None of the images you linked get to the heart of this issue, which is copyright. We only have evidence of one photoshopped Obama image being pulled, and it also happens to use a TIME magazine cover as its source. Regardless of their political motivations, about which I make no claim (yet!), copyright violation of TIME's image is a valid reason for them to pull the cover. Others including the submitter have mentioned that the image is parody, but not every manipulation is parody and I don't think the case for parody is obvious here--what aspect of TIME are they parodying?
So, figuring I've done nothing worthwhile so far today, I undertook a search of Flickr for TIME covers to see if other copyright violations of TIME's IP were left up. Well I'll be damned, there are tons of them. It does indeed look as if they are selectively enforcing their terms of use, and that one of the things they decided to remove was a controversial piece featuring Obama.
This is, as others have said, perfectly within Flickr's rights, but the Streisand Effect has taken hold and it will probably bite them in the ass now whether the image is infringing or not, especially if the fact that there are tons of other infringing images remaining is spotlighted. It would be interesting to hear comments from Flickr about the takedown, though the article states that they won't respond. Tsk tsk.
Some might say, "yes, but this property has no bearing on the 'real' world". But this is a shortsighted argument, and one that any insightful person can see will become increasingly blurry with time.
Could somebody mod me insightful so that I will understand?
Don't forget as well the US government's overseas adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama ran on an anti-war ticket, yet has ramped up the war in Afghanistan. Someone else brought up the massive "defense" spending, and a significant chunk that doesn't go to the military-industrial complex goes to maintaining a military presence in over 130 foreign countries.
Add to that the billions in foreign aid and the proposed health care reform, and we're talking about real money.
Then put in place people who actually want to serve the public...
And just how do you propose to discern between those people who desire to serve the public and those people who say they desire to serve the public but are really more interested in power?
Instead of calling for executions, you ought to execute calls. Public pressure is the only way to keep politicians working for the public, and the telephone is the most powerful way to communicate with them. It's more important than voting and makes more of a difference.
The difference between the two is that Stross writes entertaining fiction, and Krugman influences international economic policy. Krugman can do a hell of a lot more damage.
That's right. That's the other thing, with globalization...about the outsourcing...about the Internet and the IT...but that's a relatively minor thing so far, probably much bigger in ten years so, but the big thing was the freight container.
And people listen to this guy? They don't make Nobel winners like they used to.
...that as others have pointed out, pretty much any useful number search can be done with existing search engines. Meanwhile, a Google search for "true#" turns up nothing relevant.
This is why we don't put funny characters in our company names, kids.
That's nice if you want to model the entire brain but why would you? How much of the brain is geared toward bodily functions that one would not necessarily need to model? If you exclude the required synapses dedicated to those functions you can focus on a smaller subset that would be easier to build and operate...no?
No. The brain is not modular. While certain areas light up when, for example, you move your arm, there is almost always some level of activity there, and the boundaries are anything but distinct. You could try to chop out all the bits that you don't think apply, and it might actually work. I think the chances are slim, though.
what does a flawless brain look like exactly?
What does a flawless human look like? What does a normal human look like?
When you're dealing with the real world, "normal" is an abstraction and not something you will truly encounter. Everything has its own quirks.
If you're talking about a machine with consciousness, how exactly do you propose to get it "up to speed" without spending years training it? It's not going to magically start holding conversations with you and reading mathematical treatises and coming up with new ones. It's going to require the same amount of intellectual stimulation that a human child does, and that's assuming that you'll get consciousness to arise without the massive inputs coming from an attached body.
If you're looking for a machine specifically optimized to certain tasks, we already have those. They are called computers.
You're right, and it's more than interesting--it is essential. I also believe that the phenomenon of consciousness will not arise without the overwhelming multitude of stimuli continuously bombarding the network with inputs. I am neither an AI researcher nor a psychologist, but my dabbling in the former and continuous exploration of the latter lead me to this conclusion.
Somehow I missed that you (tjstork) were the author of that comment. I'm actually pretty familiar with your posts, so it makes more sense to me now as to why you posted what you did, and believe me I agree with you in this as I do fairly often. I still don't think that an on-topic post about the auto bailout / cash for clunkers is the right place for a condemnation of Republican hypocrisy, especially given that you have no idea what the poster's political affilliations are aside from disliking this program.
Well, you're right about the Republican party leadership's failures and hypocrisies, but what makes you assume that Futurepower(R) has any more faith in them than you do? Nowhere in either post does he claim to be a Republican, nor does he make any mention of his stance on farm subsidies.
One can be a fiscal conservative without being a Republican--there's the Libertarian party, many individuals (such as myself) who hold libertarian views without being aligned to any political party, and even blue dog Democrats--so if you want to attack the attackers of the GM bailouts, you'll have to do better than guilt by assumed association. If you just want to attack the Republican party, you might want to first make sure you're targeting declared Republicans.
