What's science giving us instead, a life that sucks, a death that's permanent, and a universe that will wink out of existence in 100 billion years, or some other grizly fate. Even the existence of man is utterly pointless in the long run.
Which is cool too, and I don't understand why more people don't see that. We're biomechanical automatons made out of meat. How is that not awesome?
Homeopathy was invented in like 1796. You're thinking of the rather distinct idea of herbal medicine, which does indeed contain some valid stuff, although it's hit and miss.
There's nothing in the word contamination which implies the contamination is permanent. It just means (American Heritage Dictionary, which is a different dictionary, but whatever) "To make impure or unclean by contact or mixture" if excess light is shining in some area, then there is stuff mixed in with it (photons of whatever energy visible light has) that would not otherwise be there, thus it is contaminated. Just because you can turn the lights off and the photons will automatically dissipate seems irrelevant.
The problem with feature b is that is somewhat computationally difficult. First you need to be able to automagically pick out human beings, and then you need to be able to run a "beautification" algorithm to be able to make it look sexier. Such algorithms exist, certainly, but to be able to do it to the sort of precision neccesary for this to not be "A Scanner Darkly Porn" (which admittedly, would be hot in its own way) is challenging.
I know you were joking somewhat, but damn it, I want real time beautification of video! We need to get as many engineers and computer scientists as possible on getting this problem solved!
Statistics like this measure HOW things are being produced, but not WHAT things are produced. Goods can be (and more and more are) produced by machines with minimal human involvement. And the human involvement that IS involved is often classifiable as a service job. Being a repairman or whatever is a service sector job. Hell, services could also be produced by machines, but agriculture and manufacturing seems like it's easier to pull off. It so happens that a lot of service sector jobs are in areas where humans have an advantage due to their very humanness. (Human intelligence, emotions, "looking like a human," and so forth.)
In an ideal world (which I think could potentially be within our lifetimes) nobody would ever work, and machines would do all the work for everyone. Of course, capitalism would have to "adjust" to such a situation (if nobody works, people need to make their income either by owning the machines or by some sort of redistribution scheme) but it wouldn't cause some sort of sudden crash of the global economy because nobody is producing wealth. Human beings are just one factor of production. The other two can, in principle, suffice.
Of course, the recent growth in the service sector hasn't JUST been due to technology getting more efficient, but also because wealthier economies have been able to outsource their non-service labor to poorer countries where labor is cheaper, and that could potentially lead to issues as you say, but in the long run a growth in the service sector is something natural and beneficial.
Because the whole fucking point of science is that it studies the pointless stuff too. If science was funded merely by the free market, science funding would be skewed towards researching practical stuff, which would leave abstract theoretical stuff that doesn't produce practical results for hundreds of years forced to beg for money, and that would force science to become hopelessly myopic. Science is not merely the servant of the economy, doing the grunt work of pure research so that people can go invent and create great things, science is an end in itself.
Furthermore, "stealing from people" to fund science is more justified than "stealing from people" to fund police. Providing a police service only benefits some people; criminals for instance are harmed by police, (or, for that matter, by people defending themselves independently) and that's not nice. Science, to contrast, benefits everyone, whether they directly partake of science or not.
Perhaps government funding allows science to be a bit less efficient by allowing them to get money even if they don't get results. BUT IF SO, THAT IS A GOOD THING. Science is by design inefficient. You look at some data, you create a hypothesis, and then you test it over and over again until you find out that it's false. Even the most obvious theories might end up being wrong, and thus they should be tested. This is insanely inefficient, but fuck efficiency. Science is the most important thing in the universe.
Also, the free market can only give us what we want, since it's based on voluntary transactions between people. It is fairly often the case that as science advances, we find out that something we didn't really think we wanted is, in fact, fucking awesome. In order for life to get better, we need the government to "steal people's money" and invest in crapshoots.
