You have just provided the chances of coming up with a single virus's code at random. Not only are there countless millions (billions?) of different viruses in the world, but due to the way transcription works there are many codons that result in the same transcribed amino acids, and a lot of those pairs do nothing at all (exons).
Thats all fine, my brain can process that and still make the statement that theres a huge whopping difference between "millions / billions" and a 1 with 48000 zeros following it. "Orders of magnitude" doesnt even begin to cover it. You can give a million years for a million different identical codings for a million different species, and youre not even on the radar.
The complexity we're talking about is absurd, its like grabbing a few KB from/dev/urandom and ending up with an article on the upcoming election.
Sigh, that's such an inaccurate statement and oversimplification I wouldn't even know where to begin
It would help if you would clarify what part is inaccurate. I will admit that I only have entry level bio under my belt, but I do think I recall that DNA and RNA were responsible for the formation of basically everything in a cell. Wikipedia doesnt seem to disagree.
So if you have a car, and youre telling me that the drive train is pretty complicated, and I have the blueprints for a machine that will build an entire car, I think its fair to say the blueprints are of a greater complexity-- they contain all the info about that drive train, as well as all the steps to get from zero to fully functioning car (drivetrain inclusive).
Im pretty sure that honey would crystalize before it would "expire". Theres not enough moisture in it for things to grow in, so bacteria and fungus tend to have a hard time with it.
Ive had year+ old honey that was generally fine, if tasting a bit wierd because it had started to crystalize and become more concentrated.
If you want complexity try to understand how the vertebrate nervous system evolved.
No, I think its plenty complex to consider that the smallest virus genome contains around 3500 base pairs, which gives 2^3500 different combinatory possibilities of base pairs. For those who like things in nice, whole numbers, thats one out of 4.027 x 10^1053. I will spare you all the wall of text of actually trying to paste that number in here, but suffice it to say its a mind-bogglingly large number.
Now consider that the smallest non-viral genome is 159,000 base pairs, for a total of 1.12x10^48063. Thats 20KB of information, which takes more than just throwing a bunch of nucleotides together and mixing.
You can talk about how complicated the vertebrate nervous system is, but recall that all of the information behind it is in those base pairs, and that the genome is far more complicated. Consider the complexity of the nervous system as a mere subset of the genome, if you will.
Its not about copyright, its about the gall of calling Google evil for trying to make money off of ads (which IS their business model), then utilizing their server time and service and stripping those ads.
If you really object to their terms, dont use their service.
You know, I heard from someone that theyre doing it right now! Something about "Primaries" and "November 2012"....youll want to google for the details.
No no wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit. Christ I can barely make it to the 15th floor without some jackass farting. A whole week. Don't think so.
You can just open a window if someone farts, its not a big deal.
A) Occam's razor is a rule of thumb, not a formal principle of reasoning B) The idea that there is an eternal deity who created everything does not seem to me to be more complicated than an ever-existant (or self-creating), oscilating universe that pulsates from big bang to big crunch
and one that does not violate all know laws of the universe,
C) Funny; im not aware of a law that is violated by a deity. Further, many of the theories I've heard about the universe (ie, spontaneous generation) DO violate laws of thermodynamics
The other tells you, in fact, that evidence is meaningless.
No, in fact, it does not. Source would be nice if youre going to spout nonsense. I recall it espousing "see reason" and "test everything to see whether it is true"
none any more supported by evidence than the next. The only honest thing to do is to apply the same standard of evidence to all of them, with the result that you accept them all or reject them all.
False dichotomy, and some really ungrounded statements.
If you have two religions: one which says that nothing exists and that reality is an illusion, and another which says things exist and were created long ago and that man has a capability for good but a sad inclination towards evil; would you say "neither is more supported by evidence than the next"? I suppose if you want to go all post-modern-the-truth-is-all-relative, you could take that stance, but otherwise it seems sadly indefensible.
