Economics is not a science because there are no experiments to prove its hypotheses, unlike medicen which does it as much as possible.
Economics does not use the scientific method of observations-hypotheseis-experiment-revisions. Medicine is willing to use a clinical trial where some part of the observed population gets new treatments and others don't. Economists seldom do this, with an all or nothing approach to changes in economic structures that prevent proper scientific analysis.
The best way to punish a company is to remove its charter to operate. Corporations are instruments of law, so the law can end its existence. Unfortunately that is often harsher on the people who work for the corporation than the people who run it.
It has been done. I had to do a post mortem on a SGI web server system that had been hacked becuase it had no patches for some well-know holes. It had an extremely long Netcraft uptime because it had been created several years before, then only the web pages updated since it was in a telecom server centre with no sysdamins.
When I found some session logs I found some IRC comments about looking at Netcraft for long running servers indicating that they hadn't been booted since before patches for exploits had been published.
It is also probably a good thing to help prevent incorrect prescriptions being filled. One of the chief sources of medical errors that kill people is getting the wrong drug or dose for a prescription. For example, I have a prescription for 50 10mg pills, but the pharmacist gives me 10 50mg pills. I take one and I immediately have an overdose. Just a slight slip-up in filling the prescription, but deadly.
A RFID chip on each bottle, would help to ensure that the right prescription gets filled because the actual contents of the batch (and batch number could be printed on the label of the bottle being sold. )
I actually worked on this (writing software for the measuring instruments). We put flow metres on a cow barn roof to catch the ouput of methane over some months, using ultrasonic wind speed measurements and instruments to measure methane as it passed by the fans. We also measured the CO2, water and other gasses as they were exchanged between the barn and the outside.
We really found a significant amount of methane and it depended a lot on what feed had been given to the cows. Since methane is one of the most significant green house gasses (much more potent per gram than CO2, just less of it), we could make recommendations for feed to help lessen the outgassing.
The other big source of methane is rotting vegetation in swamps. Often a swamp will have little flames rising over it as the methane burns, creating a lot of legends of ghosts and swamp monsters. Because you get a lot of rotting vegetation in the lakes created by large dams, big hydro projects create almost as much a greenhouse effect as fossil fuel plans creating the same amount of electricty, although this diminishes over time, unlike with fossil fuels.
In actual fact, the opposite happens. States where any party have a sure majority, whether small or large, Republican or Democrat, are not given many visits by candidates because the winner gets all the Electoral College votes of the state.
If the rules for selection of Electors were by proportion to party vote in state, then California and New York Republicans and Texas Democrats would get a vote for President. At the moment, a huge number of voters have effectively no vote for President because they live in a state where the other party is strong. Suggesting proportional choice of electors in an Electoral College still gives smaller states a bit bigger influence, but enfranchises millions of voters who now lose all influence in choosing the President. This would also not require any constitutional amendments, just a model law for each state as is done in many other matters.
In Canada, every candidate in an election (so every party), is allowed to have someone called a scrutineer to stnad nearby the polling booth (but no able to look in) to verify that the voting procedure is valid. The scrutineer is then able to observe the counting of ballots by the poll officials and object if a ballot is counted improperly. At the end of the count, they then register the objections or sign off that the count was not objected to and this goes along with all the ballots to the central election office.
I have acted as a scrutineer in a number of elections and it is a very fair system. But Canada has it much easier than the United States because there are many fewer elections on the same day. Federal and provincial elections only have one office to elect(for the M.P. Member of Parliament, or M.L.A, Member of Legislative Assembly, MNA in Quebec), so it is much easier to count. We don't have elected senators (yet) and the prime minister is just an elected MP who is leader of the largest party in Parliament.
Municipal elections may have many offices to fill, but they then often use mark-sense ballots etc., electronic counters like the U.S., but still with the idea of scrutineers to watch the count. But all elections have paper trails to allow for a separate recount.
