Every dollar paid in taxes is the dollar not paid in salary. Just saying.
That's not how tax incidence works. If payroll taxes are lowered but the elasticity of demand in the labor market is high, employers simply lower wages by the amount taxes are lowered. Labor demand is driven by take-home pay, not the top-line salary figure, and employers will pocket any change as long as jobs are tight and people are willing to work for the same take-home pay.
Also that's not how net transfers work; people who make $25k a year will have a withholding but will probably get the whole balance back, at least on their Federal return. People who make $1 million a year probably aren't making salary at all, and are deriving significant income from economic rents, which can be taxed at 100% without deadweight loss. (Most people would say this is immoral, economic efficiency notwithstanding.)
Empirical econometric studies of direct government transfers, "welfare," are generally favorable, at least compared to other popular alternatives, such as "nothing." Critics generally don't attack welfare with "scientific evidence," they attack it on moral and anecdotal grounds.
They just started that product line. Microsoft looks at the long-term more than other companies.
As opposed to, like, Starbucks, or Daimler, or Apple, who, in their obvious obsession with quarterly profits, charge premium profits for every good sold from day one, and thus all quickly went out of business.
Think of the Chinese Room this way: let's say there's two guys who don't speak Chinese, and they work no the rules together. Doesn't change things, right? Now lets say there's a billion people in the Chinese room. None of them speak Chinese, so by Searle's standards the Chinese Room isn't "intelligent," but what's the difference between a billion people in a room working out an algorithm for a language they don't understand, and a billion neurons? Neurons don't know Chinese, but we unquestionably consider a billion neurons intelligent, when they're operating in the skull of an ape descendent.
When I read a novel I don't hear the words in my head or even notice them on the paper. I see, hear, and feel the characters and what they do and say.
The specification of a "character" is not in the book, you're bringing it in from context; further, you don't just experience the events of the book by proxy, you reflect on them and have novel thoughts contingent on the words. I don't think its clear we can distinguish between the "decoding" of the words in your brain and the act of understanding. We can name them, we can make abstract assertions about the two acts as if they were severable, but we have no empirical evidence that they're discrete phenomena.
I don't accept the Chinese Room argument, mainly because it's not realistic. You can open the door to the Chinese Room and discover the guy who can't speak Chinese; you can never truly "open" a computational oracle, or a mind. If something quacks like an intelligence it is, insofar as we don't know how it works -- the only useful definition of "intelligence: is "that which behaves rationally but we don't know how." The moment we discover how something works, it ceases to be conscious, so it was when "God" became "the laws of nature."
What's hilarious about the Chinese Room is the idea that we're supposed to judge the oracle by how smart the guy applying the rules in the room is, when clearly the intelligence is in the guy who wrote him the rules. It's a bait and switch.
Duff's device always struck me as sort of a crank idea, it's more of a trick than a clever algorithm. The fact that you can stick some case labels inside a do/while and some outside would be considered totally breaking if you were to do it under any other circumstance, you're effectively using a label to jump into a scope (even though in this case it's harmless). Also, this is the 21st century: if you find yourself actually pasting Duff's device into your project, you're probably haven't read about all of the very nice, hand optimized inline blitting functions your platform makes available to you.
list_entry *entry = head;/* assuming head exists and is the first entry of the list */ list_entry *prev = NULL;
while (entry) { if (entry->val == to_remove)/* this is the one to remove */ if (prev) prev->next = entry->next;/* remove the entry */ else head = entry->next;/* special case - first entry */
/* move on to the next entry */ prev = entry; entry = entry->next; }
The test for the head node runs for every element on the list, and it's only going to be true under very particular circumstances. Linus said it should look like this:
list_entry **pp = &head;/* pointer to a pointer */ list_entry *entry = head;
while (entry) { if (entry->val == to_remove) *pp = entry->next;
pp = &entry->next; entry = entry->next; }
He used a pointer to a pointer as a cursor, and a dereference of the cursor to edit the list, instead of using entry->next to tell him where he was. It also kinda drives home how you should always set the initial conditions of your loop in such a way that you'll get the most out of it, and not pass a lot of stuff in as NULL to tell the loop its in its first iteration.
