2. Animals should have rights e.g. the right not to be treated inhumanely, ironically e.g. The right (of a species or population of them) to have habitat not destroyed or diminished to the point of extirpation by human activity. e.g. The right not to be disturbed and be allowed to pursue their ways (of wild animals).
3. Rights are just socially maintained attitudes people have toward each other. Some of these right-conveying attitudes should extend to other animals. And no, the animal doesn't have to be able to reciprocate. There are people who are unable to reciprocate because they are unable to exercise their will (certain disablements). They have full rights. There are people whose behaviour (psychopaths) may not merit fair treatment, but societally we still grant them rights.
You might try this handy reference book: "Monads for Morons" [Amazon.com]
It's the 23rd in an ongoing series of books attempting to explain the elusive concept behind and application of Haskell Monads.
See also: "A Monad is a Wrapper" "A Monad is syntactic Sugar" "A Monad is an (endo-)functor" "The Analogy between Monoids and Monads" "A Monad is a Box" "A Monad is a Composable Computation Description" "A Monad is a Burrito" and the classic "Spam, Spam, Spam, Monads and Spam"
WE had to run error correction codes on the smoke signals to even have any hope of having ones and zeroes! And only if the wind was favourable and the tinder dry.
And you tell that to the young people today, they wouldnay believe you.
Which comes with the side-benefit of free bring-your-own-meat "barbecue" zones.
Semi-seriously though, space-based solar actually adds energy (ergo heat when the energy increases in entropy through use) to the Earth system. Depending on the orbit of the solar satellites, the solar energy in question was going to miss the planet. The numbers might be pretty small here, but you need to think carefully.
Also, terrestrial solar on a large scale lowers the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth, trapping more heat near the surface (compared to bright sand for example.) To give you an idea, it is estimated that black-carbon deposition (soot) on arctic snow and ice is now causing a 1W/m^2 increase in retained solar energy, which represents 0.1 % more of incident solar energy being absorbed rather than reflected. Seems like a small number, but Earth (and the arctic) is big. Really really big. So it matters.
All that said, a couple bad storms could devastate a purely solar powered grid.
Not with sufficient advances in long-distance superconducting transmission and grid-scale storage, and, as you say, global distribution of solar power generation.
Also, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. A mix of solar, wind, maybe ocean-wave, geothermal, and hydro would do the trick.
I for one though, am holding out hope for the steam-punk version of fusion power: http://generalfusion.com/
In Canada, the nuclear regulator wanted to keep a nuclear plant closed because it had not met the agreed safety requirements in its upgrade process.
The Conservative government promptly fired the head of the nuclear regulatory agency and put in a patsy who would rubber-stamp the plant's ability to operate.
Shortly after that the nuclear reactor had to be shutdown for 15 months for repairs.
But of course reality (and nuclear safety) has a well known liberal bias.
"stealing from people by force to build uneconomical and unreliable power sources" As opposed to stealing from other people by force their countries' fossil fuel resources you mean?
Underground hydro - two caverns at two different depth levels. Standard mining technology. Easy peasy. Compressed air works too.
You would just rather rest comfortably on the innovations people 100 years ago took risks on than agree that we need new innovations now.
Get a basic grasp of order-of-magnitude of effects
on
Bill Gates On Energy
·
· Score: 1
Of course everything we do has trade-offs, positives and negatives on the surrounding environment, and economically.
But to compare for example the "messiness" of solar panel creation with the warming of the global climate by 4 to 7 degrees Celcius (that's 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit !) through continued fossil fuel use belies a lack of perspective on the relative scales and severities of these problems.
We need that quantitative perspective to wade our way through these problems. We need rational solutions. Saying "everything is bad" does not help.
Ok but fossil fuels are no longer ethically acceptable. Period. Everyone who uses them, and currently, yup, that's everyone, is in a morally bankrupt position with regard to near-future generations of human beings (and all kinds of other plants and critters too).
We know that their continued use (and related things like rapid destruction/conversion of natural ecosystems) is slowly causing catastrophic damage to our current climate regime (and oceans) and the eco-systems that inhabit the Earth.
And nuclear fission power introduces a lot of risk (in both the short and long terms.) The only reason it's even remotely affordable is because regulatory corners are being cut in the ongoing maintenance of plants, and because we are basically ignoring the costs of addressing the longer-term problems.
So that leaves ingenuity, renewables, massive innovation in energy storage (underground pumped hydro anyone?) and transmission (superconducting grids to balance intermittent renewables over continent-sized areas to create stable base generation stochastically.
It is also necessary that you can prove the date of documents related to the invention.
So I would suggest that the documents need to be public on the web (so they can be archived by the Internet Archive) and/or run through a timestamp server to get a timestamped digital signature associated with each document.
