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This sounds like one application of the idea futures market concept, which has been kicking around in academic circles for about a decade now.

-jcr

I agree wholeheartedly that government, and society, really should stay out of people's private lives when there is no direct victim. I apply this to drug use, pornography, sexual preference, religion... just about anything. However, I think I hear you contradicting yourself in your post. You say: "What disgusts me should have no effect on what you like -- true freedom means allowing (if not accepting) others to do what they want as long as they don't harm your body or your property." as well as The community and the state (and the people!) are given the power to define all of the following:. If the community defines pornography and stops you from obtaining it and consuming it in the privacy of your own home, then isn't that, in your view, both right (the community defines...) and wrong (true freedom means allowing...) at the same time?

Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: one function of the courts is to protect individuals from the communities in which they live:

"Mob Rule Cannot Be Allowed to Override the Decisions of Our Courts": President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1957 Address on Little Rock, Arkansas

--- SER

I would suggest finding a dedicated Producer so that you, the Consumer, can have enough stuff. Beware that you will need to provide a solution to the classic Producer-Consumer Problem. As to that, I would suggest either a semaphore, monitor, or some kind of message passing with your new-found Producer. Best of luck to the both of you!

In the past, I've written the sort of poorly-structured non-compliant web pages that can only be produced by a combination of laziness and confusion

Wait a minute, were you copying my style!?!

A while back, NASA conducted a fifteen year anniversary study on the savant known as Kim Peek. Peek was born with a strange brain deformity known as macrocephaly which results in the two hemispheres of the brain being linked due to a pocket of water at the base of the brain.

Now, there has been a lot of speculation about how neurons work and what makes someone autistic. I once had a lengthy conversation with James Olds of George Mason's Krasnow Institute and asked him about Peek. Olds explained to me that it's very mysterious how savants develop. I asked him if Peek had an abnormally large cortex but he dismissed this, citing that elephants are not geniuses. He also gave me an anecdotal story of a Harvard football player that injured his shoulder blade as the star quarter back. When they x-rayed him, they also found out that his head was mostly filled with water and the result was a severe lack of brain tissue. However, he was a 4.0 grade point average student. I asked Dr. Olds if Peek's neurons might be more densely populated but he also dismissed this saying that neurons are huge on nutrient consumption and if they grow too closely together, they will kill each other.

Anyone care to take a stab at this? Can anyone speculate on this?

Things like this are why I think futarchy is better than democracy. With a democracy, a government tends to make decisions based on the self-deceiving ideologies of individuals, with relatively little feedback based on actual results. In a futarchy, people would vote on a measure of national welfare and prediction markets would be used to predict what policies would actually be most effective in promoting national welfare. In the past, prediction markets have been shown to be much better than opinion polls and individual experts at predicting future events.

As an example, consider the current debate over public healthcare. In the end, most people don't really care about whether healthcare is publically or privately run, they just want to be healthy. The public discourse is dominated by people who exclude contradicting evidence, who are mostly concerned with promoting their ideology. With a prediction market, people would end up having to put their money where their mouth is, encouraging them to consider contradictory evidence and make the best decision possible.

The author wants to show off an evolutionary computation (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, etc.) package in Java and he picks ... jgap? Too simple. IMHO, and I think in the opinion of most EC Java coders, the system to beat is ECJ. [and I know]

physics.gmu.edu

The core of Communism is a very old system of government, called slavery. When slavery and communism are implemented, citizens lose the right to own property, choose their occupation, and take public office. They become property of the State. Communism is just a modern way of selling this type of slavery to the people, who somehow imagine that it will be fairer than living under capitalism, a view that is based on a misunderstanding of both systems.

For more facts about communism, read the fascinating online Museum of Communism, which is a brilliant read, although rather dated in terms of presentation.

Also, I've always wondered why good old Ludwig seems to so strongly support the rights of "corporations" to be free from government regulation-when their very existence is owed to a government regulation.

We're not pro-corporation, we're against them. I believe a group of investors could tell creditors that a loan contract affords limited liability up to the amount invested, but they should still be personally liable.

What state do -you- live in that there is not an exception in the law allowing a person to use violence in self-defense?

