars with the rich, then they will disappear with no net benefit at all. On the other hand, redistributing them to new jobs gives a current net benefit.
But unfortunately, dollars spent in electronics basically are the easiest for the rich to cull from. Almost as easy is dollars spent in construction contracts (or any contracts). If you really want to stimulate the economy, you have to spend the dollars directly to the wages (that is, massive government hiring).
But all that is neither here nor there. Any number of theories about what *should* be done have nothing to do with what *will* happen.
Isn't "Consensus in the field" just another algorithm? Or was that disproved by that mathematician, whassisname, Elsveir?
In real life, most academics get around the circularity problem by starting with a set of "known good" journals that are determined by consensus in the field rather than algorithms
Since you're talking about a senior citizen, sometimes it pays to consider their physical disabilities, too. For example, consider a large-screen TV/Monitor, if they have trouble seeing the small typefaces.
Consider using a large-keys keyboard (http://www.fentek-ind.com/bigkey.htm), if they have parkinsons, or other motor-control problems.
Might I make the point that the percentage freedom in a society is roughly inversely proportional to the amount that freedom is mentioned. Call it Nimdur's theorem, if nobody else can take the credit.
In Lithuania after 1990, there was very little mention of freedom, but it increased with each year's increase in the number of laws. I expect that they are very aware, by now, how free they are in the European Union, and how much freer they will be if Russia reconquers them.
I doubt if non-warlike aboriginal tribes even have a word for freedom (and yes, those do exist, though all modern governments are apparently agrarian/warlike).
Well, unless the $8/hr is an introductory rate (that is, the first 200 hrs are at $8.50, then after that you go up to $15 or $20/hr), you could do better by joining a construction site. At our place (prestress, precast concrete plant), we are paying warm bodies $10/hr.
Show that you can read drawings, and you can quickly rise up to $12-$14/hr. Which is, admittedly, a pittance, but if you live in a trailer home, you can make ends meet. Then you can still program in your spare time, and keep the rights to your work, to boot.
When I had a small business, we were contracted to produce study guides in MS Word for Mac 5.1a. The time came when professors were demanding files in Word 95, and our customers (a major publisher) were having trouble with file corruption. They asked us to handle it.
So we purchased the Word 95, and a full support contract, and verified that indeed, the files were being corrupted.
At that point, I got on the phone with my paid M$ support service, and they informed me that no, the files weren't being corrupted. I offered to send them copies of the files, so that they could do it themselves, and autopsy the change, and find the fix. They said no, they were not interested, thankyou for paying for support, but support does not include THIS kind of support.
Well, this problem continued through Word 98. It ended up costing us more than $11k, plus another $17k in contracts not awarded.
Then it came out that M$ had known all along that their files were being corrupted, and that it was Word95 that was doing it, and that they instructed their support people to deny that it was happening.
In so doing, they broke contract with the users. In that case, it was an explicit contract. In this case, it is an implied contract of usability, but even a warning notice does not eliminate liability for deliberate malfeasance.
In other words, if you buy a car with a leaking master brake cylinder that is ready to blow, and verify it, and then rent it for a day to someone who is unaware of the brakes, and say "well, sign this that if there is anything wrong with the engine, the windshield wipers, the brakes, or anything else, it is your problem..." you are still liable. You set them up and damaged them.
So I say that yes, M$ should be sued. Indeed, a smart lawyer would widen this to a class action lawsuit, and bring in the other case of Win95 file corruption (if it isn't now sunsetted) as a part of the same pattern of a corrupt organization. Then he'd go for a RICO case. He might get it.
The space elevator *does* reduce energy consumption over rockets, because rockets have to carry their source of thrust up to the level at which it is burned, causing an exponential growth in energy consumed.
The elevator eliminates the exponential growth in cost. The gravitational cost of lifting electricity is minimal.
The biggest benefit of the space fountain is the cost savings, which can be had when a company president discovers that he can purchase pellets that are 1/4 the mass for 1/8 the price. He carefully makes the purchase 4 yrs ahead of time. Then, based on the savings that he has generated for the company, he assigns himself a higher bonus...
Then, inspired by the thriftiness of their president, the accountants carefully cut the (now doubled) pellet order back to the usual quantity, before going on a well deserved vacation to bora bora.
A Profession is a teaching. Things like engineer, teacher, doctor... can all be professions.
A Career is a course of jobs, from one to another.
A Vocation is a calling, with specific reference to being a calling by God. Arguably, Mother Theresa had a calling, Pope John Paul II had a calling, Maximillian Kolbe had a calling.
