That said, one has to wonder how important it could be, in an evolutionary sense, to have early offspring, taking into account life expectancy and health.
Early offspring is extremely important (from a biological perspective, certainly not from a social or environmental one). If individuals with gene A have 2 offspring after 20 years, and those with gene B have 3 offspring after 33 years, then after a hundred years A has multiplied into 2^(100/20)=2^5=32 inddividuals, whereas there will only be 3^(100/33)=3^3=27 individuals of type B.
Yes, but I would suspect that things merely imagined or heard second hand are not stored in the same way as things actually seen or heard. Certainly, it doesn't feel the same way when I recollect a movie that I have seen as when I recollect a movie somebody told me about.
I think we agree. But if 90% accuracy indeed could be achieved, this would make it much more reliable than say eyewitness reports, which are routinely admitted as evidence in trials.
I think that people without analytical genes lack the ability to communicate and socialize effectively or even sanely--I mean hell, just look at the world around you. The only reason why we analytical types have a problem with these things is because we are in the minority.
Autistic children do worse than "normal" children when they face analytical problems that also involve keeping track of somebody else's state of knowledge. This cannot be dismissed as lack of lying and bullshitting.
I am sure the world would be a better place if people were a bit more analytical, but I think the same could be said about a world where people got better at understanding other people's point of view.
Smarty-pants couples (of the truly sharp, science-minded variety) having kids is only recently useful (or even likely), in the primate-history scheme of things. Just shows that it takes natural selection a while to catch up with the fact that we're not very far removed from small, pack-like groups living hand to mouth in primitive, hostile circumstances and not living much past 30 years old.
And in precisely what sense is it "recently useful" to be very smart and science-minded? Maybe useful in the sense of getting a nice salary, but perhaps not useful in the evolutionary sense of getting more offspring earlier.
I don't buy it. I'll believe that they have a more accurate method of telling when you experience psychological stress from lying, but the actual act of lying is such an indistinct thing that I can't believe that you have a portion of your brain that says "turn this on when you lie".
It doesn't sound completely impossible to me.
"Truth" is typically some form of recollection from memory; "lie" is some form of fabriction, storytelling, and assessment of what the listener is likely to believe. We now know that the brain does have very specialized regions, so I don't see why it should be possible (at least in principle) to tell the difference between these activities from a brain scan.
A species (chimpanzees, our "closest" relatives, for example) with 21 pairs of chromosomes can EVOLVE into one with 22 pairs. Do the fossil records indicate critters with 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4.... pairs of choromosomes?
1. Some people have XXY chromosomes; those with genetic disorders like Down's syndrome may have a different number. It is not such a great step to imagine two chromosomes being fused, split up, or being produced twice (first identical, then later one modified).
2. I am not religious, but to the extent that I can imagine a God, the one you are describing is not very impressive. So the Creator instituted the evolutionary process, but some steps were to complex for this process to handle, so he went back and tinkered. "Oh, early humans have been evolving quite well now for a couple of million years, but I need one more chromosome, and that just isn't going to happen under the original laws I defined before. Time to intervene and add a chromosome here, a gene there." How did the Almighty Creator of the Universe become a micro-mangaing bio engineer? Or are you a polytheist, and adding a particular chromosome was the task of some junior spirit/ godling?
I thought that it was 35% energy created from the explosion, the rest in waste heat? The fuel is most certainly fully burned. I always thought that efficency would come from producing less heat with less friction, not more heat. It most certainly sounds fishy
I think the whole things a bit fishy too, but the particular point about increased heat actually does make sense. According to the laws of thermodynamics, a heat (Carnot) engine has a maximum efficiency of [1-T(surround)/T(heat element)], and so the higher the temperature, the larger fraction of that energy can be converted to useful work.
Some sort of high altitude Concorde replacement is necessary
The original concorde had a failed business model (granted, noise regulation around some American airports didn't help).
What has fundamentally changed since then, that is likely to make this more successful? I think on the contrary when new "regular" flights such as 787 (or the new Airbus) are somewhat faster and have much better communications (internet, etc), it will make the value proposition for a super-fast, super-expensive flight even more questionable.
Build a better car that doesn't guzzle gas, and the oil industry will beat a path to your door, destroy the car, and kill you. Adios, Dude!
This idea is as silly as it is old. Has it occured to you that the auto industry is investing billions in finding more fuel efficient cars - it is only because it is so difficult that progress is so slow.
