Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May observes: Meanwhile, the black folk kept listening to Rev. Jess Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton tell them that they were owed reparations, that they were owed a series of entitlements. No suprise that a large fraction of negro teens subscribe to the view that reading be for whitey. In fact, negroes have invented a whole series of insult terms for those who study too much, for those who break out of the field worker status: Uncle Toms, Oreos, etc. Imagine where the Asians would be if Asian kids who did well in science and math were taunted as race traitors? Math be for whitey. Reading be for whitey. We be owed repa-ations for diskiminashun!! In the real world, a society can not consist 100% of chip designers. It also requires cooks, toilet and floor scrubbers, and people who lug concrete in wheelbarrows up stairs. This is no problem in a society with an explicit class system. You just assign jobs to people based on their social class, with the untouchables getting the shit-hauling and scrubbing jobs, and the more attractive jobs going to their betters. Some countries, like the US and Japan, have as a part of their political doctrine that everyone has the opportunity to be wealthy and successful, so they can't openly have a class system. Of course, they still need one to determine who gets the shit-hauling jobs, and the usual method of doing this is to hide the class system in the education system. Now you don't get the shit-hauling job because you are an untouchable. You get it because you didn't do well in school, or you dropped out, and you could have been successful if you had just tried harder. Of course, it's a zero sum game. The bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, and the school is just making the proles fight with each other over who those shit-haulers will be. The fact is that the society can't make everyone successful, and the success of the few is at the expense of the failure of the many, determined by the uncompensated rat race and endless toil on the wheel of public education. The US is an excellent example of this. The AFT and NEA together are the biggest labor organization in the country. THe school system functions not to educate, but as a tool of inculcation in collectivist thinking, and a awarder of certificates which give one the right to work. Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory. A well known experiment is to take some 10th graders, and divide them randomly into two groups. Send one to college, and make the others finish the remaining two years of high school. THere will be no statistically significant difference in their college performance, thus demonstrating that public schools do not teach, but merely act as filters through which only the most talented and sociable can pass. Now, minorities in this country, including almost all Asians, and quite a few blacks, have gotten with this program that education is the way out of poverty, and have successfully turned the vicious education-based class system to their advantage, by trying to beat the dominant class at their own game, with varying degrees of success. This has required them to refrain from criticizing the system itself, because no one wins a beauty contest by having a bad attitude. I think that mentality is changing, and when you hear comments like Reading be for whitey, what is being said is not that literacy and calculus and physics and chemistry are bad, in and of themselves, but that a system which rewards only getting ahead by playing along is not a arena in which these people choose to compete. Learning by doing is always vastly superior to learning by listening to someone else talk about doing. Now in a world where most jobs are not skilled people individually producing something in demand, but are the very lowest form of commoditized labor, the opportunity to screw such dissenters probably exceeds their ability to avoid being sent made to the back of the line. Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Eric Cordian wrote: In the real world, a society can not consist 100% of chip designers. It also requires cooks, toilet and floor scrubbers, and people who lug concrete in wheelbarrows up stairs. Sure, those are still needed. Though I wouldn't be so sure that toilet and floor scrubbers will be needed anymore 20 years from now. Some countries, like the US and Japan, have as a part of their political doctrine that everyone has the opportunity to be wealthy and successful, so they can't openly have a class system. Of course, they still need one to determine who gets the shit-hauling jobs, and the usual method of doing this is to hide the class system in the education system. Now you don't get the shit-hauling job because you are an untouchable. You get it because you didn't do well in school, or you dropped out, and you could have been successful if you had just tried harder. This is just bull shit. You don't have to do well in school to do well in the job market. You just need to have the right kind of skills to do well in the job market; and if the companies not hiring you are stupid and only looking at your (school) credentials and not what you know, you can always put up your own company and succeed that way. Truly that mentality of school worship, which you talk about, makes me sick. It's a myth that you need to do well in school in order to make it out there. Of course, it's a zero sum game. The bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, and the school is just making the proles fight with each other over who those shit-haulers will be. The fact is that the society can't make everyone successful, and the success of the few is at the expense of the failure of the many, determined by the uncompensated rat race and endless toil on the wheel of public education. Oh, but it is not a zero sum game. Of course the bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, sure. But here's the catch. If the bottom X% are people who could do some complicated work that would earn them $100 000 a year, then the shit haulers will have to be paid more than that amount a year. Or no one will apply for those shitty jobs. The basics of economics: If there's a shortage of something, markets tend to rise up the value until the demand and supply meet. Exactly same does go for unregulated job market. The US is an excellent example of this. The AFT and NEA together are the biggest labor organization in the country. THe school system functions not to educate, but as a tool of inculcation in collectivist thinking, and a awarder of certificates which give one the right to work. Hell yeah. Public school system should be abolished right now. Hmm, I'm not quite as fanatical on these things as Tim is (who probably would want to shoot all those teachers and administrators), but I do find public schools to be something quite horrible. Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory. No, no, no. Public schools don't educate. Their purpose is to teach obedience and understanding that a single person cannot do without the government. Thus the nooks in Washington can get to keep their power. Now in a world where most jobs are not skilled people individually producing something in demand, but are the very lowest form of commoditized labor, the opportunity to screw such dissenters probably exceeds their ability to avoid being sent made to the back of the line. You really think there is this big conspiracy that covers all the companies working in the US, which keeps these black lists and exists just to screw those who don't like the system? How about just saying that if one is lazy and does not do his work well, he might be screwed - and that is frankly a problem of his own making. You take up on a contract, you keep it. Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money. Nonetheless, I think we do such people a great disservice if we do not show that their culture has a very bad bias against learning and understanding. Such a bias, if it exists, should not be hidden, or shunted upon; it should be brought to broad day light and shown in all its stupidity. -- Mikko Särelä Emperor Bonaparte: Where does God fit into your system? Pièrre Simon Laplace: Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis.
