No, it's not racist to simply point it out. It is, however, racist to suggest the following:
"We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."
In other words, he's suggesting that we should punish 13-year-old black males more severely than white males of the same age. Now, you may argue that he was really suggesting that people who have been raised on the streets should be more culpable than those who haven't, but if that were really the case, why use the phrase "black males" at all? And, moreover, why exactly is someone raised on the streets more culpable than someone raised in the suburbs? I would argue that the opposite is true: someone raised in the suburbs has far more opportunities than someone raised on the streets.
First and foremost, Ron Paul has stated that he is against the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. There's no way that he'd be able to repeal them as President, but he could certainly direct the Justice Department to not enforce them (a la Bush).
In the more general sense, his pseudo-libertarian policies essentially neglect the fact that a corporation is a legal entity and not really a person. People have begun to forget the fact that the original idea behind a corporation was to be a mutually beneficial contract between government (i.e., the people) and individuals. In exchange for exemption from liability and other protections, you have to pay additional taxes and abide by certain rules. Ron Paul would abolish many of these rules are minimize the taxes, so what benefit is society left with? None!
Let me restate this: despite what Paul (and many others) tell you, you do not have the right to the legal benefits of a corporation. You certainly should have the right to spend money in a way that you see fit, and you have the right to assemble with whomever you wish, but you do not have the right to be granted limited liability for your actions. If you are going to remove the rules and taxes associated with corporations, you must also remove the legal benefits. A true libertarian would recognize this.
Ok, I grant you that often what politicians say and do is unrelated. But Obama doesn't take money from lobbyists. He was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, so he knows and respects the principles of the document. His voting record turns up no instances wherein he voted against civil liberties. He sponsored the bipartisan Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill, which requires that the federal government put all of its earmarks and pork into a searchable website. He recognized what was happening in Iraq from the beginning, and is ensuring that we don't escalate things with Iran. Specifically, what actions has he taken to make you believe that he is one of "those people?"
I think that Obama would be different. Just look at the things he was saying in the last debate. The most telling moment was when he basically tried to bring the threat of terrorism into perspective by saying that America, the most powerful country in the world, need not give up civil liberties in order to fight a few guys living in caves. If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was posting on Slashdot.
To be fair, all ex-presidents are pretty much set for life financially: professional speaking can be quite lucrative for them. Bill Clinton earned over $10 million from speaking engagements last year alone.
Class action suits benefit the law firms and not anyone else.
I guess that depends on how you look at class actions. If you look at them as a way for the victims to be compensated for their financial losses, then they aren't beneficial. If you look at them as a way for a group of people to punish a company when the government fails to do so, they're great. With the Justice Department under its current management, there is very little recourse that a consumer has against a misbehaving coroporation, and class actions are essential to justice.
Here's the problem with that line of reasoning. Things such as wheelchair ramps don't cost a whole lot of money, but it's still enough that any business would not want to pay it. You see, despite what some of the rabid free-marketeers will tell you, unless you sell wheelchairs, the number of disabled people is usually not sufficient to justify the cost of a wheelchair ramp. Moreover, the number of people who would care enough to "vote with their dollars" is insubstantial at best. For a perfect example, look at Wal-Mart. Their atrocious business practices are very well-documented, but how much does this really affect their bottom line? Not by very much: people just don't care, and are willing to compromise their principles for low prices.
As a result, businesses would have no incentive to add a ramp if none already exists, and disabled people wouldn't be able to patronize most businesses. Now, as a human being living in a society, I do not want this to be the case. I do not want the disabled people in my society to be treated this way. Luckily, most people in my society agree with me, and there is a way for a society to collectively make rules for itself. They're called laws.
But unless you do, how do you know that maybe biology couldn't make your discovery better, or lead your research into new directions? You don't- because you've specialized too much- and so have everybody else, the guy writing the paper on the transformation chemistry of DNA isn't stooping to link to papers on undergraduate biology either. But that can be rectified with the web- EVERYTHING can be available to EVERYBODY without worrying about cost. We don't need to limit science to specialty anymore.