But since most of them are mutually contradictory, the only honest + rational thing to do is to reject them all.
Questions about whether everyone here is being really honest aside, your logic is horribly faulty. There are an incredible number of wrong scientific theories; is the only safe thing to do to reject them all? I mean, I thought you wanted to apply the same standard of evidence across the board.
How come everyone, regardless of their religion, can plainly see that every religion but their own is just some crap that someone made up, but can't see the same thing about their own?
Because that is the nature of conviction. But are you honestly saying that because there are wrong ideas out there, ALL ideas must be wrong? You realize atheism would fall under this umbrella, right?
If you get down to cases, everyone is agnostic about everything
I have a rather strong feeling youre not agnostic that, if you jump in front of a car, you will get horribly injured. Everyone has some ideas that they hold as deep convictions, some which they hold loosely, and some which they reject. Except maybe nihilists, but I bet theyre not jumping in front of cars either, nor denying their own existence.
At some point you've got to say screw the philosophical hair-splitting, and go with the reality you experience.
Ah, so the question of why we are here and the purpose of one's life is philosophical hair-splitting? Step out of your box for a second: if there is in fact a God, wouldn't that fact, and your relationship with him, be the most important thing in the world to get right?
Begging the question, of the highest order: Suppose, for a second, that it were true. Would it be surprising to find elements of the true "religion" in other cultures and religion?
Suppose, for a second, that the creation by deity actually happened. Might you end up with an alternative explanation for why so many cultures have creation myths?
And continued to be made up: We know of a Roman citizen who was prosecuted for raising the dead.
So your arguments are "here are some things we generally agree other cultures get wrong. See how there are some similarities to christianity? Ergo, Christianity must be wrong."
This technique is, i believe, referred to as "association fallacy", in addition to your lack of actual evidence or reasons (you simply declared that "these things were made up"). Way to show us deluded christians how to reason properly.
Theres a pretty big difference between "a bunch of nucleotides and amino acids" and "structured DNA and RNA necessary for life".
Your statement is like getting a bunch of metal dust and a ceramic platter and saying "hey guys, its like im a hard drive maker now!" I mean, you have all the components, getting them put together and functioning is the easy part right?
No, the Bible most clearly says why *and* how. It says God spontaneously created all of the animals and Adam, and then created Eve from Adam's rib - this all about 10000 years ago.
No, it DOESNT say the span clearly, and that is hotly debated among christians.
Myself, I take the following stance:
* The hebrew word used for day ("yom") can mean "period of time"
* The first few spans of time labeled "yom" / "day" occur before the sun was created, which typically is associated with the span of time we know as a day
* The creation of all that is,and the beginning of time, would represent a totally unique event. It seems imprudent to assume that the laws of nature as we know them-- including time-- would function then as they do now
* The genesis narrative's point was not to be a scientific treatise on supernovas or big bangs, but rather to establish who the creator is to a group of desert nomads. Using highly technical language seems unhelpful
* the 7 "day" pattern was also used to demonstrate to the hebrew people the pattern their lives were to take. The actual number of seconds or hours that the creation week took is irrelevant; the pattern of "6 periods of work, 1 period of rest" is what was relevant
* Finally, the 7th "day" is commonly thought to continue until now. It seems odd to insist that the first 6 spans must be literal 24 hour periods, but to then declare the final "yom" can be millenia.
Given all of that, I say that "yom" / "day" must, at LEAST for the first few "days", refer to some indeterminate length of time. There are a LARGE number of christians who agree with this, and it really isnt core.
As to the 10,000 year thing, it could generally be defended (if you were taking that stance) by simply realizing that all dating methods we currently have access to rely on the assumption that the laws of nature and its processes (gravitation, radioactive decay, weathering) were the same throughout history. Which is a fine assumption, if you are also assuming that there is neither God nor a supernatural. But if that is the topic of discussion, you would be begging the question.
Of course I do not agree with that dating of the earth, for the many reasons I gave above; but I think it is a good deal more defensible than people give it credit.
