The sibling post is excellent. What you ought to do is not hate the words, but look at their original rigorous definitions. When you see people throwing them about willy-nilly, you should ask them, "How does X being pro-choice make him a fascist?" Such reinforcement is the only way that language stays meaningful.
Hitler was a fascist.* Calling Obama and Bush fascists is not, or ought not to be a cheap shot that compares them to Hitler. Fascism has a definition; it is the merger of state and corporate power. If Obama and Bush have both merged state and corporate power, and I submit that they have, along with other parts of our government, than they are engaged in fascism and can be called fascists.
It is very unfortunate that the term's association with Hitler tends to overpower any discussion of extant acts of fascism with implied acts of genocide. I think this is just the way things shook out, but it looks Orwellian from certain angles: associating the term for "one tried-and-true way to achieve a totalitarian government" with "one small step away from a Godwin" ensures that few people will try to discuss it very fully.
* Everyone please note the "s" in fascist. Using it will make you look smarter!
Fitting, as "Sticking it to the constitution" is what all three branches of the federal government seem intent on continuing to do. I guess after about a hundred years, any practice will have some serious momentum.
Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. So secret meetings with the oil and gas companies to set energy policy to their benefit is fascism by definition pure and simple.
Yet government overtly stepping in and bailing out and taking control of auto companies and insurance firms doesn't trigger the definition for you?
What about the practice of lobbying? We all know that lobbyists have tremendous power to shape the way new laws are made, very often to the point of excluding the needs and wants of the voting public. Is that not a practical "merger of state and corporate power" even if it's not codified in law?
See, you have the definition of fascism right, but it looks like you only want to use it when it applies to Republicans, whom you paint with an extremely broad brush as being The Devil Incarnate. Until people like you on either "side" start to realize that we're being played not by Republicans or by Democrats but by the entire political class, nothing is going to change for the better. I'm not sure how that's going to happen, with things being so polarized that any member of the opposite party is seen as either an idiot or hell-bent on destroying America.
It's news because it's an unusual geological event, and there are lots of geeks who find this sort of thing interesting. Since it was so widespread, I'm sure they got a lot of submissions from people who were affected by it.
So tell me... How exactly did you prove there is no intent?
You don't. You realize that a whale pooping in its environment, as it must, is nothing at all like farming. It's like seriously claiming that whale migration in the Caribbean is because that's their vacation spot. You can't prove a lack of intent, you can only point to the absence of evidence for it. The burden of proof lies on those who want to show that there is intent. Replace "intent" with "god" in your statement for an informative illustration.
Anyway, the point of my original post was that concepts are routinely misused and abused nowadays, people speaking straight-faced about whales farming and going green are stark examples.
It seems to me that the issue lies in the extremely broad cloud classifications--this comes not from any training but from reading apoc.famine's posts. If you visualize words like 'cirrus,' 'nimbus,' and 'stratus' to be categories for clouds similar to the rock categories 'igneous,' 'metamorphic,' and 'sedimentary,' and then think of the extremely varied characteristics of rocks within each category, and finally imagine that instead of flying a plane through cloud we are hitting rocks with a hammer and chisel to see how they split, you can grasp the potential for so many unknowns as to make the experiment worthless.
I don't know how well metaphor holds, as I said this is just inference, but I don't think it an absurd possibility that we know less about cloud behavior than the layman would believe.
That makes sense--Twilight Princess was a GameCube game with motion controls tacked on when they realized it wouldn't be done until the Wii came out. The new Zelda will use MotionPlus, which tracks the position and orientation of the controller in space instead of just the broad gesture control offered by the base unit.
I too had an initially negative reaction due to my experience with Twilight Princess, but after watching the video I think it looks pretty engaging. Instead of waggling to swing the sword generically, the onscreen cuts track your swing very accurately. One example of how this is used is with Deku Flowers: some open horizontally and others vertically, so in order to kill them you have to match the way they open. I'm sure the enhanced controller positioning is used all over the place, and I'm betting it's going to add to the gameplay since it's not just a waggle gimmick.
Depending on what he leaked he may be considered a hero by civil libertarians if some of the allegations and rumors swirling about these cables are true.
