First, I'm glad that method works for small English farmers, I really am.:) Unfortunately, it won't work for small American farmers like my family.
My family's farm is in Iowa. That's in the geographical center of the country. It's located a few miles from the nearest town, but that town is only a couple of thousand people. It's more of a hamlet or a village, to be honest. You have to drive almost a hundred kilometers just to get to a city of more than 10,000 people. You have to drive about 200km to get to a city of 100,000 people. The nearest metropolitan areas are over 400km away. We could set up a shop somewhere, I suppose, but given the distances involved it would be an unpleasant proposition.
Additionally, we're trying to get out of farming. Honestly, there's no future in it. My father is a local judge: he makes his living off the practice of law, not on the cattle. I'm a software engineer: growing up I knew there was no future on the farm and I got out of there as fast as I could. If my family were to go into the direct sales business, then we would have to set aside our non-farming careers. We don't want to do that.
I suspect that it's ignorance. Oftentimes, we'd feed our cattle a soybean mix. People think that cattle are only ever fed corn, but that's just hogwash. They've got good stomachs: they can digest pretty much anything that grows and isn't poisonous. (They also really like apples. When I was a kid I quickly learned not to enter the pasture after climbing the apple tree.) They also get fed cottonseed, milo, oats, hominy... I've never heard anyone rail against those, though. It seems that people hear, "oh, corn-fed beef!", and leap to the conclusion that corn is the only grain that's fed to cattle.
I am amazed at how many people are reading what I said as a defense of antibiotic-fed beef.
I am not in favor of antibiotic-fed beef. I am opposed to it on humanitarian grounds. Generally, you only need massive amounts of antibiotics if you're raising cattle in such confined conditions that any infection will spread like wildfire. I don't endorse this style of agriculture. I think it's ethical to eat meat -- but I also think we have an obligation to our animals to make their lives at least somewhat comfortable. They give us their lives: the least we can do is give them a few acres to walk around. In the process of treating animals humanely, we also reduce our dependence on antibiotic-fed beef.
The original poster presented grass-fed beef as the solution to our woes. The idea that we can meet current meat demand while feeding animals grass and hay is absolutely ridiculous. That's what I'm pointing out. We raise animals on grain because there are no other economically feasible options, and whether an animal is fed grain has nothing to do with whether it is also fed antibiotics.
I agree with you there is a market for premium food. This isn't a surprise to anyone, really: if there are high-end restaurants that charge $150 for a bowl of soup, then there are going to be high-end fast food joints that use high-quality beef.
However, notice who sells the most burgers. It's not Burgerville. It's McDonald's. Yes, the beef quality is pretty appalling and if you have a choice between McDonald's or anywhere else you choose the anywhere else --
-- but there are a lot of people who don't have that choice. McDonald's does brisk business because you can get a 1/3-pound burger (two 1/6-pound patties) for $1. That puts it within the realm of affordability for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford beef at all.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that people should eat cheap food.
I'm saying there ought be cheap food in the marketplace -- and that grain-fed beef is a good way to get it.
You will be free to continue using expensive antibiotics on your farm...
We raise antibiotic-free beef. Grain-fed, but no chemicals. You generally don't need antibiotics for free-range beef. Antibiotics are needed when you're doing large-scale industrial farming where the cattle are packed together like sardines and an infection in one animal quickly spreads throughout the barn like wildfire.
We give our animals room to roam. We do it for humane reasons -- we think it's inhumane to put an animal in a pen and never allow it to leave. I don't know any family-run farm operations that raise cattle in pens: free-ranging is almost an article of faith among us.
You are not the first person to assume that I'm in favor of putting antibiotics in beef. I'm not. I'm in favor of free-ranging them because I think it's required by the decency standards of animal husbandry.
I am also in favor of grain-fed animals, because we simply cannot produce beef in the amount demanded by the market without it.
Are you a sociopath? Or do you just go about your life assuming that other people are sociopaths, even when you haven't met them and don't know anything about them?
The current best-of-breed treatment for cystic fibrosis involves having the afflicted person breathe a saline mist for a few hours a day. This has been peer-reviewed and has been found widely effective. It's even been reported in the science section of CNN, among other places.
It's true that Big Pharma isn't pushing this -- but it's notable that (a) this treatment is much more effective and much cheaper than what came before it, and (b) nobody tried to prevent it from getting published. (Quite the opposite, in fact: this thing got published far and wide and fast.)
Want to know why? Because there are people in Big Pharma who have kids with cystic fibrosis. Just like there are people in Big Pharma who have family members with cancer or HIV/AIDS, or emphysema.
