4 seconds is too long to leave an opportunity of more efficient reallocation of capital unexploited, yet there are people who have been unemployed for over a year? This implies that we've created an economic system where it is a more efficient use of resources to rearranging ownership of theoretical constructs than finding a place in society for people who have none? Doesn't it seem that we've sort of lost sight of what the purpose of an economy is?
The writers did have a plan
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
It's clear the writers started with a clear concept: a glorified episode of "The Ghost Whisper" touching the still-raw grief of 9/11 with its plane-crash imagery. But between the pilot and the finale, they had to generate a lot of X-files-ish filler to keep the air of mystery - and that's where the hype and mythology sort of ran away on them.
Strange that a religion that claims to be so forgiving is also always threatening eternal torment to anyone who disobeys them... an organization that claims to be the standard bearer of all things good uses the exact same psychological framework as an abusive relationship?
The network logging news doesn't exactly look bad for the conspiracy theorists who think Google is just the public arm of the government's "Total Information Awareness" program.
It may be offensive to the libertarian ideal or our familiar codes of justice, but if we cross the threshold into a world where 50 people can kill 5 million, the notion of individual responsibility for one's actions breaks down. The entire culture surrounding those 50 people has to accept a measure of liability for the weapon in their midst.
It is the same concept as when the Taliban refused to surrender bin Laden: Afghanistan was invaded by pretty much the entire world - many innocent people died in that war because of a terrorist in their midst, but I think pretty much the whole world agrees it had to be done (even though the US blew up the goodwill astonishingly quickly afterwards). That was because of an attack that was a tiny fraction of the destruction a nuke could bring.
But all this game theory distracts from the point I originally intended to make - that there are a lot of ways of getting an object from point A to point B (as the war on drugs has proven). If you can have your missile shield for free with absolute certainty that it works, they hey, take it and have one less thing to worry about. But if it costs near-infinite resources to develop, might only have a 50% chance of working and can be circumvented with a yacht... well, then I think it falls into "duck and cover" territory.
In my armchair analyst opinion, intercepting a missile launch is not the most important part: detecting it is. Thanks to global trade, nobody with the economy to build enough nukes to wipe another industrialized trading nation off the map has any real incentive to do it. Anyone else can destroy a major city, but that is going to bring retribution of a biblical scale from the entire rest of the world if the true source of the attack can be determined. So firing off a couple of missiles is essentially an act of suicide anyway. An attacker's only hope is to somehow disguise the origin of the nuke to create plausible deniability. So this means a detection network alone is sufficient to ensure a missile is rendered a poor choice of delivery system.
After wading through a hundred posts I can't help but suspect that if we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of opinions here are merely expressions of confirmation bias: the majority of people posting or moderating are being skeptical or accepting based entirely on whether or not it agreed with their pre-existing model of the universe.
Is it legal to talk about the report? If I think about it too hard, who do I owe royalties to? Is there a patent pending on gathering statistics about IP yet?
addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops.
More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that imapacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have any secrets worth hiding, but I have a terrible fear of "death by random red tape".
Did you delete everything when you left? Otherwise everything you ever entered has retroactively been made semi-public (which is sort of like semi-pregnant I believe).
The point of the engine rewrite treadmill in large companies is not to create better games, it's to raise player expectations and build a high enough barrier to entry that only the largest companies/IP-holders are left in the market.
Just like the movies, if you have the money to attempt to dominate the market, you don't win on good scripts because anyone could come along out of left field and write one of those, you win by having production values/effects/names that no small player can afford to match.
It doesn't have to be a conscious strategy to do this, it's just the natural way the market will evolve - eg: the peacock's tail
If I can pick a chapter on a DVD, does the movie cease to be art?
If I then pick between two alternate versions of the movie does it cease to be art?
If I can pick chapters of different versions, does it cease to be art?
(etc)
If I push UP-DOWN-UP-DOWN-LEFT, does it cease to be art?
Since we can demonstrate a continuous isomorphism from movies to video games, by the continuum hypothesis, we must conclude that movies are not art to begin with.
What sort of timescale are we looking at for such a galaxy to exhaust it's stars and become invisible to us? Could the void out there be full of "dark galaxies" that burned out fast and early and have no remaining active stars or are the supermassive galaxies being studies represent the first generation of such things to arise, presumably lingering on for many, many billions of years, dimming slowly as only the longest-lived stars remain?
