Maybe. I just don't see how your body is going to put the 5 Volt on it, though.
Like I said, it would need some adapter electronics. The USB power requirement could be met with a glucose fuel cell, perhaps?
Or, more importantly, how your body is going to cope with the Amperage if some device down the line short-circuits it.
Hey, I never said it's a good idea;). Anyway, we could deal with this by using a wireless transmitter between the brain-silk and external devices; this would also solve the problems associated with having wires going through your skull
Usenet readers generally have a bad design decision in them: they represent conversations as trees. This means conversations split at every post, and (especially for controversial topics) turn into a bunch of two-person arguments rather than a single community discussion. Forums do not allow forking of the conversation, and this means it's more likely to remain a community discussion
Except that this is a great feature. It allows subtopics to branch from the main discussion, which in turn allows both the topic and any related insights to be considered without these subtopics disturbing each other. This particular thread - talking about the ideal discussion system, which was spawned by talking of the design of newsreaders, which was spawned by talking about newsreaders vs. web forums, which in turn is a subtopic of Cox screwing with its customers - is a perfect example.
Besides, all you get with a "flat list" forum is that people still answer specific posts and have two-on-two discussions with other people joining in, those various subtopics simply get mixed up into a near-incoherent mess. That's only to be expected: IRL, it's only in formal meetings where people talk one at the time; in all actual "community discussions" they form small groups talking about various things that may or may not be on topic. Then they wander from group to group, taking insights from these little discussions with them and mixing them in new ways.
Trying to force the discussion into a linear progression is both useless and counterproductive even if it was succesful. In fact, if I were to design a forum, I'd simply put everything into a giant tree, rather than do an artificial division between "articles" and "threads". What does that do, anyway, other than expire perfectly good discussions prematurely? Oh, and of course I'd offer an NNTP interface, with various top nodes as newsgroups.
The lack of a third party app store isn't because the care one whit what you do with your iPhone. What they care about is the overall iPhone experience, and they believe that third party stores would degrade that experience. I agree with them, and the success of the iPhone tends to back this up.
The lack of third party app stores is simply because Apple wants to milk iPhone for all it's worth. IPhone is the phone equivalent of a game console.
Why do people insist on making elaborate excuses when the actual (business) reason is so blazingly obvious?
It surprises me, how that came from a quote to a truthiness, without anybody ever checking or caring if it's actually true. We'r starting to socially condition ourselves into thinking it is undoubtedly true. And no matter if it's actually true, that is always a bad thing. Because it lets people forget the "why"s and blindly adhere to a resulting but imperfect rule, even when the results are opposite to the original intention.
Occam's Razor is a rule about making theories - mental models of nature - and says nothing about nature itself. It can easily be justified that your mental model of reality should be the simplest that fits your observations of it, because you have both limited storage and processing power. Or, to put it another way, we've had bloatware long before we had computers, and OR says you should optimize what you can:).
Occam's razor doesn't mean that the simplest solution is always the correct one. It only means it's more likely.
No, Occam's Razor says "entities shouldn't be multiplied needlessly". It doesn't say anything about probabilities, it's more about avoiding needless complication.
Of course one might have other reasons to consider simpler solutions more likely, and infer Occam's Razor from that, but the Razor itself doesn't imply any such thing.
Vultures perform the useful and valuable task of removing carrion that would otherwise rot, smell, and spread diseases. Lawyers, on the other hand, are more like parasitic worms that live in your gut, rob your food, and cause dysentry to propagate through shit they caused to happen. Comparing lawyers to vultures is a vile insult towards the honest and hard-working carrion-eaters.
You know, if you connected a USB port to a brain, the chances are that you would learn to control USB devices with it eventually. You'd need some extra electronics to handle the interface - since USB is a high-frequency serial bus and brain uses low-frequency parallel bus - but this far, it seems that simply patching the signals from/to somewhere in the brains is sufficient for them to adapt.
That's only natural, really: converting signals between different levels of abstraction, inferring conclusions, and converting the results back to low levels is what intelligence is all about.
Basically they've run out of ideas on how to use those billions of transistors to make things faster or better.
