A ethical line is crossed when a blogger creates the news instead of reporting it. Isn't that missing the point of what a blog is? Aren't most blogs still just people reporting things from their own lives? In most blogs (by instance, not by readership), the blogger *is* the news.
Note that it is a "personal journal" rather than a reporting site.
I would tend to agree with your point (that people acting as journalists should stick to reporting and avoid the creation of news), but I don't know that blogger is short for journalist who writes via blog. Something like blog journalist would make more sense. Or just say journalist. Other than the fact that a blog is much cheaper to set up than other media, what should be the difference between a blog journalist and a newspaper journalist or a television journalist?
If for no other reason than to help settle the country down, for fuck's sake, go do a recount and get it over with, then we can all go back to our regularly scheduled updates on Britany and those others.
And please, Quickly do the recount before these people start asking about where the money for the war was spent. How does a recount help? It's electronic voting. It will just give the same answer every time. Unless you are saying that the hand counted results and the polls were wrong?
This is the fundamental problem of storing the canonical vote electronically. There is no way to do a useful recount or to verify that votes were scored correctly. That's why the canonical vote needs to be stored on paper and verified by the voter before being placed in a secured bin. That's the only reliable way to store a vote.
It's also worth noting that these results are probably simple poll variation. What is different about the machine scored districts from the hand voting districts? Are the machine scored districts richer? Poorer? Differences between the two are expected. Apparently the Republican results do not have the same correlation between the polls and the hand votes, but they do show a similar difference between candidates. Giuliani and Romney both did better in machine voting (Romney did much better, a bigger margin than Clinton's). See http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS for the numbers.
The big news is that we can't differentiate between fraud and random chance here. That's why we should stick to more proven voting methods that are harder to fraud (and which show more of an audit trail which can be used to detect fraud).
That's not the Traveling Salesman problem (TSP); that's just route finding. Google maps already supports route finding between two points (which is what the Scientific American article is discussing; cheaper/better route finding). What the submitter wants is destination ordering. Given a list of n destinations (where the submitter is limiting n to five or less), in what order should you go to the destinations to minimize the overall driving distance (or whatever metric). Route finding can be part of the TSP but it's not the hard part. There are already decent algorithms for choosing a route between two points. The hard part about TSP is that you actually need to generate 120 different routes to find the best route (assuming five destinations).
Incidentally, Google may be working on this. They only recently added the ability to list an n destination route (where you specify the order). A TSP solution requires that, so they at least could implement TSP now if they wanted. Heck, a greasemonkey script might be able to do it. Learn the Google URL scheme and just generate 120 route requests, parse the page for the desired metric (distance, driving time, etc.), and pick the one that's best.
Ross Perot clearly pulled more votes from Bush 1 than Clinton On what are you basing this? What I remember is that the polls indicated that Perot voters were about equally split between Bush and Clinton as their second choice. A little googling found http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1033813.html which does support your claim that removing Perot would have helped Bush. However, Clinton still wins solidly.
The original comment was "When Virgin Galactic needs a space port, they can build one. Why is tax money building this?" Your response is (essentially) that they are using tax money to build this. In particular, the bulk of the funding is from tax money. There's no shortage (except in the wallets of the people paying the tax), but no one has claimed a shortage. The claim is that tax money shouldn't finance other people's business schemes.
Companies like Virgin claim they're privatizing space, but they're still on the government dole.
It's also worth noting that with financing, the cost will be higher than $198 million. If it's being paid over thirty years, even modest interest rates would put it over $400 million. Yes, the tax revenues will increase too, but generally not as fast as the interest (revenues go up about 3-4% a year; interest is more like 6-8%). Unless they can bring in other tenants, they will probably have to raise taxes before the end of Virgin's lease.
Since Virgin is spreading its $27 million across twenty years, it is likely that the federal money ($25 million) is actually worth more.
How can the US be slammed for protectionism when we don't let anyone in the US to do online gambling? Because the US still allows off line gambling? Las Vegas, Atlantic City, lotteries, etc.
Just a note on project management - I have found that PM classes were only useful to me at the grad level after I had some work experience. Most MBA programs only allow people have been in the workforce for the same reason. You need the work experience to provide context for the class. Without that context, you'll never be able to connect the theory to practice.
In terms of becoming a better programmer, the most important classes are the ones dealing with software engineering. Writing unit tests; coding defensively; writing maintainable code; gathering requirements. Those are the fundamentals of good programming.
The algorithm and programming classes are the fun classes, but you won't get much chance to use them. Optimizing qsort? Something you do in class but never in real life (unless you are writing a new language or maintaining something like Ruby). If that's what really interests you, then fine, shoot for the moon. However, you should start with the interest and drive in that case. Software engineering is a better choice if you want to program but don't really know exactly what.
Also, as others have noted, if programming is your passion, prove it by either making (or joining) an open source project or doing internships to pick up extra experience (or both). Again, this will offer you the practical context in which to understand the theory in your classes.
