As in my comment above, people said commoners weren't smart enough to rule themselves through representational democracy, thus they needed kings and royalty to rule them. It's a tired argument.
However, you are right. People aren't lawyers, but nonetheless they are expected to follow the law to the letter. Try using this as an excuse in court: "But Your Honor! I'm not a lawyer! How could I be expected to follow the law when I can't even understand it? Why, I haven't even read it!" If people are smart enough to be expected to follow the law, they are smart enough to propose and vote on law. People are smart enough to do all of the above.
If direct democracy is implemented in any serious manner, people will become familiar enough with the law to do it well. You would study it in civics class in high school. You would talk about it over dinner just like you do other subjects. People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life. They are smart enough to recognize right and wrong and are fully capable of proposing and arguing rules over the internet.
I see this and future use of internet voting as steps toward direct democracy. I predict that within this century, some countries will use direct democracy as the legislative body on the local and regional level. Direct Democracy is where citizens can directly propose and vote on legislation, making representatives redundant.
When democracy was first proposed, it was long argued by the elite that peasants were not smart enough to rule themselves; they needed kings to keep society from collapsing. Even the first democracies were collections of wealthy land-owning males -- almost 90% of the population, including women, slaves, and peasants, were not enfranchised into the government. Well, those naysayers were wrong, and commoners are perfectly capable of running representational democracies.
The thing is, representatives are a compromise anyways. In days when farmers worked 14 hour days 6 days a week, no one had the time to travel meet up with everyone else to discuss politics. The American legal system is based on how long it takes a person travelling on horseback to transmit information.
Now with the advent of the internet and other communication technologies, representatives are redundant. We could propose and vote on laws ourselves, over the internet. Problems such as authentication and verification have been solved in various communication systems. As soon as the general public gets the hang of internet discussions, people will see direct democracy as a reasonable alternative to representational democracy. This could happen within a generation or two.
Of course, current politicians will resist direct democracy, because it puts them out of their incredibly powerful positions.
I am not against space research per se, but I think space research isn't the best place to be spending our limited research dollars. We are losing plant and animals species by the dozens each year, just when we are learning enough about DNA to make some real advances in biology and medicine. I don't think 'rocket science', atomic research, and metallurgy will be the science that puts food in the table in the upcoming centuries. Soon, we will be growing new plants, tools, dwellings and organs. The future will be unimaginable. We will live in a symbioses with living surroundings we will have created. If my prediction holds true, we are now in the process of burning million-year-old libraries of genetic information while shooting rockets into space.
If we can't solve the political, social, and economic problems we have right now here on Earth, nothing magic is going on happen on the long space journey to our 'new home'. We have to learn to effectively deal with these problems -- they are endemic to human existence, and they will follow us everywhere. We won't leave them behind if/when we leave Earth.
How about learning how to successfully or sustainably manage resources once we do find them? Space is vast and empty. We live in a cornucopia. If we're screwing up this badly while living in a virtual paradise, there's no way we can survive the 1000+ year trip to the next planet. We'd eat ourselves of out food a fuel 10 years into the space journey.
Well, I am not good with the math, but if you read the wikipedia link there are a long string of back-and-forth debates about what the implications are for AI. Goedel himself seemed to think that his theorem meant that human mathematicians demonstrating this theorem was an example of a human doing something a turing machine will never do.
Usually argument by authority doesn't really fly in arguments concerning math or logic, but I'm not smart enough to do the math. Everytime I bring this up on slashdot, someone makes the argument "No, it doesn't," but the argument is far from settled amongst professional mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers.
"you can separate the left-most X and rest still equals 2. Thus X^2 = 2, so X = sqrt(2)."
I'm going to risk making an ass of myself and call BS. OK, so you can remove the left-most X. And then remove the new left-most X, ad infinitum. Since its an infinite series, you never run out of X^s, you can *always* remove the left-most X^, and you have the same amount that you had before: an infinite amount. So you never get to X^2, you still have X^X^X..., no matter how many left-most X^s you remove.
Other things I like are not necessarily problems, but things that just inspire awe, such as proving that.99... = 1, or that formula that shows pi*log^-1 = 0 or whatever it is... is always struck me as the Grand Unification Theory of algebra and geometry. It's so simple and shows that these numbers, which are so hard for me to work with, combine in some fashion to show some property that is strikingly simple, like finding a beatiful crystal of clarity in a quarry of grey, difficult mathematics.
