Absolutely. There's no reason to have a conference be that secure. Spending an extra five-to-ten seconds per attendee checking badges would be a major disruption in crowd flow. The primary benefit of security at this event was to make the attendees feel special, and the secondary benefit was preventing overwhelming crowds. There's basically no reason to keep out any one person who's not supposed to be there; the panels are advertisements, and the information is as good as public. Security is in place to keep out crowds of people who aren't supposed to be there, and they seemed to do well enough at that.
2. "Many members feel that they have a moral imperative to attempt to push their moral agenda on people who have nothing to do with them"
Democrats do this also with issues like affirmative action and gay marriage.
This is the example you chose? Prohibiting same-sex marriage is an attempt to push your own moral agenda onto someone else. Your grandmother's "Fw:Fw:Fw:B HUSSEIN Obama" email to the contrary, no one is going to force anyone to have a gay marriage. Allowing same-sex marriage won't affect heterosexuals in the slightest.
I remember hearing, back when Cata came out, that Blizzard was disappointed internally with the rate that content was coming out; either they were creating patches and hotfixes and general maintenance, and not making any progress on The Next Big Thing, or they were working on their expansion, and patch updates were suffering. Right around when Cata came out, Blizzard actually split the responsibility into two separate teams; one who was tasked, full time, on the next expansion, and another who was responsible for intermediate patch updates. This looks like the fruit of their labors.
The "problem" is one of critical mass: there's no reason to use a social networking site unless your friends use the same social networking site. Hell, right now, my G+ pretty much acts as an RSS agregator, allowing me to read updates from nerd celebrities that they're also posting to their blogs, twitter, facebook, and probably two or three other places. My friends are on Facebook, so, if I want to talk to them, or organize an event, I have to be on facebook.
We're not looking to discover what early Earth life looked like; we have Earth for that. What we're looking for is life that evolved in a completely isolated environment. Life on earth pretty much all uses DNA and RNA - it was the "fittest" self-replicating pattern, and it's pretty much got a monopoly on Earth. But if we can find life out there that hasn't had to compete with any of the lifeforms on earth, and didn't evolve from any life forms on earth, that would be incredibly interesting. We'd get to see if our set of amino acids were just the solution that life on earth stumbled upon, or if they're so head-and-shoulders above the competition that they will form wherever they can form.
I can't figure out what you mean by "the conditions aren't right under the evolutionary paradigm." Honestly, the sentence parses as gibberish. The basic ideas behind evolution don't even require organic matter. As Dawkins points out in "The Blind Watchmaker," any pattern that is predisposed to create copies of itself will show up in an environment more often than a pattern which is not. If the copying process has the potential to introduce random transcription errors, the it has all it needs to perform a search of the local pattern-space for "best pattern at copying itself." And, with scarce resources, there is an external pressure for these self-replicating patterns to be best at self-replicating. Nothing in here demands a perfectly earth-like environment. Water certainly helps, because all sorts of interesting chemical reactions occur at an impressive rate in aqueous solutions, but if we're looking for life outside of Earth, we need to be prepared to look for life not-quite-as-we-know-it.
What possible reason is there to fund things any other way?
Because, as my next sentence clearly states, you can fund a project based on benefit provided, rather than use. Certain individuals or corporations stand to lose much more if there is inadequate infrastructure, and stand to gain much more from the maintenance of said infrastructure. It is reasonable for them to pay a larger portion of the construction and maintenance of said infrastructure.
Duh. Businesses don't pay tax. 'Tax on business' ends up being paid either by the employees or the customers; so all the class warriors demanding that 'companies should pay more tax!' are really demanding that 'wages should be lower and prices should be higher!'
Well, since we've got corporate personhood, businesses can pay taxes. If you still insist that people are paying those taxes, I supposed it'd be the shareholders, not the employees or customers, directly paying those costs. I'm okay with that.
I'm not concerned about me; I want to ensure that the millions of other Californians are paying their fare share, so that they're properly funding the government. Since it would be prohibitively expensive to audit each and every person who purchase anything off of the internet, it makes more sense to focus the responsibility in one place, much as we put the onus on brick-and-mortar stores to collect sales tax, instead of depending on each consumer to tally their own sales tax and submit it at the end of the year.
