But that's what's evil about the Lottery. It sells daydreams to people who are too poor to afford real ones.
Lots of people play the lottery multiple times, every day, looking for that dream. If they took that money and invested it, they could retire years earlier. If they spend it on night school, the could get a better job and have a chance at making those dreams come true. If they spend it on college for their kids....well, you get they point. But they don't. They spend it on the Lotto because they don't know any better.
Spending a buck a week on a dream is a good deal. Spending grocery money on the lotto because "This time, I'm gonna win fer sure!" is a scam...run by the government, and it's not right.
Ultimately, if China cannot reproduce the binaries from the source, they will probably have to dismiss this as a marketting stunt.
I would contend that China knew this going in, and their real aim here is to look for vunerabilities in Windows that they can exploit for esponiage purposes.
"our brand of capitalism" is what drives companies to create these life-saving drugs in the first place. If you're suggesting that a socialist, universal health care style drug R&D system is going to fix this problem, ask yourself this: If the government is going to be doleing out R&D bucks collected from tax revenues, who gets to decide what drugs get researched?
Should we spend more on AIDS research than Cancer?
Should we stop funding research that uses aborted fetuses?
Should we fund research into finding a "cure" for homosexuality?
Right now, all of these questions are answered by the free market. If you fund drug R&D through the government, they will be answered by bureaucrats and special interest groups. Maybe captialism isn't perfect, but it's better than the Neo-Feudalism that government sponsored drug research would give us.
I should have been more explicit (I thought the implicaton was clear). If AOL doesn't offer the ability to download AND BURN more than 10 songs (much more than 10 songs) for $18 a month, then there's no incentive to use the service. Why not just go out and buy the CDs? Then you can rip them to whatever format you want and not have to pay the additional money for a CD-Burner and CD-Rs.
It's a simple question of what you get for your money. Nobody is going to think this is worth the money. Unless AOL can cut costs to reduce the price, this service will fail.
Do you really think countries like China or Iraq will abide by the terms of your license? You'd be preventing law-abiding countries from using the technology while freely giving it to ones that have no respect for international law.
You may be against the U.S. attacking Iraq, but I doubt that you'd like to support (for example) North Korea attacking South Korea.
See, the way is works is, if you want to change your business model, you can't keep the old one around "just in case".
Nobody is going to pay $18 bucks a month to download and burn 10 songs. You need to offer 100 or 1000 (or unlimited downloads) for $18 a month. "But!", you say, "That's not profitable! We won't make any money!"
Right, you won't make any money because you haven't thrown out the OLD system yet. These two ways of doing business are mutually exclusive. Either you're selling CD's, or your selling the rights to listen to music. You can't do both. Right now, you spend millions a year on production and distribution...so much money in fact that you have to charge $18 for 10 songs (be it in CD format or downloadable format).
The solution is CUT COSTS. Stop spending millions a year on pressing and distributing CD's and just put everything in an online library. It's just that simple. Then you can offer more because it costs less to produce. Then people will buy...but not until you make the leap.
Which ones? Too many to name. Start with "I exist", and go from there.
And as far as personal belief systems being contradictory, that's entirely possible. Personal beliefs are usually not composed of a single belief system (If they were, people would be very arrogant, and probably very boring).
I was trying to make this point when I posted this theory. Newton believed in two contradictory belief systems (Physics and Christianity) at the same time. Because all belief systems are just logical constructs, and not reflections of reality, there's nothing wrong with this. You can have 1000 different contradictory belief systems and use them in all kinds of different situations. As long as those models of the universe work for you, it doesn't matter.
Even if your belief system is "Whatever I feel is right, is right". That's fine. But it's still a belief system. And yes, I'm stealing some ideas from Kant. And Taoism. And a few other places. Which ones exactly are left as an exersise to the reader (assuming "the reader" actually exists).