What you guys are missing is that you're decoding the words on the screen right now. Reading just doesn't feel like decoding, especially if you're any good at it at all.
Right, but decoding is just the translation from one symbology into another, it doesn't create a semantic relationship, decoding can't create meaning, not in the sense we mean here. I can read your for loop, I can tell you it'll run node->count times, but you are the only one that actually can relate node->count to something in the real world, or to the abstract concept, and only humans will be able to give the effect of the loop final meaning. All the program can do is keep juggling symbols back and forth according to what can be reduced to automatic production rules.
Kurzweil's last book was basically premised on the idea that human mind is nothing but an iterative pattern recognition machine, decoding stimuli, and the problem is that this account is totally incomplete and he has to constantly smuggle in consciousness without arguing that it exists, because positing it completely breaks his mechanistic conceit, the idea that the brain is a discrete computing machine and thoughts are symbols and operations on symbols.
I keep thinking of the Matrix programmers. "I only see blondes, brunettes, redheads..."
It was a movie, written by two guys who learned everything they know about computers from AKIRA and 2001 A Space Odyssey...
The money's probably going to his legal defense fund. If he told people that, he'd get more Bitcoins than a Matrix cosplay prostitute.
If you see the 60 Minutes he was in a few months ago, it's pretty clear that the man is incapable of projecting anything less than supreme confidence in the belief that he is The Greatest Thing To Happen to whatever he's trying to do this week, particularly if his goal this week is to play Kim Dotcom, Victim of the Oppressive Copyright State who had No Idea what people used MegaUpload for.
Interesting info, thanks. Do you have a source to recommend on the history of astronomy?
Not me: I looked it up just now and Kepler actually did his work in Denmark with Tycho Brahe and in Graz, but he was the official astronomer to the Holy Roman Empire, so tomato/tomahto.
Galileo was a dick to the pope. He put a character with the name "Idiotocrotis" or something like that who used the popes arguments in his book. He actually was friends with the pope previously. No one gave Kepler any problems and he was around at the same time.
Galileo lived in the Papal states, where the Canon law was the effective civil law and the Pope was the temporal king. Kepler lived in the Holy Roman Empire the Duchy of Wurttemberg, where Roman authority was depised. This fact has the most bearing on their disparate treatment.
I'm not sure there's any basis for rational discussion either way. Would you really let inductive reasoning or modal logic decide who should live and die?
The general anesthesia that gives the most reliable results, sodium thiopental, happens to be the drug the Dutch won't export. Most general anesthetics aren't capable of guaranteeing, to the extent a court requires, that the subject is unconscious, or of working fast enough, or being administered at the levels required to induce certain unconsciousness without causing toxic side effects- vomiting, convulsions, hallucinations, agonizing pain.
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
It's just a rewording of Blackstone's ratio, but it makes the point really clear.
The US has elaborate regulations when it comes to arms exports, we don't sell nuclear weapons to Iran, nor do we allow the sale of M4s to the Lord's Resistance Army. These regulations are based on the principle that such transactions are contrary to US national interest, international norms and moral decency.
To allow such sales, with full knowledge of the recipients, when we have the power to stop them, would implicate us in their use. I suspect the EU feels the same way in general, they just have a different moral attitude towards capital punishment than us.
People can have really bad reactions to opiates: they can aspirate into their lungs; they can be allergic; if the subject has an opiate tolerance, they could remain conscious while they die of respiratory paralysis.
The idea with the three drug protocol is that the administrator can be reasonably certain the subject is unconscious and insensate when they give the drugs that stop breathing, and the drugs are selected for their uniform effect. Opiates do all kinds of stuff and the death can be either peaceful or horrible depending on individual response.
