But the United States was supposed to be different to the hundreds of abusive governments that had preceded it.
By who? When I've looked through the history of the US, there are plenty of high profile people who have warned that any such "difference" has to be actively and vigilantly maintained - be it Benjamin Franklin cautioning that the US has a republic "if you can keep it" to Eisenhower warning of the "military-industrial complex".
Exceptionalism is when you say "other rules ought to apply to us, because obviously we're special".
First, rules in the sense of exceptionalism aren't ethic or legal rules in the sense you mean. A rule might be "High taxes mean low employment" (you aren't required to fire people when you raise taxes). Exceptions such as Sweden to that rule would then fall under the consideration of exceptionalism. In other words, Sweden breaks that rule because they're special - not because the rule is somehow inherently broken or wrong.
Merely being hypocritical doesn't imply exceptionalism, especially when everyone does it.
Really, just make the markets tick every 5 minutes. Making that a random tick every 4-6 minutes would be even better. It's getting kinda ridiculous when you actually have to think relativistic speeds while trading in market.
Fast trading is not responsible for even a small fraction of the ills of the US stock market. And you don't have to think in "relativistic speeds" to trade on the stock markets. Most traders don't and they do just fine.
I really wish people would stop offering poorly thought out suggestions for fixing something that wasn't a problem in the first place.
It does in this case. The Earth, being an oblate spheroid, is a touch flatter than it would be, if it were a true sphere. That in turn means a slightly shorter distance between Washington, DC and Chicago as the original poster claimed.
It might also be a prelude to creating a system to catch people trying to evade the individual mandate portion of Obamacare or engaging in medical fraud. If the NEA can access such information, then so can the IRS.
The current administration has different priorities. I doubt they want to make life easy for a future Republican administration to crack down on medical marijuana users (though I agree that will be an outcome of such a policy).
Do you think high frequency trading is not a science?
It's not a study of a field of knowledge. I'd consider it a very specialized case of commerce or business requiring considerable knowledge, connections, skill, and infrastructure.
It's not clear to me that fairness is a good thing for a market to have. Some people will always know more than others, either because they have insider information or are just more knowledgeable about the trade good in question. If they are restricted from trading, then that knowledge doesn't get into the market and the rest of the market remains relatively ignorant of whatever knowledge the potential trader had.
There was another alternative which I didn't think of at the time. That they didn't actually know the results and made the trades in order to stir up the high frequency traders and speculators. Market manipulation is another possibility and it wouldn't require them to actually care about the Fed's decision. I will say that it's more likely to be insider knowledge than market manipulation just because they apparently got things conveniently right and they'd be taking on relatively less risk (both activities are illegal, for example, so there's not much difference in legal risk).
They could have gambled so days before the event so it seems unlikely to me that trading in the milliseconds before the announcement provides any gambling advantage. Now, something that is possible here is that they deliberately made a large trade before the Fed announcement could possibly be public knowledge in order to throw HFT programs. Market manipulation is another relatively illegal but common and traditional practice.
The information was, at the time the trade was executed,
Not in Chicago. Chicago was not in the light cone of the information release at the time that the trades were executed and hence, the information wasn't public. I must admit to being a bit surprised that there is a non empty intersection of relativity and finance law.
But if they had waited those few more milliseconds, they would have been in compliance and yet still most likely beating anyone who had to process the Fed announcement first.
Machines can be designed and programmed to minimize if not completely eliminate that possibility.
Machines that are smarter than you can't be so programmed. I'm sure someone will give it the college try and their failures while possibly highly profitable will also be instructive for the rest of us.
What is wrong with using that old saying when it is completely appropriate? It is a very good example of someone out of their depth and comparing a thing with something they are used to.
The problem is when the old saying gets used on you. At least twice in this discussion, you've accused others of being dogmatic in thought. I don't see much in the way of evidence presented for it aside from the occasional old saying. Dogmatic thought looks to be your hammer.
So what? The media aren't the only ones who use hype. A number of people had discovered that they can get more attention for their personal causes by implying that "climate change" somehow contributes.
Please consult reality instead of insulting a strawman.
As for bias, readers should take a look at khallow's earlier posts on the climate issue to see the dogma driven bias there.
Consider who just used the strawman of "the media uses hype" in the previous breath.