It's not a conspiracy theory. I state at the top of the page that not all the theories are conspiratorial (it just started out with all conspiracy theories and I never wanted to rename it)
All belief systems, from Catholicism to Physics to Astrology, are essentially the same. To build a belief system, you first need axioms. These are the facts that you take for granted. They do not need to be proven, usually because they cannot be. They form the foundation of your belief system and without them (all of them) the system will not hold up.
An example of an Axiom is "God is omniscient and omnipotent". It cannot be proven true or false by logical or experimental means. Indeed, experiments themselves are based on a scientific Axiom; that all phenomena are repeatable, given their causes can be re-created. This is not necessarily true in, say, the Christian belief system, where God can cause miracles to occur once and never again.
Once you have your set of Axioms, you can start to build your rule base. Rules are what make your system useful. All your rules must be based on either axioms or other rules. If any of your rules contradict each other, then either your logic is flawed, or one (or more) of your axioms are contradictory and must be changed (along with all the rules based off that axiom).
The reason humans build belief systems is to add order to a chaotic world. By building a mental construct that says 'Here are the rules' these systems allow humans to cope with each other, our environment, and ourselves with some degree of certainty. However, it is important to remember that ALL belief systems are simply mental constructs designed to form the world into a model that we can understand. A rose is what it is regardless of what we call it, or what significance we place on it's existence.
There's a big difference between being identified by a SS number or a drivers licence and a biometric. Biometrics can be used for more than just identification.
Retnal scans, for example, could be used to filter out suspects by race (based on eye color), or provide insight into the quality of someone's vision. While this may seem trivial, this type of information, especially medical information, is _supposed_ to be protected by the Constitution (at least here in the U.S.) and any such system mandiated by the government will threaten those constitutionally protected freedoms. Would you be comfortable giving a DNA sample to the government for identification purposes, knowing that they could analyze it for genetic defects? This is the first step on the path to a day where you can't have a driver's license because you're genetically pre-disposed to alcholism.
How do you apply big-O and all the other CS stuff to "real" code?
Want a real-world example? Here you go:
I once wrote a rendering engine for a GIS data viewer. GIS (Geographic Information System) data, in case you're not aware, is huge. We're talking gigs and gigs of data in some cases. Because of this you can't just use a regular old 2D rendering system to draw it all on the screen because it won't scale up to be able to handle all this data. So when I was writing the replacement rendering engine, I make sure that all the lookup algorithms we used were O(log(n)). This is what makes rendering all this data possible, becuase you can find what you want to draw in logrithmic time (instead of linear time). I was able to establish this standard WAY before we wrote a single line of code. I could have just built a hashing system to look up the data in O(c) [constant time], but because of the algorithm analysis techniques I learned in school I knew that O(log(n)) lookups would be sufficent for the task (and save memory). So how many times did I have to re-write this rendering engine? Zero. I did it right the first time because I could prove the way I was doing it was performant enough to meet the spec before I wrote any code.
The reason that most of the code out there is terrible is because most programmers don't have (or don't use or don't remember) any formal computer science or sofware engineering training. Because of this, too much time is required to write really good code, so corners are cut. Software Engineering is not about establishing a draconian process to force developers to code a certian way, it's about providing tools and tricks to help them solve problems and prevent bugs with the least amount of effort.
Maybe the reason that you don't seem to think that software development can be stripped down to "first principles" is because you don't have the educational background to know what those principles are. The basic principles taught to Computer Science students around the country are as mathmatically verifiable and repeatable as any other scienctific system (including physics).
Thinks like "Big O" algorithm analysis, data storage techniques, and compiler theory form the basis of Computer Science and provide the structural underpinnings for most of the software engineering methodologies out there today.
I consider myself a software engineer. I certianly do not re-invent the wheel for every project because I have been using the same methodolgy ever since I started programming professionally (OOP). While I am constantly learning new tricks, techniques and technologies, the "first principles" that I learned in school have not changed over the last 50 years of computing history, and they will never change, because they have a firm foundation in mathematics.
