If they're filing false take-down notices, then CSEministry committed perjury, which means they can be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years.
IF you can find a prosecutor with jurisdiction and willingness to prosecute. In many jurisdictions, getting a Christian ministry prosecuted for perjury can be as hard as getting police prosecuted for gross civil rights violations.
Actually, the link between 'heresy' and 'hearsay' is interesting to speculate on...
Heresy: Etymology: Middle English heresie, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin haeresis, from Late Greek hairesis, from Greek, action of taking, choice, sect, from hairein to take (source)
Hearsay: "hearsay is 1532 from phrase to hear say" (source); hear: Etymology: Middle English heren, from Old English hIeran; akin to Old High German hOren to hear, and probably to Latin cavEre to be on guard, Greek akouein to hear (source); say: Etymology: Middle English, from Old English secgan; akin to Old High German sagEn to say, Lithuanian sakyti, Greek ennepein to speak, tell (source).
Up until a few days ago CSE's website had this disclaimer: "None of the materials produced by Creation Science Evangelism are copyrighted, so feel free to copy those and distribute them freely."
This would not surprise me. However... the Wayback Machine seems to have a decent collection of content from the CSE website at DrDino.com; my quick sampling indicates they started asserting at least some copyright in 2005, and didn't turn up any quote on those lines. Care to point to a particular page from the WBM?
I will semi-agree, this is the last hole. Unfortunately, your calculations both neglect the time component, and omit the effects of INcompletely self-synthesizing organics potentially being present (and their associated probability of accumulating over time). Calculating would be a challenge, since most candidate species would be anaerobes, who ran into trouble around the Neoarchean with oxygen and have since (mostly) gone extinct or mutated far beyond recognition. Experimental methods (iterated synthesis and separation to concentrate "advanced" compounds) could probably pull it off in under a century.
The penultimate hole is full-fledged speciation. I suspect a ten- to thirty-year genetics program working with fruit flies could probably pull it off, but I doubt anyone will try for it anytime soon. There's no real scientific benefit of such an experiment; the only point is to be able to say "Shut your pie-holes, you ignorant asses!" — which the scientific community tends to avoid doing, outside of the occasional colloquium where the bar is a little too open.
...and then gain some more, and then there will be a semidecigram cylinder sitting next to it while a lot of physicists get asked pointed and embarrassing questions.
In the scenario I described, out of a million internet users, the system turns up 50,000 only 19 of whom are terrorists, but all of whom are now under suspicion.
True; however, this might be argued as reasonable suspicion... and therefore, grounds for obtaining a warrant to take a slightly more intrusive but still covert look at them (such as a pen tap register) to get more data, which might allow for an second pass test of 99.44% accuracy (both versus false positive and false negatives). If the second test's accuracy is independent of the first, there's only around a 9% chance of any of the guilty escaping the dragnet; call it one more getting away via false negative. So, we have 18 of the original 20 terrorists, and some 280 innocent suspects. That's almost to the point where skilled human effort, instead of automated computer testing, might be worthwhile.
It's a tool, like a hammer. It can be used stupidly, isn't guaranteed to work every time, and can be abused and turned against those it was created to protect — especially by idiots for who having a hammer makes everything look like a nail. Those are real dangers. But that is a reason for caution in use, as opposed to ruling it out.
I can understand the kiddie stuff. But what's wrong with asian women? Last I checked, asian women were beautiful, and there is nothing illegal about viewing them.
Thinkgeek (which shares Slashdot's corporate overlord) would evidently agree with your assessment of their appeal, as do I.
The problem is that, on average, Asian females tend to be more petite and flatter-chested than the average western Busty Bimbo counterpart. There are statistical outliers (Rin Aoki, Melissa Ashley), but that's the trend. Ergo, they look superficially younger... and thus, more like kiddie porn. I recall one pervert in some article about sex tourists ghoulishly gloating about this "advantage" when visiting East Asian brothels.
It's not inherently creepy, any more than any other sex kink or fetish. (Gentlemen prefer blondes, I generally prefer brunettes; however, everyone smiles for a redhead.) But it can hint at a bigger problem.
PRIVACY: I will access private information on computer systems only when it is necessary in the course of my technical duties. I will maintain and protect the confidentiality of any information to which I may have access regardless of the method by which I came into knowledge of it.
