"So this notion of people being unable to pay for private fire prevention is a non-starter. In practice, it's not an issue"
How about slumlords? Plenty of landlords own appartment buildings outright and absent government regulations would have no motivation to pay for fire protection. The tenants may well not have the money. Do we let them burn? Do we require the landlords to pay for protection? Is this somehow different from just taxing them? Your argument seems to be that pretty much everyone is going to pay, so the only effect I can see of not making it a tax is that the unscrupulous, and the stupid don't pay, and those that can't pay burn.
Thought provoked by slashdot post!?! Unheard of!:) In that case, I'll ramble on a bit more...
I'll certainly concede there may be valid models for providing protection services other than government. In the case of police/fire though, I must admit I'm a bit of a socialist. I think people should get police protection regardless of their pesonal ability to pay, which is difficult in a libertarian mode.
Basically, I think society should ensure that even the have-nots get a basically reasonable quality of life, whether they deserve it or not. This is not because I think it's the right thing to do so much as simple self-interest as one of the "haves". Example of why it's to the "haves" advantage to help out the "have-nots" range from higher crime rates during economic downturns up through the French Revolution.
I think I'm smarter and harder working than most, and I think I deserve a higher quality of life as a result. But I also recognize that much of my quality of life comes from living in a stable, reasonably equitable society.
I do share your preference for small decentralized governments, but I still think you need some more centralized authority since otherwise the haves just seperate themselves geographically from the have-nots (which they largely do anyway).
I guess my point is that we should recognize that one of the functions of government is to take some money from those that have it, and give it to those that don't. Besides national defense this is most of what our government does, but almost no one talks about it, at least not as a positive thing. The question is how much of it should be done, and as frequently happens, I don't like either of the extremes, i.e. communism or libertarianism.
"Do you really not see the difference? Companies don't use tanks; goverments do"
Exactly. And in the parent, you seemed to be complaining about the government monopoly on the right to use force and to tax. Without any taxes, you can't pay for a government (or, alternatively, AT&T can pay more for a government than you) In that instance, what's to stop AT&T from using tanks?
"If you don't subscribe in advance and they need to come put out your fire your insurance gets billed for the actual cost, which can be pretty substantial."
And if you have neither insurance nor money? Fires need to be put out lest they spread. Property taxes seem a reasonable way to pay for this. Nothing is stopping a particular municipality from using the funds thus collected to contract with a private company if they can provide better service and/or lower cost.
As for bake sales & charity auctions, my volunteer fire department certainly suplements its budget thus, but the bulk of it is one of the big ticket items on the budget every year at town meeting. You've got to sell a hell of a lot of cookies to buy a fire truck, so I'd be interested to see an example of a department entirely funded in this way.
Most local fire departments I am aware of recieve very little if any federal money. They do however recieve quite a bit of money from local property taxes. I aggree most of the 20,000+ will see the benefit of donating $20 each. So what happens when a fire starts at the house of someone who didn't give $20? Do you let it burn? What if it's next door to a lot of people who did donate, and you don't want it to jump to the next house? A property tax to support the fire department seems entirely reasonable to me. Everyone loves to rail against bureaucrats, but in fact, the combined salaries of every federal employee, bureaucrat or otherwise, makes up a tiny fraction of federal spending. The taxes you think are excessive, and the deficit spending which is just plain irresponsible go chiefly to fund actual doing of things. You may feel much of it is things the government shouldn't do, and I'll agree about some of it. Supporting a fire department by taxing the property it protects sounds pretty good to me though.
"One of those two types of entities has a territorial monopoly on the use of violence and the (perceived) right to tax. Spot the greater danger to your freedom."
Hmmm, yeah, lets break up that monopoly, good idea. Can't wait to see AT&T tanks rolling into my yard to announce their new mandatory local service rates. Well, OK, maybe that doesn't sound so good. I sure do hate that government monopoly though. I mean, it would be fine if only we had some ability to change its policies by voting or something...
And I have to pay for public schools despite having no school aged children. And I'm fine with that. You are not paying to educate your child. You and I are paying to ensure all children in our society have access to education.
