As far as I remember, it doesn't take time into account. Assuming that high-tech civilization survives only for few thousand years (and it is probably overgenerous estimation), amount of civilizations existing at same time is still very small. I don't think that existence of half-million year old ruins 3000 ly away is going to be any factor for as ever.
Do I get it correctly that they have analysed metapapers analysing research which analyses the (A)GW? So, it is not longer enough to have consensus on AGW, it is now required to prove that people have consensus on having consensus?
I don't think this is going to convince people with doubts - only meta-meta-meta analysis done by same people could possibly do that...
Discrimination based on religion is very much allowed and real. Try getting a job as a teacher in catholic school, while being outspoken atheist. Try getting a job as a butcher in Halal/Kosher shop not being of proper religion. Try becoming US president, being an atheist (http://www.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist-presidential-candidates-least-appealing.aspx). People putting religious signs illegally in public places are getting away with it, but people trying to remove them are being charged with offending 'religious feelings'.
[...]
wireheading is the most addictive habit known [...], and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. [...] study in which experimental rats had electrodes implanted at strategic locations in their brains, so that an applied current would induce a pleasant feeling. If the current could be obtained any time the rats pushed the lever, they would use it over and over, ignoring food and physical necessities until they died. Such experiments were actually conducted by James Olds and Peter Milner in the 1950s, first discovering the locations of such areas, and later showing extremes to which rats would go to obtain the stimulus again. [...]
Because the entire world will be at peace once the entire world is Muslim?:)
I know that you meant it as a joke, but even that is very far from truth. Majority of Islam-induced violence is actually intra-faith. I have read something about 90%+ of victims being Muslims, just of different brand.
And nature abhors a vacuum, so even if only one brand would be left in the world, there would be deadly schism very soon and circle of violence would start again.
What you mention is variation of Pascal's Wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager). And same way, you forget that assuming positive hypothesis and acting on it (existence of God or global warming) makes you life lower quality. On top of that, you don't take into account possibility that we CANNOT stop it regardless of what we do, we can just die miserably or go in blaze of glory.
Which has nothing to do with global warming really, because it is science, not blind guess - just wanted to point out that your argument is broken.
In the way that keeping them in proper state/entanglement/whatever gets more complex - like adding more knives for a single juggler, rather than adding new jugglers next to each other, each handling independent, small set of knives.
Sure, but going from 5 to a few hundred, or a few thousand, doesn't seem like an impossibility.
Think about juggling knives. There is plenty of people who can do 5. There are some which can do 7. Will you assume that going to hundreds or few thousand doesn't seem like an impossibility?
There is already enough wealth to eliminate poverty and inequality.
There is no such thing as requirement of 'enough wealth' to eliminate inequality. Just let everybody starve and you will have equality. You can always split given amount of resources equally, you don't need enough of them. Which reduces you statement to 'enough wealth to eliminate poverty'. If you would distribute world income equally, you will end up with around $10k per year for everybody. Given that amount of money, guess how people in 3rd world will look forward sewing clothes for half dollar a day.... you won't be able to buy 5$ t-shirts anymore, all goods will become considerably more expensive. It is hard to say exactly how much, but I don't think that doubling price of cheap goods in US is overestimating that impact. And imagine living in US for 5000 dollars a year assuming current prices. Not sure if it counts as 'eliminating poverty'. Of course, if you get rid of iphones, cars, planes etc and just move everybody to farming, you can get a dystopian society of reasonably fed and clothed farmers without any scientific growth or real medical care. Even then, in some areas of world, because 5000 dollars with US prices might be not enough to support people livings in really bad areas of Africa (remember, equal income means things are not cheap there anymore). And even if you do, they will just multiply till point they will be starving again (to avoid population pressure that you would need to considerably improve their livestyle and culture (woman rights etc), not just feed them).
Distributing current wealth equally would mean reasonable live for everybody assuming same access to cheap labor in 3rd world as there is currently. But same process would eliminate cheap labor. Until you can replace 90% of people with robots and have cheap source of energy (cheap as in total cost, availabilty, reliability, solar panels etc still don't qualify, imaginary cold fusion probably would), post-scarcity economy is not really possible. Unless you enjoy living in Amish world of 10 billion farmers, ripe for being overtaken by first warlord to realize that beating people with sticks is easier than growing food yourself, waiting for big asteroid to end civilization.
Contractors aren't going to get up to speed any faster than internal resources (sans technology specifics like expertise in a language).
