The surveys used in this study asked way more than simple yes/no questions, of course -- if for no other reason then that they asked multiple questions, and because they asked for demographic information, like age, sex, salary, education, yadda yadda. So what you can do is put this information together and come up with distributions, for example a table in which you list the various activities that people do online, and the typical combinations of those activities, and you list percentages of men and women who do them.
That way, for example, one might find what I suspect, which is that a higher percentage of men than women do (say) 4 or more major online activities and a higher percentage of men than women do 1 or fewer online actitivies, but a higher percentage of women than men do the average number of activities, say 2 or so. You see what I mean? They might find that there are more men than women at both ends of the spectrum of online behaviour. That would be interesting.
Figuring this stuff out isn't hard. The statistical analysis is trivial, if you have the original data, which they do. And as for the "huge fee" -- c'mon, this is the Pew. A wealthy endowed "think tank." They don't do it for a fee. They don't need no stinkin' feeeees. They do it to provide news commentators and talking heads with something predictable to exclaim about. Men boast about how they're so smart and good with tools, but really it's the women who are smart enough to roll their eyes, stop and ask directions, and save the day -- Now that's an unconventional meme on the television these days, isn't it?
The Pew does this stuff to have a political influence, which they frequently do. It's the mighty academic-news-industry complex at work, ha ha... which, I suppose, is probably why they didn't do the more sophisticated analysis. They're not social scientists, they're TV-analyst content-providers. And most likely for the target audience, the very simple analysis reinforcing some conventional wisdom is all that's really wanted. But, yeah, that means it rather bores me. Which was my point.
I think the Executive order in question says something like the FAA can only issue regulations before the 8 years are up if there is a serious accident which it can be shown a specific policy or design feature would have prevented.
I don't think you should interpret the effect as cynically as you do. The thing to bear in mind is that this order changes the motivation of the FAA regulators: let's assume arguendo that they are ordinarily honest, but also ordinarily concerned with their own skins. Now, under ordinary circumstances, they might be under a lot of pressure to regulate the heck out of a baby industry like commercial space flight. First of all, why not? There's no big industry with lots of financial clout (like the mature airline industry) that is going to bitch if they make it much harder to run a business. Second of all, the cost of failing to issue regulations is potentially sky-high, because you can be held liable, politically if not financially, for some horrid accident that maybe coulda possibly shoulda been foreseen.
So there's zero payoff in restraint, but possibly you risk your job if you miss (or are later imagined to have missed) an opportunity to put some "small" safety regulation in place. And on the other side, there's no risk to over-regulation. That means under ordinary circumstances, the FAA's motivations are going to lead to over-regulation, probably.
But what this order does is essentially serve notice on everyone that the FAA is expected to under-regulate, that they're supposed to wait until after something bad happens to think up the rules that could have prevented it. That is going to give them a lot of political cover when something bad does happen, and it will, of course. Knowing they have that political cover takes the heat off them now, changes their motivation, so they are OK with just leaving things alone for a while, which is kind of the point.
I do agree that part of the problem is a namby-pambyness amongst us these days. We fail to realize that mistakes, even costly mistakes, are often in fact the cheapest way to learn lessons. Thinking things out theoretically to the last decimal place, trying to forsee and forestall everything, is very, very expensive, not least of all because lots of stuff you think you need to worry about, you don't.
So often enough the best approach to a new frontier is really just to jump in the buggy and go -- see what happens. Mother Nature will teach you quickly enough what is important, and what is not. At a cost, of course. But that cost may be less than the cost, over time, of too much caution.
Before y'all freak, realize that these regs are doing a favor for the industry. If the Feds don't issue rules, it's not like the industry won't be unsupervised. Oh no! What'll happen instead is that it will get "supervised" by the motley crew of lawyers who sue it, and the decisions of the judges and juries who decide the resulting cases. The net result, that is, would be that a random patchwork of State and Federal Courts would exercise some kind of random and mostly unpredictable supervision of the industry.
Now, think of the McDonald's "Yes The Hot Coffee Is Actually Hot" case, or the Texas Vioxx case, or John Edwards' channeling unborn babies in the Courtroom, or any number of bizarre legal circuses, and you can see why the industry would rather drink liquid oxygen than let that lawyer's Wild West scenario happen.
So what they're getting from the Feds here is a set of clear and comprehensive rules which put an "official" stamp on certain best practises. That way, when -- notice I don't say "if" -- somebody gets sued, then as long as they've followed those regulations they're pretty safe. In Court they just point to the regulations, produce the signed inspection reports, and say they followed the rules, the passenger signed the waiver -- end of story, sorry Charlie. The bad operators will get toasted of course, but they should. The good operators won't win all their cases (Handicapped Single Minority Mother Of Five Rhodes Scholars Crawled Over Broken Glass To Sell Pencils For Nine Years To Pay For Son's Graduation Trip To Space: Court To Decide Evil Capitalist Spaceship Owner's Liability For Tragic Accident Today). But they'll win most of them.
Furthermore, these regulations give the industry a consistent national policy. No random variations from county to county, depending on which fool is sitting in the judge's chair this month. That's worth a lot, since these are going to be national-scale ventures, and it sucks up a lot of company resources to make sure you're complying with 50 sets of state regulations, not to mention a few hundred local rulebooks. Much better to have one set of Federal rules trump them all. (And a mere 120 pages is nothing compared to the tens of thousands of state and local regs that could have come into play.)
Not to mention that unpredictable liability rules mean high interest rates when you borrow money, because investors don't like unmeasurable random risks.
So maybe just take a deep breath and all. There do have to be some rules, after all. As long as they're sensible, this is a good thing. I believe also these rules are issued in lieu of any FAA meddling, too -- as I recall, the FAA is forbidden by Executive order from issuing any regulations beyond this set here for 8 years, or until an avoidable fatal accident happens, whichever comes first. Sounds sensible to me.
OK, you're right, I erroneously assumed the precis offered by/. and the Pew itself summarized the article.
