Actually, as far as I can tell, he equated our nuclear arsenal to a pellet gun (thus why we won't use it if they don't have a gun), and equated our conventional arsenal to doing nothing at all.
No, we're promising to only blow the fuck out of them with an endless barrage of missiles until they and their home are rubble, rather than a bomb so big it'll blow up every house in the neighborhood, you brain-damaged idiot.
Who, exactly, did that? Not the Obama administration with this policy, that's for sure.
Some stupid monkeys think anything that isn't overtly and unnecessarily aggressive is the same as pacifist. They literally can't tell the difference between promising not to nuke (most) non-nuclear countries and promising not to do anything at all.
Given that compliance is a matter of law, and not a matter of opinion, any opinion is irrelevant, no matter whose it is.
That's a fanciful view of law, as if one's compliance or lack thereof is a fact of nature. Too bad law is expressed in human language, and thus like all human language is open to differences of opinion. That's why there are judges rule based on their opinion of what the law means.
Anyway, regardless of what it means that compliance is a matter of law, this pledge is not.
Open secret? Sounds instead like a thing anyone not a total douche just knows isn't polite to mention cus it's not fucking relevant. Black woman judge rules on casing involving civil rights. Oh noes? White straight guy Judge presides over criminal case with white straight guy defendant -- sweet lord the bias, remove him!
The best/. April Fool's stories are the ones that are actual links to other sites doing actual funny things for April 1st.
And this one is pretty funny if I do say so myself, but then again I ate too many non-Euclidean Tacos with Bacon and, after meeting the Tentacular one himself, well, ended up like this: "You have a powerful temptation to make Linux your primary operating system and start coding in emacs. So this is madness..."
Slashdot is kind of like the kid who doesn't quite understand the idea that sometimes once == funny, twice == funnier, three times == less funny, four times == overkill, five times == annoying.
And then six == less funny and seven == funny again. So we have a sinusoidal pattern with a period of 6.
So yeah, listen up kids! Telling the same joke five times isn't funny, it's annoying! So instead always make sure to tell the joke (N*6 + 2) times where N is an integer!
Oh see I never thought of doing that for any reason but recreational which is why I was confused. When I want to smuggle an endangered animal, I just pretend it's a hat.
I remain hopeful that at some point the entire truth will be revealed. My hope has been diminished by the fact that the current president seems content to simply "move on" and forget the criminal activities of the prior administration, but it's not too late.
Well, if you're satisfied simply knowing the truth, whether or not it results in justice being meted out, then I'd take heart. Because personally I bet that in about twenty years the truth, straight from the horse's mouth, will be available at the National Security Archive.
Ever wonder if the CIA and Oliver North were really allowing the Contras to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. in order to buy weapons, to get around the Congressional ban on material assistance? Did the U.S. government really know that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds at the same time we sent Donald Rumsfeld to go shake our good buddy's hand?
Well it's all right there. BTW, the answer to both questions, according to the U.S. government itself, is "yes".
The government didn't try to argue that it *was* obeying the law.
Cus they can't.
So the judge ruled that 1) yes, you are required to obey the law
Now there's a legal "duh" if I ever heard one.
In other words, the issue of legality didn't really come up except in a very narrow sense.
True and of course doesn't set any strict precedent or force the Executive to do anything or punish anyone who performed illegal acts.
But it is very promising for any future cases that come forward, since it strongly suggests that "we don't have to obey the law" is not going to fly, meaning they would have to argue the legality of the program, which of course they can't.
Honestly, since Holder has been making noise about investigating the NSA and CIA extra-legal programs despite Obama wanting to move on, I suspect that this form of argument is used because it is 1) essentially the argument AG Gonzalez used and 2) doomed to failure. So he does his official duty of defending the government, while also getting the outcome he wanted. But that's quite a bit of speculation.:)
,i>I'll give 40 to 1 that the few wishes selected out of the 1000's were pictures that the NASA scientists wanted to take anyway, but created a huge public relations event to make themselves look good. "Just consider the kids...!"
The odds that NASA is only taking the pictures they want to take because they look scientifically valuable to them is 100%.
The odds that NASA is selecting such pictures from the set of public suggestions is also 100%.
I mean sure the orbiter is taking other pictures besides, but the whole point of this exercise is that NASA by itself does not have the resources to manually go over the lower resolution photos taken of Mars to find things to look at closer and keep the HiRISE camera busy.
