"it's time we took the money away from the scientists who have been telling us this for years and gave it to the engineers to get us out of this mess."
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
If it's not truly as serious a problem as some would have us believe, then we don't need to radically restructure the global economy, expand government at the expense of freedom, or transfer more wealth to other countries. At least for this reason.
What's this? But I keep hearing that our problems are the fault of "greedy capitalists", and that "capitalism" means an unlimited government trying to dictate and control the economy while working hand-in-hand with giant corporations.
Come to think of it, isn't a capitalist economy easier to model with physics-like methods than a statist economy like that of (say) Europe or where the US has largely gone? In an idealized (in the sense of "oversimplified") capitalist society, you're dealing with a bunch of semi-rational actors acting individually, as opposed to massive decisions getting imposed by unpredictable political methods. Whether capitalists shift to a new energy tech depends on costs and innovation, but whether statists shift to a new energy tech depends more on whether Senator So-and-So cajoles and bribes his way to getting a bill passed.
It has no bearing, only if you start with the premise that the Constitution doesn't limit federal power. Which is assuming what you're trying to prove.
Hamilton only took that position after the Constitution was ratified; note that the citation is from 1791. I know of no Founder who argued that before ratification. Instead, all of them seem to have either accepted the new government as having only limited powers, or having opposed the Constitution because they thought loopholes like this would get abused. And in case there was any doubt about the intended meaning, the 10th Amendment should have laid it to rest.
You're talking about politicians who believe that the "will of the people" gives them absolute legal authority to control every aspect of adults' lives. So why would it be any surprise that they favor excessive authority over children too?
We have a pretty good map of the nematode's "brain", as its whole body has about 1000 cells. So why has no one simulated a complete nematode in virtual-space to prove that their simulation can actually do something other than generate huge amounts of raw data? Show me non-faked realistic behavior from a simple sim-worm before you make claims about "simulating the thinking part of a cat's brain". (And what's with that "thinking part of the brain" phrase?)
I'm also unclear on this and other articles as to whether the researchers supposedly modeled the brain tissue on the individual cell level or lower, as opposed to treating whole chunks of cells as one unit. We don't really have the tech yet to get a complete map of every synapse in a cat cortex, do we?
I read a book on game AI that argued for a fundamental split between AI for games, and AI in general. The point of a game AI is to lose entertainingly. Which means the designer should focus on fakery like spawning enemies in just the right spot to be dangerous, plus entertaining features like having them ineptly track the player and exclaim, "Where'd he go?" Because of that argument, I've lost some of my interest in game-focused AI.
My favorite RTS hack involved a null-modem connection, some early edition of "Command & Conquer", and hacking config files to arm spies with lightning bolts and demolition charges.
He's a sign of how much of an ideological split we have in this country, that we have certain people flinging accusations of treason against those who question our new overlord. (Or who ask crazy questions like "Where in the Constitution do the feds get the power to...?") The same people also have a tendency to be rude to the point of vileness. I've seen this twice personally with people I'd respected.
I wouldn't say it was automatically abuse of the system to sue over the site. On the face of it, it seems to be a slanderous/libelous accusation intended specifically to smear someone in public, so there was a legitimate case to be made against it.
We had a Constitution that defined what powers the federal government may exercise. When asked where health care is on that list of powers, Mme. Pelosi replied, "Are you serious?!"
Let me put it this way. Have you seen the Berlin Wall? I have. In some places there were actually two walls, with a no-man's land in between. In that space were machine-gun towers, spaced so close that the guards could kill each other.
And people were willing to sprint through a machine-gun killing ground, just to escape from communism. That's how horrible it is when you let arrogant statists take over your life. Nor is East Germany unique. Cubans flee their country on deathtrap rafts so they can go clean toilets in America. The "national socialists" who let private property and corporations continue to exist were at least as evil as the outright communists, and the half-capitalist Chinese today continue to oppress their own people.
Arrogant, all-powerful governments abuse and murder their own people. There's no denying that. We don't want even a halfway, happy-faced version of that, thank you very much.
And other states are working on similar proposals as 2010 referenda. Also, Montana and Tennessee are already in open defiance of the feds through their "Firearms Freedom Act"s, with Montana having just filed a lawsuit petitioning for a completely in-state gun not to be considered subject to "interstate commerce" control. We need to stand ready to defend our citizens peacefully against federal aggression, knowing that this might mean more than filing lawsuits.
