"while the commute is through the 'burbs, most of the commute isn't bike friendly"
Move! Just kidding... well, sorta. The 'burbs suck, with their required drive-everywhere lifestyle. It will take a long time of people not wanting to live there to get better communities built. I don't actually find it surprising a route through the 'burbs is not bike friendly; I'd rather ride in the city any day.
A few of your red cents are subsidizing local public radio stations, who can do what they like with the money. Many of them spend some of it on content from NPR. This is not taxes "subsidizing" NPR any more than Air Force spending is "subsidizing" Boeing. Despite having "National" and "Public" in the name, NPR is not a governmental agency; it is a non-profit. It seeks funds where it can find them, chiefly by selling content to member radio stations. It does not, and can not, "force" anyone to pay for anything. The OP who doesn't want to donate to NPR as long as they force him to through taxes is an ignoramus.
Ideally, I'd really like to have a reference that wasn't pulled out of the middle of a long anti-patents argument; but even taking those numbers at face value:
The 30 billion for bio-medical research at NIH isn't all spending on developing new drugs that the pharma industry then piggy backs on. Quite a bit of it is basic research that one couldn't reasonably expect to motivate private industry to conduct.
"15% of their total costs are associated with R&D"
You say that like it's a small number; is there some other industry where R&D is more than 15% of their cost?
I know very little about the position of the Geeens in Sweden... While a 4% party may not in practice get half the power, they can certainly get a lot more than 4% of it by allying with which ever 48% party gives them more.
I'm quite familiar with the math, and a big fan of Condorcet. But I don't see the US considering it any time soon. Most (well educated) Americans remember the origins of the wackier details of our system from grade school, but assume they are brilliant solutions to fundamental concerns devised by our infalliable founding fathers; as opposed to kludgey, ineffective compromises around the long obsolete political divisions of 200 years ago. Sigh.
"Does that mean that they're not substantially correct or more accurate than other sources of information?"
In arguing about "models", "experts", and what "definitive" means, let us not forget that the study by Nature indicates Britanica is not substantially more accurate than Wikipedia, and both are substatially correct. In this context, I can't see how you can call one "definitive" and not the other using any definition I should care about.
"But with prayer you don't have the faintest idea what's in the environment"
Sure you do; or could at least. Do some surveys to find out how often people pray for others, etc. You can ceratinly get some understanding of the "noise". Not that I entirely disagree with you; designing an experiment to test an effect based on an illogical theoretical model is silly.
But as I understand it, this study was run in response to other studies that seemed to show prayer *was* effective. This makes the experimental design considerably more tractable, as you can limit yourself to trying to detect effects the other study would have.
OK, how about a citation that actually supports your statement? The one you provided establishes that someone agrees with you that pharma patents are bad, and that they wrote a book. But you said 50% of Pharma reseach funding, and more than 50% of "breakthroughs" come from public funding and charities. Your citation is certainly long, but I skimmed it anyway, and find no mention of public/charity research funding, and certainly not any sourced breakout of funding sources.
I am, in fact, so interested. I'd genuinely like to know the proportions of funding for pharma research that come from various sources, because pharma seems like a potentially more defensible area for patents, which I generally dislike. So I've heard this mostly-publicly-funded meme before, and if it were true, I'd love to be able to use it. But as far as I can tell, it's made-up horse poop. So when someone says it's true, and here's the reference to back it up, and I skim that very long reference, and find they are just wasting my time, it really pisses me off.
"Actually, experimental design and statistical evaluation are big parts of my job."
So, enlighten us. How would you handle the other posters example of a toxicology study where the toxin in question is free in the environment in variable amounts?
Personally, I'd use randomized test and control groups of sufficient size to bring the error attributable to random external exposure below an acceptable threshold, and account for that error when deciding if my results were significant.
You're this big professional, and you can't conceive of designing this experiment to account for the possibility that people outside the experiment might pray for the subjects? Learning things even in the messy, imperfectly controlled real world is what experimental design and statistics are for.
I haven't any idea whether the Green Party got what it wanted in Sweden or not, but the basic point is valid. In a proportional system, if 2 parties get 48% of the votes, and a third gets 4%, all three parties have equal power. Any two form a majority. If the other two parites split equally, any fraction of the vote from 1% to 49% means half the power. One can just as easily construct situaations where any fraction from up to 24% is entirely powerless, just based on how other parties split.
