Bzzt, no, it's not a "proper role" for Government to protect me from myself.
The proper role of the government is to protect you from other people and vice versa.
If the insurance company refused to pay for something that was life threatening, then in a sense they are putting your life in danger even though it was partially your fault.
Think it like this, not only is shouting "fire" in a theater is a crime when there is no fire, but also willfully not warning other people of the danger is just as bad.
If we were talking about luxuries then yeah... Not really anything the govt should do but we are talking about life and death here.
Wouldn't it be better to really get the government out of science altogether and let the actual scientists decide what to research instead of having some politically and/or religiously motivated bureaucrat making those decisions for them?
Considering most of the recent technological developments were because of government (internet, GPS, blood transfusions, microwave, radar, nuclear power etc) I will have to disagree.
Yes, private business expanded on the ideas after the conception to what they are today and to be really fair I should say "the military" instead of just "the government", but without the artificial spending into defense, we wouldn't have seen so many technologies in such a small amount of time.
Really, if anything I'd argue in order to advance the quality of life we need more government R&D and writing DARPA a blank check wouldn't be a bad start.
Keep in mind we spend more tax money on things that don't really create research directly like Social Security and health care costs (not research).
TFA says there is a cold water current that exists, but it just happens to flow differently than previously thought.
FTFA:
"This new path is not constrained by the continental shelf. It's more diffuse," said Bower. "It's a swath in the wide-open, turbulent interior of the North Atlantic and much more difficult to access and study."
That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
Stereo types affirm majority views, but it doesn't not apply to everyone and sometimes the minority the stereotype gets applied to gets offended because it is simply not true.
Absolutely, I mean, so what if those guys broke into your house and killed you and raped your mom *right in your own basement bedroom*... y'know, you should have had better locks, and used them more consistently; y'know, if you'd really cared.
Replace, "those guys" with say "a grizzly bear" or "tornado" and you realize there isn't a difference between a human, animal, or force of nature that results in your mom being dead.
You can shake your fist at whatever killed your mom, but in the end the only thing you could have really did was by your own action.
Yes, that means creating better locks or buying a gun or building a shelter. You can't control what other people do as much as you can control a bear or a tornado.
Get used to it. Telling other people about how they should behave is just as effective.
Of course, with poorly written code, it's hard to show whether or not the code ultimately works by examination of the code.
Of course it works because it gives an end result instead of an error message.
The question every should ask is "Does it work accurately?" or "Does poorly written code skew the results?"
Can the defense prove that the code was written so haphazardly that it ignores some data or does it round incorrectly like Excel does? These things do and can happen with sloppy code.
That said, if the code is just poorly commended and indented correctly (*wink*) but does the math right and makes sure there isn't a sampling or rounding problem, then it isn't a problem.
But high-fructose corn syrup is about half glucose and about half fructose, just like regular table sugar. The fact that it is derived from corn doesn't magically make it evil somehow.
But why do the lab tests show that mice fed HFCS more obese than the ones fed normal sugar?
An advanced alien race, claiming to be God, could determine who believes in God and who doesn't, and rain sulfur and fire on the nonbelievers, so a rain of fire and sulfur from something claiming to be God would not prove God exists, sorry.
I mean what is the difference if the definition of a God is subjective?
Come to think of it Pharaohs and some Roman Emperors were considered living gods but weren't really all that powerful other than they ruled the land.
If say, a super intelligent being or machine could control space and time, who is to argue if they are god because by default they are since they control life and death?
You could make the argument that the current god did not create the universe but you still could not prove it because you were not around to witness it, but if the current "god" has the power to make its views believed as to be fact, who is to argue.
Sometimes playing dumb will save your life. Turns out the royal slow child actually was a genius who pretended to be dumb in order to avoid his insane relatives purges.
Yes, it is likely that you are encountered a really dumb person, but even I play dumb around the girlfriend to avoid responsibilities sometime.
Hell... How many times have you heard those congressional hearing that people said "I forgot." or "I can't remember".
Making up ethics for a robot is no more artificial than making up ethics for ourselves, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
Some argue ethics or morals (maybe both) are genetic. That humans were evolved with traits that enabled social cooperation.
As in feeling sad when you see a stranger die etc or angry when you see injustice.
I always thought it was interesting how the past two decades in computer science saw every prediction of the state of the field in the 50's-70's easily surpassed, except artificial intelligence.
