There were two review boards, though only one appears to be formal. The one run by the CIA said there was nothing there that couldn't be printed. The less formal board from the White House claimed that there was classified info that had to be redacted. I would think that the CIA would be a better judge of this, but oh well...
I think it went more like this:
CIA review board: Nothing here endangers National Security, so you can print it. White House review board: This makes us look bad, so you can't print it.
Basically I believe that bad people deserve to have bad things happen to them, and it doesn't matter how they became bad.
Related to that, if a murderer has a mental illness which makes him think that it's ok to kill people, I'd treat that person as any other murderer and be all for the death penalty. However, if it's possible to cure that illness, I'd readily settle for the cure as punishment because as far as I'm concerned a treatment which alters a personality to a great enough degree is the same as killing the original person and putting a new one, even with the same memories, in his (or her place).
In any case, as far as I'm concerned the illusion of free will is so good that it's practically no different from the real thing. People go on with their lives and make their choices. So what if those choices are predetermined? They feel real, and that's all that matters. That is as long as everybody is in the same boat and there's no sentient power with true free will pulling the strings.
Personally, I believe that if we ever get to the bottom of the whole quantum uncertainty business, we'll find that it's all based on good old determinism.
Personally I believe that there's no free will. And I agree with you that it doesn't matter, unless someone comes up with a way to predict what exactly you're going to do, which doesn't seem likely (or possible) without time travel, and at that point there are bigger things to worry about.
You can think of it as a question similar to "how did the universe start". Does it matter, really? No. But humans are very curious creatures and they want to know anyway. And I don't see any problem with that.
I believe in determinism. I believe that free will is merely an illusion (though a very good one). And I believe that if I am ever on a jury at a criminal trial where the defense claims that the suspect was pretermined to commit the crime, I will be predetermined to say "guilty."
Seriously though, these wouldn't, and shouldn't be marketable products at these points. They'd have to own themselves. Why would they be made in the first place? Because it's cool!
Misleading: McDonald's sells billions of cups of coffee. There had been 700 complaints over hot coffee in the previous decade, which translates into a complaint rate of 1-in-24-million, with only a small fraction of the complaints reflecting injuries as severe as Liebeck's. By comparison, 1-in-4-million Americans will be killed by lightning in a given year, and 1-in-20-million Americans (and a much higher ratio of American toddlers) drown in 5-gallon buckets in an average year.
Now I am not a statistician, but something about these comparisons seems wrong somehow. He appears to be saying that 1 in 24 million cups of coffee results in a burn complaint, and comparing that with, say, 1 in 4 million Americans being killed by lightning in a given year. #complaints/#cups does not quite corellate with #deaths/year. Wouldn't a reasonable comparison be if the latter statistic was in the form of "1 American is killed in X million lightning bolts over the US"? Either that or on the coffee side, compare the number of Americans who will complain of McD's coffee burns a year?
How am I supposed to trust that site if they give us apples and oranges comparisons?
Exactly what percentage of PC users do you think use 1900x1440 for their desktop resolution? At work I have a 21" CRT, and going any higher than 1280x1024 makes things small enough to put a significant strain on my eyes.
Yes, actually my uncle was a participant in it, and it had a huge negative emotional effect on him. He was an electrical engineering student, so he (unlike many participants), knew exactly how electricity would effect the human body, so he stopped before they turned it up too much, but still he felt like he had been made to do horrible things. This had such a huge impact on his life, that before the experiment, he considered himself a Conciencious Objector, and was preparing to apply for CO status during the Vietnam war. After being forced to inflict pain on a person during the experiment, he felt he could no longer concider himself a CO, and was basically forced to inlist due to his birthdate (thankfully, due to his technical expertise, he became a radio technician far away from the frontlines... but he still hated it every day).
I've tried to think of what I would do if I participated in such an experiment without knowledge of its true means and purpose. I believe that I would stop as soon as the other "participant" started to want out, and that this would be a moral choice. I recall in the video of a man laughing every time he applied the shock, but as soon as the shockee started processing, the guy said something to the affect of "Well, that's it. If he doesn't want to be shocked anymore, I'm not going to do it no matter what you say." However there is no way to really be sure of my actions unless I find myself in such a situation with selective memory loss...
