So you think we should execute car thieves or credit card scammers, and they should feel lucky that you're not in charge?
Let's not forget that the kind of prison system you seem to approve of only exacerbates the problem. But hey, fuck science. You want revenge, even if it bites you in the ass in more ways than one.
Let's not forget the politicians who take advantage of voters' tendencies towards irrational hysteria to pass draconian laws. This whole "eye for an eye" thing causes more misery, and does absolutely nothing to prevent crime.
Prison is about more than punishment. Or it should be, if you want the people walking out of that prison to reintegrate into society, and not end up back on their pre-prison trajectory.
Frankly, I think before the "hard on crime" types talk about addiction issues, they ought to take at least a beginners course on the psychology and neurology of addiction. Or heck, even some basic psychology. This idea that we are completely free agents, that free will is absolute, was debunked decades ago. A lot of our behaviors, even our more cognitively complex ones, happen "under the hood", and to one extent or another our free will is an illusion, decisions like "I need another shot of vodka" or "I need to throw those dice one more time" were actually made prior to the conscious part of the mind even being aware of the urge. There's a growing body of evidence that much of what we think of as "decision making" is really the end of the decision making process, where the conscious mind creates a scenario to explain why other parts of the brain arrived at the decision.
If a policy leads to more violence and higher recidivism, then how precisely is that helping anyone? Reforming a criminal, which is one key issue to prisons (otherwise, why not just have a big dark hole and throw people in it), is undermined by such measures, and while the operator of that prison makes a few bucks more, it ends up costing taxpayers more in the end.
Advertisers are malevolent sociopath retards. They are well and truly among the most repugnant creatures the world has ever known. Remember, marketers are the guys that helped Hitler convince Germans that Jews were evil, and convinced generations of people that smoking tobacco was hip and cool. Advertisers are absolute scum, and while in the olden days they were scum who put some effort into understanding the human mind to trick us, now they're just worthless moronic scum who think if they throw enough shit on a computer screen, they'll make their clients oodles of money.
Been about ten years for me. The ISP I worked for way back in 2006 was using tucows as a domain registrar (we were a reseller), and I wrote some scripts to automatically set DNS settings on the Tucows side for our DNS servers. After I left that job, I completely forgot about them. I really had no idea they were still around.
Lovelace was a woman, and to the Libertarian Neanderthals that frequent Slashdot, that means mentioning her is a violation of some sort of sense of maleness. There are just a lot of very angry men out there, and any time anything is attributed to a woman, they literally start foaming at the mouth, shouting "SJW". They're a rather pathetic lot who, I suspect, don't spend very much time around women, or possibly other humans at all. They can be safely ignored however, they are a shrinking demographic.
But not nearly as historically significant. Babbage designed the world's first Turing complete computer, and if he could have had the parts machined in his day, the computer revolution would have kicked off a half a century earlier. Just imagine the Internet in WWII, all those Nazi hackers and astroturfers,
Whoever and however the product is used, the product is causing significant harm, therefore the product should be priced in such a fashion as to reflect the harm it does. It's that simple. You can bitch and moan about "collectivism", but carbon pricing is about using the market to deal with the problem.
Oil, coal and even natural gas lead to significant climate-changing climate changes, and the price of oil, coal and natural gas should reflect that damage. Otherwise, the fact that current pricing benefits us in the short term is only guaranteeing that we, or those that come after us, end up paying a much higher price to mitigate what we've done.
It's really that simple. Fossil fuels are a terrible fucking way to produce energy. They are polluting and they emit greenhouse gasses. They will lead to long term changes that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people and will end up costing everyone a lot more money in the decades to come. If that means I have to pay a lot more for gas, then so be it.
But it does ultimately hurt those companies because it makes competing energy sources more viable. If fossil fuels are priced higher, it makes alternatives relatively cheaper and more competitive, and at some point, when everyone starts using, say, electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the oil companies are going to feel the pain.