Actually, I would be fine with saying "We as a society will provide X dollars per child in school" and letting them take those X dollars to any school that: A) accepts anyone who walks in the door. B) does not charge a single penny of tuition above X. C) conforms to all the same hiring rules and performance measures as the public schools.
But if you want to take your X dollars and get a discount on a private school others still couldn't afford, you can go jump in a lake.
Heck, if you want a refund of that portion of your taxes that goes to public schools while your children are in private schools, I'd probably even go along with that. You'll find it's not much money, as most of that school funding is coming from the majority of us without kids in school. Voucher proposals aren't about you getting your money back, they're about your taking my money to pay for a school I don't approve of.
"And we can't really find an answer to this question unless we compute the entire game tree of chess, but this is impossible, even if you used all the atoms in the Universe to track the nodes in your tree."
This point, that the full game tree of chess exceeds the number of atomes in the universe, comes up a lot. This is true, but misses the point that you don't need to store (or even compute) the entire game tree to solve chess. Once you know that a particular move leads to certain victory, you don't need to calculate any more moves from that position. Furthermore, you don't even need to store all the moves onward from that one if you can identify an algorithm that will produce them. Once solved, the vast, vast majority of positions can simply be marked "Deep Fritz can take it from here" (for example). Chess may well be solvable in the future, with the solution stored as a big opening book, some good heuristics to be applied to a reasonable-depth min-max tree, and a few million special cases.
"In a democracy, once people realize that they can abolish all taxes and/or grant themselves entitlements, the government collapses quickly."
Nice theory, but in reality many towns in New England have been run by pure Democracy for more than a hundred years now, and collapse does not appear to be on the horizon. See, you go to town meeting, and you have to pass a budget. Nobody "realizes they can abolish all taxes and/or grant themselves entitlements". Sure, there's that one guy who proposes abolishing taxes every time, but we just tell him he's an idiot. This year he couldn't get a second, so we didn't even have to waste the ususal couple minutes voting him down.
You could of course ask your representative what their position is; they may have abstained. Congressional procedures throw in a lot of (lame) quirks, but basically follow Roberts Rules of Order whereby voice votes are only conclusive if unanimous, so the procedure goes something like: Have a voice vote. If the outcome is clear, but not unanimous, the chair asks the dissenters to abstain. Have another voice vote. Dissenters can still refuse to abstain, and force a hand-count or whatever, but there's not much point except to be a pain in the ass. Don't you people go to town meeting?:)
The House and Senate chambers are in fact outfitted with exactly such a system.
If a bill is passed by voice vote, it tells you that there is a significant majority who support it and who think their support will do them more political damage than the other guys oposition. Voice votes don't pass bills that should fail, but they certainly conceal votes that (IMO) should be recorded.
Well, I don't think that's what I'm saying. I would like for them to not expect me to conform to every detail of their moral code, just as I do not expect them to conform to every detail of mine. I do want them to conform to the parts I consider non-negotiable (e.g. killing of innocents is wrong).
I don't think "there are no absolutes" is an accurate description of my moral code. The part of my comments that you seem to be translating thus I would phrase as "there no one moral code that is independent of a particular individual".
Within my own moral code there are many absolutes. For example: "Killing people for no reason is wrong" and "Any action which does no harm to others cannot be wrong". The latter is where I tend to get really annoyed at others who disagree and want me to comply to their code.
"First of all, who's imposing moral constraints on you? If you don't like the fact that Wal-Mart won't sell it, buy it elsewhere. No harder, and probably easier to get it online."
Understand post, then reply. I have no problem with Wal-Mart saying "we think this is immoral, we won't carry it". That's fine, no problem. My problem is with people who say "God says X is immoral" rather than "I say X is immoral.
"Secondly, how do we decide whose 'moral guidelines' are better? God's? Hitler's? Yours?" We, collectively, do not decide whose moral guidelines are better. Individuals do. I have decided mine are better. Hitler probably decided his were better. Luckily a lot of people disagreed with him. God does not have moral guidelines any more than unicorns and faries do.
