I was just talking about this to a friend of mine yesterday. I've been a "customer engineer" for most of the last 47 years. Back in the age of mainframes and minicomputers businesses understood that it took training and organization to install, maintain, and program their computers, but they started losing sight of the complexity involved in good systems design and analysis when the computer started looking about the same size as their typewriter. Now phones (which are really just smaller computers) are the same size as their old walkman. Consumers can't seem to understand that computers are multi-function machines with millions of interconnecting parts (if you include the OS and applications). Assuming you had a big open building with millions of parts and subassemblies that needed setup to perform specified tasks, and most businesses would understand the need for a small army of well-trained technicians to do the setups and maintenance.
So, in my area, a lot of small businesses have sprung up offering computer maintenance for $35/hr. These businesses are capable of handling about 70% of all the normal maintenance on a computer, but then, so is anyone who can read a manual or call tech support. Then they get assigned a project over their heads, take the customer's money until it is very obvious that they can't do the job, and then walk away. The customer calls me and gets pissed off because I charge $110/hr instead of $35/hr and successfully clean up the mess left by the other "geek". And when the next computer problems show up do they call a competent tech? No, they go right back to calling some half-trained moron who only charges $35/hr. Business is full of slow learners.
The bottom line is that many of the businesses out there are not designing their business processes, they are acquiring "business technology" by "jumping to solutions" without a plan. The "business-in-a-box" approach has never worked right. Most small businesses fail within the first five years, not becasuse their tools aren't adequate, but because their business decisions are inadequate. The technology decisions are just a part of the same lack of business smarts.
Functional languages, particularly LISP and Haskell, have one advantage that I like: I can design programs that do ONLY what I want them to do. On my last couple projects my main problem was covering all wanted program behaviors, because if I left it out the program simply died elegantly and told me it couldn't do what I asked. (These are control programs, not learning programs.)
Of course, this has resulted in my finding a myriad of bugs shipped with manufacturer's devices. I have had to replace PROMS and drivers that were not well designed. The accumulated error count from one component to the next is truly scary! It is no wonder that control software (Utilities, SCADA, sensors, etc.) is such a good target for destructive hacking.
Just recently I've been trying to do more work with robot arms and vision (as opposed to movement and balance), and I'm looking for good projects to copy and learn from. This is pretty cool.
Anybody remember a link to a project for a robot-arm shooter that was mentioned on/. a few years ago? Anyone have any links to some other good projects? Anyone have any good links to robotic cranes with arms?
Not to belittle your choices, but this is a VERY complicated subject. My favorite introductions to game theory are, "The Compleat Strategyst" by Williams, and, "Strategy in Poker, Business and War" by McDonald. These are not trivial books, but they are easy reads into the uses of Game Theory.
After that, you get into some Math. Read anything you can on Probability and Risk; know your Statistics and Calculus. Much of what you are looking for will be found under the subject "Decision Theory."
I say study Economics because this is where political and economic scientific thought is making the greatest gains at this time. Game theory has a lot to do with "payoff" and Economics is a fertile field for studying payoffs. (So is Political Science, and there some good laboratories in, say, Afghanistan, Mexico and Chicago. But that's a slightly different, pragmatic, field of study.)
My favorite definition of "politics" is: "The behavior of vying for scarce rewards." This is almost exactly a definition for Economics. At one time Economics was thought to be a sub-level of politics; it now seems the opposite is true.
Hayak pretty much proved that economic behavior cannot be quantified because of the complexity. What is useful is deriving principles of actions under a variety of conditions to provide maximum payoffs, for the most people, under the widest variety of conditions. (An alternative course is to try to derive the largest payoffs for the fewest people under specific conditions.) AutoDesk used to have an Artificial Life laboratory that you could manipulate to learn about Genetic Algorithms and other AI behavior. Context-dependent AI can be learned through developing Neural Nets. Some of the guys I've talked to at Carnegie Mellon in the Quantitative Economics studies have warring economic artificial hybrid GA/Neural Nets, and the observations are pretty interesting.
If it was simply a matter of rational decision making, optimum economic strategies could probably be described and tested in a much smaller AI field. However, politics and economics are burdened with mis-perceptions, human values, and stubborn beliefs. This is a big field, and you should be able to enjoy it as a hobby for the rest of your life without running into a limit of learning.
Yeah, you got it right the first time. Despite the popularity of the idea that a million monkeys could randomly create the works of Shakespeare, It would take trillions of years for the monkeys to create the first few paragraphs. This is an obvious time-waster.
The so-called "invention" on the back of the napkin shouldn't be worth the paper it's drawn on. (An exception might be a circuit drawn with conductive ink and pasted components.) It should be the first working model that gets evaluated for a patent. Ideas should not be patent-worthy.
