Am I the only one that sees how nefarious this experiment is?
No, I'm sure plenty of other people are willing to make highly implausible leaps to support their initial assumption that anything the military does is directed at them.
But as useful as it must be to the coming military junta to prove that people twitter each other, I am going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that instead of thinking they are capable of overcoming the information deluge of internet and cellular communications by targetting a few nexus points in the social networks, that they may actually be interested in using social networks, or at least gauging their value as a strategic asset.
You know that country in the middle east you just mentioned having a problem with social networks? Our enemy. Exacerbating their problems is in fact one of the central aspects of intelligence based warfare. One of the primary reasons for setting up a democracy in Iraq is to try undermine the stability of the fundamentalist governments encircling it, and promoting the flow of information is certainly conducive to that end.
Not to mention things like setting up impromptu intelligence networks (when an ally is invaded, such as with Russia-->Georgia recently), or trying to locate a truck which was known to cross into the USA carrying biological toxins, etc. In that respect DARPA may actually be interested in finding out how they can *augment* the capabilities of our social networks so that they're more effective in the case of such an emergency.
If the war was as morally important as something like World War II, YES I would volunteer.
What made WWII morally important?
From America's view, it was just Europe going at it again like they'd always been doing. We didn't really know much about what was happening inside Germany until we invaded Germany.
We weren't really brought into the war until directly attacked by the Japanese. The war in Afghanistan is arguably built on comparable merits.
I'd also rather wish that money was spent on my fellow soldiers for better armor, not for my fancy gadget.
You would rather have bullet resistant armor than something which could keep you away from where the bullets would be flying in the first place?
If the war is as pointless (it won't make a difference in the long term) and hopeless (there is no real "victory" possible, as I've yet to hear someone clearly define it)
Victory is leaving behind a stable local government. (specifically a non-hostile one, if you want to be pedantic)
NO I would NOT volunteer because I would not want ANYONE to volunteer or to go there in the 1st place.
Whether you want people to volunteer to go there is irrelevant. The war and the people there are both givens. The question as it has been posed to you is whether your opposition to funding this technology means you are willing to sit in and do the job that it is designed to do. Or does your opposition to America fighting this war also extend to opposition to its have a low rate of causalities?
The reason it doesn't make sense is because their are multiple players operating from multiple vantage points.
Murdoch talked up the idea of blocking google eventually, where he could easily have done such a thing immediately. There was probably a variety of strategy behind the announcement, but one element may have been to get other news sources in line with the idea. It is the sort of thing that has a high cost for the first adopter (the first guy is leaving a saturated market where people can seemlessly switch to the alternatives) and with no one making the first move, nothing ever happens, but with a touch of collusion it suddenly becomes possible to do.
Google was evidently worried about being left out of the operation, so they rushed to offer an easy solution. It's not that the companies couldn't do it on their own, it's just that amidst their machinations there was a bit of space for google to jump in and assert itself, hopefully keeping anyone from "delisting" from their search engine. (And if they can have their technology involved in the purchasing of these news article, at a later date they may be able to demand a slice of the pie themselves.)
What do you mean takes human behavior into account? Does the average economic model have "x=young children are sometimes mean" as one of the parameters?
Economic models don't deal with individual human whims, they deal with statistical extrapolations based on what has been observed to occur. The fact that a "heat engine" is a suitable analogy in this case is irrelevant. If it has a higher correlation to the empirical data than other models, then it does a better job of representing human behavior by definition. (Conversely, if other models purport to be rooted in human behavior, but then humans do something wildly different than what the model suggests, obviously the model is misrepresenting how humans behave.)
If you desire to see a more apparent relation with fundamental economic principles, you may want to take this model and start working backwards.
Actually, that could work, not in the perpetual energy sense obviously, but certainly you could take the concentrated salt product from your desalinization process and recoup some of the energy by using it for osmotic fuel in this process.
I am illustrating a secondary instance of the same principles at work since you did not seem to understand them in their original form. This seemed prudent since the inherent problem is that you are not reasoning beyond your own instinctual intuition.
If you think it is incorrect examine rules in one instance to obtain information about how they may operate in separate instances, then I have some more bad news for you about the way science works. . ..
Speaking in those terms, and to use my example: the sun may rise tomorrow, or it may not. But thousands of years of observation, coupled with the scientific inference and deduction of natural laws, all tell us the mechanics of just what it means for the sun to "rise" tomorrow, and that it's not a simple 50/50 proposition.
No one ever claimed it was a 50/50 proposition. I am pointing out that if you limit yourself to what can be definitively said, then you are unable to say anything about any future probability. I don't see where you would get that I was trying to alter the inferred probability to be some other number.
Or to use your example, four straight 4's may be a statistical fluke...
If you admit this, you are ceding the debate.
I am at a loss for how you can write this and go on to contend the point.
If you truly believe that, then I invite you to step off the top of the nearest ten-story roof. Under your assertion, repetition and past experience will not necessarily hold true, and you'll float there and win your argument. From my perspective, however, if you do so then I'll need to make a call to 911 so they can scrape the pieces off the sidewalk.
