Don't be silly. Taxes wouldn't be that much lower. The government would just be less in debt (which would be a good thing of course). I'm just pointing out that government spending and government taxes have a one way relationship. Low tax income does not impact spending, but high tax income encourages high spending. If the government got more money from taxes then they'd feel flush with cash and decide to provide lots more services to compensate. When the government wants to spend more but tax income is low, it just spends and lets us all live with the consequences of tremendous debt.
I suppose it's a lateral discussion at hand. Sorry for the division. I was just responding to your ridiculous statement that you're paying more taxes as a result of tax cheaters.
It's more correct to say that government is farther in debt as a result of tax cheaters.
The government could always cut spending if it wasn't "making" as much money from taxes. That's what everyone else does when they don't make as much money as they expect.
I just pay the monthly fee to get unlimited points. I ask questions there all the time. Sometimes they're answered and sometimes not, but when they're answered they're often answered in a helpful way.
Sometimes it's just easiest to ask someone when I'm stuck with something. I had problems setting up qmail. I could have gone to a forum and been told that I should read the manual. But, instead I went to EE and actually got a helpful answer.
Before it closed down, I used google answers all the time. Sometimes my questions went unanswered. Sometimes I got excellent answers. The most useful answers I got involved math and science. I needed to create a recommendations engine for products and didn't know where to go to find out how to do it. So, I asked at google answers and got enough information to actually be able to implement it. (and it has long worked quite well) I ended up paying $30 plus a $20 tip, but it was well worth it.
When google answers closed down I went to yahoo answers and was severely disappointed. The quality of the answers there is markedly lower than the answers were at google. Google had a team of a few hundred people answering questions. Yahoo lets anyone answer. That'd be ok if good people answered, but most questions I asked got terrible answers.
For instance, I asked about finding software to capture video from my video camera. The first and only answer I got simply told me to go to Best Buy and ask the people there. Pfft!
Here's an excellent example of the type of answer I get at yahoo answers. I asked about whether it'd be possible to genetically engineer plants so they could survive on mars. One of the answers was: "Did you ever think that if we alter another planet it may have a bad reaction in space and throw all the other planets and stuff out of orbit. Remember some things are the way they are for a good reason!!"
Of course, using a standard library call doesn't mean it'll work. Some y2k non-compliant code was the result of the C/C++/Javascript libraries that return the year as an offset from 1900. We found that one of our web pages was displaying the year as "19100" because of that. Not really a big issue (it just looked silly. it didn't hurt anything), but if the standard library had just returned the year as an integer instead of as an offset from 1900 then the problem would never have existed in the first place.
On that note, why the heck was it written that way? It's not more memory efficient. An int is used to store the offset from 1900, so it used the same amount of memory either way.
When King Solomon constructed the Temple of Jerusalem, the Second Book of Chronicles, chapter 4, verses 2 and 5, tells us:
"Then he made the Sea [a big tub] of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference. It was a handbreadth thick; and its brim was shaped like the brim of a cup..... It contained three thousand baths."
Snopes says: "In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate."
I've been reading the magazine Analog for a while and I can say with certainty that there are no TV shows or movies which are anything remotely like the good science fiction I can get in 20 page short stories.
Does that mean that all science fiction movie directors are hacks? No. The problem is the medium.
If you're not happy with the LOTR movies then there is absolutely no way that any movie could have ever been made of LOTR that would please you.
Really? I found every Blitzball match after the first one to be trivially easy to win. The very first match I had trouble winning. But, after the first one you just grab Brother and then it's all gravy. I played numerous matches over the course of the game and I think I might have lost one or two matches total out of probably hundreds of games.
The strategy is easy. You get Brother on your team. You toss him the ball right away when you get the ball. He's a fast swimmer, so you just swim around in a circle avoiding the other players. Eventually all the opposing players will bunch up behind him trying to catch him. You then swim to one side and toss the ball to a teammate.
All your teammates will be completely open. Just swim up to the goal and kick it in. Sometimes you beat the goalie and sometimes not, but as long as your own goalie isn't too bad then you'll always win.