I believe the problem is that the computer input process doesn't suport efficient, fast input anymore. There is some type of computer psychosis that works against getting any work done. The whole, "type-a-little, stop, use-the-mouse, type-a-little" cycle is, IMO, detrimental to the whole thinking/producing process. The most productive programmers I know are the ones that use emacs or vi the most efficiently and have good typing skills. You can almost see the color changes in their faces when their skills are frustrated by some klutzy IDE. I suspect that the mental skills required to use things like Visual Studio and Eclipse are much different from the skills needed to think through and communicate thoughtful programming.
And that, to me, is the difference. Programming, for example, is a creative process using a high degree of problem-solving. The process of communicating this creativity to the system should not get in the way of purposeful thinking.
As for smartphones and tablets, etc., I have developed a rudimentary Morse code tab for my Windows 7 Tablet (Fujitsu convertible) that allows me to enter text at about 40 wpm through 4 "hot spots" on my touch screen. I just hate the gesture/ thumbpad interface provided by some systems. When it is done it should convert to a Windows 7 smartphone. I can teach Morse code to most people in less than 30 minutes.
FYI:
I learned to type in the early 60's on manual typewriters. My highest speed was around 90+ wpm achieved on an IBM Selectric that the Army had in our data center in Alaska. (Anybody remember that the input device on the IBM System 360 was a Selectric?) I had keypunching skills, teletype skills and tape-punching skills which were all relevant to computer programming and administration over the years. Commercial and military Morse code was transmitted by tape transport at a steady 60 wpm and if the printer was down I could listen and copy on the typewriter.
My skills have dropped drastically due, in the most part, to lack of drill. (I also have a little chronic numbness in my pinky and ring fingers on my left hand.
Also, I started turning off the screen when I was writing articles and stories to discourage my tendency to interrupt the flow of writing by immediately editing my typos and grammar. (I went from producing less than 1000 words per hour to producing about 4000 words per hour on first drafts.) Unfortunately, I developed a bad habit of looking at the keyboard which further deteriorated my touch-typing skills. Six months ago I was typing at an effective rate of 25wpm on my desktop, and less on lmy laptop. Through practice, I'm back up to about 70+wpm.
The keyboard seems to make a difference: I switched back to an IBM PC AT keyboard. It is heavier than hell, has spring-loaded keys and makes quite a bit of noise, but it feels like the old selectric keyboard and immediately increased my typing speed. I'm about to replace it with a Unicomp version that has the extra 2 function keys http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html . I've also heard good things about the Cherry keyboards.
The problem for customers seems to be deciding how they are going to maintain their websites. SiteBuilder really sucks; It is hard to use, lack features and design, and only has limited options. Customers I've talked to seem to resent not having the choice of protocols and methods. Theoretically, SiteBuilder will allow you to upload your own pictures and graphics into your selected templates, but it works better in theory than in practice.
Until now, a person with a limited website account could still design locally and upload using ftp. I can see the rationale for disabling anonymous ftp, but not the capability to use ftp to maintain your own website.
The 98% part is a rounding of a number of surveys. There is a book, "Spin-free Economics," by Nariman Baravesh that compares about 39 of the most common economic principles.
The "overhead" part comes from logically thinking through the consequences of disrupting the free market. Numerous examples are everywhere discussion of free markets exist. There is an economic presumption that "everything has a cost." In this case we are mostly concerned with "opportunity cost." If the free market is the most efficient way to allocate goods and services, then any other way must be less efficient and the cost is, in most cases, opportunity cost.
Government is not productive; it is a burden on an economic system. Since government doesn't produce anything marketable, it must take its money away from productive markets. This is only the first cost; the lost opportunity of the economic system to produce something.
When government redistributes money to production of goods and services that are not wanted and needed by the economic system, the difference in value between what the money would have produced in the free market and what was actually produced represents the opportunity cost. Even though the money gets put back into the economy, there is a loss due to the time value of money.
I am not saying that bad decision-making won't produce economic casualties. The rejection of poorly-conceived goods and services, or obsolete goods and services is part of the free market system. Many times we see government bolstering these goods and services and they don't die the quick death they were supposed to. They remain a burden on society instead of giving way to more desirable goods.
I would like to recommend two books by Thomas Sowell: "Basic Economics" and "Advanced Economics." Both are highly readable, and neither of them are filled with academic jargon.
We at the Society for Extreme Alarmism take this opportunity to warn you of the impending end of the world! In only 12,000 years (Earth years, that is) the matter being sucked away from the blue star will cause it to explode. The same universal force that causes dropped toast to land butter-side-down will determine that this explosion will hurl the black hole on a direct collision course with Earth at about half the speed of light. Elementary mathematics proves that in only 24,000 years, then, a force more disruptive than Obamanomics will destroy the Earth!
