Uh, it seems to me that in ANY system you are free to break the laws if you are willing to take the consequences. You can speak out against the government in an oppressive dictatorship if you are willing to get shot, but I wouldn't call it freedom.
I firmly believe that if it doesn't affect someone else, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want. Which should make clear my position on people in their own homes having sex, getting high, listening to country music, etc.
My frustration about building permits is that a lot of people who call themselves libertarians like to argue from this priciple to a lot of things that do affect others, even though they do it on their own land. Building unsafe housing, filling wetlands, dumping toxic waste. Sure we can just hold them responsible for their actions. (Unless they're already dead). And I'm sure we wont find out that a lot of people turn out to be irresponsible, and just figure they won't get caught (at least not before they're already dead.)
You can own your property. It's a nice feature of our society. In exchange for this nice feature, if you want to do something that's going to affect your property for longer than it's going to be your property, we'd like some say in it. If you wan't to do something on it that's going to affect others or their property, we'd like some say in it. If that's not "really" owning your property, sorry, tough luck.
There are some people out there who insist they should have a say in it even if what you're doing won't affect anyone else or their property. These are known as "shitheads".
You have my apologies, I really didn't mean to offend you, and I retract the bullshitting charge. I was just trying to point out that by getting your infratructure (water) by private means, you are atypical. I meant no disrespect to your way of life. I've lived in rural areas. Now I live in a small city. Both have their attractions. I share your dislike of suburbs. If I can see my neighbors house, I want to walk to the grocery store.
I certainly realize that there are private roads. But do you expect anyone to build a second road alongside the first? Would you want them to? It sounds like you're having trouble getting even one company to close the last mile for high speed data. I don't think you'll get enough to do so for healthy competition. It's hard to get the right-of-ways for cable laying without government help. Verizon didn't. So I think they should share their cables. Is a few extra cables running down the poles bad? No. But why should they share the poles? Six sets of poles is at least a little bad. And it won't happen. Nobody is going to want to pay the extreme costs of cable laying just so that when they're done they can begin an uphill fight against the established carrier. This is why it is called a natural monopoly. It's a market in which a monopoly will naturally form. It's a tough question how to handle such situations, but saying "keep the government out, the market solves everything" is not going to do it (IMO). And the government is arleady in it. All those existing cables were run with government support, across public lands. (And frequently across private lands with government coercion of the owners). I think "wire-providing" companies should be restricted from using their monopoly in that market to prevent competion in the "services provided by wire" market. Just like I think operating systems companies should be restricted from preventing competition in the application software market. I like competition. I think it's great. But I don't think a completely free market automatically produces it,
So forget your water, you're unusual (and, I suspect, bullshitting). I'd ask about electricity, but you'd probaly go on about your quaint little windmill. Do you have a private, unregulated road system provider? Do they have competition?
It only makes sense to run a single road, fiber line, (water and sewer in cities), electrical line to each location. To completely beat the dead horse, these are "natural monopolies". I don't want 50 fiber lines, roads or sewer lines coming to my house. I also don't want the fact that one company owns the local coax to mean that I have to buy my broadband from them despite the fact that they have crappy customer service, and make me pay extra because I don't buy TV from them too. But that's where I am now. I pay through the nose for a bunch of stuff I don't want, but don't have a choice because they control the one little bit I do want (the coax).
Fiber, like roads, power lines, and sewers, is infrastructure. It should be treated as infrastructure like the rest. i.e. run by a part of the government service, or by companies so comprehensively regulated they might as well be. (My electricity comes from a "private" company, but they understand the deal well enough: the company is named "Public Service")
Right. When you want to build something on your property, it makes sense that you be subject to restrictions regarding its impact on others. Generally, these restrictions take the form of requiring you to get a "building permit". Glad you agree with them.
More broadly, it always pisses me off when people say "It's my property, I should bea ble to do whatever I want." Go look at the deed that says it's your property. Determine the issuing authority. Unless it says "God Almighty", I think someone can tell you what you can and can't do on your property.
"Letters used frequently together are placed so that they are 'logically' next to eachother."
No. Qwerty is designed specifically so that letters commonly used together are seperated horizontally.
"Most commonly used letters are placed on the 'home' and top row and least commonly used letters are placed on the bottom."
Definitely No. Right index finger home key 'J' is third most uncommon letter. (beaten by 'q' (top row) and 'z'), home key 'k' is fith most uncommon. Their are 8 home keys, and they contain only 2 of the top 8 letters, about what you'd expect assigning the keys randomly. Don't even get me started on semi-colon.
Beyond seperating common pairs horizontally, I don't know what factors went into designing Querty, but speeding up typing does not appear to have been one of them. While the designer may not have been trying to slow you down, he wasn't trying to speed you up, and he was trying to do other things. From where I sit (using his stupid layout) that amounts to "Designed to slow you down".
Re:Minimize coins in pocket
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Making Change
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Coins flow out through merchants. They flow around until they wind up in jars on bedside tables, and it is from here that they go back to banks. The merchants aren't in any danger of maximizing a net coin input, they're trying to minimize their net coin output, reducing the chances of running out and/or the number of trips they need to make to the bank.
"That's not an unreasonable argument. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book called "On Certainty" making a very similar argument against Cartesian philosophy. You might like to read it; it's probably at your local Barnes & Noble."
See, this is my point. I have read it. It's boring as hell, and it doesn't add anything to the response to Descartes I though of right off the bat.
