Sure. I'm sure that a single piece of legislation caused the whole thing. I notice that you conveniently forget that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was sponsored by republicans (Phil Gramm strikes again), and passed the senate on a party-line vote with only one democrat crossing over. But sure, you go right ahead and believe that the Republicans are in no way responsible for our situation.
Try again. The final version of the bill passed 90-8 (and was signed into law by Bill Clinton).
Now when men assume women are operating at a direct level and women assume men are operating at a meta-meta-level, you can imagine the confusion that results. One side thinks the other is acting irrationally (like a meta-gaming character would seem to a non-meta-gaming character) and the other things the first is a dolt (like a meta-gaming character would think of a non-meta-gaming character).
Exactly. A good analogy would be that men do all their processing in the time domain, and women do all their processing in the frequency domain. There's no amount of logic -- or time-domain thinking -- that is going to allow you to either fully understand, or to duplicate, or predict the results of, her frequency-domain thought processes with a finite number of brain cells. Rather, the thing to do is to become familiar with how you can benefit from exposure to operations in the other domain, and benefit from the results of those operations. For example, nearly impossible operations in either domain (such as convolutions), can be easily done by transferring them to the opposite domain, performing a simple operation, and transferring them back.
To put it another way, here's a simplified summary of why the sexes compliment each other: Logic is useless without axioms, and it provides no means for acquiring axioms. Women can acquire the axioms because their non-linear (or non-time domain, or acausal domain, or emotional domain) thought process identifies them as the larger patterns that stand out as obvious in that domain. However the possible applications, implications, and interactions of those axioms are less obvious to them because those things happen in the causal domain (or time-domain or logic domain), where they are more obvious to men.
Well said. There was a line from a book on relationships by a woman from the late 19th century -- I wish I could remember it exactly. She explained that though men like to rely on logic, women are wary of getting drawn by them into logical lines of thought, as men are just as likely as to use logic to prove something that's false as they are to prove something that's true.
The problem with AI isn't that it's necessarily hard, it's that the bar keeps getting raised. We already have computers more intelligent that most vertebrates, and some mentally challenged humans. But to say that sounds insulting, so it's not mentioned.
Huh? There's not a computer on the planet that's as "intelligent" as even a bacteria.
"We're clock cycle away from AI"? Please. I want my turing test to be done over an actual instant messenger program. Let's see how your Markov chain reacts, when I send a photo and ask a dead simple question such as "describe what you see in the photo".
10 print "Whatever you say, I'm going to respond with this sentence." 20 input x$ 30 delay random 40 goto 10
That's a mode that a human could easily operate in. Nothing in the Turing Test says the AI has to imitate a human operating in a particularly complicated mode. If you really want to be fancy, you could throw in an occasional typo.;)
The above is fundamentally no different from mining information from the web or wiki, it's just mining information (and processing power) from another tester.
I also heavily endorse these episodes of This American Life/w Planet Money. The first one was called "The Giant Pool of Money." I think as of today, there have been three of them now, though I haven't heard today's yet.
These shows are great because, other than getting really to the bottom of the things going on, they don't seem to be motivated, like most, by finding a nice target to assign blame to... which means they stand a chance of actually seeing what's going on.
My guess it's going to occur right around the time gold starts its climb back up. Gold has been going down for a long time. As I see it, all stocks and bonds are going to be worthless soon, and gold will be the only thing not only retaining value, but with currencies going down gold will go up.
If you're planning to act on that insight, prepare to enjoy your destitution.
As it was, our Sec of Treasury, and the Federal Reserve, went out and significantly lowered the requirements to get a home loan. Allowing people who could never afford it, to get a house loan. That's what I call creating a problem.
You mean like forcing Fanny Mae to treat welfare income and unemployment income as qualified income, and to implement a 50% minority quota for loan approval? And to find new creative ways to qualify people rather than those "outdated" criteria such as the ability to come up with a down payment? That has nothing to do with the Fed. That's just the people's elected representative, Bill Clinton, doing the supposed will of the people. Such is democracy. Rationality doesn't count -- only popularity.
Anyone who's taken a high school level or higher macroeconomics course knows everything that is in that video about the money system.
Personally, I'm a little mystified as to how the maker of that video could understand so well the mechanism of the current system, and at the same time fail to understand the basic dynamics of supply and demand for credit, debt, and currency in a society, which make the current system work so well, and which would make the kinds of alternatives he proposes catastrophic failures.