Of course you can. Someone's job and expert knowledge has bearing on wether or not their actions may rise to the level of negligence, for example. Many laws apply only to certain classes of people in certain professions; only certain people may be guilty of public corruption, for example-- a private citizen who takes a bribe or kickback as a part of their job generally isn't criminally liable. People employed as soldiers and sailors are subject to a completely separate legal system, with its own laws, punishments, legal proceedings...
If this is wrong and there was a need for some form of licensing it was clearly very broadly and cheaply offered.
VHS wasn't "open" in the sense we think of it, manufacturers still required a license from JVC, but JVC made a point of charging licensees only token royalties, and JVC put a lot of effort into getting other manufacturers into the pool, whereas Sony had the idea that they'd be able to develop and then milk a monopoly.
Which is why many progress bars include some sort of animation (spinning hour glass, clock face, etc.).
Not kinetic enough. It has to seem like the computer is working hard, as if it's undertaking frantic, nervous activity -- same reason game clocks show tenths of a second in the last minute-- it makes no difference, it's just Shiny to put people in a certain emotional state, to enhance drama. The progress is making a story beat, it's not there to enhance user experience.
I worked on WHD (in sound, not the visual effects). The thing about 9 decimal places is it means there's always going to be a few numbers ticking away a dozen times a second, so the visual is still exciting, even for a process that's going to run 3 hours.
Other screens in that movie have some Cake PHP templates... During the video conferences between the vice president and the Pentagon, there's code running constantly in the corner of the screen, it's just more raw socket boilerplate...
And he was war-dialing... and in the days before "unlimited" calls per month, his parents never notice their bills...
It's implied in the film that he's somehow either passing the phone company the right signals to make his calls free, or he'd figured out how to places his calls through someone else's PBX. There's a line where Ally Sheedy sees the wardailer and says, like "Isn't that expensive," and he says, in so many words, "Oh there's ways around that!" She says, "you can go to jail," and he says, "Only if you're over 18!" The issue is lampshaded.
Oh, and in the same time period, when most folks were *just* getting credit cards, and kids didn't get them, his 16 yr old girlfriend could pop what, many hundreds of dollars? A $kbuck, on airfare to fly them half-way across the US?
She only buys a ticket for him, she drives herself down from Seattle. As she says, "It's was only a three hour drive anyway!" She drives a motor scooter, she has a personal phone in her room in 1983, these would imply that her family is of means.
mark "and people working for the DoD put huge back doors in mainframe code, during the Cold War...."
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how tax incidence works. If payroll taxes are lowered but the elasticity of demand in the labor market is high, employers simply lower wages by the amount taxes are lowered. Labor demand is driven by take-home pay, not the top-line salary figure, and employers will pocket any change as long as jobs are tight and people are willing to work for the same take-home pay.
Also that's not how net transfers work; people who make $25k a year will have a withholding but will probably get the whole balance back, at least on their Federal return. People who make $1 million a year probably aren't making salary at all, and are deriving significant income from economic rents, which can be taxed at 100% without deadweight loss. (Most people would say this is immoral, economic efficiency notwithstanding.)
Arsenic is an effective treatment for leukemia.
Empirical econometric studies of direct government transfers, "welfare," are generally favorable, at least compared to other popular alternatives, such as "nothing." Critics generally don't attack welfare with "scientific evidence," they attack it on moral and anecdotal grounds.
Hey my ID is less than one-fourth yours, I think I know how long I've been coming here! :)
As opposed to, like, Starbucks, or Daimler, or Apple, who, in their obvious obsession with quarterly profits, charge premium profits for every good sold from day one, and thus all quickly went out of business.
(removes glasses, pinches bridge of nose, wonders why he's been coming to this fucking site every couple days for 20 years now...)
Imagine what these numbers would be if they actually knew what the fuck they were doing.
Maybe they don't need a CEO. When Ballmer leaves just convert the office into a pet daycare annex.
