Probably a firmware problem. Try substituting another character, such as '@,' before you read it, and then transform it back again in your brain. I assure you that commas are a normal part of an English data stream.
There's plenty of research to suggest that packet loss is not the most attractive indicator of congestion, not merely because it involves losing data, but because it comes very late in the development of an instability. Under congestion, router queue depths go up, and you get observable latency spikes. To exploit this observation effectively you need to timestamp packets, of course.
As many others have noted, there's a second issue with TCP, which is that it is hell-bent on in-order delivery, which is an utterly pointless property for almost all modern applications—not just file sharing, but web applications as well. And it conspires to absolutely hog buffer memory on modern fast long-haul pipes, where to deliver data serially you need hundreds of megabytes in window—hundreds of megabytes that, absent TCP, could already be committed on disk.
TCP is semantically well-suited only for interactive login. UDP is the protocol of choice for everything else. It is just unfortunate that good congestion control algorithms are tricky to write, and that the socket paradigm doesn't provide a good vocabulary for packetisation. These two conceptually orthogonal problems have conspired to shut out the superior solution in almost every domain.
I just don't see a lot of mass appeal for a game that involves handing out disaster-relief supplies or carefully negotiating power-sharing deals in shaky democracies.
Goodness knows but it sounds like more fun than a simulation of getting shot in the head. What's with gamer types? The entire FPS genre is based around situations that any sane person would do anything to avoid!
Except for one thing. If you have a camera in their bedroom, it's a solid bet that they have badgers and gerbils and tasers and schoolboys and a blow-up doll of Margaret Thatcher. No blackmailer and no moralistic weirdo has less to hide than the average person.
Indeed, universal access to what goes on in everyone's bedrooms would be a very good thing, since 99.999% of us would be able to calm down and realise that everything we do is utterly, utterly normal.
The moralists wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
The dangerous thing is information differentials: if they can spy on you, but you can't spy on them. If we can watch the watchmen, no problem. At least, it's surely better than what we have today.
With your too-large belly you have a higher risk at heart disease, but I guess you don't mind your insurance company finding out about it and charging you a higher fee...
Or, of course, you could have socialised medicine, like a civilised country. I find this american horror of universal health care fascinating, because it's based on a complete misunderstanding of the mechanism of insurance. The point of insurance is not to minimise your premiums (if that is what you want, just cancel the insurance altogether), but to spread the risk—and amortise the overhead—across the largest possible base. Therefore, universal socialised medicine is the optimum solution.
Of course, there's still the small problem of managing the health care system to keep it efficient, but as a matter of fact, in the US today, you can see that market forces are no better at this than a typical socialist bureaucracy seems to be—no matter what the propagandists might be telling you.
But in any case, my real point is that if you are worried about privacy reductions driving up the cost of health care, then it's time to change the system. Indeed, when you think about it, if the health providers know more about your lifestyle, maybe than can then do more to help you keep your health. Just a thought....
Our (counterproductive) intellectual monopoly laws make one way illegal, which has apparently been confused with making it unethical/immoral.
Far be it from me to imply that the current copyright laws are in any way productive (a telling choice of words, by the way), but the notion of the Rule of Law has historically been a cornerstone of Western civilisation—scratch that, make it all civilisation. As such, the fact of something's being illegal does make it immoral, at least in so far as no higher moral imperative is being compromised through obeying the law. But for those cases there is, you know, the doctrine of fair use.
<wry>I do understand, of course, that the United States has initiated divorce proceedings from civilisation, and that the Rule of Law was in that first box of 'useless junk' that was tossed into the street some years ago ("International Criminal Court? My God, we can't have that! Someone might prosecute us for our crimes against humanity!"). But still, to refer to something that the entire rest of the civilised world holds dear as 'confusion' without further thought or analysis is going a little far.</wry>
While of course there is value in writing survey articles (I've just been rearranging my bookshelves and I was realising once again how grateful I was to my supervisor, lo these many years ago, for insisting that I really wanted a subscription to Computing Surveys), academics, quite rightly, feel that they are not contributing if they are not doing original work. Of course you cite previous work, but not because you are copying it! As to not putting your name on your work—how can we tell people not to plagiarise if we are polluting the space with unattributed and unattributable work? It seems like an attack on the very academic process.
