Well.... Philosophy, specifically epistemology, is the basis for scientific method, so I would concede that much. Still, there's a lot of... speculative philosophy that touches the physical world nowhere.
Music, at least touches physiology and mathematics.
Economics. To the extent that it generates reproducible results and has both descriptive and predictive power, I'd say it has a scientific basis. That's not how it's taught in Econ 101, nor does that appear to be the way it's practiced. In educational institutions, start talking about complex systems theory as applied to money to some tenured faculty and they look at you like you've grown a third head.
Human intelligence is tuned for self preservation, continued survival, reproduction and food acquisition. It is a result of genetic algorithms in the chemical domain, whose only "purpose" is self replication.
An AI, developed by conscious processes, will have NONE of this. All it will be set up to do is process information. Any other motivation it has will be one we give it. It will not inherently love us, or hate us, or even necessarily be aware of our existence. It won't be a threat until we weaponize it, which of course, we will. But at the same time, other AIs will be defending us against weaponized AIs. The real danger is being caught in between.
Every business is guilty of structuring under these rules.
Yes, that's the beauty of it. Everyone can be stolen from. Right now, it's happening in small increments. If there's a real financial crisis, I can foresee every small business in the USA losing their money on the same day.
That started with Reagan, who was happy to buy Saudi Oil rather than try and change the USA's energy picture. Sure. No security issue there.
So now we're selling our chip-making infrastructure. But what's one more attack vector? We're already dependent on chips made in China and software coded in India. I guess having our supplies cut off by Abu Dhabi couldn't be much worse.
It's all about moneyed interests. Countries are an illusion designed to keep the little people from revolting, which will continue to work until there's not enough affordable oil to keep cheap food, entertainment and drugs coming down the pipeline. After that, all bets are off.
Transnational, trans-generational money is the biggest power on the planet right now. Within that, there are factions, rivalries and competitions, but like a bacteria colony, collective decisions happen which benefit the colony and completely disregard everyone else.
If you want a real, effective, democratic capitalist society, that benefits the largest amount of people, you put limits on power at the top, which means limits on the amount of money any one person, or organization is allowed to possess, or control.
The founding fathers assumed that government was corruptible, and put in checks and balances. This didn't go far enough. Everybody is corruptible. Everybody. That includes businesses and individuals. The damage they can do can be limited by checks and balances. In the case of individuals and organization, it can be limited by putting an upper bound on the wealth of individuals via taxation and the size and scope of commercial organizations. Antitrust laws were an excellent first step - if only they were enforced, which they would be, had the legislature and individuals responsible for regulation not been purchased by the wealthy.
Which won't stop actual morons from trying it. These are the guys who are buying server hardware with components made in China. How could anything go wrong?
The law is whatever the government says it is. From the federal government to "civil forfeiture" by the local cops. In 'murica, we now live in a police state. Deal with it.
...talking like employees are anything but serfs and like the USA is some sort of democracy instead of an increasingly minor subsection of an international oligarchy.
I was under the impression that living in low to zero G for extended periods of time was exceedingly bad for human health Indeed it is. Of course, I never suggested such a thing, since I was under the impression that rotation can provide the same effect as gravity.
Radiation protection on a planet that lacks a magnetic field or significant atmosphere is a rather interesting problem. I suppose they'd do it the old fashioned way by putting some rock between themselves and radiation. Caves, either natural or artificial.
If only there were some sort of large floating iron-rich rocks in space that could be nudged gently into the Lagrange points by low power rockets to shield habitable environments from radiation. We could call them "asteroids." But where would we find such mythical objects in a zero G environment?
Apparently, your grasp of both physics, costs and logistics rivals Elon Musk's.
Not that a colony of a million in space is a bad idea, but Mars?
Mars is *far* away, has almost no resources, the trip is long and requires a great deal of fuel. Moreover, if there's a problem, there's no nearby fail safe place to exit to.
Near Earth orbit, in contrast, is close by, near resources like water and oxygen and mined metals, requires little fuel and if there's a major problem in your environment, you can drop down to Earth and try again.
The basic logistics favor the Earth's LaGrange points, without the unnecessary addition of a trip to Mars.
When you're in your 20s, you feel like you have time to play with fun stuff like code.
