Well, isn't that part of the idea? If you can divide your opponent's attention in half with only a small amount of your own resources, that seems like it would be a worthwhile tactic.
Exactly. Its kind of like building a fortified bunker in a strategic position. Either the enemy will have to put more resources to attack it directly which will delay and hold them up or they will have to go around and attack other areas no so strong.
Of course this leaves them open for attack from behind if they bypass it.
Any five people. The middle-aged cashier. The jailbait playing with the lipstick. The creepy guy in the photo section. These people just don't have the jiggery/pokery aptitude necessary to roll their own ringtones. Okay, maybe the creepy guy in the photo section does. But those other four people: they're the ones who are buying ringtones.
Actually, I'd argue only the jailbait is buying ringtones. The middle age cashier wouldn't be willing to pay $2.50 for a damn ringer when they are getting paid close to minimum wage.
In reality, just because they don't roll their own ringtones doesn't mean they buy ringtones at all. My parents have enough trouble changing the ones that come with the phone much less figure out how to use iTunes or Verizon store. The problem is that $2.50 is too much for people that can't see the value of having a fashionable ringtone.
Considering that viruses can mutate and jump inter species (Bird Flu) let alone something as simple as family genetics, that wouldn't work as the virus creator intended.
(One of the drawbacks of stars is that you can't exactly setup thrusters on the surface of a flaming, gaseous body.)
Well if such a civilization had reached a technological singularity event, most likely they've got a lot of time on their hands since they would have figured out how to avoid mortality by old age and would most likley use something like a gravity well to shift the stars slightly over billions of years.
Rather than push the start, they could move it in the direction of said gravity well over time. Of course that might be mini black holes or neutron stars.
I'm glad, the creator's rights to control their creations have been upheld.
Oh hold on here. The RIAA and MPAA are not the creators. Often, unless you are a big client, your works will be disrespected regardless of MPAA or RIAA's clout.
In fact, the members of these groups (Sony, BMG, Paramount etc) aren't even the real authors and creators who use their collusion to screw the real artists out of their money.
Actually, it is still thought the Soviets (and still the Russians) had a fail safe doomsday system that would automatically respond to a nuclear attack without human intervention so it would depend on who they had their missiles pointed at the time of impact.
I'm not sure if that is true, but they did freak out once when Norway launched a satellite once during the 90s.
An interesting and related question is how the laws can be tweaked, yet still conform to the anthropic principle.
My personal opinion about the Anthropic Principle is that the universe is a "best effort" or rather "just enough" to support conditions where life emerges with the least possible complexity. Even though it seems already complex to us, anything else would have to have conditions that are less likley to have occurred to create life.
I'm sure life could exist with other sets of rules if someone didn't leave it to chance and create a life form based of methane rather than carbon, but that may take 20 billion years to happen rather than the suspected 14 that it took to create us.
Of course on the flipside methane based lifeforms could have popped up already in the universe and were common but due to changes in the laws they may have died out due to this.
That said... With our current set of laws such as the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we too will die out eventually due to heat death unless we find a way around the situation in the far flung future. Of course, the laws might change yet again to conform to the anthropic prinicple so that something is around to observe the universe in which intelligence could exist under those conditions.
Otherwise... We'd have a dead universe with nothing around to care if it existed or not.
No artificial metric really matters in the security landscape.
One thousand exploits that allow someone to wipe a users home directory is nothing compared to single exploit that allows an unauthorized person to gain root access to the machine remotely.
Most linguists currently believe in the existance of something called "universal grammar", which is a set of properties common to all acquirable human languages (that is, langauges which can be learned as a native language).
The argument against universal grammar is of course is non-Latin languages like Japanese (and possibly Russian) which don't play by the rules. I'm not really a language expert on either, but I'm tried to learn Japanese and its really tough.
Everything is relationship based off the speaker and to the person or object he is talking about and then the audience. As in... If I'm talking about a pencil sitting on my desk, it has a different tense than a pencil on your desk and then a difference tense in someone else's hand or a pencil that is sitting at a far off place (-sara or -kara? I can't remember). And we haven't even gotten to issues about ownership like if it was in my hand or your hand.
Whereas in Latin based languages it is more concerned about action or tense of ownership but not relationship to the speaker or audience. Hence... It is argued universal grammar does not apply in that respect.
Would you prefer that we place enormous power in everybody's hands? Regardless of their level of skill or ethics?
I suppose it is kind of like gun control issues.
Well think of it like this in game theory terms....
You are stranded on an island with 4 other people and you find a crate with 5 guns.