Yes, but there's probably a Cathedral and the Bazaar-type effect going on. With enough eyeballs, all military secrets become rather easy to find out. The military can only hire so many people to look at the satellite information, but when Random Joe can play around with Google Maps on his lunch break and then report whatever looks "weird" on their blog, it becomes a lot harder to keep a lid on things.
Many would argue that you have a right to do whatever the hell you want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. When people's websites are shut down by Livejournal, their ability do "whatever the hell they want" is limited, and it's quite debatable whether said people were harming anyone. Of course, it's debatable which side the rights really fall on, but that's true of any discussion. For every so-called right, it is not hard to find some person who thinks that isn't a right. Especially since Slashdot is a discussion website, they should use an open-ended definition of rights so that they can stir up as much discussion as possible.
I wasn't thinking along those lines, in part because I don't think there's anything terribly malicious about hypocrisy. They didn't upload those watermarked pictures explicitly so as to screw anyone over, they just did it out of laziness or whatever. Although I suppose it would still be a bit hasty to rule out the possibility that they just screwed up in some particularly silly way.
Technically no, but a person who pays for a stock image and then keeps the watermark on is retarded. Thus, either they are hypocritical or they are retarded, and I try to be generous.
I agree, but I do think that one plausibly good argument is that anabolic steroids have a bunch of unhealthy side effects, and thus if they are legal, players will be "forced" to accept these side effects in order to keep their jobs, and that's not probably not fair. Of course, that same argument could be applied to things that are presently relatively acceptable in some sports (such as playing and training to the point that after a few years your body is a profoundly worn out piece of shit) and thus it becomes an argument more for "fair treatment for athletes" as a general rather than an argument specifically against steroids.
But yes, I do think that the "drugs are unsportsmanlike" argument is retarded.
Education (and especially science/engineering education, I think) has very strong positive externalities. (That is, when person A and B engage in some economic transaction like provide education in exchange for money, some other person C is benefited.) When a person becomes a scientist, they go out and discover things, and these discoveries improve everyone's life. Even the most ridiculously restrictive "intellectual property" laws will not be enough to internalize these improvements, which fucking change every aspect of life. Science is the engine which makes life not be a bunch of serfs sitting in mud. And although the fact that science/engineering pays "pretty well" as jobs go means that people have a decent incentive to enter those fields, it is not as high as it would be if everyone took into account externalities.
Perhaps there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but it is not at all uncommon for things to pay for themselves over time, and education is one of those things, both on the individual and social level.
That sounds like a really neat idea, but it doesn't really refute my point, because you would still need regulation or else anyone with enough money could just build a bunch of antennas that fill every frequency of the spectrum with a lot of really powerful noise, thus taking bandwidth away from even clever technologies like that. The question is merely about how the government decides to divee it up. Even if the broadcast spectrum lacks scarcity when used in a competent way, it still is a rival medium, and that allows people to be dicks, thus requiring regulation. The FCC would cease to exist, but there would still have to be some rules.
Probably, but that would have to be approached in a different way. With a major in math, science, or engineering the government could just send them off to fuck around at some lab to satisfy their requirement, but who the hell wants to hire a political science major?:)
More or less. The broadcast spectrum is the sort of thing which it is hard to "homestead" in any meaningful sense. It's not like land where you can make a fence around some unowned area and call it a day. To "own" some section of the broadcast spectrum means the exclusive right to emit photons of a certain energy within some area, and it's hard to imagine what a person would do to be able to say they've earned that right. However, if broadcast spectrum was just a free-for-all of everyone doing whatever the hell they wanted, it would be chaos, since people would be free interfere like hell with each other's uses without there being a particularly clear cut way of determining what's okay and what isn't. Thus, the broadcast spectrum is more or less owned by the government who then leases out the spectrum under various conditions.
As for the auctioning in particular, I think the idea is that selling them to the highest bidder assures that whoever gets the spectrum is going to try to get their money's worth out of it rather just letting it sit around doing nothing, thus assuring some amount of efficiency. Although I'm sure the government does appreciate an excuse for grabbing some more revenue.
