I guess there is no EU-country without a socialized healthcare system. And yes we have guaranteed vacation. And continuous payment when we are sick (that have been reduced in Germany in recent years, but it still exist). And when we are poor, we get money from the state as long as necessary (ok and a kick in the ass to change it, bat that is socialism as well;-))
However, I have been in the US ten years ago. The people were all nice and forthcoming, but I had the impression that they are a little bit naive. As long as they do not "elect" a crazy president...
Killing is unethical pre se. It will stay that way even if you find a judgment to shoot someone. From a rational point of view it is logic to defend yourself. As a Christian, Muslim, or Jew it is unethical to shoot someone or kill someone. But, as an argument I accept that self-defense is the only allowed case for killing someone else.
Drones are not used for self-defense nowadays. They are used to spy on people in Iran. They are used to murder people abroad. And it makes no difference if they committed a crime or not.
The headline talks about military robots, but in his introduction Mr. Lin talks about torture. Torture is unethical. And it stays unethical when it is performed by a machine. The only difference is, that not a person is actually performing it. But the issue remains, the victim is still a victim, and the person ordering the torture is still a scumbag. Similar logic applies to any machinery which is used to spy on people or bomb them. It makes no difference if the machine is more automated or not. A human pulls the trigger either by ordering the machine to do so or by pushing a button. As the machine has no moral standards, as it is a tool and not a being, all evil which the machine has to do is done by the one instructing it. And yes when you help someone to built such an elaborate tool, you are guilty too. On an ethic level that is.
Real intelligence requires motive. Motive requires an ego and self-awareness. And self-awareness is not the response of I know that I exist (even if people would use that as an argument).
What do you mean? Efficiency or "beat the communists". By US standards we are all communists in Europe (minus that rainy island) and German "efficiency" can be seen at a daily basis on every commercial or public helpline or office.;-)
The problem is, that IT is not seen as a mission critical element of the companies success. It is just a tool, like a coffee machine. As long as it works somehow, everything is fine. Management has to learn that data and information processing is important, yet crucial for company success.
They require fewer service personal, the developed Debian/Ubuntu based distribution can be shared with other cities, and all the money spent for services by the city stays in Germany and with German companies which is very clever for a Municipal, as this results in jobs and taxes. Instead of a money transfer to the US.
As a city you should not think in business and macro-economic terms, you have to look on it from a macro-economic viewpoint. And you have to look at the long run. Well you should look on long term results in a company as well, but a state hast to do so. Otherwise it goes bust.
As far as I know, they use a Debian derivate. However, most of their installed applications which have to come wit the distribution are municipal specific. So when they would use Ubuntu or Debian alone they would have to install their software by hand on every machine. It is much wiser to use a package system which is already available and make your own distribution.
According to Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux] they used Debian and are now using Ubuntu 8.04 and will use 10.10 in their 4th version.
If you want to become an Eclipse project you have to use a EPL compatible license which includes EPL and APL and BSD-licenses. Therefor a lot of university projects choose EPL or APL over GPL.
And the message of the article is: Do not swallow more than one rare-earth magnets.
From my point of view you should not swallow any magnet. And if your kid did swallow something you go to the hospital. And when they swallowed a meta object or a magnet, you should not use a MRT to find out where it is. But you know that, because you learned it in physics in school. And you learned in health that telling the doctor what happened might help him or her to determine the right action.
Every year especially before holidays they come up with a new evil thing. Apples are dangerous at Halloween, as evil humans in your neighborhood might put in razor blades. Really happening is this only a few times, I honestly don't know anyone personally or anyone who knows someone else personally who had to deal with such a situation. And there toys signed to be not for children below 3 years, because they might eat them accidentally or for curiosity. This applies Lego and wow it applies to magnets. It also applies to marbles (you know those things you played in kindergarten). And just to make it clear: Coffee in paper cups is dangerous to kids. Such can might fall over with all the hot coffee in it and that liquid can cause burns to arms and legs.Your kid can even die when you sleep on your sofa and then subsequently rollover and fall down on the head of you kid. So sofas are dangerous too. We should get rid of sofas, tables, heavy objects, sharp objects (when I think about it any object can pose a danger to kids and even adults!!!!) and all the other things we tell the kids not to do. Do not stick you head in an microwave oven an turn it on.
Shutdown means that the temperature of the cores is in a safe state. However, they still need cooling through the emergency cooling system which was installed after the disaster. When the cooling system fails, it can become critical again. And as the cooling system is not stable enough to sustain earthquakes or another tsunami, they are far away from a safe. At least that is what the news tell us here.
