Given that we've had lots and lots of institutionalized inequality over the centuries, it's about time somebody was pushing equality. Sometimes it's necessary to go to extremes to counterbalance other extremes.
We want equality of opportunity. We can easily measure equality of outcome. In our experience, inequality of outcome often is due to inequality of opportunity, so it's worth looking into.
There's plenty of racism and sexism in society, and blacks and Native Americans tend to come from bad backgrounds, and in that case it isn't a matter of quality of decisions that determines success or failure.
If we think that electric cars are the solution to our transportation needs then we have enough electricity to drive this fuel synthesis process
Not necessarily. It's a matter of efficiency. Automobile engines aren't really 30% efficient, and electric vehicles are typically over 90%, so we have to produce three times as much energy in synthetic fuels than in electricity, assuming that synthetic fuel production is highly efficient.
An employer can lay off an employee, or fire for no cause, and the employee gets unemployment insurance, which raises he employer's rates. It's cheaper to fire someone for cause, if ti sticks.
Except in egregious cases, it's normally necessary to document problems and counsel the employee before firing for cause. If Solar City didn't do any of those things, then they'll lose if a former employee contests the cause.
The constitutional standard is "reasonable". The other half of the amendment describes what's needed to get a warrant. With a warrant, all searches are reasonable. Without a warrant, the government has the burden of showing that the search is reasonable.
If a police officer arrests you, the police officer will need to search you for weapons, and that's not the sort of thing that can wait for a warrant. Hence, the courts have held that it's reasonable to search someone for weapons upon arrest, and therefore constitutional.
I'm not sure you've got it quite right. My take is that they looked at sentences that used "gay" to see whether they were positive or negative. Now, there are two or three people in the world whose sexual orientation is any of my business (and one of them is selection bias against being lesbian), and I rarely talk about it. There's lots of immature brats on the net who use homosexuality as a random slur. That means there's lots and lots of comments from people like them, using "gay" in a negative context, and darn few from people like me, who just don't care about other's sexuality or gender (as long as I know what pronoun to use).
The reason the Y doesn't pass on as much information as the X is that it's much smaller, not that Ys are all similar to each other. It has nothing to do with number or variety of reproducing males. I've seen speculation that the Y chromosome lost significance as part of meta-evolution, that since it couldn't be gotten rid of (a woman can pass either X chromosome on to a child of either sex, while a man has to pass his Y to any son) human evolution proceeded better with little information on the Y.
A mother will provide 23 chromosomes to the child, one of which is an X. A father will provide 23 chromosomes to the child, one of which is a Y. That's less than 5% difference in the amount of genes passed on.
I'm only talking about the most common case here. I'm aware that it can get far more complicated, but it usually doesn't.
That does happen. There are some childless couples in my family, and they do take an interest in their nieces and nephews. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're opposite-sex or same-sex. So, the question is not whether that ever occurs, but how often and how significant it is.
Now, what GP is doing right is at least attempting to avoid straight reductionism, which assumes that society is just like an individual.
Whether people can, or even bother to, justify their actions doesn't depend on relative vs. absolute morality. Someone who abuses women probably already knows this is not a good thing to do.
Absolute morality is tricky. First, you have to make very sure that a society adopts the absolute morality that you like. As an extreme example, according to the morality of the Third Reich, the soldiers killing Jews were heroes, doing a very stressful job that had to be done. Early Soviet morality said that advancing the Revolution was the primary good, which meant that, for example, the Holobibor (Soviet-created Ukrainian famine) was a good thing to do. We're seeing clashes of morality occurring in the US, with people defying the law to avoid having anything to do with same-sex marriage (or, if your morality here differs from mine, people insisting on dragging other people into supporting immorality)..
Absolute non-binary morality also causes problems. Take "Thou shalt not kill." Suppose a good guy with a sniper rifle and a great vantage point had been at Las Vegas for the mass shooting. Should the good sniper have shot the evil one? Should a surgeon refuse to perform an operation with a significant chance of death? Should we avoid major construction projects that have a good chance of having one or more fatalities occur statistically? Should I be allowed to shoot someone threatening me, and how dire does the threat have to be? The only halfway simple rule you're going to be able to write on killing people will have to balance the good that comes from the killing against the evil of the action.
