I really despise Palin. Therefore I agree with you.
The way I treat people I really despise is with scrupulous fairness. I do this for three reasons.
(1) I despise "bandwagon" thinking even more than any individual I've ever considered.
(2) To enjoy the incomparable satisfaction of being superior *even to people who agree with me*.
(3) When I despise someone, I don't want to give them the satisfaction of believing my contempt for them is the product of commonplace animosity. By extending kindness and consideration to the object of my disdain, I hold up a mirror in which they must on some level confront their own wretched, ineluctable odiousness.
The motorcycle has been done of course. How could it *not* have been done by somebody, somewhere?
The problem with a turbine powered motorcycle is that it has no engine breaking effect. You'd pull back on the throttle and you'd only have aerodynamic drag to slow you down. It might be just the ticket if you were planning to cross the continental US, sticking to the interstate highway system. It might not be so fun to ride on a twisty mountain road.
I'm not a motorcyclist, but extrapolating from similar activities I've done I'd bet a lot of the fun is developing a kind of mind-machine connection where the machine seems to respond to your thoughts. A jet powered bike would probably feel like it had "a mind of its own."
The whole point is that 0.(9) and 1 are not "two rational numbers". They are a single number.
Unfortunately, that's the very point in question.
I happen to agree that if (a) 0.999... is a real number and (b) we are talking about the real numbers as an algebraic ring, then (C) 0.999... has to represent the same number as 1.
But you can't start off by assuming we're talking about only one number that if that is what you want to prove.
I was thinking about this in the car on the way home. You don't have this particular issue if you're an ancient Roman or Babylonian. It's a side effect of way decimal numbers aid calculation so wonderfully. Unfortunately, it's not perfect. The long division algorithm ends up generating these infinite digit sequences when really ought to spit out a simple rational number like 1 or 2/3. The only possible consistent thing to do is to consider the output of the algorithm as generating an alternative representation of that simple rational number. If you do, everything works fine.
I think this problem is a kind of linguistic bug. People confuse "numbers" with the strings of digits churned out by arithmetic, because of the decimal number system's amazing usefulness in computation. Unfortunately, the decimal representation isn't perfect. The division algorithm sometimes spits out infinite sequences of repeating digits because it doesn't have a natural notation for simple rationals like 1/3 and 2/3 (which added together are 3/3 or "0.999...").
That wouldn't be so confusing if we remembered that decimal is just *notation* for representing numbers. If we change to base 3, then dividing a number by three can be done with a simple decimal point shift. The very same calculation, with the very same *numbers* that produces an infinite sequence in decimal produces a nice string when we're in base 3.
So clearly, the infinite digit problem isn't a property of particular *numbers*. It's an issue of *notation*. If we think of it that way, then it's psychologically easier to accept that two different *representations* of a number could look different. After all things have multiple names all the time. As long as there is an infinite number of representations to work with, there's no problem with assigning any finite positive number of representations to each rational number (although admittedly that point is a bit subtle).
Notation only comes into play when it comes to accepting that the same number can be written multiple ways.
Yes, but that's *exactly* the sticking point. There is simply no argument that you can make that is psychologically convincing to somebody who hasn't grasped the distinction between the number itself and how we happen to write it down. It's particularly easy to get confused because the decimal numeral system is so helpful to computation.
Remembering that decimal number system is "notation" leads to clearer thinking on the problem. Of course a thing can have more than one name. Everybody knows that. That gets people over the hump that "the numbers look so different." They should be saying, "the ways of writing that number look so different."
If such a "cut" is possible then an example shouldn't be difficult to find,
Let's be clear here. I agree that a Dedekind cut is not possible if "0.999..." is a real number and the reals with addition and multiplication are a ring structure. However -- you can't reasonably claim that if such a cut existed, it would be easy to find. That's an appeal to intuition that happens to be right in this case, but that kind of intuition is horribly unreliable. Mathematics is full of numbers which are easy to describe by their unique properties, but hard to put your finger on.
Perhaps it was badly worded, but that was not intended as an assumption, but rather a challenge to anyone who may disagree to come up with some number between 0.999... and 1
The inability to do which proves nothing other than the person in question can't think of such a number. And when somebody is arguing the other side of this question, they're sure to grasp that.
The problem with your argument isn't the way it's worded; its the *idea*. Please don't take offense. You are right about such a cut being impossible (with the assumptions I've stipulated already). It's just that assuming that is for practical purposes assuming the conclusion.
Yes, but in this case we're not talking about two rational numbers, but rather a single rational number (9/9 = 1) written two different ways.
