>>I obviously can't get you to stop rewriting history, but your revisionist speculations are not shared by the majority of economists, historians, or regular folks. It must gall you to realize that most people think FDR was one of our greatest presidents, and his policies a complete success.
"The debate is settled" claim is always an amusing one, especially since the debate is still ongoing on this issue, even now, with the money supply argument really being the most prevalent one. If you think it's settled, you probably haven't studied the issue as much as you think you have.
To the contrary, he was confused, his policies were confused, and his confusion and lack of direction hurt the economy as much as anything else did, as it made people reluctant to invest. He (Hoover and the fed both share the blame on this) fucked the money supply up, destabilized the currency and otherwise turned what should have been a couple years of depression into a decade of poverty. The fact that we haven't had a depression as long before or since should be a giant fucking clue.
Note that neither of us are disagreeing on the numbers, just the interpretation thereof. You think the 14% unemployment rate in 1937 represented a "full recovery" of the economy, but I (rightly) point out it was still triple the unemployment rate of the 1920s.
>>Maybe you can explain why the 1937-38 mini-recession was so short? For bonus points, try to do so without resorting to 'the government spent bunches of money on the buildup to WWII,' because of the logical contradiction that government spending on a war could fix things, but government spending on public programs couldn't.
Around 1937 to 1939, Roosevelt began ending his Huey Long phase, in which he was "out to get" corporations - by 1937 only 1/3rd of corporations in America were even making money. He was attacking private utilities constantly, and passed things like the Wagner Act which made companies even less profitable, in, you know, a time period in which they were already tight for cash. The NRA ended in 1939.
I could go on, but I'm sure you're set in your interpretation of the Great Depression, that you probably love what Hugo Chavez is doing to the economy in Venezuela. And it is very similar to FDR - price controls and government interventionism leading to the destruction of their economy.
>>Took off, in fact. Then in 1938 when the Republicans convinced him to stop
You mean in 1938 when the money supply dried up (again) due to Social Security, the Wagner Act, and increased reserve requirements at banks? Precipitating a second stock market crash? That 1938?
>>One of things that's known to be true is that people's usage changes as they get older. They get more expensive (higher resolution) gadgets. They take more pictures/videos, and these are of things that can't be downloaded again (e.g., of friends' weddings or children's first steps). Their usage will rise.
Yes, very true. One of the obnoxious side effects of the megapixel race, besides providing no image quality difference and actually decreasing the amount of light that hits each sensor (on our tiny, tiny sensors already in the P&S world), is that it makes file sizes ridiculously large. I turned my 10MP camera down into taking 6MP shots. A 40% reduction in file size, and even on a 46" 1080p screen, the images it took were identical.
But my new camera now also takes much larger videos than my older camera that I just replaced. VGA at 30fps means I can easily exceed 1GB for a longish shot.
I also have 80GB of (non-porn, I should mention) photographs and videos on my computer, counting both 70GB of stuff I've taken myself, and 10GB of funny images and videos downloaded from the internet.
I think that our current style of HDs will be the bulk storage medium of choice for at least a couple years to come. I'm toying with the notion of building a new machine with a RAID0 SSD setup (RAID0 Hard Drives are faster than individual SSDs) for the OS and applications, but even applications take up ridiculous amounts of space now. AION is around 10GB, my WoW directory around 20GB, some stupid 4X game that I bought that isn't 4X (Grand Ages: Rome) was 4GB or so, etc. etc. And a fair number of programs cause trouble if you don't install on the OS's hard drive. I remember using one of these digital download installers that insisted on downloading all its data onto C, even though it was full, and I had plenty of space on my other drives, for example.
>>Lots of companies selling high-priced software won't send you a disk any more. In some states, if you get a disk, you have to pay sales tax. If you download, you don't pay the tax.
Sigh... you're missing the point. For however much money they charged, they fucked up even a simple thing like shipping a DVD and manual to me. The packing slip said 1 DVD and 1 Manual. The box just had a manual.
I'm just saying that if there was ever a case where piracy was justified it was then.
>>unless your real problem is that you'd like to justify pirating MATLAB.
Using computers in a lab that had a valid license doesn't really count as piracy, just massive inconvenience.