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries. Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their lists, or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the signature so that you can discard the forgeries that pretend to be from them. You'll also see spammers increasingly _joining_ large mailing lists, so that they can get around members-only features. This has already happened: Krazy Kevin pulled this stunt 5 years ago on at least one list I was on, joining the list to harvest the most common posters, then spamming using them as sender envelopes after he'd been kicked off. At least one large mailing list farm on which I've joined a list used a Turing-test GIF to make automated list joining difficult, ...discrimination against blind users - this is legally actionable in several countries. There is a blind group in the UK taking action against a number of companies for this and the Australian Olympic committee ended up being fined several million AU$ for the same offence in 1999. and Yahoo limits the number of Yahoogroups you can join in a day, but that's the kind of job which you hire groups of Indians or other English-speaking third-world-wagers to do for you. To underscore that point, I've _watched_ cybercafes full of SE asians(*) doing exactly this kind of thing for the princely sum of US$5/day - twice the average wage of the area, even after the cafe fees were deducted. (*) Philippines and east Malaysia. AB
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
Richard Clayton wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Eric S. Johansson wrote: But using your spam size, , the slowdown factor becomes roughly 73 times. So they would need 73 machines running full tilt all the time to regain their old throughput. Believe me, the professionals have enough 0wned machines that this is trivial. On the flipside, it means the machines are burned faster. only if the professionals are dumb enough to use the machines that are making the stamps to actually send the email (since it is only the latter which are, in practice, traceable) actually, we mean burned literally. the stamp creation process raises the temperature of the CPU. Most systems are not build for full tilt computational load. They do not have the ventilation necessary for reliable operation. So, they may get by with the first 8-12 hours of stamp generation (i.e. roughly 2000-3000 stamps per machine) but the machine reliability after that time will degrade as the heat builds up. Feel free to run this experiment yourself. Take a cheat machine from your local chop shop, run hashcash in an infinite loop, and wait for the smoke detector to go off. there is nothing quite like waking up to the smell of freshly roasted Intel. the easynet.nl list (recently demised) listed nearly 700K machines that had been detected (allegedly) sending spam... so since their detection was not universal it would certainly be more than 700K :( that is a nasty bit of news. I'll run some numbers based on that and see what the ratio of spam to stamp engines would be. gut sense is that it's still not horrible, just not as advantageous. but you never know until you run the numbers. thanks for the information and the source. -- Speech recognition in use. Incorrect endings, words, and case is closer than it appears
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Eric S. Johansson wrote: the easynet.nl list (recently demised) listed nearly 700K machines that had been detected (allegedly) sending spam... so since their detection was not universal it would certainly be more than 700K :( that is a nasty bit of news. I'll run some numbers based on that and see what the ratio of spam to stamp engines would be. gut sense is that it's still not horrible, just not as advantageous. but you never know until you run the numbers. Intelligence from DSBL indicated that there were _at least_ 350k compromised machines in the USA Roadrunner network alone at one stage. They are currently tracking around 1.5 million compromised machines. The Swen and blaster worms install various spamware and backdoors. These have been estimated to have infected millions of machines worldwide and later versions removed characteristics which removed tellltale compromise signs when scanned - now they mostly phone home, instead of listening for commands. The pool of infected machines is huge. I just hope you're right about the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines are running OGR calculations, so I suspect that you just ran into a particularly badly built example. AB
RE: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Well I be darned if Mr May hasn't inspired a major burst of eloquence, between this response and Mr Young's. As for this comment: Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory. At best. In the inner cities the function of schools is strongly hinted at by the following well-used phrase: Stay In School! In other words, schools keep the crime rates down, as is a well-known statistic. They are basically storage facilities. For real schools we white folks with $$$ can move out to the suburbs or send our kids to private school. As for, Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money. I basically agree with this, though no doubt there are Leaders that play on this (and the latent laziness of all teeneagers) to a tune similar to what May is saying. But in most cases, even good schools are a joke, and black folks at least realize this. Did anyone notice that there's only 1 or 2 states in the nation that still require Regents endorsements? I'll tell you a story. Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black. I regarded few of them as stupid, but almost none of them saw the point of studying math...they just didn't see how it could benefit them, and they said this to me on a regular basis. In one class I had some relatively young and non-troublemaking students. I told them from the beginning that I would not slip the standards so they could pass...they HAD to do homework in order to pass, as that would be the only way they could practice enough for the tests. For the first couple of tests all of the non-immigrant black kids failed. But I hammered them and told them it was going to continue like this unless they did the homework and studied. I made it absolutely clear what I expected from them. By the end of the semester most of the kids were doing their homework, and passing the quizzes and tests, which I did not make easier in any way. I remember Willie Horne coming in before a test and complaining Mr Durden, I STUDIED last night!. I reached out to feel his forehead and said Willie? Are you feelin' alright? Of course, he pulled back and stifled a smile, but he got a 90. -TD From: Eric Cordian [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 00:14:10 -0800 (PST) Tim May observes: Meanwhile, the black folk kept listening to Rev. Jess Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton tell them that they were owed reparations, that they were owed a series of entitlements. No suprise that a large fraction of negro teens subscribe to the view that reading be for whitey. In fact, negroes have invented a whole series of insult terms for those who study too much, for those who break out of the field worker status: Uncle Toms, Oreos, etc. Imagine where the Asians would be if Asian kids who did well in science and math were taunted as race traitors? Math be for whitey. Reading be for whitey. We be owed repa-ations for diskiminashun!! In the real world, a society can not consist 100% of chip designers. It also requires cooks, toilet and floor scrubbers, and people who lug concrete in wheelbarrows up stairs. This is no problem in a society with an explicit class system. You just assign jobs to people