I disagree. Let me make clear though that I think that "0.999... = 1" is the only reasonable and consistent interpretation of "0.999...". What I disagree with is that we're talking about numbers at all. I think we're talking about *notation*.
Is this nitpicking? Yes! It is! I'm not ashamed to nitpick when it comes to proofs. Why does it matter? Well, because not understanding that we're talking about notation leads to "proofs" that 0.9999... = 1 that are just as incoherent as the supposed "disproofs".
Take your argument. You make the assumption you that there can be no number between 0.999... and 1. That's fine, but you've pretty much *assumed* the conclusion by ruling out a Dedekind cut beween "0.999.." and "1", which the other side (if they understood more math) would disagree with.
The proof in the summary is *much* better, but it should start with several assumptions first that ensure that the subsequent operations are allowable. But that is *really* nitpicking.
You're ignoring the possibility that some *irrational* number exists between 0.9999... and 1. In general any number of irrational numbers exist between any two rational numbers, even if there isn't enough space for "a single mosquito fart".
The proof cited it he summary isn't really a proof, it's more of a demonstration that we really don't want 0.9999... to be any different from 1 -- not if we want the normal rules of algebra to make sense. Since we're talking about a question of *notation*, it's enough to show that people who want "0.999..." to mean "1" don't have any fancy explaining to do in this case.
If you want "0.999..." to mean something else... well you *can*, but you've either got to (a) exclude "0.999..." from the normal operations of algebra or (b) come up with some kind of extension to algebra (like imaginary numbers) that is self-consistent in all cases such as that illustrated. It wouldn't be the end of mathematics if somebody did that, but of course nobody has.
I think the real problem is that people who want "0.999..." to mean something different than "1" haven't figured out what that something is.
Monasteries have long faced this problem. In Greek Orthodox monasteries, bodies are buried for three years -- long enough to reduce them to skeletons. The bones are then disinterred, cleaned, and transferred to an "ossuary" or "charnel house", typically sorting the remains by type rather than origin (all the skulls together, all the femurs together). Roman Catholic monasteries took this practice a step further in the 17th and 18th Centuries, using the bones decoratively.
Well, this isn't really about whether a plug-in hybrid is a more practical system concept at this time than a pure electric system. It's about whether GM has exaggerated its innovation prowess.
There are several reasons to care about this. First, it undermines one argument for GM's economic viability and importance to the US economy, e.g., saying "We're poised to introduce this game changing technology, if we can just get a bit of cash to see us through the next couple of quarters." Of course *marginal* improvements to what is available already are very important, especially when they are delivered at competitive costs. That's probably even *better* than a paradigm shift. But it doesn't say good things about your trustworthiness to confuse the two.
Second, there's this thing called the "adoption curve" which is very important for new technologies. Early adopters buy new technology before its practical enough for most people, because they value technological innovation *for itself*. Having something new and different is part of what they're buying. Now you don't make the bulk of your money on those people, but unless you're Steve Jobs chances are you'll need them to show your new tech is for real -- if you ever get around to selling any. Get a reputation for selling "old" technology (a.k.a. *proven, practical* technology) as "new" and you'll have a much harder time winning early adopters if you ever need them.
The final reason is that markets have segments. No product meets everyone's needs. It follows that a product that is *perfect* for a certain narrow group, it's bound to be less than optimum for a much wider group. I happen to be in a market segment where an electric car that carried four people and had a range of 70 miles would be perfect; even a range of 25 miles would be more than enough to make the car *practical*. The problem with an engine is that most of the time I'd be lugging it around consuming energy for no purpose. So I'd rather have the car *without* the gasoline engine and gas tank and get a break on the price. But what *I'd* like doesn't necessarily make a successful product, because there may not be enough people like me to recoup the huge investment a new automobile model requires.
Actually, I was awake in Civics (as well as History), and I don't think that the issues is as simple as that. Congress has several regulatory and oversight functions over the executive branch, the chief of which is the control of the purse strings. One might argue that if this goes too far, it raises similar issues to those in the Iran-Contra affair under Reagan. It raises issues about executive encroachment on legislative authority, as I'll explain here.
The big difference between non-profit (including government) and for-profit budgeting, is that in the for-profit sector an expense budget is a plan, in the non-profit sector it is an *authorization*. In the private sector, if you go over your expense budget you might get yelled at, but if you can show the excess spending enabled you to meet your profit goals nobody will care. In government or non-profits spending money that is not budgeted is *improper*.
