Give the man a cigar. This is exactly like parasites which strengthen their host.
Perhaps this is the future of the internet? A competition among virus authors to keep their host machines clean of competing viruses?
Considering what an unbelievable resource hog my antivirus software is, in the future I might actually do better to let my machine get infected and rely on the infection to symbiotically keep everything else off.
It's the merger of computation and biology. And it might be more efficient than paying a discrete third-party for antivirus software. Think of it as paying for your antivirus protection with CPU cycles rather than dollars.
Because of this, there is little or no practical value in preventing others from accessing just some orbits. Now, the U.S. government, particularly the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld, has a long history of doing stuff that has no practical value (often at the cost of American lives.)
As long as you continue to think in such terms, you will never understand Rumsfeld or the DoD.
They are acting on different horizons than you care to see from your current vantage point.
Perhaps they are acting for a much longer-range goal than you've considered -- for example, perhaps they are forcing 'unity' on Iraq in order to cause the inevitable sectarian collapse needed to curry world opinion for balkanization. Whereas you sit and think of the medium-range goal (peace in Iraq) or short-range goal (withdrawal of our troops), and so to you, Rumsfeld and the DoD are senseless maniacs.
Or perhaps it's the reverse. Perhaps you are thinking of a longer-ranged goal (deficit spending), or perhaps they are thinking even further out (control of oil supplies, ports, and pipeline corridors) or furthest of all (teaching the Middle East how to be civil).
I'm not arguing for or against any of these goals. I am simply warning you that you won't be able to accurately weigh the situation until you understand which goal(s) on which timeframe(s) they are pursuing.
The life-extension successes found with mice and rats all consisted of slowing down the metabolism, causing the little critters to triple their lifespans, at the risk of hypothermia if caught unprotected in a cold room.
So yeah, metabolic boosters will let you eat more for a given level of exercise, but they are aging your body in innumerable minor ways. Google for "eat less live more" for the same data I am speaking from.
I am a libertarian and a serious post-Objectivist, but I will admit that corporations are sociopaths: they simply maximize profits, with all else held secondary. Every individual employee of Coca-Cola might say 'I would never touch the stuff, no freaking way', and yet the incentive structure (stockholders, promotions, and the like) cause the overall organization to still vigorously and cheerfully produce and promote the product.
'I really expected to see a nuclear desert there,' says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist. 'I was quite surprised. When you enter into the exclusion zone, it's a very thriving ecosystem.'
And yet, even after his spectacular failure to predict a discrete enviro-biological outcome like Chernobyl, Ronald Chesser will gleefully publish similarly dire, similarly vacuous predictions on a 100-, 1000-, and 10000-year timescale.
To paraphrase his next dire prediction: 'In 10,000 years, the planet will melt. Or freeze. Or implode. Yes. It will definitely melt or freeze or implode. I really expect to see a desert here.'
Anyway, it falls apart where we don't live in a democracy. We live in a democratic republic. Very important distinction. The people do not make the laws in the US (outside of the rare ballot initiative), the people elect representatives to make the laws.
How is that a bad thing? At least the elected representatives have at least a basic understanding of lawmaking and its repurcussions. As well, they act as a buffer between the lawbook and this week's media-fed clamor to "think of the children!".
Even more important, representatives serve as a point of accountability. Their name and reputation are associated with their votes and actions, and this must have at least a slight restraining effect. No such restraint would operate in a pure democracy, where every person can anonymously support any fool proposition.
This is all beside the point though. The real value of democracy is that it diffuses political power, making it difficult for any person or small group to acquire very much for very long if they misuse it. The mechanism of election (i.e. republic versus democracy or whatever) isn't important.
And generally, the poverty comes from bad government--they don't have access to education, health care, and the other niceties that us Slashdot posters take for granted.
Amusing definition of 'bad government' you have there.
The American pioneers did not have education, health care, or any niceties either. But they did have a good government, which cracked down on predation and left everyone else the hell alone.
Yes, I know that the early government also committed evils. But the vital, essential point, is that produtive people were (in principle) left alone to produce and reap their own rewards and failures.
Imagine what the people who live in those galaxies are thinking...
Some are watching the approaching onrush of supergiants, counting down their star system's remaining few thousand years of life.
