you already pay for ambulance service(about $120 if you use an ambulance service in my area) and police protection can easily be had, they are called private security agencies. in fact, India does it on a regular basis. Fire protection does not have a private solution because there is no market demand for them. Of course, I didn't mention any of these examples in my previous post.
And I take it your private school jab was going to try and make me compare the approximately 7 thousand dollars the US on average pays per student to an upper class, 30 k per year private school? that would be assinine. I could go to private school for under 3 thousand per semester in a local private school. It isn't fancy, but neither is the public school I came up in. Guess what? they do exist and they are cheap. It isn't that hard to do and they are getting more popular which can only make them cheaper.
I'm not arguing that any of this is desirable, but it is all feasible. Do you have any numbers at all to refute this? Or did you feel you could just get away with some examples you pull out of your ass?
Libertarians base a vast majority of their argument around the idea of private property/personal space/privacy. In the end, their entire argument usually rests on the assumptions known as the Coase Thm. which states that efficent market outcomes are always possible if very definitive property rights are assigned. Unfortunately, most libertarians seem to forget that Coase required several things to be true about markets for his Thm. to hold and therefore, when those things can be shown as false, it is guaranteed that an inefficient outcome will occur and therefore, no more proof is required to request govt. intervention in such an area.
Realize that one of Coase's major points was that negotiating costs were insignificantly small so as to not alter outcomes(i.e. not what we have today).
Now of course, I am talking about modern Libertarian thought. I am making no reference to some of the old lines of thinking of how govt. intervention lowers dignity of all people(no matter where they stand in a govt policy) and therefore, detracts from the well being of society. This is a straight forward economics argument against almost all Libertarian policies because they cannot lead to an efficient outcome.
Now that it isn't a straw man, go on ahead and begin.
it seems, the entire argument is about you making up complete BS associative images. Yes, when I hear Nazi I think of millions of Jews slaughtered in horrific ways, starvation, massive suffering, and so forth. If you honestly believe that Piracy brings up the image of brutal murders and pillaging of others, give some proof. It seems few people here see your argument at all. Associative images are things you can just dream up, there needs to be some reason for that image to form. I guess I just don't associate modern things with occurances of dead age.
So again, I'm not attacking anything to do with copyright infringement. I'm calling BS on your belief that there is any negative associated image with the word pirate above and beyond the image associated with copyright infringement in today's world. If you seem to know of mass encounters with another type of pirate in the modern world, feel free to use them as an example of why the debate might become emotionally charged in an uneven manner. Reading comprehension might help you a tad bit as well.
I wasn't actually arguing for a liberatarian society. I"m just saying that most liberatarians fight for the view that complete deregulation leads to better, more efficient outcomes. But then again, Liberatarians foolishly believe markets are always efficient when they are not regulated (which is about as foolish and as proven to be false of any of eco 101 assumptions).
I think liberatarian society fails because in order to enact all those little controls we think are necessarry(like child labor laws) a massive governing body is required for oversight. The simple outcome would then be that liberatarians change nothing. Those that do propose changes usually call for ending almost all public assisted programs. Does ending social security mean we will have a load of poor people? maybe. there would be a system open for abuse on wages, but would labor take those abuses or simply demand a higher wage? As soon as you start making the argument that markets are inefficient(which you do), Liberatarian view points become invalid.
What emotion? don't make things up that hardly anybody in the US has any experience with. I've never sat there and thought, "those damn pirates, I wish they would all die. They are making the high seas unsafe" because pirates of those types aren't around and haven't been a big issue in US waters for over 100 years.
What makes you think piracy is thought of as anything other than copyright infringement? Its a short way of saying something everybody understands. Unlike the Nazi's, I doubt you can 1 person you know who was effected by pirates in the 17th century sense but I guarantee you I can name at least 20 people that were effected severely by WWII. They are not comparable at all unless multiplying by 0 is considered a scale of comparison.
