I'd go further than that - it seems to me that immortality is actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
If you and your progeny are immortal (in terms of aging), then even if one of them mutates in an evolutionarily advantageous way, the mutation won't propagate very quickly because it's actually competing against you, you're having more progeny, and the immediate competitors don't die off.
What's the quote about how science only advances when the old guard dies off? Same thing really, only on an evolutionary scale. Unless a mutation gives such an advantage that the old guard gets killed off deliberately, or is separated environmentally, they just keep donating obsolete DNA to the system and actively slowing evolution down.
Then something else comes along that ages, dies, the next generation is more dangerous, and the immortal species gets killed off by the rise of it's competitor.
Just a suspicion, any biologists that can tell me how wrong I am?
If I'm reading this right anyway, which I may well not be.
It's more a very good argument for what he thinks the solution will looks like. The mathematics is low enough that I can (barely) understand it well enough to follow the general argument, but certainly not well enough to be able to catch any oversights. But it's the first thing I've seen in a long time that looked simple enough I felt like I could hit the books and maybe get to a point where I *could* understand it properly. (He says, as if he's really done the last three or four things like that he promised himself he would do. My head exploded reading the first volume of "Art of Computer Programming" and I haven't got in gear to finish *that* yet either.)
Standard rotating wheel scheme, but if you cheated, it would let you play. For awhile.
Then the Interplay Police ships would pull you over and (IIRC) give you a second chance to validate your game. If *that* failed, they would attack, in game. I have no idea if it was theoretically possible to beat them, but I never did.
Never liked copy protection, but at least it had some humor to it.
Quite Right. Wikipedia declares it's decision making process to be by consensus.
However, there appear to be none of the fundamentals of actual consensus decision making processes enforced. Egalitarianism is in fact expressly denied. Consensus voting issues, the concepts of stand aside or expressly blocking consensus are ignored.
So what we're talking is neither democracy nor consensus, but consensus without actually going to the effort of reaching consensus, which looks remarkably like allowing editors to do what they want regardless of the opinions of others.
Per Wikipedia - An encyclopedia, or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.
Sorry - you'll have to change the definition to match your prejudices, but really, you should have done the before you posted.
Fair 'nuff - as soon as your notability requirements say what percentage of the population has to be aware of it, we can safely and objectively discern between Halle Berry and Jim Bob's garage band.
Otherwise we're not dealing with notable articles, we're dealing with notable topics - some people obviously believe that webcomics aren't 'notable', no matter *how* many people like them, and are using this as an excuse.
Unfortunately the correct term for *that* is not 'Editor', but rather 'Effete Snob'.
The final score was to keep, but the crossed out comments outnumber the counted ones by quite a ratio - would you trust an election where three out of four people that voted had their votes discounted?
I'm not enough of a contributor to be familiar with the SOP, but if my milk smelled this way, I might not be sure it was bad, but I'd pour it down the sink.
Has anyone ever seen Mark Shuttleworth and Bill Gates in the room at the same time.
I swear, one of these days he'll just grab his neck and pull off a rubber face mask, laughing maniacally. I can only assume their will be a white persian cat involved as well.
It's the only explanation. Microsoft can't possibly be this stupid.
Serious question on that. SCOTUS ruled that punitive damages in excess of ten times the actual damages were unconstitutional under the "Cruel and Unusual" clause in one of the tobacco lawsuit as I recall. So a jury can't impose such a fine anymore.
That being the case, just because a fine was imposed by the legislature, shouldn't suddenly make it not more than ten times the damages. Theoretically, just because I'm not a corporation doesn't mean I'm no longer protected by the same decisions.
I want to like Picasa, because it is so nice in some ways.
But it is such a pain in the arse in others that I can't use it.
Mostly it's lack of documentation, or inconsistent behavior. I've found search terms in Picasa that obviously do some intersting thing, then tried to find more info on them - nothing. It's there, but completely undocumented.
And then there's the obscure question of whether I added a tag to a jpeg IPTC tags, or if Picasa just added it to the database. If it only did the latter when a file was locked, I could handle it, but it sometimes just decides on it. No reason that I could find, just decided to do so.
And a dozen other niggling details that made it not ready for Prime time.
Because he's not actually enforcing getting paid in $US, sure. He's losing money by not doing so (Or would be if the $US was strong), because he can turn around and use those strong U.S. bucks to buy bullets at a discount.
But the discount doesn't amount to that much on a $100 transaction.
When you are dealing with an accummulated $100,000,000 dollar transaction, he becomes a lot more concerned with actually getting that money in U.S. Dollars, because it makes the difference between whether or not he can afford to buy that new aegis cruiser he's been wanting, so your bank needs to have dollars on hand.