Which makes sense, if you think that everything should be funded by those who use it. If, on the other hand, you think that everything should be funded by those who benefit from it, it makes more sense to weigh the tax against the businesses who are able to pull in millions of dollars each year due to the public infrastructure provided for by tax dollars.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
People can peaceably assemble, and it is as unconstitutional as it gets to make a law saying that they can't.
It was, but it was also about the evolution of financial systems. (Most of the stuff with Eliza was about the advent of the stock market, investing systems, and banks' roles in this.) It was also about religion. And pirates. And politics. The Baroque cycle was five or six stories, each with their own themes, all weaved into one universe.
It was, and, if you read the interview, Stephenson says, "No, I was wrong. WoW is where it's at." The problem with Second Life is, once you get over the novelty of having an avatar, it's really just a huge, elaborate chatroom. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has all of the important social aspects: communities, chat, emotes, avatars and it gives you a reason for being there: playing the game. It being a game is really a critical distinction. It pulls all sorts of people in, not just those exclusively interested in forming some sort of online community. It justifies a payment mechanism, and funds servers, development, and advertising. It gives people a common goal that they can complete exclusively in the context of the metaverse.
Stephenson got the "online alternate reality" aspect of it right way before it actually happened; he just didn't see the correlation between "expensive 3D rendering engine" and "games," because, with the state of hardware, it was way, way too expensive to even consider doing at the time.
COROT-2b is much, much larger than earth. It has a mass of approximately 3.31 times that of Jupiter, which itself is 317.83 times that of earth. (COROT-2b) Your estimate is off by about three orders of magnitude, assuming a constant rate of decay.
I imagine that the control would, in fact, be doing nothing for approximately the same amount of time that the other group played Bejeweled. You might want to throw in some other games or cognative activities (DOOM, crossword puzzles, Solitare, etc.) to see if the "action-puzzle" nature of Bejeweled is what causes the feelings of "sharpness," as well.
I see no reason why these things wouldn't cause visible discomfort in your face, as opposed to whatever (skin conductivity/heart rate?) a traditional lie detector measures. The whole point is to mask truths and lies alike, so there is no way to tell them apart.
You assert that HFT does not help the market in any way. I'd be inclined to agree, but that's really just my gut feeling. Can anyone provide any kind of source, one way or the other, saying that HFT is necessary, or good, or terribly evil? I'd like to hear what actual economists think of it, rather than just laymen.
What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
Spending money is literally what drives the economy. Saving money in a bank does make it available for other people to borrow so that they may spend it. The "redistribution of wealth" is the benefit here, though, not the saving itself.
Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years â" yes, some deflation in 2008-2009,
- RELATIVE TO WHAT, YOU DUMBO? Relative to other flawed currencies?:) Well, not to Swiss Franc. Not to Canadian dollar. Not to NZ dollar. Not to Australian Dollar.
Relative to the purchasing power of the dollar a few years ago. A Big Mac, or a loaf of bread, or a new car costs about as many USD today as it did a few years ago. The dollar is stable. A Big Mac costs a wildly different number of BitCoins today than it did a month ago. The BitCoin is unstable.
then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.
- GOOD. Good for those who hold Bitcoins. Bad for those who hold dollars.
Good for those who hold Bitcoins without spending them. Bad for those who spent them. Pretty soon, people will realize that it makes more sense to hold onto Bitcoins than spend them, so no one will spend Bitcoins - they'll hoard them, and spend, say, Dollars instead. This weakens the Bitcoin economy, because no one is spending Bitcoins.
And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
- This Keynesian wants you to be poor, do you understand that?
He wants you to pay 3.50USD for your gas, and BTW, he doesn't think it's high enough. They have a target to make it much higher. But he doesn't want you to pay 10 cents for that gallon.
Absolutely. He wants you to have to pay $15 per gallon in 50 years. He also wants minimum wage to be $45 in 50 years. He wants inflation - the purchasing power of $1 to decrease - and for people to have more dollars. This is good for the economy, because it means that spending money is more sensible than hoarding it. This means that people have to keep on working to get more money, and more economic product is produced.