If someone came up with an super-efficient car they could make their solution public and they would be rich and famous overnight (they could still patent it within a year). Regardless of what the oil industry thought of this, they would have nothing to gain by attacking the inventor.
In today's american society, how does a film with such blantant sexual imagry possibly get a G rating? What happening to our country when even our guardians or morality let this slip by. We need Hillary to do something about this.
On a more serios note, if you wonder why americans are so insane about sex, the above quote explains it pretty well. That kid will grow up in a household where the idea of sex evokes the emotion of shame. He will grow up with this and pass it along to his kids, simply because all that shame in his head will prevent him from teaching his kids that sex is a natural healthy thing. And the cycle continues.
Of all the negative idea about sex (sex is a sin, wait till marriage, sex is only for procreation, etc.), this direct linkage if sex and shame is by far the most damaging.
Let me assure you, the penguins did it only for procreation.
The biggest problem with ID is that it doesn't follow the scientific method.
As far as I remember, the scientific method has 4 steps:
1. Observation
2. Hypothesis
3. Testing
4. Repeat of testing by others
For Intelligent Design (ID) let's take an airplane as an example. We observe that it is fairly complex and appears to be well suited for flying. We hypothesize that a person designed the airplane to fly. We test this by finding the person or people who did design it. We have others repeat this test. We have then proven ID for the airplane. Someone did design it.
The first issue here is that the hypothesis should be of something that wasn't known before, otherwise it is easy to prove anything at all. I hypothesize that all colors come from elfs with pots of paint. I hypothesize that they paint the sky bluet - and look, indeed the sky is blue! I must be right (or for that matter, note the followers of Nostradamus who predict everything in the world - but only after it happened).
Let's look at macro-evolution (one species evolving to another species) now. First, nobody has ever whitnessed macro-evolution. We hypothesize that life on earth came into existance randomly over long periods of time. We are unable to test this as we have never observed this. Others are not able to duplicate our test as we cannot test
While repeatability is desireable, it is not possible for hypotheses that involve things that do not nicely fit in a lab (other than in the sense that others can make the same measurements with the same results). If someone made a theory of the sun it would be great if everyone could take the sun into their lab and take it apart but it isn't possible. What is possible is for the solar scientist to make predictions of measurements that hasn't already been made. If these are confirmed then the theory has withstood an initial test.
Evolution made the prediction that all living things contain information encoding their construction, and that this information undergoes random changes (at the time, most people thought that a supernatural life force was needed to explain reproduction). The prediction was confirmed 50 years later, with the discovery of DNA. It also predicted that life forms would change over long time periods, and that life forms could go extinct. At the time, most people thought it was impossible for lifeforms to go extinct, because it would imply that God is not perfect. Today we know from many types of dating methods (geological, radioactive) that life forms have undergone great changes over time, and nobody suggests any more that species cannot go extinct.
a) The universe is infinite spacially...
This is just wrong and not worth discussing. You may get varying opinions about the rate of expansion/contraction of the universe from astronomers, but the scientific community has a pretty good idea of the size of the universe.
Most theorists believe that the universe is spacially infinite (although the issue hasn't been completely settled). Terms such as "the size of the universe" refers to the universe which is within a distance [Time since big bang]*[Speed of light] of us. This is the universe which we can ever hope to have some form of contact or learn anything about (or make falsifiable predictions about)- and so it is the universe which is of interest to scientists. But for metaphysical arguments such as the one presented (infinite number of worlds, finite probability of life -> certain life) the spacial infinity should be of interest.
c) The universe exists...
Here is where I personally find some of the best evidence for the existence of God, the philosophical first cause argument, as well as the beauty and symmettry of the universe.
I was never very impressed by these arguments... OK so if you start to assume causality (which is a big assumption if you are discussing the origin of big bang), then something must have caused us... but why a "god" in the sense of a human-like creature with special interest in life on earth? Why not a quantum mechanical process or something? And regarding the symmetry of the universe, it could be because said process favors symmetry, or because an infinte number of worlds were created (and only the well-behaved gave life, so that is what we see), or that some wise god sat and pondered for a while and came up with this particularly symmetrical solution. The last alternative seems most contrived, and also is the only one that fails to reduce the answer to something simpler: for now we must explain the presence of this extremely sophisiticated god and how he came about, and why he was motivated to create a symmetrical world... was he made by an even more powerful god, and so on (this is the logical conclusion, if you buy the ID argument)?
Now there is no "small government" party, it seems. They both want to meddle and they both want your money (OK, technically, today's GOP just wants to spend your money, they don't actually bother to collect it first, but that's a minor quibble).