If your defense or attack on copyright infringement/piracy is so weak it rests on the idea of eliciting emotions of some activity that hasn't been experienced en masse in well over one hundred years, you are in real trouble.
I of course limit this to the US because in the US(and European) waters, there are almost no instances of piracy anymore. Almost all piracy that does occur takes place in the open seas around places like Asia and Africa and some Carribean countries. Even there, it is hardly a factor worth mentioning.
why. Most liberatarian principles would seem to rather say "My right to provide an unsafe work environment ends when you are no longer willing to foolishly work in such an environment and not demand much higher wages". The free market works if you protect competition in that view. There is no particular reason to believe a certain level of safety is the correct level of safety. What if I would put up with an unsafe environment for a higher salary? Why should your regulations impede that?
that is where you are wrong. most of the time, liberatarians believe in market solutions to what is currently regulated.
And there is no ex ante reason to believe one needs very large and complex government to get people to behave. Many of the things liberatarians usually don't believe in(limits are rights in privacy, public education, public health care, social security) are in fact what require a vast majority of our country's operating budget and are in no way needed to make sure "People behave themselves". The point is to get rid of all the other stuff people are more than capable of providing for themselves.
it is good to give that number some kind of description since it is a rarely quoted number. A lot of our committed debt is to things like social security and medicare. Most of those commitments were made before Bush, he just made them larger. So it isn't all his fault. just probably the last 5 or 10 trillion of it. Furthermore, those are discounted numbers(look up DCF analysis to get an idea) or else our current law would have us committed to infinite amounts of debt. It means we need 45 trillion dollars today of an infusion into the government so that we can pay all our debts in the future(assuming a risk free rate of return on the money we don't use today).
I haven't read the study you cited but I am betting these things are done the same way as other studies I have read(by CATO and a couple other think tanks).
Luckily, someone with sense can come in and change the law before that debt actually becomes real.
so all you can take from the test is the fact that the Conroe, on certain benchmarks, beats the shit out of the fastest processor AMD has, even if it is overclocked(which according to other Toms Hardware articles, does give it a performance boost in these tests).
I know that isn't saying much, but it does say that the next generation of processors coming out in the next 6 months will beat the pants off of all the other processors that are out there. This is a big deal because it is very rare that there has been thsi kind of speed jump in just a few months.
well, I can't find too much to back up what you are saying, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I am sure compatible players will be built, but I was under the impression that they would be incredibly expensive( because the two formats are not compatible).
as I can't find info either way though, I wouldn't mind a link with more info just to get up to date on it.
well, you have no understanding of the industry but so be it. I Just happen to be in the industry which is why I can say that is all. you can use non-public information to generate these reports in the sense that, I will never get a phone interview with the CFO or the head engineer of Sony but a senior analyst at Merill can.
further, there are several rules governing what you are talking about. research can come out with any report they want to. The rules state there can be no contact between your research group and your sales/trading floor except through official channels. This is to the point that at the GS building in New York the two areas on separate floors are no longer accessible by a staircase, everything goes through electronic entry to track people. also, a great deal of public information costs a lot of money and so, outside of the banks, few people ever have access to it.
I'm late, but this is stuff you should probably read up on a bit. I'm not saying illegal things don't go on, but you seem to have a misunderstanding of what the laws allow.
don't know if you have some insider knowledge but almost everyone disagrees with you that the two formats are compatible. I have never read anything to hint that they are. From all the tech articles I've read on them, they are about as different as night and day.
I guess no one told you that an analyst makes most of his money based on his bonus and being wrong here, which can cause Merill to lose millions if they bet the wrong way on the stock or debt. He knows if he is wrong by more than a small amount, his career will take a huge hit.
