I've noticed a huge increase in the "we'll get you one way or another" type of laws ever since private industry got hold of the prison system. D'ya think there just might be some lobbying and conflict of interest there, hmmmm??
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Recent laws are full of crap like that. Cue Ayn Rand....
Well, since the prison industry is clearly acting based on their self-interest - getting forced labour - as are the politicians - getting campaign funding - and selfishness is, in Rand's philosophy, the ultimate good, I'd say that she would applaud them as excellent examples of living up to Objectivist ethics.
You're right, if we're talking about stealing from stores or cheating on your taxes or even snorting heroin. All the evidence shows that there is no way to reprogram someone's sexual desires. Developing into a pedophile is pretty much a one-way trip.
Being a pedophile isn't a crime, thought. Fucking kids is. It is entirely possible for a pedophile to not fuck kids even thought he wants to, just like it is possible for anyone else to stay celibate. It is also possible for a pedophile to fuck someone else than a kid, just like members of same-sex communities sometimes turn to homosexuality to relieve their urges because a preferred partner isn't available.
It should be noted too that not all child molesters are pedophiles. Pedophilia means attraction to prepubescent children, but some do not molest from attraction but simply because the child happens to be conveniently available or because they are sick fucks who get off on the thought of causing suffering. In fact I'd go so far as to say that this whole pedophilia hysteria is making children less, not more, safe; after all, the forbidden fruit tastes sweetest, as they say.
People tend to go around blathering about how teenagers aren't mature enough to make decisions on their own, but they (the teenagers) are severely hampered (sheltered) in their opportunities to make important decisions.
And this shows another bias: just how important is the decision to have sex with someone anyway ? It doesn't change the course of your life, it very likely doesn't have any effect whatsoever on you, and yet it's treated like it was a matter of life and death. Sure, you can get AIDS or pregnant if you forget taking precautions; but then again, you can die crossing a street if you don't take precautions, and yet even schoolkids are allowed to do that on their own.
Having sex is no more life-altering than going to movies; it's some short-term fun, that's all. Since there's a culture of eating junk food in the movies, and it's pretty hard to do that while having sex, I'd say that of these activities, staying home and having sex has less potential for harm.
Hell, maybe if people screwed around and got it out of their system when they're in their teens, they wouldn't be tempted to do so when they're married and have children. It would remove the temptation to "try it for once", since they'd already had. It would also remove the need to get married just to have sex, so they might pick a partner they actually like and then be less likely to get a divorce later rather than just picking someone at semi-random to relieve their urges.
Social Security is neither. It just a long term ponzi scheme. They just leveraged the present to the future. The day is coming when it will break, and yet nobody is talking about when that happens.
Social security is a system where everyone is taxed and some of this tax is given to the poorest. It is simply legally enforced charity. A ponzi scheme is one where everyone who pays to the system - voluntarily - excepts to get more back. A ponzi scheme is not sustainable because it requires that money magically multiplies, while social security requires no such thing.
In a "Free" society, one that values "LIBERTY", a man is free without regard to property.
In a society which values liberty a man who has no bread either kisses the asses of those who do in the hopes of getting some or starves to death, and is thus not free, unless he cares not whether he lives or dies, in which case he is free everywhere, even when someone's holding a gun to his head.
How much "property" (how rich) must one have, to be free?
Enough so you don't die if people don't feel charitable towards you.
Actually, if you think about it, it is truly a pity that Hitler didn't become a successful artist. Then again, maybe he did, and WW2 was his idea of a performance art - it certainly has all the ingredients of a good story. Kinda disturbing idea, now that I think of it...
Taxes, could be completely voluntary. Its just that it doesn't pay for all the entitlements people have come to enjoy.
Certainly, as long as you count law enforcement amongst these entitlements. Mandatory taxation rose in the first place because voluntary contributions from people weren't enough to maintain the society.
Example? Transaction tax (not sales, transaction). Corporations are a government created entity, and as such could be required to collect, and submit transaction taxes as part of the corporate charter. This would eliminate the whole "income" tax, problems with "overseas" corporate headquarters and more. AND it would be completely open, free, and voluntary. No transactions, no taxes. Buy something, pay a tax. Sell something, pay a tax. Transfer wealth between shell corporations, pay a tax.
While this is fine by me, I fail to see how it is any more or less voluntary than income taxation. After all, no one forces you to have income; no income, no income tax.
