What the hell? A teacher posting the word "pussy" - TWICE! - as a comment to a story soliciting comments about the weirdest thing you've eaten is a sign of the Apocalypse? Really? Not to mention that it is an offense that is worthy forcing someone to resign? I don't get it. Wait, I do. You think that morality involves teachers not saying the word pussy in a semi-anonymous environment that is outside the school. I think that morality involves respecting other people's decision as long as they don't harm me or others. The difference between you and me is that you think that you should be able to force your morality on others, regardless of how trivial the topic at hand is.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but many countries have lots of buildings that are basically brick or rock, including internal walls. Firefighters don't die more there than anywhere else.
I normally disagree with you vehemently on political issues, but I find it interesting that I'm pretty much in full agreement with you on this. I'm ok with every citizen being under surveillance - under one condition, and one condition only: those in power are subject to the same surveillance, and the surveillance is accessible by everyone, freely, with no restrictions.
The fact that some people seem to think that cops and politicians are somehow morally above the fray, never failing, and too important to be under constant scrutiny is astounding to me. Scratch that - it scares the living daylights out of me. These are the same people who have no problem imprisoning others based on hear say, and cops beating someone up because someone didn't look right.
The biggest danger with mines is not that they explode - it's that no one really knows where the mines are, and that they are often right around civilian areas.
Your two scenarios would actually both be a vast improvement over the current situation.
In the first instance, you just have to get one little corner to detonate, and the entire field should go off. At that point, de-mining via artillery-shelling will actually work. If you meant to say that the mine fields are going to be much denser, great as well - you can actually employ large-scale de-mining equipment and have it be more cost-efficient than the hand-demining.
In the second instance, people sitting at a remote trigger actually make the mine safer: it means that there are less mines to go around (detonators are scarce, mines are not), someone knows where the mine is and it won't randomly go off when a kid decides to play catch in the field.
I'm pretty sure I can see the headlines already, should Germany decriminalize the swastika: "Swastikas endorsed by German Government", "Germans are again flying SS symbols", etc.
I don't think there is a country in the world that works harder at self-flagellation than the Germans - nor is there any country in the world that is expected to self-flagellate that hard.
On the contrary. The Native Americans are a perfect example that land can be owned. To be exact, the amount of land that can be owned by one person is the amount of land that that person can defend. The Native Americans just looked at the vast expanse of land around them, and thought it was silly that one person would want a specific land tract - after all, they'd just go somewhere else. To them, in their small, nomadic numbers, owning land was a pointless exercise.
The Native Americans failed to understand that where those few strange people came from, millions more were waiting to overwhelm their small numbers. And that they would not be able to defend the land they needed to live.
I agree that it isn't the only sensible way to run a society. But, given the amount of jackasses that are willing to ruin a good thing for everybody, it's pretty much the only thing that can last a while.
When the outside temperature hits 115 degrees with full on sun, the inside can hit 150+ within 10 minutes or so. Make it nice and black inside, and surfaces will probably be hitting 160. Soooo.... yeah. Don't leave stuff inside the car in Arizona or Death Valley.
I don't know how you define rush.... I've had people complain that an attack after 10 minutes was a rush. Even the 6-pool was easily defeated by the proper build order and positioning. As a matter of fact, I liked SC more than others because every strategy had a proper counter. The only thing that was required was scouting - otherwise the other person could come in with the counter to your troops.
While I don't think it is a great medium for a test, it's a pretty good one. Especially if the AI has to deal with fog of war.
Pretty much. I always thought that the idiocy I saw on gaming forums in the 90s was harmless because it was contained in videogame forums. I mean, things as stupid as platform wars would go away once people would discuss serious things like the federal budget, right? The yahoos going "Nintendo 4eva!" would disappear, right?
