Your mere mention of the FSM shows that your underlying belief has no room for the possibility that an intelligent mind is behind and possibly beyond the time-space universe we happen to find ourselves in.
Absolutely false. I can imagine that this universe was created by the FSM. I can also imagine YHWH creating the Universe about 10,000 years ago complete with in-flight photons from stars billions of light-years away, or the Trinity through Jesus Christ creating the Universe from between 10,000 to 4.3 billion years ago, depending on divine preference. I can also envision Allah, Shiva, the Titans, the Great Earth Mother, or any other intelligent being directly causing the creation of the Earth through supernatural arrangement of matter and energy. I don't take individual myths (and I'll presume you agree that all but one of the things I listed is a myth, unless you want to glom YHWH, Allah, and the Christian Trinity into the same intelligent being) very seriously because all of them present the concept of their intelligent being as logically independent from any other logical theory. One cannot directly use formal logic to examine or prove or test the intelligent being, and therefore science can be performed either with or without any particular definition of an intelligent being. The closest anyone got was Kant, and his rational supreme being is far from any widely-accepted myth today.
I find it much more likely that existence is in a nested hierarchy of complexity with intelligence at many independent and inaccessible levels. Our universe, for instance, can easily simulate Conway's Game of Life which can be used to construct a Universal Turing Machine and presumably therefore support intelligent life. Any intelligent life living in a Conway's 2D universe would be able to use the same arguments for and against an intelligent being creating its universe as you would use. More importantly there exist other undiscovered Cellular Automata models that support intelligent life and those beings could offer exactly the same arguments. Randomly, arguments from one universe would be "right" while others would be "wrong" depending solely on whether they were argued within a universe "inveted" by John Conway or one of the as-of-yet undiscovered universes. Arguments for and against an intelligent supreme being exist in all mathematically defined universes, so in which of these universes are the arguments actually right or wrong? Similarly, I would not be surprised if our entire Universe can be easily simulated in some other Universe. There may be another intelligent being that started our particular universe, or it may be the result of a large program enumerating all possible 4-dimensional spacetimes as part of an experiment ran by a an intelligent being a level above that simulation. Those intelligent beings would exist in a universe that could be simulated by an even larger universe. Just as there is no greatest cardinality it seems absurd to claim that there is a greatest universe which would contain or be "God".
I would be more surprised if our particular spacetime was the only thing that ever has or ever will exist. I do not think intelligence is a prerequisite for the existence of universes, but that intelligence is nearly guaranteed to exist in universes of sufficient complexity.
Someone who considers the universe a cosmic probability experiment will interpret scientific knowledge a certain way. Someone who believes that the universe came into being by the action of a supreme mind, God, will interpret scientific results differently.
If either of those two scientists interpret experimental results any differently than a robot programmed to perform experiments and use statistics to determine if the results are unlikely while accepting the null hypothesis, then the two are not really scientists in any meaning of the word. Saying "spacetime is curved by mass/energy BECAUSE the universe is a cosmic probability experiment" is just as silly as saying that spacetime curves because the flying spaghetti monster wants it to. Try a different strawman.
Sadly, my point was lost. The key question is why it's now perfectly sinless to charge interest for loans, to eat pork, to work on Saturday, and to wear condoms (unless you're Catholic), but it's still sinful to commit adultery, charge for it, or do it with a member of the same sex. Also, why can't we still slaughter heathens and salt their fields?
You can believe if you want that all 300 million citizens without exception are either STUPID or have no leadership skills whatsoever. But methinks Occam's Razor suggests that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface.
I think Occam's Razor instead suggests that political and economic discord is an emergent property of a chaotic social system, and that in fact there are no potential leaders who understand what is happening; that it may be computationally infeasible to understand what is actually happening; that the trend of complex economic systems such as ours is toward unpredictability and chaos; and finally that most people simply don't believe that this is actually the case.
