To summarize: "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear" is not grammatically correct; neither is "Describe and fuck communism."
Well, the first sentence should be "Fuck yourself or I'll take away your teddy bear", but I can't see any error in the second one. While having sex with an ideology is likely to be physically impossible, the sentence itself appears quite correct; it is simply a shorter form of "Describe communism and fuck communism".
Re:Sure it is possible to search 10^60
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our apparent inability to understand the exponential function. You, the parent, the grandparent, and the summary seem to all not understand the nature of an intractable problem. "Trillions" of operations a second means nothing when the search space is that big, and no advance in computing (assuming we remain limited by Moore's law and level off in the foreseeable future) will help.
Moore's law is an exponential function; it states that computing power (or the amount of transistors in a chip, but it works out to the same thing) doubles every 18 months. Assuming that it holds, and that current computers can examine one possibility per second, and that the search space is 10^60, it will take about 200 cycles of development to develop a computer which searches the entire space in one second. Since a single cycle takes about a year and a half, it sums up to 300 years. Sure, I propably won't be around anymore, but human species propably will - it's only about 9 generations, after all.
All MS is doing is cranking up bandwidth costs now. Instead of one copy being sent to all 68 subscribers on the server, my listserv now has to send them 68 copies of the same damned thing. Incredibly inefficient, but the subscribers want the email, so that's what'll happen.
Simple solution: don't allow subscriptions from Hotmail accounts.
The phenomenon you explain here isn't a violation of the law, as the law doesn't apply at such scales.
No. The "law" is only statistical. It isn't a hard, involatable law of nature at anyt level; it's simply that macroscopic entities have some many moving parts that the chances of entropy spontaneously decreasing in a given moment is inconceivably low. It is not zero, thought.
In ultra-microscopic systems, on the other hand, there are so few moving parts that the chances of entropy decreasing are non-fantastical, and must be taken into account in practice.
Looking at the consequences on a quantum level is probably useless, as quantum mechanics doesn't account for general relativity which is pretty basic to the nature of space and time. Trying to understand this in terms of string theory is even more futile in my opinion.
Since my example isn't dependent on quantum mechanics or string theory, this is irrelevant.
Of course, understanding why the second law os so basic and how it is related to the direction of the temporal dimension would probably help.
Um, I just said why: there are more high-entropy disordered states than low-entropy ordered ones, so all other things being equal, the resulting state of a given change in the system is more likely to be a high-entropy one than a low-entropy one.
There are far more possible states where the two gasses are evenly mixed in the box than ones where they are completely separated, so at any given point in time they are more likely to be mixed than neatly separated.
Erm, maybe with the phishing and similar then the difference is that you're getting ripped off, tricked and exploited by persons unknown as opposed to highly paid criminals...sorry, 'politicians';)
Ah, the joys of outsourcing. Why should the politicians be safe from it ?
You are not watching the action from some physical and psychological distance. You are role-playing the character.
No, role-playing killers is what happens when your concerned parents take away the console and send you to yard, where you and your friends will start playing "cops and robbers", "indians and cowboys", "ninja turtles" or some other wholesome game consisting of shooting imaginary bullets, arrows or throwing stars at each other in a real-life murder simulation.
Isn't it more important for the BIOS to present an efficient abstraction of certain hardware resources that *any* OS can easily communicate with according to a standard interface than to optimize support, possibly at the expense of flexibility and abstraction, for a single OS (even if that OS is Linux)?
Why ? Does any OS actually use BIOS for anything except booting anymore ? AFAIR even most DOS programs bypassed BIOS screen routines (which is why redirection didn't work so well on DOS) and talked to the hardware directly. And I'm certain Linux doesn't use BIOS for hard disk access, since Linux can use the whole disk even if BIOS is limited to the first 120MB or so of it in some really old machines.
Read what you said again. If one chooses to help the army of their country for pay as an act of free will, of course they should be held accountable for their actions. You say this in the context of blaming a US soldier for the Iraq war. The problem is that the US soldier chose to serve his country, NOT to attack Iraq. Had the US soldier signed up for the "let's invade Iraq on false pretenses" club, then yes, blame the soldier for doing so.