Big Pharma wants you to live. Big Pharma wants you to live both for human reasons (the human beings in the company have human compassion for suffering and sickness) and financial reasons (once you're dead, you no longer get sick, which means you no longer need their services). If a doctor talks to a Big Pharma rep and says, "hey, I've got a six year old kid whose lungs are shot from cystic fibrosis, what can you do to help?", the Big Pharma rep will probably talk all about their expensive treatments and how good they are... and then, off the record, will tell the doctor about the New England Journal of Medicine article that covers saline treatments for CF. Because being a Big Pharma rep is a job... but that rep might also be a father or a mother, and I can't imagine a parent who would stand by and let a little kid live in misery when a cheap and effective treatment exists.
This meme of "Big Pharma wants to kill you so that they can boost their stock price" is insulting. It has taken root only because popular culture has demonized Big Pharma so badly that a disturbing number of people will believe anything unflattering said about them, even if what they're being accused of doing runs counter to their own short- and long-term interests, to say nothing of their humanity.
So, what you're saying is that if you drive to the farm yourself, cut out all the middlemen who are involved in distributing food to grocery stores and coops, etc., then you can buy beef that's reasonably priced (but still above market rates). And if for some reason you can't, then you have to buy from a co-op and pay substantially above-market rates.
You apparently live close enough to a small farm that you can cut out the middleman like this. Most Americans don't. Most Americans live in metropolitan areas and are dozens of miles away from the nearest small family farm. To someone living in a metro area like D.C., going out to a family farm is easily a two- or three-hour round trip. The opportunity costs there jack the $4.75 price up substantially more. You aren't just paying $4.75 per pound at that rate -- you're giving up a substantial chunk of your weekend, too.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because something works for you, that it will scale up to work for a nation of millions.
My family raises cattle on a farm in Iowa. Speaking from our experience, I'll tell you that putting a pound of meat on a steer takes in the neighborhood of ten pounds of feed -- and much more than that, if you're feeding them exclusively grasses (including hay).
So. Take a hundred head of cattle and turn them loose on a hundred acres of land. These animals are still growing (since, when they're ready for the slaughterhouse, well... they get taken to the slaughterhouse). If we want to put a hundred pounds on each steer, then that means each steer needs half a ton of feed.
Good luck getting 50 tons of grass from a hundred acres of land. It's not going to happen. The farmer has two choices at this point: raise fewer cattle (and thus raise meat prices for the consumer), or convert some of the cornfields into pasture (and thus raise grain prices for the consumer).
Either way you're talking about raising the prices of basic foodstuffs. You won't inconvenience the rich: the rich will still be able to afford filet mignon and Kobe beef. After all, they're rich.
But the elderly, who live on fixed incomes... poor families who depend on food stamps... or just a college student burdened with debt who wants to be able to take his girlfriend to a steakhouse for a special occasion... all of these people are seriously impacted.
The name of the game in modern farming is efficiency. Reducing prices is the overall goal.
Thank you for sharing this with us. I imagine you're going to get flamed into oblivion for daring to question the party line about "OMG OMG M$ is evil!", but the sane nerds here appreciate the different perspective.
(For all the raving fanboys: I'm writing this on OS X, my home server runs FreeBSD, and I avoid Windows as much as possible. I am not some astroturfer. I just believe that everyone is better for hearing and considering different points of view.)
Right -- I'm also including such things as discovering new equivalent algorithms that offer better parallelization fractions, too. Theory is great: it offers the potential for both revolutionary (P=NC) and evolutionary ("hey, I wonder if...") improvements.
You're correct when you say that if you parallelize 50% of your algorithm, you still have to deal with the other 50%. However, new theoretical discoveries are made all the time in algorithm design; new theoretical advances may result in an equivalent algorithm that's 90% parallelizable.
Amdahl's Law is a strong mathematical constraint on the maximum improvement in performance for a particular algorithm. In order to get past Amdahl's Law, use a different algorithm.
I freely confess to having used "get past Amdahl's Law" in a pretty loose and informal sense, though, so as to avoid that digression.:)
Functional languages are enjoying an enormous renaissance in the field of multithread, multicore and/or multiprocessor environments.
There are a few really major obstacles to doing multi-* well. The major theoretical one is Amdahl's Law, which puts some extreme limits on how much multi-* can help you. The major practical one is our current obsession with side-effect languages. We need major theoretical advancements to get past Amdahl's Law (if, in fact, it can be gotten past at all). Functional programming is a great way to get past side-effect-based programming, though.
In a proper functional language, there is no such thing as iteration. There can't be. The instant you say, "each time through the loop, increment the counter, and as soon as it hits this certain value stop," you have stopped programming in a functional style.