When you're in your late 50s, and the cancer has come and gone, and your parents have died, and getting up and moving is a daily exercise in pain, and your wife has started having strokes and you're both in fear of the next one, and your cat/dog of 20 years is going to die of old age soon and so are you, probably in the next 20-30 years, believe you me, new software falls WAY down the list of important things to think about. Try mortality. Try meaning. Try the poignancy of life.
Code can be fun, sure, but it's not *important* at all.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Software isn't always better because it's new. Procedures either. I'm not about to have anybody use Ruby, just because some 20-something new hire things it's cool. And while I like Agile, I know that it works only because the team meets every day, forces them to track real progress vs estimates, measures what's happening in real time and basically keeps their eye on the ball. Stuff I was doing about a decade before the word, "agile" existed.
So, color me unimpressed by Powershell, Agile, objective C, json and Azure. These technologies are neat and sometimes useful, but ONLY if they solve a problem and/or IMPROVE something - a test many new technologies fail, pathetically (e.g. 100 lines of powershell to do what one line of "NET USE xxxx" does).
No. Coal is not going away. Oil isn't going away. Natural gas isn't going away. There's never been an issue with the total quantity of hydrocarbons. What we're running out of are hydrocarbons that are:
1) Inexpensive enough to run an interdependent web of supply chains utterly dependent on *cheap* transportation fuel.
2) Have a high enough net energy return to justify both their production AND enough left over to run an industrial scale civilization of the current size.
Capitalism dictates that you go for the resource that gives you the most bang for the buck first in order to maximize profit. We've done that. It's downhill from here. I suggest you google "oil" and "EROEI" to get the figures.
The fact that population growth isn't local doesn't invalidate anything. If African countries can manage resource diversion to their population, they will. Your lack of control and/or responsibility also changes nothing. This looks unlikely today due to the military power imbalance. After 20 to 50 years of Chinese occupation and development, however, I wouldn't make that bet at all.
One that's as cheap, energy dense and as easy to handle at room temperature as oil, coal, natural gas and so on.
If we *don't* do this, then I'm fairly sure that after we hit 11 billion by 2100, we'll be lucky to hit 50 million by 2200. Fewer, if we try and solve our resource problems by throwing nukes at one another, which sounds likely.
Like all species, we simply consume resources until the population crashes. What we've been so far with technology is "lucky." There's always been another *cheap* and *easy* resource to exploit. Short of a breakthrough in battery technology and thorium reactors (or fusion) that's not going to happen again.
WHY is the Chinese. We're being out-competed. The Chinese are providing technology to a number of African countries in exchange for resources (e.g. Coltan in Congo. Oil from Nigeria) and they're not insisting on human rights or democracy to provide it. Right now, the USA has the closest thing to an Ebola cure, which means that the Chinese are at a disadvantage.
This won't last, of course, and may result in a significant worldwide plague. Whether this is an unforeseen consequence of a planned feature is left as an exercise for the reader.
Granted, it won't be that fast unless it mutates in such a way that it can be spread through the air. If it does that, then growth quite a bit faster than exponential is possible.
I design and implement automated testing systems, including specialized APIs and the VMWare-based virtualization environments designed to support them.
As part of getting a BA in psychology back in the day, you had to have several statistics courses, industrial psychology, human factors, ergonomics and it was strongly suggested that you become familiar with symbolic logic. Neurophysiology, particularly neuronal functioning, was popular too. Had psychology research funding not dried up after Reagan was elected, I might still be in a lab somewhere.
Fate had other plans. Unable to find honest work, I took up the software trade instead. That was 34 years ago.
The issue is random confiscation (aka. "theft") by local police. I don't have any problem with confiscation as long as a crime was committed and the defendant proven guilty. What isn't tolerable in any way, shape, or form is confiscation of my property because some dimwitted, local yokel cop *thought* about drugs while looking at my car.
Slashdot Mirror
Well.... Philosophy, specifically epistemology, is the basis for scientific method, so I would concede that much. Still, there's a lot of ... speculative philosophy that touches the physical world nowhere.
Music, at least touches physiology and mathematics.
Economics. To the extent that it generates reproducible results and has both descriptive and predictive power, I'd say it has a scientific basis. That's not how it's taught in Econ 101, nor does that appear to be the way it's practiced. In educational institutions, start talking about complex systems theory as applied to money to some tenured faculty and they look at you like you've grown a third head.
Universities teach scientifically baseless things all the time, F'rinstance:
1) Economics
2) Philosophy
3) Theology
4) Psychology for dummies (i.e. psychoanalysis).
