Java is not slow. It's not blazingly fast either, but it sure isn't slow. What financial institutions do is to throw twice the hardware at the problem, instead of 5 times the manpower. And funnily enough, I love C++, and love to hate Java, but not for its speed.
If life, once started somewhere in the Universe, can spread through space by natural means (i.e. without first needing to evolve intelligence and build starships), then we're allowed much longer odds, because of the far wider range of space and time
If you have a million worlds all rolling the dice on abiogenesis, you have far better chances than with only one.
Nonsense. Even without space travel for primitive life we have a million worlds all rolling the dice on abiogenesis. It just so happens we live on the one that threw all sixes! Panspermian theories don't change the odds, they simply state that Earth is not a good environment for life to have originated from. Quite an extraordinary claim given the evidence that life thrives here.
Governments are absolutely terrible at providing services to people. Private enterprise is always more efficient
Nope, there's always one thing worse than a government for failing to provide service to people, that's a private enterprise holding a monopoly. You realize this yourself as well, as you continue
--the reason the internet is so fubar'd in the US is because the government granted monopolies to cable and phone companies, in order to get rural areas wired too.
If the government would have held on to the wires themselves instead of giving it away to private enterprise, I'm sure service would be much better than it is now (you do realize that voting customers have influence, however little, on government, while consumers of a monopoly have no influence at all?) .
Oh man. If you'd be truly interested in the subject (instead of trolling), it would take two seconds to get definitions, descriptions and examples of patent trolls. Maybe type if 'patent troll' in a google search box and be done with it.
Your Dr. X is not a patent troll. Forgent is a patent troll. So is Acacia. Patent trolls do not have inventors, they have lawyers. They buy up a patents here and there from inventors, and will try to find a company that produces something that is seemingly operating in a business connected to these patents. Then they sue. They will not investigate if the patent covers the business at all, they just start to harass and threaten. It's a very smudgy business, patent trolling, but apparently profitable.
Replying for Jesper. No the 46.7% income tax does not include the 25% VAT. So, for every buck you have left after half is taken away, once you spend it, there's another quarter taken away for the privilege of spending it. Of course, everything would be peachy if you could deduct your mortgage from your taxes, but this is also not the case. At least not in full. Don't know the details as I lived in Denmark for only three years without owning property.
So, for every two bucks you earn, 1 goes to the tax office right away, another quarter is taken once you spend it, leaving 75 cents out of the two.
Not sure about median wage, but I'm sure it's lower than the US (although with current euro/dollar conversion rate I might be wrong).
Healthcare is free, and tax forms are sent to you pre-printed with all your details filled in, including bank account info. Just claim travel deductions, sign and send back.
In the Netherlands however, life's very peachy. I pay roughly 40% in income tax, 19% VAT for anything I buy (there are exceptions that are at 6%, but let's ignore that for a moment), 100 euro a month per family member for basic healthcare (excluding kids however). Dental insurance does not exist (there's some kind of lottery offered by insurers where you pay 400 a year for a maximum payout of 1200). However, mortgage payments are 100% deductible (and as I own a house now, my real income tax is lower than this 40%). Don't know median wage, politicians usually use modal wages. Now around 30K euro a year. If you earn this, you pay around 25% income tax.
There are a couple more taxes and benefits to confound the issue. Tax forms you have to fill in yourself, which are subsequent checked against all that stuff that they know of you anyway (as in Denmark). They're just too lazy to fill it in for you. The tax-consultancy business is thriving.
I swear you environmentalists are crazy. What you are proposing would be like you go to the doctor, you have a slight fever, he does a single test that is incorrect 50% of the time, and then recommends you spend $1,000,000 to get a liver transplant, kidney transplants, heart transplant, bone marrow transplant, and just for fun, chemo cause it might be cancer too. Or, maybe you should just take a Tylenol and call him in the morning? But no, if we wait for just 10 minutes and think about it, and try to get a better diagnosis, well if the first diagnosis is right then you'll be dead, so better just go with that!
