Capitalist free markets, as described in every econ text I've studied, assume the objective, universal enforcement of market regulations on all participants, not a total lack of regulation (that would be anarchy, not capitalism). Capitalism thus differs from socialism or communism not by lacking market regulation, but in that the latter two advocate a privileged, active market role for the state.
A 'pure' free market does not refer to a lack of regulation, but a market in which the government enjoys no special privilege over private enterprise. The logical conclusion of such a system would result in privatized police forces, fire companies, etc. competing on equal terms with the analogous government entities. Both government and private enterprise would still be subject to regulation.
Consequently, capitalist arguments against anti-trust laws are not inherent to capitalism in general, but are made from the position that that class of regulation does not result in a more productive economy. In contrast, regulations that capitalists generally consider to be necessary for a healthy free market economy would be contract law and property law.
Then it *is* capitalism at work by its very definition. Why do you think you need anti-trust laws but because growing monopolies is a known ill-effect of capitalism in action? No. The existence of anti-trust laws does not provide an argument either for or against the efficacy of capitalist free markets, as there is nothing anti (or pro) capitalist about them.
I don't think I need to say anything about the relationship between predatory behaviour and capitalism, do I? Predatory behavior is alive and well in all socio-economic systems. They simply provide different mechanisms by which one becomes either predator or prey.
Your parent is being buried because his statements are irrelevant to the argument of your GP regardless of whether or not they're true.
First, the GP was not arguing Clinton vs. Bush, so all of your parent's arguments are straw men.
Second, none of his points make the case that the incidents in question had lasting, significant repercussions for the political atmosphere of the nation and the role of the executive office, so your parent is also offtopic for the thread.
I personally disagree with the GP, but, when your post is a deliberate troll or even an unintentional red herring (they are often indistinguishable), some harsh treatment by mods shouldn't be any kind of surprise.
SR predicts time dilation, which does not result in a violation of causality. I.e., an event may happen sooner or later and appear to have a longer or shorter duration for any given observer, but every observer will always see events occurring in the same order, thus causality is preserved.
Not that I agree with the person you're debating, but your argument here is inconsistent.
The few examples I gave were, while not things that necessarily could not have been produced otherwise, were fairly unique -- at the time -- to religious thought, such as the equality of man, the order of the universe, etc.
Paraphrase: Religion was not a requirement for these positive occurrences, but it was strongly associated with them, so we should give credit where credit is due
I am merely saying it was not something specific to religion that caused the Crusades. Religion was used a means to promote the venture; it was not the reason for it. It would have happened, all other things being equal, if they were a bunch of atheists. They would have used nationalism or race or something else instead.
Paraphrase: Religion was merely associated with these negative occurrences, not a required catalyst, therefore we shouldn't blame them on religion.
The problem is that if the reasoning for the first statement is valid for positive occurrences, it must necessarily be valid for negative ones as well. If 'good by association' is a valid argument, so is 'guilt by association'. The argument you presented in this particular post is internally inconsistent.
My experience has been that the wheel gets constantly re-invented in new languages because a non-trivial (I suspect majority) percentage of programmers would rather re-invent something than work with an existing library.
That kind of behavior is absurd on its face, but the reason behind it is the same basic principle behind the 'throw the first one away' philosophy of development. Sometimes, in order to understand a particular domain sufficiently to utilize tools which operate within/on it, you have to explore it by writing the tools yourself. In doing so, you may or may not (likely not) produce a superior set of tools compared to what already exists, but it will often be the case that you will be more productive with your self-produced tools, even if they are markedly inferior, due to your much deeper understanding of them.
The problem with ultra high-level languages/framework combos like Ruby/Rails is that you start to get real nasty artifacts of poor abstractions from people who don't have sufficient understanding of or experience with developing and working with abstract models[1]. These get worse and worse as they begin to delve deeper into the increasingly esoteric areas beyond high-level application-specific code.
Personally, I'm of the pragmatic school of thought on this. As long as it works for you, it's fine, and no skin off my back in any case.
That being said, I can understand where the guy is coming from, even if I think that that type of rant is distasteful (and stupid from a professional career standpoint). The problems begin showing up when these things start showing up in heavily hyped middleware, frameworks, and libraries. It gets harder to simply live and let live when people hype something hard without knowing enough to realize that it's horribly crippled. This goes doubly so when they don't understand enough to realize that it's horribly crippled even after the reasons are explained to them. The worst, of course, is when someone knows their pet project is broken, but continues to drag everyone else along due to hubris, inability to correct or at least admit to the problem, prioritizing other interests more highly, or whatever have you.
