IIRC, there was so much radiation in that chamber to *melt* the person in there, so I doubt even Fawkes would have survived. In this case it's less about physiological hardiness as it is about molecular cohesion.
I am responsible for policing my own. Just how might I have done that?
Actually, you're doing it now. The public outrage and media frenzy have done a great job policing the system, leading to resignations and dismissals of the responsible, and ensuring that in future, employees of the child protection services will be that much more careful about the lives they are in part responsible for.
Don't underestimate the power of talking about things with people - even if you're not politically active.
xdim,ydim = map(int,__import__("sys").argv[1:]) def recurse((position, visited)):
map(recurse,[(t,visited+[t]) for t in (lambda t: [ (t[0]+2, t[1]+1), (t[0]+2, t[1]-1), (t[0]-2, t[1]+1), (t[0]-2, t[1]-1), (t[0]-1, t[1]+2), (t[0]-1, t[1]-2),(t[0]+1, t[1]+2),(t[0]+1, t[1]-2)])(position) if 0<=t[0]<xdim and 0<=t[1]<ydim and t not in visited])
if len(visited) == xdim*ydim:
print "success: %s"%str(visited).strip("[]")
__import__("sys").exit() recurse(((0,0),[(0,0)]))
Actually, I withdraw the "so long as it is black" line... it would appear that they were initially available in different colors, until the assembly line forced them to stick with one. Nevertheless, from that I guess there were Model-Ts in other colors around.
What is this obsession with calling P2P "stealing"? Not every act of downloading files is stealing. Not a lawyer here, but surely stealing implies denying someone something, like an item or a sale. If no one is putting something on sale, then downloading shouldn't be stealing. Copyright infringement perhaps. Maybe ask the author for permission. Who knows, he might send you the text.
The Model T analogy is flawed on multiple levels. The question is more whether or not it's ok build one yourself using someone else's as a model, given they're no longer in production. (or if you have to resort to buying a used one... or if you have to buy a used one before you can build a copy yourself)
Oh and they were available in several colors from the beginning, so the whole "any color so long as it is black" line is a bit of a myth.
The thinking always goes "If I feed a certain set of inputs into the machine that is your brain and can trace the paths of your decision making with completely deterministic rules, that means that at no point did you exercise free will, and given the same input you would come to the same decision"
Well, I think that the pattern of my logic, how the paths of my mind work is the important thing here, not that you can trace each individual strand through to its logical conclusion.
It's the picture that counts, not the ink you draw it in.
I am perfectly capable of deciding for myself what I want on my iPhone, or any other computing device I own.
Apple cannot reliably tell the difference between you and someone who would install malware that threatens that particular user, the network, or the reputation of the iPhone's safety (and thus apple), so they don't really have much of a choice. If you think you know better then them and you're smart enough to work around their restrictions, no problem. But they can't endorse it.
It's a different thing with ringtones and such - Verizon forcing you to buy their media is just an irritating money making scheme.
And this certainly isn't there to make sure they can blacklist any iphone breakout software that gets into the wild.
God no!
Apple cares about their customers! *Cough Cough Cough*
Well, considering there already is breakout software in the wild and it has nothing to do with the apple store... No, this looks like another line of defence in case malware somehow makes it past their reviewing process.
And, you know what? I'm in favour of it. I don't want my phone making unsolicited phonecalls.
So are you saying that the intelligence necessary for humans to make decisions comes from external sources, i.e. god?
I'm not saying google is alive, but why shouldn't the intricately layered complexities of information that make up the internet form "the world" for a new kind of life to evolve in?
Life in the "real world" evolved on a pattern-of-matter basis, life on the internet might evolve on a pattern-of-information basis. Who's to say true intelligence isn't an early step along the way?
What, they should have used Rankine? Well, in the context, it makes about as much sense as the Kelvin scale... an arbitrary step size with absolute zero being the zero point. Sounds sensible to me! Probably would be better than Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Alas, Kelvin got there ten years earlier, so it's the Celsius scale's step size for the accepted absolute scale. Still a bit arbitrary.
