What are you saying? That the stock market is random or that you can snapshot it and use it as a random seed? The first is wrong and the second as an actual implementation seems highly contrived and improbable. What kind of people are we talking about that would do this?
An actual place where this is used is seeding PRNGs used to select people for jury pools. They want the seed to be something verifiable by third parties after the fact, but not anything that could have been predicted in advance or manipulated to determine who will be in the pool.
As much as I enjoy a good old apple bashing, anyone who trust their gps without checking the plausibility of the route is an utter fool.
The map shows the city in the wrong location. Should they have consulted two maps to verify the coordinates of their destination, or is there other in-context information that should have made it obvious the route was wrong?
Part of working is investing your children's future, not some Indian slum dog's.
This is unrelated to adults entering the country to perform skilled labor. The cost of developing their human capital has already been paid: when someone enters this country as an adult, we acquire a skilled laborer without having to pay the normal cost of educating him from childhood and sheltering him before he can work. We receive the benefit without the cost.
What does this mean, "real" Americans should all be emigrating out of North America?
Do you think that there is a country that offers both greater liberty and greater opportunity to those willing to work hard?
I cannot agree with this more. Undergoing the hardship and risk of moving to a foreign country for the chance of a better life is the foundation of the American character.
Those who oppose immigration for fear of their own ability to compete have lost this spirit. The desire to succeed by holding back others rather than through one's own merit is not only cowardly and low, but it also impoverishes society. Public policy should not harm the population at large in order to protect a lazy few.
It's run by the Republican Guard. They let the mullahs and ayatollah go on thinking they run things, also leave civilian stuff to them, too, but the hard decisions on nuclear research, cracking skulls, rigging elections, that's done by the Republican Guard. If the religious establishment think they really run things, try reigning in the Republican Guard and see what happens.
(Quibbling) You're thinking of the Revolutionary Guard. The Republic Guard is from the other Ira[nq].
I'm not sure you're correct, though. Iran has a conventional army several times larger than the Revolutionary Guard with a separate command structure. There are also the Basij militias that -- although nominally part of the Revolutionary Guard -- take their orders directly from the local clerics.
Na'vi don't seem to be an "advanced civilization" though they had their tricks and secrets indeed.
It seemed to me that the Na'vi were obviously the descendants of an extremely advanced civilization, who (living on a just-dangerous-enough-to-be-interesting garden world curated by a planet-spanning AI) had eventually reverted to a state of nature.
My country has free health care (well, you pay something, max $350 a year, but only if you can afford it and beyond that it's free)
No you most certainly don't, any more than any nation has free roads or free public education. What you have is tax-funded health care. You may not pay when you visit a clinic, but unless your health care system runs on slave labor you are all certainly paying.
By remaining, you are implicitly saying that you can live with this system, or that it is at least better than any other alternatives.
There are some missing steps between "you can live with things as they are" and "therefore you should not attempt to change anything."
A moment's reflection will show that this nonsensical argument would apply to anyone anywhere at any point in history.
I don't agree with how every cent of my taxes are spent, but that's what comes with representative democracy.
Living with decisions you don't agree with comes with any form of government where you aren't dictator for life. That isn't special about democracy, representative or otherwise. What is special about democracy is that it expands the range of responses available when you disagree with something.
Democracy works when people advocate for changes they want. When enough people agree, change happens: in that manner, we approximate the greatest good for the greatest number.
Whether an Apple laptop is price competitive depends on how long after release you look at it. Apple generally updates their laptops every 250-350 days, and AFAIK the price stays the same during that period.
How the heck are those legal? (I looked through the FAQs and don't see this covered -- e.g. no mention of Sierra/the existing owner of copyrights/trademarks saying these are OK, preferably with proof.)
They claim to have permission from the copyright holder.
The deer, otherwise left alone, could go on to do his own thing, have babies of his own, get eaten by wolves, whatever. That's Nature.
