You are guilty of reification. Information does not want to be free. Information does not want anything, because information is not a conscious entity capable of thought, desire, or volition. Treating abstract concepts as though they had thoughts, needs, or desires is faulty logic.
Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.
This is neat and clearly an important discovery and all, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit disappointed.
Cheer up, the broadcast is still going. They're just using the phosphorus-free DNA as a red herring to make the final part more shocking. You know, the last minute where they reveal Bush tied to a chair, take a good grip on his nose, and pull off the human mask to reveal a reptilian overlord beneath.
A government of the people only works with intelligent people. 50% of the people have below average intelligence.(don't you love statistics?) do you really want people that stupid making your decisions for you?
You are not going to be the one in charge, wielding unlimited power and accountable to no one, so you'd better make sure that nobody else is either. A government of the people is the only way to do that. And a government of the people requires transparency.
It should also be noted that 50% of the people having below average intelligence is in the same category of facts as 50% of atomic clocks tick too slow (the other half ticks too fast): true but extremely misleading, since it omits to mention how much below it they are.
Would you protect yourself at the expense of a stranger? Would you protect your family at the expense of another family? Would you protect your friends at the expense of other people?
Maybe. It depends on circumstances. And it could be argued that if you're protecting anything at someone elses expense then you've already lost, since they and their friends will certainly want vengeance.
Would you protect your town at the expense of another town? Would you protect your county at the expense of another county? Would you protect your state at the expense of another state?
No, why would I? It isn't "my" town/county, it's simply a town/county I happen to live in currently.
Would you protect your country at the expense of another country? Would you protect your alliance at the expense of another alliance?
Depends. Is the country I live in, or the alliance it belongs to, better - such as more free or more open, for example - than the other side? If not, why would I hamper the development of human race, when it's so much easier to simply move there?
At what point in that sequence did I lose you?
Right at the beginning, where you began making enemies for short-term gain.
I'm suspecting somewhere around protecting your state or county, right? You see how that line is arbitrary and different for everyone?
Not really: once you're beyond "your friends" we're talking about taking sides in a fight between two bunch of strangers.
But do you see how one might question the underlaying assumption of this thought experience?
The sequel was harder, though, like most sequels, and was directed by someone who wasn't the overall visionary - someone who hadn't thought up the movie for his entire life beforehand.
Which is precisely why Empire Strikes Back ended up better: it's far easier to see and correct the flaws in someone else's vision than your own. That's why editors exist.
Instead of the current growth rate of half a billion or so per year, the world's population would double, then triple and quadruple in rapid succession. If you think we have population problems today, just wait until most people live to be 250 years old.
Really? Because if I can expect to live to 250 years old, I'd put off getting any children at least for the first 100 years or so, just to get financially established. The only reason people get children as young as they do nowadays is because it takes 20 years to bring them up. Every time the average lifespan has grown, the age of giving birth has risen as well.
Plus imagine what would happen to the population if people started living forever.
People aren't going to live forever, even if you get this rejuvenation thing working. I assure you that sooner or later the odds will beat you.
Of course mandatory sterilization would be impossible to implement, and of course the babies would want to live forever too, so we would truly see a population explosion like never before.
We aren't seeing any population explosion in Western countries, despite people here living longer than ever before (or at least did a few years ago, before global capitalism got out of control).
Absolutely. Because quality of life is measured by how much you can eat in front of your computer without gaining weight.
Since most people nowadays spend their days that way out of necessity... yes. Quality of life is increased by having your body tolerate its normal usage. It lowers your quality of life that you have to spend several hours a week running in circles and lifting weights just to keep your muscle mass from disappearing and being replaced by useless fat tissue.
I suppose that this might violate some people's ideal of having to earn everything with sweat and blood, but hey: they're free to go jog in a snowstorm while I sit in front of my computer and eat potato chips.
Judges are lawyers. When they see this, they'll be thinking "you've got to be kidding me", which doesn't bode well for USCG.
Judges are lawyers. That means they're not going to squash an easy source of revenue for lawyers, such as USCG suits. And of course there's also the matter of punishing the traitor who sided with peasants.
I have glanced at a few of the documents on The Guardian, and I can categorically say that these documents should not have been released.
No, you can't categorically say that a quarter million documents shouldn't have been released just because you sampled a few of them. That's a ridiculous claim.
