In all such states you can rest assured that the price of buying insurance is within ~15% of the cost of providing said insurance.
Yes, "cost plus" pricing is a very popular government tool for keeping prices down. It eliminates the evil capitalist incentive of "if you reduce your costs by 5%, you get to keep that as profit until your competitors can do the same" and replaces it with the wholesome socialist incentive of "if you reduce your costs by 5%, we'll reduce your revenues by 5% so everyone can share your good fortune".
It's good to see that we're expanding cost-plus contracts beyond aerospace companies and the military. Now insurance companies can be guaranteed to be as efficient as NASA contractors and the defense industry.
It's possible to receive enough money from individual contributors to make up for lost donations from criminal corporations, but how much good does grassroots fundraising do you when you're not even allowed to buy a political ad with it?
Well, that right isn't worth much if once in a while you don't start actually putting bullets through the brains of those treasonous authoritarian fucks.
This particular strain of authoritarian has figured out a loophole in that system: get the extremist gun owners on your side first. Gun owners with sensible attitudes are still trying to get our Bill of Rights back through political processes, and gun owners without sensible attitudes are all standing behind our Dear Leader in preparation for when the Muslim hordes invade.
I think every education policy needs to be aware of this: Gaussian Function.
Not going to happen. Any educator smart enough to understand what a Gaussian function is will eventually call it a "bell curve", and then if they have any superiors smart enough to Google "Bell Curve" their jobs are in danger. In my experience segregating kids by intelligence definitely helps both the slower and the faster children learn, but the US has some history of getting segregated education very very wrong, which makes any suggestions for doing it "right" particularly dangerous ground to tread.
I'm feeling cynical enough to think that our best hope may be to give up on public education entirely and instead try to figure out how to get individualized education correct, with computer assistance. A computer program may never be a good substitute for the attention of a committed independent teacher, but I'll bet we could write programs that compete very well with the one-size-fits-all education that our hamstrung teachers are forced to provide. That would fix the "how do we tell the academic winners from the losers" problem very nicely: no danger of a prejudiced teacher handicapping a child with low expectations, no holding the fast kids back or letting the slow kids get lost by making everyone follow the pace of the entire class, just give each kid enough time to interact with his personal program and see how fast they can learn.
Okay, but white people can feel free to answer too:
Slavery was once practiced in Vermont, in Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, in Connecticut, in Rhode Island, in New York and New Jersey, in New Hampshire... In each case it was ended because the state was allowed to "decide what they want do" without waiting for the entire country to support that decision. So my easy question is: should these states have been allowed to end slavery on their own, without fear that a majority vote on a national level could have overturned their decision? And the harder question is: if centralized decision making had been allowed to keep slavery from being prohibited one state at a time, how much longer would it have taken before abolitionism became the majority belief?
If compromising federalist principles hastened the release of the remaining slaves, I'll stipulate an "ends justify the means" on that one. But you can't pull out "States' rights are bad because a few states might do bad things" without stopping to consider that sometimes a few states might do good things too. The nice thing about letting each state make its own decisions is that, for questions where they don't all agree with each other, sometimes just comparing the effects of the different choices they make is enough to help people understand which decisions are bad and which are good.
A direct click-through worked for me when I tried it from the "Preview" page for my comment, but I guess my browser must have just been pulling the file out of cache rather than hitting up the server again.
Also, I notice that between the two of us we've currently received three "+1, Informative" moderations for helping people hear penis jokes in exaggerated accents. Thanks for helping me do my part in making the internet such an amazing informational resource.
But when people refer to the "Theory of Evolution", they're usually referring to the idea of Common Descent - not just that species evolve whenever their genes aren't already stuck around a local optimum, but that this evolution led from a common ancestor to every species we see today. The Theory of Evolution is also true, but we needed things like the fossil record and comparison of different species' DNA to prove it; unlike the fact of evolution, the whole theory isn't inevitable or provable in a mathematical sense.