First part, good. Second part, less good; it effectively requires you take no action over other ethical offenses that you discover during the course of your work, save when your action is dictated by law... if then. We are not lawyers with an attorney-client privilege, and I don't believe that society would be improved by our having right or obligation on those lines. While we should generally keep our mouths shut, and should not use the information we learn for our own benefit, there are some things I will not walk blithely past and stay silent about. Civil Engineers have no obligation to keep quiet about any bodies that turn up while working on a building project; neither do I.
Aside from that, it's a pretty good code. Add in the line from the Civil Engineers' code about "shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public" at the beginning and I'd post it myself. As is... still missing something.
No, but giving it a simple moment of your thought to see if it's worth it to go further into investigating this "new idea" is indeed a good thing.
True in many circumstances; perhaps even most. However, not necessarily universally true under all conditions.
The conservative response (stick with the old idea) is generally gets to be of more benefit if the cost of decision analysis is high (EG, an O(2^n) algorithm), the potential cost of an incorrect dismissal is low, and the potential benefit of the new idea is low. The modern era has been marked by large numbers of new ideas where the benefits have been high (allowing new capabilities for humanity, such as the ability to work with larger amounts of energy at higher thermodynamic efficiency) and relatively low risk in trying them (due to a comparatively large surplus production beyond that needed for subsistence-level survival), making liberalism advantageous. The liberal approach is also generally beneficial in highly dynamic conditions, where previously advantageous methods become ineffective, and the value of previous experience to predicting what is going to happen is low.
HOWEVER, in the full course of human history, this may be prove a brief (thousand year) atypical aberration in the state of things. In an essentially static society, with limited surpluses, and limited room for improvement, those who experiment are more likely to end up dead than rich; evolution tends to diminish such tendencies.
Given the still generally dynamic state of the present era, conservatism is an evolutionary legacy, and deserves a certain amount of mockery. If anything, we may face an even worse period of change, with the possible effects of global warming. On the other hand, we are also facing resource depletion; geologic deposits of oil are becoming rarer, and (abiogenesis kooks aside) will not become more common again — once changed, it will not change back. Barring the Singularity, we face the Limits to Growth.
Now, for a really depressing thought: in Larry Niven's short story "Limits" speculated on the effect human mortality has on our view of the universe. We seek limits, and push at them. The lightspeed limit. The limiting strength of materials. Godel's theorem, on the limits of perfectability of mathematics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, limiting the amount of information one can have about a particle.
What if there is a fundamental, provable limit to intelligence?
In the really long haul, the conservatives may have the correct approach.
Success isn't really about schooling, it's about intelligence.
Success isn't really about either schooling or intelligence; it's about learning. The life story of Robert Gu is one example: pre-Alzheimers, he's a creative genius, but an utter failure as a human being.
Of course, your confusion on this point is understandable. The singularity threshold society Vinge depicts seems to have figured out how to ensure schooling equates with learning, which is a case of A Sufficiently Advanced Technology if I've ever heard of one.
Wrong branch of the service, but if Admiral Hyman Rickover were still alive he'd be shitting cinderblocks when he heard about this fiasco.
Based on my dad's description of how much of a tightass Rickover was about nuclear materials safety even at the best of times, Diamonds seem more likely.
As much as people like to make fun of the military, there are some things the military does that it takes extremely seriously, and generally has a relatively excellent track record with.
They do have one major advantage for insuring their people take important stuff seriously. When someone at the top comes around after a screwup and screams "I'm gonna have whoever is responsible for this taken out and shot!" at the top of his lungs, in most ordinary organizations it's pure hyperbole. For the military, this may be the simple literal truth.
(After my quick skim of the UCMJ, I(AmNotALawyerNorInTheMilitary) don't think even a kangaroo court could be persuaded to convict on capital Article 99(4) charge. Unless the base commander triggered this FUBB deliberately, the worst a court-martial could get him for is an Article 92 or 110-negligent violation, each worth a dishonorable discharge and 2 years at Leavenworth — which is still worse than most managers need to worry about.)
Nukes are not treated the same way as so many other comparatively unimportant items (like toilet seats).
Your dating experience evidently does not include any female members of the military.
"Services" produces no significant value multiplier to time. Money (actual monetary value, not fiat paper) comes from value multipliers to time.
