IANAL, but if I sell you stolen goods, then that is a crime. Likewise, if you could reasonably be expected to know the goods were stolen, then that is also a crime (theft by receiving, IIRC).
As for your last paragraph, that's a mighty big if. However, if that were true (in general, not specifically for Wal Mart), then one would indeed expect that the fine should be greater than $1M. The idea is to make the expected value of the crime negative. As any good mathematician could tell you expected value is the sum of the (product of the probability of an outcome by the value of an outcome), summed over all outcomes.
In your example, let's imagine that $100 is stolen by 50,000 shoplifters, yielding that $5M figure. The probability of getting caught is therefore quite low, specifically, 0.0001. So, if every shoplifter were fined $1M, then the expected value of shoplifting would be (0.9999) * 100 + (0.0001) * (-1,000,000) = $99.99 - $100 = -$0.01. So $1M is probably not enough of a fine.
Your first paragraph is overstating the problem behind France's ruling. The problem is that Google is getting paid to tie someone else's trademark to a third party's ad. When that third party is someone pretending to be the person who really has the trademark (i.e., a counterfeiter) this is clearly improper. It also seems somewhat improper if Google is paid to tie the word "Pepsi" to ads for Coca Cola.
On the other hand, your second paragraph makes a reasonable point. However, AFAIK the French court stipulated that this applies to competitors, such as the counterfeit bags, so that the critical sites you mention aren't affected unless perhaps they are funded by competitors.
Similarly, it might seem reasonable that Saks or Nieman Marcus would be able to buy an advertisment linking them to Vuitton, as they sell those products. However, even this is a little gray as there are also Vuitton stores (e.g., Lenox Square Mall has both a Louis Vuitton store and a Nieman Marcus, so at Lenox Square they are competitors). This gets back to the difficulty others have mentioned of Google identifying exactly who is and is not a competitor.
You wouldn't try to understand your Ramen noodles by looking at its barcode, but the barcode does help the computer to identify the noodles.
As far as I can tell, that's all they're proposing here, as well. This would allow a student researcher (or other less educated researcher) to help a more experienced biologist by figuring out whether an animal actually is species X or whether it just looks like species X to a relatively untrained eye. And, in this case I imagine the experienced biologist will be very interested when called over for a "price check" when the animal does not match any species in the database (after the database is "complete" of course).
Sure, it might. It might also demoralize the teachers and actually have a negative impact. It depends partially on whether the people spending the money spend any time in the actual classrooms that the money will affect. If not, then most likely they will spend the money unwisely. I'm not saying that only the teachers know how the money should be spent (although it wouldn't be a bad idea to seek their counsel), just that before money is spent, a little time (and money) should be invested making sure that those who are spending the money are at least passingly familiar with those they are spending the money on.
Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations.
I first heard this fact from a professor of mine, and it made sense at the time as coal is ultimately a source for uranium as well as radium. (That's where the Curies got their uranium from, after all.) This is the first time I did a web-search to verify his statement, and I wasn't surprised to see that it agrees with other people's calculations (Google for "coal radiation").
Not that I disagree with your basic sentiment, but I am constantly flummoxed by those working a cash register who become completely unglued if I give them 4 dollars and a nickel for something that cost $3.80. They got confused because when they saw the 4 dollars they immediately entered 4 dollars as amount tendered, before noticing that I was also handing them a nickel.
The school I used to teach at spent an unwholesome amount of money installing a satellite dish. This same school had about two or three working TVs, and additional TVs were not bought. Note: I'm not saying that this would have been a good investment even if we did have ample TVs, but it was a blaringly obvious waste of money in our case. (Not that this excuses anything, but the decision was made at a higher level, for all schools in our county.)
Also note that the amount of money would not have been at all unwholesome if it was spent on more important things, such as paying teachers more or (my preference) reducing class sizes.
While I do not share your religious beliefs about homosexuality...
Presumably, you do share my beliefs about homosexuality (or at least some of them). It's the beliefs I was describing that you don't share.
