It it not some axiom that all things regress. It simply isn't some blanket statement you can apply to everything and everyone equally like some law. Once again, another core problem with peoples perception. You take this "everyone is equal" thing too far. Some people do not regress. Period. Some people do, a lot. Period. Stop treating or thinking of everyone as some constant value.
To claim that you don't regress is to claim that you never forget (which is what skill regression is - you're forgetting it). This, in turn, means that your brain will get swamped with more and more information and has a harder time finding what it needs (and how would it physically store an infinite amount of data?), which means that your skills have in effect regressed. Unless, of course, you stop learning new things altogether. Both of these are far worse alternatives than simply letting unused stuff fade.
So you either regress or have some kind of horrible neurological condition. Basing a discussion about general education around people with healthy brains seems like a reasonable assumption, since various serious diseases and injuries can have an extreme variety of effects and thus need to be compensated at an individual basis, so we can probably assume that everyone is equal in this regard and do, indeed, gradually forget the skills they don't use.
That absolutely is a factor, but this is far from the first research I've seen (as an educator myself) that indicates three weeks is the longest break the average student can take before skills start to regress.
And that rises some questions about whether years-long full-time general education for children really makes any sense whatsoever. After all, these skill deteriorate because a student has no use whatsoever for them, so they'll deteriorate after school ends anyway, or more likely as soon as when the curriculum moves on. Sure, a skill you learn at 10 might be useful at 18 - but at that point it's long gone, making learning it at 10 a complete was of time.
Not that there are necessarily any good alternatives to the current "throw stuff on the student and hope that something sticks" method.
Another question is just why is a situation where even teenagers are required to be globally competitive considered acceptable? Who benefits from teaching people from day one that the goal of life is excelling in a global competition (of excelling in a global competition, apparently) against everyone else? Not those people, at the very least. It's bad enough when adults do it to themselves and burden the rest of society with their various nervous breakdowns, burnout, early death from stress and delusions of grandieur. Could we please leave the children out of it - not that we do now, but no reason to make a bad situation worse?
Failing that, could we at the very least focus these extra months entirely on writing, to increase the quality and entertainment value of various ethnical and sexual slurs and conspiracy theories on the Internet?
Do a CRC32 of each file. Write to a file one per line in this order: CRC, directory, filename. Sort the file by CRC. Read the file linearly doing a full compare on any file with the same CRC (these will be adjacent in the file).
But how much disk space will this really free you? Remember, Moore's law works on hard drives too (I still remember my first 120MB drive, vs. the 4 terabytes I have now), so the space taken up by all of your dublicated data is shrinking towars insignifance at an exponential rate. So, I propose the Ultranova way of managing disk space:
Just let it go.
No matter what you do, you are never going to recover amounts of storage space that would make any kind of real difference nowadays, so why bother about it? Simply accept that you have multiple copies of old, low-resolution digital photos, and understand that they are occupying a percentage of your hard drive that simply makes no difference whatsoever - the space they take up hardly amounts to a rounding error, and will only keep on getting more insignificant over time. So let them. The cost of electricity to run a deduplicating program will likely exceed the cost of hard drive space they're occupying nowadays, even if you're using RAID to get redundancy.
I would. An automated system never will. That's kinda the point here: as technology advances, I can keep you under surveillance whether or not this I anticipate to ever have any use of this information, because it'll cost me basically nothing. I can keep everyone under surveillance all the time without wasting my time and freezing my balls off sitting in bushes outside your house, or paying anyone else to do so or to analyze the results. I can just type a Google search for "juicy blackmail material for Gordonjcp" and p0wn you. That's exactly the problem.
It's none of your damn business. If you happened to be there to see me, then fine.
And if I follow you 24/7 and record everything you do, is that fine too? Because that's what this is about: technology is changing the situation from me seeing you by accident to me being able to get an automated report of your actions after the fact with a simple Google query.
It used to be impossible to keep everyone under constant surveillance, even police states had to prioritize. Thus you had de facto privacy even in public, unless you drew attention to yourself. But the limits set by resource requirements are quickly disappearing. Thus we either re-enforce them through law, or we accept that we have less privacy than Soviet citizens of old.
So, are you okay with being stalked 24/7 every time you set foot outside your door, and the report being given to everyone who ever asks for it, from friends to neighbours to potential employers? Because I sure as Hell am not.
