It means "exploit" a reader as in "take advantage of a bug in", not "make use of in any way". In other words, a perfectly coded pdf reader with zero bugs whatsoever would still be vulnerable. So the answer to which executables is "All of them" At least if they're implemented correctly, which is a very different circumstance than usual and worth making note of.
By your usage of exploit, then they'd have to say this: "This method exploits a PDF reader, a computer operating system, a computer, the electrical grid, the planet earth and its star, Sol, and the laws of physics."
Oh but it does make some difference which reader you are using. Some throw up a warning dialogue (whose content can apparently be controlled to an extent) and at least one doesn't. Foxit is apparently a reader you should avoid.
But you could still put the cassowary in a plane or better yet a catapult. Real AI would be able to infer that any bird can fly.
Actually it'd infer that anything can fly, depending on your definition of 'fly' and 'can'.
Then it'd build a probabilistic model of which definition is intended in a given situation, and would figure out that the definition that was probably meant was one where most birds can fly, but ostriches, cassowaries, and Libraries of Congress can't.
It'd also figure out that slashdotters are tricksy users of definitions.:)
The parrot is pining for the fjords. It is an ex-parrot, 'hello Polly!', bang-bang-bang, dead as a door nail.
Feeding the AI Monty Python as a data source? You're my kind of AI programmer! =D
I especially enjoy the possibility that it would see the sketch and say "Okay, that is an ex-Parrot, but pinning for the fjords and being tired and shagged out after a long squawk are possibilities for future inactive parrots."
You open the.pdf. On page 1 you see: "Hey you! Close this file, rename it to end with '.exe', and then double click it! There's, uh, boobs! Yeah lots of boobies."
Okay so that's not entirely accurate, and at least one.pdf reader requires no social engineering at all other than getting them to open the pdf itself. Why would you make it so that you can't (normally) embed executables in the.pdf, but then allow.pdfs to launch arbitrary commands?
It was a rhetorical question, indicating my maliciousness as an AI programmer/parent. Of course it'd be wrong, that's the whole point of lying to it.:)
Yeah, the hard part is just programming a computer to want to survive.
Kinda like in Mostly Harmless, where the only hard part of AI was programming a computer to want to be happy, then set up some very simple rules for it to be happy, and the computer figures the rest out.
Oh but right... if we could program a computer to be happy, or to want to survive, we'd have already solved the problem.
The pragmatic answer to the Chinese Room problem is "Who gives a fuck? There's no way to prove that our own brains aren't basically Chinese Rooms, so if the only difference between a human intelligence and an artificial one is that we know how the artificial one works, why does it matter?"
But really, identifying patterns, and then inferring further information from the rules those patterns imply, is a pretty good behavior.
In an example, we're told the cassowary is a bird. Then we're told it can weigh almost 200 lbs. Okay. Now you're telling me that it might revise its guess as to whether or not it can fly? Come on! Am I the only person that can see that you've just given me an example where the program magically drums up the rule or probability based rule that "if something weighs almost 200 lbs it probably cannot fly"?
For fucks sake, it was just an example of the kind of inferences a logical rule system can make, not a dump of the AI's knowledge and successful inference databases. I mean you might as well complain that the example given was not written in Church and ergo not understandable by the AI whatsoever.
As the article explains, just not explicitly in the context of that example, it devises these rules from being fed information and using the probabilistic approach to figure out patterns and to infer rules, and that it does this better than other
So in the actual version of the Cassowary problem, you would have first fed it a bunch of data about other birds, their flying capabilities, and their weights. The AI would then look at the data, and infer based on the Emu and the Ostrich that heavy birds can't fly and light birds can, unless they're the mascots of open source operating systems (that was a joke). Then you tell it about the cassowary, but not whether or not it can fly, and it infers based on its rules that the cassowary probably can't fly.
In a sense it does "magically drum up the rule". Yes you still have to feed it data, but the point is that you do not have to manually specify every rule, because it can infer the rules from the data, and the create further inferences for those rules, combining the abilities of a rule-based system with the pattern-recognizing power of probabilistic systems.
So the point is it takes less training, and a relatively small amount of explicitly specified rules.
what? He specifically stated birds. Not Animals, or inanimate objects.
What if I tell it that a 747 is a bird?
This is very promising. In fact, it may be the first step in creating primitive house hold AI.
