I just can't stop myself. If you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.
I'm not going to downmod you, but I did notice:
amiga3D (567632)
(email not shown publicly)
Would you be willing to post your email? What about the name of your elementary school, the name of your first pet, and your mother's maiden name? Or how much money you have in the bank, and your retirement accounts?
It's not about having something to hide. It's about wanting a modicum of privacy from the Lois Lerners of the world (and yeah the baddies on the right too but the IRS is current events so that's my reference du jour).
I don't know, I have a very strong Bayesian prior that the drunk driver is the cause of an accident when that drunk driver is involved in an accident. Eyewitness testimony is fraught with possible errors so unless there is something stronger like video or a black box recorder I don't think you could convince me that the sober person was the cause of the accident (even with a preponderance of the evidence standard)
But merely the existence of a cell phone near the accident should mean almost nothing - almost everyone will have one, but the vast majority of accidents that occur have nothing to do with a cell phone. So I don't think that the police should be able to just fiddle around with someone's cell phone just because 1) the phone is there, and 2) there was an accident. Of course, if an SMS pops up while the officer is there saying something like "what was that? you didn't finish that last text" then of course it becomes evidence, but this law seems to just be authorizing fishing expeditions.
If it was this story that you listened to, there is more to the story. When the man was released, he murdered a woman.
But in a way that supports your point even more - eyewitness testimony is a bad way to get to the facts (let alone the truth!). Maybe she remembered right the first time, maybe not, we can never know.
Digging through the Supreme Court Database, this happened exactly once before (Scalia, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Ginsberg all agreeing in dissent). It happened in Williams v. Illinois, which was interestingly also a DNA testing case. The question at the time was "Whether a state rule of evidence allowing an expert witness to testify about the results of DNA testing performed by non-testifying analysts, where the defendant has no opportunity to confront the actual analysts, violates the Confrontation Clause." The majority held that it did not violate the confrontation clause, with these four justices in dissent.
This. I actually wrote the other day (in response to the "How did you learn to program" article:
I grew up with "programming" on the C64 too, and it is funny that it did not seem to help very much when learning to code for real. However, my undergraduate degree is in pure math (not statistics or discrete/applied math) and it's funny that the kinds of things that I learned on that C64 helped me tremendously in mathematics.
There is a unique blend of creativity and rigor that is very similar when you write a program or write a proof, that you need when you look at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank screen, or a sheet of paper that begins with "Thm:" and ends with a lonely "Prf:". You need to be able to connect what you know, and the tools that are available to you, and have some inkling as to how they might reach the goal at the end. Sometimes it is as simple as unpacking some definitions, or just plumbing together some libraries, but the tough/fun part is when you need to figure out some non-obvious trick that will get you to the other side. And once you have that insight, you are not done; both require a great deal of rigor, such as covering all possible conditions of a conditional branching structure, or making sure that counters and loops start at 0 and go to n (or is that 1 and n+1?:) ).
Now I work with statistics, and although the work deals with many more numbers, and most people would say that it really is "math," it really doesn't feel the same as the math I did at school except when I have to create some interesting data structure or use some optimization trick to get everything to fit into memory. And those neat coding exercises are more like "math" to me than a bunch of numbers coming out of some numerical method.
Your description of "arbitrary symbol manipulation as a tool to manipulate abstractions of a problem in a way that you can trust that the result solves the problem" is a much better way of saying what I was trying to say. If you can't think through several layers of abstraction into a problem you are going to have a difficult time contributing towards large software projects. Mathematics teaches you rigorous symbol manipulation and abstract thinking at multiple levels in a way that many other disciplines do not.
Is it 'management dickery' to have a dashboard camera to record police officers on traffic stops? Or to put a black box recorder in a commercial airliner? How about background checks for elementary school teachers? Surveillance cameras on bank tellers, or casino dealers? I'm all in favor of privacy rights for the general public, but there are certain professions that by their very nature require a higher level of scrutiny, especially on the job.
This has been a problem for decades, and less intrusive methods have not seemed to solve the problem. Yes, this comes down to a "this is why we can't have nice things" argument. But of all the things that health care professionals do that requires hard work, sacrifice, a high level of skill, or dedication to helping people, this seems like such a small additional step with a tremendous possible bang for the buck. (And please don't turn this into a slippery slope argument. You should look at the costs and benefits of any proposed intrusion on privacy on its own merits)
According to this, "it has been estimated that hospitalacquired infections are responsible for 80,000 deaths in the United States and 5,000 deaths in the United Kingdom." "Compliance rates were... lower among physicians (32%)." So only 32% of doctors are washing their hands, killing 80,000 people per year. I will let the reader decide whether they want to compare this to the deaths caused by automobiles (32,367) or handguns (31,672), but apparently keeping hands clean in hospitals is a serious public health problem, and one that, of all people, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses should all be doing everything they can to fix it.