Depends. If he is talking about things like HFT (sub-ms speed and paranoia of employer to share sourcecode), you can get contractors with a lot more that just expertise in language - they know exactly what to code from start till the end, what are common stumbling blocks etc. It is just getting a person to write a http web server, in some alternate world when there are no open source projects and no reliable 3rd part providers. Getting a contractor which has already written 5 web servers for different companies is going to speed you up really a lot.
Such dynamic is not common in other areas - but in other areas, being few % faster than competitor does not let you earn order of magnitude more money. There is huge negative incentive for companies to share their code and no incentive for contractors to spread/share their knowledge in form of open source, as it can directly cuts into their future profits.
Said that, it might something else, because: - for amount of money you are paid (we are talking 1000+ daily, in whatever currency you happen to like), people are generally willing to relocate, especially for shorter projects, which this one seems to be - HFT is not exactly a hot subject right now (and they might be already reasonable off-the-shelf solutions, I'm outside of that for some years now)
This is what I hinted at in my original post - that it opens possibility of doing more enclosed tracks, with things like canyons, tunnels, windmills etc, turning it into crossover between minigolf and StarWars1 podrace, rather than 'fly in circle around these sticks 5 times, fastest guy wins'.
They are planning it as 4 year long project. With quite a few people on the team, average amount of cables you are expected to disconnect per hour is between 0.1 to 0.2. Might be hard to gamify that...
Yes I did. I have not actually ever tried to fly a drone yet, but that is irrelevant. Has anybody tried to do interesting race competition with non-trivial tracks for R/C helicopters or planes?
Because it is about flying, not about radio control. Think Star Wars pod race/death star trench/etc kind of flying, rather than boring 'safe circle' racing. Remote control is just a side requirement, because you cannot make these kind of race safe enough to put people inside helicopters racing through narrow canyons, but you can accept 70% 'fatality' rate on drones.
As for existing R/C vehicles, let me guess, they were trying to recreate real race conditions as much as possible, just in smaller scale, rather then trying to innovate? Because they were more 'I'm too afraid to drive real car race, so let's pretend' camp rather than 'real car races are way too boring and safe, let's use robots so we don't have to worry about accidental deaths'? If anything, I would rather compare it to all the robot-fights leagues which are out there - just taking it into air and focusing more on racing than fighting (we will see how much more).
The no-poaching agreement in which he was complicit cost me, personally, > $480,000.
Was it actual money you had to pay out of your savings, not-realized-gains you would be guaranteed to get if it has not happened, or not-realized-gains you think you would most probably get assuming there was no-poaching agreement?
Have they really got blacklisted? I was under impression that just cold-calls were forbidden (so Google cannot call Apple employee without invitation, to ask him if he would like to switch jobs), but there was nothing against getting people if THEY have shown interest first (and certainly not about automatically failing them later). Can you point to the link which clearly documents that late rejection with no reason given in case it was the employee looking to switch jobs?
When you look from high perch of 4GL, every 3GL language looks the same to you. Java is a lot closer to C than to SQL, Wolfram or Matlab. C is a lot closer to java than to assembly. We are talking about languages here (syntax etc), not capabilities.
My daughter (7 years old) spend 10 minutes choosing proper shade of pink for a cat in her first Scratch game. I don't think that Wolfram can even start to compete in same category of fun. She was a lot more interested in possibilities of making things meow or bark rather than trivially connecting her results to per square-furlong gross national product of 10 most polluted cities in the world.
If you are targeting 12-15 year olds, sure, pick whatever. They are forced to learn French, they can be forced to learn any other strange programming language. But for 5-8 year olds, let us play with Scratch. And having to explain that father does bit different things at work than picking between pink colors for cats... he picks between different shades of blue for odd lines in table css... yes, it is kind of a cat for grownups, just square and painted in blue stripes.
We might be only intelligent beings in universe. There is a reasonable probability there won't be a second chance for developing high technology civilization on Earth, even if new intelligent species will evolved in hundred million years, due to available of easy accessible metals and fossil fuels. It would mean that when humanity dies out, there won't be a sentience ever again in universe.
This is depressing thought. Indeed, if you are strong subscriber to "après nous, le déluge", it doesn't matter... but it is not a healthy maxim to live by.
We are better off than 100 years ago, but are we better off than 50 years ago?
