Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.
Lem's planet and its inhabitant exist in the land of make-believe, and doesn't have any actual history, but actual planets existing in actual spacetime are still subject to be guided by actual archetypes over actual time.
Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've had that long since Einstein trying to work out non-Newtonian gravity.
I presume you mean quantum mechanical gravity, since General Relativity already describes non-Newtonian gravity.
The difference, of course, is that we don't have a century's worth of observational data - or, really, any observational data - on objects that are both very small and very massive, for which it would apply.
Phrenology has no scientific basis, but Eugenics certainly does. If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them, you will have fewer of those traits in the next generation. That is a scientific fact.
Assuming the trait is genetically inherited and dependent on genotype in a simple way, possibly. If it's memetic, your attempts to stamp it out could well end up spreading it further by drawing attention to it. But even if it's genetic, evolution has failed to weed out things that will outright kill people, such as Fatal familial insomnia or hemophilia.
This is all ignoring the fact that actual eugenics programs don't typically target specific genes or even traits, but such "traits" as "being poor" or "not staying in kitchen and making sandwiches". They aren't scientific, they're political.
Just because you don't like the political act of mass murder, doesn't make it scientifically invalid.
No, because it was not scientifically valid in the first place. The only reason we're still hearing about eugenics - or ever heard about it in the first place - is that some people get off on cruelty yet don't have the guts to simply admit that, so they make excuses and public policy rather than joining appropriate clubs and dealing with their tastes in the private.
Mind you, the same goes for a lot of stupider policies...
One thing that we all need to realize is that ALL of us have this same issue, not just the people who disagree with you.
The problem is that admitting it puts you at a significant disadvantage at debates. If you can no longer summon the (self-)righteous fury your opponent can, not only are you more likely to give in from sheer exhaustion, but people viewing the debate are likely to consider your opponent as dominant and confuse that as being right. This, in turn, can have unfortunate consequences if the topic is something actually important, rather than just a means to establishing pack hierarchy.
I don't know if it's possible to tame your inner alpha male to the point where you can let it handle poo-flinging contests with other monkeys while still keeping your human intelligence in control of what you believe in or do, but if it is we'd better learn how fast, because we're running out of time. Or perhaps the problem is precisely the idea that it needs to be "tamed", rather than recruited as a member of the internal team. Perhaps we should simply accept that humans tend to establish pecking order, and practice how to do so without slipping into abuse or idiocy.
Then again, that would require admitting that people who think mainly in terms of pack hierarchy and territory aren't necessarily any less intelligent than people who think mainly in terms of logic and science, they just interpret the same message through a different lens. And that might be an unbearable blow to quite a few egos.
Spend a century+ studying an alien and end up with just a vast amount of paper listing weird shit it's done with still no idea why.
But that's not really credible. The basic motivations for all living things on Earth are reasonable simple to understand, once you know their environment and evolutionary/personal history. And while an alien planet is alien, it still exist in the same universe under the same basic principles of existence. Thus, an alien would still experience the same archetypes - conflict, birth, death, success, failure, discovery, hunger, etc. - and need to respond to them. And getting those responses wrong means you won't be around for long, so they're filtered by the requirement to be at least somewhat rational rather than completely random.
Evolution works within constraints given by the rest of reality, so while it might produce weird-looking aliens, it can't produce incomprehensible ones.
Java is what a lazy developer uses to get free security and free memory protection, a child could write a business application in Java and have it secure. To me that doesn't sounds like a good language as much as it does a language for lazy programmers, which should loose it a few points.
Java should lose points because you think it's not challenging enough? Seriously?
For fun, I still get the biggest kick out of pure functional languages. It's nice to see that job advertisements for them seem to be on the uptick.
Haskell's fun, but the second you actually want to do something with it, you run headfirst into the lack of an UI. You either settle for standard input and standard output (which, unbelievably, contain nasty bugs on WIndows) or pick one of a dozen or so wrappers around C libraries, and deal with the resulting issues (and hope the damn thing'll be maintained). It's an unfortunate situation which I think does a lot to keep the language from picking up usage.