Think of the Chinese Room this way: let's say there's two guys who don't speak Chinese, and they work no the rules together. Doesn't change things, right? Now lets say there's a billion people in the Chinese room. None of them speak Chinese, so by Searle's standards the Chinese Room isn't "intelligent," but what's the difference between a billion people in a room working out an algorithm for a language they don't understand, and a billion neurons? Neurons don't know Chinese, but we unquestionably consider a billion neurons intelligent, when they're operating in the skull of an ape descendent.
The specification of a "character" is not in the book, you're bringing it in from context; further, you don't just experience the events of the book by proxy, you reflect on them and have novel thoughts contingent on the words. I don't think its clear we can distinguish between the "decoding" of the words in your brain and the act of understanding. We can name them, we can make abstract assertions about the two acts as if they were severable, but we have no empirical evidence that they're discrete phenomena.
I don't accept the Chinese Room argument, mainly because it's not realistic. You can open the door to the Chinese Room and discover the guy who can't speak Chinese; you can never truly "open" a computational oracle, or a mind. If something quacks like an intelligence it is, insofar as we don't know how it works -- the only useful definition of "intelligence: is "that which behaves rationally but we don't know how." The moment we discover how something works, it ceases to be conscious, so it was when "God" became "the laws of nature."
What's hilarious about the Chinese Room is the idea that we're supposed to judge the oracle by how smart the guy applying the rules in the room is, when clearly the intelligence is in the guy who wrote him the rules. It's a bait and switch.
Duff's device always struck me as sort of a crank idea, it's more of a trick than a clever algorithm. The fact that you can stick some case labels inside a do/while and some outside would be considered totally breaking if you were to do it under any other circumstance, you're effectively using a label to jump into a scope (even though in this case it's harmless). Also, this is the 21st century: if you find yourself actually pasting Duff's device into your project, you're probably haven't read about all of the very nice, hand optimized inline blitting functions your platform makes available to you.
I remember something Linus Torvalds wrote a while back that stuck me as somewhat more useful, he pointed out that people deleted nodes from a linked list:
The test for the head node runs for every element on the list, and it's only going to be true under very particular circumstances. Linus said it should look like this:
He used a pointer to a pointer as a cursor, and a dereference of the cursor to edit the list, instead of using entry->next to tell him where he was. It also kinda drives home how you should always set the initial conditions of your loop in such a way that you'll get the most out of it, and not pass a lot of stuff in as NULL to tell the loop its in its first iteration.
Right, but decoding is just the translation from one symbology into another, it doesn't create a semantic relationship, decoding can't create meaning, not in the sense we mean here. I can read your for loop, I can tell you it'll run node->count times, but you are the only one that actually can relate node->count to something in the real world, or to the abstract concept, and only humans will be able to give the effect of the loop final meaning. All the program can do is keep juggling symbols back and forth according to what can be reduced to automatic production rules.
Kurzweil's last book was basically premised on the idea that human mind is nothing but an iterative pattern recognition machine, decoding stimuli, and the problem is that this account is totally incomplete and he has to constantly smuggle in consciousness without arguing that it exists, because positing it completely breaks his mechanistic conceit, the idea that the brain is a discrete computing machine and thoughts are symbols and operations on symbols.
It was a movie, written by two guys who learned everything they know about computers from AKIRA and 2001 A Space Odyssey...
The money's probably going to his legal defense fund. If he told people that, he'd get more Bitcoins than a Matrix cosplay prostitute.
If you see the 60 Minutes he was in a few months ago, it's pretty clear that the man is incapable of projecting anything less than supreme confidence in the belief that he is The Greatest Thing To Happen to whatever he's trying to do this week, particularly if his goal this week is to play Kim Dotcom, Victim of the Oppressive Copyright State who had No Idea what people used MegaUpload for.
Not me: I looked it up just now and Kepler actually did his work in Denmark with Tycho Brahe and in Graz, but he was the official astronomer to the Holy Roman Empire, so tomato/tomahto.
