What I don't like is the fact that space is becoming increasingly privatised.
Why? All it really means is that launch costs are getting low enough that it no longer requires the resources of a nation-state to do them. Historically, that has marked the tipping point where money starts pouring in and advancements accelerate. So why not let SpaceX's investors pay for further research into the matter? It's not like it excludes anyone else from doing likewise.
The library was intended as a repository of scientific, academic, and cultural texts of significance. It was never meant to be a free-for-all; It wasn't meant for the teeming masses, but for people who actually had something to contribute. It doesn't take very long anymore these days for anyone, in any scientific or engineering discipline, to come across a novel idea, implimentation, or method. All you have to do is write about it in your own words.
Bullshit. For starters, who verifies that the idea really is original - that is, that it's not in the library already? If the answer is "no one", the library becomes nothing but bunch of endless copies of the same low-hanging fruit. And if the answer is not "no one", then it becomes nigh impossible to gain access to the library, because most ideas build on other ideas, so you'd need access to the library to gain access to the library.
Also, you seem to confuse read access - the ability to read works in the library - with write access - the ability to add to them. Do you genuinely have trouble telling them apart, or do you simply wish to deny the "teeming masses" access to information for some reason - for example, because you dream of being their master?
There's already a place for the teeming masses to share their own opinions -- it's called the internet, and it's a firehose of continuous crap.
Apparently.
Pardon me for saying, but I'd like to have a place to go where when I walk into the section on evolution, all the work collected there was by people who actually bothered to study it in some kind of detail before adding something.
I take it that you must be an accomplished biologist then, because by your own standards you'd not be allowed access otherwise.
I do not need "Volumes 1--500: The uneducated people's 'proof' of evolution being wrong." If I want that, I'll watch Foxnews!
It is quite hypocritical to simultaneously look down on people for being uneducated and advocate restrictions for the spread of knowledge.
At least in USA, there should be a non-profit online library already containing all research papers for free, or for a nominal sum (like $1/year for full individual access, $1000/year for a university, just enough to pay for hosting).
That's some pretty expensive hosting for a bunch of text files. How about simply upload a monthly digest of PDFs to the Pirate Bay? A typical desktop should be enough to do seeding.
I was (repeatedly) asking why a middle ground won't work... because that was the original assertion.
Middle ground doesn't work because if there's any kinds of restrictions whatsoever on access, whoever controls those restrictions is making money off them, and has every incentive to make them stricter to increase their income. It's the same thing that happened with copyrights.
Also, if what is basically a parasite - the journal - allows for "middle ground", it risks giving credibility to the idea that it's actually completely unnecessary. A parasitic entity can survive as long as it keeps a stranglehold on the field its feeding from; give any slack, and people might start demanding even more, and before long completely dislodge it. It's the same problem every tyranny faces: once people get the idea that it's possible to defeat the tyrant, rebellions spread like wildfire.
20,000,000 iPhone users in the US paying 4x price for their phone so that 2000 can get jobs: priceless
Compared to having all manufacturing jobs shipped to China or fall to $350/month pay level with no benefits, yes: a status symbol costing more is pretty much zero cost to society. Go unions!
Or did you mean to imply that it's okay to screw workers as long as you get toys for cheap?
I like Social Security, it is a good idea. yet we ahve this notion that seniors have paid for their benefits. The reality is that the current generation of recipients paid between 50-70 cents on the dollar for the benefit they are receiving. My generation will likely be in the 70-75 percent range. At some point, someone has to pay for the shortfall, and it will likely be my kids and grandkids. That is a horrible sign of selfishness and immaturity.
/blockquote>
How are you calculating this? Because the work done by each generation benefits the next beyond just the taxes paid. How much did productivity increase during working life of the current generation of Social Security recipients? You can use the growth of economy as a rough estimate of that. Does that cover the seeming cap? I'm pretty sure it does.