Well, then you are already in youtube. The only difference now is that you are indexed.
And that's a rather huge difference. There's a tremendous difference between "you might be seen" and "every move you made is recorded, indexed and cross-referenced automatically".
If it worries you, just look for yourself (assuming you can somehow) and if you show up ask for the video to be taken down, or for your image to be blurred, assuming you have any legal right to do that.
If it doesn't worry you, you'd feel right at home in East Germany, which utilized a manual system to keep tabs on everyone. This is basically the same system, only automated.
When a criminal is killed during criminal action, you, law enforcement should say, Alhamduli Allah, and wash your hands of any activities against the intended victim of such action.
Frankly, Sweden and Norway seem better places to live than those where people praise their God whenever someone they don't like gets killed and the police "wash their hands" from investigating anything they don't feel like.
Also, do you really want to draw the attention of the kind of god that would find this sort of praise desirable - or the kind who didn't but just got it anyway?
Programs have no error tolerance whatsoever. The first time something goes wrong (the woodpecker chips at the wall), the whole thing crashes. It's not that programs are perfect, but that our computing model means that if they aren't, it's super-happy crashy time.
Contrast this with the computing model of human brain, where errors are tolerated and corrected on a best-effort basis. For example, a drunkard will become increasingly uncoordinated as alcohol disturbs his motion control centers more and more, rather than simply crash all of a sudden. Or to architecture, where a building can take a certain amount of damage before coming crashing down.
But of course that error-tolerance has a price: circuits used for error-correction or materials used for extra structural strength aren't doing anything useful under normal circumstances. Thus, an error-tolerant computer would require more transistors than a normal one of equivalent speed, and require a whole new programming model besides. Alternatively, you can use normal computers with new programming models, and to some extent we already do (managed languages), but all that extra checking has a price in speed (and a typical program written in managed language is simply guaranteed to crash immediately rather than leak buffers and corrupt memory, so it's not that much of an improvement).
So in short: our programs are fast but fragile because they typically omit all of the error-checking that would make them sturdier but slower, and also don't bother with things like separating components into different memory spaces (so they couldn't interfere with each other except through the API) that would help limit damage from errors and make recovery possible.
Then who deserves to die? You are just another wannabe hippy. Someone who doesn't love all but who is just to afraid to just admit some people deserve dead. Your like those people who are against the death penalty, not because they believe in human beings but because they don't want to take responsibility.
Take responsibility in what way, exactly speaking? If an innocent man gets sent to his death, as has happened, who gets punished in what way? Does the jury follow him to the grave? Do all supporters of death penalty draw lots to see who gets to carry the responsibility of an innocent dying? And for that matter, should some philosopher/prophet/whatever come up with an airtight argument for death penalty being wrong even when the accused really is guilty of heinous crimes, will they all turn yourselfs over for whatever punishment murder would then get?
Or, as is usually the case, does "taking responsibility" mean absolutely nothing?
Also, I find your idea of sticking a zombie horde on the deserving intriguing. Does the amount of chainsaw fuel inversely depend on the seriousness of the infraction? Or should we simply vary the ratio of quick and slow zombies?
Maybe a personal crisis, if your government funded livelihood is at risk.
Yes... so what do the scientists who can't work in the US because there's funding do? Move elsewhere. And with them goes the scientific edge, so technological, military and economic ones will soon follow.
...that they're still a world power. That means building a lot of expensive, useless weapons, because that's what world powers do.
I doubt that. With the amount of resources they're sitting on, they're more likely to be concerned with an efficient deterrent than power projection. Just remember the trouble that was caused in Europe during the natural gas disputes. As is, Russia wields more power than the US does, and its power will only continue to grow as the worlds resources deplete.
Why waste money sending a bomber fleet when you can simply not send a tanker fleet?
Please explain for the unwashed masses how a scramjet is closer to being space capable? Doesnt it require a funneled input of compressed gas to function... gas that I assume is not too abundant in the vacuum of space?
Thing of javelin throwers: they take a running start before throwing the javelin to get maximum distance. In the same way, you'd use the scramjet to accelerate as long as you can, then use a rocket engine to take you the rest of the way. And you might be able to use the scramjet as a rocket engine by simply switching into an internal air/oxygen supply when the atmosphere runs too thin.
