I already did the same thing with plain old X-windows on a linux *LAPTOP*. Windows is so behind the times. (With X, you can define the two outputs of the video card (VGA out and the LCD screen) to be different screens altogether, and define one to use the laptop's keyboard and laptop's touchpad, and the other to use a usb keyboard and mouse, and violla, localhost:1.0 is user 1 on the laptop, and localhost:2.0 is user 2 using the usb keyboard, mouse, and the external VGA monitor.)
You end poverty by making the economy better, and you do that by making the country less dependant on foriegn aid and more able to participate as an equal in world trade. To that end, technology is highly relevant. You can't fix the problem by trying to first fix poverty and then second trying to improve the technology. If you don't work on the technology, you'll never fix the poverty. As far as why open source is important - it's important because it allows the people of the country to participate as equals in the development of the technology instead of just as consumers of the technology.
Look to the model India used to launch itself onto the world stage and become a real force to be reckoned with. When adapting technology from overseas, it would always opt for trying to buy the right to use the technology behind a product, rather than just buy the rights to use the end-product. It's still got poverty, but it's a lot better off than it once was, because its sucessive governments since independance have frequently pursued a policy of metaphorically wanting to be taught to fish, instead of just being given fish.
(by we, I mean psychologists, who are the primary researchers in intelligence).
Before psychologists can say anything about intelligence that's meaningful, the term has to be rigidly defined. It's more of a linguist's problem right now than a psychologist's problem. When any two different people say "That person is smart", they will be referring to totally different qualities.
And you also have to be careful about the difference between a scientist using an existing term to describe a very narrow concept, versus a scientist actually defining that term. For example, "force" doesn't actually mean "mass times acelleration" just because Newton narrowed it to that meaning for the context of his work. If I say "that man is a force to be reckoned with", or if I say "I'm going to force you to eat a bug", or "My forces are arrayed for battle", I'm using the word 'force' in its original, more generic meaning, which is still in prevelent use.
So, no - psychologists are NOT working on defining intelligence. They are working on narrowing the existing definition down to a specific subset of it's definition, for use in their context.
But if you change the proportions, then it can work. As long as Niven was just making up the ringworld to be any size he felt like, out of some made-up uberstrong material, he could just as easily have scaled the thing so that a rosette of orbiting objects in the middle would have been placed at the right spot relative to the ring so that the day/night cycle was right. Make the ring bigger and it doesn't have to rotate as fast to get the same artificial gravity. Or, make the shadow objects bigger and they block the sun for a wider arc and the day/night cycles would be longer that way.
If they were in free orbit, the shadow objects would have to be round balls, though, not flat panels. (Flat panels would rotate into radial tide-locked positions if not tethered to each other, and thus they'd be edge-on with the sun and not providing much shadow.)
2: Every argument, even the logically wrongheaded ones, are "valid." The logical fallicies are just very easy ones to refute.
False. "Valid" has a very specific meaning in the context of formal logic, and when you use the word "fallacy", you are invoking that context. A valid argument is one in which the conclusion MUST be true if the argument's premeses are true. An invalid argument is one where that's not the case. (even if the premises are true the conclusion could still be false). A 'fallacy' is just the word for an invalid argument of this form.
An argument which is valid, but based on a false premise, is not a fallacy. An argument which is invalid is a fallacy, even if the premises are true, and even if the conclusion is coincidentally true. A fallacy is all about whether or not a logical path exists that necessarily leads from the premises to the conclusion, not about whether the premises or the conclusion themselves actually turn out to be true in the end.
The context was NOT one in which the distinction was brought up. It was "X is allowed" (in general), not "X cannot be disallowed by such-and-such a specific body."
And incidentally, if you'd have actually read my prior posts, you'd have discovered I wasn't the one advocating "the right to do X" does not mean "the right to do X by any means I choose".
Correct only in the trivial sense. You agreed with the person who did state that, without actually restating it yourself.
"Your honour, I'd like you to step into this time machine with me so we can go back in time and look at the event in question and I can show you what was going on..."
Nope. Doesn't work. You need the human judgement call to be present THERE on the scene.
I don't know about you, but when I program, I *do* think visually about it. It's really hard to describe exactly how, but to me, writing in a programming language "feels" more akin to drawing a picture than writing an essay.
I don't think all programmers approach the task using the same kind of intelligence.