Also, the whole concept of "shortfall" doesn't really make sense here. Who owes what to whom? The society, to its own members (who produce the services and products the Social Security recipients are using with their benefits)? What does that mean - that your grandkids will be hopelessly indepted to themselves?
Yes, it is "sacrifice tomorrow to pay for today", because unfortunately for a few decades the idea has been "spend tomorrow's money today" or "borrow money from the future", and we've run out of credit. AKA "deficits don't matter".
Deficits don't matter. Either you can produce enough to cover consumption, or you can't; money is just an abstraction over resources. But since resources can't be borrowed from future (assuming you don't have a time machine), if you're running a deficit but there aren't bread lines the problem is in your bookkeeping, not in your actual production/consumption ratio.
Since 2008 we've been finding out what happens when you borrow too much money from the future.
No, since 2008 we've been finding out what happens when you let a bunch of powerful sociopaths to act free of regulation.
"Austerity" has become popular because there's no more that can be borrowed from future earnings.
Austerity has become popular because it happens to be fashionable. It's all about pretending that you're an ascetic: you get the smug feeling of self-righteousness while others - the poor and the weak - pay the price. In that sense it's every bit as mindlessly self-indulging as the worst excesses of materialism. It's also just as insane, and will result in just as much damage, if not more - because a materialist wants everything no matter the cost, while an austerist wants to deny everything to everyone else no matter the cost, and the former position is merely selfish while the latter starts crossing over into scorpion territory.
It's like half the world has been partying and running up a huge bar tab, and now the bill has come due.
And to whom is the bill due? Who has been supplying the beer of credit? Why, it's the very same half of the world that "owes" the debt to itself. Which is precisely why this is all so stupid: we are producing enough to cover our consumption, so the only thing this entire "crisis" consists of is a bunch of numbers going to one column or another. This is not an economical crisis, this is a financial crisis - and that's another way to say imaginary crisis.
It is Science folks... what purpose is served by keeping it secret? Unless someone is up to no good eh?
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Plenty of people are up to no good. Giving them someone's semi-formal e-mails where every word did not receive careful forethought to take out of context and deceive themselves and others with serves no one's interests except malefactors. The ongoing climate "sceptic" farce is a perfect example where people comb a mountain of data in hopes of finding any kind of excuse to deny the readings of every instrument, including their own eyes.
Besides, I wonder if the real motivation of such court requests isn't to simply drive scientists away when they're asking questions which might conflict with a special interest group (such as fossil fuel industry).
Ease-of-access to guns is just one aspect of technology that we'll just have to get used to.
More likely it will be used as an excuse to ban 3D printing when it starts becoming good enough for complex machines. After all, it might cut into the profits of established manufacturers, and we can't have that.
The age of consent in Germany is 14, and if a US citizen goes over there and legally has consensual sex with a 14 year old non-US citizen (or even a 17 year old, according to the DOJ), they can be arrested and imprisoned in the US; something that has happened.
And no one speaks out against this extraterritorial enforcement of American laws where local laws aren't broken, because hey, it's just for child molesters, right?
So what's extraterritorial about it? US court arrests a US citizen on US soil for breaking a US law. It doesn't get much more domestic than that.
On one hand, the computer systems will be exceptionally complex.
Not necessarily. The low-level control systems are already there in the form of Fly-by-Wire. Sensors, in the form of radar and Friend-or-Foe recognization is there too. So's navigation.
What's missing is a backup visual sensor - and computer vision is a quickly advancing field - and an overall control system. But that overall control system doesn't necessarily need to be more complex than a relatively advanced video game AI.
Anyway, the real advantage of a drone fighter is that you're limited by your industrial capacity, not your pilot pool, and assembly lines are easily expanded. And on darker side, since drones don't have humans in them, they happily perform any atrocity their mission planners can think of without being bothered by a conscience, then or later.