How about a specialized CPU? Lots and lots and lots of weak single-threaded cores with their local non-shared memory, all running their own small program and connected to a very fast bus, allowing them to pass messages to each other. It would be ideal for many emerging applications, such as image recognition and AI in general.
The thing is, a general-purpose serial CPU is already as fast as it's ever going to get; already manufacturers are seeking further growth from adding extra cores rather than making existing ones faster, and have for a long time (since Pentium) used behind-the-scenes parallelism for it. While this leads to nominally x86-compatible processors, in reality using them efficiently requires completely reworking most programs, and even then, things like shared memory and the synchronization it necessiates incurs a huge penalty. So why not bite the bullet and start the inevitable transition to a truly parallel processor architechture right now?
I'm talking about something like "network-on-a-chip" here. It shouldn't even be difficult to implement, since as I said, modern CPUs are already working more or less like this behind the schemes, and simply emulating a serial processor (which is what allows things like HyperThreading). Whoever opens direct access to this programming model first gets to tailor it to their architechture, so there should definitely be incentive.
Queue the people explaining how this is evil because its "not enough".
Well, I for one would like to know what, exactly speaking, my (Finnish) government didn't want me to see. Our Prime Minister has been implicated in some corruption-related crimes lately, and I'd like to know if there's a connection.
Well, Google? What did the Finnish Government want to hide from their citizens?
You try to turn a few things around, but everyone here knows who the person filled with hatred is.
Ah yes, pointing out that Africa's problem is tribalism equals hateful racism. Good thing we cleared that.
You are an Fing idiot if you think that book said anything about "culture" it only researches factors that led to faster advance towards more powerful states and determined that culture was NOT the major factor that people like you try to make it.
In other words, it speculated on why culture advanced faster on some places than others. It drew the conclusion that it's mainly because of geography: Europe can produce lots of food, has no major deserts, is connected enough that ideas can spread yet has enough natural barriers that a single ruler can't conquer it all (which is what stopped China's advancement, dspite a headstart due to even more fertile soil) forcing nations to compete, and its major axis is east-west rather than nort-south, so the same agricultural techniques work on most of the continent. A multitude of domesticable animals was a nice plus.
But I suppose reading comprehension is not your strongest point.
Maybe you should go to Africa and see how you fit in? I bet some of the warlords could use a guy like you.
I guess this would make you the one filled with hate.
Please leave your social conditioning at the front door. Nation-states are not better or less primitive than tribes. They are much much worse. Because the only difference between tribes and nation-states, is that in the latter, the single person has less to say, and people are more forced into a morality monoculture of a dominant power.
Yes, of course. Silly me. In a tribe you're free to criticize the tribal chief, unlike the horrible culture we have here where any kind of disagreement will be punished by death.
In a tribe, you can't act like a dick, or you will be kicked out and/or killed.
Where "act like a dick" is defined as "annoy anyone more powerful than you".
In the former case you can still create your own tribe.
Well, if you magically acquire followers and land, yes.
In our so-called "modern" countries, you have to adhere to the general rules, or you go to jail.
In our modern countries, you can only be thrown to jail if you break a law, not because someone powerful happens to dislike you.
If you disagree, tough shit, cause it's not going to happen.
Really? I'm pretty sure that most of these modern countries specifically allow you to voice your disagreement, and define ways you can try to get the rules changed. You can also move.
Hell, they even go invade other countries, to enforce their own twisted reality there too.
And... You think... that tribes won't? Seriously?
And on top of that, we lost our networks of trust between real people. We have become cattle.
Speak for yourself.
Something that can not ever happen in a tribe.
Well, no; if you don't suck up to your tribesmen, they'll kill you or kick you out.
That is not in any way better than a tribal culture. It's worse. Because it in not natural for us humans.
Well, if peace, freedom, and the rule of law are unnatural, then I say: let's get artificial!
Yes, humans normally strongly disagree on many things. That's not a bad thing. It's a part of being free.
Yes, and in a tribal setting any such disagreement risks getting killed or expelled.
Yes, if there is a resource conflict on a disagreement, there is war. That's also just normal. It's part of natural selection.
So was the Black Death, but I'm still happier knowing antibiotics exist.
