Of course, evolution doesn't claim that organs, nerves or brains developed for a purpose, and that's the trick. Evolution is about statistics and not teleology, and, being mathematically sound, is as such pretty much unassailable. Religion is about the purpose, while science is about what happens.
I was about to say that they are therefore disjoint, but then I remembered Matthew 7:16, in which Jesus (not being stupid) stands up for empiricism. (Admittedly he's talking about this very issue of distinguishing the religious salesman from the product. I don't believe Jesus is recorded as saying anything about biology.)
Superstitions are not provable, so you might as well call it fiction because I can generate any bullshit and say it predicts the future on the same basis.
Yes. Anyone who tells you that their religion predicts the future is, of course, being disingenuous. Religions, typically, provide (often quite impractical) advice on how you should behave, and (often quite cynical) advice on how people in general behave, and may tender some speculation as to what comes next - but if you read closely (rather than listening to the rantings of demagogues) you will find far more disclaimers about not knowing the mind of god than you will predictions. I suspect you are confusing the claims of the (sometimes unscrupulous) salesmen with the product itself.
Everyone tells me to accept religion on faith, but the problem is the only reason I have to accept the religion is because other people tell me to. Doesn't that qualify as a superstition especially since the reason they chose to believe it is because other people told them to?
Nope, that qualifies as semantic confusion. To "accept something on faith" means that you must, a priori, believe either it or them. If you don't, you don't. Sometimes it is not unreasonable to trust the guidance of your friends; if I tell you that I used to know this great guy, Revay, who I met in an office building, who was a real whiz with APL, and who you would probably like, you might even believe me, minute though our contact is. Evidently, if I told you about this great guy, Jesus, who I kind-of met in a bus once while I was in an extremely odd state of consciousness, you would not go for it. That's your call. That's what it actually means, in English, when someone says that something must be taken on faith. It means precisely that they cannot persuade you. "Belief" is when soemthing is in your head, and you hold it to be true. "Knowledge" is when something is in your head, you hold it to be true, and you know how to persuade a skeptic. It's that simple.
I grant that someone could come to a realization by themselves, but it is very improbable that someone completely independent would come to realize the exact body of knowledge that is for instance one of the big three.
And it's interesting that you should say this. If you read theology, you will realise that no two theologians in fact believe quite the same thing. If you read church history, you will find that the articles of faith are hammered out in committee meetings, and are the result of ugly political compromises. If you speak to believers, you will discover that no two of them have the same religious experience, although there are interesting commonalities (your call, of course, if that's 'just' to do with biology, or if it's to do with biology 'as god chose to make it'). And it's especially interesting that you speak of "the big three" - remember that Jesus was a Jew, and a prophet of Islam. The "big three" of which you speak form one example of what you are talking about.
Ignore the political power plays and the petty manipulations. They don't give a true picture of anything. If you based your views of science on the shrillest, most ignorant, most money-hungry and most manipulative of its proponents it would seem pretty scary, too. Religions are methods of organising human experience, both communal and, more importantly, private. They provide a number of services to the non-specialist, including ethical calculi, cultural identities, and a reassurance that there is pattern to the world - in terms you might appreciate, that science is worth doing. It's all pre-theoretical stuff, and with the right tools, everyone knows you can do better now than we could one, or two, or four thousand years ago.
Only the salesmen say otherwise. Don't trust the salesmen. Even they know they're lying. By all means research the product, and buy it only if you want to!
Yes, something outside the universe is by definition unobservable. Physics is not the same as theology. We agree. To you, this means that religion is fiction, because you don't have any personal experience that suggests that there is a third ground besides fiction and fact. This, too, is fine by me (though it doesn't mesh quite as well with my experience). But you then conclude that religion is therefore superstition. Huh? Why is superstition a superset of fiction all of a sudden?
Religion does not become superstition unless and until you take the bizarre step of concluding that theology gives you information about physics. Yes, I know there are some nutters who believe this (and many more who pretend they do for the sake of their political ambitions, I might add); but it is a clear inconsistency, and not one of which a thinking person would care to be guilty. It is not part of the notion of religion, though there are enough propagandists who would like you to believe it. If you really believe in the empirical method, go and talk to some educated, intelligent religious people before you go making theories about what they are like.
I said that organised religions discourage psychopaths, not that historical documents do. Of course you can root through the bible and find weird shit; this is about as surprising as saying that you can find things in US history, or even in US law, that appear to contradict the US constitution. But does a Christian choose Numbers 31 as an explanation of their values? No, they'll choose Matthew 22:35-40. It's actually rather more relevant, since this was an occasion on which the founder of the religion was actually asked the question.
But the details of this particular debate aside, religions are like viruses, in this way: that if they are too lethal, they do not themselves survive. In fact, their best odds for survival are typically in becoming beneficial. This is why older religions tend to be more reasonable, and this is why when you get some strange new mutation you can have a nasty surprise.
And why does a religion have to be anthropocentric? When I was on my mathematical christology kick, 'the saviour of elm trees' was one of my standard test constructs. "Can trees be 'saved'? Might they benefit from it? What the f*** would that mean to a human Christian? And what would Jesus of Nazareth signify to a tree?" I would ask myself. But if your religion hands you avatars (as opposed to the standard Christian trinitarian incarnation structure, which is clearly species-indexed), your god can quite easily be a tree, I should think, even if you aren't a tree yourself.
I have no problem with areligious atheists (after all, a creator-god is unobservable by construction, so intellectually honest deism [perhaps even metatemporal theism] and areligious atheism are the same, up to isomorphism), but devout atheists who turn off their imaginations and disallow thought experiments when discussion religion hurt my head. How they think they can have certain knowledge (as opposed to a personal, but not persuasively communicable, belief) about the unobservable is beyond me. They're nuts in exactly the same way as the intelligent design crowd.
