The powerful scientists living their lives in luxury ruling the world while eating caviar paid for by government grants. Have you ever seen the office of some of those money grabbing scientists?
Their offices are filled with quantum nano-caviar with tiny frickin' nano-lasers on it, made out of FTL neutrinos. It's good to be a sciencemaster.
Of course, the grant money is paid in nanodollars and obeys the uncertainty relationship of (over_budget * out_of_time > Planck's quantum of bureaucratic insanity) and payment time is occasionally relativistically dilated such that funding takes infinite years to arrive, but that's what you get on the cutting edge.
So you're saying the people should spend money to get nothing of value in return, simply so that money can "trickle" back down into the economy. By that logic, just hand out money to people for doing nothing.
Such simplistic logic. The American people aren't getting NOTHING in value for producing war materiel. They're getting deaths, maimings, mutilations, trauma, infections, diseases, widows, orphans, grievances, fears, torturers, psychoses, Constitutional violations and hatred. That's a lot more productive than doing nothing!
"instantiate"? This horrible word doesn't mean what the writer thinks it does: it means "represent as or by an instance" (OED).
Yes, that's what it means in philosophy. It squelched from there into computing via Object Oriented Programming, as the squicky term for "creating an instance of a class", and from there into Windows via COM. Strictly speaking, instantiating means creating a running in-memory instance of an object or component, but since most of the time in Windows you're dealing with COM objects even when you think you're dealing with EXEs, it's pretty much the case that whenever you think you're "launching an executable", the Windows COM architecture is probably instantiating a COM object.
Well, it's not immediately your problem. And it's the Department of Agriculture, so there might not be Gillian Anderson types turning up on your doorstep in serious suits within five minutes, but they probably do know a few guys with a lot of tractors and access to several cubic miles of liquified cow manure.
since governments, by definition, have the unique ability to coerce their "customers" into paying for their services.
Actually, you'll find that coercion exists in every localised monopoly, not just government - checked your broadband ISP's terms and conditions lately? did they let you negotiate about those or just tell you "if you don't like it, move to another country, er, IP address"? But even more to the point, coercion exists in every business deal where there is an inequality of power, which is almost all of them. If you don't understand that, I'm not sure how you can begin to understand American industry. Do you have some kind of happy illusion that all industrialists everywhere are filled with love and peace and sharing and only wish to live morally and uprightly by a strict internal code of ethics, while "government" is filled with ignorant jackbooted thugs? But corporate boardrooms are little pocket governments of their sprawling global fiefdoms, and then the top CxOs walk out of private industry jobs and into "government" positions, so they're also in many cases the very same people.
Government is the exercise of power. Everyone has power, some more than others. Ergo, "government" is an inescapable feature of human life. It seems hard to be more confused about a thing than this belief that government is some kind of alien straitjacket dumped on us from the sky. No, it grew right here.
Ok, then here is the simple and easy question: How you stop either of the 2 big parties from getting Ca 50% of the cotes?
Simple and easy answer: Have either of them do something that 50% of the voting public don't like.
But it appears that the voting US public don't actually dislike big-party politicians nearly as much as they pretend to, or they'd vote for minority parties - or do what the Tea Party did and create their own in-party wing. Thing is, when a minority does do what the Tea Party did and achieves power within a majority party, a lot of other mainstream voters complain loudly that the minority-view is evil, insane and the worst thing since sliced Hitler. Or, on the other political axis, if the Occupy Wall Street folks go outside the party system and make a ruckus in the street, mainstream liberal America tut-tuts them as nice but misguided kids who'll grow out of it.
Ergo, it seems that the simplest answer is the best one: that the majority of US voters really don't share your opinion that the majority parties disenfranchise them, and in fact that R and D have near 50% popularity each precisely because middle-of-the-road politics is exactly what most of the public want right now.
