You say that's a correlation == causation strawman argument?... So is the snide comment in the original post
Do you know what a strawman argument is? You're saying that the original post here is a strawman argument.. but where's the strawman? What is the other position that's being misrepresented?
So is the snide comment in the original post
What is the snide comment? The summary, which is all most of the posters would have read, is pretty much a list of facts. I mean:
Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.
There's not really any spin there, that's just what happened.
And are you really, really taking the position that an increased number of measles cases, where we know that most of the infected weren't vaccinated, is just spuriously correlated to more people not getting vaccinated? That's really where you're at? Do you understand how impossible it would be to gain knowledge about the world if this is how you reasoned?
Hmm. There's no milk in the fridge. Also, I drank all the milk last night. But let's not go jumping to conclusions here. There seems to be correlation, but we can't reason based on that. I really want to choke whoever started the current "correlation is not causation" meme - it's true, but it's mostly used now as an excuse to discount reasonably valid evidence, often in favor of humanity-embarrassing stuff like this:
I'll buy that GW is dangerous when ALGORE sells his beach house and carbon-neutrally composts his $100*10^6 from Qatar
Yeah, this is how we should do reasoning. We should look at the behavior of people that espouse positions, and if we detect any hypocrisy then their position must be wrong.
Wow. I mean, first, many textbooks DO talk about alternative explanations over the years - be they Lamarck's theories or creationism or whatever, and I've never heard of biologists making any kind of fuss.
But, more directly, if Creationism were introduced in these texts as "the old theory that evolution replaces", it's not the biologists that would be screaming. If they're complaining, it's because the accepted theory is being presented as being on par with the old ones.
Or maybe your other science textbooks do that too? Maybe your science textbook said "we don't know whether the Sun orbits the Earth or the Earth orbits the sun, but here's some reckoning people have done over the years on both sides". Is that what your science textbook says? Or does it say "here's how it is, and here's what people used to think?" And you really, legitimately think it's biologists that would be crying foul if that's how biology textbooks presented creationism vs. evolution?
I think what the author wants is that "World Champion" is merely a result of the tally of rankings. Not established by an event... Everyone gets a trophy.
He wants events. He wants tournaments. Winning a tournament is a big goal. There's no reason some of the tournaments wouldn't be more prestigious (as Wimbledon is for tennis), and they would have reigning champions. Not everyone wins tournaments or gets trophies. His plan has nothing to do with watering down competition. His plan has nothing to do with the safety of the players, who would go on winning and losing (and, if anything, the bulk of them would be under more pressure more often).
All we're talking about is changing the sampling frequency. On one end, you have a measure like ELO that samples continuously. On the other end, you have championship matches years apart. In the middle, you have milestone tournaments a few times a year (like tennis or golf, which he mentions). There's benefits at each point on this continuum. Personally, I think that the "big tournament" structure of golf or tennis creates a lot of interest, and also gives us a useful, interesting way of comparing the success of different players over time (while still potentially rewarding short lived inspired play).
You completely misunderstood the article. His complaint isn't about how Carlsen has arrived here or how long it's taken (it hasn't been long); it's that having a single, seldom-disputed title for Chess doesn't provide a fine-grained measurement for accomplishment. Through chance or deliberate "ducking", someone can end up being world chess champion longer or shorter than they "deserve". He believes that with more frequent sampling, you could get a more accurate "signal" in terms of player skill. He believes this would generate more interest, and give us better data to compare players over time. I think he's probably right, though he's missing the fact that his system would also reward a somewhat different skill set (it's different to win tournaments vs. matches).
Boxing actually has a fairly chess-like title system (though it's a mess). What he wants is a tournament system like tennis or golf. He thinks Carlsen, if he wins, would have standing to push through this kind of change. He probably would.
Well, that's the naive cynical view. The reality is that as societies become more wealthy (particularly, as they move out of starvation/subsistence) they have less children (not more), and an important part of getting out of the poverty trap is reducing disease (which destroys a tremendous amount of labor). It's not the only step, obviously, but it is a step in the right direction (even if we are trying to behave as idealized, heartless social planning robots, and ignore all the current suffering this could mitigate).
but it is awfully convenient that the most important issue for the world just happens to be the one his charity is involved in
He didn't just find himself running a disease charity, so therefore he's claiming that's what's important. He chose to set up a charity for what he felt was the most important problem. You can say he's wrong if you want, sure - but saying it's "convenient" is really silly; you're getting the causality chain completely backwards.