Yeah, and when the government creates inches, it means cramming more "inches" onto a given piece of lumber. Now the so-called "length" of the piece is, say, "36 inches" instead of "24 inches" and it still only barely fits the space you need it for.
You hit on an important point: Creating other goods and services that use inches would be analogous to increasing productivity in the economy is exactly how it should work in order for the inches/money to remain stable.
Debt occurs when people are trying to use the inches/money for two different things. Banks don't create debt, they create opportunities to buy based on your ability to pay. The debt is created by trying to buy more goods and services than you have money to pay for NOW.
Creating goods and services requires money to buy the goods and services needed to create more goods and services. If you increase the money supply, you just have more money chasing the current amount of goods and services needed to create more goods and services. The price of those goods and services needed to create more goods and services goes up to soak up the excess money. (Vicious cycle.) Furthermore, the government doesn't produce anything, and so in order for it to spend it must take money away from the economy concerned with producing goods and services, which reduces the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services.
One more thing: About 98% of all Economists agree that free markets are the best way to allocate goods and services. When the government interferes with free markets by re-distributing money or injecting money into specific markets, there is an "overhead" of lost efficiency that also reduces the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services.
No, in today's world, injecting ANY money is inflationary. No one would be fooled by the "smoke and mirrors" of false creation of wealth, even if it wasn't supposedly circulating. What you concluded may have been a better description when "currency" and "money" were essentially the same thing, but certainly doesn't hold true today.
Spending to maintain political stability is a deferment plan. Eventually it won't work anymore. Look at what happened in Spain.
I basically agree that increasing the money supply will not affect the value of money if a proportionate INCREASE in goods and services occurs. However, just injecting money into the economy does not necessarily increase the amount of goods and services. After the first pass or two, you end up with more money chasing the current volume of goods and services.
Unfortunately, I agree that it is most probable that in the forseeable future, government will use a dual tactic of inflation and taxes to "fix the math" on our financial problems.
Yeah, the reality is that with the amount of debt we currently have, and with the huge amount of un-funded liabilities we've incurred, the government will probably use a combination of taxes and inflation to "fix" the math. However, the problem is not the amount of taxes and it is not the Demopublicans or the Republicrats: Laying blame will not help.
The issue is that the probability of the USA redeeming its debt in a timely manner has been lowered by spending beyond our means.
So many people on this list believe in probability, why is it so hard for them to understand that risk is mathematics, not politics.
But start with money. What is money? Money is a measurement standard, used to measure whether people who are trading goods and services get fair value for their trades. Money can ONLY be spent or invested. (Currency, however, can be destroyed by melting or burning, etc..)
The amount of money has to be stable against the amount of goods and services, or no one will trust it. The risk comes in two forms: First, people hold money in the hopes that they will be able to trade it back for a fair amount of goods and services. Since the US Government doesn't have any money of its own, it has to take away money that would otherwise be spent in producing and trading goods and services. If the government takes too much money, it diminishes the ability of the country to provide enough goods and services to trade with the people and countries holding the measurement. Ooops, now there's too much money and the prices rise to suck up the excess; the measurement is skewed. Big risk, puts downward pressure on the credit rating.
Second, Debt: Now the government has borrowed against the future productivity of the nation, but it may have over-borrowed against the ability to trade enough goods and services in a timely manner to acquire enough money to pay the debt in a timely manner. The longer the money is owed, the higher the interest paid for a longer period of time. And the risk is that an irresponsible government, instead of keeping the money supply stable in relation to the amount of goods and services provided, may create/print money instead. The money is worth less and can buy fewer goods and services when the debt is finally paid. Again, fair measurement is compromised, and the more debt, the higher the risk of this happening. The higher risk, the more pressure on the credit rating.
I've been asked to explain this before, so let me try: Suppose the government issued a finite amount of inches and you had to use them all somewhere. Today, if you buy a piece of lumber 24 inches long it will fit into the space you want exactly. But if the government issued more inches, and you had to use them up, then vendors would end cramming more inches into the same size of lumber. Now, if you buy a piece of lumber "24 inches" long, it might be too short to fit into that space. Or, if you do buy a piece long enough to fit into that space, you will end up with more inches. We depend on the measurement to be stable. We also depend on the lumberyard to be able to provide enough wood of the right type to accommodate our project. If the lumberyard messes with the measurement or the amount of lumber it can promise, then it becomes undependable and we start looking for other sources. Either way, the ability of the lumberyard to provide what we need is a probability, and the higher the probability the better the choice. The lower the probability, the more risky the choice.
Although a lot of posters pointed out that creating platinum coins and printing money are the same, and that printing money leads to inflation, no one has explained why. Here is the basic equation:
all the money __________________ --------> 1 all goods and services
Read this as "All the money divided by all the goods and services tends to equal 1" This is obviously a dynamic; after a few cycles through the economy the prices stabilize to where the prices for all the goods and services pretty much sucks up all the money.