If you would pay a bit more attention, you would realize that I am commenting on the limitations inherent to the structure of our beliefs, not on whether those beliefs are true or false. I make probably every assumption you do about the way the world works. The difference so far is simply that you refuse to admit that they are nothing more than assumptions (which accordingly have no other logical basis for being so, or else they would not be assumptions).
So... unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, I suggest you go back to counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
What was that you had just said about analogies? I guess they are logical for you to present but not anyone else?
Not that there is actually any comparison between your instance of a fanciful query, and my attempting to educate you on epistemology.
Flip side, you can't prove that it won't hold true in the future either. In essence, your argument is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
"Argumentum ad ignorantium" would if he were using the situation of ignorance in one premise in order to assert the opposing premise. Simply pointing out a basic logical limitation does not fit the form of the fallacy.
Past personal observation, history, science, math, and orbital mechanics all say that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith is not needed.
So your answer to the challenge is to reassert the initial position as if the challenge had never been made?
Unfortunately--and I say unfortunately because our inbuilt human intuition grates against this despite its inescapable truth--science is built on a number of conjectures which simply lack any kind of logical necessity to them at all.
Since we've already brought up logical fallacies let's talk about "the gambler's fallacy"--this is where you assume, for example, that because a dice has rolled 4 several times in a row, that its probability of rolling 4 next time is diminished (since rolling 4 4s is unlikely). The flaw is that no matter how unlikely the net series of events, this does not impact the real probability of the mechanism of the dice roll, which is 1/6 for each digit. Science complements the gambler's fallacy with the same flaw but the opposite conclusion--that the 4 is more probable because of the sequence.
The only way to get out from under this flaw is to obtain knowledge of the mechanism of the probability, but if you infer the mechanism of the probability from the sequence (not that you can actually do that) that immediately becomes circular.
Even if you could assert something definitive from the repetition of events, you would have no way to prove that there has been any repetition of events! The universe could just as well have popped into existence at this very moment in its present state with no actual history whatsoever, and it would be entirely indistinguishable from a universe benefiting from several billion years of existence.
And you might say to yourself, "well, that *seems* less probable..." but that is just the way you would like to view it because of how your brain works, if you actually tried to derive that proposition you would find it impossible to do.
You can give in to your desire to believe your intuition about this things is somehow irreproachable, or better than the alternatives, but the idea that your justification for this is anything besides an act of faith is just wishful thinking on your part, I assure you.
Incarceration is not for punishment or revenge; it serves 3 purposes to society:
Incarceration does serve those three purposes, certainly, but I fail to see how you can exclude "punishment" as a fourth. What do you think "justice" means in the context of our "justice system"? Justice is not about deterrence, rehabilitation, or prevention, it is about giving people their "just deserts"--a punishment to fit the crime.
Most normal human beings have an innate desire to see good rewarded and evil punished. You know, cheer the hero, boo the villain. Beyond all other practical motivations we feel compelled to punish murderers and rapists for pretty much the same reason we pin medals on heroes, because it promotes our preconceptions of right and wrong.
It's not really you that's paying it if the company in question has to lower their base price as a result of the tax in order to compete. (Then you're still paying the same price as you would otherwise but the company has smaller profits.)
And if the point is merely for *you* to pay for the services *you use* then I really have to wonder if a sales tax is the most appropriate format. Ostensibly you will be using services like libraries, roads, etc. regardless of your purchasing habits. In some cases there might be a correlation (gas::roads) but maybe the parent post has the right idea, and it just needs to be taken the further step of there not being a sales tax in the first place: everything is collected through income taxes.
Taxing something you want to reduce consumption of (such as tobacco) is one thing, but by extension are we to assume the legislators want to reduce consumption of everything in varying degrees? I think for the most part sales taxes are just a clever shell game. Take a little here, a little there, try to sneak things in and keep people from looking at the total. If tax collection followed one simple rule instead relying on literally hundreds of thousands of pages of individual rubrics we wouldn't even have to deal with these sorts of nebulous tax questions.
Regular teachers aren't on the clock, they're on a salary, and the lesson plan is not some optional extra they can do or not do, it is literally part of their job. Generally speaking you *must* have a lesson plan, and it must have good detail for at least the next week or two, so that if you get sick a substitute can actually take over and not just have kids lazing about for weeks while she sorts it out.
I don't think anybody teaching wants to go the route of "all my work must be conducted during scheduled hours" because what comes after that is that they get scheduled to come in and work on their lesson plans over winter and summer break. I think everyone is much cooler with having lots of vacation with some assumed time set aside for working on lesson plans.
Now what I do like about them selling lesson plans is that capitalism does what it does best and motivates them to come up with really stellar plans so they make lots of money.
What I don't like more than anything about this practice is that it preys on new teachers who make a lot less money by most tiering systems (say $20k per year starting off instead of the $40k they will be making in a year or two at the next tier). It is major suck if you are getting less money *and* have to fork out for supplementary lesson plans. Normally you would inherit a fair bit of curriculum from previous and existing teachers, but maybe once it's monetized the good natured charity which has previously existed will evaporate.
And it does seem kind of wrong that the teachers are being subsidized by tax payers to come up with these plans, but are also retaining the plans for their own private use and personal profit. On the surface it's nice to think about teachers being entrepreneurial and financially successful, but it's not exactly helping teachers out in general given that the only people who buy the plans will be other teachers, which does not result in a net influx of income to the teaching profession.
