People get paid to collect litter and sweep streets. They do it because it's necessary to keep the place liveable in.
No, they get paid not because it's necessary, but because people are willing to pay them so they don't have to live in squalor and because they are too lazy to take the trash to a dump themselves. (There are many places around the world where people are not willing to pay for trash pickup, and so trash piles up everywhere...)
There are other important differences, as well, such as the fact that refuse accumulation is not a probabilistic event but a deterministic one, and all the climate change issues are probabilistic*. While you might argue it's government's role to step in to address these probabilistic events, it gets tricky because who decides what the acceptable rate of return is on the "preventive measures"?
*Yes, on the whole, you can say that "the climate will change" and that is deterministic; what is probabilistic is the specific effect in a particular geographic area, be it changes in land arability, sea level, or frequency and magnitude of severe weather events.
This sounds all well and good, but here's the question:
How much money are you going to pay me to do nothing with my time other than sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere? I'm willing to do it, but I'm not going to do it for free.
I personally think even statically linking shouldn't make your product be a derivative work. An automobile is not a derivative product of the engine, even though the engine is "included" in the product.
I think the terms used in the license related to linking should make this explicit: If you have a fixed dependency on this code such as static linking, then your product must also be GPL, because your product is including a copy of our work. If you link dynamically, then we can't care, because you're only relying on an API, and the courts have ruled that you can't copyright an API.
What you would have to do if you distributed a work that's dynamically linked is provide source for all the dynamic libraries if you distribute those libraries with your source, because of their license, but if you just send the application and assume the user has appropriate libraries, then there can be no restriction on the application.
This should be fairly obvious: there is no (and can be no) violation of Microsoft or Apple copyright with an application for Windows or MacOS, even though those applications most surely dynamically link to copyrighted libraries.
Of course, most of this argument and personal opinion is based on logic, and I'm well aware that courts have no requirement to base their precedents on logic.
The grand total power usage in my house for me and my wife only averages about 9 kW-hr per day, which is an average of 375W. When we were running our A/C in the hottest part of the summer we only averaged 14kW-hr/day, which is still significantly less than 1kW.
48 kW-hr/day most surely includes other sources, most likely transportation.
The former - laws providing specific judicial and punitive events for certain situations - are testable, finite, specific things.
The latter - trying to say people have "the right not to suffer" is trying to codify judicial action to subjective response of individuals to external stimuli.
"The right not to be offended" is a good example of this terrible concept. "The right not to be offended" is essentially asking for everyone to live in an environment where they take no actions at all because any action has the possibility of offending someone. (I'd argue that everyone already has the right not to be offended - nobody is forcing anyone to get offended at any particular situation!) At best you may get people wandering around with no freedom to choose their actions, only performing the "allowed actions" to minimize offense.
I'd rather just live in a world where robots don't have rights, but there are clear consequences for mistreating other people's robots.
They know it will be worth less when you pay it back which is why they want you to pay back more than you borrowed. The extra covers inflation and allows them to profit off the loan.
True - but what I meant was, even if there is inflation, your mortgage (and its interest payments) do not change - so if your monthly payment is $100, $100 will always satisfy that monthly payment. Which is why it's great to be a borrower (but really bad to be a lender) if you think there's going to be massive inflation.
What I meant by "ignore the interest" is where you may save a little money by making a mortgage payment yesterday by reducing compounded interest compared to if you held that money and made the payment today instead (assuming that you didn't put that cash somewhere else yesterday and it earned more money than the day's accrued interest).
You've got to be careful with statements like this. You can't just say "[The dollar] is worth less-and-less every day" without saying less of what.
A dollar today may buy me less gasoline than it would have bought yesterday, but it still clears exactly the same amount of debt off my mortgage that it would have yesterday (for sake of example ignore interest here), and it may even buy me more pencils than it would have yesterday.
(That said, in general, I would agree that it takes more dollars to buy a larger variety of goods than it did in the past. What's even worse is that it's not just simple inflation but is also a reduction in standard of living, because prices are increasing faster than wages.)
