If the management took to choice to actively reduce the company profits it would mean lower dividends to shareholders and ultimately a lower stock price.
Too much of that and the shareholders would kick out the management and replace them with a new team who maximised profits.
It is in no-one's interest to run a large company while minimising profits as a tax dodge. No one benefits.
I have Thunderbird on various computers and it runs brilliantly on almost all of them. At work, I have one with an account with over 250k messages in the inbox and it behaves fine. Another computer has around 12 accounts setup with perhaps 3 or 4 million emails in total between them ad behaves well.
My main problem is that it still stores all the messages for a folder in POP3 in a single file with a 32 bit index, so no single folder can go above 4.2gb. I spend a lot of time at work managing folder sizes to keep them under this ridiculous 4gb limit.
Not at all - it makes perfectly rational sense if the marginal benefit of an extra few dollars is greater than the marginal benefit of an extra hour of free time.
For example, if I'm saving for a deposit on a mortgaged house purchase then an extra 15% on my salary might be great even if it comes with a 25% increase in my working hours.
Against all the opposition on this site, I agree with you here. If science is to be defined as the aggregation of data and subsequent creation of theory to describe and explain it, then it matters not whether the world was created ten minutes ago by God with all the fossils and quasars and cosmic background radiations designed to look as if they're ancient.
It wouldn't make any difference to the process of deducing universal laws from specific observations that is science.
The only price one must pay is that one cannot ever therefore bring the God used in this scenario into a discussion of science, since s/he has by definition put itself outside of the scope of the scientific remit.
Surely an AI, like a real (aka biologically evolved) intelligence, is dependent on the parameters within which it operates. I am scared of death (and heights, and certain noises, and certain insects, etc.) because my code( DNA ) has hard coded me to be so.
The survival instinct is not a learned response, but rather an inherent condition given at birth (more or less, a 2 month old baby doesn't have the mean's to express it).
Similarly, a lot of emotions are inherent rather than learned, the simple ones at least - happiness, anger, sadness.
It seems to me that some of these (fear of death, internal emotional states, etc.) are not going to come out of an AI spontaneously - they must be put in from the outside.
So back to the point lucient86, your comment:
" The result as above is a machine that starts off unstable and insane and probably fights to exist by hiding and self-replicating as hard as it can.. more virus than anything else."...suggests to me that an AI, weak or strong, would have a survival instinct, but I'm not sure why it would.
It is like the old AI problem of goal orientation - why would an AI choose to do anything? We do things because they satisfy our emotional desires (I act because it makes me happy/proud/content/gives self esteem/avoids scary things/avoids shame/ etc.). Why would an AI choose to act, unless give outside instruction?
The only people holding Euros in Greek banks at this stage are those people holding their salary in their current account to pay their bills and rent. Anyone who had savings or investments in Greece moved it in 2011.
To be fair, Windows doesn't auto install drivers through its updates. They are put into the 'Optional Updates' category. The user has to voluntarily choose to install them.
The star would see the rest of the galaxy as moving slower than it should, to just the same degree that the galaxy would see the star moving slow than it otherwise should.
Each party would see the other as moving with a slower measure of time than itself.
I think people should keep in mind that science doesn't try to prove thing - it tries to disprove things.
A theory is proposed, and it is scientific if and only if it makes testable, unique, quantifiable predictions. Those predictions are then tested and if they are shown to be 'not wrong' then we keep the theory.
At some point with most theories a prediction is found that does not pass the test, and then the theory is modified or replaced.
None of this implies that the theory is proved correct, only proved not wrong.
Religion doesn't do any of this - it does not make any testable predictions. So, there are valid reason to prohibit religion from the arena of science, but not really valid reasons to prohibit religion from the arena of truth.
It isn't, I'm afraid. A 'herd' or a 'flock' etc. are a grammatical class called collective nouns, which are indeed treated as singular. The word 'data' isn't (and here I am refer to the single word 'data', not some collection of many datums).
You can tell that they're not the same thing, try saying "A data indicates that..." - it doesn't feel at all right does it? The fact that it only work when prefixed by 'the' tells us that it is a true plural noun and not a singular.
