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  1. Re:I agree on Should Dolphins Be Treated As Non-Human Persons? · · Score: 1

    I am certain that an irrational person, who is unconscious and has not too many higher-level thinking processes is disagreeing with you somewhere somehow right now. And no, it's not just W.

  2. Re:I agree on Should Dolphins Be Treated As Non-Human Persons? · · Score: 1

    no.

  3. Re:I agree on Should Dolphins Be Treated As Non-Human Persons? · · Score: 1

    do you also have something against people who are 'height challenged', or those with missing limbs?

  4. Re:Scared me for a second. on Study Says Software Engineers Have the Best US Jobs · · Score: 1

    I do not understand your feelings about this, what are you saying?

  5. Re:I agree on Should Dolphins Be Treated As Non-Human Persons? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Also clearly dogs are human. So are chimps.

    What the hell, what's NOT a human? A rabbit? A cockroach?

    You can come up with whatever justifications to 'give rights' to whatever you want, but in reality 'rights' are an abstract idea defined by humans.

    Do dolphins have the same 'rights' as humans? Well, it's up to humans to define. I, on my part, will always discriminate against dolphins, I promise that much.

  6. Re:Move to quantified data on Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street · · Score: 1

    no one bank is able to achieve a monopoly so there is some (not enough) competition to have an effect.

    - distinction without a difference. The same guys from from one bank to another, then they end up in the gov't top positions, then they are back to the same banks.

    AFAIC they are effectively one bank, and together with the gov't and with the Fed they have their monopoly.

    --

    Car insurance is freaking gov't mandated, talk about monopoly system.

    --

    The gov't student loans together with the dept' of education is what created the monopoly in education. One system, paid from the same source. The source that gives out loans to kids. Loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Loans without collateral of any kind. Loans that are bigger than some mortgages in hope of what? That the kid will end up getting a hugely paid job to be able to pay this out? It's insane. It drives costs up because the public schools and universities see all that money. Also it screws education system, removes the incentives to actually educate kids and turns the system into a joke. An expensive joke. An expensive useless joke. Something no free market would ever have.

    --

    In fact except for the De Beers cartel, you will find it nearly impossible to point out a monopoly, which is NOT gov't based. All monopolies are gov't protected, bailed out, subsidized, regulated for, 'stimulated' and taxed for.

    --

    You assume that government intervention is the ONLY reason the economy collapsed (which by the way it is recovering).

    - I am not assuming it, I am stating it.

    Also you are wrong. Economy is NOT recovering. It will not recover, whatever it will do, it will not recover. Not with the mad gov't and mad Fed printing money while destroying savings and capital.

    The only way for the economy to recover is to abolish all gov't institutions, to cut gov't to pre 1920 levels, which would take it down to under 100 Billion dollars altogether, the way Hardin did it in 1920 to get out of that recession of 1920, which was actually even worse than the current one. That recession, in 1920, after Hardin cut the spending of gov't by 70% lasted for a year.

    Than USA had what's known as the 'roaring twenties'. Of-course that was also somewhat false, because Fed was still printing money and creating the next asset bubble in equity, which resulted in the Great Depression, once that recession was treated so differently by gov't, which decided to spend instead of cutting, to print instead of deleveraging honestly.

    This time it's worse. There is no capital, there is no manufacturing. There is huge level of inflation and there are no jobs. This one is going to crash so hard, once the US bonds are no longer held, it's going to crash the USD into oblivion when the Fed prints it to monetize all that debt.

    The US gov't is insolvent right NOW. So are ALL US banks. Right now. The debt can never be repaid and there is no production capacity. AFAIC USA in its 1800- 1970 form is over. It will crash, the USD will disappear and probably US itself will split into at minimum 2 separate countries. But we'll see. I am betting on it, all my assets, my business and my physical whereabouts is a bet on it.

    The 'leading economists' that are referenced by you are all crooks knowingly or unknowingly, but they are all crooks. BTW., I will forever consider the Nobel Prize to be a fucking joke until they take the prize from Krugman back. A shaman. The Fed chairmen, all of them past the time of Hardin are Keynesian shamans. Their only answer to all question is to print money. There is nothing else they know how to do.

    As to regulations - there is a huge reason China today is a much freer country to do business in, because of all that regulations that USA has. USA is probably the most regulated country and nearly the most highly taxed one. And I live in Europe and Asia after living in North American for 16 year, I can compare.

    NO BIG busi

  7. Re:Math Illiteracy leads to science illiteracy on College Students Lack Scientific Literacy · · Score: 0

    Dude, you are wrong.