This should a huge level of irresponsibility on the part of WikiLeaks for releasing the entire database rather than incriminating files. The files are all SECRET rather than TOP SECRET, but there are very sensitive official files in here that have no business seeing the light of day within their classification timeframe, such as HUMINT documents.
WikiLeaks is not an American website, and as such is not responsible for enforcing US government's classification system, thus not caring about them does not make it irresponsible.
Several years ago I supported WikiLeaks and what they stood for, even donating, but after this latest continuation of their anti-American campaign I cannot support them any longer. These documents are far too strategically damaging to the U.S. and its public/not-so-public allies to have been revealed in bulk.
You are, of course, free to make your own decisions. Of course, to do so sensibly requires information, which WikiLeaks is in the business of supplying. It does so without pro-American bias, which seems to be what you mean by "anti-american campaign".
Communism did not arise out of factory workers revolting, as Marx predicted. Factory workers fought for, and won, the health and safety protections they enjoy today, but went no further. Communism arose entirely out of agrarian societies.
Communism started in Europe, and France, for example, had a communist commune for a while. The main reason why Communism didn't overcome all of Europe is that most countries realized the threat and granted the workers enough rights and a sufficient wage to keep from rebelling.
Well, what's wrong with Walmart or IBM? If someone really couldn't do better than a Walmart job, then they probably couldn't run a business either. And IBM is supposed to read the future and know that their counting machines would be used for evil purposes?
You know, the Nazis didn't exactly make a secret of what those machines were used for. And since Wal-Mart employees can't feed themselves on their wages, Wal-Mart is basically having you pay their employees from your taxes so they can get bigger profits.
Finally, the Bhopal example is not free market.
Of course it's not. It's never Free Market when something goes wrong. There's always some excuse why it's not. Indeed, it's always the fault of those pesky regulations.
And feudalism has never been free market.
Feudalism is the purest imaginable example of free market: no government and no regulations, just land-owners doing what they damn well please.
The free market doesn't mean you're free to harm others without repercussions.
Yes, it does. From Wal-Mart killing off local businesses and then hiring the newly unemployed people for minimum wage which forces them to subsist on food stamps, to IBM selling counting mahcines to the Nazis so they could keep tally on the Holocaust, to building a pesticide plant in the middle of a city and letting it blow up due to negligence, to robber barons treating their factory slaves so badly during the Industrial Revolution that it gave birth to Communism, "free market" has always meant that he who has the gold makes the rules and usually screws everyone else over to get more of it. And always, always do they get away with it.
But hey, Feudalism 2.0 is fun if you're part of the nobility, so I expect it to continue on its way.
One of the legal principles in American law is that if you have enough financial clout, you can file suit against anyone for any reason, and the worst that will happen to you is that some judge will throw the case out. But that can be delayed for years, and by then the legal costs may bankrupt your victim.
Maybe, but that also means that even mimicking CAs products is irrelevant to this case. These people could be selling gasoline and never had had anything to do with computers in their lives, and CA could still sue them for infringement.
Time was that you told people how everything's so fragile and they really need "insurance", but I guess even organized crime has switched to the industrial approach, with RIAAs blackmail letter campaign and all.
However that may be, just blatantly disregarding the law is not the solution.
Of course not. Using and helping develop tools that hide your activities, such as Freenet and Tor is. Why fight ogres on their terms when you can simply hide and leave them to starve?
I wonder if there's ever been a time when the Powers That Be - governments, nobility, corporations - have not been the enemy of the people? I guess not.
If you take everything down to the wire to maximize interest, fine, but you are gambling the gains in interest vs the potential loss in terms of fees.
You aren't gambling anything, you are making use of modern infrastructure and a service your bank offers. It is no more of a gamble than not getting up early just in case the bridge on your way to work has collapsed during the night.
If you are ok with that, fine, but then don't cry when you do get hit with fees and lose out.
Well, no, you shouldn't cry but simply tell your bank to pay the bills that resulted in their failure to deliver a service as advertized, and sue them if they don't.
I keep an amount of money in my non-interest bearing checking account since that is where all my transactions draw from. That way if there is a miscalculation there's no overdraw, no bounced payments, no fees.
If your financial institutions really are this unreliable, then I can kinda see why your economy collapsed.
If you have a payment due on X date, you wait until day X - 1, and something goes wrong and delays you by one day, this is your fault, not your bank's fault.