Let me put it this way: why would one suppose that Occam's razor is the right tool for answering the question 'what's your favourite story?' How can someone be wrong about their own imaginary friend?
Of course, when people start saying 'God told me to kill you,' it's time to lock them up. Weird thing is, organised religions - being, whether you hold to them or not, evolved social structures as well as metaphilosophical frameworks - will even agree with you on this. Of course there are plenty of homicidal maniacs who pretend otherwise - but they are, for the most part, consciously lying, and should no more be laid at the door of the religions in question than people who get their instructions from their gerbils.
The thing I find interesting about homeopathy is this: on the one hand, it is an extreme long shot that water could hold long-term imprints of the sort claimed. It's not actually quite theoretically impossible; there are minerals that seem to be capable of propagating macrostructures - but of course, water is a liquid. Then again, it's an inordinately interesting liquid, and it does form nontrivial macrostructures - but of course, as far as we know, only for very short periods of time. In short: it's hard to exclude the notion on principle, even if Occam doesn't have to strop his razor very much for it to seem pretty damned far fetched.
But. Suppose for a moment (and yes, this is a metatheoretical thought experiment and not a scientific argument!) that these water memories indeed have some physical reality, any physical reality at all. Would homeopathy then work? Would the human organism have evolved to be sensitive to it? You bet it would! If there were any pathway made available to the selective process whereby a contaminated water supply could trigger the immune system before the pathogen itself arrived in enough quantity to do harm (and for some pathogens a single molecule might suffice!), it would be a massive win. Evolution is death-based learning, and death avoidance is the most powerful incentive there is. Life would be all over such an early-warning system, in (geologically speaking) a flash.
So: I do not consider this memorious water likely. Remotely possible; still worth doing further real scientific studies on, I think; but one hell of a long shot. But if studies on the claimed physical properties of water should ever prove positive, the conceptual landscape changes completely.
And here's an interesting thing: you notice that the entire industry of cryptography (to take one example) is based on this structure: if it is true that factoring certain objects is substantially harder then forming their product, then I have this groovy cryptosystem for you. And we do go ahead and use these results. Can we honestly assess the truth of this precondition, either?
The fact is that I am inclined to trust contemporary cryptographic theory, and I am inclined to dismiss homeopathy. But I thought it worth commenting on the structural parallel: it sure as hell makes me go 'hm.'
"Since he can learn from his model only insofar as it is accurate, and since the Real World has other factors..... why should we care about this?"
Yes, of course, this is why laboratory science has long since been abandoned as useless in physics, chemistry and biology. It's just amazing that economics has taken so long to catch up!
If I may wax cynical here, a software engineer is not much more than a programmer with a fighting chance of delivering a working solution, and the market situation is a simple case of 'if you're not good, then you'd better be cheap.' Of course, that's actually not a surprise. The interesting question is, how do we get good? Many people here are saying 'native enthusiasm,' and you can't argue with that. Many others are saying 'experience,' and that helps, too. But there's also the matter of quality of education. Critical thinking, planning, abstraction, problem solving and communication skills - they may have a large innate component, but they are also skills that can be taught - otherwise, frankly, field experience would do no damn good, either. But there's a growing culture in the West that an education is not a matter of passion, and not a matter of wanting to contribute your best, it's a matter of investment. You pay money for a degree, and then you expect to draw high wages, subsequently, in return. But this (forgive me for crying 'Hitler') is xxAA-think! Consider, for example, what protectionist policies like visa caps actually mean in terms of market dynamics: it's the DRM of the intellectual marketplace.
If I'm right, then what needs to be done to reach a real solution (as opposed to a short-sighted extortion-based policy) is not merely to improve the educational system, but to change the ratio of quality to cost in technical education. Attract people who want challenge, not those who want big paycheques. Then, ironically enough, you will produce more people who can command those paycheques, who are actually worth seven of someone else.
Myself, I'm a socialist. For the sake of directness, I'd suggest paying for this out of taxes, perhaps diverting funds from paper-pushers, or the armed forces. But as I've commented here before, the goal might also be accomplished purely in the marketplace, by having educational institutions sell futures in their graduating classes. Either way, build cost-effective competence, and you can continue to compete successfully.
You know, it's an interesting thing. I don't know if other people are at all like me; I hate ads, but am in some ways sympathetic to advertisers. Each time I set up a new machine, I install Firefox, without AdBlock. I then start using it. Invariably, within a week, I encounter a site on which I experience total denial of service from an ad - or some kind of wake-the-neighbours or scare-you-stupid behaviour that I cannot tolerate starting. The technology employed has changed over the years, but it has happened every single time. At this point, I once again install AdBlock, and subscribe to a listing service to knock out all ads pre-emptively. Why? Not because I want to 'steal' from anyone, but because I do not want my computer taken down, and after I have already loaded an attack-ad, it's already too late. Manual blacklisting cannot do the job when I have no UI - and is already too late when people I need to get along with are banging on the walls.
What does this mean? Either browser technology has to become less co-opertive with the advertisers, and make all programmable features, all audio, and all UI-modifying techniques disabled by default, enabled only on a per-site basis, and with a feature that if the browser locks up it automatically resets itself and re-disables the offending feature - or the advertising industry must find some means of policing itself. Nothing short of this is a solution in any way, because even if I wanted to view the ads, in the world as it is, I cannot.
The thing to remember in respect of key-loggers is that we are not discussing the right to privacy, we are discussing the right to identity. It is about the authorities collecting the information needed to impersonate people. This is interesting, and worrisome, because (although the occasional case of identty appropriation does show up, with or without technological involvement), the right to identity is so basic and so ingrained in our biological makeup that it doesn't seem to present itself to the framers of constitutions as something they need to write about (I mean, how can someone steal your you, right?). At the same time, it's fundamental to modern legal theories: after all, if personal identities are not precise, then habeas corpus becomes meaningless and village-razing approaches to 'justice' start to seem rational once more.
