Insightful my ass. Don't forget that when a person refers to a 'drug
dealer' the conventional thought is one of a minority on the local
poverty ridden streets of a major city trying to 'make a living',
however, TRUE drug dealers (where the drugs are actually manufactured)
sit in multi-million dollar homes far away from any civilized law and
simply murder any government officials that tend to interupt business
as well as their families to make a statement.
There aren't nearly as many TRUE drug dealers as there are
non-violent drugs dealers rotting in prison. If you want to vilify
the TRUE drug dealers why don't you call them MURDERERS if that's
their real crime.
and so our money goes to bail out the drug addicts. Therefore, it is
our business, and we have the prerogative to do what we can to
discourage people from getting addicted to drugs.
So it's OK to do drugs if you have health insurance, but if you
don't have health insurance, no rock climbing, no motorcycling, no
eating at McDonalds...
You really think you have the right to lock up anyone that you
think is less productive than the average citizen. Let's lock up half
the people in the world because it's the efficient thing to do.
You might find it a better construct to consider that minors operate
with the consent of their parents. Most every product out there has
"implicit consent" - we consider that it's sufficiently out of the
ordinary for a parent to object to the minor's purchasing said product
that the parents should have to make special arrangements to have it
be otherwise.
Cigarettes, guns, alcohol, etc, etc do not have implicit consent,
as it would be considered ordinary to not allow your child to purchase
them - so the parent has to purchase them. It's legal for a child to
drink, but the parents have to buy and provide the alcohol.
This avoids the need for a "harm" reason (which can get sketchy), and
rests firmly within the fact that the child is a minor.
My point with minors was just to address the exception to the rule,
not to claim that I support it. Minors are a tricky issue. In
general, I would support letting parents decide what they can have,
but there would be gray areas to work out. (Other peoples children,
child endangerment,...)
Secondly, you might want to look into the whole "second hand
smoke is harmful" bit, if that's what you're arguing. There's no good
evidence for this proposition. In fact, there seems to be good counter
evidence. Bullshit had a good episode on this, and I believe there are
some good links online.
Interesting, I just read about the tobacco industry trying to keep
some of their own research on the dangers of second hand smoke out of
court. Skimming through some google articles seems to support the
danger of second hand smoke...
If you're arguing that it violates the others because it is noxious,
you might want to consider your opinion a bit more: the same argument
can be applied to pornography, swearing, certain jokes and private
conversations, and more. I'm not so sure that's a direction you want
to go without some clear test that shows how smoking is different from
the others.
I was arguing based on health concerns, but noxiousness is also
somewhat valid. What we do in private is our own business, but what
we do in public becomes more difficult. It's especially clear when we
injure people, but bothering people is also legitimate. Do you want
to give your neighbors the right to play load music all hours of the
night? The gray areas are based on what is public since a business is
somewhat public, and what rights are violated since there is often a
conflict between the rights of opposing groups of people.
As for pornography, I don't see a problem when it is viewed by the
owner of a residence. Of course, the owner has the right to restrict
the viewing of pornography on his property. I also don't have a
problem restricting pornography in public since there doesn't seem to
much of a violation of rights by forcing someone to view their
pornography at home. As for swearing, jokes and conversations, speech
is generally protected in public to prevent the government from
restricting political speech. Still to make sure we don't crack down
on political speech, I'm OK with giving the right to free speech more
importance than the potential annoyance of that speech. In truth,
it's not really much of an issue since most people follow the social
norms.
While it may seem bad that I'm handling each issue in an ad-hoc way, I
don't think it can be avoided. The main idea is to create laws to
protect the rights of others, but there are always going to be gray
areas which is why our laws (and interpretations of laws) are so
complicated.
Unfortunately even when those people are only damaging their own
lungs, eventually, my tax money (and insurance money) is going to pay
for their long-term treatment in a hospital while they slowly
die. Cancer is the number one killer in American and smokers are
exacerbating the problem by inflicting more cancer on themselves. I
would rather they go out and get eaten by a shark or kodiak bear. No
long-term stay at the hospital, and no one to sue. The lights just go
out real quick on them.
So what happens if someone doesn't smoke. They live longer using
up more Social Security and get various diseases and eventually die
after using more health care money than if they had smoked. Your
error is to compare sudden death to smoking. This is not a fair
comparison.
You're exactly right- when you're addicted to a substance-let's
say crack- you cannot- let me reiterate- cannot function without
it.
Actually, from what I've read, cocaine is not physiologically
addictive. For some people, it is just very enjoyable, and they want
to use the drug again. If you go off the drug you don't suffer any
significant withdrawal. Crack, of course, is just cocaine. However,
since crack gets into your system faster it is more intense. Also
crack causes a short term dip in dopamine right after you come down
from the high. This tends to lead to binging behavior. However, this
is not what most people mean by withdrawal.