I was trying to book a trip from Houston to Chicago and had a few web sites going at the same time to compare prices. Once I got everything entered in, Expedia quoted me a price about 20% cheaper than all the other sites. I clicked through the purchase system, entered my address, credit card, etc...and when I finally clicked the very last "Buy This Now" button, a new page came up saying the price had jumped another $200, making it more expensive than all the other sites (which I had closed after seeing the Expedia quote).
Needless to say I was very pissed about entering in all my credit card info BEFORE seeing the real price, and I went over to another site to book the trip. I won't be using Expedia for anything in the future because of this.
...but seriously tho, I've always found that it's best if you go out of your way to make sure that code is duplicated as little as possible. Sometimes it takes some major refactoring to move a method when you discover that it's needed someplace else, but it's almost always worth it in the time saved testing, debugging and keeping the methods in sync.
They're dead...and they know it. This is one more in a long line of desperate attempts to keep thier antiquated business model on life support. When they go bankrupt, I'm sure they'll just start suing anyone and everyone, and ask the federal government for a bailout, just so they can drive their beemers for another month before the well runs dry.
The first version of whatever you write will be worthless, and probably require a lot of re-writing before it becomes production quality. This is unavoidable, no matter how much you plan and design in the early stages. So just accept the fact that the first version is really just a fact finding mission and plan accordingly.
The itsy-bitsy spider went up to outer space; down back to earth, Whoah! It grew a human face! Out came the media and the experts to explain, how the itsy-bitsy spider got a such a fucked DNA strain.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's what's evil about the Lottery. It sells daydreams to people who are too poor to afford real ones.
Lots of people play the lottery multiple times, every day, looking for that dream. If they took that money and invested it, they could retire years earlier. If they spend it on night school, the could get a better job and have a chance at making those dreams come true. If they spend it on college for their kids....well, you get they point. But they don't. They spend it on the Lotto because they don't know any better.
Spending a buck a week on a dream is a good deal. Spending grocery money on the lotto because "This time, I'm gonna win fer sure!" is a scam...run by the government, and it's not right.
Ultimately, if China cannot reproduce the binaries from the source, they will probably have to dismiss this as a marketting stunt.
I would contend that China knew this going in, and their real aim here is to look for vunerabilities in Windows that they can exploit for esponiage purposes.
"our brand of capitalism" is what drives companies to create these life-saving drugs in the first place. If you're suggesting that a socialist, universal health care style drug R&D system is going to fix this problem, ask yourself this: If the government is going to be doleing out R&D bucks collected from tax revenues, who gets to decide what drugs get researched?
Should we spend more on AIDS research than Cancer?
Should we stop funding research that uses aborted fetuses?
Should we fund research into finding a "cure" for homosexuality?
Right now, all of these questions are answered by the free market. If you fund drug R&D through the government, they will be answered by bureaucrats and special interest groups. Maybe captialism isn't perfect, but it's better than the Neo-Feudalism that government sponsored drug research would give us.
I should have been more explicit (I thought the implicaton was clear). If AOL doesn't offer the ability to download AND BURN more than 10 songs (much more than 10 songs) for $18 a month, then there's no incentive to use the service. Why not just go out and buy the CDs? Then you can rip them to whatever format you want and not have to pay the additional money for a CD-Burner and CD-Rs.
It's a simple question of what you get for your money. Nobody is going to think this is worth the money. Unless AOL can cut costs to reduce the price, this service will fail.
Do you really think countries like China or Iraq will abide by the terms of your license? You'd be preventing law-abiding countries from using the technology while freely giving it to ones that have no respect for international law.
You may be against the U.S. attacking Iraq, but I doubt that you'd like to support (for example) North Korea attacking South Korea.
See, the way is works is, if you want to change your business model, you can't keep the old one around "just in case".
Nobody is going to pay $18 bucks a month to download and burn 10 songs. You need to offer 100 or 1000 (or unlimited downloads) for $18 a month. "But!", you say, "That's not profitable! We won't make any money!"
