It's one of the many sexist pathologies of English that the male third person pronoun is used to indicate a generic third person.
I know. It's extremely sexist against men. Women get their own, unambiguous pronoun, while us men have to settle for "he" which could be referring to a woman. Stop the sexism, give men their own unambiguous pronoun.
Assuming that a visible laser dot means you are being targeted by somebody with a laser sight is Hollywood nonsense. I really doubt any judge/jury would accept that as justification for shooting first. There are assholes all over the place shining lasers in places where they shouldn't, we can't just go around blowing them all away, much as we might wish to.
What is private enterprise going to do when some jackass starts spewing noise all over a chunk of spectrum? Hire the mafia to take care of it? Send a mob with pitchforks and torches to tear down the antennas? When I get pissed off at you and decide to park a van on top of a nearby hill and blast your house with cellphone signal, completely destroying your ability to make calls, who are you going to turn to? Batman?
Uhh, can't that just outsource it? (To another agency, not India) How often does the FCC allocate spectrum? It seems like a rather rare event. Why keep those folks on FCC payroll?
The works were never released. What you are asking is the equivalent of breaking into my private residence and gaining access to my grandfather's diaries. They were copyrighted by him the moment he wrote them, and that copyright is now expired. But you can't have them. No sir, fuck off.
Didn't you just enumerate some of the intrinsic values of gold, thus rendering your final sentence ludicrous?
No. Do YOU require gold to have those properties? Is gold valuable to you because of its ductility, or is it valuable because you can trade it to somebody else? The fact is, most people have no use for the special physical properties of gold. It is only valuable because other people believe it is valuable as well, and thus forms a basis for currency. Or to put it another way, imagine you were the last person left on Earth and you had a million tons of gold. Would that be valuable to you? That's what I mean by "intrinsic value." If you were some kind of freak who likes to live all alone on a planet making really, really thin wires, then sure, gold would have value to you. Otherwise it would be a useless chunk of pretty metal.
The value is conjured up in people's minds. It is not intrinsic to the gold itself. My point is that saying that gold is somehow a more "concrete" embodiment of value than alternate currencies is false. It's just as much "all in your head" as the value of the Euro is all in your head. Now, a gold standard might prove to be more STABLE, for various reasons, but that doesn't make it more "intrinsic."
The problem is that the information remains in your head after you've read the book. The knowledge contained therein was purchased once and spread to many people. This seems to be a horrifying thing to some extremely deranged people.
Unfortunately, we're in the minority. Another decade or so and privacy as we understand it will be a baffling concept to almost everyone in the United States and probably most other places. We'll be considered, in the best case, quaint old geezers -- in the worst case, the most pernicious enemies of the state to ever exist, people who need to be eradicated.
Ignore me, I'm wrong. Even though the fraction approaches 1 to arbitrary closeness, the difference in path length between Sun-to-you and Sun-to-Earth-to-you is still always at least 8 minutes. However, I would posit that a difference in path length of 8 minutes is "nothing" in a RELATIVE sense, relative to the total time it takes the light to reach your eye. Feh.
Actually, you would not witness an 8 minute delay, depending exactly how far you are from the solar system. Suppose you are a distance X AU from the Sun. The Earth is 1 AU from the sun. Suppose you're positioned such that you, the Sun, and the Earth form a right triangle. The distance along the hypotenuse (the distance between Earth and you) is sqrt(X^2+1) AU. The total distance from Sun-to-Earth-to-you is the time it takes for the last sunlight from the dying sun to reach your eye.
Obviously, the difference in time between you seeing the Sun blinking out, and seeing the Earth start flying off on a tangent to its prior orbit, is related to the fraction X/(1+sqrt(X^2+1)). As X (the distance you are from the sun) gets larger and larger, this value approaches 1. In other words, if you were far away enough, you'd see everything happening essentially at once. It's not really that weird.
When you move something and it appears that all of its parts move in unison, this is just an illusion. The displacement you create propagates at the speed of sound in that material. This speed is fast enough that for everyday objects of everyday scales, it looks like the entire object reacts to your disturbance immediately, but it just isn't true.
