All good points. I was trying to keep it simple, the preference dealing earned him the nick name "Mr 2%" since that was his primary tally as opposed to the tally after preferences. IIRC, the Greens have held the BOP several times in the last decade or so. The Aussie senate has operated like this for a long time, I'm old enough to remember campaign slogans such as "keep the bastard's honest". Like or loath Bob Brown he did get into office via a notable political achievement.
Of course, and that's where politics fails and wars succeed. Be careful of what you hold sacred, it has a price.
Nobody is taking away the right to encrypt, and cops don't like rubber stamps any more than they like obtaining warrants, it's all just "pointless paperwork" to your average doughnut muncher.
Intelligence emerges due to the properties complex interactions naturally have.
Precisely, further, "intelligence" is in the eye of the beholder. My favorite example is an ants nest, each individual ant follows some very simple rules, so simple it doesn't need a brain to carry them out, it's nervous system alone provides enough "intelligence". The ant and the neuron both display automata like behavior that can be expressed as a state machine. Ants and neurons live in colonies (nests and brains), unlike the individuals the colonies do display what most people would call "intelligent behavior", yet nests and brains are also just state machines all the way down.
Your brains are not special.
My brain uses it's knowledge to inform itself that it will cease to exist, but deep down in the brain stem it's not really buying it's own story. And it's certainly not buying the idea it's not unique or special. I think programmers can see the idea that the human brain could be expressed as a state machine more readily than most because they are in the business of producing intelligent behavior from simple rules. However don't underestimate the impact that a deeply rooted acceptance of ones own morality can have (meat starts @ 3:55), non-existence is a fear that comes from the brain stem, it's the emotional driver for the "fight or flight" response. All humans recoil instinctively from the idea like ants instinctively find the sugar bowl. The existential question can be a deep dark rabbit hole with some side routes leading to depression and insanity. Of course if you can avoid (or get past ) all that, you may eventually lose the fear of not knowing, the moment of genuine acceptance is an experience many have described as "religious" - as in the natural buzz one gets from surviving "a leap of faith".
Disclaimer: I've been an atheist since my mum quit teaching Sunday school in the mid 60's and started reading me Aboriginal dream time stories, Greek fables, etc, as "stories that some people think are real". In my late teens I was sucked in bad by Uri-Geller for a couple of years. He fixed my broken watch, it didn't matter that he did it by staring at the TV with a face like a constipation sufferer, the proof was right there, the watch ran for days!!! A couple of years later I had a book shelf jammed full of "alternative science". James Randi set me straight on the real meaning of skepticism in his (short) 1980 book debunking Geller (that's HS science for you, both then and now), ironically I had picked up Randi's book from the bargain bin because I thought I knew enough to easily debunk it, in one night he had convincingly debunked my entire bookshelf.
Later still dad confessed to winding the watch with tweezers while I wasn't looking.
Seems to me you should be pissed off at the Gov and Coalition, since they're the ones who passed it, while the Greens were the ones arguing against it
What a lot of our US readers may be missing is that the Greens hold the balance of power in the senate and they have been in that position for a number of years now. If the govt and the opposition (Labor and Liberal) both vote for the bill then there is nothing the greens can do about it. If they follow party lines and oppose each other then the greens have the muscle to force a compromise by rejecting the legislation, if they do it twice in a row it can force a fresh election (as happened in the 70's).
The greens are in many ways the epitome of the phrase "perfection is the enemy of progress", however the role they play as mediator is a good one on many contentious issues. Under some circumstances a single independent can hold the balance of power, much of the "Great Aussie Firewall" stuff that was going around the last few years back was mainly political theater that was pandering to one such independent. He was a far-right christian who wanted to get rid of smut and propaganda, however after the trial of the GAF his own supporter's anti-abortion website was listed on Conroy's "leaked" black list. He was kicked out in the last election.
It's called a compromise, it may be a shock to some people but that's what politics is all about. Some people walk around on warm days wearing 'hoodies' and want no retention under any circumstances, some want everything ever written available to the police and would happily tattoo an id number on their forehead.
