If something isn't aggressive it isn't alive or soon wont be.
That depends on just what is meant by aggression. Mr. Hawking is talking about nuclear war, so he likely referred to the popular meaning which implies force or at least hostility. And you seem to be equating any and all "energy" with it.
I don't really understand what definition you are using to consider threads closures, though.
The standard one: a function with associated environment. An OS scheduler resuming a thread means it's basically resuming a closure representing that thread. When the thread ceases running - for example by calling "yield()", or having an interrupt occur - the system creates a new closure composed of a pointer to the next instruction (essentially treating it as a lambda function) and associated environment (the thread stack) and puts it into the run list (or appropriate waiting list).
Here is a cooperative multithreading monad I made in Haskell which utilizes exactly this pattern. And here is some test code.
On a 32 bit machine, it doesn't make much difference, but on a 64 bit machine, address space is not a scarce resource so for practical purposes the stack is only 4k. Still bigger than a serialised closure.
Threads are closures. The question the developer is faced with is: use manual closures with all the work that involves, or use closures with hardware support for resuming them (threads) with the inflexibility of data structure alignment and uncertainty of just when and in what order the closures are resumed.
Of course, a cooperative multithreading library might be the best of both worlds.
The problems we are experiencing means there are problems with the way systems are being RUN, not with how they're SUPPOSED TO be run. It's a people problem, not a system problem.
So basically, judge systems by their propaganda, not actual results?
Yes, because spending less than you make is such a terrible idea. Especially for countries that have gone broke through excessive spending and can't even manage to make debt payments.
Not necessarily terrible, but logically impossible. The whole world's total trade balance is zero, because there's no extra-terrestial trade. That means that if you have a positive trade balance, if you are exporting more than you're importing, then the rest of the world must have a negative total trade balance, since their imports are your exports and vice versus. If having negative trade balance would bankrupt you, it'll surely bankrupt the rest of the world just as well, after which you're out of trading partner.
This is actually what's happening in the EU, and is why Greece has no hope of recovery unless it leaves the euro or has its debt cancelled through bookkeeping magic. Germany insists on both having a positive trade balance, trading mainly with other EU countries, and treating debt seriously (not letting it grow endlessly). That combination is logically impossible to maintain.
By the way, market economies don't go away when you stop believing in them, something that can't be said for religion or the Soviet Union.
Markets won't, but centering the entire society around them will. The delusion that they're somehow forces of nature beyond human control despite being a mere pattern of human action will die. That delusion is what I mean by "secular religion": people are basically perceiving the coherence between their patterns of behaviour in other people, confusing it for objective reality rather than something that can be changed at will by behaving differently, changing their own behaviour to match this perceived reality, and finally noticing that the coherent part of the pattern resembles human behaviour (because it is, even if averaged) and anthropomorphising it.
The same kind of thing happens with nations and religions and ultimately any group that spends enough time together. It's why nations used to have patron gods and nowadays have symbols that are treated just as reverently. It's why convincing someone their gods don't exist is nigh-impossible. And it's why human history is often so thoroughly irrational: people don't (can't) react to objective reality, but to their subjective one, and that's constantly being fought over by what could probably be called memetic lifeforms.
So, people behave in ways consistent with various market-based economic theories because they're constantly getting cues from other people that this is how they should behave, which in turn sends cues to other people. Should enough people start disbelieving these messages, for example because they're being screwed over by the markets, the mechanism fails: the subjective reality created by constant bombardment of messages asserting it disappears with the messages. We're close to that tipping point, if not already over it.
Problem is, the universe isn't a conventional computer, and there's nobody outside the system observing it. In other words, no real information. The positions of things could be in any random placement and the "calculations" would be wildly different - but that doesn't "create information" any more than any other random number does.
By the same logic observed energy density is not "real" either. We who live inside the universe are those observing both star positions (actually how definite their position is) and energy density, so they're both equally real or unreal. All the calculations show is that they are correlated for any particular observer, whether they be inside or outside the system.
Human sacrifice has never once in history saved whoever practiced it.
You do it all the time, such as making choices or deferring a want now for something you want more later. I don't know whether it's "saved" you or not. But it's what you do all the time.
