I am an adult, and I am in the US. I am innocent of any of the crimes of my government. If it was in my power to stop those crimes from happening, I would have done it. However it was NOT in my power to be able to stop my government from doing any and/or all of the things I found to be wrong and/or offensive. If I do anything more, I'll end up behind bars indefinitely under the Patriot Act.
So you're a hypocrite and a coward? The founding fathers were willing to die, painfully probably, for the freedom and fought against a vastly superior enemy Granted, you're probably just using nonexistent threats to explain your own lack of willpower and laziness so it doesn't really matter.
The country as it is, is not the country our founding fathers intended, in any way.
Yes, the founding father considered the people to be mostly idiots and giving them too much power a disaster waiting to happen. The electoral system exists specifically to go against the will of the people if the people act as idiots. They were supposed to go against the state's wishes if they thought the people or state were making a mistake.
The founding fathers would be terrified at how much power the average person has in voting. That all elected officials were voted for by the people alone would be a shock given how many were simply voted for by other elected officials originally. Quite a few were also perfectly willing to put down any other attempt/rebellion to change the government away from how they thought it should be.
We proved that Revolution works.
No the founding father showed that they were able to successfully modify a government centuries ago. Yes, not make a new government but simply slightly modify their existing one. The people in power mostly stayed in power, states rights were an issue for a reason, since the British were never that directly involved anyway. Most revolutions that actually replace the government collapse afterwards and lead to bloody dictatorships.
So you're judging the enemy based on what systems our military has? Terrorists don't have our fancy guided missiles, communication gear, tanks, UAVs and so on. They can't drop a couple thousand bombs on military targets in some country a thousand miles away. They can, however, blow up a bunch of civilians to try and break the willpower of that nation to continue fighting. We define proper warfare in precisely the way that best suits our current advantages and goals.
The only reason it is wrong today is because we saw what happened and made more accurate weapons systems.
WW2 did have more accurate weapon system however the advantage of using nukes made them a better weapon in the situation. Simply bombing a city conventionally doesn't scare the enemy enough for them to surrender outright.
Now it's only fine to kill a handful of civilians when killing the bad guys.
Mostly it's only okay to kill only a couple dozen civilians due to PR and the resulting counter-productiveness of doing otherwise.
Military goals are whatever the winners writing history claim. For example, dropping a couple nukes and killing over a hundred thousand civilians is apparently perfectly fine if it's shortens the war and prevents a bloody invasion.
A word means exactly what people think it means and nothing more. It doesn't matter what it used to mean or what parts of it mean. Others have pointed out numerous words that have changed meaning which I'm guessing you use in their modern meaning. Why? Why do you think some words are okay to misuse compared to their original meanings but others are not?
The cost is $450 million if you simply divide the yearly shuttle budget by the number of launches. It's $1.3 billion if you count everything including r&d. The largest cost of a space shuttle flight are fixed ones however unless you launch many shuttle per year (think a hundred or so) it's not going to be $60 million per year. If you do launch enough shuttle those fixed costs would probably go way up (maintenance, orbit replacement after failures, etc.). So except in people's fantasies the cost is a lot more than $60 million.
It's not misguided. We've evolved to survive in the PRESESNT ecosystem.
Not really, alaska and the sahara desert are very far from the same eco-system and yet we live in both without many differences. We've outpaced evolution a hundred thousand years ago and it's stop mattering to us since then.
On the other hand, our SOCIETY and INFRASTRUCTURE has evolved based on current climates and eco-systems. It'd be costly to change those but that's about it and humans would survive without too many problems.
Not to mention that some of those are set up so they can't access your data themselves, period. Unless it's encrypted and the encryption key never leaves my computer I wouldn't trust any such service.
The point being? If an industry requires a lot of electricity than people buying less of it's products (due to increased costs due to extra taxes) will LOWER electricity use. It's the system working properly assuming the goal is actually to lower electricity usage.
If all the drives in an array write log entries at the same rate than they have non-independent failure rates. You lose either no drives or all drives at the same rate as losing a single drive. Sort of defeats the purpose of RAID but that's a separate issue.