Why is it that all defences of the "noble savage" always devolve into some twisted form of darwinism? Or is it simply impossible to defend that lifestyle without considering the weak dying as a good thing?
But I doubt me saying this to a group of people who don't even kill the animals they eat themselves, will change much.:(
I'm sure this is very relevant to the rest of your post, but I can't quite seem to see the connection. Perhaps you could explain?
I'm not just going to call bullshit on your post, I'm going to call it racist bullshit too - there's a pretty nasty and uncalled-for value judgement there.
Apart from the fact that I'm talking about cultures, not races, the only value judgement I made is that wars are bad and genocide worse. Yes, that makes me a bad, bad man.
Africa has a very complicated situation that you have mischaracterized in a way that does no justice to the matter whatsoever. Tell me, have you actually read anything substantial on Africa? I'll even take Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil (which I have read). Have you read anything on anthropology, religious or otherwise?
I watch news. The recurring theme on Africa is one tribe fighting another.
First off, Africa is a massive continent, and level of development varies from place to place. In parts of Northern and Central Africa, you have locations which have or have had very old civilizations (ever heard of Nubia?) - you also have places where matters are mainly tribal.
Yes, Africa is a large continent, and has old civilizations and stable countries. It also has the most unrest of any continent.
Second, when it comes to that tribalism, the level of genocidal hatred that you see in cases like the Rwandan genocide of the early '90s was NOT a default tribal setting. In fact, it was heavily influenced by European colonialism, during which tribes were broken up in very arbitrary ways, and favourites were played. In some cases this created new tribal rivalries, or heavily intensified old ones. A perfect example of this was Rwanda, where most of the hatred had its origins in the fact that one tribe had been the favourites of the French, and the other wasn't. If you want to see how this was played out in practice, read first-hand accounts of the Belgian Congo - in Heart of Darkness, Conrad was pulling his punches...a LOT. You can start by reading George Washington Williams, who wrote a couple of very shocked reports on the matter around the turn of the 20th century.
So in short, Rwandan genocide was caused by people with tribal culture being forced into a nation-state, and that nation-state falling apart once external supporting force was removed. That kinda proves my point, now doesn't it?
Third, while modern Africa does have to deal with a level of often-fractured tribalism (and remember who it was who fractured it), the developed world is STILL holding it down in a lot of ways.
So you again acknowledge my point, and then try to blame it all on "the Man" who's holding "Brothers" down.
The World Bank is well known for handing out development loans that leave a country worse-off than they were before taking the money.
Gee, then maybe those countries shouldn't take those loans in the first place. Or perhaps you are trying to suggest that the people of these nations are too stupid to understand their own best interests? That's kinda racist, don't you think?
Of course, it could also be that the "nation-states" are really just a bunch of tribes fighting against each other while iron-fisted dictators loot everything they can, but saying that could be considered critical of that culture, so it would make me a bad, bad man.
The latest excuse for holding back African development is Anthropogenic Global Warming, which is used to prevent African nations from building coal-fired power plants (which is all they can afford - and power is a necessary step to industrialization and development), and as a result there is a massive energy crisis in parts of Africa right now.
How, exactly speaking, is anyone preventing Africans from building whatever they bloody well want? Or by "preventing" do you really mean that we're not building those plants for them and then guarding them and
Very sad that this comment was highly moderated. Every argument above has been painstakingly debunked, more than once.
Really? It's been debunked that Africa's problems are caused by its culture? Then it must be the inherently savage and primitive nature of the people there. I find it hard to believe such a racist theory, do you have any references?
Much of our modern state building civilization came from Africa and I am not talking about Lucy.
Perhaps you might be so kind as to mention some of these things?
If you think the BLACK AFRICAN people are different from the rest of us,
Either BLACK AFRICAN people are different from us or BLACK AFRICAN culture is different from ours. One or the other is needed to explain the reason why BLACK AFRICA is a hellhole of constant fighting while most of the world isn't.
I admit that I'm making an assumption that it's the culture rather than any inherent inferiority of the people, based on the fact that BLACK AFRICAN people seem to do fine when growing up in other cultures.
Why do you insist on fully capitalizing BLACK AFRICAN, anyway? Are you a racist?