Gold is useless except as decoration. It only has value because people have been conditioned to think it does. The same is true for dollars, euros, or any other currency. The gold standard is no less abstract than any other form of currency, since the value a gram of gold has is entirely arbitrary and not inherent in any way.
Well, gold is useful for plating electronics connectors because it is very resistant to corrosion... and it has good symbolic value, for wedding bands and such... however, yeah, the gold standard for currency was some of the dumbest thinking in the last several hundred years. The Gold Standard played a large part in fueling the Great Depression, and the countries that were slow in dropping the Gold Standard were significantly slower in recovering from the Great Depression.
I am baffled by people who are running to gold now. To believe that the housing market can only go up is understandable, if you weren't around before the 1920's... however, to believe that gold can't suddenly lose half its value, especially after a huge run-up like it's had over the last five years or so, you have to ignorant of what happened just in the early 1980's!! The next big losers in this mess will be the ones caught in the gold bubble.
Oh please, now it's the real estate agents' faults? They were strong-arming appraisers?? EVERYONE believed that home prices would only go up, because over any 5 year period, that's the only direction they have gone since 1920!
It's probably no coincidence that Wells Fargo, one of the only banks old enough to have historical information reaching back into extended housing deflationary periods, was part of the minority who didn't buy into the fallacy -- and as a result is now making out like a bandit.
Moody's played exactly the same role in this debacle as Arthur-Anderson played in Enron's and I personally think they *ought* to suffer the same fate AA did so that future ratings agencies understand that failure to perform due diligence jeopardizes their company's existence. Wall Street understands Moody's role in this and the broad market continues to tank in spite of Bernanke's and Paulson's actions because we don't trust the ratings given by Moody's to other financial products or even companies so nobody knows how much risk they are really sitting on.
I think the reverse is true. Moody's has been doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. All the banks that have failed have failed because everyone trusts the Moody's ratings, and because those banks lost (or were about to lose) their ratings because of their inability to refinance their credit.
The broader market is "tanking" for a very similar reason -- because institutional investors cannot refinance their short term debt, which is forcing them to sell their stock assets (for cheap). That is indeed something of a catastrophe for institutional investors. But for working stiffs who earn a paycheck, it's a fantastic opportunity to use some of each paycheck to buy stocks at extremely rare discounts.
How bout metal? A nice service is eMachineShop, which lets you download their CAD software and design and order your own stuff in a number of alloys of metal, plus wood and plastics. But there is a setup overhead. So you can't just order one little $5 dohicky for a project you're doing -- it's not going to make financial sense unless you're going to need a bunch of the dohickys to cover the initial setup cost (or unless it's an inherently expensive part you want, like a replacement engine part for a custom engine). I suppose there's no service that would give you a reasonably priced one-off in metal?
I feel that a university would be negligent in awarding an Computer Science degree (or probably any science degree) to someone without a basic understanding of calculus. Computers are used for solving real-world problems. And most real world-problems, such as those involving, for example, electricity, or gravity, or economics, require calculus to fully understand them. A software developer obviously doesn't need to be a physicist or economist as well, but he does need to have the math background to implement equations from those fields in software.
If you have the kind of mind that was attracted to CS in the first place, I have to think that you got unlucky in drawing some poor (or at least not well-suited to your way of learning) calculus teachers.
Merill Lynch employs 56,300 people. 161 MILLION dollars for one man is a travesty... I will stake my life that the work of any CEO is no more demanding than jobs most of us do.... I will wager anything that most of us work just as hard and will probably just break ONE million in our lives.
And being unemployed is demanding. And ditch diggers work harder than engineers. How demanding it is is MEANINGLESS. How hard you work, in itself, is MEANINGLESS. What matters is what you produce. Whatever you do, you are payed to PRODUCE. To generate wealth. That's what you are compensated for. Not pain and suffering; not even hard work necessarily. If a man generates 200 million dollars of wealth for a company, then anything LESS than 161 million in compensation would be a travesty. Regardless of whether it was hard or easy for him.
While it's true that parody is fair use, fair use only applies to copyright, not to trademarks.
The names of famous people are trademarks. If I were to open a restaurant called Chuck Norris' Good Eats, I'd be infringing his trademark, not his copyright.
This even goes so far that someone else who was not famous, but happened to also be named Chuck Norris could not use his own name as a business name.
While IANAL, I heard about this on TV, so it must be true.
Yes, that's true. The point of trademark law is to prevent someone from doing business under a name that is the same or confusingly similar to another established trade name. And how that applies to publishing a book of jokes about a celebrity..... it doesn't. The only way they could claim it is if it were passing itself off as authorized by him.