At the end of the day, Wikipedia is a very difficult thing to get your head around if you are trained as an academic. It's not just a question of academics in some sense not respecting the process. Think about it: at a University, would you be happy with a student who went and used an encyclopaedia as a source? But if they used a scholarly article you wrote as a springboard, then—at least if they went on to do some original work—you'd be proud.
So why not rearrange the cities? The Bay area is still growing rapidly, it would seem, and the newer bits (I'm at the north edge of San Jose, for example) absolutely suck as places to live, because the population density is so low that there are no services. Nada. It's a thirty minute walk to buy groceries, a 50 minute walk to eat supper (with the possible exception of a Spanish language sports bar that sells quasi-pizza), there's nominally s Starbucks here, but it closes at, what, 8PM or something. The city planners are clearly retards. They need to draw lines and say NO MORE CONSTRUCTION OUTSIDE THIS LINE. Then they need to tear up every second street inside that boundary and make them pedestrian areas with light rail down the middle instead. Remove whatever zoning restrictions are separating the residences and the services. Charge for road use and make the light rail free, instead of the other way around.
There's no downside. The current arrangement is insanity.
So the wrong side won the US civil war? Just checking. You're allowed to say 'yes,' I know it wasn't really about slavery (though you have to ask yourself whether the revolution wasn't, given the timing).
(PS: Flamebait or not? It's an interesting and slightly worrisome fact that when I say something cynical about America I have no way to predict whether I'll be modded "flamebait" or "insightful." I swear, I can use the exact same words on two different days and get opposite moderation. Maybe it depends on timezones—am I posting while Europe is awake?)
That has HUGE ramifications, and we have to be absolutely SURE here. Consciousness means legal and social rights. Allowing a machine the right to vote for example. Ok, fine. But they would have it completely within their capacity to create an arbitrary number of copies of themselves to cast an arbitrary number of votes. Or, such "voters" would also be subject to hacking or manipulation on a scale not possible on human beings (no matter how dumb we think the viewers of Fox News may be:)).
Well, this is an unnecessary piece of panic mongering. I, for example, am a genuine, biological, human being, and I certainly don't have a vote. There's this thing called citizenship. Can the program produce a social security number? A driver's license? No? Then it's not American and can not merely be denied a vote, it can be sent to tape—or Guantanamo Bay—because the President is having a bad hair day.
Whether software (or human beings) ought to have a vote is a different question, and indeed this argument of 'but they could just breed! Or come over here by their millions! And there where would we be?' is a huge political issue and one of the great barriers to human rights in the contemporary world. It has, on the face of it, very little to do with AI.
But in fact, that's my point. Strong AI may be a very artificial philosopher's example for the foreseeable future, but perhaps it is precisely the intellectual vehicle that is needed for us to get to work on these very concrete issues without knee-jerk reactions about 'untrustworthy' foreigners clouding our judgment.
What is the procedure for obtaining rights for someone who cannot prove their identity? It may be a long time before you are certain you can build a strong AI, but it will not be quite so long before people who have suffered horrific accidents have brain-in-a-jar presentations, or perhaps interact socially through telerobotic surrogates, and real questions of whether you can prove if someone is 'human' or, contrariwise, whether they are substantially technological in nature, arise.
Basically, at the point that machines are recognized as human there is nothing to stop them from eliminating biological life. A motive? A motive for such a thing could be as simple as a software patch or a virus. Does it still qualify as self aware when EVERYTHING about this "mind" - memories, moods, positions, mannerisms, etc, can be instantly changed with the flick of a switch?
...Or an injection. I'm not a gambling man, but I would certainly accept a bet that drugs, if they have not already been developed, will exist within a decade, which will influence whether people vote, broadly speaking, conservative or liberal.
Truly, we are already far too late in considering these questions seriously.
Increase the pixel count or the complexity of the AI though, and it starts to become a better *representation*. The apple looks more realistic. Eventually photo realistic. The AI becomes smarter. Eventually it can pass a Turing test. HOWEVER, in both cases, they are simply high refined representations/emulations of an object. No matter how detailed the picture of the apple becomes, it never becomes a real apple.
But a digital photo is at least a real photo—it doesn't actually claim to be the real thing. And a photoshopped photo is generally considered to be in some sense 'real,' too. What about a rendered image from the same data used to manufacture a physical scene? What if it were bit for bit identical to an optical photo taken of that scene?