While Stuxnet might be an US production, the funding of the Green movement is definitely no CIA thing. We fund ourselves. However, I cannot speak for any US Green movement, but we in Europe are self-funded. Honestly. We are often also pro human rights and therefor against such strange organizations as the CIA or Mossad or MAD...
A lot of parents tell that they try to be gender neutral. But they are not. And yes males and females perform different tasks in reproduction and therefore their roles differ. Furthermore, gender roles are implied by your surrounding world. So if you really be able to be gender neutral in educating your kids, the real world has an impact on them as well. What we really know is, that it differs from country to country how the relation between men and women in math are. This indicates that there is at least a large amount of gender role shit in the math/no math selection.
But in the end. It is not really important who is better in math. As math capabilities is not the defining factor to be a human.
As a true nerd you never come into the position of having (human) offspring, so this is rather a theoretical method without any practical application. However, as this is a sociology based rule, there might be exceptions. I truly hope so for myself;-)
TV has a content problem. Most of the content sucks. And when you see the advertisements, you know that the world is crazy out there. I switched away from TV about 8-9 years ago. First, I watched series when I had time to borrow a tape, a DVD or download the stuff elsewhere. Over time, I moved to an online TV recorder. So know I record the stuff I want to watch (or select it for recording after it run on TV (really cool feature)) and I watch it when I have time. Some stuff like news or TV-series from public/state TV are freely available on the sites of those stations. So I can get my watching stuff when I have time. What I lost is zapping. But zapping is a good way to destroy lifetime. You watch without watching and it takes time. The focus on the TV shuts your brain down. So you cannot think about yourself, the world, or anything what really matters. You even forget the dirt in the kitchen. And after the zapping you still feel exhausted. So the broken thing about TV is zapping, the advertising, and most of the content.
As I do not watch TV advertisements, when I go to the cinema, I often do not understand the adverts there, as they tend to tell stories and build on top of them. Now I missed some years of TV ads and I cannot understand the direction of some of the ads. But I can understand what they want to sell me and which tricks they want to use. The same happens when I see ads from the US. Living in Europe gave me a different context and therefor, I see them from the outside. The ads producers must really think US citizens are simple and naive. And I know we pay twice as much for a Kindle and less for our mobile flat.;-) And I know they try to sell crazy abnormal cars.
In short: TV is broken, as it is not watch when you want what you want. And it will be gone someday and only people who need to disable their brain will have one.
Honestly, we designed such stuff in classes at university. And yes you can do such things with e-mails and every other form of communication. Nice are also analyzes of mailing lists of OSS projects, you can determine the group structure and it works for alumni networks. You can do this with icq logs (oh it has already been done). Ask Google if you want to know what they can find in your e-mail.
BTW: All such methods, however, rely on a model on human behavior. If your subjects fail to confirm to that model you get wrong results. But that is nothing new to empirical science.
That's what creationists say about their opinion on life. However, a theory (and as I wrote a scientific theory) is a set coherent set of hypotheses which can be falsified or deducted from each other (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory). The informally thing often called a theory, for example, in crime series, is merely an (educated) guess. The existence of a god or no god is a believe as it cannot be proven or disproven.
It will not have any evolutionary effect, as evolution is only effected when you do not reproduce. It is not so important when you die after procreating as long as it has no life threatening impact on you offspring.
This does not have something to do with the religion. It has something to do with a strange interpretation of the text. Normally, people should read a text and put it in the historical context. Otherwise the language cannot be understand, as language is not a constant thing. Language reflects the traditions and context of the time it is used in, which is no surprise as it is used to communicate (and yes books are also communication). Furthermore, people use analogies to illustrate their thoughts. And in ancient times, people used to describe wonders to elevate a important person. Therefore, texts shouldn't be over interpreted, like god made everything in 6 days. We know today that time and the progression of time is not a constant. And for the assumed deity which exists out of time, 6 days is a stupid construct. It is much more logic to assume that the people of that time, assumed that the creation of everything happened in 6 phases. And this is not untrue, by what we know today. We need matter and energy to form planets and stars. We need planets to create/evolve simple life. We need simple live to evolve complex life. And yes humans appeared very late and from our perspective now the "creation" is complete.
I always wonder why religion fanatics believe in a most stupid deity which act upon a strange set of rules. And by following those rules they act disrespectful to others. Fundamentalists are a little different, they try not to be disrespectful. However, the core message for all those religions out there is: "Be nice to each other." And we all fail greatly in that.