Im tempted to try to write a compressor based on this now to try to win that challenge:
for N=200 to bytesInFile Do (
if (
IsInt( cubeRoot(readBytes(N))
) Then (
Output("Magic number is " & cubeRoot(readBytes(N))
TruncateBytesFromFile(N)
) )
Decompressor would be astonishingly small, just an append cube(MagicNumber) to the original file.
In fact, as I think about this, given enough CPU time and a large enough file (lets say 50MB), there is almost no file that you could not compress-- set the minimum length hex number to check, and look for roots that yield integers starting with X^0.33, and counting down to X^0.01. Eventually you would find a root that would work, and with the size of the numbers you would be working with the space savings would be incredible. You could even write a general decompressor, and make the first 20 bytes of the file what the magic number was, and what the exponent was.
A quick check (cubing 0x9999 9999 9999) reveals that you could drop from 47 bytes to 12 bytes if your first "hit" was at byte 47. Imagine if your first hit was at 200 bytes:)
Can anyone comment on how this is working, and where the information is being hidden in this scheme?
He would have done a much better job checking if the original.dat could be found to have a square, cube, etc number in the first N characters. I mean, if the first 520 hex characters comprise a hex number that you can take the cube (or higher root) of, you would be able to use that root as a magic number, and the operation to "exponentize" it again would contain the "hidden information". With a large enough number and a large enough root, the difference between the two might be large enough to net you some space savings.
One might argue, however, that the "hidden information" was in the processor instructions to perform the mathematical operation, but I bet that it would win the challenge:) And the beauty of it is that if the first N characters isnt "root-able", you can always check N+1
NB: what is the verb form of "to raise N to the X power"? Exponentiate? What about "to take the N-th root of"?
You, being an upstart pay 30% of your revenue in taxes. I only pay 5%. That is the issue, except that instead of us producing something, we are paid wages for doing work. Is it right that one person should pay a greater percentage of their earned income than any other?
In that particular instance, I might look at the tax system and ask some questions, but in actual reality I dont think it is that simple. A lot of these "lower tax rates" and "loopholes" are actually instances of the tax system offering incentives for large corps to do activities that the government would otherwise have to pay for.
For instance, lets say you get up to a $10,000 tax refund for deploying solar panels on your building roof, per year, for a few years. A business might say, well, its going to cost $500,000 to cover our building roof with solar panels, but we get several benefits here: *Our building costs will be much lower over the next 20 years *We get a PR boost *We have additional assets that will be self-paid for after some length of time *And we can sell this to the accountants partly on the basis of the tax refund that will further sweeten the pot.
This hypothetical business will then be reducing emissions, and taking strain off of the grid, and the government may have ended up saving money vs what it might have had to do regarding polution and energy shortages. It is a win-win, with the only real question being whether it was even necessary to offer the incentive to begin with (as the company may have gone down that path regardless).
The problem is that now people are looking at that and saying "GOVERNMENT IS GIVING EVIL CORPS MONEY! WHAT ABOUT POOR PEOPLE", ignoring that "poor people" arent in a position to fix the energy problem that the government was focused on with those particular dollars.
Likewise, when there are tax breaks targetting hiring, you can argue all day long that poor Joe Smith could use the money far more than Google, but Joe Smith isnt in a position to hire another 100 workers to lower unemployment, or that those additional jobs will probably pay for the tax break through additional income tax.
What about the investment bankers on Wallstreet - why is it okay to bail them out for not analyzing the risk they took,
Well hold on there, a lot of people-- conservatives included-- might argue that it wasnt OK. Theres a strong inclination in me to say "screw them, let failed business practices fail, and companies that rely on them likewise": THAT would be letting the market decide what to do with questionable lending practices. However, there IS a strong case to be made that such ideology needs to be balanced carefully with whether "letting them fail" will induce a far greater catastrophy than sending that message is worth.
but to bail out an actual homeowner is considered some type of socialist plot?