Mmmm... even ignoring the secondary assertion (I've yet to hear an explanation of money that rings completely true), it can sometimes. Engineering design work is a form of service good, which results in development of items that can give considerable time savings. Develop a better mousetrap, spend less time chasing mice. Even if I don't build any mousetraps myself, the idea has value for a mousetrap maker, and thus the design service going into the idea creation.
Granted, a lot of what is passed off as "services" is crap (EG, efficiency expert burblings), and even more of what are called "service jobs" have value only as substitute goods: minimum wage is cheaper than amortizing the capital costs of a robot ("Would you like fries with that? BEEP!"). I suspect that the non-trivial information costs of distinguishing the competent from those talking out of their a...natomy is the leading reason for the former.
If the tale of Jonah isn't literally true, what else in the Bible isn't true? Perhaps someone could go through with a yellow highlighter and mark off those parts I should believe, and those parts I can dismiss as mythology.
Thomas Jefferson obliged your request, figuratively speaking; the highlighter hadn't been invented yet. Not as nifty as Goldman's "good parts" version of the Princess Bride (gad, Morgenstern is long winded, even for a native Florinese), but pretty good nonetheless.
DCMA would be Digital Copyright Millennium Act, which doesn't really make an awful lot of sense.
Well, it does if you understand what Mary Bono was pushing for with her copyright reforms ("forever, less a day"). Of course, those didn't make a lot of sense either — just a lot of dollars.
Evolutionary genetics and simple game theory lead to the conclusion that morality is an inevitable consequence of living in social groups.
Actually, you don't even need genetics. In Darwin's Cathedral, David Wilson convincingly argues that evolution in the most general sense (trait duplication, plus selective agency) suffices for the development of morality.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're filing false take-down notices, then CSEministry committed perjury, which means they can be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years.
IF you can find a prosecutor with jurisdiction and willingness to prosecute. In many jurisdictions, getting a Christian ministry prosecuted for perjury can be as hard as getting police prosecuted for gross civil rights violations.
Show me a miracle!
Take it up with Jon Osterman.
My money declares my (completely non-existent) trust in your deity
Non-existent trust for a non-existent deity; better than putting your trust in your fellow man... I fail to see the problem here. =)
Actually, the link between 'heresy' and 'hearsay' is interesting to speculate on...
Heresy: Etymology: Middle English heresie, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin haeresis, from Late Greek hairesis, from Greek, action of taking, choice, sect, from hairein to take (source)
Hearsay: "hearsay is 1532 from phrase to hear say" (source); hear: Etymology: Middle English heren, from Old English hIeran; akin to Old High German hOren to hear, and probably to Latin cavEre to be on guard, Greek akouein to hear (source); say: Etymology: Middle English, from Old English secgan; akin to Old High German sagEn to say, Lithuanian sakyti, Greek ennepein to speak, tell (source).
Alas, no fun at all.
Up until a few days ago CSE's website had this disclaimer: "None of the materials produced by Creation Science Evangelism are copyrighted, so feel free to copy those and distribute them freely."
This would not surprise me. However... the Wayback Machine seems to have a decent collection of content from the CSE website at DrDino.com; my quick sampling indicates they started asserting at least some copyright in 2005, and didn't turn up any quote on those lines. Care to point to a particular page from the WBM?
The penultimate hole is full-fledged speciation.
D'OH!. Make that was . Mother nature likes to play in the lab, too. =)
I feel this is a major hole.
I will semi-agree, this is the last hole. Unfortunately, your calculations both neglect the time component, and omit the effects of INcompletely self-synthesizing organics potentially being present (and their associated probability of accumulating over time). Calculating would be a challenge, since most candidate species would be anaerobes, who ran into trouble around the Neoarchean with oxygen and have since (mostly) gone extinct or mutated far beyond recognition. Experimental methods (iterated synthesis and separation to concentrate "advanced" compounds) could probably pull it off in under a century.
The penultimate hole is full-fledged speciation. I suspect a ten- to thirty-year genetics program working with fruit flies could probably pull it off, but I doubt anyone will try for it anytime soon. There's no real scientific benefit of such an experiment; the only point is to be able to say "Shut your pie-holes, you ignorant asses!" — which the scientific community tends to avoid doing, outside of the occasional colloquium where the bar is a little too open.