Taking some things away from some people for the common good isn't communism, it's simply non-anarchism. Every system of government causes harm to some people so as to produce a "common good." Whenever a person is taxed, whenever a person goes to jail, whenever the government does ANYTHING, they are harmed for the common good. That Hillary Clinton phrased it that way is definitely something that gives the right a really fucking easy target to attack, but it's just that. I admit I find her annoying too, though.
GNU was a project to make a free operating system. "Linux" is a free operating system based in part on most of the GNU components. Therefore, "Linux" is a fork of GNU. To contrast, World of Warcraft is not, because it used GNU components for a fundamentally different purpose: an MMORPG. I think it's somewhat silly to get worked up over the semantics of GNU/Linux, but the overarching principle behind it is right. Linus just finished what GNU was working on.
What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Absolutely certain knowledge does not exist, for all we know, this is all just a dream and the real Earth is spiraling away from the sun. Action can only be be based on what the facts seem to be at any given point in time, and scientists, who seem to have a pretty consistant track record with respect to facts, say that we seem to be experiencing an increase in the average temperature on Earth and this seems to be largely attributable to. If we implement policies to prevent global warming and it turns out we trigger a new ice age instead, then oh well. Life's a bitch that way.
As the article you linked says, arrow's theorem only applies to voting systems where you relatively rank candidates. Approval voting (and range voting, of which it is a special case) does not work that way, and thus is not susceptible to its flaws.
In fact, it's not particularly hard to show that approval voting satisfies all the "contradictory" properties listed in Arrow's theorem. (It's Pareto because if everyone prefers A to B, then A will get as many or more approvals than B; it has independence of irrelevant alternatives because if more people approve of A than B, then that is true regardless of whether or not there is some third candidate on the poll; and it's just _obviously_ not a dictatorship, since each person's vote counts equally.)
Of course, in a more general sense, there's probably some flaws with approval voting, in that nothing's perfect. But still, approval voting seems pretty good, while also being fairly simple to implement.
Slashdot Mirror
Homeopathy was invented in like 1796. You're thinking of the rather distinct idea of herbal medicine, which does indeed contain some valid stuff, although it's hit and miss.
There's nothing in the word contamination which implies the contamination is permanent. It just means (American Heritage Dictionary, which is a different dictionary, but whatever) "To make impure or unclean by contact or mixture" if excess light is shining in some area, then there is stuff mixed in with it (photons of whatever energy visible light has) that would not otherwise be there, thus it is contaminated. Just because you can turn the lights off and the photons will automatically dissipate seems irrelevant.
Yes, the Nazis were well known for trying to play down nationalism.
The problem with feature b is that is somewhat computationally difficult. First you need to be able to automagically pick out human beings, and then you need to be able to run a "beautification" algorithm to be able to make it look sexier. Such algorithms exist, certainly, but to be able to do it to the sort of precision neccesary for this to not be "A Scanner Darkly Porn" (which admittedly, would be hot in its own way) is challenging.
I know you were joking somewhat, but damn it, I want real time beautification of video! We need to get as many engineers and computer scientists as possible on getting this problem solved!
Statistics like this measure HOW things are being produced, but not WHAT things are produced. Goods can be (and more and more are) produced by machines with minimal human involvement. And the human involvement that IS involved is often classifiable as a service job. Being a repairman or whatever is a service sector job. Hell, services could also be produced by machines, but agriculture and manufacturing seems like it's easier to pull off. It so happens that a lot of service sector jobs are in areas where humans have an advantage due to their very humanness. (Human intelligence, emotions, "looking like a human," and so forth.)
In an ideal world (which I think could potentially be within our lifetimes) nobody would ever work, and machines would do all the work for everyone. Of course, capitalism would have to "adjust" to such a situation (if nobody works, people need to make their income either by owning the machines or by some sort of redistribution scheme) but it wouldn't cause some sort of sudden crash of the global economy because nobody is producing wealth. Human beings are just one factor of production. The other two can, in principle, suffice.