What if some 'AI' is not manufactured from whole cloth, but is in some sense a 'photoshopped' version of 'real' mind, or one developed by detailed simulation of the entire process of neural and psychological development?
Or to come at it from the other side, if a putatively synthetic mind is 'photorealistic' and you cannot, after putting in as much effort as you are willing to, eliminate the possibility that it is a natural (even if somewhat odd) personality, then how can you dare to deny its humanity? Is that not precisely one of the classic errors of the past ('his skin is dark, so obviously he's only faking being a person')?
Much goodness has been mentioned here, but not the optional emacs-calc package (does vi do calculus? I think not).
Plus picture-mode, great for drawing little boxes and, surprise surprise, putting the row of backslashes down the right edge of newly macrofied code blocks (M-x picture-mode C-c., set typing direction to vertically downwards).
Fascinating, but backwards! Surely if a guy in white robes wanders into a lab, a scientist will go, "Oh! There is a guy in white robes in my lab!" If the guy goes on to atomize most of the scientists, they will mostly go "<atomize>," while one or two may go, "Cool! I have to figure out how to build one of those."
But if God walks into your lab, where are you? He's invisible which poses certain problems with noticing His presence. More importantly, He's omnipotent, which means that any attempt to detect Him will result in your instruments saying whatever He wants them to say, rather than what they do according to their function. They could say "I'm not here!" They could say "I'm here!" They could say "I'm a chunk of Wensleydale!"
The reason that the existence of God (the entity that a religious person might mean by this term, rather than the character conjoured up by someone lampooning them) cannot be proven is that even if He chooses to manifest Himself, it invalidates all your experiments.
Interestingly enough, there is at least some chance that you'll be able to test this yourself. People not infrequently have visions. Some of them return to a normal state of consciousness going, "Wow! I met GOD!" Others go "Wow, what a weird dream. Too much Wensleydale for me." There's no criterion to choose when the data are suspect.
Meanwhile, the reason you can't prove that God doesn't exist is that he might be hiding.
Here's a technical analogy. How can a program prove the existence (or any other property) of an operating system? Only if the O/S permits an observation can the observation take place. But whatever result you get, you can still say, "Hm, maybe it's like that anyhow, maybe there's not an operating system, maybe it's just a machine."
At the end of the day, all machines are virtual, and anything you can prove exists is not the God that serious people who happen to believe in God are talking about.
Yes; we made all our mistakes a century before you, and are doing rather better now, thanks. In Britain, we abolished slavery before you even had your revolution, did you know that? You don't hear about it much just because we never tried to base an economy on it.
But wrong on every other count thereafter. You are following very pattern I was speaking of: you hear what I say, conclude that I'm not part of your faction, and leap from this to the conclusion that what I say is better ignored. As it happens, I live in the States at present, have several decades' experience in different parts of the world, and have a tolerably well-informed view that this place is a rat hole compared to what it could be, what it ought to be, and what it thinks it is. As I said, wake up.
No; as a matter of fact I live here. And sure, every American you ever meet says (when talking to a European, who knows what they say in private) "well, I never voted for Bush." But 51% of them must be lying, right?
In some sense, NetHack has had this from time to time. Some of the interactions were 'prototyped' as bugs: different object classes stored their attributes in overlapped storage (unions, shared bitfields, whatever), and the type checking was a little sporadic. So casting an enhancement spell on something that had an inappropriate data structure would occasionally give things peculiar properties. Then devteam would look at the bug report and say, hey, this is a latent feature, and give 'proper' semantics to the effect.
Made for a huge binary though. It's nothing nowadays in the days of template metaprogramming and the million monkeys coding effect, all held in balance by virtual memory and nearly-free RAM, but shoehorning the 2M executable into a 640K PC footprint was my proudest NetHack achievement.
Sadly, I almost always found the game far too hard to enjoy. There were only one or two releases I felt I could make any progress with, and devteam always thought they needed fixing because they were too easy (I was sooo sad when wand-pool stopped being the method of choice against shopkeepers). But still. Some of my best work went into that game—far, far under the covers.