You are correct, that the laws would only forbid such behaviors and not eliminate them, and I believe all would agree with you on that point. Furthermore, you are also correct that bans on homosexual acts have been deemed unconstitutional - which is exactly why those who would ban homosexual acts believe they need a constitutional amendment. (By definition, a constitutional amendment cannot be unconstitutional. Although I'm sure many of us would believe that it could render the constitution into an inconsistent document.)
I was not away that "polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support the right of civil unions for gays", although I do know that percentage to be higher than those who support marriage rights.
Here are some links that suggest that statement to be not exactly accurate:
So, I wouldn't say it's consistent yet, even if 2005 shows a majority, but it does seem we're headed that way. FWIW, personally, I would not support any ban on gay marriage, even if it allowed for civil unions, as I think that it amounts to government sticking its nose where it doesn't belong.
P.S. If you re-read my original post, you'll notice that the whole point of my argument was that the reasons why people support FMA have little (or nothing!) to do with their support for government getting more involved in our lives in general.
as we all make them. However, it seems so apropos that you misspelled "turning sentient" as "turing sentient". Now, if only you had accidentally capitalized the "T", I might have suspected that your keyboard was Turing sentient.
And the 3 came from 2005-2002 (after re-reading the site, I should have chosen 2 (and hence 12 instead of 11) since the picture comes from 2004, but that doesn't change the explanation).
Imagine this: I'm blind and deaf, so the only way I can get communication from you is when you throw me a braille ball. Now, I know that all braille balls travel at 1 m/s, and I (somehow) know that you're 20,000 meters away (you're a really strong thrower), so when I catch your ball I know that you threw it 20,000 seconds ago. Now, there's a wall 14 meters from you that you simultaneously throw a second ball towards, and amazingly it reaches me after only 20,002 seconds! Well, since I know that it took 14 seconds for that ball to reach the wall, I subtract 14 from 20,002 to get 19,988. I now conclude that the wall is only 19,988 meters from me (i.e., it's 12 meters closer to me than you are), without needing to conclude that the ball has broken its "law" of traveling at 1 m/s.
The event happened 20,000 years ago, and the portion of the 14 ly radius sphere that's approximately 11 ly closer to us than the star should now be visible. That is, it took ~20,000 years for the flash to reach us, and ~(20,000+14-11) = ~(20,000+3) years for that portion of the echo to reach us.
I hope that I didn't over- or under-simplify this.:)
It's called the inverse square law because radiation's power decreases by 1/(distance^2). Unless the source is a dipole, in which case it is 1/(distance^3), but these are not dipoles.:)
What's interesting, at least when you first think about it, is how the sphere of influence spans 14 light-years less than 3 years after we detected its "flash".
Of course, it's not really going faster-than-light, it's just a matter of perespective. The event happened 20,000 years ago, and the portion of the 14 ly radius sphere that's approximately 11 ly closer to us than the star should now be visible. That is, it took ~20,000 years for the flash to reach us, and ~(20,000+14-11) = ~(20,000+3) years for that portion of the echo to reach us.
Searching for "Mona Lisa" or "King George III" both returned a Wikipedia subsection. On the bright side:
They do cite Wikipedia appropriately, from what I can tell.
There is additional information - not just Wikipedia stuff.
As for Wikipedia not copying the content of previous encyclopedia sites, I'm sure some if it does, since there's weak editorial control. However, I believe you are correct in that most of the content is not copied from other sites.
P.S. In case you were wondering what "ispative" means, it's my misspelling for "ipsative".
But I'd have a hard time believing that most people think that hard about the government's role in marriage. I understand your premise, I just don't believe your conclusion. By the same logic, would it make sense to claim that people don't take murder so seriously, because the government does? After all, there has been an increase in murders (at least in the absolute sense) ever since the government first got involved in them (whenever that was).
They don't have entries for ispative and idiothetic, so I know they're not just copying Wikipedia's entries carte blanche.
It doesn't have Wikipedia's look and feel.
Granted, these are not necessarily good things, but I don't see how this is a rip-off of Wikipedia any more than Wikipedia is a rip-off of other prior encyclopedia cites.