The good news is that micromanagement works: "The majority of the time, the situations that were associated with a higher compliance rate were those having to do with dirty tasks, the introduction of alcoholbased hand rub or gel, performance feedback, and accessibility of materials."
This isn't about monitoring bathroom breaks, it is about monitoring basic competence to do your job. A patient is supposed to end a hospital visit healthier than they started, and if health care professionals are doing things that make that goal more difficult then they are failing at their job. It's not the same as, say, monitoring the number of lines of code that a developer writes (where there is, at best, a tenuous relationship between the measured value and the quality of software - and probably none at all), it is a well-documented and serious problem that kills people. It's more like measuring whether a developer leaves his workstation turned off all day. Washing hands regularly is a necessary though not sufficient condition to make people healthy in a hospital, and if constant monitoring is required to get more than 1/3 of doctors to do it, then so be it.
I grew up with "programming" on the C64 too, and it is funny that it did not seem to help very much when learning to code for real. However, my undergraduate degree is in pure math (not statistics or discrete/applied math) and it's funny that the kinds of things that I learned on that C64 helped me tremendously in mathematics.
There is a unique blend of creativity and rigor that is very similar when you write a program or write a proof, that you need when you look at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank screen, or a sheet of paper that begins with "Thm:" and ends with a lonely "Prf:". You need to be able to connect what you know, and the tools that are available to you, and have some inkling as to how they might reach the goal at the end. Sometimes it is as simple as unpacking some definitions, or just plumbing together some libraries, but the tough/fun part is when you need to figure out some non-obvious trick that will get you to the other side. And once you have that insight, you are not done; both require a great deal of rigor, such as covering all possible conditions of a conditional branching structure, or making sure that counters and loops start at 0 and go to n (or is that 1 and n+1?:) ).
Now I work with statistics, and although the work deals with many more numbers, and most people would say that it really is "math," it really doesn't feel the same as the math I did at school except when I have to create some interesting data structure or use some optimization trick to get everything to fit into memory. And those neat coding exercises are more like "math" to me than a bunch of numbers coming out of some numerical method.
It probably takes ten pages of legalese to say "you will tell us every detail that you know about the bug that you found. Also, if you spend your money doing something dangerous and/or stupid, you agree not to sue us." And like you point out, there is the usual NDA and publicity stuff too.
As for child stars, IANAL, but I believe that there is a way to get judicial pre-approval (e.g., here). I'm guessing that in this case they have neither the expertise nor inclination to go through a judicial proceeding for a relatively small amount of money. But that still doesn't explain why they don't just have the parents submit the bug and sign the contract.
sucking money out of the economy, then letting it sit, thereby starving the economy of capital, thereby adding to high unemployment, lower wages, less benefits, less job security, less public services, etc
the issue is that big corporations are making large profits and are doing nothing with it. No reinvestment, no dividends, no capital investment – it just sitting in a bank account
Though I detect a subtle distinction between GP and your post, you are both describing cash hoarding. But where I really differ with you is here:
America has rock bottom interest rates and companies find it easy to hawk bonds to raise money – even junk bonds. So don’t worry about the Fed.
I worry a lot about the Fed. Just because rates are low doesn't mean that monetary policy is loose enough. Let's check inflation:
"Over the last 12 months, the all
items index increased 1.1 percent before seasonal adjustment."
1.1% inflation does not sound like the result of loose monetary policy. But macroeconomic data has all sorts of issues with it, so for some theory, let's go to the greatest monetary economist ever, Milton Freidman:
Low interest rates are generally a sign that money has been tight, as in Japan; high interest rates, that money has been easy.source
So the rock bottom interest rates that you refer to are indicative that money has been tight, when it should have been loose. Therefore I hold the Fed responsible and Apple (mostly) blameless.
2 points: first, companies, just like individuals, may justifiably want to hold cash in order to deal with unexpected contingencies. In tough times, they want to hold more cash, and make less investments, despite the fact that it makes everybody worse off. That's Keynes 101. Now, Apple is probably taking it to an extreme, but given the rocky road they have gone through over their lifespan, maybe it is understandable that they want to have lots and lots of cash. Like how my grandmother who grew up during the Great Depression keeps a ball of aluminum foil so she can reuse the stuff - you know, just in case.