Do you give all the guns to one person or do you give them to everyone.
And to spice things up before your failed trip to the island, you found out that one of the passengers was a serial killer and if he had the gun he would kill you, but you don't know who has it.
Would you:
A.) Give the guns to one person who you aren't sure has your best interest in mind but lessens the chance the bank robber gets the gun in which you know you'll die but this isn't guaranteed since you don't know who is the serial killer who if he got the guns would be able to kill everyone else without recourse.
B.) Give the guns to everyone which gives the gun to the criminal a gun but also gives everyone a fighting chance if the serial killer comes after them.
You don't just design the robot, you design the environment that it will be operating in.
Huh? I thought that was the point of humanoid robotics.
Sure, you can build a warehouse design for wheeled robots, but when you need to send in a 5 million dollar kill bot to flush out insurgents, you don't want that machine to look at the stairs and throw its mechanical arms into the air saying "No got legs!" and then call in an airstrike to level the house.
What, no one ever heard of vacuum lines? Or maybe pressurized lines?
1. Airplanes often travel at 30,000ft which may make it more difficult to do this on the wings (where they keep the fuel) 2. Airplanes have a whole problem with weight versus lift ratio. If you can squeeze a few more passengers by using fiber optics instead of the gear required for the pressurized/vacuum lines then the Airline executives would prefer that.
Be indignant about that. Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.
How can you be sure the same isn't true for regular media?
Take any old encyclopedia... Can you tell me for sure that they weren't edited in such a way for any type of bias or misinformation?
If it has sources, then what if the sources are suspect? If you have an authority, what do you to have to prove (other than gut instinct and the authorities references which could also be suspect) they aren't a paid shill too?
I think it all comes down to trust.
Do you trust Wikipedia? Could you trust your school text books? Could you trust the news? Can you even trust your parents to tell you the truth about things?
Example, I have an old copy of a 1944 encyclopedia reference (not the entire series) which mentions the Soviets as our allies. Are there any references to Soviet atrocities from the 1930s? Nope. They are our allies.
From a personal perspective, you should assume that everyone is either lying to you or misinformed themselves without anyone disclaiming the fact but I have to trust them because I have no other choice, but it doesn't help to ask "Are you sure?".
We agree that Wikipedia isn't as authoritative as they make it out to be, but what I disagree with you is that they have to disclaim it or that anything else in life is better.
Turns out it's two kids playing a video game in the same room controlling the robots that destroyed humanity.
No. I still remember that episode. It was due to some plague that killed off humanity so they based their lives and wars around video games. Still pretty interesting though.
The RIAA's tactics aren't preventing anyone from making a living--at least, not directly.
It could be said that because of the RIAA some musicians are unable to make a living because they do not conform the the RIAAs standards and the artificial industry environment the RIAA has created.
I mean, would there be a better world for independent musicians if the RIAA wasn't around?
What's the point of reading books if you're not going to keep them for reference?
It depends.
All my non-fiction, historical, reference manuals, and game rule books I keep with a passion since often more than not, I'll have to grab one for a debate on some forum somewhere or to quote something;)
But in my modern fiction section, I have a great deal of stuff that I'll read once and then never read again. I mean seriously... War Hammer 40K pulp novels are fun to read, but I don't even think they are officially cannon and most of the story is summarized in the game rule books.
We hear too often from these climate "experts", finally someone is ready to admit that our climate is so big and complex that we don't know exactly how it all works.
I wouldn't say we don't know exactly how it all works at the micro level but at the macro is a fairly simple concept.
The sun warms the earth at unevenly depending on the tilt and rotation of the earth. The atmosphere is moving anyways due to rotation but warm air and water moves from hot to cold areas to give off energy since there are no means for the atmosphere and oceans to store the energy without movement in some way.
No because the earth is not a perfect sphere and the atmosphere and water contents do change over time (volcanoes anyone?) the day to day prediction of weather do not work other than general seasonal predictions (It may snow sometime between December and February in Maine is a pretty good prediction.)
The idea behind global warming is that if more energy is trapped in the atmosphere and not bounced off into space it has to go somewhere which means the weather will tend to have more energy behind it.
It is pretty much as simple as that.
However the question if man is causing the decrease of reflection due to greenhouse gases and what happens exactly when the weather system has more energy has yet to be determined.
The second problem is that more and more schoolkids and students are using those as a substitute for learning or thinking for themselves.
That is more of a problem of how information and logic works rather than the learning process.
