I know there's a lot of very idealistic and naive libertarians on Slashdot who chafe against anything that would even hint suppressing free flow of information, no matter how objectionable or subversive.
I protest you using "libertarian" to describe someone believing in freedom of speech. "Libertarian" nowadays means completely unregulated capitalism. It has nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes.
But you all need to realise that when the rubber hits the road, idealism doesn't get you very far in the real world.
Why do I picture a 90's anti-hero with an eyepatch and a cigar in his mouth when I read that ?-)
Truth be told, the UK has a large problem with radical, violent, political Islam, and merely pussyfooting around, striving not to offend, and obsessing about theoretical and abstract notions of "rights" and "freedoms" -- and conveniently ignoring the obligations of EVERYONE to obey the law and behave like citizens -- will get us nowhere.
Nice. It seems that in your worldview, rights and freedoms are optional but obligations are not. Sorry, kiddo, that's not how it works. Law has obligations to me - in the form of guaranteeing me certain rights and freedoms - and in exchange, I have obligation to obey it. Law exists to serve people, not the other way around.
I heartily endorse any action taken to crack Islamist heads in the UK.
If you believe that heads need to be cracked, perhaps you should vote for politicians willing to crack them, rather than ones who'll pussyfoot and try to make the problem invisible, which is the only thing banning websites will do.
Sometimes, tough choices have to be made, and idealism dispensed with.
And usually those who say that end up taking the path of least resistance out of laziness and cowardice, and then congratulate themselves on their "toughness", by which they mean the willingness to do harm to innocents rather than strength, endurance or courage.
Nothing's more pathetic than a spineless wimp pretending that slithering over and smothering the weak makes him a tough guy. Except, perhaps, his wannabe fanclub on the Internet.
Yes...yes! Maybe we could make them wear yellow crescents!
Nice strawman. Do you realize that you just validated the grandparent's point? He talks about deporting immigrants who've expressed hostility towards their host culture, some to the point of committing crimes, even murder, and you come out and call him a nazi. That gives him the option of either giving up - which, in his view, results in his nation getting destroyed - or moving towards more radical methods.
Congratulations. You've prevented the matter from being discussed in a calm and reasonable manner, thus making sure that anyone concerned has little choice but to radicalize. Well done.
Could we cut them out by some kind of economic sanctions based on religious belief? Maybe just prevent them from owning businesses and stuff. Or deport them! Do you know if this plan has ever been tried before?
Yes, I'm pretty sure that hostile immigrants have been deported before. Are these hostile immigrants? Who knows, you cut the discussion short in favour of shouting "Nazi nazi nazi", so now I'll just have to assume the worst or risk my country. Again, congratulations. Pat yourself on the back.
CAT would work the same way. At each step of the way where the product gains embodied carbon (that is, either carbon that's emitted in the process of making it or ends up in the product in such a way that it will be directly emitted when the product is used), it's charged CAT.
So, if I grow wood and burn it for energy, I'll be taxed more than if I mined and used coal? Because, after all, coal gets no new carbon added at any point, while wood sucks it out of the atmosphere throughout its life. The same goes for all biofuels, naturally.
Simply tax the total increase in atmospheric carbon instead. Like any AI researcher will tell you, assign the reward/penalty to the goal, not the behaviour you think will lead there. Otherwise, you'll end up with an automated vacuum cleaner that dumps garbage on the floor and then vacuums it to maximize the amount of floorspace cleaned (rather than minimizing dirtiness), or something equally inane.
And as always, pay attention to what they didn't say. Nowhere do they say "we tested the conditions that were reported and couldn't find a problem under those conditions".
Yes, but also pay attention to what Woz doesn't say:
'This new model has an accelerator that goes wild but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again -- safely.'
Nowhere does the article mention what these repeatable conditions are. That's very strange; you'd think someone who found a problem in a car that can kill the unwary would report the conditions it's triggered under rather than just say that there's a problem. Furthermore, it makes it impossible to prove that the problem doesn't exist or is fixed. That latter part makes my FUD detector tingle.