Going broke doesn't make dumb people smarter. Especially with the app that was developed by a Dermatologist: these people are being told by individuals who represent themselves as experts that the product works. If they do a quick google search for "color light kill acne", they get pages and pages of legitimate-looking results. In the United States, we regulate medical claims specifically because it is unreasonable to expect everyone to hold the level of expertise that would allow them to determine the validity of such claims.
Allowing fraud wouldn't necessarily result in a smarter population, but it would provide a financial reward for being a more clever fraudster.
In this case, you need to raise the tax rate even higher, to make up for lost revenues from "poor-people purchases," which, in turn, is going to end up reaming the dwindling middle class. The problem is, the wealthiest, are still going to come off way ahead with sales tax, no matter how you slice it. Those who can afford to give the highest percentage of their income as taxes are the same people who feel compelled to spend the lowest percentage of their income on taxable goods.
I've never understood why people seem to think it makes the most sense to simplify the tax system to only apply to sales tax. Why wouldn't it be simpler,fairer, to simplify it to apply only to income? Only to net-worth? I simply cannot understand why the self-styled "populist" movement is proposing tax systems which will benefit the top tenth-of-a-percent of the population, to the severe detriment of the lower 95%.
The problem is, if the purchase takes place over the internet, where can it be physically said to take place? The home of the purchaser? The place of business of the seller? The physical location of the server hosting the website, or hosting the credit-card-processing service?
Congress has said that taxes can be collected if the business has a physical presence in the state where the purchase takes place. Amazon tried to get around this by calling all of their places of business in California "subsidies." California is merely closing this loophole.
A sales tax has officially and legally been levied against Amazon. If they try to change the law to make that tax no longer apply, I'd call that an attempt to "dodge" the tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. There's no reason to have a conference be that secure. Spending an extra five-to-ten seconds per attendee checking badges would be a major disruption in crowd flow. The primary benefit of security at this event was to make the attendees feel special, and the secondary benefit was preventing overwhelming crowds. There's basically no reason to keep out any one person who's not supposed to be there; the panels are advertisements, and the information is as good as public. Security is in place to keep out crowds of people who aren't supposed to be there, and they seemed to do well enough at that.
Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. =(
2. "Many members feel that they have a moral imperative to attempt to push their moral agenda on people who have nothing to do with them" Democrats do this also with issues like affirmative action and gay marriage.
This is the example you chose? Prohibiting same-sex marriage is an attempt to push your own moral agenda onto someone else. Your grandmother's "Fw:Fw:Fw:B HUSSEIN Obama" email to the contrary, no one is going to force anyone to have a gay marriage. Allowing same-sex marriage won't affect heterosexuals in the slightest.
I remember hearing, back when Cata came out, that Blizzard was disappointed internally with the rate that content was coming out; either they were creating patches and hotfixes and general maintenance, and not making any progress on The Next Big Thing, or they were working on their expansion, and patch updates were suffering. Right around when Cata came out, Blizzard actually split the responsibility into two separate teams; one who was tasked, full time, on the next expansion, and another who was responsible for intermediate patch updates. This looks like the fruit of their labors.
The "problem" is one of critical mass: there's no reason to use a social networking site unless your friends use the same social networking site. Hell, right now, my G+ pretty much acts as an RSS agregator, allowing me to read updates from nerd celebrities that they're also posting to their blogs, twitter, facebook, and probably two or three other places. My friends are on Facebook, so, if I want to talk to them, or organize an event, I have to be on facebook.
We're not looking to discover what early Earth life looked like; we have Earth for that. What we're looking for is life that evolved in a completely isolated environment. Life on earth pretty much all uses DNA and RNA - it was the "fittest" self-replicating pattern, and it's pretty much got a monopoly on Earth. But if we can find life out there that hasn't had to compete with any of the lifeforms on earth, and didn't evolve from any life forms on earth, that would be incredibly interesting. We'd get to see if our set of amino acids were just the solution that life on earth stumbled upon, or if they're so head-and-shoulders above the competition that they will form wherever they can form.
