Domain: augsburg.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to augsburg.edu.
Comments · 6
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Re:Bitcoin...
You really don't understand the 4 levels of money, at all.
1. Barter of physical good
Before money was invented we used to barter for goods.Ignore the
/Oblg. "Wood for Sheep?" Settlers of Catan joke.Problem: You can't trade a _partial_ (or "granular") quantity -- you can only trade "course" amounts.
Solution: So we invented a token system.2.a) Tokens
So instead of trading the things themselves, we abstracted them and used tokens instead. This is extremely more flexible because now we have quantized our money to a small amount -- the penny, and we can easily assign a "multi-value" to things. You may not value Y but value Z instead. I however am willing to pay more for Y.Problem: I want to trade for non-material things.
Solution: You can trade for services -- the next level of money.2. b) Time, Experience, and Skill.
I may not have the time or skill to build a house, but I can trade money to someone who does. We both win.Problem: Greed drives people to just make shit up and enslave others via usury. i.e. Since some yahoo decided we don't even need tokens to represent the things, we can just abstract money one more step and just treat it as a concept of numbers. This is due to a false belief that: "There is never enough."
Solution: But what _really_ is money? Money is just another convenient form of reality of ...3.
... Energy
At the end of the day we all want matter which is just a different form of energy.One day humans will spiritually grow up and stop behaving like little 2 year olds -- that day will forced upon us when we have free energy. We already an analogy of this with software and injection molding. Once you have the first "master" it costs almost zero to print X amount of them. So what is the value when you have as much "money" as a society could possible want and it is trivial to produce something??
The Fashion Industry shows us a glimpse:
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
* https://www.ted.com/talks/joha...4. Honor
Sadly here is a word you don't see much more of. In the good 'ol days, a person's word was "literally" their bond. They had honor, acted honorably, and treated others with honor.The _uniqueness_ of what people bring to the table is the last evolution of money. In a sense, a person's reputation, will eventually determine their worth to others. Hey, this person gets shit done! Or "Don't use that person, he is always late, does a poor job, etc."
Weirdly enough, a philosopher wrote about this when she explained the "logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others." which is even more strangely in this Object-Oriented Programming and Objectivist Epistemology: Parallels and Implications" paper:
The starting point is
(A) the fact that a rational man will only act in ways that safeguard the conditions of existence required by his nature for his proper survival. Therefore,
(B) he will benefit from cooperation and trade with others only if those with whom he deals respect the conditions of his proper survival. He knows that
(C) those with whom he can deal for mutual benefit are rational men like himself, and therefore
(D) they will deal with him on condition that he respect their conditions of proper survival. Therefore,
(E) a rational man, in order to benefit from cooperation and trade with others, will respect the conditions of proper survival - the rights - of other menAs a species we're still at stage 2 of understand money.
Illusion? No, you're the one delusional on what money _really_ is.
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Re:What's the MTBF?
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Re:Three times smaller!!!
Nope. You're also wrong about the development of the language. Care to cite something?
"He who bestows his goods upon the poor shall have as much again, and ten times more."
John Bunyan (1626-1688).Goods + 10 x Goods = 11 x Goods
This has not changed in the last 350 years.
This document, titled "Common Errors in Forming Arithmetic Comparisons" might help. See "Seven Common Errors" number 6.
Confusing ‘times as much’ with ‘times more than’: If B is three times as much as A, then B is two times more than A – not three times more than A. The essential feature is the difference is between ‘as much as’ and ‘more than.’ ‘As much as’ indicates a ratio; ‘more than’ indicates a difference. ‘More than’ means ‘added onto the base’. This essential difference is ignored by those who say that ‘times’ is dominant so that ‘three times as much’ is really the same as ‘three times more than.’
Or how about this one, from The Economist magazine's style guide:
Take care. Three times more than x means four times as much as x."
Perhaps you might be interested in the style gude from the Institute of Physics.
"Five times as much" does not mean the same as "five times more than" (i.e. six times as much) –the first is multiplicative, the second additive.
English speakers really only started getting sloppy with this in the last 100 years or so.
If you're wrong once, and then you're wrong two more times, how many total times are you wrong?
At this point, it's pretty obvious that you are the troll.
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Re:25x more dense, not 5x more dense...Just trying to follow what you're saying. You're saying that "X is 200% more than Y" means X=2*Y+Y, but that "X is 2x more than Y" means X=2*Y. I thought that "200%" was synonymous with "2 times".
Ignoring percentages and simply focusing on "X is two times more than Y" meaning X=2*Y, I'm assuming that "X is 1.1 times more than Y" means X=1.1*Y. Does "X is 0.5 times more than Y" mean that X=0.5*Y, that X is actually less than Y? Would this mean that "X is 0 times more than Y" means that X=0?
A useful guide I found on this topic: Common errors in forming arithmetic comparisons
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Re:On Par?
I'm using them in the form of an equation, Tegra2 = 2 x AppleA4 in performance.
If you're saying that the correct way to read that is "Tegra2 is 2x more [powerful] than AppleA4", then how would you read the following?
Tegra2 = 1 x AppleA4
Surely not "Tegra2 is 1x more [powerful] than AppleA4", as that claims it's one time more powerful than the AppleA4. Or taken further,
Tegra2 = 0.5 x AppleA4
"Tegra2 is 0.5x more [powerful] than AppleA4" would imply that it was faster, even though it's half the speed!
If I said that Tegra 2 was 200% more powerful than the A4, I would clearly be in the wrong because as you said a 200% increase implies a 3x increase.
A 200% increase implies a 2x increase, not a 3x increase. 2x means "2 times [the base, in this case the AppleA4's performance]", the same thing 200% means in this case. Why would its meaning change depending on whether you used "2x" or "200%"? In either case, once you add the word "increase" this means "in addition to what's already there". Take a look at Common errors in forming arithmetic comparisons (two-page PDF). From the second page, Seven common errors:
Confusing 'times as much' with 'times more than'. If B is three times as much as A, then B is two times more than A - not three times more than A. The essential feature is the difference is between 'as much as' and 'more than.' 'As much as' indicates a ratio; 'more than' indicates a difference. 'More than' means 'added onto the base'. This essential difference is ignored by those who say that 'times' is dominant so that 'three times as much' is really the same as 'three times more than.'
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Re:Universities and schoolsmicrosoft knows that universities with a computer science or engineering school could go linux if they wanted to,
While the CS department at my school is pretty small, we use neither Windows nor Linux in our lab. What we do use is OS X. Why? Because the professors aren't fucking idiots. They explicitly designed the curriculum to give students skills that will transfer to whatever operating system or environment they end up using.