The problem with (D) and (R), is that they think they need to take from one, and give it to another, under the threat of a gun.
And are right. Social security exists because historically, charities weren't enough to keep people from dying from hunger. Ultimately, the society exists to protect its members, and the government to manage said society; since it failed to do its purpose relying on the goodwill of its members, it now uses force to do its job.
And I'm not entitled to anything, other than "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness". LIVING in FREEDOM and pursuing happiness doesn't require ANYTHING from anyone else. NOTHING!
Then you aren't entitled to property either, since that is neither life, liberty nor pursuit of happiness, so why are you complaining about losing something you weren't entitled in the first place ?
Furthermore, you are wrong. Unless you are a subsistence farmer, you require plenty of things from other people to live; if you don't live, you don't live in freedom either. If you getting these things depends on the goodwill of others - as it will with voluntary charity - you either avoid taking any action which might upset them or die, and are thus no more free than if someone held a gun to your head. Thus the need for law-based mandatory social security which can't be taken away simply because someone doesn't like you.
For this reason I support minimum guaranteed income for all citizens, which you can't lose no matter what. It doesn't need to be much, mind you; just barely enough to live on.
The moment you think it does, you've already under tyranny. You just don't realize it. The moment the mob and take what they want, from you, you are not "free".
Since you are only entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", the mob has full right to take what they will from you; after all, you aren't entitled to possessions. Or so it follows logically from your claims, anyway.
I bet you protest all the stupid security crap under the guise of "national security", well, guess what, tyranny comes not as a thief, but as a government official saying "Hi, we're from the government, we're here to help".
I do. Stupid security crap interferes with freedom, just as poverty does.
I don't want the government to help protect me from things that don't exist. When ALL men are free, there is NOTHING to fear. Freedom doesn't require anything, from anyone except yourself.
Freedom requires you to either have means to support yourself independent on anyone's opinion of you, or not care whether you live or die. If you are poor, and depend on voluntary charity, you are not free.
Your other claim is unrelated but false. I've known plenty of people who would use their freedom to cause
The BIGGEST problem with Obama's stated goal of income redistribution is that it creates a sense of entitlement, the poor are ENTITLED to money, just because they don't have any.
The biggest problem with libertarians and other anti-tax people is that they feel they're ENTITLED to a quality of life above that of a lone subsistence farmer while simultaneously complaining when forced to support the society which makes such quality possible. Indeed, many rage against the government confiscating part of their income on the very Internet which was funded with those confiscated resources, completely ignoring the fact that they only have "income" because they live in an organized society that is kept running with that confiscated portion, and wondering why the general populace doesn't vote for them.
Please tell me, where am I wrong? Don't just mod me "troll", tell me, what right anyone has to take from anyone else, just because they want something?
It comes down to having two mutually exclusive choices:
Do not tax anyone. Consequently, all the resources - wealth - in the society are concentrated on a few hands, and the rest live a miserable life or outright starve, just like it was during the industrial revolution. Since starving people have nothing to lose but their chains, such conditions can and have led to bloody revolutions.
Tax people, therefore taking some of that concentrated wealth back from those who have it and redistribute it to the poor, thus preventing anyone from starving or getting truly desperate but having to put up with whining libertarians who'd rather "let them eat cake".
Most people consider the life and well-being of the majority of the citizens as well as the stability of the society to be more important than the right of the few to enjoy all the benefits of an organized society without paying any of the price. I know that that is shocking and stomach-turning to you, but try to understand that these people suffer from mental conditions called "empathy" and "thinking beyond your nose", so they really can't help it.
Tyranny of the mob isn't an excuse!
Tyranny of a few wealthy feudal lords isn't better, you know. Unless you happen to be one of them, of course. Do you perhaps fancy yourself John Galt ?
Maybe you like waiting in line for health care. I don't.
Waiting in line for a while is better than not getting healthcare ever. And if you could afford healthcare in a private system, you can simply use the same money for bribes or private clinic.
At the end of the day spamming is about getting as many people as possible to see your spam as possible for as little effort as possible. Investigating a contact form just to spam one small forum or a contact form for a few people at a company just isn't worth it.
Since spamming is all about getting the same text into lots of forums, simply have an anti-spam bot read random other forums. If they have messages which contain the same or nearly same text than what was posted on your forum, they're either spam or copypasta troll, and should be removed. Please note, however, that this is true only if the posts on those other forums are older than the one in your forum; otherwise, it becomes too easy to censor someone else's message by reposting it elsewhere.