I think it would be interesting to check different disciplines against each other, but programming is a bit too all-encompassing to be nailed down to just one kind of intelligence. It's partly language thinking, partly spatial thinking, partly mathematical thinking, a little bit of art, etc...
The speedometer only measures based on multiplying the revolutions of one of the wheels by the presumed circumference of the tire on that wheel. This is only an accurate measure of your speed when all the following conditions are true:
1 - The tires have perfect friction with the road and are not slipping in the slightest.
2 - The tires are inflated to the exact expected level.
3 - The car is going straight forward (the speedometer measures from just one of the wheels, so when the inner wheels of the turn are moving slower than the outer wheels, it will give a false speed.)
In an accident, those might not be true - especially not the first and third ones. If the accident occurred in slippery conditions, the speedometer's readings will be completely wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but totally disconnected from the actual speed of the car. If you spin your wheels tring to move along on ice, the speedometer can claim you're going 40 miles per hour when you're only going about 5, or visa versa, the when your wheels lock up on ice when trying to stop, the speedometer will claim you went to a speed of zero in an instant, when you are actually still sliding along very fast.
You can be pulled over anytime by a cop whenever he sees you driving like a dumbfuck, so what's the difference if it is a blackbox that nails you?
A cop has a brain that understands more than a few simple variables, and five senses that can detect some kinds of extenuating circumstances - like the collision you had to speed up to escape from, or the dying friend in the passenger seat of the car in which you are rushing to the hospital.
Okay, so let's say I plan to travel by firing large bullets at your head and letting Newton's third law push me the other direction. Sure, it'll take a lot of bullets, but with the right kind of gun I could get quite a kick that way and propell myself along on some kind of wheeled cart. Now, do I have the right to do this? Of course not. Now, when you understand that "right to do X" does not mean "right to do X by any means necessary", then you can take your head out of your ass and apologise.
Let's say you OWN a car, it's YOURS. YOU CAN PROVE IT BY SHOWING THE CORRECT PAPERWORK.
You have the RIGHT to do with it as you will.
Your right to do as you please with your belongings ends where other people's belongings (including their bodies) begin. Should you be allowed to park your car sideways in the middle a street, blocking two driving lanes, for example? Nobody got hurt by you doing this. Nobody got damaged by it. It's just that you ruined the usefuleness of everyone else's cars when you did so.
Driving is ONE METHOD of traveling. It is not the only method. Thus freedom to travel is not necessarily violated when you don't have the freedom to drive. We have freedom of speech, but I don't have the right to spray-paint political slogans on buildings even though that would be one method of excercising free speech.
The next time someone advocates a black box that automatically fines you for speeding, ask them this: It would be trivial to put a governing device on a car that prevents the car from going over a top speed equal to the max speed limit in your area (like 65 miles per hour in most US states, for example). So why isn't this being done? Because there are always circumstances which are exceptions to the rule. There can exist situations during which speeding is acceptable because of a larger problem occuring (like driving a friend to the hospital who's going to die in a few minutes if not treated, or trying to get away from a madman chasing you, or temporarily breaking the speed limit for a few seconds to evade someone about to collide into your side.) These circumstances are things you can explain to a human being writing you a ticket, who can observe the exceptional circumstances on his own, but you can't explain them to a machine that's automatically giving you a fine.
The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy. It's perfectly valid - it's just that it's often based on a false premise. If the premise "X always leads to Y" is true, then the conclusion that "If Y is undesirable then X should be undesirable also" is a perfectly valid line of reasoning. The problem is that the premise "X always leads to Y" is often false. It's often an argument that is valid but based on an incorrect premise. The way to defeat a slippery slope argument if you don't agree with it is NOT to just label it a fallacy and leave it at that. It's not a fallacy. The way to attack a slippery slope argument if you don't agree with it is to point out that X does not necessarily lead to Y, and when you do that, you are engaging in the practice of shooting down an argument by shooting down one of it's premises - which is a method that works even on valid arguments. (Which the slippery slope argument IS.)
The way inflation works, there is no difference between earning $18k a year in a depressed economy versus earning $25k a year in a prosperoous one. The worth of money is relative. And going to a flat tax system would affect the economy tremendously.
How is getting paid 18k, of which you get to keep all of it, any better than what would happen with a flat tax, which is to get paid more for the same work, and lose some of it such that you're left with the same 18k. Employers pay what they think workers will accept for the work, and what they think they are willing to spare. If you tax the rich (the employers) more than the poor, then the rich get more stingy and don't pay the poor as much, espeically when they know the poor will accept a small pay because they aren't being taxed.
