But a similar leak from a different nuclear plant in their neighbourhood? - that's a different matter altogether.
Amazingly, they're not situated on massive earthquake fault lines next to the ocean.
Pretty much nothing can happen to a gas or coal plant that would require evacuation of everybody in a 30km radius
No, just by being within 30km of one you're being killed, slowly. Tens of thousands of lives are cut short every year. Even with Chernobyl nuclear power plants can't claim those sorts of numbers.
Then there's the gas line explosions, gas line leaks, underground coal fires and the list goes on. Then there's the damage from coal mining, gas extraction and so on. Not to mention all the other forms of industry that create horribly toxic substances and slowly poison those around them.
As far as things than will lead to my eventual and unavoidable death, living near a nuclear power plant wouldn't bother me at all.
To make matters worse: for many plants (for example in Germany) there is simply no way to evacuate everybody in an area with of radius 30km around them. Not without basically nuking (no pun intended) the whole economy, for example.
Have you seen pictures of Japan, have you? Whole cities are just gone, thousands dead, thousands more missing. Power outages. Roads destroyed. Heating gone. Food shortages. Evacuating 30km from a plant anywhere is nothing compared to that.
So yeah, if your local nuke plant is taken out than frankly you've got bigger things to worry about than that.
So that's why people are worried.
And as I said, people are paranoid idiots who can't evaluate risk if it bit them in the ass with steel jaws.
Stuff like this shouldn't be necessary. All these measures are patches for working around a broken system.
That system is called western civilization. It shouldn't be necessary to do any work at all but have all of life's pleasures delivered for simply living but that's not reality either. Deal with it.
Is some kid right out of college expected to put development of his Awesome New Idea on hold until he can contract a patent attorney, an accountant and a legal aide so he can implement the most trivial and obvious of software patterns?
That advice has little to do with software patents honestly and is just good advice when setting up a business of any sort. Talk to an attorney and/or talk to an accountant. Do that a few times till you find one who isn't a lying worthless shit. Then do your own research. Then talk to them again.
Life is full of complications so, as I said before, learn to deal with it.
Kiss the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world goodbye, they'll go off and innovate in areas *not* encumbered by such useless nonsense.
Zuckerberg is getting sued last I checked for some hilariously bad contract he made early on.
Sergey Brin was a student at Stanford, they in fact paid to have everything he did patented. Actually, everything he did was owned by them but that's the usual PhD student arrangement. Works out quite well assuming your school isn't a bunch of bastards. Probably paid for good accountants and attorneys as well to ensure good return on their investment.
a radiation leak (or worse), just might affect them.
Unless they're in Japan, not really. Actually the economic impact will hurt them somewhat but no one cares about that.
Not that it matters, people want any excuse to panic it seems. Like 9/11, no one was going to blow up Bumfuck, Iowa but that didn't stop people there from screaming loudly. More loudly than those in New York actually I'd say.
So why didn't the company and it's management organize things better so it's workers didn't have to work 100 hours a week? Why are the workers selfish and not the management who decided their comfort isn't worth making their own sacrifices for? Why isn't management selfish for essentially lowering their worker's salaries significantly for their own benefit?
Paying to help me network is no different from paying for a computer I bring in from home to work on because I don't like the one they gave me.
And if the company said you have to bring in your own system and buy various random hardware on which to test their software I'm sure you'd have no problems at all, right?
The rest of us have reasons to network too, we just don't whine about how important it is to our job.
In other words networking isn't really important to your job or at least not directly so. Jobs where it's considered a vital part provide expense accounts for a reason.
The executive or sale person who takes out potential clients to dinner or golf probably has an expense account. Networking which is company specific such as conferences is paid for as a business expense. The IT guy who does it to potentially know a guy who knows a guy doesn't count as that.
You sound bitter, sorry your choices in life have no worked out for you.
I'm sure if your salary went down you'd also be complaining which is effectively what's happening.
If I have business attire that I -- promise promise! -- only use for work, my employer doesn't pay for it and I can't deduct it.
I've heard of companies paying for this. My last employer paid for health insurance, college courses, stock purchases in the company (via the usual plans and discounts), sending people to conferences (aka: free vacation) and other such things. Not to mention that I could telecommute for a week or two from half way across the world if I wanted to.