This is not to say you weren't addicted to crack. Most
professionals use a different definition than physiological
dependence. Addiction is generally defined as any repeated behavior
where the individual wants to stop but can't stop behavior. Of
course, the parent doesn't like this definition, but he seemed more
into pontification...
Here, the consideration overriding your personal liberty is the harm
done to others.
The key phrase here is to others. I think a Libertarian
would ground this with the ideas of rights. We have certain rights in
this country, but conflicts occur when someone acts in such a way as
to directly take away the rights others. My right to bear arms is
trumpeted when by shooting that gun I take away your right to live.
While this may seem like a nitpick, I don't condone laws that seek
to stop people from "harming" themselves. The individual should be
able to decide what is harmful. If he is addicted to behavior that he
agrees is harmful to himself, society should have ways to help treat
his disorder.
It's restricted because there is a tremendous amount of compelling evidence that smokers are far more likely to die than non-smokers.
That's not a good reason to restrict smoking. The real reason it
should be restricted is because second hand smoke violates the rights
of others. This reason is consistent with all the current
restrictions except the age restriction. The age restriction is to
protect minors from "harm" before they become adults and can decide
what is harmful for themselves.
I, like many of those in your two-thirds 'statistic,' am not afraid of fission. I'm afraid of idiots who don't
know what to do with the products of fission, but take on the job anyway and truck it to some
underground facility. I'm afraid of a for-profit utility that cuts corners. I'm afraid of backroom legistlation
that looks the other way for the "Mr. Burns" in your town.
Is coal that much better? From what I've read, coal based power plants just dump radioactive material into the air. There may be a small percentage of uranimum in coal, but it adds up quickly when you burn as much as we do. By some estimates, if you could somehow extract the radioactive material impuraties in coal you could get enough radioactive material to produce half the energy of the coal. (This doesn't take into account breeder reactors.) We're just dumping this stuff into the air. Is nuclear waste much more deadly than the nuclear material we're already dumping instead?
Sure, go right ahead. But as an owner of the company, shouldn't you be
keeping a close eye on it?
I think the whole owner idea is a bit of a semantic game. The
corporations like the ownership semantics because it encourages people
to invest, but if you use it against them, they will switch to calling
it investment.
No and no. Fact: corporations often do Very Bad Things, either
through malice or sheer apathy. This is not exactly in dispute. Fact:
limited liability tends to shield owners and employees of corporations
from the effects of their decisions. That's what limited liability
means, and these days only the most egrerious behavior puts the fires
of legal retribution to anyone's feet but the feet-less
corporation. Fact: given freedom from the consequences of one's
actions, most people will begin to behave very poorly indeed. One
_possible_ solution is to "pierce the corporate veil", as Badnarik put
it, and hold the owners and/or employees of the company accountable
for things done in the course of enhancing their wealth. But it may
ultimately prove to be unusable, for reasons I described in my
questions.
If you have any, I am all for hearing about additional ways to keep
people from behaving like jackals under the cover of a corporate
entity. Because if there's one thing I think we can agree on, it's
that the current level of accountability for corporate misbehavior
simply doesn't cut it.
Well my criticism was mainly for economic Libertarians; I don't
think attacking investors is a consistent position for them. However,
as you point out, this is a real problem that needs to solved. Let's
say a corporation does something illegal. Ideally you should punish
the person(s) responsible for the decision and fine the company for an
amount greater than the gain the company received from the crime.
However, because of employee self interest, it may be difficult to
find out a crime was committed. To help resolve this, every
corporation should be required to have a fund to pay off
whistle-blowers. This fund would be proportionate to the "value" of
the company and the payout would be determined by the severity and
profit of the illegal act. It may also help to increase the
punishment for so called white collared crimes.
Unfortunately, the majority of bad things a corporation does are
probably legal. Corporations are so large and organized that they
help create bad laws and loopholes to exploit for a profit. To solve
this, we need to improve the quality of politicians. This brings up
campaign finance reform...
The loan one is better, but still doesn't work. Because it's not
just a loan. It's a loan with orders on how to use it. "I will give
you $X in exchange for Y shares and you are obligated to enhance the
value of those shares by any means necessary". If the corporation then
breaks the law under your 'orders', how should you _not_ be held
responsible?
So it's OK if I tell them they are obligated to enhance the value
of those shares by any legal means necessary. Can't you see the slope
your sliding down or are you blinded by ideology.
In truth, while the smalltime investor may not know precisely what's
going on, he is partly responsible, just by contributing money.
So if I give someone a gift, I should be partly liable for how they
use the gift. Or if I give someone a loan, I should partly liable for
how they use the money. This doesn't sound like freedom.
