Just make a limited government like the framers of the US constitution were planning and the majority of real issues go away.
Except that they didn't, now did they? They built a limited government, and it expanded again and again, because the limited one just wasn't enough.
The freedom of your own body, to do whatever you wish to it without harming others is a basic right.
And if I use that right to not take a vaccine, get the disease, and it mutates on my body so that it'll bypass vaccinations of my neighbours, I've just harmed them through my choices.
Anyway, I agree with you in principle. However, please understand that as long as we live in the same world, it's nowhere near easy to determine what concerns just me and nobody else. And once you start codifying that to law - which you must do, unless you prefer judges wielding the power of kings - and people start finding ways around it, prompting corrections, said law convolves into something that would give Cthulhu nightmares.
The right to own property, to engage in business, and to be entitled to the fruit of your labors are all basic rights too. These things should have no government involvement and by extension democracy should not violate them.
Engaging in business involves contract law (what constitutes a binding agreement? what are the penalties for breaking it? under what conditions may it be dissolved? what limitations are there for it (answer "none" and I will have myself installed as a de facto tyrant in no time)), property law (who owes what and how can ownership be transferred? what's stopping me from simply buying a millimeter-thick strip of land completely surrounding your house and holding you prisoner there?) and employment law (can I demand my female secretary to "entertain" me and my guests? what's minimum wage (answer "none" and watch what happens when people get the choice between starvation and rebellion). I'm sorry, but it's simply impossible to keep the government out of it.
And that "fruits of your labour" thing sounds almost communist, you Marxist demon!
Democracy, metagovernment, etc. is only worthwhile when the government is limited, that is the key point. The key point isn't that we live in a democracy, the key point is that we were/are under a limited government.
Government is always limited, unless you happen to live in a dictatorship. Everyone agrees that letting Caligula have unlimited power is bad; the controversy is about where the limits lay.
Euhm, quite frankly if you were tasked with keeping the president safe on that day... wouldn't you do the same ?
Quite frankly... No. I think that anyone who's capable of posing a serious threat has to be smart enough to not brag about it on Facebook beforehand. I'd also assume that anyone who did talk about killing the president on Facebook were an Internet Tough Guy. Therefore, I'd concentrate my efforts on actual security, rather than watchign Facebook.
On the other hand, if I was tasked with creating an East Germany -style snitch network, I'd simply befriend everyone on Facebook. No need to pay the informants that way.
The thing is, Western society is going towards a crisis. Globalization has brought nothing but misery and failing economies, and there's an ever-increasing resistance to it. On the other hand, the new nobility love their Feudalism 2.0 project, and don't want to give it up for the benefit of mere serfs. There's going to be a lot of unrest in coming years as it's decided if we're able to undo the damage caused by decades of right-wing politics, or plunge into a new Dark Age.
It just shows a rounding error that is infinitely far down the line. It is still a rounding error introduced by the decimal system.
It isn't "far down" the line. No matter how far down the line you go, you'll never find any difference between 0.999... and 1. Therefore, they're equal.
Infinity is not merely a very big number. It really is just that: infinite. That's a far more important thing people have trouble comprehending.
Actually, quite a lot of people have trouble understanding what the Monty Hall problem is asking. For example, people often leave out the crucial part that the show host knows which door holds the prize, and deliberately opens the door with no prize before offering you the choice whether to change doors or not.
Actually, that's quite a deliberate omission. If the show host didn't know which door held the price and just opened one at random, switching doesn't change your odds of getting the price. On the other hand, if the host knew and deliberately picked the price-less door, switching will improve your odds. Switching will thefeore improve your odds of winning by an unknown amount (since you don't know how likely the show host has forgotten which door held the price). Therefore, you should switch.
So now just multiply 0.00...1 infinite times until you get 1 and 0=1
The problem is that you never will. 0.00...1 will always have an infinite amount of zeroes in the place of ellipses, no matter how many times you've multiplied it (let's say by ten, for simplicity's sake). It never gets any farther from zero, no matter how many times or with what you multiply it - which, of course, is exactly how zero behaves.
Don't forget that many people voluntarily give money to their church every sunday, and are happy to do so, and feel that it's the right thing to do. You could call that "taking money from people by lying to them," but you're ignoring that people are getting spiritual fulfillment and moral satisfaction from it.
