Uh, maybe this book isn't for you, if all you're interested in is more theorems. The theory of information doesn't boil down to signal/noise equations. If you don't even get the Borges reference (which, honestly, no book on information can do without), that's a pretty good sign.
Geoff Nunberg's NYT review of this book from March summarizes the problems of Gleick's rah-rah information romance nicely, not the least of which is the separation of information from any and all social context.
A mid-level civil service worker in China gets paid about $500 a month in a well-developed city. He lives comfortably on this salary, bought his own 1-bedroom place, goes out to eat in restaurants on weekends, and has a decent PC computer and Internet connection. This is an educated knowledge worker with an M.S. degree.
You can't apply a Western minimum wage to a place where you can rent an apartment for less than the price of my California utility bills.
Definitions, my dear AC. Natural monopolies describe the structural elements of a market -- that is, there exists economies of scale such that it is more efficient for one firm to serve everyone than for multiple firms to each serve a segment. For the sake of this efficiency, one firm will be usually be allowed to exist (a so-called statutory monopoly or government monopoly) and competitors excluded, in exchange for government regulation to prevent exploitative business practices as a result of the natural monopoly. In this case, the use of state power ensures the optimal out in terms of social cost and value. You might not buy that theory, but it does prevent five different companies to try to lay identical power lines and/or plumbing to your house.
What you're actually describing is coercive vs non-coercive monopolies. The coercive monopolist attempts to exclude competitors from the market, either via predatory practices or state power. The absence of antitrust regulation implicitly encourages private coercive behavior, as there are very few natural incentives for a monopolist firm to -not- engage in such practices. While in theory a monopolist firm in a normal market can be non-coercive and efficient, lots of things can be in theory possible and yet in practice rare due to these various incentives.
Well, I dunno, I think it's not so much proof of his eccentric version of heliocentrism, but the presentation of any version of heliocentrism as truth rather than hypothesis. Cardinal Bellarmine, the Church's presumed expert in the matter, was simply unconvinced by assertions made and evidence presented, when put against the accepted doctrine, as written fairly explicitly in the Scriptures. As you said, Galileo didn't have much solid proof. The Tychonic theory of geocentrism with a mobile sun also explained the phases of Venus, for example. Without having observed stellar parallax, there's not much else you can say - and even if you have a parallax, there are ways to explain around that without having to invoke 'God did it'. In context of a pre-Newtonian era, it's not too difficult to think of alternate explanations.
Galileo had a number of admirers and defenders, up to Urban VIII. The Dialogues, unfortunately, basically attacked everyone else who held different theories, without holding up much else. Most importantly, by using the Pope's own theory (that the universe is in fact geocentric, but made by God to appear heliocentric to human observation) with 'Simplicio' and then striking it down, the Dialogues became a challenge to papal supremacy and had to be put down. It seems Galileo apparently didn't have the social skills to keep his allies and avoid alienating potential supporters.
Can we get an actual expert or SOX consultant to comment on this interpretation of accounting law (and not random geeks talking out their asses)? From what I've seen second-hand regarding SOX-compliance work, especialy where IT intersected with finance and accounting, I get the impression that there can be apparently unrelated consequences and complications arising from SOX. Rules for apparently simple things like revenue recognition are probably less cut-and-dry than you'd expect. All the enterprise budgets allocated to paying SOX consultants must be for something...
You mean Joshua Muravchik, neocon extraordinaire of the American Enterprise Institute? Why, that'd be like going to stormfront.org to learn about socialism. No bias there, no sir.
To draw an analogy, if people abuse a fire alarm, they are punished with appropriate measures. We do not remove fire alarms from our buildings entirely just because they have the potential to be false. The danger that the fire alarm protects us from is of enough consequence that we must risk the false positives.
I think that's irrelevant in this case, considering that the New Jersey state constitution also offer this guarantee. "Every person may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right. No law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press."
The constitutional question can still be brought up in state court, as local government is a creature of the state government.
Because the US is the economic hegemon in this era of globalization, just as Britain was in the 19th century. The hegemon is supposed to keep market conditions open for free trade and punish defectors from the scheme, because it's a classical Prisoner's Dilemma - unless somebody enforces the rules of the game, the incentive is to defect by doing exactly what China is doing.
Canada is a player in the market, but it's not the hegemon, and it's not the Canadians' responsibility to enforce the rules of a free international market.
Hm. Is there a reason why the United States is just letting the Chinese practice their blatantly economic-nationalist trade policy, all the while sitting under the pretenses of free trade? How that particular "regulatory tangle" not constituting a barrier to free trade? Where are the retaliatory sanctions?
Re:You want intelligent design here, not evolution
on
Microsoft Origami Unfolds
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
functionality != usability
One of the main lessons you learn in industrial design. It really doesn't matter how much functionality you can pack into a widget, or even how cheap (for some reasonable value of cheap) you can make the widget, if your target user base can't make proper use of it.