    Math is no more a language in itself than Music is.

    Is Music a language? Music is a way of expression, but is it a language?

    I don't see it. Math is not about scientific notation, in fact notation only gets in the way of understanding Math in many cases.

    Math is a way to think to express an idea, but its primary function is not for one person to explain something to another person, its goal in itself is for one person to get satisfaction from ability to solve a question. Of-course the question can be asked by this or other person.

    Here is a question: do all lines ever converge on a single plane? What if they are not on what we consider to be a plane but are on some other shape? Can lines be parallel forever? On any shape?

    So those are questions. If you can think of the way to answer them, it doesn't matter which words you use, whether you use any notations or not, it absolutely does not matter one bit, as long as you can find a way to answer it.

    Math is about answering questions, no matter how strange.

    Gov't and schools are KILLING education in math because of exactly what you just presented: thinking that math is about the specifics of the symbols or the language in which it is described.

    Who gives two fucks HOW you describe your answer? Can you answer the question or not, that's the only real meaningful definition of Math.

  8. Re:Math Illiteracy leads to science illiteracy on College Students Lack Scientific Literacy · · Score: 1

    I don't think everybody should consider Math to be beautiful, just like not everybody cares for Shakespeare or Leonardo or Michelangelo or Tchaikovsky. But Math is not science at all.

    Math is not science, no matter what your silly school curriculum is telling you. Math was never a science, it was always a toy for the mind and it was the most abstract of all toys of that kind, like painting or music or literature also are.

    Math is an artistic expression and this fact is lost on people, so consider this: you are on the side of teaching an art form in a way, that presents it as something else, and you are saying: people do not consider it to be beautiful.

    Of-course they do not, they never had a chance even to see Math for what it is in the first place. How can you make music interesting to anybody if you teach it as you teach math? You can't. Math is absolutely not science, it's an art form and people who put it into curriculum as science do not understand it themselves.

    You can never make students like math if you completely pervert the idea of it and that's what is done to students in the classes - they are taught an ugly perverted idea of what math is NOT under the name of Math. Obviously people hate it.

  9. Re:They lack general literacy on College Students Lack Scientific Literacy · · Score: 1

    it's that American colleges are accepting anyone to a four year program if they sign up for one

    - yes, and the reason for this is that gov't got into business of handing out student loans, which on one hand allows more people to go to colleges (ok, good) on the other hand it gives colleges an excellent way to make more money through raising tuition fees immediately, after any gov't loan increase (bad) and at the same time the expected level of education out of any student is supposedly higher every year, but this only leads to handing out of more gov't loans and in a vicious cycle to tuition fee hikes but also to artificial inflation in education levels.

    Yes, gov't does not only print money and inflate your currency and steals your purchasing power while destroying the future of the country by destroying savings and capital required to make country productive through being a producer of consumer goods, it also inflates education and forces people to get into more and more loans to get this higher levels of education they don't need.

  10. Re:Math Illiteracy leads to science illiteracy on College Students Lack Scientific Literacy · · Score: 2

    I disagree. Math is not science.

    Math is a creative process of seeking answers to questions, which are purely imaginative.

    So from the very beginning, Math is rooted in imagination - imagining an abstract problem to solve for the heck of it.

    Secondly Math is about finding an interesting 'beautiful' to the mind solution to the problem that was imagined.

    Science on the other hand is about observing phenomena and trying to find the mechanisms by which the phenomena can be explained. Science is about discovery of natural phenomena and finding answers to the question: how does that work.

    Math is about coming up with a completely imagined idea and then trying to see if there is a way to grind this idea down to nuts and bolts that are already explained and showing the process.

    Math is about beauty of the mind and of the unknown but also of totally imagined.

    Science is about answering questions that are raised every day to how things work, how to make things work better, how to fix things, how to come up with new things based on already known things, how to find things that may exist but are not known yet.

    ---

    I'd say that math literacy is not extremely important for a natural scientist who is just observing and trying to come up with simple explanations of phenomena, but math will make it easier to generalize the explanation.

    You do not have to understand math at all to come up with reasonable explanations on how things work by doing observations and experiments.

    However math will make you a better scientist, because math does require and improve understanding of logic and of imagination and it allows to build frameworks for explaining natural phenomena that can be described very tightly through math.

  11. Re:Move to quantified data on Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street · · Score: 1

    because they are more efficient

    - says who they are more efficient? They generate more money for the trading house, but they completely price out the retail trader.

    Obviously there is money in retail traders, so there would be plenty of choice for retail traders to do trades, but their houses would be retail oriented and would have to be manned by people rather than machines with self imposed rules.

