The government is funded by our tax dollars and debt. Fundamentally they should have bank accounts, investments, etc. that store tax income and are then appropriate it however they see fit be it in the future, now, etc. If they take out debts, these debts probably have some repayment schedule and this is factored in. If they run out of finances, they will either A) Increase taxes B) Borrow more or C) Print money all of which must be accounted for in the future to avoid catastrophic failure.
I don't know what you mean about computers running out of numbers. They can easily run out of memory, which stores numbers in binary format, and they also have a limited precision of number they can use for calculation at each clock cycle. Fundamental CS deals with something called truncation and truncation error both of which are a result of the finite capacity of a machine to store numbers.
Well, when the government runs out of money it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe we will get real volunteer politicians in office that actually give a damn about anything other than ways they can screw the average American for their own benefit.
I agree with the spouse part. My wife is really bad about bothering me when I am working on something at home. She needs little chores done "right now" that could actually wait, or needs to discuss something that also could wait. Work actually feels like a break sometimes where I can be in silence and focus.
Exactly why a statistician or mathematician should be involved in creating metrics for things, rather than some idiot nutritionist that gets by with Math for Liberal Studies.
Except that by smoking they die earlier and cost less in care overall. Not to mention the smoker tax isn't even applied to health care at all. Its just a tax to add revenue to the fed and state budgets justified as a moral punishment of smokers.
Funny thing about that. Its been proven that overweight people are healthier than underweight people. Not obese, moderately overweight. Citation here : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4468001.stm . The fact of the matter is, humans are supposed to have some fat on them. It helps them weather famines and illness. If you are underweight you have a much higher chance of dieing from an illness simply because you have no energy reserves to fight it not to mention being skinny is a sign that you are not getting enough nutrients from a variety of foods. This whole shift towards "everyone must be skinny and obey the BMI" is a load of shit. BMI is the worst calculation for how healthy someone is. It assumes a linear relationship from weight to height and doesnt even consider muscle mass or other activities. Sumo wrestlers are some of the most healthy people in the world partly due to the intense workouts they do daily. They have little visceral fat, but mostly subcutaneous fat. Subcutaneous fat is more-or-less harmless but also the most noticeable and stigmatized. Its the first one (visceral fat) that causes big guts and all sorts of health problems.
The BMI is ridiculous. I used to work out all the time, had about a fluctuating 4-8 percent fat. I was rated in the upper limits of overweight bordering on obese. The problem is I am also tall. How many 6'4" people weigh 180 pounds? Come on. They used figures from short to average people and tried to linearly generalize it to everyone. The fact of the matter is, the bigger you are, the more muscle and bone you need to support your body structure so it ends up being more of a quadratic relationship. Its like they expect tall people to be bean poles. I never had any problems like your bodybuilder friends had, even though I was a borderline bodybuilder. I drank protien, creatine, worked out 6 days a week, etc. Bodybuilding is actually done at lower weights, so the injuries are mainly from overuse rather than acute sources like a powerlifter ripping a tendon. I never cut weight though so maybe thats what you meant. My worst injury was actually from being drunk and falling into a pit.
You've never drank Houston water apparently and had green stuff come out of your faucet. If I lived in Denver (and I will soon) I would agree with you, since their water is not chlorinated heavily and actually tastes like purified water.
Exclusivity is property. That's why tresspassing is forbidden, the owner has exclusive use of that land. It's not like I'm taking anything, and after I leave it looks exactly the same.
Except that trespassing is not property theft. Exclusivity is not property since its not owned anymore than you own the right to breath air.
That is ridiculous. The problem is that copyright is civil. If it were criminal, they would have non-fine options, like community service.
Credibility lost. Why is there criminal penalties for copyright infringement (i.e. up 250,000 fine and 5 years in prison per violation) if its only civil? You get a double whammy when they sue your ass in civil court for ridiculous sums of money that are hundreds of thousands of times in excess of the actual damages.