Depends on definition of 'we'. I think, that, weighted by population, world is a lot better than 50 years ago. Enough to look at China - while it has its great firewall right now and monitors its citizen lives extensively, I still don't think it in any way compares with Cultural Revolution times in terms of 'oppression'. Same for Eastern block - life under USSR directorate was a lot more oppressing that what is happening right now.
If we focus on Western countries in particular (so limiting ourselves to 20% or so of the world)... maybe you are right - I don't know about the living history enough, being raised in Eastern block. I still think that many people would consider mandatory conscription to fight in Vietnam War quite bad and 'oppressing' today.
I suppose that rather than reaching 100 or 50 years in the past, we should settle on 20 or 25 years. I would agree that period of 1989(end of cold war)-2001(WTC attack) is probably 'golden age' for freedom and things are going downhill from there. But I would consider these 12 years more as a statistical fluke rather than a rule...
Advances in computing have enabled oppression that would have been unimaginable not even a few decades ago.
Yes, because slaves in ancient Egypt or early USA were not really 'oppressed'. Nobody was monitoring their tweets, nobody was invoking 'protection from terrorists' while bodypatting them before they boarded their business class flights for holiday trips, they haven't to copy with uncertainty of their routers having hardware embedded backdoors done by NSA and there was no risk of them being caught in the city because of CCTVs monitoring.
Every time I hear people claiming how bad contemporary freedoms are, I really wish them being sent to middle ages or earlier and put into non-ruling class shoes. Spending few years as serf, not being allowed to own anything, move more than few miles from your place of birth, reading anything except Bible (if you even knew how to read in first place) and having your relatives raped by local lord on the whim without any chances of going to the court would probably put things into perspective.
It is your gene pool, even these are not your descendants. Helping your brother to have 4 children will contribute more to 'spreading' your gene pool than having 1 child yourself. In any case, you should care more about your memes (not the internet kind) and these are hard to pass down if humanity goes extinct.
It has to be pretty big rock, to occlude the star at every position of Earth around the Sun. If it is near 'them', it has to be at least in order of magnitude of star size. If it is near us, it has to be around size of 2AU, which is pretty big for 'rock'.
Slashdot Mirror
Patent Troll Wars, DLC for Total War: Warhammer where forces of Games Workshop fight with Blizzard?
As far as I remember, it doesn't take time into account. Assuming that high-tech civilization survives only for few thousand years (and it is probably overgenerous estimation), amount of civilizations existing at same time is still very small. I don't think that existence of half-million year old ruins 3000 ly away is going to be any factor for as ever.
My "best" is not the same as your "best".
But it seems that your 'obvious' is same as everybody's else 'obvious'.
Do I get it correctly that they have analysed metapapers analysing research which analyses the (A)GW? So, it is not longer enough to have consensus on AGW, it is now required to prove that people have consensus on having consensus?
I don't think this is going to convince people with doubts - only meta-meta-meta analysis done by same people could possibly do that...
Discrimination based on religion is very much allowed and real.
Try getting a job as a teacher in catholic school, while being outspoken atheist.
Try getting a job as a butcher in Halal/Kosher shop not being of proper religion.
Try becoming US president, being an atheist (http://www.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist-presidential-candidates-least-appealing.aspx).
People putting religious signs illegally in public places are getting away with it, but people trying to remove them are being charged with offending 'religious feelings'.
It was presented quite nicely in Ringworld series from Larry Niven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
[...]
wireheading is the most addictive habit known [...], and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control.
[...]
study in which experimental rats had electrodes implanted at strategic locations in their brains, so that an applied current would induce a pleasant feeling. If the current could be obtained any time the rats pushed the lever, they would use it over and over, ignoring food and physical necessities until they died. Such experiments were actually conducted by James Olds and Peter Milner in the 1950s, first discovering the locations of such areas, and later showing extremes to which rats would go to obtain the stimulus again.
[...]
Because the entire world will be at peace once the entire world is Muslim? :)
I know that you meant it as a joke, but even that is very far from truth. Majority of Islam-induced violence is actually intra-faith. I have read something about 90%+ of victims being Muslims, just of different brand.
And nature abhors a vacuum, so even if only one brand would be left in the world, there would be deadly schism very soon and circle of violence would start again.
What you mention is variation of Pascal's Wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager). And same way, you forget that assuming positive hypothesis and acting on it (existence of God or global warming) makes you life lower quality. On top of that, you don't take into account possibility that we CANNOT stop it regardless of what we do, we can just die miserably or go in blaze of glory.
