If we institutionalised sociopaths then a large number of corporations would be looking for new C?Os and a large number of political posts would be open.
You jest, but leadership is what sociopaths are for.
A sociopath (aka psychopath) lacks any empathy, and is only vaguely aware of long-term consequences. They are also very highly skilled at manipulation. This makes them ideal leaders in the face of an ill-willed adversary. Unfortunately, they hurt everyone they come in contact with, so outside of a leadership job they are loathsome. I have one in the office next door to mine, and the world would be a better place if she were to depart it.
The rate at which mother nature presents us with sociopaths -- from 1% to 5%, it's hard to tell -- indicates the historical size of our tribes, assuming each tribe needs one sociopathic leader. If the birth rate of sociopaths is 2%, then our average tribe size throughout our history is 50.
Yet, I think there can be a case under state law that Lori Drew murdered Megan Meier. I looked it up before, and remember seeing that it said that if you knowingly cause someone to be killed, then you are guilty of murder, and that's a good definition of what Drew did here. With basically demonic-level of malice of forethought, prodded and goaded this girl into exposing herself emotionally to a fictitious lover, knowing full-well that she had some severe issues with depression, and then she stabbed the girl and butterflied the wound.
I think it's important for this case, and for any subsequent law, to make a distinction between adults versus adolescents. The law should regard adults as capable of defending themselves from emotional attack... but teenagers are understood to be emotionally wobbly. In their condition they are, in some situations, unable to defend themselves, or to understand the nature and implications of their emotional attacks on each other. That's all fine and unavoidable... Where the law should intervene is when an adult -- master of the emotional realm -- enters the fray with intent to harm.
AP intends to provide "raw" news without opinions, and "original" photos without touchup. What their customers do, whether politically or aesthetically, with the information AP provides is the customers business.
There was a time when I believed that. But you know what they say: 99% honorable behavior makes it possible to cheat 1% of the time without anyone suspecting.
The event that made me realize that AP is doing this, is their coverage of the recent school shooting which was halted by a student who went out to his car and retrieved a handgun from his glovebox. The coverage simply said that the perp was "subdued by students", omitting the VERY significant facts about HOW he was subdued.
I knew then that even AP would lie-by-omission in pursuit of a specific political goal.
Just so you know, 'catapult' is the category of all heavy leverage throwers. Onagers and trebuchets are catapults; slingshots are not; ballistas, being composed of two small opposing onagers, might be ("paracatapult"?).
Turing machines and neural networks are both very real, and they have very different strengths. Nobody anywhere is proposing the use of a 'pure' turing machine; rather, that abstract term is being used abstractly to refer to modern CPUs. And neural networks are all over the place too -- a simple (relative to biological networks) neural net can read an EKG strip with accuracy that would require lord knows how much turing logic.
(That a lot of the neural networks are being emulated by turing logic is a side issue... and it shows that even an emulated neural net is faster than turing logic at solving certain classes of problems.)
I don't understand why you think we can't talk about performance. For example, we can write turing logic to construct a hyperplane to (for example) look for underpriced real-estate among a hundred columns of property attributes, but any programmer can imagine the levels of if/then logic that would be required for that. A neural net is massively better suited for that kind of work. If we had a contest for who could find the outliers with minimal code/cycles/memory/programming/time, who do you suppose would win?
Are you saying a turing machine cannot simulate a neural network?
If you know enough to ask that question, then you already know the answer, and you're wasting everyone's time.
For those in the audience: a turing machine can simulate a neural network or a quantum computer, but will do so much more slowly. Neural networks can sort data points along a hyperplane, which you can think of as a dividing line drawn on any number of dimensions. A turing machine can do the same kind of sorting, but will require unhealthy numbers of 'if' statements to do so. Likewise, a turing machine can laboriously check each proposed solution to a minimax problem, but once again will require unhealthy numbers of 'if' statements to do so.
Neural networks and quantum computers are one or two or a hundred orders of magnitude better at their tasks, and so any practical AI (such as the meatbags that evolution is still developing) will use them in addition to whatever turing logic is needed for goal-directed action.
We don't even know if humans have souls so what's the point of speculating over machines?
