So compressed, you have 4 megabytes of data...per individual. 7 billion individual human beings means you potentially need 28 petabytes of storage...
28 petabytes is 28 000 terabytes. Currently, a terabyte of hard disk space seems to cost about 100 euros. That makes a total cost of about 600 000 euros, or about 800 000 US dollars, assuming 100% redundancy.
In other words, it costs peanuts, even with no compression.
That's just for human beings. If we look at the sequences of non-human species the storage needed expands exponentially.
No, it doesn't. Most of the genes between various species are the same, since they code the same proteins. Consequently, a useful - normalized - database of world's genomes grows fast for a while, but then the growth slows since all the proteins are already there; the same is true of an archive that simply lists all the genes of all species and is compressed with any decent compressor.
It's certainly a crime, but it is fraud, not theft (just as copyright infringement is not theft). Theft involves deprivation of possession of chattel property.
Well, Coyer has been deprived of something, namely the domain name. So no, it's not like ignoring copyrights, but rather like hijacking all your mail by somehow convincing the post office to forward it to you instead. Which is theft.
At the highest classification levels, you end up with strips less than 1mm x 5mm.
There's nothing recoverable from that level of shred.
Of course there is, it's just a lot of work. Scan the pieces, find likely matching edges for each piece based on how closely they match, then start going through various combinations based on image (letter shape) recognition, filter based on a dictionary (what combinations create legible words).
Of course they do. As times keep on getting worse, the possibility of Joe 99% engaging in subversive actions gets ever greater, so if the 1% are to keep on looting the rest, they need to tighten the grip ever more. And of course, even in good times, "they" are people who love having power over others, either because they think they know better than everyone else or simply because they have issues.
There are no feds swooping in in black helicopters to dig through your garbage and piece together your shredded electric bill.
Of course not. It's spy drones for overall surveillance, sewage analysis to find any "undesirable" habits, and the electric bill goes to the government straight from the electric company.
Honestly, mods, giving positive reinforcement to this sort of paranoia is only hurting the people suffering from it.
Sadly, in the light of Carnivore and Palantir, I'd say it's not paranoia but well justified caution.
If you don't want the government to spy on you, burn the papers and scatter the ashes. Shredders have never provided any real security, since you can simply re-assemble the pieces by hand, it just takes a while.
Completely ignoring the rights of artists will only discourage people from further creating such works...
Really? Because it seems to me that "such works" keep on getting created despite the pretty much total disregard for the copyrights by pretty much everyone.
Besides, if you want to make a career of acting/directing/stuntmanning/CGI creating/whatever, fine; but why should I subsidize it, either through taxes or by giving up freedom of communication? If you can't succeed without forcing the entire rest of the society to bend over backwards, man up, seek other line of work, and continue making movies or music as a hobby if you like it that much. Or you could admit that you can't succeed without financial support from the rest of the society, and seek such support - it's available, both through the government and private donations.
This whole War on Access is even more pointless than the War on Drugs. This one doesn't even make for good victims to hate-campaign against.
As I understand your reference to surveillance, you're trying to say that if production to meet society's needs requires only 1% of people, we throw the 99% in prison. Do I misunderstand you?
Yes; I'm referring to the ongoing effort to turn the entire society into an open-air Panopticon-style prison.
The only particularly troubling time is when these findings are made public, because among the "ZOMG WE'RE DOOMED" people like you there's always the chance that there's one complete nutcase who goes to such a research facility to try and disrupt the work - and inadvertently releases things into the wild with far worse consequences.
If your research project has the potential to kill half the world should a nutjob interfere, one would hope you'd hire guards, or at least lock the door.
Then you can explain to me why those who are supposedly providing me "herd immunity" get visibly infected and sick on a regular basis, and I don't.
Because vaccines only work against the particular illnesses one has been vaccinated against. They don't protect against other diseased. That's why your neighbours keep on getting sick with various lesser infections. And the more serious ones never come your way, due to herd immunity (which means everyone around you is immune, so there's none that could give you the disease, which is exactly what large-scale vaccinations provide - so why the quotes?).