Perhaps we should come up with a new scale that encompasses absolute zero and a very well defined temperature that makes sense on an absolute/astronomical level?
Perhaps a logarithmic scale? Any ideas?
Then we should use Degrees Delisle, which has the added bonus of going backwards. Body temperature is at 95 Delisle. The sun (ours, that is) is at negative several thousand degrees Delisle.
Actually - there may be another ethical implication from using robot soldiers - it moves blame away entirely from the troops to the people giving the orders. There are examples in history of atrocities committed where the soldiers gave the excuse that they were only following orders, and their officers gave the excuse that they were only giving orders, and that the actual ethical responsibility for the acts remained with the people in the field. A robot, by definition, has no intent, which means that the entire blame and responsibility rests with the people giving the orders. This might well change things a bit.
our galaxy is about 100000 light years across, which is about a quintillion kilometers (10^18). On the other hand there are about 200 billion stars in it. At the rate that we're finding planets despite only being able to see a tiny fraction of these stars clearly enough, we probably wouldn't even have to go all that far to find some semblance of life - and the first good candidate is only 20 light years away!
There's one thing to be said for the FPS engine - it doesn't distance you from the character. It's the difference between "Oh crap - my guy is being shot at!" and "Oh crap - I'm being shot at!"
I too liked the old game, but I think what made it great had more to do with the ambience, the mood of it, the feel of the environment, the people, than with the engine. Most of all, it had a very strong theme of contrast and conflict - death and survival, destruction and rebuilding, gloom and hope - that started from the first few seconds of the intro movie and continued right to the end. I am more worried about that particular aspect making it to the new game than I am with the precise format of it. Fallout 3 will probably be fun, but fallout 2 was art.
Anyway, it deserves a fair try, if only because it could turn out to be amazing.
I find it amazing that even in the face of such horrible events, human nature is such that it can find humor. Because this is the thing: Life isn't terrible. Yes, very bad things happen. People do horrible things. Always have, always will. This one is worse than many. But we cope, and continue, and manage to find beauty and companionship and humor despite it all, and that's amazing.
So, thank you for your humor. I think that it is a necessity in tragedy, a good grounding to prevent us from getting wrapped up in our mourning, or at least to prevent us from being swept away in wave after wave of media-induced panic - they tend to not report the good things, you have to use your own eyes for that.
I admit that "That's ridiculous" was a bad choice of words... perhaps I should have phrased it better... "I disagree strongly with this" or something akin to that. But just because I prepended my argument with it doesn't mean you should reject the argument itself. In any case, that first bit wasn't meant to be an argument, just a general statement of disapproval (To elaborate, I disapprove of using a column that doesn't cite its sources as a source. Considering Scott Adams occasionally makes fun of people who regard anecdotal evidence as a valid authority, perhaps he should be less quick to use it himself. I disapprove of the thought that it doesn't matter if you alter someone's brain to change their desires. And will is not entirely free if a parasite is altering your mind - that's coercion.)
Before I go back to the main conversation, I would like to argue that evolution is a fairly clear concept, and probably the one part of the sciences that we scientists understand best. I can't tell you why there is such a thing as gravity, or where the other fundamental forces come from, or what the deal with quarks is, but I can tell you in very clear terms the logic of evolution. The reason people have a problem with evolution is not that it's counter intuitive but rather that it disagrees with what their foremost authority says on the subject - and they trust this authority more than they trust their capacity of reasoning. (Which, incidentally, they consider to be the gift of this infallible authority... I don't understand that part)
The other two are conceptually difficult, simply because we generally have no experience at the scales we're talking about, where the universe behaves in a fundamentally different way. I suppose one could argue that our motivations behave differently from what we're used to if you consider the scale to be the inner workings of the brain.