I'm pretty convinced now that I was wrong on that. The political discourse I'm seeing now uses the same terminology and rhetorical constructs as those used in the platform wars. It's all hot air, partisanship and arguing by putting others down. Using twitter comments on the air is worsening the discourse because it merely gives an official outlet to a lot of people who really have no clue, don't know they have no clue, and don't even care they have no clue. But they are now convinced that because they either got on the air or someone they agree with got on the air means that this is the same as Kissinger agreeing with them.
I'm not saying that Twitter can't be used to send interesting comments. I'm saying, however, that Twitter is used by the media in the worst possible way right now: to further turn news into entertainment of the worst kind: reality TV.
Ummm...no. Intellectual didn't mean Jewish or Bolshevik. It means someone highly educated whose primary job was to work his/her brain. There were plenty of those left, even under Hitler. They were just very, very careful what they said to whom, or they were in the favor of the party.
Furthermore, I explicitly pointed out that hounding intellectuals who say the wrong things took a turn for the worse once the Nazis came to power - which still leaves the entire period between 1918 and 1933 as intellectually active.
It's incredibly dangerous to assume the Nazis were anti-intellectual, because they weren't. On the contrary, they worshiped intellectuals - as long as those intellectuals droned on about Aryan supremacy and the Jewish Untermensch. What do you think Goebbels was, if not a consummate Intellectual?
I listened to Beck. Before he had his own TV show, before he was popular like Limbaugh. There is no viewpoint for him that isn't too inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory, nor is there a connection that is too tenuous that he won't bring it up.
He doesn't inform, he brings up snippets and ties them to Terrorism, Childporn and the downfall of the American Way of Life. Regardless of context, or of indication to the contrary. He's worse than Savage, in that sense. And I never thought that was possible.
As for the two videos you listed, I didn't see anything quoted in your first video. Certainly not around the point you indicated. Merely speculation on what someone might do. The second video is completely pointless, and Beck's analysis completely misinterprets the point that was made in the speech. These aren't people saying "telling" things, these are non-stories and complete false-hoods. That's why I don't listen to Beck, and am astounded that anyone turns to him for anything other than to see poo-flinging in action.
I think what you fail to mention is that every place where a rabid anti-intellectual movement took hold went down the tubes very quickly.
All communists countries in the last 50 years with an equivalent of China's cultural revolution experienced this. As for Germany in the interwar period, I think you ought to revisit your sources a bit. While it wasn't a hotbed of intellectual activity, there was no hounding intellectuals - just intellectuals who said the wrong things, with the serious issues only coming after 1933. And we know how that ended.
Again, anti-intellectual movements are indeed nothing new. But they are a sign of things going down the drain very quickly.
The fact that he is at the helm of a conglomerate that employs a gaggle of lawyers and CTOs. I'm sure one of them told him that they can block Google if he wanted to do so.
But at others pointed out, that's not the end-game. The end-game is to disallow fair use completely, and to have everyone pay everyone anytime anything remotely creative gets read.
If you just assume then it is not science. Science is about testing your assumptions.
Even science has some untestable working assumptions. 1) There is no old guy with a beard in the sky who arbitrarily changes the rules. 2) Humans have enough intelligence and sensory input to build a consistent model of the world.
I'd say it goes beyond that: humans can't react to those factors either. Where do you think the current credit meltdown came from? Humans were not able to model the credit market behavior, just as much as the mathematical models were unable to do so.
It is not even subjective - I'd argue it's almost quantum mechanical: the mere act of looking at a market changes its behavior. The advantage of modeling quantum mechanical systems though is that they don't change their rules just to spite you. The certainty for the momentum of a particle changes in a particular fashion when its location is analyzed, no matter how many times you perform that measurement. The particle doesn't change its behavior to screw over the investigator.
I was about to say the same thing. Unlike poker, the rules of the games are altered based on the current knowledge about the state of the game. This means that as soon as someone proclaims "We know the rules of Economics!", someone else is going to look at those rules and either game them to their benefit, or rewrite them to better suit their own purpose.