All expenditures by the executive branch must be authorized by Congress. Every appropriation has to be initiated in the House (this goes back to the English Civil War, believe it or not). The constitutional issue in the Iran Contra affair was Ollie North's "neat idea" of getting hold its own pot of money (from Iran) to be spent doing something the Congress hadn't authorized (overthrowing the Sandanista regime in Nicaragua). This, by the way, was the kind of thing that ignited the English Civil War in 1642. Parliament wouldn't give Charles I money for his wars, so Charles dismissed parliament and started finding creative ways to raise funds without them (e.g. Ship Money). This was very much the minds of the framers when they wrote the Constitution. They made sure that all appropriations started in the House of Commons... or rather the House of Representatives.
The executive branch has a great deal of leeway; Congress doesn't get to micromanage what it does. If it thinks going to China to talk about a possible program of cooperation is how it ought to be discharging its executive branch duties, then that's that. But any actual such program has to be Congressionally authorized before the executive branch can actually implement it. The executive branch cannot spend any money without Congressional approval *even money that is not from US taxpayers*. So if China says something like "we'll give you access to our launch platform if you give us access to your guidance technology," the executive branch can agree (unless a law forbids this), but it can't actually make use of that launch capability because that's spending money.
Of course, this is almost certainly *not* what Bolden is proposing to do, but if Wolf *thinks* that he is, even if that is a paranoid delusion, it doesn't really hurt to remind Bolden that he can't do that sort of thing.
When they have you wasting your time picking sense out of their nonsense, you've been effectively neutralized. Nonsense can be manufactured at a far greater rate than it could possibly be critiqued.
is when you pass an electronic manuscript around for review. You can read the comments and make changes right there. Unfortunately, that forces into doc format because everybody in the world can handle that.
It shouldn't be too much of a problem as long as you don't try to do fancy formatting. In fact, you shouldn't even use italics, bold, underline etc. Rather you should follow the conventions used for typewritten mansucripts. Why? Because some editors don't like them, and they're not really necessary. The conventions like _italics or underline this way_ and *bold this way* are good enough and work when excerpts are send through text only email. These amount to commonly understood semantic markup.
Restructured text (RST) is really quite an interesting way to bridge the gap between plain text and a formatted manuscript. It pretty much handles all the typographical things an author should worry about (which is not much) and can generate html, postscript or pdf with a few simple tools. RST would be be close to ideal, except then you have to go back to doc files when you send the manuscript out for review.
What the world really needs is format expressly designed for the needs of authors and editors. That would provide for revision tracking, commenting, and outlining but in a worst case scenario would allow the text to be reconstructed with a text editor.
Well, you put your finger on the essential issue. Who gets to define what is lawful?
Appealing to "International Law" does not really get you anywhere, especially with a country that isn't a signatory to international conventions.
For example, the standard in maritime law that was pretty much universally observed was that a state enjoyed sovereignty over waters ou to three miles from its coast. Then the US and a bunch of other nations got together and extended sovereignty to 12 miles plus a 200 mile "Exclusive Economic Zone" -- a concept that didn't even exist beforehand. So suppose North Korea isn't a signatory. Why should they obligated to respect the US EEZ, which is something that other countries pretty much invented out of nothing?
Because we'll give them a bloody nose if they mess around in the waters we claim. If you aren't a superpower, you have to rely on other nations who have signed on to the EEZ concept to support you, so basically you and your gang collectively give the "interloper" a bloody nose.
As the arctic sea opens up, resources like oil will be up for grabs. Russia has been making noises about territorial claims that the US isn't happy about. Some of the basis for these claims are frankly laughable extrapolations of international conventions. But it won't matter. What will matter is that they're well placed to make anyone who tries anything in their newly claimed waters regret it. I suspect that this state of affairs will become "international law" because nobody will be willing to do what it takes to challenge Russia's claims.
If you were an alien anthropologist with no ideological stake in the question, you'd inevitably come up with the following empirical definition of "criminal": a criminal is a party that violates rules set down by another party which is in a position to inflict punishment. This is entirely separate to whether those rules are ones all parties would agree to, or whether those rules have any rational basis at all. If a lawyer sends you a legally bogus threat that forces you to stop doing something, that alien anthropologist would describe your actions as criminal; that you are not a de jure criminal would seem to be of no significance to him at all.
The harsh lesson is this: the protection of "the law" is only meaningful to the degree that people are willing to fight for that protection. The enslavement, abuse and murder of North Koreans by the regime in Pyongyang strikes any decent human being as "criminal", but the stark truth is that nobody cares enough to impose that concept of "criminality" on the regime. Human rights in such a case is just a noble sounding, but empty sentiment.