Actually, this is a fundamental flaw inherent in any organization where decisions are made by a group of people. There are definitely people who are just plain bigots. Then there are those who want to criminalize extramarital sex, sodomy (inside or outside of marriage), etc. And of course there are people who belong to both groups. My point was just that there is a significant (though probably a minority) number of people who are pro-FMA only because they see it as strengthening the role of God in our society. These same people will quickly point out such things as how religion has been involved in our government from the beginning, and that the separation of Church and state only goes so far as to prohibit the establishing of religion or the free expression of religion. It does not guarantee that religious beliefs won't form a basis for how laws are written. (I, myself, will quickly acknowledge this is a slippery slope - I'm just paraphrasing many of the arguments I have heard.)
For sake of argument, I'll accept your correlation, but I find it very hard to accept your causation. I think divorce rose merely because (a) women became more financially independent and (b) it became more acceptable.
Secondly, your government paranoia dismisses the fact that the majority of Americans support laws forbidding homosexuals the ability to marry one another. These people (and I'm not one of them) don't support these laws because they'll give the government more control or more money, and at least some of them are not doing it out of hatred towards gays either. Some of them support these laws because their religious beliefs tell them that homosexuality is a sin (and some of them truly hate the sin, but not the sinner) and see no constitutional problem with laws that eliminate such sins. (After all, we have laws against and our attitudes against that are supported by religion.) I'm definitely not trying to convince you to change your beliefs, merely pointing out that you are drastically missing the reasons behind the FMA. If you don't understand those reasons, you won't be able to successfully fight them.
Having said all that, I support the idea that we should keep the government out of marriage, at least to the extent that they keep out of other contracts. (Judges will still need to get involved during some/most divorces, etc.)
But my assumption is that once forging fingerprints begins to cost companies some money, improvements will be made to make it harder to forge. I'm familiar with that experiment where every fingerprint scanner at a specific expo was fooled (or at least every one that would allow itself to be tested), but I don't think that means that the scanners can't be improved - just that the designers underestimate the ability of the scanners to be fooled, or the ability of crooks to fool them. Eventually, I expect (based on no evidence whatsoever, and very little meaningful information) that fingerprints will be harder to forge than a credit card, due to improvements in scanners.
As for getting new fingerprints, I anticipate that the problem in the future is that rather than emulating your fingerprints, crooks will hack the database storing your fingerprints and convince the database that the crook's fingerprints are in fact yours (and/or vice-versa). The headache will be convincing the fingerprint companies that you are who you say you are. Naturally, one safeguard might be to prevent two people from having the same fingerprint - on file, that is. I'm assuming (quite ignorantly I might add) that nature has already prevented it from being the case in reality.
But I think your sentiment is spot on. Well, for the most part. I think this has the capability of being more secure, but it has the flaw of its users expecting it to be perfectly secure, which would actually make it less secure (see also Why Things Bite Back, by Edward Tenner).
Just like at least one reason Linux is more secure is that it is less used, fingerprint scanners will be unlikely to be a target for the next few years. If they become the primary means of verification, whether they become more secure than the current system depends on how much their shortcomings are acknowledged. (Naturally, most/. readers already know about the various ways to circumvent these systems.)
I spent several years developing enterprise-class software in Quick Basic, before writing a converter that would convert our ~1M lines-of-code to VB6. Imagine the challenges involved in converting code written in a language designed to be procedural driven to one designed to be event driven! (I had to hand convert our primary toolset which has all of the GUI stuff. Then, it has to invoke the proper routines when the specific buttons were pressed. I have to admit, it was the most fun I've ever had on a software project.) What made it even more interesting is that some of the code written in Quick Basic was originally written in old-fashioned line-numbered BASIC, with the GOTO's still intact. (In fact, part of our programmer's handbook taught when to use GOTO's, and the answer was not "never".)
I have to admit, I also enjoyed the Quick Basic days when we had to make sure our program never used more than 590K. (We allowed no more than 50K be taken up by MS-DOS et al.) It encouraged statements like "intNumLinesOnForm = 15 - 5 * boolShowDetail", where "boolShowDetail" was actually an integer that was 0 if false and -1 if true. VB6 kept this behavior, but VB.NET turned true into +1. Luckily, I left (to go back to school) before that became an issue.