Maybe it's disappointing to hear that? Maybe you really think 99% of the country is actually a seething mass of revolution starving in front of their iPads and cable HDTVs and begging for a strong Tumblr voice to lead them to freedom? But what if it isn't, and Mrs & Mr Middle Mosteverytown really just aren't that into politics, because by and large, it leaves them alone, gets bills paid, delivers the mail, keeps gas prices down, and does most of the boots-stomping-on-human-faces in dusty foreign countries where they don't speak English?
When I was called on, I explained that the glass was red because it allowed all colors to pass through it except for the color red. This color was reflected back to our eyes.
Nice theory, except that red light is transmitted through a red glass, not reflected off it, as you could verify by the simple experiment of holding that glass up to a light source. So, the opposite of what you just said is the case. No wonder your teacher was annoyed with the question.
On a strictly theoretical basis, it's better to take something than nothing.
No, only in very artificial situations occurring in a vacuum with free money dropping from the sky from psychology researchers is this even remotely the case.
In a world filled with competitive players, everything that your rival gets is not only something that you don't get, but gives your rival the ability to hurt you. Take a look at how, say, Apple and Microsoft compete. Does Apple think "well, it doesn't hurt me if Microsoft builds a tablet, that's sales I wouldn't have gotten anyway?" Heck no. The smart CEO thinks strategically and says "if I don't leave my rivals as utterly broken, smoking craters, every dollar they get from a sale can be turned into armies of marketers and lawyers who will take me out."
I'm not saying this state of affairs is good - in fact this ruthless tendency towards infighting is a lethal disease of capitalism - but the globalist Pollyanna talk in business today about "thinking on the margins" and not worrying about strategy, the competitive environment or where your industrial base is being outsourced to, is just silly.
On a strictly theoretical basis where your trading partners are also your ruthless enemies who want you out of business by fair means or foul, it makes perfect strategic sense to take a temporary short-term loss yourself in order to avoid manufacturing your own downfall later.
This kind of paranoid thinking also leads to huge stuffups later down the line, but there's a reason why CEOs are paranoid, and it's not just that they're mentally deficient. It's that the rational demands of business are not Econ 101, they're Art of War.
If you need a "design pattern" to work around the fact that your language doesn't allow you to abstract away repeated boilerplate code and say what you really mean instead of what the language forces you to pretend you mean, then that's not an alternative, it's a design flaw in the language.
If you spend 24 hrs driving at 125 mph you will experience a time dilation of 1.5 ns.
.. relative to your start and end points, and your start and end points will experience an exactly corresponding time dilation, leaving you with what relative time dilation exactly?
Just a quick question out of ignorance, how does the stardate communicate relative time frames?
Well, based on Einstein's theory of General Relativity, it starts out on firm scientific ground by assuming as an absolute fundamental limit that no material object can travel faster than light, so since a starship moves between Federation outposts with an effective velocity thousands of times faster than C it's obvious that oh my is that the time? I'd love to stay and explain this, really I would, but I've got an urgent appointment with J J Abrams in about three parsecs. But in short: dilithium crystals, multistate equivocators, and Heisenberg compensators. Thank you.
It doesn't match everyday experience and has a history of charlatans. The people investing it have been prone to being fooled and running badly designed experiments. There isn't strong evidence that can be reliably repeated that it exists.
Actually, that's not quite the case. ESP/psi does indeed match everyday experience - it turns out to be a very common set of phenomena - but it can't reliably be engineered. Psi effects are very strongly coupled to individual personalities, life circumstances and emotional involvement, and don't lend themselves to the normal scientific approach of isolation and depersonalisation and experimental control. This is vey frustrating to researchers who want to be able to run clinical trials and remove the personal factor, but some newer experiments, particularly the autoganzfeld ones, are very promising and seem to show strongly repeatable effects like precognition. Many people report synchronicities and precognitive dreams connected with strongly personal life events. Even the 1970s SCANATE remove viewing protocols show very striking above-chance correlations. What seems to be very difficult, however, is any attempt to "scale up" these small and very personal psi effects into any kind of automated, industrialised psi-on-demand, as we've been able to achieve with disciplines like physics which underwrote the Industrial Revolution. And yes, the "trickster" effect - where real verified psi seems to get inextricably mixed up with equally verifiable malice and fraud - also complicates things immensely.
