But doing that to a moving target from dozens of feet away, various eye position, varying pupil size, glasses, etc is probably just as unrealistic/impossible.
This actually made me laugh out loud. Impossible? You must be the most technologically pessimistic/.'er in history. None of the factors you mentioned are even remotely any kind of fundamental barrier. Unrealistic? Minority Report features telepathic mutants who can predict the future, and is set what, something like 30-50 years in the future? It's a complete straw man to assume that people are equating Minority Report to modern technology in the first place.
Oh, and if the sheep didn't need lecturing, then we would have far less problems.
Please, grow up. Your use of the word "sheep" is not only practically devoid of content, it's also chock full of self-important arrogance. "Oh, the sheep are so stupid! If only everyone was as smart as me!" If you are actually a remotely intelligent person, the least insightful thing you could be doing (yes, even less so than bothering to address some netizen about the failings of their public writing) is complaining about how dumb everyone else is. Please spare the rest of us (intelligent and otherwise) from the sight of your wanking.
Minority Report actually featured iris scans, not retinal scans (which are scans of the retina, not retena). But by all means, feel free continue to lecture the "sheep".
Because when I was writing my post pointing out the time-span of the edits, I initially believed it to be much shorter (up until the next edit, since generally vandalism seems to be reverted on the next immediate edit). But no, the next edit was indeed the addition of the bizarre citation requirement.
Congratulations, you've pointed out an act of vandalism that once happened on Wikipedia. I wonder what happens if you look at the time-stamp of that edit? Oh, 19:06 Jan 26, and it was corrected 3:25 Jan 27... oh noes, a whole ~8 hrs went with that entry present.
I've looked at countless Wikipedia pages, and only ever found vandalized content when I was digging through histories or linked to it. -1, Empirical wank-session.
If you can't justify it to the average person, you can't realistically ask them to support it (you know, by paying for it, fighting in it, and dying in it).
But that aside, I've discovered a truly remarkable counter-argument, the proof of which is too small to fit in this margin.
s/lying/murder/ and your statements still basically held true at one time/place or another. So what's left? It's pretty substanceless to claim things are "human" or "natural". Yes, humans lie, so lying is a human thing to do, very good.
This may be important to the topic since people with this disorder account for a large percentage of crimes, are expert liars, and fill up our prisons (I mean American prisons, for other countries, I don't know).
Whether or not you agree with the war in Iraq, the fact that the US does have a powerful military is a big deterrent to dictators who'd like to do various international mischief. China can't invade Taiwan primarily because the US Navy is there. North Korea can't invade its southern neighbor because the US would take action; even though the UN was the official body that countered the north's first attack, the vast majority of non-Korean troops in the UN force came from the US. There are many other similar examples.
This sounds a lot like an altruistic argument to me. The libertarian response is, "So what if China invades Taiwan? So what if NK invades SK?" I wouldn't personally posit that argument, but I also don't see the sense in spending something like six times (last time I checked) more than any other nation on the planet for defence. It strikes me as beyond paranoid. If we want to be world police, we can do it without maintaining a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and researching new ones. Don't even get me started on missile defence. At any rate, I'd say feeding the hungry and providing AIDS medicine to Africa are both much higher "international altruism" priorities than sticking our fingers into every foreign situation we feel like meddling in.
I'm just saying that Europe can have a smaller military because the US has a bigger one.
So if the US slashed its defence budget in half, do you really think the EU would beef theirs up a proportional amount to compensate?
As far as social programs go, most of these programs are designed to make up for a lack of financial planning and/or discipline on the part of individuals. For example, if everyone was wise enough to invest their money in a retirement account, Social Security would be unnecessary.
Good example. Since you imply that everyone is clearly not wise enough, I'd say you just provided the justification for Social Security.
Frankly, I find it somewhat ridiculous that we spend half of our tax dollars on taking care of people who could take care of themselves.
Well, this is a pretty fundamental disagreement, as I've had this argument many times. I have two mostly independent responses.