The US soldier signed up for attacking whoever his superiors tell him to. Maybe he couldn't have known that this would include Iraq, specifically, but surely he knew that he might be called on to attack someone ?
By your logic, lets also blame postal workers for delivering mail bombs and anthrax. If they signed up to deliver packages, of course they should be liable for the packages they deliver. Or perhaps we should look deeper and realize that they didn't sign up to deliver THAT package, they signed up to deliver packages.
Postal workers signed up to deliver packages, not bombs, but US soldiers signed up to fight wars. Sure, they didn't sign up to fight Iraq specifically, but I can't belive any were stupid enough not to know what an army is used for.
In any case, I'm not blaming the US soldiers for the Iraq war, I'm simply saying that they can't be said to be completely blameless. A singular Mafia thug isn't guilty for everything the Mafia does, but he is guilty in taking part in them. He is, in essence, a soldier in the service of Mafia. He is not as guilty as the supreme leader, but he isn't blameless either.
Mind you, it's about what I'd expect from a deity whose first three commandments are all about how great he is.
No, the first commandment is about not worshipping any other gods. That is perfectly reasonable; after all, if you're a god, and the only God at that, and know that others are false, so worshipping them and obeying their rules is stupid at best and downright disastrous at worst, why wouldn't you just forbid it ?
The irony here is that almost any atheistic argument can be used to justify this particular religious command:).
But Microsoft won't say what the patents actually are. They're probably hoping to try to sue for all the patents they can in one fell swoop, in hopes that nobody will be able to come up with a solution in time.
No, they're propably hoping to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by making vague threats which can't possibly be verified one way or another. Just like they paid SCO to do earlier. That's how Microsoft does business.
Not exactly. That is why you can find last minute tickets selling for 1/2 price. After breaking even on the sales (In your example, after selling 1/6 of his stock) every additional sale is profit regardless of the price. If a scalper has broken even and has tickets left after the event then he is doing a poor job of scalping.
Not neccessarily. If the scalper sells the remaining tickets at a reduced price at the last minute, he gives people incentive to wait until the last minute and purchase the tickets at that price. Of course not everyone does so, since it decreases your chances of getting tickets at all, but a scalper who only cares about maximizing profits at a single event might end up reducing his future earning potential.
Business, even shady, is not that simple:).
Therefore, assuming a rational actor (Huge assumption), if the scalper has tickets left it is entirely reasonable to assume that there were too many tickets available for the event in the first place.
Since most events use prebuilt places - concert halls and such - with fixed maximum number of users, it is indeed unlikely that the amounts of tickets and the amount of potential visitors doesn't match exactly. After all, it doesn't make much sense to rent a place and then not try to sell it out, unless of course you are trying to create artificial scarcity to drive prices up.
I am no biblical scholar, but I am pretty sure that the bible is pretty clear that no one will know when the second coming will occur.
Yes, according to the Bible Jesus said that even he doesn't know when it happens, only God Himself.
But, you see, the core of fundamentalism isn't faith in God. The core of fundamentalism is an absolute refusal to admit that you might be wrong. It should be no surprise, then, that a fundamentalist might hold a belief which directly contradicts the Bible while also claiming Bible to be infallible.
This is a civil case where standards of proof are much more liberal than in a criminal case.
I'm wondering if civil cases should simply be abolished. The penalties imposed there - lifetime debt slavery in this case - tend to be far higher than those from actual crimes, and since you don't actually have to prove the accused guilty to get them convicted in a civil case, they are constantly abused by organizations such as the RIAA.
think the law is retarded. But blaming the jury is like blaming the soldier on the ground in Iraq for the war--he just does what he's told, and not what he thinks should be done.
