I don't think that argument works for companies that are multinationals. They might decide to leave a particular country, but if they do they're allowing competition to grow unless that country is actually unprofitable.
I'm not even sure it works in companies that operate entirely in an area covered by one particular set of tax laws. Certainly they want as much profit as they can get, but that's different from saying that if they don't get as much as they want they'll quit doing business.
Now you may be saying that investors will prefer to invest where they get the maximum return, and that's generally true, but that's a very different statement than a statement about what a company will do, or even what a particular investor will do. Some people, e.g., invest in an area because that's what they are interested in or where they are knowledgeable.
The assertion that private industry is more efficient than government has many counter-examples. There are other reasons to prefer private industry in anything that isn't a natural monopoly, but efficiency isn't one of them. Government can actually be more efficient that private industry usually is in a monopoly situation. They could probably be as efficient as a private industry in any situation if they weren't so concerned with fraud. Fraud *is* a big problem, but, when fraud is controlled, red tape can grow into a worse problem. Red tape is what lead to the $5,000 hammer. Somebody couldn't just run down to the hardware store and pick one up, because it needed justification, and the corp. wasn't willing to do the red tape for any cheaper price.
I would go so far as to assert that whenever any industry becomes an actual monopoly (say one player with more than 75% of the market, but be explicit in defining what "the market" means) the main company should be nationalized. But that the smaller players be allowed to continue to compete wherever they can. The large player is going to cease development anyway, and concentrate on market dominance, whereas the government has less motive to concentrate on market dominance.
The problem with this, of course, is that it concentrates power into the government...but it's already got a monopoly on the legal use of force (that being the definition of a government). And it's hard to imagine a government being more intrusive than corporations have already shown themselves eager to be. (Still, that's a part of the reason that I proposed that minor players be continued to be allowed to compete.)
As a further note, this nationalization should not be seen as a punitive measure. It should be a buyout. Any punitive measures should be for laws that were broken. This is tricky, as if a nationalization were expected it would drive up the stock price, so the price should be set as the value 6 months (1 year?) before the nationalization was decided upon.
Well, yes, but I think you'd need to go back to the late 1940's to find an actual conservative in high office.
A conservative is supposed to be one who conserves what is good about the current system. Not someone with wild ideas about how to take things "back to the good old days". That *never* works.
I used to describe myself as a conservative, but these days when I look around I don't see the good parts of the system being sufficient to be fixed. I sure wish I still did. So now I can't call myself conservative anymore. I want to do wild things like requiring working examples submitted with each patent request (which means source code and build tools for software). I want to restrict copyrights to 17 years...and doubt that thats enough of a restriction. I want to remove the personhood of corporations. These aren't conservative positions, because they aren't characteristic of the current state of affairs. Just "once upon a time" being conservative doesn't mean that they are now conservative.
That's a reasonable interpretation, and I don't know the case or the reasons, but how certain are you that your description is what happened? That's not what the summary sounded like to me.
And since so many people didn't seem to get this, after you test the parachute, you can't use it until you've repacked it, at which point it needs to be tested again.
This is why traditionally parachutists packed their own parachute. And carried a backup. (I'm not sure whether they actually packed the backup themselves.)
The problem here is if you're incompetent to pack a parachute, you might be better off letting someone else do it for you. He was probably expecting Google to manage his backup chute.
It's all very well to say he should have done his own backup, but lots and lots and lots of people are incompetent at that, and many of them know it. So they expect their provider to do it for them. This isn't really unreasonable...but the point is legitimately arguable. But expecting him to manage his own backups may be quite unreasonable, and I don't see *any* valid argument against that.
In a printout vertical white space is good (within limits). On a screen the total amount of vertical space is strongly constrained. So if I want to see much of the code, the vertical space need to be compacted. Not totally, I like a blank line before the start of each documentation comment and for punctuation within logical breaks in the routine, e.g. after major loops, but strongly. Designs that require lots of white space keep me from seeing enough code.