Which has nothing to do with global warming really, because it is science, not blind guess - just wanted to point out that your argument is broken.
In the way that keeping them in proper state/entanglement/whatever gets more complex - like adding more knives for a single juggler, rather than adding new jugglers next to each other, each handling independent, small set of knives.
Sure, but going from 5 to a few hundred, or a few thousand, doesn't seem like an impossibility.
Think about juggling knives. There is plenty of people who can do 5. There are some which can do 7. Will you assume that going to hundreds or few thousand doesn't seem like an impossibility?
There is already enough wealth to eliminate poverty and inequality.
There is no such thing as requirement of 'enough wealth' to eliminate inequality. Just let everybody starve and you will have equality. You can always split given amount of resources equally, you don't need enough of them.
Which reduces you statement to 'enough wealth to eliminate poverty'. If you would distribute world income equally, you will end up with around $10k per year for everybody. Given that amount of money, guess how people in 3rd world will look forward sewing clothes for half dollar a day.... you won't be able to buy 5$ t-shirts anymore, all goods will become considerably more expensive. It is hard to say exactly how much, but I don't think that doubling price of cheap goods in US is overestimating that impact.
And imagine living in US for 5000 dollars a year assuming current prices. Not sure if it counts as 'eliminating poverty'. Of course, if you get rid of iphones, cars, planes etc and just move everybody to farming, you can get a dystopian society of reasonably fed and clothed farmers without any scientific growth or real medical care. Even then, in some areas of world, because 5000 dollars with US prices might be not enough to support people livings in really bad areas of Africa (remember, equal income means things are not cheap there anymore). And even if you do, they will just multiply till point they will be starving again (to avoid population pressure that you would need to considerably improve their livestyle and culture (woman rights etc), not just feed them).
Distributing current wealth equally would mean reasonable live for everybody assuming same access to cheap labor in 3rd world as there is currently. But same process would eliminate cheap labor. Until you can replace 90% of people with robots and have cheap source of energy (cheap as in total cost, availabilty, reliability, solar panels etc still don't qualify, imaginary cold fusion probably would), post-scarcity economy is not really possible. Unless you enjoy living in Amish world of 10 billion farmers, ripe for being overtaken by first warlord to realize that beating people with sticks is easier than growing food yourself, waiting for big asteroid to end civilization.
Contractors aren't going to get up to speed any faster than internal resources (sans technology specifics like expertise in a language).
Depends. If he is talking about things like HFT (sub-ms speed and paranoia of employer to share sourcecode), you can get contractors with a lot more that just expertise in language - they know exactly what to code from start till the end, what are common stumbling blocks etc. It is just getting a person to write a http web server, in some alternate world when there are no open source projects and no reliable 3rd part providers. Getting a contractor which has already written 5 web servers for different companies is going to speed you up really a lot.
Such dynamic is not common in other areas - but in other areas, being few % faster than competitor does not let you earn order of magnitude more money. There is huge negative incentive for companies to share their code and no incentive for contractors to spread/share their knowledge in form of open source, as it can directly cuts into their future profits.
Said that, it might something else, because:
- for amount of money you are paid (we are talking 1000+ daily, in whatever currency you happen to like), people are generally willing to relocate, especially for shorter projects, which this one seems to be
- HFT is not exactly a hot subject right now (and they might be already reasonable off-the-shelf solutions, I'm outside of that for some years now)
This is what I hinted at in my original post - that it opens possibility of doing more enclosed tracks, with things like canyons, tunnels, windmills etc, turning it into crossover between minigolf and StarWars1 podrace, rather than 'fly in circle around these sticks 5 times, fastest guy wins'.
They are planning it as 4 year long project. With quite a few people on the team, average amount of cables you are expected to disconnect per hour is between 0.1 to 0.2. Might be hard to gamify that...
Yes I did. I have not actually ever tried to fly a drone yet, but that is irrelevant.
Has anybody tried to do interesting race competition with non-trivial tracks for R/C helicopters or planes?
Because it is about flying, not about radio control. Think Star Wars pod race/death star trench/etc kind of flying, rather than boring 'safe circle' racing. Remote control is just a side requirement, because you cannot make these kind of race safe enough to put people inside helicopters racing through narrow canyons, but you can accept 70% 'fatality' rate on drones.
