It has been mentioned on Slashdot that the age at which the brain starts to seriously deteriorate is around 40, so I would argue that this should be the oldest anyone should ever enter the Senate. The traditional retirement age of 65 is there for a good reason - traditionally, even craft guilds have found people to be more of a problem than a help above that age.
Traditional retirement age is 64 because prior to modern medicine, almost nobody lived to be that old, and those who did were disease-broken husks. It has nothing to do with brainpower and everything to do with being able to walk.
And Senators don't need functional brains, their corporate masters are more than happy to think for them.
I mean for one, the "series of tubes" thing just sounds funny. It was not an eloquent way of putting it. Second, it is a rather large oversimplification. Ok I'm fine with it for children since you are trying to really simplify it, but it is a bad way to describe it overall. The relationship between my plumbing (an actual series of tubes) and my net connection is tenuous at best despite the Internet connection begin called a "pipe" in some contexts.
The Internet is not a series of tubes. The Internet is a message-delivery system. Compare it to the postal system and each packet to a letter, and you'll make a lot more sense.
Latency, of course, means how long it takes for a letter to reach its destination, and bandwidth means how many letters the postal truck can fit per round-trip. A router is a post office that sends letters to another post office in the right direction, and since the lazy bastards simply throw away any letters they don't have time to handle, you need to send back an ACKnowledgement that the letter was received. And since the system only delivers letters, and they have a maximum size, if you want to send a long text you need to break it to small pieces, number them, and send them separately, then resend any that the other end doesn't ACKnowledge in a reasonable amount of time. Oh, and there's a vicious Carnivore reading your letters while they're in transit, trying to find some excuse to eat you, so you'd better encrypt them so only the recipient can read them.
Young people just made fun of him because he was old, basically, and he didn't have a technical understanding of the internet
And still considered himself fit to make decisions concerning it. It's the combination of ignorance and power that got people alarmed; making fun of him was simply a way of trying to check that power and prevent him from doing damage.
Memory leaks usually get swapped out... your swap usage will grow but the system will keep going just as fast since those pages will never get swapped in again.
I once had explorer.exe on Windows 7 go into some kind of seizure where it ended up using over 2 gigs of memory (of a total 4) before I killed it. It certainly was swapping in and out constantly. Fun, that.
I know, shame on us for having an education and not being as bigoted and sexist as our predecessors.
You are, you've just switched targets and think this makes you better.
I mean, fuck, you can't even buy a good slave anymore, can you?
You aren't impressing anyone, you know. Even the free market fundamentalists who claim any deviation from dogma leads to communistic dictatorship have a better point than you. And your mom's a fat whore.
We live in a society that assumes that men want to have sex with women, no matter their state of mind, and that further presumes that a man cannot be raped by a woman, and any man that does make such a claim is a pussy. So it is understandable that so few cases are prosecuted.
More importantly, most women calling themselves "feminists" nowadays switch between "women are equal - nay, superior - to men" and "women are poor victims who need to be protected from those nasty, mean men", depending on which will benefit them most at the moment. The very same person who gets drunk and has sex with strangers then turns around and accuses them from not protecting her from herself nonetheless demand equal power in society. And it's never the woman's own lack of ability that keeps her from rising to the top in an organization, no, it's a conspiracy of men - the "glass ceiling" doing it!
Just like modern libertarians are corporate whores bringing shame to once-proud name, so are modern feminists psychopathic hypocratic drama queens who would get the living crap beaten out of them by those past ones who went to jail and sometimes died for the sake of being treated like adults rather than adult children. This goes especially to all of you - "I was almost raped" - radical - "all heterosexual sex is rape" - feminists - "child molestation is okay if it's a woman doing it to boys" - out there (all actual quotes).
Sometimes I really wish I'd been born homosexual so I wouldn't have to deal with this shit...
Our era of bounty and consequence-free living is nearly over, though, so you can rest easy, it won't be long before we will be living in an era where these guys will get what they have coming to them.
If history is any guide, when going gets tough, robber barons live like nobility and the rest of us live like serfs. So no, these guys won't get what they have coming to them, because the less wealth Joe Average has, the more guards, lawyers, judges, policemen and political influence Joe Robbers ill-gotten loot can buy.