Illinois. A local town made national news because they arrested a home owner for shooting a burglar who robbed him twice. I had my unregistered handgun stolen twice by the police.

Just how could we avoid the government having a "monopoly" on the use of military-scale force?

Great question! The federal government should have zero power to recruit or fund any standing army but the coast guard. States form militias to protect their territory. In the event of an attack on our land by another government, the Congress can enable the CiC to assemble the State militias.

I refuse to accept that Japan or Germany were threats to us, but that is a complex debate.

Might you point out to me which prescription drugs are produced by the government?

They set the standard for what is acceptable. Don't believe that those in power aren't getting amazing amounts of money to overlook a few red tape items? In my opinion, the UL does an amazing job protecting lives. They have competition. Let free market UL-like FDAs appear and drugs won't cost $300,000,000 to make.

The Founding Fathers saw fit to give Congress the authority to grant copyrights and patents.

I believe that invention and creation is important. I am a writer and I own a software company. I do well financially by supporting my books (free if you don't pay) with live appearances and consulting. I support my (free if you don't pay) software the same way. I could make millions but I like my free time more. If you spend $50,000,000 inventing a widget, you should initially find a market that will pay back your invention costs and analyze how long it will take competition to knock it off. It isn't free to copy drugs, machinery, etc.

. All these point to a central authority as the optimal way to do things, and the obvious use of taxation as the alternate payment method points to that agency being a government one.

I disagree. Stossel investigated private roads and found private roads are less congested, safer and less costly. Numerous iideas exist for privatized roadways. One of my companies supports a highway contractor and the waste of public dollars is incredible.

Really? What government agency created Standard Oil? The railroad barons? Microsoft? Government -can- create monopolies, true, but not -only- government can.

Standard Oil had a "monopoly" on kerosene. Before the government started antitrust investigations, a new energy source was discovered by a company unable to compete with SO: gasoline.

There w re no railroad barons. It is a myth. Our own government created these so called barons, who were actually Whig/Republican mercantilism supporters. Again, a complex story made simple when you realize the source of power was government regulations! Lincoln's War was started so he could get his friends government contracts.

Microsoft continually upgrades their software, develops new items and loses money on many fiascos. Microsoft will fall from google or apple like IBM from Compaq, GM from Honda, and on and on.

This website might be the one you're thinking of. There is a very cool, very relevant idea called the "dominant assurance contract". It's explained informally here and more formally here.

I know this is a case of a private individual funding vaccine research (as opposed to government funding), but the idea of giving prizes as an incentive to produce vaccines, as presented in the linked article, seems like a good option that Mr. Gates or others like him should try.

"Why prizes for research? Prizes provide strong incentives."

Finding Cures
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/artic les/00/cures.html

Wow, calling an economic theory handling the implications of imperfect information "pseudo-intellectual crap"... my confidence is shaken

You really, really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, perfect information (which needn't be capitalized) is not "an assumption at the undergrad level". They might refer to specific circumstances and assume away search costs for simplicity for that application, but I know of no undergraduate cirriculum that teaches "markets only work with perfect information, and markets always have perfect information".

Just off the top of my head, here's an intro econ course (okay, it's 103 instead of 101) that talks about search costs:

The course notes: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/e 103/econ103.htm (see week 10)

And the specific lecture: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/e 103/micro8.htm - see section II

And if you want to fall back your pitiful "well, capitalism works better with zero search costs", fine, that's true, but trivial. Capitalism works better with zero transaction costs, zero negotiation costs, zero costs of production, perfect rationality, etc. Again, that doesn't throw any economic insights into doubt. And I don't understand your focus on "capitalism". Mixed economies and socialism have to deal with search costs too, even if, as in the former case, they are dispersed differently, or, as in the latter case, they are denominated in non-monetary units. Having socialism or regulation does not get you out of the problem of information, so it wouldn't itself prove any system better than any other

Wow, calling an economic theory handling the implications of imperfect information "pseudo-intellectual crap"... my confidence is shaken

You really, really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, perfect information (which needn't be capitalized) is not "an assumption at the undergrad level". They might refer to specific circumstances and assume away search costs for simplicity for that application, but I know of no undergraduate cirriculum that teaches "markets only work with perfect information, and markets always have perfect information".

