Secondly, outside of specialist usage (in statistics, measurements, sciences, etc) normal means "common", "not rare", etc.
But the opposite of normal (abnormal) is derogatory, whereas the opposite of common (uncommon or rare) is not. "Normal" is a somewhat loaded term, that's all.
No one is saying that half the world is homosexual, but the fact that it's (say) 5% is irrelevant.
The people there don't have to pretend that 2 guys screwing each other is all perfectly normal
Besides that it is quite normal (it's been going on longer than civilization)
Nevermind how long it has been going on for, or how it occurs in all species known to man, you still can't call a characteristic unique to 4%-8% of the population "normal". The low numbers of homosexual individuals make it, at the very worst, "unusual".
Utter tosh. "Normal" does not mean "at least half the population share that characteristic". For example, it is perfectly normal for someone to have red hair.
It's playing with words, you're really wanting to say that homosexuals are "abnormal".
As someone who lived through the IRA bombing campaign in London, I can tell you that the only real kind of "preparedness" for civilians is to keep an eye out for suspicious packages in trains or pubs, and to follow directions from the emergency services in case of an actual explosion.
Other than that, you carry on as normal.
The alternative is to lock yourself in your bedroom and die a little every time you hear a car backfire outside.
Heart disease.
Cancer
Chronic lower respiratory disease
Stroke
Motor accidents
Alzheimer's disease
Diabetes
Influenza and pneumonia
Apart from trying to be reasonably fit and following a sensible diet, there's not much you can do about any of those except motor accidents.
It would be much much more beneficial to make people play accident simulation driving sims than 'terror attack' sims.
Two things: first, driving sims and terror attack sims are not mutually exclusive, and second, all the anti-government crowd here would go berserk if it was suggested that there should be ongoing driver education/testing.
That doesn't make sense. Why would they try to run down the share price and get less money when they sell it? They already got a kicking in the press for underpricing the Post Office when they sold it off.
It's about ideology. The Conservatives don't approve of businesses being in public ownership. Whether you agree with them or not, that is a fact.
The Royal Mail thing barely caused a ripple in the media that I remember, and besides it was Vince Cable's fault and he was a LibDem.
I'm not sure how I can see it would be in the chancellors interest either...
He is a Tory with an aversion to public ownership, and he has a lot of Tory friends eager to buy shares in the bank cheaply. What's so hard to understand?
Icing on the cake is that it's all Gordon Brown's fault for being so evil as to take the bank into public ownership to stop it collapsing in the first place.
Since the taxpayer took a large stake in RBS, it has been deliberately run into the ground to lower it's share price ready to be sold back into private ownership. It ends up looking like a windfall for the current chancellor, when in fact it's transferred a big pile of taxpayer's money into private hands while wrecking a financial institution.
Banksters.
The most amusing thing is the current Chancellor blaming Gordon Brown for paying too much in the first place during the banking crisis. Frankly, they should just have nationalised the fucking thing without compensation since it had no value.
Cheques payments are still quite popular here in the UK for small businesses. This is purely because it allows you a bit of "flexibility" when your supplier rings up threatening to put your account on hold, because you haven't paid them for three months, and you can swear that you have indeed written out a cheque, and just need to get it signed, posted off, etc.
You can eke out another week or two of money not actually leaving your bank quite easily.
We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
This simply isn't true. I spend very little on tech toys and media (much less than 10% of my monthly pay) but I still need to live somewhere, eat, pay for water and electricity, get myself to work, pay for my kids to eat and have clothes, and so on.
In terms of saving money, I could take no holidays, never eat out or drink alcohol at all, but I certainly wouldn't be able to reduce my outgoings to a quarter of what they are and work ten hours a week.
Similarly, when he spent his one night in jail for not paying the highway tax and wrote the essay which inspired Gandi and Martin Luther King toward civil disobedience, Emerson came and bailed him out in the morning.
If you think humans are mean to each other while they have a day job, imagine how much worse it would get if they had nothing but liesure time. "an idle mind is the devil's workshop"
I don't see humans ever not working at a job as the norm.
The effects of the rise of automation can best be described as a loss in the value of labor and a gain in the value of capital.