Polynomials can sill be really big. n^100000000 is in P, but an O(n^100000000) algorithm would not be practical.
It might be, depending on the value of n and how much time n=1 would take. Not everything needs to scale well; sometimes you just need the fastest possible algorithm to, say, sort a mostly-sorted 100-element array.
After all, a big reason why workers come over on the program is because we genuinely lack enough skilled labor to meet our needs at reasonable price levels.
No, you don't. You, like all non-third-world economies, lack skilled labour willing to work at subsistence wage. This is the corporate definition of "reasonable price level", and is what offshoring and immigration labour is meant to fix. After all, the top 1% holds only a third of all wealth, so there's plenty of room for improvement.
The Humble Indy Bundle was distributed without DRM and letting people pay whatever they want (down to a penny!), and a quarter of the people who downloaded the games from their servers were pirating it!
Your anti-DRM group is comprised mostly of us nerds who have a problem with our computers not being completely under our control. Most gamers, I've found, are not nearly as savvy or idealistic.
DRM is inconvenient. At the minimum, you have to insert a disc to play a game that's already taking room on your hard drive; as the infection worsens, you start getting software that refuses to work if a CD burner or CD emulation software is installed, then installs malware (hello Sony!), then finally requires a constant connection to DRM servers.
By contrast, the Pirate Bay Edition has been disinfected and works just like any other program in your computer. It's superior value and as an added bonus costs nothing. So, the coldly rational choice is to never buy from the store, since you don't know what trouble you might be getting, and only foolhardy ideologist would do that.
If you let business be you don't have a patent system. A patent system is a state-granted monopoly, the exact opposite of what the free market stands for.
Property law is also a state-granted monopoly. So is contract law. And free market doesn't "stand for" anything, it's simply an economic optimization tool society uses to benefit its members, and couldn't exist without a strong state enforcing rules for its participants.
You'd think the fall of Soviet Russia had been an excellent lesson on what happens when you let economic decisions be driven by ideology rather than reality, but I guess free market fundamentalists aren't any better than other fundamentalists in learning from observation, so now our economy is in the gutter too.
I don't get why this has been modded "funny". It's true. Just like monkeys tapping away at keyboards in order to generate the works of Shakespeare, a computer can generate player algorithm patterns that work well in this particular setting. The speed is just boosted by selectively choosing the ones that match whatever it is you want to get at the end.
And this teeny little boost is the difference between getting what you want before or after the monkeys and the computer disappear from proton decay.
Seriously. Any argument that includes "assuming infinite time" belongs in the sphere of theology, not computer science.
If you run a pattern generator long enough you can get all possible patterns within a finite possibility space.
While true, this is also completely meaningless. For even trivial pattern spaces of, say, 512 bits, "long enough" would be far longer than the current age of the Universe.
Sure he was trying to protect the integrity of the holy 30 minute rule, but it was no longer his job, or his problem, he should have handed over the keys.
If it's no longer his job, or his problem, then why should he care about whether the company has keys or not? Seriously, if someone fires me, then calls me later asking the password to login to their own computers, I'll laugh and close the phone. Keeping track of a root password is work, and since I no longer work for you, and don't have any reason to like you...
Well, if a given organization calls for stricter control of Wikileaks, the chances are that whatever they have published lately is true.
More cynically, the more malicious stupidity some document contains, the more likely it is to be true. Love makes fools, marriage cuckolds, and patriotism malevolent imbeciles.
No; the more computers act like magical black boxes, the easier it becomes using them. It becomes harder to fix them, if you don't understand how the black box works.
A computer is not a car. It is a general-purpose device. If it doesn't let you, say, install a program, is that caused by 1) something being misconfigured, 2) security policy preventing a user from installing anything or 3) an anti-virus detecting an infected program? Why, that depends entirely on what the owner wants.
There is no difference between fixing and using a general-purpose device. That's why anything that makes them harder to fix also makes them harder to use. And refusal to accept this is what causes almost all computer problems in the world.
So, you're trying to reduce costs to battle spiralling inflation, at the same time telling people that you can't pay them more while the value of the money in their pocket is going down. Just how would the private sector tackle this better?
Well, the traditional method is to hire some thugs to beat or gun down the serfs. You know, the Invisible Hand puts on knuckle irons;)...