You're probably not going to like the answers, but I've actually been studying this topic rather intensively recently.
>>Okay, so, in the depression, what year did the economy start to turn around?
Start to turn around, or actually turned around? "Start" to turn around could be any decline in the unemployment rate, but under FDR, unemployment stayed at ridiculously high levels until the start of WW2.
Unemployment in the 20s was around 5%, but averaged 18% across the 30s. It was still above 17% in 1939.
>>How fast did it grow after it did, compared to pre-depression growth?
By which measure? The Dow? It fluctuated according to estimates of future growth, which was meaningless in the face of FDR's vascillitating.
The GNP? Depending on the measure, it was either 3-4% lower in '39 than in '29, or about unchanged.
>>When did it reach a pre-depression level?
Between 1939 and 1942, depending on your measure. After a longer depression than any event we've ever had before or since, mainly due to government intervention.
>>At what year would GDP growth extrapolated from pre-depression rates, and assuming the depression never happened, meet the actual GDP? That is to say, at what point in time were the effects of the depression entirely erased?
Based on wikipedia, 1939. In reality, we never caught up with where we would have been if the great depression was shorter.
>>I've disproven Hayek many times before, not that that takes much work, I just copy the masters who've been doing it for decades.
There's several points he made, some of which have been absolutely proven (like government control harming free markets), and others that are less so (government control over economies leads to tyranny). I'd argue that the second is actually a valid point, as any time a government forces someone to do something they don't want to do, well, that's tyranny isn't it? Except nowadays they tend to just use tax incentives, subsidies, etc. to make people do what they want instead of doing the kind of horrible shenanigans FDR did.
Unfortunately, Hugo Chavez didn't give Obama a copy of The Road to Serfdom.
That was a case of a company messing up, not a moral argument for the right to pirate. I mean seriously, it took you 6+ months to get a copy of MATLAB? What were you doing all that time? And just because there was a problem that would cost you money doesn't mean you have the right to break the law to get round the problem.
If you read what I said, you'd see that I was just going into a computer lab that had it installed to run and test the code, which was a very unoptimal solution. And I would argue that it was justification to pirate - I'd payed however many thousands of dollars for the software, so I did actually own the right to use the code.
>>As for convenience, that's no excuse at all, it's just laziness. Given the ease of legally downloading these days, it's even less of an excuse.
When I bought MATLAB, it came in the mail nearly 9 months after I began the process to buy it. We had licensed some MATLAB code that we needed to pay a yearly royalty fee on it, so this delay would have cost me XX,000 dollars had I not had access to computer labs with MATLAB on it to run and debug the code on it.
The best part is? When they finally mailed it out to us, 6 months after billing my company / me thousands of dollars for it, they forgot to put the software in the box. Sure, it had a packing slip that said the CD should be in there, but nothing was inside the box but a manual. Their online download system is a POS as well.
>>This just shows the utter hypocrisy of the libertarians. I've said all along that libertarians really want corporate feudalism, or at least they have been completely co-opted by corporate feudalists.
Maybe they just played a lot of Shadowrun, and are excited by the notion of being able to cyber out their obese hacker bodies?
The general principle that government intervention into the workings of the economy hurts the economy was successfully argued by Hayek back in the 40s. Any analysis of what FDR did (which went waaay beyond anything Obama and Co. have tried) shows what happens when the government tries to interfere in private contracts (which they did), set market prices (which they did, by fining farmers, for example, that didn't "license" themselves at $1,000/day), try to control the labor supply (more people in farms = good?), assumed War Powers in order to sodomize constitutional rights in a time of peace, tried to stabilize currency but ended up doing the opposite, etc. etc.
The government should mainly be around just to provide for the common defense, public health, and enforcement of laws (including private contracts). Unlike most Libertarians, I support government programs that save or generate more money than they cost - if a program is essentially free, why get all Ayn Rand over it? Suprisingly, there's actually quite a few government programs that are like this - Poison Control centers are a good example.
