The widening of the income gap is a valid rebuttal to the claim that increase any particular measure of total national wealth necessarily means that as a nation, more prosperous individually, regardless of who or what caused it.
We could all be worse off save for one lone gadzillionare who was "doing fine, thanks." It wouldn't matter why this guy got the loot and the rest of us didn't, the simple fact that it happened is all that matters.
I take it the other points (about peace and stuff) stand?
Picking on one point (prosperity) out of one articles, and ignoring several others is a little disingenuous. From the one you used, there are a number of other cases that you would have a harder time dismissing, such as:
(Ending) the unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas.
going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
a 250 percent boost in military spending
Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?
John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state.
We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two
We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.
The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do.
The last point, of course, is the obvious rebuttal to your claims of prosperity. While Bill Gates and Exxon are doing great under this administration, the rest of us haven't been so lucky. Average prosperity doesn't matter nearly as much as inflation adjusted median income.
--MarkusQ
But it could just as well be ingenious in the opposite direction as well. I note that it says nothing about addresses being required. In a country with well over a billion people, what are the chances of anyone having a unique name?
As always with this sort of thing, the devil will be in the details. It may be as bad as you think, but it might be a clever sap for the PHBs with no teeth what so ever. Sort of a "Who is Wen Chen and why is he saying these horrible things about me?" situation.
One useful thing they could do would be to put the old sleepycat.com content back up somewhere. There was quite a bit of useful information there about dealing with older versions of Berkeley DB, but now you just get redirected to Oracle's index page. While commercial vendors tend to think in "push the new, deny the old" mode, a lot of us have to deal with what's out there. For example, when you come across software written to an older API, it's nice to be able to go back and read the changelogs and release notes between then and now.
Never tell anyone? More like they can't shut up about it.
They are hardly identical. One of the main problems with such a "coalition" is that it depends on it's members being ignorant of how much their goals differ from the other members.
If you don't think they give off more than a "slight indication that anything is amiss" you obviously haven't talked to any for more than a minute or two.
If it weren't for the fact that the current voting-machine companies are conspiracies(get several completely independent companies) machine voting would be much less corruptible than paper ballots--it's much easier to fake a ballot with only human-readable text on it than one with a cryptographic signature.
Read this and then tell me if you still believe that machine voting would be much less corruptible than paper ballots. Remember to include in your re-thinking that it may be easier to fake one paper ballot but it is surely harder to fake them in bulk.
Why do you want to make sure that only the most fallible machine in the world can read the ballots?
Because, I would presume, he is more worried about corruption than about failure. Computers may be more reliable, but they are also far more corruptible than any human.
You will never find a human that will, after a few minutes of persuasion, reliably betray its principles, never tell anyone, never come back to blackmail you, and even completely forget the whole incident even happened should you care to ask him to, let alone thousands of identical humans who will do so in lockstep without giving the slightest indication that anything is amiss.
If you want a conspiracy that won't fall apart, use computers. If you want to prevent such a conspiracy, keep the computers as far away from the process as you can.
standard mining techniques developed on Earth wouldn't work there
While true, I think you are being needlessly glum here.
For example, it is true that normal pumps would not work for removing rain water from a lunar ice-mine, because they rely on the pressure of the atmosphere. But having your lunar ice-mine fill with water is not nearly as big of a problem as you might think. All you need to do is change all the signage to read "Lunar Well" instead and you're done.
Likewise, a canary can not be used to detect when the air goes bad in a lunar mine (because there isn't any), but this can be solved by having the canary wear a little spacesuit, and supplying it with little tanks of air from the same source as the miners are using.
And further, some techniques developed on Earth (e.g., the Company Store) would actually work better on the moon!
They don't? What happens when I try to impart some angular momentum to a spinning hard drive, then? Gyroscopic forces dampen it.
No, they don't.
You might be thinking of "friction." But even that doesn't destroy the angular momentum, it just thermalizes it as a whole bunch of unsynchronized rotations of small objects. And when you started the hard drive, you had to push against the Earth, which gave a very very small rotation to a very very large object.