If we actually had perfect law enforcement we would either drop a great many laws or society would rip itself apart. We currently rely on the amount of work involved in law enforcement to act as a sort of natural prioritizer to make police go after what matters and skip the small stuff.
Even more importantly, perfect law enforcement would give the government absolute power. Imperfect enforcement means that resistance movements can grow under the radar until they become powerful enough to actually accomplish something. Perfect enforcement basically means that status quo stays forever.
My point was that its a moral/philosophical debate, not a logical one, so you really need to just take your feelings on the issue and go with that. Also, I wasn't so much suggesting there aren't potential solutions to those problems, I was simply posing the question: If you upload your mental state to a computer, are you still human?
The question you actually posed was: "If uploading your mind goes horribly wrong, stripping you of emotions in the process, are you still human?" That you didn't notice the difference between this and the question you thought you were asking is the strongest argument for why you shouldn't, in fact, "just take your feelings on the issue and go with that".
Logic is one of your key capabilities as a human. Discard that, and you "stop being a human", reducing yourself to a mere monkey; and monkeys aren't very good at solving moral or philosophical problems. Feelings are the way to gauge how desirable or undesirable a given set of circumstances would be, but you still need to use logic to sort things out for them to evaluate.
My irony-detector sometimes goes haywire when I encounter discussion of issues that have to do with politics. I've read so many comments that I thought have to be a joke but turned out to be serious that I hesitate to trust my ability to discern the difference between authentic idiocy and the clever opera buffo.
This is known as Poe's Law, and it basically states that it's impossible to tell actual stupidity from a parody of stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Traditional retirement age is 64 because prior to modern medicine, almost nobody lived to be that old, and those who did were disease-broken husks. It has nothing to do with brainpower and everything to do with being able to walk.
And Senators don't need functional brains, their corporate masters are more than happy to think for them.
Also known as a Beowulf clusterfuck.
The Internet is not a series of tubes. The Internet is a message-delivery system. Compare it to the postal system and each packet to a letter, and you'll make a lot more sense.
Latency, of course, means how long it takes for a letter to reach its destination, and bandwidth means how many letters the postal truck can fit per round-trip. A router is a post office that sends letters to another post office in the right direction, and since the lazy bastards simply throw away any letters they don't have time to handle, you need to send back an ACKnowledgement that the letter was received. And since the system only delivers letters, and they have a maximum size, if you want to send a long text you need to break it to small pieces, number them, and send them separately, then resend any that the other end doesn't ACKnowledge in a reasonable amount of time. Oh, and there's a vicious Carnivore reading your letters while they're in transit, trying to find some excuse to eat you, so you'd better encrypt them so only the recipient can read them.
And still considered himself fit to make decisions concerning it. It's the combination of ignorance and power that got people alarmed; making fun of him was simply a way of trying to check that power and prevent him from doing damage.
I once had explorer.exe on Windows 7 go into some kind of seizure where it ended up using over 2 gigs of memory (of a total 4) before I killed it. It certainly was swapping in and out constantly. Fun, that.
You are, you've just switched targets and think this makes you better.
You aren't impressing anyone, you know. Even the free market fundamentalists who claim any deviation from dogma leads to communistic dictatorship have a better point than you. And your mom's a fat whore.
More importantly, most women calling themselves "feminists" nowadays switch between "women are equal - nay, superior - to men" and "women are poor victims who need to be protected from those nasty, mean men", depending on which will benefit them most at the moment. The very same person who gets drunk and has sex with strangers then turns around and accuses them from not protecting her from herself nonetheless demand equal power in society. And it's never the woman's own lack of ability that keeps her from rising to the top in an organization, no, it's a conspiracy of men - the "glass ceiling" doing it!
Just like modern libertarians are corporate whores bringing shame to once-proud name, so are modern feminists psychopathic hypocratic drama queens who would get the living crap beaten out of them by those past ones who went to jail and sometimes died for the sake of being treated like adults rather than adult children. This goes especially to all of you - "I was almost raped" - radical - "all heterosexual sex is rape" - feminists - "child molestation is okay if it's a woman doing it to boys" - out there (all actual quotes).
Sometimes I really wish I'd been born homosexual so I wouldn't have to deal with this shit...