Well, to be honest, I'd prefer it if my screen were taller rather than wider, but it doesn't rotate easily.
Actually, it once was the prevailing belief. But you need to go back to before around 350 BC (I think that's the right era, I could be off by a century either way).
OK. I happen to disagree. But if a project has a coding standard, then you need to follow it anyway.
As it happens, my preferred comment style matches one of the ones he disapproves of. I like to conserve vertical space, so I prefer:
/** Title of the comment.
* body of the comment.
* body continued. */
I don't plan on reading it there, though, I plan on using Doxygen to produce commented text, and not looking at the code again unless I need to modify it.
I don't believe I argued against that point of view.
OTOH, it's also worth remembering that at that time both Syria and Egypt were attempting to take and hold ALL of Israel. Which would also have been against international law. (That was what the UAR was about. They wanted to seize all the land in between them to create a contiguous country. I doubt that even had they done so they could have created a working government, but that doesn't change what they planned.)
There's considerable question as to how much of Israel was taken illegally. Much of it was bought legally, and the Palestinians then migrated to (IIRC) Egypt, but it could have been Jordan or Syria. Then, later, the countries they migrated to threw them out again, or essentially so. (This was all back before the 7 day war, so it's a bit fuzzy.) At that time Israel had a mixture of Israelis and Palestinians living there, but as the war dragged on prejudices became stronger, and more and more Palestinians were forced out, often illegally. And the Israeli government almost always sided with the Israeli's (not too surprisingly), so more and more Palestinians got to feeling that violence was their only hope. In this they were long encouraged by Egypt and Syria...and, admittedly, Israel.
And the whole country is SMALL. It's about the size of New Jersey. Narrower in places. I'm not sure whether that estimate includes the Palestinian occupied areas or not.
My theory is that people are having less physical contact with other people, so diseases are having a harder time spreading. This is probably testable by checking which diseases are being reduced.
OK, IIUC your's saying that "dimension" only applies if there is a measurable quantity that is continuous. This bothers me because I don't accept that ordinary space-time is continuous, merely that it has extremely fine divisions. (My wild guess is that it breaks down around 10^-33cm. Blame it on trying to read GeoMetroDynamics without enough math.)
Perhaps it could be explained as "a dimension is something that could be substituted for length if you were facing in the right direction". I'm guessing these dimensions also need to be orthogonal (i.e. independent) of the other dimensions. (Though that doesn't quite work for space-time. But pretty nearly.)
The claim isn't that it makes sense, but rather that it explains the observable evidence as well as any other theory, and doesn't have any more requirement for "unexplained events".
Face it, "makes sense" doesn't even apply to radio waves. We can calculate how they act, and translate that into predictions, but that's not the same as making sense, or you'd say quantum theory makes sense.
Phlogiston was a lot simpler explanation of fire than chemistry (and you drastically oversimplified the current explanation of how fire works...to the extent that your explanation is falsifiable).
Occam's Razor says to prefer the simpler explanation, but the simpler explanation has to explain ALL the observed effects. And of the explanations we have the SAME explanation can be interpreted to be either the multiverse or some version (multiple different versions are possible) of the singular universe. So you can't rationally choose between them. Most physicists prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, which is basically "Things happen and we can't explain them", but there's no real reason for this, except childhood conditioning...and most of them will admit this if you can get them to think seriously about it...but they'd rather watch TV or play poker in their off-time.
No, Hillary started waffling on the TPP during the Democratic debates. But I didn't find any clear statements against in for a long time after that, and she's one of the authors.
She hasn't be pushing the campaign to take a stand against it. I think she's still in favor of it. I'm likely to vote "Other".
I always wonder what they mean by dimension. Does it need to be continuous? Why aren't the various quantum numbers considered to be dimensions? (And, in fact, aren't they frequently handled that way? Rather small dimensions, of course, since, e.g., electric charge apparently only varies between plus and minus one in steps of 1/3.)
