If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, the rules for filing income, estate, and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad. Your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you reside.
What you're missing is that, since US income tax rates are so ridiculously low, your foreign income tax credit is going to nearly or completely wipe out any income tax you might have otherwise owed to the IRS, especially if you live in a civilized country with social services paid for by income taxes. It's a pain to file a form saying you don't owe any money just because you happen to have been born in the US, and that overhead isn't really free, but it's a far cry from being double taxed. If you paid taxes overseas and paid the IRS, you were almost certainly doing something wrong.
Now where that doesn't work is, say, drugs.... It takes... like a billion dollars to get a new drug on the market, so you either need to find something that is going to sell a billion dollars in six months or you need long-term patent protection.
I wonder if that's true. I know that existing pharmaceutical companies that operate in the existing patent environment spend billions of dollars looking for new drugs and so, to sustain themselves, they need long-term patent protection. I've heard what amounts to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that the drug companies are producing more symptom-controlling drugs for chronic conditions than they are cures. These conspiracy theories are appealing because a person that has to take expensive drugs to control a chronic condition for the rest of his life makes a lot more money for the drug company than someone that takes a cure for two weeks and is then cured so the theory "makes sense" regardless if it's true. I wonder, though, what sorts of drugs would be invented if the patent system were overhauled to shorten the monopoly? Maybe the next multi-billion-dollar penis pill for 70-year-old men won't be invented and, instead, we'll cure something. It'd be nice if it worked out that way, huh?
There has got to be a performance hit for "extending" garbage collection to files, sockets, and databases. How hard is it to realise you no longer need a resource and free it.
They haven't "extended garbage collection", they've introduced syntactic sugar. Instead of this (with real indenting in real life because you're not limited by Slashdot's lame commenting system):
File file = null;
try { file = openAFile();
// operate on file, possibly causing an exception } catch (IOException e) { // do whatever you like with e, possibly rethrowing } finally { if (file != null) { try { file.close(); } catch (IOException e) { // what the hell do you do here? } } }
You can have something like this:
try (File file = openAFile()) { // operate on file, possibly causing an exception } catch (IOException e) { // do whatever you like with e, possibly rethrowing }
// file is closed here because the compiler has inserted // the right epilogue for you, saving you boilerplate, preventing // you from inserting the wrong boilerplate, and not impacting // the GC in the slightest
Her name is danah boyd (or danah michele boyd if you want to be completist). It seems ironic that an article on "real" names doesn't use danah's real name.
Ian
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 2
What a vapid response.
...the government has no business in growing like companies do...
The government doesn't have to grow in terms of people employed, buildings built, or services rendered for the growth argument proposed by the GP to work. The government could, in theory at least, use the growth provided by borrowing to enlarge the economy for the benefit of all, for example. One way to do that would be to subsidize private investments of various forms to cause more employment, better infrastructure, and perhaps higher standards of living.
...the US government is supposed to provide some clearly defined services...
If "clearly defined" were actually true, this debate wouldn't be happening; the people involved could consult the clear definitions and act on them. One root problem in US society (and I'm sure it's a problem in every society) is that the definitions are not clear enough and so different people interpret them differently.
...government expansion sounds a lot like the road to communism...
"Big government" is not the same as communism, or even "the road to communism", whatever that is. In fact, quoting Wikipedia: "A communist society would have no governments, countries, or class divisions". You're waving "communism" around like a weapon, trying to scare people. It's kind of embarrassing.
You don't need a public record that person A voted for candidate 1 to be able to verify the vote, so I think the answer to your question is "no".
To verify a vote, you need a few things:
Proof that all who voted were eligible,
A count of all voters who voted,
A count of all ballots cast,
Some system to ensure that the ballots that are counted are the same ballots that were cast, and
A mechanism for independent verification of the final tally of all ballots.
Having 1 means that each of the votes should count. Having all of 2, 3, and 4 means that no extra ballots are included in the count (no ballot stuffing occurred), and that no one's vote was skipped. Having 5 means that you can ensure that the count is reported truthfully.
Step 4 is the hardest to get right because, at some point, you just have to trust. I think you can really only get 4 by enforcing transparency in the voting process. Note, though, that if you have all 5, then the vote can be verified without knowing who voted for whom.
Again, there is no evidence of this point of view.
I'm not sure how you got modded up. I can only assume the intelligent design folks somehow got points today.
