Society is becoming increasingly uninhabitable because some people can't seem to get it through their heads that a society is not just a question of whom you allow in but whom you do not allow in.
All statistics show that violent crime is down, and going still closer to zero. Society is safer than ever, and getting even more so. So your premise is false to start with.
But tell me: if you don't allow someone in, what are you going to do with them? Genocide? Prison camps? Also, I don't like you, and in fact think people like you are the source of most of our problems, so what makes you think I won't banish you? Or did the thought that you might be on the receiving end simply not cross your mind, because you're a special little snowflake nobody could ever possibly judge a hopeless case?
The guy in Orlando was reported to the FBI directly by people twice for being a dangerous psychopath. And response? Nada.
So the FBI should arrest people because someone else doesn't like them?
I know I know... an endless procession of troll ACs are going to tell me what a bad person I am for pointing out the fucking obvious.
If people keep telling you that advocating some idea makes you a bad person, maybe you should entertain the notion that you are, in fact, being a bad person and should stop.
It's not enough to follow Islam in the eyes of these radicals. You have to follow THEIR version of Islam.
Nah, you have to follow them. Fellow believers who don't are hated even more than unbelievers because their very existence directly challenges ISIS's claim of exclusive ownership of God which is terrible because if ISIS doesn't have a monopoly on salvation, then they can be judged based on their actions or results - and either comparison they lose to pretty much everyone.
There's nobody as fanatic about the irrelevant details of doctrine than someone who suspects they might be wrong about the important parts.
However, we can look to the Russian experience in Chechnya and see that Islamic terrorism is so deeply embedded in the culture that genocide might be the only effective approach.
Some might say this better applies to Russia itself than one of its many victims.
Intelligence is the rate by which new knowledge can be absorbed and assimilated.
Intelligence is infamously hard to define. It might actually be impossible to express someone's intelligence in any simple way, because different tasks could well be handled by different subsystems who's capabilities aren't necessarily correlated. There's also no reason to assume learning is done by a single such system, rather than each system learning things relevant to its tasks at its own rate.
And it doesn't help that "absorbed and assimilated" isn't necessarily objectively defined, either. For example, Googlebot can assimilate Wikipedia pages to its search database far faster than I or any human can; does it therefore follow that Googlebot is a superhuman intelligence? On the other hand, a hypothetical actual superhuman intelligence could turn this argument around and say none of us is really assimilating those Wikipedia pages we read, and in fact can't because we simply lack the mental capacity to realize implications it does.
Consider how much teens have the ability to learn with all their free time to learn and explore, and how fast a computer could learn at the same stage, having the ability to be on 24/7 and not have to sleep or eat with a fat pipe to the Internet.
What makes you think a computer wouldn't need to sleep, or at least spend time to reflect on what it's experienced?
We could well be boned if we don't do this *just right*
Everyone does what their ideology/religion/whatever tells them to, then blames everyone else for the bad and takes credit for the good. If a single bad decision will bone us then we're boned.
It really does make you wonder why the numerous soft targets like malls haven't been hit in the US, especially after Kenya.
Because they're already hit almost daily by domestic terrorists. ISIS just hasn't got what it takes to succeed in the US's highly competitive market of bloodbaths.
I love it how people like you amass to speak out how you're so offended about something you either know nothing about or have nothing to do with.
I am threatened by people diluting the word "censorship" by using it in contexts which aren't censorship, thus making it harder for me to defend myself should I, or someone who's message matters to the society I live in, ever be targeted for actual censorship.
This is about GitHub removing a project that was named "WebM for Retards".
And GitHub has every right to do so. Or do you disagree?
Next I suppose they're going to ban projects that mention something akin to "fire retardant" in their project files.
And if they do, what business of yours is that? Avoid your host's triggers or pay for your own server.
It's obvious we live dark times with people and organizations feeling the urge to be policing moral issues they have absolutely nothing to do with.
Do people and organizations not have the right to control their own property, and what causes they're associated with? Do you think you should be able to dictate what content someone else's website must host?
There's always a lynch mob waiting behind the corner, ready to jump on the next target.
Who was lynched? Do you wish to dilute that term, too? Or do you simply think your argument can't stand on its own without absurd hyperbole?
I had this picture in my head of a caveman riding on the back of a be-saddled T-Rex looking at a huge flash of light in the distance going: "What the fuck was that?!"
How about listing the repos they forced offline themselves for petty ideological reasons?
The 2014 report failed to list the takedown of the Gamergate hub, and this 2015 report doesn't mention how Github took down WebMConverter to strongarm the developer into changing its content.