We can't directly and distinctly perceive magnetism
Ordinarily.
"Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart just in case?" — Peter Lorre to Vincent Price at Bela Lugosi's funeral
...and then gain some more, and then there will be a semidecigram cylinder sitting next to it while a lot of physicists get asked pointed and embarrassing questions.
In the scenario I described, out of a million internet users, the system turns up 50,000 only 19 of whom are terrorists, but all of whom are now under suspicion.
True; however, this might be argued as reasonable suspicion... and therefore, grounds for obtaining a warrant to take a slightly more intrusive but still covert look at them (such as a pen tap register) to get more data, which might allow for an second pass test of 99.44% accuracy (both versus false positive and false negatives). If the second test's accuracy is independent of the first, there's only around a 9% chance of any of the guilty escaping the dragnet; call it one more getting away via false negative. So, we have 18 of the original 20 terrorists, and some 280 innocent suspects. That's almost to the point where skilled human effort, instead of automated computer testing, might be worthwhile.
It's a tool, like a hammer. It can be used stupidly, isn't guaranteed to work every time, and can be abused and turned against those it was created to protect — especially by idiots for who having a hammer makes everything look like a nail. Those are real dangers. But that is a reason for caution in use, as opposed to ruling it out.
I can understand the kiddie stuff. But what's wrong with asian women? Last I checked, asian women were beautiful, and there is nothing illegal about viewing them.
Thinkgeek (which shares Slashdot's corporate overlord) would evidently agree with your assessment of their appeal, as do I.
The problem is that, on average, Asian females tend to be more petite and flatter-chested than the average western Busty Bimbo counterpart. There are statistical outliers (Rin Aoki, Melissa Ashley), but that's the trend. Ergo, they look superficially younger... and thus, more like kiddie porn. I recall one pervert in some article about sex tourists ghoulishly gloating about this "advantage" when visiting East Asian brothels.
It's not inherently creepy, any more than any other sex kink or fetish. (Gentlemen prefer blondes, I generally prefer brunettes; however, everyone smiles for a redhead.) But it can hint at a bigger problem.
The code of ethics is found here
I quibble:
First part, good. Second part, less good; it effectively requires you take no action over other ethical offenses that you discover during the course of your work, save when your action is dictated by law... if then. We are not lawyers with an attorney-client privilege, and I don't believe that society would be improved by our having right or obligation on those lines. While we should generally keep our mouths shut, and should not use the information we learn for our own benefit, there are some things I will not walk blithely past and stay silent about. Civil Engineers have no obligation to keep quiet about any bodies that turn up while working on a building project; neither do I.
Aside from that, it's a pretty good code. Add in the line from the Civil Engineers' code about "shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public" at the beginning and I'd post it myself. As is... still missing something.
No, but giving it a simple moment of your thought to see if it's worth it to go further into investigating this "new idea" is indeed a good thing.
True in many circumstances; perhaps even most. However, not necessarily universally true under all conditions.
The conservative response (stick with the old idea) is generally gets to be of more benefit if the cost of decision analysis is high (EG, an O(2^n) algorithm), the potential cost of an incorrect dismissal is low, and the potential benefit of the new idea is low. The modern era has been marked by large numbers of new ideas where the benefits have been high (allowing new capabilities for humanity, such as the ability to work with larger amounts of energy at higher thermodynamic efficiency) and relatively low risk in trying them (due to a comparatively large surplus production beyond that needed for subsistence-level survival), making liberalism advantageous. The liberal approach is also generally beneficial in highly dynamic conditions, where previously advantageous methods become ineffective, and the value of previous experience to predicting what is going to happen is low.
HOWEVER, in the full course of human history, this may be prove a brief (thousand year) atypical aberration in the state of things. In an essentially static society, with limited surpluses, and limited room for improvement, those who experiment are more likely to end up dead than rich; evolution tends to diminish such tendencies.
Given the still generally dynamic state of the present era, conservatism is an evolutionary legacy, and deserves a certain amount of mockery. If anything, we may face an even worse period of change, with the possible effects of global warming. On the other hand, we are also facing resource depletion; geologic deposits of oil are becoming rarer, and (abiogenesis kooks aside) will not become more common again — once changed, it will not change back. Barring the Singularity, we face the Limits to Growth.
