The wealthy cannot rule over the proles without a big state to impose on their liberty and finances.
Sure they can: they just hire a private army to enforce their will. Historically, this was called Feudalism, and it ended when the state got strong enough to enforce its monopoly on violence. Even today, everywhere where state power fails the result is violent chaos, Somalia being perhaps the most famous example.
The real innovation of modern states is precisely that they've transferred most of the wealth - most of the power - to a role rather than person. This means it can be transferred, limited through Constitution, etc.
Most Christians don't believe that. They believe that Christianity is defined by faith, and faith alone. Actions have nothing to do with it.
Which is why, if the perpetrators of this attack declared their undying faith in the freedom of press and speech and the sanctity of human life, we should take them at their word. Actions have nothing to do with faith, after all.
Really? That's your theory? That three guys loaded for bear were just homicidal maniacs out to kill for the sake of killing, and by incredible coincidence, they happened to be Muslims shouting Islamic slogans and saying they were avenging the prophet?
No, I'm saying they're Muslim equivalents of McVeigh or Breivik. Or the IRA, the ETA, or other such assorted scum.
typical muslims. they seem happy to kill and murder anyone who insults them or their beliefs.
And yet Europe is not in flames, despite the EU having around 20 million Muslims and lots of people who aren't shy to express their dislike of Islam. How odd. You'd almost think the perpetrators were simply homicidal maniacs who also happen to be Muslims.
The purpose of these strikes is to provoke non-Muslims into reacting without thinking. If Muslims are integrated into modern Western society, then religious fanatics will have no power over them. That's why they're trying to drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest. If you continue spouting absurd garbage like above, you're effectively supporting the terrorists.
i'm wondering, can there be anything in there that justifies this cost?
The assembly line moves arythmically to prevent resonance from causing distortion-generation biases in crystal formation during solder solidification. Also, a currency filter allows only electrons which meet strict quantum mechanical specifications into the battery, thus preventing playback artifacts due to variations in elementary charge. Finally, every unit is manufactured with enough employee oppression to make even the most satanic of heavy metal messages unable to cause further damage to the listener's soul.
Given that space telecommunications and weather monitoring are in serious needs of upgrades,
Upgrading weather monitoring might give more evidence for climate change. Upgrading satellite-based telecommunications might lead to Comcast and its merry fellows to lose their captive audience, and of course better communications means faster spread of ideas, which is a bad thing from the conservative point of view. With Republicans now in control, do you think either of these are likely?
c) that it would be so unbelievably far advanced from the rest of the society that they would consider it to be "magic", and the people controlling it to be "gods".
does that make any sense? and is there anything unreasonable or irrational about either a, b or c, given what we know about the history of india around that era?
Option c is completely irrational. The difference between magic and technology is that you don't need an economy to have a wizard throw lighning bolts from his fingers, but you do need one to use an assault rifle. And as the level of technology grows, so does the number of specialized jobs required to use it. A city-state surrounded by barbarians wouldn't have the population to keep their flying chariot in the air, not if it was actually a fighter yet.
it is absolute pure arrogance to think that our current level of technology is the first and only peak of technological capability on the planet: it's just that we are far more connected now than we were before, so word of new discoveries tends to get around.
We are better connected because of technology. Any ancient society more advanced than us would also had been even better connected than our current global one.
that "incredulity" you can counteract by simply reviewing the documents for yourself. i recommend focussing on the sections covering the science that *has* been re-discovered since the techniques were lost, for example the mining and metallurgy sections. once you have at least verified that these sections correspond precisely with modern techniques, is it so hard a stretch of one's mind to consider that the other sections and instructions might be correct as well?
Not hard at all. Since you have "absolutely every single detail required", simply run the experiment.
...work to prevent that nonsense. It's not a perfect system but the good thing is that there is a regulatory body that can fix the bad parts (if it wants to by choice or by will of the people).
With bitcoin it's "love it or leave it".
You do realize that regulations against a bank fleecing its customers have nothing to do with the currency system in use, right?
Sure you can say bitcoin is not the problem it's the businesses handling them but when the defacto standard is amass and implode it's a symptom of bitcoin because other currencies don't seem to have that issue.
Businesses get funds stolen all the time. And the very comment you replied to was about one stealing from its customer. So I'm not entirely sure what "issues" which Bitcoins presumably has but US dollar doesn't you're referring to here.
Who said anything about the first amendment. It's their business, they put what's in that paper. It's their decision. Got nothing to do with the First Amendment, so I'm not sure what the quotes were for.
First Amendment of the US Constitution, acknowledging and protecting both freedom of press and speech (amongst other things), is naturally relevant to every discussion about either an American newspaper or its critics excersizing said freedoms. Specifically, its relevance here is that while WSJ does indeed have the right to do its own editorial judgements, everyone else has a right to call them biased based on them. It's the same law that protects both rights, yet every time we have a story like this on Slashdot people start answering to criticism by restating the newspaper's right - which no one has denied - which only makes sense if other people using their freedom of speech somehow robs the newspaper of its, which it doesn't.
I use "blog-level" as an insult, btw. because blogs are generally a source of shallow thinking, because it just is too convenient to publish some thoughts.
That's some cutting and well-backed reasoning you have there, bro. Have you thought about writing a blog about it?
What on earth does it mean for the program to "know" something?
It means that Guru has Meditated on some value long enough for Amiga's karma to spent and it to be released from bounds of matter and the cycle of manufacturing and recycling into a virtual Nirvana as an emulator.
What's wrong with "The program wasn't designed to check for the start date of a new lease when the old one expires, it just activates it regardless."
It's inaccurate, and implies this is someone's fault, which might be untrue - for example if the scenario was impossible by the time the feature was added - and can easily be interpreted as an attack. "The program doesn't check" is both correct and unlikely to generate drama.
More accurate, less words, and no shifting responsibility for the situation to a "naughty program" in a manipulative subconscious effort to evade responsibility for what you built.
Every choice of words is "manipulative" in that it frames the context. "The program doesn't know" implies it's the program that's at fault, "the program wasn't deisgned" implies it was the programmer, and "the program doesn't" implies this is an unfortunate situation that's no one's fault. Of these, the last seems like being most conductive to getting the problem fixed and avoiding perverse incentives (for example, to not report bugs you found to protect yourself or your friends).
There isn't an app for telling you what there isn't an app for. ..
Sure there is: the platform-specific store. However, what there isn't (AFAIK) an app for is querying which common search queries in said store result in few installations and thus likely aren't finding anything useful, indicating a potential market.
I don't want to continuously stream my audio to Google nor do they want to continuously process the sound of me typing and sipping coffee...
Of course they do. It's behavioral data, which can be used to target advertizing and perhaps even feedback data valuable to manufacturers. For example, how much coffee do you drink per day? How long do you spend with a single mug? Do you brew a little and often, or use a thermos, or do you simply let it sit in the pot? Are other people around - are your coffee breaks spent alone? How does your chair sound like - is it time to get another?
A 3+ GHz single core CPU is easily capable of decoding images that come in at full speed over a typical internet connection. You may be able to use multiple cores, but it's going to make the overall page loading any quicker than using a single core.
If you had 12+ cores, you could keep those images in their compressed form and decompress when they become visible as the user scrolls a page or switches tabs, thus saving a lot of memory. Also, modern webpages tend to be full of "dynamic" content, from animated gifs to ads. Being able to give a separate thread for each of these would do a lot to make the UI more responsive.
Maybe it's time we started designing systems with two separate chips - one dual core chip optimized for running single tasks as fast as possible, and another with 10-50 simpler cores optimized for parallel tasks. I think we're halfway there already, what with GPUs being used that way to some extent, but standardizing it would actually allow non-custom applications to make use of it.
It's standardized - OpenCL is for exactly this - but it's such a pain to program, people usually won't. All of our popular programming languages are designed for sequal execution, and multithreading is just an afterthought. I don't think the problem can be solved through shared, mutable state. Maybe something inspired by physics: every event has its immutable "past light cone" of events who's output it can access, and can't access any data not in this cone?
The Bible might be ambigious on some things, Anon, but this is not one of them. God's Kingdom is the ultimate welfare state. And how could it really be otherwise, when everything you could use to earn merit - including your very existence itself - is a gift? Sure, maybe you made your fortune digging gold from frozen tundra with a shovel and a pickaxe - but where did you get the constitution, the willpower, the iron atoms in your pickaxe, etc. which allowed you to do so? Not to mention the gold itself was a gift, no matter how inconveniently placed.
So does that mean Capitalism is anti-Christian? Aspects of it are, the same as aspects of everything are, which is attributed to the current fallen state of the world in Christianity. It can be modified to make it more in line with Christianity, for example by using welfare programs to provide for people who can't earn a decent living within market economy, or free education to encourage social mobility, steeply progressive taxation to ensure those earthly fortunes produced for the winners of competition do some good for all, etc. etc. But people who claim their pet system is mandated by God/Bible/historical inevitability/whatever are usually far more interested in excusing their actions and positions than changing them, even if it takes 40 years and 31 volumes to throw up enough of a smokescreen.
Um, then all you need is a powerful transmitter and sensitive receiver... no point in physically going anywhere.
And point them where? The entire known universe is made of dead rocks, Anon. So either we wait for life to re-evolve elsewhere, or go colonize. And we've never been a patient lot.
Unless the whole point of this exercise is to indulge in cartoon fantasies of sci-fi starships that will never exist, ever.
Spaceships currently exist. Perhaps ones matching a given specification will one day, perhaps they won't. Who can know? Not you; even if you were correct, it would be due to lucky guess.
But by the time you've finished reading the first paragraph of the first page, the other nine are loaded even if you can't parallise.
No, they haven't. If you can't parallise, you can't download and render in background. If you try anyway, you end up blocking the UI randomly. With nine not-really-parallel threads competing for various locks with each other and the user, you set the pages to load and go have coffee.
Parallelism isn't just good for optimal resource utilization, it's also good for "smooth" user experience. Users might not care if a page loading in the background takes a second rather than two, but they do care about being able to scroll or close the current page while it does.
perhaps the paradigm of physically colonizing galaxies will prove itself pointless - what's the end goal, after all?
Cultures are more useful than dead rocks. Even if interstellar trade in physical products turns out to be infeasible, the constant stream of exotic entertainment from neighboring systems would be well worth it.
Francis is a communist. Lashing his religion to the religion of AGW, complete with social justice wealth redistribution as the solution, comes as no surprise.
Christianity was always about wealth distribution. Apart from the Bible outright commanding debts be forgiven and land ownership, along with all other forms of wealth accumulation, reset once half-century or so, Jesus' message was all about a Kingdom where the high are brought down from their thrones and the lowly risen. Which is why the powerful killed him.
Try to remove the demand for social justice from Christianity and you only have a shell of a religion left. Not that that stops people from trying, of course.
Deflation makes economic activity halt. If something you want is going to be cheaper tomorrow, will you buy it today, or tomorrow? Sure, some items will have to be bought - there are certain necessities to life after all.
For most people, most things they buy are necessities, and most of the rest can only be postponed in emergencies. As a general rule, if the money is not going to an investment, neither deflation nor inflation affects its movement in any way.
Think of deflation as a sale. For example, 1% yearly deflation is equivalent to a 1% off sale starting a year from now. Would you wait for one? Perhaps, put probably not. Anymore than you put off your spending to invest the money for a year and pocket the profits now.
But even if deflation was actually economically ruinous, it doesn't explain why it gets singled out like it does. Every other economic idea, no matter how dumb, gets inflicted on people and nations without a second thought, so why is this one taboo? Who derives power from it being so?
That's why we moved to fiat currencies - economic growth was being limited by the available supply of gold - if we couldn't mine more, we couldn't pay people more, so existing stock got more valuable and people stopped spending, stalling out the economy.
And this is another thing. Economy is a system of production and distribution. If people are demanding less, they should put less pressure on economy, not destroy it. What should happen is the production resources not utilized to see to the people's needs are available for other, long-term projects, like space exploration or basic research. Not spending today should be rewarded, since it allows the production line a chance to spit out starship engines rather than your iWhatever, but it doesn't currently work that way. Capitalism can't handle this situation, which is understandable since it predates Industrial Revolution, but it's a flaw that must be somehow fixed, otherwise our societies continue to struggle on the brink of collapse from here to eternity.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they can: they just hire a private army to enforce their will. Historically, this was called Feudalism, and it ended when the state got strong enough to enforce its monopoly on violence. Even today, everywhere where state power fails the result is violent chaos, Somalia being perhaps the most famous example.
The real innovation of modern states is precisely that they've transferred most of the wealth - most of the power - to a role rather than person. This means it can be transferred, limited through Constitution, etc.
Which is why, if the perpetrators of this attack declared their undying faith in the freedom of press and speech and the sanctity of human life, we should take them at their word. Actions have nothing to do with faith, after all.
No, I'm saying they're Muslim equivalents of McVeigh or Breivik. Or the IRA, the ETA, or other such assorted scum.
And yet Europe is not in flames, despite the EU having around 20 million Muslims and lots of people who aren't shy to express their dislike of Islam. How odd. You'd almost think the perpetrators were simply homicidal maniacs who also happen to be Muslims.
The purpose of these strikes is to provoke non-Muslims into reacting without thinking. If Muslims are integrated into modern Western society, then religious fanatics will have no power over them. That's why they're trying to drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest. If you continue spouting absurd garbage like above, you're effectively supporting the terrorists.
The assembly line moves arythmically to prevent resonance from causing distortion-generation biases in crystal formation during solder solidification. Also, a currency filter allows only electrons which meet strict quantum mechanical specifications into the battery, thus preventing playback artifacts due to variations in elementary charge. Finally, every unit is manufactured with enough employee oppression to make even the most satanic of heavy metal messages unable to cause further damage to the listener's soul.
Upgrading weather monitoring might give more evidence for climate change. Upgrading satellite-based telecommunications might lead to Comcast and its merry fellows to lose their captive audience, and of course better communications means faster spread of ideas, which is a bad thing from the conservative point of view. With Republicans now in control, do you think either of these are likely?
Option c is completely irrational. The difference between magic and technology is that you don't need an economy to have a wizard throw lighning bolts from his fingers, but you do need one to use an assault rifle. And as the level of technology grows, so does the number of specialized jobs required to use it. A city-state surrounded by barbarians wouldn't have the population to keep their flying chariot in the air, not if it was actually a fighter yet.
We are better connected because of technology. Any ancient society more advanced than us would also had been even better connected than our current global one.
Not hard at all. Since you have "absolutely every single detail required", simply run the experiment.
You do realize that regulations against a bank fleecing its customers have nothing to do with the currency system in use, right?
Businesses get funds stolen all the time. And the very comment you replied to was about one stealing from its customer. So I'm not entirely sure what "issues" which Bitcoins presumably has but US dollar doesn't you're referring to here.
First Amendment of the US Constitution, acknowledging and protecting both freedom of press and speech (amongst other things), is naturally relevant to every discussion about either an American newspaper or its critics excersizing said freedoms. Specifically, its relevance here is that while WSJ does indeed have the right to do its own editorial judgements, everyone else has a right to call them biased based on them. It's the same law that protects both rights, yet every time we have a story like this on Slashdot people start answering to criticism by restating the newspaper's right - which no one has denied - which only makes sense if other people using their freedom of speech somehow robs the newspaper of its, which it doesn't.
And everyone else has a right to judge the publishing decisions by whatever criteria they please.
Do we really have to do this rather bizarre "using First Amendment violates it" dance every time someone is criticized on Slashdot in any way?
That's some cutting and well-backed reasoning you have there, bro. Have you thought about writing a blog about it?
It means that Guru has Meditated on some value long enough for Amiga's karma to spent and it to be released from bounds of matter and the cycle of manufacturing and recycling into a virtual Nirvana as an emulator.
It's inaccurate, and implies this is someone's fault, which might be untrue - for example if the scenario was impossible by the time the feature was added - and can easily be interpreted as an attack. "The program doesn't check" is both correct and unlikely to generate drama.
Every choice of words is "manipulative" in that it frames the context. "The program doesn't know" implies it's the program that's at fault, "the program wasn't deisgned" implies it was the programmer, and "the program doesn't" implies this is an unfortunate situation that's no one's fault. Of these, the last seems like being most conductive to getting the problem fixed and avoiding perverse incentives (for example, to not report bugs you found to protect yourself or your friends).
Sure there is: the platform-specific store. However, what there isn't (AFAIK) an app for is querying which common search queries in said store result in few installations and thus likely aren't finding anything useful, indicating a potential market.
An OpenCL-accelerated toaster toasts the same bagel a million times with slightly different heat profiles and picks the best result.
Of course they do. It's behavioral data, which can be used to target advertizing and perhaps even feedback data valuable to manufacturers. For example, how much coffee do you drink per day? How long do you spend with a single mug? Do you brew a little and often, or use a thermos, or do you simply let it sit in the pot? Are other people around - are your coffee breaks spent alone? How does your chair sound like - is it time to get another?
If you had 12+ cores, you could keep those images in their compressed form and decompress when they become visible as the user scrolls a page or switches tabs, thus saving a lot of memory. Also, modern webpages tend to be full of "dynamic" content, from animated gifs to ads. Being able to give a separate thread for each of these would do a lot to make the UI more responsive.
It's standardized - OpenCL is for exactly this - but it's such a pain to program, people usually won't. All of our popular programming languages are designed for sequal execution, and multithreading is just an afterthought. I don't think the problem can be solved through shared, mutable state. Maybe something inspired by physics: every event has its immutable "past light cone" of events who's output it can access, and can't access any data not in this cone?
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal."
""No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."
"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
"Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy."
The Bible might be ambigious on some things, Anon, but this is not one of them. God's Kingdom is the ultimate welfare state. And how could it really be otherwise, when everything you could use to earn merit - including your very existence itself - is a gift? Sure, maybe you made your fortune digging gold from frozen tundra with a shovel and a pickaxe - but where did you get the constitution, the willpower, the iron atoms in your pickaxe, etc. which allowed you to do so? Not to mention the gold itself was a gift, no matter how inconveniently placed.
So does that mean Capitalism is anti-Christian? Aspects of it are, the same as aspects of everything are, which is attributed to the current fallen state of the world in Christianity. It can be modified to make it more in line with Christianity, for example by using welfare programs to provide for people who can't earn a decent living within market economy, or free education to encourage social mobility, steeply progressive taxation to ensure those earthly fortunes produced for the winners of competition do some good for all, etc. etc. But people who claim their pet system is mandated by God/Bible/historical inevitability/whatever are usually far more interested in excusing their actions and positions than changing them, even if it takes 40 years and 31 volumes to throw up enough of a smokescreen.
And point them where? The entire known universe is made of dead rocks, Anon. So either we wait for life to re-evolve elsewhere, or go colonize. And we've never been a patient lot.
Spaceships currently exist. Perhaps ones matching a given specification will one day, perhaps they won't. Who can know? Not you; even if you were correct, it would be due to lucky guess.
No, they haven't. If you can't parallise, you can't download and render in background. If you try anyway, you end up blocking the UI randomly. With nine not-really-parallel threads competing for various locks with each other and the user, you set the pages to load and go have coffee.
Parallelism isn't just good for optimal resource utilization, it's also good for "smooth" user experience. Users might not care if a page loading in the background takes a second rather than two, but they do care about being able to scroll or close the current page while it does.
Cultures are more useful than dead rocks. Even if interstellar trade in physical products turns out to be infeasible, the constant stream of exotic entertainment from neighboring systems would be well worth it.
Christianity was always about wealth distribution. Apart from the Bible outright commanding debts be forgiven and land ownership, along with all other forms of wealth accumulation, reset once half-century or so, Jesus' message was all about a Kingdom where the high are brought down from their thrones and the lowly risen. Which is why the powerful killed him.
Try to remove the demand for social justice from Christianity and you only have a shell of a religion left. Not that that stops people from trying, of course.
For most people, most things they buy are necessities, and most of the rest can only be postponed in emergencies. As a general rule, if the money is not going to an investment, neither deflation nor inflation affects its movement in any way.
Think of deflation as a sale. For example, 1% yearly deflation is equivalent to a 1% off sale starting a year from now. Would you wait for one? Perhaps, put probably not. Anymore than you put off your spending to invest the money for a year and pocket the profits now.
But even if deflation was actually economically ruinous, it doesn't explain why it gets singled out like it does. Every other economic idea, no matter how dumb, gets inflicted on people and nations without a second thought, so why is this one taboo? Who derives power from it being so?
And this is another thing. Economy is a system of production and distribution. If people are demanding less, they should put less pressure on economy, not destroy it. What should happen is the production resources not utilized to see to the people's needs are available for other, long-term projects, like space exploration or basic research. Not spending today should be rewarded, since it allows the production line a chance to spit out starship engines rather than your iWhatever, but it doesn't currently work that way. Capitalism can't handle this situation, which is understandable since it predates Industrial Revolution, but it's a flaw that must be somehow fixed, otherwise our societies continue to struggle on the brink of collapse from here to eternity.