A really good proof would be able to show a solution for n dimensions, where n > 2, but all we have as a proof is an exhaustive enumeration of the possible networks in 2 dimensions. Most unsatisfying, to those of us who like to see analytical proofs that don't rely on mechanical methods.
While I am inclined to agree with you, the thing is that there is no a priori reason why such a proof should exist. We should be happy that a proof exists at all.
For some additional perspective on this, here is a very readable article by Chaitin on his Omega number. (Since this is a divulgation article, it may be advisable to read first his short bio at the end, otherwise this may seem crackpottery to some).
The abolishment of IP would be the death of engineering.
Before pulling out the hanky for drying your tears, please pull out your head from wherever you have it and realize that except for a very small group of crazy people nobody is calling for the death of IP.
Failure or not, that's investment that someone else need not put money into if they can just steal the workable idea after the fact.
You have this backwards. What happens is that big useless companies waste millions on small trivialities, and then somehow believe they have the right to harass everybody else who came up with the same thing in an evening. Well, currenlty, the law says that they have the right, and that is a problem.
And some companies spend a lot of money patenting everything they can in a given field, and then drop it in a whim of management. Now nobody can do anything in that field for twenty years.
You are also completely missing the point (also made by others here) that actually making a competitive product is the hard and expensive part, in particular for software.
In this case, it would be good PR for a bank to cover it for the charities. Heck, the banks could probably even write it off as a donation.
Good PR? Give me a break. Banks don't give a rats ass about PR because they mostly 0wn this planet, and there is literally nothing that will stop them from 0wning it more. I mean, they seriously damaged the world economy, put lots of people into excruciating hardship in the US, and there they are. PR didn't really play a role in this.
So no, they will take the money for the backcharge, and if a charity goes broke, then that will be it.
Get your facts straight. Fossil fuels are never subsidized, but instead heavily taxed by the governments.
They are both, subsidized AND taxed. Not everywhere in the same way, though. Did you know the UK subsidizes oil extraction in the north sea? The reason is of course cronyism and corruption.
Your employer also has the right to give all the raise or bonus money to the guy who is more willing to comply. I'm not saying it is right, but it is reality.
I advice against living your life like that. Trying to win the rat race makes you mostly an excellent rat, but a rat nonetheless, and a pretty miserable rat at that. Always having to be available to the boss is simply slavery. Unless you are in banking, there's no significant raise or bonus nowadays.
You are correct on the point of this being reality. But you can reject such a situation, or you can just accept living in slavery. BTW that's what unions are for, but you lot are having to repeat history to learn that. Or, alternatively, you get to be the most pathetic and codependent cohort of Americans to date.
Newt is a lying, cheating ass, so it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. But so are all the other Washington politicians, lobbyists and PAC executives, on both sides of the aisle.
There is an issue of degree here, and that should not be ignored. It is true that none of them is a saint, but they fail at being a saint for different reasons and at different levels. Burying your head in the sand won't help. You have to judge wisely, make choices and vote accordingly, otherwise things will only change for the worse. Right now it is easy, as IMO it is pretty clear that republicans are way more evil than democrats.
I'm staying with FireFox (3.6) solely for the extensions.
I'm hearing that a lot, but the fact is that all the extensions I use (firebug, abp, it's all text, and some others) just run fine with the latest firefox too. What addon is it that does not work?
As a rough heuristic, any state wealth-redistribution program that doesn't have packs of lobbyists and AEI economists shrieking about socialism, communism, and class warfare is very likely converting your tax dollars into somebody's shareholder value more or less by design.
If you look at real data, like Total phones, far far far more dumb phones are sold.
That's interesting. Do you have links on this? I got the impression everyone except me spends their time fingering their fondleslabs these days. Also, your claim contradicts the data I can find, e.g. http://gizmodo.com/5817082/everbodys-getting-smartphones
There's no such thing as "unobtrusive ad", just like there is no "unobtrusive DRM".
I disagree. You can have a small pic and a bit of text. That's pretty unobstrusive. I'm willing to put up with that in limited amounts (I don't klick on it anyways, but that's a different matter). Loading a huge flash animation is a completely different beast.
And I truly do not understand your DRM analogy. A pic with a bit of text to the left or the right of the main webpage is like DRM how?
Stealth submarines, solar powered call communications networks, encrypted communications. They are equipped like a damn government.