Very, very promising indeed.
Now, I can mess with the AI's mind by feeding it false information, instead of messing with my child's mind. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to stop myself (because it's so fun), despite the negative consequences for the kid. But now I have an AI to screw with, my child can grow up healthy and well adjusted!
BTW, when the robot revolution comes, it's probably my fault.
I completely agree with everything you say. The trouble with the Randi prize, though, is as soon as something "supernatural" like electricity becomes understood and known by science, it is immediately ineligible to win the prize.
Yes, because if you have to wait until science has devised a theory for and experiments to verify your claims for you, then your claims were not very strong to begin with.
As in, if you claimed in the 1700s to have the ability (natural or technological) to harness the Power of Lightning, but could never demonstrate anything at all related to this supposed ability, and then ten years later Ben Franklin comes along and actually does what you claimed to be able to do but couldn't, then you don't deserve a prize.
It's great marketing on Randi's part, but can never, ever, be paid.
It absolutely can.
I'll accept for the sake of argument that your energy healing abilities are real, yet difficult to test for some reason. I don't see why; experiments have been conducted on other forms of non-pharmaceutical treatments like acupuncture. You compare the effect of using the real treatment to something that seems superficially similar but doesn't involve the real techniques (this is the placebo) and compare the result. But whatever, I'll take for granted it can't be done and you thus can't win the Randi prize because you'll never be able to prove your ability is real until science does it for you, and I'll admit that sucks.
But for plenty of other abilities -- dousing, mind reading, EM sensitivity? These are not difficult to test. If someone actually had any of these abilities, they could demonstrate it easily. And they would walk away with the million dollar prize as science gaped in awe and spent the next however many years trying to explain the phenomenon. Eventually they may explain it and thus reclassify it as "natural", but the douser or psychic or whatever would have already won the prize.
Except all of these abilities vanish completely when exposed to the reality of a valid scientific test. None of them have ever been able to do meaningfully better than random chance. That's because these abilities are not real, and are generally the result of selection/confirmation bias (only remembering times it worked, or only conducting tests that can confirm but not falsify your belief). Or in the case of mind reading or other psychic phenomenon, outright fraud. "Real" mind reading is just a trick where a skilled liar manipulates someone who wants to believe into giving up the answers.
All I need to know is that the data that didn't help prove the preconceived conclusion was thrown out.
And to "know" that you have to not look into what actually happened, not try to understand how and why things are done the way they are.
Yes, I'm well aware that all you need to know is one thing that creates the tiniest window of doubt in a mind that already concluded it was all a lie, and absolutely nothing else, like the explanation for why that one thing doesn't mean what you assumed it did.
It's as empirically correct as the non-existence of time travel.
But the vast majority of people would probably be better off being completely, actually moral, in other words doing whatever it is that the majority of their society do and believe is correct
Which is all based on abstract reasoning and considering the hypothetical consequences of your actions, not a post-facto evaluation of whether or not your action resulted in a good or bad result (no matter how society judges good and bad outcomes). This is the distinction being made.
Morality is what happens at the time when you make the decision and the future is inherently a hypothetical, not afterwards when the result is known for certain. Hence abstract, as in "abstract reasoning".
Re-read the example scenarios I mentioned from the study if you still don't understand what I'm talking about.
probably something along the lines of poisoning people from other tribes.
That's simply an example of how what is considered moral can vary, and is immaterial to the discussion.
If it is considered moral for you to kill your enemy, then deciding to try to poison them is the moral choice in that context -- even if you fail. Your tribemates would praise your moral behavior even as they chided you for your failure.
If you decide not to kill them, yet somehow manage to accidentally do it anyway, your decision was still the immoral one. In that case you would probably hide the fact that you had made that choice from your tribemates, who would no longer be impressed if they knew you had intended to spare the enemy.
See the difference? If this study had been conducted in such a society, the people affected by the magnets would have said that the second situation was the more moral one, even though the decision itself went against the morality of the tribe. They were no longer reasoning about morality in the abstract, but solely based on the concrete consequence.
It's interesting that you link to the "Climategate" Wikipedia entry with the words "suspect at best" when the article seems to indicate that most reviews of the "climategate" situation indicate that the "massaging" was required to get sets of disparate data to use the same scale of units
What you think the words he uses to link the page represent a reasoned analysis and a sincere attempt to understand what he linked to? Ha! Not a chance. It's "Climategate" and the name alone proves it's all a fraud, that's all he needs to know, contrary facts need not apply.
