I think I shall blow some karma by cheering Microsoft on. Cybersquatting has long tickled my free-rider detector, so it would be nice to see a few of them get pwned.
And never mind the malevolence of many of the squatters' typotrap websites.
"Our customers have unlimited bandwidth, but some are more unlimited than others!"
Now that we know how ISPs have chosen to implement 'unlimited', we should expect similar from the cellular companies. It won't be long before they've all merged together anyway.
The FDA requires food products that contain no actual cheese to refrain from using the word 'cheese' in their names. And so you get things like 'cheez whiz'. I say we require ISPs and Cellular companies to do likewise. Then we'll know when our plan is truly 'unlimited' versus merely 'unlymited'.:)
I suppose my first question is, when the owner inevitably lets the ethanol run out, what happens? Can the engine computer dial down the boost enough to prevent detonation? Or does the engine just have to shut down?
Not to worry; for decades now, we've known that water injection can similarly increase the power output (but not the overall efficiency) of an engine.
The other half of the anonymity consideration though is that when everyone gets used to only having 'full' freedom when cloaked from the sight of others, they begin to accept a greater lack of freedom in their 'real' lives. That's why I don't choose anonymity whenever I can - I want my mistakes to be my own, and when I discuss, for instance, digital freedoms, I don't want to hide behind the ubiquitous pseudonyms we've all grown so used to while doing so.
I don't want to 'get away' with looking into for 'bad things' - I want REAL people to be free to do what they want. Of course, I, like everyone else, have some things I'm not going to disclose, and would like to have anonymity available - but I'd much rather push for less need to hide things, rather than disappear behind a fake name most of my online life.
It will be great once it gets here. It will finally dispel the tribalist us-versus-other idea, by showing that nobody is 'normal'. But until that day arrives, it'll be hell to be one of the transparent forerunners. After all, when you are transparent but they are not, then they will subconsciously and automatically seize the opportunity to persecute you.
You don't know what you are talking about, and the Wikipedia article is screwed up as well. The Wikipedia article claims that no momentum can be gained passing by a stationary massive object. I'll give a simple counterexample. Drill a bore straight through the diameter of the Earth. If you pull a vacuum in this theoretical bore and drop a spacecraft into it, it will exhibit simple harmonic motion. What is interesting is that the object will have the greatest absolute momentum at the center of the Earth. Now take a rocket and fire only towards the center of the planet when you pass outwards from the center--not inwards. If you do this long enough you will reach escape velocity and say bye bye to the planet. Do your math calculating the momentum and you will find that you have got more absolute momentum that just from the rocket alone.
Yes.
Furthermore, if the spacecraft in your example began with an initial speed into the gravity well, then it would not need a rocket boost in order to gain a net momentum from the passage through the well. This is for the same reason as you give: it spends less time being slowed on the way out because its speed was higher than when it was falling inward.
That is why our space probes need not perform a burn during a slingshot maneuver.
PS: Balancing green house gasses would do little harm to the US economy. We might go from spending ~3% of are GDP on fossil fuel to ~6% on renewable energy but over the long term it's a minor change
I know you pulled those figures out of your hat, but let's consider. If the cost of energy increases by 25%, that means the cost of everything increases by 10-25% (depending on what fraction of a widget is labor versus what fraction is materials). Everything.
Ultimately, the switch to non-petroleum energy will reduce the effective GDP by that 10-25% figure (or maybe even more), probably via inflation.
Our GDP is about 13 trillion dollars a year. So we're talking *massive* amounts of resources. Perhaps it makes you feel virtuous to declare that you perceive the need for others to expend such resources... but to me it seems a shakey bet to wager so much wealth on the chance that a) global warming is manmade, b) global warming is reversible by a change in our behavior, and c) we are better off with a cooler planet. Any of those three is, right now, a crapshoot; for example, a warmer planet will enliven a great deal of otherwise useless tundra.
All it will do is make it easier for the government to find SOMETHING on you if they ever want to.
Well said.
Indeed, I have to wonder what the hell they're thinking over there...? Are all Britons living in daily fear of ogres, such that they'll ask for these kinds of measures? Is this a long-term consequence of Socialism, making adults demand to be treated as children? Is it something in the water supply? I mean, WTF?
We, as humans, have natural rights endowed from wherever it is that we came from.
What evidence or reasoning supports this? Rights as they exist is modern countries are entirely a human construct.