Seeing as the state government (who is paying for it, BTW) stands to gain more in revenues than it's spending on the spaceport, I fail to see your logic. More? $198 million for space port (see the http://www.space.com/news/ap_070327_branson_spacep ort.html link); $27.5 million lease. Where's the other $170.5 million? OK, count off $25 million from the feds; that's still $145.5 million short. Even just the $33 million piece that they're financing now would be $5.5 million short. That's why they need a $6.5 million per year sales tax -- to make up for the shortage.
immediate revocation of the patent That seems plenty sufficient a penalty. If there is undisclosed prior art, you lose the patent. Thus if a company wants a strong patent, the burden is on it to write the patent narrowly (to minimize the possible of conflicting claims from prior art) and do a thorough search for prior art. This would reverse the current situation, where companies try to write the *broadest* patent that they can get accepted and the patent office is responsible for showing prior art limiting the claims.
Personally, I would like to see the patent office move from being an evaluator of applications to being an arbiter between plaintiff and defendant in patent infringement claims. If they accepted every patent application and only evaluated the claims when disputed, that would be a fundamentally easier job. Then the defendant would be responsible for discovering the prior art rather than the patent office. This is a stronger model, because the defendant is also the own who would suffer damages (and is presumably someone who has knowledge in the field). One of the weaknesses of the current model is that the patent office is not the one that suffers when weak or overly broad patents get through.
If I get drunk a lot, I'm only harming myself, not other people.
That's assuming that you don't go for a drive, beat someone up or vomit on the sidewalk. And that you aren't married (ok, this is/.). That no one is dependent on you. That you don't need to work the next day. That you pay for your own medical care (and no, employer provided insurance does not count--your coworkers end up paying for you) and always will (no Medicare later and no switch to employer provided insurance). So basically if you are independently wealthy to the point of being unemployed and have no dependents, then drinking is only harmful in the actions that you might take when drunk. Otherwise, drinking beyond moderation (one or two drinks a day; averaging towards one) does harm others. That's why there is a separate branch of Alcoholics Anonymous for the families of alcoholics.
Have your ever seem an integrator after a layoff? They have a complete mental breakdown. I'm serious! That really teaches integrators about identifying themselves through their workplace. That's why one needs to switch to open source projects immediately after a layoff. Scratch the itch for free while looking for the next sucker who's willing to pay.
However, logically, the machines must create fewer jobs than they eliminate (otherwise their total cost of ownership will wind up being higher than keeping humans on staff, and they won't be adopted). Unless expense was the barrier to increasing quantity supplied. For price elastic goods, dropping the price can *increase* the amount of money collected (because the increase in quantity sold outweighs the decrease in price). I.e. the machine may mean fewer jobs per item produced, but if the total number of items produced increases enough, it can offset the reduction. This is why the Fed is constantly increasing the money supply--to allow this additional production to be purchased. If they increase the money supply to much, we get inflation; if they don't increase the money supply fast enough, we get a recession.
By making things cheaper, the machines enable jobs that could not have existed without the machine. For example, is it really cost effective for every family to have its own troupe of actors and stage? No, but it is cost effective for every family to buy a television and share the same actors and sets. As a result, something that had been a rare treat (oh, the festival is in town, I bet there will be a play) or a special privilege for the rich becomes an everyday occurrence.
We're nowhere close to having machines capable enough to replace humans at basic tasks (for example, can a Roomba clean walls?). If we do get to that point, we'll have to rethink our current system (which is concerned more with scarce resources than abundant ones). Of course, we'll also have unlimited manufacturing capacity (at least at the labor level) at that point, so we should have plenty of resources.
OK, so point me at those archives, or a development wiki, something that can get me up to speed with the code and what tools and dev. environment are recommended. Mailing lists and other info: http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythInfo
Look at the bottom under Mailing Lists. The archives are the "here" links.
Installation is bad enough now, what with all the extensions I already have to install to get a usable browser. If I had to install extensions for each and every little basic feature, it would take hours to hunt down everything I need. I'd be perfectly happy if the core extensions came installed by default so long as I could uninstall them afterwards. What I want is not fewer features but flexibility. This might actually help with your issue, as it would presumably be easier to add a core extension to the default install than it is to add a feature to the browser. If people don't like it, they can always uninstall it. With a feature, you don't have that option.
I find tabs annoying because they pop up at times when I don't want them. I wouldn't have the same issue with most other features, as they aren't as obtrusive.
IMO, the Download Manager is a great example of something that would be better as an extension that was installed by default. Then when someone installs a replacement like FlashGot, it could replace the Download Manager entirely rather than try to work around it.
Then don't use them?? Seriously, why not hit ctrl-n instead of ctrl-t? I don't get them through ctrl-t -- I get them at random times due to the way that Firefox works. For example, install an extension and allow it to restart Firefox at the end. Net result is that it opens a set of tabs for the extension, the home page, and whatever page you were viewing prior to requesting the update. Also, when I hit the context menu, Open in New Tab is right next to the Open in New Window -- sometimes I hit the wrong one.
