My wife votes absentee in Washington all the time and there is no such requirement here. She and many like her do this for convenience.
The real problem is that voting takes place during working hours on the voter's own time. Most of the rest of the world votes on weekends (e.g. Germany on Sunday).
Those who believe that news channels should be left-wing such as CNN instead of centrist such as Fox get angry that someone dare to try to be balanced and accurate.
Oh, you mean like the morning show anchor who accused people who disagreed with the GWB of being "traitors"?
The people in charge of the cluster don't want to call it "Big Mac" because (1) they don't want a lawsuit from McDonalds
Back in the day (1986 IIRC) when the first 1Mb Mac was announced, Apple went to some trouble to stop people calling it the "Big Mac" (The preferred name was "Fat Mac".) Eventually it was released as the "Mac Plus".
The money that doesn't get spent gets put into some sort of financial instrument, which then is put back into the economy in the form of money that can be used as capital.
Unless the economy has so much capacity that it can't use the capital. Then everyone tends to buy commodities like gold, which is basically like "keeping it all in large bills under their mattress."
The cheapest price they could find for a wedding photographer was $1200 in the Houston area.
When we were pricing stuff, we talked to Yuen Lui. They wanted 5000 bucks, the rights to the negatives and to stick their stupid little logo on everything. Fortunately, a friend gave us the card of a very nice private photographer who cost about 10% of that, was a joy to have at the ceremony and gave us the negatives as part of the package. I feel really lucky, though, and I have no idea how to find reasonable human beings like this in general.
For a species to go from foraging to agrigulture seems like an enormous effort
Indeed: farming is quite an effort compared to the amount of work performed by hunter-gatherers. About twice as labor intensive. Which explains why there are a number of sites in the world where people abandoned farming. Also, sites in the New World show a marked decrease in health with the advent of farming (maize is lysine deficient) - so its not like it was healthier or something.
Penrose is no idiot, but when he says that he is out of his area of knowledege and way out of his depth.
Maybe that is why he is working with microbiologists, philosphers, and other specialists on the problem.
I have read both his books and while I agree that the argument from Godel's theorem is debatable, I always saw it more as a suggestion of where to start looking than a proof - and I will agree that this may be a flaw in his presentation.
Those who accuse him of mysticism should read the opening of SOM where he describes four positions (Strong AI, Weak AI, Noncomputational physics and Mysticism) and comes down firmly in the third camp.
I personally find his work with Hammerhoff to be quite compelling in that their models suggest explanations for many enegmatic features of consciousness (e.g. unitary experience, flow of time, anethesia, scale of emergence). All the strong AI crowd can do for most of these is just wave their hands and say "add more processors!". By contrast, the equations Penrose has come up with predict things, like basic preconscious awareness in flatworms and the timing of various brain rhythms and offer a wide range of interesting insights into subjects as diverse as evolution and Bhuddist meditative practices.
Bottom line: The test of science is prediction, not the chain of reasoning used to make the prediction. Penrose et alia are making testable predictions. Unfortunately, the Strong AI camp seem more interested in an academic food fight and calling names.
Audio quality is something he can't measure yet. The process of how the human ear interprets sound is not yet understood well enough for us to make quantitative measurements of audio quality.
I have a background in speech processing and this is quite true.
I am also what I sometimes call an "unwilling audiophile". My system is nothing great (kids and a house that does not have a good listening room). But my family all drags me along shopping for audio equipment because I can hear things that they cannot. (And quite frankly, neither can most of the "snake-oil salesmen", so pay no attention to their jive.)
It's almost embarrasing, because I am a fairly scientificly minded fellow, but I really can hear differences. I agree that the speaker cable crowd is full of it (back in the day when real audiophiles could actually solve PDEs they just used heavy duty lamp cord) but there are serious differences between transistor and IC-based components. (Yes, I've had enough EE to know what a corner frequency is, but the corners are in different places and I can still hear it.) The last time I went out, it was annoying to listen to the output of the modern amplifiers and I had to keep smacking the salesdrone to use the better amp. And CDs have a drop in clarity and strength in the midrange that I can hear (in a good room with a pair of high end electrostatics). My current speakers are the best wall mounts I could find at a decent price - a compromise between keeping them out of reach of my two small boys, my budget and my ears.
So there are some loonies out there, but we are still a ways away from actualy understanding human sound perception.
I can generally tell code that is written using small monitors because it tends to be "local". There is not much awareness of existing functions in the same file or in related files.
I have two monitors on my desk (both larger than the laptops preferred by many these days) hooked up to a OSX box. Editing on one with BBEdit, Terminal shell open for the target machine on the other, translucent windows so I can find stuff that is buried. It may seem silly, but I honestly feel that these little details translate into better designs and code.
4. Data Integrity. Both in terms of being able to maintain the national data in non-proprietary formats and in terms of being able of secure the data against outside meddling. This was a major consideration for Peru.
On a side note, all of the benefits you listed are economic. For some reason a lot of people here seem to forget that governments have non-economic concerns, like supporting culture, dispensing justice, providing for defense and the general welfare of the people. Open Source has a lot to offer in support of these goals as well.
The truth is, that there is no limit to the amount of possible work.
I am not happy with this argument. The part that says "it has always worked this way so it will always work this way" seems to ignore any possible qualitative changes to the nature of an economy. On a more practial level, in a consumer society, consumers have a finite amount of time and space to devote to product consumption. Put another way, I can't buy all the stuff that could conceivably be created at a high level of productivity because I don't have the space to store it or the time to use it. (And arguing that I have infinite time given advances in medical science doesn't work either because the amount of stuff produced per unit time increases, but the speed at which I live does not.)