"You might also like to read what other people have had to say about in response to that argument, or about what the implications of that argument might be. But I don't think 'The Matrix', entertaining as it is, moves the discussion forward at all."
Or I might want to think for myself. I don't think "The Matrix" moves the discussion forward amonst people who are already familiar with the ideas, but it certainly does amongst those who aren't. And I don't think being familiar with twenty peoples writings about each others writings moves anything forward for anyone. It just lets you think you look smart while you actually look like an elitist asshole. I too took a bunch of philosophy in college, until I decided it was fun, but basically pointless. I can sum up what you'll learn from Descarte, Wittgenstein, and the whole philosophy of mind bunch in a quick Socratic dialog:
"You know, you can't really know anything, because even when you're sure, you can't be sure you're sure." "What the fuck are you talking about?" "Well, when you think you know something, it's only because you think you know about knowing things, but you could be wrong about the whole deal." "Okay, I can see that. What's the point?" "Uh, nothing really, but it's kind of weird." "Yeah I guess. Listen, I gotta go..." "But wait! Kripke's reformulation of Wittgensteins third assertion has significant impact on the challenge of the neo-Cartesian... Well, you're probably not familiar with Kripke, are you?" <now he thinks I'm smart> "No, not really." <elitist asshole>
The California one says that you can't measure their speed by how long it takes them to go a certain distance, you have to use radar, laser, etc. Which seems kind of stupid.
Even if you use radar, the speed limit had to be set as a result of an engineering study to determine the approptiate limit. i.e. It was set in the normal way, you didn't lower it yesterday because you felt like catching some speeders.
Still nothing about having to wave big red flags and shout "Hey there's a cop over here! The words 'Speed Limit' have meaning!"
I waded through a bunch of it, and saw nothing to support your point. Some states appear to have laws restricting the ability of the police to enforce limits lower than those posted (it was raining so you should have gone even slower), or preventing limits lower than those justified by safety concerns, etc.
I saw no mention of the cops being unable to use intelligence (hiding behind bushes) in enforcing the law.
Please provide a reference that is actually related.
"Well, curiously enough, it does make you think you know more about philosophy. I don't mean to be an "elitist asshole" here, but if you pick up even a short history of Western philosophy (e.g., the books by Kenny or Magee)"
You know, I think I'd rather pick up "The Matrix". I don't think even you would be interested in a movie version of any particular history of Western philosophy. (Unless there's a good nude scene with Wollstonecraft of course...)
But really, I think the "elitist asshole" thing comes from your looking down on people who dare to discuss philosophy in a context ("The Matrix") that a lot of other people are familiar with. I think you've spent a lot of time studying the subject, and don't want to admit to yourself that the time was wasted because there aren't really any answers, and the questions can be fairly clearly presented, even to lay people, by a movie that spends most of its time on Kung-Fu.
Philosophy is a whole bunch of speculating about answerless questions. Anyone can do it. Some people don't like that, so they pretend the important part is not the speculation, but familiarity with the speculations of others. Which turns things on it's head. Rather than responding to someones mention of Plato's cave by saying "No, no, this Descartes quotation is more on point", a good philosopher should be able talk about the ideas in "The Matrix" intelligently.
So:
Descartes is more on point because he imagined being deceived by a malevolent entity rather than by the nature of perception itself. e.g. Even if you assume you are capable of perceiveing reality, you cannot be sure you actually are. This is an interesting idea, which you can think about for as long as you want, and even write big, hard to understand books about (despite the fact that it's not very hard to understand), but eventually you should get on with your life, because unless someone offers you the red and blue pills, it just doesn't matter.
I read the Descartes a long while ago now, so perhaps you can point out some other interesting ideas of his. If you can cast the relevant thought experiments in Matrix terms, I'll think you might have promise as a philosopher. If you insist they can only be grasped by someone who has studied the original Descartes, I'll think your an elitist asshole. (And then I'll point out that you undoubtably read it in translation, which really isn't acceptable if you expect me to deign to discuss it with you...)
They don't want to record the huge number of hours cops spend driving or sitting around with nothing happening.
The cop is going to turn on the recorder anytime something interesting might happen, because it's going to help him 99% of the time. And because if he doesn't turn on the recorder, he knows that eventualy a lawer is going to ask him why.
Re:How long will the hard drives last
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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What you said.
I saw a demo of a military-grade pc at a trade show once. They had a nice little display showing drive seeks, reads and writes. The guy set up some big file copy, so the display was going nuts, then calmly climbed up on the desk and kicked the thing off. Three foot drop to the cement floor and a loud crash (this thing was heavy). The drive just didn't care.
Of course, they don't have to turn it on at all. I suspect the cheif motivation for this system is letting the cop prove things did in fact go down the way he says. For purposes both of defending himself and of convicting you. No more your word against his. Of course, if it is your word against his, and he didn't turn the recorder on, or the tape got lost, your lawyer has some good material to work with.
Offtopic sig response: What part of the second amendment would you prefer to omit?
Re:I knew I should have patented that!
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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How would this get you out of tickets? I wasn't aware that speeding was legal if the cop hides behind bushes. Or even if he isn't there at all, for that matter.
That's really funny. "trendy ways to fudge numbers" Lol. So now everybody who actually wants the right answer uses the sampled numbers.
And it's not changing the number of citizens in a voting district, and certainly not the number of voters who show up on election day. It's changing the number of congressmen coming from particular states. The republicans looked at the raw count, and at the right answer, and decided they liked the wrong answer better.
