Subsidies within governments.
One of the ONLY reasons we form large area governments (e.g., EU, USA, USM, etc) is to facilitate the transfer of wealth from haves to have nots. A shared currency with a central taxation is the vehicle for that transfer. As soon as little subdivisions (New York(USA), South East(UK), Germany(EU)) start accounting and saying "hey, mate! We send more than we get" then they are forgetting that purpose. As we say here, and you've heard elsewhere, within my house, we are all communists (sharers and carers) but at some distance that fades to being something less sharing and caring. For some, that distance is across the street, for others, it is across the planet. When an "across the planet" type sees an "across the street" type doing well, they sometimes get jealous and send in the "boyz with bayonets" to breach that barrier. The relative homogeneity of some countries makes it easier to extend that barrier to the border, but at the same time makes it harder to push it beyond that border. The social capital benefits of homogeneity, to me, suggests that we should work to increase the perception that we are all "home boyz", rather than encouraging the Balkanization of our societies. Bottom line - don't play the "we send more than we get back card", just be glad that you are better off than those other blokes that need central help. And hope that the centrals don't get so greedy that they drive away the wealth generators. After all, the best parasite is the one that does not kill the host.
Try reading Pirate Cinema. Absent evidence to the contrary, I think the hero in this book is a self-centered solipsistic me-firster who is more than a little representative of the type... "finder's keepers and all that"... yeah, right.
But then again, the evil-doers in the book are front-page news today IRL as they try to write their ownership tags on infrastructure items like the internet. Sort of as if I were to go paint a great big "This road is mine, pay toll at the stop sign", which I would back up by standing by said stop sign with a squeegee and a can of spray paint, so I could deliver the appropriate thank you to the people who deign to drive "my" highway.
Seems to me that you can either play fair games with friends or play unfair games with cheaters. Auto-aim bots make FPS games no fun at all if you are playing against a random set of players. But giving up your browser history to get a fair game? Ought to be offered as an Opt-In and be done with it.
A story I wrote is based on this idea, in particular, a mathematician working with NSA on quantum cryptography finds that a physical process is being randomized using an eight-bit (think 6502) pseudorandom number generator which he concludes is an example of a legacy code that was never updated (think of the sin() function, when is the last time you looked inside that?).
Of course, the story is about the discovery process more than the discovery itself.
And the movie Thirteenth Floor is a much better look at this idea than the Matrix is.
First worlders may think we are transitioning to a post-scarcity world, but the third world remains unconvinced, whether they are in SE Asia or Detroit. The question you should ask yourself is whether we are on the path toward "Children of Men" (less the issue of no children for 20 years) or "Star Trek" (less the warp drives).
The science of software testing is still in the Gothic tradition... build it and see if it will stand. Throw in a flying buttress or two if it starts to bulge out.
Brick laying is just more advanced and we do not expect errors as described and the artisan is rightly on the hook. Give me a way to automatically test all branches in a program (without me having to specify the language) and I'll start selling the software as "Underwriters Lab certified", which STILL does not guarantee correct, but does guarantee it passed the state-of-the-art testing done by UL.
It's just that our expectations are much out of line with the practice, and a client who demanded free repairs for life would have to subsidize up front or buy a maintenance package. Any market for either?
Astrology IS science, and as such it is falsifiable. And every test has shown that it does not predict yesterday's news. So applying it in decision making is bad decision making.
By the way, when I was sitting on a selection committee we grabbed a few years worth of data (in a military graduate school, so everyone who was admitted stayed for the whole plan, whether or not they graduated). We did a regression to see what predicted final success (GPA, did graduate, and a couple of other endpoints). Turned out that age was the best predictor (older students did better, we thought perhaps because they had real world experience). These were mostly engineering and applied math students. Also turned out that we could not use the model to pick new students anyway, so back to the old subjective systems.
As a statistician I have to ask why we give grades at all? If the purpose is to measure performance against a standard, as in I wanted you to learn your ABCs and you did, therefore you get an A, that leads to one answer, and the comment that a C reflects bad teaching is correct. But when I am sitting on a selection committee looking for whom to admit to graduate school I also want to know if you are a better student than other applicants, in which case I would prefer to see some C's even if I would not admit them. Of course, it is easy to give A's in courses that don't have good standards, just as it is easier for judges to give all gymnasts 10's, but harder to give all baseball teams wins. Boils down to the difference between art and sports, and A vs C boils down to who do I want serving me coffee and who do I want designing bridges.