First, asserting that the poor ought to just "do better", and "not be poor" (which is what you're asserting when you say they "could" take care of themselves) is such an obvious dead-end to me that I have trouble understanding the popularity of the meme in America (and it's a very American attitude). Is it so they can feel better about all the wise decisions they've made to avoid poverty? Maybe it's because while I was growing up in a trailer park, I noticed this phenomenon: the worst trailer trash raised the worst kids. Pretty simple, huh? What do you get when someone was either poor from the start or made bad decisions and became poor? Oftentimes you get an abusive drunk who raises a disadvantaged child. Who will be poor. Ad nauseum. Admonishing people to not be poor doesn't change who they are, who they know, the life they know, and the way they were raised. However, providing them with a decent standard of living can make all the difference for their children. With such huge correlations between income and all sorts of negative behavior, I'd think giving money away to improve future social conditions is a no-brainer. A lot of sociologists agree with this, but we're talking about society here, what do they know?
Your point about people failing to plan for their future is completely missing the forest for the trees. You can yell at people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps until the cows come home, but until you provide them with boots in the first place, there's not much that can be done. If virtually everyone you knew growing up turned to dealing drugs for money, and you had a lousy education with no prospects, how likely are you to be a productive member of society? I don't
The US does what it thinks is best for itself, and Europe does the same. Big deal.
Right, because all policy decisions are binary.
In reality, the US does what it thinks is best for itself, and all everyone else can go fuck themselves. Europe does what it thinks is best for itself, but it (at times) tries to not to piss off its neighbors.
A neighborhood really is a good analogy here. Each "family" does, in general, what it thinks is best for itself. However, a good neighbor also makes decisions like, "Even though right now, at 4 a.m., I really want to blast Baby Got Back out of my 7500 kajiggawatt sound system, I concede that the drawbacks to my neighbors greatly outweight the benefits to me." If my neighbor two houses down did that, I wouldn't think very well of them. Look at a lot of foreign attitudes toward the U.S. right now, and you'll see the same kind of annoyance.
So if I'm paying $400 a month for rent, and $350 a month for food, I'm spending "huge amounts of money" on rent?
The fact that you're literally comparing the dollar amounts between defence and social spending is troubling. Defence spending shouldn't even be on the same order of magnitude as social spending. Take a look at Britain's budget, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/91D/93/ACF12D7 .pdf . And Britain isn't exactly what I'd call a pacifist state.
Depending on your definition of AI, there is another option: skipping the evolutionary simulation and "just" simulating scanned copies of human brains.
Well aren't you the smug intellectual victor here. I think you're displaying the debating skills of a 17-year-old. Seriously, the other guy might look like an idiot, but you look like a total asshole. And by pointing this out, I'm displaying the skills of, what, a 22-year-old? Depressing.
Nietzsche beleived this, and said to live each day as though it were your last, but to make each decision as though you'd make it a thousand times more
Ahh, but an interesting side-note... assuming the universe's expansion/contraction cycles were perfectly deterministic (the same every time), each version of you would also be completely deterministic. So would you really be making a decision over and over, or would that "decision" be more a reflection of what you are?
On the other hand, if the cycles aren't deterministic, then it seems improbable that you'd be around time after time.
First of all, I don't arbitrarily despise France (as you may have guessed my name is French), but the point is (and I don't even think a Frenchman would disagree about this), in France the govt has more power than the US govt. and the corporations have less power than US corporations. I think we can at least agree on that right?
Apologies, I didn't really mean to imply that you despised France, and yes, we can definitely agree on that point.
Ok, I agree that these sys admins _could_ do a lot of damage. So, what do you think the UN will do if they're in charge? Hire magical sys admins that are incapable of doing a lot of damage? It would probably end up being the same sys admins, or people with similar qualifications. The same people will be capable of doing a lot of damage if the UN "runs the internet".
You're implying here than the concern here is incompetence, when it's clearly not. I doubt any of the member states are too concerned that ICANN might just "screw something up". I would indeed not be surprised if the eventual solution that appeased them involved the very same sys admins. The point is that right now the US government has the power to act unilaterally in this arena, and that frightens a lot of other nations. You can talk about how it's not really the US government running things, but as long as US law binds ICANN, it is ultimately our government that has the power. And from an international perspective, it's not acceptable for the US to say, "Well, it's out of our hands, unless we choose for it not to be at some later date."
This is your best point yet! So, given that ICANN hasn't done anything wrong, why would we want to turn this, as you called it: "helluva responsibility", over to an organization that _has_ done a number of things wrong?