Just goes to show that UI design should be part of language design from the start, rather than be left for the third parties. Otherwise you just get a mess.
I'm not sure Javascript is literally Turing complete, because it can't simulate an infinite tape.
Can't it? Since we're being technical, we must differentiate between Javascript specification and any particular Javascript implementation. Does the specification have anything in it that enforces finite pointer size, or could you, in theory, use BigInts? For that matter, can BigInts be implemented in a way that doesn't run into trouble when memory space gets exhausted, at least for the purposes of acting as pointers?
For example, is it possible to communicate using only HTML tags and nothing else?
Sure. You're limited to communicating the logical structure of a page, which is meaningless without the actual contents, but then again, all communication is meaningless without the context.
If it's important to you to balance your budget (as is the case if you're a state legislator but not the case if you're a US congresscritter) then you'll get it done.
If it's more important than every other concern to you to run a balanced budget, you'll likely still fail because you're removed from office by a revolution. And a good thing too; as the EU keeps on demonstrating, it's idiotic to worry about balancing the budget in the middle of a depression.
I'm merely saying that it's not like the states are getting some kind of magic windfall that makes their balanced budgets unrealistically achievable.
Yes, they are: they get to outsource some of their functions - such as defence - to the federal government, which is running a deficit. And that means that the average state is getting more than it's paying (because otherwise the federal budget would be balanced).
All that "free money" ultimate came from themselves. It's not pixie dust.
And everything the borrowing pays for goes to them, as well. Altough some of it is probably used to buy "pixie dust"...
It only means you don't really own your property. You are leasing it from the government. That's insane.
What do you mean, "own"? You can't mean possession - you aren't carrying your solar power system with you, after all. So why should your claim to "own" something trump any competing claims? And even if they did, why would that matter - do you expect other people to enforce your claims?
That's why a system that lets you "own" anything you aren't carrying with you at all times inevitably picks up aspects of "leasing things from the government": ownership is only meaningful as long as it's recognized by other people, and that requires a system to decide who's claims are valid and enforcing them. That, in turn, requires resources to upkeep, and it would hardly be reasonable to expect yourself to be exempt from paying for them.
Libertarianism fails because - amongst other reasons - it takes artificial things - such as property rights - to be the natural state of things. Hardly surprising, seeing how people tend to take as granted anything they're used to, but still not correct.
Poor people should pay more taxes to cover their benes then.
Benefits for the poor exist to keep the rich from facing Mr. Guillotine. Or, in America specifically, a communist revolution. In a rational society they'd also exist for the sake of helping keep the economy going by keeping demand up, but the remnants of market libertarian idealism are still sufficient to keep us from tackling the current crisis efficiently in that manner.
Peace and order only exist - an should only exist - as long as most people have something to lose besides their chains.
Law enforcement shouldn't be good or evil. They should be an impartial enforcer of the governments laws.
Because telling what's already a bunch of jackbooted thugs they should just follow orders is going to improve things.
Once we started treating them like some benevolent father figure they started seeing themselves in that way as well.
The proper term is "public servant".
It's no longer a government of the people... it's a government to control the people.
US government is "of the people". But the people have been led to believe every public institution is either evil, patronising, inefficient or some combination of these, so a government that's of them can hardly help but be shaped by these ideals, stupid as they are. But at least they fulfil their goal of keeping it too weak to stop private enterprise from screwing you over.
Ronnie Raygun is dead. Shake off his spell and reclaim your government already.
Claimed efficiency is only 2%, using PV panels. It would make more sense to just use the PV panels to replace coal fired plants for generating electricity.
Suppose, however, that you could alter the chemistry to get oil? Even at 2% efficiency, we'd be looking at an infinite, carbon-neutral, enviromentally nondestructive alternative to oil shales and tar sands.
Or, even better, put it into reducing the staggering number of deaths caused by preventable diseases if you really want to cut down the death rate.
Won't work, it'll just shift the deaths to other causes. Death rate is either 100% or 0%, there's no middle ground; you're either immortal or living on borrowed time.
