They will probably do that anyway, because it needlessly complicates their case if they don't--- apart from the PR value, suing someone for patent infringement after you've openly pledged not to assert the patent against them will make enforcing the patent in court harder, since it can be argued to be an implied royalty-free license, or at least to trigger estoppel.
They spend much more of their budget on unmanned missions these days, and I think have gotten much more of a scientific return on that than the Apollo program did. I'd say the value being extracted with 50% of the budget is at least 1000% of the Apollo era, which did relatively little science, and lots of photo ops and Cold-War posturing.
These days, NASA does things like operate a space telescope, send a rover to Mars, send a probe to Europa, operate dozens of scientific satellites, etc.
In real dollars, it's down a lot from the Apollo-era budget
By more than I would've thought, too, although in retrospect I suppose it's obvious Apollo was really, really expensive.
Numbers: the peak Apollo-era budget was around $6 billion in 1966, which according to the government's CPI calculator, is about $40 billion in 2010 dollars. NASA's actual current-year budget is less than half that, a bit under $19 billion.
In terms of money that can be devoted to a particular program, it's an even bigger decrease. The vast majority of that $40b-equivalent in the late 1960s was being devoted to the single program of sending people to the moon. But today NASA has a ton of other things it has to spend money on, like operating the Hubble telescope and a wholebunch of scientificsatellites, which also come with increasingly absurd amounts of data to process, store, and make available.
The shuttle pilots, yes, but pilots are a minority of astronauts these days; more are mission specialists with science or engineering backgrounds and no military experience.
But why is more knowledge "better"? Why is space travel for civilians a desirable outcome? Where does your value system that makes those subjective judgments come from, if you recognize nothing outside science as valid?
Upon some additional research, it appears that very pun, surely an obvious one, is one of the many things he's suing over: He alleges that it was libelous for some websites to refer to him and his associates as a "gang of Crookes".
I agree with most of that, but not as sure about the last part. Sure, there are plenty of objective measures by which "people are living better today than they ever have". But, overall, people are today less satisfied with their lives than they used to be. It's not clear to me that that constitutes progress: if you triple the size of someone's house, give them a big-screen TV, a better doctor, and a new car, and they still are unhappy, it's not clear to me that you have actually improved their lives. In particular, a lot of the social institutions and relationships that used to improve people's quality of life have broken down over the past century or so, which reduces quality of life.
Of course I didn't originate that observation; there's a decent amount of sociological and psychological research roughly organized around the slogan, "everything's amazing but nobody's happy".
Interestingly, one of the study authors at least is taking this the other way. Rather than taking the similarity between NDEs and ketamine experiences as evidence that NDEs aren't spiritual, he's taking it as evidence that ketamine experiences are spiritual, just like NDEs. It's not clear as a whole that explaining NDEs was even the goal: for at least one of them, it seems that explaining ketamine experiences was the goal.
It depends on the philosophy you wrap around science. There's a particular kind of scientific rationalism that takes as one of its tenets: anything that cannot be investigated scientifically is obsolete mysticism that must be discarded. You can actually see a lot of that in this Slashdot discussion.
It disproves some fundamentalist interpretations of NDEs, yes, but most people who these days have the strong fundamentalist views are as unlikely to accept this proof as they are to accept evolution.
For people who hold philosophy-of-mind views other than the strict dualism of traditional religions, though, it's not as clear what this shows. It shows that something physical happens in the brain when people have near-death experiences, but that in itself isn't too surprising, because something happens in the brain anytime people have any experience: all experiences, sensations, thoughts, plans, feelings, etc., are enacted through some combination of chemical/neuronal/etc. signalling. So it's not actually particularly interesting, philosophically, that someone found a particular one, since we already assume one exists for all sensations, thoughts, and feelings. What exactly that means is trickier. If you were to argue that this means NDEs are "merely physical" and don't correspond to any higher-level concepts at all, would you commit to saying that of all human experiences? It's not impossible, but I find most people balk at it: at most, they'll accept that some mental illnesses are "just brain chemicals" (e.g. "the depression is a chemical imbalance talking, not really you"), but they won't go so far as to admit that the fact that they love their mother, or enjoy steak, is "just brain chemicals" in the same way.
(I personally don't hold to the fully reductionist view; it's not clear to me that even a complete map of neuronal pathways actually resolves all philosophical questions, or renders higher-level concepts obsolete.)
Oddly, one of the study authors claims that this research strengthens his belief in spirituality, and leads to him believe that there's a spiritual aspect to ketamine as well.
Religion is nothing more than a reality distortion field and the sooner we clear it away from the mind of man, the sooner we can become more than we are today and stop holding ourselves back.
What does it mean to "become more than we are today"? Note: you must answer in purely physicalist, scientific terms, not invoking any of these wishy-washy "value" systems, yet still explain to me why some human futures can be "more" (do you mean something like "better"?) than other futures.