This is just a quirky math fact though; proportional parliamentary systems are still far prefferable to the f'ed up American system, IMO.
"speak openly of your disbelief in the concept of sexual morality -- especially in the presence of women -- and lets see whether or not your produce any offspring."
Experiment performed! It is my beleif that there is no such thing as "sexual morality"; What two or more consenting adults do in their own home that doesn't directly harm others is nobodies business, and cannot be immoral, no matter how grossed out someone else would be to hear about it, or how much fun it is for those involved. I'll happily profess this beleif in the presence of anyone if the topic comes up. I've little doubt that my beleifs and attitudes toward life (of which this is just one) are part of what made me attractive to my lovely wife. We have two children.
As far as the statement "The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding"; it's idiotic. Purposes are for the sentient; genes have none.
You've forgotten the choice of what frequencies to monitior, and the rate of observations; on the other hand, there aren't that many quasars (it appears there are something like 500,000 known today; the number goes up dramatically as the date of publication becomes more recent)
But I think the real point is that the attacker has to guess which of 2^256 AES keys you're using to send the quasar observation instructions before the start time expires. i.e., if you have a channel you think someone might be able to crack, but you think that it will take them a long time, you can use that to communicate a quasar observation time sooner than that.
So I think the theory is considerably more sound than people give it credit for. In practice, schemes for defending communications from well-funded attackers tend to ignore the myriad of ways such an attacker might capture your message before it ever gets encrypted in the first place. No amount of encryption will help you if the attacker can afford a team capable of sneaking into you office and installing a hardware keylogger you can't detect.
"Sure, they would get ostracized and never allowed to go to the electoral college again if they voted against their state"
And arrested. State election laws typically make it a crime for electors to vote differently than they declared. I'm no fan of the electoral college but for different reasons than you. It's certainly hard to argue the popular vote is "just for show", since that selects the members of the electoral college. I know of exactly one example in history where an elector voted against the way he was supposed to (and that elector knew his switch wouldn't make a difference, but wanted to make a symbolic protest over the early cabinet picks of the president-elect; and he got in considerable real trouble for it)
If, by some bizzarre set of circumstances I can't imagine, a bunch of electors switched and actually changed the outcome, it's still not clear "they could have already done the damage", their votes might not be valid if they were legally required to vote a different way.
"The only real difference is that computer virus is not capable of self adaptation"
Neither are biological viruses. They are just bits of DNA; just instructions for how to build copies of themselves; there is no decision making or adapting. They "adapt" only because when actual living cells make umpteen-bajillion copies of a bit of DNA, some of these copies are wrong. Or maybe a bit of radiation fried one of the instructions. Out of these zillions of wrong copies, almost all just result in non-working instructions. Some result in slightly different, still working intructions. Once in a great while, one results in a working set of instructions that just happened to change the bit your bodies "virus scanner" systems check for, and then you get a flu epidemic. But the virus doesn't "adapt" in any concious, or even living, way. It just gets mis-transcribed.
Gross profit by itself is useless for deciding if a stock is over valued. At their current Market Cap, if they keep having quarters just like the one you're so happy with, their investors will have made their money back in... 70 years! That is, after all, what a 70 P/E ratio means. As things stand today, you'll be dead before you make money off Google. Of course investors in Google, if they've thought it through at all, presumably think it will grow enough to justify their investment. Like no company ever has. It is this irrational optimism about a companies future that remind us of '99. The faith that a company will grow in excess of all logic, just because they are so cool.
Intelectual Property rights extend back to the Renaisance at least, and I wouldn't call physical property rights exactly strong under a feudal system. Free access to physical property for any one who can manage to bash your head in and take it was certainly the baseline norm for longer than not.
Which is not to say I disagree with you; Societal sanction of property rights should be structured so as to benefit society as a whole. I think this argues for strong physical property rights, and intelectual property rights just strong enough that it is usually more profitable to share ideas under those rights than to keep them secret.
But I reject the notion that the idea of physical property is any less a constuct of society than the idea of intellectual proprty, or that there is any "natural" level for either. Property rights of any kind are what society at large says they are.
"While I only have a moderate number of married friends those that I know I see out in social situations far less while I see them playing more games or watching more tv now than they did when they were single."
