Your copy of firefox could find a simulation artifact of some sort and figure it out that way.
For example, windows 95 will grant program 2 gigs of memory space even on a machine with 32 MB of RAM/800 MB of hard disk. Tests on such memory would let FireFox figure out if it is inside a computer...
a computer can simulate itself No, that's the whole point. No computer can simulate itself completely (it would have to be able to simulate itself, and simulate inself simulating itself, etc.)
If you don't get this idea, try it yourself: create a blank notepad.exe document, then type in the complete description of its content. "This document is blank" would be wrong because it is no longer blank, but keep trying...
I think this is good news for our ability to distinguish reality from simulation: it should be possible to make simulation crash itself! (but would we want to, is the real question)
Where in the Constitution does it say your inalienable rights can be denied to you if you are not trusted?
The only 3 cases where the Govt has a right to demand citizenship proof (i.e. your papers) are if you: i) run for Public Office ii) vote or iii) are summoned for jury duty.
The Chinese Government, bin Laden, a guy next door, Lucy Liu, or the United States Govt- neither of these have ANY say over your inalienable rights. Why you people like to think otherwise is beyond me.
You go into the transaction in a position of weakness because you believe you need permission. If you cannot do something without asking for aproval or authorization, then by the very definition you need permission.
The default assumtion today is that a person does not have any rights. This holds unless and until the person shows the documents.
The Constitution, however, states that it should be assumed a person has all the rights, and the burden of proof is on the Government to show otherwise.
What you are doing is showing your employer that you do not need permission. Do you not see that you are presumed guilting until you can prove you are innocent? The employer assumes that you don't have that right until you show otherwise.
So what I want to know is why people like you don't mind being treated as suspected criminals each time they deal with authorities?
Scared of losing your passport so much that you have to keep it strapped to your body? All because you now have to prove that you were granted a priviledge to exist, to breathe, to travel, to marry, to find work or start a business?
I am amazed that what used to be inalienable right of every person has now turned into a set of limited priviledges for the selected few. The fact that our government manadged to pull off the convertion, and the sheeple accepted it and cheered along.. all this is no small achievement I am sure.
These laws are just retarded knee jerk reactions[...] Not really. These laws are an inevitable consequence of the European/Socialist system, and are thus a mere harbinger of the darker things to come.
Please understand that things like this are inevitable when the government is tasked to act in the name of the Greater Common Good. Given all the pervious acts of socialists, hacking tool bans should be the least of your worries. In the past, Jews, Genetics and Cybernetics, Hate Speech, Overtime pay, Tobacco and Abortions all were deemed harmful. What's next? Ban on monogamy, people with high IQ, witty remarks, hard work and study, Christianity, charity and honesty.
God I miss the good old times when our Government was given a set of very limited rights, and explicitly forbidden to fuck with anything except the foreign countries or the interstate commerce.
Average literacy means shit. You can't compare an open country like US with a closed-borders biggoted country like Switzerland.. Just consider that 10% of the population of the US is foreign and cannot speak English, and you might understand why population averages mean little
Why don't you look at the level of science done by all countries. You will see that US does better than any country (infact, almost ahead of all the other countries combined!)
Published scientific papers: 1st place: USA with 2,600,000/year Second place: Japan with 700,000/year
Total paper citations: 1st place: USA with 31 million Second place: England with 6 million
Oh yeah, the next time you watch TV or use GPS remeber who put up all those sattelites... (no, I am not going to mention telephone, radio, trains, alternating currents, light bulbs, transistors, computers, or artificial hearts)
Love it or hate it, we ARE the future. We are number one (and the world is better for it). You are welcome!
We are leading the World in terms of health-related research, new drug discoveries, successes in complex surgical procedures (such as multiple organ transplants, hearth surgery, brain surgery, etc.). What sucks is that we have to pay for the rest of the world as well since your socialist governments invest jack shit in research and the Americans foot that bill.