Have you checked out WiiWare titles? There are some good ones on there and they're all (I think) $10 or less. Here's a few that might be worth researching if you want to get more play time out of the Wii.
LostWinds - A puzzle platformer which uses the nunchuck to move your character while the pointer controls the wind, used in various ways to fling objects, enemies, your character, etc. to solve the puzzles.
Bit Trip series (Beats / Core) - Rhythm games with an old-school feel. The first one, Beats, is like Pong crossed with a shmup.
Orbient - two-button gravity based game. Crash your planet into blue planets to get bigger, trap grey planets in your orbit for more points, don't hit red ones or you'll die. A button makes each planet's gravity pull you in, and B is anti-gravity. The game can get very tricky when there are as few as four planets nearby.
I haven't bought a Wii game on a disc in over a year, but thanks to WiiWare I'm still getting use out of the system. If you've already looked at WiiWare and nothing strikes your fancy, that's a shame. If you haven't, though, check it out. (You'll be better off looking online, since the console interface gives you only a brief description and two screenshots...XBLA is light-years ahead in that respect.)
Maybe they showed up and watched World War I and II and said, "Wow, that is some heavy shit. We'll... we'll just come back later when you're not busy, ok?"
That's an interesting supposition, and raised one of my own.
If alien life indeed exists, why would they necessarily view our world wars with any more trepidation than we do while watching two ant colonies duke it out? If all of our actions are biochemical computations, who is to say that an interstellar race hasn't evolved to such a degree that our level of consciousness looks to them like pheromones, and our great works nothing more than the tracings of ants?
Isn't the Maybe Game fun? It's like I'm a sci-fi writer with me as my own audience.
There is a huge flaw in the right wings beliefs concerning taxes. Failure to tax properly has driven the national economy to the breaking point.
Sort of.
The flaw in right wing beliefs is that tax cuts can be made while maintaining a bunch of social programs (at the state and federal levels) and massive overseas adventurism (at the federal level).
Cut the "defense" budget to something reasonable, which means pulling the troops out of bases in 130 foreign countries and realizing that the defense industry is a black hole for money, and tax cuts are quite sustainable. This will not happen without massive public pressure due to lobbying. Cutting social programs is even more onerous and less viable, because people have been raised to depend on them or at least to believe that they are good and necessary.
So yes, tax cuts without a parallel scaling back of the governments which they fund is indeed irresponsible and a failure of conservative leadership, but it's a mistake to take responsible tax cuts off the table.
Disclaimer: I'm posting from complete ignorance here.
Is it possible that being around the spray, that is, skin contact and inhalation, is less damaging than ingestion? Of course, one would think that the farm workers are eating as much or more of the sprayed food as the rest of us, but that doesn't seem to have been a part of the study and could introduce further complications (perhaps the pesticides decay over time and are more harmful that way, so the farm workers eating them while fresh are harmed less).
I don't buy organic so I don't have a dog in this fight, but if it's possible for the issues I raised to exist, they ought to be studied before a conclusion is drawn.
Eventually you just give up and make sure that the jerks weaving through traffic don't have room to wedge their cars in ahead of you.
So it is your decision, then, to stop maintaining a safe distance and make your life easier by ignoring a rule. How is this qualitatively different from the weavers ignoring the rules by weaving in traffic? On top of that, if everyone save for the weavers was to maintain a safe following distance, wouldn't the weaver have woven his way onward before you had to drop back again? So the clumping exacerbates your frustration at weavers, since the weaver gets stuck in front of you instead of moving on, and you add to the clumping by deciding to prevent more weavers from getting in front of you. Is it not equally possible that a slow stretch of traffic could be caused initially by a clumper instead of a weaver? Or the two types working in tandem (for extremely adversarial values of tandem)?
Yep, I used to see this at one of the permanent road work sites I passed every weekend. You'd have a two- or three-mile stretch of slow-moving traffic in one lane leaving the other lane wide open, this despite repeated signs that read "USE BOTH LANES TO MERGE POINT."
What amused/infuriated me was that when I zipped down the empty lane to the merge point, I'd sometimes find a few cars pinned there because the drivers in the other lane must have decided that since they had to wait these cars should too. That rarely lasted too long, and even with the delay it beat crawling for fifteen minutes.
Thank you for writing such an excellent post. Abstraction is very useful, but when too heavily relied upon it results in unclear thinking with similarly clouded results.
Slashdot Mirror
None of the images you linked get to the heart of this issue, which is copyright. We only have evidence of one photoshopped Obama image being pulled, and it also happens to use a TIME magazine cover as its source. Regardless of their political motivations, about which I make no claim (yet!), copyright violation of TIME's image is a valid reason for them to pull the cover. Others including the submitter have mentioned that the image is parody, but not every manipulation is parody and I don't think the case for parody is obvious here--what aspect of TIME are they parodying?