5) Political "science"
6) Art
7) Music
8) Theater
9) Sociology
I could go on, but science isn't a prerequisite for being forced to pay to learn a bunch of nonsense.
Oh do please explain. Do you think AI will resemble human intelligence? Do you also think rockets resemble sparrows because both can fly?
Human intelligence is tuned for self preservation, continued survival, reproduction and food acquisition. It is a result of genetic algorithms in the chemical domain, whose only "purpose" is self replication.
An AI, developed by conscious processes, will have NONE of this. All it will be set up to do is process information. Any other motivation it has will be one we give it. It will not inherently love us, or hate us, or even necessarily be aware of our existence. It won't be a threat until we weaponize it, which of course, we will. But at the same time, other AIs will be defending us against weaponized AIs. The real danger is being caught in between.
Every business is guilty of structuring under these rules.
Yes, that's the beauty of it. Everyone can be stolen from. Right now, it's happening in small increments. If there's a real financial crisis, I can foresee every small business in the USA losing their money on the same day.
Back when banking was just, well.... banking, it made sense to keep your money there. I smell a growth opportunity in private "safe deposit boxes."
He planned to go up and try it again.
That started with Reagan, who was happy to buy Saudi Oil rather than try and change the USA's energy picture. Sure. No security issue there.
So now we're selling our chip-making infrastructure. But what's one more attack vector? We're already dependent on chips made in China and software coded in India. I guess having our supplies cut off by Abu Dhabi couldn't be much worse.
It's all about moneyed interests. Countries are an illusion designed to keep the little people from revolting, which will continue to work until there's not enough affordable oil to keep cheap food, entertainment and drugs coming down the pipeline. After that, all bets are off.
Money=Power.
Political power. Economic Power. Personal Power.
Transnational, trans-generational money is the biggest power on the planet right now. Within that, there are factions, rivalries and competitions, but like a bacteria colony, collective decisions happen which benefit the colony and completely disregard everyone else.
If you want a real, effective, democratic capitalist society, that benefits the largest amount of people, you put limits on power at the top, which means limits on the amount of money any one person, or organization is allowed to possess, or control.
The founding fathers assumed that government was corruptible, and put in checks and balances. This didn't go far enough. Everybody is corruptible. Everybody. That includes businesses and individuals. The damage they can do can be limited by checks and balances. In the case of individuals and organization, it can be limited by putting an upper bound on the wealth of individuals via taxation and the size and scope of commercial organizations. Antitrust laws were an excellent first step - if only they were enforced, which they would be, had the legislature and individuals responsible for regulation not been purchased by the wealthy.
Motley Fool.
I've read their "analyses" on things I actually know about. You might as well get your advice from Yahoo answers.
Which won't stop actual morons from trying it. These are the guys who are buying server hardware with components made in China. How could anything go wrong?
The law is whatever the government says it is. From the federal government to "civil forfeiture" by the local cops. In 'murica, we now live in a police state. Deal with it.
...talking like employees are anything but serfs and like the USA is some sort of democracy instead of an increasingly minor subsection of an international oligarchy.
Is anyone out there actually stupid enough to believe this? Anyone?
(Crickets)
I was under the impression that living in low to zero G for extended periods of time was exceedingly bad for human health
Indeed it is. Of course, I never suggested such a thing, since I was under the impression that rotation can provide the same effect as gravity.
Radiation protection on a planet that lacks a magnetic field or significant atmosphere is a rather interesting problem. I suppose they'd do it the old fashioned way by putting some rock between themselves and radiation. Caves, either natural or artificial.
If only there were some sort of large floating iron-rich rocks in space that could be nudged gently into the Lagrange points by low power rockets to shield habitable environments from radiation. We could call them "asteroids." But where would we find such mythical objects in a zero G environment?
Apparently, your grasp of both physics, costs and logistics rivals Elon Musk's.
Not that a colony of a million in space is a bad idea, but Mars?
Mars is *far* away, has almost no resources, the trip is long and requires a great deal of fuel. Moreover, if there's a problem, there's no nearby fail safe place to exit to.
Near Earth orbit, in contrast, is close by, near resources like water and oxygen and mined metals, requires little fuel and if there's a major problem in your environment, you can drop down to Earth and try again.
