Minnesota's attempt to do this dates back nearly 20 years, long before the current global-warming political debate, so interesting to see it finally passing. I believe the first bill was proposed in 1992, which would've imposed a $6 per ton tax; here's a 1994 report by a MN environmental group as well. Major attempts seemed to happen every 3-5 years.
Yeah, but that's just saying that unfalsifiable models aren't falsifiable. A model with infinite free parameters can always be tuned to fit any set of observable data, sure, but it isn't much of a discovery either.
Sovereign immunity really does mean that you cannot sue the government for monetary damages for any reason, unless they explicitly consent to it. The reason Microsoft could sue the U.S. government for copyright violation is that the U.S. federal government has waived its immunity in advance, for wide classes of torts, via the Tucker Act and Federal Tort Claims Act.
In a much earlier era, the standard way for someone with a grievance against the U.S. government to collect on it was to file a petition with Congress, which would pass special-case legislation agreeing to pay them, if Congress felt that the person in question was indeed owed redress. The fundamental separation-of-powers justification is that an individual claiming that they're owed money is a request for money from the U.S. Treasury, and only Congress may appropriate such money.
This obviously became rather tedious as the volume of claims increased, and didn't give a great perception of fairness, so in 1855 Congress delegated the hearing of most such claims to a newly created Court of Claims, a special court that served as essentially a claims-hearing arm of Congress (a "legislative" or "Article I" court, not a part of the judicial branch), which would report a recommendation back to Congress; Congress typically then appropriated the money as a sort of rubber-stamp, but was still technically in charge. The system gradually shifted to a more and more judicial one, first by having the U.S. Treasurer automatically dispense judgments from pre-appropriated money, and later increasingly by consenting to have claims heard in regular courts.
Is it even possible to "verify there's nothing hidden"? You can hide a small knife, or small bit of C4, pretty much anywhere--- taped under a bar stool, in a potted plant, etc.
Were I picking terms, I'd use "Orwellian" or "authoritarian" as a better generic pejorative for someone who supports strong government surveillance, control of access to information, and censorship of publication.
This website's owners picked "fascism", perhaps somewhat unfortunately, and I, in order to provide quality Slashdot-comment humor, had to therefore follow them. The main sense in which it's a bad fit is that historical fascism was a combination of authoritarian control over public culture with a more collectivist stakeholder-consensus economic model, and strong nationalism, and Conroy doesn't appear particularly interested in those latter two.
The parody/satire defense doesn't work in this case, because a reasonable person familiar with his politics might well believe that Stephen Conroy is currently serving as the Minister for Fascism in Australia's government!
That's true, but Firefox will at least still run on platforms it doesn't have a native JS compiler for, presumably by falling back to the interpreter. Chrome just doesn't exist for non-x86/arm platforms.
Depends on what you mean by "pattern", of course, but pi is conjectured to be normal, which would exclude many sorts of patterns. It's not proven, though.
He mentions in the "press release" page that the most important thing developed in his code is "an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library able to manipulate huge numbers stored on hard disks", which sounds basic-research-y. There's some more on that in the technical-details PDF, although unfortunately he says he doesn't plan to release the code (somewhat unusual, since most of his projects are free software).
As he points out himself, he doesn't really care about calculating digits of Pi; it's a convenient hook on which to hang an interesting algorithms challenge. From the FAQ:
I am not especially interested in the digits of Pi, but in the various algorithms involved to do arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge.
He also mentions elsewhere that of his code, "The most important part is an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library able to manipulate huge numbers stored on hard disks."
This is admittedly not an issue for a ton of people, but Chrome/Chromium is less architecture-portable as well, since instead of being all C/C++ or some other portable language like most browsers, its JavaScript engine directly emits native code.
It can currently do x86 and ARM, which covers almost everyone, but does mean that it can't run it on, for example, PPC macs, so I can't use it on my PowerBook, which is actually the machine that I'd most appreciate a faster browser on.
Obviously the reason it makes headlines is that the question of how many human-habitable planets there are, and what kinds of properties they have, is tied to the question of whether anything vaguely like earth-like life exists elsewhere in the universe.
However a good deal of astronomers are also just interested in everything about the cosmos: what's out there, how does it work, how does it relate to other things, what kinds of variations are there, etc. From that perspective, this particular kind of thing, "exoplanet", is a class of far-away object we don't have a lot of examples of and can't give particularly confident accounts of (how and how often they form, their distribution, etc.). Even if there was no tie-in to human habitability, there are a number of astronomers interested in collecting more data on and clarifying our understanding of basically any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about".
In most countries you already do need some sort of permission, don't you? An exception is if you're flying at relatively low altitudes over your own property, since in some countries airspace below a certain level is considered to be part of the ownership of the property. But if you're flying at even sort-of-high altitudes, you have to be a licensed pilot. And if you're flying at low altitudes over another person's property without permission, you're violating their property rights.
Another exception in the U.S. seems to be very light aircraft (I believe under 155 lbs), under the theory that in any crash you're not very likely to harm anyone but yourself. If a flying car weighed anything like a normal car, though, it wouldn't come close to meeting that threshhold (a Honda Civic is over 2500 lbs).