Imagine instead of people we're talking about horses. Horses have had a variety of jobs throughout history. They bounced around between farm, military, and transportation jobs as different trends and technologies came and went. Horses didn't have to worry, there was always something they'd be useful for.
And then, within a 50 year span, they lost almost all those jobs, because machines surpassed them in their core competency (pulling and carrying stuff).
Similarly, humans will get bumped and jostled around and generally will have something to contribute... until we quite suddenly (from a history perspective) don't. A few more advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and the majority of humans will have nothing to contribute to the economy. The kinds of jobs that humans will still excel at (eg. creative stuff like writing) are also things that just don't require that many people to do, and which many people will continue having no aptitude for.
This is good news. It'll be awesome to see what humans can do post-scarcity. But the transition will be awkward.
you do know they have decided to let homosexuals join don't you?
That's not true in any meaningful sense. From Scouting.org:
While the BSA does not proactively inquire about sexual orientation of employees, volunteers, or members, we do not grant membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals
As for my comment, it was more to the point that it is not large enough to require parallel programming between machines and this is by design. If I remember correctly, these contests are limited to a single computer and a small team. Parallel algorithm development is a whole different animal. In that world, 10Mb is nothing, a graph with millions of nodes is not big.
You aren't making this better - you're just making it clearer you don't understand algorithm complexity.
Google used to.
I'm not talking about interview questions with sheep. I'm talking about the algorithm competitions they recruit from. They watch external competitions, and were spending enough time on it that they eventually started an in house one a while back (Google Code Jam - this year's contest is currently in progress). I still get headhunting calls from Google and financial firms based on participation in contests years ago.
God I regret it every time I come to Slashdot - might as well be YouTube comments.
[quote]The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot.[/quote]
People have already corrected you on this - but holy crap is this a revealingly stupid thing to say.
[quote]but being good in these contests is no predictor of success in a programming career. [/quote]
It absolutely, demonstrably is - and you'll see former top competitors in important positions at pretty much all the big tech firms. Google, in particular, spends a tremendous amount of time and money identifying prospects this way - and past competitors are key to lots of its most innovative and successful products. Obviously this isn't the only skill involved in being a good programmer, but practicing these difficult problems and learning the theory behind them is a huge leg up in being successful.
The poster specifically mentions IE 6, which is only eleven years old.
Most of this software wasn't written for IE 6 - that's just the most recent browser it runs on. I imagine much of it was actually from around the time of IE 4.
And yeah, there's a lot of variety in terms of the actual problems to be addressed here. For us, our weird old internal IE only web pages have been less of a problem than our weird old Java stuff.
You can pick out the new people in the thread pretty easily, with their "if you do it right, nothing ever goes wrong" type optimism. Software needs to be maintained, and sometimes you're going to hit thresholds with significant costs. And sometimes you're going to hitch your wagon to a tech that dies or fails or changes.
Compatibility is a two edged sword. Being able to easily port Android apps makes that the easy path - develop for Android, still get BB support.. why would you bother writing for the BB API? That means your platform gets more apps to start, but very few unique ones - and many that don't make best use of your unique features/APIs.
If their use was kept secret, systems like this would likely perform well most of the time; the correlations these systems are based on are probably pretty steady.
Once students get any information about the system, however, it's doomed - and in any case it's unlikely the system will give real, useful assistance in improving skills beyond what you'd get from a grammar checker.
You missed an option: they'll primarily play games on tablets and mobile devices. When I talk to my teenage nephew, he's now more likely to talk about a mobile game than a console game (though he has all the current consoles). The games are cheaper, more numerous, and much more varied.
The consoles will have to change their model to stay relevant.
It could be they are already using a fancier scheme - it's hard to tell what's real details of their method, and what's pop-sci "summary". So I apologize if I'm not giving them deserved credit here.
That way, you would have to have the same error on four different fragments for it to fail
I understand they wanted the overall system to be fault tolerant, but it might be better to leave that part to established computer science. I understand DNA might be uniquely prone to certain types of errors or reading problems - but there's a lot of computer science theory (and practice) established here that would likely make the overall system more robust than what looks like a fairly simple redundancy scheme.