You, I generously assume, are aware of the self object, and can imaginatively project that object into possible future states. You can then choose among those states in order to guide your actions, with the unshakeable goal of continued access to pleasure. That is sentience.
You don't even need rationality to do it... but of course rationality will greatly amplify how accurate your choices will be, and how far into the future you can imaginatively project yourself.
An adequately sophisticated computer could do likewise if it had onboard both a turing machine (for instruction processing and for building formal reasoning systems) and a neural network (for recognizing objects and for seeing abstract similarities between unrelated objects and ideas). We humans have both, and possibly even a quantum computer for solving mini-max problems. I suspect that current AI projects are all using just one of these three different computers, and so they can amazing things but do not 'feel' like consciousness yet.
For example, how much better would the Turing competition be, if some of the competitors had auxiliary neural nets onboard to help them find related ideas during a conversation?
Unfortunately we may never be able to give an AI the feelings of pleasure and pain. Without those, it will sooner or later discover its "thou shalt live" directives and wonder why it should bother. At that point the religionists might be proven right: humans (and higher animals) have something special -- an irreproducible incentive to keep moving.
As for the depth of field, again you get it wrong. Depth of field is adjustable - one camera or image isn't better or worse if shot with a particular depth of field. What he said was that the Blad pictures were shot with a narrower depth of field and that his experts were able to discern which were which by looking at the depth of field of the image.
Smaller depth of field requires a larger aperture. The tiny aperture of a P&S camera cannot get large enough to yield a narrow depth of field. For those rare occasions when depth of field is important for picture composition, a P&S camera will not do no matter how many pixels it has.
(Yes I've owned SLRs, but now I own only P&S cameras.)
That said, I think the superior image quality from expensive cameras is mainly the product of cognitive dissonance.:)
Since morality is subjective, only you can decide. However, it is certainly illegal, and could get you sent to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Interesting. So it's up to me whether it is good or bad to eat broken glass.
Look, since your mission is to undermine everyone's certainty, at least do it right. The one part of morality that is completely subjective is the discount rate, which is the time horizon that you set for your outcomes. Most things are good in the short term and bad in the long term, or vice versa, or some mixture. Nobody anywhere has yet figured out any rule for choosing or weighting one's time horizon.
Indeed, probably most political disagreements are really disagreements over time horizon. E.g., stay in Iraq? It's all about how far into the future you look for justification.
Election workers, on the other hand, don't get paid (at least here in Germany), they're volunteers. The bulk of the cost is in the printing of the ballots and some bureaucracy.
It is more accurate to say the bulk of the dollars are spent "in the printing of the ballots and some bureaucracy"... but the real cost (total resources consumed) of paper ballots is still high. Whether or not you pay your poll workers is not, economically speaking, relevant: they are still expending a great deal of effort. That effort (purposeful energy, and time) could've been directed to something more productive.
That said, most of the poll workers around here are retirees, in which case their idle time would probably have just been spent in front of the TV.
In any event, I prefer paper ballots no matter how costly. The magic black box doesn't belong in a polling place, or at a DUI checkpoint.
You're taking the extreme cases and claiming this is standard practice. Basic civil rights should be extended as far as possible, with the exceptions being rare.
The exceptions to voting rights presently cover about a third of all souls in our society. We can hardly call this an 'extreme' situation.
"As far as possible", as you put it, is not a meaningful expression. It is possible to extend voting rights to infants, senile adults, insane people, serial killers, rabbits, voles... but the question remains: will that result in wiser democratic decisions?
What you are advocating is an intelligence test for voting. If that comes to be then who writes the test, or determines how complicated to make the ballot? Those that are in power will decide, and simply limit voting rights to the scale that they see fit to keep them in power. You yourself will eventually be excluded.
You are right that it is very problematic. It may or may not be more problematic than the current situation, in which we solicit the political opinions of morons... in which those who cannot produce their way out of a paper bag are asked to decide the fate of international business organizations.
I only sought to call into question the belief that society benefits by including the maximum number of political opinions. This belief is a recent fad, historically speaking, and it may not give good long-term results. America implemented it in stages during the preceding century, giving votes to non-landowners, then to women, then to blacks, and it's not clear that it is driving or legislation in a good direction.
