But The Plants! All the plants would die. In fact, the ridiculously negative carbon equilibrium so established would SUCK THE CARBON FROM OUR VERY BONES! (Carbon is a relatively major component of bone tissue, the calcium phosphate component aside.)
I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features. The only reason you "need" all that is because the banks created all these funny rules so that they could introduce more and more products and services.
While some of these product distinctions are due to things like differing tax treatments for different types of investments, most of these things basically boil down to banks attempting to differentiate their products and because different models give different values to certain types of investments.
For instance, there is no inherent theoretical reason, according to the conventional risk-return gaussian models, why bonds should be treated differently from stocks with a suitably adjusted risk premium in the expected returns. But in actual fact, these things are very different: Bonds have a guaranteed return, and stocks could lose significant quantities of their value in a severe market downturn.
For that thing, it's actually a good reason we have all these different types of investment products, because they do have different risk profiles, and to maximally reduce your specific risks you'll want to load up on some and avoid others. It's when someone starts telling you that 'this high-yield investment is just as safe as a government bond' that you should get suspicious.
Most other fields seem pretty rife with incompetent individuals as well. Maybe it's just that in our field, some hiring managers have the sense to test for it.
My understanding of antitrust law is that they are to prevent companies with monopolies from using their monopoly power to hurt competition in other lines. That is, to use their monopoly dominance in one field to bludgeon their competitors in another field. For example, using one's dominance in the operating system market to take over the web browser market.
I'm not sure I see how google can do that based on this yahoo deal. I can see how it gives them a huge, dominating presence in the advertising market, but I don't see how they are abusing that dominance to hurt competition. They're simply offering the best deal in town to advertisers, and advertisers are generally taking it. Who's being harmed?
and before somebody says "it will never happen" this is only a logical extension of red-eye removal.
No it isn't. This tech makes the scene different from what it would look like to someone who was there. Red-eye removal makes the picture look like it would to someone there. Unless your eyes do actually glow red...
Keep your eyes open for "environmentalists" that are against nuclear power. Those people have other interests in mind. "Environmentalism" is just their tool.
While this is certainly true for some anti-nuclear environmentalists, let's not see (general) conspiracies where it isn't warranted. As a great person once said, never attribute to malice what can as easily be explained by stupidity[or ignorance].
Kurzweil's father died of heart disease (runs in the family) when he was in his mid fifties, and kurzweil was diagnosed with early stages of diabetes when he was in his early forties. Today, likely because of his health regimen, he is very fit and does not clinically have diabetes. He doesn't claim that his current regimen is gonna keep him alive forever, just to keep him alive longer, hopefully to the point where medical advances will take him the rest of the way. Say what you will about his predictions, but appears to be in very good health for a 60 year old.
That's fine if all you need to do is synthesize existing information. If you need to distill new knowledge from something which hasn't yet been digitized, patience is generally necessary.
As a capitalist myself... I'd attempt to start having the government MAKE money rather than take it via taxes.
Private enterprise is supposed to provide the society with what the government can't, and vice versa. I.E. The government is supposed to do the things which society needs but which aren't profitable. The government isn't there to compete with private enterprise. What you describe sounds more like fascism than capitalism.
reimburse college loans for students carrying 3.2GPA or higher
I Would suggest instead to reimburse tuition (for anybody) progressively, such that the better grade-point average you get, the more tuition you get back. That way students have incentive to do better no matter where they are at grade-wise. With a hard 3.2 limit, students with 3.2+ have no incentive to do better, and students so far below 3.2 that they have no chance of reaching that goal won't bother neither.
If humans don't spread beyond this planet, we fail.
That really depends on how one defines failure. One could just as easily define human existence as meaningfully tied to that of the earth (which is certainly true of all individual human existences up to this point), that we should cherish the planet which we are a part of and make our relationship with it as good as it can be.
The purpose of life is to survive.
