It wasn't just the style, it was the COMICS CODE. When the code was adopted, it forbid showing realistic means to commit crimes - so there goes the detective aspect of Detective comics (featuring none other than Batman). Batman now had to solve unrealistic murders and thefts only. The code forbid making criminals look attractive, so you had to make all the villians scarred, disfigured, or warped in some obvious ways. (Hence not just the Joker and Two-face, but eventually the DiVito Penguin with flipper-hands, horrible teeth, and obesity). The code said police and officials had to be shown as upright and honest, so no cops on the take plotlines. The code tried to stop all sorts of graphic horror and violence, so what was left as a way to deal with a bunch of insane, strange looking people out committing crimes? Mockery and Humor, or go where TV was not about to go - into serious introspection. As people eventually realized, one of the things the code said, in effect, was "Hey kids, trust beautiful people, but the disabled are all criminals!". I don't particularly get riled up over the Adam West series - it's just part of the same screwed up society that wouldn't show some The Prisoner episodes because they were seen as critical of the Viet Nam war. As you point out, TV was just following the comics of the time. But the comics of the time were seriously screwed up because of the code.
One reason for lesser capital gains taxes is investing supposedly creates jobs. By that line, we start lower capital gains taxation when the money has stayed in that business for a full year - reasoning that a year is certainly time enough to create a significant job. Making this a more explicit principle of gains taxation would mean several changes:
1. The money would have to be invested in businesses that create jobs in this country (the USA in my case - non US slashdot readers may want to compare what I'm describing with the way their markets and tax systems work), and probably we would have to set a threshold, such as 50% of the jobs, or 50% of the payroll, or something like that. 2. You couldn't get the better capital gains rate for a mutual fund unless it had kept its investment portfolio so it overall met the same rule as though it was an individual stock. Yes, that could get very complex, with a muni for example, investing more in a company that has 80% US employment just to get some flexability in selling off some other low performing but profitable stocks earlier - but note that particular complexity is something that might be good in itself. We don't really want investors to be looking for ccompanies with 50% of their employees in the US, but ignoring ones with 60%, 70% or more because it more than meets the minimum required, not if more than meeting the minimum is beneficial to the rest of the country. 2a. You probably can write the rules so individual investors can get the same ability to count some investments in offsetting others as for mutual funds and institutions, but I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader. 3. Since you dont pay gains taxes on an actual loss, this doesn't stop investors from selling off losses without a waiting period. By itself, such a system doesn't change the laws about claiming losses to offset profits on your taxes either. That might be a good thing, in that we aren't tweaking both ends of a feedback loop at the same time. 4. Obviously, microtrading would be the exact opposite of this system, and likely the first thing banned. However, if you cannot get the better capital gains rate on hyperfast transactions in such a system, most, if not all, of the allure is gone, so maybe the law doesn't have to specifically ban anything. People might still use HST in selected circumstances to deal with such issues as needing to free up funds for a more profitable investment they anticipate, for example - it's just they would generally be beaten in the market by the people who rely on holding on for the long term, unless their market projection was very, very good. 5. There's a lot more involved in crafting such a system for the real world, such as how business bankruptcy and recovery of assets by shareholders affects such a system.
Simple crafting of a thermonuclear device is, in itself, non-violent. Let's make sure we don't have any laws that would inadvertently restrict my right to construct one, under penalty of death. I'm not just using nukes as an example of the limits of your principles, mind you. More seriously, these ultra high speed transfer programs seem to show potential to be weapons of financial mass distruction. A device that could produce a greater great depression is a WMD in a sense very like an H-bomb. I'd argue that restricting them is constitutionally just like saying the right to bear arms does not extend to more physical weapons of mass distruction. People's right to seek profit in the market can be limited, just as posession of arms can be limited, by the fact that the potential downside is mass distruction far out of proportion to any advantages of use.
The one thing about Game of Thrones that most people who are just becoming fans don't get - EVERYBODY DIES! If it follows the books, absolutely every character you find youself liking, every one that becomes a favorite with millions of viewers, will die, generally by extreme violence. Imagine if you were really getting into original Trek, and somewhere about in the middle of season 2, Kirk gets his head exploded by a sniper disruptor, and McCoy has a heart attack trying to save him. Three weeks latrer, Checkov is dead, then by the end of the season Spock has been graphically fed feet first into a Vulcan rice picker. Maybe you thought 'City on the Edge of Forever' was couragious by showing sometimes nice people die, but now, someone you like is snuffing it every single episode. They bring back the Romulan commander you found yourself sneakily admiring, just to kill him off two minutes later. Klingons start naming their warriors with other sounds than K because that seems to be bad luck the way they are ALL being poisoned before they can get to command positions. The enterprise returns to the world of 'Shore Leave' just so people can permanent-die there this time. By the end of season 3, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, Rand, and the Enterprise itself are all violently dead, and so is everyone on most of the planets they visited. Oh, and every transporter malfunction ever was shown with bright red blood spraying neck high over all the walls of the room, and it turns out photon torpedos destroy spaceships and equipment, but leave their crews naked and alive, floating in vacuum until they pop like in Total Recall.