I believe that most of the rock dating is based on the decay of radioactive elements. The decay of elements, for example U -> Pb, is at a standard half-life. If that varies, then that is a very fundamental challenge to current physics theories.
Carbon dating varies due to a varying of the amount of C14 in the atmosphere during different times in the past. One science teach I had in high school pointed out the obvious question to me: when we are dating rocks using radioactive decay, how do we know it was originally all parent? So, in any sample, if there is 7% U in a most Pb sample, how do we know that 74 MYA (or whatever) is was all U? What if a volcano went of and mixed a bit of U with a bit of lead?
First off, I think this is a hoax. But this communication problem is something that archaeologists have to deal with all the time. This guy is Dutch, which might help the situation, but an archaeologist doing research is a great cover for an international spy. Remember that the US and the UK are making fairly overt overtures about invading Iran and overthrowing the government. The bureaucrats in the government, in a place that is tightly controlled like Iran, really do not care about ancient cities and what-not. They may be willing to grant a 2-year visa to a professor, so long as he doesn't use the internet (just in case he is a spy). Of course, the happy researcher will follow his visa restrictions to the letter so as not to jeopardize his life's work. If he really is in the middle of the desert, then no, there is no internet, because there are no phone lines, electricity, or running water. He might be going into town every couple of months.
This is much, much easier to track down and prosecute than password fishing. Number one, in order to have credbility, the address will have to be in the country. No one is going to send their keyfob to Gambia or Russia. Second, the cops will just keep an eye on the address, and bust in once they have enough evidence, and find a guy with a pile of key fobs in front of him.
"Malicious code comes in two flavours - code that is outright malicious, and code that is completely benign in browsers that conform to the W3C specifications, but is interpreted wrongly by some browsers to generate a malicious effect."
A bit of nitpicking -- malicious specifically refers to evil intent. If you say that some browsers generate a malicious effect, you are saying that the effect has mental states and that its mental state is desirous of harm.
You can't say this enough. This thing is huge. It beats any vertebrate record by far.
This article claims about a seperate, confirmed dinosaur find that
Local palaeontologists said the dinosaur was a herbivore measuring up to 51 metres (167 ft) long - beating its nearest rival, the 100-tonne Argentinosaurus huinculensis, by a good eight metres (26 ft).
So the current vertebrate record is 167 ft. If this thing is hundreds of feet long... Christ, that's enourmous. They say that these giant sauropods had to eat constantly to maintain enough energy. The sauropods were eating plants, and while animals are a bit more nutritious, that would necessitate of successful hunts.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. Could it be some long-ass sea snake?
I'm going to write a letter to National Geographic, maybe the BBC or some other organizations to see if they can follow up on this story. Casper Shilling claims that he's running into political difficulty organizing the excavation, and he doesn't have an internet connection in Iran.
Of course, US and UK hostilities with Iran won't help this situation AT ALL. GOD DAMN YOU, GWB!
OK, now I'm starting to think this is a hoax -- he says on the site:
"...But is it a dinosaur? Despite my limited knowledge in that area of inquiry, it seems unlikely, for a variety of reasons - but primarily, the condition of the bones suggests a fossil much younger than the Cretaceous Era. It is, based on my understanding of human skeletal remains, possibly even contemporaneous with humans, or at any rate, early hominids. And yet, that is impossible. Unfortunately, proper carbon dating will have to wait - the local government is notoriously shy about allowing any historical or archaeological material out of country for any reason. "
Okay, let's review.
He's an archaeologist, not a paleontologist. He is comfortable guesstimating what period the bones are from by their condition, yet he doesn't mention the rock strata he found them in. Early hominid fossils do exist, but mostly what archaeologists deal with are unfossilized remains. I'd be surprised by an archaeologist who felt comfortable judging a fossils' age by its condition -- I think you would need a lot of experience with fossils in the ground to do that, and I doubt this guy has much experience with hominid fossils -- they are only found in the rift valley in Africa, and he's in Iran
You can't carbon date rocks. He has to be smocking crack, or *very* inexperienced with fossils.
Either this is a hoax, or this guy is totally naive when it comes to fossils. Having a bachelors in anthropology, I can say that option #2 is totally plausible.
I'm sorry, now that I read the site more closely, Casper Shilling is not a paleontologist, but rather an archaeologist. So he's used to digging up human remains, bodily and architectural, not fossilized animal bones.
Here is a link with working images on it, the site of the paleontologist to whom a local pointed out the site.