People should be judged on their actions. I am not someone else's
keeper even if I have business dealings with them. It is really a
word game to say I own a part of a corporation just because I have
invested money in said corporation. When I own something I have
control over it. I can't have control over a group of people in a
corporation. If you want to control corporations, you need to have
laws in place to punish the people who make the "illegal" decisions.
This may include penalizing people who benefited from these decisions,
but this would never penalize an investor for more than his
investment.
One could question whether, in a libertarian state, there would even
be such powerful corporations in the first place. Badnarik himself
addresses this issue in his answers - corporations, he says, are way
too powerful, in large part because they operate under the aegis of
the state. Corporations, as they exist today in the US, are an
aberrant abomination that blur the line between private enterprise and
government power.
I don't have much confidence that libertarian ideology will help
reign in corporations. The landmark decision that corporations are
individuals is used by corporations to protect themselves from
government regulations. With little regulation in a libertarian
government, it becomes a moot issue. Corporations will be free to
grow as large and powerful as possible. They will exert monopoly
power and distort the precious perfect market that libertarians love.
This is the most profitable course of action.
It's called non-determinstic polynomial because a non-deterministic Turing machine can solve the decision problem in a polynomial amount of time. However, most people don't use this definition to explain NP. Most people use the equivalent definition that you use a Turing machine to check a solution (certificate) of the problem in polynomial time. The two are equivalent since a non-deterministic Turing machine can just generate all the certificates and check them all in polynomial time.
Which is not exactly true. It could be true but not provable. It
could be false but not provable. It could be provably true, or
provably false. Or, it could be neither true nor false.
How could it be true/false and not provable? What is truth if not
a proof based on the rules of you system and the axioms. If no proof
exists then by what standard do you claim the result is true. Now it
could be neither true nor false. In this case, the system is
incomplete and some statements are neither true or false.
What does NP=co-NP mean, you ask? You can consult
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-NP for the details. But the important
point is that it is just as unlikely as P=NP.
Why is it just as unlikely? Would there be any interesting
consequences if NP=co-NP? It doesn't help resolve the P=NP question.
Weird Al always got permission. In a couple of cases the victims weren't happy after the fact, but it didn't matter since he got permission before hand.
You make it seem as if procrastination is something under rational control. While this is intuitive, I doubt it's correct. Motivational systems are very basic and logical thinking about your priorities may not help. When someone procrastinates, they often do something simple instead of something more important but complex or distastefull. They have a hard time motivating themselves to do what is high on their priority list.
This lack of motivation can come from many sources. I personally had a Thyroid hormone problem that killed my motivation. I knew what I needed to get done; I just had a very hard time getting motivated enough to do it. Instead I would procrastinate and waste time on trivial tasks. (Computer Games, TV, Internet)
The difference is between a few patents and all patents. Pretty big difference.
It also seems you are worried that the computer company may not reveal the patent, however, the license would be for interfacing with the feature. It would cover any of the patents needed for that interface.
You may complain that this is not air tight. Well tough luck for Microsoft. They shouldn't be able to exploit their Monopoly to force a better contract.
There is an obvious way out of your scenario. Microsoft only
supports the feature if they are given a license to the particular
patent for use in the Windows OS. Of course, even this is probably
unnecessary since hopefully the patent is on the hardware and not on
some unwritten OS software that communicates with the hardware.
(Otherwise, Linux is in a heap of trouble.)
A much more problematic scenario is that Microsoft uses the contract
to include patented features in it's hardware products, such as the
XBox. Essentially all the Japanese computer makers have to give up
their patent rights in order to install Windows, an obvious abuse of
the desktop monopoly. Hopefully the forced contract wasn't this
broad.
That sounds sensible, but it's not true. Think about it in
terms of energy. Escape velocity is simply the minimum speed at which
an object's kinetic energy is sufficient to escape the Earth's
gravitational well: i.e. the point at which kinetic energy equals
potential energy. Direction is irrelevent to this calculation: if you
are moving with escape velocity, there is not enough pull in the
gravitational field to stop you escaping whichever direction you start
out.
I'm still not convinced, but my differential equations are too
rusty to do the math. It still seems conceivable that if you leave
the earth at an angle some unnecessary amount of energy will always be
trapped in kinetic energy.
An intuitive way of thinking about it is to remember that escape
velocity is the speed required to get to infinity.
This implies that if I leave with escape velocity then as I get
further out in space my speed will approach zero. If I leave the
earth at an angle. I find it hard to believe the forces will balance
out and my velocity will approach zero. It seems plausible that some
fixed amount of energy will always be trapped in kinetic form.
Therefore this isn't really escape velocity since some of the energy
was wasted. If I leave straight up then it's possible for my speed to
approach zero
No, escape velocity is actually misnamed. Velocity implies speed and
direction. But escape speed is what it really is, since direction
doesn't actually matter. The planet is round. When you go far enough,
all directions become "up".