Because as above, failure is a necessary part of life, and if you take away all risk of failing and having real financial difficulty, you have just made fiscal irresponsibility a "no risk" proposition. There needs to be a risk of hardship for poor decisions in order to discourage those decisions from being made-- which again is why I am by nature inclined to let those banks just fall, and let that be a reminder of why you practice safe lending habits. The huge difference is, Joe Smith defaulting on his loan and losing his house is unlikely to cause a major depression; several of the top banks collapsing is far more dangerous.
Society, or at least those who control things (the 1%, so to speak) don't like those questions to be raised or addressed
You know what is most absurd about all of this? We, in the US, ARE the top 5% compared to the world. India might well ask why us selfish americans are so greedy as the top 5% that we complain loudly when any jobs start to go to them. That picture right there makes me strongly suspect t
Patrick appears to be in the wrong in that article, incidentally. He acknowledges the fact that filesystems use more space for multiple files than for a single file, but doesnt seem to understand that the only way his "compressor" could have worked is by using a delimiter or marker of some kind to indicate where data was stripped, and that said delimiter must take up some amount of space.
His rebuttal is basically "its not my fault that modern filesystems have to use non-zero space to store information".
It is semi-clever, but its sneaky of him to try to act like the injured party when he is so wrong that even a compression non-guru like myself can notice his error.
When the discussion becomes Should Americans be OK with BILLIONAIRES creating the products they use?...which heavily implies that theres some fundamental problem from having a lot of money, and that that, by itself, makes you unfit for certain societal roles, then yes it IS class warfare.
I make a modest living, and I dont have a problem with the fact that there are people out there much wealthier than I am: It doesnt particularly impact me. We can have great discussions about whether the money was gotten legitimately, or whether their investment vehicles are parasitic, and thats fine. But moving the discussion towards whether having money makes you a bad person doesnt seem productive to me.
Slashdot Mirror
You have just provided the chances of coming up with a single virus's code at random. Not only are there countless millions (billions?) of different viruses in the world, but due to the way transcription works there are many codons that result in the same transcribed amino acids, and a lot of those pairs do nothing at all (exons).
Thats all fine, my brain can process that and still make the statement that theres a huge whopping difference between "millions / billions" and a 1 with 48000 zeros following it. "Orders of magnitude" doesnt even begin to cover it. You can give a million years for a million different identical codings for a million different species, and youre not even on the radar.
The complexity we're talking about is absurd, its like grabbing a few KB from /dev/urandom and ending up with an article on the upcoming election.
Sigh, that's such an inaccurate statement and oversimplification I wouldn't even know where to begin
It would help if you would clarify what part is inaccurate. I will admit that I only have entry level bio under my belt, but I do think I recall that DNA and RNA were responsible for the formation of basically everything in a cell. Wikipedia doesnt seem to disagree.
So if you have a car, and youre telling me that the drive train is pretty complicated, and I have the blueprints for a machine that will build an entire car, I think its fair to say the blueprints are of a greater complexity-- they contain all the info about that drive train, as well as all the steps to get from zero to fully functioning car (drivetrain inclusive).
http://frugalliving.about.com/od/foodsavings/f/Honey.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation
http://www.stilltasty.com/questions/index/128
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/04/15/why-doesn%E2%80%99t-honey-go-bad/
Any other questions?
Im pretty sure that honey would crystalize before it would "expire". Theres not enough moisture in it for things to grow in, so bacteria and fungus tend to have a hard time with it.
Ive had year+ old honey that was generally fine, if tasting a bit wierd because it had started to crystalize and become more concentrated.
Its not tasteless, its actually quite bitter:
Caffeine is a bitter, white crystalline xanthine alkaloid....
If you would check the actual link, you might note that the same guy appears to sell these cables.
If you want complexity try to understand how the vertebrate nervous system evolved.