I'm guessing it's an argument more like, "why are we allocating a bunch of money to [x], when [priority y] is more important, and we don't have unlimited money".
It's an odd sort of argument, in that it make sense to some extent, but in practice has to be ignored to some extent also, or we'll never do anything except really basic stuff. For example, if you have extra money you're thinking of donating to charity, why donate to the EFF, or to support an artist you like, when kids are dying in Africa; that's surely more important, right?
The more high-level question makes some sense though: is our current overall allocation of money to the military the proper level, or should it be reduced to free up money for other priorities?
Basically. The trend started in 1998, when Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers were topped with 75m of unoccupied structure so they could claim to be taller than the US's Sears Tower. That set off a controversy that led to the current multiple categories.
It does actually have oil, though you're correct that oil is no longer a major part of their economy, as the fields are mostly now depleted. However oil was very important to it being built up as the prosperous emirate it is now--- most of the current business was initially financed with oil money. At one point, Dubai's oil exports accounted for over 50% of GDP, though that number's now down under 10%.
In a symbolic way this seems vaguely a symptom of decline, but the U.S.'s disinterest in this particular metric---building really tall office buildings---dates back a few decades. The U.S. was still unquestionably the world superpower through the 1990s at least, but the spurt of building tall buildings stopped by the mid-1970s, since they weren't particularly economical compared to just building two or three shorter (but still pretty tall) buildings.
If anything there's a minor tall-building resurgence in the U.S. recently: the Trump Tower in Chicago and Bank of America Tower in NYC, both completed 2009, are the tallest new buildings since the last major spurt of skyscraper construction in 1973-74.
This building has occupied floors higher than the world's tallest TV mast.
That part isn't actually true (though not by much). The roof of Burj Dubai's highest occupied floor seems to be 620m or so, slightly less than the 629m TV mast (the last 200m or so of Burj Dubai is unoccupied structure). However, the structure as a whole is much taller than any other structure, and the highest occupied floor is over 100m higher than any other building's occupied floor.
Thomas McCabe is a mathematics student at Yale University and a research associate at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Not sure that's the mainstream definition of "A.I. researcher", but more relevantly, I can think of another technology panic that seems to keep recurring that the Singularity Institute might have something to do with.
Do annoying ads before the film, and annoying theatre-goers throughout the experience, count as quality concerns? Or are there venues where one may pay to watch this film in a reasonably quiet environment?
Slashdot Mirror
Minnesota's attempt to do this dates back nearly 20 years, long before the current global-warming political debate, so interesting to see it finally passing. I believe the first bill was proposed in 1992, which would've imposed a $6 per ton tax; here's a 1994 report by a MN environmental group as well. Major attempts seemed to happen every 3-5 years.
Yeah, but that's just saying that unfalsifiable models aren't falsifiable. A model with infinite free parameters can always be tuned to fit any set of observable data, sure, but it isn't much of a discovery either.
Sovereign immunity really does mean that you cannot sue the government for monetary damages for any reason, unless they explicitly consent to it. The reason Microsoft could sue the U.S. government for copyright violation is that the U.S. federal government has waived its immunity in advance, for wide classes of torts, via the Tucker Act and Federal Tort Claims Act.
In a much earlier era, the standard way for someone with a grievance against the U.S. government to collect on it was to file a petition with Congress, which would pass special-case legislation agreeing to pay them, if Congress felt that the person in question was indeed owed redress. The fundamental separation-of-powers justification is that an individual claiming that they're owed money is a request for money from the U.S. Treasury, and only Congress may appropriate such money.
This obviously became rather tedious as the volume of claims increased, and didn't give a great perception of fairness, so in 1855 Congress delegated the hearing of most such claims to a newly created Court of Claims, a special court that served as essentially a claims-hearing arm of Congress (a "legislative" or "Article I" court, not a part of the judicial branch), which would report a recommendation back to Congress; Congress typically then appropriated the money as a sort of rubber-stamp, but was still technically in charge. The system gradually shifted to a more and more judicial one, first by having the U.S. Treasurer automatically dispense judgments from pre-appropriated money, and later increasingly by consenting to have claims heard in regular courts.
Bad English indeed, to flip around the words in the idiomatic English phrase "set up us the bomb".
As far as I can tell, they're just going to share with scientists imagery that they're already taking, not offer to take photos on request.
Kurzweil's already uploaded himself to a computer, so from his perspective, software is all you need!
Is it even possible to "verify there's nothing hidden"? You can hide a small knife, or small bit of C4, pretty much anywhere--- taped under a bar stool, in a potted plant, etc.
Were I picking terms, I'd use "Orwellian" or "authoritarian" as a better generic pejorative for someone who supports strong government surveillance, control of access to information, and censorship of publication.
This website's owners picked "fascism", perhaps somewhat unfortunately, and I, in order to provide quality Slashdot-comment humor, had to therefore follow them. The main sense in which it's a bad fit is that historical fascism was a combination of authoritarian control over public culture with a more collectivist stakeholder-consensus economic model, and strong nationalism, and Conroy doesn't appear particularly interested in those latter two.