Clearly I've never looked into the math, but in normal measurement dimensions can be things like month of the year, income, number of weddings, or whatever you are measuring. And in that sense you can clearly have any number of dimensions, and, in fact, when I said "month of the year" I was rolling up the time dimension....if that means taking a measure of the quantity modulo something.
This is probably misguided, but I always find it confusing, and don't either know the answer, or know an easy way of determining it.
The multiverse (well, the ERP multiverse) is an INTERPRETATION of math applied to physics. It's not either religion or philosophy. Whether it's a correct interpretation is so far unknowable. (There are other interpretations that are equally valid of the same math, and perhaps they actually mean the same thing, even though the English translations are wildly different.)
String Theory is a different beast. It is a work in progress that, IIUC, still has too many Finagle Factors to be taken seriously. Perhaps philosophy is a correct designation for that. Actually, I think it changes so with different "variable constants" that it's actually a collective noun for a set of theories that have a similar approach in math. Unfortunately, I haven't heard that any of them are validatable, but I do believe that some of them have been falsified as far as applying to the universe that we can observe.
There is a crisis, but it's been misidentified. The crisis is a PR crisis caused by tentative theoretical work being pushed by publicists as if it were validated and proven....leading to a crisis in public trust.
Physics depends on the existence of theories that are speculative. But PR insists on certainty.
Sorry, but so far the multiverse is totally in agreement with observational evidence. Now you may think that a singular universe is a simpler interpretation, but it isn't really, because then you need to account for selecting only one branch of the "probable futures". There are interpretations which account for that, but every single one of them turns out to be as hard to swallow as the multiverse. (From my perspective.) E.g., one of the interpretations can be called something like "super pre-determinism" which holds that every single atomic transition state was implicit in the original big bang explosion. But just try to explain the mechanism of that determination. Other approaches involve superluminal communication to allow coordinated state transitions...but there's no proposed mechanism. Etc.
To be honest, even the multiverse has problems with coordinated state transitions. IIUC it handles them by making it impossible to detect whether or not the state transitions are simultaneous.
It's the old problems of monopolies and centralized control. It's not *necessarily* bad, but it depends too much on who's in charge...and the person in charge wasn't selected to optimize YOUR benefit.
Whether a rational approach is a good approach or not depends on the underlying axioms and postulates. And getting a good set is not a simple problem.
Generally people prefer to have their axioms and postulates not clearly specified and to use "flexible" logic to derive their conclusions. Calling this rational, however, is not rational.
Geometry couldn't even get up to 8 axioms without ending up with multiple contradictory systems that can only be reconciled by saying the words mean different things in the different versions. E.g. (IIUC) a point in 2 dimensional Spherical Geometry would be equivalent to the two points where a diameter intersects with the spherical surface in 3 dimensional Euclidean geometry.
So probably no. Also coming to an actual rational decision in a complex case can take an unbounded amount of time. So probably no.
This doesn't mean you can't try to approach a rational decision.
If APIs are copyrightable, probably most of it. APIs being copyrightable changes the entire shape of the licensing influence. This wouldn't have any effect on the use of software licensed with BSD or MIT, but GPL is different.
Traditional interpretation has said that APIs weren't copyrightable, but if they are then source code to interface with GPL code would also need to be GPL.
The thing is, laser printers are reported to emit small airborne particles that lodge in the lungs. In a well ventilated office environment, this isn't anything to be very worried about, but I would be using it at home, in a relatively small room.
Also it would need to be a color laser/scanner combination. Not impossible, but last I checked unusual.
P.S.: The last Brother printer I bought would barely even talk to my computer, and the scanner was unusable. After a week of trying to make it work I gave up. The HP at least works, even though it have problems with printing on acetate or cardstock.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that argument works for companies that are multinationals. They might decide to leave a particular country, but if they do they're allowing competition to grow unless that country is actually unprofitable.