Second, when there is cash hoarding going on, it is the responsibility of the central bank (in the US, the Federal Reserve) to ensure that there is sufficient cash being spent. There are different schools of thought here regarding the power or impotence of the central bank when rates are already near zero, but to assign moral responsibility to a company that is doing what it thinks it needs to do for the long-term benefit of its employees and customers during the slowest post-war recovery seems misguided. Better to assign blame to the few members of the Fed who have the power to loosen the money supply but refuse to do more, or blame the hard money crowd on the right that see hyperinflation right around the corner and create an atmosphere where the Fed has to walk carefully, or blame the president for not putting loose money advocates on the FRB earlier than he did.
If you accept the Church-Turing Thesis is true, then Groklaw has the best explanation why anything run through a Turing Machine is just math, and therefore not patentable.
And the irony is that if done right, this is a product that could benefit from the cloud/Saas/whatever model. Imagine if instead of 20 Gb storage, they actually performed most of the rendering in a highly optimized compute cloud. Then you are no longer talking about comparing the price of the purchase of software versus the cost to rent it, then you would be comparing the cost to rent the software versus the cost of the software plus the the cost to build your own latest high spec image/video editing workstation. The economies of scale and reduced downtime would enable adobe to offer rendering performance at least an order of magnitude better than the typical graphics workstation setup at a lower cost per month over the useable lifetime of the hardware.
I agree, charging her as an adult is completely off the wall. This is exactly the kind of thing that the juvenile justice system is built for - a kid is accused of breaking a law (perhaps one that, as gp mentions, we are hyper-sensitive to after the Boston marathon, but a law nevertheless). The government has an interest in enforcing that law and, if the person is found guilty, punishing that individual.
But we, as a society, accept that kids can't always recognize the consequences of their actions and have developed a separate system of justice that, when they make the kind of mistakes that kids are wont to make (such as mixing chemicals inappropriately), we are able to show mercy in our choice of punishment, and then seal the records to make sure that one childhood mistake doesn't follow her for the rest of her life.
First, it is great that someone actually looked up the specific language. But after reading it, I am less worried than I was by just reading the summary. I partially agree with your analysis on the first paragraph. But it is not merely babble. If you read it from the point of view of a limited-government conservative, who believes in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, it is very important to tie the work of the NSF (or any part of government) back to justice, domestic tranquility, common defence, or general welfare. Therefore it is not merely vacuous - it is an important argument against the ~50% people who vote Republican and by pure chance will win ever other election (or so). In a democracy, it is best to convince your opponents rather than rely on out-voting them every single time, even if that means that you only get half a loaf.
Fortunately, you are right that it is broad enough to drive a truck through. But that is no mere accident; basic research, even from a Republican perspective, is often an OK government expenditure if it is argued carefully and respectfully, and the spending is carefully tailored so as not to be wasteful. And that is the real point of this - not to deny funding to science, but rather to prove conservative bona fides and push conservative priorities in science. Will that mean fewer grants to climate science? Probably. But maybe more funding to DARPA battery research. In two or four years, the hands controlling the purse-strings will probably change, and priorities of the NSF will change as well, so it's tough to get too worked up about it. I would be more worried if the Republicans just said that they are cutting off funding to the NSF rather than saying, as they are, we are going to defund X and fund more Y.
And honestly, if you were to ask me personally whether we need YACCS (Yet Another Climate Change Study) or a new DARPA challenge, I would rather have cool new robots!
There are two differences between the US and Europe with regards to suitability for a common currency: 1) fiscal policy cross-subsidizations, and 2) labor mobility
1) Automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance provide short term assistance to areas that have localized recessions, with money from areas that have localized booms. The US has many of these fiscal transfers, both automatic and ad hoc, while Europe has almost none.
2) Over the long run, if you have labor mobility, places that are depressed for a long period of time (e.g., rust belt) become depopulated as people seek better opportunities elsewhere (e.g. sun belt). When Silicon Valley took off, people from around the country relocated to share in the boom. As much as Americans joke about the different cultures within the US, it is much easier for someone from Chicago to relocate to Los Angeles than someone from Athens to permanently reside in Frankfurt.
This is the kind of thing that touchscreens should be perfect for. It's basically just context-switching UI, such that when the program knows that you want to write a formula, it should switch from a virtual querty keyboard to a more appropriate input device. Maybe a virtual, periodic table keyboard, with two or three rows of numeric input corresponding to normal, superscript, and subscript. Or whatever. The point is that a customizable input device (like a touchscreen) is only better than a non-customizable one if it in fact, gets customized.