Most churches don't claim that giving money to them will bring you health or good fortune. They are asking for money for running costs and charity without any promise of a return. Making such promises - selling indulgences - was one of the abuses that launched Protestantism, you know.
Do you think Coca-Cola would sell in any country that did not have similar trade secrets laws? Their financial success lies entirely on keeping the formula for their product a trade secret.
Bullshit. Coca-Cola tastes identical to Pepsi or any other cola, so obviously it was unable to keep the relevant parts of the formula a secret. It's success is based on marketing and nothing more.
Nope, you should thank Lenin. Without him, there wouldn't have been a Soviet Union to beat. In fact, the US owes winning the Cold War to Lenin and winning World War II to Hitler!
After all, isn't it trendy to hate on libertarians these days?
Libertarians stand for privatized oppression. Most other parties stand for government-supplied oppression. Does anyone actually stand for freedom nowadays?
I mean, a chess computer has no concept of a plan,
That really depends on the program, now doesn't it? I'd be very surprised if the programs didn't cache some of their computations to immediately generate the countermove if the opponent moves as expected, and use the reminder of their turn to further simulate future moves. After all, it's an obvious optimization, and that's what plans are - now I do this, then he does that, then I respond with this move, and so on.
and even Kasparov or Topalov or whoever can only calculate a handful of positions a second.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. A brain is basically a massively parallel computer, simulating the likely events in your immediate vicinity all the time - and in the case of humans, using abstract thought to simulate far away places as well. It's likely that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of plans that are considered subconsciously but rejected because of some obvious flaw, freeing the conscious mind to only examine the most promising ones in detail.
If this doesn't qualify as 'obvious' then we are all doomed.
How it works is that the Patent Office rubber-stamps every paper offered to it, resulting in lots of inane patents that are then used to extort people due to the fact that it takes a costly court battle to get the patent overturned. The system is set up in this way because it allows large corporations to squash any small newcomers should the need arise.
The Achilles heel of nuclear power has always been the high capital costs, which means a longer period before profitable returns, and thus greater risk.
The Achilles heel of nuclear power is that people are, for whatever reason, deathly afraid of radiation, and will run around like headless chicken at the very mention of the word. This combines nicely with the less rational anti-technology elements of the enviromental movement to turn what should be engineering decisions into political ones. Various demagogues who care nothing about the consequences of their actions as long as they get power then finish the mess.
Then again, it's not like that's different from any other issue, so I guess it's just business as usual.
WRONG! Final Fantasy does have three elements, but they are: Magic, Chocobos, and some dude named Cid!!!
Those are story elements, not gameplay elements. And you forgot the girl who's actually a half-Esper/Ancient/Summoner but has forgotten her heritage. Yup, FF owes a lot to bad fanfiction:).
So... you're saying you'd rather feel like a big-time bureaucrat, which is clearly better?
Given a choice between small- and big-time bureaucrat, then heck yeah!
But even more I'd like to feel like the Emperor, the guy who gives orders like "colonize that planet, conquer this solar system at all costs, crush the Endurean Empire if reasonably practical, gather a strong navy in this star system and inform me when done" and then let the bureaucrats (AI) deal with the details. That way the game could have complex economy and politics and consequently more depth, yet it would avoid getting into micromanaging some farm world's production. Distant Worlds is a step in that direction, but the UI is still insufficient.
I'd also like to see internal politics in a Civ/Orion-style game. Why don't I have allies, supporters, enemies, even covert rebels? The games keep track of each citizen (population unit) anyway, so why not model them a bit more deeply? That way, when my internal agents learn that there's a Rebel in my small colony world, I Caligula the Second could decide to bomb it to smithereens rather than send the secret police down there and risk the rebel fleeing.
The throne of Orion sits empty, and whoever defeats the Guardian and takes it recovers ancient and lucrative markets, gaining a definitive edge over their competitors. But I guess the Bad Game Rays are still too powerful for current generation designers to overcome...
9 is fun to a point, but at some point the battles start being based mostly on luck, because there's an ever-increasing lag between giving characters commands and them actually doing anything.
The game was intentionally linear through most of the game because of the way they tried to push the story. I'll give them a little credit...I see what they were trying to do and it might have worked if the story and characters were stronger.
Final Fantasy has three elements: exploration, battles, and story. Story determines what areas you can explore at any particular time, and key scenes are usually associated with area transitions. This makes the overall structure like a series of large halls (story states, where you can explore) connected by corridors (key events) populated by orcs (fight marathons, boss fights).
