"We in the West are pretty clean for the most part - it's getting India, China and other developing countries to clean up..."
What the hell are you smoking? Or more aptly, what planet are you living on?
A person living in China is responsible for 17% as much greenhouse-gas emissions as is a person living in the United States. A person living in India is responsible for 8% as much greenhouse-gas emissions as a person living in the United States.
and that's not even accounting for the fact that much of the most polluting parts of the Chinese and Indian economies are devoted to supplying the West with goods.
Scientists do not need faith in their theories after they are proven. Scientific theories are verifiable according to a simply describable rational process that anyone with skills can carry out without faith. Scientific theories are considered promising explanations of parts or aspects of reality if a) they are self-consistent, b) they are logically consistent with other theories which co-define the same terms (symbols for parts or aspects of reality), c) they are structured as a mutually supporting set of statements which are particular assertions about the presence and state of some things; assertions clearly enough stated in terms of other known/accepted concepts/terms/things that the assertions could be falsified by comprehensible experiments carried out to measure the mentioned/described aspects of reality. d) they have not been falsified yet, and e) they are simpler (contain less information, in their so far unfalsified explanation of the same amount of phenomena) than competing theories.
"God did it" definitely fails c) in that the explanation does not explain any phenomena in terms of any other known (already explained) phenomena/concepts/terms. Instead, it explains just about all phenomena in terms of a completely unknown, undescribed, and unexplained posited entity, which might as well just be the concept "null" because it does not differ in description or properties from null except in the completely circular and content-free sense in which it is defined as "the entity which is the cause of all these other phenomena".
God as prime cause stories also fail c) because in form they are generally rambling analogies or vague generalities which are not carefully or coherently or specifically enough stated to be falsifiable assertions. Those specifics which are stated in the "God" stories have the safety (from falsifiability) of being about alleged episodes lost in the mists of the past.
Most more detailed description of what this prime cause is like also fail b) in that the stories about God's appearances and works on aspects of reality are not consistent with other verifiable measures of those aspects of reality and also different versions of the God and God-cause stories are inconsistent with each other in many specifics.
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,... to... provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers"
Taken together, these two enumerated powers would in my interpretation grant them the right to tax and regulate for pretty much any purpose that the Congress deemed to be providing for the common defense or general welfare of the US (and obviously of its people too.)
It doesn't say defense against what. How about for example, defense against the economic imperilment and international instability and conflict that is the almost certain consequence of continued environmental degradation and anthropogenic global warming. By either taxes or legislation. Check. Constitutional.
How about ensuring the continued general Welfare of the US by preventing or limiting further environmental/ecological damage and by preventing or limiting global warming. By either taxes or legislation. Check. Constitutional.
'If left alone, the best bulb will win its rightful standing in the marketplace. Government doesn't need to be in the business of telling people what light bulb they have to use.'
I agree with this provided the government responsibly institutes a massive carbon tax (with corresponding cuts in other taxes) so as to level the "free-market's" playing field so that it achieves environmental responsibility. When your electricity starts costing 5 times as much, you can make whatever choice of light bulb you want.
I'm pretty sure the constitution doesn't limit what government can legislate, except for the pretty specific clauses ensuring specific kinds of fundamental individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, association, freedom from arbitrary incarceration, and several other specific limitations on the government's scope of power.
In other respects, it's allowed to be a government and legislate whatever its democratically elected legislators vote to legislate.
For spontaneous emergence and evolution of life, here is an attempt at an environment requirements specification.
1. High prevalence of flexibly reactive / combining atoms of several types, to create a molecular structural alphabet and vocabulary.
2. Tendency for the reactive elements to be brought together more often than they are flung apart (a significant gravity well).
3. Presence of the prevalent potentially reactive atoms, simple compounds, and complex molecules in all of Solid Phase, Liquid Phase, and Gas Phase. "Earth, Water, Air"
This is a crucial point. Life as we know it creates complex but repeatable processes and forms, by using an alphabet and vocabulary of structure but also an alphabet and vocabulary of transformation-process types. These energy-utilizing transformation processes of particular reliable forms are created using the interaction of liquids (carriers of energy and structural components), solids (containers and channellers of these liquids), and gases (carriers of more readily accessible/strippable energy-potentials).
4. The presence of a particular range of free energies. In other words, an "intermediate" thermodynamic regime in the local environment.
i.e. "Fire" (by weak but apt analogy). There must be common occurrences of free energies (energy disequilibria and coherent directional energy flows causing work to be done) which are just strong enough to re-arrange things periodically, and to allow controlled processes of transformation of energy and materials to occur. But there must be relatively few occurrences of enormous free energies which would blow structure apart completely or substantially, and there must not be a lack of free energy; an icy crystal dead zone in which no structural experimentation can occur, or a uniform high-entropy high energy zone like the interior of the sun, in which solid process-containment structure formation would not be possible.
