"before its too late and a mushroom cloud appears in somebody's basement"
I for one cannot wait for the moment one of those amateur fusion tinkerers vaporizes his own house in one humongous boom. I'll be there and cheering when it happens.
Do you know why ?
Because it'll signal the end of a whole era. Have you followed the research domain of LENR/CANR - formerly known as "cold fusion" - over the years, for example ? There you have thousands of labs all around the planet making endless refinements and taking almost infinite precautions so they make the most impossibly-deniable measurement of some excess heat when electrolyzing half a pint of water.
This is madness ! That kind of exercise in pointless "due process" is an incredible waste of time ! That's at best undergrad routine, it should be reserved for the time when LENR/CANR/LANR/whatever-it-is makes it to mainstream acceptance, and be funded with leftover budget while the big names focus on the Big Things like earning a Nobel rewriting our understanding of chemistry and building net power generators and licencing the tech all around.
What those guys really need to build acceptance and make a true breakthrough is one of them to go in a huge boom that razes a whole wing of the electrochemistry department building, a boom so big no one can pretend with a straight face that the excess energy in the beer-mug-sized jar was just a measurement fluke. A large fireball rising amidst flying debris and thunder ! What better pan-in-the-face demonstration of useable excess energy or net power gain can you wish for ?
How many brilliant chemist careers were started by exploding hydrogen-filled balloons and/or dumping raw sodium metal in water ? This is what we really need: more big booms for science's future ! More awe in the eyes of the passers-by ! Nuclear technology did not build such a pervasive recognition in the mainstream throughout the 50s by merely splitting some atoms inside a heavy graphite box, but by expanding radioactive mushrooms of fiery hell to the stratosphere !
"If an exact copy of you were made (absolutely exact, right down to the quantum state of every particle); do you believe that given the exact same environment (a twinned universe?) your doppleganger would ever do anything different than yourself?"
The copy would act a LOT like the original, but would diverge eventually, because it cannot remain in the same state after being copied: both copies can't be in the same place so they will be affected differently by their environment.
The whole free-will debate is missing the point: there being complete determinism to human nature or, at a higher level, in the Universe itself does not equate it being predictable by us, because of this little grain of sand discovered by Edward Lorenz - the fact that ce can't know the full starting conditions. The most we can hope to achieve is good local predictions at a very small time scale.
Apple's stock does seem overvalued. That's the great thing about it: you don't have to believe anyone else. The stock seems overvalued to you ? Sell it / short it. You think the profitability is going to grow ? Buy it. You're unsure ? Don't do anything about it. No one is stopping you from acting out your mind, including not giving a f*** about it, or going there and correcting the discrepancy you perceive, on your own. If you turn out to be right then you would have helped bring some balance back into the whole thing, and been rewarded for it.
All in all, the many reasons given in TFA and comments all boil down to: the price wasn't right. People pirate music and software because the price asked is not what they are willing to spend on it. We can argue about how and why the price really is wrong in specific cases or in general, or we can discuss the various theories defining whether or not, and why, it's right or wrong to pirate, yet it wouldn't change the fact that people do it because they want to.
Some investors look beyond the next fiscal quarter
And rightfully so. A company's stock is its promise of profitability, and the shares are shards of this promis. Stock market are really places where people buy and sell promises. The valuation of these promises has thus everything to do with the future, and not the present.
"Please. Capitalism is the ultimate parasitic system. The capitalists add no value. They perform no labor. They reap the rewards of others' labor."
By your "logic", which says that there exists no value outside of the work input by the worker and that the impact of the tools he uses is absolutely negligible, wood cut in two hours with a blunt axe is twice as valuable as the same amount of wood cut in one hour with a sharp axe. That's the kind of nonsense Marx based his entire theories upon. This is the elephant-sized hole in his work, the gaping chasm between communist ideas and the facts.
"the USSR, China and Cuba are not and never were socialist."
