And if you did screw up and can't afford it, your kids should suffer? How biblical! "For I am a jealous economic system, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the seventh generation."
If this gets to be a problem, then laws will be written to prevent this behaviour. Current law has never had to deal with this issue. Saying that we should not use the technology because the law hadn't anticipated a potential abuse is not very useful - most technologies in common use today had the same property at their time of introduction. Update the laws - don't ban innovation.
The question is: What sort of laws are effective? Many of the gun control laws in the US are ineffective because they attempt to punish antisocial behavior after the fact (deterrance is notoriously unreliable). Making it difficult for antisocial individuals to get hold of guns by seriously restricting the supply is far more likely to be effective.
By the same token, if you only make it illegal to have such voting parties, then the ability to enforce compliance is much higher than if you simply require everyone to vote at a single controlled location. Someone might rat on the group, but what if they don't? Would you turn in your loan shark? I doubt it!
This is not to say that there are no technical bugaboos waitingin the wings. Some time in the next 50 years, it is quite concievable that church members could be bugged. Maybe we need to surround voting booths with Faraday cages and walk past an EMP generator...
Once again I couldn't find a Sherlock plugin, although they do have nice comment tags for parsing the output. Anyone knows of an official one (unlike Google, which just has three unofficial ones ands their recommended one looks out of date to me) let me know. Until then, I have put one up on our Sherlock page. Enjoy.
My business partner and I have started reviewing books by describing them as foods. We both independently described Cryptonomicon as a Napolean. Large, tasty, artfully constructed and quite enjoyable, but somewhat lacking in nutritional value (although some of us have metabolisms that require a lot of empty calories;-))
In the last six months there has been a noticable increase in MacOS viri. Same old lame deployment schemes (MBDF in a Sherlock plugin was the last one I saw) but I took it as a good sign - the Mac has to be back if teenage wankers who can't find porn on the net start writing viri for MacOS.
This is simply not true, as is clear from the WalMart/Amazon lawsuit. WalMart claimed that Amazon hired away their data warehousing team and thereby stole trade secrets. Amazon eventually settled by removing this team from anything having to do with this aspect of their business. No software was even involved, just the contents of some people's heads. You can be damn sure that they are not interested in open sourcing their software - they consider it a crucial competetive advantage (and having talked to the team leader I believe it).
While I think that the essay makes some very good points, I think his solution is no better. The average company expects results from their money and without a guarentee that this will happen, no one is going to fund hackers to just do what they want on the hopes that it will be useful to the funders.
The problem really is cultural - propertarian models are fundamentally different from non-propertarian and no amount of window-dressing will change this.
While I enjoyed this post and felt it was spot on most of the time, I would like to point out that there are more objective interpretations of the QM formalism than the Copenhagen Interpretation. For an interesting discussion of this and a different interpretation, check out the transational interpretation.
Why would there be a constitutional fight in the US? The supreme court has consistently held (3 seperate cases this century) that the second ammendment does NOT guarentee a right to bear arms outside of the context of a state militia. I gather that the Federalist papers support this interpretation as well.
Just because the gun nuts shout this loudly doesn't make it true.
Yes! AI is plauged by the old "If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail" problem. Or in their case, "If all you have is a Turing Machine then everything looks like an Algorithm." This can be very productive (cf. Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and I think that the stuff AI has come up with plays some part in the Big Picture, but paradigms are also limiting and a certain degree of humility is appropriate.
Incidentally, another good layman's book on the embodied mind is Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
I have to say I had the opposite impression. GEB bored me after a while - it all seemed trite, simplistic and obvious and I never finished it. Penrose's books (Shadows of the Mind is the followup) OTOH seemed to proceed from the assumption that we don't know it all and suggest where we might go looking (even his opponents have praise for the review of physics in ENM). There are many interesting questions relating to minds that physics doesn't even know where to begin (one that Penrose doesn't even mention is: Why is there a present moment - not just past and future).
One of the most interesting non-traditional QM theories I have seen is the transactional interpretation put forth by a UW professor. Read all about it. I personally think that what makes us _not_ Turing machines is our ability to comprehend infinity on some level. Strong AI claims that this is an illusion, but TI provides a mechanism that allows for infinite computations in finite time which means that it might not be an illusion after all.
As marks against Penrose, I completely understand the problems with his arguments, but his strong AI opponents have not proved their own case either. Given a choice of where to proceed I come down on the side of present ignorance. History has too often shown that just when we think we know it all something is about to whack us right between the eyes.
Aren't you doing *exactly* the same thing?
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
No, but people tend to argue that legality/morality somehow ought to solve the problem.
Unfortunately, this is not a moral problem. It is a chemistry problem. This country manufactures most of the armaments in the world (including your "bombs"). Given a large enough concentration of this stuff it will invitably diffuse out into the population as a whole, no matter what checks you try to put on it and statistically some will wind up in the hands of kids like this. Simple osmosis.
The only intelligent way to do gun control is to stop making the damn things.
As usual, I don't see the cost of assembly, configuration and mantainence. As somone once observed, "Linux is only free if your time has no value." The same could be said for Windows.