"Mrs. King, we have determined that your son Martin is statistically likely to grow up to be a troublemaker. We advise you begin Prozac treatments to curb these tendencies and allow him to live a normal life. Now please move to be back of the bus."
Perhaps their advantage is not technical, but in the skill of social engineering in large organizations (governments and corporations) to create cycles of dependency where it becomes too risky to the careers of senior or middle management to attempt a switch to an alternative product?
I couldn't care less what new gizmos and glitz the web has... what I care about is that if I create apps, just like documents and databases, I want to still be able to access and use them 20 or 40 years from now without recoding and reformatting them. The gold rush is over. What I want now is bulletproof base of archival-quality standards, not ones that reinvent themselves every product cycle.
As he is someone who has made his fortune from people paying for virtual possessions, I doubt that physical possession of the item is really that important for the sale:)
He should create an inventory of the parts of the rover and rent out custody of individual pieces on monthly subscription to those who want bragging rights to "having" something on the moon.
And thus began the great jedi schism of 2010, when hoodie fundemenatalists were cast out of the light of the one true force and were forced to found a new order referred to derisively as "the dark side".
In my books, if you can have people this upset over doctrine, you are indeed qualified to call yourself a religion.
Given that a flash-blocking addon is pretty much a requirement to make the web readable these days, does this fancy html5 come with an expectation that browsers will give client-users more power to control what craziness sites are allowed to access with all these more intrusive "features"?
You do realize that, even in the olden days, in order for someone to submit a link, they generally needed to have read it somewhere else first? Slashdot stories did not arise by abiogenesis.
hmm... I thought the point of the ad was "hey advertisers/government agencies, we have peoples' whole lives encoded in our database of their searches, come get it".
Slashdot Mirror
4 seconds is too long to leave an opportunity of more efficient reallocation of capital unexploited, yet there are people who have been unemployed for over a year? This implies that we've created an economic system where it is a more efficient use of resources to rearranging ownership of theoretical constructs than finding a place in society for people who have none? Doesn't it seem that we've sort of lost sight of what the purpose of an economy is?
It's clear the writers started with a clear concept: a glorified episode of "The Ghost Whisper" touching the still-raw grief of 9/11 with its plane-crash imagery. But between the pilot and the finale, they had to generate a lot of X-files-ish filler to keep the air of mystery - and that's where the hype and mythology sort of ran away on them.
Strange that a religion that claims to be so forgiving is also always threatening eternal torment to anyone who disobeys them ... an organization that claims to be the standard bearer of all things good uses the exact same psychological framework as an abusive relationship?
The network logging news doesn't exactly look bad for the conspiracy theorists who think Google is just the public arm of the government's "Total Information Awareness" program.
It may be offensive to the libertarian ideal or our familiar codes of justice, but if we cross the threshold into a world where 50 people can kill 5 million, the notion of individual responsibility for one's actions breaks down. The entire culture surrounding those 50 people has to accept a measure of liability for the weapon in their midst.
It is the same concept as when the Taliban refused to surrender bin Laden: Afghanistan was invaded by pretty much the entire world - many innocent people died in that war because of a terrorist in their midst, but I think pretty much the whole world agrees it had to be done (even though the US blew up the goodwill astonishingly quickly afterwards). That was because of an attack that was a tiny fraction of the destruction a nuke could bring.
But all this game theory distracts from the point I originally intended to make - that there are a lot of ways of getting an object from point A to point B (as the war on drugs has proven). If you can have your missile shield for free with absolute certainty that it works, they hey, take it and have one less thing to worry about. But if it costs near-infinite resources to develop, might only have a 50% chance of working and can be circumvented with a yacht ... well, then I think it falls into "duck and cover" territory.
My entry:
@
( it's entirely possible I've played too much nethack over the years )
In my armchair analyst opinion, intercepting a missile launch is not the most important part: detecting it is. Thanks to global trade, nobody with the economy to build enough nukes to wipe another industrialized trading nation off the map has any real incentive to do it. Anyone else can destroy a major city, but that is going to bring retribution of a biblical scale from the entire rest of the world if the true source of the attack can be determined. So firing off a couple of missiles is essentially an act of suicide anyway. An attacker's only hope is to somehow disguise the origin of the nuke to create plausible deniability. So this means a detection network alone is sufficient to ensure a missile is rendered a poor choice of delivery system.
