Fair enough, provided that funding for repairs is *guaranteed* meaning that even if a catastrophe is due to gross negligence or intentional sabotage, some combination of insurance and company liquidation will still cover it.
Sure, but allow the insurance company to sue the oil company for the damage afterwards if they can prove negligence or intentional sabotage. The cleanup will be paid, and the culpable parties will be punished (eventually, if culpability can be proved).
And that the insurance company has to be able to cover their liabilities even if several unrelated catastrophes occur in the same bad year.
That's already a problem with insurance now, and it is handled by reinsurance. If the probability of oil spills are not linked (and I don't think they are, but please enlighten me if I am wrong), it shouldn't drive up the price of insurance too much.
[...]we'd be siphoning a pretty huge amount of money out of the system, so I don't know that it would actually improve anything.
Don't think of it as siphoning, think of it as paying to a reserve that covers the cleanup of any spill. Sure, there will be an overhead, but putting all of the money needed in a reserve from day one would result in opportunity cost, so I don't think it will be much more expensive (assuming functioning markets in the insurance business, but between companies, I don't think that's much of a stretch).
As the AC said, you are interpreting the frequentistic concept of p-value in a Bayesian framework. I think it says something about frequentistic probability theory that its most famous concept is confusing except if it is explained in an incompatible framework.
Three sigma. As in.001 probability that the null hypothesis is true despite our sample observation.
No, 0.001 probability that we would observe this, or worse, if the zero hypothesis were true. In order for it to tell anything about the probability of the null hypothesis being true, you need to include the probability of the null hypothesis being true before we made the observation.
The oil in the ground is undigested because there is no oxygen present, not because it takes a long time to digest it. n-alkanes, some of the most abundant compounds in oil, are the ones that are eaten first by bacteria once the oil is in the environment.
No corporation may engage in any activity in which the costs of repairing any public/environmental/etc. damage from a worst-case scenario cannot be covered by liquidating company assets.
This will severely restrict the number of companies who can work in any given field, leading to lack of competition and all of the inefficiencies that follows from that.
Why not allow the companies to take out insurance for such events? That would (ideally) make the payment scale directly with the risk of failure, so that new companies can start a small operation without massive investments, and so that companies that have bad policies are punished for having the bad policies, not for the failures that these policies cause.
The problem with this strategy is that you are restricting who can realistically go into the petroleum business, and thus restricting the competition. Perhaps forcing the companies to have a insurance to pay for cleaning up would be better? That would scale with the size of the operation, so it wouldn't force a oligopoly, while companies that did too little to safeguard their operation would be punished by higher insurance rates.
This was in regard to an exchange, in which case there will be a paper trail. And while you are right that it would be a bad idea to try and get the police to help you get Bitcoins you have hidden from the IRS back, the same would be the case for ordinary money, or art, or anything else.
However, if it isn't "real" currency, thefts and/or fraud will not be investigated by law enforcement agencies.
It will not be covered by the same, harsh, laws as "real" money is covered by, but I see no reason for why it should not covered by ordinary fraud laws. If I pay Blizzard for a years worth of WoW access, and they stop supplying it after 3 months, will the courts not help me? They don't owe me money, but they have still broken a contract. Why is a Bitcoin exchange any different?
Some vegans would argue that they do: The honey is supposed to be their winter food store, and we harvest it and replace it with sugary water or syrup. From WP:
Neither the Vegan Society nor the American Vegan Society considers the use of honey, silk or other insect products to be suitable for vegans, while Vegan Action and Vegan Outreach regard it as a matter of personal choice
Great, an example of flammable water where they actually have established that something has changed. This puts it leaps and bounds beyond most such claims.
However "the amount has changed" is not a proof that it is caused by fracking (correlation and causation and all that). It would be pretty easy to measure the amount of C-14 in the water, which would immediately tell whether it is old methane or methane from recent biodegradation. Until such a test has been performed, this goes in the "interesting, but not conclusive" category.
It is quite often one of the problems of medical papers. People are different, and you can always find another way to split up the groups. What if you only look at males? Aged 20-30? Who eats a moderate amount of broccoli? Furthermore, there are a lot of diseases that people can have, so if you are doing a observational study, even eating multivitamins doesn't change the incidence of cancer in 20-30 year old males who eat a moderate amount of broccoli, what about the incidence of ear cancer? In the right ear?
Seems to be flattening out now that Mt Gox is allowing withdrawals again. I think it'll come back up now - until the next bad news story, just like any other currency:-)
So it does. Well, and dropping again, now. But that is to be expected, and I agree that it will at least stabilize soon.
With regards to the bubble, more than a doubling in price within a month seems to predate most large falls in Bitcoin, so I will consider that a sign of a bubble. From the November 1st to December 1st, the price had pentupled.
The declaration from China came in the middle of a bubble. In my analysis (yay, random internet guy analysis), it seems as if that drop was not because of any direct impact of the declaration, but simply came because enough people knew it was in a bubble and was simply waiting to sell as soon the bubble seemed to burst. The declaration acted as a signal for the end of the bubble.
