@wendell & @ryan To touch basis with the subject of Verizon and their "unlimited" plan, my co-worker had a unlimited plan with the mifi device they had been grandfathered into for a while now. Her son and his friend used a lot of data every month, 200GB+ and they sent a letter terminating the plan unless she switches to new data plan. (100GB was about $700 a month...)
Then it wasn't even a month later they sent a letter about these new unlimited plans, but when she spoke with the Verizon rep, they not only said they'll still slow them down, but if she used that much data again they'll cancel out the contract. So the whole "unlimited" thing is still nonsense from Verizon, it seems.
Quite unfortunate since she can't get any decent internet where she lives, at all.
"I do have a comment to make to any armchair strategist, who has never made a drop. Yes I agree that the Bugs' planet possibly could have been plastered with H-bombs until it was surfaced with radioactive glass. But would that have won the war? The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren't even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman's conception of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. Blasting the surface of their planet would have killed soldiers and workers, it would not have killed the brain caste and the queens - I doubt that anyone can be certain that even a direct hit with a burrowing H-rocket would kill a queen; we don't know how far down they are. Nor am I anxious to find out; none of the boys who went down those holes came up again." - Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers So when I see 'Superbugs in Space' I think of sci-fi eusocial civilizations. In given phyla though there is at least one eusocial species of mammal and many highly solitary arthropods, even solitary hymenoptera. I feel the need to write some science fiction where, say, the pseudo-arthropods are highly solitary and individualistic, and where the pseudo-avians are highly eusocial.
I disagree. I wrote the word and created the context. You can always fallback to it's definition if you are unsure.
With regards to data caps, hopefully competition between carriers will help ease that.In a different case, I have an "unlimited" broadband plan that is capped. After 1TB, the speed slows significantly (25Mbit down to 8). However, due to poor infrastructure, my internet speed is close to the capped speed. So in this way it is unlimited? Still, it must be painful downgrading to a capped connection because the infrastructure can't keep up with the explosion of video streaming on the internet.
I appreciate your interpretation, but if you fail (or perhaps refuse) to see my point then unfortunately there is not much I can do to help you at this juncture.
I have to agree. I understand everyone has their own opinions on the state of things, but i think the majority of us enjoy the level1 news because of the commentary on technology and it's ramifications. I won't debate Ryan's insights into topics that have been covered, and i thoroughly enjoyed them, but i feel like all that needs to be said about the main stream media is "take it with a grain of salt" and leave it at that. I think the vast majority of this community already knows that fact checking sources and reading from multiple outlets is the best way to be informed properly.
To be clear, i'm not saying i dislike Ryan or his input, i just hope that we can focus more on the tech and not on the current political climate.
C'mon dude, do you really need to bring that kind of toxicity here? The dude was merely stating that you shouldn't make assumptions about a person or their character, it's pretty sound advice.
You did not make any 'points'. You gave a personal opinion, which is immediately falsified under burden of evidence (which has been provided to you). And then you have made some strawman arguments, things that no one has denied, to try and back them up.
Ummmm... I don't think I said anything about data caps.
Exactly! When you create your own context, as you admit to doing, whatever statements you are making is valid only within that created context. For general reality, the default applies.
A.I. made strong progression through the 50s and 60s, and first half of the 70s. Mostly due to people like Minsky, Chomsky, Schutzenberger, Knuth et al. They did a lot of basic research, and so did their students. But by the 80s the push for machine learning, relying mostly on immediate results centered on trivial tasks, had caused funds to get divided and that resulted in remarkably low amounts available for basic research. Add to that the fact that the kind of theories that, say, Minsky for example was coming up with requires years and years of dedicated investigations, whereas machine learning and neural networking can be learned and implemented (based on the focus) in a few years, and that makes people who are more into glamour research than real discoveries gravitate towards what Minsky called "strong mimcry", and not true artificial intelligence. Here's an interview of his, sometime before his death, and some of the points he makes are telling of where A.I. went wrong, and when the term was hijacked to mean something very trivial. There are many areas where I disagree with Minsky, strongly, but I think he is spot on about what went wrong, and how it can be fixed. What is needed is a return to structuralism and cognitivism. And this is beginning to happen. Over the last decade, every nobel prize in the area (whether awarded through Psychology, Physiology or some other branding) has been given to people dedicated to finding cognitive neural maps, not to neural networking modellers. There's a lot of chatter, coming mostly from corporations that need to keep creating buzzwords and noise in order to maintain attention, about things like "singularity", "robot uprising", "consciousness" etc. But that's all they are... buzzwords. No scientist takes them seriously, and "singularity" is bad science fiction.
That is – evidence of most media outlets being "in the pockets" of powerful people. The original conspiratorial point I'm arguing against. It's pretty clear you don't agree, but insisting evidence has been provided when it hasn't certainly doesn't help your argument.
I guess at this point your argument has regressed into me not having made an argument. Anyone who can read and scroll up can dispute that. :)
The theoretical physicist John Wheeler conceptualized existence as fundamentally informatic. It from bit. A little metaphysical, I know, but I often wonder if traditional electronics are even capable of achieving sentience. I feel like implementing the randomness sufficient to generate human-like consciousness might necessitate the increased bandwidth of photons over electrons. Our bodies produce biophotons after all. Perhaps an optical computer could help us better map mirror neurons?
Most media outlets are owned by an ever consolidating group of multinational corporations. Corporations and governments have had a symbiotic relationship since the 17th century. The transition from mercantilism to capitalism was spurred by the successes of the East India Companies and the massive gains in productivity offered by the Industrial Revolution. The modern world runs on energy and capital and the vast majority of both are owned by fundamentally intertwined entities. We are not allied with the House of Saud because they share our Western ideals. Our infrastructure relies on petroleum and they have a lot of it.
Corporatocracy is a thing. Too big to fail. More like too big to manage.
There's enough stuff for you to read in there. But for summary's sake:
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky
Journalists for Hire by Udo Ulfkotte
CIA and the Media by Carl Bernstein
Operation Mockingbird (I would suggest reading the real leaked papers)
The Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg
The Media Files on Wikileaks' database
You need to read to understand an issue. This sophomoric stubbornness, refusing to do the actual reading and a priori deciding something as not "relevant" because it would falsify your illusions is not terribly useful. Here's Aron Swartz on something similar.
Making a random statement, even repeatedly and increasing stubbornness, does not make it true. Statements do not valicate the truth condition of their semantics. That has to be done referentially. Since you have not made any evidential arguments, refused to study evidence, and then claimed that others have not provided you with any evidence, it is quite clear that you are not interested in a discussion. You merely want to stubbornly perpetuate your illusions regarding some facts, and keep complaining that Ryan's expose made you suffer a mild cognitive dissonance.
Sorry... but this conversation has begun to circulate. I am not interested in this exercise in redundancy. So, unless you are willing to read the evidence provided and make informed arguments with proper citations (not random non-peer reviewed junk, mind you), I think our times (both yours and mine) are better spent elsewhere. I am done with this non-conversation. You are making yourself look like a stubborn child who has run out of excuses, and I don't want to encourage you by engaging you any more.
I'll agree that we're not really getting anywhere. I'm asking you to provide peer reviewed citations for my original point, and you seem to be dancing around the subject in addition to calling me names. I already responded to the links you posted above in another post which you would know if you had actually read the thread.
In fact, I would point you toward Paul Graham's "How To Disagree" in hopes it might actually be useful for you. I'm done responding to you for now, but I will reconsider in the future if you're able to compose yourself in a more civil manner.