The implication of this is that people must take action to become capital owners. That doesn't necessarily mean you should go out and buy a robot. You probably won't be able to afford one and you won't be able to gain remunerative work. The solution to this is to buy capital now, in the form of corporate stocks, and to do estate planning to insure that your children inherit your capital ownership because they likely won't be able to acquire it themselves. All inheritance taxes should be abolished.
If everyone could become a rich capitalist, then there wouldn't really be anything to criticise capitalism for, would there?
In the real world, wealth gets concentrated more and more amongst fewer and fewer at the top, unless there is wholesale government intervention to force redistribution of that wealth.
I'm a hard determinist so I'll have to disagree. People are just as determinisistic as machines. Just because we are ignorant of the incredible intricacies of our own minds and bodies doesn't mean they are magically different and exempt from the laws of physics.
The Nineteenth Century called and wants its belief system back.
It can be, yes, if you have a small elite of the very rich doling out random scraps of food to placate their consciences while the vast majority starve.
We're not in this together.....we're not in anything yet. We're not anywhere close to inventing AI. All of this is just speculation.
We're not anywhere close to have autonomous vehicles? I guess you miss some news lately.
Story after story about how amazing it is that Google can get vehicles to drive on clear highways in perfect weather conditions is not proof that we are close to having real world autonomous vehicles.
Do you think, say, coal mining or 19th century London or Paris were such a paradise except for those lucky one-percenters?
The problem is that most slashdotters consider themselves one-percenters, at least potentially. They cannot empathise with a poor, hard working mill worker, as they assume they'd be the mill boss..
No. To farm, you need land. 200 years ago, if you did not have a job, you sold yourself as an indentured servant.
Or, you wandered the forest as a hunter and occasionally rob from the rich who might wander nearby. Of course, to assuage your feelings of guilt from robbing people, you might be tempted to redistribute some of your ill-gotten gains to the poor people in villages surrounding said forest.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, outside of specialist usage (in statistics, measurements, sciences, etc) normal means "common", "not rare", etc.
But the opposite of normal (abnormal) is derogatory, whereas the opposite of common (uncommon or rare) is not. "Normal" is a somewhat loaded term, that's all.
No one is saying that half the world is homosexual, but the fact that it's (say) 5% is irrelevant.
The people there don't have to pretend that 2 guys screwing each other is all perfectly normal
Besides that it is quite normal (it's been going on longer than civilization)
Nevermind how long it has been going on for, or how it occurs in all species known to man, you still can't call a characteristic unique to 4%-8% of the population "normal". The low numbers of homosexual individuals make it, at the very worst, "unusual".
Utter tosh. "Normal" does not mean "at least half the population share that characteristic". For example, it is perfectly normal for someone to have red hair.
It's playing with words, you're really wanting to say that homosexuals are "abnormal".
Hmm, seems like they're giving out extra mod points to bigots today. In no way is this a troll.
Other than that, you carry on as normal.
The alternative is to lock yourself in your bedroom and die a little every time you hear a car backfire outside.
Top ten [sic] leading causes of death:
Heart disease.
Cancer
Chronic lower respiratory disease
Stroke
Motor accidents
Alzheimer's disease
Diabetes
Influenza and pneumonia
Apart from trying to be reasonably fit and following a sensible diet, there's not much you can do about any of those except motor accidents.
It would be much much more beneficial to make people play accident simulation driving sims than 'terror attack' sims.
Two things: first, driving sims and terror attack sims are not mutually exclusive, and second, all the anti-government crowd here would go berserk if it was suggested that there should be ongoing driver education/testing.
Is there a simulation out there on what to do if you are jumped by a street thug? Happened to me a couple of times.
Make sure you are carrying a large arsenal of fully automatic weaponry.
If you out-Crocodile Dundee Crocodile Dundee by pulling a GE minigun out of your pants, most muggers are going to back off.
I don't want to start a holy war here
Yeah, that is precisely what you were attempting to do.
Wow, someone doesn't recognise a classic troll when they see one.
Well played, sir, well played.
they could have processed the 600,000 transactions to the wrong account
Ah, I wondered why I suddenly had a GBP 600,000,000 overdraft.
That doesn't make sense. Why would they try to run down the share price and get less money when they sell it? They already got a kicking in the press for underpricing the Post Office when they sold it off .
It's about ideology. The Conservatives don't approve of businesses being in public ownership. Whether you agree with them or not, that is a fact.