But when you go down that far you run into problems of definition. I consider the following an entity with free will:
A complex computer (brain) in control of a body creates random scenarios of potential outcomes of actions, evaluates the amount of benefit derived from each according to a complex set of rules consisting of a hereditary and learned instruction set, picks one of the actions that it predicts to result in the highest benefit and implements it, observes the outcome of the action and based on the amount of real benefit the action brings, and how well the scenario matches reality, it modifies both the learned instruction set for evaluating benefit and the circuitry by which it functions, working as a complete unit, without the interference of another entity to whom this definition applies.
Now one can argue that there are no random variables and so the scenarios are predefined, but that is wrong - there are random variables. (Quantum Mechanics contains true random aspects) Personally, I don't think that matters, pseudo random variables are enough for me. (A comptibilist standpoint - I think of will as no longer free if an outside entity alters it)
Still, we are machines, but we are not bound by causal determinism. (Given identical initial conditions, the same thing does not have to happen twice. So say the laws of physics.). Logical determinism is just plain silly (I rolled a three with my die. Therefore, it must have been true that I would roll a three before I rolled it. Yeeesss.... But if there is absolutely no method of predicting what you roll beforehand, that's good enough for me. Or to put it another way, assume the universe is in a certain state, the state of the universe can't be different. Technically true, but a futile argument that you cannot justify anything with.) That is why I consider us to have free will.
Free will is an illusion [typepad.com] anyway, even in humans.
That's ridiculous. The point of free will is not how you arrive at a decision or how you rationalise it, but rather that you can make the decisions at all. It doesn't matter how your brain goes about it.
What matters is that there is a process in the brain that makes decisions, and they're messing with it.
And free will and consciousness being illusions are just catchphrases. In order to be subject to an illusion, you need consciousness in the first place, and I don't think that consciousness could exist without the capacity of controlling your thoughts (free-will style).
...I don't think I've ever seen so many ad hominem attacks against a non hominem.;)
"Ad hominem" is when you criticise the person making an argument rather then the argument itself. Vista isn't making arguments.
What the writer does is compare the characters of the two operating systems. Saying one is worse than the other isn't ad hominem, it's a conlusion based on arguments.
Incidentally,
Saying that OSX is better than Vista because OSX hasn't changed its UI much since 2001 (at least regarding buttons) and Vista has changed the look of the window bar buttons? That's just stupid.
That's part Straw Man, part ad hominem, part oversimplification, as well as an appeal to ridicule. It's an easily refuted misrepresentation of the other man's position (straw man), and you're calling him stupid for a particular argument, rather than saying why the argument is wrong.
Spending most of the first page of the article beating the dead horse of Cairo promises regarding WinFS and other things which have nothing to do with comparing Vista to OSX?
Well, he did say that Microsoft had to make sure that Vista is a monumental release, and removing promised features made it less monumental. So that was an apt point. Incidentally, it wasn't "most of the first page" as you say, but rather one sentence. Here's the entirety of it: "They also chopped quite a few features out of Vista, most notably the WinFS object-based data storage and management system, which had been promised in various forms since the first blurbs about Cairo in the early 1990s". That's it! It's more of a side note. So I would say your argument is another straw man.
I'd much rather read an article by a Linux or Windows fanboy bashing each other unapologetically than listen to that author say "I'm going to compare A and B" and then spend half their time talking about C.
But first, I'm curious, what's C in this analogy? If it's that Cairo reference again, then this is an Unrepresentative Sample fallacy, because most of the article does directly compare the current features of the two operating systems. Oh, and dismissing the article by calling the author in some way worse than linux/windows fanboys is very much ad hominem. (Technically, I'm guilty of a fallacy in that last sentence. Spot it?)
I don't know if that article was biased. Maybe, maybe not. But these statements do not support the case for bias.
being in compliance with the majority of areas audited means you failed to comply with all of them. I mean, Charles Manson was in compliance with most of the laws of the time...