When one of the CFL's broke in my kids room, I followed the EPA rules to clean it up. What a pain.
So I bought a bunch of no-name LED bulbs on Amazon and although the lighting is a little harsh (as many others have noted), it's a good light to read by (1000+ luments/75 W equivalent) and a lampshade helps (a lot).
Now I am just waiting for someone to sell a reasonably powerful G16.5 base led (like 300+ lumens/25-40 W equivalent) so that I can replace the remaining incandescents left in the house (except for the oven light!).
Subsidization between channels is actually a lot more complicated than people think. Assume that channel A is a popular station, and channel B is unpopular. Maybe 500,000 people watch channel A during the month and 10,000 watch channel B. Further, let's say that the cable company pays $20/month/subscriber for channel A and $5/month/subscriber for channel B. If you only watch channel B, then it seems like you are getting shafted, since it seems like you are paying $25 to only get $5 worth of benefit.
But the problem is that the denominators typically used to present cost/subscriber does not take into account whether the subscriber watches the channel or not. So in the above case, if there are 1,000,000 total subscribers to the cable system, then channel A charges $20,000,000/month and channel B charges $5,000,000/month. If the channels were a la carte, channel A would charge $40/month to the 500,000 subscribers that want it in order to make $20,000,000 per month (40 x 500,000 = $20,000,000), and channel B would have to charge $200/month to each of its 10,000 subscribers.
So are the channel B watchers paying too much or too little when bundled?
Despite R's weaknesses as a programming language, R has such a large number of well-documented, well-tested, statistical functions with a wide array of arguments to vary that it is very difficult for another language to match. For example, maybe you want to build an arima time series model. OK, not too tough to find a library in Python or C++ that does that. Now what if you want to add an exogenous variable to the arima model? Maybe a seasonal component? Next maybe you want to automatically pick the best model according to AIC? Oops, make that BIC. Looking at it again maybe a Vector Autoregressive model is best. Or a VECM?
While I'm sure there are excellent implementations of all of these wrinkles in other languages, with R, I have great confidence that the functions that I want and need now and in the future are going to be there and are going to be implemented correctly, and kudos to the R team for giving us that kind of confidence.
R does have a lot of problems, among the worst is loop performance. It really forces you to vectorize everything, which leads to less maintainable code, and is generally a coding technique that new hires coming from other languages will face a steep learning curve with. What I have found useful is to use R as a data exploration and model parameterization tool, but once the model is ready to be put into production, you can use the parameters calculated by R in an implementation in the language of your choice, e.g., C++.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that as with so many questions of "which language is best," the real question is "which question is best for you and your application?" R is usually the best language only for people who are regularly using a such a wide variety of statistical analyses that you won't find a large part of what you need in the libraries of other languages. For me, I couldn't imagine working without it.
From the dictionary:
Origin of CREDIT
Middle French, from Old Italian credito, from Latin creditum something entrusted to another, loan, from neuter of creditus, past participle of credere to believe, entrust
While your justifiable vigilance is a valid point in favor of Bitcoins, I am not sure about the long-term prospects for a currency whose main selling point is that you don't need to trust anyone or anything in order to use it. The ultracautious attitude displayed by Bitcoin proponents does not seem compatible with the granting of credit, which, (in its modern form) has been at the foundation of commerce since Renaissance Italy.
As long as Bitcoin users and miners are predominantly less willing to trust, and Bitcoin intermediaries like Mt Gox generally prove themselves untrustworthy, Bitcoin will be unable to be a successful currency. That is, Bitcoin will not be a robust medium of exchange that is able to support growth in the economy, because credit granted and received in Bitcoins will be so limited. (Although it could continue to be a commodity, whose main use is not to be used in direct exchange for goods and services).
A good classifier will take into account interactions as well, so if 80% of the people who like both Top Gear and Glee are heterosexual, then they can still get some predictive power. Further, if 90% of people from your city are heterosexual, they could take that into account as well. And that doesn't consider the internal stuff that Facebook knows (and can sell to advertisers), such as the demographic profile of the people near your IP address.
It's not just averages of society, it is individual profiling. At it's most benign, it will target ads that it thinks your demographic profile will be most responsive too, but at it's worst, it could certainly be (mis-)used for individual persecution.
This. But it is an argument between someone with the car data recorder versus someone who buys ink by the barrel, so get your popcorn, pull up a seat, and enjoy the show!
Slashdot Mirror
I just can't stop myself. If you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.
