I must chime in here because there's so much wrong with the pink unicorn argument.
Firstly, seeing a pink unicorn is as you say an experience. Don't confuse that with evidence though. Many many times in both science and law the eye witness is the least reliable. Your eyes will lie to you. Same with your other senses. So accepting experiences as evidence is a false equivalency, they just aren't the same thing.
Evidence is something you can show someone else. What you're talking about (experiences) by definition cannot be. I can take a picture of a pink unicorn, that would count as evidence. That evidence could be examined for fraud, examined for authenticity, examined for just tricks of the light (or bad film developing) that might explain what happened. Any particular piece of evidence has MANY possible explanations. This is why many different pieces of evidence are needed. A body of a pink unicorn would be evidence. A live specimen would be evidence. (both of these could be explained as genetic freaks/accidents) Documentation including several specimens, photos, videos, behavioral analysis, and the physical coordinates so others can go do it all again, that counts as evidence, and very strong evidence that pink unicorns exist. Any scientist that would accept less than this has questionable standards of evidence.
You see the thing with evidence is that I can go see it too and evaluate it. An experience is the opposite of this. Experience are open to interpretation. You start with the axiom "only people who have experienced god can talk about god or understand this experiential evidence" and that's just the exclusive club of "I'm right and you're wrong because you can't understand" sharpened to a fine point. It is an indistinguishable variation of the Calvanist "god chose me and not you so that's why you don't get it" club. I didn't think these guys were still around but I had an argument with one the other day, took me forever to figure out what he was talking about since it made so little sense to me.
Just to be a nudge, there's not a lot of difference chemically. Exploding is just burning very fast, bonus for how much gas/energy gets released during that particular chemical reaction. The more volume of gas gets released and the faster the burn the bigger the boom. We have two words since the effects can be dramatically different, but it's a continuum of chemical reactions not an either/or proposition. Something that burns - gasoline, can explode under the right conditions. If it is well airated with lots of available oxygen, boom. Makes your car go.
Just because something burns at the conditions you are familiar with doesn't mean it can't explode under the right circumstances and vice versa.
Take it easy. I'm well aware of the history of the genre. I was pointing out that some people get it flat wrong and get all indignant about it at the same time. As the analogy goes, it'd be like people discovering Tolkien for the first time and getting mad about how much he copied from Warhammer/WOW and going bananas on internet forums about how much Tolkien sucks for being a copycat.
Nothing in my post indicates that such copying is a bad things. In fact I was poking fun at the people that think that copying is bad and at the same time fail to even see who copied from who.
Just like what Warcraft did to the Warhammer world. At this point they're pretty divergent, but I'm never sure whether to be said or just bemused every time someone accuses a Warhammer game of ripping of Warcraft's world/setting/creatures/etc. Even heard it once in reference to Warhammer miniatures.
You can't seriously say it's only for the privileged when the cost is so low? Most people who are serious about starting a business can scrape together a few grand and give it a shot.
No, the real question is what to do when you have access. What the heck does the program do?
Oh come on. "cost is so low"? Ok so in order to have equal access I need to spend a 1000$ a month? How in the world do you come to the conclusion that's a 'low' cost? Especially to the individual trader? I can't afford that, and I make decent money.
And the thing about the rich/poor spending/not spending, that's a whole other can of worms. It's really not so simple as "give it to the poor, the rich weren't gonna use it anyway".
You are absolutely right, but the counter argument of "let the rich do whatever they want because they're the only ones that do useful stuff" is equally invalid and frequently the only argument (or at least root argument) in favor if things like HFT and de-regulation in general.
But if you don't have the special contacts, property and cash to co-locate and server farms, you can't take advantage. The reality is special people get special privileged access.
Actually, a 12A supply in a colo facility will cost you about a grand a month. Half that if you are happy to share rack space. The relevant facilities are known to everyone,
Apparently not.:) Also a grand a month is not pocket change, That's more than a lot of mortgage payments. I dare say the majority of people can't afford a second house. So my statement about being specially privileged stands even if it's no longer licensed that way.
you can just ask the exchange if you want to know which warehouse you need to be in. You don't need special contacts; the exchange will tell you what you need to know to trade with it. You need to buy the servers yourself, but that's not exactly privileged knowledge.
You link actually says "the exchange has ended the practice" re flash orders. I wasn't a big fan of them either.
