If potential criminals are jailed based on predictions to the point that the
crimes are prevented, then the predictions were wrong:) You may only jail
those forseen to be in jail, and even then only at the forseen time, otherwise
your predictions are crap and nondeterministic. There are no what-if's. Of
course, given the nondeterminism of the universe itself at the quantum scale,
predecting the future would seem to be impossible even if the mind works at a
deterministic level.
Kitten is a subclass of Flesh which mixes in Water. Water responds to
microwave by heating. When its temperature parameter is sufficiently
increased, Flesh cooks.
Regarding the 9th Amendment, as I understand things the US Constituion was written under a "if the government isn't explicitly allowed to do it, then it cannot do it" assumption. The Bill of Rights was merely a "ok, these are things the government absolutely definitely cannot do" and was added only becasue many did not like the apparent vagueness of the Consitution. The 9th Amendment is just a clarification of the "if not explicitly allowed, then denied" mode for government powers. Of course, the commerce clause, the taxation amendment (16th), and the changes in senate elections (17th) have arguably resulted in expansion of the scope of the federal government far beyond what was originally intended despite the framers' best intentions.
Mod parent up:) As is stands, I was changing numbers anyway to get a local area code number. I should have payed more attention however; I can't remember exactly who told me that, but for some reason it's stuck in my head, and now I feel lied to.
When I shopped, I looked at Cingular and T-Mobile's prepaid plans. At least
in my area, Cingular's
two prepaid plans include a 10 cents per minute, 1 dollar per day plan (I
agree, not very useful, though perhaps in some situations) and a 25 cent per
minute plan without the daily fee. Minutes in $25-$75 chunks expire after 90
days, with $100 dollar chunks lasting a year.
T-Mobile's
prepaid plan has a graduated pay scale as low as 10 cents per minute if you
buy minutes in chunks of $100, and as high as 30 cents in chunks of $10.
Expiration is 90 days at the $25-50 level. If you've bought enough minutes to
be "gold" customer (1000 minutes I believe), then any chunk of minutes lasts a
one year. The graduated pricing still applies but gets slightly cheaper with 10
cents still being the cheapest in $100 chunks ($50 buys at 11 cents per min;
$25, 17 cents per).
I believe both Cingular and T-Mobile carry over unused minutes as long as
you buy new minutes before the old ones expire. Note that number portability
does not apply to prepaid accounts, at least T-Mobile told me I could not
transfer my previous cell number.
I decided on T-Mobile, brought my unlocked GSM phone to a T-Mobile store,
and had no troubles (though some kiosks did not carry prepaid plans; I had to
go to my town's main store).
Right, but the amount a bank may loan out is a multiple of their actual
reserves, the multiple being set by the Federal Reserve. Thus potential loans
are indeed proportional to actual reserves.
I don't fully understand the economics of the situation, but money in the bank is money that may be loaned out for others to buy houses or start businesses...
I thought it was "elephant in the room"? Googlefight!. We're talking orders of magnitude here... Please tell me that lame TV commercial that botched the idiom isn't starting a trend? I think 800 lb gorilla should remain as the Urban Dictionary's "an overbearing entity in a specific industry or sphere of activity" and not expand to the more abstract, from Wikipedia, "an obvious truth that is being ignored"
Like someone said, GMail exists to read email, and therefore the possibility
of it supporting encryption seems unlikely... but, if a webmail were to support
encryption, it could either store the PGP private key encrypted with a
passphrase (storing neither the passphrase nor the decrypted emails
permanently), or it could rely on browser support for performing all
decryption. Still not unbreakable, but requires theoretically large resources
and could probably not be done en masse.
I would love to see browser PGP support for a number of reasons. One
possibility I would love would be, rather than maintaining a separate
login/password on every website under the sun, one could merely PGP sign say,
slashdot posts. Slashdot would maintain some minimal trust information for
each PGP id to decide whether or not to allow the post. Unknown id's could be
subject to bayesian filtering or something. Any physical person could create
any number of PGP id's to remain semi-anonymous as slashdot is now.
Of course, PGP keys are hard to tote around to arbitrary computers. One
would need a usb stick or something which would certainly be too much
trouble and subject to incompatibilities.
I agree with your sentiments, but I think no one cares about encryption.
For what it's worth, freenigma provides
GnuPG webmail through a Firefox extension and an existing webmail account
supported by freenigma (includes GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, others). I have not
used freenigma, but last time I read the docs I got the impression it was not
compatible with, say, mutt's PGP/MIME which I use for kicks (I have zero
encryption using friends).