The thing is, if you remove exploration, you are left only with a bunch of cutscenes connecting a series of fights together. That might work as a game if the fight system was good, but Final Fantasy's system has traditionally been pretty boring, to put it bluntly; it hasn't really evolved since NES times. The fights simply aren't interesting enough to carry the game on their own; with no breather areas to be explored, the only thing to do besides watching cutscenes is to select "attack" or "magic" from a menu over and over again.
Disclaimer: the last FF I played was IX, so this might have changed since then. But I don't think it has; and even if it has, removing exploration would still cripple the game compared to leaving it there. Exploration helps pace the game, by letting the player decide when he's ready for the next Big Dramatic Moment, rather than forcing the game designer try to guess how many undramatic - and thus by definition pointless - fights he has to go through before the next cutscene happens.
Really, there is very little difference between "exhaustion penalty" and "rest bonus" other than perception.
There is no difference between doing a spreadsheet and playing a computer game other than perception. It's all math beneath the surface.
This is what most of empire (especially space empire) building games fail at: you and your opponents feel like small-time bureaucrats, not Ceasar or Palpatine. Ironically, it would also be the easiest to fix, since - as you noticed - a simple cosmetic change is often enough.
I agree that saying this software is "learning" is somewhat misleading. It's similar to Human learning in some ways, but after looking at some of it's tweets, it's not much to brag about.
Actually, the problem is that people expect this program to be learning the meaning of the words, and isn't. It can't, because the underlaying meaning of human language lays on the foundation of physical actions we can perform - push, pull, go to, throw etc. This machine has no concept of these actions, or even the 3D (or anyD) space where they could occur, so it's simply impossible for it to learn human language.
To drive the point home (notice the metaphora here), the very words I used as examples of physical actions above are regularly used in the context of programming. "Don't push me" is another context where the meaning is obvious if you know the base meaning. And so on.
Computers simply aren't powerful enough yet to create internal models that would reach human level - in fact, I doubt they're even at the level of reptiles yet - and since human language refers to and describes these models, the task of learning human language in any meaningful sense is impossible for them, for now.
See, the problem I have with this kind of argument is that it's similar to the argument that evolution is making progress, as if humans are the pinnacle of evolution. It's a silly argument, but your argument is similar.
And yet it is true, based on all available evidence: given two random points in the history of life on this planet, it is more likely than not that lifeforms are more complex in the later than the earlier one. The same is true of human history, and in fact the Universe as a whole seems to behave in this way, developing more and finer structures as time passes by.
Civilization advances and retreats.
Actually, it's very rare that technology is lost; mostly civilization "retreating" simply means that a local empire falls, which may or may not slow down technological development.
There is no reason society must 'progress.'
Yet it has, for as far back as we have been able to track it. That's only natural: for society to stop progressing would require people to stop being imaginative or curious.
If innovation was all that really mattered the Amiga would've won the desktop battle back in the early 90's.
It's the exact other way around: PC's architecture allows for continual improvement, Amiga's didn't. Amiga failed to keep up with the pace of technical development, and so what was once an impressive machine became less and less so with time, sold less, was developed slower, and so on.
There's this Finnish gaming magazine that's actually blaming piracy for the death of Commodore 64, rather than improving technology making it less and less useful by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that they didn't, now did they? They built a limited government, and it expanded again and again, because the limited one just wasn't enough.
And if I use that right to not take a vaccine, get the disease, and it mutates on my body so that it'll bypass vaccinations of my neighbours, I've just harmed them through my choices.
Anyway, I agree with you in principle. However, please understand that as long as we live in the same world, it's nowhere near easy to determine what concerns just me and nobody else. And once you start codifying that to law - which you must do, unless you prefer judges wielding the power of kings - and people start finding ways around it, prompting corrections, said law convolves into something that would give Cthulhu nightmares.
Engaging in business involves contract law (what constitutes a binding agreement? what are the penalties for breaking it? under what conditions may it be dissolved? what limitations are there for it (answer "none" and I will have myself installed as a de facto tyrant in no time)), property law (who owes what and how can ownership be transferred? what's stopping me from simply buying a millimeter-thick strip of land completely surrounding your house and holding you prisoner there?) and employment law (can I demand my female secretary to "entertain" me and my guests? what's minimum wage (answer "none" and watch what happens when people get the choice between starvation and rebellion). I'm sorry, but it's simply impossible to keep the government out of it.