My suggestion is that the reviewing of a certain number of freely published lesson plans should be tied to keeping one's status in the highest pay-tier. That means the most experience/qualified teachers will be annually donating, say, a couple of really good daily lessons for the benefit of all teachers and students in the nation (and they're already getting paid extra for their alleged mastery in teaching, so no complaining!)
Except for the bit where the guy responsible lives in Thailand, or Rwanda, or Guatemala. Most probably you don't have a suspect at all--at most you have a picture of the victim. So now you are going to search for an unknown victim who could be anywhere in the world... and since when does the United States bring cases on behalf of victims that aren't US citizens anyway?
Cracking down on child porn means cracking down on possession. Generally speaking there is no practical way to find the initial distributor or the victim. Sometimes you might get lucky and catch the perp, but that's only sometimes.
go bust the people who are giving child rapists money.
How have the people who gave them money caused "actual harm" anymore than in the "simple possession" case? If you're willing to punish the one you should be willing to punish the other.
For one thing, government prevents insurance providers from operating across state lines. Competition is what reduces prices, and when you eliminate competition in from the other 49 states you eliminate many opportunities for price reduction.
For another, it applies certain tax breaks only to employer provided insurance. This means companies provide insurance with their benefits package because it looks like a sweeter deal than if they give you the cash equivalent and expect you to buy insurance yourself. But it also means you aren't able to shop around (competition again) and much worse, it means the insurance company cant offer you discount rates for practicing preventative medicine, etc. (Preventative medicine makes healthcare much cheaper for everyone.)
Re:Just to start us off with a car analogy...
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Lulu Introduces DRM
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DRM is not the devil. It is a tool. The sooner we stop crying about buzz words and instead actually do something about how they are used, the better off we will all be.
Absolutely. Opposing DRM is not some kind of religion, it is not even a moral position, it is saying "hey, DRM is inconvenient, I don't really want to have to deal with it in my data." The best way to show this is to not buy anything with DRM in it. Ideally enough people do this that selling DRM-less becomes the more profitable way to go.
Expanding your position to "I will also not buy anything from anybody who makes any money off of anything with DRM" is just silly. The only reason to structure your boycott like that is if, not only do want to have open data as before, but you also want to prevent anyone else from being able to buy closed data. Why would you possibly care? It's like refusing to buy good nintendo games because the platform also supports sucky nintendo games. If you just make a point of buying the good games I assure you that this will give the best results as far as voting with your dollars goes.
It's at least as easy for Hulu to deliver different ads to different countries as it is to block people from those countries and hunt down their US proxies, etc.
Some businesses like McDonalds may have a presence that allows running many customized ads (and as it is unlikely they have setup a presence without advertising it there does not need to be much if any cost creating new adds). Otherwise you can contract with someone local there who is selling web advertising--if they are selling it at all then presumably there is a price at which they will be only too happy to include you in their schemes.
If the margins are too small then you just increase the number of ad intervals.
Yes at some point that will drive off viewers, but then that just achieves what blocking them would have achieved, doesn't it?
I don't think people have been using the internet to aggregate information for display on public chalkboards "for ages."
And the point is not that this is some ingenious invention to rock civilization. The point is that you have this phase boundary of (technology and free information) against (poverty and state oppression) and this guy is using his postboard to create a bridge which lets information flow across the boundary.
It is actually a fair bit more significant than, for example, having some cool new feature designed for your next gen phone.
The research on sales tax being more detrimental to lower income groups is pretty solid.
I find it rather doubtful that among the wide array of possible implementations of this idea that all are correlated to a negative impact on the poor, or that anyone has even attempted to offer research which would show this.
If you exempt food (my state already does), utilities, maybe a few other things (pointing out, too, that second hand goods are already tax free) I don't see how you can get any more "progressive" without explicitly paying people to be below the poverty line. Which, by the way, if you really wanted to do you could--adopting a more economy-friendly tax collection policy does not in any way prevent you from spending the proceeds on socialists programs.
I also wonder what it means when we talk about detrimenting the poor and rewarding the rich. The first half might be a concern, but I don't deduct points because someone else will benefit too, even if it's grossly disproportionate. If overall the poor get richer then that's progressive.
The tax option looks interesting, but a little too in line with typical ideas of the conservative right in the United States to win my vote.
Would you really consider not implementing an idea which would help the poor simply because you don't like who it originated from?
*Why* IE 8 gets better battery life than Safari? Is it simply because IE 8 has better, more efficient code? Is it because Safari is spending more processor resources getting me my pages quickly? (in which case perhaps Safari still gives the highest battery measured by numbers of pages visited) Is it because of OS integration (all the tests were run on Windows Vista or XP) in which case isn't IE (a) cheating (b) introducing other tradeoffs (security, etc.)? A virus might ultimately cost me more battery life, so even if my battery life is the solitary end in which I place concern, these other factors are still relevant.
It is an interesting report, but given that the results are very close, I think it's hard to draw any substantial conclusions from it (except that viewing ads costs battery life).
