Yeah, I'm sick of nerds who think sports are for dumb jocks. Sports are just games. They require just as much strategic and tactical ability as most other games. Just because you have to run doesn't make the players stupid.
Granted, some sports are better than others in this respect. But this is true of games in general. See tic-tac-toe and chess.
You do know that water is composed of oxygen, right?
And hydrogen! Attracted to each other through quantum electrostatic forces! And unless those forces are overcome, that oxygen won't be available for deep sea dwellers to breathe! That was their point!
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
Really? This is a rather trivial consequence of the meanings of the words "time" and "Space-Time".
I think we'd do a lot better to rename it something less associated with it's common useage, such as the Temporal axis. Then you can start to discuss what the properties of that axis are, without running into issues with metaphorical associations.
That's been done. "About Time", by Paul Davies, is a nice survey for lay people. It turns out, outside of weird warping due to moving at relativistic speeds, the "Temporal Axis" behaves a lot like time.
I did that to a friend of mine when I was in college. The library had an alarm system in place so that books couldn't be taken out of the library without checking them out. A friend of mine worked at the library and gave me a bunch of active strips.
So I carefully unsewed part of my friend's back pack strap, inserted a strip, and sewed it back together. I also threw some strips in random pockets, just so he'd think it might be over once he found them.
You could always tell when he was leaving the library. The alarm would go off and he'd yell "FUCK! EVERY FUCKING TIME!"
I also put one in a friend's shoe. He became quite neurotic.
Just off the top of my head, I'm not a physicist but I like to read. If the universe is expanding then it must be a finite area.
Nope. Think of the real numbers. They go on infinitely in both directions. However, the mapping f(x) = 2x is an expansion. That is to say, the distance between two points increases under the mapping.
(Obviously, the distance between a point a and b is going to be |a-b|. The distance between f(a) and f(b) is |f(a) - f(b)| = |2a - 2b| = 2|a-b|.)
So if movement and expansion uses energy, then since there is finite energy it can not extend to infinity, thus it will stop growing at some point.
"Extending to infinity" is a tricky idea to pin down. No offense, but I don't think you would understand any solid formulation I could give in a reasonable amount of time. Basically, in this context, there is no object that is infinite and a number.
There are billions upon billions of tons of hydrogen and helium in the Sun, but you don't see the price of it being as low as you'd expect. That's because it doesn't affect you,Same with music I illegally copied. If you can't get to it, you can't use it.
But you can, and unless you actually buy every track you illegally copy (and use) as well, you've lowered their monetary value.
Yes. I worked for a medical bill auditing company that was trying to expand into automated Medicare PD bill review. It is a huge cluster fuck. For one thing, billing codes (as in codes referring to procedures and medications) have only recently started becoming standardized. The governmet sets limits as to how much they're willing to spend on a procedure -- they vary by market. Granted, this is more-or-less fair. There's no reason to screw New York city hospitals with Kansas City rates. But this complicates things too, as a hospital system might own a monopoly on hospital services in a city, and drive prices up in that market.
Fraud is very common, as is double billing or "unbundling" -- some procedures medically require others to be performed, so when the cost of the first is calculated, it includes the cost of the others. Unbundling is basically a sophisticated form of double billing where the the requisite procedures are billed on top of the procedure that required them. Most people don't fight this, thinking that the "big" procedure was just really expensive.
You're such a lol-cow. I bet you won't be able to resist replying again. Especially since you're obviously wrong about my "glaring errors in logic."
Hint: The Learner's Dictionary's pedagogical purpose is to use simplified definitions to teach English as a second language.
Hint: Numbered lines in dictionary entries are distinct meanings. When you look up a word, and it has multiple entries, you are to understand that it means either the first line, or the second line, or the third line, and so on, depending on the context. That is to say, a dictionary entry can be incomplete and misleading, but still not wrong.
Hint: The lines are numbered according to the most common uses.
Hint: That murder is homicide logically follows from the general definition of 'homicide'.
Hint: The Learner's Dictionary gave a partial answer to the question of what 'homicide' might be in a context, but did not give the general answer. The Learner's Dictionary does not claim to be complete. No dictionary really does, though the OED comes close.
So now you're down to arguing that the information is "not complete" instead of inaccurate. The information in the Cambridge dictionary contradicts the information from your sources. That does not constitute a lack of "completeness" simply because it is an "advanced learner's" dictionary, it means that they are directly competing.