Since we're talking about supposedly approaching it from a scientific perspective, I'd have to say it doesn't explain the prevalence of the concept, although you propose an interesting, untested hypothesis.
The same is true of people, though. People can only: hire people, buy stuff, or put money in the bank. What is this "terminal point" you speak of? Everyone pays taxes out of money that has one step previously also had tax money paid on it, because the economy is just a big loop of money flows.
No, they don't. Companies already price all their products at the highest price the market will bear--- if they could raise their prices, they would have already done so. Corporate taxes generally hurt their profit margins, and to some extent the compensation and bonuses of their top executives.
Which is why they're so against them, incidentally. If corporate taxes mainly hurt the consumer, and had no negative effect on the corporation's executives or shareholders, they wouldn't care, and wouldn't exert all this effort trying to oppose and avoid them.
FWIW, the constitution of India includes a promise that the government will endeavor to make the distribution of wealth more equal (though it doesn't guarantee an actually equal distribution).
No, a mixture of the customers, employees, and shareholders do. Your statement is only true if all other factors (like rate of profit, and size of bonuses) are fixed, which there is no particular reason for them to be. If you take money out of a corporation, where it comes from depends on the elasticity of all the other factors. Some corporations can easily cut salaries; other corporations can easily cut dividends; other corporations can easily raise prices; most end up doing some mixture of things, depending on market conditions.
I think it's a bit more gray-area than "volunteer to give your information to a corporation". Most sites from which Google collects data don't even inform the user that Google is collecting statistical data on their browsing of the site, much less ask their permission.
It's possible it does already violate the law, since misrepresenting a product is already not covered by the First Amendment. One problem is that the only people who could complain are those who were actually misled: customers who genuinely thought the book was legit from the description, and only after purchasing it found it to be auto-generated crap. But they most likely can just return the book, so don't have a very strong complaint either.
Really the main people harmed are customers who never get misled into buying the book, but just find their search results spammed up. Sadly, spamming up your Amazon search results is not a crime. Amazon itself ideally should care, if they want their results to be useful, but so far they seem not to. Maybe if it got bad enough, so e.g. these crap books were 50% of their books, they would?
In tech at least, things don't seem to work out that way--- it's mostly sketchy companies that try to get unpaid interns, while all the reputable, successful companies pay their interns. And not only do they pay them, they pay them extremely well; a typical Google, Microsoft, or Intel intern gets in the range of $40/hr.
Slashdot Mirror
They will probably do that anyway, because it needlessly complicates their case if they don't--- apart from the PR value, suing someone for patent infringement after you've openly pledged not to assert the patent against them will make enforcing the patent in court harder, since it can be argued to be an implied royalty-free license, or at least to trigger estoppel.
The article does include this sentence:
That seems to pretty strongly imply that the researchers believe there's an IQ -> smoking causation.
They spend much more of their budget on unmanned missions these days, and I think have gotten much more of a scientific return on that than the Apollo program did. I'd say the value being extracted with 50% of the budget is at least 1000% of the Apollo era, which did relatively little science, and lots of photo ops and Cold-War posturing.
These days, NASA does things like operate a space telescope, send a rover to Mars, send a probe to Europa, operate dozens of scientific satellites, etc.
This had better not impact the supply of freeze-dried ice cream!
By more than I would've thought, too, although in retrospect I suppose it's obvious Apollo was really, really expensive.
Numbers: the peak Apollo-era budget was around $6 billion in 1966, which according to the government's CPI calculator, is about $40 billion in 2010 dollars. NASA's actual current-year budget is less than half that, a bit under $19 billion.
In terms of money that can be devoted to a particular program, it's an even bigger decrease. The vast majority of that $40b-equivalent in the late 1960s was being devoted to the single program of sending people to the moon. But today NASA has a ton of other things it has to spend money on, like operating the Hubble telescope and a whole bunch of scientific satellites, which also come with increasingly absurd amounts of data to process, store, and make available.
The shuttle pilots, yes, but pilots are a minority of astronauts these days; more are mission specialists with science or engineering backgrounds and no military experience.
But why is more knowledge "better"? Why is space travel for civilians a desirable outcome? Where does your value system that makes those subjective judgments come from, if you recognize nothing outside science as valid?
Upon some additional research, it appears that very pun, surely an obvious one, is one of the many things he's suing over: He alleges that it was libelous for some websites to refer to him and his associates as a "gang of Crookes".
Well I can say he's certainly not a crooke.
I agree with most of that, but not as sure about the last part. Sure, there are plenty of objective measures by which "people are living better today than they ever have". But, overall, people are today less satisfied with their lives than they used to be. It's not clear to me that that constitutes progress: if you triple the size of someone's house, give them a big-screen TV, a better doctor, and a new car, and they still are unhappy, it's not clear to me that you have actually improved their lives. In particular, a lot of the social institutions and relationships that used to improve people's quality of life have broken down over the past century or so, which reduces quality of life.