You must not live in Quebec. At one time political parties were not printed on the ballot, just the candidate's name and occupation. It was common practice for one party to arange for an idependent candidate to run with the same name as the candiate of the other party. So there would be a ballot with 2 Jean Claud Tremblays or Pierre Gauthiers on the same ballot. One could only know who was the candidate they intended to vote for by the occupation.
Actually Nebraska is a bad example since it now divides its electoral college vote according to the votes in each conggressional district, with the two extra (for senators) going to winner in popular vote. This system (also used in Maine) or one that just divides the electoral college proportional to votes for the candidates would bring the U.S. much closer to a democracy. Right now it is less of a democracy than Russia is.
Of course the roots of the words conervation and conservative both come from the word conserve. They both mean someone who wants to save things that already exist rather than change things. A conservative is one who wants to preserve the existing political relationship rather than change it a lot.
So a true conservative would also be a true conservationist. Unfortunately we have too oftened labelled those who want to change the present order by imposing a new regime ordered by a particular ideology as "conservatives" rather than what they really are: reactionaries.
I couln't help but laugh when looking at the Periodic table of the Operators and thinking of the criticisms of APL that it had too many operators and was a "write-only" language. At least APL had a simple precedence rule (all code to right has higher precedence and code in parentheses is evaluated first).
APL differentiated between functions, which took values as operands, and operators, which take functions as operands to generate new functions. This seems something that Perl could do to help clean up the definitions of much of its syntax.
There is also the idea of simple incapacitation as a rationale for punishment, when it's imprisonment, for instance. Some people believe that the drop in crime rates over the last 20-30 years has been mostly due to the increased use of prisons and the simple incapacitative effect it has on crime.
That would be only true if only those places that had an increase in incarceration had a decrease in crime. But places that lowered their incarceration rates in Europe also lowered their crime rates and often more than in the U.S.
What actually seems to prevent crime is better possibilites of gainful emplyment and futures of those most likely to be criminals. Fewer crack addicts means fewer people robbing corner stores to buy crack.
Those countries with the lowest crime rates tend also to be those countries witht he best support systems for the disadvantage in society. Punishement severity has never been shown to change probability of a crime. The most important factor in detering crime is probability of being caught and convicted with a meaningful, but not neccessarily harsh, sentence.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the conditions that allows CBS to have a monopoly of its particular broadcast frequencies in a city(no one else can use them in that city) is that they are non-discrimatory in accepting advertising as long as the ads do not violate any laws.
Would it be alright if CBS accepted ads from the Ku Kux Klan but not the NAACP (or vice versa)? Since they have accepted advertising from partisan organizations in the past (such as election advertising this year), they are being hypocrites by refusing this one.
So I am assuming that George W. Bush should not have the right to vote because he committed felonies but that he was not caught.
The whole purpose of the justice system is to try to prevent crime by people in the future, not permanently punish anyone who ever breaks the law.
When somone is in jail or on parole for a crime, certainly they should be restricted in voting as part of their punishment. But after they have served their sentence, they should become full citizens again. Without a chance of returning to society, the U.S. is guaranteeing that all felons are marked for life so they have no incentive to rehabilitate themselves. No wonder you have the highest crime rate and the most people in jail of any democracy.
There is lots of evidence to show that the Sobig virus was created by a spammer to install a lot of open relays for spam. One of the side effects is that the infected machine will listen on a high port and forward all email amessages received on its built-in SMTP engine (that it uses for spreading in the first place).
If you check on spam origins lately, you wil find a lot seems to come from ADSL/cable clients who proably don't even realize that they are helping spammers.
It seems quite likely that the first targets of the virus would be addresses in spam lists.
I have a B.Math and after university went to Teacher's College.
One of the things I found most hard to teach was mathematics becuase it was hard to remember how I learned a technique that was now almost innate. The very reason that I found it very difficult to create lessons outlining the steps to do basic operations was becuase I often never had to do those intermediate steps explicitly.