Blaming a US soldier serving in Iraq for Iraq war would be like blaming a Mafia thug for helping enable the crimes of Mafia. US doesn't have conscription, but a voluntary for-pay army. If you choose to take money from it in order to help it in its activities, of your own free will and under no coercion, then of course you can be blamed for taking part in said activities. Why on Earth would US soldiers be exempt from being held accountable for their choices ?
As for the jury, it decided to enforce an unjust law when it had the option of not doing so, and not only that, but ordered higher penalties than the law required. It is guilty as Hell.
Besides, if the jury must uphold the law, then just why are they there ?
The only such process we can observe at this time is entropy. In a closed system, it always increases, it can never decrease.
In a closed system entropy can and does decrease from time to time. It is simply much more likely to increase, due to there being more possible states with high entropy than there are states with low entropy in known physical systems, and the likelihood of it decreasing in a given period decreases sharply as the complexity of the system grows. It never goes to zero, thought.
A classical example is a box with two separate gasses, initially separated by a dividing wall. If the wall is removed, the gasses will mix, eventually spreading equally to every part of the box. However, suppose that the box only contains a single molecule of both gasses. It is certainly possible, and even likely, that both molecules happen to be at their initial side of the box, and both gassed therefore separated back to their own sides, at some future point. Add another molecule to both gassed, and you'll have to wait a bit longer for all four to be at their initial sides, but still not too long. A third molecule, and it takes longer still, then fourth, fifth and so on.
The more molecules you add, the longer you'll have to wait. However, no matter how many molecules there are in the box, given a long enough time, the gasses will separate, simply due to random motion of the molecules happenign to take all the molecules of one gas to one side of the box at the same time, and all the molecules of the other gas to the other side at the same time.
It will take almost, but not quite, forever, but that's a far cry from "never".
Seeing how the project to build a self-sufficient sealed habitat on Earth ran into some unexpected difficulties, I'd strongly suggest postponing lunar habitats until one has been run at least a full year on Earth. After all, if there's some nasty surprises waiting, it's better to find them when safety is a few dozen meters, rather than 400 000 kilometers, away.
The "supply problem" exists. There is a limited number of tickets for an event than cannot be increased. The scalper may exacerbate that problem from the viewpoint of someone who got priced out of the market, but they don't create the problem.
You are assuming that the scalper sells every last ticket they buy. This is not neccessarily true; it they buy at $50 and sell at $300, it is entirely reasonable to err on the side of buying too much, since the profit from a single sold ticket cover the losses from 5 unsold ones.
Given this, it is entirely possible that there was originally enough tickets for everyone who wanted to attend, but thanks to the scalper, some of them can't get them at a price they can afford anymore. In this case the scalper indeed was the sole creator of the previously nonexisten supply problem.
Solve the Moral Problem: Pass and enforce draconian laws about it. This can only work if the enforcement and penalties are sufficient to discourage the attempt. This is more likely to raise the price to accomodate the risk.
I belive that a social solution - shunning the sociopaths - is better than legal in this case. That's why I'm posting in this thread, trying to expose the scalpers as the parasitic scum as they are, rather than the honest businessmen they aren't.
In the long run, they can't make money by hoarding tickets. If the scalpers buy the tickets and do not sell them, then they can't make that money. Now, your argument is that scalpers buy tickets at the set price, hold them (once the show is sold out) then resell them for a greater price, that's true. That's what scalpers do. My argument is that they aren't 'inflating' the price when they do that. You are buying a ticket for what you think it is worth, otherwise you wouldn't buy it.
So, if I were to, say, buy all the gasoline within thousand miles, and then sell it at twice the price, I wouldn't be fleecing the public, right ? That's what scalpers do, just for tickets instead of gasoline.
And the price is inflated from what it was originally.
The scalper doesn't provide more tickets or add value to the ticket but they can make sure you GET your ticket. If you are willing to pay for it, they will get it for you. Otherwise, no matter HOW willing to pay you are, you couldn't get a ticket if you weren't in line first.