More precisely, inflation means the money supply is increasing more quickly than the actual goods and services available in the economy, and vice versa - You can increase the money supply as much as you want as long as the underlying economy is (in reality) expanding at the same rate.
Any kind of hard standard however means that the money supply is disconnected from the actual underlying economy - it's linked to the actual reserve - a quickly expanding economy means, perforce, deflation and vice versa, which in turn causes an economy to fluctuate between deflationary and inflationary cycles far more quickly and dangerously - deflation being worse because there are no built in economic safeguards to preventing it once started - holding your money instead of spending it means it's *more* valuable tomorrow than today, which cause further deflation. rinse, repeat.
Moreover, since the access to the reserves influences the local money supply, the economy doesn't achieve equilibrium automatically over different areas (even with the same currency)) creating arbitrary opportunities for arbitrage, which, by definition, means that some economic energy is being drained off as people make money off the inefficiency (Albeit, while correcting it).
Lastly, you can, in theory, corner the market on *any* commodity (It was nearly done during the Grant administration). I always find it interesting that the very libertarian influences that tend to like the concept of a gold standard are the people philosophically opposed to the very regulations that would make it difficult to corner the gold market once implemented.
IANAE, but my layman's understanding - It makes a difference in terms of how strong the dollar is, which in turn affects how much we can borrow - keeping oil in dollar amount means that to buy oil country 'X' has to have U.S. Dollars, which in turn means they have to *buy* U.S. dollars, increasing our foreign reserves without the U.S. actually doing anything.
This artificially strengthens the U.S. Dollar relative to everything else, but as long as the U.S. Dollar is naturally strong anyway, it's to the advantage of the OPEC nations to do that, because it means *they* get more bang for their (our) buck in turn, and can buy things at better rates of exchange.
Of course, if our dollars were to become weaker somehow (coff coff), then the Saudi's etcetera would no longer have that advantage to their favor, and might go shopping for a better currency, which in turn would artificially strengthen *that* currency instead of ours.
There would be other effects that make this not quite the great deal for OPEC that it immediately seems - they already maintain large dollar reserves that instantly become less valuable, and it would tick off any *other* trading partner also maintaining those reserves, as well as having destabilizing effect in the global economy that they wouldn't be sure would work in their favor, but it would be really bad for us, regardless.
Particularly with Bonzo Boy in the W.H. - Tax cuts would *not* help, and it's the only thing he's knows about economics.
Yeah, right until someone starts running arbitrage on the pegged commodities, which in turn will create a black market on those commodities, and the whole thing goes straight down the toilet.
Which, in an internet based culture, will happen at speeds measured in cpu cycles,
I'm thinking, ah, no. Floating currency despite the obvious problems, work lots better because you can't run them that way.
And, btw, just to go off topic while there are smart people watching, can somebody please explain to me why exactly a non-deterministic theory like QM should be unable to lose information, aka the Hawking information paradox?
If it's non-deterministic, then you cannot, with certainty predict the future, even with certain information of the present, and by the same notion, there would be multiple pasts that can produce a given now.
But as I understand the information paradox, it is based on the concept that the past be (at least in theory) reconstructible from the present, which seem to me to be incompatible with a non-deterministic theory. In fact, if (as I understand it) the corollary to increasing entropy in a system is that the mathematical description of the system is continuously getting simpler, that would imply that information *is* lost as entropy increases.
My immediate response is that it sounds like you got a few errors and didn't tell anyone, then let it cascade till all hell broke loose, but darned if I can tell what you did from this rant.
Not that I find Ubuntu perfect - I can do entirely without the number of 'Bundled' packages - I installed a program that required KDE, and everything else in the wold came with it - I can't get one program to uninstall without synaptic uninstalling the entire KDE system, and I may just not be bright enough, but apt-get seems to do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I read this for a second as "Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Asteroid", and thought Google *might* be overreaching - .
Pug
I'd go further than that - it seems to me that immortality is actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
If you and your progeny are immortal (in terms of aging), then even if one of them mutates in an evolutionarily advantageous way, the mutation won't propagate very quickly because it's actually competing against you, you're having more progeny, and the immediate competitors don't die off.
What's the quote about how science only advances when the old guard dies off? Same thing really, only on an evolutionary scale. Unless a mutation gives such an advantage that the old guard gets killed off deliberately, or is separated environmentally, they just keep donating obsolete DNA to the system and actively slowing evolution down.
Then something else comes along that ages, dies, the next generation is more dangerous, and the immortal species gets killed off by the rise of it's competitor.
