Cool. So you have a training regime to increase mental and physical dexterity? What about gene therapy? Or do you just go the bionic implant route?
They discuss a light version of enlightenment-era philosophy. Liberty, equality and fraternity... you get the deal. Add a bunch of ritual (because that is a psychologically satisfying way of doing things) and that's pretty much Freemasonry.
Oh. Sounds like Scientology. Nevermind.
FWIW, the only ex-Freemason groups blowing the whistle on the evils of Freemasonry that seem to exist are entirely populated by people who converted to fundamentalist forms of Christianity and seem to be exclusively concerned with why Freemasonry ruins your personal salvation relationship with Fundamentalist Jesus.
I'm yet to see a normal person who is a former/lapsed Freemason who actually thinks it's bad or dangerous. Not for them, yes. A little silly in retrospect, perhaps. But damaging, no.
You so very conveniently ignored the final stanza of my post.
You're right. I'd already addressed that point elsewhere in the thread, and so skimmed over it here. I probably shouldn't have done that.
However, I don't think this changes anything I said. I don't think he set out planning to kill himself, and I didn't even imply that I thought that. I think that decision was made (as I put it) "in the heat of the moment". I doubt there was very much rational weighing up of costs and benefits going on at all.
Having said that, the issue of sexual assault in prisons is an important one. It's literally a joke to many people; in fact, it's one of the few types of "rape joke" that's still socially acceptable. No legislator wants to talk about it lest they be seen as "soft on crime" in a society based around retribution rather than justice. Hell, police in the US will actually use it as a threat!
If you're right about this guy, fixing that problem would have resulted in not only less sexual assault in the world, but also fewer innocent people's lives being endangered and one less suicide here. How is that not win-win?
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
I know people from that kind of situation too. However, I don't know about you, but my acquaintances are a highly biassed sample. I generally don't mix with habitual armed robbers. Pretty much everyone I consider a friend is kind hearted, and that includes the ones which had shitty upbringings.
Having said that, many of them are, while not necessarily criminal, still not very well-adjusted, and still have unresolved or partly-resolved problems which have the effect of sometimes hurting other people, even if they intend otherwise. PTSD often breaks up relationships, for example, if the other party isn't wise to it. (I've been the other party. No, I will not elaborate.)
I can easily see how some of this could spill over into criminality if not checked. There are many anti-social methods which people use to keep some psychological semblance of control of a life which is perceived to be out of control. That's one of the key reasons why some people develop eating disorders (to keep control over what people put into their mouths), but it's also one of the key reasons why some people become abusive partners (to control someone else).
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing.
Or, to put it another way, it's the luck of the draw. That is, life dealt you a bad hand.
It's interesting that you said "the nature of the person", where I'm concentrating on nurture. What I actually find the most inconvenient is that there is, when you get down to it, no good evidence to call this one either way. The character of a person is undoubtedy a product of both nature and nurture. At the moment, we don't know of exactly where the boundary between the two lies, and it would be highly unethical to find out experimentally.
A lot of people have this perverted sense of compassion that involves sympathy for the Devil himself, so that they may show everyone what a great and noble person they are. The compassion would rightly be for those he endangered. The criminal himself is not a victim.
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I'm going to assume that we're not talking about crimes of opportunity and victimless crimes like drug possession or use, and concentrate on the people we really think of as "criminals" and who are accurately defined by that title. These criminals are, generally speaking, either good people for whom crime was the easiest option, or bad people who weren't affluent enough to become CEOs.
Either way, society has to take at least some of the responsibility for creating most criminals.
If things had been even a little different in your life, you could have been this guy. No amount of using distancing language like "Devil", "not a victim", and "rabid dog" changes the fact that there but for the grace of $DEITY go you.
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants.
The tacit assumption that society is working on here is that anyone who wants to commit suicide by definition has something wrong with them. Almost of the time, this is even probably true. (Sometimes that's even okay; consider voluntary medical euthanasia, which only makes sense if the patient in question does have something seriously wrong with them.)
There is no "pretending" in the case where someone is mentally ill, or otherwise not in control of themselves. A person in that state is not a fully functioning adult.
Having said that, there's an interesting question as to whether or not it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I'll leave that thought hanging there for now.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
[...] Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
This is not a binary decision. Yes, we need people who learn from their mistakes, which is usually the only way to learn certain lessons. OTOH, nobody would advocate teaching doctors the importance of washing their hands by letting them discover for themselves that not doing so results in dead patients.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades?