And that "fruits of your labour" thing sounds almost communist, you Marxist demon!
Government is always limited, unless you happen to live in a dictatorship. Everyone agrees that letting Caligula have unlimited power is bad; the controversy is about where the limits lay.
And every other system is 2 wolves dying of hunger so that 1 sheep may live. What's your point?
Quite frankly... No. I think that anyone who's capable of posing a serious threat has to be smart enough to not brag about it on Facebook beforehand. I'd also assume that anyone who did talk about killing the president on Facebook were an Internet Tough Guy. Therefore, I'd concentrate my efforts on actual security, rather than watchign Facebook.
On the other hand, if I was tasked with creating an East Germany -style snitch network, I'd simply befriend everyone on Facebook. No need to pay the informants that way.
The thing is, Western society is going towards a crisis. Globalization has brought nothing but misery and failing economies, and there's an ever-increasing resistance to it. On the other hand, the new nobility love their Feudalism 2.0 project, and don't want to give it up for the benefit of mere serfs. There's going to be a lot of unrest in coming years as it's decided if we're able to undo the damage caused by decades of right-wing politics, or plunge into a new Dark Age.
It isn't "far down" the line. No matter how far down the line you go, you'll never find any difference between 0.999... and 1. Therefore, they're equal.
Infinity is not merely a very big number. It really is just that: infinite. That's a far more important thing people have trouble comprehending.
Actually, that's quite a deliberate omission. If the show host didn't know which door held the price and just opened one at random, switching doesn't change your odds of getting the price. On the other hand, if the host knew and deliberately picked the price-less door, switching will improve your odds. Switching will thefeore improve your odds of winning by an unknown amount (since you don't know how likely the show host has forgotten which door held the price). Therefore, you should switch.
The problem is that you never will. 0.00...1 will always have an infinite amount of zeroes in the place of ellipses, no matter how many times you've multiplied it (let's say by ten, for simplicity's sake). It never gets any farther from zero, no matter how many times or with what you multiply it - which, of course, is exactly how zero behaves.
Most churches don't claim that giving money to them will bring you health or good fortune. They are asking for money for running costs and charity without any promise of a return. Making such promises - selling indulgences - was one of the abuses that launched Protestantism, you know.
Bullshit. Coca-Cola tastes identical to Pepsi or any other cola, so obviously it was unable to keep the relevant parts of the formula a secret. It's success is based on marketing and nothing more.
Nope, you should thank Lenin. Without him, there wouldn't have been a Soviet Union to beat. In fact, the US owes winning the Cold War to Lenin and winning World War II to Hitler!
Anarchy: oppresion by the strongest warrior or most charismatic gang leader. In other words, Libertarianism Lite.
Libertarians stand for privatized oppression. Most other parties stand for government-supplied oppression. Does anyone actually stand for freedom nowadays?
That really depends on the program, now doesn't it? I'd be very surprised if the programs didn't cache some of their computations to immediately generate the countermove if the opponent moves as expected, and use the reminder of their turn to further simulate future moves. After all, it's an obvious optimization, and that's what plans are - now I do this, then he does that, then I respond with this move, and so on.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. A brain is basically a massively parallel computer, simulating the likely events in your immediate vicinity all the time - and in the case of humans, using abstract thought to simulate far away places as well. It's likely that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of plans that are considered subconsciously but rejected because of some obvious flaw, freeing the conscious mind to only examine the most promising ones in detail.
Just cross-connect the wires and run it backwards.
How it works is that the Patent Office rubber-stamps every paper offered to it, resulting in lots of inane patents that are then used to extort people due to the fact that it takes a costly court battle to get the patent overturned. The system is set up in this way because it allows large corporations to squash any small newcomers should the need arise.
Couldn't you just use the Standard Edition? All those "smartphone" doohickeys require CPU and memory anyway.
The Achilles heel of nuclear power is that people are, for whatever reason, deathly afraid of radiation, and will run around like headless chicken at the very mention of the word. This combines nicely with the less rational anti-technology elements of the enviromental movement to turn what should be engineering decisions into political ones. Various demagogues who care nothing about the consequences of their actions as long as they get power then finish the mess.
Then again, it's not like that's different from any other issue, so I guess it's just business as usual.