I suspect that part of the reason that people in some places (e.g. the UK) are willing to surrender their privacy to universal surveillance, although they are unlikely to articulate it in this way, is that it reinforces their identity - when someone does something, people can see on the tapes who did it, and they can see not only when it is me, but also when it is not. But universal keylogging is a step in the opposite direction, it is a step in the direction of 'when one is guilty then all are guilty.'
Timescales. If people made investments with 50 or 100 year horizons, the market probably would do some good. In fact, this was arguably one of the positive qualities of monarchy, and dynastic thinking in general. (Of course, one is no more likely to get a good king as a good president, and kings last longer; there are two sides to every coin.)
The only direction I have been able to think of going from where we are now that might bring back some sanity is selling long horizon futures in researchers, either as individuals or perhaps small groups (such as graduating classes from your institution). It's a bit like the xxAA problem; the corporation, fundamentally the middleman in the equation, can't be trusted as the vehicle to set the goals.
You include 'has DNA' in the list of criteria for life specifically, I assume, to exclude alien lifeforms. Is this bigotry innate (and evolved!), or did you have an unfortunate childhood experience with some shales and a magnetic vortex based master intelligence?
As to your question, if you put a learning and abstraction engine into an environment with multiple (near-)copies of itself and ask it to plan for the future, it's pretty clear that the useful (i.e. adaptive) option among the possible outcomes is approximate self-modeling. For many technical reasons it's tricky to get right, but nature had lots of time, and provided plenty of impetus, to work on it.
If you don't think that's a strong enough answer, then consider this: how can you prove to me that you are self-aware? How can you prove to yourself that you are? Reflexive social planning ("I know how to do this, but if I try I will be too scared to go through with it, so I had better take a friend....") is the best evidence you can give me.
You say, 'It's bloody hard for a research manager to his or her job well when researchers aren't doing theirs' - my point is merely that the converse is, if anything, even more true. Indeed, the only real quibble I have with what you have just said is that it is not, as you perhaps imply, the researcher's job alone to estimate the costs, risks and benefits of a course of action - nor even to articulate them. Typically, many of the costs, risks and benefits are of an institutional, social or political nature, and the kind of explanation of an idea that is going to be wanted by those higher up the management chain is something that cannot be arrived at by someone with a purely technical background working alone. Thus the manager, too, has a responsibility to 'do what they can to implement the idea without worrying too much about whose job it's supposed to be.' Note, however, that the defining function of the researcher is that they do research; the defining function of the manager is that they manage. All else has to be done somehow, by someone, with skills that can be located or developed, and if typically helps a lot if the manager is willing to manage that. This is not a fantasy about a team standing around to catch 'brain farts', it is rational behaviour when trying to achieve maximum payoff from a set of assets.
The manager is the specialist whose job is to hire and coordinate the other specialists who, in their turn, get the job done. If innovation is a specialisation which is frequently not found in the same person as internal marketing and deployment, and the manager does nothing to ensure that these additional skills that enable the innovation to achieve positive payoff are covered by other members of the team, this is the manager's failing. The innovator is not empowered to change the composition of the team; the manager is.
A manager who is doing his or her job does not whine (having bought a pen) 'this pen does not work' when the obvious options are (a) learn to write or (b) hire a scribe. This situation is no different.
Of course, it may be a canny career move for an innovator to acquire additional social engineering skills, enabling them to work effectively in a smaller team and/or with less able managers. But then again an innovator may have higher priorities, such as acquiring additional technical skills, or indeed performing further innovation. In fact, the entire motivation for the corporate environment is to allow each person to play to their strengths, to enable specialisation. In particular, the managers' typical objective in a technology department is to use their 'people' skills to exploit the potential of those who have 'things' skills and lack 'people' skills themselves.
Finally, of course, managers should be careful what they wish for. If the researchers did in fact decide that the system had failed them, that they needed to perform their own management, and that they were going to fight directly for the cash rather than focusing on the fun stuff and leaving the management to the managers, the IQ 105 managers would then find themselves up against a new breed of IQ 185 competitors who, while less experienced, were pissed off at them and actively trying to take them down. I don't think anyone would be having any fun, then. Fortunately for everyone, it's usually easier to find another job.
Indeed. The trust problem should be clear from the start: all issues of the message aside, it's proposed that it will somehow help matters to have a working opt-out system. How can an opt-out on a blind probe be useful? Spammers are by definition crooks (whether or not we believe that their hearts are in the right place); they are thus, a priori, dishonest and disrespectful of contracts, social and otherwise. So, what is the recipient's most likely interpretation of an opt-out link? That this is a means to validate the receiving address, that's what - a one-bit phishing attack. So no thoughtful person will click on it. Like everything else in the article, it's an attempt to assuage the author's own conscience over an impulse to bullying, and not a contribution in the least. Because bullying doesn't cease to be bullying merely because you think you're right....
Would I ever be forgiven for saying, 'Oh good! Finally someone is working towards a world in which there are no turnstiles in the subway, in which I can legally pick up a sandwich and walk away, in which I don't have to spend an hour filling in forms to get access to services that are supposedly mine by right, and in which I don't have to worry that, as a single person, if I went out one evening and never came home it would be a month before anyone even noticed, that if I passed out at home, no help would ever come?'