Just off the top of my head, here's an intro econ course (okay, it's 103 instead of 101) that talks about search costs:

The course notes: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/e 103/econ103.htm (see week 10)

And the specific lecture: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/e 103/micro8.htm - see section II

And if you want to fall back your pitiful "well, capitalism works better with zero search costs", fine, that's true, but trivial. Capitalism works better with zero transaction costs, zero negotiation costs, zero costs of production, perfect rationality, etc. Again, that doesn't throw any economic insights into doubt. And I don't understand your focus on "capitalism". Mixed economies and socialism have to deal with search costs too, even if, as in the former case, they are dispersed differently, or, as in the latter case, they are denominated in non-monetary units. Having socialism or regulation does not get you out of the problem of information, so it wouldn't itself prove any system better than any other

Java has similarities with C as far as some of the keywords, etc, but underneath the covers it is very different from C (and C++). Although the confusion definitely trips people up who think because it looks like C, it works the same. Not so. Java is an object-oriented language, and was heavily influenced by Objective-C, Modula-3, and Smalltalk.

Two researchers have combined these two disparate ideas to come up with a measure of media bias that doesn't depend on journalists' own perceptions of where they fit on the political spectrum, or on subjective judgments about the philosophical orientation of think tanks. Tim Groseclose, of UCLA and Stanford, and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago used data comparing which think tanks various politicians liked to quote and which think tanks various media outlets liked to quote in their news stories to estimate two ADA scores for each media outlet in the study, one based on the number of times a think tank was cited, and the other on the length of the citation.

The media outlets were The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the three network news shows, Fox News' Special Report and The Drudge Report (the [Yale study is online here]).

"Our results show a very significant liberal bias," they write. "One of our measures found that The Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News' Special Report is the most centrist." And all three papers, plus NBC and CBS, "were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives." Fair and balanced, anyone? To use a simplified example, they say, suppose there were only two think tanks, and The New York Times cited the liberal one twice as often as the conservative one. Then the newspaper's ADA score would be the same as that of a member of Congress who did the same.

The estimated ADA score for Fox, based on citations, was 35.6. That puts it in the company of Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and a few points below the House median, 39.0. The two highest were The New York Times, at 67.6, and CBS Evening News, at 70.0. The average Republican in Congress has an ADA score of 11.2, and the average Democrat 74.1.

The authors say they expected to find that the mainstream media leaned to the left, but they were "astounded by the degree." So when people say, for example, that The New York Times may be tilted left, but people can compensate for that by watching Fox News, they don't take into account that the Times is much further from the center than Fox. "To gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading The New York Times."

My point was that there's a fundamental difference between conventional medical illnesses and mentall illnesses. The former are constraints; the latter are preferences. We only label mental illnesses as illnesses because they are "bad" preferences. People should change their bad preferences; buy they are not "illnesses" in the usual sense of the work.

That's basically all I'm saying.

And it's not my lexicon; it's the well-understood lexicon of economics. Here's a professor who argues basically what I argued here:

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/s zaszjhe.doc

I'm amazed at the ignorance on slashdot. I've lost count of how many people have said, "How can she qualified for SOCTUS if she's never been a judge?"

The simple fact is that she would not be the first justice to never have sit on the bench before. Most recently Chief Justice Rehnquist was never a judge before he served http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rehnquist. (Contrary to another poster, http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/hill/marshall.htm Thurgood Marshall was a judge before he served.)

Of course, as some of you have pointed out, for a lawyer, what matters not are these cases where the laywer is paid for their work. Everyone (even rich companies) have the right to a solid defense. And in this case I actually agree with the decision- M$ should only be liable for data corruption that actually occured, not which might someday occur.

What does matter is what pro bono work she's done. This is where you find out what issues are important to her and gives better insight on how she would rule and write her opinions. Apparently she has been actively involved with trying to get other laywers to do pro bono work, so either she has a stack load of cases we can examine or she's a hypocrite.

Yes, it was part of FutureMAP and called the Policy Analysis Market(PAM). Here is a good overview of PAM. Interestingly enough, the majority of the *informed* press coverage about it was positive. Here's an analysis.

