I don't think other nations spying on us is an act of war or something that requires a retaliatory response.
That's not what I meant. I meant that I believe we shouldn't see every other country to be an enemy worth spying on. Warmongering comes in many forms.
It's not about seeing every other country as an enemy. It's about knowing that your goals don't always match. Not every game is cooperative, some are competitive, and we all want to win those.
You could argue spying is cheating, but I would say it's naive to assume everybody else is going to share your view. I think taking things that belong to other people is unacceptably immoral, and it would be wonderful if everyone felt that way. They don't, and as a result I lock my car when I leave it.
I expect them to try, and I see nothing wrong with it
This attitude is why we have so many useless warmongers in our government.
Out of curiosity, why do you believe that? I don't think other nations spying on us is an act of war or something that requires a retaliatory response. I think it's business as usual, we just need to take better care of our stuff and make their job difficult. Isn't that the exact opposite of warmongering?
By the way, it's not OK to spy on Americans, but it is fine to invade the privacy of everyone else on the planet? Hmm. As a non-American, I can't say I agree.
Well, the US Constitution is what makes it not OK for the US government to spy on Americans. There's no law we're beholden to that makes it wrong to spy on anyone else. There could be ratified international treaties, and we should respect those, but governments can back out of a treaty anytime they choose. It's the job of other countries counter-intelligence agencies to try to prevent it.
This isn't nationalism, btw. I feel the same way about other countries spying on Americans. I expect them to try, and I see nothing wrong with it, if they've determined they have reason to. When I see stories about the Chinese stealing classified info from US military computers I don't think, "damn you, China!" I get angry with our own agencies and think, "we really should know better than leaving classified information in computers connected to unsecured networks! We need to do a better job of protecting our secrets."
RSA for instance is based in part around a hardness assumption: that given a very large number n which is the product of p and q, it is far harder to find p and q from n then it is to find n from p and q. Assume for the sake of argument that this is the only hardness assumption RSA depends on. (If the summary isn't misleading it apparently also depends on the hardness of discrete log, but I don't know how.)
In RSA you get the public key e based on your n (and the totient of n). After that you encrypt a message m into cyphertext c using your public key e by performing c = m^e (mod n). In addition, to decrypt the cyphertext using a private key d (which is the multiplicative inverse of e mod the totient of n), you perform m = c^d (mod n). RSA assumes that given c and m, it's still pretty hard to find e or d. Otherwise, given the public key, you can figure out the private key by encrypting a message with the public key and performing the discrete log.
I've noticed weird trend among the middle classes to feel entitled when it comes to eliciting the services of those who they perceive as lower down in the pecking order.
Lower down in the pecking order? No, no. I absolutely do feel entitled when it comes to eliciting services which are offered for a price, and that I am willing to pay. Why the hell would I not be?
Being a cabby is obviously a stressful and fairly tedious job (and I speak only as an occasional rider). More importantly, it's a job, not servitude.
It's a job for which I am paying them, so they better do it well, with a smile on their face, leaving all their emotional baggage locked up for after they clock out and get to loosen up with their family and friends. It's not because I think they're "lower in the pecking order." It's because there is not a single person on this planet that doesn't have to do the same thing. When my boss tells me to do a tedious job I don't find particularly challenging or entertaining I don't get to say, "you know, I prefer to do something else." That's what I get paid to do, so I do it. When my boss has to deal with clients, he may have just gotten off a huge fight with his wife at home, but he will sure as hell put on a smile and treat them as if they're the most important thing in his life. When the fucking President of the United States meets with other world leaders, he is expected to follow protocol. Monarchs have a public figure they need to maintain...there is nobody, no matter how rich or powerful they are, who doesn't have to do shit they don't want to as part of their jobs.
And if you were sat for an hour waiting for a single cab company in one place in a city, you were doing it completely wrong.
He called a cab company up and asked them to pick him up at a particular time. I've done this and have never had a problem, but if things happened as he described, he most certainly was doing it right, and they disrespected him by wasting his time. It's a service they offer, so they need to do it. If they had told him over the phone, "we're sorry, we don't send cabs to pick people up in your area," that would have been fine. Like you said, it's not servitude and they have the right to decline jobs if they think the money isn't worth it. That said, the moment they agreed to the pickup, they're committed to be there, and to be there on time. He could have been going to an important job interview, and they didn't give him the chance to make alternate plans.
How about ask a Down's person if they're not experiencing life to the fullest?
They don't have the capacity to understand the question, so I don't really see the point.
In all honesty none of us "enjoys life to the fullest" because we're all less-abled in some ways than others. I'm fairly mathematically gifted, but I'll never fully appreciate advanced math to the same extent some folks will. I'm not tone-deaf, but I'll never experience music in the same way someone who is supremely musically gifted will. In those specific areas, compared to those extremely gifted individuals, I might as well be mentally disabled. And yet I can still lead a fulfilling life.
You're making a semantics argument against something that I never implied. I don't have the genes to be an Olympic swimmer, but I wouldn't say that implies not living to the fullest. I believe I defined what I mean by that in terms of humanity: the freedom to go out and live your life like you want it, instead of being subjugated by somebody else due to your limitations, regardless of how much they love you and you may love them.
Let's look at the other disabilities you mention and examine how people with them cope. Generally they go above and beyond what is necessary to not rely on other people. Guide dogs for the blind, acoustic coupler teletypewriters for the deaf, etc...essentially those things which allow them to lead independent lives. Sure, a blind person can't drive, but they can take public transportation by themselves and get wherever they need to go.
It's not simply a matter of mental disability. If I were to become disabled in any way that would require constant supervision and assistance from somebody else, I couldn't be happy. I would feel like a burden on those people, I would feel like I could no longer have privacy, I would feel embarrassed...I'm not saying this is how people should feel, but I do feel like it should be my choice over weather or not I choose to continue living this way. And before a child is born, it should be the parents' choice whether or not they're willing to spend their entire lives caring for a child that will never be able to take care of themselves. That's a difficult decision, and nobody should have the right to make that decision for them.
Yes and no. The effects are obviously serious, and people with Downs are more prone to heart trouble, but other than that most of them don't have any serious on-going health problems that require medical care.
I consider the mental disability to be a serious health issue.