I think that last point is the real reason for the push to automated armies. In these times of increasing economic disparity, unrest is bound to follow sooner or later; and when it does, the leaders want to be able to stomp it out, and that requires an army that won't hesitate to shoot its own civilians.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether your constitution protects your right to speak... your actions have consequences, and you need to take responsibility for them. The US Constitution is *not* a carte blanche to do whatever the hell you want, and the free speech provision says nothing about being exempt from the consequences of your speech, it only says that they won't prevent you from speaking in the first place.
So in short, my right to free speech is conditional on whether every human being on this planet approve of what I say. If they don't, I, not them, am responsible for anything they might do to show their displeasure. Also, North Korea has complete freedom of speech because it doesn't ball-gag its citizens pre-emptively.
But tell me, does responsibility for one's own actions not extend to muslims? Are those following Islam not adults capable of controlling themselves? Because if they are, then they, not a Youtube troll, are responsible for these riots; and if not, then that puts Islam in far worse light than any video could.
If some guy in the street says that my mother is a scabby whore, should he share the blame if I were to then pull out a knife and cut out his liver?
Wouldn't these riots be more like you cutting out your brother's liver because someone else called your mother a whore? Which probably says more about Islam than any Youtube video ever could.
Yes, he really is being jailed for his actual wrongdoings.
Maybe. But then again, as the summary and you say, this is very convenient for the US government, so how do we know this isn't another made-up charge like with Julian Assange?
Grow up, slashmods. People can have dissenting opinions.
You have the right to post "Bitcoin sucks". The mods have a right to determine that your post adds nothing of value to the conversation. You have a right to whine that this makes the mods immature; they have the right to ignore you.
And yes, you most certainly can trace any Bitcoin (or fraction thereof) back to its origin block.
No, because transactions can combine coins from multiple sources to produce multiple outputs. After such merging and splitting you could assign a single coin several different valid histories and origins, thus making the concept pretty much meaningless.
Not that any of this makes any difference for any practical matter.
Sure, you can double the pixel count (from 4 million to 8 million) on a 4k display, so pixels are 40% smaller in each dimension basically (sqrt(2)) but that effect isn't really all that big a deal unless you're like 15 with perfect eyesight. For everyone else it's a waste of money and processing power.
Which is why modern games no longer use anti-aliasing - since pixels in modern displays are too small to be seen, the jagged edge aliasing problem is a thing of the past, so it would be utterly useless. No, wait...
That's the catch here, we've designed for a single pixel to take up a certain fraction of your personal field of view, suddenly higher density displays come along, to which we initially ask, why, was there something wrong with the old pixel densities?
Yes: the higher the pixel density, the sharper everything will look, exactly because a single pixel will take up a smaller fraction of your field of view. Assuming, of course, that the UI elements were vector graphics rather than raster images in the first place.
Your post is just indicative of the modern mentality that people are not responsible for their own lives and actions.
Unless they're advertisers, in which case they're not responsible for preying on children - or adults either, for that matter. Got it.
More and more I'm convinced that "personal responsibility" is just another way for evil people to justify their evil. It's always the victim who bears the responsibility, never the asshole who preys on him. I can certainly understand why the predators themselves would prefer to deceive themselves, but why does anyone else support such twisted worldview - a fear that stopping malefactors would require money and/or regulations?
At some point every person has to take responsibility for their own choices.
Strangely, the people advocating this often don't seem to think it extends to the choice of persuading others to follow an unwise course of action in order to benefit at their expense. Whether this is because they mistake practical problems - such as obesity - as moral ones - and have a primarily punishment-oriented morality, so obesity can be seen as a punishment for gluttony, requiring no action on the condemners part to enforce, thus appealing to their own sloth - or because they dream of one day being the deceiver is an open question.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? All it really means is that launch costs are getting low enough that it no longer requires the resources of a nation-state to do them. Historically, that has marked the tipping point where money starts pouring in and advancements accelerate. So why not let SpaceX's investors pay for further research into the matter? It's not like it excludes anyone else from doing likewise.
