There's one *really* important thing to note about inflation. Yes, it shows that things might be able to move faster than light relative to each other, but in inflation every object in the universe still stays within its *own* light cone. No object in an inflationary universe move away from its previous stationary reference frame at > c. In fact, nothing moves at all relative to its stationary reference frame solely due to inflation.
The problem with *any* way of moving yourself outside your light cone is that it automatically implies the existence of a time machine, which is to say, that the universe can be massively non-causal. It doesn't matter how you get from point A to point B... if you can do it faster than light, you have the ability to violate causality.
This might, of course, be the case (QM is certainly flaky enough that it might be), but so far there's no evidence of macroscopic non-causality.
Why is this important? Because it means that you can only ever use this trick to move further away from *everything*, not closer to any one thing, at faster than the speed of light. Indeed, this trick doesn't let you move at all.
You're right. What happens instead is that Dell goes out of business due to lower costs by manufacturers out of the country (eventually... just like the car companies) unless you go the protectionism route, which has even worse long-term effects.
Bill Gates has demonstrated that there's no effective limit on how much a person can *improve* their labor to increase income. So has Warren Buffett (arguably a better example).
Work has no intrinsic value whatsoever. Only productivity has value (and, even there, only by definition since it's "value created over time"). I.e. your work is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
Similarly, increasing capital investment only increases income if you're producing more of something that people value. Eventually this is a losing proposition (except for the very few true natural monopolies). So it comes down to the same thing. You have to *improve* your capital investment in order to increase income. That's no easier than improving ones labor... arguably *much* harder.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: economic efficiency can be measured in many different ways. If all you count is the dollars spent for a certain level of goods, then perhaps your argument would be correct. But that's not all that matters to people. Quality of life is intangible, but still has economic value.
If I say "I want to support my local mom-and-pop store by buying from them", you can call that economically inefficient if you want, but economics isn't abount money and productivity, it's about supply and demand and individual preferences. It's about people getting what they want.
If it's my preference to spend locally (which is a bit of a straw man, because actually I don't personally care), then I'm getting an economic benefit from spending locally. It may not be the most efficient in terms of moving goods and services, but that's not all their is to economics.
I think the point is that "Buy Local" (or even "Buy American") is *selfish*, not racist. It's saying "I want the place I live to be populated by prosperous people (perhaps so they won't steal from me, perhaps because some of them are related to me, or maybe I just like seeing smiles)".
That may not make it a *valid* argument, but it's not an *evil* one.
There is absolutely no value whatsoever in "hard" work. If all we ever did as a species was "work harder", we would be limited to the productive output of the maximum number of hours an unskilled undirected population could perform with no tools and no plans. Essentially, we would still be hunter-gatherers.
What is needed at a higher scale than just individual labor is to work *smarter*, not harder.
There are (at least) 2 competing philosophies of work: 1) it's fair to pay people based on the *amount* of their work, and 2) it's fair to pay people based on the *value* of their work.
If what you want as a society is to create value rather than make work, #2 is really the only way to do it.
You scheme would pay Van Gogh and Fred the Janitor the same for a month's hard work painting a piece of fine art. This is absurd if what you want is good paintings.
Van Gogh's work is almost infinitely more valuable (Fred's painting might even have *negative* net value, as in you'd have to pay for the materials and then pay someone to haul it away).
Put both of them to work doing janitorial work, though, and I suspect Van Gogh would *still* perform better than Fred, at least after the first 2 weeks, but *at worst* there would be a fairly small difference between the value they create for society in that role.
A comparison of the value created for society by two approaches:
Pay VG $1,000,000 for a $10,000,000 painting and FtJ $1,000 for $1,500 worth of cleaning up. Net value to society: $9,000,500.
Pay VG $1,000 for $1,000 worth of cleaning up and FtJ $1,000 for a -$50 painting. Net value to society: -$50.
Humans have advanced as a species almost entirely through specialization. Let's not destroy that, ok?
Some people really *do* just have more talent in a particular field than others. Sorry if that's elistist. It's also realistic.