Do you wake up every day and tell your wife that she's become a fat, bitter shrew and that you don't want to be married to her anymore because you want to go find a cute younger woman who isn't a fat, bitter shrew? Do you tell your kids that you're disappointed that they're not as smart or handsome as you'd hoped they'd be? Do you tell your boss he's a fucking idiot and that you think you could do a better job than him? Do you tell you mother that you don't want to visit her or call her because you're too different from her now to have anything to talk about? Do you tell yourself that you're not the hero of the story, just another loser in a world full of losers?
In all those cases the horribly depressed person holding said "secret" will talk about it to every single other person except the one who the "secret" pertains to. Talking to others is generally how people relieve stress and get things off their chest. Usually they only don't tell the person such things relate to because previous attempts to tell them went nowhere.
I do and I'm salaried, well technically I work however long I want to as long as my manager(s) consider I get my work done. It average out to 40 hours or somewhat below that in the long run. Now if I worked 80 hours at some other company then I'd probably make a lot more money but I'm not greedy or masochistic.
Some key ways to accomplish this I think are: -Have skills that make you worth more than a well bred monkey. -Interviews are a two-way process, pick your future workplace carefully. -Money isn't everything and more money will probably involve more expected hours, ask how long you're expected to work to make that money. -Say no to working absurd hours to get things done, the world won't end and next time you'll get less work. If you need to then work less the next week.
You also need to add in maintenance, staff (someone has to manage and test this thing), facilities (you're housing and launching it where?), fuel, insurance and other such costs.
Also there are only something like 20 commercial satellite launches a year and I think that includes geosynchronous orbit ones. Maybe you could double that if you add in government satellites but it's still not much.
Well I have read what you both refer to and I can say that aside from deeper and more beleivable characters and stories in general, Shirow has a distinctly better explanation for his sentient program than Heinlein's handwaving of "it just had so many parts fitted to it". And more interestingly philosophical to boot.
Heinlein was an example of the concept of self-creating AI and how it predates this all by decades. You apparently lack the reading comprehension to understand that it's possible to make separate points in a single post. Heinlein was aiming for a completely different plot and idea than Shirow so trying to compare the two works together shows you have no idea what you're talking about. I never compared the two, see previous point on reading comprehension. Now the Sprawl trilogy is in the same genre as is probably most everything else done in cyberpunk.
As for better explanation, well sometimes authors realize that things can't be well explained. I think Lem poked fun at this when he wrote a lovely but utterly impossible description of how some junk metal gained sentience.
And attacking someone with "you do not understand books with no pictures" shows that a) you have no appreciation of visual arts and b) you have no valid arguments yet want to find some way of attacking someone who does.
No, it means I'm making fun of the original poster's limited reading skill and lack of knowledge of the work in this area.
I beg to differ. The difference between Shirow's version and everyone else is the entity was not created by humans. A data trojan inadvertantly interacted with random data on the web in the same way a molecule interacted with others to form DNA. This is very different from "AI's gone wild" a-la heinlein or t-1000.
What part of "randomly gaining sentience" do you not understand? Heinlein's version simply kept having parts added to it till it simply gained sentience one day from some chance event. It didn't go rogue so I'm guessing you have no idea what I'm talking about either.
and Shirow covers this entire area better as well if you examine the bulk of his work.
So you claim while showing apparently no knowledge of any other work in the field or anything that doesn't have pictures in it. Yeah, I'll consider the value of your opinion to be worth about zero. Likewise anyone who claims an author can cover such an area "entirely" in a single work is an idiot who doesn't understand that certain treatments necessarily contradict other treatments plot wise.
That concept is older than old. Heck, computers randomly gaining sentience was done by Heinlein in 1966 and I doubt he was the first. Going from a single computer gaining sentience to a network of computers does not make it brilliant. Hell, the Sprawl trilogy pretty much created cyberpunk and I think it covered this whole area as well.
The real mark of brilliance in such areas is how you actually treat the subject and what interesting sub-questions you bring to light. There are a hundred different ways to cover some basic ideas and every single one of them can be utterly unique.
You mean like the CO2 that results from making ebook readers and the infrastructure for them? Of course unlike ebook readers paper stores carbon so it may very well result in a net decrease of CO2 in the air.
They're mostly cutting down 25 year old trees that they planted 25 years ago specifically so they can be cut down now. Then they replant and move over to the next lot which was planted 24 years ago and so on.