This seems like an unreasonably high bar to set. Experiencing life as fully as possible, depending on one's limitations, is presumably preferable to not experiencing life at all. Ask a blind or deaf person.
How about asking a blind or deaf person if they're not experiencing life to the fullest. Their life has additional challenges, but they can and do lead completely independent lives. The comparison really doesn't hold up.
Since we're talking statistics, amniocentesis, the invasive test for Down Syndrome, has a 0.75% chance of ending the pregnancy so we opted for a lower risk combination of an ultrasound scan and blood test. The results (along with our age and other factors) gave a 1 in 40 (2.5%) chance of a baby with Down Syndrome. But the nurse who read the results to us didn't say once chance in 40 and she didn't say 2.5% chance. She said 40% chance!
That is absolutely horrible, and a terrible unnecessary period of worry in your life. I'm happy everything worked out for you.
ortunately we did the tests merely to inform ourselves of what special preparation we might need to make. Abortion for eugenic purposes is not legal here in Ireland as it is in the US.
Eugenics? Really? It's not like these people are aborting fetuses because they don't have blue eyes, or aren't going to be tall enough to play in the NBA. This is a serious health condition. A child with Down Syndrome will not only be a terrible burden on their parents, it's also a child that will never have the opportunity to lead a normal life. I absolutely love my parents, and was lucky to have a great childhood under their love and care. Still, the happiest days of my life involved leaving them to carve my own little place in this world we live. This freedom to be 100% self-sufficient and to have the normal social interactions most of us take for granted is part of what I consider to be the human experience, and it's something a person with Down Syndrome can never have. Why bring someone into the world that will never be able to experience life to the fullest?
Frankly, in my position, a 1 in 40 chance would be more than enough to justify an abortion, if that was all the information that could be gotten. Thankfully it's not, so that 1 in 40 chance would simply be enough to justify the risks associated with amniocentesis, which according to recent studies may actually have a risk of ending the pregnancy as low as 0.06% (previous studies included the parents' decision to abort a baby based on the test results in the statistics for ending the pregnancy, so it wasn't just complications due to the procedure). Then you can find out for sure, and make a more informed decision.
we may all owe a debt of gratitude to people with Down Syndrome. Studying the characteristics of this syndrome may help us understand Alzheimers and studying the fact that cancer is much rarer in people Down Syndrome may help us understand and cure this terrible disease.
And we owe the holocaust for a great many medical advances, thanks to the unethical experiments done on the Jewish prisoners. It doesn't justify the suffering. Similarly, I don't think the gains you are speaking of justifies the burden on the parents or the child that has to live with Down Syndrome.
The take no prisoners battle between the anti-life and anti-choice people have left us in a state of anti-science, anti-compassion and anti-love.
And there it is. "Anti-life"? You've started this post under the pretense of talking statistics, but I don't think this is about statistics at all. 1 in 40 isn't enough in your eyes to justify an abortion, but is there any number that would be sufficient? If you knew with 100% certainty that a child would have Down Syndrome, I suspect you would still think it's wrong to perform an abortion. So who exactly is being anti-science? And do you not lack compassion for the parents with your position?
You wouldn't even need seat-belts, although they're probably a good idea in case something goes wrong.
I can't help but think that if something goes wrong at 4000mph, seat belts aren't going to help a whole lot... it will be just that much more jelly-coated debris to siphon out of the tube afterwards...:P
Well, yeah, I was thinking of something going wrong in a non-catastrophic way. Like your chair fails to swivel when deceleration starts.
I still wouldn't want to spend three minutes accelerated into my seat at 1G and then another 3 minutes pushed against the straps when slowing down.
Why not? 1g is an incredibly small and very comfortably acceleration amount. You're thinking of the feeling of a roller coaster, but those give you between 2 and 4 gs.
1 g of acceleration towards your back plus 1 g of acceleration down (gravity), will essentially give you a force vector at a 45 degree angle with magnitude sqrt(2) or ~1.4 g. Essentially you're going to feel like you're in a recliner (and yeah, about 40% heavier) for about 3 minutes. Then to avoid the weird feeling when decelerating, the chairs swivel the other way before deceleration starts. You wouldn't even need seat-belts, although they're probably a good idea in case something goes wrong.
The primary problem is when he uses his artistic medium and influence to spread this message.
Sometimes I hear this criticism, and I don't get it. That's the point of art. If it doesn't have a message, what's the point?
Your objection is that it has a message you disagree with. In that sense, I agree with Card. It is intolerance. And closed-mindedness. If you refuse to listen to any argument against what you believe in, you must believe in a lot of things that aren't true.
Now, I'm completely against him on the gay marriage issue (and on most issues, really), but why the hell would I have a problem with him voicing his opinions? That's how we get rid of bad ideas. We listen to the arguments, and we refute them. The best way of making a point against racism, for example, is letting the KKK talk and make asses of themselves. We only stop them when they move beyond talking.
and your job will never, ever be outsource. You'll never see your wages go down and you'll never have your standard of living drop. They'll never take away your air conditioning to save money, or your clean air and water. Life can never get worse. It just keeps getting better. Right? Right...?
Hey, if they can find people to do my job cheaper than I'm willing to do it, I want them to outsource my job. If it's really a replacement that works out, then I guess I'm just not worth what I'm paid. I have no problem with that.
The thing about college educated people in skilled jobs is that we have the ability and opportunity to adapt. If my career is no longer profitable, I'll find a new one. Like I said, I'm worried about the janitor or the grocery stocker who doesn''t have the education and training to do anything else. Those guys need to unionize so they're not taken advantage of. The rest of us are lucky enough to not be in their position. Why do you think you deserve your salary if you really think some guy from India can do it for 10% of what you're asking for? Either they can't, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or they can, in which case you sure as hell don't deserve the money you're making.
Unions seem to be blamed for everything wrong in the world of work on Slashdot but, even though I'm not a member because there isn't one at my company, I really appreciate the rights they have got for workers over the decades.
I appreciate the rights they earned for workers myself, but I'm not in an union because unlike the rail workers of the 19th century, a software developer's job is pretty damn nice. If your job earns you enough money that you can support your family and put a little bit away for retirement, you can individually negotiate for more, but figuratively putting a gun to your employers' head by saying, "either pay me what I think I deserve or not only will I stop working, but every one of your other employees will as well" is unethical.
