If the government wasn't so darn powerful then there wouldn't be as many or as high bids and yet the Libertarians here on Slashdot are always modded down for having the temerity to suggest that bigger government is not the answer.
If the government wasn't so powerful there would be no need to bribe it before doing some grievously evil corporate sheningan. Libertarians get modded down because they refuse to see that, in the absence of government, some other powerful group would take over and become new rulers; and in all likelihood, that group would be a lot more tyrannical than the current government. Nature abhors vacuum, and that goes for power vacuum too.
Oh, and some libertarians get modded down because they post rants about how people should starve to death so they wouldn't need to pay taxes to fund social security, but I'm assuming you meant the non-sociopathic variety.
One cannot have lots of individual choice and freedom in a big government country; the desire to use the power of big government to limit choices, "manage" freedoms and control outcomes is simply too much for some to resist.
However, you still have far more choice and freedom than under a feudal lord. That's the alternative to a big government: local strongmen running everything to their liking.
The high-minded left often forgets or ignores the fact that not everyone is as altruistic or benevolent as they claim to be and that human nature absolutely will misuse the levers of power given the opportunity; so why magnify the damage by increasing the size and reach of those levers?
Because the levers will exist, whether they're manned by the government or by individuals. If they're controlled by the government, we at least can have some accountability or rules on how they're used, while if they're held by individuals, I'm at their mercy.
Two reasons why they are more likely to be "more intelligent" than us. One is that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, and the human race is probably 50 thousand years old. If we find intelligent life, and they had a vaguely similar evolution of intelligence that we did, then it's very unlikely to be less evolved than us.
Life on Earth is 4 billion years old. Solar system is 5 billion years old. Since elements other than hydrogen and helium - which are necessary to build complex structures, which in turn are necessary for life - were build by the first generations of stars, and took time to reach levels abundant enough to coalesce into planets, it's quite possible that we are, in fact, amongst the first intelligencies on this universe.
Universe might be 14 billion years old, but the time it has been able to support life is much shorter.
More memory - meh, that's overrated. I have google, so as long as I know how to look things up, I'm in like Flynn.
Faster thinking, however - THAT is a biggie. If I can think twice as fast as you can, and if I train myself to think critically, all other things being equal, I'll usually be several steps ahead of you in thinking things through.
You have a computer. You can use it to analyze data, to effectively "think faster". People have used tools to do that ever since abacuses were invented. The main limiting factor right now is bandwidth between the computer and brain; as interfaces get better (there are already game controllers that are used by neural activity), using the massive processing power of a modern computer for any given task gets easier and easier.
I'd imagine that, eventually, computers become completely integrated to our nervous systems; at this point, they would pre-emptively search the Internet for any information relevant to what you're currently thinking or observing, as well as process it, essentially making Internet a "common consciousness" of human race.
there would be motivation to keep getting smarter.
What motivation is that?
Sure, YOU might like to be smarter.
I wanting to be smarter is a good motivation for me to use the means available to me to become smarter.
That was kinda obvious, now wasn't it?
I might like to be smarter too. But that doesn't translate to the species having any real use for more intelligence. We'd be much better served by providing First World educations to everyone in the Third World than we'd be if we developed a way to make you (or me) smarter.
Why? If the human species doesn't have any use for more intelligence, why would it be served by education? After all, the whole point of education is making you more able to use your intelligence; it makes you effectively more intelligent, by giving you results of other people's thought processes, so you can continue where they left off, rather than start from the beginning.
In any case, you're probably correct: developing Third World would increase the total amount of intelligence available considerable. However, from what I've understood, the problem in that area is not lack of knowledge, but constant civil wars that damage the infrastructure and disturb agriculture, combined with incompetent dictatorships.
People have been taking drugs to make themselves smarter for a very long time. Why do you think so many people like coffee?
Because it makes them feel less tired?
There's relatively little evidence that any of these new drugs actually raise your intelligence in ways that a double-espresso doesn't.
Gee, I wonder if that's why grandparent said attempting?