So the ancient philosophers we denigrate were perhaps wiser than we or they knew.
I recognize that spontaneous life emergence in some kind of pure informational medium may also be possible. Perhaps simple information processing operations can achieve analogous combinatory and exploratory functions needed to discover working self-creating, self-sustaining, self-improving complex processes. I haven't quite expanded my mind to imagine the details of that yet, and even so, I worry about the lack of generality of and problems with the sustainability of the information-medium and information processor, in such a case.
A Microsoft Nokia bad-analogy award
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Microsoft today most reminds me of a coral reef in the Caribbean. Still standing there, huge, menacing, misshapen and barnacle-encrusted. But dead. The environment has changed around it and it can't adapt.
Nokia is a huge ship battered by the storm coming in toward the reef for shelter.
High-speed trains are consistent with an energy independence stratetegy, since they reduce the need for fossil fuels. They use less fuel per passenger mile and train infrastructure can in principle be converted to electric / hydrogen fuel cell drive, which along with massive investment in clean renewable electricity generation technology would eliminate more fossil fuel dependence still, not to mention reducing GHG emissions.
Lower greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile.
Air travel is a massive GHG emitter. By taking one flight across the country, you pretty much double your personal GHG emissions for the year.
Ready possibility for conversion to electric drive / hydrogren fuel cells to lower GHG emissions further, as long as implemented in conjunction with greening of the electricity grid (offshore wind, massive solar etc.).
Unless of course you don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, in which case, I don't know why I'm wearing away the tips of my fingers typing to you.
By analogy, we should not allow people to have private homes with private rooms, because imagine what they might be hiding there.
And as for backyard gardens, forget it. Imagine what might be buried there.
The point is, real estate allows you to do many useful things, and allows some hopefully tiny percentage of deviants to do nasty things. So do you want to get rid of private real estate?
Encrypted net caches are pretty much the same issue.
Another key technology for an Internet immune to strangulation by governments is location-independent content.
It would help if there was a content virtualization layer, which fragments, encrypts, and redundantly distributes content. Content later coalesces when requested. This needs to be based on open protocols, with the technology globally distributed and many of the content servers at the edge of the network in countless peoples' homes. No individual will be liable for hosting any particular content, because the technology will ensure that they do not know what is on their computer. Just some random fragments; multiply encrypted byteblocks.
For performance it should be a mix of pure P2P and server-farm based infrastructure, but it is mandatory that no single company or organization own the infrastructure. It should be as pervasive and distributed as DNS, but for URI-addressable content.
Your theory only works for as long as there exist a substantial number of niches in human economic processes that require human labor, or are best served by human labor. If we keep improving automation technology (software and hardware) at the rate we have been over the last century, it surely won't be long before the economy only requires, say, 50% of (previously classed as able and employable) adults to work in it. And at some point beyond that, only 25%.
The way I say it: McDonalds only still hires lots of teenagers, seniors and immmigrants because they're still marginally cheaper than the equivalent robots. But CG smiles are starting to get pretty good, and a computer is just about to beat the world champions at Jeopardy. Even McDonalds is now starting to outsource your "Ky tkyrorder" conversation to remote call centres, and how long before I just touch my order in on an ipad cemented into the wall?
Wait a minute, I thought the reason that Linux UI has been kept so craptastically over-complicated was to maintain the exclusivity of the geek culture club that can handle it.
"Of course we could give this a decent UI, you know, we know how to uh huh, but uh what would be the point of that?"
A strong argument against the existence of "real god", the strongest in my view, is the plausibility of the psychological and sociological role that "invented god-concept" (a Jungian archetype, a useful and persistent meme) would play in human society.
From birth, humans see powerful intelligent agency, more wise and powerful than they themselves, all around them, in the form of their parents and other older humans. Why would we not make an analogy and posit the same sort of agency as an explanation of the powerful and unexplainable forces of nature, as an explanation of otherwise inexplicable turns of fortune. Surely someone made the great unseen "mother/father to us all" angry. Surely we must act righteously to gain favor from this ultimate arbiter of our fate.
And surely if we behave well, we will be accepted into this great ancestor's company when we die, for otherwise, the most feared and incomprehensible fate awaits us. Nothing. Our personal non-existence is unimaginable and unimaginably painful to contemplate. We must replace that most terrible worry with a soothing story, such as our parent would tell us to calm our fear of the night.
