Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism.
So, what happened the last time you were on a submarine under fire? I guess now and then you just get teleported over onto a submarine inexplicably under fire, and get a quick choice to use gizmos or die. Wow, the public has to be warned about this terrible hazard.
You know, wars tend to be somewhat dangerous things. Bad things happen in a war. People get killed. The intent of military technology is to ensure victory, but some people seem to think that it is to sanitise war into a situation where it has no risk. Did someone say that this technology is to protect human life? What are our submariners going to do once they shoot down that incoming torpedo in their nuclear submarine armed with 50 megaton ICBMs?
Oh yeah.
Being prepared is fine. But you need to judge the likelihood of what you are preparing against happening - because there is an infinite number of potential threats. Submarines being attacked by torpedos is not a reasonable threat. The purpose of modern submarines - which is to be a global, hidden deterrent - is not helped by torpedo defenses. Submariners sign up in the full knowledge that their lives are decided by a bunch of civvies in a boardroom, and may well be at risk at any time.
Each million bucks spent on protecting a few hundred sailors for a few minutes in the rather unlikely occurance of a global nuclear armageddon could have saved 30 or so US households from extreme poverty, paid for several hundred critical operations, allowed a few hundred talented students to go to college, or ensured the survival of several thousand currently starving villagers in Africa - possible ensuring long term stability, and preventing the aforementioned armageddon from taking place. Is it really worth it?
If gravity has no "speed" then the advisories against instantaneous communication are violated as a change in the relative position of mass A to mass B would instantly be signaled even across the galaxies.
Which is precisely why such proposals are deeply problematic.
Consider the traditional SR simultaneity paradox -
You have a train, which is carrying a photon torpedo. At time t, klingon saboteurs detonate the torpedo, sending out a pulse of light in all directions. By conventional SR, a viewer on the train and a viewer off it would observe that the speed of the pulse's propagation is as expected - at c, but while the train guy observes that the carriage is completely vaporised at the same time, that relative motion guy would not that the back of the train got vaporised first. In fact, not merely observe - the key result of SR is that both conclusions are equally valid.
But if gravity perturbances moved instantaneously, then we could fit a gravitionic transmitter on each end of the train, so the viewers would know when each end of the train got vaporised. This inevitably leads to some sort of discrepancy - for example, one observer would end up calculating a different speed of light, or we could violate causality, which would entirely invalidate one of the key postulates of SR, and the entirity of modern physics. It would contradict a century of evidence.
Proposing instant communication of information is a crazily serious claim, and needs crazily strong evidence.
The endless thing about authority misses the point - wikipedia isn't trying to be a supreme informational authority, if such a thing can exist. The function of wikipedia, based on it's guidelines, is primarily as an information aggregator, summariser, and linker. For serious work, an article should be considered as a starting point for research, or a way to see at a glance what related fields there are.
Seriously, maybe film makers should be looking away from the obvious candidates. The more film like games are film like because they are based on the cliches of films. Making a film of it, then, is likely to just strip away all the inventiveness and the flavour to result in an extravagant and pointless case of self-fertilisation. A copy of a copy of a parody. If film makers started looking at the non-obvious games, then maybe they can be forced to bring some imaginative interpretation to the enterprise, and create something new out of a brand.
They have massive political power -> We, um, don't
We shouldn't really be talking about a technological singularity, but a political one. Somewhere along the line, some one needs to wake up and realise that civilisation as we know it doesn't actually work optimally. Civilisation is meant to protect the weak and provide a safety net, it's meant to encourage creativity and diffusion of the results of that creativity, stop pointless wars and conflicts, and so on and so forth. Civilisation as it exists today doesn't achieve any of this. Despite our advances in technology, the vast majority of humans in this world aren't using the unique intelligence our species possess, but instead waste their time and effort keeping the system itself going with menial, repetitive, mechanical labour. It is simply absurd.