Better yet, for the ultimate hack, work on this project, doing nothing illegal while you are there, but pay close attention to the code that processes people's tax forms, and look for any buffer overflow bugs in the code that reads the text of the fields on the form (I assume they have some massive OCR system for this, instead of a warehouse full of typists doing it by hand).
Then, next year, submit a very carefully crafted 1040 form on April 15...
"Hey, this 1040 seems a bit odd. It's from a Mr "John Doe __________akjg908t9(%&@(dasaga9agajda(%(@Q@FAA062F root.exe"
If you design a law that effectively makes all forms of an activity illegal, but then get to enforce it selectively only in the cases where you want to, then you have written yourself a blank check that allows you free reign to legally control that activity. So don't for a minute think that it is ignorance or accident that caused this law to make all TV watching illegal - it's probably deliberate.
Make all TV watching illegal by default, and then selectively enforce this when and where you want to, and now you have full legal control over the television market.
That's why I don't respect the argument that "if they can't catch you doing it, then who cares that they made a benign activity illegal? It's no real harm, right?"
popular perception changed to the idea that copyright serves the author. Not so, it always was about the people's interest.
What does the phrase "the people" refer to? The way you use it, it looks like you think it only applies to the consumers of works. Not so. It also applies to the authors of works. "the author" is fully a subset of "the people". Therefore a law that does not serve the author cannot be said to serve the people - because it's leaving out some of "the people" - really important ones that are responsible for the creation of the content in the first place.
I never really understood why there was a need for the shadow squares to be taut with wire. Can't they just be independant objects in orbit - in a rosette?
cross-species sex to seal contracts is not part of normal human behavior
It's a bit hard to judge this based on current norms when current norms don't even include the *possibility* of this in the first place since there aren't hundreds of types of human species around.
Luis is 200 years old. You'd have a hard time finding 200 year old actor to play the part. Now, finding an actor that LOOKS like Louis would be easy. He looks about 20.
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I already did the same thing with plain old X-windows on a linux *LAPTOP*. Windows is so behind the times. (With X, you can define the two outputs of the video card (VGA out and the LCD screen) to be different screens altogether, and define one to use the laptop's keyboard and laptop's touchpad, and the other to use a usb keyboard and mouse, and violla, localhost:1.0 is user 1 on the laptop, and localhost:2.0 is user 2 using the usb keyboard, mouse, and the external VGA monitor.)
You end poverty by making the economy better, and you do that by making the country less dependant on foriegn aid and more able to participate as an equal in world trade. To that end, technology is highly relevant. You can't fix the problem by trying to first fix poverty and then second trying to improve the technology. If you don't work on the technology, you'll never fix the poverty. As far as why open source is important - it's important because it allows the people of the country to participate as equals in the development of the technology instead of just as consumers of the technology.
Look to the model India used to launch itself onto the world stage and become a real force to be reckoned with. When adapting technology from overseas, it would always opt for trying to buy the right to use the technology behind a product, rather than just buy the rights to use the end-product. It's still got poverty, but it's a lot better off than it once was, because its sucessive governments since independance have frequently pursued a policy of metaphorically wanting to be taught to fish, instead of just being given fish.
(by we, I mean psychologists, who are the primary researchers in intelligence).
Before psychologists can say anything about intelligence that's meaningful, the term has to be rigidly defined. It's more of a linguist's problem right now than a psychologist's problem. When any two different people say "That person is smart", they will be referring to totally different qualities.
And you also have to be careful about the difference between a scientist using an existing term to describe a very narrow concept, versus a scientist actually defining that term. For example, "force" doesn't actually mean "mass times acelleration" just because Newton narrowed it to that meaning for the context of his work. If I say "that man is a force to be reckoned with", or if I say "I'm going to force you to eat a bug", or "My forces are arrayed for battle", I'm using the word 'force' in its original, more generic meaning, which is still in prevelent use.
So, no - psychologists are NOT working on defining intelligence. They are working on narrowing the existing definition down to a specific subset of it's definition, for use in their context.
I didn't say "when I code" - I said "when I program". Programming is the combination of designing and coding, taken together.
The book SAID he looked that young - in the beginning part where it's describing his birthday party.