Now, for a really depressing thought: in Larry Niven's short story "Limits" speculated on the effect human mortality has on our view of the universe. We seek limits, and push at them. The lightspeed limit. The limiting strength of materials. Godel's theorem, on the limits of perfectability of mathematics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, limiting the amount of information one can have about a particle.
What if there is a fundamental, provable limit to intelligence?
In the really long haul, the conservatives may have the correct approach.
Choice 2: Get hotel in correct timezone, fly there two days before.
(I am not a lawyer. Even if I were a lawyer, no-one in their right mind would want me as their lawyer.)
Success isn't really about schooling, it's about intelligence.
Success isn't really about either schooling or intelligence; it's about learning. The life story of Robert Gu is one example: pre-Alzheimers, he's a creative genius, but an utter failure as a human being.
Of course, your confusion on this point is understandable. The singularity threshold society Vinge depicts seems to have figured out how to ensure schooling equates with learning, which is a case of A Sufficiently Advanced Technology if I've ever heard of one.
Wrong branch of the service, but if Admiral Hyman Rickover were still alive he'd be shitting cinderblocks when he heard about this fiasco.
Based on my dad's description of how much of a tightass Rickover was about nuclear materials safety even at the best of times, Diamonds seem more likely.
As much as people like to make fun of the military, there are some things the military does that it takes extremely seriously, and generally has a relatively excellent track record with.
They do have one major advantage for insuring their people take important stuff seriously. When someone at the top comes around after a screwup and screams "I'm gonna have whoever is responsible for this taken out and shot!" at the top of his lungs, in most ordinary organizations it's pure hyperbole. For the military, this may be the simple literal truth.
(After my quick skim of the UCMJ, I(AmNotALawyerNorInTheMilitary) don't think even a kangaroo court could be persuaded to convict on capital Article 99(4) charge. Unless the base commander triggered this FUBB deliberately, the worst a court-martial could get him for is an Article 92 or 110-negligent violation, each worth a dishonorable discharge and 2 years at Leavenworth — which is still worse than most managers need to worry about.)
Nukes are not treated the same way as so many other comparatively unimportant items (like toilet seats).
Your dating experience evidently does not include any female members of the military.
"Services" produces no significant value multiplier to time. Money (actual monetary value, not fiat paper) comes from value multipliers to time.
Mmmm... even ignoring the secondary assertion (I've yet to hear an explanation of money that rings completely true), it can sometimes. Engineering design work is a form of service good, which results in development of items that can give considerable time savings. Develop a better mousetrap, spend less time chasing mice. Even if I don't build any mousetraps myself, the idea has value for a mousetrap maker, and thus the design service going into the idea creation.
Granted, a lot of what is passed off as "services" is crap (EG, efficiency expert burblings), and even more of what are called "service jobs" have value only as substitute goods: minimum wage is cheaper than amortizing the capital costs of a robot ("Would you like fries with that? BEEP!"). I suspect that the non-trivial information costs of distinguishing the competent from those talking out of their a...natomy is the leading reason for the former.
Semi-seriously. I'm not sure the services-dominant model is sustainable.
If the tale of Jonah isn't literally true, what else in the Bible isn't true? Perhaps someone could go through with a yellow highlighter and mark off those parts I should believe, and those parts I can dismiss as mythology.
Thomas Jefferson obliged your request, figuratively speaking; the highlighter hadn't been invented yet. Not as nifty as Goldman's "good parts" version of the Princess Bride (gad, Morgenstern is long winded, even for a native Florinese), but pretty good nonetheless.
DCMA would be Digital Copyright Millennium Act, which doesn't really make an awful lot of sense.
Well, it does if you understand what Mary Bono was pushing for with her copyright reforms ("forever, less a day"). Of course, those didn't make a lot of sense either — just a lot of dollars.
Evolutionary genetics and simple game theory lead to the conclusion that morality is an inevitable consequence of living in social groups.
Actually, you don't even need genetics. In Darwin's Cathedral, David Wilson convincingly argues that evolution in the most general sense (trait duplication, plus selective agency) suffices for the development of morality.
Network neutrality, enforced by roving bands of ninjas.
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
How about: 2 - Bite my shiny metal ass!
Someone ought to get the robot one of the T-shirts with that... just for casual Fridays, of course.