This guy has probably been analyzing hardware releases for the last 7 or 8 years and has a good idea as to how costs really go. You don't need to understand the underlying logic to figure out what hte costs are going to look like for a product. Undergrads in college can usually get within 30% with very limited information and very little experience. It's not hard and requires absolutely no engineering knowledge. These guys have to really learn their sector though, and I'd bet he is going to be within the 15% range. There might be a reason why the are moving the high side(maybe a short position in the bank) but such an occurance could bring the SEC down on them really hard because that is illegal (if it is ever found out about).
you should do two things: realize that these people at Merrill Lynch have some of the best connections into every market they care about and therefore, have a lot more inside information than you could dream of. These are also people who spend 14 hours a day learning how to estimate these numbers because millions of dollars are made and lost by being wrong here. Outside of those actually producing the materials, they are probably some of the most qualified people.
also, While Merill's estimates are on the high side, the lower end of estimates by people from several groups including the Microprocessor Forum still see the overall price of the box to be around 700 dollars. Not the 800 Merill claimed(they quickly retracted their 900 dollar estimate). So either way, it is an expensive box.
With the amount of cutting edge technology they are using, I woulnd't be surprised to hear a final number well over 700 dollars. Very little in the PS3 is standard and therefore, they will be paying massively for the components.
don't feel too bad. It's the same genius in Jobs that exists in several other people the engineering crowd will never think highly of. The great example is the business ability of Gates. Not much in the way of technical knowhow or insight(supposedly) but dangerous when it came to business. Others as well as Michael Eisner.
I think the big thing with Jobs was that he had some relatively small success in the 80's and then came back with something else, which is pretty rare. Few people reach the top, fall off precipitously, and still come climbing back.
The high tech field is filled with incredible technical geniuses but few of them are the names history will remember.
PS. I don't mean to take away from Apple's early success that Jobs helped orchestrate, but in the big picture it wasn't by any means the biggest or most important player. With the iPod, he has produced something that reached the pinnacle of its arena and has held it quite well for a while. The products by Apple in the 80's were beaten by competition.
the same kind of physics that most great physicists do today. Its the kind where they say "well, if I was allowed to use a book of integrals when solving the hydrogen atom, I don't see the difference with you using Mathematica today". which is true most of the time.
The skill in physics has nothing to do with cranking out the fourier integral. The problem is using algebra to manipulate hte problem so the computer or your own work gives answers that can be analyzed. my problem was that people skip the entire step of taking an integral and putting it into a form where it can be analyzed. It means that at times, some of the intuition of the problem is lost.
And of course, let me rephrase this. We aren't talking about doing things like a sawtooth or square wave by hand(which everyone could do easily) or simple integrals. I'm talking about solving a driven , damped harmonic oscillator or doing a fourier expansion of a Gaussian wave packet. of course, we could fail people that can't do this stuff by hand, but then you lose the good physicists(especially experimentalists) just to replace them with mathematicians. Its the physical intuition that is most important. I feel bad for your physics department if they put math above physics.
I was completely mixing up my history. this is why I shouldn't try responding while prepping for a vector calc test after weeks of not paying attention. I realized it this morning before even reading your response.
You're right, for some reason I mixe atilla and Hannibal up. But Atilla was known for devastating the eastern roman empire, after the split. Though to tell you, Atilla did reach rome in 418 as a prisoner and was originally traded back as part of the original peace that ended in 440.
But that depends. I think in calculus, a calculator should be banned unless it is a four function calculator. Understand how to do relatively complex derivatives and integrals by hand is very important and it is a skill few people have. I was the only student in Quantum Mechanics last semester that could do Fourier series and integrals by hand because I had developed a good basic intuition in calculus in high school.
This was very important as there are several integrals that I can do by hand that baffle all calculators and the answers I end up giving are much more intuitive (most of the time). Furthermore, several simple linear algebra problems are much easier to be by hand(though those problems are few and far between outside of physics).
But then again, knowing how to use a calculator to evaluate a great deal of mundane information (especially in statistics) is very important. There is very little insight to be gained by finding the standard deviation by hand.
I don't know about your literary skills, but your historical knowledge needs a good bit of work. Atilla the Hun Sacked rome during the second war, which was before Rome rose to greatness and (I think) ~600 years before the visigoths came around.