But if you change the proportions, then it can work. As long as Niven was just making up the ringworld to be any size he felt like, out of some made-up uberstrong material, he could just as easily have scaled the thing so that a rosette of orbiting objects in the middle would have been placed at the right spot relative to the ring so that the day/night cycle was right. Make the ring bigger and it doesn't have to rotate as fast to get the same artificial gravity. Or, make the shadow objects bigger and they block the sun for a wider arc and the day/night cycles would be longer that way.
If they were in free orbit, the shadow objects would have to be round balls, though, not flat panels. (Flat panels would rotate into radial tide-locked positions if not tethered to each other, and thus they'd be edge-on with the sun and not providing much shadow.)
2: Every argument, even the logically wrongheaded ones, are "valid." The logical fallicies are just very easy ones to refute.
False. "Valid" has a very specific meaning in the context of formal logic, and when you use the word "fallacy", you are invoking that context. A valid argument is one in which the conclusion MUST be true if the argument's premeses are true. An invalid argument is one where that's not the case. (even if the premises are true the conclusion could still be false). A 'fallacy' is just the word for an invalid argument of this form.
An argument which is valid, but based on a false premise, is not a fallacy. An argument which is invalid is a fallacy, even if the premises are true, and even if the conclusion is coincidentally true. A fallacy is all about whether or not a logical path exists that necessarily leads from the premises to the conclusion, not about whether the premises or the conclusion themselves actually turn out to be true in the end.
Please learn about the Federal-State distinction.
The context was NOT one in which the distinction was brought up. It was "X is allowed" (in general), not "X cannot be disallowed by such-and-such a specific body."
And incidentally, if you'd have actually read my prior posts, you'd have discovered I wasn't the one advocating "the right to do X" does not mean "the right to do X by any means I choose".
Correct only in the trivial sense. You agreed with the person who did state that, without actually restating it yourself.
"Your honour, I'd like you to step into this time machine with me so we can go back in time and look at the event in question and I can show you what was going on..."
Nope. Doesn't work. You need the human judgement call to be present THERE on the scene.
I don't know about you, but when I program, I *do* think visually about it. It's really hard to describe exactly how, but to me, writing in a programming language "feels" more akin to drawing a picture than writing an essay.
I don't think all programmers approach the task using the same kind of intelligence.
I think it would be interesting to check different disciplines against each other, but programming is a bit too all-encompassing to be nailed down to just one kind of intelligence. It's partly language thinking, partly spatial thinking, partly mathematical thinking, a little bit of art, etc...
The speedometer only measures based on multiplying the revolutions of one of the wheels by the presumed circumference of the tire on that wheel. This is only an accurate measure of your speed when all the following conditions are true:
1 - The tires have perfect friction with the road and are not slipping in the slightest.
2 - The tires are inflated to the exact expected level.
3 - The car is going straight forward (the speedometer measures from just one of the wheels, so when the inner wheels of the turn are moving slower than the outer wheels, it will give a false speed.)
In an accident, those might not be true - especially not the first and third ones. If the accident occurred in slippery conditions, the speedometer's readings will be completely wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but totally disconnected from the actual speed of the car. If you spin your wheels tring to move along on ice, the speedometer can claim you're going 40 miles per hour when you're only going about 5, or visa versa, the when your wheels lock up on ice when trying to stop, the speedometer will claim you went to a speed of zero in an instant, when you are actually still sliding along very fast.
You can be pulled over anytime by a cop whenever he sees you driving like a dumbfuck, so what's the difference if it is a blackbox that nails you?
A cop has a brain that understands more than a few simple variables, and five senses that can detect some kinds of extenuating circumstances - like the collision you had to speed up to escape from, or the dying friend in the passenger seat of the car in which you are rushing to the hospital.
Okay, so let's say I plan to travel by firing large bullets at your head and letting Newton's third law push me the other direction. Sure, it'll take a lot of bullets, but with the right kind of gun I could get quite a kick that way and propell myself along on some kind of wheeled cart. Now, do I have the right to do this? Of course not. Now, when you understand that "right to do X" does not mean "right to do X by any means necessary", then you can take your head out of your ass and apologise.
Let's say you OWN a car, it's YOURS. YOU CAN PROVE IT BY SHOWING THE CORRECT PAPERWORK.
You have the RIGHT to do with it as you will.
Your right to do as you please with your belongings ends where other people's belongings (including their bodies) begin. Should you be allowed to park your car sideways in the middle a street, blocking two driving lanes, for example? Nobody got hurt by you doing this. Nobody got damaged by it. It's just that you ruined the usefuleness of everyone else's cars when you did so.