It is a bad mistake to use the words Vocation and Career interchangeably. Vocations are things that, if missed by the recipient, badly damage their chance at salvation and holiness. Vocations are also things that are sometimes claimed by wolves in sheeps' clothing, to help them get more clothes, cheap -- whether the vocation is real, or just claimed, comes out eventually. Vocations shape your whole life, not just 8 hrs, 5 days a week.
My vocation, for example, is to work far below my education, in a concrete yard, and live in a trailer home, and help coworkers and fellow trailer-park residents, while quietly (not silently) evangelizing Christianity. My claim (you can believe it or not) is that I got here through direct directives from God in prayer, followed by events happening as He said they would. That includes Him telling me in the middle of prayer "get your stuff together, because I am moving you", followed by -- 3 minutes later -- a supervisor walking into sight, discussing with another supervisor, and then coming up, and asking me to come up to the office, where they moved me to another location.
Now, you can believe me or not -- but if I am lying, making claims like that is really going to backfire badly. If I am telling the truth, making claims like that won't. That's part and parcel with the nature of the word "vocation".
My career, though, would have been to be an aerospace engineer. Of course, that never got past the B.S. AE/OE. Careers are like that -- kindof random.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the note on Löb's Theorem. Yes, this is why I can use the term "reason" correctly regarding issues of God. I'm not trying to prove God; that would necessarily involve me trying to prove myself, and would involve my theorem trying to prove itself.
Rather, I am applying reason to a set of givens (which include experiences I have had, and experiences recorded by others) and to proves (which in this case, is the question of what is human or not).
Not that my reasoning is perfect or infallible. But it's better than not trying to use reason at all.
It isn't just the community that defines what is right and wrong.
The Nazi community defined that Jews were subhuman.
Our community defined that barely-preborn or just-born children are subhuman (and we're about to do so again, via the FOCA).
There is a more absolute definition of right and wrong than that -- but I'm not allowed to say, or the thought-police censors known as "slashdot moderators" will tag me as flame bait, overrated, or some such.
Note that such censorship is not based on the value of the thinking that goes into the comment, but just based on their own gut reaction, because they don't like it. Oh, well.
Here goes -- Right and Wrong is defined by the one who created the entire system we live in. He has admin and ownership rights, and gets to define that. Our best interpretations of who he is, and what he has defined, come through our rational analysis of when we run into those rules, as well as our rational analysis of his direct interventions of the system. In my case, my rational analysis indicates a probability that the Christian Bible is correct. Others, with different data, or different levels of ability to reason, may conclude differently. But there is only one "right" answer, and some peoples' answers are going to be closer to the "right" answer than others.
So I'd say that the Christian Trinitarian God defines right and wrong. And he defines that there are no subhumans.
Of course, if you RTA, he didn't break the law. Moreover, he told Microsoft about the company and the patent in writing, possibly depending on the fact that such writing tends to get ignored.
Moreover, it appears that he allowed his company to lapse (but probably not the incorporation to lapse, since lawyers advise against it), and had basically shut it down due to a complete lack of profits.
Microsoft is trying to make it appear that he broke the law, to cover the fact that they really did break the law. They took his work, and used it without agreed-upon compensation. Now, I too do not hold patents to be natural law. They are only a construct of the current system that we are in, historically designed to profit powerful companies like Microsoft and other King's Friends. But they are a part of our current law, and Microsoft makes heavy use of them. And Microsoft did break the law, stealing his work without agreed-upon compensation, long before Mr. M. ever applied for employment there.
I'd say that this one needs to go for full damages. Possibly triple, if the jury concludes that Microsoft has a history of criminal and corrupt behavior (though that would be harder to prove.) Hmmm... I wonder if there could be a class-action lawsuit by those whose work was stolen (including GNU and WordPerfect and Apple and others) against Microsoft. Go through their code and show that the majority of their work was stolen.
Nah. That'd take an insider to prove it. And then Microsoft would scream bloody murder, even if they had themselves authorized the insider's access.
Nonsense. Humans have the advantage of endurance. Our aboriginals literally can run/walk prey to the point of fatigue, and then attack them when they're weak. Not too different than wolves. We are built to go long times at a moderately fast pace, as opposed to short times at a super fast pace.
The article is simply noting that there is a difference between known risks and unknown risks, and not all risks that we classify as "known" are actually known.
Let me give you a prime example that my brother ran into as he was working towards a PhD in Atomic Physics, which is quite ironic.