I'd like my ebook reading solution to not require a power cord to even finish one book on. Just as a comparison the kindle can run for a week straight, wireless off, while that notebook you linked to is lucky to run for three hours.
You're an idiot, don't think I can say it in any nice way. Now let's destroy your incoherent half-rambling argument. More specifically you're a fool who ha no idea about history and thinks the grass was greener a century ago under the lovely coal blackened sky.
Ideas have been stolen since long before the US existed. Hell, some of our most famous inventors stole many of their ideas from others. As for intellectual property, you know why patents exist? So that a poor person can make money from their invention without having it stolen by every person he shows it to. The alternatives aren't generally much better since many inventions can't be properly used by the creator. There's also a lovely list of inventions that got sold for pennies on the dollar because the creator was too poor to market them himself.
So in other words 2G is shit in Europe period since ATT is doing exactly that right now, moving it to a different frequency. Just so happens that not all frequencies are the same and some don't provide as good a signal everywhere as others.
I spent a nice amount of time living in a shitty apartment, with no ac, barely usable heating, no car (in a place where one is really useful), no tv, an absurdly old cell phone and almost never ate at home (no time, unless you count $1 canned soup). I could have afforded much better but my savings were low and I didn't really need such luxuries. That wasn't even the most frugally that I could have lived althrough I did make sure to track all the expenses I had (ie: I wanted to make sure I didn't spend too much on toys and frivolities). I also know people who make less than half what I do in the same area and still pack a decent amount into savings.
I understand that there are some people who really can't afford to put money into savings but I've seen many more who simply don't care to sacrifice their fun. It's also not something you can simply do out of the blue one day (due to habit, obligations, etc.) but rather something you need to do constantly and since the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
I am an adult, and I am in the US. I am innocent of any of the crimes of my government. If it was in my power to stop those crimes from happening, I would have done it. However it was NOT in my power to be able to stop my government from doing any and/or all of the things I found to be wrong and/or offensive. If I do anything more, I'll end up behind bars indefinitely under the Patriot Act.
So you're a hypocrite and a coward? The founding fathers were willing to die, painfully probably, for the freedom and fought against a vastly superior enemy Granted, you're probably just using nonexistent threats to explain your own lack of willpower and laziness so it doesn't really matter.
The country as it is, is not the country our founding fathers intended, in any way.
Yes, the founding father considered the people to be mostly idiots and giving them too much power a disaster waiting to happen. The electoral system exists specifically to go against the will of the people if the people act as idiots. They were supposed to go against the state's wishes if they thought the people or state were making a mistake.
The founding fathers would be terrified at how much power the average person has in voting. That all elected officials were voted for by the people alone would be a shock given how many were simply voted for by other elected officials originally. Quite a few were also perfectly willing to put down any other attempt/rebellion to change the government away from how they thought it should be.
We proved that Revolution works.
No the founding father showed that they were able to successfully modify a government centuries ago. Yes, not make a new government but simply slightly modify their existing one. The people in power mostly stayed in power, states rights were an issue for a reason, since the British were never that directly involved anyway. Most revolutions that actually replace the government collapse afterwards and lead to bloody dictatorships.
So you're judging the enemy based on what systems our military has? Terrorists don't have our fancy guided missiles, communication gear, tanks, UAVs and so on. They can't drop a couple thousand bombs on military targets in some country a thousand miles away. They can, however, blow up a bunch of civilians to try and break the willpower of that nation to continue fighting. We define proper warfare in precisely the way that best suits our current advantages and goals.
The only reason it is wrong today is because we saw what happened and made more accurate weapons systems.
WW2 did have more accurate weapon system however the advantage of using nukes made them a better weapon in the situation. Simply bombing a city conventionally doesn't scare the enemy enough for them to surrender outright.
Now it's only fine to kill a handful of civilians when killing the bad guys.
Mostly it's only okay to kill only a couple dozen civilians due to PR and the resulting counter-productiveness of doing otherwise.
Military goals are whatever the winners writing history claim. For example, dropping a couple nukes and killing over a hundred thousand civilians is apparently perfectly fine if it's shortens the war and prevents a bloody invasion.