I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.
You do realize that you CAN see this information, don't you? Go to, for instance, Google finance. Type in a ticker symbol. Scroll down to the "Officers and directors" section. Click on somebody's name. See that "Bio and compensation" link? Click that.
This crap is all required to be reported by the SEC for exactly the reason you are conjuring up here. Chill out. As for anybody who isn't an officer or director of a publicly traded corporation, no, you do NOT have any business knowing that person's compensation level. If you think otherwise, why don't you start the ball rolling by posting your full name and salary in response to this comment?
their currency is just as virtual as online virtual currency -- it has no actual intrinsic value.
Neither does real gold, unless you happen to need to make really really thin wires, or build something which is extremely reflective, or actually make use of gold's natural properties in some other way. Don't delude yourself. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value."
It was never intended as a competing currency. The government has, after the fact, DECLARED that it is equivalent to real currency. You cannot, in most sane countries, be prosecuted for something you did before it was a crime. And if the intention of the government was to make virtual currency illegal, they could have just declared it so, rather than saying it's the same as real currency. Obviously the intention is to be able to tax transactions made in game worlds with actual tax.
Of course, since the two currencies have been declared equivalent, I don't see why I couldn't just pay my taxes in virtual gold. They're the same thing right?
Only a third? That's even less than I was thinking. They certainly have no way of justifying the purchase of a wireless phone manufacturer. Thanks for enhancing my point for me.
Regardless of this particular tissy, the idea that Apple would be interested in owning any significant portion of Nokia is laughable. Unless the iPhone starts making up an ENORMOUS chunk of their business, it just isn't explainable to the shareholders why Apple, a computer company ever since its inception, has become a major owner of a company whose purpose is the manufacturing of a wide variety of wireless phones. It doesn't make sense (although it could in the future, I don't think we're anywhere near that at this point)
Innovations per person-year. One person, working for one year, to produce one innovation, is a single "point." This accurately reflects the costs of employing multiple inventors and also the time it takes to produce the innovation.
Using this as a baseline for calculation, you can compute revenue per share per innovation point, which, for a privately held company, is proportional to revenue / employees / ( innovation / employee / year ) == revenue * year / innovation. Assuming that a year's worth of development is roughly equivalent between companies, this means that what you are looking for is the amount of revenue per innovation. On its face, this seems to imply that longer patent terms are preferable since they maximize the revenue derived from each innovation before competition intervenes. Some other argument is necessary to show that shorter patent terms are beneficial to the inventors. For the inventors, fiscally, it's really hard to make a case for shorter patent terms.
The social benefit of innovation is a different story, which can't be so easily encoded in a simple equation. I think we need to look to countries where, on the whole, inventor satisfaction and public satisfaction are both in a reasonable balance, and emulate whatever that system happens to be. There's just no way to define it any more concretely than that.
I always value words from the wise. Thanks for replying in the context of your much longer experience without jumping down my throat. I appreciate it, it's not common here.
Consider Bangladesh. Moving to higher ground, in that instance, pretty much means moving to other countries. Even if it happens over a period of years, they're going to end up compressed into a tiny strip of land along their borders. How are they supposed to deal with this? Do you think the neighboring nations will just accept an influx of 160 million people?
I'm not disputing that there's no need to remember a hell of a lot of things. Hell, I can never even remember the order of arguments to fwrite() without looking it up. But quicksort, I think, is such an obvious and elegant thing once it's been properly explained that I'm really not sure WHY I would forget it. I've spent my professional career working mostly with PhD's and masters of engineering (don't have a masters or PhD myself) so perhaps my perceptions of what is reasonable are a bit skewed. I'll accept that.
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It's one of the many sexist pathologies of English that the male third person pronoun is used to indicate a generic third person.
I know. It's extremely sexist against men. Women get their own, unambiguous pronoun, while us men have to settle for "he" which could be referring to a woman. Stop the sexism, give men their own unambiguous pronoun.
