Re:Wrong. Think Buddhism and Fransican monks
on
The Mechanized Future
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Philosophy is a pasttime of the wealthy. Technological and social progress have created a society where almost everybody is, compared to the helots of ancient times, wealthy. Quite ordinary people now find themselves dealing with detritus produced by a life of unexamined wealth and consumption.
Actually most philosophy before the 21st century was done by people who took vows of poverty and sat in caves or monasteries and thought about these problems. Wikipedia is down right now or I'd link you to eastern and western philosophers.
The whole concept of Buddhism is that suffering comes from wanting things... Not the lack of them. So basically they had plenty of time to think about things because they either took donations of food or grew their own gardens. Not because they had wealthy patrons or slaves to sustain them. They simply stopped playing the universal rat race and accepted poverty. Same thing happened in European Monasteries but with Christian overtone (St Thomas Aquinas?)
Now when we get into modern times did we get non-religious philosophy like Voltaire (well he wasn't modern but might as well have been), Kafka, Nietzsche, and everyone else who took different views on materialism etc.
Simply saying having more luxuries now is the key reason for these philosophies is not true, but rather stems from the human fear of change.
Personally, I think that there nothing philosophical about what the author is saying other that it matches a luddite world view that fears having too much time on their hands and change to their personal life.
In that respect people have been saying these since the automated looms replaced workers in the 1800's.
Personally, I think technology can be used both ways... To repress humanity and to expand it. However, we haven't had many Buddhist monks contemplate this since it is a rather recent thing, but from what I have gathered... Transhumanist and Buddhist ideals aren't that far away from each other.
They both seek to desire to rise about their limitations of being human.
What does that mean? Mars doesn't have enough gravity to hold enough gas at its current temperature. If we warm it up, that problem increases. You can't just wish that problem away. Mars doesn't need heat or oxygen to be Earth-like. Mars needs mass.
Maybe we could just drop Pluto on it since it isn't doing anything important these days.
But seriously, wouldn't dropping a few large water comets or rock asteroids on mars help to add mass? Or would they just burn up into energy?
This is a massive setback compared to the development of the electronic computer - and advances in theory usually can't be accelerated all that much. It is likely to be between 50 and 100 years before we know enough to build non-trivial applications out of quantum computers. Not because we can't build the hardware, but because we don't know how to write any software to run on them.
Technically it was only 40 years before the theory of relativity and the creation of its application in nuclear reactions.
Of course it took a World War to cause the financing to happen, but sometimes just because we don't know about the things we don't know (as opposed to knowing the theory but not knowing the application) doesn't mean we will simply won't be able to create the application until we have the exact theory work down.
Also I would like to point out that accelerating returns also is more advanced now it was 60 years ago. Now scientists have more tools to work with now than people in the 1940s had and that helps things along.
Not to mention health care and basic needs are far more adequate these days and the fact we have more scientists and engineers today employed than we have had at any other time in our history usually speeds these things increasingly along.
They're capable, but yet they've seriously screwed up the Iraq war in multiple ways? They're capable, but yet Paul Wolfowitz gets caught in a conflict of interest giving his girlfriend a position of authority in the World Bank? Somehow these things don't come from capable people.
Not to Godwin this, but in the same respect Hitler had the world's most capable cohorts at the time and probably the most strategically capable General Staff that the world will over see. That said... He still blundered horribly by invading Russia. Simply by the shear fact that he had such a capable staff of Generals is probably why he lasted so long after that.
Capable people are still human and make fatal errors while guided by their own delusions of their own "great" plan.
The problem with Government is that they forgot they were trying to legislate an international network.
Radio stations like EBM Radio are purely unaffected mostly by this ruling. Of course they don't play much MPAA music as it is (otherwise why would we listen to them?)
Maybe some enterprising foreigner will setup a internet radio proxy service overseas beyond the reach of the MPAA?