While I don't disagree that my viewpoint is rare, there's a not very good extension/add-on to remove tabs. I suspect that someone will finish a proper one eventually. Especially now that there is no real way to avoid tabs (they're everywhere). It's not a unique viewpoint, just uncommon.
You might be referring to a few low end deals like:... The prices were lower, but never much less than Windoze system prices at the same time. No, I think that your parent was referring to the $249 deals from Wintergreen, et. al. As I recall, Lindows (this was before the name change) got down as cheap as $200 ($199) on at least one configuration. People were buying them to install their copies of Microsoft Windows on them. They were in fact about $200 or $300 cheaper. As others have noted, less than $100 of that was software costs. Like you said, crummy hardware.
The same site bottoms out with a $499 Vista PC. However, the specs are much better (e.g. twice as much RAM to meet Vista's minimum).
It's also worth noting that the $500 laptop was also much smaller than most other laptops (about three pounds). If you compared it to other laptops of the same weight, it was a third the price and had similar specs (all the ultralights had last generation CPUs). For example, a modern equivalent is Fujitsu Lifebook P7230 which costs about $1700.
I agree, but I think that if you ask a hundred users what their "key" features would be, you'd probably get 101 different answers. Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core? I don't like them and it is currently impossible to turn them completely off (for example, install an add-on and restart firefox; home page, current page, and add-on page come up in tabs). I'd also currently like to remove the password manager functionality, as the current version is insecure (it can be fooled into sending passwords to other web sites than the one for which the password was saved).
Rather than putting things in the core, what about two classes of extensions: core extensions, which are heavily cross validated and unit tested by core developers; and add-ons, which are what they are now -- a collection of random itches that people scratched. This would allow a set of stable extensions that almost everyone uses, flexibility for those who don't want to use core extensions (since they can be removed), and the current ability to scratch an itch with a less thoroughly tested extension or even just an extension with very narrow use (e.g. only with a single website).
To quote Friedman: By the time the market reacts we are all dead. I can't find that quote. It doesn't sound like Friedman (who was very much pro market). It sounds more like you are paraphrasing Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead." Note that this wasn't about market reaction (which happens in the short term), but market *stabilization*. Keynes felt that new events constantly perturbed the market and never let it reach the long term stable states discussed by classical economic theory.
I don't know that Keynes' point really applies here. The problem here is more of a tragedy of the commons problem. Even in the long term, from the cattle farmer's perspective, it may still be a net good to use the antibiotics on the cows. It may even be a net good for beef eaters (who get cheaper meat). Vegetarians on the other hand do not get a benefit from cheaper cows but still get the cost of more resistant bacteria. Since vegetarians have no impact on the meat market, their input is ignored. The same problem exists with people who eat only organic beef or those who eat only foreign raised beef.
It is not progressive. It is flat. Period. A token prebate does not change that. What is the marginal rate on someone under proverty level? What is the marginal rate on someone at poverty level? What is the marginal rate on someone that makes $10,000,000,000 per year? They are all the same because it is a flat tax. Currently, people (in the US) pay taxes of roughly 14% on the first dollar of wage income for social security and medicare. Then, once they get enough income to get past exemptions and deductions, they pay about 23.5%. This climbs to a maximum of around 43%. Then it drops back to around 35.4% (social security has an income *cap*) before rising to 37.4%. However, since investment income is taxed differently than wage income, the effective tax rate of someone making $10 billion per year is likely to be far lower than their 37.4% marginal rate. For example, the Kerry family paid about a 13% marginal tax rate. Note that this is actually lower than the 14% that low income people pay. Is that really a progressive rate?
A flat marginal rate could be more progressive, in the sense that it is not as regressive. Of course, most flat taxes would be subject to the same kind of tax evasion schemes (which focus on changing the tax basis rather than the nominal marginal rate).
Personally, if I were going to rewrite the tax system, I would start by tying taxes more to their expenditures. I would also shift taxes to better relate to those expenditures. For example, FEMA, defense, and law enforcement are most related to the amount of property that one has. Therefore, it would make sense for them to be paid out of a property tax (and law enforcement often is at the local level). By contrast, education and basic scientific research are most correlated with increasing income. Therefore, they should be paid out of an income or wage tax (whereas now education is mostly paid out of local property and state sales taxes). Social security is about moving consumption from one's wage earning years to one's retirement years, so I'd base it (and welfare) on a consumption, sales, or value added tax.
Currently, expenditures are not tied to taxes in any way. As a result, people want more expenditures and fewer taxes at the same time. If instead the taxes were tied to the expenditures in such a way that increasing the expenditure increased the tax (and decreasing the tax decreased the expenditure), people would have to acknowledge the trade offs. Changing each basis to better match the benefit would also help make the trade offs clearer.