If you think the casting couch and abuse of women are only a generation or two old, you're deluding yourself. There have always been self-important assholes who either justified what they did or didn't bother, and that has been the case since considerably before Bentham started writing about Utilitarianism.
Pardon me, I meant that PDFs aren't that much less expensive than dead tree books.
As I said, people who know the figures for costs of books have posted them on Slashdot. The economics weren't all that accurate, but publishers need to make a lot of money on individual book sales to cover fixed costs unless the book is a best-seller or something.
Anyway I expect that convenience of ebooks + low price would mean a big increase in volume of ebooks sold
There are people whose business it is to know the demand curve for books, and it turns out to be pretty inelastic. If a book from a real publisher is priced pretty much as similar books are priced now,, halving the price is not going to double the sales. I haven't seen anything on the demand curve for cheaply written self-published books, but that has little to do with published books.
Publishers are not necessary in the copyright system. You can always self-publish. Back when books were all made of dead trees, there were "vanity publishers". Currently, it's really easy to self-publish through Amazon and perhaps Barnes & Noble. The advantage, to an author, of using a regular publisher is that the publisher will provide services like editing and good formatting and proofreading (not necessarily doing it well), publishers have publicity channels ready to go, and publishers will often absorb some of the risk.
Moreover, copyright doesn't forbid competition. If you and I both write books that have similar premises and plots, we can both publish. It does forbid copying, so I couldn't take your book, change a few things, and publish without your permission. I don't see that as a problem. If you do, could you explain further?
DMCA takedown notices don't quite work because there's no penalty for filing zillions of ones that don't apply. (There's a possible penalty if you claim copyright over something you don't have the copyright to, but not for saying that my symphony infringes on your/. post.) There's also the issue that people have come to think they have rights over sites that display their work (and perhaps monetize it) for free.
Copyright law can be changed so it can't be used to restrict ownership of anything else. Such claims violate the old principle of copyright law that it can't restrict you from doing something, as long as it's your own words or whatever, and the courts have not been entirely friendly to these claims.
So, if the DMCA were amended to have penalties for filing frivolous takedown notices, and if there were restrictions on copyright law explicitly saying it can't be used to restrict ownership, that would satisfy all of your complaints.
There are exceptions (called "specific performance") but AFAIK that applies primarily to real estate. The court may well tell you you have to do a real estate deal you contracted for.
If any average citizen did what Clinton did, they might be reprimanded, and their clearance might be suspended temporarily or indefinitely. That's what I was able to find.
How many egotistical people do YOU know that give a rats ass what YOU think about them?
I don't know anyone personally with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but they do exist. I'm not a clinical psychologist or inclined to remotely diagnose people, but Trump does exhibit lots of the symptoms.
In practice, mens rea was and is necessary for prosecution. Comey didn't say Clinton hadn't broken the law, he said nobody would prosecute her. Try to find a case where someone mishandled classified information without intent and was criminally prosecuted. I couldn't.
Realistically, if you treat it as strict liability, anyone who screws up is going to do his or her best to cover it up. It's better to have these sorts of things reported.
I assure you, the cartoons I watched as a kid did not have a realistic view of relationships, zoology, or gravity. I turned out OK (as long as I keep taking my meds).
I do go far back, and there's always been a lot of stuff suitable for kids. When we had five available TV stations, there were always cartoons before and after school and Saturday mornings, and a lot of the movies were kid-friendly. It wasn't like having Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, but it worked.
It pretty much replaced computers for my mother-in-law. If you're going to do web surfing and want a few mindless games, a tablet is great. Get a Bluetooth keyboard for it and you can do light word processing and email. This is the sort of use I used to suggest Ubuntu or Mint for, but tablets are simpler to use. Lots of us have more complicated use cases that a tablet isn't sufficient for, of course.
I use mine as an eBook and PDF reader, and it's a lot better at that than my laptop or desktop. I haven't developed anything on it yet. I'm very content with my selection of electronic devices.
What's going to happen when AI becomes so simple that the home-based small business can do it?
That always happens. When it gets simple enough, people call it by the name of a technique and it ceases to be AI. In the meantime, there's always harder problems to work on, which will be considered AI for some time to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that we've had lots and lots of institutionalized inequality over the centuries, it's about time somebody was pushing equality. Sometimes it's necessary to go to extremes to counterbalance other extremes.