You seem to think you have the truth about the unknowable, and that your moral code derives from a higher source than mine. Sounds pretty "holier-than-thou" to me. Other people think God's will has been plainly revealed to them too, yet for them it justifies entirely different things. Construct your idea of God apropriately, and you can in fact justify whatever you please. I do not believe in god(s). Therefore I believe your moral judgements are your own. You are responsible for them, and thus putting that responsibility on God is a "cop-out". As far as what has offended me in the past, it is not the beliefs of religious people, it is that I am expected to take their belief in God more seriously than a childs belief in Santa.
I don't feel I need complete knowledge of everything to assert that god does not exist, just as I do not need complete knowledge of of all parralel lines to assert that none of them meet. Quite simply, I do not believe god is possible. Obviously it matters a lot how you define the word "god". I'm assuming your definition includes the concept of omnipotence, which is sufficient for me, because I find omnipotence to be an inherently ridiculous concept. The classic "Can God create a rock he cannot lift?". So with respect to convincing me of the existence of God: 1) first define "God"; 2) then convince me a being that fits that definition even could exist. 3) Then you can try to convince me that beings existence is probable.
As to how you, I, or the DC sniper can prove our moral standard is valid: we can't. I am willing to act upon my moral standard anyway, as presumably are the collective citizenry of the DC area via law enforcement. I disagree with your assertion that I am claiming my opinion has more or less merit than someone elses. The DC snipers opinion on morals is as valid as mine, but that wouldn't slow me down a bit if I had the oportunity to stop him. I've found that when I think something is really beyond-the-pale immorral, most others aggree with me. On the other hand a lot of people seem to find a lot of things immoral that I do not. These people tend to be religious, and they tend to want me to conform to their moral standard.
"people do not like moral constraints being imposed on them, whether it be God doing it or Wal-Mart."
I impose my own moral constrains upon myself, thanks. I'm not very fond of others imposing their moral constraints upon me, but what really ticks me of is their ascribing those constraints to an invisible, unprovable super-being. That's a cop out. They're just dodging the responsibility for imposing *their* constraints, and assigning *their* constraints superior status. God can explain or justify anything, and hence explains and justifies nothing. A lot of people use God to justify some perfectly fine things, but if they'd have some guts and admit it is they themselves that are making the judgements, they might have a harder time justifying terrible things.
"With all due respect, I submit to you that absent God, there is no objective standard for ethics, or morality"
I submit to you that there is in fact no objective standard for morality. It might be nice if there were, but that doesn't make it so. Ascribing your own subjective morality to an unprovable higher power is just an excuse to inflict it on others without stepping up and taking responsibility for it yourself. I do not believe in God, yet I do my best to act morally, as my conscience dictates. If you do something I think is wrong, I will tell you *I* say that is wrong, and I will do what I can to stop you. I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear why you think it's challenging to be an atheist, but I'll tell you I agree. It is challenging. Self delusion is easy. Damn, that came off harsher than I intended. But I really hate the implication that atheists are immoral. All humanity are guided by our own conscience. Some of us claim the dictates of our conscience actually come from an invisible super-being, and are hence more important than everyone elses.
No, I'm sure they forge them by hand. Of course they buy them. Either directly or from someone else who bought them. Probably a few of them steal them from someone who bought them. Numerous studies have shown rates of gun violence correlate closely with the number of guns around. But we'd better not try to reduce the number of guns around, or we won't have a well regulated militia! All those handguns are essential for defending ourselves against oppressive governments who have freakin bombers and tanks.
Fair enough. I guess I just wouldn't lump "good old fasioned databases" in with "signal processing". SETI is definitely the latter, but I'd say not the former. While the data is stored until processed, I'd imagine it's dropped once found to be nothing but noise. The case I'm thinking of (the one I work with) is when you have a whole bunch o' data, and you want to find all the records (or more to the point, combinations of records) that meet some complex criteria; Then you want to do some slightly different criteria; Then some totaly different criteria; etc. until the imagination of your clients is exausted (never). If you build the engine right, the complex criteria aren't, and its all about how fast you can load up records, but the "cobinations of" thing (at least in my case) hoses the aproach of just paralellizing the bottleneck away.