Oh, yes, the same old lie. In fact, if you listen to the communist apologists, there has never ever been a single socialist country anywhere in the world, not even remotely. The documented historical fact that every single time socialism (in the classic sense) is applied to anything, that thing suffers epic failures (famines when it is applied to food production and distribution, as in every single country that has had famines in the 20th century), evades them entirely.
But the truth is that any amount of socialism requires organisation of force and violence (and gun superiority to boot) for its application, and enough socialism to call a country "really socialist" requires a full-blown police state to enforce it.
That trove of regulation, state-enforced monopolies and corporate-federal state cross-interests ? That's light-years away from true capitalism.
"What about the 6 million children who die of hunger and treatable illness worldwide each and every year?"
Everywhere except in the strongly-capitalist countries. Nice wool you have on your eyes ! Those children die not of having too much trade and too many salaried jobs thrust upon them by capitalists, but quite the opposite. They die because the people who rule them with guns and machettes will NOT let the capitalists from out of the borders deal with them.
"Or consider the billions of people who will never get a chance at a decent education. There could be Einsteins, Bachs and geniuses all over the world who will never be allowed to achieve their potential because capitalists are loathe to spend money on educating people any more than is required for them to work in their factories and offices."
Wake up and smell the coffee, it is private schools run for profit that are lifting the millions of poors in the third-world out of illiteracy and misery.
"Please. Capitalism is the ultimate parasitic system. The capitalists add no value. They perform no labor."
Buuullshit.
Earning money and then not spending it into tastier food (or whatever non-capital good) but rather into the building of a useful tool that will save efforts and time has no value and performs no useful function ? You are out of your mind.
The value represented by interest and profit in a capitalist system comes from this saving of efforts and time, which allows the creation of more wealth with equal amount of work. This value comes from the improvement of the efficiency it causes. This is the one big thing that Marx got entirely wrong, even though people like Leibniz had written about it decades before Das Kapital.
At long last an actually-decent air transport security measure. Good to know. Now all they need to do is double the number of flying personnel and get rid of the circus at the airport.
One more, this time using some Dirac-inspired theory of everything I read about some time ago:
What is space-time anyway?
It's a Bose-Einstein condensate of zero-level energy, it "makes" space-time by simply being there, and by there being no space-time where it ain't. This condensate serves as the bizarre "ether" upon which everything rests, by occupying the zero-level it forces everything else to remain at a positive level of energy, so basically all particles we can oberve are just "froth" on top of it.
Why does mass/energy warp space-time?
Because it perturbs the underlying zero-level condensate.
Why does mass/energy resist being accelerated?
Because the "drag" induced by the condensate is proportional to the second-order of movement, and not the first order.
Why is the resistance to acceleration always in the exact same proportion to the gravitational effects?
Because both have the same nature, being "dynamic drag" on the second order of movement relative to the underlying condensate. OK, that's not very convincing.
I have more, though, and there are alternative explanations for each of them.
Because anything with mass pins down dimensions together at one single point by messing with them ? If you think about it from the time-relative-to-space viewpoint instead of the space-relative-to-time viewpoint, what you're seeing is not really a particle, but something which has the effects you associate with being a particle, and pretty much all of it is nothing more than some messing with one dimension relative to another when you prod it.
What is space-time anyway?
The necessary counter-part to quantum properties, so these can actually exist in some way distinct from each other ?
why does mass/energy resist being accelerated?
Because "accelerating something" means messing with the time-space relationship some massive particle has, warping it one way or the other, which affects whatever space-time warping stuff its mas really is ?
Why is the resistance to acceleration always in the exact same proportion to the gravitational effects?
Because they're similar in nature, being both warpages of space-time ?
I'm pretty sure a large knife made out of a sharpened plexi or other glass material, wrapped i nsome newspaper and taped to your back or thigh, could make it through.
Same here. I live in a country with very low gun ownership, and extremely strict gun sale and ownership restriction laws.
Here, the criminals don't use guns, because they don't need to. They just outnumber you, and there's little you can do about that if you do not have any lethal arm that works from a distance (like, oh, a handgun). At worst the criminals wield boxcutters, because it's cheap and they hardly even have to use them anyway save for the occasional victim who might have a knife (though these are restricted in size by the law, too).
