Cowards would rather die for their beliefs instead of standing up for them.
And Internet Tough Guys sling mud on them afterwards, thinging this makes them something besides vultures. Except that real-life vultures serve a necessary function, so the comparison is unfair to the buzzards. Sorry, janitor birds.
We need to start thinking of sitting at a computer for hours on end as dangerous and distasteful, like excessive drinking or smoking, I think, complete with some stigmatization of those who go overboard and active discouragement throughout society, including at work. We do that a bit with WoW nerds and the like, but all the people who zone out for 3+ hours a night on Wikipedia, TV-tropes, Facebook, Slashdot, Netflix, internet shopping sites, doing obsessive packrat-like downloading, playing less-nerdy games like The Sims or Farmville, etc. are doing just as much harm to themselves and are far more common I would guess.
So what will these people be doing instead? Eat out? Go to movies? Almost all activities require spending more energy than hanging on the Internet. And with fossil fuels running out, nuclear too scary to use and renewables an expensive joke, that means that encouraging spending energy would be pretty suicidal for the society.
Lethargic couch potatoes settle for fantasy while healthy, active and energetic people demand something real. Thus it's the couch potatoes who are better adapted to the most likely future of increasing poverty. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since reality can't ever hold a candle to fantasy. Taken to its logical conclusion, this could lead to a future like the Matrix, except controlled by its inhabitants.
So, far from being a pitiful degenerate, the WoW nerd is in fact the forerunner of the next step in human evolution, a Homo Superior who can survive with no fresh air, exercise, or face-to-face social interaction. Natural selection is already weeding out those of them who can't take on the rigorous demands of this lifestyle, and it's only a matter of time before these real-life X-Men and -women(?) will replace the outdated mere mortals.
I guess the real question is, could he become king of England?
Well, no, cause he's dead.
But wouldn't that make him an excellent king? Being dead, he can't become involved in any scandal, all his words can be re-interpreted as people wish, and all his misdeeds can be excused as fair for his time. It works for American Founding Fathers, so why not the King of England?
Even better would be a completely fictional person, a royal version of a virtual idol if you will. Almost all we get to see of real royals is already fiction generated by PR machines, so why not go all the way and remove the last icky bits of flesh and blood that sometimes shine through? Heck, with AI advancing as it does, it wouldn't take long to get to the point where people could chat with their virtual king over the Internet.
Take it a few steps further and we can replace the entire government with a bunch of AI programs holding public discussions with one another, thus letting lobbyists to write the laws in peace without the meddling of inefficient middlemen.
The simple fact that anyone who produces evidence to the contrary is automatically suspect is perhaps THE biggest problem with the entire climate change debate.
No, the biggest problem is that there are economic interests involved. The "debate" is between evidence and special interests, in the same way as, say, the evolution vs. creationism "debate". The main difference is that accepting the evidence with regards to climate change implies a need to concrete action - specifically, giving up fossil fuels, which is going to be very painful - which is why more people are willing to delude themselves there.
Norwegian studies about global warming are as credible as tobacco company funded studies about the effects of smoking, and for the same reason.
Who's "we", why do they want to get rid of money, and why should anyone else care about that more than about the possibility of not having banks impose private taxes on transactions between third parties?
I see this with my father. He just retired after 31 years of hard manual labor where he could earn 90k/year with overtime. It's great that he had that option and he took advantage of it as much as possible. Now at 63, he doesn't have any hobbies and shuns intellectual stimulation because his brain has been dulled beyond repair.
Bullshit. I've worked jobs where you're little more than an automaton. This means that you're free to think anything you like as your body works. If you prefer not to, that's not the job's fault but your own.
And doing or not doing anything with your free time is also your choice. Perhaps your father did so much overtime that he had none, but it's a bit hard to believe he had no choice there if he really did make 90k/year. And if he did have a choice, then, well... he made it, not his job.
Thanks, but, no thanks! Hold out for the desired position and it's a life-changing decision if you don't.
It might be life-changing, but doing a boring job doesn't turn into a braindead zombie. It just means you need to learn to entertain yourself without external stimuli.