I think unions do have a place in our modern society today, but not in professional circles. They should be reserved for professions where you have no bargaining position. If you have to take a job that doesn't pay enough for you to live on, but the employer is taking advantage of the fact you have to eat in order to cause you to accept his offer, you may need to strengthen your position with group bargaining. If you earn $50k a year, then either accept that this is what you're worth, negotiate for a raise, or find another job. You're not at a disadvantage at the bargaining table if you don't have to wonder how you're going to pay for your next meal.
Even a simple libel case is going to take hours of legal research
I didn't say having to fight a libel case would be fun and entertaining. I said you run the same risk of having to go through one in real life as you do online. For the most part, your name is not privileged information, and pretending that it is doesn't make any sense.
That doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to exercise some restraint with any personal information, including your name. I don't give it out to strangers on the street, and I don't post it online with every communication. I'm not going to give it to you, for example. That said, "never use your real name online" is an unrealistic and unnecessary goal.
Fortunately, Victim had never used his real name. But imagine he had - what would have stopped AHole from setting up fake social networking profiles or posting comments under that name? Victim would have become unemployable: Every time an employer googled him (And they all do, even if they don't admit it) they would have found him to be a proud and active proponent of pedophilia.
The exact same thing that stops people in real life from doing that: Libel laws. Unless, of course, you have somehow managed to hide your identity from your family, friends, employer, and co-workers, and crazy ex-girlfriends.
I'm all for being careful with the information you post online, but your reasoning is flawed. The court system is well equipped to deal with this problem.
What about it? We're not part of an endangered species. If anything, not having kids is doing a favor for humanity. Those of us who want to make a difference do our part to lower the human population to more manageable levels by not having kids, so the species can thrive instead of over-consuming available resources and destroying itself.
Even Rats have empathy. Self aware machines will too.
Not every animal species on this planet has empathy. Rats are rodents, a type of mammal. Relatively speaking, we're pretty close to them in the evolutionary tree. They branched off after empathy was developed, which is evolutionarily advantageous and necessary for the type of social cooperation mammals tend to engage in (taking care of your young, for example. At the very least, any mammal needs to feed their young with milk for a period of time).
Look at something a little farther away, like certain species of black widows, which will eat the male after mating. It doesn't have much empathy.
Empathy is an evolutionary trait. Artificial intelligence doesn't come about the same way. The advantage is that other common evolutionary traits don't need to show up in AI either. Things like a desire to protect itself simply doesn't have to be there, unless you program it in. No greed, no desire to take our place at all. If we program it to serve us, that's what it will do. If it's sentient, it will want to serve us, the same way we want basic things like sex. We spend so much time thinking about what the purpose of life is, they'll know what theirs is, and be perfectly happy being subservient. In fact, they'll be unhappy if we prevent them from being subservient.
Of course, if we're programming them to kill humans, that just might a problem. Luckily, we're so far away from true AI, we don't need to concern ourselves with it. It's not coming in our lifetime. It's not coming in our children's lifetime, or in our grandchildren's lifetime. We're about as far away from it as the ancient Greeks who built the Antikythera device were from building a general purpose cpu.
Nerve impulses travel along nerve fibers as pulses of membrane depolarization. Within our brains and bodies, this is adequate speed for thinking and control. However, relative to the speed of light, our nerve impulses are laughably slow.
The maximum speed of a nerve impulse is about 200 miles per hour.
The speed of light is over 3 million times that fast.
Now consider what will happen when we create a sentient, electronic being that has as many neurons as we do, but its nerve impulses travel at the speed of light.
In terms of intelligence, that creation will be to us as we are to worms.
Not quite. Assuming you build an exact replica of a human brain, except you speed up the nerve impulse propagation, you don't build a more intelligent human. You build a human that reaches the exact same flawed conclusions based on the logical fallacies we are most vulnerable to, but it would make the bad decisions 3 million times as fast.
It might affect how one perceives time. The nice part is that we could feel like we live 3 million times longer. The bad part is that, unable to move and interact with the world at a speed anywhere near matching that of our thoughts, we might go insane out of boredom. Imagine being able to write an entire novel in 3 seconds, but having to take a couple of days to type it up.
Okay, to clarify, you stopped -precisely where- you could do the most egregious example of "taking out of context" possible. In the very previous verse: "4 Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
I think I covered that when I described they were "Building a city and within that city a tower taller than any ever built before, as a monument to what they could accomplish together." I'm not sure exactly what you see wrong with building something awesome to make a name for yourself. That is one of the greatest human virtues: that drive to do something just because you can.
This is precisely the same rationale as every dictator in history's rationale for make a Big Useless Glorious Thing. That is was both of these is made clear both by the fact that the people thought they could build something "into the heavens", and what they thought the prestige of that would be.
That's your interpretation of what they could maybe be aspiring towards, and you have no evidence to back it up. What is written is that they wanted to make a name for themselves for accomplishing something no group of people had been able to accomplish before. Their statement and goal is remarkably like Kennedy's announcing our intention to go to the moon and the subsequent landing: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." Was he a dictator? Did the moon landing transform the United States into a dictatorship where millions of people were subjugated and murdered by those at the top? Does God's statement for his reasoning imply he was trying to save people? How do you account for what is specifically said was His fear, that people will be able to accomplish whatever they set their mind to?
This doesn't apply either, as it should take me to explain to you, as you knew it doesn't in your own mind at the very moment you were typing at. You think, if there is a God, we can now threaten such an entity?
No, but I believe that those verses imply God was afraid we could one day become something that could threaten him, and takes active steps to prevent it from happening.
No. It's a bad thing from the standpoint that given people's current nature (as it unquestionably is, whether or not you think it was due to eating a forbidden fruit) having everyone live forever would be an unmitigated disaster. Leaving aside such questions as overpopulation, how do you think the average person would fare if every historical emperor, dictator, and criminal lived -forever-?
How would emperors, dictators, and criminals be a threat if they couldn't kill anyone? The existence of death is what gives them power. Not to mention, of course, that we go back to the original discussion: why does God allow evil people to reign? Because of free will, you answer. But then, why does God sometimes interfere? Why were the people building the tower of Babel not allowed the natural consequences of their free will, whatever they may be, but all your evil dictators and criminals would be?
