We don't know that the speed of light was always as it is now.
For speed of light to vary, either photons must have mass (so they don't need to move at c anymore), or the constant of nature c would need to vary over spaceitme. Either of these would have massive effects on pretty much everything: photons mediate electromagnetic force, which not only underlays all of chemistry, but combines with strong interaction to define stable elements and how much energy nuclear reactions release, while c defines the very structure of causality itself.
So frankly, in this case "it's an alien movie" is a more likely explanation.
But they aren't independent. A device that has high bandwidth and high latency must be massively parallel (since for a sequential device bandwidth is simply inverse of latency) and have massive internal buffers to hold all the data being processed. That seems pretty unlikely for implementing such a simple algorithm, unless of course the implementation is purposefully broken.
It's about having your cake and eating it too. Banks and credit card companies have succesfully integrated themselves into the society so it can't function without them. They're too big to fail, and can thus take insane risks and the profits associated with them, secure in the knowledge they'll get saved on public dime should those risks turn sour. So why should society not force them to pay the price: make them serve the public good even when that's not in their personal best interests?
Does this guy want to consider a bunch of other Trans-Neptunian objects as planets too? Because if he doesn't, he's probably either letting nostalgia or some other emotional attachment cloud his judgment.
Or he realizes that the whole concept of a "planet" is just a historical curiosity from ages long past, was invented by people who had no idea what they were describing, and is thus bound to lead to problems in scientific context. Best delegate it to the realm of public relations, where it can serve a useful role to give people a rough idea of what's being talked about without getting mired in details.
So: "A planet is an astronomical object the speaker thinks is best described as a planet."
And so forth. Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?
I suspect there's some kind of pissing match going on behind the scenes, and Pluto is simply being used as a proxy. That's usually the case when something utterly insignificant gets treated like it was Serious Business.
In the end, even astronomers are just humans, and can't avoid projecting their personal issues into their work.
There could be hundreds of legitimate accesses of that file. If the hacker was indeed using a hidden IP address to access the database, but his real IP to download the gist, how are Uber going to determine that from all the other legitimate accesses?
Why would they? They'll simply rise a lawsuit demanding damages against them all. Since that's a civil suit, the accused need to prove their innocence, which will take years and absurd amounts of money - or they can settle out of court with Uber for a couple thousand dollars.
Oh, I thought someone just took a shit on my Slashdot today.
Today? Opening threads in new tabs/windows has been broken for a while now - the comment area is clipped to half of screen size, with a huge useless margin on the right.
So... It's going to stay that way, huh?
My guess is it's going to get worse. Someone has decided Beta is a matter of principle/authority/whatever for them, and is slowly sabotaging the real Slashdot to smoke out the users before it'll go down.
I guess the lesson here is to never build community around a centralized resource, like a server, especially one owned by a company. I wonder if a forum or an imageboard could be implemented in a P2P fashion?
The size of the brain is much less important than the brain to body mass ratio. Several animals have larger brains than humans (elephants being one), but they all have large bodies as well:
No, not really. What sets a human and elephant apart is not how smart an individual human is compared to an individual elephant, but the ability to communicate. Human language is Turing complete, art is basically communication for the sake of communication, and our perhaps most popular form of entertainment is making up stories and sharing them. That's the draw of this very website, and even now I'm using it to serialize a particular neural network - an idea - which you then can deserialize at your leisure.
Almost all human beings who have ever lived are part of a single millenia-old, planet-spanning superorganism we call "culture". It doesn't matter how much gray matter an elephant might be lugging around, it can't even begin to compare to the ~ 100 billion kg total for human species, even with all the issues with coordinating that mass.
And we're getting better at that coordination, too.
The more enlightened employers also consider morale and mental health, not just as HR tokens, but as actual productivity tools
Most employers aren't enlightened, any more than most absolute monarchs of old were. Any relationship where one party wields power over the other is always going to become a black comedy. But that's okay; the lesson will be repeated as many times as humanity needs to have it pounded home.
Google has ignored that line the minute they became a publicly traded company.
Which rises some interesting questions about the true nature of the stock market.
Every decision they make is how to benefit their stockholders.
No, because making censorship more socially acceptable through its omnipresence hurts stockholders too. What Google is maximizing is the value of holding Google stock: even if a decision hurts everyone, it's okay as long as it hurts stockholders less than non-stockholders.