Art. I Sec. 9: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person." This refers to the importation of slaves. Also Art. I Sec. 2: "the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." Ie. "free people... and others."
So you're saying it's "idiotic" and "irrational" to ask your government what legal authority it has for its actions, and you weren't willing to explain what you thought the 10th Amendment means.
We will indeed be challenging this illegal law in court, but it was right to ask the question beforehand instead of remaining silent.
That reading is not quite what the Founders intended, as judged from documents like the state ratifying documents and the Federalist Papers. Eg., Madison explicitly explained what "general welfare" meant in Federalist #41. It's one of the general purposes of government, and it appears again as part of a taxing and borrowing clause to mean Congress may tax and borrow money to meet its spending needs. Madison explained that it was absolutely not intended as a power for government to tax, spend and regulate for just any purpose it claimed would serve the country, and that only paranoid anti-Federalists would claim otherwise. His argument makes the most sense, since giving Congress an unlimited power of that sort would gut the 10th Amendment (which was passed after that clause and overrides it if there's any doubt) and the whole concept of a limited government.
Neat idea; so it'd be like an MP3 to MIDI converter?
I don't think it'd pass muster under current law, though. George Harrison of the Beatles was hit by a relevant lawsuit over "My Sweet Lord", because it contained just a few notes that he allegedly heard from the Chiffons' "He's So Fine". (There was a similar case involving "Bittersweet Symphony".) The legal problem was that he supposedly copied the note sequence, not that he came up with it independently. But these days it's just about impossible to argue that you never heard Song A before you wrote Song B, so we've kind of turned the note sequence itself into the copyrighted thing, not the sound recording or even a particular line of inspiration. That is, if I wrote a story about a hunt for a white whale today, I think I'd legally be in the right if I honestly said it's not derivative because I'd never heard of "Moby Dick". But realistically, a court would never accept that, because the court would say "of course you've heard of it".
An argument I've seen is that the public's willingness to respect copyright law depends on how well we think the law squares with a vague moral sense of fair play. Ie., if copyright were 14 years we'd be more willing to punish piracy than we are with life-plus-70-years copyrights. Do we think the existing copyright terms are there to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", or to let some media conglomerate or celebrity keep collecting checks for something done by long-dead people?
Yeah, it'd be more useful. But isn't the energy level involved low enough that IR requires special structures in snakes? I'm guessing it can't easily be sensed just by tweaking normal color receptors. Is there an animal known to have a "normal" IR receptor? With UV, you could at least see some details in nature that aren't normally visible to humans. For instance, some flowers have patterns on them in UV.
About eight years ago I read about a line of experiments that measurably increased rodents' performance in a set of memory and learning tasks. I believe the genetic change involved the NMDA receptor, but a quick search doesn't turn up an obvious link to that.
There was a report this September that gene therapy had been used to grant "full" color vision to colorblind monkeys, following on an earlier experiment that did the same thing to rodents. That is, the rodents were given three-color vision where they normally have two color receptor types. (Would that make them transrodents?) Apparently, the brain automatically adapts to having a new receptor type installed in the retina! And the same technique could be used on humans to grant us a fourth receptor type, maybe a UV receptor gotten from parrots or something. I'd volunteer to have this done to one eye. (The first comment on this article presents a dissenting view that just because the monkeys were able to distinguish colors in greater detail than before, that shouldn't be taken as proof that they "have full color vision". All the more reason to try it in a human!)
The rodents could be in combination with cyborg cats though, as seen in this 1995 report of recognizable images read directly from a cat's visual cortex.
"So what, we should be asking, is the FCC doing anywhere near it? Doesn't someone need their hand slapped about now?"
Peacefully, yes! Multiple states including TN and MT are now in open defiance of federal gun law, not because of guns specifically but as a more general push to restore the 10th Amendment. We'll see what develops from there, and from the states now considering nullification of a health insurance mandate. We need to be willing to peacefully resist unlawful federal activity and protect our people, whether the specific topic seems like another "for the children" power grab or something else.
To decide what ought to be done, it's important to ask yourself whether you think the US Government is one of limited (as the Founders said) or (as Pelosi has said) "essentially unlimited" power. You can't logically say that the feds have authority to do half of what they do today, without also allowing that pretty much anything else is also within their authority.
I saw the launch firsthand. The other day, I'd been asked to explain the basic physics of projectile flight to a student, and here I was today watching a parabolic trail of smoke being drawn in the sky!
Slashdot Mirror
"it's time we took the money away from the scientists who have been telling us this for years and gave it to the engineers to get us out of this mess."