If you have a payment due on X date, and you leave orders to the bank to pay said payment at X date, but the bank fails to do so, it is clearly the banks fault. How could it not be? Also, if you can't access the money on your account at X day, then yes, it is also the banks fault.
Failure to deliver electricity is the power companys fault, failure to deliver water is the water companys fault, failure to deliver phone services is the phone companys fault, and failure to deliver financial services is the banks fault. Trying to blame customers for not expecting them to do a shitty job at it is beyond idiotic.
It is not reasonable to expect there will never be any problems with electronic payment systems.
No, it is perfectly reasonable to expect and demand that the banks, which have wormed their way to the heart of our economic systems, also deliver the reliability this requires, and pay the bill when they fail to do so.
1 to 2 days is reasonable to sort this out, you are taking an unreasonable risk if you don't attempt to complete payment to a bill at least 3 days before the due date.
No, you aren't. It is not at all unreasonable to consider the failure of the wire transfer system that handles nearly all financial transactions to be the same type of Force Majeure failure as earthquakes, hurricanes etc.
But then again, I'v understood that you UScritters still use the antiquated system of mailing cheques to each other, so I guess your mileage might wary.
In other words, these consumers should get stuck with these late fees, and learn about a valuable lesson in taking reasonable steps to ensure their obligations are met, even if something goes not quite as expected with the payment.
Paying bills days early (and losing the interest) is not a reasonable step. Also, it is not reasonable to hold people to their obligations but release the bank from theirs.
Unfortunately they're currently too busy trying to milk motion controls and using that as an excuse to not release new hardware. Hopefully Nintendo will just out of nowhere drop a magic console developed using their profits from their current gen console.
They aren't releasing new hardware because with every new hardware generation the development costs for games and the cost of hardware unit rise. Someone has to make all those ultra-detailed character models and textures, someone has to make the sounds, someone has to make the levels and fill in all the details. Why do you think procedural generation is getting so much attention lately?
What all of this means is that you have to sell a lot of games to become profitable, which in turn means there must be a huge existing customer base with consoles; but that in turn requires plenty of good games to exist exclusively for that console. And as the per-unit price for consoles keeps on rising, it becomes harder and harder to sell them and establish that customer base, unless you sell at a loss, which is understandably a huge financial risk.
Nintendo's solution was to make Wii: a console with outdated technology and a gimmicky controller. It worked, so they aren't likely to be making a "super-console" anytime soon.
That's what I'm calling bullshit on. The fact that creative expression is identical with fill-rates or polygons/sec.
Those things do set the limits of what you can do. Want a wide open room? You have to render all those polygons it's made of. That's why the "maze" style of FPS is ever so popular: it allows you to cull the amount of stuff drawn at any one moment through a visibility map. It's only in the past few years where large, open gameworlds have become popular: the whole concept of "levels" exists to get around the limited amount of memory and processing power.
Or suppose we're making a simulation game? Then it's the CPU and memory that are going to impose the limits. In its time, "Simlife" could take 15 minutes per turn, and even today, running huge worlds with no animal/plant limits through DOSBOX is slow. Or maybe a new version of SimCity with a more detailed economic simulation and bigger cities?
Computing power determines what can be done with computers.
Before you start saying that these consoles are essentially tapped out, keep in mind that the PS3 isn't near its full potential yet.
According to Sony. Gee, I wonder if they might have a bit of a bias?
PS3 hard to develop for on purpose - Kazuo Hirai (SCEE Chairman)
Yes... you need a different coding style than with other platforms to get everything out of it. Which means that even if some development studio was willing to limit themselves to PS3 sales, they'd be hard pressed to find programmers who can make use of it.
Sony took a gamble and lost.
Now, when you've finally "tapped out this rock", then come back and complain. Until then, blame yourselves for your inability to develop good games that take full advantage of these platforms.
The platforms are tapped out, as far as economically sensible development goes. PCs, on the other hand, keep on getting more powerful, so the sweet point of most bang for your buck keeps increasing as well.
Have you ever tried to actually do something with a Swiss army knife? Or any other knife with non-fixed blades? Sure, it's possible, but a bunch of special-purpose tools beat it hands-down every time. Which, I suppose, is a pretty good metaphor for C++:).
Write a rejection of Claim 1 based in part on the OP's website and/or code. And none of this handwavy "clearly prior art" bullshit. I'm talking something that would hold up in court.
I'm pretty sure that printing dollars is illegal in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.