Really? Mere survival doesn't seem very meaningful in and of itself. I mean, surviving just for the sake of surviving seems a pretty miserable existence to me. If life is actually important, I would expect a more important role for it than just that. Mere survival certainly isn't the purpose of my life, I have bigger things in mind.
We should be at war with universe*... "conquering" new places that are deemed inhabitable and making them habitable
Why must we be at war with everything? The universe is big enough to have lots of different forms of matter and energy, life is just one of many. Also note that 'life' is a rather hazily defined concept, even (if not especially) within scientific circles. So saying we must conquer the universe with life is, in turn, not clearly defined.
We shouldn't have to justify our ambitions economically... Lets just do something because its awesome.
This is a false dilemma. Economics doesn't tell you what you should value, it is the study of how things of value(be they money, technology, happiness or whatever you want) are distributed and maximized. First you decide what goal is 'awesome', and then you apply economic theory to determine the most effective/effecient way of achieving that goal.
I remember from my population genetics class that separate populations need only one interbreeding event very 1000 generations or so in order prevent them drifting apart into reproductive incompatibility. The prof gave the example that the (very long lived) sequoia red wood trees, which are found in both asia and north america, are still capable of interbreeding despite having been separated for millions of years.
Of course, the amount of time required for populations to become reproductively incompatible would be augmented by the rate of evolution of those populations, so the figure above is only for a baseline situation. High rates of mutation and heavy selection pressures could speed up the process.
Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant
This never happens to me, and to think it would seems to betray a misunderstanding of how google's page-rank algorithm works. If something is irrelevant, nobody will link to it, and if nobody links to it, it's not gonna show up in the top search results.
Or maybe me and this guy just aren't googling for the same things.
If he's being geniune in that statement, that means they went into a multi-million dollar venture without first checking to make sure the venture had a chance in hell of, ya know, actually being profitable. If they don't have that basic due diligence down, I don't have a lot of confidence in them being able to make their new scheme work.
considering whether I'd rather have Howard Stern or Oprah
Dude, if those are two tastes you are deciding between, you must be really fucked up. Or married. I tend to glom them into the same category, but alas...
The only mention of lasers in TFA is about an incident several months ago, that involved the alleged illumination (not destruction) of a US military spacecraft.
Slashdot Mirror
Just throw some GFP in there. Anyone who wants to see if it's artificial can just turn the lights out.
But The Plants! All the plants would die. In fact, the ridiculously negative carbon equilibrium so established would SUCK THE CARBON FROM OUR VERY BONES! (Carbon is a relatively major component of bone tissue, the calcium phosphate component aside.)
While some of these product distinctions are due to things like differing tax treatments for different types of investments, most of these things basically boil down to banks attempting to differentiate their products and because different models give different values to certain types of investments.
For instance, there is no inherent theoretical reason, according to the conventional risk-return gaussian models, why bonds should be treated differently from stocks with a suitably adjusted risk premium in the expected returns. But in actual fact, these things are very different: Bonds have a guaranteed return, and stocks could lose significant quantities of their value in a severe market downturn.
For that thing, it's actually a good reason we have all these different types of investment products, because they do have different risk profiles, and to maximally reduce your specific risks you'll want to load up on some and avoid others. It's when someone starts telling you that 'this high-yield investment is just as safe as a government bond' that you should get suspicious.
Google just wants people to use their search and click on their ads on phones
They want both, and the two are synergistic.
Most other fields seem pretty rife with incompetent individuals as well. Maybe it's just that in our field, some hiring managers have the sense to test for it.
My understanding of antitrust law is that they are to prevent companies with monopolies from using their monopoly power to hurt competition in other lines. That is, to use their monopoly dominance in one field to bludgeon their competitors in another field. For example, using one's dominance in the operating system market to take over the web browser market.
I'm not sure I see how google can do that based on this yahoo deal. I can see how it gives them a huge, dominating presence in the advertising market, but I don't see how they are abusing that dominance to hurt competition. They're simply offering the best deal in town to advertisers, and advertisers are generally taking it. Who's being harmed?