First, I should make it clear that I think "Intelligent Design" is bunk, and I accept as fact that life evolves. Given that, my understanding of evolution permits "Nature does things for a reason" as an imprecise way of describing survival of the fittest. It's possible to imagine an ancient mammal or pre-mammal without this p21 gene that could regenerate. If a mutant showed up with the p21 gene and was fitter for it, then the gene would proliferate and nature's "reason" for the proliferation is that the gene is useful. Similarly, maybe salamanders "lost" p21 because of a useful mutation, and you could again interpret that as nature "having a reason" for the elimination of the gene from the salamander's gene pool.
I'd agree that "Nature does things for a reason" sounds a little like Intelligent Design because anthropomorphizing nature makes it seem like the speaker believes in an intelligent agent with motivations and "reasons", but it's a bit pedantic to assume that's the only possible interpretation.
I think I get your point, but I also think you've missed a point: a 1024-blade razor is probably incrementally better than a 1023-blade razor (for some value of "better"). On the other hand, a 1024-bit key is twice as good as a 1023-bit key. Unless I've forgotten my 3rd-year CS courses, factorization difficulty is exponential in the number of bits, so things get harder really quickly. Of course, Moore's Law is also exponential so, in theory, the time from "use 256-bit keys" to "use 512-bit keys" is about the same as the the time from "use 512-bit keys" to "use 1024-bit keys", but that sort of rebuts your comment. If Moore's Law continues to hold, then the arms race continues, but it remains easier to compute and store a key of arbitrary size than to crack a key of the same size. If Moore's Law becomes a wistfully-remembered relic, then the arms race is over and there's a well-known key size that's easy to generate and store but hard to crack. The only way for the cracking side to win is to find an efficient way to factor large integers. Quantum computing is a potential option, finding a general solution to NP-complete problems is another. Neither seems imminent.
I didn't RTFA, and the other comments in the discussion make me skeptical anyway, but your post seems to contradict itself. If the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete (which I know to be true) and the Hamiltonian Path Problem is also NP-complete (which I assume is true from this discussion), then solving one problem is isomorphic to solving the other and a solution to either can be transformed into a solution to the other in polynomial time. If you'd be impressed "if they found the shortest path on an undirected graph with variable length edges", then you should be impressed with this, too (assuming they have found a solution as the summary indicates).
Like I said earlier, I don't have a problem with people complaining about Slashdot's system--I don't have any delusions that what's here is perfect and short of joining Slashdot's staff, the only way to fix anything is to voice your opinion. What I disagree with is the claim that anyone's freedom to act is impaired by Slashot or its policies. This site is a globally-accessible private club with lenient admission policies. If you don't like it, you always have the freedom to go somewhere else.
And it's not a matter of ignoring the moderation. The Slashdot system does prevent people who have been moderated down frequently from posting.
I didn't know that. Given that it's a big internet, I still fail to see how anyone is losing freedom here, though. Slashdot embodies a community of people with a certain "groupthink" that goes along with it. It's certainly not an ideal system, but to claim that freedom is being curtailed somewhere is still ridiculous. If you have something to say that Slashdot's evil moderators are suppressing, say it anonymously, use Tor or another proxy or log in from your public library if the system is blocking your IP, say it on one of the many free blogging sites and link to it, say it anywhere, really. The moderation system obviously affects the scope of the discussion here on Slashdot, but being excluded from a discussion does not keep you out of all discussions. Maybe it hurts someone's feelings but it's not wrong and no one's being forced to do or not do anything.
I suspect that your taking offence means that you are either associated with Slashdot or you like its moderation system because it makes you feel good about yourself when you're a moderator.
You suspect wrong, but then I'm now falling into the trap of trying to win an argument on the internet.... I'm not associated with Slashdot (besides having an account here), and the rare time that I moderate anyone, I tend to mod people up, not down. It's too bad I can't prove any of that. Humans are social animals so I probably do get small warm-fuzzies when I "encourage" other people's opinions by modding them up, but I don't take any pleasure in modding people down--I'd rather ignore them or have a discussion, like I'm doing here.
Too bad you can't mod me down, right now, eh?
I actually have mod points today but, rather than try to silence your comments by modding you down, I decided to spend some of my Sunday afternoon having a debate so, no, it's not "too bad".
Well, nobody wants to read BS but why should anybody be forced to rely on others to decide for them what is BS and what isn't?