A word means exactly what people think it means and nothing more. It doesn't matter what it used to mean or what parts of it mean. Others have pointed out numerous words that have changed meaning which I'm guessing you use in their modern meaning. Why? Why do you think some words are okay to misuse compared to their original meanings but others are not?
The cost is $450 million if you simply divide the yearly shuttle budget by the number of launches. It's $1.3 billion if you count everything including r&d. The largest cost of a space shuttle flight are fixed ones however unless you launch many shuttle per year (think a hundred or so) it's not going to be $60 million per year. If you do launch enough shuttle those fixed costs would probably go way up (maintenance, orbit replacement after failures, etc.). So except in people's fantasies the cost is a lot more than $60 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield/
Small things won't necessarily damage a spacecraft although there's a limit to how much you can protect it and protection does increase the mass.
It's not misguided. We've evolved to survive in the PRESESNT ecosystem.
Not really, alaska and the sahara desert are very far from the same eco-system and yet we live in both without many differences. We've outpaced evolution a hundred thousand years ago and it's stop mattering to us since then.
On the other hand, our SOCIETY and INFRASTRUCTURE has evolved based on current climates and eco-systems. It'd be costly to change those but that's about it and humans would survive without too many problems.
Not to mention that some of those are set up so they can't access your data themselves, period. Unless it's encrypted and the encryption key never leaves my computer I wouldn't trust any such service.
Because Americans know that masters tend to *limit* your choices rather than expand them.
How does a master's limit you? A PhD I could see but a masters? Or are you trying to explain away your own laziness or incompetence?
The point being? If an industry requires a lot of electricity than people buying less of it's products (due to increased costs due to extra taxes) will LOWER electricity use. It's the system working properly assuming the goal is actually to lower electricity usage.
If all the drives in an array write log entries at the same rate than they have non-independent failure rates. You lose either no drives or all drives at the same rate as losing a single drive. Sort of defeats the purpose of RAID but that's a separate issue.
Do you wake up every day and tell your wife that she's become a fat, bitter shrew and that you don't want to be married to her anymore because you want to go find a cute younger woman who isn't a fat, bitter shrew? Do you tell your kids that you're disappointed that they're not as smart or handsome as you'd hoped they'd be? Do you tell your boss he's a fucking idiot and that you think you could do a better job than him? Do you tell you mother that you don't want to visit her or call her because you're too different from her now to have anything to talk about? Do you tell yourself that you're not the hero of the story, just another loser in a world full of losers?
In all those cases the horribly depressed person holding said "secret" will talk about it to every single other person except the one who the "secret" pertains to. Talking to others is generally how people relieve stress and get things off their chest. Usually they only don't tell the person such things relate to because previous attempts to tell them went nowhere.
I do and I'm salaried, well technically I work however long I want to as long as my manager(s) consider I get my work done. It average out to 40 hours or somewhat below that in the long run. Now if I worked 80 hours at some other company then I'd probably make a lot more money but I'm not greedy or masochistic.
Some key ways to accomplish this I think are:
-Have skills that make you worth more than a well bred monkey.
-Interviews are a two-way process, pick your future workplace carefully.
-Money isn't everything and more money will probably involve more expected hours, ask how long you're expected to work to make that money.
-Say no to working absurd hours to get things done, the world won't end and next time you'll get less work. If you need to then work less the next week.
Scores on several scales in this measure have been demonstrated to correlate with job performance across a variety of jobs.
The question is how well does is correlate? And how does it correlate compared to more standard method of hiring?
We're talking about social statistics here, high correlation for them is equivalent to uselessly low correlation for most other fields.
You also need to add in maintenance, staff (someone has to manage and test this thing), facilities (you're housing and launching it where?), fuel, insurance and other such costs.
Also there are only something like 20 commercial satellite launches a year and I think that includes geosynchronous orbit ones. Maybe you could double that if you add in government satellites but it's still not much.
Well I have read what you both refer to and I can say that aside from deeper and more beleivable characters and stories in general, Shirow has a distinctly better explanation for his sentient program than Heinlein's handwaving of "it just had so many parts fitted to it". And more interestingly philosophical to boot.