Note, by the way, that getting a good education is hard to do if you're poor. Even if you're moderately above average intelligence. So it doesn't always follow that bright people will find a way to overcome their upbringing.
That's a culture-dependent thing, really. Here in Finland, all education up to and including university level is paid by the state, which also pays a (very) small amount to cover living expenses for students. So if you're smart and motivated, you can get up to a doctorate level without having to pay for it yourself.
It's likely that this system will get dismantled eventually, due to having fulfilled its purpose of dragging the country up from its agricultural (at the arctic circle!) roots in early 1900s when it gained independence from Russia when the latter collapsed in WW1, and being against the currently fashionable right-wing ideology; but for now, it's possible to get good education in Finland, no matter how poor you are.
I wonder if such a system would become widespread if alien contact were established? After all, humanity as a whole could ill afford to waste resources such as intelligence when faced with actual competition and threat of extinction.
That last one has a lot of issues that may make it more beneficial to sterilize the planet due to biological contamination, and in that case mars would seem to be the better planet to transform IMHO.
Sterilizing a planet is almost impossible. There are bacteria that live kilometers down in cracks in bedrock; you'd have to reduce the planet to a fully molten state to be sure you'd gotten rid of them all, and then wait for it to cool down again to colonize. No, it's much better to develop some sort of "immunity nanobot" to inoculate yourself against everything.
You seem to share Hawking's delusion that more intelligence is an inevitable part of the progression of an intelligent species.
It is. However, please note that the effective intelligence of an individual doesn't necessarily equal his inherent intelligence, but the combined intelligence of him and all the gear he has available to him. For example, a human with a pocket calculator is effectively more intelligent than the same human without the calculator; and our pocket calculators are getting much more capable.
I + Internet > just me.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates. After all, how much intelligence does it really take to do 95+% of all the things required to make a technological civilization work?
And yet we seem to have a constant drive to improve our technology, which in turn makes us more capable - or do you really think that anyone, no matter how intelligent, could layout modern computer chips with their close to billion of transistors (774 million for i5 - and I just looked that up from the Web) by hand? It is deceptive to just compare brain capacities, just like it would be absurd to declare modern civilizations as weaker than ancient ones, since people tend to be in worse shape.
The main trust of human evolution has simply switched from genetic to memetic, that's all. Some people talk about "technological singularity", where technology increases intelligence which in turn increases technology at ever-increasing rate; well, this is it. The Internet provides instant access to pretty much all information one would want; the processing power available to the average individual (of industrial world, obviously) makes supercomputers of yesterday seem like abacuses in comparison; new magic-like technology from invisibility cloaks to nanotechnological engines/transistors/whatever to 3D object printers are announced weekly. In fact our technology is advancing so fast it's unstabilizing our economy, causing massive unemployment and stock market crashes.
We are far more intelligent than any previous generation has been, if intelligence is defined as the ability to get information and process it. And the future generations will only keep getting more so, especially as computers get greater bandwidth into our brains. That's the next step: integrating all this technology into ourselves.
But, what if life on another planet started off with a different scenario, and rather than massive competition for resources, cooperation was the overriding measure of fitness?
Cooperation is very common on Earth, from bacterias (which exchange genes) all the way up to humans. In fact, if you count mitochondria as separate entities, you could say that all multicellular life on Earth is based and dependent on cooperation.
However, it is impossible to avoid competition for resources in any imaginable scenario. No matter how much there is, life will simply expand to use them all, at which point there's competition. As a practical demonstration, take the ancient game Simlife: one of the objects you could put to gameworld was infinite food source (represented by a shopping cart), and if you put them into the gameworld, access to them became the object of competition. Heck, even plants competed for space, despite needing no actual resources.
In any case, this doesn't matter. We haven't wiped off natives for a while now, even if they do control some useable resources. And almost any culture would be much better off simply integrating humanity than trying to wipe us out and deal with non-optimal (to them) local conditions. Once you switch to memetic evolution, genes become less important, as your real legacy is the ideas you leave behind; a civilization that's hell-bent on colonizing every world including those with natives will spread slower than one which conquers them and enlists the local population.