based on their social class, with the untouchables getting the shit-hauling and scrubbing jobs, and the more attractive jobs going to their betters. Some countries, like the US and Japan, have as a part of their political doctrine that everyone has the opportunity to be wealthy and successful, so they can't openly have a class system. Of course, they still need one to determine who gets the shit-hauling jobs, and the usual method of doing this is to hide the class system in the education system. Now you don't get the shit-hauling job because you are an untouchable. You get it because you didn't do well in school, or you dropped out, and you could have been successful if you had just tried harder. Of course, it's a zero sum game. The bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, and the school is just making the proles fight with each other over who those shit-haulers will be. The fact is that the society can't make everyone successful, and the success of the few is at the expense of the failure of the many, determined by the uncompensated rat race and endless toil on the wheel of public education. The US is an excellent example of this. The AFT and NEA together are the biggest labor organization in the country. THe school system functions not to educate, but as a tool of inculcation in collectivist thinking, and a awarder of certificates which give one the right to work. Schools don't educate, but merely serve as
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
-- Alan Brown wrote: I just hope you're right about the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines are running OGR calculations, so I suspect that you just ran into a particularly badly built example. Eric S. Johansson no, it was a stock Intel motherboard, CPU, CPU fan in a standard (i.e. not cheap) case with reasonably sized power supply (i.e. 300 watts). It has the standard number of fans. With modern CPUs one needs a great deal of care installing the heat sink to avoid overheating. A standard CPU fan is not equivalent to a competently built computer. A modern bios has the capability to switch the computer off if it detects overheating. Unfortunately this capability is often off by default, or is deliberately switched off by shoddy assemblers who do not care whether they have installed functional CPU cooling -- and they usually have not. I recently built a computer for my son. Went through two CPU cooling systems before I got satisfactory cooling with the third system Then after the a few months the rather small and fragile plastic motherboard clip that held the extremely massive cooling system against the CPU cracked, impairing cooling efficiency, and I had to take the system apart and McGyver a clip out of inductor wire. Since it has worked fine. Modern cpu cooling systems are so massive that we need metal to metal clips all the way through the mother board, but today's motherboards still come with these frail little crappy plastic clips suitable only for old style fans. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG jd8twQqu33IqobCtWRsiI82DmRPHLLGBFHtty1eK 44/TTa0hL/CvVpbKSadQPFrmPhdPmSiuxBQEal47m
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Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
Alan Brown wrote: They are currently tracking around 1.5 million compromised machines. *ouch*. on 24x7 both power and connectivity? The Swen and blaster worms install various spamware and backdoors. These have been estimated to have infected millions of machines worldwide and later versions removed characteristics which removed tellltale compromise signs when scanned - now they mostly phone home, instead of listening for commands. and nobody has noticed. That's mine bogglingly astounding. A friend of mine just bought an XP machine and insisted on grabbing updates herself over her modem. yes, she has soft firewalls and virus protection in place but I'm willing to bet she's one of the compromised now so I should probably investigate detection/removal tools. you do need to give Microsoft credit, after all, they are the world leader in zombie friendly software. I figured they probably have at least a three-year head start over Linux in this arena. The pool of infected machines is huge. I just hope you're right about the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines are running OGR calculations, so I suspect that you just ran into a particularly badly built example. no, it was a stock Intel motherboard, CPU, CPU fan in a standard (i.e. not cheap) case with reasonably sized power supply (i.e. 300 watts). It has the standard number of fans. I think this makes it even more imperative to develop the kit ability of dynamically increasing postage process based on what your peers say. what a way to start the new year. ;-) Alan, I do appreciate you carrying the message as it were. ---eric -- Speech recognition in use. Incorrect endings, words, and case is closer than it appears
Skeptical about claim that stamp creation burns out modern CPUs
On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:13 AM, Eric S. Johansson wrote: actually, we mean burned literally. the stamp creation process raises the temperature of the CPU. Most systems are not build for full tilt computational load. They do not have the ventilation necessary for reliable operation. So, they may get by with the first 8-12 hours of stamp generation (i.e. roughly 2000-3000 stamps per machine) but the machine reliability after that time will degrade as the heat builds up. Feel free to run this experiment yourself. Take a cheat machine from your local chop shop, run hashcash in an infinite loop, and wait for the smoke detector to go off. there is nothing quite like waking up to the smell of freshly roasted Intel. I'm skeptical of this claim. A lot of Intel and AMD and similar machines are running full-tilt, 24/7. To wit, Beowulf-type clusters, the Macintosh G5 cluster that is now rated third fasted in the world, and so on. None of these machines is reported to be burning up literally. Likewise, a lot of home and corporate users are running background tasks which are at 100% CPU utilization. (Examples abound, from render farms to financial modeling to... Friends of mine run a bunch of 2 and 3 GHz Pentium 4 machines in CPU-bound apps, and they run them 24/7. (Their company, Invest by Agents, analyzes tens of thousands of stocks. They use ordinary Dells and have had no catastrophic burned literally failures.) Further, junction-to-case temperature in a ceramic package has a time constant of tens of seconds, meaning, the case temperature reaches something like 98% of its equilibrium value (as wattage reaches, say, 60 watts, or whatever), in tens of seconds. (For basic material and physics reasons...I used to make many of these measurements when I was at Intel, and nothing in the recent packaging has changed the physics of heat flow much.) We also used to run CPUs at 125 C ambient, under operating conditions, for weeks at a time. Here the junction temperature was upwards of 185 C. Failures occurred in various ways, usually do to electromigration and things like that. Almost never was there any kind of fire. Just burnout, which is a generic name but has nothing of course to do with burning in the chemical sense. Now I grant you that I haven't tested CPUs in this way in many years. But I am skeptical that recent CPUs are substantially different than past CPUs. I would like to see some actual reports of burned literally CPUs. By the way, I have run some apps on my Macintosh 1 GHz CPU which are CPU-bound. No burn ups. I'd like to see some support for the claim that running a stamp creation process is more likely to burn up a modern machine than all of these apps running financial modeling, render farms, and supercomputer clusters are doing. Until then, render me skeptical. --Tim May