I'm not going to downmod you, but I did notice:
amiga3D (567632)
(email not shown publicly)
Would you be willing to post your email? What about the name of your elementary school, the name of your first pet, and your mother's maiden name? Or how much money you have in the bank, and your retirement accounts?
It's not about having something to hide. It's about wanting a modicum of privacy from the Lois Lerners of the world (and yeah the baddies on the right too but the IRS is current events so that's my reference du jour).
Stocks usually move at new information, not at confirmation of old information.
Often described as "Buy the rumor, sell the news."
I don't know, I have a very strong Bayesian prior that the drunk driver is the cause of an accident when that drunk driver is involved in an accident. Eyewitness testimony is fraught with possible errors so unless there is something stronger like video or a black box recorder I don't think you could convince me that the sober person was the cause of the accident (even with a preponderance of the evidence standard)
But merely the existence of a cell phone near the accident should mean almost nothing - almost everyone will have one, but the vast majority of accidents that occur have nothing to do with a cell phone. So I don't think that the police should be able to just fiddle around with someone's cell phone just because 1) the phone is there, and 2) there was an accident. Of course, if an SMS pops up while the officer is there saying something like "what was that? you didn't finish that last text" then of course it becomes evidence, but this law seems to just be authorizing fishing expeditions.
If it was this story that you listened to, there is more to the story. When the man was released, he murdered a woman.
But in a way that supports your point even more - eyewitness testimony is a bad way to get to the facts (let alone the truth!). Maybe she remembered right the first time, maybe not, we can never know.
Digging through the Supreme Court Database, this happened exactly once before (Scalia, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Ginsberg all agreeing in dissent). It happened in Williams v. Illinois, which was interestingly also a DNA testing case. The question at the time was "Whether a state rule of evidence allowing an expert witness to testify about the results of DNA testing performed by non-testifying analysts, where the defendant has no opportunity to confront the actual analysts, violates the Confrontation Clause." The majority held that it did not violate the confrontation clause, with these four justices in dissent.
This. I actually wrote the other day (in response to the "How did you learn to program" article:
I grew up with "programming" on the C64 too, and it is funny that it did not seem to help very much when learning to code for real. However, my undergraduate degree is in pure math (not statistics or discrete/applied math) and it's funny that the kinds of things that I learned on that C64 helped me tremendously in mathematics.
:) ).
There is a unique blend of creativity and rigor that is very similar when you write a program or write a proof, that you need when you look at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank screen, or a sheet of paper that begins with "Thm:" and ends with a lonely "Prf:". You need to be able to connect what you know, and the tools that are available to you, and have some inkling as to how they might reach the goal at the end. Sometimes it is as simple as unpacking some definitions, or just plumbing together some libraries, but the tough/fun part is when you need to figure out some non-obvious trick that will get you to the other side. And once you have that insight, you are not done; both require a great deal of rigor, such as covering all possible conditions of a conditional branching structure, or making sure that counters and loops start at 0 and go to n (or is that 1 and n+1?
Now I work with statistics, and although the work deals with many more numbers, and most people would say that it really is "math," it really doesn't feel the same as the math I did at school except when I have to create some interesting data structure or use some optimization trick to get everything to fit into memory. And those neat coding exercises are more like "math" to me than a bunch of numbers coming out of some numerical method.
Your description of "arbitrary symbol manipulation as a tool to manipulate abstractions of a problem in a way that you can trust that the result solves the problem" is a much better way of saying what I was trying to say. If you can't think through several layers of abstraction into a problem you are going to have a difficult time contributing towards large software projects. Mathematics teaches you rigorous symbol manipulation and abstract thinking at multiple levels in a way that many other disciplines do not.
Is it 'management dickery' to have a dashboard camera to record police officers on traffic stops? Or to put a black box recorder in a commercial airliner? How about background checks for elementary school teachers? Surveillance cameras on bank tellers, or casino dealers? I'm all in favor of privacy rights for the general public, but there are certain professions that by their very nature require a higher level of scrutiny, especially on the job.
This has been a problem for decades, and less intrusive methods have not seemed to solve the problem. Yes, this comes down to a "this is why we can't have nice things" argument. But of all the things that health care professionals do that requires hard work, sacrifice, a high level of skill, or dedication to helping people, this seems like such a small additional step with a tremendous possible bang for the buck. (And please don't turn this into a slippery slope argument. You should look at the costs and benefits of any proposed intrusion on privacy on its own merits)
According to this, "it has been estimated that hospitalacquired infections are responsible for 80,000 deaths in the United States and 5,000 deaths in the United Kingdom." "Compliance rates were ... lower among physicians (32%)." So only 32% of doctors are washing their hands, killing 80,000 people per year. I will let the reader decide whether they want to compare this to the deaths caused by automobiles (32,367) or handguns (31,672), but apparently keeping hands clean in hospitals is a serious public health problem, and one that, of all people, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses should all be doing everything they can to fix it.