But if your state stopped receiving that money and its residents stopped paying the federal taxes for those uses, and instead those taxes were paid directly to the state, then it doesn't really look all that bad on the books, does it?
But it also wouldn't be balanced anymore, would it? Because, as you may or may not know, the federal budget is not balanced.
I realize that on a state-by-state basis there is variance, but add up all 50 and the fed's contribution is less than zero, or exactly zero if they just happen to magically have no overhead at all.
But of course a state government also has overhead; better dissolve it as well. Next up are counties, cities, individual neighbourhoods... Indeed, dissolve all levels of government since it all has negative contributions and let every person provide their own security, their own infrastructure, and their own money!
You, sir, are a financial genus, every bit the equal of those who ruin Wall Street.
The judge instructed us very clearly that truth is not an absolute defense; that is, even if every single thing in the article was provably true, it would still count as libel if it was (for example) just rehashing old information to defame the financier as he tried to start up a new operation.
Does this mean that credit rating agencies are libeling you if they give you anything but the highest rating? Because isn't "rehashing old information to defame the financier as he tried to start up a new operation" exactly what they're doing then?
Or does these laws only protect the first-class citizens?
Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies.
No it does not.
Does not what, exactly speaking? The literal meaning of the sentence is that you're trying to use several different weak foreign currencies to pay your way. Since this is finance, it's impossible to say if we're seeing bad grammar or the beginnings of yet another terribly clever instrument of economic mass destruction.
Some things are impossible. You can't cook an extremely thick piece of fish, for example. The outside would turn to mush before the inside is cooked. And the microbes would be having a field-day.
What if you inserted metal pebbles inside the fish and heated them with magnetic induction? Or used laser pulses from multiple directions which cross at the center, while actively cooling the outside? You could irradiate the whole thing to get rid of microbes beforehand.
Methings anti-organic food could be a big hit amongst people identifying as anti-hippies:).
If the employees are happy about how they're being treated, they'll do the best job they can, because they want to stay with the company. If they're not, they're going to do the bare minimum to stay employed while they look for another job at a better company.
More to the point, if your employees hate you, the urge to harm you in revenge is going to be part of everything they do. There isn't necessarily any calculation, or even conscious decisions, things just start going wrong. People will do their job exactly as told, refuse to notice any deviations from equilibrium while they're still small, and the chaotic nature of life takes care of the rest.
Why would prices spike as a result of more supply?
Probably because for all anyone knew the Fed might have dumbed the coins half-free, while a private buyer is unlikely to do so, so the expected near-future supply has actually been lowered.
The behavior of bitcoin markets always seems to be opposite of the imagined super free market principles it claims to be founded on.
It's always annoying when reality contradicts a good theory, isn't it? Almost like the Bitcoin economy itself, which just keeps growing and spawning copycats rather than dying. It's almost like there was a niche for digital cash in world economy.
Grow a thicker skin and remember that yelling at that jerk in traffic means you've allowed a complete stranger power over your behavior.
And suppressing your urge to yell at him uses some of your limited supply of willpower, thus risking running out when it actually matters.
Can we please put away the ridiculous notion that people are in complete control over their thoughts, feelings and actions? It contradicts everyone's everyday experience and keeps on leading to gross miscalculations about human behaviour, resulting in for example the current economic clusterfuck. People aren't rational except through great effort and can't keep it up for long; most of the time we simply go by habit and instinct.
"Grow a thicker skin" is about the same as advice as "grow wings".
Slashdot Mirror
Lem's planet and its inhabitant exist in the land of make-believe, and doesn't have any actual history, but actual planets existing in actual spacetime are still subject to be guided by actual archetypes over actual time.
I presume you mean quantum mechanical gravity, since General Relativity already describes non-Newtonian gravity.
The difference, of course, is that we don't have a century's worth of observational data - or, really, any observational data - on objects that are both very small and very massive, for which it would apply.
Assuming the trait is genetically inherited and dependent on genotype in a simple way, possibly. If it's memetic, your attempts to stamp it out could well end up spreading it further by drawing attention to it. But even if it's genetic, evolution has failed to weed out things that will outright kill people, such as Fatal familial insomnia or hemophilia.