It would be like having a bunch of bards and probably successful composers would have wealthy patrons. Sounds like the renaissance. A lot of events have nothing to do with the recording industry. People would still want to go to Lollapalooza for example. As of right now, because of the recording industry people like me have no chance of releasing our music to people because the market is cornered. The bands that were the best would rise to the top and probably be selling their own CD's, and the ones that only stay afloat because of marketing would die off. Sounds awesome to me.
Its not a free market obviously. Capitalism is supposed to efficiently produce goods at the best price possible. Prices of distribution and production on media has dropped with technological advances, but the price remains the same? Thats an oligopoly friend. Capitalism is sold to us as the best and most efficient system whereby we all get wealthier together, yet it routinely creates fixed markets, creates binary classes of super-rich and super-poor, and monopolies/oligopolies. We were sold false promises.
Copying something that is digital is not stealing. Its violating copyright. You do not deprive the person of any property, so it cannot be stealing. Thats like saying that if I transcribe, by hand, a poem out of a book on a piece of paper to remember later then I stole the book. Or even worse, say I memorize a poem, take it home and write it down later, then I stole the book. Even photocopying an entire book and then leaving it at the book store is not stealing the book. Its violating copyright. Copyright law violations actually have worse punishments than shoplifting something of the same value. You don't get fined millions of dollars for stealing a CD, you get community service and a few hundred to a thousand in fines at worst (and maybe a week or so of jail time). Your almost better off stealing a CD from a store than downloading it from a torrent. You cannot tell me that this isn't ridiculous and retain any credibility at all.
If the rich people would stop bribing the feds for tax cuts they use to make more money (that they never use to pay for more employees) and instead be forced to use any tax breaks as raises for their workers or benefits for their workers and for hiring new workers we wouldn't have people pirating since they could afford things when they wanted them.
The real problem with this is that the musicians get an insignificant cut of their music because of the middle-man practice of the RIAA. If you cut out the middle man then the music would be more reasonably priced.
Its a marketing failure. When you have to choose between a bag of groceries and a DVD you usually pick groceries. Those that are really into the media they wanted will simply pirate it, since its easy. Not everyone has disposable income, as a matter of fact, most people in the US have limited disposable income because they get paid shit wages and have families to support. If they would lower the price on media, more people would buy it. However, the RIAA/MPAA doesnt want that, because they would make the same amount of money and also have no cause for making money off of lawsuits and middle man charges like the Amazon cloud. Steam has shown if you make things convenient, available to people anywhere at any time, available on multiple platforms, and sell it cheap (they do sales all the time) you will make big bucks. It doesn't matter if I need to have my Steam account available, I can go to any computer I want and have my games up and running in a few hours. Before Steam, I used to pirate games all the time because they either were A) Sold out at the store B) Simply not available at the store yet C) It took too long to find it after searching several different stores or D) I had to order online and wait for it to get shipped. It was easier to just get on Packetnews and download the game from a Bot and order it online if I liked the game later. If the music and movie industry would stop fighting innovation, and make things more convenient and extendable to the majority of platforms in use (Xbox 360, etc) then they would be making money. iTunes is a prime example of successful convenience. So far the movie industry is way, way behind; but Netflix is a step in the right direction.
Either way, the argument that piracy is damaging companies is a bunch of hooey. This theory (if you believe it) shows that you can either get everyone to buy media by reducing prices and this have less to no piracy, or you can make the same amount of money selling it to less people and have pirate markets. This basically means that the piracy litigation frenzy happening now is not to protect potential profits being lost, its to make additional profits from people that would never have bought it in the first place unless you changed your strategy. As far as I knew, courts were not meant to be a way to make money or open new markets based solely on lawsuits, its a way to have your rights protected, have justice, and maintain order.
The trouble is that 70 percent of people that get degrees get it in worthless disciplines like marketing or management. Management is basically common sense with basic business education thrown in. You only make a good manager if you would have been one without education anyway. Plenty of worthless managers have degrees in management, but have no common sense nor organizational skills. They would be better off getting some kind of hybrid degree between business law and accounting. At least then they could successfully handle something in business.