I could not find which practice re: flash orders were actually limited. The orders themselves or the practice of only letting a select group see them. Also the articles point out that regardless of the NYSE's support, other large brokerage firms support the feature internally and even other excchanges are popping up that offer it. This piece was amusing: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124940289965505053.html. Plainly stated the exact same thing in both the pros and cons of flash trading (i.e. the flash traders get a better price. This means they got a competitive advantage over other traders). Fundamentally the practice still exists in large volume and is not at this point in time outright illegal. It needs to be.
Sorry, I got a bit muddled up when referring to the "previous" question. I meant to address how one really knows what the market would have looked like without HFT.
Regarding spending/saving/tax, remember that saved money ends up back in the system somewhere. The question of growth is not as simple as deciding the tax rates.
Perhaps, but the market did function before HFT. It's probably safe to assume it would continue to function just fine if it was eliminated. As for what's better for growth? The rich tend to save money not spend it. Money that isn't moving around is not good for the economy. This is an interesting paper about the subject, but it isn't the first place I've read about the idea: http://www.uml.edu/centers/cic/Research/Tilly_Research/tilly-Geese,%20golden%20eggs,%20traps-6.04.pdf
This is a bit muddled. For a while, NASDAQ allowed flash orders, but this has been done away with, IIRC.
Not from what I've read. Ok so the key piece I was missing was that now anyone can do it. But if you don't have the special contacts, property and cash to co-locate and server farms, you can't take advantage. The reality is special people get special privileged access.
Also, you are wrong that people can put in orders ahead of other people. That's simply not how it works. What people are doing is simply to predict where other people are about to put orders in, and when they think it opportune, to trade against those live orders in the market. Of course, anyone would be against someone being allowed to jump the queue, but this is just a strawman argument.
Also, you have not addressed the previous question. You weren't the one asked, but you did reply to it.
I did address the question of value in a couple of places. It's been shown before that contrary to the commonly proposed reason for tax cuts, rich people do not commonly spend a lot of money. They tend to save it and sit on it and take it out of circulation. This and the above adds up to negative value. We (society) are harmed by the existence of HFT in this context. If it was just simple arbitrage as you are arguing, we wouldn't be having this argument, but that's not what is going on.
There's a difference between arbitrage and front-running.
One has value (although limited in the case of a virtual good like a stock) the other does not. The fortune teller analogy is apt because the crux of the ethics argument is not that a trader bought something at value x and then sometime later in time (or in the case of a physical good, perhaps moved it in space) and sold it at value y, but that they have special knowledge about a pending sale, and interrupt that sale with special privileges and then take a cut of the sale.
For example we have two transactions a sell and a buy in the system and destined to take place. If no one does anything a certain amount of profit will be made. The HFT interjects themselves into this transaction by knowing about them both ahead of time and then takes some of the profit from the transaction before allowing it to continue. Thus the buyer and/or seller have made less money than otherwise would have been had the HFT done nothing. Reasonable people find this behavior unethical.
The principle objection is that if I put in an order, there's some guy that can see my order, and then get his order in and processed ahead of mine based on the value of my order. That guy then turns around and sells stuff to me that I was trying to buy for an increased price BECAUSE he knew I was in the process of buying it. There's no risk in this process and no value is added. If a trader submits their order before mine and they make money on then selling it to me, that's just luck of the draw and that is what the market is about. But that's not what's happening in this case. The market is looked at as a FIFO system, first order in is first processed. Now we have a few specially privileged people able to see into the FIFO and based on that information stick their own orders into the FIFO to get priority processing. That last bit is where the ethical violation exists. That's what should be illegal.
What would have been the "acceptable" level of invasion of privacy to ensure that this guy isn't some jerk in a sleeper cell? I don't have the answer. I know that this isn't right, but I can't think of a better way to deal with it that would be acceptable to both me, and the fox news watching segment of the population (which seems oddly active in this thread, btw.)
Oh, I don't know, a warrant maybe? That would be a nice little detail.
Nobody is suggesting law enforcement all be fired and go home. What people are saying is that law enforcement is in an inherent position of power, and as such must be held to higher standards AND comply with the checks and balances that the law requires. If not, they are breaking the law, and must suffer criminal penalties themselves. As a point of interest, the judge said you can't do this kind of thing without a warrant. What they did is therefore NOT legal.
