I think you need to say what you mean by "conscious" and by "choice." You've asserted that choice is a conscious process, but that's almost certainly not true, and studies like this prove it. That doesn't mean that you don't have free will, though. It just means that you don't make decisions at a conscious level. At a conscious level you may go over the inputs to the decision (or you may not), but the decision is then taken by unconscious mental processes acting either on the inputs that you considered, or not, depending on whether you put your attention on the decision.
The problem with the argument "there is free will" versus "there is not free will" is that the terms are poorly defined. By "free will" do you mean non-determinism? This is the traditional meaning, but the two aren't opposites. You can't have free will if the universe is deterministic, but the universe is apparently probabilistic, yet that doesn't mean that you necessarily have free will. If the outcome of your decisions is non-deterministic, but there is no conscious agent directing it, is that free will? What if it's an unconscious agent whose behavior is affected by conscious intentions? Where do the conscious intentions come from?
This is a really hard problem. Tests like the one in this study do not determine whether or not there is free will, but it's easy to grab attention by claiming that they do, and this is why such claims are made. Either that, or it's just inevitable.
It will almost certainly cost them sales in the short term. However, in the long term forcing them to tell the story of why GMOs are a good idea instead of just hiding the fact that the products are made with GMOs is a better way to get conspiracy freaks to chill. This whole thing could have been over a decade ago if the GMO proponents hadn't tried to dodge public concern. People assume that where there's smoke there's fire, and when you try to stifle public concern about something, it's totally natural for the public to freak out and get paranoid.
The funny thing about this is that what's actually going on is that people who practice mindfulness are less easily rattled. It's got nothing to do with the VR googles.
Yes, and indeed the referenced article says that we had two months of warning and did a drone strike to take out the command and control operation (or, more likely, some goat herders). And that wasn't enough to prevent the attack. If there's a lesson here, it's that this is an asymmetrical problem, and fixing it is going to require addressing underlying causes, not throwing cash and civil liberties on the bonfire in a futile attempt to even things up.
Or, this is the end of relying on the incredibly shaky pipeline of hackable routers that closed-source router vendors accidentally release. That pipeline is preventing vendors of routers that can run open source software from finding a sufficient market to actually make anything. Yes, what the FCC has done here is bogus, but in the long run it may actually be good for OpenWRT.
I was really into the space shuttle--I used to build models of various proposed space shuttles when I was a teenager into model rocketry. At the time of the disaster, I had found my way into a program in the psych department at the local community college that tried to study the effects of living in enclosed spaces by using a space shuttle mockup built out of plywood, TV monitors, some Atari 800s and electronic hardware from the surplus yard down in Taunton. It was very not realistic, but at the same time not bad--apparently it felt very convincing to the people who were in it.
So needless to say, we were all pretty wrecked. I don't know how many times I watched the explosion on the instant replay, but it was a lot. Lots of crying, very maudlin, but on the other hand the lot of us were able to hang out together and grieve with people who got it. Looking back on it, it's a funny coincidence that we were all there when it happened, but we were.
In principle they have to maintain less, so it's a win. In practice, it's early days for new generation mechanisms like solar, despite the rather terrifying amount of capacity that we now have. When everybody has panels, we'll have to have some way to pay for the grid, so obviously net metering _by itself_ doesn't scale, and particularly in states with lots of sunny days, this kind of adjustment was inevitable.
More memory doesn't necessarily make things faster if you have multiple streams and limited bandwidth. You can wind up with a situation where you have a lot of data queued in the buffer, and this botches TCP congestion control so that you wind up getting really poor throughput. Google "bufferbloat" for details. Using a crappy external wireless AP makes this worse. You really do want the wireless card to be treated as a first-class network interface on your router. Unfortunately, wireless drivers are usually closed-source, often have internal bufferbloat problems and other bugs, and can't be updated.
The article's main point, that a faster CPU in the router is wicked awesome, is completely true, of course. You just want to make sure you're running a recent Linux kernel that does a good job of queuing in the presence of a congested link.:)
I can't lead you by the nose to the numbers and expect you to accept them. I'm asking you to try to actually get an understanding of the problem, and then come back and tell me you still disagree with me. What you've said so far indicates that you don't actually know what the numbers are--if you did, you'd probably be outraged. It's always possible that you do know what the numbers are and think it's okay, but that's a bit hard to believe.