Computer Scientists - and Economists - have a habit of assuming that they just need to find the proper model for human behavior, and all the problems will be solved. That's because that's how it works in a science: you assume the rules don't change in an arbitrary fashion. Humans, however, do. This makes any prediction of human behavior a statistical undertaking at best. Your success will be measured by how much better you compared to a random decision making process. At worst, the statistical anomaly completely wrecks your model - see the Black Swan Theory in Economics.
What makes you think that the people who are in business for themselves are better at fixing things than those who are in government? Judging from healthcare and various businesses, people are incompetent and inefficient all over the place.
As for your dig about government handouts, I find it entertaining that this generally comes from people who are making average or above money.
And that's exactly the problem with the pro-life crowd that wants to turn a fertilized egg into a person. It necessarily reduces the ability of the mother to make decisions regarding her own life. However, the same approach doesn't change the ability of the father to make decisions regarding his own life.
That's the fundamental problem right there. Personhood for a fertilized egg necessarily equates to women having less rights than men, and them becoming far more vulnerable to manipulation by men via rape.
Just because of that, I agree that abortion is left to the group of people that you mention.
On a side note: I love how the current conservative wing of the republicans decry government intervention into business, but are perfectly fine with government intervention into the personal lives of subjects... I mean, citizens.
Of course. Fag. Oh wait, you take offense to that? Think it's insulting? I'm just calling you out for who you are - a Fag. Oh wait, that's not how it works? Really?
You're comment is everything that's wrong in politics right now: all sound and fury, loaded with emotional arguments and no substance.
Correct. So, do you want the US to be like the various Islamic countries that lead on this front? Just checking, because that has a number of implications on other fronts.
And interestingly, South America, with one of the most restrictive set of abortion laws, has about as many or more abortions than the more liberal countries.
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What the hell? A teacher posting the word "pussy" - TWICE! - as a comment to a story soliciting comments about the weirdest thing you've eaten is a sign of the Apocalypse? Really? Not to mention that it is an offense that is worthy forcing someone to resign? I don't get it. Wait, I do. You think that morality involves teachers not saying the word pussy in a semi-anonymous environment that is outside the school. I think that morality involves respecting other people's decision as long as they don't harm me or others. The difference between you and me is that you think that you should be able to force your morality on others, regardless of how trivial the topic at hand is.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but many countries have lots of buildings that are basically brick or rock, including internal walls. Firefighters don't die more there than anywhere else.
The correct equivalency is a camera in the mayor's office and a camera in my office.
I normally disagree with you vehemently on political issues, but I find it interesting that I'm pretty much in full agreement with you on this. I'm ok with every citizen being under surveillance - under one condition, and one condition only: those in power are subject to the same surveillance, and the surveillance is accessible by everyone, freely, with no restrictions.
The fact that some people seem to think that cops and politicians are somehow morally above the fray, never failing, and too important to be under constant scrutiny is astounding to me. Scratch that - it scares the living daylights out of me. These are the same people who have no problem imprisoning others based on hear say, and cops beating someone up because someone didn't look right.
The biggest danger with mines is not that they explode - it's that no one really knows where the mines are, and that they are often right around civilian areas.
Your two scenarios would actually both be a vast improvement over the current situation.
In the first instance, you just have to get one little corner to detonate, and the entire field should go off. At that point, de-mining via artillery-shelling will actually work. If you meant to say that the mine fields are going to be much denser, great as well - you can actually employ large-scale de-mining equipment and have it be more cost-efficient than the hand-demining.
In the second instance, people sitting at a remote trigger actually make the mine safer: it means that there are less mines to go around (detonators are scarce, mines are not), someone knows where the mine is and it won't randomly go off when a kid decides to play catch in the field.
I'm pretty sure I can see the headlines already, should Germany decriminalize the swastika: "Swastikas endorsed by German Government", "Germans are again flying SS symbols", etc.