Indeed they are. And the pedagogical purpose behind a Learner's Dictionary puts makes it less authoritative than a general purpose dictionary. By the way, the OED agrees with me about 'homicide'.
The fact of the matter is that this is all stemming from you not being able to rise above your disagreement with a choice of words made insiginificant by the fact that the actual message got across, and while you can link to PDFs all day long to argue a case that you cannot formulate yourself, that, as well as your distasteful ad hominem attacks make it pretty clear that if anyone is trolling here, it most certainly and without any objective doubt, is you.
You started the ad hominem attacks. Granted, it was mild, and I shouldn't have escalated them.
No, you're postulating that they're misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries.
I never said they were incorrect. You did. I simply said they weren't an appropriate resource to consult for the purposes of this discussion because they use simplified definitions. The definition of 'homicide' was simplified to the point of incompleteness for pedagogical purposes. I never said murder wasn't homicide. I said not all homicide is murder.
They're advertising that they're including simplified defintions. Simplified defintions are not necessarily incorrect, and they certainly are not when the purpose of the dictionaries is *teaching*, which by definition requires the information to be correct and accurate.
But not complete.
You're desperately trying to argue that a publisher as established as Cambridge Press would compromise their professional integrity and create dictionaries with inaccurate definitions for the purpose of teaching, because it's supposedly easier to teach things that are incorrect. That's just absurdly ridiculous.
No, that's not what I'm trying to argue. Your inability to comprehend basic English leads me to suspect you've used one of their dictionaries for academic purposes.
You're grasping for straws here, and it's pretty sad.
I'm a mathematician, so I'm naturally slightly arrogant. Sort of. I mean, I think I have a fairly reasonable estimate of my skills in mind, hardly ever get "put in my place" by someone with better skills, know when to cede an argument, etc. But I'm confident when I say something with mathematical content.
When I took the class on the Philosophy of Life (focusing specificially on defining life for the purposes of knowing if an artificial creation is "actually" alive, which involved studies in computation, Turing machines, Wittgenstein, first-order logic, experiment design and statistical interpretation, evolution, etc), I joined the ranks of a very small field. Something like a thousand people in the world are qualified to talk about this stuff intelligently. I don't mean to sound arrogant -- artificial life is very multi-disciplinary in scope, so unless one is familiar with all the involved disciplines, it is difficult to not be trivial.
Now, throw someone with a healthy ego into a field like that, where virtually no one they meet is better at it than they are, and you suddenly have an ego explosion. I went through it, and outgrew it (since I know a lot of people better than me at mathematics, my primary interest).
If the best you can do postulate a something as absurd as that Cambridge Press are intentionally misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries, then you're obviously in over your head.
I don't have to postulate it. They advertise it. They specifically say they publish simplified definitions to ease the students' time learning the material. This is the purpose of a Learner's Dictionary. To help people who aren't familiar with the nuances of the language learn gain a rough working knowledge of the language.
Even the Cambridge Dictionary of American English returns the same definition.
Not surprising, since it too is a learner's dictionary. http://www.cambridge.org/us/esl/cdae/ See where it says "English as a Second Language" at the top?
If, on average, people bought songs they downloaded and liked with probability p, then the monetary value of the song goes down to (1 - p)*x, where x is the price with no measurable piracy.
Sorry, this is wrong.
Say a label produces x copies of a song for distribution. And that pirates make y copies. Then the monetary value goes down to x/(x + y) times the original price. Mind you, again, making personal copies won't significanly increase inflation. Nobody really expects you to buy copies for your home, car, work, etc. You can move your disc around, or do other morally neutral acts like that.
Morality is the domain of actions -- hurting a person physically, or depriving him of his physical property, for example. What possessions I own, or what music I listen to, cannot possibly be construed as immoral.
I don't know about that. I agree that merely making a copy of something is not immoral. But using that copy can be, depending on whether you acted in good faith when the copy was made. Listening to pirated music can certainly be immoral. By making a copy and using it, you are artificially increasing the supply of said music, without the moral authority to do so. This lowers the monetary value of the music for everybody.
Mind you, this is an empirical observation. If everybody who downloaded songs bought the album containing every song they like, no significant inflation would occur. If, on average, people bought songs they downloaded and liked with probability p, then the monetary value of the song goes down to (1 - p)*x, where x is the price with no measurable piracy.
Stealing is too strong a word to describe it, but you are definitely taking rights away from those that legally have them. I'm of the opinion that my rights are more important than theirs, in this particular case, but I won't delude myself into thinking I'm not hurting anyone.