Gee, can these name choosers at least give a minimum of coolness? Huge continent-sized lumps of rock in space should at least have some weighty, dignified name. I mean, think of what we would be doing in the future. Will people ever be able say 'Invaders from planet Buffy' with a straight face?
And what if we find life? I'd assume the inhabitants of a planet named after characters in a TV show can be quite offended. I propose we go back to good old fashioned Gods and Goddesses.
Even the old tried-and-true get-the-AIs-to-shoot-each-other-until-you-overpowe r-them trick does not work--they will notice that you're circling over the battling AIs like vultures, and team up to kill you.
That's not good AI. In most of the games I play, the AIs *always* team up against the player. Enabling a diplomatic system which can be played and manipulated is what good AI involves. The challenge from your foes should be interesting, not just a mad fight to the death.
In my opinion, the easiest and best way to learn to code well isn't by starting a grand project that you'll probably go a quarter-way-though, and then stop, dejected at the lack of progress. No, the best way is by tinkering with projects that other people have already worked on, figuring out how they work, and adding your own additions. I recommend you look around at some of the FOSS games on the net, and browse their sources for a bit.
Misses the point though. Asimov's laws were never a prepackaged guide to AI design, but instead an idealistic philosophy for creation of a robot-based utopia.
A real soldier would comply with such an order. They did comply with such orders. They complied in Germany, in the Congo, in Russia, China, Vietnam, Haiti, France, America... And often with an uniquely human sense of relish, with the human emotions of hatred and cruelty.
Humanity is the flaw here. Perhaps, with robots, we may be able to hard-code in a sense of morality. But for that, we will still have to rely on our fallible human designers.
Have you ever considered that some people have a way they do things?... Why the fuck should I be forced to use tabbed UI in order to avoid what is obviously a bug in the software?
Oh, I am so terribly sorry for not noticing the gun that the mozilla people are holding to your head.
13 extensions installed, still takes less than a second on mine. This is on a 1.5 GHz with 256 MB ram. Perhaps there is something wrong with your computer? Spyware, perhaps, from Internet Explorer use?
In any case, Firefox isn't really about windows - rather, tabs, which open in the background. If you learn to use that, you will get much better performance. IE meanwhile is designed to open new windows, and is also preloaded as part of the operating system. Obviously it has an advantage here.
Nor is it the fault of the Mozilla devteam that people are making, and using slow extensions. The whole point of firefox is the customisability. What is useless to you certainly isn't useless to other people. To people like ME, speed is itself useless - page download times massively eclipse time taken by the browser itself. The firefox developers can't be all things to all people. If speed is a priority over customisability and compatibility, perhaps you are better off using a different browser (like Opera, or maybe Lynx) instead.
A Guardian opinion piece on the subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1568479 ,00.html
The whole idea of coorporations spreading freedom is simple sillyness - Corporations have evolved to make themselves rich, and any freedom they spread is a coincidental side effect. Market organisms have a life of their own, and their morality is based on dollar values, not virtuous conduct. The ultimate optimum state for a company isn't a democracy, but a tyrannical dictatorship where all wealth is directed straight to the few.
Big bad nationalist China. Evil nazi Germany. Good old USA. Hitler lurking around Europe.
You've gotta be joking.
Nations aren't people. There's no such thing as national good or bad karma. Historians can judge, of course. The popular imagination is ever filled with prejudices, but looking back into history to characterise nations as persistent agents is sheer folly. We need to judge Governments based on the character of the individuals that make them up, and the people they lead. The US, let us not forget, is a state built on the genocide of natives, and the enslavement of Africans. Didn't stop them carrying the torch for democracy later on. China today has a foreign policy based on ruthless free-market cooperation, and internal policies that focus on stability over all else. It isn't terribly nice, certainly. But the fact they benefit from the status quo means that they are unlikely to change it by a silly little war, especially if it is likely to escalate into a global affair.