My mother is not going to buy your system. Like me, she buys a machine to get work done. She has an iMac and loves it. I have an office full of Macs and I spend almost no time maintaining them (and I'm a programmer and I punish them pretty hard.).
We also have two Linux boxes and they are a big time sink.
Huh? The value of the comic book is 1 dollar. You are adding up the dollars in circulation and proving that globally the transaction economy is zero-sum WRT to the medium of exchange. You could do the same thing with the comic book to show that it is zero-sum WRT to existing capital.
More than that you are missing the point that the opposite of "less than" is "greater than or _equal_". Market efficiencies tend to make equal the natural result and this means that locally the transaction economy tends to be a zero sum game as well.
Finally, who said anything about price controls? Or Rand's sophistry about the "morality" of capitalism? Or communist ideology for that matter? I am generally not in favor of price controls, I think Ayn Rand is a psychotic hag who couldn't think her way out of a wet paper bag and I think that communists are deluding themselves on several fronts.
I also think that markets are tools that we as a society need to understand and use, not be used by. This is why the gift economy is so interesting - it is another tool we can all use to make our lives more enjoyable.
Oh come on. If you know that I think that your goods are worth more than my money, you will raise your price to the break-even point. And vice versa. Markets tend towards maximal "efficiency" in these terms, resulting in a zero sum game.
My partner always prepares for negotiations by asking at what point we are willing to talk away. You have to be able to walk away or you are dead.
This is why the "labor market" is such a farce - at some point is are no longer a free negotiator and must choose between starvation and an exploitative job.
There is a very simple rule here given to me by a guy I used to work for:
"Whoever mentions price first loses."
The correct response to asking for your salery histroy is to ask what the budgented salery range is. They probably won't tell you, but at least everyone will understand that you are not a fool.
As for headhunters, I really don't understand what their purpose is. They troll for resumes on the net, filter out the loonies and pass them on to the client. Any fool can do that for a flat fee. Why they think they deserve a percentage is beyond me.
Then again, I never use them. I have never had a reasonable gig through a headhunter - every single one I've worked with was an ignorant self-important waste of space hawking grim jobs. It's even fun to try to reverse engineer the copmpany/position from their description. We did this once and it was sooo much fun;-) The job still sucked though...
Slashdot Mirror
And if you did screw up and can't afford it, your kids should suffer? How biblical! "For I am a jealous economic system, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the seventh generation."
The question is: What sort of laws are effective? Many of the gun control laws in the US are ineffective because they attempt to punish antisocial behavior after the fact (deterrance is notoriously unreliable). Making it difficult for antisocial individuals to get hold of guns by seriously restricting the supply is far more likely to be effective.
By the same token, if you only make it illegal to have such voting parties, then the ability to enforce compliance is much higher than if you simply require everyone to vote at a single controlled location. Someone might rat on the group, but what if they don't? Would you turn in your loan shark? I doubt it!
This is not to say that there are no technical bugaboos waitingin the wings. Some time in the next 50 years, it is quite concievable that church members could be bugged. Maybe we need to surround voting booths with Faraday cages and walk past an EMP generator...
Once again I couldn't find a Sherlock plugin, although they do have nice comment tags for parsing the output. Anyone knows of an official one (unlike Google, which just has three unofficial ones ands their recommended one looks out of date to me) let me know. Until then, I have put one up on our Sherlock page. Enjoy.
My business partner and I have started reviewing books by describing them as foods. We both independently described Cryptonomicon as a Napolean. Large, tasty, artfully constructed and quite enjoyable, but somewhat lacking in nutritional value (although some of us have metabolisms that require a lot of empty calories ;-))
Can we get them to filter out advertising? Slashdot is pleasanter (and loads faster) since I turned on WebFree again...
In the last six months there has been a noticable increase in MacOS viri. Same old lame deployment schemes (MBDF in a Sherlock plugin was the last one I saw) but I took it as a good sign - the Mac has to be back if teenage wankers who can't find porn on the net start writing viri for MacOS.
Our local rabble-rousing rag printed some pictures of the victim's injuries (from the court documents?). They were nasty.
This is simply not true, as is clear from the WalMart/Amazon lawsuit. WalMart claimed that Amazon hired away their data warehousing team and thereby stole trade secrets. Amazon eventually settled by removing this team from anything having to do with this aspect of their business. No software was even involved, just the contents of some people's heads. You can be damn sure that they are not interested in open sourcing their software - they consider it a crucial competetive advantage (and having talked to the team leader I believe it).
While I think that the essay makes some very good points, I think his solution is no better. The average company expects results from their money and without a guarentee that this will happen, no one is going to fund hackers to just do what they want on the hopes that it will be useful to the funders.
The problem really is cultural - propertarian models are fundamentally different from non-propertarian and no amount of window-dressing will change this.
While I enjoyed this post and felt it was spot on most of the time, I would like to point out that there are more objective interpretations of the QM formalism than the Copenhagen Interpretation. For an interesting discussion of this and a different interpretation, check out the transational interpretation.