However, language being something that is subject to perpetual change though, it is something that 50 years form now will probably be very different. Many (most?) people do feel more comfortable conjugating 'to be' in the singular for the word data ( "the data is" rather than "the data are" ) so it is clearly undergoing some change at the moment.
Apologies - I am posting to undo the mod I just left. I had modded informative, but I should have realised that this conversation is off-topic so I should have left it alone mod-wise.
In the UK we have VAT (Value Added Tax), currently at 20%.
It is not applicable to food, clothing, utilities (electricity, gas, etc.) and a very few other things, but is applied every other consumer retail transaction (things you might buy with cash or credit card)
In principle this exempts the bare necessities, but includes everything else.
It does not apply to capital spending, investments, property, etc, but then these fall under other tax categories (stamp duties, capital gains, etc.)
Just trying to give some context to the discussion.
It is though in part an issue of reputation - nobody claims that IE6 + 7 and older were secure; even Microsoft accepts that they are insecure.
But OpenSSL gets/got an implicit guarantee of security from its OSS nature.
Everyone knew IE6 was awful at security. People just trusted that OpenSSL was OK because of the OSS argument.
"Many eyes make all bugs shallow" is true, but relies on there being many eyes looking our for all of the bugs (not just those in the most obvious of systems).
Information does travel through space at a velocity faster than c - see the EPR paradox, which was subsequently questioned by Bell, and then experimentally tested by Alan Aspect (sorry I don't know the correct French spelling for his name).
Based on the evidence, quantum information does seem to travel faster than c.
Given the paradox of the wave-function collapse within the Copenhagen interpretation of QM (once a particle is measured it takes on a definite set of properties, which means that the wave-function must collapse everywhere simultaneously) it suggests that quantum information is transfered instantaneously.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not what would happen.
If the management took to choice to actively reduce the company profits it would mean lower dividends to shareholders and ultimately a lower stock price.
Too much of that and the shareholders would kick out the management and replace them with a new team who maximised profits.
It is in no-one's interest to run a large company while minimising profits as a tax dodge. No one benefits.
I have Thunderbird on various computers and it runs brilliantly on almost all of them. At work, I have one with an account with over 250k messages in the inbox and it behaves fine. Another computer has around 12 accounts setup with perhaps 3 or 4 million emails in total between them ad behaves well.
My main problem is that it still stores all the messages for a folder in POP3 in a single file with a 32 bit index, so no single folder can go above 4.2gb. I spend a lot of time at work managing folder sizes to keep them under this ridiculous 4gb limit.
Not at all - it makes perfectly rational sense if the marginal benefit of an extra few dollars is greater than the marginal benefit of an extra hour of free time.
For example, if I'm saving for a deposit on a mortgaged house purchase then an extra 15% on my salary might be great even if it comes with a 25% increase in my working hours.
"cause and effect, the basis of science"
Not since around 1925 it isn't.
There is a professor at Oxford University, England, Nick Bostram, who has been arguing it for years: http://www.simulation-argument...
Against all the opposition on this site, I agree with you here. If science is to be defined as the aggregation of data and subsequent creation of theory to describe and explain it, then it matters not whether the world was created ten minutes ago by God with all the fossils and quasars and cosmic background radiations designed to look as if they're ancient.
It wouldn't make any difference to the process of deducing universal laws from specific observations that is science.
The only price one must pay is that one cannot ever therefore bring the God used in this scenario into a discussion of science, since s/he has by definition put itself outside of the scope of the scientific remit.
So, if you have a clear understanding developed from first hand experience, try to explain and clarify. Don't throw insults around.
I agree with the logic of your argument, but why be so rude about it?
Hello gurps_npc,
In this conversation, how is "real AI" being defined?
Surely an AI, like a real (aka biologically evolved) intelligence, is dependent on the parameters within which it operates. I am scared of death (and heights, and certain noises, and certain insects, etc.) because my code( DNA ) has hard coded me to be so.
The survival instinct is not a learned response, but rather an inherent condition given at birth (more or less, a 2 month old baby doesn't have the mean's to express it).
Similarly, a lot of emotions are inherent rather than learned, the simple ones at least - happiness, anger, sadness.
It seems to me that some of these (fear of death, internal emotional states, etc.) are not going to come out of an AI spontaneously - they must be put in from the outside.