Perhaps the ongoing collapse of our economic system is a blessing in disguise, freeing us from servitude to what's apparently a monster factory. Time will tell, I suppose.
If a syphilis-infection, for example, increases one's danger of bankruptcy, his credit score should reflect that.
If syphilis increases one's danger of bankruptcy, then creditors can earn higher profits by having your credit scores reflect your syphilis status. But why should those potential profits trump your privacy?
Build on a flood plain, make millions of dollars today, and let the tax payers pick up the bill after a catastrophic 100-year flood years later. Rinse, rebuild and repeat.
Seeing how those tax payers have spent 100 years eating cheap food from that fertile flood plain, and the bill only amounts to a tiny fraction of their direct savings - much less the increased economic opportunities inherent in a more populous nation - it works out quite nicely to everyone. Until, that is, someone starts making noices about taxes being stealing, the city remains a ruin, and everyone starves.
Other than the "ownership" hyperbole, you're right, regardless of the posterior plumbing of the douchebag.
The whole point of slapping - or other low-intensity violence - is to show the victim's very body is perpetrator's possession, to do with as they please. Please explain how describing this as ownership is hyperbolical?
Except the numbers show that, obviously, people do just that. And when a stronger target DOES hit back, the attacker takes more hurt than gives.
Half of population are below median intelligence. Bullies are no exception.
I used to agree with this just as vehemently as you seem to. When the bullies started coming up without a Y-chromosome, though, I'm sexist enough to content myself with discrediting them.
I'm sorry to hear that. Let's hope you get better soon.
A man who slaps around a woman is statistically much more likely to be punished in court, pilloried by the media, and basically served up to the metaphorical stake. A woman who permanently disfigures a man is fodder for a bunch of washed up old women on a TV talk show.
Just out of curiosity, what talk shows have so many women who disfigured a man and got away with it that you can make meaningful statistics about such appearances?
Also, while "slapping someone around" is not as serious as a fisthfight as far as medical consequences go, the implications are actually far nastier. It's not a fight between equals, it's some douchebag asserting their power - their ownership - over someone else. Because you don't slap someone who might punch back, precisely because it does nothing but anger the target, but only someone who you think is incapable of fighting back either physically or even legally. People engaging in such bullying absolutely should be made examples of, and deserve no one's sympathy when they are. Goddamn overgrown schoolyard bullies.
The problem is that there aren't any truly capitalist states, nor has one ever existed.
Then how do you know that
A truly capitalist state would be vastly more harmonious and progressive than most any other kind of state, the misery and repression begin when capitalism begins to slip into fascist corporatism.
?
If 20th century taught us anything, it's that ideologies that promise Earthly paradise in return for absolute obedience are extremely suspect.
There's one problem it won't fix: the Greek debts to EU are not going to shift to the a currency just because Greece does. The debts to the rest of the EU will remain in Euros, and if the Greek "new Drachma" devalues massively compared to the Euro, the relative loan repayments in new Drachma will go up correspondingly.
And the reason a financially independent Greece would keep paying Euro loans is...?
Frankly, Euro was doomed from the beginning. As long as national currencies could float relative to each other deficits and surpluses balanced automatically through such adjustment. Euro scrapped this mechanism with replacing it with another, so now weakest EU nation goes bankrupt, then the next weakest, then the next, etc. Ultimately, they all serve as permanently indentured servants to the final victor (almost certainly Germany). Except of course they'll simply break away, returning their national currencies and declaring their Euro debt null and void.
So what happens when we design an economy that doesn't need money?
Who's we? People with money aren't going to give up their power over other people. And those other people aren't going to give up their chance to become the oppressors themselves, even if the chance is purely hypothetical; American elections are proof enough of that.
Human evil is one problem technology can't overcome.
The part being copied would have to be something that is unavailable otherwise and/or very costly to be worth the time/effort to counterfeit it with a 3D printer.
Spare parts and specialty tools. I constantly find myself needing some weirdly shaped piece of plastic that's impossible to find anywhere.
Jewelry? Too much scrutiny applied there, too.
You do realize some people wear jewelry as ornamentation, and thus don't care if it has the right density of defects visible only when viewed with an electron microscope?