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen is stuck in line behind an obnoxious guy pontificating about the work of media critic and scholar Marshall McLuhan
MAN: Now, Marshall McLuhan--
WOODY ALLEN: You don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's work--
MAN: Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture, so I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity.
WOODY ALLEN: Oh, do you?
MAN: Yeah.
WOODY ALLEN: Oh, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. Come over here for a second?
[Allen pulls McCluhan out from behind a group of bystanders]
MAN: Oh--
WOODY ALLEN: Tell him.
MARSHALL McLUHAN: -- I heard, I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
You don't understand how this works. You write patents like "Use of graphene as a conducting element in an electronic device," or "Method of fabricating graphene on silicon substrates employing one of several obvious design choices that nonetheless sound like witchcraft to anyone without a PhD in Materials Science."
It doesn't matter if the patents won't stand up. If there's enough of them, it won't be worth the cost for any private party to knock them all down. The only way to stop this is to get tough on fraudulent claims. If an "inventor" shows a pattern of putting his name on patent applications that a professional working in the field would consider trivial, then he should go to prison for perjury.
The problem with the current system for policing fraud is that it relies on competitors. But the whole strategy is to pile the BS so deep it's not worth the competitors' bother. Furthermore, the competitors aren't going to rock the boat because they're doing the same damned thing.
Patent abuse is a win-some, lose-some proposition for the corporations engaged in it. It's the public and the real inventors who consistently lose.
I'd have said, "I have the device locked up in a safe place. I'll be happy to give it to you, but of course I'll need some documentation showing it is yours. I'll take a written request for it as sufficient proof -- you're a cop after all, so I can trust you. Naturally, I'll require a receipt. I don't want to be held responsible if you lose it again."
The device is useless to this guy. What he needs is proof this really happened.
"Surveys" and "Consensus" sound science indeed you fucking ninny
No, but they are useful to people who are *not* scientists, and therefore don't know how to parse the kind of nuanced,carefully caveated statements scientists are trained to make when they speak in public. When a scientist is saying something is a slam-dunk, it sounds like a member of the general public saying he's almost 50% sure the thing is bunk. People expect public statements to be couched in hyperbole, the way marketers and politicians do it. Understatement is a foreign concept to them.
So maybe it's not science *itself*, but it helps the public's understanding of science to sit a scientist down and force him to answer yes or no questions.
I say this as somebody who is married to a geophysicist. Privately, she'll admit that the evidence for global temperature increases is overwhelming. Consequently, her knee-jerk reaction is to *attack* it. That's how you win glory in science: overturning the consensus. On the other hand, if somebody *else* attacks the scientific consensus, the *other* knee jerk reaction is to throw that guy's work on the ground and kick it to an inglorious death.
... its a web browser. It shouldn't require a high end processor or a ton of memory. If it does, its not that useful.
Really?
You may not have noticed, but over the last decade or so web browsers have become platforms... the critical point for application delivery. HTML5 will include support for offline web applications, and pieces of that infrastructure (e.g., web storage) are already shipping on desktop browsers.
I suspect that a browser centric application model will become even more important over the next few years, especially to enterprise app developers. Maybe precise parity with desktop browsers is not such a great idea, but I doubt that a world lass mobile browser will be much or even any more lightweight than its desktop counterparts. Not if we're talking, say, five years or so in the future.
I've tried out some "just a browser" browsers for use on old hardware, and while they are technically impressive for their efficiency, they have very limited usefulness. They're a lot better than no browser of course.
Why do Europeans have problems not generalizing about Americans?
Yes, I've often wondered myself why all Europeans have stereotyped views of Americans, damn their brie-eating, lederhosen wearing, cricket-playing hides!
Well, they aren't necessarily idiots. They'd be idiots if they were IT professionals who fell to this scam, but most of them aren't.
A had an acquaintance who got fooled into revealing his facebook credentials, and he is certainly not an idiot. He is a PhD civil engineer and quite brilliant, but computer networks, authentication, authorization and all that are simply things he doesn't know anything about. In a way it's almost a shame to take his attention away from things he's brilliant at so he can learn his way around the pitfalls of social networks.
The vectors for this kind of thing are increasing, as sites increasingly invite you to authenticate with OpenID. How likely are most users to suspect phishing? Not very. Passwords are not good for this.
Next, remove the skin, placing it on a mandarin crepe that has been spread with a teaspoon of hoisin sauce. Top with a sprig of green onion, then fold/roll into a burrito style package.
Serve, pairing with a reisling, dry Chardonnay or a white Bordeaux.
Slashdot Mirror
I really despise Palin. Therefore I agree with you.
The way I treat people I really despise is with scrupulous fairness. I do this for three reasons.