The good news is that micromanagement works: "The majority of the time, the situations that were associated with a higher compliance rate were those having to do with dirty tasks, the introduction of alcoholbased hand rub or gel, performance feedback, and accessibility of materials."
This isn't about monitoring bathroom breaks, it is about monitoring basic competence to do your job. A patient is supposed to end a hospital visit healthier than they started, and if health care professionals are doing things that make that goal more difficult then they are failing at their job. It's not the same as, say, monitoring the number of lines of code that a developer writes (where there is, at best, a tenuous relationship between the measured value and the quality of software - and probably none at all), it is a well-documented and serious problem that kills people. It's more like measuring whether a developer leaves his workstation turned off all day. Washing hands regularly is a necessary though not sufficient condition to make people healthy in a hospital, and if constant monitoring is required to get more than 1/3 of doctors to do it, then so be it.
I grew up with "programming" on the C64 too, and it is funny that it did not seem to help very much when learning to code for real. However, my undergraduate degree is in pure math (not statistics or discrete/applied math) and it's funny that the kinds of things that I learned on that C64 helped me tremendously in mathematics.
:) ).
There is a unique blend of creativity and rigor that is very similar when you write a program or write a proof, that you need when you look at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank screen, or a sheet of paper that begins with "Thm:" and ends with a lonely "Prf:". You need to be able to connect what you know, and the tools that are available to you, and have some inkling as to how they might reach the goal at the end. Sometimes it is as simple as unpacking some definitions, or just plumbing together some libraries, but the tough/fun part is when you need to figure out some non-obvious trick that will get you to the other side. And once you have that insight, you are not done; both require a great deal of rigor, such as covering all possible conditions of a conditional branching structure, or making sure that counters and loops start at 0 and go to n (or is that 1 and n+1?
Now I work with statistics, and although the work deals with many more numbers, and most people would say that it really is "math," it really doesn't feel the same as the math I did at school except when I have to create some interesting data structure or use some optimization trick to get everything to fit into memory. And those neat coding exercises are more like "math" to me than a bunch of numbers coming out of some numerical method.
It probably takes ten pages of legalese to say "you will tell us every detail that you know about the bug that you found. Also, if you spend your money doing something dangerous and/or stupid, you agree not to sue us." And like you point out, there is the usual NDA and publicity stuff too.
As for child stars, IANAL, but I believe that there is a way to get judicial pre-approval (e.g., here). I'm guessing that in this case they have neither the expertise nor inclination to go through a judicial proceeding for a relatively small amount of money. But that still doesn't explain why they don't just have the parents submit the bug and sign the contract.
sucking money out of the economy, then letting it sit, thereby starving the economy of capital, thereby adding to high unemployment, lower wages, less benefits, less job security, less public services, etc
the issue is that big corporations are making large profits and are doing nothing with it. No reinvestment, no dividends, no capital investment – it just sitting in a bank account
Though I detect a subtle distinction between GP and your post, you are both describing cash hoarding. But where I really differ with you is here:
America has rock bottom interest rates and companies find it easy to hawk bonds to raise money – even junk bonds. So don’t worry about the Fed.
I worry a lot about the Fed. Just because rates are low doesn't mean that monetary policy is loose enough. Let's check inflation:
"Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 1.1 percent before seasonal adjustment."
1.1% inflation does not sound like the result of loose monetary policy. But macroeconomic data has all sorts of issues with it, so for some theory, let's go to the greatest monetary economist ever, Milton Freidman:
Low interest rates are generally a sign that money has been tight, as in Japan; high interest rates, that money has been easy. source
So the rock bottom interest rates that you refer to are indicative that money has been tight, when it should have been loose. Therefore I hold the Fed responsible and Apple (mostly) blameless.
2 points: first, companies, just like individuals, may justifiably want to hold cash in order to deal with unexpected contingencies. In tough times, they want to hold more cash, and make less investments, despite the fact that it makes everybody worse off. That's Keynes 101. Now, Apple is probably taking it to an extreme, but given the rocky road they have gone through over their lifespan, maybe it is understandable that they want to have lots and lots of cash. Like how my grandmother who grew up during the Great Depression keeps a ball of aluminum foil so she can reuse the stuff - you know, just in case.