When you combine data sets in order to get averages, standard deviations, and the like, there is one set of equations that you should use if you know the size of each data set.
There is entirely a different set of equations that you should use, if you *don't* know the size of each data set.
Typically, only the second of these is published as "the rule for combining data sets", probably because the first case is trivial. But because only the second of these is published, often researchers combine data sets of known size using the wrong set of equations. There errors typically aren't all that large (though they can be). That was where my brother ran into the problem, chasing down errors that shouldn't have shown up.
Right there is a risk that is classified as known, which is actually unknown.
Now, the original article is claiming that we are ignoring secondary probabilities of error. For numerical calculations, that is quite normal, since the magnitude of r^2 is much less than the magnitude of r, for small r. But for theoretical conclusions, it is not always valid. Sometimes very distinct features are brought out by the 2nd-order calculations (such as the charge/mass ratio of a unitary spin black hole).
Indeed, the fact that we are ignoring this, is itself an error in theory.
It was similar flaws in theory that led to launching the Challenger (first order approximation: we haven't lost a shuttle yet, therefore it is safe.) Not only that, but the problem is endemic with government-sponsored research. LHC is government-sponsored. Therefore, my own first-order approximation is that the LHC is subject to the same flaws in groupthink as NASA.
Wrong. Almost all countries have extremely restrictive immigration and labor laws. The net effect of this is to allow free trade for corporations, while restricting trade for laborers, thus transferring wealth from laborers to corporations (from the poor/weak to the rich/powerful members of the societies).
First, let me note that I have read the book, and I take exception to some of the things in the book. I'll throw my exceptions at the end, for those who don't want to bother with them.
You seem to be comparing Michael Dell to John Galt, or the two or three other main characters (president of the railroad, president of the copper company... I don't remember.)
You forget that there were more character sketches in the book than those three.
There were those who ran companies, but were all the time on the dole of one kind or another, or who did not pay their workers justly, or who did not pay attention to how they were doing a job. Those people were taken for fraud by the president of the copper company (who was simply doing his best to destroy their wealth), and were in turn defrauding their governments.
Now, I would contend that in the current environment of the last 50 years in the US, that almost all successful corporations (and definitely their CEOs) fall into the latter category, not the first. Michael Dell claims that he earned what he has. I would disagree. If you start looking at his employees, and start seeing the value that they put into the company, and the value that they got out, I think you will quickly discover that Dell did not earn what he has. He simply justifies having what he has.
There is a big difference, because Value Recieved = Value Produced + Value Taken from Others. Most interactions involve trading, and most trading outrageously benefits the more powerful party.
Now, you can throw into the equation the amount of money "earned" from government contracts -- all of that money is stolen money, according to Atlas Shrugged. Now, some would claim that "tax zeroing" would not be stolen money (taking contracts that equal the loss on taxes paid out). However, that ignores the value recieved from the government in terms of protection recieved. Most of the costs of government go to protection in one form or another, and the value of that goes not to producers (income earners), but to owners. So almost all taxes, if paid in contract fee-for-service, would actually be paid by owners. Michael Dell is an owner, much more than a producer.
And so on.
- - - - - -Review of Ayn Rand Below - - - - - -
Now, I read Atlas Shrugged, because someone called me a John Galt. To some extent, they were right. I found it impossible, for a time, to work with society, so I internalized my efforts. After a time, I again found it possible, and returned my efforts to working within society.
Now... my opinion on Ayn Rand, is that she was a Communist Agent Provacateur. That is, she was attempting to get the nobility of America to crush the poor, enough that it would stimulate a Red Oktober type event.
I say this, because her philosophy ignored enough factors, that it was actually aimed in that direction. If you compare her work to that of Friederich Hayak, she willfully ignores everything in terms of JUSTICE (not social justice) to the weak, that she actually is advocating a situation that Hayak deplores.
Then, if you look at her personal relationships, you see that she is not for justice in that sense, either. Her morals, if anything, seem to match those of communists and spies. Her writing matches.
Which is, in turn, another problem that I have with Atlas Shrugged. She is a dirty writer, and I don't feel cleaner after I have read her work. Nor do I feel intellectually stimulated. Her philosophy, as I said before, is full of holes. I prefer Hayak, personally.
So as far as reading Atlas Shrugged, I don't advise it for others.
Society is built by cooperation.
Actually, I rather suspect that society is destroyed by competition, not built by it. The competition is supposed to eliminate that which is no longer needed, in one of the least painful ways possible. In other words, a kinder, gentler destruction.