Get a good goalie as soon as possible and it's practically impossible to lose even if you try. In some tournaments I wanted to win second place in order to get the second place prize. But, I found that I couldn't actually do it. I couldn't figure out how to lose with my players.
Then I realized that I just needed to recruit some terrible players and put them onto my team when I wanted to lose.
In short, the AI in that game was incredibly stupid. I sometimes played poorly in some ways in order to make it more challenging.
Yes, the TV whine makes me insane as well. I was ecstatic years ago when I got an expensive CRT TV and it didn't make any whining noise. I've found that cheap CRT monitors whine while flat screen monitors don't make any noise.
Clearly I'm one of those people who is sensitive to high pitched whines. Either it doesn't bother other people or other people can't hear it at all. I've never done a survey to find out which it is.
Does anyone make a fluorescent bulb that doesn't make that high pitched noise? That noise drives me insane. I tried some fluorescents but switched back after a while because I just couldn't take the noise.
There's also the issue of dimmer switches. Do they make fluorescents that can be dimmed? How can I dim the lights to create a romantic atmosphere if doing so causes the light to burn out?
Then of course there's the color of the light. Most fluorescents give off a freaky white light. But, I know they make fluorescents that have the warmer color like incandescents, so there's no problem there.
I agree. I think the system would work better if all bills required 60% to pass and 45% to repeal. Furthermore, once a bill has been in place for more than 5 years it should be possible to repeal it with only 35% of the vote.
I'd rather hear "correlation != causation" over and over again rather than be subjected to dialog where people make no attempt to explain why they're assuming causation.
There's an easy way to prevent these messages from appearing. Say why you think it couldn't possibly just be correlation. Studies like this tend to confirm pre-existing beliefs regardless of whether causation has actually been proven. If you don't say anything about it then an obvious response is going to be to point out that correlation is not causation.
To the "correlation != causation" people, I say good for you! Keep it up! You're providing an important public service even if you're not as appreciated as you should be.
FWIW, the speed of light in a vacuum isn't "more or less 3E8". It's precisely 299792458 m/s. The meter is actually defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 seconds.
So you're saying that someone should write a virus that installs Folding@Home on computers and sets CPU usage to the highest possible so that any other viruses on that computer are starved for CPU cycles?
Actually, that has a number of positive side effects: 1. The computer will be so slow that the user will have to realize that something is wrong with their system. A normal virus wouldn't monopolize the system because they don't want to alert the user. If they realize something is wrong then they'll either live with it or they'll fix it and perhaps learn something about security in the process. 2. The computer has a security hole in it (either a technical one or a human one), so they'll get infected eventually. Might as well have their computer being used to fold proteins for medical research rather than send out spam.
That's an interesting though experiment, but I'm not sure they are fair as written. Tossing someone onto the tracks exposes a new person to danger. They weren't in danger at all before. The people sleeping on the tracks were already in a danger zone and were therefore fair game for this least-harm decision.
A better example would be a situation where a town was being bombed by some evil enemy. Let's say that the town has 1000 people in it. You could shoot down the bomber if it attacked another plane, thereby exposing its position. A plane with 100 people on it is flying overhead. Do you direct that plane into dangerous airspace in order to flush out the bomber?
Ok, that needs work, but it seems clearer to me. Assuming the fliers were already putting themselves at significant risk by flying during a dangerous time when air strikes occurred and assuming that the people in the town had no particular reason to believe their town would be hit, I think that redirecting the plane is the reasonable thing to do.
I wouldn't throw the guy onto the track though. He wasn't one of the potential victims in the first place.
I agree. I saw the video of Jobs' talk about the iPhone and I was excited. I was finally ready to switch to a non-palm device after a decade of palm devices. But, this breaks it for me. My Treo 650 is just going to have to do for a while.
Wake me when Jobs takes medication to fix the brain aneurysm he just had.
But photons only travel at c when travelling in a vacuum. Do they "experience" time when they travel through air at a speed less than c?
Does this question even make sense? Photons don't have a persistent state that can change over time, so there's no way to tell how old one is.
Is it true that COBOL doesn't support local variables? If true then I have nothing but pity for anyone who maintains such code. If it's not true then I apologize for the slander.