I don't think there is a country in the world that works harder at self-flagellation than the Germans - nor is there any country in the world that is expected to self-flagellate that hard.
On the contrary. The Native Americans are a perfect example that land can be owned. To be exact, the amount of land that can be owned by one person is the amount of land that that person can defend. The Native Americans just looked at the vast expanse of land around them, and thought it was silly that one person would want a specific land tract - after all, they'd just go somewhere else. To them, in their small, nomadic numbers, owning land was a pointless exercise.
The Native Americans failed to understand that where those few strange people came from, millions more were waiting to overwhelm their small numbers. And that they would not be able to defend the land they needed to live.
I agree that it isn't the only sensible way to run a society. But, given the amount of jackasses that are willing to ruin a good thing for everybody, it's pretty much the only thing that can last a while.
Not to mention that the successful details-nazi doesn't use wikipedia to make point.
When the outside temperature hits 115 degrees with full on sun, the inside can hit 150+ within 10 minutes or so. Make it nice and black inside, and surfaces will probably be hitting 160. Soooo.... yeah. Don't leave stuff inside the car in Arizona or Death Valley.
I don't know how you define rush.... I've had people complain that an attack after 10 minutes was a rush. Even the 6-pool was easily defeated by the proper build order and positioning. As a matter of fact, I liked SC more than others because every strategy had a proper counter. The only thing that was required was scouting - otherwise the other person could come in with the counter to your troops.
While I don't think it is a great medium for a test, it's a pretty good one. Especially if the AI has to deal with fog of war.
Pretty much. I always thought that the idiocy I saw on gaming forums in the 90s was harmless because it was contained in videogame forums. I mean, things as stupid as platform wars would go away once people would discuss serious things like the federal budget, right? The yahoos going "Nintendo 4eva!" would disappear, right?
I'm pretty convinced now that I was wrong on that. The political discourse I'm seeing now uses the same terminology and rhetorical constructs as those used in the platform wars. It's all hot air, partisanship and arguing by putting others down. Using twitter comments on the air is worsening the discourse because it merely gives an official outlet to a lot of people who really have no clue, don't know they have no clue, and don't even care they have no clue. But they are now convinced that because they either got on the air or someone they agree with got on the air means that this is the same as Kissinger agreeing with them.
I'm not saying that Twitter can't be used to send interesting comments. I'm saying, however, that Twitter is used by the media in the worst possible way right now: to further turn news into entertainment of the worst kind: reality TV.
Ummm...no. Intellectual didn't mean Jewish or Bolshevik. It means someone highly educated whose primary job was to work his/her brain. There were plenty of those left, even under Hitler. They were just very, very careful what they said to whom, or they were in the favor of the party.
Furthermore, I explicitly pointed out that hounding intellectuals who say the wrong things took a turn for the worse once the Nazis came to power - which still leaves the entire period between 1918 and 1933 as intellectually active.
It's incredibly dangerous to assume the Nazis were anti-intellectual, because they weren't. On the contrary, they worshiped intellectuals - as long as those intellectuals droned on about Aryan supremacy and the Jewish Untermensch. What do you think Goebbels was, if not a consummate Intellectual?
I listened to Beck. Before he had his own TV show, before he was popular like Limbaugh. There is no viewpoint for him that isn't too inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory, nor is there a connection that is too tenuous that he won't bring it up.
He doesn't inform, he brings up snippets and ties them to Terrorism, Childporn and the downfall of the American Way of Life. Regardless of context, or of indication to the contrary. He's worse than Savage, in that sense. And I never thought that was possible.
As for the two videos you listed, I didn't see anything quoted in your first video. Certainly not around the point you indicated. Merely speculation on what someone might do. The second video is completely pointless, and Beck's analysis completely misinterprets the point that was made in the speech. These aren't people saying "telling" things, these are non-stories and complete false-hoods. That's why I don't listen to Beck, and am astounded that anyone turns to him for anything other than to see poo-flinging in action.