P.S. The company I worked for was a great one. The president and vice-president were both programmers that made a point of still doing a little coding on a regular basis.
you could simultaneously simulate a giant gorilla throwing poop at a brick wall, a stucco wall, a steel wall, and a glass wall, although you would have to stipulate the condition which would select the simulation results you actually get - such as which wall yields the largest splatter. That would obviously be the last calculation we would ever need.
(A lot of people don't realize that only one of the 2^n calculations is returned, but one can conditionalize which calculation is returned, so that ultimately only the "useful" calculation is returned. All of the other calculations are sent to our unlucky quantum brothers in other universes. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the cosmic backround radiation wasn't found to actually be such a residue from our lucky quantum brothers who have already developed quantum computing!)
Better yet, since pi only contains a countable number of infinite digits, and there are uncountably infinite numbers of problems (see any decent book on theory of computing), the digits of pi most likely solve an infinite number of problems. Of course, since we can only describe a finite number of problems (in a finite amount of time), there are far fewer of these. The digits of pi do solve, for example, the problem of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Of course, the question we're really looking at is what are the digits telling us in some non-geometrical sense (presumably), and, better yet, is there anything they're telling us that is independent of the number base (e.g., decimal vs. binary vs. trinary)? Of course, your argument still holds.
as otherwise you are correct that force has little meaning.
However, as for the penalty/punishment issue I still disagree. It might or might not be normal to view the coercive redistribution of wealth as a penalty. Not being normal myself, it is hard for me to judge. As for it being rational, it is not (not that I'm claiming to rational myself, just that I'm closer to being rational than I am to being normal). A rational viewpoint might be to ask if it is meant to be a punishment. But then once asked it would be rational to question what the purpose of the punishment was. Since there would be no rational purpose of the punishment, it would be rational to assume that it is simply not fair, which is an entirely different beast altogether. And, of course, you know what everyone's mother taught them about not fair...
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but if I sell you stolen goods, then that is a crime. Likewise, if you could reasonably be expected to know the goods were stolen, then that is also a crime (theft by receiving, IIRC).
As for your last paragraph, that's a mighty big if. However, if that were true (in general, not specifically for Wal Mart), then one would indeed expect that the fine should be greater than $1M. The idea is to make the expected value of the crime negative. As any good mathematician could tell you expected value is the sum of the (product of the probability of an outcome by the value of an outcome), summed over all outcomes.
In your example, let's imagine that $100 is stolen by 50,000 shoplifters, yielding that $5M figure. The probability of getting caught is therefore quite low, specifically, 0.0001. So, if every shoplifter were fined $1M, then the expected value of shoplifting would be (0.9999) * 100 + (0.0001) * (-1,000,000) = $99.99 - $100 = -$0.01. So $1M is probably not enough of a fine.
Your first paragraph is overstating the problem behind France's ruling. The problem is that Google is getting paid to tie someone else's trademark to a third party's ad. When that third party is someone pretending to be the person who really has the trademark (i.e., a counterfeiter) this is clearly improper. It also seems somewhat improper if Google is paid to tie the word "Pepsi" to ads for Coca Cola.
On the other hand, your second paragraph makes a reasonable point. However, AFAIK the French court stipulated that this applies to competitors, such as the counterfeit bags, so that the critical sites you mention aren't affected unless perhaps they are funded by competitors.
Similarly, it might seem reasonable that Saks or Nieman Marcus would be able to buy an advertisment linking them to Vuitton, as they sell those products. However, even this is a little gray as there are also Vuitton stores (e.g., Lenox Square Mall has both a Louis Vuitton store and a Nieman Marcus, so at Lenox Square they are competitors). This gets back to the difficulty others have mentioned of Google identifying exactly who is and is not a competitor.
You wouldn't try to understand your Ramen noodles by looking at its barcode, but the barcode does help the computer to identify the noodles.