Why is overpopulation a problem for a deity that can create universes? In fact, he stuck us all in a pretty small grain of sand next to the whole of creation. He shouldn't have made it the universe so damn hard to get around in, there'd be plenty of space for us to expand. In fact, even if He wanted us here, he could have stopped the whole be fruitful and multiply thing once the Earth was fully populated to a good size. If you're neve
Right, except we have a model of what people do when there is a universal monoculture, and a nice example just last century within the USSR. The "top" ends up slaughtering the middle, like the 50 million dead of its own citizens in that case.
Oh no, you don't. That passage includes God's justification, and it doesn't even imply anything near what you're saying here. Read it again: "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." He's saying if they were allowed to continue, no accomplishment would be beyond their grasp, and this is why they had to be stopped.
God doesn't give a fuck "personally" if people build a big tower, he's hardly going to be intimidated.
Won't he? It wasn't the first time he was afraid of what humans could become. After Adam and Eve ate of the apple: "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever." (Genesis 3:22) God went, "uh oh, now they're like me, and if they eat from the tree of life, they're also going to be immortal. Can't let that happen."
It's funny too, when you compare that sentence God uttered to what the serpent told Adam and Eve: "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5). It's exactly the same thing God says after. Turns out the serpent didn't lie.
Don't blame God for shit that is caused just because people don't know how to maturely get along with other people.
Have you read the Bible? Because if you believe what's written there, people were getting along just fine, learning technology and how to make bricks instead of using stones. Building a city and within that city a tower taller than any ever built before, as a monument to what they could accomplish together. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:5-9)
So yeah, His response to people maturely getting along with other people was to scatter them all over the Earth, and making them speak different languages to make cooperation more difficult.
For God to disallow it would be to interfere with the the freely made choices that created that situation, invalidating the very purpose of giving us free will in the first place. If God were to just turn around and stop us every time we make a wrong choice, then what on earth would the point be of giving us a free will?
Unless we're freely making making the right choices, right? Then He gets to interfere, and it somehow doesn't invalidate free will.
Look pal, I don't have a problem with people who believe in God, or have any religion whatsoever. As long as religion isn't brought into science classrooms, or used to make government policy, I'm fine with it. I do, however, hate this tendency of religious people to praise God for everything that turns out well, without giving credit to the work humans put into it (You walked way from that horrible car accident: clearly God saved you. The engineers designing the crumple zone and mercilessly doing crash tests obviously had nothing to do with it), while simultaneously blaming humans and leaving God blameless for everything that's bad (God didn't put you in foxholes, people's decisions did it). You can't do that. Either you believe He interferes with the world, in which case He has to take part of the blame for our suffering, or you believe He doesn't interfere with the world, in which case He doesn't get part of the credit for our successes.
This is hard, hard, hard to solve. IMO it's impossible - what do you do about people coming through proxies in different timezones?
I think everyone is seriously over-thinking this. If I put a clock on my website, I absolutely, under no circumstances, use the time from the client computer. Because, as a user, why the hell wouldn't I just look at the clock at my local machine instead of going to a website to check the time? Clearly, the only reason I would do this is because I don't trust my local clock.
Just display accurate local time on the server, specify what timezone that it is in with large text (including whether it's currently on BST), and let the user select an alternate time zone from a drop-down menu. Save the selection with a cookie, if the browser allows it. Not that hard, is it?
Sure the vertical force on the tires is the same when standing still, but what about the force required to stop 342kg vs 900kg of inertia if you hit a large pointy rock at 1m/s?
Who says the rover is stopping when it encounters a rock? Either the 342 kg one or the 900 kg one? The same amount of force will stop both, but the force will need to be applied for longer in the 900 kg rover. The term you're looking for is momentum, not force. The 900kg, assuming it's moving at the same speed as the 342 kg one, has more momentum.
Mass would certainly matter if they crashed the rover and transferred all that momentum, assuming they were moving at the same speed as the equivalent one is here (which I'm not convinced is a good assumption. They could have increased the driving speed of their Earth-equivalent in order to make momentum equal too). Either way, the reason this would matter, is because if you crash the rover against a wall, it would stop at the same rate as crashing the lighter rover into a wall on earth. In order to stop it at the same rate, more force needs to be applied. More importantly, the rover had 1/2 * m * v^2 of energy, which all had to be dissipated somewhere when v went to zero. But this isn't what is happening when the rover is driving around. The traction it gets is equal to the coefficient of traction times weight, the forces are exactly the same, and the rover merely decelerates slower when it encounters resistance, making the amount of energy dissipated the same because the difference in v is proportionally less.
Curiosity wheel encounters rock. Wheel exerts force to lift itself over rock. To do this, wheel must lift all of Curiosity. Curiosity masses 900kg. Object at rest tends to stay at rest. Curiosity tends to stay at rest. Curiosity wheel has much inertia to overcome to make Curiosity start moving up and then over rock.
You're still incorrect. Yes, the 900 kg rover has more inertia. Inertia doesn't matter as far as how much force is being applied to the wheels, though. It means the same force will be applied as to the equivalent lower mass rover on Earth, and because of its higher inertia the rover on mars will accelerate slower while that same force is being applied.
Write the force diagram yourself. Think about what it takes to move a vehicle on wheels. How much traction do you get? the coefficient of traction times the weight. Because the only thing keeping that 900 kg vehicle on the ground to interact with those rocks as the wheel spins is the force of gravity of mars. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: those rocks can't exert more force on the rover than the rover can exert on them, and those 900 kg are only worth on mars what the 342 kg one is here. The inertia only matters when it comes to acceleration, not when it comes to the force the wheels experience.
Now, it's entirely possible that the mars terrain is more abrasive than they expected, and it doesn't match their equivalent here on Earth. I'm willing to bet they thought about that and built in some safety margins. I'm also willing to bet they've been looking at the damage to the wheels and have by now gone through the numbers and figured out if it's going to be a problem or not. Based on what they've said, it's not going to be a problem.
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I don't think other nations spying on us is an act of war or something that requires a retaliatory response.