So I read it. But I don't think you're correct. I found no evidence at all in the study of anything other than comparisons of the mean, in every question asked. No variances or standard deviations were listed anywhere in those 55 pages.
So I still think my complaint is accurate, even after reading the entire report.
Polls comparing the average behaviour of men and women are boring and useless. Frankly, who gives a damn what the differences between the average man and average woman is? Someone who is average, I guess...
What a pity someone doesn't look at the differences in the distribution of how men and women use the net. Here's my guess: the distibution of men who use the net is probably much wider than the distribution of women, that is, there are probably more male the female total power net geeks, and also more men than women who never use the net at all.
Unix started as a cut-down (ha ha) version of Multics, and the command naming weirdness is probably a result of that. See, at the time, the job control language for big iron was short and sometimes awfully cryptic. So the Multicians provided commands that were very easy to understand, like "change_working_directory." You didn't need to look in the manual to know what that command did.
But of course, they also realized it would be a pain for power users to have to type those long names out every time they used the command (no command autocompletion in those days, and besides many people communicated with the mainframe using a teletype printer, like the old Decwriter II). So the Multicians also came up with abbreviations for each command, like "cwd" for "change_working_directory," and the deal was that you could use either the full command name or the abbreviation as you pleased.
So far, so good. But when Unix was written, they only took over the abbreviations. Don't know why. And the problem is that the abbreviations were only meant to be used by power users. Newbies were supposed to be using the full commands. So the abbreviations were designed to be fast to type -- short, distinctive -- and not at all with the idea of it being easy to infer what they did. You shouldn't be using the abbreviation if you aren't sure what the command does, not on Multics.
So chalk this weirdness up to historical accident, I'd say. No one knew at the time that Unix would take over the world, especially since Multics itself never became much more than a fascinating research curiosity.
I'm aware of that. I'm just pointing out some people do use "mass" to mean inertial mass, and if that's what he meant, then his equation is complete and correct as it stands.
I appreciate that. Indeed, I'd agree with you, if I agreed with you that the Tennessee Legislature is forced to be logically consistent, and therefore, once they'd decided you "owned" software for the purpose of taxation they were then forced to admit you owned it for any other purpose.
Alas, the one thing lawyers are never forced to be is logically consistent. I predict it will be no trouble at all for the Tennessee Legislature (and the Courts) to set up the law such that you own your software when it comes time to pay property tax on it, but that you do not own your software for many other purposes.
Look, all the kids who were good at logic and respected its power and value went into science, engineering, medicine, retail sales, hamburger flipping or housepainting after they got out of school. It was the kids who were good at verbal bullying and who thought logic was a pretty flower that smelled bad that went into the law. Nasty fact of life. It would be funny if it weren't tragic.
Can't believe no one mentioned Noether's Theorem, so I'll submit it. Proof that the existence of any symmetry in a Lagrangian implies a conserved quantity.
Hence, the fact that force laws do not change with time implies conservation of energy, that they do not change with position implies conservation of linear momentum, and that they do not change with rotation implies conservation of angular momentum. Highly awesome.
You and the OP are probably using different m's. His equation (E = m c^2) is correct at all energies if m is the inertial mass. Your equation is correct if m is the rest mass.
The point is to find some kind of tax that has enough public support to pass. In this case, perhaps the proposer thinks a little intellectual class warfare will work. Maybe he thinks there are lots of people in Tennessee who sort of resent the geeky kind of computer-savvy person who buys a lot of software, so that he can recruit them into supporting this tax rather than a tax on (say) paperclips or gasoline.
It's like the fact that the taxes on "sins" such as booze and cigarettes are very often much higher than taxes on "virtues" like bottled water and running shoes. Coincidence? Ha. Fact is, the fine art of taxation involves expertise in a little word game where you can talk people into parting with a higher fraction of their income by choosing carefully which of their expenditures you are taxing.
I don't agree. I think the legal issues are unimportant, compared to the economic and social issues. The question of whether the Tennessee Legislature can write a law that achieves whatever taxing effect they want, and whether the gnomes in Redmond can write a new EULA that achieves whatever quasi-sorta-kinda ownership reality they want, are both uninteresting to me. I'm sure they can. They've got able lawyers on the payroll.
The only interesting questions here are what the effect would be on the Tennessee economy, and on people's perception of the social contract.
For example, people will generally agree to a tax that they can connect, however, vaguely, with a government service they find necessary. No one would agree to a tax for no other purpose than to give Christmas bonuses to IRS auditors. But they will agree to a tax increase that funds research into crib death. From an economist's point of view, this distinction is meaningless. But it matters to society, and to its harmonious function. So it's interesting how these social arguments of the "justice" of a given form of taxation work themselves out.
I think you are fooling yourself with this statement:
If the property owner so desired, he or she could pay the taxes himself/herself without charging the renter extra for it.
Not in a free market, he can't. The taxes are part of the cost of "production" and in a free market all costs of production must turn up in the price. Any class of producers who fail to pass the full cost of production on to their consumers will always lose money and go out of business. So the "choice" of the property owner not to pass on his taxes is entirely illusory. It's like the "choice" you technically have to not take the medicine when you get sick and just die.
Similarly, the property owner could refuse to pay taxes, and they would be the ones taken to court, not the renter.
Also not quite consistent with the real world. In the real world, your obligation to cover the owner's costs -- i.e. your obligation to pay the rent -- is covered by a contract, and if you fail to pay the taxes (part of the rent), you get taken to Court, and a lot faster than the government will take the owner to Court over taxes. So, yes, your obligation to pay the taxes is enforceable by law. It's not enforceable by criminal law, however, and that remains the slim difference between you and the owner.
I appreciate that there's a lovely word game going on here that the owners and government would like you to fall for, that tries to convince the consumer that his burdens are somehow lighter than those of the producers further up the line. It's a nice fantasy, very comforting.
You're talking like a lawyer, where the question of who is "paying" is some kind of subtle theological question.
Me, I think like an economist. I define the person paying as the guy who is out the cash when the dust settles, period, end of story, Khattam Shud. Doesn't matter to me who gets the tax bill or who writes the check to the government.