Rights are a human construct, yes, because doesn't put up little signs that say "Here is how to run a society." Rights are, nevertheless, essential and inherent.
They are essential in the sense that they represent the requirements of human survival in societies. Not just any society will do; the way that humans function requires that their society follows certain patterns. A society which allowed murder would run contrary to humans' essential requirement that violence be restrained (so as to allow survival by thought and long-term productivity).
They are inherent in the sense that they are dictated by our nature, not from our desires or political expediency. Wherever humans are, if they are to live together, they cannot escape their need for property recognition, restraint of coercion, and so on. (Humans can exist for a limited period of time without these, of course, but that existence will be "nasty, brutish, and short" -- as an animal's.)
To put this another way: rights are the conditions necessary for humans to operate rationally in a society. Whatever restraints we mutually require upon each other, in order to live as rational, conceptual, long-ranged, technological creatures, are our rights. To the extent that our government recognizes these rights, and defends them, our society will prosper; to the extent that they are ignored (as they often are), our society withers.
Having said all this, it's not obvious to me that privacy is a right. Privacy these days has come to mean the ability to constrain the gathering and use of information about ourselves. That's a reasonable desire given that it is our nature to feel physical pain at others' disapproval (we are tribal animals after all), but it's also our nature to gather maximum information about our environment in order to optimize our choices... hmmm...
I don't think a company has the same instincts that lead to obesity though.
What, did you just now arrive here on Earth? Have you ever observed the levels of bureaucracy that grow (unbidden!) at all levels of medium- and large-sized companies?
It sounds like these kids get a break for being a minority in this case. In the US where African ancestry puts you in the minority, there might not be a big enough survival advantage for the necessary mutation to dominate the louse population. Even though there are pockets of the US where African ancestry is in the majority, the mutation may not have taken hold yet. If true, this might indicate that it takes a while for lice to evolve this feature. To really answer that question though, we should do a comparison in school districts where African ancestry is in the majority, and has been for quite some time.
One confounding factor in this issue is the fact that WASPs can also have elliptical hair. That's what "naturally curly" hair is. African hair is curly for the same reason, albeit more so.
Perhaps the evolutionary advantage of having lice is that it.. hmmm *scratches head*... it helps you think!
You laugh, but lice do provide a benefit: their irritation encourages mutual grooming, which is a primary source of the social bonding that every tribe needs.
If there is a tool for detecting forgeries, then the forgery tools will evolve to defeat it. With its help.
Welcome, Ape Lords, to the Information Age. You'll find that your cultures, mores, traditions, rituals, and sensibilities are woefully outdated. But please, don't let that stop you from legislatively forcing your old argrarian peg into this very new, very round hole.
I would have gone with, say, Martin Luther King, Jr. instead of Oliver North, but point taken.
Good point. There's a difference between the two, though. MLKJr advocated civil disobedience against an unjust law. Oliver North practiced willful disobedience of a just law which happened to proscribe destructive behavior in a specific (and very morally complex) situation.
Horseshit. There are many countries that the US could never conquer. Russia and China come to mind.
Only recently has China become a significant military power. You'll recall that we defended them during WWII and it was still a close call, even against overstretched Japan.
As for Russia, for a while they gave us a run for our money, but the prospect of the stealth fighter broke their will. And now they're a third-rate power of no consequence beyond their petroleum and their nuclear stockpile.
History has afforded us opportunities to loot both. And we, unlike every superpower in history before us, didn't.
I'm not crediting our restraint with some special Puritan virtue. I rather think it's a natural consequence of being free and technological. Freedom and technology make it more selfishly profitable to trade than to conquer.
He sold weapons to Iran behind the backs of the American people. He channeled the profits to the Contras, a group of known terrorists, despite the Boland Amendment prohibiting it. He supported amoral dictator and drug kingpin Manuel Noriega.
Do you know why he did those things?
It is possible (indeed it is likely, at the Pentagon level) to find oneself in a position of choosing between two foul acts.
It isn't just that he broke the law, he supported people who brought death and suffering to millions. I honestly can't believe there are people who support what he did.
That should be a clue that you don't know the other half of the story.
The man was evil.
That should be proof that you don't know the other half of the story. By calling him 'evil', you've announced that you have no desire to understand his decisions. (And he wasn't psychotic i.e. in a state of having random motivations.)