"Guns, Germs and Steel" tries to explain why cultural differences arose, thus reinforcing my point that they exist.
And try to remember we are all human, more so that you might like to think.
That's a rather strange statement coming from someone who's advocating racism. Are you sure you really thought your assertions and their implications through?
Gee, I don't know. Is "Modest Proposal" trolling? "Divine Comedy" (where most of Dante's enemies, even those still alive at the time, turned out to be burning in Hell)? "Piss Christ"? Speaking of Jesus, what would you consider most conversations between him and the Pharisees in New Testament?
Basically, if you get people to react, you touched something in them, so I'd say that every instant of successfull trolling is necessarily art.
Roger Ebert seems to have bound himself deeply to his personal definition of what art should be and is desperately grasping at straws to try and convince others that he is right. Creating, and trying to enforce rules, for what constitute art is the goal of a pedantic bureaucrat without the capacity to just enjoy.
On a more sinister note, if you can get games declared "not art", then you could perhaps convince people that they shouldn't be protected under 1st Amendment or other applicable rules. Artistic freedom is a time-honored argument against censorship, so if you want to censor games, the first thing you need to do is make sure they're not regarded as art. This is especially important now that increasingly complex games can be made by pretty anyone who cares to try, making "official" rating systems increasingly worthless. Add the fact that even mainstream games are including more mature themes - sure, for now it's mostly just gore, but in a few years there might even be *gasp* sex - and of course the "games are for kids" -crowd would go on the offensive.
So maybe Ebert is just a weirdo who gets his kicks on arguing pointless things, or maybe he's preparing for the coming censorship attack by trying to frame games as unworthy of protection. And even if he's not going to make that argument, someone will.
I call bullshit. What's going on in Africa isn't civil war - one faction of a nation against another - but tribal warfare combined with genocidal racism. The exact same went on before Europeans came, so it can hardly be blamed on them.
Basically, it's still stone age in most of Africa, only the cavemen have access to automatic rifles and radio. The end result isn't pretty, but once you ignore the imported technology and concentrate on cultural trends, it's quite similar to, say, the situation in Europe before the rise of the Roman Empire.
Or, to put it even more bluntly, Africans are suffering because their culture is too primitive to support nation-states, and they should either go back to being hunter-gatherer tribes living in jungle or copy the necessary memes from Chinese or European culture to finish their transition to be part of the modern world.
As a side note, it's interesting how this demonstrates the value of philosophy, theology, and other non-technological memes that shaped European, Chinese and other succesful cultures. Those seem superficial at first glance, yet lacking them makes technology work against people, rather than for them.
So you're saying either everyone should fly a fighter jet or no one should?
Nice non-sequiter. As it happens, anyone can take flying lessons and apply to join the Air Force.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean everyone should have access to it.
Actually... Yes, it does. That's what something being legal means.
In fact it can be hard and expensive already to legally own an automatic firearm in the states. Are you saying that's wrong?
If the difficulty and expense are caused artificially to make it harder to use your legal rights... then yes, it's wrong. Ban them or allow them, but either way, don't pretend something else.
Driving is legal and it's not a right. There are definitely people that shouldn't drive. If everyone has the right to do it then why test people?
To see if they meet the requirements of driving safely, those being knowledge of traffick laws and skill at handling the car. These tests and the driving permit system are not meant to keep anyone from driving, they're meant to force people to learn to drive safely before they go to public roads.
Just let them do it. Clearly testing doesn't work any way as there are too many people who clearly can't drive yet have a license.
Yes, most real-world tests have false positive rate above zero. What about it?
Indentured workers are easier to manipulate than normal employees so that's what they want. There is a certain type of US manager than didn't get the point that slavery is bad and they want to get as close to it as the law will allow.
Unregulated capitalism leads to slavery, because reducing your employees to that helps drive down costs, thus increasing profits. This is something many people at all levels of society seem to fail to understand, despite the rather dramatic demonstration during the Industrial Revolution.
And no, slavery is not bad... for the slave owner.
When you export them to places like Australia they almost need a lawyer following them 24/7 to whisper common sense in their ears and keep them out of jail.
