PROFITS should be used for expansion and R&D, not selling off pieces of ownership in the company. That is the RATIONAL way to do it.
Not necessarily true. If a dollar of profit cannot be reinvested in the business so as to generate more present value than the next best alternative use of that dollar (i.e. the opportunity cost), then the dollar should be returned to the shareholders (i.e. the owners of the company) so that they can put that dollar to its best alternative use. They are the owners of the company and their shares of the profits belong to them, not the public or the government. If they want to reinvest those dollars back into the company then they are free to do that, but the decision is theirs by right of their ownership.
any battery technology developed is released into the public domain.
If the government is going to finance it with taxpayer money then I would prefer to see it licensed for a fee, price depending upon the end user, with preference given to American corporations, groups, and individuals. If you public domain it then the Chinese, Indians, and all of our foreign competitors will simply take the fruits of US taxpayer funded research and sell the results back to us at undercut dumping prices, which will do very little to stimulate our economy. The goal should be to encourage domestic research and production, not facilitate more outsourcing at the taxpayer's expense.
the mortgage buyers would buy without enough questions because they knew there were buyers who would buy the derivatives without too many questions.
The last buyers in that chain where the biggest fools of all for investing in product which they could neither evaluate nor understand. The advice of Warren Buffet on such matters comes to mind (paraphrased), "If you don't understand it, then don't buy it". If you buy it anyway without understanding it then you are speculating (i.e. gambling). If nobody can understand or evaluate it because brokers upstream have concealed or failed to pass on important information then anyone who buys the products without access to critical information about the investment products is a fool and an idiot (no amount of analysis is likely to help when critical information is simply missing).
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
There are certainly some financial instruments which are almost indistinguishable from gambling. For example, the ability to buy or sell options or derivatives on a futures contract based upon the average temperature over a given week in Los Angeles. However, not all or even most financial instruments are completely without merit. The general idea is to make financing in the right amounts available to the broadest base of qualified borrowers at the most efficient rates possible because this provides the highest possible rate of economic growth (which correlates very closely with standards of living and wealth in general of the society). Having been a small business owner in the past, surely you can appreciate the ability to get loans for your business on generally agreeable terms. Now imagine that some or most of the enabling instruments which you attribute to the greed of bankers and brokers were made illegal. You might find that getting a loan for your small business is more difficult and costs more because you are dealing with a smaller pool of local banks who know you and your business (and know that you will have difficulty going somewhere else for your loan). It would be very difficult for smaller businesses, like yours, to tap into larger regional, national, and international sources of credit because the instruments which serve to aggregate loans and risks have been made illegal. The financial instruments available today are double edged swords to be sure, but attributing them soley to the greed of bankers and brokers or banning for that reason would be short sighted.
One possible response would be for the various sysadmins everywhere to get organized and attempt to close ranks against ISPs which host spammers in any of their IP ranges. Then all of the sysadmins could collectively retaliate against the ISPs in question by blocking all traffic from their entire range. There would be collateral damage, of course, but the ISPs, faced with the fragmentation of the Internet, might relent and quit hosting spammers in return for a cut of the action. The botnets would still be a problem but their effectiveness would be reduced if the ISPs hosting the Command and Control / Relay servers were retaliated against.
If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight.
Not only that, but depending upon the key value of state w, the ratio between dark energy pressure and its energy density, if the value of w is less than -1 then the universe will eventually be pulled apart as the rate of expansion begins to accelerate towards infinity. First the nearest galactic clusters will fade from view, then the nearest galaxies in our cluster, then the stars in our galaxy. Finally, approximately three months before the end, the solar system itself will become gravitationaly unbound, in the last minutes stars and planets will be torn apart, and finally, an instant before the end of everything individual atoms and their subatomic pieces will be ripped into ever smaller pieces until there is nothing left (i.e. the last bits just wink out of existence). The end, if it were to occur in this way, is around 50 billion years, or approximately 3.8 times the current known age of the universe, into the future. This hypothesis is known colloquially as the Big Rip.
Carl Sagan, in a televised debate with William F Buckley Jr following a showing of the 1983 television movie The Day After, discussed the concept of nuclear winter and compared the arms race to "two sworn enemies standing waist-deep in gasoline, one with three matches and the other with five". In fact, the only really sensible response to the whole affair was to live near a primary target so that one would be spared the horror of survival (i.e. instant and relatively painless death). It is interesting to note that many people in the public perceive the Cold War as being behind us when in fact, many of the weapons systems that menaced mankind during those years were never taken off line and remain operational to this day.