Cheer up, the broadcast is still going. They're just using the phosphorus-free DNA as a red herring to make the final part more shocking. You know, the last minute where they reveal Bush tied to a chair, take a good grip on his nose, and pull off the human mask to reveal a reptilian overlord beneath.
You are not going to be the one in charge, wielding unlimited power and accountable to no one, so you'd better make sure that nobody else is either. A government of the people is the only way to do that. And a government of the people requires transparency.
It should also be noted that 50% of the people having below average intelligence is in the same category of facts as 50% of atomic clocks tick too slow (the other half ticks too fast): true but extremely misleading, since it omits to mention how much below it they are.
Don't use solar panels, use concentrating solar plants.
Maybe. It depends on circumstances. And it could be argued that if you're protecting anything at someone elses expense then you've already lost, since they and their friends will certainly want vengeance.
No, why would I? It isn't "my" town/county, it's simply a town/county I happen to live in currently.
Depends. Is the country I live in, or the alliance it belongs to, better - such as more free or more open, for example - than the other side? If not, why would I hamper the development of human race, when it's so much easier to simply move there?
Right at the beginning, where you began making enemies for short-term gain.
Not really: once you're beyond "your friends" we're talking about taking sides in a fight between two bunch of strangers.
But do you see how one might question the underlaying assumption of this thought experience?
Which is precisely why Empire Strikes Back ended up better: it's far easier to see and correct the flaws in someone else's vision than your own. That's why editors exist.
Really? Because if I can expect to live to 250 years old, I'd put off getting any children at least for the first 100 years or so, just to get financially established. The only reason people get children as young as they do nowadays is because it takes 20 years to bring them up. Every time the average lifespan has grown, the age of giving birth has risen as well.
In the case of nitrogen-based fertilizer you can create it out of thin air, actually :).
People aren't going to live forever, even if you get this rejuvenation thing working. I assure you that sooner or later the odds will beat you.
We aren't seeing any population explosion in Western countries, despite people here living longer than ever before (or at least did a few years ago, before global capitalism got out of control).
Since most people nowadays spend their days that way out of necessity... yes. Quality of life is increased by having your body tolerate its normal usage. It lowers your quality of life that you have to spend several hours a week running in circles and lifting weights just to keep your muscle mass from disappearing and being replaced by useless fat tissue.
I suppose that this might violate some people's ideal of having to earn everything with sweat and blood, but hey: they're free to go jog in a snowstorm while I sit in front of my computer and eat potato chips.
Judges are lawyers. That means they're not going to squash an easy source of revenue for lawyers, such as USCG suits. And of course there's also the matter of punishing the traitor who sided with peasants.
No, you can't categorically say that a quarter million documents shouldn't have been released just because you sampled a few of them. That's a ridiculous claim.
WikiLeaks is not an American website, and as such is not responsible for enforcing US government's classification system, thus not caring about them does not make it irresponsible.
You are, of course, free to make your own decisions. Of course, to do so sensibly requires information, which WikiLeaks is in the business of supplying. It does so without pro-American bias, which seems to be what you mean by "anti-american campaign".
Communism started in Europe, and France, for example, had a communist commune for a while. The main reason why Communism didn't overcome all of Europe is that most countries realized the threat and granted the workers enough rights and a sufficient wage to keep from rebelling.
You know, the Nazis didn't exactly make a secret of what those machines were used for. And since Wal-Mart employees can't feed themselves on their wages, Wal-Mart is basically having you pay their employees from your taxes so they can get bigger profits.
Of course it's not. It's never Free Market when something goes wrong. There's always some excuse why it's not. Indeed, it's always the fault of those pesky regulations.
Feudalism is the purest imaginable example of free market: no government and no regulations, just land-owners doing what they damn well please.
Yes, it does. From Wal-Mart killing off local businesses and then hiring the newly unemployed people for minimum wage which forces them to subsist on food stamps, to IBM selling counting mahcines to the Nazis so they could keep tally on the Holocaust, to building a pesticide plant in the middle of a city and letting it blow up due to negligence, to robber barons treating their factory slaves so badly during the Industrial Revolution that it gave birth to Communism, "free market" has always meant that he who has the gold makes the rules and usually screws everyone else over to get more of it. And always, always do they get away with it.
But hey, Feudalism 2.0 is fun if you're part of the nobility, so I expect it to continue on its way.