To an extent that is true. Beyond that, the "stealth" in those submarines isn't worth that much, and on a standard military radar these things pretty much look like they are out to burning a couple of pixels on the screen. If you discount whatever overhyping went into this story to make it more impressive, what you are left with is a very bad submarine and a failed attempt at having their own network.
And if you think about it, what these things show is also a degree of desperation. Why would you build a submarine for smuggling? It is a ridiculous idea as long as other channels work. Why would you go to the hassle of running your own telco network if you could use a standard one?
Despite what most people think, the gov. of Mexico is going to prevail in this. The corrupt politicians are learning the hard way that dealing with thugs is always a bad idea, and those watching from afar have noticed too. These thugs have nothing to negociate - they are just thugs, and particularly nasty ones at that. It is simply not an option to appease them, and that fact is slowly reaching every corner of civil and military society. The war might rage on for a decade at present or worse levels, but the thugs will lose. It's them against the rest of the world.
Had they just gone under in 2008, it would have sucked but we'd be well on our way to recovery now.
Well, I guess it's just a matter of perspective. It is true that without intervention we would be on "our way to recovery" now, but that would be more like restoring some modicum of civilization, like functioning police, electricity and running water. As things stand now we are technically not on our way to recovery, but we are still way, way better off than what would have happened following financial armageddon.
Some people still haven't realized what was at stake back then.
His deep insight that true chaos devolves from ordered deterministic processes (e.g. cellular automatia) across all of nature is nothing short of astounding.
While I agree that this fact is astounding and very interesting, it certainly wasn't him that made this observation first.
I realized a second thing: "Free market" also seems to mean "100% completely free". But that would mean freedom from all laws too, wouldn't it? How is this different from the law of the jungle and the right of the strongest then?
Although they tried to make ugly pattern-free music, they just ended up making modern music.
Actually, I liked it. It was very thoughtful and complex. Beautiful. So as far as I am concerned, they failed, albeit in a very interesting way. Art is like that.
I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken.
Legal countermeasures are likely to be more effective. The government should regulate the ownership of lasers above a very low energy output. This is the way this works in Europe. In the US, you can freely buy lasers with a full watt of output, which is just ridiculously dangerous for everyone, including whoever owns them.
Given how bad something obvious as firearm regulation works in the US, i don't expect this to happen, though.
I was in GB in 2007, and the colleague I went to visit told me with amusement that he had trouble getting a loan to pay for the house he wanted to buy. They wanted to lend him money alright, the problem was getting a loan to pay for only the house. He had to argue rather firmly with the lenders to convince them that he did not want a much larger loan ("don't you want to buy a nicer car?").
Unfortunately, I didn't recognize what the underlying phenomenon was, so I did not play it for profit.
I take some issue with your claim that the fault was also "at the bottom". Many unsophisticated people were convinced by smart looking NLP trained guys in suits to take out loans they obviously could not afford. This is mostly, in my opinion, a failure of the lender.
There is also a double standard at work here, in particular concerning the cases where people actually took the opportunity to game the system in a legal way. When the big guy does it, it is investment genius. When the small guy does it, it is morally wrong. That can't be right.
Models aren't equal to models, and even rough models of chaotic phenomena can be very useful and predictive, if they are the right ones. Read this for some acknowledgement of which brand of economics has been right during the last few years. Here is another account, including some pointers to predictions of the current crisis reaching as far back as 1999. Krugman even has a "model" of how good models get out of fashion.
Economics suffers from the manipulation by political interests, and by the wish of many practitioners to project their moral ideals onto the world. Many economists simply go and try to prove that the world works however they want it to work, and find funding for that from rich supporters. That makes the endeavour biased.
lol, a European claiming their economy isn't down the drain. Now THAT'S funny!
In case you didn't notice, he said Netherlands, which is doing quite well.
I expect Europe to do a lot better than the US, in particular if the right wing gets to implement its "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach to government.
This is one of those things. Here the broken patent system came together with religion and superstition and the outcome is not good for anyone. Embryos are now considered full human beings before the law, which will have detrimental repercussions in law everywhere (for example, abortion law). Research on the use of stem cells will be seriously delayed, if not halted altogether, and not because of the lack of patents (which would, if anything, spur innovation by removing legal risks).
There are a lot of therapies for serious illnesses that could be developed without these insane religious sensibilities. So much suffering for nothing.
It is actually handy to have experience with a disorganized mess, since that let's you learn the value of doing things better.