But if you take it too far, then everything gets destroyed at once by competition. Take Rwanda or Bosnia, for example. That's the Darwinist Religion at its worst.
But to get something like Amazon-dot-com going, it took people working together while the payoff was still questionable. That's co-operation.
Just wanted to keep our definitions clear. It's easier to navigate social interactions when language is well-defined.
... this is an appropriate time for a class-action lawsuit. Such a lawsuit could also entail discovery of the number of people who demanded their data be deleted... and for whom that was not done.
No. You could as easily say it was octal or hexadecimal.
Clearly, Base 10 obviously refers to the identity theorem. It means you use whatever base is convenient.
Just, before you do, you have to declare...
"All your bases are belong to 10...."
Just a point... have you ever returned your CFL lightbulbs for warranty replacement? Umm... and did you make sure to follow the postal regulations for shipping hazardous materials?
Did you make sure to get the Circuit City Extended Warranty for your Christmas gifts?
Did you make sure to check whether Circuit City was even there this month?
So unlocking the iPhone invalidates a bunch of nonsense that is only worth whatever the company wants it to be worth, later, minus whatever penalty they want to apply to you, to "discourage frivoulous complaints"...
And you still have a problem with invalidating a warranty?
Sure, if you define "fun" as "a smooth learning curve", then you can make fun games automatically.
But not all of the fun is in the learning. Some fun is in tweaking humor. Some fun is in triggering a person's likes and dislikes (Nethack, ponies). Some fun is created by changing the venue (is it a space game? a historical shoot-em-up? A politics game?
Yes, there are underlying patterns to a lot of games. But simply limiting our definition of "fun" to "learning" and "follows the pattern" reminds me of the automatic novel generations in Orwell's 1984.
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
I work for a fortune-500 concrete company. I have a coworker who had worked in Accounting/Management with just a high-school education. He applied for a job here, and got one in the QC department. They took him over to the cylinder break machine, showed him how it worked, and asked him to start doing break tests.
He said "no."
They said, "I'm sorry, is there a problem?"
He said "there are thinkers, and there are drones. You want me to be a drone. I'm a thinker."
So they said, "just a second", and immediately moved him to management.
Say what?
It was entirely based on that personality test of refusing to work that they moved him to management -- that, combined with his basic acknowledgement of a 2-class system, and his claim that he was in the upper class.
I'm going to point this out: from what I have seen, this story is typical of economies worldwide.
World Stock Markets, FALL! FALL FAR! KEEP GOING! GO AWAY!
You are also forgetting that we are living in the bursting of the largest credit bubble in human history. So every dollar taken in taxes right now is *not* an additional expenditure now.
Rather, every dollar taken in taxes right now is a dollar that will not be spent in a different way, now.
Now, where that is nonapplicable, is in the fact that a lot of dollars are spent in "investment", and those dollars are evaporating at an amazing rate. In other words, if you leave the dollars with the rich, then they will disappear with no net benefit at all. On the other hand, redistributing them to new jobs gives a current net benefit.
But unfortunately, dollars spent in electronics basically are the easiest for the rich to cull from. Almost as easy is dollars spent in construction contracts (or any contracts). If you really want to stimulate the economy, you have to spend the dollars directly to the wages (that is, massive government hiring).
But all that is neither here nor there. Any number of theories about what *should* be done have nothing to do with what *will* happen.
Does that mean that he will now need to found several more journals, and start writing some of his articles under a pseudonym?
Isn't "Consensus in the field" just another algorithm? Or was that disproved by that mathematician, whassisname, Elsveir?
In real life, most academics get around the circularity problem by starting with a set of "known good" journals that are determined by consensus in the field rather than algorithms
Since you're talking about a senior citizen, sometimes it pays to consider their physical disabilities, too. For example, consider a large-screen TV/Monitor, if they have trouble seeing the small typefaces.
Consider using a large-keys keyboard (http://www.fentek-ind.com/bigkey.htm), if they have parkinsons, or other motor-control problems.
Might I make the point that the percentage freedom in a society is roughly inversely proportional to the amount that freedom is mentioned. Call it Nimdur's theorem, if nobody else can take the credit.
In Lithuania after 1990, there was very little mention of freedom, but it increased with each year's increase in the number of laws. I expect that they are very aware, by now, how free they are in the European Union, and how much freer they will be if Russia reconquers them.
I doubt if non-warlike aboriginal tribes even have a word for freedom (and yes, those do exist, though all modern governments are apparently agrarian/warlike).
You mean, like throwing shoes could get you in trouble?