Actually, you only have to do a good job on the one of the two words that existing technology already does a good job on. You can botch the other one and ReCaptcha won't know the difference.
If this is supposed to pass for a libertarian argument, don't forget that little issue of *fraud*. The use of force isn't the only evil, even for (most) libertarians. He submitted a document that failed to disclose a (bribe)contribution, which is in the class of things it claimed to disclose.
I'd add: Evolution *can* explain the origin of "life" from "non-life" as long as something you call "non-life" is capable of replicating itself given only chemicals widespread in the Earth's environment.
Anything that can do this will soon become almost omnipresent in the ecosphere if there's no life to eat it. Any tiny change that makes one form of the molecule replicate more easily (or convert the original to a new form) would allow it to *replace* the first one throughout the ecosphere. And so on, and so on, and so on.
It doesn't have to be something we would ever *dream* of calling "life". *All* it has to be is a self-replicating molecule.
Evolution can take it from there.
Feel free to choose your own poison when deciding how that first self-replicating molecule came about. Perhaps it floated in on a comet. Perhaps it spontaneously and randomly occured. Perhaps space aliens (or some god) had a picnic on the planet and left some trash.
*That* doesn't matter. All that matters is that all the life we know of could plausibly have arisen from that, with no additional "input" (intelligent or otherwise).
Not something that I think *I* would do, but don't they have to control for people that convert to religion when they find out they have a terminal illness?
That direction, though a bit sad, is much more expected.
You enforce it by only allowing the automated cars on the road.
You just have toll gates that inflict severe tire damage if you try to enter them without a transponder (that part's only 1/2 joke).
In a true emergency (like a psycho with solid tires), you'd have to have some kind of mechanism to do a controlled shutdown and return to local control.
The *real* problem is how you deal with hardware failures. Deliberate hacking is a bit tricky too.
How would this system deal with an insured driver driving someone else's (uninsured) car? Assuming their insurance covers occasional driving of other vehicles (and AFAIK, *all* insurance policies do), they aren't doing anything illegal (or even immoral), nor is the owner of the car.
Seems like you'd need face recognition rather than license plate recognition. Err... good luck.
I think the *point* of that statement is: "Fine, if times have changed enough that the Founder's principles no longer work well, we have a mechanism for solving that: Amend the Constitution". Trying to reinterpret it out of existence is a Bush League trick (hehe).
However, it would not be the first time someone has built a WinCE laptop. I believe it was HP that tried this trick many years ago (I worked on a peripheral driver).
It wasn't a success, but it wasn't a brick, either.
The reason you can't just install another battery pack at home and charge from it is that you'd never get a UL listing for a 10 megawatt (conservatively) transfer system.
The reason you can't get a UL listing for it is that there's no conceivable engineering solution to the gargantuan task of making it safe for a home user. Or even a gas station attendant. The 2 1-inch thick copper charging cables might be a bit pricey and unwieldy too.
You'd be a lot better off buying a forklift and switching the batteries.
Really... there's no use for a car battery that charges in anything less than an hour. Unless it's really small and can only go a few dozen miles.
Just wanted to point out that it's an environmental *problem* that TVs turn on instantly. The only reason this is remotely possible is the vampire drain keeping everything warm.
(ok, LCDs, not as much -- but not trivial, either)
I'm not exactly a representative sample, but I've sent 3-4 "Send Feedback" reports to Microsoft, and every single one of them has resulted in an email followup from a live human that clearly didn't just send me a form letter.
Are most of these comments missing the point: he's not being sued/arrested for something that *he* said, he's being sued/arrested for something that *someone else said* on a forum he created.
The only question is, are we (or even just Slashdot, or the OP) now liable for content posted by others here? Some of it apparently derogatory to the Indian government?
*That* is the chilling effect that we can't tolerate.
This ruling is so 20th century. In the modern world, any operating system that is of any use at all has to include a fully-functional HTTP processing and HTML rendering API . Several years ago, it might have made sense to say that web browsing was a separate market from operating systems. It no longer does. And a browser is almost nothing but a big dialog box that uses that API. If MS didn't write that relatively trivial program, someone else would do it in a second and we'd be in no different position.