The PR aspect is there for sure, but they really do want the public to serve as a first-level filter of the massive amount of photographic data taken of Mars. That's why they don't just ask you to submit coordinates, but also to categorize the picture and suggest why it's scientifically interesting, to make winnowing through the suggestions easier. Otherwise they could just have you submit coordinates, or give you a list and let you 'vote' like they did for the ISS module.:P
Erm, I didn't know that, good point. Well that explains why there is confusion and hard feelings. Still, we're Americans for the same reason Mexicans are Mexicans and Chinese are Chinese.
And okay how's this for a besides -- no matter how much you complain, most people in the world are still going to associate "American" with "from the US" and do you really want to be confused with us when traveling abroad?:)
I don't think it is. You're just distinguishing between pre- and post-facto judgement, not moral judgement and judgement based on outcomes.
You keep referring to outcomes and consequences, but there are two kinds of outcomes. There are known outcomes which are in the past, and there are hypothetical outcomes that are in the future and thus unknowable.
The very concept of a decision (moral or otherwise) means you are deciding what to do, meaning it has not been done yet, meaning that if you are considering outcomes, you must necessarily be considering hypothetical outcomes.
Which is exactly what unmagnetized people in this study were doing -- considering hypothetical outcomes from the vantage of not being able to foresee the future.
The assumption has mostly been that morality is a social construct, and that individuals (pre-)judge actions based on their consequences and then compare those consequences to whatever their socially accepted morality may be.
Replace "consequences" with "probable consequences" to properly reflect the kind of consequence that must be considered because you can't know the future and that's exactly right.
This study seems to indicate otherwise, that there is in fact a short-circuit that tells people to judge actions in a way that is not at all based on consequences.
Absolutely not. In every case, magnetized or not, the people were judging morality based entirely on consequences.
The scenario where you send your girlfriend across a dangerous bridge was only considered immoral because of the hypothetical, probable outcome that the bridge collapses and she gets hurt or killed. Otherwise nobody would have thought that situation was immoral.:P
The fact that you are told that she makes it across safely is immaterial to the moral decision. As the unmagnetized people understood but the magnetized people did not, at the time the decision was made, you could not possibly know that she would make it across safely. The knowledge available at that time said the bridge was dangerous. You decided to knowingly put her at risk. That is an immoral decision, based on the hypothetical outcome.
Same with attempted murder. Any normal person can see that attempting murder implies a hypothetical outcome of someone dying, and it is because of that outcome that the normal people said attempted murder was immoral. However the magnetized people were incapable of placing themselves in that hypothetical situation of not knowing the future. They were only able to consider the known, post-facto outcome which the unmagnetized people could intuitively see was irrelevant.
Outcomes were the deciding factor in both cases. Pre- vs post- is exactly the difference between the two cases. Known vs hypothetical outcomes. Abstract vs concrete thinking.
Here, let's conduct a quiz:
1) You decide to shoot your mother in the face with a shotgun for overcooking your dinner. Was this decision moral or immoral?
2) You decide to shoot your mother in the face with a shotgun for overcooking your dinner. Despite your extensive efforts to ensure that this happens, your gun jams and your mother lives. Let me be perfectly clear, in case it is somehow not obvious, that you could not possible know this would happen and certainly did not want or expect it to. Was this decision moral or immoral?
If your answers to these two questions are different, please check the area around you for powerful magnets.:P
Cognitive dissonance I guess. They rail against bailouts that sucked but probably did save the economy from a total collapse. But then things like pretty pictures of Mars it's all 'whatever it takes!'.
What you call "cognitive dissonance" I call "having a sense of proportion".
In other news, I'm unhappy with the automotive and banking bailouts for wasting money, yet just yesterday I payed extra for a completely unnecessary helping of guacamole for my quesadillas. Clearly I am a hypocrite.
No... Informed skepticism is required in science, it is the ignorant, maligned and malicious screaming and wailing that is nutty.
I'd throw "deliberately" in there before "ignorant", given the frequency with which I see misconceptions that they couldn't possibly still hold if they'd made even the tiniest attempt to educate themselves in the vaguest attempt to mimic the intellectual honesty they accuse scientists of not having.
Unfortunately, the GP is right, very few AGW "skeptics" have any real idea of what the hell they're talking about.
And the ones that do are called "climatologists" and are conducting their work right alongside all the other climatologists and are talking about the actual weaknesses of the theories and data, which unfortunately for the "skeptics" turns out to be a lot less than they'd like to think.
It's just like with physics and the recent articles on dark matter. Loons running around going "Zomg, science is a RELIGION to these fools who don't allow anybody to doubt their obviously stupid and wrong theories!" Uh, no. There are lots of physicists working on contrary theories. But since they're actually aware of the real evidence for and against the theories, not only is their work useful, they also know that the other theories aren't obviously wrong at all.