Now hang on a second - how can you be a libertarian and be in favor of regulating private networks? That doesn't make any sense. The slippery slope is not something mythical; as you can see, they are trying to use net neutrality to move forward towards regulating actual CONTENT! There is a big difference between a government agency making comments about Drudge Report being an annoying or inaccurate website, and another to decide that it's "harmful content" and needs to be taken off-line.
This is what happens when you give them a finger...they take your entire arm. You guys all have been asking for them to tell telcos how to run their networks. Now that they are doing that, you are all bitching about it. WTF??
All good points, and I don't disagree with them. As I said I don't like the bill in place, but I do think some sort of network neutrality principle should be passed, even if it is just an extension of the common carrier railroad laws into internet backbone infrastructure.
Remember, censorship can easily happen under an Obamanation. Also, censorship can easily happen when corporations leverage their oligopoly powers over their citizens. Witness the debates over jailbreaking, Android, and all the evil corporate shenanigans that have been going on. When "regulation" means "enforcing the laws and principles of our country", like the first sale doctrine (which is nearly extinct now) or the common carrier principle, then yeah, I'm for regulation, as much as it nearly causes me physical pain to say that.
I think that Glenn Beck, while normally pretty reasonable (Youtube portrayals of him aside, he's one of the few smart commentators out there presenting a lot of new research), has been misrepresenting the network neutrality issue rather severely. Framing it as "the fairness doctrine for the internet", as the article did, is complete hogwash. We won't get that (at least) until Network Neutrality 2.0 gets passed.
>>And, in the end, the superior product won, and Netscape's attempt to take over the server market failed.
Were you around back then? There was a massive jump in the adoption of IE3, and that jump corresponded with Microsoft using its monopoly over OSes to bundle IE and destroy Netscape.
If by useable, you mean they broke basic core functionality in things like the windows explorer (breadcrumbs, what?) and the file dialog, then yeah, it was usable. Ever use Vista on a small screened machine? I give workshops around the country, and when I go to save something in front of a crowd of people, Vista resizes the left side down so small there's no easy click for the desktop and all the file names are "..." Unsolveable? Of course not, but when you're giving workshops for teachers, it's bad (trust me) to have to go on a short diversion to explain how to resize the file dialog to non-insane dimensions.
I've actually yet to meet someone who liked Vista more than, "Well, I can use it, I guess."
Win7 looks like it is continuing Vistas hideous UI decisions, but somehow it got good press, bizarrely even on Slashdot. So we'll see how it goes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center Sort of like NSA meets army meets FBI meets NYPD meets you and your lawyer. Under section 802 its "any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law" and the full force of the the US gov starts to warm up around you and your lawyer;)
This article was linked on the Drudge Report as "Julius [Caeser, implied] wants to regulate the internet."
I consider it, rather, a common carrier issue, akin to the situation we had with the railways 100 years ago - they were able to leverage their power over transit into other areas. You know, like how Microsoft used its OS dominance to destroy a rival in another field (web browsers). While all the networks are crying out that its a solution in need of a problem, the whole issue was raised because the telco's all started talking excitedly about how they could do all sorts of shady things, like double-dipping for bandwidth charges, that network neutrality would stop.
I'm a libertarian, and I support net neutrality, since oligopolies are market failures (see for example the price of cell phones in America over time). The actual implementation? Seems to actually have too many loopholes to me. They can, for example, tier service in order to deal with "net congestion". Hah.
>>I'm thinking someone at Kaiser is hoping this will pave the way for "You want health insurance? We just need to sequence your genome first. Oh, sorry, you're going to get Huntingtons disease. Good luck with that."
The nice thing about my health insurance through Kaiser is that they don't screen applications. You're charged an amount based on your age, and that's it. I think you have to fill out a thing about your existing conditions (they won't cover cancer if you have it already, I think) but that's about it.
What worries me is if these patients' DNA was used without their consent. Yes, it may be in the greater good to steal people's DNA, but Michael Crichton has a reasonably good rebuttal to this in Next.
>>Would that happen in real life combat? Does it happen in the fantasy novels D&D tries to simulate?
In both real life and in fantasy combats, there's usually a way of telling when you're severely outmatched. Rolling a 17 and still missing is the D&D equivalent of it. In 4e, you don't have the time to swing 10 times at a monster to try to get a feel for his defenses.