Just a suspicion, any biologists that can tell me how wrong I am?
Pug
If I'm reading this right anyway, which I may well not be.
It's more a very good argument for what he thinks the solution will looks like. The mathematics is low enough that I can (barely) understand it well enough to follow the general argument, but certainly not well enough to be able to catch any oversights. But it's the first thing I've seen in a long time that looked simple enough I felt like I could hit the books and maybe get to a point where I *could* understand it properly. (He says, as if he's really done the last three or four things like that he promised himself he would do. My head exploded reading the first volume of "Art of Computer Programming" and I haven't got in gear to finish *that* yet either.)
But it sure *looks* pretty.
Pug
Best Copy protection ever - Starflight.
Standard rotating wheel scheme, but if you cheated, it would let you play. For awhile.
Then the Interplay Police ships would pull you over and (IIRC) give you a second chance to validate your game. If *that* failed, they would attack, in game. I have no idea if it was theoretically possible to beat them, but I never did.
Never liked copy protection, but at least it had some humor to it.
Pug
Altair. Why?
Quite Right. Wikipedia declares it's decision making process to be by consensus.
However, there appear to be none of the fundamentals of actual consensus decision making processes enforced. Egalitarianism is in fact expressly denied. Consensus voting issues, the concepts of stand aside or expressly blocking consensus are ignored.
So what we're talking is neither democracy nor consensus, but consensus without actually going to the effort of reaching consensus, which looks remarkably like allowing editors to do what they want regardless of the opinions of others.
See Oligarchy.
Pug
Per Wikipedia - An encyclopedia, or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.
Sorry - you'll have to change the definition to match your prejudices, but really, you should have done the before you posted.
Pug
Fair 'nuff - as soon as your notability requirements say what percentage of the population has to be aware of it, we can safely and objectively discern between Halle Berry and Jim Bob's garage band.
Otherwise we're not dealing with notable articles, we're dealing with notable topics - some people obviously believe that webcomics aren't 'notable', no matter *how* many people like them, and are using this as an excuse.
Unfortunately the correct term for *that* is not 'Editor', but rather 'Effete Snob'.
Pug
Yeah, but there were some interesting links to the discussions regarding these deletions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Checkerboard_Nightmare
The final score was to keep, but the crossed out comments outnumber the counted ones by quite a ratio - would you trust an election where three out of four people that voted had their votes discounted?
I'm not enough of a contributor to be familiar with the SOP, but if my milk smelled this way, I might not be sure it was bad, but I'd pour it down the sink.
Pug
Has anyone ever seen Mark Shuttleworth and Bill Gates in the room at the same time.
I swear, one of these days he'll just grab his neck and pull off a rubber face mask, laughing maniacally. I can only assume their will be a white persian cat involved as well.
It's the only explanation. Microsoft can't possibly be this stupid.
Pug
Wusses - this is just what I've been needing for my planet eating Doomsday Machine.
Well, that and Neutronium.
Pug
Only the words between the quotes - the rest of it I was okay with.
Pug the poly-illiterate
Well, it was good enough for Honest Abe, and he was just a backwoods hick - Grin.
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htmlEuclid's Elements
I've been reviewing this and taking notes in Freemind.
Pug
Serious question on that. SCOTUS ruled that punitive damages in excess of ten times the actual damages were unconstitutional under the "Cruel and Unusual" clause in one of the tobacco lawsuit as I recall. So a jury can't impose such a fine anymore.
That being the case, just because a fine was imposed by the legislature, shouldn't suddenly make it not more than ten times the damages. Theoretically, just because I'm not a corporation doesn't mean I'm no longer protected by the same decisions.
Pug
I want to like Picasa, because it is so nice in some ways.
But it is such a pain in the arse in others that I can't use it.
Mostly it's lack of documentation, or inconsistent behavior. I've found search terms in Picasa that obviously do some intersting thing, then tried to find more info on them - nothing. It's there, but completely undocumented.
And then there's the obscure question of whether I added a tag to a jpeg IPTC tags, or if Picasa just added it to the database. If it only did the latter when a file was locked, I could handle it, but it sometimes just decides on it. No reason that I could find, just decided to do so.
And a dozen other niggling details that made it not ready for Prime time.
It's not bad, but it's annoying. For me anyway.
Pug
I've notice their code was much better towards the end of the day, not nearly as many kludges in it.
Pug
Because he's not actually enforcing getting paid in $US, sure. He's losing money by not doing so (Or would be if the $US was strong), because he can turn around and use those strong U.S. bucks to buy bullets at a discount.
But the discount doesn't amount to that much on a $100 transaction.