An example, simplified in true Economist fashion, would be the "dollar/apple" model". If all the money equals 1 dollar, and all the goods and services are 5 apples, the price of each apple will stabilize at $.20. If you increase the money to $2, the price of apples will stabilize at $.40. Or, if you increase the availability of goods and services to 10 apples, the price of each apple will stabilize at $.10. The whole economic picture is a lot more complex, but this clearly illustrates the underlying principle. The USA could devalue the currency by creating more money, and it will probably happen one way or another. This is a big worry for China and other countries that carry large reserves of American dollars or American debt.
Seigniorage also describes the fee, including profit, that governments paid to banks to mint coins or issue money based on precious metals. The difference is that money fully backed by precious metals tends to be pretty stable over time. Up until about 20 years ago an ounce of gold would buy pretty much what an ounce of gold would buy 150 years ago. An ounce of gold in 1860 would get you a very good suit, and an ounce of gold in 1990 would still get you a pretty good suit (say, a Hickey Freeman semi-custom at Marshall Fields.) Now an ounce of gold would buy you TWO pretty good suits, but the reason is more likely that the availability of good suits is twice what it was in 1990 (Which corresponds to the second illustration in the "dollar/apple" model). One reason extreme Libertarians push for money backed 100% by precious metals is that such money cannot inflate or devalue if the given quantity of the precious metal is relatively constant. (Paul Krugman's Nobel-prize winning model was based on metals-based currencies WITHOUT 100% backing, and showed how a devalued currency could cause the reserves of the issuing country to be drained.)
LOL..but you have a point: A lot of people will overlook the fact that the reporter is "interpreting" the facts, or "judging the facts" instead of "reporting the facts"as they really occurred. By loading the report, the reporter tries to influence the readers into accepting a negative viewpoint without thinking. (It works both ways: How many complaints have we heard from the Right that the "liberal news media" slants their content?..and the same complaints in earlier posts about Fox News?)
Well, none of the Ten Commandments says, "Thou shalt not Lie." However, (disclaimer: I was raised Catholic) this is a clear case of "bearing false witness."
But now that I think about it; the presumption that the reporter is deliberately slanting the news, without evidence to support it, is also a case of "bearing false witness."
"Ooooh.. Logic is so HARD! Why don't we all just vote Democrat and rest our brains?"
Yeah, I think that e-books and digital PDF's are a good thing. I can see the day when a quality text on a technical subject will be priced at $3 -$4 and still make enough to cover editing and graphics, and still provide a good profit for the author. Everyone wins.
Of course, I want my e-reader to allow me to highlight topical sentences, add notes to my text, create combination outlines and notes, fill in Toulmin tables, create repositories of practice exercises, do intelligent review planning and scoring, move with my fingers when I'm using my Evelyn Wood reading methods, and create mind maps (possibly in combination with my outlines like an old Mac program I had a few years back).
Yeah, I know you're being snide, but I had a pretty good Jesuit education, and I could demonstrate competency in Logic to any of them. Logic is not my field, nor is Mathematics (anymore), so I would expect that academics currently involved would have something useful to share with me.
I got a little amusement out of your comment though I suspect you didn't really intend the implication.
If you read the article, the presupposition of underlying future uses is that they will be able to logically predict and then prevent mishaps. I would explain Godel's theorem to a lay person by saying that logical analysis is layered, and above each layer is another layer that analyzes the underlying propositions, predicates and so forth differently. It is therefore impossible to accurately predict all the results just by using logic.
The article is, of course, dumb'ed down for public consumption, and the chain of events implied is much more complicated. The process itself may be very useful, but it is never finished because randomness and error will bring unpredictability.
If you are interested in a more fun way to learn about the logical layers, I suggest, "The Lady or the Tiger" by Raymond Smullyan. I love his books, and this one touches on Godel's Theorem in a very approachable way.
I'm a highly trained computer professional. Geeks bite the heads off chickens in carnivals. (OK, there was that one time back in my pot-smoking days I stayed at the computer so long I got REALLY hungry, but that was an extreme circumstance and the chicken was laughing at me...)
No, and the changes don't always make sense. And if you rely on your OS to provide a platform for doing actual work, then changes in the OS can sometimes bring surprises or failures that end up using lots of administrative time that could be better applied to useful projects.
In my case, I had a problem with XWindows and gdm not working properly. Actually learning all the new stuff about xorg and gdm is a noble goal, but not if you are trying to finish something else first. XWindows has made so many changes since I last had to program to it (about 15 years) that I rejected any thoughts of making it my new hobby, and de-installed Ubuntu for Debian.