Who's forcing you? Read at -1 or read through the RSS feed and pass it through your killfile at your leisure. I agree that freedom is important. I disagree that any freedom is "missing" or being infringed here. You're free to read Slashdot (assuming you are free--I suppose some people aren't free to read Slashdot) and you're free to make use of the moderation system or not, according to your wishes. You're also (generally) free to set up a competing site that provides "better" filtering for whatever definition of "better" you'd like to use.
I understand that, in a free society, people should be free to gripe about problems and maybe even instigate change through griping. Perhaps Slashdot's moderation system could be improved (or replaced), so I don't have a beef with someone complaining about the implementation. What I do have a problem with is people claiming that they're being oppressed when there are people in the world who are actually being oppressed. Claiming that Slashdot's moderation system is depriving you of some measure of freedom is an offensive example of ridiculous hyperbole.
I lean towards agreeing with you regarding the future of peer review in science, but, regarding Slashdot's moderation system, quitcherbitchen'.
I read at +3 (unless I'm moderating or happen to catch a story before there's about 100 comments) because I don't want to read all the crazy bullshit that gets posted to this site. Notice that I read at +3 because I choose not to read the bullshit, not because some invisible hand of censorship has taken away my right to wallow in it. If you want to read everything, read at -1. If, like me, you don't have time for the neo-Nazis, the GNAA, the Goatse references, the multiple copies of the same post from different commenters, the recurring troll memes, etcetera ad nauseum, you can choose to filter it out.
[I] see no reason why the schools shouldn't teach what everyone (around them) already believes.
I think the "[I]" is an unfair edit to jjohnson's post. The original comment, as written, claims that the zealously religious residents of the South are the ones who "see no reason why the schools shouldn't teach what everyone (around them) already believes".
I don't have any numbers for you, but I'd be surprised if Rhino was particularly fast. I've used Rhino extensively for the last two years in a project I'm working on. The Rhino interpreter doesn't seem to do much in the way of optimization, so the JVM can't really give you any extra benefit. In fact, as far as I can tell, Rhino is just a port of SpiderMonkey to Java. This is not to say Rhino is slow--far from it. I find Rhino to be a great tool, and the speed at which it interprets scripts is "fast enough". I just don't think Sun's JVM optimizations are making a whole heck of a lot of difference.
Your post caught me way off guard. In general, I think unions are terrible. From my perspective, they exist solely to redistribute wealth in a way that hinders the economy and makes life more expensive for everyone. In fact, I mourned the day that a Canadian Toyota plant finally lost out to a union. I suppose the employees wanted to be unionized or it never would have happened, but, in the big picture, I think we were better off with non-union car companies.
A union that is "just a team of lawyers" sounds like an interesting idea, but I'd be worried it's a slippery slope. I mean, protecting legal rights is a useful feature, but I wouldn't want that to be extended to inventing new "rights". I suppose my perspective is coloured by the bad experiences my family members have had with unions.
One wonders why the shareholders haven't demanded that Microsoft either start paying a dividend or greatly increase the current dividend, as appropriate. That money isn't really Microsoft's--it belongs to the shareholders and it strikes me as ridiculous that Microsoft thinks it can better direct all those billions of dollars than the individual shareholders could. (Whether or not Microsoft could do better is irrelevant--the shareholders should be clamoring for their money so they can put it in a hedge fund, blow it on drugs, fund their retirement, or whatever, because, as I said, the money belongs to the shareholders and they should be free to choose what to do with it.)
I tried to fill out my 2006 Canadian census form online and failed because the site was incompatible with Linux. I believe they had the problem corrected before the submission deadline, but I had already given up and submitted the paper form. The compatibility problem I encountered had something to do with their high-falutin' Java-based web application, which frustrated me because I didn't (and still don't) understand why what amounts to a sensitive multiple-choice form required anything more than HTML over HTTPS. I believe things will work better next time around, though, and I'm kinda proud not only to see my country making progress in this direction but also that the people running the show actually reacted to a bunch of Linux-using hippies and made the site more widely-accessible even if it did take some complaint.
In Canada, "making copies of movies for your friends" is 100% legit (assuming you're really doing it for your friends--sharing a torrent with your closest 100,000,000 "friends" may or may not be legit, I'm not sure). And since I might get a movie from a friend who gives me a copy, which is legit, then there is at least one way to "[get] movies you didn't pay for" that is also legit. Just because the Content Producing Cartel of America has nearly eradicated fair use in the United States doesn't mean that the equivalent legal rights have been universally eradicated world-wide. For the time being, we still have Fair Dealing rights here in the snowy North.