The US administration and US people like you, meanwhile, continues to show it's misunderstanding of the world. You are still on about nations attacking the US. You are still on about nuclear deterrents! The US has failed to realise that there is no longer a nation on the world for whom military deterrence is effective, because nations are either so large that they can only benefit from good relations, or so small that they cannot concieveably mount a conventional, traceable attack.
Oh, so you think the world owes 'America' a favour for WWII? Owes a favour to whom? Dubya certainly wasn't there on the beaches of Normandy. You probably weren't either. The machines that built the tanks that liberated France are rusted and gone. Is the America of today the same one which voted for FDR? Not really, is it? So isn't it slightly presumptious to say that living on the same patch of land, and sharing some genetics allows you to force down and ignore their disagreements?
Let's take the arguments to the logical conclusion. Why did China join in the Korean war? Because they thought the US participation would directly threaten them. Should the US have been stronger, then that would have lead to a world war there and then, probably involving the Russians as well. The Cuban missile crisis. Should the US have been stronger? Don't be silly. If Kennedy had gone through with the Hawks' plan, there would have been a nuclear war.
International politics is not a game to be played by idiots with inflated egos who think that acting tough is going to win the day.
Well, the first comment is by a non-entity. I can't find a single paper under his name about climatology, so I don't think he is fit to judge whether the criticism by the first referer was appropiate. In any case, the issue is more that of tone than anything else. Yes?
The AASC has a rotating presidency.
Hansen has a good reason to attack the second reviewer - it is noted in comments in Pielke's blog that the issues raised not only attack Pielke's comments, but also the paper itself. He isn't defending Pielke here, but his own paper. He also wants more comments to his paper published, because a debate would raise more interest to his conclusions. And he doesn't comment on the first referer, who was still saying things like:
"This is a serious accusation that does not appear to have any basis in fact."
The links the other guy gave were to blogs as well. Being blogs alone don't make much difference in terms of credibility of sources. The issue here is whether their arguments are well made or not, and whether their sources are reputable.
Well, William Connolley works for the British Antarctic Survey as a climate modeller. He has plenty of peer reviewed papers published after peer review.
Secondly, the link you gave was to a blog, as well.
Thirdly, you can easily disprove my attack (or validate it) by finding an article criticising GW by Pielke published in a reputable paper. For my part, I can source Connolley's quotes back to Pielke's own site:
What was being discussed at that time was that investigation of natural climate cycles showed that we should be beginning an ice age. Once we had better technology, we could see that despite this, we were in fact warming rapidly.
Causation is shown very strongly by the data we have, because (a) we know mechanistically it's possible, (b) we know by models this is the effect we expect and (c) it is deeply implausible that a natural effect can hide from us in 400,000 years of records and affect us in a timescale of a few decades without showing any substantial blip in our other data.
He certain has been peer-reviewed, though. The feedback he got from his papers include:
The exchange is not worthy of publication. In fact, I do not understand why P&C even wrote their piece in the first place. They continually destroy whatever point they had in mind by noting Hansen 'did it right'... None of the participants in this pathetic exchange seem to have the slightest clue about the large decadal noise that exists in the oceans and some ocean models.
Which bring up the question about why he resigned, which in his own words:
The current discussion in the media based on the three Science Express articles misses the more significant issue of spatial trends in tropospheric temperature trends.
He quit because the committee was focusing on trends in the global average, and he was more interested in geographical locations.
Realclimate is a group blog focusing only on scientific analysis and which gives no recommendations for policy change. The views they give strike me as typically very cautious - so what do you consider to be alarmism?
Slashdot Mirror
Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism.
So, what happened the last time you were on a submarine under fire? I guess now and then you just get teleported over onto a submarine inexplicably under fire, and get a quick choice to use gizmos or die. Wow, the public has to be warned about this terrible hazard.