What are some of the rumors? I posted earlier that I think it's only responsible to release certain kinds of information, namely anything that the government is hiding from the people it was created to serve. This would include abuses, falsified reasons for going to war, etc. but not things like how our fancy new radar systems work.
If this information does get posted to wikileaks, there will be bad consequences and, if those bad consequences include 1 person being killed than it is a big deal that the information has been leaked.
Eh, I dunno about all that. I'm sure a lot of this stuff consists of military secrets and whatnot that gives the US military the advantage--which it uses to kill people. Not always bad people, and not always for good reasons. It seems a little lopsided to say that one person's death due to release of information is a big deal when the status quo results in thousands of deaths. I don't think you intended to make it "us versus them" but that's what it looks like.
I think there is a responsible way to release some of that classified information, and that is to release only things that Wikileaks thinks civilians should be aware of. Yes, there will exist the possibility of some bad stuff that you mentioned, but I'll bet it's only in the embarrassment and international relations categories. The US government has been powered for decades by its own momentum; for the most part it takes no account of the citizens it was created to serve. Since this stuff is military data, there might not be a whole lot in there, but even bringing to light the awful practices like those found in Gitmo would do a lot to show that the people in charge aren't who they say they are, don't follow their own rules, and have purposes other than "exporting freedom" in mind.
It's not an all-or-none proposition, and I hope that Wikileaks is responsible enough to leak only information that the US gov't is hiding from its own people. Lord knows nobody in Washington has the stones to clean things up.
The net effect was that thousands of extremely unlucky people's savings were wiped out by runaway silicon. The more this behavior is excused, the more the balance of power shifts even further toward the bankers with the big iron, necessarily leaving individual investors even weaker in a system already tilted too far from them.
Do you want the stock market to become an AI playground with potentially devastating consequences for the economy? More than it already is, I mean? I don't. I don't care for regulations, especially when so much of those existing and proposed are bad regulations, but this shit is criminal. If the market were kept to a speed such that individual stocks could be traded no faster than humans on the exchange floor could trade them, say three seconds or so, I guarantee that the market would be a saner place. The only people who would "lose out" are the bankers relying on massive stock holdings and microsecond trades to make their money, as they are the only ones in the position to make money that way. They will fight tooth and nail to keep this privilege, but the practice can't stand up to scrutiny and the rest of the nation can force them to abolish it.
The stock market is at its heart a social endeavor. For it to work correctly, its transactions ought to take place at a pace that humans can follow. The market is supposed to be a way to fund promising endeavors or flourishing businesses by rewarding those who provide capital with bigger returns. The addition of microsecond trading changes the nature of the beast into a numbers game (for the computer powerhouse funds companies) and a crap shoot (for the average Joe). There is no business sense in buying a stock and selling it 1.3 seconds later: that is an attempt to create money out of thin air, an unsustainable practice no matter how it's gone about.
Just because we can set up "expert systems" with buy/sell triggers and ultrafast trades doesn't mean that we should. As you say, there needs to be at least the opportunity for a human decision. It's the same reason that we have low speed limits in residential areas: the machines have no problem handling the speed, but the people in control of them can't react intelligently or quickly enough if something unexpected happens. For evidence, witness the 100 point or greater swings that are now commonplace in the stock market--such drastic swings were rare and a big deal in the 20th century; now they are hardly remarked upon. This is not and will never be normal.
Heh. So government creates a problem for which the solution is to rely on the same government. The one that watches porn instead of making sure its regulations are followed. The one who forms its regulations around the suggestions of the megacorps who have the capacity and the will to do the most damage--and let's not forget that many of the megacorps got the "mega" prefix through lobbying for advantageous regulations that they were large enough to handle yet were onerous enough to drive their smaller competitors from their business sector.
Why is the answer to problems created by government always to give the same government more power?
Except that this shit IS regulated. Remember the hullabaloo over the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act that was passed a while back after Mattel's screw-up with lead paint? Remember how all the free market advocates said that the law would adversely affect everything from small-time toymakers (who would be forced to pay for testing they couldn't afford on products that never come into contact with dangerous chemicals) to libraries (who, without an exemption that may or may not have gone through, would be forced to test all children's books on their shelves to be compliant) while not reliably preventing bad stuff from happening?