Yeah, the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary -- a dictionary meant for people learning English as a second language, which therefore can't use language that captures nuance as used by natural English speakers -- is a much better resource than a general purpose dictionary when deciding issues between native speakers.
Give it up, douche bag. If this is the best you can do, you've lost.
We'll have Artificial Intelligence (synthetic life by my standards) I think, long before we're actually engineering proteins and building an original base DNA sequence of our own making and creating the cell to run it from scratch.
I highly doubt it. Think of the relative complexities of a computer capable of simulating the human brain (and by that I mean capable of running several hundred million threads, each of which runs an interruptable O(2^n) algorithm quickly enough to respond to external stimuli) to the relative simplicity of a single cell. I mean, an artificial species wouldn't have to survive very long to be the first example of artificial life.
This is very exciting. I took a class from someone who ended up working at the Venter Institute, so I'm pumped to see that they've made major progress.
On the other hand, the field of Artificial Life is small. Something on the order of a thousand other people are qualified to talk about this intelligently. So my hopes for discussion are pretty much nil.
Well, assuming playing a song causes a surplus in its supply, yes. As you said:
Trust me, I STOPPED listening to the radio because no matter which station I turned on it was the same 20 songs played repeatedly with 1 or 2 'old' songs in there for 'variety'.
There's clearly a surplus in the supply there. More concretely, suppose there's a song you like enough to want to listen to 10 times a day. If it only plays nine times a day on the radio, you might go out and buy a single. If it plays 10 times a day, you aren't going to bother.
It's my opinion that the MARKET *is* speaking, and they say it's not worth them paying $20 for one friggin song they're going to listen to and 11 tracks of pure electronic garbage. Where's the 'value' in $20 a song (on a CD)? They just want to charge more than the market will support and they cry when people find other ways to do things.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. How about me? My karma took a nose dive over the weekend.
Yeah, I'm sick of nerds who think sports are for dumb jocks. Sports are just games. They require just as much strategic and tactical ability as most other games. Just because you have to run doesn't make the players stupid.
Granted, some sports are better than others in this respect. But this is true of games in general. See tic-tac-toe and chess.
You do know that water is composed of oxygen, right?
And hydrogen! Attracted to each other through quantum electrostatic forces! And unless those forces are overcome, that oxygen won't be available for deep sea dwellers to breathe! That was their point!
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
Really? This is a rather trivial consequence of the meanings of the words "time" and "Space-Time".
I think we'd do a lot better to rename it something less associated with it's common useage, such as the Temporal axis. Then you can start to discuss what the properties of that axis are, without running into issues with metaphorical associations.
That's been done. "About Time", by Paul Davies, is a nice survey for lay people. It turns out, outside of weird warping due to moving at relativistic speeds, the "Temporal Axis" behaves a lot like time.
No SHIT!
That is SO INSIGHTFUL! I'm REELING at the POSSIBILITIES!
I did that to a friend of mine when I was in college. The library had an alarm system in place so that books couldn't be taken out of the library without checking them out. A friend of mine worked at the library and gave me a bunch of active strips.
So I carefully unsewed part of my friend's back pack strap, inserted a strip, and sewed it back together. I also threw some strips in random pockets, just so he'd think it might be over once he found them.
You could always tell when he was leaving the library. The alarm would go off and he'd yell "FUCK! EVERY FUCKING TIME!"
I also put one in a friend's shoe. He became quite neurotic.
Just off the top of my head, I'm not a physicist but I like to read. If the universe is expanding then it must be a finite area.
Nope. Think of the real numbers. They go on infinitely in both directions. However, the mapping f(x) = 2x is an expansion. That is to say, the distance between two points increases under the mapping.
(Obviously, the distance between a point a and b is going to be |a-b|. The distance between f(a) and f(b) is |f(a) - f(b)| = |2a - 2b| = 2|a-b|.)
So if movement and expansion uses energy, then since there is finite energy it can not extend to infinity, thus it will stop growing at some point.
"Extending to infinity" is a tricky idea to pin down. No offense, but I don't think you would understand any solid formulation I could give in a reasonable amount of time. Basically, in this context, there is no object that is infinite and a number.
There are billions upon billions of tons of hydrogen and helium in the Sun, but you don't see the price of it being as low as you'd expect. That's because it doesn't affect you,Same with music I illegally copied. If you can't get to it, you can't use it.