Even in military usage it seems a good thing, war and the resulting dead civilians will never go away but more information would prevent killing civilians as often.
The real problem for such technology is in domestic surveillance and the ever present move toward a police state.
As others have said, few lawyers make that much and people who are very good in tech can make a killing as well (consulting, being sniped by the right company, bonuses to not be sniped by that company, etc.). That's without even going into management which pays even more.
Also, salary is irrelevant in many ways. If you have to work 80 hours and have no life while under constant stress than what could is the money to you? And btw, if that describes your job in tech than I recommend being more selective next time you look for a job.
Love is a bunch of chemicals and chemical signals in your head causing the neural network that is your brain to act in a specific way. In other words it doesn't exist except as an illusion caused by the design of your brain.
I can't "prove" a theory, but I can easily "disprove" one. That's the problem with fundamentalist religion nuts. They don't understand that there is no absolute proof without absolute knowledge, and absolute knowledge is beyond the grasp of humanity... for the moment.
There is no such thing as absolute knowledge since there is always some potential hole in your observations. I mean that not even getting into the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Unless everything is just one giant simulation and even then one could claim our knowledge about the simulation is flawed. The usual example being that one can always claim there's an invisible and intangible dragon in their garage and no matter what you do you cannot disprove it (since they'll add another caveat to how it's undetectable)
On that same note, there are also infinite scientific theories to explain any set of observations. Just take any theory and add "and a magical undetectable unicorn causes it to happen" to make another one. Occam's razor is generally used to deal with this problem but it will never go away.
There's also a clear and demonstrable inverse correlation between wealth and happiness. And IQ and happiness. Do you have any insight that doesn't trivialize and avoid the topic at hand?
I do. A general lack of correlation does not mean demonstrable negative correlation.
If einstein believing in god doesn't disprove your handwaiving and wishful thinking, I'm not sure what will.
Einstein believed in a non-personal watchmaker god with no influence beyond the creation of the universe asfaik. About as close as you can get to atheism without actually being one.
I mean, wow, is this "use false internet rumors in an argument" day or something?
Interesting, so you responded to my broad insult of Christianity (a specific religion, note, not all religions) with a broad insult of atheism? So I take it then that not being a hypocrite isn't part of life philosophy?
See, the real difference between you and me is that unlike you I'm freely going to admit to being an asshole on here. It's what I do. It's fun. I don't need convoluted justifications to make how I act more palatable to myself like you appear to.
Although I do love how you assume I'm opposed to all religions and a militant atheist. I'll put that on my list along with the time some atheist called me a fundie after I made fun of what he was saying.
Odd, so far I've been handed religious texts by people, seen protests by people, heard loud outdoor preaching by people and even had them come to my door to bother me. None of those people were talking about atheism.
Or do you call it bothering only if they preach something you don't agree with?
Why would a gay man want a wife? Do you seriously not understand what homosexuality is? If he wants a partner than he can, gasp, find another gay guy and marry him.
Now he might want children which requires a woman but that does not mean he wants a wife. More like an egg donor. Then you've got the same situation as any other infertile couple. All the other feelings just aren't and never will be there.
And then they lead miserable lives as a result because the addiction is always with them. Then again I suppose Christians are all about being miserable and repressed no matter what the situation at hand. What can one expect from people who are taught to believe sex is disgusting.
Also, you are aware that the first step in fighting an addiction is "admit you have a problem" right? Burying your head in the sand is counterproductive.
If you are unwilling to trust the government why are you willing to trust Wikileaks?
Because wikileaks has no strong incentive to lie and a massive incentive to not lie?
Wikileaks doesn't gain much from the cables, some reputation but they have so many cable and their reputation is already very high. The cost of a fake cable, which would instantly be discovered, would sink all of that and likely get some of them put in jail (due to a lack of a public opinion shield from annoyed governments).
Governments on the other hand, or rather the politicians and bureaucrats that make them up, have very strong ideological and monetary reasons for lying and historically have been shown to do that very often. Now, as someone else noted. You can argue that the government official who created this cable originally was in fact lying or unknowingly passing on false information. That is logical and plausible. Saying wikileaks faked it is on the other hand pure FUD, shame on you.