Sometimes you can simply jump ship from that particular project. Other times, with smaller communities (of any sort, not just developers), the keepers of the keys to the golden goose can screw things up for their entire community ecosystem. In software development, one of the most frustrating things that can happen is that a crippled project works (or is simply popular) enough that you're forced to continue working with it, causing your project to be plagued by and littered with the collateral damage of having to work with badly leaky abstractions and poor implementations.
Things of course get more heated and less objective if you've personally invested yourself in a community or project affected by situations like those described above.
[1]I've found this to be particularly noticeable when inexperienced programmers try to implement a scripting or domain-specific language without understanding the concept of, e.g., a graph, which leads to no concept of a parse tree, which tends to limit them to things that resemble bastardized DOS batch files with no flow control or nested statements. They don't have enough understanding to recognize that source code is a description of a non-linear graph, and end up writing a script engine that can only parse a flat linear sequence of instructions.
The worst case I saw was that the script engine was so tightly coupled to a specific script that you had to revise the engine itself if you changed the order of some of the logically independent statements in the script (or maybe the worst was one that reminded me of working with a sad, sad assembly interpreter because variables were fixed in number, name, and data type in the script engine itself, and scripts had to work with them almost like registers). Don't get me wrong—the guys who did tho
This distinction entered the common vernacular when IBM briefly held the trademark on the term "personal computer".
Every older programmer that I've met still uses the term that way. That usage was also pervasive when I got my first computer as a kid in the 80s, so I still use it that way through force of habit. The Apple switch campaign and pc/mac commercials also continue to make the distinction 'pc' vs. 'mac'.
It's 'dumb' in that the distinction is meaningless in the sense that macs are technically 'personal computers', but 'PC', as with many other terms, has additional connotations to a certain segment of the population which makes this usage both meaningful and correct.
'Deprecate' has a precise, relevant meaning when talking about specifications. It basically is a polite way to put all people who depend on a specification (or implementation thereof) that a certain feature is slated to be removed at an arbitrary time in the future. This is done so that developers, integrators, etc., can migrate away from the deprecated features before they are removed, allowing a smooth transition.
If what you mean by "externalize costs," is "do something illegal," then your comment has no actual bearing on a free market economy that exists within the framework of a system of government bound by the rule of law. Anti-littering laws are a prime example of regulation. Environmental protection laws and OSHA regulations are yet another example of market regulation preventing manufacturers from externalizing the costs (onto the environment and their own employees, respectively). Laws in general are market regulations, so there is no such thing as a truly free market 'within a framework of a system of government' except in the sense of the meta-market of which the system of government is itself a product.
Free of any market regulation, Pickle co. could externalize an enormous amount of cost by dispensing with safety compliance for unskilled laborers and simply dumping all waste products into the river. These activities are by-and-large regulated in 1st world countries, so manufacturers move operations overseas where they are still allowed to externalize these costs. This is tolerated by 1st world countries because the costs are now being externalized outside of their sphere of concern. Such an operation may even go so far as to result in a global net loss, but the distribution of costs and benefits are highly uneven, making even this type of situation economically attractive for the beneficiaries.
Just to make things clear, I'm not advocating any particular economic system, just explaining my understanding. If anything, I personally lean towards libertarianism, but I try not to let what I wish things were like color my perception of the way things actually are.
At first glance (and this is where most people stop), lowered prices stem from increases in efficiency.
However, when real cost of production can no longer be lowered through efficiency, and significant downward pressure is still being exerted on the market (e.g., when a significant entity downstream in the supply chain dictates this), manufacturers have an additional option: externalize costs.
This is where the hypothetical $3.50 pickles may be a better choice than the $3.00 ones for the market as a whole. In order to sell that $3.00 bottle, the manufacturer may have had to externalize a higher cost than the price differential.
A simple example on a smaller scale would be the following scenario:
Imagine you're standing in the middle of a park, and the only trashcan is 100yds in the opposite direction from your destination. The cost for you to throw it away would be some additional time. Feeling that you cannot afford to spend the time (say you have an appointment to make), you have the option of externalizing the cost of disposal by simply dropping it on the ground. The cost is then borne by all other users of the park, as its value as an aesthetically pleasing environment is lessened by the presence of litter.