Now look what happened. The law has been enacted, yet it was a private citizen who alerted the regulators to the problem. So what good did the CPISA do in this case? If everyone had relied on that regulation for their safety, this never would have been caught. Some regulation may be necessary and beneficial, but when it kills off the little guys while the big fish somehow circumvent it, it becomes not a good for the people but another tool of the megacorps that actually need to be controlled. Bad regulation is worse than no regulation.
Writing is better than talking. Thinking is better than writing. Deciding is better than thinking - William James
That's a decent saying, but I would be very surprised if it came from William James. In truth, I think James would disagree with every part of it because of its inflexibility: writing is under many circumstances not better than talking, and thinking ought to be a prerequisite for most writing and deciding. Thought without action is meaningless, making the writing an extension of thought and not inferior to it.
Having said that, if you have a source for the quote I'd be very interested to see it in proper context. I'm being pedantic only because he is a personal hero of mine and is misread enough without mistaken attributions =)
Whatever you think of Congress, it's a pretty handy damping loop to keep the Peepul from trashing the Constitution, and hence, the country.
Funny, I always found it to be the other way around--the People being the damping tool to keep Congress from trashing the Constitution--only we haven't been very good at it for some decades.
Why would you genuinely have a problem with people who do not want to hurt other people?
That's not necessarily a complete definition of pacifism. Some take it as far as NEVER hurting other people, and that position I disagree with. It's fine if you don't want to defend yourself, but in situations where there is a third party being targeted who is not in a position to defend himself (yes, think of the children) and you are able but not willing to prevent the attack, you have failed morally.
I get not wanting to hurt other people; I'm mostly that way myself, but many who choose to label themselves pacifists claim that they will always refrain from causing harm. I find this position morally questionable as well as logically impossible, as there are many situations where a failure to harm one person results in harming another.
Lots of people seem to have a problem with pacifists benefiting from their militaries' defense--this is indeed silly, because it implies that only those aligned exactly with the country's leadership deserve the benefits of it, when in reality it's very healthy to foster a variety of opinion.
All I'm saying is that I'm not impressed by the performance. The tech is cool but they should have gone with an instrument where you can get away with less nuance, like a guitar or piano perhaps. The violin like all bowed instruments is very unforgiving when it comes to technique. Contrast the violin with their trumpet-playing robot to see what I mean. That performance is technically very good whereas the violin playing is not.
Also, it's not AI and I am very aware of what goes into playing an instrument, as I play several.
I'm not sure that your example is a stumbling block. I imagine "I water sugar with want" would be pictogrammed as something like "water sugar arrow-towards my-avatar (or "me"). Someone from a different linguistic background might reverse the order of subject and object, but the arrow would still point towards the self. The shading that the word "want" gives the sentence is lost; the symbols could be interpreted as want, need, demand, etc., but the intent of you-giving-me sugar water is still very clear. I suspect this is one of the strong points of a pictographic system: we may say it differently, but the picture of the action is pretty clear.
You're right that it's very limited, and it's not going to be of much use while discussing the finer points of economic theories or musical performance. A device housing a good pictogram system could be very useful for emergency personnel who may not speak the language of those he's there to help, and waiting for a translator isn't often feasible under those circumstances. Something like this could be a boon for any area with a significantly diverse population.
Slightly OT, but a wonderful illustration of the language-creation you mention is housed in the book Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe. In it, there is a foreign empire ruled by something akin to a theocracy whose citizens are allowed to speak only in quotations from their scripture. A captured soldier from that society is still quite able to tell an original and engaging story, though Wolfe is kind enough to provide us with an interpreter along with the soldier's original words.
(Even more OT, that's the fourth and mostly final volume of the Book of the New Sun, which is some of the finest science fiction you will ever read.)
Slashdot Mirror
The sibling post is excellent. What you ought to do is not hate the words, but look at their original rigorous definitions. When you see people throwing them about willy-nilly, you should ask them, "How does X being pro-choice make him a fascist?" Such reinforcement is the only way that language stays meaningful.