It is not, of course, that I am blind to the vast potential for abuse of any such powerful technology, but not one comment here has suggested that that anyone in the audience has even noticed that there could be actual benefits for the average citizen. Is it because slashdot hates the Chinese so deeply? (Certainly the general distrust for the Chinese government here seems quite at odds with the competence and practicality they have been showing lately, especially in the context of the complete disregard for the rule of law that the US has been evidencing at the same time.) Or is it just that by now the governments of the English-speaking 'developed world' have become so bad at watching the watchers that we have come to think that effective oversight is a theoretical impossibility?
And then, all politics aside, this thing will come to pass, thorughout the world, and perhaps our effort should be devoted to studying it, understanding it, and working out how to make the benefits actually outweigh the costs. As a few enlightened individuals have commented, one important factor is openness. It may not be true that the average citizen has nothing to hide, but the average corrupt official or surveilling blackmailer has (I hope!) much more to hide than you or I. So let us make it known: if the powers that be are determined to do this thing, then we, all of us, need the power to watch the watchers. If there is an inevitable end to privacy, then we must definitively end secrecy as well. And that is actually a bargain I would be willing to make.
First, it's important to remember that immigrants are (statistically speaking) pre-selected for practicality and competence: they have successfully uprooted themselves from one place to another, they have dealt with all the associated logistics, and whether they arrived legally and therefore dealt successfully with the immigration bureaucracy, or illegally and, well, dealt successfully with border guards and the impediments of living without an identity, we know that they are people who can see an opportunity and grasp it, against heavy odds. Immigrants, by and large, are the people you WANT in your country, because they are people who FOUGHT to be there, (and yes, merely getting a visa for the US is indeed a fight) even if the country they left did not or could not work hard enough to keep them. Second, it's remotely possible that the language and culture barriers they experience are in some ways a benefit, since they may serve to shield immigrants (and especially illegals) from vice advertising and credit services. Certainly, at any rate, they have the advantage of an outside perspective on the way their new environment operates. One way or another, immigrants are not the victims that the indigenous poor are - at least, not unless they were trafficked in by third parties as slave/indentured labour. And, of course, they are people who arrived expecting to adapt.
But that means it's not right to conclude that everything is fine and the indigenous poor are just lazy. They are not, and their problems are real. It's just that immigrants by and large have what amounts to graduate degrees in real life, and are thus more successful at dealing with life challenges that are frankly unrealistic for the average person lacking in the appropriate schooling and anticipated mores. Policy makers are too fond (the example is imaginary) of making people fill out forms to attend literacy classes, if you see what I mean. Immigrants may differentially not give up when faced with such challenges, but that doesn't make it a reasonable thing to require.
Since there's no huge need for gaming broadcasts to be live, this could be beautiful. All you need is a log of the match. You can then do the cinematography in post-production, as it were. Indeed, with a little help from the vendor, you could generate the final footage with enhanced visuals on a rendering farm, and it could look like film....
Seriously, it has the potential to blow away real world sports, as a viewer experience.
What amazes me is that this should be legal. Aren't there (particularly in Europe) laws that are intended to protect artistic integrity? How can unauthorised sampling (which produces new art) be bad, but radio stations doing the same thing badly, minus any motivation but the motive of profit for a blackmailer be good?
The various comments here have caught what I expect is both halves of the point without connecting in the middle. A home PC you buy from Dell cannot drink from the 40Gbps hose. Not under Linux, definitely not under Windows. So... no, whatever she is running, if it can do this thing then it is not going to be shipped preconfigured as a home computer. And, even if it were, there would be the little question of the drivers for the NIC, which I seriously doubt are part of the Windows distro.
So they keep that last.5/5. I truly believe, based on my own real world experience at the 10Gbps mark, that the Windows install was the hardest part!
I'm not American. When I lived in Illinois, I was told I could not buy beer because I do not drive. Now I am told that, should I live in the States again, I will not be allowed to board a plane unless I learn to drive? And this makes sense to you?
I understand that the US is opposed to Kyoto on economic grounds, but isn't this taking it beyond a joke...?!
I'm not even opposed to uniform ID. Change the constitution so that the Federal government can legally issue one. The current approach is an abuse by its nature. It shows no respect for either common sense or the rule of law. It is... astonishing.
I stopped buying CDs cold when I got the third one that wouldn't play at all due to some DRM scheme or other. Fraud is fraud is fraud! I used to buy them all the time. I have a couple of thousand in the other room, I think. But what possible reason would I have to pay money for a coaster?
Now I just don't trust them. Not the objects, not the manufacturers. I can't imagine what would persuade me to start buying again. Perhaps if they gave me ten or twenty that I wanted, that played ok, for free? Or a 'twice your money back if it doesn't play' guarantee?
As to downloading - well, they aren't going to get me to buy anything DRMd, for the same reason. They aren't trustworthy people. They will pull the plug on me when they want more cash. Indeed, how do I know that DRM signature will be valid, that the file will play at all? These are the same people who were selling CDs that don't work!
But wait! You say "the force generated by the magnetically-induced levitation and the downward force of gravity must be equal, Planck's constant can thus be precisely related to the kilogram," but that won't work. Force is measured in Newtons; you've just measured weight, not mass. In fact, this 'method' would give you different values depending on when and where you used it!
Yes, of course, it is important to have colleges that are not funded by the state and thus not subject to regulation, otherwise important messages about Scientific Penguinism and the fact that global warming (a) does not exist and (b) is caused by homosexuality would get lost (not to mention ther ones where you can learn how to blow up aircraft using Evian water and Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts):-}.
Seriously, though, when you say "I'd rather choose the education I want rather than fund one I don't want. I'd also rather choose my retirement than have the government dictate my lifestyle. Something about freedom, now what was that..." you're implying that, as a socialist, I advocate the abolition of democracy. I certainly don't. Actually rather the reverse: I'd like to see tax dollars doing things that benefit everyone, by providing a stable, virtual, well engineered socio-economic environment for the economy to play out in, much as is done with our physical environments in cities. It still matters that society, like a city, be well managed, but that's a separate question, one of competent design and consultation.