The problem isn't one of physical resources, it's one of temporal and mental resources. Just as you say, practically everything I would need to know about biology, I can find on the web. Textbooks are easily found on P2P networks, course notes are readily available, and I can access any journal I want through my university. (Of course, this is ignoring all laboratory experience, but that is a whole other issue.) Why, then, am I not a biology expert? Because every person has a finite capacity for information, and because information takes a finite amount of time to absorb, and I have a finite time on this planet. I choose not to be proficient in biology so that I can be more proficient in my area, and because I'm not all that interested in biology.
Even if I was interested in learning about transformation chemistry of DNA, I wouldn't expect to find the basics of biology in the paper. You seem to be arguing that journal articles should contain nicely-packaged summaries of the field, but I think you're missing my point. That's not the goal of journal articles. Nicely-packaged summaries of mature fields already exist: they're called textbooks! Likewise, nicely-packaged summaries of younger fields also exist in the form of review articles. The purpose of journal articles is to inform and enlighten people who are already experts (or, in the case of grad students such as myself, are on their way to becoming experts).
You wouldn't expect a high school algebra textbook to cover the basics of counting, would you? Why should you expect someone with a Ph.D., who has studied their field for at least eight years, to explain the basics of their field? It's the same difference in number of years in school!
What you're proposing about assumptions is unproductive and impossible. In my field (semiconductor lasers and photonics), if every assumption was expounded upon, each paper would be thousands of pages long. I suspect this is true for all but the newest of fields. Journal articles need to assume that the reader already has a general familiarity with the material, because the target audience has this knowledge. For example, if I am writing a paper, I am not going to explain undergraduate quantum mechanics, solid state physics, or electromagnetics. Not only would that reflect poorly on me (as it would seem patronizing to the typical reader), but it would also be a poor use of my time.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can get the background required to understand journal papers. The most obvious way is to attend a university and study the material. Yes, it costs money and time, but that's the price you pay. If that doesn't work for you, there is plenty of reading material available. You can start by looking at undergraduate textbooks at your local college library. If those don't help you, move on to graduate textbooks. If you need more, then you can look at course graduate course lecture notes (many of which you can find for free online). If you want the most direct background, review articles are the way to go. If even those don't help, look up the author's past papers. If a person outside a field wants to understand a paper, then it is that person's responsibility to read the background material.
Regarding "pay-to-read studies," the system is not as broken as you make it out to be. Practically everyone who wants to have access to a journal can get it. Universities and research-oriented companies subscribe, so all you have to do is walk into a library and peruse them yourself.
That may be true, but all physics has progressed in the same way. In fact, what you're complaining about is the essence of why physicists cannot truly write "proofs." When developing new theories, all you can hope to do it show that it encompasses the old theory and (hopefully) is more illuminating than it.
For example:
1. Newton's Law of Gravitation predicted that planets obeyed the rules of epicycles, but had far more explanatory power.
2. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics predicted Newton's Laws, but allowed them to be more easily applied to more complicated systems, such as electromagnetic ones.
3. Gauss's Law for electric fields correctly predicts Coulomb's Law, but can be applied to more systems. Ampere's law (sans displacement current) correctly predicts the Biot-Savart Law. Maxwell's equations (with the displacement current) predict all the other prior observations, and showed that the speed of electromagnetic radiation was the same as the speed of light.
4. General relativity predicted classical mechanics, but was better able to describe fast, heavy things.
5. Quantum mechanics predicted classical mechanics in the other limit, but was better able to describe small, light things.
6. Quantum field theory predicts quantum mechanics, but is better able to describe fields.
And now, these physicists are saying that the many-worlds interpretation correctly predicts quantum mechanics. At the same time, it solves the measurement problem, so if it is true, it is better able to describe the universe than quantum mechanics (which is, as it stands, logically inconsistent). This in no way diminishes the accomplishment made, in the same way that the accomplishments of Newton, Lagrange, Hamilton, Gauss, Ampere, Maxwell, Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and Feynman are not diminished by their method.
I'm no expert on QM, but I'd say that it'd have to be uncountably infinite. If, for example, you did a position measurement on a free particle in a Gaussian superposition of momentum states, you could get any position value corresponding to a real number.
Occam's razor is not a law of the universe. Though it is a philosophical law underpinning the philosophy of science, it would be a cardinal sin to invoke it to make predictions. For example, it would be a lot easier for me to say, "Gravity is magic" than it is for me to list the 26 or so axioms underpinning classical mechanics. (By my count, there are four axioms of propositional calculus, four predicate calculus axioms, eight equality axioms, seven ZFC axioms, two rules of inference, and Newton's force law.)