With other folks taking the suspect's picture it is going to become common for these photos to make their way onto the web and into TV news. So you now have even worse situations with "Look who got arrested today!!!" even when no arrest was made.
1. If you are arrested, it is public information. Some localities go so far to even put your mug shot on the county jail webpage of the "latest arrests".
2. If I was being arrested, I would like a 3rd party video taping so I could get the evidence in court without trying to get a court order to release the cops video camera.
Slavery kills technological innovation- see Greek history, Roman history, and the American civil war for reference.
He's got a point there. The industrial revolution never happened in Egypt, Roman, or even Feudal times not because they were dumb and backwards (heck the Romans had the best engineers of their time), but because they just solved a lot of their problems by throwing slave manpower at it. After protestantism set in Northern Europe in the 1500's, innovation sparked into a new era due to the fact that it was frowned upon to not pay people for their worth.
Which is why the Northern states had more of an industrial base when the civil war broke out.
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
Personally, I relish the day that automation renders my occupation redundant. It will mean that computers fix and program themselves which will mean the singularity has happened.
Of course this also might mean the end of the human race, but I'm all up for some change or at least not having to go into work the next morning.
Is there any compelling reason why kids SHOULD be allowed to buy this game?
Because there isn't a definitive or scientifically proven correlation between violent video and real world violence?
For that matter is there even a definitive or scientifically proven correlation between sex crimes and porn?
Millions of kids throughout the world below the age of 18 were exposed to games like Doom and Mortal Kombat, but yet only a two of those that played actually murdered anyone and it is suspected that was because of non-related issues such as bullying and bad parenting.
I'd wager that letting a 16 year old kid play Manhunt as long as he wants (barring of course interfering with time for school work) will not have any negative affect on his attitude towards society or psychological health.
Really, how difficult will it to put a bounty out for kids to go about smashing such things with rocks or something? Unless they can stay undetected they're gonna be prime targets for removal by anyone who doesn't want them about.
Well... That is what the sniper hidden on the rooftop waiting for a "no-signal" alert is for.
And to be fair to the kid (and to those standing around him), the alternative was to just have a Predator drone drop some white phosphorus on last known position of the robot.
Thank you. As a former US Marine I so often get discouraged by the hatred so many Americans have fostered for their country.
Why is this a bad thing? Americans should hate government even if it is the most free country in the world in some unimaginal utopia.
Government is a necessary evil. It can do good, but it is always evil.
Secondly, the American people are not the government and neither are they the country. We are not some collective, but rather persons that share a common bond that we live together. That doesn't mean we should love our government, but rather distrust by default whoever is in power regardless of which side of the issue the stand for.
Lastly, you should never be proud of your country simply because you were born here, but rather individuals in it and what you and they have actually done. Like it or not, sometimes patriotism is pretty close to racism and sexism since you have no choice of which country you are born in just like you have no choice of what race or sex you are born.
Heck, you should have more pride in your religion because you choose to believe in what you believe (or not at all). If you choose to be proud of what you have done (like serve this nation... thank you) then that is what real patriotism should be.
Not simply waving flags and saying we are better than everyone else because that we just happened to be born in a particular geographic place.
Seriously, an IT department should support a set list of systems, not everything a user brings to work and wants to use - thats how costs spiral out of control (as noted in the FA) and also how IT eventually gets blamed for the cost overruns et al.
Well that is fine and dandy... until the CEO gets an iPhone for Christmas.
You can improve a patent and then get a different patent for it. So it seems to me that someone saying that it's patents holding this back only show their ignorance of the patent system.
IANAPL, but patents based on improvements on other patents still require licensing from the original patent holder to produce. If you could simply bypass a patent by making a slight improvement, then I'm sure Blackberry and RIM suits would have never happened.
The politicians are elected by the people. If the politicians do something wrong, it is the fault of the people who voted for them. Stop passing the buck.
Not really, because there is a serious flaw with winner takes all elections. Half of America did not vote for Bush in the last election (actually to be fair it was 3/4ths since 50% of Americans did not vote), but yet Bush contains 100% of the power of the presidency.