From that point of view, all taxes are paid by consumers and the final users of property. Doesn't matter to me who "legally" pays for them. That's just a shell game designed to fool the rubes.
Politicians are smarter than you think. For example, this absurdity might just be stalking horse for a more normal tax increase. Think it through this way:
Let's suppose the TN tax board says, uh oh, the state needs more money. But citizens are going to resist an ordinary tax increase on, say, property or cars. Well, not all citizens. Only the citizens who actually own property and cars -- e.g. middle-class and above, entrepreneurs, business-owners. How can we recruit them to support such a tax?
Idea! Let's float some outrageous proposal about taxing some asset they use to generate their wealth. It needn't be a big tax, but just the idea that we're going to be poking our fingers into an area that has been blessedly free of Big Brother will make them freak. They'll think of all the new fees they'll have to pay accountants and lawyers and secretaries to figure out the right way to buy software and keep the records...
Then, in about 6 weeks, we can drop the other shoe. Or, gentlemen, we could just have an ordinary tax increase, a small one -- what say you to that? Chorus of assent, along with sighs of relief...and the tax board smiles privately. Mission accomplished!
You certainly do. They're part of the rent. It's no different from the way you pay gasoline taxes when you buy gas. The taxes are figured into the price of the gas.
You're correct that the government does not send leaseholders a bill for the property taxes. But surely the absence of a written bill does not fool you into thinking you're not paying one?
Come on, on this issue any half decent lawyer is going to be able to have his cake and eat it too. You can be quite confident that both the EULA and the tax will be found all legal and proper as Sunday, even if the judge(s) in the case have to do a little fancy twisting and turning when they write the opinion.
Just one example in another area would be zoning regulations or Federal land-use regulations: you think you own your property in fee simple once you buy it and clear the mortgage, and can then do what you damn well please with it, but oopsy, you don't, not really, because the city, state and even Federal government can just come in any time after you buy it, and tax it or impose pretty much whatever restrictions they want on your use of it.
In short, your rights to "your" property have always been at the pleasure of the majority. Make a note of that fact, and remember it next election.
Good grief, yes. See, the reason the IQ 100 lawyers have been able to keep the IQ 130+ intellectuals under control throughout history is because intellectuals always think logical consistency is some kind of restraint on the law. The lawyers probably laugh themselves sick over that naive folly.
Of course. I'm not doubting the forces of evolution at all, and I don't know any other way in which life can get started.
What I'm saying is that, until we have a good idea how a chemical system can evolve from non-life to life, we will not have a good idea about (1) what the good conditions for the origin of life are, and (2) what the "signposts" are that suggest the existence of life, and (3) what alternative forms of life there might be, other than the carbon-based DNA/protein stuff we know.
It's like this: because we know what a computer is in the abstract sense, e.g. a Turing machine, we can imagine many different instantiations or realizations of a computer. Analog, digital, based on tubes, transistors, steam valves and pipes, with this or that logic, et cetera and so forth.
But we don't know what life is like in the abstract. This is reflected in the fact that we don't know how life can be constructed, deliberately or through evolution, from non-life. We really only know what life is like in its Earthly manisfestation. We have only the fuzziest of notions what a different implementation of life would be like. So we are severely handicapped when it comes to looking for life elsewhere. Basically, we don't really know what we're looking for, aside from life that looks like our own.
You might say, to continue the geeky analogy, that life is so far a mostly "closed-source" application. We have many compiled applications to examine, but no source code, and only the vaguest idea how the "compiler" might work. (By the way, in this context I don't mean that we don't know how to "write the program" for making a cell from another cell, or for making a cell function properly. I mean we don't know how to "write the program" that makes a cell from scratch.)
Complex really means something like DNA or a protein, with tens of thousands of atoms in it, not a molecule as simple as a single nucleotide or one amino acid, with a dozen or so.
It isn't really the step from the simplest of molecules, like water, to slightly more complex molecules, like amino acids, which is the problem. Experiments starting with Stanley Miller's have shown this is an easy step.
Very likely the tricky step is forming an enclosed system in which information is passed back and forth from some information-storage molecule like DNA to some actuator molecules, like proteins. Not only have we never seen such a system, outside of life and deliberately-constructed life analogues, but we have no idea how it could even come about.
It's hard to even imagine a plausible evolutionary sequence that leads from random organic molecules to this kind of system. The problem is that the benefits of being "alive", in particular being able to reproduce yourself are clear, but it's hard to see any benefits to being "halfway alive", e.g. to having half of the necessary molecules for reproducing yourself. That makes it hard to imagine any intermediate steps between non-life and life that would be favored by natural selection. And if there aren't any good intermediate stages, then life has to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly unlikely coming together of an entire living system. This is almost equally hard to swallow (unless you want to invoke the hand of God).
A good analogy is with wings: how do wings evolve? The problem is that on first glance it doesn't seem useful to have only one wing, or wings too short to lift your mass. So how could a wingless creature evolve by small stages towards having wings? It would seem that wings would have to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly-unlikely set of mutations that would give a species wings in one generation.
However, I believe the current belief is that wings started off as cooling fins, or possibly steering vanes for animals that leaped through the air. In which case, of course small fins or vanes are useful, and one can see the intermediate stages that would allow full wings to evolve gradually. What's needed in evolutionary biology is some similar insight into how certain groupings of molecules well short of what we'd call a living system could, nevertheless, have an evolutionary advantage.
What's also needed is some idea of why we don't see this kind of process going on all the time on Earth. Why don't we see things halfway to living all the time in the muds and stagnant ponds of the Earth? One possible answer is that the best conditions for the evolution of life (e.g. no free oxygen) are no longer present.
I disagree. It will please the narcissist in all of us, to design a machine that can talk to us.
But after you get over the coolness factor of having built in in the first place, what then? What can it do that any random human can't do? As the old joke goes, why go to all that trouble to create artificial brains when you can crate natural brains by unskilled labor?