If history is any guide, when going gets tough, robber barons live like nobility and the rest of us live like serfs. So no, these guys won't get what they have coming to them, because the less wealth Joe Average has, the more guards, lawyers, judges, policemen and political influence Joe Robbers ill-gotten loot can buy.
Are you using the Anarchist Cookbook ?-)
It might be, depending on the value of n and how much time n=1 would take. Not everything needs to scale well; sometimes you just need the fastest possible algorithm to, say, sort a mostly-sorted 100-element array.
No, you don't. You, like all non-third-world economies, lack skilled labour willing to work at subsistence wage. This is the corporate definition of "reasonable price level", and is what offshoring and immigration labour is meant to fix. After all, the top 1% holds only a third of all wealth, so there's plenty of room for improvement.
You call your bathroom mirror "the future" ?-) With the dramatic pause and all?
And it made over a million dollars.
DRM is inconvenient. At the minimum, you have to insert a disc to play a game that's already taking room on your hard drive; as the infection worsens, you start getting software that refuses to work if a CD burner or CD emulation software is installed, then installs malware (hello Sony!), then finally requires a constant connection to DRM servers.
By contrast, the Pirate Bay Edition has been disinfected and works just like any other program in your computer. It's superior value and as an added bonus costs nothing. So, the coldly rational choice is to never buy from the store, since you don't know what trouble you might be getting, and only foolhardy ideologist would do that.
Property law is also a state-granted monopoly. So is contract law. And free market doesn't "stand for" anything, it's simply an economic optimization tool society uses to benefit its members, and couldn't exist without a strong state enforcing rules for its participants.
You'd think the fall of Soviet Russia had been an excellent lesson on what happens when you let economic decisions be driven by ideology rather than reality, but I guess free market fundamentalists aren't any better than other fundamentalists in learning from observation, so now our economy is in the gutter too.
And this teeny little boost is the difference between getting what you want before or after the monkeys and the computer disappear from proton decay.
Seriously. Any argument that includes "assuming infinite time" belongs in the sphere of theology, not computer science.
While true, this is also completely meaningless. For even trivial pattern spaces of, say, 512 bits, "long enough" would be far longer than the current age of the Universe.
If it's no longer his job, or his problem, then why should he care about whether the company has keys or not? Seriously, if someone fires me, then calls me later asking the password to login to their own computers, I'll laugh and close the phone. Keeping track of a root password is work, and since I no longer work for you, and don't have any reason to like you...
Well, if a given organization calls for stricter control of Wikileaks, the chances are that whatever they have published lately is true.
More cynically, the more malicious stupidity some document contains, the more likely it is to be true. Love makes fools, marriage cuckolds, and patriotism malevolent imbeciles.
A computer is not a car. It is a general-purpose device. If it doesn't let you, say, install a program, is that caused by 1) something being misconfigured, 2) security policy preventing a user from installing anything or 3) an anti-virus detecting an infected program? Why, that depends entirely on what the owner wants.
There is no difference between fixing and using a general-purpose device. That's why anything that makes them harder to fix also makes them harder to use. And refusal to accept this is what causes almost all computer problems in the world.
Well, the traditional method is to hire some thugs to beat or gun down the serfs. You know, the Invisible Hand puts on knuckle irons ;)...
Most users need to know when something has changed so they can associate any potential breakage with the correct event.
The more computers act like magical black boxes, the harder it becomes using them.
Even more importantly, perfect law enforcement would give the government absolute power. Imperfect enforcement means that resistance movements can grow under the radar until they become powerful enough to actually accomplish something. Perfect enforcement basically means that status quo stays forever.
The question you actually posed was: "If uploading your mind goes horribly wrong, stripping you of emotions in the process, are you still human?" That you didn't notice the difference between this and the question you thought you were asking is the strongest argument for why you shouldn't, in fact, "just take your feelings on the issue and go with that".
Logic is one of your key capabilities as a human. Discard that, and you "stop being a human", reducing yourself to a mere monkey; and monkeys aren't very good at solving moral or philosophical problems. Feelings are the way to gauge how desirable or undesirable a given set of circumstances would be, but you still need to use logic to sort things out for them to evaluate.
This is known as Poe's Law, and it basically states that it's impossible to tell actual stupidity from a parody of stupidity.