Luckily, you appear to have a naturally strong immune system, so you can deal with little stuff; unfortunately, it's gone to your head and made you think you could deal with something like polio too. Luckily, there's still enough vaccinated people that you're unlikely to have to put that hubris to test; unfortunately, there's a tipping point when there's enough unvaccinated people in the population for it to start spreading amongst them even if the general population is immune.
In the meantime, try to avoid getting scatched by any rusty items - tetanus shots only last 10 years.
So dramatically increased efficiency leads to surplus labor. So if we take it as an axiom of capitalism that one must sell one's labor to buy food and shelter, how do we keep those negatively affected by this surplus from turning to crime?
I've talked to fundamentalists who do not believe in "evolution". You just have to use phrases like "survival of the fittest" to move the conversation along and avoid the word "evolution". They actually have no problem with concepts like disease resistant organisms. So I have no problem believing these people will follow acceptable guidelines with respect to prescribing antibiotics and will know exactly why these guidelines exists.
And what happens if new information is discovered, those guidelines change, and the new ones happen to use the word "evolution"?
People who have such serious issues with reality shouldn't be in a position where such issues can lead to mistakes which might kill a lot of people. Perhaps if they would do the necessary mental gymnastics to fit things to their worldview, they could be trusted ("ah, these new guidelines clearly mean micro-evolution"), but as is wouldn't they simply stop reading the infidel guideline as soon as they encountered the word "evolution"?
The concentration of wealth happens when government becomes too large & powerful, which guarantees corruption and "crony capitalism" which seeks to prevent competition from small players and erects barriers to entry into the market by the "little guy", as has increasingly been the case in the US over the last 80-100 years.
The concentration of wealth happens because of compound interest: the more money you have, the faster you can make more, even if your return of investment stays the same. But of course it doesn't, since the efficiency of scale works for you too the larger you are, allowing you to get better deals, favorable treatment at suppliers and resellers, and more visibility through marketing. You can also use shadier tactics such as selling at a loss to drive competitors bankrupt, customer lock-in, and deals with suppliers and resellers to keep them from catering to anyone but you. Then there's a world of outright criminal activities that opens up with weaker government, such as hiring thugs to bust unions.
This is exactly rocket science, you know.
Forced wealth redistribution by the government has never, ever, in all of history, turned out well and does not lift up the poor, but rather brings everyone down to equal poverty and misery.
Worked just fine for Nordic welfare states. And the US too, back before Reagan. And now, after repeated tax cuts for the rich, the economy is in tailspin and poverty ever-increasing.
I have studied psychology and sociology of religion, Far from seeing religion is "just mythology", once you have understood the implications for human society of mythology, you start to see mythology and religion everywhere. "Market economy", "Free markets" and the international elite of bankers and bank economists are aspects of the religion which has largely replaced Christianity in the West. The mythology of the inevitable triumph of capitalism is a powerful and destructive mythology, as influential as was Communism. Like Communism, it claims to be based on "facts" about the world which are in reality remarkably unverifiable. The only way to fight mythologies is to understand their strengths and weaknesses. By regarding them as powerless, we play into the hands of the people who use them to manipulate society.
I wonder if this is linked to an earlier story about China shutting down "non-paying" college majors, and speculation that the US might do the same? Can't have the peons think there might be alternatives.
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
If it was just that, they would simply not learn or quietly leave, not make a big show of not learning. But making a big show of how religious you are has long traditions in Abrahamic religions (and probably elsewhere too). Just read the New Testament, it has plenty of examples of similar behaviour.
Because as much as I hate and disagree with it, breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA, and there are still some of us who grudgingly but respectfully honor the rule of law.
"Rule of law" usually implies that laws were written by some other criteria than "he who has the gold makes the rules" (since otherwise they just become rule by the strongest, or dictatorship). Since copyright laws were written based on what Disney wanted with no regards to anything else, obeying or not obeying them has nothing to do with the rule of law.
Re:Errors are universal, humour is cultural
on
The Science of Humor
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· Score: 1
So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
Not really. Culture is really just a shared set of assumptions about reality. Your brain draws from them to make its interferences, so humour that relies on one set might not work or work less well with a diffferent set.