I'll also recommend TekSavvy. Their service is cheap, fast, and good. You can also get a static IP for a couple of dollars per month, and they don't block or filter anything, to my knowledge. I've just moved into a new subdivision that doesn't have DSL support yet, so I'm stuck with Rogers (*spit*), but I'll be switching back to TekSavvy ASAP. Speaking of which, I called in early January to see if my area was supported. The woman said "Not according to our records, but I'll talk to my Bell rep to see if we can get an ETA and I'll call you back." She actually called me back about a week or two later. When she called me back, I was told that DSL would be available to me sometime in March and she would call me then to open an account for me. I haven't heard from her yet but I expect to, based on past experiences.
One benefit to burning gas to produce hydrogen that drives your car is that, conceivably, you could burn lots of gas in one place to produce hydrogen that runs lots of cars all over the place. The benefit here is that all the pollutants that are produced by burning gas are in one place (or, at least, very few places) so you can spend time and money making the gas burning part as clean as possible whereas, in the current system of burning gas in every car, the efforts at cleaning up the gas burning process are hampered by the fact that the car still has to be good at moving stuff from A to B without being tethered to anything. There's obviously a loss in efficiency that comes from converting stored energy into different forms before finally using it for something useful, but hopefully the environmental payoff is worth it. Of course, this all assumes that burning hydrogen in a car is easier to do cleanly than burning gas in a car so, if that's not true, then never mind.
You believe that your wife is human, but can't know it for sure. You believe that your wife loves you, but can't know it for sure. That's the reality of human love. There's an element of risk and faith.
With a robot, you absolutely know that it's a robot, and you absolutely know that it doesn't actually love you, it merely simulates it. There's no risk. There's no faith. You know it's all fake. You can only pretend to believe it.
I have a feeling this discussion is going to end up with us agreeing to disagree, but you've got yourself confused there. When I said that I only know my wife is human/loves me to the extent that I can observe her doing things that support that theory, I meant it in a Descartian way—that I can't know anything with absolute certainty (except that cogito ergo sum). Therefore, you can't say first that I take it on faith that my wife is human and then say that I absolutely know that a hypothetical love-bot is a robot.
Also, you come back again to the fact that a robot cannot love—it can merely simulate loving. What's the difference? If a computer simulates playing chess, what's the difference between that and a computer playing chess? What's the difference between a "real" diamond and a "fake" diamond? They're both clear carbon—the only difference is in the mushy, sentimental BS that people link with paying a warlord for the right to do some digging in his backyard. A sufficiently advanced android would be indistinguishable from a human in the same way.
I suppose that my point boils down to this: all aspects of the human experience are physical events in the brain, so convincing someone to feel love or loved is merely a matter of stimulating the right set of physical events in his brain. I don't see any reason to believe that the stimulus has to be human. In fact, I don't see any reason to believe that the stimulus has to be external—it could just as easily be some electrodes planted in the brain that simulate passionate, abiding love for some lost person.
I don't want to suggest that you are racist or sexist, nor do I want to invoke Godwin's law, but your argument that robot love is not "real" makes me think of arguments that black people or women are not people. It's arbitrary. The racist and sexist arguments are negative because the so-called non-people are hurt by them whereas denying love to a machine seems without victim, but, from an objective, non-judgmental perspective, the arguments seem very similar to me—some arbitrary criterion is proposed for determining personhood/loveability and the argument is fixed a priori such that black people and women/robots are disqualified by definition. That's not a convincing argument that a person could not love a robot—it's merely a rewording of the question to exclude robots.
They're not doing it for the console (as in, for the console's benefit), they're doing it for themselves (as in, they want the console). Similar words, different meaning.
Yeah, I realized that after I hit Post and then read a few of the other comments. I think some people do go to great lengths to protect their possessions—even greater than could be attributed to simple desire to continue possessing them. For example, some works of art are valued for themselves and not merely for the benefit of possession and I'm sure there are people that have sacrificed for the art.
And therefore you know definitively that it is not actually in love.
A person who "falls in love" with a machine is completely missing what it really is to be in love. It might be a pretty decent simulation of love. And, if that's what you want, cool. But that's all it is.
I fail to see the difference between a perfect simulation and reality. I'm no solipsist, but, in the end, my experiences are nothing more than the sum of my sensory inputs. I "know" that my wife loves me, but I only know it because she acts the way that someone in love acts. In fact, I "know" that she's human, but only because she looks, acts, smells, sounds, feels, and tastes human. She could be a replicant, for all I know. Loving and feeling loved are 100% internal. They are a collection of sensory inputs that add up to a common phenomenon. I can see no reason to believe that the necessary sensory inputs could not, in principle, be simulated with sufficient accuracy to create a feeling of being loved that is indistinguishable from "the real thing" and, supposing that such a simulation is possible, I see no reason to differentiate between "real love" and "simulated love".