I still think kids should be forced to learn Algebra II and Trig unless they can show they have a mental disability that makes it impossible. There's no excuse to not know such easy math. Everyone has a brain for it, its just that some kids don't like math so they convince themselves they are bad at it. If you had any idea how much harder and more abstract mathematical topics exist in the world you would probably advocate them learning at least calculus in high school. I just about have an MS in Math and I haven't even scratched the surface of the knowledge that currently exists. Even PhDs in math don't know everything about math, they have to specialize in specific topics and wouldn't know much about topics two steps removed from their specialty (such as Numerical PDE's and Topology).
That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Police think twice about killing someone, since in court killing someone needs justification. However cops have less of a disincentive in their mind to beat someone, or tase someone, or pepper spray someone as long as they recover after. No need to explain that in court "I was just arresting a person who was resisting arrest". The fact of the matter is, humans were not meant to be electrocuted. We can withstand a beating from another human, or some pepper in our eyes, but human beings did not evolve near fields of Tesla coils or in realms of perpetual lightning storms. My friend was tased and charged with resisting arrest when he decided to run out a back window of a house with a party he was invited to when cops knocked on the front door. Mind you, he did not run out of the window when there was cops arresting people, or shouting at people. He was invited to the party by people who rented the house that were over 21. He did not know there would be underage drinkers at the time, but most college kids go to parties like this without incident and without harm to anyone. Without being warned that he was under arrest, a police officer hiding in a bush outside the window shot him with a taser. Later they charged him with resisting arrest and contributing to delinquency of minors. So a police officer can decide you are under arrest, say nothing about it to anyone, and tase you to subdue you, meanwhile charging you with "resisting arrest"? The other charge was bullshit too since he didn't buy alcohol for anyone, but lets leave that alone for the moment. I am ranting now, but Tasers are still bullshit.
I know. I actually read a few articles thinking, at first, it may be something worth reading to only get smacked in the face with an obvious prank. Now, I am not totally sure if this article is even serious or not. Boy who cried wolf.
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The government is funded by our tax dollars and debt. Fundamentally they should have bank accounts, investments, etc. that store tax income and are then appropriate it however they see fit be it in the future, now, etc. If they take out debts, these debts probably have some repayment schedule and this is factored in. If they run out of finances, they will either A) Increase taxes B) Borrow more or C) Print money all of which must be accounted for in the future to avoid catastrophic failure.
I don't know what you mean about computers running out of numbers. They can easily run out of memory, which stores numbers in binary format, and they also have a limited precision of number they can use for calculation at each clock cycle. Fundamental CS deals with something called truncation and truncation error both of which are a result of the finite capacity of a machine to store numbers.
Well, when the government runs out of money it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe we will get real volunteer politicians in office that actually give a damn about anything other than ways they can screw the average American for their own benefit.
It still is a great indication of whose interests the majority of the House representative actually serves. Corporations.
uhhh.... 7900? Does your car run on anti-matter?
You're wife sounds kind of selfish.
Thats a little judgmental. Maybe she just doesn't understand the fact that it takes time to get into concentration mode.
I agree with the spouse part. My wife is really bad about bothering me when I am working on something at home. She needs little chores done "right now" that could actually wait, or needs to discuss something that also could wait. Work actually feels like a break sometimes where I can be in silence and focus.
Exactly why a statistician or mathematician should be involved in creating metrics for things, rather than some idiot nutritionist that gets by with Math for Liberal Studies.
Except that by smoking they die earlier and cost less in care overall. Not to mention the smoker tax isn't even applied to health care at all. Its just a tax to add revenue to the fed and state budgets justified as a moral punishment of smokers.
Funny thing about that. Its been proven that overweight people are healthier than underweight people. Not obese, moderately overweight. Citation here : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4468001.stm . The fact of the matter is, humans are supposed to have some fat on them. It helps them weather famines and illness. If you are underweight you have a much higher chance of dieing from an illness simply because you have no energy reserves to fight it not to mention being skinny is a sign that you are not getting enough nutrients from a variety of foods. This whole shift towards "everyone must be skinny and obey the BMI" is a load of shit. BMI is the worst calculation for how healthy someone is. It assumes a linear relationship from weight to height and doesnt even consider muscle mass or other activities. Sumo wrestlers are some of the most healthy people in the world partly due to the intense workouts they do daily. They have little visceral fat, but mostly subcutaneous fat. Subcutaneous fat is more-or-less harmless but also the most noticeable and stigmatized. Its the first one (visceral fat) that causes big guts and all sorts of health problems.