Actually, the wave function of the universe can contain different realities at the same time. No need for actual multiverses. The problem is only that at some point, a collapse of parts of the wave function needs to occur, so the alternatives, although present in the wave-function, do not come to fruition.
Um... why? Why would the wave function "need" to collapse? After all, since our perceptions are contained within the wave function of the universe, measuring a particle being in a particular place doesn't actually imply that the function has collapsed. It's only when an outside observer tries to read the result when you must translate the result into concrete form - collapse the wave function - but there are no outside observers to reality itself.
Btw I read about studies that can predict human decision before said human makes one consciously = no free will (Incompatibilism). We are just meatbags with sophisticated wet computers.
The problem is that this definition of "free will" is incompatible with everything imaginable - either you have reasons to pick whatever you did (determinism), or you pick randomly (nondeterminism), or some combination of these; but you'll always need to have some kind of mechanism for actually making the choice.
The real problem, of course, is that free will is a concept in law and philosophy and determinism is a concept in physics. Comparing the two results in in inane results, just like trying to compare the smell of a rose to the color yellow or the concept of a prime number.
But seriously, there are only two possibilities for time travel.
(1) The universe is fully deteministic in which case the time-travel already occurred and the travel will change nothing, or
(2) alternate universe "time-lines" in which case whatever horrible thing you are trying to change still occurred in the original universe and you have just created a copy. Nobody ever deals with that.
3) The universe is fully deterministic, so if you go to past and kill your grandfather before your father was conceived you cease to exist, thus didn't go to past, thus didn't kill your grandfather, thus existed, thus went to past and so on ad infinitum. In other words, time oscillates.
4) The universe is not fully deterministic, so if you go to past and so on, things will play differently at each oscillation and possibly eventually settle into some kind of consistent sequence of events.
5) Time is multi-dimensional. If you go past and kill your grandfather, he once lived to his 80's and now died on his 16th birthday. There's still only one universe/timeline, but it has an attached "metatime" that tracks changes to it (and presumably meta-metatime and so on). The current version of the timeline doesn't include you, but a past (metapast?) one did, thus your grandfater being shot is (meta)causally consistent - it's only invalid with a naive understanding of time.
6) The universe just plain doesn't care about such inconsistencies. You are small, the universe is large, and the illogic of your grandfather dying before your father was conceived is roughly equivalent to the damage my fingers suffered from typing this post - not worth worrying about. Enjoy your living dead grandfather and unborn life.
If they're charging each customer $50/mo, and one customer is using 1 GB/mo while another is slurping 500 GB/mo, yes there's a fairness issue.
Is there? Does the customer who uses 500 GB/mo cost 500 times what the 1 GB/mo user does? Or do they cost basically the same?
Bandwidth is not a consumable resource like water or electricity, nor does using it cause wear and tear like using the roads does. Bandwidth is simply potential: how many bits can the system transmit each second. And maintenance for equipment that can transmit 500 GB/mo is the same as for equipment that can transmit 1 GB/mo. So no, there is no fairness issue charging the same for both users.
To hear it their way, it would be like me ordering a pizza and you, the pizza shop owner, expecting the company that made the cheese to pay for half the pizza because you do not charge enough to your customers. Does that really make sense?
Sure. It makes perfect sense under the "company's only responsibility is to maximize its value to its shareholders, who in turn are not responsible for the resulting havoc" doctrine to extort the cheese-making company if possible. Greed is good, amirite?
Most people that embezzle funds (which this guy didn't do, but the principle applies) start with the intention of paying it back.
Except that the principle doesn't apply, because this guy didn't embezzle anything. He was paid to produce code and produced the code. He didn't write the code himself, but that, in itself, is not dishonest, unless there's some particular reason why he should had (security clearance, for example).
They start small, find there aren't any consequences and continue to escalate their dishonesty. That is the pattern with almost all employee dishonesty issues and there is no reason to expect this guy would have been different.
Yes, there is: this guy had delivered what he had been paid for, and according to the summary done that in a timely manner and commendable quality.
