"The obvious thing is to mine it out, but wouldn't lightening the mass of the moon have a (probably quite bad) effect on it's tidal effects to the earth?"
You are joking, aren't you?
And who the heck modded that "interesting"? Unless, of course, the "interesting" part is looking for how the heck are we going to mine to an extent that makes anything about a tiny fraction of a tiny scratch out of a whole damn body as massive as the Moon.
"every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want..."
Maybe. But they take even greater effort in determining what *they* want. Sometimes that's related to users's desires, sometimes (i.e.: lock-in, closed-source distribution license) not.
No doubt. My question is if it is *your* friend too.
"doing it himself *without* all the extra parts Dell insisted they would only sell him a computer with was what cut the price in half."
Of course yes. Because he needed a somehow special-purpose PC (hex-core, without other bells and whistles) but went to a generalist builder that earns its money out of selling bazillions of take-it-or-leave-it computers. Even taking into account the variety that Dell offers for its computers on his web, you don't go to Dell and ask for a one-off computer.
How is it that "hex-core processors" is nowadays "Generic PCs For Corporate Use" as it was asked?
"By going with Newegg and building it myself over a weekend, the price was cut in a little more than half."
Hey! That's a good idea for Dell guys! They should build their PCs on weekends without paying people to do the work; this way they'll be able to cut costs almost by half!
Now: did you took into account what will happen with spare parts? With maintenance down the road?
"We do scientific number crunching, but don't have any GPGPU code right now"
So, basically you needed a somehow special purpose computer and felt strange that a generalist PC builder had problems with that. Somehow I don't find that so surprising.
"Actually, people did get hurt. People died, it just wasn't anybody you know, so it doesn't matter, right?"
No. It doesn't matter *here* because they didn't die because of a nuclear incident. They died because a plane crashed and some conventional chemical explosive, well, exploded.
"You stated that by increasing the protein or fat in our diet we categorically "will develop cardiovascular illness""
Yes, and with due details for such a broad assertion, I still support it.
"I provided an example of where this has not happened"
Point being, that you provided an example quite away from the average we were talking about and *even then* it in fact reduces live expentancy by cardiovascular damage (what do you think is first cause of death among adult Inuits? Heart disease and stroke, with high levels -above average Canadian population, of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes).
"and further pointed out that in the last hundred thousand years that our (homo-sapiens) diet has been low in carbs."
Which is obviously, utterly and enormously false.
Basic diet of 'Homo sapiens' from late Neolithic onwards is *heavily* based on carbs. Hell, diet for more that 2/3 of *current* world population is still heavily based on carbs. What do you think allowed 'H. sapiens' to become sedentary -and thus, grow great populations, but cereals???
"what is your baseline for fat/protien/carb percentage to postulate such a thing?"
It really depends, within some wide margins. As an easy to spell average for a full grown adult, 15~35% from fat, 10~15% from proteins, 50~75% from carbohidrates is widely accepted and it's within the ranges found in communities shown to have healthy habits (as measured by life expectancy and life quality metrics). Certainly, it can vary a lot depending on age and live styles (mainly sendentariness/physical activity)
"How do your baseline percentages compare to our diets of the last hundred thousand years(IE, low carb)?"
Define "our". I'm not from USA, but even for USA, its usual diet has not been low in carbs in the last century but quite on the contrary, based on bread, potatoes and legumes/pod vegetables (of course, with due variances), all of them, high on carbs. It only started to change after IIWW, and then only on middle/upper classes. Coincidentally it's from IIWW with more sedentarism and changes on diet that cardiovascular diseases and obesity started to be a problem in the USA.
"How do you reconcile the fact that populations with high fat/protein diets (IE, Inuits) traditionally do not have these problems you mention?"
You could have brougth to the table martians too, don't you?
On one hand, don't you think Inuits to live in quite extreme and isolated conditions that could force some selective pressure on their metabolic regimes and physiology? If we were talking about, say, average lung capacity or hematic recounts, would you put on the table Andinian or Tibetian people as examples?
On the other hand, do not think that their (forced by their environment) diet doesn't come at a cost: Inuit's life expectancy on Inuit territories (so Inuits that, on average are more or less on traditional Inuit diets) is about 64 to 67 y.o. depending on sources, which is about 15 years less!!! than average Canadians. If you want another more or less apple-to-apple comparation, Greenland Inuit men life expectancy was 60.3 years by 1998 while Scotish men was 72.5, over 12 years more.