A. Generalizing about the UN from a few big-media scandals is pretty thin. The UN does mountains of important work in the world constantly. It's not really fair to hold up failures like Oil for Food and claim the organization is incompetent. It just isn't.
B. We probably don't. From a purely self-centered perspective, Americans have pretty much no reason to give ICANN to the UN. If the US government goes crazier and screws us, we're not going to be too worried about root servers at that point. I'm just trying to illustrate the member states are behaving in a very rational manner, and that the global perspective is at least as important as the American one.
I view government as a necessary EVIL. The best government is the least government you can get away with.
There's a problem with this view. Sometimes public enterprise does a better job of things than private enterprise. Throw it out for the sake of superstition (which is essentially what you're appealing to when calling it "evil"), and you're throwing out all the benefits associated with public enterprise. There are simply times when you can "get away with" less government, but more government is the optimal solution. We could "get away with" abolishing the UN, and millions of people would starve, die from lack of medical treatment, and so forth. So a blanket appeal "against government" accomplishes absolutely nothing.
The best Government is one which keeps the majority of power at the local level. E.G. Bottom-up instead of top-down.
I pretty much thoroughly disagree. I cite the pre-civil war South as the iconic example of local government abuse that would have continued unchecked without the feds putting their foot down. Federal government at least has to answer to every state for abuses. If a local government's victims stay local and powerless, they're fucked. There's no lower level of government to appeal to.
I believe it's much more difficult to mantain choking control over people at large at the federal level. I believe many local governments would consist of a majority with a bent towards harming the local minority.
Local governments are also easier to buy out. ALL government has a price, and that price matters.
There's nothing stopping you from managing your own local slice of communication infrastructure. The US government has a hands-off policy, which leads me to think that your real gripe is that you want someone to have an intrusive hands-on policy instead.
No, I simply think the body of laws that governs the equivalent of ICANN shouldn't be American.
The Internet under US control works and it works well. There is no current problem (or feasible future problem) with the Internet that UN government is the solution for, becase no current problem (or feasible future problem) is the fault of the US's hands-off policy.
But the US simply cannot guarantee that the policy will remain hands-off. And without this assurance, ICANN's nationality matters, because it essentially ties control of the root servers to US law. This is a current problem, obviously not to US citizens (as many more important aspects of their life are subject to US law), but to the rest of the world that may not be so optimistic concerning our government's future behavior.
Nope, sitting pretty in the land of the free. Hence my use of the phrase, "our method of governance" referring to our laissez-faire, entrepreneurial approach. But I don't seem to arbitrarily despise France either, so I'm not very American in that regard.
Well, in the US, the government doesn't run the corporations, the corporations run the government.
I do understand that to be the case, however from an international perspective that's not really an argument. It's like someone with a huge St. Bernard saying to you, "Heh, my dog walks me!" with a wink and smile and then letting their dog shit on your lawn. ICANN hasn't shit on anyone's lawn, but it certainly can in theory, and that's what's important to these other nations.
In any case, ICANN is merely responsible for keeping track of names and numbers on the net.
Merely responsible? I'd say that's a helluva responsibility. Let me put it this way: could ICANN sabotage the hell out of the net? Could they up and pull all the domain entries for a given TLD? I admit that I'm not intimate enough with the details to say that this could or could not happen, but I have yet see anything that stops them from doing so, in principle.
This is not something that requires corupt multinational organizational (e.g. the UN) oversight.
Nothing requires corrupt oversight. I'm being totally humorless and deadpan here on purpose.
It requires a few sys admins and maybe a manager or two. I really don't see what kind of representation you want here?
The implementation isn't important, the implications are. If those few sysadmins could make a mess of things, it makes other nations nervous.
Please add, "as long as ICANN says so" to the end of each of those. None of those countries find representation in the US. So, in principle, none of those countries have any real say in what happens to their TLDs. And principle is very important at an international level.
Slashdot Mirror
But doing that to a moving target from dozens of feet away, various eye position, varying pupil size, glasses, etc is probably just as unrealistic/impossible.
/.'er in history. None of the factors you mentioned are even remotely any kind of fundamental barrier. Unrealistic? Minority Report features telepathic mutants who can predict the future, and is set what, something like 30-50 years in the future? It's a complete straw man to assume that people are equating Minority Report to modern technology in the first place.