Most other places haven't been cursed by leaders who stick to an ideology even as it's proven wrong by reality since the Soviet Union fell.
It works like bullying: eventually the victim's own fear means instant compliance with the bully's wishes.
You're thinking of a thug. A thug bullies people to get them to obey him. A bully, on the other hand, is in it for the pain. He bullies people because he enjoys that, not because there's any other reward for it. A sadist, in other words.
It is important to make the difference between selfish and malicious evil. Selfish evil is rational, at least to some extent, but malicious evil is insane.
Of course they won't. The justification for returning to flight is to stop losing money, so they aren't going to start doing expensive additional maintenance if they do fly. I hope the pilot's union speaks up on the issue, for the sake of the passengers and crew.
If you don't do necessary maintenance on an airplane, it will crash and burn, literally. An airplane costs hundreds of millions of dollars, even before considering any costs from legal liability or loss of reputation. In other words, what kind of moron would make the decision to neglect maintenance?
I do support the freedom to own guns and don't think own even automatics should be completely out of the question (though it should be quite hard to get them)
Either automatic weapons in the hands of citizenry are okay or they are not. Which one is it?
I have nothing but contempt for people who don't have the guts to ban something outright but try to make it de facto banned by forcing people to jump through hoops.
Communism in Europe did not flourish in western Europe, where the trend had gone to more limited government, but in Russia, where the Czar was still supreme. Capitalism with a limited government is still the best.
Actually, Europe has socialism with limited government.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away. -- T. Jefferson (quoted from memory so may not be exact)
That is true of everything, including economy and corporations. Nature abhors vacuum, so someone will always hold the power. The only question is whether it's someone we can vote for or against.
Many think that in Europe all those extra rules and regulation makes it very difficult to run a business in that area of the world, so companies will move to other areas where they have more flexibility in their policies.
Yes, it's very convenient to be able to abuse workers till they've burned out or dead, at which point you can always get more from the masses of the unemployed. It's what capitalists did during Industrial Revolution, and led to the birth of Communism. It's also what's going on in the current Offshoring Revolution; I wonder what'll we get this time?
I had an accident and the zone of my brain which is responsible for the communication between the two hemispheres of the brain (corpus callosum) was damaged during a important head injury. Now it's difficult to take notes while listening to a speaker for example because I need to concentrate on two tasks.
Can the "other" hemisphere act on its own? I mean, is it more like having lost half your brain, or having been split into two beings in a single body?
So both hemispheres need to work actively but what is more important is the communication between them
Yes. I theorize that in order to meld separate nodes to a single entity, the communication between them has to be at least as fast as information processing within them. That way they stay so well synchronized and coordinated that they are, for all intents and purposes, a single entity - a brain, rather than just a bunch of neurons.
This is important for AI research, since it implies that the current design of computers - fast processor, but huge cost of communication and cache misses - is as bad fit for AI as can be. Instead, you'd want lots and lots and lots of relatively weak cores with their own dedicated on-chip memory and capability of sending messages to each other.
I wonder if graphis cards and compute shaders would fit the bill? They certainly are much better at parallelization. Of course, even then you'd need lots and lots and lots of them...
Or just run the whole thing over the Internet. Let's add AI nodes to various P2P programs and see Skynet emerge:). Seriously, the burden on a single computer would be pretty low, so it should be technically doable...
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, it would need some adapter electronics. The USB power requirement could be met with a glucose fuel cell, perhaps?
Hey, I never said it's a good idea ;). Anyway, we could deal with this by using a wireless transmitter between the brain-silk and external devices; this would also solve the problems associated with having wires going through your skull
Except that this is a great feature. It allows subtopics to branch from the main discussion, which in turn allows both the topic and any related insights to be considered without these subtopics disturbing each other. This particular thread - talking about the ideal discussion system, which was spawned by talking of the design of newsreaders, which was spawned by talking about newsreaders vs. web forums, which in turn is a subtopic of Cox screwing with its customers - is a perfect example.
Besides, all you get with a "flat list" forum is that people still answer specific posts and have two-on-two discussions with other people joining in, those various subtopics simply get mixed up into a near-incoherent mess. That's only to be expected: IRL, it's only in formal meetings where people talk one at the time; in all actual "community discussions" they form small groups talking about various things that may or may not be on topic. Then they wander from group to group, taking insights from these little discussions with them and mixing them in new ways.