Yes, it was part of FutureMAP and called the Policy Analysis Market(PAM). Here is a good overview of PAM. Interestingly enough, the majority of the *informed* press coverage about it was positive. Here's an analysis.

Apathy is the word of the day. It's a creeping, sublime disease that permeates the psyche of more people in the US every day. Very occasionally, (9/11/01, more recently in the early days of the hurricane flooding), large numbers of people awaken from their malaise, and try to do something...feel like taking action...for a while.

So many people fail to get involved and fail to feel the need to get involved (what difference am I going to make, anyway, it's all done behind closed doors, money talks, etc, etc.), that they royally fuck up the system.

So, your government doesn't represent you, and you feel as if you have no voice? How much of the voting-age population feels that way? A bit over 40 percent would be my guess...maybe closer to 70 percent *feel* that way (the 30% that voted for the guy that lost, plus the 40% that didn't bother voting). The only solution is to go out and fill out a ballot when given the opportunity to do so.

I definitely don't do it on every issue, but I definitely *do* vote on issues that I feel are important, or where I want my voice to be heard. I talk to friends about things, and let them know why I feel a certain way. I ask people what they think about different issues.

Most people really don't care. They just don't. Either it's too much work to think about, or they are embarrassed that they haven't read more, or they go with whatever the newspapers, TV, or talk-radio tell them to think.

We have exactly the government we've asked for. We pay nearly no attention to it, unless there's some supremely obvious benefit or detriment to us personally. Like mold, it grows in the dark, while we ignore it on one hand and wail about it being such a corrupt, stinking mess on the other.

The problem is not corruption, that's a symptom. The problem is not our percieved lack of representation, that's a symptom, too. The problem is as simple as one boring word that 40 percent or more of the voting-age population in the US needs to look up and understand intimately.

The problem is apathy.

Robin Hansen has been trying to set up markets in this sort of thing for a while, but with little success. It seems that, for the most part, people get more than a little conservative*, and not only don't want to bet, but also don't want to see the odds.

*I'm using that in the general sense, not the current flame-fest sense.

Robin Hansen has been trying to set up markets in this sort of thing for a while, but with little success. It seems that, for the most part, people get more than a little conservative*, and not only don't want to bet, but also don't want to see the odds.

*I'm using that in the general sense, not the current flame-fest sense.

Excellent idea, seriously proposed here by the same guy who came up with the unfairly-maligned "terrorism futures" market.

Well, technically a majority of Americans didn't vote for Bush. According to this, only 60.3% of the people who could vote did vote. But a majority of Americans that voted did vote for Bush. Although just by 0.73%.

You might also try Joseph Yenowsky: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/brainy.html

From this page:
2004 Election Data Summary
Bush: 62,041,268 (50.73%)
Kerry: 59,028,548 (48.27%)
Total: 122,293,720
Turnout rate among voting-eligible: 60.3%

So, doing the math, only 30.59019% of the voting-eligible population actually support him. That is not over 50% of the population. Also, I have spoken with several people who actually did vote for this guy, and they have since told me that they regret it . Not that it does any good now :(

If there is a terrorist bombing, we get money back (taxes).

Actually, that's a little bit like the idea behind government by futarchy, the system of government referenced in my sig. Robin Hanson, an economics prof at George Mason University, has a web page about it here:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html

A research paper is available here:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf

The gist of it is that policy decisions are either made or advised by a prediction market. In a prediction market, on can bid on what sort of effect a policy decision might have. In the case of the Patriot Act, one might bid on the probability that there would be a terrorist attack if the Act was extended, versus what the probability would be if it weren't extended. If one's bid ends up being correct one makes money; otherwise, one loses money. It sounds a little hokey at first, but the interesting thing is that prediction markets tend to be better at predicting future events than basically any other method out there. There's of course a number of people who have knee-jerk reactions to anything that involves markets, but such is life.

In more elaborate schemes, citizens can vote on metrics of national welfare, perhaps as some function of GDP, personal liberties, mortality rates, and so on. One can then bid on how different policies would be expected to impact the national welfare metric, and policies which would benefit it would then go into effect.

