fuck the 1% and their war shit.. and fuck religion fanatics too...

Another dreamer wishing in one hand and shitting in the other, I wonder which hand fills up first.

What does a physically limited human in a helmet in the cockpit bring to the battle that a physically remote human in a helmet cannot do? Is the extra "situation awareness" brought about by the kinesthetic sense and the millisecond lag caused by speed-of-signal issues worth the extra cost of making an expensive toy for pilots over making a slightly less expensive toy for armchair warriors? Do we really expect the on-site human to be able to whip that $600K helmet off, squint Dirty Harry style and squeeze of a few thousand well placed rounds into a target that cannot be seen without the enhancements of that helmet? When I was AF, I'd have raised these issues and probably been told what I was told then, the remote sensing and control technology just is not up to the task.

"Prove it" says I, and I would invoke the post WWI demonstration bombing that got Billy Mitchell in trouble.

I am a member of two planning commissions in Minnesota and I find it very ironic that here in the Land of 10,000 lakes (or, in the spring, one really big lake), we are having to block ethanol plants and agricultural irrigation because of ground water and deep water concerns. Similarly we are finding that the ground water we do have is slowly being destroyed by run-in from fields covered with chemicals. It does make me an outlier in the Republican party (social liberal wing thereof) when I pose these "tragedies of the commons" arguments to the died-in-the-wool free-market libertarian types. I can show them the specific assumptions in their models that cause them to FAIL (mode critical) and as a mathematician I am often surprised that they do not see how those failures force an external, non-free market solution. But I soldier on.

I went with both eyes good for distance vision because I wanted to be able to see well if I fell off my sailboat and lost my glasses (since they would be off-the-shelf sunglasses or reading glasses). I have been quite happy with the results and represent a sample size of 1. On the other hand, I DO need reading glasses, but they are cheap enough that my house looks like an explosion in a glasses factory.

When I was teaching at the Air Force Institute of Technology, on the topic of the the math behind IFF systems, I used this example (Vincennes incident) as an example of how human factors enter into battlefield decisions in a way that can nullify the best planned algorithms. Now I am using those examples in the hospital decision making environment.

FWIW, the example problem I presented was of an airplane heading towards a base, flying with no IFF transponder, flying low and erratically. The question was whether it was a damaged friendly (no IFF, no radio) and returning to base or an enemy spoofing to look like a damaged friendly. The Army troops were unanimous, "Shoot it down; sort it out on the ground". The flyboys were not so sanguine.

The first thing you have to ask is whether a computer that passes the test has some rights that other machines don't. The test we are looking for is one that, if a program passes the test then legal protections would intervene if you wanted to shut it off and scramble the memory. Any other test is just semantics and tomfoolery, like arguing over what color is the sky. Without the actionable component (a blue sky means I don't need my umbrella to get across the parking lot to my car) the question of "best test for AI ..." is a form of mental self-abuse, without the happy ending.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The incentive is NOT to make the most money. It is to charge just enough that there is very little room for a competitor to slip in a lower premium for the same protections. Thus, if you are deemed to be an expected cost is $1K/year driver then your premium should be about $1.1K a year to leave them some protection against the high-side risks (protection they usually get through re-insurance, but that's another concept and we don't want to overload the wet-ware circuits). Conversely, if you are deemed to be an expected cost is $10K/year driver then your premium should be $11K a year and I bet they just hope someone else comes along and offers you a better deal.

But "increasing the total sum they get from premiums" is not even a first order approximation of the TWTWW (the way the world works).

The underground and grey economies are showing that the rich are the only ones who NEED what they get, the rest of us are just droning on ...

I guarantee that if more than some (insert your guess here)% of the economy went into barter then the IRS would start enforcing EXISTING laws that make barter transactions taxable as income. So, calling brownies money (as barter) does not make them untaxable, just (currently) untaxed. As for non-profits getting a special tax break, why not (1) eliminate all corporate taxes, (2) remove free speech from corporations and unions, (3) tax wealth more (level that entitlement cliff), (4) tax consumption more (carbon tax, anyone?), (5) tax income less (but progressively).

This list is not supportable by either party, which makes me think it could be the best set of trade-offs ever. The only improvement would be if estates of everyone who died were taxed at a rate that paid off their (proportional) share of the national debt that they let get run up on their watch (without regard to which party incurred it). Might make those 20-somethings think a little bit about how much debt they wanted their cohort to put on the books.

As a practicing mathematician and statistician I really don't think the publicly available data is suitable for any weekend warriors to do their own analyses. The data that is available, I fear, will have been "cleaned" to ensure consistency with local dogma rather than to ensure suitability for analysis.

Nice and concise, the US was lucky in WW2 in that we did not exit with ravaged infrastructure. jellomizer wrote a nice summary.

This is pretty consistent with economic models that claim we are all competing for the same jobs, with the attendant sloppy back and forth to equilibrium.

Do you think they think they can build 'em up faster than rising oceans can swamp them? And how hard is pouring tons of sand on coral on the coral? Where is the outrage!

"You can make a Slashdot signature quote seem authoritative by attributing it to a famous person" - Sun Tzu

Citation? My references attribute this to Buddha.

Mine this set and I'll bet you find ONE (1) real statement and 10 that use that statement (directly or indirectly).