The theory that the free market is self-correcting is only true for free market models that assume that agents do not (or cannot) externalize significant costs.
This presents a dilemma in real-world markets, where entities actively and successfully seek out ways to externalize costs. Such a market's ability to self-correct is contingent upon a majority of agents within the system basing their decisions on total cost to the system. E.g., consumers need to be educated and interested enough to investigate and realize that the hypothetical $3.00 bottle of pickles, through N degrees of separation, removes value from the economy and ends up costing them more than the $3.50 bottle. The alternative to well-educated and informed masses is regulation by well-informed specialists, which is a more economically feasible solution, paradoxically making centralized regulation itself a product of the free market.
CS is both a branch of mathematics and a science in that it is a branch of mathematics specifically developed to be directly applicable to 'real-world' problems and developing and refining models of real-world problems according to the scientific method.
You are correct in thinking that "computer engineering" and "software engineering" are not scientific disciplines, because they aren't. They are also not computer science. A software engineer is to a computer scientist what a mechanical engineer is to a physicist.
The lines seem to be blurred when it comes to computer science because, more so than with any other scientific discipline, great computer scientists have a tendency to also be great engineers. As Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man Month:
For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, "working out" are essential disciplines for the theoretician. There is very little separating the science from the engineering when the medium is information and logic, so computer scientists have the luxury of taking their science through to an actual concrete implementation very quickly and by themselves.
A physicist, on the other hand, would usually require an enormous amount of education in material properties, state of the art in manufacturing technologies, and/or a massive amount of infrastructure to provide power etc. to engineer an actual implementation that tests his theories. For physics, and most other sciences, application of theory requires a non-trivial and entirely different set of skills and knowledge than it takes to develop theory, which is why there is a much more distinctive break between the science and engineering in physics, biology, chemistry, etc. than there is with computer science, where a program might not only serve as the definition and description of a theory, but also as a concrete implementation.
Not really. All serious competitors in demo competitions know the ISA and performance characteristics of the target architecture very well, but that is nowhere near knowing the hardware 'inside and out'. It's the difference between being very familiar with the API vs. the actual code implementing a library.
I have no love for 'Monsatan', but the benefit of biotech research for, e.g., corn is undeniable. Do a quick google search on the subject, and you'll see tons of graphs like those contained in this article.
Ironically enough, organic farming is only economical because of the biotechnology developed and funded by the likes of Pioneer Hi-Bred, and the companies that were amalgamated into Syngenta or Monsanto. Their research is what produced the varieties with such productive genetics compared to the wild progenitor that organic farms of commodity crops can even have a chance of being economical.
YMMV. I've found Honolulu to be far more similar to Osaka than to Boston, and neither was anything like the mid-west or west coast (which itself is vastly different between, say, SoCal, Vegas and anywhere in Oregon/Washington).
In all seriousness, of the 17 countries and states of the US, in how many have you actually done one or both of the following:
A) Attended a wedding or funeral for a local-born person whom you know independently of the rest of your family.
B) Participated in a significant community activity unconnected with a university (e.g, coaching or participating in a sport, participating in local political debates/forums).
You declare a concentration, but I've heard "My concentration is foo" (often), or "I'm majoring in foo" (also often) far more often than "I'm a foo concentrator" (never, actually).
You're deliberately selecting for failures. The entirety of all agriculture is basically the introduction or synthesis and then introduction of new organisms to a given environment to convert solar and chemical energy into useful resources for people. The total cost/benefit ratio to humans of deliberate foreign species introduction is staggeringly in favor of continuing to do so.
If you don't put a detector in the photon's path and the photon hits the wall instead the photon's wave still collapses (or a universe is selected, depending on how you see it). This is not true, and exactly the point that your parent was trying to make. Without a detector, you see an interference pattern on the wall, which can only happen if the photon passes through both slits and interferes with itself. By detecting the photon at the slits, on the other hand, the pattern disappears because the photon's wave function is collapsed and it only passes through one slit.
If you're a programmer, think of it as a lazy evaluation mechanism. The wave function of the photon does not collapse unless it is subjected to an interaction that forces it to do so. Generic radiation-earth interactions may well not collapse the state of the particles because, as with the unobserved slits in the double-slit experiment, such an interaction may not distinguish between discrete values and thus never collapses the wave function.
To give an example using the infamous cat, the cat's state is never collapsed if you throw the box against a wall, only if it is interacted with in such a way that the discrete state of the cat is of material importance to the outcome of the interaction (e.g., looking inside).