This is all ignoring the fact that actual eugenics programs don't typically target specific genes or even traits, but such "traits" as "being poor" or "not staying in kitchen and making sandwiches". They aren't scientific, they're political.
No, because it was not scientifically valid in the first place. The only reason we're still hearing about eugenics - or ever heard about it in the first place - is that some people get off on cruelty yet don't have the guts to simply admit that, so they make excuses and public policy rather than joining appropriate clubs and dealing with their tastes in the private.
Mind you, the same goes for a lot of stupider policies...
The problem is that admitting it puts you at a significant disadvantage at debates. If you can no longer summon the (self-)righteous fury your opponent can, not only are you more likely to give in from sheer exhaustion, but people viewing the debate are likely to consider your opponent as dominant and confuse that as being right. This, in turn, can have unfortunate consequences if the topic is something actually important, rather than just a means to establishing pack hierarchy.
I don't know if it's possible to tame your inner alpha male to the point where you can let it handle poo-flinging contests with other monkeys while still keeping your human intelligence in control of what you believe in or do, but if it is we'd better learn how fast, because we're running out of time. Or perhaps the problem is precisely the idea that it needs to be "tamed", rather than recruited as a member of the internal team. Perhaps we should simply accept that humans tend to establish pecking order, and practice how to do so without slipping into abuse or idiocy.
Then again, that would require admitting that people who think mainly in terms of pack hierarchy and territory aren't necessarily any less intelligent than people who think mainly in terms of logic and science, they just interpret the same message through a different lens. And that might be an unbearable blow to quite a few egos.
But that's not really credible. The basic motivations for all living things on Earth are reasonable simple to understand, once you know their environment and evolutionary/personal history. And while an alien planet is alien, it still exist in the same universe under the same basic principles of existence. Thus, an alien would still experience the same archetypes - conflict, birth, death, success, failure, discovery, hunger, etc. - and need to respond to them. And getting those responses wrong means you won't be around for long, so they're filtered by the requirement to be at least somewhat rational rather than completely random.
Evolution works within constraints given by the rest of reality, so while it might produce weird-looking aliens, it can't produce incomprehensible ones.
Java should lose points because you think it's not challenging enough? Seriously?
From metal you crushed with your bare hands from primordial hydrogen, I presume? No? Thought so.
Haskell's fun, but the second you actually want to do something with it, you run headfirst into the lack of an UI. You either settle for standard input and standard output (which, unbelievably, contain nasty bugs on WIndows) or pick one of a dozen or so wrappers around C libraries, and deal with the resulting issues (and hope the damn thing'll be maintained). It's an unfortunate situation which I think does a lot to keep the language from picking up usage.
Just goes to show that UI design should be part of language design from the start, rather than be left for the third parties. Otherwise you just get a mess.
Can't it? Since we're being technical, we must differentiate between Javascript specification and any particular Javascript implementation. Does the specification have anything in it that enforces finite pointer size, or could you, in theory, use BigInts? For that matter, can BigInts be implemented in a way that doesn't run into trouble when memory space gets exhausted, at least for the purposes of acting as pointers?
Sure. You're limited to communicating the logical structure of a page, which is meaningless without the actual contents, but then again, all communication is meaningless without the context.
If it's more important than every other concern to you to run a balanced budget, you'll likely still fail because you're removed from office by a revolution. And a good thing too; as the EU keeps on demonstrating, it's idiotic to worry about balancing the budget in the middle of a depression.
Yes, they are: they get to outsource some of their functions - such as defence - to the federal government, which is running a deficit. And that means that the average state is getting more than it's paying (because otherwise the federal budget would be balanced).
And everything the borrowing pays for goes to them, as well. Altough some of it is probably used to buy "pixie dust"...
"Too much money" compared to what? The amount you decided the public sector should have?
What do you mean, "own"? You can't mean possession - you aren't carrying your solar power system with you, after all. So why should your claim to "own" something trump any competing claims? And even if they did, why would that matter - do you expect other people to enforce your claims?