Bullshit. For starters, who verifies that the idea really is original - that is, that it's not in the library already? If the answer is "no one", the library becomes nothing but bunch of endless copies of the same low-hanging fruit. And if the answer is not "no one", then it becomes nigh impossible to gain access to the library, because most ideas build on other ideas, so you'd need access to the library to gain access to the library.
Also, you seem to confuse read access - the ability to read works in the library - with write access - the ability to add to them. Do you genuinely have trouble telling them apart, or do you simply wish to deny the "teeming masses" access to information for some reason - for example, because you dream of being their master?
Apparently.
I take it that you must be an accomplished biologist then, because by your own standards you'd not be allowed access otherwise.
It is quite hypocritical to simultaneously look down on people for being uneducated and advocate restrictions for the spread of knowledge.
That's some pretty expensive hosting for a bunch of text files. How about simply upload a monthly digest of PDFs to the Pirate Bay? A typical desktop should be enough to do seeding.
Middle ground doesn't work because if there's any kinds of restrictions whatsoever on access, whoever controls those restrictions is making money off them, and has every incentive to make them stricter to increase their income. It's the same thing that happened with copyrights.
Also, if what is basically a parasite - the journal - allows for "middle ground", it risks giving credibility to the idea that it's actually completely unnecessary. A parasitic entity can survive as long as it keeps a stranglehold on the field its feeding from; give any slack, and people might start demanding even more, and before long completely dislodge it. It's the same problem every tyranny faces: once people get the idea that it's possible to defeat the tyrant, rebellions spread like wildfire.
So school teaches fairy tales, but random pages on the Internet tell The Truth?
Right.
Compared to having all manufacturing jobs shipped to China or fall to $350/month pay level with no benefits, yes: a status symbol costing more is pretty much zero cost to society. Go unions!
Or did you mean to imply that it's okay to screw workers as long as you get toys for cheap?
Azshara for president. Why settle for the lesser evil?
Deficits don't matter. Either you can produce enough to cover consumption, or you can't; money is just an abstraction over resources. But since resources can't be borrowed from future (assuming you don't have a time machine), if you're running a deficit but there aren't bread lines the problem is in your bookkeeping, not in your actual production/consumption ratio.
No, since 2008 we've been finding out what happens when you let a bunch of powerful sociopaths to act free of regulation.
Austerity has become popular because it happens to be fashionable. It's all about pretending that you're an ascetic: you get the smug feeling of self-righteousness while others - the poor and the weak - pay the price. In that sense it's every bit as mindlessly self-indulging as the worst excesses of materialism. It's also just as insane, and will result in just as much damage, if not more - because a materialist wants everything no matter the cost, while an austerist wants to deny everything to everyone else no matter the cost, and the former position is merely selfish while the latter starts crossing over into scorpion territory.
And to whom is the bill due? Who has been supplying the beer of credit? Why, it's the very same half of the world that "owes" the debt to itself. Which is precisely why this is all so stupid: we are producing enough to cover our consumption, so the only thing this entire "crisis" consists of is a bunch of numbers going to one column or another. This is not an economical crisis, this is a financial crisis - and that's another way to say imaginary crisis.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Plenty of people are up to no good. Giving them someone's semi-formal e-mails where every word did not receive careful forethought to take out of context and deceive themselves and others with serves no one's interests except malefactors. The ongoing climate "sceptic" farce is a perfect example where people comb a mountain of data in hopes of finding any kind of excuse to deny the readings of every instrument, including their own eyes.
Besides, I wonder if the real motivation of such court requests isn't to simply drive scientists away when they're asking questions which might conflict with a special interest group (such as fossil fuel industry).
And culture being available to the general public for a low price is a negative effect?
More likely it will be used as an excuse to ban 3D printing when it starts becoming good enough for complex machines. After all, it might cut into the profits of established manufacturers, and we can't have that.