It sounds like you are a Liberatrian, or should become one. Glad to hear it.
An important observation. But it is faith in the scientific method, which has been extremely successful in the past explaining and discovering things we didn't know.
That makes it rather different than faith in God/religion. Such faith has a terrible track record predicting things we didn't know or providing theories that are testable and have survived empirical tests.
This is, after all, funded by DARPA so I wonder what creepy guys are drooling over the results in the shadows?
Myabe some will be rejected from the competition because there is no possible way to mount.50 caliber machine guns on the vehicle
Of course it will have military uses, it is sponsored by Darpa and the Congress has already decided that one third of all military vehicles must be autonomous by 20XX (sorry, forgot).
And why would it be so terrible if they mounted a.50 cal on it? Regardless of your political and filosofical opinions, how could this be worse than having a HHMMVV with two soldiers and a.50? Sure, maybe there is a small risk that the robot did something wrong, but it is not like human soldiers are perfect and never fire at the wrong target and never do any mistakes. And real soldiers don't have emergency stops and remote controls.
Also, I am sure there are many civilian spinoffs for this as well; one can imagine anything from space exploration to crop dusting.
in the united states, it's legal to sell armour-piercing ammuniction -- bullets whose sole purpose of design is to go through bullet proof vests; obviously a device designed to kill or maim human beings. the manufacturers to do not even make the pretense of proposing other uses for said ammunition. this activity is all fine and legal.
But, in the United States, it is legal to kill and maim human beings in some situations, in particular if they break into your house.
We may agree or disagree with that law, but there really is no inconsistency relative to the new ruling (unless the ammunition has been promoted to for illegal uses).
On the other hand, Napster was originally shut down because it they were unable to prevent users from sharing copyrighted music. That is an inconsistency because gunmakers do not have to guarantee that their goods only can be used in legal ways.
But throwing it out of thewindow of the ISS? come on, this must be a joke. why would you want to do that? It costs (hundreds of) thousands of dollars to get a few kilo's in that orbit. If you are able to spend such an amount of money, surely you can make/buy something better than that?
The space station slowly falls down because of the friction with the athmosphere. For this reason it regularly has to be lifted into higher orbits with fuel expesively brought from Earth. By getting rid of items not being used they reduce the need for this fuel. It is unclear how significant this is and if it ever was a consideration - but it is clear that you gain at least something from throwing out stuff that isn't used.
Why limit this to just sex offenders? Why not all criminals?
This is a silly argument, because it can made for any form of punishment.
I think we are all in agreement that being GPS-tracked for life is a very serious form of punishment. As such, it should be compared to other serious forms of punishements, like life in prison or death. Of course it is terrible to be GPS-tracked for life, but is it any worse than being inprisoned for life or put to death?
The GPS-system could in many cases provide benefits over those alternatives, for example by giving the criminal a chance to work instead of having the taxpayers provide for his living.
The good news is that spreadsheets let people who aren't programmers do all kinds of fancy calculations on a computer. The bad news is that spreadsheets let people who aren't programmers do all kinds of fancy calculations on a computer.
I agree. On the other hand, if you do know how to code, I would say that many simple programs can be developed extremely quickly in spreadsheets. Also, as long as the programs are relatively simple, I actually think the spreadsheet implementations are easier to debug than normal code, because you see all intermediate variables.
The problems arise with users who cannot code in the first place, or when coders try to use the spreadsheets for too advanced applications.
Such corporations couldn't exist at all without the government giving them the legal right to exist. As a libertarian, the idea of giving a corportation any of the rights of a person is completely disgusting to me.
I don't understand this point. A corporation is just a group of people (the shareholders) cooperating to pursuit wealth. If people are allowed to work to further their own wealth, how can you prevent people from cooperating in doing so? Send out the police as soon as two people exchange ideas about a commerical venture?
The only right that the corporation has that individuals don't is limited liability - if the corporation goes belly up you can't take the personal belongings of the shareholders. But anyone who is uncomfortable with this right is perfectly free to to avoid ever lending money to a corporation.
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That said, one has to wonder how important it could be, in an evolutionary sense, to have early offspring, taking into account life expectancy and health.
Early offspring is extremely important (from a biological perspective, certainly not from a social or environmental one). If individuals with gene A have 2 offspring after 20 years, and those with gene B have 3 offspring after 33 years, then after a hundred years A has multiplied into 2^(100/20)=2^5=32 inddividuals, whereas there will only be 3^(100/33)=3^3=27 individuals of type B.