I can't figure out what you mean by "the conditions aren't right under the evolutionary paradigm." Honestly, the sentence parses as gibberish. The basic ideas behind evolution don't even require organic matter. As Dawkins points out in "The Blind Watchmaker," any pattern that is predisposed to create copies of itself will show up in an environment more often than a pattern which is not. If the copying process has the potential to introduce random transcription errors, the it has all it needs to perform a search of the local pattern-space for "best pattern at copying itself." And, with scarce resources, there is an external pressure for these self-replicating patterns to be best at self-replicating. Nothing in here demands a perfectly earth-like environment. Water certainly helps, because all sorts of interesting chemical reactions occur at an impressive rate in aqueous solutions, but if we're looking for life outside of Earth, we need to be prepared to look for life not-quite-as-we-know-it.
What possible reason is there to fund things any other way?
Because, as my next sentence clearly states, you can fund a project based on benefit provided, rather than use. Certain individuals or corporations stand to lose much more if there is inadequate infrastructure, and stand to gain much more from the maintenance of said infrastructure. It is reasonable for them to pay a larger portion of the construction and maintenance of said infrastructure.
Duh. Businesses don't pay tax. 'Tax on business' ends up being paid either by the employees or the customers; so all the class warriors demanding that 'companies should pay more tax!' are really demanding that 'wages should be lower and prices should be higher!'
Well, since we've got corporate personhood, businesses can pay taxes. If you still insist that people are paying those taxes, I supposed it'd be the shareholders, not the employees or customers, directly paying those costs. I'm okay with that.
I'm not concerned about me; I want to ensure that the millions of other Californians are paying their fare share, so that they're properly funding the government. Since it would be prohibitively expensive to audit each and every person who purchase anything off of the internet, it makes more sense to focus the responsibility in one place, much as we put the onus on brick-and-mortar stores to collect sales tax, instead of depending on each consumer to tally their own sales tax and submit it at the end of the year.
Which makes sense, if you think that everything should be funded by those who use it. If, on the other hand, you think that everything should be funded by those who benefit from it, it makes more sense to weigh the tax against the businesses who are able to pull in millions of dollars each year due to the public infrastructure provided for by tax dollars.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
People can peaceably assemble, and it is as unconstitutional as it gets to make a law saying that they can't.
+1 Funny!
It was, but it was also about the evolution of financial systems. (Most of the stuff with Eliza was about the advent of the stock market, investing systems, and banks' roles in this.) It was also about religion. And pirates. And politics. The Baroque cycle was five or six stories, each with their own themes, all weaved into one universe.
It was, and, if you read the interview, Stephenson says, "No, I was wrong. WoW is where it's at." The problem with Second Life is, once you get over the novelty of having an avatar, it's really just a huge, elaborate chatroom. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has all of the important social aspects: communities, chat, emotes, avatars and it gives you a reason for being there: playing the game. It being a game is really a critical distinction. It pulls all sorts of people in, not just those exclusively interested in forming some sort of online community. It justifies a payment mechanism, and funds servers, development, and advertising. It gives people a common goal that they can complete exclusively in the context of the metaverse.
Stephenson got the "online alternate reality" aspect of it right way before it actually happened; he just didn't see the correlation between "expensive 3D rendering engine" and "games," because, with the state of hardware, it was way, way too expensive to even consider doing at the time.
COROT-2b is much, much larger than earth. It has a mass of approximately 3.31 times that of Jupiter, which itself is 317.83 times that of earth. (COROT-2b) Your estimate is off by about three orders of magnitude, assuming a constant rate of decay.
I imagine that the control would, in fact, be doing nothing for approximately the same amount of time that the other group played Bejeweled. You might want to throw in some other games or cognative activities (DOOM, crossword puzzles, Solitare, etc.) to see if the "action-puzzle" nature of Bejeweled is what causes the feelings of "sharpness," as well.
I see no reason why these things wouldn't cause visible discomfort in your face, as opposed to whatever (skin conductivity/heart rate?) a traditional lie detector measures. The whole point is to mask truths and lies alike, so there is no way to tell them apart.