Cultural imperialism is often decried as the destroyer of cultures, but I consider that a good thing: it moves the struggle for survival into the realm of abstract ideas, which means it's only horrible in a completely abstract way, as no one actually dies or suffers; only cultures do. Individuals actually benefit, having access to better technology and more advanced ideas. That's why they choose the new culture to begin with, and the old one withers away and dies.
You know the knobs driving around your city right now with one hand on the wheel and a cellphone in the other? Imagine them in the air...
Exactly. This is the real reason we don't have flying cars: humans can't drive them. Even experienced pilots require a kilometer or more free space around the plane to be safe; close formation flying is risky and regularly results in accidents. A rush hour in a city with millions of vehicles flown by amateurs who're sending text messages at the same time would be like a warzone under heavy artillery bombardment.
We can already build small and powerful enough engines to make car-sized objects fly just fine; we're just waiting for the AI technology to get to the point where Joe Sixpack doesn't have to (and can't, since you just know that some moron is going to insist on trying to fly himself despite having absolutely no skill whatsoever) have anything more to do with the controls than giving the address/coordinates to fly to.
Alternatively, allow human control but have the computer override them if you're getting too close to other vehicles, ground or other objects, or ascending/descending too fast, or whatever.
If that's true then the vast majority of us are not contributing anything worth noting to the gene pool. That's not a very nice thought.
Well, if it disturbs your, simply start contributing to the cultural pool instead. That's our real strength, since unlike genotype, you can change and remix memotype during your life - in fact, all of us are doing so all the time. This allows orders of magnitude faster adaptation, ot the point where we shape the environment intentionally more than it does us.
Good. The small-time investor who is not scrupulous about choosing his investments, and instead makes them based on monetary decisions, is as much to blame for the power of the corporation as anyone else.
No, the small-time investor doesn't choose his investments based on monetary decisions. That's a small-time speculator. A small-time investor simply invests a certain percentage of his wage each month, spread between a few corporations, with the hope that they grow in average in step with economy. This is a good thing for the whole economy, since it means that you're essentially deferring eating your share of the pie, so it can be used to build more infrastructure, in exchange of getting a bigger one later on.
The grandparent's suggestion of punishing the corporation is nonsensical, since a corporation is incapable of committing any wrongdoing, on the account of being a figment of legal imagination. It's the people acting on behalf of the corporation that commit the "ethically questionable actions", and since they know that they committed them, they can simply cash in the temporary advantage got that way and jump ship, leaving the whole mess to explode on someone else's face. Dissolving the corporation in such a case punishes the innocent and does nothing to discourage the crime.
If you had to be choosier about your investments based on the corporation's potential to fail the ethics test, then perhaps people would be a bit more moral about what they do with their money.
Unfortunately, being choosy requires having knowledge, and getting knowledge about the dealings of corporations is a full-time job. I already have one, I can't afford the time. So I guess I'll say screw it, spend my money on beer, and demand that the government bail me out if I run into trouble, using money taxed from those who spent all their free time picking investment targets.
This will never work without limits. I have an alternate, similar proposal. Limit executive salaries to the sum of the people who work directly for them, and force them to share the responsibility if any of those people commits a crime during the course of their work. This helps solve the problem of ridiculous executive salaries and institutes a reasonable chain of responsibility.
It will do neither. It will simply move salaries under other titles in bookkeeping, and result in absurdly complicated chains of command and records as everyone and their dog try to cover their own ass.
It is impossible to legislate corruption away. However, it's quite possible to always blame the CEO, giving him the incentive to stomp it out.
Unfortunately, there are many non-priests queueing up all kinds of boys. Kind of proves we are all sinners after all.
Yes. However, most organizations don't protect such people, hide their activities and try to silence the victims. That was the real point of the scandal: there are sickos everywhere, but Catholic church sided with them against the victims.