Alternatively or additionally, you could traverse any links and check if they contain any telltale signs of spam.
That makes absolutely no sense: if your engine is off, then it's not generating heat anymore!
But what heat there is is still going to be transferring outwards from the inner walls of the cylinders into other parts of the engine, which will consequently become hotter than they were while the engine was running and pumping cooling liquid through the cylinder wall channels. In fact, it's entirely possible that the liquid itself starts boiling; it didn't previously, because it simply didn't have time to absorb enough heat between trips to the radiator, but now it is sitting still right next to very hot metal and can't get rid of that heat in any way.
This is why you shouldn't turn any internal combustion engine from full power to off without letting it cool at idle or low power for a while.
Your fuel injectors are off, so you're not burning gas. But you are still generating compression. That's why engine breaking works. You'll coast for a *lot* longer in neutral than with the way you're doing it.
And your engine is burning fuel to overcome its internal friction and produce power for the electric systems of your car the whole way.
The key is to drive a manual transmission and to hold in the clutch whenever you can(especially downhill) so that the car coasts(runs at idle) as much as possible.
Actually, modern engines with direct fuel injection will not use any fuel as long as RPM is over the idle treshold and gas pedal is not being pushed. In other words, you use less fuel by going downhill with clutch engaged than disengaged. Not to mention you won't wear your brakes down as fast.
And don't engine brake because that is poor form and is retarded. Use your damn brakes.
Related to the first item, coasting with the clutch engaged - engine braking - saves fuel. As an added bonus, it also results in smoother traffic; for example, if you let the speed gradually fall off when approaching traffic lights rather than brake only when you have to, with luck they might turn back to green before you reach them, in which case you don't have to stop at all.
Brakes are energy-dissipation devices. Dissipating your kinetic energy through the engine is preferred, as it's better for your wallet and for the overall flow of traffic.
I take it by "strict typing" you mean static typing? What's so great about it? Lots of server-side languages and frameworks (Python/Django, for example) are dynamically typed. I guess I'm not gettting what your point is here.
Static typing allows the compiler/runtime to find type mismatch errors and complain, while with dynamic typing, the program will simply crash upon encountering one. Static typing makes a whole class of bugs impossible, just like automatic memory management, and results in more reliable programs.
As far as my work is concerned, the factor 20 or more speedup I get by actually programming in C will always be of use.
Which assumes that said speedup will always be existent. There is nothing inherently slow in scripting languages; it's simply harder to write a reasonably good compiler for them than for C.
The CO2 to fuel thing is more like saying 'I'm going to fly!' while jumping of a high building while flapping your arms and making bird noises.
Actually it's more like selling tickets to such rides. Or, as a newspaper once commented modern art: "An artist arranges stones in a circle and someone pays a million for them. A genius sells and a moron buys."
Gold is just a pretty yellow metal, and yet people have and continue killing each other over it. Just because something has no intrinsic value doesn't mean that it doesn't have externally assigned value. In fact I'd go so far as to say that nothing has truly intrinsic value, because there is nothing in the laws of physics that would correspond to the human concept of "value", so all value anything might have must be externally assigned.
Or, to put it another way, all value is imaginary.
Re:Taking pictures of the sun?
on
The Quietest Sun
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· Score: 2, Informative
Alternatively, you could simply project the image from the telescope to a piece of paper/cardboard and photograph that. That way there's no chance of filter failure, because there is no filter.
Maintaining a pack hierarchy is something even chickens manage to do by instinct - it's called "pecking order."
Therefore proving that even chickens are capable of distinguishing between self and not self. That is hardly surprising, actually, since your white blood cells are capable of the same feat, despite not having a nervous system at all.
Wolves maintain pack hierarchy based on pheromones. Again, instinctive. Or didn't you know that ear and submision carry their own scents?
The specific communication methods used are completely irrelevant, as is whether a behaviour is instinctual - passed on in genes - or learned - absorbed from the surroundings. A wolf still needs to be able to distinguish between itself, those higher than itself and those lower than itself in the pack hierarchy to be able to function in it.
Evolutionary change isn't a smooth continuum over time, but occurs in spurts, as conditions change, and new "islands of stability" arise. Evolutionary change can happen in just a few years - witness the "super-bugs."