The American system of government gives a lot of power to the congress, including a huge amount of control of the purse strings of government.
This particular set of cuts is clearly a Republican budget and agenda.
Science = bad (might undercut cherished beliefs, might take away my goddamned SUVs and ATVs, done by liberal nerds), Military = good (protects God-given rights.)
At some point the connection between the programmer and what the program does is going to get pretty tenuous and completely unpredictable in detail.
If I write a program that says: 1. Use various parsing, logic, and probability rules to learn about concepts and relationships given a vast corpus of human-generated text as input 2. From a general logical theory of advice-giving, and copying the general pattern of advice-giving situational episodes you have "read" i.e. parsed into concept and relationship and probability based symbolic representations of situations, generate abstract templates for advice-giving utterances in a certain domain X (a certain kind of law, say). 3. Use a general pattern matching algorithm to generate specific advice utterances by filling in the general advice-workflow templates with particulars of the case which you solicited to fill in the gaps in the templates....
What am I as the programmer going to know about what the program is going to advise? Answer? Pretty much nothing.
Let me get this straight. These people are bringing suit because some software gave them legal advice?
So they are essentially taking the position that the software is an intelligent agent capable of giving advice.
So they are implicitly positioning the software as a legal person (the agent that gave the advice, presumably by assessing input from the plaintiffs and making its own decisions about what advice to give.)
So they should be petitioning to sue the software itself. (And good luck collecting from it.)
Trying to sue whoever wrote the software and whoever operates it and gives it a server and power is kind of like suing the parents and the landlord of the person who did you wrong.
Governments using carrots and sticks to corral and constrain and align behaviour. It's not the immorality of governing organizations. It's the TRADE-OFF of governing organizations.
Try inner city Rio de Janeiro or a failed state (several to choose from in Africa) with no effective government, and see what happens to the average chance of getting hurt on any given day.
Nowadays it's: "If I have seen further it is by stealing the intellectual property of giants."
and before you congratulate me let me be the first to say I stole that from someone's sig.
But seriously, scientific knowledge paywalls are evil, in that they are a barrier to the advancement of science. Ok maybe some kind of six month exclusivity for organizing the editing and reviewing of the damn thing, but anything more is highway robbery.
How do you know the next Einstein isn't some teenager in Africa, who would have discovered something amazing if they'd been allowed to read anything that had gone before. How do you know it isn't a geek coder, or, here's a ridiculous idea, a patent clerk, who has no particular access to today's exclusive scientific journals. The current system is madness. It should be subverted by any peaceful means. I cheer on the science liberators. Bravo.
In your comment you said a number of things. You said you are non-technical. Coding is all about mastering very particular technique. You said you don't want to make it your career, which suggests you don't have a deep interest in the hows and the whys of quality coding/software engineering.
So why not leave it to those who have either been doing it since the age of 14 or who have a gift and a love for the craft and the science of it.
It sounds like you might do better at the other aspects of the business. But anyway there are lots of lighter-weight options than a CS degree. Try continuing education courses at a university or collage. Or a diploma program at a college. Or as others have said, the MIT online courseware.
The original poster, and you, who call it tack-on garbage, are the very reason that general education requirements are tacked on.
Clearly both of you can't even conceive why studying, for example, literature and philosophy might be useful to the practice of top-level computer science or software engineering. Therefore you clearly need to come out of your tunnel and be exposed to the world.
When I was studying artificial intelligence and computational vision for my post-grad degree, the stuff I learned most from was the shelf full of twentieth century philosophy books on logics, epistemology, and metaphysics (and Zen). binary-encoded symbols in computers representing things and processes out there in the world is a wondrous thing, and also a thing whose complexities are not easily mastered without a good grounding in philosophy. How can you know about the limitations of your representations - they ways they are sure to fail or become too complex or be challenged as limited or invalid - if you don't understand philosophy?
And I've come to understand how much of peoples' understanding of the world and themselves is in narrative form, and what the significance is of what is left in, and what is left out of a "good" narrative, and how narrative is fundamentally about the guiding of attention and the selection of the sub-situations salient to humans' concerns and needs. Some of that knowledge has come through a lot of careful consideration of great stories in several forms of art and literature. All of it is central to a conception of how to do good user interface in computing.
Slashdot Mirror
1. People are animals.
2. Animals should have rights
e.g. the right not to be treated inhumanely, ironically
e.g. The right (of a species or population of them) to have habitat not destroyed or diminished to the point of extirpation by human activity.
e.g. The right not to be disturbed and be allowed to pursue their ways (of wild animals).