If this is a legit fossil, my guess is that its an ocean-going creature. If that thing flew, it would have needed enormous amounts of energy to keep itself aloft. It probably would have had to eat constantly. Unless, as one fantasy author speculated about dragons, they were lighter-than-air flyers, full of hydrogen or methane or something.
science is a fringe activity
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Face it, most of what people want to do is socialize. Science or other knowledge-acquiring endeavours are fringe activities for the small geek subpopulation. That being said, when technology becomes mass produced and sold to people in order to socialize, that lowers the cost and makes the science much cheaper to pursue.
I say make space travel mostly a entertainment/travel industry for now. As the general public finances it, there will be investment and competition by private industry. The cost of space travel will become so cheap that it will be feasible to manufacture in space, and also to throw a few experiments up there.
Forget about the science-and-engineering oriented utopia promised us by science fiction. As a general rule, people want bread and circus. It would be much more effecient to throw a few experiments on the bread-and-circus rockets than the way it's currently being financed.
I know you are allowed to sell GPL code. Would their use of GPL InnoDB code in a commercial version of MySQL violate the 'linking' clause of the GPL? If so, could they get around it by modularizing or otherwise seperating the InnoDB code from the rest of MySQL in a GPL friendly fashion?
"What about google reading your emails, monitoring your behavior, trying to control every aspect of your life?
"
I've heard before that knowledge == power, but can you make the link between reading my email and controlling every aspect of my life more explicit? I'll bet you have a long rant that's been welling up ever since you began your project;)
It seems to me that Google, contrary to other IT companies, actually sees its business as providing access to information, whereas companies like MS and AOL seek vendor lock-in for their file formats and protocols.
Some of you may have already realized this, but for me, I had this realization while reading this article summary. Google is like the first real IT company -- this is what the computer revolution was meant to be.
I'm wondering why the illustrators chose to show these as 'solid' objects, and not clouds or even animated swirling clouds.
As a non-scientist, the images I was exposed to growing up were always spheres orbiting spheres, which inevitably led to the 'realization' of everyone I knew (including myself) at some point in their life that atoms were just like the solar system, and what if we are in just a big atom, and atoms really are just little solar systems...? This image, showing the electron 'cloud' around a hydrogen nucleus, is very enlightening for someone who is terrible at math. Totally destroys the 'recursing solar system' theory;)
Slashdot Mirror
As in my comment above, people said commoners weren't smart enough to rule themselves through representational democracy, thus they needed kings and royalty to rule them. It's a tired argument.
However, you are right. People aren't lawyers, but nonetheless they are expected to follow the law to the letter. Try using this as an excuse in court: "But Your Honor! I'm not a lawyer! How could I be expected to follow the law when I can't even understand it? Why, I haven't even read it!" If people are smart enough to be expected to follow the law, they are smart enough to propose and vote on law. People are smart enough to do all of the above.
If direct democracy is implemented in any serious manner, people will become familiar enough with the law to do it well. You would study it in civics class in high school. You would talk about it over dinner just like you do other subjects. People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life. They are smart enough to recognize right and wrong and are fully capable of proposing and arguing rules over the internet.
I see this and future use of internet voting as steps toward direct democracy. I predict that within this century, some countries will use direct democracy as the legislative body on the local and regional level. Direct Democracy is where citizens can directly propose and vote on legislation, making representatives redundant.
When democracy was first proposed, it was long argued by the elite that peasants were not smart enough to rule themselves; they needed kings to keep society from collapsing. Even the first democracies were collections of wealthy land-owning males -- almost 90% of the population, including women, slaves, and peasants, were not enfranchised into the government. Well, those naysayers were wrong, and commoners are perfectly capable of running representational democracies.
The thing is, representatives are a compromise anyways. In days when farmers worked 14 hour days 6 days a week, no one had the time to travel meet up with everyone else to discuss politics. The American legal system is based on how long it takes a person travelling on horseback to transmit information.
Now with the advent of the internet and other communication technologies, representatives are redundant. We could propose and vote on laws ourselves, over the internet. Problems such as authentication and verification have been solved in various communication systems. As soon as the general public gets the hang of internet discussions, people will see direct democracy as a reasonable alternative to representational democracy. This could happen within a generation or two.
Of course, current politicians will resist direct democracy, because it puts them out of their incredibly powerful positions.