I'm not even sure it works in companies that operate entirely in an area covered by one particular set of tax laws. Certainly they want as much profit as they can get, but that's different from saying that if they don't get as much as they want they'll quit doing business.
Now you may be saying that investors will prefer to invest where they get the maximum return, and that's generally true, but that's a very different statement than a statement about what a company will do, or even what a particular investor will do. Some people, e.g., invest in an area because that's what they are interested in or where they are knowledgeable.
The assertion that private industry is more efficient than government has many counter-examples. There are other reasons to prefer private industry in anything that isn't a natural monopoly, but efficiency isn't one of them. Government can actually be more efficient that private industry usually is in a monopoly situation. They could probably be as efficient as a private industry in any situation if they weren't so concerned with fraud. Fraud *is* a big problem, but, when fraud is controlled, red tape can grow into a worse problem. Red tape is what lead to the $5,000 hammer. Somebody couldn't just run down to the hardware store and pick one up, because it needed justification, and the corp. wasn't willing to do the red tape for any cheaper price.
I would go so far as to assert that whenever any industry becomes an actual monopoly (say one player with more than 75% of the market, but be explicit in defining what "the market" means) the main company should be nationalized. But that the smaller players be allowed to continue to compete wherever they can. The large player is going to cease development anyway, and concentrate on market dominance, whereas the government has less motive to concentrate on market dominance.
The problem with this, of course, is that it concentrates power into the government...but it's already got a monopoly on the legal use of force (that being the definition of a government). And it's hard to imagine a government being more intrusive than corporations have already shown themselves eager to be. (Still, that's a part of the reason that I proposed that minor players be continued to be allowed to compete.)
As a further note, this nationalization should not be seen as a punitive measure. It should be a buyout. Any punitive measures should be for laws that were broken. This is tricky, as if a nationalization were expected it would drive up the stock price, so the price should be set as the value 6 months (1 year?) before the nationalization was decided upon.
Well, yes, but I think you'd need to go back to the late 1940's to find an actual conservative in high office.
A conservative is supposed to be one who conserves what is good about the current system. Not someone with wild ideas about how to take things "back to the good old days". That *never* works.
I used to describe myself as a conservative, but these days when I look around I don't see the good parts of the system being sufficient to be fixed. I sure wish I still did. So now I can't call myself conservative anymore. I want to do wild things like requiring working examples submitted with each patent request (which means source code and build tools for software). I want to restrict copyrights to 17 years...and doubt that thats enough of a restriction. I want to remove the personhood of corporations. These aren't conservative positions, because they aren't characteristic of the current state of affairs. Just "once upon a time" being conservative doesn't mean that they are now conservative.
That's a reasonable interpretation, and I don't know the case or the reasons, but how certain are you that your description is what happened? That's not what the summary sounded like to me.
And since so many people didn't seem to get this, after you test the parachute, you can't use it until you've repacked it, at which point it needs to be tested again.
This is why traditionally parachutists packed their own parachute. And carried a backup. (I'm not sure whether they actually packed the backup themselves.)
The problem here is if you're incompetent to pack a parachute, you might be better off letting someone else do it for you. He was probably expecting Google to manage his backup chute.
It's all very well to say he should have done his own backup, but lots and lots and lots of people are incompetent at that, and many of them know it. So they expect their provider to do it for them. This isn't really unreasonable...but the point is legitimately arguable. But expecting him to manage his own backups may be quite unreasonable, and I don't see *any* valid argument against that.
In a printout vertical white space is good (within limits). On a screen the total amount of vertical space is strongly constrained. So if I want to see much of the code, the vertical space need to be compacted. Not totally, I like a blank line before the start of each documentation comment and for punctuation within logical breaks in the routine, e.g. after major loops, but strongly. Designs that require lots of white space keep me from seeing enough code.