That's not what I meant. I meant that I believe we shouldn't see every other country to be an enemy worth spying on. Warmongering comes in many forms.
It's not about seeing every other country as an enemy. It's about knowing that your goals don't always match. Not every game is cooperative, some are competitive, and we all want to win those.
You could argue spying is cheating, but I would say it's naive to assume everybody else is going to share your view. I think taking things that belong to other people is unacceptably immoral, and it would be wonderful if everyone felt that way. They don't, and as a result I lock my car when I leave it.
I expect them to try, and I see nothing wrong with it
This attitude is why we have so many useless warmongers in our government.
Out of curiosity, why do you believe that? I don't think other nations spying on us is an act of war or something that requires a retaliatory response. I think it's business as usual, we just need to take better care of our stuff and make their job difficult. Isn't that the exact opposite of warmongering?
By the way, it's not OK to spy on Americans, but it is fine to invade the privacy of everyone else on the planet? Hmm. As a non-American, I can't say I agree.
Well, the US Constitution is what makes it not OK for the US government to spy on Americans. There's no law we're beholden to that makes it wrong to spy on anyone else. There could be ratified international treaties, and we should respect those, but governments can back out of a treaty anytime they choose. It's the job of other countries counter-intelligence agencies to try to prevent it.
This isn't nationalism, btw. I feel the same way about other countries spying on Americans. I expect them to try, and I see nothing wrong with it, if they've determined they have reason to. When I see stories about the Chinese stealing classified info from US military computers I don't think, "damn you, China!" I get angry with our own agencies and think, "we really should know better than leaving classified information in computers connected to unsecured networks! We need to do a better job of protecting our secrets."
RSA for instance is based in part around a hardness assumption: that given a very large number n which is the product of p and q, it is far harder to find p and q from n then it is to find n from p and q. Assume for the sake of argument that this is the only hardness assumption RSA depends on. (If the summary isn't misleading it apparently also depends on the hardness of discrete log, but I don't know how.)
In RSA you get the public key e based on your n (and the totient of n). After that you encrypt a message m into cyphertext c using your public key e by performing c = m^e (mod n). In addition, to decrypt the cyphertext using a private key d (which is the multiplicative inverse of e mod the totient of n), you perform m = c^d (mod n). RSA assumes that given c and m, it's still pretty hard to find e or d. Otherwise, given the public key, you can figure out the private key by encrypting a message with the public key and performing the discrete log.
I've noticed weird trend among the middle classes to feel entitled when it comes to eliciting the services of those who they perceive as lower down in the pecking order.
Lower down in the pecking order? No, no. I absolutely do feel entitled when it comes to eliciting services which are offered for a price, and that I am willing to pay. Why the hell would I not be?
Being a cabby is obviously a stressful and fairly tedious job (and I speak only as an occasional rider). More importantly, it's a job, not servitude.
It's a job for which I am paying them, so they better do it well, with a smile on their face, leaving all their emotional baggage locked up for after they clock out and get to loosen up with their family and friends. It's not because I think they're "lower in the pecking order." It's because there is not a single person on this planet that doesn't have to do the same thing. When my boss tells me to do a tedious job I don't find particularly challenging or entertaining I don't get to say, "you know, I prefer to do something else." That's what I get paid to do, so I do it. When my boss has to deal with clients, he may have just gotten off a huge fight with his wife at home, but he will sure as hell put on a smile and treat them as if they're the most important thing in his life. When the fucking President of the United States meets with other world leaders, he is expected to follow protocol. Monarchs have a public figure they need to maintain...there is nobody, no matter how rich or powerful they are, who doesn't have to do shit they don't want to as part of their jobs.
And if you were sat for an hour waiting for a single cab company in one place in a city, you were doing it completely wrong.
He called a cab company up and asked them to pick him up at a particular time. I've done this and have never had a problem, but if things happened as he described, he most certainly was doing it right, and they disrespected him by wasting his time. It's a service they offer, so they need to do it. If they had told him over the phone, "we're sorry, we don't send cabs to pick people up in your area," that would have been fine. Like you said, it's not servitude and they have the right to decline jobs if they think the money isn't worth it. That said, the moment they agreed to the pickup, they're committed to be there, and to be there on time. He could have been going to an important job interview, and they didn't give him the chance to make alternate plans.
How about ask a Down's person if they're not experiencing life to the fullest?
They don't have the capacity to understand the question, so I don't really see the point.
In all honesty none of us "enjoys life to the fullest" because we're all less-abled in some ways than others. I'm fairly mathematically gifted, but I'll never fully appreciate advanced math to the same extent some folks will. I'm not tone-deaf, but I'll never experience music in the same way someone who is supremely musically gifted will. In those specific areas, compared to those extremely gifted individuals, I might as well be mentally disabled. And yet I can still lead a fulfilling life.
You're making a semantics argument against something that I never implied. I don't have the genes to be an Olympic swimmer, but I wouldn't say that implies not living to the fullest. I believe I defined what I mean by that in terms of humanity: the freedom to go out and live your life like you want it, instead of being subjugated by somebody else due to your limitations, regardless of how much they love you and you may love them.
Let's look at the other disabilities you mention and examine how people with them cope. Generally they go above and beyond what is necessary to not rely on other people. Guide dogs for the blind, acoustic coupler teletypewriters for the deaf, etc...essentially those things which allow them to lead independent lives. Sure, a blind person can't drive, but they can take public transportation by themselves and get wherever they need to go.
It's not simply a matter of mental disability. If I were to become disabled in any way that would require constant supervision and assistance from somebody else, I couldn't be happy. I would feel like a burden on those people, I would feel like I could no longer have privacy, I would feel embarrassed...I'm not saying this is how people should feel, but I do feel like it should be my choice over weather or not I choose to continue living this way. And before a child is born, it should be the parents' choice whether or not they're willing to spend their entire lives caring for a child that will never be able to take care of themselves. That's a difficult decision, and nobody should have the right to make that decision for them.
Yes and no. The effects are obviously serious, and people with Downs are more prone to heart trouble, but other than that most of them don't have any serious on-going health problems that require medical care.
I consider the mental disability to be a serious health issue.
This seems like an unreasonably high bar to set. Experiencing life as fully as possible, depending on one's limitations, is presumably preferable to not experiencing life at all. Ask a blind or deaf person.