While I would tend to go with flat rates rather than progressive rates, the switch from income to property taxes (for defense, etc.) would probably have much of the effect that you want (switching taxes from poor people to rich people/businesses). Switching from income and wage taxes to consumption taxes (for social security, welfare, and Medicare) would counteract the negative effect of a property tax on investment and eliminate the need for special treatment for capital gains and dividends.
This has NEVER meant that you are obligated to send the code to anyone who asks. Please read section 3b of the GPL:
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
Note that this doesn't apply in this case (which is about PHP scripts), because 3a is satisfied. However, you made the global claim that the GPL "NEVER" obligates people to provide the source to third parties who have not already obtained the software. "Any third party" is exactly that.
If this really is viable long term utilities would start doing it - and they have the engineers and cash to invest should they decide to do so; and they like subsidies as much as the next person. I think that you are missing a couple things in regards to utilities:
A utility is a government managed entity. While it is privately owned, prices, etc. are set by the government. This makes it hard to offer innovative pricing, like a guaranteed rate.
A utility is a steady dividend, low growth company. Its stock will reflect this. While the utility has the manpower to do this, they do not have the ability to raise capital by selling high P/E stock. Even if this program would make economic sense to them, they won't be able to launch it *now*. They need it to turn from a speculative investment to a sure thing.
With a separate stock, the worst that the investor faces is loss of the money paid for the stock. If this were integrated as part of a utility stock, it's like investors have to buy two stocks in parallel: a low return, low risk stock (the utility) and a high risk, high return stock. Worse, if the high risk stock goes under, the investor loses the investment in the otherwise low risk stock. Net result is a high risk (risk is a max function; mixing high and low makes high), medium return (return is an average function; mixing high and low makes medium) stock.
To get the full benefits of being a green company, it's better to be only a green company. Adding green to coal doesn't make as much sense. The green investors will prefer full green companies to those that are mixed.
While in the future, solar incentives may fall, they may also go up. Politically, incentives for renewable energy are becoming more viable. You seem to be assuming that the supply of renewable energy will increase faster than the demand. I suspect that it is more likely that both the desired renewable mix and total demand for electricity will climb.
Another issue is - who maintains it and disposes of it - especially if the company fails? How much will it cost to remove it and repair the roof? What happens if it gets ripped off in a storm - who's liable for any damage? The homeowner? The solar panel owner? The ecopreneur? I'm sure the neighbor who is selling these has gotten rock solid legal advice to avoid putting their assets at risk if something goes south. A characteristic of MLM schemes is that they don't put a lot of effort in protecting their sales people, as the sales people are independent. It's quite likely that the "ecopreneur" would be vulnerable if the company fails.
That said, I don't think that buyers have a great deal about which to worry. If the company fails, another company will take over maintenance of the panels. Why? Because they would then get the eight cents per kilowatt hour. Unless maintenance is more expensive than that, maintenance would survive a bankruptcy. Sure, it would be good for buyers to do due diligence on whether there are hidden problems in the contract, but I don't think that that is a show stopper. It's merely a concern.
This is probably a dangerous stock to own. There is a high chance of the company going belly up (if subsidies drop; if there are a couple cloudy years; if maintenance costs are higher than expected). Similarly, all MLM schemes are dangerous to the sales people. Sure, they get the benefits of being independent contractors. However, they lose the risk sharing of the large employer (and I suspect that they will be promised a commission from the electricity sales which won't provide money now). However, I'm not interested in buying stock or becoming an "ecopreneur" -- I'm just curious if it's something that people should buy and put on their roof.
The right to property extends from the right to life I feel some tortured logic approaching.
specifically that you own your own body Ok, I'm with you, although I would put this under Liberty rather than Life.
you therefore own the effects of your body So when I exhale, I own that carbon dioxide? It's an effect of my body, right? Then a plant takes in the carbon dioxide. Do I now own part of the plant? The plant emits oxygen. You breathe the oxygen. Do you now claim that I own part of you? After all, you are now partially an effect of the operation of my body.
Note: this argument is an example of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum -- I'm pointing out that your argument doesn't hold by drawing the most ridiculous inference that I can find. Basically, I've established that your first and second statements are contradictory; people can't absolutely own their bodies *and* the results of the operation of their bodies at the same time.
you have the right to secure those things necessary to live, e.g., shelter, food, etc. though your industry Ok, what if my industry involves hitting you over the head and taking your food? That's ok, right? I need that food to live.
Inalienable rights are those that do not require a government to enforce. You have them. A government or an individual can act in ways that take away one's inalienable rights
If you are claiming that the government actually owns your body, well, perhaps you should be living in a slightly different country from me, thanks! Actually, I'm claiming that in a world where we did not accept compromise of the three inalienable rights, there would be no government. After all, without the ability to restrict the three inalienable rights, what power does a government have?
Of course, if we lived in such a world, people would immediately create government because we value the safety and comfort that government provides more than we value freedom from government. Further, we would create property ownership, because that does in fact encourage people to be industrious and plan for the future. Similarly, I could live in an apartment building where everyone was allowed to make as much noise as they want. I choose to live in an apartment building where the management will evict someone if they continually violate the building's noise rules. For much the same reason, I choose to live in a country where government enforces property ownership. I cede power to the government to do so.