It is capable of VTOL, but its operational spec is STOVL for a very good reason. Any winged (by which I mean the wings provide the vast majority of lift during operation, as opposed to rotors) craft capable of VTOL can trivially (for relative values of trivial) carry a much larger payload if allowed to operate with a STOVL mission profile instead.
You can specify VTOL as a requirement if you really wanted to, but in the end you'll get far more literal bang for your buck if you take advantage of the ability to do STOVL instead of VTOL whenever possible.
The reason is that if my herbicide of choice was Round-Up anyway (I'm not saying that it was his choice) and my neighbor was using RR Canola, a significant portion of my crop would eventually be RR Canola simply because it would be more likely to survive, even at lower treatment levels.
This is either an honest mistake, or a deliberate to mislead. You do not spray non-rr cultivars with roundup, as it will toast down anything that isn't resistant. The only thing you can use it for is controlling weeds outside your tillable ground, or possibly preplant/pre-emerge. Any other usages are inconsistent with the product's label, and actually a punishable offense.
There is no legitimate use of roundup that will incidentally cause significant selection pressure on a crop. Lacking significant positive selection pressure, rare genotypes will only be maintained at a very low frequency in—if not disappear entirely from—a population. The assertion that the levels of the rr genotype would eventually become significant on accident, with absolutely no intervention, is false.
The only reason you would spray roundup on a non-rr crop, aside from just wanting to kill it for some reason, is to deliberately select for the rr genotype.
Make no mistake, that guy knew exactly what he was doing. He spent the better part of his life studying and refining his canola germplasm, obviously had a fairly deep knowledge of plant breeding in general, and basically walked into this with his eyes wide open. He just either didn't think he'd get caught, or didn't think the consequences would be quite so serious.
This is wrong. You can patent a 'naturally' developed cultivar with enough SNP markers to uniquely identify the cultivar's genetic fingerprint. This is in fact how the various seed companies protect their germplasm.
It's pretty bewildering to me how the population of/., which seems to be at least above-average in technological literacy in most areas, is so ignorant regarding biotech.
Germplasm/genetic construct patents expire after 20 years, just like any other patents. Also, many universities around the world maintain banks of public domain germplasm. Until Monsanto can destroy all public seed banks (hint: not going to happen), they can't even begin to hope to control all cultivars.
The case is nowhere near as straightforward as most people seem to believe. If you research the details, he bought massive quantities of Round-Up, which was basically the first smoking gun in Monsanto's case[1].
The quantity of Round-Up be bought exceeded the amount that could be applied to his non-crop acreage, ruling out the possibility that it was purchased solely for border weed control etc. This was a very strong indication that he not only knew he was growing RR Canola, but that he was actively selecting for it by spraying his fields.
The other smoking gun was the fact that his crop was 95-98% RR canola[2]. That level of 'contamination' indicates very aggressive, active selection for the target genotype. You do not get that from the trace contamination due to windblown seed or accidental cross-pollination.
I don't doubt that the first few plants were accidental, either through unintentional cross-pollination or stray seed, but once he found that they were round-up resistant, he actively worked to integrate the rr the genotype into his own populations. He probably just didn't feel like he was doing anything wrong.
Small-time seed producers have done exactly the same sort thing with non-GMO germplasm from, e.g., Pioneer Hi-Bred for decades. They'd buy and plant a bag of hybrid seed, and look through the field for accidental selfs (plants produced by accidental self-pollination due to incomplete detasseling during hybrid production) to steal their inbreds from their female heterotic lines. That is just as illegal as what Schmeiser did, but you don't really hear about those guys being busted and completely ruined because Pioneer isn't run by the same type of raging pricks as the guys at Monsanto.
[1] http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=gm-54 - "Monsanto argues that in spite of Schmeiser's claims that he did not use Roundup on his crops in 1998, there is no evidence that he used Muster and Assure herbicides as claimed. Furthermore, Monsanto provides evidence that Schmeiser purchased 720 liters of Roundup in 1998."
[2] http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2004/2004scc34/2004scc34.html - Schmeiser never purchased Roundup Ready Canola nor did he obtain a licence to plant it. Yet, in 1998, tests revealed that 95 to 98 percent of his 1,000 acres of canola crop was made up of Roundup Ready plants.... The trial judge found that "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's crop."
If you take a stack of glossy paper—for instance, a magazine—and light it with an accelerant while the pages are compressed as they would be in the case of a wad of folded paper in a pocket, you'll find the majority of the paper still readable after the fire has died out.