Application writers *really* need to have: an API for showing richly formatted help text in a standard format, and more generally an API to embed HTTP/HTML into their applications without having to write it themselves or ship (a hundred different incompatible versions of) it with their product. There also has to be a way for the OS to update itself (either/both automatically and with user intervention via a reasonably easy to use UI) over the internet to respond to security problems.
Is anyone *really* going to argue that an OS can eschew these and not be a joke? I could go on with a bunch more API requirements, but those are entirely sufficient to make the point.
Yes, in theory, any or all of these functions could be provided in a different way, or from different vendors (possibly excepting the update mechanism). They could even all be different, but it would be for no particularly good reason. It was a real joy, let me tell you, writing.HLP files (not).
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This is their pathetic response to the "three factor authentication" requirement.
Really.
The problem with *any* way of moving yourself outside your light cone is that it automatically implies the existence of a time machine, which is to say, that the universe can be massively non-causal. It doesn't matter how you get from point A to point B... if you can do it faster than light, you have the ability to violate causality.
This might, of course, be the case (QM is certainly flaky enough that it might be), but so far there's no evidence of macroscopic non-causality.
Why is this important? Because it means that you can only ever use this trick to move further away from *everything*, not closer to any one thing, at faster than the speed of light. Indeed, this trick doesn't let you move at all.
You're right. What happens instead is that Dell goes out of business due to lower costs by manufacturers out of the country (eventually... just like the car companies) unless you go the protectionism route, which has even worse long-term effects.
Work has no intrinsic value whatsoever. Only productivity has value (and, even there, only by definition since it's "value created over time"). I.e. your work is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
Similarly, increasing capital investment only increases income if you're producing more of something that people value. Eventually this is a losing proposition (except for the very few true natural monopolies). So it comes down to the same thing. You have to *improve* your capital investment in order to increase income. That's no easier than improving ones labor... arguably *much* harder.
Anyone that uses the words "evolution" and "should" in the same sentence needs to have their Slashdot account revoked.
If I say "I want to support my local mom-and-pop store by buying from them", you can call that economically inefficient if you want, but economics isn't abount money and productivity, it's about supply and demand and individual preferences. It's about people getting what they want.
If it's my preference to spend locally (which is a bit of a straw man, because actually I don't personally care), then I'm getting an economic benefit from spending locally. It may not be the most efficient in terms of moving goods and services, but that's not all their is to economics.
That may not make it a *valid* argument, but it's not an *evil* one.
What is needed at a higher scale than just individual labor is to work *smarter*, not harder.
There are (at least) 2 competing philosophies of work: 1) it's fair to pay people based on the *amount* of their work, and 2) it's fair to pay people based on the *value* of their work.
If what you want as a society is to create value rather than make work, #2 is really the only way to do it.
You scheme would pay Van Gogh and Fred the Janitor the same for a month's hard work painting a piece of fine art. This is absurd if what you want is good paintings.
Van Gogh's work is almost infinitely more valuable (Fred's painting might even have *negative* net value, as in you'd have to pay for the materials and then pay someone to haul it away).
Put both of them to work doing janitorial work, though, and I suspect Van Gogh would *still* perform better than Fred, at least after the first 2 weeks, but *at worst* there would be a fairly small difference between the value they create for society in that role.
A comparison of the value created for society by two approaches:
Pay VG $1,000,000 for a $10,000,000 painting and FtJ $1,000 for $1,500 worth of cleaning up. Net value to society: $9,000,500.
Pay VG $1,000 for $1,000 worth of cleaning up and FtJ $1,000 for a -$50 painting. Net value to society: -$50.
Humans have advanced as a species almost entirely through specialization. Let's not destroy that, ok?
Some people really *do* just have more talent in a particular field than others. Sorry if that's elistist. It's also realistic.