Also, guess why we only lost 3k soldiers in Iraq while the Russians lost 200k in Chechnya? Because our medics are so good that the wounded just don't die!
the next problem is alternative data sources like image data, sound data, video, etc...etc...etc... Ah, but that's where you come in. Study your retina and visual cortex or whatever, and hack together an algorithm to process an image to a standard contrast/color/saturation, split it into primitives, then analyze and classify those on multiple abstraction layers: lots of lines and curves -> lines are parallel, curves form concentric ovals and some triangles -> a pair of ovals is below a lot of parallel lines -> a face -> with a certain symmetry and distribution of shadows -> a face of a young female reasonably in shape with just enough makeup -> a young pretty girl!
Or is something like that another 5-10 years away?
Well, that's in addition to the only three things that our government is currently subsidizing: the military, the high-fructose corn syrup producers/growers, and the labor costs for the high-tech companies. While this isn't perfect, it could be much worse.
I am sure in almost any other First/Second World country things are in fact much worse, and your govt also subsidizes your healthcare, your high school and college education, your low-tech and unskilled workers, your welfare bums, your media and TV companies, and so on.
See, there's a reason US of A is still number one.
Seriously though, how many people remember the good old days when libraries kept some annual issues of Sports Illustrated at a Reference section, for a no-checkout, table-use only?
"A New Kind of Science" is an interesting read if you got time. Just don't treat it as the Gospel particularly where it mentions the science history and who discovered what.
Interestingly, the entire book is available as a free download off Wolfram's webpage as high-res PDF files (very large in size). Just be aware that the pictures won't look that good at default zoom on your 72 dpi screen...
Off topic here, but I wanted to ask about one of your books.
Is World at the End of Time about that city called Middletown that had a superbomb exploded over it and transported one million years into the future with the cooling Sun, giant Moon, and hot spaceblonds?
1) 'Hanging chad' is what is wrong with paper. What do you do with multiple markings or corrections on a ballot? What if someone's out of ink or doesn't press hard enough? Or changes her mind and tries to cross out the initial selection? Electronic voting can force the voter to make a clear, unambiguous choice while paper cannot.
2) Ballot stuffing should be much harder with e-voting. The machine can enforce hard limits (1 vote per minute or whatever) and perform basic sanity checks like making sure the polling place doesn't just get an extra 1000 votes mere minutes before closing, or 100s of votes in a row for the same candidate, or whatever. Can paper do any of that?
3) Paper trail. That's right, an electronic machine can actually produce a time-stamped cryptographically signed paper trail authenticating every vote cast which will make it very hard to add even an extra 100 votes to the record... With paper ballots alone you can just stuff all the extra ballots into the box any time you like and there is no way to reconstruct exactly what happened.
4) Counting the results. I don't think I need to say more here.
5) Biometrics. It might be possible to make sure that a particular person only votes once (using a fingerprint hash for example). It sure beats purple finger or demanding people present ID and register to vote beforehand.
I really don't see why we discard the whole idea just because a single company fucked up in their e-voting implementation.
Would I like to pay extra $20/month to give your kid a 2% chance of success? No not really. I am sorry to say that your kid is not worth that much to me.
Well, I am sure BMS also paid about taxes which probably comes to around 20% off their sales profit. As an added bonus, they helped countless cancer patients many of whom are Americans.
That's the difference between this country and the Soviet Union, you know. The government here does not desire to be both your cobbler, your baker, or you candlestick maker. Instead, we let those 'greedy capitalist pigs' do what they are really good at, namely late stage development, mass production, and marketing of a product, which saves your tax money in the end.
In fact, I suspect that's one of the reasons why Americans have a much greater life expectancy than the Russians.
With steroids, everybody is equal and has a sporting chance, so anyone can have 165 IQ and be athletic. It really only comes down to the willpower and determination, not what set of genes you have. What's wrong with that?
Otherwise, activities such as bodybuilding would be impossible (without steroids) for most normal people, since their genes will not allow them to starve and build up muscles at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Your copy of firefox could find a simulation artifact of some sort and figure it out that way.
For example, windows 95 will grant program 2 gigs of memory space even on a machine with 32 MB of RAM/800 MB of hard disk. Tests on such memory would let FireFox figure out if it is inside a computer...
If you don't get this idea, try it yourself: create a blank notepad.exe document, then type in the complete description of its content. "This document is blank" would be wrong because it is no longer blank, but keep trying...