My perspective is that of an electrical engineer. During my daily job I interact with dozens of tools. Each part vender and sometimes each part has a different tool to write code with, debug with, do boundary scan with, etc. We have people that are productive with VI, EMACS, Ultraedit, or even Notepad ++. Each program (work project) mandates either Subversion or Clearcase for config management (both linux and windows versions). All these are different tools and then you have VHDL simulation, VHDL synthesis, board schematic capture, FPGA timing analysis, board timing analysis, power consumption, signal integrity all use different tools, and many of these cases have multiple tools that do the job that we are either evaluating, or one tool is slightly better at one aspect than another and we need that capability, or one program requires an older version due to legacy support vs another newer program that wants the latest tools for integration and debug support. So now you have all these different tools to do different aspects of work in our workflow and often no less than 5-8 versions of each of those tools on the network.
There's no way you can come up with image sets that encompass all those use cases that then don't require extensive installation of extra software. And even if you could, all these tools create a workflow and not everyone does it quite the same way so your images require further tweaking by the user to get back to what they need in order to continue working in an efficient manner. Not to mention that any time they spend working on computer issues costs the company quite a bit more than the IT guys time.
Sure office drones that do nothing but use word might be able to just get by with just a re-image and push, but if they are that restricted/limited why do they even need a full blown PC anyway? They could do their job on an cell-phone with a docking station.:)
You're pushing the time you save back on the user who has to get his/her PC back to working order again. This can sometimes take days of tweaking and installing to get productivity back to where it was, depending on the tools and complexity of configuring them. If your re-image makes the user's computer exactly the way it was but sans virus, nobody will care but that's also unlikely to be true. But if you're just saving yourself time at the expense of the other guy getting his stuff back up and running... well then there could be plenty wrong with a re-image in this case. Especially when you consider every hour the user spends getting situated and back up to speed with an essentially new PC is an hour that everyone depending on that user now loses.
Actually, I read that ruling. And the judge did find that the story was false. So did the jury on the first trial. They found that Akre was fired in retaliation for threatening to go to the FCC under the whistleblower laws. Those laws only work when you're whistleblowing the truth, you can't just make crap up and get protected for it. http://ceasespin.org/ceasespin_blog/ceasespin_blogger_files/fox_news_gets_okay_to_misinform_public.html
and http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Reporters+sue+Fox+over+Monsanto.-a0129170235
The appellate court which did not have a jury overturned the jury ruling on the basis that the FCC's rule against false and misleading claims was not an official/formal rule. In other words, Fox News went to court and defended it's behavior of lying and distorting news and facts and won. The ruling wasn't overturned because there was no lie but because there was no official rule against lying.
The sad part is that there are still people that believe what they see on that channel. The really sad part is the line you gave above is exactly what Fox reported about the subject and you believed it without bothering to do ANY fact checking.
See, this is what I mean about knee jerk reactions without ever engaging higher cognitive functions. Intelligence is the mother of all evolutionary advantages, do you really think it that unlikely that we might be the first to develop it?
I still don't see what you mean. You have a basic assertion that your idea has merit based on your reasoning. I actually gave some examples of possible descendants or related creatures of the so-called 'pink unicorn'. I'm not sure how you get knee-jerk out of that. You're going to have to either explain (and carefully) or back down. Just repeating that I'm over-reacting constantly doesn't make it any truer.
Take a look here
http://www.helium.com/knowledge/291333-the-most-important-accidental-scientific-discoveries
There's even a word for it, serendipity. Anyway I think you misunderstood my point, its not that people out for a wander stumble on new discoveries out of the blue, although they have, its that imagination and the ability to step outside the box mentally play an important role in the scientific method. Strident dogmatism is the antithesis of that, and will ultimately lead to serious problems.
Every link on that page proves my point. The researchers were A) not looking for the discovery in question so no additional imagination or 'out of the box' thinking was required. and B) Every one of them had to have the pre-requisite knowledge and grounding in 'in the box' thinking in order to recognize the meaning of their new observation. EVERY ONE of them started with an observation, not wishful thinking, not imagination, just good observation and letting those observations lead them to a conclusion and not letting a pre-ordained conclusion lead their observations.
Which is exactly what I said. I challenged you to come up with a discovery that was led by imagination (i.e. was not based on an observation or previous knowledge), and you haven't.