But since we are already talking about the god vs. computer simulation,
We aren't. We are talking about pope urging priests to go forth and blog. You simply went off on a tangent to deliver your anti-religious speech. Or was it a clever demonstration on the necessity of your suggested domain ?-)
Anyway, I'm all for it, as long as all religious-related rants go there, including atheist ones. Now have fun convincing people who view each other as godless heathens, stone-age fairy tale believers, and various other nasty things to coexist in a single domain. It should be entertaining to watch, at the least:).
I would LOVE if a corporation could commit crimes so egregious that they could be chopped to pieces and auctioned off.
That would simply screw the small-time investor, and still let the executives cash their stock options and move on. No, what you need to do is hold the CEO personally responsible for everything a corporation does. He's moved on between the deed and it's surfacing, fine: drag him to a court kicking and screaming, confiscate all the proceeds of the crime, and then send him to jail, just like any other criminal.
A botnet attack? But then the activity shouldn't be concentrated by country, but spread around the world about evenly.
Or it could be that someone's seeding a torrent from behind the firewall. That would explain the suddenly starting continuous activity. It might also explain the concentration by country (language or timezone). It would help if the graph could be organized by such factors.
In the middle of that, you've got a vehicle (maybe the first you've seen in days or weeks) with well-dressed people and boxes upon boxes of equipment -- you know what the first thought you're going to have is? Fuck! That's dinner. Get the gun.
How strange. My first tought was: "These people are bringing me dinner. Help them so they can bring more.".
Morality is a luxury that not everybody can afford.
That keeps repeated often, yet it's absolute rubbish. "Morality" in humans is an evolved trait, which means that it helps, rather than hinders, survival. For example, by shooting at ham operators or looting supply colons, the perpetrators of these acts make it harder to get help to the area, therefore increasing the chances that they themselves starve to death (or are shot by guards).
It's like when you've got a person who's gone overboard and they're struggling to stay afloat -- the one thing you never ever ever do is jump in after them. That's a nice hollywood touch, but in the real world that person is desperate and will octopus-death-grip anything that's floating that comes near it -- which includes you. Then you'll both drown.
Thank you for refuting your own point: panicking in a tough spot gets you killed. Extra points for choosing an example where simply staying still for a few seconds is sufficient to avoid death (human bodies float).
Better to throw them the rope and let them save themselves. Maybe that's callous, but again -- your morality could get you (and others) killed. As such, it's a luxury in a crisis (at best).
No, it's not callous, it's common sense, just like it's common sense to not shoot at people who are trying to bring food and water to you. The areas where people can fight off their reptile brain and stay calm and orderly usually fair fine after a disaster, and start recovering immediately as help floods in with no need to waste resources to enforce order; the ones where people resort to looting continue deteroriating until either order is restored through force or there's insufficient population left to continue fighting.
Morality is not a luxury, it's a case of prisoner's dilemma: not looting supply colonies increases your chances of survival as long as others leave them alone as well. That's why empathy evolved, and that's why this idiotic believe that "everything goes in a crisis" is so dangerous and self-defeating.
More parties would increase the chances of one of them having a backbone, though.
More to the point, a multi-party system allows the malcontents to start a new party (such as the Green or Pirate Party), forcing the old ones to take people's opinions seriously or perish. Then again, that hasn't stopped globalization or other right-wing policies, despite the economic misery they continue to inflict on the majority of the industrial countries population...
Movement of tectonic plates can and has been measured, so it's not just a theory.
But the wrath of God is empirically provable -- as evidenced by this quake and Pat Robertson's divine interpretation thereof.
The wrath of God is not empirically provable. It is impossible to say if any particular disaster was a divine punishment or simply bad luck.
Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, Robertson has predicted doomsday in 1982, a Pacific Northwestern tsunami in 2006, and a huge terrorist attack at 2007. These predictions didn't come true. According to Bible, this means that Robertson is a false prophet (since his predictions don't come true) and shouldn't be listened to.
Do some physical labor and what do you feel like the next day? That's right, you're in pain. Pain is your body's way of saying "stop that, you fool."
Actually, I usually feel better after physical labour than if I'd just sit down the whole day. It's my body's way of saying it likes having proper circulation for a while.