No, I think its plenty complex to consider that the smallest virus genome contains around 3500 base pairs, which gives 2^3500 different combinatory possibilities of base pairs. For those who like things in nice, whole numbers, thats one out of 4.027 x 10^1053. I will spare you all the wall of text of actually trying to paste that number in here, but suffice it to say its a mind-bogglingly large number.
Now consider that the smallest non-viral genome is 159,000 base pairs, for a total of 1.12x10^48063. Thats 20KB of information, which takes more than just throwing a bunch of nucleotides together and mixing.
You can talk about how complicated the vertebrate nervous system is, but recall that all of the information behind it is in those base pairs, and that the genome is far more complicated. Consider the complexity of the nervous system as a mere subset of the genome, if you will.
Its not about copyright, its about the gall of calling Google evil for trying to make money off of ads (which IS their business model), then utilizing their server time and service and stripping those ads.
If you really object to their terms, dont use their service.
You know, I heard from someone that theyre doing it right now! Something about "Primaries" and "November 2012"....youll want to google for the details.
Yea, cause Europe totally doesnt have financial difficulties. Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Italy, all doing wonderful.
Something about "glass houses" and "throwing stones"...?
No no wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit. Christ I can barely make it to the 15th floor without some jackass farting. A whole week. Don't think so.
You can just open a window if someone farts, its not a big deal.
A) Occam's razor is a rule of thumb, not a formal principle of reasoning
B) The idea that there is an eternal deity who created everything does not seem to me to be more complicated than an ever-existant (or self-creating), oscilating universe that pulsates from big bang to big crunch
and one that does not violate all know laws of the universe,
C) Funny; im not aware of a law that is violated by a deity. Further, many of the theories I've heard about the universe (ie, spontaneous generation) DO violate laws of thermodynamics
The other tells you, in fact, that evidence is meaningless.
No, in fact, it does not. Source would be nice if youre going to spout nonsense. I recall it espousing "see reason" and "test everything to see whether it is true"
none any more supported by evidence than the next. The only honest thing to do is to apply the same standard of evidence to all of them, with the result that you accept them all or reject them all.
False dichotomy, and some really ungrounded statements.
If you have two religions: one which says that nothing exists and that reality is an illusion, and another which says things exist and were created long ago and that man has a capability for good but a sad inclination towards evil; would you say "neither is more supported by evidence than the next"? I suppose if you want to go all post-modern-the-truth-is-all-relative, you could take that stance, but otherwise it seems sadly indefensible.
But since most of them are mutually contradictory, the only honest + rational thing to do is to reject them all.
Questions about whether everyone here is being really honest aside, your logic is horribly faulty. There are an incredible number of wrong scientific theories; is the only safe thing to do to reject them all? I mean, I thought you wanted to apply the same standard of evidence across the board.
How come everyone, regardless of their religion, can plainly see that every religion but their own is just some crap that someone made up, but can't see the same thing about their own?
Because that is the nature of conviction. But are you honestly saying that because there are wrong ideas out there, ALL ideas must be wrong? You realize atheism would fall under this umbrella, right?
If you get down to cases, everyone is agnostic about everything
I have a rather strong feeling youre not agnostic that, if you jump in front of a car, you will get horribly injured. Everyone has some ideas that they hold as deep convictions, some which they hold loosely, and some which they reject. Except maybe nihilists, but I bet theyre not jumping in front of cars either, nor denying their own existence.
At some point you've got to say screw the philosophical hair-splitting, and go with the reality you experience.
Ah, so the question of why we are here and the purpose of one's life is philosophical hair-splitting? Step out of your box for a second: if there is in fact a God, wouldn't that fact, and your relationship with him, be the most important thing in the world to get right?
Begging the question, of the highest order: Suppose, for a second, that it were true. Would it be surprising to find elements of the true "religion" in other cultures and religion?
Suppose, for a second, that the creation by deity actually happened. Might you end up with an alternative explanation for why so many cultures have creation myths?
And continued to be made up: We know of a Roman citizen who was prosecuted for raising the dead.
So your arguments are "here are some things we generally agree other cultures get wrong. See how there are some similarities to christianity? Ergo, Christianity must be wrong."
This technique is, i believe, referred to as "association fallacy", in addition to your lack of actual evidence or reasons (you simply declared that "these things were made up"). Way to show us deluded christians how to reason properly.
Which one thing are you referring to?
The part where naturalists suggest base spontaneous generation and a universal perpetual motion machine?
Theres a pretty big difference between "a bunch of nucleotides and amino acids" and "structured DNA and RNA necessary for life".
Your statement is like getting a bunch of metal dust and a ceramic platter and saying "hey guys, its like im a hard drive maker now!" I mean, you have all the components, getting them put together and functioning is the easy part right?
No, the Bible most clearly says why *and* how. It says God spontaneously created all of the animals and Adam, and then created Eve from Adam's rib - this all about 10000 years ago.
No, it DOESNT say the span clearly, and that is hotly debated among christians.
Myself, I take the following stance:
Given all of that, I say that "yom" / "day" must, at LEAST for the first few "days", refer to some indeterminate length of time. There are a LARGE number of christians who agree with this, and it really isnt core.
As to the 10,000 year thing, it could generally be defended (if you were taking that stance) by simply realizing that all dating methods we currently have access to rely on the assumption that the laws of nature and its processes (gravitation, radioactive decay, weathering) were the same throughout history. Which is a fine assumption, if you are also assuming that there is neither God nor a supernatural. But if that is the topic of discussion, you would be begging the question.
Of course I do not agree with that dating of the earth, for the many reasons I gave above; but I think it is a good deal more defensible than people give it credit.
Forgive me, were you just employing guilt by association?
You know who else liked to use fallacies? HITLER!
Wait, Startpage is making Google do all the hard work, then stripping their ads and adding their own for revenue?
Doesnt that seem a little shady to you?
Im tempted to try to write a compressor based on this now to try to win that challenge:
for N=200 to bytesInFile Do (
if (
IsInt( cubeRoot(readBytes(N))
) Then (
Output("Magic number is " & cubeRoot(readBytes(N))
TruncateBytesFromFile(N)
)
)
Decompressor would be astonishingly small, just an append cube(MagicNumber) to the original file.
In fact, as I think about this, given enough CPU time and a large enough file (lets say 50MB), there is almost no file that you could not compress-- set the minimum length hex number to check, and look for roots that yield integers starting with X^0.33, and counting down to X^0.01. Eventually you would find a root that would work, and with the size of the numbers you would be working with the space savings would be incredible. You could even write a general decompressor, and make the first 20 bytes of the file what the magic number was, and what the exponent was.
A quick check (cubing 0x9999 9999 9999) reveals that you could drop from 47 bytes to 12 bytes if your first "hit" was at byte 47. Imagine if your first hit was at 200 bytes :)
Can anyone comment on how this is working, and where the information is being hidden in this scheme?
He would have done a much better job checking if the original.dat could be found to have a square, cube, etc number in the first N characters. I mean, if the first 520 hex characters comprise a hex number that you can take the cube (or higher root) of, you would be able to use that root as a magic number, and the operation to "exponentize" it again would contain the "hidden information". With a large enough number and a large enough root, the difference between the two might be large enough to net you some space savings.
One might argue, however, that the "hidden information" was in the processor instructions to perform the mathematical operation, but I bet that it would win the challenge :) And the beauty of it is that if the first N characters isnt "root-able", you can always check N+1
NB: what is the verb form of "to raise N to the X power"? Exponentiate? What about "to take the N-th root of"?
You, being an upstart pay 30% of your revenue in taxes. I only pay 5%. That is the issue, except that instead of us producing something, we are paid wages for doing work. Is it right that one person should pay a greater percentage of their earned income than any other?