"In fact, we aren't: medical research has added fairly little to our life expectancy. Most increase in life expectancy is due to improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc."
You are aware that improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc. are direct consecuence of suggestions supported by medical research, aren't you?
"I skimmed TFA, and it's important to note that scientific base research (for new pills, procedures, etc.) is not the issue here. This is about studies, i.e. field testing of large numbers of patients, and the (wrong, causation != correlation, etc.) interpretations that are made public afterwards. Funny enough, until recently, criticising the official results of medical studies was seen as conspiracy theory by those in power in medical circles."
I wasn't surprised by this. My anecdotal experience is that medicine graduates make for awful scientists just in the ways you state. Then, after a sight to their curriculum it comes to no surprise: they are mainly trained to diagnose and treat illness (and that's, of course, a good thing: that's what we want them for), not into proper research practices.
"Reduce the primary source of fuel so that it will use the secondary source of fuel. It's really that simple."
No, it isn't.
The (almost) only direct source of "fuel" for the organism is sugar (glucose), full stop*1.
Anything else the body ingests or stores has to be reduced to sugar (usually by means of the krebs cycle) prior to be "burned".
While this is a very basic simplification, this, and the fact that the blood can carry a limited level of sugar at a time, is what explains, at a whole body level, everything else.
Like...: * Since you can only burn sugar, sugar-equivalent contents is all that counts for weight imballance (of course, within limits: you can't just stop your ingestion of, say, oligoelements). That's what we really talk about when we talk about food calories. * If you directly eat sugar (glucose), the sugar will be immediatly burn, but since your blood has limited sugar carriage capacity, you should be continously eating like a hummingbird to sustain that, so you usually just can't eat sugar in excess. * If you eat carbs, they'll be transformed into sugar and burned. Any carb in excess will be stored as glucogen in your liver. If there's still carbs in excess once your liver can't hold any more glucogen, it will be transformed into fat and stored under your skin. * If you eat fat, it will be transformed into sugar and burned. Any fat in excess will be stored under your skin unless you are so low in glucogen (which usually won't happen) that part of the fat is transformed into glucogen and stored in the liver. * If you eat proteins, they'll be used for structural development (like muscle mass). Usually, anything in excess will be trashed away, unless you are very low in sugar, carbs and fat intake (it usually doesn't happen) in which case, it will be uneffitiently transformed into sugar and then, burned. * To explain for long term weigth, all that's needed is accounting for your ballance between ingested calories and burned calories: if you eat more calories than you burn, your weight increases; if you eat less, you lose weight.
For a practical example: If you eat less carbs and more fat to the point that daily calories stay the same, You Will Not Lose Weight (but in the long run you will develop cardiovascular illness). If you eat less carbs and more proteins to the point that daily calories stay the same, You Will Not Lose Weight (but in the long run you will destroy your liver).
Given the ballance between ingress and burn, you can obviously go two (complimentary) routes:
1) Eat less calories. Sustaining a varied and ballanced diet, only eating less, is the way any sensible nutritionist will suggest since it's the easiest to do properly long term and the easiest to lead to you changing your habits. But as long as you stay to the First Principle "eat less calories", and within sensible limits, you will get it right.
2) Burn more calories. That's where exercise and rising your basal metabolism come into account. Aerobic exercise is an obvious recomendation, but other less obvious things like lowering your home thermostat 3~4 degrees in winter will have it's effect too. Again, it's not what you do, but what you achieve with regards of burned calories.
Everything else about diets is about making acceptable for you to eat less calories/burn more calories (like, unless you are a kind of iron-man you won't have the will for strengh training like weight lifting unless you go heavy on sugars; the same with aerobics, like long distance running or bycicling unless you go heavy on carbohidrates, or you'll probably break your diet if you are just told "eat exactly the same as you did, only on third the quantities", so you are offered a diet with much less calories but about the same or even more volume so you feel satiated, or you'll probably will abandon a diet if you don't see fast results at least at the beginning, so you are offered a diet very low in calories for the first weeks so you fastly see your efforts are
"It's not because casinos are large and powerful that they get their way. That law has been there forever, I can kick you out of my house because [basically any reason]"
Ture. But your home is not a Casino.