The only way you could make it fair would be to do away with the current system and dilute the power of the offices.
Let's say the looser in the election gets to be the Deputy president and can veto anything the president does as a safe guard and if he and the president veto congress then they can't over ride him so less legislation and less arbitrary laws get passed.
And don't get started about congress... Districting should be outlawed and the whole thing turned into Proportional representation.
But I doubt we would see anything like that in our life time.
To be fair, if IBM forces them to pay up, it won't be the lawmakers that will suffer directly, but rather the students who were most likely not even born when this event happened. The officials involved for the loss are probably not even still in office.
Either way... I'm thinking these kids aren't going to get new desks and text books any time soon and will most likley look like a scene from Invader Zim when they had to have that fund raiser.
Which is why the leveling system itself is the carcinogen.
Gold farming is a sign of a broken game that allows too much disparities in levels and lack of skill being used for game play. When all game play on MMOs is time sinks, then the developers see all problems as "not enough time sinks".
The Diku mud style of play doesn't work well for server with more than 100 players and the model is completely broken when you scale to games like WoW.
The only MMO that got it right the first time was Ultima Online.
It was rare in feudal Japan and virtually nonexistent in classical China.
Actually it was not rare towards the end of the Tokugawa era for wealthy merchants to pay for Samurai to adopt them in order to gain that class status. (Actually to be fair, General Hideyoshi tried to get a descendant of the Shogun to adopt him even though he was older than the descendant so he could gain the official title for himself, but the descendant would not and he had to settle for a lesser title)
Although, by the end of the Tokugawa era, most Samurai had no true formal military training (and sometimes no swordship training either) and lived from hand outs from their feudal lord patron so were often more than happy to adopt anyone willing to foot the bill.
Really what they need to do is set up "weight classes" for players. Let some servers have time limits on the amount of stuff you can do per day
Actually, Ultima Online did this on a certain server (Seige Perilous maybe) in which you could only increase your skills and stats only so much per day. They did this I believe to combat Macroing programs. I'm not sure if they still do this.
Personally, I think leveling is the root core of the problem. A skill based system like UO worked better in that regard in that even the lowliest newbie is still pretty close to a 6 month old player so much that 5 newbies could kill a 7xGM skilled single player if the newbies put their effort into it.
I didn't buy an iPod to put 3rd party software on it. I use it to make calls.
Apparently that was a Fruedian slip when I mean to say "I use it to play MP3s", but I'm still not going to buy the iPhone at $500 and if ATT is the provider.
Supports third party development? Are you kidding? Sure, you can make web apps, but palm, symbian and even windows mobile kinda blow it out of the water on that front.
I dunno...
I didn't buy a cell phone to put 3rd party software on it. I use it to make calls. I didn't buy an iPod to put 3rd party software on it. I use it to make calls. I didn't buy a Nintendo DS to put 3rd party (homebrew) software on it. I use it to play store bought games.
See... If I really wanted something more open ended I would purchase said device and do it, but mostly I don't have the time to futz around anymore like I used to (I'm tempted to try an SNES emulated on a DS)
That said, just because there is no SDK doesn't really matter to the target group Apple is aiming to sell the iPhone for. The crowd that wants it to "just work" (well maybe the crowd that likes to pretend they are in hip and cool)
My complaint is that the provider is ATT and its $500. If I wanted a programmable phone I'd buy one off eBay from a Korean manufacture.
Slashdot Mirror
Philosophy is a pasttime of the wealthy. Technological and social progress have created a society where almost everybody is, compared to the helots of ancient times, wealthy. Quite ordinary people now find themselves dealing with detritus produced by a life of unexamined wealth and consumption.
Actually most philosophy before the 21st century was done by people who took vows of poverty and sat in caves or monasteries and thought about these problems. Wikipedia is down right now or I'd link you to eastern and western philosophers.