The BMI is ridiculous. I used to work out all the time, had about a fluctuating 4-8 percent fat. I was rated in the upper limits of overweight bordering on obese. The problem is I am also tall. How many 6'4" people weigh 180 pounds? Come on. They used figures from short to average people and tried to linearly generalize it to everyone. The fact of the matter is, the bigger you are, the more muscle and bone you need to support your body structure so it ends up being more of a quadratic relationship. Its like they expect tall people to be bean poles. I never had any problems like your bodybuilder friends had, even though I was a borderline bodybuilder. I drank protien, creatine, worked out 6 days a week, etc. Bodybuilding is actually done at lower weights, so the injuries are mainly from overuse rather than acute sources like a powerlifter ripping a tendon. I never cut weight though so maybe thats what you meant. My worst injury was actually from being drunk and falling into a pit.
You've never drank Houston water apparently and had green stuff come out of your faucet. If I lived in Denver (and I will soon) I would agree with you, since their water is not chlorinated heavily and actually tastes like purified water.
Exclusivity is property. That's why tresspassing is forbidden, the owner has exclusive use of that land. It's not like I'm taking anything, and after I leave it looks exactly the same.
Except that trespassing is not property theft. Exclusivity is not property since its not owned anymore than you own the right to breath air.
That is ridiculous. The problem is that copyright is civil. If it were criminal, they would have non-fine options, like community service.
Credibility lost. Why is there criminal penalties for copyright infringement (i.e. up 250,000 fine and 5 years in prison per violation) if its only civil? You get a double whammy when they sue your ass in civil court for ridiculous sums of money that are hundreds of thousands of times in excess of the actual damages.
It would be like having a bunch of bards and probably successful composers would have wealthy patrons. Sounds like the renaissance. A lot of events have nothing to do with the recording industry. People would still want to go to Lollapalooza for example. As of right now, because of the recording industry people like me have no chance of releasing our music to people because the market is cornered. The bands that were the best would rise to the top and probably be selling their own CD's, and the ones that only stay afloat because of marketing would die off. Sounds awesome to me.
Its not a free market obviously. Capitalism is supposed to efficiently produce goods at the best price possible. Prices of distribution and production on media has dropped with technological advances, but the price remains the same? Thats an oligopoly friend. Capitalism is sold to us as the best and most efficient system whereby we all get wealthier together, yet it routinely creates fixed markets, creates binary classes of super-rich and super-poor, and monopolies/oligopolies. We were sold false promises.
Copying something that is digital is not stealing. Its violating copyright. You do not deprive the person of any property, so it cannot be stealing. Thats like saying that if I transcribe, by hand, a poem out of a book on a piece of paper to remember later then I stole the book. Or even worse, say I memorize a poem, take it home and write it down later, then I stole the book. Even photocopying an entire book and then leaving it at the book store is not stealing the book. Its violating copyright. Copyright law violations actually have worse punishments than shoplifting something of the same value. You don't get fined millions of dollars for stealing a CD, you get community service and a few hundred to a thousand in fines at worst (and maybe a week or so of jail time). Your almost better off stealing a CD from a store than downloading it from a torrent. You cannot tell me that this isn't ridiculous and retain any credibility at all.
If the rich people would stop bribing the feds for tax cuts they use to make more money (that they never use to pay for more employees) and instead be forced to use any tax breaks as raises for their workers or benefits for their workers and for hiring new workers we wouldn't have people pirating since they could afford things when they wanted them.
The real problem with this is that the musicians get an insignificant cut of their music because of the middle-man practice of the RIAA. If you cut out the middle man then the music would be more reasonably priced.