I'd write a long post making fun of your poor grammar, inability to read, paranoia, and sad little grasp at authority, but it feels like a waste to argue with an AC.
I'm not actually sure whether you're joking. In any case, gene contamination risk is (rightly, I think) seen as a benefit of terminator genes: if modified gene content does spread somehow, it would be less likely to continue to spread (over generations) further afield from the original contamination. There's a natural stop to the spreading of plants with limited ability to reproduce.
To the extent you're serious, I suppose that, yes, you've identified a potential concern. Also a potential concern is the possibility that consuming GM plants will turn us into zombies. Either of these scenarios would require mechanisms to exist that we have no evidence of, but there's no absolute reason either of those things couldn't happen.
However, there's a lot of risks that are much more likely and that should probably be higher up on the list of concerns. I certainly don't dispute there are legitimate risks to using GM technology, but there's also serious risks to closing off those avenues - and if demands a real, informed debate where pros, cons, risks and rewards are all weighed seriously.
Re:Wow, Monsanto's evil tentacles reached his brai
on
Anti-GMO Activist Recants
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· Score: 4, Informative
Since when are terminator genes good for the environment?
"Terminator genes" are a perfect example of the scaremongering on the anti-GMO side. They were never really deployed, and Monsanto has vowed not to do so.
And even if they were, you've got the idea wrong. They weren't an environmental threat - rather, terminator genes were scary because they'd make poor farmers reliant on big industry for their seeds (Terminator genes prevent the resultant plants from having viable seeds). They COULD actually be good for the environment, as they'd prevent GM plants from spreading uncontrolled (which is another scare story).
There's pluses and minuses to GM plants for food. But the debate is dominated by people with bizarre, uninformed emotional connections to one side or the other. Like yourself. Are you as brave and open minded as the guy in the OP? Having found out you're double-wrong on this, are you going to reconsider the issue and perhaps take a moment to learn about what's at stake?
I doubt it. I think it's much more likely that you'll lash out at me because I'm mean, or something equally productive.
Stopping taking pictures on private property is one of the things the someone can be told to do.
This wasn't about stopping taking pictures - the demand was to delete the pictures. Which he couldn't - it's a film camera. And it's not something they're legally entitled to under Canadian law. From the story:
Lawyer Douglas King, of Pivot Legal in Vancouver, agrees, saying that private mall security guards and police have no right to try to seize someone’s camera or demand that photos be deleted — even on private property.
The security guards made an illegal request that they thought they could get away with - and usually they would have because people are easily cowed. In this case, the kid couldn't comply, they didn't pay attention, and they escalated the situation for no reason. I'm hoping the mall gets sued.
I suppose there's not a ban on selling heroine either. Substances sold just have to meet a certain standard of not containing heroine. Oh, and there's something else, with different properties, that we're calling heroine and it's legal. So no heroine ban.
So... yeah... what the hell are you talking about? There's a bunch of items you used to be able to sell and now you can't. That stuff is banned.
You can argue about whether the ban is appropriate or the best plan or something. Or you could argue that the other bulbs meet all possible sets of needs better (which I think it's clear they don't - but at least you could argue that).
But arguing that they aren't banning certain bulbs is really, fantastically stupid. Sorry, but it is. And you're going to just keep on doing it, aren't you? I'm really, really, super looking forward to your next post where you make a definition of ban that isn't met by what is happening here. Go ahead, that'll be great. Do it.
God, I regret it every time I read or post on Slashdot. Frickin' morons.
If your only goal is getting rid of the old bulbs, then, uh, yes - a ban is more effective. But I think there's legitimate reasons to prefer old bulbs for some uses, and even if I didn't I'm very skeptical of removing that choice. People make many choices that waste energy. People make all sorts of bad choices in a free society. Society has an interest in reducing those choices, but I don't think it's appropriate to eliminate this kind of choice. As an analogy, banning smoking would be "more effective" than taxing it (probably at least) but I think tax is a more appropriate balance in a free society.
The tax would need to be exorbitantly high for cheap-to-produce incandescent bulbs to be as expensive as the more efficient bulbs.