Those are story elements, not gameplay elements. And you forgot the girl who's actually a half-Esper/Ancient/Summoner but has forgotten her heritage. Yup, FF owes a lot to bad fanfiction :).
Given a choice between small- and big-time bureaucrat, then heck yeah!
But even more I'd like to feel like the Emperor, the guy who gives orders like "colonize that planet, conquer this solar system at all costs, crush the Endurean Empire if reasonably practical, gather a strong navy in this star system and inform me when done" and then let the bureaucrats (AI) deal with the details. That way the game could have complex economy and politics and consequently more depth, yet it would avoid getting into micromanaging some farm world's production. Distant Worlds is a step in that direction, but the UI is still insufficient.
I'd also like to see internal politics in a Civ/Orion-style game. Why don't I have allies, supporters, enemies, even covert rebels? The games keep track of each citizen (population unit) anyway, so why not model them a bit more deeply? That way, when my internal agents learn that there's a Rebel in my small colony world, I Caligula the Second could decide to bomb it to smithereens rather than send the secret police down there and risk the rebel fleeing.
The throne of Orion sits empty, and whoever defeats the Guardian and takes it recovers ancient and lucrative markets, gaining a definitive edge over their competitors. But I guess the Bad Game Rays are still too powerful for current generation designers to overcome...
9 is fun to a point, but at some point the battles start being based mostly on luck, because there's an ever-increasing lag between giving characters commands and them actually doing anything.
Final Fantasy has three elements: exploration, battles, and story. Story determines what areas you can explore at any particular time, and key scenes are usually associated with area transitions. This makes the overall structure like a series of large halls (story states, where you can explore) connected by corridors (key events) populated by orcs (fight marathons, boss fights).
The thing is, if you remove exploration, you are left only with a bunch of cutscenes connecting a series of fights together. That might work as a game if the fight system was good, but Final Fantasy's system has traditionally been pretty boring, to put it bluntly; it hasn't really evolved since NES times. The fights simply aren't interesting enough to carry the game on their own; with no breather areas to be explored, the only thing to do besides watching cutscenes is to select "attack" or "magic" from a menu over and over again.
Disclaimer: the last FF I played was IX, so this might have changed since then. But I don't think it has; and even if it has, removing exploration would still cripple the game compared to leaving it there. Exploration helps pace the game, by letting the player decide when he's ready for the next Big Dramatic Moment, rather than forcing the game designer try to guess how many undramatic - and thus by definition pointless - fights he has to go through before the next cutscene happens.
There is no difference between doing a spreadsheet and playing a computer game other than perception. It's all math beneath the surface.
This is what most of empire (especially space empire) building games fail at: you and your opponents feel like small-time bureaucrats, not Ceasar or Palpatine. Ironically, it would also be the easiest to fix, since - as you noticed - a simple cosmetic change is often enough.
Actually, the problem is that people expect this program to be learning the meaning of the words, and isn't. It can't, because the underlaying meaning of human language lays on the foundation of physical actions we can perform - push, pull, go to, throw etc. This machine has no concept of these actions, or even the 3D (or anyD) space where they could occur, so it's simply impossible for it to learn human language.
To drive the point home (notice the metaphora here), the very words I used as examples of physical actions above are regularly used in the context of programming. "Don't push me" is another context where the meaning is obvious if you know the base meaning. And so on.
Computers simply aren't powerful enough yet to create internal models that would reach human level - in fact, I doubt they're even at the level of reptiles yet - and since human language refers to and describes these models, the task of learning human language in any meaningful sense is impossible for them, for now.
lol no u
And yet it is true, based on all available evidence: given two random points in the history of life on this planet, it is more likely than not that lifeforms are more complex in the later than the earlier one. The same is true of human history, and in fact the Universe as a whole seems to behave in this way, developing more and finer structures as time passes by.
Actually, it's very rare that technology is lost; mostly civilization "retreating" simply means that a local empire falls, which may or may not slow down technological development.
Yet it has, for as far back as we have been able to track it. That's only natural: for society to stop progressing would require people to stop being imaginative or curious.
It's the exact other way around: PC's architecture allows for continual improvement, Amiga's didn't. Amiga failed to keep up with the pace of technical development, and so what was once an impressive machine became less and less so with time, sold less, was developed slower, and so on.
There's this Finnish gaming magazine that's actually blaming piracy for the death of Commodore 64, rather than improving technology making it less and less useful by comparison.