Sure, go to the doctor for a prescription, and mandatory rehab. Same with anything more addictive than alcohol. Why not? It is not like everybody is going to start using coke all of a sudden.
Such a law would cut the money (oxygen) from drug cartels, and give us proper statistics on how many people are using. Tax dollars would also be raised, which could be put towards researching addiction, and paying for rehab clinics, and child protection.
This would solve multiple problems at once, and probably reduce overall cocaine use.
Dude, it is easier to attract a bird with honey than with vinegar. There are signs of change in China, and/engagement/ is the way to bring this about. You do not want to cultivate and us versus them situation. That is how wars start.
Have you ever met an arrogant deluded control freak? How do you think wise people handle such a situation? Some goes for China.
Why would the laws of Nature impinge on your free will?
It is a classical problem in philosophy: how could there be free-will in a clockwork universe. The question is really a simple misunderstanding that has been taken very seriously, esp. by those who want to believe in a soul that transcends death.
we'll soon be hearing "my brain made me do it" as a courtroom defense.
We hear it, but it almost never works. There are statistics on this in criminology. Insanity defense goes back a long time -- the 19thC I believe, and the probability of it working hasn't changed in recent times.
Read "How the Mind Works" for an alternative discussion on consciousness, that steers clear of quantumn mysticism, which really doesn't explain anything at all.
Besides, nobody has to provide something better than quantum mysticism to point out how intellectually trashy it is. It is just a pointless distraction from the serious work of understanding how our minds work.
There is a much more interesting explanation for empathy and it is researched in detail in the field of social-neural-science. Goldman has a book that broadly covers some of the interesting ideas: "Social Cognition".
From TFA: "conservation of mysteries". Pretty straight-forward.
We seem to have free-will (very important for spirituality), but the universe appears to obey well ordered rules (laws of physics), so how can we have free will (and by proxy, a meaning to life)? Simple: stick it in quantumn mechanics, the new pineal gland that joins the ghost to the machine. That, we have reduced two mysteries to one.
One problem comes from understanding what we mean by free will -- I side with Daniel Dennett on this. Another problem comes from choosing one perspective over another because it makes people feel good.
The brain processes that process sentient creatures work under the assumption of an essence (ghost) in a sentience actor that has attributes (personality characteristics), which can be used to predict their behaviour. The notion of free-will and the spiritual path arise naturally out of this perspective, which can only see sentient actors as causal agents. Aspergers people have problems with this faculty.
The brain processes that see the ordering of the universe according to principles and rules give rise to logic. These processes probably arose originally as a by-product of brain processes that reverse engineer perspective and such from sensory information. These processes/can/ see sentient actors as causal agents, but suck at making predictions. These processes gave rise to the conception of quantumn mechanics.
Yet a third process creates the illusion that you have a unified consiousness, and only a single interpretation of sensory information (in the present moment), and a single story line for what is going on (again, in the present moment). This process needs to unify what is happening beneath, and creates a biased by simple and powerful construction of reality that can be used for further contemplation on the meaning of life, and calibration of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to the moment of consciousness.
Yet a forth process (the final one for this discussion), is building schema, and wants to create an over-arching and consistent and abstract conception (schema) of reality. The spiritual individual will found this abstract conception in sentient-processing processes, and have a problem with the ordered principle nature of reality, which must be suppressed (internally). This forth process jumps of quatumn mechanics to make itself consistent with the undeniable perception of an ordered universe, and the fact that things like computers work.
It is all very simple to me, because, like everyone else, I believe my abstract conception of reality (whatever it is) in any given present moment. If I am ever wrong, it is always about a previous instance of consciousness. But if we are both right, then someone must be in denial. Considering the immense caloric investment in creating your abstract schema, it is no wonder that the mind resorts to subconscious tricks to protect it. (This can lead to psychosis.)
How did their school manage to fail to teach them these skills?
It is a modern myth that we can teach most anybody any skill. We can do it, but only to a very rudimentary level. Programming takes specialised brain processing that many people (most) will never have. I saw a paper a few years ago that looked at predicted whether someone could/learn/ programming from how well they did on a psychological metric that tested specific types of reasoning.