Actually, you only have to do a good job on the one of the two words that existing technology already does a good job on. You can botch the other one and ReCaptcha won't know the difference.
If this is supposed to pass for a libertarian argument, don't forget that little issue of *fraud*. The use of force isn't the only evil, even for (most) libertarians. He submitted a document that failed to disclose a (bribe)contribution, which is in the class of things it claimed to disclose.
Anything that can do this will soon become almost omnipresent in the ecosphere if there's no life to eat it. Any tiny change that makes one form of the molecule replicate more easily (or convert the original to a new form) would allow it to *replace* the first one throughout the ecosphere. And so on, and so on, and so on.
It doesn't have to be something we would ever *dream* of calling "life". *All* it has to be is a self-replicating molecule.
Evolution can take it from there.
Feel free to choose your own poison when deciding how that first self-replicating molecule came about. Perhaps it floated in on a comet. Perhaps it spontaneously and randomly occured. Perhaps space aliens (or some god) had a picnic on the planet and left some trash.
*That* doesn't matter. All that matters is that all the life we know of could plausibly have arisen from that, with no additional "input" (intelligent or otherwise).
That direction, though a bit sad, is much more expected.
You just have toll gates that inflict severe tire damage if you try to enter them without a transponder (that part's only 1/2 joke).
In a true emergency (like a psycho with solid tires), you'd have to have some kind of mechanism to do a controlled shutdown and return to local control.
The *real* problem is how you deal with hardware failures. Deliberate hacking is a bit tricky too.
Seems like you'd need face recognition rather than license plate recognition. Err... good luck.
I think the *point* of that statement is: "Fine, if times have changed enough that the Founder's principles no longer work well, we have a mechanism for solving that: Amend the Constitution". Trying to reinterpret it out of existence is a Bush League trick (hehe).
However, it would not be the first time someone has built a WinCE laptop. I believe it was HP that tried this trick many years ago (I worked on a peripheral driver). It wasn't a success, but it wasn't a brick, either.
The reason you can't get a UL listing for it is that there's no conceivable engineering solution to the gargantuan task of making it safe for a home user. Or even a gas station attendant. The 2 1-inch thick copper charging cables might be a bit pricey and unwieldy too.
You'd be a lot better off buying a forklift and switching the batteries.
Really... there's no use for a car battery that charges in anything less than an hour. Unless it's really small and can only go a few dozen miles.
Yes, yes, and times 300,000,000 in the US alone, that's between 15MW and .3GW.
The string has to be short enough that people can enter it by hand into the iTunes store without making too many mistakes or getting frustrated.
Hmmm... trickier.
(ok, LCDs, not as much -- but not trivial, either)
I'm not exactly a representative sample, but I've sent 3-4 "Send Feedback" reports to Microsoft, and every single one of them has resulted in an email followup from a live human that clearly didn't just send me a form letter.
The only question is, are we (or even just Slashdot, or the OP) now liable for content posted by others here? Some of it apparently derogatory to the Indian government?
*That* is the chilling effect that we can't tolerate.
Application writers *really* need to have: an API for showing richly formatted help text in a standard format, and more generally an API to embed HTTP/HTML into their applications without having to write it themselves or ship (a hundred different incompatible versions of) it with their product. There also has to be a way for the OS to update itself (either/both automatically and with user intervention via a reasonably easy to use UI) over the internet to respond to security problems.
Is anyone *really* going to argue that an OS can eschew these and not be a joke? I could go on with a bunch more API requirements, but those are entirely sufficient to make the point.
Yes, in theory, any or all of these functions could be provided in a different way, or from different vendors (possibly excepting the update mechanism). They could even all be different, but it would be for no particularly good reason. It was a real joy, let me tell you, writing .HLP files (not).
Actually, ClearType came from R&D. You have to admit, it's pretty necessary in order for LCD monitors to take off.
Their handwriting recognition IME's did too.
In fact, *tons* of stuff that's in Windows and Office came out of MS R&D. It's just not that flashy.
Of course, tons more didn't. But that's how R&D goes.