I think, in fact, that my point is supported by looking at the USA today. It may not be at all socialist, but something is still severely lacking in terms of competent design and consultation. Ergo, it is not socialism that causes this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, evolution doesn't claim that organs, nerves or brains developed for a purpose, and that's the trick. Evolution is about statistics and not teleology, and, being mathematically sound, is as such pretty much unassailable. Religion is about the purpose, while science is about what happens.
I was about to say that they are therefore disjoint, but then I remembered Matthew 7:16, in which Jesus (not being stupid) stands up for empiricism. (Admittedly he's talking about this very issue of distinguishing the religious salesman from the product. I don't believe Jesus is recorded as saying anything about biology.)
(Sorry sorry, SUBset, yes.)
Yes. Anyone who tells you that their religion predicts the future is, of course, being disingenuous. Religions, typically, provide (often quite impractical) advice on how you should behave, and (often quite cynical) advice on how people in general behave, and may tender some speculation as to what comes next - but if you read closely (rather than listening to the rantings of demagogues) you will find far more disclaimers about not knowing the mind of god than you will predictions. I suspect you are confusing the claims of the (sometimes unscrupulous) salesmen with the product itself.
Nope, that qualifies as semantic confusion. To "accept something on faith" means that you must, a priori, believe either it or them. If you don't, you don't. Sometimes it is not unreasonable to trust the guidance of your friends; if I tell you that I used to know this great guy, Revay, who I met in an office building, who was a real whiz with APL, and who you would probably like, you might even believe me, minute though our contact is. Evidently, if I told you about this great guy, Jesus, who I kind-of met in a bus once while I was in an extremely odd state of consciousness, you would not go for it. That's your call. That's what it actually means, in English, when someone says that something must be taken on faith. It means precisely that they cannot persuade you. "Belief" is when soemthing is in your head, and you hold it to be true. "Knowledge" is when something is in your head, you hold it to be true, and you know how to persuade a skeptic. It's that simple.
And it's interesting that you should say this. If you read theology, you will realise that no two theologians in fact believe quite the same thing. If you read church history, you will find that the articles of faith are hammered out in committee meetings, and are the result of ugly political compromises. If you speak to believers, you will discover that no two of them have the same religious experience, although there are interesting commonalities (your call, of course, if that's 'just' to do with biology, or if it's to do with biology 'as god chose to make it'). And it's especially interesting that you speak of "the big three" - remember that Jesus was a Jew, and a prophet of Islam. The "big three" of which you speak form one example of what you are talking about.
Ignore the political power plays and the petty manipulations. They don't give a true picture of anything. If you based your views of science on the shrillest, most ignorant, most money-hungry and most manipulative of its proponents it would seem pretty scary, too. Religions are methods of organising human experience, both communal and, more importantly, private. They provide a number of services to the non-specialist, including ethical calculi, cultural identities, and a reassurance that there is pattern to the world - in terms you might appreciate, that science is worth doing. It's all pre-theoretical stuff, and with the right tools, everyone knows you can do better now than we could one, or two, or four thousand years ago.
Only the salesmen say otherwise. Don't trust the salesmen. Even they know they're lying. By all means research the product, and buy it only if you want to!
Yes, something outside the universe is by definition unobservable. Physics is not the same as theology. We agree. To you, this means that religion is fiction, because you don't have any personal experience that suggests that there is a third ground besides fiction and fact. This, too, is fine by me (though it doesn't mesh quite as well with my experience). But you then conclude that religion is therefore superstition. Huh? Why is superstition a superset of fiction all of a sudden?
Religion does not become superstition unless and until you take the bizarre step of concluding that theology gives you information about physics. Yes, I know there are some nutters who believe this (and many more who pretend they do for the sake of their political ambitions, I might add); but it is a clear inconsistency, and not one of which a thinking person would care to be guilty. It is not part of the notion of religion, though there are enough propagandists who would like you to believe it. If you really believe in the empirical method, go and talk to some educated, intelligent religious people before you go making theories about what they are like.
I said that organised religions discourage psychopaths, not that historical documents do. Of course you can root through the bible and find weird shit; this is about as surprising as saying that you can find things in US history, or even in US law, that appear to contradict the US constitution. But does a Christian choose Numbers 31 as an explanation of their values? No, they'll choose Matthew 22:35-40. It's actually rather more relevant, since this was an occasion on which the founder of the religion was actually asked the question.
But the details of this particular debate aside, religions are like viruses, in this way: that if they are too lethal, they do not themselves survive. In fact, their best odds for survival are typically in becoming beneficial. This is why older religions tend to be more reasonable, and this is why when you get some strange new mutation you can have a nasty surprise.
And why does a religion have to be anthropocentric? When I was on my mathematical christology kick, 'the saviour of elm trees' was one of my standard test constructs. "Can trees be 'saved'? Might they benefit from it? What the f*** would that mean to a human Christian? And what would Jesus of Nazareth signify to a tree?" I would ask myself. But if your religion hands you avatars (as opposed to the standard Christian trinitarian incarnation structure, which is clearly species-indexed), your god can quite easily be a tree, I should think, even if you aren't a tree yourself.
I have no problem with areligious atheists (after all, a creator-god is unobservable by construction, so intellectually honest deism [perhaps even metatemporal theism] and areligious atheism are the same, up to isomorphism), but devout atheists who turn off their imaginations and disallow thought experiments when discussion religion hurt my head. How they think they can have certain knowledge (as opposed to a personal, but not persuasively communicable, belief) about the unobservable is beyond me. They're nuts in exactly the same way as the intelligent design crowd.