Well, to be honest, I'd prefer it if my screen were taller rather than wider, but it doesn't rotate easily.
Actually, it once was the prevailing belief. But you need to go back to before around 350 BC (I think that's the right era, I could be off by a century either way).
OK. I happen to disagree. But if a project has a coding standard, then you need to follow it anyway.
As it happens, my preferred comment style matches one of the ones he disapproves of. I like to conserve vertical space, so I prefer:
I don't plan on reading it there, though, I plan on using Doxygen to produce commented text, and not looking at the code again unless I need to modify it.
I don't believe I argued against that point of view.
OTOH, it's also worth remembering that at that time both Syria and Egypt were attempting to take and hold ALL of Israel. Which would also have been against international law. (That was what the UAR was about. They wanted to seize all the land in between them to create a contiguous country. I doubt that even had they done so they could have created a working government, but that doesn't change what they planned.)
If they weren't censoring *some* communications I would agree with you. If they pick and choose, then they should rightfully be the target of suits.
OK, let's try it this way:
On what basis do you not consider the Israeli government an organization of terrorists.
There's considerable question as to how much of Israel was taken illegally. Much of it was bought legally, and the Palestinians then migrated to (IIRC) Egypt, but it could have been Jordan or Syria. Then, later, the countries they migrated to threw them out again, or essentially so. (This was all back before the 7 day war, so it's a bit fuzzy.) At that time Israel had a mixture of Israelis and Palestinians living there, but as the war dragged on prejudices became stronger, and more and more Palestinians were forced out, often illegally. And the Israeli government almost always sided with the Israeli's (not too surprisingly), so more and more Palestinians got to feeling that violence was their only hope. In this they were long encouraged by Egypt and Syria...and, admittedly, Israel.
And the whole country is SMALL. It's about the size of New Jersey. Narrower in places. I'm not sure whether that estimate includes the Palestinian occupied areas or not.
My theory is that people are having less physical contact with other people, so diseases are having a harder time spreading. This is probably testable by checking which diseases are being reduced.
OK, IIUC your's saying that "dimension" only applies if there is a measurable quantity that is continuous. This bothers me because I don't accept that ordinary space-time is continuous, merely that it has extremely fine divisions. (My wild guess is that it breaks down around 10^-33cm. Blame it on trying to read GeoMetroDynamics without enough math.)
Perhaps it could be explained as "a dimension is something that could be substituted for length if you were facing in the right direction". I'm guessing these dimensions also need to be orthogonal (i.e. independent) of the other dimensions. (Though that doesn't quite work for space-time. But pretty nearly.)
The claim isn't that it makes sense, but rather that it explains the observable evidence as well as any other theory, and doesn't have any more requirement for "unexplained events".
Face it, "makes sense" doesn't even apply to radio waves. We can calculate how they act, and translate that into predictions, but that's not the same as making sense, or you'd say quantum theory makes sense.
Phlogiston was a lot simpler explanation of fire than chemistry (and you drastically oversimplified the current explanation of how fire works...to the extent that your explanation is falsifiable).
Occam's Razor says to prefer the simpler explanation, but the simpler explanation has to explain ALL the observed effects. And of the explanations we have the SAME explanation can be interpreted to be either the multiverse or some version (multiple different versions are possible) of the singular universe. So you can't rationally choose between them. Most physicists prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, which is basically "Things happen and we can't explain them", but there's no real reason for this, except childhood conditioning...and most of them will admit this if you can get them to think seriously about it...but they'd rather watch TV or play poker in their off-time.
No, Hillary started waffling on the TPP during the Democratic debates. But I didn't find any clear statements against in for a long time after that, and she's one of the authors.
She hasn't be pushing the campaign to take a stand against it. I think she's still in favor of it. I'm likely to vote "Other".
I always wonder what they mean by dimension. Does it need to be continuous? Why aren't the various quantum numbers considered to be dimensions? (And, in fact, aren't they frequently handled that way? Rather small dimensions, of course, since, e.g., electric charge apparently only varies between plus and minus one in steps of 1/3.)