Where I work we do some frankly amazing things along these lines, and peoples jaws drop. Then, invariably, they ask what kind of amazing processing power is behind it. I smile, and explain that the data box is a dual processor, Mhz only slightly faster than the one on their desk. They conclude our software is godlike, and thus that I am a programmer of mad skilz beyond their wildest dreams. Not that it's not true:), but at this point, I see little reason to mention the 20 terrabytes of fast RAID and several gigs of RAM that are the real story.
Basically, it slightly peeves me that huge-processing power systems get all the press, when for a lot of problems, you can design algorithms that let you throw disk & memory at the problem instead of CPU. Throwing CPU at a problem means throwing bucks at it by orders of magnitude versus storage.
Granted, the people building the system in the article are probably no dummies, so they probably really do have problems that must be attacked with CPU, but I've seen plenty of dummies who didn't and went that way anyway because they think that's the only measure of computer power.
"good old-fashioned databases and signal processing - when you have hundreds of terabytes of data that you wish to mine for interesting patterns, speed matters"
I agree with most of your points, but as someone with only a few dozen terabytes to worry about, i can say, speed does matter. DISK speed. MEMORY access speed. With that much data, Cpu speed beyond "decent" is really only useful as something you can trade for less disk access via compression, and even that hits a wall pretty fast. Supercomputers like this one are great for big calculation; not so much for big data.
$4000 in fines, drug testing, probation for a 1/2 ounce of pot. Sounds about right, if not slightly harsh. Show me a non-violent first time offender accused of a misdemeanor who was willing to plead no-contest and got it considerably worse, and you can start to argue there is a two-teir system. But that's not the point. I won't disagree if you say that the rich & powerful tend to come out better in the legal system. You said "In light of the 'important persons act'..." implying that this is policy; that there is an actual law to this effect. That's bull.
Slashdot Mirror
"So this notion of people being unable to pay for private fire prevention is a non-starter. In practice, it's not an issue"
How about slumlords? Plenty of landlords own appartment buildings outright and absent government regulations would have no motivation to pay for fire protection. The tenants may well not have the money. Do we let them burn? Do we require the landlords to pay for protection? Is this somehow different from just taxing them? Your argument seems to be that pretty much everyone is going to pay, so the only effect I can see of not making it a tax is that the unscrupulous, and the stupid don't pay, and those that can't pay burn.
Thought provoked by slashdot post!?! Unheard of! :) In that case, I'll ramble on a bit more...
I'll certainly concede there may be valid models for providing protection services other than government. In the case of police/fire though, I must admit I'm a bit of a socialist. I think people should get police protection regardless of their pesonal ability to pay, which is difficult in a libertarian mode.
Basically, I think society should ensure that even the have-nots get a basically reasonable quality of life, whether they deserve it or not. This is not because I think it's the right thing to do so much as simple self-interest as one of the "haves". Example of why it's to the "haves" advantage to help out the "have-nots" range from higher crime rates during economic downturns up through the French Revolution.
I think I'm smarter and harder working than most, and I think I deserve a higher quality of life as a result. But I also recognize that much of my quality of life comes from living in a stable, reasonably equitable society.
I do share your preference for small decentralized governments, but I still think you need some more centralized authority since otherwise the haves just seperate themselves geographically from the have-nots (which they largely do anyway).
I guess my point is that we should recognize that one of the functions of government is to take some money from those that have it, and give it to those that don't. Besides national defense this is most of what our government does, but almost no one talks about it, at least not as a positive thing. The question is how much of it should be done, and as frequently happens, I don't like either of the extremes, i.e. communism or libertarianism.
"Do you really not see the difference? Companies don't use tanks; goverments do"
Exactly. And in the parent, you seemed to be complaining about the government monopoly on the right to use force and to tax. Without any taxes, you can't pay for a government (or, alternatively, AT&T can pay more for a government than you) In that instance, what's to stop AT&T from using tanks?
"If you don't subscribe in advance and they need to come put out your fire your insurance gets billed for the actual cost, which can be pretty substantial."
And if you have neither insurance nor money? Fires need to be put out lest they spread. Property taxes seem a reasonable way to pay for this. Nothing is stopping a particular municipality from using the funds thus collected to contract with a private company if they can provide better service and/or lower cost.