I mean, really, if Woz wants to call attention to this problem, why doesn't he just give the steps to reproduce it so we can confirm it?
I have no idea if this is a serious problem or not, but I have no use for this kind of attitude that corporations pretty much habitually display.
And neither does anyone else. That's what makes me suspicious.
ACTA is basically saying "We got the DMCA in the USA, so why don't you write a similar law where you are... or we're going to raise the price of our content to the point we break your economy!"
Empty threat, as anyone who wants the content but doesn't want to pay can already get it for free from isohunt. And even if they couldn't, do you really think that people would get themselves bankcrupt over entertainment?
Why? She illegally shared a huge number of songs. When caught, she tried to frame her kids for it. She tried to destroy evidence. She lied repeatedly under oath.
In other words, she did nothing that ought to be a crime, and when accused of breaking bought laws, tried to defend herself. How horrible of her!
Why exactly should we support or admire this moron?
We should support her because she's a human being who's being threatened by an inhuman monstrosity.
So, the internet of the future isn't going to be a general-purpose protocol-agnostic world-wide data network for sharing and communication of information?
Very likely not, since free exchange of information threatens both political and financial interests, so they both want it shut down. The only way I see it as surviving is if it's converted to a swarm model from the current carrier model - that is, rather than talking to your ISP who can censor what you see or cut you off altogether, your equipment talks to your neighbour's equipment, which talks to his enighbours equipment and so forth.
Open access points represent a step towards that model, which makes them a threat to powers that be, and is why they are opposed by them.
Uh, can I opt-out of the future?
Sure, just die. That means that you don't have to take part in Brave New World, which makes it all okay.
And what of the wagonmakers? Must they stop making wagons because of how some of their wagons are used? What about the wheelwrights and axlemakers?
No, you don't have to stop making wagons. Just stop cooperating with a dictator in order to sell him more wagons.
At some point along that line, it no longer becomes immoral to remain in business, even if you are aware that some of your products are being used in an utterly despicable manner.
However, it always remains immoral to side with a dictatorship to sell your products to them.
VMWare should, in theory, be able to simulate a system faster than the host processor, as long as it doesn't actually run that fast.
Assuming that the host system has more storage capacity (memory) than the target system, then yes. Otherwise no.
We should, in theory, be able to simulate the universe, just not as fast as the universe actually moves.
I'm not so sure of it. A smaller universe, perhaps; but a complete simulation of this universe running within this universe would need to include itself, which would lead to infinite recursion and thus infinite storage requirements.
This leads to an interesting question: is the information storage capacity of the universe finite, and if it is, how much of it is currently used? Based on thermodynamics, I'd say that yes, it is: remember, entropy is the amount of reorganizations that go unnoticed in a system, and that has a very natural mapping to unused areas of storage space. Then again, entropy increasing seems to suggest that data is being deleted... Argh! The universe is being formatted!
But this is a trend even in Xbox360 games. The new Mass Effect 2 does this. in order to even play the game you have to register with easports.com (in game they link to your xbox live account info) and it sends a lot of info there as you play. Plus the game has turned from a great cinematic experience to a "you have to buy all this crap" in order to have the good gear fest.
Except for the pirates, who've not only had the game available for days, but have the DLC packs too.
Sometimes I think that game publishers are trying to self-destruct.
More importantly, though, if you justify acts of violence by saying "oh, they're extremists" or "oh, nobody likes them," then perhaps next time you'll be in the group that gets acted out against.
Violence? We're talking about making a website not load here. It's scientology that practices violence.
Scientologists aren't popular because their beliefs are corny or stupid, or because the "church" engages in fraudulent practices and is known to abuse members; that doesn't mean that individual Scientologists are religious extremists or bad people any more than the fact that Osama Bin Laden is a Muslim means that all Muslims are terrible people. Scientologists are just a popular group to hate right now.
Scientologists are a popular group to hate because they constantly engage in activities that are undeniably evil. The comparison to Islam is deceptive; scientology is a single organization, while Islam is not. Not every muslim answers to Osama bin Laden, while every scientologist answers to David Miscavige.