Let me put it this way: why would one suppose that Occam's razor is the right tool for answering the question 'what's your favourite story?' How can someone be wrong about their own imaginary friend?
Of course, when people start saying 'God told me to kill you,' it's time to lock them up. Weird thing is, organised religions - being, whether you hold to them or not, evolved social structures as well as metaphilosophical frameworks - will even agree with you on this. Of course there are plenty of homicidal maniacs who pretend otherwise - but they are, for the most part, consciously lying, and should no more be laid at the door of the religions in question than people who get their instructions from their gerbils.
The thing I find interesting about homeopathy is this: on the one hand, it is an extreme long shot that water could hold long-term imprints of the sort claimed. It's not actually quite theoretically impossible; there are minerals that seem to be capable of propagating macrostructures - but of course, water is a liquid. Then again, it's an inordinately interesting liquid, and it does form nontrivial macrostructures - but of course, as far as we know, only for very short periods of time. In short: it's hard to exclude the notion on principle, even if Occam doesn't have to strop his razor very much for it to seem pretty damned far fetched.
But. Suppose for a moment (and yes, this is a metatheoretical thought experiment and not a scientific argument!) that these water memories indeed have some physical reality, any physical reality at all. Would homeopathy then work? Would the human organism have evolved to be sensitive to it? You bet it would! If there were any pathway made available to the selective process whereby a contaminated water supply could trigger the immune system before the pathogen itself arrived in enough quantity to do harm (and for some pathogens a single molecule might suffice!), it would be a massive win. Evolution is death-based learning, and death avoidance is the most powerful incentive there is. Life would be all over such an early-warning system, in (geologically speaking) a flash.
So: I do not consider this memorious water likely. Remotely possible; still worth doing further real scientific studies on, I think; but one hell of a long shot. But if studies on the claimed physical properties of water should ever prove positive, the conceptual landscape changes completely.
And here's an interesting thing: you notice that the entire industry of cryptography (to take one example) is based on this structure: if it is true that factoring certain objects is substantially harder then forming their product, then I have this groovy cryptosystem for you. And we do go ahead and use these results. Can we honestly assess the truth of this precondition, either?
The fact is that I am inclined to trust contemporary cryptographic theory, and I am inclined to dismiss homeopathy. But I thought it worth commenting on the structural parallel: it sure as hell makes me go 'hm.'
"Since he can learn from his model only insofar as it is accurate, and since the Real World has other factors... .. why should we care about this?"
Yes, of course, this is why laboratory science has long since been abandoned as useless in physics, chemistry and biology. It's just amazing that economics has taken so long to catch up!
If I may wax cynical here, a software engineer is not much more than a programmer with a fighting chance of delivering a working solution, and the market situation is a simple case of 'if you're not good, then you'd better be cheap.' Of course, that's actually not a surprise. The interesting question is, how do we get good? Many people here are saying 'native enthusiasm,' and you can't argue with that. Many others are saying 'experience,' and that helps, too. But there's also the matter of quality of education. Critical thinking, planning, abstraction, problem solving and communication skills - they may have a large innate component, but they are also skills that can be taught - otherwise, frankly, field experience would do no damn good, either. But there's a growing culture in the West that an education is not a matter of passion, and not a matter of wanting to contribute your best, it's a matter of investment. You pay money for a degree, and then you expect to draw high wages, subsequently, in return. But this (forgive me for crying 'Hitler') is xxAA-think! Consider, for example, what protectionist policies like visa caps actually mean in terms of market dynamics: it's the DRM of the intellectual marketplace.
If I'm right, then what needs to be done to reach a real solution (as opposed to a short-sighted extortion-based policy) is not merely to improve the educational system, but to change the ratio of quality to cost in technical education. Attract people who want challenge, not those who want big paycheques. Then, ironically enough, you will produce more people who can command those paycheques, who are actually worth seven of someone else.
Myself, I'm a socialist. For the sake of directness, I'd suggest paying for this out of taxes, perhaps diverting funds from paper-pushers, or the armed forces. But as I've commented here before, the goal might also be accomplished purely in the marketplace, by having educational institutions sell futures in their graduating classes. Either way, build cost-effective competence, and you can continue to compete successfully.
You know, it's an interesting thing. I don't know if other people are at all like me; I hate ads, but am in some ways sympathetic to advertisers. Each time I set up a new machine, I install Firefox, without AdBlock. I then start using it. Invariably, within a week, I encounter a site on which I experience total denial of service from an ad - or some kind of wake-the-neighbours or scare-you-stupid behaviour that I cannot tolerate starting. The technology employed has changed over the years, but it has happened every single time. At this point, I once again install AdBlock, and subscribe to a listing service to knock out all ads pre-emptively. Why? Not because I want to 'steal' from anyone, but because I do not want my computer taken down, and after I have already loaded an attack-ad, it's already too late. Manual blacklisting cannot do the job when I have no UI - and is already too late when people I need to get along with are banging on the walls.
What does this mean? Either browser technology has to become less co-opertive with the advertisers, and make all programmable features, all audio, and all UI-modifying techniques disabled by default, enabled only on a per-site basis, and with a feature that if the browser locks up it automatically resets itself and re-disables the offending feature - or the advertising industry must find some means of policing itself. Nothing short of this is a solution in any way, because even if I wanted to view the ads, in the world as it is, I cannot.
The thing to remember in respect of key-loggers is that we are not discussing the right to privacy, we are discussing the right to identity. It is about the authorities collecting the information needed to impersonate people. This is interesting, and worrisome, because (although the occasional case of identty appropriation does show up, with or without technological involvement), the right to identity is so basic and so ingrained in our biological makeup that it doesn't seem to present itself to the framers of constitutions as something they need to write about (I mean, how can someone steal your you, right?). At the same time, it's fundamental to modern legal theories: after all, if personal identities are not precise, then habeas corpus becomes meaningless and village-razing approaches to 'justice' start to seem rational once more.