"They have not begin, sorry. There are not even any plans to begin them."
Exactly! There aren't any plans to have any trials at all, they're just locking people up.
Re:What does "solicited" mean?
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Spam, Milord
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I expect the legal definition of spam would address all the issues you mention quite precisely, if perhaps somewhat arbitrarily.
"you've expressly agreed to receiving particular types of email from a party (without commenting on other types) and they send you another type?" Unsolicited.
"Or a mail that could be construed as being of either type?" Could be construed as being unsolicited. Get a court to decide if you care enough.
"What if you've agreed to receiving any email from a company, and you receive one from another company in the same group?" Did I agree to receive email from the "group"? No. Unsolicited.
"Or from someone acting as their agent, or subcontractor, or who's taken over their business?" All of those would be from the company, solicited.
"And this `existing trading relationship' - what types of email should that justify sending you? And for how long after any contact from your are they justified in sending you email?" Here's where I expect the law to be precise, but somewhat arbitrary. Take Colorados anti-telemarketer law (an opt-in no-call list) for example. If you do business with a company, they can call you as much as they want about anything for 6 months, or until you tell them to stop.
I think the moral line is fairly narrow, I expect the legal line would be downright sharp. If it's not sharp enough, that's why we have courts.
All that said, I really don't care about the grey areas. If I can stop getting bulk email from companies I've never contacted or even heard of, much less done business with, I'll consider the spam war won. I've never given anyone permission to send bulk email to my current address, and I get hundreds of spam a day.
Re:What does "solicited" mean?
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Spam, Milord
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Oh, come on, it's not a hard question at all. Your triple negative phrasing is a bit confusing though, so I'm going to assume someone is sending an email based on the situations you describe, and mark them solicited or unsolicited:
"That you expressly asked for this particular piece of email?" Solicited.
"That you expressly asked for emails of this type from this party?" Solicited.
"That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get emails of this type?" Unsolicited.
"That you expressly asked for any and all emails from this party?" Solicited.
"That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get any email from them?" Unsolicited.
"Etc. Etc." Unsolicited.
If I have asked you to send me a particular email, or I have asked you to send me any class of email which covers that particular email, that email is solicited. If I haven't asked, it's unsolicited.
There aren't any "levels" of solicited. I either asked you to send me the mail or I didn't. If I didn't expressly ask not to have my wallet taken, is it theft?
"Thanks for your input. The silver market is a extremely stable market, but don't let me stop you from doing you own research."
The point is I'm willing to stipulate that the silver market is rock solid. If I wanted the most stable investment I could possibly find, I might consider buying a bunch of silver and burying it in the back yard.
I fully expect inflation will cause FRNs I have today to be worth less in the future in terms of silver, milk, housing, or whatever. This is why I would consider burying silver before considering burying FRNs. But how much less will it be worth, and how soon? Your currency looks to me like it's going to be worth half what I paid for it (100% inflation) the moment it hits my hand.
Banks will make more money off me than you? Lets see, my bank will pay me to keep my money there, or they will reverse the deal, and charge me in exchange for giving me access now to what I'll save in the future. The difference in the interest rate they'll pay and the interest rate they'll charge is about 2% (YMMV). So they make more money off me than you because I do business with them, and not you, but in percentage terms, they want 2% in exchange for giving me considerable flexibility about when I spend vs. save my money. You want 50% for, uh, what exactly?
It's not a currency unless it's widely accepted (consult the definition of "currency"). The basic question relevant to currency is "With which one can I buy a gallon of milk?". Hell, since you're so concerned about inflation, I'll even throw in "Which one do I expect will buy me more milk in five years?" Since I don't think any reasonable person would expect the dollar to undergo 100% inflation in the next five years, FRNs win. So it looks to me just like selling silver at a really bad price. You justify by saying it's a currency, and quickly redirecting discussion to the supposed problems with FRNs. I call that a scam.
Re:Nearly classical economics
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Mighty Amazon
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"This is particularly true when they are competing with ebay which really doesn't have any pricing mechanism except for the pure market-driven auction one."
Of course EBay has a pricing mechanism. There is a fixed cost to list an auction. You seem to be under the impression that EBay sells "stuff". They don't. They sell auction administration (and auction visibility). It is only in hosting other peoples selling of stuff that Amazon is competing with ebay, and in this arena both companies are providing certain amounts of service (and size of customer base) and taking a certain cut. The economics here are no more classical than any other retailers offering goods from various wholesalers. It had better not be too hard to run Amazon like a business, because it is a business.
And while we're at it, if JoesWebSiteOfRetailFun.com figures out how to do things slightly cheaper than Amazon, Amazon is not screwed. Name recognition is important. On the web it's huge. Nobody has heard of Joes. (Never mind that Joes would also have to do all the things that let Amazon be as cheap as it is, including economies of scale.)
I think I understand why you're no longer an economist. No, scratch that, as far as I can tell economists just make stuff up anyway...
"Partial-backing with value is infinitely better than zero-backing with debt."