This actually made me laugh out loud. Impossible? You must be the most technologically pessimistic
Oh, and if the sheep didn't need lecturing, then we would have far less problems.
Please, grow up. Your use of the word "sheep" is not only practically devoid of content, it's also chock full of self-important arrogance. "Oh, the sheep are so stupid! If only everyone was as smart as me!" If you are actually a remotely intelligent person, the least insightful thing you could be doing (yes, even less so than bothering to address some netizen about the failings of their public writing) is complaining about how dumb everyone else is. Please spare the rest of us (intelligent and otherwise) from the sight of your wanking.
I love KDE and all, love it, but that's still basically an insult to Photoshop and Photoshop users.
Minority Report actually featured iris scans, not retinal scans (which are scans of the retina, not retena). But by all means, feel free continue to lecture the "sheep".
Some households aren't keen on their dogs drinking out of the toilet. Others have small children, and have to worry about drowning.
Because when I was writing my post pointing out the time-span of the edits, I initially believed it to be much shorter (up until the next edit, since generally vandalism seems to be reverted on the next immediate edit). But no, the next edit was indeed the addition of the bizarre citation requirement.
No, you're thinking of all these "mind-numbingly sadistic games", of which there is only truly one.
Congratulations, you've pointed out an act of vandalism that once happened on Wikipedia. I wonder what happens if you look at the time-stamp of that edit? Oh, 19:06 Jan 26, and it was corrected 3:25 Jan 27... oh noes, a whole ~8 hrs went with that entry present.
I've looked at countless Wikipedia pages, and only ever found vandalized content when I was digging through histories or linked to it. -1, Empirical wank-session.
Einstein also doubted "spooky action at a distance", but look who's correlating entangled particles now, huh?
If you can't justify it to the average person, you can't realistically ask them to support it (you know, by paying for it, fighting in it, and dying in it).
But that aside, I've discovered a truly remarkable counter-argument, the proof of which is too small to fit in this margin.
Blah blah blah
s/lying/murder/ and your statements still basically held true at one time/place or another. So what's left? It's pretty substanceless to claim things are "human" or "natural". Yes, humans lie, so lying is a human thing to do, very good.
This may be important to the topic since people with this disorder account for a large percentage of crimes, are expert liars, and fill up our prisons (I mean American prisons, for other countries, I don't know).
Uhm? American prisons are full of drug offenders.
Whether or not you agree with the war in Iraq, the fact that the US does have a powerful military is a big deterrent to dictators who'd like to do various international mischief. China can't invade Taiwan primarily because the US Navy is there. North Korea can't invade its southern neighbor because the US would take action; even though the UN was the official body that countered the north's first attack, the vast majority of non-Korean troops in the UN force came from the US. There are many other similar examples.
This sounds a lot like an altruistic argument to me. The libertarian response is, "So what if China invades Taiwan? So what if NK invades SK?" I wouldn't personally posit that argument, but I also don't see the sense in spending something like six times (last time I checked) more than any other nation on the planet for defence. It strikes me as beyond paranoid. If we want to be world police, we can do it without maintaining a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and researching new ones. Don't even get me started on missile defence. At any rate, I'd say feeding the hungry and providing AIDS medicine to Africa are both much higher "international altruism" priorities than sticking our fingers into every foreign situation we feel like meddling in.
I'm just saying that Europe can have a smaller military because the US has a bigger one.
So if the US slashed its defence budget in half, do you really think the EU would beef theirs up a proportional amount to compensate?
As far as social programs go, most of these programs are designed to make up for a lack of financial planning and/or discipline on the part of individuals. For example, if everyone was wise enough to invest their money in a retirement account, Social Security would be unnecessary.
Good example. Since you imply that everyone is clearly not wise enough, I'd say you just provided the justification for Social Security.
Frankly, I find it somewhat ridiculous that we spend half of our tax dollars on taking care of people who could take care of themselves.
Well, this is a pretty fundamental disagreement, as I've had this argument many times. I have two mostly independent responses.