Why should $HOME be the same on each system. Why not have a expression in.login or Windows login.bat create a value that points to the Home location on each machine?
For example on a Windows XP machine your login profile script would do set HOME="%HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%"
in Cygwin it would be export HOME="$HOMEDRIVE/$HOMEPATH"
etc. depending on the OS. So you would use $HOME (or %HOME% in Windows) whenever you wanted the home location.
What it looks like is that Microsoft has decided that they can't achieve security with Office 11 if they allow it to run on completely insecure operating systems like the Win9x line.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable design choice since there is no way to achieve any real security on a Win9x box (it operates with no separation between user and kernel mode privileges). So Microsoft was between a rock and a hard place in this decision. I think they actually took a decision for security instead of compatability which is what everyone has been asking them to do for a while.
They have to balance 2 things. Increased sales of newer OS to be able to run the new Office 11 or loss of sales to alternate OS or unwillingness to upgrade.
I would think that anyone who wants to upgrade to Office 11 probably also wants the horsepower to run it well and would be upgrading OS as well.
Anyone wanting to run Win9x as OS really doesn't care for security or compatability anyway so wouldn't want the Office 11 suite installed either.
They already have bought the United States (see election of George W. Bush and the dropping of the anti-trust case). So why hould they buy anything smaller?
What is called mathematics in public school is really rote learning of arithmetic and would turn off any intelligent person. Something I did when my daughter was in grade 4 and 5 was to volunteer to visit her classroom on Friday ever second week (compressed workweek helped) with a more interesting Math Club topic. YOu might want to do a similar thing if the school allows it.
You need to get away from arithmetic as all there is to mathematics. Group theory was really interesting when you give out cards with colored sections and ask questions abnout predicting which color is on top if you rotate to left twice, flip once and rotate right once. The students were quite eager to learn how to work it out in advance.
Combinatorics was fun when we discussed ways of pairing people for games so that everybody played prefered opponents. Having the kids actually move about to make the pairs in different parts of room made it fun, while showing the logistics problems that are solved by mathematics.
Simple cryptography was really interesting because it allowed people to exchange secret messages, yet transposition ciphers are not that hard mathematically.
I got a lot of interest when we discussed Cartesian geometry when I showed that one could move sprites across the screen by evaluating equations (involving addition and multiplication with a calculator).
The normal school curriculum is designed to gurantee everyone learns the basics rather than helping bright kids explore the possibilities. So often bright kids tune out the lessons and don't even do as well as the mediocre kids. THis helped cure a bit of that.
My daughters seemed to be following a similar path until they were in University and actually had to study and learn programming in a decent formal course.
Then then found out that it was interesting as a tool for real world problems rather than an exercise to please the high school teacher. Of course, as teenagers, they never wanted anything to do with what dad did, but now they realize what I do is not so boring.
My eldest daughter now is living on her own with her boyfriend who is studing comp sci and has put together her own computers. As a teenager, she only wanted to read email. She even sends me slashdot references in case I might be interested.
The best way to get anyone interested in programming (or math) is to see it as a useful tool to solve problems that people actually want to solve. So
working with them on writing a game, or keep track of books read etc. is much more likely to interest them than a "learn the syntax of language X" book.
If we were suited to eat meat, we wouldn't need to cook it.
Humans only eat meat that has been pre-processed to break it down into food that a herbivore can also eat. That is also what carrion eaters like vultures do, so we are closer to vultures and hyenas in our eating habits.
So until you are willing to eat your meat raw, you have to concede that human metabolism is inherently either carrion or vegetarian based.
That is really important. Often local groups can do more to preserve your environment than any national organizations. Even the Sierra Club is most active at the community level with local chapters. THere is still a struggle to even preserve the natural areas we have in our urban neigbourhoods, let alone the Amazon rain forest.