You know, I've always wondered why many self-proclaimed libertarian types are so against regulating emissions. Like it or not, we ultimately all share the same air and water. There's simply no getting around that fact. Each of us owns about one six-billionth of the atmosphere and oceans. Therefore, what gives corporations the right to dump their pollutants into my air? Should the government likewise allow local companies to dump their trash onto my land? That would clearly be an egregious violation of property rights, so what is the difference?
I am of the opinion that no entity should be allowed to dump its garbage into or onto my property. If they are going to do so, they should pay to remove it, either through taxes or by writing me a check.
Personally, I stick to games with endings because I have a tendency to obsess over things, especially video games. Once a game takes hold of me, nothing can tear me away from it (to my detriment). If I played a MMORPG, there's no doubt in my mind that it would eventually ruin my life.
Incidentally, this is also why I don't drink, and why I can only buy enough food to last for three days at a time. Alcoholism runs in my family, and frankly, I don't have the self-control to prevent myself from becoming an alcoholic. Likewise, if I have any more food than three days' worth, then I'll eat it all in the first three days anyway, so it's better for me to not even have the opportunity.
I call bullshit, why are they getting this when their expenses are significantly lower and it isn't part of the money given out to everybody who bought Windows?
I know that it's popular on Slashdot to vent against lawyers who do class action suits, but come on. You said it yourself: the law firm incurred $8 million in expenses to see this thing through. Yes, they ended up earning $75 million (because they won), but how much would they have gotten if they lost? Nothing; in fact, should they have lost, the judge could've ordered them to pay Microsoft's fees (which are likely even higher). Eight million is quite a large amount of money to gamble, especially considering that the lawyer in this case has her own law firm, and probably paid those expenses out-of-pocket. All told, the market's decided that a 30% contingency is fair for such a high risk, and I'm inclined to agree.
Moreover, I'd like to know how you'd "fix" the system as it stands. Obviously, you cannot ban class actions or limit the damages, because in many ways they're the only recourse that a bunch of people screwed by a corporation have, without the government (the largest class of them all) stepping in. You cannot place any limits on class action lawyers' pricing structures, either, because that'll have the effect of decreasing the number of class actions we have. No lawyer is going to take such an expensive case on a 10% contingency.
The only way that I can see is to have the government step in more often when a company has screwed people. Unfortunately, the DoJ hasn't really been prosecuting misbehaving corporations since early 2001: I wonder why?
If you're going to use something physical as currency, energy is a far better thing to back it with. Think about it: it's conserved, everything costs it to make it, and it has intrinsic value to all of us. (The gold standard, by comparison, is idiotic. Gold has very little use, can be created and destroyed, and is completely arbitrary. When the conquistadors stole gold from the natives and returned it to Spain, they were not really contributing to the European economy: gold only had value because they said it had value. Energy has value because it can be used to do things.)
I just loved when John Bolton went on the Daily Show and tried to convince people that, in a democracy, elected officials should only listen to those people who elected them. When Jon Stewart mentioned that Lincoln surrounded himself with people of all sorts of viewpoints (including his enemies), Bolton then claimed that Jon was "historically wrong," and even claimed that Jon was against "democratic theory." The very next day, Jon brought in a historian who had literally written books about Lincoln and asserted that Jon was 100% correct. It was a rare glimpse into the mindset of the Bushites.
I can't believe this is true! Why did no one tell me that Slashdot has a Spanish version? Seriously, looking at it is like looking at Bizarro Slashdot.
Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".
Right...but the Xbox and Xbox 360 have cost Microsoft billions of dollars, not to mention the fact that neither console have ever been the market leader.
The rice represents a chaotic system whose trajectory is impossible to predict over a long time span. The bathtub represents the overall statistical behavior of the system. It's a decent analogy. A better analogy, IMO, is the behavior of individual gas molecules in a container. In a classical universe (that is, even ignoring quantum mechanics), if you knew the starting positions and momenta of every gas molecule in that container, you would not be able to reliably predict the position of those molecules after a certain amount of time.