As far as I can tell, that's all they're proposing here, as well. This would allow a student researcher (or other less educated researcher) to help a more experienced biologist by figuring out whether an animal actually is species X or whether it just looks like species X to a relatively untrained eye. And, in this case I imagine the experienced biologist will be very interested when called over for a "price check" when the animal does not match any species in the database (after the database is "complete" of course).
Sure, it might. It might also demoralize the teachers and actually have a negative impact. It depends partially on whether the people spending the money spend any time in the actual classrooms that the money will affect. If not, then most likely they will spend the money unwisely. I'm not saying that only the teachers know how the money should be spent (although it wouldn't be a bad idea to seek their counsel), just that before money is spent, a little time (and money) should be invested making sure that those who are spending the money are at least passingly familiar with those they are spending the money on.
From the ORNL:
I first heard this fact from a professor of mine, and it made sense at the time as coal is ultimately a source for uranium as well as radium. (That's where the Curies got their uranium from, after all.) This is the first time I did a web-search to verify his statement, and I wasn't surprised to see that it agrees with other people's calculations (Google for "coal radiation").
Not that I disagree with your basic sentiment, but I am constantly flummoxed by those working a cash register who become completely unglued if I give them 4 dollars and a nickel for something that cost $3.80. They got confused because when they saw the 4 dollars they immediately entered 4 dollars as amount tendered, before noticing that I was also handing them a nickel.
The school I used to teach at spent an unwholesome amount of money installing a satellite dish. This same school had about two or three working TVs, and additional TVs were not bought. Note: I'm not saying that this would have been a good investment even if we did have ample TVs, but it was a blaringly obvious waste of money in our case. (Not that this excuses anything, but the decision was made at a higher level, for all schools in our county.)
Also note that the amount of money would not have been at all unwholesome if it was spent on more important things, such as paying teachers more or (my preference) reducing class sizes.
Presumably, you do share my beliefs about homosexuality (or at least some of them). It's the beliefs I was describing that you don't share.
You are correct, that the laws would only forbid such behaviors and not eliminate them, and I believe all would agree with you on that point. Furthermore, you are also correct that bans on homosexual acts have been deemed unconstitutional - which is exactly why those who would ban homosexual acts believe they need a constitutional amendment. (By definition, a constitutional amendment cannot be unconstitutional. Although I'm sure many of us would believe that it could render the constitution into an inconsistent document.)
I was not away that "polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support the right of civil unions for gays", although I do know that percentage to be higher than those who support marriage rights.
Here are some links that suggest that statement to be not exactly accurate:
So, I wouldn't say it's consistent yet, even if 2005 shows a majority, but it does seem we're headed that way. FWIW, personally, I would not support any ban on gay marriage, even if it allowed for civil unions, as I think that it amounts to government sticking its nose where it doesn't belong.
P.S. If you re-read my original post, you'll notice that the whole point of my argument was that the reasons why people support FMA have little (or nothing!) to do with their support for government getting more involved in our lives in general.
as we all make them. However, it seems so apropos that you misspelled "turning sentient" as "turing sentient". Now, if only you had accidentally capitalized the "T", I might have suspected that your keyboard was Turing sentient.
And the 3 came from 2005-2002 (after re-reading the site, I should have chosen 2 (and hence 12 instead of 11) since the picture comes from 2004, but that doesn't change the explanation).
Imagine this: I'm blind and deaf, so the only way I can get communication from you is when you throw me a braille ball. Now, I know that all braille balls travel at 1 m/s, and I (somehow) know that you're 20,000 meters away (you're a really strong thrower), so when I catch your ball I know that you threw it 20,000 seconds ago. Now, there's a wall 14 meters from you that you simultaneously throw a second ball towards, and amazingly it reaches me after only 20,002 seconds! Well, since I know that it took 14 seconds for that ball to reach the wall, I subtract 14 from 20,002 to get 19,988. I now conclude that the wall is only 19,988 meters from me (i.e., it's 12 meters closer to me than you are), without needing to conclude that the ball has broken its "law" of traveling at 1 m/s.