At least as far as several of the greatest writers in the last 2 centuries are concerned, I did get it right. For your reference (because I can't warp you back to the discussions I have had on this rule):
Just as you said, language is a form of communication. Therefore, there is a time and a place for any branch for a given language. I see the problem as having a great number of people who lack the ability to articulately communicate an idea. but I don't think that is anyway limited to this generation.
of course, this man just seems to be complaining about the new method of communication. It used to be if you wanted to write someone a letter, it would take days or weeks to arrive and therefore, you took appropriate caution in how you presented your ideas. Those days are over.
Email and blogs do not in anyway replace great and creative writing, but are an addition to the communication tools we have. Just because more people can now express themselves to a large audience through writing doesn't mean standards have dropped, it just means that anyone can particpate without having judgement first passed by an editor.
Most blogs I read are filled with mindless drivel. But I do not judge them on the same scale as a book or newspaper so I have no reason to believe those blogs are a fundamental attack on good writing skills. These people never had them and their euivalents 30 years ago just went unpublished.
Please forgive any errors in this post as I have hurt my left hand and find typing relatively difficult.
Franklin was a good example. I find it funny you cite Whitney though, who tried like hell to use his patent on the cotton gin but no court woudl enforce it until 13 years after filing, which gave competition ample time to come up with work arounds.
I think Franklin was the last inventor to public domain everything he did. Very rarely have ideas ever died with their inventor. I can think of no examples. There have always been people reverse engineering ideas just as fast as ideas spring up.
really, you should just simplify you complaints then. you hate the fact that DVD's give you more options.
There is a fundamental flaw in your logic if you put a disk in on the full screen side and hten when asked, choose wide screen and then get pissed at the player for telling you to flip the disk. you were the idiot who didn't realize what side you put it in( or forgot what you wanted to do in the first place).
DVD menus are a different beast all together. They are not supposed to be like a VCR. It's new. They are supposed to give you the flexibility to navigate around multiple options. Now it wouldnt' make much sense for me to hit play when wanting to go into the scene selection option, would it? Or hitting play to change the language settings? That would be a fundamental contradiction.
I think VCR's had a great UI for their time. But technology allowed us to have much more flexibility in the UI. Now I will admit some DVD's are done in a horrible fashion(I can never figure out with the Ghostbusters DVD which side is for widescreen and which side is for full screen), but a well made DVD is levels above a Cassette in ease of use and functionality. I think tkhe real complaint is against foolish companies that can't make a decent menu system.
wait now, I need an example of these bad menu's that you can't teach your grandmother to navigate. in every disk I have owned one of two things happen: 1) pop in disk and after previews movie starts
2) pop in disk, after it goes to the main menu just hit ok because the default choice is always "play"
now , if your grandmother can't handle this but is ok with adjusting for tracking, fast forwarding and rewinding, it is a good thing that 99.999% of the population isn't so inhibitted with technology because then there would be no advances.
The only thing I remember being easier wtih VHS tapes(and it still is by a long shot) was making copies of rentals so I could watch them later. This is impossible with standard equipment and a DVD. the funny thing was, I never knew it was copyright infringement back them because the FBI warning seemed to say that it was only illegal if you distributed copies or showed them in a public place. Built one hell of a VHS collection that way.
don't get too certain of google's stance with the government. They admit the reason they are standing up to the government is because they don't want to release company secrets. It's a bit different than a business arrangement and is a legitimate thing to get court protection from, which they are seeking.
Sometimes you can stand up to the 800 pound gorilla and stil get beaten back by a chimp. It just depends on which one of the two is holding the bigger gun to your head. Remember that google makes its money by selling advertising. If they lose advertising base, they lose command of the rates they have been charging. It's a pretty complicated game.
Slashdot Mirror
you already pay for ambulance service(about $120 if you use an ambulance service in my area) and police protection can easily be had, they are called private security agencies. in fact, India does it on a regular basis. Fire protection does not have a private solution because there is no market demand for them. Of course, I didn't mention any of these examples in my previous post.