My vague memories of reading people like Dawkins keep whispering things like 'evolution is changes in allele frequency in a gene pool', which is obviously nonsense because that says nothing about 'individuals'.
Dawkins himself came up with the concept of memetic evolution of culture, which doesn't involve such changes yet follows the same general idea.
Ironically enough, evolving through acquired traits is once again becoming the dominant type in the form of cultural transfer, making us closer to our bacterial roots than the intervening steps.
This is actually a good thing. More research will get done. When researchers write papers, they have to be peer reviewed. In essence, the results are available to the world. Everyone benefits.
They can be peer reviewed by other Chinese scientists. There's absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that the rest of the world benefits, and it's somewhat questionably whether China itself benefits from having its dictatorship empowered by new technology.
China will contribute a huge amount to science. Also, it's in their best interest to collaborate with the rest of the world, or else they will be left behind.
China has 1/5th of the world's population. It's the biggest country on Earth by that measure. If China refuses to cooperate with US and Europe, it's we who'll be hard-pressed to keep up.
As I see it, the future of humanity depends on China either staying a weak agricultural backwater, or going through some pretty extensive reforms. Neither seems likely, yet having a dictatorship as the world's most powerful nation promises a dark future indeed.
Nobody(outside of physicists doing thought experiments and Kurzweil planning his next move) really cares anymore; because subsequent research has uncovered such a long list of stuff that will almost definitely kill us before the heat death of the universe does.
Assuming that heat death will even happen. The maximum entropy a given area of space can contain is directly proportional to the square of its radius, and the universe is getting bigger.
But why will life "always" expand to the limit of resources?
Because a lifeform that expands to use all the resources will become more numerous than one who doesn't.
How do you know this to be "always" true of life EVERYWHERE in the universe?
Because basic laws of mathemathics are the same everywhere.
What fundamental law of physics (that we assume to be true everywhere as one of the axioms of physics) does this inevitably arise from?
There are no "axioms of physics", as physics is simply a model to explain observations. On the other hand, there are axioms of mathematics, and this results directly from them. So does evolution in general, for that matter.
I can see many situations on Earth where people choose to limit the number of offspring they have to replacement (or lower) levels. Look at First World countries - birthrates are declining despite the fact that, person per person, they use FAR more resources than people in Second and Third World countries. These First World nations are still successful (present economic woes aside) and still have a significant impact on the destiny of the human species, and certainly could live on SUBSTANTIALLY lower levels of resource utilization...
Indeed, let's look at first world countries. What differentiates a First World country - here assumed to mean an industrialized nation - from a Third World one, a developing nation? Why, resource usage of course. An industrial society is utilizing far more of the resources available to it than a nonindustrial one; this is directly responsible for higher standard of living and greater power of industrial societies.
So, if life "always" expanded to the point of resource exhaustion, then why are we seeing cases where some fairly sizeable chunks are not doing this?
We aren't. You are simply confusing population with resource usage. In reality First World's resource usage is increasing, not decreasing.
Isn't it possible to imagine a population comprised entirely of creatures that seek equilibrium rather than expansion?
Certainly. Now imagine what happens if even one of those creatures says "screw it, I'll expand"? Which one's descendants will dominate the species in time?
Please don't say "I can't imagine a situation in which..." because that's an incredibly bad argument.
You're the one having trouble using your imagination. You aren't thinking about the consequences of having various attitudes. I've given the reasons to believe that life will expand to utilize all available resources after which competition will happen; you haven't given a single one to support your claim that it might not. Do you have any reasons, besides some vague notion of "different paradigm"?
You can't imagine it because there's been no reason to imagine it - every single case of "alien life" that you have been exposed to has either been Terrestrial in origin (just a different eco system) or invented by human beings who were telling stories, and as such entirely grounded in Earth, our history on Earth, our minds which evolved on Earth, etc. You don't think this could give us a pretty huge blind-spot when it comes to thinking about how things might be elsewhere? A huge bias that is so omnipresent that we don't even know it's there?