Incorrect. Without the scalper the tickets wouldn't be sold out so soon, so I'd had better chances of getting them from the original source. They don't make it any more likely that I get the ticket, since they can't make new tickets; they simply make sure that whoever gets the ticket pays a lot more of it than they would in a world without scalpers.
Just like that stockbroker, or that dealer for bonds.
Bullshit. The difference between stock and tickets is that stock represents partial ownership of a company, while tickets are consumables. Stock have value long-term, at least if the company doesn't go banckrupt, so it is natural that they get bought and sold many times during the lifetime of the company. In this case, having stockbrokers willing to buy the stocks makes them more valuable, since it makes it easy to convert them to money.
Tickets, on the other hand have value for a tightly bound short time, from the time they're issued to the time the event they're for is held. Ticket-hoarders are simply profiteering, not doing anything useful.
YES. Scalpers take that extra money that you pay them, but you have to pay them for them to take it. This isn't the case of something best distributing money to all possible bands, this is the case of bands needing to fix their supply problems and TM needing to fix its ticket problems.
This is the case of scalpers managing to get money for nothing, money which would otherwise go to the bands who are, supposedly, doing something useful, namely, producing music. There is no "supply problem" here, unless you wish to consider the scalpers artificially restricting supply to drive the prices up for profiteering purposes a supply problem.
Where there is an artificially induced shortage, a black market usually springs up. that black market is those scalpers. The ONLY sure fire way to get rid of that black market is to remove its reason for existing.
The reason for its existance is the same as the reason spam exists: when there's a chance to make profit by screwing up someone, there's always someone else antisocial enough to do just that.
I can see why you are miffed about scalping. It appears as if those ticket prices are inflated beyong what is 'fair', but that anger isn't going to DO anything. Matching tickets to ID's isn't going to DO anything. Making captchas for ticket sales isn't going to DO anything. The thing you have to accept is that what will do something is letting the price o tickets float. That will probably mean that ticket prices come up to something close to the scalped level.
Actually, since I very rarely go to concerts or other events, the issue of scalping has little to do with me personally. My beef here is that such parasitic
If there happened to be a person called Jesus who lived around that time, but was nothing like the bible says, then it would fairly reasonable to say that Jesus wasn't real.
Yes, but if there was a document which coincided with the biblical description, then wouldn't that document been included into the Bible when it was composed ? It is not a book, after all, but a collection of books, letters and such. So it seems to me that the claim "There is no non-biblical accounts of Jesus" is true by definition.
For Jesus having supposedly been such a rabble rouser, who was purported to have been sentenced to death by Romans during a period of time when we know a LOT about history thanks to the Romans writing about everything, NO ONE happened to have written about Jesus during the time he was alive.
Yes, it certainly is amazing that the historians of a world-spanning empire didn't concentrate on scriptural disagreements the followers of an obscure minority religion living in the outskirts of said empire had, at a time it took months to cross the empire for either news or men. How couldn't they possibly realize that said disagreements would end up spawning a new religion which would come to dominate the world and outlive the Roman Empire, not to mention dispose of every god they knew of and redelegate them to star in campy TV series and comic books ?
TB is a hundred times better than Evolution for reading mail on a Linux box.
What's so good in it ? I'm currently using Evolution 1.2, and it is both stable and simple to use. So, why would I want to switch to Thunderbird ?
Come on, statically charged ornithologists here, discharge your sales pitch in a flash of light and explosion of sound to overcome the grounding cynicism of us evolution-users !
The post I was responding to was putting forth the idea that religion makes people less likely to kill each other at large, this is patently untrue.
The post you responded to claimed that religion is evolutionary beneficial, which means that it gives the religious person's descendants and relatives a competitive advantage. From this context it is obvious that the post meant killing said relatives, not people at large, since that would be an evolutionary disadvantage, making it harder to outcompete the heathens.
Your reading comprehension seems poor though, too bad for you.
Your reasoning abilities seem woefully underevolved. Good for me and my relatives:).
Are you serious? How can scalpers generate a shortage?
By buying tickets en masse with the intent of hoarding them. This means that tickets run out sooner, after which the only way to get one is through the scalpers at inflated prices.
Then they sell tickets for some super popular band at 55 dollars a pop. Do you think that there are more people willing to go @55 dollars than there are seats to hold them? Bam, shortage at that price. No scalpers necessary.
So what does adding scalpers to the equation do ? Does it provide any more tickets ? No. Does it somehow increase what you get for your ticket ? No. So what does it do ? It makes you pay more for your ticket.
That's why I think calling scalpers bloodsuckers is justified: they do not add any value to the system, they simply bleed money from it. And they are actively harmful for the events the tickets are sold for; after all, the more tickets cost, the less events you can afford to go to per year. Scalpers profit, consumers and producers suffer. Yes, bloodsucker is a perfect term for a scalper.
If you have a concert budget of $300 for a year, and tickets to a concert cost $50, you can afford to go see six concerts that year, potentially giving money for six bands. But if the bloodsucking scalper hoards all the tickets to the first concert, and sells them at the artificially inflated monopoly price of $300, you can only afford to see that one concert that year. One band gets $50, five bands get nothing, and the bloodsucker who contributed absolutely nothing of value gets $250.
So stockbrokers and bankers are bloodsuckers too because they trade on volume and limited access?
Stockbrokers add value to the stockmarket. They make it easy to trade stocks, which makes it easier to get venture capital for new companies. Banks, similarly, make it easier to get capital in the form of loans, which allows companies to grow faster than they otherwise could.
So no, bankers and stockbrokers are not bloodsuckers, at least not by definition. Scalpers, on the other hand, are worthless parasitic bloodsuckers by definition.
Scalpers move in to resell tickets at what is more likely the market price. Does this mean scalpers are good? No, of course not. Scalpers introduce all sorts of negative externalities, but they are making mutually beneficial transactions occur, they are pretty irrepresable in that regard.
"Mutually beneficial" ? Bullshit. There's nothing "mutually beneficial" in how scalpers operate. What they do is create an artificial shortage in the ticket supply by hoarding as many tickets as they can, and then selling them at monopoly prices. They are the De Beers of ticket world, and like the De Beers, the world would be better without them.
Had they not intervened, then the people they sold the tickets to would have obtained the tickets anyway, and much cheaper at that. Scalpers are parasites who add nothing of any value to the system, but rather take it away. Disgusting bloodsuckers.
It is completely unreasonable to expect compensation for second-hand radio.
Here in Finland, the cab drivers must pay the local MAFIAA, Teosto, if they want to listen to radio while driving. The justification is that the passengers can also hear the radio, so it counts as "extra service" - which, of course, is complete nonsense and indeed unreasonable, and thus perfectly in line with the new finnish copyright law, Lex Karpela, and the usual MAFIAA/Teosto mode of operation.
The faster all copyright law is abolished, the better off we'll all be. It has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt that you can't have a middle ground, since the copyright cartels simply won't settle for it. Either no copyright, or copyright trumping all common sense and decency. Those are the options, and I'd rather choose "no copyright".
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Well, the first sentence should be "Fuck yourself or I'll take away your teddy bear", but I can't see any error in the second one. While having sex with an ideology is likely to be physically impossible, the sentence itself appears quite correct; it is simply a shorter form of "Describe communism and fuck communism".
Moore's law is an exponential function; it states that computing power (or the amount of transistors in a chip, but it works out to the same thing) doubles every 18 months. Assuming that it holds, and that current computers can examine one possibility per second, and that the search space is 10^60, it will take about 200 cycles of development to develop a computer which searches the entire space in one second. Since a single cycle takes about a year and a half, it sums up to 300 years. Sure, I propably won't be around anymore, but human species propably will - it's only about 9 generations, after all.
I guess you proved your own point, though :).
Simple solution: don't allow subscriptions from Hotmail accounts.
No. The "law" is only statistical. It isn't a hard, involatable law of nature at anyt level; it's simply that macroscopic entities have some many moving parts that the chances of entropy spontaneously decreasing in a given moment is inconceivably low. It is not zero, thought.