The previous bill called for retention on everyone's data for 2yrs, the one that passed said the police have to 'ask' the ISP to retain the data while they get a warrant and ISP's have to comply with the request. Unless you're at either end of the extremes on this issue it sounds like a very sensible compromise that retains privacy while adding extra hurdles to suspected criminals who are trying to erase their tracks. It's a minor tweak to the status-quo, a judge is still involved before anyone can rummage through your digital laundry.
Many years ago I dropped a full cup of coffee on my MB at work. After I finished cursing I drained it out into the dust bin and kept right on typing without a problem. The next day it had dried out properly but the sugar in the coffee had recrystalised and ceased the keys.
Godfather types work on a different worldview with different logic - the risk of you opening your mouth makes you a threat, actually opening it makes you the enemy. Either way, you're screwed.
and if we can find a way to live sustainably for a billion years
We have about 0.5 billion years before Earth looks like Venus, coincidentally about the same length of time since multicellular life first evolved. We evolved in conjunction with the a biosphere that probably is unique. The likelyhood of our very long term survival is remote, the chances of our distant ancestors still being the same species is even more remote.
What about space colonies, terra-forming, Dyson spheres, etc? - Despite the hype and cynicism that surrounds SETI, "Fermi's paradox" (AKA "Where are they?") is still a damned good question. What empirical evidence we have seems to suggest that technological species that have mastered broadcasting on the EM spectrum are either, exceedingly rare, or a fleeting phenomena that lasts for less than an eye-blink on geological time scales.
Our survival for the next century or two depends on how we maintain this unique biosphere (natural spaceship/raft if you like). The pessimist in me says that the fatal flaw in human civilizations of any kind is that humans did not evolve massive chimp brains to live like termites. If we can't work out how to stop destroying the life support systems that exists on this rudderless ship, the human race won't be going anywhere long term.
While it might be an interesting change of pace to elect a scientist rather than a lawyer or executive, that seems unlikely.
You may be surprised how many politicians, lawyers, and executives have a BSc or better under their belt. For example the Iron Lady was a chemist trained at Oxford, her scientific training probably helped her to become one of the first world leaders to call for action on AGW in the 80's...OTOH...the Iron Lady did have other ideas in other areas, more than a few of those policies can be used to demonstrate that technocrats have shitty policy ideas just like everyone else.
The greens currently hold the balance of power in the Australian senate and they have for a long time, politically they cannot be ignored on any issue unless it has bypartisan support from both major parties..
WL released them in conjunction with three major newspapers in Germany the UK and the US, the four independent organizations worked together in secrecy for weeks to weed out informants names,etc. They then synchronized the publication so none of the newspapers could claim a "scoop". I'd say Assange, at least three major publishers, their chief editors, and four legal departments, all thought long and hard about what it was they were releasing.
But still, perhaps the people who were scanning the documents were sloppy. Let's assume they missed some stuff in their rush to publish. So now that everybody has had time to go through them with a fine tooth comb, where are the bodies piling up? All the millions the US and others have spent investigating this, all the macho chest beating in congress about WL and "harm's way", yet they still haven't shown us so much as a broken kneecap?
Disclaimer: None of this makes me an "Assange supporter", I am a "Free press" supporter. I don't like the majority of his personality traits, which is just one more reason I am reluctant to brand him a witch. "A dingo ate my baby" is no longer that funny to Aussies who were adults in the early 80's, it a reminder to me of how easy it is for an entire nation to burn the socially inept at the stake.
I just turned in a term paper on Network Neutrality issues and regulatory approaches to them.
Thanks, that's confirmation of the way I see things. Being an Aussie I don't get to see all the US political maneuvering on this issue. However I did see one Fox 'report' looking at NN (at least 6 months ago). It basically came to the conclusion that (paraphrase) "Obama wants to dictate what you can and can't see on the intertubes and the brave ISP's are fighting for your rights". And it was a "news" report, not that loud idiot with a whiteboard. How anyone with the slightest inkling of what this is about can swallow that shit, or worse still repeat it as if it were fact, baffles me.