While it is true that a well designed and abstracted piece of code should be able to develop independently from its eventual concrete dependencies, it takes more advanced developers who are familiar with design patterns and software engineering principles to properly inject and implement that strategy (puns intended for all of the developers out there). Not every manager has access to such high quality programming staff.
The economist would tell you that almost never will a government bureaucrat fail to praise their agency as vital for the health of our economy or the defense of our nation, gush about how their budget should be even larger next year so that they can do even more good, and generally argue in favor of any policy, technology, or position which secures their jobs, increases their power, and expands their scope.
As to "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is taken as an absolute, but as an absolute it is transparently false. Did you ever pay for the lunch your mother gave you? Have you never had a friend treat you to lunch? have you never eaten an apple off a tree, or picked a tomato from your backyard?
It is probably more accurate to say that the statement is frequently misunderstood. For most people the concept of cost is understood only in terms of handing over money in exchange for a good or service when in fact there are many other forms of cost (not everyone is intelligent enough to think abstractly and understand all of the subtleties in life after all). It could be the cost of waiting in line, or the cost of your mother's labor to fix the lunch for you, or any number of other forms of work and not just cost in terms of money paid or received in exchange. However, you are right in that even when a larger view of cost is taken the statement is NOT absolute, but few things are truly absolute or unlimited, even the air we breath.
High speed trains in the United States are, unfortunately, non-starters for the following reasons:
(1) NIMBYism: It is too easy here in the United States for special interests, and every neighborhood which might be negatively affected by high speed rail would become a NIMBY against it, to oppose projects with broad public appeal for narrow minded and selfish reasons. In countries with high speed rail which includes most of Europe and especially France, it is very difficult or impossible to stand in the way of public works projects because they "lower one's home value" or are "uncharacteristic for the neighborhood" or "have environmental impacts" (a favorite of no-growth and slow growth homeowner's associations to delay and kill undesirable projects).
(2) Electricity: France and other nations which deploy high speed rail have lots of high power nuclear reactors to generate the necessary electricity and make the whole affair economical. Moving a train weighing several hundred tons at 250+ mph takes a lot of energy which would have to be in addition to all of the energy that we are currently using here in the United States (and we are already short or running close to our limits on the electrical grids). This infrastructure is, of course, subject to the same types of NIMBYism as described above.
(3) Route Planning (too many stops): In order to be effective, a high speed train has to make as few stops as possible, thereby allowing extended stretches of high cruising speeds (as with airlines which is really the closest analogous form of travel). However, the political pressure on long distance routes here in the United States, to introduce more stops, is and would be tremendous since any city which has a stop stands to benefit enormously from being a stop on a high speed rail network with few stops (Los Angeles would be much smaller than it is today if not for its status as an rail stop and junction connecting California to important railroads throughout the American southwest).
Remember also that there are many special interests, including the prison industrial complex, the anti-drug enforcement suppliers who supply all of the agencies, and the tens of thousands of bureaucrats at the DEA itself whose continued employment depends upon the preservation of the status quo with regard to the "war on drugs". When you try to cut 30+ BILLION dollars of yearly spending from the federal budget then you can expect a hard fight from those constituencies who have been on the receiving end of that largesse for over three (3) decades now (they see it as you taking away their meal ticket and nobody likes to have their cheese moved after all). The war on drugs isn't about right and wrong, but rather, like so many other things in politics, it is about money: how much and who gets it.
As long as F# continues to be compiled as CLR instructions then it is very likely that any features that start out in F# and are not already analagous in C# will migrate over. Although it may not be possible to capture fully all of the features of a purely function language designed for that purpose, C# has really started picking up speed in the 2.0 release and the 3.x versions have really added some really great features in relatively short order (lambda expressions and LINQ really are a godsend). Also, because.NET Assemblies are cross compatible, even when written in different languages, it should be possible to write an F# library where functional implementations make the most sense and then call into it from your C#, VB.NET, or managed C++ code.
with the addition of lambda expressions, anonymous delegates (which provide closures as you functional people call them), and anonymous types C# is well on its way to becomming an effective language for functional style programming. If you don't believe that then don't take my word for it, but instead check out Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman (warning PDF), by Erik Meijer of Microsoft Research who talks about his background in Haskel and how that has translated into his work at Microsoft and C# and the.NET Framework (ver 3+) and while some here on Slashdot may accuse me of being a shill for Microsoft, only the most dedicated Microsoft basher could fail to see the value that is to be found in C# and.NET (which is a big and often unseen part of why Microsoft is still breathing right now).