I think we're talking at cross purposes. If there's a consistant net torque (e.g. tidal forces pulling the station to be perpendicular to the ground) that's something you'll have to fix with thrusters. Gyros won't do it for you, as there is a limit to how fast they can spin (and thus how much torque they can suck up). After they're "full" what are you going to do about it?
It may become impossible to dock with the station depending on the axis and speed of rotation after you lose stationkeeping. Then how would you transship the replacement gyros?
Again, this is a question of angular momentum (which is conserved), not of orientation (which isn't). If the station has picked up some sort of spin that is large enough to impede docking, gyros aren't going to help. They need to use some sort of thruster that ejects reaction mass, and there's really no way around it.
--MarkusQ
P.S., Yes, you could in theory also use the Earth's magnetic field, the solar wind, or a light sail, but last I heard they didn't have McGiver, Scotty, or Geordi LeForge aboard, so those aren't really options.
This seems rather alarmist. First off, why would they risk destroying the station to preserve the attitude? It seems that letting it turn somewhat for a limited amount of time would be far better than risking its destruction to preserve its orientation at all costs.
And the time would be limited. Remember, there is conservation of angular momentum. If you are tumbling, you will need to use the thrusters to stop it in any case (gyros don't create or destroy angular momentum--if you want to get rid of some permanently, you'll need to cast off some reaction mass). But for what they do do, which is reorienting a ship by temporarily holding some angular momentum, they can be used as slowly as you want. Heck, if you weren't in a hurry you could turn the ship by hand (actually, foot) by just "walking" around the outer wall without any gyros at all.
Your longest path algorithm won't work, you may have a cycle in your graph and your remaining path will never reach the endpoint. The algorithm will not terminate.
My parenthetical comment was just a sketch; obviously (by the usual meaning of "longest path") you wouldn't ever use the same arc twice, so cycles don't matter.
In techie speak, the US constitution is default-deny, followed by a list of exceptions.
I believe we are basically in agreement, and will admit that your formulation is more accurate. I probably should have said "define limits" instead of "set limits," because the "set limits" phrasing does sound like default-allow. My intent and focus was the fact that the constitution is concerned with the limits to permissible governmental actions, rather than the actions of citizens or non-citizens.
If someone who is not a citizen can expect to be protected by our constitution when not on our soil, can we enforce our constitution on them as well?
That's not the purpose of a constitution. A constitution doesn't grant rights to the people or offer them protection. And it isn't something that can be "enforced" on people, citizen or not.
The one and only purpose of a constitution is to set limits on the power of the government.
Read one, sometime. Ours, for example. The whole thing is a mass of "this branch of government may not do so and so, except in these very special circumstances" and "this branch of government is required to do thus and so".
Why?
Because the founders of constitutional governments are almost uniformly recent survivors of abuses of government authority. King George's belief that he could do anything he felt like (the equivalent, in his day, of the unitary executive, or the "If the president does it it isn't illegal" school of thought) did not sit well at all with our founding fathers.
You have to be a real SOB to assign an NP-complete problem as your exam.
Be grateful he was asking you to design it and not execute it.
--MarkusQ
P.S. For that matter, it should be pretty easy to design an algorithm that does this, based around a wave front (work out from one end, kill all paths when they reach the other end, unless there is only one, which is the longest).
At the old 25 cents each rate, here's a dollar's worth:
Nixon was the one running against JFK in 1960
Nixon (and CREP) were caught trying tamper with the election in 1972, and eventually resigned from the complications of the cover up.
Just because someone "wins", in doesn't mean they didn't cheat.
Ditto, if they lose
Hope that helps.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Bonus clue: many of the people who are being accused of presiding over the present round of corruption were players at a lower level during the Nixon administration. Thus it doesn't have to be that "all politicians are always crooked" but might be the somewhat more limited "these particular crooks are still crooked". Note that they were selling the old "the President has as much athority as if he were king" snake oil back then, too.
Uh, WTF does this have to do with "News for Nerds"?
Very good, you rad the first three words. Now look at the next three, "STUFF THAT MATTERS." See the connection?
I don't see how this is even remotely in line with the supposed purpose of this site. I mean, do we really need another ten thousand Bush-bashing posts?