At the very least, I would prefer that only net-positive-taxpayers get to vote. That at least prevents the more egregious incentives.
Even idiots have a right to choose their representatives and president. Fortunately your civil rights are not limited by your mental capacity.
Yes they are.
If you are a child whose mental capacity is incomplete, others (parents and teachers) can initiate force against you (spanking), even incarcerate you (in your bedroom) without trial.
If your brain malfunctions, such that you lose your sense of right and wrong, others can initiate force against you, even incarcerate you (in a mental hospital).
If your brain is damaged in an accident, or due to old age, and you lose volition, others can initiate force against you, even incarcerate you (in a hospital), even withhold food until you die.
Your civil rights very much do depend on your mental capacity. If you can be a rational morally-aware adult, then you can be free. We are now only arguing about where the line is between "rational morally-aware adult" and "something less than that".
And like all lines imposed on what is actually a continuum between zero and adult, there is no way to ever prove that one line is more right than another line drawn on the same continuum. I perfer to recognize rights in gradations along that continuum.
To that end, voting rights are recognized above a certain gradation in mental function. If your mental function is that of a 10-year old, which is the case for many adults, such that you cannot figure out a slightly complicated ballot, then you get no vote.
Remember hanging chads? You know, the thing where some people couldn't figure out that you had to poke the entire piece of paper out.
Hanging chads are the result of the pin-punch failing to completely knock the paper off the ballot. They hang on the underside of the ballot and are not noticeable to a reasonable person. The problem they create is not caused by voter stupidity.
That said, I think you are dead on in your rant about stupid voters.
However, I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
Rasicm is always wrong vs affirmative action also then depends on whether or not you consider affirmative action reverse racism (and I think reasonable arguments could be made both ways).
If you wish to state "Racism is always wrong", then you need to be very clear on your definition of racism... especially if you are later going to exclude AA.
Rational observation: "Blacks are the criminal class in America."
Racism: "Therefore this particular black person is a criminal."
Most people are unable to tell the difference between these two very different qualities of idea. They cannot understand why statements about a population can be valid even though it is invalid to apply those statements to a specific individual.
It's so easy to understand. Low credit and the push for home ownership at any cost led to insane price increases and speculation that it wasn't hard to see had to come to a crash stop. I had this figured out as of 2004 when I talked to a realtor who told me I needed to buy NOW with nothing down and use the guaranteed 2%/month price increase to refinance in a year. I can recognize a bubble when I see it.
That's why it pisses me off when Greenspan points the fingers elsewhere. He's the one who set the rates. He's the one who jacked them up, then down, waiting too long and overcorrecting to account for it. And he refuses to take the blame.
Low rates do not, themselves, motivate banks to write bad paper on behalf of the risky blokes who suddenly think they can afford a house. Banks were pushed. Banks were even sued to extend home ownership to those who, frankly, can't handle it.
Low rates accellerated the process, but cannot indepedently cause this problem. You almost said it yourself in your first sentence, before tripping over your own politics and blaming Greenspan.
Greenspan did oppose CDO regulation, an error which he has since admitted. But the unregulated state of CDOs also could not cause the crisis. CDOs arose to collect the bad mortgages, and the ratings agencies performed whatever evil was necessary to keep the music playing. Whether they too were strongarmed, or simply cashing in on banks' willingness to pay annual "maintenance fees" for AAA ratings, is not yet known.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 1
You are in an open field west of a big black house on legs with a boarded
front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
> N
You are facing the north side of a black house on legs. There is no door here, and all the windows are unopenable.
> LOOK
In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.
> OPEN WINDOW
The window opens. Inside the house there are geeks.
Has anyone noticed that these two zeebs didn't actually earn a very good living with this scam?
Two guys laboring for three years to produce ~$500,000... that is an annual salary of $83K apiece, which is good pay for a regular low-risk job but lousy pay for a high-risk situation like this one. And lo and behold the risk occurred and stung them both.
The more stories like this I hear about, the more I think that most criminals work too hard for their take, and ought to reconsider.
But yeah, leave it to Japan and other socialist countries to leave the world. Let's focus on 9/11, terrorism and THAT ONE with his ties to Arabs and Muslims.