Weird Al Yankovic makes money by parodying other artists; but the key concept is he does it, by creating the parody himself with his own sick-warped genius; He doesn't steal other peoples parodies.
So what? IF the book violates copyrights, which is not stated in the suit, they are not Chuck Norris's copyrights; he has no standing to sue. There isn't some kind of legal right to control what jokes can be published about you. Especially when you're a public figure. This is so absurd, I have to wonder if he's getting royalties in exchange for filing the suit, to generate publicity.
He's a public figure. A TV/movie star. No one needs permission to use the image and likeness of a public figure. You only need permission from the copyright holder of any photographs.
This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
How did intelligence ever select for itself. The first chimp who figured out how to make a termite probe out of a twig, and use it to fish for termites in a log, was a darn smart chip. But the moment he did it, even the exceptionally stupid chimps in his community followed suit, and within a generation, all the surrounding communities were using this invention. The exceptionally smart genes that allowed for this innovation are provided no positive selection in comparison to the exceptionally stupid genes that evolved right along side them. The invention benefits chimpdom, but (as there is no chimp patent law), it doesn't benefit its inventor any more than any other chimp. The smart gene and the stupid gene continue on in the gene pool to cancel each other out.
The assumption that evolution is driven primarily by natural selection is, I believe, a bad one. And it is one which is accepted uncritically, since to criticize it will get you thrown into the creationist's camp. Until we can overcome this, the study of evolution is not going to advance in a meaningful way.
Human intelligence is basically shaped by sexual selection. Humas/monkeys survived just fine without super intelligence. Human brain is basically a giant sexual ornament, analog to peacock's tail. Many aspects of human intelligence like humor, music, language are a result of sexual selection. "Survival of the fittest" can explain none of those traits. Women always mention "sense of humor" when they talk about desirable men. Being bold might get you killed, being an arrogant rock star will get you laid like, well, a rock star.
This explanation for evolution is a huge cop-out. It suggest that women spontaneously evolved an appreciation for humor before men evolved the capacity for it. If they evolved these things simultaneously, then there had to be some selection pressure external of sexual selection driving it. Similarly, the rationalization for peacocks and other colorful birds fails on the same grounds. It's commonly rationalized that the colors, dances and songs of male birds are attractive and and prove good fitness to the females. But this just removes the question by a step. How would female birds evolve the appreciation for colorful mates in their absence? If they evolved simultaneously, what was the selection force external to sexual selection?
Personally, I find it stunning that people accept these explanations. "Why do men have beards?" "Because women find beards attractive." "Why do women not have beards?" "Because men find beards unattractive." Give me a break. These are not explanations. They are circular reasoning.
Except the punishments haven't been getting harsher and harsher. They've been getting more and more lenient. Around 1970, the Supreme Court decided that the People could no longer execute rapists, like the "victim". So, why should it be surprising that a People with no legal recourse will take an illegal recourse? When we have no legal power to give criminals the appropriate punishment via law, what else would one expect to happen?
The idea that a today convicted rapists and murders are turned loose in society after a stay in prison, even if they openly admit their intention to commit their crime again, is utterly insane. It certainly can't be called "justice." If we want to be lenient, and not simply execute all murderers and rapists, then we should at least make any release of such people from prison contingent on a thorough analysis that shows them to be rehabilitated and reformed. If such a system were in place, and worked, I would have no problem with wiping the slate clean for such people.
Meanwhile 40,000 Americans die on the highways every year. I'd like to see some of that Homeland Security money go to some guardrails - it would actually save some lives rather than being a political circus.
It's the legitimate role of state and local government to prevent its citizens from murdering or raping each other -- whether it happens once a year or a hundred times a year. And it's the legitimate role of federal government to prevent foreign powers from murdering its citizens -- whether 3,000 die in a year or none die in a year. And it's not the legitimate role of any government to prevent people from driving their cars off the roads -- whether it's 40 thousand or 40 million who do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Try again. The final version of the bill passed 90-8 (and was signed into law by Bill Clinton).
Exactly. A good analogy would be that men do all their processing in the time domain, and women do all their processing in the frequency domain. There's no amount of logic -- or time-domain thinking -- that is going to allow you to either fully understand, or to duplicate, or predict the results of, her frequency-domain thought processes with a finite number of brain cells. Rather, the thing to do is to become familiar with how you can benefit from exposure to operations in the other domain, and benefit from the results of those operations. For example, nearly impossible operations in either domain (such as convolutions), can be easily done by transferring them to the opposite domain, performing a simple operation, and transferring them back.