A better example might be History of the World - Part One. Not only does the title imply that the movie is only a part of a bigger whole, but they actually had a trailer for Part Two at the end!
That logic is fallacious, even if the observable universe is a "simulation", then this simulation runs inside a real universe, and we're at the start again figuring out what the universe is.
And if the universe containing the simulation of our universe is itself being simulated inside our universe?
But at least we're allowed to gripe about our government. Or change things via democratic means, if we don't like it.
In Soviet Russia, there was a joke:
An American dog asks a Russian dog, "So, how's this 'glastnost' thing working out?" The Russian dog replies, "It's great! They made my chain one meter longer, moved the food two meters further away, and I can bark to my heart's content!"
But something tells me that after Firefox 3 is released, they will no longer be doing security updates for Firefox 2. That'll be annoying to anyone still running win9x.
If GWBush had actually fought in Vietnam and became MIA, the state of the world would most likely be a hell of a lot better. Thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives..... Now that's no reason to go back in time and risk a paradox, but we can daydream, right?
McCain doesn't seem nearly as bad as Bush.... yet. He's steadily getting there.
Seriously, I'm even willing to vote for Hillary Clinton over this guy now, and that's saying something. Too bad the "Anyone But McCain" campaign is unlikely to do any better than the "Anyone But Bush" one did.
Atari again? Didn't they learn their lesson with the Temple of Elemental Evil, a game that could have taken legendary status if not for all the bugs (ok, it was quite short as well).
Slashdot Mirror
There's exactly NO chance that they made their demo product unstable and prone to crashing to keep people from playing it for too long.
Ah, come on, unless you happen to be omniscient, there's always a non-zero chance, as negligible as it may be.
There were two review boards, though only one appears to be formal. The one run by the CIA said there was nothing there that couldn't be printed. The less formal board from the White House claimed that there was classified info that had to be redacted. I would think that the CIA would be a better judge of this, but oh well...
I think it went more like this:
CIA review board: Nothing here endangers National Security, so you can print it.
White House review board: This makes us look bad, so you can't print it.
Basically I believe that bad people deserve to have bad things happen to them, and it doesn't matter how they became bad.
Related to that, if a murderer has a mental illness which makes him think that it's ok to kill people, I'd treat that person as any other murderer and be all for the death penalty. However, if it's possible to cure that illness, I'd readily settle for the cure as punishment because as far as I'm concerned a treatment which alters a personality to a great enough degree is the same as killing the original person and putting a new one, even with the same memories, in his (or her place).
In any case, as far as I'm concerned the illusion of free will is so good that it's practically no different from the real thing. People go on with their lives and make their choices. So what if those choices are predetermined? They feel real, and that's all that matters. That is as long as everybody is in the same boat and there's no sentient power with true free will pulling the strings.
Personally, I believe that if we ever get to the bottom of the whole quantum uncertainty business, we'll find that it's all based on good old determinism.
How did the very first concious observer collapse into existence?
Personally I believe that there's no free will. And I agree with you that it doesn't matter, unless someone comes up with a way to predict what exactly you're going to do, which doesn't seem likely (or possible) without time travel, and at that point there are bigger things to worry about.
You can think of it as a question similar to "how did the universe start". Does it matter, really? No. But humans are very curious creatures and they want to know anyway. And I don't see any problem with that.
I believe in determinism. I believe that free will is merely an illusion (though a very good one). And I believe that if I am ever on a jury at a criminal trial where the defense claims that the suspect was pretermined to commit the crime, I will be predetermined to say "guilty."
Yup, that's how some cultures think about women.
Seriously though, these wouldn't, and shouldn't be marketable products at these points. They'd have to own themselves. Why would they be made in the first place? Because it's cool!
From the link:
Misleading: McDonald's sells billions of cups of coffee. There had been 700 complaints over hot coffee in the previous decade, which translates into a complaint rate of 1-in-24-million, with only a small fraction of the complaints reflecting injuries as severe as Liebeck's. By comparison, 1-in-4-million Americans will be killed by lightning in a given year, and 1-in-20-million Americans (and a much higher ratio of American toddlers) drown in 5-gallon buckets in an average year.