Uh, I didn't say it shouldn't be illegal, I said it is not a justification for SHOOTING somebody.
Assuming that a visible laser dot means you are being targeted by somebody with a laser sight is Hollywood nonsense. I really doubt any judge/jury would accept that as justification for shooting first. There are assholes all over the place shining lasers in places where they shouldn't, we can't just go around blowing them all away, much as we might wish to.
And I should point out that your sarcasm detector appears to be faulty.
It's not faulty, it was just suffering unacceptable interference from an unshielded device
The Window console (cmd.exe) is a true-blue Windows program. It doesn't "emulate" anything. It is not DOS.
What is private enterprise going to do when some jackass starts spewing noise all over a chunk of spectrum? Hire the mafia to take care of it? Send a mob with pitchforks and torches to tear down the antennas? When I get pissed off at you and decide to park a van on top of a nearby hill and blast your house with cellphone signal, completely destroying your ability to make calls, who are you going to turn to? Batman?
Uhh, can't that just outsource it? (To another agency, not India) How often does the FCC allocate spectrum? It seems like a rather rare event. Why keep those folks on FCC payroll?
The works were never released. What you are asking is the equivalent of breaking into my private residence and gaining access to my grandfather's diaries. They were copyrighted by him the moment he wrote them, and that copyright is now expired. But you can't have them. No sir, fuck off.
Didn't you just enumerate some of the intrinsic values of gold, thus rendering your final sentence ludicrous?
No. Do YOU require gold to have those properties? Is gold valuable to you because of its ductility, or is it valuable because you can trade it to somebody else? The fact is, most people have no use for the special physical properties of gold. It is only valuable because other people believe it is valuable as well, and thus forms a basis for currency. Or to put it another way, imagine you were the last person left on Earth and you had a million tons of gold. Would that be valuable to you? That's what I mean by "intrinsic value." If you were some kind of freak who likes to live all alone on a planet making really, really thin wires, then sure, gold would have value to you. Otherwise it would be a useless chunk of pretty metal.
The value is conjured up in people's minds. It is not intrinsic to the gold itself. My point is that saying that gold is somehow a more "concrete" embodiment of value than alternate currencies is false. It's just as much "all in your head" as the value of the Euro is all in your head. Now, a gold standard might prove to be more STABLE, for various reasons, but that doesn't make it more "intrinsic."
The problem is that the information remains in your head after you've read the book. The knowledge contained therein was purchased once and spread to many people. This seems to be a horrifying thing to some extremely deranged people.
this is stupid....where do they come up with these "statistics" ? I'm thinking directly from their asses....cause that's what they are.
I vote this "Most Spectacular Missing Of The Point" for the month of January.
Unfortunately, we're in the minority. Another decade or so and privacy as we understand it will be a baffling concept to almost everyone in the United States and probably most other places. We'll be considered, in the best case, quaint old geezers -- in the worst case, the most pernicious enemies of the state to ever exist, people who need to be eradicated.
Ignore me, I'm wrong. Even though the fraction approaches 1 to arbitrary closeness, the difference in path length between Sun-to-you and Sun-to-Earth-to-you is still always at least 8 minutes. However, I would posit that a difference in path length of 8 minutes is "nothing" in a RELATIVE sense, relative to the total time it takes the light to reach your eye. Feh.
Actually, you would not witness an 8 minute delay, depending exactly how far you are from the solar system. Suppose you are a distance X AU from the Sun. The Earth is 1 AU from the sun. Suppose you're positioned such that you, the Sun, and the Earth form a right triangle. The distance along the hypotenuse (the distance between Earth and you) is sqrt(X^2+1) AU. The total distance from Sun-to-Earth-to-you is the time it takes for the last sunlight from the dying sun to reach your eye.
Obviously, the difference in time between you seeing the Sun blinking out, and seeing the Earth start flying off on a tangent to its prior orbit, is related to the fraction X/(1+sqrt(X^2+1)). As X (the distance you are from the sun) gets larger and larger, this value approaches 1. In other words, if you were far away enough, you'd see everything happening essentially at once. It's not really that weird.