As for bake sales & charity auctions, my volunteer fire department certainly suplements its budget thus, but the bulk of it is one of the big ticket items on the budget every year at town meeting. You've got to sell a hell of a lot of cookies to buy a fire truck, so I'd be interested to see an example of a department entirely funded in this way.
Most local fire departments I am aware of recieve very little if any federal money. They do however recieve quite a bit of money from local property taxes. I aggree most of the 20,000+ will see the benefit of donating $20 each. So what happens when a fire starts at the house of someone who didn't give $20? Do you let it burn? What if it's next door to a lot of people who did donate, and you don't want it to jump to the next house? A property tax to support the fire department seems entirely reasonable to me.
Everyone loves to rail against bureaucrats, but in fact, the combined salaries of every federal employee, bureaucrat or otherwise, makes up a tiny fraction of federal spending. The taxes you think are excessive, and the deficit spending which is just plain irresponsible go chiefly to fund actual doing of things. You may feel much of it is things the government shouldn't do, and I'll agree about some of it. Supporting a fire department by taxing the property it protects sounds pretty good to me though.
"One of those two types of entities has a territorial monopoly on the use of violence and the (perceived) right to tax. Spot the greater danger to your freedom."
Hmmm, yeah, lets break up that monopoly, good idea. Can't wait to see AT&T tanks rolling into my yard to announce their new mandatory local service rates. Well, OK, maybe that doesn't sound so good. I sure do hate that government monopoly though. I mean, it would be fine if only we had some ability to change its policies by voting or something...
Not without equipment they don't.
And I have to pay for public schools despite having no school aged children. And I'm fine with that. You are not paying to educate your child. You and I are paying to ensure all children in our society have access to education.
Actually, I would be fine with saying "We as a society will provide X dollars per child in school" and letting them take those X dollars to any school that:
A) accepts anyone who walks in the door.
B) does not charge a single penny of tuition above X.
C) conforms to all the same hiring rules and performance measures as the public schools.
But if you want to take your X dollars and get a discount on a private school others still couldn't afford, you can go jump in a lake.
Heck, if you want a refund of that portion of your taxes that goes to public schools while your children are in private schools, I'd probably even go along with that. You'll find it's not much money, as most of that school funding is coming from the majority of us without kids in school. Voucher proposals aren't about you getting your money back, they're about your taking my money to pay for a school I don't approve of.
"And we can't really find an answer to this question unless we compute the entire game tree of chess, but this is impossible, even if you used all the atoms in the Universe to track the nodes in your tree."
This point, that the full game tree of chess exceeds the number of atomes in the universe, comes up a lot. This is true, but misses the point that you don't need to store (or even compute) the entire game tree to solve chess. Once you know that a particular move leads to certain victory, you don't need to calculate any more moves from that position. Furthermore, you don't even need to store all the moves onward from that one if you can identify an algorithm that will produce them. Once solved, the vast, vast majority of positions can simply be marked "Deep Fritz can take it from here" (for example). Chess may well be solvable in the future, with the solution stored as a big opening book, some good heuristics to be applied to a reasonable-depth min-max tree, and a few million special cases.
"You mean anecdotal, not empirical. Shithead."
No he doesn't, vulgarian.
Anecdotal: "I played white last week and kicked the guys ass"
Empirical: "Examining all recorded tournament games at the master level and above, players playing white win far more frequently."
Proof: "UberFritz version 5000 has examined all possible braches of the game tree, and white can force a win in 243 moves."
"In a democracy, once people realize that they can abolish all taxes and/or grant themselves entitlements, the government collapses quickly."
Nice theory, but in reality many towns in New England have been run by pure Democracy for more than a hundred years now, and collapse does not appear to be on the horizon. See, you go to town meeting, and you have to pass a budget. Nobody "realizes they can abolish all taxes and/or grant themselves entitlements". Sure, there's that one guy who proposes abolishing taxes every time, but we just tell him he's an idiot. This year he couldn't get a second, so we didn't even have to waste the ususal couple minutes voting him down.