Tor
Would not a well-rehearsed lie reside in memory?
Yes, but I would suspect that things merely imagined or heard second hand are not stored in the same way as things actually seen or heard. Certainly, it doesn't feel the same way when I recollect a movie that I have seen as when I recollect a movie somebody told me about.
Tor
I think we agree. But if 90% accuracy indeed could be achieved, this would make it much more reliable than say eyewitness reports, which are routinely admitted as evidence in trials.
Tor
I think that people without analytical genes lack the ability to communicate and socialize effectively or even sanely--I mean hell, just look at the world around you. The only reason why we analytical types have a problem with these things is because we are in the minority.
Autistic children do worse than "normal" children when they face analytical problems that also involve keeping track of somebody else's state of knowledge. This cannot be dismissed as lack of lying and bullshitting.
I am sure the world would be a better place if people were a bit more analytical, but I think the same could be said about a world where people got better at understanding other people's point of view.
Tor
Smarty-pants couples (of the truly sharp, science-minded variety) having kids is only recently useful (or even likely), in the primate-history scheme of things. Just shows that it takes natural selection a while to catch up with the fact that we're not very far removed from small, pack-like groups living hand to mouth in primitive, hostile circumstances and not living much past 30 years old.
And in precisely what sense is it "recently useful" to be very smart and science-minded? Maybe useful in the sense of getting a nice salary, but perhaps not useful in the evolutionary sense of getting more offspring earlier.
Tor
I don't buy it. I'll believe that they have a more accurate method of telling when you experience psychological stress from lying, but the actual act of lying is such an indistinct thing that I can't believe that you have a portion of your brain that says "turn this on when you lie".
It doesn't sound completely impossible to me. "Truth" is typically some form of recollection from memory; "lie" is some form of fabriction, storytelling, and assessment of what the listener is likely to believe. We now know that the brain does have very specialized regions, so I don't see why it should be possible (at least in principle) to tell the difference between these activities from a brain scan.
Tor
A species (chimpanzees, our "closest" relatives, for example) with 21 pairs of chromosomes can EVOLVE into one with 22 pairs. Do the fossil records indicate critters with 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4.... pairs of choromosomes?
1. Some people have XXY chromosomes; those with genetic disorders like Down's syndrome may have a different number. It is not such a great step to imagine two chromosomes being fused, split up, or being produced twice (first identical, then later one modified).
2. I am not religious, but to the extent that I can imagine a God, the one you are describing is not very impressive. So the Creator instituted the evolutionary process, but some steps were to complex for this process to handle, so he went back and tinkered. "Oh, early humans have been evolving quite well now for a couple of million years, but I need one more chromosome, and that just isn't going to happen under the original laws I defined before. Time to intervene and add a chromosome here, a gene there." How did the Almighty Creator of the Universe become a micro-mangaing bio engineer? Or are you a polytheist, and adding a particular chromosome was the task of some junior spirit/ godling?
Tor
I thought that it was 35% energy created from the explosion, the rest in waste heat? The fuel is most certainly fully burned. I always thought that efficency would come from producing less heat with less friction, not more heat. It most certainly sounds fishy
I think the whole things a bit fishy too, but the particular point about increased heat actually does make sense. According to the laws of thermodynamics, a heat (Carnot) engine has a maximum efficiency of [1-T(surround)/T(heat element)], and so the higher the temperature, the larger fraction of that energy can be converted to useful work.
Tor
The government *is* doing what it can
Well here is a video of some fine government officials who certainly are doing what they can...
Tor
Some sort of high altitude Concorde replacement is necessary
The original concorde had a failed business model (granted, noise regulation around some American airports didn't help).
What has fundamentally changed since then, that is likely to make this more successful? I think on the contrary when new "regular" flights such as 787 (or the new Airbus) are somewhat faster and have much better communications (internet, etc), it will make the value proposition for a super-fast, super-expensive flight even more questionable.
Tor
It is interesting that the US is looking to revert to a capsule kind of design after all these years.
Wonder why the Europeans and Russians prefer the shuttle design.
Tor
Build a better car that doesn't guzzle gas, and the oil industry will beat a path to your door, destroy the car, and kill you. Adios, Dude!
This idea is as silly as it is old. Has it occured to you that the auto industry is investing billions in finding more fuel efficient cars - it is only because it is so difficult that progress is so slow.