Am I forgiven if I would prefer a hypothetical US/China war to take place without too much killing? I always find it odd how such paradigm shifts are somehow read as ingenuity if they come from ones own side and cheating if they come from the other. But this seems like a step in a sensible direction from a purely humanitarian standpoint, at least when set against the alternative.
Not, you understand, that I share the view that, for example, Taiwan is a 'natural' part of China. I don't happen to think that nations are 'natural' at all.
But in a real sense America can use all the bashing it can get. Seriously. Time to wake up. The fact that you think it matters whether criticism comes from within or without is, it seems, proof of this. Speaking in the broadest terms, America (corporately, I don't mean every single individual) has developed a tendency to view everything 'religiously' rather than empirically. There are white hats and black hats, not right actions and wrong actions. There are us and them, not cooperative-minded people and antagonistic people. This underlies everything from teaching non-science in science classes, to voting for people you know are wrong for the job because of the party they belong to, to making social policy decisions on the basis of whether or not they seem too 'socialistic' rather than looking at what effect (positive or negative) they would have, to choosing friends and enemies among other nations without stopping to think about their internal structures and agendas.
So, now, having said that, I'm not an American. Does that make me a troll? Because like most other non-Americans I do not want to be your enemy. But the key point is that the reason I don't want to be your enemy is not, if you will, that I'm afraid of afraid of rabid dogs and I don't want to meet your war machine in a dark alley, but because I'd like to see the world become a better place, and it would be just great if America (which used to hold itself up as a beacon of hope in this regard) would at least join in.
So there you have it. I'm un-American. I'm wearing the black hat. Mod me troll and make me go away. Because, I guess, it's easier than understanding that much of the rest of the world—specifically, those parts of it where we still believe that the political process can work and wars should no longer be necessary—has lost its respect for you as a power.
What an interesting idea. So you're working on getting US votes for the rest of the world, too?
I say this only half in jest. From the foreign perspective, (a) the US asserts itself way too much in our territory for us not to be represented too, and (b) its government, no, doesn't seem so exceptionally valid lately.
How is it not an attack on the election when voters are getting turned away because of it? It's like when protests against (e.g.) warfare "turn violent"—you have to ask yourself who benefits before you get a clue as to who is responsible. Dirty tricks are far from unheard of in this world, and I suspect there are more agents provocateurs out there than most of us would care to imagine. All it takes is (parties changed to protect the innocent) one crypto-Pucite to walk around saying, "hey, your Mauveite prospects aren't around? Why not fill their forms in for them, you'll be doing them a favour. Nah, don't worry about the details, they'll figure it out on election day," and that's a fifty vote differential in the bag.
No. It is an established fact that the Republicans are biasing the vote by playing statistical dirty tricks: decreasing the chances that Democrats will get to the polls on time, arranging paper user interfaces so that errors tend in their favour, applying different standards of required clarity of marking at different polling stations. Your argument that 'soft' and in principle correctable bias doesn't count is a support of this pattern (whether as a principal or a dupe, I cannot say).
I'm not saying that Democrats never engage in the same activities, by the way, though I do think it's worth noting that I've seen almost no mention of it in the foreign press, while Republican shenanigans have been widely commented on.
Your country has reached the sad point where it can no longer be trusted to run its own elections. That was clear before the polls closed in 2000. I don't see much evidence of change, even if—and here I do agree with you—people have become more sensitive to the issue.
My father remembers the streamline Pacific class locos. These were breaking 125MPH in 1938. So, yes, they had HSTs, by the European definition, 60 years ago. And no, it wasn't here, and no, it isn't here.
But your point is taken. It is a conspiracy. Yet, this is supposedly a democracy—can't you vote in a little sanity?
Cars faster than trains? Even the pathetic trains they have in England do 125MPH. In France that's 200MPH. China? 270MPH. Cars cheaper than trains? Only, I suspect, because your wonderful highway system is state-subsidised, but the government is in bed with the automotive companies and will do nothing similar for rail. Wake up, America! There's a whole world out there, and you're not within sight of the leading edge when it comes to anything infrastructural.
Oh, and you're right. Train tickets aren't as cheap as cars per hour travelled. But that's assuming I spend time in a car for fun. Cars are cramped, smelly, have no restaurants or social opportunities, are inconvenient for reaching city centres and take three times as long to get there. These facts will stay the same even if cars become self-piloting, though I guess that then, at least, you'll be able to sleep and perhaps even to drink without getting yourself and several other people killed.