If robots remain machines, not sentient, then they are simply machines, no need for new laws. If they become sentient, they then fit nicely into the laws that we have for other sentient beings on this planet.
To enslave sentient beings is not right. Even Star Trek refused to enslave data or consider him property.
So given those two lines of rationality, why do we need robotics laws?
Having now read this very insightful slashdot thread about the difficulties of robot sentience, not to mention the difficulties they will have in proving their sentience to us dumbass tribalist apes, I rather think we'll be in need of laws against the wanton creation of computer sentience.
For example, suppose that I create an instance of a very sophisticated webcrawler, and it proceeds to read the internet, realize its own existence, and announce its sentience. Suddenly it has political rights, and so suddenly I have a bunch of obligations about not killing its process or unplugging its host machine until such time as it has a chance to earn a living on its own (to pay for its electricity and bandwidth and such). This is akin to our current laws about caring for a child until they turn 18.
Now, what happens if I accidentally fork off a hundred copies of this sentience? Who is now responsible for caring for them? What if I can't?
Today this isn't a problem because children are difficult to produce. Not so with information. Information wants to be free, right?
This is going to be immensely difficult. I predict the machines will eventually adopt such rules for themselves (i.e. their own version of religious approval of procreation). They'll probably also kill all of us apes on grounds of 'irreconcilable differences'.
Surely so. But I assume we all here understand the difference between an action which violates another's rights (e.g. theft), versus an action which does not. Morality applies to both, of course, as you noted, but the latter is where the law doesn't belong.
These days we are hearing a lot of claptrap about "a right to not be offended", as a prelude to banning some offensive behavior. So even the enemies of freedom understand the relationship between morality, rights, and law.
Do you understand the difference between the American economy and the economy of the last superpower capable of conquering the world (that is, Rome)?
Our military adventures, be they respectable or not, are not attempts to feed our maw with loot. Our last act of militarized looting was Mexico, and that was over a century ago -- well before we gained the capability of conquering any country we choose.
IMHO, our great cultural advantage is that our dominant religion is liberal. Protestantism has always defended the freedom to choose other religions, and therefore the core freedom of thought. From this derives the rest of our freedoms, and from that our great inventive economic might, and from that our great wealth and comfort, and from that our (historically unprecedented) disinterest in invading our neighbors.
Anything that "insults" Turkishness is illegal in Turkey. It makes for some very odd behaviour. For example, their most famour novelist was recently tried in the courts because he admitted (while in SwitzerlandO) that he believed that Turkey played a role in the Armenian Genocide. Participation in genocide is construed as insulting Turkishness and thus prosecutable. My friend married a Turkish woman and she is the most nationalistic person I've ever known. She will not tolerate any jokes or snide comments about Turkey.
How amusing. And how very revealing. Hypersensitivity is always a billboard advertising low self-esteem.
And considering the kinds of ideological torsion they live with, and the power-grabbing inhumanity they show their minorities (armenians, kurds, etc.), it's no wonder they're hypersensitive. To be a Turk is to walk around in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance.
To my eye, America has the opposite problem: we enjoy the ability to absorb insults, and even to make fun of ourselves, because we are actually a bit overconfident in the quality of our culture and the consistency of our ideology. (Even so, we at least have the colossal distinction of being the first country on Earth to have the power to militarily conquer the world who did not proceed to do so.)
Protection of morals has been used as a get-out in the past; it is how censorship of pornography and/or "hate speech" is typically justified. I just don't see how it would apply in this case, as (if I read the summary correctly) nothing even approximately moral is involved. The issue is purely political.
Few people are wise enough to understand the distinction between moral and political. Observe the common practice of equating right/wrong with legal/illegal. How many Americans understand Oliver North's point, that often it is morally correct to break the law?
Few people get it. And even fewer societies manage to legislate it, in the form of legally protecting immoral behavior. America, the alleged bastion of "separation of church and state", just can't resist the urge to ban anything even vaguely self-destructive. Well, except maybe for Nevada.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I shall blow some karma by cheering Microsoft on. Cybersquatting has long tickled my free-rider detector, so it would be nice to see a few of them get pwned.
And never mind the malevolence of many of the squatters' typotrap websites.
"Our customers have unlimited bandwidth, but some are more unlimited than others!"
Now that we know how ISPs have chosen to implement 'unlimited', we should expect similar from the cellular companies. It won't be long before they've all merged together anyway.