We want equality of opportunity. We can easily measure equality of outcome. In our experience, inequality of outcome often is due to inequality of opportunity, so it's worth looking into.
There's plenty of racism and sexism in society, and blacks and Native Americans tend to come from bad backgrounds, and in that case it isn't a matter of quality of decisions that determines success or failure.
Not necessarily. It's a matter of efficiency. Automobile engines aren't really 30% efficient, and electric vehicles are typically over 90%, so we have to produce three times as much energy in synthetic fuels than in electricity, assuming that synthetic fuel production is highly efficient.
An employer can lay off an employee, or fire for no cause, and the employee gets unemployment insurance, which raises he employer's rates. It's cheaper to fire someone for cause, if ti sticks.
Except in egregious cases, it's normally necessary to document problems and counsel the employee before firing for cause. If Solar City didn't do any of those things, then they'll lose if a former employee contests the cause.
The constitutional standard is "reasonable". The other half of the amendment describes what's needed to get a warrant. With a warrant, all searches are reasonable. Without a warrant, the government has the burden of showing that the search is reasonable.
If a police officer arrests you, the police officer will need to search you for weapons, and that's not the sort of thing that can wait for a warrant. Hence, the courts have held that it's reasonable to search someone for weapons upon arrest, and therefore constitutional.
Death before the Dark Side!
There's no need to have white hair. I found that my prospects improved dramatically after I started dying it.
I'm not sure you've got it quite right. My take is that they looked at sentences that used "gay" to see whether they were positive or negative. Now, there are two or three people in the world whose sexual orientation is any of my business (and one of them is selection bias against being lesbian), and I rarely talk about it. There's lots of immature brats on the net who use homosexuality as a random slur. That means there's lots and lots of comments from people like them, using "gay" in a negative context, and darn few from people like me, who just don't care about other's sexuality or gender (as long as I know what pronoun to use).
IIRC, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because God couldn't find even a few people there who were charitable to the poor and welcoming to strangers.
The reason the Y doesn't pass on as much information as the X is that it's much smaller, not that Ys are all similar to each other. It has nothing to do with number or variety of reproducing males. I've seen speculation that the Y chromosome lost significance as part of meta-evolution, that since it couldn't be gotten rid of (a woman can pass either X chromosome on to a child of either sex, while a man has to pass his Y to any son) human evolution proceeded better with little information on the Y.
A mother will provide 23 chromosomes to the child, one of which is an X. A father will provide 23 chromosomes to the child, one of which is a Y. That's less than 5% difference in the amount of genes passed on.
I'm only talking about the most common case here. I'm aware that it can get far more complicated, but it usually doesn't.
That does happen. There are some childless couples in my family, and they do take an interest in their nieces and nephews. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're opposite-sex or same-sex. So, the question is not whether that ever occurs, but how often and how significant it is.
Now, what GP is doing right is at least attempting to avoid straight reductionism, which assumes that society is just like an individual.
Whether people can, or even bother to, justify their actions doesn't depend on relative vs. absolute morality. Someone who abuses women probably already knows this is not a good thing to do.
Absolute morality is tricky. First, you have to make very sure that a society adopts the absolute morality that you like. As an extreme example, according to the morality of the Third Reich, the soldiers killing Jews were heroes, doing a very stressful job that had to be done. Early Soviet morality said that advancing the Revolution was the primary good, which meant that, for example, the Holobibor (Soviet-created Ukrainian famine) was a good thing to do. We're seeing clashes of morality occurring in the US, with people defying the law to avoid having anything to do with same-sex marriage (or, if your morality here differs from mine, people insisting on dragging other people into supporting immorality)..
Absolute non-binary morality also causes problems. Take "Thou shalt not kill." Suppose a good guy with a sniper rifle and a great vantage point had been at Las Vegas for the mass shooting. Should the good sniper have shot the evil one? Should a surgeon refuse to perform an operation with a significant chance of death? Should we avoid major construction projects that have a good chance of having one or more fatalities occur statistically? Should I be allowed to shoot someone threatening me, and how dire does the threat have to be? The only halfway simple rule you're going to be able to write on killing people will have to balance the good that comes from the killing against the evil of the action.