After wading through a hundred posts I can't help but suspect that if we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of opinions here are merely expressions of confirmation bias: the majority of people posting or moderating are being skeptical or accepting based entirely on whether or not it agreed with their pre-existing model of the universe.
Is it legal to talk about the report? If I think about it too hard, who do I owe royalties to? Is there a patent pending on gathering statistics about IP yet?
addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops.
... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that imapacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have any secrets worth hiding, but I have a terrible fear of "death by random red tape".
More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining
Did you delete everything when you left? Otherwise everything you ever entered has retroactively been made semi-public (which is sort of like semi-pregnant I believe).
The point of the engine rewrite treadmill in large companies is not to create better games, it's to raise player expectations and build a high enough barrier to entry that only the largest companies/IP-holders are left in the market.
Just like the movies, if you have the money to attempt to dominate the market, you don't win on good scripts because anyone could come along out of left field and write one of those, you win by having production values/effects/names that no small player can afford to match.
It doesn't have to be a conscious strategy to do this, it's just the natural way the market will evolve - eg: the peacock's tail
If I can pick a chapter on a DVD, does the movie cease to be art?
If I then pick between two alternate versions of the movie does it cease to be art?
If I can pick chapters of different versions, does it cease to be art?
(etc)
If I push UP-DOWN-UP-DOWN-LEFT, does it cease to be art?
Since we can demonstrate a continuous isomorphism from movies to video games, by the continuum hypothesis, we must conclude that movies are not art to begin with.
What sort of timescale are we looking at for such a galaxy to exhaust it's stars and become invisible to us? Could the void out there be full of "dark galaxies" that burned out fast and early and have no remaining active stars or are the supermassive galaxies being studies represent the first generation of such things to arise, presumably lingering on for many, many billions of years, dimming slowly as only the longest-lived stars remain?
"Mrs. King, we have determined that your son Martin is statistically likely to grow up to be a troublemaker. We advise you begin Prozac treatments to curb these tendencies and allow him to live a normal life. Now please move to be back of the bus."
Perhaps their advantage is not technical, but in the skill of social engineering in large organizations (governments and corporations) to create cycles of dependency where it becomes too risky to the careers of senior or middle management to attempt a switch to an alternative product?
It's ironic you used that example ... my 20-year old rabbit ears look fine on top of my HDTV and happily receive state-of-the-art HDTV signals.
Software designs break because they are part of a poorly engineered system, not because of any fundamental law of entropy.
I couldn't care less what new gizmos and glitz the web has ... what I care about is that if I create apps, just like documents and databases, I want to still be able to access and use them 20 or 40 years from now without recoding and reformatting them. The gold rush is over. What I want now is bulletproof base of archival-quality standards, not ones that reinvent themselves every product cycle.
As he is someone who has made his fortune from people paying for virtual possessions, I doubt that physical possession of the item is really that important for the sale :)
He should create an inventory of the parts of the rover and rent out custody of individual pieces on monthly subscription to those who want bragging rights to "having" something on the moon.
And thus began the great jedi schism of 2010, when hoodie fundemenatalists were cast out of the light of the one true force and were forced to found a new order referred to derisively as "the dark side".
In my books, if you can have people this upset over doctrine, you are indeed qualified to call yourself a religion.
Will google now pull out of the US?
Given that a flash-blocking addon is pretty much a requirement to make the web readable these days, does this fancy html5 come with an expectation that browsers will give client-users more power to control what craziness sites are allowed to access with all these more intrusive "features"?
Before coming up with convoluted rationalizations, it's best to do a little basic fact-checking first:
"Volcanoes emit around 0.3 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 1% of human CO2 emissions which is around 29 billion tonnes per year." -- source: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm
You do realize that, even in the olden days, in order for someone to submit a link, they generally needed to have read it somewhere else first? Slashdot stories did not arise by abiogenesis.
hmm ... I thought the point of the ad was "hey advertisers/government agencies, we have peoples' whole lives encoded in our database of their searches, come get it".