No it isn't. This tech makes the scene different from what it would look like to someone who was there. Red-eye removal makes the picture look like it would to someone there. Unless your eyes do actually glow red ...
While this is certainly true for some anti-nuclear environmentalists, let's not see (general) conspiracies where it isn't warranted. As a great person once said, never attribute to malice what can as easily be explained by stupidity[or ignorance].
Kurzweil's father died of heart disease (runs in the family) when he was in his mid fifties, and kurzweil was diagnosed with early stages of diabetes when he was in his early forties. Today, likely because of his health regimen, he is very fit and does not clinically have diabetes. He doesn't claim that his current regimen is gonna keep him alive forever, just to keep him alive longer, hopefully to the point where medical advances will take him the rest of the way. Say what you will about his predictions, but appears to be in very good health for a 60 year old.
The bottom line is that skill is distributed on a normal curve[citation needed]
That's fine if all you need to do is synthesize existing information. If you need to distill new knowledge from something which hasn't yet been digitized, patience is generally necessary.
Private enterprise is supposed to provide the society with what the government can't, and vice versa. I.E. The government is supposed to do the things which society needs but which aren't profitable. The government isn't there to compete with private enterprise. What you describe sounds more like fascism than capitalism.
I Would suggest instead to reimburse tuition (for anybody) progressively, such that the better grade-point average you get, the more tuition you get back. That way students have incentive to do better no matter where they are at grade-wise. With a hard 3.2 limit, students with 3.2+ have no incentive to do better, and students so far below 3.2 that they have no chance of reaching that goal won't bother neither.
That really depends on how one defines failure. One could just as easily define human existence as meaningfully tied to that of the earth (which is certainly true of all individual human existences up to this point), that we should cherish the planet which we are a part of and make our relationship with it as good as it can be.
The purpose of life is to survive.
Really? Mere survival doesn't seem very meaningful in and of itself. I mean, surviving just for the sake of surviving seems a pretty miserable existence to me. If life is actually important, I would expect a more important role for it than just that. Mere survival certainly isn't the purpose of my life, I have bigger things in mind.
We should be at war with universe* ... "conquering" new places that are deemed inhabitable and making them habitable
Why must we be at war with everything? The universe is big enough to have lots of different forms of matter and energy, life is just one of many. Also note that 'life' is a rather hazily defined concept, even (if not especially) within scientific circles. So saying we must conquer the universe with life is, in turn, not clearly defined.
This is a false dilemma. Economics doesn't tell you what you should value, it is the study of how things of value(be they money, technology, happiness or whatever you want) are distributed and maximized. First you decide what goal is 'awesome', and then you apply economic theory to determine the most effective/effecient way of achieving that goal.
Of course, the amount of time required for populations to become reproductively incompatible would be augmented by the rate of evolution of those populations, so the figure above is only for a baseline situation. High rates of mutation and heavy selection pressures could speed up the process.
This never happens to me, and to think it would seems to betray a misunderstanding of how google's page-rank algorithm works. If something is irrelevant, nobody will link to it, and if nobody links to it, it's not gonna show up in the top search results.
Or maybe me and this guy just aren't googling for the same things.
...some sort of directory, or maybe a search engine. I hear the google mini is pretty good for these kinds of applications.
The government is already involved in this market. They sold the the cell providers a government mandated monopoly on the cell phone spectrums.
If he's being geniune in that statement, that means they went into a multi-million dollar venture without first checking to make sure the venture had a chance in hell of, ya know, actually being profitable. If they don't have that basic due diligence down, I don't have a lot of confidence in them being able to make their new scheme work.
His prediction is about 10 years too late.
Dude, if those are two tastes you are deciding between, you must be really fucked up. Or married. I tend to glom them into the same category, but alas ...
Ah, but did it experience ego death?
An advantage of my proposal is that it is even more deliciously ironic than the main proposal.
That would solve both of their biggest problems.
I'm dead serious.