All the more reason for society to protect the weak from the strong.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live?
I agree with your indictment of the US prison system, but I wanted to zoom out and try to answer this question in isolation.
I can understand the argument that if the person is a legal adult of sound mind, they are due a certain amount of autonomy over their life. However, people who commit suicide are rarely of sound mind. Decisions made in the heat of the moment are often not what you really want.
IMO, it's compassion to help end the suffering of someone who is terminally ill and in pain and wishes to die. It is also compassion to protect a mentally ill person who is at risk of self-harm from the worst effects of their illness.
Whether this case is closer to the former or the latter, I'll leave to a moral philosopher to judge.
They would now. They wouldn't have one day after Obama took office. But it was never going to happen. Who wants to give up a power that might come in handy some day?
This is completely irrational, but even though my brain has a problem with giving Obama the ability to extrajudicially execute US citizens, my gut feels that he'd use the power wisely. Where my gut starts to really knot is the thought of Paul Ryan, Michelle Bachman, or (deity forbid) Sarah Palin with that power.
I'm not a hardware designer (obviously), but I am a compiler writer by trade, and I have put in a bit of research in the current literature of VLSI design, and share a commute with a VLSI designer with whom I talk about this stuff all the time.
My assessment, which is worth exactly what you paid for it, is that while I agree that VLSI design isn't the same as compiler writing, I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a harder problem. To be clear, I'm not trying to get into a pissing contest here. My conjecture is that the "big" problems are of about equal difficulty, but more brain-hours have been dedicated to researching compilers than researching VLSI design tools.
That's largely because of the volume of research material. There is, by line-of-code, far more software than hardware in the world, and more people use compilers than VLSI design tools. And, of course, there's more production-quality software source code available to researchers than there is for hardware. AMD does not simply release its netlists to anyone who asks.
And then there's the return-on-funding-investment issue: software research directly benefits a lot more organisations than hardware research. Yes, we would all be better off with faster-time-to-market hardware, but until quite recently, basic research in VLSI tools would mostly directly benefit the bottom lines of Intel and NVIDIA, where basic research in software tools would directly benefit the bottom lines of startups everywhere.
There's also the problem of turn-around time. The turn-around time for testing a software artefact can be measured in seconds or minutes, where testing a hardware artefact may take days or longer. Even if we started at the same point in history and dedicated the same number of researchers to the problem, compilers would quickly ahead faster than hardware would simply because of the time it takes to run a single experiment! For software, compilation is manufacturing.
So that's why I think there's an apparent discrepancy. Now here's why I think the underlying problems are similar:
First off, from a theoretical point of view, most of the subproblems of interest in both areas are NP-hard. Of course, that could be why they're "of interest".
Now, of course, it's not true that NP-hard problems are all alike in practice, even though they are in theory. For some NP-hard problems (SAT modulo theories being the obvious example), it's tractable to solve them exactly even for quite large problem sizes. For others, we can't even get decent solutions to moderate-sized problems. Some problems feature pretty good known heuristics, where others do not. the heuristics used by compiler writers develop at a faster rate.
Secondly, to the extent that problems of interest are not NP-hard, they seem to be just too different to make a fair comparison.
For example, it is true that some of the physics constraints (e.g. parasitic capacitance) do not have good models which you could just slot into an existing constraint solver. I find it hard to believe that this is because the problem is inherently more complicated than the deep-magic-on-the-global-properties-of-the-program that some modern compilers do. It's far more likely that the right sort of people simply haven't gone to the trouble to try to understand them.
Hell, at least problems like that are actually solvable in principle! Compilers try to understand Turing-complete languages, so some of those problems are inherently unsolvable.
I think you underestimate how good compilers have become.
I think you may have misunderstood the realities of what a modern expert assembly language programmer does.
An expert assembly language programmer knows when to write assembly language and when not to write assembly language. Assuming that raw performance is the metric by which programmers are judged (which isn't necessarily the case), an expert assembly language programmer will still win over any high-level language programmer because they can also use the compiler.
It's the same with hand-laid-out VLSI. It's not like some team of hardware designers placed every single transistor. That would cause just as much of an unmaintainable mess as writing a large application entirely in assembly language. Rather, the hand-layout designer worked in partnership with the automated tools.
I'm sure that you probably don't like the taste of coffee or chocolate, either. If you partake in either of those, you probably load it up with milk, sugar and/or other flavourings to disguise the taste of the bean.