And I take it your private school jab was going to try and make me compare the approximately 7 thousand dollars the US on average pays per student to an upper class, 30 k per year private school? that would be assinine. I could go to private school for under 3 thousand per semester in a local private school. It isn't fancy, but neither is the public school I came up in. Guess what? they do exist and they are cheap. It isn't that hard to do and they are getting more popular which can only make them cheaper.
I'm not arguing that any of this is desirable, but it is all feasible. Do you have any numbers at all to refute this? Or did you feel you could just get away with some examples you pull out of your ass?
that's nice. now keep going.
Here is a less straw man argument filled one.
Libertarians base a vast majority of their argument around the idea of private property/personal space/privacy. In the end, their entire argument usually rests on the assumptions known as the Coase Thm. which states that efficent market outcomes are always possible if very definitive property rights are assigned. Unfortunately, most libertarians seem to forget that Coase required several things to be true about markets for his Thm. to hold and therefore, when those things can be shown as false, it is guaranteed that an inefficient outcome will occur and therefore, no more proof is required to request govt. intervention in such an area.
Realize that one of Coase's major points was that negotiating costs were insignificantly small so as to not alter outcomes(i.e. not what we have today).
Now of course, I am talking about modern Libertarian thought. I am making no reference to some of the old lines of thinking of how govt. intervention lowers dignity of all people(no matter where they stand in a govt policy) and therefore, detracts from the well being of society. This is a straight forward economics argument against almost all Libertarian policies because they cannot lead to an efficient outcome.
Now that it isn't a straw man, go on ahead and begin.
it seems, the entire argument is about you making up complete BS associative images. Yes, when I hear Nazi I think of millions of Jews slaughtered in horrific ways, starvation, massive suffering, and so forth. If you honestly believe that Piracy brings up the image of brutal murders and pillaging of others, give some proof. It seems few people here see your argument at all. Associative images are things you can just dream up, there needs to be some reason for that image to form. I guess I just don't associate modern things with occurances of dead age.
So again, I'm not attacking anything to do with copyright infringement. I'm calling BS on your belief that there is any negative associated image with the word pirate above and beyond the image associated with copyright infringement in today's world. If you seem to know of mass encounters with another type of pirate in the modern world, feel free to use them as an example of why the debate might become emotionally charged in an uneven manner. Reading comprehension might help you a tad bit as well.
I wasn't actually arguing for a liberatarian society. I"m just saying that most liberatarians fight for the view that complete deregulation leads to better, more efficient outcomes. But then again, Liberatarians foolishly believe markets are always efficient when they are not regulated (which is about as foolish and as proven to be false of any of eco 101 assumptions).
I think liberatarian society fails because in order to enact all those little controls we think are necessarry(like child labor laws) a massive governing body is required for oversight. The simple outcome would then be that liberatarians change nothing. Those that do propose changes usually call for ending almost all public assisted programs. Does ending social security mean we will have a load of poor people? maybe. there would be a system open for abuse on wages, but would labor take those abuses or simply demand a higher wage? As soon as you start making the argument that markets are inefficient(which you do), Liberatarian view points become invalid.
What emotion? don't make things up that hardly anybody in the US has any experience with. I've never sat there and thought, "those damn pirates, I wish they would all die. They are making the high seas unsafe" because pirates of those types aren't around and haven't been a big issue in US waters for over 100 years.
What makes you think piracy is thought of as anything other than copyright infringement? Its a short way of saying something everybody understands. Unlike the Nazi's, I doubt you can 1 person you know who was effected by pirates in the 17th century sense but I guarantee you I can name at least 20 people that were effected severely by WWII. They are not comparable at all unless multiplying by 0 is considered a scale of comparison.
If your defense or attack on copyright infringement/piracy is so weak it rests on the idea of eliciting emotions of some activity that hasn't been experienced en masse in well over one hundred years, you are in real trouble.