Even in D&D Online, there's a die that rolls every time you swing that you can kind of keep an eye on to see how relatively easy or hard the monsters you're fighting are.
>>The computer can hide the dice rolls, in fact it can hide the whole "combat system" from you, and just allow you to roleplay.
Eh, sometimes you need to know that you missed the monster after rolling a 17 (i.e., that you're pretty badly outclassed in the combat), something a "MISS!" sign doesn't convey until too late.
I've toyed around with actually writing a program very close to this, with a direct implementation of the 4th edition rules and a shared gametable so my friends and I can all play remotely. The trouble is, 4e sucks, and 3e isn't easy to directly implement within a game engine (though D&D Online does a reasonable enough job).
>>If it is ever shown that 'God' is the simplest way to explain something, I'm sure there will be waves of converts.
Would there be? I doubt it. Bayesian logic gives us the reason why. Depending on your prior estimation (which is based on faith rather than evidence) items of potential evidence for or against the existence of God are more or less likely to be accepted. Some atheists would only accept God talking to them directly as proof of God, and even then, I doubt they'd actually convert. AJ Ayer was convinced that God had spoken to him near his death, but he still rejected believing in God, because it was illogical (or, perhaps more likely, embarrassing after a lifetime of being a famous atheist). I can do into the math in more detail if you'd like.
>>If I've dropped a rock 100 times and every time I do it, it falls to the ground, then I have faith that there is at most a very small chance that it will decide to fly up into the air the next time I drop it.
>>... your claim that a magic man in the sky is extraordinary, and requires evidence.
Logical fail. There's a difference between saying something along the lines of "there's no evidence for God" and "It is blatantly obvious God does not exist". The latter requires evidence, and something somewhat more substantial than the fact that the GP doesn't believe God exists.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I obviously can't get you to stop rewriting history, but your revisionist speculations are not shared by the majority of economists, historians, or regular folks. It must gall you to realize that most people think FDR was one of our greatest presidents, and his policies a complete success.
"The debate is settled" claim is always an amusing one, especially since the debate is still ongoing on this issue, even now, with the money supply argument really being the most prevalent one. If you think it's settled, you probably haven't studied the issue as much as you think you have.
To the contrary, he was confused, his policies were confused, and his confusion and lack of direction hurt the economy as much as anything else did, as it made people reluctant to invest. He (Hoover and the fed both share the blame on this) fucked the money supply up, destabilized the currency and otherwise turned what should have been a couple years of depression into a decade of poverty. The fact that we haven't had a depression as long before or since should be a giant fucking clue.
Note that neither of us are disagreeing on the numbers, just the interpretation thereof. You think the 14% unemployment rate in 1937 represented a "full recovery" of the economy, but I (rightly) point out it was still triple the unemployment rate of the 1920s.
>>Maybe you can explain why the 1937-38 mini-recession was so short? For bonus points, try to do so without resorting to 'the government spent bunches of money on the buildup to WWII,' because of the logical contradiction that government spending on a war could fix things, but government spending on public programs couldn't.
Around 1937 to 1939, Roosevelt began ending his Huey Long phase, in which he was "out to get" corporations - by 1937 only 1/3rd of corporations in America were even making money. He was attacking private utilities constantly, and passed things like the Wagner Act which made companies even less profitable, in, you know, a time period in which they were already tight for cash. The NRA ended in 1939.
I could go on, but I'm sure you're set in your interpretation of the Great Depression, that you probably love what Hugo Chavez is doing to the economy in Venezuela. And it is very similar to FDR - price controls and government interventionism leading to the destruction of their economy.
>>Took off, in fact. Then in 1938 when the Republicans convinced him to stop
You mean in 1938 when the money supply dried up (again) due to Social Security, the Wagner Act, and increased reserve requirements at banks? Precipitating a second stock market crash? That 1938?
What? The data says the exact opposite.
>>One of things that's known to be true is that people's usage changes as they get older. They get more expensive (higher resolution) gadgets. They take more pictures/videos, and these are of things that can't be downloaded again (e.g., of friends' weddings or children's first steps). Their usage will rise.