The Royal Mail thing barely caused a ripple in the media that I remember, and besides it was Vince Cable's fault and he was a LibDem.
I'm not sure how I can see it would be in the chancellors interest either...
He is a Tory with an aversion to public ownership, and he has a lot of Tory friends eager to buy shares in the bank cheaply. What's so hard to understand?
Icing on the cake is that it's all Gordon Brown's fault for being so evil as to take the bank into public ownership to stop it collapsing in the first place.
Since the taxpayer took a large stake in RBS, it has been deliberately run into the ground to lower it's share price ready to be sold back into private ownership. It ends up looking like a windfall for the current chancellor, when in fact it's transferred a big pile of taxpayer's money into private hands while wrecking a financial institution. Banksters.
The most amusing thing is the current Chancellor blaming Gordon Brown for paying too much in the first place during the banking crisis. Frankly, they should just have nationalised the fucking thing without compensation since it had no value.
You can eke out another week or two of money not actually leaving your bank quite easily.
We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
This simply isn't true. I spend very little on tech toys and media (much less than 10% of my monthly pay) but I still need to live somewhere, eat, pay for water and electricity, get myself to work, pay for my kids to eat and have clothes, and so on.
In terms of saving money, I could take no holidays, never eat out or drink alcohol at all, but I certainly wouldn't be able to reduce my outgoings to a quarter of what they are and work ten hours a week.
Similarly, when he spent his one night in jail for not paying the highway tax and wrote the essay which inspired Gandi and Martin Luther King toward civil disobedience, Emerson came and bailed him out in the morning.
So? It's the principle that counts.
If you think humans are mean to each other while they have a day job, imagine how much worse it would get if they had nothing but liesure time. "an idle mind is the devil's workshop" I don't see humans ever not working at a job as the norm.
Ah, the good old Protestant Work Ethic.
Most of us think it's bollocks.
The effects of the rise of automation can best be described as a loss in the value of labor and a gain in the value of capital.
The implication of this is that people must take action to become capital owners. That doesn't necessarily mean you should go out and buy a robot. You probably won't be able to afford one and you won't be able to gain remunerative work. The solution to this is to buy capital now, in the form of corporate stocks, and to do estate planning to insure that your children inherit your capital ownership because they likely won't be able to acquire it themselves. All inheritance taxes should be abolished.
If everyone could become a rich capitalist, then there wouldn't really be anything to criticise capitalism for, would there?
In the real world, wealth gets concentrated more and more amongst fewer and fewer at the top, unless there is wholesale government intervention to force redistribution of that wealth.
Luckily for Kurzweill, he's going to live for ever, so there will always be the prospect of the Singularity being in his lifetime.
I'm a hard determinist so I'll have to disagree. People are just as determinisistic as machines. Just because we are ignorant of the incredible intricacies of our own minds and bodies doesn't mean they are magically different and exempt from the laws of physics.
The Nineteenth Century called and wants its belief system back.
Charity is plutocracy?
It can be, yes, if you have a small elite of the very rich doling out random scraps of food to placate their consciences while the vast majority starve.
We're not in this together.....we're not in anything yet. We're not anywhere close to inventing AI. All of this is just speculation.
We're not anywhere close to have autonomous vehicles? I guess you miss some news lately.
Story after story about how amazing it is that Google can get vehicles to drive on clear highways in perfect weather conditions is not proof that we are close to having real world autonomous vehicles.
Most people will have almost no interest in any other human as all their needs and desires will be met by machines.
One person's utopia is another's dystopia.
Do you think, say, coal mining or 19th century London or Paris were such a paradise except for those lucky one-percenters?
The problem is that most slashdotters consider themselves one-percenters, at least potentially. They cannot empathise with a poor, hard working mill worker, as they assume they'd be the mill boss..
No. To farm, you need land. 200 years ago, if you did not have a job, you sold yourself as an indentured servant.
Or, you wandered the forest as a hunter and occasionally rob from the rich who might wander nearby. Of course, to assuage your feelings of guilt from robbing people, you might be tempted to redistribute some of your ill-gotten gains to the poor people in villages surrounding said forest. ;)
And as a bonus, you got to wear ladies' tights.
A fine dream. The robot owners will keep all the benefits, while everyone else will be homeless.
Then they will attack the robot owners and redistribute the wealth as it should have been by done by government.