Clearly I've never looked into the math, but in normal measurement dimensions can be things like month of the year, income, number of weddings, or whatever you are measuring. And in that sense you can clearly have any number of dimensions, and, in fact, when I said "month of the year" I was rolling up the time dimension....if that means taking a measure of the quantity modulo something.
This is probably misguided, but I always find it confusing, and don't either know the answer, or know an easy way of determining it.
The multiverse (well, the ERP multiverse) is an INTERPRETATION of math applied to physics. It's not either religion or philosophy. Whether it's a correct interpretation is so far unknowable. (There are other interpretations that are equally valid of the same math, and perhaps they actually mean the same thing, even though the English translations are wildly different.)
String Theory is a different beast. It is a work in progress that, IIUC, still has too many Finagle Factors to be taken seriously. Perhaps philosophy is a correct designation for that. Actually, I think it changes so with different "variable constants" that it's actually a collective noun for a set of theories that have a similar approach in math. Unfortunately, I haven't heard that any of them are validatable, but I do believe that some of them have been falsified as far as applying to the universe that we can observe.
There is a crisis, but it's been misidentified. The crisis is a PR crisis caused by tentative theoretical work being pushed by publicists as if it were validated and proven....leading to a crisis in public trust.
Physics depends on the existence of theories that are speculative. But PR insists on certainty.
Sorry, but so far the multiverse is totally in agreement with observational evidence. Now you may think that a singular universe is a simpler interpretation, but it isn't really, because then you need to account for selecting only one branch of the "probable futures". There are interpretations which account for that, but every single one of them turns out to be as hard to swallow as the multiverse. (From my perspective.) E.g., one of the interpretations can be called something like "super pre-determinism" which holds that every single atomic transition state was implicit in the original big bang explosion. But just try to explain the mechanism of that determination. Other approaches involve superluminal communication to allow coordinated state transitions...but there's no proposed mechanism. Etc.
To be honest, even the multiverse has problems with coordinated state transitions. IIUC it handles them by making it impossible to detect whether or not the state transitions are simultaneous.
Occam's razor can't slice this problem.
It's the old problems of monopolies and centralized control. It's not *necessarily* bad, but it depends too much on who's in charge...and the person in charge wasn't selected to optimize YOUR benefit.
Whether a rational approach is a good approach or not depends on the underlying axioms and postulates. And getting a good set is not a simple problem.
Generally people prefer to have their axioms and postulates not clearly specified and to use "flexible" logic to derive their conclusions. Calling this rational, however, is not rational.
Geometry couldn't even get up to 8 axioms without ending up with multiple contradictory systems that can only be reconciled by saying the words mean different things in the different versions. E.g. (IIUC) a point in 2 dimensional Spherical Geometry would be equivalent to the two points where a diameter intersects with the spherical surface in 3 dimensional Euclidean geometry.
So probably no. Also coming to an actual rational decision in a complex case can take an unbounded amount of time. So probably no.
This doesn't mean you can't try to approach a rational decision.
If APIs are copyrightable, probably most of it. APIs being copyrightable changes the entire shape of the licensing influence. This wouldn't have any effect on the use of software licensed with BSD or MIT, but GPL is different.
Traditional interpretation has said that APIs weren't copyrightable, but if they are then source code to interface with GPL code would also need to be GPL.
The thing is, laser printers are reported to emit small airborne particles that lodge in the lungs. In a well ventilated office environment, this isn't anything to be very worried about, but I would be using it at home, in a relatively small room.
Also it would need to be a color laser/scanner combination. Not impossible, but last I checked unusual.
P.S.: The last Brother printer I bought would barely even talk to my computer, and the scanner was unusable. After a week of trying to make it work I gave up. The HP at least works, even though it have problems with printing on acetate or cardstock.