Escape velocity is the minimal velocity needed to overcome the earth
gravity when taking off from sea level ignoring things like gravity.
Minimal must refer to the length of the vector, so we are looking for
a velocity vector whose 2-norm is smallest such that we escape the
earth gravity. At any point on the earth this is straight up. If you
don't go straight up, you will need more velocity to escape gravity.
As long as you're pointed above the horizon, and as long as you have
enough extra speed to overcome the friction due to the air you happen
to be travelling through, then all you have to do to get off the
planet is to go at escape speed.
No, you need to head in a direction that is directly opposite the
center of the earth. (To a first approximation.) If you don't then
you will not maximize the speed at which you move away from the
earth's center.
Rockets go straight up to get out of the atmosphere in the fastest
possible way, reducing drag and thus requiring less fuel. If fuel
wasn't an issue (hah!) it doesn't matter which way you point the
thing.
Even without an atmosphere, it's best to go straight up.
Anything that falls to the earth from a non-orbital
position hits the earth at 11 km/sec (escape speed), minus the speed
that it bleeds off in the atmosphere.
They are proposing to design a ship that can bleed off energy very
slowly, and therefore not require expensive heat shields, as it
re-enters the earths atmosphere.
Second, the Bush administration does not constitute the
"ringleaders of the right wing." Bush is just like most presidential
candidates: too moderate for the hardliners of his own party, too far
to the other side for the tastes of the opposition party, but very
electable to the moderate masses who are inconsistent in support of
one party or the other.
They are the right wingers with the most power, so it's not much of
a stretch to call them ringleaders.
Third, your posts in this thread consist of vague accusations,
generalizations and strawman arguments. If you're going to say that
the Bush administration is in bed with the Saudis (as the parent seems
to imply), or that we should panic right now because the oil reserves
will last no longer than 24, or that energy corporations will resist
all alternative forms of energy, at least provide some kind of
reference (even a "study" by the Cato institute would be more
reputable than absolutely nothing). Just saying that it is so on your
own authority does not so make it.
I didn't know the Saudis were an oil importer. Clearly he's
talking about the Bush administrations past and current relationships
with US oil companies. This makes them impartial.
Fourth, you really should consider that energy corporations are
in the business of making money. The premise of your arguments would
seem to be that they are in the business of destroying the environment
and depleting the fossil fuel reserves at all costs, as you ascribe no
logical economic attitudes to them. What self-respecting capitalist
would not prefer to grow cheap algae in his own back yard and sell it
at increased margin instead of importing oil at the whim of a foreign
cartel? Andrew Carnegie figured it out more than a century ago: if you
can make it cheaper, you can sell it cheaper and you can undersell
your competition. If this technology works out (you should note the
'if' -- it's not a given yet, though that seems to be another false
premise you operate from), you can bet that the energy MegaCorps will
be stumbling over each other in a mad dash to the USPTO to be the
first to get a 20-year lock-in on this thing.
This is very naive. The oil business is scared of any new
technology that has low barriers to entry. Any increase in
competition is going to lower their profits. So what if they are
importing the oil from a foreign government, as long as they are
getting their profit margin. Because monopolies are illegal, there is
no motivation to drive the competition out of business. Instead a
small mildly collusive group will rake in the profits. Not to mention
the huge capital investment they have in the current way of doing
business. If this capital becomes devalued because of a new
technology, they would lose enormous amounts of money, making it more
difficult for them to compete with the new technology.
Just through it was an interesting story about the effects that
pattents have on society.. Can you imagine where the computer world
might be if we'd gotten the transistor 5 years earlier or even more?
It's an exciting thing to think about, and raises questions about
patents.. Perhaps we could have cured cancer with that extra computing
power.. Maybe we could have cured AIDs.. Or maybe our video games
would be that much cooler
Or maybe we still wouldn't have transistors since companies would be
less likely to do research since it would be harder to profit from the
results.
the interesting thing about turing machines though is how they are
maximal and nothing additional makes the turing machine more powerful
(like non-determinism, multiple tapes, two way tapes, etc) because
those can all be simulated with a regular turing machine using an
algorithm adjustment.
This is also know as the Church-Turing thesis. While not obvious,
it is really a statement about physics. Building a machine that is
more powerful than a Turing machine depends on what tools I have to
build the machine. This depends on the laws of physics. Therefore
this question will never be mathematically proven since, like all laws
of physics, it is empirical.
However, if you assume a particular model of physics is true then it
is possible to prove the Church-Turing thesis. There is a paper by Warren
D. Smith that shows that the Church-Turing thesis does not hold for a
model of Newtonian mechanics. In another paper, he shows the thesis
does hold in a simple quantum mechanical model.
And the advantage here is that it is (allegedly) a successful
predictive model of whether to use big or small packets, and not
reactive.