Also, it teaches you how to live in reality. Often, disorganisation and messyness are the result of history combined with actual constraints, and it is simply not reasonable to fix them. An excessive focus on avoiding messyness often implies not getting things done, or getting them done when life has moved on. If you look around, you will have no trouble finding lots and lots of projects that succeeded despite being badly organized, and lots more that died because they spent too much time basically in an autistic loop, self optimizing their internal structure and never getting off the ground.
Diong things the right way has a price, and compromise (and thus messyness and disorganization) is necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am inclined to agree with you, the thing is that there is no a priori reason why such a proof should exist. We should be happy that a proof exists at all.
For some additional perspective on this, here is a very readable article by Chaitin on his Omega number. (Since this is a divulgation article, it may be advisable to read first his short bio at the end, otherwise this may seem crackpottery to some).
Before pulling out the hanky for drying your tears, please pull out your head from wherever you have it and realize that except for a very small group of crazy people nobody is calling for the death of IP.
You have this backwards. What happens is that big useless companies waste millions on small trivialities, and then somehow believe they have the right to harass everybody else who came up with the same thing in an evening. Well, currenlty, the law says that they have the right, and that is a problem.
And some companies spend a lot of money patenting everything they can in a given field, and then drop it in a whim of management. Now nobody can do anything in that field for twenty years.
You are also completely missing the point (also made by others here) that actually making a competitive product is the hard and expensive part, in particular for software.
Good PR? Give me a break. Banks don't give a rats ass about PR because they mostly 0wn this planet, and there is literally nothing that will stop them from 0wning it more. I mean, they seriously damaged the world economy, put lots of people into excruciating hardship in the US, and there they are. PR didn't really play a role in this.
So no, they will take the money for the backcharge, and if a charity goes broke, then that will be it.
They are both, subsidized AND taxed. Not everywhere in the same way, though. Did you know the UK subsidizes oil extraction in the north sea? The reason is of course cronyism and corruption.
Your employer also has the right to give all the raise or bonus money to the guy who is more willing to comply. I'm not saying it is right, but it is reality.
I advice against living your life like that. Trying to win the rat race makes you mostly an excellent rat, but a rat nonetheless, and a pretty miserable rat at that. Always having to be available to the boss is simply slavery. Unless you are in banking, there's no significant raise or bonus nowadays.
You are correct on the point of this being reality. But you can reject such a situation, or you can just accept living in slavery. BTW that's what unions are for, but you lot are having to repeat history to learn that. Or, alternatively, you get to be the most pathetic and codependent cohort of Americans to date.
Newt is a lying, cheating ass, so it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. But so are all the other Washington politicians, lobbyists and PAC executives, on both sides of the aisle.
There is an issue of degree here, and that should not be ignored. It is true that none of them is a saint, but they fail at being a saint for different reasons and at different levels. Burying your head in the sand won't help. You have to judge wisely, make choices and vote accordingly, otherwise things will only change for the worse. Right now it is easy, as IMO it is pretty clear that republicans are way more evil than democrats.
You probably have no money for a new teacher's salary because administrators wanted to redecorate one of their offices.
Hm, no, more likely the money is sinking into some private company owned by a friend of a legislator.
I'm staying with FireFox (3.6) solely for the extensions.
I'm hearing that a lot, but the fact is that all the extensions I use (firebug, abp, it's all text, and some others) just run fine with the latest firefox too. What addon is it that does not work?
As a rough heuristic, any state wealth-redistribution program that doesn't have packs of lobbyists and AEI economists shrieking about socialism, communism, and class warfare is very likely converting your tax dollars into somebody's shareholder value more or less by design.
That is true, unfortunately.
If you look at real data, like Total phones, far far far more dumb phones are sold.
That's interesting. Do you have links on this? I got the impression everyone except me spends their time fingering their fondleslabs these days. Also, your claim contradicts the data I can find, e.g. http://gizmodo.com/5817082/everbodys-getting-smartphones
There's no such thing as "unobtrusive ad", just like there is no "unobtrusive DRM".
I disagree. You can have a small pic and a bit of text. That's pretty unobstrusive. I'm willing to put up with that in limited amounts (I don't klick on it anyways, but that's a different matter). Loading a huge flash animation is a completely different beast.
And I truly do not understand your DRM analogy. A pic with a bit of text to the left or the right of the main webpage is like DRM how?