<ahem>Actually, we threw you out because you were a bunch of nutjobs, and you ran off to another continent, started a war with the inhabitants, whined to us that you needed military help, got all upset when that turned out to have a price, invested heavily in the slave trade, and finally declared independence when you realised that the abolition of slavery was becoming unavoidable throughout the Empire and it was going to wreck your economy when it happened. But that's neither here nor there.</ahem>
Montreal is on this continent, you know, in a country with rather too much room, and it's pretty livable. Not perfect, but no doctrine of 'no food without a car.' You really are just being weird.
Slashdot Mirror
So we fix this ... how? The fact that people are idiots is not news, but the fact that efforts to educate them seem to be going backwards is an issue!
Probably a firmware problem. Try substituting another character, such as '@,' before you read it, and then transform it back again in your brain. I assure you that commas are a normal part of an English data stream.
There's plenty of research to suggest that packet loss is not the most attractive indicator of congestion, not merely because it involves losing data, but because it comes very late in the development of an instability. Under congestion, router queue depths go up, and you get observable latency spikes. To exploit this observation effectively you need to timestamp packets, of course.
As many others have noted, there's a second issue with TCP, which is that it is hell-bent on in-order delivery, which is an utterly pointless property for almost all modern applications—not just file sharing, but web applications as well. And it conspires to absolutely hog buffer memory on modern fast long-haul pipes, where to deliver data serially you need hundreds of megabytes in window—hundreds of megabytes that, absent TCP, could already be committed on disk.
TCP is semantically well-suited only for interactive login. UDP is the protocol of choice for everything else. It is just unfortunate that good congestion control algorithms are tricky to write, and that the socket paradigm doesn't provide a good vocabulary for packetisation. These two conceptually orthogonal problems have conspired to shut out the superior solution in almost every domain.
Goodness knows but it sounds like more fun than a simulation of getting shot in the head. What's with gamer types? The entire FPS genre is based around situations that any sane person would do anything to avoid!
Except for one thing. If you have a camera in their bedroom, it's a solid bet that they have badgers and gerbils and tasers and schoolboys and a blow-up doll of Margaret Thatcher. No blackmailer and no moralistic weirdo has less to hide than the average person.
Indeed, universal access to what goes on in everyone's bedrooms would be a very good thing, since 99.999% of us would be able to calm down and realise that everything we do is utterly, utterly normal.
The moralists wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
The dangerous thing is information differentials: if they can spy on you, but you can't spy on them. If we can watch the watchmen, no problem. At least, it's surely better than what we have today.
Or, of course, you could have socialised medicine, like a civilised country. I find this american horror of universal health care fascinating, because it's based on a complete misunderstanding of the mechanism of insurance. The point of insurance is not to minimise your premiums (if that is what you want, just cancel the insurance altogether), but to spread the risk—and amortise the overhead—across the largest possible base. Therefore, universal socialised medicine is the optimum solution.
Of course, there's still the small problem of managing the health care system to keep it efficient, but as a matter of fact, in the US today, you can see that market forces are no better at this than a typical socialist bureaucracy seems to be—no matter what the propagandists might be telling you.
But in any case, my real point is that if you are worried about privacy reductions driving up the cost of health care, then it's time to change the system. Indeed, when you think about it, if the health providers know more about your lifestyle, maybe than can then do more to help you keep your health. Just a thought....
Far be it from me to imply that the current copyright laws are in any way productive (a telling choice of words, by the way), but the notion of the Rule of Law has historically been a cornerstone of Western civilisation—scratch that, make it all civilisation. As such, the fact of something's being illegal does make it immoral, at least in so far as no higher moral imperative is being compromised through obeying the law. But for those cases there is, you know, the doctrine of fair use.
<wry>I do understand, of course, that the United States has initiated divorce proceedings from civilisation, and that the Rule of Law was in that first box of 'useless junk' that was tossed into the street some years ago ("International Criminal Court? My God, we can't have that! Someone might prosecute us for our crimes against humanity!"). But still, to refer to something that the entire rest of the civilised world holds dear as 'confusion' without further thought or analysis is going a little far.</wry>
While of course there is value in writing survey articles (I've just been rearranging my bookshelves and I was realising once again how grateful I was to my supervisor, lo these many years ago, for insisting that I really wanted a subscription to Computing Surveys), academics, quite rightly, feel that they are not contributing if they are not doing original work. Of course you cite previous work, but not because you are copying it! As to not putting your name on your work—how can we tell people not to plagiarise if we are polluting the space with unattributed and unattributable work? It seems like an attack on the very academic process.