Right, you won't make any money because you haven't thrown out the OLD system yet. These two ways of doing business are mutually exclusive. Either you're selling CD's, or your selling the rights to listen to music. You can't do both. Right now, you spend millions a year on production and distribution...so much money in fact that you have to charge $18 for 10 songs (be it in CD format or downloadable format).
The solution is CUT COSTS. Stop spending millions a year on pressing and distributing CD's and just put everything in an online library. It's just that simple. Then you can offer more because it costs less to produce. Then people will buy...but not until you make the leap.
Which ones? Too many to name. Start with "I exist", and go from there.
And as far as personal belief systems being contradictory, that's entirely possible. Personal beliefs are usually not composed of a single belief system (If they were, people would be very arrogant, and probably very boring).
I was trying to make this point when I posted this theory. Newton believed in two contradictory belief systems (Physics and Christianity) at the same time. Because all belief systems are just logical constructs, and not reflections of reality, there's nothing wrong with this. You can have 1000 different contradictory belief systems and use them in all kinds of different situations. As long as those models of the universe work for you, it doesn't matter.
Even if your belief system is "Whatever I feel is right, is right". That's fine. But it's still a belief system. And yes, I'm stealing some ideas from Kant. And Taoism. And a few other places. Which ones exactly are left as an exersise to the reader (assuming "the reader" actually exists).
It's not a conspiracy theory. I state at the top of the page that not all the theories are conspiratorial (it just started out with all conspiracy theories and I never wanted to rename it)
Ah yes, but the process of "rationalization" simply involves adding and subtracting axioms until the system makes sense again.
like so:
Axioms:
1) Stealing is bad
2) I need food to live
Rules:
a) I'm hungry
b) The store has food
c) I have no money
rationalization() {
remove(#1)
add(#3)
}
New Axioms:
2) I need food to live
3) Stealing is bad, unless you're hungry
Theory #29 - Information theory 101
All belief systems, from Catholicism to Physics to Astrology, are essentially the same. To build a belief system, you first need axioms. These are the facts that you take for granted. They do not need to be proven, usually because they cannot be. They form the foundation of your belief system and without them (all of them) the system will not hold up.
An example of an Axiom is "God is omniscient and omnipotent". It cannot be proven true or false by logical or experimental means. Indeed, experiments themselves are based on a scientific Axiom; that all phenomena are repeatable, given their causes can be re-created. This is not necessarily true in, say, the Christian belief system, where God can cause miracles to occur once and never again.
Once you have your set of Axioms, you can start to build your rule base. Rules are what make your system useful. All your rules must be based on either axioms or other rules. If any of your rules contradict each other, then either your logic is flawed, or one (or more) of your axioms are contradictory and must be changed (along with all the rules based off that axiom).
The reason humans build belief systems is to add order to a chaotic world. By building a mental construct that says 'Here are the rules' these systems allow humans to cope with each other, our environment, and ourselves with some degree of certainty. However, it is important to remember that ALL belief systems are simply mental constructs designed to form the world into a model that we can understand. A rose is what it is regardless of what we call it, or what significance we place on it's existence.
FYI: Inflammable means flammable...
Microsoft: Hey Sega! You should build a console with PC hardware and DirectX! Call it "Dreamcast".
Sega: OK....But, you're not looking to get into the console market, are you?
Microsoft: "No....are you kidding? We just make software!"
Sega: "What's that box over there in the corner...the one with the big X on it?"
Microsoft: "Huh? Eh..Oh nothing, nothing...don't uh......Hey! Look! Money! Lookie Here! Isn't it Pretty! Money!"
And we all know how that story ended
You paid him $127,001 because the firewall settings would only let you get the money off localhost.
You paid him $127,001 because the firewall settings wouldn't let you get the money off localhost.
There's a big difference between being identified by a SS number or a drivers licence and a biometric. Biometrics can be used for more than just identification.