And the best way to earn trust would be to release a bunch of leaks unaltered and then when it is worth the risk release an altered one.
This isn't magical information that no one else in the world has ever seen. [sarcasm]I'm sure the US government which hates wikileaks and has the original cables would never point out discrepancies.[/sarcasm]
I am just wondering if it is wise to take something that is so easy to forge as the truth without verification.
No, it's very difficult to forge this because many other source of it exist. Or do you claim some massive conspiracy between everyone whose read this cable before, who still has access to this cable and wikileaks?
Amazing, you can make interesting posts that don't make you look like an Eliza script. I was afraid I'd utterly misjudged you. Now if only you could have them be 80% content instead of 100% sarcastic junk.
Seriously, I ask you to define your argument more precisely and not be pointlessly enigmatic and this is your response? I figured you actually had an argument somewhere in there, well balls to that it seems.
So yeah, go and wank off to your lovely sarcastic and utterly worthless rebuttal to me. I suspect you're smiling and think you're were always right while I was some stupid buffoon. God, to be young and ignorant. At least, when I insult people I have the decency to have an argument behind it.
See, now I'm actually sad, I was hoping for an decent intelligent discussion where I'd learn something and I get this. Bloody let down to be honest.
If you haven't read Dawkin's Selfish Gene you really should. It's an excellent book.
Because it's quite clear you haven't read it.
I've read, been a while, it's an old book and most of it I've seen in other places long before I read it. Unlike you I have in fact studied biology more deeply than reading one forty year old book. So, again, your point being?
That is all immaterial to the simple fact, which is all I mentioned, that humans are the end result of evolution which function at the level of DNA. Nothing to do with Dawkins but simple biology. You are muddying the argument. Either answer my point directly or admit you have no counter-argument.
No, the attempt to remove ambiguity is the defining characteristic of philosophy. Specifically, one finds the source of ambiguity (the axioms or definitions that do not agree) and attempts to see if they can be shown as invalid.
Assuming one is of a logical mindset and uses said logical mindset when performing philosophy. That is considered the proper mindset last I checked except for frat boys taking philosophy classes for easy As.
So you are in fact saying the definition is whatever you want it to be so that it says you're right and any attempt to argue otherwise you'll simply say you meant a different definition of the term? That is not philosophy, that is shoddy logic and cheap bar room rhetoric.
I did, google provides ambiguous results none of which are from philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also provides no definition as far as I can tell.
So once again, what is the definition you claim for the term? You are being very avoidant of defining what you claim is a simple term.
As I said, Dawkins makes a similar argument in the Selfish Gene.
No, that's the argument made by every biologist out there. It's called evolution.
Dawkins was merely pointing out specific quirks of evolution and what drives it (propagation of genes rather than individuals of a species). He didn't make an argument but simply popularized various scientific theories.
So are you in fact denying evolution? If so then in what way? What's your counter-argument to my claim other than saying "Dawkins said something similar"?
Except for the last sentence (which is a non-sequitir) you are talking about determinism. Which as I've already said, is a question we are unlikely to have answered in our lifetimes.
Sigh, so basically you're arguing that humans have a soul and AIs won't? Or consciousness or qualia or whatever your fluffy way of avoiding the term is. Sigh, god please don't tell me you're one of those who believes in atom level human identical philosophical zombies.
Not really. I simply pointed out that everything we are is written in our DNA and that DNA was created by a specific process. We are machines created for a purpose.
So by your logic the AI and humans are the results of the evolutionary process which created humans. That process is in turn the result of the physical parameters of the universe. We're not quite sure what that is the result of but the specific parameters are quite likely random (cue anthropic principle). Which in turn means the whole argument has no point.
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But a similar leak from a different nuclear plant in their neighbourhood? - that's a different matter altogether.
Amazingly, they're not situated on massive earthquake fault lines next to the ocean.