That's where Game of Thrones is headed. Personally, I'm thinking they will kill off one of the really popular characters and then be terribly surprised when that one becomes the straw that broke three million viewers backs and their audience share suddenly drops 50% in a week, and then the week after is worse, and all of the sudden they are needing to cancel it because they are down to less than 400,000 viewers per episode and getting a million pieces of hate mail a week. I honestly expect the series to self distruct if it trys to remain true to the novels.
Somebody says they would pirate rather than take a free copy and you say they are motivated by cost (being a cheap-ass). A person who really is only looking at the fiscal cost would be the very person who doesn't care whether it's IP infringement (at least, without risk of being fined) or legally free. Any person who does care is the very person who is not being motivated by being a "cheap-ass". I agree that Cito is generalizing without looking at the limits of his argument, but you just misread his last couple of sentences totally and attributed to him the exact opposite of his actual views. This being slashdot, you got modded up for that.
Jobs was a known bad transplant risk (for cancer that had already spread to multiple organs, a common reason to take a person off the lists entirely), and that liver only bought him a couple of years, if that. There are plenty of people who gain 20 or 30 healthy productive years from a liver transplant - in fact the best estimate currently for how long a transplant patient will live if they make it through the first few months when organ rejection is likely is now averaging 30 years. So yes, Jobs got a lifetime like anyone else, but not all lifetimes are (re)created equal.
Because we all know that Jobs would not have done a solid for a friend and sold it for a bargain price
Think about how many times just that sort of explanation has been used in court by people charged with racketeering, ponzi schemses, and similar. "Just a litte favor for a friend" is what people who are paying illegal kickbacks bribery, or extortion always say. A guy gets a contract for a new highway overpass, and it just haapens he recently built an outdoor hot tubbing area behind state representitive X's house at a bargain rate - just a favor for a long standing friend.
Here, a corporation was apparently formed and dissolved soon after just to handle this one transaction. Doesn't that sound like just maybe somebody knew they were guilty of something and was trying to cover it up? Oh no, people don't do that to hide from the law, they form new corporations just to do "a solid for a friend!".
A brand new install of Autocad costs $3,995 and up. It produces files that have a distinctive extension, making them easy to identify and to tell from other types of documents without even having to examine internal code. Any file produced by a legal autocad install was made by somebody who paid serious money to be able to do so. Ergo, if someone can harvest a thousand Autocad files at random, a high proportion of them will be of valuable, useful stuff.
Fighting warez sites distributing Autocad means, if the company is successful, a higher percentage of the documents made with it will be the valuable stuff. At 4K a legitimate copy, actually stopping a high percentage of 'pirates' means increasing the danger to your own legitimate users.
If going through 10,000 autocad documents means finding, say, a dozen new patent filings and diagrams, two trade secret process designs for million dollar product lines, a few archetectural blueprint packages, and such, it becomes worth a government paying a programming team to write the software and putting three or four fulltime engineers and a few technicians on just evaluating those documents for the 'good' ones. If there were a thousand bootleg copies of the software for every legitimate one, that government might not bother to go through 10 million documents for about the same haul, as most of the bootleg copies won't be producing anything worth that much.
Why by the British government? They forced Turing to try a somewhat experimental treatment for a condition that wasn't really any of their business, and the worst case assumption is this caused a suicidal depression. They still were apparently thinking the treatment was for Turing's own good. Yes, people can do a lot of harm that way, but it doesn't mean they will necessarily come to hate or even murder the person. Every case where somebody misguidedly forces a person to do something for his own good is not the Spanish inquisition, torturing people to death for the good of their souls. If Turing was actually murdered, which as you point out, is not at all what this article indicates, how is it unreasonable that someone sympathetic to the Nazis, or even some of those Nazis who escaped to Argentina and such places, found out something about his role in WW2 and did it? One real question here is if the British government was aware of blowback issues and took enough steps to protect its former spies and intel people. If people are going to speculate here, how about directing some of the speculation that way.
There's a general axiom of science that the observer isn't specially priveleged. In other words, when it comes to astronomy, what we see looking out is similar to what everyone else would see. The trouble with that idea is that, because of statistical laws, it has to break down at some level - if you look for, say, 20 different things, each with a very high, say, 95% chance of occuring, there will probably be at least one that looks seriously atypical from your viewpoint (assuming those things can be treated independently, of course). Scientists tend to argue that on some scale the universe looks uniform to all observers, but that's not actually as useful a starting assumption as it sounds, because no one is sure just what that scale's boundrys are, the minimum sample needed is, or just what things are or aren't 'unifomitarian'.
For example, some 19th and early 20th century astronomers observing our own solar system, thought that Earth's having such a large moon was very unusual, and if there were extra-solar, earth-like worlds, they would usually have much smaller moons, if any. But until we can image objects the size of our moon across interstellar distances, for all we know, Venus and Mars are unusual in not having larger moons (or any moon at all in the case of Venus). The common idea, that Earth-Moon like 'double planets' are rare, is based on damned near no data.
For another, the Sun and the Moon have almost exactly the same apparent diameter as seen from Earth - surely that's just a statistically unusual coincidence, but technically, we don't really know but that it might be anomalously common, and in complete contrast to the random ratios we might expect, for the same situation to occur elsewhere.
Maybe it will turn out that gas giants in a system typically range from a largest one in the closer orbit, outward to a smallest gas giant in the largest of a series of orbits, (and our solar system mostly fits a standard rule) or maybe our solar system has it bass ackwards, or maybe gas giant size and orbit distribution is completely random.