3. Rights are just socially maintained attitudes people have toward each other. Some of these right-conveying attitudes should extend to other animals. And no, the animal doesn't have to be able to reciprocate. There are people who are unable to reciprocate because they are unable to exercise their will (certain disablements). They have full rights. There are people whose behaviour (psychopaths) may not merit fair treatment, but societally we still grant them rights.
You might try this handy reference book: "Monads for Morons" [Amazon.com]
It's the 23rd in an ongoing series of books attempting to explain the elusive concept behind and application of Haskell Monads.
See also:
"A Monad is a Wrapper"
"A Monad is syntactic Sugar"
"A Monad is an (endo-)functor"
"The Analogy between Monoids and Monads"
"A Monad is a Box"
"A Monad is a Composable Computation Description"
"A Monad is a Burrito"
and the classic
"Spam, Spam, Spam, Monads and Spam"
WE had to run error correction codes on the smoke signals to even have any hope of having ones and zeroes!
And only if the wind was favourable and the tinder dry.
And you tell that to the young people today, they wouldnay believe you.
That gives a whole new meaning to the phrase:
GOTO considered harmful.
Good thing you never got into the ADVANCED language, with its COMEFROM statements.
...Comin' right up. Hold on. I'll just open this hatch door and get you another bottle.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhit!
on the interweb.
Why expect privacy?
not a closure
the brand got torpedoed (in terms of goodwill)
so keep calm and carry on under a new name.
There's nothing new under the Sun.
Which comes with the side-benefit of free bring-your-own-meat "barbecue" zones.
Semi-seriously though, space-based solar actually adds energy (ergo heat when the energy increases in entropy through use) to the Earth system.
Depending on the orbit of the solar satellites, the solar energy in question was going to miss the planet.
The numbers might be pretty small here, but you need to think carefully.
Also, terrestrial solar on a large scale lowers the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth, trapping more heat near the surface (compared to bright sand for example.)
To give you an idea, it is estimated that black-carbon deposition (soot) on arctic snow and ice is now causing a 1W/m^2 increase in retained solar energy, which represents 0.1 % more of incident solar energy being absorbed rather than reflected. Seems like a small number, but Earth (and the arctic) is big.
Really really big. So it matters.
All that said, a couple bad storms could devastate a purely solar powered grid.
Not with sufficient advances in long-distance superconducting transmission and grid-scale storage, and, as you say, global distribution of solar power generation.
Also, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. A mix of solar, wind, maybe ocean-wave, geothermal, and hydro would do the trick.
I for one though, am holding out hope for the steam-punk version of fusion power: http://generalfusion.com/
In Canada, the nuclear regulator wanted to keep a nuclear plant closed because it had not met the agreed safety requirements in its upgrade process.
The Conservative government promptly fired the head of the nuclear regulatory agency and put in a patsy who would rubber-stamp the plant's
ability to operate.
Shortly after that the nuclear reactor had to be shutdown for 15 months for repairs.
But of course reality (and nuclear safety) has a well known liberal bias.
"stealing from people by force to build uneconomical and unreliable power sources" As opposed to stealing from other people by force their countries' fossil fuel resources you mean?
Underground hydro - two caverns at two different depth levels. Standard mining technology. Easy peasy. Compressed air works too.
You would just rather rest comfortably on the innovations people 100 years ago took risks on than agree that we need new innovations now.
Of course everything we do has trade-offs, positives and negatives on the surrounding environment, and economically.
But to compare for example the "messiness" of solar panel creation with the warming of the global climate by 4 to 7 degrees Celcius (that's 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit !) through continued fossil fuel use belies a lack of perspective on the relative scales and severities of these problems.
We need that quantitative perspective to wade our way through these problems. We need rational solutions. Saying "everything is bad" does not help.
Ok but fossil fuels are no longer ethically acceptable. Period. Everyone who uses them, and currently, yup, that's everyone, is in a morally bankrupt position with regard to near-future generations of human beings (and all kinds of other plants and critters too).
We know that their continued use (and related things like rapid destruction/conversion of natural ecosystems) is slowly causing catastrophic damage to our current climate regime (and oceans) and the eco-systems that inhabit the Earth.
And nuclear fission power introduces a lot of risk (in both the short and long terms.) The only reason it's even remotely affordable is because regulatory corners are being cut in the ongoing maintenance of plants, and because we are basically ignoring the costs of addressing the longer-term problems.
So that leaves ingenuity, renewables, massive innovation in energy storage (underground pumped hydro anyone?) and transmission (superconducting grids to balance intermittent renewables over continent-sized areas to create stable base generation stochastically.
where you might wish to consider basing your open-invention-based business.
It is also necessary that you can prove the date of documents related to the invention.
So I would suggest that the documents need to be public on the web (so they can be archived by the Internet Archive)
and/or run through a timestamp server to get a timestamped digital signature associated with each document.