Fortunately we still have access to basic chemicals for making gunpowder by ourselves (sodium chlorate, available in every gardening store, mix with equal volume of sugar and keep dry), and to basic metal-working handtools. That's why the trend of modifying harmless alarm guns into projectile-firing weapons has been steadily growing.
"Plenty of countries where gun ownership is extremely restricted and funnily enough they have a lower crime rate (especially on gun crime) than the US. Just look at most European countries."
Yeah, like Switzerland. About as many guns per inhabitant as in the US, and it has the lowest homicide rate of them all. And they have rifle festivals, popular shooting contests, and guns are a hotly debated issue there, too.
You might also want to have a look at the numerous countries that have firearm ban laws, and exceedingly high firearm homicide rate anyway, like Russia, South Africa and Brazil.
Create an offshore company, transfer ownership of your house to it, and from then on rent your house from yourself through a legally distinct entity that you control.
TFA states that french ISPs have "struck a deal" with the government, but the truth is that there's only the government claiming that.
Right after the statement hit the press, the ISPs issued their own statements through the President of the national FAI association representing them, telling how they had not been consulted and had not agreed to anything, how they had not changed position on the inefficiency of any filtering scheme, and how the statement by Mme Alliot-Marie was unilateral goobledegook lacking technical and juridical relevance.
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Phone Captcha.
"before its too late and a mushroom cloud appears in somebody's basement"
I for one cannot wait for the moment one of those amateur fusion tinkerers vaporizes his own house in one humongous boom. I'll be there and cheering when it happens.
Do you know why ?
Because it'll signal the end of a whole era. Have you followed the research domain of LENR/CANR - formerly known as "cold fusion" - over the years, for example ? There you have thousands of labs all around the planet making endless refinements and taking almost infinite precautions so they make the most impossibly-deniable measurement of some excess heat when electrolyzing half a pint of water.
This is madness ! That kind of exercise in pointless "due process" is an incredible waste of time ! That's at best undergrad routine, it should be reserved for the time when LENR/CANR/LANR/whatever-it-is makes it to mainstream acceptance, and be funded with leftover budget while the big names focus on the Big Things like earning a Nobel rewriting our understanding of chemistry and building net power generators and licencing the tech all around.
What those guys really need to build acceptance and make a true breakthrough is one of them to go in a huge boom that razes a whole wing of the electrochemistry department building, a boom so big no one can pretend with a straight face that the excess energy in the beer-mug-sized jar was just a measurement fluke. A large fireball rising amidst flying debris and thunder ! What better pan-in-the-face demonstration of useable excess energy or net power gain can you wish for ?
How many brilliant chemist careers were started by exploding hydrogen-filled balloons and/or dumping raw sodium metal in water ? This is what we really need: more big booms for science's future ! More awe in the eyes of the passers-by ! Nuclear technology did not build such a pervasive recognition in the mainstream throughout the 50s by merely splitting some atoms inside a heavy graphite box, but by expanding radioactive mushrooms of fiery hell to the stratosphere !
"Some of these hobbyists hope similar reactors can one day power the planet, but so far they consume more energy than they create"
That's fine, the billion-dollar fusion projects aren't producing excess power either, and likely never will because of Bremsstrahlung.
You're missing one significant scenario here:
-Humans/animals have free will as a strongly emergent characteristic, that particles do not have.
And it seems the scientists from TFA are missing it too.
"If an exact copy of you were made (absolutely exact, right down to the quantum state of every particle); do you believe that given the exact same environment (a twinned universe?) your doppleganger would ever do anything different than yourself?"
The copy would act a LOT like the original, but would diverge eventually, because it cannot remain in the same state after being copied: both copies can't be in the same place so they will be affected differently by their environment.
The whole free-will debate is missing the point: there being complete determinism to human nature or, at a higher level, in the Universe itself does not equate it being predictable by us, because of this little grain of sand discovered by Edward Lorenz - the fact that ce can't know the full starting conditions. The most we can hope to achieve is good local predictions at a very small time scale.