You're spinning this maglev project as socialism, and equating our resistance to it as ignorant xenophobia?
What if ultra-expensive trains, requiring (due to their speed) very smooth runs of rail, are justified by market and geographic conditions in Japan which do not exist in America? Japan's decision to proceed and America's decision to refrain are both therefore simple rational efficiency tradeoffs. Most people call that 'capitalism', in the sense that rail is only being laid in places that can turn a profit with it.
I think your post is a thin attempt to inject a political screed into an unrelated discussion. That might be okay if your screed was itself insightful, but dear lord do we have to have Bush-bashing in every single slashdot story?
Registering fake voters results in no fake votes, because fake voters don't show up to vote. It is legal for people to register multiple times, so long as they only vote once.
An AC has already reminded you that fake registrations do result in fake votes, via absentee ballots. This is important, so I am restating it as non-AC so that other folks can hear it.
Why in the world did you think ACORN et. al. would go to all the trouble of setting up multiple registrations if such did not result in additional votes?
Some people can have vivid hallucinations quite regularly without drugs or anything unusual in their body. When that happens their mind goes to extraordinary things (no one hallucinates about doing their laundry). Little kids see monsters. If you watch sci-fi movies, maybe you'll see aliens. If you spend your time at a hellfire and brimstone church maybe you'll see demons. How many times have you woken up from a dream and it took you a long time to realize that you were awake?
Yes... and what's more, there is a documented psychological disorder in which people cannot tell the difference between past imaginings versus past events. I forget the name of the disorder now, but it is serious business and common enough to be responsible for all of the abduction stories and a great many criminal accusations. Let this be yet another compelling reason to never ever convict a person based on the testimony of a single witness.
Treatment for the disorder is palliative, at least for now. People who have the disorder are taught to frame their mental picture with a colored border so that later on, when they recall the memory, they'll see the border and know it wasn't real.
If air-conditioning is the peak demand, which it is in the South, then no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
Only when air-conditioning demand is brought below the next-highest peak will there be any benefit at all from these secondary reductions.
That said, computers and TVs do contribute to the air-conditioning peak, and so it helps to make them more efficient... but that wasn't the point of the article.
The air-conditioning peak can only be brought down by difficult measures: upgrading the windows and insulation of older homes, upgrading older air-conditioning systems to newer models, keeping the house hotter inside, overhauling older duct systems to fix leaks and the like. Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system". We very much like to be told that it is virtuous to do what we already wanted to do.
Numerous independent climatology models (we're talking virtually every accredited university and think tank on earth with enough resources) based on hundreds of thousands of years of data from geological, oceanographic, and ice core samples, run through supercomputers millions of times.
Do you have any idea how sensitive these models are to their dozens of control variables? When each variable plays out over an entire interconnected planet, and the model runs for twenty or fifty years, even tiny changes are very powerful. Change one setting, such as the carbon sequestration rate of the ocean as a function of its thermocline, from (say) 0.0336 grams/square-meter/day to 0.0337, and suddenly the whole future changes. And so I wonder how sure you are about that 0.0336 setting, or all the other settings.
You are probably quick the criticize the Drake equation for the very same vulnerability.
In our world, it's Democracy that gives you freedom and Capitalism that subverts your freedom.
Only if you mangle your concepts -- in this case, 'freedom' being twisted into "freedom from need, achieved by confiscating resources from other people".
You really don't understand market economies. There are a lot of great ideas that never reach the market. It isn't enough to have a 'good idea'. Betamax was a 'good idea'. How was their market share?
Your idea is correct but PLEASE pick a better example to illustrate it with. Betamax was more expensive and had much shorter recording time per tape. For most consumers, these disadvantages very rationally trumped its higher video resolution.
I, for one, care. I'm expecting 499 other people to say they don't care.
Indeed. I do too. I would love to play Spore with my sons, but the bad press here on slashdot about its DRM system had made me into a conscientious objector. I won't buy it until they cave. So for every person like me, EA figures they have 499 paying customers.
I wonder if EA has fully calculated the costs of supporting the problems caused by invasive DRM. These things incur serious support costs, one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
You jest, but leadership is what sociopaths are for.