One minor point: There are no stars 10 times older than our sun. At 4.75 billion years old, the sun is about 1/3 the age of the entire universe, so even the earliest stars formed are only about 2 1/2 times as old. So i'll predict that, if there's more 'odd configurations' in older star systems, it will have to manefest itself over a smaller range of ages.
Pot and Acid are often used in non-recreational manners. There's plenty of people who took acid to explore their own minds and some whose goal was spiritual insight. (I'm not saying that it worked - I've seen some people where I'm pretty sure it didn't). Pot supposedly has some good uses as an anti-nausea drug, and LSD was used in a number of treatment programs to get people off of other drugs, drinking and some even sexually obsessive behaviors such as paedophilia in the 60s and many of these programs reported very good overall success, but a lot of the patients also claimed to have had spiritual insights that sounded like new age, world religions or 'Eastern' mystical experiences. It makes a certain amount of sense that treating such conditions as severe alcoholism might actually need a drug powerful enough to reach deep into a person's psyche, and that any drug that could help such a condition would also produce what the patient would call a 'life changing experience'.
As it stands, these two drugs are totally banned, and the government insists they have absolutely no legitimate uses. I don't know of anyone who uses methaqmphetamine or crack for spiritual insight - ALL meth and crack use seems to be recreational/escapist in motivation, yet both drugs are on the list of substances with legitimate medical uses. The easiest way to get a drug on the 'don't even think about trying to find a legitmizing use" list for the USA is for people to mention feeling at one with the universe, wanting world peace, or using that pesky word, 'love' outside of a church. If these drugs had just made people want to listen to Laurence Welk and dress like Advertising Execs, instead of listening to Jazz and dressing like Flower Children, they would probably be mandatory today instead of banned.
What If you build a server room that's either centered around a vertical pipe, or shaped as your long and narrow design, but adding an uphill gradient? Maybe instead of a constant slope, you could start off flat at the intake end, and end up swooping upwards? On the other hand, how much of a problem is a constant stiff breeze in a server room? You could get a lot of cooling with a constant 35 Kph vertical wind, but can your techs work in one?
Seems like evolutionary pressure (h)as been applIed
You would think so, but it hasn't. Reason it out a little further and I think you'll see why. One thing condoms are useful for is not having babies until you want to. Delaying reproduction isn't the same as not reproducing. Another thing condoms are useful for is avoiding diseases, some of which could make the user permanently infertile. In the long run, condom use could make some users more reproductively successful, not necessarily less. If you're betting there is significant evolutionary pressure, you're betting that there's a lot of people using a temporary method of birth control to permanently curtail reproduction instead of just to time it better, and that disease prevention doesn't offset avoiding reproduction in high risk situations. Neither of these is statistically supported.
There's plenty of examples where having just a few offspring and investing lots of resources into raising them beats having lots of offspring who are mostly on their own - in fact the whole mammalian survival strategy is basically "fewer offspring, more care", and mammals as a whole have been a pretty successful class. Condoms are a mammalian sort of idea.
Make an obvious show of force, and fifty people know about it. When one of them talks, you have no idea who spilled the beans, and in fact, you really can't tell if anyone did or if it's an outsider just speculating that you leaned on Microsoft. The quietest way is to plan in advance. Find a young guy in your agency who has what it takes to become just the right employee in the right position a few years down the road, and pay him* to get really good at what you think Microsoft will want by then. The second best approach is to let just one or two people on the inside at Microsoft know why you want somebody hired there. Combine this with the carrot and stick doctrine - offer the one or two persons at MS a nice treat, and quitely research their pasts in case you need to whip out a stick later. If you can't find any negatives on one of these guys, and he seems like a real pro-government boy scout, maybe you can just ask him to become your mole so you don't have to plant one.
*him could, of course, be her, or with MS, maybe it.
The whole concept of the unconsious as an inaccessable region of thought that drives behavior without any chance for the consious to understand or correct it is basic Freudian psychology, and largely discredited. Minsky's 'Society of Mind" is probably a lot closer, and there's literally generations of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and people who do whatever that thing Daniel Dennett does that have had some impact post Minsky's book. There are lots of things the brain normally does subconsiously. They aren't one monolithic mass, some of them can be done quite well with consious introspective awareness, and some people have trained the skill of consious oversight far beyond others. If some people have learned to control the thermal regulation centers in the limbic system consiously, it's a safe bet a lot more can look at a normally subconsious bias and ask themselves penetrating questions about whether it is really accurate and whether it helps them reach objective conclusions. As you put it, it takes work, and you could say that what you phrased as "realise that you do have unconsious biases" is just a particular case of a person recognising that they need to do that work.
As I understand it, the concept that "Truth is not always a defense" in English libel and slander laws relates to cases where other, innocent parties may also be damaged and particularly where the person who committed the libel or slander knew ( or should reasonably have known) of such damage. If there's a slippery slope there, it's probably because the general public can evidently count as the innocent party - so someone could, in theory, claim that the police are incompetent, and while true, this could cause damage by undermining public confidence and inspiring criminals. But, even if the letter of the law may allow such an interpretation, has anyone seriously tried it in court?