The reason anarchy works during a snowstorm is that everyone knows it's iterated prisoner's dilemma (or the snowbank dilemma, appropriately) that isn't going to end before the snow is gone the cops are back. If you play any iterated game where the expected future state is still anarchy, your choices will be quite different. Or more importantly, your choice may still be to cooperate but a sufficient number of people's choices will change to defect and these new warlords will be the ones spreading their genes instead of you. In short, each choice of government forms an ESS with different ratios of cooperate/defect in the population.
"yes, evolution exists and is how God went about creating us and God loves every one of us, even terrorists, gays, hookers, atheists, and even politicians, and you are forgiven your sins as long as you repent because the price for your sins has been paid" kind of church.
So when did god get around to permanently pardoning all the usurers and pork-eaters and contraceptive-users and Sabbath-workers but forgot to do the same for the gays and prostitutes?
In how many cities do 99% of people have a gas pump in their garage? With an electric infrastructure commercial charging stations would be the exception, not the rule.
Really? I got a free flu shot once, but usually I have to pay $25 and my kids' vaccinations were hundreds of dollars per visit.
There are free public health clinics if you can't afford $25. If there aren't in your area, well, enjoy your "freedom" from taxes to support public health services I guess.
If you ignore the possibility of taking on some risks yourself to protect other people's liberty. That's what "Freedom isn't free" really means - it's not an exhortation to pay taxes, it means you accept risk so that your fellow man may be free.
So you should accept the risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine so that your fellow citizens can be free from disease.
I'm assuming through all of this that your definition of freedom is something like "the ability to make independent decisions about how to live one's life without being coerced by others" or words to that effect. Maximizing individual freedom means reducing the effect of deadly and debilitating diseases. How is a person paralyzed by polio more free than a person who never contracted polio, all other things being equal? If you accept that debilitating diseases decrease individual freedom then you should see how vaccinations cause a conflict between the freedom of individuals being vaccinated and potential victims of the disease. The equation to consider is cost(disease)*disease_incidence = cost(vaccination)*vaccination_incidence. To maximize freedom that equation will hold true and also be globally minimal. If it becomes an inequality then it means vaccinating one more or one fewer person could increase overall freedom, and in fact you'll find a balance where some individuals are not vaccinated because the risk to them is greater than the expected benefit to others who benefit from a higher degree of herd immunity.
Meanwhile, the State mechanism that seeks to force vaccinations was responsible for half a billion murders, in the 20th century alone. Where does that fit into the cost/benefit analysis?
And before States and public health and modern medicine roughly a quarter of the 100 billion people who have ever lived probably died before their 1st birthday. In simplistic utilitarian terms a lower percentage of the population of the 20th century was killed outright than nature killed in the past. I abhor the intentional killing of people for any reason and I certainly don't agree with states that kill their own citizens for any reason, and additionally it is not solely the State that is responsible for a decrease in infant mortality, but it is still true that modern state-based society results in a higher quality of life for a greater percentage of the population. The sense I get from this is not how great States are but how horrible life must have been in the past and how much better we can become. Is getting a mandatory jab in the arm truly worse than going back to the dark ages?
Unfortunately, some people take this as justification to use violence to vaccinate people against their will.
Allowing yourself to get infected with and spread a deadly virus is not much different than taking a gun and randomly shooting in a crowded area, especially when there is a (usually free) alternative that is safer than gun ownership (4 serious adverse reactions per 100,000 for the HPV vaccine versus roughly 30 injuries and deaths per 100,000 people from guns every year).
I have nothing against gun ownership but I think it's perfectly justified for the police to use violence to prevent a person from injuring others with a gun. Limited violence (a sterile needle prick) to prevent deadly disease is justifiable. The only other solution would be to restrict freedom of movement so that vaccinated people could live in certain areas and legally prevent unvaccinated people from entering. That sounds like a far worse imposition of violence.
Turn off the email servers, network storage, databases, web services, and support infrastructure. There you go; you've excised the "IT kingdom" and returned to the 80's "Personal Computer" era when only the geeky managers might have a PC with Lotus to help them do their job. Congratulations.
Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool?
That depends; are all the trucks mechanically sound with a low amount of downtime when repairs are necessary, or are deliveries completed accurately and on time without accidents? Hire competent people; they will generally be competent at their new job as well. If they require training, pay for it, it will be worth it.
Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks?
Again, do the tellers keep perfect tills or do books reflect inerrant accuracy? Hire from the best pool of people.
Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
I work in a hospital and the very best nursing administrators are nurses. The best IT managers came from the ranks of IT.
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
A generic MBA has to spend a lot of time learning the workflow and often they simply don't learn properly. They read trade rags which is the equivalent of an MBA in an investment bank reading the Wall Street Journal or Forbes to learn how to do their job. They think they can trust vendors and even worse trust "industry analysts" from big name vendors. In short; most have a complete misunderstanding of what IT is, how it works, what it costs, how it is actually managed at a technical level, and who should be hired to do that technical management.
You should be reporting to a CIO that has a business background. You should be able to explain why you need that new router or that data center upgrade. If you can't make that case succinctly and factually, and with due regard for cost/benefits involved, then you NEED another layer between you and the board room.
And from which area of expertise do you hire that layer between you and the boardroom? And why wouldn't said area of expertise make an even better CIO?
Part of the problem is brake bias, too. RWD cars are going to be a lot harder to stop properly at WOT because the rear brakes are biased and potentially limited to a certain PSI. FWD cars like the Lexus do most of the braking with the driven wheels so I imagine the imbalance is not as bad.
I was quite literally trying to overcome the power of the engine with just some very inadequate hydraulic mechanical advantage.
I'd be interested to see the pedal ratio and master cylinder diameter on those cars. You should be able to generate about 1000 PSI with 250 pounds of foot pressure, a 4:1 pedal ratio, and a 1 1/8" master cylinder. Sure, 250 pounds isn't a walk in the park but should be doable with the correct posture. That's basically the worst brake setup I can find, too.
Lastly, I have been in a car with a runaway engine. THE BRAKES WERE NOT CAPABLE OF STOPPING THE ENGINE. Putting the car in neutral, and turning off the engine both worked. Getting caught in a snow bank helps too.
Were you on ice at the time? I can easily see a stuck throttle being a bitch to stop on ice since you really won't be able to pump the brakes effectively and the ABS is probably useless working against wheel slippage and WOT. If you weren't on ice I'd say it was either time to bleed your brake lines or buy a new car. What death trap wouldn't have more stopping power than acceleration? I've been in a car with bad brakes and it was scary as hell. How would you not notice the brakes were so weak? If you can't stop faster than you can accelerate then something is very, very wrong.
Of course the really powerful cars are going to have significantly better brakes than a Lexus anyway. Multiple pistons per caliper on front and back, with far, far less brake fade.
But I was always too chicken to set it up to try every failed username/password combination against the host attempting to log in and executing a 'sudo shutdown -h now' if it succeeded. I can't imagine the botnet operators change the vulnerable passwords; that might alert the owner that something was up.
It's all too easy to socially engineer people into doing things without them being aware of it. "Hey, could you test this biometric scanner for me? It keeps saying 'swipe finger evenly' but I think it's just broken."
Encrypt your private key with a passphrase that you know, which is a property of something you are (your brain). Nothing will protect you from local malware that can intercept your keystrokes. Even if you use a secure keyfob for your private key the trojan could just take over your session and execute commands on your behalf once you're securely connected.
Additionally, we're talking about using torture on "terrorists" who have been rather careful to form cell structures that are designed to make torture ineffective in the first place.
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Just haul some manure in your truck and don't clean it out too well. Mention this fact to callers and see how many more free weekends you have.
Your mere mention of the FSM shows that your underlying belief has no room for the possibility that an intelligent mind is behind and possibly beyond the time-space universe we happen to find ourselves in.