It's funny how a certain lunatic fringe keeps using that phrase, when they really mean to say "jews".
The One Percent and their fanclub must be getting desperate, if they're resorting to accusations of racism. What's next? Anyone who doesn't bend over for them is a pedophile?
Corporations only have the amount of power they currently enjoy and can only act as criminally as they do without real fear because the government has power they can co-opt, and are able to do it safely because of the sheer size of government. If the government wasn't so all-encompassing and huge, corporations wouldn't have the power they do.
Any power the central government doesn't hold, the corporations, local landowners, and other wealthy entities will simply use directly. Whether you pay Pinkerton, a bunch of mercenaries, or the Government to deal with your opponents, money still brings you power. The only difference is that the Government is at least somewhat holden to popular opinion, so it'll likely show more restraint than the former two.
That's the problem with various libertarian ideologies: they think that if the Government loses power, the power simply disappears. Of course it doesn't, it just means that some other entity wields it instead. And most other entities don't have even the nominal commitment to the public good the Government does, nor even the shade of democracy to keep them in check.
It's not capitalism that's given corporations the power they have these days
No, it's the concentration of wealth into few hands that does, but that's an inevitable result of capitalism, unless rigorously fought by progressive taxation and forcibly splitting up large corporations. It's too late for America, for the gap of wealth - and thus power - between the rich and poor is alrady too wide to push such reforms through, but here in Europe it might still be possible.
I'd prefer 'after-elections'. 4 years or so after your term of office ends there is an election where people vote if they were satisfied with what you achieved in office. If they are not, you're sent to prison for low level positions, and executed for anything high up.
Thus making it certain that only people with a pathological need for power will ever try for public positions, making all the current problems even worse.
I am certain that secular western society is objectively better in many regards than, say, oppressive Sharia rule under the Taliban in Afghanistan. But I also believe that we are doing ourselves a great disservice by not focussing on why our way is better, and by doing so failing to see the many ways in which it isn't.
Just out of curiosity, could you please explain some of the many things you said you hold Taliban rule to be equal or superior to Western democracy?
You can walk around america with a t-shirt that says "Obama sucks donkey balls!" all you want, you can't in tailand with a comparable shirt about the king.
Try to protest Wall Street, though, and the police will shut you down. So no, you can't insult the ruler in the USA either.
Yes, and oppressing freedom of speech and attacking opponents of their government with violence.
Indeed, they should designate Free Speech Zones where you can say what you want of the King without anyone else hearing it. Perhaps America could share its know-how in the matter?
Awesome, you are just using good people in creating more bureacracy, because that's what we really need right?
Perhaps. There's a limited amount of money for projects, and that means that someone needs to decide who gets it. Not only would it preferable for that person to have a three-digit IQ and basic reading comprehension skills, but also enough time to think and compare various potentially worthwile projects to decide which gets the resources, which in turn requires sufficient manpower to spread the projects to (especially if you want multiple people to take a look at a proposal, to compensate for personal biases and a single person getting multiple worthwhile proposals by chance). Also, in order for that person to do his job well, the grants need to be written clearly and convey the necessary information, making their writing a skill of its own - and preferably done by someone who is not personally invested in the project.
Obviously, the law of diminishing returns applies here too, but a well-working bureaucracy is vital for any large organization.
If we abolish, or significantly reduce the importance of the humanities in education, our entire society will become poorer in ways that are difficult to measure. I'm a physics guy, but I have found reading Homer, Gibbon, Plato and Aristotle immensely enriching. I don't read these things to make money. I read them because they are part of the shared history and culture of our society.
"The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympian men." -Nietzsche
This is the ethos the powerful follow, in the States, in China, and in Europe. Our society is getting segregated by class because those in power want it that way. The working class - "men living a life of toil" - don't need enrichment, for their only purpose is to work so the upper class - "Olympian men" - can live in a "world of art". In China, of course, this is exactly how it's always been, but Europe and USA are reverting back to historical status quo too. That is the great social program Reagan got underway, and the right wing has pushed ever since.