Its a marketing failure. When you have to choose between a bag of groceries and a DVD you usually pick groceries. Those that are really into the media they wanted will simply pirate it, since its easy. Not everyone has disposable income, as a matter of fact, most people in the US have limited disposable income because they get paid shit wages and have families to support. If they would lower the price on media, more people would buy it. However, the RIAA/MPAA doesnt want that, because they would make the same amount of money and also have no cause for making money off of lawsuits and middle man charges like the Amazon cloud. Steam has shown if you make things convenient, available to people anywhere at any time, available on multiple platforms, and sell it cheap (they do sales all the time) you will make big bucks. It doesn't matter if I need to have my Steam account available, I can go to any computer I want and have my games up and running in a few hours. Before Steam, I used to pirate games all the time because they either were A) Sold out at the store B) Simply not available at the store yet C) It took too long to find it after searching several different stores or D) I had to order online and wait for it to get shipped. It was easier to just get on Packetnews and download the game from a Bot and order it online if I liked the game later. If the music and movie industry would stop fighting innovation, and make things more convenient and extendable to the majority of platforms in use (Xbox 360, etc) then they would be making money. iTunes is a prime example of successful convenience. So far the movie industry is way, way behind; but Netflix is a step in the right direction.
Either way, the argument that piracy is damaging companies is a bunch of hooey. This theory (if you believe it) shows that you can either get everyone to buy media by reducing prices and this have less to no piracy, or you can make the same amount of money selling it to less people and have pirate markets. This basically means that the piracy litigation frenzy happening now is not to protect potential profits being lost, its to make additional profits from people that would never have bought it in the first place unless you changed your strategy. As far as I knew, courts were not meant to be a way to make money or open new markets based solely on lawsuits, its a way to have your rights protected, have justice, and maintain order.
The trouble is that 70 percent of people that get degrees get it in worthless disciplines like marketing or management. Management is basically common sense with basic business education thrown in. You only make a good manager if you would have been one without education anyway. Plenty of worthless managers have degrees in management, but have no common sense nor organizational skills. They would be better off getting some kind of hybrid degree between business law and accounting. At least then they could successfully handle something in business.
I still think kids should be forced to learn Algebra II and Trig unless they can show they have a mental disability that makes it impossible. There's no excuse to not know such easy math. Everyone has a brain for it, its just that some kids don't like math so they convince themselves they are bad at it. If you had any idea how much harder and more abstract mathematical topics exist in the world you would probably advocate them learning at least calculus in high school. I just about have an MS in Math and I haven't even scratched the surface of the knowledge that currently exists. Even PhDs in math don't know everything about math, they have to specialize in specific topics and wouldn't know much about topics two steps removed from their specialty (such as Numerical PDE's and Topology).
That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Police think twice about killing someone, since in court killing someone needs justification. However cops have less of a disincentive in their mind to beat someone, or tase someone, or pepper spray someone as long as they recover after. No need to explain that in court "I was just arresting a person who was resisting arrest". The fact of the matter is, humans were not meant to be electrocuted. We can withstand a beating from another human, or some pepper in our eyes, but human beings did not evolve near fields of Tesla coils or in realms of perpetual lightning storms. My friend was tased and charged with resisting arrest when he decided to run out a back window of a house with a party he was invited to when cops knocked on the front door. Mind you, he did not run out of the window when there was cops arresting people, or shouting at people. He was invited to the party by people who rented the house that were over 21. He did not know there would be underage drinkers at the time, but most college kids go to parties like this without incident and without harm to anyone. Without being warned that he was under arrest, a police officer hiding in a bush outside the window shot him with a taser. Later they charged him with resisting arrest and contributing to delinquency of minors. So a police officer can decide you are under arrest, say nothing about it to anyone, and tase you to subdue you, meanwhile charging you with "resisting arrest"? The other charge was bullshit too since he didn't buy alcohol for anyone, but lets leave that alone for the moment. I am ranting now, but Tasers are still bullshit.
He does make a compelling argument for searching for other hominid species in non-premo areas.
I know. I actually read a few articles thinking, at first, it may be something worth reading to only get smacked in the face with an obvious prank. Now, I am not totally sure if this article is even serious or not. Boy who cried wolf.