So, figuring I've done nothing worthwhile so far today, I undertook a search of Flickr for TIME covers to see if other copyright violations of TIME's IP were left up. Well I'll be damned, there are tons of them. It does indeed look as if they are selectively enforcing their terms of use, and that one of the things they decided to remove was a controversial piece featuring Obama.
This is, as others have said, perfectly within Flickr's rights, but the Streisand Effect has taken hold and it will probably bite them in the ass now whether the image is infringing or not, especially if the fact that there are tons of other infringing images remaining is spotlighted. It would be interesting to hear comments from Flickr about the takedown, though the article states that they won't respond. Tsk tsk.
Except this is voluntary.
I think the comment is "insightful" because it reveals the way things are, not because it is a prescription for the way things ought to be.
Some might say, "yes, but this property has no bearing on the 'real' world". But this is a shortsighted argument, and one that any insightful person can see will become increasingly blurry with time.
Could somebody mod me insightful so that I will understand?
Alternatively, I will settle for an explanation.
My kingdom for a mod point!
Don't forget as well the US government's overseas adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama ran on an anti-war ticket, yet has ramped up the war in Afghanistan. Someone else brought up the massive "defense" spending, and a significant chunk that doesn't go to the military-industrial complex goes to maintaining a military presence in over 130 foreign countries.
Add to that the billions in foreign aid and the proposed health care reform, and we're talking about real money.
The soft empire cannot be maintained.
Then put in place people who actually want to serve the public ...
And just how do you propose to discern between those people who desire to serve the public and those people who say they desire to serve the public but are really more interested in power?
Instead of calling for executions, you ought to execute calls. Public pressure is the only way to keep politicians working for the public, and the telephone is the most powerful way to communicate with them. It's more important than voting and makes more of a difference.
The difference between the two is that Stross writes entertaining fiction, and Krugman influences international economic policy. Krugman can do a hell of a lot more damage.
What does that have to do with flirting nazis?
That's right. That's the other thing, with globalization...about the outsourcing...about the Internet and the IT...but that's a relatively minor thing so far, probably much bigger in ten years so, but the big thing was the freight container.
And people listen to this guy? They don't make Nobel winners like they used to.
...that as others have pointed out, pretty much any useful number search can be done with existing search engines. Meanwhile, a Google search for "true#" turns up nothing relevant.
This is why we don't put funny characters in our company names, kids.
That's nice if you want to model the entire brain but why would you? How much of the brain is geared toward bodily functions that one would not necessarily need to model? If you exclude the required synapses dedicated to those functions you can focus on a smaller subset that would be easier to build and operate...no?
No. The brain is not modular. While certain areas light up when, for example, you move your arm, there is almost always some level of activity there, and the boundaries are anything but distinct. You could try to chop out all the bits that you don't think apply, and it might actually work. I think the chances are slim, though.
what does a flawless brain look like exactly?
What does a flawless human look like? What does a normal human look like?
When you're dealing with the real world, "normal" is an abstraction and not something you will truly encounter. Everything has its own quirks.
Who is that!
And why would we want to build electronic brains?
If you're talking about a machine with consciousness, how exactly do you propose to get it "up to speed" without spending years training it? It's not going to magically start holding conversations with you and reading mathematical treatises and coming up with new ones. It's going to require the same amount of intellectual stimulation that a human child does, and that's assuming that you'll get consciousness to arise without the massive inputs coming from an attached body.
If you're looking for a machine specifically optimized to certain tasks, we already have those. They are called computers.
You're right, and it's more than interesting--it is essential. I also believe that the phenomenon of consciousness will not arise without the overwhelming multitude of stimuli continuously bombarding the network with inputs. I am neither an AI researcher nor a psychologist, but my dabbling in the former and continuous exploration of the latter lead me to this conclusion.
Somehow I missed that you (tjstork) were the author of that comment. I'm actually pretty familiar with your posts, so it makes more sense to me now as to why you posted what you did, and believe me I agree with you in this as I do fairly often. I still don't think that an on-topic post about the auto bailout / cash for clunkers is the right place for a condemnation of Republican hypocrisy, especially given that you have no idea what the poster's political affilliations are aside from disliking this program.
Well, you're right about the Republican party leadership's failures and hypocrisies, but what makes you assume that Futurepower(R) has any more faith in them than you do? Nowhere in either post does he claim to be a Republican, nor does he make any mention of his stance on farm subsidies.
One can be a fiscal conservative without being a Republican--there's the Libertarian party, many individuals (such as myself) who hold libertarian views without being aligned to any political party, and even blue dog Democrats--so if you want to attack the attackers of the GM bailouts, you'll have to do better than guilt by assumed association. If you just want to attack the Republican party, you might want to first make sure you're targeting declared Republicans.
Have you checked out WiiWare titles? There are some good ones on there and they're all (I think) $10 or less. Here's a few that might be worth researching if you want to get more play time out of the Wii.
LostWinds - A puzzle platformer which uses the nunchuck to move your character while the pointer controls the wind, used in various ways to fling objects, enemies, your character, etc. to solve the puzzles.
Bit Trip series (Beats / Core) - Rhythm games with an old-school feel. The first one, Beats, is like Pong crossed with a shmup.
Orbient - two-button gravity based game. Crash your planet into blue planets to get bigger, trap grey planets in your orbit for more points, don't hit red ones or you'll die. A button makes each planet's gravity pull you in, and B is anti-gravity. The game can get very tricky when there are as few as four planets nearby.
I haven't bought a Wii game on a disc in over a year, but thanks to WiiWare I'm still getting use out of the system. If you've already looked at WiiWare and nothing strikes your fancy, that's a shame. If you haven't, though, check it out. (You'll be better off looking online, since the console interface gives you only a brief description and two screenshots...XBLA is light-years ahead in that respect.)
Maybe they showed up and watched World War I and II and said, "Wow, that is some heavy shit. We'll ... we'll just come back later when you're not busy, ok?"
That's an interesting supposition, and raised one of my own.
If alien life indeed exists, why would they necessarily view our world wars with any more trepidation than we do while watching two ant colonies duke it out? If all of our actions are biochemical computations, who is to say that an interstellar race hasn't evolved to such a degree that our level of consciousness looks to them like pheromones, and our great works nothing more than the tracings of ants?
Isn't the Maybe Game fun? It's like I'm a sci-fi writer with me as my own audience.
Agreed =)
There is a huge flaw in the right wings beliefs concerning taxes. Failure to tax properly has driven the national economy to the breaking point.
Sort of.
The flaw in right wing beliefs is that tax cuts can be made while maintaining a bunch of social programs (at the state and federal levels) and massive overseas adventurism (at the federal level).
Cut the "defense" budget to something reasonable, which means pulling the troops out of bases in 130 foreign countries and realizing that the defense industry is a black hole for money, and tax cuts are quite sustainable. This will not happen without massive public pressure due to lobbying. Cutting social programs is even more onerous and less viable, because people have been raised to depend on them or at least to believe that they are good and necessary.
So yes, tax cuts without a parallel scaling back of the governments which they fund is indeed irresponsible and a failure of conservative leadership, but it's a mistake to take responsible tax cuts off the table.
Disclaimer: I'm posting from complete ignorance here.
Is it possible that being around the spray, that is, skin contact and inhalation, is less damaging than ingestion? Of course, one would think that the farm workers are eating as much or more of the sprayed food as the rest of us, but that doesn't seem to have been a part of the study and could introduce further complications (perhaps the pesticides decay over time and are more harmful that way, so the farm workers eating them while fresh are harmed less).
I don't buy organic so I don't have a dog in this fight, but if it's possible for the issues I raised to exist, they ought to be studied before a conclusion is drawn.
Eventually you just give up and make sure that the jerks weaving through traffic don't have room to wedge their cars in ahead of you.
So it is your decision, then, to stop maintaining a safe distance and make your life easier by ignoring a rule. How is this qualitatively different from the weavers ignoring the rules by weaving in traffic? On top of that, if everyone save for the weavers was to maintain a safe following distance, wouldn't the weaver have woven his way onward before you had to drop back again? So the clumping exacerbates your frustration at weavers, since the weaver gets stuck in front of you instead of moving on, and you add to the clumping by deciding to prevent more weavers from getting in front of you. Is it not equally possible that a slow stretch of traffic could be caused initially by a clumper instead of a weaver? Or the two types working in tandem (for extremely adversarial values of tandem)?
My point isn't to attack or defend anyone in particular, only to point out the fallacy of the single cause.
Yep, I used to see this at one of the permanent road work sites I passed every weekend. You'd have a two- or three-mile stretch of slow-moving traffic in one lane leaving the other lane wide open, this despite repeated signs that read "USE BOTH LANES TO MERGE POINT."
What amused/infuriated me was that when I zipped down the empty lane to the merge point, I'd sometimes find a few cars pinned there because the drivers in the other lane must have decided that since they had to wait these cars should too. That rarely lasted too long, and even with the delay it beat crawling for fifteen minutes.
And in fact that behavior is largely caused by the people who break the rules as defined by this study.
How?
Oh my God! We have a winner!
Thank you for writing such an excellent post. Abstraction is very useful, but when too heavily relied upon it results in unclear thinking with similarly clouded results.