Maybe, but that also means that even mimicking CAs products is irrelevant to this case. These people could be selling gasoline and never had had anything to do with computers in their lives, and CA could still sue them for infringement.
Time was that you told people how everything's so fragile and they really need "insurance", but I guess even organized crime has switched to the industrial approach, with RIAAs blackmail letter campaign and all.
Of course not. Using and helping develop tools that hide your activities, such as Freenet and Tor is. Why fight ogres on their terms when you can simply hide and leave them to starve?
I wonder if there's ever been a time when the Powers That Be - governments, nobility, corporations - have not been the enemy of the people? I guess not.
You aren't gambling anything, you are making use of modern infrastructure and a service your bank offers. It is no more of a gamble than not getting up early just in case the bridge on your way to work has collapsed during the night.
Well, no, you shouldn't cry but simply tell your bank to pay the bills that resulted in their failure to deliver a service as advertized, and sue them if they don't.
If your financial institutions really are this unreliable, then I can kinda see why your economy collapsed.
If you have a payment due on X date, and you leave orders to the bank to pay said payment at X date, but the bank fails to do so, it is clearly the banks fault. How could it not be? Also, if you can't access the money on your account at X day, then yes, it is also the banks fault.
Failure to deliver electricity is the power companys fault, failure to deliver water is the water companys fault, failure to deliver phone services is the phone companys fault, and failure to deliver financial services is the banks fault. Trying to blame customers for not expecting them to do a shitty job at it is beyond idiotic.
No, it is perfectly reasonable to expect and demand that the banks, which have wormed their way to the heart of our economic systems, also deliver the reliability this requires, and pay the bill when they fail to do so.
No, you aren't. It is not at all unreasonable to consider the failure of the wire transfer system that handles nearly all financial transactions to be the same type of Force Majeure failure as earthquakes, hurricanes etc.
But then again, I'v understood that you UScritters still use the antiquated system of mailing cheques to each other, so I guess your mileage might wary.
Paying bills days early (and losing the interest) is not a reasonable step. Also, it is not reasonable to hold people to their obligations but release the bank from theirs.
They aren't releasing new hardware because with every new hardware generation the development costs for games and the cost of hardware unit rise. Someone has to make all those ultra-detailed character models and textures, someone has to make the sounds, someone has to make the levels and fill in all the details. Why do you think procedural generation is getting so much attention lately?
What all of this means is that you have to sell a lot of games to become profitable, which in turn means there must be a huge existing customer base with consoles; but that in turn requires plenty of good games to exist exclusively for that console. And as the per-unit price for consoles keeps on rising, it becomes harder and harder to sell them and establish that customer base, unless you sell at a loss, which is understandably a huge financial risk.
Nintendo's solution was to make Wii: a console with outdated technology and a gimmicky controller. It worked, so they aren't likely to be making a "super-console" anytime soon.
No, it wouldn't. 486 had trouble with Duke Nukem 3D, it sure has heck couldn't render 10s of thousands of cubes in real 3D.
Those things do set the limits of what you can do. Want a wide open room? You have to render all those polygons it's made of. That's why the "maze" style of FPS is ever so popular: it allows you to cull the amount of stuff drawn at any one moment through a visibility map. It's only in the past few years where large, open gameworlds have become popular: the whole concept of "levels" exists to get around the limited amount of memory and processing power.
Or suppose we're making a simulation game? Then it's the CPU and memory that are going to impose the limits. In its time, "Simlife" could take 15 minutes per turn, and even today, running huge worlds with no animal/plant limits through DOSBOX is slow. Or maybe a new version of SimCity with a more detailed economic simulation and bigger cities?
Computing power determines what can be done with computers.
According to Sony. Gee, I wonder if they might have a bit of a bias?
Yes... you need a different coding style than with other platforms to get everything out of it. Which means that even if some development studio was willing to limit themselves to PS3 sales, they'd be hard pressed to find programmers who can make use of it.
Sony took a gamble and lost.
The platforms are tapped out, as far as economically sensible development goes. PCs, on the other hand, keep on getting more powerful, so the sweet point of most bang for your buck keeps increasing as well.
Have you ever tried to actually do something with a Swiss army knife? Or any other knife with non-fixed blades? Sure, it's possible, but a bunch of special-purpose tools beat it hands-down every time. Which, I suppose, is a pretty good metaphor for C++ :).
I'm pretty sure that printing dollars is illegal in the United States.