Many in the technology industry just don't "get it". Apple is starting down the right track, but even some of their stuff is mind-bogglingly unintuitive. And attitudes like yours is so very prevalent among the engineering divisions. "We have 2x the feature set they do at 80 percent of their price! Why isn't our product selling?"
It is really time that human interface design gets a bit more attention.
The Old Guard of "elders" has become less and less relevant in Chinese government. President Hu and his people can't get these old fools out fast enough; some of them resent the loss of influence and has been doing whatever they could to irk the sitting administration.
When these people were in power, they were far, far worse than any in the current government in terms of suppressing dissident thought. Think Cultural Revolution.
Hm. Most Chinese wouldn't search for a romanized string "Tiananmen". They would search using Chinese characters. This sort of off-by-one "misspelling" is rare when you have to pick among actual pictographs. Second, assume that someone would search in pinyin, it's not like "Tiananmen" is actually one word. The first instinct for a search in pin yin would be "Tian An Men", as they are in fact three characters being mapped to. Also kind of difficult to misspell, as these are atomic sounds in pinyin or very simple, two-sound combinations taught from first grade up, and "en" and "an" are seriously different sounds mapping to two very different set of pictographs.
To hit a misspelling like Tianenmen, you'd have to be thinking in an English-oriented mindset. Heh, or have prior knowledge of this little issue and are deliberately out looking for trouble.
I try to support ad-based sites that I enjoy visiting, because it's either that or the more annoying subscription model. The purpose of using mainly a hosts file is that it takes a bit of work for me to put a site into the file (view source, fire up a text editor, add the line, etc). If I am annoyed by an ad so much that I would undertake all of these extra steps, then you really have been evil with your ad placement.
Pop-up blocker is always on, though. Pop-ups and unders are always evil. If you want to get my attention, work on having content that is appropriate to my interests, not annoying me during my browsing session.
Actually, for me, Dashboard is pretty convenient. It means I don't have keep all those tabs open and pick around in a browser. Hit F12, glance at the widgets' output, use, click anywhere to make it go away, and go about my business.
It's more personal preference, really. All of the widget functions are done better elsewhere, but it saves a lot of clicks when you just want to glance at the 5-day weather outlook or look up a definition in the dictionary, all the while without switching out of the foreground word processor or Xcode or whatnot.
Maybe I'm getting jaded these days, but it seems that every other week we have an announcement about a revolutionary breakthrough that's going to cure all these terminal conditions. And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies, in the way that antibiotics swept away most bacterial illnesses. Survival rates are up, sure, but most people are still dying and these conditions are still considered more or less terminal. Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures, or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?
What, are their tactics in this matter not worthy of ridicule and scorn? I dunno, it seems that paying protection money to keep my system safe is a pretty evil and absurd proposal. Being tech-saavy, I don't have to go along with it. The same might not be said for a number of other users. I'm within my righs if I wish to point out the absurdity, no?
Sometimes, there's a good reason for the ridicule and scorn.
Re:Leave Moore's law out of this, please
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Theories are explanations about phenomena, supported by evidence and observations. Laws are merely descriptions of phenomena. It's not as if you can eventually promote theories to law. They are two different types of things.
Moore's Law is a description of semiconductor packing and describes the phenomena of it doubling in a given time period. A Moore's Theory would be if it attempted to explain WHY this occurs.
And you, sir, have no idea what "irony" is. Look it up some time. It'd serve you well in being a pretentious ass in the future.
The fact is that the PTC is asserting itself in the role of a moral majority, which is patently false outside its own meddling group of the highly religious. Pointing out the falsehoods in their assumptions may be rather useless (one can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into in the first place), but it does poke holes in their self-centric positions. The grandparent post is absolutely correct in upholding the conclusion that "[the PTC] don't speak for Americans everywhere", and that this organization should at least cease to project that particular misconception - of pretending to speak on behalf of a community united in moral outrage.
But then again, the highly religious are really adept at pretending to be spokespersons of nonexistent entities, no?
- Y.L.
This clinical trial doesn't involve the exposure of testers to live Ebola virus. That would be wholly unethical given the lethality of the disease. No trial of that sort would have any chance of being approved. This study just tries to prove the vaccine's safety for human use.
In the article it specifically notes "Volunteers will not be exposed to Ebola virus." No live virus was involved in the manufacturing process either.
Because of the ethical problems involved in any human clinical trial with real live virus, they'll probably use the "two-animal" rule in that if it protects at least two animal species from the virus, it's considered valid. Once this study proves safety, then it'll be licensed. The real trial would begin if they ever use this in the next Ebola outbreak.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, maybe this book isn't for you, if all you're interested in is more theorems. The theory of information doesn't boil down to signal/noise equations. If you don't even get the Borges reference (which, honestly, no book on information can do without), that's a pretty good sign.