Galileo lived in the Papal states, where the Canon law was the effective civil law and the Pope was the temporal king. Kepler lived in the Holy Roman Empire the Duchy of Wurttemberg, where Roman authority was depised. This fact has the most bearing on their disparate treatment.
...and David Irving, and Peter Duesberg, and L. Ron Hubbard... Truly they will all be proven right!
I'm not sure there's any basis for rational discussion either way. Would you really let inductive reasoning or modal logic decide who should live and die?
PS. And I liked John Carter.
The general anesthesia that gives the most reliable results, sodium thiopental, happens to be the drug the Dutch won't export. Most general anesthetics aren't capable of guaranteeing, to the extent a court requires, that the subject is unconscious, or of working fast enough, or being administered at the levels required to induce certain unconsciousness without causing toxic side effects- vomiting, convulsions, hallucinations, agonizing pain.
Good John Adams quote relative to this point:
It's just a rewording of Blackstone's ratio, but it makes the point really clear.
The US has elaborate regulations when it comes to arms exports, we don't sell nuclear weapons to Iran, nor do we allow the sale of M4s to the Lord's Resistance Army. These regulations are based on the principle that such transactions are contrary to US national interest, international norms and moral decency.
To allow such sales, with full knowledge of the recipients, when we have the power to stop them, would implicate us in their use. I suspect the EU feels the same way in general, they just have a different moral attitude towards capital punishment than us.
People can have really bad reactions to opiates: they can aspirate into their lungs; they can be allergic; if the subject has an opiate tolerance, they could remain conscious while they die of respiratory paralysis.
The idea with the three drug protocol is that the administrator can be reasonably certain the subject is unconscious and insensate when they give the drugs that stop breathing, and the drugs are selected for their uniform effect. Opiates do all kinds of stuff and the death can be either peaceful or horrible depending on individual response.
Of course you can. Someone's job and expert knowledge has bearing on wether or not their actions may rise to the level of negligence, for example. Many laws apply only to certain classes of people in certain professions; only certain people may be guilty of public corruption, for example-- a private citizen who takes a bribe or kickback as a part of their job generally isn't criminally liable. People employed as soldiers and sailors are subject to a completely separate legal system, with its own laws, punishments, legal proceedings...
VHS wasn't "open" in the sense we think of it, manufacturers still required a license from JVC, but JVC made a point of charging licensees only token royalties, and JVC put a lot of effort into getting other manufacturers into the pool, whereas Sony had the idea that they'd be able to develop and then milk a monopoly.
FD. I am a Sony employee.
Remember when a nerd was someone who cared about tail call optimizations and SSA, and not which corporation made their cellphone?
Off my lawn.
Not kinetic enough. It has to seem like the computer is working hard, as if it's undertaking frantic, nervous activity -- same reason game clocks show tenths of a second in the last minute-- it makes no difference, it's just Shiny to put people in a certain emotional state, to enhance drama. The progress is making a story beat, it's not there to enhance user experience.
I worked on WHD (in sound, not the visual effects). The thing about 9 decimal places is it means there's always going to be a few numbers ticking away a dozen times a second, so the visual is still exciting, even for a process that's going to run 3 hours.
Other screens in that movie have some Cake PHP templates... During the video conferences between the vice president and the Pentagon, there's code running constantly in the corner of the screen, it's just more raw socket boilerplate...
It's implied in the film that he's somehow either passing the phone company the right signals to make his calls free, or he'd figured out how to places his calls through someone else's PBX. There's a line where Ally Sheedy sees the wardailer and says, like "Isn't that expensive," and he says, in so many words, "Oh there's ways around that!" She says, "you can go to jail," and he says, "Only if you're over 18!" The issue is lampshaded.
She only buys a ticket for him, she drives herself down from Seattle. As she says, "It's was only a three hour drive anyway!" She drives a motor scooter, she has a personal phone in her room in 1983, these would imply that her family is of means.
More or less believable that L'Affaire Snowden?