You could of course ask your representative what their position is; they may have abstained. Congressional procedures throw in a lot of (lame) quirks, but basically follow Roberts Rules of Order whereby voice votes are only conclusive if unanimous, so the procedure goes something like: Have a voice vote. If the outcome is clear, but not unanimous, the chair asks the dissenters to abstain. Have another voice vote. Dissenters can still refuse to abstain, and force a hand-count or whatever, but there's not much point except to be a pain in the ass. :)
Don't you people go to town meeting?
The House and Senate chambers are in fact outfitted with exactly such a system.
If a bill is passed by voice vote, it tells you that there is a significant majority who support it and who think their support will do them more political damage than the other guys oposition. Voice votes don't pass bills that should fail, but they certainly conceal votes that (IMO) should be recorded.
Well, I don't think that's what I'm saying. I would like for them to not expect me to conform to every detail of their moral code, just as I do not expect them to conform to every detail of mine. I do want them to conform to the parts I consider non-negotiable (e.g. killing of innocents is wrong).
I don't think "there are no absolutes" is an accurate description of my moral code. The part of my comments that you seem to be translating thus I would phrase as "there no one moral code that is independent of a particular individual".
Within my own moral code there are many absolutes. For example: "Killing people for no reason is wrong" and "Any action which does no harm to others cannot be wrong". The latter is where I tend to get really annoyed at others who disagree and want me to comply to their code.
"First of all, who's imposing moral constraints on you? If you don't like the fact that Wal-Mart won't sell it, buy it elsewhere. No harder, and probably easier to get it online."
Understand post, then reply. I have no problem with Wal-Mart saying "we think this is immoral, we won't carry it". That's fine, no problem. My problem is with people who say "God says X is immoral" rather than "I say X is immoral.
"Secondly, how do we decide whose 'moral guidelines' are better? God's? Hitler's? Yours?"
We, collectively, do not decide whose moral guidelines are better. Individuals do. I have decided mine are better. Hitler probably decided his were better. Luckily a lot of people disagreed with him. God does not have moral guidelines any more than unicorns and faries do.
You seem to think you have the truth about the unknowable, and that your moral code derives from a higher source than mine. Sounds pretty "holier-than-thou" to me. Other people think God's will has been plainly revealed to them too, yet for them it justifies entirely different things. Construct your idea of God apropriately, and you can in fact justify whatever you please. I do not believe in god(s). Therefore I believe your moral judgements are your own. You are responsible for them, and thus putting that responsibility on God is a "cop-out". As far as what has offended me in the past, it is not the beliefs of religious people, it is that I am expected to take their belief in God more seriously than a childs belief in Santa.
I don't feel I need complete knowledge of everything to assert that god does not exist, just as I do not need complete knowledge of of all parralel lines to assert that none of them meet. Quite simply, I do not believe god is possible. Obviously it matters a lot how you define the word "god". I'm assuming your definition includes the concept of omnipotence, which is sufficient for me, because I find omnipotence to be an inherently ridiculous concept. The classic "Can God create a rock he cannot lift?". So with respect to convincing me of the existence of God: 1) first define "God"; 2) then convince me a being that fits that definition even could exist. 3) Then you can try to convince me that beings existence is probable.
As to how you, I, or the DC sniper can prove our moral standard is valid: we can't. I am willing to act upon my moral standard anyway, as presumably are the collective citizenry of the DC area via law enforcement. I disagree with your assertion that I am claiming my opinion has more or less merit than someone elses. The DC snipers opinion on morals is as valid as mine, but that wouldn't slow me down a bit if I had the oportunity to stop him. I've found that when I think something is really beyond-the-pale immorral, most others aggree with me. On the other hand a lot of people seem to find a lot of things immoral that I do not. These people tend to be religious, and they tend to want me to conform to their moral standard.
"people do not like moral constraints being imposed on them, whether it be God doing it or Wal-Mart."
I impose my own moral constrains upon myself, thanks. I'm not very fond of others imposing their moral constraints upon me, but what really ticks me of is their ascribing those constraints to an invisible, unprovable super-being. That's a cop out. They're just dodging the responsibility for imposing *their* constraints, and assigning *their* constraints superior status. God can explain or justify anything, and hence explains and justifies nothing. A lot of people use God to justify some perfectly fine things, but if they'd have some guts and admit it is they themselves that are making the judgements, they might have a harder time justifying terrible things.