First, of course, what exactly constitutes a single "organism" is a bit controversial, especially with plants, and especially with clonal colonies.
Well, I think it's evident that what really excites us when we talk about "the oldest living organism" is that it is the oldest living organism without a genetic/metabolic "reboot." Same as I might brag that my OpenBSD server has an uptime of 5 years. Nobody cares if I've been doing fresh installs over 5 years, but if I've had the same system going without errors, hackers, or random happenstance taking it down, that is bragworthy.
If it's possible to kill one subset of the organism in question by disease without affecting the rest of the colony, I would say that there is too much distinctiveness between the individual plants to call them a single organism, at least in the sense in which we'd like to think of an "organism" here.
In summary, trust nobody that you can't go beat up in person.
It seems to me that it would be sufficient to know somebody who could beat up the offender in person. The two of you could form a reciprocal agreement to enact violence, and of course at the root of it you are willing to exact violence against each other if one of you reneges on exacting violence on those in his sphere of effect.
But you can continue adding tiers to this, creating an entire network of violence, to greater and greater effect. Pacifists (dead nodes) are a problem, of course, but we'll just classify them as rule-breakers and have them beaten up until they leave or become violent.
When a computer exists that is as intelligent as a stupid human, almost every job at and close to minimum wage vanishes. Robots can and will get cheaper than a human worker, no one will need taxi cab drivers, grocery store baggers, first tier phone customer service reps, construction workers, janitors, garbage men, delivery men, mail men, traffic cops, book keepers, data entry people, secretaries, fast food chefs, etc.
(At this point we will have two choices as a society. 1) Let them (the stupid people) starve, 2) give them welfare for no other reason than they're economically useless.
(1) *If* the production/energy/and maintainence costs of the machine is less than minimum wage, a rational thing might be to lower the minimum wage (which is stupid anyway). See, instead of starving as useless adjuncts to society, they can just work cheaper than the machines.
It's worth pointing out, too, that while in modern society we are used to technology making things cheaper--and certainly at some the cost of things like computers is going to be close to the cost of raw materials--as we consume more and more the price of raw materials is eventually going to spike, and the cost of technology is going to start moving in the opposite direction.
(2) If the cost of all those functions you mention becomes utterly negligible, that means the cost of living becomes negligible, and the amount of profit you must make in order to have a decent living is negligible as well. Maybe someone tips me a dollar for saying something nice about them and then that's all I need to get by for the rest of my life. Doesn't sound so dystopian to me.
(3) Assume the worst case, that we have divided society into Group A, which has every necessity met by machines, and Group B, which does not have machines and which Group A refuses to do business with. Do you think Group B will simply lay down and die for lack of business with Group A, or do you think Group B might try to survive, organize themselves by their skillsets, and exchange resources with each other? In essence, all you have done is organize Group A and Group B into two separately functioning economies.
Technological efficiency is never going to eliminate the need for or existence of human exchange, which is all an economy is.
"'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"
The problem is that Wikipedia does not end at Wikipedia. Even if they themselves are given copyright permissions I imagine they consider it a problem if the endusers that copy the images from Wikipedia for other purposes get in trouble.
The critics apparently want Wikipedia to pursue the maximum image quality they can get for readers of the site, but they don't stop to consider that there's a lot more people do with the stuff on wikipedia than just view it on the wikipedia.org domain.
...when the populace was armed with muskets, and the government was armed with muskets.
Now the populace is armed with, at best, assault rifles, and the government is armed with tanks.
(1) When the populace was armed with muskets, the government was armed with artillery cannons, war ships, and every advantage of an experienced and well-trained army. Things are never equitable for revolutionaries, but then their terms for victory do not usually require annihilation of their oppressors, just to make continued oppression an increasingly expensive proposition.
(2) Assault rifles may be ineffective against tanks, but tanks are also ineffective against people with assault rifles. Tanks are very good against infrastructure but in a civil war there is some rather significant overlap between what you consider their infrastructure and what you consider your own infrastructure. Not to mention that if you are transitioning from a democracy or otherwise generally free state your grab at power is going to be quite tenuous if you are not highly discriminate in your retaliation.
(3) Given a little time civilians have many options for responding to tanks. IEDs are quite simple to make, and they may be able to hijack military supplies or find external allies. Look how effective the Afghanis were against the Soviet tanks. Guns, on the other hand, are much more difficult to fabricate, and if already supplied that leaves the civilians with that much more resource to focus elsewhere.
What really keeps the government in check is the right to join the military.
Assuming we're talking about America, the military already has a heavy ideological slant, which is the big reason the counting of military ballots is often a contentious election issue (with the party that is not favored keen on any technicalities which could disqualify those ballots). Of course, I do not see the present ideological slant as representing the slightest danger of empowering a dictator, but the point is that even with the "right to join the military," you do not ensure that the military will have an equitable political makeup. Also, there is no formal "right" to join the military, so even if it's fairly open at present, that could change with time.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one that sees how nefarious this experiment is?
No, I'm sure plenty of other people are willing to make highly implausible leaps to support their initial assumption that anything the military does is directed at them.