And if copy a song from a friend, you fail to comply with all the laws. That doesn't make you a serial killer. If you read the article, you will see what the code of conduct violations were, and how they were/are being addressed.
Surely any decent text editor has the option to convert all to caps. You can edit the document normally, and convert case later. Not only will this make your most recent changes stand out a lot before you save, it should make writing and reading easier and more pleasant.
Plus it wont seem like you're shouting at the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, there was so much radiation in that chamber to *melt* the person in there, so I doubt even Fawkes would have survived. In this case it's less about physiological hardiness as it is about molecular cohesion.
I am responsible for policing my own. Just how might I have done that?
Actually, you're doing it now. The public outrage and media frenzy have done a great job policing the system, leading to resignations and dismissals of the responsible, and ensuring that in future, employees of the child protection services will be that much more careful about the lives they are in part responsible for. Don't underestimate the power of talking about things with people - even if you're not politically active.
xdim,ydim = map(int,__import__("sys").argv[1:])
def recurse((position, visited)):
map(recurse,[(t,visited+[t]) for t in (lambda t: [ (t[0]+2, t[1]+1), (t[0]+2, t[1]-1), (t[0]-2, t[1]+1), (t[0]-2, t[1]-1), (t[0]-1, t[1]+2), (t[0]-1, t[1]-2),(t[0]+1, t[1]+2),(t[0]+1, t[1]-2)])(position) if 0<=t[0]<xdim and 0<=t[1]<ydim and t not in visited])
if len(visited) == xdim*ydim:
print "success: %s"%str(visited).strip("[]")
__import__("sys").exit()
recurse(((0,0),[(0,0)]))
example:
python chess.py 5 5
success: (0, 0), (2, 1), (4, 2), (3, 4), (1, 3), (0, 1), (2, 2), (3, 0), (1, 1), (0, 3), (2, 4), (4, 3), (3, 1), (1, 0), (0, 2), (1, 4), (3, 3), (4, 1), (2, 0), (1, 2), (0, 4), (2, 3), (4, 4), (3, 2), (4, 0)
comment out line 6 to make it 6 lines of python that find all possible tours from (0,0)
Actually, I withdraw the "so long as it is black" line... it would appear that they were initially available in different colors, until the assembly line forced them to stick with one. Nevertheless, from that I guess there were Model-Ts in other colors around.
What is this obsession with calling P2P "stealing"? Not every act of downloading files is stealing. Not a lawyer here, but surely stealing implies denying someone something, like an item or a sale. If no one is putting something on sale, then downloading shouldn't be stealing. Copyright infringement perhaps. Maybe ask the author for permission. Who knows, he might send you the text.
The Model T analogy is flawed on multiple levels. The question is more whether or not it's ok build one yourself using someone else's as a model, given they're no longer in production. (or if you have to resort to buying a used one... or if you have to buy a used one before you can build a copy yourself)
Oh and they were available in several colors from the beginning, so the whole "any color so long as it is black" line is a bit of a myth.
He blew it. He sould at least have used a carbon-arc and hundreds of mirrors and lenses.
Would you find solace in the fact that the LEDs are always illuminated, and only let light through when slits in a wheel align?
Thank you.
The thinking always goes "If I feed a certain set of inputs into the machine that is your brain and can trace the paths of your decision making with completely deterministic rules, that means that at no point did you exercise free will, and given the same input you would come to the same decision"
Well, I think that the pattern of my logic, how the paths of my mind work is the important thing here, not that you can trace each individual strand through to its logical conclusion.
It's the picture that counts, not the ink you draw it in.
I am perfectly capable of deciding for myself what I want on my iPhone, or any other computing device I own.
Apple cannot reliably tell the difference between you and someone who would install malware that threatens that particular user, the network, or the reputation of the iPhone's safety (and thus apple), so they don't really have much of a choice. If you think you know better then them and you're smart enough to work around their restrictions, no problem. But they can't endorse it.
It's a different thing with ringtones and such - Verizon forcing you to buy their media is just an irritating money making scheme.