I of course limit this to the US because in the US(and European) waters, there are almost no instances of piracy anymore. Almost all piracy that does occur takes place in the open seas around places like Asia and Africa and some Carribean countries. Even there, it is hardly a factor worth mentioning.
why. Most liberatarian principles would seem to rather say "My right to provide an unsafe work environment ends when you are no longer willing to foolishly work in such an environment and not demand much higher wages". The free market works if you protect competition in that view. There is no particular reason to believe a certain level of safety is the correct level of safety. What if I would put up with an unsafe environment for a higher salary? Why should your regulations impede that?
that is where you are wrong. most of the time, liberatarians believe in market solutions to what is currently regulated.
And there is no ex ante reason to believe one needs very large and complex government to get people to behave. Many of the things liberatarians usually don't believe in(limits are rights in privacy, public education, public health care, social security) are in fact what require a vast majority of our country's operating budget and are in no way needed to make sure "People behave themselves". The point is to get rid of all the other stuff people are more than capable of providing for themselves.
it is good to give that number some kind of description since it is a rarely quoted number. A lot of our committed debt is to things like social security and medicare. Most of those commitments were made before Bush, he just made them larger. So it isn't all his fault. just probably the last 5 or 10 trillion of it. Furthermore, those are discounted numbers(look up DCF analysis to get an idea) or else our current law would have us committed to infinite amounts of debt. It means we need 45 trillion dollars today of an infusion into the government so that we can pay all our debts in the future(assuming a risk free rate of return on the money we don't use today).
I haven't read the study you cited but I am betting these things are done the same way as other studies I have read(by CATO and a couple other think tanks).
Luckily, someone with sense can come in and change the law before that debt actually becomes real.
so all you can take from the test is the fact that the Conroe, on certain benchmarks, beats the shit out of the fastest processor AMD has, even if it is overclocked(which according to other Toms Hardware articles, does give it a performance boost in these tests).
I know that isn't saying much, but it does say that the next generation of processors coming out in the next 6 months will beat the pants off of all the other processors that are out there. This is a big deal because it is very rare that there has been thsi kind of speed jump in just a few months.
well, I can't find too much to back up what you are saying, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I am sure compatible players will be built, but I was under the impression that they would be incredibly expensive( because the two formats are not compatible).
as I can't find info either way though, I wouldn't mind a link with more info just to get up to date on it.
well, you have no understanding of the industry but so be it. I Just happen to be in the industry which is why I can say that is all. you can use non-public information to generate these reports in the sense that, I will never get a phone interview with the CFO or the head engineer of Sony but a senior analyst at Merill can.
further, there are several rules governing what you are talking about. research can come out with any report they want to. The rules state there can be no contact between your research group and your sales/trading floor except through official channels. This is to the point that at the GS building in New York the two areas on separate floors are no longer accessible by a staircase, everything goes through electronic entry to track people. also, a great deal of public information costs a lot of money and so, outside of the banks, few people ever have access to it.
I'm late, but this is stuff you should probably read up on a bit. I'm not saying illegal things don't go on, but you seem to have a misunderstanding of what the laws allow.
don't know if you have some insider knowledge but almost everyone disagrees with you that the two formats are compatible. I have never read anything to hint that they are. From all the tech articles I've read on them, they are about as different as night and day.
d vdinfo.htm
x
Some links
http://hometheater.about.com/od/dvdbasics/a/bluhd
http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-x-2077-x-x-
I guess no one told you that an analyst makes most of his money based on his bonus and being wrong here, which can cause Merill to lose millions if they bet the wrong way on the stock or debt. He knows if he is wrong by more than a small amount, his career will take a huge hit.