(1) I despise "bandwagon" thinking even more than any individual I've ever considered.
(2) To enjoy the incomparable satisfaction of being superior *even to people who agree with me*.
(3) When I despise someone, I don't want to give them the satisfaction of believing my contempt for them is the product of commonplace animosity. By extending kindness and consideration to the object of my disdain, I hold up a mirror in which they must on some level confront their own wretched, ineluctable odiousness.
The motorcycle has been done of course. How could it *not* have been done by somebody, somewhere?
The problem with a turbine powered motorcycle is that it has no engine breaking effect. You'd pull back on the throttle and you'd only have aerodynamic drag to slow you down. It might be just the ticket if you were planning to cross the continental US, sticking to the interstate highway system. It might not be so fun to ride on a twisty mountain road.
I'm not a motorcyclist, but extrapolating from similar activities I've done I'd bet a lot of the fun is developing a kind of mind-machine connection where the machine seems to respond to your thoughts. A jet powered bike would probably feel like it had "a mind of its own."
The whole point is that 0.(9) and 1 are not "two rational numbers". They are a single number.
Unfortunately, that's the very point in question.
I happen to agree that if
(a) 0.999... is a real number and
(b) we are talking about the real numbers as an algebraic ring, then
(C) 0.999... has to represent the same number as 1.
But you can't start off by assuming we're talking about only one number that if that is what you want to prove.
I was thinking about this in the car on the way home. You don't have this particular issue if you're an ancient Roman or Babylonian. It's a side effect of way decimal numbers aid calculation so wonderfully. Unfortunately, it's not perfect. The long division algorithm ends up generating these infinite digit sequences when really ought to spit out a simple rational number like 1 or 2/3. The only possible consistent thing to do is to consider the output of the algorithm as generating an alternative representation of that simple rational number. If you do, everything works fine.
I think this problem is a kind of linguistic bug. People confuse "numbers" with the strings of digits churned out by arithmetic, because of the decimal number system's amazing usefulness in computation. Unfortunately, the decimal representation isn't perfect. The division algorithm sometimes spits out infinite sequences of repeating digits because it doesn't have a natural notation for simple rationals like 1/3 and 2/3 (which added together are 3/3 or "0.999...").
That wouldn't be so confusing if we remembered that decimal is just *notation* for representing numbers. If we change to base 3, then dividing a number by three can be done with a simple decimal point shift. The very same calculation, with the very same *numbers* that produces an infinite sequence in decimal produces a nice string when we're in base 3.
So clearly, the infinite digit problem isn't a property of particular *numbers*. It's an issue of *notation*. If we think of it that way, then it's psychologically easier to accept that two different *representations* of a number could look different. After all things have multiple names all the time. As long as there is an infinite number of representations to work with, there's no problem with assigning any finite positive number of representations to each rational number (although admittedly that point is a bit subtle).
Notation only comes into play when it comes to accepting that the same number can be written multiple ways.
Yes, but that's *exactly* the sticking point. There is simply no argument that you can make that is psychologically convincing to somebody who hasn't grasped the distinction between the number itself and how we happen to write it down. It's particularly easy to get confused because the decimal numeral system is so helpful to computation.
Remembering that decimal number system is "notation" leads to clearer thinking on the problem. Of course a thing can have more than one name. Everybody knows that. That gets people over the hump that "the numbers look so different." They should be saying, "the ways of writing that number look so different."
If such a "cut" is possible then an example shouldn't be difficult to find,
Let's be clear here. I agree that a Dedekind cut is not possible if "0.999..." is a real number and the reals with addition and multiplication are a ring structure. However -- you can't reasonably claim that if such a cut existed, it would be easy to find. That's an appeal to intuition that happens to be right in this case, but that kind of intuition is horribly unreliable. Mathematics is full of numbers which are easy to describe by their unique properties, but hard to put your finger on.
Perhaps it was badly worded, but that was not intended as an assumption, but rather a challenge to anyone who may disagree to come up with some number between 0.999... and 1
The inability to do which proves nothing other than the person in question can't think of such a number. And when somebody is arguing the other side of this question, they're sure to grasp that.
The problem with your argument isn't the way it's worded; its the *idea*. Please don't take offense. You are right about such a cut being impossible (with the assumptions I've stipulated already). It's just that assuming that is for practical purposes assuming the conclusion.
Yes, but in this case we're not talking about two rational numbers, but rather a single rational number (9/9 = 1) written two different ways.
I disagree. Let me make clear though that I think that "0.999... = 1" is the only reasonable and consistent interpretation of "0.999...". What I disagree with is that we're talking about numbers at all. I think we're talking about *notation*.