You'll win over more independents (or at least stop scaring us) if you stop saying things like "denying them cheap, effective universal health care". The first two issues you mentioned are important to independents. They're the reasons we swung toward the left in the last election. However, the health care issue is a solidly left wing issue that gives anyone with libertarian leanings the heebie jeebies.
The article states that mice alter their behavior when exposed to the parasite. They then alter their behavior back when treated with drugs that kill the parasite.
You're missing the point - and the beauty - of the Heseinburg Uncertainty Principle. Your implicit assumption is that the electron has an exact location, much like a baseball would. Your assumption is that the electron has an exact position and an exact momentum, we are just incapable of measuring both at the same time. But an electron is not a baseball. The implication of the Uncertainty Principle is that the electron has no exact position or momentum. It is, inherently, uncertain. It is not a result of our inability to measure it. Uncertainty and randomness are built into the Universe.
The above is an example of confusing interpretation with knowledge. Let's say I have a box with some lights and buttons on it. The lights react in various confusing ways to pressing the buttons. The box isn't purely random, so I can definitely come up with a useful system for predicting what happens as a result of various button presses. The theory I come up with will be verifiable and quite definitely a useful theory.
Nevertheless, there are numerous possible explanations about what really happens in the box and there is absolutely no reason to believe any of those explanations expect possibly to reject those using Occam's razor as guidance.
Unless someone figures out some new ways of messing with the universe (by changing what appear to be fundamental constants), it will never be possible to actually open the box to see what goes on inside. By that I mean that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle guarantees that we will never be able to observe things at that level without disturbing the system we're trying to watch. (We would never learn much about ape society if, in order to observe it, we kept dropping nukes into the forest.)
As such, it's folly to say that particles at the quantum level are inherently probabilistic. Just because the rules are different from the ones we know at a macroscopic level doesn't mean they're not deterministic. That's religious talk. It's saying that because we can't see the specific events that those events must be magical.
Of course, it's also folly to try to determine what those deterministic rules might be. No possible system we invent could ever be tested.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be silly. Taxes wouldn't be that much lower. The government would just be less in debt (which would be a good thing of course). I'm just pointing out that government spending and government taxes have a one way relationship. Low tax income does not impact spending, but high tax income encourages high spending. If the government got more money from taxes then they'd feel flush with cash and decide to provide lots more services to compensate. When the government wants to spend more but tax income is low, it just spends and lets us all live with the consequences of tremendous debt.
I suppose it's a lateral discussion at hand. Sorry for the division. I was just responding to your ridiculous statement that you're paying more taxes as a result of tax cheaters.
It's more correct to say that government is farther in debt as a result of tax cheaters.
The government could always cut spending if it wasn't "making" as much money from taxes. That's what everyone else does when they don't make as much money as they expect.
I just pay the monthly fee to get unlimited points. I ask questions there all the time. Sometimes they're answered and sometimes not, but when they're answered they're often answered in a helpful way.
Sometimes it's just easiest to ask someone when I'm stuck with something. I had problems setting up qmail. I could have gone to a forum and been told that I should read the manual. But, instead I went to EE and actually got a helpful answer.
Before it closed down, I used google answers all the time. Sometimes my questions went unanswered. Sometimes I got excellent answers. The most useful answers I got involved math and science. I needed to create a recommendations engine for products and didn't know where to go to find out how to do it. So, I asked at google answers and got enough information to actually be able to implement it. (and it has long worked quite well) I ended up paying $30 plus a $20 tip, but it was well worth it.
When google answers closed down I went to yahoo answers and was severely disappointed. The quality of the answers there is markedly lower than the answers were at google. Google had a team of a few hundred people answering questions. Yahoo lets anyone answer. That'd be ok if good people answered, but most questions I asked got terrible answers.
For instance, I asked about finding software to capture video from my video camera. The first and only answer I got simply told me to go to Best Buy and ask the people there. Pfft!