Why is it worse to be eaten by a person than eaten by a wolf? Prey animals are literally devoured alive, their tendons cut so they cannot run and their entrails ripped out of their still-struggling bodies. As the relative of human hunters, I am sure you know that the ability to kill cleanly is considered a minimum competence. It's natural for prey animals to die exhausted and in terror. That doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes -- a lot of the time -- unnatural is better.
I do not hunt. But if I did, I would do it humanely, with a gun.
You're apparently using "selfish" to mean "acting in accordance with a motivation", which is not a particularly useful description (especially if you are including involuntary processes in this), and is certainly not consistent with the general use of the word.
The difference between altruism and selfishness isn't whether or not you like what you're doing, but what sorts of things you like to do.
I do take issue with the concept of having to pay more to not have a keylogger on my phone.
It makes sense to me that company might offer a cheaper-but-spyware-riddled version of a phone. It's not much different from adware, which is often free or cheaper than other software of its type. Whether you cast it as "paying a premium for privacy" or "getting a discount for giving up privacy", it's the same idea as long as the company is upfront about the spyware (if they aren't, then they're just crooks).
The free market has its own failings. When drug development is strongly driven by the profit potential, drug development inevitably goes where the money is, but that's not always where we need drug development to go. For instance, there are a lot of well-off white guys who have trouble getting boners, so the drug companies have spent untold millions giving us Viagra and similar drugs. Meanwhile, there are a lot of poor, dark-skinned people in the Third World who are suffering from malaria.
You could have left out the words "white guys" and "dark-skinned" from your post without changing anything, unless your intention was to slip in a side implication that markets are more prone to racial discrimination than government bodies. If that is your implication, I disagree with this. Businessmen have to balance their private prejudices against their greed, but the same doesn't apply to unaccountable bureaucrats.
Mathematicians also have this tendency to view CS as just a branch of math, and algorithms as something that can be expressed as "just" a series of formulas.
Why do you consider that inaccurate? I'll agree that programming itself certainly isn't just math, but I would consider computer science to be a specialized branch of mathematics.
The main problem isn't fire. It's that that they require large ground crews to manage and airplanes are much faster. When it comes to cargo, they're more efficient than airplanes but less efficient than trains or ships. There are niches where they could be useful, but they don't make sense as a general replacement for airplanes or railroads.
"Reasoning doesnâ(TM)t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions," said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. "It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us." Truth and accuracy were beside the point.
That is a fairly damning quote on its own, but I will assume that Dr. Mercier is being misrepresented by omission of context.
It is not the case that all strategies have the same value. If reason were no more accurate than random choices, then there would be no evolutionary value whatsoever to evaluating the suggestions of others on the basis of reason.
The "purpose" of claws (if we are ascribing intentionality to natural selection, which is a mistake) may be to help climbing or to grip onto prey, not to be strong and sharp, but if they weren't strong and sharp they wouldn't be able to do that.
I've heard that the creator of Bitcoin holds approximately 1/3 of all Bitcoins in existence, which is (by some back-of-the-envelope math) in the neighborhood of 1/10 of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist. Even if everything else about the idea is good, what are the reasons to use Satoshi Nakamoto's coins instead of forking the currency?
But what if you replace the brain neuron by neuron, without a break in conciousness?
That's begging the question. If you assume that there will be no break or reduction in consciousness as bits of your brain are replaced, then you never lose continuity. It's not obvious that this would be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan did some horrible things to Chinese people in WWII, and their government has never acknowledged any of it.
On the surface, it seems like the Japanese government has repeatedly acknowledged its crimes during World War II. See List of war apology statements issued by Japan.
What are you saying? That the stock market is random or that you can snapshot it and use it as a random seed? The first is wrong and the second as an actual implementation seems highly contrived and improbable. What kind of people are we talking about that would do this?