Consider, for a more basic example, a person suddenly becoming famous as an athelete, and somone else raking up muck about their parents. It may be true muck, but was the goal to expose the truth, or to take the recently famous person down a peg or two, or maybe even to make some money by, say, rattling the famous athelete just before the big game and betting accordingly? It makes a certain amount of logical sense, in that the overall English system emphasises motive so often, to consider it here.
It's a linguistic artifact. Trolling in the sense of dangling bait in front of a 'fish' was pretty much what the word meant for those examples of trying to lead somebody to a conclusion, perhaps even with a quite decent purpose if you count getting ignorant people to fully expose their ignorance so it could be corrected, or similar purposes. But, when this word also conjured up images of a Troll in the mythological sense, of course it came to mean an ignorant, rude or uncouth lout., or even a monster . Thanks to Phishing, we can't go back to calling the first form 'fishing' either, not without confusion. All that's left is to start calling the first form of trolls "Wishniks", which I propose we start doing immediately.
Medelson? What's he got to do with GMO plants? (Scott Medelson, shown on you-Tube as bench pressing 1080 lbs., is the first hit most of the time once you get Google to actually show you Medelsons instead of Mendelssohns). Sirrah, I suspect you mean the Physics teacher and friar, Gregor Mendel.
Sorry, but that's proof that the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm a regular volunteer at my church's outreach food distributions, and when we get more food than is needed we pass the rest on selectively to several different area food pantries, and usually stick around after delivery, help out, and sometimes even call their needs list for them and such to help them deal with a sudden spike in resources like that. What they will accept is very variable (Which is as it should be - private charities don't all need to be in lockstep.), and while I know places that would wory about a label coming off, I know more that wouldn't. For the hole in the outer package, it may make a difference if it was clearly a puncture or tear or if it looked like it might, even just possibly, be gnawed, but again, some places would take the foil packets out and pass them on, and some would give it out as is.
I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote about the effects of corrupt governments either, but I suspect you are extrapolating too far, and maybe treating it like the whole story. Right now, giving to some nations mans propping up the parasites they have for "leaders", and.knowing a lot of materials won't get through. But, people have the choice to give to organizations that largely work around those governments, and there are ways, so long as your standard is not 100% honest government selflessly concerned about every starving person in that nation, and blind to any ethnic differences, or you're not going to give at all. There are still places where people are just plain going hungry.
If I want to try KDE I just download the kubuntu distribution?
Shore answer: Yes. Longer answer: Yes, but by default, Kubuntu 12.04 doesn't use KDE 4.9 yet, it uses version 4.8.2. That's in a long term stable release for Kubuntu, so it seems like a pretty safe bet that the October release of Kubuntu (12.10) will go on up to at least 4.9.0. Really, I'm at least slightly impressed that Kubuntu's board feels a version of KDE that's only a few months from cutting edge is fine for an LTS release.
You caught yourself on using a technically incorrect definition of IQ - Thanks! You're halfway to understanding what you are wondering about, because you are at least trying to phrase your questions accurately.
A few points:
1. Intelligence does seem to be rising with each generation, if you use some of the standard tests and factor out a few questions for obvious logical reasons, (Such as one, for one example, that shows a picture of an old style rotary phone.). I.Q. remains at 100, but how many questions you get right to score that 100 goes up a smidge, in general, with each generation.
2. Intelligence is greatly affected by more than one gene. It's quite likely there are genes that together create a higher than average intelligence, mentally stabile person if they are all there together with a gene we'll call (as a convenient fictitious example) I.Q.Factor3A, but create a person with a higher than average intelligence, and a dehabilitating mental illness, if they are in the same organism as the gene I.Q.Factor3B version. It's also fairly likely there are cases where the I.Q.Factor3 gene doesn't, by itself, cause any problems in a person of average intelligence, whether it's version A or B.
3. One example of this is Aspergers syndrome. People (including many researchers) have tended to assume that a person with Aspergers has a lot of good genes for general intelligence and a bad gene that causes Aspergers, and that the same bad gene causes more 'typical' Autism in people without the bunch of good genes. But, that doesn't have to be the case. It could be, just for example, that a certain combination of otherwise good genes causes Aspergers if you have all five of them, but if you have any three, you get better than average intelligence without the problem side, and if you have any four, you get the smarts, plus only a few mildly limiting side effects that in general don't cause enough problems to be diagnosed. Factor in environment on top of this, and you see what a puzzle researchers are trying to unravel.
1. Presumably, if post singularity species want to be found, they will, and if they don't, they won't.
2. We can't talk scientifically about such entities, as if they exist, they can pretty much manipulate the scientists into concluding whatever they want. Science studys the natural order - a species whose technology is equivalent to magic will be functionally just as 'supernatural' as though they were genuinely so.