Okay, you have us there. At least 4 cables have been cut, so we can assume that there are at least 4 countries that are spying on each other.
Sounds like an awful vast conspiracy to me. I mean, come on... FOUR countries spying on each other?
Well, unless the $8/hr is an introductory rate (that is, the first 200 hrs are at $8.50, then after that you go up to $15 or $20/hr), you could do better by joining a construction site. At our place (prestress, precast concrete plant), we are paying warm bodies $10/hr.
Show that you can read drawings, and you can quickly rise up to $12-$14/hr. Which is, admittedly, a pittance, but if you live in a trailer home, you can make ends meet. Then you can still program in your spare time, and keep the rights to your work, to boot.
When I had a small business, we were contracted to produce study guides in MS Word for Mac 5.1a. The time came when professors were demanding files in Word 95, and our customers (a major publisher) were having trouble with file corruption. They asked us to handle it.
So we purchased the Word 95, and a full support contract, and verified that indeed, the files were being corrupted.
At that point, I got on the phone with my paid M$ support service, and they informed me that no, the files weren't being corrupted. I offered to send them copies of the files, so that they could do it themselves, and autopsy the change, and find the fix. They said no, they were not interested, thankyou for paying for support, but support does not include THIS kind of support.
Well, this problem continued through Word 98. It ended up costing us more than $11k, plus another $17k in contracts not awarded.
Then it came out that M$ had known all along that their files were being corrupted, and that it was Word95 that was doing it, and that they instructed their support people to deny that it was happening.
In so doing, they broke contract with the users. In that case, it was an explicit contract. In this case, it is an implied contract of usability, but even a warning notice does not eliminate liability for deliberate malfeasance.
In other words, if you buy a car with a leaking master brake cylinder that is ready to blow, and verify it, and then rent it for a day to someone who is unaware of the brakes, and say "well, sign this that if there is anything wrong with the engine, the windshield wipers, the brakes, or anything else, it is your problem..." you are still liable. You set them up and damaged them.
So I say that yes, M$ should be sued. Indeed, a smart lawyer would widen this to a class action lawsuit, and bring in the other case of Win95 file corruption (if it isn't now sunsetted) as a part of the same pattern of a corrupt organization. Then he'd go for a RICO case. He might get it.
The space elevator *does* reduce energy consumption over rockets, because rockets have to carry their source of thrust up to the level at which it is burned, causing an exponential growth in energy consumed.
The elevator eliminates the exponential growth in cost. The gravitational cost of lifting electricity is minimal.
The biggest benefit of the space fountain is the cost savings, which can be had when a company president discovers that he can purchase pellets that are 1/4 the mass for 1/8 the price. He carefully makes the purchase 4 yrs ahead of time. Then, based on the savings that he has generated for the company, he assigns himself a higher bonus...
Then, inspired by the thriftiness of their president, the accountants carefully cut the (now doubled) pellet order back to the usual quantity, before going on a well deserved vacation to bora bora.
Backlogged by a truckers' strike,...
A Profession is a teaching. Things like engineer, teacher, doctor... can all be professions.
A Career is a course of jobs, from one to another.
A Vocation is a calling, with specific reference to being a calling by God. Arguably, Mother Theresa had a calling, Pope John Paul II had a calling, Maximillian Kolbe had a calling.
It is a bad mistake to use the words Vocation and Career interchangeably. Vocations are things that, if missed by the recipient, badly damage their chance at salvation and holiness. Vocations are also things that are sometimes claimed by wolves in sheeps' clothing, to help them get more clothes, cheap -- whether the vocation is real, or just claimed, comes out eventually. Vocations shape your whole life, not just 8 hrs, 5 days a week.
My vocation, for example, is to work far below my education, in a concrete yard, and live in a trailer home, and help coworkers and fellow trailer-park residents, while quietly (not silently) evangelizing Christianity. My claim (you can believe it or not) is that I got here through direct directives from God in prayer, followed by events happening as He said they would. That includes Him telling me in the middle of prayer "get your stuff together, because I am moving you", followed by -- 3 minutes later -- a supervisor walking into sight, discussing with another supervisor, and then coming up, and asking me to come up to the office, where they moved me to another location.
Now, you can believe me or not -- but if I am lying, making claims like that is really going to backfire badly. If I am telling the truth, making claims like that won't. That's part and parcel with the nature of the word "vocation".
My career, though, would have been to be an aerospace engineer. Of course, that never got past the B.S. AE/OE. Careers are like that -- kindof random.