I suppose I might concede that the first several iterations of this hypothetical love-bot would only be capable of limited relationships because the creativity of the human mind might be difficult to match with a machine, but I think that would be a temporary obstacle.
Ian
PS I suppose I should state here that I'm areligious, don't believe in a "soul", and take a pretty materialistic (as opposed to spiritualistic) point of view. I don't think love is mystical in any way. It's pretty awesome, but it's just a bunch of chemistry in the molecules-and-atoms sense. If you disagree with me on that point, then I don't think we're ever going to agree on the larger point under discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding me? There's only two bits different between 0 and 9. Why the hell would you waste time overwriting the entire byte?
What you're missing is that, since US income tax rates are so ridiculously low, your foreign income tax credit is going to nearly or completely wipe out any income tax you might have otherwise owed to the IRS, especially if you live in a civilized country with social services paid for by income taxes. It's a pain to file a form saying you don't owe any money just because you happen to have been born in the US, and that overhead isn't really free, but it's a far cry from being double taxed. If you paid taxes overseas and paid the IRS, you were almost certainly doing something wrong.
Ian
I wonder if that's true. I know that existing pharmaceutical companies that operate in the existing patent environment spend billions of dollars looking for new drugs and so, to sustain themselves, they need long-term patent protection. I've heard what amounts to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that the drug companies are producing more symptom-controlling drugs for chronic conditions than they are cures. These conspiracy theories are appealing because a person that has to take expensive drugs to control a chronic condition for the rest of his life makes a lot more money for the drug company than someone that takes a cure for two weeks and is then cured so the theory "makes sense" regardless if it's true. I wonder, though, what sorts of drugs would be invented if the patent system were overhauled to shorten the monopoly? Maybe the next multi-billion-dollar penis pill for 70-year-old men won't be invented and, instead, we'll cure something. It'd be nice if it worked out that way, huh?
Ian
Are you trolling? You said:
They haven't "extended garbage collection", they've introduced syntactic sugar. Instead of this (with real indenting in real life because you're not limited by Slashdot's lame commenting system):
You can have something like this:
So either you're trolling or "The Dawn Of Time" is right: you have no idea what you're talking about.
Ian
Her name is danah boyd (or danah michele boyd if you want to be completist). It seems ironic that an article on "real" names doesn't use danah's real name.
Ian
What a vapid response.
The government doesn't have to grow in terms of people employed, buildings built, or services rendered for the growth argument proposed by the GP to work. The government could, in theory at least, use the growth provided by borrowing to enlarge the economy for the benefit of all, for example. One way to do that would be to subsidize private investments of various forms to cause more employment, better infrastructure, and perhaps higher standards of living.
If "clearly defined" were actually true, this debate wouldn't be happening; the people involved could consult the clear definitions and act on them. One root problem in US society (and I'm sure it's a problem in every society) is that the definitions are not clear enough and so different people interpret them differently.
"Big government" is not the same as communism, or even "the road to communism", whatever that is. In fact, quoting Wikipedia: "A communist society would have no governments, countries, or class divisions". You're waving "communism" around like a weapon, trying to scare people. It's kind of embarrassing.
Ian
You don't need a public record that person A voted for candidate 1 to be able to verify the vote, so I think the answer to your question is "no".
To verify a vote, you need a few things:
Having 1 means that each of the votes should count. Having all of 2, 3, and 4 means that no extra ballots are included in the count (no ballot stuffing occurred), and that no one's vote was skipped. Having 5 means that you can ensure that the count is reported truthfully.
Step 4 is the hardest to get right because, at some point, you just have to trust. I think you can really only get 4 by enforcing transparency in the voting process. Note, though, that if you have all 5, then the vote can be verified without knowing who voted for whom.
Ian
First, I should make it clear that I think "Intelligent Design" is bunk, and I accept as fact that life evolves. Given that, my understanding of evolution permits "Nature does things for a reason" as an imprecise way of describing survival of the fittest. It's possible to imagine an ancient mammal or pre-mammal without this p21 gene that could regenerate. If a mutant showed up with the p21 gene and was fitter for it, then the gene would proliferate and nature's "reason" for the proliferation is that the gene is useful. Similarly, maybe salamanders "lost" p21 because of a useful mutation, and you could again interpret that as nature "having a reason" for the elimination of the gene from the salamander's gene pool.