One thing that always bugged me about mutt's PGP is that attachments are
neither signed nor encrypted. I'm not sure if this is a mutt problem or a
general OpenPGP issue, but it is certainly unfortunate. I suppose one is
expected to manually encrypt attachments prior to mailing? This might be
acceptable, even preferable, if computer interfaces were not so cumbersome.
As for no one caring about encryption, I propose creating an animation for
sending email, similar to the Windows file transfer animation with the sheets
of paper flitting across the screen. This animation would add dozens of little
faces watching the email, with visible text, flit across the screen. An
encrypted email could perhaps be represented as a closed envelope.
Generally yes. Even off-campus work may performed if approved by the school (the example I have in mind is an internship; I believe that off-campus work must be related to one's studies).
Looks like an allowable animal must both chew the cud and have a cloven hoof. Pigs have a cloven hoof but don't chew the cud. So, force the pig to chew the cud and you're ok? Some parts of "the law" strike me more as a guide for surviving in the desert in ancient times rather than arbitrary rules to follow. For example, Basically, the Dietary Law is a prohibition against eating scavenger animals. The article goes on about how the more complex digestive system of grazing animals leads to less toxicity in the meat. Perhaps farm pigs fed a controlled diet should be considered "clean".
"Get off this estate." "What for?" "Because it's mine." "Where did you get it?" "From my father." "Where did he get it?" "From his father." "And where did he get it?" "He fought for it." "Well, I'll fight you for it."
I wonder how removing party designations from ballots, randomizing the
candidate order on each ballot, or providing completely blank ballots and
requiring a full name be written, would affect the polls, implementation
issues aside. The goal would be minimizing the effect of ignorant votes.
My ideal forum: Anonymous, semi-anonymous, or "open" posts like the summary
describes are run through some bayes or otherwise learning filter. If it's
clean, it gets posted, if not, then to the trash. Through some mechanism not
requiring a unique website login (e.g. a browser extension that made PGP
signatures as easy as a click; why doesn't this exist?), a "verified" post
could be made by the semi-anonymous PGP ID. Once enough trust is gained by
refraining from making posts flagged as spam, or simply being designated a
moderator, the verified ID could then mark posts as spam or not to train the
spam filter on mistakes.
Also in my ideal forum: no [images in] sigs, no avatars, no wasted space by
gigantic post headers (Ubuntu formus, I'm looking at you!). Provide a user
page for all sorts of junk if you must, be keep it out of the discussion or at
least off to one side.
Science isn't really a quest for truth. It's more of an intentional and
directed quest for falsehood. For example, it can never be "proven" that
gravity exists, "it's all just an exceedingly unlikely random occurance" is
always a possibility. What science can do is tell you that certain things are
false. For example, Aristotle said heavier objects move to the ground faster
than lighter objects. Galileo, or so the story goes, showed this to be false
by dropping unequal weights from a tower. Newton said gravity behaves in such
and such a way. Einstein and observations of the heavens show that this misses
a few details. Very narrow lists of statements not known to be false (e.g. the
laws of physics) have proven very useful for many purposes such as building
bridges, telescopes, and all sorts of machines. But it requires faith to take
these lists as "truth".
Only mathematics has proofs, because we made up all the rules. The best we
can do in the real world is identify falsehoods.
While much evidence suggests that the world is older than 2,000 years, I'm
not sure of any undeniable way to prove a 2,000 year old earth false. I would
agree that this is unfortunate, but creationists are at least better off than
flat-earth folk. I mean, you can fly a plane around the earth if you want.
Well, in some sense things are purposely set up this way. Perhaps to avoid the tyranny of the majority or whatever. I'd like to see more discussion in this rather than an implicit assumption that more people voting directly on more things is better. Of course, when the representative democracy of the US was set up, the states had more power and the feds had less. Now the federal government has grabbed everything important through the commerce clause and various strings attached money taken via taxation and given to the states, so the dynamics of the US republic are a bit different with power more concentrated and each individual vote counting for less... But those are the things I'm fuzzy on and would like to hear more about.
Correlations have been found between pronation and knee pain, for example. This of course does not imply causality, and as I understand the state of the research it's a bit early to be making claims that preventing overpronation will prevent injury. I would welcome any news to the contrary. I agree that different shoes will work for different people, but I'm not sure the standard shoe advice of "overpronators need motion control" etc. is worth anything. For myself at least, I always preferred lightweight and flexible shoes despite the recommendations of running shoes stores for my mild overpronation (the stores never followed up on a purchase to ask how I liked the shoe, so I'm not even sure where they get information to make these recommendations). So in my experience, everyone's on their own to find what works for them.
