Shares of stock are worth, what the last buyer/seller agreed to sell them at. Since most corporations shares trade above "book" value, the process creates money ( I use the term loosely here ) due to "anticipated future revenues" and on paper, the overall size of the economy grows, and more money ( wealth ) circulates.
Before the first share of an IPO trades, investment banks and the corporation "fix" the price at what they believe they can sell all available shares for, and hand them out to large investors and members of the "special" club. Assume this is $20 per share. Assume the company is actually worth $20 a share. As soon as the first share is traded on opening day on the stock exchange, assume it trades for $30. $10 per share of "wealth" was just created, as the open market "anticipates" future revenues.
This is why it is not an immediate zero sum game. If the company continues to grow revenues, and investors continue to anticipate growth, the value/wealth will continue to increase. When investors sour, the company stumbles, the revenues dry up, etc, which could be 1 year or 100 years later, the previously generated wealth evaporates.
You should check out what it costs for the hydraulic press required to form body panels. In a situation where you are forming them by hand, I say, art is not dead, but good luck forming them cheaper than a machine can.
I know when we see the video clips of cars being assembled, it looks easy, but when you look at an actual car, it is a remarkable piece of human engineering, and a small group of hackers aren't going to be able to produce one nearly as cheaply when you factor in time. Even if you bought as many pre-manufactured aftermarket parts as possible, it would still cost 3+ times more than the sticker price.
Overhauling the TV show makes it look easy via the magic of the editing process.
It may not be perjury. I'm not an attorney, or a judge, so I really can't say. However, the process ( jury selection of jurors who will not use or don't know about jury nullification ) can be and imo is extremely effective, in making people think and perceive that it might be perjury to provide false statements during jury selection.
Regardless of the jury nullification issue, my overall opinion of the process, from the 1 time I reported for jury duty, is that it appeared, from the point of view of a juror, to be fair and equitable and just. This is of course, only my 1 experience, which is a statistically insignificant amount of data. Perhaps others who have been to jury duty can chime in.
So the question becomes, what are the odds 12 or more people are going to commit perjury, by proclaiming they will in fact apply the law as written, then not apply the law as written ?
While the parallels are certainly visible, one must ask themselves the following question:
Is a numerical simulation of a thing, the same as an actual instance of a thing ?
Because a computer is a man made device, static in nature, subject to entropy, not self-directed reproduction.
Software, is a numerical simulation, the result of man assigning values to symbols and performing math on them using a computer.
Neither the computer, or the software, is alive by any accepted definition of life.
If you think that a computer is alive, then you also think that an abacus is alive. Or that a clock is alive. Because like a computer, an abacus and a clock, are devices designed to perform calculations that humans enter into them. As as far as I am aware, no computer, abacus, or clock, has mutated or evolved into something other than what it was created to be, except via decay.
We use the terms virus, and genetic programming, and genetic algorithms, to describe types of computer programs, but no one that I have ever had the pleasure of working with, would consider them a life form, as they would a cat, dog, plant, monkey, etc.
A similar situation arises in graph theory. We call a node, connected to two other nodes, a tree. Do you think that means it is literally the same as the pine tree growing outside on your lawn ? I think not, because, if they were the same, we could simply draw a new forest from which would could virtually harvest wood to live in a house we drew on paper.
And perhaps an equally important question would be... "So when is everybody ?"
The odds of humans, locating life elsewhere, today, are astronomical, when you factor in the aspect of time. We could conceivably scan the entire visible universe and not contact life, because it existed during a different time in the visible universe, or exists currently outside the visible universe.
So it's not just a question of where, but also of when. Where x When is arguably an extremely large search space.
No, not really. A computer is, at the fundamental level, no more complicated than a player piano. Anything we generally refer to as information, has been in fact, programmed ( added / input ) into the computer by a human. It can store the result values of a computation, but in order to do it, the results of the computation had to be input in the compact form which is a program.
As we move towards a police state, jury nullification can be a valuable weapon in the war for liberty against oppressive laws that should not be enforced. That is just one example out of many situations where jury nullification is a great thing.
The justice system is highly aware of jury nullification. At my one and only ( so far ) jury duty case, the attorneys during juror selection, and the judge, asked all jurors if they could "apply the law(s) as written by the State of {A} to the case at hand." I'm not an attorney, but if a juror were to answer "yes" or remain in the court room after being dismissed for failure to agree to apply to the law(s) as written, then the juror who attempted an overt nullification may force a mistrial.