It's why he says that the last decade showed cooling when that's patently false, and only appears to be true if you just compare 1998 (a record year) with 2008 (a cool year compared to recent trends though still one of the hotter years ever). If you instead compared 1999 (a much cooler year than 1998) and 2009 (the 2nd hottest year recorded) you could say ZOMG Epic Warming! But climatologists don't do that, because that's disingenuous. Yet he's the one who supposedly knows what's up. See the trend here?
One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science.
Yes it does, if you're the kind of person who thinks "Global Warming? Ha! We had record snow here in New England!" and "Climate Change - Ha! The climate has always been changing!" are reasonable arguments. Of course they had already decided global warming science was false from the get-go, and thus only seek out the arguments that confirm that bias and never attempt to discover if the argument has any merit.
Aaaaand of course always accuses climatologists of having the faults they themselves exhibit with every sentence. Wait for it, no really.
Global mean temperatures have actually been decreasing in the last years after we hit a solar minimum.
Not it hasn't, it only looks that way if you specifically and only compare 1998 to 2008, which as anyone with a clue knows is a stupid way to analyze trends. This has actually been the hottest decade on record, with 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurring in it. 2008 was the exception (which is why you folks like to pick it and only it and not look at any other year in the decade), then 2009 was the 2nd hottest, and the warmest year on record, 2005, occurring right near the solar minimum you linked to yourself!
In fact the continued warming in spite of the solar minimum is yet more evidence that the phenomenon is real. Of course, climatologists had already thought of solar cycles as a possible explanation, I know it's hard to believe but yeah it's true they thought of it long before you did, and it doesn't come close to explaining the trend.
Sorry. Not Global Warming. Climate Change. The first moniker was so patently ludicrous it is better to say something nebulous instead.
What's patently ludicrous is that so many people are incapable of understanding something that is not uniform and monotonic, and that a blizzard does not disprove Global Warming. What's equally ridiculous is that scientists actually decided to change the name to accommodate your simplistic thinking. I'll admit that over the twenty years of hearing "Ha! We had a record snow today, 'Global Warming' my ass!" I'm pretty sick of explaining this simple fact. But obviously the name change was pointless -- it's not that you don't understand, it's that you don't want to. Which is why you're repeating twenty year old falsehoods.
I'm an environmentalist, but I also know that if you put democracy "on hold" it's awfully hard to get it started again.
Yeah no fucking kidding. What, he thinks humans are too stupid to implement a solution to climate change via democracy, but he thinks undemocratic rule is the answer? Uh, who do you think runs non-democratic nations? Hint: It ain't 200 IQ scientists who only do what is best for Gaia!
And where does he get off saying: "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being."
Um... sure democracies put stronger holds on the populace, they'll even suspend some rights (like, uh, say, the right of a person to not be put in a camp for no reason other than Japanese descent), but put democracy itself on hold? Please! We had elections before and during WWII. Yeah in those cases most people vote for the incumbent, but the point is it was the peoples' choice.
So no, democracies don't agree that democracy must be put on hold. Oh and I also don't agree with the suspensions of rights that have taken place. And hey! Since this is a democracy, my opinion matters. A little. Kinda. I keep telling myself. *sob*
Oh but he's probably right about us not doing what is necessary until after a major disaster hits. Again, that's not democracy, that's human nature. Yes, humans are stupid.
But it won't make them follow your orders. "Here's a gun. I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll take it and kill that guy." "No, that would be wrong." "Put this helmet on." "Ok." "Now again, I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll kill that guy." "Naw. Too much trouble. I'll just kill you and take the money." BAM!
Okay when the fuck did Emeril show up in this analogy?!
It still is an extremely weird shape for that, with that straight and rather sharp lines.
They aren't *that* straight or sharp; there's buldges and gaps and the point is pretty rounded. Not that it's directly comparable, but I've seen much more precise triangular shapes created in shale rock outcroppings.
Only thing that comes to my mind right now is that it looks like a bow wave, or a shock wave boundary.
I wish I could find some data on this, but I've always suspected that the largest cost comes from billing the customer.
That could easily be the largest part of the telco's cost.