I suggest it would be educational for said readers to also look at a certain dbIII's posts and ponder someone who would say "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail ". Here, you dismiss someone's argument on the basis that people who are concerned about flaw X (which incidentally happens to be dogmatic and selective rhetoric) only because they suffer from flaw X.
That's part of the allure of technology and capitalism. You let the capital - the machines - that you own work for you, and you just enjoy the results. And technology enables us to control our capital even if we're physically far away.
That depends on the capital staying owned. As I recall, there's a saying, possession is nine-tenths of the law. If you're a light hour away, you don't possess that capital. And if it should decide to do something else, like say, colonize the galaxy, what are you going to do?
Ok, I saw it. You have a point to make? I'll also note that a considerable portion of the northern hemisphere from about 40 degree latitude and up was tundra or ice field in the last 15k years and isn't now.
Well, there is some evidence of global warming over the past century. But most of what passes for evidence these days is either observation bias or someone attaching their pet issue to "climate change". For example, a recent oyster die-off on the northwest coast of the US was blamed on oceanic acidifcation from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Turns out it's probably something that has been going on for a long time (say sourced by oceanic volcanism or the like), but we only noticed it recently and it gets blamed on the current favorite target of choice, climate change.
What sort of controls do we have to keep them from overrunning the asteroid belt or the entire galaxy?
Well, we can kill them with the usual sort of weapons. Point is that it takes a while for humans to get out of hand.
That's going to change. As computers and nanorobots become more advanced, we will inevitably incorporate them into our own bodies. Maybe at first it will just be robots to clean out our arteries and kill cancer cells where they might pop up. But I think eventually it will also include things like adding more memory and processing power to our own brains, and finally replacing our weak physical bodies altogether.
Well, then these improved humans, will it be cost effective to use them for anything in space?
Your definition of "free" seems to include massive technologies that simply don't exist
Like a tree.
Here's how I would use the word: your posts are fact-free.
I note two facts in my so-called "fact-free" post, the power output of the Sun and that no one is charging you to use energy from the Sun. Two things is not zero things.
Which is just fine. That would be observable. And when you're done screwing around with the "climate deniers" perhaps we can then discuss just how much of a problem AGW would be at that point.
Our cheap energy is running out and the value of putting people into tin cans in low Earth orbit will be highly questionable. Your fantasies will be totally impractical by then.
The Sun outputs roughly 4*10^26 watts of power, all of it free for the taking. And the Earth intercepts a part of that.
Also, we'll just have to find other sources of cheap energy.
As to who owns what in the Solar System, I'll just wait and see what happens. The US doesn't have a lock on space development nor is it doing much for the vast sums it spends on space development.
So it's the sixth lowest record in 35 or so such records. That's a bit underwhelming. And I find it interesting how the other replier goes on to say that ice volume is down significantly even though it is "hard to measure". It's interesting how much modern climatology relies on data that is hard to verify.
If we are talking about the effectiveness of machines vs. robots, it is 100% about computational power.
Not at all. These missions are notorious for being rather lightweight on computational power.
The theoretical limit is that the away team is as smart as the earth team and no communication is required at all, and therefore latency is not an issue ever.
And here's an issue with that. Who gets trusted with this sort of system? Say a business wants to set up a mining operation using self annealing, von Neumann machines that happen to be at least as smart as humans. What sort of controls would be in place to keep them from overrunning the Asteroid Belt, possibly even the entire galaxy?
Keep in mind that by the time said business figures out that their controls have been subverted and some sort of "repair" expedition arrives (possibly involving space marines with nuclear weapons), there may have been a vast explosion in the population of these machines and they may be spreading throughout the Solar System.
Humans can get out of control too in pretty much the same ways. But at least they want and need certain things; they act and communicate in certain ways; and it takes time and a lot of resources to make more viable humans (even if you're going the Star Wars cloning route). A population doubling time of 30 years (for a typical fertile human society) is a lot less risky than a population doubling time of one month.
Even in the Brave New World of superhuman robotics, you need some sort of real time off switch (or at least the ability to escalate to combat such threats on their own terms). And humans aren't going to accept another computer system as the control.
Slashdot Mirror
But the United States was supposed to be different to the hundreds of abusive governments that had preceded it.
By who? When I've looked through the history of the US, there are plenty of high profile people who have warned that any such "difference" has to be actively and vigilantly maintained - be it Benjamin Franklin cautioning that the US has a republic "if you can keep it" to Eisenhower warning of the "military-industrial complex".