The basic logistics favor the Earth's LaGrange points, without the unnecessary addition of a trip to Mars.
The reason for the diets, supplements and exercise aren't to extend life, but to enhance life's quality.
You can be 75 and a cripple, in pain and bankrupted by health care costs or...
You can be be 75, run marathons, be fairly pain free and pay relatively little for health care.
I know people in both situations. To some degree, it's your choice.
When you're in your 20s, you feel like you have time to play with fun stuff like code.
When you're in your late 50s, and the cancer has come and gone, and your parents have died, and getting up and moving is a daily exercise in pain, and your wife has started having strokes and you're both in fear of the next one, and your cat/dog of 20 years is going to die of old age soon and so are you, probably in the next 20-30 years, believe you me, new software falls WAY down the list of important things to think about. Try mortality. Try meaning. Try the poignancy of life.
Code can be fun, sure, but it's not *important* at all.
Yeah, here's the thing about being complacent.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Software isn't always better because it's new. Procedures either. I'm not about to have anybody use Ruby, just because some 20-something new hire things it's cool. And while I like Agile, I know that it works only because the team meets every day, forces them to track real progress vs estimates, measures what's happening in real time and basically keeps their eye on the ball. Stuff I was doing about a decade before the word, "agile" existed.
So, color me unimpressed by Powershell, Agile, objective C, json and Azure. These technologies are neat and sometimes useful, but ONLY if they solve a problem and/or IMPROVE something - a test many new technologies fail, pathetically (e.g. 100 lines of powershell to do what one line of "NET USE xxxx" does).
No. Coal is not going away. Oil isn't going away. Natural gas isn't going away. There's never been an issue with the total quantity of hydrocarbons. What we're running out of are hydrocarbons that are:
1) Inexpensive enough to run an interdependent web of supply chains utterly dependent on *cheap* transportation fuel.
2) Have a high enough net energy return to justify both their production AND enough left over to run an industrial scale civilization of the current size.
Capitalism dictates that you go for the resource that gives you the most bang for the buck first in order to maximize profit. We've done that. It's downhill from here. I suggest you google "oil" and "EROEI" to get the figures.
The fact that population growth isn't local doesn't invalidate anything. If African countries can manage resource diversion to their population, they will. Your lack of control and/or responsibility also changes nothing. This looks unlikely today due to the military power imbalance. After 20 to 50 years of Chinese occupation and development, however, I wouldn't make that bet at all.
One that's as cheap, energy dense and as easy to handle at room temperature as oil, coal, natural gas and so on.
If we *don't* do this, then I'm fairly sure that after we hit 11 billion by 2100, we'll be lucky to hit 50 million by 2200. Fewer, if we try and solve our resource problems by throwing nukes at one another, which sounds likely.
Like all species, we simply consume resources until the population crashes. What we've been so far with technology is "lucky." There's always been another *cheap* and *easy* resource to exploit. Short of a breakthrough in battery technology and thorium reactors (or fusion) that's not going to happen again.
WHY is the Chinese. We're being out-competed. The Chinese are providing technology to a number of African countries in exchange for resources (e.g. Coltan in Congo. Oil from Nigeria) and they're not insisting on human rights or democracy to provide it. Right now, the USA has the closest thing to an Ebola cure, which means that the Chinese are at a disadvantage.
This won't last, of course, and may result in a significant worldwide plague. Whether this is an unforeseen consequence of a planned feature is left as an exercise for the reader.
Granted, it won't be that fast unless it mutates in such a way that it can be spread through the air. If it does that, then growth quite a bit faster than exponential is possible.
I design and implement automated testing systems, including specialized APIs and the VMWare-based virtualization environments designed to support them.
As part of getting a BA in psychology back in the day, you had to have several statistics courses, industrial psychology, human factors, ergonomics and it was strongly suggested that you become familiar with symbolic logic. Neurophysiology, particularly neuronal functioning, was popular too. Had psychology research funding not dried up after Reagan was elected, I might still be in a lab somewhere.
Fate had other plans. Unable to find honest work, I took up the software trade instead. That was 34 years ago.
I use my psychology degree every day.
The issue is random confiscation (aka. "theft") by local police. I don't have any problem with confiscation as long as a crime was committed and the defendant proven guilty. What isn't tolerable in any way, shape, or form is confiscation of my property because some dimwitted, local yokel cop *thought* about drugs while looking at my car.