I hope that helps.
The event happened 20,000 years ago, and the portion of the 14 ly radius sphere that's approximately 11 ly closer to us than the star should now be visible. That is, it took ~20,000 years for the flash to reach us, and ~(20,000+14-11) = ~(20,000+3) years for that portion of the echo to reach us.
I hope that I didn't over- or under-simplify this. :)
It's called the inverse square law because radiation's power decreases by 1/(distance^2). Unless the source is a dipole, in which case it is 1/(distance^3), but these are not dipoles. :)
What's interesting, at least when you first think about it, is how the sphere of influence spans 14 light-years less than 3 years after we detected its "flash".
Of course, it's not really going faster-than-light, it's just a matter of perespective. The event happened 20,000 years ago, and the portion of the 14 ly radius sphere that's approximately 11 ly closer to us than the star should now be visible. That is, it took ~20,000 years for the flash to reach us, and ~(20,000+14-11) = ~(20,000+3) years for that portion of the echo to reach us.
Searching for "Mona Lisa" or "King George III" both returned a Wikipedia subsection. On the bright side:
As for Wikipedia not copying the content of previous encyclopedia sites, I'm sure some if it does, since there's weak editorial control. However, I believe you are correct in that most of the content is not copied from other sites.
P.S. In case you were wondering what "ispative" means, it's my misspelling for "ipsative".
But I'd have a hard time believing that most people think that hard about the government's role in marriage. I understand your premise, I just don't believe your conclusion. By the same logic, would it make sense to claim that people don't take murder so seriously, because the government does? After all, there has been an increase in murders (at least in the absolute sense) ever since the government first got involved in them (whenever that was).
Granted, these are not necessarily good things, but I don't see how this is a rip-off of Wikipedia any more than Wikipedia is a rip-off of other prior encyclopedia cites.
Actually, this is a fundamental flaw inherent in any organization where decisions are made by a group of people. There are definitely people who are just plain bigots. Then there are those who want to criminalize extramarital sex, sodomy (inside or outside of marriage), etc. And of course there are people who belong to both groups. My point was just that there is a significant (though probably a minority) number of people who are pro-FMA only because they see it as strengthening the role of God in our society. These same people will quickly point out such things as how religion has been involved in our government from the beginning, and that the separation of Church and state only goes so far as to prohibit the establishing of religion or the free expression of religion. It does not guarantee that religious beliefs won't form a basis for how laws are written. (I, myself, will quickly acknowledge this is a slippery slope - I'm just paraphrasing many of the arguments I have heard.)
Too bad they're completely wrong! ;)
For sake of argument, I'll accept your correlation, but I find it very hard to accept your causation. I think divorce rose merely because (a) women became more financially independent and (b) it became more acceptable.
Secondly, your government paranoia dismisses the fact that the majority of Americans support laws forbidding homosexuals the ability to marry one another. These people (and I'm not one of them) don't support these laws because they'll give the government more control or more money, and at least some of them are not doing it out of hatred towards gays either. Some of them support these laws because their religious beliefs tell them that homosexuality is a sin (and some of them truly hate the sin, but not the sinner) and see no constitutional problem with laws that eliminate such sins. (After all, we have laws against and our attitudes against that are supported by religion.) I'm definitely not trying to convince you to change your beliefs, merely pointing out that you are drastically missing the reasons behind the FMA. If you don't understand those reasons, you won't be able to successfully fight them.
Having said all that, I support the idea that we should keep the government out of marriage, at least to the extent that they keep out of other contracts. (Judges will still need to get involved during some/most divorces, etc.)
But my assumption is that once forging fingerprints begins to cost companies some money, improvements will be made to make it harder to forge. I'm familiar with that experiment where every fingerprint scanner at a specific expo was fooled (or at least every one that would allow itself to be tested), but I don't think that means that the scanners can't be improved - just that the designers underestimate the ability of the scanners to be fooled, or the ability of crooks to fool them. Eventually, I expect (based on no evidence whatsoever, and very little meaningful information) that fingerprints will be harder to forge than a credit card, due to improvements in scanners.