Example, do I really need to actually pretend I'm in the late 1860s and come up with my own periodic table from scratch going through each element and determining how many neutrons and protons it has without borrowing any knowledge whatsoever from resources.
No.
Should I learn the theory and the concepts about how Mendeleev came about with the periodic table and understand the idea that this also is related to the amount of neutrons and protons an element has?
Yes. It would be useful.
Should I memorize the exact order each and every single element and remember their names in that order?
Well... I remember Hydrogen is first followed by Helium (and something about noble gases) but beyond that I think unless you work with it on a daily basis, that is what Google is for.
As an aside, you shouldn't confuse 'standard of living' with 'quality of life'. Standard of livng is about how much you have, basically your wealth and your leisure, although I don't know a lot about it. Quality of life I do know about, and is defined as (by the WHO)
True. Persons that are living "extreme poverty" (living on less than $1 a day, risk of starving, no clean water) is about 1.1 billion and is falling. The majority of the 5 or so billion left usually aren't starving but I will say they their standard of living isn't what we are used to when it comes to health care and mortality rates. (Example China)
Why, because at that point it became apparent to you that they understand economics better than you do?
No, because it hurts!
But seriously it is the same reason we have SEC, insider trading, and banking laws and regulation. Just because you know how to do it, doesn't mean its ok to do it.
I suspect after the whole Subprime fiasco is over the Feds will institute something or another to beat anyone willing to loan money to people who can't possibly pay back the loan with a 100lb sack of worthless dollar bills (due to inflation). Economics in itself is completely arbitrary and isn't like the laws of physics where you can master the knowledge of the system. In economics, you can change the system pretty much all the time which of course leads to arbitrary scarcities which would have not existed other than the fact someone made it so on purpose just to exploit some one else.
Slashdot Mirror
Or we could just abolish money. That's just as practical and reduces the level of complexity in our society immensely.
Really? I'm pretty sure you've never looked at a tax form before.
The problem is that the IRS was created to solve a problem (social security) which will be a moot pint in 50 odd years unless something else is done.
Well, isn't that part of the idea? If you can divide your opponent's attention in half with only a small amount of your own resources, that seems like it would be a worthwhile tactic.
Exactly. Its kind of like building a fortified bunker in a strategic position. Either the enemy will have to put more resources to attack it directly which will delay and hold them up or they will have to go around and attack other areas no so strong.
Of course this leaves them open for attack from behind if they bypass it.
Any five people. The middle-aged cashier. The jailbait playing with the lipstick. The creepy guy in the photo section. These people just don't have the jiggery/pokery aptitude necessary to roll their own ringtones. Okay, maybe the creepy guy in the photo section does. But those other four people: they're the ones who are buying ringtones.
Actually, I'd argue only the jailbait is buying ringtones. The middle age cashier wouldn't be willing to pay $2.50 for a damn ringer when they are getting paid close to minimum wage.
In reality, just because they don't roll their own ringtones doesn't mean they buy ringtones at all. My parents have enough trouble changing the ones that come with the phone much less figure out how to use iTunes or Verizon store. The problem is that $2.50 is too much for people that can't see the value of having a fashionable ringtone.
Considering that viruses can mutate and jump inter species (Bird Flu) let alone something as simple as family genetics, that wouldn't work as the virus creator intended.
(One of the drawbacks of stars is that you can't exactly setup thrusters on the surface of a flaming, gaseous body.)
Well if such a civilization had reached a technological singularity event, most likely they've got a lot of time on their hands since they would have figured out how to avoid mortality by old age and would most likley use something like a gravity well to shift the stars slightly over billions of years.
Rather than push the start, they could move it in the direction of said gravity well over time. Of course that might be mini black holes or neutron stars.
I'm glad, the creator's rights to control their creations have been upheld.
Oh hold on here. The RIAA and MPAA are not the creators. Often, unless you are a big client, your works will be disrespected regardless of MPAA or RIAA's clout.
In fact, the members of these groups (Sony, BMG, Paramount etc) aren't even the real authors and creators who use their collusion to screw the real artists out of their money.
If you think you're in the right, you should try to change law.
So in that respect, the American Colonists should have obeyed British law and not thrown the tea into the harbor?
Well the military wouldn't know who to attack
Actually, it is still thought the Soviets (and still the Russians) had a fail safe doomsday system that would automatically respond to a nuclear attack without human intervention so it would depend on who they had their missiles pointed at the time of impact.
I'm not sure if that is true, but they did freak out once when Norway launched a satellite once during the 90s.
An interesting and related question is how the laws can be tweaked, yet still conform to the anthropic principle.