The runner "hits the wall" and gets a "runner's high" -- that high is the endorphins kicking in to combat the pain.
You only feel pain if you're running too fast so your cardiovascular system can't keep your muscles oxygenated. Alternatively, you could also feel pain if you're so fat your joints can't take the extra stress - but if you are, it's very likely your cv system is pathetic too.
Moderate exersize is ok; I like to walk. But if you do it until it hurts, it can't possibly be good for you.
This is correct. However, if it hurts just because you ran a few steps, you're out of shape and should excerzise more.
I go to "working man's" bars where construstion workers hang out. These guys spend all day in heavy exersize, and the ones ten years my junior look ten years older than me. If exersize is so good for you then why do I look so young while these guys look like they could be my dad?
On the other hand, my grandfather did stone carving all his life, and still looked like a statue made of granite wrapped in somewhat wrinkled skin at his deathbed at 85, so YMMV.
The notion that exersize, especially exersize that results in sore muscles is good for you is an excuse by drug addled jocks.
Yet amazingly these jocks do tend to be in good shape. How strange.
What if he sells his likeness and the movie studio uses it in a way that he finds morally repugnant?
Maybe he should have thought of that before selling his likeness?
What are the implications of creating CGI films containing models of public figures?
Are those any different than, say, political comics? Anyway, there's a precedent, amazingly enough from Finland. So if even a country that tries to imitate China doesn't have a problem with them, why should any country?
Or models just strikingly similar to yourself or a friend?
Why shouldn't I be able to use my own likeness in wherever I please? As for my friends, I'm pretty sure that there's existing laws governing, say, using photoedits or something that would be applicable here.
Considering that Battle Angel*, which Cameron plans to do as (one of) his next project(s) is based around exactly that kind of implementation of the technology - I'd say that he is more than "just talking".
Ah, Alita, lovingly nicknamed "The Angel of Death", and the lovely world she inhabits with its two-pupilled (in a single eyeball) mutants. That's one of the few movies that can actually benefit from the uncanny valley. The physics engine is going to be need some extra optimization for soft-body dynamics, considering the amount of guts and assorted organic material flying everywhere in a typical fight Alita gets involved in:).
Except that for all intents and purposes, it has nothing to do with the GPU. It could just as well have been on a separate chip, like the Broadcom chip for the new Intel Atoms.
Any function a programmable chip can do can also be done by a custom chip. However, a programmable chip can do them all without needing to include multiple chips or change manufacturing processes as new uses are invented. Sure, you could make a custom chip decoding HD video, but what happens when someone comes up with a new and superior format for it? If you're using a compute shader to accelerate your video decoding, just program a new codec and the GPU will accelerate it just fine; if you're using a custom chip, you're out of luck.
Some things are better solved, in fact generally best solved by dedicated hardware like a HD decoder. How much falls between general purpose and dedicated hardware? Very good question.
Not really. A GPU is a dedicated chip; it's just dedicated to certain class of uses, rather than one specific use. Consequently, it gets the speedup benefit of a dedicated chip, yet can be repurposed to other uses if the user doesn't care about HD video.
The situations where a fully specialized chip is better than a more general one are very rare.
They actually realized that their income will be from the "initial sale", meaning the first few days or weeks the item will be on the market, before copies could be made.
Actually, their income came from donations and patronage. Shakespeare, in particular, was funded by the king.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government wasn't so powerful there would be no need to bribe it before doing some grievously evil corporate sheningan. Libertarians get modded down because they refuse to see that, in the absence of government, some other powerful group would take over and become new rulers; and in all likelihood, that group would be a lot more tyrannical than the current government. Nature abhors vacuum, and that goes for power vacuum too.
Oh, and some libertarians get modded down because they post rants about how people should starve to death so they wouldn't need to pay taxes to fund social security, but I'm assuming you meant the non-sociopathic variety.
However, you still have far more choice and freedom than under a feudal lord. That's the alternative to a big government: local strongmen running everything to their liking.