It's not surprising, though, that psi should be so awkward, if you think about it. We're talking about something deeply embedded in the human personality, which is a very complex system deeply entangled with personal lives and circumstances. The normal hard science approach of "cut it into tiny pieces, study each piece" works less and less well as you go up the tower of complexity from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology/sociology. The more we deal with living, conscious, self-reflective systems, the harder it is to isolate and control a subsystem. And psi seems to reside in the deepest recesses of the human mind, alongside dreams and religion, where things get very strange and even the most rigorously scientific of us aren't entirely sane. The result is that attempting to standardise and codify this mental underworld that we really don't understand at all can get you lost very quickly.
For a gentle yet scientific introduction to this fascinating subject, I'd recommend Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's "Extraordinary Knowing, followed by Dean Radin's Entangled Minds. Both of these summarise the last 150 years of psi research, which many skeptics completely ignore. For a deeper treatment, look at the book in my sig, which is a university psychology-level textbook summary of the same research.
Slashdot Mirror
If a vegetarian eats vegetables. What does a humanitarian eat?
Humanitables.
The powerful scientists living their lives in luxury ruling the world while eating caviar paid for by government grants. Have you ever seen the office of some of those money grabbing scientists?
Their offices are filled with quantum nano-caviar with tiny frickin' nano-lasers on it, made out of FTL neutrinos. It's good to be a sciencemaster.
Of course, the grant money is paid in nanodollars and obeys the uncertainty relationship of (over_budget * out_of_time > Planck's quantum of bureaucratic insanity) and payment time is occasionally relativistically dilated such that funding takes infinite years to arrive, but that's what you get on the cutting edge.
So you're saying the people should spend money to get nothing of value in return, simply so that money can "trickle" back down into the economy. By that logic, just hand out money to people for doing nothing.
Such simplistic logic. The American people aren't getting NOTHING in value for producing war materiel. They're getting deaths, maimings, mutilations, trauma, infections, diseases, widows, orphans, grievances, fears, torturers, psychoses, Constitutional violations and hatred. That's a lot more productive than doing nothing!
Hordes of the East? Seriously?
Exactly, some of them play Alliance instead...
that brooks no descent
I beg to dissent. The USA hasn't shipped a decent Descent for years either.
"instantiate"? This horrible word doesn't mean what the writer thinks it does: it means "represent as or by an instance" (OED).
Yes, that's what it means in philosophy. It squelched from there into computing via Object Oriented Programming, as the squicky term for "creating an instance of a class", and from there into Windows via COM. Strictly speaking, instantiating means creating a running in-memory instance of an object or component, but since most of the time in Windows you're dealing with COM objects even when you think you're dealing with EXEs, it's pretty much the case that whenever you think you're "launching an executable", the Windows COM architecture is probably instantiating a COM object.
Wasn't that a nice semantics lesson?
with a 500 foot poll
If the users don't like it, they can vote with their feet!
Then he has no mail, not my problem.
Well, it's not immediately your problem. And it's the Department of Agriculture, so there might not be Gillian Anderson types turning up on your doorstep in serious suits within five minutes, but they probably do know a few guys with a lot of tractors and access to several cubic miles of liquified cow manure.
Your decision.
since governments, by definition, have the unique ability to coerce their "customers" into paying for their services.
Actually, you'll find that coercion exists in every localised monopoly, not just government - checked your broadband ISP's terms and conditions lately? did they let you negotiate about those or just tell you "if you don't like it, move to another country, er, IP address"? But even more to the point, coercion exists in every business deal where there is an inequality of power, which is almost all of them. If you don't understand that, I'm not sure how you can begin to understand American industry. Do you have some kind of happy illusion that all industrialists everywhere are filled with love and peace and sharing and only wish to live morally and uprightly by a strict internal code of ethics, while "government" is filled with ignorant jackbooted thugs? But corporate boardrooms are little pocket governments of their sprawling global fiefdoms, and then the top CxOs walk out of private industry jobs and into "government" positions, so they're also in many cases the very same people.