I'm not convinced that so few people are suited to running barefoot. Cynically, the shoe companies would certainly rather you buy shoes, but the lack of scientific evidence tells me they don't really have any more clue than I do on how to prevent injury. The recent speculations that many human features evolved for better distance running are also interesting. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I've heard from high arched to low arched folks all doing fine barefoot. Barefoot running definitely requires time to adapt and should not be attempted recklessly (the same should be said for any running or exercise). Took me two months to really feel good running barefoot. But I'm glad I did it because now I don't have to go through the hassle of finding shoes that fit, not to mention the cash savings. And mud feels awesome.
Indeed, shoes affect different people in different ways. I had shin splints
in some shoes and running surfaces, but not in other shoes. My anecdotal
evidence is that running barefoot on grass, dirt, concrete, and pavement
(surfaces free of sharp pebbly rocks) has become more comfortable than running
in shoes (and less expensive and more fun, especially when there is mud). This
doesn't mean barefeet work for everyone, but it also means expensive shoes are
not inherently superior to cheap shoes (with my barefoot adaptations I can run
just fine in bed slippers or mocassins or anything with enough flexibility) or
even no shoes.
And to my surprise, when I researched to make sure I wasn't damaging myself,
I found no science in support of current shoe designs. Conclusion: whatever
works for you is best; don't be fooled into thinking expensive shoes will
necessarily "work for you".
"A good pair of running shoes is going to set you back at least $100, no
matter what. If you buy anything cheaper, you're simply risking injury."
It is simply untrue to claim that inexpensive running shoes come with the
risk of injury. Sorry to drift off-topic, but this is an oft repeated
falsehood that I once believed myself, and I'd like to share what I've since
learned. Review literature on the subject concludes that the only reliable
predictors for injury are experience level, training load, and history of
previous injury. In particular, a sudden increase in training load often
results in injury, and one might speculate that beginners are more prone to
this error.
There is no evidence that cushioning or motion control technologies have
done anything to reduce the incidence of injury over the years. Indeed, some
groups, including westerners on concrete, run in bare feet, without obviously
higher injury rates than those wearing "good" running shoes, though
peer-reviewed studies are scarce. The biomechanics of running and running
injuries are simply not well understood. As such it's difficult to claim that
any particular design can reduce injury rates.
Slashdot Mirror
If potential criminals are jailed based on predictions to the point that the crimes are prevented, then the predictions were wrong :) You may only jail
those forseen to be in jail, and even then only at the forseen time, otherwise
your predictions are crap and nondeterministic. There are no what-if's. Of
course, given the nondeterminism of the universe itself at the quantum scale,
predecting the future would seem to be impossible even if the mind works at a
deterministic level.
Kitten is a subclass of Flesh which mixes in Water. Water responds to microwave by heating. When its temperature parameter is sufficiently increased, Flesh cooks.
Define free market.
Regarding the 9th Amendment, as I understand things the US Constituion was written under a "if the government isn't explicitly allowed to do it, then it cannot do it" assumption. The Bill of Rights was merely a "ok, these are things the government absolutely definitely cannot do" and was added only becasue many did not like the apparent vagueness of the Consitution. The 9th Amendment is just a clarification of the "if not explicitly allowed, then denied" mode for government powers. Of course, the commerce clause, the taxation amendment (16th), and the changes in senate elections (17th) have arguably resulted in expansion of the scope of the federal government far beyond what was originally intended despite the framers' best intentions.
Mod parent up :) As is stands, I was changing numbers anyway to get a local area code number. I should have payed more attention however; I can't remember exactly who told me that, but for some reason it's stuck in my head, and now I feel lied to.
When I shopped, I looked at Cingular and T-Mobile's prepaid plans. At least in my area, Cingular's two prepaid plans include a 10 cents per minute, 1 dollar per day plan (I agree, not very useful, though perhaps in some situations) and a 25 cent per minute plan without the daily fee. Minutes in $25-$75 chunks expire after 90 days, with $100 dollar chunks lasting a year.
T-Mobile's prepaid plan has a graduated pay scale as low as 10 cents per minute if you buy minutes in chunks of $100, and as high as 30 cents in chunks of $10. Expiration is 90 days at the $25-50 level. If you've bought enough minutes to be "gold" customer (1000 minutes I believe), then any chunk of minutes lasts a one year. The graduated pricing still applies but gets slightly cheaper with 10 cents still being the cheapest in $100 chunks ($50 buys at 11 cents per min; $25, 17 cents per).
I believe both Cingular and T-Mobile carry over unused minutes as long as you buy new minutes before the old ones expire. Note that number portability does not apply to prepaid accounts, at least T-Mobile told me I could not transfer my previous cell number.