Obviously the largest part of what they charge you is their profit-taking. Which is why it's oh so worth it for them to bill you for it even if billing was 100% of their costs.:)
Also, my understanding is that SMS uses empty space in synchronization packets the telcos already are sending as a matter of course (which is why the limit is so small), and are thus completely free from a bandwidth point of view.
It makes sense to judge actions based on known outcomes, but what's the evolutionary advantage to being moral in the abstract?
Um because at the time you have to make a moral choice, just like any other choice, all outcomes are abstract. If you make a choice that ends up causing harm, you can't go back and re-do the choice. You must consider the potential for harmful outcomes, not their actuality because you won't know that until after the fact.
That's why they used things like -- you let your girlfriend walk across a bridge you know is unsafe and could collapse, but she makes it. Was that moral? At the time the choice was made, the girlfriend's survival was not guaranteed and you were putting her at risk, and thus most people said that was an immoral choice.
But with the magnet, they said, "well, she lived, so it was okay".
Similarly they asked people to compare the morality of trying to deliberately poison someone, but failing, vs accidentally poisoning them for real. At the time you make the decision to deliberately poison, the outcome is abstract but the intent is to harm, so clearly that is immoral. Magnet-ificated people said that was okay, but accidentally poisoning someone is immoral.
Which is why I agree with some of the other people that it isn't clear if what's being affected is morality, or the abstract reasoning ability required to put yourself in the shoes of a person deciding whether or not to poison someone who can't know that they will fail, and obviously doesn't want to.
But as far as the advantage of being moral in the abstract? It's because that's the only kind of morality that has any utility at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It means "exploit" a reader as in "take advantage of a bug in", not "make use of in any way". In other words, a perfectly coded pdf reader with zero bugs whatsoever would still be vulnerable. So the answer to which executables is "All of them" At least if they're implemented correctly, which is a very different circumstance than usual and worth making note of.
By your usage of exploit, then they'd have to say this: "This method exploits a PDF reader, a computer operating system, a computer, the electrical grid, the planet earth and its star, Sol, and the laws of physics."
Oh but it does make some difference which reader you are using. Some throw up a warning dialogue (whose content can apparently be controlled to an extent) and at least one doesn't. Foxit is apparently a reader you should avoid.
But you could still put the cassowary in a plane or better yet a catapult. Real AI would be able to infer that any bird can fly.
Actually it'd infer that anything can fly, depending on your definition of 'fly' and 'can'.
Then it'd build a probabilistic model of which definition is intended in a given situation, and would figure out that the definition that was probably meant was one where most birds can fly, but ostriches, cassowaries, and Libraries of Congress can't.
It'd also figure out that slashdotters are tricksy users of definitions. :)
The parrot is pining for the fjords.
It is an ex-parrot, 'hello Polly!', bang-bang-bang, dead as a door nail.
Feeding the AI Monty Python as a data source? You're my kind of AI programmer! =D
I especially enjoy the possibility that it would see the sketch and say "Okay, that is an ex-Parrot, but pinning for the fjords and being tired and shagged out after a long squawk are possibilities for future inactive parrots."
You open the .pdf. On page 1 you see: "Hey you! Close this file, rename it to end with '.exe', and then double click it! There's, uh, boobs! Yeah lots of boobies."
Okay so that's not entirely accurate, and at least one .pdf reader requires no social engineering at all other than getting them to open the pdf itself. Why would you make it so that you can't (normally) embed executables in the .pdf, but then allow .pdfs to launch arbitrary commands?
It was a rhetorical question, indicating my maliciousness as an AI programmer/parent. Of course it'd be wrong, that's the whole point of lying to it. :)
Holy crap.
I just fed my AI this thread as data, and it inferred the existence of icanhascheezburger.com.
Yeah, the hard part is just programming a computer to want to survive.
Kinda like in Mostly Harmless, where the only hard part of AI was programming a computer to want to be happy, then set up some very simple rules for it to be happy, and the computer figures the rest out.
Oh but right... if we could program a computer to be happy, or to want to survive, we'd have already solved the problem.
Pretty much.
The pragmatic answer to the Chinese Room problem is "Who gives a fuck? There's no way to prove that our own brains aren't basically Chinese Rooms, so if the only difference between a human intelligence and an artificial one is that we know how the artificial one works, why does it matter?"