Some are on a planet trapped in a dust cloud, wondering about the meaning of the dim legends that refer to bright points of light that once showed in the night sky.
Some are frantically transmitting radio signals to the rest of the universe, to announce "Look! I, too, was once alive."
Some are hauling themselves out of the primordial ooze on their planet, newly warmed by a star passing through their previously cold sector.
Some are looking enviously at the Milky Way, wondering what it was like to live in a quiet galaxy.
Some have packed up their whole ecosystem and are headed out into space on giant arcologies, in search of a cooler, quieter place to settle down, away from the 100,000,000-year maelstrom.
Free flow is NOT capitalistic, in fact it is socialistic. It tries to remove the risk in any transaction -- it is that risk that gives both parties a great reward of feeling like they profited from the barter.
I'm with you on the Capitalism thing, but this is where I can't keep up. I thought that ubiquitous information raised the overall efficiency of any market? Sure, if I lack information, then I might feel like I profited from a barter, even if I objectively did not due to my ignorance about the product.
I suspect you are confusing microeconomics, in which unequal information is the basis of profits, with macroeconomics, in which missing information causes broad inefficiencies.
Will [nuclear power] be on time? Will it be enough?
It necessarily will, by the very nature of markets. With ten thousand different oil fields around the world, oil will not suddenly run out at 3pm on October 8th, 2050. The price will gradually rise, and so the demand for alternatives will gradually rise too.
We could throw up a nuclear reactor in a year if we really needed one. China has already got an off-the-shelf design and has 13 under construction. It won't be long before they're selling turn-key reactor solutions to the world. Swipe your national credit card, and wait six to eight weeks for your reactor to arrive on giant barges.
You are right, it sucked and it should not have happened.
Without a doubt. No one claimed otherwise.
What I asked was, why does our society abhor incest more than murder, attempted murder, and the like? There is a noticeable absence of rationality in how we Westerners approach the subject.
Whatever the damage to you and I was, at least we are alive and well today, with all of our limbs and probably all of our mental faculties. Yes it sucked, but in my opinion it's vastly preferable to the crimes which it is held to be worse than.
I can deal and respect many of the objectionable ones, but I think a couple of crimes are universal. Child (a real child not 'underage' teenager, a *child*) molestation . ..
Now why is that, exactly?
We know that child molestation has occurred for untold eons. Humans are therefore resilient, resistant to such things, for the sake of survival. And at the risk of getting flamed, I want to point out the evidence that most victims of such mistreatment do in fact go on to lead normal lives. Natural selection sternly requires it.
So. Why is child molestation such an obviously hideous evil?
Is it just because we in the West are presently obsessed with sex?
I swear I am not trolling. I myself am actually a victim, from age 8, but I seem to be fine (although my level of slashdotting may be a sign of a deep malfunction). Ever since I realized that I survived unscathed, I have been wondering for a long time why this subject gets an automatic "OMG teh molestation!!!11!" response, when it is actually such a commonplacde in human history.
It almost -- ALMOST -- smells like we are protesting too much.
When the radiation from Hanford reaches the Columbia in a few hundred years, the damage those dams have done will look like minor incidents in comparison.
It's already contaminated the Columbia river. But in any event, cleanup is underway, including the cool new vitrification process in which underground waste is electrothermally encased in solid glass blocks. So please spare your FUD for topics where it's wanted, needed, and relevant.
It was a targeted Trojan that got into Valve and stole the source-code to Half-Life 2, right off the project lead's workstation. IIRC, it arrived via a bug in Outlook's message-preview facility.
I do recognize that. It is my feeling that if this damage was allowed to happen, the amount of damage it causes would go down quickly and far. It is important to recognize that preventing any kind of speech can cause damage too. Maybe it is not as easily quantifiable, but (IMHO, of course) it is plenty significant.
Your goal, then, is to lower the expected average truth value of all public statements.
This is a perilous goal. Consider the total social value of your present ability to trust (to degree x) the average statement. Any reduction in that value will be multiplied by the total number of statements heard and acted upon -- a quadrillion per month?
The total social cost of such a broad loss of trust, and the cost of the consequent increase in need for personal verification of everything, is staggering.
For some initial evidence that this is so, you can find (somewhere) the macroecon studies that found a tendency towards poverty in non-trusting cultures, the prime example being Italy, where anyone who is not family will probably lie to you and rip you off.