Back to the case of extending the Patriot Act, even if the extension promotes national security, it would have negative effects on personal liberties. Depending on what sort of metric citizens vote on, this may be judged to be an overall good or an overall bad.

And no, I have no sort of affiliation with Hanson, prediction markets, or anything of the sort. I just think it's a cool idea.

If there is a terrorist bombing, we get money back (taxes).

Actually, that's a little bit like the idea behind government by futarchy, the system of government referenced in my sig. Robin Hanson, an economics prof at George Mason University, has a web page about it here:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html

A research paper is available here:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf

The gist of it is that policy decisions are either made or advised by a prediction market. In a prediction market, on can bid on what sort of effect a policy decision might have. In the case of the Patriot Act, one might bid on the probability that there would be a terrorist attack if the Act was extended, versus what the probability would be if it weren't extended. If one's bid ends up being correct one makes money; otherwise, one loses money. It sounds a little hokey at first, but the interesting thing is that prediction markets tend to be better at predicting future events than basically any other method out there. There's of course a number of people who have knee-jerk reactions to anything that involves markets, but such is life.

In more elaborate schemes, citizens can vote on metrics of national welfare, perhaps as some function of GDP, personal liberties, mortality rates, and so on. One can then bid on how different policies would be expected to impact the national welfare metric, and policies which would benefit it would then go into effect.

Back to the case of extending the Patriot Act, even if the extension promotes national security, it would have negative effects on personal liberties. Depending on what sort of metric citizens vote on, this may be judged to be an overall good or an overall bad.

And no, I have no sort of affiliation with Hanson, prediction markets, or anything of the sort. I just think it's a cool idea.

Today, I'm going to explain how a trade defecit works, by expanding upon an example from an article by WALTER E. WILLIAMS. When I'm done, I hope that you'll better understand what a trade defecit is, and why it is not a preferable situation.

In a global view, let's say you have your grocer, who in this arguement supplies everything to you for some reason, and you have your employer, who buys your time from you.

Now, let's say you get paid 100 dollars per week. This is the equivilant to an export. You are exporting your time to your employer for money. At this point, you have a trade surplus of 100 dollars per week. Not bad! You now have 100 dollars per week more at your disposal than you did last week.

Let's say that you spend 100 dollars on groceries each week. This is anagolous to imports, because you are importing groceries to your cupboard. I don't know why you would, maybe you have a thyroid dysfunction, or you are addicted to caviar and faberge eggs or something. Anyway, now you have no trade surplus, and no trade defacit. The rates are in parity. This situation isn't good, nor is it bad. You have an equal amount of capital at your disposal as you did before.

Now, let's say you decide to double your caviar intake and suddenly start importing 200 dollars worth of food from the grocery store every month. You are now suffering a trade defecit of 100 dollars per month. This is considered by many to be a bad thing. The capital at your disposal now decreases 100 dollars every month.

Simple, isn't it? When we apply the above to nations, it's not quite so clear-cut, but it's close. While in our above example we only have two resources which create or demand capital, a nation has many resources which create and demand capital. A car plant, for example, will create cars and therefore create capital, regardless of whether the customer is domestic or foreign. A bakery will continue to create bread, and some measure of that bread will create capital and wealth within the nation of it's own origin, regardless. Thankfully, this means that even in the event of a trade defecit, it doesn't mean that the country is neccessarily getting poorer the moment it has a trade defecit.

However, it does mean, when a country is importing more than it exports, that whatever amount more it imports than exports, will be drained from the economy of that nation, just as even though the guy with a job and a grocer in our example above gets a cheque from his parents for 200 dollars every week, the trade defecit of 100 dollars means that the amount of capital he has available to him is still only 100 dollars (100 from the job + 200 from because his mother loves him - 200 from the grocer = 100 dollars).

In the case of a nation, the trade defecit becomes a drag on the amount of money in circulation in that nation, as dollars are sent to other nations in exchange for products don't come back, except through exports.

All of this implies that it is in a countries best interest to maintain a trade surplus, to increase the amount of capital in circulation in the nation, and help increase the power and wealth of the nation as a whole.

And saying that "namely, you can learn that it doesn't exist" shows that not only do you not understand the above, but that you don't understand the paper you just posted.