If you react to errors, you can resend, but you've already wasted
bandwidth. If you can avoid the error in the first place, it's much
better!:)
It predicts based on past performance therefore it is reacting.
The savings on switching packet size is based on resending small
packets instead of resending large packets. Losing a single small
packet is not nearly as bad as losing a large packet. Of course, as
the packets get smaller there is more overhead... Hence you need to
optimize the size based on the current noise conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful my ass. Don't forget that when a person refers to a 'drug dealer' the conventional thought is one of a minority on the local poverty ridden streets of a major city trying to 'make a living', however, TRUE drug dealers (where the drugs are actually manufactured) sit in multi-million dollar homes far away from any civilized law and simply murder any government officials that tend to interupt business as well as their families to make a statement.
There aren't nearly as many TRUE drug dealers as there are non-violent drugs dealers rotting in prison. If you want to vilify the TRUE drug dealers why don't you call them MURDERERS if that's their real crime.
and so our money goes to bail out the drug addicts. Therefore, it is our business, and we have the prerogative to do what we can to discourage people from getting addicted to drugs.
So it's OK to do drugs if you have health insurance, but if you don't have health insurance, no rock climbing, no motorcycling, no eating at McDonalds...
You really think you have the right to lock up anyone that you think is less productive than the average citizen. Let's lock up half the people in the world because it's the efficient thing to do.
You might find it a better construct to consider that minors operate with the consent of their parents. Most every product out there has "implicit consent" - we consider that it's sufficiently out of the ordinary for a parent to object to the minor's purchasing said product that the parents should have to make special arrangements to have it be otherwise.
Cigarettes, guns, alcohol, etc, etc do not have implicit consent, as it would be considered ordinary to not allow your child to purchase them - so the parent has to purchase them. It's legal for a child to drink, but the parents have to buy and provide the alcohol.
This avoids the need for a "harm" reason (which can get sketchy), and rests firmly within the fact that the child is a minor.
My point with minors was just to address the exception to the rule, not to claim that I support it. Minors are a tricky issue. In general, I would support letting parents decide what they can have, but there would be gray areas to work out. (Other peoples children, child endangerment,...)
Secondly, you might want to look into the whole "second hand smoke is harmful" bit, if that's what you're arguing. There's no good evidence for this proposition. In fact, there seems to be good counter evidence. Bullshit had a good episode on this, and I believe there are some good links online.
Interesting, I just read about the tobacco industry trying to keep some of their own research on the dangers of second hand smoke out of court. Skimming through some google articles seems to support the danger of second hand smoke...
If you're arguing that it violates the others because it is noxious, you might want to consider your opinion a bit more: the same argument can be applied to pornography, swearing, certain jokes and private conversations, and more. I'm not so sure that's a direction you want to go without some clear test that shows how smoking is different from the others.
I was arguing based on health concerns, but noxiousness is also somewhat valid. What we do in private is our own business, but what we do in public becomes more difficult. It's especially clear when we injure people, but bothering people is also legitimate. Do you want to give your neighbors the right to play load music all hours of the night? The gray areas are based on what is public since a business is somewhat public, and what rights are violated since there is often a conflict between the rights of opposing groups of people.
As for pornography, I don't see a problem when it is viewed by the owner of a residence. Of course, the owner has the right to restrict the viewing of pornography on his property. I also don't have a problem restricting pornography in public since there doesn't seem to much of a violation of rights by forcing someone to view their pornography at home. As for swearing, jokes and conversations, speech is generally protected in public to prevent the government from restricting political speech. Still to make sure we don't crack down on political speech, I'm OK with giving the right to free speech more importance than the potential annoyance of that speech. In truth, it's not really much of an issue since most people follow the social norms.
While it may seem bad that I'm handling each issue in an ad-hoc way, I don't think it can be avoided. The main idea is to create laws to protect the rights of others, but there are always going to be gray areas which is why our laws (and interpretations of laws) are so complicated.
Unfortunately even when those people are only damaging their own lungs, eventually, my tax money (and insurance money) is going to pay for their long-term treatment in a hospital while they slowly die. Cancer is the number one killer in American and smokers are exacerbating the problem by inflicting more cancer on themselves. I would rather they go out and get eaten by a shark or kodiak bear. No long-term stay at the hospital, and no one to sue. The lights just go out real quick on them.
So what happens if someone doesn't smoke. They live longer using up more Social Security and get various diseases and eventually die after using more health care money than if they had smoked. Your error is to compare sudden death to smoking. This is not a fair comparison.
You're exactly right- when you're addicted to a substance-let's say crack- you cannot- let me reiterate- cannot function without it.
Actually, from what I've read, cocaine is not physiologically addictive. For some people, it is just very enjoyable, and they want to use the drug again. If you go off the drug you don't suffer any significant withdrawal. Crack, of course, is just cocaine. However, since crack gets into your system faster it is more intense. Also crack causes a short term dip in dopamine right after you come down from the high. This tends to lead to binging behavior. However, this is not what most people mean by withdrawal.