"Casinos (as private property) can kick you out for the same reasons"
Casinos are not "just" private property; they are "public places of business" and, while regulated by state law, the general consensus and the way it is usually put down (because it's just the sensible way to put it down) is that a public place of business should allow admittance for people that is plainly engaged to the business in cuestion, like it's the case for a gambling house and somebody just gambling (by "just" I mean he's not drunk, making disorders, being afroamerican, etc.).
Casinos might get advantage of the "rules of conduct for allowed admitance" if they wanted to behave as other business do (like, say, dressing white tie on an old fashioned private club) and explicitly tell something on the lines of "ladies and gentelmen may be denied admittance on the fact of winning their bets above the local owner's expectations". Of course, that would have pretty bad press so, instead, they strongarm the local legislation so they can do what it is not generally allowed to other places of public business on more palatable arguments.
"so can mcdonalds"
No, McDonalds certainly can't do that. If you go clean, on your senses, without making disorders, well, if you just happen to be a normal person acting like a normal person and go into a McDonald they are forced by law to sell you a McWhatever if they can sell them on normal circumstances to anyone else. That's the burden they acquired when they opened to the public.
"Well, given the number of people besides myself who say "I bought this stock because I support this company" I'd say your 100% claim is false."
How many companies pay dividends nowadays? Are you telling me you are buying stocks as if it were charity, as lost money offered to the company? But if it is not for the dividends it is for the rise of the stock price itself, which is speculation, pure and simple.
"I've never understood this. What if the asteroid is spinning, like they pretty well ALL are? There is no "day" or "night" side."
It's easy: you paint the WHOLE asteroid so you change its albedo. But albedo only counts if there's light to be reflected, doesn't it? It is not as if the part "in the night" gets a "counter effect" that compensates that of the sunny side.
"Cost of insurance >>> (cost of all you own * risk of total burn-down)"
No; it's more like Cost of insurance > (cost of all you own * risk of total burn-down) or a competing insurance company would outbid the first one.
So it's ">>>" versus ">".
The other problem is that insurance works just exactly as any other free market endevour. On the offering party, greed trying to suck money from the pockets of the customer. Something like an astoroid nemesis is the whole world versus the universe and you can't suck money out of the universe (yet).
Yes, there would be private companies wanting to make money building the device, but you still would have to convince their 7000 million customers to pay for the service. This is, almost by definition, what governments are for.
"As far as I know the only kinetic energy involved is that of the tiny masses moving under magnetic propulsion"
Given that kinetic energy grows linearly with mass but quadratically with speed even under Netwon Laws and given that those little particles run at speeds near light I wouldn't be surprised if their kinetic energy were a bit over what you think it should. In fact, for a mass particle, no matter how little it is, it's kinetic energy grows up to infinite as it approaches light speed so, theoretically, you could build an accelerator that would make a single subatomic particle to hold kinetic energy well over that of the trains.
"Actually this rule protects you as much as it protects the big guys."
No, they doesn't, only they seem to.
"I mean who do you think would really win if computers were unleashed to do their worse. You whos most complex rules are if price less then X sell stock or the banks who have a team of mathematicians who spend all day figuring out the best way to trick the market into wild swings?"
And that's exactly why. These companies are there because thousands of "john does" went into the trade market either directly or indirectly. What would happen in your case? First time, the little guys lose. Second time, the little guys lose. Third time, the little guys take their money off the system in stampede. Given that about 70% of all the trade at New York is moved by fast trading companies (and, as a general matter, all kind of speculative companies one way or other) that are sucking millions out of it, the big losers would be those companies that would have the chance of sucking money out of the citizens' pockets no more.
That's why they carefully tune the rules so on one hand the big fishes suck money out of middle class as fast as possible given out the chance for the minion to counter attack but on the other hand they don't allow for the worst greed to rise that would kill the goose of the golden eggs.
Somehow I'm not comfortable with the situation tuned so some companies are allowed to suck my savings "just" at max rate.
"If the intent was not to move the price without seeking a fill, however, the securities law says that is wrong."
How is it any different than "touching" a stock to find the lower price it will sell and/or the highest price it will buy? You are not interested on buying/selling at any of the intermediate prices you find, either.
But, somehow, it's OK when done by Goldman Sachs and illegal otherwise.