To cover that we could of course put the federal income tax up on the average income from 23% to 40% (while ignoring the laffer curve). Yeah I'm sure everyone would love that. Use your head. Yes the defense budget is bloated and out of control, but damn it, so is everything else!
Not really. According to Wikipedia, 30-50% sounds around right for a first-world country. Advanced civilization is expensive to maintain, and trying to cut corners - for example by cutting social security - tends to increase costs elsewhere more (you need more internal security to keep the people who have nothing to lose but their chains from revolting). The laternative is to descend to third world status, which is unlikely to result in people having more disposable income.
Perhaps you should think of the society in terms of a corporation: a company which pays most of its profits to its shareholders rather than investing them will be utterly crushed by its competitors and deliver far less value in the long run.
if you have nothing better to do in life than sit around and inhale a drug to "get high" and have psychodelic hallucinations then you're probably not destined for greatness
So? The chances are, you are not "destined for greatness" no matter what you do. Why waste your life chasing for a winning lottery ticket rather than simply relax and enjoy what you can have? Besides that the lottery company - the 1% - have a harder time exploiting you if you don't buy into the lie, I mean.
Most people can never be great, because great means exceptional, and most people are average by definition. You are not exceptional and will never be great. And there's no shame in that, no matter how much you're trying to evoke it.
The stereotypical stoner mentality - "relax, take it eeeeasy" - is the antithesis of the rat race mentality, and almost impossible to exploit, so of course the people who benefit from having all the little hamsters spin their wheels fight pot. And since they are nasty people, they use nasty methods, to the point of calling their fight a War with capital W, complete with propaganda front to complement the armed forces and prison camps. And all that should really make you wonder if you should trust them to be quite honest.
Hardly. KGB Bot is everyone's friend, for no one has anything to hide from the KGB Bot, and no one would want to miss having KGB Bots messages on their wall, unless they're traitors. You're not a traitor, now are you?
If I simply assert squatter's claim to some property, will society leave me alone?
That's up to whoever actually owns the property, now isn't it? Why on Earth do you think you could simply assert that something of theirs is now yours?
i'm not afraid of it. why the hell would i be afraid of it? i think it is stupid. am i allowed to think Bitcoin is stupid? do i have your permission? no?
I have no idea why you're afraid of Bitcoin. That you are is pretty evident from your earlier post and your aggression here.
not being able to think Bitcoin is stupid is the strongest evidence for the lack of viability of Bitcoin: that so many fanboys can't and won't see that the emperor has no clothes
There are people who think Bitcoin is not stupid, therefore Bitcoin is stupid and non-viable? Fascinating logic.
So let the fools exert their energies on Bitcoin if it provides a harmless waste of time for them. This alternacurrency ghetto will bubble and pop and limp along, and eventually peter out into obscurity if and when someone responsible is actually able to take hold of our broken and mismanaged financial system.
Yet here you are, expending your time and effort in an attempt to discredit it, in direct contradiction to your own statements.
This is the strongest evidence for the viability of Bitcoin: that so many people are apparently deathly afraid of it. Nobody bothers fighting something they truly believe is doomed to fail on its own.
And what if I don't want to live in society? Will society let me independently exist, or will they force my participation, through such means as property taxes?
Paying property taxes implies that you own property, which in turn implies that you're using the legal ownership guarantees of the society and thus participating.
Yes, you can exist independently of society; it's just a such a darn miserable existence that no one chooses that. And if some do, that existence is likely to be a short one, since humans are herd animals and don't really do well on their own, even if we don't count receiving an education as participation.
Like when the two wolves and the lamb voted on what to eat for dinner.
Which is a scenario where there are no possible good outcomes, since someone's going to die no matter what, either through starvation or being eaten. It also has nothing to do with actual politics of any state, unless you're saying two-third of your country's population is die-hard cannibals, in which case you might have more pressing problems than politics. Both of which make this a bad metaphor.
Mind you, the post you responded to certainly managed to make "government control" sound pretty sinister.
Or worse, we get a situation where Republicans say they want to cut taxes and decrease spending while Democrats say they want to raise taxes and increase spending. So the parties compromise by cutting taxes and increasing spending!
So perhaps you should stop voting for Republicans then, if they keep on failing to deliver on things you care about?