What could be more abstract than GO? The rules are simple, the pieces are simple, and the board is simple. It is the interactions that are complex. It is an example of what is called "emergent complexity" or complex situations arising out of a simple set of rules in an evolving environment. It has also been said that if there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe then they probably play GO too.
In fact this has been tried by law enforcement here in the United States at least once and just recently. They were attempting to identify a suspect in a recent string of serial murders by analyzing partial dna matches to possible relatives. They were unsuccessful this time for technical reasons, but that does not dismiss the possibility that they can and will use this technique again in the future so the ethical questions remain. The article (Los Angeles Times) is here for those interested in the details.
Games of perfect knowledge versus an opponent are pretty simple to solve. You'll find they all basically boil down to minimax applied to game trees plus an evaluation function (which gives you a fitness value)
All of which, when applied to the simplest and most abstract of all strategy games (GO), fails to produce a competitive program. Search has its limits, even in zero-sum, perfect information, partisan, deterministic strategy games.
I still don't get it. How do you fix the public school system by removing the students?
There is a difference between the government providing a good or service directly and distributing vouchers good towards the purchase of a particular good or service. The public schools, as we know them today, would become non-profit competitors to private schools and other institutions of learning that would accept vouchers and provide education. Naturally, the state would still have to organize testing to ensure that standards are met, but parents, who are generally although not always in the best position to look out for the best interests of their children, would decide which school their children attend with their voucher being accepted as whole or partial payment made by the government. Competition improves quality and lowers prices. This has been proven again and again in industry after industry and education is not a special exception to that rule. The answer to your question is that we "fix" the public school system by submitting them to the discipline of the marketplace.
Paying back this 10 trillion is going to send the US back to the stone age by comparison.
It was never really meant to be paid back. The current monetary system can only be sustained by continual expansion of debt therefore it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. At one time in our collective history, before the rise of modern industry and finance, this sort of monetary system was a useful adjunct to economic growth, but with limited resources, exploding population, and the destruction of our environment looming ever larger into the future it is time for us to collectively take stock and ask ourselves, "Is this really how we want our monetary system to function"? There are alternatives to the present monetary system (still capitalism, but with a different concept of money), but unfortunately very few people, and least of all the bankers of the world, are prepared to seriously discuss them.
just a sneaky way of encouraging privatization and school vouchers.
This is exactly what should be happening to improve the education of our children. There are reasons why so many parents, even those who can barely afford it, choose to send their children to private schools rather than subject them to public education. The teacher's union and the public education bureaucrats have run our public schools into the ground and nothing will change unless and until ALL parents are given a choice which is exactly what vouchers and privatization inject into the education system...choice. Unfortunately, this is not a new issue. For example, Milton Friedman discussed this very problem in volume 6 of Free to Choose back in 1980 and sadly, almost all of the issues brought up in that program are still current nearly 30 years later. We have already tried everything else (more money, more teachers, smaller classes, no child left behind, etc...) except vouchers in our public schools and it has failed to create any lasting or meaningful changes. Isn't it time now to give vouchers a real chance?
The beginner sees patterns everywhere. This is good. The beginner gets lots of experience with and practice using patterns. The beginner also thinks, "The more patterns I use, the better the design." The beginner will learn that this is not so, that all designs should be as simple as possible. Complexity and patterns should only be used where they are needed for practical extensibility.
As learning progresses, the intermediate mind starts to see where patterns are needed and where they aren't. The intermediate mind still tries to fit too many square patterns into round holes, but also begins to see that patterns can be adapted to fit situations where the canonical pattern doesn't fit.
The Zen mind is able to see patterns where they fit naturally. The Zen mind is not obsessed with using patterns; rather, it looks for simple solutions that best solve the problem. The Zen mind thinks in terms of the object principles and their trade-offs. When a need for a pattern naturally arises, the Zen mind applies it, knowing well that it may require adaptation. The Zen mind also sees relationships to similar patterns and understands the subtleties of differences in the intent of related patterns. The Zen mind is also a beginner mind, it doesn't let all of that pattern knowledge overly influence design decisions.