Now you might be talking about the willingness to overturn previously held beliefs when new evidence overturns them, but this has little to do with imagination or creative thinking. Imagination and creative thinking can be used to hold off new ideas (and has) as easily as it could be used to accept and pioneer new ideas. It takes a certain amount of courage and rigor when the observations don't match the expected to pursue them diligently and explore what those new observations mean.
How do you know there might be no trace? The fact is that earlier civilisations are far from impossible, while not being probable, while pink unicorns are nonsense. Can you see the point being made?
No I really don't see the difference between those two things besides ideology. You've chosen to argue that one is more likely than the other without any evidence whatsoever. The two things are equally possible. Why is a pink horse like creature with horn on it's head less likely to you than some missing advanced civilization? Actually, since we have a bunch of horse like creatures (with horns on their head no less) around now I would argue unicorns are far far more likely to have existed at some point. Not that I think it's likely, just more likely than the advanced civilization that manages to leave no trace.
Knee jerk adherence to dogma is as bad as the religious fanatics, since it destroys the imagination, a vital component of the scientific method.
What knee jerk? Everyone said it's possible but a pointless exercise in speculation. I'm not sure what random imaginings have to do with science.
Discoveries are not often built on previous experience.
*boggle* I challenge you to find one discovery in the history of the human race that wasn't built on the backs of previous researchers and the observational evidence that came before.
No doubt, but there are infinite possibilities. None of which are thrown away categorically, they just have to fit certain criteria first and the biggest one is to be relevant to current evidence and data. Daydreaming all day about the infinite possibilities doesn't get much done. Everyone here has said.. yeah it's possible, but so what? Without the evidence to show some level of probability it doesn't matter and your possibility is equally as likely as any of these other equally irrelevant possibilities. Why should your particular possibility have more weight? Particularly when there are other possibilities that explain data, can be tested, and/or make predictions that can be tested.
You might be confusing amateur philosophy and science.
There's nothing wrong with new ideas. But science is about explaining the natural world. Introducing new and imaginative ideas that explain nothing isn't science. New and imaginative ideas that try to explain observations or connect theories are however quite welcome. See Dark Energy, Dark Matter, String Theory, Panspermia theories etc. There are even papers published on various forms of possible space travel.
Just because you can postulate a non-disprovable idea doesn't mean the idea has any merit if it can't be applied to an actual observational or scientific problem. I fail to see a difference between pink unicorns that died out and left no trace and previous civilization that died out and left no trace, yet you seem to think one is interesting while the other a degrading reference. There's a vast gulf between a random speculation and a testable theory that fits available evidence.
I don't buy it. If that were the case, then 1/3 ==.333... could not exist since the division operator is broken by infinity and the equality doesn't hold, thus no arguments and we have to figure out irrational numbers all over again.
just because I write 1/3 or.333... doesn't mean they're different numbers. Same with 3/3 and.999... and 1. Just 3 different ways to write the same thing.
We aren't talking about the general case, we're talking about the specific case of.999... == 1. In fact I clearly stated that it's a way to solve for the limit when the function is defined at that point which explicitly defines the specific cases where applicable.
Also, you've yet to explain why 3*.333... == 1 and not 3*.333...==.999..., but 2*.333... ==.666...
just because I write 1/3 or.333... doesn't mean they're different numbers. Same with 3/3 and.999... and 1. Just 3 different ways to write the same thing.
You probably don't have a problem with the idea that 1/3 =.333..., so multiply both sides by 3 and what do you get?
You do get 1 = 1, but you don't get 1 = 0.999... like you claim you do. By analogy with limits, the limit of an equation as x approaches y is not the same as the same equation evaluated at x = y.
Yes, yes it is. In fact that's the easiest way to calculate the limit if the function is defined at that point. It's just that functions that are defined at the limit you're looking for aren't particularly interesting. Limits get more interesting at asymptotes and infinity where you can't just plug in y into f(x).
Slashdot Mirror
Mechwarrior 4 is free these days: http://www.mektek.net/projects/mw4/download.html
I read FSB as FBI when I first saw this article and was not surprised.
"Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside." - Gandalf
I think that's where Gandalf left it.
I must chime in here because there's so much wrong with the pink unicorn argument.