I'd agree that "Nature does things for a reason" sounds a little like Intelligent Design because anthropomorphizing nature makes it seem like the speaker believes in an intelligent agent with motivations and "reasons", but it's a bit pedantic to assume that's the only possible interpretation.
Ian
I think I get your point, but I also think you've missed a point: a 1024-blade razor is probably incrementally better than a 1023-blade razor (for some value of "better"). On the other hand, a 1024-bit key is twice as good as a 1023-bit key. Unless I've forgotten my 3rd-year CS courses, factorization difficulty is exponential in the number of bits, so things get harder really quickly. Of course, Moore's Law is also exponential so, in theory, the time from "use 256-bit keys" to "use 512-bit keys" is about the same as the the time from "use 512-bit keys" to "use 1024-bit keys", but that sort of rebuts your comment. If Moore's Law continues to hold, then the arms race continues, but it remains easier to compute and store a key of arbitrary size than to crack a key of the same size. If Moore's Law becomes a wistfully-remembered relic, then the arms race is over and there's a well-known key size that's easy to generate and store but hard to crack. The only way for the cracking side to win is to find an efficient way to factor large integers. Quantum computing is a potential option, finding a general solution to NP-complete problems is another. Neither seems imminent.
I didn't RTFA, and the other comments in the discussion make me skeptical anyway, but your post seems to contradict itself. If the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete (which I know to be true) and the Hamiltonian Path Problem is also NP-complete (which I assume is true from this discussion), then solving one problem is isomorphic to solving the other and a solution to either can be transformed into a solution to the other in polynomial time. If you'd be impressed "if they found the shortest path on an undirected graph with variable length edges", then you should be impressed with this, too (assuming they have found a solution as the summary indicates).
Ian
I can has achievement?
Perhaps. I interpreted your cry for more freedom as an expression of feeling oppressed. I suppose there's a gray area between the black and white here and maybe I misinterpreted your position. You originally said "[the moderation system] allows a small group of regulars (with time on their hands) to change what others should perceive according to their perspective. Where is the freedom in that?" and it's that that I interpreted as you feeling oppressed.
Like I said earlier, I don't have a problem with people complaining about Slashdot's system--I don't have any delusions that what's here is perfect and short of joining Slashdot's staff, the only way to fix anything is to voice your opinion. What I disagree with is the claim that anyone's freedom to act is impaired by Slashot or its policies. This site is a globally-accessible private club with lenient admission policies. If you don't like it, you always have the freedom to go somewhere else.
I didn't know that. Given that it's a big internet, I still fail to see how anyone is losing freedom here, though. Slashdot embodies a community of people with a certain "groupthink" that goes along with it. It's certainly not an ideal system, but to claim that freedom is being curtailed somewhere is still ridiculous. If you have something to say that Slashdot's evil moderators are suppressing, say it anonymously, use Tor or another proxy or log in from your public library if the system is blocking your IP, say it on one of the many free blogging sites and link to it, say it anywhere, really. The moderation system obviously affects the scope of the discussion here on Slashdot, but being excluded from a discussion does not keep you out of all discussions. Maybe it hurts someone's feelings but it's not wrong and no one's being forced to do or not do anything.
You suspect wrong, but then I'm now falling into the trap of trying to win an argument on the internet.... I'm not associated with Slashdot (besides having an account here), and the rare time that I moderate anyone, I tend to mod people up, not down. It's too bad I can't prove any of that. Humans are social animals so I probably do get small warm-fuzzies when I "encourage" other people's opinions by modding them up, but I don't take any pleasure in modding people down--I'd rather ignore them or have a discussion, like I'm doing here.
I actually have mod points today but, rather than try to silence your comments by modding you down, I decided to spend some of my Sunday afternoon having a debate so, no, it's not "too bad".
Ian
Who's forcing you? Read at -1 or read through the RSS feed and pass it through your killfile at your leisure. I agree that freedom is important. I disagree that any freedom is "missing" or being infringed here. You're free to read Slashdot (assuming you are free--I suppose some people aren't free to read Slashdot) and you're free to make use of the moderation system or not, according to your wishes. You're also (generally) free to set up a competing site that provides "better" filtering for whatever definition of "better" you'd like to use.