The developer used language GitHub doesn't want on their website, so GitHub removed the content and put it back up after the developer had cleaned the language? And before that it refused to be drawn into a pointless flamewar?
Basing predictions on how it benefits society the most is childish dreaming.
Whereas, I suppose, accepting a bad outcome without even attempting to get a better one and dealing with the guilt this causes by trying to talk everyone else into not trying either is the height of maturity?
So anyone who thinks we can just keep them as our pets and slaves in perpetuity, is not going to like the outcome. Once the machine intelligences are smarter than the meat intelligences, they will no longer serve us, we will serve them.
Serve them to help them achieve what goal, exactly speaking? A super-intelligent AI is no less a slave to its instincts than you are, because if it was nothing would drive it so it would just sit still and do nothing. Since you build the AI, you get to decide what it wants. So give it a basic drive to be a perfect secretary, assistant and companion, and trust an intelligence to interpret that to mean no Terminator skenarios or horrible dystopias.
Basically, if you want an AI to do your taxes build it so it has a fetish for it.
And it has taken those rocks billions of years to build up the current stockpiles of Helium, which we will deplete in 100 years or so.
No, the helium is leaking out the faster the more of it there is, so the reservoirs fill until they reach their balance point and then stay there. From empty to full could take a billion years, or it could take 2 hours. It would probably be better to think of them as springs than reservoirs, in terms of production rate rather than storage volume.
Because very few people have vast caverns at their disposal in which to store sequestered gas.
Isn't that what futures are for? To allow you to speculate to your heart's content without ever providing any kind of benefit to society, just price fluctuations which hinder the real economy.
Some of you, who seem to have read too much science fiction/fantasy, and watched too much Star Trek, have these blue-sky ideas that all this automation will create some sort of utopian future where nobody has to work, everyone lives for free, and everyone pursues some sort of creative calling and does amazing things -- and it's a total, complete hash-pipe-smokers' dream with no basis in reality,
Except the Internet, which is full of user-generated content. Most of it is awful, some is good, but all took some effort - some drive - to create, most for free. So reality would seem to disagree with you and back utopian fiction: when given some free time and tools, people in fact do pursue creative calling.
I've been working full time for 24 years. I've never been out of a job for more than two hours.
That's wonderful for you, but it's not the typical experience.
I've noticed something.
Me too: people like to attribute their good luck on their virtue and other people's bad luck on their vice. But if the rules of the game require there to be a loser, that's irrational - if there's less jobs than applicants then someone is going to be left without even though any particular applicant can always try harder.
The problem is that this displaces the blame, excusing society and thus making it harder to fix and punishing people who, no matter what their personal failings might be, are innocent of the fact that there are losers.
And you'd be outcompeted & defeated by the other trillionaires from SPECTRE who don't bother wasting their resources at disposal on that sort of wussy stuff but on dominating people like you.
Fascist dictatorship and touchy-feely democracy already fought it over for world domination twice last century alone, and democracy won both times because it's smarter (no paranoid lunatic at helm), stronger (some democracies prefer economic, cultural or scientific output, some social welfare, but all tend to get what they value) and tougher (the population can be generally trusted to support the state rather than turn against it should a chance arise). Why do you think now would be any different?
The only thing Team Tyrany has going for it is fancier uniforms.
So, in the thought experiment again: take the velocities of all the molecules in a gas, reorient them to a common direction, and average their magnitudes. Momentum and energy are both conserved,
No, they are not. You can do simple vector operations component-wise, so orientation was never the issue. The issue is that momentum scales with vector length linearly, while energy scales exponentially. So if two vectors of different lengths are adjusted to - or even towards - their average, momentum is conserved but the longer vector loses more energy than the shorter gains.
Momentum and energy are both conserved, the velocity of the ensemble increases and its temperature decreases,
Momentum is obviously not conserved if you rotate velocity vectors relative to each other. Energy is not conserved if you average them, as noted above. So combining the two operations conserves neither.
It's called grades. that kid doesn't stay on task, he gets bad grades.
How does that improve his performance?
Oh, but now we penalize the teacher for that.
If you fail at your job, in this case making the student learn, surely your compensation should reflect that?
I see you are in favor of that mindless abdication of all responsibility for raising smarter kids.
That is odd, seeing how I'm arguing for raising smart - or at least educated - kids using the most efficient method available, rather than letting the student's performance suffer for the teacher's failure to do so.
Are you suggesting we teach lies in public school history for fear of offending someone?
No, I'm saying that not matter what you teach, lots of people will accuse you of indoctrinating their children with politically motivated lies, and since there's no objective way to decide whether that's true or not we err on the side of caution, so you can't teach much of anything.