You know, wars tend to be somewhat dangerous things. Bad things happen in a war. People get killed. The intent of military technology is to ensure victory, but some people seem to think that it is to sanitise war into a situation where it has no risk. Did someone say that this technology is to protect human life? What are our submariners going to do once they shoot down that incoming torpedo in their nuclear submarine armed with 50 megaton ICBMs?
Oh yeah.
Being prepared is fine. But you need to judge the likelihood of what you are preparing against happening - because there is an infinite number of potential threats. Submarines being attacked by torpedos is not a reasonable threat. The purpose of modern submarines - which is to be a global, hidden deterrent - is not helped by torpedo defenses. Submariners sign up in the full knowledge that their lives are decided by a bunch of civvies in a boardroom, and may well be at risk at any time.
Each million bucks spent on protecting a few hundred sailors for a few minutes in the rather unlikely occurance of a global nuclear armageddon could have saved 30 or so US households from extreme poverty, paid for several hundred critical operations, allowed a few hundred talented students to go to college, or ensured the survival of several thousand currently starving villagers in Africa - possible ensuring long term stability, and preventing the aforementioned armageddon from taking place. Is it really worth it?
Or you know, maybe, just maybe, we could avoid getting into a war?
Which is precisely why such proposals are deeply problematic.
Consider the traditional SR simultaneity paradox -
You have a train, which is carrying a photon torpedo. At time t, klingon saboteurs detonate the torpedo, sending out a pulse of light in all directions. By conventional SR, a viewer on the train and a viewer off it would observe that the speed of the pulse's propagation is as expected - at c, but while the train guy observes that the carriage is completely vaporised at the same time, that relative motion guy would not that the back of the train got vaporised first. In fact, not merely observe - the key result of SR is that both conclusions are equally valid.
But if gravity perturbances moved instantaneously, then we could fit a gravitionic transmitter on each end of the train, so the viewers would know when each end of the train got vaporised. This inevitably leads to some sort of discrepancy - for example, one observer would end up calculating a different speed of light, or we could violate causality, which would entirely invalidate one of the key postulates of SR, and the entirity of modern physics. It would contradict a century of evidence.
Proposing instant communication of information is a crazily serious claim, and needs crazily strong evidence.
More (coherent) info available via wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
Puts a whole new dimension on people urinating in the pool.
Yes, but not evil compared to what?
We need an unified evilness index, with weekly rankings. Then we can convert between evils: e.g.
1 Microsoft = 10000 Googles
1 Dubya = 1.5 Microsoft
etc
The endless thing about authority misses the point - wikipedia isn't trying to be a supreme informational authority, if such a thing can exist. The function of wikipedia, based on it's guidelines, is primarily as an information aggregator, summariser, and linker. For serious work, an article should be considered as a starting point for research, or a way to see at a glance what related fields there are.
Seriously, maybe film makers should be looking away from the obvious candidates. The more film like games are film like because they are based on the cliches of films. Making a film of it, then, is likely to just strip away all the inventiveness and the flavour to result in an extravagant and pointless case of self-fertilisation. A copy of a copy of a parody. If film makers started looking at the non-obvious games, then maybe they can be forced to bring some imaginative interpretation to the enterprise, and create something new out of a brand.
They have massive political power -> We, um, don't
We shouldn't really be talking about a technological singularity, but a political one. Somewhere along the line, some one needs to wake up and realise that civilisation as we know it doesn't actually work optimally. Civilisation is meant to protect the weak and provide a safety net, it's meant to encourage creativity and diffusion of the results of that creativity, stop pointless wars and conflicts, and so on and so forth. Civilisation as it exists today doesn't achieve any of this. Despite our advances in technology, the vast majority of humans in this world aren't using the unique intelligence our species possess, but instead waste their time and effort keeping the system itself going with menial, repetitive, mechanical labour. It is simply absurd.