Which is why even oil companies are preparing for a post-oil world. Everyone is. The Saudis are creating the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know the game is up, and oil has only decades left.
Does "removing subsidies" also mean pricing energy sources for their environmental and climactic costs? If you're not pricing energy sources in that way, you're effectively subsidizing them, because somehow someone somewhere is going to have to pay to deal with issues like remediation, environmental damage and yes, whether the Koch meme repeaters like it or not, significant alterations in global climate.
You too, huh? "Oh look, you'll be able to collaborate easier", to which everyone looked amazed and said to each other "Yup, I'll sure use that", and then proceeded to continue emailing each other documents in progress like they've been doing for twenty years.
I'm not equivocating, because most of what you refer to is either garbage or highly contested philosophical interpretations.
I'm sorry. You don't have a Prime mover to show me, and you cannot even demonstrate that one is necessary.
I don't need an alternative explanation. That isn't how it works. It's your job to come up with a testable verifiable and falsifiable test for your Prime Mover. That is your job, so produce the paper and the data that shows the Prime Mover exists. Don't give me speculative papers about a holographic universe and a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo, because you're right, I absolutely and completely reject anything that isn't real, verifiable evidence.
Waving your hands in the air and pointing everything declare "that's evidence", isn't evidence at all.
And virtually nothing is known about the starting conditions of the Universe, so there is absolute no reason to assert that causality was a factor at the moment the universe began (which may, in fact, not even have been the Big Bang at all). And even if I accept causality is necessary, it still means at some point, something was not bounded by causality, but where you and I differ is you invoke an extra entity which the best evidence you can provide is to assert, with little or no justification, that everything is evidence of, whereas I would accept that the Universe was uncaused in and of itself. The benefit being, I know the universe exists. I have absolutely no evidence of a Prime Mover.
Fine, call it parsimony then. There is no evidence for a Prime Mover, and if "uncaused" is a requirement (and it may not be, it may simply be a side effect of how we view the world around us, there's no reason to think causality applies to the origins of the universe), then the most parsimonious explanation is that the Universe is uncaused.
Wanting to copulate with supermodels demonstrates how cognition and emotion can override biology. If we really wanted to guarantee successful reproduction, going for women who starve themselves is pretty idiotic. Better to go for a nice plump (but not too plump) pear-shaped woman in her late teens to late twenties, in the prime of life and good wide hips to minimize the chances of a medical crisis in labor that can kill both baby and mother. If it wasn't for the fashion industry, we'd still be idolizing Marilyn Monroe, and not those anorexics that appear on fashion mags.
In other words, you invoke an entity which you give the attribute of "uncaused" to. I will invoke Occam's Razor, remove the unnecessary entity and give the attribute of "uncaused" to the Universe.
Well, if we knew the red spot was a life form, we could at least study it to figure out what kind of metabolism it had, how it reproduced, etc. It might be very hard considering it's floating in the second largest gravity well in the solar system, but you could at least learn some things.
At the moment the best we can do is probably recognize life that is reasonably similar to life on Earth; i.e. is carbon-based, uses ATP or a similar molecule to produce energy, uses some sort of nucleotides to store genetic information, has a cell wall or membrane, and so forth. Yes, one can envision life that works in very different ways, and there has been research into the possibility of life based on other elements; for instance silicon, or the use of other solvents, like ammonia, as opposed to water. There may also be numerous ways to create a genetic code far different than RNA and DNA, so the field could be very wide indeed.
One thing is clear, and that is life wherever it is and however it is formed will have to solve a similar set of problems, and if it becomes widespread, will have a significant effect on the worlds it inhabits. Life on Earth pretty much remade the entire atmosphere, which tells you how significant the geological consequences of life can be.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think we should execute car thieves or credit card scammers, and they should feel lucky that you're not in charge?
Let's not forget that the kind of prison system you seem to approve of only exacerbates the problem. But hey, fuck science. You want revenge, even if it bites you in the ass in more ways than one.
