The problem with the name "pollution" is that it is wrong. You might consider all things that change the climate to be pollution, but that doesn't make all pollution something that changes climate. Names should be exactly what they describe, not a proper superset, not a proper subset. In this case you are erring towards a superset. And I don't want to hear all of the idiotic arguments that will arise from one bad choice of words-- not that this entire subject of global warming is anything but idiotic arguments from everyone who is too lazy to learn and use the mathematical tools that humanity has been developing for thousands of years.
And what if I don't believe it because I don't see any math at all (much less well organized mathematical arguments from observation to conclusion), I'm smart enough to know the difference between "don't believe" and "believe the opposite of", and I think that people who make appeals to their age are pathetically lacking anything better to appeal to?
One of the many eye-openers that reading Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" book has provided me, all those years ago, is that, no matter how much we humans may try, we may *never* be sure to have removed all errors or imperfections from anything that's even marginally worth of our interest. In a nutshell, if you can prove that something has reached perfection, at the same you prove that it is not interesting anymore.
You have severely misunderstood. That's understandable, since the English language doesn't support quantifiers well. Read carefully:
It is not possible to write a program that can verify the correctness of all other programs.
It is possible to write a program whose correctness can be verified.
It is not possible to write a program which correctly outputs yes/no to the question of correctness of every possible input program.
It is possible (and is done often) to write a program such that only outputs "yes" when the input is error-free, although "no" only indicates that the error-freeness hasn't been proven.
As far as "no interesting program will ever be bug free", you either don't consider microprocessors to be interesting or you were not aware that many microprocessors have been fully verified. Yes it is a hard problem. However, it is not an impossible problem, and the obstacle isn't mathematics, it's design choices. Those who know how to implement logic don't know how to make the implementation user-friendly, those who know how to make things usable don't know how to implement logic. Time will bridge that gap.
This only works in a very limited number of situations. For example, two compilers can both produce "correct" code, but it's highly unlikely that they will produce the same code. There are no half assed techniques that can produce reliable code, and anything less than mathematical logic is half assed.
You don't outlaw nuclear weapons. You outlaw the reckless endangerment that comes from owning them. Laws must not be based on actions, and especially not based on possession, but based on intent.
There is a difference between an asshole and a sociopath.
Bullies are assholes. They are selfish pricks who enjoy ruining things around them.
"Sociopaths" (to use the term loosely) are people who are not as inhibited by emotions. A lack of empathy is not the same thing as a preference for injuring others. Not to mention, being able to control your emotions and behave purely rationally can be a very good(tm) thing, if the person accepts helping others as rational.
I believe there are more assholes in the world than sociopaths. However, it is the presence of sociopaths that puts a limit on assholes. Bully a regular person and you will probably get away with it; bully a sociopath and it might be the last thing you do.
You would also have to end corporate income tax, and put the remaining balance directly onto payroll income tax (with the appropriate raise in income). You'd also have to end payroll taxes (taxes that employer pays on your income) and put the balance of that onto your taxes and income. You'd also have to end sales tax and put the balance onto your income tax. You'd have to do it for both state and federal taxes.
This doesn't even begin to take into account how much your income is reduced by the fact that your company's customers and suppliers have to pay all of those taxes as well. More income for customers = more income for you. Less taxes on suppliers = cheaper prices for you.
Anyone working in the private sector has well over 50% of their working hours siphoned away by taxes.
Frankly, it is actually putting people in danger in a way that is especially enormously terrible since it would be so easy to avoid. Why would you EVER publish unique identifiers that map to people like that? I can understand this was probably an oversight, but it really is indefensible as an intentional disclosure.
I consider this publication beneficial. If the data was restricted to government employees only, then only a small portion of the population would be in danger and the monitoring continues unchallenged. When everyone has to share the same danger, monitoring people becomes an issue.
I hate when people are so naive as to believe that collecting data on people is fine as long as only the government has access to that data. If it is not acceptable to make the data available to everyone, then it is not acceptable to make the data available to anyone.
Did you ever try to do something significant? Run a company, run a political party, publish a popular newspaper, build a marvel of engineering? To call a legal system unobtrusive, it requires more than insignificant people not being bothered by legalities. A legal system should also not hinder those make progress for humanity. If the defense against a legal system is to be a serf, then to hell with it.
Japan should never be used a comparison for any statistic. Japan is a country that existed for thousands of years in isolation, only opening up to foreign trade for the last couple hundred years. They have around 98% ethnic purity. Their language is unique, their beliefs are unique, there is no other place in the world with similar social expectations. They have 2 dominant religions that have (and with 1 exception due to an emperor, always have) existed in complete peace with each other. Japan is so unique that any correlation between them and the rest of the world is actually intriguing. To try to find significance to a single statistical difference is practically impossible.