I guess we're all safe, just as long as there aren't any laws or regulations that these websites might be violating. I'm sure the authors of Freenet double-check their regulatory compliance every week. After all, the index volume for the Code of Federal Regulations is only 1100 pages, and the other 50 volumes can't be too much bigger. And why even bother reading the US Code? You barely have to skim the thing to determine that there could never be anything illegal about providing assistance to third parties who want to covertly transmit large amounts of unspecified data.
If they are smart they don't ignore the silent majority.
If they are smart, they do ignore the silent majority that's waiting for their demands of an "acceptable" candidate to be met. What's the point of trying to convince someone who's not going to vote for you that they shouldn't feel quite so self-righteous about not voting for you?
A digression:
In numerical analysis, there's a way to minimize a function where, roughly speaking, you look at the last choice you picked as a function input, no matter how bad it is, and you make your next choice in the direction which reduces that badness as much as possible. It's called "gradient descent" or "steepest descent", and while it's slow, it's popular because it's simple and it works.
There is no numerical analysis method where you look at your last choice, decide it's just too bad to even bother incrementally improving, then refuse to move on unless someone magically gives you a next choice that's practically perfect. Such a method would be fast if it worked, but in nearly every case it wouldn't work, because it's retarded.
If you use data from the same one-time-pad twice, it quickly turns from "a theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem" into "one of the weakest cryptosystems ever".
If you don't use data from the same one-time pad twice, then it's pointless to use one one-time pad to send another one-time pad, because every N bytes that you receive for the next key is just replacing N bytes of your last key that now can't be reused to send any other data.
But I don't see why you're surprised that a lot of Asimov fans were disappointed. The man wrote three dozen robot stories, and only a couple of them (neither of which was collected in "I, Robot") flirted with Frankenstein themes. Even in those two, "Robots designed to subvert the Three Laws discover the possibility of doing so to a greater extent", and "Machines falsify economic predictions to get political opponents fired" are at least a little more subtle than "Robots designed to obey humanity conspire to establish totalitarianism and impose martial law".
Either way... the movie covered it, and covered it in almost exactly the same way that Daneel did, admittedly in a far more condensed way.
Well, the robots in the movie interpreted "The Zeroth Law" to mean that humanity's survival depended on omnipresent robotic enforcement of a benevolent dictatorship, and Daneel interpreted it to mean that humanity's survival depended on developing a new culture that didn't even have robots.
So if by "almost exactly" you mean "almost exactly the opposite of", then sure, I'll grant your point.;-)
No, the plot is "Frankenstein". Asimov's whole motivation for inventing "The Three Laws" was to avoid falling into that literary rut, which was well-traversed back when he started writing and which is a bottomless canyon today.
I don't think the movie was garbage (hey, there's a reason Frankenstein was such a classic), but calling it "I, Robot" was just false advertising, even if the script subverted an Asimov idea while borrowing a couple character names.
The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.
Are you insane? Windows 95 may have crashed every week or so on average, and it certainly crashed every 49.7 days if you were ever lucky enough to make it that far, but we're comparing it to Windows 3.1 here! Even if you disregard the bugs in Windows 3.1 code itself, the thing used cooperative multitasking and unprotected memory, so your computer crashed every time the buggiest program you ran had a particularly bad flaw. It would freeze up multiple times a day, under any kind of heavy use.
I think it's clear that if your criterion is "improvement over best previously available version", Windows 95 really was the high point of Microsoft development. Stability doesn't outweigh that conclusion, stability is one of the reasons for it.
Or for that matter, a candidate/party who supports disenfranchisement. Democrats, the party who WON'T let you vote as a form of punishment.
You mean "a" party who won't let your vote count as a form of punishment. The Republican party does the same thing.
Such a wonderful 2-party system we have in America. I'm just waiting to see who the Libertarian will be. Maybe there will be someone worth voting for.
"Worth voting for" depends on what state you're in. If you're in a swing state, your vote actually has a one in a million chance of deciding the election, and there are enough differences between McCain and Obama that you may conclude that voting for one or the other is worth sucking up your principles even if there's a good third party candidate on the ballot.