Luckily, I keep my/home and/opt directories on separate partitions, so installing Debian did not require me to lose much time or any work.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just talking about this to a friend of mine yesterday. I've been a "customer engineer" for most of the last 47 years. Back in the age of mainframes and minicomputers businesses understood that it took training and organization to install, maintain, and program their computers, but they started losing sight of the complexity involved in good systems design and analysis when the computer started looking about the same size as their typewriter. Now phones (which are really just smaller computers) are the same size as their old walkman. Consumers can't seem to understand that computers are multi-function machines with millions of interconnecting parts (if you include the OS and applications). Assuming you had a big open building with millions of parts and subassemblies that needed setup to perform specified tasks, and most businesses would understand the need for a small army of well-trained technicians to do the setups and maintenance.
So, in my area, a lot of small businesses have sprung up offering computer maintenance for $35/hr. These businesses are capable of handling about 70% of all the normal maintenance on a computer, but then, so is anyone who can read a manual or call tech support. Then they get assigned a project over their heads, take the customer's money until it is very obvious that they can't do the job, and then walk away. The customer calls me and gets pissed off because I charge $110/hr instead of $35/hr and successfully clean up the mess left by the other "geek". And when the next computer problems show up do they call a competent tech? No, they go right back to calling some half-trained moron who only charges $35/hr. Business is full of slow learners.
The bottom line is that many of the businesses out there are not designing their business processes, they are acquiring "business technology" by "jumping to solutions" without a plan. The "business-in-a-box" approach has never worked right. Most small businesses fail within the first five years, not becasuse their tools aren't adequate, but because their business decisions are inadequate. The technology decisions are just a part of the same lack of business smarts.
Functional languages, particularly LISP and Haskell, have one advantage that I like: I can design programs that do ONLY what I want them to do. On my last couple projects my main problem was covering all wanted program behaviors, because if I left it out the program simply died elegantly and told me it couldn't do what I asked. (These are control programs, not learning programs.)
Of course, this has resulted in my finding a myriad of bugs shipped with manufacturer's devices. I have had to replace PROMS and drivers that were not well designed. The accumulated error count from one component to the next is truly scary! It is no wonder that control software (Utilities, SCADA, sensors, etc.) is such a good target for destructive hacking.
Sound control! Good on ya!
Just recently I've been trying to do more work with robot arms and vision (as opposed to movement and balance), and I'm looking for good projects to copy and learn from. This is pretty cool.
Anybody remember a link to a project for a robot-arm shooter that was mentioned on /. a few years ago?
Anyone have any links to some other good projects?
Anyone have any good links to robotic cranes with arms?
Thanks.
Not to belittle your choices, but this is a VERY complicated subject. My favorite introductions to game theory are, "The Compleat Strategyst" by Williams, and, "Strategy in Poker, Business and War" by McDonald. These are not trivial books, but they are easy reads into the uses of Game Theory.
After that, you get into some Math. Read anything you can on Probability and Risk; know your Statistics and Calculus. Much of what you are looking for will be found under the subject "Decision Theory."
I say study Economics because this is where political and economic scientific thought is making the greatest gains at this time. Game theory has a lot to do with "payoff" and Economics is a fertile field for studying payoffs. (So is Political Science, and there some good laboratories in, say, Afghanistan, Mexico and Chicago. But that's a slightly different, pragmatic, field of study.)
My favorite definition of "politics" is: "The behavior of vying for scarce rewards." This is almost exactly a definition for Economics. At one time Economics was thought to be a sub-level of politics; it now seems the opposite is true.
Hayak pretty much proved that economic behavior cannot be quantified because of the complexity. What is useful is deriving principles of actions under a variety of conditions to provide maximum payoffs, for the most people, under the widest variety of conditions. (An alternative course is to try to derive the largest payoffs for the fewest people under specific conditions.) AutoDesk used to have an Artificial Life laboratory that you could manipulate to learn about Genetic Algorithms and other AI behavior. Context-dependent AI can be learned through developing Neural Nets. Some of the guys I've talked to at Carnegie Mellon in the Quantitative Economics studies have warring economic artificial hybrid GA/Neural Nets, and the observations are pretty interesting.
If it was simply a matter of rational decision making, optimum economic strategies could probably be described and tested in a much smaller AI field. However, politics and economics are burdened with mis-perceptions, human values, and stubborn beliefs. This is a big field, and you should be able to enjoy it as a hobby for the rest of your life without running into a limit of learning.
Yeah, you got it right the first time. Despite the popularity of the idea that a million monkeys could randomly create the works of Shakespeare, It would take trillions of years for the monkeys to create the first few paragraphs. This is an obvious time-waster.
The so-called "invention" on the back of the napkin shouldn't be worth the paper it's drawn on. (An exception might be a circuit drawn with conductive ink and pasted components.) It should be the first working model that gets evaluated for a patent. Ideas should not be patent-worthy.