So I think there are real limits to what an economy with 100% employment can produce. And I suspect that we are approaching this particular nonlinearity in the present day. You may disagree, but I think the argument is not so easily dismissed.
That CIO feels guilty, but he is insulated from the ethical and legal implications of the visa issue, indeed from the entire transition to offshore--as is his company. Its executives simply are not involved, except to make the decision in the first place.
But later on he says:
However, the Fortune 100 CIO who has that recurring nightmare is worried that it's too easy for companies like his to outsource overseas today. "Look, I can't wake up tomorrow and decide I'm going to move to Italy and get a job," he says. "So why should someone from another country be able to come here on a temporary visa and take jobs from Americans?
So here he is, richer and better educated than most of the humans who ever lived and he can't even handle basic moral action! He doesn't think something is right, but either can't be bothered or doesn't have the power to say or do anything about it. This makes him either a coward or a slave, neither of which is particularly admirable.
I find talk like that extremely insulting to Africans as it suggests they are not as "advanced" as Western civilizations and cannot control themselves when presented with military technology.
Some of us feel that Western civilizations cannot control themselves when presented with military technology.
Slashdot Mirror
From the British Thunderbirds 60s TV series I give you the Mach 6 Fireflash!
(Now if they could just learn how to make civillian aircraft whose safety systems are more reliable...)
My wife votes absentee in Washington all the time and there is no such requirement here. She and many like her do this for convenience.
The real problem is that voting takes place during working hours on the voter's own time. Most of the rest of the world votes on weekends (e.g. Germany on Sunday).
Check out the Transactional Interpetation of Quantum Mechanics. Critiques of all the well known interpretations (CI, MWI) and others you may not have heard of.
Something similar happened up here in the US Northwest (Bellingham area). Killed some kids as I recall.
This sounds like The Garbage Project
I have read both his books and while I agree that the argument from Godel's theorem is debatable, I always saw it more as a suggestion of where to start looking than a proof - and I will agree that this may be a flaw in his presentation.
Those who accuse him of mysticism should read the opening of SOM where he describes four positions (Strong AI, Weak AI, Noncomputational physics and Mysticism) and comes down firmly in the third camp.
I personally find his work with Hammerhoff to be quite compelling in that their models suggest explanations for many enegmatic features of consciousness (e.g. unitary experience, flow of time, anethesia, scale of emergence). All the strong AI crowd can do for most of these is just wave their hands and say "add more processors!". By contrast, the equations Penrose has come up with predict things, like basic preconscious awareness in flatworms and the timing of various brain rhythms and offer a wide range of interesting insights into subjects as diverse as evolution and Bhuddist meditative practices.
Bottom line: The test of science is prediction, not the chain of reasoning used to make the prediction. Penrose et alia are making testable predictions. Unfortunately, the Strong AI camp seem more interested in an academic food fight and calling names.
I am also what I sometimes call an "unwilling audiophile". My system is nothing great (kids and a house that does not have a good listening room). But my family all drags me along shopping for audio equipment because I can hear things that they cannot. (And quite frankly, neither can most of the "snake-oil salesmen", so pay no attention to their jive.)
It's almost embarrasing, because I am a fairly scientificly minded fellow, but I really can hear differences. I agree that the speaker cable crowd is full of it (back in the day when real audiophiles could actually solve PDEs they just used heavy duty lamp cord) but there are serious differences between transistor and IC-based components. (Yes, I've had enough EE to know what a corner frequency is, but the corners are in different places and I can still hear it.) The last time I went out, it was annoying to listen to the output of the modern amplifiers and I had to keep smacking the salesdrone to use the better amp. And CDs have a drop in clarity and strength in the midrange that I can hear (in a good room with a pair of high end electrostatics). My current speakers are the best wall mounts I could find at a decent price - a compromise between keeping them out of reach of my two small boys, my budget and my ears.
So there are some loonies out there, but we are still a ways away from actualy understanding human sound perception.
I can generally tell code that is written using small monitors because it tends to be "local". There is not much awareness of existing functions in the same file or in related files.
I have two monitors on my desk (both larger than the laptops preferred by many these days) hooked up to a OSX box. Editing on one with BBEdit, Terminal shell open for the target machine on the other, translucent windows so I can find stuff that is buried. It may seem silly, but I honestly feel that these little details translate into better designs and code.
You missed one:
4. Data Integrity. Both in terms of being able to maintain the national data in non-proprietary formats and in terms of being able of secure the data against outside meddling. This was a major consideration for Peru.
On a side note, all of the benefits you listed are economic. For some reason a lot of people here seem to forget that governments have non-economic concerns, like supporting culture, dispensing justice, providing for defense and the general welfare of the people. Open Source has a lot to offer in support of these goals as well.
(Ducks
So I think there are real limits to what an economy with 100% employment can produce. And I suspect that we are approaching this particular nonlinearity in the present day. You may disagree, but I think the argument is not so easily dismissed.
But later on he says:
So here he is, richer and better educated than most of the humans who ever lived and he can't even handle basic moral action! He doesn't think something is right, but either can't be bothered or doesn't have the power to say or do anything about it. This makes him either a coward or a slave, neither of which is particularly admirable.