Yes, very true. One of the obnoxious side effects of the megapixel race, besides providing no image quality difference and actually decreasing the amount of light that hits each sensor (on our tiny, tiny sensors already in the P&S world), is that it makes file sizes ridiculously large. I turned my 10MP camera down into taking 6MP shots. A 40% reduction in file size, and even on a 46" 1080p screen, the images it took were identical.
But my new camera now also takes much larger videos than my older camera that I just replaced. VGA at 30fps means I can easily exceed 1GB for a longish shot.
I also have 80GB of (non-porn, I should mention) photographs and videos on my computer, counting both 70GB of stuff I've taken myself, and 10GB of funny images and videos downloaded from the internet.
I think that our current style of HDs will be the bulk storage medium of choice for at least a couple years to come. I'm toying with the notion of building a new machine with a RAID0 SSD setup (RAID0 Hard Drives are faster than individual SSDs) for the OS and applications, but even applications take up ridiculous amounts of space now. AION is around 10GB, my WoW directory around 20GB, some stupid 4X game that I bought that isn't 4X (Grand Ages: Rome) was 4GB or so, etc. etc. And a fair number of programs cause trouble if you don't install on the OS's hard drive. I remember using one of these digital download installers that insisted on downloading all its data onto C, even though it was full, and I had plenty of space on my other drives, for example.
>>Lots of companies selling high-priced software won't send you a disk any more. In some states, if you get a disk, you have to pay sales tax. If you download, you don't pay the tax.
Sigh... you're missing the point. For however much money they charged, they fucked up even a simple thing like shipping a DVD and manual to me. The packing slip said 1 DVD and 1 Manual. The box just had a manual.
I'm just saying that if there was ever a case where piracy was justified it was then.
>>unless your real problem is that you'd like to justify pirating MATLAB.
Using computers in a lab that had a valid license doesn't really count as piracy, just massive inconvenience.
You're probably not going to like the answers, but I've actually been studying this topic rather intensively recently.
>>Okay, so, in the depression, what year did the economy start to turn around?
Start to turn around, or actually turned around? "Start" to turn around could be any decline in the unemployment rate, but under FDR, unemployment stayed at ridiculously high levels until the start of WW2.
Unemployment in the 20s was around 5%, but averaged 18% across the 30s. It was still above 17% in 1939.
>>How fast did it grow after it did, compared to pre-depression growth?
By which measure? The Dow? It fluctuated according to estimates of future growth, which was meaningless in the face of FDR's vascillitating.
The GNP? Depending on the measure, it was either 3-4% lower in '39 than in '29, or about unchanged.
>>When did it reach a pre-depression level?
Between 1939 and 1942, depending on your measure. After a longer depression than any event we've ever had before or since, mainly due to government intervention.
>>At what year would GDP growth extrapolated from pre-depression rates, and assuming the depression never happened, meet the actual GDP? That is to say, at what point in time were the effects of the depression entirely erased?
Based on wikipedia, 1939. In reality, we never caught up with where we would have been if the great depression was shorter.
>>I've disproven Hayek many times before, not that that takes much work, I just copy the masters who've been doing it for decades.
There's several points he made, some of which have been absolutely proven (like government control harming free markets), and others that are less so (government control over economies leads to tyranny). I'd argue that the second is actually a valid point, as any time a government forces someone to do something they don't want to do, well, that's tyranny isn't it? Except nowadays they tend to just use tax incentives, subsidies, etc. to make people do what they want instead of doing the kind of horrible shenanigans FDR did.
Unfortunately, Hugo Chavez didn't give Obama a copy of The Road to Serfdom.
If you read what I said, you'd see that I was just going into a computer lab that had it installed to run and test the code, which was a very unoptimal solution. And I would argue that it was justification to pirate - I'd payed however many thousands of dollars for the software, so I did actually own the right to use the code.
>>He's not saying that they paid before the software arrived, just that the bill arrived 6 months before the software.
No, paid in advance, and then the software arrived many many months later. Without the, you know, software in it.
>>Microsoft Vodka? When do they learn to use Russian Standard Vodka (worth checking out btw, some style for the Saturday night).
