Absolutely, I disagree with your disagreement. I think the GP was not arguing against the claim you claim he disagreed with. I think he was trying to say that the definition of "business" extends beyond the capitalist/corporate connotation of the word, and applies to the manner in which a software organization is run. Even if it is 100% volunteer and the product is free, there are still certain basic elements of organization necessary to be successful; these elements can be construed as operating in a business sense.
Of course, assuming I have accurately interpreted the GP's meaning, I disagree with this assertion:-)
You have rectangular walls? Man, I thought my company was cheap, but at least they are willing to splurge on 3 dimensions for my parallelepiped cubicle walls.
</pedant>
I didn't call anything a lie. As a matter of fact, I specifically said "they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the truth, either". That was kind of my whole point.
I do a little bit of "tech-support" for our group; whenever a user is having trouble accessing their account on our application, they call me. Sometimes, they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the truth, either. I spent at least 10 minutes once trying to walk a guy through logging in. I was certain the guy was just fat-fingering his password, so I had him say it out loud to me on the phone as he typed it in. He read it out perfectly, but still no luck logging in. Long story short, he was saying "abc123" out loud, which was his password (not really, just an example), but he was typing "abc1234". Completely unconsciously. Sometimes, the users think they are telling the truth, but they really aren't.
Just to add to this point: you are also much less likely to do something stupid like drive home drunk, talk out your ass and get beat up, etc. when you are drinking at home. The few alcoholics I've know inevitably fail at some social norm when smashed in public.
What? You have no such data? You've made no such study? Your conclusion is based on nothing more than your own judgements, preconceptions and projections?
Oh, yeah. I'm on Slashdot.
When, oh when will slashdotters cease their backwards dependence on non-scientifically formulated judgments, and join the rest of the world in the warm glow of rationality and reason? I shudder to think what state the world would be in if policy and general consensus were no better informed than those "conclusions" submitted to Slashdot.
The right to fly on planes does exist along with all of the others we have because this document doesn't say that we don't have this right.
Absolutely, you have the right to fly on planes. All you have to do is obtain one. After all, the private airlines have the right to not allow you on their planes if you don't like their conditions. And of course, as a common good, the government has a responsibility to monitor and control access to flight space. So you'll need to submit to some regulation there, as well.
It's like your right to use public roads. Just b/c you have the right doesn't obligate anyone else to give you a ride.
Here
is where I go for the definition of rare words. Incidentally, Wikipedia says that epicaricacy is Greek in origin; schadenfreude is the word borrowed from the Germans. And as you correctly assume, the two are functionally equivalent.
The only time I ever type out an email address is if I need to email someone for whom I only have a business card, i.e. very rarely. Everyone else, I have their address in my contacts list and it just pops up when I start to type, or I have an email from them (or that they are copied on) I can reply to, or cut n paste, etc. So typos would only very very rarely be a problem for me. But maybe my mom was right, and I really am special...
Internet access should be a basic human right.
Stop talking about wifi "theft". It's like water "theft", or air "theft". There's plenty to go around, and we all need it, so fuck right off.
Wow. We need internet access? You're seriously comparing basic requirements of life (water, air) to internet access? You honestly think ISPs have an obligation to provide everyone with access at their own expense with no remuneration?
Between online banking, ATMs, telephones and email, I can't remember the last time I actually set foot in a bank. I think it was for a cashier's check or something.
Well, in some ways, we are already overriding natural selection via technology. Childhood immunizations, therapies that protect the embryo from the mother's HIV, pacemakers, etc. Things that once were a death sentence have been overcome by technology. So a human organism born 100 years ago with certain defects would not survive to procreate, whereas today they can. Certain specific types of "non-fitness" for a human organism are no longer meaningful, thanks to technology.
Yes, this is a long way from intelligent design, but given that we can already ignore some evolutionary pressures, it seems likely that we will continue to develop our technological ability to override more such pressures. While this in no way implies we will have designer babies or shed our physical form, it indicates the possibility that one day we might
What I don't understand is, why would a civilization spread via Von Neumann machines? What's the point? Sure, send some out, program them to bring back resources. But just send them out to mindlessly spread as far as possible? Seems useless as well as possibly dangerous, if there are hostile civilizations out there that might view such encroachment negatively.
I find opening a different browser to make the anonymous post works, so I think it is cookie based, rather than IP. And I do mean different browser, not just a new session of the same browser; it seems as though I have seen that both succeed and fail.
Laws of nature stem from theories of nature, when sufficiently proven through empirical evidence. Asimov's laws, on the other hand, can obviously be violated just by building a robot with certain behavior. They're not "law" in the same sense.
They are "law" in the same sense that a robot built subject to the Three Laws can no more choose to disobey the law than a human can choose to disobey the Laws of Nature. Your earlier post seemed to imply that robots would have the same relationship to Asimov's Three Laws that humans have to speed limits.
The framework of ancient Jewish law is not entirely rational, and thus it is not necessarily entirely moral.