I decided on T-Mobile, brought my unlocked GSM phone to a T-Mobile store, and had no troubles (though some kiosks did not carry prepaid plans; I had to go to my town's main store).
Right, but the amount a bank may loan out is a multiple of their actual reserves, the multiple being set by the Federal Reserve. Thus potential loans are indeed proportional to actual reserves.
I don't fully understand the economics of the situation, but money in the bank is money that may be loaned out for others to buy houses or start businesses...
I thought it was "elephant in the room"? Googlefight!. We're talking orders of magnitude here... Please tell me that lame TV commercial that botched the idiom isn't starting a trend? I think 800 lb gorilla should remain as the Urban Dictionary's "an overbearing entity in a specific industry or sphere of activity" and not expand to the more abstract, from Wikipedia, "an obvious truth that is being ignored"
Like someone said, GMail exists to read email, and therefore the possibility of it supporting encryption seems unlikely... but, if a webmail were to support encryption, it could either store the PGP private key encrypted with a passphrase (storing neither the passphrase nor the decrypted emails permanently), or it could rely on browser support for performing all decryption. Still not unbreakable, but requires theoretically large resources and could probably not be done en masse.
I would love to see browser PGP support for a number of reasons. One possibility I would love would be, rather than maintaining a separate login/password on every website under the sun, one could merely PGP sign say, slashdot posts. Slashdot would maintain some minimal trust information for each PGP id to decide whether or not to allow the post. Unknown id's could be subject to bayesian filtering or something. Any physical person could create any number of PGP id's to remain semi-anonymous as slashdot is now.
Of course, PGP keys are hard to tote around to arbitrary computers. One would need a usb stick or something which would certainly be too much trouble and subject to incompatibilities.
I agree with your sentiments, but I think no one cares about encryption. For what it's worth, freenigma provides GnuPG webmail through a Firefox extension and an existing webmail account supported by freenigma (includes GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, others). I have not used freenigma, but last time I read the docs I got the impression it was not compatible with, say, mutt's PGP/MIME which I use for kicks (I have zero encryption using friends).
One thing that always bugged me about mutt's PGP is that attachments are neither signed nor encrypted. I'm not sure if this is a mutt problem or a general OpenPGP issue, but it is certainly unfortunate. I suppose one is expected to manually encrypt attachments prior to mailing? This might be acceptable, even preferable, if computer interfaces were not so cumbersome.
As for no one caring about encryption, I propose creating an animation for sending email, similar to the Windows file transfer animation with the sheets of paper flitting across the screen. This animation would add dozens of little faces watching the email, with visible text, flit across the screen. An encrypted email could perhaps be represented as a closed envelope.
Generally yes. Even off-campus work may performed if approved by the school (the example I have in mind is an internship; I believe that off-campus work must be related to one's studies).
Looks like an allowable animal must both chew the cud and have a cloven hoof. Pigs have a cloven hoof but don't chew the cud. So, force the pig to chew the cud and you're ok? Some parts of "the law" strike me more as a guide for surviving in the desert in ancient times rather than arbitrary rules to follow. For example, Basically, the Dietary Law is a prohibition against eating scavenger animals. The article goes on about how the more complex digestive system of grazing animals leads to less toxicity in the meat. Perhaps farm pigs fed a controlled diet should be considered "clean".
Maybe he was referring to the fact that other folks talk about weight [sic] in kilograms, which won't change on the moon ;-) How much do you mass?
"Get off this estate."
"What for?"
"Because it's mine."
"Where did you get it?"
"From my father."
"Where did he get it?"
"From his father."
"And where did he get it?"
"He fought for it."
"Well, I'll fight you for it."
-- Carl Sandburg, "The People, Yes"
You're right. It is black and white. One may only be for or against copyright at any given moment.
Are you saying one can simply push one button to vote a party ticket? God help us.
I wonder how removing party designations from ballots, randomizing the candidate order on each ballot, or providing completely blank ballots and requiring a full name be written, would affect the polls, implementation issues aside. The goal would be minimizing the effect of ignorant votes.
My ideal forum: Anonymous, semi-anonymous, or "open" posts like the summary describes are run through some bayes or otherwise learning filter. If it's clean, it gets posted, if not, then to the trash. Through some mechanism not requiring a unique website login (e.g. a browser extension that made PGP signatures as easy as a click; why doesn't this exist?), a "verified" post could be made by the semi-anonymous PGP ID. Once enough trust is gained by refraining from making posts flagged as spam, or simply being designated a moderator, the verified ID could then mark posts as spam or not to train the spam filter on mistakes.