Since you opened the topic, I'll tell you what I think would be the most remarkable developments in AI:
(1) Something truly more intelligent than us. I don't mean with an IQ of 200, I mean as much more intelligent than us as we are more intelligent than a horse. To us, I suppose it would seem to be able to pull certainties from the air, because we would probably not even be able to follow the process by which it could figure things out.
Of course, this seems damn unlikely. How could we program something to be more intelligent than us? How could we design deductive patterns that we ourselves can't use, can't even comprehend?
(2) Designing a machine awareness not limited by our "feature" of attention. Although we can process at a primitive level many things simultaneously, we can do our most complex work only one thing at at time, in a single stream of computation. We have to "pay attention" or "concentrate" on one thing at a time.
What would happen if we could design a machine awareness that didn't have this feature? Which could truly multi-task even at the highest level, and think about many things -- possible hundreds of things -- simultaneously?
We all know there are problems that are difficult to solve unless you can think simultaneously about more than one thing. We try to do this more or less by rapidly switching our attention back and forth, from one aspect of the problem to the other. What if a machine could just do it all simultaneously? Maybe problems that elude us could be solved easily by it. It wouldn't be smarter than us, really -- just have a very different way of thinking about problems. That would be way cool.
And I don't really give a damn if, in either (1) or (2), the computer has to talk to me in a long string of compact symbols that don't sound the least little bit like ordinary human speech. Compare to these cognitive wonders, talking like a person seems to me like a parlor trick.
(1) I'm entitled to use my own experience to judge whether human communication for the purposes of complex information conveyance wastes bandwidth. Why not? There's no evidence that my experience is atypical. Consider it a random sampling of all human conversation, if you will. Which means that what is evidently true of all human conversation must, absent evidence of some weird systematic bias, be true of the conversation I've observed personally.
(2) And my empirical judgment on that sample is that generally speaking it could be done a lot more compactly. You're free to disagree on the basis of your own empirical experience. That is, you're free to assert that most of the conversation you've heard is just about as efficient and short as it could be. Do you? (snicker)
(3) The argument that abstract and complex human conversation must be efficient because it's subject to natural selection rests on the assumption that efficiency in this kind of communication is adaptive. I doubt that. I'm underwhelmed by the suggestion that a hominid able to efficiently express probabilities would have a serious advantage over one that could not (and which used the brainpower required to do something else instead, e.g. quickly and accurately guess the emotional state of potential mates and enemies from their faces).
Every other species on the planet gets along fine without abstract complex information exchange. That seems weird if it's so all-fired useful. I find it far more likely, therefore, that our nifty ability to exchange complex and abstract information is just an amusing side-effect of a system evolved for more plebian purposes, and I doubt it has been subjected to natural selection for efficiency.
(4) "Pattern recognition" isn't a vague term, it's just a general term. After all, you understood something by it well enough to take umbrage at the idea that this is largely how we think. So while you thought what I asserted about pattern recognition was nonsense, you certainly seemd to find it well-defined nonsense!
As for what I meant by it, I meant essentially what Searle mocks in the famous Chinese box thought experiment. I mean a set of agents manipulating data according to locally simple rules, where any complex global meaning emerges only as an implication of what the agents do -- there is no Cartesian observer, no "I" at the center of the spider web, appreciating the global "meaning" of it all.
From the way I say this you might deduce I take the Dennettist position that mocks the entire idea of the Cartesian observer in his gallery, appreciating the "meaning" of it all. You'd be right. If pressed I would say that I think the evidence that human beings use classical Aristotelian deductive logic at all is scanty, at best. They seem to use it almost exclusively to rationalize conclusions already reached by some other method.
(5) The evidence that we think using networks of agents doing what I'd call "pattern recognition" instead of deduction from abstract principle that I find compelling would be, to start:
(a) Our natural "clock speed" is so low, at best a few kHz, that there's no way we could perform the cognitive tasks we do in the time we do except through massively parallel algorithms.
(b) In visual processing it's very clear a great deal of heirarchical pattern recognition goes on, e.g. cells just behind the retina detect corners and edges, movement, et cetera, and what goes up the optic nerve is not a pixel-by-pixel image but rather a low-level abstraction of the image, more or less a list of various pattern elements in the image. Further up the pipe it seems likely (based, for example, on various quirks that allow us to be subject to optical illusions) that more pattern detection goes on, that is, that another layer distributes more complex lists of higher-level pattern elements (foreground and background objects, moving and stationary, irregular and compact, et cetera). This
(1) No it's not, because your listener frequently doesn't know what you mean by "that one," so the conversations are actually more like this:
Computer style:
"I want the book on the second shelf third from the right."
Human style:
"That one".
"Uh...she's too young for you, dude!"
"No, not the girl, you idiot, the book, behind her."
"Which book? AI For Dummies, 3rd ed.?"
"Noooo, the book on XML near it."
"This one?"
"No, on the shelf above that one -- the second shelf."
"This one?"
"No, the blue book next to it. The third book from the right."
"OK."
I'd be willing to agree that in principle, when the context is well-known, that, yeah, it is easier to return the value of a "local variable" like "that one" rather than a global variable like "the book on the second shelf...etc." But, alas, far too many conversations in my experience look like the second one above for me to really buy it. I think we talk like that way because speech for abstract information conveyance is an evolutionary accident and there's no pressure to make it more efficient. (Communication of essential information, like "I want to have sex with you" is another story -- that is conveyed very efficiently indeed, lightning quick.)
(2) Argh! The Cartesian deductive logic scam. Any decision or insight can be rationalized post facto as following from a chain of orderly deductive logic. But is that actually how we figured it out? Or is the deductive stuff just how we tell ourselves we did, or how we explain the correctness of the conclusion to others? I'd say the thought that this is how we actually think, that we actually have brain tissue that makes deductions from abstract principles, is getting more doubtful with every discovery of how our brains actually work.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I haven't been clear still...