Enjoy being able to care about anything besides money for as long as you can, it won't last.
Slashdot Mirror
28 petabytes is 28 000 terabytes. Currently, a terabyte of hard disk space seems to cost about 100 euros. That makes a total cost of about 600 000 euros, or about 800 000 US dollars, assuming 100% redundancy.
In other words, it costs peanuts, even with no compression.
No, it doesn't. Most of the genes between various species are the same, since they code the same proteins. Consequently, a useful - normalized - database of world's genomes grows fast for a while, but then the growth slows since all the proteins are already there; the same is true of an archive that simply lists all the genes of all species and is compressed with any decent compressor.
Well, Coyer has been deprived of something, namely the domain name. So no, it's not like ignoring copyrights, but rather like hijacking all your mail by somehow convincing the post office to forward it to you instead. Which is theft.
Of course there is, it's just a lot of work. Scan the pieces, find likely matching edges for each piece based on how closely they match, then start going through various combinations based on image (letter shape) recognition, filter based on a dictionary (what combinations create legible words).
Of course they do. As times keep on getting worse, the possibility of Joe 99% engaging in subversive actions gets ever greater, so if the 1% are to keep on looting the rest, they need to tighten the grip ever more. And of course, even in good times, "they" are people who love having power over others, either because they think they know better than everyone else or simply because they have issues.
Of course not. It's spy drones for overall surveillance, sewage analysis to find any "undesirable" habits, and the electric bill goes to the government straight from the electric company.
Sadly, in the light of Carnivore and Palantir, I'd say it's not paranoia but well justified caution.
If you don't want the government to spy on you, burn the papers and scatter the ashes. Shredders have never provided any real security, since you can simply re-assemble the pieces by hand, it just takes a while.
Really? Because it seems to me that "such works" keep on getting created despite the pretty much total disregard for the copyrights by pretty much everyone.
Besides, if you want to make a career of acting/directing/stuntmanning/CGI creating/whatever, fine; but why should I subsidize it, either through taxes or by giving up freedom of communication? If you can't succeed without forcing the entire rest of the society to bend over backwards, man up, seek other line of work, and continue making movies or music as a hobby if you like it that much. Or you could admit that you can't succeed without financial support from the rest of the society, and seek such support - it's available, both through the government and private donations.
This whole War on Access is even more pointless than the War on Drugs. This one doesn't even make for good victims to hate-campaign against.
Yes; I'm referring to the ongoing effort to turn the entire society into an open-air Panopticon-style prison.
If your research project has the potential to kill half the world should a nutjob interfere, one would hope you'd hire guards, or at least lock the door.
Because vaccines only work against the particular illnesses one has been vaccinated against. They don't protect against other diseased. That's why your neighbours keep on getting sick with various lesser infections. And the more serious ones never come your way, due to herd immunity (which means everyone around you is immune, so there's none that could give you the disease, which is exactly what large-scale vaccinations provide - so why the quotes?).
Luckily, you appear to have a naturally strong immune system, so you can deal with little stuff; unfortunately, it's gone to your head and made you think you could deal with something like polio too. Luckily, there's still enough vaccinated people that you're unlikely to have to put that hubris to test; unfortunately, there's a tipping point when there's enough unvaccinated people in the population for it to start spreading amongst them even if the general population is immune.
In the meantime, try to avoid getting scatched by any rusty items - tetanus shots only last 10 years.
Since it became fashionable to hate people who live on welfare because they can't find a job.
What do you think all the surveillance is for?
And what happens if new information is discovered, those guidelines change, and the new ones happen to use the word "evolution"?
People who have such serious issues with reality shouldn't be in a position where such issues can lead to mistakes which might kill a lot of people. Perhaps if they would do the necessary mental gymnastics to fit things to their worldview, they could be trusted ("ah, these new guidelines clearly mean micro-evolution"), but as is wouldn't they simply stop reading the infidel guideline as soon as they encountered the word "evolution"?