My personal opinion about the Anthropic Principle is that the universe is a "best effort" or rather "just enough" to support conditions where life emerges with the least possible complexity. Even though it seems already complex to us, anything else would have to have conditions that are less likley to have occurred to create life.
I'm sure life could exist with other sets of rules if someone didn't leave it to chance and create a life form based of methane rather than carbon, but that may take 20 billion years to happen rather than the suspected 14 that it took to create us.
Of course on the flipside methane based lifeforms could have popped up already in the universe and were common but due to changes in the laws they may have died out due to this.
That said... With our current set of laws such as the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we too will die out eventually due to heat death unless we find a way around the situation in the far flung future. Of course, the laws might change yet again to conform to the anthropic prinicple so that something is around to observe the universe in which intelligence could exist under those conditions.
Otherwise... We'd have a dead universe with nothing around to care if it existed or not.
Google comes close with simple "what" questions like:
What is one plus one? will give you 2.
What is the speed of light? will give you 299 792 458 m / s.
And maybe even something like...
What is the Capital of Sweden? will give you Stockholm.
Will give you the answer at the top of the screen.
Of course if you type
What is the reason for Napoleon's 1812 defeat?
It will give you the 1812 overture as the first hit so it has a bit more to go on context.
No artificial metric really matters in the security landscape.
One thousand exploits that allow someone to wipe a users home directory is nothing compared to single exploit that allows an unauthorized person to gain root access to the machine remotely.
Most linguists currently believe in the existance of something called "universal grammar", which is a set of properties common to all acquirable human languages (that is, langauges which can be learned as a native language).
The argument against universal grammar is of course is non-Latin languages like Japanese (and possibly Russian) which don't play by the rules. I'm not really a language expert on either, but I'm tried to learn Japanese and its really tough.
Everything is relationship based off the speaker and to the person or object he is talking about and then the audience. As in... If I'm talking about a pencil sitting on my desk, it has a different tense than a pencil on your desk and then a difference tense in someone else's hand or a pencil that is sitting at a far off place (-sara or -kara? I can't remember). And we haven't even gotten to issues about ownership like if it was in my hand or your hand.
Whereas in Latin based languages it is more concerned about action or tense of ownership but not relationship to the speaker or audience. Hence... It is argued universal grammar does not apply in that respect.
Whoops... I changed my story to say serial killer since that sounded more dramatic rather than a bank robber half way through, but you get the point ;)
Would you prefer that we place enormous power in everybody's hands? Regardless of their level of skill or ethics?
I suppose it is kind of like gun control issues.
Well think of it like this in game theory terms....
You are stranded on an island with 4 other people and you find a crate with 5 guns.
Do you give all the guns to one person or do you give them to everyone.
And to spice things up before your failed trip to the island, you found out that one of the passengers was a serial killer and if he had the gun he would kill you, but you don't know who has it.
Would you:
A.) Give the guns to one person who you aren't sure has your best interest in mind but lessens the chance the bank robber gets the gun in which you know you'll die but this isn't guaranteed since you don't know who is the serial killer who if he got the guns would be able to kill everyone else without recourse.
B.) Give the guns to everyone which gives the gun to the criminal a gun but also gives everyone a fighting chance if the serial killer comes after them.
Tough question.
You don't just design the robot, you design the environment that it will be operating in.
Huh? I thought that was the point of humanoid robotics.
Sure, you can build a warehouse design for wheeled robots, but when you need to send in a 5 million dollar kill bot to flush out insurgents, you don't want that machine to look at the stairs and throw its mechanical arms into the air saying "No got legs!" and then call in an airstrike to level the house.
What, no one ever heard of vacuum lines? Or maybe pressurized lines?
1. Airplanes often travel at 30,000ft which may make it more difficult to do this on the wings (where they keep the fuel)
2. Airplanes have a whole problem with weight versus lift ratio. If you can squeeze a few more passengers by using fiber optics instead of the gear required for the pressurized/vacuum lines then the Airline executives would prefer that.
Be indignant about that. Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.
How can you be sure the same isn't true for regular media?
Take any old encyclopedia... Can you tell me for sure that they weren't edited in such a way for any type of bias or misinformation?
If it has sources, then what if the sources are suspect? If you have an authority, what do you to have to prove (other than gut instinct and the authorities references which could also be suspect) they aren't a paid shill too?
I think it all comes down to trust.
Do you trust Wikipedia? Could you trust your school text books? Could you trust the news? Can you even trust your parents to tell you the truth about things?