Gee, can these name choosers at least give a minimum of coolness? Huge continent-sized lumps of rock in space should at least have some weighty, dignified name. I mean, think of what we would be doing in the future. Will people ever be able say 'Invaders from planet Buffy' with a straight face?
And what if we find life? I'd assume the inhabitants of a planet named after characters in a TV show can be quite offended. I propose we go back to good old fashioned Gods and Goddesses.
That's not good AI. In most of the games I play, the AIs *always* team up against the player. Enabling a diplomatic system which can be played and manipulated is what good AI involves. The challenge from your foes should be interesting, not just a mad fight to the death.
In my opinion, the easiest and best way to learn to code well isn't by starting a grand project that you'll probably go a quarter-way-though, and then stop, dejected at the lack of progress. No, the best way is by tinkering with projects that other people have already worked on, figuring out how they work, and adding your own additions. I recommend you look around at some of the FOSS games on the net, and browse their sources for a bit.
Misses the point though. Asimov's laws were never a prepackaged guide to AI design, but instead an idealistic philosophy for creation of a robot-based utopia.
Don't be silly.
A real soldier would comply with such an order. They did comply with such orders. They complied in Germany, in the Congo, in Russia, China, Vietnam, Haiti, France, America... And often with an uniquely human sense of relish, with the human emotions of hatred and cruelty.
Humanity is the flaw here. Perhaps, with robots, we may be able to hard-code in a sense of morality. But for that, we will still have to rely on our fallible human designers.
Oh, I am so terribly sorry for not noticing the gun that the mozilla people are holding to your head.
Welcome to KillBot v1.2324b
Intialising.... System ready. Readings normal.
Please enter your command:
> IDDQD
Invalid
> IDKFA
Invalid
> GOD
Invalid
> IMPULSE 9
Invalid
> THIS GAME SUCKS
Old news.
The Nazis had remote controlled robots that exploded under tanks.
13 extensions installed, still takes less than a second on mine. This is on a 1.5 GHz with 256 MB ram. Perhaps there is something wrong with your computer? Spyware, perhaps, from Internet Explorer use?
In any case, Firefox isn't really about windows - rather, tabs, which open in the background. If you learn to use that, you will get much better performance. IE meanwhile is designed to open new windows, and is also preloaded as part of the operating system. Obviously it has an advantage here.
Nor is it the fault of the Mozilla devteam that people are making, and using slow extensions. The whole point of firefox is the customisability. What is useless to you certainly isn't useless to other people. To people like ME, speed is itself useless - page download times massively eclipse time taken by the browser itself. The firefox developers can't be all things to all people. If speed is a priority over customisability and compatibility, perhaps you are better off using a different browser (like Opera, or maybe Lynx) instead.
A Guardian opinion piece on the subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1568479 ,00.html
The whole idea of coorporations spreading freedom is simple sillyness - Corporations have evolved to make themselves rich, and any freedom they spread is a coincidental side effect. Market organisms have a life of their own, and their morality is based on dollar values, not virtuous conduct. The ultimate optimum state for a company isn't a democracy, but a tyrannical dictatorship where all wealth is directed straight to the few.
And if you criticise the Slashdot moderation system, or /. modders in general, you will always get modded up.
You've gotta be joking.
Nations aren't people. There's no such thing as national good or bad karma. Historians can judge, of course. The popular imagination is ever filled with prejudices, but looking back into history to characterise nations as persistent agents is sheer folly. We need to judge Governments based on the character of the individuals that make them up, and the people they lead. The US, let us not forget, is a state built on the genocide of natives, and the enslavement of Africans. Didn't stop them carrying the torch for democracy later on. China today has a foreign policy based on ruthless free-market cooperation, and internal policies that focus on stability over all else. It isn't terribly nice, certainly. But the fact they benefit from the status quo means that they are unlikely to change it by a silly little war, especially if it is likely to escalate into a global affair.