And? Are you worried that, uh, people will choose not to buy the old bulbs once they're more expensive? Are you worried that the government is going to get too much money? Anyways, yes, I agree the tax would have to be high in order to displace some old behaviors. That's the point, clearly. If people stop buying the highly taxed items, then society wins. If some people continue, then they win (by getting the stuff they want, for whatever reason) and society wins too (since the tax they've paid is going to way over-compensate for any extra energy use).
To be clearer, there's some tax number that represents a balance to the parties involved. A ban is effectively an "infinite tax". Infinity doesn't seem like the right number. Murder needs an infinite tax. Using an inefficient bulb... probably less than that.
It's also worth noting that, while current opposition to the "ban" is primarily from Republicans, the bill was passed by a Democratic Congress but signed by a Republican President.
It seems oddly natural for Americans to decide whether they agree with something by asking which party came up with the idea. I'm not American, and find this impulse really fantastically tragic. It's a good idea or it isn't, regardless of who came up with it.
So, the bill is not anti-consumer
Yes, it obviously, obviously is. For people that prefer the old bulbs, they've lost that choice. When someone can't get something they want, that's a negative for that person. That person, in this case, is a consumer. So it's a negative for some group of consumers. That's what anti-consumer means. A tax would also be anti-consumer, but it would strike a better balance between the interests of the bulb-buying consumer and the broader interests of society.
Should be a tax. Encourage people to make the right choices, but don't screw people who have special circumstances or are willing to compensate society for the cost of their preference.
To be clear, it's not like (at the highest level) they are doing something in 1 hour that would take the average guy 4 or something. The top level problems are often difficult enough that an average programmer would never complete them (or at least not without significant outside assistance and/or further education). Between equally matched competitors it can sometimes be a race, but in general these competitions are better thought of as tests: can you solve this problem?
Comparing top competitors to regular programmers, their speed is certainly impressive - but the more important differentiator is their knowledge, experience, and creative problem-solving ability.
There's been times I've outperformed Petr (the guy mentioned here) on individual problems (though obviously he's usually faster than me usually, and I haven't competed in years). The key difference between us is not speed - it's that he's able to solve a whole bunch of problems I just plain can't.
Mark Zuckerberg competed on TopCoder (though he wasn't terribly committed, and didn't do terribly well) before he was famous. If you follow Slashdot, you'll remember the final Rubik's cube proof - that was done largely by high ranked TopCoders. One of the early developers for Writely was also one of TopCoder's first dominant competitors (snewman). Google is filled with current and former TopCoder competitors - they're doing heavy lifting all over the company, and Google spends tons of time and effort to get more (as do many other companies). I still get calls from companies (particularly high-frequency-trader type companies, but tech in general) fairly often based on my mediocre (and now semi-ancient) TopCoder participation.
Naturally, though, most programmers (of any sort) are going to be fairly anonymous contributors on larger projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know what a strawman argument is? You're saying that the original post here is a strawman argument.. but where's the strawman? What is the other position that's being misrepresented?
What is the snide comment? The summary, which is all most of the posters would have read, is pretty much a list of facts. I mean:
There's not really any spin there, that's just what happened.
And are you really, really taking the position that an increased number of measles cases, where we know that most of the infected weren't vaccinated, is just spuriously correlated to more people not getting vaccinated? That's really where you're at? Do you understand how impossible it would be to gain knowledge about the world if this is how you reasoned?
Hmm. There's no milk in the fridge. Also, I drank all the milk last night. But let's not go jumping to conclusions here. There seems to be correlation, but we can't reason based on that. I really want to choke whoever started the current "correlation is not causation" meme - it's true, but it's mostly used now as an excuse to discount reasonably valid evidence, often in favor of humanity-embarrassing stuff like this:
Yeah, this is how we should do reasoning. We should look at the behavior of people that espouse positions, and if we detect any hypocrisy then their position must be wrong.
Wow. I mean, first, many textbooks DO talk about alternative explanations over the years - be they Lamarck's theories or creationism or whatever, and I've never heard of biologists making any kind of fuss.
But, more directly, if Creationism were introduced in these texts as "the old theory that evolution replaces", it's not the biologists that would be screaming. If they're complaining, it's because the accepted theory is being presented as being on par with the old ones.
Or maybe your other science textbooks do that too? Maybe your science textbook said "we don't know whether the Sun orbits the Earth or the Earth orbits the sun, but here's some reckoning people have done over the years on both sides". Is that what your science textbook says? Or does it say "here's how it is, and here's what people used to think?" And you really, legitimately think it's biologists that would be crying foul if that's how biology textbooks presented creationism vs. evolution?