To an extent that is true. Beyond that, the "stealth" in those submarines isn't worth that much, and on a standard military radar these things pretty much look like they are out to burning a couple of pixels on the screen. If you discount whatever overhyping went into this story to make it more impressive, what you are left with is a very bad submarine and a failed attempt at having their own network.
And if you think about it, what these things show is also a degree of desperation. Why would you build a submarine for smuggling? It is a ridiculous idea as long as other channels work. Why would you go to the hassle of running your own telco network if you could use a standard one?
Despite what most people think, the gov. of Mexico is going to prevail in this. The corrupt politicians are learning the hard way that dealing with thugs is always a bad idea, and those watching from afar have noticed too. These thugs have nothing to negociate - they are just thugs, and particularly nasty ones at that. It is simply not an option to appease them, and that fact is slowly reaching every corner of civil and military society. The war might rage on for a decade at present or worse levels, but the thugs will lose. It's them against the rest of the world.
Well, I guess it's just a matter of perspective. It is true that without intervention we would be on "our way to recovery" now, but that would be more like restoring some modicum of civilization, like functioning police, electricity and running water. As things stand now we are technically not on our way to recovery, but we are still way, way better off than what would have happened following financial armageddon.
Some people still haven't realized what was at stake back then.
While I agree that this fact is astounding and very interesting, it certainly wasn't him that made this observation first.
You must be a communist!!1!
Actually, I liked it. It was very thoughtful and complex. Beautiful. So as far as I am concerned, they failed, albeit in a very interesting way. Art is like that.
Legal countermeasures are likely to be more effective. The government should regulate the ownership of lasers above a very low energy output. This is the way this works in Europe. In the US, you can freely buy lasers with a full watt of output, which is just ridiculously dangerous for everyone, including whoever owns them.
Given how bad something obvious as firearm regulation works in the US, i don't expect this to happen, though.
Fun anecdote.
I was in GB in 2007, and the colleague I went to visit told me with amusement that he had trouble getting a loan to pay for the house he wanted to buy. They wanted to lend him money alright, the problem was getting a loan to pay for only the house. He had to argue rather firmly with the lenders to convince them that he did not want a much larger loan ("don't you want to buy a nicer car?").
Unfortunately, I didn't recognize what the underlying phenomenon was, so I did not play it for profit.
I take some issue with your claim that the fault was also "at the bottom". Many unsophisticated people were convinced by smart looking NLP trained guys in suits to take out loans they obviously could not afford. This is mostly, in my opinion, a failure of the lender.
There is also a double standard at work here, in particular concerning the cases where people actually took the opportunity to game the system in a legal way. When the big guy does it, it is investment genius. When the small guy does it, it is morally wrong. That can't be right.
Yes, that's a very interesting one. Thanks.
Models aren't equal to models, and even rough models of chaotic phenomena can be very useful and predictive, if they are the right ones. Read this for some acknowledgement of which brand of economics has been right during the last few years. Here is another account, including some pointers to predictions of the current crisis reaching as far back as 1999. Krugman even has a "model" of how good models get out of fashion.
Economics suffers from the manipulation by political interests, and by the wish of many practitioners to project their moral ideals onto the world. Many economists simply go and try to prove that the world works however they want it to work, and find funding for that from rich supporters. That makes the endeavour biased.
nuclear plant operators downplaying, obscuring, lying etc. I am genuinely shocked!1!!
In case you didn't notice, he said Netherlands, which is doing quite well.
I expect Europe to do a lot better than the US, in particular if the right wing gets to implement its "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach to government.
This is one of those things. Here the broken patent system came together with religion and superstition and the outcome is not good for anyone. Embryos are now considered full human beings before the law, which will have detrimental repercussions in law everywhere (for example, abortion law). Research on the use of stem cells will be seriously delayed, if not halted altogether, and not because of the lack of patents (which would, if anything, spur innovation by removing legal risks).
There are a lot of therapies for serious illnesses that could be developed without these insane religious sensibilities. So much suffering for nothing.
Also, it teaches you how to live in reality. Often, disorganisation and messyness are the result of history combined with actual constraints, and it is simply not reasonable to fix them. An excessive focus on avoiding messyness often implies not getting things done, or getting them done when life has moved on. If you look around, you will have no trouble finding lots and lots of projects that succeeded despite being badly organized, and lots more that died because they spent too much time basically in an autistic loop, self optimizing their internal structure and never getting off the ground.
Diong things the right way has a price, and compromise (and thus messyness and disorganization) is necessary.