Pah! You haven't lived until you've had a Nuggetini made with real McDonalds Chicken McNuggets!
http://www.spike.com/blog/how-to-make/74079 ..and a better metaphor for Windows 7 cannot be found.
>>As for convenience, that's no excuse at all, it's just laziness. Given the ease of legally downloading these days, it's even less of an excuse.
When I bought MATLAB, it came in the mail nearly 9 months after I began the process to buy it. We had licensed some MATLAB code that we needed to pay a yearly royalty fee on it, so this delay would have cost me XX,000 dollars had I not had access to computer labs with MATLAB on it to run and debug the code on it.
The best part is? When they finally mailed it out to us, 6 months after billing my company / me thousands of dollars for it, they forgot to put the software in the box. Sure, it had a packing slip that said the CD should be in there, but nothing was inside the box but a manual. Their online download system is a POS as well.
>>Yeah, I didn't mean Barr - it was the New York guys that were running for the local offices that were up.
Ouch. New York politicians that are 9/11 truthers? That's not just crazy, that's insane.
>>They lost me in the last election because all of the candidates were 911 conspiracy nuts.
Bob Barr wasn't (AFAICT):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6300661667256681550&hl=en#
Both McCain and Obama support the massive expansion of government, which is why I "threw my vote away" on Barr last year.
>>This just shows the utter hypocrisy of the libertarians. I've said all along that libertarians really want corporate feudalism, or at least they have been completely co-opted by corporate feudalists.
Maybe they just played a lot of Shadowrun, and are excited by the notion of being able to cyber out their obese hacker bodies?
The general principle that government intervention into the workings of the economy hurts the economy was successfully argued by Hayek back in the 40s. Any analysis of what FDR did (which went waaay beyond anything Obama and Co. have tried) shows what happens when the government tries to interfere in private contracts (which they did), set market prices (which they did, by fining farmers, for example, that didn't "license" themselves at $1,000/day), try to control the labor supply (more people in farms = good?), assumed War Powers in order to sodomize constitutional rights in a time of peace, tried to stabilize currency but ended up doing the opposite, etc. etc.
The government should mainly be around just to provide for the common defense, public health, and enforcement of laws (including private contracts). Unlike most Libertarians, I support government programs that save or generate more money than they cost - if a program is essentially free, why get all Ayn Rand over it? Suprisingly, there's actually quite a few government programs that are like this - Poison Control centers are a good example.
All good points, and I don't disagree with them. As I said I don't like the bill in place, but I do think some sort of network neutrality principle should be passed, even if it is just an extension of the common carrier railroad laws into internet backbone infrastructure.
Remember, censorship can easily happen under an Obamanation. Also, censorship can easily happen when corporations leverage their oligopoly powers over their citizens. Witness the debates over jailbreaking, Android, and all the evil corporate shenanigans that have been going on. When "regulation" means "enforcing the laws and principles of our country", like the first sale doctrine (which is nearly extinct now) or the common carrier principle, then yeah, I'm for regulation, as much as it nearly causes me physical pain to say that.
I think that Glenn Beck, while normally pretty reasonable (Youtube portrayals of him aside, he's one of the few smart commentators out there presenting a lot of new research), has been misrepresenting the network neutrality issue rather severely. Framing it as "the fairness doctrine for the internet", as the article did, is complete hogwash. We won't get that (at least) until Network Neutrality 2.0 gets passed.
>>And, in the end, the superior product won, and Netscape's attempt to take over the server market failed.
Were you around back then? There was a massive jump in the adoption of IE3, and that jump corresponded with Microsoft using its monopoly over OSes to bundle IE and destroy Netscape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Older_reports
And I actually did prefer Netscape 4 to IE3. I still miss some of its features in firefox these days.
>>Vista SP1 now, that was usable.
If by useable, you mean they broke basic core functionality in things like the windows explorer (breadcrumbs, what?) and the file dialog, then yeah, it was usable. Ever use Vista on a small screened machine? I give workshops around the country, and when I go to save something in front of a crowd of people, Vista resizes the left side down so small there's no easy click for the desktop and all the file names are "..." Unsolveable? Of course not, but when you're giving workshops for teachers, it's bad (trust me) to have to go on a short diversion to explain how to resize the file dialog to non-insane dimensions.