Jury nullification is but 1 aspect of the law, and the people who deal with it every day, have made it not so cut and dry to apply by way of process.
You make a valid argument on the surface. However, your model fails to consider the lost value of the pirated and/or counterfeited goods and the nature of the capital flows, be they parasitic or not.
A website hosting company, with say 1,000 clients, loses 10 clients, its a small fraction of their revenues and due to the economies of scale in operating a web hosting company, is not likely to result in much loss when the pirate/counterfeit websites are shut down.
On the other hand, the pirate/counterfeit goods being sold, may in fact be producing a significant overall loss, due to the fact that, if the pirate/counterfeiters were not generating a profit over their web hosting expense, the websites wouldn't exist in the first place.
I would address your points individually, but you seem to be operating in class warfare mode, and attacking broad groups of people regardless of any individuals contribution or actions. That strategy might satisfy your internal desire to hold someone, anyone, accountable, but it will turn ugly and you will realize it the moment it is used by someone else against you.
I wouldn't exactly say that all the necessary knowledge
True. Actual event logs would be hard to come by. I was thinking of the mathematics involved in design and simulation. My wording was a bit optimistic, most likely due to the fact that I recently ordered 30 or so used books on DSP, 3D graphics and mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, etc from Amazon.com for about $120 total, books + shipping. Back in the 60's and 70's, alot of this knowledge didn't even exist. The foundations were present but unrefined.
Don't place the blame on Barney Frank - put it on the anti-regulation republicans where it belongs.
If I blamed it on Republicans I would be participating in partisan politics, and I find partisan politics thoroughly disgusting.
Barney Frank is at the center of the cloud that is the mortgage crisis, hence he was named specifically. His *friends in congress* include every elected member of congress that has had a hand in altering legislation, for whatever reason, and failing to monitor the outcome, regardless of their party affiliation.
Pretending problems are the domain of a specific party when laying blame, is pure idiocy.
First, the guidance systems required are horribly complicated
No doubt they are complicated, but they are still governed by physics. Control theory, digital signal processing, etc are all out here in the wild on the web.
Second, the materials aren't cheap.
No they aren't cheap. But ordering some ammonium perchlorate over the phone, takes Xh hours and Xm materials dollars. Developing the complete IP required to facilitate space travel, accounting for all the physics, requires Yh hours and Ym material dollars. Xh+Xm+Yh+Ym is more expensive, every time, barring negative values (which could be obtained via resale of IP), than just Xh+Xm.
Third, the level of heath required is staggering.
The monkey that builds it, gets the monkey that flys and the monkey doctor to sign a waiver. Problem solved.
Bloddhound SSC publishing the complete specifications
For their particular single instance of a space flight vehicle and plan. I was speaking to "space flight in general" and all the mathematical equations that govern its limits. Just as circuit boards and IC's used to be designed by people using an arduous manual process, todays circuits are designed by EDA tools that "govern the limits" of any type of circuit, and drastically reduce the design cost in terms of man hours. The same sort of framework *could* exist for space flight, at some point in the future. It was an extrapolation of past advances in technology with an eye on the future, not a statement on the difficulty in todays environment.
Assuming where you wrote "double" you meant "doubt", I would think its not so much a public versus private debate, as it is an information age / internet / access to knowledge economic factor. Back when NASA first started, information was hard to come by, and being a government run organization, the administrative overhead tends to be quite high, as politics are involved.
Private companies, in the internet age, can crowd source and share all of the intellectual property required to manage space flight, to whatever degree, without the overhead of the administrative issues NASA would be forced to deal with. Combine this aspect with the frictionless information environment that is the internet, and it becomes much less expensive than in previous decades.
Projecting trends into the future, one could easily imagine an open source, cots/open hardware framework, formalized via RFCs, that can simply be deployed by any organization wishing to implement space flight on their own. The task then becomes one of financing, acquiring and fabricating materials, and obtaining licenses, without the giant hurdles of gathering and implementing the IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Does a submarine swim?
Is this a simulated submarine or an actual submarine ? ;)
as if they were watching a cage with a bunch of chimpanzees in an experiment.
Isn't this exactly what a behavioral psychologist is trained to do ?
for the heart of the sun.
In other words ... its a glorified popularity contest, and ironically, facebook is popular atm.
and $100k is about ... 3 times the price ;)
Shares of stock are worth, what the last buyer/seller agreed to sell them at. Since most corporations shares trade above "book" value, the process creates money ( I use the term loosely here ) due to "anticipated future revenues" and on paper, the overall size of the economy grows, and more money ( wealth ) circulates.