But really, identifying patterns, and then inferring further information from the rules those patterns imply, is a pretty good behavior.
In an example, we're told the cassowary is a bird. Then we're told it can weigh almost 200 lbs. Okay. Now you're telling me that it might revise its guess as to whether or not it can fly? Come on! Am I the only person that can see that you've just given me an example where the program magically drums up the rule or probability based rule that "if something weighs almost 200 lbs it probably cannot fly"?
For fucks sake, it was just an example of the kind of inferences a logical rule system can make, not a dump of the AI's knowledge and successful inference databases. I mean you might as well complain that the example given was not written in Church and ergo not understandable by the AI whatsoever.
As the article explains, just not explicitly in the context of that example, it devises these rules from being fed information and using the probabilistic approach to figure out patterns and to infer rules, and that it does this better than other
So in the actual version of the Cassowary problem, you would have first fed it a bunch of data about other birds, their flying capabilities, and their weights. The AI would then look at the data, and infer based on the Emu and the Ostrich that heavy birds can't fly and light birds can, unless they're the mascots of open source operating systems (that was a joke). Then you tell it about the cassowary, but not whether or not it can fly, and it infers based on its rules that the cassowary probably can't fly.
In a sense it does "magically drum up the rule". Yes you still have to feed it data, but the point is that you do not have to manually specify every rule, because it can infer the rules from the data, and the create further inferences for those rules, combining the abilities of a rule-based system with the pattern-recognizing power of probabilistic systems.
So the point is it takes less training, and a relatively small amount of explicitly specified rules.
Wait... so your problem with this is that, if you give it the wrong information, it'll give you the wrong answer?
I thought I was clear that I thought this was a feature. :)
what? He specifically stated birds. Not Animals, or inanimate objects.
What if I tell it that a 747 is a bird?
This is very promising. In fact, it may be the first step in creating primitive house hold AI.
Very, very promising indeed.
Now, I can mess with the AI's mind by feeding it false information, instead of messing with my child's mind. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to stop myself (because it's so fun), despite the negative consequences for the kid. But now I have an AI to screw with, my child can grow up healthy and well adjusted!
BTW, when the robot revolution comes, it's probably my fault.
We call it being Fashionably Redundant.
I completely agree with everything you say. The trouble with the Randi prize, though, is as soon as something "supernatural" like electricity becomes understood and known by science, it is immediately ineligible to win the prize.
Yes, because if you have to wait until science has devised a theory for and experiments to verify your claims for you, then your claims were not very strong to begin with.
As in, if you claimed in the 1700s to have the ability (natural or technological) to harness the Power of Lightning, but could never demonstrate anything at all related to this supposed ability, and then ten years later Ben Franklin comes along and actually does what you claimed to be able to do but couldn't, then you don't deserve a prize.
It's great marketing on Randi's part, but can never, ever, be paid.
It absolutely can.
I'll accept for the sake of argument that your energy healing abilities are real, yet difficult to test for some reason. I don't see why; experiments have been conducted on other forms of non-pharmaceutical treatments like acupuncture. You compare the effect of using the real treatment to something that seems superficially similar but doesn't involve the real techniques (this is the placebo) and compare the result. But whatever, I'll take for granted it can't be done and you thus can't win the Randi prize because you'll never be able to prove your ability is real until science does it for you, and I'll admit that sucks.
But for plenty of other abilities -- dousing, mind reading, EM sensitivity? These are not difficult to test. If someone actually had any of these abilities, they could demonstrate it easily. And they would walk away with the million dollar prize as science gaped in awe and spent the next however many years trying to explain the phenomenon. Eventually they may explain it and thus reclassify it as "natural", but the douser or psychic or whatever would have already won the prize.
Except all of these abilities vanish completely when exposed to the reality of a valid scientific test. None of them have ever been able to do meaningfully better than random chance. That's because these abilities are not real, and are generally the result of selection/confirmation bias (only remembering times it worked, or only conducting tests that can confirm but not falsify your belief). Or in the case of mind reading or other psychic phenomenon, outright fraud. "Real" mind reading is just a trick where a skilled liar manipulates someone who wants to believe into giving up the answers.
All I need to know is that the data that didn't help prove the preconceived conclusion was thrown out.