Let's not forget the politicians who take advantage of voters' tendencies towards irrational hysteria to pass draconian laws. This whole "eye for an eye" thing causes more misery, and does absolutely nothing to prevent crime.
Prison is about more than punishment. Or it should be, if you want the people walking out of that prison to reintegrate into society, and not end up back on their pre-prison trajectory.
Frankly, I think before the "hard on crime" types talk about addiction issues, they ought to take at least a beginners course on the psychology and neurology of addiction. Or heck, even some basic psychology. This idea that we are completely free agents, that free will is absolute, was debunked decades ago. A lot of our behaviors, even our more cognitively complex ones, happen "under the hood", and to one extent or another our free will is an illusion, decisions like "I need another shot of vodka" or "I need to throw those dice one more time" were actually made prior to the conscious part of the mind even being aware of the urge. There's a growing body of evidence that much of what we think of as "decision making" is really the end of the decision making process, where the conscious mind creates a scenario to explain why other parts of the brain arrived at the decision.
If a policy leads to more violence and higher recidivism, then how precisely is that helping anyone? Reforming a criminal, which is one key issue to prisons (otherwise, why not just have a big dark hole and throw people in it), is undermined by such measures, and while the operator of that prison makes a few bucks more, it ends up costing taxpayers more in the end.
Advertisers are malevolent sociopath retards. They are well and truly among the most repugnant creatures the world has ever known. Remember, marketers are the guys that helped Hitler convince Germans that Jews were evil, and convinced generations of people that smoking tobacco was hip and cool. Advertisers are absolute scum, and while in the olden days they were scum who put some effort into understanding the human mind to trick us, now they're just worthless moronic scum who think if they throw enough shit on a computer screen, they'll make their clients oodles of money.
Been about ten years for me. The ISP I worked for way back in 2006 was using tucows as a domain registrar (we were a reseller), and I wrote some scripts to automatically set DNS settings on the Tucows side for our DNS servers. After I left that job, I completely forgot about them. I really had no idea they were still around.
Lovelace was a woman, and to the Libertarian Neanderthals that frequent Slashdot, that means mentioning her is a violation of some sort of sense of maleness. There are just a lot of very angry men out there, and any time anything is attributed to a woman, they literally start foaming at the mouth, shouting "SJW". They're a rather pathetic lot who, I suspect, don't spend very much time around women, or possibly other humans at all. They can be safely ignored however, they are a shrinking demographic.
But not nearly as historically significant. Babbage designed the world's first Turing complete computer, and if he could have had the parts machined in his day, the computer revolution would have kicked off a half a century earlier. Just imagine the Internet in WWII, all those Nazi hackers and astroturfers,
I guess this all explains why the nice little checkbox not to show ads doesn't survive a page refresh. Meet the new boss, samer than the old boss...
Whoever and however the product is used, the product is causing significant harm, therefore the product should be priced in such a fashion as to reflect the harm it does. It's that simple. You can bitch and moan about "collectivism", but carbon pricing is about using the market to deal with the problem.
Oil, coal and even natural gas lead to significant climate-changing climate changes, and the price of oil, coal and natural gas should reflect that damage. Otherwise, the fact that current pricing benefits us in the short term is only guaranteeing that we, or those that come after us, end up paying a much higher price to mitigate what we've done.
It's really that simple. Fossil fuels are a terrible fucking way to produce energy. They are polluting and they emit greenhouse gasses. They will lead to long term changes that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people and will end up costing everyone a lot more money in the decades to come. If that means I have to pay a lot more for gas, then so be it.
By subsidies, many of us mean that everyone else gets to pay for the damage done by the use of fossil fuels, while the companies reap profits.
But it does ultimately hurt those companies because it makes competing energy sources more viable. If fossil fuels are priced higher, it makes alternatives relatively cheaper and more competitive, and at some point, when everyone starts using, say, electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the oil companies are going to feel the pain.
Which is why even oil companies are preparing for a post-oil world. Everyone is. The Saudis are creating the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know the game is up, and oil has only decades left.