    How exactly this would work out I do not know. That's the point of the market economy rather than centrally planned economy - market economy cannot be predicted fully because it is left to choices of individuals and centrally planned economy proposes no choices at all.

    Without regulation against anti-competitive behaviors and monopolies then the entire economy would devolve into a series of monopolies much worse than anything going on right now.

    - this sound extremely funny, when anybody says: OMG! Without gov't we'll have monopolies.

    Here is my response: ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDEDLY BLIND?

    There are monopolies right now, killing all competition, only relying on the fact that they are completely government backed! WTF is wrong with you? All banks and large investment firms, all energy firms, military and insurances and communications and food and education, and utilities it's all gov't granted monopolies TODAY! And you are afraid of some hypothetical monopolies that could happen if there was no gov't monopolies? Why do YOU like gov't monopolies so much? What did they do for you except rob you of your money?

    This is definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over (bringing the same gov't into power all the time, forget who was voted in, the same exact system is in gov't) and expecting some different results.

    Would be the day business would jump for joy as they sat back and raped the consumers because unbridled unrestricted capitalism would lead to even more greedy and corrupt businesses, large unregulated monopolies, and ultimately would collapse the economy.

    ? Ultimately collapse the economy? Which economy? Because you don't have an economy NOW to collapse, it's already collapsed, all with gov't intervention.

    What kind of cool aid are you on?

    The big businesses would JUMP FOR JOY? WHY?

    Big businesses are all benefiting from the gov't money. From gov't bail outs. From gov't subsidies. From gov't protection racket. From gov't contracts. From gov't regulations that price out any new competition (and make competition directly illegal in many cases).

    WHY would you think such a nonsensical thing at all if you were intelligent? Did you know that the Fed was set up by Rockefeller and JP Morgan, because they clearly understood something you do not? That the best way to have monopolies is to get free money from gov't, who must just be able to print it?

    I am out of words for stupidity displayed by so many people including yours.

  12. Re:Move to quantified data on Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street · · Score: 0

    It doesn't have to be regulations to do this. That's a false choice.

    If gov't regulations AND all gov't subsidies AND all gov't protections to people and to banks AND all gov't involvement into economy was completely removed from banking and investments, then there would have been PLENTY of choice for you to trade only with houses that do either manual transactions or set up self imposed rules.

    Today's trading houses are all automatic, the HFT has killed the market for retail customer.

    Nobody personally CAN compete with machines, running 1000-5000 discovery transactions a second, that's impossible. You can ride the coat-tails for a while if you are lucky, but you can't win.

    Today the banks and hedge funds are so heavily regulated, that no new ones can come into the market, and the existing ones are so entrenched and so much subsidized and are controlling the system from top down that you can't compete with them on anything, including the lobbying which sets the anti-competitive regulations.

    You can't compete with existing banks - that's a problem CREATED by the gov't. That's why the gov't even exists today - to ensure that nobody can compete with gov't subsidized monopolies.

    Get rid of gov't from all aspects of economy and stand back and watch how the real free market works, which would mean people would have to be actually responsible for their investments, for the choice of bank (if there is no FDIC, there is no moral hazard), for the choice of trading house.

    I imagine that immediately there would be competition in trading houses, where some of them would provide a choice to trade with only humans without machines.

  13. Re:China the new global superpower, and US decline on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 1

    In 19 century the slavery was already mostly gone, and didn't you forget a little thing called the Civil War?

    19 century created the wealth, put the country on the map, brought US dollar up in value by a factor of 2, created an economy everybody was jealous of for another century almost, created enough wealth so that even WITHOUT the slave labor the US was still the wealthiest country in the world.

    The wealth created in the 19 century actually was instrumental in providing the freedoms to people - to slaves, to women, to children, all of that was only possible because the wealth was increasing so rapidly.

    Most of the wealth increased after the Civil war of-course, but much of it had to do with the beginning of industrialization in early 18 hundreds.

  14. Re:China the new global superpower, and US decline on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 1

    Show me in the US Constitution where does it say it is gov'ts job to do anything at all beyond protecting the freedoms and liberties and making sure that the justice system works.

    On the other hand, it's exactly about the politicians and their rich buddies cracking the Constitution and figuring out ways to rob the economy of its wealth, which was created during the most free times in US history - 19 century, when people were free to do business and created the most prosperous country, dollar went up in value by a factor of 2, prices were falling, new innovations were springing up, society was improving exactly due to all this new wealth that was generated, all privately.