This guy has probably been analyzing hardware releases for the last 7 or 8 years and has a good idea as to how costs really go. You don't need to understand the underlying logic to figure out what hte costs are going to look like for a product. Undergrads in college can usually get within 30% with very limited information and very little experience. It's not hard and requires absolutely no engineering knowledge. These guys have to really learn their sector though, and I'd bet he is going to be within the 15% range. There might be a reason why the are moving the high side(maybe a short position in the bank) but such an occurance could bring the SEC down on them really hard because that is illegal (if it is ever found out about).
you should do two things: realize that these people at Merrill Lynch have some of the best connections into every market they care about and therefore, have a lot more inside information than you could dream of. These are also people who spend 14 hours a day learning how to estimate these numbers because millions of dollars are made and lost by being wrong here. Outside of those actually producing the materials, they are probably some of the most qualified people.
also, While Merill's estimates are on the high side, the lower end of estimates by people from several groups including the Microprocessor Forum still see the overall price of the box to be around 700 dollars. Not the 800 Merill claimed(they quickly retracted their 900 dollar estimate). So either way, it is an expensive box.
With the amount of cutting edge technology they are using, I woulnd't be surprised to hear a final number well over 700 dollars. Very little in the PS3 is standard and therefore, they will be paying massively for the components.
don't feel too bad. It's the same genius in Jobs that exists in several other people the engineering crowd will never think highly of. The great example is the business ability of Gates. Not much in the way of technical knowhow or insight(supposedly) but dangerous when it came to business. Others as well as Michael Eisner.
I think the big thing with Jobs was that he had some relatively small success in the 80's and then came back with something else, which is pretty rare. Few people reach the top, fall off precipitously, and still come climbing back.
The high tech field is filled with incredible technical geniuses but few of them are the names history will remember.
PS. I don't mean to take away from Apple's early success that Jobs helped orchestrate, but in the big picture it wasn't by any means the biggest or most important player. With the iPod, he has produced something that reached the pinnacle of its arena and has held it quite well for a while. The products by Apple in the 80's were beaten by competition.
the same kind of physics that most great physicists do today. Its the kind where they say "well, if I was allowed to use a book of integrals when solving the hydrogen atom, I don't see the difference with you using Mathematica today". which is true most of the time.
The skill in physics has nothing to do with cranking out the fourier integral. The problem is using algebra to manipulate hte problem so the computer or your own work gives answers that can be analyzed. my problem was that people skip the entire step of taking an integral and putting it into a form where it can be analyzed. It means that at times, some of the intuition of the problem is lost.
And of course, let me rephrase this. We aren't talking about doing things like a sawtooth or square wave by hand(which everyone could do easily) or simple integrals. I'm talking about solving a driven , damped harmonic oscillator or doing a fourier expansion of a Gaussian wave packet. of course, we could fail people that can't do this stuff by hand, but then you lose the good physicists(especially experimentalists) just to replace them with mathematicians. Its the physical intuition that is most important. I feel bad for your physics department if they put math above physics.
I was completely mixing up my history. this is why I shouldn't try responding while prepping for a vector calc test after weeks of not paying attention. I realized it this morning before even reading your response.
You're right, for some reason I mixe atilla and Hannibal up. But Atilla was known for devastating the eastern roman empire, after the split. Though to tell you, Atilla did reach rome in 418 as a prisoner and was originally traded back as part of the original peace that ended in 440.
But that depends. I think in calculus, a calculator should be banned unless it is a four function calculator. Understand how to do relatively complex derivatives and integrals by hand is very important and it is a skill few people have. I was the only student in Quantum Mechanics last semester that could do Fourier series and integrals by hand because I had developed a good basic intuition in calculus in high school.
This was very important as there are several integrals that I can do by hand that baffle all calculators and the answers I end up giving are much more intuitive (most of the time). Furthermore, several simple linear algebra problems are much easier to be by hand(though those problems are few and far between outside of physics).
But then again, knowing how to use a calculator to evaluate a great deal of mundane information (especially in statistics) is very important. There is very little insight to be gained by finding the standard deviation by hand.
I don't know about your literary skills, but your historical knowledge needs a good bit of work. Atilla the Hun Sacked rome during the second war, which was before Rome rose to greatness and (I think) ~600 years before the visigoths came around.