The whole concept of Buddhism is that suffering comes from wanting things... Not the lack of them. So basically they had plenty of time to think about things because they either took donations of food or grew their own gardens. Not because they had wealthy patrons or slaves to sustain them. They simply stopped playing the universal rat race and accepted poverty. Same thing happened in European Monasteries but with Christian overtone (St Thomas Aquinas?)
Now when we get into modern times did we get non-religious philosophy like Voltaire (well he wasn't modern but might as well have been), Kafka, Nietzsche, and everyone else who took different views on materialism etc.
Simply saying having more luxuries now is the key reason for these philosophies is not true, but rather stems from the human fear of change.
Personally, I think that there nothing philosophical about what the author is saying other that it matches a luddite world view that fears having too much time on their hands and change to their personal life.
In that respect people have been saying these since the automated looms replaced workers in the 1800's.
Personally, I think technology can be used both ways... To repress humanity and to expand it. However, we haven't had many Buddhist monks contemplate this since it is a rather recent thing, but from what I have gathered... Transhumanist and Buddhist ideals aren't that far away from each other.
They both seek to desire to rise about their limitations of being human.
What does that mean? Mars doesn't have enough gravity to hold enough gas at its current temperature. If we warm it up, that problem increases. You can't just wish that problem away. Mars doesn't need heat or oxygen to be Earth-like. Mars needs mass.
Maybe we could just drop Pluto on it since it isn't doing anything important these days.
But seriously, wouldn't dropping a few large water comets or rock asteroids on mars help to add mass? Or would they just burn up into energy?
This is a massive setback compared to the development of the electronic computer - and advances in theory usually can't be accelerated all that much. It is likely to be between 50 and 100 years before we know enough to build non-trivial applications out of quantum computers. Not because we can't build the hardware, but because we don't know how to write any software to run on them.
Technically it was only 40 years before the theory of relativity and the creation of its application in nuclear reactions.
Of course it took a World War to cause the financing to happen, but sometimes just because we don't know about the things we don't know (as opposed to knowing the theory but not knowing the application) doesn't mean we will simply won't be able to create the application until we have the exact theory work down.
Also I would like to point out that accelerating returns also is more advanced now it was 60 years ago. Now scientists have more tools to work with now than people in the 1940s had and that helps things along.
Not to mention health care and basic needs are far more adequate these days and the fact we have more scientists and engineers today employed than we have had at any other time in our history usually speeds these things increasingly along.
They're capable, but yet they've seriously screwed up the Iraq war in multiple ways? They're capable, but yet Paul Wolfowitz gets caught in a conflict of interest giving his girlfriend a position of authority in the World Bank? Somehow these things don't come from capable people.
Not to Godwin this, but in the same respect Hitler had the world's most capable cohorts at the time and probably the most strategically capable General Staff that the world will over see. That said... He still blundered horribly by invading Russia. Simply by the shear fact that he had such a capable staff of Generals is probably why he lasted so long after that.
Capable people are still human and make fatal errors while guided by their own delusions of their own "great" plan.
It depends on what kind of nuclear reactors.
Are we talking about Africa or European reactors? And secondly how would two reactors carry the quantum dots? With a line or a strand of creeper?
The problem with Government is that they forgot they were trying to legislate an international network.
Radio stations like EBM Radio are purely unaffected mostly by this ruling. Of course they don't play much MPAA music as it is (otherwise why would we listen to them?)
Maybe some enterprising foreigner will setup a internet radio proxy service overseas beyond the reach of the MPAA?
With other folks taking the suspect's picture it is going to become common for these photos to make their way onto the web and into TV news. So you now have even worse situations with "Look who got arrested today!!!" even when no arrest was made.
1. If you are arrested, it is public information. Some localities go so far to even put your mug shot on the county jail webpage of the "latest arrests".
2. If I was being arrested, I would like a 3rd party video taping so I could get the evidence in court without trying to get a court order to release the cops video camera.