First, asserting that the poor ought to just "do better", and "not be poor" (which is what you're asserting when you say they "could" take care of themselves) is such an obvious dead-end to me that I have trouble understanding the popularity of the meme in America (and it's a very American attitude). Is it so they can feel better about all the wise decisions they've made to avoid poverty? Maybe it's because while I was growing up in a trailer park, I noticed this phenomenon: the worst trailer trash raised the worst kids. Pretty simple, huh? What do you get when someone was either poor from the start or made bad decisions and became poor? Oftentimes you get an abusive drunk who raises a disadvantaged child. Who will be poor. Ad nauseum. Admonishing people to not be poor doesn't change who they are, who they know, the life they know, and the way they were raised. However, providing them with a decent standard of living can make all the difference for their children. With such huge correlations between income and all sorts of negative behavior, I'd think giving money away to improve future social conditions is a no-brainer. A lot of sociologists agree with this, but we're talking about society here, what do they know?
Your point about people failing to plan for their future is completely missing the forest for the trees. You can yell at people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps until the cows come home, but until you provide them with boots in the first place, there's not much that can be done. If virtually everyone you knew growing up turned to dealing drugs for money, and you had a lousy education with no prospects, how likely are you to be a productive member of society? I don't
The US does what it thinks is best for itself, and Europe does the same. Big deal.
Right, because all policy decisions are binary.
In reality, the US does what it thinks is best for itself, and all everyone else can go fuck themselves. Europe does what it thinks is best for itself, but it (at times) tries to not to piss off its neighbors.
A neighborhood really is a good analogy here. Each "family" does, in general, what it thinks is best for itself. However, a good neighbor also makes decisions like, "Even though right now, at 4 a.m., I really want to blast Baby Got Back out of my 7500 kajiggawatt sound system, I concede that the drawbacks to my neighbors greatly outweight the benefits to me." If my neighbor two houses down did that, I wouldn't think very well of them. Look at a lot of foreign attitudes toward the U.S. right now, and you'll see the same kind of annoyance.
So if I'm paying $400 a month for rent, and $350 a month for food, I'm spending "huge amounts of money" on rent?
7 .pdf . And Britain isn't exactly what I'd call a pacifist state.
The fact that you're literally comparing the dollar amounts between defence and social spending is troubling. Defence spending shouldn't even be on the same order of magnitude as social spending. Take a look at Britain's budget, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/91D/93/ACF12D
Depending on your definition of AI, there is another option: skipping the evolutionary simulation and "just" simulating scanned copies of human brains.
Well aren't you the smug intellectual victor here. I think you're displaying the debating skills of a 17-year-old. Seriously, the other guy might look like an idiot, but you look like a total asshole. And by pointing this out, I'm displaying the skills of, what, a 22-year-old? Depressing.
Props on the slick 1984 reference. You win at /.
With /. as ugly as it is, I'll take any blue I can get.
I hope you're not teaching your children to be that snide.
Nietzsche beleived this, and said to live each day as though it were your last, but to make each decision as though you'd make it a thousand times more
Ahh, but an interesting side-note... assuming the universe's expansion/contraction cycles were perfectly deterministic (the same every time), each version of you would also be completely deterministic. So would you really be making a decision over and over, or would that "decision" be more a reflection of what you are?
On the other hand, if the cycles aren't deterministic, then it seems improbable that you'd be around time after time.
First of all, I don't arbitrarily despise France (as you may have guessed my name is French), but the point is (and I don't even think a Frenchman would disagree about this), in France the govt has more power than the US govt. and the corporations have less power than US corporations. I think we can at least agree on that right?
Apologies, I didn't really mean to imply that you despised France, and yes, we can definitely agree on that point.
Ok, I agree that these sys admins _could_ do a lot of damage. So, what do you think the UN will do if they're in charge? Hire magical sys admins that are incapable of doing a lot of damage? It would probably end up being the same sys admins, or people with similar qualifications. The same people will be capable of doing a lot of damage if the UN "runs the internet".
You're implying here than the concern here is incompetence, when it's clearly not. I doubt any of the member states are too concerned that ICANN might just "screw something up". I would indeed not be surprised if the eventual solution that appeased them involved the very same sys admins. The point is that right now the US government has the power to act unilaterally in this arena, and that frightens a lot of other nations. You can talk about how it's not really the US government running things, but as long as US law binds ICANN, it is ultimately our government that has the power. And from an international perspective, it's not acceptable for the US to say, "Well, it's out of our hands, unless we choose for it not to be at some later date."