So were you suggesting rising taxes to pay off the national debt, thus giving you less disposable cash? Or perhaps you meant cutting military budget, thus sacrificing world power? No. You specifically mentioned "social safety net" as what you want cut. Which means you're sacrificing weaker members of society for this "better future" for yourself - in other words, human sacrifice.
At the very least honor your would-be victims enough to admit what you're trying to do.
Do we say a hammer is a greater god than Tlaloc or a screwdriver a greater god than Baal just because they're real and actually work? No. We just use them as tools. Markets are the same way, just considerably more valuable a tool.
Nobody talks of sacrifices in regards to a hammer or a screwdriver. Nobody insists hammer is the ideal and human beings need to adapt to it. Nobody starts think tanks just to speak against the use a nailgun or a cordless drill.
Market is a tool, obviously, but it's become far more than that to our culture. It has become a false god, before who's displeasure mere mortals are utterly powerless and which must be placated by sacrifice.
But why should we expect good things when we dump so many costs and burdens on the employers? Especially when they have the choice of employing people in far cheaper countries or automating the work?
Why do we give employers the choice of using slave labour in third-world shitholes while still doing business - or even residing - in the first world? Because the market demands it. Why do we have anything at all to do with dictatorships like China? Because market demands it. Why do we not simply rise toll barriers to remove the price advantage of slave labour? Because the market forbids it. Why are the unemployed made to live in poverty? Because the market has determined them as worthless. Why do people say things like "My net worth is $100,000"? Because the market values everything in dollars. Why do the worst fanatics try to reword even fundamental human rights in terms of (self-)ownership? Because that is the most important - and often the only important - concept to them.
The false god will fall, and then we can put the market into work as the useful tool it is, rather than a force that determines human fate we're treating it as. Assuming, of course, our civilization can take the associated forced readjustment of its mythological structure that's already underway.
It's time to make some sacrifices, to make the present a bit more dumpy in order to have a better future.
Human sacrifice has never once in history saved whoever practiced it. But this time is different, because the Invisible Hand is a greater god than Tlaloc or Baal.
It's pathetic how obvious it is once you see modern economy as it really is: just another religion hiding behind claims of rationality. And one currently going through typical end-of-line panic with associated frenzy of sacrifices and penances.
Calling a whole group of people less intelligent because of their political beliefs is really the worst kind of bigotry.
That is only true if political beliefs are akin to religious faith. And even then it requires the most banal definition of religion, where it's nothing but a label one applies to oneself, devoid of any content. If, on the other hand, political - or religious - beliefs have content, then of course you can be judged by choosing to adhere to them and especially for advancing their agendas.
Since you brought up Hitler, riddle me this: if someone told you they're a Nazi, would that not affect your view of them? And if they told you they admire comrade Stalin, would you not consider them either a moron or evil or both?
Amazing that you can twist an impending failure of capitalism and the predictable consequent social upheaval to follow as somehow the fault of "socialist" social engineering and something those socialists have been trying to cause, rather than something they've been warning about and trying to avoid.
Not really amazing, once you realize that economy is basically a secular religion. Capitalism has its temples (banks, stock exchanges), priests (economists) trying to discern the will of the gods, those gods themselves duking it out in heaven (stocks, futures and associated financial instruments going up and down in value in a "market" largely disconnected from the real world) and myths (Invisible Hand knows best).
Soviet economy had its equivalents, and ultimately collapsed when people lost faith; its major failing was being apocalyptic (it predicted worldwide revolution) with no means of surviving the failure of the promised imminent implosion of capitalism. Ironically, the very collapse of Soviet Union seems to have kicked that implosion underway due to the resulting lack of threat of revolution to curb the worst excesses. Communism couldn't survive competition; capitalism can't survive without it.
So of course true believers blame the whole thing on human sin ("financial irresponsibility") and wish to placate the angry gods through chastising the sinners (austerity). That such measures only make the problems worse is irrelevant, because people operate on religious archetypes they project into what's ultimately accounting. Thus things like debt become huge, crushing problems rather than a largely irrelevant number somewhere far away from the flow of goods and services that make up the real economy.
So the windy snowstorm will cause the windmills to fail? How is that?
Windspeed variance (wind blows slower near the ground than high up to do drag) across the rotor causes twisting forces, which destroy the bearings. To prevent this, the rotor needs to be locked still in high winds.
Real programming actually requires thought. Then you have the whole issue of security.