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
If it's not truly as serious a problem as some would have us believe, then we don't need to radically restructure the global economy, expand government at the expense of freedom, or transfer more wealth to other countries. At least for this reason.
World population today: >6 billion. World population ca. 1900: 1 billion.
What's this? But I keep hearing that our problems are the fault of "greedy capitalists", and that "capitalism" means an unlimited government trying to dictate and control the economy while working hand-in-hand with giant corporations.
Come to think of it, isn't a capitalist economy easier to model with physics-like methods than a statist economy like that of (say) Europe or where the US has largely gone? In an idealized (in the sense of "oversimplified") capitalist society, you're dealing with a bunch of semi-rational actors acting individually, as opposed to massive decisions getting imposed by unpredictable political methods. Whether capitalists shift to a new energy tech depends on costs and innovation, but whether statists shift to a new energy tech depends more on whether Senator So-and-So cajoles and bribes his way to getting a bill passed.
It has no bearing, only if you start with the premise that the Constitution doesn't limit federal power. Which is assuming what you're trying to prove.
Hamilton only took that position after the Constitution was ratified; note that the citation is from 1791. I know of no Founder who argued that before ratification. Instead, all of them seem to have either accepted the new government as having only limited powers, or having opposed the Constitution because they thought loopholes like this would get abused. And in case there was any doubt about the intended meaning, the 10th Amendment should have laid it to rest.
You're talking about politicians who believe that the "will of the people" gives them absolute legal authority to control every aspect of adults' lives. So why would it be any surprise that they favor excessive authority over children too?
We have a pretty good map of the nematode's "brain", as its whole body has about 1000 cells. So why has no one simulated a complete nematode in virtual-space to prove that their simulation can actually do something other than generate huge amounts of raw data? Show me non-faked realistic behavior from a simple sim-worm before you make claims about "simulating the thinking part of a cat's brain". (And what's with that "thinking part of the brain" phrase?)
I'm also unclear on this and other articles as to whether the researchers supposedly modeled the brain tissue on the individual cell level or lower, as opposed to treating whole chunks of cells as one unit. We don't really have the tech yet to get a complete map of every synapse in a cat cortex, do we?
I read a book on game AI that argued for a fundamental split between AI for games, and AI in general. The point of a game AI is to lose entertainingly. Which means the designer should focus on fakery like spawning enemies in just the right spot to be dangerous, plus entertaining features like having them ineptly track the player and exclaim, "Where'd he go?" Because of that argument, I've lost some of my interest in game-focused AI.
My favorite RTS hack involved a null-modem connection, some early edition of "Command & Conquer", and hacking config files to arm spies with lightning bolts and demolition charges.
He's a sign of how much of an ideological split we have in this country, that we have certain people flinging accusations of treason against those who question our new overlord. (Or who ask crazy questions like "Where in the Constitution do the feds get the power to...?") The same people also have a tendency to be rude to the point of vileness. I've seen this twice personally with people I'd respected.
I wouldn't say it was automatically abuse of the system to sue over the site. On the face of it, it seems to be a slanderous/libelous accusation intended specifically to smear someone in public, so there was a legitimate case to be made against it.
We had a Constitution that defined what powers the federal government may exercise. When asked where health care is on that list of powers, Mme. Pelosi replied, "Are you serious?!"
Let me put it this way. Have you seen the Berlin Wall? I have. In some places there were actually two walls, with a no-man's land in between. In that space were machine-gun towers, spaced so close that the guards could kill each other.
And people were willing to sprint through a machine-gun killing ground, just to escape from communism. That's how horrible it is when you let arrogant statists take over your life. Nor is East Germany unique. Cubans flee their country on deathtrap rafts so they can go clean toilets in America. The "national socialists" who let private property and corporations continue to exist were at least as evil as the outright communists, and the half-capitalist Chinese today continue to oppress their own people.
Arrogant, all-powerful governments abuse and murder their own people. There's no denying that. We don't want even a halfway, happy-faced version of that, thank you very much.
And other states are working on similar proposals as 2010 referenda. Also, Montana and Tennessee are already in open defiance of the feds through their "Firearms Freedom Act"s, with Montana having just filed a lawsuit petitioning for a completely in-state gun not to be considered subject to "interstate commerce" control. We need to stand ready to defend our citizens peacefully against federal aggression, knowing that this might mean more than filing lawsuits.
Art. I Sec. 9: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person." This refers to the importation of slaves. Also Art. I Sec. 2: "the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." Ie. "free people... and others."