As an example of some really cool concurrent languages that emphasize recursion and functional programming, look at Clojure, Scala, Erlang and F#. All of these languages provide iteration and other side effect techniques if you really need them -- but all of these languages emphasize recursion.
I am not going to save you the trouble of three Wikipedia searches. (Except, I will tell you that Fotini Markopoulou has gotten married recently, and is now Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara. That might help you find information on her.)
The question was to name three famous women mathematicians. Those three definitely qualify.
Emmy Noether, Fotini Markopoulos, and Lisa Randall.
Anyone who says these women are physicists will be smacked. They are all extremely theoretical physicists. Noether is a legendary mathematician in her own right; Markopoulos and Randall are both such theoretical physicists that their work is essentially indistinguishable from pure math. The latter two could easily receive appointments to the math departments of their choice; Emmy Noether couldn't, but only on account of being dead.
Come to think of it, some of my professors in graduate school seemed pretty dead themselves. So sure, Emmy Noether could probably chair the department of her choice.
So, let me get this straight. The guy builds up a large data-center firm from nothing... provides jobs for literally thousands of people... through those jobs, provides healthcare for literally thousands of families... by growing his firm into the multibillion-dollar range, he provides the government with literally hundreds of millions of dollars each year in tax revenue...
... and you're going to sit there being all high and mighty, sitting in moral judgment over him despite the fact you don't know him from Adam?
You say, "it seems that as some people get wealthier and wealthier," without showing that he's one of these people. It's guilt by association: because he was wealthy and tried to reduce his tax burden, therefore he's just like your stereotype of greedy, narcissistic, illegal immigrant-hiring, empathy-lacking, fat cats.
The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said that if anyone wanted to criticize his movies, they should do so by making their own movie. It's a good rule. If you want to criticize the behavior of a successful businessman who as far as we know has never broken the law, you should start by becoming a successful businessman who has never broken the law. Let your own life serve as a criticism of others.
With respect to whether forcing someone to live in pain and without dignity is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath -- yes, it is. This is why so many doctors nowadays are taking continuing education classes in chronic pain management and death with dignity.
Under current ethical guidelines, a doctor is allowed to prescribe any amount of narcotic necessary to manage the pain of a terminal patient, even if that dose of narcotic will hasten the patient's death. (The law has not caught up with medical ethics, but it's in the process of doing so.)
If the only way to manage the pain of your terminal illness is to give you a dose that will hasten your death, the AMA says that if you ask for it I am allowed to ethically give it to you. The AMA also says that I should tell you that very powerful drugs are available to manage your pain, and to encourage you not to live in pain. I can't force you to take the Fentanyl patch, but I can make sure you know you have that option available to you and that no one will think less of you for it.
Pain management, dignity, hospice care, etc. -- these are all ways medicine in the US is trying to balance the Hippocratic Oath against the indignities of terminal care.
"It is every American's Constitutional right to avoid paying taxes to the maximum extent permissible by law." -- Judge David R. Hansen, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
There's nothing wrong or immoral with reducing your tax bill. It's only wrong to do it in violation of the law. The IRS claims he engaged in a legal fiction to dodge taxes illegally. He claims he engaged in a legal fiction to dodge taxes legally. We decide who's right or wrong in the courts: we don't leap to judgment on Slashdot. (I know, I know, I must be new here. Check the UID, kids, I'm not.)
If the IRS is right, then yes, his actions were unjust. If he's right, then more power to him.
If you believe it's virtuous to pay more taxes than you absolutely have to, I'm sure the IRS wouldn't mind if you threw an extra couple of hundred on your check come April 15. Otherwise, let's give the dead the benefit of the doubt, and not declare him to have been taking advantage of us.
With respect to how Bush launched an "illegal war," you can only argue this if you're willing to apply the same to Clinton.
Montenegro and Serbia, two sovereign countries attacked in the late 1990s, filed a lawsuit against their aggressors. They held, among other things, that their territorial rights were violated; that the aggression occurred outside of UN Article 51 or UN Security Council approval; that Montenegrin and Serbian citizens were killed; and they demanding that the International Court of Justice hear their claim.
They unquestionably had a case and deserved a hearing. First, the US couldn't say we were obligated under anti-genocide treaties since we were bending over backwards to not call it a genocide. Second, we didn't even bother trying for Security Council approval. (Russia was threatening a veto.) Third, neither of Serbia nor Montenegro had attacked NATO, and thus the self-defense provisions of the UN Charter couldn't be held to apply.
So far, this sounds like it ought be solved in court. Maybe they would win, maybe they wouldn't, but it's pretty clear-cut the case at least deserved a hearing. This is why it shocked me that in December 2004 the International Court of Justice in the Hague decided they had no jurisdiction to hear the complaint.