Rights are not granted by any government. They are retained by THE PEOPLE and recognized by the government. This is a very important distinction which you absolutely must understand before entering into any discussion of property rights. There is no inalienable right to property. The thing that we called property "rights" is an artificial creation. Note that prior to the European arrival in North America, most of the "Indian" tribes had no notion of property ownership. The Europeans came in and "bought" the property from the Indians for trivial amounts.
Property ownership exists only because government says that it does. Like anything that government does, it is enforced by the threat of removal of actual, inalienable rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness). Our modern society leans mostly towards jail for this. That is at least more enlightened than previous societies which mostly used execution (or maiming) as the punishment for theft of property.
Now, all that said, I still think that property ownership is a good artificial right for government to create. I am willing to accept the associated loss of freedoms for the corresponding gain in comfort. I.e. I like that I can purchase property and make improvements to it for me to enjoy without worrying that others will take my improvements away for their own use. This is similar to the way that I like that if I complain to my landlord that the neighbors are too loud, the landlord will threaten them with eviction to hold down the noise. Sure, that restricts my freedom to make lots of noise, but I value the restriction more than the freedom.
Quiet is an *artificial* right, given to me by my landlord in exchange for my sacrifice of my right to make noise. In the same way, the government gives me property ownership in exchange for my binding promise not to infringe others' artificial right to property ownership. Government binds me to this promise with the threats of property forfeiture or loss of liberty (i.e. jail).
If consumers are willing to buy what's available, then open specs don't even matter. By that logic, we should eliminate property ownership. After all, people without property are clearly willing to live in places they don't own. Therefore, property ownership is unnecessary. The fact that people are willing to compromise on an inferior solution does not indicate that we should avoid trying for improvement.
It is true that 90+% of everyone buys MS Windows for home use. That does not indicate that we should throw over the other 5-10% -- that is in fact exactly the time when open specs matter *most*. Microsoft understands that. Note how they embraced open specs when Netscape was the market leader (IE4 had better CSS support than did Navigator 4). Further, notice how they stopped developing IE until a credible threat took part of their market share. Now, it's perfectly legitimate to question the idea of asking government to mandate open specs. It's not legitimate to claim that it is not a problem or that it does not matter.
I'm a radical libertarian. My best friend in college was an affirmed and unashamed marxist. We had no problems getting along, even when discussing politics. But something has happened in the subsequent years. People on the left stopped talking to people on the right, and vice versa. They isolated themselves into insular enclaves. Radical libertarians and Marxists have a lot in common. Both think that the current economic system is crap and should be replaced with a radically different system. Both decry the way that big business uses government to maintain itself (although they have very different views on how to fix that; i.e. reducing government power versus shifting the flow of control towards one where the government runs the business). Depending on the brand of Marxist, both may believe that government should stay out of personal decisions (e.g. abortion, drug use, prostitution, etc.).
It's also worth noting that the nature of political systems require a certain catering to extremists. For example, in the USA, the Republicans use pro-life activists as volunteers to distribute literature, etc. Moderates aren't active in the same way. The majority of people in the USA believe that abortion is morally wrong but should be legal. However, the activists believe either that abortion should be illegal (pro-life) or that it is morally right (pro-choice). Since politicians need volunteers and contributors, they cater to those groups that provide them: the extremists. Abortion is especially interesting in that up until 1980, it was Democrats (e.g. Bill Clinton and Al Gore) who were pro-life and Republicans (e.g. the Bush family helped found Planned Parenthood) who were pro-choice.
On how many of the following issues would you and your Marxist friend have agreed?
1. Is there a God? What role should religion play in government? 2. Abortion. 3. Should the government try to act in economic matters (most likely the single point of disagreement that has you thinking of yourselves as being on opposite sides of the fence). 4. Casual drug use. 5. Racism. 6. Is the current system good?
Slashdot Mirror
Definition of blog: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/blog
Note that it is a "personal journal" rather than a reporting site.
I would tend to agree with your point (that people acting as journalists should stick to reporting and avoid the creation of news), but I don't know that blogger is short for journalist who writes via blog. Something like blog journalist would make more sense. Or just say journalist. Other than the fact that a blog is much cheaper to set up than other media, what should be the difference between a blog journalist and a newspaper journalist or a television journalist?
And please, Quickly do the recount before these people start asking about where the money for the war was spent. How does a recount help? It's electronic voting. It will just give the same answer every time. Unless you are saying that the hand counted results and the polls were wrong?
This is the fundamental problem of storing the canonical vote electronically. There is no way to do a useful recount or to verify that votes were scored correctly. That's why the canonical vote needs to be stored on paper and verified by the voter before being placed in a secured bin. That's the only reliable way to store a vote.