As an aside, when I came home with my first standardized test scores I excitedly told my dad I was in the "top 99%". He, of course, pointed out that even lichens are in the top 99%, being in the 99th percentile was, however, considered laudable. Deflated a bit, but always learning. Thanks, Dad.
Just as in mathematics there are things that are undecidable. The real question is not whether evolution exists, it is whether god exists and if so, did it create the universe yesterday, last Thursday, 6,000 years ago, 13.7B years ago, -Aleph0 years ago, in parallel or in series, as a quantum (over the Rational), or continuous (over the Reals) space.
Myself, I think the universe exists as a serial expression of all possible states in a countable universe (-Aleph0 to Aleph0 in every direction, x,y,z,t, others) and we travel through it as an information set on top of that universe, with the possibility that we can exercise free will over that countable universe using randomness generated over the Reals, not over the Rationals. That makes our decisions unpredictable in every sense, even if our choices are countably infinite. But that is actionable (it gives me a foundation for making decisions) but not testable (yet). It may never be testable.
So change the rules to require that players work their way down a column rather than jumping past unopened windows. That would smooth out the viewing experience a bit.
As for the rest -- rules is rules, live with it.
Yet another reason I avoid cute and meaningful online names (most of the time, I guess I trust Slashdot more than any other forum). Who would go through all this just to steal x1415926@?
People, this is one forum where I would have hoped we would all be familiar with the political compass and could read at least the abstract and conclusions of papers like Merlo2011.
That said, the Republicans are in a civil war between the "statists" and the "liberals" (in the european sense of the word). The Dumbocrats (sp?) are similarly torn, but they are miraculously immune from questioning by the Media-ocratic press. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet (~6B not in Europe or US are basically killing themselves, us, and anything else as they squabble over whose imaginary friends are the most potent (sorta like a real-world extension of the Friday night fights between StarWars fanboys and Trekkies, but with real bullets and real bombs).
When I taught military strategy, I often asked mystudents if they thought rational societies could win out over irrational ones. The mathematics of mutual assured destruction (the context for my question) fail in the absence of a form of rationality on both sides. In the 60s and 70s there was a form of that rationality as required by the assumptions. I fear that in the present world there is no such bi-lateral rationality, at least not between the Western European styles of government and the theocratic forms we are confronting.
Good luck with all that. Myself, I don't live near a ground zero during these time. Welcome to World War IV.
Just once I'd like to see comparative statistics on how many Chinese (percentage-wise) believe in AGW. At a recent Climate Change Summit the experts were all about two things.
(1) It does not matter what you or your politicians think, the real measure is the insurance industry. At the summit, a spokesperson for a large insurance company pointed out that wind insurance in Florida is now like flood insurance. Too big for insurance companies to cover (because they are not too big to fail), so the government is forcing coverage (because the government IS too big to fail (Hurrican Windstorm Insurance). Uhm, ignore Greece and Iceland, please).
Then (2) there is no silver bullet. Removing all the cars or removing all the coal fired power plants (worldwide) won't solve the problem. We need "silver buckshot" hitting multiple targets.
It will be interesting to see if commercial projects can compete with "state-capitalism" projects (like China is running). State-capitalism being the media name for the sort of national socialist (fascist, though that term is often overloaded to unusability) economic system China is using.
I was a PhD student with background as a mathematician in the AF, who had worked on ballistic missile codes (boost, sub-orbital and reentry). I had been writing a sci-fi story that followed almost exactly what happened (SRB blow-through failure), except that my SRB failure was away from the main tank, the shuttle just failed to achieve orbit (I had done the calculations) and the story was about the attempt to rescue the cargo (the story was all about the precautions you'd take if the cargo was so dangerous that it could not be allowed back into the atmosphere). Needless to say, after this I never was able to open that folder again, it is still in my stack of unfinished short stories.
Unless you are building and maintaining your own systems off the grid, you have effectively forced society to support your habits, including using wasteful bulbs. An alternative to having cheap incandescent bulbs might be to have a carbon-tax like surcharge for the extra infrastructure... then your "cheap" 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs would also carry a hefty excise tax that would make them less competitive. Of course, we all know that infrastructure is free, at least in the minds of the typical Walmart shopper.
Slashdot Mirror
Not when the real outlaws show up, its like they are having a friendly little school yard fight when the B-52s show up.