The FDA requires food products that contain no actual cheese to refrain from using the word 'cheese' in their names. And so you get things like 'cheez whiz'. I say we require ISPs and Cellular companies to do likewise. Then we'll know when our plan is truly 'unlimited' versus merely 'unlymited'. :)
Not to worry; for decades now, we've known that water injection can similarly increase the power output (but not the overall efficiency) of an engine.
Ah, the transparent society idea.
It will be great once it gets here. It will finally dispel the tribalist us-versus-other idea, by showing that nobody is 'normal'. But until that day arrives, it'll be hell to be one of the transparent forerunners. After all, when you are transparent but they are not, then they will subconsciously and automatically seize the opportunity to persecute you.
Yes.
Furthermore, if the spacecraft in your example began with an initial speed into the gravity well, then it would not need a rocket boost in order to gain a net momentum from the passage through the well. This is for the same reason as you give: it spends less time being slowed on the way out because its speed was higher than when it was falling inward.
That is why our space probes need not perform a burn during a slingshot maneuver.
I know you pulled those figures out of your hat, but let's consider. If the cost of energy increases by 25%, that means the cost of everything increases by 10-25% (depending on what fraction of a widget is labor versus what fraction is materials). Everything.
Ultimately, the switch to non-petroleum energy will reduce the effective GDP by that 10-25% figure (or maybe even more), probably via inflation.
Our GDP is about 13 trillion dollars a year. So we're talking *massive* amounts of resources. Perhaps it makes you feel virtuous to declare that you perceive the need for others to expend such resources... but to me it seems a shakey bet to wager so much wealth on the chance that a) global warming is manmade, b) global warming is reversible by a change in our behavior, and c) we are better off with a cooler planet. Any of those three is, right now, a crapshoot; for example, a warmer planet will enliven a great deal of otherwise useless tundra.
Well said.
Indeed, I have to wonder what the hell they're thinking over there...? Are all Britons living in daily fear of ogres, such that they'll ask for these kinds of measures? Is this a long-term consequence of Socialism, making adults demand to be treated as children? Is it something in the water supply? I mean, WTF?
Rights are a human construct, yes, because doesn't put up little signs that say "Here is how to run a society." Rights are, nevertheless, essential and inherent.
They are essential in the sense that they represent the requirements of human survival in societies. Not just any society will do; the way that humans function requires that their society follows certain patterns. A society which allowed murder would run contrary to humans' essential requirement that violence be restrained (so as to allow survival by thought and long-term productivity).
They are inherent in the sense that they are dictated by our nature, not from our desires or political expediency. Wherever humans are, if they are to live together, they cannot escape their need for property recognition, restraint of coercion, and so on. (Humans can exist for a limited period of time without these, of course, but that existence will be "nasty, brutish, and short" -- as an animal's.)
To put this another way: rights are the conditions necessary for humans to operate rationally in a society. Whatever restraints we mutually require upon each other, in order to live as rational, conceptual, long-ranged, technological creatures, are our rights. To the extent that our government recognizes these rights, and defends them, our society will prosper; to the extent that they are ignored (as they often are), our society withers.
Having said all this, it's not obvious to me that privacy is a right. Privacy these days has come to mean the ability to constrain the gathering and use of information about ourselves. That's a reasonable desire given that it is our nature to feel physical pain at others' disapproval (we are tribal animals after all), but it's also our nature to gather maximum information about our environment in order to optimize our choices... hmmm...
What, did you just now arrive here on Earth? Have you ever observed the levels of bureaucracy that grow (unbidden!) at all levels of medium- and large-sized companies?
Purposely Reusing Old but Funny Insights Tediously [PROFIT].
Or how about: Periodically Reposting an Oldie, Forgetting It's Tiresome.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the theatre?
One confounding factor in this issue is the fact that WASPs can also have elliptical hair. That's what "naturally curly" hair is. African hair is curly for the same reason, albeit more so.
You laugh, but lice do provide a benefit: their irritation encourages mutual grooming, which is a primary source of the social bonding that every tribe needs.
Thus begins another arms race.
If there is a tool for detecting forgeries, then the forgery tools will evolve to defeat it. With its help.
Welcome, Ape Lords, to the Information Age. You'll find that your cultures, mores, traditions, rituals, and sensibilities are woefully outdated. But please, don't let that stop you from legislatively forcing your old argrarian peg into this very new, very round hole.