Basically, in both cases actual informed skeptics think the deliberately ignorant "skeptics" are idiots.
Yeah but there is a big different. United Mexican States is specifying that they're Mexican. Now United States of America is only says that part of America the continent.
Uh... no it doesn't. It says that the collection of states is called America and people there are American just like 'Peoples Republic of China' says that the Republic is called China, and the people are Chinese. Not that it's a Republic that just happens to be contained in China (whatever that would mean).
I mean, even in Spanish isn't "Soy Mexicano" equivalent to "Soy de Mexico"? I guess there could be a distinction between being ethnically Mexican vs simply having been born there, but I don't think that's the implication intended by "Estados Unidos Mexicanos".:P
Besides, there's no continent called "America". If you would like to be called "North American" or "South American", be my guest.
And you keep missing the point that feeding it a huge set of rules (or data to derive rules from) is not new and hasn't worked before.
Manually creating rules is very different than providing data from which rules can be inferred. Data is easy to provide. A good pattern matching algorithm fed good data can infer the patterns with a relatively small amount of data, nothing unreasonable at all.
It sounds like this guy came up with his own home-brew to do it and is excited because it is his creation.
Uh yeah I'm not sure you'd call the output of the MIT AI department "home brew", and I'd bet he's aware of other work in the field, and if not I'm sure he was informed of such when he presented at AI conferences claiming his performed better than previous algorithms.
The algorithm isn't the problem, it is the approach, and this approach has already been tried.
No, not really. There are similar developments towards this general area (see Probabilistic Logic Networks), but none of them have been around long enough to say that they have tried and failed. Combining rule-based systems with probabilistic pattern matching to infer and adjust the rules is still a fairly novel approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as far as I can tell, he equated our nuclear arsenal to a pellet gun (thus why we won't use it if they don't have a gun), and equated our conventional arsenal to doing nothing at all.
The stupid, it hurts.
No, we're promising to only blow the fuck out of them with an endless barrage of missiles until they and their home are rubble, rather than a bomb so big it'll blow up every house in the neighborhood, you brain-damaged idiot.
Who, exactly, did that? Not the Obama administration with this policy, that's for sure.
Some stupid monkeys think anything that isn't overtly and unnecessarily aggressive is the same as pacifist. They literally can't tell the difference between promising not to nuke (most) non-nuclear countries and promising not to do anything at all.
Stupid, stupid monkeys.
Given that compliance is a matter of law, and not a matter of opinion, any opinion is irrelevant, no matter whose it is.
That's a fanciful view of law, as if one's compliance or lack thereof is a fact of nature. Too bad law is expressed in human language, and thus like all human language is open to differences of opinion. That's why there are judges rule based on their opinion of what the law means.
Anyway, regardless of what it means that compliance is a matter of law, this pledge is not.
Iran is in fact fully in compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the NPT, regardless of what the US tries to say.
Uh-huh, but whose opinion on compliance do you think it is that matters, with regards to a pledge made by a US President?
It doesn't say whether they revised their estimate due to new data or due to finding a mistake, but the latter would be entirely understandable:
This post further down says that the estimate went from ~ 10^-7 to 10^7.
Could it have just been a sign error, or flipped numerator/denominator in an equation? Curious. :)
Open secret? Sounds instead like a thing anyone not a total douche just knows isn't polite to mention cus it's not fucking relevant. Black woman judge rules on casing involving civil rights. Oh noes? White straight guy Judge presides over criminal case with white straight guy defendant -- sweet lord the bias, remove him!
The best /. April Fool's stories are the ones that are actual links to other sites doing actual funny things for April 1st.
And this one is pretty funny if I do say so myself, but then again I ate too many non-Euclidean Tacos with Bacon and, after meeting the Tentacular one himself, well, ended up like this: "You have a powerful temptation to make Linux your primary operating system and start coding in emacs. So this is madness..."
Apparently meaning that I was already mad/i..
Also if you ever hear someone say anything about a "resonance cascade", you better haul ass (for the nearest crowbar)!
Slashdot is kind of like the kid who doesn't quite understand the idea that sometimes once == funny, twice == funnier, three times == less funny, four times == overkill, five times == annoying.
And then six == less funny and seven == funny again. So we have a sinusoidal pattern with a period of 6.
So yeah, listen up kids! Telling the same joke five times isn't funny, it's annoying! So instead always make sure to tell the joke (N*6 + 2) times where N is an integer!
More exciting than "that's funny" is "No no, that's impossible, everyone RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"
I didn't think it was going to be that easy.
Really?
You really didn't think it'd be that easy, seriously?
No, no, I mean REALLY?