When companies exist only by monopolistic decree of congress (utilities, ISPs, overbroad patents and IP, quotas preventing competition), then that company should at least be held to the same restrictions as congress.
If McDonalds wants to regulate speech in their restaurants, that is fine. If Comcast wants to, that is not fine, Comcast is effectively a creation of the government. I imagine a search engine is closer to free than privileged, so in this case the courts are probably ruling towards the intent of the First Amendment, but that isn't necessarily always the case with every company.
He has a problem with not enough black people being hired? Well he's black. Lock him in a room with a semiconductor design textbook, and don't let him out until he is qualified to be hired. Let's see how much he cares then.
Godel's incompleteness theorems don't mean that you can't make fully verified software. It means that you can make software which can't be verified. Big deal. Verification is coming; in some areas, like medical/aero software and processor design it's already here.
Entire processors have been verified mathematically to perform as designed. That's some serious complexity right there. Much medical and aeronautical software is verified.
...Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Red Hat...
... all create consumer products for casual users. Casual users don't demand perfect software, so of course they don't get it. Some companies do have that expertise though, and it isn't cheap.
Having money isn't corrupt. It is the means by which the money is acquired that may be corrupt.
Granted, as US law is setup now, it's nearly impossible to become rich without your hands in the US treasury, or special legal status not afforded to the general public. But it's not the "being rich" itself that is the problem.
The Suni / Shiite fighting are constantly fighting each other in Iraq, even leading to a named Iraq civil war...as I said. The US has completely avoided going to war with any country that is actually willing to fighting back. The question isn't whether the US would win in Panama, it's whether or not Panama would be willing to fight back. The only thing a country really has to be able to do to defend itself against the US is to make it known that they will attack the mainland US in retaliation.
Yeah, the US would kick their ass faster than we won in Vietnam. I mean against North Korea. I mean the last country we fought that wasn't dragging it's bleeding body out of a civil war. When was that, 1940?
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
A single point is certainly a triangle, all side lengths are zero. It would be very irregular not to include a single point in the definition of triangles.
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The problem with the name "pollution" is that it is wrong. You might consider all things that change the climate to be pollution, but that doesn't make all pollution something that changes climate. Names should be exactly what they describe, not a proper superset, not a proper subset. In this case you are erring towards a superset. And I don't want to hear all of the idiotic arguments that will arise from one bad choice of words-- not that this entire subject of global warming is anything but idiotic arguments from everyone who is too lazy to learn and use the mathematical tools that humanity has been developing for thousands of years.
And what if I don't believe it because I don't see any math at all (much less well organized mathematical arguments from observation to conclusion), I'm smart enough to know the difference between "don't believe" and "believe the opposite of", and I think that people who make appeals to their age are pathetically lacking anything better to appeal to?
One of the many eye-openers that reading Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" book has provided me, all those years ago, is that, no matter how much we humans may try, we may *never* be sure to have removed all errors or imperfections from anything that's even marginally worth of our interest. In a nutshell, if you can prove that something has reached perfection, at the same you prove that it is not interesting anymore.
You have severely misunderstood. That's understandable, since the English language doesn't support quantifiers well. Read carefully:
It is not possible to write a program that can verify the correctness of all other programs.
It is possible to write a program whose correctness can be verified.
It is not possible to write a program which correctly outputs yes/no to the question of correctness of every possible input program.
It is possible (and is done often) to write a program such that only outputs "yes" when the input is error-free, although "no" only indicates that the error-freeness hasn't been proven.
As far as "no interesting program will ever be bug free", you either don't consider microprocessors to be interesting or you were not aware that many microprocessors have been fully verified. Yes it is a hard problem. However, it is not an impossible problem, and the obstacle isn't mathematics, it's design choices. Those who know how to implement logic don't know how to make the implementation user-friendly, those who know how to make things usable don't know how to implement logic. Time will bridge that gap.
This only works in a very limited number of situations. For example, two compilers can both produce "correct" code, but it's highly unlikely that they will produce the same code. There are no half assed techniques that can produce reliable code, and anything less than mathematical logic is half assed.
Personally, I don't think any corporation should be able to talk politics
Do you realize that the RNC and DNC are both corporations?
I am a natural born US citizen
So you're not a vampire?
Can't find a link right now, but iirc, gasoline has the world record for efficiency in killing spree.
You don't outlaw nuclear weapons. You outlaw the reckless endangerment that comes from owning them. Laws must not be based on actions, and especially not based on possession, but based on intent.
"Rationalize" does not mean rational; it is actually quite the opposite.
There is a difference between an asshole and a sociopath.
Bullies are assholes. They are selfish pricks who enjoy ruining things around them.