Firstly, seeing a pink unicorn is as you say an experience. Don't confuse that with evidence though. Many many times in both science and law the eye witness is the least reliable. Your eyes will lie to you. Same with your other senses. So accepting experiences as evidence is a false equivalency, they just aren't the same thing.
Evidence is something you can show someone else. What you're talking about (experiences) by definition cannot be. I can take a picture of a pink unicorn, that would count as evidence. That evidence could be examined for fraud, examined for authenticity, examined for just tricks of the light (or bad film developing) that might explain what happened. Any particular piece of evidence has MANY possible explanations. This is why many different pieces of evidence are needed. A body of a pink unicorn would be evidence. A live specimen would be evidence. (both of these could be explained as genetic freaks/accidents) Documentation including several specimens, photos, videos, behavioral analysis, and the physical coordinates so others can go do it all again, that counts as evidence, and very strong evidence that pink unicorns exist. Any scientist that would accept less than this has questionable standards of evidence.
You see the thing with evidence is that I can go see it too and evaluate it. An experience is the opposite of this. Experience are open to interpretation. You start with the axiom "only people who have experienced god can talk about god or understand this experiential evidence" and that's just the exclusive club of "I'm right and you're wrong because you can't understand" sharpened to a fine point. It is an indistinguishable variation of the Calvanist "god chose me and not you so that's why you don't get it" club. I didn't think these guys were still around but I had an argument with one the other day, took me forever to figure out what he was talking about since it made so little sense to me.
Just to be a nudge, there's not a lot of difference chemically. Exploding is just burning very fast, bonus for how much gas/energy gets released during that particular chemical reaction. The more volume of gas gets released and the faster the burn the bigger the boom. We have two words since the effects can be dramatically different, but it's a continuum of chemical reactions not an either/or proposition. Something that burns - gasoline, can explode under the right conditions. If it is well airated with lots of available oxygen, boom. Makes your car go.
Just because something burns at the conditions you are familiar with doesn't mean it can't explode under the right circumstances and vice versa.
Nothing in my post indicates that such copying is a bad things. In fact I was poking fun at the people that think that copying is bad and at the same time fail to even see who copied from who.
Just like what Warcraft did to the Warhammer world. At this point they're pretty divergent, but I'm never sure whether to be said or just bemused every time someone accuses a Warhammer game of ripping of Warcraft's world/setting/creatures/etc. Even heard it once in reference to Warhammer miniatures.
You can't seriously say it's only for the privileged when the cost is so low? Most people who are serious about starting a business can scrape together a few grand and give it a shot.
No, the real question is what to do when you have access. What the heck does the program do?
Oh come on. "cost is so low"? Ok so in order to have equal access I need to spend a 1000$ a month? How in the world do you come to the conclusion that's a 'low' cost? Especially to the individual trader? I can't afford that, and I make decent money.
And the thing about the rich/poor spending/not spending, that's a whole other can of worms. It's really not so simple as "give it to the poor, the rich weren't gonna use it anyway".
You are absolutely right, but the counter argument of "let the rich do whatever they want because they're the only ones that do useful stuff" is equally invalid and frequently the only argument (or at least root argument) in favor if things like HFT and de-regulation in general.
But if you don't have the special contacts, property and cash to co-locate and server farms, you can't take advantage. The reality is special people get special privileged access.
Actually, a 12A supply in a colo facility will cost you about a grand a month. Half that if you are happy to share rack space. The relevant facilities are known to everyone,
Apparently not. :) Also a grand a month is not pocket change, That's more than a lot of mortgage payments. I dare say the majority of people can't afford a second house. So my statement about being specially privileged stands even if it's no longer licensed that way.
you can just ask the exchange if you want to know which warehouse you need to be in. You don't need special contacts; the exchange will tell you what you need to know to trade with it. You need to buy the servers yourself, but that's not exactly privileged knowledge.
You link actually says "the exchange has ended the practice" re flash orders. I wasn't a big fan of them either.
I could not find which practice re: flash orders were actually limited. The orders themselves or the practice of only letting a select group see them. Also the articles point out that regardless of the NYSE's support, other large brokerage firms support the feature internally and even other excchanges are popping up that offer it. This piece was amusing: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124940289965505053.html. Plainly stated the exact same thing in both the pros and cons of flash trading (i.e. the flash traders get a better price. This means they got a competitive advantage over other traders). Fundamentally the practice still exists in large volume and is not at this point in time outright illegal. It needs to be.