The fact is that it is a great value to be able to trust (to some degree) the word of strangers. Laws against libel/slander create a disincentive to lying, which a) reduces the number of lies, and b) decreases our urge to waste resources seeking personal verification of what we hear. Information, in other words, is inherently valuable, and so anything that increases the average accuracy of our society's information is going to be greatly broadly valuable too.
Your passion makes me wonder if you are not perhaps the victim of a prior, justified slander.
*I* say: fuck censorship. Let anyone say anything they please. Maybe it'll help force people to realize that everyone biases things, and that they need to develop filters to figure out who to trust and when to trust them.
The terms "free speech" and "censorship" have exact meanings. They refer to state coercion, particularly aimed at those who speak out against the state. We have no significant degree of censorship in America; there are isolated cases of policemen going batshiat now and then, but it is not systematic.
As for the rest, and as for this case, it is important to recognize that speech can cause quantifiable damage. This is the basis of laws against libel/slander. Those laws are built to protect individuals against intentional untruths, and (in principle) no more than that.
If you object to all this, how would you do things differently?
The problem is they are bribing the government so they don't have to label these things. They sell them as "real" and then pocket the difference while we get scurvy while from oranges that don't have any vitamin C in them.
They aren't doing that because they are nefarious.
They are doing that because consumers are irrational about such things... in the same way they are irrational about radiation and nuclear power.
We humans have a lot of bugs in our risk-assessment algorithms.
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "Listen to this transmission! Do you believe this?!"
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "WTF?"
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "This is one f***ed-up species!"
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "Word."
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "I say we blast off, and nuke the site from orbit."
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "It's the only way to be sure."
Those many years of evolution haven't prepared us for man-made chemicals which were only recently introduced. And you don't think we've evolved in the last few thousand years since we stopped eating rotted carcass from the jungle floor?
Some of the most poisonous compounds in the world are natural defensive chemicals that bugs and critters make. Botulinium toxin comes to mind. In any case, the body cannot tell the difference between a manmade versus a bacteriamade compound. Both can be toxic, both can cause cancer due to prolonged exposure, both require a dynamic defensive system such as we already carry onboard.
And you don't think we've evolved in the last few thousand years since we stopped eating rotted carcass from the jungle floor? Funny you bring up evolution but also think it stopped.
Evolution cannot stop, it self-adjusts to whatever is presently interfering with reproduction. But even if it had -- well, that's all the more reason to infuse our food production with positive intention.
I'm all for progress, but food is delicate, mistakes have often serious and sometimes fatal effects.
In what sense is food 'delicate'? Certainly an industrial product can be toxic, but food is not an exceptional case. In fact, we should expect our bodies to be more tolerant of food and water pollution than of other vectors. After all, you've got a million years of evolution behind you, ensuring that your gullet can tolerate the half-rotted carcass you found lying on the jungle floor.
I'd bet that 99.99% of food-related fatalities over the past 30 years have been due to natural pathogens (or choking). Care for some organic spinach?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this is the future of the internet? A competition among virus authors to keep their host machines clean of competing viruses?
Considering what an unbelievable resource hog my antivirus software is, in the future I might actually do better to let my machine get infected and rely on the infection to symbiotically keep everything else off.
It's the merger of computation and biology. And it might be more efficient than paying a discrete third-party for antivirus software. Think of it as paying for your antivirus protection with CPU cycles rather than dollars.
Odd you'd say that, considering how much computer technology presently relies on the inherent predictability of pseudorandom algorithms.
Ever called srand() or randseed() ?
As long as you continue to think in such terms, you will never understand Rumsfeld or the DoD.
They are acting on different horizons than you care to see from your current vantage point.
Perhaps they are acting for a much longer-range goal than you've considered -- for example, perhaps they are forcing 'unity' on Iraq in order to cause the inevitable sectarian collapse needed to curry world opinion for balkanization. Whereas you sit and think of the medium-range goal (peace in Iraq) or short-range goal (withdrawal of our troops), and so to you, Rumsfeld and the DoD are senseless maniacs.
Or perhaps it's the reverse. Perhaps you are thinking of a longer-ranged goal (deficit spending), or perhaps they are thinking even further out (control of oil supplies, ports, and pipeline corridors) or furthest of all (teaching the Middle East how to be civil).