If you think the casting couch and abuse of women are only a generation or two old, you're deluding yourself. There have always been self-important assholes who either justified what they did or didn't bother, and that has been the case since considerably before Bentham started writing about Utilitarianism.
In other words, you don't have anything comparable to the race riots of the 60s.
Pardon me, I meant that PDFs aren't that much less expensive than dead tree books.
As I said, people who know the figures for costs of books have posted them on Slashdot. The economics weren't all that accurate, but publishers need to make a lot of money on individual book sales to cover fixed costs unless the book is a best-seller or something.
There are people whose business it is to know the demand curve for books, and it turns out to be pretty inelastic. If a book from a real publisher is priced pretty much as similar books are priced now,, halving the price is not going to double the sales. I haven't seen anything on the demand curve for cheaply written self-published books, but that has little to do with published books.
Publishers are not necessary in the copyright system. You can always self-publish. Back when books were all made of dead trees, there were "vanity publishers". Currently, it's really easy to self-publish through Amazon and perhaps Barnes & Noble. The advantage, to an author, of using a regular publisher is that the publisher will provide services like editing and good formatting and proofreading (not necessarily doing it well), publishers have publicity channels ready to go, and publishers will often absorb some of the risk.
Moreover, copyright doesn't forbid competition. If you and I both write books that have similar premises and plots, we can both publish. It does forbid copying, so I couldn't take your book, change a few things, and publish without your permission. I don't see that as a problem. If you do, could you explain further?
DMCA takedown notices don't quite work because there's no penalty for filing zillions of ones that don't apply. (There's a possible penalty if you claim copyright over something you don't have the copyright to, but not for saying that my symphony infringes on your /. post.) There's also the issue that people have come to think they have rights over sites that display their work (and perhaps monetize it) for free.
Copyright law can be changed so it can't be used to restrict ownership of anything else. Such claims violate the old principle of copyright law that it can't restrict you from doing something, as long as it's your own words or whatever, and the courts have not been entirely friendly to these claims.
So, if the DMCA were amended to have penalties for filing frivolous takedown notices, and if there were restrictions on copyright law explicitly saying it can't be used to restrict ownership, that would satisfy all of your complaints.
There are exceptions (called "specific performance") but AFAIK that applies primarily to real estate. The court may well tell you you have to do a real estate deal you contracted for.
If any average citizen did what Clinton did, they might be reprimanded, and their clearance might be suspended temporarily or indefinitely. That's what I was able to find.
I don't know anyone personally with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but they do exist. I'm not a clinical psychologist or inclined to remotely diagnose people, but Trump does exhibit lots of the symptoms.
In practice, mens rea was and is necessary for prosecution. Comey didn't say Clinton hadn't broken the law, he said nobody would prosecute her. Try to find a case where someone mishandled classified information without intent and was criminally prosecuted. I couldn't.
Realistically, if you treat it as strict liability, anyone who screws up is going to do his or her best to cover it up. It's better to have these sorts of things reported.
How about comparing tablets to books? I very often had my nose in a book as a child.
Hex paper was hard to get when I was a kid.
My son was well under eight when he asked us why child-proof caps have the instructions printed right on them.
I assure you, the cartoons I watched as a kid did not have a realistic view of relationships, zoology, or gravity. I turned out OK (as long as I keep taking my meds).
I do go far back, and there's always been a lot of stuff suitable for kids. When we had five available TV stations, there were always cartoons before and after school and Saturday mornings, and a lot of the movies were kid-friendly. It wasn't like having Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, but it worked.
It pretty much replaced computers for my mother-in-law. If you're going to do web surfing and want a few mindless games, a tablet is great. Get a Bluetooth keyboard for it and you can do light word processing and email. This is the sort of use I used to suggest Ubuntu or Mint for, but tablets are simpler to use. Lots of us have more complicated use cases that a tablet isn't sufficient for, of course.
I use mine as an eBook and PDF reader, and it's a lot better at that than my laptop or desktop. I haven't developed anything on it yet. I'm very content with my selection of electronic devices.
That always happens. When it gets simple enough, people call it by the name of a technique and it ceases to be AI. In the meantime, there's always harder problems to work on, which will be considered AI for some time to come.