IIRC, the brightest man-made electromagnetic sources are over-the-horizon radars. I think the use of them will drop off much slower than the use of RF for information. The signal will show a 24 hour cycle due to the rotation of the earth. That means that the detecting intelligent life on Earth will be possible for a longer time, though deciphering messages will not be possible.
Great, so now, in stead of choosing 5 random words from the dictionary for a password, which I would be able to remember after a week of use, I now have to keep my password written down within reach of my computer for months, after which I will probably have to change the password, and go through the process again. So in stead of having a somewhat safe system, I now have a completely unsafe system. Oh, and my password space has gotten much smaller, because your system is already far too big a burden without me having a password longer than absolutely necessary.
Assuming you are talking about Chinas move in the start of December, Bitcoin was clearly in a bubble at the time (the price had risen a factor of 6 in a month). Bubbles are notoriously vulnerable to any signal of the end of the bubble, so we really can't say that this behavior is general. Do we have any non-bubble examples of substantial, sustained drops in the value of Bitcoin following government intervention? Just to put some concrete numbers on the concepts, let's say a bubble is when the price have more than doubled in a month, a substantial drop is more than 20%, and it is sustained if the drop is still there a week later (but feel free to criticize these numbers).
This raises the questions whether there is a correlation, and if there is, what the causation is. Is it the violence and the abuse that leads to people being criminal, or is that merely an indicator of people coming from the social classes who have the least to lose by becoming criminals (or is there some other possibility that I am missing)?
[...]#4 are not sufficient for picking an OS that gets no security updates, especially when there's readily-available alternatives that don't have this problem, and have free licensing to boot.
Is there alternatives out there that can run every XP program? Especially considering that legacy software is bound to be error-ridden and badly coded.
If there isn't, couldn't you easily be in the position that running XP is the least unreasonable possibility? Though I suppose a virtual machine running XP is marginally better from a security perspective.
The problem is that moving information faster than the speed of light in a relativistic universe is equivalent to having an effect precede its cause, i.e. breaking causality. Or, more succinctly, {causality, relativity, FTL}, pick two.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't (at least) the h-index exclude you own citations? So you have to get somebody to cite your paper in a paper you are not coauthoring.
Fair enough, provided that funding for repairs is *guaranteed* meaning that even if a catastrophe is due to gross negligence or intentional sabotage, some combination of insurance and company liquidation will still cover it.
Sure, but allow the insurance company to sue the oil company for the damage afterwards if they can prove negligence or intentional sabotage. The cleanup will be paid, and the culpable parties will be punished (eventually, if culpability can be proved).
And that the insurance company has to be able to cover their liabilities even if several unrelated catastrophes occur in the same bad year.
That's already a problem with insurance now, and it is handled by reinsurance. If the probability of oil spills are not linked (and I don't think they are, but please enlighten me if I am wrong), it shouldn't drive up the price of insurance too much.
[...]we'd be siphoning a pretty huge amount of money out of the system, so I don't know that it would actually improve anything.
Don't think of it as siphoning, think of it as paying to a reserve that covers the cleanup of any spill. Sure, there will be an overhead, but putting all of the money needed in a reserve from day one would result in opportunity cost, so I don't think it will be much more expensive (assuming functioning markets in the insurance business, but between companies, I don't think that's much of a stretch).
As the AC said, you are interpreting the frequentistic concept of p-value in a Bayesian framework. I think it says something about frequentistic probability theory that its most famous concept is confusing except if it is explained in an incompatible framework.
Three sigma. As in .001 probability that the null hypothesis is true despite our sample observation.
No, 0.001 probability that we would observe this, or worse, if the zero hypothesis were true. In order for it to tell anything about the probability of the null hypothesis being true, you need to include the probability of the null hypothesis being true before we made the observation.
The oil in the ground is undigested because there is no oxygen present, not because it takes a long time to digest it. n-alkanes, some of the most abundant compounds in oil, are the ones that are eaten first by bacteria once the oil is in the environment.
No corporation may engage in any activity in which the costs of repairing any public/environmental/etc. damage from a worst-case scenario cannot be covered by liquidating company assets.
This will severely restrict the number of companies who can work in any given field, leading to lack of competition and all of the inefficiencies that follows from that.
Why not allow the companies to take out insurance for such events? That would (ideally) make the payment scale directly with the risk of failure, so that new companies can start a small operation without massive investments, and so that companies that have bad policies are punished for having the bad policies, not for the failures that these policies cause.
The problem with this strategy is that you are restricting who can realistically go into the petroleum business, and thus restricting the competition. Perhaps forcing the companies to have a insurance to pay for cleaning up would be better? That would scale with the size of the operation, so it wouldn't force a oligopoly, while companies that did too little to safeguard their operation would be punished by higher insurance rates.
This was in regard to an exchange, in which case there will be a paper trail. And while you are right that it would be a bad idea to try and get the police to help you get Bitcoins you have hidden from the IRS back, the same would be the case for ordinary money, or art, or anything else.