An actual place where this is used is seeding PRNGs used to select people for jury pools. They want the seed to be something verifiable by third parties after the fact, but not anything that could have been predicted in advance or manipulated to determine who will be in the pool.
As much as I enjoy a good old apple bashing, anyone who trust their gps without checking the plausibility of the route is an utter fool.
The map shows the city in the wrong location. Should they have consulted two maps to verify the coordinates of their destination, or is there other in-context information that should have made it obvious the route was wrong?
Part of working is investing your children's future, not some Indian slum dog's.
This is unrelated to adults entering the country to perform skilled labor. The cost of developing their human capital has already been paid: when someone enters this country as an adult, we acquire a skilled laborer without having to pay the normal cost of educating him from childhood and sheltering him before he can work. We receive the benefit without the cost.
What does this mean, "real" Americans should all be emigrating out of North America?
Do you think that there is a country that offers both greater liberty and greater opportunity to those willing to work hard?
I cannot agree with this more. Undergoing the hardship and risk of moving to a foreign country for the chance of a better life is the foundation of the American character.
Those who oppose immigration for fear of their own ability to compete have lost this spirit. The desire to succeed by holding back others rather than through one's own merit is not only cowardly and low, but it also impoverishes society. Public policy should not harm the population at large in order to protect a lazy few.
Um... It is the opposition's job to oppose the government, whether they agree with the particular proposition or not -
That's insane. So their job isn't to represent the wishes of their constituents, or even their best interests?
Because browser makers... don't render content identically.
Which should be perfectly okay.
It's run by the Republican Guard. They let the mullahs and ayatollah go on thinking they run things, also leave civilian stuff to them, too, but the hard decisions on nuclear research, cracking skulls, rigging elections, that's done by the Republican Guard. If the religious establishment think they really run things, try reigning in the Republican Guard and see what happens.
(Quibbling) You're thinking of the Revolutionary Guard. The Republic Guard is from the other Ira[nq].
I'm not sure you're correct, though. Iran has a conventional army several times larger than the Revolutionary Guard with a separate command structure. There are also the Basij militias that -- although nominally part of the Revolutionary Guard -- take their orders directly from the local clerics.
Na'vi don't seem to be an "advanced civilization" though they had their tricks and secrets indeed.
It seemed to me that the Na'vi were obviously the descendants of an extremely advanced civilization, who (living on a just-dangerous-enough-to-be-interesting garden world curated by a planet-spanning AI) had eventually reverted to a state of nature.
My country has free health care (well, you pay something, max $350 a year, but only if you can afford it and beyond that it's free)
No you most certainly don't, any more than any nation has free roads or free public education. What you have is tax-funded health care. You may not pay when you visit a clinic, but unless your health care system runs on slave labor you are all certainly paying.
By remaining, you are implicitly saying that you can live with this system, or that it is at least better than any other alternatives.
There are some missing steps between "you can live with things as they are" and "therefore you should not attempt to change anything."
A moment's reflection will show that this nonsensical argument would apply to anyone anywhere at any point in history.
I don't agree with how every cent of my taxes are spent, but that's what comes with representative democracy.
Living with decisions you don't agree with comes with any form of government where you aren't dictator for life. That isn't special about democracy, representative or otherwise. What is special about democracy is that it expands the range of responses available when you disagree with something.
Democracy works when people advocate for changes they want. When enough people agree, change happens: in that manner, we approximate the greatest good for the greatest number.
Whether an Apple laptop is price competitive depends on how long after release you look at it. Apple generally updates their laptops every 250-350 days, and AFAIK the price stays the same during that period.
How the heck are those legal? (I looked through the FAQs and don't see this covered -- e.g. no mention of Sierra/the existing owner of copyrights/trademarks saying these are OK, preferably with proof.)
They claim to have permission from the copyright holder.
http://agdinteractive.com/global/legal.html
King's Quest, Quest for Glory, and all related material are copyrighted by Sierra Entertainment, Inc. and are used with permission.
