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Even if Japan had made a bomb in time, by 1945, they had barely any navy or air force left to deploy it. By then, the fantastically inept IJN leadership had squandered all their best assets in strategic blunders. The only way they could have used the thing would be to drop it on themselves.


What a fascinating paper! Although I know the speed of light is finite and have considered many of the implications of relativity, I never thought of the effects on the apparent occultation of two celestial bodies at significant distances from one another relative to the observer. The moon's transit between Earth and Mars would not appear reciprocally the same to observers on both planets. Obvious in retrospect, but the layman does not tend to consider relativistic effects in this kind of simple geometric reasoning.

There's enough distance between us and the Moon that if you had a flashlight bright enough, you could easily perceive the delay between switching it on and seeing the Moon's surface brighten, as the light made the return trip. Something to think about next time you look up at the Moon and wonder about its scale and distance.


You're striking at the core of the issue here.

In RMS's ideal version of the world, there is no distinction: every "user" is also a "developer". The freedom guaranteed by the GPL enables society to reach a state in which every individual is not merely a consumer of solutions, but a producer. In this vision, we all cooperate to solve problems together because solving problems in the world makes the world better for everyone.

In reality, problem-solving ability (the intersection of the cognitive ability, skill set, drive, and opportunity to solve problems) is a limited resource. There are problem solvers and there are sheep, a configuration that results in a natural kind of economy. "Corporate" with all its lawyers and sales hucksters, i.e. persons not directly engaged in the work of solving problems, are a necessary demon. They connect problem solvers with users that have problems to solve. Users, for their part, exist to give us their money as a reward for the work of solving their problems.

Whether to support the GPL is really a moral decision about which world you believe in. Do you solve problems to make the world a better place, or to make more money for yourself? I personally wish RMS' vision would come true even though I don't believe it's possible. There are natural limitations to problem-solving ability other than the psychological effects of the capitalist environment on those who grow up in it. Still. When you really dig to the bottom of opposition to the GPL, you always find one thing, and one thing only. Money. "ME".


Well, that's one way to maximize thrust to mass ratio.


You have to understand, most people are born with a conscience. It takes a long time and concerted effort to erase it. The doublethink and cognitive dissonance on display here is the end result of that process.

These corporations literally employ child psychologists to study the exact rate of white flashes and scene changes in a television spot that grabs their attention and will not release it. Our children are not on a level playing field with PHD educated adult psychologists. Marketers and salespeople will defend this practice. They don't see anything wrong with it.

P.S. I don't wear sunglasses or any article of clothing with a brand, drink coke or pepsi, and I eat the raisin bran I do because it comes in a bag instead of a bag inside a paper box. Mentally rejecting advertising has had the most positive impact on my physical and emotional health of anything I've ever done.


It's been an issue since they switched from the G4, TBH.


Nuking Kyoto would have been an irredeemable loss to humanity; anyone who has ever been there would surely understand this. The city is concentrated with ancient wonders and cultural vibrance of the highest order. Not to mention that the indelible injury to the national psychology of Japan would have been magnitudes greater.

It's astounding to me that the decision to destroy it would come down to just a few men on a war council. Thank God that Stimson prevailed.


I think language and symbology is at the core of why they are so impenetrable.

One major sin is taking new concepts and ideas and putting the primary discoverer's name on them. Such names yield no clue as to the interpretation or application of the idea itself.

Another problem is the symbols used in certain mathematical texts. Everyone who uses them treats them like they're universally understood, but in reality the syntax and meaning of the symbols can and frequently are recycled and reused across disciplines and even theories in the same discipline. You have to be close to the 'in-group'. Like reading other people's code where operators have been overloaded, it's like learning a new language every time you want to dig into a cool new maths paper.

I don't actually have any good solutions to these problems. I would guess there are lots of lessons to be learned from the history of Chinese characters, though. They have thousands of unambiguous symbols which _can_ be learned by non-natives and which _do_ give an appreciable degree of cross-lingual intelligibility among languages that use them.


I was extremely frustrated with my machine learning class because of this. The notation used was hazy. Also if you ask me, probability theory should just be squashed and the ideas reformulated with new more consistent syntax / symbols, because the entire thing is so damn inconsistent and disorganized at present.


>Also if you ask me, probability theory should just be squashed and the ideas reformulated with new more consistent syntax / symbols, because the entire thing is so damn inconsistent and disorganized at present.

How do you mean? Probability doesn't even have that much complicated symbolism... although I do wish we would teach in probability courses how to translate between random-variable "distributed according to" notation and actual density functions. As in, I wish I knew how to do that.


It's like you're seeing into a machine's imagination. Look at the 8th-layer images of the pitcher, or the gorillas with improved prior, for instance. They're very close to layout sketches an artist might use to block out a painting or photograph before beginning the work.

Unreal. Strong AI is not as far off as we think. 15 years. Maybe 20.


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