Second, when there is cash hoarding going on, it is the responsibility of the central bank (in the US, the Federal Reserve) to ensure that there is sufficient cash being spent. There are different schools of thought here regarding the power or impotence of the central bank when rates are already near zero, but to assign moral responsibility to a company that is doing what it thinks it needs to do for the long-term benefit of its employees and customers during the slowest post-war recovery seems misguided. Better to assign blame to the few members of the Fed who have the power to loosen the money supply but refuse to do more, or blame the hard money crowd on the right that see hyperinflation right around the corner and create an atmosphere where the Fed has to walk carefully, or blame the president for not putting loose money advocates on the FRB earlier than he did.
If you accept the Church-Turing Thesis is true, then Groklaw has the best explanation why anything run through a Turing Machine is just math, and therefore not patentable.
And the irony is that if done right, this is a product that could benefit from the cloud/Saas/whatever model. Imagine if instead of 20 Gb storage, they actually performed most of the rendering in a highly optimized compute cloud. Then you are no longer talking about comparing the price of the purchase of software versus the cost to rent it, then you would be comparing the cost to rent the software versus the cost of the software plus the the cost to build your own latest high spec image/video editing workstation. The economies of scale and reduced downtime would enable adobe to offer rendering performance at least an order of magnitude better than the typical graphics workstation setup at a lower cost per month over the useable lifetime of the hardware.
I agree, charging her as an adult is completely off the wall. This is exactly the kind of thing that the juvenile justice system is built for - a kid is accused of breaking a law (perhaps one that, as gp mentions, we are hyper-sensitive to after the Boston marathon, but a law nevertheless). The government has an interest in enforcing that law and, if the person is found guilty, punishing that individual.
But we, as a society, accept that kids can't always recognize the consequences of their actions and have developed a separate system of justice that, when they make the kind of mistakes that kids are wont to make (such as mixing chemicals inappropriately), we are able to show mercy in our choice of punishment, and then seal the records to make sure that one childhood mistake doesn't follow her for the rest of her life.
First, it is great that someone actually looked up the specific language. But after reading it, I am less worried than I was by just reading the summary. I partially agree with your analysis on the first paragraph. But it is not merely babble. If you read it from the point of view of a limited-government conservative, who believes in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, it is very important to tie the work of the NSF (or any part of government) back to justice, domestic tranquility, common defence, or general welfare. Therefore it is not merely vacuous - it is an important argument against the ~50% people who vote Republican and by pure chance will win ever other election (or so). In a democracy, it is best to convince your opponents rather than rely on out-voting them every single time, even if that means that you only get half a loaf.
Fortunately, you are right that it is broad enough to drive a truck through. But that is no mere accident; basic research, even from a Republican perspective, is often an OK government expenditure if it is argued carefully and respectfully, and the spending is carefully tailored so as not to be wasteful. And that is the real point of this - not to deny funding to science, but rather to prove conservative bona fides and push conservative priorities in science. Will that mean fewer grants to climate science? Probably. But maybe more funding to DARPA battery research. In two or four years, the hands controlling the purse-strings will probably change, and priorities of the NSF will change as well, so it's tough to get too worked up about it. I would be more worried if the Republicans just said that they are cutting off funding to the NSF rather than saying, as they are, we are going to defund X and fund more Y.
And honestly, if you were to ask me personally whether we need YACCS (Yet Another Climate Change Study) or a new DARPA challenge, I would rather have cool new robots!
a.k.a "Too good to check"
There are two differences between the US and Europe with regards to suitability for a common currency: 1) fiscal policy cross-subsidizations, and 2) labor mobility
1) Automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance provide short term assistance to areas that have localized recessions, with money from areas that have localized booms. The US has many of these fiscal transfers, both automatic and ad hoc, while Europe has almost none.
2) Over the long run, if you have labor mobility, places that are depressed for a long period of time (e.g., rust belt) become depopulated as people seek better opportunities elsewhere (e.g. sun belt). When Silicon Valley took off, people from around the country relocated to share in the boom. As much as Americans joke about the different cultures within the US, it is much easier for someone from Chicago to relocate to Los Angeles than someone from Athens to permanently reside in Frankfurt.
This is the kind of thing that touchscreens should be perfect for. It's basically just context-switching UI, such that when the program knows that you want to write a formula, it should switch from a virtual querty keyboard to a more appropriate input device. Maybe a virtual, periodic table keyboard, with two or three rows of numeric input corresponding to normal, superscript, and subscript. Or whatever. The point is that a customizable input device (like a touchscreen) is only better than a non-customizable one if it in fact, gets customized.
among other problems
When one of the CFL's broke in my kids room, I followed the EPA rules to clean it up. What a pain.