If someone came up with an super-efficient car they could make their solution public and they would be rich and famous overnight (they could still patent it within a year). Regardless of what the oil industry thought of this, they would have nothing to gain by attacking the inventor.
Tor
In today's american society, how does a film with such blantant sexual imagry possibly get a G rating? What happening to our country when even our guardians or morality let this slip by. We need Hillary to do something about this.
On a more serios note, if you wonder why americans are so insane about sex, the above quote explains it pretty well. That kid will grow up in a household where the idea of sex evokes the emotion of shame. He will grow up with this and pass it along to his kids, simply because all that shame in his head will prevent him from teaching his kids that sex is a natural healthy thing. And the cycle continues.
Of all the negative idea about sex (sex is a sin, wait till marriage, sex is only for procreation, etc.), this direct linkage if sex and shame is by far the most damaging.
Let me assure you, the penguins did it only for procreation.
Tor
The biggest problem with ID is that it doesn't follow the scientific method. As far as I remember, the scientific method has 4 steps:
1. Observation
2. Hypothesis
3. Testing
4. Repeat of testing by others
For Intelligent Design (ID) let's take an airplane as an example. We observe that it is fairly complex and appears to be well suited for flying. We hypothesize that a person designed the airplane to fly. We test this by finding the person or people who did design it. We have others repeat this test. We have then proven ID for the airplane. Someone did design it.
The first issue here is that the hypothesis should be of something that wasn't known before, otherwise it is easy to prove anything at all. I hypothesize that all colors come from elfs with pots of paint. I hypothesize that they paint the sky bluet - and look, indeed the sky is blue! I must be right (or for that matter, note the followers of Nostradamus who predict everything in the world - but only after it happened).
Let's look at macro-evolution (one species evolving to another species) now. First, nobody has ever whitnessed macro-evolution. We hypothesize that life on earth came into existance randomly over long periods of time. We are unable to test this as we have never observed this. Others are not able to duplicate our test as we cannot test
While repeatability is desireable, it is not possible for hypotheses that involve things that do not nicely fit in a lab (other than in the sense that others can make the same measurements with the same results). If someone made a theory of the sun it would be great if everyone could take the sun into their lab and take it apart but it isn't possible. What is possible is for the solar scientist to make predictions of measurements that hasn't already been made. If these are confirmed then the theory has withstood an initial test.
Evolution made the prediction that all living things contain information encoding their construction, and that this information undergoes random changes (at the time, most people thought that a supernatural life force was needed to explain reproduction). The prediction was confirmed 50 years later, with the discovery of DNA. It also predicted that life forms would change over long time periods, and that life forms could go extinct. At the time, most people thought it was impossible for lifeforms to go extinct, because it would imply that God is not perfect. Today we know from many types of dating methods (geological, radioactive) that life forms have undergone great changes over time, and nobody suggests any more that species cannot go extinct.
Tor
a) The universe is infinite spacially... This is just wrong and not worth discussing. You may get varying opinions about the rate of expansion/contraction of the universe from astronomers, but the scientific community has a pretty good idea of the size of the universe.
Most theorists believe that the universe is spacially infinite (although the issue hasn't been completely settled). Terms such as "the size of the universe" refers to the universe which is within a distance [Time since big bang]*[Speed of light] of us. This is the universe which we can ever hope to have some form of contact or learn anything about (or make falsifiable predictions about)- and so it is the universe which is of interest to scientists. But for metaphysical arguments such as the one presented (infinite number of worlds, finite probability of life -> certain life) the spacial infinity should be of interest.
c) The universe exists... Here is where I personally find some of the best evidence for the existence of God, the philosophical first cause argument, as well as the beauty and symmettry of the universe.
I was never very impressed by these arguments... OK so if you start to assume causality (which is a big assumption if you are discussing the origin of big bang), then something must have caused us... but why a "god" in the sense of a human-like creature with special interest in life on earth? Why not a quantum mechanical process or something? And regarding the symmetry of the universe, it could be because said process favors symmetry, or because an infinte number of worlds were created (and only the well-behaved gave life, so that is what we see), or that some wise god sat and pondered for a while and came up with this particularly symmetrical solution. The last alternative seems most contrived, and also is the only one that fails to reduce the answer to something simpler: for now we must explain the presence of this extremely sophisiticated god and how he came about, and why he was motivated to create a symmetrical world... was he made by an even more powerful god, and so on (this is the logical conclusion, if you buy the ID argument)?
Tor
Now there is no "small government" party, it seems. They both want to meddle and they both want your money (OK, technically, today's GOP just wants to spend your money, they don't actually bother to collect it first, but that's a minor quibble).
It sounds like you are a Liberatrian, or should become one. Glad to hear it.
Tor
I find your faith refreshing...
An important observation. But it is faith in the scientific method, which has been extremely successful in the past explaining and discovering things we didn't know.
That makes it rather different than faith in God/religion. Such faith has a terrible track record predicting things we didn't know or providing theories that are testable and have survived empirical tests.
Tor
This is, after all, funded by DARPA so I wonder what creepy guys are drooling over the results in the shadows? Myabe some will be rejected from the competition because there is no possible way to mount .50 caliber machine guns on the vehicle
.50 cal on it? Regardless of your political and filosofical opinions, how could this be worse than having a HHMMVV with two soldiers and a .50? Sure, maybe there is a small risk that the robot did something wrong, but it is not like human soldiers are perfect and never fire at the wrong target and never do any mistakes. And real soldiers don't have emergency stops and remote controls.
Of course it will have military uses, it is sponsored by Darpa and the Congress has already decided that one third of all military vehicles must be autonomous by 20XX (sorry, forgot).
And why would it be so terrible if they mounted a
Also, I am sure there are many civilian spinoffs for this as well; one can imagine anything from space exploration to crop dusting.
Tor
in the united states, it's legal to sell armour-piercing ammuniction -- bullets whose sole purpose of design is to go through bullet proof vests; obviously a device designed to kill or maim human beings. the manufacturers to do not even make the pretense of proposing other uses for said ammunition. this activity is all fine and legal.
But, in the United States, it is legal to kill and maim human beings in some situations, in particular if they break into your house.
We may agree or disagree with that law, but there really is no inconsistency relative to the new ruling (unless the ammunition has been promoted to for illegal uses).
On the other hand, Napster was originally shut down because it they were unable to prevent users from sharing copyrighted music. That is an inconsistency because gunmakers do not have to guarantee that their goods only can be used in legal ways.
Tor
Most universities have web of science (which indeed is a better product). This means that most users (=scientists) have access to it anyway. Tor
But throwing it out of thewindow of the ISS? come on, this must be a joke. why would you want to do that? It costs (hundreds of) thousands of dollars to get a few kilo's in that orbit. If you are able to spend such an amount of money, surely you can make/buy something better than that?
The space station slowly falls down because of the friction with the athmosphere. For this reason it regularly has to be lifted into higher orbits with fuel expesively brought from Earth. By getting rid of items not being used they reduce the need for this fuel. It is unclear how significant this is and if it ever was a consideration - but it is clear that you gain at least something from throwing out stuff that isn't used.
Tor
Why limit this to just sex offenders? Why not all criminals?
This is a silly argument, because it can made for any form of punishment.
I think we are all in agreement that being GPS-tracked for life is a very serious form of punishment. As such, it should be compared to other serious forms of punishements, like life in prison or death. Of course it is terrible to be GPS-tracked for life, but is it any worse than being inprisoned for life or put to death?
The GPS-system could in many cases provide benefits over those alternatives, for example by giving the criminal a chance to work instead of having the taxpayers provide for his living.
Tor
All stock movements are surprises. Predicted changes in corporate profits do not lead to a change of stock value.
Tor
The good news is that spreadsheets let people who aren't programmers do all kinds of fancy calculations on a computer. The bad news is that spreadsheets let people who aren't programmers do all kinds of fancy calculations on a computer.
I agree. On the other hand, if you do know how to code, I would say that many simple programs can be developed extremely quickly in spreadsheets. Also, as long as the programs are relatively simple, I actually think the spreadsheet implementations are easier to debug than normal code, because you see all intermediate variables.
The problems arise with users who cannot code in the first place, or when coders try to use the spreadsheets for too advanced applications.
Tor
Such corporations couldn't exist at all without the government giving them the legal right to exist. As a libertarian, the idea of giving a corportation any of the rights of a person is completely disgusting to me.
I don't understand this point. A corporation is just a group of people (the shareholders) cooperating to pursuit wealth. If people are allowed to work to further their own wealth, how can you prevent people from cooperating in doing so? Send out the police as soon as two people exchange ideas about a commerical venture?
The only right that the corporation has that individuals don't is limited liability - if the corporation goes belly up you can't take the personal belongings of the shareholders. But anyone who is uncomfortable with this right is perfectly free to to avoid ever lending money to a corporation.
Tor