Every human brain is different, and that is not the schools responsibility, although mushy feel-good progressives want to make us think it is so. Students require high expectations, or alternatively, they must have an attitude that they will get out of their education what they put in. That so many students explore so little of their potential points to the key pedagogical problem. The solution isn't making class more entertaining, or coming up with new gimmicks.
At a certain point, students must know that these are the expectations, and if you cannot or will not do it, then go do something else. You cannot make a cat interested in watching TV (the brain doesn't function that way), and you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink (cannot force a student to work appropriately).
It is not about being brilliant, but rather, having expectation that you can actually do something useful. I noted that a lot of naive CS students would try to learn the course work by reading and taking notes, and spending as little time as possible in front of the computer. WTF?
If you cannot stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. We either need two/different/ degrees, or tepid luke-warm water which is meaningless.
Something to consider next time you are using a buggy government webpage that probably cost millions of dollars.
It is an amazingly sad state of affairs, that the majority of the population have become so complacent in following the lies, that they no longer think for themselves.
It is far worse than that. There are plenty of people who say (sometimes yell) that they or the ones who think for themselves and are educated. Consider:
9-11 conspiracy theories
Close-encounter conspiracies
All major/academic/ feminist theories
Climate change denial
Myth of media violence
Every purveyor of these myths thinks that they have all of the relevant information, and if you disagree, it is because you lack education, are stupid, or plain evil. All of them have an axe to grind with science, because in some way, scientific thinking does not give them a leg to stand on. They are right, because either science is a religion, or because they have the correct science.
In short, the human being expresses group-level delusions, and there is usually much gnashing of teeth. My advice to the Texas education board, is not to give an inch, because that just encourages them.
Atlas did indeed shrug. Anyone who wants to see what liberals are all about should head to Detroit.
You, my friend, are an ideologue. This can be disproven by trying to find some disconfirming evidence for your previous statement. If you think none exists, then my point is proven.
Here here. Large consultancy firms would save their clients money by investing more resources in mentoring and code reviews, which would raise the level of skill of their consultants. Many of these people were not that interested in programming in the first place, and once they got a job, then fitting in, and playing well with the clients seems to be all that is important.
You, sir, live in a very strange world. Killing Bin Laden does not weaken the terrorist threat and may well make all of this worse. Think Leia to Darth Vader "The tighter you clench your first, the more star systems will slip through your fingers like grains of sand." There is a fight for control of the hearts and minds, and you do not want to lose that fight -- it is more important in keeping america safe. Bin Laden is nothing, and should have been kept alive and paraded in front of international courts. Some radicals would have always kept hold of conspiracy theories, whether in America or the Middle East. We do not want to incite a clash of civilisations. We would be equally responsible for the consequences.
it wouldnt matter zit, whether government is your email provider or not. either way, they will spy on you.
Actually, a government department is less likely to spy on you because they have no economic incentive. All you need is privacy provision in the email act, and the chances become very slim. I've worked in government, and they like to do things by the book.
Still, I don't think it's a very strong argument, and it can easily be misused
Indeed it can. For example, an uneducated person with money may dislike Fact X, so they create a camber of echoes for Fact Not-X, using whatever scrappy nonsense they can pay people to pull together. Then the general public will think both sides are ideologues. This is precisely how public opinion is shaped in a modern democracy.
Dude, market fundamentalism is based on neoliberalism as explicated by Hayek, who in turn formulated his theories based on his experiences in fascist Austria before WWII. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were fervent advocates of Hayek's vision of a free market, and the rest is, as they say, history.
A better understanding of human nature (by economists) would drive a new model of economics, but currently the way things stand, any talk of something different to neoliberal economics is "socialism". Note that Hayek believed that interference in the free market was totalitarianism, and that is how the discourse proceeds today. We can forgive Hayek for missing the irony of his words -- his world was in the grip of fascism -- but today, the free market/is/ the new totalitarianism.
The "sidelines" is just a place to stand, in hope that you do not get hit by the rabid saliva of some yapping dog.