It's also worth noting that these results are probably simple poll variation. What is different about the machine scored districts from the hand voting districts? Are the machine scored districts richer? Poorer? Differences between the two are expected. Apparently the Republican results do not have the same correlation between the polls and the hand votes, but they do show a similar difference between candidates. Giuliani and Romney both did better in machine voting (Romney did much better, a bigger margin than Clinton's). See http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS for the numbers.
The big news is that we can't differentiate between fraud and random chance here. That's why we should stick to more proven voting methods that are harder to fraud (and which show more of an audit trail which can be used to detect fraud).
That's not the Traveling Salesman problem (TSP); that's just route finding. Google maps already supports route finding between two points (which is what the Scientific American article is discussing; cheaper/better route finding). What the submitter wants is destination ordering. Given a list of n destinations (where the submitter is limiting n to five or less), in what order should you go to the destinations to minimize the overall driving distance (or whatever metric). Route finding can be part of the TSP but it's not the hard part. There are already decent algorithms for choosing a route between two points. The hard part about TSP is that you actually need to generate 120 different routes to find the best route (assuming five destinations).
Incidentally, Google may be working on this. They only recently added the ability to list an n destination route (where you specify the order). A TSP solution requires that, so they at least could implement TSP now if they wanted. Heck, a greasemonkey script might be able to do it. Learn the Google URL scheme and just generate 120 route requests, parse the page for the desired metric (distance, driving time, etc.), and pick the one that's best.
The original comment was "When Virgin Galactic needs a space port, they can build one. Why is tax money building this?" Your response is (essentially) that they are using tax money to build this. In particular, the bulk of the funding is from tax money. There's no shortage (except in the wallets of the people paying the tax), but no one has claimed a shortage. The claim is that tax money shouldn't finance other people's business schemes.
Companies like Virgin claim they're privatizing space, but they're still on the government dole.
It's also worth noting that with financing, the cost will be higher than $198 million. If it's being paid over thirty years, even modest interest rates would put it over $400 million. Yes, the tax revenues will increase too, but generally not as fast as the interest (revenues go up about 3-4% a year; interest is more like 6-8%). Unless they can bring in other tenants, they will probably have to raise taxes before the end of Virgin's lease.
Since Virgin is spreading its $27 million across twenty years, it is likely that the federal money ($25 million) is actually worth more.
In terms of becoming a better programmer, the most important classes are the ones dealing with software engineering. Writing unit tests; coding defensively; writing maintainable code; gathering requirements. Those are the fundamentals of good programming.
The algorithm and programming classes are the fun classes, but you won't get much chance to use them. Optimizing qsort? Something you do in class but never in real life (unless you are writing a new language or maintaining something like Ruby). If that's what really interests you, then fine, shoot for the moon. However, you should start with the interest and drive in that case. Software engineering is a better choice if you want to program but don't really know exactly what.
Also, as others have noted, if programming is your passion, prove it by either making (or joining) an open source project or doing internships to pick up extra experience (or both). Again, this will offer you the practical context in which to understand the theory in your classes.
Personally, I would like to see the patent office move from being an evaluator of applications to being an arbiter between plaintiff and defendant in patent infringement claims. If they accepted every patent application and only evaluated the claims when disputed, that would be a fundamentally easier job. Then the defendant would be responsible for discovering the prior art rather than the patent office. This is a stronger model, because the defendant is also the own who would suffer damages (and is presumably someone who has knowledge in the field). One of the weaknesses of the current model is that the patent office is not the one that suffers when weak or overly broad patents get through.
By making things cheaper, the machines enable jobs that could not have existed without the machine. For example, is it really cost effective for every family to have its own troupe of actors and stage? No, but it is cost effective for every family to buy a television and share the same actors and sets. As a result, something that had been a rare treat (oh, the festival is in town, I bet there will be a play) or a special privilege for the rich becomes an everyday occurrence.
We're nowhere close to having machines capable enough to replace humans at basic tasks (for example, can a Roomba clean walls?). If we do get to that point, we'll have to rethink our current system (which is concerned more with scarce resources than abundant ones). Of course, we'll also have unlimited manufacturing capacity (at least at the labor level) at that point, so we should have plenty of resources.
Look at the bottom under Mailing Lists. The archives are the "here" links.
The documentation is at http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythInstal
The wiki is at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page -- includes a Developer section.
I find tabs annoying because they pop up at times when I don't want them. I wouldn't have the same issue with most other features, as they aren't as obtrusive.
IMO, the Download Manager is a great example of something that would be better as an extension that was installed by default. Then when someone installs a replacement like FlashGot, it could replace the Download Manager entirely rather than try to work around it.
While I don't disagree that my viewpoint is rare, there's a not very good extension/add-on to remove tabs. I suspect that someone will finish a proper one eventually. Especially now that there is no real way to avoid tabs (they're everywhere). It's not a unique viewpoint, just uncommon.