Why? Even the tiniest, infinitesimal error in your measured starting positions will eventually diverge and produce completely different behavior. Of course, such measurement error is inevitable: the particles occupy a space of real numbers, and in general, a mathematically exact measurement would require infinite bandwidth, requiring the existence of signals that have existed for an infinite amount of time. The Big Bang happened a finite time ago, so you cannot have an exact measurement of position. Therefore, it is literally impossible for a measurer to predict the behavior of those particles at an arbitrary time in the future.
Now, does that mean that the entire field of statistical mechanics is false? Clearly it is not: we can reliably compute statistical quantities such as internal energy, pressure, temperature, and volume. Meteorologists predict the short-term chaotic behavior of the atmosphere, while climatologists predict the long-term non-chaotic behavior of the atmosphere.
Why do they suck less than health insurance? You have to be able to answer that to incorporate profit as part of your diagnosis.
There's a huge difference between the retail market and health care market: price elasticity. The market for health care is the ideal example of a perfectly inelastic demand curve: if you don't buy the product, you will die. Nothing is more vital, except perhaps food and water. (Fortunately, food and water are easily made accessible to everyone.) Essentially, if a group of people can completely control the means of production, they have the ultimate monopoly, one in which you don't even have the choice of forgoing the product.
In fact, I would claim that even calling the health care industry a "market" is a bastardization of the concept, since a market requires that people have the option of non-participation. This is simply not true of the health care industry. Of course, those profiting from it have made it appear to be at least a pseudo-market, and as a result, our health care costs are increasing exponentially.
And the truth is, I was watching the Republican debate on Saturday, and I was deeply saddened by what I saw. I literally cringed when Giuliani started to talk about market-based solutions (like health savings accounts), because the rules of the marketplace simply do not apply to a pseudo-market. The fact is that our costs as a percentage of GDP are steadily rising as our standard of care falls. I know that the Democrats are going to push for socialized medicine, but I am very afraid that the Republicans will be able to derail those plans by appealing to a naive mantra of lowering taxes. I wonder how high our health care expenditures need to get before people will let anything be done about it. 20% of our GDP? 25%? 40? Where does it end?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not racist to simply point it out. It is, however, racist to suggest the following:
"We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."
In other words, he's suggesting that we should punish 13-year-old black males more severely than white males of the same age. Now, you may argue that he was really suggesting that people who have been raised on the streets should be more culpable than those who haven't, but if that were really the case, why use the phrase "black males" at all? And, moreover, why exactly is someone raised on the streets more culpable than someone raised in the suburbs? I would argue that the opposite is true: someone raised in the suburbs has far more opportunities than someone raised on the streets.
First and foremost, Ron Paul has stated that he is against the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. There's no way that he'd be able to repeal them as President, but he could certainly direct the Justice Department to not enforce them (a la Bush).
In the more general sense, his pseudo-libertarian policies essentially neglect the fact that a corporation is a legal entity and not really a person. People have begun to forget the fact that the original idea behind a corporation was to be a mutually beneficial contract between government (i.e., the people) and individuals. In exchange for exemption from liability and other protections, you have to pay additional taxes and abide by certain rules. Ron Paul would abolish many of these rules are minimize the taxes, so what benefit is society left with? None!
Let me restate this: despite what Paul (and many others) tell you, you do not have the right to the legal benefits of a corporation. You certainly should have the right to spend money in a way that you see fit, and you have the right to assemble with whomever you wish, but you do not have the right to be granted limited liability for your actions. If you are going to remove the rules and taxes associated with corporations, you must also remove the legal benefits. A true libertarian would recognize this.
Ok, I grant you that often what politicians say and do is unrelated. But Obama doesn't take money from lobbyists. He was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, so he knows and respects the principles of the document. His voting record turns up no instances wherein he voted against civil liberties. He sponsored the bipartisan Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill, which requires that the federal government put all of its earmarks and pork into a searchable website. He recognized what was happening in Iraq from the beginning, and is ensuring that we don't escalate things with Iran. Specifically, what actions has he taken to make you believe that he is one of "those people?"
I think that Obama would be different. Just look at the things he was saying in the last debate. The most telling moment was when he basically tried to bring the threat of terrorism into perspective by saying that America, the most powerful country in the world, need not give up civil liberties in order to fight a few guys living in caves. If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was posting on Slashdot.
To be fair, all ex-presidents are pretty much set for life financially: professional speaking can be quite lucrative for them. Bill Clinton earned over $10 million from speaking engagements last year alone.