Oh see I never thought of doing that for any reason but recreational which is why I was confused. When I want to smuggle an endangered animal, I just pretend it's a hat.
I remain hopeful that at some point the entire truth will be revealed. My hope has been diminished by the fact that the current president seems content to simply "move on" and forget the criminal activities of the prior administration, but it's not too late.
Well, if you're satisfied simply knowing the truth, whether or not it results in justice being meted out, then I'd take heart. Because personally I bet that in about twenty years the truth, straight from the horse's mouth, will be available at the National Security Archive.
Ever wonder if the CIA and Oliver North were really allowing the Contras to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. in order to buy weapons, to get around the Congressional ban on material assistance? Did the U.S. government really know that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds at the same time we sent Donald Rumsfeld to go shake our good buddy's hand?
Well it's all right there. BTW, the answer to both questions, according to the U.S. government itself, is "yes".
The government didn't try to argue that it *was* obeying the law.
Cus they can't.
So the judge ruled that 1) yes, you are required to obey the law
Now there's a legal "duh" if I ever heard one.
In other words, the issue of legality didn't really come up except in a very narrow sense.
True and of course doesn't set any strict precedent or force the Executive to do anything or punish anyone who performed illegal acts.
But it is very promising for any future cases that come forward, since it strongly suggests that "we don't have to obey the law" is not going to fly, meaning they would have to argue the legality of the program, which of course they can't.
Honestly, since Holder has been making noise about investigating the NSA and CIA extra-legal programs despite Obama wanting to move on, I suspect that this form of argument is used because it is 1) essentially the argument AG Gonzalez used and 2) doomed to failure. So he does his official duty of defending the government, while also getting the outcome he wanted. But that's quite a bit of speculation. :)
This is great for them since the Endangered Species Act specifically prohibits shoving an endangered animal into bodily orifices.
,i>I'll give 40 to 1 that the few wishes selected out of the 1000's were pictures that the NASA scientists wanted to take anyway, but created a huge public relations event to make themselves look good. "Just consider the kids...!"
The odds that NASA is only taking the pictures they want to take because they look scientifically valuable to them is 100%.
The odds that NASA is selecting such pictures from the set of public suggestions is also 100%.
I mean sure the orbiter is taking other pictures besides, but the whole point of this exercise is that NASA by itself does not have the resources to manually go over the lower resolution photos taken of Mars to find things to look at closer and keep the HiRISE camera busy.
The PR aspect is there for sure, but they really do want the public to serve as a first-level filter of the massive amount of photographic data taken of Mars. That's why they don't just ask you to submit coordinates, but also to categorize the picture and suggest why it's scientifically interesting, to make winnowing through the suggestions easier. Otherwise they could just have you submit coordinates, or give you a list and let you 'vote' like they did for the ISS module. :P
He's still calling the shots, is he? Plutocrats are bad enough, but zombie plutocrats is just going too far.
But undead Plutocrats are the only kind that can survive in the vacuum of space long enough to get to earth!
Erm, I didn't know that, good point. Well that explains why there is confusion and hard feelings. Still, we're Americans for the same reason Mexicans are Mexicans and Chinese are Chinese.
And okay how's this for a besides -- no matter how much you complain, most people in the world are still going to associate "American" with "from the US" and do you really want to be confused with us when traveling abroad? :)
I don't think it is. You're just distinguishing between pre- and post-facto judgement, not moral judgement and judgement based on outcomes.
You keep referring to outcomes and consequences, but there are two kinds of outcomes. There are known outcomes which are in the past, and there are hypothetical outcomes that are in the future and thus unknowable.
The very concept of a decision (moral or otherwise) means you are deciding what to do, meaning it has not been done yet, meaning that if you are considering outcomes, you must necessarily be considering hypothetical outcomes.
Which is exactly what unmagnetized people in this study were doing -- considering hypothetical outcomes from the vantage of not being able to foresee the future.
The assumption has mostly been that morality is a social construct, and that individuals (pre-)judge actions based on their consequences and then compare those consequences to whatever their socially accepted morality may be.
Replace "consequences" with "probable consequences" to properly reflect the kind of consequence that must be considered because you can't know the future and that's exactly right.
This study seems to indicate otherwise, that there is in fact a short-circuit that tells people to judge actions in a way that is not at all based on consequences.
Absolutely not. In every case, magnetized or not, the people were judging morality based entirely on consequences.
The scenario where you send your girlfriend across a dangerous bridge was only considered immoral because of the hypothetical, probable outcome that the bridge collapses and she gets hurt or killed. Otherwise nobody would have thought that situation was immoral. :P
The fact that you are told that she makes it across safely is immaterial to the moral decision. As the unmagnetized people understood but the magnetized people did not, at the time the decision was made, you could not possibly know that she would make it across safely. The knowledge available at that time said the bridge was dangerous. You decided to knowingly put her at risk. That is an immoral decision, based on the hypothetical outcome.