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
On Dec 31, 2003, at 5:53 PM, Tyler Durden wrote: PS: Is there any comment that Mr May would like to profer on the issue of having been rejected by some hot black tail back in the day? (ie, aside from I'd like to see you are your infant children stripped of epidermis and dipped in seasalt) First, please stop including the entire message you are responding to, plus the parts you comment on. I dislike editing other people's sloppiness as much as I dislike paying for their breeding choices. Second, your comment above merits no response. --Tim May
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:51 AM, Tyler Durden wrote: I'll tell you a story. Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black. I regarded few of them as stupid, but almost none of them saw the point of studying math...they just didn't see how it could benefit them, and they said this to me on a regular basis. First, please stop including the full text of the message you are replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or bottom-post to edited fragments. Second, we are fast-moving toward a society and economy where only those who _wanted_ to study math and science by the time they were in high school will have anything more than a menial, makework job. Now whether they go the full course and get a college degree or advanced degree is not so much the point as it is that they were intrinsically interested. So if a kid in high school can't see the benefit of studying math, he shouldn't be. It's as simple as that. The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a society and economy might look like where the costs of material production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/ The analogy I drew, in an essay, and that Howard Landman, Ted Kaehler, Mike Korns, and others added to was this: * We already have an example of an entire town and an entire industry where essentially the costs of material production are nearly zero. * Namely, Hollywood. Film stock is essentially free...bits even more so. Cameras remain expensive, but are vastly less so than they were a decade ago. Basically, everything material in Hollywood is nearly free. What is expensive is the creative talent, the know-how, the ensembles of actors and directors and writers and all. (And writing is itself a perfect example of material abundance. All of the money is in the writing and distribution, virtually none of it in the materials, or in the low skill segment.) Which is why some writers and some Hollywood types make tens of millions a year and most don't. * The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp division between the skilled and in demand end of the spectrum and the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand. (I argued this, circa 1991-2, to a bunch of people who basically bought the line that technology would bring wealth to the masses, blah blah. I argued that yes, the masses would have great material goods, just as the masses today have color tvs in their cribs. But the big money would elude them. Libertarian rhetoric about everybody being wealthy is only meaningful in the sense that even the poorest today are wealthy by Roman or Middle Ages or even Renaissance standards. But the split between those with talents in demand--the Peter Jacksons, the Stephen Kings, the Tim Berners-Lees, etc. and the reading be for whitey and I don't see any benefit to studying math vast bulk will widen.) Much more could be said on this. I recall I wrote some long articles along these lines in the early years of the list. In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math. It's like convincing a kid to start writing so he'll stand a chance of being the next Stephen King: if he needs convincing, he won't be. The burnoff of useless eaters will be glorious. --Tim May
Re: Skeptical about claim that stamp creation burns out modern CPUs
Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now I grant you that I haven't tested CPUs in this way in many years. But I am skeptical that recent CPUs are substantially different than past CPUs. I would like to see some actual reports of burned literally CPUs. I've never seen a burned literally CPU, but I have tracked the demise of an AMD K6 (or K6-2, can't remember now) from hot carrier effects. If all processors were made like that one, you would see a lot more load-induced failures. -- Riad Wahby [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIT VI-2 M.Eng
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May wrote... First, please stop including the full text of the message you are replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or bottom-post to edited fragments. I actually do this for a reason. If I'm not doing a line-by-line response (or sometimes even if I am), I want the original post from which I am excerpting to be visible, so that it can be referred to and determined I am not taking this particular quote out of context. So if a kid in high school can't see the benefit of studying math, he shouldn't be. It's as simple as that. Well, part of me doesn't entirely disagree. At least, high school teachers should be teaching and not babysitting. I actually consider it hard enough to develop true competence in math or science (enough to teach on the HS level), and then even harder developing the skills necessary to communicate the ideas effectively. A math or physics teacher can't be an effective babysitter, pal, AND guidance counselor. Or at least, not in the kinds of quantities liberals imagine the schools should be filled with. On the other hand, given the current state of world education in math and science, by 9th grade it's not necessarily too late for a kid to turn into a good mathematician (actually, I myself am an example: in 9th grade I was in a lame but famous private school pulling down low Bs and high Cs in math because I was bored. By 12th grade I was in what was and is regarded as THE top-notch school for math and science in the country, pulling down 100 in calculus...but don't get me wrong, I still know the difference between me and true genius in mathematics). However, the fact is that the school system sucks. It's a joke. Repeat offenders get bounced from school to school, wrecking classes and the environment everywhere they go. Teachers in most states have 25 classroom hours a week, a number matched nowhere in the world (as far as I've ever heard), and THAT'S in addition to homeroom and other duties. The cirriculum is a silly joke, watered down and watered down so that only someone who never shows up couldn't graduate. (And in black schools you'd be suprised how many times I've heard 'these kids can't learn...don't try'.) So your whole burnoff of the eaters theme misses one critical element: direct contact with kids. If you yourself had seen and met kids you KNEW might actually have quite a talent for math, YES EVEN YOU might be tempted to give a crap, and see if just one or two might somehow be inspiried merely to do some homework. This is particularly true when you realize that you actually LIKE some of these kids, which are as fully human as you are, by the way. Or, it might just make you even angrier...give your rage some real, practical real-world fuel rather than being the theoretical cloistered construct it at least appears to be. At least, 'talent' doesn't seem to be the problem. Inner-city black kids have proven that they can do extremely well in whatever they view as important (I'd argue that some of this is due to genetic superiority)...a well-run school system could easily produce the kind of math and engineering talent needed without brain-draining from other countries (and which is probably