This is not to say you weren't addicted to crack. Most professionals use a different definition than physiological dependence. Addiction is generally defined as any repeated behavior where the individual wants to stop but can't stop behavior. Of course, the parent doesn't like this definition, but he seemed more into pontification...
Here, the consideration overriding your personal liberty is the harm done to others.
The key phrase here is to others. I think a Libertarian would ground this with the ideas of rights. We have certain rights in this country, but conflicts occur when someone acts in such a way as to directly take away the rights others. My right to bear arms is trumpeted when by shooting that gun I take away your right to live.
While this may seem like a nitpick, I don't condone laws that seek to stop people from "harming" themselves. The individual should be able to decide what is harmful. If he is addicted to behavior that he agrees is harmful to himself, society should have ways to help treat his disorder.
It's restricted because there is a tremendous amount of compelling evidence that smokers are far more likely to die than non-smokers.
That's not a good reason to restrict smoking. The real reason it should be restricted is because second hand smoke violates the rights of others. This reason is consistent with all the current restrictions except the age restriction. The age restriction is to protect minors from "harm" before they become adults and can decide what is harmful for themselves.
I, like many of those in your two-thirds 'statistic,' am not afraid of fission. I'm afraid of idiots who don't know what to do with the products of fission, but take on the job anyway and truck it to some underground facility. I'm afraid of a for-profit utility that cuts corners. I'm afraid of backroom legistlation that looks the other way for the "Mr. Burns" in your town.
Is coal that much better? From what I've read, coal based power plants just dump radioactive material into the air. There may be a small percentage of uranimum in coal, but it adds up quickly when you burn as much as we do. By some estimates, if you could somehow extract the radioactive material impuraties in coal you could get enough radioactive material to produce half the energy of the coal. (This doesn't take into account breeder reactors.) We're just dumping this stuff into the air. Is nuclear waste much more deadly than the nuclear material we're already dumping instead?
Sure, go right ahead. But as an owner of the company, shouldn't you be keeping a close eye on it?
I think the whole owner idea is a bit of a semantic game. The corporations like the ownership semantics because it encourages people to invest, but if you use it against them, they will switch to calling it investment.
No and no. Fact: corporations often do Very Bad Things, either through malice or sheer apathy. This is not exactly in dispute. Fact: limited liability tends to shield owners and employees of corporations from the effects of their decisions. That's what limited liability means, and these days only the most egrerious behavior puts the fires of legal retribution to anyone's feet but the feet-less corporation. Fact: given freedom from the consequences of one's actions, most people will begin to behave very poorly indeed. One _possible_ solution is to "pierce the corporate veil", as Badnarik put it, and hold the owners and/or employees of the company accountable for things done in the course of enhancing their wealth. But it may ultimately prove to be unusable, for reasons I described in my questions.
If you have any, I am all for hearing about additional ways to keep people from behaving like jackals under the cover of a corporate entity. Because if there's one thing I think we can agree on, it's that the current level of accountability for corporate misbehavior simply doesn't cut it.
Well my criticism was mainly for economic Libertarians; I don't think attacking investors is a consistent position for them. However, as you point out, this is a real problem that needs to solved. Let's say a corporation does something illegal. Ideally you should punish the person(s) responsible for the decision and fine the company for an amount greater than the gain the company received from the crime. However, because of employee self interest, it may be difficult to find out a crime was committed. To help resolve this, every corporation should be required to have a fund to pay off whistle-blowers. This fund would be proportionate to the "value" of the company and the payout would be determined by the severity and profit of the illegal act. It may also help to increase the punishment for so called white collared crimes.
Unfortunately, the majority of bad things a corporation does are probably legal. Corporations are so large and organized that they help create bad laws and loopholes to exploit for a profit. To solve this, we need to improve the quality of politicians. This brings up campaign finance reform...
The loan one is better, but still doesn't work. Because it's not just a loan. It's a loan with orders on how to use it. "I will give you $X in exchange for Y shares and you are obligated to enhance the value of those shares by any means necessary". If the corporation then breaks the law under your 'orders', how should you _not_ be held responsible?
So it's OK if I tell them they are obligated to enhance the value of those shares by any legal means necessary. Can't you see the slope your sliding down or are you blinded by ideology.
In truth, while the smalltime investor may not know precisely what's going on, he is partly responsible, just by contributing money.
So if I give someone a gift, I should be partly liable for how they use the gift. Or if I give someone a loan, I should partly liable for how they use the money. This doesn't sound like freedom.