Similarly there are a lot of posts here claiming that there's no difference between Obama and Romney on the issue. This is simply false, there's a clear distinction between the two policies that even I can see from 10,000 miles away. Claiming they're the same does nothing but imply the claimant is intellectually lazy. Such laziness in politics makes one a perfect target for propaganda presented as news.
PS: If any Obama operatives are reading this, take my name off your fucking spam list, I do not want to "Own a piece of the Democratic convention for as little as $5", I can't vote for your guy and the metaphor of selling political access nauseates me a little.
Fire doesn't dissolve anything, it's the energy released from oxidization. As others have said, water is the universal solvent and was when I went to HS in the 70's, I'm sure (like me) you remember what you learnt, but I'm less certain that it matches what we were were taught.;)
The probability of getting it to work in the near future demands we don't throw everything at it, the same probability combined with the potential payoff demands we keep tinkering and finding solutions to sub-problems or trying completely different designs. Some of those solutions will inevitably be useful in unrelated fields, most won't. We may never get a working fusion reactor but big science (such as the LHC and Fusion) is not just about the questions it was designed to answer. Look at how the LHC was funded and the engineering challenges that were overcome in building it, the skills learned (both technical and organizational) just by building and mainlining the thing are of more immediate and tangible benefit to mankind than confirming Mr Higgs was correct to within five decimal places. Not to mention the intangible benefits of providing a place where scientists from around the globe can more easily exchange ideas and techniques.
Too bad solar together with pretty much all other renewable energy sources utterly suck for providing baseline energy load.
What the coal industry desperately wants you to think is that "base load" is referring to something more important than a flat output curve. It's irrelevant if the output curve is flat or variable, no single technology comes close to matching the demand curve, thus all individual energy sources suck at matching the demand curve and nothing is maintenance free (eg: 1 in 7 coal plants are shut down for scheduled maintenance at any point in time).
Coal and Nuclear output a steady supply that has to be shaped to meet the demand curve, they have traditionally managed this problem with fast switching gas turbines and hydro in the day and pumping water uphill at night. There is fuck all logical reason that variable output cannot do the same thing, in fact it must since it does not match the demand curve either.
Someone, somewhere, has convinced you that "base load" is essential to meeting demand, yet it's obvious that demand is variable and somewhat unpredictable. The real problem of meeting the demand curve is about fixed and variable sources of energy and the speed at which each technology can be "switched". The question "how can variable supply X output steady supply Y" is completely irrelevant to the real world problem of meeting a fluctuating demand curve. A more practical question would be - how can we combine the various technologies to make it both profitable to reduce emissions AND keep the lights on.
The energy market is one of the main reason we have 7 billion people instead of 1-2 billion. A market in the economic sense is nothing more than the set of laws governing trade, how those rules are structured determines the benefit/detriment the market has on society. For example there is no known market for slaves that is considered beneficial to modern society.
Nothing is impossible but somethings are highly improbable. Ultimately electromagnetism is what determines how the lining material reacts to being bombarded with high energy particles. Breaking any durability limits set by our understanding of EM would mean our most observationally accurate "physical law" is wrong - possible, but very, very, improbable.
We either switch long before we reach the point where it's the physical supply limit that's driving up the price, or our civilization collapses.
With coal, that point is well past the point where AGW famines and migrations have significantly reduced the population and returned us to the dark ages. So yeah, "make hay while the sun shines" is good advice.
Slashdot Mirror
All good points. I was trying to keep it simple, the preference dealing earned him the nick name "Mr 2%" since that was his primary tally as opposed to the tally after preferences. IIRC, the Greens have held the BOP several times in the last decade or so. The Aussie senate has operated like this for a long time, I'm old enough to remember campaign slogans such as "keep the bastard's honest". Like or loath Bob Brown he did get into office via a notable political achievement.
And sometimes compromise isn't acceptable.
Of course, and that's where politics fails and wars succeed. Be careful of what you hold sacred, it has a price.