Furthermore, if the god thing is true and one day we stand before god, he will not ask you. Have you always believed in creationism or evolution. He will ask if you tried to be a good person.
These religious fundamentalist are all alike. Obviously it doesn't matter how they call their deity. For evangelical Christians evolution is a lie (though their own idea of creation of life is not even a theory (if you think it is a theory, please look up the scientific definition of theory)). And now fundamentalist from the monotheistic abrahametic religion version 1.2 come to the same "conclusion".
I always wonder why all these fundamentalist believe in a stupid god who works by rules which are totally imprecise and dependent to certain properties of a region and technical level. Fundamentalists from version 1.0 are not to work on $HolyDay and that included making fire (some 6000 years ago). Nowadays they are therefor not allowed to use cars on $HolyDay or cook on $HolyDay even though today making a fire in your home does not require any big thing to do. And new problems arise with microwaves is that fire in the ancient context? What they forget is. Why the people (er. god) came up with that rule?
I guess they should merge their religion interpretation into the fundamentalists. We could even make a TV series from it.
Deforestation is indeed a problem, but burning wood as such is not. Therefore they need a wood management. And as far as I know they're making progress.
I personally would prefer a taxing mechanism too, as it works more effectively than rights and grants. However, the is this market dogma hanging around...
The primary idea is, that the people get the certificate not the state. So companies have to buy CO2 certificates from people. And as the CO2 amount of certificates is reduced every year, it will get more expensive for those polluting the most. For example, when the Chinese would increase their CO2 output they need more certificates making it for them more expensive. And in when the population growth in one country certainly that country's people get in total more certificates. However, the total number of certs will still be reduced every year.
Alternatively you could allow countries with a CO2 sink to issue certificates which will result in the preservation of those sinks.
And BTW: When the US is at 18t or even 15t CO2 per person, than it is still more then 10 times higher as sustainability would allow the US citizens. Logically the same applies to the EU. However, an decrease of CO2 emissions during an economic crisis is normal. So the reduction to 17.5t for the US in 2008 (according to your data) might be just indicating reduced activity. I hope it is not and the US is going in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess there is no EU-country without a socialized healthcare system. And yes we have guaranteed vacation. And continuous payment when we are sick (that have been reduced in Germany in recent years, but it still exist). And when we are poor, we get money from the state as long as necessary (ok and a kick in the ass to change it, bat that is socialism as well ;-))
However, I have been in the US ten years ago. The people were all nice and forthcoming, but I had the impression that they are a little bit naive. As long as they do not "elect" a crazy president...
It should. And it was. I hate my spellchecker! Aaaaah ;-)
Killing is unethical pre se. It will stay that way even if you find a judgment to shoot someone. From a rational point of view it is logic to defend yourself. As a Christian, Muslim, or Jew it is unethical to shoot someone or kill someone. But, as an argument I accept that self-defense is the only allowed case for killing someone else.
Drones are not used for self-defense nowadays. They are used to spy on people in Iran. They are used to murder people abroad. And it makes no difference if they committed a crime or not.
The headline talks about military robots, but in his introduction Mr. Lin talks about torture. Torture is unethical. And it stays unethical when it is performed by a machine. The only difference is, that not a person is actually performing it. But the issue remains, the victim is still a victim, and the person ordering the torture is still a scumbag. Similar logic applies to any machinery which is used to spy on people or bomb them. It makes no difference if the machine is more automated or not. A human pulls the trigger either by ordering the machine to do so or by pushing a button. As the machine has no moral standards, as it is a tool and not a being, all evil which the machine has to do is done by the one instructing it. And yes when you help someone to built such an elaborate tool, you are guilty too. On an ethic level that is.
Real intelligence requires motive. Motive requires an ego and self-awareness. And self-awareness is not the response of I know that I exist (even if people would use that as an argument).
What do you mean? Efficiency or "beat the communists". By US standards we are all communists in Europe (minus that rainy island) and German "efficiency" can be seen at a daily basis on every commercial or public helpline or office. ;-)
The problem is, that IT is not seen as a mission critical element of the companies success. It is just a tool, like a coffee machine. As long as it works somehow, everything is fine. Management has to learn that data and information processing is important, yet crucial for company success.
They require fewer service personal, the developed Debian/Ubuntu based distribution can be shared with other cities, and all the money spent for services by the city stays in Germany and with German companies which is very clever for a Municipal, as this results in jobs and taxes. Instead of a money transfer to the US.