Bingo. I'm (quite happily) married w/ 2 kids. There isn't much time for going out to social events. But each night between kids bedtime and mine, I've got a couple free hours. I don't like TV, so gaming it is.
Spread spectrum is resistant to noise and to selective jamming (it's hard for me to jam you, and not just all RF).
If the power of my transmitter multiplied by it's distance from your receiver is greater than the same number for the transmitter you want to receive, and I broadcast noise on all the frequencies you use, you will be jammed; no magic tech will save you. (Well, maybe a highly directional antenna, to effectively change the distances, but I digress) As the example in question seems to involve jamming ones next-door neighbor vs a distant transmitter, it shouldn't take all that much power.
Right! We'll just use guns to eliminate the FCC! I'm not clear on the details here, short of reducing the whole country to violent anarchy, nor why it is assumed the side with tanks and nukes will lose, but oh well, let's ignore that for now. If we did get rid of the FCC, we wouldn't have any of that pesky regulation, and everything would be wonderful. Nevermind that the article is complaining (wrongly) that the FCC is threatening to NOT regulate something the poster (and most here) think it SHOULD regulate; we should definintely resort to (futile) armed violence first and attempt to actually understand the issues second.
You, sir, are a perfect example of someone who should not be allowed to bear arms.
Spread spectrum is great for dealing with random noise, because the signal gets through on the less noisy frequencies. It doesn't do squat vs. intentional jamming, when the jammer is presumably going to generate wide spectrum noise in any case to avoid needing to know what frequency you're on.
While I support less spectrum regulation, the parent is correct, in a no regulation at all scenario, one person wanting to be a jerk can easily ruin things for many others.
"a) Tough market to crack."
If you could make a CPU that was 7 times faster than everyone elses, I think you'd find the market incredibly easy to crack.
"b) These chips are specialised for graphics processing." Bingo; Graphics processing is specialized, and in particular, *highly paralelizable*. Rather than your minivan/sports car analogy, I'd go for this one: In a given amount of time, a Greyhound bus will get 20 times as many people across town as a Ferrari. Asking why GPU makers aren't threatening the CPU leaders is like asking why Greyhound isn't doing well on the Formula 1 circuit.
Well, it matters a lot what the rule is doesn't it? A waiter enforcing a no-burgers-without-mayonaise rule is obviously unreasonable. A waiter enforcing a no-feces-flinging rule is preserving a nice dining environment for other patrons. The parent poster has not told us the specifics, but has implied they acted to preseve a good learning environment for the other students. Why everyone assumes this is false is unclear to me. Based only on the student having stated their complaint as "I pay your salary so...", rather than, "I think I would get more out of this class if..." I find it hard to imagine that booting them wasn't the apropriate response.
"Apparently signatures sent via FAX are legally binding..."
No, not really. What's legally binding is anything where you can go into court and convince the judge the person was agreeing to whatever they were agreeing to. There is nothing magical about a fax, or even the original. If they can realistically argue they happened to be writing their name on random stuff that day, and had no idea that that was a contract to sell real estate...
As I understand it the "physics" being modeled here is not the trajectory of the incoming rocket to determine if it hits you. It is the trajectories of the flames leaping forth as the rocket explodes; it's still just graphics processing. It is better for the CPU to describe things at an abstract level, then forget about it and let a dedicated processor project that into space and figure out how lights bounces off it, etc. Currently, these abstract descriptions are mostly in the form of sets of polygons. But some cool effects we want to turn into pixels on the screen are not most nicely described by sets of polys.
With this, the CPU can say there are 50 little flame bits moving outward from such and such a point, with such and such properties; and the GPU can handle turning those abstract descriptions into pixels on the screen, just as it always has. Now it just has an additional type of absract description it can support.
"I would prefer if nVidia and ATI actually focused on bringing cinematic quality 3D rendering to gaming, instead of just claiming they do"
And this is one part of their continuing attempt to do that; of course, "cinematic" quality is what you get when you spend as much time as you feel like rendering each frame, so for game renderes to catch it, rendering will have to get so good that there is just no improvement to be made by rendering for more than 1/60 th of a second. Might be a while.