Nobody is taking away the right to encrypt, and cops don't like rubber stamps any more than they like obtaining warrants, it's all just "pointless paperwork" to your average doughnut muncher.
as though acting like a human is some lofty goal worth attaining
As someone once put it - "Who wants a computer that can remember the words to the Flintstones theme song, but forgets to pay the rent."
Intelligence emerges due to the properties complex interactions naturally have.
Precisely, further, "intelligence" is in the eye of the beholder. My favorite example is an ants nest, each individual ant follows some very simple rules, so simple it doesn't need a brain to carry them out, it's nervous system alone provides enough "intelligence". The ant and the neuron both display automata like behavior that can be expressed as a state machine. Ants and neurons live in colonies (nests and brains), unlike the individuals the colonies do display what most people would call "intelligent behavior", yet nests and brains are also just state machines all the way down.
Your brains are not special.
My brain uses it's knowledge to inform itself that it will cease to exist, but deep down in the brain stem it's not really buying it's own story. And it's certainly not buying the idea it's not unique or special. I think programmers can see the idea that the human brain could be expressed as a state machine more readily than most because they are in the business of producing intelligent behavior from simple rules. However don't underestimate the impact that a deeply rooted acceptance of ones own morality can have (meat starts @ 3:55), non-existence is a fear that comes from the brain stem, it's the emotional driver for the "fight or flight" response. All humans recoil instinctively from the idea like ants instinctively find the sugar bowl. The existential question can be a deep dark rabbit hole with some side routes leading to depression and insanity. Of course if you can avoid (or get past ) all that, you may eventually lose the fear of not knowing, the moment of genuine acceptance is an experience many have described as "religious" - as in the natural buzz one gets from surviving "a leap of faith".
Disclaimer: I've been an atheist since my mum quit teaching Sunday school in the mid 60's and started reading me Aboriginal dream time stories, Greek fables, etc, as "stories that some people think are real". In my late teens I was sucked in bad by Uri-Geller for a couple of years. He fixed my broken watch, it didn't matter that he did it by staring at the TV with a face like a constipation sufferer, the proof was right there, the watch ran for days!!! A couple of years later I had a book shelf jammed full of "alternative science". James Randi set me straight on the real meaning of skepticism in his (short) 1980 book debunking Geller (that's HS science for you, both then and now), ironically I had picked up Randi's book from the bargain bin because I thought I knew enough to easily debunk it, in one night he had convincingly debunked my entire bookshelf.
Later still dad confessed to winding the watch with tweezers while I wasn't looking.
Seems to me you should be pissed off at the Gov and Coalition, since they're the ones who passed it, while the Greens were the ones arguing against it
What a lot of our US readers may be missing is that the Greens hold the balance of power in the senate and they have been in that position for a number of years now. If the govt and the opposition (Labor and Liberal) both vote for the bill then there is nothing the greens can do about it. If they follow party lines and oppose each other then the greens have the muscle to force a compromise by rejecting the legislation, if they do it twice in a row it can force a fresh election (as happened in the 70's).
The greens are in many ways the epitome of the phrase "perfection is the enemy of progress", however the role they play as mediator is a good one on many contentious issues. Under some circumstances a single independent can hold the balance of power, much of the "Great Aussie Firewall" stuff that was going around the last few years back was mainly political theater that was pandering to one such independent. He was a far-right christian who wanted to get rid of smut and propaganda, however after the trial of the GAF his own supporter's anti-abortion website was listed on Conroy's "leaked" black list. He was kicked out in the last election.
It's called a compromise, it may be a shock to some people but that's what politics is all about. Some people walk around on warm days wearing 'hoodies' and want no retention under any circumstances, some want everything ever written available to the police and would happily tattoo an id number on their forehead.
The previous bill called for retention on everyone's data for 2yrs, the one that passed said the police have to 'ask' the ISP to retain the data while they get a warrant and ISP's have to comply with the request. Unless you're at either end of the extremes on this issue it sounds like a very sensible compromise that retains privacy while adding extra hurdles to suspected criminals who are trying to erase their tracks. It's a minor tweak to the status-quo, a judge is still involved before anyone can rummage through your digital laundry.