not a relaible long-term option). The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a society and economy might look like where the costs of material production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/ I don't remember reading any von Neumann where he discusses the idea of general assemblersI'm still not convinced the general physics of that idea works out, and I believe Freeman Dyson has had some similar doubts. But despite that there's a point here... * Namely, Hollywood. Film stock is essentially free...bits even more so. Cameras remain expensive, but are vastly less so than they were a decade ago. Basically, everything material in Hollywood is nearly free. What is expensive is the creative talent, the know-how, the ensembles of actors and directors and writers and all. Hell, you don't have to go that far. Food is already cheap enough that we might regard it as being nearly free. I mean, for a couple of bucks you can buy enough beef to stuff a welfare family of five, and to feed a rural Chinese family for a friggin' week. (Well, at least in the US...) People from mainland China would still regard most welfare families as rich by Chinese standards. * The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp division between the skilled and in demand end of the spectrum and the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand. I've also witnessed this trend, but I currently believe it only holds in
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Jan 1, 2004, at 12:50 PM, Tyler Durden wrote: Tim May wrote... First, please stop including the full text of the message you are replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or bottom-post to edited fragments. I actually do this for a reason. If I'm not doing a line-by-line response (or sometimes even if I am), I want the original post from which I am excerpting to be visible, so that it can be referred to and determined I am not taking this particular quote out of context. The world has had well over ten years to adjust to using editors to supply sufficient context. However, the fact is that the school system sucks. It's a joke. Repeat offenders get bounced from school to school, wrecking classes and the environment everywhere they go. As demanded by the negroes and their Jew speaker-to-negroes handlers. (A high school teacher of mine pointed out that when someone demands something, reach for your gun. She left teaching not long after.) Teachers in most states have 25 classroom hours a week, a number matched nowhere in the world (as far as I've ever heard), and THAT'S in addition to homeroom and other duties. The cirriculum is a silly joke, watered down and watered down so that only someone who never shows up couldn't graduate. (And in black schools you'd be suprised how many times I've heard 'these kids can't learn...don't try'.) Because the Jews and negroes have demanded that all students be taught stuff they obviously will never use. Most innerr city mutants should be taught practical skills, not abstract stuff their previous education has been bereft of. So your whole burnoff of the eaters theme misses one critical element: direct contact with kids. If you yourself had seen and met kids you KNEW might actually have quite a talent for math, YES EVEN YOU might be tempted to give a crap, and see if just one or two might somehow be inspiried merely to do some homework. This is particularly true when you realize that you actually LIKE some of these kids, which are as fully human as you are, by the way. I don't give a shit whether they're fully human or not. I only care that they stop stealing from me, that liberal Jews stop saying that my taxes have to be increased to support these fully human bags of shit. The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a society and economy might look like where the costs of material production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/ I don't remember reading any von Neumann where he discusses the idea of general assemblersI'm still not convinced the general physics of that idea works out, and I believe Freeman Dyson has had some similar doubts. But despite that there's a point here... Then your education in physics about von Neumann is sorely lacking. Von Neumann spend part of several years investigating self-replicating machines, using some ideas of Ulam and others. Well-covered in the cellular automata literature. In science fiction, one will find the general assembler literally referred to as the von Neumann probe. Cf. 35-year old fiction by Saberhagen on Berserkers, or slightly more recent fiction by Roger Macbride Allen and others, for example. Von Neumann machines are more than just non-functional bottleneck machines. As for nanotech, I wasn't endorsing it, just noting the context. My skepticism is noted in Crandall's book on nanotech. * The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp division between the skilled and in demand end of the spectrum and the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand. I've also witnessed this trend, but I currently believe it only holds in certain segments. There are various craft industries (as I call them) where this equation seems to be held in suspension. Like it or not, hip hop is one of those, though I suppose you could argue that the number of hip-hop 'artists' that make it is tiny compared to the audience. But the point is that in a craft industry, we're really referring to specific and local tastes, as opposed to Darwinian selection (ie, the 'most fit'). In a craft there may be room for many to contribute. (Other examples of craft industries are US high-end audio, the wine industry, high-end marijuana, organic foods and cheeses, and the current German-centered board game renassaiance.) What's desired in such an envornment is not necessarily the best/fastest/brightest, but something with a particularly 'quality' that corresponds to local vagaries of culture and taste. (At least, there's no other way to explain the success of Snoop Doggy Dog...) Snoop is razzlekamazzled by the negroes, who have the money they stole from
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Re: Skeptical about claim that stamp creation burns out modern CPUs
On Jan 1, 2004, at 11:56 AM, Riad S. Wahby wrote: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now I grant you that I haven't tested CPUs in this way in many years. But I am skeptical that recent CPUs are substantially different than past CPUs. I would like to see some actual reports of burned literally CPUs. I've never seen a burned literally CPU, but I have tracked the demise of an AMD K6 (or K6-2, can't remember now) from hot carrier effects. If all processors were made like that one, you would see a lot more load-induced failures. Just so. A lot of games are close to being CPU-bound, plus the screensavers used as Mersenne prime finders and the like, and there are few reports of house fires caused by the CPU being smoked. When I did reliability stuff for Intel, CPUs failed, but mostly not in ways that had them catching on fire, as the stamp guy is suggesting is common for stamp generation. --Tim May #1. Sanhedrin 59a: Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild animal. #2. Aboda Sarah 37a: A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated. #3. Yebamoth 11b: Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age. #4. Abodah Zara 26b: Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed. #5. Yebamoth 98a: All gentile children are animals. #6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122: A Jew is forbidden to drink from a glass of wine which a Gentile has touched, because the touch has made the wine unclean. #7. Baba Necia 114, 6: The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts.