And this certainly isn't there to make sure they can blacklist any iphone breakout software that gets into the wild. God no! Apple cares about their customers! *Cough Cough Cough*
Well, considering there already is breakout software in the wild and it has nothing to do with the apple store... No, this looks like another line of defence in case malware somehow makes it past their reviewing process.
And, you know what? I'm in favour of it. I don't want my phone making unsolicited phonecalls.
So are you saying that the intelligence necessary for humans to make decisions comes from external sources, i.e. god?
I'm not saying google is alive, but why shouldn't the intricately layered complexities of information that make up the internet form "the world" for a new kind of life to evolve in?
Life in the "real world" evolved on a pattern-of-matter basis, life on the internet might evolve on a pattern-of-information basis. Who's to say true intelligence isn't an early step along the way?
Then we should use Degrees Delisle, which has the added bonus of going backwards. Body temperature is at 95 Delisle. The sun (ours, that is) is at negative several thousand degrees Delisle.
Fahrenheit is a rather silly temperature scale for stars, no?
Actually - there may be another ethical implication from using robot soldiers - it moves blame away entirely from the troops to the people giving the orders. There are examples in history of atrocities committed where the soldiers gave the excuse that they were only following orders, and their officers gave the excuse that they were only giving orders, and that the actual ethical responsibility for the acts remained with the people in the field. A robot, by definition, has no intent, which means that the entire blame and responsibility rests with the people giving the orders. This might well change things a bit.
There's one thing to be said for the FPS engine - it doesn't distance you from the character.
It's the difference between "Oh crap - my guy is being shot at!" and "Oh crap - I'm being shot at!"
I too liked the old game, but I think what made it great had more to do with the ambience, the mood of it, the feel of the environment, the people, than with the engine. Most of all, it had a very strong theme of contrast and conflict - death and survival, destruction and rebuilding, gloom and hope - that started from the first few seconds of the intro movie and continued right to the end. I am more worried about that particular aspect making it to the new game than I am with the precise format of it. Fallout 3 will probably be fun, but fallout 2 was art.
Anyway, it deserves a fair try, if only because it could turn out to be amazing.
I find it amazing that even in the face of such horrible events, human nature is such that it can find humor.
Because this is the thing: Life isn't terrible. Yes, very bad things happen. People do horrible things. Always have, always will. This one is worse than many. But we cope, and continue, and manage to find beauty and companionship and humor despite it all, and that's amazing.
So, thank you for your humor. I think that it is a necessity in tragedy, a good grounding to prevent us from getting wrapped up in our mourning, or at least to prevent us from being swept away in wave after wave of media-induced panic - they tend to not report the good things, you have to use your own eyes for that.
The parent comment is the most insightful comment I've seen in a long while. Where are those points when you need them?
Apologies for the length of this post.
I admit that "That's ridiculous" was a bad choice of words... perhaps I should have phrased it better... "I disagree strongly with this" or something akin to that. But just because I prepended my argument with it doesn't mean you should reject the argument itself. In any case, that first bit wasn't meant to be an argument, just a general statement of disapproval (To elaborate, I disapprove of using a column that doesn't cite its sources as a source. Considering Scott Adams occasionally makes fun of people who regard anecdotal evidence as a valid authority, perhaps he should be less quick to use it himself. I disapprove of the thought that it doesn't matter if you alter someone's brain to change their desires. And will is not entirely free if a parasite is altering your mind - that's coercion.)
Before I go back to the main conversation, I would like to argue that evolution is a fairly clear concept, and probably the one part of the sciences that we scientists understand best. I can't tell you why there is such a thing as gravity, or where the other fundamental forces come from, or what the deal with quarks is, but I can tell you in very clear terms the logic of evolution.