Most other frameworks, at least for PHP and Python, seem to be the same way.
In fact, the only one that I can think of that is purposefully NOT that way is the Ruby on Rails framework which takes the path of "punishment" in the form of "ugly code" for those who attempt to deviate from the orthodoxy of the framework. In my opinion "punishing" developers for deviations is NOT the best way to promote your framework, but the Ruby on Rails disciples will not be convinced otherwise so I have given up trying.
One of the arguments made in the "On Intelligence" book concerned the inadequacy of using the Von Nuemann Architecture with the standard fetch, decode, execute, store paradigm, which is at the heart of all modern computing, to construct a true human like intelligence. You either have to build hardware that approximates the human brain (i.e. lots of nueron like devices) OR you have to simulate such a device on the above mentioned von nuemann type computers (which are inefficient at simulating a brain and require uber computing power to simulate even a much less complicated than human brain). In other words, this is not an area where one can do any useful work that hasn't already been done in isolation on consumer computing hardware.
so when a filmmaker puts their creative spin on the story it is viewed as destroying the story.
Which is not an entirely unfounded belief given the history of Hollywood with "adapting" well known stories and losing their essence in the process. The most recent notable exception was Peter Jackson with The Lord of the Rings. Those films proved that when the story of the original author is taken intact or very nearly so (even LOTR had a few rearrangements and cuts of some minor sub-plots for the sake of expedience, Tom Bombadil for example, but what WAS shown was true to the story as written) the result can be as good and even better than the "re-interpretation" of some director or writer. I cannot understand why writers and directors feel the need to butcher classics. If they want to do something new and original then why not do something new and original? Nobody says that you cannot borrow ideas from previous stories, but make the characters and the setting uniquely your own if you want to have the creative freedom to "interpret" your own version of events. If on the other hand you want to make IRobot or LOTR then make them but do not presume to reinterpret a classic story that you didn't create or own, it just sets you up to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
PROFITS should be used for expansion and R&D, not selling off pieces of ownership in the company. That is the RATIONAL way to do it.
Not necessarily true. If a dollar of profit cannot be reinvested in the business so as to generate more present value than the next best alternative use of that dollar (i.e. the opportunity cost), then the dollar should be returned to the shareholders (i.e. the owners of the company) so that they can put that dollar to its best alternative use. They are the owners of the company and their shares of the profits belong to them, not the public or the government. If they want to reinvest those dollars back into the company then they are free to do that, but the decision is theirs by right of their ownership.
any battery technology developed is released into the public domain.
If the government is going to finance it with taxpayer money then I would prefer to see it licensed for a fee, price depending upon the end user, with preference given to American corporations, groups, and individuals. If you public domain it then the Chinese, Indians, and all of our foreign competitors will simply take the fruits of US taxpayer funded research and sell the results back to us at undercut dumping prices, which will do very little to stimulate our economy. The goal should be to encourage domestic research and production, not facilitate more outsourcing at the taxpayer's expense.
the mortgage buyers would buy without enough questions because they knew there were buyers who would buy the derivatives without too many questions.
The last buyers in that chain where the biggest fools of all for investing in product which they could neither evaluate nor understand. The advice of Warren Buffet on such matters comes to mind (paraphrased), "If you don't understand it, then don't buy it". If you buy it anyway without understanding it then you are speculating (i.e. gambling). If nobody can understand or evaluate it because brokers upstream have concealed or failed to pass on important information then anyone who buys the products without access to critical information about the investment products is a fool and an idiot (no amount of analysis is likely to help when critical information is simply missing).
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
There are certainly some financial instruments which are almost indistinguishable from gambling. For example, the ability to buy or sell options or derivatives on a futures contract based upon the average temperature over a given week in Los Angeles. However, not all or even most financial instruments are completely without merit. The general idea is to make financing in the right amounts available to the broadest base of qualified borrowers at the most efficient rates possible because this provides the highest possible rate of economic growth (which correlates very closely with standards of living and wealth in general of the society). Having been a small business owner in the past, surely you can appreciate the ability to get loans for your business on generally agreeable terms. Now imagine that some or most of the enabling instruments which you attribute to the greed of bankers and brokers were made illegal. You might find that getting a loan for your small business is more difficult and costs more because you are dealing with a smaller pool of local banks who know you and your business (and know that you will have difficulty going somewhere else for your loan). It would be very difficult for smaller businesses, like yours, to tap into larger regional, national, and international sources of credit because the instruments which serve to aggregate loans and risks have been made illegal. The financial instruments available today are double edged swords to be sure, but attributing them soley to the greed of bankers and brokers or banning for that reason would be short sighted.
