Posts by Vociferous

Re: can't resist

I'm over 40 and that's been my default attitude to new internet companies for years. I've learned that I'm wrong in direct proportion to how dumb I think the company's idea is.

Re: I think it's a bit harsh

> the social function 4chan serves

You mean as a hub for trading of underage porn, underage hentai, self-shot penis shots, and staging ground for forum invasions and harassment of 11-year-old-girls on Facebook? Yeah, I don't see how the net could survive without that.

Re: We already have artificial "thinking" beeings

Those kinds of structures are called "superorganisms". There's lots written about them.

Re: like a bird

> what it currently lacks is the thing it needs to be called "a person".

Emotions. Neither AI's nor robots will have them. That's why they'll remain machines. The concept that just because something is intelligent, it gets feelings like ambition or fear, is wrong. Intelligence has nothing to do with feelings. An AI will not bat an eyelid (if it had one) when you pull the power cord, because it does not fear, does not desire, does not care.

Re: "Truthy" math

> He's saying that are no hard stats in the report to back it up.

And it took me less than a minute and a single search of the real report to find out that he's wrong.

Re: "Truthy" math

> Here's the link to the IPCC report

No, that's a link to a denier site.

The actual IPCC report is here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

You can for instance have a look in the "Summary for Policy Makers" and have a look at picture SPM6 on page 18, in which the 95% confidence interval for predicted global average temperature change due to human+natural forcings contains the actually measured temperature for the period, while the predicted temperature change for only natural forcings is wholly outside the 95% range (i.e. is rejected).

If you want more detail, refer to the corresponding section of the full text and supplement.

Re: Reminder

That's a lot of words to say "there isn't one". Which was exactly my point.

Re: Reminder

Name one environmental protection law supported by libertarians.

Re: A picture is worth a thousand words.

Yes, a picture IS worth a thousand words.

Re: Reminder

> Well I am the one that disproves that

As the core organizing idea of libertarianism is that ownership is absolute, with all other views emanating from that, and environmental protection equals prohibiting owners of land from freely exploiting their land, thereby violating their absolute property rights... Well, at the risk of committing a True Scotsman fallacy, I have to wonder if maybe you're a liberal, not a libertarian.

> Libertarians are not ideologists

Surely you jest.

You managed to get a post through even though it has the d word in it? How?

Re: We could be in a simulation

> Scifi story where scientists developed a sim universe and the occupants promptly broke out

'The Cyberiad' by Stanislaw Lem. Also a great many episodes of Star Trek.

Re: Wonderful

>The observer, of course.

I wrote a joke answer first, but thought better of it. This is AFAIK, and according to my understanding:

If the observer is IN the universe, then I suppose theoretically the observer could be the reference point and one could make everything else in the universe rotate around him, but changing the trajectories of every object in the universe would be difficult. Like Dan1980 points out, in a sense the universe IS rotating around you, due to the Earth's rotation.

An observer OUTSIDE our universe can't observe our universe rotating: there's an event horizon separating him from our universe, he can't see us any more than we can see the naked singularity in a black hole.

Now, as far as I know it is possible that the universe might be rotating around an axis. It's not an unreasonable thought, most things in the universe rotate around an axis, so why not the universe? I don't know how one'd go about showing this, though.

Re: Wonderful

Rotate relative to what?

> we'll be able to run it in real time as live wallpaper on our phones

That's not the direction technology is going any more. You'll be able to STREAM it on your phone.

Re: Unaffordium, sorry.

@Miami Mike: The ISS is a bad example, as it's both a prototype and a PR project (i.e. not intended to do anything besides being built), and it was built in the most expensive way imaginable (with the space shuttle, which cost 6x more than a normal rocket per launch). Arguably the ISS main task is actually to soak up money; certainly that's what it does best.

That said, the 100YSS is probably still in the trillion dollar range. It'll need major technological breakthroughs to become viable.

Re: Unaffordium, sorry.

@shadowdragon: If you think it's expensive to build things in Earth orbit, you should do the math on how much it would cost to launch things from Earth to build and maintain high-technological factories on Luna capable of building spaceships. Hint: it's more difficult and more expensive than building them at the bottom of the Marianas trench.

Re: Having spent far too many hours on internet forums

> Why?

Well, firstly I personally quite like humans. Secondly, humans are the one single hope any life on Earth has of escaping the inevitable death of our planet and sun, and I really like plants & animals. Thirdly, any species, even a big, violent, destructive, and rather ugly monkey like Homo sapiens, has an intrinsic right to exist. Fourthly, because without humans there'll be no future machine civilization. And, lastly, I do believe humanity can be house trained and start behaving itself -- it just needs to outgrow its primitive delusions and get control of its own reproduction -- and once that happens humanity isn't much of a problem any more.

>UX, ease of use and intuitiveness are all pretty important

The problem is that all software companies use the same usability consultants, resulting in all the software looking the same, so you end up with Ubuntu looking like Windows 8, and Firefox looking like Chrome. Which is a bummer if you don't agree with the current fashion trends in UI, like for instance I don't.

> as important as the functionality hidden behind the interface

That has always been my main gripe with Firefox: the condescension and stupidity of hiding nearly all configurability in an intentionally hidden, poorly documented, and intentionally obfuscated webpage.

Re: yes but...

> weren't Google the company that did no evil at one point?

Yes, but good intentions and billions of dollars don't mix.

That said, people are holding Google to much higher standards than other companies, even Microsoft, partly because it's seen as dominating, partly because it's the hip and happening thing to do if you're a conspiracy theorist.

Re: yes but...

@Greg D: Sounds like you had a broken config file. That was a pretty common problem with Firefox some... oh, 10 major revisions ago.

Re: Nearly

For me the killer feature is the triangle in the right hand part of the address bar. Extremely useful, to the point I find it difficult to use any browser which doesn't have it.

Re: Being drunk is a defence?

Being drunk/high is usually considered an aggravating circumstance.

When correlations are very hard to find, that's a sign they don't exist.

Science can't disprove things, it can only show if things are statistically significant correlated. This means that, for instance, it is impossible to prove that a substance is absolutely not cancerogenous, or that compter games absolutely do not cause violent behavior. It is easy to show strong correlations (for instance, that smoking correlates with cancer, or that driving drunk correlates with getting in to accidents), but as correlation gets weaker, it gets progressively more difficult.

Any situation where you have many studies which more or less randomly (or, as in the case of fictional violence vs real violence, tendentiously) get completely different results regarding whether two things are correlated, you should suspect that in reality the correlation is extremely weak or non-existent.

As for badly/tendentiously designed: my favorite "fictional violence causes real violence" study had a toddler placed for 20 minutes alone in an empty room with nothing but a doll, a plastic toy hammer, and a TV showing a cartoon in which one character hit another with a hammer. If, at any point, the toddler put any part of the hammer in contact with the doll, it was considered to have been inspired by the cartoon to hit the doll with the hammer. I'm sure it comes as a surprise that they found a correlation between fictional and real violence.