Here's an excellent example of the type of answer I get at yahoo answers. I asked about whether it'd be possible to genetically engineer plants so they could survive on mars. One of the answers was: "Did you ever think that if we alter another planet it may have a bad reaction in space and throw all the other planets and stuff out of orbit. Remember some things are the way they are for a good reason!!"
Of course, using a standard library call doesn't mean it'll work. Some y2k non-compliant code was the result of the C/C++/Javascript libraries that return the year as an offset from 1900. We found that one of our web pages was displaying the year as "19100" because of that. Not really a big issue (it just looked silly. it didn't hurt anything), but if the standard library had just returned the year as an integer instead of as an offset from 1900 then the problem would never have existed in the first place.
On that note, why the heck was it written that way? It's not more memory efficient. An int is used to store the offset from 1900, so it used the same amount of memory either way.
Also, an article on straightdope.com says:
When King Solomon constructed the Temple of Jerusalem, the Second Book of Chronicles, chapter 4, verses 2 and 5, tells us:
"Then he made the Sea [a big tub] of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference. It was a handbreadth thick; and its brim was shaped like the brim of a cup..... It contained three thousand baths."
Apparently that translates to pi being exactly 3.
Snopes says: "In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate."
I've been reading the magazine Analog for a while and I can say with certainty that there are no TV shows or movies which are anything remotely like the good science fiction I can get in 20 page short stories.
Does that mean that all science fiction movie directors are hacks? No. The problem is the medium.
If you're not happy with the LOTR movies then there is absolutely no way that any movie could have ever been made of LOTR that would please you.
Really? I found every Blitzball match after the first one to be trivially easy to win. The very first match I had trouble winning. But, after the first one you just grab Brother and then it's all gravy. I played numerous matches over the course of the game and I think I might have lost one or two matches total out of probably hundreds of games.
The strategy is easy. You get Brother on your team. You toss him the ball right away when you get the ball. He's a fast swimmer, so you just swim around in a circle avoiding the other players. Eventually all the opposing players will bunch up behind him trying to catch him. You then swim to one side and toss the ball to a teammate.
All your teammates will be completely open. Just swim up to the goal and kick it in. Sometimes you beat the goalie and sometimes not, but as long as your own goalie isn't too bad then you'll always win.
Get a good goalie as soon as possible and it's practically impossible to lose even if you try. In some tournaments I wanted to win second place in order to get the second place prize. But, I found that I couldn't actually do it. I couldn't figure out how to lose with my players.
Then I realized that I just needed to recruit some terrible players and put them onto my team when I wanted to lose.
In short, the AI in that game was incredibly stupid. I sometimes played poorly in some ways in order to make it more challenging.
If you pay $24 where you are then you'll probably pay $48 or more per month here in California.
Using a kill-a-watt I found out that my computer draws 600W. (3 monitors, dual cpu, high end video card, 4 hard drives, 8 fans)
I was able to reduce my power bill from $250/month to $100/month by turning it off every night.
The upshot is that people should buy a kill-a-watt and find out what the big offenders are. Guessing probably won't work.
It never occurred to me that the socket would be relevant. In a 3 bulb lamp, why wouldn't all 3 sockets be the same?
I suppose I could buy a couple bulbs and swap them around to different lamps to see whether I can hear them.
Yes, the TV whine makes me insane as well. I was ecstatic years ago when I got an expensive CRT TV and it didn't make any whining noise. I've found that cheap CRT monitors whine while flat screen monitors don't make any noise.
Clearly I'm one of those people who is sensitive to high pitched whines. Either it doesn't bother other people or other people can't hear it at all. I've never done a survey to find out which it is.
Does anyone make a fluorescent bulb that doesn't make that high pitched noise? That noise drives me insane. I tried some fluorescents but switched back after a while because I just couldn't take the noise.
There's also the issue of dimmer switches. Do they make fluorescents that can be dimmed? How can I dim the lights to create a romantic atmosphere if doing so causes the light to burn out?
Then of course there's the color of the light. Most fluorescents give off a freaky white light. But, I know they make fluorescents that have the warmer color like incandescents, so there's no problem there.
I agree. I think the system would work better if all bills required 60% to pass and 45% to repeal. Furthermore, once a bill has been in place for more than 5 years it should be possible to repeal it with only 35% of the vote.