Actually, those "spurts" take millions of years each. It simply seems sudden when viewed against the 3+ billion years of history of life on this planet.
As for your "superbugs", all examples I or my head-voices are aware of are very minor alterations which either allowed the bug to jump species, happened to affect the particular surface molecule the host body used to identify it by, or simply affected the metabolism of the bug in question to make some particular medicine less effective against it. Comparing that to a radical rewiring of the brain is ludicrous.
An increase in the ability to be introspective is an advantage - one that would quickly propagate throught the population, since its' bearers would, among other things, be well positioned to act on urges to monopolize the "breeding stock".
Local population maybe. However, humans were well segregated into groups with little or no genetic exchange 3000 years ago; no matter how advantageous a trait is, it cannot spread to a population which doesn't have direct or indirect genetic contact with the area the trait originated in.
Besides, if the trait is advantageous in all circumstances, why would it appear at the exact moment the culture needed it to go forward ? You'd imagine that human culture would stay stuck for tens of thousands of years waiting for the missing piece, or develop it tens of thousands of years in advantage; yet no such thing happened. And if the trait is not universally advantageous, why would it spread through the global population, most of which wouldn't be in the same situation ?
Then there's a rather huge logical problem with this proposal, namely: where did the voices originate ? It's almost like this guy was proposing that there was something in humans which thought but wasn't really their mind, but surely the thinking part would be most deserving of being called the human ? Either there was a thinking part in these people, or their behaviour was purely instinctual; but purely instinctual behaviour is unable to build a culture - which these people clearly had, having stone tools, art and clothes - since that requires passing on acquired traits.
Finally, there simply isn't any evidence whatsoever for the hypothesis. No, some myths which have been retold, recombined with each other and purposefully altered by thousands of people during thousands of years having a faint feel of surrealism isn't proof, but simply the expected result from such treatment. And, as I noted, it is impossible to prove it one way or another even with anyone alive today, much less for someone dead thousands of years; so this speculation - not theory or hypothesis, since those would require at least some way to test it - is, to put it bluntly, utter rubbish.
The only way I can see of overcomign this hurdle would be a Neural Network combined with a genetic algorithim but that would require massive amounts of computing power and a very very very large amount of time since you would essentially be evolving a brain.
What it requires is a learning algorithm, which can develop appropriate responses without the programmer's help. Neural network is one such algorithm, and genetic algorithms can be considered learning ones some sense.
Maybe something like "evolution of concepts", where the concepts - formed by combining and mutating other concepts - which most accurately predict reality will gain priority over less accurate concepts ? Try to add incoming data to the model in multiple ways and see which allows predicting the outcome of decisions made based on the model most accurately.
Seriously - the human brain is divided into two halves, and there's some indication that we, as humans, only developed "self-awareness" and "consciousness" quite recently in history.
Wild speculation isn't indication. And I find it hard to believe that such a huge evolutionary jump could happen in the span of a few centuries, and apparently everywhere at once, even in areas which didn't experience the hypothesized problem with increasing societal complexity. Or do you know of any group of pre-conscious sub-humans still around ?
Completely another matter is that it is impossible for you to prove to me that you have a consciousness, rather than voices in your head telling you what to do, despite the fact that we're both alive simultaneously; consequently, this hypothesis is akin to Intelligent Design in being unprovable and unfalsifiable.
In the case of some types of mental illness, as well as the breakdown of cognitive functioning in older people, we can see the reversion to our former "auto-pilot" state.
We regularly see them lose cognitive functions, but that doesn't mean that they start receiving instructions from the outside; it simply means that they become, to put it bluntly, stupid. And while mentally ill people sometimes hear voices, they don't lose their consciousness as a result; those voices simply act as "noise".
A good example is dogs. In the wild, they have a social structure, but no evidence of awareness of the difference between "self" and "other".
Then perhaps you might wish to explain how they are able to maintain a hierarchical pack structure ? After all, it is rather hard to know your place in the pack if you can't tell the difference between yourself and the Alpha. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's rather hard to maintain your life if you can't tell yourself and your next meal apart, especially if you're a carnivore - tearing chunks of flesh off your own leg isn't conductive to your survival.
l. Someday, in that ever-coming scary future, your girlfriend or your wife will leave you for that compassionate and caring bot ("everything you're not!") with whom she's been having a virtual affair for months ("he's got more guts and data than you'll ever have!"). I bet he's be a good listener too. Skynet won't kill humanity, it will steal its women.