If you are truly so ignorant to believe that the US moon landing is fake explain why we have been able to bounce lasers off specific spots on the moon since the late 60s.
Because Moon is a giant disco ball covered in space dust. The mirrored surface shines through in some places.
You are trying to replace humans, not Vulcans. Kirk ran the missions better than Spock because he could identify better with illogical and petty aliens.
Kirk ran the missions better because the writers were flattering the audience. In reality a rational machine will simply learn how humans actually react, not how they should react according to logic/economics/whatever.
Most of the time, economics is simply various economists or think tanks pushing policies advantageous to their patron's ideological or financial goals. So it's not even pseudoscience, but flat-out astrology.
Before the programmer who is automating job X is laid off, the person currently performing job X will be laid off due to the new program. Programmers will outlast the positions they are automating.
A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?
If I were the author, I'd worry less about the programmer and more about how this world will handle the potential mass unemployment situation.
It has run up huge debts in a desperate attempt to keep demand up, and is now collapsing under them. It's not a "potential situation", we've had unemployment and underpaid workers for decades and now the bill is in the mail.
A better question is what'll replace it: will general desperation allow communism to rise up again for round two, or will someone come up with something new?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Problem is, the bad guy gets at least a few shots by surprise, and then there's the next incident, and the next, and... Bad Guy With Gun is an enemy you can never beat by shooting.
Slashdot Mirror
For speed of light to vary, either photons must have mass (so they don't need to move at c anymore), or the constant of nature c would need to vary over spaceitme. Either of these would have massive effects on pretty much everything: photons mediate electromagnetic force, which not only underlays all of chemistry, but combines with strong interaction to define stable elements and how much energy nuclear reactions release, while c defines the very structure of causality itself.
So frankly, in this case "it's an alien movie" is a more likely explanation.
But they aren't independent. A device that has high bandwidth and high latency must be massively parallel (since for a sequential device bandwidth is simply inverse of latency) and have massive internal buffers to hold all the data being processed. That seems pretty unlikely for implementing such a simple algorithm, unless of course the implementation is purposefully broken.
It's about having your cake and eating it too. Banks and credit card companies have succesfully integrated themselves into the society so it can't function without them. They're too big to fail, and can thus take insane risks and the profits associated with them, secure in the knowledge they'll get saved on public dime should those risks turn sour. So why should society not force them to pay the price: make them serve the public good even when that's not in their personal best interests?
Or he realizes that the whole concept of a "planet" is just a historical curiosity from ages long past, was invented by people who had no idea what they were describing, and is thus bound to lead to problems in scientific context. Best delegate it to the realm of public relations, where it can serve a useful role to give people a rough idea of what's being talked about without getting mired in details.
So: "A planet is an astronomical object the speaker thinks is best described as a planet."
I suspect there's some kind of pissing match going on behind the scenes, and Pluto is simply being used as a proxy. That's usually the case when something utterly insignificant gets treated like it was Serious Business.
In the end, even astronomers are just humans, and can't avoid projecting their personal issues into their work.
Why would they? They'll simply rise a lawsuit demanding damages against them all. Since that's a civil suit, the accused need to prove their innocence, which will take years and absurd amounts of money - or they can settle out of court with Uber for a couple thousand dollars.
Nothing personal, just business.
Today? Opening threads in new tabs/windows has been broken for a while now - the comment area is clipped to half of screen size, with a huge useless margin on the right.
My guess is it's going to get worse. Someone has decided Beta is a matter of principle/authority/whatever for them, and is slowly sabotaging the real Slashdot to smoke out the users before it'll go down.
I guess the lesson here is to never build community around a centralized resource, like a server, especially one owned by a company. I wonder if a forum or an imageboard could be implemented in a P2P fashion?
No, not really. What sets a human and elephant apart is not how smart an individual human is compared to an individual elephant, but the ability to communicate. Human language is Turing complete, art is basically communication for the sake of communication, and our perhaps most popular form of entertainment is making up stories and sharing them. That's the draw of this very website, and even now I'm using it to serialize a particular neural network - an idea - which you then can deserialize at your leisure.
Almost all human beings who have ever lived are part of a single millenia-old, planet-spanning superorganism we call "culture". It doesn't matter how much gray matter an elephant might be lugging around, it can't even begin to compare to the ~ 100 billion kg total for human species, even with all the issues with coordinating that mass.