I'd rather hear "correlation != causation" over and over again rather than be subjected to dialog where people make no attempt to explain why they're assuming causation.
There's an easy way to prevent these messages from appearing. Say why you think it couldn't possibly just be correlation. Studies like this tend to confirm pre-existing beliefs regardless of whether causation has actually been proven. If you don't say anything about it then an obvious response is going to be to point out that correlation is not causation.
To the "correlation != causation" people, I say good for you! Keep it up! You're providing an important public service even if you're not as appreciated as you should be.
FWIW, the speed of light in a vacuum isn't "more or less 3E8". It's precisely 299792458 m/s. The meter is actually defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 seconds.
So you're saying that someone should write a virus that installs Folding@Home on computers and sets CPU usage to the highest possible so that any other viruses on that computer are starved for CPU cycles?
Actually, that has a number of positive side effects:
1. The computer will be so slow that the user will have to realize that something is wrong with their system. A normal virus wouldn't monopolize the system because they don't want to alert the user. If they realize something is wrong then they'll either live with it or they'll fix it and perhaps learn something about security in the process.
2. The computer has a security hole in it (either a technical one or a human one), so they'll get infected eventually. Might as well have their computer being used to fold proteins for medical research rather than send out spam.
Where are the white hats when we need them?
That's an interesting though experiment, but I'm not sure they are fair as written. Tossing someone onto the tracks exposes a new person to danger. They weren't in danger at all before. The people sleeping on the tracks were already in a danger zone and were therefore fair game for this least-harm decision.
A better example would be a situation where a town was being bombed by some evil enemy. Let's say that the town has 1000 people in it. You could shoot down the bomber if it attacked another plane, thereby exposing its position. A plane with 100 people on it is flying overhead. Do you direct that plane into dangerous airspace in order to flush out the bomber?
Ok, that needs work, but it seems clearer to me. Assuming the fliers were already putting themselves at significant risk by flying during a dangerous time when air strikes occurred and assuming that the people in the town had no particular reason to believe their town would be hit, I think that redirecting the plane is the reasonable thing to do.
I wouldn't throw the guy onto the track though. He wasn't one of the potential victims in the first place.
I agree. I saw the video of Jobs' talk about the iPhone and I was excited. I was finally ready to switch to a non-palm device after a decade of palm devices. But, this breaks it for me. My Treo 650 is just going to have to do for a while.
Wake me when Jobs takes medication to fix the brain aneurysm he just had.
But photons only travel at c when travelling in a vacuum. Do they "experience" time when they travel through air at a speed less than c? Does this question even make sense? Photons don't have a persistent state that can change over time, so there's no way to tell how old one is.
Is it true that COBOL doesn't support local variables? If true then I have nothing but pity for anyone who maintains such code. If it's not true then I apologize for the slander.
You'll win over more independents (or at least stop scaring us) if you stop saying things like "denying them cheap, effective universal health care". The first two issues you mentioned are important to independents. They're the reasons we swung toward the left in the last election. However, the health care issue is a solidly left wing issue that gives anyone with libertarian leanings the heebie jeebies.
The article states that mice alter their behavior when exposed to the parasite. They then alter their behavior back when treated with drugs that kill the parasite.
Nevertheless, there are numerous possible explanations about what really happens in the box and there is absolutely no reason to believe any of those explanations expect possibly to reject those using Occam's razor as guidance.
Unless someone figures out some new ways of messing with the universe (by changing what appear to be fundamental constants), it will never be possible to actually open the box to see what goes on inside. By that I mean that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle guarantees that we will never be able to observe things at that level without disturbing the system we're trying to watch. (We would never learn much about ape society if, in order to observe it, we kept dropping nukes into the forest.)
As such, it's folly to say that particles at the quantum level are inherently probabilistic. Just because the rules are different from the ones we know at a macroscopic level doesn't mean they're not deterministic. That's religious talk. It's saying that because we can't see the specific events that those events must be magical.
Of course, it's also folly to try to determine what those deterministic rules might be. No possible system we invent could ever be tested.