Great Scott! You're in a TIME LOOP! Don't move! There's a car to your left, get in slowly and accelerate to 88mph down the street. Oh, and here's a banana peel for the FUSION REACTOR.
Another issue though is that all of humanity benefits from scientific
advances.
Be careful with absolutes. While I agree with you, there are *many* people who will point out that the discovery of how to build atom bombs did *not* benefit humanity. Why is this relevant? Funding is all about politics, and absolutes don't mix well with politics.
That didn't stop them when they bought Doubleclick. You know all that big brother advertising evilness Google is famous for? Doubleclick was well known for it.
That may be, but as a computer programmer I can tell you that moving the Bezier control points isn't anywhere near enough to turn a 1.5mb file into a 40k file.
SVG is an XML text file (you can open it with your favourite notepad app and look inside if you like). XML wastes *huge* amounts of space compared with the information it embodies, whereas a good binary format will try to store *only* the information that's needed.
You can easily have a 100 to 1 space gain without losing any information at all by using binary. However, XML is designed for portability and standards, and the 100 fold space inefficiency was explicitly chosen as an acceptable tradeoff by the language designers.
However, if you convert SVG into some other image format, the problem is that image format will probably not support all the possible features of SVG, and therefore the conversion program has to either refuse conversion, or make changes in the image. It's similar to when you shrink a bitmap - there are fewer pixels, so you necessarily lose detail. That's the reason your images get warped.
True, but selling information that enables criminal hacking can make you an accessory.
Actually getting paid for this can and will be used in court against you.
Teaching isn't about producing results. A team effort is great when the goal is to create a product. Teaching is about training a mind to achieve a certain standard of competency. Two or more combined minds that achieve competency as a whole does not guarantee competency of the individuals.
I disagree. Black Scholes was only invented in 1973. The increased risk taking was a consequence of better computers and more elaborate quantitative methods.
Of course, but if you work in a hedge fund and don't make the targets, you get fired. So the probability calculation is 1/6th yields 10% (if the fund achieves above average gains), maybe 3/6ths yields nothing (if the fund achieves average gains) and 2/6ths you get fired (if the fund underperforms).
Probabilistically, this isn't a repeated game where you always have a 1/6th chance of profit, it's a finite game where once you hit the 2/6 event, the game ends.
I'd like a career change, but at 46 I can't see it happening.
I also have the
whole "how could I possibly walk away from this high paying, full benefits
job even if it makes me hate every particle in the universe" syndrome.
Sell your house, divorce your wife and move away so you don't have to see your kids. Make sure you become a teetotaller (both alcohol and sex), and find a cheap appartment near the train tracks. Get yourself a seasonal bus ticket.
If you follow my advice, then you'll have very little day to day expenses, and it will be very easy for you to "walk away from this high paying, full benefits job".
Trust me, you are only one tiny mental adjustment away from your dream of leaving your job! Embrace the change and read also my self-help advice column to learn how to become a half-man half-fish genetic hybrid in 10 days!
Not at all. Have you seen the parking fees in town lately? This product serves a real need. Now you can drive to work on a molecule, and keep it in your pocket during work hours. Moreover, it's eco-friendly. I'm told molecules run on electricity.
Taleb's point
is that a partnership with unlimited liabilities would never have gotten into
the situation Lehman got into.
That's just theoretical wankery. Remember the joke: An economics professor and his student walk down the street. The student sees a $100 bill on the ground and stoops to pick it up. His professor stops him and says "leave it, it's fake, otherwise somebody would have picked it up already".
People accept the threat of unlimited liabilities all the time in all sorts of situations. For example, criminals have a threat of life in prison or even the death penalty, and yet they still elect to take the risks. Students take loans that could and probably will take half or more of their lifetime to repay. From the student's POV, that's pretty close to unlimited liability. Soldiers who volunteer to go to war face the threat of being maimed or killed with high probability. That's an unlimited threat of liabilities, and yet millions do it.
The point is that Taleb's argument is flawed, human nature is vastly different from the rosy ultra-rational toy model that many economists and bankers paint the world to be. Lehman with unlimited liabilities would have behaved essentially exactly the same way.
Well you're wrong. For starters, they can't have criminal convictions themselves. Expecting them to behave privately in line with the higher standards of their office is both natural, and in fact highly logical.
Do you really feel it is ok for a judge to turn on the respectable persona while he's sitting on the bench, and as soon as he leaves the courtroom he can act like a jerk and a wife beater? At the very least that puts a huge question mark over his judgment, and frankly his competence to make life and death decisions over other people.
Nobody's putting a gun to his head and forcing the guy to be a judge. If he wants to be one, he should get his private life in order.
Eh? No, I'm saying with great power comes great responsibility. Judges need to be held to a higher standard than ordinary people, because they're judges.
Being a bad parent while being a judge is worse than being a bad parent while being a plumber.
Not necessarily. While the judge is a person with all the rights and privileges of the average joe, it also makes sense to expect a higher standard of behaviour from him due to his position, beyond merely the letter of the law. There should be some kind of disciplinary consequence, and it should be seen to be done, not merely done behind closed doors. That's something his superiors can do I would hope.
No, the Catholics didn't take liberties, insofar as that they were (legitimately at the time) doing what they claimed the (exclusive) right to be doing: interpreting the bible in any way that they saw fit.
It's logically consistent, even if it's obviously self-serving. But it's wrong
to view it from the modern viewpoint where both protestants and catholics are equally legitimate. In the historical context, the protestants were wrong until
they eventually became right by force of arms.