At the end of the day, Wikipedia is a very difficult thing to get your head around if you are trained as an academic. It's not just a question of academics in some sense not respecting the process. Think about it: at a University, would you be happy with a student who went and used an encyclopaedia as a source? But if they used a scholarly article you wrote as a springboard, then—at least if they went on to do some original work—you'd be proud.
So why not rearrange the cities? The Bay area is still growing rapidly, it would seem, and the newer bits (I'm at the north edge of San Jose, for example) absolutely suck as places to live, because the population density is so low that there are no services. Nada. It's a thirty minute walk to buy groceries, a 50 minute walk to eat supper (with the possible exception of a Spanish language sports bar that sells quasi-pizza), there's nominally s Starbucks here, but it closes at, what, 8PM or something. The city planners are clearly retards. They need to draw lines and say NO MORE CONSTRUCTION OUTSIDE THIS LINE. Then they need to tear up every second street inside that boundary and make them pedestrian areas with light rail down the middle instead. Remove whatever zoning restrictions are separating the residences and the services. Charge for road use and make the light rail free, instead of the other way around.
There's no downside. The current arrangement is insanity.
So the wrong side won the US civil war? Just checking. You're allowed to say 'yes,' I know it wasn't really about slavery (though you have to ask yourself whether the revolution wasn't, given the timing).
(PS: Flamebait or not? It's an interesting and slightly worrisome fact that when I say something cynical about America I have no way to predict whether I'll be modded "flamebait" or "insightful." I swear, I can use the exact same words on two different days and get opposite moderation. Maybe it depends on timezones—am I posting while Europe is awake?)
Well, this is an unnecessary piece of panic mongering. I, for example, am a genuine, biological, human being, and I certainly don't have a vote. There's this thing called citizenship. Can the program produce a social security number? A driver's license? No? Then it's not American and can not merely be denied a vote, it can be sent to tape—or Guantanamo Bay—because the President is having a bad hair day.
Whether software (or human beings) ought to have a vote is a different question, and indeed this argument of 'but they could just breed! Or come over here by their millions! And there where would we be?' is a huge political issue and one of the great barriers to human rights in the contemporary world. It has, on the face of it, very little to do with AI.
But in fact, that's my point. Strong AI may be a very artificial philosopher's example for the foreseeable future, but perhaps it is precisely the intellectual vehicle that is needed for us to get to work on these very concrete issues without knee-jerk reactions about 'untrustworthy' foreigners clouding our judgment.
What is the procedure for obtaining rights for someone who cannot prove their identity? It may be a long time before you are certain you can build a strong AI, but it will not be quite so long before people who have suffered horrific accidents have brain-in-a-jar presentations, or perhaps interact socially through telerobotic surrogates, and real questions of whether you can prove if someone is 'human' or, contrariwise, whether they are substantially technological in nature, arise.
...Or an injection. I'm not a gambling man, but I would certainly accept a bet that drugs, if they have not already been developed, will exist within a decade, which will influence whether people vote, broadly speaking, conservative or liberal.
Truly, we are already far too late in considering these questions seriously.
But a digital photo is at least a real photo—it doesn't actually claim to be the real thing. And a photoshopped photo is generally considered to be in some sense 'real,' too. What about a rendered image from the same data used to manufacture a physical scene? What if it were bit for bit identical to an optical photo taken of that scene?
What if some 'AI' is not manufactured from whole cloth, but is in some sense a 'photoshopped' version of 'real' mind, or one developed by detailed simulation of the entire process of neural and psychological development?
Or to come at it from the other side, if a putatively synthetic mind is 'photorealistic' and you cannot, after putting in as much effort as you are willing to, eliminate the possibility that it is a natural (even if somewhat odd) personality, then how can you dare to deny its humanity? Is that not precisely one of the classic errors of the past ('his skin is dark, so obviously he's only faking being a person')?