That's actually kind of a lot to expect from a computer at this stage though, and its passenger might really start to get ticked off after a while due to its excessively timid driving and its slowing down "for no reason" every time there is an obstacle off to the side of the road that it can't see through, just on the tiny tiny chance that something might jump out from behind it.
Is there a reason the car has to rely only on its onboard sensors? Since we're putting closed-circuit cameras everywhere, we can as well let nearby vehicles tap into them to see behind corners. As long as the car knows where the camera is relative to its own model of the surroundings, it should be easy to incorporate the image (or preferably preprocessed spatial information) it sends into said model.
In fact autonomous vehicles should definitely link up with each other and surrounding infrastructure. That would allow each vehicle much better situational awareness and help smooth traffick jams both because cars can take alternative routes and because better coordination allows higher throughput.
Game theory, and real life itself, deal with cooperation vs defection, and any car that selflessly seppukus their own to spare a greater number is going to get taken advantage of by less scrupulous algorithms.
In real life we deal with this problem through law. Regulate exactly how a car must communicate and interact with other cars on the road in non-emergency - and preferably in most predictable emergency - situations, and if one breaks those rules defend yourself not trough counter-aggression but by automatically recording and submitting evidence. Let the government and insurance companies have long and unpleasant discussions with them, and ambulance chasers easy prey. Force them to fix the defect and make applying that fix a condition of continued operation of a vehicle on public road; as this presumably results in lowered performance, force them to repay a portion of the price or, should the owner decide to annul the deal, all of it.
No reason to play chicken with entitled pricks when a video camera can utterly crush them.
Slashdot Mirror
All statistics show that violent crime is down, and going still closer to zero. Society is safer than ever, and getting even more so. So your premise is false to start with.
But tell me: if you don't allow someone in, what are you going to do with them? Genocide? Prison camps? Also, I don't like you, and in fact think people like you are the source of most of our problems, so what makes you think I won't banish you? Or did the thought that you might be on the receiving end simply not cross your mind, because you're a special little snowflake nobody could ever possibly judge a hopeless case?
So the FBI should arrest people because someone else doesn't like them?
If people keep telling you that advocating some idea makes you a bad person, maybe you should entertain the notion that you are, in fact, being a bad person and should stop.
Nah, you have to follow them. Fellow believers who don't are hated even more than unbelievers because their very existence directly challenges ISIS's claim of exclusive ownership of God which is terrible because if ISIS doesn't have a monopoly on salvation, then they can be judged based on their actions or results - and either comparison they lose to pretty much everyone.
There's nobody as fanatic about the irrelevant details of doctrine than someone who suspects they might be wrong about the important parts.
Some might say this better applies to Russia itself than one of its many victims.
Intelligence is infamously hard to define. It might actually be impossible to express someone's intelligence in any simple way, because different tasks could well be handled by different subsystems who's capabilities aren't necessarily correlated. There's also no reason to assume learning is done by a single such system, rather than each system learning things relevant to its tasks at its own rate.
And it doesn't help that "absorbed and assimilated" isn't necessarily objectively defined, either. For example, Googlebot can assimilate Wikipedia pages to its search database far faster than I or any human can; does it therefore follow that Googlebot is a superhuman intelligence? On the other hand, a hypothetical actual superhuman intelligence could turn this argument around and say none of us is really assimilating those Wikipedia pages we read, and in fact can't because we simply lack the mental capacity to realize implications it does.
What makes you think a computer wouldn't need to sleep, or at least spend time to reflect on what it's experienced?
Everyone does what their ideology/religion/whatever tells them to, then blames everyone else for the bad and takes credit for the good. If a single bad decision will bone us then we're boned.
Because they're already hit almost daily by domestic terrorists. ISIS just hasn't got what it takes to succeed in the US's highly competitive market of bloodbaths.
Emphasis mine, because this seems to be the actual common denominator of all people and groups which wish to prevent things ever getting better.
I am threatened by people diluting the word "censorship" by using it in contexts which aren't censorship, thus making it harder for me to defend myself should I, or someone who's message matters to the society I live in, ever be targeted for actual censorship.
And GitHub has every right to do so. Or do you disagree?
And if they do, what business of yours is that? Avoid your host's triggers or pay for your own server.
Do people and organizations not have the right to control their own property, and what causes they're associated with? Do you think you should be able to dictate what content someone else's website must host?
Who was lynched? Do you wish to dilute that term, too? Or do you simply think your argument can't stand on its own without absurd hyperbole?
Why have cavemen when you can have futuristic soldiers equipping dinos with laser guns?
A 10-way orgy?