Re: Skeptical about claim that stamp creation burns out modern CPUs
-- On 1 Jan 2004 at 10:44, Tim May wrote: Further, junction-to-case temperature in a ceramic package has a time constant of tens of seconds, meaning, the case temperature reaches something like 98% of its equilibrium value (as wattage reaches, say, 60 watts, or whatever), in tens of seconds. The time constant for the CPU+plus cooling system is a good deal longer, and in modern CPUs the large mass of the cooling system can result in quite long periods, for example a quarter of an hour, before CPU load results in heat related shut off. We also used to run CPUs at 125 C ambient Today's CPUs will generally fail a bit above seventy centigrade. They frequently fail in ways that cause them to draw increased current, eventuallly incinerating the motherboard. To prevent this, always look for the bios option to shut down the motheroboard in the event of CPU overheating. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Uw0lUnQOu8bBc6kOrcDpYZKS0DjzIgrXM9AJSVh2 49rBlWsHg9Teys0ELS5pT26g56P8tEMtp/mQ3eihl
Re: Skeptical about claim that stamp creation burns out modern CPUs
On Jan 1, 2004, at 2:35 PM, Eric S. Johansson wrote: Tim May wrote: I'm skeptical of this claim. A lot of Intel and AMD and similar machines are running full-tilt, 24/7. To wit, Beowulf-type clusters, the Macintosh G5 cluster that is now rated third fasted in the world, and so on. None of these machines is reported to be burning up literally. Likewise, a lot of home and corporate users are running background tasks which are at 100% CPU utilization. I will admit to a degree of skepticism myself even though I am describing overheating as a likely outcome. But what is your actual evidence, as opposed to your belief that overheating is a likely outcome? I have said that I know of many machines (tens of thousands of CPUs, and probably many more I don't know about directly) which are running CPU-bound applications 24/7. I have heard of no burning up literally cases with the many Beowulf clusters, supercomputers, and 24/7 home or business screensavers and crunching apps, so I suspect they are not common. If you have actual evidence, as opposed to likely outcome speculations, please present the evidence. First, if you lose a fan on an Intel CPU of at least Pentium III generation or an AMD equivalent, you will lose your CPU to thermal overload. This is a well-known and well-documented problem. One question is can stamp work thermally overload and damage a CPU. Second question is how much stamp work can you do without thermally overloading the CPU. This is true whether one is running Office or a stamp program. You are just repeating a general point about losing a fan, not about stamp generation per se. Boxer fan lifetimes are usually about comparable to hard drive lifetimes, which also kill a particular machine. You are not presenting anything new here, and the association with stamp generation is nonexistent. Large clusters have more careful thermal engineering applied to them than probably most of the zombies out there. I have seen one Beowulf cluster constructed out of standard 1U chassis, motherboards, fans etc. and frequently 10 percent of the systems are down at any one time. The vast majority of the failures have been due to thermal problems. Most clusters use exactly the same air-cooled machines as are available from Dell, Sun, Apple, etc. In fact, the blades and rackmount systems are precisely those available from Dell, Sun, Apple, etc. You are presenting no evidence, just hypothesizing that your stamp protocol somehow burns out more CPUs than render farms do, than Mersenne prime apps to, than financial simulations do, etc. Yet you present no actual numbers. so, will we see a Pentium IV spontaneously ignite like a third tier heavy-metal group in a Rhode Island nightclub? No, you're right, we won't. I think it's safe to say we will see increasing unreliability, power supply failures, and failures of microelectronics due to increased thermal load. Which is good enough for my purposes. Evidence is desirable, belief is just belief. --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:14:01PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:59:50PM -0500, Sunder wrote: If those are your beliefs, then by all means, set the first example, and go kill yourself. Better yet, sacrifice yourself to your goddess... By doing so, you'll also earn yourself a Darwin Award... unless you've already fathered kids... But from your tone of voice, I'd say you've probably castrated yourself years ago. No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human? The painful banality and stupidity of the junk you're spouting is a good indicator. -- avva
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May wrote... Because the Jews and negroes have demanded that all students be taught stuff they obviously will never use. Most inner city mutants should be taught practical skills, not abstract stuff their previous education has been bereft of. Well, I don't know who's responsible, but teaching what basically amounts to a liberal arts cirriculum is almost certainly useless in the inner cities, and black kids know this...they want something they can USE. Things like authomotive repair or, perhaps, airline baggage screening probably makes a lot more sense. I don't give a shit whether they're fully human or not. I only care that they stop stealing from me, that liberal Jews stop saying that my taxes have to be increased to support these fully human bags of shit. Well, this is where you lose a lot of credibility on this list, despite your sometimes farily acute technical observations. Let's just say that your 'philosophy' has concluded that it's probably better for the useless eaters be burned off, and that this would be good for the planet (the scary thing is that it's becomming obvious that in the near future neither the planet nor human society will really need 6 billion or more people). So this is your philosophy...fine. But you seem to have little or no emotion or sympathy towards those 'lumpen proletariat' (cue commentary on term by James Donald)...in other words, these are people who love/hate/fear/lust/eat just like you, and who don't regard themselves as 'useless', and yet it would seem that history just might pass them by, and that there may be a large segment of human population that will (in the short run) be marginalized, and in the long run be wiped out (according to your philosophies), apparently in some terrible and painful cataclysm. That your philosophies seemed to have erased any interhuman emotion you may have in this context seems strange. And no, I'm not suggesting that you cry your way out of your ideas, but recognize that if your ideas are correct, they're tragic. That which is 'inevitable' and also cataclysmic and (arguably) avoidable may also easily be tragic. Hell...that's probably the very definition of tragic, and in the most pessimistic of appraisals (ie, yours) the fate of American black folks (with many, possibly millions of exceptions) might easily be tragic, and that's a shame, like all human suffering. Then your education in physics about von Neumann is sorely lacking. Von Neumann spend part of several years investigating self-replicating machines, using some ideas of Ulam and others. Well-covered in the cellular automata literature. As you can probably tell, I've never read many secondary or tertiary sources. (ie, as a physicist I've always considered it of dubious usefulness to read ABOUT physics...) I've only read the few more famous von Neumann journal articles I've come across w.r.t. cellular automata...I actually thought he had only written two or three, and I don't remember his ideas of self-replicating machines as including something like a GA, but then again it's easily possible I didn't pick up on the ramifications of what I was reading (which is granted when I was much younger). Snoop is razzlekamazzled by the negroes, who have the money they stole from gullible whites, which is reason enough for niggers, whiggers, and chiggers to all be jivin' like daze shit. Well, perhaps he's just wise to his market. Those who steal need killing. Killing the guilty is about to get a lot more efficient. Billions in the world need killing, and tens of millions in the U.S. are part of this. If true, this is tragic. You might argue that it's necessary, good and inevitable, but it's still tragic. Some of these people will be living lives of very high quality, despite their need for killing. If you got out more, you might know that. -TD _ Make your home warm and cozy this winter with tips from MSN House Home. http://special.msn.com/home/warmhome.armx
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: a whole lot of really good points elided As you can probably tell, I've never read many secondary or tertiary sources. I have a very hard time believeing that anyone would consider VN a secondary or tertiary source. (ie, as a physicist I've always considered it of dubious usefulness to read ABOUT physics...) I've only read the few more famous von Neumann journal articles I've come across w.r.t. cellular automata...I actually thought he had only written two or three, That's only because he's hard reading :-) -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. The Promise of World Peace http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May wrote... In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math. Why the BedSty student Tim? This is where your arguments - which on shallow inspection may attempt to lay claim to honest thought - fall down. Why only the inner city black schools? I grew up in New York. I am intimately familiar with BedSty, Red Hook, etc. But I am also familiar with at least two schools in white ghettos (PS87/HS44), and I'm here to tell you from very personal experience, that there is no significant difference. You have some incredible moments of lucidity and insight, and occasionally, we are the lucky recipients of these fleeting events - but then, just as sure as the sun coming over the horizon every morning of every day, you slip back into the pseudo-intellectual racist crap. What's wit dat? Even the Great Tim May cannot be taken seriously with the kind of non-thought that has been coming out of your hermithole the last few years. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. The Promise of World Peace http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm
Re: Sources and Sinks
Tim May (2004-01-02 02:42Z) wrote: Bob, a crack addict collecting disability or welfare or other government freebies, works 0% of his time for the government/society. (Dat not true. I gots to stands in line to get my check increased!) Do those who have previously been in the workforce, in your opinion, have the right to reclaim through welfare any amount up to that they've paid through taxes to the entity providing welfare/unemployment? Or is all unemployment money Pluto's fruit?
