Yes. And it is clear that without Amazon's one-click-patent, nobody would never have guessed what goes on behind that button. I think the AC in this thread is right, the FIRST step in a patent application should be: "could this be kept secret". If not, then no patent.
Then remove the hindsight bias, make only stuff patentable that you have not published or released before. That's how Europe does it. Then, if you show the problem to a subject matter expert, and he comes up with the same solution, it is either obvious, or it is previously disclosed. Both are reasons to not grant the patent.
Difference is that the guys is claiming that "x can be caused by y, and y is a materialistic statement", following "x cannot be caused by z, because z is not a materialistic statement'. And in this context,a 'materialistic statement', or equivalently a statement about 'how matter interacts', quite effectively defines the verb 'caused'.
Making the statement that you found questionable, almost tautological.
When comparing the Bible and science, you might want to start with considering the source. Who created the Bible? Who created science? The evidence very clearly indicates that both are created by people. The Bible is two books, one written by old Jews while being banished from their home country, the other written by people travelling with the word. Science is a practice that is developed and tuned by people over a similar amount of time, and is still under development. Not done. Both the Bible and science are created by people. Fallible people. However, one set of these people are divinely inspired, the other set is religious.
Economic theory... an economist and a scientist walk down the street. The scientist notices a 10 dollar bill on the street, and says so. The economist says that the scientist is wrong, because if there was a 10 dollar bill on the street, somebody surely would have picked it up already.
Depends. If they're looking for the average length between two randomly chosen accounts, a few hundred tries should give them a pretty good estimate. If they're looking for the longest path, just find a guy with no friends on facebook (for instance me, I created an account to see what facebook was all about. Now that's 10 minutes of my life I will not get back), and state that it's infinite. Not a particularly hard problem.
I think that at this point --- with Christianity ranging from (a) bible literalists, including young-earth creationists that are still looking for Noah's arc, via (b) people that believe in a bearded man in the sky that keeps track of individual sins, to (c) an unknowable entity that has created the universe and everything, but doesn't really do a lot about it these days, to finally (d) a concept of divinity that represents spirituality, morality and a sense of meaning and belonging between humans --- that anybody that is protestant cannot call himself Christian anymore, unless they feel comfortable with being lumped with the US insane asylum that represents a large part of the protestant church. I'm sorry dude, you might not be a complete douchebag, but you are associating with them and giving them credibility. Clean up your house.
Sure, but time will tell if for such use-cases people will need to own their own equipment, or if they would simply use some service 'in the cloud', to help them with such compute intensive tasks that they might need to do every other month or so. True hobbyists will have their own equipment, sure, but consumers?
Good show dude. GP is talking about liberals versus conservatives. You talks about Republicans versus Democrats. By your own examples, these parties are not statically connected to these ideologies. Since you have already educated yourself, maybe time for some thought?
Late to the party, but no --- it's not 50+ years of bullshit that is causing this. These 50+ years could have grown to 100+ years before any doubt about the US would have surfaced. It's the country that defines AAA by their unbroken promise that they will pay back their loans. The US never faltered, and (up to 2011) kept their promises whatever it takes. But now, that promise is broken by congress: they are openly debating defaulting.
Yes, the current downgrading is definitely caused by a revolutionary movement of these teabaggers that give their middle finger to Wallstreet and to the global economical system as a whole. They proclaim they want a simpler government, one their tiny little brains can comprehend. What comes in must come out. Screw debt to GDP ratio, forget about inflation control, they want to go back to the days when economy could be understood by simple people, and where government is only there to beat the living daylights out of anyone that disagrees with the USA. To accomplish this, they are willing to do grossly stupid and unnecessary things, simply because they feel like that is the right thing to do. And they've got massive support in an increasingly badly educated population. Obviously S&P reacts, they're part of Wallstreet and are scared shitless by these peasants at the gate. I
They don't need to compete with current desktop/laptop performance in 5 to 10 years, they are able to compete with desktop/laptop performance from 5 to 10 years ago. And that is good enough.
As an alternative reason for why a war can end a depressions, what about creating demand for your industry by assisting in the bombing of the industry of every other country on the earth, leaving only your industry capable of producing goods for at least a decade? Might that not work?
When I read your statement that the US is not nearly as indebted as other nations, I thought that cannot be correct, the US is topped only by Greece and Iceland. Europe is much better off. So I go to the wiki, and see, US only at 58% of GDP... pretty impressive. That's CIA and Eurostat. Right next to it, there's IMF: wow, 92% of GDP. That's more than Portugal (though still less than Italy). A bit more digging, brings me to a site for which I don't have a clue how reliable it is. More than 100% of GDP. So how big is GDP, according to some world bank data about as big as the US debt.