Bad analogy. How about: you go to the doctor with a slight fever, he does a test that is inconclusive, takes a look at your lifestyle and suggests that although this particular fever might or might not kill you, you would be overall better off to quit smoking, not drink two bottles of whiskey a day, and maybe not eat at McDonalds everyday.
You then start complaining that the stress of quitting the smoke and lessening the drink would make you more unproductive at work. The burden of finding healthy food, or even worse, shopping and cooking, would kill your productivity even more. As you will become 100% unproductive you will get fired. So you conclude that the doctor is crazy by even suggesting to clean up your lifestyle and you start yelling at him for being a quack.
The physician looks at you and sighs. Not all remedies are lethal, not all ailings are imaginary.
Fast growing for who? For the Chinese businesses, or for ordinay people? What's more relevent are things like GDP per capita and average disposable income. In these, China is waaaaaaaay behind.
For a country the size, and with the population, of China, such per capita averages can be seriously misleading. Suppose that at one point in the future, 25% of the Chinese population will enjoy a lifestyle with an average income of the US, while the remaining 75% of the population is as piss poor as it always was. Per capita numbers will show that China is still waaaaay behind the US economically, while, in fact, a subpopulation the size of the entire US population is as well off as the average US citizen.
China is a vast place, with very inequal distribution of income and opportunity. Doing averages over such a situation is comparable with lumping the US, Canada, Mexico and Middle-America all together and claiming that the average American citizen is poor compared with the Northern Europeans.
One approach is to externally verify what you've voted for without being able to prove it. That should be enough, because when enough people raise their voice about being improperly counted, something is bound to happen. One of the approaches is called three ballot voting (pdf). It's a bit convoluted, but it seems to work.
The phrase 'begging the question', by virtue of using an outdated meaning of 'begging' (namely 'requesting'. Requesting the premise in this case,) is confusing and people should therefore refrain from using it. Using the phrase 'begging the question' instead of 'raising the question' is pretentious (by referring to some fairly obscure phrase,) and wrong at the same time (for using it in the wrong context.) For both reasons, 'begging the question' should simply never be used. Use 'circular reasoning' in the first meaning, and 'raising the question' in the second.
A jpeg is a compressed file. In order to compress it all redundancy needs to be removed. When all redundancy is removed, the bitstream is for all practical purposes random. When it is random it can be used as a one-time-pad. Notwithstanding the fact that you would need a quantum source for a truly random pad, I dare you to propose a method that will defeat this approach reliably.
Apart from the obvious oil connection, touching the Saudi connection would also bring to light that the dominant fundamentalist Wahabi sect that took control over religious life in the Arabic world was actively promoted by, amongst others, the US to cull the threat of socialism.
Apart from the standard response that a government created 'company' will never compete in the market place without a government created monopoly to back it (which cannot be done in this case), another great indicator that this project will be stillborn is the inclusion of the keyword 'semantic web'. Anything based on 'semantic web technology' does not work, will never work and is tackling the problem at the wrong end.
Ah well, just another few hundred millions down the drain. It's only tax money, including mine.
The objective of research is to solve problems relevant to society.
That's a particularly narrow-minded view on research, don't you think? I believe that the objective of research is to further the human race, both in capabilities as well as in the quality of discussion and thought. But whatever rocks your boat. If you would have said: "The objective of the government in funding research is to solve problems relevant to society", I could concur. It's still a pretty piss-poor view for a government to take, but then again, governments do tend to take that view more and more. Groups studying late Etruskan dialects are the victims in this view.
Pork is institutionalized corruption. You want me to vote for your bill? What's in it for me? Pork makes the entirety of US politics corrupt to its core. The "Tubes" senator being investigated for corruption is laughable, as all politicians are demonstrateably corrupt. All due to pork.
I'll deny it, with ease. The GPL is about the freedom of the end-users to tinker with the source code, and does this by restricting the freedom of the distributors. Would a society that allows slavery and murder be more or less free than a society that doesn't? Your freedom to swing your fists stops at the end of my nose.