This is your best point yet! So, given that ICANN hasn't done anything wrong, why would we want to turn this, as you called it: "helluva responsibility", over to an organization that _has_ done a number of things wrong?
A. Generalizing about the UN from a few big-media scandals is pretty thin. The UN does mountains of important work in the world constantly. It's not really fair to hold up failures like Oil for Food and claim the organization is incompetent. It just isn't.
B. We probably don't. From a purely self-centered perspective, Americans have pretty much no reason to give ICANN to the UN. If the US government goes crazier and screws us, we're not going to be too worried about root servers at that point. I'm just trying to illustrate the member states are behaving in a very rational manner, and that the global perspective is at least as important as the American one.
I view government as a necessary EVIL. The best government is the least government you can get away with.
There's a problem with this view. Sometimes public enterprise does a better job of things than private enterprise. Throw it out for the sake of superstition (which is essentially what you're appealing to when calling it "evil"), and you're throwing out all the benefits associated with public enterprise. There are simply times when you can "get away with" less government, but more government is the optimal solution. We could "get away with" abolishing the UN, and millions of people would starve, die from lack of medical treatment, and so forth. So a blanket appeal "against government" accomplishes absolutely nothing.
The best Government is one which keeps the majority of power at the local level. E.G. Bottom-up instead of top-down.
I pretty much thoroughly disagree. I cite the pre-civil war South as the iconic example of local government abuse that would have continued unchecked without the feds putting their foot down. Federal government at least has to answer to every state for abuses. If a local government's victims stay local and powerless, they're fucked. There's no lower level of government to appeal to.
I believe it's much more difficult to mantain choking control over people at large at the federal level. I believe many local governments would consist of a majority with a bent towards harming the local minority.
Local governments are also easier to buy out. ALL government has a price, and that price matters.
There's nothing stopping you from managing your own local slice of communication infrastructure. The US government has a hands-off policy, which leads me to think that your real gripe is that you want someone to have an intrusive hands-on policy instead.
No, I simply think the body of laws that governs the equivalent of ICANN shouldn't be American.
The Internet under US control works and it works well. There is no current problem (or feasible future problem) with the Internet that UN government is the solution for, becase no current problem (or feasible future problem) is the fault of the US's hands-off policy.
But the US simply cannot guarantee that the policy will remain hands-off. And without this assurance, ICANN's nationality matters, because it essentially ties control of the root servers to US law. This is a current problem, obviously not to US citizens (as many more important aspects of their life are subject to US law), but to the rest of the world that may not be so optimistic concerning our government's future behavior.
Let me guess...You're from France right?
Nope, sitting pretty in the land of the free. Hence my use of the phrase, "our method of governance" referring to our laissez-faire, entrepreneurial approach. But I don't seem to arbitrarily despise France either, so I'm not very American in that regard.
Well, in the US, the government doesn't run the corporations, the corporations run the government.
I do understand that to be the case, however from an international perspective that's not really an argument. It's like someone with a huge St. Bernard saying to you, "Heh, my dog walks me!" with a wink and smile and then letting their dog shit on your lawn. ICANN hasn't shit on anyone's lawn, but it certainly can in theory, and that's what's important to these other nations.
In any case, ICANN is merely responsible for keeping track of names and numbers on the net.
Merely responsible? I'd say that's a helluva responsibility. Let me put it this way: could ICANN sabotage the hell out of the net? Could they up and pull all the domain entries for a given TLD? I admit that I'm not intimate enough with the details to say that this could or could not happen, but I have yet see anything that stops them from doing so, in principle.
This is not something that requires corupt multinational organizational (e.g. the UN) oversight.
Nothing requires corrupt oversight. I'm being totally humorless and deadpan here on purpose.
It requires a few sys admins and maybe a manager or two. I really don't see what kind of representation you want here?
The implementation isn't important, the implications are. If those few sysadmins could make a mess of things, it makes other nations nervous.
Please add, "as long as ICANN says so" to the end of each of those. None of those countries find representation in the US. So, in principle, none of those countries have any real say in what happens to their TLDs. And principle is very important at an international level.