    The gov't together with some of the big business guys, who despise the free market, with all the competition it brings, they found a way to abuse the Constitution of USA and found a way to ensure they have monopolies, they can print money, they can be bailed out, they can have free of interest money, they can have gov't projects, they can have all the regulations that kill competition etc.etc.

    All of that done with changes to the Constitution or just by not even looking at it when coming up with all the bills.

    There should be no bills, all the bills past 1913 should be abolished, FED, IRS, FDIC, SS, IE, price fixing, wage fixing, Fannie/Freddie, all insurance programs, all corporate welfare programs, every single thing that US gov't has done since the 1913 is responsible for destruction of the greatest economy on the planet and for the loss of all the freedoms people had in USA.

  15. Re:China the new global superpower, and US decline on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 2

    USA was able to keep that up for a century, back in 19th, so why did that stop? Because the gov't found a way to crack around the Constitution and destroy foundation of the US principles.

  16. Re:China the new global superpower, and US decline on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 1

    No. What is really needed is to get rid of the tight grip of the government from the neck of industry.

    While in 19 century the US has achieved an unprecedented economic jump, became the dominant world power and couldn't be surpassed in economic output by anybody, the 20 century became the USs Achilles heel - the gov't has firmly put its boot on the throat of private sector economy and has taken over.

    First JP Morgan and Rockefeller made sure that US gov't sets up the Federal reserve, and then it was it. Once the federal gov't was funded by a money printing institution, it was over. The gov't grew, the income taxes were introduced to make it grow even more. Eventually the US gov't caused the recession of 1920. Fortunately for US (and for the last time in its history for now) a sane president was in control - Hardin, who cut gov't spending by 70% and allowed economy to restructure, and it did within 1 year.

    Next time the gov't caused a collapse was in 1929, but it learned that it didn't like spending cuts, so instead it printed ever more money, started gov't projects and caused the Great Depression.

    Only ending of the WWII allowed US to become the economic super power again, because all other countries had their manufacturing base destroyed for a while, so US's working class grew and their salaries grew simply because there was all this capital that US had, that wasn't destroyed in the war and at the same time US dollar became the reserve currency, which allowed USA to export inflation to other countries.

    Now finally, China is learning that it makes no sense to prop up US consumer. Obviously the US debt will NOT be repaid in sound money - US will rather destroy its currency and pay in funny money or will not pay, but it's not possible for USA to pay back its debt, US lost all the capital needed for production due to its gov'ts grip on the neck of the producer.

    Obviously China now is much more capitalistic in reality than USA, China now is what USA was in 19 century and USA now is what all empires were before they collapsed.

    It's NOT more gov't and protectionism that's needed. It's sound economics that's needed, and for that the gov't has to be stopped.

    IRS, FED, FDIC, Freddie/Fannie, all regulations, starting with Patriot Act and going into all gov't institutions - EPA, FDA, FAA, FCC, CIA etc.etc., all of those need to be disbanded.

    US gov't must stop interfering with private enterprise, it must stop consuming all of the credit, it must stop destroying the US currency, it must stop doing everything.

    Its only job is minimum military and justice system, everything else it must be stopped from doing.

    That's the only way to SAVE the US economy, nothing short of that will do it.

  17. On FF block pop up windows on MS Asks Google To Delay Fuzzer Tool · · Score: 1

    Didn't work for me until I turned off the 'block pop-up windows' in Tools-Options-Content.

    So I'll keep that window pop-up blocker turned on I guess.

  18. Re:Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    Japan made a fatal mistake of listening to dunce-cretins like Bernanke and devaluing their currency in the 90s to subsidize the worthless US consumer (worthless in a sense, that US is paying for the consumer goods with money it gets on credit from the producer nations, rather than with produced goods.)

    China is still doing this, but they are waking up. They are starting to diversify from US debt and US will find itself on a brink of a complete societal collapse once China is no longer buying and holding US bonds but is dumping them and US monetizes all of its debt.

    IF the West imposes tariffs on Chinese goods, guess what the Chinese will do: they will stop importing them into the West. But at the same time they will stop pegging their currency to US dollar, pushing their currency lower as US prints more and more money.

    Guess what?! China has more than enough customers INSIDE China to buy all of the goods China produces.

    Guess what?! The West has lost so much capital (investment/factories) to Asia that it will take the West decades to rebuild all that capital, and it has NO SAVINGS! So what is it going to rebuild it with? The standard monetary policy of the West is to print money. This does not translate into capital, it translates into inflation and loss of purchasing power. It ONLY works as long as other nations, that are producer nations and are importing goods into the West are WILLING to peg their currencies to the currencies of the West.