Subsidies within governments. One of the ONLY reasons we form large area governments (e.g., EU, USA, USM, etc) is to facilitate the transfer of wealth from haves to have nots. A shared currency with a central taxation is the vehicle for that transfer. As soon as little subdivisions (New York(USA), South East(UK), Germany(EU)) start accounting and saying "hey, mate! We send more than we get" then they are forgetting that purpose. As we say here, and you've heard elsewhere, within my house, we are all communists (sharers and carers) but at some distance that fades to being something less sharing and caring. For some, that distance is across the street, for others, it is across the planet. When an "across the planet" type sees an "across the street" type doing well, they sometimes get jealous and send in the "boyz with bayonets" to breach that barrier. The relative homogeneity of some countries makes it easier to extend that barrier to the border, but at the same time makes it harder to push it beyond that border. The social capital benefits of homogeneity, to me, suggests that we should work to increase the perception that we are all "home boyz", rather than encouraging the Balkanization of our societies. Bottom line - don't play the "we send more than we get back card", just be glad that you are better off than those other blokes that need central help. And hope that the centrals don't get so greedy that they drive away the wealth generators. After all, the best parasite is the one that does not kill the host.
Only 90%??? I am SO proud. After all, 95% of the planet still believe in his noodlieness.
Don't believe in IP either, I'll bet.
... "finder's keepers and all that" ... yeah, right.
Try reading Pirate Cinema . Absent evidence to the contrary, I think the hero in this book is a self-centered solipsistic me-firster who is more than a little representative of the type
But then again, the evil-doers in the book are front-page news today IRL as they try to write their ownership tags on infrastructure items like the internet. Sort of as if I were to go paint a great big "This road is mine, pay toll at the stop sign", which I would back up by standing by said stop sign with a squeegee and a can of spray paint, so I could deliver the appropriate thank you to the people who deign to drive "my" highway.
Seems to me that you can either play fair games with friends or play unfair games with cheaters. Auto-aim bots make FPS games no fun at all if you are playing against a random set of players. But giving up your browser history to get a fair game? Ought to be offered as an Opt-In and be done with it.
Careful, you probably just gave Homeland Security some new research ideas.
A story I wrote is based on this idea, in particular, a mathematician working with NSA on quantum cryptography finds that a physical process is being randomized using an eight-bit (think 6502) pseudorandom number generator which he concludes is an example of a legacy code that was never updated (think of the sin() function, when is the last time you looked inside that?).
Of course, the story is about the discovery process more than the discovery itself.
And the movie Thirteenth Floor is a much better look at this idea than the Matrix is.
First worlders may think we are transitioning to a post-scarcity world, but the third world remains unconvinced, whether they are in SE Asia or Detroit. The question you should ask yourself is whether we are on the path toward "Children of Men" (less the issue of no children for 20 years) or "Star Trek" (less the warp drives).
The science of software testing is still in the Gothic tradition ... build it and see if it will stand. Throw in a flying buttress or two if it starts to bulge out.
Brick laying is just more advanced and we do not expect errors as described and the artisan is rightly on the hook. Give me a way to automatically test all branches in a program (without me having to specify the language) and I'll start selling the software as "Underwriters Lab certified", which STILL does not guarantee correct, but does guarantee it passed the state-of-the-art testing done by UL.
It's just that our expectations are much out of line with the practice, and a client who demanded free repairs for life would have to subsidize up front or buy a maintenance package. Any market for either?
Astrology IS science, and as such it is falsifiable. And every test has shown that it does not predict yesterday's news. So applying it in decision making is bad decision making.
By the way, when I was sitting on a selection committee we grabbed a few years worth of data (in a military graduate school, so everyone who was admitted stayed for the whole plan, whether or not they graduated). We did a regression to see what predicted final success (GPA, did graduate, and a couple of other endpoints). Turned out that age was the best predictor (older students did better, we thought perhaps because they had real world experience). These were mostly engineering and applied math students. Also turned out that we could not use the model to pick new students anyway, so back to the old subjective systems.
As a statistician I have to ask why we give grades at all? If the purpose is to measure performance against a standard, as in I wanted you to learn your ABCs and you did, therefore you get an A, that leads to one answer, and the comment that a C reflects bad teaching is correct. But when I am sitting on a selection committee looking for whom to admit to graduate school I also want to know if you are a better student than other applicants, in which case I would prefer to see some C's even if I would not admit them. Of course, it is easy to give A's in courses that don't have good standards, just as it is easier for judges to give all gymnasts 10's, but harder to give all baseball teams wins. Boils down to the difference between art and sports, and A vs C boils down to who do I want serving me coffee and who do I want designing bridges.