So you're saying it's "idiotic" and "irrational" to ask your government what legal authority it has for its actions, and you weren't willing to explain what you thought the 10th Amendment means.
We will indeed be challenging this illegal law in court, but it was right to ask the question beforehand instead of remaining silent.
That reading is not quite what the Founders intended, as judged from documents like the state ratifying documents and the Federalist Papers. Eg., Madison explicitly explained what "general welfare" meant in Federalist #41. It's one of the general purposes of government, and it appears again as part of a taxing and borrowing clause to mean Congress may tax and borrow money to meet its spending needs. Madison explained that it was absolutely not intended as a power for government to tax, spend and regulate for just any purpose it claimed would serve the country, and that only paranoid anti-Federalists would claim otherwise. His argument makes the most sense, since giving Congress an unlimited power of that sort would gut the 10th Amendment (which was passed after that clause and overrides it if there's any doubt) and the whole concept of a limited government.
Neat idea; so it'd be like an MP3 to MIDI converter?
I don't think it'd pass muster under current law, though. George Harrison of the Beatles was hit by a relevant lawsuit over "My Sweet Lord", because it contained just a few notes that he allegedly heard from the Chiffons' "He's So Fine". (There was a similar case involving "Bittersweet Symphony".) The legal problem was that he supposedly copied the note sequence, not that he came up with it independently. But these days it's just about impossible to argue that you never heard Song A before you wrote Song B, so we've kind of turned the note sequence itself into the copyrighted thing, not the sound recording or even a particular line of inspiration. That is, if I wrote a story about a hunt for a white whale today, I think I'd legally be in the right if I honestly said it's not derivative because I'd never heard of "Moby Dick". But realistically, a court would never accept that, because the court would say "of course you've heard of it".
An argument I've seen is that the public's willingness to respect copyright law depends on how well we think the law squares with a vague moral sense of fair play. Ie., if copyright were 14 years we'd be more willing to punish piracy than we are with life-plus-70-years copyrights. Do we think the existing copyright terms are there to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", or to let some media conglomerate or celebrity keep collecting checks for something done by long-dead people?
Yeah, it'd be more useful. But isn't the energy level involved low enough that IR requires special structures in snakes? I'm guessing it can't easily be sensed just by tweaking normal color receptors. Is there an animal known to have a "normal" IR receptor? With UV, you could at least see some details in nature that aren't normally visible to humans. For instance, some flowers have patterns on them in UV.
I think that experiment was part of a sequence that also showed the gene affected seizures, so maybe that particular boost had dangerous side effects.
About eight years ago I read about a line of experiments that measurably increased rodents' performance in a set of memory and learning tasks. I believe the genetic change involved the NMDA receptor, but a quick search doesn't turn up an obvious link to that.
There was a report this September that gene therapy had been used to grant "full" color vision to colorblind monkeys, following on an earlier experiment that did the same thing to rodents. That is, the rodents were given three-color vision where they normally have two color receptor types. (Would that make them transrodents?) Apparently, the brain automatically adapts to having a new receptor type installed in the retina! And the same technique could be used on humans to grant us a fourth receptor type, maybe a UV receptor gotten from parrots or something. I'd volunteer to have this done to one eye. (The first comment on this article presents a dissenting view that just because the monkeys were able to distinguish colors in greater detail than before, that shouldn't be taken as proof that they "have full color vision". All the more reason to try it in a human!)
The rodents could be in combination with cyborg cats though, as seen in this 1995 report of recognizable images read directly from a cat's visual cortex.
"So what, we should be asking, is the FCC doing anywhere near it? Doesn't someone need their hand slapped about now?"
Peacefully, yes! Multiple states including TN and MT are now in open defiance of federal gun law, not because of guns specifically but as a more general push to restore the 10th Amendment. We'll see what develops from there, and from the states now considering nullification of a health insurance mandate. We need to be willing to peacefully resist unlawful federal activity and protect our people, whether the specific topic seems like another "for the children" power grab or something else.
To decide what ought to be done, it's important to ask yourself whether you think the US Government is one of limited (as the Founders said) or (as Pelosi has said) "essentially unlimited" power. You can't logically say that the feds have authority to do half of what they do today, without also allowing that pretty much anything else is also within their authority.
I saw the launch firsthand. The other day, I'd been asked to explain the basic physics of projectile flight to a student, and here I was today watching a parabolic trail of smoke being drawn in the sky!