Is this nitpicking? Yes! It is! I'm not ashamed to nitpick when it comes to proofs. Why does it matter? Well, because not understanding that we're talking about notation leads to "proofs" that 0.9999... = 1 that are just as incoherent as the supposed "disproofs".
Take your argument. You make the assumption you that there can be no number between 0.999... and 1. That's fine, but you've pretty much *assumed* the conclusion by ruling out a Dedekind cut beween "0.999.." and "1", which the other side (if they understood more math) would disagree with.
The proof in the summary is *much* better, but it should start with several assumptions first that ensure that the subsequent operations are allowable. But that is *really* nitpicking.
You're ignoring the possibility that some *irrational* number exists between 0.9999... and 1. In general any number of irrational numbers exist between any two rational numbers, even if there isn't enough space for "a single mosquito fart".
The proof cited it he summary isn't really a proof, it's more of a demonstration that we really don't want 0.9999... to be any different from 1 -- not if we want the normal rules of algebra to make sense. Since we're talking about a question of *notation*, it's enough to show that people who want "0.999..." to mean "1" don't have any fancy explaining to do in this case.
If you want "0.999..." to mean something else ... well you *can*, but you've either got to (a) exclude "0.999..." from the normal operations of algebra or (b) come up with some kind of extension to algebra (like imaginary numbers) that is self-consistent in all cases such as that illustrated. It wouldn't be the end of mathematics if somebody did that, but of course nobody has.
I think the real problem is that people who want "0.999..." to mean something different than "1" haven't figured out what that something is.
Monasteries have long faced this problem. In Greek Orthodox monasteries, bodies are buried for three years -- long enough to reduce them to skeletons. The bones are then disinterred, cleaned, and transferred to an "ossuary" or "charnel house", typically sorting the remains by type rather than origin (all the skulls together, all the femurs together). Roman Catholic monasteries took this practice a step further in the 17th and 18th Centuries, using the bones decoratively.
Well, this isn't really about whether a plug-in hybrid is a more practical system concept at this time than a pure electric system. It's about whether GM has exaggerated its innovation prowess.
There are several reasons to care about this. First, it undermines one argument for GM's economic viability and importance to the US economy, e.g., saying "We're poised to introduce this game changing technology, if we can just get a bit of cash to see us through the next couple of quarters." Of course *marginal* improvements to what is available already are very important, especially when they are delivered at competitive costs. That's probably even *better* than a paradigm shift. But it doesn't say good things about your trustworthiness to confuse the two.
Second, there's this thing called the "adoption curve" which is very important for new technologies. Early adopters buy new technology before its practical enough for most people, because they value technological innovation *for itself*. Having something new and different is part of what they're buying. Now you don't make the bulk of your money on those people, but unless you're Steve Jobs chances are you'll need them to show your new tech is for real -- if you ever get around to selling any. Get a reputation for selling "old" technology (a.k.a. *proven, practical* technology) as "new" and you'll have a much harder time winning early adopters if you ever need them.
The final reason is that markets have segments. No product meets everyone's needs. It follows that a product that is *perfect* for a certain narrow group, it's bound to be less than optimum for a much wider group. I happen to be in a market segment where an electric car that carried four people and had a range of 70 miles would be perfect; even a range of 25 miles would be more than enough to make the car *practical*. The problem with an engine is that most of the time I'd be lugging it around consuming energy for no purpose. So I'd rather have the car *without* the gasoline engine and gas tank and get a break on the price. But what *I'd* like doesn't necessarily make a successful product, because there may not be enough people like me to recoup the huge investment a new automobile model requires.
You can't "steal" electricity. After you use it, you have to give it back.
No. A *human* has to sign the application, thus being at risk (we are warned) of perjury.
Actually, I was awake in Civics (as well as History), and I don't think that the issues is as simple as that. Congress has several regulatory and oversight functions over the executive branch, the chief of which is the control of the purse strings. One might argue that if this goes too far, it raises similar issues to those in the Iran-Contra affair under Reagan. It raises issues about executive encroachment on legislative authority, as I'll explain here.
The big difference between non-profit (including government) and for-profit budgeting, is that in the for-profit sector an expense budget is a plan, in the non-profit sector it is an *authorization*. In the private sector, if you go over your expense budget you might get yelled at, but if you can show the excess spending enabled you to meet your profit goals nobody will care. In government or non-profits spending money that is not budgeted is *improper*.