Hitler was a fascist.* Calling Obama and Bush fascists is not, or ought not to be a cheap shot that compares them to Hitler. Fascism has a definition; it is the merger of state and corporate power. If Obama and Bush have both merged state and corporate power, and I submit that they have, along with other parts of our government, than they are engaged in fascism and can be called fascists.
It is very unfortunate that the term's association with Hitler tends to overpower any discussion of extant acts of fascism with implied acts of genocide. I think this is just the way things shook out, but it looks Orwellian from certain angles: associating the term for "one tried-and-true way to achieve a totalitarian government" with "one small step away from a Godwin" ensures that few people will try to discuss it very fully.
* Everyone please note the "s" in fascist. Using it will make you look smarter!
Fitting, as "Sticking it to the constitution" is what all three branches of the federal government seem intent on continuing to do. I guess after about a hundred years, any practice will have some serious momentum.
Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. So secret meetings with the oil and gas companies to set energy policy to their benefit is fascism by definition pure and simple.
Yet government overtly stepping in and bailing out and taking control of auto companies and insurance firms doesn't trigger the definition for you?
What about the practice of lobbying? We all know that lobbyists have tremendous power to shape the way new laws are made, very often to the point of excluding the needs and wants of the voting public. Is that not a practical "merger of state and corporate power" even if it's not codified in law?
See, you have the definition of fascism right, but it looks like you only want to use it when it applies to Republicans, whom you paint with an extremely broad brush as being The Devil Incarnate. Until people like you on either "side" start to realize that we're being played not by Republicans or by Democrats but by the entire political class, nothing is going to change for the better. I'm not sure how that's going to happen, with things being so polarized that any member of the opposite party is seen as either an idiot or hell-bent on destroying America.
I'm glad you mentioned Auto-Tune the News. I had never heard of it, and now I've seen all of it. There's some really funny stuff in there.
It's news because it's an unusual geological event, and there are lots of geeks who find this sort of thing interesting. Since it was so widespread, I'm sure they got a lot of submissions from people who were affected by it.
Seriously. They don't even properly close their quotes! ;)
So tell me... How exactly did you prove there is no intent?
You don't. You realize that a whale pooping in its environment, as it must, is nothing at all like farming. It's like seriously claiming that whale migration in the Caribbean is because that's their vacation spot. You can't prove a lack of intent, you can only point to the absence of evidence for it. The burden of proof lies on those who want to show that there is intent. Replace "intent" with "god" in your statement for an informative illustration.
Anyway, the point of my original post was that concepts are routinely misused and abused nowadays, people speaking straight-faced about whales farming and going green are stark examples.
They're doing neither, as both farming and "carbon footprint reduction" require intent. Without intent, this is just another case of "shit happens."
It seems to me that the issue lies in the extremely broad cloud classifications--this comes not from any training but from reading apoc.famine's posts. If you visualize words like 'cirrus,' 'nimbus,' and 'stratus' to be categories for clouds similar to the rock categories 'igneous,' 'metamorphic,' and 'sedimentary,' and then think of the extremely varied characteristics of rocks within each category, and finally imagine that instead of flying a plane through cloud we are hitting rocks with a hammer and chisel to see how they split, you can grasp the potential for so many unknowns as to make the experiment worthless.
I don't know how well metaphor holds, as I said this is just inference, but I don't think it an absurd possibility that we know less about cloud behavior than the layman would believe.
That makes sense--Twilight Princess was a GameCube game with motion controls tacked on when they realized it wouldn't be done until the Wii came out. The new Zelda will use MotionPlus, which tracks the position and orientation of the controller in space instead of just the broad gesture control offered by the base unit.
I too had an initially negative reaction due to my experience with Twilight Princess, but after watching the video I think it looks pretty engaging. Instead of waggling to swing the sword generically, the onscreen cuts track your swing very accurately. One example of how this is used is with Deku Flowers: some open horizontally and others vertically, so in order to kill them you have to match the way they open. I'm sure the enhanced controller positioning is used all over the place, and I'm betting it's going to add to the gameplay since it's not just a waggle gimmick.