But as useful as it must be to the coming military junta to prove that people twitter each other, I am going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that instead of thinking they are capable of overcoming the information deluge of internet and cellular communications by targetting a few nexus points in the social networks, that they may actually be interested in using social networks, or at least gauging their value as a strategic asset.
You know that country in the middle east you just mentioned having a problem with social networks? Our enemy. Exacerbating their problems is in fact one of the central aspects of intelligence based warfare. One of the primary reasons for setting up a democracy in Iraq is to try undermine the stability of the fundamentalist governments encircling it, and promoting the flow of information is certainly conducive to that end.
Not to mention things like setting up impromptu intelligence networks (when an ally is invaded, such as with Russia-->Georgia recently), or trying to locate a truck which was known to cross into the USA carrying biological toxins, etc. In that respect DARPA may actually be interested in finding out how they can *augment* the capabilities of our social networks so that they're more effective in the case of such an emergency.
If the war was as morally important as something like World War II, YES I would volunteer.
What made WWII morally important?
From America's view, it was just Europe going at it again like they'd always been doing. We didn't really know much about what was happening inside Germany until we invaded Germany.
We weren't really brought into the war until directly attacked by the Japanese. The war in Afghanistan is arguably built on comparable merits.
I'd also rather wish that money was spent on my fellow soldiers for better armor, not for my fancy gadget.
You would rather have bullet resistant armor than something which could keep you away from where the bullets would be flying in the first place?
If the war is as pointless (it won't make a difference in the long term) and hopeless (there is no real "victory" possible, as I've yet to hear someone clearly define it)
Victory is leaving behind a stable local government. (specifically a non-hostile one, if you want to be pedantic)
NO I would NOT volunteer because I would not want ANYONE to volunteer or to go there in the 1st place.
Whether you want people to volunteer to go there is irrelevant. The war and the people there are both givens. The question as it has been posed to you is whether your opposition to funding this technology means you are willing to sit in and do the job that it is designed to do. Or does your opposition to America fighting this war also extend to opposition to its have a low rate of causalities?
The reason it doesn't make sense is because their are multiple players operating from multiple vantage points.
Murdoch talked up the idea of blocking google eventually, where he could easily have done such a thing immediately. There was probably a variety of strategy behind the announcement, but one element may have been to get other news sources in line with the idea. It is the sort of thing that has a high cost for the first adopter (the first guy is leaving a saturated market where people can seemlessly switch to the alternatives) and with no one making the first move, nothing ever happens, but with a touch of collusion it suddenly becomes possible to do.
Google was evidently worried about being left out of the operation, so they rushed to offer an easy solution. It's not that the companies couldn't do it on their own, it's just that amidst their machinations there was a bit of space for google to jump in and assert itself, hopefully keeping anyone from "delisting" from their search engine. (And if they can have their technology involved in the purchasing of these news article, at a later date they may be able to demand a slice of the pie themselves.)
I think everyone can agree what we really need is web-executable COBOL.
What do you mean takes human behavior into account? Does the average economic model have "x=young children are sometimes mean" as one of the parameters?
Economic models don't deal with individual human whims, they deal with statistical extrapolations based on what has been observed to occur. The fact that a "heat engine" is a suitable analogy in this case is irrelevant. If it has a higher correlation to the empirical data than other models, then it does a better job of representing human behavior by definition. (Conversely, if other models purport to be rooted in human behavior, but then humans do something wildly different than what the model suggests, obviously the model is misrepresenting how humans behave.)
If you desire to see a more apparent relation with fundamental economic principles, you may want to take this model and start working backwards.
Actually, that could work, not in the perpetual energy sense obviously, but certainly you could take the concentrated salt product from your desalinization process and recoup some of the energy by using it for osmotic fuel in this process.
And you're arguing by analogy, another fallacy.
I am illustrating a secondary instance of the same principles at work since you did not seem to understand them in their original form. This seemed prudent since the inherent problem is that you are not reasoning beyond your own instinctual intuition.
If you think it is incorrect examine rules in one instance to obtain information about how they may operate in separate instances, then I have some more bad news for you about the way science works. . . .
Speaking in those terms, and to use my example: the sun may rise tomorrow, or it may not. But thousands of years of observation, coupled with the scientific inference and deduction of natural laws, all tell us the mechanics of just what it means for the sun to "rise" tomorrow, and that it's not a simple 50/50 proposition.
No one ever claimed it was a 50/50 proposition. I am pointing out that if you limit yourself to what can be definitively said, then you are unable to say anything about any future probability. I don't see where you would get that I was trying to alter the inferred probability to be some other number.
Or to use your example, four straight 4's may be a statistical fluke...
If you admit this, you are ceding the debate. I am at a loss for how you can write this and go on to contend the point.
If you truly believe that, then I invite you to step off the top of the nearest ten-story roof. Under your assertion, repetition and past experience will not necessarily hold true, and you'll float there and win your argument. From my perspective, however, if you do so then I'll need to make a call to 911 so they can scrape the pieces off the sidewalk.
If you would pay a bit more attention, you would realize that I am commenting on the limitations inherent to the structure of our beliefs, not on whether those beliefs are true or false. I make probably every assumption you do about the way the world works. The difference so far is simply that you refuse to admit that they are nothing more than assumptions (which accordingly have no other logical basis for being so, or else they would not be assumptions).
So... unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, I suggest you go back to counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
What was that you had just said about analogies? I guess they are logical for you to present but not anyone else? Not that there is actually any comparison between your instance of a fanciful query, and my attempting to educate you on epistemology.
Flip side, you can't prove that it won't hold true in the future either. In essence, your argument is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
"Argumentum ad ignorantium" would if he were using the situation of ignorance in one premise in order to assert the opposing premise. Simply pointing out a basic logical limitation does not fit the form of the fallacy.
Past personal observation, history, science, math, and orbital mechanics all say that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith is not needed.
So your answer to the challenge is to reassert the initial position as if the challenge had never been made?
Unfortunately--and I say unfortunately because our inbuilt human intuition grates against this despite its inescapable truth--science is built on a number of conjectures which simply lack any kind of logical necessity to them at all.
Since we've already brought up logical fallacies let's talk about "the gambler's fallacy"--this is where you assume, for example, that because a dice has rolled 4 several times in a row, that its probability of rolling 4 next time is diminished (since rolling 4 4s is unlikely). The flaw is that no matter how unlikely the net series of events, this does not impact the real probability of the mechanism of the dice roll, which is 1/6 for each digit. Science complements the gambler's fallacy with the same flaw but the opposite conclusion--that the 4 is more probable because of the sequence.
The only way to get out from under this flaw is to obtain knowledge of the mechanism of the probability, but if you infer the mechanism of the probability from the sequence (not that you can actually do that) that immediately becomes circular.
Even if you could assert something definitive from the repetition of events, you would have no way to prove that there has been any repetition of events! The universe could just as well have popped into existence at this very moment in its present state with no actual history whatsoever, and it would be entirely indistinguishable from a universe benefiting from several billion years of existence.
And you might say to yourself, "well, that *seems* less probable..." but that is just the way you would like to view it because of how your brain works, if you actually tried to derive that proposition you would find it impossible to do.
You can give in to your desire to believe your intuition about this things is somehow irreproachable, or better than the alternatives, but the idea that your justification for this is anything besides an act of faith is just wishful thinking on your part, I assure you.
Incarceration is not for punishment or revenge; it serves 3 purposes to society:
Incarceration does serve those three purposes, certainly, but I fail to see how you can exclude "punishment" as a fourth. What do you think "justice" means in the context of our "justice system"? Justice is not about deterrence, rehabilitation, or prevention, it is about giving people their "just deserts"--a punishment to fit the crime.
Most normal human beings have an innate desire to see good rewarded and evil punished. You know, cheer the hero, boo the villain. Beyond all other practical motivations we feel compelled to punish murderers and rapists for pretty much the same reason we pin medals on heroes, because it promotes our preconceptions of right and wrong.
The question is... who eats the tax?
It's not really you that's paying it if the company in question has to lower their base price as a result of the tax in order to compete. (Then you're still paying the same price as you would otherwise but the company has smaller profits.)
And if the point is merely for *you* to pay for the services *you use* then I really have to wonder if a sales tax is the most appropriate format. Ostensibly you will be using services like libraries, roads, etc. regardless of your purchasing habits. In some cases there might be a correlation (gas::roads) but maybe the parent post has the right idea, and it just needs to be taken the further step of there not being a sales tax in the first place: everything is collected through income taxes.
Taxing something you want to reduce consumption of (such as tobacco) is one thing, but by extension are we to assume the legislators want to reduce consumption of everything in varying degrees? I think for the most part sales taxes are just a clever shell game. Take a little here, a little there, try to sneak things in and keep people from looking at the total. If tax collection followed one simple rule instead relying on literally hundreds of thousands of pages of individual rubrics we wouldn't even have to deal with these sorts of nebulous tax questions.
Regular teachers aren't on the clock, they're on a salary, and the lesson plan is not some optional extra they can do or not do, it is literally part of their job. Generally speaking you *must* have a lesson plan, and it must have good detail for at least the next week or two, so that if you get sick a substitute can actually take over and not just have kids lazing about for weeks while she sorts it out.
I don't think anybody teaching wants to go the route of "all my work must be conducted during scheduled hours" because what comes after that is that they get scheduled to come in and work on their lesson plans over winter and summer break. I think everyone is much cooler with having lots of vacation with some assumed time set aside for working on lesson plans.
Now what I do like about them selling lesson plans is that capitalism does what it does best and motivates them to come up with really stellar plans so they make lots of money.
What I don't like more than anything about this practice is that it preys on new teachers who make a lot less money by most tiering systems (say $20k per year starting off instead of the $40k they will be making in a year or two at the next tier). It is major suck if you are getting less money *and* have to fork out for supplementary lesson plans. Normally you would inherit a fair bit of curriculum from previous and existing teachers, but maybe once it's monetized the good natured charity which has previously existed will evaporate.
And it does seem kind of wrong that the teachers are being subsidized by tax payers to come up with these plans, but are also retaining the plans for their own private use and personal profit. On the surface it's nice to think about teachers being entrepreneurial and financially successful, but it's not exactly helping teachers out in general given that the only people who buy the plans will be other teachers, which does not result in a net influx of income to the teaching profession.