Geoff Nunberg's NYT review of this book from March summarizes the problems of Gleick's rah-rah information romance nicely, not the least of which is the separation of information from any and all social context.
A mid-level civil service worker in China gets paid about $500 a month in a well-developed city. He lives comfortably on this salary, bought his own 1-bedroom place, goes out to eat in restaurants on weekends, and has a decent PC computer and Internet connection. This is an educated knowledge worker with an M.S. degree.
You can't apply a Western minimum wage to a place where you can rent an apartment for less than the price of my California utility bills.
Definitions, my dear AC. Natural monopolies describe the structural elements of a market -- that is, there exists economies of scale such that it is more efficient for one firm to serve everyone than for multiple firms to each serve a segment. For the sake of this efficiency, one firm will be usually be allowed to exist (a so-called statutory monopoly or government monopoly) and competitors excluded, in exchange for government regulation to prevent exploitative business practices as a result of the natural monopoly. In this case, the use of state power ensures the optimal out in terms of social cost and value. You might not buy that theory, but it does prevent five different companies to try to lay identical power lines and/or plumbing to your house.
What you're actually describing is coercive vs non-coercive monopolies. The coercive monopolist attempts to exclude competitors from the market, either via predatory practices or state power. The absence of antitrust regulation implicitly encourages private coercive behavior, as there are very few natural incentives for a monopolist firm to -not- engage in such practices. While in theory a monopolist firm in a normal market can be non-coercive and efficient, lots of things can be in theory possible and yet in practice rare due to these various incentives.
The pseudo-libertarian rant is amusing, though.
Well, I dunno, I think it's not so much proof of his eccentric version of heliocentrism, but the presentation of any version of heliocentrism as truth rather than hypothesis. Cardinal Bellarmine, the Church's presumed expert in the matter, was simply unconvinced by assertions made and evidence presented, when put against the accepted doctrine, as written fairly explicitly in the Scriptures. As you said, Galileo didn't have much solid proof. The Tychonic theory of geocentrism with a mobile sun also explained the phases of Venus, for example. Without having observed stellar parallax, there's not much else you can say - and even if you have a parallax, there are ways to explain around that without having to invoke 'God did it'. In context of a pre-Newtonian era, it's not too difficult to think of alternate explanations.
Galileo had a number of admirers and defenders, up to Urban VIII. The Dialogues, unfortunately, basically attacked everyone else who held different theories, without holding up much else. Most importantly, by using the Pope's own theory (that the universe is in fact geocentric, but made by God to appear heliocentric to human observation) with 'Simplicio' and then striking it down, the Dialogues became a challenge to papal supremacy and had to be put down. It seems Galileo apparently didn't have the social skills to keep his allies and avoid alienating potential supporters.
Can we get an actual expert or SOX consultant to comment on this interpretation of accounting law (and not random geeks talking out their asses)? From what I've seen second-hand regarding SOX-compliance work, especialy where IT intersected with finance and accounting, I get the impression that there can be apparently unrelated consequences and complications arising from SOX. Rules for apparently simple things like revenue recognition are probably less cut-and-dry than you'd expect. All the enterprise budgets allocated to paying SOX consultants must be for something...
You mean Joshua Muravchik, neocon extraordinaire of the American Enterprise Institute? Why, that'd be like going to stormfront.org to learn about socialism. No bias there, no sir.
To draw an analogy, if people abuse a fire alarm, they are punished with appropriate measures. We do not remove fire alarms from our buildings entirely just because they have the potential to be false. The danger that the fire alarm protects us from is of enough consequence that we must risk the false positives.
I think that's irrelevant in this case, considering that the New Jersey state constitution also offer this guarantee. "Every person may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right. No law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press."
The constitutional question can still be brought up in state court, as local government is a creature of the state government.
Because the US is the economic hegemon in this era of globalization, just as Britain was in the 19th century. The hegemon is supposed to keep market conditions open for free trade and punish defectors from the scheme, because it's a classical Prisoner's Dilemma - unless somebody enforces the rules of the game, the incentive is to defect by doing exactly what China is doing.
Canada is a player in the market, but it's not the hegemon, and it's not the Canadians' responsibility to enforce the rules of a free international market.
Hm. Is there a reason why the United States is just letting the Chinese practice their blatantly economic-nationalist trade policy, all the while sitting under the pretenses of free trade? How that particular "regulatory tangle" not constituting a barrier to free trade? Where are the retaliatory sanctions?
functionality != usability
One of the main lessons you learn in industrial design. It really doesn't matter how much functionality you can pack into a widget, or even how cheap (for some reasonable value of cheap) you can make the widget, if your target user base can't make proper use of it.