In the case of a concentrated jet of heated material, such as might be expected from a compromised lithium battery, the damage is even more contained.
If the battery was compromised such that the heat was directed in the opposite direction, the paper could well have served as a protective insulator without even sustaining visible burn damage.
You're pretty much correct. I just finished downloading another set of Quickbird imagery for work, and the panchromatic imagery has a 60cm/pixel resolution at nadir. It's not even that expensive if you don't require a new collect. Minimum order area from the existing image catalogue will run you somewhere around $400.
There is a *huge* difference on the digital backend of this theoretical imaging setup, however, as I doubt that Quickbird (or any other non-military sat) can deliver that kind of resolution over that kind of area at a sustained 4fps.
Slashdot Mirror
A 'pure' free market does not refer to a lack of regulation, but a market in which the government enjoys no special privilege over private enterprise. The logical conclusion of such a system would result in privatized police forces, fire companies, etc. competing on equal terms with the analogous government entities. Both government and private enterprise would still be subject to regulation.
Consequently, capitalist arguments against anti-trust laws are not inherent to capitalism in general, but are made from the position that that class of regulation does not result in a more productive economy. In contrast, regulations that capitalists generally consider to be necessary for a healthy free market economy would be contract law and property law. Then it *is* capitalism at work by its very definition. Why do you think you need anti-trust laws but because growing monopolies is a known ill-effect of capitalism in action? No. The existence of anti-trust laws does not provide an argument either for or against the efficacy of capitalist free markets, as there is nothing anti (or pro) capitalist about them. I don't think I need to say anything about the relationship between predatory behaviour and capitalism, do I? Predatory behavior is alive and well in all socio-economic systems. They simply provide different mechanisms by which one becomes either predator or prey.
Your parent is being buried because his statements are irrelevant to the argument of your GP regardless of whether or not they're true.
First, the GP was not arguing Clinton vs. Bush, so all of your parent's arguments are straw men.
Second, none of his points make the case that the incidents in question had lasting, significant repercussions for the political atmosphere of the nation and the role of the executive office, so your parent is also offtopic for the thread.
I personally disagree with the GP, but, when your post is a deliberate troll or even an unintentional red herring (they are often indistinguishable), some harsh treatment by mods shouldn't be any kind of surprise.
SR predicts time dilation, which does not result in a violation of causality. I.e., an event may happen sooner or later and appear to have a longer or shorter duration for any given observer, but every observer will always see events occurring in the same order, thus causality is preserved.
Not that I agree with the person you're debating, but your argument here is inconsistent.
The few examples I gave were, while not things that necessarily could not have been produced otherwise, were fairly unique -- at the time -- to religious thought, such as the equality of man, the order of the universe, etc.Paraphrase: Religion was not a requirement for these positive occurrences, but it was strongly associated with them, so we should give credit where credit is due
I am merely saying it was not something specific to religion that caused the Crusades. Religion was used a means to promote the venture; it was not the reason for it. It would have happened, all other things being equal, if they were a bunch of atheists. They would have used nationalism or race or something else instead.Paraphrase: Religion was merely associated with these negative occurrences, not a required catalyst, therefore we shouldn't blame them on religion.
The problem is that if the reasoning for the first statement is valid for positive occurrences, it must necessarily be valid for negative ones as well. If 'good by association' is a valid argument, so is 'guilt by association'. The argument you presented in this particular post is internally inconsistent.
Updates wouldn't affect the lifetime of any current (and presumably future) SSDs any more than inserts due to wear levelling.
My experience has been that the wheel gets constantly re-invented in new languages because a non-trivial (I suspect majority) percentage of programmers would rather re-invent something than work with an existing library.
That kind of behavior is absurd on its face, but the reason behind it is the same basic principle behind the 'throw the first one away' philosophy of development. Sometimes, in order to understand a particular domain sufficiently to utilize tools which operate within/on it, you have to explore it by writing the tools yourself. In doing so, you may or may not (likely not) produce a superior set of tools compared to what already exists, but it will often be the case that you will be more productive with your self-produced tools, even if they are markedly inferior, due to your much deeper understanding of them.
The problem with ultra high-level languages/framework combos like Ruby/Rails is that you start to get real nasty artifacts of poor abstractions from people who don't have sufficient understanding of or experience with developing and working with abstract models[1]. These get worse and worse as they begin to delve deeper into the increasingly esoteric areas beyond high-level application-specific code.