My suggestion is that the reviewing of a certain number of freely published lesson plans should be tied to keeping one's status in the highest pay-tier. That means the most experience/qualified teachers will be annually donating, say, a couple of really good daily lessons for the benefit of all teachers and students in the nation (and they're already getting paid extra for their alleged mastery in teaching, so no complaining!)
Except for the bit where the guy responsible lives in Thailand, or Rwanda, or Guatemala. Most probably you don't have a suspect at all--at most you have a picture of the victim. So now you are going to search for an unknown victim who could be anywhere in the world... and since when does the United States bring cases on behalf of victims that aren't US citizens anyway?
Cracking down on child porn means cracking down on possession. Generally speaking there is no practical way to find the initial distributor or the victim. Sometimes you might get lucky and catch the perp, but that's only sometimes.
go bust the people who are giving child rapists money.
How have the people who gave them money caused "actual harm" anymore than in the "simple possession" case? If you're willing to punish the one you should be willing to punish the other.
For one thing, government prevents insurance providers from operating across state lines. Competition is what reduces prices, and when you eliminate competition in from the other 49 states you eliminate many opportunities for price reduction.
For another, it applies certain tax breaks only to employer provided insurance. This means companies provide insurance with their benefits package because it looks like a sweeter deal than if they give you the cash equivalent and expect you to buy insurance yourself. But it also means you aren't able to shop around (competition again) and much worse, it means the insurance company cant offer you discount rates for practicing preventative medicine, etc. (Preventative medicine makes healthcare much cheaper for everyone.)
DRM is not the devil. It is a tool. The sooner we stop crying about buzz words and instead actually do something about how they are used, the better off we will all be.
Absolutely. Opposing DRM is not some kind of religion, it is not even a moral position, it is saying "hey, DRM is inconvenient, I don't really want to have to deal with it in my data." The best way to show this is to not buy anything with DRM in it. Ideally enough people do this that selling DRM-less becomes the more profitable way to go.
Expanding your position to "I will also not buy anything from anybody who makes any money off of anything with DRM" is just silly. The only reason to structure your boycott like that is if, not only do want to have open data as before, but you also want to prevent anyone else from being able to buy closed data. Why would you possibly care? It's like refusing to buy good nintendo games because the platform also supports sucky nintendo games. If you just make a point of buying the good games I assure you that this will give the best results as far as voting with your dollars goes.
It's at least as easy for Hulu to deliver different ads to different countries as it is to block people from those countries and hunt down their US proxies, etc.
Some businesses like McDonalds may have a presence that allows running many customized ads (and as it is unlikely they have setup a presence without advertising it there does not need to be much if any cost creating new adds). Otherwise you can contract with someone local there who is selling web advertising--if they are selling it at all then presumably there is a price at which they will be only too happy to include you in their schemes.
If the margins are too small then you just increase the number of ad intervals.
Yes at some point that will drive off viewers, but then that just achieves what blocking them would have achieved, doesn't it?
I don't think people have been using the internet to aggregate information for display on public chalkboards "for ages."
And the point is not that this is some ingenious invention to rock civilization. The point is that you have this phase boundary of (technology and free information) against (poverty and state oppression) and this guy is using his postboard to create a bridge which lets information flow across the boundary.
It is actually a fair bit more significant than, for example, having some cool new feature designed for your next gen phone.
The research on sales tax being more detrimental to lower income groups is pretty solid.
I find it rather doubtful that among the wide array of possible implementations of this idea that all are correlated to a negative impact on the poor, or that anyone has even attempted to offer research which would show this.
If you exempt food (my state already does), utilities, maybe a few other things (pointing out, too, that second hand goods are already tax free) I don't see how you can get any more "progressive" without explicitly paying people to be below the poverty line. Which, by the way, if you really wanted to do you could--adopting a more economy-friendly tax collection policy does not in any way prevent you from spending the proceeds on socialists programs.
I also wonder what it means when we talk about detrimenting the poor and rewarding the rich. The first half might be a concern, but I don't deduct points because someone else will benefit too, even if it's grossly disproportionate. If overall the poor get richer then that's progressive.
The tax option looks interesting, but a little too in line with typical ideas of the conservative right in the United States to win my vote.
Would you really consider not implementing an idea which would help the poor simply because you don't like who it originated from?
*Why* IE 8 gets better battery life than Safari? Is it simply because IE 8 has better, more efficient code? Is it because Safari is spending more processor resources getting me my pages quickly? (in which case perhaps Safari still gives the highest battery measured by numbers of pages visited) Is it because of OS integration (all the tests were run on Windows Vista or XP) in which case isn't IE (a) cheating (b) introducing other tradeoffs (security, etc.)? A virus might ultimately cost me more battery life, so even if my battery life is the solitary end in which I place concern, these other factors are still relevant. It is an interesting report, but given that the results are very close, I think it's hard to draw any substantial conclusions from it (except that viewing ads costs battery life).
First, of course, what exactly constitutes a single "organism" is a bit controversial, especially with plants, and especially with clonal colonies.