Their logic is convoluted and twisted. After all, the ICJ is the internationally-recognized final arbiter of international law. The Balkan campaign was clearly an international conflict subject to the United Nations Charter, United Nations Security Council Resolutions, the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Armed Combat. For the ICJ to declare they have no jurisdiction over a war is for the ICJ to declare there is no body capable of hearing these difficult problems; and laws without courts are just words on a paper, devoid of significance or meaning, unable of rising even to the level of a recommendation.
The lesson to be drawn from this is... when it comes to war, there is no such thing as an 'illegal' war, because there is no agency capable of enforcing laws.
Call it an unjust war, sure. I might even agree with you. Call it a war of convenience and I'll definitely agree with you. Call it an illegal war, though, and I'm going to ask you to explain why Bush's war was illegal and needs to be prosecuted and why Clinton's war wasn't illegal and didn't need to be.
A "fairly small" terrorist incident? Three thousand dead, probably another thirty thousand people who have suddenly lost a father, a mother, a brother, a best friend, a son? Thirty thousand direct victims, literally billions of dollars in property damage done, and you consider this to be a “minor terrorist incident”? If that's a minor terrorist incident then the Bali bombings and the London bus bombings are so trivial that no one ought bother even remembering them.
I'm not going to respond to your other claims. Those are matters of politics, and you're entitled to your own opinion. But those two factual errors -- that the US war in Iraq is "illegal", and that the 9/11 attacks were a "minor" terrorist incident -- scream out for correction.
Look at the word "uninvolved" in my phrase "uninvolved third party," please.
In the case of an office lease, you hold a property right in the office space. In the case of hiring a company to handle X, you've established an employer relationship with them and the law is pretty clear on how that affect privilege (it's preserved; they're considered to be working for you).
The examples you're giving are good ones, but they're also examples of involved third parties.
Unfortunately, you missed the part in my post where I said an uninvolved third party. If you're contracting with a firm that agrees to be bound by your rules, whom you are paying to do business on your behalf, etc., then they're an involved third party and what they do is covered under work product rules.
Google Docs, as I understand it, is different. From all that I've seen of Google Docs, it doesn't meet the standard. If you want to claim it does, the burden's on you to prove it. The analogies drawn to reprographics companies and the like are all inherently flawed -- as is all argument by analogy. Just because the law says X is legal doesn't mean something very close to X is okay, and in the case of reprographics and Google Docs they aren't very close to each other at all.
Yes. When I was looking for a lawyer, I asked them how they contacted their clients, and where their email servers were located. The guy I eventually chose as my lawyer told me he contacts clients via email, phone and IM only to arrange face to face meetings, and then walked me down the hall to the server room. He introduced me to the sysadmin, and the law firm sysadmin answered more of my questions.
Choosing a lawyer is a big deal. You should treat it like one. Any lawyer who is not willing to fully answer your questions is not worth your time or money.
IANAL. My only legal credential is that I come from a family of lawyers and judges who are absolutely adamant about their moral obligation to preserve privilege.
As they have explained it to me, once you voluntarily hand information off to an uninvolved third party, the veil of privilege is breached and it can be discovered.
As they have explained it to me, anything you give to Google can be subpoenaed. Google is currently one of the most-frequently-served companies in the world, and Google gives full and enthusiastic cooperation with lawfully issued subpoenas.
If you really see nothing wrong with risking the privilege of your work product by putting it into the hands of a third party, and if you really see nothing wrong with making it discoverable via subpoena, then by all means use Google Docs. However, for my own sake, I refuse to deal with lawyers who use outsourced IT services.
It is not your job to educate them on their professional responsibilities. Odds are very good that you aren't competent to advise them on it, and it would arguably be a violation of their canons of ethics to take advice from you. Lawyers and doctors have ethics committees to field questions like these: refer your users to them.
In the interim, stand by your guns. If your users say they'll go to the ethics committee and they're sure they'll be exonerated, propose this as a hypothetical question: if you give privileged documents to an uninvolved third party, is the veil of privilege pierced? Yes or no? (The answer is usually "yes"; exceptions are rare.) So, if you give privileged documents to Google, is the veil of privilege pierced?
Don't give advice. Just ask questions, and whatever you do, don't give in.
Soap bubbles can be misled by local minima just like hill-walking algorithms. The problem with soap bubble computation is that when it hits a stable state -- how do you know it's stable? For all you know it's going to collapse further in a few seconds.
Repeat after me: the "soap bubbles can solve the smallest surface problem" meme is wrong as a matter of physics, and wrong as a matter of computer science.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'm glad that method works for small English farmers, I really am. :) Unfortunately, it won't work for small American farmers like my family.