They have no right to ask, but they do have the power to demand, granted by those very same profits. And power trumps right every time.
So what's extraterritorial about it? US court arrests a US citizen on US soil for breaking a US law. It doesn't get much more domestic than that.
Not necessarily. The low-level control systems are already there in the form of Fly-by-Wire. Sensors, in the form of radar and Friend-or-Foe recognization is there too. So's navigation.
What's missing is a backup visual sensor - and computer vision is a quickly advancing field - and an overall control system. But that overall control system doesn't necessarily need to be more complex than a relatively advanced video game AI.
Anyway, the real advantage of a drone fighter is that you're limited by your industrial capacity, not your pilot pool, and assembly lines are easily expanded. And on darker side, since drones don't have humans in them, they happily perform any atrocity their mission planners can think of without being bothered by a conscience, then or later.
I think that last point is the real reason for the push to automated armies. In these times of increasing economic disparity, unrest is bound to follow sooner or later; and when it does, the leaders want to be able to stomp it out, and that requires an army that won't hesitate to shoot its own civilians.
So in short, my right to free speech is conditional on whether every human being on this planet approve of what I say. If they don't, I, not them, am responsible for anything they might do to show their displeasure. Also, North Korea has complete freedom of speech because it doesn't ball-gag its citizens pre-emptively.
But tell me, does responsibility for one's own actions not extend to muslims? Are those following Islam not adults capable of controlling themselves? Because if they are, then they, not a Youtube troll, are responsible for these riots; and if not, then that puts Islam in far worse light than any video could.
Wouldn't these riots be more like you cutting out your brother's liver because someone else called your mother a whore? Which probably says more about Islam than any Youtube video ever could.
Maybe. But then again, as the summary and you say, this is very convenient for the US government, so how do we know this isn't another made-up charge like with Julian Assange?
You have the right to post "Bitcoin sucks". The mods have a right to determine that your post adds nothing of value to the conversation. You have a right to whine that this makes the mods immature; they have the right to ignore you.
Aren't rights wonderful?
No, because transactions can combine coins from multiple sources to produce multiple outputs. After such merging and splitting you could assign a single coin several different valid histories and origins, thus making the concept pretty much meaningless.
Not that any of this makes any difference for any practical matter.
Sure, you can double the pixel count (from 4 million to 8 million) on a 4k display, so pixels are 40% smaller in each dimension basically (sqrt(2)) but that effect isn't really all that big a deal unless you're like 15 with perfect eyesight. For everyone else it's a waste of money and processing power.
Which is why modern games no longer use anti-aliasing - since pixels in modern displays are too small to be seen, the jagged edge aliasing problem is a thing of the past, so it would be utterly useless. No, wait...
Yes: the higher the pixel density, the sharper everything will look, exactly because a single pixel will take up a smaller fraction of your field of view. Assuming, of course, that the UI elements were vector graphics rather than raster images in the first place.
Unless they're advertisers, in which case they're not responsible for preying on children - or adults either, for that matter. Got it.
More and more I'm convinced that "personal responsibility" is just another way for evil people to justify their evil. It's always the victim who bears the responsibility, never the asshole who preys on him. I can certainly understand why the predators themselves would prefer to deceive themselves, but why does anyone else support such twisted worldview - a fear that stopping malefactors would require money and/or regulations?
Let's blame advertisers for taking advantage of parent's poor self control in order to benefit at children's expense, yes.
Strangely, the people advocating this often don't seem to think it extends to the choice of persuading others to follow an unwise course of action in order to benefit at their expense. Whether this is because they mistake practical problems - such as obesity - as moral ones - and have a primarily punishment-oriented morality, so obesity can be seen as a punishment for gluttony, requiring no action on the condemners part to enforce, thus appealing to their own sloth - or because they dream of one day being the deceiver is an open question.