I am not against space research per se, but I think space research isn't the best place to be spending our limited research dollars. We are losing plant and animals species by the dozens each year, just when we are learning enough about DNA to make some real advances in biology and medicine. I don't think 'rocket science', atomic research, and metallurgy will be the science that puts food in the table in the upcoming centuries. Soon, we will be growing new plants, tools, dwellings and organs. The future will be unimaginable. We will live in a symbioses with living surroundings we will have created. If my prediction holds true, we are now in the process of burning million-year-old libraries of genetic information while shooting rockets into space.
If we can't solve the political, social, and economic problems we have right now here on Earth, nothing magic is going on happen on the long space journey to our 'new home'. We have to learn to effectively deal with these problems -- they are endemic to human existence, and they will follow us everywhere. We won't leave them behind if/when we leave Earth.
How about learning how to successfully or sustainably manage resources once we do find them? Space is vast and empty. We live in a cornucopia. If we're screwing up this badly while living in a virtual paradise, there's no way we can survive the 1000+ year trip to the next planet. We'd eat ourselves of out food a fuel 10 years into the space journey.
See, it's one more...
Well, I am not good with the math, but if you read the wikipedia link there are a long string of back-and-forth debates about what the implications are for AI. Goedel himself seemed to think that his theorem meant that human mathematicians demonstrating this theorem was an example of a human doing something a turing machine will never do.
Usually argument by authority doesn't really fly in arguments concerning math or logic, but I'm not smart enough to do the math. Everytime I bring this up on slashdot, someone makes the argument "No, it doesn't," but the argument is far from settled amongst professional mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers.
"you can separate the left-most X and rest still equals 2. Thus X^2 = 2, so X = sqrt(2)."
I'm going to risk making an ass of myself and call BS. OK, so you can remove the left-most X. And then remove the new left-most X, ad infinitum. Since its an infinite series, you never run out of X^s, you can *always* remove the left-most X^, and you have the same amount that you had before: an infinite amount. So you never get to X^2, you still have X^X^X..., no matter how many left-most X^s you remove.
First up, does Goedel's incompleteness theorem imply that computers will never be able to have human-like intelligence?
.99... = 1, or that formula that shows pi*log^-1 = 0 or whatever it is... is always struck me as the Grand Unification Theory of algebra and geometry. It's so simple and shows that these numbers, which are so hard for me to work with, combine in some fashion to show some property that is strikingly simple, like finding a beatiful crystal of clarity in a quarry of grey, difficult mathematics.
Other things I like are not necessarily problems, but things that just inspire awe, such as proving that
"Did you know that it is actually possible to take your pet snake for a 'walk'?"
And did you know that you can also go for a 'stroll'?
I believe that most of the rock dating is based on the decay of radioactive elements. The decay of elements, for example U -> Pb, is at a standard half-life. If that varies, then that is a very fundamental challenge to current physics theories.
Carbon dating varies due to a varying of the amount of C14 in the atmosphere during different times in the past. One science teach I had in high school pointed out the obvious question to me: when we are dating rocks using radioactive decay, how do we know it was originally all parent? So, in any sample, if there is 7% U in a most Pb sample, how do we know that 74 MYA (or whatever) is was all U? What if a volcano went of and mixed a bit of U with a bit of lead?
" What do you suppose we do about the thousands of existing applications that use the registry? "
How about a virtual registry?
First off, I think this is a hoax. But this communication problem is something that archaeologists have to deal with all the time. This guy is Dutch, which might help the situation, but an archaeologist doing research is a great cover for an international spy. Remember that the US and the UK are making fairly overt overtures about invading Iran and overthrowing the government. The bureaucrats in the government, in a place that is tightly controlled like Iran, really do not care about ancient cities and what-not. They may be willing to grant a 2-year visa to a professor, so long as he doesn't use the internet (just in case he is a spy). Of course, the happy researcher will follow his visa restrictions to the letter so as not to jeopardize his life's work. If he really is in the middle of the desert, then no, there is no internet, because there are no phone lines, electricity, or running water. He might be going into town every couple of months.
This is much, much easier to track down and prosecute than password fishing. Number one, in order to have credbility, the address will have to be in the country. No one is going to send their keyfob to Gambia or Russia. Second, the cops will just keep an eye on the address, and bust in once they have enough evidence, and find a guy with a pile of key fobs in front of him.
"Malicious code comes in two flavours - code that is outright malicious, and code that is completely benign in browsers that conform to the W3C specifications, but is interpreted wrongly by some browsers to generate a malicious effect."
A bit of nitpicking -- malicious specifically refers to evil intent. If you say that some browsers generate a malicious effect, you are saying that the effect has mental states and that its mental state is desirous of harm.