"Do a task for every file in a directory" does not really require thought or security, and is a typical use case for casual programming skill. And even "real" programming typically requires obsessive attention to detail more than great intellect.
the Borg aren't a democratic society. The Borg is a collective in the same sense that your body is a collective of cells. The Borg is a galaxy-spanning organism made of metal and humanoids.
A democracy is a collective of its members. It's not as tightly bound as the Borg, but communication technology is advancing, so something like the Borg is definitely one possible future for humanity. And not necessarily even a dark one - Star Trek went out of its way to make Borg villainous, right down to zombielike gait.
We alrady have smartphones, the next step will be smart glasses and then embedded devices.
So, what does the government of the USA do, since it's oligarchic? Answer, what the corporations tell them to. Then they tell us that it was for our own good.
It's true that corporations and oligarchs wield an inappropriate amount of power in the US. But that's because Joe Average hopes to one day be an oligarch himself, and votes like he already was.
US is a land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, who are busy trying to screw the poor and the middle class but end up screwing themselves. Corporations merely exploit that combination of delusions of grandeur and and malice, and do so because they're required - by law and culture - to put narrowly defined "shareholder value" over everything else.
There's no reason why companies - even tobacco companies - need to be inherently malevolent. They could spend money on researching safer additives, e-cigs, etc. It's the overemphasis on profit to the exclusion of anything else that causes the dysfunction.
Funny how making people responsible for their own debt can reduce the impact on society of such costs.
I'm all for forcing banks and other debtors to eat the losses caused by making loans to people who can't pay them back with reasonable personal cost, rather than the current practice of allowing them to call upon society to ruin the debtee in a desperate attempt to cover up their own incompetence. No one should lose their home because they listened to a professional financieer, who can bloody well take responsibility for their work, just like everyone else.
That is what you meant, right? Seeing how it's the debtor who owns the debt?
The reality is that governments are addicted to the tax income. 11 billion a year in Australia.
No, the reality is that governments in democratic countries do what their citizens tell them to, and, like the summary stated, "the smoking epidemic is still ongoing" so there's a lot of them who wouldn't like a smoking ban. Taxes are a nice side benefit, but it's the will of the people which keeps tobacco legal.
We have people who don't have the sense of a fucking housefly.
Intelligence is a tool, it'll do what you tell it to. If you want an accurate prediction of the consequences of various actions, it'll do its best to provide. And if you want to delude yourself, it'll happily oblige that request too.
A patriot doing as ordered driven out of the country.
The Devil knows his own, and will eat them last. So this effective banishment should be considered a badge of honor for Mr. Mori. And, conversely, doing well in the US - and, to be fair, many other places - is quickly becoming a different kind of badge altogether.
I can even envision a situation where Excel encryption is better than a PKI solution like GPG. Imagine a situation where a firm is under investigation and has to turn all email over to opposing counsel. Opposing counsel is reviewing emails and encounters this encrypted spreadsheet. What happens now?
In the case of Excel encrypted: Them: "Give me the passphrase!" You: "Uhh, that was like a year ago. I don't remember it." So now they have to choose whether it's worth brute-forcing or to just move on.
In the case of GPG encrypted: Them: "We have the private key from discovery, so give us the passphrase!" You: "Uhhh, I don't remember the passphrase." Them: "Bullshit! You just signed an email with it 5 minutes ago, dumbass!"
So basically, Excel encryption is better because it allows you to play fast and loose with data retention laws. Really?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's the thirst. What do you think people are - Sith Lords?
"Use your aggressive feelings. Let the * flow through your * !"
That depends on just what is meant by aggression. Mr. Hawking is talking about nuclear war, so he likely referred to the popular meaning which implies force or at least hostility. And you seem to be equating any and all "energy" with it.
Leader is whoever people follow. If they do so because he's aggressive, there's usually going to be trouble.
The standard one: a function with associated environment. An OS scheduler resuming a thread means it's basically resuming a closure representing that thread. When the thread ceases running - for example by calling "yield()", or having an interrupt occur - the system creates a new closure composed of a pointer to the next instruction (essentially treating it as a lambda function) and associated environment (the thread stack) and puts it into the run list (or appropriate waiting list).
Here is a cooperative multithreading monad I made in Haskell which utilizes exactly this pattern. And here is some test code.