Personally, I'm of the pragmatic school of thought on this. As long as it works for you, it's fine, and no skin off my back in any case.
That being said, I can understand where the guy is coming from, even if I think that that type of rant is distasteful (and stupid from a professional career standpoint). The problems begin showing up when these things start showing up in heavily hyped middleware, frameworks, and libraries. It gets harder to simply live and let live when people hype something hard without knowing enough to realize that it's horribly crippled. This goes doubly so when they don't understand enough to realize that it's horribly crippled even after the reasons are explained to them. The worst, of course, is when someone knows their pet project is broken, but continues to drag everyone else along due to hubris, inability to correct or at least admit to the problem, prioritizing other interests more highly, or whatever have you.
Sometimes you can simply jump ship from that particular project. Other times, with smaller communities (of any sort, not just developers), the keepers of the keys to the golden goose can screw things up for their entire community ecosystem. In software development, one of the most frustrating things that can happen is that a crippled project works (or is simply popular) enough that you're forced to continue working with it, causing your project to be plagued by and littered with the collateral damage of having to work with badly leaky abstractions and poor implementations.
Things of course get more heated and less objective if you've personally invested yourself in a community or project affected by situations like those described above.
[1]I've found this to be particularly noticeable when inexperienced programmers try to implement a scripting or domain-specific language without understanding the concept of, e.g., a graph, which leads to no concept of a parse tree, which tends to limit them to things that resemble bastardized DOS batch files with no flow control or nested statements. They don't have enough understanding to recognize that source code is a description of a non-linear graph, and end up writing a script engine that can only parse a flat linear sequence of instructions.
The worst case I saw was that the script engine was so tightly coupled to a specific script that you had to revise the engine itself if you changed the order of some of the logically independent statements in the script (or maybe the worst was one that reminded me of working with a sad, sad assembly interpreter because variables were fixed in number, name, and data type in the script engine itself, and scripts had to work with them almost like registers). Don't get me wrong—the guys who did tho
This distinction entered the common vernacular when IBM briefly held the trademark on the term "personal computer".
Every older programmer that I've met still uses the term that way. That usage was also pervasive when I got my first computer as a kid in the 80s, so I still use it that way through force of habit. The Apple switch campaign and pc/mac commercials also continue to make the distinction 'pc' vs. 'mac'.
It's 'dumb' in that the distinction is meaningless in the sense that macs are technically 'personal computers', but 'PC', as with many other terms, has additional connotations to a certain segment of the population which makes this usage both meaningful and correct.
'Deprecate' has a precise, relevant meaning when talking about specifications. It basically is a polite way to put all people who depend on a specification (or implementation thereof) that a certain feature is slated to be removed at an arbitrary time in the future. This is done so that developers, integrators, etc., can migrate away from the deprecated features before they are removed, allowing a smooth transition.
Free of any market regulation, Pickle co. could externalize an enormous amount of cost by dispensing with safety compliance for unskilled laborers and simply dumping all waste products into the river. These activities are by-and-large regulated in 1st world countries, so manufacturers move operations overseas where they are still allowed to externalize these costs. This is tolerated by 1st world countries because the costs are now being externalized outside of their sphere of concern. Such an operation may even go so far as to result in a global net loss, but the distribution of costs and benefits are highly uneven, making even this type of situation economically attractive for the beneficiaries.
Just to make things clear, I'm not advocating any particular economic system, just explaining my understanding. If anything, I personally lean towards libertarianism, but I try not to let what I wish things were like color my perception of the way things actually are.
At first glance (and this is where most people stop), lowered prices stem from increases in efficiency.
However, when real cost of production can no longer be lowered through efficiency, and significant downward pressure is still being exerted on the market (e.g., when a significant entity downstream in the supply chain dictates this), manufacturers have an additional option: externalize costs.
This is where the hypothetical $3.50 pickles may be a better choice than the $3.00 ones for the market as a whole. In order to sell that $3.00 bottle, the manufacturer may have had to externalize a higher cost than the price differential.
A simple example on a smaller scale would be the following scenario:
Imagine you're standing in the middle of a park, and the only trashcan is 100yds in the opposite direction from your destination. The cost for you to throw it away would be some additional time. Feeling that you cannot afford to spend the time (say you have an appointment to make), you have the option of externalizing the cost of disposal by simply dropping it on the ground. The cost is then borne by all other users of the park, as its value as an aesthetically pleasing environment is lessened by the presence of litter.