They didn't say she could download 1500 dvds, it's about feeds. Not sure how much fits on a HD-DVD, but say 25GB for 90 mins. Then, for a single feed, you would roughly need 5 MB per second bandwidth. She has 5 GB, so she can with these numbers watch 1,000 feeds simultaneously. So, I would say, they did their math, their numbers are off the right order.
Hmm, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, (search for it), is an account by Julius Caesar himself about his exploits in what's now called France. There's also a guy called Cicero, an enemy of Caesar, that wrote at length about the character in question. Augustus, well, search for it. All first hand accounts, written shortly after the events occurred. Romans were reasonably literate, and documented their exploits quite extensively. Herod the Great (search for it) was a client king of the Romans, and as such has appeared in quite a few commentaries. These are all much more trustworthy sources than a group of rogue believers deciding to write up the teachings of their Guru. The Romans were masters of the world: in literature, in engineering, and in power. The USA is built upon the teachings of the Roman republic, not upon the teachings of Christ.
The problem with dimensional analysis in math is that dimensional analysis is both incomplete and inconsistent. The big no-no in mathematics. To wit:
The sine of an angle is a dimensionless quantity, but only if the dimensionless quantity is a ratio of two length measurements (except when the angle is measured in steradians, then it should be dimensionless with the units of plane over plane). And vice-versa: the arcsine takes a dimensionless quantity, but only if its a ratio of length (or planes).
Mathematicians loathe such a system. It has its uses, but is not there yet.
There's no point in an ant being selfish in this way. If not working for the queen to get offspring, what would they do? Watch a bit of tele, hoping the rest would take up the slack? This particular kind of individual selfishness is not what the selfish gene is about. It is not about individuals, it is about genes: if an ant is not working towards the transmission of its genes, it is not selfish, but stupid and ripe for extinction.
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Java is not slow. It's not blazingly fast either, but it sure isn't slow. What financial institutions do is to throw twice the hardware at the problem, instead of 5 times the manpower. And funnily enough, I love C++, and love to hate Java, but not for its speed.
So by that definition, Java is not an industrial strength development tool. The entirety of the financial world disagrees here.
Nope, there's always one thing worse than a government for failing to provide service to people, that's a private enterprise holding a monopoly. You realize this yourself as well, as you continue
If the government would have held on to the wires themselves instead of giving it away to private enterprise, I'm sure service would be much better than it is now (you do realize that voting customers have influence, however little, on government, while consumers of a monopoly have no influence at all?) .
Oh man. If you'd be truly interested in the subject (instead of trolling), it would take two seconds to get definitions, descriptions and examples of patent trolls. Maybe type if 'patent troll' in a google search box and be done with it.
And with E we've narrowed it down to the actual patent trolls.
Your Dr. X is not a patent troll. Forgent is a patent troll. So is Acacia. Patent trolls do not have inventors, they have lawyers. They buy up a patents here and there from inventors, and will try to find a company that produces something that is seemingly operating in a business connected to these patents. Then they sue. They will not investigate if the patent covers the business at all, they just start to harass and threaten. It's a very smudgy business, patent trolling, but apparently profitable.
In the Netherlands however, life's very peachy. I pay roughly 40% in income tax, 19% VAT for anything I buy (there are exceptions that are at 6%, but let's ignore that for a moment), 100 euro a month per family member for basic healthcare (excluding kids however). Dental insurance does not exist (there's some kind of lottery offered by insurers where you pay 400 a year for a maximum payout of 1200). However, mortgage payments are 100% deductible (and as I own a house now, my real income tax is lower than this 40%). Don't know median wage, politicians usually use modal wages. Now around 30K euro a year. If you earn this, you pay around 25% income tax.
There are a couple more taxes and benefits to confound the issue. Tax forms you have to fill in yourself, which are subsequent checked against all that stuff that they know of you anyway (as in Denmark). They're just too lazy to fill it in for you. The tax-consultancy business is thriving.
Bad analogy. How about: you go to the doctor with a slight fever, he does a test that is inconclusive, takes a look at your lifestyle and suggests that although this particular fever might or might not kill you, you would be overall better off to quit smoking, not drink two bottles of whiskey a day, and maybe not eat at McDonalds everyday.