All expenditures by the executive branch must be authorized by Congress. Every appropriation has to be initiated in the House (this goes back to the English Civil War, believe it or not). The constitutional issue in the Iran Contra affair was Ollie North's "neat idea" of getting hold its own pot of money (from Iran) to be spent doing something the Congress hadn't authorized (overthrowing the Sandanista regime in Nicaragua). This, by the way, was the kind of thing that ignited the English Civil War in 1642. Parliament wouldn't give Charles I money for his wars, so Charles dismissed parliament and started finding creative ways to raise funds without them (e.g. Ship Money). This was very much the minds of the framers when they wrote the Constitution. They made sure that all appropriations started in the House of Commons ... or rather the House of Representatives.
The executive branch has a great deal of leeway; Congress doesn't get to micromanage what it does. If it thinks going to China to talk about a possible program of cooperation is how it ought to be discharging its executive branch duties, then that's that. But any actual such program has to be Congressionally authorized before the executive branch can actually implement it. The executive branch cannot spend any money without Congressional approval *even money that is not from US taxpayers*. So if China says something like "we'll give you access to our launch platform if you give us access to your guidance technology," the executive branch can agree (unless a law forbids this), but it can't actually make use of that launch capability because that's spending money.
Of course, this is almost certainly *not* what Bolden is proposing to do, but if Wolf *thinks* that he is, even if that is a paranoid delusion, it doesn't really hurt to remind Bolden that he can't do that sort of thing.
When they have you wasting your time picking sense out of their nonsense, you've been effectively neutralized. Nonsense can be manufactured at a far greater rate than it could possibly be critiqued.
is when you pass an electronic manuscript around for review. You can read the comments and make changes right there. Unfortunately, that forces into doc format because everybody in the world can handle that.
It shouldn't be too much of a problem as long as you don't try to do fancy formatting. In fact, you shouldn't even use italics, bold, underline etc. Rather you should follow the conventions used for typewritten mansucripts. Why? Because some editors don't like them, and they're not really necessary. The conventions like _italics or underline this way_ and *bold this way* are good enough and work when excerpts are send through text only email. These amount to commonly understood semantic markup.
Restructured text (RST) is really quite an interesting way to bridge the gap between plain text and a formatted manuscript. It pretty much handles all the typographical things an author should worry about (which is not much) and can generate html, postscript or pdf with a few simple tools. RST would be be close to ideal, except then you have to go back to doc files when you send the manuscript out for review.
What the world really needs is format expressly designed for the needs of authors and editors. That would provide for revision tracking, commenting, and outlining but in a worst case scenario would allow the text to be reconstructed with a text editor.
Well, you put your finger on the essential issue. Who gets to define what is lawful?
Appealing to "International Law" does not really get you anywhere, especially with a country that isn't a signatory to international conventions.
For example, the standard in maritime law that was pretty much universally observed was that a state enjoyed sovereignty over waters ou to three miles from its coast. Then the US and a bunch of other nations got together and extended sovereignty to 12 miles plus a 200 mile "Exclusive Economic Zone" -- a concept that didn't even exist beforehand. So suppose North Korea isn't a signatory. Why should they obligated to respect the US EEZ, which is something that other countries pretty much invented out of nothing?
Because we'll give them a bloody nose if they mess around in the waters we claim. If you aren't a superpower, you have to rely on other nations who have signed on to the EEZ concept to support you, so basically you and your gang collectively give the "interloper" a bloody nose.
As the arctic sea opens up, resources like oil will be up for grabs. Russia has been making noises about territorial claims that the US isn't happy about. Some of the basis for these claims are frankly laughable extrapolations of international conventions. But it won't matter. What will matter is that they're well placed to make anyone who tries anything in their newly claimed waters regret it. I suspect that this state of affairs will become "international law" because nobody will be willing to do what it takes to challenge Russia's claims.
If you were an alien anthropologist with no ideological stake in the question, you'd inevitably come up with the following empirical definition of "criminal": a criminal is a party that violates rules set down by another party which is in a position to inflict punishment. This is entirely separate to whether those rules are ones all parties would agree to, or whether those rules have any rational basis at all. If a lawyer sends you a legally bogus threat that forces you to stop doing something, that alien anthropologist would describe your actions as criminal; that you are not a de jure criminal would seem to be of no significance to him at all.
The harsh lesson is this: the protection of "the law" is only meaningful to the degree that people are willing to fight for that protection. The enslavement, abuse and murder of North Koreans by the regime in Pyongyang strikes any decent human being as "criminal", but the stark truth is that nobody cares enough to impose that concept of "criminality" on the regime. Human rights in such a case is just a noble sounding, but empty sentiment.