There are problems with the approach the guy took to his job, which mostly deal with outsiders getting access to information they possibly shouldn't, but getting your assigned task accomplished in an unorthodox manner cannot in itself be considered dishonest.
I'm amazed it worked, after having pulled my 3rd all nighter supporting our cheap chinese labor (who I had no choice on) and their absolutely brain-dead retarded mistakes,
Because accomplishing things you consider valuable triggers the reward circuits in your brain. That's the reason people do volunteer work, have hobbies, etc.
Both you and the parent are confusing "work" and "job". They are not the same thing, altough if you're lucky they might overlap.
In a free society, I shouldn't have to justify what I want to do to you or why I want to own something to anybody. It's none of your business. And it's none of your or my business why some redneck in the middle of Tennessee wants an assault rifle.
It becomes my business when the redneck owning an assault rifle increases the likelihood of me being shot. A free society is still a society, and needs to resolve conflicts of interests - in this case the right of the redneck to own a gun against other people's right to not be murdered.
So yes, you do need to justify why a conflict of interest should be resolved in your favour, even in a free society. And the anti-gun people need to justify their position. Then we'll see who has the strongest point.
I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.
And I can't help pointing out that most accidents happen precisely because people get it in their heads that since nothing has happened this far, nothing ever will, and throw caution ot the wind.
Also, while the world as a whole limps on, quite a few civilizations have fallen from enviromental damage. So it's not like all doomsayers were wrong.
Or imagine if people didn't glom onto old characters constantly and instead looked for new and interesting characters and ideas.
Using an old character has the advantage of getting a setting with it. You don't need to setup the character and the world, you can simply take the defaults that come with Superman and then add your ideas and/or characters. It's simply more efficient than starting from scratch.
There's no reason a comic character from the 1930s should be relevant or profitable in the 2010s.
There are several, but one obvious one would be to help examine what, if anything, in the 1930s is worthy of preserving in the 2010s. Why has this character survived for 80 years and what has changed over the years? Why is Superman still relevant enough for this story to make it to the front page of Slashdot?
But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Superman movie, because this would undermine the "real"/canonical Superman line.
There is no canonical Superman line. Even the movies have rebooted the whole mess several times. Furthermore, Sturgeon's Law also works in reverse, so any fandom with large enough following will produce works far surpassing their source material; why not let them?
The real problem with modern copyright law is that seeks to block derived works, yet truly great works are the result of evolution: someone takes an existing work into a new and interesting direction, injecting ideas and possibly crossing it over with other works. The best such works then survive to serve as the building blocks of the next generation of works. Copyright would disrupt this process, leaving culture crippled and older works dead. The Internet thankfully gets around part of it, but imagine if the chain and ball was removed from cultural progress's feet?
Software would be harder to do and require more qualifications to do it. It would also work correctly far more often. Right now we are in the wild west of programming. In time that will change and it will become a regular engineering profession.
And that will have a cost. For example, the next Linux won't happen since hobbyists can't participate - you can't control the spread of your software once it's left your hands, so the potential liability is infinite. The GCC will be killed, because a free compiler encourages reckless hobbyist programming. And every computer will need a DRM system to keep it from executing unsigned code, because othewise every company will simply keep using cheap PCs to run spaghetti code.
The only way software will ever become an egineering profession is to have a dystopia.
Slashdot Mirror
And Internet Tough Guys sling mud on them afterwards, thinging this makes them something besides vultures. Except that real-life vultures serve a necessary function, so the comparison is unfair to the buzzards. Sorry, janitor birds.
So what will these people be doing instead? Eat out? Go to movies? Almost all activities require spending more energy than hanging on the Internet. And with fossil fuels running out, nuclear too scary to use and renewables an expensive joke, that means that encouraging spending energy would be pretty suicidal for the society.
Lethargic couch potatoes settle for fantasy while healthy, active and energetic people demand something real. Thus it's the couch potatoes who are better adapted to the most likely future of increasing poverty. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since reality can't ever hold a candle to fantasy. Taken to its logical conclusion, this could lead to a future like the Matrix, except controlled by its inhabitants.