Many years ago I dropped a full cup of coffee on my MB at work. After I finished cursing I drained it out into the dust bin and kept right on typing without a problem. The next day it had dried out properly but the sugar in the coffee had recrystalised and ceased the keys.
Either way, I'm no longer a threat to them.
Godfather types work on a different worldview with different logic - the risk of you opening your mouth makes you a threat, actually opening it makes you the enemy. Either way, you're screwed.
and if we can find a way to live sustainably for a billion years
We have about 0.5 billion years before Earth looks like Venus, coincidentally about the same length of time since multicellular life first evolved. We evolved in conjunction with the a biosphere that probably is unique. The likelyhood of our very long term survival is remote, the chances of our distant ancestors still being the same species is even more remote.
What about space colonies, terra-forming, Dyson spheres, etc? - Despite the hype and cynicism that surrounds SETI, "Fermi's paradox" (AKA "Where are they?") is still a damned good question. What empirical evidence we have seems to suggest that technological species that have mastered broadcasting on the EM spectrum are either, exceedingly rare, or a fleeting phenomena that lasts for less than an eye-blink on geological time scales.
Our survival for the next century or two depends on how we maintain this unique biosphere (natural spaceship/raft if you like). The pessimist in me says that the fatal flaw in human civilizations of any kind is that humans did not evolve massive chimp brains to live like termites. If we can't work out how to stop destroying the life support systems that exists on this rudderless ship, the human race won't be going anywhere long term.
While it might be an interesting change of pace to elect a scientist rather than a lawyer or executive, that seems unlikely.
You may be surprised how many politicians, lawyers, and executives have a BSc or better under their belt. For example the Iron Lady was a chemist trained at Oxford, her scientific training probably helped her to become one of the first world leaders to call for action on AGW in the 80's...OTOH...the Iron Lady did have other ideas in other areas, more than a few of those policies can be used to demonstrate that technocrats have shitty policy ideas just like everyone else.
and to get on a shorter waiting list for tests and treatments for non-life-threatening conditions.
You don't even get that in Australia, unless we are talking fake breasts or something equally frivolous.
The greens currently hold the balance of power in the Australian senate and they have for a long time, politically they cannot be ignored on any issue unless it has bypartisan support from both major parties..
My proposal is to do away with copyright and instead strictly enforce distribution rights
Copyright is intellectual property law. What's the point of having a license to distribute IP when you have just abolished IP?
Constitutional monarchy. I know I'm being pedantic here but in a practical sense it does mean the King of Sweden is less of a "King" than the POTUS.
releasing documents without ANY thought
WL released them in conjunction with three major newspapers in Germany the UK and the US, the four independent organizations worked together in secrecy for weeks to weed out informants names,etc. They then synchronized the publication so none of the newspapers could claim a "scoop". I'd say Assange, at least three major publishers, their chief editors, and four legal departments, all thought long and hard about what it was they were releasing.
But still, perhaps the people who were scanning the documents were sloppy. Let's assume they missed some stuff in their rush to publish. So now that everybody has had time to go through them with a fine tooth comb, where are the bodies piling up? All the millions the US and others have spent investigating this, all the macho chest beating in congress about WL and "harm's way", yet they still haven't shown us so much as a broken kneecap?
Disclaimer: None of this makes me an "Assange supporter", I am a "Free press" supporter. I don't like the majority of his personality traits, which is just one more reason I am reluctant to brand him a witch. "A dingo ate my baby" is no longer that funny to Aussies who were adults in the early 80's, it a reminder to me of how easy it is for an entire nation to burn the socially inept at the stake.
I read it. Some web page says some fuckhead said some other fuckhead said....
And you're the only fuckhead who said anything about "proof".
I just turned in a term paper on Network Neutrality issues and regulatory approaches to them.
Thanks, that's confirmation of the way I see things. Being an Aussie I don't get to see all the US political maneuvering on this issue. However I did see one Fox 'report' looking at NN (at least 6 months ago). It basically came to the conclusion that (paraphrase) "Obama wants to dictate what you can and can't see on the intertubes and the brave ISP's are fighting for your rights". And it was a "news" report, not that loud idiot with a whiteboard. How anyone with the slightest inkling of what this is about can swallow that shit, or worse still repeat it as if it were fact, baffles me.