Class action suits benefit the law firms and not anyone else.
I guess that depends on how you look at class actions. If you look at them as a way for the victims to be compensated for their financial losses, then they aren't beneficial. If you look at them as a way for a group of people to punish a company when the government fails to do so, they're great. With the Justice Department under its current management, there is very little recourse that a consumer has against a misbehaving coroporation, and class actions are essential to justice.
Here's the problem with that line of reasoning. Things such as wheelchair ramps don't cost a whole lot of money, but it's still enough that any business would not want to pay it. You see, despite what some of the rabid free-marketeers will tell you, unless you sell wheelchairs, the number of disabled people is usually not sufficient to justify the cost of a wheelchair ramp. Moreover, the number of people who would care enough to "vote with their dollars" is insubstantial at best. For a perfect example, look at Wal-Mart. Their atrocious business practices are very well-documented, but how much does this really affect their bottom line? Not by very much: people just don't care, and are willing to compromise their principles for low prices.
As a result, businesses would have no incentive to add a ramp if none already exists, and disabled people wouldn't be able to patronize most businesses. Now, as a human being living in a society, I do not want this to be the case. I do not want the disabled people in my society to be treated this way. Luckily, most people in my society agree with me, and there is a way for a society to collectively make rules for itself. They're called laws.
But unless you do, how do you know that maybe biology couldn't make your discovery better, or lead your research into new directions? You don't- because you've specialized too much- and so have everybody else, the guy writing the paper on the transformation chemistry of DNA isn't stooping to link to papers on undergraduate biology either. But that can be rectified with the web- EVERYTHING can be available to EVERYBODY without worrying about cost. We don't need to limit science to specialty anymore.
The problem isn't one of physical resources, it's one of temporal and mental resources. Just as you say, practically everything I would need to know about biology, I can find on the web. Textbooks are easily found on P2P networks, course notes are readily available, and I can access any journal I want through my university. (Of course, this is ignoring all laboratory experience, but that is a whole other issue.) Why, then, am I not a biology expert? Because every person has a finite capacity for information, and because information takes a finite amount of time to absorb, and I have a finite time on this planet. I choose not to be proficient in biology so that I can be more proficient in my area, and because I'm not all that interested in biology.
Even if I was interested in learning about transformation chemistry of DNA, I wouldn't expect to find the basics of biology in the paper. You seem to be arguing that journal articles should contain nicely-packaged summaries of the field, but I think you're missing my point. That's not the goal of journal articles. Nicely-packaged summaries of mature fields already exist: they're called textbooks! Likewise, nicely-packaged summaries of younger fields also exist in the form of review articles. The purpose of journal articles is to inform and enlighten people who are already experts (or, in the case of grad students such as myself, are on their way to becoming experts).
You wouldn't expect a high school algebra textbook to cover the basics of counting, would you? Why should you expect someone with a Ph.D., who has studied their field for at least eight years, to explain the basics of their field? It's the same difference in number of years in school!
What you're proposing about assumptions is unproductive and impossible. In my field (semiconductor lasers and photonics), if every assumption was expounded upon, each paper would be thousands of pages long. I suspect this is true for all but the newest of fields. Journal articles need to assume that the reader already has a general familiarity with the material, because the target audience has this knowledge. For example, if I am writing a paper, I am not going to explain undergraduate quantum mechanics, solid state physics, or electromagnetics. Not only would that reflect poorly on me (as it would seem patronizing to the typical reader), but it would also be a poor use of my time.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can get the background required to understand journal papers. The most obvious way is to attend a university and study the material. Yes, it costs money and time, but that's the price you pay. If that doesn't work for you, there is plenty of reading material available. You can start by looking at undergraduate textbooks at your local college library. If those don't help you, move on to graduate textbooks. If you need more, then you can look at course graduate course lecture notes (many of which you can find for free online). If you want the most direct background, review articles are the way to go. If even those don't help, look up the author's past papers. If a person outside a field wants to understand a paper, then it is that person's responsibility to read the background material.
Regarding "pay-to-read studies," the system is not as broken as you make it out to be. Practically everyone who wants to have access to a journal can get it. Universities and research-oriented companies subscribe, so all you have to do is walk into a library and peruse them yourself.