One possible response would be for the various sysadmins everywhere to get organized and attempt to close ranks against ISPs which host spammers in any of their IP ranges. Then all of the sysadmins could collectively retaliate against the ISPs in question by blocking all traffic from their entire range. There would be collateral damage, of course, but the ISPs, faced with the fragmentation of the Internet, might relent and quit hosting spammers in return for a cut of the action. The botnets would still be a problem but their effectiveness would be reduced if the ISPs hosting the Command and Control / Relay servers were retaliated against.
If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight.
Not only that, but depending upon the key value of state w, the ratio between dark energy pressure and its energy density, if the value of w is less than -1 then the universe will eventually be pulled apart as the rate of expansion begins to accelerate towards infinity. First the nearest galactic clusters will fade from view, then the nearest galaxies in our cluster, then the stars in our galaxy. Finally, approximately three months before the end, the solar system itself will become gravitationaly unbound, in the last minutes stars and planets will be torn apart, and finally, an instant before the end of everything individual atoms and their subatomic pieces will be ripped into ever smaller pieces until there is nothing left (i.e. the last bits just wink out of existence). The end, if it were to occur in this way, is around 50 billion years, or approximately 3.8 times the current known age of the universe, into the future. This hypothesis is known colloquially as the Big Rip.
Carl Sagan, in a televised debate with William F Buckley Jr following a showing of the 1983 television movie The Day After , discussed the concept of nuclear winter and compared the arms race to "two sworn enemies standing waist-deep in gasoline, one with three matches and the other with five". In fact, the only really sensible response to the whole affair was to live near a primary target so that one would be spared the horror of survival (i.e. instant and relatively painless death). It is interesting to note that many people in the public perceive the Cold War as being behind us when in fact, many of the weapons systems that menaced mankind during those years were never taken off line and remain operational to this day.
While it is true that a well designed and abstracted piece of code should be able to develop independently from its eventual concrete dependencies, it takes more advanced developers who are familiar with design patterns and software engineering principles to properly inject and implement that strategy (puns intended for all of the developers out there). Not every manager has access to such high quality programming staff.
It's also much easier to get to a specific pixel / small area with a mouse than with your fat fingertip.
We're sorry, but the fingers you've used to dial are too fat. To order a magic dialing wand please mash the keypad now.
The economist would tell you that almost never will a government bureaucrat fail to praise their agency as vital for the health of our economy or the defense of our nation, gush about how their budget should be even larger next year so that they can do even more good, and generally argue in favor of any policy, technology, or position which secures their jobs, increases their power, and expands their scope.
As to "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is taken as an absolute, but as an absolute it is transparently false. Did you ever pay for the lunch your mother gave you? Have you never had a friend treat you to lunch? have you never eaten an apple off a tree, or picked a tomato from your backyard?
It is probably more accurate to say that the statement is frequently misunderstood. For most people the concept of cost is understood only in terms of handing over money in exchange for a good or service when in fact there are many other forms of cost (not everyone is intelligent enough to think abstractly and understand all of the subtleties in life after all). It could be the cost of waiting in line, or the cost of your mother's labor to fix the lunch for you, or any number of other forms of work and not just cost in terms of money paid or received in exchange. However, you are right in that even when a larger view of cost is taken the statement is NOT absolute, but few things are truly absolute or unlimited, even the air we breath.
High speed trains in the United States are, unfortunately, non-starters for the following reasons:
(1) NIMBYism: It is too easy here in the United States for special interests, and every neighborhood which might be negatively affected by high speed rail would become a NIMBY against it, to oppose projects with broad public appeal for narrow minded and selfish reasons. In countries with high speed rail which includes most of Europe and especially France, it is very difficult or impossible to stand in the way of public works projects because they "lower one's home value" or are "uncharacteristic for the neighborhood" or "have environmental impacts" (a favorite of no-growth and slow growth homeowner's associations to delay and kill undesirable projects).