I believe the problem is that the computer input process doesn't suport efficient, fast input anymore. There is some type of computer psychosis that works against getting any work done. The whole, "type-a-little, stop, use-the-mouse, type-a-little" cycle is, IMO, detrimental to the whole thinking/producing process. The most productive programmers I know are the ones that use emacs or vi the most efficiently and have good typing skills. You can almost see the color changes in their faces when their skills are frustrated by some klutzy IDE. I suspect that the mental skills required to use things like Visual Studio and Eclipse are much different from the skills needed to think through and communicate thoughtful programming.
And that, to me, is the difference. Programming, for example, is a creative process using a high degree of problem-solving. The process of communicating this creativity to the system should not get in the way of purposeful thinking.
As for smartphones and tablets, etc., I have developed a rudimentary Morse code tab for my Windows 7 Tablet (Fujitsu convertible) that allows me to enter text at about 40 wpm through 4 "hot spots" on my touch screen. I just hate the gesture/ thumbpad interface provided by some systems. When it is done it should convert to a Windows 7 smartphone. I can teach Morse code to most people in less than 30 minutes.
FYI:
I learned to type in the early 60's on manual typewriters. My highest speed was around 90+ wpm achieved on an IBM Selectric that the Army had in our data center in Alaska. (Anybody remember that the input device on the IBM System 360 was a Selectric?) I had keypunching skills, teletype skills and tape-punching skills which were all relevant to computer programming and administration over the years. Commercial and military Morse code was transmitted by tape transport at a steady 60 wpm and if the printer was down I could listen and copy on the typewriter.
My skills have dropped drastically due, in the most part, to lack of drill. (I also have a little chronic numbness in my pinky and ring fingers on my left hand.
Also, I started turning off the screen when I was writing articles and stories to discourage my tendency to interrupt the flow of writing by immediately editing my typos and grammar. (I went from producing less than 1000 words per hour to producing about 4000 words per hour on first drafts.) Unfortunately, I developed a bad habit of looking at the keyboard which further deteriorated my touch-typing skills. Six months ago I was typing at an effective rate of 25wpm on my desktop, and less on lmy laptop. Through practice, I'm back up to about 70+wpm.
The keyboard seems to make a difference: I switched back to an IBM PC AT keyboard. It is heavier than hell, has spring-loaded keys and makes quite a bit of noise, but it feels like the old selectric keyboard and immediately increased my typing speed. I'm about to replace it with a Unicomp version that has the extra 2 function keys http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html . I've also heard good things about the Cherry keyboards.
The problem for customers seems to be deciding how they are going to maintain their websites. SiteBuilder really sucks; It is hard to use, lack features and design, and only has limited options. Customers I've talked to seem to resent not having the choice of protocols and methods. Theoretically, SiteBuilder will allow you to upload your own pictures and graphics into your selected templates, but it works better in theory than in practice.
Until now, a person with a limited website account could still design locally and upload using ftp. I can see the rationale for disabling anonymous ftp, but not the capability to use ftp to maintain your own website.
The 98% part is a rounding of a number of surveys. There is a book, "Spin-free Economics," by Nariman Baravesh that compares about 39 of the most common economic principles.
The "overhead" part comes from logically thinking through the consequences of disrupting the free market. Numerous examples are everywhere discussion of free markets exist. There is an economic presumption that "everything has a cost." In this case we are mostly concerned with "opportunity cost." If the free market is the most efficient way to allocate goods and services, then any other way must be less efficient and the cost is, in most cases, opportunity cost.
Government is not productive; it is a burden on an economic system. Since government doesn't produce anything marketable, it must take its money away from productive markets. This is only the first cost; the lost opportunity of the economic system to produce something.
When government redistributes money to production of goods and services that are not wanted and needed by the economic system, the difference in value between what the money would have produced in the free market and what was actually produced represents the opportunity cost. Even though the money gets put back into the economy, there is a loss due to the time value of money.
I am not saying that bad decision-making won't produce economic casualties. The rejection of poorly-conceived goods and services, or obsolete goods and services is part of the free market system. Many times we see government bolstering these goods and services and they don't die the quick death they were supposed to. They remain a burden on society instead of giving way to more desirable goods.
I would like to recommend two books by Thomas Sowell: "Basic Economics" and "Advanced Economics." Both are highly readable, and neither of them are filled with academic jargon.
We at the Society for Extreme Alarmism take this opportunity to warn you of the impending end of the world! In only 12,000 years (Earth years, that is) the matter being sucked away from the blue star will cause it to explode. The same universal force that causes dropped toast to land butter-side-down will determine that this explosion will hurl the black hole on a direct collision course with Earth at about half the speed of light. Elementary mathematics proves that in only 24,000 years, then, a force more disruptive than Obamanomics will destroy the Earth!
Repent Now!
Yeah, and when the government creates inches, it means cramming more "inches" onto a given piece of lumber. Now the so-called "length" of the piece is, say, "36 inches" instead of "24 inches" and it still only barely fits the space you need it for.