Of course I didn't originate that observation; there's a decent amount of sociological and psychological research roughly organized around the slogan, "everything's amazing but nobody's happy".
Interestingly, one of the study authors at least is taking this the other way. Rather than taking the similarity between NDEs and ketamine experiences as evidence that NDEs aren't spiritual, he's taking it as evidence that ketamine experiences are spiritual, just like NDEs. It's not clear as a whole that explaining NDEs was even the goal: for at least one of them, it seems that explaining ketamine experiences was the goal.
It depends on the philosophy you wrap around science. There's a particular kind of scientific rationalism that takes as one of its tenets: anything that cannot be investigated scientifically is obsolete mysticism that must be discarded. You can actually see a lot of that in this Slashdot discussion.
It disproves some fundamentalist interpretations of NDEs, yes, but most people who these days have the strong fundamentalist views are as unlikely to accept this proof as they are to accept evolution.
For people who hold philosophy-of-mind views other than the strict dualism of traditional religions, though, it's not as clear what this shows. It shows that something physical happens in the brain when people have near-death experiences, but that in itself isn't too surprising, because something happens in the brain anytime people have any experience: all experiences, sensations, thoughts, plans, feelings, etc., are enacted through some combination of chemical/neuronal/etc. signalling. So it's not actually particularly interesting, philosophically, that someone found a particular one, since we already assume one exists for all sensations, thoughts, and feelings. What exactly that means is trickier. If you were to argue that this means NDEs are "merely physical" and don't correspond to any higher-level concepts at all, would you commit to saying that of all human experiences? It's not impossible, but I find most people balk at it: at most, they'll accept that some mental illnesses are "just brain chemicals" (e.g. "the depression is a chemical imbalance talking, not really you"), but they won't go so far as to admit that the fact that they love their mother, or enjoy steak, is "just brain chemicals" in the same way.
(I personally don't hold to the fully reductionist view; it's not clear to me that even a complete map of neuronal pathways actually resolves all philosophical questions, or renders higher-level concepts obsolete.)
Oddly, one of the study authors claims that this research strengthens his belief in spirituality, and leads to him believe that there's a spiritual aspect to ketamine as well.
What does it mean to "become more than we are today"? Note: you must answer in purely physicalist, scientific terms, not invoking any of these wishy-washy "value" systems, yet still explain to me why some human futures can be "more" (do you mean something like "better"?) than other futures.
Since we're talking about supposedly approaching it from a scientific perspective, I'd have to say it doesn't explain the prevalence of the concept, although you propose an interesting, untested hypothesis.
The same is true of people, though. People can only: hire people, buy stuff, or put money in the bank. What is this "terminal point" you speak of? Everyone pays taxes out of money that has one step previously also had tax money paid on it, because the economy is just a big loop of money flows.
No, they don't. Companies already price all their products at the highest price the market will bear--- if they could raise their prices, they would have already done so. Corporate taxes generally hurt their profit margins, and to some extent the compensation and bonuses of their top executives.
Which is why they're so against them, incidentally. If corporate taxes mainly hurt the consumer, and had no negative effect on the corporation's executives or shareholders, they wouldn't care, and wouldn't exert all this effort trying to oppose and avoid them.
FWIW, the constitution of India includes a promise that the government will endeavor to make the distribution of wealth more equal (though it doesn't guarantee an actually equal distribution).
No, a mixture of the customers, employees, and shareholders do. Your statement is only true if all other factors (like rate of profit, and size of bonuses) are fixed, which there is no particular reason for them to be. If you take money out of a corporation, where it comes from depends on the elasticity of all the other factors. Some corporations can easily cut salaries; other corporations can easily cut dividends; other corporations can easily raise prices; most end up doing some mixture of things, depending on market conditions.
If the artificial economic entity has rights, it should pay taxes too.
I think it's a bit more gray-area than "volunteer to give your information to a corporation". Most sites from which Google collects data don't even inform the user that Google is collecting statistical data on their browsing of the site, much less ask their permission.
It's possible it does already violate the law, since misrepresenting a product is already not covered by the First Amendment. One problem is that the only people who could complain are those who were actually misled: customers who genuinely thought the book was legit from the description, and only after purchasing it found it to be auto-generated crap. But they most likely can just return the book, so don't have a very strong complaint either.
Really the main people harmed are customers who never get misled into buying the book, but just find their search results spammed up. Sadly, spamming up your Amazon search results is not a crime. Amazon itself ideally should care, if they want their results to be useful, but so far they seem not to. Maybe if it got bad enough, so e.g. these crap books were 50% of their books, they would?
Man, not sure how I misread that whole comment.
In tech at least, things don't seem to work out that way--- it's mostly sketchy companies that try to get unpaid interns, while all the reputable, successful companies pay their interns. And not only do they pay them, they pay them extremely well; a typical Google, Microsoft, or Intel intern gets in the range of $40/hr.