The surveys used in this study asked way more than simple yes/no questions, of course -- if for no other reason then that they asked multiple questions, and because they asked for demographic information, like age, sex, salary, education, yadda yadda. So what you can do is put this information together and come up with distributions, for example a table in which you list the various activities that people do online, and the typical combinations of those activities, and you list percentages of men and women who do them.
That way, for example, one might find what I suspect, which is that a higher percentage of men than women do (say) 4 or more major online activities and a higher percentage of men than women do 1 or fewer online actitivies, but a higher percentage of women than men do the average number of activities, say 2 or so. You see what I mean? They might find that there are more men than women at both ends of the spectrum of online behaviour. That would be interesting.
Figuring this stuff out isn't hard. The statistical analysis is trivial, if you have the original data, which they do. And as for the "huge fee" -- c'mon, this is the Pew. A wealthy endowed "think tank." They don't do it for a fee. They don't need no stinkin' feeeees. They do it to provide news commentators and talking heads with something predictable to exclaim about. Men boast about how they're so smart and good with tools, but really it's the women who are smart enough to roll their eyes, stop and ask directions, and save the day -- Now that's an unconventional meme on the television these days, isn't it?
The Pew does this stuff to have a political influence, which they frequently do. It's the mighty academic-news-industry complex at work, ha ha... which, I suppose, is probably why they didn't do the more sophisticated analysis. They're not social scientists, they're TV-analyst content-providers. And most likely for the target audience, the very simple analysis reinforcing some conventional wisdom is all that's really wanted. But, yeah, that means it rather bores me. Which was my point.
I think the Executive order in question says something like the FAA can only issue regulations before the 8 years are up if there is a serious accident which it can be shown a specific policy or design feature would have prevented.
I don't think you should interpret the effect as cynically as you do. The thing to bear in mind is that this order changes the motivation of the FAA regulators: let's assume arguendo that they are ordinarily honest, but also ordinarily concerned with their own skins. Now, under ordinary circumstances, they might be under a lot of pressure to regulate the heck out of a baby industry like commercial space flight. First of all, why not? There's no big industry with lots of financial clout (like the mature airline industry) that is going to bitch if they make it much harder to run a business. Second of all, the cost of failing to issue regulations is potentially sky-high, because you can be held liable, politically if not financially, for some horrid accident that maybe coulda possibly shoulda been foreseen.
So there's zero payoff in restraint, but possibly you risk your job if you miss (or are later imagined to have missed) an opportunity to put some "small" safety regulation in place. And on the other side, there's no risk to over-regulation. That means under ordinary circumstances, the FAA's motivations are going to lead to over-regulation, probably.
But what this order does is essentially serve notice on everyone that the FAA is expected to under-regulate, that they're supposed to wait until after something bad happens to think up the rules that could have prevented it. That is going to give them a lot of political cover when something bad does happen, and it will, of course. Knowing they have that political cover takes the heat off them now, changes their motivation, so they are OK with just leaving things alone for a while, which is kind of the point.
I do agree that part of the problem is a namby-pambyness amongst us these days. We fail to realize that mistakes, even costly mistakes, are often in fact the cheapest way to learn lessons. Thinking things out theoretically to the last decimal place, trying to forsee and forestall everything, is very, very expensive, not least of all because lots of stuff you think you need to worry about, you don't.
So often enough the best approach to a new frontier is really just to jump in the buggy and go -- see what happens. Mother Nature will teach you quickly enough what is important, and what is not. At a cost, of course. But that cost may be less than the cost, over time, of too much caution.
Before y'all freak, realize that these regs are doing a favor for the industry. If the Feds don't issue rules, it's not like the industry won't be unsupervised. Oh no! What'll happen instead is that it will get "supervised" by the motley crew of lawyers who sue it, and the decisions of the judges and juries who decide the resulting cases. The net result, that is, would be that a random patchwork of State and Federal Courts would exercise some kind of random and mostly unpredictable supervision of the industry.
Now, think of the McDonald's "Yes The Hot Coffee Is Actually Hot" case, or the Texas Vioxx case, or John Edwards' channeling unborn babies in the Courtroom, or any number of bizarre legal circuses, and you can see why the industry would rather drink liquid oxygen than let that lawyer's Wild West scenario happen.
So what they're getting from the Feds here is a set of clear and comprehensive rules which put an "official" stamp on certain best practises. That way, when -- notice I don't say "if" -- somebody gets sued, then as long as they've followed those regulations they're pretty safe. In Court they just point to the regulations, produce the signed inspection reports, and say they followed the rules, the passenger signed the waiver -- end of story, sorry Charlie. The bad operators will get toasted of course, but they should. The good operators won't win all their cases (Handicapped Single Minority Mother Of Five Rhodes Scholars Crawled Over Broken Glass To Sell Pencils For Nine Years To Pay For Son's Graduation Trip To Space: Court To Decide Evil Capitalist Spaceship Owner's Liability For Tragic Accident Today). But they'll win most of them.
Furthermore, these regulations give the industry a consistent national policy. No random variations from county to county, depending on which fool is sitting in the judge's chair this month. That's worth a lot, since these are going to be national-scale ventures, and it sucks up a lot of company resources to make sure you're complying with 50 sets of state regulations, not to mention a few hundred local rulebooks. Much better to have one set of Federal rules trump them all. (And a mere 120 pages is nothing compared to the tens of thousands of state and local regs that could have come into play.)
Not to mention that unpredictable liability rules mean high interest rates when you borrow money, because investors don't like unmeasurable random risks.
So maybe just take a deep breath and all. There do have to be some rules, after all. As long as they're sensible, this is a good thing. I believe also these rules are issued in lieu of any FAA meddling, too -- as I recall, the FAA is forbidden by Executive order from issuing any regulations beyond this set here for 8 years, or until an avoidable fatal accident happens, whichever comes first. Sounds sensible to me.
Nope, the study does not contain any moments of the distributions higher than the first, the mean. That's what I said.
I'm not sure why you are interested if you don't "give a damm".
I'm interested in the higher moments, I don't give a damn about the mean. Sorry that wasn't clear.
OK, you're right, I erroneously assumed the precis offered by /. and the Pew itself summarized the article.