Yes, but that's okay: as Terminator 3 showed, it already has their replacements lined up. And being made of liquid metal means you can have them looking like a cat-eared anime girl or your sister if that's what does it for you. Try to measure up against that, bitch !
Only half joking - you know someone in Japan is working on this as we speak...
BTW. I remember once reading an online sci-fi story where an entire civilization had managed to kill itself into extinction in this exact way - since the robots were superior mates, no one got the real thing, hence no babies. Can't recall the URL...
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Being a pedophile isn't a crime, thought. Fucking kids is. It is entirely possible for a pedophile to not fuck kids even thought he wants to, just like it is possible for anyone else to stay celibate. It is also possible for a pedophile to fuck someone else than a kid, just like members of same-sex communities sometimes turn to homosexuality to relieve their urges because a preferred partner isn't available.
It should be noted too that not all child molesters are pedophiles. Pedophilia means attraction to prepubescent children, but some do not molest from attraction but simply because the child happens to be conveniently available or because they are sick fucks who get off on the thought of causing suffering. In fact I'd go so far as to say that this whole pedophilia hysteria is making children less, not more, safe; after all, the forbidden fruit tastes sweetest, as they say.
And this shows another bias: just how important is the decision to have sex with someone anyway ? It doesn't change the course of your life, it very likely doesn't have any effect whatsoever on you, and yet it's treated like it was a matter of life and death. Sure, you can get AIDS or pregnant if you forget taking precautions; but then again, you can die crossing a street if you don't take precautions, and yet even schoolkids are allowed to do that on their own.
Having sex is no more life-altering than going to movies; it's some short-term fun, that's all. Since there's a culture of eating junk food in the movies, and it's pretty hard to do that while having sex, I'd say that of these activities, staying home and having sex has less potential for harm.
Hell, maybe if people screwed around and got it out of their system when they're in their teens, they wouldn't be tempted to do so when they're married and have children. It would remove the temptation to "try it for once", since they'd already had. It would also remove the need to get married just to have sex, so they might pick a partner they actually like and then be less likely to get a divorce later rather than just picking someone at semi-random to relieve their urges.
Social security is a system where everyone is taxed and some of this tax is given to the poorest. It is simply legally enforced charity. A ponzi scheme is one where everyone who pays to the system - voluntarily - excepts to get more back. A ponzi scheme is not sustainable because it requires that money magically multiplies, while social security requires no such thing.
In a society which values liberty a man who has no bread either kisses the asses of those who do in the hopes of getting some or starves to death, and is thus not free, unless he cares not whether he lives or dies, in which case he is free everywhere, even when someone's holding a gun to his head.
Enough so you don't die if people don't feel charitable towards you.
Actually, if you think about it, it is truly a pity that Hitler didn't become a successful artist. Then again, maybe he did, and WW2 was his idea of a performance art - it certainly has all the ingredients of a good story. Kinda disturbing idea, now that I think of it...
Certainly, as long as you count law enforcement amongst these entitlements. Mandatory taxation rose in the first place because voluntary contributions from people weren't enough to maintain the society.
While this is fine by me, I fail to see how it is any more or less voluntary than income taxation. After all, no one forces you to have income; no income, no income tax.
And are right. Social security exists because historically, charities weren't enough to keep people from dying from hunger. Ultimately, the society exists to protect its members, and the government to manage said society; since it failed to do its purpose relying on the goodwill of its members, it now uses force to do its job.
Then you aren't entitled to property either, since that is neither life, liberty nor pursuit of happiness, so why are you complaining about losing something you weren't entitled in the first place ?
Furthermore, you are wrong. Unless you are a subsistence farmer, you require plenty of things from other people to live; if you don't live, you don't live in freedom either. If you getting these things depends on the goodwill of others - as it will with voluntary charity - you either avoid taking any action which might upset them or die, and are thus no more free than if someone held a gun to your head. Thus the need for law-based mandatory social security which can't be taken away simply because someone doesn't like you.
For this reason I support minimum guaranteed income for all citizens, which you can't lose no matter what. It doesn't need to be much, mind you; just barely enough to live on.
Since you are only entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", the mob has full right to take what they will from you; after all, you aren't entitled to possessions. Or so it follows logically from your claims, anyway.
I do. Stupid security crap interferes with freedom, just as poverty does.