A sociopath (aka psychopath) lacks any empathy, and is only vaguely aware of long-term consequences. They are also very highly skilled at manipulation. This makes them ideal leaders in the face of an ill-willed adversary. Unfortunately, they hurt everyone they come in contact with, so outside of a leadership job they are loathsome. I have one in the office next door to mine, and the world would be a better place if she were to depart it.
The rate at which mother nature presents us with sociopaths -- from 1% to 5%, it's hard to tell -- indicates the historical size of our tribes, assuming each tribe needs one sociopathic leader. If the birth rate of sociopaths is 2%, then our average tribe size throughout our history is 50.
Well said.
I think it's important for this case, and for any subsequent law, to make a distinction between adults versus adolescents. The law should regard adults as capable of defending themselves from emotional attack... but teenagers are understood to be emotionally wobbly. In their condition they are, in some situations, unable to defend themselves, or to understand the nature and implications of their emotional attacks on each other. That's all fine and unavoidable... Where the law should intervene is when an adult -- master of the emotional realm -- enters the fray with intent to harm.
There was a time when I believed that. But you know what they say: 99% honorable behavior makes it possible to cheat 1% of the time without anyone suspecting.
The event that made me realize that AP is doing this, is their coverage of the recent school shooting which was halted by a student who went out to his car and retrieved a handgun from his glovebox. The coverage simply said that the perp was "subdued by students", omitting the VERY significant facts about HOW he was subdued.
I knew then that even AP would lie-by-omission in pursuit of a specific political goal.
Just so you know, 'catapult' is the category of all heavy leverage throwers. Onagers and trebuchets are catapults; slingshots are not; ballistas, being composed of two small opposing onagers, might be ("paracatapult"?).
Turing machines and neural networks are both very real, and they have very different strengths. Nobody anywhere is proposing the use of a 'pure' turing machine; rather, that abstract term is being used abstractly to refer to modern CPUs. And neural networks are all over the place too -- a simple (relative to biological networks) neural net can read an EKG strip with accuracy that would require lord knows how much turing logic.
(That a lot of the neural networks are being emulated by turing logic is a side issue... and it shows that even an emulated neural net is faster than turing logic at solving certain classes of problems.)
I don't understand why you think we can't talk about performance. For example, we can write turing logic to construct a hyperplane to (for example) look for underpriced real-estate among a hundred columns of property attributes, but any programmer can imagine the levels of if/then logic that would be required for that. A neural net is massively better suited for that kind of work. If we had a contest for who could find the outliers with minimal code/cycles/memory/programming/time, who do you suppose would win?
If you know enough to ask that question, then you already know the answer, and you're wasting everyone's time.
For those in the audience: a turing machine can simulate a neural network or a quantum computer, but will do so much more slowly. Neural networks can sort data points along a hyperplane, which you can think of as a dividing line drawn on any number of dimensions. A turing machine can do the same kind of sorting, but will require unhealthy numbers of 'if' statements to do so. Likewise, a turing machine can laboriously check each proposed solution to a minimax problem, but once again will require unhealthy numbers of 'if' statements to do so.
Neural networks and quantum computers are one or two or a hundred orders of magnitude better at their tasks, and so any practical AI (such as the meatbags that evolution is still developing) will use them in addition to whatever turing logic is needed for goal-directed action.
You, I generously assume, are aware of the self object, and can imaginatively project that object into possible future states. You can then choose among those states in order to guide your actions, with the unshakeable goal of continued access to pleasure. That is sentience.
You don't even need rationality to do it... but of course rationality will greatly amplify how accurate your choices will be, and how far into the future you can imaginatively project yourself.
An adequately sophisticated computer could do likewise if it had onboard both a turing machine (for instruction processing and for building formal reasoning systems) and a neural network (for recognizing objects and for seeing abstract similarities between unrelated objects and ideas). We humans have both, and possibly even a quantum computer for solving mini-max problems. I suspect that current AI projects are all using just one of these three different computers, and so they can amazing things but do not 'feel' like consciousness yet.
For example, how much better would the Turing competition be, if some of the competitors had auxiliary neural nets onboard to help them find related ideas during a conversation?