Yet you can? You are immune to this bias, so you realize that everything from bacteria up will have the kind of advanced planning ability required to not overreproduce on other planets? Or are you using this supposed bias as an excuse to not have any actual explanation for how such a mechanism could arise or be enforce
Slashdot Mirror
I protest you using "libertarian" to describe someone believing in freedom of speech. "Libertarian" nowadays means completely unregulated capitalism. It has nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes.
Why do I picture a 90's anti-hero with an eyepatch and a cigar in his mouth when I read that ?-)
Nice. It seems that in your worldview, rights and freedoms are optional but obligations are not. Sorry, kiddo, that's not how it works. Law has obligations to me - in the form of guaranteeing me certain rights and freedoms - and in exchange, I have obligation to obey it. Law exists to serve people, not the other way around.
If you believe that heads need to be cracked, perhaps you should vote for politicians willing to crack them, rather than ones who'll pussyfoot and try to make the problem invisible, which is the only thing banning websites will do.
And usually those who say that end up taking the path of least resistance out of laziness and cowardice, and then congratulate themselves on their "toughness", by which they mean the willingness to do harm to innocents rather than strength, endurance or courage.
Nothing's more pathetic than a spineless wimp pretending that slithering over and smothering the weak makes him a tough guy. Except, perhaps, his wannabe fanclub on the Internet.
Nice strawman. Do you realize that you just validated the grandparent's point? He talks about deporting immigrants who've expressed hostility towards their host culture, some to the point of committing crimes, even murder, and you come out and call him a nazi. That gives him the option of either giving up - which, in his view, results in his nation getting destroyed - or moving towards more radical methods.
Congratulations. You've prevented the matter from being discussed in a calm and reasonable manner, thus making sure that anyone concerned has little choice but to radicalize. Well done.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that hostile immigrants have been deported before. Are these hostile immigrants? Who knows, you cut the discussion short in favour of shouting "Nazi nazi nazi", so now I'll just have to assume the worst or risk my country. Again, congratulations. Pat yourself on the back.
Doom was ported to OpenGL a long time ago.
So, if I grow wood and burn it for energy, I'll be taxed more than if I mined and used coal? Because, after all, coal gets no new carbon added at any point, while wood sucks it out of the atmosphere throughout its life. The same goes for all biofuels, naturally.
Simply tax the total increase in atmospheric carbon instead. Like any AI researcher will tell you, assign the reward/penalty to the goal, not the behaviour you think will lead there. Otherwise, you'll end up with an automated vacuum cleaner that dumps garbage on the floor and then vacuums it to maximize the amount of floorspace cleaned (rather than minimizing dirtiness), or something equally inane.
And as always, pay attention to what they didn't say. Nowhere do they say "we tested the conditions that were reported and couldn't find a problem under those conditions".
Yes, but also pay attention to what Woz doesn't say:
Nowhere does the article mention what these repeatable conditions are. That's very strange; you'd think someone who found a problem in a car that can kill the unwary would report the conditions it's triggered under rather than just say that there's a problem. Furthermore, it makes it impossible to prove that the problem doesn't exist or is fixed. That latter part makes my FUD detector tingle.
I mean, really, if Woz wants to call attention to this problem, why doesn't he just give the steps to reproduce it so we can confirm it?
And neither does anyone else. That's what makes me suspicious.
Empty threat, as anyone who wants the content but doesn't want to pay can already get it for free from isohunt. And even if they couldn't, do you really think that people would get themselves bankcrupt over entertainment?
On the other hand, if you enjoy your work and are friends with your coworkers, you'll lose far more than just pay when you're fired.
There's something to be said for working in the same place your entire career.
In other words, she did nothing that ought to be a crime, and when accused of breaking bought laws, tried to defend herself. How horrible of her!
We should support her because she's a human being who's being threatened by an inhuman monstrosity.
Very likely not, since free exchange of information threatens both political and financial interests, so they both want it shut down. The only way I see it as surviving is if it's converted to a swarm model from the current carrier model - that is, rather than talking to your ISP who can censor what you see or cut you off altogether, your equipment talks to your neighbour's equipment, which talks to his enighbours equipment and so forth.
Open access points represent a step towards that model, which makes them a threat to powers that be, and is why they are opposed by them.