I think this is good news for our ability to distinguish reality from simulation: it should be possible to make simulation crash itself! (but would we want to, is the real question)
It looks like you are reading Slashdot again.
Would you like some help in getting back to work?
The only 3 cases where the Govt has a right to demand citizenship proof (i.e. your papers) are if you:
i) run for Public Office ii) vote or iii) are summoned for jury duty.
The Chinese Government, bin Laden, a guy next door, Lucy Liu, or the United States Govt- neither of these have ANY say over your inalienable rights. Why you people like to think otherwise is beyond me. You go into the transaction in a position of weakness because you believe you need permission. If you cannot do something without asking for aproval or authorization, then by the very definition you need permission.
The Constitution, however, states that it should be assumed a person has all the rights, and the burden of proof is on the Government to show otherwise. What you are doing is showing your employer that you do not need permission. Do you not see that you are presumed guilting until you can prove you are innocent? The employer assumes that you don't have that right until you show otherwise.
So what I want to know is why people like you don't mind being treated as suspected criminals each time they deal with authorities?
Scared of losing your passport so much that you have to keep it strapped to your body? All because you now have to prove that you were granted a priviledge to exist, to breathe, to travel, to marry, to find work or start a business?
I am amazed that what used to be inalienable right of every person has now turned into a set of limited priviledges for the selected few. The fact that our government manadged to pull off the convertion, and the sheeple accepted it and cheered along.. all this is no small achievement I am sure.
Wow. Just wow.
Please understand that things like this are inevitable when the government is tasked to act in the name of the Greater Common Good. Given all the pervious acts of socialists, hacking tool bans should be the least of your worries. In the past, Jews, Genetics and Cybernetics, Hate Speech, Overtime pay, Tobacco and Abortions all were deemed harmful.
What's next? Ban on monogamy, people with high IQ, witty remarks, hard work and study, Christianity, charity and honesty.
God I miss the good old times when our Government was given a set of very limited rights, and explicitly forbidden to fuck with anything except the foreign countries or the interstate commerce.
Bah, I can think up some that are way cooler. Let's see here:
rt.fm
poop-s.coop (a real TLD by the way)
pen.is (BIC's homepage in Iceland?)
vagi.na
got.root (also real)
Eat-sh.it
sniff.co.ck (real TLD)
Give-a-fu.ck
por.no
s.cat
free.blow.jobs
felat.io
sc.um
goat.se (deserves an honorable mention I guess).
Funny you should mention outsourcing. Last time I checked, Russia annually issues about 7,000,000 work visas for foreigners.
Now compare that to all the bitching about 60k H1Bs...
Ah yes, the magical Papiere Bitte.
On a positive note we could probably drive a generator off our Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.
Actually, you don't need a passport to get into Canada. They are only asking for it because you would not be able to get back to the US without one.
Average literacy means shit. You can't compare an open country like US with a closed-borders biggoted country like Switzerland..
Just consider that 10% of the population of the US is foreign and cannot speak English, and you might understand why population averages mean little
Why don't you look at the level of science done by all countries. You will see that US does better than any country (infact, almost ahead of all the other countries combined!)
Published scientific papers: 1st place:
USA with 2,600,000/year
Second place: Japan with 700,000/year
Total paper citations:
1st place: USA with 31 million
Second place: England with 6 million
Oh yeah, the next time you watch TV or use GPS remeber who put up all those sattelites... (no, I am not going to mention telephone, radio, trains, alternating currents, light bulbs, transistors, computers, or artificial hearts)
Love it or hate it, we ARE the future. We are number one (and the world is better for it). You are welcome!
Are you serious?
We are leading the World in terms of health-related research, new drug discoveries, successes in complex surgical procedures (such as multiple organ transplants, hearth surgery, brain surgery, etc.). What sucks is that we have to pay for the rest of the world as well since your socialist governments invest jack shit in research and the Americans foot that bill.