OK, I'll spell it out. Our entire national government is under the control of a single party and has been over the last six years, during which time (among other things) they have:
Actively engaged in election tampering
Actively worked to conceal the pedophiles in their ranks
Lied to start what may turn out to be world war three
Declared the president to be above the law
Suspended Habeas Corpus
Endorsed / redefined torture and made it legal
In general, treated the consitution as a minor irrelevancy
Also, during this time:
The government has declared that need no reason other than greed to seize private property
We lost a major American city due to ineptitude and cronyism
We went from being generally loved throughout the world to mostly feared
We went from having budget surpluses to having record debts
We started operating a gulag of secret prisons
War profiteering has reached record levels
...and on and on. Note that we don't even have to get into the "conspiracy theories" to build this list; these are just the things readily substantiated from the public record and well sourced news stories often based on the admissions (and even the bragging!) of the perpetrators.
So why do people put up with this? Why haven't "We, The People" risen up and told them to sit down, shut up, and let someone competent run the country? Apparently, for one reason and one reason only, because the party in power
"keeps us safe from the terrorists."
So evidence indicating that they aren't in fact doing that is clearly "stuff that matters". In fact, it probably matters more than any other type of story this site runs.
Do we need more posts "bashing Bush"? No. Do we need to get it through the thick skulls of the few remaining supporters of his corrupt regime that their blind loyalty to these frauds is doing more damage to our country than any terrorist could ever hope for? Yes.
Do we need to break their strangle hold on the congress while there is still hope of it exercising some sort of oversight? Undoubtedly.
Yes in for the Indian tribes. And no for Vegas. Could well be a tough cop/nice cop routine, if you believe they're more connected that generally admitted.
How much money is being channeled through the lobby system in Washington?
At least $85 million, that we know of. Not all on this issue, but much of it aimed at keeping out competition. Most likely, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Having a "rolled up" dimension doesn't require an extra dimension, because they're not _actually_ rolled up. The metric used to describe them is just easy to picture that way. Just like curved 4-dimensional space time doesn't need a 5th dimension to be curved into. I tried looking for a good web-site that explains this, but didn't find one in the time I'm willing to spend looking for one. I'm sure someone else knows of one, though.
The weekdays-space (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc.) is rolled up into a "tube" with a circumference of exactly seven days. But it isn't "rolled up" through any other dimension. This is also a good way to get people to picture how the universe could be finite and yet leave the question "what's outside it?" meaningless (technically, the weekday-space is finite but unbounded). The color wheel and the compass rose are two other examples.
However, even gcc complains about c being possibly uninitialized, even though we can tell from looking at the code that n MUST be greater than 0, so on the first pass through the code, the second if clause must be true, thus c will always have a valid value.
This is a good example of why code verification is a hard problem. You may be able to tell from the given code fragment that c is always initialized, but I can't. Specifically, when "float n = 0.5;" it seems to me pretty clear that c isn't initialized.
Now, you may well cry fowl, that I was "supposed to know" that n was int and not float, but that sort of reliance on information that isn't derivable from the code in question always crops up in automated code verification. And it doesn't matter if it was "obvious" or that the system was "supposed to know it."
Slashdot Mirror
The widening of the income gap is a valid rebuttal to the claim that increase any particular measure of total national wealth necessarily means that as a nation, more prosperous individually, regardless of who or what caused it.
We could all be worse off save for one lone gadzillionare who was "doing fine, thanks." It wouldn't matter why this guy got the loot and the rest of us didn't, the simple fact that it happened is all that matters.
I take it the other points (about peace and stuff) stand?
--MarkusQ
Picking on one point (prosperity) out of one articles, and ignoring several others is a little disingenuous. From the one you used, there are a number of other cases that you would have a harder time dismissing, such as:
The last point, of course, is the obvious rebuttal to your claims of prosperity. While Bill Gates and Exxon are doing great under this administration, the rest of us haven't been so lucky. Average prosperity doesn't matter nearly as much as inflation adjusted median income. --MarkusQ
The Onion actually seems to have a better track record than a lot of psychics at predicting the future.
I'm not sure if I find that comforting or frightening.
--MarkusQ
Thank you. If I had mod points I'd give you one, but instead here's a link to the case you mentioned.