I am vice-chair of a local organization that acts to preserve neighbourhood greenspace (woodlots, meadows, ponds etc.) in urban areas. You would think that having a place to walk your dog or stroll around looking for wildflowers and chipmunks would be seen as part of the amenities that a city should preserve. Often we are the only "citizen" representatives speaking to Planning Committee about changes of land use. The developers will have half a dozen speakers, justifying the selloff of parkland, but weekday meetings are hard for average citizens to get to when you need to take time off work. No problem for the developers who make millions from a change in zoning at the stroke of a pen.
But one of our biggest battles is to stop government agencies selling off parkland, "undeveloped" land etc. to developers who see it as cheap land banking. Here in Ontario, municipal politicians can get campaign money from corporations, who can deduct it as expenses, while individuals who contribute to election campaigns have no tax writeoff. Guess where our local politicians get most of their campaign contributions?
Recently, our mayor appeared on the front cover of a "New Homes" flyer extolling the virtues of a new subdivision next to a Class 1 wetland, even before city council had voted to allow the zoning to proceed.
Political involvement to ensure that environmental concerns are on the radar is one of the most important things one can do. Computer geeks can do a lot because the Internet is becoming a really important source of information for issues that have previously been suppressed by media control. Remember that big city newspapers find developers a huge source of advertising revenue. They certainly have no incentive to warn people of loss of greenspace to new development.
Slashdot Mirror
Economics does not use the scientific method of observations-hypotheseis-experiment-revisions. Medicine is willing to use a clinical trial where some part of the observed population gets new treatments and others don't. Economists seldom do this, with an all or nothing approach to changes in economic structures that prevent proper scientific analysis.
The best way to punish a company is to remove its charter to operate. Corporations are instruments of law, so the law can end its existence. Unfortunately that is often harsher on the people who work for the corporation than the people who run it.
UH. Bestbuy OWNS FutureShop. They run two separate chains to appear to compete with other and get more sales.
I think the Land of the Free is no longer the U.S.A. but Canada.
When I found some session logs I found some IRC comments about looking at Netcraft for long running servers indicating that they hadn't been booted since before patches for exploits had been published.
Perfect way to search for vulnerable machines.
A RFID chip on each bottle, would help to ensure that the right prescription gets filled because the actual contents of the batch (and batch number could be printed on the label of the bottle being sold. )
We really found a significant amount of methane and it depended a lot on what feed had been given to the cows. Since methane is one of the most significant green house gasses (much more potent per gram than CO2, just less of it), we could make recommendations for feed to help lessen the outgassing.
The other big source of methane is rotting vegetation in swamps. Often a swamp will have little flames rising over it as the methane burns, creating a lot of legends of ghosts and swamp monsters. Because you get a lot of rotting vegetation in the lakes created by large dams, big hydro projects create almost as much a greenhouse effect as fossil fuel plans creating the same amount of electricty, although this diminishes over time, unlike with fossil fuels.
If the rules for selection of Electors were by proportion to party vote in state, then California and New York Republicans and Texas Democrats would get a vote for President. At the moment, a huge number of voters have effectively no vote for President because they live in a state where the other party is strong. Suggesting proportional choice of electors in an Electoral College still gives smaller states a bit bigger influence, but enfranchises millions of voters who now lose all influence in choosing the President. This would also not require any constitutional amendments, just a model law for each state as is done in many other matters.
I have acted as a scrutineer in a number of elections and it is a very fair system. But Canada has it much easier than the United States because there are many fewer elections on the same day. Federal and provincial elections only have one office to elect(for the M.P. Member of Parliament, or M.L.A, Member of Legislative Assembly, MNA in Quebec), so it is much easier to count. We don't have elected senators (yet) and the prime minister is just an elected MP who is leader of the largest party in Parliament.
Municipal elections may have many offices to fill, but they then often use mark-sense ballots etc., electronic counters like the U.S., but still with the idea of scrutineers to watch the count. But all elections have paper trails to allow for a separate recount.