In ultra-microscopic systems, on the other hand, there are so few moving parts that the chances of entropy decreasing are non-fantastical, and must be taken into account in practice.
Since my example isn't dependent on quantum mechanics or string theory, this is irrelevant.
Um, I just said why: there are more high-entropy disordered states than low-entropy ordered ones, so all other things being equal, the resulting state of a given change in the system is more likely to be a high-entropy one than a low-entropy one.
There are far more possible states where the two gasses are evenly mixed in the box than ones where they are completely separated, so at any given point in time they are more likely to be mixed than neatly separated.
Ah, the joys of outsourcing. Why should the politicians be safe from it ?
No, role-playing killers is what happens when your concerned parents take away the console and send you to yard, where you and your friends will start playing "cops and robbers", "indians and cowboys", "ninja turtles" or some other wholesome game consisting of shooting imaginary bullets, arrows or throwing stars at each other in a real-life murder simulation.
Why ? Does any OS actually use BIOS for anything except booting anymore ? AFAIR even most DOS programs bypassed BIOS screen routines (which is why redirection didn't work so well on DOS) and talked to the hardware directly. And I'm certain Linux doesn't use BIOS for hard disk access, since Linux can use the whole disk even if BIOS is limited to the first 120MB or so of it in some really old machines.
The US soldier signed up for attacking whoever his superiors tell him to. Maybe he couldn't have known that this would include Iraq, specifically, but surely he knew that he might be called on to attack someone ?
Postal workers signed up to deliver packages, not bombs, but US soldiers signed up to fight wars. Sure, they didn't sign up to fight Iraq specifically, but I can't belive any were stupid enough not to know what an army is used for.
In any case, I'm not blaming the US soldiers for the Iraq war, I'm simply saying that they can't be said to be completely blameless. A singular Mafia thug isn't guilty for everything the Mafia does, but he is guilty in taking part in them. He is, in essence, a soldier in the service of Mafia. He is not as guilty as the supreme leader, but he isn't blameless either.
No, the first commandment is about not worshipping any other gods. That is perfectly reasonable; after all, if you're a god, and the only God at that, and know that others are false, so worshipping them and obeying their rules is stupid at best and downright disastrous at worst, why wouldn't you just forbid it ?
The irony here is that almost any atheistic argument can be used to justify this particular religious command :).
No, they're propably hoping to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by making vague threats which can't possibly be verified one way or another. Just like they paid SCO to do earlier. That's how Microsoft does business.
Not neccessarily. If the scalper sells the remaining tickets at a reduced price at the last minute, he gives people incentive to wait until the last minute and purchase the tickets at that price. Of course not everyone does so, since it decreases your chances of getting tickets at all, but a scalper who only cares about maximizing profits at a single event might end up reducing his future earning potential.
Business, even shady, is not that simple :).
Therefore, assuming a rational actor (Huge assumption), if the scalper has tickets left it is entirely reasonable to assume that there were too many tickets available for the event in the first place.Since most events use prebuilt places - concert halls and such - with fixed maximum number of users, it is indeed unlikely that the amounts of tickets and the amount of potential visitors doesn't match exactly. After all, it doesn't make much sense to rent a place and then not try to sell it out, unless of course you are trying to create artificial scarcity to drive prices up.
Yes, according to the Bible Jesus said that even he doesn't know when it happens, only God Himself.
But, you see, the core of fundamentalism isn't faith in God. The core of fundamentalism is an absolute refusal to admit that you might be wrong. It should be no surprise, then, that a fundamentalist might hold a belief which directly contradicts the Bible while also claiming Bible to be infallible.
I'm wondering if civil cases should simply be abolished. The penalties imposed there - lifetime debt slavery in this case - tend to be far higher than those from actual crimes, and since you don't actually have to prove the accused guilty to get them convicted in a civil case, they are constantly abused by organizations such as the RIAA.