I'm not arguing for or against any of these goals. I am simply warning you that you won't be able to accurately weigh the situation until you understand which goal(s) on which timeframe(s) they are pursuing.
And more importantly, can it pop a military-sized tin of jiffypop?
Faster metabolism = faster aging.
The life-extension successes found with mice and rats all consisted of slowing down the metabolism, causing the little critters to triple their lifespans, at the risk of hypothermia if caught unprotected in a cold room.
So yeah, metabolic boosters will let you eat more for a given level of exercise, but they are aging your body in innumerable minor ways. Google for "eat less live more" for the same data I am speaking from.
I am a libertarian and a serious post-Objectivist, but I will admit that corporations are sociopaths: they simply maximize profits, with all else held secondary. Every individual employee of Coca-Cola might say 'I would never touch the stuff, no freaking way', and yet the incentive structure (stockholders, promotions, and the like) cause the overall organization to still vigorously and cheerfully produce and promote the product.
And yet, even after his spectacular failure to predict a discrete enviro-biological outcome like Chernobyl, Ronald Chesser will gleefully publish similarly dire, similarly vacuous predictions on a 100-, 1000-, and 10000-year timescale.
To paraphrase his next dire prediction: 'In 10,000 years, the planet will melt. Or freeze. Or implode. Yes. It will definitely melt or freeze or implode. I really expect to see a desert here.'
Well said.
How is that a bad thing? At least the elected representatives have at least a basic understanding of lawmaking and its repurcussions. As well, they act as a buffer between the lawbook and this week's media-fed clamor to "think of the children!".
Even more important, representatives serve as a point of accountability. Their name and reputation are associated with their votes and actions, and this must have at least a slight restraining effect. No such restraint would operate in a pure democracy, where every person can anonymously support any fool proposition.
This is all beside the point though. The real value of democracy is that it diffuses political power, making it difficult for any person or small group to acquire very much for very long if they misuse it. The mechanism of election (i.e. republic versus democracy or whatever) isn't important.
Amusing definition of 'bad government' you have there.
The American pioneers did not have education, health care, or any niceties either. But they did have a good government, which cracked down on predation and left everyone else the hell alone.
Yes, I know that the early government also committed evils. But the vital, essential point, is that produtive people were (in principle) left alone to produce and reap their own rewards and failures.
That's nothing that a dozen generations of selective breeding can't fix.
Imagine what the people who live in those galaxies are thinking...
Some are watching the approaching onrush of supergiants, counting down their star system's remaining few thousand years of life.
Some are on a planet trapped in a dust cloud, wondering about the meaning of the dim legends that refer to bright points of light that once showed in the night sky.
Some are frantically transmitting radio signals to the rest of the universe, to announce "Look! I, too, was once alive."
Some are hauling themselves out of the primordial ooze on their planet, newly warmed by a star passing through their previously cold sector.
Some are looking enviously at the Milky Way, wondering what it was like to live in a quiet galaxy.
Some have packed up their whole ecosystem and are headed out into space on giant arcologies, in search of a cooler, quieter place to settle down, away from the 100,000,000-year maelstrom.
I'm with you on the Capitalism thing, but this is where I can't keep up. I thought that ubiquitous information raised the overall efficiency of any market? Sure, if I lack information, then I might feel like I profited from a barter, even if I objectively did not due to my ignorance about the product.
I suspect you are confusing microeconomics, in which unequal information is the basis of profits, with macroeconomics, in which missing information causes broad inefficiencies.
It necessarily will, by the very nature of markets. With ten thousand different oil fields around the world, oil will not suddenly run out at 3pm on October 8th, 2050. The price will gradually rise, and so the demand for alternatives will gradually rise too.
We could throw up a nuclear reactor in a year if we really needed one. China has already got an off-the-shelf design and has 13 under construction. It won't be long before they're selling turn-key reactor solutions to the world. Swipe your national credit card, and wait six to eight weeks for your reactor to arrive on giant barges.
You are right, it sucked and it should not have happened.
Without a doubt. No one claimed otherwise.
What I asked was, why does our society abhor incest more than murder, attempted murder, and the like? There is a noticeable absence of rationality in how we Westerners approach the subject.