People should be judged on their actions. I am not someone else's keeper even if I have business dealings with them. It is really a word game to say I own a part of a corporation just because I have invested money in said corporation. When I own something I have control over it. I can't have control over a group of people in a corporation. If you want to control corporations, you need to have laws in place to punish the people who make the "illegal" decisions. This may include penalizing people who benefited from these decisions, but this would never penalize an investor for more than his investment.
One could question whether, in a libertarian state, there would even be such powerful corporations in the first place. Badnarik himself addresses this issue in his answers - corporations, he says, are way too powerful, in large part because they operate under the aegis of the state. Corporations, as they exist today in the US, are an aberrant abomination that blur the line between private enterprise and government power.
I don't have much confidence that libertarian ideology will help reign in corporations. The landmark decision that corporations are individuals is used by corporations to protect themselves from government regulations. With little regulation in a libertarian government, it becomes a moot issue. Corporations will be free to grow as large and powerful as possible. They will exert monopoly power and distort the precious perfect market that libertarians love. This is the most profitable course of action.
It's called non-determinstic polynomial because a non-deterministic Turing machine can solve the decision problem in a polynomial amount of time. However, most people don't use this definition to explain NP. Most people use the equivalent definition that you use a Turing machine to check a solution (certificate) of the problem in polynomial time. The two are equivalent since a non-deterministic Turing machine can just generate all the certificates and check them all in polynomial time.
Which is not exactly true. It could be true but not provable. It could be false but not provable. It could be provably true, or provably false. Or, it could be neither true nor false.
How could it be true/false and not provable? What is truth if not a proof based on the rules of you system and the axioms. If no proof exists then by what standard do you claim the result is true. Now it could be neither true nor false. In this case, the system is incomplete and some statements are neither true or false.
What does NP=co-NP mean, you ask? You can consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-NP for the details. But the important point is that it is just as unlikely as P=NP.
Why is it just as unlikely? Would there be any interesting consequences if NP=co-NP? It doesn't help resolve the P=NP question.
Weird Al always got permission. In a couple of cases the victims weren't happy after the fact, but it didn't matter since he got permission before hand.
You make it seem as if procrastination is something under rational control. While this is intuitive, I doubt it's correct. Motivational systems are very basic and logical thinking about your priorities may not help. When someone procrastinates, they often do something simple instead of something more important but complex or distastefull. They have a hard time motivating themselves to do what is high on their priority list.
This lack of motivation can come from many sources. I personally had a Thyroid hormone problem that killed my motivation. I knew what I needed to get done; I just had a very hard time getting motivated enough to do it. Instead I would procrastinate and waste time on trivial tasks. (Computer Games, TV, Internet)
The difference is between a few patents and all patents. Pretty big difference.
It also seems you are worried that the computer company may not reveal the patent, however, the license would be for interfacing with the feature. It would cover any of the patents needed for that interface.
You may complain that this is not air tight. Well tough luck for Microsoft. They shouldn't be able to exploit their Monopoly to force a better contract.
There is an obvious way out of your scenario. Microsoft only supports the feature if they are given a license to the particular patent for use in the Windows OS. Of course, even this is probably unnecessary since hopefully the patent is on the hardware and not on some unwritten OS software that communicates with the hardware. (Otherwise, Linux is in a heap of trouble.)
A much more problematic scenario is that Microsoft uses the contract to include patented features in it's hardware products, such as the XBox. Essentially all the Japanese computer makers have to give up their patent rights in order to install Windows, an obvious abuse of the desktop monopoly. Hopefully the forced contract wasn't this broad.
That sounds sensible, but it's not true. Think about it in terms of energy. Escape velocity is simply the minimum speed at which an object's kinetic energy is sufficient to escape the Earth's gravitational well: i.e. the point at which kinetic energy equals potential energy. Direction is irrelevent to this calculation: if you are moving with escape velocity, there is not enough pull in the gravitational field to stop you escaping whichever direction you start out.
I'm still not convinced, but my differential equations are too rusty to do the math. It still seems conceivable that if you leave the earth at an angle some unnecessary amount of energy will always be trapped in kinetic energy.
An intuitive way of thinking about it is to remember that escape velocity is the speed required to get to infinity.
This implies that if I leave with escape velocity then as I get further out in space my speed will approach zero. If I leave the earth at an angle. I find it hard to believe the forces will balance out and my velocity will approach zero. It seems plausible that some fixed amount of energy will always be trapped in kinetic form. Therefore this isn't really escape velocity since some of the energy was wasted. If I leave straight up then it's possible for my speed to approach zero
No, escape velocity is actually misnamed. Velocity implies speed and direction. But escape speed is what it really is, since direction doesn't actually matter. The planet is round. When you go far enough, all directions become "up".
Escape velocity is the minimal velocity needed to overcome the earth gravity when taking off from sea level ignoring things like gravity. Minimal must refer to the length of the vector, so we are looking for a velocity vector whose 2-norm is smallest such that we escape the earth gravity. At any point on the earth this is straight up. If you don't go straight up, you will need more velocity to escape gravity.