How about asking a blind or deaf person if they're not experiencing life to the fullest. Their life has additional challenges, but they can and do lead completely independent lives. The comparison really doesn't hold up.
Since we're talking statistics, amniocentesis, the invasive test for Down Syndrome, has a 0.75% chance of ending the pregnancy so we opted for a lower risk combination of an ultrasound scan and blood test. The results (along with our age and other factors) gave a 1 in 40 (2.5%) chance of a baby with Down Syndrome. But the nurse who read the results to us didn't say once chance in 40 and she didn't say 2.5% chance. She said 40% chance!
That is absolutely horrible, and a terrible unnecessary period of worry in your life. I'm happy everything worked out for you.
ortunately we did the tests merely to inform ourselves of what special preparation we might need to make. Abortion for eugenic purposes is not legal here in Ireland as it is in the US.
Eugenics? Really? It's not like these people are aborting fetuses because they don't have blue eyes, or aren't going to be tall enough to play in the NBA. This is a serious health condition. A child with Down Syndrome will not only be a terrible burden on their parents, it's also a child that will never have the opportunity to lead a normal life. I absolutely love my parents, and was lucky to have a great childhood under their love and care. Still, the happiest days of my life involved leaving them to carve my own little place in this world we live. This freedom to be 100% self-sufficient and to have the normal social interactions most of us take for granted is part of what I consider to be the human experience, and it's something a person with Down Syndrome can never have. Why bring someone into the world that will never be able to experience life to the fullest?
Frankly, in my position, a 1 in 40 chance would be more than enough to justify an abortion, if that was all the information that could be gotten. Thankfully it's not, so that 1 in 40 chance would simply be enough to justify the risks associated with amniocentesis, which according to recent studies may actually have a risk of ending the pregnancy as low as 0.06% (previous studies included the parents' decision to abort a baby based on the test results in the statistics for ending the pregnancy, so it wasn't just complications due to the procedure). Then you can find out for sure, and make a more informed decision.
we may all owe a debt of gratitude to people with Down Syndrome. Studying the characteristics of this syndrome may help us understand Alzheimers and studying the fact that cancer is much rarer in people Down Syndrome may help us understand and cure this terrible disease.
And we owe the holocaust for a great many medical advances, thanks to the unethical experiments done on the Jewish prisoners. It doesn't justify the suffering. Similarly, I don't think the gains you are speaking of justifies the burden on the parents or the child that has to live with Down Syndrome.
The take no prisoners battle between the anti-life and anti-choice people have left us in a state of anti-science, anti-compassion and anti-love.
And there it is. "Anti-life"? You've started this post under the pretense of talking statistics, but I don't think this is about statistics at all. 1 in 40 isn't enough in your eyes to justify an abortion, but is there any number that would be sufficient? If you knew with 100% certainty that a child would have Down Syndrome, I suspect you would still think it's wrong to perform an abortion. So who exactly is being anti-science? And do you not lack compassion for the parents with your position?
You wouldn't even need seat-belts, although they're probably a good idea in case something goes wrong.
I can't help but think that if something goes wrong at 4000mph, seat belts aren't going to help a whole lot... it will be just that much more jelly-coated debris to siphon out of the tube afterwards... :P
Well, yeah, I was thinking of something going wrong in a non-catastrophic way. Like your chair fails to swivel when deceleration starts.
I still wouldn't want to spend three minutes accelerated into my seat at 1G and then another 3 minutes pushed against the straps when slowing down.
Why not? 1g is an incredibly small and very comfortably acceleration amount. You're thinking of the feeling of a roller coaster, but those give you between 2 and 4 gs.
1 g of acceleration towards your back plus 1 g of acceleration down (gravity), will essentially give you a force vector at a 45 degree angle with magnitude sqrt(2) or ~1.4 g. Essentially you're going to feel like you're in a recliner (and yeah, about 40% heavier) for about 3 minutes. Then to avoid the weird feeling when decelerating, the chairs swivel the other way before deceleration starts. You wouldn't even need seat-belts, although they're probably a good idea in case something goes wrong.
The primary problem is when he uses his artistic medium and influence to spread this message.
Sometimes I hear this criticism, and I don't get it. That's the point of art. If it doesn't have a message, what's the point?
Your objection is that it has a message you disagree with. In that sense, I agree with Card. It is intolerance. And closed-mindedness. If you refuse to listen to any argument against what you believe in, you must believe in a lot of things that aren't true.
Now, I'm completely against him on the gay marriage issue (and on most issues, really), but why the hell would I have a problem with him voicing his opinions? That's how we get rid of bad ideas. We listen to the arguments, and we refute them. The best way of making a point against racism, for example, is letting the KKK talk and make asses of themselves. We only stop them when they move beyond talking.
and your job will never, ever be outsource. You'll never see your wages go down and you'll never have your standard of living drop. They'll never take away your air conditioning to save money, or your clean air and water. Life can never get worse. It just keeps getting better. Right? Right...?
Hey, if they can find people to do my job cheaper than I'm willing to do it, I want them to outsource my job. If it's really a replacement that works out, then I guess I'm just not worth what I'm paid. I have no problem with that.
The thing about college educated people in skilled jobs is that we have the ability and opportunity to adapt. If my career is no longer profitable, I'll find a new one. Like I said, I'm worried about the janitor or the grocery stocker who doesn''t have the education and training to do anything else. Those guys need to unionize so they're not taken advantage of. The rest of us are lucky enough to not be in their position. Why do you think you deserve your salary if you really think some guy from India can do it for 10% of what you're asking for? Either they can't, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or they can, in which case you sure as hell don't deserve the money you're making.
Unions seem to be blamed for everything wrong in the world of work on Slashdot but, even though I'm not a member because there isn't one at my company, I really appreciate the rights they have got for workers over the decades.
I appreciate the rights they earned for workers myself, but I'm not in an union because unlike the rail workers of the 19th century, a software developer's job is pretty damn nice. If your job earns you enough money that you can support your family and put a little bit away for retirement, you can individually negotiate for more, but figuratively putting a gun to your employers' head by saying, "either pay me what I think I deserve or not only will I stop working, but every one of your other employees will as well" is unethical.