Apple's stock does seem overvalued.
That's the great thing about it: you don't have to believe anyone else. The stock seems overvalued to you ? Sell it / short it. You think the profitability is going to grow ? Buy it. You're unsure ? Don't do anything about it. No one is stopping you from acting out your mind, including not giving a f*** about it, or going there and correcting the discrepancy you perceive, on your own. If you turn out to be right then you would have helped bring some balance back into the whole thing, and been rewarded for it.
I think you're entirely right in this analysis.
All in all, the many reasons given in TFA and comments all boil down to: the price wasn't right. People pirate music and software because the price asked is not what they are willing to spend on it. We can argue about how and why the price really is wrong in specific cases or in general, or we can discuss the various theories defining whether or not, and why, it's right or wrong to pirate, yet it wouldn't change the fact that people do it because they want to.
With 160B cap and 3B profit, and assuming a dividend share of 50%, you'd get less than 1% of your stock's value in dividend. That's not much.
Well, I think funding a private space program for Mars colonization would reinforce the brand.
Some investors look beyond the next fiscal quarter
And rightfully so. A company's stock is its promise of profitability, and the shares are shards of this promis. Stock market are really places where people buy and sell promises. The valuation of these promises has thus everything to do with the future, and not the present.
"Please. Capitalism is the ultimate parasitic system. The capitalists add no value. They perform no labor. They reap the rewards of others' labor."
By your "logic", which says that there exists no value outside of the work input by the worker and that the impact of the tools he uses is absolutely negligible, wood cut in two hours with a blunt axe is twice as valuable as the same amount of wood cut in one hour with a sharp axe. That's the kind of nonsense Marx based his entire theories upon. This is the elephant-sized hole in his work, the gaping chasm between communist ideas and the facts.
"the USSR, China and Cuba are not and never were socialist."
Oh, yes, the same old lie. In fact, if you listen to the communist apologists, there has never ever been a single socialist country anywhere in the world, not even remotely. The documented historical fact that every single time socialism (in the classic sense) is applied to anything, that thing suffers epic failures (famines when it is applied to food production and distribution, as in every single country that has had famines in the 20th century), evades them entirely.
But the truth is that any amount of socialism requires organisation of force and violence (and gun superiority to boot) for its application, and enough socialism to call a country "really socialist" requires a full-blown police state to enforce it.
"Look at the health insurance system in the US."
That trove of regulation, state-enforced monopolies and corporate-federal state cross-interests ? That's light-years away from true capitalism.
"What about the 6 million children who die of hunger and treatable illness worldwide each and every year?"
Everywhere except in the strongly-capitalist countries. Nice wool you have on your eyes ! Those children die not of having too much trade and too many salaried jobs thrust upon them by capitalists, but quite the opposite. They die because the people who rule them with guns and machettes will NOT let the capitalists from out of the borders deal with them.
"Or consider the billions of people who will never get a chance at a decent education. There could be Einsteins, Bachs and geniuses all over the world who will never be allowed to achieve their potential because capitalists are loathe to spend money on educating people any more than is required for them to work in their factories and offices."
Wake up and smell the coffee, it is private schools run for profit that are lifting the millions of poors in the third-world out of illiteracy and misery.
"Please. Capitalism is the ultimate parasitic system. The capitalists add no value. They perform no labor."
Buuullshit.
Earning money and then not spending it into tastier food (or whatever non-capital good) but rather into the building of a useful tool that will save efforts and time has no value and performs no useful function ? You are out of your mind.
The value represented by interest and profit in a capitalist system comes from this saving of efforts and time, which allows the creation of more wealth with equal amount of work. This value comes from the improvement of the efficiency it causes. This is the one big thing that Marx got entirely wrong, even though people like Leibniz had written about it decades before Das Kapital.
At long last an actually-decent air transport security measure. Good to know. Now all they need to do is double the number of flying personnel and get rid of the circus at the airport.