Freedom requires you to either have means to support yourself independent on anyone's opinion of you, or not care whether you live or die. If you are poor, and depend on voluntary charity, you are not free.
Your other claim is unrelated but false. I've known plenty of people who would use their freedom to cause
The biggest problem with libertarians and other anti-tax people is that they feel they're ENTITLED to a quality of life above that of a lone subsistence farmer while simultaneously complaining when forced to support the society which makes such quality possible. Indeed, many rage against the government confiscating part of their income on the very Internet which was funded with those confiscated resources, completely ignoring the fact that they only have "income" because they live in an organized society that is kept running with that confiscated portion, and wondering why the general populace doesn't vote for them.
It comes down to having two mutually exclusive choices:
Most people consider the life and well-being of the majority of the citizens as well as the stability of the society to be more important than the right of the few to enjoy all the benefits of an organized society without paying any of the price. I know that that is shocking and stomach-turning to you, but try to understand that these people suffer from mental conditions called "empathy" and "thinking beyond your nose", so they really can't help it.
Tyranny of a few wealthy feudal lords isn't better, you know. Unless you happen to be one of them, of course. Do you perhaps fancy yourself John Galt ?
Waiting in line for a while is better than not getting healthcare ever. And if you could afford healthcare in a private system, you can simply use the same money for bribes or private clinic.
Pre-emptive multitasking, actually. Co-operative is what the versions prior to that had.
Since spamming is all about getting the same text into lots of forums, simply have an anti-spam bot read random other forums. If they have messages which contain the same or nearly same text than what was posted on your forum, they're either spam or copypasta troll, and should be removed. Please note, however, that this is true only if the posts on those other forums are older than the one in your forum; otherwise, it becomes too easy to censor someone else's message by reposting it elsewhere.
Alternatively or additionally, you could traverse any links and check if they contain any telltale signs of spam.
But what heat there is is still going to be transferring outwards from the inner walls of the cylinders into other parts of the engine, which will consequently become hotter than they were while the engine was running and pumping cooling liquid through the cylinder wall channels. In fact, it's entirely possible that the liquid itself starts boiling; it didn't previously, because it simply didn't have time to absorb enough heat between trips to the radiator, but now it is sitting still right next to very hot metal and can't get rid of that heat in any way.
This is why you shouldn't turn any internal combustion engine from full power to off without letting it cool at idle or low power for a while.
And your engine is burning fuel to overcome its internal friction and produce power for the electric systems of your car the whole way.
Actually, modern engines with direct fuel injection will not use any fuel as long as RPM is over the idle treshold and gas pedal is not being pushed. In other words, you use less fuel by going downhill with clutch engaged than disengaged. Not to mention you won't wear your brakes down as fast.
Related to the first item, coasting with the clutch engaged - engine braking - saves fuel. As an added bonus, it also results in smoother traffic; for example, if you let the speed gradually fall off when approaching traffic lights rather than brake only when you have to, with luck they might turn back to green before you reach them, in which case you don't have to stop at all.
Brakes are energy-dissipation devices. Dissipating your kinetic energy through the engine is preferred, as it's better for your wallet and for the overall flow of traffic.
Static typing allows the compiler/runtime to find type mismatch errors and complain, while with dynamic typing, the program will simply crash upon encountering one. Static typing makes a whole class of bugs impossible, just like automatic memory management, and results in more reliable programs.
Which assumes that said speedup will always be existent. There is nothing inherently slow in scripting languages; it's simply harder to write a reasonably good compiler for them than for C.
Actually it's more like selling tickets to such rides. Or, as a newspaper once commented modern art: "An artist arranges stones in a circle and someone pays a million for them. A genius sells and a moron buys."
Gold is just a pretty yellow metal, and yet people have and continue killing each other over it. Just because something has no intrinsic value doesn't mean that it doesn't have externally assigned value. In fact I'd go so far as to say that nothing has truly intrinsic value, because there is nothing in the laws of physics that would correspond to the human concept of "value", so all value anything might have must be externally assigned.
Or, to put it another way, all value is imaginary.
Less than one hundred, if they're Russian nukes.
Alternatively, you could simply project the image from the telescope to a piece of paper/cardboard and photograph that. That way there's no chance of filter failure, because there is no filter.
Therefore proving that even chickens are capable of distinguishing between self and not self. That is hardly surprising, actually, since your white blood cells are capable of the same feat, despite not having a nervous system at all.