But that's not what the article says - it doesn't say that it costs more for litigation and licensing, it says that it's a net loss to society.
The argument is that, for a given unit of technology in society, it costs more to have that technology in the presence of litigation and patent trolls. This doesn't have anything to do with the distribution of spending between the licensing and licensed, but the total amount society must pay for a given level of technology.
It's kind of like monthly payments: you can take out a mortgage to "afford" a home, but end up paying significantly more in total for that home than if mortgages didn't exist in the first place due to two factors: no interest cost and also because the selling price would have to be lower to begin with.
A warehouse doesn't pay tax on everything it contains on an annual basis.
In the United States they do. In the US, companies will often destroy goods (and equipment) by scrapping because it's cheaper to destroy them than pay tax on the inventory. This is also why companies will periodically hold inventory-clearing sales with items at stupendously reduced prices.
I can just see, in many years, headlines decrying ancestral decisions to tap lunar orbital energy which went too far, resulting in lunar orbital decay and imminent collision.
As many have said below, your brain is indeed doing math - what it's not doing is "computation".
Most of the discussions in this thread are forgetting that important difference. The applications for which this type of chip will be useful are those in which the exact value of something is not important, but the relationships between values are. For instance, if you're implementing a control system algorithm, you don't care that the value of your integration is something specific, but you do care that it will always increase in proportion to the inputs and time. This is more akin to how your brain works - it doesn't care how much force it has to apply to your arm to make it move to catch a ball - it just knows that it needs "more" or "less".
For things like finance or engineering design that actually require computation this chip would be a poor choice.
...and considering how they have to deal with a much more complex environment...
Actually, the environment in which an aircraft operates is significantly simpler than that in which a ground vehicle must operate. There's a reason why aircraft autopilots existed decades ago and we still don't really have automotive "autopilot."
Even if you couldn't track wallet IDs to specific people, doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the equivalent of an "analog hole"? When Bitcoins are converted into real goods or services, someone is going to notice, and eventually that "notice" is going to get back to the revenue collection agency of whatever government controls the area.
I always see this argument - but what happens when an entire nations' worth of people transition from gasoline to electricity? Dramatically increased electricity demand is going to push up the price of electricity. I'd estimate that in the long run energy prices will be pretty close to a wash.
Consider this: my current residential electric usage for my wife and I runs about 6kW-hr/day. Assuming 20% gasoline efficiency and 100% electric transportation efficiency, this amounts to about 1 gallon of gasoline per day, or the equivalent of about 30 gallons of gasoline a month. This is probably a very generously low estimate for average household gasoline consumption. So if we traded all gasoline for electricity, we're looking at something like doubling the electricity demand.
While the grid itself can handle this, what will the spot prices for energy do if we double the demand for electricity producing source material?
But isn't the difference you describe between frequentistic (sic) and Bayesian the difference between an event truly governed by probability versus one of confidence in a prediction, respectively?
Ultimately, I think my original post failed to convey that my frustration is in what I see as confusion between the concepts of probability of an event occurring and confidence bands in a prediction.
To be specific: you can't have better than 50% confidence in a prediction on a single coin flip because coin flips are random. Asteroid paths are not random, however, so the confidence in a prediction really could reach 100% (maybe not in a mathematical sense, but in a practical do-I-need-to-get-an-escape-plan sense). This is perhaps a better statement of what I meant by "it will hit or it will not."
You can always turn a deterministic problem into a probabilistic one if enough variables are hidden. But this doesn't mean that the underlying mechanics of the situation are necessarily probabilistic.
The gasoline example you gave above is inherently probabilistic, because you do expect that, given the same perceived initial conditions many times, the outcomes would vary each time the "experiment" is carried out.
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers. No matter how many times you measure a fair die roll, the probabilities will always come up the same.
More measurements won't help you with a coin toss, quantum mechanics, or your gasoline example, because it's not possible to gain enough measurements (or in QM's case, there is strong evidence that no such parameters even exist to measure in the first place).