Nicely said. I wish I had been this clear.
You hit on an important point: Creating other goods and services that use inches would be analogous to increasing productivity in the economy is exactly how it should work in order for the inches/money to remain stable.
Debt occurs when people are trying to use the inches/money for two different things. Banks don't create debt, they create opportunities to buy based on your ability to pay. The debt is created by trying to buy more goods and services than you have money to pay for NOW.
Creating goods and services requires money to buy the goods and services needed to create more goods and services. If you increase the money supply, you just have more money chasing the current amount of goods and services needed to create more goods and services. The price of those goods and services needed to create more goods and services goes up to soak up the excess money. (Vicious cycle.) Furthermore, the government doesn't produce anything, and so in order for it to spend it must take money away from the economy concerned with producing goods and services, which reduces the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services.
One more thing: About 98% of all Economists agree that free markets are the best way to allocate goods and services. When the government interferes with free markets by re-distributing money or injecting money into specific markets, there is an "overhead" of lost efficiency that also reduces the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services.
No, in today's world, injecting ANY money is inflationary. No one would be fooled by the "smoke and mirrors" of false creation of wealth, even if it wasn't supposedly circulating. What you concluded may have been a better description when "currency" and "money" were essentially the same thing, but certainly doesn't hold true today.
Spending to maintain political stability is a deferment plan. Eventually it won't work anymore. Look at what happened in Spain.
I basically agree that increasing the money supply will not affect the value of money if a proportionate INCREASE in goods and services occurs. However, just injecting money into the economy does not necessarily increase the amount of goods and services. After the first pass or two, you end up with more money chasing the current volume of goods and services.
Unfortunately, I agree that it is most probable that in the forseeable future, government will use a dual tactic of inflation and taxes to "fix the math" on our financial problems.
Yeah, the reality is that with the amount of debt we currently have, and with the huge amount of un-funded liabilities we've incurred, the government will probably use a combination of taxes and inflation to "fix" the math. However, the problem is not the amount of taxes and it is not the Demopublicans or the Republicrats: Laying blame will not help.
The issue is that the probability of the USA redeeming its debt in a timely manner has been lowered by spending beyond our means.
So many people on this list believe in probability, why is it so hard for them to understand that risk is mathematics, not politics.
But start with money. What is money? Money is a measurement standard, used to measure whether people who are trading goods and services get fair value for their trades. Money can ONLY be spent or invested. (Currency, however, can be destroyed by melting or burning, etc..)
The amount of money has to be stable against the amount of goods and services, or no one will trust it. The risk comes in two forms: First, people hold money in the hopes that they will be able to trade it back for a fair amount of goods and services. Since the US Government doesn't have any money of its own, it has to take away money that would otherwise be spent in producing and trading goods and services. If the government takes too much money, it diminishes the ability of the country to provide enough goods and services to trade with the people and countries holding the measurement. Ooops, now there's too much money and the prices rise to suck up the excess; the measurement is skewed. Big risk, puts downward pressure on the credit rating.
Second, Debt: Now the government has borrowed against the future productivity of the nation, but it may have over-borrowed against the ability to trade enough goods and services in a timely manner to acquire enough money to pay the debt in a timely manner. The longer the money is owed, the higher the interest paid for a longer period of time. And the risk is that an irresponsible government, instead of keeping the money supply stable in relation to the amount of goods and services provided, may create/print money instead. The money is worth less and can buy fewer goods and services when the debt is finally paid. Again, fair measurement is compromised, and the more debt, the higher the risk of this happening. The higher risk, the more pressure on the credit rating.
I've been asked to explain this before, so let me try: Suppose the government issued a finite amount of inches and you had to use them all somewhere. Today, if you buy a piece of lumber 24 inches long it will fit into the space you want exactly. But if the government issued more inches, and you had to use them up, then vendors would end cramming more inches into the same size of lumber. Now, if you buy a piece of lumber "24 inches" long, it might be too short to fit into that space. Or, if you do buy a piece long enough to fit into that space, you will end up with more inches. We depend on the measurement to be stable. We also depend on the lumberyard to be able to provide enough wood of the right type to accommodate our project. If the lumberyard messes with the measurement or the amount of lumber it can promise, then it becomes undependable and we start looking for other sources. Either way, the ability of the lumberyard to provide what we need is a probability, and the higher the probability the better the choice. The lower the probability, the more risky the choice.
Although a lot of posters pointed out that creating platinum coins and printing money are the same, and that printing money leads to inflation, no one has explained why. Here is the basic equation:
all the money
__________________ --------> 1
all goods and services
Read this as "All the money divided by all the goods and services tends to equal 1" This is obviously a dynamic; after a few cycles through the economy the prices stabilize to where the prices for all the goods and services pretty much sucks up all the money.