Many in the technology industry just don't "get it". Apple is starting down the right track, but even some of their stuff is mind-bogglingly unintuitive. And attitudes like yours is so very prevalent among the engineering divisions. "We have 2x the feature set they do at 80 percent of their price! Why isn't our product selling?"
It is really time that human interface design gets a bit more attention.
The Old Guard of "elders" has become less and less relevant in Chinese government. President Hu and his people can't get these old fools out fast enough; some of them resent the loss of influence and has been doing whatever they could to irk the sitting administration.
When these people were in power, they were far, far worse than any in the current government in terms of suppressing dissident thought. Think Cultural Revolution.
Hm. Most Chinese wouldn't search for a romanized string "Tiananmen". They would search using Chinese characters. This sort of off-by-one "misspelling" is rare when you have to pick among actual pictographs. Second, assume that someone would search in pinyin, it's not like "Tiananmen" is actually one word. The first instinct for a search in pin yin would be "Tian An Men", as they are in fact three characters being mapped to. Also kind of difficult to misspell, as these are atomic sounds in pinyin or very simple, two-sound combinations taught from first grade up, and "en" and "an" are seriously different sounds mapping to two very different set of pictographs.
To hit a misspelling like Tianenmen, you'd have to be thinking in an English-oriented mindset. Heh, or have prior knowledge of this little issue and are deliberately out looking for trouble.
Ah, the greater fool theory of investment in action. "No matter how much I pay for this, a greater fool than I will pay even more."
Or several greater fools, in this case.
I hope your character isn't a Night Elf named Illidan Stormrage.
I try to support ad-based sites that I enjoy visiting, because it's either that or the more annoying subscription model. The purpose of using mainly a hosts file is that it takes a bit of work for me to put a site into the file (view source, fire up a text editor, add the line, etc). If I am annoyed by an ad so much that I would undertake all of these extra steps, then you really have been evil with your ad placement.
Pop-up blocker is always on, though. Pop-ups and unders are always evil. If you want to get my attention, work on having content that is appropriate to my interests, not annoying me during my browsing session.
Actually, for me, Dashboard is pretty convenient. It means I don't have keep all those tabs open and pick around in a browser. Hit F12, glance at the widgets' output, use, click anywhere to make it go away, and go about my business.
It's more personal preference, really. All of the widget functions are done better elsewhere, but it saves a lot of clicks when you just want to glance at the 5-day weather outlook or look up a definition in the dictionary, all the while without switching out of the foreground word processor or Xcode or whatnot.
Maybe I'm getting jaded these days, but it seems that every other week we have an announcement about a revolutionary breakthrough that's going to cure all these terminal conditions. And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies, in the way that antibiotics swept away most bacterial illnesses. Survival rates are up, sure, but most people are still dying and these conditions are still considered more or less terminal. Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures, or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?
My my. Aren't we the optimist?
Though I really hope your version turns out true. 'Cause the alternatives are too scary to contemplate.
What, are their tactics in this matter not worthy of ridicule and scorn? I dunno, it seems that paying protection money to keep my system safe is a pretty evil and absurd proposal. Being tech-saavy, I don't have to go along with it. The same might not be said for a number of other users. I'm within my righs if I wish to point out the absurdity, no?
Sometimes, there's a good reason for the ridicule and scorn.
Theories are explanations about phenomena, supported by evidence and observations. Laws are merely descriptions of phenomena. It's not as if you can eventually promote theories to law. They are two different types of things.
Moore's Law is a description of semiconductor packing and describes the phenomena of it doubling in a given time period. A Moore's Theory would be if it attempted to explain WHY this occurs.
Objectivist propaganda isn't all that more appealing than its counterpart on the opposite side of the political spectrum - communism.
And you, sir, have no idea what "irony" is. Look it up some time. It'd serve you well in being a pretentious ass in the future. The fact is that the PTC is asserting itself in the role of a moral majority, which is patently false outside its own meddling group of the highly religious. Pointing out the falsehoods in their assumptions may be rather useless (one can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into in the first place), but it does poke holes in their self-centric positions. The grandparent post is absolutely correct in upholding the conclusion that "[the PTC] don't speak for Americans everywhere", and that this organization should at least cease to project that particular misconception - of pretending to speak on behalf of a community united in moral outrage. But then again, the highly religious are really adept at pretending to be spokespersons of nonexistent entities, no? - Y.L.
In the article it specifically notes "Volunteers will not be exposed to Ebola virus." No live virus was involved in the manufacturing process either.
Because of the ethical problems involved in any human clinical trial with real live virus, they'll probably use the "two-animal" rule in that if it protects at least two animal species from the virus, it's considered valid. Once this study proves safety, then it'll be licensed. The real trial would begin if they ever use this in the next Ebola outbreak.