Sure, just die. That means that you don't have to take part in Brave New World, which makes it all okay.
No, you don't have to stop making wagons. Just stop cooperating with a dictator in order to sell him more wagons.
However, it always remains immoral to side with a dictatorship to sell your products to them.
Nice strawman, thought.
Oh, how I wish that was true!
I'm not so sure of it. A smaller universe, perhaps; but a complete simulation of this universe running within this universe would need to include itself, which would lead to infinite recursion and thus infinite storage requirements.
This leads to an interesting question: is the information storage capacity of the universe finite, and if it is, how much of it is currently used? Based on thermodynamics, I'd say that yes, it is: remember, entropy is the amount of reorganizations that go unnoticed in a system, and that has a very natural mapping to unused areas of storage space. Then again, entropy increasing seems to suggest that data is being deleted... Argh! The universe is being formatted!
How do you support multiple cores at user program level besides having threads, which Java already has?
Except for the pirates, who've not only had the game available for days, but have the DLC packs too.
Sometimes I think that game publishers are trying to self-destruct.
It's also a nontrivial expense to run that server.
Understandable, since Dawkins seems to view evolution almost religiously, so of course any deviation from dogma would be rejected as heresy.
This one.
No it isn't.
Violence? We're talking about making a website not load here. It's scientology that practices violence.
Scientologists are a popular group to hate because they constantly engage in activities that are undeniably evil. The comparison to Islam is deceptive; scientology is a single organization, while Islam is not. Not every muslim answers to Osama bin Laden, while every scientologist answers to David Miscavige.
Dawkins himself came up with the concept of memetic evolution of culture, which doesn't involve such changes yet follows the same general idea.
Ironically enough, evolving through acquired traits is once again becoming the dominant type in the form of cultural transfer, making us closer to our bacterial roots than the intervening steps.
They can be peer reviewed by other Chinese scientists. There's absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that the rest of the world benefits, and it's somewhat questionably whether China itself benefits from having its dictatorship empowered by new technology.
China has 1/5th of the world's population. It's the biggest country on Earth by that measure. If China refuses to cooperate with US and Europe, it's we who'll be hard-pressed to keep up.
As I see it, the future of humanity depends on China either staying a weak agricultural backwater, or going through some pretty extensive reforms. Neither seems likely, yet having a dictatorship as the world's most powerful nation promises a dark future indeed.
Hey, you outsource and offshore because you don't want to pay a decent wage, you deserve all the pain you get.
Assuming that heat death will even happen. The maximum entropy a given area of space can contain is directly proportional to the square of its radius, and the universe is getting bigger.
Because a lifeform that expands to use all the resources will become more numerous than one who doesn't.
Because basic laws of mathemathics are the same everywhere.
There are no "axioms of physics", as physics is simply a model to explain observations. On the other hand, there are axioms of mathematics, and this results directly from them. So does evolution in general, for that matter.
Indeed, let's look at first world countries. What differentiates a First World country - here assumed to mean an industrialized nation - from a Third World one, a developing nation? Why, resource usage of course. An industrial society is utilizing far more of the resources available to it than a nonindustrial one; this is directly responsible for higher standard of living and greater power of industrial societies.
We aren't. You are simply confusing population with resource usage. In reality First World's resource usage is increasing, not decreasing.
Certainly. Now imagine what happens if even one of those creatures says "screw it, I'll expand"? Which one's descendants will dominate the species in time?
See the gragedy of the commons for a detailed explanation.
You're the one having trouble using your imagination. You aren't thinking about the consequences of having various attitudes. I've given the reasons to believe that life will expand to utilize all available resources after which competition will happen; you haven't given a single one to support your claim that it might not. Do you have any reasons, besides some vague notion of "different paradigm"?
Yet you can? You are immune to this bias, so you realize that everything from bacteria up will have the kind of advanced planning ability required to not overreproduce on other planets? Or are you using this supposed bias as an excuse to not have any actual explanation for how such a mechanism could arise or be enforce
Having competing governments in a single country is not fun. If you want competing goverments, you need multiple countries. And we already have those.