Similarly there are a lot of posts here claiming that there's no difference between Obama and Romney on the issue. This is simply false, there's a clear distinction between the two policies that even I can see from 10,000 miles away. Claiming they're the same does nothing but imply the claimant is intellectually lazy. Such laziness in politics makes one a perfect target for propaganda presented as news.
PS: If any Obama operatives are reading this, take my name off your fucking spam list, I do not want to "Own a piece of the Democratic convention for as little as $5", I can't vote for your guy and the metaphor of selling political access nauseates me a little.
Can any of you see a politician locking down a Cisco firewall?
I can, and the picture is almost as funny as a BOFH negotiating an international treaty.
You just forfieted your geek card, Linux is a kernel.
No he's ok. ;)
You OTOH, have just earned the pedant endorsement on yours with that post, congratulation.
Fire doesn't dissolve anything, it's the energy released from oxidization. As others have said, water is the universal solvent and was when I went to HS in the 70's, I'm sure (like me) you remember what you learnt, but I'm less certain that it matches what we were were taught. ;)
...so try and embrace it instead.
The probability of getting it to work in the near future demands we don't throw everything at it, the same probability combined with the potential payoff demands we keep tinkering and finding solutions to sub-problems or trying completely different designs. Some of those solutions will inevitably be useful in unrelated fields, most won't. We may never get a working fusion reactor but big science (such as the LHC and Fusion) is not just about the questions it was designed to answer. Look at how the LHC was funded and the engineering challenges that were overcome in building it, the skills learned (both technical and organizational) just by building and mainlining the thing are of more immediate and tangible benefit to mankind than confirming Mr Higgs was correct to within five decimal places. Not to mention the intangible benefits of providing a place where scientists from around the globe can more easily exchange ideas and techniques.
Too bad solar together with pretty much all other renewable energy sources utterly suck for providing baseline energy load.
What the coal industry desperately wants you to think is that "base load" is referring to something more important than a flat output curve. It's irrelevant if the output curve is flat or variable, no single technology comes close to matching the demand curve, thus all individual energy sources suck at matching the demand curve and nothing is maintenance free (eg: 1 in 7 coal plants are shut down for scheduled maintenance at any point in time).
Coal and Nuclear output a steady supply that has to be shaped to meet the demand curve, they have traditionally managed this problem with fast switching gas turbines and hydro in the day and pumping water uphill at night. There is fuck all logical reason that variable output cannot do the same thing, in fact it must since it does not match the demand curve either.
Someone, somewhere, has convinced you that "base load" is essential to meeting demand, yet it's obvious that demand is variable and somewhat unpredictable. The real problem of meeting the demand curve is about fixed and variable sources of energy and the speed at which each technology can be "switched". The question "how can variable supply X output steady supply Y" is completely irrelevant to the real world problem of meeting a fluctuating demand curve. A more practical question would be - how can we combine the various technologies to make it both profitable to reduce emissions AND keep the lights on.
The energy market is one of the main reason we have 7 billion people instead of 1-2 billion. A market in the economic sense is nothing more than the set of laws governing trade, how those rules are structured determines the benefit/detriment the market has on society. For example there is no known market for slaves that is considered beneficial to modern society.
Nothing is impossible but somethings are highly improbable. Ultimately electromagnetism is what determines how the lining material reacts to being bombarded with high energy particles. Breaking any durability limits set by our understanding of EM would mean our most observationally accurate "physical law" is wrong - possible, but very, very, improbable.
We either switch long before we reach the point where it's the physical supply limit that's driving up the price, or our civilization collapses.
With coal, that point is well past the point where AGW famines and migrations have significantly reduced the population and returned us to the dark ages. So yeah, "make hay while the sun shines" is good advice.
Some views are so stunning that erecting a turbine would be a crime, but if that's true then erecting a mansion at the site is also a crime.