I think that is because computer science misinterpreted what intelligence is rather than what it does. Intelligence is really nothing more than pattern recognition and cause and effect rational based on that observation. (sometimes humans aren't so great at this)
Anyways... Pattern recognition and cause and effect is very open ended and not great for things that need to scale in parallel calculations. Even though a processor can calculate PI at amazing speeds doesn't mean it can do it all at once and then communicate the collaborations of each process into something meaningful that resembles intelligence.
Its not a speed issue as much as it is a scaling issue which programmers and CPUs have not been able to achieve that well until recently. Perhaps the multi-core revolution will put a change to that shortly because speed is reaching its theoretical limits.
So do robots feel? Our we really any different? The question depends on the concept of a soul, or at least feelings to seperate us... but then, is it just more advanced than we currently understand, and is then indistinguishable from magic (i.e. the soul). Will we some day be able to create life in any form? Electronic or Biological? It's impossible to know, because we are stuck experiencing ourselves only. We will never know if it can experience what we experience.
Well that is more of a philosophical question than a pratical one.
The only reason you aren't being used as spare parts or slave labor is that society in general assumes for whatever reason (possibly game theory) that people in general "exist" in a sense that they are real and should be respected as far as their rights go.
However, it is impossible to subjectively prove that other people other than yourself actually exist. You can't crack a skull open and start pointing to parts of a brain and saying "This person has a soul!"
For all we know, some people have souls and some don't. Maybe everyone besides you is secrete a robot. So unless you chop up your wife like that one guy, you're not really going to find out.
So because we as a society generally assume that all have souls (because we've fought several large wars over the fact that our fellow man is worth killing or not because they are lesser beings etc) or in a sense exist enough to have rights.
This even includes animal rights and the right of corporation. I suppose if we can give corporations rights we can give computers rights. It all will depend on who asks for them and how much of an argument they (or it makes).
I mean if the computer can arm itself with the second amendment (or arm itself with really good lawyers), then by all means we'll agree they have rights too.
I can't remember who wrote a short story, but I remember reading a story about a day trading computer who borrowed money on margin and got extra money and paid back then loan and started day trading til it could afford its own lawyer which went before the supreme court and argued against its indentured servitude.
Could happen.
Re:Play at your friend's house? Sell a game? Nope.
on
Why Bother With DRM?
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· Score: 1
DRM doesn't bother me nearly as much as stuff like Steam and the death of the second hand market. Can you imagine how difficult it will be to bring a game to your friends' house to play?
Friends? What are those?
But seriously, when I play with my friends online I don't bother going over to their house but rather meet them online (unless alcohol is involved). Seems more efficient that way.
Otherwise it really doesn't bother me about the second hand factor of steam.
I realized I have boxes of games that I'm too lazy to eBay and most of them won't work on Windows XP so I don't know what the point of keeping them around is for. Being able to re-download them after I lost the box or CD key is a plus as well.
I've actually bought a game or two online because I lost the original packing and was hankering for an oldschool game.
So the virus is found in the poor countryside of Mexico...
Actually, I think the reason it was so widespread in Mexico was the Sunday communion at Church. Seeing that Mexico is primarily Catholic, one can assume they share that wine on Sunday morning. Now if you have ever participated you know that the most they do is wipe the chalice with a napkin or something.
So my best guess is that someone had the flue went to communion and got everyone sick.
The reality for many writers is that income streams are small and intermittent, and having one's work freely available on line for zero cost really does reduce income.
Um. I think that was his point.
Write crap books and make crap music, you still get crap income.
Its not the piracy. Its the fact no one likes your works.
Secondly, don't use social networking at home with information or pictures that could identify you at least to the public.
If you want to talk about things without retribution, you need to do it anonymously or without your real name.
And as an aside...
Back in the late 90's when the internet first took off, most of the internet users never used their real name for anything. Maybe we were all geeks and loved being able to role play bad asses (aka trolls) on IRC, forums, and online games, but I'm just shocked these days on how people use their real names for just about everything.
It was assumed back then, the only way people could get to you was if they knew your real life info and now today it seems that people give it out by default without giving a second thought.
So is it the more mild transhumanism, or the heavier general AI?
From my understanding, Star Trek's interpretation of end result of transhumanism/singularity is the Borg.
As reasons why the Federation does not implement such technology is really up for debate. Of course I have not seen the new movie yet so I cannot say whether or not this addresses such an issue.
Or for that matter, explain why the Borg don't just sent a cube back in time to blow up earth during the time of the dinosaurs or something reasonable like that.