I'm in Texas, on the other hand. With a one in a googol chance of my vote deciding the Presidential election, I'm free to vote my conscience since I'll be "throwing my vote away" no matter who gets it. The stupidity of the Electoral College partially cancels out the stupidity of plurality voting, hoorah! Unfortunately this year the "Libertarian" is going to be Bob Barr, a man whose commitment to liberty probably would have meant more if he'd discovered it before getting kicked out of Congress.
"Doesn't support ALSA unless you tweak the configuration first" still sucks, don't get me wrong, but it's at least an improvement over "Doesn't support ALSA at all". On Fedora 8, rhythmbox seems to use Alsa by default for me, and VLC tries "Pulse Audio" then falls back automatically to Alsa when it finds I don't have the former configured... but I had to set up Alsa by hand to make it default to software mixing, even though that's supposed to be the default behavior now when hardware mixing isn't available. If it doesn't work automatically for you either, you might Google "alsa dmix ubuntu" and see what you can find. Finding and copying a working asound.conf file is annoying but not very time consuming.
Try closing all other applications that could possibly have the audio device open.
Running "lsof | grep dsp" and "lsof | grep snd" as root is a good way to find out which applications those are.
I'm surprised that a program written in 2008 doesn't support ALSA, but there you go. I had to close up firefox (because of Flash) before the sound device was freed up.
Not to lay blame solely on the game writers. I'm also surprised that a sound driver for modern hardware doesn't support kernel-level mixing. Yes, I know my motherboard sound chipset doesn't support hardware channel mixing; that doesn't mean you can't do a better job of faking it.
slavery...and it was Christianity which fought against THAT and prevailed.
Yes, and it was also Christianity which fought for that and lost. I assure you, the American South never has been a hotbed of secular humanism.
You're right that there are obviously many other causes that are just as good as religion (and other religions that are just as good as Christianity) for driving groups of people to commit atrocities, but you don't need to distort history to prove it.
That's "ran by ex-volunteers", actually. In the book not all volunteers ended up in the military, and veterans weren't allowed to serve in politics or vote until after they had left. Even aside from those facts, the "flaws" in Verhoeven's movie were just as far from our examples in reality as your criticisms are from the story you're attempting to criticize.
Congratulations on managing to form complete sentences out of the results of your failures of reading comprehension, though. You're clearly at the pinnacle of anti-Heinlein thought.
It is not their place to decide if a court-issued subpoena is "worth" complying with or not, especially not in a democratic country (eat trolls, eat!).
Actually, a "troll" is usually defined as someone who posts something inflammatory to elicit responses; the people who respond (like myself right now) are just called "suckers".
At least I'm in good company. Somewhere, up in heaven, Harriet Tubman is flipping you off.
I used to wish my favorite science fiction novels would be turned into movies. That stopped after they fumbled "The Puppet Masters" and pissed on "Starship Troopers". Seriously, "Starship Troopers", one of the few SF books that could have been translated for the big screen with little more effort than "tell everyone to read chapter N, act it out, then read N+1"... How do you screw up a coming-of-age movie with moral debate set among battles between aliens and powered battle suits? Why, to start you cast actors whose next "coming of age" events will be balding and menopause, change as many plot facets as necessary to parody a strawman of the morals you didn't like, and turn the aliens into animals and the battle suits into cannon fodder.
And you think they could get Mote in God's Eye right? Yeah, it's a tempting thought, but you know by revision 3 of the script, Hollywood would have turned the Moties into Ewoks.
it simply says that fair use is not copyright infringement.