Slashdot Mirror
"while the commute is through the 'burbs, most of the commute isn't bike friendly"
Move! Just kidding... well, sorta. The 'burbs suck, with their required drive-everywhere lifestyle. It will take a long time of people not wanting to live there to get better communities built. I don't actually find it surprising a route through the 'burbs is not bike friendly; I'd rather ride in the city any day.
A few of your red cents are subsidizing local public radio stations, who can do what they like with the money. Many of them spend some of it on content from NPR. This is not taxes "subsidizing" NPR any more than Air Force spending is "subsidizing" Boeing. Despite having "National" and "Public" in the name, NPR is not a governmental agency; it is a non-profit. It seeks funds where it can find them, chiefly by selling content to member radio stations. It does not, and can not, "force" anyone to pay for anything. The OP who doesn't want to donate to NPR as long as they force him to through taxes is an ignoramus.
"my commute is only 10 miles (through the suburbs)"
Ride a bike!
Ideally, I'd really like to have a reference that wasn't pulled out of the middle of a long anti-patents argument; but even taking those numbers at face value:
The 30 billion for bio-medical research at NIH isn't all spending on developing new drugs that the pharma industry then piggy backs on. Quite a bit of it is basic research that one couldn't reasonably expect to motivate private industry to conduct.
"15% of their total costs are associated with R&D"
You say that like it's a small number; is there some other industry where R&D is more than 15% of their cost?
I know very little about the position of the Geeens in Sweden... While a 4% party may not in practice get half the power, they can certainly get a lot more than 4% of it by allying with which ever 48% party gives them more.
I'm quite familiar with the math, and a big fan of Condorcet. But I don't see the US considering it any time soon. Most (well educated) Americans remember the origins of the wackier details of our system from grade school, but assume they are brilliant solutions to fundamental concerns devised by our infalliable founding fathers; as opposed to kludgey, ineffective compromises around the long obsolete political divisions of 200 years ago. Sigh.
"Does that mean that they're not substantially correct or more accurate than other sources of information?"
In arguing about "models", "experts", and what "definitive" means, let us not forget that the study by Nature indicates Britanica is not substantially more accurate than Wikipedia, and both are substatially correct. In this context, I can't see how you can call one "definitive" and not the other using any definition I should care about.
"But with prayer you don't have the faintest idea what's in the environment"
Sure you do; or could at least. Do some surveys to find out how often people pray for others, etc. You can ceratinly get some understanding of the "noise". Not that I entirely disagree with you; designing an experiment to test an effect based on an illogical theoretical model is silly.
But as I understand it, this study was run in response to other studies that seemed to show prayer *was* effective. This makes the experimental design considerably more tractable, as you can limit yourself to trying to detect effects the other study would have.
OK, how about a citation that actually supports your statement? The one you provided establishes that someone agrees with you that pharma patents are bad, and that they wrote a book. But you said 50% of Pharma reseach funding, and more than 50% of "breakthroughs" come from public funding and charities. Your citation is certainly long, but I skimmed it anyway, and find no mention of public/charity research funding, and certainly not any sourced breakout of funding sources.
I am, in fact, so interested. I'd genuinely like to know the proportions of funding for pharma research that come from various sources, because pharma seems like a potentially more defensible area for patents, which I generally dislike. So I've heard this mostly-publicly-funded meme before, and if it were true, I'd love to be able to use it. But as far as I can tell, it's made-up horse poop. So when someone says it's true, and here's the reference to back it up, and I skim that very long reference, and find they are just wasting my time, it really pisses me off.
"Actually, experimental design and statistical evaluation are big parts of my job."
So, enlighten us. How would you handle the other posters example of a toxicology study where the toxin in question is free in the environment in variable amounts?
Personally, I'd use randomized test and control groups of sufficient size to bring the error attributable to random external exposure below an acceptable threshold, and account for that error when deciding if my results were significant.
You're this big professional, and you can't conceive of designing this experiment to account for the possibility that people outside the experiment might pray for the subjects? Learning things even in the messy, imperfectly controlled real world is what experimental design and statistics are for.
You know, that's the sort of thing a Nazi would say.
I haven't any idea whether the Green Party got what it wanted in Sweden or not, but the basic point is valid. In a proportional system, if 2 parties get 48% of the votes, and a third gets 4%, all three parties have equal power. Any two form a majority. If the other two parites split equally, any fraction of the vote from 1% to 49% means half the power. One can just as easily construct situaations where any fraction from up to 24% is entirely powerless, just based on how other parties split.