The theory that the free market is self-correcting is only true for free market models that assume that agents do not (or cannot) externalize significant costs.
This presents a dilemma in real-world markets, where entities actively and successfully seek out ways to externalize costs. Such a market's ability to self-correct is contingent upon a majority of agents within the system basing their decisions on total cost to the system. E.g., consumers need to be educated and interested enough to investigate and realize that the hypothetical $3.00 bottle of pickles, through N degrees of separation, removes value from the economy and ends up costing them more than the $3.50 bottle. The alternative to well-educated and informed masses is regulation by well-informed specialists, which is a more economically feasible solution, paradoxically making centralized regulation itself a product of the free market.
You are correct in thinking that "computer engineering" and "software engineering" are not scientific disciplines, because they aren't. They are also not computer science. A software engineer is to a computer scientist what a mechanical engineer is to a physicist.
The lines seem to be blurred when it comes to computer science because, more so than with any other scientific discipline, great computer scientists have a tendency to also be great engineers. As Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man Month: For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, "working out" are essential disciplines for the theoretician. There is very little separating the science from the engineering when the medium is information and logic, so computer scientists have the luxury of taking their science through to an actual concrete implementation very quickly and by themselves.
A physicist, on the other hand, would usually require an enormous amount of education in material properties, state of the art in manufacturing technologies, and/or a massive amount of infrastructure to provide power etc. to engineer an actual implementation that tests his theories. For physics, and most other sciences, application of theory requires a non-trivial and entirely different set of skills and knowledge than it takes to develop theory, which is why there is a much more distinctive break between the science and engineering in physics, biology, chemistry, etc. than there is with computer science, where a program might not only serve as the definition and description of a theory, but also as a concrete implementation.
Computer science is a branch of mathematics. Perhaps applied mathematics if you feel the need to make such a distinction.
Not really. All serious competitors in demo competitions know the ISA and performance characteristics of the target architecture very well, but that is nowhere near knowing the hardware 'inside and out'. It's the difference between being very familiar with the API vs. the actual code implementing a library.
I have no love for 'Monsatan', but the benefit of biotech research for, e.g., corn is undeniable. Do a quick google search on the subject, and you'll see tons of graphs like those contained in this article.
Ironically enough, organic farming is only economical because of the biotechnology developed and funded by the likes of Pioneer Hi-Bred, and the companies that were amalgamated into Syngenta or Monsanto. Their research is what produced the varieties with such productive genetics compared to the wild progenitor that organic farms of commodity crops can even have a chance of being economical.
In all seriousness, of the 17 countries and states of the US, in how many have you actually done one or both of the following:
A) Attended a wedding or funeral for a local-born person whom you know independently of the rest of your family.
B) Participated in a significant community activity unconnected with a university (e.g, coaching or participating in a sport, participating in local political debates/forums).
You declare a concentration, but I've heard "My concentration is foo" (often), or "I'm majoring in foo" (also often) far more often than "I'm a foo concentrator" (never, actually).
You're deliberately selecting for failures. The entirety of all agriculture is basically the introduction or synthesis and then introduction of new organisms to a given environment to convert solar and chemical energy into useful resources for people. The total cost/benefit ratio to humans of deliberate foreign species introduction is staggeringly in favor of continuing to do so.
If you're a programmer, think of it as a lazy evaluation mechanism. The wave function of the photon does not collapse unless it is subjected to an interaction that forces it to do so. Generic radiation-earth interactions may well not collapse the state of the particles because, as with the unobserved slits in the double-slit experiment, such an interaction may not distinguish between discrete values and thus never collapses the wave function.
To give an example using the infamous cat, the cat's state is never collapsed if you throw the box against a wall, only if it is interacted with in such a way that the discrete state of the cat is of material importance to the outcome of the interaction (e.g., looking inside).
It is capable of VTOL, but its operational spec is STOVL for a very good reason. Any winged (by which I mean the wings provide the vast majority of lift during operation, as opposed to rotors) craft capable of VTOL can trivially (for relative values of trivial) carry a much larger payload if allowed to operate with a STOVL mission profile instead.
You can specify VTOL as a requirement if you really wanted to, but in the end you'll get far more literal bang for your buck if you take advantage of the ability to do STOVL instead of VTOL whenever possible.