When you move something and it appears that all of its parts move in unison, this is just an illusion. The displacement you create propagates at the speed of sound in that material. This speed is fast enough that for everyday objects of everyday scales, it looks like the entire object reacts to your disturbance immediately, but it just isn't true.
I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.
You do realize that you CAN see this information, don't you? Go to, for instance, Google finance. Type in a ticker symbol. Scroll down to the "Officers and directors" section. Click on somebody's name. See that "Bio and compensation" link? Click that.
This crap is all required to be reported by the SEC for exactly the reason you are conjuring up here. Chill out. As for anybody who isn't an officer or director of a publicly traded corporation, no, you do NOT have any business knowing that person's compensation level. If you think otherwise, why don't you start the ball rolling by posting your full name and salary in response to this comment?
It's not the parallax, it's the distance between your eyes which is wrong, you caveman!
their currency is just as virtual as online virtual currency -- it has no actual intrinsic value.
Neither does real gold, unless you happen to need to make really really thin wires, or build something which is extremely reflective, or actually make use of gold's natural properties in some other way. Don't delude yourself. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value."
It was never intended as a competing currency. The government has, after the fact, DECLARED that it is equivalent to real currency. You cannot, in most sane countries, be prosecuted for something you did before it was a crime. And if the intention of the government was to make virtual currency illegal, they could have just declared it so, rather than saying it's the same as real currency. Obviously the intention is to be able to tax transactions made in game worlds with actual tax.
Of course, since the two currencies have been declared equivalent, I don't see why I couldn't just pay my taxes in virtual gold. They're the same thing right?
Only a third? That's even less than I was thinking. They certainly have no way of justifying the purchase of a wireless phone manufacturer. Thanks for enhancing my point for me.
Regardless of this particular tissy, the idea that Apple would be interested in owning any significant portion of Nokia is laughable. Unless the iPhone starts making up an ENORMOUS chunk of their business, it just isn't explainable to the shareholders why Apple, a computer company ever since its inception, has become a major owner of a company whose purpose is the manufacturing of a wide variety of wireless phones. It doesn't make sense (although it could in the future, I don't think we're anywhere near that at this point)
Innovations per person-year. One person, working for one year, to produce one innovation, is a single "point." This accurately reflects the costs of employing multiple inventors and also the time it takes to produce the innovation.
Using this as a baseline for calculation, you can compute revenue per share per innovation point, which, for a privately held company, is proportional to revenue / employees / ( innovation / employee / year ) == revenue * year / innovation. Assuming that a year's worth of development is roughly equivalent between companies, this means that what you are looking for is the amount of revenue per innovation. On its face, this seems to imply that longer patent terms are preferable since they maximize the revenue derived from each innovation before competition intervenes. Some other argument is necessary to show that shorter patent terms are beneficial to the inventors. For the inventors, fiscally, it's really hard to make a case for shorter patent terms.
The social benefit of innovation is a different story, which can't be so easily encoded in a simple equation. I think we need to look to countries where, on the whole, inventor satisfaction and public satisfaction are both in a reasonable balance, and emulate whatever that system happens to be. There's just no way to define it any more concretely than that.
I always value words from the wise. Thanks for replying in the context of your much longer experience without jumping down my throat. I appreciate it, it's not common here.
Consider Bangladesh. Moving to higher ground, in that instance, pretty much means moving to other countries. Even if it happens over a period of years, they're going to end up compressed into a tiny strip of land along their borders. How are they supposed to deal with this? Do you think the neighboring nations will just accept an influx of 160 million people?
I'm not disputing that there's no need to remember a hell of a lot of things. Hell, I can never even remember the order of arguments to fwrite() without looking it up. But quicksort, I think, is such an obvious and elegant thing once it's been properly explained that I'm really not sure WHY I would forget it. I've spent my professional career working mostly with PhD's and masters of engineering (don't have a masters or PhD myself) so perhaps my perceptions of what is reasonable are a bit skewed. I'll accept that.