Blaming a US soldier serving in Iraq for Iraq war would be like blaming a Mafia thug for helping enable the crimes of Mafia. US doesn't have conscription, but a voluntary for-pay army. If you choose to take money from it in order to help it in its activities, of your own free will and under no coercion, then of course you can be blamed for taking part in said activities. Why on Earth would US soldiers be exempt from being held accountable for their choices ?
As for the jury, it decided to enforce an unjust law when it had the option of not doing so, and not only that, but ordered higher penalties than the law required. It is guilty as Hell.
Besides, if the jury must uphold the law, then just why are they there ?
In a closed system entropy can and does decrease from time to time. It is simply much more likely to increase, due to there being more possible states with high entropy than there are states with low entropy in known physical systems, and the likelihood of it decreasing in a given period decreases sharply as the complexity of the system grows. It never goes to zero, thought.
A classical example is a box with two separate gasses, initially separated by a dividing wall. If the wall is removed, the gasses will mix, eventually spreading equally to every part of the box. However, suppose that the box only contains a single molecule of both gasses. It is certainly possible, and even likely, that both molecules happen to be at their initial side of the box, and both gassed therefore separated back to their own sides, at some future point. Add another molecule to both gassed, and you'll have to wait a bit longer for all four to be at their initial sides, but still not too long. A third molecule, and it takes longer still, then fourth, fifth and so on.
The more molecules you add, the longer you'll have to wait. However, no matter how many molecules there are in the box, given a long enough time, the gasses will separate, simply due to random motion of the molecules happenign to take all the molecules of one gas to one side of the box at the same time, and all the molecules of the other gas to the other side at the same time.
It will take almost, but not quite, forever, but that's a far cry from "never".
Seeing how the project to build a self-sufficient sealed habitat on Earth ran into some unexpected difficulties, I'd strongly suggest postponing lunar habitats until one has been run at least a full year on Earth. After all, if there's some nasty surprises waiting, it's better to find them when safety is a few dozen meters, rather than 400 000 kilometers, away.
You are assuming that the scalper sells every last ticket they buy. This is not neccessarily true; it they buy at $50 and sell at $300, it is entirely reasonable to err on the side of buying too much, since the profit from a single sold ticket cover the losses from 5 unsold ones.
Given this, it is entirely possible that there was originally enough tickets for everyone who wanted to attend, but thanks to the scalper, some of them can't get them at a price they can afford anymore. In this case the scalper indeed was the sole creator of the previously nonexisten supply problem.
I belive that a social solution - shunning the sociopaths - is better than legal in this case. That's why I'm posting in this thread, trying to expose the scalpers as the parasitic scum as they are, rather than the honest businessmen they aren't.
So, if I were to, say, buy all the gasoline within thousand miles, and then sell it at twice the price, I wouldn't be fleecing the public, right ? That's what scalpers do, just for tickets instead of gasoline.
And the price is inflated from what it was originally.
Incorrect. Without the scalper the tickets wouldn't be sold out so soon, so I'd had better chances of getting them from the original source. They don't make it any more likely that I get the ticket, since they can't make new tickets; they simply make sure that whoever gets the ticket pays a lot more of it than they would in a world without scalpers.
Bullshit. The difference between stock and tickets is that stock represents partial ownership of a company, while tickets are consumables. Stock have value long-term, at least if the company doesn't go banckrupt, so it is natural that they get bought and sold many times during the lifetime of the company. In this case, having stockbrokers willing to buy the stocks makes them more valuable, since it makes it easy to convert them to money.
Tickets, on the other hand have value for a tightly bound short time, from the time they're issued to the time the event they're for is held. Ticket-hoarders are simply profiteering, not doing anything useful.
This is the case of scalpers managing to get money for nothing, money which would otherwise go to the bands who are, supposedly, doing something useful, namely, producing music. There is no "supply problem" here, unless you wish to consider the scalpers artificially restricting supply to drive the prices up for profiteering purposes a supply problem.
The reason for its existance is the same as the reason spam exists: when there's a chance to make profit by screwing up someone, there's always someone else antisocial enough to do just that.