The deer, otherwise left alone, could go on to do his own thing, have babies of his own, get eaten by wolves, whatever. That's Nature.
Why is it worse to be eaten by a person than eaten by a wolf? Prey animals are literally devoured alive, their tendons cut so they cannot run and their entrails ripped out of their still-struggling bodies. As the relative of human hunters, I am sure you know that the ability to kill cleanly is considered a minimum competence. It's natural for prey animals to die exhausted and in terror. That doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes -- a lot of the time -- unnatural is better.
I do not hunt. But if I did, I would do it humanely, with a gun.
I didn't know you could even get a degree in "IT". Which department at a university would offer that?
When I was a kid my father poached wild game. It was the only way we could afford meat.
Did you grow up in Sherwood Forest?
You're apparently using "selfish" to mean "acting in accordance with a motivation", which is not a particularly useful description (especially if you are including involuntary processes in this), and is certainly not consistent with the general use of the word.
The difference between altruism and selfishness isn't whether or not you like what you're doing, but what sorts of things you like to do.
It matters because when they increment the major version number unnecessarily, it breaks extensions (which are the main reason to use firefox).
I do take issue with the concept of having to pay more to not have a keylogger on my phone.
It makes sense to me that company might offer a cheaper-but-spyware-riddled version of a phone. It's not much different from adware, which is often free or cheaper than other software of its type. Whether you cast it as "paying a premium for privacy" or "getting a discount for giving up privacy", it's the same idea as long as the company is upfront about the spyware (if they aren't, then they're just crooks).
The free market has its own failings. When drug development is strongly driven by the profit potential, drug development inevitably goes where the money is, but that's not always where we need drug development to go. For instance, there are a lot of well-off white guys who have trouble getting boners, so the drug companies have spent untold millions giving us Viagra and similar drugs. Meanwhile, there are a lot of poor, dark-skinned people in the Third World who are suffering from malaria.
You could have left out the words "white guys" and "dark-skinned" from your post without changing anything, unless your intention was to slip in a side implication that markets are more prone to racial discrimination than government bodies. If that is your implication, I disagree with this. Businessmen have to balance their private prejudices against their greed, but the same doesn't apply to unaccountable bureaucrats.
Mathematicians also have this tendency to view CS as just a branch of math, and algorithms as something that can be expressed as "just" a series of formulas.
Why do you consider that inaccurate? I'll agree that programming itself certainly isn't just math, but I would consider computer science to be a specialized branch of mathematics.
So, really, why haven't we done more of this?
The main problem isn't fire. It's that that they require large ground crews to manage and airplanes are much faster. When it comes to cargo, they're more efficient than airplanes but less efficient than trains or ships. There are niches where they could be useful, but they don't make sense as a general replacement for airplanes or railroads.
"Reasoning doesnâ(TM)t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions," said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. "It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us." Truth and accuracy were beside the point.
That is a fairly damning quote on its own, but I will assume that Dr. Mercier is being misrepresented by omission of context.
It is not the case that all strategies have the same value. If reason were no more accurate than random choices, then there would be no evolutionary value whatsoever to evaluating the suggestions of others on the basis of reason.
The "purpose" of claws (if we are ascribing intentionality to natural selection, which is a mistake) may be to help climbing or to grip onto prey, not to be strong and sharp, but if they weren't strong and sharp they wouldn't be able to do that.
I've heard that the creator of Bitcoin holds approximately 1/3 of all Bitcoins in existence, which is (by some back-of-the-envelope math) in the neighborhood of 1/10 of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist. Even if everything else about the idea is good, what are the reasons to use Satoshi Nakamoto's coins instead of forking the currency?
But what if you replace the brain neuron by neuron, without a break in conciousness?
That's begging the question. If you assume that there will be no break or reduction in consciousness as bits of your brain are replaced, then you never lose continuity. It's not obvious that this would be the case.