"Allowing people to make their own choice" is not part of the curriculum. ;-)
Depending on what he leaked he may be considered a hero by civil libertarians if some of the allegations and rumors swirling about these cables are true.
What are some of the rumors? I posted earlier that I think it's only responsible to release certain kinds of information, namely anything that the government is hiding from the people it was created to serve. This would include abuses, falsified reasons for going to war, etc. but not things like how our fancy new radar systems work.
If this information does get posted to wikileaks, there will be bad consequences and, if those bad consequences include 1 person being killed than it is a big deal that the information has been leaked.
Eh, I dunno about all that. I'm sure a lot of this stuff consists of military secrets and whatnot that gives the US military the advantage--which it uses to kill people. Not always bad people, and not always for good reasons. It seems a little lopsided to say that one person's death due to release of information is a big deal when the status quo results in thousands of deaths. I don't think you intended to make it "us versus them" but that's what it looks like.
I think there is a responsible way to release some of that classified information, and that is to release only things that Wikileaks thinks civilians should be aware of. Yes, there will exist the possibility of some bad stuff that you mentioned, but I'll bet it's only in the embarrassment and international relations categories. The US government has been powered for decades by its own momentum; for the most part it takes no account of the citizens it was created to serve. Since this stuff is military data, there might not be a whole lot in there, but even bringing to light the awful practices like those found in Gitmo would do a lot to show that the people in charge aren't who they say they are, don't follow their own rules, and have purposes other than "exporting freedom" in mind.
It's not an all-or-none proposition, and I hope that Wikileaks is responsible enough to leak only information that the US gov't is hiding from its own people. Lord knows nobody in Washington has the stones to clean things up.
The net effect was that thousands of extremely unlucky people's savings were wiped out by runaway silicon. The more this behavior is excused, the more the balance of power shifts even further toward the bankers with the big iron, necessarily leaving individual investors even weaker in a system already tilted too far from them.
Do you want the stock market to become an AI playground with potentially devastating consequences for the economy? More than it already is, I mean? I don't. I don't care for regulations, especially when so much of those existing and proposed are bad regulations, but this shit is criminal. If the market were kept to a speed such that individual stocks could be traded no faster than humans on the exchange floor could trade them, say three seconds or so, I guarantee that the market would be a saner place. The only people who would "lose out" are the bankers relying on massive stock holdings and microsecond trades to make their money, as they are the only ones in the position to make money that way. They will fight tooth and nail to keep this privilege, but the practice can't stand up to scrutiny and the rest of the nation can force them to abolish it.
Provided we stop excusing it.
The stock market is at its heart a social endeavor. For it to work correctly, its transactions ought to take place at a pace that humans can follow. The market is supposed to be a way to fund promising endeavors or flourishing businesses by rewarding those who provide capital with bigger returns. The addition of microsecond trading changes the nature of the beast into a numbers game (for the computer powerhouse funds companies) and a crap shoot (for the average Joe). There is no business sense in buying a stock and selling it 1.3 seconds later: that is an attempt to create money out of thin air, an unsustainable practice no matter how it's gone about.
Just because we can set up "expert systems" with buy/sell triggers and ultrafast trades doesn't mean that we should. As you say, there needs to be at least the opportunity for a human decision. It's the same reason that we have low speed limits in residential areas: the machines have no problem handling the speed, but the people in control of them can't react intelligently or quickly enough if something unexpected happens. For evidence, witness the 100 point or greater swings that are now commonplace in the stock market--such drastic swings were rare and a big deal in the 20th century; now they are hardly remarked upon. This is not and will never be normal.
Heh. So government creates a problem for which the solution is to rely on the same government. The one that watches porn instead of making sure its regulations are followed. The one who forms its regulations around the suggestions of the megacorps who have the capacity and the will to do the most damage--and let's not forget that many of the megacorps got the "mega" prefix through lobbying for advantageous regulations that they were large enough to handle yet were onerous enough to drive their smaller competitors from their business sector.
Why is the answer to problems created by government always to give the same government more power?