Before the first share of an IPO trades, investment banks and the corporation "fix" the price at what they believe they can sell all available shares for, and hand them out to large investors and members of the "special" club. Assume this is $20 per share. Assume the company is actually worth $20 a share. As soon as the first share is traded on opening day on the stock exchange, assume it trades for $30. $10 per share of "wealth" was just created, as the open market "anticipates" future revenues.
This is why it is not an immediate zero sum game. If the company continues to grow revenues, and investors continue to anticipate growth, the value/wealth will continue to increase. When investors sour, the company stumbles, the revenues dry up, etc, which could be 1 year or 100 years later, the previously generated wealth evaporates.
... when I refuse to use the facebook spy cloud app for free.
Beware yee all who dance with the devil named Mark.
persuade their peers of there being reasonable doubt
If there is reasonable doubt, then the process has worked as designed and intended.
You should check out what it costs for the hydraulic press required to form body panels. In a situation where you are forming them by hand, I say, art is not dead, but good luck forming them cheaper than a machine can.
I know when we see the video clips of cars being assembled, it looks easy, but when you look at an actual car, it is a remarkable piece of human engineering, and a small group of hackers aren't going to be able to produce one nearly as cheaply when you factor in time. Even if you bought as many pre-manufactured aftermarket parts as possible, it would still cost 3+ times more than the sticker price.
Overhauling the TV show makes it look easy via the magic of the editing process.
It may not be perjury. I'm not an attorney, or a judge, so I really can't say. However, the process ( jury selection of jurors who will not use or don't know about jury nullification ) can be and imo is extremely effective, in making people think and perceive that it might be perjury to provide false statements during jury selection.
Regardless of the jury nullification issue, my overall opinion of the process, from the 1 time I reported for jury duty, is that it appeared, from the point of view of a juror, to be fair and equitable and just. This is of course, only my 1 experience, which is a statistically insignificant amount of data. Perhaps others who have been to jury duty can chime in.
+1
So the question becomes, what are the odds 12 or more people are going to commit perjury, by proclaiming they will in fact apply the law as written, then not apply the law as written ?
While the parallels are certainly visible, one must ask themselves the following question:
Is a numerical simulation of a thing, the same as an actual instance of a thing ?
Because a computer is a man made device, static in nature, subject to entropy, not self-directed reproduction.
Software, is a numerical simulation, the result of man assigning values to symbols and performing math on them using a computer.
Neither the computer, or the software, is alive by any accepted definition of life.
If you think that a computer is alive, then you also think that an abacus is alive. Or that a clock is alive. Because like a computer, an abacus and a clock, are devices designed to perform calculations that humans enter into them. As as far as I am aware, no computer, abacus, or clock, has mutated or evolved into something other than what it was created to be, except via decay.
We use the terms virus, and genetic programming, and genetic algorithms, to describe types of computer programs, but no one that I have ever had the pleasure of working with, would consider them a life form, as they would a cat, dog, plant, monkey, etc.
A similar situation arises in graph theory. We call a node, connected to two other nodes, a tree. Do you think that means it is literally the same as the pine tree growing outside on your lawn ? I think not, because, if they were the same, we could simply draw a new forest from which would could virtually harvest wood to live in a house we drew on paper.
Symbolic parallels are just that, symbolic.
It didn't have to be mentioned, because everyone knows Windows has all the viruses. ;)
Anything we generally refer to as information, has been in fact, programmed (added / input) into the human by a human.
When is the last time you saw 2 player pianos combine their punch rolls to produce a new composition without outside intervention ?
... computers are inanimate objects, the creation of a monkey playing in a sandbox.
Life is a physical phenomena
You could argue if it is possible for a computer as we know it, to form on its own, in the absence of life.
So where is everybody?
And perhaps an equally important question would be ... "So when is everybody ?"
The odds of humans, locating life elsewhere, today, are astronomical, when you factor in the aspect of time. We could conceivably scan the entire visible universe and not contact life, because it existed during a different time in the visible universe, or exists currently outside the visible universe.
So it's not just a question of where, but also of when. Where x When is arguably an extremely large search space.
No, not really. A computer is, at the fundamental level, no more complicated than a player piano. Anything we generally refer to as information, has been in fact, programmed ( added / input ) into the computer by a human. It can store the result values of a computation, but in order to do it, the results of the computation had to be input in the compact form which is a program.
As we move towards a police state, jury nullification can be a valuable weapon in the war for liberty against oppressive laws that should not be enforced. That is just one example out of many situations where jury nullification is a great thing.