These guys were perfectly decided to buy stocks at the price they asked them for and they were perfectly decided to assume the risks of their bet (having to "eat" their stocks if the other player didn't want to re-buy them). Again, how is it that this is OK when it's a big fish doing it but illegal otherwise?
"Buying and selling from yourself to manipulate the price is actually illegal."
a) The fact that it is illegal makes it not illegit. b) It obviously seems to be illegal only depending on who is the one doing it.
Practically all trading will manipulate the price. Practically all trading will be focused on price alterations they are part of. Basically 70% of NY stocks trading are there to take direct advantage of the price manipulations they themselves introduce. How is it that when it's Goldamn Sachs it's OK but when it is an unknown Norewegian it's illegal?
"Casinos in vegas can do exactly that and the main ratinalle is that they are private property."
Which is exactly what I said: no matter why they purportedly do, the real fact is that they do it because they are powerful enough to get their way into laws.
"But it has exactly nothing to do with Norwegians playing the stock market."
It is exactly the same: when Goldman Sachs does it, it's the way it's meant to work; when a Norwegian John Doe does it, it becomes illegal -for him.
"His analogy isn't bad at all; he's likening the computer to the gun, aka, the tool employed by the human in the situation."
Except the analogy "forgets" about *who* is holding and triggering the weapon implying the stupidness of someone triggering a weapon trying to hide his guiltiness. Here it is the other one the one that holds the weapon and (stupidly) decides when to trigger it.
They had an idea of how the computer would change the prices but that does not make them responsible for what the computer did. vs They had an idea of how the gun would change the head of that person but that does not make them responsible for what the gun did.
Can it be any more stupid?
It's more: they had an idea of how some other poker gambler on the table would lead their bets, but that does not make them responsible for what the other gambler did.
Slashdot Mirror
"The obvious thing is to mine it out, but wouldn't lightening the mass of the moon have a (probably quite bad) effect on it's tidal effects to the earth?"
You are joking, aren't you?
And who the heck modded that "interesting"? Unless, of course, the "interesting" part is looking for how the heck are we going to mine to an extent that makes anything about a tiny fraction of a tiny scratch out of a whole damn body as massive as the Moon.
"try using photos of the Eiffel Tower for commercial gain and see where it gets you."
I don't think there's any problem making commercial gain from Eiffer Tower. It's the night lights what could get you in troubles.
"every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want..."
Maybe. But they take even greater effort in determining what *they* want. Sometimes that's related to users's desires, sometimes (i.e.: lock-in, closed-source distribution license) not.
"Reading comprehension is your friend."
No doubt. My question is if it is *your* friend too.
"doing it himself *without* all the extra parts Dell insisted they would only sell him a computer with was what cut the price in half."
Of course yes. Because he needed a somehow special-purpose PC (hex-core, without other bells and whistles) but went to a generalist builder that earns its money out of selling bazillions of take-it-or-leave-it computers. Even taking into account the variety that Dell offers for its computers on his web, you don't go to Dell and ask for a one-off computer.
"we were getting hex-core processors"
How is it that "hex-core processors" is nowadays "Generic PCs For Corporate Use" as it was asked?
"By going with Newegg and building it myself over a weekend, the price was cut in a little more than half."
Hey! That's a good idea for Dell guys! They should build their PCs on weekends without paying people to do the work; this way they'll be able to cut costs almost by half!
Now: did you took into account what will happen with spare parts? With maintenance down the road?
"We do scientific number crunching, but don't have any GPGPU code right now"
So, basically you needed a somehow special purpose computer and felt strange that a generalist PC builder had problems with that. Somehow I don't find that so surprising.
"HE-implosion based nuclear bombs require incredibly precise timing of the explosives to compress the core to criticality"
So incredibly precise timing that it was nothing but almost mass production by 1950.
1950 technology: so precise you can't believe it.
"Actually, people did get hurt. People died, it just wasn't anybody you know, so it doesn't matter, right?"
No. It doesn't matter *here* because they didn't die because of a nuclear incident. They died because a plane crashed and some conventional chemical explosive, well, exploded.
"I think you missed my point."
Certainly that might be the case. Let's see.
"You stated that by increasing the protein or fat in our diet we categorically "will develop cardiovascular illness""
Yes, and with due details for such a broad assertion, I still support it.