In that particular instance, I might look at the tax system and ask some questions, but in actual reality I dont think it is that simple. A lot of these "lower tax rates" and "loopholes" are actually instances of the tax system offering incentives for large corps to do activities that the government would otherwise have to pay for.
For instance, lets say you get up to a $10,000 tax refund for deploying solar panels on your building roof, per year, for a few years. A business might say, well, its going to cost $500,000 to cover our building roof with solar panels, but we get several benefits here:
*Our building costs will be much lower over the next 20 years
*We get a PR boost
*We have additional assets that will be self-paid for after some length of time
*And we can sell this to the accountants partly on the basis of the tax refund that will further sweeten the pot.
This hypothetical business will then be reducing emissions, and taking strain off of the grid, and the government may have ended up saving money vs what it might have had to do regarding polution and energy shortages. It is a win-win, with the only real question being whether it was even necessary to offer the incentive to begin with (as the company may have gone down that path regardless).
The problem is that now people are looking at that and saying "GOVERNMENT IS GIVING EVIL CORPS MONEY! WHAT ABOUT POOR PEOPLE", ignoring that "poor people" arent in a position to fix the energy problem that the government was focused on with those particular dollars.
Likewise, when there are tax breaks targetting hiring, you can argue all day long that poor Joe Smith could use the money far more than Google, but Joe Smith isnt in a position to hire another 100 workers to lower unemployment, or that those additional jobs will probably pay for the tax break through additional income tax.
What about the investment bankers on Wallstreet - why is it okay to bail them out for not analyzing the risk they took,
Well hold on there, a lot of people-- conservatives included-- might argue that it wasnt OK. Theres a strong inclination in me to say "screw them, let failed business practices fail, and companies that rely on them likewise": THAT would be letting the market decide what to do with questionable lending practices. However, there IS a strong case to be made that such ideology needs to be balanced carefully with whether "letting them fail" will induce a far greater catastrophy than sending that message is worth.
but to bail out an actual homeowner is considered some type of socialist plot?
Because as above, failure is a necessary part of life, and if you take away all risk of failing and having real financial difficulty, you have just made fiscal irresponsibility a "no risk" proposition. There needs to be a risk of hardship for poor decisions in order to discourage those decisions from being made-- which again is why I am by nature inclined to let those banks just fall, and let that be a reminder of why you practice safe lending habits. The huge difference is, Joe Smith defaulting on his loan and losing his house is unlikely to cause a major depression; several of the top banks collapsing is far more dangerous.
Society, or at least those who control things (the 1%, so to speak) don't like those questions to be raised or addressed
You know what is most absurd about all of this? We, in the US, ARE the top 5% compared to the world. India might well ask why us selfish americans are so greedy as the top 5% that we complain loudly when any jobs start to go to them. That picture right there makes me strongly suspect t
Patrick appears to be in the wrong in that article, incidentally. He acknowledges the fact that filesystems use more space for multiple files than for a single file, but doesnt seem to understand that the only way his "compressor" could have worked is by using a delimiter or marker of some kind to indicate where data was stripped, and that said delimiter must take up some amount of space.
His rebuttal is basically "its not my fault that modern filesystems have to use non-zero space to store information".
It is semi-clever, but its sneaky of him to try to act like the injured party when he is so wrong that even a compression non-guru like myself can notice his error.
When the discussion becomes ...which heavily implies that theres some fundamental problem from having a lot of money, and that that, by itself, makes you unfit for certain societal roles, then yes it IS class warfare.
Should Americans be OK with BILLIONAIRES creating the products they use?
I make a modest living, and I dont have a problem with the fact that there are people out there much wealthier than I am: It doesnt particularly impact me. We can have great discussions about whether the money was gotten legitimately, or whether their investment vehicles are parasitic, and thats fine. But moving the discussion towards whether having money makes you a bad person doesnt seem productive to me.
Ever park in a pay lot?
Thats not a fine, its a business transaction: you are paying for a service.
How is this all relevant again?