Pretty much nothing can happen to a gas or coal plant that would require evacuation of everybody in a 30km radius
No, just by being within 30km of one you're being killed, slowly. Tens of thousands of lives are cut short every year. Even with Chernobyl nuclear power plants can't claim those sorts of numbers.
Then there's the gas line explosions, gas line leaks, underground coal fires and the list goes on. Then there's the damage from coal mining, gas extraction and so on. Not to mention all the other forms of industry that create horribly toxic substances and slowly poison those around them.
As far as things than will lead to my eventual and unavoidable death, living near a nuclear power plant wouldn't bother me at all.
To make matters worse: for many plants (for example in Germany) there is simply no way to evacuate everybody in an area with of radius 30km around them. Not without basically nuking (no pun intended) the whole economy, for example.
Have you seen pictures of Japan, have you? Whole cities are just gone, thousands dead, thousands more missing. Power outages. Roads destroyed. Heating gone. Food shortages. Evacuating 30km from a plant anywhere is nothing compared to that.
So yeah, if your local nuke plant is taken out than frankly you've got bigger things to worry about than that.
So that's why people are worried.
And as I said, people are paranoid idiots who can't evaluate risk if it bit them in the ass with steel jaws.
Stuff like this shouldn't be necessary. All these measures are patches for working around a broken system.
That system is called western civilization. It shouldn't be necessary to do any work at all but have all of life's pleasures delivered for simply living but that's not reality either. Deal with it.
Is some kid right out of college expected to put development of his Awesome New Idea on hold until he can contract a patent attorney, an accountant and a legal aide so he can implement the most trivial and obvious of software patterns?
That advice has little to do with software patents honestly and is just good advice when setting up a business of any sort. Talk to an attorney and/or talk to an accountant. Do that a few times till you find one who isn't a lying worthless shit. Then do your own research. Then talk to them again.
Life is full of complications so, as I said before, learn to deal with it.
Kiss the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world goodbye, they'll go off and innovate in areas *not* encumbered by such useless nonsense.
Zuckerberg is getting sued last I checked for some hilariously bad contract he made early on.
Sergey Brin was a student at Stanford, they in fact paid to have everything he did patented. Actually, everything he did was owned by them but that's the usual PhD student arrangement. Works out quite well assuming your school isn't a bunch of bastards. Probably paid for good accountants and attorneys as well to ensure good return on their investment.
a radiation leak (or worse), just might affect them.
Unless they're in Japan, not really. Actually the economic impact will hurt them somewhat but no one cares about that.
Not that it matters, people want any excuse to panic it seems. Like 9/11, no one was going to blow up Bumfuck, Iowa but that didn't stop people there from screaming loudly. More loudly than those in New York actually I'd say.
So why didn't the company and it's management organize things better so it's workers didn't have to work 100 hours a week? Why are the workers selfish and not the management who decided their comfort isn't worth making their own sacrifices for? Why isn't management selfish for essentially lowering their worker's salaries significantly for their own benefit?
As a matter of fact, if you're using anything other than a magnetized needle to right to your hard drive, quit calling yourself a computer user.
Bah, everyone knows that real computer users employ butterflies not needles.
Paying to help me network is no different from paying for a computer I bring in from home to work on because I don't like the one they gave me.
And if the company said you have to bring in your own system and buy various random hardware on which to test their software I'm sure you'd have no problems at all, right?
The rest of us have reasons to network too, we just don't whine about how important it is to our job.
In other words networking isn't really important to your job or at least not directly so. Jobs where it's considered a vital part provide expense accounts for a reason.
The executive or sale person who takes out potential clients to dinner or golf probably has an expense account. Networking which is company specific such as conferences is paid for as a business expense. The IT guy who does it to potentially know a guy who knows a guy doesn't count as that.
You sound bitter, sorry your choices in life have no worked out for you.
I'm sure if your salary went down you'd also be complaining which is effectively what's happening.
If I have business attire that I -- promise promise! -- only use for work, my employer doesn't pay for it and I can't deduct it.
I've heard of companies paying for this. My last employer paid for health insurance, college courses, stock purchases in the company (via the usual plans and discounts), sending people to conferences (aka: free vacation) and other such things. Not to mention that I could telecommute for a week or two from half way across the world if I wanted to.