Also in my ideal forum: no [images in] sigs, no avatars, no wasted space by gigantic post headers (Ubuntu formus, I'm looking at you!). Provide a user page for all sorts of junk if you must, be keep it out of the discussion or at least off to one side.
Science isn't really a quest for truth. It's more of an intentional and directed quest for falsehood. For example, it can never be "proven" that gravity exists, "it's all just an exceedingly unlikely random occurance" is always a possibility. What science can do is tell you that certain things are false. For example, Aristotle said heavier objects move to the ground faster than lighter objects. Galileo, or so the story goes, showed this to be false by dropping unequal weights from a tower. Newton said gravity behaves in such and such a way. Einstein and observations of the heavens show that this misses a few details. Very narrow lists of statements not known to be false (e.g. the laws of physics) have proven very useful for many purposes such as building bridges, telescopes, and all sorts of machines. But it requires faith to take these lists as "truth".
Only mathematics has proofs, because we made up all the rules. The best we can do in the real world is identify falsehoods.
While much evidence suggests that the world is older than 2,000 years, I'm not sure of any undeniable way to prove a 2,000 year old earth false. I would agree that this is unfortunate, but creationists are at least better off than flat-earth folk. I mean, you can fly a plane around the earth if you want.
If someone set out to make a entire toolbox of tools that did one thing well, would you deride them because the toolbox as a whole can do many things?
Well, in some sense things are purposely set up this way. Perhaps to avoid the tyranny of the majority or whatever. I'd like to see more discussion in this rather than an implicit assumption that more people voting directly on more things is better. Of course, when the representative democracy of the US was set up, the states had more power and the feds had less. Now the federal government has grabbed everything important through the commerce clause and various strings attached money taken via taxation and given to the states, so the dynamics of the US republic are a bit different with power more concentrated and each individual vote counting for less... But those are the things I'm fuzzy on and would like to hear more about.
Correlations have been found between pronation and knee pain, for example. This of course does not imply causality, and as I understand the state of the research it's a bit early to be making claims that preventing overpronation will prevent injury. I would welcome any news to the contrary. I agree that different shoes will work for different people, but I'm not sure the standard shoe advice of "overpronators need motion control" etc. is worth anything. For myself at least, I always preferred lightweight and flexible shoes despite the recommendations of running shoes stores for my mild overpronation (the stores never followed up on a purchase to ask how I liked the shoe, so I'm not even sure where they get information to make these recommendations). So in my experience, everyone's on their own to find what works for them.
I'm not convinced that so few people are suited to running barefoot. Cynically, the shoe companies would certainly rather you buy shoes, but the lack of scientific evidence tells me they don't really have any more clue than I do on how to prevent injury. The recent speculations that many human features evolved for better distance running are also interesting. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I've heard from high arched to low arched folks all doing fine barefoot. Barefoot running definitely requires time to adapt and should not be attempted recklessly (the same should be said for any running or exercise). Took me two months to really feel good running barefoot. But I'm glad I did it because now I don't have to go through the hassle of finding shoes that fit, not to mention the cash savings. And mud feels awesome.
Indeed, shoes affect different people in different ways. I had shin splints in some shoes and running surfaces, but not in other shoes. My anecdotal evidence is that running barefoot on grass, dirt, concrete, and pavement (surfaces free of sharp pebbly rocks) has become more comfortable than running in shoes (and less expensive and more fun, especially when there is mud). This doesn't mean barefeet work for everyone, but it also means expensive shoes are not inherently superior to cheap shoes (with my barefoot adaptations I can run just fine in bed slippers or mocassins or anything with enough flexibility) or even no shoes.
And to my surprise, when I researched to make sure I wasn't damaging myself, I found no science in support of current shoe designs. Conclusion: whatever works for you is best; don't be fooled into thinking expensive shoes will necessarily "work for you".
"A good pair of running shoes is going to set you back at least $100, no matter what. If you buy anything cheaper, you're simply risking injury."
It is simply untrue to claim that inexpensive running shoes come with the risk of injury. Sorry to drift off-topic, but this is an oft repeated falsehood that I once believed myself, and I'd like to share what I've since learned. Review literature on the subject concludes that the only reliable predictors for injury are experience level, training load, and history of previous injury. In particular, a sudden increase in training load often results in injury, and one might speculate that beginners are more prone to this error.
There is no evidence that cushioning or motion control technologies have done anything to reduce the incidence of injury over the years. Indeed, some groups, including westerners on concrete, run in bare feet, without obviously higher injury rates than those wearing "good" running shoes, though peer-reviewed studies are scarce. The biomechanics of running and running injuries are simply not well understood. As such it's difficult to claim that any particular design can reduce injury rates.