Cushman

87 ms·

811.
by Cushman 14y ago
Next time, try a little more craft and a little less snark.
812.
by Cushman 14y ago
> But this idea (that is, that while lecturing others, you have some right to break those rules because you them inconvenient) is absurd. Heh. Protip: When criticizing style as a point of argument, make sure you don't accidentally a wor
813.
by Cushman 14y ago
I went to college, thanks. If you sincerely believe that government shouldn't have the ability to own or regulate the use of public lands, we're unlikely to have a productive conversation.
814.
by Cushman 14y ago
Wow. Okay, well, uh... don't let me take up any more of your valuable time, then. Good talking to you.
815.
by Cushman 14y ago
I don't get it... is someone forcing you to drive on public roads? Was your driving examiner holding a gun to your head while you parallel parked? Does a State Trooper come to your door every two years and march you down to the DMV to renew
816.
by Cushman 14y ago
When you got your driver's license, you agreed to obey traffic regulations. Not some of the rules, some of the time, not only when you agree with the rules about what's safe, not unless you're in a hurry. I'm not trying to say all the rules
817.
by Cushman 14y ago
No, I assume (or rather hope) that traffic regulations will be enforced strictly, and that drivers will respond appropriately to the incentive and obey the law . I assume local regulatory boards will respond to any economic impact caused b
818.
by Cushman 14y ago
Is it wrong to not be bothered by this? I'll be disappointed if fully autonomous vehicles haven't started to hit the market by 2015. Stricter enforcement of manual driving rules should probably be a part of that. I'm not saying I'm down wit
819.
by Cushman 14y ago
I don't think I've missed the point, though it's possible I'm talking past you. I've granted what you're saying-- I don't think synthetic replacement of parts of my brain should alter my identity or consciousness any more than a nap does. B
820.
by Cushman 14y ago
There are discontinuities in brain state we are willing to accept: sleep, drug use, travelling the world for a year. There are those we are not: Death, Alzheimer's, radical personality change. Have you ever known someone who got in a relati
821.
by Cushman 14y ago
Assuming we are defining consciousness objectively as the pattern which encodes my brain state: I would continue to be me through the copying procedure, which can presumably be less disruptive to my consciousness than falling asleep. I woul
822.
by Cushman 14y ago
Sigh. Not that I don't love the idea of revolutionary technology, but the very idea betrays what seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding: Man, as in man kind , already is immortal. We seem to stand a decent chance of outliving our star
823.
by Cushman 14y ago
You haven't answered the question, though: Why does the market continue to bear what you see as exorbitant rates? Consider that we have an oversupply of bar-certified lawyers, there is no conspiracy or collusion going on. What is preventi
824.
by Cushman 14y ago
From the filing: "Google delivered to its document vendor over 97 million documents for electronic processing and review. ... Google’s document vendor filtered custodial documents for production by running agreed-upon key-term searches, and
825.
by Cushman 14y ago
Are you implying that Google spent three million dollars sending an intern down to Kinko's with a truck full of file boxes?
826.
by Cushman 14y ago
This would never make the front of Reddit. What would the headline be... "TIL that some people speculate about terraforming Mars"?
827.
by Cushman 14y ago
Out of curiosity, how much would you bid to reproduce some tens of millions of pages of documents in such a way that you would be willing to testify before a judge that every single one was true and accurate? (Considering that the judge
828.
by Cushman 14y ago
If the problem is money, then why go after the lawyers? Why not the accountants who finance the company? Or the HR managers who organize it? Or the contractors who will be putting that factory up, or, hell, the blue-collar guys who will eve
829.
by Cushman 14y ago
I'm normally very liberal about submissions-- I figure whatever we upvote belongs here. But this... I don't understand why this even got submitted.
830.
by Cushman 14y ago
My mom has a strict no-gifts-from-reps policy-- she won't even take a card, as far as I know. There's been one exception to this: At one point, a rep found out it was her birthday, and delivered a huge cake. To the unit. Of course, she want
831.
by Cushman 14y ago
> In medicine you don't typically do Viagra 2.0, with a boatload of new IP that makes the original obsolete (and hence any competitors shipping the old version scrambling). Actually, there is an entire class of drugs known in medicine a
832.
by Cushman 14y ago
You wound me, sir. It has been noted by others (in the article, for example) that Linux is the undisputed king of high-performance computing, in the public sector at least. My only assumption is that that is not random, that there are reaso
833.
by Cushman 14y ago
I was trying not to be too personal, but I do basically agree with you. I dearly adore transhumanist fiction, but their real-world philosophy seems to boil down to pretending that the fiction is real. One hesitates to compare them in that r
834.
by Cushman 14y ago
I'd contend that manpower is the bottleneck, and time spent writing and debugging software is time taken away from designing and performing experiments. How much time, exactly, depends on the precise software. I'm not saying it's on the s
835.
by Cushman 14y ago
There are interesting facets to it, I think. What would they be using if Linux didn't exist? How much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? Or Windows? How many of those millions of man-hours contributed to this discovery? Ho
836.
by Cushman 14y ago
Well, it's much more controversial than that-- but perhaps I'm to blame, because it's also more controversial than I've been trying to claim. Perhaps the more neutral framing is this: There are things that happen to life which you will not
837.
by Cushman 14y ago
Evolution is the result of the reproduction of populations of individuals. A single organism reproducing once is a non-event, evolutionarily speaking. This implies effects in the population that are counterintuitive from the perspective o
838.
by Cushman 14y ago
Okay, okay, you got me. I'll concede the point entirely :) Feel free to disregard the analogy as it applies to computers which may be made to run faster by raising the input voltage.
839.
by Cushman 14y ago
Analyzing and debating the "exceptions" to the "law" is what I'm calling "validating". I just don't really understand what makes the premise valuable enough to deliberate over when there's a simple, straightforward, boring explanation for t
840.
by Cushman 14y ago
That's a good note, but I did mean the computer's input voltage, not the CPU's. You can increase an individual neuron's firing speed plausibly trivially, but the brain (like the computer) is a complex regulated system that can't be played

More ›