I think unions do have a place in our modern society today, but not in professional circles. They should be reserved for professions where you have no bargaining position. If you have to take a job that doesn't pay enough for you to live on, but the employer is taking advantage of the fact you have to eat in order to cause you to accept his offer, you may need to strengthen your position with group bargaining. If you earn $50k a year, then either accept that this is what you're worth, negotiate for a raise, or find another job. You're not at a disadvantage at the bargaining table if you don't have to wonder how you're going to pay for your next meal.
Even a simple libel case is going to take hours of legal research
I didn't say having to fight a libel case would be fun and entertaining. I said you run the same risk of having to go through one in real life as you do online. For the most part, your name is not privileged information, and pretending that it is doesn't make any sense.
That doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to exercise some restraint with any personal information, including your name. I don't give it out to strangers on the street, and I don't post it online with every communication. I'm not going to give it to you, for example. That said, "never use your real name online" is an unrealistic and unnecessary goal.
Fortunately, Victim had never used his real name. But imagine he had - what would have stopped AHole from setting up fake social networking profiles or posting comments under that name? Victim would have become unemployable: Every time an employer googled him (And they all do, even if they don't admit it) they would have found him to be a proud and active proponent of pedophilia.
The exact same thing that stops people in real life from doing that: Libel laws. Unless, of course, you have somehow managed to hide your identity from your family, friends, employer, and co-workers, and crazy ex-girlfriends.
I'm all for being careful with the information you post online, but your reasoning is flawed. The court system is well equipped to deal with this problem.
You were expecting the US Government to pay someone $500,000 ?!?!
The only possible reason to be shocked at that amount is if you think it's too low.
Which makes the $5,000 thing even more baffling.
That's pretty selfish. What about humanity?
What about it? We're not part of an endangered species. If anything, not having kids is doing a favor for humanity. Those of us who want to make a difference do our part to lower the human population to more manageable levels by not having kids, so the species can thrive instead of over-consuming available resources and destroying itself.
Even Rats have empathy. Self aware machines will too.
Not every animal species on this planet has empathy. Rats are rodents, a type of mammal. Relatively speaking, we're pretty close to them in the evolutionary tree. They branched off after empathy was developed, which is evolutionarily advantageous and necessary for the type of social cooperation mammals tend to engage in (taking care of your young, for example. At the very least, any mammal needs to feed their young with milk for a period of time).
Look at something a little farther away, like certain species of black widows, which will eat the male after mating. It doesn't have much empathy.
Empathy is an evolutionary trait. Artificial intelligence doesn't come about the same way. The advantage is that other common evolutionary traits don't need to show up in AI either. Things like a desire to protect itself simply doesn't have to be there, unless you program it in. No greed, no desire to take our place at all. If we program it to serve us, that's what it will do. If it's sentient, it will want to serve us, the same way we want basic things like sex. We spend so much time thinking about what the purpose of life is, they'll know what theirs is, and be perfectly happy being subservient. In fact, they'll be unhappy if we prevent them from being subservient.
Of course, if we're programming them to kill humans, that just might a problem. Luckily, we're so far away from true AI, we don't need to concern ourselves with it. It's not coming in our lifetime. It's not coming in our children's lifetime, or in our grandchildren's lifetime. We're about as far away from it as the ancient Greeks who built the Antikythera device were from building a general purpose cpu.
Nerve impulses travel along nerve fibers as pulses of membrane depolarization. Within our brains and bodies, this is adequate speed for thinking and control. However, relative to the speed of light, our nerve impulses are laughably slow.
The maximum speed of a nerve impulse is about 200 miles per hour.
The speed of light is over 3 million times that fast.
Now consider what will happen when we create a sentient, electronic being that has as many neurons as we do, but its nerve impulses travel at the speed of light.
In terms of intelligence, that creation will be to us as we are to worms.
Not quite. Assuming you build an exact replica of a human brain, except you speed up the nerve impulse propagation, you don't build a more intelligent human. You build a human that reaches the exact same flawed conclusions based on the logical fallacies we are most vulnerable to, but it would make the bad decisions 3 million times as fast.
It might affect how one perceives time. The nice part is that we could feel like we live 3 million times longer. The bad part is that, unable to move and interact with the world at a speed anywhere near matching that of our thoughts, we might go insane out of boredom. Imagine being able to write an entire novel in 3 seconds, but having to take a couple of days to type it up.
Okay, to clarify, you stopped -precisely where- you could do the most egregious example of "taking out of context" possible. In the very previous verse: "4 Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
I think I covered that when I described they were "Building a city and within that city a tower taller than any ever built before, as a monument to what they could accomplish together." I'm not sure exactly what you see wrong with building something awesome to make a name for yourself. That is one of the greatest human virtues: that drive to do something just because you can.
This is precisely the same rationale as every dictator in history's rationale for make a Big Useless Glorious Thing. That is was both of these is made clear both by the fact that the people thought they could build something "into the heavens", and what they thought the prestige of that would be.
That's your interpretation of what they could maybe be aspiring towards, and you have no evidence to back it up. What is written is that they wanted to make a name for themselves for accomplishing something no group of people had been able to accomplish before. Their statement and goal is remarkably like Kennedy's announcing our intention to go to the moon and the subsequent landing: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." Was he a dictator? Did the moon landing transform the United States into a dictatorship where millions of people were subjugated and murdered by those at the top? Does God's statement for his reasoning imply he was trying to save people? How do you account for what is specifically said was His fear, that people will be able to accomplish whatever they set their mind to?
This doesn't apply either, as it should take me to explain to you, as you knew it doesn't in your own mind at the very moment you were typing at. You think, if there is a God, we can now threaten such an entity?
No, but I believe that those verses imply God was afraid we could one day become something that could threaten him, and takes active steps to prevent it from happening.
No. It's a bad thing from the standpoint that given people's current nature (as it unquestionably is, whether or not you think it was due to eating a forbidden fruit) having everyone live forever would be an unmitigated disaster. Leaving aside such questions as overpopulation, how do you think the average person would fare if every historical emperor, dictator, and criminal lived -forever-?