The reason people have a problem with evolution is not that it's counter intuitive but rather that it disagrees with what their foremost authority says on the subject - and they trust this authority more than they trust their capacity of reasoning. (Which, incidentally, they consider to be the gift of this infallible authority... I don't understand that part)
The other two are conceptually difficult, simply because we generally have no experience at the scales we're talking about, where the universe behaves in a fundamentally different way. I suppose one could argue that our motivations behave differently from what we're used to if you consider the scale to be the inner workings of the brain.
But when you go down that far you run into problems of definition. I consider the following an entity with free will:
A complex computer (brain) in control of a body creates random scenarios of potential outcomes of actions, evaluates the amount of benefit derived from each according to a complex set of rules consisting of a hereditary and learned instruction set, picks one of the actions that it predicts to result in the highest benefit and implements it, observes the outcome of the action and based on the amount of real benefit the action brings, and how well the scenario matches reality, it modifies both the learned instruction set for evaluating benefit and the circuitry by which it functions, working as a complete unit, without the interference of another entity to whom this definition applies.
Now one can argue that there are no random variables and so the scenarios are predefined, but that is wrong - there are random variables. (Quantum Mechanics contains true random aspects) Personally, I don't think that matters, pseudo random variables are enough for me. (A comptibilist standpoint - I think of will as no longer free if an outside entity alters it)
Still, we are machines, but we are not bound by causal determinism. (Given identical initial conditions, the same thing does not have to happen twice. So say the laws of physics.). Logical determinism is just plain silly (I rolled a three with my die. Therefore, it must have been true that I would roll a three before I rolled it. Yeeesss.... But if there is absolutely no method of predicting what you roll beforehand, that's good enough for me. Or to put it another way, assume the universe is in a certain state, the state of the universe can't be different. Technically true, but a futile argument that you cannot justify anything with.) That is why I consider us to have free will.
That's ridiculous. The point of free will is not how you arrive at a decision or how you rationalise it, but rather that you can make the decisions at all. It doesn't matter how your brain goes about it.
What matters is that there is a process in the brain that makes decisions, and they're messing with it.
And free will and consciousness being illusions are just catchphrases. In order to be subject to an illusion, you need consciousness in the first place, and I don't think that consciousness could exist without the capacity of controlling your thoughts (free-will style).
What the writer does is compare the characters of the two operating systems. Saying one is worse than the other isn't ad hominem, it's a conlusion based on arguments.
Incidentally, That's part Straw Man, part ad hominem, part oversimplification, as well as an appeal to ridicule. It's an easily refuted misrepresentation of the other man's position (straw man), and you're calling him stupid for a particular argument, rather than saying why the argument is wrong.
Well, he did say that Microsoft had to make sure that Vista is a monumental release, and removing promised features made it less monumental. So that was an apt point. Incidentally, it wasn't "most of the first page" as you say, but rather one sentence. Here's the entirety of it: "They also chopped quite a few features out of Vista, most notably the WinFS object-based data storage and management system, which had been promised in various forms since the first blurbs about Cairo in the early 1990s". That's it! It's more of a side note. So I would say your argument is another straw man.
But first, I'm curious, what's C in this analogy? If it's that Cairo reference again, then this is an Unrepresentative Sample fallacy, because most of the article does directly compare the current features of the two operating systems. Oh, and dismissing the article by calling the author in some way worse than linux/windows fanboys is very much ad hominem. (Technically, I'm guilty of a fallacy in that last sentence. Spot it?)
I don't know if that article was biased. Maybe, maybe not. But these statements do not support the case for bias.
And if copy a song from a friend, you fail to comply with all the laws. That doesn't make you a serial killer. If you read the article, you will see what the code of conduct violations were, and how they were/are being addressed.
Surely any decent text editor has the option to convert all to caps. You can edit the document normally, and convert case later. Not only will this make your most recent changes stand out a lot before you save, it should make writing and reading easier and more pleasant.
Plus it wont seem like you're shouting at the screen.
ERROR: Does Not Commute
Who wants to change batteries during a movie? Yes, you can buy an extra battery, but if you have to, it's clearly a design flaw.