My family's farm is in Iowa. That's in the geographical center of the country. It's located a few miles from the nearest town, but that town is only a couple of thousand people. It's more of a hamlet or a village, to be honest. You have to drive almost a hundred kilometers just to get to a city of more than 10,000 people. You have to drive about 200km to get to a city of 100,000 people. The nearest metropolitan areas are over 400km away. We could set up a shop somewhere, I suppose, but given the distances involved it would be an unpleasant proposition.
Additionally, we're trying to get out of farming. Honestly, there's no future in it. My father is a local judge: he makes his living off the practice of law, not on the cattle. I'm a software engineer: growing up I knew there was no future on the farm and I got out of there as fast as I could. If my family were to go into the direct sales business, then we would have to set aside our non-farming careers. We don't want to do that.
I suspect that it's ignorance. Oftentimes, we'd feed our cattle a soybean mix. People think that cattle are only ever fed corn, but that's just hogwash. They've got good stomachs: they can digest pretty much anything that grows and isn't poisonous. (They also really like apples. When I was a kid I quickly learned not to enter the pasture after climbing the apple tree.) They also get fed cottonseed, milo, oats, hominy... I've never heard anyone rail against those, though. It seems that people hear, "oh, corn-fed beef!", and leap to the conclusion that corn is the only grain that's fed to cattle.
I am amazed at how many people are reading what I said as a defense of antibiotic-fed beef.
I am not in favor of antibiotic-fed beef. I am opposed to it on humanitarian grounds. Generally, you only need massive amounts of antibiotics if you're raising cattle in such confined conditions that any infection will spread like wildfire. I don't endorse this style of agriculture. I think it's ethical to eat meat -- but I also think we have an obligation to our animals to make their lives at least somewhat comfortable. They give us their lives: the least we can do is give them a few acres to walk around. In the process of treating animals humanely, we also reduce our dependence on antibiotic-fed beef.
The original poster presented grass-fed beef as the solution to our woes. The idea that we can meet current meat demand while feeding animals grass and hay is absolutely ridiculous. That's what I'm pointing out. We raise animals on grain because there are no other economically feasible options, and whether an animal is fed grain has nothing to do with whether it is also fed antibiotics.
I agree with you there is a market for premium food. This isn't a surprise to anyone, really: if there are high-end restaurants that charge $150 for a bowl of soup, then there are going to be high-end fast food joints that use high-quality beef.
However, notice who sells the most burgers. It's not Burgerville. It's McDonald's. Yes, the beef quality is pretty appalling and if you have a choice between McDonald's or anywhere else you choose the anywhere else --
-- but there are a lot of people who don't have that choice. McDonald's does brisk business because you can get a 1/3-pound burger (two 1/6-pound patties) for $1. That puts it within the realm of affordability for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford beef at all.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that people should eat cheap food.
I'm saying there ought be cheap food in the marketplace -- and that grain-fed beef is a good way to get it.
You will be free to continue using expensive antibiotics on your farm...
We raise antibiotic-free beef. Grain-fed, but no chemicals. You generally don't need antibiotics for free-range beef. Antibiotics are needed when you're doing large-scale industrial farming where the cattle are packed together like sardines and an infection in one animal quickly spreads throughout the barn like wildfire.
We give our animals room to roam. We do it for humane reasons -- we think it's inhumane to put an animal in a pen and never allow it to leave. I don't know any family-run farm operations that raise cattle in pens: free-ranging is almost an article of faith among us.
You are not the first person to assume that I'm in favor of putting antibiotics in beef. I'm not. I'm in favor of free-ranging them because I think it's required by the decency standards of animal husbandry.
I am also in favor of grain-fed animals, because we simply cannot produce beef in the amount demanded by the market without it.
Are you a sociopath? Or do you just go about your life assuming that other people are sociopaths, even when you haven't met them and don't know anything about them?
The current best-of-breed treatment for cystic fibrosis involves having the afflicted person breathe a saline mist for a few hours a day. This has been peer-reviewed and has been found widely effective. It's even been reported in the science section of CNN, among other places.
It's true that Big Pharma isn't pushing this -- but it's notable that (a) this treatment is much more effective and much cheaper than what came before it, and (b) nobody tried to prevent it from getting published. (Quite the opposite, in fact: this thing got published far and wide and fast.)
Want to know why? Because there are people in Big Pharma who have kids with cystic fibrosis. Just like there are people in Big Pharma who have family members with cancer or HIV/AIDS, or emphysema.