One more, this time using some Dirac-inspired theory of everything I read about some time ago:
What is space-time anyway?
It's a Bose-Einstein condensate of zero-level energy, it "makes" space-time by simply being there, and by there being no space-time where it ain't. This condensate serves as the bizarre "ether" upon which everything rests, by occupying the zero-level it forces everything else to remain at a positive level of energy, so basically all particles we can oberve are just "froth" on top of it.
Why does mass/energy warp space-time?
Because it perturbs the underlying zero-level condensate.
Why does mass/energy resist being accelerated?
Because the "drag" induced by the condensate is proportional to the second-order of movement, and not the first order.
Why is the resistance to acceleration always in the exact same proportion to the gravitational effects?
Because both have the same nature, being "dynamic drag" on the second order of movement relative to the underlying condensate. OK, that's not very convincing.
I have more, though, and there are alternative explanations for each of them.
Hey, let's have a try at this, sounds like fun.
Why does mass/energy warp space-time?
Because anything with mass pins down dimensions together at one single point by messing with them ? If you think about it from the time-relative-to-space viewpoint instead of the space-relative-to-time viewpoint, what you're seeing is not really a particle, but something which has the effects you associate with being a particle, and pretty much all of it is nothing more than some messing with one dimension relative to another when you prod it.
What is space-time anyway?
The necessary counter-part to quantum properties, so these can actually exist in some way distinct from each other ?
why does mass/energy resist being accelerated?
Because "accelerating something" means messing with the time-space relationship some massive particle has, warping it one way or the other, which affects whatever space-time warping stuff its mas really is ?
Why is the resistance to acceleration always in the exact same proportion to the gravitational effects?
Because they're similar in nature, being both warpages of space-time ?
Okay, your turn.
I'm pretty sure a large knife made out of a sharpened plexi or other glass material, wrapped i nsome newspaper and taped to your back or thigh, could make it through.
"Dismissal from the department" is a heck of a way to mispell "getting a medal and commendations for his bravery".
Then it's a fortunate thing their enemies don't have photon torpedoes, eh.
Oh, wait...
I'm celebrating those 50 years by reading "Kings of the High Frontier" by V. Koman.
Same here. I live in a country with very low gun ownership, and extremely strict gun sale and ownership restriction laws.
Here, the criminals don't use guns, because they don't need to. They just outnumber you, and there's little you can do about that if you do not have any lethal arm that works from a distance (like, oh, a handgun). At worst the criminals wield boxcutters, because it's cheap and they hardly even have to use them anyway save for the occasional victim who might have a knife (though these are restricted in size by the law, too).
Fortunately we still have access to basic chemicals for making gunpowder by ourselves (sodium chlorate, available in every gardening store, mix with equal volume of sugar and keep dry), and to basic metal-working handtools. That's why the trend of modifying harmless alarm guns into projectile-firing weapons has been steadily growing.
"Plenty of countries where gun ownership is extremely restricted and funnily enough they have a lower crime rate (especially on gun crime) than the US. Just look at most European countries."
Yeah, like Switzerland. About as many guns per inhabitant as in the US, and it has the lowest homicide rate of them all. And they have rifle festivals, popular shooting contests, and guns are a hotly debated issue there, too.
You might also want to have a look at the numerous countries that have firearm ban laws, and exceedingly high firearm homicide rate anyway, like Russia, South Africa and Brazil.
Oh, yeah, because we all know the criminals are in it for the sport, the thrill and the adrenaline rush of putting their own lives at risk.
Seriously...
Create an offshore company, transfer ownership of your house to it, and from then on rent your house from yourself through a legally distinct entity that you control.
TFA states that french ISPs have "struck a deal" with the government, but the truth is that there's only the government claiming that.
Right after the statement hit the press, the ISPs issued their own statements through the President of the national FAI association representing them, telling how they had not been consulted and had not agreed to anything, how they had not changed position on the inefficiency of any filtering scheme, and how the statement by Mme Alliot-Marie was unilateral goobledegook lacking technical and juridical relevance.