Absolutely false. I can imagine that this universe was created by the FSM. I can also imagine YHWH creating the Universe about 10,000 years ago complete with in-flight photons from stars billions of light-years away, or the Trinity through Jesus Christ creating the Universe from between 10,000 to 4.3 billion years ago, depending on divine preference. I can also envision Allah, Shiva, the Titans, the Great Earth Mother, or any other intelligent being directly causing the creation of the Earth through supernatural arrangement of matter and energy. I don't take individual myths (and I'll presume you agree that all but one of the things I listed is a myth, unless you want to glom YHWH, Allah, and the Christian Trinity into the same intelligent being) very seriously because all of them present the concept of their intelligent being as logically independent from any other logical theory. One cannot directly use formal logic to examine or prove or test the intelligent being, and therefore science can be performed either with or without any particular definition of an intelligent being. The closest anyone got was Kant, and his rational supreme being is far from any widely-accepted myth today.
I find it much more likely that existence is in a nested hierarchy of complexity with intelligence at many independent and inaccessible levels. Our universe, for instance, can easily simulate Conway's Game of Life which can be used to construct a Universal Turing Machine and presumably therefore support intelligent life. Any intelligent life living in a Conway's 2D universe would be able to use the same arguments for and against an intelligent being creating its universe as you would use. More importantly there exist other undiscovered Cellular Automata models that support intelligent life and those beings could offer exactly the same arguments. Randomly, arguments from one universe would be "right" while others would be "wrong" depending solely on whether they were argued within a universe "inveted" by John Conway or one of the as-of-yet undiscovered universes. Arguments for and against an intelligent supreme being exist in all mathematically defined universes, so in which of these universes are the arguments actually right or wrong? Similarly, I would not be surprised if our entire Universe can be easily simulated in some other Universe. There may be another intelligent being that started our particular universe, or it may be the result of a large program enumerating all possible 4-dimensional spacetimes as part of an experiment ran by a an intelligent being a level above that simulation. Those intelligent beings would exist in a universe that could be simulated by an even larger universe. Just as there is no greatest cardinality it seems absurd to claim that there is a greatest universe which would contain or be "God".
I would be more surprised if our particular spacetime was the only thing that ever has or ever will exist. I do not think intelligence is a prerequisite for the existence of universes, but that intelligence is nearly guaranteed to exist in universes of sufficient complexity.
It's going to be rather hard to get Boost libraries out of the official C++ standard. You may have to wait 10 or 20 years to depreciate them.
Someone who considers the universe a cosmic probability experiment will interpret scientific knowledge a certain way. Someone who believes that the universe came into being by the action of a supreme mind, God, will interpret scientific results differently.
If either of those two scientists interpret experimental results any differently than a robot programmed to perform experiments and use statistics to determine if the results are unlikely while accepting the null hypothesis, then the two are not really scientists in any meaning of the word. Saying "spacetime is curved by mass/energy BECAUSE the universe is a cosmic probability experiment" is just as silly as saying that spacetime curves because the flying spaghetti monster wants it to. Try a different strawman.
Sadly, my point was lost. The key question is why it's now perfectly sinless to charge interest for loans, to eat pork, to work on Saturday, and to wear condoms (unless you're Catholic), but it's still sinful to commit adultery, charge for it, or do it with a member of the same sex. Also, why can't we still slaughter heathens and salt their fields?
You can believe if you want that all 300 million citizens without exception are either STUPID or have no leadership skills whatsoever. But methinks Occam's Razor suggests that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface.
I think Occam's Razor instead suggests that political and economic discord is an emergent property of a chaotic social system, and that in fact there are no potential leaders who understand what is happening; that it may be computationally infeasible to understand what is actually happening; that the trend of complex economic systems such as ours is toward unpredictability and chaos; and finally that most people simply don't believe that this is actually the case.
Pfffft, who cares about Europe? Didn't we have to bail them out of a couple wars a while back?