This is just a quirky math fact though; proportional parliamentary systems are still far prefferable to the f'ed up American system, IMO.
"speak openly of your disbelief in the concept of sexual morality -- especially in the presence of women -- and lets see whether or not your produce any offspring."
Experiment performed!
It is my beleif that there is no such thing as "sexual morality"; What two or more consenting adults do in their own home that doesn't directly harm others is nobodies business, and cannot be immoral, no matter how grossed out someone else would be to hear about it, or how much fun it is for those involved. I'll happily profess this beleif in the presence of anyone if the topic comes up. I've little doubt that my beleifs and attitudes toward life (of which this is just one) are part of what made me attractive to my lovely wife. We have two children.
As far as the statement "The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding"; it's idiotic. Purposes are for the sentient; genes have none.
You've forgotten the choice of what frequencies to monitior, and the rate of observations; on the other hand, there aren't that many quasars (it appears there are something like 500,000 known today; the number goes up dramatically as the date of publication becomes more recent)
But I think the real point is that the attacker has to guess which of 2^256 AES keys you're using to send the quasar observation instructions before the start time expires. i.e., if you have a channel you think someone might be able to crack, but you think that it will take them a long time, you can use that to communicate a quasar observation time sooner than that.
So I think the theory is considerably more sound than people give it credit for. In practice, schemes for defending communications from well-funded attackers tend to ignore the myriad of ways such an attacker might capture your message before it ever gets encrypted in the first place. No amount of encryption will help you if the attacker can afford a team capable of sneaking into you office and installing a hardware keylogger you can't detect.
"Sure, they would get ostracized and never allowed to go to the electoral college again if they voted against their state"
And arrested. State election laws typically make it a crime for electors to vote differently than they declared. I'm no fan of the electoral college but for different reasons than you. It's certainly hard to argue the popular vote is "just for show", since that selects the members of the electoral college. I know of exactly one example in history where an elector voted against the way he was supposed to (and that elector knew his switch wouldn't make a difference, but wanted to make a symbolic protest over the early cabinet picks of the president-elect; and he got in considerable real trouble for it)
If, by some bizzarre set of circumstances I can't imagine, a bunch of electors switched and actually changed the outcome, it's still not clear "they could have already done the damage", their votes might not be valid if they were legally required to vote a different way.
"The only real difference is that computer virus is not capable of self adaptation"
Neither are biological viruses. They are just bits of DNA; just instructions for how to build copies of themselves; there is no decision making or adapting. They "adapt" only because when actual living cells make umpteen-bajillion copies of a bit of DNA, some of these copies are wrong. Or maybe a bit of radiation fried one of the instructions. Out of these zillions of wrong copies, almost all just result in non-working instructions. Some result in slightly different, still working intructions. Once in a great while, one results in a working set of instructions that just happened to change the bit your bodies "virus scanner" systems check for, and then you get a flu epidemic.
But the virus doesn't "adapt" in any concious, or even living, way. It just gets mis-transcribed.
Gross profit by itself is useless for deciding if a stock is over valued. At their current Market Cap, if they keep having quarters just like the one you're so happy with, their investors will have made their money back in... 70 years! That is, after all, what a 70 P/E ratio means. As things stand today, you'll be dead before you make money off Google. Of course investors in Google, if they've thought it through at all, presumably think it will grow enough to justify their investment. Like no company ever has. It is this irrational optimism about a companies future that remind us of '99. The faith that a company will grow in excess of all logic, just because they are so cool.
Intelectual Property rights extend back to the Renaisance at least, and I wouldn't call physical property rights exactly strong under a feudal system. Free access to physical property for any one who can manage to bash your head in and take it was certainly the baseline norm for longer than not.
Which is not to say I disagree with you; Societal sanction of property rights should be structured so as to benefit society as a whole. I think this argues for strong physical property rights, and intelectual property rights just strong enough that it is usually more profitable to share ideas under those rights than to keep them secret.
But I reject the notion that the idea of physical property is any less a constuct of society than the idea of intellectual proprty, or that there is any "natural" level for either. Property rights of any kind are what society at large says they are.