I suspect that part of the reason that people in some places (e.g. the UK) are willing to surrender their privacy to universal surveillance, although they are unlikely to articulate it in this way, is that it reinforces their identity - when someone does something, people can see on the tapes who did it, and they can see not only when it is me, but also when it is not. But universal keylogging is a step in the opposite direction, it is a step in the direction of 'when one is guilty then all are guilty.'
The only direction I have been able to think of going from where we are now that might bring back some sanity is selling long horizon futures in researchers, either as individuals or perhaps small groups (such as graduating classes from your institution). It's a bit like the xxAA problem; the corporation, fundamentally the middleman in the equation, can't be trusted as the vehicle to set the goals.
You include 'has DNA' in the list of criteria for life specifically, I assume, to exclude alien lifeforms. Is this bigotry innate (and evolved!), or did you have an unfortunate childhood experience with some shales and a magnetic vortex based master intelligence?
As to your question, if you put a learning and abstraction engine into an environment with multiple (near-)copies of itself and ask it to plan for the future, it's pretty clear that the useful (i.e. adaptive) option among the possible outcomes is approximate self-modeling. For many technical reasons it's tricky to get right, but nature had lots of time, and provided plenty of impetus, to work on it.
If you don't think that's a strong enough answer, then consider this: how can you prove to me that you are self-aware? How can you prove to yourself that you are? Reflexive social planning ("I know how to do this, but if I try I will be too scared to go through with it, so I had better take a friend....") is the best evidence you can give me.
You say, 'It's bloody hard for a research manager to his or her job well when researchers aren't doing theirs' - my point is merely that the converse is, if anything, even more true. Indeed, the only real quibble I have with what you have just said is that it is not, as you perhaps imply, the researcher's job alone to estimate the costs, risks and benefits of a course of action - nor even to articulate them. Typically, many of the costs, risks and benefits are of an institutional, social or political nature, and the kind of explanation of an idea that is going to be wanted by those higher up the management chain is something that cannot be arrived at by someone with a purely technical background working alone. Thus the manager, too, has a responsibility to 'do what they can to implement the idea without worrying too much about whose job it's supposed to be.' Note, however, that the defining function of the researcher is that they do research; the defining function of the manager is that they manage. All else has to be done somehow, by someone, with skills that can be located or developed, and if typically helps a lot if the manager is willing to manage that. This is not a fantasy about a team standing around to catch 'brain farts', it is rational behaviour when trying to achieve maximum payoff from a set of assets.
The manager is the specialist whose job is to hire and coordinate the other specialists who, in their turn, get the job done. If innovation is a specialisation which is frequently not found in the same person as internal marketing and deployment, and the manager does nothing to ensure that these additional skills that enable the innovation to achieve positive payoff are covered by other members of the team, this is the manager's failing. The innovator is not empowered to change the composition of the team; the manager is.
A manager who is doing his or her job does not whine (having bought a pen) 'this pen does not work' when the obvious options are (a) learn to write or (b) hire a scribe. This situation is no different.
Of course, it may be a canny career move for an innovator to acquire additional social engineering skills, enabling them to work effectively in a smaller team and/or with less able managers. But then again an innovator may have higher priorities, such as acquiring additional technical skills, or indeed performing further innovation. In fact, the entire motivation for the corporate environment is to allow each person to play to their strengths, to enable specialisation. In particular, the managers' typical objective in a technology department is to use their 'people' skills to exploit the potential of those who have 'things' skills and lack 'people' skills themselves.
Finally, of course, managers should be careful what they wish for. If the researchers did in fact decide that the system had failed them, that they needed to perform their own management, and that they were going to fight directly for the cash rather than focusing on the fun stuff and leaving the management to the managers, the IQ 105 managers would then find themselves up against a new breed of IQ 185 competitors who, while less experienced, were pissed off at them and actively trying to take them down. I don't think anyone would be having any fun, then. Fortunately for everyone, it's usually easier to find another job.
Indeed. The trust problem should be clear from the start: all issues of the message aside, it's proposed that it will somehow help matters to have a working opt-out system. How can an opt-out on a blind probe be useful? Spammers are by definition crooks (whether or not we believe that their hearts are in the right place); they are thus, a priori, dishonest and disrespectful of contracts, social and otherwise. So, what is the recipient's most likely interpretation of an opt-out link? That this is a means to validate the receiving address, that's what - a one-bit phishing attack. So no thoughtful person will click on it. Like everything else in the article, it's an attempt to assuage the author's own conscience over an impulse to bullying, and not a contribution in the least. Because bullying doesn't cease to be bullying merely because you think you're right....
Would I ever be forgiven for saying, 'Oh good! Finally someone is working towards a world in which there are no turnstiles in the subway, in which I can legally pick up a sandwich and walk away, in which I don't have to spend an hour filling in forms to get access to services that are supposedly mine by right, and in which I don't have to worry that, as a single person, if I went out one evening and never came home it would be a month before anyone even noticed, that if I passed out at home, no help would ever come?'
It is not, of course, that I am blind to the vast potential for abuse of any such powerful technology, but not one comment here has suggested that that anyone in the audience has even noticed that there could be actual benefits for the average citizen. Is it because slashdot hates the Chinese so deeply? (Certainly the general distrust for the Chinese government here seems quite at odds with the competence and practicality they have been showing lately, especially in the context of the complete disregard for the rule of law that the US has been evidencing at the same time.) Or is it just that by now the governments of the English-speaking 'developed world' have become so bad at watching the watchers that we have come to think that effective oversight is a theoretical impossibility?