Example, I have an old copy of a 1944 encyclopedia reference (not the entire series) which mentions the Soviets as our allies. Are there any references to Soviet atrocities from the 1930s? Nope. They are our allies.
From a personal perspective, you should assume that everyone is either lying to you or misinformed themselves without anyone disclaiming the fact but I have to trust them because I have no other choice, but it doesn't help to ask "Are you sure?".
We agree that Wikipedia isn't as authoritative as they make it out to be, but what I disagree with you is that they have to disclaim it or that anything else in life is better.
Turns out it's two kids playing a video game in the same room controlling the robots that destroyed humanity.
No. I still remember that episode. It was due to some plague that killed off humanity so they based their lives and wars around video games. Still pretty interesting though.
The RIAA's tactics aren't preventing anyone from making a living--at least, not directly.
It could be said that because of the RIAA some musicians are unable to make a living because they do not conform the the RIAAs standards and the artificial industry environment the RIAA has created.
I mean, would there be a better world for independent musicians if the RIAA wasn't around?
Yes. It does totally suck, so don't you think some act of contrition, other than empty words, would be appropriate?
To be fair, it saves Ken a lifetime of humiliation at family reunions of being known someone who gave a speech on a Spike TV event.
What's the point of reading books if you're not going to keep them for reference?
;)
It depends.
All my non-fiction, historical, reference manuals, and game rule books I keep with a passion since often more than not, I'll have to grab one for a debate on some forum somewhere or to quote something
But in my modern fiction section, I have a great deal of stuff that I'll read once and then never read again. I mean seriously... War Hammer 40K pulp novels are fun to read, but I don't even think they are officially cannon and most of the story is summarized in the game rule books.
We hear too often from these climate "experts", finally someone is ready to admit that our climate is so big and complex that we don't know exactly how it all works.
I wouldn't say we don't know exactly how it all works at the micro level but at the macro is a fairly simple concept.
The sun warms the earth at unevenly depending on the tilt and rotation of the earth. The atmosphere is moving anyways due to rotation but warm air and water moves from hot to cold areas to give off energy since there are no means for the atmosphere and oceans to store the energy without movement in some way.
No because the earth is not a perfect sphere and the atmosphere and water contents do change over time (volcanoes anyone?) the day to day prediction of weather do not work other than general seasonal predictions (It may snow sometime between December and February in Maine is a pretty good prediction.)
The idea behind global warming is that if more energy is trapped in the atmosphere and not bounced off into space it has to go somewhere which means the weather will tend to have more energy behind it.
It is pretty much as simple as that.
However the question if man is causing the decrease of reflection due to greenhouse gases and what happens exactly when the weather system has more energy has yet to be determined.
The second problem is that more and more schoolkids and students are using those as a substitute for learning or thinking for themselves.
That is more of a problem of how information and logic works rather than the learning process.
Example, do I really need to actually pretend I'm in the late 1860s and come up with my own periodic table from scratch going through each element and determining how many neutrons and protons it has without borrowing any knowledge whatsoever from resources.
No.
Should I learn the theory and the concepts about how Mendeleev came about with the periodic table and understand the idea that this also is related to the amount of neutrons and protons an element has?
Yes. It would be useful.
Should I memorize the exact order each and every single element and remember their names in that order?
Well... I remember Hydrogen is first followed by Helium (and something about noble gases) but beyond that I think unless you work with it on a daily basis, that is what Google is for.
As an aside, you shouldn't confuse 'standard of living' with 'quality of life'. Standard of livng is about how much you have, basically your wealth and your leisure, although I don't know a lot about it. Quality of life I do know about, and is defined as (by the WHO)
True. Persons that are living "extreme poverty" (living on less than $1 a day, risk of starving, no clean water) is about 1.1 billion and is falling. The majority of the 5 or so billion left usually aren't starving but I will say they their standard of living isn't what we are used to when it comes to health care and mortality rates. (Example China)
Why, because at that point it became apparent to you that they understand economics better than you do?
No, because it hurts!
But seriously it is the same reason we have SEC, insider trading, and banking laws and regulation. Just because you know how to do it, doesn't mean its ok to do it.
I suspect after the whole Subprime fiasco is over the Feds will institute something or another to beat anyone willing to loan money to people who can't possibly pay back the loan with a 100lb sack of worthless dollar bills (due to inflation). Economics in itself is completely arbitrary and isn't like the laws of physics where you can master the knowledge of the system. In economics, you can change the system pretty much all the time which of course leads to arbitrary scarcities which would have not existed other than the fact someone made it so on purpose just to exploit some one else.