As a city you should not think in business and macro-economic terms, you have to look on it from a macro-economic viewpoint. And you have to look at the long run. Well you should look on long term results in a company as well, but a state hast to do so. Otherwise it goes bust.
As far as I know, they use a Debian derivate. However, most of their installed applications which have to come wit the distribution are municipal specific. So when they would use Ubuntu or Debian alone they would have to install their software by hand on every machine. It is much wiser to use a package system which is already available and make your own distribution.
According to Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux] they used Debian and are now using Ubuntu 8.04 and will use 10.10 in their 4th version.
If you want to become an Eclipse project you have to use a EPL compatible license which includes EPL and APL and BSD-licenses. Therefor a lot of university projects choose EPL or APL over GPL.
The headline should be: "Shit happens"
And the message of the article is: Do not swallow more than one rare-earth magnets.
From my point of view you should not swallow any magnet. And if your kid did swallow something you go to the hospital. And when they swallowed a meta object or a magnet, you should not use a MRT to find out where it is. But you know that, because you learned it in physics in school. And you learned in health that telling the doctor what happened might help him or her to determine the right action.
Every year especially before holidays they come up with a new evil thing. Apples are dangerous at Halloween, as evil humans in your neighborhood might put in razor blades. Really happening is this only a few times, I honestly don't know anyone personally or anyone who knows someone else personally who had to deal with such a situation. And there toys signed to be not for children below 3 years, because they might eat them accidentally or for curiosity. This applies Lego and wow it applies to magnets. It also applies to marbles (you know those things you played in kindergarten). And just to make it clear: Coffee in paper cups is dangerous to kids. Such can might fall over with all the hot coffee in it and that liquid can cause burns to arms and legs.Your kid can even die when you sleep on your sofa and then subsequently rollover and fall down on the head of you kid. So sofas are dangerous too. We should get rid of sofas, tables, heavy objects, sharp objects (when I think about it any object can pose a danger to kids and even adults!!!!) and all the other things we tell the kids not to do. Do not stick you head in an microwave oven an turn it on.
Shutdown means that the temperature of the cores is in a safe state. However, they still need cooling through the emergency cooling system which was installed after the disaster. When the cooling system fails, it can become critical again. And as the cooling system is not stable enough to sustain earthquakes or another tsunami, they are far away from a safe. At least that is what the news tell us here.
While Stuxnet might be an US production, the funding of the Green movement is definitely no CIA thing. We fund ourselves. However, I cannot speak for any US Green movement, but we in Europe are self-funded. Honestly. We are often also pro human rights and therefor against such strange organizations as the CIA or Mossad or MAD ...
A lot of parents tell that they try to be gender neutral. But they are not. And yes males and females perform different tasks in reproduction and therefore their roles differ. Furthermore, gender roles are implied by your surrounding world. So if you really be able to be gender neutral in educating your kids, the real world has an impact on them as well. What we really know is, that it differs from country to country how the relation between men and women in math are. This indicates that there is at least a large amount of gender role shit in the math/no math selection.
But in the end. It is not really important who is better in math. As math capabilities is not the defining factor to be a human.
As a true nerd you never come into the position of having (human) offspring, so this is rather a theoretical method without any practical application. However, as this is a sociology based rule, there might be exceptions. I truly hope so for myself ;-)
TV has a content problem. Most of the content sucks. And when you see the advertisements, you know that the world is crazy out there. I switched away from TV about 8-9 years ago. First, I watched series when I had time to borrow a tape, a DVD or download the stuff elsewhere. Over time, I moved to an online TV recorder. So know I record the stuff I want to watch (or select it for recording after it run on TV (really cool feature)) and I watch it when I have time. Some stuff like news or TV-series from public/state TV are freely available on the sites of those stations. So I can get my watching stuff when I have time. What I lost is zapping. But zapping is a good way to destroy lifetime. You watch without watching and it takes time. The focus on the TV shuts your brain down. So you cannot think about yourself, the world, or anything what really matters. You even forget the dirt in the kitchen. And after the zapping you still feel exhausted. So the broken thing about TV is zapping, the advertising, and most of the content.
As I do not watch TV advertisements, when I go to the cinema, I often do not understand the adverts there, as they tend to tell stories and build on top of them. Now I missed some years of TV ads and I cannot understand the direction of some of the ads. But I can understand what they want to sell me and which tricks they want to use. The same happens when I see ads from the US. Living in Europe gave me a different context and therefor, I see them from the outside. The ads producers must really think US citizens are simple and naive. And I know we pay twice as much for a Kindle and less for our mobile flat. ;-) And I know they try to sell crazy abnormal cars.