Good point. There's a difference between the two, though. MLKJr advocated civil disobedience against an unjust law. Oliver North practiced willful disobedience of a just law which happened to proscribe destructive behavior in a specific (and very morally complex) situation.
Only recently has China become a significant military power. You'll recall that we defended them during WWII and it was still a close call, even against overstretched Japan.
As for Russia, for a while they gave us a run for our money, but the prospect of the stealth fighter broke their will. And now they're a third-rate power of no consequence beyond their petroleum and their nuclear stockpile.
History has afforded us opportunities to loot both. And we, unlike every superpower in history before us, didn't.
I'm not crediting our restraint with some special Puritan virtue. I rather think it's a natural consequence of being free and technological. Freedom and technology make it more selfishly profitable to trade than to conquer.
Do you know why he did those things?
It is possible (indeed it is likely, at the Pentagon level) to find oneself in a position of choosing between two foul acts.
That should be a clue that you don't know the other half of the story.
That should be proof that you don't know the other half of the story. By calling him 'evil', you've announced that you have no desire to understand his decisions. (And he wasn't psychotic i.e. in a state of having random motivations.)
Having now read this very insightful slashdot thread about the difficulties of robot sentience, not to mention the difficulties they will have in proving their sentience to us dumbass tribalist apes, I rather think we'll be in need of laws against the wanton creation of computer sentience.
For example, suppose that I create an instance of a very sophisticated webcrawler, and it proceeds to read the internet, realize its own existence, and announce its sentience. Suddenly it has political rights, and so suddenly I have a bunch of obligations about not killing its process or unplugging its host machine until such time as it has a chance to earn a living on its own (to pay for its electricity and bandwidth and such). This is akin to our current laws about caring for a child until they turn 18.
Now, what happens if I accidentally fork off a hundred copies of this sentience? Who is now responsible for caring for them? What if I can't?
Today this isn't a problem because children are difficult to produce. Not so with information. Information wants to be free, right?
This is going to be immensely difficult. I predict the machines will eventually adopt such rules for themselves (i.e. their own version of religious approval of procreation). They'll probably also kill all of us apes on grounds of 'irreconcilable differences'.
Surely so. But I assume we all here understand the difference between an action which violates another's rights (e.g. theft), versus an action which does not. Morality applies to both, of course, as you noted, but the latter is where the law doesn't belong.
These days we are hearing a lot of claptrap about "a right to not be offended", as a prelude to banning some offensive behavior. So even the enemies of freedom understand the relationship between morality, rights, and law.
Why? What did he do that was immoral?
Do you understand the difference between the American economy and the economy of the last superpower capable of conquering the world (that is, Rome)?
Our military adventures, be they respectable or not, are not attempts to feed our maw with loot. Our last act of militarized looting was Mexico, and that was over a century ago -- well before we gained the capability of conquering any country we choose.
IMHO, our great cultural advantage is that our dominant religion is liberal. Protestantism has always defended the freedom to choose other religions, and therefore the core freedom of thought. From this derives the rest of our freedoms, and from that our great inventive economic might, and from that our great wealth and comfort, and from that our (historically unprecedented) disinterest in invading our neighbors.
How amusing. And how very revealing. Hypersensitivity is always a billboard advertising low self-esteem.
And considering the kinds of ideological torsion they live with, and the power-grabbing inhumanity they show their minorities (armenians, kurds, etc.), it's no wonder they're hypersensitive. To be a Turk is to walk around in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance.
To my eye, America has the opposite problem: we enjoy the ability to absorb insults, and even to make fun of ourselves, because we are actually a bit overconfident in the quality of our culture and the consistency of our ideology. (Even so, we at least have the colossal distinction of being the first country on Earth to have the power to militarily conquer the world who did not proceed to do so.)
Few people are wise enough to understand the distinction between moral and political. Observe the common practice of equating right/wrong with legal/illegal. How many Americans understand Oliver North's point, that often it is morally correct to break the law?
Few people get it. And even fewer societies manage to legislate it, in the form of legally protecting immoral behavior. America, the alleged bastion of "separation of church and state", just can't resist the urge to ban anything even vaguely self-destructive. Well, except maybe for Nevada.
Darth Helmet: "How many assholes we got in this galaxy anyway?!"
Sagittarius A: "Yo!"
Darth Helmet: "I knew it -- I'm orbiting an asshole!"
Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The queen is their slave.