As long as you're pointed above the horizon, and as long as you have enough extra speed to overcome the friction due to the air you happen to be travelling through, then all you have to do to get off the planet is to go at escape speed.
No, you need to head in a direction that is directly opposite the center of the earth. (To a first approximation.) If you don't then you will not maximize the speed at which you move away from the earth's center.
Rockets go straight up to get out of the atmosphere in the fastest possible way, reducing drag and thus requiring less fuel. If fuel wasn't an issue (hah!) it doesn't matter which way you point the thing.
Even without an atmosphere, it's best to go straight up.
Anything that falls to the earth from a non-orbital position hits the earth at 11 km/sec (escape speed), minus the speed that it bleeds off in the atmosphere.
They are proposing to design a ship that can bleed off energy very slowly, and therefore not require expensive heat shields, as it re-enters the earths atmosphere.
Second, the Bush administration does not constitute the "ringleaders of the right wing." Bush is just like most presidential candidates: too moderate for the hardliners of his own party, too far to the other side for the tastes of the opposition party, but very electable to the moderate masses who are inconsistent in support of one party or the other.
They are the right wingers with the most power, so it's not much of a stretch to call them ringleaders.
Third, your posts in this thread consist of vague accusations, generalizations and strawman arguments. If you're going to say that the Bush administration is in bed with the Saudis (as the parent seems to imply), or that we should panic right now because the oil reserves will last no longer than 24, or that energy corporations will resist all alternative forms of energy, at least provide some kind of reference (even a "study" by the Cato institute would be more reputable than absolutely nothing). Just saying that it is so on your own authority does not so make it.
I didn't know the Saudis were an oil importer. Clearly he's talking about the Bush administrations past and current relationships with US oil companies. This makes them impartial.
Fourth, you really should consider that energy corporations are in the business of making money. The premise of your arguments would seem to be that they are in the business of destroying the environment and depleting the fossil fuel reserves at all costs, as you ascribe no logical economic attitudes to them. What self-respecting capitalist would not prefer to grow cheap algae in his own back yard and sell it at increased margin instead of importing oil at the whim of a foreign cartel? Andrew Carnegie figured it out more than a century ago: if you can make it cheaper, you can sell it cheaper and you can undersell your competition. If this technology works out (you should note the 'if' -- it's not a given yet, though that seems to be another false premise you operate from), you can bet that the energy MegaCorps will be stumbling over each other in a mad dash to the USPTO to be the first to get a 20-year lock-in on this thing.
This is very naive. The oil business is scared of any new technology that has low barriers to entry. Any increase in competition is going to lower their profits. So what if they are importing the oil from a foreign government, as long as they are getting their profit margin. Because monopolies are illegal, there is no motivation to drive the competition out of business. Instead a small mildly collusive group will rake in the profits. Not to mention the huge capital investment they have in the current way of doing business. If this capital becomes devalued because of a new technology, they would lose enormous amounts of money, making it more difficult for them to compete with the new technology.
Just through it was an interesting story about the effects that pattents have on society.. Can you imagine where the computer world might be if we'd gotten the transistor 5 years earlier or even more? It's an exciting thing to think about, and raises questions about patents.. Perhaps we could have cured cancer with that extra computing power.. Maybe we could have cured AIDs.. Or maybe our video games would be that much cooler
Or maybe we still wouldn't have transistors since companies would be less likely to do research since it would be harder to profit from the results.
the interesting thing about turing machines though is how they are maximal and nothing additional makes the turing machine more powerful (like non-determinism, multiple tapes, two way tapes, etc) because those can all be simulated with a regular turing machine using an algorithm adjustment.
This is also know as the Church-Turing thesis. While not obvious, it is really a statement about physics. Building a machine that is more powerful than a Turing machine depends on what tools I have to build the machine. This depends on the laws of physics. Therefore this question will never be mathematically proven since, like all laws of physics, it is empirical.
However, if you assume a particular model of physics is true then it is possible to prove the Church-Turing thesis. There is a paper by Warren D. Smith that shows that the Church-Turing thesis does not hold for a model of Newtonian mechanics. In another paper, he shows the thesis does hold in a simple quantum mechanical model.
And the advantage here is that it is (allegedly) a successful predictive model of whether to use big or small packets, and not reactive.
If you react to errors, you can resend, but you've already wasted bandwidth. If you can avoid the error in the first place, it's much better! :)
It predicts based on past performance therefore it is reacting. The savings on switching packet size is based on resending small packets instead of resending large packets. Losing a single small packet is not nearly as bad as losing a large packet. Of course, as the packets get smaller there is more overhead... Hence you need to optimize the size based on the current noise conditions.