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why the BedSty student Tim? Uhh, read more carefully. He was responding to a specific point from Tyler Durden. You have some incredible moments of lucidity and insight, and occasionally, we are the lucky recipients of these fleeting events - but then, just as sure as the sun coming over the horizon every morning of every day, you slip back into the pseudo-intellectual racist crap. What's wit dat? I don't think Tim is racist as such. He hates everyone equally. :-) But seriously, calling it racism seems wrong-headed. Racism is I hate black people because they're black. Tim hates (some, most, all?) black people because he percieves them as benefitting unfairly from his hard work. I'm pretty sure, all other things being equal, he wouldn't hate a black person who, through his own hard work and without taking a penny from the government, turned himself into a successful, tax-paying source. Or, at least, I'm not convinced he would hate such a person, which is to say I'm not convinced he's a racist. It seems that more and more people see racism where it doesn't (necessarily) exist. Perhaps this is simply because it's a convenient catch-all counter-argument---you're arguing that way because you're a racist, hence you're immoral, hence I win, an ad hominem trump card that more often than not passes for a real argument, probably because people are afraid to voice opinions to the contrary for fear of being labeled racists themselves. Another more insidious possibility is that as a result of such tactics, people actually _do_ see racism where it isn't. The latter worries me. A lot. In any case, before you tear into me for being Tim's shill, consider whether the following examples count as X-ism: 1) I hate X people because they are X. 2) I hate X people because most people who are X are also Y. 3) I hate people who are Y. Most people who are Y are also X. I'd say that the first one is the very definition of X-ism. The second one seems to me to be a special case of Y-ism (assuming that, as seems to be the case given the phrasing, Y's are hated for being Y), but is not X-ism. The third one, the one I believe describes this situation, is not X-ism. You might care to call into question the generalization most people who are Y are also X, but even that isn't X-ism unless the generalization is motivated by a thought process similar to #1. -- Riad Wahby [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIT VI-2 M.Eng
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
I'll comment on the sociology after commenting on the physics: (actually, looking over your sociology, I see it's just more of the liberal whine and sleaze, so I won't bother commenting on it again) On Jan 1, 2004, at 6:34 PM, Tyler Durden wrote: Tim May wrote... Then your education in physics about von Neumann is sorely lacking. Von Neumann spend part of several years investigating self-replicating machines, using some ideas of Ulam and others. Well-covered in the cellular automata literature. As you can probably tell, I've never read many secondary or tertiary sources. (ie, as a physicist I've always considered it of dubious usefulness to read ABOUT physics...) I've only read the few more famous von Neumann journal articles I've come across w.r.t. cellular automata...I actually thought he had only written two or three, and I don't remember his ideas of self-replicating machines as including something like a GA, but then again it's easily possible I didn't pick up on the ramifications of what I was reading (which is granted when I was much younger). The last refuge of the scoundrel is to dismiss stuff as secondary and tertiary sources, sort of like the fakers I used to meet in college who nattered on about having learned their physics from Newton's Principia instead of from secondary and tertiary sources. I encountered von Neumann's work on self-replicating machines when I was in high school (*). It came up in connection with the Fermi paradox and in issues of life (this was before the term artificial life was au courant...I was at the first A-LIFE Conference in '87...von Neumann couldn't make it). (* And no, I don't know mean my high school teachers taught us about von Neumann machines. 97% of the science I knew by the time I graduated from high school I'd learned on my own, from the usual secondary and tertiary sources.) A few moments of thought will show the connection between replicators and general assemblers. A general assembler can make another general assembler, hence all general assemblers are replicators. And in fact this is necessary to make mechanosynthesis nanotech viable, as otherwise it takes all the multibillion dollar wafer fabs in the world, if they could make nanoscale things, to make some scum on the bottom of a test tube. GAs only start to become possible after the replication problem has been solved (which it has not, despite claims about self-reproducing software structures and train sets and the like). If you are not aware of basic developments, recall Wittgenstein's maxim: Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. --Tim May He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Nietzsche
Sources and Sinks
The jabber about how poor people are actually paying for the successful is beyond belief. All sorts of arguments are being made about how poor people somehow pay for the infrastructure the wealthy exploit. And the chestnut about how tax breaks aid the wealth disproportionately is once again brought out. (Yeah, if Alice was paying $50K in taxes and the taxes are cut to $40K she benefits more than Bob the Wino who got no tax benefits because he paid no taxes. Which misses the point about Alice's high taxes in the first place.) This is why the Tax Freedom Day approach is more useful. Tax freedom day is of course the day when the average American or Brit or whatever has stopped working for the government and has the rest of his income for himself. For most years, this is estimated to around May-June. That is, for almost half of a year a typical taxpayer is working for the government. Not a perfect measure, as it averages together folks of various tax brackets, including the many in America who pay nothing (but it doesn't assign a negative number to those who receive net net money from the government). And it fails to take into account the double taxation which a business owner faces: roughly a 50% tax on his profits, then when the profits are disbursed to the owners of the corporation, another 35-45% tax bite. For a business owner, he is effectively working for the government for the first 70% of every year. Which means only October-December is he working for his own interests. Jabber about how poor people are actually receiving fewer tax benefits than rich people misses the point of who's working for whom. Alice, an engineer or pharmacist or perhaps a small business owner, works between 40% and 70% of her time to pay money into government. Bob, a crack addict collecting disability or welfare or other government freebies, works 0% of his time for the government/society. (Dat not true. I gots to stands in line to get my check increased!) Alice is a source, Bob is a sink. Talk about how Alice gets benefits ignores the fact that she's working for the government for a big chunk of her life. Bob is not. Alice is a slave for the government, and society, so that Bob can lounge in his mobile home watching ESPN and collecting a monthly check. (I'd like to know why all of the folks here in California who are getting benefits and services are not at my door on Saturday morning to help me with my yard work. I'd like to know why finding reliable yard workers has become nearly impossible in the past couple of decades. Will work for food signs are a fucking joke...try hiring one of those layabouts to actually do some work for food and watch the sneers, or watch them threatening to fake a work injury if a shakedown fee is not given to them. These people should be put in lime pits.) When you hear John Young and Tyler Durden nattering about the persons of privilege are reaping the rewards of a benificent government, think about Alice and Bob and ask yourself who'se doing the real work. Ask who're the sources and who're the sinks. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need...and I've got a game to watch on satellite...and where's my check? --Tim May The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. --John Stuart Mill
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Tim May wrote: A few moments of thought will show the connection between replicators and general assemblers. A general assembler can make another general assembler, hence all general assemblers are replicators. And in fact this is necessary to make mechanosynthesis nanotech viable, as otherwise it takes all the multibillion dollar wafer fabs in the world, if they could make nanoscale things, to make some scum on the bottom of a test tube. Or a few-dollar fermentation tanks with suitable bacteria, once its genome is tweaked in required way. Who ever said that the nanoparticles we need can't be proteins or organic molecules with required shape/properties? If viral particles can self-assemble from host-cell-synthetized proteins, if complicated structures like bacterial propulsion systems - or even whole plants - can be formed, why not nanomechanical systems? Why bother with assembling machines when they could be grown? I hope I didn't screw up my understanding of nanosynthesis. If it is build anything you want by telling the general assembler, then this won't work and would need a lab; but for mass-producing nnoparticles, eg. surface coatings or elements for camera or memory arrays, biotech should be good enough.
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Jan 1, 2004, at 7:44 PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote: On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Tim May wrote: A few moments of thought will show the connection between replicators and general assemblers. A general assembler can make another general assembler, hence all general assemblers are replicators. And in fact this is necessary to make mechanosynthesis nanotech viable, as otherwise it takes all the multibillion dollar wafer fabs in the world, if they could make nanoscale things, to make some scum on the bottom of a test tube. Or a few-dollar fermentation tanks with suitable bacteria, once its genome is tweaked in required way. Who ever said that the nanoparticles we need can't be proteins or organic molecules with required shape/properties? If viral particles can self-assemble from host-cell-synthetized proteins, if complicated structures like bacterial propulsion systems - or even whole plants - can be formed, why not nanomechanical systems? Why bother with assembling machines when they could be grown? I hope I didn't screw up my understanding of nanosynthesis. If it is build anything you want by telling the general assembler, then this won't work and would need a lab; but for mass-producing nnoparticles, eg. surface coatings or elements for camera or memory arrays, biotech should be good enough. Which is why I was careful to say mechanosynthesis and even to qualify the type of replicator as Drexler-style. We've had systems which can replicate in 25 minutes or so for as long as we've existed. But making bread is not the same thing as making computers, or Boeing 747s, or non-bread kinds of food. Specialized biologicals making specialized things is probably where nanotechnology will be a commercial success, but it just ain't real nanotech. --Tim May
Re: Sources and Sinks
On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:26 PM, Justin wrote: Tim May (2004-01-02 02:42Z) wrote: Bob, a crack addict collecting disability or welfare or other government freebies, works 0% of his time for the government/society. (Dat not true. I gots to stands in line to get my check increased!) Do those who have previously been in the workforce, in your opinion, have the right to reclaim through welfare any amount up to that they've paid through taxes to the entity providing welfare/unemployment? Or is all unemployment money Pluto's fruit? No, as there is no fund that this money is in. Once taxes are paid in, the money has gone out to crack addicts, Halliburton, welfare whores (excuse me, hoes), foreign dictators like Mubarek and Sharon, and so on. In fact, the estimated overall debt is something like $30-40 trillion. I've outlined how this number is arrived at a few times in the past. As there are about 100 million tax filers in the U.S.--the other 175 million being children, spouses, prisoners, welfare recipients, illegal aliens, non-filers, etc.--a simple calculation shows the average indebtedness per tax filer is around $300,000 or more. This is far, far beyond what the average household owns in total. Because the U.S. has been charging it for the past 40 years. Quibblers will say we can reduce this indebtedness by selling off government-owned lands, which would be a good start. Or be taxing corporations more, but this still ends up with the individual tax filers, ultimately. Or by devaluing the dollar dramatically, which is the likeliest strategy the kleptocrats will follow, after gettting enough advance warning to get their own assets out of dollar-denominated vehicles. So, you see, there IS NO FUND one can withdraw money from. Anyone claiming new welfare benefits requires even more thefts from those still working. Just because money was stolen from you doesn't give you any right to steal from me. --Tim May
Re: Singers jailed for lyrics
At 05:19 PM 12/31/2003, John Kelsey wrote: In the most morally neutral case, this is like one criminal gang attacking another. If the Sopprano family invades the Bozini family's turf, takes over their protection rackets, and hunts down their godfather, it could be messy, and it really will be an initiation of force in the most literal sense. But is this the same kind of initiation of force that we normally talk about when, say, a mugger knocks me over the head and takes my laptop and wallet? (And of course, it's not that morally neutral. It's more like a bunch of vigilantes from the neighborhood next door getting rid of the gang running your neighborhood, for reasons of their own, but probably to your benefit.) Although I disagree with the personal benefit aspect, this is the way I view the two major US poltical parties: two mob organizations fighting over turf and tax spoils. I think its time to clean up the D.C. (Augean) Stables. ND