    In short:

    China does NOT NEED USA (and other Western countries) to consume the products China produces.

    USA NEEDS CHINA to produce and import the cheap goods.

    The tariffs will only hurt the countries that are setting them, not the producers.

    Whatever you think about the problems that China has in housing, the other countries have much more of a problem with this.

    Should China stop pegging their currency to the currencies of the West, the Chinese all of a sudden become MUCH richer and all of a sudden they can afford all of those houses, which will become cheaper in real terms.

    Guess what also, if China stops pegging their currency to the West, their currency will SKYROCKET and US and other Western nations will LOSE even MORE capital, as everybody will buy Chinese currency and push all of their savings into Chinese banks.

    --

    It's over for the West, and the reason for this problem is the kind of life the people now think they are owed by their respective societies. There is no way to have all the economic 'justice' and not to pay the ultimate price of a collapsed state for it.

  19. Re:Funny on Replacing Traditional Storage, Databases With In-Memory Analytics · · Score: 1

    But but but, you are missing the point. Can 2 postmasters access the same disk, one to read from it only and the other one to do writes?

    If that was possible, then 2 postmasters could be on one machine, each on its own processor/memory or on 2 machines with the data directory mapped to both. The answer from the PostgreSQL guys in the IRC channel was that it's not possible, because all postmasters end up writing SOMETHING to the data directory, maybe those are just XLOGs, but they will write something and will screw each other up.

    That's why the answer to this question is to replicate the database and have one for read only with huge RAM and the other for writing, and stream-replicate the write DB to read only DB through XLOG file pushing.

  20. It's funny that only today I chatted with some folks on the PostgreSQL IRC support channel about this, asking whether it is at all possible to have 2 postmasters running at the same time, one to do in memory SQL against an all-in-memory database, and the other to write to the database (and no, they think that it is not possible to have 2 postmasters talking to the same database this way, they believe it will corrupt the data). The suggestion was just to increase shared_buffers and file system block buffer size. I am thinking that maybe also it's useful to try and set up the streaming replication (xlog shipping) to another PostgreSQL database store/instance and use the other database as read only, then increase shared_buffers and OS disk block buffers.

    Don't really know whether there is any significant advantage of one approach over another (except for having 2 databases of-course, so they become spares.)

  21. Re:US is Nazi Germany Times 2. on 'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida? · · Score: 1

    Maybe you are not singling out Jews and Gays (though I am not even sure on these two), but you are singling out Muslims and Mexicans. Yes, the dirty Muslims and the dirty Mexicans, who are clearly not people (based on 9/11 response and based on Arizona and other laws). And to think, you only now have repealed the DADT and some blacks were hung on trees only half a century ago.

  22. Re:Considering that they have tied their money ... on EU Wants Power To Block China's Tech Buying · · Score: 1

    Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!! :)

    You made me laugh too hard.

    QE2 is 'designed' to do WHAT? :)))))))

    QE2 is an admission that US debt is no longer attractive to the foreign buyers, that the long terms interest rates are going up and cannot be controlled by Fed set short term interest rates, that inflation is rampant.

    QE2 is the Fed being the lender of last resort to the US federal government. QE2 is an admission that US federal government is bankrupt.

    I fully expect that this spring bonds of US municipalities will be also in the same trouble and there will be some sort of QE3 to buy back US muni bonds.

    QE2 is a disaster and if it has anything to do with China, it's that China is waking up and it's no longer interested in both financing US debt and providing US with goods to be bought with the Chinese financed debt.

    QE2 is a consequence of a failed fiscal and monetary policy and of a failed government.

  23. DDOS it on One Tip Enough To Put Name On Terrorist Watch List · · Score: 1

    Well, this just makes it possible to DDOS the entire thing. What, there are over 300 million people in USA, right? So how hard is it to build a script to just iterate over all those people and submit tips on all of them?

    Do it in a distributed way and once everybody is on the list only the people who are not on it will look suspicious.

  24. Re:hairs in vacuum on Periodic Table Etched Onto a Single Hair · · Score: 1

    so, and with all the hair, put a bunch of atoms on each hair (a bunch, which would be readable with that microscope they used, thus at micron level, with each element being 4 microns across (4/1000000 of a meter across), place a table like that on each hair, you have quite a few. You can go ahead and calculate how many hairs the guy has and how many 4 micron Uraniums and Thoriums and Plutoniums and Americiums he would have.

  25. Re:hairs in vacuum on Periodic Table Etched Onto a Single Hair · · Score: 1

    That's why I said put a bunch of atoms for each element on each hair he has. Don't have to stop at only the head either...