At least, that's what the law used to say, before the DMCA case against DeCSS confirmed that software for decoding someone's video obfuscation scheme is an illegal "circumvention device". I'd like to know whether a court thinks that "removes or ignores broadcast flag" would be a similarly illegal property for a consumer device to have, but I suspect that the threat alone will persuade many PVR manufacturers to avoid pushing the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, "cost plus" pricing is a very popular government tool for keeping prices down. It eliminates the evil capitalist incentive of "if you reduce your costs by 5%, you get to keep that as profit until your competitors can do the same" and replaces it with the wholesome socialist incentive of "if you reduce your costs by 5%, we'll reduce your revenues by 5% so everyone can share your good fortune".
It's good to see that we're expanding cost-plus contracts beyond aerospace companies and the military. Now insurance companies can be guaranteed to be as efficient as NASA contractors and the defense industry.
It's about campaign airtime now, too.
It's possible to receive enough money from individual contributors to make up for lost donations from criminal corporations, but how much good does grassroots fundraising do you when you're not even allowed to buy a political ad with it?
Well, that right isn't worth much if once in a while you don't start actually putting bullets through the brains of those treasonous authoritarian fucks.
This particular strain of authoritarian has figured out a loophole in that system: get the extremist gun owners on your side first. Gun owners with sensible attitudes are still trying to get our Bill of Rights back through political processes, and gun owners without sensible attitudes are all standing behind our Dear Leader in preparation for when the Muslim hordes invade.
I think every education policy needs to be aware of this: Gaussian Function.
Not going to happen. Any educator smart enough to understand what a Gaussian function is will eventually call it a "bell curve", and then if they have any superiors smart enough to Google "Bell Curve" their jobs are in danger. In my experience segregating kids by intelligence definitely helps both the slower and the faster children learn, but the US has some history of getting segregated education very very wrong, which makes any suggestions for doing it "right" particularly dangerous ground to tread.
I'm feeling cynical enough to think that our best hope may be to give up on public education entirely and instead try to figure out how to get individualized education correct, with computer assistance. A computer program may never be a good substitute for the attention of a committed independent teacher, but I'll bet we could write programs that compete very well with the one-size-fits-all education that our hamstrung teachers are forced to provide. That would fix the "how do we tell the academic winners from the losers" problem very nicely: no danger of a prejudiced teacher handicapping a child with low expectations, no holding the fast kids back or letting the slow kids get lost by making everyone follow the pace of the entire class, just give each kid enough time to interact with his personal program and see how fast they can learn.
Ask black people.
Okay, but white people can feel free to answer too:
Slavery was once practiced in Vermont, in Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, in Connecticut, in Rhode Island, in New York and New Jersey, in New Hampshire... In each case it was ended because the state was allowed to "decide what they want do" without waiting for the entire country to support that decision. So my easy question is: should these states have been allowed to end slavery on their own, without fear that a majority vote on a national level could have overturned their decision? And the harder question is: if centralized decision making had been allowed to keep slavery from being prohibited one state at a time, how much longer would it have taken before abolitionism became the majority belief?
If compromising federalist principles hastened the release of the remaining slaves, I'll stipulate an "ends justify the means" on that one. But you can't pull out "States' rights are bad because a few states might do bad things" without stopping to consider that sometimes a few states might do good things too. The nice thing about letting each state make its own decisions is that, for questions where they don't all agree with each other, sometimes just comparing the effects of the different choices they make is enough to help people understand which decisions are bad and which are good.
A direct click-through worked for me when I tried it from the "Preview" page for my comment, but I guess my browser must have just been pulling the file out of cache rather than hitting up the server again.
Also, I notice that between the two of us we've currently received three "+1, Informative" moderations for helping people hear penis jokes in exaggerated accents. Thanks for helping me do my part in making the internet such an amazing informational resource.
http://downloads.southparkstuff.com/sounds/epi310/310_settlesthat.mp3 (NSFW)
But when people refer to the "Theory of Evolution", they're usually referring to the idea of Common Descent - not just that species evolve whenever their genes aren't already stuck around a local optimum, but that this evolution led from a common ancestor to every species we see today. The Theory of Evolution is also true, but we needed things like the fossil record and comparison of different species' DNA to prove it; unlike the fact of evolution, the whole theory isn't inevitable or provable in a mathematical sense.