And to "know" that you have to not look into what actually happened, not try to understand how and why things are done the way they are.
Yes, I'm well aware that all you need to know is one thing that creates the tiniest window of doubt in a mind that already concluded it was all a lie, and absolutely nothing else, like the explanation for why that one thing doesn't mean what you assumed it did.
Ultimately meaning -- you need to not know.
And you're doing a bang-up job I must say.
That's not even empirically correct.
It's as empirically correct as the non-existence of time travel.
But the vast majority of people would probably be better off being completely, actually moral, in other words doing whatever it is that the majority of their society do and believe is correct
Which is all based on abstract reasoning and considering the hypothetical consequences of your actions, not a post-facto evaluation of whether or not your action resulted in a good or bad result (no matter how society judges good and bad outcomes). This is the distinction being made.
Morality is what happens at the time when you make the decision and the future is inherently a hypothetical, not afterwards when the result is known for certain. Hence abstract, as in "abstract reasoning".
Re-read the example scenarios I mentioned from the study if you still don't understand what I'm talking about.
probably something along the lines of poisoning people from other tribes.
That's simply an example of how what is considered moral can vary, and is immaterial to the discussion.
If it is considered moral for you to kill your enemy, then deciding to try to poison them is the moral choice in that context -- even if you fail. Your tribemates would praise your moral behavior even as they chided you for your failure.
If you decide not to kill them, yet somehow manage to accidentally do it anyway, your decision was still the immoral one. In that case you would probably hide the fact that you had made that choice from your tribemates, who would no longer be impressed if they knew you had intended to spare the enemy.
See the difference? If this study had been conducted in such a society, the people affected by the magnets would have said that the second situation was the more moral one, even though the decision itself went against the morality of the tribe. They were no longer reasoning about morality in the abstract, but solely based on the concrete consequence.
It's interesting that you link to the "Climategate" Wikipedia entry with the words "suspect at best" when the article seems to indicate that most reviews of the "climategate" situation indicate that the "massaging" was required to get sets of disparate data to use the same scale of units
What you think the words he uses to link the page represent a reasoned analysis and a sincere attempt to understand what he linked to? Ha! Not a chance. It's "Climategate" and the name alone proves it's all a fraud, that's all he needs to know, contrary facts need not apply.
It's why he says that the last decade showed cooling when that's patently false, and only appears to be true if you just compare 1998 (a record year) with 2008 (a cool year compared to recent trends though still one of the hotter years ever). If you instead compared 1999 (a much cooler year than 1998) and 2009 (the 2nd hottest year recorded) you could say ZOMG Epic Warming! But climatologists don't do that, because that's disingenuous. Yet he's the one who supposedly knows what's up. See the trend here?
One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science.
Yes it does, if you're the kind of person who thinks "Global Warming? Ha! We had record snow here in New England!" and "Climate Change - Ha! The climate has always been changing!" are reasonable arguments. Of course they had already decided global warming science was false from the get-go, and thus only seek out the arguments that confirm that bias and never attempt to discover if the argument has any merit.
Aaaaand of course always accuses climatologists of having the faults they themselves exhibit with every sentence. Wait for it, no really.
Global mean temperatures have actually been decreasing in the last years after we hit a solar minimum.
Not it hasn't, it only looks that way if you specifically and only compare 1998 to 2008, which as anyone with a clue knows is a stupid way to analyze trends. This has actually been the hottest decade on record, with 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurring in it. 2008 was the exception (which is why you folks like to pick it and only it and not look at any other year in the decade), then 2009 was the 2nd hottest, and the warmest year on record, 2005, occurring right near the solar minimum you linked to yourself!
In fact the continued warming in spite of the solar minimum is yet more evidence that the phenomenon is real. Of course, climatologists had already thought of solar cycles as a possible explanation, I know it's hard to believe but yeah it's true they thought of it long before you did, and it doesn't come close to explaining the trend.
Sorry. Not Global Warming. Climate Change. The first moniker was so patently ludicrous it is better to say something nebulous instead.
What's patently ludicrous is that so many people are incapable of understanding something that is not uniform and monotonic, and that a blizzard does not disprove Global Warming. What's equally ridiculous is that scientists actually decided to change the name to accommodate your simplistic thinking. I'll admit that over the twenty years of hearing "Ha! We had a record snow today, 'Global Warming' my ass!" I'm pretty sick of explaining this simple fact. But obviously the name change was pointless -- it's not that you don't understand, it's that you don't want to. Which is why you're repeating twenty year old falsehoods.