That's why a system that lets you "own" anything you aren't carrying with you at all times inevitably picks up aspects of "leasing things from the government": ownership is only meaningful as long as it's recognized by other people, and that requires a system to decide who's claims are valid and enforcing them. That, in turn, requires resources to upkeep, and it would hardly be reasonable to expect yourself to be exempt from paying for them.
Libertarianism fails because - amongst other reasons - it takes artificial things - such as property rights - to be the natural state of things. Hardly surprising, seeing how people tend to take as granted anything they're used to, but still not correct.
Benefits for the poor exist to keep the rich from facing Mr. Guillotine. Or, in America specifically, a communist revolution. In a rational society they'd also exist for the sake of helping keep the economy going by keeping demand up, but the remnants of market libertarian idealism are still sufficient to keep us from tackling the current crisis efficiently in that manner.
Peace and order only exist - an should only exist - as long as most people have something to lose besides their chains.
Because telling what's already a bunch of jackbooted thugs they should just follow orders is going to improve things.
The proper term is "public servant".
US government is "of the people". But the people have been led to believe every public institution is either evil, patronising, inefficient or some combination of these, so a government that's of them can hardly help but be shaped by these ideals, stupid as they are. But at least they fulfil their goal of keeping it too weak to stop private enterprise from screwing you over.
Ronnie Raygun is dead. Shake off his spell and reclaim your government already.
Suppose, however, that you could alter the chemistry to get oil? Even at 2% efficiency, we'd be looking at an infinite, carbon-neutral, enviromentally nondestructive alternative to oil shales and tar sands.
Won't work, it'll just shift the deaths to other causes. Death rate is either 100% or 0%, there's no middle ground; you're either immortal or living on borrowed time.
But it also wouldn't be balanced anymore, would it? Because, as you may or may not know, the federal budget is not balanced.
But of course a state government also has overhead; better dissolve it as well. Next up are counties, cities, individual neighbourhoods... Indeed, dissolve all levels of government since it all has negative contributions and let every person provide their own security, their own infrastructure, and their own money!
You, sir, are a financial genus, every bit the equal of those who ruin Wall Street.
Does this mean that credit rating agencies are libeling you if they give you anything but the highest rating? Because isn't "rehashing old information to defame the financier as he tried to start up a new operation" exactly what they're doing then?
Or does these laws only protect the first-class citizens?
Does not what, exactly speaking? The literal meaning of the sentence is that you're trying to use several different weak foreign currencies to pay your way. Since this is finance, it's impossible to say if we're seeing bad grammar or the beginnings of yet another terribly clever instrument of economic mass destruction.
What if you inserted metal pebbles inside the fish and heated them with magnetic induction? Or used laser pulses from multiple directions which cross at the center, while actively cooling the outside? You could irradiate the whole thing to get rid of microbes beforehand.
Methings anti-organic food could be a big hit amongst people identifying as anti-hippies :).
More to the point, if your employees hate you, the urge to harm you in revenge is going to be part of everything they do. There isn't necessarily any calculation, or even conscious decisions, things just start going wrong. People will do their job exactly as told, refuse to notice any deviations from equilibrium while they're still small, and the chaotic nature of life takes care of the rest.
Physical impossibilities usually are.
Isn't that the very definition of economic value?
Probably because for all anyone knew the Fed might have dumbed the coins half-free, while a private buyer is unlikely to do so, so the expected near-future supply has actually been lowered.
It's always annoying when reality contradicts a good theory, isn't it? Almost like the Bitcoin economy itself, which just keeps growing and spawning copycats rather than dying. It's almost like there was a niche for digital cash in world economy.
And suppressing your urge to yell at him uses some of your limited supply of willpower, thus risking running out when it actually matters.
Can we please put away the ridiculous notion that people are in complete control over their thoughts, feelings and actions? It contradicts everyone's everyday experience and keeps on leading to gross miscalculations about human behaviour, resulting in for example the current economic clusterfuck. People aren't rational except through great effort and can't keep it up for long; most of the time we simply go by habit and instinct.
"Grow a thicker skin" is about the same as advice as "grow wings".