But you can, and unless you actually buy every track you illegally copy (and use) as well, you've lowered their monetary value.
People, look at his nickname. He is clearly an AMA shill.
;-)
(I'm joking.
Yes. I worked for a medical bill auditing company that was trying to expand into automated Medicare PD bill review. It is a huge cluster fuck. For one thing, billing codes (as in codes referring to procedures and medications) have only recently started becoming standardized. The governmet sets limits as to how much they're willing to spend on a procedure -- they vary by market. Granted, this is more-or-less fair. There's no reason to screw New York city hospitals with Kansas City rates. But this complicates things too, as a hospital system might own a monopoly on hospital services in a city, and drive prices up in that market.
Fraud is very common, as is double billing or "unbundling" -- some procedures medically require others to be performed, so when the cost of the first is calculated, it includes the cost of the others. Unbundling is basically a sophisticated form of double billing where the the requisite procedures are billed on top of the procedure that required them. Most people don't fight this, thinking that the "big" procedure was just really expensive.
SomethingAwful sucks, desu desu.
d^_-b
But you can, and unless you actually buy every track you illegally copy as well, you've lowered their monetary value.
You're such a lol-cow. I bet you won't be able to resist replying again. Especially since you're obviously wrong about my "glaring errors in logic."
Hint: The Learner's Dictionary's pedagogical purpose is to use simplified definitions to teach English as a second language.
Hint: Numbered lines in dictionary entries are distinct meanings. When you look up a word, and it has multiple entries, you are to understand that it means either the first line, or the second line, or the third line, and so on, depending on the context. That is to say, a dictionary entry can be incomplete and misleading, but still not wrong.
Hint: The lines are numbered according to the most common uses.
Hint: That murder is homicide logically follows from the general definition of 'homicide'.
Hint: The Learner's Dictionary gave a partial answer to the question of what 'homicide' might be in a context, but did not give the general answer. The Learner's Dictionary does not claim to be complete. No dictionary really does, though the OED comes close.
Do you understand now?
So now you're down to arguing that the information is "not complete" instead of inaccurate. The information in the Cambridge dictionary contradicts the information from your sources. That does not constitute a lack of "completeness" simply because it is an "advanced learner's" dictionary, it means that they are directly competing.
Indeed they are. And the pedagogical purpose behind a Learner's Dictionary puts makes it less authoritative than a general purpose dictionary. By the way, the OED agrees with me about 'homicide'.
The fact of the matter is that this is all stemming from you not being able to rise above your disagreement with a choice of words made insiginificant by the fact that the actual message got across, and while you can link to PDFs all day long to argue a case that you cannot formulate yourself, that, as well as your distasteful ad hominem attacks make it pretty clear that if anyone is trolling here, it most certainly and without any objective doubt, is you.
You started the ad hominem attacks. Granted, it was mild, and I shouldn't have escalated them.
No, you're postulating that they're misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries.
d f
I never said they were incorrect. You did. I simply said they weren't an appropriate resource to consult for the purposes of this discussion because they use simplified definitions. The definition of 'homicide' was simplified to the point of incompleteness for pedagogical purposes. I never said murder wasn't homicide. I said not all homicide is murder.
They're advertising that they're including simplified defintions. Simplified defintions are not necessarily incorrect, and they certainly are not when the purpose of the dictionaries is *teaching*, which by definition requires the information to be correct and accurate.
But not complete.
You're desperately trying to argue that a publisher as established as Cambridge Press would compromise their professional integrity and create dictionaries with inaccurate definitions for the purpose of teaching, because it's supposedly easier to teach things that are incorrect. That's just absurdly ridiculous.
No, that's not what I'm trying to argue. Your inability to comprehend basic English leads me to suspect you've used one of their dictionaries for academic purposes.
You're grasping for straws here, and it's pretty sad.
Classic Troll projection. This might prove to be useful to you: http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.p
I'm a mathematician, so I'm naturally slightly arrogant. Sort of. I mean, I think I have a fairly reasonable estimate of my skills in mind, hardly ever get "put in my place" by someone with better skills, know when to cede an argument, etc. But I'm confident when I say something with mathematical content.
When I took the class on the Philosophy of Life (focusing specificially on defining life for the purposes of knowing if an artificial creation is "actually" alive, which involved studies in computation, Turing machines, Wittgenstein, first-order logic, experiment design and statistical interpretation, evolution, etc), I joined the ranks of a very small field. Something like a thousand people in the world are qualified to talk about this stuff intelligently. I don't mean to sound arrogant -- artificial life is very multi-disciplinary in scope, so unless one is familiar with all the involved disciplines, it is difficult to not be trivial.