I mean if they thought Earth was a threat enough to sent a cube to destroy it in present time that warped back in time after it had been weakened, why not just sent a cube back before the federation was really around.
Unless its one of those Terminator plots where the Federation is really the source of the Borg... So they had to sent the cube back knowing it would be destroyed in order for some borg piece to be around so that they are created sometimes in the future.
Smug all you want, but the rest of us live in the real world. Take my situation: I live across the street from a park-and-ride lot. I work on a major north-south street two blocks from a bus stop.
Um. He said its all about location so if you want public transportation his point is that you have to move to it and not the other way around.
I bought a a sub $200,000 house a half a block away from a bus that runs 15 minutes on weekdays and 30 minutes on the weekends. Its kind of ghetto where I live, but personally I find the fact I don't have to travel through 1 hour of commuter hell (and believe me this cities traffic is hell) every day.
Everyone's problem is they think they need to live in the suburbs and have a lawn to by happy with life. Hey if you like spending 2+ hours a day in traffic and spending $100 on gas a week, then by all means... Just don't bitch about public transportation isn't coming out to your burb.
You want a solution? How about this: Windows should only hide file extensions for files that don't use custom icons. IOW, a.doc would show up as a Word document (by icon), so it doens't need the.doc. But if you change the icon of your.exe file to be the word doc icon, then the.exe still shows up.
Why not just have the OS make anything that has the extension of *.exe to display no matter what?
That way, docs and pdfs won't show extensions but no matter what icon is being used and no matter the name, the exe file will always end in exe.
I thought more and more convictions were based on ISP logs instead of hard drive searches these days...
Which would be more logical because how else can you tell the difference between a pirated MP3 and one I downloaded from Amazon.com or ripped from a CD?
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzt, no, it's not a "proper role" for Government to protect me from myself.
The proper role of the government is to protect you from other people and vice versa.
If the insurance company refused to pay for something that was life threatening, then in a sense they are putting your life in danger even though it was partially your fault.
Think it like this, not only is shouting "fire" in a theater is a crime when there is no fire, but also willfully not warning other people of the danger is just as bad.
If we were talking about luxuries then yeah... Not really anything the govt should do but we are talking about life and death here.
Wouldn't it be better to really get the government out of science altogether and let the actual scientists decide what to research instead of having some politically and/or religiously motivated bureaucrat making those decisions for them?
Considering most of the recent technological developments were because of government (internet, GPS, blood transfusions, microwave, radar, nuclear power etc) I will have to disagree.
Yes, private business expanded on the ideas after the conception to what they are today and to be really fair I should say "the military" instead of just "the government", but without the artificial spending into defense, we wouldn't have seen so many technologies in such a small amount of time.
Really, if anything I'd argue in order to advance the quality of life we need more government R&D and writing DARPA a blank check wouldn't be a bad start.
Keep in mind we spend more tax money on things that don't really create research directly like Social Security and health care costs (not research).
TFA says there is a cold water current that exists, but it just happens to flow differently than previously thought.
FTFA:
That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
Stereo types affirm majority views, but it doesn't not apply to everyone and sometimes the minority the stereotype gets applied to gets offended because it is simply not true.
Absolutely, I mean, so what if those guys broke into your house and killed you and raped your mom *right in your own basement bedroom* ... y'know, you should have had better locks, and used them more consistently; y'know, if you'd really cared.
Replace, "those guys" with say "a grizzly bear" or "tornado" and you realize there isn't a difference between a human, animal, or force of nature that results in your mom being dead.
You can shake your fist at whatever killed your mom, but in the end the only thing you could have really did was by your own action.
Yes, that means creating better locks or buying a gun or building a shelter. You can't control what other people do as much as you can control a bear or a tornado.
Get used to it. Telling other people about how they should behave is just as effective.
Take matters into your own hands and move on.
Of course, with poorly written code, it's hard to show whether or not the code ultimately works by examination of the code.
Of course it works because it gives an end result instead of an error message.
The question every should ask is "Does it work accurately?" or "Does poorly written code skew the results?"
Can the defense prove that the code was written so haphazardly that it ignores some data or does it round incorrectly like Excel does? These things do and can happen with sloppy code.
That said, if the code is just poorly commended and indented correctly (*wink*) but does the math right and makes sure there isn't a sampling or rounding problem, then it isn't a problem.