--MarkusQ
But it could just as well be ingenious in the opposite direction as well. I note that it says nothing about addresses being required. In a country with well over a billion people, what are the chances of anyone having a unique name?
As always with this sort of thing, the devil will be in the details. It may be as bad as you think, but it might be a clever sap for the PHBs with no teeth what so ever. Sort of a "Who is Wen Chen and why is he saying these horrible things about me?" situation.
--MarkusQ
One useful thing they could do would be to put the old sleepycat.com content back up somewhere. There was quite a bit of useful information there about dealing with older versions of Berkeley DB, but now you just get redirected to Oracle's index page. While commercial vendors tend to think in "push the new, deny the old" mode, a lot of us have to deal with what's out there. For example, when you come across software written to an older API, it's nice to be able to go back and read the changelogs and release notes between then and now.
--MarkusQ
Thanks for that link.
I'd counter by pointing out that:
--MarkusQ
Read this and then tell me if you still believe that machine voting would be much less corruptible than paper ballots. Remember to include in your re-thinking that it may be easier to fake one paper ballot but it is surely harder to fake them in bulk.
--MarkusQ
Because, I would presume, he is more worried about corruption than about failure. Computers may be more reliable, but they are also far more corruptible than any human.
You will never find a human that will, after a few minutes of persuasion, reliably betray its principles, never tell anyone, never come back to blackmail you, and even completely forget the whole incident even happened should you care to ask him to, let alone thousands of identical humans who will do so in lockstep without giving the slightest indication that anything is amiss.
If you want a conspiracy that won't fall apart, use computers. If you want to prevent such a conspiracy, keep the computers as far away from the process as you can.
--MarkusQ
While true, I think you are being needlessly glum here.
For example, it is true that normal pumps would not work for removing rain water from a lunar ice-mine, because they rely on the pressure of the atmosphere. But having your lunar ice-mine fill with water is not nearly as big of a problem as you might think. All you need to do is change all the signage to read "Lunar Well" instead and you're done.
Likewise, a canary can not be used to detect when the air goes bad in a lunar mine (because there isn't any), but this can be solved by having the canary wear a little spacesuit, and supplying it with little tanks of air from the same source as the miners are using.
And further, some techniques developed on Earth (e.g., the Company Store) would actually work better on the moon!
--MarkusQ
No, they don't.
You might be thinking of "friction." But even that doesn't destroy the angular momentum, it just thermalizes it as a whole bunch of unsynchronized rotations of small objects. And when you started the hard drive, you had to push against the Earth, which gave a very very small rotation to a very very large object.
Angular momentum is conserved.
--MarkusQ
I think we're talking at cross purposes. If there's a consistant net torque (e.g. tidal forces pulling the station to be perpendicular to the ground) that's something you'll have to fix with thrusters. Gyros won't do it for you, as there is a limit to how fast they can spin (and thus how much torque they can suck up). After they're "full" what are you going to do about it?
--MarkusQ
Again, this is a question of angular momentum (which is conserved), not of orientation (which isn't). If the station has picked up some sort of spin that is large enough to impede docking, gyros aren't going to help. They need to use some sort of thruster that ejects reaction mass, and there's really no way around it.
--MarkusQ
P.S., Yes, you could in theory also use the Earth's magnetic field, the solar wind, or a light sail, but last I heard they didn't have McGiver, Scotty, or Geordi LeForge aboard, so those aren't really options.
This seems rather alarmist. First off, why would they risk destroying the station to preserve the attitude? It seems that letting it turn somewhat for a limited amount of time would be far better than risking its destruction to preserve its orientation at all costs.
And the time would be limited. Remember, there is conservation of angular momentum. If you are tumbling, you will need to use the thrusters to stop it in any case (gyros don't create or destroy angular momentum--if you want to get rid of some permanently, you'll need to cast off some reaction mass). But for what they do do, which is reorienting a ship by temporarily holding some angular momentum, they can be used as slowly as you want. Heck, if you weren't in a hurry you could turn the ship by hand (actually, foot) by just "walking" around the outer wall without any gyros at all.
--MarkusQ
My parenthetical comment was just a sketch; obviously (by the usual meaning of "longest path") you wouldn't ever use the same arc twice, so cycles don't matter.