Well, I think it's evident that what really excites us when we talk about "the oldest living organism" is that it is the oldest living organism without a genetic/metabolic "reboot." Same as I might brag that my OpenBSD server has an uptime of 5 years. Nobody cares if I've been doing fresh installs over 5 years, but if I've had the same system going without errors, hackers, or random happenstance taking it down, that is bragworthy.
If it's possible to kill one subset of the organism in question by disease without affecting the rest of the colony, I would say that there is too much distinctiveness between the individual plants to call them a single organism, at least in the sense in which we'd like to think of an "organism" here.
I'm pretty sure this is the first time people on the internet have ever been accused of disseminating overly-substantial and accurate information.
But I wonder why this guy did not subpoena the names of any youtube commenters? :/
In summary, trust nobody that you can't go beat up in person.
It seems to me that it would be sufficient to know somebody who could beat up the offender in person. The two of you could form a reciprocal agreement to enact violence, and of course at the root of it you are willing to exact violence against each other if one of you reneges on exacting violence on those in his sphere of effect.
But you can continue adding tiers to this, creating an entire network of violence, to greater and greater effect. Pacifists (dead nodes) are a problem, of course, but we'll just classify them as rule-breakers and have them beaten up until they leave or become violent.
A voyage between Hamburg and Yokohama is only 6,600 nm. via the Northern Sea Route â" less than 60% of the 11,400 nm. Suez route.
So it sounds like this new route will conserve fuel and cut out at least 40% of their CO2 emissions.
Imagine the benefits to the environment if we could just figure out a way to melt the ice caps completely. Our greenhouse emissions would plummet!
When a computer exists that is as intelligent as a stupid human, almost every job at and close to minimum wage vanishes. Robots can and will get cheaper than a human worker, no one will need taxi cab drivers, grocery store baggers, first tier phone customer service reps, construction workers, janitors, garbage men, delivery men, mail men, traffic cops, book keepers, data entry people, secretaries, fast food chefs, etc. (At this point we will have two choices as a society. 1) Let them (the stupid people) starve, 2) give them welfare for no other reason than they're economically useless.
(1) *If* the production/energy/and maintainence costs of the machine is less than minimum wage, a rational thing might be to lower the minimum wage (which is stupid anyway). See, instead of starving as useless adjuncts to society, they can just work cheaper than the machines.
It's worth pointing out, too, that while in modern society we are used to technology making things cheaper--and certainly at some the cost of things like computers is going to be close to the cost of raw materials--as we consume more and more the price of raw materials is eventually going to spike, and the cost of technology is going to start moving in the opposite direction.
(2) If the cost of all those functions you mention becomes utterly negligible, that means the cost of living becomes negligible, and the amount of profit you must make in order to have a decent living is negligible as well. Maybe someone tips me a dollar for saying something nice about them and then that's all I need to get by for the rest of my life. Doesn't sound so dystopian to me.
(3) Assume the worst case, that we have divided society into Group A, which has every necessity met by machines, and Group B, which does not have machines and which Group A refuses to do business with. Do you think Group B will simply lay down and die for lack of business with Group A, or do you think Group B might try to survive, organize themselves by their skillsets, and exchange resources with each other? In essence, all you have done is organize Group A and Group B into two separately functioning economies.
Technological efficiency is never going to eliminate the need for or existence of human exchange, which is all an economy is.
"'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"
The problem is that Wikipedia does not end at Wikipedia. Even if they themselves are given copyright permissions I imagine they consider it a problem if the endusers that copy the images from Wikipedia for other purposes get in trouble.
The critics apparently want Wikipedia to pursue the maximum image quality they can get for readers of the site, but they don't stop to consider that there's a lot more people do with the stuff on wikipedia than just view it on the wikipedia.org domain.
...when the populace was armed with muskets, and the government was armed with muskets. Now the populace is armed with, at best, assault rifles, and the government is armed with tanks.
(1) When the populace was armed with muskets, the government was armed with artillery cannons, war ships, and every advantage of an experienced and well-trained army. Things are never equitable for revolutionaries, but then their terms for victory do not usually require annihilation of their oppressors, just to make continued oppression an increasingly expensive proposition.
(2) Assault rifles may be ineffective against tanks, but tanks are also ineffective against people with assault rifles. Tanks are very good against infrastructure but in a civil war there is some rather significant overlap between what you consider their infrastructure and what you consider your own infrastructure. Not to mention that if you are transitioning from a democracy or otherwise generally free state your grab at power is going to be quite tenuous if you are not highly discriminate in your retaliation.
(3) Given a little time civilians have many options for responding to tanks. IEDs are quite simple to make, and they may be able to hijack military supplies or find external allies. Look how effective the Afghanis were against the Soviet tanks. Guns, on the other hand, are much more difficult to fabricate, and if already supplied that leaves the civilians with that much more resource to focus elsewhere.
What really keeps the government in check is the right to join the military.
Assuming we're talking about America, the military already has a heavy ideological slant, which is the big reason the counting of military ballots is often a contentious election issue (with the party that is not favored keen on any technicalities which could disqualify those ballots). Of course, I do not see the present ideological slant as representing the slightest danger of empowering a dictator, but the point is that even with the "right to join the military," you do not ensure that the military will have an equitable political makeup. Also, there is no formal "right" to join the military, so even if it's fairly open at present, that could change with time.