Actually, since I very rarely go to concerts or other events, the issue of scalping has little to do with me personally. My beef here is that such parasitic
Yes, but if there was a document which coincided with the biblical description, then wouldn't that document been included into the Bible when it was composed ? It is not a book, after all, but a collection of books, letters and such. So it seems to me that the claim "There is no non-biblical accounts of Jesus" is true by definition.
Yes, it certainly is amazing that the historians of a world-spanning empire didn't concentrate on scriptural disagreements the followers of an obscure minority religion living in the outskirts of said empire had, at a time it took months to cross the empire for either news or men. How couldn't they possibly realize that said disagreements would end up spawning a new religion which would come to dominate the world and outlive the Roman Empire, not to mention dispose of every god they knew of and redelegate them to star in campy TV series and comic books ?
Inconceivable.
What's so good in it ? I'm currently using Evolution 1.2, and it is both stable and simple to use. So, why would I want to switch to Thunderbird ?
Come on, statically charged ornithologists here, discharge your sales pitch in a flash of light and explosion of sound to overcome the grounding cynicism of us evolution-users !
The post you responded to claimed that religion is evolutionary beneficial, which means that it gives the religious person's descendants and relatives a competitive advantage. From this context it is obvious that the post meant killing said relatives, not people at large, since that would be an evolutionary disadvantage, making it harder to outcompete the heathens.
Your reasoning abilities seem woefully underevolved. Good for me and my relatives :).
By buying tickets en masse with the intent of hoarding them. This means that tickets run out sooner, after which the only way to get one is through the scalpers at inflated prices.
So what does adding scalpers to the equation do ? Does it provide any more tickets ? No. Does it somehow increase what you get for your ticket ? No. So what does it do ? It makes you pay more for your ticket.
That's why I think calling scalpers bloodsuckers is justified: they do not add any value to the system, they simply bleed money from it. And they are actively harmful for the events the tickets are sold for; after all, the more tickets cost, the less events you can afford to go to per year. Scalpers profit, consumers and producers suffer. Yes, bloodsucker is a perfect term for a scalper.
If you have a concert budget of $300 for a year, and tickets to a concert cost $50, you can afford to go see six concerts that year, potentially giving money for six bands. But if the bloodsucking scalper hoards all the tickets to the first concert, and sells them at the artificially inflated monopoly price of $300, you can only afford to see that one concert that year. One band gets $50, five bands get nothing, and the bloodsucker who contributed absolutely nothing of value gets $250.
Stockbrokers add value to the stockmarket. They make it easy to trade stocks, which makes it easier to get venture capital for new companies. Banks, similarly, make it easier to get capital in the form of loans, which allows companies to grow faster than they otherwise could.
So no, bankers and stockbrokers are not bloodsuckers, at least not by definition. Scalpers, on the other hand, are worthless parasitic bloodsuckers by definition.
"Mutually beneficial" ? Bullshit. There's nothing "mutually beneficial" in how scalpers operate. What they do is create an artificial shortage in the ticket supply by hoarding as many tickets as they can, and then selling them at monopoly prices. They are the De Beers of ticket world, and like the De Beers, the world would be better without them.
Had they not intervened, then the people they sold the tickets to would have obtained the tickets anyway, and much cheaper at that. Scalpers are parasites who add nothing of any value to the system, but rather take it away. Disgusting bloodsuckers.
Here in Finland, the cab drivers must pay the local MAFIAA, Teosto, if they want to listen to radio while driving. The justification is that the passengers can also hear the radio, so it counts as "extra service" - which, of course, is complete nonsense and indeed unreasonable, and thus perfectly in line with the new finnish copyright law, Lex Karpela, and the usual MAFIAA/Teosto mode of operation.
The faster all copyright law is abolished, the better off we'll all be. It has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt that you can't have a middle ground, since the copyright cartels simply won't settle for it. Either no copyright, or copyright trumping all common sense and decency. Those are the options, and I'd rather choose "no copyright".