Government is the exercise of power. Everyone has power, some more than others. Ergo, "government" is an inescapable feature of human life. It seems hard to be more confused about a thing than this belief that government is some kind of alien straitjacket dumped on us from the sky. No, it grew right here.
Ok, then here is the simple and easy question: How you stop either of the 2 big parties from getting Ca 50% of the cotes?
Simple and easy answer: Have either of them do something that 50% of the voting public don't like.
But it appears that the voting US public don't actually dislike big-party politicians nearly as much as they pretend to, or they'd vote for minority parties - or do what the Tea Party did and create their own in-party wing. Thing is, when a minority does do what the Tea Party did and achieves power within a majority party, a lot of other mainstream voters complain loudly that the minority-view is evil, insane and the worst thing since sliced Hitler. Or, on the other political axis, if the Occupy Wall Street folks go outside the party system and make a ruckus in the street, mainstream liberal America tut-tuts them as nice but misguided kids who'll grow out of it.
Ergo, it seems that the simplest answer is the best one: that the majority of US voters really don't share your opinion that the majority parties disenfranchise them, and in fact that R and D have near 50% popularity each precisely because middle-of-the-road politics is exactly what most of the public want right now.
Maybe it's disappointing to hear that? Maybe you really think 99% of the country is actually a seething mass of revolution starving in front of their iPads and cable HDTVs and begging for a strong Tumblr voice to lead them to freedom? But what if it isn't, and Mrs & Mr Middle Mosteverytown really just aren't that into politics, because by and large, it leaves them alone, gets bills paid, delivers the mail, keeps gas prices down, and does most of the boots-stomping-on-human-faces in dusty foreign countries where they don't speak English?
The true parasites are... banksters... dog lackeys... like an artichoke... ears that need to listen... jingling of thirty pieces of silver.
I for one salute our dog-artichoke-gangster-ear mutant chimera underlords, as long as they don't leak too many toxic fluids onto the carpet.
Math is all around us... in the tree, the rock. Math surrounds us and binds us all together.
There's no mystical universal functional-computation model controlling my destiny!
I don't (eval) it!
That is why (eq you nil).
When I was called on, I explained that the glass was red because it allowed all colors to pass through it except for the color red. This color was reflected back to our eyes.
Nice theory, except that red light is transmitted through a red glass, not reflected off it, as you could verify by the simple experiment of holding that glass up to a light source. So, the opposite of what you just said is the case. No wonder your teacher was annoyed with the question.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the universe to be empty?
If the universe was empty, "make sense" wouldn't exist.
Null is a perfectly sensible value, thank you very much!
On a strictly theoretical basis, it's better to take something than nothing.
No, only in very artificial situations occurring in a vacuum with free money dropping from the sky from psychology researchers is this even remotely the case.
In a world filled with competitive players, everything that your rival gets is not only something that you don't get, but gives your rival the ability to hurt you. Take a look at how, say, Apple and Microsoft compete. Does Apple think "well, it doesn't hurt me if Microsoft builds a tablet, that's sales I wouldn't have gotten anyway?" Heck no. The smart CEO thinks strategically and says "if I don't leave my rivals as utterly broken, smoking craters, every dollar they get from a sale can be turned into armies of marketers and lawyers who will take me out."
I'm not saying this state of affairs is good - in fact this ruthless tendency towards infighting is a lethal disease of capitalism - but the globalist Pollyanna talk in business today about "thinking on the margins" and not worrying about strategy, the competitive environment or where your industrial base is being outsourced to, is just silly.
On a strictly theoretical basis where your trading partners are also your ruthless enemies who want you out of business by fair means or foul, it makes perfect strategic sense to take a temporary short-term loss yourself in order to avoid manufacturing your own downfall later.
This kind of paranoid thinking also leads to huge stuffups later down the line, but there's a reason why CEOs are paranoid, and it's not just that they're mentally deficient. It's that the rational demands of business are not Econ 101, they're Art of War.