However, if it isn't "real" currency, thefts and/or fraud will not be investigated by law enforcement agencies.
It will not be covered by the same, harsh, laws as "real" money is covered by, but I see no reason for why it should not covered by ordinary fraud laws. If I pay Blizzard for a years worth of WoW access, and they stop supplying it after 3 months, will the courts not help me? They don't owe me money, but they have still broken a contract. Why is a Bitcoin exchange any different?
Neither the Vegan Society nor the American Vegan Society considers the use of honey, silk or other insect products to be suitable for vegans, while Vegan Action and Vegan Outreach regard it as a matter of personal choice
Especially, flammable tap water.
Great, an example of flammable water where they actually have established that something has changed. This puts it leaps and bounds beyond most such claims.
However "the amount has changed" is not a proof that it is caused by fracking (correlation and causation and all that). It would be pretty easy to measure the amount of C-14 in the water, which would immediately tell whether it is old methane or methane from recent biodegradation. Until such a test has been performed, this goes in the "interesting, but not conclusive" category.
It is quite often one of the problems of medical papers. People are different, and you can always find another way to split up the groups. What if you only look at males? Aged 20-30? Who eats a moderate amount of broccoli? Furthermore, there are a lot of diseases that people can have, so if you are doing a observational study, even eating multivitamins doesn't change the incidence of cancer in 20-30 year old males who eat a moderate amount of broccoli, what about the incidence of ear cancer? In the right ear?
Seems to be flattening out now that Mt Gox is allowing withdrawals again. I think it'll come back up now - until the next bad news story, just like any other currency :-)
So it does. Well, and dropping again, now. But that is to be expected, and I agree that it will at least stabilize soon.
With regards to the bubble, more than a doubling in price within a month seems to predate most large falls in Bitcoin, so I will consider that a sign of a bubble. From the November 1st to December 1st, the price had pentupled.
The declaration from China came in the middle of a bubble. In my analysis (yay, random internet guy analysis), it seems as if that drop was not because of any direct impact of the declaration, but simply came because enough people knew it was in a bubble and was simply waiting to sell as soon the bubble seemed to burst. The declaration acted as a signal for the end of the bubble.
Oh, and it seems to keep dropping.
Since you can't really image too frequently by MRI, CT, etc. due to exposure limits,
There are exposure limits to MRI? Why? I can see it being too costly to do frequently, but I don't see how it could affect the patient.
IIRC, the brightest man-made electromagnetic sources are over-the-horizon radars. I think the use of them will drop off much slower than the use of RF for information. The signal will show a 24 hour cycle due to the rotation of the earth. That means that the detecting intelligent life on Earth will be possible for a longer time, though deciphering messages will not be possible.
Great, so now, in stead of choosing 5 random words from the dictionary for a password, which I would be able to remember after a week of use, I now have to keep my password written down within reach of my computer for months, after which I will probably have to change the password, and go through the process again. So in stead of having a somewhat safe system, I now have a completely unsafe system. Oh, and my password space has gotten much smaller, because your system is already far too big a burden without me having a password longer than absolutely necessary.
Assuming that the distribution the data points have is reasonably well-behaved.
[T]he only battery I think I have that is more than one cell is the one in the smoke alarm.
What about lead-acid car batteries? Or lithium batteries for your computer?
Assuming you are talking about Chinas move in the start of December, Bitcoin was clearly in a bubble at the time (the price had risen a factor of 6 in a month). Bubbles are notoriously vulnerable to any signal of the end of the bubble, so we really can't say that this behavior is general. Do we have any non-bubble examples of substantial, sustained drops in the value of Bitcoin following government intervention? Just to put some concrete numbers on the concepts, let's say a bubble is when the price have more than doubled in a month, a substantial drop is more than 20%, and it is sustained if the drop is still there a week later (but feel free to criticize these numbers).
This raises the questions whether there is a correlation, and if there is, what the causation is. Is it the violence and the abuse that leads to people being criminal, or is that merely an indicator of people coming from the social classes who have the least to lose by becoming criminals (or is there some other possibility that I am missing)?
[...]#4 are not sufficient for picking an OS that gets no security updates, especially when there's readily-available alternatives that don't have this problem, and have free licensing to boot.
Is there alternatives out there that can run every XP program? Especially considering that legacy software is bound to be error-ridden and badly coded.
If there isn't, couldn't you easily be in the position that running XP is the least unreasonable possibility? Though I suppose a virtual machine running XP is marginally better from a security perspective.
You have to register it to get your license plate, and you have to pay taxes whaen you get it (100% of the value of the car, to be exact).
Is it Godwinning the thread to point out that the nazies made the same mistake when designing the Enigma protocol?
The problem is that moving information faster than the speed of light in a relativistic universe is equivalent to having an effect precede its cause, i.e. breaking causality. Or, more succinctly, {causality, relativity, FTL}, pick two.