Also, guess why we only lost 3k soldiers in Iraq while the Russians lost 200k in Chechnya? Because our medics are so good that the wounded just don't die!
lots of lines and curves -> lines are parallel, curves form concentric ovals and some triangles -> a pair of ovals is below a lot of parallel lines -> a face -> with a certain symmetry and distribution of shadows -> a face of a young female reasonably in shape with just enough makeup -> a young pretty girl!
Or is something like that another 5-10 years away?
Well, that's in addition to the only three things that our government is currently subsidizing: the military, the high-fructose corn syrup producers/growers, and the labor costs for the high-tech companies. While this isn't perfect, it could be much worse.
I am sure in almost any other First/Second World country things are in fact much worse, and your govt also subsidizes your healthcare, your high school and college education, your low-tech and unskilled workers, your welfare bums, your media and TV companies, and so on.
See, there's a reason US of A is still number one.
Your porn stash doesn't count!
Seriously though, how many people remember the good old days when libraries kept some annual issues of Sports Illustrated at a Reference section, for a no-checkout, table-use only?
"A New Kind of Science" is an interesting read if you got time. Just don't treat it as the Gospel particularly where it mentions the science history and who discovered what.
Interestingly, the entire book is available as a free download off Wolfram's webpage as high-res PDF files (very large in size). Just be aware that the pictures won't look that good at default zoom on your 72 dpi screen...
Off topic here, but I wanted to ask about one of your books.
Is World at the End of Time about that city called Middletown that had a superbomb exploded over it and transported one million years into the future with the cooling Sun, giant Moon, and hot spaceblonds?
1) 'Hanging chad' is what is wrong with paper. What do you do with multiple markings or corrections on a ballot? What if someone's out of ink or doesn't press hard enough? Or changes her mind and tries to cross out the initial selection? Electronic voting can force the voter to make a clear, unambiguous choice while paper cannot.
2) Ballot stuffing should be much harder with e-voting. The machine can enforce hard limits (1 vote per minute or whatever) and perform basic sanity checks like making sure the polling place doesn't just get an extra 1000 votes mere minutes before closing, or 100s of votes in a row for the same candidate, or whatever. Can paper do any of that?
3) Paper trail. That's right, an electronic machine can actually produce a time-stamped cryptographically signed paper trail authenticating every vote cast which will make it very hard to add even an extra 100 votes to the record... With paper ballots alone you can just stuff all the extra ballots into the box any time you like and there is no way to reconstruct exactly what happened.
4) Counting the results. I don't think I need to say more here.
5) Biometrics. It might be possible to make sure that a particular person only votes once (using a fingerprint hash for example). It sure beats purple finger or demanding people present ID and register to vote beforehand.
I really don't see why we discard the whole idea just because a single company fucked up in their e-voting implementation.
Would I like to pay extra $20/month to give your kid a 2% chance of success? No not really. I am sorry to say that your kid is not worth that much to me.
Would my kid be worth that much to you?
Well, I am sure BMS also paid about taxes which probably comes to around 20% off their sales profit. As an added bonus, they helped countless cancer patients many of whom are Americans.
That's the difference between this country and the Soviet Union, you know. The government here does not desire to be both your cobbler, your baker, or you candlestick maker. Instead, we let those 'greedy capitalist pigs' do what they are really good at, namely late stage development, mass production, and marketing of a product, which saves your tax money in the end.
In fact, I suspect that's one of the reasons why Americans have a much greater life expectancy than the Russians.
Taking steroids IS honorable!
With steroids, everybody is equal and has a sporting chance, so anyone can have 165 IQ and be athletic. It really only comes down to the willpower and determination, not what set of genes you have. What's wrong with that?
Otherwise, activities such as bodybuilding would be impossible (without steroids) for most normal people, since their genes will not allow them to starve and build up muscles at the same time.
You are right: while all the other listed issues are interrelated, this "Gun Control" stands on its own. To fix the list, we need to add:
Freedom of Speech,
habeas corpus and
Civil rights
Also needed is Immigration all of these up together.
Most of us oppose destroying nascient life.
If you create new life, that's generally not a problem (but do double-check with the creationists)!
Searching for how many female redneck scanks with a doctorate degree in nanobiology would date me made me really sad.
Those women don't know what they are missing.