Slavery kills technological innovation- see Greek history, Roman history, and the American civil war for reference.
He's got a point there. The industrial revolution never happened in Egypt, Roman, or even Feudal times not because they were dumb and backwards (heck the Romans had the best engineers of their time), but because they just solved a lot of their problems by throwing slave manpower at it. After protestantism set in Northern Europe in the 1500's, innovation sparked into a new era due to the fact that it was frowned upon to not pay people for their worth.
Which is why the Northern states had more of an industrial base when the civil war broke out.
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
Personally, I relish the day that automation renders my occupation redundant. It will mean that computers fix and program themselves which will mean the singularity has happened.
Of course this also might mean the end of the human race, but I'm all up for some change or at least not having to go into work the next morning.
Is there even anything that can bring one of those down?
Energy based weapons?
I mean, if they can knock a MIRV out of orbit then they can knock a SR-71 out of the sky.
Of course that would depend if the Russians or Chinese had such a system.
I wouldn't want my kids watching a gory horror film. I sure as hell don't want them playing this game.
Thats fine, but is there any scientific proof that it does any harm?
You might as well be preventing them from watching Barney the Dinosaur or playing Pokemon and get the same result.
Is there any compelling reason why kids SHOULD be allowed to buy this game?
Because there isn't a definitive or scientifically proven correlation between violent video and real world violence?
For that matter is there even a definitive or scientifically proven correlation between sex crimes and porn?
Millions of kids throughout the world below the age of 18 were exposed to games like Doom and Mortal Kombat, but yet only a two of those that played actually murdered anyone and it is suspected that was because of non-related issues such as bullying and bad parenting.
I'd wager that letting a 16 year old kid play Manhunt as long as he wants (barring of course interfering with time for school work) will not have any negative affect on his attitude towards society or psychological health.
Really, how difficult will it to put a bounty out for kids to go about smashing such things with rocks or something? Unless they can stay undetected they're gonna be prime targets for removal by anyone who doesn't want them about.
Well... That is what the sniper hidden on the rooftop waiting for a "no-signal" alert is for.
And to be fair to the kid (and to those standing around him), the alternative was to just have a Predator drone drop some white phosphorus on last known position of the robot.
Thank you. As a former US Marine I so often get discouraged by the hatred so many Americans have fostered for their country.
Why is this a bad thing? Americans should hate government even if it is the most free country in the world in some unimaginal utopia.
Government is a necessary evil. It can do good, but it is always evil.
Secondly, the American people are not the government and neither are they the country. We are not some collective, but rather persons that share a common bond that we live together. That doesn't mean we should love our government, but rather distrust by default whoever is in power regardless of which side of the issue the stand for.
Lastly, you should never be proud of your country simply because you were born here, but rather individuals in it and what you and they have actually done. Like it or not, sometimes patriotism is pretty close to racism and sexism since you have no choice of which country you are born in just like you have no choice of what race or sex you are born.
Heck, you should have more pride in your religion because you choose to believe in what you believe (or not at all). If you choose to be proud of what you have done (like serve this nation... thank you) then that is what real patriotism should be.
Not simply waving flags and saying we are better than everyone else because that we just happened to be born in a particular geographic place.
Seriously, an IT department should support a set list of systems, not everything a user brings to work and wants to use - thats how costs spiral out of control (as noted in the FA) and also how IT eventually gets blamed for the cost overruns et al.
Well that is fine and dandy... until the CEO gets an iPhone for Christmas.
You can improve a patent and then get a different patent for it. So it seems to me that someone saying that it's patents holding this back only show their ignorance of the patent system.
IANAPL, but patents based on improvements on other patents still require licensing from the original patent holder to produce. If you could simply bypass a patent by making a slight improvement, then I'm sure Blackberry and RIM suits would have never happened.
Why do the Japanese seem to always throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Well, he should be thankful they didn't have another Sony Exec offer to be his second.