Well, I won't defend the moral imperative of the laws of Leviticus, but I'm not sure what you find irrational about them. They are self-consistent, and served as the basis for a sustained community for a very long time. Obviously, they have some merit in the sense of practical application, which is certainly a form of rationality.
Just as some people observe the laws and others do not, some robots might observe Asimov's laws while others do not. Legality is not tantamount to morality. Some might argue that a robot is morally justified in killing a human in some situation, but whether it's moral or not is the wrong question in a discussion about which side of the law it falls on.
In Asimov's world, the Three Laws of Robotics were envisioned more along the lines of Laws of Nature (for robots) than Laws of Legislature (for humans). Other than a few "bugs", so to speak, the robots in Asimov's world did not have the choice to disobey the laws.
Leviticus tells observers what is legal. Only reason can tell us what is moral.
In ancient Judaism, morality == obeying God's laws. And all laws were handed down by God. Within that framework, legality and morality are indistinguishable.
Gotcha. However, my understanding is that quantum theory says that the universe is not mechanistic, but rather apparently random. While true randomness wouldn't be free-will any more than determinism (mechanism) would be, if there is an unobservable force generating an unobservable influence on reality, it would still appear random to us.
I'll admit, though, my understanding of quantum theories is at best rather shaky, so maybe the possibility of a mechanistic universe is still on the table.
Once you give these notions fixed properties (i.e. souls give us free will) then they because testable.
I'm afraid I don't understand this assertion. If science can not observe a force called the soul, then how does assigning an unobservable action to this unobservable force give us a handle on testing either the force or its actions?
The problem I have with relying on science as the end all be all is that it is inherently impossible to take the observer out of the equation. There is no "human knowledge" that is not put through the incredibly subjective filter of human perception. So, while science has been seen to be a very useful tool, it has limits. It offers a predictive model of the world around us as filtered by human perception. So, when you start in on trying to scientifically analyze things such as the subjectiveness of human thoughts/perceptions, well, the recursiveness lends a large amount of doubt to the results.
Yeah, it cracks me up the lengths some people go in order to avoid convenient labels. There is a group of 4 guys and 1 girl. If trying to point out the girl, they will say "The girl". If 3 of the guys are similarly colored and the 4th is completely differently colored, the same people that would say "The girl" say "The guy standing to the left of the the girl? He has on white sneakers, short hair, drinking a pint of lager?" Because to some people, publicly acknowledging differences in pigmentation is far far worse than secretly hating people of different pigmentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely, I disagree with your disagreement. I think the GP was not arguing against the claim you claim he disagreed with. I think he was trying to say that the definition of "business" extends beyond the capitalist/corporate connotation of the word, and applies to the manner in which a software organization is run. Even if it is 100% volunteer and the product is free, there are still certain basic elements of organization necessary to be successful; these elements can be construed as operating in a business sense.
:-)
Of course, assuming I have accurately interpreted the GP's meaning, I disagree with this assertion
You have rectangular walls? Man, I thought my company was cheap, but at least they are willing to splurge on 3 dimensions for my parallelepiped cubicle walls.
</pedant>
though we might get a badly supported plug-in someday.
No thank you. I am really not interested in any, ahem, "plug-ins" for myself, no matter how well supported.
Death by snu-snu?
your lovers to be more like pets and horribly boring in the sack
Wow, you 4 digit UID guys really are jaded! To my unsophisticated tastes, these seem mutually exclusive characteristics...
I didn't call anything a lie. As a matter of fact, I specifically said "they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the truth, either". That was kind of my whole point.
I do a little bit of "tech-support" for our group; whenever a user is having trouble accessing their account on our application, they call me. Sometimes, they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the truth, either. I spent at least 10 minutes once trying to walk a guy through logging in. I was certain the guy was just fat-fingering his password, so I had him say it out loud to me on the phone as he typed it in. He read it out perfectly, but still no luck logging in. Long story short, he was saying "abc123" out loud, which was his password (not really, just an example), but he was typing "abc1234". Completely unconsciously. Sometimes, the users think they are telling the truth, but they really aren't.
Just to add to this point: you are also much less likely to do something stupid like drive home drunk, talk out your ass and get beat up, etc. when you are drinking at home. The few alcoholics I've know inevitably fail at some social norm when smashed in public.
What? You have no such data? You've made no such study? Your conclusion is based on nothing more than your own judgements, preconceptions and projections?
Oh, yeah. I'm on Slashdot.
When, oh when will slashdotters cease their backwards dependence on non-scientifically formulated judgments, and join the rest of the world in the warm glow of rationality and reason? I shudder to think what state the world would be in if policy and general consensus were no better informed than those "conclusions" submitted to Slashdot.
</snark>
The right to fly on planes does exist along with all of the others we have because this document doesn't say that we don't have this right.
Absolutely, you have the right to fly on planes. All you have to do is obtain one. After all, the private airlines have the right to not allow you on their planes if you don't like their conditions. And of course, as a common good, the government has a responsibility to monitor and control access to flight space. So you'll need to submit to some regulation there, as well.
It's like your right to use public roads. Just b/c you have the right doesn't obligate anyone else to give you a ride.
Here is where I go for the definition of rare words. Incidentally, Wikipedia says that epicaricacy is Greek in origin; schadenfreude is the word borrowed from the Germans. And as you correctly assume, the two are functionally equivalent.
The only time I ever type out an email address is if I need to email someone for whom I only have a business card, i.e. very rarely. Everyone else, I have their address in my contacts list and it just pops up when I start to type, or I have an email from them (or that they are copied on) I can reply to, or cut n paste, etc. So typos would only very very rarely be a problem for me. But maybe my mom was right, and I really am special...
Internet access should be a basic human right.
Stop talking about wifi "theft". It's like water "theft", or air "theft". There's plenty to go around, and we all need it, so fuck right off.
Wow. We need internet access? You're seriously comparing basic requirements of life (water, air) to internet access? You honestly think ISPs have an obligation to provide everyone with access at their own expense with no remuneration?
Someone forgot their dried-frog pills today, eh?
Between online banking, ATMs, telephones and email, I can't remember the last time I actually set foot in a bank. I think it was for a cashier's check or something.
Well, in some ways, we are already overriding natural selection via technology. Childhood immunizations, therapies that protect the embryo from the mother's HIV, pacemakers, etc. Things that once were a death sentence have been overcome by technology. So a human organism born 100 years ago with certain defects would not survive to procreate, whereas today they can. Certain specific types of "non-fitness" for a human organism are no longer meaningful, thanks to technology.
Yes, this is a long way from intelligent design, but given that we can already ignore some evolutionary pressures, it seems likely that we will continue to develop our technological ability to override more such pressures. While this in no way implies we will have designer babies or shed our physical form, it indicates the possibility that one day we might
What I don't understand is, why would a civilization spread via Von Neumann machines? What's the point? Sure, send some out, program them to bring back resources. But just send them out to mindlessly spread as far as possible? Seems useless as well as possibly dangerous, if there are hostile civilizations out there that might view such encroachment negatively.
I find opening a different browser to make the anonymous post works, so I think it is cookie based, rather than IP. And I do mean different browser, not just a new session of the same browser; it seems as though I have seen that both succeed and fail.
Adaptation implies a flawed transfer, as a perfect transfer cannot yield the ability to adapt, only the ability to perpetuate.
Methylation
Laws of nature stem from theories of nature, when sufficiently proven through empirical evidence. Asimov's laws, on the other hand, can obviously be violated just by building a robot with certain behavior. They're not "law" in the same sense.
They are "law" in the same sense that a robot built subject to the Three Laws can no more choose to disobey the law than a human can choose to disobey the Laws of Nature. Your earlier post seemed to imply that robots would have the same relationship to Asimov's Three Laws that humans have to speed limits.
The framework of ancient Jewish law is not entirely rational, and thus it is not necessarily entirely moral.
Well, I won't defend the moral imperative of the laws of Leviticus, but I'm not sure what you find irrational about them. They are self-consistent, and served as the basis for a sustained community for a very long time. Obviously, they have some merit in the sense of practical application, which is certainly a form of rationality.
In Asimov's world, the Three Laws of Robotics were envisioned more along the lines of Laws of Nature (for robots) than Laws of Legislature (for humans). Other than a few "bugs", so to speak, the robots in Asimov's world did not have the choice to disobey the laws.
Leviticus tells observers what is legal. Only reason can tell us what is moral.
In ancient Judaism, morality == obeying God's laws. And all laws were handed down by God. Within that framework, legality and morality are indistinguishable.
Gotcha. However, my understanding is that quantum theory says that the universe is not mechanistic, but rather apparently random. While true randomness wouldn't be free-will any more than determinism (mechanism) would be, if there is an unobservable force generating an unobservable influence on reality, it would still appear random to us.
I'll admit, though, my understanding of quantum theories is at best rather shaky, so maybe the possibility of a mechanistic universe is still on the table.
Once you give these notions fixed properties (i.e. souls give us free will) then they because testable.
I'm afraid I don't understand this assertion. If science can not observe a force called the soul, then how does assigning an unobservable action to this unobservable force give us a handle on testing either the force or its actions?
The problem I have with relying on science as the end all be all is that it is inherently impossible to take the observer out of the equation. There is no "human knowledge" that is not put through the incredibly subjective filter of human perception. So, while science has been seen to be a very useful tool, it has limits. It offers a predictive model of the world around us as filtered by human perception . So, when you start in on trying to scientifically analyze things such as the subjectiveness of human thoughts/perceptions, well, the recursiveness lends a large amount of doubt to the results.
Yeah, it cracks me up the lengths some people go in order to avoid convenient labels. There is a group of 4 guys and 1 girl. If trying to point out the girl, they will say "The girl". If 3 of the guys are similarly colored and the 4th is completely differently colored, the same people that would say "The girl" say "The guy standing to the left of the the girl? He has on white sneakers, short hair, drinking a pint of lager?" Because to some people, publicly acknowledging differences in pigmentation is far far worse than secretly hating people of different pigmentation.
had no trouble finding the correct answer in my heads
What, you had to count to 21 to solve the problem? </jk>