Hmm you and a couple of anons 'don't get it', Macfox is trying to ask a question that is reasonable and not that hard to parse, yet he gets the 'you don't seem to understand the concept' from you. His point is that if the visor is fairly transparent, then light from the environment (e.g. looking at a white table) will interfere with the augmentation. I.e. you can't simulate the covering of white table with black tablecloth, even though you can (more convincingly) cover a black table with white virtual tablecloth.

However wouldn't it be possible to use an LCD screen in the visor, which could selectively block out areas if needed? I understand the visor is not in the correct focal plane for the purpose, but brightly lit, large, contiguous objects with low apparent speed (e.g. a window, the sky, a light source or a white wall) could be blocked out, similar to how smudges on sunglasses have a blurred but very noticeable effect. All it would take is a transparent LCD screen which is old tech and uses very little power.

What's science's answer to this one?

1. Any sufficiently advanced civilisation can create a simulation (or more) on a grand scale.
2. In a simulated world, intelligence and construction may arise, eventually leading to sufficiently advanced simulated civilisations
3. (... after some thousands of recursions, also recognising that there is plenty of 'time' for that because time is an internal variable of the universe in question...)

The big Q:

What is the likelihood that in the vast tree of simulated universes, we are sitting at the root?

Could it be that as a simulated civilisation advances, and invents the microscope and the telescope, and intelligent species proliferate, the simulatING civilisation has to throw more and more hardware at the problem? Or has to invent physics on the go? E.g. pre-Newton and pre-radiotelescopes, a Newtonian world would have perfectly worked, from the viewpoint of the humans, with 'rendered' stars; pre-microscope, maybe bacteria etc. didn't need to exist. The simulator just simulated some sickness or reaction. When the loop tightened, they had to invent something.

Maybe science stops when there is enough evidence that some things just can't reconcile with one another, or when more and more investment is needed for less and less impactful findings (bosons, very remote galaxies etc.). Maybe a team of scientists one level up are playing pranks or feeling creative. And some other scientists tie their hands and just start some cellular automaton to see where it leads to.

Isn't thinking this the equivalent of the geocentric or heliocentric world view?

Nah, it's much simpler. The universe is floating in a sea of vacuum, which seeps through the pores of the universe, i.e. it's statistically unlikely but the energy balance is zero. You can immediately grasp the concept if you think of a squashed sponge ball, which as it expands, it soaks up air from its neighborhood. And of course if physicists are happy to buy into the idea that the Universe just sprang out of nothing, why not think that it sprang out like a sponge ball compressed (or nanoprinted) into a tiny space?

**ducks**

> When you're angry, the media is spreading fear, and citizens are demanding action from their government, its all to easy to swing wildly too far in giving up freedom and privacy. We've had more than a decade of that in the US and it isn't pretty.

A lot of us here are in STEM or work with data in some way. How on Earth are you going to prevent shit like this from happening if not by close surveillance? For it is not an individual action but a pattern of individually innocent-looking actions that is predictive of a plot suspicion. With all the liberal whining, let's get real: in the age where even just one (moderately armed) asshole can cause serious damage (e.g. indirectly to freedom of speech), you won't have a real super-duper search warrant until after it's too late. So you are forced to monitor whatever you can to establish patterns among activities that individually aren't suspicious. Just because anger can lead to close surveillance, it does not mean that carefully measured analysis would have lead you somewhere else. Network data analysis 101 welcome to the class of 2015.

Wishy-washy thing you're saying. Who cares about the 'definition'. These terrorists killed a dozen or two, for political reasons, in Europe, sounds un-vague enough for me and probably another few hundred million EU citizens.

That is a pretty damning statistic, I admit. But it would be weird for Western Europeans to limit migration from Eastern Europe, because Western Europe in general, made the mistake of accepting millions of culturally very different immigrants en masse who's values are radically different, and migration from Eastern Europe is the only route to improve demographic balance. So if I were a Western European far right wing politician (which I'm not, not even a sympathizer) then I'd _definitely_ insist on strengthening the immigration flow from Eastern Europe to revitalise the local mainstream population (as the aging Danish society itself can't over-procreate the migrants of multicultural origin).

It may still be the smaller bad, in comparison to not doing anything on the excuse that it incurs the risk (or even the likelihood) of what you talk about. Life is action -> reaction, get used to it. Noone believes that the states won't misuse their powers, but it's naive and insulting of YOU to assume that people don't consider that self-defense and self-preservation has costs. If you think about it, the modern state is way more knowledgeable about you than it was in the medieval or industrial times, credit cards, non-anonymous travel etc., yet I don't think you'd want to go backwards in time...

> True in the US, but in Europe, we are already past tipping point: the majority of people now see organised religion as a force for harm.

Haha, good one :-) There are countries like the UK where there is strong economic sense to be (pretend to be) religious, if not for something else, to benefit from superior schools while not having to pay for "public" (=private) schools.