Trying to force the discussion into a linear progression is both useless and counterproductive even if it was succesful. In fact, if I were to design a forum, I'd simply put everything into a giant tree, rather than do an artificial division between "articles" and "threads". What does that do, anyway, other than expire perfectly good discussions prematurely? Oh, and of course I'd offer an NNTP interface, with various top nodes as newsgroups.
The lack of third party app stores is simply because Apple wants to milk iPhone for all it's worth. IPhone is the phone equivalent of a game console.
Why do people insist on making elaborate excuses when the actual (business) reason is so blazingly obvious?
Occam's Razor is a rule about making theories - mental models of nature - and says nothing about nature itself. It can easily be justified that your mental model of reality should be the simplest that fits your observations of it, because you have both limited storage and processing power. Or, to put it another way, we've had bloatware long before we had computers, and OR says you should optimize what you can :).
No, Occam's Razor says "entities shouldn't be multiplied needlessly". It doesn't say anything about probabilities, it's more about avoiding needless complication.
Of course one might have other reasons to consider simpler solutions more likely, and infer Occam's Razor from that, but the Razor itself doesn't imply any such thing.
Vultures perform the useful and valuable task of removing carrion that would otherwise rot, smell, and spread diseases. Lawyers, on the other hand, are more like parasitic worms that live in your gut, rob your food, and cause dysentry to propagate through shit they caused to happen. Comparing lawyers to vultures is a vile insult towards the honest and hard-working carrion-eaters.
You know, if you connected a USB port to a brain, the chances are that you would learn to control USB devices with it eventually. You'd need some extra electronics to handle the interface - since USB is a high-frequency serial bus and brain uses low-frequency parallel bus - but this far, it seems that simply patching the signals from/to somewhere in the brains is sufficient for them to adapt.
That's only natural, really: converting signals between different levels of abstraction, inferring conclusions, and converting the results back to low levels is what intelligence is all about.
How about a specialized CPU? Lots and lots and lots of weak single-threaded cores with their local non-shared memory, all running their own small program and connected to a very fast bus, allowing them to pass messages to each other. It would be ideal for many emerging applications, such as image recognition and AI in general.
The thing is, a general-purpose serial CPU is already as fast as it's ever going to get; already manufacturers are seeking further growth from adding extra cores rather than making existing ones faster, and have for a long time (since Pentium) used behind-the-scenes parallelism for it. While this leads to nominally x86-compatible processors, in reality using them efficiently requires completely reworking most programs, and even then, things like shared memory and the synchronization it necessiates incurs a huge penalty. So why not bite the bullet and start the inevitable transition to a truly parallel processor architechture right now?
I'm talking about something like "network-on-a-chip" here. It shouldn't even be difficult to implement, since as I said, modern CPUs are already working more or less like this behind the schemes, and simply emulating a serial processor (which is what allows things like HyperThreading). Whoever opens direct access to this programming model first gets to tailor it to their architechture, so there should definitely be incentive.
Well, I for one would like to know what, exactly speaking, my (Finnish) government didn't want me to see. Our Prime Minister has been implicated in some corruption-related crimes lately, and I'd like to know if there's a connection.
Well, Google? What did the Finnish Government want to hide from their citizens?
Ah yes, pointing out that Africa's problem is tribalism equals hateful racism. Good thing we cleared that.
In other words, it speculated on why culture advanced faster on some places than others. It drew the conclusion that it's mainly because of geography: Europe can produce lots of food, has no major deserts, is connected enough that ideas can spread yet has enough natural barriers that a single ruler can't conquer it all (which is what stopped China's advancement, dspite a headstart due to even more fertile soil) forcing nations to compete, and its major axis is east-west rather than nort-south, so the same agricultural techniques work on most of the continent. A multitude of domesticable animals was a nice plus.
But I suppose reading comprehension is not your strongest point.
I guess this would make you the one filled with hate.
Yes, of course. Silly me. In a tribe you're free to criticize the tribal chief, unlike the horrible culture we have here where any kind of disagreement will be punished by death.