So I bought a bunch of no-name LED bulbs on Amazon and although the lighting is a little harsh (as many others have noted), it's a good light to read by (1000+ luments/75 W equivalent) and a lampshade helps (a lot).
Now I am just waiting for someone to sell a reasonably powerful G16.5 base led (like 300+ lumens/25-40 W equivalent) so that I can replace the remaining incandescents left in the house (except for the oven light!).
Subsidization between channels is actually a lot more complicated than people think. Assume that channel A is a popular station, and channel B is unpopular. Maybe 500,000 people watch channel A during the month and 10,000 watch channel B. Further, let's say that the cable company pays $20/month/subscriber for channel A and $5/month/subscriber for channel B. If you only watch channel B, then it seems like you are getting shafted, since it seems like you are paying $25 to only get $5 worth of benefit.
But the problem is that the denominators typically used to present cost/subscriber does not take into account whether the subscriber watches the channel or not. So in the above case, if there are 1,000,000 total subscribers to the cable system, then channel A charges $20,000,000/month and channel B charges $5,000,000/month. If the channels were a la carte, channel A would charge $40/month to the 500,000 subscribers that want it in order to make $20,000,000 per month (40 x 500,000 = $20,000,000), and channel B would have to charge $200/month to each of its 10,000 subscribers.
So are the channel B watchers paying too much or too little when bundled?
Despite R's weaknesses as a programming language, R has such a large number of well-documented, well-tested, statistical functions with a wide array of arguments to vary that it is very difficult for another language to match. For example, maybe you want to build an arima time series model. OK, not too tough to find a library in Python or C++ that does that. Now what if you want to add an exogenous variable to the arima model? Maybe a seasonal component? Next maybe you want to automatically pick the best model according to AIC? Oops, make that BIC. Looking at it again maybe a Vector Autoregressive model is best. Or a VECM?
While I'm sure there are excellent implementations of all of these wrinkles in other languages, with R, I have great confidence that the functions that I want and need now and in the future are going to be there and are going to be implemented correctly, and kudos to the R team for giving us that kind of confidence.
R does have a lot of problems, among the worst is loop performance. It really forces you to vectorize everything, which leads to less maintainable code, and is generally a coding technique that new hires coming from other languages will face a steep learning curve with. What I have found useful is to use R as a data exploration and model parameterization tool, but once the model is ready to be put into production, you can use the parameters calculated by R in an implementation in the language of your choice, e.g., C++.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that as with so many questions of "which language is best," the real question is "which question is best for you and your application?" R is usually the best language only for people who are regularly using a such a wide variety of statistical analyses that you won't find a large part of what you need in the libraries of other languages. For me, I couldn't imagine working without it.
From the dictionary:
Origin of CREDIT
Middle French, from Old Italian credito, from Latin creditum something entrusted to another, loan, from neuter of creditus, past participle of credere to believe, entrust
While your justifiable vigilance is a valid point in favor of Bitcoins, I am not sure about the long-term prospects for a currency whose main selling point is that you don't need to trust anyone or anything in order to use it. The ultracautious attitude displayed by Bitcoin proponents does not seem compatible with the granting of credit, which, (in its modern form) has been at the foundation of commerce since Renaissance Italy.
As long as Bitcoin users and miners are predominantly less willing to trust, and Bitcoin intermediaries like Mt Gox generally prove themselves untrustworthy, Bitcoin will be unable to be a successful currency. That is, Bitcoin will not be a robust medium of exchange that is able to support growth in the economy, because credit granted and received in Bitcoins will be so limited. (Although it could continue to be a commodity, whose main use is not to be used in direct exchange for goods and services).
A good classifier will take into account interactions as well, so if 80% of the people who like both Top Gear and Glee are heterosexual, then they can still get some predictive power. Further, if 90% of people from your city are heterosexual, they could take that into account as well. And that doesn't consider the internal stuff that Facebook knows (and can sell to advertisers), such as the demographic profile of the people near your IP address.
It's not just averages of society, it is individual profiling. At it's most benign, it will target ads that it thinks your demographic profile will be most responsive too, but at it's worst, it could certainly be (mis-)used for individual persecution.
This. But it is an argument between someone with the car data recorder versus someone who buys ink by the barrel, so get your popcorn, pull up a seat, and enjoy the show!