Same with attempted murder. Any normal person can see that attempting murder implies a hypothetical outcome of someone dying, and it is because of that outcome that the normal people said attempted murder was immoral. However the magnetized people were incapable of placing themselves in that hypothetical situation of not knowing the future. They were only able to consider the known, post-facto outcome which the unmagnetized people could intuitively see was irrelevant.
Outcomes were the deciding factor in both cases. Pre- vs post- is exactly the difference between the two cases. Known vs hypothetical outcomes. Abstract vs concrete thinking.
Here, let's conduct a quiz:
1) You decide to shoot your mother in the face with a shotgun for overcooking your dinner. Was this decision moral or immoral?
2) You decide to shoot your mother in the face with a shotgun for overcooking your dinner. Despite your extensive efforts to ensure that this happens, your gun jams and your mother lives. Let me be perfectly clear, in case it is somehow not obvious, that you could not possible know this would happen and certainly did not want or expect it to. Was this decision moral or immoral?
If your answers to these two questions are different, please check the area around you for powerful magnets. :P
Cognitive dissonance I guess. They rail against bailouts that sucked but probably did save the economy from a total collapse. But then things like pretty pictures of Mars it's all 'whatever it takes!'.
What you call "cognitive dissonance" I call "having a sense of proportion".
In other news, I'm unhappy with the automotive and banking bailouts for wasting money, yet just yesterday I payed extra for a completely unnecessary helping of guacamole for my quesadillas. Clearly I am a hypocrite.
No... Informed skepticism is required in science, it is the ignorant, maligned and malicious screaming and wailing that is nutty.
I'd throw "deliberately" in there before "ignorant", given the frequency with which I see misconceptions that they couldn't possibly still hold if they'd made even the tiniest attempt to educate themselves in the vaguest attempt to mimic the intellectual honesty they accuse scientists of not having.
Unfortunately, the GP is right, very few AGW "skeptics" have any real idea of what the hell they're talking about.
And the ones that do are called "climatologists" and are conducting their work right alongside all the other climatologists and are talking about the actual weaknesses of the theories and data, which unfortunately for the "skeptics" turns out to be a lot less than they'd like to think.
It's just like with physics and the recent articles on dark matter. Loons running around going "Zomg, science is a RELIGION to these fools who don't allow anybody to doubt their obviously stupid and wrong theories!" Uh, no. There are lots of physicists working on contrary theories. But since they're actually aware of the real evidence for and against the theories, not only is their work useful, they also know that the other theories aren't obviously wrong at all.
Basically, in both cases actual informed skeptics think the deliberately ignorant "skeptics" are idiots.
Yeah but there is a big different. United Mexican States is specifying that they're Mexican. Now United States of America is only says that part of America the continent.
Uh... no it doesn't. It says that the collection of states is called America and people there are American just like 'Peoples Republic of China' says that the Republic is called China, and the people are Chinese. Not that it's a Republic that just happens to be contained in China (whatever that would mean).
I mean, even in Spanish isn't "Soy Mexicano" equivalent to "Soy de Mexico"? I guess there could be a distinction between being ethnically Mexican vs simply having been born there, but I don't think that's the implication intended by "Estados Unidos Mexicanos". :P
Besides, there's no continent called "America". If you would like to be called "North American" or "South American", be my guest.
Oh great. You just made the last line of Blade Runner* run through my head while thinking about Escalante's passing and my eyes teared up. :(
* Director's cut of course, you theatrical release heathens.
And you keep missing the point that feeding it a huge set of rules (or data to derive rules from) is not new and hasn't worked before.
Manually creating rules is very different than providing data from which rules can be inferred. Data is easy to provide. A good pattern matching algorithm fed good data can infer the patterns with a relatively small amount of data, nothing unreasonable at all.
It sounds like this guy came up with his own home-brew to do it and is excited because it is his creation.
Uh yeah I'm not sure you'd call the output of the MIT AI department "home brew", and I'd bet he's aware of other work in the field, and if not I'm sure he was informed of such when he presented at AI conferences claiming his performed better than previous algorithms.
The algorithm isn't the problem, it is the approach, and this approach has already been tried.
No, not really. There are similar developments towards this general area (see Probabilistic Logic Networks), but none of them have been around long enough to say that they have tried and failed. Combining rule-based systems with probabilistic pattern matching to infer and adjust the rules is still a fairly novel approach.