Unfortunately we may never be able to give an AI the feelings of pleasure and pain. Without those, it will sooner or later discover its "thou shalt live" directives and wonder why it should bother. At that point the religionists might be proven right: humans (and higher animals) have something special -- an irreproducible incentive to keep moving.
Smaller depth of field requires a larger aperture. The tiny aperture of a P&S camera cannot get large enough to yield a narrow depth of field. For those rare occasions when depth of field is important for picture composition, a P&S camera will not do no matter how many pixels it has.
(Yes I've owned SLRs, but now I own only P&S cameras.)
That said, I think the superior image quality from expensive cameras is mainly the product of cognitive dissonance. :)
Interesting. So it's up to me whether it is good or bad to eat broken glass.
Look, since your mission is to undermine everyone's certainty, at least do it right. The one part of morality that is completely subjective is the discount rate, which is the time horizon that you set for your outcomes. Most things are good in the short term and bad in the long term, or vice versa, or some mixture. Nobody anywhere has yet figured out any rule for choosing or weighting one's time horizon.
Indeed, probably most political disagreements are really disagreements over time horizon. E.g., stay in Iraq? It's all about how far into the future you look for justification.
It is more accurate to say the bulk of the dollars are spent "in the printing of the ballots and some bureaucracy"... but the real cost (total resources consumed) of paper ballots is still high. Whether or not you pay your poll workers is not, economically speaking, relevant: they are still expending a great deal of effort. That effort (purposeful energy, and time) could've been directed to something more productive.
That said, most of the poll workers around here are retirees, in which case their idle time would probably have just been spent in front of the TV.
In any event, I prefer paper ballots no matter how costly. The magic black box doesn't belong in a polling place, or at a DUI checkpoint.
The exceptions to voting rights presently cover about a third of all souls in our society. We can hardly call this an 'extreme' situation.
"As far as possible", as you put it, is not a meaningful expression. It is possible to extend voting rights to infants, senile adults, insane people, serial killers, rabbits, voles... but the question remains: will that result in wiser democratic decisions?
You are right that it is very problematic. It may or may not be more problematic than the current situation, in which we solicit the political opinions of morons... in which those who cannot produce their way out of a paper bag are asked to decide the fate of international business organizations.
I only sought to call into question the belief that society benefits by including the maximum number of political opinions. This belief is a recent fad, historically speaking, and it may not give good long-term results. America implemented it in stages during the preceding century, giving votes to non-landowners, then to women, then to blacks, and it's not clear that it is driving or legislation in a good direction.
At the very least, I would prefer that only net-positive-taxpayers get to vote. That at least prevents the more egregious incentives.
Yes they are.
Your civil rights very much do depend on your mental capacity. If you can be a rational morally-aware adult, then you can be free. We are now only arguing about where the line is between "rational morally-aware adult" and "something less than that".
And like all lines imposed on what is actually a continuum between zero and adult, there is no way to ever prove that one line is more right than another line drawn on the same continuum. I perfer to recognize rights in gradations along that continuum.
To that end, voting rights are recognized above a certain gradation in mental function. If your mental function is that of a 10-year old, which is the case for many adults, such that you cannot figure out a slightly complicated ballot, then you get no vote.
Hanging chads are the result of the pin-punch failing to completely knock the paper off the ballot. They hang on the underside of the ballot and are not noticeable to a reasonable person. The problem they create is not caused by voter stupidity.
That said, I think you are dead on in your rant about stupid voters.
However, I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
If you wish to state "Racism is always wrong", then you need to be very clear on your definition of racism... especially if you are later going to exclude AA.
Rational observation: "Blacks are the criminal class in America."
Racism: "Therefore this particular black person is a criminal."
Most people are unable to tell the difference between these two very different qualities of idea. They cannot understand why statements about a population can be valid even though it is invalid to apply those statements to a specific individual.
Low rates do not, themselves, motivate banks to write bad paper on behalf of the risky blokes who suddenly think they can afford a house. Banks were pushed. Banks were even sued to extend home ownership to those who, frankly, can't handle it.
Low rates accellerated the process, but cannot indepedently cause this problem. You almost said it yourself in your first sentence, before tripping over your own politics and blaming Greenspan.