(2) Electricity: France and other nations which deploy high speed rail have lots of high power nuclear reactors to generate the necessary electricity and make the whole affair economical. Moving a train weighing several hundred tons at 250+ mph takes a lot of energy which would have to be in addition to all of the energy that we are currently using here in the United States (and we are already short or running close to our limits on the electrical grids). This infrastructure is, of course, subject to the same types of NIMBYism as described above.
(3) Route Planning (too many stops): In order to be effective, a high speed train has to make as few stops as possible, thereby allowing extended stretches of high cruising speeds (as with airlines which is really the closest analogous form of travel). However, the political pressure on long distance routes here in the United States, to introduce more stops, is and would be tremendous since any city which has a stop stands to benefit enormously from being a stop on a high speed rail network with few stops (Los Angeles would be much smaller than it is today if not for its status as an rail stop and junction connecting California to important railroads throughout the American southwest).
Remember also that there are many special interests, including the prison industrial complex, the anti-drug enforcement suppliers who supply all of the agencies, and the tens of thousands of bureaucrats at the DEA itself whose continued employment depends upon the preservation of the status quo with regard to the "war on drugs". When you try to cut 30+ BILLION dollars of yearly spending from the federal budget then you can expect a hard fight from those constituencies who have been on the receiving end of that largesse for over three (3) decades now (they see it as you taking away their meal ticket and nobody likes to have their cheese moved after all). The war on drugs isn't about right and wrong, but rather, like so many other things in politics, it is about money: how much and who gets it.
As long as F# continues to be compiled as CLR instructions then it is very likely that any features that start out in F# and are not already analagous in C# will migrate over. Although it may not be possible to capture fully all of the features of a purely function language designed for that purpose, C# has really started picking up speed in the 2.0 release and the 3.x versions have really added some really great features in relatively short order (lambda expressions and LINQ really are a godsend). Also, because .NET Assemblies are cross compatible, even when written in different languages, it should be possible to write an F# library where functional implementations make the most sense and then call into it from your C#, VB.NET, or managed C++ code.
with the addition of lambda expressions, anonymous delegates (which provide closures as you functional people call them), and anonymous types C# is well on its way to becomming an effective language for functional style programming. If you don't believe that then don't take my word for it, but instead check out Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman (warning PDF), by Erik Meijer of Microsoft Research who talks about his background in Haskel and how that has translated into his work at Microsoft and C# and the .NET Framework (ver 3+) and while some here on Slashdot may accuse me of being a shill for Microsoft, only the most dedicated Microsoft basher could fail to see the value that is to be found in C# and .NET (which is a big and often unseen part of why Microsoft is still breathing right now).
What could be more abstract than GO? The rules are simple, the pieces are simple, and the board is simple. It is the interactions that are complex. It is an example of what is called "emergent complexity" or complex situations arising out of a simple set of rules in an evolving environment. It has also been said that if there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe then they probably play GO too.
In fact this has been tried by law enforcement here in the United States at least once and just recently. They were attempting to identify a suspect in a recent string of serial murders by analyzing partial dna matches to possible relatives. They were unsuccessful this time for technical reasons, but that does not dismiss the possibility that they can and will use this technique again in the future so the ethical questions remain. The article (Los Angeles Times) is here for those interested in the details.
Games of perfect knowledge versus an opponent are pretty simple to solve. You'll find they all basically boil down to minimax applied to game trees plus an evaluation function (which gives you a fitness value)
All of which, when applied to the simplest and most abstract of all strategy games (GO), fails to produce a competitive program. Search has its limits, even in zero-sum, perfect information, partisan, deterministic strategy games.
I still don't get it. How do you fix the public school system by removing the students?
There is a difference between the government providing a good or service directly and distributing vouchers good towards the purchase of a particular good or service. The public schools, as we know them today, would become non-profit competitors to private schools and other institutions of learning that would accept vouchers and provide education. Naturally, the state would still have to organize testing to ensure that standards are met, but parents, who are generally although not always in the best position to look out for the best interests of their children, would decide which school their children attend with their voucher being accepted as whole or partial payment made by the government. Competition improves quality and lowers prices. This has been proven again and again in industry after industry and education is not a special exception to that rule. The answer to your question is that we "fix" the public school system by submitting them to the discipline of the marketplace.
Paying back this 10 trillion is going to send the US back to the stone age by comparison.