The parody/satire defense doesn't work in this case, because a reasonable person familiar with his politics might well believe that Stephen Conroy is currently serving as the Minister for Fascism in Australia's government!
That's true, but Firefox will at least still run on platforms it doesn't have a native JS compiler for, presumably by falling back to the interpreter. Chrome just doesn't exist for non-x86/arm platforms.
Depends on what you mean by "pattern", of course, but pi is conjectured to be normal, which would exclude many sorts of patterns. It's not proven, though.
He mentions in the "press release" page that the most important thing developed in his code is "an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library able to manipulate huge numbers stored on hard disks", which sounds basic-research-y. There's some more on that in the technical-details PDF, although unfortunately he says he doesn't plan to release the code (somewhat unusual, since most of his projects are free software).
As he points out himself, he doesn't really care about calculating digits of Pi; it's a convenient hook on which to hang an interesting algorithms challenge. From the FAQ:
He also mentions elsewhere that of his code, "The most important part is an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library able to manipulate huge numbers stored on hard disks."
This is admittedly not an issue for a ton of people, but Chrome/Chromium is less architecture-portable as well, since instead of being all C/C++ or some other portable language like most browsers, its JavaScript engine directly emits native code.
It can currently do x86 and ARM, which covers almost everyone, but does mean that it can't run it on, for example, PPC macs, so I can't use it on my PowerBook, which is actually the machine that I'd most appreciate a faster browser on.
For those not previously familiar with Fabrice Bellard, he's known for:
Reagan actually signed the original version of this order, which extended most of the immunities.
Obviously the reason it makes headlines is that the question of how many human-habitable planets there are, and what kinds of properties they have, is tied to the question of whether anything vaguely like earth-like life exists elsewhere in the universe.
However a good deal of astronomers are also just interested in everything about the cosmos: what's out there, how does it work, how does it relate to other things, what kinds of variations are there, etc. From that perspective, this particular kind of thing, "exoplanet", is a class of far-away object we don't have a lot of examples of and can't give particularly confident accounts of (how and how often they form, their distribution, etc.). Even if there was no tie-in to human habitability, there are a number of astronomers interested in collecting more data on and clarifying our understanding of basically any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about".
In most countries you already do need some sort of permission, don't you? An exception is if you're flying at relatively low altitudes over your own property, since in some countries airspace below a certain level is considered to be part of the ownership of the property. But if you're flying at even sort-of-high altitudes, you have to be a licensed pilot. And if you're flying at low altitudes over another person's property without permission, you're violating their property rights.
Another exception in the U.S. seems to be very light aircraft (I believe under 155 lbs), under the theory that in any crash you're not very likely to harm anyone but yourself. If a flying car weighed anything like a normal car, though, it wouldn't come close to meeting that threshhold (a Honda Civic is over 2500 lbs).
I'm guessing it's an argument more like, "why are we allocating a bunch of money to [x], when [priority y] is more important, and we don't have unlimited money".
It's an odd sort of argument, in that it make sense to some extent, but in practice has to be ignored to some extent also, or we'll never do anything except really basic stuff. For example, if you have extra money you're thinking of donating to charity, why donate to the EFF, or to support an artist you like, when kids are dying in Africa; that's surely more important, right?
The more high-level question makes some sense though: is our current overall allocation of money to the military the proper level, or should it be reduced to free up money for other priorities?
Basically. The trend started in 1998, when Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers were topped with 75m of unoccupied structure so they could claim to be taller than the US's Sears Tower. That set off a controversy that led to the current multiple categories.
It does actually have oil, though you're correct that oil is no longer a major part of their economy, as the fields are mostly now depleted. However oil was very important to it being built up as the prosperous emirate it is now--- most of the current business was initially financed with oil money. At one point, Dubai's oil exports accounted for over 50% of GDP, though that number's now down under 10%.
In a symbolic way this seems vaguely a symptom of decline, but the U.S.'s disinterest in this particular metric---building really tall office buildings---dates back a few decades. The U.S. was still unquestionably the world superpower through the 1990s at least, but the spurt of building tall buildings stopped by the mid-1970s, since they weren't particularly economical compared to just building two or three shorter (but still pretty tall) buildings.
If anything there's a minor tall-building resurgence in the U.S. recently: the Trump Tower in Chicago and Bank of America Tower in NYC, both completed 2009, are the tallest new buildings since the last major spurt of skyscraper construction in 1973-74.
That part isn't actually true (though not by much). The roof of Burj Dubai's highest occupied floor seems to be 620m or so, slightly less than the 629m TV mast (the last 200m or so of Burj Dubai is unoccupied structure). However, the structure as a whole is much taller than any other structure, and the highest occupied floor is over 100m higher than any other building's occupied floor.
Thomas McCabe is a mathematics student at Yale University and a research associate at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Not sure that's the mainstream definition of "A.I. researcher", but more relevantly, I can think of another technology panic that seems to keep recurring that the Singularity Institute might have something to do with.
Do annoying ads before the film, and annoying theatre-goers throughout the experience, count as quality concerns? Or are there venues where one may pay to watch this film in a reasonably quiet environment?