What a relief.
I guess we're all safe, just as long as there aren't any laws or regulations that these websites might be violating. I'm sure the authors of Freenet double-check their regulatory compliance every week. After all, the index volume for the Code of Federal Regulations is only 1100 pages, and the other 50 volumes can't be too much bigger. And why even bother reading the US Code? You barely have to skim the thing to determine that there could never be anything illegal about providing assistance to third parties who want to covertly transmit large amounts of unspecified data.
If they are smart they don't ignore the silent majority.
If they are smart, they do ignore the silent majority that's waiting for their demands of an "acceptable" candidate to be met. What's the point of trying to convince someone who's not going to vote for you that they shouldn't feel quite so self-righteous about not voting for you?
A digression:
In numerical analysis, there's a way to minimize a function where, roughly speaking, you look at the last choice you picked as a function input, no matter how bad it is, and you make your next choice in the direction which reduces that badness as much as possible. It's called "gradient descent" or "steepest descent", and while it's slow, it's popular because it's simple and it works.
There is no numerical analysis method where you look at your last choice, decide it's just too bad to even bother incrementally improving, then refuse to move on unless someone magically gives you a next choice that's practically perfect. Such a method would be fast if it worked, but in nearly every case it wouldn't work, because it's retarded.
If you use data from the same one-time-pad twice, it quickly turns from "a theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem" into "one of the weakest cryptosystems ever".
If you don't use data from the same one-time pad twice, then it's pointless to use one one-time pad to send another one-time pad, because every N bytes that you receive for the next key is just replacing N bytes of your last key that now can't be reused to send any other data.
But I don't see why you're surprised that a lot of Asimov fans were disappointed. The man wrote three dozen robot stories, and only a couple of them (neither of which was collected in "I, Robot") flirted with Frankenstein themes. Even in those two, "Robots designed to subvert the Three Laws discover the possibility of doing so to a greater extent", and "Machines falsify economic predictions to get political opponents fired" are at least a little more subtle than "Robots designed to obey humanity conspire to establish totalitarianism and impose martial law".
Either way... the movie covered it, and covered it in almost exactly the same way that Daneel did, admittedly in a far more condensed way.
;-)
Well, the robots in the movie interpreted "The Zeroth Law" to mean that humanity's survival depended on omnipresent robotic enforcement of a benevolent dictatorship, and Daneel interpreted it to mean that humanity's survival depended on developing a new culture that didn't even have robots.
So if by "almost exactly" you mean "almost exactly the opposite of", then sure, I'll grant your point.
the plot is entirely an Asimovian robotic mystery
No, the plot is "Frankenstein". Asimov's whole motivation for inventing "The Three Laws" was to avoid falling into that literary rut, which was well-traversed back when he started writing and which is a bottomless canyon today.
I don't think the movie was garbage (hey, there's a reason Frankenstein was such a classic), but calling it "I, Robot" was just false advertising, even if the script subverted an Asimov idea while borrowing a couple character names.
The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.
Are you insane? Windows 95 may have crashed every week or so on average, and it certainly crashed every 49.7 days if you were ever lucky enough to make it that far, but we're comparing it to Windows 3.1 here! Even if you disregard the bugs in Windows 3.1 code itself, the thing used cooperative multitasking and unprotected memory, so your computer crashed every time the buggiest program you ran had a particularly bad flaw. It would freeze up multiple times a day, under any kind of heavy use.
I think it's clear that if your criterion is "improvement over best previously available version", Windows 95 really was the high point of Microsoft development. Stability doesn't outweigh that conclusion, stability is one of the reasons for it.
Seriously, it's a game where you can beat evil mimes to death with a rake. Who wouldn't pay $20 for that?
Or for that matter, a candidate/party who supports disenfranchisement. Democrats, the party who WON'T let you vote as a form of punishment.
You mean "a" party who won't let your vote count as a form of punishment. The Republican party does the same thing.