Exceptionalism is when you say "other rules ought to apply to us, because obviously we're special".
First, rules in the sense of exceptionalism aren't ethic or legal rules in the sense you mean. A rule might be "High taxes mean low employment" (you aren't required to fire people when you raise taxes). Exceptions such as Sweden to that rule would then fall under the consideration of exceptionalism. In other words, Sweden breaks that rule because they're special - not because the rule is somehow inherently broken or wrong.
Merely being hypocritical doesn't imply exceptionalism, especially when everyone does it.
Personally, I'd like to see the BBC paid out of taxation
Depends how you define taxation. But for me, a mandatory user fee created and enforced by government is taxation.
Really, just make the markets tick every 5 minutes. Making that a random tick every 4-6 minutes would be even better. It's getting kinda ridiculous when you actually have to think relativistic speeds while trading in market.
Fast trading is not responsible for even a small fraction of the ills of the US stock market. And you don't have to think in "relativistic speeds" to trade on the stock markets. Most traders don't and they do just fine.
I really wish people would stop offering poorly thought out suggestions for fixing something that wasn't a problem in the first place.
Curvature doesn't reduce the distance.
It does in this case. The Earth, being an oblate spheroid, is a touch flatter than it would be, if it were a true sphere. That in turn means a slightly shorter distance between Washington, DC and Chicago as the original poster claimed.
It might also be a prelude to creating a system to catch people trying to evade the individual mandate portion of Obamacare or engaging in medical fraud. If the NEA can access such information, then so can the IRS.
The current administration has different priorities. I doubt they want to make life easy for a future Republican administration to crack down on medical marijuana users (though I agree that will be an outcome of such a policy).
Do you think high frequency trading is not a science?
It's not a study of a field of knowledge. I'd consider it a very specialized case of commerce or business requiring considerable knowledge, connections, skill, and infrastructure.
It's not clear to me that fairness is a good thing for a market to have. Some people will always know more than others, either because they have insider information or are just more knowledgeable about the trade good in question. If they are restricted from trading, then that knowledge doesn't get into the market and the rest of the market remains relatively ignorant of whatever knowledge the potential trader had.
There was another alternative which I didn't think of at the time. That they didn't actually know the results and made the trades in order to stir up the high frequency traders and speculators. Market manipulation is another possibility and it wouldn't require them to actually care about the Fed's decision. I will say that it's more likely to be insider knowledge than market manipulation just because they apparently got things conveniently right and they'd be taking on relatively less risk (both activities are illegal, for example, so there's not much difference in legal risk).
They could have gambled so days before the event so it seems unlikely to me that trading in the milliseconds before the announcement provides any gambling advantage. Now, something that is possible here is that they deliberately made a large trade before the Fed announcement could possibly be public knowledge in order to throw HFT programs. Market manipulation is another relatively illegal but common and traditional practice.
The information was, at the time the trade was executed,
Not in Chicago. Chicago was not in the light cone of the information release at the time that the trades were executed and hence, the information wasn't public. I must admit to being a bit surprised that there is a non empty intersection of relativity and finance law.
But if they had waited those few more milliseconds, they would have been in compliance and yet still most likely beating anyone who had to process the Fed announcement first.
Machines can be designed and programmed to minimize if not completely eliminate that possibility.
Machines that are smarter than you can't be so programmed. I'm sure someone will give it the college try and their failures while possibly highly profitable will also be instructive for the rest of us.
Plus, there's That all can be sold off or leased.
What is wrong with using that old saying when it is completely appropriate? It is a very good example of someone out of their depth and comparing a thing with something they are used to.
The problem is when the old saying gets used on you. At least twice in this discussion, you've accused others of being dogmatic in thought. I don't see much in the way of evidence presented for it aside from the occasional old saying. Dogmatic thought looks to be your hammer.
News just in - the media uses hype.
So what? The media aren't the only ones who use hype. A number of people had discovered that they can get more attention for their personal causes by implying that "climate change" somehow contributes.
Please consult reality instead of insulting a strawman. As for bias, readers should take a look at khallow's earlier posts on the climate issue to see the dogma driven bias there.
Consider who just used the strawman of "the media uses hype" in the previous breath.