I haven't met a lot of these lazy people of whom you speak. We see them on TV, sure, but in real life? People sometimes do not want to put much effort into the meaningless job they are able to get, but if they had the opportunity to do something they considered meaningful, they'd work their asses off. But our economy isn't structured that way.
Sorry, I was insufficiently detailed in making my point. What I mean is that we have no way other than work for people who have no money to get money. Whether, and how much, you work, and how in-demand your skills are, all determine whether you can have money. So of course people work too much--it's the only way to get ahead if you are paid hourly, and it's often the only way to keep your job if you are on salary.
The problem is that this is ideologically unappetizing for people who have been buying in to the trickle-down model for the past thirty years, and it is really hard to let go of a strongly-held opinion, so there must be some other reason. This is a serious problem, for which the cure is not criticism of those who are stuck in this particular rut. They are suffering from being stuck there as much as we are, but getting them out will take more than just pointing out to them that they are mistaken.
No, the average Joe today cannot afford better health service than the richest people of 100 years ago. He can _get_ it, but he can't _afford_ it. Wages have fallen in the past thirty years. That is why people are working more. It's cruel to paint this as people being greedy. What is happening is just the opposite.
My grandfather worked as a mechanic at an orchid farm and was able to buy a nice new car every two years and retire in relative luxury to Florida. Nothing fancy, but a really nice retirement, which he and his wife enjoyed until he passed from a burst aneurysm in his eighties, for which the treatment is the same today as it was then: hope you get lucky and notice it before it goes, and watch it like a hawk until the risk of it going is worse than the risk of dying from trying to fix it.
People doing the same thing my grandfather did for a living today are barely getting by, and are not saving for retirement. Why is that, do you think?
(a) there isn't enough work for everyone because the people who have work are doing too much of it. (b) work isn't some virtuous act that we should all do as much of as possible.
The problem we have is that work is the only metric we have for determining how to share wealth. Think about it.
Um, the Republicans threatened to shut down the government if the cut wasn't renewed. I thought Obama should have called their bluff, and he did the next year when they did it again, but saying that what happened is Obama's fault is like saying that when someone mugs you, it's your fault, because you shouldn't have handed over your wallet.
Plus, seriously, the U.S. is like Crimea? We have been invaded by a foreign power, with support from some citizens and opposition from others? I'm sorry, but there is literally no commonality between the two cases other than that both of them nominally involve the interruption of electrical power delivery. This isn't analysis: it's fear-mongering.
Bifocals suck for computer work. Speaking from experience. You want near-distance reading glasses, not bifocals. These would have the same prescription as the bottom of your bifocals, but across the entire lens.
Mod parent up. I started to find my monitor blurry despite wearing strong corrective lenses when I was about 40 or 45. It's hard to say exactly when because I didn't really notice for a while. Reading glasses don't really help for this if you are nearsighted, because the monitor is too far away--you need nearsightedness correction. But the correction of your regular distance vision lenses stops working for near-distance vision when you get old enough to develop presbyopia.
There are a number of ways to address this. You can get a pair of work glasses (I have a pair) that are a weak version of your regular distance vision prescription. This will allow you to clearly focus on a screen that's 24" (or whatever) away. Measure how far your eyes are from your screen with a tape measure and bring that measurement with you when you go to the optometrist.
Bifocals are a poor solution for this problem, because you really want your whole range of vision to work, not just the bottom half. However, you can get multifocus contact lenses if you wear contacts. These are a bit different than bifocals, and take some getting used to, but apparently work very well (I haven't tried them--I'm reporting what a friend who swears by them has told me).
Another thing you can do, as others have suggested, is get a really big monitor. This doesn't work as well as you might like with every operating system. I'm having great luck with a 40" samsung 4k display and a Chromebook, because ChromeOS does a stupid but effective hack to make it work: they tell the browser the resolution is half what it is, and use bigger fonts. My experience doing the same thing with Ubuntu has been less positive.
Slashdot Mirror
I have plenty of evidence that the report is false, in the form of people bloviating on my timeline.