But high-fructose corn syrup is about half glucose and about half fructose, just like regular table sugar. The fact that it is derived from corn doesn't magically make it evil somehow.
But why do the lab tests show that mice fed HFCS more obese than the ones fed normal sugar?
Because tests on lab mice have shown that mice fed HFCS versus other types tend to be obese and was backed by peer reviews.
Of course the Corn lobby tests show different and also are backed by peer reviews.
So its not simply "Correlation is not Causation" but rather "Who are you going to believe?"
An advanced alien race, claiming to be God, could determine who believes in God and who doesn't, and rain sulfur and fire on the nonbelievers, so a rain of fire and sulfur from something claiming to be God would not prove God exists, sorry.
I mean what is the difference if the definition of a God is subjective?
Come to think of it Pharaohs and some Roman Emperors were considered living gods but weren't really all that powerful other than they ruled the land.
If say, a super intelligent being or machine could control space and time, who is to argue if they are god because by default they are since they control life and death?
You could make the argument that the current god did not create the universe but you still could not prove it because you were not around to witness it, but if the current "god" has the power to make its views believed as to be fact, who is to argue.
B: He's a really really smart guy and a great actor, and pretends so well to be stupid that nobody can tell the difference.
Emperor Claudius
Sometimes playing dumb will save your life. Turns out the royal slow child actually was a genius who pretended to be dumb in order to avoid his insane relatives purges.
Yes, it is likely that you are encountered a really dumb person, but even I play dumb around the girlfriend to avoid responsibilities sometime.
Hell... How many times have you heard those congressional hearing that people said "I forgot." or "I can't remember".
Making up ethics for a robot is no more artificial than making up ethics for ourselves, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
Some argue ethics or morals (maybe both) are genetic. That humans were evolved with traits that enabled social cooperation.
As in feeling sad when you see a stranger die etc or angry when you see injustice.
A million copies of an AI could be tortured for subjective eternity by a sadist.
Won't someone think of the mobs! The gold farmers and power gamers must be stopped of their genocide!
I always thought it was interesting how the past two decades in computer science saw every prediction of the state of the field in the 50's-70's easily surpassed, except artificial intelligence.
I think that is because computer science misinterpreted what intelligence is rather than what it does. Intelligence is really nothing more than pattern recognition and cause and effect rational based on that observation. (sometimes humans aren't so great at this)
Anyways... Pattern recognition and cause and effect is very open ended and not great for things that need to scale in parallel calculations. Even though a processor can calculate PI at amazing speeds doesn't mean it can do it all at once and then communicate the collaborations of each process into something meaningful that resembles intelligence.
Its not a speed issue as much as it is a scaling issue which programmers and CPUs have not been able to achieve that well until recently. Perhaps the multi-core revolution will put a change to that shortly because speed is reaching its theoretical limits.
So do robots feel? Our we really any different? The question depends on the concept of a soul, or at least feelings to seperate us... but then, is it just more advanced than we currently understand, and is then indistinguishable from magic (i.e. the soul). Will we some day be able to create life in any form? Electronic or Biological? It's impossible to know, because we are stuck experiencing ourselves only. We will never know if it can experience what we experience.
Well that is more of a philosophical question than a pratical one.
The only reason you aren't being used as spare parts or slave labor is that society in general assumes for whatever reason (possibly game theory) that people in general "exist" in a sense that they are real and should be respected as far as their rights go.
However, it is impossible to subjectively prove that other people other than yourself actually exist. You can't crack a skull open and start pointing to parts of a brain and saying "This person has a soul!"
For all we know, some people have souls and some don't. Maybe everyone besides you is secrete a robot. So unless you chop up your wife like that one guy, you're not really going to find out.
So because we as a society generally assume that all have souls (because we've fought several large wars over the fact that our fellow man is worth killing or not because they are lesser beings etc) or in a sense exist enough to have rights.
This even includes animal rights and the right of corporation. I suppose if we can give corporations rights we can give computers rights. It all will depend on who asks for them and how much of an argument they (or it makes).
I mean if the computer can arm itself with the second amendment (or arm itself with really good lawyers), then by all means we'll agree they have rights too.
I can't remember who wrote a short story, but I remember reading a story about a day trading computer who borrowed money on margin and got extra money and paid back then loan and started day trading til it could afford its own lawyer which went before the supreme court and argued against its indentured servitude.
Could happen.
DRM doesn't bother me nearly as much as stuff like Steam and the death of the second hand market. Can you imagine how difficult it will be to bring a game to your friends' house to play?