The other reason many conservatives distrust "compromise" is that the promises aren't kept. One of the more famous was the 1980s plan to amnesty illegal aliens while increasing enforcement to make sure the problem didn't happen again. We go the amnesty but not the enforcement. Another example from the 1980s was the budget compromises where taxes went up in exchange for future spending cuts - but the cuts never arrived.
Enforcement costs money. If you're looking for a place to cut costs, not paying police to harass people would be a pretty obvious place to start.
See, this is one of the main problems conservatives face: there's a very strong perception that you're always willing to spend money as long as it's spent to harm someone. It's only when we're talking about helping people that economic conservatives start complaining. And you've done nothing to dispell that perception here by demanding more "enforcement" in one sentence and spending cuts in the very next. So, it's kinda hard to not see you as cartoon supervillains.
Conservatives are tired of being told that a kick in the head is a compromise because it was only one foot instead of two.
You haven't been kicked in the head, you've just failed to dictate the policies of the entire nation. Not getting your way is in no way comparable to having brutal physical violence done to you.
Manual window management. It's 2012, if computers can drive cars, why do I still have to manually move windows around, resize them, alt-tab between overlapping windows, accidentally screw things up due to keyboard focus, etc. etc?
Because the computer doesn't have the slightest idea of what you're doing, and even less idea of what cognitive processes are going on in your brain, so it can't possibly know how you want your workspace arranged.
Basically, driving a car requires solving the problem of getting from point A to point B, whereas automatically managing windows requires reading your mind.
Like a lot of people, they have this unreasonable expectation that they should be able to use a phone with out a technical computer degree.
They should get phones then, not smartphones. Expecting a small mobile computer with a phone app to be any easier to use than any other computer is indeed unreasonable.
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To claim that you don't regress is to claim that you never forget (which is what skill regression is - you're forgetting it). This, in turn, means that your brain will get swamped with more and more information and has a harder time finding what it needs (and how would it physically store an infinite amount of data?), which means that your skills have in effect regressed. Unless, of course, you stop learning new things altogether. Both of these are far worse alternatives than simply letting unused stuff fade.
So you either regress or have some kind of horrible neurological condition. Basing a discussion about general education around people with healthy brains seems like a reasonable assumption, since various serious diseases and injuries can have an extreme variety of effects and thus need to be compensated at an individual basis, so we can probably assume that everyone is equal in this regard and do, indeed, gradually forget the skills they don't use.
And that rises some questions about whether years-long full-time general education for children really makes any sense whatsoever. After all, these skill deteriorate because a student has no use whatsoever for them, so they'll deteriorate after school ends anyway, or more likely as soon as when the curriculum moves on. Sure, a skill you learn at 10 might be useful at 18 - but at that point it's long gone, making learning it at 10 a complete was of time.
Not that there are necessarily any good alternatives to the current "throw stuff on the student and hope that something sticks" method.
Another question is just why is a situation where even teenagers are required to be globally competitive considered acceptable? Who benefits from teaching people from day one that the goal of life is excelling in a global competition (of excelling in a global competition, apparently) against everyone else? Not those people, at the very least. It's bad enough when adults do it to themselves and burden the rest of society with their various nervous breakdowns, burnout, early death from stress and delusions of grandieur. Could we please leave the children out of it - not that we do now, but no reason to make a bad situation worse?
Failing that, could we at the very least focus these extra months entirely on writing, to increase the quality and entertainment value of various ethnical and sexual slurs and conspiracy theories on the Internet?
But how much disk space will this really free you? Remember, Moore's law works on hard drives too (I still remember my first 120MB drive, vs. the 4 terabytes I have now), so the space taken up by all of your dublicated data is shrinking towars insignifance at an exponential rate. So, I propose the Ultranova way of managing disk space:
Just let it go.
No matter what you do, you are never going to recover amounts of storage space that would make any kind of real difference nowadays, so why bother about it? Simply accept that you have multiple copies of old, low-resolution digital photos, and understand that they are occupying a percentage of your hard drive that simply makes no difference whatsoever - the space they take up hardly amounts to a rounding error, and will only keep on getting more insignificant over time. So let them. The cost of electricity to run a deduplicating program will likely exceed the cost of hard drive space they're occupying nowadays, even if you're using RAID to get redundancy.