Because the levers will exist, whether they're manned by the government or by individuals. If they're controlled by the government, we at least can have some accountability or rules on how they're used, while if they're held by individuals, I'm at their mercy.
Life on Earth is 4 billion years old. Solar system is 5 billion years old. Since elements other than hydrogen and helium - which are necessary to build complex structures, which in turn are necessary for life - were build by the first generations of stars, and took time to reach levels abundant enough to coalesce into planets, it's quite possible that we are, in fact, amongst the first intelligencies on this universe.
Universe might be 14 billion years old, but the time it has been able to support life is much shorter.
You have a computer. You can use it to analyze data, to effectively "think faster". People have used tools to do that ever since abacuses were invented. The main limiting factor right now is bandwidth between the computer and brain; as interfaces get better (there are already game controllers that are used by neural activity), using the massive processing power of a modern computer for any given task gets easier and easier.
I'd imagine that, eventually, computers become completely integrated to our nervous systems; at this point, they would pre-emptively search the Internet for any information relevant to what you're currently thinking or observing, as well as process it, essentially making Internet a "common consciousness" of human race.
I wanting to be smarter is a good motivation for me to use the means available to me to become smarter.
That was kinda obvious, now wasn't it?
Why? If the human species doesn't have any use for more intelligence, why would it be served by education? After all, the whole point of education is making you more able to use your intelligence; it makes you effectively more intelligent, by giving you results of other people's thought processes, so you can continue where they left off, rather than start from the beginning.
In any case, you're probably correct: developing Third World would increase the total amount of intelligence available considerable. However, from what I've understood, the problem in that area is not lack of knowledge, but constant civil wars that damage the infrastructure and disturb agriculture, combined with incompetent dictatorships.
People have been taking drugs to make themselves smarter for a very long time. Why do you think so many people like coffee?
Because it makes them feel less tired?
Gee, I wonder if that's why grandparent said attempting?
That's a culture-dependent thing, really. Here in Finland, all education up to and including university level is paid by the state, which also pays a (very) small amount to cover living expenses for students. So if you're smart and motivated, you can get up to a doctorate level without having to pay for it yourself.
It's likely that this system will get dismantled eventually, due to having fulfilled its purpose of dragging the country up from its agricultural (at the arctic circle!) roots in early 1900s when it gained independence from Russia when the latter collapsed in WW1, and being against the currently fashionable right-wing ideology; but for now, it's possible to get good education in Finland, no matter how poor you are.
I wonder if such a system would become widespread if alien contact were established? After all, humanity as a whole could ill afford to waste resources such as intelligence when faced with actual competition and threat of extinction.
Sterilizing a planet is almost impossible. There are bacteria that live kilometers down in cracks in bedrock; you'd have to reduce the planet to a fully molten state to be sure you'd gotten rid of them all, and then wait for it to cool down again to colonize. No, it's much better to develop some sort of "immunity nanobot" to inoculate yourself against everything.
It is. However, please note that the effective intelligence of an individual doesn't necessarily equal his inherent intelligence, but the combined intelligence of him and all the gear he has available to him. For example, a human with a pocket calculator is effectively more intelligent than the same human without the calculator; and our pocket calculators are getting much more capable.
I + Internet > just me.
And yet we seem to have a constant drive to improve our technology, which in turn makes us more capable - or do you really think that anyone, no matter how intelligent, could layout modern computer chips with their close to billion of transistors (774 million for i5 - and I just looked that up from the Web) by hand? It is deceptive to just compare brain capacities, just like it would be absurd to declare modern civilizations as weaker than ancient ones, since people tend to be in worse shape.
The main trust of human evolution has simply switched from genetic to memetic, that's all. Some people talk about "technological singularity", where technology increases intelligence which in turn increases technology at ever-increasing rate; well, this is it. The Internet provides instant access to pretty much all information one would want; the processing power available to the average individual (of industrial world, obviously) makes supercomputers of yesterday seem like abacuses in comparison; new magic-like technology from invisibility cloaks to nanotechnological engines/transistors/whatever to 3D object printers are announced weekly. In fact our technology is advancing so fast it's unstabilizing our economy, causing massive unemployment and stock market crashes.