No. Both backing methods under consideration involve risk. The value you should ascribe to FRNs depends on your belief about the future chances that the US Government will remain stable and continue to pay its debts, the chances that people will trust the US Government when they print dollars. The value you should ascribe to your currency depends upon what you believe about the future value of silver. I don't know lots about the silver market, but the future value of silver sounds likely to be fairly stable to me, (even more so than the US government) so that sounds good. But wait! You want me to accept that your currency is worth twice as much as the silver I can get for it? OK, so I have to take my expectations about the furture value of silver, and average them with predictions about another value: The chances that people will continue to trust a new startup that says this is worth money for no good reason (we've already accounted for the silver). Based on that, I'd say the appropriate value of your currency is pretty close to the value of the silver in my pocket. I'll take the greenbacks. If you want to start a new currency based on silver, I'd recommend detaching it from the dollar, and I'd name the basic denomination the "ounce". See where I'm going here? Once you get things going, you might even be able to get people trusting "warehouse receipts" ala Silver Certificates. But they'll need to trust you to pay for some reason. (Being a national government helps here, but Big banks used to do it too) I understand you'll have a hard time making a profit with this scheme, but frankly, when I'm deciding what currency to use, your making a profit is not exactly a high priority.
You obviously rattled that off in 30 seconds, since you didn't think about it much. Suppose you need a new big iron system for order processing? Sorry, I can't coherently imagine that; order processing just isn't a big deal. Let's assume we're talking instead about a task that would require a big machine, and look at your concerns:
1) Still need a central server for storage/backup
There might be interesting applications of grid computing for distributed, redundant storage, but the classic applications would be oriented toward massing processor power, not storage.
2) One server needs one UPS, 1000 workstations...
Well, I've got a UPS on my workstation anyway, but even if you don't this is just one variation of:
3) Worsktations are flaky...
One workstation is flaky. A couple thousand are rock-solid, if your grid software is any good at all. You hope everybody doesn't run Windows Update (or do some other maintenance) all at once? That seems pretty unlikely, and in any case I hope you don't ever do maintenance on your single server, since it will obviously be all at once. I actually worked somewhere that used a "grid" like technique for animation rendering. Every workstation had a background app running. If your machine was idle for a little while, this app start up, ask the "NetRender" machine for a frame, and get to work. If it finished the frame it would send it in and ask for another. If it didn't (you came back from lunch, a janitor yanked out the power cord, whatever) NetRender didn't care. Once it had passed out all the frames in an animation, it would just start again at the begining, passing out the ones it hadn't gotten back. Was there "painstaking inefficiency"? Well, at the end of the rendering the last job set up for a particular night, almost every machine in the shop was presumably racing to finnish the same frame, but who cares? They weren't doing anything else anyway. (actually, I think NetRender had some further inteligence so it didn't pass out the same frame more than X times a minute)
4) The corporate network is now a bottleneck Something is always the bottleneck. A good way to decide whether grid computing is apropriate to a task is to ask whether your statement sounds like a pro or a con.
I actually figured you were just playing devils advocate; but once my ire is up about creationism, I find it hard to stop.
Superstrings, hyper inflation, etc. sure are popular with people who know more physics than me, but to a semi-layman, they look a lot like the standard model is getting a bit long in the tooth.
I actually buy the gas giants though. My limited intuition tells me gas giants should be predominant in a galaxy being formed by uh, slowly condensing gas. In any case, enormous gas giants are the only type of extra-solar planets we have any ability to detect currently, so the fact that that's all we've found isn't so surprising. There still may be plenty of small rockies out there to support sci-fi colinization fantasies (which is the whole point, right?).
I had an astronomy professor named Wolman in college who would put forth the "Wolman model" as an alternative to the standard model. I could never entirely tell if he took it seriously, or if it was just meant to point out alternatives were possible. I don't remember all the details, but I think it was an infinite, extremely (if not infinitely) old, cartesian universe where the vast majority of matter was non-radiating particles, all pretty close to 1 cm in size. IIRC, that size was necessary to explain the uniformity of cosmic background radiation as a diffraction effect on the light of very distant stars. We called it the "Marbles model" behind his back. Anyway, more than one honors thesis was earned fitting some piece of evidence into the Wolman model. I switched to Math before I got that far, but helped a friend optimize his computer program to model galaxy formation from gas produced via relativistic marble collisions. Honestly, the model was awfully crude, my help got it from two months of runtime (his thesis was due in one) to a couple processor-days on a pair of brand-new hot-shit 386s. Supposedly there was an A in the senior physics seminar for anyone who could find an unresolvable problem in the model. The point being that "unresolvable" is largely a matter of how far you're willing to bend over backwards, and that the same is true of the standard model.
Actually, the older programmers I've worked with indeed produced less bugs on first writing. But their code was behind schedule and unmaintainable. One wanted to keep learning new things, so he would use the 5 latest new things he wanted to learn, regardless of project requirements. Another had so much experience it crippled him. Every project could be (over) designed as a combination of things he'd done before, so the simplest dynamic web page became a pile of multiply inheriting objects comunicating via message queues and persisting themselves to a relational database. To another, everything looked like old hat, so he didn't bother designing anything, he just dove in to coding. In each case, their experience almost, but not quite, let them get away with their faults.
Experience is great, and you need it to avoid some pitfalls. But having it doesn't mean you will avoid them, and experience has a few pitfalls of it's own.
Enthusiasm is the advantage of the young. I myself am a lousy programmer when I'm bored. More experienced programmers may be able to solve a problem more easily, but younger programmers haven't already felt the thrill of solving it a couple hundred times.