The reason anarchy works during a snowstorm is that everyone knows it's iterated prisoner's dilemma (or the snowbank dilemma, appropriately) that isn't going to end before the snow is gone the cops are back. If you play any iterated game where the expected future state is still anarchy, your choices will be quite different. Or more importantly, your choice may still be to cooperate but a sufficient number of people's choices will change to defect and these new warlords will be the ones spreading their genes instead of you. In short, each choice of government forms an ESS with different ratios of cooperate/defect in the population.
Flunitrazepam to the rescue!
Wait. What do you mean by "fundamentalist?" Do you just mean evangelical?
Fundamentalism means ignoring reason and science if faith gets in the way. E.g. believing things that are Wrong.
"yes, evolution exists and is how God went about creating us and God loves every one of us, even terrorists, gays, hookers, atheists, and even politicians, and you are forgiven your sins as long as you repent because the price for your sins has been paid" kind of church.
So when did god get around to permanently pardoning all the usurers and pork-eaters and contraceptive-users and Sabbath-workers but forgot to do the same for the gays and prostitutes?
In how many cities do 99% of people have a gas pump in their garage? With an electric infrastructure commercial charging stations would be the exception, not the rule.
Really? I got a free flu shot once, but usually I have to pay $25 and my kids' vaccinations were hundreds of dollars per visit.
There are free public health clinics if you can't afford $25. If there aren't in your area, well, enjoy your "freedom" from taxes to support public health services I guess.
If you ignore the possibility of taking on some risks yourself to protect other people's liberty. That's what "Freedom isn't free" really means - it's not an exhortation to pay taxes, it means you accept risk so that your fellow man may be free.
So you should accept the risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine so that your fellow citizens can be free from disease.
I'm assuming through all of this that your definition of freedom is something like "the ability to make independent decisions about how to live one's life without being coerced by others" or words to that effect. Maximizing individual freedom means reducing the effect of deadly and debilitating diseases. How is a person paralyzed by polio more free than a person who never contracted polio, all other things being equal? If you accept that debilitating diseases decrease individual freedom then you should see how vaccinations cause a conflict between the freedom of individuals being vaccinated and potential victims of the disease. The equation to consider is cost(disease)*disease_incidence = cost(vaccination)*vaccination_incidence. To maximize freedom that equation will hold true and also be globally minimal. If it becomes an inequality then it means vaccinating one more or one fewer person could increase overall freedom, and in fact you'll find a balance where some individuals are not vaccinated because the risk to them is greater than the expected benefit to others who benefit from a higher degree of herd immunity.
Meanwhile, the State mechanism that seeks to force vaccinations was responsible for half a billion murders, in the 20th century alone. Where does that fit into the cost/benefit analysis?
And before States and public health and modern medicine roughly a quarter of the 100 billion people who have ever lived probably died before their 1st birthday. In simplistic utilitarian terms a lower percentage of the population of the 20th century was killed outright than nature killed in the past. I abhor the intentional killing of people for any reason and I certainly don't agree with states that kill their own citizens for any reason, and additionally it is not solely the State that is responsible for a decrease in infant mortality, but it is still true that modern state-based society results in a higher quality of life for a greater percentage of the population. The sense I get from this is not how great States are but how horrible life must have been in the past and how much better we can become. Is getting a mandatory jab in the arm truly worse than going back to the dark ages?
Unfortunately, some people take this as justification to use violence to vaccinate people against their will.
Allowing yourself to get infected with and spread a deadly virus is not much different than taking a gun and randomly shooting in a crowded area, especially when there is a (usually free) alternative that is safer than gun ownership (4 serious adverse reactions per 100,000 for the HPV vaccine versus roughly 30 injuries and deaths per 100,000 people from guns every year).
I have nothing against gun ownership but I think it's perfectly justified for the police to use violence to prevent a person from injuring others with a gun. Limited violence (a sterile needle prick) to prevent deadly disease is justifiable. The only other solution would be to restrict freedom of movement so that vaccinated people could live in certain areas and legally prevent unvaccinated people from entering. That sounds like a far worse imposition of violence.