Big Pharma wants you to live. Big Pharma wants you to live both for human reasons (the human beings in the company have human compassion for suffering and sickness) and financial reasons (once you're dead, you no longer get sick, which means you no longer need their services). If a doctor talks to a Big Pharma rep and says, "hey, I've got a six year old kid whose lungs are shot from cystic fibrosis, what can you do to help?", the Big Pharma rep will probably talk all about their expensive treatments and how good they are ... and then, off the record, will tell the doctor about the New England Journal of Medicine article that covers saline treatments for CF. Because being a Big Pharma rep is a job... but that rep might also be a father or a mother, and I can't imagine a parent who would stand by and let a little kid live in misery when a cheap and effective treatment exists.
This meme of "Big Pharma wants to kill you so that they can boost their stock price" is insulting. It has taken root only because popular culture has demonized Big Pharma so badly that a disturbing number of people will believe anything unflattering said about them, even if what they're being accused of doing runs counter to their own short- and long-term interests, to say nothing of their humanity.
So, what you're saying is that if you drive to the farm yourself, cut out all the middlemen who are involved in distributing food to grocery stores and coops, etc., then you can buy beef that's reasonably priced (but still above market rates). And if for some reason you can't, then you have to buy from a co-op and pay substantially above-market rates.
You apparently live close enough to a small farm that you can cut out the middleman like this. Most Americans don't. Most Americans live in metropolitan areas and are dozens of miles away from the nearest small family farm. To someone living in a metro area like D.C., going out to a family farm is easily a two- or three-hour round trip. The opportunity costs there jack the $4.75 price up substantially more. You aren't just paying $4.75 per pound at that rate -- you're giving up a substantial chunk of your weekend, too.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because something works for you, that it will scale up to work for a nation of millions.
My family raises cattle on a farm in Iowa. Speaking from our experience, I'll tell you that putting a pound of meat on a steer takes in the neighborhood of ten pounds of feed -- and much more than that, if you're feeding them exclusively grasses (including hay).
So. Take a hundred head of cattle and turn them loose on a hundred acres of land. These animals are still growing (since, when they're ready for the slaughterhouse, well... they get taken to the slaughterhouse). If we want to put a hundred pounds on each steer, then that means each steer needs half a ton of feed.
Good luck getting 50 tons of grass from a hundred acres of land. It's not going to happen. The farmer has two choices at this point: raise fewer cattle (and thus raise meat prices for the consumer), or convert some of the cornfields into pasture (and thus raise grain prices for the consumer).
Either way you're talking about raising the prices of basic foodstuffs. You won't inconvenience the rich: the rich will still be able to afford filet mignon and Kobe beef. After all, they're rich.
But the elderly, who live on fixed incomes... poor families who depend on food stamps... or just a college student burdened with debt who wants to be able to take his girlfriend to a steakhouse for a special occasion... all of these people are seriously impacted.
The name of the game in modern farming is efficiency. Reducing prices is the overall goal.
Thank you for sharing this with us. I imagine you're going to get flamed into oblivion for daring to question the party line about "OMG OMG M$ is evil!", but the sane nerds here appreciate the different perspective.
(For all the raving fanboys: I'm writing this on OS X, my home server runs FreeBSD, and I avoid Windows as much as possible. I am not some astroturfer. I just believe that everyone is better for hearing and considering different points of view.)
Right -- I'm also including such things as discovering new equivalent algorithms that offer better parallelization fractions, too. Theory is great: it offers the potential for both revolutionary (P=NC) and evolutionary ("hey, I wonder if...") improvements.
You're correct when you say that if you parallelize 50% of your algorithm, you still have to deal with the other 50%. However, new theoretical discoveries are made all the time in algorithm design; new theoretical advances may result in an equivalent algorithm that's 90% parallelizable.
Amdahl's Law is a strong mathematical constraint on the maximum improvement in performance for a particular algorithm. In order to get past Amdahl's Law, use a different algorithm.
I freely confess to having used "get past Amdahl's Law" in a pretty loose and informal sense, though, so as to avoid that digression. :)
Functional languages are enjoying an enormous renaissance in the field of multithread, multicore and/or multiprocessor environments.
There are a few really major obstacles to doing multi-* well. The major theoretical one is Amdahl's Law, which puts some extreme limits on how much multi-* can help you. The major practical one is our current obsession with side-effect languages. We need major theoretical advancements to get past Amdahl's Law (if, in fact, it can be gotten past at all). Functional programming is a great way to get past side-effect-based programming, though.
In a proper functional language, there is no such thing as iteration. There can't be. The instant you say, "each time through the loop, increment the counter, and as soon as it hits this certain value stop," you have stopped programming in a functional style.