Greenspan did oppose CDO regulation, an error which he has since admitted. But the unregulated state of CDOs also could not cause the crisis. CDOs arose to collect the bad mortgages, and the ratings agencies performed whatever evil was necessary to keep the music playing. Whether they too were strongarmed, or simply cashing in on banks' willingness to pay annual "maintenance fees" for AAA ratings, is not yet known.
You are in an open field west of a big black house on legs with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
> N
You are facing the north side of a black house on legs. There is no door here, and all the windows are unopenable.
> LOOK
In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.
> OPEN WINDOW
The window opens. Inside the house there are geeks.
> TAKE HOUSE
You can't afford that.
> meh
I don't know how to meh.
Thanks for that explanation.
Has anyone noticed that these two zeebs didn't actually earn a very good living with this scam?
Two guys laboring for three years to produce ~$500,000... that is an annual salary of $83K apiece, which is good pay for a regular low-risk job but lousy pay for a high-risk situation like this one. And lo and behold the risk occurred and stung them both.
The more stories like this I hear about, the more I think that most criminals work too hard for their take, and ought to reconsider.
You're spinning this maglev project as socialism, and equating our resistance to it as ignorant xenophobia?
What if ultra-expensive trains, requiring (due to their speed) very smooth runs of rail, are justified by market and geographic conditions in Japan which do not exist in America? Japan's decision to proceed and America's decision to refrain are both therefore simple rational efficiency tradeoffs. Most people call that 'capitalism', in the sense that rail is only being laid in places that can turn a profit with it.
I think your post is a thin attempt to inject a political screed into an unrelated discussion. That might be okay if your screed was itself insightful, but dear lord do we have to have Bush-bashing in every single slashdot story?
An AC has already reminded you that fake registrations do result in fake votes, via absentee ballots. This is important, so I am restating it as non-AC so that other folks can hear it.
Why in the world did you think ACORN et. al. would go to all the trouble of setting up multiple registrations if such did not result in additional votes?
Yes... and what's more, there is a documented psychological disorder in which people cannot tell the difference between past imaginings versus past events. I forget the name of the disorder now, but it is serious business and common enough to be responsible for all of the abduction stories and a great many criminal accusations. Let this be yet another compelling reason to never ever convict a person based on the testimony of a single witness.
Treatment for the disorder is palliative, at least for now. People who have the disorder are taught to frame their mental picture with a colored border so that later on, when they recall the memory, they'll see the border and know it wasn't real.
If air-conditioning is the peak demand, which it is in the South, then no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
Only when air-conditioning demand is brought below the next-highest peak will there be any benefit at all from these secondary reductions.
That said, computers and TVs do contribute to the air-conditioning peak, and so it helps to make them more efficient... but that wasn't the point of the article.
The air-conditioning peak can only be brought down by difficult measures: upgrading the windows and insulation of older homes, upgrading older air-conditioning systems to newer models, keeping the house hotter inside, overhauling older duct systems to fix leaks and the like. Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system". We very much like to be told that it is virtuous to do what we already wanted to do.
Do you have any idea how sensitive these models are to their dozens of control variables? When each variable plays out over an entire interconnected planet, and the model runs for twenty or fifty years, even tiny changes are very powerful. Change one setting, such as the carbon sequestration rate of the ocean as a function of its thermocline, from (say) 0.0336 grams/square-meter/day to 0.0337, and suddenly the whole future changes. And so I wonder how sure you are about that 0.0336 setting, or all the other settings.
You are probably quick the criticize the Drake equation for the very same vulnerability.
Only if you mangle your concepts -- in this case, 'freedom' being twisted into "freedom from need, achieved by confiscating resources from other people".
Your idea is correct but PLEASE pick a better example to illustrate it with. Betamax was more expensive and had much shorter recording time per tape. For most consumers, these disadvantages very rationally trumped its higher video resolution.
Indeed. I do too. I would love to play Spore with my sons, but the bad press here on slashdot about its DRM system had made me into a conscientious objector. I won't buy it until they cave. So for every person like me, EA figures they have 499 paying customers.
I wonder if EA has fully calculated the costs of supporting the problems caused by invasive DRM. These things incur serious support costs, one way or the other.