Am I the only one that gets terribly frustrated by statements like "the asteroid has a 1 in X chance to hit earth"?
There's no probability here - the asteroid either will or will not hit. Why can't they say just say this is the measure of uncertainty in the curve fit rather than a "chance to hit"?
Of course, it doesn't know about special conditions like construction or weather.
Does anyone know of any articles that talk about how these autonomous automobiles cope with weather? In the area in which I live rain can even obscure lane markers (lines are invisible when the roads are wet. I blame the paint choice.) And what about snow, when the road itself can be invisible?
Unless the autonomous automobiles depend on some other means of roadway analysis, I see weather as being a fairly large issue. Is GPS actually accurate enough to determine position within a lane?
I happen to agree with you that being told you can't see a loved one in the hospital can cause suffering, but I wouldn't call it a human rights violation.
If every social issue starts getting labeled a "rights violation" then that term has no meaning any more, and society will really suffer.
Thanks for supporting my thesis: You forgot to answer the real first question though.
By what system or justification do you define "basic human and civil rights" in the first place? Why is the definition you believe more correct than any other definition? How can you prove it? Does your world view even require that you need to prove it?
Without objectivity, there are only attempts to force people to conform to opinions, and that, in my opinion, is the worst violation of "human rights" that can exist.
The presence of legislation that allows two men or two women to marry each other has no impact on me or my heterosexual marriage.
Actually, there is always an effect on a belief system when a society changes its views on whether that belief system is acceptable or not. I'm not addressing any particular belief system here - it's just a fact that there is no such thing as "no impact" in such a social construct.
If you are in the group that holds a belief and the greater society says that belief is not acceptable, then you do suffer for it.
So the first question in any given social issue is often: is it better to accept one particular belief at the expense of another? I would say there is a deeper question that we should be asking first instead: by what standard should a society evaluate the merits of any particular belief?
Be careful! If your standard by which beliefs are evaluated is subjective, "What I think" soon trumps "What society thinks" and it all falls down.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Slashdot Mirror
No, they get paid not because it's necessary, but because people are willing to pay them so they don't have to live in squalor and because they are too lazy to take the trash to a dump themselves. (There are many places around the world where people are not willing to pay for trash pickup, and so trash piles up everywhere...)
There are other important differences, as well, such as the fact that refuse accumulation is not a probabilistic event but a deterministic one, and all the climate change issues are probabilistic*. While you might argue it's government's role to step in to address these probabilistic events, it gets tricky because who decides what the acceptable rate of return is on the "preventive measures"?
*Yes, on the whole, you can say that "the climate will change" and that is deterministic; what is probabilistic is the specific effect in a particular geographic area, be it changes in land arability, sea level, or frequency and magnitude of severe weather events.
This sounds all well and good, but here's the question:
How much money are you going to pay me to do nothing with my time other than sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere? I'm willing to do it, but I'm not going to do it for free.
I personally think even statically linking shouldn't make your product be a derivative work. An automobile is not a derivative product of the engine, even though the engine is "included" in the product.
I think the terms used in the license related to linking should make this explicit: If you have a fixed dependency on this code such as static linking, then your product must also be GPL, because your product is including a copy of our work. If you link dynamically, then we can't care, because you're only relying on an API, and the courts have ruled that you can't copyright an API.
What you would have to do if you distributed a work that's dynamically linked is provide source for all the dynamic libraries if you distribute those libraries with your source, because of their license, but if you just send the application and assume the user has appropriate libraries, then there can be no restriction on the application.
This should be fairly obvious: there is no (and can be no) violation of Microsoft or Apple copyright with an application for Windows or MacOS, even though those applications most surely dynamically link to copyrighted libraries.
Of course, most of this argument and personal opinion is based on logic, and I'm well aware that courts have no requirement to base their precedents on logic.
It's sad that so few people realize this.