That may be true, but all physics has progressed in the same way. In fact, what you're complaining about is the essence of why physicists cannot truly write "proofs." When developing new theories, all you can hope to do it show that it encompasses the old theory and (hopefully) is more illuminating than it.
For example:
1. Newton's Law of Gravitation predicted that planets obeyed the rules of epicycles, but had far more explanatory power.
2. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics predicted Newton's Laws, but allowed them to be more easily applied to more complicated systems, such as electromagnetic ones.
3. Gauss's Law for electric fields correctly predicts Coulomb's Law, but can be applied to more systems. Ampere's law (sans displacement current) correctly predicts the Biot-Savart Law. Maxwell's equations (with the displacement current) predict all the other prior observations, and showed that the speed of electromagnetic radiation was the same as the speed of light.
4. General relativity predicted classical mechanics, but was better able to describe fast, heavy things.
5. Quantum mechanics predicted classical mechanics in the other limit, but was better able to describe small, light things.
6. Quantum field theory predicts quantum mechanics, but is better able to describe fields.
And now, these physicists are saying that the many-worlds interpretation correctly predicts quantum mechanics. At the same time, it solves the measurement problem, so if it is true, it is better able to describe the universe than quantum mechanics (which is, as it stands, logically inconsistent). This in no way diminishes the accomplishment made, in the same way that the accomplishments of Newton, Lagrange, Hamilton, Gauss, Ampere, Maxwell, Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and Feynman are not diminished by their method.
I'm no expert on QM, but I'd say that it'd have to be uncountably infinite. If, for example, you did a position measurement on a free particle in a Gaussian superposition of momentum states, you could get any position value corresponding to a real number.
Occam's razor is not a law of the universe. Though it is a philosophical law underpinning the philosophy of science, it would be a cardinal sin to invoke it to make predictions. For example, it would be a lot easier for me to say, "Gravity is magic" than it is for me to list the 26 or so axioms underpinning classical mechanics. (By my count, there are four axioms of propositional calculus, four predicate calculus axioms, eight equality axioms, seven ZFC axioms, two rules of inference, and Newton's force law.)
You know, I've always wondered why many self-proclaimed libertarian types are so against regulating emissions. Like it or not, we ultimately all share the same air and water. There's simply no getting around that fact. Each of us owns about one six-billionth of the atmosphere and oceans. Therefore, what gives corporations the right to dump their pollutants into my air? Should the government likewise allow local companies to dump their trash onto my land? That would clearly be an egregious violation of property rights, so what is the difference? I am of the opinion that no entity should be allowed to dump its garbage into or onto my property. If they are going to do so, they should pay to remove it, either through taxes or by writing me a check.
Question: does this evil Slashdot have a goatee? Otherwise, it cannot really be taken seriously.
Personally, I stick to games with endings because I have a tendency to obsess over things, especially video games. Once a game takes hold of me, nothing can tear me away from it (to my detriment). If I played a MMORPG, there's no doubt in my mind that it would eventually ruin my life.
Incidentally, this is also why I don't drink, and why I can only buy enough food to last for three days at a time. Alcoholism runs in my family, and frankly, I don't have the self-control to prevent myself from becoming an alcoholic. Likewise, if I have any more food than three days' worth, then I'll eat it all in the first three days anyway, so it's better for me to not even have the opportunity.
I simply do not trust the men in funny hats.
Neither does Curious George.
I call bullshit, why are they getting this when their expenses are significantly lower and it isn't part of the money given out to everybody who bought Windows?
I know that it's popular on Slashdot to vent against lawyers who do class action suits, but come on. You said it yourself: the law firm incurred $8 million in expenses to see this thing through. Yes, they ended up earning $75 million (because they won), but how much would they have gotten if they lost? Nothing; in fact, should they have lost, the judge could've ordered them to pay Microsoft's fees (which are likely even higher). Eight million is quite a large amount of money to gamble, especially considering that the lawyer in this case has her own law firm, and probably paid those expenses out-of-pocket. All told, the market's decided that a 30% contingency is fair for such a high risk, and I'm inclined to agree.
Moreover, I'd like to know how you'd "fix" the system as it stands. Obviously, you cannot ban class actions or limit the damages, because in many ways they're the only recourse that a bunch of people screwed by a corporation have, without the government (the largest class of them all) stepping in. You cannot place any limits on class action lawyers' pricing structures, either, because that'll have the effect of decreasing the number of class actions we have. No lawyer is going to take such an expensive case on a 10% contingency.