An example, simplified in true Economist fashion, would be the "dollar/apple" model". If all the money equals 1 dollar, and all the goods and services are 5 apples, the price of each apple will stabilize at $.20. If you increase the money to $2, the price of apples will stabilize at $.40. Or, if you increase the availability of goods and services to 10 apples, the price of each apple will stabilize at $.10. The whole economic picture is a lot more complex, but this clearly illustrates the underlying principle. The USA could devalue the currency by creating more money, and it will probably happen one way or another. This is a big worry for China and other countries that carry large reserves of American dollars or American debt.
Seigniorage also describes the fee, including profit, that governments paid to banks to mint coins or issue money based on precious metals. The difference is that money fully backed by precious metals tends to be pretty stable over time. Up until about 20 years ago an ounce of gold would buy pretty much what an ounce of gold would buy 150 years ago. An ounce of gold in 1860 would get you a very good suit, and an ounce of gold in 1990 would still get you a pretty good suit (say, a Hickey Freeman semi-custom at Marshall Fields.) Now an ounce of gold would buy you TWO pretty good suits, but the reason is more likely that the availability of good suits is twice what it was in 1990 (Which corresponds to the second illustration in the "dollar/apple" model). One reason extreme Libertarians push for money backed 100% by precious metals is that such money cannot inflate or devalue if the given quantity of the precious metal is relatively constant. (Paul Krugman's Nobel-prize winning model was based on metals-based currencies WITHOUT 100% backing, and showed how a devalued currency could cause the reserves of the issuing country to be drained.)
LOL..but you have a point: A lot of people will overlook the fact that the reporter is "interpreting" the facts, or "judging the facts" instead of "reporting the facts"as they really occurred. By loading the report, the reporter tries to influence the readers into accepting a negative viewpoint without thinking. (It works both ways: How many complaints have we heard from the Right that the "liberal news media" slants their content? ..and the same complaints in earlier posts about Fox News?)
Well, none of the Ten Commandments says, "Thou shalt not Lie." However, (disclaimer: I was raised Catholic) this is a clear case of "bearing false witness."
But now that I think about it; the presumption that the reporter is deliberately slanting the news, without evidence to support it, is also a case of "bearing false witness."
"Ooooh.. Logic is so HARD! Why don't we all just vote Democrat and rest our brains?"
Just the obligatory link to the Moller Skycar... http://www.moller.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=57
Yeah, I think that e-books and digital PDF's are a good thing. I can see the day when a quality text on a technical subject will be priced at $3 -$4 and still make enough to cover editing and graphics, and still provide a good profit for the author. Everyone wins.
Of course, I want my e-reader to allow me to highlight topical sentences, add notes to my text, create combination outlines and notes, fill in Toulmin tables, create repositories of practice exercises, do intelligent review planning and scoring, move with my fingers when I'm using my Evelyn Wood reading methods, and create mind maps (possibly in combination with my outlines like an old Mac program I had a few years back).
Yeah, I know you're being snide, but I had a pretty good Jesuit education, and I could demonstrate competency in Logic to any of them. Logic is not my field, nor is Mathematics (anymore), so I would expect that academics currently involved would have something useful to share with me.
I got a little amusement out of your comment though I suspect you didn't really intend the implication.
If you read the article, the presupposition of underlying future uses is that they will be able to logically predict and then prevent mishaps. I would explain Godel's theorem to a lay person by saying that logical analysis is layered, and above each layer is another layer that analyzes the underlying propositions, predicates and so forth differently. It is therefore impossible to accurately predict all the results just by using logic.
The article is, of course, dumb'ed down for public consumption, and the chain of events implied is much more complicated. The process itself may be very useful, but it is never finished because randomness and error will bring unpredictability.
If you are interested in a more fun way to learn about the logical layers, I suggest, "The Lady or the Tiger" by Raymond Smullyan. I love his books, and this one touches on Godel's Theorem in a very approachable way.
I'm a highly trained computer professional. Geeks bite the heads off chickens in carnivals. (OK, there was that one time back in my pot-smoking days I stayed at the computer so long I got REALLY hungry, but that was an extreme circumstance and the chicken was laughing at me...)
Have them learn LISP.
No, and the changes don't always make sense. And if you rely on your OS to provide a platform for doing actual work, then changes in the OS can sometimes bring surprises or failures that end up using lots of administrative time that could be better applied to useful projects.
In my case, I had a problem with XWindows and gdm not working properly. Actually learning all the new stuff about xorg and gdm is a noble goal, but not if you are trying to finish something else first. XWindows has made so many changes since I last had to program to it (about 15 years) that I rejected any thoughts of making it my new hobby, and de-installed Ubuntu for Debian.
Luckily, I keep my /home and /opt directories on separate partitions, so installing Debian did not require me to lose much time or any work.