Just make an offering of entropy and they'll be unpredictable again.
Are you really counting "needs to read the documentation" as a negative for Java in the context of professional software development? Seriously?
Threads are closures. The question the developer is faced with is: use manual closures with all the work that involves, or use closures with hardware support for resuming them (threads) with the inflexibility of data structure alignment and uncertainty of just when and in what order the closures are resumed.
Of course, a cooperative multithreading library might be the best of both worlds.
So basically, judge systems by their propaganda, not actual results?
Not necessarily terrible, but logically impossible. The whole world's total trade balance is zero, because there's no extra-terrestial trade. That means that if you have a positive trade balance, if you are exporting more than you're importing, then the rest of the world must have a negative total trade balance, since their imports are your exports and vice versus. If having negative trade balance would bankrupt you, it'll surely bankrupt the rest of the world just as well, after which you're out of trading partner.
This is actually what's happening in the EU, and is why Greece has no hope of recovery unless it leaves the euro or has its debt cancelled through bookkeeping magic. Germany insists on both having a positive trade balance, trading mainly with other EU countries, and treating debt seriously (not letting it grow endlessly). That combination is logically impossible to maintain.
Markets won't, but centering the entire society around them will. The delusion that they're somehow forces of nature beyond human control despite being a mere pattern of human action will die. That delusion is what I mean by "secular religion": people are basically perceiving the coherence between their patterns of behaviour in other people, confusing it for objective reality rather than something that can be changed at will by behaving differently, changing their own behaviour to match this perceived reality, and finally noticing that the coherent part of the pattern resembles human behaviour (because it is, even if averaged) and anthropomorphising it.
The same kind of thing happens with nations and religions and ultimately any group that spends enough time together. It's why nations used to have patron gods and nowadays have symbols that are treated just as reverently. It's why convincing someone their gods don't exist is nigh-impossible. And it's why human history is often so thoroughly irrational: people don't (can't) react to objective reality, but to their subjective one, and that's constantly being fought over by what could probably be called memetic lifeforms.
So, people behave in ways consistent with various market-based economic theories because they're constantly getting cues from other people that this is how they should behave, which in turn sends cues to other people. Should enough people start disbelieving these messages, for example because they're being screwed over by the markets, the mechanism fails: the subjective reality created by constant bombardment of messages asserting it disappears with the messages. We're close to that tipping point, if not already over it.
4 ASCII characters can be represented in 28 bits.
You'd think someone who can reverse entropy could keep a damn website up...
By the same logic observed energy density is not "real" either. We who live inside the universe are those observing both star positions (actually how definite their position is) and energy density, so they're both equally real or unreal. All the calculations show is that they are correlated for any particular observer, whether they be inside or outside the system.
So were you suggesting rising taxes to pay off the national debt, thus giving you less disposable cash? Or perhaps you meant cutting military budget, thus sacrificing world power? No. You specifically mentioned "social safety net" as what you want cut. Which means you're sacrificing weaker members of society for this "better future" for yourself - in other words, human sacrifice.
At the very least honor your would-be victims enough to admit what you're trying to do.
Nobody talks of sacrifices in regards to a hammer or a screwdriver. Nobody insists hammer is the ideal and human beings need to adapt to it. Nobody starts think tanks just to speak against the use a nailgun or a cordless drill.
Market is a tool, obviously, but it's become far more than that to our culture. It has become a false god, before who's displeasure mere mortals are utterly powerless and which must be placated by sacrifice.
Why do we give employers the choice of using slave labour in third-world shitholes while still doing business - or even residing - in the first world? Because the market demands it. Why do we have anything at all to do with dictatorships like China? Because market demands it. Why do we not simply rise toll barriers to remove the price advantage of slave labour? Because the market forbids it. Why are the unemployed made to live in poverty? Because the market has determined them as worthless. Why do people say things like "My net worth is $100,000"? Because the market values everything in dollars. Why do the worst fanatics try to reword even fundamental human rights in terms of (self-)ownership? Because that is the most important - and often the only important - concept to them.
The false god will fall, and then we can put the market into work as the useful tool it is, rather than a force that determines human fate we're treating it as. Assuming, of course, our civilization can take the associated forced readjustment of its mythological structure that's already underway.