The more intelligent, ruthless, and cynical among us can take advantage of these churning fears and abstract hopes, and use these stories, this meme, as an amplifier of their personal power, as a ladder to the top of the societal hierarchy. They can claim to have a closer relationship with and knowledge of the deity. They can claim to have heard and interpreted its will and thus claim to be entitled to enforce its will.
Religiosity is mainly just a predisposition to value things like group solidarity and the stability that comes from enforced conformity and hierarchical authority.
Someone who values these things (or fears the lack of them) more than they value some kind of quest for truth or rationality or objectivity, is predisposed to religion.
If you were smarter, you'd only loathe dumb greenies, not all greenies. If you could identify the smartest 1% of people, I'd wager that 95% of them are "greenies", if that means they realize that humans are impacting the ecosystems and climate of Earth in a big way, an unethical way, and a reckless and dangerous way, and they realize that our throughput of natural resources is highly unsustainable.
My loathing hierarchy runs more like this: Less Loathed: 1. Dumb greenies - not analytical, but intuit that some big shit is majorly screwed up. Heart in the right place and trying to reduce harm. 2. Smart greenies who walk the talk. Correct analysis of big issues has scared the bejeezus out of them, so willing to walk and talk about it. 3. Hypocritical smart greenies. - would be willing to change. Wants someone to force them to. 4. Dumb Greedies - too dumb to assess anything at all, but happy as a clam to keep on keepin' on. 5. Smart Greedies - know what's going on and don't give a fig because changes might reduce their personal wealth or freedom. More Loathed
Slashdot Mirror
"We in the West are pretty clean for the most part - it's getting India, China and other developing countries to clean up..."
What the hell are you smoking? Or more aptly, what planet are you living on?
A person living in China is responsible for 17% as much greenhouse-gas emissions as is a person living in the United States.
A person living in India is responsible for 8% as much greenhouse-gas emissions as a person living in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita
and that's not even accounting for the fact that much of the most polluting parts of the Chinese and Indian economies are devoted to supplying the West with goods.
"the answer for the simplest is God."
There. Fixed that for you.
Scientists do not need faith in their theories after they are proven. Scientific theories are verifiable according to a simply describable
rational process that anyone with skills can carry out without faith. Scientific theories are considered promising explanations of
parts or aspects of reality if
a) they are self-consistent,
b) they are logically consistent with other theories which co-define the same
terms (symbols for parts or aspects of reality),
c) they are structured as a mutually supporting set of statements which are particular assertions about the
presence and state of some things; assertions clearly enough stated in terms of other known/accepted concepts/terms/things that the assertions
could be falsified by comprehensible experiments carried out to measure the mentioned/described aspects of reality.
d) they have not been falsified yet, and
e) they are simpler (contain less information, in their so far unfalsified explanation of the same amount of phenomena) than competing theories.
"God did it" definitely fails c) in that the explanation does not explain any phenomena in terms of any other known (already explained)
phenomena/concepts/terms. Instead, it explains just about all phenomena in terms of a completely unknown, undescribed, and unexplained
posited entity, which might as well just be the concept "null" because it does not differ in description or properties from null except in the
completely circular and content-free sense in which it is defined as "the entity which is the cause of all these other phenomena".
God as prime cause stories also fail c) because in form they are generally rambling analogies or vague generalities which are not carefully
or coherently or specifically enough stated to be falsifiable assertions. Those specifics which are stated in the "God" stories have the
safety (from falsifiability) of being about alleged episodes lost in the mists of the past.
Most more detailed description of what this prime cause is like also fail b) in that the stories about God's appearances and works on aspects of reality are not consistent with other verifiable measures of those aspects of reality and also different versions of the God and God-cause stories are inconsistent with each other in many specifics.
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,... to... provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States"
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers"
Taken together, these two enumerated powers would in my interpretation grant them the right to tax and regulate for pretty much any purpose
that the Congress deemed to be providing for the common defense or general welfare of the US (and obviously of its people too.)
It doesn't say defense against what. How about for example, defense against the economic imperilment and international instability and conflict that is the almost certain consequence of continued environmental degradation and anthropogenic global warming. By either taxes or legislation. Check. Constitutional.
How about ensuring the continued general Welfare of the US by preventing or limiting further environmental/ecological damage and by preventing or limiting global warming. By either taxes or legislation. Check. Constitutional.
'If left alone, the best bulb will win its rightful standing in the marketplace. Government doesn't need to be in the business of telling people what light bulb they have to use.'
I agree with this provided the government responsibly institutes a massive carbon tax (with corresponding cuts in other taxes) so as to level the "free-market's" playing field so that it achieves environmental responsibility. When your electricity starts costing 5 times as much, you can make whatever choice of light bulb you want.
I'm pretty sure the constitution doesn't limit what government can legislate, except for the pretty specific clauses ensuring specific kinds of fundamental individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, association, freedom from arbitrary incarceration, and several other specific limitations on the government's scope of power.
In other respects, it's allowed to be a government and legislate whatever its democratically elected legislators vote to legislate.
or they just enjoy the challenge of restoring /wiping and re-installing virus-ridden computers on a monthly basis.
What are people who are terrified of and do not welcome our new artificial intelligence overlords?
Modern myths for 200 dollars...
For spontaneous emergence and evolution of life, here is an attempt at an environment requirements specification.
1. High prevalence of flexibly reactive / combining atoms of several types, to create a molecular structural alphabet and vocabulary.
2. Tendency for the reactive elements to be brought together more often than they are flung apart (a significant gravity well).
3. Presence of the prevalent potentially reactive atoms, simple compounds, and complex molecules in all of
Solid Phase, Liquid Phase, and Gas Phase. "Earth, Water, Air"
This is a crucial point. Life as we know it creates complex but repeatable processes and forms, by using an alphabet and vocabulary of structure but also an alphabet and vocabulary of transformation-process types. These energy-utilizing transformation processes of particular reliable forms are created using the interaction of liquids (carriers of energy and structural components), solids (containers and channellers of these liquids), and gases (carriers of more readily accessible/strippable energy-potentials).
4. The presence of a particular range of free energies. In other words, an "intermediate" thermodynamic regime in the local environment.
i.e. "Fire" (by weak but apt analogy). There must be common occurrences of free energies (energy disequilibria and coherent directional energy flows causing work to be done) which are just strong enough to re-arrange things periodically, and to allow controlled processes of transformation of energy and materials to occur. But there must be relatively few occurrences of enormous free energies which would blow structure apart completely or substantially, and there must not be a lack of free energy; an icy crystal dead zone in which no structural experimentation can occur, or a uniform high-entropy high energy zone like the interior of the sun, in which solid process-containment structure formation would not be possible.
So the ancient philosophers we denigrate were perhaps wiser than we or they knew.
I recognize that spontaneous life emergence in some kind of pure informational medium may also be possible. Perhaps simple information processing operations can achieve analogous combinatory and exploratory functions needed to discover working self-creating, self-sustaining, self-improving complex processes.
I haven't quite expanded my mind to imagine the details of that yet, and even so, I worry about the lack of generality of and problems with the sustainability of the information-medium and information processor, in such a case.
Microsoft today most reminds me of a coral reef in the Caribbean.
Still standing there, huge, menacing, misshapen and barnacle-encrusted.
But dead. The environment has changed around it and it can't adapt.
Nokia is a huge ship battered by the storm coming in toward the reef
for shelter.
What do you think is going to happen?
High-speed trains are consistent with an energy independence stratetegy, since they reduce the need for fossil fuels.
They use less fuel per passenger mile and train infrastructure can in principle be converted to electric / hydrogen fuel cell drive, which along with massive investment in clean renewable electricity generation technology would eliminate more fossil fuel dependence still, not to mention reducing GHG emissions.
Lower greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile.
Air travel is a massive GHG emitter.
By taking one flight across the country, you pretty much double your personal GHG emissions
for the year.
Ready possibility for conversion to electric drive / hydrogren fuel cells to lower GHG emissions further,
as long as implemented in conjunction with greening of the electricity grid (offshore wind, massive solar etc.).
Unless of course you don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, in which case, I don't know
why I'm wearing away the tips of my fingers typing to you.
of can-do attitude.
which will be loaded with 1TB HDDs, enabling the USA in one brilliant 2-bird throw, to catch up in the broadband infrastructure race.
I don't think the debate shuts down there.
By analogy, we should not allow people to have private homes with private rooms, because imagine what they might be hiding there.
And as for backyard gardens, forget it. Imagine what might be buried there.
The point is, real estate allows you to do many useful things, and allows some hopefully tiny percentage of deviants to do nasty things.
So do you want to get rid of private real estate?
Encrypted net caches are pretty much the same issue.
Content-based addressing with dhts
Another key technology for an Internet immune to strangulation by governments is location-independent content.
It would help if there was a content virtualization layer, which fragments, encrypts, and redundantly distributes content. Content later coalesces when requested.
This needs to be based on open protocols, with the technology globally distributed and many of the content servers at the edge of the network in countless peoples' homes. No individual will be liable for hosting any particular content, because the technology will ensure that they do not know what is on their computer. Just some random fragments; multiply encrypted byteblocks.
For performance it should be a mix of pure P2P and server-farm based infrastructure, but it is mandatory that no single company or organization own the infrastructure. It should be as pervasive and distributed as DNS, but for URI-addressable content.
Your theory only works for as long as there exist a substantial number of niches in human economic processes that require human labor, or are best served by human labor. If we keep improving automation technology (software and hardware) at the rate we have been over the last century, it surely won't be long before the economy only requires, say, 50% of (previously classed as able and employable) adults to work in it. And at some point beyond that, only 25%.
The way I say it: McDonalds only still hires lots of teenagers, seniors and immmigrants because they're still marginally cheaper than the equivalent robots. But CG smiles are starting to get pretty good, and a computer is just about to beat the world champions at Jeopardy. Even McDonalds is now starting to outsource your "Ky tkyrorder" conversation to remote call centres, and how long before I just touch my order in on an ipad cemented into the wall?
Anonymous is a concept, not a group. It is an intensional definition of a set, not the set extension.
So is Al Quaeda, Earth First! etc.
Some authorities tend not to get that.
Depending on my mood, I call myself a software engineer, software architect, or a code monkey.
My actual highest credential is in Computing & Information Science, but the term "information scientist"
is so 22nd century and I avoid it.
I'm pretty sure this pisses off the professional associations of engineers, architects, AND monkeys.
Wait a minute,
I thought the reason that Linux UI has been kept so craptastically over-complicated was to maintain the exclusivity of the geek culture club that can handle it.
"Of course we could give this a decent UI, you know, we know how to uh huh, but uh what would be the point of that?"
A strong argument against the existence of "real god", the strongest in my view, is the plausibility of the psychological and sociological role that "invented god-concept" (a Jungian archetype, a useful and persistent meme) would play in human society.
From birth, humans see powerful intelligent agency, more wise and powerful than they themselves, all around them,
in the form of their parents and other older humans. Why would we not make an analogy and posit the same sort of agency as an explanation
of the powerful and unexplainable forces of nature, as an explanation of otherwise inexplicable turns of fortune. Surely someone made the
great unseen "mother/father to us all" angry. Surely we must act righteously to gain favor from this ultimate arbiter of our fate.
And surely if we behave well, we will be accepted into this great ancestor's company when we die, for otherwise, the most feared and incomprehensible fate awaits us. Nothing. Our personal non-existence is unimaginable and unimaginably painful to contemplate. We must replace that most terrible worry with a soothing story, such as our parent would tell us to calm our fear of the night.
The more intelligent, ruthless, and cynical among us can take advantage of these churning fears and abstract hopes, and use these stories, this meme, as an amplifier of their personal power, as a ladder to the top of the societal hierarchy. They can claim to have a closer relationship with and knowledge of the deity. They can claim to have heard and interpreted its will and thus claim to be entitled to enforce its will.
It's too useful an idea not to invent.
Religiosity is mainly just a predisposition to value things like group solidarity
and the stability that comes from enforced conformity and hierarchical authority.
Someone who values these things (or fears the lack of them) more than they
value some kind of quest for truth or rationality or objectivity, is predisposed
to religion.
University researchers should be exempt by law from paying patent royalties/licenses.
Period.
Obligatory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnQZlq9Q2M4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEnCKEfSgUM
You telling me that doesn't work?
If you were smarter, you'd only loathe dumb greenies, not all greenies.
If you could identify the smartest 1% of people, I'd wager that 95% of them
are "greenies", if that means they realize that humans are impacting the
ecosystems and climate of Earth in a big way, an unethical way, and a reckless and
dangerous way, and they realize that our throughput of natural resources is highly
unsustainable.
My loathing hierarchy runs more like this:
Less Loathed:
1. Dumb greenies - not analytical, but intuit that some big shit is majorly screwed up. Heart in the right place and trying to reduce harm.
2. Smart greenies who walk the talk. Correct analysis of big issues has scared the bejeezus out of them, so willing to walk and talk about it.
3. Hypocritical smart greenies. - would be willing to change. Wants someone to force them to.
4. Dumb Greedies - too dumb to assess anything at all, but happy as a clam to keep on keepin' on.
5. Smart Greedies - know what's going on and don't give a fig because changes might reduce their personal wealth or freedom.
More Loathed
World crude oil consumption = 86,000,000 Barrels/day = 31,390,000,000 Barrels/year
divided by 800 Barrels / Acre = 39,237,500 Acres
= 157,788 square kilometres
= 1/4 the size of Texas
= 29,274,211 American Football Fields