I understand that, in a free society, people should be free to gripe about problems and maybe even instigate change through griping. Perhaps Slashdot's moderation system could be improved (or replaced), so I don't have a beef with someone complaining about the implementation. What I do have a problem with is people claiming that they're being oppressed when there are people in the world who are actually being oppressed. Claiming that Slashdot's moderation system is depriving you of some measure of freedom is an offensive example of ridiculous hyperbole.
Ian
I lean towards agreeing with you regarding the future of peer review in science, but, regarding Slashdot's moderation system, quitcherbitchen'.
I read at +3 (unless I'm moderating or happen to catch a story before there's about 100 comments) because I don't want to read all the crazy bullshit that gets posted to this site. Notice that I read at +3 because I choose not to read the bullshit, not because some invisible hand of censorship has taken away my right to wallow in it. If you want to read everything, read at -1. If, like me, you don't have time for the neo-Nazis, the GNAA, the Goatse references, the multiple copies of the same post from different commenters, the recurring troll memes, etcetera ad nauseum, you can choose to filter it out.
Ian
I think the "[I]" is an unfair edit to jjohnson's post. The original comment, as written, claims that the zealously religious residents of the South are the ones who "see no reason why the schools shouldn't teach what everyone (around them) already believes".
Ian
I don't have any numbers for you, but I'd be surprised if Rhino was particularly fast. I've used Rhino extensively for the last two years in a project I'm working on. The Rhino interpreter doesn't seem to do much in the way of optimization, so the JVM can't really give you any extra benefit. In fact, as far as I can tell, Rhino is just a port of SpiderMonkey to Java. This is not to say Rhino is slow--far from it. I find Rhino to be a great tool, and the speed at which it interprets scripts is "fast enough". I just don't think Sun's JVM optimizations are making a whole heck of a lot of difference.
Ian
Your post caught me way off guard. In general, I think unions are terrible. From my perspective, they exist solely to redistribute wealth in a way that hinders the economy and makes life more expensive for everyone. In fact, I mourned the day that a Canadian Toyota plant finally lost out to a union. I suppose the employees wanted to be unionized or it never would have happened, but, in the big picture, I think we were better off with non-union car companies.
A union that is "just a team of lawyers" sounds like an interesting idea, but I'd be worried it's a slippery slope. I mean, protecting legal rights is a useful feature, but I wouldn't want that to be extended to inventing new "rights". I suppose my perspective is coloured by the bad experiences my family members have had with unions.
Ian
One wonders why the shareholders haven't demanded that Microsoft either start paying a dividend or greatly increase the current dividend, as appropriate. That money isn't really Microsoft's--it belongs to the shareholders and it strikes me as ridiculous that Microsoft thinks it can better direct all those billions of dollars than the individual shareholders could. (Whether or not Microsoft could do better is irrelevant--the shareholders should be clamoring for their money so they can put it in a hedge fund, blow it on drugs, fund their retirement, or whatever, because, as I said, the money belongs to the shareholders and they should be free to choose what to do with it.)
Ian
I don't really have a lot to say, but you made one error. Zero degrees C is 273K, so 138K is actually -135 degrees C, not -211.
Ian
I tried to fill out my 2006 Canadian census form online and failed because the site was incompatible with Linux. I believe they had the problem corrected before the submission deadline, but I had already given up and submitted the paper form. The compatibility problem I encountered had something to do with their high-falutin' Java-based web application, which frustrated me because I didn't (and still don't) understand why what amounts to a sensitive multiple-choice form required anything more than HTML over HTTPS. I believe things will work better next time around, though, and I'm kinda proud not only to see my country making progress in this direction but also that the people running the show actually reacted to a bunch of Linux-using hippies and made the site more widely-accessible even if it did take some complaint.
Ian
In Canada, "making copies of movies for your friends" is 100% legit (assuming you're really doing it for your friends--sharing a torrent with your closest 100,000,000 "friends" may or may not be legit, I'm not sure). And since I might get a movie from a friend who gives me a copy, which is legit, then there is at least one way to "[get] movies you didn't pay for" that is also legit. Just because the Content Producing Cartel of America has nearly eradicated fair use in the United States doesn't mean that the equivalent legal rights have been universally eradicated world-wide. For the time being, we still have Fair Dealing rights here in the snowy North.