You must not live in Quebec. At one time political parties were not printed on the ballot, just the candidate's name and occupation. It was common practice for one party to arange for an idependent candidate to run with the same name as the candiate of the other party. So there would be a ballot with 2 Jean Claud Tremblays or Pierre Gauthiers on the same ballot. One could only know who was the candidate they intended to vote for by the occupation.
Actually Nebraska is a bad example since it now divides its electoral college vote according to the votes in each conggressional district, with the two extra (for senators) going to winner in popular vote. This system (also used in Maine) or one that just divides the electoral college proportional to votes for the candidates would bring the U.S. much closer to a democracy. Right now it is less of a democracy than Russia is.
Of course the roots of the words conervation and conservative both come from the word conserve. They both mean someone who wants to save things that already exist rather than change things. A conservative is one who wants to preserve the existing political relationship rather than change it a lot.
So a true conservative would also be a true conservationist. Unfortunately we have too oftened labelled those who want to change the present order by imposing a new regime ordered by a particular ideology as "conservatives" rather than what they really are: reactionaries.
I couln't help but laugh when looking at the Periodic table of the Operators and thinking of the criticisms of APL that it had too many operators and was a "write-only" language. At least APL had a simple precedence rule (all code to right has higher precedence and code in parentheses is evaluated first).
APL differentiated between functions, which took values as operands, and operators, which take functions as operands to generate new functions. This seems something that Perl could do to help clean up the definitions of much of its syntax.
There is also the idea of simple incapacitation as a rationale for punishment, when it's imprisonment, for instance. Some people believe that the drop in crime rates over the last 20-30 years has been mostly due to the increased use of prisons and the simple incapacitative effect it has on crime. That would be only true if only those places that had an increase in incarceration had a decrease in crime. But places that lowered their incarceration rates in Europe also lowered their crime rates and often more than in the U.S.
What actually seems to prevent crime is better possibilites of gainful emplyment and futures of those most likely to be criminals. Fewer crack addicts means fewer people robbing corner stores to buy crack.
Those countries with the lowest crime rates tend also to be those countries witht he best support systems for the disadvantage in society. Punishement severity has never been shown to change probability of a crime. The most important factor in detering crime is probability of being caught and convicted with a meaningful, but not neccessarily harsh, sentence.
Would it be alright if CBS accepted ads from the Ku Kux Klan but not the NAACP (or vice versa)? Since they have accepted advertising from partisan organizations in the past (such as election advertising this year), they are being hypocrites by refusing this one.
So I am assuming that George W. Bush should not have the right to vote because he committed felonies but that he was not caught.
The whole purpose of the justice system is to try to prevent crime by people in the future, not permanently punish anyone who ever breaks the law. When somone is in jail or on parole for a crime, certainly they should be restricted in voting as part of their punishment. But after they have served their sentence, they should become full citizens again. Without a chance of returning to society, the U.S. is guaranteeing that all felons are marked for life so they have no incentive to rehabilitate themselves. No wonder you have the highest crime rate and the most people in jail of any democracy.
There is lots of evidence to show that the Sobig virus was created by a spammer to install a lot of open relays for spam.
One of the side effects is that the infected machine will listen on a high port and forward all email amessages received on its built-in SMTP engine (that it uses for spreading in the first place).
If you check on spam origins lately, you wil find a lot seems to come from ADSL/cable clients who proably don't even realize that they are helping spammers.
It seems quite likely that the first targets of the virus would be addresses in spam lists.
I have a B.Math and after university went to Teacher's College. One of the things I found most hard to teach was mathematics becuase it was hard to remember how I learned a technique that was now almost innate. The very reason that I found it very difficult to create lessons outlining the steps to do basic operations was becuase I often never had to do those intermediate steps explicitly.
Why should $HOME be the same on each system. Why not have a expression in .login or Windows login.bat create a value that points to the Home location on each machine?
For example on a Windows XP machine your login profile script would do
set HOME="%HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%"
in Cygwin it would be
export HOME="$HOMEDRIVE/$HOMEPATH"
etc. depending on the OS.