When I was a young programmer, I'd come home at night and write other programs for the hell of it. These days, I'll sometimes stay at work late (knowing I'll get chewed out by my wife) if I'm working on something satisfying. In 10 or 20 years, I just can't see coding being one of the top 2 or 3 things capturing my interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, it seems to me that in ANY system you are free to break the laws if you are willing to take the consequences. You can speak out against the government in an oppressive dictatorship if you are willing to get shot, but I wouldn't call it freedom.
I firmly believe that if it doesn't affect someone else, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want. Which should make clear my position on people in their own homes having sex, getting high, listening to country music, etc.
My frustration about building permits is that a lot of people who call themselves libertarians like to argue from this priciple to a lot of things that do affect others, even though they do it on their own land. Building unsafe housing, filling wetlands, dumping toxic waste. Sure we can just hold them responsible for their actions. (Unless they're already dead). And I'm sure we wont find out that a lot of people turn out to be irresponsible, and just figure they won't get caught (at least not before they're already dead.)
You can own your property. It's a nice feature of our society. In exchange for this nice feature, if you want to do something that's going to affect your property for longer than it's going to be your property, we'd like some say in it. If you wan't to do something on it that's going to affect others or their property, we'd like some say in it. If that's not "really" owning your property, sorry, tough luck.
There are some people out there who insist they should have a say in it even if what you're doing won't affect anyone else or their property. These are known as "shitheads".
You have my apologies, I really didn't mean to offend you, and I retract the bullshitting charge. I was just trying to point out that by getting your infratructure (water) by private means, you are atypical. I meant no disrespect to your way of life. I've lived in rural areas. Now I live in a small city. Both have their attractions. I share your dislike of suburbs. If I can see my neighbors house, I want to walk to the grocery store.
I certainly realize that there are private roads. But do you expect anyone to build a second road alongside the first? Would you want them to? It sounds like you're having trouble getting even one company to close the last mile for high speed data. I don't think you'll get enough to do so for healthy competition. It's hard to get the right-of-ways for cable laying without government help. Verizon didn't. So I think they should share their cables. Is a few extra cables running down the poles bad? No. But why should they share the poles? Six sets of poles is at least a little bad. And it won't happen. Nobody is going to want to pay the extreme costs of cable laying just so that when they're done they can begin an uphill fight against the established carrier. This is why it is called a natural monopoly. It's a market in which a monopoly will naturally form.
It's a tough question how to handle such situations, but saying "keep the government out, the market solves everything" is not going to do it (IMO). And the government is arleady in it. All those existing cables were run with government support, across public lands. (And frequently across private lands with government coercion of the owners). I think "wire-providing" companies should be restricted from using their monopoly in that market to prevent competion in the "services provided by wire" market. Just like I think operating systems companies should be restricted from preventing competition in the application software market.
I like competition. I think it's great. But I don't think a completely free market automatically produces it,
So forget your water, you're unusual (and, I suspect, bullshitting). I'd ask about electricity, but you'd probaly go on about your quaint little windmill. Do you have a private, unregulated road system provider? Do they have competition?
It only makes sense to run a single road, fiber line, (water and sewer in cities), electrical line to each location. To completely beat the dead horse, these are "natural monopolies". I don't want 50 fiber lines, roads or sewer lines coming to my house. I also don't want the fact that one company owns the local coax to mean that I have to buy my broadband from them despite the fact that they have crappy customer service, and make me pay extra because I don't buy TV from them too. But that's where I am now. I pay through the nose for a bunch of stuff I don't want, but don't have a choice because they control the one little bit I do want (the coax).
Fiber, like roads, power lines, and sewers, is infrastructure. It should be treated as infrastructure like the rest. i.e. run by a part of the government service, or by companies so comprehensively regulated they might as well be. (My electricity comes from a "private" company, but they understand the deal well enough: the company is named "Public Service")
Right. When you want to build something on your property, it makes sense that you be subject to restrictions regarding its impact on others. Generally, these restrictions take the form of requiring you to get a "building permit". Glad you agree with them.
More broadly, it always pisses me off when people say "It's my property, I should bea ble to do whatever I want." Go look at the deed that says it's your property. Determine the issuing authority. Unless it says "God Almighty", I think someone can tell you what you can and can't do on your property.
"Letters used frequently together are placed so that they are 'logically' next to eachother."
No. Qwerty is designed specifically so that letters commonly used together are seperated horizontally.
"Most commonly used letters are placed on the 'home' and top row and least commonly used letters are placed on the bottom."
Definitely No. Right index finger home key 'J' is third most uncommon letter. (beaten by 'q' (top row) and 'z'), home key 'k' is fith most uncommon. Their are 8 home keys, and they contain only 2 of the top 8 letters, about what you'd expect assigning the keys randomly. Don't even get me started on semi-colon.
Beyond seperating common pairs horizontally, I don't know what factors went into designing Querty, but speeding up typing does not appear to have been one of them. While the designer may not have been trying to slow you down, he wasn't trying to speed you up, and he was trying to do other things. From where I sit (using his stupid layout) that amounts to "Designed to slow you down".
Your computer requested it. Any more questions?
Coins flow out through merchants. They flow around until they wind up in jars on bedside tables, and it is from here that they go back to banks. The merchants aren't in any danger of maximizing a net coin input, they're trying to minimize their net coin output, reducing the chances of running out and/or the number of trips they need to make to the bank.
"That's not an unreasonable argument. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book called "On Certainty" making a very similar argument against Cartesian philosophy. You might like to read it; it's probably at your local Barnes & Noble."