"I provided an example of where this has not happened"
Point being, that you provided an example quite away from the average we were talking about and *even then* it in fact reduces live expentancy by cardiovascular damage (what do you think is first cause of death among adult Inuits? Heart disease and stroke, with high levels -above average Canadian population, of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes).
"and further pointed out that in the last hundred thousand years that our (homo-sapiens) diet has been low in carbs."
Which is obviously, utterly and enormously false.
Basic diet of 'Homo sapiens' from late Neolithic onwards is *heavily* based on carbs. Hell, diet for more that 2/3 of *current* world population is still heavily based on carbs. What do you think allowed 'H. sapiens' to become sedentary -and thus, grow great populations, but cereals???
"what is your baseline for fat/protien/carb percentage to postulate such a thing?"
It really depends, within some wide margins. As an easy to spell average for a full grown adult, 15~35% from fat, 10~15% from proteins, 50~75% from carbohidrates is widely accepted and it's within the ranges found in communities shown to have healthy habits (as measured by life expectancy and life quality metrics). Certainly, it can vary a lot depending on age and live styles (mainly sendentariness/physical activity)
"How do your baseline percentages compare to our diets of the last hundred thousand years(IE, low carb)?"
Define "our". I'm not from USA, but even for USA, its usual diet has not been low in carbs in the last century but quite on the contrary, based on bread, potatoes and legumes/pod vegetables (of course, with due variances), all of them, high on carbs. It only started to change after IIWW, and then only on middle/upper classes. Coincidentally it's from IIWW with more sedentarism and changes on diet that cardiovascular diseases and obesity started to be a problem in the USA.
"How do you reconcile the fact that populations with high fat/protein diets (IE, Inuits) traditionally do not have these problems you mention?"
You could have brougth to the table martians too, don't you?
On one hand, don't you think Inuits to live in quite extreme and isolated conditions that could force some selective pressure on their metabolic regimes and physiology? If we were talking about, say, average lung capacity or hematic recounts, would you put on the table Andinian or Tibetian people as examples?
On the other hand, do not think that their (forced by their environment) diet doesn't come at a cost: Inuit's life expectancy on Inuit territories (so Inuits that, on average are more or less on traditional Inuit diets) is about 64 to 67 y.o. depending on sources, which is about 15 years less!!! than average Canadians. If you want another more or less apple-to-apple comparation, Greenland Inuit men life expectancy was 60.3 years by 1998 while Scotish men was 72.5, over 12 years more.
"In fact, we aren't: medical research has added fairly little to our life expectancy. Most increase in life expectancy is due to improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc."
You are aware that improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc. are direct consecuence of suggestions supported by medical research, aren't you?
"I skimmed TFA, and it's important to note that scientific base research (for new pills, procedures, etc.) is not the issue here. This is about studies, i.e. field testing of large numbers of patients, and the (wrong, causation != correlation, etc.) interpretations that are made public afterwards. Funny enough, until recently, criticising the official results of medical studies was seen as conspiracy theory by those in power in medical circles."
I wasn't surprised by this. My anecdotal experience is that medicine graduates make for awful scientists just in the ways you state. Then, after a sight to their curriculum it comes to no surprise: they are mainly trained to diagnose and treat illness (and that's, of course, a good thing: that's what we want them for), not into proper research practices.
"Reduce the primary source of fuel so that it will use the secondary source of fuel. It's really that simple."
No, it isn't.
The (almost) only direct source of "fuel" for the organism is sugar (glucose), full stop*1.
Anything else the body ingests or stores has to be reduced to sugar (usually by means of the krebs cycle) prior to be "burned".
While this is a very basic simplification, this, and the fact that the blood can carry a limited level of sugar at a time, is what explains, at a whole body level, everything else.
Like...:
* Since you can only burn sugar, sugar-equivalent contents is all that counts for weight imballance (of course, within limits: you can't just stop your ingestion of, say, oligoelements). That's what we really talk about when we talk about food calories.
* If you directly eat sugar (glucose), the sugar will be immediatly burn, but since your blood has limited sugar carriage capacity, you should be continously eating like a hummingbird to sustain that, so you usually just can't eat sugar in excess.
* If you eat carbs, they'll be transformed into sugar and burned. Any carb in excess will be stored as glucogen in your liver. If there's still carbs in excess once your liver can't hold any more glucogen, it will be transformed into fat and stored under your skin.