So I read it. But I don't think you're correct. I found no evidence at all in the study of anything other than comparisons of the mean, in every question asked. No variances or standard deviations were listed anywhere in those 55 pages.
So I still think my complaint is accurate, even after reading the entire report.
Polls comparing the average behaviour of men and women are boring and useless. Frankly, who gives a damn what the differences between the average man and average woman is? Someone who is average, I guess...
What a pity someone doesn't look at the differences in the distribution of how men and women use the net. Here's my guess: the distibution of men who use the net is probably much wider than the distribution of women, that is, there are probably more male the female total power net geeks, and also more men than women who never use the net at all.
Unix started as a cut-down (ha ha) version of Multics, and the command naming weirdness is probably a result of that. See, at the time, the job control language for big iron was short and sometimes awfully cryptic. So the Multicians provided commands that were very easy to understand, like "change_working_directory." You didn't need to look in the manual to know what that command did.
But of course, they also realized it would be a pain for power users to have to type those long names out every time they used the command (no command autocompletion in those days, and besides many people communicated with the mainframe using a teletype printer, like the old Decwriter II). So the Multicians also came up with abbreviations for each command, like "cwd" for "change_working_directory," and the deal was that you could use either the full command name or the abbreviation as you pleased.
So far, so good. But when Unix was written, they only took over the abbreviations. Don't know why. And the problem is that the abbreviations were only meant to be used by power users. Newbies were supposed to be using the full commands. So the abbreviations were designed to be fast to type -- short, distinctive -- and not at all with the idea of it being easy to infer what they did. You shouldn't be using the abbreviation if you aren't sure what the command does, not on Multics.
So chalk this weirdness up to historical accident, I'd say. No one knew at the time that Unix would take over the world, especially since Multics itself never became much more than a fascinating research curiosity.
I'm aware of that. I'm just pointing out some people do use "mass" to mean inertial mass, and if that's what he meant, then his equation is complete and correct as it stands.
I appreciate that. Indeed, I'd agree with you, if I agreed with you that the Tennessee Legislature is forced to be logically consistent, and therefore, once they'd decided you "owned" software for the purpose of taxation they were then forced to admit you owned it for any other purpose.
Alas, the one thing lawyers are never forced to be is logically consistent. I predict it will be no trouble at all for the Tennessee Legislature (and the Courts) to set up the law such that you own your software when it comes time to pay property tax on it, but that you do not own your software for many other purposes.
Look, all the kids who were good at logic and respected its power and value went into science, engineering, medicine, retail sales, hamburger flipping or housepainting after they got out of school. It was the kids who were good at verbal bullying and who thought logic was a pretty flower that smelled bad that went into the law. Nasty fact of life. It would be funny if it weren't tragic.
Can't believe no one mentioned Noether's Theorem, so I'll submit it. Proof that the existence of any symmetry in a Lagrangian implies a conserved quantity.
Hence, the fact that force laws do not change with time implies conservation of energy, that they do not change with position implies conservation of linear momentum, and that they do not change with rotation implies conservation of angular momentum. Highly awesome.
You and the OP are probably using different m's. His equation (E = m c^2) is correct at all energies if m is the inertial mass. Your equation is correct if m is the rest mass.
The point is to find some kind of tax that has enough public support to pass. In this case, perhaps the proposer thinks a little intellectual class warfare will work. Maybe he thinks there are lots of people in Tennessee who sort of resent the geeky kind of computer-savvy person who buys a lot of software, so that he can recruit them into supporting this tax rather than a tax on (say) paperclips or gasoline.
It's like the fact that the taxes on "sins" such as booze and cigarettes are very often much higher than taxes on "virtues" like bottled water and running shoes. Coincidence? Ha. Fact is, the fine art of taxation involves expertise in a little word game where you can talk people into parting with a higher fraction of their income by choosing carefully which of their expenditures you are taxing.
I don't agree. I think the legal issues are unimportant, compared to the economic and social issues. The question of whether the Tennessee Legislature can write a law that achieves whatever taxing effect they want, and whether the gnomes in Redmond can write a new EULA that achieves whatever quasi-sorta-kinda ownership reality they want, are both uninteresting to me. I'm sure they can. They've got able lawyers on the payroll.
The only interesting questions here are what the effect would be on the Tennessee economy, and on people's perception of the social contract.
For example, people will generally agree to a tax that they can connect, however, vaguely, with a government service they find necessary. No one would agree to a tax for no other purpose than to give Christmas bonuses to IRS auditors. But they will agree to a tax increase that funds research into crib death. From an economist's point of view, this distinction is meaningless. But it matters to society, and to its harmonious function. So it's interesting how these social arguments of the "justice" of a given form of taxation work themselves out.
I think you are fooling yourself with this statement:
If the property owner so desired, he or she could pay the taxes himself/herself without charging the renter extra for it.
Not in a free market, he can't. The taxes are part of the cost of "production" and in a free market all costs of production must turn up in the price. Any class of producers who fail to pass the full cost of production on to their consumers will always lose money and go out of business. So the "choice" of the property owner not to pass on his taxes is entirely illusory. It's like the "choice" you technically have to not take the medicine when you get sick and just die.
Similarly, the property owner could refuse to pay taxes, and they would be the ones taken to court, not the renter.
Also not quite consistent with the real world. In the real world, your obligation to cover the owner's costs -- i.e. your obligation to pay the rent -- is covered by a contract, and if you fail to pay the taxes (part of the rent), you get taken to Court, and a lot faster than the government will take the owner to Court over taxes. So, yes, your obligation to pay the taxes is enforceable by law. It's not enforceable by criminal law, however, and that remains the slim difference between you and the owner.
I appreciate that there's a lovely word game going on here that the owners and government would like you to fall for, that tries to convince the consumer that his burdens are somehow lighter than those of the producers further up the line. It's a nice fantasy, very comforting.
You're talking like a lawyer, where the question of who is "paying" is some kind of subtle theological question.
