ejlo

The ones who fight cynism are the most cynic.

Here is a page with a lot of good examples of more accessible modern classical music:

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/how-to-fall-in-love-with-modern-c...

Trump also has nothing to offer the rural midwest. The difference was that he pretended that he had.

Even if manufacturing and coal mining where to increase ten fold, there would be no new jobs for people without a long education, due to automation.

Of course, things turned out way better for him than he could have planned, but that doesn't rule out that there was some plan behind it.

Step 1. He also attacked pentagon and Washington. Imaging if the latter had succeeded! It's not hard to predict the reaction to such an event.

Step 2. I think he tried to provoke the attack on Afghanistan. Iraq was later.

Step 4. With the terrain in Afghanistan, a quick war is not possible.

It would have been quite stupid, though, to reveal the plan too early.

Of course, it's difficult to know for sure if that was the original plan or not. However the actions seem to be quite consistent with that strategy: Choosing Afghanistan (the grave of empires) as the base of operations, and the selection of targets in the attack looks like an attempt to enrage, not just to cause fear.

Whatever the actual plan was, I do think it involved provoking US to attack Afghanistan.

He seems to have completely missed the reason for 9/11, which is not strange since it was not until the 2004 speech (http://worldpress.org/Americas/1964.cfm) that bin Laden explained the reason for the attacks, namely "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy".

In this light it must be regarded as a great success, not a failure, especially since the self bleeding politics continued without much opposition long after 2004.

Hmm, did you try searching for it before posting?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_fi...

Mathematically, tau is clearly superior, since it represents a full circle. The question is whether the gain is big enough compared to the trouble of introducing a new constant. It's not like pi is going to disappear any time soon.

I think this poses a real threat to the open web itself.

First we have DRM video and soon after music.

Next the game industry wants to protect their source code. And app developers.

After that come images. A lot of companies would love to display their pictures but keep them from being "stolen".

And, at last, normal text will also be DRM'd and the open web is history.

Wow, 60 lives were saved and 40 persons less had surgical complications! Just in 3 month in Ontario.

Of course, there was not enough data yet to conclude any improvement within the 95% confidence interval, but still, it does hint at a great reduction in serious mistakes.

> The miseries from bank runs and crashes are real, but even so, the total impact on human welfare from fractional reserves has been overwhelmingly positive.

It surely has been positive in the past but that does not mean it is positive now or in the future.

We are entering a new era, where (economic) growth is no longer necessary for human development, due to automation and that an increasingly large percentage of innovation is in software. In a world of progress without growth, we cannot have an economic system that requires growth to function properly.

Instead, we need economic stability.

An event like this is important as an eye opener, to show the citizens that there are alternatives to the current car focused city. If enough people like the alternative version, it will be easier to make reforms to reduce traffic in the future.

The tool for that is demurrage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29, which adds devaluation of the currency over time. This complements Basic Income very well, with UBI for money creation and demurrage for money destruction.

For physical currency is has some obvious practical problems, which has prevent adoption, but for virtual currencies it is easy to implement.

Well, assuming you run the JIT on its own code it could be considered conscious to a tiny degree. It can analyze it's code, but only at a very low level, with no understanding of how it works. Also it can change its own code, but only to improve speed, not to change its functionality.

But, you are right that it is possible to write quite simple self modifying programs that would be conscious with this definition. However, having consciousness without intelligence can't be very useful.

For me consciousness is "the ability to analyze and influence your own thoughts".

This might not correspond 100% to what philosophers mean, but it has the immense advantage of making consciousness a well defined concept, and even measurable.