Turn off the email servers, network storage, databases, web services, and support infrastructure. There you go; you've excised the "IT kingdom" and returned to the 80's "Personal Computer" era when only the geeky managers might have a PC with Lotus to help them do their job. Congratulations.
Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool?
That depends; are all the trucks mechanically sound with a low amount of downtime when repairs are necessary, or are deliveries completed accurately and on time without accidents? Hire competent people; they will generally be competent at their new job as well. If they require training, pay for it, it will be worth it.
Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks?
Again, do the tellers keep perfect tills or do books reflect inerrant accuracy? Hire from the best pool of people.
Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
I work in a hospital and the very best nursing administrators are nurses. The best IT managers came from the ranks of IT.
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
A generic MBA has to spend a lot of time learning the workflow and often they simply don't learn properly. They read trade rags which is the equivalent of an MBA in an investment bank reading the Wall Street Journal or Forbes to learn how to do their job. They think they can trust vendors and even worse trust "industry analysts" from big name vendors. In short; most have a complete misunderstanding of what IT is, how it works, what it costs, how it is actually managed at a technical level, and who should be hired to do that technical management.
You should be reporting to a CIO that has a business background. You should be able to explain why you need that new router or that data center upgrade. If you can't make that case succinctly and factually, and with due regard for cost/benefits involved, then you NEED another layer between you and the board room.
And from which area of expertise do you hire that layer between you and the boardroom? And why wouldn't said area of expertise make an even better CIO?
The Internet will successfully route around it.
Part of the problem is brake bias, too. RWD cars are going to be a lot harder to stop properly at WOT because the rear brakes are biased and potentially limited to a certain PSI. FWD cars like the Lexus do most of the braking with the driven wheels so I imagine the imbalance is not as bad.
I was quite literally trying to overcome the power of the engine with just some very inadequate hydraulic mechanical advantage.
I'd be interested to see the pedal ratio and master cylinder diameter on those cars. You should be able to generate about 1000 PSI with 250 pounds of foot pressure, a 4:1 pedal ratio, and a 1 1/8" master cylinder. Sure, 250 pounds isn't a walk in the park but should be doable with the correct posture. That's basically the worst brake setup I can find, too.
Lastly, I have been in a car with a runaway engine. THE BRAKES WERE NOT CAPABLE OF STOPPING THE ENGINE. Putting the car in neutral, and turning off the engine both worked. Getting caught in a snow bank helps too.
Were you on ice at the time? I can easily see a stuck throttle being a bitch to stop on ice since you really won't be able to pump the brakes effectively and the ABS is probably useless working against wheel slippage and WOT. If you weren't on ice I'd say it was either time to bleed your brake lines or buy a new car. What death trap wouldn't have more stopping power than acceleration? I've been in a car with bad brakes and it was scary as hell. How would you not notice the brakes were so weak? If you can't stop faster than you can accelerate then something is very, very wrong.
Of course the really powerful cars are going to have significantly better brakes than a Lexus anyway. Multiple pistons per caliper on front and back, with far, far less brake fade.
But I was always too chicken to set it up to try every failed username/password combination against the host attempting to log in and executing a 'sudo shutdown -h now' if it succeeded. I can't imagine the botnet operators change the vulnerable passwords; that might alert the owner that something was up.
It's all too easy to socially engineer people into doing things without them being aware of it. "Hey, could you test this biometric scanner for me? It keeps saying 'swipe finger evenly' but I think it's just broken."
Encrypt your private key with a passphrase that you know, which is a property of something you are (your brain). Nothing will protect you from local malware that can intercept your keystrokes. Even if you use a secure keyfob for your private key the trojan could just take over your session and execute commands on your behalf once you're securely connected.
Additionally, we're talking about using torture on "terrorists" who have been rather careful to form cell structures that are designed to make torture ineffective in the first place.