* If you eat fat, it will be transformed into sugar and burned. Any fat in excess will be stored under your skin unless you are so low in glucogen (which usually won't happen) that part of the fat is transformed into glucogen and stored in the liver.
* If you eat proteins, they'll be used for structural development (like muscle mass). Usually, anything in excess will be trashed away, unless you are very low in sugar, carbs and fat intake (it usually doesn't happen) in which case, it will be uneffitiently transformed into sugar and then, burned.
* To explain for long term weigth, all that's needed is accounting for your ballance between ingested calories and burned calories: if you eat more calories than you burn, your weight increases; if you eat less, you lose weight.
For a practical example:
If you eat less carbs and more fat to the point that daily calories stay the same, You Will Not Lose Weight (but in the long run you will develop cardiovascular illness).
If you eat less carbs and more proteins to the point that daily calories stay the same, You Will Not Lose Weight (but in the long run you will destroy your liver).
Given the ballance between ingress and burn, you can obviously go two (complimentary) routes:
1) Eat less calories. Sustaining a varied and ballanced diet, only eating less, is the way any sensible nutritionist will suggest since it's the easiest to do properly long term and the easiest to lead to you changing your habits. But as long as you stay to the First Principle "eat less calories", and within sensible limits, you will get it right.
2) Burn more calories. That's where exercise and rising your basal metabolism come into account. Aerobic exercise is an obvious recomendation, but other less obvious things like lowering your home thermostat 3~4 degrees in winter will have it's effect too. Again, it's not what you do, but what you achieve with regards of burned calories.
Everything else about diets is about making acceptable for you to eat less calories/burn more calories (like, unless you are a kind of iron-man you won't have the will for strengh training like weight lifting unless you go heavy on sugars; the same with aerobics, like long distance running or bycicling unless you go heavy on carbohidrates, or you'll probably break your diet if you are just told "eat exactly the same as you did, only on third the quantities", so you are offered a diet with much less calories but about the same or even more volume so you feel satiated, or you'll probably will abandon a diet if you don't see fast results at least at the beginning, so you are offered a diet very low in calories for the first weeks so you fastly see your efforts are
"It's not because casinos are large and powerful that they get their way. That law has been there forever, I can kick you out of my house because [basically any reason]"
Ture. But your home is not a Casino.
"Casinos (as private property) can kick you out for the same reasons"
Casinos are not "just" private property; they are "public places of business" and, while regulated by state law, the general consensus and the way it is usually put down (because it's just the sensible way to put it down) is that a public place of business should allow admittance for people that is plainly engaged to the business in cuestion, like it's the case for a gambling house and somebody just gambling (by "just" I mean he's not drunk, making disorders, being afroamerican, etc.).
Casinos might get advantage of the "rules of conduct for allowed admitance" if they wanted to behave as other business do (like, say, dressing white tie on an old fashioned private club) and explicitly tell something on the lines of "ladies and gentelmen may be denied admittance on the fact of winning their bets above the local owner's expectations". Of course, that would have pretty bad press so, instead, they strongarm the local legislation so they can do what it is not generally allowed to other places of public business on more palatable arguments.
"so can mcdonalds"
No, McDonalds certainly can't do that. If you go clean, on your senses, without making disorders, well, if you just happen to be a normal person acting like a normal person and go into a McDonald they are forced by law to sell you a McWhatever if they can sell them on normal circumstances to anyone else. That's the burden they acquired when they opened to the public.
"Well, given the number of people besides myself who say "I bought this stock because I support this company" I'd say your 100% claim is false."
How many companies pay dividends nowadays? Are you telling me you are buying stocks as if it were charity, as lost money offered to the company? But if it is not for the dividends it is for the rise of the stock price itself, which is speculation, pure and simple.
"I've never understood this. What if the asteroid is spinning, like they pretty well ALL are? There is no "day" or "night" side."
It's easy: you paint the WHOLE asteroid so you change its albedo. But albedo only counts if there's light to be reflected, doesn't it? It is not as if the part "in the night" gets a "counter effect" that compensates that of the sunny side.
"Cost of insurance >>> (cost of all you own * risk of total burn-down)"
No; it's more like Cost of insurance > (cost of all you own * risk of total burn-down) or a competing insurance company would outbid the first one.
So it's ">>>" versus ">".