Personally, I don't mind, and can appreciate the subtleties in, good quality bitter foods. This doesn't make me superior to you in any way. "I don't like it" or "I can't stand it" is not the same thing as "anyone who likes it is the victim of groupthink".
Yeah, megaswill lager is awful stuff. Especially the American stuff. Which, incidentally, is a lasting side-effect of prohibition. Most of the breweries shut down, and when prohibition was lifted, only a few remained. The lack of competition resulted in a cheaper, inferior product, and the rest is history. Tying it into TFA, that is almost certainly one of the reasons why beer is so cheap.
FWIW, I can't stand the taste of strawberries. Go figure.
First off, one person's "pretty famous" is another person's "completely obscure".
Secondly, from the 5 minutes I spent finding out who this guy I'd never heard of is, he is "Islamic" in the same sense that Fred Phelps is "Christian". Most Christians (at least those I know) already think that Fred Phelps has committed all sorts of blasphemy. One more wouldn't surprise them in the least, especially if it was a clever Poe.
As TFA says, "balloon gas" is a mix of recycled helium and air. Presumably, you wouldn't use pure hydrogen gas in a party balloon either. If you mixed it with a non-oxidising gas, such as a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, wouldn't that mitigate the problem considerably? And of course you could use more non-oxidising gas and retain the same buoyancy as current balloon gas.
Incidentally, I've been to a lot of children's birthday parties in my time, and I'm yet to see a balloon popped by a candle. Not saying it couldn't happen, but AFAIK it has pretty much never happened.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that like it's a bad thing.
You're forgetting that this is Slashdot, which has a higher proportion of sci-fi, fantasy and mythology appreciators than most other tech blogs.
You might have missed the memo, but BSA is no longer a way to make a superlative comparison.
FWIW, it seems to be just the BSA. The scouting movement in most other English-speaking countries still seems perfectly respectable.
Which just goes to show, once again, that the USA can't be trusted with nice things.
They discuss a light version of enlightenment-era philosophy. Liberty, equality and fraternity... you get the deal. Add a bunch of ritual (because that is a psychologically satisfying way of doing things) and that's pretty much Freemasonry.
FWIW, the only ex-Freemason groups blowing the whistle on the evils of Freemasonry that seem to exist are entirely populated by people who converted to fundamentalist forms of Christianity and seem to be exclusively concerned with why Freemasonry ruins your personal salvation relationship with Fundamentalist Jesus.
I'm yet to see a normal person who is a former/lapsed Freemason who actually thinks it's bad or dangerous. Not for them, yes. A little silly in retrospect, perhaps. But damaging, no.
I nearly got in at Hendon...
You so very conveniently ignored the final stanza of my post.
You're right. I'd already addressed that point elsewhere in the thread, and so skimmed over it here. I probably shouldn't have done that.
However, I don't think this changes anything I said. I don't think he set out planning to kill himself, and I didn't even imply that I thought that. I think that decision was made (as I put it) "in the heat of the moment". I doubt there was very much rational weighing up of costs and benefits going on at all.
Having said that, the issue of sexual assault in prisons is an important one. It's literally a joke to many people; in fact, it's one of the few types of "rape joke" that's still socially acceptable. No legislator wants to talk about it lest they be seen as "soft on crime" in a society based around retribution rather than justice. Hell, police in the US will actually use it as a threat!
If you're right about this guy, fixing that problem would have resulted in not only less sexual assault in the world, but also fewer innocent people's lives being endangered and one less suicide here. How is that not win-win?
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
I know people from that kind of situation too. However, I don't know about you, but my acquaintances are a highly biassed sample. I generally don't mix with habitual armed robbers. Pretty much everyone I consider a friend is kind hearted, and that includes the ones which had shitty upbringings.
Having said that, many of them are, while not necessarily criminal, still not very well-adjusted, and still have unresolved or partly-resolved problems which have the effect of sometimes hurting other people, even if they intend otherwise. PTSD often breaks up relationships, for example, if the other party isn't wise to it. (I've been the other party. No, I will not elaborate.)
I can easily see how some of this could spill over into criminality if not checked. There are many anti-social methods which people use to keep some psychological semblance of control of a life which is perceived to be out of control. That's one of the key reasons why some people develop eating disorders (to keep control over what people put into their mouths), but it's also one of the key reasons why some people become abusive partners (to control someone else).