Of course, the recent growth in the service sector hasn't JUST been due to technology getting more efficient, but also because wealthier economies have been able to outsource their non-service labor to poorer countries where labor is cheaper, and that could potentially lead to issues as you say, but in the long run a growth in the service sector is something natural and beneficial.
Because the whole fucking point of science is that it studies the pointless stuff too. If science was funded merely by the free market, science funding would be skewed towards researching practical stuff, which would leave abstract theoretical stuff that doesn't produce practical results for hundreds of years forced to beg for money, and that would force science to become hopelessly myopic. Science is not merely the servant of the economy, doing the grunt work of pure research so that people can go invent and create great things, science is an end in itself.
Furthermore, "stealing from people" to fund science is more justified than "stealing from people" to fund police. Providing a police service only benefits some people; criminals for instance are harmed by police, (or, for that matter, by people defending themselves independently) and that's not nice. Science, to contrast, benefits everyone, whether they directly partake of science or not.
Perhaps government funding allows science to be a bit less efficient by allowing them to get money even if they don't get results. BUT IF SO, THAT IS A GOOD THING. Science is by design inefficient. You look at some data, you create a hypothesis, and then you test it over and over again until you find out that it's false. Even the most obvious theories might end up being wrong, and thus they should be tested. This is insanely inefficient, but fuck efficiency. Science is the most important thing in the universe.
Also, the free market can only give us what we want, since it's based on voluntary transactions between people. It is fairly often the case that as science advances, we find out that something we didn't really think we wanted is, in fact, fucking awesome. In order for life to get better, we need the government to "steal people's money" and invest in crapshoots.
Yes, but there's probably a Cathedral and the Bazaar-type effect going on. With enough eyeballs, all military secrets become rather easy to find out. The military can only hire so many people to look at the satellite information, but when Random Joe can play around with Google Maps on his lunch break and then report whatever looks "weird" on their blog, it becomes a lot harder to keep a lid on things.
They could make a movie about Moore's paradox, but I don't think they could.
I'd watch that.
Many would argue that you have a right to do whatever the hell you want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. When people's websites are shut down by Livejournal, their ability do "whatever the hell they want" is limited, and it's quite debatable whether said people were harming anyone. Of course, it's debatable which side the rights really fall on, but that's true of any discussion. For every so-called right, it is not hard to find some person who thinks that isn't a right. Especially since Slashdot is a discussion website, they should use an open-ended definition of rights so that they can stir up as much discussion as possible.
I wasn't thinking along those lines, in part because I don't think there's anything terribly malicious about hypocrisy. They didn't upload those watermarked pictures explicitly so as to screw anyone over, they just did it out of laziness or whatever. Although I suppose it would still be a bit hasty to rule out the possibility that they just screwed up in some particularly silly way.
Technically no, but a person who pays for a stock image and then keeps the watermark on is retarded. Thus, either they are hypocritical or they are retarded, and I try to be generous.
I agree, but I do think that one plausibly good argument is that anabolic steroids have a bunch of unhealthy side effects, and thus if they are legal, players will be "forced" to accept these side effects in order to keep their jobs, and that's not probably not fair. Of course, that same argument could be applied to things that are presently relatively acceptable in some sports (such as playing and training to the point that after a few years your body is a profoundly worn out piece of shit) and thus it becomes an argument more for "fair treatment for athletes" as a general rather than an argument specifically against steroids.
But yes, I do think that the "drugs are unsportsmanlike" argument is retarded.
Sounds like a whole lot of nothing to me.
In Soviet Russia, perhaps.
Education (and especially science/engineering education, I think) has very strong positive externalities. (That is, when person A and B engage in some economic transaction like provide education in exchange for money, some other person C is benefited.) When a person becomes a scientist, they go out and discover things, and these discoveries improve everyone's life. Even the most ridiculously restrictive "intellectual property" laws will not be enough to internalize these improvements, which fucking change every aspect of life. Science is the engine which makes life not be a bunch of serfs sitting in mud. And although the fact that science/engineering pays "pretty well" as jobs go means that people have a decent incentive to enter those fields, it is not as high as it would be if everyone took into account externalities.