I've actually yet to meet someone who liked Vista more than, "Well, I can use it, I guess."
Win7 looks like it is continuing Vistas hideous UI decisions, but somehow it got good press, bizarrely even on Slashdot. So we'll see how it goes.
Whoosh. Fusion Center:
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/intro/info.html
This article was linked on the Drudge Report as "Julius [Caeser, implied] wants to regulate the internet."
I consider it, rather, a common carrier issue, akin to the situation we had with the railways 100 years ago - they were able to leverage their power over transit into other areas. You know, like how Microsoft used its OS dominance to destroy a rival in another field (web browsers). While all the networks are crying out that its a solution in need of a problem, the whole issue was raised because the telco's all started talking excitedly about how they could do all sorts of shady things, like double-dipping for bandwidth charges, that network neutrality would stop.
I'm a libertarian, and I support net neutrality, since oligopolies are market failures (see for example the price of cell phones in America over time). The actual implementation? Seems to actually have too many loopholes to me. They can, for example, tier service in order to deal with "net congestion". Hah.
>>...revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret
Apparently, there IS an app for that.
>>With fusion centres in the US and any suspect now a "terrorist" most of the attorney client privilege protection is getting blurred.
Well, I certainly hope they keep those terrorists away from the fusion centres!!
>>I'm thinking someone at Kaiser is hoping this will pave the way for "You want health insurance? We just need to sequence your genome first. Oh, sorry, you're going to get Huntingtons disease. Good luck with that."
The nice thing about my health insurance through Kaiser is that they don't screen applications. You're charged an amount based on your age, and that's it. I think you have to fill out a thing about your existing conditions (they won't cover cancer if you have it already, I think) but that's about it.
What worries me is if these patients' DNA was used without their consent. Yes, it may be in the greater good to steal people's DNA, but Michael Crichton has a reasonably good rebuttal to this in Next.
>>*Not* "your enemy's STR and HP are both higher than your own"
I'd rather just have a digital gametable that handled all the minutia for us.
>>Would that happen in real life combat? Does it happen in the fantasy novels D&D tries to simulate?
In both real life and in fantasy combats, there's usually a way of telling when you're severely outmatched. Rolling a 17 and still missing is the D&D equivalent of it. In 4e, you don't have the time to swing 10 times at a monster to try to get a feel for his defenses.
Even in D&D Online, there's a die that rolls every time you swing that you can kind of keep an eye on to see how relatively easy or hard the monsters you're fighting are.
>>The computer can hide the dice rolls, in fact it can hide the whole "combat system" from you, and just allow you to roleplay.
Eh, sometimes you need to know that you missed the monster after rolling a 17 (i.e., that you're pretty badly outclassed in the combat), something a "MISS!" sign doesn't convey until too late.
I've toyed around with actually writing a program very close to this, with a direct implementation of the 4th edition rules and a shared gametable so my friends and I can all play remotely. The trouble is, 4e sucks, and 3e isn't easy to directly implement within a game engine (though D&D Online does a reasonable enough job).
>>If it is ever shown that 'God' is the simplest way to explain something, I'm sure there will be waves of converts.
Would there be? I doubt it. Bayesian logic gives us the reason why. Depending on your prior estimation (which is based on faith rather than evidence) items of potential evidence for or against the existence of God are more or less likely to be accepted. Some atheists would only accept God talking to them directly as proof of God, and even then, I doubt they'd actually convert. AJ Ayer was convinced that God had spoken to him near his death, but he still rejected believing in God, because it was illogical (or, perhaps more likely, embarrassing after a lifetime of being a famous atheist). I can do into the math in more detail if you'd like.
>>If I've dropped a rock 100 times and every time I do it, it falls to the ground, then I have faith that there is at most a very small chance that it will decide to fly up into the air the next time I drop it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
>>... your claim that a magic man in the sky is extraordinary, and requires evidence.
Logical fail. There's a difference between saying something along the lines of "there's no evidence for God" and "It is blatantly obvious God does not exist". The latter requires evidence, and something somewhat more substantial than the fact that the GP doesn't believe God exists.
I'd recommend reading this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance