Economics are outside my field but your questions are interesting so I'll have a go.
A few Points:
You hinted at this with your response to AlXtreme. I suppose AlXtreme's answer better describes potential wealth. Vast oil reserves represents potential wealth equal to what others will give for it.
We have a workable definition if we adopt a variant definition of wealth: Wealth is what I have that I want. With this definition OPEC's oil reserves still represents wealth to it(They burn fossil fuels and thus want oil). Of course they have many other wants that need filling before they will feel wealthy.
Up to a point, Oil is worth more to a big consumer(such as the US) than it is to an OPEC nation. There will be things that are worth more to an OPEC nation than oil(perhaps food and knowledge).
This unequal valuation of goods among countries encourages trade.
I fear any explanation of economic processes reduces the problem to near idiocy but it is interesting none-the-less. Thanks for your intersting questions.
I'm glad you mentioned prototyping because I think that is a real benefit of an easy programming language. If a user feels confident enough to try and program their own solution it forces them to really think about what they need and want. As a developer of business applications, I can tell you that a user who knows their required features and how those features might necessarily work is extremely valuable. Which is great so long as they're not tied to the original product they developed. That being said, we've been trying to bring software developing to the average user for a long time now.
As an aside, I think there are quite a few developers who have elitist issues going on with anything they perceive as more accessible(vi/emacs instead of Eclipse/Visual Studio; C/Assembly instead of Java/Javascript; etc).
I was in Beijing just over 2 months ago(Around the time of the big freeze) and you'd be amazed at how much they've cleaned it up. The amount of building work going on in that city is tremendous. With new train lines coming and a push to move the major polluters out of the city I don't think you'd recognize the city you described.
I did notice some smog when we flew into the city, does any meteorologists in the crowd know how cold fronts affect smog? Don't get me wrong things in Beijing are not peachy but it is, for now, becoming a nice city.
Am I missing something here? Why doesn't python count? It's easy, has a nice "line enter mode", embraces many advance programming concepts from various programming paradigms(OP, Functional, Procedural, etc). And has a bunch of nice Graphical hooks for the eventual game programming your little one will end up doing.
Disregarding Python, what's wrong with Emac's elisp or a nice session with tcsh. You'd be hard pressed to find a computer that you couldn't run one of these languages on and I've just barely scratched the surface of possibilities
No I'd have to say that today's children are given an even richer programing environment to grow with than we were.
Running with your cultural background idea: Why not take this to the local level, ie, make your captcha refer to website content.
The spammers can circumvent captchas effectively because they make sense out of context. But if your captcha asks for the Author's surname, the name of the website, or the news item's title; suddenly you need to actually know about the blog before posting.
Take this to far though, and it starts to look like those discriminatory voter tests of yesteryear.
Sounds alot like what the newspapers are doing in the UK. You'll often get a free DVD with the Sunday editions of the newspapers. A basic paper envlope no frills dvd. Not sure which newspapers though.
Evil Microsoft aside. Let us suppose that this is the same level of documentation Microsoft's internal development teams get:
Could this be why Microsoft projects consistently run over deadlines and behind expectations? (At least in the first iteration.)
This isn't Microsoft trying to screw the competitor, but just a peek into the hole that Microsoft has dug themselves into. Afterall, Microsoft hires can't all be dull-witted-code-monkeys, but perhaps the existing codebase has become a steaming pile of sh*t.
Working with c# and attempting to do anything beyond the immediately supported seems to support this. (Try overriding an OnPaint event on a ListViewBox for instance)
Lets start with the easy stuff. You're right, this is not a black and white world and thus to find fault in any government policy, Education and Terrorism included, does not equal a condemnation of the underlying principles. Also, there is undoubtably more effecicient ways to be running all of our governmental agencies and we should always strive to improve them.
I take exception with your claim on how expensive the US eduction system is. What are we talking about here, primary, secondary, university level eductaion? Which states are we reffering to? Does this include things like research grants? How are we measuring the results of said education systems? Is it by standardized tests? Are we looking at the average, the top, bottom or middle quartiles? Are we making like for like comparisons with other countries. There's so many variables here and you have glossed over all of it. So much so, in fact, I wonder if this is a researched supposition or just your politics masked as fact.
As far as costs coming from those who benefit, I can certainly empathise with that sort of desire. Yo must realize that a fundamental ideal of our tax system, and many others' lies on what is called progressive tax. That is, those who can afford it most pay progressively more in taxes. The idea is, that the wealthy can afford more than the poor, pretty obvious really. The alternatives being flat or regressive tax systems. The worry wth those systems is that it favors those who are already privelidged and thus encourages a widening gap between the haves and the have nots. Wether our current tax systems are truly progressive is very debatable, however, my argument is that you and I as wealthy US citizens pay more because that's the way the system was designed, and a lot of people like that particular design feature.
Let us just say that the preponderance of evidence supports the theorey of evolution. Something that can not be said for creationism as explianed in the bible.
You are right, of course, bad science is everywhere you look. There will be scientists who believe in creationism, even blindly so. Afterall, we are all inherently irrational creatures and scientists are no exception.
Science, on the other hand, strives for the most rational explanations. And when the Grandparent said: We don't consider science to be subject to public policy, and as such, laymen don't get a vote. I think I can safely translate him to mean: Science cares not for an individual's desires, only for the truth
While there was long believed to be some sort of mystical special quality to organic molecules, eventually we figured out that chemistry is chemistry, and that simply by using Carbon we get interesting possiblities.
Indeed, I suspect that this is much the same as when people insist we are not animals. The overwhelming desire of our species to say we're special.
We've never really come up with a definition of intelligence or the mind that we're willing to stick with for any length of time. Granted I can't find anything to back this up but it's my belief that people change their definitions specifically to exclude other things. So the definition in actuality is that is something we have that they don't(select your we's and they's according to preference).
Kinda like that documentary from the 90's "20 Dates":
"So you don't know what your type is, but you know I'm not it"
Just hope to god you don't get crazy frog, or the birds or anything of the like. And as another poster mentioned the worst was that they'd repeat the exact same commercial twice in the same break. I swear the crazy frog tune made it into the top ten charts in the UK. Frickin 13 year olds. It's been better recently, though I still stay away from MTV if I can help it.
This is just how things are decided upon by the masses. With tiny little morality plays tht rarely, if ever represent the truth of the situation.
The Scene: A small, empty, and locally owned record store with a going out of business sign on it's window. The Actors: The Small Businessman: Symbolizes all that's good in America. A local self made man that every one is supposed to love. The Evil Goatee wearing Pirate: The young hoodlum who carelessly and illegally distributes Music and thus drives the Businessman out of business.
(Never mind the fact that music sales are not down and the closing of the little shop has more to do with decade long consumer trends away from downtown and locally owned shops.)
The Scene: A small and simple but well kept house The Actors: The Honest Single Mother: Symbolizes all the helpless through no faut of their own The Evil Goatee wearing RIAA Lawyer: The young hoodlum who harasses innocent mums. No better than Mobster really.
(Never mind the fact that most cases have legitimate copyright infringement at their core)
The Scene: A squalid street corner busy with foot traffic The Actors: The Hard-up Musician playing for change: Symbolizes a pure musician who only wishes to be payed for creations ::Insert bad guy:: This depending on if you think RIAA or music piracy is to blame
Rinse and Repeat.
Notice that this happens with all sorts of issues.
Wow, some one has some like minded mod friends. Anyone who modded the last few posts up is a REAL cool kid.
This is an absolutey fucking ridiculous debate. Let's take one apple(Large very succesful corporation and it's software) and compare it to a few oranges(random open source projects that conveniently fit whatever point you're making).
Look there is definately some shitty open source software. Coming as a.net developer I can speak with experience that Microsoft products are frequently backwards and shitty as well. Let's all just face it. This mountain that we software engineers have made is a stinking pile of shit .
But I digress, You, nor the person you're responding too, nor the silly mods have made any worthwhile points for the last couple a posts.
I was living in Chelmsford (Arguably the capitol of Chavdom) for about 6 months and all my older relatives were making this same complaint. A little worried I ventured into Chelmsford on a Friday evening and discovered this to be BS.
Sure, some people drink to much. And sure, some kids are up to no good. Tell me again how this is unusual.
Just like the recent scare of hoodies, it's mostly a misunderstanding of youth by adults. Sure some youngsters are genuinely dangerous, the vast majority are not.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that you Jesus?
Does this mean we're part of a spatial club because we gate it? -- I am an idiot.
Economics are outside my field but your questions are interesting so I'll have a go.
A few Points:
I fear any explanation of economic processes reduces the problem to near idiocy but it is interesting none-the-less. Thanks for your intersting questions.
I'm glad you mentioned prototyping because I think that is a real benefit of an easy programming language. If a user feels confident enough to try and program their own solution it forces them to really think about what they need and want. As a developer of business applications, I can tell you that a user who knows their required features and how those features might necessarily work is extremely valuable. Which is great so long as they're not tied to the original product they developed. That being said, we've been trying to bring software developing to the average user for a long time now.
As an aside, I think there are quite a few developers who have elitist issues going on with anything they perceive as more accessible(vi/emacs instead of Eclipse/Visual Studio; C/Assembly instead of Java/Javascript; etc).
Here you go. The map for that: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=japan Let me know if you need any more help taking a joke to far.
I'm sorry, but which part of the consitution do you think this breaks? Or am I just misunderstanding you?
I was in Beijing just over 2 months ago(Around the time of the big freeze) and you'd be amazed at how much they've cleaned it up. The amount of building work going on in that city is tremendous. With new train lines coming and a push to move the major polluters out of the city I don't think you'd recognize the city you described.
I did notice some smog when we flew into the city, does any meteorologists in the crowd know how cold fronts affect smog? Don't get me wrong things in Beijing are not peachy but it is, for now, becoming a nice city.
Go to here: EPEAT
And check out the silver awards in all the categories. Notice that no manufacture has been awarded a gold yet.
In all of the categories Apple is represented by a few models which score at or near the top of the pack.
I'm an integrator of the highest order. I integrate so much freetime into my work that even I wonder how I get anything done.
Oh, do think Google wants me to integrate work into my off time?
Is that the same Shannon behind information theorey and Shannon-Fano encoding? Man, this guy is cool.
--Steve
Am I missing something here? Why doesn't python count? It's easy, has a nice "line enter mode", embraces many advance programming concepts from various programming paradigms(OP, Functional, Procedural, etc). And has a bunch of nice Graphical hooks for the eventual game programming your little one will end up doing.
Disregarding Python, what's wrong with Emac's elisp or a nice session with tcsh. You'd be hard pressed to find a computer that you couldn't run one of these languages on and I've just barely scratched the surface of possibilities
No I'd have to say that today's children are given an even richer programing environment to grow with than we were.
--Steve
Running with your cultural background idea:
Why not take this to the local level, ie, make your captcha refer to website content.
The spammers can circumvent captchas effectively because they make sense out of context. But if your captcha asks for the Author's surname, the name of the website, or the news item's title; suddenly you need to actually know about the blog before posting.
Take this to far though, and it starts to look like those discriminatory voter tests of yesteryear.
someone's just taken Linguistics 101;-)
::sniff:: ::sniff:: ahh... nothing like the smell of elitism in the morning.
Sounds alot like what the newspapers are doing in the UK. You'll often get a free DVD with the Sunday editions of the newspapers. A basic paper envlope no frills dvd. Not sure which newspapers though.
You CAN pirate fuel for your car though:
Frying squad foils cooking oil car scam
Evil Microsoft aside. Let us suppose that this is the same level of documentation Microsoft's internal development teams get:
Could this be why Microsoft projects consistently run over deadlines and behind expectations? (At least in the first iteration.)
This isn't Microsoft trying to screw the competitor, but just a peek into the hole that Microsoft has dug themselves into. Afterall, Microsoft hires can't all be dull-witted-code-monkeys, but perhaps the existing codebase has become a steaming pile of sh*t.
Working with c# and attempting to do anything beyond the immediately supported seems to support this. (Try overriding an OnPaint event on a ListViewBox for instance)
Whoa, Slow down there partner.
Lets start with the easy stuff. You're right, this is not a black and white world and thus to find fault in any government policy, Education and Terrorism included, does not equal a condemnation of the underlying principles. Also, there is undoubtably more effecicient ways to be running all of our governmental agencies and we should always strive to improve them.
I take exception with your claim on how expensive the US eduction system is. What are we talking about here, primary, secondary, university level eductaion? Which states are we reffering to? Does this include things like research grants? How are we measuring the results of said education systems? Is it by standardized tests? Are we looking at the average, the top, bottom or middle quartiles? Are we making like for like comparisons with other countries. There's so many variables here and you have glossed over all of it. So much so, in fact, I wonder if this is a researched supposition or just your politics masked as fact.
As far as costs coming from those who benefit, I can certainly empathise with that sort of desire. Yo must realize that a fundamental ideal of our tax system, and many others' lies on what is called progressive tax. That is, those who can afford it most pay progressively more in taxes. The idea is, that the wealthy can afford more than the poor, pretty obvious really. The alternatives being flat or regressive tax systems. The worry wth those systems is that it favors those who are already privelidged and thus encourages a widening gap between the haves and the have nots. Wether our current tax systems are truly progressive is very debatable, however, my argument is that you and I as wealthy US citizens pay more because that's the way the system was designed, and a lot of people like that particular design feature.
Let us just say that the preponderance of evidence supports the theorey of evolution. Something that can not be said for creationism as explianed in the bible.
You are right, of course, bad science is everywhere you look. There will be scientists who believe in creationism, even blindly so. Afterall, we are all inherently irrational creatures and scientists are no exception.
Science, on the other hand, strives for the most rational explanations. And when the Grandparent said: We don't consider science to be subject to public policy, and as such, laymen don't get a vote. I think I can safely translate him to mean: Science cares not for an individual's desires, only for the truth
Indeed, I suspect that this is much the same as when people insist we are not animals. The overwhelming desire of our species to say we're special. We've never really come up with a definition of intelligence or the mind that we're willing to stick with for any length of time. Granted I can't find anything to back this up but it's my belief that people change their definitions specifically to exclude other things. So the definition in actuality is that is something we have that they don't(select your we's and they's according to preference).
Kinda like that documentary from the 90's "20 Dates":
"So you don't know what your type is, but you know I'm not it"
Just hope to god you don't get crazy frog, or the birds or anything of the like. And as another poster mentioned the worst was that they'd repeat the exact same commercial twice in the same break. I swear the crazy frog tune made it into the top ten charts in the UK. Frickin 13 year olds. It's been better recently, though I still stay away from MTV if I can help it.
See Subject
Exactly right.
::Insert bad guy:: This depending on if you think RIAA or music piracy is to blame
This is just how things are decided upon by the masses. With tiny little morality plays tht rarely, if ever represent the truth of the situation.
The Scene: A small, empty, and locally owned record store with a going out of business sign on it's window.
The Actors:
The Small Businessman: Symbolizes all that's good in America. A local self made man that every one is supposed to love.
The Evil Goatee wearing Pirate: The young hoodlum who carelessly and illegally distributes Music and thus drives the Businessman out of business.
(Never mind the fact that music sales are not down and the closing of the little shop has more to do with decade long consumer trends away from downtown and locally owned shops.)
The Scene: A small and simple but well kept house
The Actors:
The Honest Single Mother: Symbolizes all the helpless through no faut of their own
The Evil Goatee wearing RIAA Lawyer: The young hoodlum who harasses innocent mums. No better than Mobster really.
(Never mind the fact that most cases have legitimate copyright infringement at their core)
The Scene: A squalid street corner busy with foot traffic
The Actors:
The Hard-up Musician playing for change: Symbolizes a pure musician who only wishes to be payed for creations
Rinse and Repeat.
Notice that this happens with all sorts of issues.
Wow, some one has some like minded mod friends. Anyone who modded the last few posts up is a REAL cool kid.
.net developer I can speak with experience that Microsoft products are frequently backwards and shitty as well. Let's all just face it. This mountain that we software engineers have made is a stinking pile of shit .
This is an absolutey fucking ridiculous debate. Let's take one apple(Large very succesful corporation and it's software) and compare it to a few oranges(random open source projects that conveniently fit whatever point you're making).
Look there is definately some shitty open source software. Coming as a
But I digress, You, nor the person you're responding too, nor the silly mods have made any worthwhile points for the last couple a posts.
Ok, Mod me the fuck down biatch!!!
No, that's just ordinary fear of youth.
I was living in Chelmsford (Arguably the capitol of Chavdom) for about 6 months and all my older relatives were making this same complaint. A little worried I ventured into Chelmsford on a Friday evening and discovered this to be BS.
Sure, some people drink to much. And sure, some kids are up to no good. Tell me again how this is unusual.
Just like the recent scare of hoodies, it's mostly a misunderstanding of youth by adults. Sure some youngsters are genuinely dangerous, the vast majority are not.