The US administration and US people like you, meanwhile, continues to show it's misunderstanding of the world. You are still on about nations attacking the US. You are still on about nuclear deterrents! The US has failed to realise that there is no longer a nation on the world for whom military deterrence is effective, because nations are either so large that they can only benefit from good relations, or so small that they cannot concieveably mount a conventional, traceable attack.
Oh, so you think the world owes 'America' a favour for WWII? Owes a favour to whom? Dubya certainly wasn't there on the beaches of Normandy. You probably weren't either. The machines that built the tanks that liberated France are rusted and gone. Is the America of today the same one which voted for FDR? Not really, is it? So isn't it slightly presumptious to say that living on the same patch of land, and sharing some genetics allows you to force down and ignore their disagreements?
Let's take the arguments to the logical conclusion. Why did China join in the Korean war? Because they thought the US participation would directly threaten them. Should the US have been stronger, then that would have lead to a world war there and then, probably involving the Russians as well. The Cuban missile crisis. Should the US have been stronger? Don't be silly. If Kennedy had gone through with the Hawks' plan, there would have been a nuclear war.
International politics is not a game to be played by idiots with inflated egos who think that acting tough is going to win the day.
Well, the first comment is by a non-entity. I can't find a single paper under his name about climatology, so I don't think he is fit to judge whether the criticism by the first referer was appropiate. In any case, the issue is more that of tone than anything else. Yes?
The AASC has a rotating presidency.
Hansen has a good reason to attack the second reviewer - it is noted in comments in Pielke's blog that the issues raised not only attack Pielke's comments, but also the paper itself. He isn't defending Pielke here, but his own paper. He also wants more comments to his paper published, because a debate would raise more interest to his conclusions. And he doesn't comment on the first referer, who was still saying things like:
"This is a serious accusation that does not appear to have any basis in fact."
Sorry, confused you with the other guy.
The links the other guy gave were to blogs as well. Being blogs alone don't make much difference in terms of credibility of sources. The issue here is whether their arguments are well made or not, and whether their sources are reputable.
Well, William Connolley works for the British Antarctic Survey as a climate modeller. He has plenty of peer reviewed papers published after peer review.
h or%3A%22Connolley%22&btnG=Search
P ielke_reviews.pdf
e.g. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=aut
Secondly, the link you gave was to a blog, as well.
Thirdly, you can easily disprove my attack (or validate it) by finding an article criticising GW by Pielke published in a reputable paper. For my part, I can source Connolley's quotes back to Pielke's own site:
http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/
Where we can find even more damning criticism like:
"This is a serious accusation that does not appear to have any basis in fact."
Which Pielke cites as evidence of a conspiracy against him.
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
What was being discussed at that time was that investigation of natural climate cycles showed that we should be beginning an ice age. Once we had better technology, we could see that despite this, we were in fact warming rapidly.
Causation is shown very strongly by the data we have, because (a) we know mechanistically it's possible, (b) we know by models this is the effect we expect and (c) it is deeply implausible that a natural effect can hide from us in 400,000 years of records and affect us in a timescale of a few decades without showing any substantial blip in our other data.
Why he is an idiot: http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/08/pielke-senior -has-blog.html#comments
He certain has been peer-reviewed, though. The feedback he got from his papers include:
The exchange is not worthy of publication. In fact, I do not understand why P&C even wrote their piece in the first place. They continually destroy whatever point they had in mind by noting Hansen 'did it right'... None of the participants in this pathetic exchange seem to have the slightest clue about the large decadal noise that exists in the oceans and some ocean models.
Which bring up the question about why he resigned, which in his own words:
The current discussion in the media based on the three Science Express articles misses the more significant issue of spatial trends in tropospheric temperature trends.
He quit because the committee was focusing on trends in the global average, and he was more interested in geographical locations.
Realclimate is a group blog focusing only on scientific analysis and which gives no recommendations for policy change. The views they give strike me as typically very cautious - so what do you consider to be alarmism?