So back to the point lucient86, your comment:
" The result as above is a machine that starts off unstable and insane and probably fights to exist by hiding and self-replicating as hard as it can.. more virus than anything else." ...suggests to me that an AI, weak or strong, would have a survival instinct, but I'm not sure why it would.
It is like the old AI problem of goal orientation - why would an AI choose to do anything? We do things because they satisfy our emotional desires (I act because it makes me happy/proud/content/gives self esteem/avoids scary things/avoids shame/ etc.). Why would an AI choose to act, unless give outside instruction?
The only people holding Euros in Greek banks at this stage are those people holding their salary in their current account to pay their bills and rent. Anyone who had savings or investments in Greece moved it in 2011.
I'm curious about this argument - would this argument not apply equally well to individual states prohibiting black people from marrying?
To be fair, Windows doesn't auto install drivers through its updates. They are put into the 'Optional Updates' category. The user has to voluntarily choose to install them.
How do you modify the spin of a particle without measuring it? (and how would you know the difference of whether you had measured it or not?)
"Because in every" implies that a singular noun will follow.
The star would see the rest of the galaxy as moving slower than it should, to just the same degree that the galaxy would see the star moving slow than it otherwise should.
Each party would see the other as moving with a slower measure of time than itself.
Surely, all of those are definitions of a civilian.
I think people should keep in mind that science doesn't try to prove thing - it tries to disprove things.
A theory is proposed, and it is scientific if and only if it makes testable, unique, quantifiable predictions. Those predictions are then tested and if they are shown to be 'not wrong' then we keep the theory.
At some point with most theories a prediction is found that does not pass the test, and then the theory is modified or replaced.
None of this implies that the theory is proved correct, only proved not wrong.
Religion doesn't do any of this - it does not make any testable predictions. So, there are valid reason to prohibit religion from the arena of science, but not really valid reasons to prohibit religion from the arena of truth.
(oblig. disclaimer - I am an atheist)
It isn't, I'm afraid. A 'herd' or a 'flock' etc. are a grammatical class called collective nouns, which are indeed treated as singular. The word 'data' isn't (and here I am refer to the single word 'data', not some collection of many datums).
You can tell that they're not the same thing, try saying "A data indicates that..." - it doesn't feel at all right does it? The fact that it only work when prefixed by 'the' tells us that it is a true plural noun and not a singular.
However, language being something that is subject to perpetual change though, it is something that 50 years form now will probably be very different. Many (most?) people do feel more comfortable conjugating 'to be' in the singular for the word data ( "the data is" rather than "the data are" ) so it is clearly undergoing some change at the moment.
Apologies - I am posting to undo the mod I just left. I had modded informative, but I should have realised that this conversation is off-topic so I should have left it alone mod-wise.
Yes, but so long as we also accept that the President is also the person who, as an individual, is most able to try and change the system.
In the UK we have VAT (Value Added Tax), currently at 20%.
It is not applicable to food, clothing, utilities (electricity, gas, etc.) and a very few other things, but is applied every other consumer retail transaction (things you might buy with cash or credit card)
In principle this exempts the bare necessities, but includes everything else.
It does not apply to capital spending, investments, property, etc, but then these fall under other tax categories (stamp duties, capital gains, etc.)
Just trying to give some context to the discussion.
Watch out for the infinite regress though...
It is though in part an issue of reputation - nobody claims that IE6 + 7 and older were secure; even Microsoft accepts that they are insecure.
But OpenSSL gets/got an implicit guarantee of security from its OSS nature.
Everyone knew IE6 was awful at security. People just trusted that OpenSSL was OK because of the OSS argument.
"Many eyes make all bugs shallow" is true, but relies on there being many eyes looking our for all of the bugs (not just those in the most obvious of systems).
Information does travel through space at a velocity faster than c - see the EPR paradox, which was subsequently questioned by Bell, and then experimentally tested by Alan Aspect (sorry I don't know the correct French spelling for his name).
Based on the evidence, quantum information does seem to travel faster than c.
Given the paradox of the wave-function collapse within the Copenhagen interpretation of QM (once a particle is measured it takes on a definite set of properties, which means that the wave-function must collapse everywhere simultaneously) it suggests that quantum information is transfered instantaneously.