He wants events. He wants tournaments. Winning a tournament is a big goal. There's no reason some of the tournaments wouldn't be more prestigious (as Wimbledon is for tennis), and they would have reigning champions. Not everyone wins tournaments or gets trophies. His plan has nothing to do with watering down competition. His plan has nothing to do with the safety of the players, who would go on winning and losing (and, if anything, the bulk of them would be under more pressure more often).
All we're talking about is changing the sampling frequency. On one end, you have a measure like ELO that samples continuously. On the other end, you have championship matches years apart. In the middle, you have milestone tournaments a few times a year (like tennis or golf, which he mentions). There's benefits at each point on this continuum. Personally, I think that the "big tournament" structure of golf or tennis creates a lot of interest, and also gives us a useful, interesting way of comparing the success of different players over time (while still potentially rewarding short lived inspired play).
You completely misunderstood the article. His complaint isn't about how Carlsen has arrived here or how long it's taken (it hasn't been long); it's that having a single, seldom-disputed title for Chess doesn't provide a fine-grained measurement for accomplishment. Through chance or deliberate "ducking", someone can end up being world chess champion longer or shorter than they "deserve". He believes that with more frequent sampling, you could get a more accurate "signal" in terms of player skill. He believes this would generate more interest, and give us better data to compare players over time. I think he's probably right, though he's missing the fact that his system would also reward a somewhat different skill set (it's different to win tournaments vs. matches).
Boxing actually has a fairly chess-like title system (though it's a mess). What he wants is a tournament system like tennis or golf. He thinks Carlsen, if he wins, would have standing to push through this kind of change. He probably would.
Well, that's the naive cynical view. The reality is that as societies become more wealthy (particularly, as they move out of starvation/subsistence) they have less children (not more), and an important part of getting out of the poverty trap is reducing disease (which destroys a tremendous amount of labor). It's not the only step, obviously, but it is a step in the right direction (even if we are trying to behave as idealized, heartless social planning robots, and ignore all the current suffering this could mitigate).
He didn't just find himself running a disease charity, so therefore he's claiming that's what's important. He chose to set up a charity for what he felt was the most important problem. You can say he's wrong if you want, sure - but saying it's "convenient" is really silly; you're getting the causality chain completely backwards.
Imagine instead of people we're talking about horses. Horses have had a variety of jobs throughout history. They bounced around between farm, military, and transportation jobs as different trends and technologies came and went. Horses didn't have to worry, there was always something they'd be useful for.
And then, within a 50 year span, they lost almost all those jobs, because machines surpassed them in their core competency (pulling and carrying stuff).
Similarly, humans will get bumped and jostled around and generally will have something to contribute... until we quite suddenly (from a history perspective) don't. A few more advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and the majority of humans will have nothing to contribute to the economy. The kinds of jobs that humans will still excel at (eg. creative stuff like writing) are also things that just don't require that many people to do, and which many people will continue having no aptitude for.
This is good news. It'll be awesome to see what humans can do post-scarcity. But the transition will be awkward.
That's not true in any meaningful sense. From Scouting.org:
You aren't making this better - you're just making it clearer you don't understand algorithm complexity.
I'm not talking about interview questions with sheep. I'm talking about the algorithm competitions they recruit from. They watch external competitions, and were spending enough time on it that they eventually started an in house one a while back (Google Code Jam - this year's contest is currently in progress). I still get headhunting calls from Google and financial firms based on participation in contests years ago.
God I regret it every time I come to Slashdot - might as well be YouTube comments.
[quote]The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot.[/quote]
People have already corrected you on this - but holy crap is this a revealingly stupid thing to say.
[quote]but being good in these contests is no predictor of success in a programming career. [/quote]
It absolutely, demonstrably is - and you'll see former top competitors in important positions at pretty much all the big tech firms. Google, in particular, spends a tremendous amount of time and money identifying prospects this way - and past competitors are key to lots of its most innovative and successful products. Obviously this isn't the only skill involved in being a good programmer, but practicing these difficult problems and learning the theory behind them is a huge leg up in being successful.
The poster specifically mentions IE 6, which is only eleven years old.