The prices were lower, but never much less than Windoze system prices at the same time. No, I think that your parent was referring to the $249 deals from Wintergreen, et. al. As I recall, Lindows (this was before the name change) got down as cheap as $200 ($199) on at least one configuration. People were buying them to install their copies of Microsoft Windows on them. They were in fact about $200 or $300 cheaper. As others have noted, less than $100 of that was software costs. Like you said, crummy hardware.
The same site bottoms out with a $499 Vista PC. However, the specs are much better (e.g. twice as much RAM to meet Vista's minimum).
It's also worth noting that the $500 laptop was also much smaller than most other laptops (about three pounds). If you compared it to other laptops of the same weight, it was a third the price and had similar specs (all the ultralights had last generation CPUs). For example, a modern equivalent is Fujitsu Lifebook P7230 which costs about $1700.
Rather than putting things in the core, what about two classes of extensions: core extensions, which are heavily cross validated and unit tested by core developers; and add-ons, which are what they are now -- a collection of random itches that people scratched. This would allow a set of stable extensions that almost everyone uses, flexibility for those who don't want to use core extensions (since they can be removed), and the current ability to scratch an itch with a less thoroughly tested extension or even just an extension with very narrow use (e.g. only with a single website).
I don't know that Keynes' point really applies here. The problem here is more of a tragedy of the commons problem. Even in the long term, from the cattle farmer's perspective, it may still be a net good to use the antibiotics on the cows. It may even be a net good for beef eaters (who get cheaper meat). Vegetarians on the other hand do not get a benefit from cheaper cows but still get the cost of more resistant bacteria. Since vegetarians have no impact on the meat market, their input is ignored. The same problem exists with people who eat only organic beef or those who eat only foreign raised beef.
A flat marginal rate could be more progressive, in the sense that it is not as regressive. Of course, most flat taxes would be subject to the same kind of tax evasion schemes (which focus on changing the tax basis rather than the nominal marginal rate).
Personally, if I were going to rewrite the tax system, I would start by tying taxes more to their expenditures. I would also shift taxes to better relate to those expenditures. For example, FEMA, defense, and law enforcement are most related to the amount of property that one has. Therefore, it would make sense for them to be paid out of a property tax (and law enforcement often is at the local level). By contrast, education and basic scientific research are most correlated with increasing income. Therefore, they should be paid out of an income or wage tax (whereas now education is mostly paid out of local property and state sales taxes). Social security is about moving consumption from one's wage earning years to one's retirement years, so I'd base it (and welfare) on a consumption, sales, or value added tax.
Currently, expenditures are not tied to taxes in any way. As a result, people want more expenditures and fewer taxes at the same time. If instead the taxes were tied to the expenditures in such a way that increasing the expenditure increased the tax (and decreasing the tax decreased the expenditure), people would have to acknowledge the trade offs. Changing each basis to better match the benefit would also help make the trade offs clearer.
While I would tend to go with flat rates rather than progressive rates, the switch from income to property taxes (for defense, etc.) would probably have much of the effect that you want (switching taxes from poor people to rich people/businesses). Switching from income and wage taxes to consumption taxes (for social security, welfare, and Medicare) would counteract the negative effect of a property tax on investment and eliminate the need for special treatment for capital gains and dividends.
But maybe that's just me.
- A utility is a government managed entity. While it is privately owned, prices, etc. are set by the government. This makes it hard to offer innovative pricing, like a guaranteed rate.
- A utility is a steady dividend, low growth company. Its stock will reflect this. While the utility has the manpower to do this, they do not have the ability to raise capital by selling high P/E stock. Even if this program would make economic sense to them, they won't be able to launch it *now*. They need it to turn from a speculative investment to a sure thing.
- With a separate stock, the worst that the investor faces is loss of the money paid for the stock. If this were integrated as part of a utility stock, it's like investors have to buy two stocks in parallel: a low return, low risk stock (the utility) and a high risk, high return stock. Worse, if the high risk stock goes under, the investor loses the investment in the otherwise low risk stock. Net result is a high risk (risk is a max function; mixing high and low makes high), medium return (return is an average function; mixing high and low makes medium) stock.
- To get the full benefits of being a green company, it's better to be only a green company. Adding green to coal doesn't make as much sense. The green investors will prefer full green companies to those that are mixed.
- While in the future, solar incentives may fall, they may also go up. Politically, incentives for renewable energy are becoming more viable. You seem to be assuming that the supply of renewable energy will increase faster than the demand. I suspect that it is more likely that both the desired renewable mix and total demand for electricity will climb.
Another issue is - who maintains it and disposes of it - especially if the company fails? How much will it cost to remove it and repair the roof? What happens if it gets ripped off in a storm - who's liable for any damage? The homeowner? The solar panel owner? The ecopreneur? I'm sure the neighbor who is selling these has gotten rock solid legal advice to avoid putting their assets at risk if something goes south. A characteristic of MLM schemes is that they don't put a lot of effort in protecting their sales people, as the sales people are independent. It's quite likely that the "ecopreneur" would be vulnerable if the company fails.That said, I don't think that buyers have a great deal about which to worry. If the company fails, another company will take over maintenance of the panels. Why? Because they would then get the eight cents per kilowatt hour. Unless maintenance is more expensive than that, maintenance would survive a bankruptcy. Sure, it would be good for buyers to do due diligence on whether there are hidden problems in the contract, but I don't think that that is a show stopper. It's merely a concern.