I think you need to say what you mean by "conscious" and by "choice." You've asserted that choice is a conscious process, but that's almost certainly not true, and studies like this prove it. That doesn't mean that you don't have free will, though. It just means that you don't make decisions at a conscious level. At a conscious level you may go over the inputs to the decision (or you may not), but the decision is then taken by unconscious mental processes acting either on the inputs that you considered, or not, depending on whether you put your attention on the decision.
The problem with the argument "there is free will" versus "there is not free will" is that the terms are poorly defined. By "free will" do you mean non-determinism? This is the traditional meaning, but the two aren't opposites. You can't have free will if the universe is deterministic, but the universe is apparently probabilistic, yet that doesn't mean that you necessarily have free will. If the outcome of your decisions is non-deterministic, but there is no conscious agent directing it, is that free will? What if it's an unconscious agent whose behavior is affected by conscious intentions? Where do the conscious intentions come from?
This is a really hard problem. Tests like the one in this study do not determine whether or not there is free will, but it's easy to grab attention by claiming that they do, and this is why such claims are made. Either that, or it's just inevitable.
It will almost certainly cost them sales in the short term. However, in the long term forcing them to tell the story of why GMOs are a good idea instead of just hiding the fact that the products are made with GMOs is a better way to get conspiracy freaks to chill. This whole thing could have been over a decade ago if the GMO proponents hadn't tried to dodge public concern. People assume that where there's smoke there's fire, and when you try to stifle public concern about something, it's totally natural for the public to freak out and get paranoid.
The funny thing about this is that what's actually going on is that people who practice mindfulness are less easily rattled. It's got nothing to do with the VR googles.
The equal time rule doesn't apply here; if it did, the way it would apply would be to force twitter to torpedo all trending political hashtags.
Ooh, that's a fantastic idea!
Yes, and indeed the referenced article says that we had two months of warning and did a drone strike to take out the command and control operation (or, more likely, some goat herders). And that wasn't enough to prevent the attack. If there's a lesson here, it's that this is an asymmetrical problem, and fixing it is going to require addressing underlying causes, not throwing cash and civil liberties on the bonfire in a futile attempt to even things up.
Or, this is the end of relying on the incredibly shaky pipeline of hackable routers that closed-source router vendors accidentally release. That pipeline is preventing vendors of routers that can run open source software from finding a sufficient market to actually make anything. Yes, what the FCC has done here is bogus, but in the long run it may actually be good for OpenWRT.
I was really into the space shuttle--I used to build models of various proposed space shuttles when I was a teenager into model rocketry. At the time of the disaster, I had found my way into a program in the psych department at the local community college that tried to study the effects of living in enclosed spaces by using a space shuttle mockup built out of plywood, TV monitors, some Atari 800s and electronic hardware from the surplus yard down in Taunton. It was very not realistic, but at the same time not bad--apparently it felt very convincing to the people who were in it.
So needless to say, we were all pretty wrecked. I don't know how many times I watched the explosion on the instant replay, but it was a lot. Lots of crying, very maudlin, but on the other hand the lot of us were able to hang out together and grieve with people who got it. Looking back on it, it's a funny coincidence that we were all there when it happened, but we were.
In principle they have to maintain less, so it's a win. In practice, it's early days for new generation mechanisms like solar, despite the rather terrifying amount of capacity that we now have. When everybody has panels, we'll have to have some way to pay for the grid, so obviously net metering _by itself_ doesn't scale, and particularly in states with lots of sunny days, this kind of adjustment was inevitable.
More memory doesn't necessarily make things faster if you have multiple streams and limited bandwidth. You can wind up with a situation where you have a lot of data queued in the buffer, and this botches TCP congestion control so that you wind up getting really poor throughput. Google "bufferbloat" for details. Using a crappy external wireless AP makes this worse. You really do want the wireless card to be treated as a first-class network interface on your router. Unfortunately, wireless drivers are usually closed-source, often have internal bufferbloat problems and other bugs, and can't be updated.
The article's main point, that a faster CPU in the router is wicked awesome, is completely true, of course. You just want to make sure you're running a recent Linux kernel that does a good job of queuing in the presence of a congested link. :)
I can't lead you by the nose to the numbers and expect you to accept them. I'm asking you to try to actually get an understanding of the problem, and then come back and tell me you still disagree with me. What you've said so far indicates that you don't actually know what the numbers are--if you did, you'd probably be outraged. It's always possible that you do know what the numbers are and think it's okay, but that's a bit hard to believe.