Much goodness has been mentioned here, but not the optional emacs-calc package (does vi do calculus? I think not). Plus picture-mode, great for drawing little boxes and, surprise surprise, putting the row of backslashes down the right edge of newly macrofied code blocks (M-x picture-mode C-c ., set typing direction to vertically downwards).
Fascinating, but backwards! Surely if a guy in white robes wanders into a lab, a scientist will go, "Oh! There is a guy in white robes in my lab!" If the guy goes on to atomize most of the scientists, they will mostly go "<atomize>," while one or two may go, "Cool! I have to figure out how to build one of those."
But if God walks into your lab, where are you? He's invisible which poses certain problems with noticing His presence. More importantly, He's omnipotent, which means that any attempt to detect Him will result in your instruments saying whatever He wants them to say, rather than what they do according to their function. They could say "I'm not here!" They could say "I'm here!" They could say "I'm a chunk of Wensleydale!"
The reason that the existence of God (the entity that a religious person might mean by this term, rather than the character conjoured up by someone lampooning them) cannot be proven is that even if He chooses to manifest Himself, it invalidates all your experiments.
Interestingly enough, there is at least some chance that you'll be able to test this yourself. People not infrequently have visions. Some of them return to a normal state of consciousness going, "Wow! I met GOD!" Others go "Wow, what a weird dream. Too much Wensleydale for me." There's no criterion to choose when the data are suspect.
Meanwhile, the reason you can't prove that God doesn't exist is that he might be hiding.
Here's a technical analogy. How can a program prove the existence (or any other property) of an operating system? Only if the O/S permits an observation can the observation take place. But whatever result you get, you can still say, "Hm, maybe it's like that anyhow, maybe there's not an operating system, maybe it's just a machine."
At the end of the day, all machines are virtual, and anything you can prove exists is not the God that serious people who happen to believe in God are talking about.
Yes; we made all our mistakes a century before you, and are doing rather better now, thanks. In Britain, we abolished slavery before you even had your revolution, did you know that? You don't hear about it much just because we never tried to base an economy on it.
But wrong on every other count thereafter. You are following very pattern I was speaking of: you hear what I say, conclude that I'm not part of your faction, and leap from this to the conclusion that what I say is better ignored. As it happens, I live in the States at present, have several decades' experience in different parts of the world, and have a tolerably well-informed view that this place is a rat hole compared to what it could be, what it ought to be, and what it thinks it is. As I said, wake up.
No; as a matter of fact I live here. And sure, every American you ever meet says (when talking to a European, who knows what they say in private) "well, I never voted for Bush." But 51% of them must be lying, right?
In some sense, NetHack has had this from time to time. Some of the interactions were 'prototyped' as bugs: different object classes stored their attributes in overlapped storage (unions, shared bitfields, whatever), and the type checking was a little sporadic. So casting an enhancement spell on something that had an inappropriate data structure would occasionally give things peculiar properties. Then devteam would look at the bug report and say, hey, this is a latent feature, and give 'proper' semantics to the effect.
Made for a huge binary though. It's nothing nowadays in the days of template metaprogramming and the million monkeys coding effect, all held in balance by virtual memory and nearly-free RAM, but shoehorning the 2M executable into a 640K PC footprint was my proudest NetHack achievement.
Sadly, I almost always found the game far too hard to enjoy. There were only one or two releases I felt I could make any progress with, and devteam always thought they needed fixing because they were too easy (I was sooo sad when wand-pool stopped being the method of choice against shopkeepers). But still. Some of my best work went into that game—far, far under the covers.
Am I forgiven if I would prefer a hypothetical US/China war to take place without too much killing? I always find it odd how such paradigm shifts are somehow read as ingenuity if they come from ones own side and cheating if they come from the other. But this seems like a step in a sensible direction from a purely humanitarian standpoint, at least when set against the alternative.
Not, you understand, that I share the view that, for example, Taiwan is a 'natural' part of China. I don't happen to think that nations are 'natural' at all.
But in a real sense America can use all the bashing it can get. Seriously. Time to wake up. The fact that you think it matters whether criticism comes from within or without is, it seems, proof of this. Speaking in the broadest terms, America (corporately, I don't mean every single individual) has developed a tendency to view everything 'religiously' rather than empirically. There are white hats and black hats, not right actions and wrong actions. There are us and them, not cooperative-minded people and antagonistic people. This underlies everything from teaching non-science in science classes, to voting for people you know are wrong for the job because of the party they belong to, to making social policy decisions on the basis of whether or not they seem too 'socialistic' rather than looking at what effect (positive or negative) they would have, to choosing friends and enemies among other nations without stopping to think about their internal structures and agendas.