This is probably a dangerous stock to own. There is a high chance of the company going belly up (if subsidies drop; if there are a couple cloudy years; if maintenance costs are higher than expected). Similarly, all MLM schemes are dangerous to the sales people. Sure, they get the benefits of being independent contractors. However, they lose the risk sharing of the large employer (and I suspect that they will be promised a commission from the electricity sales which won't provide money now). However, I'm not interested in buying stock or becoming an "ecopreneur" -- I'm just curious if it's something that people should buy and put on their roof.
Note: this argument is an example of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum -- I'm pointing out that your argument doesn't hold by drawing the most ridiculous inference that I can find. Basically, I've established that your first and second statements are contradictory; people can't absolutely own their bodies *and* the results of the operation of their bodies at the same time. you have the right to secure those things necessary to live, e.g., shelter, food, etc. though your industry Ok, what if my industry involves hitting you over the head and taking your food? That's ok, right? I need that food to live.
Inalienable rights are those that do not require a government to enforce. You have them. A government or an individual can act in ways that take away one's inalienable rights If you are claiming that the government actually owns your body, well, perhaps you should be living in a slightly different country from me, thanks! Actually, I'm claiming that in a world where we did not accept compromise of the three inalienable rights, there would be no government. After all, without the ability to restrict the three inalienable rights, what power does a government have?
Of course, if we lived in such a world, people would immediately create government because we value the safety and comfort that government provides more than we value freedom from government. Further, we would create property ownership, because that does in fact encourage people to be industrious and plan for the future. Similarly, I could live in an apartment building where everyone was allowed to make as much noise as they want. I choose to live in an apartment building where the management will evict someone if they continually violate the building's noise rules. For much the same reason, I choose to live in a country where government enforces property ownership. I cede power to the government to do so.
Property ownership exists only because government says that it does. Like anything that government does, it is enforced by the threat of removal of actual, inalienable rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness). Our modern society leans mostly towards jail for this. That is at least more enlightened than previous societies which mostly used execution (or maiming) as the punishment for theft of property.
Now, all that said, I still think that property ownership is a good artificial right for government to create. I am willing to accept the associated loss of freedoms for the corresponding gain in comfort. I.e. I like that I can purchase property and make improvements to it for me to enjoy without worrying that others will take my improvements away for their own use. This is similar to the way that I like that if I complain to my landlord that the neighbors are too loud, the landlord will threaten them with eviction to hold down the noise. Sure, that restricts my freedom to make lots of noise, but I value the restriction more than the freedom.
Quiet is an *artificial* right, given to me by my landlord in exchange for my sacrifice of my right to make noise. In the same way, the government gives me property ownership in exchange for my binding promise not to infringe others' artificial right to property ownership. Government binds me to this promise with the threats of property forfeiture or loss of liberty (i.e. jail). If consumers are willing to buy what's available, then open specs don't even matter. By that logic, we should eliminate property ownership. After all, people without property are clearly willing to live in places they don't own. Therefore, property ownership is unnecessary. The fact that people are willing to compromise on an inferior solution does not indicate that we should avoid trying for improvement.
It is true that 90+% of everyone buys MS Windows for home use. That does not indicate that we should throw over the other 5-10% -- that is in fact exactly the time when open specs matter *most*. Microsoft understands that. Note how they embraced open specs when Netscape was the market leader (IE4 had better CSS support than did Navigator 4). Further, notice how they stopped developing IE until a credible threat took part of their market share. Now, it's perfectly legitimate to question the idea of asking government to mandate open specs. It's not legitimate to claim that it is not a problem or that it does not matter.
It's also worth noting that the nature of political systems require a certain catering to extremists. For example, in the USA, the Republicans use pro-life activists as volunteers to distribute literature, etc. Moderates aren't active in the same way. The majority of people in the USA believe that abortion is morally wrong but should be legal. However, the activists believe either that abortion should be illegal (pro-life) or that it is morally right (pro-choice). Since politicians need volunteers and contributors, they cater to those groups that provide them: the extremists. Abortion is especially interesting in that up until 1980, it was Democrats (e.g. Bill Clinton and Al Gore) who were pro-life and Republicans (e.g. the Bush family helped found Planned Parenthood) who were pro-choice.
On how many of the following issues would you and your Marxist friend have agreed?
1. Is there a God? What role should religion play in government?
2. Abortion.
3. Should the government try to act in economic matters (most likely the single point of disagreement that has you thinking of yourselves as being on opposite sides of the fence).
4. Casual drug use.
5. Racism.
6. Is the current system good?
Maybe you weren't as different as you think?