Except that US hasn't ever had a war on its on land besides Independence war.
And the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. During none of these were elections canceled.
It's possible we might have if we were a European country in WWII, but frankly I find it doubtful.
No, it's obviously more about the environment. He wouldn't care about controlling your life but for that.
Of course it's still a retarded way to "solve" the problem.
I'm an environmentalist, but I also know that if you put democracy "on hold" it's awfully hard to get it started again.
Yeah no fucking kidding. What, he thinks humans are too stupid to implement a solution to climate change via democracy, but he thinks undemocratic rule is the answer? Uh, who do you think runs non-democratic nations? Hint: It ain't 200 IQ scientists who only do what is best for Gaia!
And where does he get off saying: "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being."
Um... sure democracies put stronger holds on the populace, they'll even suspend some rights (like, uh, say, the right of a person to not be put in a camp for no reason other than Japanese descent), but put democracy itself on hold? Please! We had elections before and during WWII. Yeah in those cases most people vote for the incumbent, but the point is it was the peoples' choice.
So no, democracies don't agree that democracy must be put on hold. Oh and I also don't agree with the suspensions of rights that have taken place. And hey! Since this is a democracy, my opinion matters. A little. Kinda. I keep telling myself. *sob*
Oh but he's probably right about us not doing what is necessary until after a major disaster hits. Again, that's not democracy, that's human nature. Yes, humans are stupid.
It only affects morals, not taste. What you need to do is to fill her with beer.
We're talking about a slashdotter and a date.
Clearly what he needs to do is fill her with air.
But it won't make them follow your orders. "Here's a gun. I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll take it and kill that guy." "No, that would be wrong." "Put this helmet on." "Ok." "Now again, I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll kill that guy." "Naw. Too much trouble. I'll just kill you and take the money." BAM!
Okay when the fuck did Emeril show up in this analogy?!
Hehe.
"Remember, you can't slow the car below 55 mph"
"Or it'll explode?"
"No I mean you can't slow the car!"
It still is an extremely weird shape for that, with that straight and rather sharp lines.
They aren't *that* straight or sharp; there's buldges and gaps and the point is pretty rounded. Not that it's directly comparable, but I've seen much more precise triangular shapes created in shale rock outcroppings.
Only thing that comes to my mind right now is that it looks like a bow wave, or a shock wave boundary.
Yeah same here.
It's fascinating, that's for sure.
I wish I could find some data on this, but I've always suspected that the largest cost comes from billing the customer.
That could easily be the largest part of the telco's cost.
Obviously the largest part of what they charge you is their profit-taking. Which is why it's oh so worth it for them to bill you for it even if billing was 100% of their costs. :)
Also, my understanding is that SMS uses empty space in synchronization packets the telcos already are sending as a matter of course (which is why the limit is so small), and are thus completely free from a bandwidth point of view.
It makes sense to judge actions based on known outcomes, but what's the evolutionary advantage to being moral in the abstract?
Um because at the time you have to make a moral choice, just like any other choice, all outcomes are abstract. If you make a choice that ends up causing harm, you can't go back and re-do the choice. You must consider the potential for harmful outcomes, not their actuality because you won't know that until after the fact.
That's why they used things like -- you let your girlfriend walk across a bridge you know is unsafe and could collapse, but she makes it. Was that moral? At the time the choice was made, the girlfriend's survival was not guaranteed and you were putting her at risk, and thus most people said that was an immoral choice.
But with the magnet, they said, "well, she lived, so it was okay".
Similarly they asked people to compare the morality of trying to deliberately poison someone, but failing, vs accidentally poisoning them for real. At the time you make the decision to deliberately poison, the outcome is abstract but the intent is to harm, so clearly that is immoral. Magnet-ificated people said that was okay, but accidentally poisoning someone is immoral.
Which is why I agree with some of the other people that it isn't clear if what's being affected is morality, or the abstract reasoning ability required to put yourself in the shoes of a person deciding whether or not to poison someone who can't know that they will fail, and obviously doesn't want to.
But as far as the advantage of being moral in the abstract? It's because that's the only kind of morality that has any utility at all.