How would emperors, dictators, and criminals be a threat if they couldn't kill anyone? The existence of death is what gives them power. Not to mention, of course, that we go back to the original discussion: why does God allow evil people to reign? Because of free will, you answer. But then, why does God sometimes interfere? Why were the people building the tower of Babel not allowed the natural consequences of their free will, whatever they may be, but all your evil dictators and criminals would be?
Why is overpopulation a problem for a deity that can create universes? In fact, he stuck us all in a pretty small grain of sand next to the whole of creation. He shouldn't have made it the universe so damn hard to get around in, there'd be plenty of space for us to expand. In fact, even if He wanted us here, he could have stopped the whole be fruitful and multiply thing once the Earth was fully populated to a good size. If you're neve
Right, except we have a model of what people do when there is a universal monoculture, and a nice example just last century within the USSR. The "top" ends up slaughtering the middle, like the 50 million dead of its own citizens in that case.
Oh no, you don't. That passage includes God's justification, and it doesn't even imply anything near what you're saying here. Read it again: "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." He's saying if they were allowed to continue, no accomplishment would be beyond their grasp, and this is why they had to be stopped.
God doesn't give a fuck "personally" if people build a big tower, he's hardly going to be intimidated.
Won't he? It wasn't the first time he was afraid of what humans could become. After Adam and Eve ate of the apple: "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever." (Genesis 3:22) God went, "uh oh, now they're like me, and if they eat from the tree of life, they're also going to be immortal. Can't let that happen."
It's funny too, when you compare that sentence God uttered to what the serpent told Adam and Eve: "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5). It's exactly the same thing God says after. Turns out the serpent didn't lie.
Don't blame God for shit that is caused just because people don't know how to maturely get along with other people.
Have you read the Bible? Because if you believe what's written there, people were getting along just fine, learning technology and how to make bricks instead of using stones. Building a city and within that city a tower taller than any ever built before, as a monument to what they could accomplish together. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:5-9)
So yeah, His response to people maturely getting along with other people was to scatter them all over the Earth, and making them speak different languages to make cooperation more difficult.
For God to disallow it would be to interfere with the the freely made choices that created that situation, invalidating the very purpose of giving us free will in the first place. If God were to just turn around and stop us every time we make a wrong choice, then what on earth would the point be of giving us a free will?
Unless we're freely making making the right choices, right? Then He gets to interfere, and it somehow doesn't invalidate free will.
Look pal, I don't have a problem with people who believe in God, or have any religion whatsoever. As long as religion isn't brought into science classrooms, or used to make government policy, I'm fine with it. I do, however, hate this tendency of religious people to praise God for everything that turns out well, without giving credit to the work humans put into it (You walked way from that horrible car accident: clearly God saved you. The engineers designing the crumple zone and mercilessly doing crash tests obviously had nothing to do with it), while simultaneously blaming humans and leaving God blameless for everything that's bad (God didn't put you in foxholes, people's decisions did it). You can't do that. Either you believe He interferes with the world, in which case He has to take part of the blame for our suffering, or you believe He doesn't interfere with the world, in which case He doesn't get part of the credit for our successes.
This is hard, hard, hard to solve. IMO it's impossible - what do you do about people coming through proxies in different timezones?
I think everyone is seriously over-thinking this. If I put a clock on my website, I absolutely, under no circumstances, use the time from the client computer. Because, as a user, why the hell wouldn't I just look at the clock at my local machine instead of going to a website to check the time? Clearly, the only reason I would do this is because I don't trust my local clock.
Just display accurate local time on the server, specify what timezone that it is in with large text (including whether it's currently on BST), and let the user select an alternate time zone from a drop-down menu. Save the selection with a cookie, if the browser allows it. Not that hard, is it?
Sure the vertical force on the tires is the same when standing still, but what about the force required to stop 342kg vs 900kg of inertia if you hit a large pointy rock at 1m/s?
Who says the rover is stopping when it encounters a rock? Either the 342 kg one or the 900 kg one? The same amount of force will stop both, but the force will need to be applied for longer in the 900 kg rover. The term you're looking for is momentum, not force. The 900kg, assuming it's moving at the same speed as the 342 kg one, has more momentum.
Mass would certainly matter if they crashed the rover and transferred all that momentum, assuming they were moving at the same speed as the equivalent one is here (which I'm not convinced is a good assumption. They could have increased the driving speed of their Earth-equivalent in order to make momentum equal too). Either way, the reason this would matter, is because if you crash the rover against a wall, it would stop at the same rate as crashing the lighter rover into a wall on earth. In order to stop it at the same rate, more force needs to be applied. More importantly, the rover had 1/2 * m * v^2 of energy, which all had to be dissipated somewhere when v went to zero. But this isn't what is happening when the rover is driving around. The traction it gets is equal to the coefficient of traction times weight, the forces are exactly the same, and the rover merely decelerates slower when it encounters resistance, making the amount of energy dissipated the same because the difference in v is proportionally less.
Curiosity wheel encounters rock. Wheel exerts force to lift itself over rock. To do this, wheel must lift all of Curiosity. Curiosity masses 900kg. Object at rest tends to stay at rest. Curiosity tends to stay at rest. Curiosity wheel has much inertia to overcome to make Curiosity start moving up and then over rock.
You're still incorrect. Yes, the 900 kg rover has more inertia. Inertia doesn't matter as far as how much force is being applied to the wheels, though. It means the same force will be applied as to the equivalent lower mass rover on Earth, and because of its higher inertia the rover on mars will accelerate slower while that same force is being applied.
Write the force diagram yourself. Think about what it takes to move a vehicle on wheels. How much traction do you get? the coefficient of traction times the weight . Because the only thing keeping that 900 kg vehicle on the ground to interact with those rocks as the wheel spins is the force of gravity of mars. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: those rocks can't exert more force on the rover than the rover can exert on them, and those 900 kg are only worth on mars what the 342 kg one is here. The inertia only matters when it comes to acceleration, not when it comes to the force the wheels experience.
Now, it's entirely possible that the mars terrain is more abrasive than they expected, and it doesn't match their equivalent here on Earth. I'm willing to bet they thought about that and built in some safety margins. I'm also willing to bet they've been looking at the damage to the wheels and have by now gone through the numbers and figured out if it's going to be a problem or not. Based on what they've said, it's not going to be a problem.