To put it another way, here's a simplified summary of why the sexes compliment each other: Logic is useless without axioms, and it provides no means for acquiring axioms. Women can acquire the axioms because their non-linear (or non-time domain, or acausal domain, or emotional domain) thought process identifies them as the larger patterns that stand out as obvious in that domain. However the possible applications, implications, and interactions of those axioms are less obvious to them because those things happen in the causal domain (or time-domain or logic domain), where they are more obvious to men.
Well said. There was a line from a book on relationships by a woman from the late 19th century -- I wish I could remember it exactly. She explained that though men like to rely on logic, women are wary of getting drawn by them into logical lines of thought, as men are just as likely as to use logic to prove something that's false as they are to prove something that's true.
Huh? There's not a computer on the planet that's as "intelligent" as even a bacteria.
my AI will respond, "I didn't get it."
#1:
That's a mode that a human could easily operate in. Nothing in the Turing Test says the AI has to imitate a human operating in a particularly complicated mode. If you really want to be fancy, you could throw in an occasional typo. ;)
#2
The above is fundamentally no different from mining information from the web or wiki, it's just mining information (and processing power) from another tester.
I also heavily endorse these episodes of This American Life /w Planet Money. The first one was called "The Giant Pool of Money." I think as of today, there have been three of them now, though I haven't heard today's yet.
These shows are great because, other than getting really to the bottom of the things going on, they don't seem to be motivated, like most, by finding a nice target to assign blame to... which means they stand a chance of actually seeing what's going on.
If you're planning to act on that insight, prepare to enjoy your destitution.
You mean like forcing Fanny Mae to treat welfare income and unemployment income as qualified income, and to implement a 50% minority quota for loan approval? And to find new creative ways to qualify people rather than those "outdated" criteria such as the ability to come up with a down payment? That has nothing to do with the Fed. That's just the people's elected representative, Bill Clinton, doing the supposed will of the people. Such is democracy. Rationality doesn't count -- only popularity.
Anyone who's taken a high school level or higher macroeconomics course knows everything that is in that video about the money system.
Personally, I'm a little mystified as to how the maker of that video could understand so well the mechanism of the current system, and at the same time fail to understand the basic dynamics of supply and demand for credit, debt, and currency in a society, which make the current system work so well, and which would make the kinds of alternatives he proposes catastrophic failures.
I agree. Also illuminating is Essays on the Great Depression by one Ben S. Bernanke.
Well, gold is useful for plating electronics connectors because it is very resistant to corrosion... and it has good symbolic value, for wedding bands and such... however, yeah, the gold standard for currency was some of the dumbest thinking in the last several hundred years. The Gold Standard played a large part in fueling the Great Depression, and the countries that were slow in dropping the Gold Standard were significantly slower in recovering from the Great Depression.
I am baffled by people who are running to gold now. To believe that the housing market can only go up is understandable, if you weren't around before the 1920's... however, to believe that gold can't suddenly lose half its value, especially after a huge run-up like it's had over the last five years or so, you have to ignorant of what happened just in the early 1980's!! The next big losers in this mess will be the ones caught in the gold bubble.
Oh please, now it's the real estate agents' faults? They were strong-arming appraisers?? EVERYONE believed that home prices would only go up, because over any 5 year period, that's the only direction they have gone since 1920!
It's probably no coincidence that Wells Fargo, one of the only banks old enough to have historical information reaching back into extended housing deflationary periods, was part of the minority who didn't buy into the fallacy -- and as a result is now making out like a bandit.
I think the reverse is true. Moody's has been doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. All the banks that have failed have failed because everyone trusts the Moody's ratings, and because those banks lost (or were about to lose) their ratings because of their inability to refinance their credit.
The broader market is "tanking" for a very similar reason -- because institutional investors cannot refinance their short term debt, which is forcing them to sell their stock assets (for cheap). That is indeed something of a catastrophe for institutional investors. But for working stiffs who earn a paycheck, it's a fantastic opportunity to use some of each paycheck to buy stocks at extremely rare discounts.
How bout metal? A nice service is eMachineShop, which lets you download their CAD software and design and order your own stuff in a number of alloys of metal, plus wood and plastics. But there is a setup overhead. So you can't just order one little $5 dohicky for a project you're doing -- it's not going to make financial sense unless you're going to need a bunch of the dohickys to cover the initial setup cost (or unless it's an inherently expensive part you want, like a replacement engine part for a custom engine). I suppose there's no service that would give you a reasonably priced one-off in metal?