And then, all politics aside, this thing will come to pass, thorughout the world, and perhaps our effort should be devoted to studying it, understanding it, and working out how to make the benefits actually outweigh the costs. As a few enlightened individuals have commented, one important factor is openness. It may not be true that the average citizen has nothing to hide, but the average corrupt official or surveilling blackmailer has (I hope!) much more to hide than you or I. So let us make it known: if the powers that be are determined to do this thing, then we, all of us, need the power to watch the watchers. If there is an inevitable end to privacy, then we must definitively end secrecy as well. And that is actually a bargain I would be willing to make.
First, it's important to remember that immigrants are (statistically speaking) pre-selected for practicality and competence: they have successfully uprooted themselves from one place to another, they have dealt with all the associated logistics, and whether they arrived legally and therefore dealt successfully with the immigration bureaucracy, or illegally and, well, dealt successfully with border guards and the impediments of living without an identity, we know that they are people who can see an opportunity and grasp it, against heavy odds. Immigrants, by and large, are the people you WANT in your country, because they are people who FOUGHT to be there, (and yes, merely getting a visa for the US is indeed a fight) even if the country they left did not or could not work hard enough to keep them. Second, it's remotely possible that the language and culture barriers they experience are in some ways a benefit, since they may serve to shield immigrants (and especially illegals) from vice advertising and credit services. Certainly, at any rate, they have the advantage of an outside perspective on the way their new environment operates. One way or another, immigrants are not the victims that the indigenous poor are - at least, not unless they were trafficked in by third parties as slave/indentured labour. And, of course, they are people who arrived expecting to adapt.
But that means it's not right to conclude that everything is fine and the indigenous poor are just lazy. They are not, and their problems are real. It's just that immigrants by and large have what amounts to graduate degrees in real life, and are thus more successful at dealing with life challenges that are frankly unrealistic for the average person lacking in the appropriate schooling and anticipated mores. Policy makers are too fond (the example is imaginary) of making people fill out forms to attend literacy classes, if you see what I mean. Immigrants may differentially not give up when faced with such challenges, but that doesn't make it a reasonable thing to require.
Since there's no huge need for gaming broadcasts to be live, this could be beautiful. All you need is a log of the match. You can then do the cinematography in post-production, as it were. Indeed, with a little help from the vendor, you could generate the final footage with enhanced visuals on a rendering farm, and it could look like film.... Seriously, it has the potential to blow away real world sports, as a viewer experience.
What amazes me is that this should be legal. Aren't there (particularly in Europe) laws that are intended to protect artistic integrity? How can unauthorised sampling (which produces new art) be bad, but radio stations doing the same thing badly, minus any motivation but the motive of profit for a blackmailer be good?
This is not my planet.
The various comments here have caught what I expect is both halves of the point without connecting in the middle. A home PC you buy from Dell cannot drink from the 40Gbps hose. Not under Linux, definitely not under Windows. So ... no, whatever she is running, if it can do this thing then it is not going to be shipped preconfigured as a home computer. And, even if it were, there would be the little question of the drivers for the NIC, which I seriously doubt are part of the Windows distro.
.5/5. I truly believe, based on my own real world experience at the 10Gbps mark, that the Windows install was the hardest part!
So they keep that last
I'm not American. When I lived in Illinois, I was told I could not buy beer because I do not drive. Now I am told that, should I live in the States again, I will not be allowed to board a plane unless I learn to drive? And this makes sense to you?
... astonishing.
I understand that the US is opposed to Kyoto on economic grounds, but isn't this taking it beyond a joke...?!
I'm not even opposed to uniform ID. Change the constitution so that the Federal government can legally issue one. The current approach is an abuse by its nature. It shows no respect for either common sense or the rule of law. It is
I stopped buying CDs cold when I got the third one that wouldn't play at all due to some DRM scheme or other. Fraud is fraud is fraud! I used to buy them all the time. I have a couple of thousand in the other room, I think. But what possible reason would I have to pay money for a coaster?
Now I just don't trust them. Not the objects, not the manufacturers. I can't imagine what would persuade me to start buying again. Perhaps if they gave me ten or twenty that I wanted, that played ok, for free? Or a 'twice your money back if it doesn't play' guarantee?
As to downloading - well, they aren't going to get me to buy anything DRMd, for the same reason. They aren't trustworthy people. They will pull the plug on me when they want more cash. Indeed, how do I know that DRM signature will be valid, that the file will play at all? These are the same people who were selling CDs that don't work!
...Er. That's XP and DOS, right...?
But wait! You say "the force generated by the magnetically-induced levitation and the downward force of gravity must be equal, Planck's constant can thus be precisely related to the kilogram," but that won't work. Force is measured in Newtons; you've just measured weight, not mass. In fact, this 'method' would give you different values depending on when and where you used it!
Or am I deeply confused?
Yes, of course, it is important to have colleges that are not funded by the state and thus not subject to regulation, otherwise important messages about Scientific Penguinism and the fact that global warming (a) does not exist and (b) is caused by homosexuality would get lost (not to mention ther ones where you can learn how to blow up aircraft using Evian water and Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts) :-}.
..." you're implying that, as a socialist, I advocate the abolition of democracy. I certainly don't. Actually rather the reverse: I'd like to see tax dollars doing things that benefit everyone, by providing a stable, virtual, well engineered socio-economic environment for the economy to play out in, much as is done with our physical environments in cities. It still matters that society, like a city, be well managed, but that's a separate question, one of competent design and consultation.
Seriously, though, when you say "I'd rather choose the education I want rather than fund one I don't want. I'd also rather choose my retirement than have the government dictate my lifestyle. Something about freedom, now what was that
I think, in fact, that my point is supported by looking at the USA today. It may not be at all socialist, but something is still severely lacking in terms of competent design and consultation. Ergo, it is not socialism that causes this problem.