Retnal scans, for example, could be used to filter out suspects by race (based on eye color), or provide insight into the quality of someone's vision. While this may seem trivial, this type of information, especially medical information, is _supposed_ to be protected by the Constitution (at least here in the U.S.) and any such system mandiated by the government will threaten those constitutionally protected freedoms. Would you be comfortable giving a DNA sample to the government for identification purposes, knowing that they could analyze it for genetic defects? This is the first step on the path to a day where you can't have a driver's license because you're genetically pre-disposed to alcholism.
Want a real-world example? Here you go:
I once wrote a rendering engine for a GIS data viewer. GIS (Geographic Information System) data, in case you're not aware, is huge. We're talking gigs and gigs of data in some cases. Because of this you can't just use a regular old 2D rendering system to draw it all on the screen because it won't scale up to be able to handle all this data. So when I was writing the replacement rendering engine, I make sure that all the lookup algorithms we used were O(log(n)). This is what makes rendering all this data possible, becuase you can find what you want to draw in logrithmic time (instead of linear time). I was able to establish this standard WAY before we wrote a single line of code. I could have just built a hashing system to look up the data in O(c) [constant time], but because of the algorithm analysis techniques I learned in school I knew that O(log(n)) lookups would be sufficent for the task (and save memory). So how many times did I have to re-write this rendering engine? Zero. I did it right the first time because I could prove the way I was doing it was performant enough to meet the spec before I wrote any code.
The reason that most of the code out there is terrible is because most programmers don't have (or don't use or don't remember) any formal computer science or sofware engineering training. Because of this, too much time is required to write really good code, so corners are cut. Software Engineering is not about establishing a draconian process to force developers to code a certian way, it's about providing tools and tricks to help them solve problems and prevent bugs with the least amount of effort.
Maybe the reason that you don't seem to think that software development can be stripped down to "first principles" is because you don't have the educational background to know what those principles are. The basic principles taught to Computer Science students around the country are as mathmatically verifiable and repeatable as any other scienctific system (including physics).
Thinks like "Big O" algorithm analysis, data storage techniques, and compiler theory form the basis of Computer Science and provide the structural underpinnings for most of the software engineering methodologies out there today.
I consider myself a software engineer. I certianly do not re-invent the wheel for every project because I have been using the same methodolgy ever since I started programming professionally (OOP). While I am constantly learning new tricks, techniques and technologies, the "first principles" that I learned in school have not changed over the last 50 years of computing history, and they will never change, because they have a firm foundation in mathematics.
I was trying to book a trip from Houston to Chicago and had a few web sites going at the same time to compare prices. Once I got everything entered in, Expedia quoted me a price about 20% cheaper than all the other sites. I clicked through the purchase system, entered my address, credit card, etc...and when I finally clicked the very last "Buy This Now" button, a new page came up saying the price had jumped another $200, making it more expensive than all the other sites (which I had closed after seeing the Expedia quote).
Needless to say I was very pissed about entering in all my credit card info BEFORE seeing the real price, and I went over to another site to book the trip. I won't be using Expedia for anything in the future because of this.
"Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of aaarrrrggh".
...but seriously tho, I've always found that it's best if you go out of your way to make sure that code is duplicated as little as possible. Sometimes it takes some major refactoring to move a method when you discover that it's needed someplace else, but it's almost always worth it in the time saved testing, debugging and keeping the methods in sync.
They're dead...and they know it. This is one more in a long line of desperate attempts to keep thier antiquated business model on life support. When they go bankrupt, I'm sure they'll just start suing anyone and everyone, and ask the federal government for a bailout, just so they can drive their beemers for another month before the well runs dry.
"Plan to throw one away"
The first version of whatever you write will be worthless, and probably require a lot of re-writing before it becomes production quality. This is unavoidable, no matter how much you plan and design in the early stages. So just accept the fact that the first version is really just a fact finding mission and plan accordingly.
...you have it set to "vibrate". Then you should be all good.
The itsy-bitsy spider went up to outer space;
down back to earth, Whoah! It grew a human face!
Out came the media and the experts to explain,
how the itsy-bitsy spider got a such a fucked DNA strain.