Except that this shit IS regulated. Remember the hullabaloo over the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act that was passed a while back after Mattel's screw-up with lead paint? Remember how all the free market advocates said that the law would adversely affect everything from small-time toymakers (who would be forced to pay for testing they couldn't afford on products that never come into contact with dangerous chemicals) to libraries (who, without an exemption that may or may not have gone through, would be forced to test all children's books on their shelves to be compliant) while not reliably preventing bad stuff from happening?
Now look what happened. The law has been enacted, yet it was a private citizen who alerted the regulators to the problem. So what good did the CPISA do in this case? If everyone had relied on that regulation for their safety, this never would have been caught. Some regulation may be necessary and beneficial, but when it kills off the little guys while the big fish somehow circumvent it, it becomes not a good for the people but another tool of the megacorps that actually need to be controlled. Bad regulation is worse than no regulation.
Writing is better than talking. Thinking is better than writing. Deciding is better than thinking - William James
That's a decent saying, but I would be very surprised if it came from William James. In truth, I think James would disagree with every part of it because of its inflexibility: writing is under many circumstances not better than talking, and thinking ought to be a prerequisite for most writing and deciding. Thought without action is meaningless, making the writing an extension of thought and not inferior to it.
Having said that, if you have a source for the quote I'd be very interested to see it in proper context. I'm being pedantic only because he is a personal hero of mine and is misread enough without mistaken attributions =)
Whatever you think of Congress, it's a pretty handy damping loop to keep the Peepul from trashing the Constitution, and hence, the country.
Funny, I always found it to be the other way around--the People being the damping tool to keep Congress from trashing the Constitution--only we haven't been very good at it for some decades.
Why would you genuinely have a problem with people who do not want to hurt other people?
That's not necessarily a complete definition of pacifism. Some take it as far as NEVER hurting other people, and that position I disagree with. It's fine if you don't want to defend yourself, but in situations where there is a third party being targeted who is not in a position to defend himself (yes, think of the children) and you are able but not willing to prevent the attack, you have failed morally.
I get not wanting to hurt other people; I'm mostly that way myself, but many who choose to label themselves pacifists claim that they will always refrain from causing harm. I find this position morally questionable as well as logically impossible, as there are many situations where a failure to harm one person results in harming another.
Lots of people seem to have a problem with pacifists benefiting from their militaries' defense--this is indeed silly, because it implies that only those aligned exactly with the country's leadership deserve the benefits of it, when in reality it's very healthy to foster a variety of opinion.
All I'm saying is that I'm not impressed by the performance. The tech is cool but they should have gone with an instrument where you can get away with less nuance, like a guitar or piano perhaps. The violin like all bowed instruments is very unforgiving when it comes to technique. Contrast the violin with their trumpet-playing robot to see what I mean. That performance is technically very good whereas the violin playing is not.
Also, it's not AI and I am very aware of what goes into playing an instrument, as I play several.
I'm not sure that your example is a stumbling block. I imagine "I water sugar with want" would be pictogrammed as something like "water sugar arrow-towards my-avatar (or "me"). Someone from a different linguistic background might reverse the order of subject and object, but the arrow would still point towards the self. The shading that the word "want" gives the sentence is lost; the symbols could be interpreted as want, need, demand, etc., but the intent of you-giving-me sugar water is still very clear. I suspect this is one of the strong points of a pictographic system: we may say it differently, but the picture of the action is pretty clear.
You're right that it's very limited, and it's not going to be of much use while discussing the finer points of economic theories or musical performance. A device housing a good pictogram system could be very useful for emergency personnel who may not speak the language of those he's there to help, and waiting for a translator isn't often feasible under those circumstances. Something like this could be a boon for any area with a significantly diverse population.
Slightly OT, but a wonderful illustration of the language-creation you mention is housed in the book Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe. In it, there is a foreign empire ruled by something akin to a theocracy whose citizens are allowed to speak only in quotations from their scripture. A captured soldier from that society is still quite able to tell an original and engaging story, though Wolfe is kind enough to provide us with an interpreter along with the soldier's original words.
(Even more OT, that's the fourth and mostly final volume of the Book of the New Sun, which is some of the finest science fiction you will ever read.)
For example, there is no, fixed rule, for how to use, commas.
Be that as it may, I fear you may have violated it.