"Sociopaths" (to use the term loosely) are people who are not as inhibited by emotions. A lack of empathy is not the same thing as a preference for injuring others. Not to mention, being able to control your emotions and behave purely rationally can be a very good(tm) thing, if the person accepts helping others as rational.
I believe there are more assholes in the world than sociopaths. However, it is the presence of sociopaths that puts a limit on assholes. Bully a regular person and you will probably get away with it; bully a sociopath and it might be the last thing you do.
You would also have to end corporate income tax, and put the remaining balance directly onto payroll income tax (with the appropriate raise in income). You'd also have to end payroll taxes (taxes that employer pays on your income) and put the balance of that onto your taxes and income. You'd also have to end sales tax and put the balance onto your income tax. You'd have to do it for both state and federal taxes.
This doesn't even begin to take into account how much your income is reduced by the fact that your company's customers and suppliers have to pay all of those taxes as well. More income for customers = more income for you. Less taxes on suppliers = cheaper prices for you.
Anyone working in the private sector has well over 50% of their working hours siphoned away by taxes.
Frankly, it is actually putting people in danger in a way that is especially enormously terrible since it would be so easy to avoid. Why would you EVER publish unique identifiers that map to people like that? I can understand this was probably an oversight, but it really is indefensible as an intentional disclosure.
I consider this publication beneficial. If the data was restricted to government employees only, then only a small portion of the population would be in danger and the monitoring continues unchallenged. When everyone has to share the same danger, monitoring people becomes an issue.
I hate when people are so naive as to believe that collecting data on people is fine as long as only the government has access to that data. If it is not acceptable to make the data available to everyone, then it is not acceptable to make the data available to anyone.
Did you ever try to do something significant? Run a company, run a political party, publish a popular newspaper, build a marvel of engineering? To call a legal system unobtrusive, it requires more than insignificant people not being bothered by legalities. A legal system should also not hinder those make progress for humanity. If the defense against a legal system is to be a serf, then to hell with it.
Japan should never be used a comparison for any statistic. Japan is a country that existed for thousands of years in isolation, only opening up to foreign trade for the last couple hundred years. They have around 98% ethnic purity. Their language is unique, their beliefs are unique, there is no other place in the world with similar social expectations. They have 2 dominant religions that have (and with 1 exception due to an emperor, always have) existed in complete peace with each other. Japan is so unique that any correlation between them and the rest of the world is actually intriguing. To try to find significance to a single statistical difference is practically impossible.
In a free economy, yes.
When companies exist only by monopolistic decree of congress (utilities, ISPs, overbroad patents and IP, quotas preventing competition), then that company should at least be held to the same restrictions as congress.
If McDonalds wants to regulate speech in their restaurants, that is fine. If Comcast wants to, that is not fine, Comcast is effectively a creation of the government. I imagine a search engine is closer to free than privileged, so in this case the courts are probably ruling towards the intent of the First Amendment, but that isn't necessarily always the case with every company.
It's pretty much open season on the US now, and you can expect to see virus attacks on US infrastructure in the future. All thanks to the NSA.
I wouldn't mind getting some new infrastructure. Burn it all down.
He has a problem with not enough black people being hired? Well he's black. Lock him in a room with a semiconductor design textbook, and don't let him out until he is qualified to be hired. Let's see how much he cares then.
I'll jump into the middle of this AC argument!
Godel's incompleteness theorems don't mean that you can't make fully verified software. It means that you can make software which can't be verified. Big deal. Verification is coming; in some areas, like medical/aero software and processor design it's already here.
Entire processors have been verified mathematically to perform as designed. That's some serious complexity right there. Much medical and aeronautical software is verified.
...Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Red Hat...
... all create consumer products for casual users. Casual users don't demand perfect software, so of course they don't get it. Some companies do have that expertise though, and it isn't cheap.
Having money isn't corrupt. It is the means by which the money is acquired that may be corrupt.
Granted, as US law is setup now, it's nearly impossible to become rich without your hands in the US treasury, or special legal status not afforded to the general public. But it's not the "being rich" itself that is the problem.
The Suni / Shiite fighting are constantly fighting each other in Iraq, even leading to a named Iraq civil war...as I said. The US has completely avoided going to war with any country that is actually willing to fighting back. The question isn't whether the US would win in Panama, it's whether or not Panama would be willing to fight back. The only thing a country really has to be able to do to defend itself against the US is to make it known that they will attack the mainland US in retaliation.
Yeah, the US would kick their ass faster than we won in Vietnam. I mean against North Korea. I mean the last country we fought that wasn't dragging it's bleeding body out of a civil war. When was that, 1940?
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
--Thomas Jefferson
A single point is certainly a triangle, all side lengths are zero. It would be very irregular not to include a single point in the definition of triangles.