Every evaluation and ranking algorithm that is not based off a random number generator carries, by definition, biases favoring some criteria over others.
And, believing this, you of course browse at -2, since Slashdot's moderation system is a kind of ranking system and thus carries bias, and all biases are equal?
The difference is obviously academic if nobody actually does it; but do the various auto-updaters of today attempt to resist, by some DRMish means, archiving of updates as they are received, such that you could either do an offline 'replay' of each update against a retail copy, or preserve a final working version(depending on whether updates are delivered as replacements or as deltas)?
The obvious solution to this kind of problem is to store old games as virtual machine snapshots. Unfortunately, these are not currently standardized - at least the emulated 3D card requires new drivers for the guest operating system from version to to version - but if they will be, you simply need to expand the format a little to store a virtual network: a virtual machine running the game and another running whatever online DRM the game needs.
There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.
And what will they be spending? You can be utterly convinced the future is an endless parade on gold-plated streets, but if you don't have money right now you can't spend it either, unless you get consumer credit. And if you do get credit today, what will you spend tomorrow?
People aren't sitting on giant piles of treasure they're only refraining from spending out of fear, they're sitting in giant holes of debt they have no chance whatsoever of filling before the next collapse comes. It's not an issue of the total supply of money, it's the issue of how large fraction of it Joe Average gets - and the answer is "not enough".
Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are.
But not the same cultural programming. Also, you are making the assumption that people base their behaviour on coolly considering rewards and risks, when this is not even remotely true, especially in high-risk situations. What they'll do is follow their habits.
Culture has value
Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.
Cool sermon, preacher. Now, I don't know what personal demons you're addressing here, but what I meant is that culture has value to its practitioners since adherence to local customs shows membership in the local community, to oneself and others. Thus it takes pretty serious incentives for people to break with it, and if they do, there will be a price to be paid in lessened social cohesion.
There isn't a whole lot of ways to reconcile how Google wants to make money from Android, with a desire user privacy.
Not if you want to keep your private information private from Google, of course, but there's no reason why Uber or Clash of Whatever need to get in on the fun, or even know what targeted advertisements are being shown - they'll just need to designate a screen area for the operating system to draw the adverts in, and call fullScreenAdvertisement() at suitable points.
Answer: it is a personal decision that has nothing to do with highways trying to apply selective tolls that discriminate against station wagons full of mag tape.
What if some toll road operator first builds Hicksville's highway connection using public subsidies and right-of-way, then opens a general store there, and finally starts selectively enforcing huge tolls and lower speed limits against any trucks carrying goods for the competing stores (but not their own)?
There was an article recently (can't remember where) that made the case that with slowing density increase the lifetime of HDDs has to decrease because you're not going to replace them after two or three years anyway because the next generation is so much better.
Fixed that for you. Why would hard drives be exempt from the forced obsolescence business model?
I'll tell you what, you go to a Baptist church and tell them they need to give up a "ridiculous part of their culture". Or try it at a Mosque.
I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death.
Whether you have trouble or not is not the issue. Whether the message is listened to is. Culture has value, since it helps bind people together and thus serve as a basis of organization, and shared customs serve to reinforce it. If you attack them, you force people into a situation where anyone suspending the custom is seen - even by themselves - as breaking away from the culture, and thus the society. They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.
TL;DR You're that Persian messenger at the start of 300.
But as the economy recovers, the banks will likely withdraw that money from the Fed and invest it more profitably, putting those trillions into circulation that the Fed minted over the past decade or so. What happens then is anyone's guess - no nation has ever done this trick before, and there's no way to know what will happen to the currency.
What will happen is that the banks will invest the money in various "financial instruments", creating fortunes that'll never exist anywhere except on paper and melt away when the next crisis hits, at which point the bankers already have their bonuses (which also get "invested"). Not a single penny goes to real economy, thus it can't inflate - or stimulate - it.
Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.
Since you never get a full confession you have no check on whether people did the crime.
Since a confession doesn't mean the person did the crime, and pleading innocence also doesn't prove said innocence, I really don't see how confession has any value whatsoever. You either can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did it, or you can not. And while a confession including, say, the hiding place of the body has some weight to it, this weight is no more so than would demonstrating the suspect has knowledge of the specifics of the crime in some other way.
Some sort of lottery system that would make political campaigns and party affiliations obsolete, and put an end to the career in public service.
Thus making lobbyists more powerful, since they are now dealing with amateurs. Amateurs who's lives have been interrupted, and who are thus in desperate need of future financial security. Sounds like a good plan.
I wonder what would happen if citizens could sue the government for "questionable claims during campaign".
Nothing good. These are the same citizens who get to vote again every few years, yet keep voting the same people in. Why would getting courts involved do anything but make politics even more vicious and dysfunctional?
They are calling to task the "Most transparent US administration in history", which is threatening to veto this bill because "the Environmental Protection Agency should, in some case, be able to write regulations based on science and data that is not made available to the public." There's some transparency for you.
So, are you saying all science and data on every subject should always be public? Or that EPA should pretend not to know any that, for whatever reason, aren't?
Anything that curtails the power of the tyrannical EPA is a good thing in my book - they have become way too powerful.
Not quite sure what you need a cite on - That police in the US don't have the right to beat the shit out of you for no reason?
Yes. Does Officer Friendly actually get in trouble for breaking your arm? Or does he simply claim that you assaulted him, and possibly plant some drugs in your car to "find", and walk free? Because it sure seems like it's the latter.
Profiting from sending other people's children (or, put another way, excess population) to die in other countries which can't meaningfully fight back doesn't sound all that risky to me.
Neither Saddam nor Taliban could really fight back, yet those wars ended costing the US about a trillion dollars it could ill afford to lose. Furthermore, sending "excess population" to die risks revolution or at least demonstrations, like those during Vietnam war; and speaking of Vietnam, you also risk misjudging your enemy. Finally, in a capitalist economy everyone is a potential consumer helping drive up demand (and, more cynically, a potential worker helping drive down wages), and thus corporate profits - and this includes the enemy - so while some profit from the reconstruction, most are worse off.
Wars will end because both tree-hugging hippies and Mr. Burns want them to end. Even the Military-Industrial complex is better off fighting imaginary threats, which can be scaled and steered to pocket a maximum amount of money with minimum amount of expenses.
That said, "imperialism" is a human fact: people love Greatness, no matter you are American, British, French, Russian, Spanish or Chinese.
People love greatness, and measure it in a variety of ways, including artistic and scientific achievements. Military might took a disproportionate importance simply because it used to be absolute necessity in the violent chaos of international relations. However, the age of war is ending, simply because they're too expensive and risky to wage, so we're seeing a shift in thinking - or do you think the Roman Empire would had advertised itself as "Land of the Free"?
I bet many Chinese think of themselves as the heirs of Genghis Khan.
He was a foreign warlord who conquered China, so that seems unlikely.
Greatness means power, which in turn means freedom to act as you wish. I'm afraid our brain is wired to think this way.
Right, so when people say Leonardo da Vinci was a great painter, they really mean he could kill you in 60 ways with a paintbrush?
So how NSA would be able to explain to a child that computer virus and malware represent the highest standard of behavior.
Just put it into historicalcontext. A computer virus is a huge step up from real ones. And using one to stop a nuclear weapons program while causing zero casualties is definitely a win for the world.
If Officer Friendly breaks your arm throwing you against a car to violently frisk you, it makes it that much easier for your lawyer to end his career
This is completely at odds with everything I've heard about US legal system, where the victims need to prove they didn't provoke the attacker ("stand your ground"), especially if the attacker is a cop, so citation needed.
Again, totally nothing factually wrong with that. If it were not for the Americans, all of Europe would either suffer under the Nazis or under the Soviets.
Really? All of Europe you say? Even Great Britain? Finland?
Actually... yes. Without US there's no way the British Empire could had mounted the Normandy invasion. That means the Soviet Union would had either lost or continued rolling on after reaching Berlin. Britain stopped a Nazi invasion and Finland a Soviet one, but neither could had hoped to last much longer without aid, much less win. And of course there's the post-war rebuilding of Europe and world economy, which was mostly orchestrated and bankrolled by the US.
If I own a loaf of bread, I get to choose whatever the F I want to do with it. I own it. No matter what my neighbor thinks, I own it and if I want to eat it, or let it sit, it is my property.
But your right to do what you want with your property is limited by other laws. For example you are not allowed to beat people to death with your loaf of bread, nor form and abuse a monopoly with your company. The latter which is what Google is - rightly or wrongly - accused of doing.
Google is private property. Private property with shareholders yes, but it is still private property. The moment a government, -any- government, starts to interfere, it is interfering with private property.
Google is legal fiction. It's very existence, the same as all corporations, depends on constant government interference. If the government ceases interfering on the marketplace, Google ceases to exist. Given this, it's absolutely government's right - and in fact duty - to define the exact parameters of its interference.
And that is exactly the thing I don't want the government to do with very limited exceptions (such as an idiot owning a nuclear bomb). Simply being the best in their industry (search results), is not one of these exceptions.
And that's all nice and good, but why should your personal preferences take precedence over someone else's? Why should you get to dictate the conditions of corporate existence?
The owner of the corporation is in charge of the corporation, not a voter (or a politician that nobody voted for).
No one is disputing Google's owners right to make decisions on behalf of the company. What's in question is whether the government should use it's legitimate - under antitrust laws - power over the company.
And once more, you modding-morons can mod me down as much as you like because you disagree, it doesn't make my points any less valid.
Well, your points aren't backed by either facts, logic or even ideology - since you're willing to accept exceptions but only when you judge them okay - so they aren't valid by any stretch of imagination. Also, you keep calling people morons.
Why should an AI have to think about all the things us meatbags have to think about that aren't relevant to it?
Because if it can't model a meatbag, why would it be able to model an electron (so can't do physics), an industrial robot (so can't program them), a car (can't control vehicles), abstract entities (can't do logic or math) or anything else for that matter?
Imagination is not optional for intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to build mental models and manipulate them.
AIs don't have parents (well, not in the traditional sense anyway) and so won't have a human-like childhood experience to reflect upon,
Any entity that comes to a new setting will require a period of acclimatization. Whether you call this "childhood" or not is irrelevant.
nor should they have to worry about whether that lump is cancerous, or whether they have to go into work tomorrow, or if that dish had too much salt in it.
Computers break down and require resources - more than human bodies, in fact - thus work enters the picture.
The book also presents a very interesting hypothesis that resolves the Fermi Paradox.
A hypothesis that falls apart when you start wondering how beings who embrace such logic ever built a society to begin with, and then avoided wiping each other out with nuclear weapons. Also, I can't help but think what happens if any set of species forms an alliance or even casual contact - attacking any warns all the others. So while we can't rule out a psychotic species causing havoc, it would be a weird aberration at worst.
Frankly, I find it much more likely that we simply happen to be amongst the first civilizations to develop. Universe is not that old, elements took time to manufacture, life took time to get from first whatever-they-were to us, and Earth has a lot of things going for it specifically.
Slashdot Mirror
And, believing this, you of course browse at -2, since Slashdot's moderation system is a kind of ranking system and thus carries bias, and all biases are equal?
The obvious solution to this kind of problem is to store old games as virtual machine snapshots. Unfortunately, these are not currently standardized - at least the emulated 3D card requires new drivers for the guest operating system from version to to version - but if they will be, you simply need to expand the format a little to store a virtual network: a virtual machine running the game and another running whatever online DRM the game needs.
And what will they be spending? You can be utterly convinced the future is an endless parade on gold-plated streets, but if you don't have money right now you can't spend it either, unless you get consumer credit. And if you do get credit today, what will you spend tomorrow?
People aren't sitting on giant piles of treasure they're only refraining from spending out of fear, they're sitting in giant holes of debt they have no chance whatsoever of filling before the next collapse comes. It's not an issue of the total supply of money, it's the issue of how large fraction of it Joe Average gets - and the answer is "not enough".
But not the same cultural programming. Also, you are making the assumption that people base their behaviour on coolly considering rewards and risks, when this is not even remotely true, especially in high-risk situations. What they'll do is follow their habits.
Not if you want to keep your private information private from Google, of course, but there's no reason why Uber or Clash of Whatever need to get in on the fun, or even know what targeted advertisements are being shown - they'll just need to designate a screen area for the operating system to draw the adverts in, and call fullScreenAdvertisement() at suitable points.
What if some toll road operator first builds Hicksville's highway connection using public subsidies and right-of-way, then opens a general store there, and finally starts selectively enforcing huge tolls and lower speed limits against any trucks carrying goods for the competing stores (but not their own)?
Fixed that for you. Why would hard drives be exempt from the forced obsolescence business model?
Whether you have trouble or not is not the issue. Whether the message is listened to is. Culture has value, since it helps bind people together and thus serve as a basis of organization, and shared customs serve to reinforce it. If you attack them, you force people into a situation where anyone suspending the custom is seen - even by themselves - as breaking away from the culture, and thus the society. They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.
TL;DR You're that Persian messenger at the start of 300.
What will happen is that the banks will invest the money in various "financial instruments", creating fortunes that'll never exist anywhere except on paper and melt away when the next crisis hits, at which point the bankers already have their bonuses (which also get "invested"). Not a single penny goes to real economy, thus it can't inflate - or stimulate - it.
Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.
Since a confession doesn't mean the person did the crime, and pleading innocence also doesn't prove said innocence, I really don't see how confession has any value whatsoever. You either can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did it, or you can not. And while a confession including, say, the hiding place of the body has some weight to it, this weight is no more so than would demonstrating the suspect has knowledge of the specifics of the crime in some other way.
Thus making lobbyists more powerful, since they are now dealing with amateurs. Amateurs who's lives have been interrupted, and who are thus in desperate need of future financial security. Sounds like a good plan.
Bail? If you've been in jail for a month, you've served the sentence already, deservedly so or not, so what is the bail for?
Make plea bargaining illegal. What's gained by it?
Nothing good. These are the same citizens who get to vote again every few years, yet keep voting the same people in. Why would getting courts involved do anything but make politics even more vicious and dysfunctional?
I suppose if you want the nation to collapse...
So, are you saying all science and data on every subject should always be public? Or that EPA should pretend not to know any that, for whatever reason, aren't?
Indeed, back in Good Old Days one could use water for fuel. But not to worry, fracking is already working on getting them back.
But hey, maybe you fancy living in Mordor.
Yes. Does Officer Friendly actually get in trouble for breaking your arm? Or does he simply claim that you assaulted him, and possibly plant some drugs in your car to "find", and walk free? Because it sure seems like it's the latter.
Neither Saddam nor Taliban could really fight back, yet those wars ended costing the US about a trillion dollars it could ill afford to lose. Furthermore, sending "excess population" to die risks revolution or at least demonstrations, like those during Vietnam war; and speaking of Vietnam, you also risk misjudging your enemy. Finally, in a capitalist economy everyone is a potential consumer helping drive up demand (and, more cynically, a potential worker helping drive down wages), and thus corporate profits - and this includes the enemy - so while some profit from the reconstruction, most are worse off.
Wars will end because both tree-hugging hippies and Mr. Burns want them to end. Even the Military-Industrial complex is better off fighting imaginary threats, which can be scaled and steered to pocket a maximum amount of money with minimum amount of expenses.
People love greatness, and measure it in a variety of ways, including artistic and scientific achievements. Military might took a disproportionate importance simply because it used to be absolute necessity in the violent chaos of international relations. However, the age of war is ending, simply because they're too expensive and risky to wage, so we're seeing a shift in thinking - or do you think the Roman Empire would had advertised itself as "Land of the Free"?
He was a foreign warlord who conquered China, so that seems unlikely.
Right, so when people say Leonardo da Vinci was a great painter, they really mean he could kill you in 60 ways with a paintbrush?
Just put it into historical context. A computer virus is a huge step up from real ones. And using one to stop a nuclear weapons program while causing zero casualties is definitely a win for the world.
And the falsehood here is assuming the money would had been spent on creating new value, rather than on, say, financial instruments.
This is completely at odds with everything I've heard about US legal system, where the victims need to prove they didn't provoke the attacker ("stand your ground"), especially if the attacker is a cop, so citation needed.
Actually... yes. Without US there's no way the British Empire could had mounted the Normandy invasion. That means the Soviet Union would had either lost or continued rolling on after reaching Berlin. Britain stopped a Nazi invasion and Finland a Soviet one, but neither could had hoped to last much longer without aid, much less win. And of course there's the post-war rebuilding of Europe and world economy, which was mostly orchestrated and bankrolled by the US.
But your right to do what you want with your property is limited by other laws. For example you are not allowed to beat people to death with your loaf of bread, nor form and abuse a monopoly with your company. The latter which is what Google is - rightly or wrongly - accused of doing.
Google is legal fiction. It's very existence, the same as all corporations, depends on constant government interference. If the government ceases interfering on the marketplace, Google ceases to exist. Given this, it's absolutely government's right - and in fact duty - to define the exact parameters of its interference.
And that's all nice and good, but why should your personal preferences take precedence over someone else's? Why should you get to dictate the conditions of corporate existence?
No one is disputing Google's owners right to make decisions on behalf of the company. What's in question is whether the government should use it's legitimate - under antitrust laws - power over the company.
Well, your points aren't backed by either facts, logic or even ideology - since you're willing to accept exceptions but only when you judge them okay - so they aren't valid by any stretch of imagination. Also, you keep calling people morons.
Because if it can't model a meatbag, why would it be able to model an electron (so can't do physics), an industrial robot (so can't program them), a car (can't control vehicles), abstract entities (can't do logic or math) or anything else for that matter?
Imagination is not optional for intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to build mental models and manipulate them.
Any entity that comes to a new setting will require a period of acclimatization. Whether you call this "childhood" or not is irrelevant.
Computers break down and require resources - more than human bodies, in fact - thus work enters the picture.
A hypothesis that falls apart when you start wondering how beings who embrace such logic ever built a society to begin with, and then avoided wiping each other out with nuclear weapons. Also, I can't help but think what happens if any set of species forms an alliance or even casual contact - attacking any warns all the others. So while we can't rule out a psychotic species causing havoc, it would be a weird aberration at worst.
Frankly, I find it much more likely that we simply happen to be amongst the first civilizations to develop. Universe is not that old, elements took time to manufacture, life took time to get from first whatever-they-were to us, and Earth has a lot of things going for it specifically.