Get off this rock.
Into a hole filled with vacuum? That's... an interesting alternative, yes. You first?
"They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea."
Oh yes? Well... they better should be suited for that if they live in the Mariana Trench!!
D'oh!
No no, you misunderstand. They're literally suited for it... by wearing tiny little pressure suits.
If you need a "design pattern" to work around the fact that your language doesn't allow you to abstract away repeated boilerplate code and say what you really mean instead of what the language forces you to pretend you mean, then that's not an alternative, it's a design flaw in the language.
If you spend 24 hrs driving at 125 mph you will experience a time dilation of 1.5 ns.
.. relative to your start and end points, and your start and end points will experience an exactly corresponding time dilation, leaving you with what relative time dilation exactly?
Has there been a change in Earth's gravity? Is this why everything's heavy in the future?
This sucker is electrical!
Marty, the time circuits are electrical, but the internal combustion engine runs on gasoline! It always has!
I want everyone to be able to choose from thier own free will. ... the problem really is with the clueless masses, they dont know and cant decide
One of these beliefs is not like the other.
Just a quick question out of ignorance, how does the stardate communicate relative time frames?
Well, based on Einstein's theory of General Relativity, it starts out on firm scientific ground by assuming as an absolute fundamental limit that no material object can travel faster than light, so since a starship moves between Federation outposts with an effective velocity thousands of times faster than C it's obvious that oh my is that the time? I'd love to stay and explain this, really I would, but I've got an urgent appointment with J J Abrams in about three parsecs. But in short: dilithium crystals, multistate equivocators, and Heisenberg compensators. Thank you.
What about ESP is "extraordinary" to you?
It doesn't match everyday experience and has a history of charlatans. The people investing it have been prone to being fooled and running badly designed experiments. There isn't strong evidence that can be reliably repeated that it exists.
Actually, that's not quite the case. ESP/psi does indeed match everyday experience - it turns out to be a very common set of phenomena - but it can't reliably be engineered. Psi effects are very strongly coupled to individual personalities, life circumstances and emotional involvement, and don't lend themselves to the normal scientific approach of isolation and depersonalisation and experimental control. This is vey frustrating to researchers who want to be able to run clinical trials and remove the personal factor, but some newer experiments, particularly the autoganzfeld ones, are very promising and seem to show strongly repeatable effects like precognition. Many people report synchronicities and precognitive dreams connected with strongly personal life events. Even the 1970s SCANATE remove viewing protocols show very striking above-chance correlations. What seems to be very difficult, however, is any attempt to "scale up" these small and very personal psi effects into any kind of automated, industrialised psi-on-demand, as we've been able to achieve with disciplines like physics which underwrote the Industrial Revolution. And yes, the "trickster" effect - where real verified psi seems to get inextricably mixed up with equally verifiable malice and fraud - also complicates things immensely.
It's not surprising, though, that psi should be so awkward, if you think about it. We're talking about something deeply embedded in the human personality, which is a very complex system deeply entangled with personal lives and circumstances. The normal hard science approach of "cut it into tiny pieces, study each piece" works less and less well as you go up the tower of complexity from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology/sociology. The more we deal with living, conscious, self-reflective systems, the harder it is to isolate and control a subsystem. And psi seems to reside in the deepest recesses of the human mind, alongside dreams and religion, where things get very strange and even the most rigorously scientific of us aren't entirely sane. The result is that attempting to standardise and codify this mental underworld that we really don't understand at all can get you lost very quickly.
For a gentle yet scientific introduction to this fascinating subject, I'd recommend Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's "Extraordinary Knowing, followed by Dean Radin's Entangled Minds. Both of these summarise the last 150 years of psi research, which many skeptics completely ignore. For a deeper treatment, look at the book in my sig, which is a university psychology-level textbook summary of the same research.
There's a fundamental principle at play here that's described by Bayesian probability.
Bayesian "prior probability" is just a fancy word for personal prejudice. I'm not sure what level of scientific credibility should be ascribed to it.