Heinlein was an example of the concept of self-creating AI and how it predates this all by decades. You apparently lack the reading comprehension to understand that it's possible to make separate points in a single post. Heinlein was aiming for a completely different plot and idea than Shirow so trying to compare the two works together shows you have no idea what you're talking about. I never compared the two, see previous point on reading comprehension. Now the Sprawl trilogy is in the same genre as is probably most everything else done in cyberpunk.
As for better explanation, well sometimes authors realize that things can't be well explained. I think Lem poked fun at this when he wrote a lovely but utterly impossible description of how some junk metal gained sentience.
And attacking someone with "you do not understand books with no pictures" shows that a) you have no appreciation of visual arts and b) you have no valid arguments yet want to find some way of attacking someone who does.
No, it means I'm making fun of the original poster's limited reading skill and lack of knowledge of the work in this area.
I beg to differ. The difference between Shirow's version and everyone else is the entity was not created by humans. A data trojan inadvertantly interacted with random data on the web in the same way a molecule interacted with others to form DNA.
This is very different from "AI's gone wild" a-la heinlein or t-1000.
What part of "randomly gaining sentience" do you not understand? Heinlein's version simply kept having parts added to it till it simply gained sentience one day from some chance event. It didn't go rogue so I'm guessing you have no idea what I'm talking about either.
and Shirow covers this entire area better as well if you examine the bulk of his work.
So you claim while showing apparently no knowledge of any other work in the field or anything that doesn't have pictures in it. Yeah, I'll consider the value of your opinion to be worth about zero. Likewise anyone who claims an author can cover such an area "entirely" in a single work is an idiot who doesn't understand that certain treatments necessarily contradict other treatments plot wise.
That concept is older than old. Heck, computers randomly gaining sentience was done by Heinlein in 1966 and I doubt he was the first. Going from a single computer gaining sentience to a network of computers does not make it brilliant. Hell, the Sprawl trilogy pretty much created cyberpunk and I think it covered this whole area as well.
The real mark of brilliance in such areas is how you actually treat the subject and what interesting sub-questions you bring to light. There are a hundred different ways to cover some basic ideas and every single one of them can be utterly unique.
You mean like the CO2 that results from making ebook readers and the infrastructure for them? Of course unlike ebook readers paper stores carbon so it may very well result in a net decrease of CO2 in the air.
They're mostly cutting down 25 year old trees that they planted 25 years ago specifically so they can be cut down now. Then they replant and move over to the next lot which was planted 24 years ago and so on.
I'd like my ebook reading solution to not require a power cord to even finish one book on. Just as a comparison the kindle can run for a week straight, wireless off, while that notebook you linked to is lucky to run for three hours.
You're an idiot, don't think I can say it in any nice way. Now let's destroy your incoherent half-rambling argument. More specifically you're a fool who ha no idea about history and thinks the grass was greener a century ago under the lovely coal blackened sky.
Ideas have been stolen since long before the US existed. Hell, some of our most famous inventors stole many of their ideas from others. As for intellectual property, you know why patents exist? So that a poor person can make money from their invention without having it stolen by every person he shows it to. The alternatives aren't generally much better since many inventions can't be properly used by the creator. There's also a lovely list of inventions that got sold for pennies on the dollar because the creator was too poor to market them himself.
Depends, how much time do you have to make observations? It's probably rather easy if you got a couple million years to burn.
So in other words 2G is shit in Europe period since ATT is doing exactly that right now, moving it to a different frequency. Just so happens that not all frequencies are the same and some don't provide as good a signal everywhere as others.
I spent a nice amount of time living in a shitty apartment, with no ac, barely usable heating, no car (in a place where one is really useful), no tv, an absurdly old cell phone and almost never ate at home (no time, unless you count $1 canned soup). I could have afforded much better but my savings were low and I didn't really need such luxuries. That wasn't even the most frugally that I could have lived althrough I did make sure to track all the expenses I had (ie: I wanted to make sure I didn't spend too much on toys and frivolities). I also know people who make less than half what I do in the same area and still pack a decent amount into savings.
I understand that there are some people who really can't afford to put money into savings but I've seen many more who simply don't care to sacrifice their fun. It's also not something you can simply do out of the blue one day (due to habit, obligations, etc.) but rather something you need to do constantly and since the beginning.