Whatever the damage to you and I was, at least we are alive and well today, with all of our limbs and probably all of our mental faculties. Yes it sucked, but in my opinion it's vastly preferable to the crimes which it is held to be worse than.
Now why is that, exactly?
We know that child molestation has occurred for untold eons. Humans are therefore resilient, resistant to such things, for the sake of survival. And at the risk of getting flamed, I want to point out the evidence that most victims of such mistreatment do in fact go on to lead normal lives. Natural selection sternly requires it.
So. Why is child molestation such an obviously hideous evil?
Is it just because we in the West are presently obsessed with sex?
I swear I am not trolling. I myself am actually a victim, from age 8, but I seem to be fine (although my level of slashdotting may be a sign of a deep malfunction). Ever since I realized that I survived unscathed, I have been wondering for a long time why this subject gets an automatic "OMG teh molestation!!!11!" response, when it is actually such a commonplacde in human history.
It almost -- ALMOST -- smells like we are protesting too much.
It's already contaminated the Columbia river. But in any event, cleanup is underway, including the cool new vitrification process in which underground waste is electrothermally encased in solid glass blocks. So please spare your FUD for topics where it's wanted, needed, and relevant.
It was a targeted Trojan that got into Valve and stole the source-code to Half-Life 2, right off the project lead's workstation. IIRC, it arrived via a bug in Outlook's message-preview facility.
Yes! And then a big nose! Will we really have to wait 1000 years for somebody to invent a Smelloscope?
Your goal, then, is to lower the expected average truth value of all public statements.
This is a perilous goal. Consider the total social value of your present ability to trust (to degree x) the average statement. Any reduction in that value will be multiplied by the total number of statements heard and acted upon -- a quadrillion per month?
The total social cost of such a broad loss of trust, and the cost of the consequent increase in need for personal verification of everything, is staggering.
For some initial evidence that this is so, you can find (somewhere) the macroecon studies that found a tendency towards poverty in non-trusting cultures, the prime example being Italy, where anyone who is not family will probably lie to you and rip you off.
The fact is that it is a great value to be able to trust (to some degree) the word of strangers. Laws against libel/slander create a disincentive to lying, which a) reduces the number of lies, and b) decreases our urge to waste resources seeking personal verification of what we hear. Information, in other words, is inherently valuable, and so anything that increases the average accuracy of our society's information is going to be greatly broadly valuable too.
Your passion makes me wonder if you are not perhaps the victim of a prior, justified slander.
William Shatner submitting slashdot articles now?
The terms "free speech" and "censorship" have exact meanings. They refer to state coercion, particularly aimed at those who speak out against the state. We have no significant degree of censorship in America; there are isolated cases of policemen going batshiat now and then, but it is not systematic.
As for the rest, and as for this case, it is important to recognize that speech can cause quantifiable damage. This is the basis of laws against libel/slander. Those laws are built to protect individuals against intentional untruths, and (in principle) no more than that.
If you object to all this, how would you do things differently?
They aren't doing that because they are nefarious.
They are doing that because consumers are irrational about such things... in the same way they are irrational about radiation and nuclear power.
We humans have a lot of bugs in our risk-assessment algorithms.
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "Listen to this transmission! Do you believe this?!"
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "WTF?"
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "This is one f***ed-up species!"
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "Word."
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "I say we blast off, and nuke the site from orbit."
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "It's the only way to be sure."
Some of the most poisonous compounds in the world are natural defensive chemicals that bugs and critters make. Botulinium toxin comes to mind. In any case, the body cannot tell the difference between a manmade versus a bacteriamade compound. Both can be toxic, both can cause cancer due to prolonged exposure, both require a dynamic defensive system such as we already carry onboard.
Evolution cannot stop, it self-adjusts to whatever is presently interfering with reproduction. But even if it had -- well, that's all the more reason to infuse our food production with positive intention.
In what sense is food 'delicate'? Certainly an industrial product can be toxic, but food is not an exceptional case. In fact, we should expect our bodies to be more tolerant of food and water pollution than of other vectors. After all, you've got a million years of evolution behind you, ensuring that your gullet can tolerate the half-rotted carcass you found lying on the jungle floor.
I'd bet that 99.99% of food-related fatalities over the past 30 years have been due to natural pathogens (or choking). Care for some organic spinach?