Ian
I'll also recommend TekSavvy. Their service is cheap, fast, and good. You can also get a static IP for a couple of dollars per month, and they don't block or filter anything, to my knowledge. I've just moved into a new subdivision that doesn't have DSL support yet, so I'm stuck with Rogers (*spit*), but I'll be switching back to TekSavvy ASAP. Speaking of which, I called in early January to see if my area was supported. The woman said "Not according to our records, but I'll talk to my Bell rep to see if we can get an ETA and I'll call you back." She actually called me back about a week or two later. When she called me back, I was told that DSL would be available to me sometime in March and she would call me then to open an account for me. I haven't heard from her yet but I expect to, based on past experiences.
Ian
One benefit to burning gas to produce hydrogen that drives your car is that, conceivably, you could burn lots of gas in one place to produce hydrogen that runs lots of cars all over the place. The benefit here is that all the pollutants that are produced by burning gas are in one place (or, at least, very few places) so you can spend time and money making the gas burning part as clean as possible whereas, in the current system of burning gas in every car, the efforts at cleaning up the gas burning process are hampered by the fact that the car still has to be good at moving stuff from A to B without being tethered to anything. There's obviously a loss in efficiency that comes from converting stored energy into different forms before finally using it for something useful, but hopefully the environmental payoff is worth it. Of course, this all assumes that burning hydrogen in a car is easier to do cleanly than burning gas in a car so, if that's not true, then never mind.
Ian
I have a feeling this discussion is going to end up with us agreeing to disagree, but you've got yourself confused there. When I said that I only know my wife is human/loves me to the extent that I can observe her doing things that support that theory, I meant it in a Descartian way—that I can't know anything with absolute certainty (except that cogito ergo sum). Therefore, you can't say first that I take it on faith that my wife is human and then say that I absolutely know that a hypothetical love-bot is a robot.
Also, you come back again to the fact that a robot cannot love—it can merely simulate loving. What's the difference? If a computer simulates playing chess, what's the difference between that and a computer playing chess? What's the difference between a "real" diamond and a "fake" diamond? They're both clear carbon—the only difference is in the mushy, sentimental BS that people link with paying a warlord for the right to do some digging in his backyard. A sufficiently advanced android would be indistinguishable from a human in the same way.
I suppose that my point boils down to this: all aspects of the human experience are physical events in the brain, so convincing someone to feel love or loved is merely a matter of stimulating the right set of physical events in his brain. I don't see any reason to believe that the stimulus has to be human. In fact, I don't see any reason to believe that the stimulus has to be external—it could just as easily be some electrodes planted in the brain that simulate passionate, abiding love for some lost person.
I don't want to suggest that you are racist or sexist, nor do I want to invoke Godwin's law, but your argument that robot love is not "real" makes me think of arguments that black people or women are not people. It's arbitrary. The racist and sexist arguments are negative because the so-called non-people are hurt by them whereas denying love to a machine seems without victim, but, from an objective, non-judgmental perspective, the arguments seem very similar to me—some arbitrary criterion is proposed for determining personhood/loveability and the argument is fixed a priori such that black people and women/robots are disqualified by definition. That's not a convincing argument that a person could not love a robot—it's merely a rewording of the question to exclude robots.
Ian
Yeah, I realized that after I hit Post and then read a few of the other comments. I think some people do go to great lengths to protect their possessions—even greater than could be attributed to simple desire to continue possessing them. For example, some works of art are valued for themselves and not merely for the benefit of possession and I'm sure there are people that have sacrificed for the art.
I fail to see the difference between a perfect simulation and reality. I'm no solipsist, but, in the end, my experiences are nothing more than the sum of my sensory inputs. I "know" that my wife loves me, but I only know it because she acts the way that someone in love acts. In fact, I "know" that she's human, but only because she looks, acts, smells, sounds, feels, and tastes human. She could be a replicant, for all I know. Loving and feeling loved are 100% internal. They are a collection of sensory inputs that add up to a common phenomenon. I can see no reason to believe that the necessary sensory inputs could not, in principle, be simulated with sufficient accuracy to create a feeling of being loved that is indistinguishable from "the real thing" and, supposing that such a simulation is possible, I see no reason to differentiate between "real love" and "simulated love".
I suppose I might concede that the first several iterations of this hypothetical love-bot would only be capable of limited relationships because the creativity of the human mind might be difficult to match with a machine, but I think that would be a temporary obstacle.
Ian
PS I suppose I should state here that I'm areligious, don't believe in a "soul", and take a pretty materialistic (as opposed to spiritualistic) point of view. I don't think love is mystical in any way. It's pretty awesome, but it's just a bunch of chemistry in the molecules-and-atoms sense. If you disagree with me on that point, then I don't think we're ever going to agree on the larger point under discussion.