Me, I think like an economist. I define the person paying as the guy who is out the cash when the dust settles, period, end of story, Khattam Shud. Doesn't matter to me who gets the tax bill or who writes the check to the government.
From that point of view, all taxes are paid by consumers and the final users of property. Doesn't matter to me who "legally" pays for them. That's just a shell game designed to fool the rubes.
Politicians are smarter than you think. For example, this absurdity might just be stalking horse for a more normal tax increase. Think it through this way:
Let's suppose the TN tax board says, uh oh, the state needs more money. But citizens are going to resist an ordinary tax increase on, say, property or cars. Well, not all citizens. Only the citizens who actually own property and cars -- e.g. middle-class and above, entrepreneurs, business-owners. How can we recruit them to support such a tax?
Idea! Let's float some outrageous proposal about taxing some asset they use to generate their wealth. It needn't be a big tax, but just the idea that we're going to be poking our fingers into an area that has been blessedly free of Big Brother will make them freak. They'll think of all the new fees they'll have to pay accountants and lawyers and secretaries to figure out the right way to buy software and keep the records...
Then, in about 6 weeks, we can drop the other shoe. Or, gentlemen, we could just have an ordinary tax increase, a small one -- what say you to that? Chorus of assent, along with sighs of relief...and the tax board smiles privately. Mission accomplished!
You certainly do. They're part of the rent. It's no different from the way you pay gasoline taxes when you buy gas. The taxes are figured into the price of the gas.
You're correct that the government does not send leaseholders a bill for the property taxes. But surely the absence of a written bill does not fool you into thinking you're not paying one?
Come on, on this issue any half decent lawyer is going to be able to have his cake and eat it too. You can be quite confident that both the EULA and the tax will be found all legal and proper as Sunday, even if the judge(s) in the case have to do a little fancy twisting and turning when they write the opinion.
Just one example in another area would be zoning regulations or Federal land-use regulations: you think you own your property in fee simple once you buy it and clear the mortgage, and can then do what you damn well please with it, but oopsy, you don't, not really, because the city, state and even Federal government can just come in any time after you buy it, and tax it or impose pretty much whatever restrictions they want on your use of it.
In short, your rights to "your" property have always been at the pleasure of the majority. Make a note of that fact, and remember it next election.
Good grief, yes. See, the reason the IQ 100 lawyers have been able to keep the IQ 130+ intellectuals under control throughout history is because intellectuals always think logical consistency is some kind of restraint on the law. The lawyers probably laugh themselves sick over that naive folly.
Of course. I'm not doubting the forces of evolution at all, and I don't know any other way in which life can get started.
What I'm saying is that, until we have a good idea how a chemical system can evolve from non-life to life, we will not have a good idea about (1) what the good conditions for the origin of life are, and (2) what the "signposts" are that suggest the existence of life, and (3) what alternative forms of life there might be, other than the carbon-based DNA/protein stuff we know.
It's like this: because we know what a computer is in the abstract sense, e.g. a Turing machine, we can imagine many different instantiations or realizations of a computer. Analog, digital, based on tubes, transistors, steam valves and pipes, with this or that logic, et cetera and so forth.
But we don't know what life is like in the abstract. This is reflected in the fact that we don't know how life can be constructed, deliberately or through evolution, from non-life. We really only know what life is like in its Earthly manisfestation. We have only the fuzziest of notions what a different implementation of life would be like. So we are severely handicapped when it comes to looking for life elsewhere. Basically, we don't really know what we're looking for, aside from life that looks like our own.
You might say, to continue the geeky analogy, that life is so far a mostly "closed-source" application. We have many compiled applications to examine, but no source code, and only the vaguest idea how the "compiler" might work. (By the way, in this context I don't mean that we don't know how to "write the program" for making a cell from another cell, or for making a cell function properly. I mean we don't know how to "write the program" that makes a cell from scratch.)
Complex really means something like DNA or a protein, with tens of thousands of atoms in it, not a molecule as simple as a single nucleotide or one amino acid, with a dozen or so.
It isn't really the step from the simplest of molecules, like water, to slightly more complex molecules, like amino acids, which is the problem. Experiments starting with Stanley Miller's have shown this is an easy step.
Very likely the tricky step is forming an enclosed system in which information is passed back and forth from some information-storage molecule like DNA to some actuator molecules, like proteins. Not only have we never seen such a system, outside of life and deliberately-constructed life analogues, but we have no idea how it could even come about.
It's hard to even imagine a plausible evolutionary sequence that leads from random organic molecules to this kind of system. The problem is that the benefits of being "alive", in particular being able to reproduce yourself are clear, but it's hard to see any benefits to being "halfway alive", e.g. to having half of the necessary molecules for reproducing yourself. That makes it hard to imagine any intermediate steps between non-life and life that would be favored by natural selection. And if there aren't any good intermediate stages, then life has to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly unlikely coming together of an entire living system. This is almost equally hard to swallow (unless you want to invoke the hand of God).
A good analogy is with wings: how do wings evolve? The problem is that on first glance it doesn't seem useful to have only one wing, or wings too short to lift your mass. So how could a wingless creature evolve by small stages towards having wings? It would seem that wings would have to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly-unlikely set of mutations that would give a species wings in one generation.
However, I believe the current belief is that wings started off as cooling fins, or possibly steering vanes for animals that leaped through the air. In which case, of course small fins or vanes are useful, and one can see the intermediate stages that would allow full wings to evolve gradually. What's needed in evolutionary biology is some similar insight into how certain groupings of molecules well short of what we'd call a living system could, nevertheless, have an evolutionary advantage.
What's also needed is some idea of why we don't see this kind of process going on all the time on Earth. Why don't we see things halfway to living all the time in the muds and stagnant ponds of the Earth? One possible answer is that the best conditions for the evolution of life (e.g. no free oxygen) are no longer present.
I thought he was waiting for the version that uses a positron-emitting cathode.
I disagree. It will please the narcissist in all of us, to design a machine that can talk to us.