Most of this software wasn't written for IE 6 - that's just the most recent browser it runs on. I imagine much of it was actually from around the time of IE 4.
And yeah, there's a lot of variety in terms of the actual problems to be addressed here. For us, our weird old internal IE only web pages have been less of a problem than our weird old Java stuff.
You can pick out the new people in the thread pretty easily, with their "if you do it right, nothing ever goes wrong" type optimism. Software needs to be maintained, and sometimes you're going to hit thresholds with significant costs. And sometimes you're going to hitch your wagon to a tech that dies or fails or changes.
Compatibility is a two edged sword. Being able to easily port Android apps makes that the easy path - develop for Android, still get BB support.. why would you bother writing for the BB API? That means your platform gets more apps to start, but very few unique ones - and many that don't make best use of your unique features/APIs.
If their use was kept secret, systems like this would likely perform well most of the time; the correlations these systems are based on are probably pretty steady.
Once students get any information about the system, however, it's doomed - and in any case it's unlikely the system will give real, useful assistance in improving skills beyond what you'd get from a grammar checker.
You missed an option: they'll primarily play games on tablets and mobile devices. When I talk to my teenage nephew, he's now more likely to talk about a mobile game than a console game (though he has all the current consoles). The games are cheaper, more numerous, and much more varied.
The consoles will have to change their model to stay relevant.
It could be they are already using a fancier scheme - it's hard to tell what's real details of their method, and what's pop-sci "summary". So I apologize if I'm not giving them deserved credit here.
I understand they wanted the overall system to be fault tolerant, but it might be better to leave that part to established computer science. I understand DNA might be uniquely prone to certain types of errors or reading problems - but there's a lot of computer science theory (and practice) established here that would likely make the overall system more robust than what looks like a fairly simple redundancy scheme.
I'd write a long post making fun of your poor grammar, inability to read, paranoia, and sad little grasp at authority, but it feels like a waste to argue with an AC.
I'm not actually sure whether you're joking. In any case, gene contamination risk is (rightly, I think) seen as a benefit of terminator genes: if modified gene content does spread somehow, it would be less likely to continue to spread (over generations) further afield from the original contamination. There's a natural stop to the spreading of plants with limited ability to reproduce.
To the extent you're serious, I suppose that, yes, you've identified a potential concern. Also a potential concern is the possibility that consuming GM plants will turn us into zombies. Either of these scenarios would require mechanisms to exist that we have no evidence of, but there's no absolute reason either of those things couldn't happen.
However, there's a lot of risks that are much more likely and that should probably be higher up on the list of concerns. I certainly don't dispute there are legitimate risks to using GM technology, but there's also serious risks to closing off those avenues - and if demands a real, informed debate where pros, cons, risks and rewards are all weighed seriously.
Since when are terminator genes good for the environment?
"Terminator genes" are a perfect example of the scaremongering on the anti-GMO side. They were never really deployed, and Monsanto has vowed not to do so.
And even if they were, you've got the idea wrong. They weren't an environmental threat - rather, terminator genes were scary because they'd make poor farmers reliant on big industry for their seeds (Terminator genes prevent the resultant plants from having viable seeds). They COULD actually be good for the environment, as they'd prevent GM plants from spreading uncontrolled (which is another scare story).
There's pluses and minuses to GM plants for food. But the debate is dominated by people with bizarre, uninformed emotional connections to one side or the other. Like yourself. Are you as brave and open minded as the guy in the OP? Having found out you're double-wrong on this, are you going to reconsider the issue and perhaps take a moment to learn about what's at stake?
I doubt it. I think it's much more likely that you'll lash out at me because I'm mean, or something equally productive.
Stopping taking pictures on private property is one of the things the someone can be told to do.
This wasn't about stopping taking pictures - the demand was to delete the pictures. Which he couldn't - it's a film camera. And it's not something they're legally entitled to under Canadian law. From the story:
Lawyer Douglas King, of Pivot Legal in Vancouver, agrees, saying that private mall security guards and police have no right to try to seize someone’s camera or demand that photos be deleted — even on private property.
The security guards made an illegal request that they thought they could get away with - and usually they would have because people are easily cowed. In this case, the kid couldn't comply, they didn't pay attention, and they escalated the situation for no reason. I'm hoping the mall gets sued.