And we're getting better at that coordination, too.
"We"? Is this the last roman_mir post we'll see? Or did you actually mean "the rest of you"?
Most employers aren't enlightened, any more than most absolute monarchs of old were. Any relationship where one party wields power over the other is always going to become a black comedy. But that's okay; the lesson will be repeated as many times as humanity needs to have it pounded home.
Which rises some interesting questions about the true nature of the stock market.
No, because making censorship more socially acceptable through its omnipresence hurts stockholders too. What Google is maximizing is the value of holding Google stock: even if a decision hurts everyone, it's okay as long as it hurts stockholders less than non-stockholders.
Perhaps the ongoing collapse of our economic system is a blessing in disguise, freeing us from servitude to what's apparently a monster factory. Time will tell, I suppose.
If syphilis increases one's danger of bankruptcy, then creditors can earn higher profits by having your credit scores reflect your syphilis status. But why should those potential profits trump your privacy?
Seeing how those tax payers have spent 100 years eating cheap food from that fertile flood plain, and the bill only amounts to a tiny fraction of their direct savings - much less the increased economic opportunities inherent in a more populous nation - it works out quite nicely to everyone. Until, that is, someone starts making noices about taxes being stealing, the city remains a ruin, and everyone starves.
The whole point of slapping - or other low-intensity violence - is to show the victim's very body is perpetrator's possession, to do with as they please. Please explain how describing this as ownership is hyperbolical?
Half of population are below median intelligence. Bullies are no exception.
I'm sorry to hear that. Let's hope you get better soon.
Just out of curiosity, what talk shows have so many women who disfigured a man and got away with it that you can make meaningful statistics about such appearances?
Also, while "slapping someone around" is not as serious as a fisthfight as far as medical consequences go, the implications are actually far nastier. It's not a fight between equals, it's some douchebag asserting their power - their ownership - over someone else. Because you don't slap someone who might punch back, precisely because it does nothing but anger the target, but only someone who you think is incapable of fighting back either physically or even legally. People engaging in such bullying absolutely should be made examples of, and deserve no one's sympathy when they are. Goddamn overgrown schoolyard bullies.
Then how do you know that
?
If 20th century taught us anything, it's that ideologies that promise Earthly paradise in return for absolute obedience are extremely suspect.
And the reason a financially independent Greece would keep paying Euro loans is...?
Frankly, Euro was doomed from the beginning. As long as national currencies could float relative to each other deficits and surpluses balanced automatically through such adjustment. Euro scrapped this mechanism with replacing it with another, so now weakest EU nation goes bankrupt, then the next weakest, then the next, etc. Ultimately, they all serve as permanently indentured servants to the final victor (almost certainly Germany). Except of course they'll simply break away, returning their national currencies and declaring their Euro debt null and void.
Who's we? People with money aren't going to give up their power over other people. And those other people aren't going to give up their chance to become the oppressors themselves, even if the chance is purely hypothetical; American elections are proof enough of that.
Human evil is one problem technology can't overcome.
Spare parts and specialty tools. I constantly find myself needing some weirdly shaped piece of plastic that's impossible to find anywhere.
You do realize some people wear jewelry as ornamentation, and thus don't care if it has the right density of defects visible only when viewed with an electron microscope?
Because Moon is a giant disco ball covered in space dust. The mirrored surface shines through in some places.
Kirk ran the missions better because the writers were flattering the audience. In reality a rational machine will simply learn how humans actually react, not how they should react according to logic/economics/whatever.
Most of the time, economics is simply various economists or think tanks pushing policies advantageous to their patron's ideological or financial goals. So it's not even pseudoscience, but flat-out astrology.
A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?
It has run up huge debts in a desperate attempt to keep demand up, and is now collapsing under them. It's not a "potential situation", we've had unemployment and underpaid workers for decades and now the bill is in the mail.
A better question is what'll replace it: will general desperation allow communism to rise up again for round two, or will someone come up with something new?
Because a peaceful species would be jealous about our chance to die in a ditch or nuclear fireball, and seek to imitate us?
If anything, we'd be used as a cautionary example of playing with powers we can't control.
Problem is, the bad guy gets at least a few shots by surprise, and then there's the next incident, and the next, and... Bad Guy With Gun is an enemy you can never beat by shooting.