I haven't met a lot of these lazy people of whom you speak. We see them on TV, sure, but in real life? People sometimes do not want to put much effort into the meaningless job they are able to get, but if they had the opportunity to do something they considered meaningful, they'd work their asses off. But our economy isn't structured that way.
Sorry, I was insufficiently detailed in making my point. What I mean is that we have no way other than work for people who have no money to get money. Whether, and how much, you work, and how in-demand your skills are, all determine whether you can have money. So of course people work too much--it's the only way to get ahead if you are paid hourly, and it's often the only way to keep your job if you are on salary.
The problem is that this is ideologically unappetizing for people who have been buying in to the trickle-down model for the past thirty years, and it is really hard to let go of a strongly-held opinion, so there must be some other reason. This is a serious problem, for which the cure is not criticism of those who are stuck in this particular rut. They are suffering from being stuck there as much as we are, but getting them out will take more than just pointing out to them that they are mistaken.
No, the average Joe today cannot afford better health service than the richest people of 100 years ago. He can _get_ it, but he can't _afford_ it. Wages have fallen in the past thirty years. That is why people are working more. It's cruel to paint this as people being greedy. What is happening is just the opposite.
My grandfather worked as a mechanic at an orchid farm and was able to buy a nice new car every two years and retire in relative luxury to Florida. Nothing fancy, but a really nice retirement, which he and his wife enjoyed until he passed from a burst aneurysm in his eighties, for which the treatment is the same today as it was then: hope you get lucky and notice it before it goes, and watch it like a hawk until the risk of it going is worse than the risk of dying from trying to fix it.
People doing the same thing my grandfather did for a living today are barely getting by, and are not saving for retirement. Why is that, do you think?
(a) there isn't enough work for everyone because the people who have work are doing too much of it.
(b) work isn't some virtuous act that we should all do as much of as possible.
The problem we have is that work is the only metric we have for determining how to share wealth. Think about it.
Why is it so hard to actually look at the numbers? They are really striking. They do not support this idea of yours. Please look at the numbers.
Um, the Republicans threatened to shut down the government if the cut wasn't renewed. I thought Obama should have called their bluff, and he did the next year when they did it again, but saying that what happened is Obama's fault is like saying that when someone mugs you, it's your fault, because you shouldn't have handed over your wallet.
Plus, seriously, the U.S. is like Crimea? We have been invaded by a foreign power, with support from some citizens and opposition from others? I'm sorry, but there is literally no commonality between the two cases other than that both of them nominally involve the interruption of electrical power delivery. This isn't analysis: it's fear-mongering.
Prices are coming down. Mine was about $600, but I bet you can get one in a year or two for $400.
Bifocals suck for computer work. Speaking from experience. You want near-distance reading glasses, not bifocals. These would have the same prescription as the bottom of your bifocals, but across the entire lens.
Lasik doesn't help with presbyopia.
Mod parent up. I started to find my monitor blurry despite wearing strong corrective lenses when I was about 40 or 45. It's hard to say exactly when because I didn't really notice for a while. Reading glasses don't really help for this if you are nearsighted, because the monitor is too far away--you need nearsightedness correction. But the correction of your regular distance vision lenses stops working for near-distance vision when you get old enough to develop presbyopia.
There are a number of ways to address this. You can get a pair of work glasses (I have a pair) that are a weak version of your regular distance vision prescription. This will allow you to clearly focus on a screen that's 24" (or whatever) away. Measure how far your eyes are from your screen with a tape measure and bring that measurement with you when you go to the optometrist.
Bifocals are a poor solution for this problem, because you really want your whole range of vision to work, not just the bottom half. However, you can get multifocus contact lenses if you wear contacts. These are a bit different than bifocals, and take some getting used to, but apparently work very well (I haven't tried them--I'm reporting what a friend who swears by them has told me).
Another thing you can do, as others have suggested, is get a really big monitor. This doesn't work as well as you might like with every operating system. I'm having great luck with a 40" samsung 4k display and a Chromebook, because ChromeOS does a stupid but effective hack to make it work: they tell the browser the resolution is half what it is, and use bigger fonts. My experience doing the same thing with Ubuntu has been less positive.
"only"?
Why do people put up with this? Is this really what you want to be thinking about on your deathbed?