We are far more intelligent than any previous generation has been, if intelligence is defined as the ability to get information and process it. And the future generations will only keep getting more so, especially as computers get greater bandwidth into our brains. That's the next step: integrating all this technology into ourselves.
Cooperation is very common on Earth, from bacterias (which exchange genes) all the way up to humans. In fact, if you count mitochondria as separate entities, you could say that all multicellular life on Earth is based and dependent on cooperation.
However, it is impossible to avoid competition for resources in any imaginable scenario. No matter how much there is, life will simply expand to use them all, at which point there's competition. As a practical demonstration, take the ancient game Simlife: one of the objects you could put to gameworld was infinite food source (represented by a shopping cart), and if you put them into the gameworld, access to them became the object of competition. Heck, even plants competed for space, despite needing no actual resources.
In any case, this doesn't matter. We haven't wiped off natives for a while now, even if they do control some useable resources. And almost any culture would be much better off simply integrating humanity than trying to wipe us out and deal with non-optimal (to them) local conditions. Once you switch to memetic evolution, genes become less important, as your real legacy is the ideas you leave behind; a civilization that's hell-bent on colonizing every world including those with natives will spread slower than one which conquers them and enlists the local population.
Cultural imperialism is often decried as the destroyer of cultures, but I consider that a good thing: it moves the struggle for survival into the realm of abstract ideas, which means it's only horrible in a completely abstract way, as no one actually dies or suffers; only cultures do. Individuals actually benefit, having access to better technology and more advanced ideas. That's why they choose the new culture to begin with, and the old one withers away and dies.
Exactly. This is the real reason we don't have flying cars: humans can't drive them. Even experienced pilots require a kilometer or more free space around the plane to be safe; close formation flying is risky and regularly results in accidents. A rush hour in a city with millions of vehicles flown by amateurs who're sending text messages at the same time would be like a warzone under heavy artillery bombardment.
We can already build small and powerful enough engines to make car-sized objects fly just fine; we're just waiting for the AI technology to get to the point where Joe Sixpack doesn't have to (and can't, since you just know that some moron is going to insist on trying to fly himself despite having absolutely no skill whatsoever) have anything more to do with the controls than giving the address/coordinates to fly to.
Alternatively, allow human control but have the computer override them if you're getting too close to other vehicles, ground or other objects, or ascending/descending too fast, or whatever.
Well, if it disturbs your, simply start contributing to the cultural pool instead. That's our real strength, since unlike genotype, you can change and remix memotype during your life - in fact, all of us are doing so all the time. This allows orders of magnitude faster adaptation, ot the point where we shape the environment intentionally more than it does us.
No, the small-time investor doesn't choose his investments based on monetary decisions. That's a small-time speculator. A small-time investor simply invests a certain percentage of his wage each month, spread between a few corporations, with the hope that they grow in average in step with economy. This is a good thing for the whole economy, since it means that you're essentially deferring eating your share of the pie, so it can be used to build more infrastructure, in exchange of getting a bigger one later on.
The grandparent's suggestion of punishing the corporation is nonsensical, since a corporation is incapable of committing any wrongdoing, on the account of being a figment of legal imagination. It's the people acting on behalf of the corporation that commit the "ethically questionable actions", and since they know that they committed them, they can simply cash in the temporary advantage got that way and jump ship, leaving the whole mess to explode on someone else's face. Dissolving the corporation in such a case punishes the innocent and does nothing to discourage the crime.
Unfortunately, being choosy requires having knowledge, and getting knowledge about the dealings of corporations is a full-time job. I already have one, I can't afford the time. So I guess I'll say screw it, spend my money on beer, and demand that the government bail me out if I run into trouble, using money taxed from those who spent all their free time picking investment targets.
It will do neither. It will simply move salaries under other titles in bookkeeping, and result in absurdly complicated chains of command and records as everyone and their dog try to cover their own ass.
It is impossible to legislate corruption away. However, it's quite possible to always blame the CEO, giving him the incentive to stomp it out.