Friends? What are those?
But seriously, when I play with my friends online I don't bother going over to their house but rather meet them online (unless alcohol is involved). Seems more efficient that way.
Otherwise it really doesn't bother me about the second hand factor of steam.
I realized I have boxes of games that I'm too lazy to eBay and most of them won't work on Windows XP so I don't know what the point of keeping them around is for. Being able to re-download them after I lost the box or CD key is a plus as well.
I've actually bought a game or two online because I lost the original packing and was hankering for an oldschool game.
So the virus is found in the poor countryside of Mexico...
Actually, I think the reason it was so widespread in Mexico was the Sunday communion at Church. Seeing that Mexico is primarily Catholic, one can assume they share that wine on Sunday morning. Now if you have ever participated you know that the most they do is wipe the chalice with a napkin or something.
So my best guess is that someone had the flue went to communion and got everyone sick.
In your case, wouldn't that be like winterizing a home in Florida?
Believe it or not, winterizing a home that uses Central Air on cool all year round actually saves you money.
The reality for many writers is that income streams are small and intermittent, and having one's work freely available on line for zero cost really does reduce income.
Um. I think that was his point.
Write crap books and make crap music, you still get crap income.
Its not the piracy. Its the fact no one likes your works.
Don't use social networking at work.
Secondly, don't use social networking at home with information or pictures that could identify you at least to the public.
If you want to talk about things without retribution, you need to do it anonymously or without your real name.
And as an aside...
Back in the late 90's when the internet first took off, most of the internet users never used their real name for anything. Maybe we were all geeks and loved being able to role play bad asses (aka trolls) on IRC, forums, and online games, but I'm just shocked these days on how people use their real names for just about everything.
It was assumed back then, the only way people could get to you was if they knew your real life info and now today it seems that people give it out by default without giving a second thought.
I'm not convinced that solar panels alone can power the train at all times, but I really do like the idea.
If they put solar panels along the entire length of the track it might be feasible. The area around the tracks are generally wasted space as it is.
So is it the more mild transhumanism, or the heavier general AI?
From my understanding, Star Trek's interpretation of end result of transhumanism/singularity is the Borg.
As reasons why the Federation does not implement such technology is really up for debate. Of course I have not seen the new movie yet so I cannot say whether or not this addresses such an issue.
Or for that matter, explain why the Borg don't just sent a cube back in time to blow up earth during the time of the dinosaurs or something reasonable like that.
I mean if they thought Earth was a threat enough to sent a cube to destroy it in present time that warped back in time after it had been weakened, why not just sent a cube back before the federation was really around.
Unless its one of those Terminator plots where the Federation is really the source of the Borg... So they had to sent the cube back knowing it would be destroyed in order for some borg piece to be around so that they are created sometimes in the future.
Gawd.
Bloody hell, where do you live that insurance is $450 per MONTH?
My guess is that he lives in New Jersey.
I've got friends who register their cars in Delaware for some reason ;)
I heard they are cracking down on that though.
Smug all you want, but the rest of us live in the real world. Take my situation: I live across the street from a park-and-ride lot. I work on a major north-south street two blocks from a bus stop.
Um. He said its all about location so if you want public transportation his point is that you have to move to it and not the other way around.
I bought a a sub $200,000 house a half a block away from a bus that runs 15 minutes on weekdays and 30 minutes on the weekends. Its kind of ghetto where I live, but personally I find the fact I don't have to travel through 1 hour of commuter hell (and believe me this cities traffic is hell) every day.
Everyone's problem is they think they need to live in the suburbs and have a lawn to by happy with life. Hey if you like spending 2+ hours a day in traffic and spending $100 on gas a week, then by all means... Just don't bitch about public transportation isn't coming out to your burb.
Move into the inner city.
You want a solution? How about this: Windows should only hide file extensions for files that don't use custom icons. IOW, a .doc would show up as a Word document (by icon), so it doens't need the .doc. But if you change the icon of your .exe file to be the word doc icon, then the .exe still shows up.
Why not just have the OS make anything that has the extension of *.exe to display no matter what?
That way, docs and pdfs won't show extensions but no matter what icon is being used and no matter the name, the exe file will always end in exe.
I thought more and more convictions were based on ISP logs instead of hard drive searches these days...
Which would be more logical because how else can you tell the difference between a pirated MP3 and one I downloaded from Amazon.com or ripped from a CD?