So, far from being a pitiful degenerate, the WoW nerd is in fact the forerunner of the next step in human evolution, a Homo Superior who can survive with no fresh air, exercise, or face-to-face social interaction. Natural selection is already weeding out those of them who can't take on the rigorous demands of this lifestyle, and it's only a matter of time before these real-life X-Men and -women(?) will replace the outdated mere mortals.
But wouldn't that make him an excellent king? Being dead, he can't become involved in any scandal, all his words can be re-interpreted as people wish, and all his misdeeds can be excused as fair for his time. It works for American Founding Fathers, so why not the King of England?
Even better would be a completely fictional person, a royal version of a virtual idol if you will. Almost all we get to see of real royals is already fiction generated by PR machines, so why not go all the way and remove the last icky bits of flesh and blood that sometimes shine through? Heck, with AI advancing as it does, it wouldn't take long to get to the point where people could chat with their virtual king over the Internet.
Take it a few steps further and we can replace the entire government with a bunch of AI programs holding public discussions with one another, thus letting lobbyists to write the laws in peace without the meddling of inefficient middlemen.
No, the biggest problem is that there are economic interests involved. The "debate" is between evidence and special interests, in the same way as, say, the evolution vs. creationism "debate". The main difference is that accepting the evidence with regards to climate change implies a need to concrete action - specifically, giving up fossil fuels, which is going to be very painful - which is why more people are willing to delude themselves there.
Norwegian studies about global warming are as credible as tobacco company funded studies about the effects of smoking, and for the same reason.
An oil-producing country says that burning oil is okay. News at 11.
Who's "we", why do they want to get rid of money, and why should anyone else care about that more than about the possibility of not having banks impose private taxes on transactions between third parties?
So Jobs is the best there is at what he does, what he does isn't very nice, and he has an absurd amount of fanboys. And he's a warrior philosopher.
Jobs is the Wolverine of computer biz.
The peasants are already questioning the divine right of their masters; why further shake their faith with the truth?
Bullshit. I've worked jobs where you're little more than an automaton. This means that you're free to think anything you like as your body works. If you prefer not to, that's not the job's fault but your own.
And doing or not doing anything with your free time is also your choice. Perhaps your father did so much overtime that he had none, but it's a bit hard to believe he had no choice there if he really did make 90k/year. And if he did have a choice, then, well... he made it, not his job.
It might be life-changing, but doing a boring job doesn't turn into a braindead zombie. It just means you need to learn to entertain yourself without external stimuli.
Um... why? Why would the wave function "need" to collapse? After all, since our perceptions are contained within the wave function of the universe, measuring a particle being in a particular place doesn't actually imply that the function has collapsed. It's only when an outside observer tries to read the result when you must translate the result into concrete form - collapse the wave function - but there are no outside observers to reality itself.
The problem is that this definition of "free will" is incompatible with everything imaginable - either you have reasons to pick whatever you did (determinism), or you pick randomly (nondeterminism), or some combination of these; but you'll always need to have some kind of mechanism for actually making the choice.
The real problem, of course, is that free will is a concept in law and philosophy and determinism is a concept in physics. Comparing the two results in in inane results, just like trying to compare the smell of a rose to the color yellow or the concept of a prime number.
3) The universe is fully deterministic, so if you go to past and kill your grandfather before your father was conceived you cease to exist, thus didn't go to past, thus didn't kill your grandfather, thus existed, thus went to past and so on ad infinitum. In other words, time oscillates.
4) The universe is not fully deterministic, so if you go to past and so on, things will play differently at each oscillation and possibly eventually settle into some kind of consistent sequence of events.
5) Time is multi-dimensional. If you go past and kill your grandfather, he once lived to his 80's and now died on his 16th birthday. There's still only one universe/timeline, but it has an attached "metatime" that tracks changes to it (and presumably meta-metatime and so on). The current version of the timeline doesn't include you, but a past (metapast?) one did, thus your grandfater being shot is (meta)causally consistent - it's only invalid with a naive understanding of time.