The concentration of wealth happens because of compound interest: the more money you have, the faster you can make more, even if your return of investment stays the same. But of course it doesn't, since the efficiency of scale works for you too the larger you are, allowing you to get better deals, favorable treatment at suppliers and resellers, and more visibility through marketing. You can also use shadier tactics such as selling at a loss to drive competitors bankrupt, customer lock-in, and deals with suppliers and resellers to keep them from catering to anyone but you. Then there's a world of outright criminal activities that opens up with weaker government, such as hiring thugs to bust unions.
This is exactly rocket science, you know.
Worked just fine for Nordic welfare states. And the US too, back before Reagan. And now, after repeated tax cuts for the rich, the economy is in tailspin and poverty ever-increasing.
I wonder if this is linked to an earlier story about China shutting down "non-paying" college majors, and speculation that the US might do the same? Can't have the peons think there might be alternatives.
If it was just that, they would simply not learn or quietly leave, not make a big show of not learning. But making a big show of how religious you are has long traditions in Abrahamic religions (and probably elsewhere too). Just read the New Testament, it has plenty of examples of similar behaviour.
"Rule of law" usually implies that laws were written by some other criteria than "he who has the gold makes the rules" (since otherwise they just become rule by the strongest, or dictatorship). Since copyright laws were written based on what Disney wanted with no regards to anything else, obeying or not obeying them has nothing to do with the rule of law.
Not really. Culture is really just a shared set of assumptions about reality. Your brain draws from them to make its interferences, so humour that relies on one set might not work or work less well with a diffferent set.
The One Percent and their fanclub must be getting desperate, if they're resorting to accusations of racism. What's next? Anyone who doesn't bend over for them is a pedophile?
Any power the central government doesn't hold, the corporations, local landowners, and other wealthy entities will simply use directly. Whether you pay Pinkerton, a bunch of mercenaries, or the Government to deal with your opponents, money still brings you power. The only difference is that the Government is at least somewhat holden to popular opinion, so it'll likely show more restraint than the former two.
That's the problem with various libertarian ideologies: they think that if the Government loses power, the power simply disappears. Of course it doesn't, it just means that some other entity wields it instead. And most other entities don't have even the nominal commitment to the public good the Government does, nor even the shade of democracy to keep them in check.
No, it's the concentration of wealth into few hands that does, but that's an inevitable result of capitalism, unless rigorously fought by progressive taxation and forcibly splitting up large corporations. It's too late for America, for the gap of wealth - and thus power - between the rich and poor is alrady too wide to push such reforms through, but here in Europe it might still be possible.
Thus making it certain that only people with a pathological need for power will ever try for public positions, making all the current problems even worse.
Just out of curiosity, could you please explain some of the many things you said you hold Taliban rule to be equal or superior to Western democracy?
Try to protest Wall Street, though, and the police will shut you down. So no, you can't insult the ruler in the USA either.
Indeed, they should designate Free Speech Zones where you can say what you want of the King without anyone else hearing it. Perhaps America could share its know-how in the matter?
Perhaps. There's a limited amount of money for projects, and that means that someone needs to decide who gets it. Not only would it preferable for that person to have a three-digit IQ and basic reading comprehension skills, but also enough time to think and compare various potentially worthwile projects to decide which gets the resources, which in turn requires sufficient manpower to spread the projects to (especially if you want multiple people to take a look at a proposal, to compensate for personal biases and a single person getting multiple worthwhile proposals by chance). Also, in order for that person to do his job well, the grants need to be written clearly and convey the necessary information, making their writing a skill of its own - and preferably done by someone who is not personally invested in the project.
Obviously, the law of diminishing returns applies here too, but a well-working bureaucracy is vital for any large organization.
"The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympian men." -Nietzsche
This is the ethos the powerful follow, in the States, in China, and in Europe. Our society is getting segregated by class because those in power want it that way. The working class - "men living a life of toil" - don't need enrichment, for their only purpose is to work so the upper class - "Olympian men" - can live in a "world of art". In China, of course, this is exactly how it's always been, but Europe and USA are reverting back to historical status quo too. That is the great social program Reagan got underway, and the right wing has pushed ever since.
Enjoy being able to care about anything besides money for as long as you can, it won't last.