The only way that I can see is to have the government step in more often when a company has screwed people. Unfortunately, the DoJ hasn't really been prosecuting misbehaving corporations since early 2001: I wonder why?
I should clarify: I only buy (thermodynamic) free energy. :-)
If you're going to use something physical as currency, energy is a far better thing to back it with. Think about it: it's conserved, everything costs it to make it, and it has intrinsic value to all of us. (The gold standard, by comparison, is idiotic. Gold has very little use, can be created and destroyed, and is completely arbitrary. When the conquistadors stole gold from the natives and returned it to Spain, they were not really contributing to the European economy: gold only had value because they said it had value. Energy has value because it can be used to do things.)
can you imagine how different things would be on the world stage today if al gore was in the white house?
Yes, I can. (Watch out for glaciers!)
I just loved when John Bolton went on the Daily Show and tried to convince people that, in a democracy, elected officials should only listen to those people who elected them. When Jon Stewart mentioned that Lincoln surrounded himself with people of all sorts of viewpoints (including his enemies), Bolton then claimed that Jon was "historically wrong," and even claimed that Jon was against "democratic theory." The very next day, Jon brought in a historian who had literally written books about Lincoln and asserted that Jon was 100% correct. It was a rare glimpse into the mindset of the Bushites.
I can't believe this is true! Why did no one tell me that Slashdot has a Spanish version? Seriously, looking at it is like looking at Bizarro Slashdot.
Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".
Right...but the Xbox and Xbox 360 have cost Microsoft billions of dollars, not to mention the fact that neither console have ever been the market leader.
The rice represents a chaotic system whose trajectory is impossible to predict over a long time span. The bathtub represents the overall statistical behavior of the system. It's a decent analogy. A better analogy, IMO, is the behavior of individual gas molecules in a container. In a classical universe (that is, even ignoring quantum mechanics), if you knew the starting positions and momenta of every gas molecule in that container, you would not be able to reliably predict the position of those molecules after a certain amount of time.
Why? Even the tiniest, infinitesimal error in your measured starting positions will eventually diverge and produce completely different behavior. Of course, such measurement error is inevitable: the particles occupy a space of real numbers, and in general, a mathematically exact measurement would require infinite bandwidth, requiring the existence of signals that have existed for an infinite amount of time. The Big Bang happened a finite time ago, so you cannot have an exact measurement of position. Therefore, it is literally impossible for a measurer to predict the behavior of those particles at an arbitrary time in the future.
Now, does that mean that the entire field of statistical mechanics is false? Clearly it is not: we can reliably compute statistical quantities such as internal energy, pressure, temperature, and volume. Meteorologists predict the short-term chaotic behavior of the atmosphere, while climatologists predict the long-term non-chaotic behavior of the atmosphere.
Why do they suck less than health insurance? You have to be able to answer that to incorporate profit as part of your diagnosis.
There's a huge difference between the retail market and health care market: price elasticity. The market for health care is the ideal example of a perfectly inelastic demand curve: if you don't buy the product, you will die. Nothing is more vital, except perhaps food and water. (Fortunately, food and water are easily made accessible to everyone.) Essentially, if a group of people can completely control the means of production, they have the ultimate monopoly, one in which you don't even have the choice of forgoing the product.
In fact, I would claim that even calling the health care industry a "market" is a bastardization of the concept, since a market requires that people have the option of non-participation. This is simply not true of the health care industry. Of course, those profiting from it have made it appear to be at least a pseudo-market, and as a result, our health care costs are increasing exponentially.
And the truth is, I was watching the Republican debate on Saturday, and I was deeply saddened by what I saw. I literally cringed when Giuliani started to talk about market-based solutions (like health savings accounts), because the rules of the marketplace simply do not apply to a pseudo-market. The fact is that our costs as a percentage of GDP are steadily rising as our standard of care falls. I know that the Democrats are going to push for socialized medicine, but I am very afraid that the Republicans will be able to derail those plans by appealing to a naive mantra of lowering taxes. I wonder how high our health care expenditures need to get before people will let anything be done about it. 20% of our GDP? 25%? 40? Where does it end?