Even in military usage it seems a good thing, war and the resulting dead civilians will never go away but more information would prevent killing civilians as often.
The real problem for such technology is in domestic surveillance and the ever present move toward a police state.
As others have said, few lawyers make that much and people who are very good in tech can make a killing as well (consulting, being sniped by the right company, bonuses to not be sniped by that company, etc.). That's without even going into management which pays even more.
Also, salary is irrelevant in many ways. If you have to work 80 hours and have no life while under constant stress than what could is the money to you? And btw, if that describes your job in tech than I recommend being more selective next time you look for a job.
and the re-interpretation of the ideas of dead men a bad thing?
If it's a bad thing then why did you do it yourself?
Love is a bunch of chemicals and chemical signals in your head causing the neural network that is your brain to act in a specific way. In other words it doesn't exist except as an illusion caused by the design of your brain.
I can't "prove" a theory, but I can easily "disprove" one. That's the problem with fundamentalist religion nuts. They don't understand that there is no absolute proof without absolute knowledge, and absolute knowledge is beyond the grasp of humanity... for the moment.
There is no such thing as absolute knowledge since there is always some potential hole in your observations. I mean that not even getting into the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Unless everything is just one giant simulation and even then one could claim our knowledge about the simulation is flawed. The usual example being that one can always claim there's an invisible and intangible dragon in their garage and no matter what you do you cannot disprove it (since they'll add another caveat to how it's undetectable)
On that same note, there are also infinite scientific theories to explain any set of observations. Just take any theory and add "and a magical undetectable unicorn causes it to happen" to make another one. Occam's razor is generally used to deal with this problem but it will never go away.
There's also a clear and demonstrable inverse correlation between wealth and happiness. And IQ and happiness. Do you have any insight that doesn't trivialize and avoid the topic at hand?
I do. A general lack of correlation does not mean demonstrable negative correlation.
If einstein believing in god doesn't disprove your handwaiving and wishful thinking, I'm not sure what will.
Einstein believed in a non-personal watchmaker god with no influence beyond the creation of the universe asfaik. About as close as you can get to atheism without actually being one.
I mean, wow, is this "use false internet rumors in an argument" day or something?
Interesting, so you responded to my broad insult of Christianity (a specific religion, note, not all religions) with a broad insult of atheism? So I take it then that not being a hypocrite isn't part of life philosophy?
See, the real difference between you and me is that unlike you I'm freely going to admit to being an asshole on here. It's what I do. It's fun. I don't need convoluted justifications to make how I act more palatable to myself like you appear to.
Although I do love how you assume I'm opposed to all religions and a militant atheist. I'll put that on my list along with the time some atheist called me a fundie after I made fun of what he was saying.
Odd, so far I've been handed religious texts by people, seen protests by people, heard loud outdoor preaching by people and even had them come to my door to bother me. None of those people were talking about atheism.
Or do you call it bothering only if they preach something you don't agree with?
Why would a gay man want a wife? Do you seriously not understand what homosexuality is? If he wants a partner than he can, gasp, find another gay guy and marry him.
Now he might want children which requires a woman but that does not mean he wants a wife. More like an egg donor. Then you've got the same situation as any other infertile couple. All the other feelings just aren't and never will be there.
And then they lead miserable lives as a result because the addiction is always with them. Then again I suppose Christians are all about being miserable and repressed no matter what the situation at hand. What can one expect from people who are taught to believe sex is disgusting.
Also, you are aware that the first step in fighting an addiction is "admit you have a problem" right? Burying your head in the sand is counterproductive.
If you are unwilling to trust the government why are you willing to trust Wikileaks?
Because wikileaks has no strong incentive to lie and a massive incentive to not lie?
Wikileaks doesn't gain much from the cables, some reputation but they have so many cable and their reputation is already very high. The cost of a fake cable, which would instantly be discovered, would sink all of that and likely get some of them put in jail (due to a lack of a public opinion shield from annoyed governments).
Governments on the other hand, or rather the politicians and bureaucrats that make them up, have very strong ideological and monetary reasons for lying and historically have been shown to do that very often. Now, as someone else noted. You can argue that the government official who created this cable originally was in fact lying or unknowingly passing on false information. That is logical and plausible. Saying wikileaks faked it is on the other hand pure FUD, shame on you.