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing.
Or, to put it another way, it's the luck of the draw. That is, life dealt you a bad hand.
It's interesting that you said "the nature of the person", where I'm concentrating on nurture. What I actually find the most inconvenient is that there is, when you get down to it, no good evidence to call this one either way. The character of a person is undoubtedy a product of both nature and nurture. At the moment, we don't know of exactly where the boundary between the two lies, and it would be highly unethical to find out experimentally.
I should point out that Stephen King has already anticipated this objection.
A lot of people have this perverted sense of compassion that involves sympathy for the Devil himself, so that they may show everyone what a great and noble person they are. The compassion would rightly be for those he endangered. The criminal himself is not a victim.
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I'm going to assume that we're not talking about crimes of opportunity and victimless crimes like drug possession or use, and concentrate on the people we really think of as "criminals" and who are accurately defined by that title. These criminals are, generally speaking, either good people for whom crime was the easiest option, or bad people who weren't affluent enough to become CEOs.
Either way, society has to take at least some of the responsibility for creating most criminals.
If things had been even a little different in your life, you could have been this guy. No amount of using distancing language like "Devil", "not a victim", and "rabid dog" changes the fact that there but for the grace of $DEITY go you.
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants.
The tacit assumption that society is working on here is that anyone who wants to commit suicide by definition has something wrong with them. Almost of the time, this is even probably true. (Sometimes that's even okay; consider voluntary medical euthanasia, which only makes sense if the patient in question does have something seriously wrong with them.)
There is no "pretending" in the case where someone is mentally ill, or otherwise not in control of themselves. A person in that state is not a fully functioning adult.
Having said that, there's an interesting question as to whether or not it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I'll leave that thought hanging there for now.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
[...]
Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
This is not a binary decision. Yes, we need people who learn from their mistakes, which is usually the only way to learn certain lessons. OTOH, nobody would advocate teaching doctors the importance of washing their hands by letting them discover for themselves that not doing so results in dead patients.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades?
All the more reason for society to protect the weak from the strong.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live?
I agree with your indictment of the US prison system, but I wanted to zoom out and try to answer this question in isolation.
I can understand the argument that if the person is a legal adult of sound mind, they are due a certain amount of autonomy over their life. However, people who commit suicide are rarely of sound mind. Decisions made in the heat of the moment are often not what you really want.
IMO, it's compassion to help end the suffering of someone who is terminally ill and in pain and wishes to die. It is also compassion to protect a mentally ill person who is at risk of self-harm from the worst effects of their illness.
Whether this case is closer to the former or the latter, I'll leave to a moral philosopher to judge.
You might have me mistaken for someone who thinks that this kind of power is okay. I neither said nor implied anything of the sort.
They would now. They wouldn't have one day after Obama took office. But it was never going to happen. Who wants to give up a power that might come in handy some day?
This is completely irrational, but even though my brain has a problem with giving Obama the ability to extrajudicially execute US citizens, my gut feels that he'd use the power wisely. Where my gut starts to really knot is the thought of Paul Ryan, Michelle Bachman, or (deity forbid) Sarah Palin with that power.
I'm not a hardware designer (obviously), but I am a compiler writer by trade, and I have put in a bit of research in the current literature of VLSI design, and share a commute with a VLSI designer with whom I talk about this stuff all the time.
My assessment, which is worth exactly what you paid for it, is that while I agree that VLSI design isn't the same as compiler writing, I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a harder problem. To be clear, I'm not trying to get into a pissing contest here. My conjecture is that the "big" problems are of about equal difficulty, but more brain-hours have been dedicated to researching compilers than researching VLSI design tools.
That's largely because of the volume of research material. There is, by line-of-code, far more software than hardware in the world, and more people use compilers than VLSI design tools. And, of course, there's more production-quality software source code available to researchers than there is for hardware. AMD does not simply release its netlists to anyone who asks.
And then there's the return-on-funding-investment issue: software research directly benefits a lot more organisations than hardware research. Yes, we would all be better off with faster-time-to-market hardware, but until quite recently, basic research in VLSI tools would mostly directly benefit the bottom lines of Intel and NVIDIA, where basic research in software tools would directly benefit the bottom lines of startups everywhere.
There's also the problem of turn-around time. The turn-around time for testing a software artefact can be measured in seconds or minutes, where testing a hardware artefact may take days or longer. Even if we started at the same point in history and dedicated the same number of researchers to the problem, compilers would quickly ahead faster than hardware would simply because of the time it takes to run a single experiment! For software, compilation is manufacturing.