"While I only have a moderate number of married friends those that I know I see out in social situations far less while I see them playing more games or watching more tv now than they did when they were single."
Bingo. I'm (quite happily) married w/ 2 kids. There isn't much time for going out to social events. But each night between kids bedtime and mine, I've got a couple free hours. I don't like TV, so gaming it is.
Spread spectrum is resistant to noise and to selective jamming (it's hard for me to jam you, and not just all RF).
If the power of my transmitter multiplied by it's distance from your receiver is greater than the same number for the transmitter you want to receive, and I broadcast noise on all the frequencies you use, you will be jammed; no magic tech will save you. (Well, maybe a highly directional antenna, to effectively change the distances, but I digress) As the example in question seems to involve jamming ones next-door neighbor vs a distant transmitter, it shouldn't take all that much power.
Right! We'll just use guns to eliminate the FCC! I'm not clear on the details here, short of reducing the whole country to violent anarchy, nor why it is assumed the side with tanks and nukes will lose, but oh well, let's ignore that for now. If we did get rid of the FCC, we wouldn't have any of that pesky regulation, and everything would be wonderful. Nevermind that the article is complaining (wrongly) that the FCC is threatening to NOT regulate something the poster (and most here) think it SHOULD regulate; we should definintely resort to (futile) armed violence first and attempt to actually understand the issues second.
You, sir, are a perfect example of someone who should not be allowed to bear arms.
Spread spectrum is great for dealing with random noise, because the signal gets through on the less noisy frequencies. It doesn't do squat vs. intentional jamming, when the jammer is presumably going to generate wide spectrum noise in any case to avoid needing to know what frequency you're on.
While I support less spectrum regulation, the parent is correct, in a no regulation at all scenario, one person wanting to be a jerk can easily ruin things for many others.
"a) Tough market to crack."
If you could make a CPU that was 7 times faster than everyone elses, I think you'd find the market incredibly easy to crack.
"b) These chips are specialised for graphics processing."
Bingo; Graphics processing is specialized, and in particular, *highly paralelizable*. Rather than your minivan/sports car analogy, I'd go for this one: In a given amount of time, a Greyhound bus will get 20 times as many people across town as a Ferrari. Asking why GPU makers aren't threatening the CPU leaders is like asking why Greyhound isn't doing well on the Formula 1 circuit.
Well, it matters a lot what the rule is doesn't it? A waiter enforcing a no-burgers-without-mayonaise rule is obviously unreasonable. A waiter enforcing a no-feces-flinging rule is preserving a nice dining environment for other patrons. The parent poster has not told us the specifics, but has implied they acted to preseve a good learning environment for the other students. Why everyone assumes this is false is unclear to me. Based only on the student having stated their complaint as "I pay your salary so...", rather than, "I think I would get more out of this class if..." I find it hard to imagine that booting them wasn't the apropriate response.
"Apparently signatures sent via FAX are legally binding..."
No, not really. What's legally binding is anything where you can go into court and convince the judge the person was agreeing to whatever they were agreeing to. There is nothing magical about a fax, or even the original. If they can realistically argue they happened to be writing their name on random stuff that day, and had no idea that that was a contract to sell real estate...
As I understand it the "physics" being modeled here is not the trajectory of the incoming rocket to determine if it hits you. It is the trajectories of the flames leaping forth as the rocket explodes; it's still just graphics processing. It is better for the CPU to describe things at an abstract level, then forget about it and let a dedicated processor project that into space and figure out how lights bounces off it, etc. Currently, these abstract descriptions are mostly in the form of sets of polygons. But some cool effects we want to turn into pixels on the screen are not most nicely described by sets of polys.
With this, the CPU can say there are 50 little flame bits moving outward from such and such a point, with such and such properties; and the GPU can handle turning those abstract descriptions into pixels on the screen, just as it always has. Now it just has an additional type of absract description it can support.
"I would prefer if nVidia and ATI actually focused on bringing cinematic quality 3D rendering to gaming, instead of just claiming they do"
And this is one part of their continuing attempt to do that; of course, "cinematic" quality is what you get when you spend as much time as you feel like rendering each frame, so for game renderes to catch it, rendering will have to get so good that there is just no improvement to be made by rendering for more than 1/60 th of a second. Might be a while.