As an example of some really cool concurrent languages that emphasize recursion and functional programming, look at Clojure, Scala, Erlang and F#. All of these languages provide iteration and other side effect techniques if you really need them -- but all of these languages emphasize recursion.
You must be kidding.
I am not going to save you the trouble of three Wikipedia searches. (Except, I will tell you that Fotini Markopoulou has gotten married recently, and is now Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara. That might help you find information on her.)
The question was to name three famous women mathematicians. Those three definitely qualify.
Emmy Noether, Fotini Markopoulos, and Lisa Randall.
Anyone who says these women are physicists will be smacked. They are all extremely theoretical physicists. Noether is a legendary mathematician in her own right; Markopoulos and Randall are both such theoretical physicists that their work is essentially indistinguishable from pure math. The latter two could easily receive appointments to the math departments of their choice; Emmy Noether couldn't, but only on account of being dead.
Come to think of it, some of my professors in graduate school seemed pretty dead themselves. So sure, Emmy Noether could probably chair the department of her choice.
So, let me get this straight. The guy builds up a large data-center firm from nothing... provides jobs for literally thousands of people... through those jobs, provides healthcare for literally thousands of families... by growing his firm into the multibillion-dollar range, he provides the government with literally hundreds of millions of dollars each year in tax revenue...
... and you're going to sit there being all high and mighty, sitting in moral judgment over him despite the fact you don't know him from Adam?
You say, "it seems that as some people get wealthier and wealthier," without showing that he's one of these people. It's guilt by association: because he was wealthy and tried to reduce his tax burden, therefore he's just like your stereotype of greedy, narcissistic, illegal immigrant-hiring, empathy-lacking, fat cats.
The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said that if anyone wanted to criticize his movies, they should do so by making their own movie. It's a good rule. If you want to criticize the behavior of a successful businessman who as far as we know has never broken the law, you should start by becoming a successful businessman who has never broken the law. Let your own life serve as a criticism of others.
With respect to whether forcing someone to live in pain and without dignity is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath -- yes, it is. This is why so many doctors nowadays are taking continuing education classes in chronic pain management and death with dignity.
Under current ethical guidelines, a doctor is allowed to prescribe any amount of narcotic necessary to manage the pain of a terminal patient, even if that dose of narcotic will hasten the patient's death. (The law has not caught up with medical ethics, but it's in the process of doing so.)
If the only way to manage the pain of your terminal illness is to give you a dose that will hasten your death, the AMA says that if you ask for it I am allowed to ethically give it to you. The AMA also says that I should tell you that very powerful drugs are available to manage your pain, and to encourage you not to live in pain. I can't force you to take the Fentanyl patch, but I can make sure you know you have that option available to you and that no one will think less of you for it.
Pain management, dignity, hospice care, etc. -- these are all ways medicine in the US is trying to balance the Hippocratic Oath against the indignities of terminal care.
"It is every American's Constitutional right to avoid paying taxes to the maximum extent permissible by law." -- Judge David R. Hansen, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
There's nothing wrong or immoral with reducing your tax bill. It's only wrong to do it in violation of the law. The IRS claims he engaged in a legal fiction to dodge taxes illegally. He claims he engaged in a legal fiction to dodge taxes legally. We decide who's right or wrong in the courts: we don't leap to judgment on Slashdot. (I know, I know, I must be new here. Check the UID, kids, I'm not.)
If the IRS is right, then yes, his actions were unjust. If he's right, then more power to him.
If you believe it's virtuous to pay more taxes than you absolutely have to, I'm sure the IRS wouldn't mind if you threw an extra couple of hundred on your check come April 15. Otherwise, let's give the dead the benefit of the doubt, and not declare him to have been taking advantage of us.
A few facts --
With respect to how Bush launched an "illegal war," you can only argue this if you're willing to apply the same to Clinton.
Montenegro and Serbia, two sovereign countries attacked in the late 1990s, filed a lawsuit against their aggressors. They held, among other things, that their territorial rights were violated; that the aggression occurred outside of UN Article 51 or UN Security Council approval; that Montenegrin and Serbian citizens were killed; and they demanding that the International Court of Justice hear their claim.
They unquestionably had a case and deserved a hearing. First, the US couldn't say we were obligated under anti-genocide treaties since we were bending over backwards to not call it a genocide. Second, we didn't even bother trying for Security Council approval. (Russia was threatening a veto.) Third, neither of Serbia nor Montenegro had attacked NATO, and thus the self-defense provisions of the UN Charter couldn't be held to apply.
So far, this sounds like it ought be solved in court. Maybe they would win, maybe they wouldn't, but it's pretty clear-cut the case at least deserved a hearing. This is why it shocked me that in December 2004 the International Court of Justice in the Hague decided they had no jurisdiction to hear the complaint.