3. If a post singularity alien society doesn't want us to detect them, they may well also not want us to detect other pre-singularity aliens, so in that case, that window for easy detection becomes 0 years wide. Given post singularitans who don't want to openly reveal themselves, the possibiltiy they want to censor pre-singularity civilizations is proportionately higher than that they want to let the little fish communicate unhindered and hide just themselves, and both alternatives are higher than the chance they want to facilitate pre-singularity civilizations meeting even while they hide.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't just the style, it was the COMICS CODE. When the code was adopted, it forbid showing realistic means to commit crimes - so there goes the detective aspect of Detective comics (featuring none other than Batman). Batman now had to solve unrealistic murders and thefts only. The code forbid making criminals look attractive, so you had to make all the villians scarred, disfigured, or warped in some obvious ways. (Hence not just the Joker and Two-face, but eventually the DiVito Penguin with flipper-hands, horrible teeth, and obesity). The code said police and officials had to be shown as upright and honest, so no cops on the take plotlines. The code tried to stop all sorts of graphic horror and violence, so what was left as a way to deal with a bunch of insane, strange looking people out committing crimes? Mockery and Humor, or go where TV was not about to go - into serious introspection. As people eventually realized, one of the things the code said, in effect, was "Hey kids, trust beautiful people, but the disabled are all criminals!". I don't particularly get riled up over the Adam West series - it's just part of the same screwed up society that wouldn't show some The Prisoner episodes because they were seen as critical of the Viet Nam war. As you point out, TV was just following the comics of the time. But the comics of the time were seriously screwed up because of the code.
One reason for lesser capital gains taxes is investing supposedly creates jobs. By that line, we start lower capital gains taxation when the money has stayed in that business for a full year - reasoning that a year is certainly time enough to create a significant job. Making this a more explicit principle of gains taxation would mean several changes:
1. The money would have to be invested in businesses that create jobs in this country (the USA in my case - non US slashdot readers may want to compare what I'm describing with the way their markets and tax systems work), and probably we would have to set a threshold, such as 50% of the jobs, or 50% of the payroll, or something like that.
2. You couldn't get the better capital gains rate for a mutual fund unless it had kept its investment portfolio so it overall met the same rule as though it was an individual stock. Yes, that could get very complex, with a muni for example, investing more in a company that has 80% US employment just to get some flexability in selling off some other low performing but profitable stocks earlier - but note that particular complexity is something that might be good in itself. We don't really want investors to be looking for ccompanies with 50% of their employees in the US, but ignoring ones with 60%, 70% or more because it more than meets the minimum required, not if more than meeting the minimum is beneficial to the rest of the country.
2a. You probably can write the rules so individual investors can get the same ability to count some investments in offsetting others as for mutual funds and institutions, but I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
3. Since you dont pay gains taxes on an actual loss, this doesn't stop investors from selling off losses without a waiting period. By itself, such a system doesn't change the laws about claiming losses to offset profits on your taxes either. That might be a good thing, in that we aren't tweaking both ends of a feedback loop at the same time.
4. Obviously, microtrading would be the exact opposite of this system, and likely the first thing banned. However, if you cannot get the better capital gains rate on hyperfast transactions in such a system, most, if not all, of the allure is gone, so maybe the law doesn't have to specifically ban anything. People might still use HST in selected circumstances to deal with such issues as needing to free up funds for a more profitable investment they anticipate, for example - it's just they would generally be beaten in the market by the people who rely on holding on for the long term, unless their market projection was very, very good.
5. There's a lot more involved in crafting such a system for the real world, such as how business bankruptcy and recovery of assets by shareholders affects such a system.
Simple crafting of a thermonuclear device is, in itself, non-violent. Let's make sure we don't have any laws that would inadvertently restrict my right to construct one, under penalty of death.
I'm not just using nukes as an example of the limits of your principles, mind you. More seriously, these ultra high speed transfer programs seem to show potential to be weapons of financial mass distruction. A device that could produce a greater great depression is a WMD in a sense very like an H-bomb. I'd argue that restricting them is constitutionally just like saying the right to bear arms does not extend to more physical weapons of mass distruction. People's right to seek profit in the market can be limited, just as posession of arms can be limited, by the fact that the potential downside is mass distruction far out of proportion to any advantages of use.
The one thing about Game of Thrones that most people who are just becoming fans don't get - EVERYBODY DIES! If it follows the books, absolutely every character you find youself liking, every one that becomes a favorite with millions of viewers, will die, generally by extreme violence. Imagine if you were really getting into original Trek, and somewhere about in the middle of season 2, Kirk gets his head exploded by a sniper disruptor, and McCoy has a heart attack trying to save him. Three weeks latrer, Checkov is dead, then by the end of the season Spock has been graphically fed feet first into a Vulcan rice picker. Maybe you thought 'City on the Edge of Forever' was couragious by showing sometimes nice people die, but now, someone you like is snuffing it every single episode. They bring back the Romulan commander you found yourself sneakily admiring, just to kill him off two minutes later. Klingons start naming their warriors with other sounds than K because that seems to be bad luck the way they are ALL being poisoned before they can get to command positions. The enterprise returns to the world of 'Shore Leave' just so people can permanent-die there this time. By the end of season 3, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, Rand, and the Enterprise itself are all violently dead, and so is everyone on most of the planets they visited. Oh, and every transporter malfunction ever was shown with bright red blood spraying neck high over all the walls of the room, and it turns out photon torpedos destroy spaceships and equipment, but leave their crews naked and alive, floating in vacuum until they pop like in Total Recall.
That's where Game of Thrones is headed. Personally, I'm thinking they will kill off one of the really popular characters and then be terribly surprised when that one becomes the straw that broke three million viewers backs and their audience share suddenly drops 50% in a week, and then the week after is worse, and all of the sudden they are needing to cancel it because they are down to less than 400,000 viewers per episode and getting a million pieces of hate mail a week. I honestly expect the series to self distruct if it trys to remain true to the novels.