Human sacrifice has never once in history saved whoever practiced it. But this time is different, because the Invisible Hand is a greater god than Tlaloc or Baal.
It's pathetic how obvious it is once you see modern economy as it really is: just another religion hiding behind claims of rationality. And one currently going through typical end-of-line panic with associated frenzy of sacrifices and penances.
That is only true if political beliefs are akin to religious faith. And even then it requires the most banal definition of religion, where it's nothing but a label one applies to oneself, devoid of any content. If, on the other hand, political - or religious - beliefs have content, then of course you can be judged by choosing to adhere to them and especially for advancing their agendas.
Since you brought up Hitler, riddle me this: if someone told you they're a Nazi, would that not affect your view of them? And if they told you they admire comrade Stalin, would you not consider them either a moron or evil or both?
Not really amazing, once you realize that economy is basically a secular religion. Capitalism has its temples (banks, stock exchanges), priests (economists) trying to discern the will of the gods, those gods themselves duking it out in heaven (stocks, futures and associated financial instruments going up and down in value in a "market" largely disconnected from the real world) and myths (Invisible Hand knows best).
Soviet economy had its equivalents, and ultimately collapsed when people lost faith; its major failing was being apocalyptic (it predicted worldwide revolution) with no means of surviving the failure of the promised imminent implosion of capitalism. Ironically, the very collapse of Soviet Union seems to have kicked that implosion underway due to the resulting lack of threat of revolution to curb the worst excesses. Communism couldn't survive competition; capitalism can't survive without it.
So of course true believers blame the whole thing on human sin ("financial irresponsibility") and wish to placate the angry gods through chastising the sinners (austerity). That such measures only make the problems worse is irrelevant, because people operate on religious archetypes they project into what's ultimately accounting. Thus things like debt become huge, crushing problems rather than a largely irrelevant number somewhere far away from the flow of goods and services that make up the real economy.
Windspeed variance (wind blows slower near the ground than high up to do drag) across the rotor causes twisting forces, which destroy the bearings. To prevent this, the rotor needs to be locked still in high winds.
"Do a task for every file in a directory" does not really require thought or security, and is a typical use case for casual programming skill. And even "real" programming typically requires obsessive attention to detail more than great intellect.
A democracy is a collective of its members. It's not as tightly bound as the Borg, but communication technology is advancing, so something like the Borg is definitely one possible future for humanity. And not necessarily even a dark one - Star Trek went out of its way to make Borg villainous, right down to zombielike gait.
We alrady have smartphones, the next step will be smart glasses and then embedded devices.
It's true that corporations and oligarchs wield an inappropriate amount of power in the US. But that's because Joe Average hopes to one day be an oligarch himself, and votes like he already was.
US is a land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, who are busy trying to screw the poor and the middle class but end up screwing themselves. Corporations merely exploit that combination of delusions of grandeur and and malice, and do so because they're required - by law and culture - to put narrowly defined "shareholder value" over everything else.
There's no reason why companies - even tobacco companies - need to be inherently malevolent. They could spend money on researching safer additives, e-cigs, etc. It's the overemphasis on profit to the exclusion of anything else that causes the dysfunction.
I'm all for forcing banks and other debtors to eat the losses caused by making loans to people who can't pay them back with reasonable personal cost, rather than the current practice of allowing them to call upon society to ruin the debtee in a desperate attempt to cover up their own incompetence. No one should lose their home because they listened to a professional financieer, who can bloody well take responsibility for their work, just like everyone else.
That is what you meant, right? Seeing how it's the debtor who owns the debt?
No, the reality is that governments in democratic countries do what their citizens tell them to, and, like the summary stated, "the smoking epidemic is still ongoing" so there's a lot of them who wouldn't like a smoking ban. Taxes are a nice side benefit, but it's the will of the people which keeps tobacco legal.
Intelligence is a tool, it'll do what you tell it to. If you want an accurate prediction of the consequences of various actions, it'll do its best to provide. And if you want to delude yourself, it'll happily oblige that request too.
The Devil knows his own, and will eat them last. So this effective banishment should be considered a badge of honor for Mr. Mori. And, conversely, doing well in the US - and, to be fair, many other places - is quickly becoming a different kind of badge altogether.
So basically, Excel encryption is better because it allows you to play fast and loose with data retention laws. Really?