Yes. However, most organizations don't protect such people, hide their activities and try to silence the victims. That was the real point of the scandal: there are sickos everywhere, but Catholic church sided with them against the victims.
We aren't. We are talking about pope urging priests to go forth and blog. You simply went off on a tangent to deliver your anti-religious speech. Or was it a clever demonstration on the necessity of your suggested domain ?-)
Anyway, I'm all for it, as long as all religious-related rants go there, including atheist ones. Now have fun convincing people who view each other as godless heathens, stone-age fairy tale believers, and various other nasty things to coexist in a single domain. It should be entertaining to watch, at the least :).
That would simply screw the small-time investor, and still let the executives cash their stock options and move on. No, what you need to do is hold the CEO personally responsible for everything a corporation does. He's moved on between the deed and it's surfacing, fine: drag him to a court kicking and screaming, confiscate all the proceeds of the crime, and then send him to jail, just like any other criminal.
A botnet attack? But then the activity shouldn't be concentrated by country, but spread around the world about evenly.
Or it could be that someone's seeding a torrent from behind the firewall. That would explain the suddenly starting continuous activity. It might also explain the concentration by country (language or timezone). It would help if the graph could be organized by such factors.
Your mom's so fat, she caused a curvature overflow, so now the universe is expanding again.
More to the point, a multi-party system allows the malcontents to start a new party (such as the Green or Pirate Party), forcing the old ones to take people's opinions seriously or perish. Then again, that hasn't stopped globalization or other right-wing policies, despite the economic misery they continue to inflict on the majority of the industrial countries population...
Movement of tectonic plates can and has been measured, so it's not just a theory.
The wrath of God is not empirically provable. It is impossible to say if any particular disaster was a divine punishment or simply bad luck.
Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, Robertson has predicted doomsday in 1982, a Pacific Northwestern tsunami in 2006, and a huge terrorist attack at 2007. These predictions didn't come true. According to Bible, this means that Robertson is a false prophet (since his predictions don't come true) and shouldn't be listened to.
Actually, I usually feel better after physical labour than if I'd just sit down the whole day. It's my body's way of saying it likes having proper circulation for a while.
You only feel pain if you're running too fast so your cardiovascular system can't keep your muscles oxygenated. Alternatively, you could also feel pain if you're so fat your joints can't take the extra stress - but if you are, it's very likely your cv system is pathetic too.
This is correct. However, if it hurts just because you ran a few steps, you're out of shape and should excerzise more.
Maybe he should have thought of that before selling his likeness?
Are those any different than, say, political comics? Anyway, there's a precedent, amazingly enough from Finland. So if even a country that tries to imitate China doesn't have a problem with them, why should any country?
Why shouldn't I be able to use my own likeness in wherever I please? As for my friends, I'm pretty sure that there's existing laws governing, say, using photoedits or something that would be applicable here.
Ah, Alita, lovingly nicknamed "The Angel of Death", and the lovely world she inhabits with its two-pupilled (in a single eyeball) mutants. That's one of the few movies that can actually benefit from the uncanny valley. The physics engine is going to be need some extra optimization for soft-body dynamics, considering the amount of guts and assorted organic material flying everywhere in a typical fight Alita gets involved in :).
When did 30 FPS become bad?
Any function a programmable chip can do can also be done by a custom chip. However, a programmable chip can do them all without needing to include multiple chips or change manufacturing processes as new uses are invented. Sure, you could make a custom chip decoding HD video, but what happens when someone comes up with a new and superior format for it? If you're using a compute shader to accelerate your video decoding, just program a new codec and the GPU will accelerate it just fine; if you're using a custom chip, you're out of luck.
Not really. A GPU is a dedicated chip; it's just dedicated to certain class of uses, rather than one specific use. Consequently, it gets the speedup benefit of a dedicated chip, yet can be repurposed to other uses if the user doesn't care about HD video.
The situations where a fully specialized chip is better than a more general one are very rare.
Actually, their income came from donations and patronage. Shakespeare, in particular, was funded by the king.