I suppose there's not a ban on selling heroine either. Substances sold just have to meet a certain standard of not containing heroine. Oh, and there's something else, with different properties, that we're calling heroine and it's legal. So no heroine ban.
So... yeah... what the hell are you talking about? There's a bunch of items you used to be able to sell and now you can't. That stuff is banned.
You can argue about whether the ban is appropriate or the best plan or something. Or you could argue that the other bulbs meet all possible sets of needs better (which I think it's clear they don't - but at least you could argue that).
But arguing that they aren't banning certain bulbs is really, fantastically stupid. Sorry, but it is. And you're going to just keep on doing it, aren't you? I'm really, really, super looking forward to your next post where you make a definition of ban that isn't met by what is happening here. Go ahead, that'll be great. Do it.
God, I regret it every time I read or post on Slashdot. Frickin' morons.
The tax wouldn't be as effective as the ban
If your only goal is getting rid of the old bulbs, then, uh, yes - a ban is more effective. But I think there's legitimate reasons to prefer old bulbs for some uses, and even if I didn't I'm very skeptical of removing that choice. People make many choices that waste energy. People make all sorts of bad choices in a free society. Society has an interest in reducing those choices, but I don't think it's appropriate to eliminate this kind of choice. As an analogy, banning smoking would be "more effective" than taxing it (probably at least) but I think tax is a more appropriate balance in a free society.
The tax would need to be exorbitantly high for cheap-to-produce incandescent bulbs to be as expensive as the more efficient bulbs.
And? Are you worried that, uh, people will choose not to buy the old bulbs once they're more expensive? Are you worried that the government is going to get too much money? Anyways, yes, I agree the tax would have to be high in order to displace some old behaviors. That's the point, clearly. If people stop buying the highly taxed items, then society wins. If some people continue, then they win (by getting the stuff they want, for whatever reason) and society wins too (since the tax they've paid is going to way over-compensate for any extra energy use).
To be clearer, there's some tax number that represents a balance to the parties involved. A ban is effectively an "infinite tax". Infinity doesn't seem like the right number. Murder needs an infinite tax. Using an inefficient bulb... probably less than that.
It's also worth noting that, while current opposition to the "ban" is primarily from Republicans, the bill was passed by a Democratic Congress but signed by a Republican President.
It seems oddly natural for Americans to decide whether they agree with something by asking which party came up with the idea. I'm not American, and find this impulse really fantastically tragic. It's a good idea or it isn't, regardless of who came up with it.
So, the bill is not anti-consumer
Yes, it obviously, obviously is. For people that prefer the old bulbs, they've lost that choice. When someone can't get something they want, that's a negative for that person. That person, in this case, is a consumer. So it's a negative for some group of consumers. That's what anti-consumer means. A tax would also be anti-consumer, but it would strike a better balance between the interests of the bulb-buying consumer and the broader interests of society.
Should be a tax. Encourage people to make the right choices, but don't screw people who have special circumstances or are willing to compensate society for the cost of their preference.
To be clear, it's not like (at the highest level) they are doing something in 1 hour that would take the average guy 4 or something. The top level problems are often difficult enough that an average programmer would never complete them (or at least not without significant outside assistance and/or further education). Between equally matched competitors it can sometimes be a race, but in general these competitions are better thought of as tests: can you solve this problem?
Comparing top competitors to regular programmers, their speed is certainly impressive - but the more important differentiator is their knowledge, experience, and creative problem-solving ability.
There's been times I've outperformed Petr (the guy mentioned here) on individual problems (though obviously he's usually faster than me usually, and I haven't competed in years). The key difference between us is not speed - it's that he's able to solve a whole bunch of problems I just plain can't.
Mark Zuckerberg competed on TopCoder (though he wasn't terribly committed, and didn't do terribly well) before he was famous. If you follow Slashdot, you'll remember the final Rubik's cube proof - that was done largely by high ranked TopCoders. One of the early developers for Writely was also one of TopCoder's first dominant competitors (snewman). Google is filled with current and former TopCoder competitors - they're doing heavy lifting all over the company, and Google spends tons of time and effort to get more (as do many other companies). I still get calls from companies (particularly high-frequency-trader type companies, but tech in general) fairly often based on my mediocre (and now semi-ancient) TopCoder participation.
Naturally, though, most programmers (of any sort) are going to be fairly anonymous contributors on larger projects.