See, this is my point. I have read it. It's boring as hell, and it doesn't add anything to the response to Descartes I though of right off the bat.
"You might also like to read what other people have had to say about in response to that argument, or about what the implications of that argument might be. But I don't think 'The Matrix', entertaining as it is, moves the discussion forward at all."
Or I might want to think for myself. I don't think "The Matrix" moves the discussion forward amonst people who are already familiar with the ideas, but it certainly does amongst those who aren't. And I don't think being familiar with twenty peoples writings about each others writings moves anything forward for anyone. It just lets you think you look smart while you actually look like an elitist asshole. I too took a bunch of philosophy in college, until I decided it was fun, but basically pointless. I can sum up what you'll learn from Descarte, Wittgenstein, and the whole philosophy of mind bunch in a quick Socratic dialog:
"You know, you can't really know anything, because even when you're sure, you can't be sure you're sure."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Well, when you think you know something, it's only because you think you know about knowing things, but you could be wrong about the whole deal."
"Okay, I can see that. What's the point?"
"Uh, nothing really, but it's kind of weird."
"Yeah I guess. Listen, I gotta go..."
"But wait! Kripke's reformulation of Wittgensteins third assertion has significant impact on the challenge of the neo-Cartesian... Well, you're probably not familiar with Kripke, are you?" <now he thinks I'm smart>
"No, not really." <elitist asshole>
The California one says that you can't measure their speed by how long it takes them to go a certain distance, you have to use radar, laser, etc. Which seems kind of stupid.
Even if you use radar, the speed limit had to be set as a result of an engineering study to determine the approptiate limit. i.e. It was set in the normal way, you didn't lower it yesterday because you felt like catching some speeders.
Still nothing about having to wave big red flags and shout "Hey there's a cop over here! The words 'Speed Limit' have meaning!"
I waded through a bunch of it, and saw nothing to support your point. Some states appear to have laws restricting the ability of the police to enforce limits lower than those posted (it was raining so you should have gone even slower), or preventing limits lower than those justified by safety concerns, etc.
I saw no mention of the cops being unable to use intelligence (hiding behind bushes) in enforcing the law.
Please provide a reference that is actually related.
"Well, curiously enough, it does make you think you know more about philosophy. I don't mean to be an "elitist asshole" here, but if you pick up even a short history of Western philosophy (e.g., the books by Kenny or Magee)"
You know, I think I'd rather pick up "The Matrix". I don't think even you would be interested in a movie version of any particular history of Western philosophy. (Unless there's a good nude scene with Wollstonecraft of course...)
But really, I think the "elitist asshole" thing comes from your looking down on people who dare to discuss philosophy in a context ("The Matrix") that a lot of other people are familiar with. I think you've spent a lot of time studying the subject, and don't want to admit to yourself that the time was wasted because there aren't really any answers, and the questions can be fairly clearly presented, even to lay people, by a movie that spends most of its time on Kung-Fu.
Philosophy is a whole bunch of speculating about answerless questions. Anyone can do it. Some people don't like that, so they pretend the important part is not the speculation, but familiarity with the speculations of others. Which turns things on it's head. Rather than responding to someones mention of Plato's cave by saying "No, no, this Descartes quotation is more on point", a good philosopher should be able talk about the ideas in "The Matrix" intelligently.
So:
Descartes is more on point because he imagined being deceived by a malevolent entity rather than by the nature of perception itself. e.g. Even if you assume you are capable of perceiveing reality, you cannot be sure you actually are. This is an interesting idea, which you can think about for as long as you want, and even write big, hard to understand books about (despite the fact that it's not very hard to understand), but eventually you should get on with your life, because unless someone offers you the red and blue pills, it just doesn't matter.
I read the Descartes a long while ago now, so perhaps you can point out some other interesting ideas of his. If you can cast the relevant thought experiments in Matrix terms, I'll think you might have promise as a philosopher. If you insist they can only be grasped by someone who has studied the original Descartes, I'll think your an elitist asshole. (And then I'll point out that you undoubtably read it in translation, which really isn't acceptable if you expect me to deign to discuss it with you...)
They don't want to record the huge number of hours cops spend driving or sitting around with nothing happening.
The cop is going to turn on the recorder anytime something interesting might happen, because it's going to help him 99% of the time. And because if he doesn't turn on the recorder, he knows that eventualy a lawer is going to ask him why.
What you said.
I saw a demo of a military-grade pc at a trade show once. They had a nice little display showing drive seeks, reads and writes. The guy set up some big file copy, so the display was going nuts, then calmly climbed up on the desk and kicked the thing off. Three foot drop to the cement floor and a loud crash (this thing was heavy). The drive just didn't care.
Of course, they don't have to turn it on at all. I suspect the cheif motivation for this system is letting the cop prove things did in fact go down the way he says. For purposes both of defending himself and of convicting you. No more your word against his. Of course, if it is your word against his, and he didn't turn the recorder on, or the tape got lost, your lawyer has some good material to work with.
Offtopic sig response:
What part of the second amendment would you prefer to omit?
How would this get you out of tickets? I wasn't aware that speeding was legal if the cop hides behind bushes. Or even if he isn't there at all, for that matter.
That's really funny. "trendy ways to fudge numbers" Lol. So now everybody who actually wants the right answer uses the sampled numbers.
And it's not changing the number of citizens in a voting district, and certainly not the number of voters who show up on election day. It's changing the number of congressmen coming from particular states. The republicans looked at the raw count, and at the right answer, and decided they liked the wrong answer better.