It is unfortunately that the ITER sucks up so much funding, and that other fusion approaches are not as aggressively pursued. But the budget is tiny in the grand scheme of things, and really should come out of a small levy placed on coal and oil. My understanding is that the ITER will be energy positive, and we are down to understanding the best materials for the job. DEMO should be energy positive and produce electricity, and demonstrate the technology to build large-scale commercial reactors. There are some ifs and buts, but the project is definitely worth pursuing.
Even 20 years ago, if you wanted top pay and any respect you had to switch from whatever productive thing you did into management.
I suspect that this has been the way since the beginning of time. The difference today is that market fundamentalists reify the ruling class as somehow exceptional, when in reality, the hard work is done by the low paid, and all the great ideas come from (pretty-much) marginalised trouble makers.
Market fundamentalism has its roots in liberalism, and was reactionary against the totalitarian socialism of Austria. Neo-liberalism is not without merit. But by taking the market as the source of morals, we have neglected what really drives value in society.
Neo-conservative clash-of-civilisation cultural chauvinism is a reaction to the very same neo-liberal market fundamentalism that drives right-wing politics. It is a deeply flawed reaction to the problems of market fundamentalism, and has given voice to racists, religious fundamentalists and other bigots. They know they are correct, and have little need of education, scientific or otherwise.
Climate change will shape the future of politics, and unhappily, scientists will be at the centre of an irrational scrap-fight. We are in for a whole lot of pain. I recommend standing on the side-lines with a large serve of pop-corn.
It is not 60 years right now. The ITER is expected to break-even before 2020. In turn, this will allow experimentation on the last remaining pieces of the puzzle, and allow the construction of DEMO, which is expected to produce as much electricity as a full-sized fission plant.
In the long road to fusion power, we are currently drilling down on the details. The cost of ITER is less than what the Canadian government wants to spend on F-35 fighters.
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia, the polymer notes are recycled into hard plastic bins.
Besides, /nothing/ would convince you that AGW is real.
Sure, go to the doctor for a prescription, and mandatory rehab. Same with anything more addictive than alcohol. Why not? It is not like everybody is going to start using coke all of a sudden.
Such a law would cut the money (oxygen) from drug cartels, and give us proper statistics on how many people are using. Tax dollars would also be raised, which could be put towards researching addiction, and paying for rehab clinics, and child protection.
This would solve multiple problems at once, and probably reduce overall cocaine use.
Recently discovered "researchblogging.org". Not computer news, but more substance than /. by a long shot.
Dude, it is easier to attract a bird with honey than with vinegar. There are signs of change in China, and /engagement/ is the way to bring this about. You do not want to cultivate and us versus them situation. That is how wars start.
Have you ever met an arrogant deluded control freak? How do you think wise people handle such a situation? Some goes for China.
What Manning did was illegal, and he'll be punished for it
He has /already/ been punished and made an example of. I wander how history will remember Manning...
Cause if it is the law, then it is automatically moral and right, pure and simple, /sarcasm
Why would the laws of Nature impinge on your free will?
It is a classical problem in philosophy: how could there be free-will in a clockwork universe. The question is really a simple misunderstanding that has been taken very seriously, esp. by those who want to believe in a soul that transcends death.
we'll soon be hearing "my brain made me do it" as a courtroom defense.
We hear it, but it almost never works. There are statistics on this in criminology. Insanity defense goes back a long time -- the 19thC I believe, and the probability of it working hasn't changed in recent times.
Read "How the Mind Works" for an alternative discussion on consciousness, that steers clear of quantumn mysticism, which really doesn't explain anything at all.
Besides, nobody has to provide something better than quantum mysticism to point out how intellectually trashy it is. It is just a pointless distraction from the serious work of understanding how our minds work.
There is a much more interesting explanation for empathy and it is researched in detail in the field of social-neural-science. Goldman has a book that broadly covers some of the interesting ideas: "Social Cognition".
Care to state it?
From TFA: "conservation of mysteries". Pretty straight-forward.
/can/ see sentient actors as causal agents, but suck at making predictions. These processes gave rise to the conception of quantumn mechanics.