I had never heard of Google until this morning. They don't have a Macintosh Sherlock plugin, so I took a moment to write one.
Metasearching rules!
Enjoy.
An interesting variation on FTL information transfer (not to mention a serious slam of the Copenhagen Interpretation) can be found here.
Why would there be a constitutional fight in the US? The supreme court has consistently held (3 seperate cases this century) that the second ammendment does NOT guarentee a right to bear arms outside of the context of a state militia. I gather that the Federalist papers support this interpretation as well.
Just because the gun nuts shout this loudly doesn't make it true.
These give me server errors, but I can view the QT just fine in a browser. Anyone else manage to do this?
England has a nasty habit of punishing its national treasures. Marlborough, Wilde, Turing, Churchill, the list goes on...
(an expat Brit who thinks that a statue is not a bad idea, especially if you have to look at a queer pub at the same time!)
Yes! AI is plauged by the old "If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail" problem. Or in their case, "If all you have is a Turing Machine then everything looks like an Algorithm." This can be very productive (cf. Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and I think that the stuff AI has come up with plays some part in the Big Picture, but paradigms are also limiting and a certain degree of humility is appropriate.
Incidentally, another good layman's book on the embodied mind is Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
I have to say I had the opposite impression. GEB bored me after a while - it all seemed trite, simplistic and obvious and I never finished it. Penrose's books (Shadows of the Mind is the followup) OTOH seemed to proceed from the assumption that we don't know it all and suggest where we might go looking (even his opponents have praise for the review of physics in ENM). There are many interesting questions relating to minds that physics doesn't even know where to begin (one that Penrose doesn't even mention is: Why is there a present moment - not just past and future).
One of the most interesting non-traditional QM theories I have seen is the transactional interpretation put forth by a UW professor. Read all about it. I personally think that what makes us _not_ Turing machines is our ability to comprehend infinity on some level. Strong AI claims that this is an illusion, but TI provides a mechanism that allows for infinite computations in finite time which means that it might not be an illusion after all.
As marks against Penrose, I completely understand the problems with his arguments, but his strong AI opponents have not proved their own case either. Given a choice of where to proceed I come down on the side of present ignorance. History has too often shown that just when we think we know it all something is about to whack us right between the eyes.
No, but people tend to argue that legality/morality somehow ought to solve the problem.
Unfortunately, this is not a moral problem. It is a chemistry problem. This country manufactures most of the armaments in the world (including your "bombs"). Given a large enough concentration of this stuff it will invitably diffuse out into the population as a whole, no matter what checks you try to put on it and statistically some will wind up in the hands of kids like this. Simple osmosis.
The only intelligent way to do gun control is to stop making the damn things.
As usual, I don't see the cost of assembly, configuration and mantainence. As somone once observed, "Linux is only free if your time has no value." The same could be said for Windows.
My mother is not going to buy your system. Like me, she buys a machine to get work done. She has an iMac and loves it. I have an office full of
Macs and I spend almost no time maintaining them (and I'm a programmer and I punish them pretty hard.).
We also have two Linux boxes and they are a big time sink.
Huh? The value of the comic book is 1 dollar. You are adding up the dollars in circulation and proving that globally the transaction economy is zero-sum WRT to the medium of exchange. You could do the same thing with the comic book to show that it is zero-sum WRT to existing capital.
More than that you are missing the point that the opposite of "less than" is "greater than or _equal_". Market efficiencies tend to make equal the natural result and this means that locally the transaction economy tends to be a zero sum game as well.
Finally, who said anything about price controls? Or Rand's sophistry about the "morality" of capitalism? Or communist ideology for that matter? I am generally not in favor of price controls, I think Ayn Rand is a psychotic hag who couldn't think her way out of a wet paper bag and I think that communists are deluding themselves on several fronts.
I also think that markets are tools that we as a society need to understand and use, not be used by. This is why the gift economy is so interesting - it is another tool we can all use to make our lives more enjoyable.
Oh come on. If you know that I think that your goods are worth more than my money, you will raise your price to the break-even point. And vice versa. Markets tend towards maximal "efficiency" in these terms, resulting in a zero sum game.
My partner always prepares for negotiations by asking at what point we are willing to talk away. You have to be able to walk away or you are dead.
This is why the "labor market" is such a farce - at some point is are no longer a free negotiator and must choose between starvation and an exploitative job.
There is a very simple rule here given to me by a guy I used to work for:
;-) The job still sucked though...
"Whoever mentions price first loses."
The correct response to asking for your salery histroy is to ask what the budgented salery range is. They probably won't tell you, but at least everyone will understand that you are not a fool.
As for headhunters, I really don't understand what their purpose is. They troll for resumes on the net, filter out the loonies and pass them on to the client. Any fool can do that for a flat fee. Why they think they deserve a percentage is beyond me.
Then again, I never use them. I have never had a reasonable gig through a headhunter - every single one I've worked with was an ignorant self-important waste of space hawking grim jobs. It's even fun to try to reverse engineer the copmpany/position from their description. We did this once and it was sooo much fun