I feel that a university would be negligent in awarding an Computer Science degree (or probably any science degree) to someone without a basic understanding of calculus. Computers are used for solving real-world problems. And most real world-problems, such as those involving, for example, electricity, or gravity, or economics, require calculus to fully understand them. A software developer obviously doesn't need to be a physicist or economist as well, but he does need to have the math background to implement equations from those fields in software.
If you have the kind of mind that was attracted to CS in the first place, I have to think that you got unlucky in drawing some poor (or at least not well-suited to your way of learning) calculus teachers.
And being unemployed is demanding. And ditch diggers work harder than engineers. How demanding it is is MEANINGLESS. How hard you work, in itself, is MEANINGLESS. What matters is what you produce. Whatever you do, you are payed to PRODUCE. To generate wealth. That's what you are compensated for. Not pain and suffering; not even hard work necessarily. If a man generates 200 million dollars of wealth for a company, then anything LESS than 161 million in compensation would be a travesty. Regardless of whether it was hard or easy for him.
Yes, that's true. The point of trademark law is to prevent someone from doing business under a name that is the same or confusingly similar to another established trade name. And how that applies to publishing a book of jokes about a celebrity..... it doesn't. The only way they could claim it is if it were passing itself off as authorized by him.
So what? IF the book violates copyrights, which is not stated in the suit, they are not Chuck Norris's copyrights; he has no standing to sue. There isn't some kind of legal right to control what jokes can be published about you. Especially when you're a public figure. This is so absurd, I have to wonder if he's getting royalties in exchange for filing the suit, to generate publicity.
That has nothing to do with defamation if it's an obvious joke.
He's a public figure. A TV/movie star. No one needs permission to use the image and likeness of a public figure. You only need permission from the copyright holder of any photographs.
How did intelligence ever select for itself. The first chimp who figured out how to make a termite probe out of a twig, and use it to fish for termites in a log, was a darn smart chip. But the moment he did it, even the exceptionally stupid chimps in his community followed suit, and within a generation, all the surrounding communities were using this invention. The exceptionally smart genes that allowed for this innovation are provided no positive selection in comparison to the exceptionally stupid genes that evolved right along side them. The invention benefits chimpdom, but (as there is no chimp patent law), it doesn't benefit its inventor any more than any other chimp. The smart gene and the stupid gene continue on in the gene pool to cancel each other out.
The assumption that evolution is driven primarily by natural selection is, I believe, a bad one. And it is one which is accepted uncritically, since to criticize it will get you thrown into the creationist's camp. Until we can overcome this, the study of evolution is not going to advance in a meaningful way.
This explanation for evolution is a huge cop-out. It suggest that women spontaneously evolved an appreciation for humor before men evolved the capacity for it. If they evolved these things simultaneously, then there had to be some selection pressure external of sexual selection driving it. Similarly, the rationalization for peacocks and other colorful birds fails on the same grounds. It's commonly rationalized that the colors, dances and songs of male birds are attractive and and prove good fitness to the females. But this just removes the question by a step. How would female birds evolve the appreciation for colorful mates in their absence? If they evolved simultaneously, what was the selection force external to sexual selection?
Personally, I find it stunning that people accept these explanations. "Why do men have beards?" "Because women find beards attractive." "Why do women not have beards?" "Because men find beards unattractive." Give me a break. These are not explanations. They are circular reasoning.
CRAP! 15 was my RSA public key!
Except the punishments haven't been getting harsher and harsher. They've been getting more and more lenient. Around 1970, the Supreme Court decided that the People could no longer execute rapists, like the "victim". So, why should it be surprising that a People with no legal recourse will take an illegal recourse? When we have no legal power to give criminals the appropriate punishment via law, what else would one expect to happen?
The idea that a today convicted rapists and murders are turned loose in society after a stay in prison, even if they openly admit their intention to commit their crime again, is utterly insane. It certainly can't be called "justice." If we want to be lenient, and not simply execute all murderers and rapists, then we should at least make any release of such people from prison contingent on a thorough analysis that shows them to be rehabilitated and reformed. If such a system were in place, and worked, I would have no problem with wiping the slate clean for such people.
It's the legitimate role of state and local government to prevent its citizens from murdering or raping each other -- whether it happens once a year or a hundred times a year. And it's the legitimate role of federal government to prevent foreign powers from murdering its citizens -- whether 3,000 die in a year or none die in a year. And it's not the legitimate role of any government to prevent people from driving their cars off the roads -- whether it's 40 thousand or 40 million who do it.