Their logic is convoluted and twisted. After all, the ICJ is the internationally-recognized final arbiter of international law. The Balkan campaign was clearly an international conflict subject to the United Nations Charter, United Nations Security Council Resolutions, the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Armed Combat. For the ICJ to declare they have no jurisdiction over a war is for the ICJ to declare there is no body capable of hearing these difficult problems; and laws without courts are just words on a paper, devoid of significance or meaning, unable of rising even to the level of a recommendation.
The lesson to be drawn from this is... when it comes to war, there is no such thing as an 'illegal' war, because there is no agency capable of enforcing laws.
Call it an unjust war, sure. I might even agree with you. Call it a war of convenience and I'll definitely agree with you. Call it an illegal war, though, and I'm going to ask you to explain why Bush's war was illegal and needs to be prosecuted and why Clinton's war wasn't illegal and didn't need to be.
A "fairly small" terrorist incident? Three thousand dead, probably another thirty thousand people who have suddenly lost a father, a mother, a brother, a best friend, a son? Thirty thousand direct victims, literally billions of dollars in property damage done, and you consider this to be a “minor terrorist incident”? If that's a minor terrorist incident then the Bali bombings and the London bus bombings are so trivial that no one ought bother even remembering them.
I'm not going to respond to your other claims. Those are matters of politics, and you're entitled to your own opinion. But those two factual errors -- that the US war in Iraq is "illegal", and that the 9/11 attacks were a "minor" terrorist incident -- scream out for correction.
Look at the word "uninvolved" in my phrase "uninvolved third party," please.
In the case of an office lease, you hold a property right in the office space. In the case of hiring a company to handle X, you've established an employer relationship with them and the law is pretty clear on how that affect privilege (it's preserved; they're considered to be working for you).
The examples you're giving are good ones, but they're also examples of involved third parties.
Unfortunately, you missed the part in my post where I said an uninvolved third party. If you're contracting with a firm that agrees to be bound by your rules, whom you are paying to do business on your behalf, etc., then they're an involved third party and what they do is covered under work product rules.
Google Docs, as I understand it, is different. From all that I've seen of Google Docs, it doesn't meet the standard. If you want to claim it does, the burden's on you to prove it. The analogies drawn to reprographics companies and the like are all inherently flawed -- as is all argument by analogy. Just because the law says X is legal doesn't mean something very close to X is okay, and in the case of reprographics and Google Docs they aren't very close to each other at all.
Yes. When I was looking for a lawyer, I asked them how they contacted their clients, and where their email servers were located. The guy I eventually chose as my lawyer told me he contacts clients via email, phone and IM only to arrange face to face meetings, and then walked me down the hall to the server room. He introduced me to the sysadmin, and the law firm sysadmin answered more of my questions.
Choosing a lawyer is a big deal. You should treat it like one. Any lawyer who is not willing to fully answer your questions is not worth your time or money.
IANAL. My only legal credential is that I come from a family of lawyers and judges who are absolutely adamant about their moral obligation to preserve privilege.
As they have explained it to me, once you voluntarily hand information off to an uninvolved third party, the veil of privilege is breached and it can be discovered.
As they have explained it to me, anything you give to Google can be subpoenaed. Google is currently one of the most-frequently-served companies in the world, and Google gives full and enthusiastic cooperation with lawfully issued subpoenas.
If you really see nothing wrong with risking the privilege of your work product by putting it into the hands of a third party, and if you really see nothing wrong with making it discoverable via subpoena, then by all means use Google Docs. However, for my own sake, I refuse to deal with lawyers who use outsourced IT services.
It is not your job to educate them on their professional responsibilities. Odds are very good that you aren't competent to advise them on it, and it would arguably be a violation of their canons of ethics to take advice from you. Lawyers and doctors have ethics committees to field questions like these: refer your users to them.
In the interim, stand by your guns. If your users say they'll go to the ethics committee and they're sure they'll be exonerated, propose this as a hypothetical question: if you give privileged documents to an uninvolved third party, is the veil of privilege pierced? Yes or no? (The answer is usually "yes"; exceptions are rare.) So, if you give privileged documents to Google, is the veil of privilege pierced?
Don't give advice. Just ask questions, and whatever you do, don't give in.
Soap bubbles can be misled by local minima just like hill-walking algorithms. The problem with soap bubble computation is that when it hits a stable state -- how do you know it's stable? For all you know it's going to collapse further in a few seconds.
Repeat after me: the "soap bubbles can solve the smallest surface problem" meme is wrong as a matter of physics, and wrong as a matter of computer science.
They can't. Soap bubbles can get misled by local minima just like naive hill-walking algorithms.