The justice system is highly aware of jury nullification. At my one and only ( so far ) jury duty case, the attorneys during juror selection, and the judge, asked all jurors if they could "apply the law(s) as written by the State of {A} to the case at hand." I'm not an attorney, but if a juror were to answer "yes" or remain in the court room after being dismissed for failure to agree to apply to the law(s) as written, then the juror who attempted an overt nullification may force a mistrial.
Jury nullification is but 1 aspect of the law, and the people who deal with it every day, have made it not so cut and dry to apply by way of process.
You make a valid argument on the surface. However, your model fails to consider the lost value of the pirated and/or counterfeited goods and the nature of the capital flows, be they parasitic or not.
A website hosting company, with say 1,000 clients, loses 10 clients, its a small fraction of their revenues and due to the economies of scale in operating a web hosting company, is not likely to result in much loss when the pirate/counterfeit websites are shut down.
On the other hand, the pirate/counterfeit goods being sold, may in fact be producing a significant overall loss, due to the fact that, if the pirate/counterfeiters were not generating a profit over their web hosting expense, the websites wouldn't exist in the first place.
The devil is in the details.
+1
I would address your points individually, but you seem to be operating in class warfare mode, and attacking broad groups of people regardless of any individuals contribution or actions. That strategy might satisfy your internal desire to hold someone, anyone, accountable, but it will turn ugly and you will realize it the moment it is used by someone else against you.
I wouldn't exactly say that all the necessary knowledge
True. Actual event logs would be hard to come by. I was thinking of the mathematics involved in design and simulation. My wording was a bit optimistic, most likely due to the fact that I recently ordered 30 or so used books on DSP, 3D graphics and mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, etc from Amazon.com for about $120 total, books + shipping. Back in the 60's and 70's, alot of this knowledge didn't even exist. The foundations were present but unrefined.
Don't place the blame on Barney Frank - put it on the anti-regulation republicans where it belongs.
If I blamed it on Republicans I would be participating in partisan politics, and I find partisan politics thoroughly disgusting.
Barney Frank is at the center of the cloud that is the mortgage crisis, hence he was named specifically. His *friends in congress* include every elected member of congress that has had a hand in altering legislation, for whatever reason, and failing to monitor the outcome, regardless of their party affiliation.
Pretending problems are the domain of a specific party when laying blame, is pure idiocy.
First, the guidance systems required are horribly complicated
No doubt they are complicated, but they are still governed by physics. Control theory, digital signal processing, etc are all out here in the wild on the web.
Second, the materials aren't cheap.
No they aren't cheap. But ordering some ammonium perchlorate over the phone, takes Xh hours and Xm materials dollars. Developing the complete IP required to facilitate space travel, accounting for all the physics, requires Yh hours and Ym material dollars. Xh+Xm+Yh+Ym is more expensive, every time, barring negative values (which could be obtained via resale of IP), than just Xh+Xm.
Third, the level of heath required is staggering.
The monkey that builds it, gets the monkey that flys and the monkey doctor to sign a waiver. Problem solved.
Bloddhound SSC publishing the complete specifications
For their particular single instance of a space flight vehicle and plan. I was speaking to "space flight in general" and all the mathematical equations that govern its limits. Just as circuit boards and IC's used to be designed by people using an arduous manual process, todays circuits are designed by EDA tools that "govern the limits" of any type of circuit, and drastically reduce the design cost in terms of man hours. The same sort of framework *could* exist for space flight, at some point in the future. It was an extrapolation of past advances in technology with an eye on the future, not a statement on the difficulty in todays environment.
I double private company can do it much cheaper.
Assuming where you wrote "double" you meant "doubt", I would think its not so much a public versus private debate, as it is an information age / internet / access to knowledge economic factor. Back when NASA first started, information was hard to come by, and being a government run organization, the administrative overhead tends to be quite high, as politics are involved.
Private companies, in the internet age, can crowd source and share all of the intellectual property required to manage space flight, to whatever degree, without the overhead of the administrative issues NASA would be forced to deal with. Combine this aspect with the frictionless information environment that is the internet, and it becomes much less expensive than in previous decades.
Projecting trends into the future, one could easily imagine an open source, cots/open hardware framework, formalized via RFCs, that can simply be deployed by any organization wishing to implement space flight on their own. The task then becomes one of financing, acquiring and fabricating materials, and obtaining licenses, without the giant hurdles of gathering and implementing the IP.