Driving is ONE METHOD of traveling. It is not the only method. Thus freedom to travel is not necessarily violated when you don't have the freedom to drive. We have freedom of speech, but I don't have the right to spray-paint political slogans on buildings even though that would be one method of excercising free speech.
The next time someone advocates a black box that automatically fines you for speeding, ask them this: It would be trivial to put a governing device on a car that prevents the car from going over a top speed equal to the max speed limit in your area (like 65 miles per hour in most US states, for example). So why isn't this being done? Because there are always circumstances which are exceptions to the rule. There can exist situations during which speeding is acceptable because of a larger problem occuring (like driving a friend to the hospital who's going to die in a few minutes if not treated, or trying to get away from a madman chasing you, or temporarily breaking the speed limit for a few seconds to evade someone about to collide into your side.) These circumstances are things you can explain to a human being writing you a ticket, who can observe the exceptional circumstances on his own, but you can't explain them to a machine that's automatically giving you a fine.
The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy. It's perfectly valid - it's just that it's often based on a false premise. If the premise "X always leads to Y" is true, then the conclusion that "If Y is undesirable then X should be undesirable also" is a perfectly valid line of reasoning. The problem is that the premise "X always leads to Y" is often false. It's often an argument that is valid but based on an incorrect premise. The way to defeat a slippery slope argument if you don't agree with it is NOT to just label it a fallacy and leave it at that. It's not a fallacy. The way to attack a slippery slope argument if you don't agree with it is to point out that X does not necessarily lead to Y, and when you do that, you are engaging in the practice of shooting down an argument by shooting down one of it's premises - which is a method that works even on valid arguments. (Which the slippery slope argument IS.)
"flat tax" means flat percentage. It does not mean a constant value, as your $10,000 example is.
The way inflation works, there is no difference between earning $18k a year in a depressed economy versus earning $25k a year in a prosperoous one. The worth of money is relative. And going to a flat tax system would affect the economy tremendously.
How is getting paid 18k, of which you get to keep all of it, any better than what would happen with a flat tax, which is to get paid more for the same work, and lose some of it such that you're left with the same 18k. Employers pay what they think workers will accept for the work, and what they think they are willing to spare. If you tax the rich (the employers) more than the poor, then the rich get more stingy and don't pay the poor as much, espeically when they know the poor will accept a small pay because they aren't being taxed.
Better yet, for the ultimate hack, work on this project, doing nothing illegal while you are there, but pay close attention to the code that processes people's tax forms, and look for any buffer overflow bugs in the code that reads the text of the fields on the form (I assume they have some massive OCR system for this, instead of a warehouse full of typists doing it by hand).
F root.exe"
Then, next year, submit a very carefully crafted 1040 form on April 15...
"Hey, this 1040 seems a bit odd. It's from a Mr "John Doe __________akjg908t9(%&@(dasaga9agajda(%(@Q@FAA062
If you design a law that effectively makes all forms of an activity illegal, but then get to enforce it selectively only in the cases where you want to, then you have written yourself a blank check that allows you free reign to legally control that activity. So don't for a minute think that it is ignorance or accident that caused this law to make all TV watching illegal - it's probably deliberate.
Make all TV watching illegal by default, and then selectively enforce this when and where you want to, and now you have full legal control over the television market.
That's why I don't respect the argument that "if they can't catch you doing it, then who cares that they made a benign activity illegal? It's no real harm, right?"
popular perception changed to the idea that copyright serves the author. Not so, it always was about the people's interest.
What does the phrase "the people" refer to? The way you use it, it looks like you think it only applies to the consumers of works. Not so. It also applies to the authors of works. "the author" is fully a subset of "the people". Therefore a law that does not serve the author cannot be said to serve the people - because it's leaving out some of "the people" - really important ones that are responsible for the creation of the content in the first place.
I never really understood why there was a need for the shadow squares to be taut with wire. Can't they just be independant objects in orbit - in a rosette?
cross-species sex to seal contracts is not part of normal human behavior
It's a bit hard to judge this based on current norms when current norms don't even include the *possibility* of this in the first place since there aren't hundreds of types of human species around.
Luis is 200 years old. You'd have a hard time finding 200 year old actor to play the part. Now, finding an actor that LOOKS like Louis would be easy. He looks about 20.