Where "act like a dick" is defined as "annoy anyone more powerful than you".
Well, if you magically acquire followers and land, yes.
In our modern countries, you can only be thrown to jail if you break a law, not because someone powerful happens to dislike you.
Really? I'm pretty sure that most of these modern countries specifically allow you to voice your disagreement, and define ways you can try to get the rules changed. You can also move.
And... You think... that tribes won't? Seriously?
Speak for yourself.
Well, no; if you don't suck up to your tribesmen, they'll kill you or kick you out.
Well, if peace, freedom, and the rule of law are unnatural, then I say: let's get artificial!
Yes, and in a tribal setting any such disagreement risks getting killed or expelled.
So was the Black Death, but I'm still happier knowing antibiotics exist.
Why is it that all defences of the "noble savage" always devolve into some twisted form of darwinism? Or is it simply impossible to defend that lifestyle without considering the weak dying as a good thing?
I'm sure this is very relevant to the rest of your post, but I can't quite seem to see the connection. Perhaps you could explain?
Apart from the fact that I'm talking about cultures, not races, the only value judgement I made is that wars are bad and genocide worse. Yes, that makes me a bad, bad man.
I watch news. The recurring theme on Africa is one tribe fighting another.
Yes, Africa is a large continent, and has old civilizations and stable countries. It also has the most unrest of any continent.
So in short, Rwandan genocide was caused by people with tribal culture being forced into a nation-state, and that nation-state falling apart once external supporting force was removed. That kinda proves my point, now doesn't it?
So you again acknowledge my point, and then try to blame it all on "the Man" who's holding "Brothers" down.
Gee, then maybe those countries shouldn't take those loans in the first place. Or perhaps you are trying to suggest that the people of these nations are too stupid to understand their own best interests? That's kinda racist, don't you think?
Of course, it could also be that the "nation-states" are really just a bunch of tribes fighting against each other while iron-fisted dictators loot everything they can, but saying that could be considered critical of that culture, so it would make me a bad, bad man.
How, exactly speaking, is anyone preventing Africans from building whatever they bloody well want? Or by "preventing" do you really mean that we're not building those plants for them and then guarding them and
Really? It's been debunked that Africa's problems are caused by its culture? Then it must be the inherently savage and primitive nature of the people there. I find it hard to believe such a racist theory, do you have any references?
Perhaps you might be so kind as to mention some of these things?
Either BLACK AFRICAN people are different from us or BLACK AFRICAN culture is different from ours. One or the other is needed to explain the reason why BLACK AFRICA is a hellhole of constant fighting while most of the world isn't.
I admit that I'm making an assumption that it's the culture rather than any inherent inferiority of the people, based on the fact that BLACK AFRICAN people seem to do fine when growing up in other cultures.
Why do you insist on fully capitalizing BLACK AFRICAN, anyway? Are you a racist?
"Guns, Germs and Steel" tries to explain why cultural differences arose, thus reinforcing my point that they exist.
That's a rather strange statement coming from someone who's advocating racism. Are you sure you really thought your assertions and their implications through?
Gee, I don't know. Is "Modest Proposal" trolling? "Divine Comedy" (where most of Dante's enemies, even those still alive at the time, turned out to be burning in Hell)? "Piss Christ"? Speaking of Jesus, what would you consider most conversations between him and the Pharisees in New Testament?
Basically, if you get people to react, you touched something in them, so I'd say that every instant of successfull trolling is necessarily art.
On a more sinister note, if you can get games declared "not art", then you could perhaps convince people that they shouldn't be protected under 1st Amendment or other applicable rules. Artistic freedom is a time-honored argument against censorship, so if you want to censor games, the first thing you need to do is make sure they're not regarded as art. This is especially important now that increasingly complex games can be made by pretty anyone who cares to try, making "official" rating systems increasingly worthless. Add the fact that even mainstream games are including more mature themes - sure, for now it's mostly just gore, but in a few years there might even be *gasp* sex - and of course the "games are for kids" -crowd would go on the offensive.
So maybe Ebert is just a weirdo who gets his kicks on arguing pointless things, or maybe he's preparing for the coming censorship attack by trying to frame games as unworthy of protection. And even if he's not going to make that argument, someone will.