I also have a problem with the minimum wage. Specifically, having one is a bad idea. Read Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly. It might open your eyes.

You can learn more about the trade deficit from Walter Williams, an economics professor at GMU. Namely, you can learn that it doesn't exist.

As such we should abolish voting and replace it with something better.

I prefer futarchy, myself.

http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf

Democracies often fail to aggregate information, while speculative markets excel at this
task. We consider a new form of governance, wherein voters would say what we want, but
speculators would say how to get it. Elected representatives would oversee the after-the-fact
measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they
expect to raise national welfare. Those who recommend policies that regressions suggest
will raise GDP should be willing to endorse similar market advice. Using a qualitative
engineering-style approach, we present three scenarios, consider thirty design issues, and
then present a more specific design responding to those concerns.

Personally, I like Walter E. Williams' name of "constitutionalist" rather than "conservative". It's more descriptive.

I agree with your assessment of the American political system. But I have to correct a couple of misperceptions you mentioned.

2004 election turnout was 60% of eligible voters, high in the consistently narrow range of turnout since 1972 (when it dropped from its higher postwar rate, when 18-21 year olds were added to those eligible). 60% still isn't enough: about 30% voted for each of the two main candidates, with 40% "voting" for none of the above by abstaining (and, therefore, 70% "voting against" the winner or runnerup).

And I give Americans *no* special credit in my post to which you replied. The only change in my level of scorn, from pre-Bush assessment, has come in seeing how like us were the 1930s Germans. I'm more sympathetic to them, in equal measure for the contempt my "fellow" Americans have earned. When Bush has replaced the Supreme Court and the Constitution with a Christian Sharia basis, we'll be mirrors of the enemies they've chosen, the Wahabist Taliban and Qaeda, and equal to their Nazi role models.

While the right to privacy isn't enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the Nineth Amendment does say:

Amendment IX - Construction of Constitution. Ratified 12/15/1791.

Further courts including the US Supreme Court has ruled there is a right to privacy:

• Supreme Court strikes down Texas sodomy law
  WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court Thursday struck down a Texas state law banning private consensual sex between adults of the same sex in a decision gay rights groups hailed as historic.
• Thurgood Marshall
  President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues.
• Privacy
  Early treatises on privacy appeared with the development of privacy protection in American law from the 1890's onward, and privacy protection was justified largely on moral grounds. This literature helps distinguish descriptive accounts of privacy, describing what is in fact protected as private, from normative accounts of privacy defending its value and the extent to which it should be protected. In these discussions some treat privacy as an interest with moral value, while others refer to it as a moral or legal right that ought to be protected by society or the law. Clearly one can be insensitive to another's privacy interests without violating any right to privacy, if there is one.

That was just a quick check but I'd bet I can find more references to the right to privacy. The reference at Stanford University mentions privacy protection from the 1890s.

Car? Is that one of those "outside" things?

No, it's actually the first element in a cons-cell.

Walmart was getting into an area it didn't need to be in. Sure, they've got a gargantuan distribution network established, but when it comes to soliciting customers, they lose on the internet. They win in brick-and-mortar because they are everywhere, open 24/7, and stock a huge selection of crap. On the internet, everyone stocks an equally huge selection of crap, is open 24/7, and they lose their competitive advantage. Unlike their online music distribution service, the DVD rental-by-mail service carries massive overhead with it that is a financial liability.

People consider Netflix the 'little guy' because some stock analysts have predicted doom for them going against Blockbuster and Walmart. This news represents traction that Netflix has found against its competition. Ultimately, I would not be surprised if Blockbuster bought out Netflix. They did this in the early nineties when Sound Warehouse rented video tapes for fifty-cents.

You're right - only a 50% minimum means that more people voted to fill the seat than implied "none of the above" by not choosing. My mistaken 33% threshold would have to be rephrased as requiring the winning vote-getter to exceed the abstaining percentage. Which would, in the elections since WWII, be just over 30% in even the closest races.

But I still disagree that the failure of a new system to pass in the current broken system reflects on the merit of the system. If 40% of eligible voters abstain, how do we know they don't want the new system? If the remaining 60% of voters are split any more closely than 83:17% (for a possible total of 50:50% overall), we don't know the will of the people. This seems clear to me, especially if my math is correct this time :).