At least as far as several of the greatest writers in the last 2 centuries are concerned, I did get it right. For your reference (because I can't warp you back to the discussions I have had on this rule):
h tm
g /grammartrap.html ( see "Examples of Fake Rules" down towards the bottom)
http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/059.html
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/s/split.
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/writin
So as long at it sounds good to my ear, I will continue to split infinitives. Of course, a once over of your own post is in order.
Just as you said, language is a form of communication. Therefore, there is a time and a place for any branch for a given language. I see the problem as having a great number of people who lack the ability to articulately communicate an idea. but I don't think that is anyway limited to this generation.
of course, this man just seems to be complaining about the new method of communication. It used to be if you wanted to write someone a letter, it would take days or weeks to arrive and therefore, you took appropriate caution in how you presented your ideas. Those days are over.
Email and blogs do not in anyway replace great and creative writing, but are an addition to the communication tools we have. Just because more people can now express themselves to a large audience through writing doesn't mean standards have dropped, it just means that anyone can particpate without having judgement first passed by an editor.
Most blogs I read are filled with mindless drivel. But I do not judge them on the same scale as a book or newspaper so I have no reason to believe those blogs are a fundamental attack on good writing skills. These people never had them and their euivalents 30 years ago just went unpublished.
Please forgive any errors in this post as I have hurt my left hand and find typing relatively difficult.
http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/c otton_gin.htm
Franklin was a good example. I find it funny you cite Whitney though, who tried like hell to use his patent on the cotton gin but no court woudl enforce it until 13 years after filing, which gave competition ample time to come up with work arounds.
I think Franklin was the last inventor to public domain everything he did. Very rarely have ideas ever died with their inventor. I can think of no examples. There have always been people reverse engineering ideas just as fast as ideas spring up.
really, you should just simplify you complaints then. you hate the fact that DVD's give you more options.
There is a fundamental flaw in your logic if you put a disk in on the full screen side and hten when asked, choose wide screen and then get pissed at the player for telling you to flip the disk. you were the idiot who didn't realize what side you put it in( or forgot what you wanted to do in the first place).
DVD menus are a different beast all together. They are not supposed to be like a VCR. It's new. They are supposed to give you the flexibility to navigate around multiple options. Now it wouldnt' make much sense for me to hit play when wanting to go into the scene selection option, would it? Or hitting play to change the language settings? That would be a fundamental contradiction.
I think VCR's had a great UI for their time. But technology allowed us to have much more flexibility in the UI. Now I will admit some DVD's are done in a horrible fashion(I can never figure out with the Ghostbusters DVD which side is for widescreen and which side is for full screen), but a well made DVD is levels above a Cassette in ease of use and functionality. I think tkhe real complaint is against foolish companies that can't make a decent menu system.
wait now, I need an example of these bad menu's that you can't teach your grandmother to navigate. in every disk I have owned one of two things happen:
1) pop in disk and after previews movie starts
2) pop in disk, after it goes to the main menu just hit ok because the default choice is always "play"
now , if your grandmother can't handle this but is ok with adjusting for tracking, fast forwarding and rewinding, it is a good thing that 99.999% of the population isn't so inhibitted with technology because then there would be no advances.
The only thing I remember being easier wtih VHS tapes(and it still is by a long shot) was making copies of rentals so I could watch them later. This is impossible with standard equipment and a DVD. the funny thing was, I never knew it was copyright infringement back them because the FBI warning seemed to say that it was only illegal if you distributed copies or showed them in a public place. Built one hell of a VHS collection that way.
don't get too certain of google's stance with the government. They admit the reason they are standing up to the government is because they don't want to release company secrets. It's a bit different than a business arrangement and is a legitimate thing to get court protection from, which they are seeking.
Sometimes you can stand up to the 800 pound gorilla and stil get beaten back by a chimp. It just depends on which one of the two is holding the bigger gun to your head. Remember that google makes its money by selling advertising. If they lose advertising base, they lose command of the rates they have been charging. It's a pretty complicated game.