"No less so since the new witch trials began"
"They have not begin, sorry. There are not even any plans to begin them."
Exactly! There aren't any plans to have any trials at all, they're just locking people up.
I expect the legal definition of spam would address all the issues you mention quite precisely, if perhaps somewhat arbitrarily.
"you've expressly agreed to receiving particular types of email from a party (without commenting on other types) and they send you another type?"
Unsolicited.
"Or a mail that could be construed as being of either type?"
Could be construed as being unsolicited. Get a court to decide if you care enough.
"What if you've agreed to receiving any email from a company, and you receive one from another company in the same group?"
Did I agree to receive email from the "group"? No. Unsolicited.
"Or from someone acting as their agent, or subcontractor, or who's taken over their business?"
All of those would be from the company, solicited.
"And this `existing trading relationship' - what types of email should that justify sending you? And for how long after any contact from your are they justified in sending you email?"
Here's where I expect the law to be precise, but somewhat arbitrary. Take Colorados anti-telemarketer law (an opt-in no-call list) for example. If you do business with a company, they can call you as much as they want about anything for 6 months, or until you tell them to stop.
I think the moral line is fairly narrow, I expect the legal line would be downright sharp. If it's not sharp enough, that's why we have courts.
All that said, I really don't care about the grey areas. If I can stop getting bulk email from companies I've never contacted or even heard of, much less done business with, I'll consider the spam war won. I've never given anyone permission to send bulk email to my current address, and I get hundreds of spam a day.
Oh, come on, it's not a hard question at all. Your triple negative phrasing is a bit confusing though, so I'm going to assume someone is sending an email based on the situations you describe, and mark them solicited or unsolicited:
"That you expressly asked for this particular piece of email?"
Solicited.
"That you expressly asked for emails of this type from this party?"
Solicited.
"That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get emails of this type?"
Unsolicited.
"That you expressly asked for any and all emails from this party?"
Solicited.
"That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get any email from them?"
Unsolicited.
"Etc. Etc."
Unsolicited.
If I have asked you to send me a particular email, or I have asked you to send me any class of email which covers that particular email, that email is solicited. If I haven't asked, it's unsolicited.
There aren't any "levels" of solicited. I either asked you to send me the mail or I didn't. If I didn't expressly ask not to have my wallet taken, is it theft?
"Thanks for your input. The silver market is a extremely stable market, but don't let me stop you from doing you own research."
The point is I'm willing to stipulate that the silver market is rock solid. If I wanted the most stable investment I could possibly find, I might consider buying a bunch of silver and burying it in the back yard.
I fully expect inflation will cause FRNs I have today to be worth less in the future in terms of silver, milk, housing, or whatever. This is why I would consider burying silver before considering burying FRNs. But how much less will it be worth, and how soon? Your currency looks to me like it's going to be worth half what I paid for it (100% inflation) the moment it hits my hand.
Banks will make more money off me than you? Lets see, my bank will pay me to keep my money there, or they will reverse the deal, and charge me in exchange for giving me access now to what I'll save in the future. The difference in the interest rate they'll pay and the interest rate they'll charge is about 2% (YMMV). So they make more money off me than you because I do business with them, and not you, but in percentage terms, they want 2% in exchange for giving me considerable flexibility about when I spend vs. save my money. You want 50% for, uh, what exactly?
It's not a currency unless it's widely accepted (consult the definition of "currency"). The basic question relevant to currency is "With which one can I buy a gallon of milk?". Hell, since you're so concerned about inflation, I'll even throw in "Which one do I expect will buy me more milk in five years?" Since I don't think any reasonable person would expect the dollar to undergo 100% inflation in the next five years, FRNs win.
So it looks to me just like selling silver at a really bad price. You justify by saying it's a currency, and quickly redirecting discussion to the supposed problems with FRNs. I call that a scam.
"This is particularly true when they are competing with ebay which really doesn't have any pricing mechanism except for the pure market-driven auction one."
Of course EBay has a pricing mechanism. There is a fixed cost to list an auction. You seem to be under the impression that EBay sells "stuff". They don't. They sell auction administration (and auction visibility). It is only in hosting other peoples selling of stuff that Amazon is competing with ebay, and in this arena both companies are providing certain amounts of service (and size of customer base) and taking a certain cut. The economics here are no more classical than any other retailers offering goods from various wholesalers. It had better not be too hard to run Amazon like a business, because it is a business.
And while we're at it, if JoesWebSiteOfRetailFun.com figures out how to do things slightly cheaper than Amazon, Amazon is not screwed. Name recognition is important. On the web it's huge. Nobody has heard of Joes. (Never mind that Joes would also have to do all the things that let Amazon be as cheap as it is, including economies of scale.)
I think I understand why you're no longer an economist. No, scratch that, as far as I can tell economists just make stuff up anyway...
"Partial-backing with value is infinitely better than zero-backing with debt."
No. Both backing methods under consideration involve risk. The value you should ascribe to FRNs depends on your belief about the future chances that the US Government will remain stable and continue to pay its debts, the chances that people will trust the US Government when they print dollars.