--MarkusQ
I believe we are basically in agreement, and will admit that your formulation is more accurate. I probably should have said "define limits" instead of "set limits," because the "set limits" phrasing does sound like default-allow. My intent and focus was the fact that the constitution is concerned with the limits to permissible governmental actions, rather than the actions of citizens or non-citizens.
--MarkusQ
That's not the purpose of a constitution. A constitution doesn't grant rights to the people or offer them protection. And it isn't something that can be "enforced" on people, citizen or not.
The one and only purpose of a constitution is to set limits on the power of the government.
Read one, sometime. Ours, for example. The whole thing is a mass of "this branch of government may not do so and so, except in these very special circumstances" and "this branch of government is required to do thus and so".
Why?
Because the founders of constitutional governments are almost uniformly recent survivors of abuses of government authority. King George's belief that he could do anything he felt like (the equivalent, in his day, of the unitary executive, or the "If the president does it it isn't illegal" school of thought) did not sit well at all with our founding fathers.
--MarkusQ
Be grateful he was asking you to design it and not execute it.
--MarkusQ
P.S. For that matter, it should be pretty easy to design an algorithm that does this, based around a wave front (work out from one end, kill all paths when they reach the other end, unless there is only one, which is the longest).
Oh wait, where did I see that..ah, yes, here's the link.
Just intented as a friendly (though slightly pointed) response to your other question.
--MarkusQ
Oh wait, where did I see that..ah, yes, here's the link.
Just intented as a friendly (though slightly pointed) response to your other question.
--MarkusQ
At the old 25 cents each rate, here's a dollar's worth:
Hope that helps.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Bonus clue: many of the people who are being accused of presiding over the present round of corruption were players at a lower level during the Nixon administration. Thus it doesn't have to be that "all politicians are always crooked" but might be the somewhat more limited "these particular crooks are still crooked". Note that they were selling the old "the President has as much athority as if he were king" snake oil back then, too.
Very good, you rad the first three words. Now look at the next three, "STUFF THAT MATTERS." See the connection?
OK, I'll spell it out. Our entire national government is under the control of a single party and has been over the last six years, during which time (among other things) they have:
Also, during this time:
...and on and on. Note that we don't even have to get into the "conspiracy theories" to build this list; these are just the things readily substantiated from the public record and well sourced news stories often based on the admissions (and even the bragging!) of the perpetrators.
So why do people put up with this? Why haven't "We, The People" risen up and told them to sit down, shut up, and let someone competent run the country? Apparently, for one reason and one reason only, because the party in power "keeps us safe from the terrorists."
So evidence indicating that they aren't in fact doing that is clearly "stuff that matters". In fact, it probably matters more than any other type of story this site runs.
Do we need more posts "bashing Bush"? No. Do we need to get it through the thick skulls of the few remaining supporters of his corrupt regime that their blind loyalty to these frauds is doing more damage to our country than any terrorist could ever hope for? Yes.
Do we need to break their strangle hold on the congress while there is still hope of it exercising some sort of oversight? Undoubtedly.
Is this "stuff that matters"? Obviously.
I hope that answers your questions.
--MarkusQ
Yes in for the Indian tribes. And no for Vegas. Could well be a tough cop/nice cop routine, if you believe they're more connected that generally admitted.
At least $85 million, that we know of. Not all on this issue, but much of it aimed at keeping out competition. Most likely, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
--MarkusQ
The weekdays-space (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc.) is rolled up into a "tube" with a circumference of exactly seven days. But it isn't "rolled up" through any other dimension. This is also a good way to get people to picture how the universe could be finite and yet leave the question "what's outside it?" meaningless (technically, the weekday-space is finite but unbounded). The color wheel and the compass rose are two other examples.
--MarkusQ
This is a good example of why code verification is a hard problem. You may be able to tell from the given code fragment that c is always initialized, but I can't. Specifically, when "float n = 0.5;" it seems to me pretty clear that c isn't initialized.
Now, you may well cry fowl, that I was "supposed to know" that n was int and not float, but that sort of reliance on information that isn't derivable from the code in question always crops up in automated code verification. And it doesn't matter if it was "obvious" or that the system was "supposed to know it."
--MarkusQ