As an aside, when I came home with my first standardized test scores I excitedly told my dad I was in the "top 99%". He, of course, pointed out that even lichens are in the top 99%, being in the 99th percentile was, however, considered laudable. Deflated a bit, but always learning. Thanks, Dad.
Now as soon as I get all those darn laser pointers I ordered, and then get them to point at the same spot ...
Sweet!
Just as in mathematics there are things that are undecidable. The real question is not whether evolution exists, it is whether god exists and if so, did it create the universe yesterday, last Thursday, 6,000 years ago, 13.7B years ago, -Aleph0 years ago, in parallel or in series, as a quantum (over the Rational), or continuous (over the Reals) space.
Myself, I think the universe exists as a serial expression of all possible states in a countable universe (-Aleph0 to Aleph0 in every direction, x,y,z,t, others) and we travel through it as an information set on top of that universe, with the possibility that we can exercise free will over that countable universe using randomness generated over the Reals, not over the Rationals. That makes our decisions unpredictable in every sense, even if our choices are countably infinite. But that is actionable (it gives me a foundation for making decisions) but not testable (yet). It may never be testable.
So change the rules to require that players work their way down a column rather than jumping past unopened windows. That would smooth out the viewing experience a bit. As for the rest -- rules is rules, live with it.
Yet another reason I avoid cute and meaningful online names (most of the time, I guess I trust Slashdot more than any other forum). Who would go through all this just to steal x1415926@?
Dittos and mod this up. +1 for being Right and right
That said, the Republicans are in a civil war between the "statists" and the "liberals" (in the european sense of the word). The Dumbocrats (sp?) are similarly torn, but they are miraculously immune from questioning by the Media-ocratic press. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet (~6B not in Europe or US are basically killing themselves, us, and anything else as they squabble over whose imaginary friends are the most potent (sorta like a real-world extension of the Friday night fights between StarWars fanboys and Trekkies, but with real bullets and real bombs).
When I taught military strategy, I often asked mystudents if they thought rational societies could win out over irrational ones. The mathematics of mutual assured destruction (the context for my question) fail in the absence of a form of rationality on both sides. In the 60s and 70s there was a form of that rationality as required by the assumptions. I fear that in the present world there is no such bi-lateral rationality, at least not between the Western European styles of government and the theocratic forms we are confronting.
Good luck with all that. Myself, I don't live near a ground zero during these time. Welcome to World War IV.
I wish I had not already commented, I'd much rather have modded this up!
(1) It does not matter what you or your politicians think, the real measure is the insurance industry. At the summit, a spokesperson for a large insurance company pointed out that wind insurance in Florida is now like flood insurance. Too big for insurance companies to cover (because they are not too big to fail), so the government is forcing coverage (because the government IS too big to fail (Hurrican Windstorm Insurance). Uhm, ignore Greece and Iceland, please).
Then (2) there is no silver bullet. Removing all the cars or removing all the coal fired power plants (worldwide) won't solve the problem. We need "silver buckshot" hitting multiple targets.
It will be interesting to see if commercial projects can compete with "state-capitalism" projects (like China is running). State-capitalism being the media name for the sort of national socialist (fascist, though that term is often overloaded to unusability) economic system China is using.
I was a PhD student with background as a mathematician in the AF, who had worked on ballistic missile codes (boost, sub-orbital and reentry). I had been writing a sci-fi story that followed almost exactly what happened (SRB blow-through failure), except that my SRB failure was away from the main tank, the shuttle just failed to achieve orbit (I had done the calculations) and the story was about the attempt to rescue the cargo (the story was all about the precautions you'd take if the cargo was so dangerous that it could not be allowed back into the atmosphere). Needless to say, after this I never was able to open that folder again, it is still in my stack of unfinished short stories.
It reads
that are TRUE. I have an elegant solution, but it requires Perl and more space than Slashdot allows for its comments.
They ate tiger nuts, and they went extinct. Coincidence? I think not.
Unless you are building and maintaining your own systems off the grid, you have effectively forced society to support your habits, including using wasteful bulbs. An alternative to having cheap incandescent bulbs might be to have a carbon-tax like surcharge for the extra infrastructure ... then your "cheap" 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs would also carry a hefty excise tax that would make them less competitive. Of course, we all know that infrastructure is free, at least in the minds of the typical Walmart shopper.