It was never really meant to be paid back. The current monetary system can only be sustained by continual expansion of debt therefore it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. At one time in our collective history, before the rise of modern industry and finance, this sort of monetary system was a useful adjunct to economic growth, but with limited resources, exploding population, and the destruction of our environment looming ever larger into the future it is time for us to collectively take stock and ask ourselves, "Is this really how we want our monetary system to function"? There are alternatives to the present monetary system (still capitalism, but with a different concept of money), but unfortunately very few people, and least of all the bankers of the world, are prepared to seriously discuss them.
Debt as Money
just a sneaky way of encouraging privatization and school vouchers.
This is exactly what should be happening to improve the education of our children. There are reasons why so many parents, even those who can barely afford it, choose to send their children to private schools rather than subject them to public education. The teacher's union and the public education bureaucrats have run our public schools into the ground and nothing will change unless and until ALL parents are given a choice which is exactly what vouchers and privatization inject into the education system...choice. Unfortunately, this is not a new issue. For example, Milton Friedman discussed this very problem in volume 6 of Free to Choose back in 1980 and sadly, almost all of the issues brought up in that program are still current nearly 30 years later. We have already tried everything else (more money, more teachers, smaller classes, no child left behind, etc...) except vouchers in our public schools and it has failed to create any lasting or meaningful changes. Isn't it time now to give vouchers a real chance?
From Head First Design Patterns:
The beginner sees patterns everywhere. This is good. The beginner gets lots of experience with and practice using patterns. The beginner also thinks, "The more patterns I use, the better the design." The beginner will learn that this is not so, that all designs should be as simple as possible. Complexity and patterns should only be used where they are needed for practical extensibility.
As learning progresses, the intermediate mind starts to see where patterns are needed and where they aren't. The intermediate mind still tries to fit too many square patterns into round holes, but also begins to see that patterns can be adapted to fit situations where the canonical pattern doesn't fit.
The Zen mind is able to see patterns where they fit naturally. The Zen mind is not obsessed with using patterns; rather, it looks for simple solutions that best solve the problem. The Zen mind thinks in terms of the object principles and their trade-offs. When a need for a pattern naturally arises, the Zen mind applies it, knowing well that it may require adaptation. The Zen mind also sees relationships to similar patterns and understands the subtleties of differences in the intent of related patterns. The Zen mind is also a beginner mind, it doesn't let all of that pattern knowledge overly influence design decisions.
Most other frameworks, at least for PHP and Python, seem to be the same way.
In fact, the only one that I can think of that is purposefully NOT that way is the Ruby on Rails framework which takes the path of "punishment" in the form of "ugly code" for those who attempt to deviate from the orthodoxy of the framework. In my opinion "punishing" developers for deviations is NOT the best way to promote your framework, but the Ruby on Rails disciples will not be convinced otherwise so I have given up trying.
One of the arguments made in the "On Intelligence" book concerned the inadequacy of using the Von Nuemann Architecture with the standard fetch, decode, execute, store paradigm, which is at the heart of all modern computing, to construct a true human like intelligence. You either have to build hardware that approximates the human brain (i.e. lots of nueron like devices) OR you have to simulate such a device on the above mentioned von nuemann type computers (which are inefficient at simulating a brain and require uber computing power to simulate even a much less complicated than human brain). In other words, this is not an area where one can do any useful work that hasn't already been done in isolation on consumer computing hardware.
so when a filmmaker puts their creative spin on the story it is viewed as destroying the story.
Which is not an entirely unfounded belief given the history of Hollywood with "adapting" well known stories and losing their essence in the process. The most recent notable exception was Peter Jackson with The Lord of the Rings. Those films proved that when the story of the original author is taken intact or very nearly so (even LOTR had a few rearrangements and cuts of some minor sub-plots for the sake of expedience, Tom Bombadil for example, but what WAS shown was true to the story as written) the result can be as good and even better than the "re-interpretation" of some director or writer. I cannot understand why writers and directors feel the need to butcher classics. If they want to do something new and original then why not do something new and original? Nobody says that you cannot borrow ideas from previous stories, but make the characters and the setting uniquely your own if you want to have the creative freedom to "interpret" your own version of events. If on the other hand you want to make IRobot or LOTR then make them but do not presume to reinterpret a classic story that you didn't create or own, it just sets you up to fail.