This is either an honest mistake, or a deliberate to mislead. You do not spray non-rr cultivars with roundup, as it will toast down anything that isn't resistant. The only thing you can use it for is controlling weeds outside your tillable ground, or possibly preplant/pre-emerge. Any other usages are inconsistent with the product's label, and actually a punishable offense.
There is no legitimate use of roundup that will incidentally cause significant selection pressure on a crop. Lacking significant positive selection pressure, rare genotypes will only be maintained at a very low frequency in—if not disappear entirely from—a population. The assertion that the levels of the rr genotype would eventually become significant on accident, with absolutely no intervention, is false.
The only reason you would spray roundup on a non-rr crop, aside from just wanting to kill it for some reason, is to deliberately select for the rr genotype.
Make no mistake, that guy knew exactly what he was doing. He spent the better part of his life studying and refining his canola germplasm, obviously had a fairly deep knowledge of plant breeding in general, and basically walked into this with his eyes wide open. He just either didn't think he'd get caught, or didn't think the consequences would be quite so serious.
This is wrong. You can patent a 'naturally' developed cultivar with enough SNP markers to uniquely identify the cultivar's genetic fingerprint. This is in fact how the various seed companies protect their germplasm.
It's pretty bewildering to me how the population of /., which seems to be at least above-average in technological literacy in most areas, is so ignorant regarding biotech.
Germplasm/genetic construct patents expire after 20 years, just like any other patents. Also, many universities around the world maintain banks of public domain germplasm. Until Monsanto can destroy all public seed banks (hint: not going to happen), they can't even begin to hope to control all cultivars.
The case is nowhere near as straightforward as most people seem to believe. If you research the details, he bought massive quantities of Round-Up, which was basically the first smoking gun in Monsanto's case[1].
The quantity of Round-Up be bought exceeded the amount that could be applied to his non-crop acreage, ruling out the possibility that it was purchased solely for border weed control etc. This was a very strong indication that he not only knew he was growing RR Canola, but that he was actively selecting for it by spraying his fields.
The other smoking gun was the fact that his crop was 95-98% RR canola[2]. That level of 'contamination' indicates very aggressive, active selection for the target genotype. You do not get that from the trace contamination due to windblown seed or accidental cross-pollination.
I don't doubt that the first few plants were accidental, either through unintentional cross-pollination or stray seed, but once he found that they were round-up resistant, he actively worked to integrate the rr the genotype into his own populations. He probably just didn't feel like he was doing anything wrong.
Small-time seed producers have done exactly the same sort thing with non-GMO germplasm from, e.g., Pioneer Hi-Bred for decades. They'd buy and plant a bag of hybrid seed, and look through the field for accidental selfs (plants produced by accidental self-pollination due to incomplete detasseling during hybrid production) to steal their inbreds from their female heterotic lines. That is just as illegal as what Schmeiser did, but you don't really hear about those guys being busted and completely ruined because Pioneer isn't run by the same type of raging pricks as the guys at Monsanto.
[1] http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=gm-54 - "Monsanto argues that in spite of Schmeiser's claims that he did not use Roundup on his crops in 1998, there is no evidence that he used Muster and Assure herbicides as claimed. Furthermore, Monsanto provides evidence that Schmeiser purchased 720 liters of Roundup in 1998."
[2] http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2004/2004scc34/2004scc34.html - Schmeiser never purchased Roundup Ready Canola nor did he obtain a licence to plant it. Yet, in 1998, tests revealed that 95 to 98 percent of his 1,000 acres of canola crop was made up of Roundup Ready plants. ... The trial judge found that "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's crop."
If you take a stack of glossy paper—for instance, a magazine—and light it with an accelerant while the pages are compressed as they would be in the case of a wad of folded paper in a pocket, you'll find the majority of the paper still readable after the fire has died out.
In the case of a concentrated jet of heated material, such as might be expected from a compromised lithium battery, the damage is even more contained.
If the battery was compromised such that the heat was directed in the opposite direction, the paper could well have served as a protective insulator without even sustaining visible burn damage.
You're pretty much correct. I just finished downloading another set of Quickbird imagery for work, and the panchromatic imagery has a 60cm/pixel resolution at nadir. It's not even that expensive if you don't require a new collect. Minimum order area from the existing image catalogue will run you somewhere around $400.
There is a *huge* difference on the digital backend of this theoretical imaging setup, however, as I doubt that Quickbird (or any other non-military sat) can deliver that kind of resolution over that kind of area at a sustained 4fps.