The politicians are elected by the people. If the politicians do something wrong, it is the fault of the people who voted for them. Stop passing the buck.
Not really, because there is a serious flaw with winner takes all elections. Half of America did not vote for Bush in the last election (actually to be fair it was 3/4ths since 50% of Americans did not vote), but yet Bush contains 100% of the power of the presidency.
The only way you could make it fair would be to do away with the current system and dilute the power of the offices.
Let's say the looser in the election gets to be the Deputy president and can veto anything the president does as a safe guard and if he and the president veto congress then they can't over ride him so less legislation and less arbitrary laws get passed.
And don't get started about congress... Districting should be outlawed and the whole thing turned into Proportional representation.
But I doubt we would see anything like that in our life time.
Oh, so that makes it OK to rip IBM off.
To be fair, if IBM forces them to pay up, it won't be the lawmakers that will suffer directly, but rather the students who were most likely not even born when this event happened. The officials involved for the loss are probably not even still in office.
Either way... I'm thinking these kids aren't going to get new desks and text books any time soon and will most likley look like a scene from Invader Zim when they had to have that fund raiser.
Is there some kind of a barrier that stops you from using trainers or bots to farm gold?
That would require understanding of how to program an AI and from understanding is difficult in itself.
You could probably make more money selling the Bot program than actually using it to farm.
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games.
Which is why the leveling system itself is the carcinogen.
Gold farming is a sign of a broken game that allows too much disparities in levels and lack of skill being used for game play. When all game play on MMOs is time sinks, then the developers see all problems as "not enough time sinks".
The Diku mud style of play doesn't work well for server with more than 100 players and the model is completely broken when you scale to games like WoW.
The only MMO that got it right the first time was Ultima Online.
It was rare in feudal Japan and virtually nonexistent in classical China.
Actually it was not rare towards the end of the Tokugawa era for wealthy merchants to pay for Samurai to adopt them in order to gain that class status. (Actually to be fair, General Hideyoshi tried to get a descendant of the Shogun to adopt him even though he was older than the descendant so he could gain the official title for himself, but the descendant would not and he had to settle for a lesser title)
Although, by the end of the Tokugawa era, most Samurai had no true formal military training (and sometimes no swordship training either) and lived from hand outs from their feudal lord patron so were often more than happy to adopt anyone willing to foot the bill.
Really what they need to do is set up "weight classes" for players. Let some servers have time limits on the amount of stuff you can do per day
Actually, Ultima Online did this on a certain server (Seige Perilous maybe) in which you could only increase your skills and stats only so much per day. They did this I believe to combat Macroing programs. I'm not sure if they still do this.
Personally, I think leveling is the root core of the problem. A skill based system like UO worked better in that regard in that even the lowliest newbie is still pretty close to a 6 month old player so much that 5 newbies could kill a 7xGM skilled single player if the newbies put their effort into it.
I didn't buy an iPod to put 3rd party software on it. I use it to make calls.
Apparently that was a Fruedian slip when I mean to say "I use it to play MP3s", but I'm still not going to buy the iPhone at $500 and if ATT is the provider.
Supports third party development? Are you kidding? Sure, you can make web apps, but palm, symbian and even windows mobile kinda blow it out of the water on that front.
I dunno...
I didn't buy a cell phone to put 3rd party software on it. I use it to make calls.
I didn't buy an iPod to put 3rd party software on it. I use it to make calls.
I didn't buy a Nintendo DS to put 3rd party (homebrew) software on it. I use it to play store bought games.
See... If I really wanted something more open ended I would purchase said device and do it, but mostly I don't have the time to futz around anymore like I used to (I'm tempted to try an SNES emulated on a DS)
That said, just because there is no SDK doesn't really matter to the target group Apple is aiming to sell the iPhone for. The crowd that wants it to "just work" (well maybe the crowd that likes to pretend they are in hip and cool)
My complaint is that the provider is ATT and its $500. If I wanted a programmable phone I'd buy one off eBay from a Korean manufacture.