When you are dealing with an accummulated $100,000,000 dollar transaction, he becomes a lot more concerned with actually getting that money in U.S. Dollars, because it makes the difference between whether or not he can afford to buy that new aegis cruiser he's been wanting, so your bank needs to have dollars on hand.
More precisely, inflation means the money supply is increasing more quickly than the actual goods and services available in the economy, and vice versa - You can increase the money supply as much as you want as long as the underlying economy is (in reality) expanding at the same rate.
Any kind of hard standard however means that the money supply is disconnected from the actual underlying economy - it's linked to the actual reserve - a quickly expanding economy means, perforce, deflation and vice versa, which in turn causes an economy to fluctuate between deflationary and inflationary cycles far more quickly and dangerously - deflation being worse because there are no built in economic safeguards to preventing it once started - holding your money instead of spending it means it's *more* valuable tomorrow than today, which cause further deflation. rinse, repeat.
Moreover, since the access to the reserves influences the local money supply, the economy doesn't achieve equilibrium automatically over different areas (even with the same currency)) creating arbitrary opportunities for arbitrage, which, by definition, means that some economic energy is being drained off as people make money off the inefficiency (Albeit, while correcting it).
Lastly, you can, in theory, corner the market on *any* commodity (It was nearly done during the Grant administration). I always find it interesting that the very libertarian influences that tend to like the concept of a gold standard are the people philosophically opposed to the very regulations that would make it difficult to corner the gold market once implemented.
Pug (Again, my layman's views)
IANAE, but my layman's understanding - It makes a difference in terms of how strong the dollar is, which in turn affects how much we can borrow - keeping oil in dollar amount means that to buy oil country 'X' has to have U.S. Dollars, which in turn means they have to *buy* U.S. dollars, increasing our foreign reserves without the U.S. actually doing anything.
This artificially strengthens the U.S. Dollar relative to everything else, but as long as the U.S. Dollar is naturally strong anyway, it's to the advantage of the OPEC nations to do that, because it means *they* get more bang for their (our) buck in turn, and can buy things at better rates of exchange.
Of course, if our dollars were to become weaker somehow (coff coff), then the Saudi's etcetera would no longer have that advantage to their favor, and might go shopping for a better currency, which in turn would artificially strengthen *that* currency instead of ours.
There would be other effects that make this not quite the great deal for OPEC that it immediately seems - they already maintain large dollar reserves that instantly become less valuable, and it would tick off any *other* trading partner also maintaining those reserves, as well as having destabilizing effect in the global economy that they wouldn't be sure would work in their favor, but it would be really bad for us, regardless.
Particularly with Bonzo Boy in the W.H. - Tax cuts would *not* help, and it's the only thing he's knows about economics.
Pug
Yeah, right until someone starts running arbitrage on the pegged commodities, which in turn will create a black market on those commodities, and the whole thing goes straight down the toilet.
Which, in an internet based culture, will happen at speeds measured in cpu cycles,
I'm thinking, ah, no. Floating currency despite the obvious problems, work lots better because you can't run them that way.
Pug
But isn't that what disproved? My (layman's) understanding of it was that it proved that deterministic theories and QM were mutually incompatible, and that later experiments proved that the winner of the two was QM.
And, btw, just to go off topic while there are smart people watching, can somebody please explain to me why exactly a non-deterministic theory like QM should be unable to lose information, aka the Hawking information paradox?
If it's non-deterministic, then you cannot, with certainty predict the future, even with certain information of the present, and by the same notion, there would be multiple pasts that can produce a given now.
But as I understand the information paradox, it is based on the concept that the past be (at least in theory) reconstructible from the present, which seem to me to be incompatible with a non-deterministic theory. In fact, if (as I understand it) the corollary to increasing entropy in a system is that the mathematical description of the system is continuously getting simpler, that would imply that information *is* lost as entropy increases.
Is there a layman's explanation for this?
Pug?
Oohhhh, damn, so it's really still 2322? And I thought I'd invented a flying time machine.
This sucks man.
Pug
Wow - My mom is a human, and *she* can use it.
My immediate response is that it sounds like you got a few errors and didn't tell anyone, then let it cascade till all hell broke loose, but darned if I can tell what you did from this rant.
Not that I find Ubuntu perfect - I can do entirely without the number of 'Bundled' packages - I installed a program that required KDE, and everything else in the wold came with it - I can't get one program to uninstall without synaptic uninstalling the entire KDE system, and I may just not be bright enough, but apt-get seems to do the same thing.
But it's hardly unusable - .
Pug
Okay, I'm just going to lie down here and bleed for a minute . . .
There's also a group of former special operations people, in the Los Angeles underground. If you can find them.