As for getting new fingerprints, I anticipate that the problem in the future is that rather than emulating your fingerprints, crooks will hack the database storing your fingerprints and convince the database that the crook's fingerprints are in fact yours (and/or vice-versa). The headache will be convincing the fingerprint companies that you are who you say you are. Naturally, one safeguard might be to prevent two people from having the same fingerprint - on file, that is. I'm assuming (quite ignorantly I might add) that nature has already prevented it from being the case in reality.
But I think your sentiment is spot on. Well, for the most part. I think this has the capability of being more secure, but it has the flaw of its users expecting it to be perfectly secure, which would actually make it less secure (see also Why Things Bite Back, by Edward Tenner).
Just like at least one reason Linux is more secure is that it is less used, fingerprint scanners will be unlikely to be a target for the next few years. If they become the primary means of verification, whether they become more secure than the current system depends on how much their shortcomings are acknowledged. (Naturally, most /. readers already know about the various ways to circumvent these systems.)
I spent several years developing enterprise-class software in Quick Basic, before writing a converter that would convert our ~1M lines-of-code to VB6. Imagine the challenges involved in converting code written in a language designed to be procedural driven to one designed to be event driven! (I had to hand convert our primary toolset which has all of the GUI stuff. Then, it has to invoke the proper routines when the specific buttons were pressed. I have to admit, it was the most fun I've ever had on a software project.) What made it even more interesting is that some of the code written in Quick Basic was originally written in old-fashioned line-numbered BASIC, with the GOTO's still intact. (In fact, part of our programmer's handbook taught when to use GOTO's, and the answer was not "never".)
I have to admit, I also enjoyed the Quick Basic days when we had to make sure our program never used more than 590K. (We allowed no more than 50K be taken up by MS-DOS et al.) It encouraged statements like "intNumLinesOnForm = 15 - 5 * boolShowDetail", where "boolShowDetail" was actually an integer that was 0 if false and -1 if true. VB6 kept this behavior, but VB.NET turned true into +1. Luckily, I left (to go back to school) before that became an issue.
P.S. The company I worked for was a great one. The president and vice-president were both programmers that made a point of still doing a little coding on a regular basis.
you could simultaneously simulate a giant gorilla throwing poop at a brick wall, a stucco wall, a steel wall, and a glass wall, although you would have to stipulate the condition which would select the simulation results you actually get - such as which wall yields the largest splatter. That would obviously be the last calculation we would ever need.
(A lot of people don't realize that only one of the 2^n calculations is returned, but one can conditionalize which calculation is returned, so that ultimately only the "useful" calculation is returned. All of the other calculations are sent to our unlucky quantum brothers in other universes. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the cosmic backround radiation wasn't found to actually be such a residue from our lucky quantum brothers who have already developed quantum computing!)
((Yes, I'm just kidding.))
Even more precisely, pi is transcendental.
Better yet, since pi only contains a countable number of infinite digits, and there are uncountably infinite numbers of problems (see any decent book on theory of computing), the digits of pi most likely solve an infinite number of problems. Of course, since we can only describe a finite number of problems (in a finite amount of time), there are far fewer of these. The digits of pi do solve, for example, the problem of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Of course, the question we're really looking at is what are the digits telling us in some non-geometrical sense (presumably), and, better yet, is there anything they're telling us that is independent of the number base (e.g., decimal vs. binary vs. trinary)? Of course, your argument still holds.
as otherwise you are correct that force has little meaning.
However, as for the penalty/punishment issue I still disagree. It might or might not be normal to view the coercive redistribution of wealth as a penalty. Not being normal myself, it is hard for me to judge. As for it being rational, it is not (not that I'm claiming to rational myself, just that I'm closer to being rational than I am to being normal). A rational viewpoint might be to ask if it is meant to be a punishment. But then once asked it would be rational to question what the purpose of the punishment was. Since there would be no rational purpose of the punishment, it would be rational to assume that it is simply not fair, which is an entirely different beast altogether. And, of course, you know what everyone's mother taught them about not fair...