Even if what you said were true, it would be a snapshot. Want to guess that families of which religion procreates more? That tipping point is not one-way and may come back purely as a result of clear demographic trends.

> they are decent to the extent that they discard their holy books, not to the extent that they follow them

There is some very humane and peaceful stuff in the New Testament. So you're simplifying to the extent of being wrong.

But I agree with your larger point that hazards to society should be treated as such, because we have one life, one planet etc. so let's do a good amount of risk prevention to protect what's important to us, and good risk prevention starts with earnest analysis of causes and effects - let the statistics talk, and let's apply Bayesian inference - , not some politically correct bullshit. For example, let's not harrass disabled Caucasian people, young Chinese girls etc. on an airport who, based on these superficial data alone, are much less likely to commit terrorist acts than for example males who look like a facebook of terrorists and their support network. Too much PC-ness just causes an unnatural lack of balance to effort spent vs. realised returns. Another way of saying is, if you don't act on Bayesian statistics (e.g. picking search targets on airports) then you just harrass the criminally underrepresented group so that you can righteously claim that your search efforts are uncorrelated to skin color, gender etc. I as a man don't mind if I'm picked out of the line more often than women because I respect society's interest and recognize the utility of using prior probabilities.

If on one occasion, A preceded B, then A must have caused B and must cause it almost a century later.
If the alternative to your hypothetical B is a definite C, and a definite C is worse than a hypothetical B, while a realised B would be as bad as C, then we should still remain on course for C.

Maybe still more free than the mean / median / top decile of Muslim religion-states? So whether or not you're right on this point is kind of irrelevant.

Blah-blah-blah. Why is it that e.g. the Poilsh can integrate more nicely into the UK society? Maybe because they try, and there are more shared values? Religions teach people things and values that may or may not be compatible with Western values. There is an undeniable pattern between Islam and disrespect for Western values, e.g. secularity (separation of church and state), religious freedom, women's rights, child (girl) education, types of punishments, I could go on and on.Once the demographic processes tip the balance in favor of a Muslim majority, see if it's indeed a 'run-of-the-mill socioeconomic problem' or just the end of the place as you know it, with Sharia law for your grandchildren.

You are the second guy who thinks the gp wrote tape is dead. He wrote hdd will be AS dead AS tape is today. No more, no less. I.e. as a backup media if that (ssd follows moore's law but hdd?).

I think that high political circles and social forces will make Charlie Hebdo continue no matter what, otherwise it looks like successful censorship and loss of face (loss of sovereignty) even in the unlikely case that the remaining staff would refrain from continuing.

The real damage is through all the other media outlets who will consciously or subconsciously self-censor themselves.

If an entity or social force (e.g. the Muslim fundamentalism) has the power to introduce censorship in areas that matter to them, then in effect Muslim fundamentalism gained some (additional) level of sovereignty over French (and W. European and Western and World) territory, at the expense of preexisting (French etc.) sovereignties.

So in some form it is a significant battle in the fight between Islam (as culture and social phenomenon) and Western civilisation.

It won't stop Charlie Hebdo but it claimed a huge swath of territory. Combine it with the effective censorship of that stupid movie in the US and you (presuming Western values) will WANT a pervasive surveillance state to counteract the encroachment of foreign powers into your own life, as the lesser evil.

> But let's be realistic. Terrorism of pretty much anykind is only a minor nuisance in the western world

I don't consider it a minor nuisance if it results in
- widespread self-censorship by media outlets and thus loss of freedom of speech
- hatred, suspicion and distrust toward immigrant communities
- examples and role models for malleable young minds
- consequently increased surveiillance and monitoring of all citizens

There are a couple of common, but false rebuttals to these:

1. Terrorism is 'a minor nuisance' and we can thank to ourselves that we make a bigger deal out of it than what it is, drawing to ourselves the big negatives above.
a) it's natural that newspaper editors etc. will self-censor esp. if they have family
b) it's (unfortunately) natural that people (usually uneducated, misguided but plentyful) will react less favorably or more indifferently toward Muslims as a response
c) who knows what the level of terrorism would be, had there not been some measures against it (surveiilance, etc.)?

2. Why are we applying mass surveillance, when ordinary law abiding citizens shouldn't be monitored, only court approved suspects and their social network - or in other words, Western civilisation purposefully chose the evil of monitoring law-abiding citizens so why should we blame terrorists for that?
A: You either cover networks comprehensively, or you will miss signals, because a lot of things aren't suspicious in and of themselves, however give rise to suspicion if a pattern among them is detected. To detect a pattern that emerges from individually innocent looking events, you have to, well, capture the individually innocent events. You must also retain them otherwise you can't use them to contribute to detection of future events. If you aren't comprehensive in monitoring, your adversary will exploit the gaps.