Perhaps there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but it is not at all uncommon for things to pay for themselves over time, and education is one of those things, both on the individual and social level.
That sounds like a really neat idea, but it doesn't really refute my point, because you would still need regulation or else anyone with enough money could just build a bunch of antennas that fill every frequency of the spectrum with a lot of really powerful noise, thus taking bandwidth away from even clever technologies like that. The question is merely about how the government decides to divee it up. Even if the broadcast spectrum lacks scarcity when used in a competent way, it still is a rival medium, and that allows people to be dicks, thus requiring regulation. The FCC would cease to exist, but there would still have to be some rules.
Probably, but that would have to be approached in a different way. With a major in math, science, or engineering the government could just send them off to fuck around at some lab to satisfy their requirement, but who the hell wants to hire a political science major? :)
More or less. The broadcast spectrum is the sort of thing which it is hard to "homestead" in any meaningful sense. It's not like land where you can make a fence around some unowned area and call it a day. To "own" some section of the broadcast spectrum means the exclusive right to emit photons of a certain energy within some area, and it's hard to imagine what a person would do to be able to say they've earned that right. However, if broadcast spectrum was just a free-for-all of everyone doing whatever the hell they wanted, it would be chaos, since people would be free interfere like hell with each other's uses without there being a particularly clear cut way of determining what's okay and what isn't. Thus, the broadcast spectrum is more or less owned by the government who then leases out the spectrum under various conditions.
As for the auctioning in particular, I think the idea is that selling them to the highest bidder assures that whoever gets the spectrum is going to try to get their money's worth out of it rather just letting it sit around doing nothing, thus assuring some amount of efficiency. Although I'm sure the government does appreciate an excuse for grabbing some more revenue.
Well, their top story is that Netbeans is switching to the GPLv2, whereas Daily Drudge's top story is that HISTORIC HELL STORM SET FOR JAMAICA.
Taking some things away from some people for the common good isn't communism, it's simply non-anarchism. Every system of government causes harm to some people so as to produce a "common good." Whenever a person is taxed, whenever a person goes to jail, whenever the government does ANYTHING, they are harmed for the common good. That Hillary Clinton phrased it that way is definitely something that gives the right a really fucking easy target to attack, but it's just that. I admit I find her annoying too, though.
GNU was a project to make a free operating system. "Linux" is a free operating system based in part on most of the GNU components. Therefore, "Linux" is a fork of GNU. To contrast, World of Warcraft is not, because it used GNU components for a fundamentally different purpose: an MMORPG. I think it's somewhat silly to get worked up over the semantics of GNU/Linux, but the overarching principle behind it is right. Linus just finished what GNU was working on.
What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Absolutely certain knowledge does not exist, for all we know, this is all just a dream and the real Earth is spiraling away from the sun. Action can only be be based on what the facts seem to be at any given point in time, and scientists, who seem to have a pretty consistant track record with respect to facts, say that we seem to be experiencing an increase in the average temperature on Earth and this seems to be largely attributable to. If we implement policies to prevent global warming and it turns out we trigger a new ice age instead, then oh well. Life's a bitch that way.
As the article you linked says, arrow's theorem only applies to voting systems where you relatively rank candidates. Approval voting (and range voting, of which it is a special case) does not work that way, and thus is not susceptible to its flaws.
In fact, it's not particularly hard to show that approval voting satisfies all the "contradictory" properties listed in Arrow's theorem. (It's Pareto because if everyone prefers A to B, then A will get as many or more approvals than B; it has independence of irrelevant alternatives because if more people approve of A than B, then that is true regardless of whether or not there is some third candidate on the poll; and it's just _obviously_ not a dictatorship, since each person's vote counts equally.)
Of course, in a more general sense, there's probably some flaws with approval voting, in that nothing's perfect. But still, approval voting seems pretty good, while also being fairly simple to implement.