And the best way to earn trust would be to release a bunch of leaks unaltered and then when it is worth the risk release an altered one.
This isn't magical information that no one else in the world has ever seen. [sarcasm]I'm sure the US government which hates wikileaks and has the original cables would never point out discrepancies.[/sarcasm]
I am just wondering if it is wise to take something that is so easy to forge as the truth without verification.
No, it's very difficult to forge this because many other source of it exist. Or do you claim some massive conspiracy between everyone whose read this cable before, who still has access to this cable and wikileaks?
Amazing, you can make interesting posts that don't make you look like an Eliza script. I was afraid I'd utterly misjudged you. Now if only you could have them be 80% content instead of 100% sarcastic junk.
Seriously, I ask you to define your argument more precisely and not be pointlessly enigmatic and this is your response? I figured you actually had an argument somewhere in there, well balls to that it seems.
So yeah, go and wank off to your lovely sarcastic and utterly worthless rebuttal to me. I suspect you're smiling and think you're were always right while I was some stupid buffoon. God, to be young and ignorant. At least, when I insult people I have the decency to have an argument behind it.
See, now I'm actually sad, I was hoping for an decent intelligent discussion where I'd learn something and I get this. Bloody let down to be honest.
If you haven't read Dawkin's Selfish Gene you really should. It's an excellent book.
Because it's quite clear you haven't read it.
I've read, been a while, it's an old book and most of it I've seen in other places long before I read it. Unlike you I have in fact studied biology more deeply than reading one forty year old book. So, again, your point being?
That is all immaterial to the simple fact, which is all I mentioned, that humans are the end result of evolution which function at the level of DNA. Nothing to do with Dawkins but simple biology. You are muddying the argument. Either answer my point directly or admit you have no counter-argument.
No, the attempt to remove ambiguity is the defining characteristic of philosophy. Specifically, one finds the source of ambiguity (the axioms or definitions that do not agree) and attempts to see if they can be shown as invalid.
Assuming one is of a logical mindset and uses said logical mindset when performing philosophy. That is considered the proper mindset last I checked except for frat boys taking philosophy classes for easy As.
So you are in fact saying the definition is whatever you want it to be so that it says you're right and any attempt to argue otherwise you'll simply say you meant a different definition of the term? That is not philosophy, that is shoddy logic and cheap bar room rhetoric.
I did, google provides ambiguous results none of which are from philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also provides no definition as far as I can tell.
So once again, what is the definition you claim for the term? You are being very avoidant of defining what you claim is a simple term.
As I said, Dawkins makes a similar argument in the Selfish Gene.
No, that's the argument made by every biologist out there. It's called evolution.
Dawkins was merely pointing out specific quirks of evolution and what drives it (propagation of genes rather than individuals of a species). He didn't make an argument but simply popularized various scientific theories.
So are you in fact denying evolution? If so then in what way? What's your counter-argument to my claim other than saying "Dawkins said something similar"?
Except for the last sentence (which is a non-sequitir) you are talking about determinism. Which as I've already said, is a question we are unlikely to have answered in our lifetimes.
Sigh, so basically you're arguing that humans have a soul and AIs won't? Or consciousness or qualia or whatever your fluffy way of avoiding the term is. Sigh, god please don't tell me you're one of those who believes in atom level human identical philosophical zombies.
And I already replied to you.
Nonsensically. Unless your knowledge of evolution and biology is in fact that lacking but I'm assuming otherwise.
A "cause" is not the same thing as "ultimate cause". I've also pointed this out in another post.
Then please define "ultimate cause" specifically and exactly. You are arguing semantics without defining it except with vague references.
Not really. I simply pointed out that everything we are is written in our DNA and that DNA was created by a specific process. We are machines created for a purpose.
So by your logic the AI and humans are the results of the evolutionary process which created humans. That process is in turn the result of the physical parameters of the universe. We're not quite sure what that is the result of but the specific parameters are quite likely random (cue anthropic principle). Which in turn means the whole argument has no point.