Stand really close to someone else. The odds that falling satellite debris will hit two people are absolutely dismal.
Yep. TFA puts it at 1:3200, actually.
Yep. TFA puts the odds at about 1:3200, actually.
You assert that HFT does not help the market in any way. I'd be inclined to agree, but that's really just my gut feeling. Can anyone provide any kind of source, one way or the other, saying that HFT is necessary, or good, or terribly evil? I'd like to hear what actual economists think of it, rather than just laymen.
What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
- that's the problem. The entire fiscal policy of USA destroys the value of savings by inflation and this is what destroys the economy.
Spending money is literally what drives the economy. Saving money in a bank does make it available for other people to borrow so that they may spend it. The "redistribution of wealth" is the benefit here, though, not the saving itself.
Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years â" yes, some deflation in 2008-2009,
- RELATIVE TO WHAT, YOU DUMBO? Relative to other flawed currencies? :) Well, not to Swiss Franc. Not to Canadian dollar. Not to NZ dollar. Not to Australian Dollar.
Relative to the purchasing power of the dollar a few years ago. A Big Mac, or a loaf of bread, or a new car costs about as many USD today as it did a few years ago. The dollar is stable. A Big Mac costs a wildly different number of BitCoins today than it did a month ago. The BitCoin is unstable.
then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.
- GOOD. Good for those who hold Bitcoins. Bad for those who hold dollars.
Good for those who hold Bitcoins without spending them. Bad for those who spent them. Pretty soon, people will realize that it makes more sense to hold onto Bitcoins than spend them, so no one will spend Bitcoins - they'll hoard them, and spend, say, Dollars instead. This weakens the Bitcoin economy, because no one is spending Bitcoins.
And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
- This Keynesian wants you to be poor, do you understand that?
He wants you to pay 3.50USD for your gas, and BTW, he doesn't think it's high enough. They have a target to make it much higher. But he doesn't want you to pay 10 cents for that gallon.
Absolutely. He wants you to have to pay $15 per gallon in 50 years. He also wants minimum wage to be $45 in 50 years. He wants inflation - the purchasing power of $1 to decrease - and for people to have more dollars. This is good for the economy, because it means that spending money is more sensible than hoarding it. This means that people have to keep on working to get more money, and more economic product is produced.
Going broke doesn't make dumb people smarter. Especially with the app that was developed by a Dermatologist: these people are being told by individuals who represent themselves as experts that the product works. If they do a quick google search for "color light kill acne", they get pages and pages of legitimate-looking results. In the United States, we regulate medical claims specifically because it is unreasonable to expect everyone to hold the level of expertise that would allow them to determine the validity of such claims.
Allowing fraud wouldn't necessarily result in a smarter population, but it would provide a financial reward for being a more clever fraudster.
In this case, you need to raise the tax rate even higher, to make up for lost revenues from "poor-people purchases," which, in turn, is going to end up reaming the dwindling middle class. The problem is, the wealthiest, are still going to come off way ahead with sales tax, no matter how you slice it. Those who can afford to give the highest percentage of their income as taxes are the same people who feel compelled to spend the lowest percentage of their income on taxable goods.
I've never understood why people seem to think it makes the most sense to simplify the tax system to only apply to sales tax. Why wouldn't it be simpler,fairer, to simplify it to apply only to income? Only to net-worth? I simply cannot understand why the self-styled "populist" movement is proposing tax systems which will benefit the top tenth-of-a-percent of the population, to the severe detriment of the lower 95%.
The problem is, if the purchase takes place over the internet, where can it be physically said to take place? The home of the purchaser? The place of business of the seller? The physical location of the server hosting the website, or hosting the credit-card-processing service?
Congress has said that taxes can be collected if the business has a physical presence in the state where the purchase takes place. Amazon tried to get around this by calling all of their places of business in California "subsidies." California is merely closing this loophole.
A sales tax has officially and legally been levied against Amazon. If they try to change the law to make that tax no longer apply, I'd call that an attempt to "dodge" the tax.