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen is stuck in line behind an obnoxious guy pontificating about the work of media critic and scholar Marshall McLuhan
Evidently, sometimes it is.
You can send the person who signs his name to the fraudulent patent application, which is already is a crime.
You don't understand how this works. You write patents like "Use of graphene as a conducting element in an electronic device," or "Method of fabricating graphene on silicon substrates employing one of several obvious design choices that nonetheless sound like witchcraft to anyone without a PhD in Materials Science."
It doesn't matter if the patents won't stand up. If there's enough of them, it won't be worth the cost for any private party to knock them all down. The only way to stop this is to get tough on fraudulent claims. If an "inventor" shows a pattern of putting his name on patent applications that a professional working in the field would consider trivial, then he should go to prison for perjury.
The problem with the current system for policing fraud is that it relies on competitors. But the whole strategy is to pile the BS so deep it's not worth the competitors' bother. Furthermore, the competitors aren't going to rock the boat because they're doing the same damned thing.
Patent abuse is a win-some, lose-some proposition for the corporations engaged in it. It's the public and the real inventors who consistently lose.
I'd have said, "I have the device locked up in a safe place. I'll be happy to give it to you, but of course I'll need some documentation showing it is yours. I'll take a written request for it as sufficient proof -- you're a cop after all, so I can trust you. Naturally, I'll require a receipt. I don't want to be held responsible if you lose it again."
The device is useless to this guy. What he needs is proof this really happened.
(1) When a cop investigating you acts friendly toward you, don't assume that means he's your friend.
(2) [corollary] When a cop who's been investigating you tells you that you don't need to talk to your lawyer, *talk to your lawyer*.
I misread the title of your post as "Cuccinelli makes me embarrassed to be a Virgin."
No offense intended, of course. I just felt I should contribute some observations to this debate.
"Surveys" and "Consensus" sound science indeed you fucking ninny
No, but they are useful to people who are *not* scientists, and therefore don't know how to parse the kind of nuanced,carefully caveated statements scientists are trained to make when they speak in public. When a scientist is saying something is a slam-dunk, it sounds like a member of the general public saying he's almost 50% sure the thing is bunk. People expect public statements to be couched in hyperbole, the way marketers and politicians do it. Understatement is a foreign concept to them.
So maybe it's not science *itself*, but it helps the public's understanding of science to sit a scientist down and force him to answer yes or no questions.
I say this as somebody who is married to a geophysicist. Privately, she'll admit that the evidence for global temperature increases is overwhelming. Consequently, her knee-jerk reaction is to *attack* it. That's how you win glory in science: overturning the consensus. On the other hand, if somebody *else* attacks the scientific consensus, the *other* knee jerk reaction is to throw that guy's work on the ground and kick it to an inglorious death.
No wonder people are confused.
... its a web browser. It shouldn't require a high end processor or a ton of memory. If it does, its not that useful.
Really?
You may not have noticed, but over the last decade or so web browsers have become platforms... the critical point for application delivery. HTML5 will include support for offline web applications, and pieces of that infrastructure (e.g., web storage) are already shipping on desktop browsers.
I suspect that a browser centric application model will become even more important over the next few years, especially to enterprise app developers. Maybe precise parity with desktop browsers is not such a great idea, but I doubt that a world lass mobile browser will be much or even any more lightweight than its desktop counterparts. Not if we're talking, say, five years or so in the future.
I've tried out some "just a browser" browsers for use on old hardware, and while they are technically impressive for their efficiency, they have very limited usefulness. They're a lot better than no browser of course.
Why do Europeans have problems not generalizing about Americans?
Yes, I've often wondered myself why all Europeans have stereotyped views of Americans, damn their brie-eating, lederhosen wearing, cricket-playing hides!
Well, they aren't necessarily idiots. They'd be idiots if they were IT professionals who fell to this scam, but most of them aren't.
A had an acquaintance who got fooled into revealing his facebook credentials, and he is certainly not an idiot. He is a PhD civil engineer and quite brilliant, but computer networks, authentication, authorization and all that are simply things he doesn't know anything about. In a way it's almost a shame to take his attention away from things he's brilliant at so he can learn his way around the pitfalls of social networks.
The vectors for this kind of thing are increasing, as sites increasingly invite you to authenticate with OpenID. How likely are most users to suspect phishing? Not very. Passwords are not good for this.
Next, remove the skin, placing it on a mandarin crepe that has been spread with a teaspoon of hoisin sauce. Top with a sprig of green onion, then fold/roll into a burrito style package.
Serve, pairing with a reisling, dry Chardonnay or a white Bordeaux.