Now I am not a statistician, but something about these comparisons seems wrong somehow. He appears to be saying that 1 in 24 million cups of coffee results in a burn complaint, and comparing that with, say, 1 in 4 million Americans being killed by lightning in a given year. #complaints/#cups does not quite corellate with #deaths/year. Wouldn't a reasonable comparison be if the latter statistic was in the form of "1 American is killed in X million lightning bolts over the US"? Either that or on the coffee side, compare the number of Americans who will complain of McD's coffee burns a year?
How am I supposed to trust that site if they give us apples and oranges comparisons?
I don't think it's faces you're looking for.
Exactly what percentage of PC users do you think use 1900x1440 for their desktop resolution? At work I have a 21" CRT, and going any higher than 1280x1024 makes things small enough to put a significant strain on my eyes.
hundreds? Me thinks you're underestimating the size of the Chinese bootlegging industry.
I went to that site with IE6, and it worked as advertised.
Yes, actually my uncle was a participant in it, and it had a huge negative emotional effect on him. He was an electrical engineering student, so he (unlike many participants), knew exactly how electricity would effect the human body, so he stopped before they turned it up too much, but still he felt like he had been made to do horrible things. This had such a huge impact on his life, that before the experiment, he considered himself a Conciencious Objector, and was preparing to apply for CO status during the Vietnam war. After being forced to inflict pain on a person during the experiment, he felt he could no longer concider himself a CO, and was basically forced to inlist due to his birthdate (thankfully, due to his technical expertise, he became a radio technician far away from the frontlines... but he still hated it every day).
I've tried to think of what I would do if I participated in such an experiment without knowledge of its true means and purpose. I believe that I would stop as soon as the other "participant" started to want out, and that this would be a moral choice. I recall in the video of a man laughing every time he applied the shock, but as soon as the shockee started processing, the guy said something to the affect of "Well, that's it. If he doesn't want to be shocked anymore, I'm not going to do it no matter what you say." However there is no way to really be sure of my actions unless I find myself in such a situation with selective memory loss...
Nobody got shot, lost an eye, or anything.
Perhaps that's because lawyers were rare, back in the day...
Exactly. If there's no lawsuit, it doesn't make the news.
A better example might be History of the World - Part One. Not only does the title imply that the movie is only a part of a bigger whole, but they actually had a trailer for Part Two at the end!
That must be a LOT of turtles....
That logic is fallacious, even if the observable universe is a "simulation", then this simulation runs inside a real universe, and we're at the start again figuring out what the universe is.
And if the universe containing the simulation of our universe is itself being simulated inside our universe?
But at least we're allowed to gripe about our government. Or change things via democratic means, if we don't like it.
In Soviet Russia, there was a joke:
An American dog asks a Russian dog, "So, how's this 'glastnost' thing working out?"
The Russian dog replies, "It's great! They made my chain one meter longer, moved the food two meters further away, and I can bark to my heart's content!"
What was cool about Fallout was the non-linear nature of the map, random encounters ...snip... You'll have none of that with an MMO.
I'd say at least a couple of the things you mentioned are rather easy to do in an MMO.
But something tells me that after Firefox 3 is released, they will no longer be doing security updates for Firefox 2. That'll be annoying to anyone still running win9x.
FTA: It could explain why similarly shaped molecules can have very different smells, and molecules with very different structures can smell similar.
The guy has obviously never heard of hashing.
If GWBush had actually fought in Vietnam and became MIA, the state of the world would most likely be a hell of a lot better. Thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives..... Now that's no reason to go back in time and risk a paradox, but we can daydream, right?
McCain doesn't seem nearly as bad as Bush.... yet. He's steadily getting there.
Seriously, I'm even willing to vote for Hillary Clinton over this guy now, and that's saying something. Too bad the "Anyone But McCain" campaign is unlikely to do any better than the "Anyone But Bush" one did.
Atari again? Didn't they learn their lesson with the Temple of Elemental Evil, a game that could have taken legendary status if not for all the bugs (ok, it was quite short as well).