But after you get over the coolness factor of having built in in the first place, what then? What can it do that any random human can't do? As the old joke goes, why go to all that trouble to create artificial brains when you can crate natural brains by unskilled labor?
Since you opened the topic, I'll tell you what I think would be the most remarkable developments in AI:
(1) Something truly more intelligent than us. I don't mean with an IQ of 200, I mean as much more intelligent than us as we are more intelligent than a horse. To us, I suppose it would seem to be able to pull certainties from the air, because we would probably not even be able to follow the process by which it could figure things out.
Of course, this seems damn unlikely. How could we program something to be more intelligent than us? How could we design deductive patterns that we ourselves can't use, can't even comprehend?
(2) Designing a machine awareness not limited by our "feature" of attention. Although we can process at a primitive level many things simultaneously, we can do our most complex work only one thing at at time, in a single stream of computation. We have to "pay attention" or "concentrate" on one thing at a time.
What would happen if we could design a machine awareness that didn't have this feature? Which could truly multi-task even at the highest level, and think about many things -- possible hundreds of things -- simultaneously?
We all know there are problems that are difficult to solve unless you can think simultaneously about more than one thing. We try to do this more or less by rapidly switching our attention back and forth, from one aspect of the problem to the other. What if a machine could just do it all simultaneously? Maybe problems that elude us could be solved easily by it. It wouldn't be smarter than us, really -- just have a very different way of thinking about problems. That would be way cool.
And I don't really give a damn if, in either (1) or (2), the computer has to talk to me in a long string of compact symbols that don't sound the least little bit like ordinary human speech. Compare to these cognitive wonders, talking like a person seems to me like a parlor trick.
OK, I'll bite, as follows:
(1) I'm entitled to use my own experience to judge whether human communication for the purposes of complex information conveyance wastes bandwidth. Why not? There's no evidence that my experience is atypical. Consider it a random sampling of all human conversation, if you will. Which means that what is evidently true of all human conversation must, absent evidence of some weird systematic bias, be true of the conversation I've observed personally.
(2) And my empirical judgment on that sample is that generally speaking it could be done a lot more compactly. You're free to disagree on the basis of your own empirical experience. That is, you're free to assert that most of the conversation you've heard is just about as efficient and short as it could be. Do you? (snicker)
(3) The argument that abstract and complex human conversation must be efficient because it's subject to natural selection rests on the assumption that efficiency in this kind of communication is adaptive. I doubt that. I'm underwhelmed by the suggestion that a hominid able to efficiently express probabilities would have a serious advantage over one that could not (and which used the brainpower required to do something else instead, e.g. quickly and accurately guess the emotional state of potential mates and enemies from their faces).
Every other species on the planet gets along fine without abstract complex information exchange. That seems weird if it's so all-fired useful. I find it far more likely, therefore, that our nifty ability to exchange complex and abstract information is just an amusing side-effect of a system evolved for more plebian purposes, and I doubt it has been subjected to natural selection for efficiency.
(4) "Pattern recognition" isn't a vague term, it's just a general term. After all, you understood something by it well enough to take umbrage at the idea that this is largely how we think. So while you thought what I asserted about pattern recognition was nonsense, you certainly seemd to find it well-defined nonsense!
As for what I meant by it, I meant essentially what Searle mocks in the famous Chinese box thought experiment. I mean a set of agents manipulating data according to locally simple rules, where any complex global meaning emerges only as an implication of what the agents do -- there is no Cartesian observer, no "I" at the center of the spider web, appreciating the global "meaning" of it all.
From the way I say this you might deduce I take the Dennettist position that mocks the entire idea of the Cartesian observer in his gallery, appreciating the "meaning" of it all. You'd be right. If pressed I would say that I think the evidence that human beings use classical Aristotelian deductive logic at all is scanty, at best. They seem to use it almost exclusively to rationalize conclusions already reached by some other method.
(5) The evidence that we think using networks of agents doing what I'd call "pattern recognition" instead of deduction from abstract principle that I find compelling would be, to start:
(a) Our natural "clock speed" is so low, at best a few kHz, that there's no way we could perform the cognitive tasks we do in the time we do except through massively parallel algorithms.
(b) In visual processing it's very clear a great deal of heirarchical pattern recognition goes on, e.g. cells just behind the retina detect corners and edges, movement, et cetera, and what goes up the optic nerve is not a pixel-by-pixel image but rather a low-level abstraction of the image, more or less a list of various pattern elements in the image. Further up the pipe it seems likely (based, for example, on various quirks that allow us to be subject to optical illusions) that more pattern detection goes on, that is, that another layer distributes more complex lists of higher-level pattern elements (foreground and background objects, moving and stationary, irregular and compact, et cetera). This
(1) No it's not, because your listener frequently doesn't know what you mean by "that one," so the conversations are actually more like this:
Computer style:
"I want the book on the second shelf third from the right."
Human style:
"That one".
"Uh...she's too young for you, dude!"
"No, not the girl, you idiot, the book, behind her."
"Which book? AI For Dummies, 3rd ed.?"
"Noooo, the book on XML near it."
"This one?"
"No, on the shelf above that one -- the second shelf."
"This one?"
"No, the blue book next to it. The third book from the right."
"OK."
I'd be willing to agree that in principle, when the context is well-known, that, yeah, it is easier to return the value of a "local variable" like "that one" rather than a global variable like "the book on the second shelf...etc." But, alas, far too many conversations in my experience look like the second one above for me to really buy it. I think we talk like that way because speech for abstract information conveyance is an evolutionary accident and there's no pressure to make it more efficient. (Communication of essential information, like "I want to have sex with you" is another story -- that is conveyed very efficiently indeed, lightning quick.)
(2) Argh! The Cartesian deductive logic scam. Any decision or insight can be rationalized post facto as following from a chain of orderly deductive logic. But is that actually how we figured it out? Or is the deductive stuff just how we tell ourselves we did, or how we explain the correctness of the conclusion to others? I'd say the thought that this is how we actually think, that we actually have brain tissue that makes deductions from abstract principles, is getting more doubtful with every discovery of how our brains actually work.