So, now, having said that, I'm not an American. Does that make me a troll? Because like most other non-Americans I do not want to be your enemy. But the key point is that the reason I don't want to be your enemy is not, if you will, that I'm afraid of afraid of rabid dogs and I don't want to meet your war machine in a dark alley, but because I'd like to see the world become a better place, and it would be just great if America (which used to hold itself up as a beacon of hope in this regard) would at least join in.
So there you have it. I'm un-American. I'm wearing the black hat. Mod me troll and make me go away. Because, I guess, it's easier than understanding that much of the rest of the world—specifically, those parts of it where we still believe that the political process can work and wars should no longer be necessary—has lost its respect for you as a power.
What an interesting idea. So you're working on getting US votes for the rest of the world, too?
I say this only half in jest. From the foreign perspective, (a) the US asserts itself way too much in our territory for us not to be represented too, and (b) its government, no, doesn't seem so exceptionally valid lately.
So, sure! Votes for all, I say!
How is it not an attack on the election when voters are getting turned away because of it? It's like when protests against (e.g.) warfare "turn violent"—you have to ask yourself who benefits before you get a clue as to who is responsible. Dirty tricks are far from unheard of in this world, and I suspect there are more agents provocateurs out there than most of us would care to imagine. All it takes is (parties changed to protect the innocent) one crypto-Pucite to walk around saying, "hey, your Mauveite prospects aren't around? Why not fill their forms in for them, you'll be doing them a favour. Nah, don't worry about the details, they'll figure it out on election day," and that's a fifty vote differential in the bag.
No. It is an established fact that the Republicans are biasing the vote by playing statistical dirty tricks: decreasing the chances that Democrats will get to the polls on time, arranging paper user interfaces so that errors tend in their favour, applying different standards of required clarity of marking at different polling stations. Your argument that 'soft' and in principle correctable bias doesn't count is a support of this pattern (whether as a principal or a dupe, I cannot say).
I'm not saying that Democrats never engage in the same activities, by the way, though I do think it's worth noting that I've seen almost no mention of it in the foreign press, while Republican shenanigans have been widely commented on.
Your country has reached the sad point where it can no longer be trusted to run its own elections. That was clear before the polls closed in 2000. I don't see much evidence of change, even if—and here I do agree with you—people have become more sensitive to the issue.
My father remembers the streamline Pacific class locos. These were breaking 125MPH in 1938. So, yes, they had HSTs, by the European definition, 60 years ago. And no, it wasn't here, and no, it isn't here.
But your point is taken. It is a conspiracy. Yet, this is supposedly a democracy—can't you vote in a little sanity?
Cars faster than trains? Even the pathetic trains they have in England do 125MPH. In France that's 200MPH. China? 270MPH. Cars cheaper than trains? Only, I suspect, because your wonderful highway system is state-subsidised, but the government is in bed with the automotive companies and will do nothing similar for rail. Wake up, America! There's a whole world out there, and you're not within sight of the leading edge when it comes to anything infrastructural.
Oh, and you're right. Train tickets aren't as cheap as cars per hour travelled. But that's assuming I spend time in a car for fun. Cars are cramped, smelly, have no restaurants or social opportunities, are inconvenient for reaching city centres and take three times as long to get there. These facts will stay the same even if cars become self-piloting, though I guess that then, at least, you'll be able to sleep and perhaps even to drink without getting yourself and several other people killed.
<ahem>Actually, we threw you out because you were a bunch of nutjobs, and you ran off to another continent, started a war with the inhabitants, whined to us that you needed military help, got all upset when that turned out to have a price, invested heavily in the slave trade, and finally declared independence when you realised that the abolition of slavery was becoming unavoidable throughout the Empire and it was going to wreck your economy when it happened. But that's neither here nor there.</ahem>
Montreal is on this continent, you know, in a country with rather too much room, and it's pretty livable. Not perfect, but no doctrine of 'no food without a car.' You really are just being weird.