Here, read this article on group dynamics and you'll understand why groups need leaders:

http://www.gmu.edu/student/csl/5stages.html

You are going to have to cite a statue for that one.

http://cne.gmu.edu/itcore/images/thinker.gif

Sorry, couldn't resist.

For my dissertation I designed a Web-based Blackboard Release 6 course to test a theory of learning.

Remember, room 303 is for the Department of Psychology, as you can see from this alumni ref. from gmu http://www.gmu.edu/org/iopsa/students.htm

Wendy Casper (2001)
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Tulsa
600 S. College Ave.
Lorton Hall, Room 303
Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
(w) 918.631.3774
(fax) 918.631.2833

But then again, only time will tell ...

You just described the scenario in Snow Crash. Rampant anarcho-capitalism, with the Mafia being a respectable company (and damn good in pizza delivery, too), and roads provided by Fairlanes Inc. and Cruiseways Inc. Security provided by General Bob's Army. And the government being reduced to a shadow of its former self because all the corps started to buy off pieces of the USA.

http://chnm.gmu.edu/history120/20thcentury/consume rism/pop_stephenson1.html/

Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.

Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.

One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.

Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.

Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.

One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.

The solution they came up with was to use some space on the hard disk as extra RAM. Although the hard disk is much slower than RAM, it is also much cheaper and users always have a lot more hard disk space than RAM. So, Windows was designed to create this pseudo-RAM or in Microsoft's terms - Virtual Memory, to make up for the shortfall in RAM when running memory-intensive programs."

ACS is an old term in disuse. The proper term is ACO, or Ant Colony Optimization. ACO is a population-oriented stochastic search technique similar to evolutionary computation (EC) methods (genetic algorithms, for example), but ACO is primarily geared to optimizing combinatorics problems, where you need to combine a given N objects in a certain way. For example, ACO works reasonably well on the travelling salesman problem (where you're visiting N cities in a certain order). ACO is poorly suited for noncombinatorics problems such as where you need to know the settings of N knobs. For those, EC works far better (and EC works for combinators as well, being a general black-box technique. ACO is not).

ACO got its name from inspiration from ant pheromone trails, but in fact it bears no relationship to them almost at all. It's an unfortunate stealing of the terms "ant" and "pheromone". Well, that's cybersquatting in science terminology for you. Here's the general idea applied to the traveling salesman problem. ACO tries M tours (the "ants"), initially chosen at random, and assesses their quality. Edges along the higher quality tours get some "pheromone" deposited on them -- thus if an edge appeared in many high-quality tours, it gets a lot of "pheromone". The tours are thrown away and M new tours are constructed by choosing edges stochastically, with probability weighted towards those with more pheromone. The cycle then repeats.

So all an "ant" is is a complete candidate solution to the problem; and all a "phereomone" is is the quality of a SUBsolution in that solution. That's all there's to it.

If you've read this far and want to see some _real_ ant-inspired pheromone robotics/agent algorithms, as opposed to an optimization technique under the nome de guerre of "ants", probably this is the state of the art.

My sig is simply in reponse to Fermi's quote - "where are they?" - about ETs being MIA in the face of the numbers. It's just my opinion that every intelligent civilization evolves exponentially to the point of self-destruction, or singularity (at which point pre-singularity civilizations are as interesting as slime mold, and ignored, but still respected in a prime-directive kind of way).

Personally, I felt the real problem was that we were given such poor choices to begin with. The 2 party system is sorely lacking, and we could seriously use a third, or even fourth, viable party. Both parties leave the majority wanting, at the moment, and both parties appear to be controlled by fringe elements.

Getting people to re-evaluate their core beliefs about such "sci-fi" ideas is HARD, but give Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns a read if you want to understand how incredibly fast progress is going to accelerate in the next few decades leading up to our potential[1] Singularity.

Immortality -- even if only biological -- is just ONE of the implications of exponentially evolving technology, but most people will just balk at even this possibility because they can't accept even that tiny bit of future shock.

[1] The odds are that the growing incompatibility between our primitive brains and advancing tech will kill us first.