The American system of government gives a lot of power to the congress, including a huge amount of control of the purse strings of government.
This particular set of cuts is clearly a Republican budget and agenda.
Science = bad (might undercut cherished beliefs, might take away my goddamned SUVs and ATVs, done by liberal nerds),
Military = good (protects God-given rights.)
As a comp sci M.Sc. Canadian software engineer, yeah, even software architect should the mood strike, I resemble that remark!
At some point the connection between the programmer and what the program does is going to get pretty tenuous
and completely unpredictable in detail.
If I write a program that says:
1. Use various parsing, logic, and probability rules to learn about concepts and relationships given a vast corpus of human-generated text as input
2. From a general logical theory of advice-giving, and copying the general pattern of advice-giving situational episodes you have "read" i.e. parsed
into concept and relationship and probability based symbolic representations of situations, generate abstract templates for advice-giving
utterances in a certain domain X (a certain kind of law, say).
3. Use a general pattern matching algorithm to generate specific advice utterances by filling in the general advice-workflow templates with
particulars of the case which you solicited to fill in the gaps in the templates....
What am I as the programmer going to know about what the program is going to advise? Answer? Pretty much nothing.
NOTWITHSTANDING the foregoing statement of THE PARTY, mine is drafted with oh so judicious use of copy and paste.
"You, sir, have no business talking about the law or chess if you are going to equate the law to chess."
You are absolutely right. Law is much more analogous to "So You Think You Can Dance...?"
Let me get this straight. These people are bringing suit because some software gave them legal advice?
So they are essentially taking the position that the software is an intelligent agent capable of giving advice.
So they are implicitly positioning the software as a legal person (the agent that gave the advice, presumably
by assessing input from the plaintiffs and making its own decisions about what advice to give.)
So they should be petitioning to sue the software itself. (And good luck collecting from it.)
Trying to sue whoever wrote the software and whoever operates it and gives it a server and power is
kind of like suing the parents and the landlord of the person who did you wrong.
Governments using carrots and sticks to corral and constrain and align behaviour. It's not the immorality of governing organizations. It's the TRADE-OFF of governing organizations.
Try inner city Rio de Janeiro or a failed state (several to choose from in Africa) with no effective government, and
see what happens to the average chance of getting hurt on any given day.
Nowadays it's:
"If I have seen further it is by stealing the intellectual property of giants."
and before you congratulate me let me be the first to say I stole that from someone's sig.
But seriously, scientific knowledge paywalls are evil, in that they are a barrier to the advancement of science. Ok maybe some kind of six month exclusivity for organizing the editing and reviewing of the damn thing, but anything more is highway robbery.
How do you know the next Einstein isn't some teenager in Africa, who would have discovered something amazing if they'd been allowed to read anything that had gone before. How do you know it isn't a geek coder, or, here's a ridiculous idea,
a patent clerk, who has no particular access to today's exclusive scientific journals. The current system is madness.
It should be subverted by any peaceful means. I cheer on the science liberators. Bravo.
In your comment you said a number of things.
You said you are non-technical. Coding is all about mastering very particular technique.
You said you don't want to make it your career, which suggests you don't have a deep
interest in the hows and the whys of quality coding/software engineering.
So why not leave it to those who have either been doing it since the age of 14 or
who have a gift and a love for the craft and the science of it.
It sounds like you might do better at the other aspects of the business.
But anyway there are lots of lighter-weight options than a CS degree.
Try continuing education courses at a university or collage. Or a diploma program
at a college. Or as others have said, the MIT online courseware.
The original poster, and you, who call it tack-on garbage, are the very reason that general education requirements are tacked on.
Clearly both of you can't even conceive why studying, for example, literature and philosophy might be useful to the practice of top-level computer science or software engineering. Therefore you clearly need to come out of your tunnel and be exposed to the world.
When I was studying artificial intelligence and computational vision for my post-grad degree, the stuff I learned most from was the shelf full of twentieth century philosophy books on logics, epistemology, and metaphysics (and Zen). binary-encoded symbols in computers representing things and processes out there in the world is a wondrous thing, and also a thing whose complexities are not easily mastered without a good grounding in philosophy. How can you know about the limitations of your representations - they ways they are sure to fail or become too complex or be challenged as limited or invalid - if you don't understand philosophy?
And I've come to understand how much of peoples' understanding of the world and themselves is in narrative form, and what the significance is of what is left in, and what is left out of a "good" narrative, and how narrative is fundamentally about the guiding of attention and the selection of the sub-situations salient to humans' concerns and needs. Some of that knowledge has come through a lot of careful consideration of great stories in several forms of art and literature.
All of it is central to a conception of how to do good user interface in computing.