I call bullshit. What's going on in Africa isn't civil war - one faction of a nation against another - but tribal warfare combined with genocidal racism. The exact same went on before Europeans came, so it can hardly be blamed on them.
Basically, it's still stone age in most of Africa, only the cavemen have access to automatic rifles and radio. The end result isn't pretty, but once you ignore the imported technology and concentrate on cultural trends, it's quite similar to, say, the situation in Europe before the rise of the Roman Empire.
Or, to put it even more bluntly, Africans are suffering because their culture is too primitive to support nation-states, and they should either go back to being hunter-gatherer tribes living in jungle or copy the necessary memes from Chinese or European culture to finish their transition to be part of the modern world.
As a side note, it's interesting how this demonstrates the value of philosophy, theology, and other non-technological memes that shaped European, Chinese and other succesful cultures. Those seem superficial at first glance, yet lacking them makes technology work against people, rather than for them.
Nice non-sequiter. As it happens, anyone can take flying lessons and apply to join the Air Force.
Actually... Yes, it does. That's what something being legal means.
If the difficulty and expense are caused artificially to make it harder to use your legal rights... then yes, it's wrong. Ban them or allow them, but either way, don't pretend something else.
To see if they meet the requirements of driving safely, those being knowledge of traffick laws and skill at handling the car. These tests and the driving permit system are not meant to keep anyone from driving, they're meant to force people to learn to drive safely before they go to public roads.
Yes, most real-world tests have false positive rate above zero. What about it?
Unregulated capitalism leads to slavery, because reducing your employees to that helps drive down costs, thus increasing profits. This is something many people at all levels of society seem to fail to understand, despite the rather dramatic demonstration during the Industrial Revolution.
And no, slavery is not bad... for the slave owner.
Most other places haven't been cursed by leaders who stick to an ideology even as it's proven wrong by reality since the Soviet Union fell.
True, they just oppose a government powerful enough to do something about it.
You're thinking of a thug. A thug bullies people to get them to obey him. A bully, on the other hand, is in it for the pain. He bullies people because he enjoys that, not because there's any other reward for it. A sadist, in other words.
It is important to make the difference between selfish and malicious evil. Selfish evil is rational, at least to some extent, but malicious evil is insane.
If you don't do necessary maintenance on an airplane, it will crash and burn, literally. An airplane costs hundreds of millions of dollars, even before considering any costs from legal liability or loss of reputation. In other words, what kind of moron would make the decision to neglect maintenance?
Either automatic weapons in the hands of citizenry are okay or they are not. Which one is it?
I have nothing but contempt for people who don't have the guts to ban something outright but try to make it de facto banned by forcing people to jump through hoops.
Actually, Europe has socialism with limited government.
That is true of everything, including economy and corporations. Nature abhors vacuum, so someone will always hold the power. The only question is whether it's someone we can vote for or against.
Yes, it's very convenient to be able to abuse workers till they've burned out or dead, at which point you can always get more from the masses of the unemployed. It's what capitalists did during Industrial Revolution, and led to the birth of Communism. It's also what's going on in the current Offshoring Revolution; I wonder what'll we get this time?
Can the "other" hemisphere act on its own? I mean, is it more like having lost half your brain, or having been split into two beings in a single body?
Yes. I theorize that in order to meld separate nodes to a single entity, the communication between them has to be at least as fast as information processing within them. That way they stay so well synchronized and coordinated that they are, for all intents and purposes, a single entity - a brain, rather than just a bunch of neurons.
This is important for AI research, since it implies that the current design of computers - fast processor, but huge cost of communication and cache misses - is as bad fit for AI as can be. Instead, you'd want lots and lots and lots of relatively weak cores with their own dedicated on-chip memory and capability of sending messages to each other.
I wonder if graphis cards and compute shaders would fit the bill? They certainly are much better at parallelization. Of course, even then you'd need lots and lots and lots of them...
Or just run the whole thing over the Internet. Let's add AI nodes to various P2P programs and see Skynet emerge :). Seriously, the burden on a single computer would be pretty low, so it should be technically doable...