The other problem is that insurance works just exactly as any other free market endevour. On the offering party, greed trying to suck money from the pockets of the customer. Something like an astoroid nemesis is the whole world versus the universe and you can't suck money out of the universe (yet).
Yes, there would be private companies wanting to make money building the device, but you still would have to convince their 7000 million customers to pay for the service. This is, almost by definition, what governments are for.
"it is because babies like the oo sound"
I'd bet it is their mothers those that like it, more than the babies.
Humm... any grant for my study?
"As far as I know the only kinetic energy involved is that of the tiny masses moving under magnetic propulsion"
Given that kinetic energy grows linearly with mass but quadratically with speed even under Netwon Laws and given that those little particles run at speeds near light I wouldn't be surprised if their kinetic energy were a bit over what you think it should. In fact, for a mass particle, no matter how little it is, it's kinetic energy grows up to infinite as it approaches light speed so, theoretically, you could build an accelerator that would make a single subatomic particle to hold kinetic energy well over that of the trains.
"Actually this rule protects you as much as it protects the big guys."
No, they doesn't, only they seem to.
"I mean who do you think would really win if computers were unleashed to do their worse. You whos most complex rules are if price less then X sell stock or the banks who have a team of mathematicians who spend all day figuring out the best way to trick the market into wild swings?"
And that's exactly why. These companies are there because thousands of "john does" went into the trade market either directly or indirectly. What would happen in your case? First time, the little guys lose. Second time, the little guys lose. Third time, the little guys take their money off the system in stampede. Given that about 70% of all the trade at New York is moved by fast trading companies (and, as a general matter, all kind of speculative companies one way or other) that are sucking millions out of it, the big losers would be those companies that would have the chance of sucking money out of the citizens' pockets no more.
That's why they carefully tune the rules so on one hand the big fishes suck money out of middle class as fast as possible given out the chance for the minion to counter attack but on the other hand they don't allow for the worst greed to rise that would kill the goose of the golden eggs.
Somehow I'm not comfortable with the situation tuned so some companies are allowed to suck my savings "just" at max rate.
"If the intent was not to move the price without seeking a fill, however, the securities law says that is wrong."
How is it any different than "touching" a stock to find the lower price it will sell and/or the highest price it will buy? You are not interested on buying/selling at any of the intermediate prices you find, either.
But, somehow, it's OK when done by Goldman Sachs and illegal otherwise.
These guys were perfectly decided to buy stocks at the price they asked them for and they were perfectly decided to assume the risks of their bet (having to "eat" their stocks if the other player didn't want to re-buy them). Again, how is it that this is OK when it's a big fish doing it but illegal otherwise?
"Buying and selling from yourself to manipulate the price is actually illegal."
a) The fact that it is illegal makes it not illegit.
b) It obviously seems to be illegal only depending on who is the one doing it.
Practically all trading will manipulate the price. Practically all trading will be focused on price alterations they are part of. Basically 70% of NY stocks trading are there to take direct advantage of the price manipulations they themselves introduce. How is it that when it's Goldamn Sachs it's OK but when it is an unknown Norewegian it's illegal?
"Casinos in vegas can do exactly that and the main ratinalle is that they are private property."
Which is exactly what I said: no matter why they purportedly do, the real fact is that they do it because they are powerful enough to get their way into laws.
"But it has exactly nothing to do with Norwegians playing the stock market."
It is exactly the same: when Goldman Sachs does it, it's the way it's meant to work; when a Norwegian John Doe does it, it becomes illegal -for him.
"His analogy isn't bad at all; he's likening the computer to the gun, aka, the tool employed by the human in the situation."
Except the analogy "forgets" about *who* is holding and triggering the weapon implying the stupidness of someone triggering a weapon trying to hide his guiltiness. Here it is the other one the one that holds the weapon and (stupidly) decides when to trigger it.
They had an idea of how the computer would change the prices but that does not make them responsible for what the computer did.
vs
They had an idea of how the gun would change the head of that person but that does not make them responsible for what the gun did.
Can it be any more stupid?
It's more: they had an idea of how some other poker gambler on the table would lead their bets, but that does not make them responsible for what the other gambler did.
"Vladimir Vladimirovich if you work for Amerikanskiis you could be Special Master or as they say Czar."
Humm... it would be Sergey Aleynikov more than Vladimir Vladimirovich, I should say...