We seem to have free-will (very important for spirituality), but the universe appears to obey well ordered rules (laws of physics), so how can we have free will (and by proxy, a meaning to life)? Simple: stick it in quantumn mechanics, the new pineal gland that joins the ghost to the machine. That, we have reduced two mysteries to one.
One problem comes from understanding what we mean by free will -- I side with Daniel Dennett on this. Another problem comes from choosing one perspective over another because it makes people feel good.
The brain processes that process sentient creatures work under the assumption of an essence (ghost) in a sentience actor that has attributes (personality characteristics), which can be used to predict their behaviour. The notion of free-will and the spiritual path arise naturally out of this perspective, which can only see sentient actors as causal agents. Aspergers people have problems with this faculty.
The brain processes that see the ordering of the universe according to principles and rules give rise to logic. These processes probably arose originally as a by-product of brain processes that reverse engineer perspective and such from sensory information. These processes
Yet a third process creates the illusion that you have a unified consiousness, and only a single interpretation of sensory information (in the present moment), and a single story line for what is going on (again, in the present moment). This process needs to unify what is happening beneath, and creates a biased by simple and powerful construction of reality that can be used for further contemplation on the meaning of life, and calibration of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to the moment of consciousness.
Yet a forth process (the final one for this discussion), is building schema, and wants to create an over-arching and consistent and abstract conception (schema) of reality. The spiritual individual will found this abstract conception in sentient-processing processes, and have a problem with the ordered principle nature of reality, which must be suppressed (internally). This forth process jumps of quatumn mechanics to make itself consistent with the undeniable perception of an ordered universe, and the fact that things like computers work.
It is all very simple to me, because, like everyone else, I believe my abstract conception of reality (whatever it is) in any given present moment. If I am ever wrong, it is always about a previous instance of consciousness. But if we are both right, then someone must be in denial. Considering the immense caloric investment in creating your abstract schema, it is no wonder that the mind resorts to subconscious tricks to protect it. (This can lead to psychosis.)
The case and screen on my imac are very robust. Also, my imac is practically silent. Good industrial design for peanuts extra.
How did their school manage to fail to teach them these skills?
It is a modern myth that we can teach most anybody any skill. We can do it, but only to a very rudimentary level. Programming takes specialised brain processing that many people (most) will never have. I saw a paper a few years ago that looked at predicted whether someone could /learn/ programming from how well they did on a psychological metric that tested specific types of reasoning.
Every human brain is different, and that is not the schools responsibility, although mushy feel-good progressives want to make us think it is so. Students require high expectations, or alternatively, they must have an attitude that they will get out of their education what they put in. That so many students explore so little of their potential points to the key pedagogical problem. The solution isn't making class more entertaining, or coming up with new gimmicks.
At a certain point, students must know that these are the expectations, and if you cannot or will not do it, then go do something else. You cannot make a cat interested in watching TV (the brain doesn't function that way), and you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink (cannot force a student to work appropriately).
It is not about being brilliant, but rather, having expectation that you can actually do something useful. I noted that a lot of naive CS students would try to learn the course work by reading and taking notes, and spending as little time as possible in front of the computer. WTF?
/different/ degrees, or tepid luke-warm water which is meaningless.
If you cannot stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. We either need two
Something to consider next time you are using a buggy government webpage that probably cost millions of dollars.
It is an amazingly sad state of affairs, that the majority of the population have become so complacent in following the lies, that they no longer think for themselves.
It is far worse than that. There are plenty of people who say (sometimes yell) that they or the ones who think for themselves and are educated. Consider:
Every purveyor of these myths thinks that they have all of the relevant information, and if you disagree, it is because you lack education, are stupid, or plain evil. All of them have an axe to grind with science, because in some way, scientific thinking does not give them a leg to stand on. They are right, because either science is a religion, or because they have the correct science.
In short, the human being expresses group-level delusions, and there is usually much gnashing of teeth. My advice to the Texas education board, is not to give an inch, because that just encourages them.
Atlas did indeed shrug. Anyone who wants to see what liberals are all about should head to Detroit.