So that's why I think there's an apparent discrepancy. Now here's why I think the underlying problems are similar:
First off, from a theoretical point of view, most of the subproblems of interest in both areas are NP-hard. Of course, that could be why they're "of interest".
Now, of course, it's not true that NP-hard problems are all alike in practice, even though they are in theory. For some NP-hard problems (SAT modulo theories being the obvious example), it's tractable to solve them exactly even for quite large problem sizes. For others, we can't even get decent solutions to moderate-sized problems. Some problems feature pretty good known heuristics, where others do not. the heuristics used by compiler writers develop at a faster rate.
Secondly, to the extent that problems of interest are not NP-hard, they seem to be just too different to make a fair comparison.
For example, it is true that some of the physics constraints (e.g. parasitic capacitance) do not have good models which you could just slot into an existing constraint solver. I find it hard to believe that this is because the problem is inherently more complicated than the deep-magic-on-the-global-properties-of-the-program that some modern compilers do. It's far more likely that the right sort of people simply haven't gone to the trouble to try to understand them.
Hell, at least problems like that are actually solvable in principle! Compilers try to understand Turing-complete languages, so some of those problems are inherently unsolvable.
I think you underestimate how good compilers have become.
I think you may have misunderstood the realities of what a modern expert assembly language programmer does.
An expert assembly language programmer knows when to write assembly language and when not to write assembly language. Assuming that raw performance is the metric by which programmers are judged (which isn't necessarily the case), an expert assembly language programmer will still win over any high-level language programmer because they can also use the compiler.
It's the same with hand-laid-out VLSI. It's not like some team of hardware designers placed every single transistor. That would cause just as much of an unmaintainable mess as writing a large application entirely in assembly language. Rather, the hand-layout designer worked in partnership with the automated tools.
He says he wants to move to Melbourne, so it can't be the beaches.
Incidentally, did anyone tell him that his sheets of banknotes aren't worth anything in Australia?
GP was right. There was a wonderful story to be told here, and thanks for telling it.
...and that's fine.
I'm sure that you probably don't like the taste of coffee or chocolate, either. If you partake in either of those, you probably load it up with milk, sugar and/or other flavourings to disguise the taste of the bean.
Personally, I don't mind, and can appreciate the subtleties in, good quality bitter foods. This doesn't make me superior to you in any way. "I don't like it" or "I can't stand it" is not the same thing as "anyone who likes it is the victim of groupthink".
Yeah, megaswill lager is awful stuff. Especially the American stuff. Which, incidentally, is a lasting side-effect of prohibition. Most of the breweries shut down, and when prohibition was lifted, only a few remained. The lack of competition resulted in a cheaper, inferior product, and the rest is history. Tying it into TFA, that is almost certainly one of the reasons why beer is so cheap.
FWIW, I can't stand the taste of strawberries. Go figure.
So Apple may be parodying an IP troll? That would explain a lot, actually.
If everyone could afford congressmen, you'd have democracy back.
Lots more here, including lurid claims about blackmail and sex parties:
Man, I wish I had enough sociopathy to be a cult leader.
I hear a whirring sound. I think it's Kemal Ataturk spinning in his grave.
If astronomers could afford congressmen, the US wouldn't be in the mess it's in today.
First off, one person's "pretty famous" is another person's "completely obscure".
Secondly, from the 5 minutes I spent finding out who this guy I'd never heard of is, he is "Islamic" in the same sense that Fred Phelps is "Christian". Most Christians (at least those I know) already think that Fred Phelps has committed all sorts of blasphemy. One more wouldn't surprise them in the least, especially if it was a clever Poe.
Great artists steal. Really bad artists steal while simultaneously suing other artists for stealing.
As TFA says, "balloon gas" is a mix of recycled helium and air. Presumably, you wouldn't use pure hydrogen gas in a party balloon either. If you mixed it with a non-oxidising gas, such as a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, wouldn't that mitigate the problem considerably? And of course you could use more non-oxidising gas and retain the same buoyancy as current balloon gas.
Incidentally, I've been to a lot of children's birthday parties in my time, and I'm yet to see a balloon popped by a candle. Not saying it couldn't happen, but AFAIK it has pretty much never happened.
But his voice is so mesmerising! He sounds just like Wallace Shawn!