In short: TV is broken, as it is not watch when you want what you want. And it will be gone someday and only people who need to disable their brain will have one.
Honestly, we designed such stuff in classes at university. And yes you can do such things with e-mails and every other form of communication. Nice are also analyzes of mailing lists of OSS projects, you can determine the group structure and it works for alumni networks. You can do this with icq logs (oh it has already been done). Ask Google if you want to know what they can find in your e-mail.
BTW: All such methods, however, rely on a model on human behavior. If your subjects fail to confirm to that model you get wrong results. But that is nothing new to empirical science.
That's what creationists say about their opinion on life. However, a theory (and as I wrote a scientific theory) is a set coherent set of hypotheses which can be falsified or deducted from each other (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory). The informally thing often called a theory, for example, in crime series, is merely an (educated) guess. The existence of a god or no god is a believe as it cannot be proven or disproven.
It will not have any evolutionary effect, as evolution is only effected when you do not reproduce. It is not so important when you die after procreating as long as it has no life threatening impact on you offspring.
This does not have something to do with the religion. It has something to do with a strange interpretation of the text. Normally, people should read a text and put it in the historical context. Otherwise the language cannot be understand, as language is not a constant thing. Language reflects the traditions and context of the time it is used in, which is no surprise as it is used to communicate (and yes books are also communication). Furthermore, people use analogies to illustrate their thoughts. And in ancient times, people used to describe wonders to elevate a important person. Therefore, texts shouldn't be over interpreted, like god made everything in 6 days. We know today that time and the progression of time is not a constant. And for the assumed deity which exists out of time, 6 days is a stupid construct. It is much more logic to assume that the people of that time, assumed that the creation of everything happened in 6 phases. And this is not untrue, by what we know today. We need matter and energy to form planets and stars. We need planets to create/evolve simple life. We need simple live to evolve complex life. And yes humans appeared very late and from our perspective now the "creation" is complete.
I always wonder why religion fanatics believe in a most stupid deity which act upon a strange set of rules. And by following those rules they act disrespectful to others. Fundamentalists are a little different, they try not to be disrespectful. However, the core message for all those religions out there is: "Be nice to each other." And we all fail greatly in that.
Furthermore, if the god thing is true and one day we stand before god, he will not ask you. Have you always believed in creationism or evolution. He will ask if you tried to be a good person.
These religious fundamentalist are all alike. Obviously it doesn't matter how they call their deity. For evangelical Christians evolution is a lie (though their own idea of creation of life is not even a theory (if you think it is a theory, please look up the scientific definition of theory)). And now fundamentalist from the monotheistic abrahametic religion version 1.2 come to the same "conclusion".
I always wonder why all these fundamentalist believe in a stupid god who works by rules which are totally imprecise and dependent to certain properties of a region and technical level. Fundamentalists from version 1.0 are not to work on $HolyDay and that included making fire (some 6000 years ago). Nowadays they are therefor not allowed to use cars on $HolyDay or cook on $HolyDay even though today making a fire in your home does not require any big thing to do. And new problems arise with microwaves is that fire in the ancient context? What they forget is. Why the people (er. god) came up with that rule?
I guess they should merge their religion interpretation into the fundamentalists. We could even make a TV series from it.
Deforestation is indeed a problem, but burning wood as such is not. Therefore they need a wood management. And as far as I know they're making progress.
I personally would prefer a taxing mechanism too, as it works more effectively than rights and grants. However, the is this market dogma hanging around ...
The primary idea is, that the people get the certificate not the state. So companies have to buy CO2 certificates from people. And as the CO2 amount of certificates is reduced every year, it will get more expensive for those polluting the most. For example, when the Chinese would increase their CO2 output they need more certificates making it for them more expensive. And in when the population growth in one country certainly that country's people get in total more certificates. However, the total number of certs will still be reduced every year.
Alternatively you could allow countries with a CO2 sink to issue certificates which will result in the preservation of those sinks.
And BTW: When the US is at 18t or even 15t CO2 per person, than it is still more then 10 times higher as sustainability would allow the US citizens. Logically the same applies to the EU. However, an decrease of CO2 emissions during an economic crisis is normal. So the reduction to 17.5t for the US in 2008 (according to your data) might be just indicating reduced activity. I hope it is not and the US is going in the right direction.
Remember the goal is 1.5t