You, my friend, are an ideologue. This can be disproven by trying to find some disconfirming evidence for your previous statement. If you think none exists, then my point is proven.
Here here. Large consultancy firms would save their clients money by investing more resources in mentoring and code reviews, which would raise the level of skill of their consultants. Many of these people were not that interested in programming in the first place, and once they got a job, then fitting in, and playing well with the clients seems to be all that is important.
You, sir, live in a very strange world. Killing Bin Laden does not weaken the terrorist threat and may well make all of this worse. Think Leia to Darth Vader "The tighter you clench your first, the more star systems will slip through your fingers like grains of sand." There is a fight for control of the hearts and minds, and you do not want to lose that fight -- it is more important in keeping america safe. Bin Laden is nothing, and should have been kept alive and paraded in front of international courts. Some radicals would have always kept hold of conspiracy theories, whether in America or the Middle East. We do not want to incite a clash of civilisations. We would be equally responsible for the consequences.
it wouldnt matter zit, whether government is your email provider or not. either way, they will spy on you.
Actually, a government department is less likely to spy on you because they have no economic incentive. All you need is privacy provision in the email act, and the chances become very slim. I've worked in government, and they like to do things by the book.
Still, I don't think it's a very strong argument, and it can easily be misused
Indeed it can. For example, an uneducated person with money may dislike Fact X, so they create a camber of echoes for Fact Not-X, using whatever scrappy nonsense they can pay people to pull together. Then the general public will think both sides are ideologues. This is precisely how public opinion is shaped in a modern democracy.
Dude, market fundamentalism is based on neoliberalism as explicated by Hayek, who in turn formulated his theories based on his experiences in fascist Austria before WWII. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were fervent advocates of Hayek's vision of a free market, and the rest is, as they say, history.
/is/ the new totalitarianism.
A better understanding of human nature (by economists) would drive a new model of economics, but currently the way things stand, any talk of something different to neoliberal economics is "socialism". Note that Hayek believed that interference in the free market was totalitarianism, and that is how the discourse proceeds today. We can forgive Hayek for missing the irony of his words -- his world was in the grip of fascism -- but today, the free market
The "sidelines" is just a place to stand, in hope that you do not get hit by the rabid saliva of some yapping dog.
It is unfortunately that the ITER sucks up so much funding, and that other fusion approaches are not as aggressively pursued. But the budget is tiny in the grand scheme of things, and really should come out of a small levy placed on coal and oil. My understanding is that the ITER will be energy positive, and we are down to understanding the best materials for the job. DEMO should be energy positive and produce electricity, and demonstrate the technology to build large-scale commercial reactors. There are some ifs and buts, but the project is definitely worth pursuing.
Even 20 years ago, if you wanted top pay and any respect you had to switch from whatever productive thing you did into management.
I suspect that this has been the way since the beginning of time. The difference today is that market fundamentalists reify the ruling class as somehow exceptional, when in reality, the hard work is done by the low paid, and all the great ideas come from (pretty-much) marginalised trouble makers.
Market fundamentalism has its roots in liberalism, and was reactionary against the totalitarian socialism of Austria. Neo-liberalism is not without merit. But by taking the market as the source of morals, we have neglected what really drives value in society.
Neo-conservative clash-of-civilisation cultural chauvinism is a reaction to the very same neo-liberal market fundamentalism that drives right-wing politics. It is a deeply flawed reaction to the problems of market fundamentalism, and has given voice to racists, religious fundamentalists and other bigots. They know they are correct, and have little need of education, scientific or otherwise.
Climate change will shape the future of politics, and unhappily, scientists will be at the centre of an irrational scrap-fight. We are in for a whole lot of pain. I recommend standing on the side-lines with a large serve of pop-corn.
It is not 60 years right now. The ITER is expected to break-even before 2020. In turn, this will allow experimentation on the last remaining pieces of the puzzle, and allow the construction of DEMO, which is expected to produce as much electricity as a full-sized fission plant.
In the long road to fusion power, we are currently drilling down on the details. The cost of ITER is less than what the Canadian government wants to spend on F-35 fighters.