Such a wonderful 2-party system we have in America. I'm just waiting to see who the Libertarian will be. Maybe there will be someone worth voting for.
"Worth voting for" depends on what state you're in. If you're in a swing state, your vote actually has a one in a million chance of deciding the election, and there are enough differences between McCain and Obama that you may conclude that voting for one or the other is worth sucking up your principles even if there's a good third party candidate on the ballot.
I'm in Texas, on the other hand. With a one in a googol chance of my vote deciding the Presidential election, I'm free to vote my conscience since I'll be "throwing my vote away" no matter who gets it. The stupidity of the Electoral College partially cancels out the stupidity of plurality voting, hoorah! Unfortunately this year the "Libertarian" is going to be Bob Barr, a man whose commitment to liberty probably would have meant more if he'd discovered it before getting kicked out of Congress.
"Doesn't support ALSA unless you tweak the configuration first" still sucks, don't get me wrong, but it's at least an improvement over "Doesn't support ALSA at all". On Fedora 8, rhythmbox seems to use Alsa by default for me, and VLC tries "Pulse Audio" then falls back automatically to Alsa when it finds I don't have the former configured... but I had to set up Alsa by hand to make it default to software mixing, even though that's supposed to be the default behavior now when hardware mixing isn't available. If it doesn't work automatically for you either, you might Google "alsa dmix ubuntu" and see what you can find. Finding and copying a working asound.conf file is annoying but not very time consuming.
Running "lsof | grep dsp" and "lsof | grep snd" as root is a good way to find out which applications those are.
I'm surprised that a program written in 2008 doesn't support ALSA, but there you go. I had to close up firefox (because of Flash) before the sound device was freed up.
Not to lay blame solely on the game writers. I'm also surprised that a sound driver for modern hardware doesn't support kernel-level mixing. Yes, I know my motherboard sound chipset doesn't support hardware channel mixing; that doesn't mean you can't do a better job of faking it.
You're right that there are obviously many other causes that are just as good as religion (and other religions that are just as good as Christianity) for driving groups of people to commit atrocities, but you don't need to distort history to prove it.
That's "ran by ex-volunteers", actually. In the book not all volunteers ended up in the military, and veterans weren't allowed to serve in politics or vote until after they had left. Even aside from those facts, the "flaws" in Verhoeven's movie were just as far from our examples in reality as your criticisms are from the story you're attempting to criticize.
Congratulations on managing to form complete sentences out of the results of your failures of reading comprehension, though. You're clearly at the pinnacle of anti-Heinlein thought.
It is not their place to decide if a court-issued subpoena is "worth" complying with or not, especially not in a democratic country (eat trolls, eat!).
Actually, a "troll" is usually defined as someone who posts something inflammatory to elicit responses; the people who respond (like myself right now) are just called "suckers".
At least I'm in good company. Somewhere, up in heaven, Harriet Tubman is flipping you off.
I used to wish my favorite science fiction novels would be turned into movies. That stopped after they fumbled "The Puppet Masters" and pissed on "Starship Troopers". Seriously, "Starship Troopers", one of the few SF books that could have been translated for the big screen with little more effort than "tell everyone to read chapter N, act it out, then read N+1"... How do you screw up a coming-of-age movie with moral debate set among battles between aliens and powered battle suits? Why, to start you cast actors whose next "coming of age" events will be balding and menopause, change as many plot facets as necessary to parody a strawman of the morals you didn't like, and turn the aliens into animals and the battle suits into cannon fodder.
And you think they could get Mote in God's Eye right? Yeah, it's a tempting thought, but you know by revision 3 of the script, Hollywood would have turned the Moties into Ewoks.
At least, that's what the law used to say, before the DMCA case against DeCSS confirmed that software for decoding someone's video obfuscation scheme is an illegal "circumvention device". I'd like to know whether a court thinks that "removes or ignores broadcast flag" would be a similarly illegal property for a consumer device to have, but I suspect that the threat alone will persuade many PVR manufacturers to avoid pushing the issue.