Does "removing subsidies" also mean pricing energy sources for their environmental and climactic costs? If you're not pricing energy sources in that way, you're effectively subsidizing them, because somehow someone somewhere is going to have to pay to deal with issues like remediation, environmental damage and yes, whether the Koch meme repeaters like it or not, significant alterations in global climate.
I personally know of a guy who uses tomatoes for criminal activities... Tomatoes, hookers and blow, a deadly combination!
Yeah, it's always bad to put in "I poisoned the CEO and slept with the CFO's wife on the CIO's couch while the CTO watched."
So it's still beta/vapor ware.
Wake me up when it actually works, and when it actually is useful.
You too, huh? "Oh look, you'll be able to collaborate easier", to which everyone looked amazed and said to each other "Yup, I'll sure use that", and then proceeded to continue emailing each other documents in progress like they've been doing for twenty years.
I'm not equivocating, because most of what you refer to is either garbage or highly contested philosophical interpretations.
I'm sorry. You don't have a Prime mover to show me, and you cannot even demonstrate that one is necessary.
I don't need an alternative explanation. That isn't how it works. It's your job to come up with a testable verifiable and falsifiable test for your Prime Mover. That is your job, so produce the paper and the data that shows the Prime Mover exists. Don't give me speculative papers about a holographic universe and a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo, because you're right, I absolutely and completely reject anything that isn't real, verifiable evidence.
Waving your hands in the air and pointing everything declare "that's evidence", isn't evidence at all.
And virtually nothing is known about the starting conditions of the Universe, so there is absolute no reason to assert that causality was a factor at the moment the universe began (which may, in fact, not even have been the Big Bang at all). And even if I accept causality is necessary, it still means at some point, something was not bounded by causality, but where you and I differ is you invoke an extra entity which the best evidence you can provide is to assert, with little or no justification, that everything is evidence of, whereas I would accept that the Universe was uncaused in and of itself. The benefit being, I know the universe exists. I have absolutely no evidence of a Prime Mover.
Fine, call it parsimony then. There is no evidence for a Prime Mover, and if "uncaused" is a requirement (and it may not be, it may simply be a side effect of how we view the world around us, there's no reason to think causality applies to the origins of the universe), then the most parsimonious explanation is that the Universe is uncaused.
Wanting to copulate with supermodels demonstrates how cognition and emotion can override biology. If we really wanted to guarantee successful reproduction, going for women who starve themselves is pretty idiotic. Better to go for a nice plump (but not too plump) pear-shaped woman in her late teens to late twenties, in the prime of life and good wide hips to minimize the chances of a medical crisis in labor that can kill both baby and mother. If it wasn't for the fashion industry, we'd still be idolizing Marilyn Monroe, and not those anorexics that appear on fashion mags.
In other words, you invoke an entity which you give the attribute of "uncaused" to. I will invoke Occam's Razor, remove the unnecessary entity and give the attribute of "uncaused" to the Universe.
Well, if we knew the red spot was a life form, we could at least study it to figure out what kind of metabolism it had, how it reproduced, etc. It might be very hard considering it's floating in the second largest gravity well in the solar system, but you could at least learn some things.
At the moment the best we can do is probably recognize life that is reasonably similar to life on Earth; i.e. is carbon-based, uses ATP or a similar molecule to produce energy, uses some sort of nucleotides to store genetic information, has a cell wall or membrane, and so forth. Yes, one can envision life that works in very different ways, and there has been research into the possibility of life based on other elements; for instance silicon, or the use of other solvents, like ammonia, as opposed to water. There may also be numerous ways to create a genetic code far different than RNA and DNA, so the field could be very wide indeed.
One thing is clear, and that is life wherever it is and however it is formed will have to solve a similar set of problems, and if it becomes widespread, will have a significant effect on the worlds it inhabits. Life on Earth pretty much remade the entire atmosphere, which tells you how significant the geological consequences of life can be.
Let me amend that. There are not a lot of chimps posting on /.