I suggest it would be educational for said readers to also look at a certain dbIII's posts and ponder someone who would say "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail ". Here, you dismiss someone's argument on the basis that people who are concerned about flaw X (which incidentally happens to be dogmatic and selective rhetoric) only because they suffer from flaw X.
That's part of the allure of technology and capitalism. You let the capital - the machines - that you own work for you, and you just enjoy the results. And technology enables us to control our capital even if we're physically far away.
That depends on the capital staying owned. As I recall, there's a saying, possession is nine-tenths of the law. If you're a light hour away, you don't possess that capital. And if it should decide to do something else, like say, colonize the galaxy, what are you going to do?
Ok, I saw it. You have a point to make? I'll also note that a considerable portion of the northern hemisphere from about 40 degree latitude and up was tundra or ice field in the last 15k years and isn't now.
Well, there is some evidence of global warming over the past century. But most of what passes for evidence these days is either observation bias or someone attaching their pet issue to "climate change". For example, a recent oyster die-off on the northwest coast of the US was blamed on oceanic acidifcation from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Turns out it's probably something that has been going on for a long time (say sourced by oceanic volcanism or the like), but we only noticed it recently and it gets blamed on the current favorite target of choice, climate change.
You mean the things that grow on this planet only
And which need only a degree of gravity, sunlight, and the right mix of nutrients. Those can all exist elsewhere just as they do on Earth.
What sort of controls do we have to keep them from overrunning the asteroid belt or the entire galaxy?
Well, we can kill them with the usual sort of weapons. Point is that it takes a while for humans to get out of hand.
That's going to change. As computers and nanorobots become more advanced, we will inevitably incorporate them into our own bodies. Maybe at first it will just be robots to clean out our arteries and kill cancer cells where they might pop up. But I think eventually it will also include things like adding more memory and processing power to our own brains, and finally replacing our weak physical bodies altogether.
Well, then these improved humans, will it be cost effective to use them for anything in space?
Your definition of "free" seems to include massive technologies that simply don't exist
Like a tree.
Here's how I would use the word: your posts are fact-free.
I note two facts in my so-called "fact-free" post, the power output of the Sun and that no one is charging you to use energy from the Sun. Two things is not zero things.
When the Arctic is ice free in summers
Which is just fine. That would be observable. And when you're done screwing around with the "climate deniers" perhaps we can then discuss just how much of a problem AGW would be at that point.
Our cheap energy is running out and the value of putting people into tin cans in low Earth orbit will be highly questionable. Your fantasies will be totally impractical by then.
The Sun outputs roughly 4*10^26 watts of power, all of it free for the taking. And the Earth intercepts a part of that.
Also, we'll just have to find other sources of cheap energy.
As to who owns what in the Solar System, I'll just wait and see what happens. The US doesn't have a lock on space development nor is it doing much for the vast sums it spends on space development.
So it's the sixth lowest record in 35 or so such records. That's a bit underwhelming. And I find it interesting how the other replier goes on to say that ice volume is down significantly even though it is "hard to measure". It's interesting how much modern climatology relies on data that is hard to verify.
If we are talking about the effectiveness of machines vs. robots, it is 100% about computational power.
Not at all. These missions are notorious for being rather lightweight on computational power.
The theoretical limit is that the away team is as smart as the earth team and no communication is required at all, and therefore latency is not an issue ever.
And here's an issue with that. Who gets trusted with this sort of system? Say a business wants to set up a mining operation using self annealing, von Neumann machines that happen to be at least as smart as humans. What sort of controls would be in place to keep them from overrunning the Asteroid Belt, possibly even the entire galaxy?
Keep in mind that by the time said business figures out that their controls have been subverted and some sort of "repair" expedition arrives (possibly involving space marines with nuclear weapons), there may have been a vast explosion in the population of these machines and they may be spreading throughout the Solar System.
Humans can get out of control too in pretty much the same ways. But at least they want and need certain things; they act and communicate in certain ways; and it takes time and a lot of resources to make more viable humans (even if you're going the Star Wars cloning route). A population doubling time of 30 years (for a typical fertile human society) is a lot less risky than a population doubling time of one month.
Even in the Brave New World of superhuman robotics, you need some sort of real time off switch (or at least the ability to escalate to combat such threats on their own terms). And humans aren't going to accept another computer system as the control.