Sorry, I got a bit muddled up when referring to the "previous" question. I meant to address how one really knows what the market would have looked like without HFT.
Regarding spending/saving/tax, remember that saved money ends up back in the system somewhere. The question of growth is not as simple as deciding the tax rates.
Perhaps, but the market did function before HFT. It's probably safe to assume it would continue to function just fine if it was eliminated. As for what's better for growth? The rich tend to save money not spend it. Money that isn't moving around is not good for the economy. This is an interesting paper about the subject, but it isn't the first place I've read about the idea: http://www.uml.edu/centers/cic/Research/Tilly_Research/tilly-Geese,%20golden%20eggs,%20traps-6.04.pdf
This is a bit muddled. For a while, NASDAQ allowed flash orders, but this has been done away with, IIRC.
Not from what I've read. Ok so the key piece I was missing was that now anyone can do it. But if you don't have the special contacts, property and cash to co-locate and server farms, you can't take advantage. The reality is special people get special privileged access.
Also, you are wrong that people can put in orders ahead of other people. That's simply not how it works. What people are doing is simply to predict where other people are about to put orders in, and when they think it opportune, to trade against those live orders in the market. Of course, anyone would be against someone being allowed to jump the queue, but this is just a strawman argument.
Flash orders as explained here http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2010/03/dodd.htm are exactly jumping the queue. It's also explained here: http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/13124-computerized-front-running-another-goldman-dominated-fraud-.html. The situation is of course more complex than I made it out to be, but the fundamental issue is, HFT have a special advantage and siphon money out of the economy. This takes away from people that would ostensibly make better use of it circulating it back into the economy on products and services.
Also, you have not addressed the previous question. You weren't the one asked, but you did reply to it.
I did address the question of value in a couple of places. It's been shown before that contrary to the commonly proposed reason for tax cuts, rich people do not commonly spend a lot of money. They tend to save it and sit on it and take it out of circulation. This and the above adds up to negative value. We (society) are harmed by the existence of HFT in this context. If it was just simple arbitrage as you are arguing, we wouldn't be having this argument, but that's not what is going on.
There's a difference between arbitrage and front-running.
One has value (although limited in the case of a virtual good like a stock) the other does not. The fortune teller analogy is apt because the crux of the ethics argument is not that a trader bought something at value x and then sometime later in time (or in the case of a physical good, perhaps moved it in space) and sold it at value y, but that they have special knowledge about a pending sale, and interrupt that sale with special privileges and then take a cut of the sale.
For example we have two transactions a sell and a buy in the system and destined to take place. If no one does anything a certain amount of profit will be made. The HFT interjects themselves into this transaction by knowing about them both ahead of time and then takes some of the profit from the transaction before allowing it to continue. Thus the buyer and/or seller have made less money than otherwise would have been had the HFT done nothing. Reasonable people find this behavior unethical.
The principle objection is that if I put in an order, there's some guy that can see my order, and then get his order in and processed ahead of mine based on the value of my order. That guy then turns around and sells stuff to me that I was trying to buy for an increased price BECAUSE he knew I was in the process of buying it. There's no risk in this process and no value is added. If a trader submits their order before mine and they make money on then selling it to me, that's just luck of the draw and that is what the market is about. But that's not what's happening in this case. The market is looked at as a FIFO system, first order in is first processed. Now we have a few specially privileged people able to see into the FIFO and based on that information stick their own orders into the FIFO to get priority processing. That last bit is where the ethical violation exists. That's what should be illegal.
What would have been the "acceptable" level of invasion of privacy to ensure that this guy isn't some jerk in a sleeper cell? I don't have the answer. I know that this isn't right, but I can't think of a better way to deal with it that would be acceptable to both me, and the fox news watching segment of the population (which seems oddly active in this thread, btw.)
Oh, I don't know, a warrant maybe? That would be a nice little detail.
Nobody is suggesting law enforcement all be fired and go home. What people are saying is that law enforcement is in an inherent position of power, and as such must be held to higher standards AND comply with the checks and balances that the law requires. If not, they are breaking the law, and must suffer criminal penalties themselves. As a point of interest, the judge said you can't do this kind of thing without a warrant. What they did is therefore NOT legal.