I think what you fail to mention is that every place where a rabid anti-intellectual movement took hold went down the tubes very quickly.
All communists countries in the last 50 years with an equivalent of China's cultural revolution experienced this. As for Germany in the interwar period, I think you ought to revisit your sources a bit. While it wasn't a hotbed of intellectual activity, there was no hounding intellectuals - just intellectuals who said the wrong things, with the serious issues only coming after 1933. And we know how that ended.
Again, anti-intellectual movements are indeed nothing new. But they are a sign of things going down the drain very quickly.
The fact that he is at the helm of a conglomerate that employs a gaggle of lawyers and CTOs. I'm sure one of them told him that they can block Google if he wanted to do so.
But at others pointed out, that's not the end-game. The end-game is to disallow fair use completely, and to have everyone pay everyone anytime anything remotely creative gets read.
If you just assume then it is not science. Science is about testing your assumptions.
Even science has some untestable working assumptions.
1) There is no old guy with a beard in the sky who arbitrarily changes the rules.
2) Humans have enough intelligence and sensory input to build a consistent model of the world.
I'd say it goes beyond that: humans can't react to those factors either. Where do you think the current credit meltdown came from? Humans were not able to model the credit market behavior, just as much as the mathematical models were unable to do so.
It is not even subjective - I'd argue it's almost quantum mechanical: the mere act of looking at a market changes its behavior. The advantage of modeling quantum mechanical systems though is that they don't change their rules just to spite you. The certainty for the momentum of a particle changes in a particular fashion when its location is analyzed, no matter how many times you perform that measurement. The particle doesn't change its behavior to screw over the investigator.
I was about to say the same thing. Unlike poker, the rules of the games are altered based on the current knowledge about the state of the game. This means that as soon as someone proclaims "We know the rules of Economics!", someone else is going to look at those rules and either game them to their benefit, or rewrite them to better suit their own purpose.
Computer Scientists - and Economists - have a habit of assuming that they just need to find the proper model for human behavior, and all the problems will be solved. That's because that's how it works in a science: you assume the rules don't change in an arbitrary fashion. Humans, however, do. This makes any prediction of human behavior a statistical undertaking at best. Your success will be measured by how much better you compared to a random decision making process. At worst, the statistical anomaly completely wrecks your model - see the Black Swan Theory in Economics.
Since when is someone who makes less than average a freeloader?
Then why is this called "Obamacare" by the Republicans and Conservatives?
What makes you think that the people who are in business for themselves are better at fixing things than those who are in government? Judging from healthcare and various businesses, people are incompetent and inefficient all over the place.
As for your dig about government handouts, I find it entertaining that this generally comes from people who are making average or above money.
And that's exactly the problem with the pro-life crowd that wants to turn a fertilized egg into a person. It necessarily reduces the ability of the mother to make decisions regarding her own life. However, the same approach doesn't change the ability of the father to make decisions regarding his own life.
That's the fundamental problem right there. Personhood for a fertilized egg necessarily equates to women having less rights than men, and them becoming far more vulnerable to manipulation by men via rape.
Just because of that, I agree that abortion is left to the group of people that you mention.
On a side note: I love how the current conservative wing of the republicans decry government intervention into business, but are perfectly fine with government intervention into the personal lives of subjects... I mean, citizens.
Of course. Fag. Oh wait, you take offense to that? Think it's insulting? I'm just calling you out for who you are - a Fag. Oh wait, that's not how it works? Really?
You're comment is everything that's wrong in politics right now: all sound and fury, loaded with emotional arguments and no substance.
Correct. So, do you want the US to be like the various Islamic countries that lead on this front? Just checking, because that has a number of implications on other fronts.
And interestingly, South America, with one of the most restrictive set of abortion laws, has about as many or more abortions than the more liberal countries.