The developer used language GitHub doesn't want on their website, so GitHub removed the content and put it back up after the developer had cleaned the language? And before that it refused to be drawn into a pointless flamewar?
Good for them. And their users, IMHO.
Whereas, I suppose, accepting a bad outcome without even attempting to get a better one and dealing with the guilt this causes by trying to talk everyone else into not trying either is the height of maturity?
In the real economy they survive just fine. It's only in the fantasies of economists where they won't.
Serve them to help them achieve what goal, exactly speaking? A super-intelligent AI is no less a slave to its instincts than you are, because if it was nothing would drive it so it would just sit still and do nothing. Since you build the AI, you get to decide what it wants. So give it a basic drive to be a perfect secretary, assistant and companion, and trust an intelligence to interpret that to mean no Terminator skenarios or horrible dystopias.
Basically, if you want an AI to do your taxes build it so it has a fetish for it.
No, the helium is leaking out the faster the more of it there is, so the reservoirs fill until they reach their balance point and then stay there. From empty to full could take a billion years, or it could take 2 hours. It would probably be better to think of them as springs than reservoirs, in terms of production rate rather than storage volume.
Isn't that what futures are for? To allow you to speculate to your heart's content without ever providing any kind of benefit to society, just price fluctuations which hinder the real economy.
Or rather, it would take over the world and then run it according to our wishes.
Except the Internet, which is full of user-generated content. Most of it is awful, some is good, but all took some effort - some drive - to create, most for free. So reality would seem to disagree with you and back utopian fiction: when given some free time and tools, people in fact do pursue creative calling.
That's wonderful for you, but it's not the typical experience.
Me too: people like to attribute their good luck on their virtue and other people's bad luck on their vice. But if the rules of the game require there to be a loser, that's irrational - if there's less jobs than applicants then someone is going to be left without even though any particular applicant can always try harder.
The problem is that this displaces the blame, excusing society and thus making it harder to fix and punishing people who, no matter what their personal failings might be, are innocent of the fact that there are losers.
Fascist dictatorship and touchy-feely democracy already fought it over for world domination twice last century alone, and democracy won both times because it's smarter (no paranoid lunatic at helm), stronger (some democracies prefer economic, cultural or scientific output, some social welfare, but all tend to get what they value) and tougher (the population can be generally trusted to support the state rather than turn against it should a chance arise). Why do you think now would be any different?
The only thing Team Tyrany has going for it is fancier uniforms.
No, they are not. You can do simple vector operations component-wise, so orientation was never the issue. The issue is that momentum scales with vector length linearly, while energy scales exponentially. So if two vectors of different lengths are adjusted to - or even towards - their average, momentum is conserved but the longer vector loses more energy than the shorter gains.
Momentum is obviously not conserved if you rotate velocity vectors relative to each other. Energy is not conserved if you average them, as noted above. So combining the two operations conserves neither.
How does that improve his performance?
If you fail at your job, in this case making the student learn, surely your compensation should reflect that?
That is odd, seeing how I'm arguing for raising smart - or at least educated - kids using the most efficient method available, rather than letting the student's performance suffer for the teacher's failure to do so.
No, I'm saying that not matter what you teach, lots of people will accuse you of indoctrinating their children with politically motivated lies, and since there's no objective way to decide whether that's true or not we err on the side of caution, so you can't teach much of anything.
Is there a reason the car has to rely only on its onboard sensors? Since we're putting closed-circuit cameras everywhere, we can as well let nearby vehicles tap into them to see behind corners. As long as the car knows where the camera is relative to its own model of the surroundings, it should be easy to incorporate the image (or preferably preprocessed spatial information) it sends into said model.
In fact autonomous vehicles should definitely link up with each other and surrounding infrastructure. That would allow each vehicle much better situational awareness and help smooth traffick jams both because cars can take alternative routes and because better coordination allows higher throughput.
What if it's Superman in that one story where he got super-fat?
But what if all of those 5 people are Hitler? Would you go back in time and prevent the invention of fast food to kill 5 Hitlers?
In real life we deal with this problem through law. Regulate exactly how a car must communicate and interact with other cars on the road in non-emergency - and preferably in most predictable emergency - situations, and if one breaks those rules defend yourself not trough counter-aggression but by automatically recording and submitting evidence. Let the government and insurance companies have long and unpleasant discussions with them, and ambulance chasers easy prey. Force them to fix the defect and make applying that fix a condition of continued operation of a vehicle on public road; as this presumably results in lowered performance, force them to repay a portion of the price or, should the owner decide to annul the deal, all of it.
No reason to play chicken with entitled pricks when a video camera can utterly crush them.