My perspective is that of an electrical engineer. During my daily job I interact with dozens of tools. Each part vender and sometimes each part has a different tool to write code with, debug with, do boundary scan with, etc. We have people that are productive with VI, EMACS, Ultraedit, or even Notepad ++. Each program (work project) mandates either Subversion or Clearcase for config management (both linux and windows versions). All these are different tools and then you have VHDL simulation, VHDL synthesis, board schematic capture, FPGA timing analysis, board timing analysis, power consumption, signal integrity all use different tools, and many of these cases have multiple tools that do the job that we are either evaluating, or one tool is slightly better at one aspect than another and we need that capability, or one program requires an older version due to legacy support vs another newer program that wants the latest tools for integration and debug support. So now you have all these different tools to do different aspects of work in our workflow and often no less than 5-8 versions of each of those tools on the network.
:)
There's no way you can come up with image sets that encompass all those use cases that then don't require extensive installation of extra software. And even if you could, all these tools create a workflow and not everyone does it quite the same way so your images require further tweaking by the user to get back to what they need in order to continue working in an efficient manner. Not to mention that any time they spend working on computer issues costs the company quite a bit more than the IT guys time.
Sure office drones that do nothing but use word might be able to just get by with just a re-image and push, but if they are that restricted/limited why do they even need a full blown PC anyway? They could do their job on an cell-phone with a docking station.
You're pushing the time you save back on the user who has to get his/her PC back to working order again. This can sometimes take days of tweaking and installing to get productivity back to where it was, depending on the tools and complexity of configuring them. If your re-image makes the user's computer exactly the way it was but sans virus, nobody will care but that's also unlikely to be true. But if you're just saving yourself time at the expense of the other guy getting his stuff back up and running... well then there could be plenty wrong with a re-image in this case. Especially when you consider every hour the user spends getting situated and back up to speed with an essentially new PC is an hour that everyone depending on that user now loses.
Actually, I read that ruling. And the judge did find that the story was false. So did the jury on the first trial. They found that Akre was fired in retaliation for threatening to go to the FCC under the whistleblower laws. Those laws only work when you're whistleblowing the truth, you can't just make crap up and get protected for it.
http://ceasespin.org/ceasespin_blog/ceasespin_blogger_files/fox_news_gets_okay_to_misinform_public.html
and
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Reporters+sue+Fox+over+Monsanto.-a0129170235
The appellate court which did not have a jury overturned the jury ruling on the basis that the FCC's rule against false and misleading claims was not an official/formal rule. In other words, Fox News went to court and defended it's behavior of lying and distorting news and facts and won. The ruling wasn't overturned because there was no lie but because there was no official rule against lying.
Read it yourself. http://www.2dca.org/opinions/Opinion_Pages/Opinion_Page_2003/February/February%2014,%202003/2D01-529.pdf
The sad part is that there are still people that believe what they see on that channel. The really sad part is the line you gave above is exactly what Fox reported about the subject and you believed it without bothering to do ANY fact checking.
See, this is what I mean about knee jerk reactions without ever engaging higher cognitive functions. Intelligence is the mother of all evolutionary advantages, do you really think it that unlikely that we might be the first to develop it?
I still don't see what you mean. You have a basic assertion that your idea has merit based on your reasoning. I actually gave some examples of possible descendants or related creatures of the so-called 'pink unicorn'. I'm not sure how you get knee-jerk out of that. You're going to have to either explain (and carefully) or back down. Just repeating that I'm over-reacting constantly doesn't make it any truer.
Take a look here http://www.helium.com/knowledge/291333-the-most-important-accidental-scientific-discoveries There's even a word for it, serendipity. Anyway I think you misunderstood my point, its not that people out for a wander stumble on new discoveries out of the blue, although they have, its that imagination and the ability to step outside the box mentally play an important role in the scientific method. Strident dogmatism is the antithesis of that, and will ultimately lead to serious problems.
Every link on that page proves my point. The researchers were A) not looking for the discovery in question so no additional imagination or 'out of the box' thinking was required. and B) Every one of them had to have the pre-requisite knowledge and grounding in 'in the box' thinking in order to recognize the meaning of their new observation. EVERY ONE of them started with an observation, not wishful thinking, not imagination, just good observation and letting those observations lead them to a conclusion and not letting a pre-ordained conclusion lead their observations.