What kind of house, refrigerator, etc. is that?
The grand total power usage in my house for me and my wife only averages about 9 kW-hr per day, which is an average of 375W. When we were running our A/C in the hottest part of the summer we only averaged 14kW-hr/day, which is still significantly less than 1kW.
48 kW-hr/day most surely includes other sources, most likely transportation.
I'd say there is a huge difference.
The former - laws providing specific judicial and punitive events for certain situations - are testable, finite, specific things.
The latter - trying to say people have "the right not to suffer" is trying to codify judicial action to subjective response of individuals to external stimuli.
"The right not to be offended" is a good example of this terrible concept. "The right not to be offended" is essentially asking for everyone to live in an environment where they take no actions at all because any action has the possibility of offending someone. (I'd argue that everyone already has the right not to be offended - nobody is forcing anyone to get offended at any particular situation!) At best you may get people wandering around with no freedom to choose their actions, only performing the "allowed actions" to minimize offense.
I'd rather just live in a world where robots don't have rights, but there are clear consequences for mistreating other people's robots.
True - but what I meant was, even if there is inflation, your mortgage (and its interest payments) do not change - so if your monthly payment is $100, $100 will always satisfy that monthly payment. Which is why it's great to be a borrower (but really bad to be a lender) if you think there's going to be massive inflation.
What I meant by "ignore the interest" is where you may save a little money by making a mortgage payment yesterday by reducing compounded interest compared to if you held that money and made the payment today instead (assuming that you didn't put that cash somewhere else yesterday and it earned more money than the day's accrued interest).
You've got to be careful with statements like this. You can't just say "[The dollar] is worth less-and-less every day" without saying less of what.
A dollar today may buy me less gasoline than it would have bought yesterday, but it still clears exactly the same amount of debt off my mortgage that it would have yesterday (for sake of example ignore interest here), and it may even buy me more pencils than it would have yesterday.
(That said, in general, I would agree that it takes more dollars to buy a larger variety of goods than it did in the past. What's even worse is that it's not just simple inflation but is also a reduction in standard of living, because prices are increasing faster than wages.)
But that's not what the article says - it doesn't say that it costs more for litigation and licensing, it says that it's a net loss to society.
The argument is that, for a given unit of technology in society, it costs more to have that technology in the presence of litigation and patent trolls. This doesn't have anything to do with the distribution of spending between the licensing and licensed, but the total amount society must pay for a given level of technology.
It's kind of like monthly payments: you can take out a mortgage to "afford" a home, but end up paying significantly more in total for that home than if mortgages didn't exist in the first place due to two factors: no interest cost and also because the selling price would have to be lower to begin with.
In the United States they do. In the US, companies will often destroy goods (and equipment) by scrapping because it's cheaper to destroy them than pay tax on the inventory. This is also why companies will periodically hold inventory-clearing sales with items at stupendously reduced prices.
I don't know about farms and livestock though.
I can just see, in many years, headlines decrying ancestral decisions to tap lunar orbital energy which went too far, resulting in lunar orbital decay and imminent collision.
As many have said below, your brain is indeed doing math - what it's not doing is "computation".
Most of the discussions in this thread are forgetting that important difference. The applications for which this type of chip will be useful are those in which the exact value of something is not important, but the relationships between values are. For instance, if you're implementing a control system algorithm, you don't care that the value of your integration is something specific, but you do care that it will always increase in proportion to the inputs and time. This is more akin to how your brain works - it doesn't care how much force it has to apply to your arm to make it move to catch a ball - it just knows that it needs "more" or "less".
For things like finance or engineering design that actually require computation this chip would be a poor choice.
Actually, the environment in which an aircraft operates is significantly simpler than that in which a ground vehicle must operate. There's a reason why aircraft autopilots existed decades ago and we still don't really have automotive "autopilot."
Even if you couldn't track wallet IDs to specific people, doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the equivalent of an "analog hole"? When Bitcoins are converted into real goods or services, someone is going to notice, and eventually that "notice" is going to get back to the revenue collection agency of whatever government controls the area.