"With all due respect, I submit to you that absent God, there is no objective standard for ethics, or morality"
I submit to you that there is in fact no objective standard for morality. It might be nice if there were, but that doesn't make it so. Ascribing your own subjective morality to an unprovable higher power is just an excuse to inflict it on others without stepping up and taking responsibility for it yourself. I do not believe in God, yet I do my best to act morally, as my conscience dictates. If you do something I think is wrong, I will tell you *I* say that is wrong, and I will do what I can to stop you.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear why you think it's challenging to be an atheist, but I'll tell you I agree. It is challenging. Self delusion is easy.
Damn, that came off harsher than I intended. But I really hate the implication that atheists are immoral. All humanity are guided by our own conscience. Some of us claim the dictates of our conscience actually come from an invisible super-being, and are hence more important than everyone elses.
You managed it even before your post began:
"by Anonymous Coward"
No, I'm sure they forge them by hand. Of course they buy them. Either directly or from someone else who bought them. Probably a few of them steal them from someone who bought them. Numerous studies have shown rates of gun violence correlate closely with the number of guns around. But we'd better not try to reduce the number of guns around, or we won't have a well regulated militia! All those handguns are essential for defending ourselves against oppressive governments who have freakin bombers and tanks.
Fair enough. I guess I just wouldn't lump "good old fasioned databases" in with "signal processing". SETI is definitely the latter, but I'd say not the former. While the data is stored until processed, I'd imagine it's dropped once found to be nothing but noise. The case I'm thinking of (the one I work with) is when you have a whole bunch o' data, and you want to find all the records (or more to the point, combinations of records) that meet some complex criteria; Then you want to do some slightly different criteria; Then some totaly different criteria; etc. until the imagination of your clients is exausted (never). If you build the engine right, the complex criteria aren't, and its all about how fast you can load up records, but the "cobinations of" thing (at least in my case) hoses the aproach of just paralellizing the bottleneck away.
:), but at this point, I see little reason to mention the 20 terrabytes of fast RAID and several gigs of RAM that are the real story.
Where I work we do some frankly amazing things along these lines, and peoples jaws drop. Then, invariably, they ask what kind of amazing processing power is behind it. I smile, and explain that the data box is a dual processor, Mhz only slightly faster than the one on their desk. They conclude our software is godlike, and thus that I am a programmer of mad skilz beyond their wildest dreams. Not that it's not true
Basically, it slightly peeves me that huge-processing power systems get all the press, when for a lot of problems, you can design algorithms that let you throw disk & memory at the problem instead of CPU. Throwing CPU at a problem means throwing bucks at it by orders of magnitude versus storage.
Granted, the people building the system in the article are probably no dummies, so they probably really do have problems that must be attacked with CPU, but I've seen plenty of dummies who didn't and went that way anyway because they think that's the only measure of computer power.
"any kind of complicated or chaotic system is a good candidate for modelling"
Actually, perhaps the chief feature of chaotic systems is that they are NOT good candidates for modeling.
"good old-fashioned databases and signal processing - when you have hundreds of terabytes of data that you wish to mine for interesting patterns, speed matters"
I agree with most of your points, but as someone with only a few dozen terabytes to worry about, i can say, speed does matter. DISK speed. MEMORY access speed. With that much data, Cpu speed beyond "decent" is really only useful as something you can trade for less disk access via compression, and even that hits a wall pretty fast. Supercomputers like this one are great for big calculation; not so much for big data.
$4000 in fines, drug testing, probation for a 1/2 ounce of pot. Sounds about right, if not slightly harsh. Show me a non-violent first time offender accused of a misdemeanor who was willing to plead no-contest and got it considerably worse, and you can start to argue there is a two-teir system.
But that's not the point. I won't disagree if you say that the rich & powerful tend to come out better in the legal system. You said "In light of the 'important persons act'..." implying that this is policy; that there is an actual law to this effect. That's bull.