Somebody says they would pirate rather than take a free copy and you say they are motivated by cost (being a cheap-ass). A person who really is only looking at the fiscal cost would be the very person who doesn't care whether it's IP infringement (at least, without risk of being fined) or legally free. Any person who does care is the very person who is not being motivated by being a "cheap-ass". I agree that Cito is generalizing without looking at the limits of his argument, but you just misread his last couple of sentences totally and attributed to him the exact opposite of his actual views. This being slashdot, you got modded up for that.
Jobs was a known bad transplant risk (for cancer that had already spread to multiple organs, a common reason to take a person off the lists entirely), and that liver only bought him a couple of years, if that. There are plenty of people who gain 20 or 30 healthy productive years from a liver transplant - in fact the best estimate currently for how long a transplant patient will live if they make it through the first few months when organ rejection is likely is now averaging 30 years. So yes, Jobs got a lifetime like anyone else, but not all lifetimes are (re)created equal.
Because we all know that Jobs would not have done a solid for a friend and sold it for a bargain price
Think about how many times just that sort of explanation has been used in court by people charged with racketeering, ponzi schemses, and similar. "Just a litte favor for a friend" is what people who are paying illegal kickbacks bribery, or extortion always say. A guy gets a contract for a new highway overpass, and it just haapens he recently built an outdoor hot tubbing area behind state representitive X's house at a bargain rate - just a favor for a long standing friend.
Here, a corporation was apparently formed and dissolved soon after just to handle this one transaction. Doesn't that sound like just maybe somebody knew they were guilty of something and was trying to cover it up? Oh no, people don't do that to hide from the law, they form new corporations just to do "a solid for a friend!".
A brand new install of Autocad costs $3,995 and up. It produces files that have a distinctive extension, making them easy to identify and to tell from other types of documents without even having to examine internal code. Any file produced by a legal autocad install was made by somebody who paid serious money to be able to do so. Ergo, if someone can harvest a thousand Autocad files at random, a high proportion of them will be of valuable, useful stuff.
Fighting warez sites distributing Autocad means, if the company is successful, a higher percentage of the documents made with it will be the valuable stuff. At 4K a legitimate copy, actually stopping a high percentage of 'pirates' means increasing the danger to your own legitimate users.
If going through 10,000 autocad documents means finding, say, a dozen new patent filings and diagrams, two trade secret process designs for million dollar product lines, a few archetectural blueprint packages, and such, it becomes worth a government paying a programming team to write the software and putting three or four fulltime engineers and a few technicians on just evaluating those documents for the 'good' ones. If there were a thousand bootleg copies of the software for every legitimate one, that government might not bother to go through 10 million documents for about the same haul, as most of the bootleg copies won't be producing anything worth that much.
Why by the British government? They forced Turing to try a somewhat experimental treatment for a condition that wasn't really any of their business, and the worst case assumption is this caused a suicidal depression. They still were apparently thinking the treatment was for Turing's own good. Yes, people can do a lot of harm that way, but it doesn't mean they will necessarily come to hate or even murder the person. Every case where somebody misguidedly forces a person to do something for his own good is not the Spanish inquisition, torturing people to death for the good of their souls.
If Turing was actually murdered, which as you point out, is not at all what this article indicates, how is it unreasonable that someone sympathetic to the Nazis, or even some of those Nazis who escaped to Argentina and such places, found out something about his role in WW2 and did it? One real question here is if the British government was aware of blowback issues and took enough steps to protect its former spies and intel people. If people are going to speculate here, how about directing some of the speculation that way.
There's a general axiom of science that the observer isn't specially priveleged. In other words, when it comes to astronomy, what we see looking out is similar to what everyone else would see. The trouble with that idea is that, because of statistical laws, it has to break down at some level - if you look for, say, 20 different things, each with a very high, say, 95% chance of occuring, there will probably be at least one that looks seriously atypical from your viewpoint (assuming those things can be treated independently, of course). Scientists tend to argue that on some scale the universe looks uniform to all observers, but that's not actually as useful a starting assumption as it sounds, because no one is sure just what that scale's boundrys are, the minimum sample needed is, or just what things are or aren't 'unifomitarian'.
For example, some 19th and early 20th century astronomers observing our own solar system, thought that Earth's having such a large moon was very unusual, and if there were extra-solar, earth-like worlds, they would usually have much smaller moons, if any. But until we can image objects the size of our moon across interstellar distances, for all we know, Venus and Mars are unusual in not having larger moons (or any moon at all in the case of Venus). The common idea, that Earth-Moon like 'double planets' are rare, is based on damned near no data.
For another, the Sun and the Moon have almost exactly the same apparent diameter as seen from Earth - surely that's just a statistically unusual coincidence, but technically, we don't really know but that it might be anomalously common, and in complete contrast to the random ratios we might expect, for the same situation to occur elsewhere.
Maybe it will turn out that gas giants in a system typically range from a largest one in the closer orbit, outward to a smallest gas giant in the largest of a series of orbits, (and our solar system mostly fits a standard rule) or maybe our solar system has it bass ackwards, or maybe gas giant size and orbit distribution is completely random.