I'm not sure I see the distinction you're making. Heresy and splinter sects have always existed in the history of christianity, I don't deny that. But the protestants deserve credit for making it acceptable to disagree with catholic dogma. They literally fought and died in huge numbers over many years throughout Europe to legitimize their movement. That's not the same as people complaining about the corruption of their local priests etc.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize (I assume) that those are *lower* bounds on the storage size. There's no guarantee that uint16_t is in fact (only) 16 bits long...
s.e.l.
Great Scott! You're in a TIME LOOP! Don't move! There's a car to your left, get in slowly and accelerate to 88mph down the street. Oh, and here's a banana peel for the FUSION REACTOR.
Then you should read Ken Thompson on putting backdoors in C compilers. Do you trust your build system?
Be careful with absolutes. While I agree with you, there are *many* people who will point out that the discovery of how to build atom bombs did *not* benefit humanity. Why is this relevant? Funding is all about politics, and absolutes don't mix well with politics.
That didn't stop them when they bought Doubleclick. You know all that big brother advertising evilness Google is famous for? Doubleclick was well known for it.
Actually, when writing end user license agreements, lawyers often limit themselves to a single paragraph to describe the rights of the user...
SVG is an XML text file (you can open it with your favourite notepad app and look inside if you like). XML wastes *huge* amounts of space compared with the information it embodies, whereas a good binary format will try to store *only* the information that's needed. You can easily have a 100 to 1 space gain without losing any information at all by using binary. However, XML is designed for portability and standards, and the 100 fold space inefficiency was explicitly chosen as an acceptable tradeoff by the language designers.
However, if you convert SVG into some other image format, the problem is that image format will probably not support all the possible features of SVG, and therefore the conversion program has to either refuse conversion, or make changes in the image. It's similar to when you shrink a bitmap - there are fewer pixels, so you necessarily lose detail. That's the reason your images get warped.
It's daylight here on the other side of the world, can I still download the nightly version or do I have to wait 12 hours?
True, but selling information that enables criminal hacking can make you an accessory. Actually getting paid for this can and will be used in court against you.
I agree, since this is usually easy to test for on the spot with probing questions.
Teaching isn't about producing results. A team effort is great when the goal is to create a product. Teaching is about training a mind to achieve a certain standard of competency. Two or more combined minds that achieve competency as a whole does not guarantee competency of the individuals.
I disagree. Black Scholes was only invented in 1973. The increased risk taking was a consequence of better computers and more elaborate quantitative methods.
You seem to have a problem with reading comprehension. Nowhere did I claim laws have no effect.
Probabilistically, this isn't a repeated game where you always have a 1/6th chance of profit, it's a finite game where once you hit the 2/6 event, the game ends.
Sell your house, divorce your wife and move away so you don't have to see your kids. Make sure you become a teetotaller (both alcohol and sex), and find a cheap appartment near the train tracks. Get yourself a seasonal bus ticket.
If you follow my advice, then you'll have very little day to day expenses, and it will be very easy for you to "walk away from this high paying, full benefits job".
Trust me, you are only one tiny mental adjustment away from your dream of leaving your job! Embrace the change and read also my self-help advice column to learn how to become a half-man half-fish genetic hybrid in 10 days!
Oh, and don't touch those eggs, you don't know where they've been :)
Not at all. Have you seen the parking fees in town lately? This product serves a real need. Now you can drive to work on a molecule, and keep it in your pocket during work hours. Moreover, it's eco-friendly. I'm told molecules run on electricity.
That's just theoretical wankery. Remember the joke: An economics professor and his student walk down the street. The student sees a $100 bill on the ground and stoops to pick it up. His professor stops him and says "leave it, it's fake, otherwise somebody would have picked it up already".
People accept the threat of unlimited liabilities all the time in all sorts of situations. For example, criminals have a threat of life in prison or even the death penalty, and yet they still elect to take the risks. Students take loans that could and probably will take half or more of their lifetime to repay. From the student's POV, that's pretty close to unlimited liability. Soldiers who volunteer to go to war face the threat of being maimed or killed with high probability. That's an unlimited threat of liabilities, and yet millions do it.
The point is that Taleb's argument is flawed, human nature is vastly different from the rosy ultra-rational toy model that many economists and bankers paint the world to be. Lehman with unlimited liabilities would have behaved essentially exactly the same way.
Good for you. I prefer judges to be quality controlled.
Do you really feel it is ok for a judge to turn on the respectable persona while he's sitting on the bench, and as soon as he leaves the courtroom he can act like a jerk and a wife beater? At the very least that puts a huge question mark over his judgment, and frankly his competence to make life and death decisions over other people.
Nobody's putting a gun to his head and forcing the guy to be a judge. If he wants to be one, he should get his private life in order.
Being a bad parent while being a judge is worse than being a bad parent while being a plumber.
Not necessarily. While the judge is a person with all the rights and privileges of the average joe, it also makes sense to expect a higher standard of behaviour from him due to his position, beyond merely the letter of the law. There should be some kind of disciplinary consequence, and it should be seen to be done, not merely done behind closed doors. That's something his superiors can do I would hope.
It's logically consistent, even if it's obviously self-serving. But it's wrong to view it from the modern viewpoint where both protestants and catholics are equally legitimate. In the historical context, the protestants were wrong until they eventually became right by force of arms.
I'm not sure I see the distinction you're making. Heresy and splinter sects have always existed in the history of christianity, I don't deny that. But the protestants deserve credit for making it acceptable to disagree with catholic dogma. They literally fought and died in huge numbers over many years throughout Europe to legitimize their movement. That's not the same as people complaining about the corruption of their local priests etc.