So, maybe the 58% of GDP number is a bit of an underestimation... or there's something really weird going on here. Two public sources, almost a factor of two difference, and a completely different ranking. In the CIA/Eurostat ranking, US is 36th worst of in the world, with most of the EU even more in debt. In the IMF ranking, US is 11th worst off, with only the EU-members Greece, Italy, Iceland, Belgium and Ireland (not even 25% of EU economy) more in debt than the US.
Please explain to me why the "job creators" would like to invest in an economy that is in the shitters. If I were to sit on a few million bucks, I would wait it out. Most people are like me.
If the author wanted to say something that's not in his 400-page long book, he probably should have shortened it, concentrating on what he wanted to say. Then, if the author writes an essay saying "this is what I meant....", we probably are better of to ignore both the book and the essay, as the author clearly isn't competent.
You forget the third potential result: if "global warming" is true but AGW is not, then we will need to take increasingly drastic action as we attempt to solve a problem by removing something that is not a causal factor. What, returning the US to pre-2000 levels of energy use and CO2 emission didn't stop the warming? Then we must reduce even more, and tax CO2 emissions even more.
It isn't a case of being "a bit poorer", it a case of destroying major economic systems as unforseen consequences of increasingly strict limits overrun common sense.
I don't think this is necessary at all. You're assuming here that if we are going to battle AGW, that we're going to go all out, not stopping until we're either broke or got the whole thing under control. The science tells us that we will only see the effects of battling CO2 in 20 to 30 years. So, according to AGW, we're already late to the game and all we can do is try to make it not kill us. This means we need a healthy economy, otherwise we will not be able to do this.
And, to avoid destroying major economic systems we probably should first shoot the bankers.
Why would information about a company only change on some tick, say, an hour? Wouldn't that be unfair to firms that are not a phone call away? Why not make it 24 hours, or a quarter? Open the trade floor once a year for 15 minutes. You make a mistake, wait a year. Probably often better than waiting an hour.
So, what could possibly change in the underlying value of a corporation in a microsecond? Nothing, you are right. The stock market is however not trading the underlying value (as this value is unknown and unmeasurable, and given that the underlying value also includes expectations about the future, it probably doesn't exist at all), but rather the information about the underlying value. And that information can change by the microsecond. Each trade establishes a new datapoint about the underlying value of a corporation. So one single person, or algorithm, that thinks that this particular stock should trade a quantum higher or lower, makes a statement about the underlying value of a corporation.
Your idea of a trade an hour would make that tiny bit of information aggregate into a big thing. Big things lead to massive swings in the stock market. People get scared and do wild stuff. So, if anything, HFT has removed volatility, not added to it. Yes, everyone also found out that if one person makes a stupid bet, all those suckers that use stop-losses to protect their investment get creamed. It used to be the market maker that would clean out the suckers, now its the algorithm. Nothing has changed. Don't use stop-loss, use options for protection.
In the past, it used to be who had the fastest horse. The New York stock exchange and the Chicago stock exchange could be out of sync for weeks. If you traveled from New York to Chicago with some important news, and beat the other guy, you could make millions. This news, when brought by horse, leads to massive changes and immediate bankruptcies as there is no time to react to such large bits of news.
But.... buggywhip makers rejoiced. Then the telegraph came. It become important to have the fastest morse signallers. Then the phone came, and then it became quiet for a while. The limits of the technology were reached and the playing field was leveled. Trades could now be done by professionals and regular people. Then the computer came, and the network. We are now again in a speed race that will last until some physical limit will be reached. Lots of energy goes in there, but not more than the gains. When this all settles down, there will be a steady source of arbitraders that will remove inefficiencies in nano-seconds. Brilliant engineers will leave the field, and another level of artificial volatility is removed from the markets, leading to less artefacts created by the discrete nature of trading. Time is made continuous. And that makes this whole trading thing more stable.
Is it worth billions? Well, yes. The cumulated effects of the inefficiencies in the market apparently add up to such sums. If you leave these in the market, they will be translated to unnatural volatility.
You're absolutely right. If we use less energy per person, and less food, and we pollute our own habitat less, we might be able to sustain 18 billion people instead of the measly 6 we have now. If we eat even less, we might be able to give 30 billion people a very basic existence! Now that would be heaven! 30 billion! Eventually, we're going to beat termites by sheer biomass!
We are currently running the falsification. If we don't do a thing (and we're not), and the global warming hypothesis is right: the earth will warm up, sea levels will rise, and billions of people will get dislocated. But, on the bright side, if we don't do a thing, and burn all the coal we can find, and don't see a difference, global warming is falsified. Hurray! We are running a scientifically valid experiment of falsification on the one earth we inhabit. That's real hard science.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. And it is clear that without Amazon's one-click-patent, nobody would never have guessed what goes on behind that button. I think the AC in this thread is right, the FIRST step in a patent application should be: "could this be kept secret". If not, then no patent.