One minor point: There are no stars 10 times older than our sun. At 4.75 billion years old, the sun is about 1/3 the age of the entire universe, so even the earliest stars formed are only about 2 1/2 times as old. So i'll predict that, if there's more 'odd configurations' in older star systems, it will have to manefest itself over a smaller range of ages.
Pot and Acid are often used in non-recreational manners. There's plenty of people who took acid to explore their own minds and some whose goal was spiritual insight. (I'm not saying that it worked - I've seen some people where I'm pretty sure it didn't). Pot supposedly has some good uses as an anti-nausea drug, and LSD was used in a number of treatment programs to get people off of other drugs, drinking and some even sexually obsessive behaviors such as paedophilia in the 60s and many of these programs reported very good overall success, but a lot of the patients also claimed to have had spiritual insights that sounded like new age, world religions or 'Eastern' mystical experiences. It makes a certain amount of sense that treating such conditions as severe alcoholism might actually need a drug powerful enough to reach deep into a person's psyche, and that any drug that could help such a condition would also produce what the patient would call a 'life changing experience'.
As it stands, these two drugs are totally banned, and the government insists they have absolutely no legitimate uses. I don't know of anyone who uses methaqmphetamine or crack for spiritual insight - ALL meth and crack use seems to be recreational/escapist in motivation, yet both drugs are on the list of substances with legitimate medical uses. The easiest way to get a drug on the 'don't even think about trying to find a legitmizing use" list for the USA is for people to mention feeling at one with the universe, wanting world peace, or using that pesky word, 'love' outside of a church. If these drugs had just made people want to listen to Laurence Welk and dress like Advertising Execs, instead of listening to Jazz and dressing like Flower Children, they would probably be mandatory today instead of banned.
What If you build a server room that's either centered around a vertical pipe, or shaped as your long and narrow design, but adding an uphill gradient? Maybe instead of a constant slope, you could start off flat at the intake end, and end up swooping upwards?
On the other hand, how much of a problem is a constant stiff breeze in a server room? You could get a lot of cooling with a constant 35 Kph vertical wind, but can your techs work in one?
The president has flaunted the law consistently
"Flouted", not "flaunted"
Seems like evolutionary pressure (h)as been applIed
You would think so, but it hasn't. Reason it out a little further and I think you'll see why. One thing condoms are useful for is not having babies until you want to. Delaying reproduction isn't the same as not reproducing. Another thing condoms are useful for is avoiding diseases, some of which could make the user permanently infertile. In the long run, condom use could make some users more reproductively successful, not necessarily less. If you're betting there is significant evolutionary pressure, you're betting that there's a lot of people using a temporary method of birth control to permanently curtail reproduction instead of just to time it better, and that disease prevention doesn't offset avoiding reproduction in high risk situations. Neither of these is statistically supported.
There's plenty of examples where having just a few offspring and investing lots of resources into raising them beats having lots of offspring who are mostly on their own - in fact the whole mammalian survival strategy is basically "fewer offspring, more care", and mammals as a whole have been a pretty successful class. Condoms are a mammalian sort of idea.
Make an obvious show of force, and fifty people know about it. When one of them talks, you have no idea who spilled the beans, and in fact, you really can't tell if anyone did or if it's an outsider just speculating that you leaned on Microsoft. The quietest way is to plan in advance. Find a young guy in your agency who has what it takes to become just the right employee in the right position a few years down the road, and pay him* to get really good at what you think Microsoft will want by then. The second best approach is to let just one or two people on the inside at Microsoft know why you want somebody hired there. Combine this with the carrot and stick doctrine - offer the one or two persons at MS a nice treat, and quitely research their pasts in case you need to whip out a stick later. If you can't find any negatives on one of these guys, and he seems like a real pro-government boy scout, maybe you can just ask him to become your mole so you don't have to plant one.
*him could, of course, be her, or with MS, maybe it.
The whole concept of the unconsious as an inaccessable region of thought that drives behavior without any chance for the consious to understand or correct it is basic Freudian psychology, and largely discredited. Minsky's 'Society of Mind" is probably a lot closer, and there's literally generations of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and people who do whatever that thing Daniel Dennett does that have had some impact post Minsky's book. There are lots of things the brain normally does subconsiously. They aren't one monolithic mass, some of them can be done quite well with consious introspective awareness, and some people have trained the skill of consious oversight far beyond others. If some people have learned to control the thermal regulation centers in the limbic system consiously, it's a safe bet a lot more can look at a normally subconsious bias and ask themselves penetrating questions about whether it is really accurate and whether it helps them reach objective conclusions. As you put it, it takes work, and you could say that what you phrased as "realise that you do have unconsious biases" is just a particular case of a person recognising that they need to do that work.
As I understand it, the concept that "Truth is not always a defense" in English libel and slander laws relates to cases where other, innocent parties may also be damaged and particularly where the person who committed the libel or slander knew ( or should reasonably have known) of such damage. If there's a slippery slope there, it's probably because the general public can evidently count as the innocent party - so someone could, in theory, claim that the police are incompetent, and while true, this could cause damage by undermining public confidence and inspiring criminals. But, even if the letter of the law may allow such an interpretation, has anyone seriously tried it in court?
Consider, for a more basic example, a person suddenly becoming famous as an athelete, and somone else raking up muck about their parents. It may be true muck, but was the goal to expose the truth, or to take the recently famous person down a peg or two, or maybe even to make some money by, say, rattling the famous athelete just before the big game and betting accordingly? It makes a certain amount of logical sense, in that the overall English system emphasises motive so often, to consider it here.
It's a linguistic artifact. Trolling in the sense of dangling bait in front of a 'fish' was pretty much what the word meant for those examples of trying to lead somebody to a conclusion, perhaps even with a quite decent purpose if you count getting ignorant people to fully expose their ignorance so it could be corrected, or similar purposes. But, when this word also conjured up images of a Troll in the mythological sense, of course it came to mean an ignorant, rude or uncouth lout., or even a monster . Thanks to Phishing, we can't go back to calling the first form 'fishing' either, not without confusion. All that's left is to start calling the first form of trolls "Wishniks", which I propose we start doing immediately.
Medelson? What's he got to do with GMO plants? (Scott Medelson, shown on you-Tube as bench pressing 1080 lbs., is the first hit most of the time once you get Google to actually show you Medelsons instead of Mendelssohns). Sirrah, I suspect you mean the Physics teacher and friar, Gregor Mendel.
Sorry, but that's proof that the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm a regular volunteer at my church's outreach food distributions, and when we get more food than is needed we pass the rest on selectively to several different area food pantries, and usually stick around after delivery, help out, and sometimes even call their needs list for them and such to help them deal with a sudden spike in resources like that. What they will accept is very variable (Which is as it should be - private charities don't all need to be in lockstep.), and while I know places that would wory about a label coming off, I know more that wouldn't. For the hole in the outer package, it may make a difference if it was clearly a puncture or tear or if it looked like it might, even just possibly, be gnawed, but again, some places would take the foil packets out and pass them on, and some would give it out as is. .knowing a lot of materials won't get through. But, people have the choice to give to organizations that largely work around those governments, and there are ways, so long as your standard is not 100% honest government selflessly concerned about every starving person in that nation, and blind to any ethnic differences, or you're not going to give at all. There are still places where people are just plain going hungry.
I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote about the effects of corrupt governments either, but I suspect you are extrapolating too far, and maybe treating it like the whole story. Right now, giving to some nations mans propping up the parasites they have for "leaders", and
... and you should feel doubleplus ungood.
If I want to try KDE I just download the kubuntu distribution?
Shore answer: Yes.
Longer answer: Yes, but by default, Kubuntu 12.04 doesn't use KDE 4.9 yet, it uses version 4.8.2. That's in a long term stable release for Kubuntu, so it seems like a pretty safe bet that the October release of Kubuntu (12.10) will go on up to at least 4.9.0. Really, I'm at least slightly impressed that Kubuntu's board feels a version of KDE that's only a few months from cutting edge is fine for an LTS release.
You caught yourself on using a technically incorrect definition of IQ - Thanks! You're halfway to understanding what you are wondering about, because you are at least trying to phrase your questions accurately.
A few points:
1. Intelligence does seem to be rising with each generation, if you use some of the standard tests and factor out a few questions for obvious logical reasons, (Such as one, for one example, that shows a picture of an old style rotary phone.). I.Q. remains at 100, but how many questions you get right to score that 100 goes up a smidge, in general, with each generation.
2. Intelligence is greatly affected by more than one gene. It's quite likely there are genes that together create a higher than average intelligence, mentally stabile person if they are all there together with a gene we'll call (as a convenient fictitious example) I.Q.Factor3A, but create a person with a higher than average intelligence, and a dehabilitating mental illness, if they are in the same organism as the gene I.Q.Factor3B version. It's also fairly likely there are cases where the I.Q.Factor3 gene doesn't, by itself, cause any problems in a person of average intelligence, whether it's version A or B.
3. One example of this is Aspergers syndrome. People (including many researchers) have tended to assume that a person with Aspergers has a lot of good genes for general intelligence and a bad gene that causes Aspergers, and that the same bad gene causes more 'typical' Autism in people without the bunch of good genes. But, that doesn't have to be the case. It could be, just for example, that a certain combination of otherwise good genes causes Aspergers if you have all five of them, but if you have any three, you get better than average intelligence without the problem side, and if you have any four, you get the smarts, plus only a few mildly limiting side effects that in general don't cause enough problems to be diagnosed. Factor in environment on top of this, and you see what a puzzle researchers are trying to unravel.
1. Presumably, if post singularity species want to be found, they will, and if they don't, they won't.
2. We can't talk scientifically about such entities, as if they exist, they can pretty much manipulate the scientists into concluding whatever they want. Science studys the natural order - a species whose technology is equivalent to magic will be functionally just as 'supernatural' as though they were genuinely so.
3. If a post singularity alien society doesn't want us to detect them, they may well also not want us to detect other pre-singularity aliens, so in that case, that window for easy detection becomes 0 years wide. Given post singularitans who don't want to openly reveal themselves, the possibiltiy they want to censor pre-singularity civilizations is proportionately higher than that they want to let the little fish communicate unhindered and hide just themselves, and both alternatives are higher than the chance they want to facilitate pre-singularity civilizations meeting even while they hide.
Are you going to grab the polls by an ankle and bang them repeatedly against a concrete floor? Cause I'm totally down with that...