Which is exactly what I said. I challenged you to come up with a discovery that was led by imagination (i.e. was not based on an observation or previous knowledge), and you haven't.
Now you might be talking about the willingness to overturn previously held beliefs when new evidence overturns them, but this has little to do with imagination or creative thinking. Imagination and creative thinking can be used to hold off new ideas (and has) as easily as it could be used to accept and pioneer new ideas. It takes a certain amount of courage and rigor when the observations don't match the expected to pursue them diligently and explore what those new observations mean.
How do you know there might be no trace? The fact is that earlier civilisations are far from impossible, while not being probable, while pink unicorns are nonsense. Can you see the point being made?
No I really don't see the difference between those two things besides ideology. You've chosen to argue that one is more likely than the other without any evidence whatsoever. The two things are equally possible. Why is a pink horse like creature with horn on it's head less likely to you than some missing advanced civilization? Actually, since we have a bunch of horse like creatures (with horns on their head no less) around now I would argue unicorns are far far more likely to have existed at some point. Not that I think it's likely, just more likely than the advanced civilization that manages to leave no trace.
Knee jerk adherence to dogma is as bad as the religious fanatics, since it destroys the imagination, a vital component of the scientific method.
What knee jerk? Everyone said it's possible but a pointless exercise in speculation. I'm not sure what random imaginings have to do with science.
Discoveries are not often built on previous experience.
*boggle* I challenge you to find one discovery in the history of the human race that wasn't built on the backs of previous researchers and the observational evidence that came before.
There's no substantive difference between the two. Evolution is a process.
No doubt, but there are infinite possibilities. None of which are thrown away categorically, they just have to fit certain criteria first and the biggest one is to be relevant to current evidence and data. Daydreaming all day about the infinite possibilities doesn't get much done. Everyone here has said.. yeah it's possible, but so what? Without the evidence to show some level of probability it doesn't matter and your possibility is equally as likely as any of these other equally irrelevant possibilities. Why should your particular possibility have more weight? Particularly when there are other possibilities that explain data, can be tested, and/or make predictions that can be tested.
You might be confusing amateur philosophy and science.
There's nothing wrong with new ideas. But science is about explaining the natural world. Introducing new and imaginative ideas that explain nothing isn't science. New and imaginative ideas that try to explain observations or connect theories are however quite welcome. See Dark Energy, Dark Matter, String Theory, Panspermia theories etc. There are even papers published on various forms of possible space travel.
Just because you can postulate a non-disprovable idea doesn't mean the idea has any merit if it can't be applied to an actual observational or scientific problem. I fail to see a difference between pink unicorns that died out and left no trace and previous civilization that died out and left no trace, yet you seem to think one is interesting while the other a degrading reference. There's a vast gulf between a random speculation and a testable theory that fits available evidence.
You might be getting confused, but the set of real numbers includes all rational and irrational numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_number
Complex numbers are not real.
I don't buy it. If that were the case, then 1/3 == .333... could not exist since the division operator is broken by infinity and the equality doesn't hold, thus no arguments and we have to figure out irrational numbers all over again.
1/3 == .333... given .999... .666... .999... .999...
.333... doesn't mean they're different numbers. Same with 3/3 and .999... and 1. Just 3 different ways to write the same thing.
3*.333...==
2*.333... ==
3*1/3 ==
3*1/3 == 3/3 == 1 ==
just because I write 1/3 or
We aren't talking about the general case, we're talking about the specific case of .999... == 1. In fact I clearly stated that it's a way to solve for the limit when the function is defined at that point which explicitly defines the specific cases where applicable.
.999..., but 2*.333... == .666...
just because I write 1/3 or .333... doesn't mean they're different numbers. Same with 3/3 and .999... and 1. Just 3 different ways to write the same thing.
Also, you've yet to explain why 3*.333... == 1 and not 3*.333...==
You do get 1 = 1, but you don't get 1 = 0.999... like you claim you do. By analogy with limits, the limit of an equation as x approaches y is not the same as the same equation evaluated at x = y.
Yes, yes it is. In fact that's the easiest way to calculate the limit if the function is defined at that point. It's just that functions that are defined at the limit you're looking for aren't particularly interesting. Limits get more interesting at asymptotes and infinity where you can't just plug in y into f(x).