Then remove the hindsight bias, make only stuff patentable that you have not published or released before. That's how Europe does it. Then, if you show the problem to a subject matter expert, and he comes up with the same solution, it is either obvious, or it is previously disclosed. Both are reasons to not grant the patent.
Sure, and do they update the Bible according to new insight?
Difference is that the guys is claiming that "x can be caused by y, and y is a materialistic statement", following "x cannot be caused by z, because z is not a materialistic statement'. And in this context,a 'materialistic statement', or equivalently a statement about 'how matter interacts', quite effectively defines the verb 'caused'.
Making the statement that you found questionable, almost tautological.
When comparing the Bible and science, you might want to start with considering the source. Who created the Bible? Who created science? The evidence very clearly indicates that both are created by people. The Bible is two books, one written by old Jews while being banished from their home country, the other written by people travelling with the word. Science is a practice that is developed and tuned by people over a similar amount of time, and is still under development. Not done. Both the Bible and science are created by people. Fallible people. However, one set of these people are divinely inspired, the other set is religious.
Economic theory ... an economist and a scientist walk down the street. The scientist notices a 10 dollar bill on the street, and says so. The economist says that the scientist is wrong, because if there was a 10 dollar bill on the street, somebody surely would have picked it up already.
To get into java you need a good understanding of OOP concepts ...
Yes, and then forget all about OOP, and learn Java.
Yes, it's a major weakness of GC that it is not compatible with RAII.
How many "normal" computers were developed on a "normal" computer, not an FPGA?
Private members are part of the public interface in C++. Friends can see your privates.
Depends. If they're looking for the average length between two randomly chosen accounts, a few hundred tries should give them a pretty good estimate. If they're looking for the longest path, just find a guy with no friends on facebook (for instance me, I created an account to see what facebook was all about. Now that's 10 minutes of my life I will not get back), and state that it's infinite. Not a particularly hard problem.
I think that at this point --- with Christianity ranging from (a) bible literalists, including young-earth creationists that are still looking for Noah's arc, via (b) people that believe in a bearded man in the sky that keeps track of individual sins, to (c) an unknowable entity that has created the universe and everything, but doesn't really do a lot about it these days, to finally (d) a concept of divinity that represents spirituality, morality and a sense of meaning and belonging between humans --- that anybody that is protestant cannot call himself Christian anymore, unless they feel comfortable with being lumped with the US insane asylum that represents a large part of the protestant church. I'm sorry dude, you might not be a complete douchebag, but you are associating with them and giving them credibility. Clean up your house.
Sure, but time will tell if for such use-cases people will need to own their own equipment, or if they would simply use some service 'in the cloud', to help them with such compute intensive tasks that they might need to do every other month or so. True hobbyists will have their own equipment, sure, but consumers?
Good show dude. GP is talking about liberals versus conservatives. You talks about Republicans versus Democrats. By your own examples, these parties are not statically connected to these ideologies. Since you have already educated yourself, maybe time for some thought?
Late to the party, but no --- it's not 50+ years of bullshit that is causing this. These 50+ years could have grown to 100+ years before any doubt about the US would have surfaced. It's the country that defines AAA by their unbroken promise that they will pay back their loans. The US never faltered, and (up to 2011) kept their promises whatever it takes. But now, that promise is broken by congress: they are openly debating defaulting. Yes, the current downgrading is definitely caused by a revolutionary movement of these teabaggers that give their middle finger to Wallstreet and to the global economical system as a whole. They proclaim they want a simpler government, one their tiny little brains can comprehend. What comes in must come out. Screw debt to GDP ratio, forget about inflation control, they want to go back to the days when economy could be understood by simple people, and where government is only there to beat the living daylights out of anyone that disagrees with the USA. To accomplish this, they are willing to do grossly stupid and unnecessary things, simply because they feel like that is the right thing to do. And they've got massive support in an increasingly badly educated population. Obviously S&P reacts, they're part of Wallstreet and are scared shitless by these peasants at the gate. I
They don't need to compete with current desktop/laptop performance in 5 to 10 years, they are able to compete with desktop/laptop performance from 5 to 10 years ago. And that is good enough.
As an alternative reason for why a war can end a depressions, what about creating demand for your industry by assisting in the bombing of the industry of every other country on the earth, leaving only your industry capable of producing goods for at least a decade? Might that not work?
When I read your statement that the US is not nearly as indebted as other nations, I thought that cannot be correct, the US is topped only by Greece and Iceland. Europe is much better off. So I go to the wiki, and see, US only at 58% of GDP... pretty impressive. That's CIA and Eurostat. Right next to it, there's IMF: wow, 92% of GDP. That's more than Portugal (though still less than Italy). A bit more digging, brings me to a site for which I don't have a clue how reliable it is. More than 100% of GDP. So how big is GDP, according to some world bank data about as big as the US debt.