I always see this argument - but what happens when an entire nations' worth of people transition from gasoline to electricity? Dramatically increased electricity demand is going to push up the price of electricity. I'd estimate that in the long run energy prices will be pretty close to a wash.
Consider this: my current residential electric usage for my wife and I runs about 6kW-hr/day. Assuming 20% gasoline efficiency and 100% electric transportation efficiency, this amounts to about 1 gallon of gasoline per day, or the equivalent of about 30 gallons of gasoline a month. This is probably a very generously low estimate for average household gasoline consumption. So if we traded all gasoline for electricity, we're looking at something like doubling the electricity demand.
While the grid itself can handle this, what will the spot prices for energy do if we double the demand for electricity producing source material?
I thought he was talking about his pet fish...
But isn't the difference you describe between frequentistic (sic) and Bayesian the difference between an event truly governed by probability versus one of confidence in a prediction, respectively?
Ultimately, I think my original post failed to convey that my frustration is in what I see as confusion between the concepts of probability of an event occurring and confidence bands in a prediction.
To be specific: you can't have better than 50% confidence in a prediction on a single coin flip because coin flips are random. Asteroid paths are not random, however, so the confidence in a prediction really could reach 100% (maybe not in a mathematical sense, but in a practical do-I-need-to-get-an-escape-plan sense). This is perhaps a better statement of what I meant by "it will hit or it will not."
You can always turn a deterministic problem into a probabilistic one if enough variables are hidden. But this doesn't mean that the underlying mechanics of the situation are necessarily probabilistic.
The gasoline example you gave above is inherently probabilistic, because you do expect that, given the same perceived initial conditions many times, the outcomes would vary each time the "experiment" is carried out.
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers. No matter how many times you measure a fair die roll, the probabilities will always come up the same.
More measurements won't help you with a coin toss, quantum mechanics, or your gasoline example, because it's not possible to gain enough measurements (or in QM's case, there is strong evidence that no such parameters even exist to measure in the first place).
No, because a (proverbial) coin flip is a probabilistic event.
Am I the only one that gets terribly frustrated by statements like "the asteroid has a 1 in X chance to hit earth"?
There's no probability here - the asteroid either will or will not hit. Why can't they say just say this is the measure of uncertainty in the curve fit rather than a "chance to hit"?
Does anyone know of any articles that talk about how these autonomous automobiles cope with weather? In the area in which I live rain can even obscure lane markers (lines are invisible when the roads are wet. I blame the paint choice.) And what about snow, when the road itself can be invisible?
Unless the autonomous automobiles depend on some other means of roadway analysis, I see weather as being a fairly large issue. Is GPS actually accurate enough to determine position within a lane?
You're still missing the point.
I happen to agree with you that being told you can't see a loved one in the hospital can cause suffering, but I wouldn't call it a human rights violation.
If every social issue starts getting labeled a "rights violation" then that term has no meaning any more, and society will really suffer.
Thanks for supporting my thesis: You forgot to answer the real first question though.
By what system or justification do you define "basic human and civil rights" in the first place? Why is the definition you believe more correct than any other definition? How can you prove it? Does your world view even require that you need to prove it?
Without objectivity, there are only attempts to force people to conform to opinions, and that, in my opinion, is the worst violation of "human rights" that can exist.
Actually, there is always an effect on a belief system when a society changes its views on whether that belief system is acceptable or not. I'm not addressing any particular belief system here - it's just a fact that there is no such thing as "no impact" in such a social construct.
If you are in the group that holds a belief and the greater society says that belief is not acceptable, then you do suffer for it.
So the first question in any given social issue is often: is it better to accept one particular belief at the expense of another? I would say there is a deeper question that we should be asking first instead: by what standard should a society evaluate the merits of any particular belief?
Be careful! If your standard by which beliefs are evaluated is subjective, "What I think" soon trumps "What society thinks" and it all falls down.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?