I would. An automated system never will. That's kinda the point here: as technology advances, I can keep you under surveillance whether or not this I anticipate to ever have any use of this information, because it'll cost me basically nothing. I can keep everyone under surveillance all the time without wasting my time and freezing my balls off sitting in bushes outside your house, or paying anyone else to do so or to analyze the results. I can just type a Google search for "juicy blackmail material for Gordonjcp" and p0wn you. That's exactly the problem.
And if I follow you 24/7 and record everything you do, is that fine too? Because that's what this is about: technology is changing the situation from me seeing you by accident to me being able to get an automated report of your actions after the fact with a simple Google query.
It used to be impossible to keep everyone under constant surveillance, even police states had to prioritize. Thus you had de facto privacy even in public, unless you drew attention to yourself. But the limits set by resource requirements are quickly disappearing. Thus we either re-enforce them through law, or we accept that we have less privacy than Soviet citizens of old.
So, are you okay with being stalked 24/7 every time you set foot outside your door, and the report being given to everyone who ever asks for it, from friends to neighbours to potential employers? Because I sure as Hell am not.
And that's a rather huge difference. There's a tremendous difference between "you might be seen" and "every move you made is recorded, indexed and cross-referenced automatically".
If it doesn't worry you, you'd feel right at home in East Germany, which utilized a manual system to keep tabs on everyone. This is basically the same system, only automated.
Frankly, Sweden and Norway seem better places to live than those where people praise their God whenever someone they don't like gets killed and the police "wash their hands" from investigating anything they don't feel like.
Also, do you really want to draw the attention of the kind of god that would find this sort of praise desirable - or the kind who didn't but just got it anyway?
Programs have no error tolerance whatsoever. The first time something goes wrong (the woodpecker chips at the wall), the whole thing crashes. It's not that programs are perfect, but that our computing model means that if they aren't, it's super-happy crashy time.
Contrast this with the computing model of human brain, where errors are tolerated and corrected on a best-effort basis. For example, a drunkard will become increasingly uncoordinated as alcohol disturbs his motion control centers more and more, rather than simply crash all of a sudden. Or to architecture, where a building can take a certain amount of damage before coming crashing down.
But of course that error-tolerance has a price: circuits used for error-correction or materials used for extra structural strength aren't doing anything useful under normal circumstances. Thus, an error-tolerant computer would require more transistors than a normal one of equivalent speed, and require a whole new programming model besides. Alternatively, you can use normal computers with new programming models, and to some extent we already do (managed languages), but all that extra checking has a price in speed (and a typical program written in managed language is simply guaranteed to crash immediately rather than leak buffers and corrupt memory, so it's not that much of an improvement).
So in short: our programs are fast but fragile because they typically omit all of the error-checking that would make them sturdier but slower, and also don't bother with things like separating components into different memory spaces (so they couldn't interfere with each other except through the API) that would help limit damage from errors and make recovery possible.
Take responsibility in what way, exactly speaking? If an innocent man gets sent to his death, as has happened, who gets punished in what way? Does the jury follow him to the grave? Do all supporters of death penalty draw lots to see who gets to carry the responsibility of an innocent dying? And for that matter, should some philosopher/prophet/whatever come up with an airtight argument for death penalty being wrong even when the accused really is guilty of heinous crimes, will they all turn yourselfs over for whatever punishment murder would then get?
Or, as is usually the case, does "taking responsibility" mean absolutely nothing?
Also, I find your idea of sticking a zombie horde on the deserving intriguing. Does the amount of chainsaw fuel inversely depend on the seriousness of the infraction? Or should we simply vary the ratio of quick and slow zombies?
Yes... so what do the scientists who can't work in the US because there's funding do? Move elsewhere. And with them goes the scientific edge, so technological, military and economic ones will soon follow.
I doubt that. With the amount of resources they're sitting on, they're more likely to be concerned with an efficient deterrent than power projection. Just remember the trouble that was caused in Europe during the natural gas disputes. As is, Russia wields more power than the US does, and its power will only continue to grow as the worlds resources deplete.
Why waste money sending a bomber fleet when you can simply not send a tanker fleet?