Now, throw someone with a healthy ego into a field like that, where virtually no one they meet is better at it than they are, and you suddenly have an ego explosion. I went through it, and outgrew it (since I know a lot of people better than me at mathematics, my primary interest).
If the best you can do postulate a something as absurd as that Cambridge Press are intentionally misleading people and including incorrect definitions in their dictionaries, then you're obviously in over your head.
I don't have to postulate it. They advertise it. They specifically say they publish simplified definitions to ease the students' time learning the material. This is the purpose of a Learner's Dictionary. To help people who aren't familiar with the nuances of the language learn gain a rough working knowledge of the language.
Even the Cambridge Dictionary of American English returns the same definition.
Not surprising, since it too is a learner's dictionary. http://www.cambridge.org/us/esl/cdae/ See where it says "English as a Second Language" at the top?
Yes.
:-)
Wolfram still compared negatively to Venter.
If, on average, people bought songs they downloaded and liked with probability p, then the monetary value of the song goes down to (1 - p)*x, where x is the price with no measurable piracy.
Sorry, this is wrong.
Say a label produces x copies of a song for distribution. And that pirates make y copies. Then the monetary value goes down to x/(x + y) times the original price. Mind you, again, making personal copies won't significanly increase inflation. Nobody really expects you to buy copies for your home, car, work, etc. You can move your disc around, or do other morally neutral acts like that.
Morality is the domain of actions -- hurting a person physically, or depriving him of his physical property, for example. What possessions I own, or what music I listen to, cannot possibly be construed as immoral.
I don't know about that. I agree that merely making a copy of something is not immoral. But using that copy can be, depending on whether you acted in good faith when the copy was made. Listening to pirated music can certainly be immoral. By making a copy and using it, you are artificially increasing the supply of said music, without the moral authority to do so. This lowers the monetary value of the music for everybody.
Mind you, this is an empirical observation. If everybody who downloaded songs bought the album containing every song they like, no significant inflation would occur. If, on average, people bought songs they downloaded and liked with probability p, then the monetary value of the song goes down to (1 - p)*x, where x is the price with no measurable piracy.
Stealing is too strong a word to describe it, but you are definitely taking rights away from those that legally have them. I'm of the opinion that my rights are more important than theirs, in this particular case, but I won't delude myself into thinking I'm not hurting anyone.
Yeah, the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary -- a dictionary meant for people learning English as a second language, which therefore can't use language that captures nuance as used by natural English speakers -- is a much better resource than a general purpose dictionary when deciding issues between native speakers.
Give it up, douche bag. If this is the best you can do, you've lost.
We'll have Artificial Intelligence (synthetic life by my standards) I think, long before we're actually engineering proteins and building an original base DNA sequence of our own making and creating the cell to run it from scratch.
I highly doubt it. Think of the relative complexities of a computer capable of simulating the human brain (and by that I mean capable of running several hundred million threads, each of which runs an interruptable O(2^n) algorithm quickly enough to respond to external stimuli) to the relative simplicity of a single cell. I mean, an artificial species wouldn't have to survive very long to be the first example of artificial life.
This is very exciting. I took a class from someone who ended up working at the Venter Institute, so I'm pumped to see that they've made major progress.
On the other hand, the field of Artificial Life is small. Something on the order of a thousand other people are qualified to talk about this intelligently. So my hopes for discussion are pretty much nil.
So...playing a song on a radio lowers its value?
Well, assuming playing a song causes a surplus in its supply, yes. As you said:
Trust me, I STOPPED listening to the radio because no matter which station I turned on it was the same 20 songs played repeatedly with 1 or 2 'old' songs in there for 'variety'.
There's clearly a surplus in the supply there. More concretely, suppose there's a song you like enough to want to listen to 10 times a day. If it only plays nine times a day on the radio, you might go out and buy a single. If it plays 10 times a day, you aren't going to bother.
It's my opinion that the MARKET *is* speaking, and they say it's not worth them paying $20 for one friggin song they're going to listen to and 11 tracks of pure electronic garbage. Where's the 'value' in $20 a song (on a CD)? They just want to charge more than the market will support and they cry when people find other ways to do things.
Indeed. I don't disagree.