The value you should ascribe to your currency depends upon what you believe about the future value of silver. I don't know lots about the silver market, but the future value of silver sounds likely to be fairly stable to me, (even more so than the US government) so that sounds good. But wait! You want me to accept that your currency is worth twice as much as the silver I can get for it? OK, so I have to take my expectations about the furture value of silver, and average them with predictions about another value: The chances that people will continue to trust a new startup that says this is worth money for no good reason (we've already accounted for the silver). Based on that, I'd say the appropriate value of your currency is pretty close to the value of the silver in my pocket. I'll take the greenbacks.
If you want to start a new currency based on silver, I'd recommend detaching it from the dollar, and I'd name the basic denomination the "ounce". See where I'm going here? Once you get things going, you might even be able to get people trusting "warehouse receipts" ala Silver Certificates. But they'll need to trust you to pay for some reason. (Being a national government helps here, but Big banks used to do it too) I understand you'll have a hard time making a profit with this scheme, but frankly, when I'm deciding what currency to use, your making a profit is not exactly a high priority.
You obviously rattled that off in 30 seconds, since you didn't think about it much. Suppose you need a new big iron system for order processing? Sorry, I can't coherently imagine that; order processing just isn't a big deal. Let's assume we're talking instead about a task that would require a big machine, and look at your concerns:
1) Still need a central server for storage/backup
There might be interesting applications of grid computing for distributed, redundant storage, but the classic applications would be oriented toward massing processor power, not storage.
2) One server needs one UPS, 1000 workstations...
Well, I've got a UPS on my workstation anyway, but even if you don't this is just one variation of:
3) Worsktations are flaky...
One workstation is flaky. A couple thousand are rock-solid, if your grid software is any good at all. You hope everybody doesn't run Windows Update (or do some other maintenance) all at once? That seems pretty unlikely, and in any case I hope you don't ever do maintenance on your single server, since it will obviously be all at once.
I actually worked somewhere that used a "grid" like technique for animation rendering. Every workstation had a background app running. If your machine was idle for a little while, this app start up, ask the "NetRender" machine for a frame, and get to work. If it finished the frame it would send it in and ask for another. If it didn't (you came back from lunch, a janitor yanked out the power cord, whatever) NetRender didn't care. Once it had passed out all the frames in an animation, it would just start again at the begining, passing out the ones it hadn't gotten back. Was there "painstaking inefficiency"? Well, at the end of the rendering the last job set up for a particular night, almost every machine in the shop was presumably racing to finnish the same frame, but who cares? They weren't doing anything else anyway. (actually, I think NetRender had some further inteligence so it didn't pass out the same frame more than X times a minute)
4) The corporate network is now a bottleneck
Something is always the bottleneck. A good way to decide whether grid computing is apropriate to a task is to ask whether your statement sounds like a pro or a con.
I actually figured you were just playing devils advocate; but once my ire is up about creationism, I find it hard to stop.
Superstrings, hyper inflation, etc. sure are popular with people who know more physics than me, but to a semi-layman, they look a lot like the standard model is getting a bit long in the tooth.
I actually buy the gas giants though. My limited intuition tells me gas giants should be predominant in a galaxy being formed by uh, slowly condensing gas. In any case, enormous gas giants are the only type of extra-solar planets we have any ability to detect currently, so the fact that that's all we've found isn't so surprising. There still may be plenty of small rockies out there to support sci-fi colinization fantasies (which is the whole point, right?).
I had an astronomy professor named Wolman in college who would put forth the "Wolman model" as an alternative to the standard model. I could never entirely tell if he took it seriously, or if it was just meant to point out alternatives were possible. I don't remember all the details, but I think it was an infinite, extremely (if not infinitely) old, cartesian universe where the vast majority of matter was non-radiating particles, all pretty close to 1 cm in size. IIRC, that size was necessary to explain the uniformity of cosmic background radiation as a diffraction effect on the light of very distant stars. We called it the "Marbles model" behind his back. Anyway, more than one honors thesis was earned fitting some piece of evidence into the Wolman model. I switched to Math before I got that far, but helped a friend optimize his computer program to model galaxy formation from gas produced via relativistic marble collisions. Honestly, the model was awfully crude, my help got it from two months of runtime (his thesis was due in one) to a couple processor-days on a pair of brand-new hot-shit 386s. Supposedly there was an A in the senior physics seminar for anyone who could find an unresolvable problem in the model. The point being that "unresolvable" is largely a matter of how far you're willing to bend over backwards, and that the same is true of the standard model.
Actually, the older programmers I've worked with indeed produced less bugs on first writing. But their code was behind schedule and unmaintainable. One wanted to keep learning new things, so he would use the 5 latest new things he wanted to learn, regardless of project requirements. Another had so much experience it crippled him. Every project could be (over) designed as a combination of things he'd done before, so the simplest dynamic web page became a pile of multiply inheriting objects comunicating via message queues and persisting themselves to a relational database. To another, everything looked like old hat, so he didn't bother designing anything, he just dove in to coding. In each case, their experience almost, but not quite, let them get away with their faults.
Experience is great, and you need it to avoid some pitfalls. But having it doesn't mean you will avoid them, and experience has a few pitfalls of it's own.
Enthusiasm is the advantage of the young. I myself am a lousy programmer when I'm bored. More experienced programmers may be able to solve a problem more easily, but younger programmers haven't already felt the thrill of solving it a couple hundred times.
When I was a young programmer, I'd come home at night and write other programs for the hell of it. These days, I'll sometimes stay at work late (knowing I'll get chewed out by my wife) if I'm working on something satisfying. In 10 or 20 years, I just can't see coding being one of the top 2 or 3 things capturing my interest.