Thing of javelin throwers: they take a running start before throwing the javelin to get maximum distance. In the same way, you'd use the scramjet to accelerate as long as you can, then use a rocket engine to take you the rest of the way. And you might be able to use the scramjet as a rocket engine by simply switching into an internal air/oxygen supply when the atmosphere runs too thin.
Not really. According to Wikipedia, 30-50% sounds around right for a first-world country. Advanced civilization is expensive to maintain, and trying to cut corners - for example by cutting social security - tends to increase costs elsewhere more (you need more internal security to keep the people who have nothing to lose but their chains from revolting). The laternative is to descend to third world status, which is unlikely to result in people having more disposable income.
Perhaps you should think of the society in terms of a corporation: a company which pays most of its profits to its shareholders rather than investing them will be utterly crushed by its competitors and deliver far less value in the long run.
So? The chances are, you are not "destined for greatness" no matter what you do. Why waste your life chasing for a winning lottery ticket rather than simply relax and enjoy what you can have? Besides that the lottery company - the 1% - have a harder time exploiting you if you don't buy into the lie, I mean.
Most people can never be great, because great means exceptional, and most people are average by definition. You are not exceptional and will never be great. And there's no shame in that, no matter how much you're trying to evoke it.
The stereotypical stoner mentality - "relax, take it eeeeasy" - is the antithesis of the rat race mentality, and almost impossible to exploit, so of course the people who benefit from having all the little hamsters spin their wheels fight pot. And since they are nasty people, they use nasty methods, to the point of calling their fight a War with capital W, complete with propaganda front to complement the armed forces and prison camps. And all that should really make you wonder if you should trust them to be quite honest.
Hardly. KGB Bot is everyone's friend, for no one has anything to hide from the KGB Bot, and no one would want to miss having KGB Bots messages on their wall, unless they're traitors. You're not a traitor, now are you?
Better keep an eye on your phone bill, just in case. Just because you're not using your old account doesn't mean that nobody won't.
That's up to whoever actually owns the property, now isn't it? Why on Earth do you think you could simply assert that something of theirs is now yours?
I have no idea why you're afraid of Bitcoin. That you are is pretty evident from your earlier post and your aggression here.
There are people who think Bitcoin is not stupid, therefore Bitcoin is stupid and non-viable? Fascinating logic.
Yet here you are, expending your time and effort in an attempt to discredit it, in direct contradiction to your own statements.
This is the strongest evidence for the viability of Bitcoin: that so many people are apparently deathly afraid of it. Nobody bothers fighting something they truly believe is doomed to fail on its own.
Paying property taxes implies that you own property, which in turn implies that you're using the legal ownership guarantees of the society and thus participating.
Yes, you can exist independently of society; it's just a such a darn miserable existence that no one chooses that. And if some do, that existence is likely to be a short one, since humans are herd animals and don't really do well on their own, even if we don't count receiving an education as participation.
Which is a scenario where there are no possible good outcomes, since someone's going to die no matter what, either through starvation or being eaten. It also has nothing to do with actual politics of any state, unless you're saying two-third of your country's population is die-hard cannibals, in which case you might have more pressing problems than politics. Both of which make this a bad metaphor.
Mind you, the post you responded to certainly managed to make "government control" sound pretty sinister.
So perhaps you should stop voting for Republicans then, if they keep on failing to deliver on things you care about?
Enforcement costs money. If you're looking for a place to cut costs, not paying police to harass people would be a pretty obvious place to start.
See, this is one of the main problems conservatives face: there's a very strong perception that you're always willing to spend money as long as it's spent to harm someone. It's only when we're talking about helping people that economic conservatives start complaining. And you've done nothing to dispell that perception here by demanding more "enforcement" in one sentence and spending cuts in the very next. So, it's kinda hard to not see you as cartoon supervillains.
You haven't been kicked in the head, you've just failed to dictate the policies of the entire nation. Not getting your way is in no way comparable to having brutal physical violence done to you.
Grow up.
The first rule of secret escape plans is that you keep them secret.
Because the computer doesn't have the slightest idea of what you're doing, and even less idea of what cognitive processes are going on in your brain, so it can't possibly know how you want your workspace arranged.
Basically, driving a car requires solving the problem of getting from point A to point B, whereas automatically managing windows requires reading your mind.
They should get phones then, not smartphones. Expecting a small mobile computer with a phone app to be any easier to use than any other computer is indeed unreasonable.