As for existing R/C vehicles, let me guess, they were trying to recreate real race conditions as much as possible, just in smaller scale, rather then trying to innovate? Because they were more 'I'm too afraid to drive real car race, so let's pretend' camp rather than 'real car races are way too boring and safe, let's use robots so we don't have to worry about accidental deaths'? If anything, I would rather compare it to all the robot-fights leagues which are out there - just taking it into air and focusing more on racing than fighting (we will see how much more).
The no-poaching agreement in which he was complicit cost me, personally, > $480,000.
Was it actual money you had to pay out of your savings, not-realized-gains you would be guaranteed to get if it has not happened, or not-realized-gains you think you would most probably get assuming there was no-poaching agreement?
Have they really got blacklisted? I was under impression that just cold-calls were forbidden (so Google cannot call Apple employee without invitation, to ask him if he would like to switch jobs), but there was nothing against getting people if THEY have shown interest first (and certainly not about automatically failing them later).
Can you point to the link which clearly documents that late rejection with no reason given in case it was the employee looking to switch jobs?
When you look from high perch of 4GL, every 3GL language looks the same to you. Java is a lot closer to C than to SQL, Wolfram or Matlab. C is a lot closer to java than to assembly. We are talking about languages here (syntax etc), not capabilities.
My daughter (7 years old) spend 10 minutes choosing proper shade of pink for a cat in her first Scratch game. I don't think that Wolfram can even start to compete in same category of fun. She was a lot more interested in possibilities of making things meow or bark rather than trivially connecting her results to per square-furlong gross national product of 10 most polluted cities in the world.
If you are targeting 12-15 year olds, sure, pick whatever. They are forced to learn French, they can be forced to learn any other strange programming language. But for 5-8 year olds, let us play with Scratch. And having to explain that father does bit different things at work than picking between pink colors for cats... he picks between different shades of blue for odd lines in table css... yes, it is kind of a cat for grownups, just square and painted in blue stripes.
We might be only intelligent beings in universe. There is a reasonable probability there won't be a second chance for developing high technology civilization on Earth, even if new intelligent species will evolved in hundred million years, due to available of easy accessible metals and fossil fuels. It would mean that when humanity dies out, there won't be a sentience ever again in universe.
This is depressing thought. Indeed, if you are strong subscriber to "après nous, le déluge", it doesn't matter... but it is not a healthy maxim to live by.
We are better off than 100 years ago, but are we better off than 50 years ago?
Depends on definition of 'we'. I think, that, weighted by population, world is a lot better than 50 years ago. Enough to look at China - while it has its great firewall right now and monitors its citizen lives extensively, I still don't think it in any way compares with Cultural Revolution times in terms of 'oppression'.
Same for Eastern block - life under USSR directorate was a lot more oppressing that what is happening right now.
If we focus on Western countries in particular (so limiting ourselves to 20% or so of the world)... maybe you are right - I don't know about the living history enough, being raised in Eastern block. I still think that many people would consider mandatory conscription to fight in Vietnam War quite bad and 'oppressing' today.
I suppose that rather than reaching 100 or 50 years in the past, we should settle on 20 or 25 years. I would agree that period of 1989(end of cold war)-2001(WTC attack) is probably 'golden age' for freedom and things are going downhill from there. But I would consider these 12 years more as a statistical fluke rather than a rule...
Advances in computing have enabled oppression that would have been unimaginable not even a few decades ago.
Yes, because slaves in ancient Egypt or early USA were not really 'oppressed'. Nobody was monitoring their tweets, nobody was invoking 'protection from terrorists' while bodypatting them before they boarded their business class flights for holiday trips, they haven't to copy with uncertainty of their routers having hardware embedded backdoors done by NSA and there was no risk of them being caught in the city because of CCTVs monitoring.
Every time I hear people claiming how bad contemporary freedoms are, I really wish them being sent to middle ages or earlier and put into non-ruling class shoes. Spending few years as serf, not being allowed to own anything, move more than few miles from your place of birth, reading anything except Bible (if you even knew how to read in first place) and having your relatives raped by local lord on the whim without any chances of going to the court would probably put things into perspective.
It is your gene pool, even these are not your descendants. Helping your brother to have 4 children will contribute more to 'spreading' your gene pool than having 1 child yourself.
In any case, you should care more about your memes (not the internet kind) and these are hard to pass down if humanity goes extinct.
It has to be pretty big rock, to occlude the star at every position of Earth around the Sun. If it is near 'them', it has to be at least in order of magnitude of star size. If it is near us, it has to be around size of 2AU, which is pretty big for 'rock'.