You then start complaining that the stress of quitting the smoke and lessening the drink would make you more unproductive at work. The burden of finding healthy food, or even worse, shopping and cooking, would kill your productivity even more. As you will become 100% unproductive you will get fired. So you conclude that the doctor is crazy by even suggesting to clean up your lifestyle and you start yelling at him for being a quack.
The physician looks at you and sighs. Not all remedies are lethal, not all ailings are imaginary.
For a country the size, and with the population, of China, such per capita averages can be seriously misleading. Suppose that at one point in the future, 25% of the Chinese population will enjoy a lifestyle with an average income of the US, while the remaining 75% of the population is as piss poor as it always was. Per capita numbers will show that China is still waaaaay behind the US economically, while, in fact, a subpopulation the size of the entire US population is as well off as the average US citizen.
China is a vast place, with very inequal distribution of income and opportunity. Doing averages over such a situation is comparable with lumping the US, Canada, Mexico and Middle-America all together and claiming that the average American citizen is poor compared with the Northern Europeans.
And then your boss tells you to vote for egger while using key 8854. If this combination isn't found on the table, you're fired.
One approach is to externally verify what you've voted for without being able to prove it. That should be enough, because when enough people raise their voice about being improperly counted, something is bound to happen. One of the approaches is called three ballot voting (pdf). It's a bit convoluted, but it seems to work.
A jpeg is a compressed file. In order to compress it all redundancy needs to be removed. When all redundancy is removed, the bitstream is for all practical purposes random. When it is random it can be used as a one-time-pad. Notwithstanding the fact that you would need a quantum source for a truly random pad, I dare you to propose a method that will defeat this approach reliably.
Frankenstein and all that, you know.
Ah well, just another few hundred millions down the drain. It's only tax money, including mine.
Pork is institutionalized corruption. You want me to vote for your bill? What's in it for me? Pork makes the entirety of US politics corrupt to its core. The "Tubes" senator being investigated for corruption is laughable, as all politicians are demonstrateably corrupt. All due to pork.
Only old people remember stuff.
I'll deny it, with ease. The GPL is about the freedom of the end-users to tinker with the source code, and does this by restricting the freedom of the distributors. Would a society that allows slavery and murder be more or less free than a society that doesn't? Your freedom to swing your fists stops at the end of my nose.
And in what sense would that be undesirable? What is gained by Lucas being able to milk out Star Wars even more?
They didn't say she could download 1500 dvds, it's about feeds. Not sure how much fits on a HD-DVD, but say 25GB for 90 mins. Then, for a single feed, you would roughly need 5 MB per second bandwidth. She has 5 GB, so she can with these numbers watch 1,000 feeds simultaneously. So, I would say, they did their math, their numbers are off the right order.
Hmm, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, (search for it), is an account by Julius Caesar himself about his exploits in what's now called France. There's also a guy called Cicero, an enemy of Caesar, that wrote at length about the character in question. Augustus, well, search for it. All first hand accounts, written shortly after the events occurred. Romans were reasonably literate, and documented their exploits quite extensively. Herod the Great (search for it) was a client king of the Romans, and as such has appeared in quite a few commentaries. These are all much more trustworthy sources than a group of rogue believers deciding to write up the teachings of their Guru. The Romans were masters of the world: in literature, in engineering, and in power. The USA is built upon the teachings of the Roman republic, not upon the teachings of Christ.
The sine of an angle is a dimensionless quantity, but only if the dimensionless quantity is a ratio of two length measurements (except when the angle is measured in steradians, then it should be dimensionless with the units of plane over plane). And vice-versa: the arcsine takes a dimensionless quantity, but only if its a ratio of length (or planes).
Mathematicians loathe such a system. It has its uses, but is not there yet.
There's no point in an ant being selfish in this way. If not working for the queen to get offspring, what would they do? Watch a bit of tele, hoping the rest would take up the slack? This particular kind of individual selfishness is not what the selfish gene is about. It is not about individuals, it is about genes: if an ant is not working towards the transmission of its genes, it is not selfish, but stupid and ripe for extinction.