So, maybe the 58% of GDP number is a bit of an underestimation... or there's something really weird going on here. Two public sources, almost a factor of two difference, and a completely different ranking. In the CIA/Eurostat ranking, US is 36th worst of in the world, with most of the EU even more in debt. In the IMF ranking, US is 11th worst off, with only the EU-members Greece, Italy, Iceland, Belgium and Ireland (not even 25% of EU economy) more in debt than the US.
There's some major number juggling going on here.
Please explain to me why the "job creators" would like to invest in an economy that is in the shitters. If I were to sit on a few million bucks, I would wait it out. Most people are like me.
If the author wanted to say something that's not in his 400-page long book, he probably should have shortened it, concentrating on what he wanted to say. Then, if the author writes an essay saying "this is what I meant ....", we probably are better of to ignore both the book and the essay, as the author clearly isn't competent.
s/PostGresql/MySQL/
You forget the third potential result: if "global warming" is true but AGW is not, then we will need to take increasingly drastic action as we attempt to solve a problem by removing something that is not a causal factor. What, returning the US to pre-2000 levels of energy use and CO2 emission didn't stop the warming? Then we must reduce even more, and tax CO2 emissions even more. It isn't a case of being "a bit poorer", it a case of destroying major economic systems as unforseen consequences of increasingly strict limits overrun common sense.
I don't think this is necessary at all. You're assuming here that if we are going to battle AGW, that we're going to go all out, not stopping until we're either broke or got the whole thing under control. The science tells us that we will only see the effects of battling CO2 in 20 to 30 years. So, according to AGW, we're already late to the game and all we can do is try to make it not kill us. This means we need a healthy economy, otherwise we will not be able to do this.
And, to avoid destroying major economic systems we probably should first shoot the bankers.
Why would information about a company only change on some tick, say, an hour? Wouldn't that be unfair to firms that are not a phone call away? Why not make it 24 hours, or a quarter? Open the trade floor once a year for 15 minutes. You make a mistake, wait a year. Probably often better than waiting an hour.
So, what could possibly change in the underlying value of a corporation in a microsecond? Nothing, you are right. The stock market is however not trading the underlying value (as this value is unknown and unmeasurable, and given that the underlying value also includes expectations about the future, it probably doesn't exist at all), but rather the information about the underlying value. And that information can change by the microsecond. Each trade establishes a new datapoint about the underlying value of a corporation. So one single person, or algorithm, that thinks that this particular stock should trade a quantum higher or lower, makes a statement about the underlying value of a corporation.
Your idea of a trade an hour would make that tiny bit of information aggregate into a big thing. Big things lead to massive swings in the stock market. People get scared and do wild stuff. So, if anything, HFT has removed volatility, not added to it. Yes, everyone also found out that if one person makes a stupid bet, all those suckers that use stop-losses to protect their investment get creamed. It used to be the market maker that would clean out the suckers, now its the algorithm. Nothing has changed. Don't use stop-loss, use options for protection.
In the past, it used to be who had the fastest horse. The New York stock exchange and the Chicago stock exchange could be out of sync for weeks. If you traveled from New York to Chicago with some important news, and beat the other guy, you could make millions. This news, when brought by horse, leads to massive changes and immediate bankruptcies as there is no time to react to such large bits of news. But.... buggywhip makers rejoiced. Then the telegraph came. It become important to have the fastest morse signallers. Then the phone came, and then it became quiet for a while. The limits of the technology were reached and the playing field was leveled. Trades could now be done by professionals and regular people. Then the computer came, and the network. We are now again in a speed race that will last until some physical limit will be reached. Lots of energy goes in there, but not more than the gains. When this all settles down, there will be a steady source of arbitraders that will remove inefficiencies in nano-seconds. Brilliant engineers will leave the field, and another level of artificial volatility is removed from the markets, leading to less artefacts created by the discrete nature of trading. Time is made continuous. And that makes this whole trading thing more stable.
Is it worth billions? Well, yes. The cumulated effects of the inefficiencies in the market apparently add up to such sums. If you leave these in the market, they will be translated to unnatural volatility.
You're absolutely right. If we use less energy per person, and less food, and we pollute our own habitat less, we might be able to sustain 18 billion people instead of the measly 6 we have now. If we eat even less, we might be able to give 30 billion people a very basic existence! Now that would be heaven! 30 billion! Eventually, we're going to beat termites by sheer biomass!
We are currently running the falsification. If we don't do a thing (and we're not), and the global warming hypothesis is right: the earth will warm up, sea levels will rise, and billions of people will get dislocated. But, on the bright side, if we don't do a thing, and burn all the coal we can find, and don't see a difference, global warming is falsified. Hurray! We are running a scientifically valid experiment of falsification on the one earth we inhabit. That's real hard science.