6) The universe just plain doesn't care about such inconsistencies. You are small, the universe is large, and the illogic of your grandfather dying before your father was conceived is roughly equivalent to the damage my fingers suffered from typing this post - not worth worrying about. Enjoy your living dead grandfather and unborn life.
If you don't have a causal loop, then by what definition have you time traveled?
Is there? Does the customer who uses 500 GB/mo cost 500 times what the 1 GB/mo user does? Or do they cost basically the same?
Bandwidth is not a consumable resource like water or electricity, nor does using it cause wear and tear like using the roads does. Bandwidth is simply potential: how many bits can the system transmit each second. And maintenance for equipment that can transmit 500 GB/mo is the same as for equipment that can transmit 1 GB/mo. So no, there is no fairness issue charging the same for both users.
Sure. It makes perfect sense under the "company's only responsibility is to maximize its value to its shareholders, who in turn are not responsible for the resulting havoc" doctrine to extort the cheese-making company if possible. Greed is good, amirite?
Except that the principle doesn't apply, because this guy didn't embezzle anything. He was paid to produce code and produced the code. He didn't write the code himself, but that, in itself, is not dishonest, unless there's some particular reason why he should had (security clearance, for example).
Yes, there is: this guy had delivered what he had been paid for, and according to the summary done that in a timely manner and commendable quality.
There are problems with the approach the guy took to his job, which mostly deal with outsiders getting access to information they possibly shouldn't, but getting your assigned task accomplished in an unorthodox manner cannot in itself be considered dishonest.
Hey, austerity empowers.
Because accomplishing things you consider valuable triggers the reward circuits in your brain. That's the reason people do volunteer work, have hobbies, etc.
Both you and the parent are confusing "work" and "job". They are not the same thing, altough if you're lucky they might overlap.
In other words, he knows how to make a profit by screwing over other people and escape the consequences. Clear Wall Street material.
It becomes my business when the redneck owning an assault rifle increases the likelihood of me being shot. A free society is still a society, and needs to resolve conflicts of interests - in this case the right of the redneck to own a gun against other people's right to not be murdered.
So yes, you do need to justify why a conflict of interest should be resolved in your favour, even in a free society. And the anti-gun people need to justify their position. Then we'll see who has the strongest point.
And I can't help pointing out that most accidents happen precisely because people get it in their heads that since nothing has happened this far, nothing ever will, and throw caution ot the wind.
Also, while the world as a whole limps on, quite a few civilizations have fallen from enviromental damage. So it's not like all doomsayers were wrong.
Using an old character has the advantage of getting a setting with it. You don't need to setup the character and the world, you can simply take the defaults that come with Superman and then add your ideas and/or characters. It's simply more efficient than starting from scratch.
There are several, but one obvious one would be to help examine what, if anything, in the 1930s is worthy of preserving in the 2010s. Why has this character survived for 80 years and what has changed over the years? Why is Superman still relevant enough for this story to make it to the front page of Slashdot?
There is no canonical Superman line. Even the movies have rebooted the whole mess several times. Furthermore, Sturgeon's Law also works in reverse, so any fandom with large enough following will produce works far surpassing their source material; why not let them?
The real problem with modern copyright law is that seeks to block derived works, yet truly great works are the result of evolution: someone takes an existing work into a new and interesting direction, injecting ideas and possibly crossing it over with other works. The best such works then survive to serve as the building blocks of the next generation of works. Copyright would disrupt this process, leaving culture crippled and older works dead. The Internet thankfully gets around part of it, but imagine if the chain and ball was removed from cultural progress's feet?
It's difficult to make superhero movies without special effects, which require lots of skilled labour and expensive equipment.
And that will have a cost. For example, the next Linux won't happen since hobbyists can't participate - you can't control the spread of your software once it's left your hands, so the potential liability is infinite. The GCC will be killed, because a free compiler encourages reckless hobbyist programming. And every computer will need a DRM system to keep it from executing unsigned code, because othewise every company will simply keep using cheap PCs to run spaghetti code.
The only way software will ever become an egineering profession is to have a dystopia.