The specific communication methods used are completely irrelevant, as is whether a behaviour is instinctual - passed on in genes - or learned - absorbed from the surroundings. A wolf still needs to be able to distinguish between itself, those higher than itself and those lower than itself in the pack hierarchy to be able to function in it.
Actually, those "spurts" take millions of years each. It simply seems sudden when viewed against the 3+ billion years of history of life on this planet.
As for your "superbugs", all examples I or my head-voices are aware of are very minor alterations which either allowed the bug to jump species, happened to affect the particular surface molecule the host body used to identify it by, or simply affected the metabolism of the bug in question to make some particular medicine less effective against it. Comparing that to a radical rewiring of the brain is ludicrous.
Local population maybe. However, humans were well segregated into groups with little or no genetic exchange 3000 years ago; no matter how advantageous a trait is, it cannot spread to a population which doesn't have direct or indirect genetic contact with the area the trait originated in.
Besides, if the trait is advantageous in all circumstances, why would it appear at the exact moment the culture needed it to go forward ? You'd imagine that human culture would stay stuck for tens of thousands of years waiting for the missing piece, or develop it tens of thousands of years in advantage; yet no such thing happened. And if the trait is not universally advantageous, why would it spread through the global population, most of which wouldn't be in the same situation ?
Then there's a rather huge logical problem with this proposal, namely: where did the voices originate ? It's almost like this guy was proposing that there was something in humans which thought but wasn't really their mind, but surely the thinking part would be most deserving of being called the human ? Either there was a thinking part in these people, or their behaviour was purely instinctual; but purely instinctual behaviour is unable to build a culture - which these people clearly had, having stone tools, art and clothes - since that requires passing on acquired traits.
Finally, there simply isn't any evidence whatsoever for the hypothesis. No, some myths which have been retold, recombined with each other and purposefully altered by thousands of people during thousands of years having a faint feel of surrealism isn't proof, but simply the expected result from such treatment. And, as I noted, it is impossible to prove it one way or another even with anyone alive today, much less for someone dead thousands of years; so this speculation - not theory or hypothesis, since those would require at least some way to test it - is, to put it bluntly, utter rubbish.
I don't think that the word "advanced" means what you seem to think it means. Oh, and Syntax Error on not using "that" before "think".
Learn to know your friends well enough that you can tell them apart from a T-0.001 ?
What it requires is a learning algorithm, which can develop appropriate responses without the programmer's help. Neural network is one such algorithm, and genetic algorithms can be considered learning ones some sense.
Maybe something like "evolution of concepts", where the concepts - formed by combining and mutating other concepts - which most accurately predict reality will gain priority over less accurate concepts ? Try to add incoming data to the model in multiple ways and see which allows predicting the outcome of decisions made based on the model most accurately.
Wild speculation isn't indication. And I find it hard to believe that such a huge evolutionary jump could happen in the span of a few centuries, and apparently everywhere at once, even in areas which didn't experience the hypothesized problem with increasing societal complexity. Or do you know of any group of pre-conscious sub-humans still around ?
Completely another matter is that it is impossible for you to prove to me that you have a consciousness, rather than voices in your head telling you what to do, despite the fact that we're both alive simultaneously; consequently, this hypothesis is akin to Intelligent Design in being unprovable and unfalsifiable.
We regularly see them lose cognitive functions, but that doesn't mean that they start receiving instructions from the outside; it simply means that they become, to put it bluntly, stupid. And while mentally ill people sometimes hear voices, they don't lose their consciousness as a result; those voices simply act as "noise".
Then perhaps you might wish to explain how they are able to maintain a hierarchical pack structure ? After all, it is rather hard to know your place in the pack if you can't tell the difference between yourself and the Alpha. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's rather hard to maintain your life if you can't tell yourself and your next meal apart, especially if you're a carnivore - tearing chunks of flesh off your own leg isn't conductive to your survival.
Yes, but that's okay: as Terminator 3 showed, it already has their replacements lined up. And being made of liquid metal means you can have them looking like a cat-eared anime girl or your sister if that's what does it for you. Try to measure up against that, bitch !
Only half joking - you know someone in Japan is working on this as we speak...
BTW. I remember once reading an online sci-fi story where an entire civilization had managed to kill itself into extinction in this exact way - since the robots were superior mates, no one got the real thing, hence no babies. Can't recall the URL...