Diciontary.com says about malicious:
Having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful
Maybe pick another work other than malicious for your outright/wrong interpretation bad code system.
You can't say this enough. This thing is huge. It beats any vertebrate record by far.
This article claims about a seperate, confirmed dinosaur find that
Local palaeontologists said the dinosaur was a herbivore measuring up to 51 metres (167 ft) long - beating its nearest rival, the 100-tonne Argentinosaurus huinculensis, by a good eight metres (26 ft).
So the current vertebrate record is 167 ft. If this thing is hundreds of feet long... Christ, that's enourmous. They say that these giant sauropods had to eat constantly to maintain enough energy. The sauropods were eating plants, and while animals are a bit more nutritious, that would necessitate of successful hunts.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. Could it be some long-ass sea snake?
I'm going to write a letter to National Geographic, maybe the BBC or some other organizations to see if they can follow up on this story. Casper Shilling claims that he's running into political difficulty organizing the excavation, and he doesn't have an internet connection in Iran.
Of course, US and UK hostilities with Iran won't help this situation AT ALL. GOD DAMN YOU, GWB!
"...But is it a dinosaur? Despite my limited knowledge in that area of inquiry, it seems unlikely, for a variety of reasons - but primarily, the condition of the bones suggests a fossil much younger than the Cretaceous Era. It is, based on my understanding of human skeletal remains, possibly even contemporaneous with humans, or at any rate, early hominids. And yet, that is impossible. Unfortunately, proper carbon dating will have to wait - the local government is notoriously shy about allowing any historical or archaeological material out of country for any reason. "
Okay, let's review.
Either this is a hoax, or this guy is totally naive when it comes to fossils. Having a bachelors in anthropology, I can say that option #2 is totally plausible.
I'm sorry, now that I read the site more closely, Casper Shilling is not a paleontologist, but rather an archaeologist. So he's used to digging up human remains, bodily and architectural, not fossilized animal bones.
Here is a link with working images on it, the site of the paleontologist to whom a local pointed out the site.
If this is a legit fossil, my guess is that its an ocean-going creature. If that thing flew, it would have needed enormous amounts of energy to keep itself aloft. It probably would have had to eat constantly. Unless, as one fantasy author speculated about dragons, they were lighter-than-air flyers, full of hydrogen or methane or something.
Face it, most of what people want to do is socialize. Science or other knowledge-acquiring endeavours are fringe activities for the small geek subpopulation. That being said, when technology becomes mass produced and sold to people in order to socialize, that lowers the cost and makes the science much cheaper to pursue.
I say make space travel mostly a entertainment/travel industry for now. As the general public finances it, there will be investment and competition by private industry. The cost of space travel will become so cheap that it will be feasible to manufacture in space, and also to throw a few experiments up there.
Forget about the science-and-engineering oriented utopia promised us by science fiction. As a general rule, people want bread and circus. It would be much more effecient to throw a few experiments on the bread-and-circus rockets than the way it's currently being financed.
I know you are allowed to sell GPL code. Would their use of GPL InnoDB code in a commercial version of MySQL violate the 'linking' clause of the GPL? If so, could they get around it by modularizing or otherwise seperating the InnoDB code from the rest of MySQL in a GPL friendly fashion?
"What about google reading your emails, monitoring your behavior, trying to control every aspect of your life? "
;)
I've heard before that knowledge == power, but can you make the link between reading my email and controlling every aspect of my life more explicit? I'll bet you have a long rant that's been welling up ever since you began your project
It seems to me that Google, contrary to other IT companies, actually sees its business as providing access to information, whereas companies like MS and AOL seek vendor lock-in for their file formats and protocols.
Some of you may have already realized this, but for me, I had this realization while reading this article summary. Google is like the first real IT company -- this is what the computer revolution was meant to be.
As a non-scientist, the images I was exposed to growing up were always spheres orbiting spheres, which inevitably led to the 'realization' of everyone I knew (including myself) at some point in their life that atoms were just like the solar system, and what if we are in just a big atom, and atoms really are just little solar systems...? This image, showing the electron 'cloud' around a hydrogen nucleus, is very enlightening for someone who is terrible at math. Totally destroys the 'recursing solar system' theory ;)
Do the Dutch really have a Justice system based on gobbledegook?
"And recall, the goal is 'as simple as possible, but no simpler'. Not just 'simple'"
Again, I ask, what is the scientific reason for this being the goal?