So you would use $HOME (or %HOME% in Windows) whenever you wanted the home location.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable design choice since there is no way to achieve any real security on a Win9x box (it operates with no separation between user and kernel mode privileges). So Microsoft was between a rock and a hard place in this decision. I think they actually took a decision for security instead of compatability which is what everyone has been asking them to do for a while.
They have to balance 2 things. Increased sales of newer OS to be able to run the new Office 11 or loss of sales to alternate OS or unwillingness to upgrade. I would think that anyone who wants to upgrade to Office 11 probably also wants the horsepower to run it well and would be upgrading OS as well.
Anyone wanting to run Win9x as OS really doesn't care for security or compatability anyway so wouldn't want the Office 11 suite installed either.
They already have bought the United States (see election of George W. Bush and the dropping of the anti-trust case). So why hould they buy anything smaller?
You need to get away from arithmetic as all there is to mathematics. Group theory was really interesting when you give out cards with colored sections and ask questions abnout predicting which color is on top if you rotate to left twice, flip once and rotate right once. The students were quite eager to learn how to work it out in advance.
Combinatorics was fun when we discussed ways of pairing people for games so that everybody played prefered opponents. Having the kids actually move about to make the pairs in different parts of room made it fun, while showing the logistics problems that are solved by mathematics.
Simple cryptography was really interesting because it allowed people to exchange secret messages, yet transposition ciphers are not that hard mathematically.
I got a lot of interest when we discussed Cartesian geometry when I showed that one could move sprites across the screen by evaluating equations (involving addition and multiplication with a calculator).
The normal school curriculum is designed to gurantee everyone learns the basics rather than helping bright kids explore the possibilities. So often bright kids tune out the lessons and don't even do as well as the mediocre kids. THis helped cure a bit of that.
Then then found out that it was interesting as a tool for real world problems rather than an exercise to please the high school teacher. Of course, as teenagers, they never wanted anything to do with what dad did, but now they realize what I do is not so boring.
My eldest daughter now is living on her own with her boyfriend who is studing comp sci and has put together her own computers. As a teenager, she only wanted to read email. She even sends me slashdot references in case I might be interested.
The best way to get anyone interested in programming (or math) is to see it as a useful tool to solve problems that people actually want to solve. So working with them on writing a game, or keep track of books read etc. is much more likely to interest them than a "learn the syntax of language X" book.
So until you are willing to eat your meat raw, you have to concede that human metabolism is inherently either carrion or vegetarian based.
I am vice-chair of a local organization that acts to preserve neighbourhood greenspace (woodlots, meadows, ponds etc.) in urban areas. You would think that having a place to walk your dog or stroll around looking for wildflowers and chipmunks would be seen as part of the amenities that a city should preserve. Often we are the only "citizen" representatives speaking to Planning Committee about changes of land use. The developers will have half a dozen speakers, justifying the selloff of parkland, but weekday meetings are hard for average citizens to get to when you need to take time off work. No problem for the developers who make millions from a change in zoning at the stroke of a pen.
But one of our biggest battles is to stop government agencies selling off parkland, "undeveloped" land etc. to developers who see it as cheap land banking. Here in Ontario, municipal politicians can get campaign money from corporations, who can deduct it as expenses, while individuals who contribute to election campaigns have no tax writeoff. Guess where our local politicians get most of their campaign contributions?
Recently, our mayor appeared on the front cover of a "New Homes" flyer extolling the virtues of a new subdivision next to a Class 1 wetland, even before city council had voted to allow the zoning to proceed.
Political involvement to ensure that environmental concerns are on the radar is one of the most important things one can do. Computer geeks can do a lot because the Internet is becoming a really important source of information for issues that have previously been suppressed by media control. Remember that big city newspapers find developers a huge source of advertising revenue. They certainly have no incentive to warn people of loss of greenspace to new development.