It is all well and good when you want to learn something over the net. But if you start giving degrees over the net, the system will be gamed almost instantly. Already in traditional universities, there is cheating going on. There are people in India with advanced degrees willing to do your homework for you for ridiculously low prices. Now they will do your entire coursework for you on a turn key basis. Send in a cheque, and they do all the work and you get the degree.
Creating a company costs some 150$ or so. Can Tesla Motor Corporation set up a wholly owned subsidiary Tesla Motor Sales and Service Corporation of North Carolina and sell it through them? Corporations are people, but it is lot harder (and more fun) to create real people than corporations.
Napoleon's troops in Egypt were using the Sphinx for target practice. But it is not always racist. Chinese have been quarrying their great wall for bricks for ages. Many Italian homes were built using recycled bricks from the aqueducts. Stone tablets inscribed with royal decrees being used as washing stones...
Most juries take a dim view of porn and porn makers, their eyes glaze over and fall asleep if you try to explain the intricacies of copyright laws, but they do understand slander. They might get sued for slander and get into very hot water.
In this particular case, the net gain to the society is mostly around the hips, upper thighs and lower bellies. USA is one of the few countries in the world where obesity is correlated wit poverty, not wealth. The super cheap corn, and HFCS contribute to that a lot. And corn became super cheap because it was engineered to be roundup ready.
Wait till that gene transfers to the weeds. Then there will be famine and all the gain the society would make it catastrophic.
I recently got a 500 MB per month high speed data plan. I used the speed test app to test the speed. I blew through half my quota in speed tests alone. The test was for a fixed duration, not the fixed amount of data. At 1Gbps speed, I would have gone over the limit in just test!
People with the money will buy what they want. If they want college degrees, they will bid up the price. Despite all that "shrink the beast", "government does nothing well", "government is your enemy", "all taxation is theft" crowd slashing burning the budgets, despite siphoning tons money to prison complexes and military, there is still high quality affordable education provided by the State University systems for their residents.
You compete with the rich on their pet things like Ivy League degree, you will lose the bidding war. But that is not the end of the world. Harvard is over rated. And if Harvard keeps prostituting itself to get more and more spoiled rich kids, it would lose its aura. The best way to teach a lesson to these univs is not to play the game they have set up. Ignore them, go to state schools, do well in the job market, the very same free market will rein in Harvard and its peers.
I recall a short story by Asimov. Basically another alien race sets up a colony in Jupiter (which Earth has left unoccupied) claiming the treaty allowing a planet to have dominion over a "system" does not include all the planets of the "star system". (Very similar to the arguments between USA and USSR during the Cuban missile crisis). Eventually the clever astro lawyer resolve the issue by recursing one more level. If the alien's argument is valid, there is nothing to stop Earth to set up a base in any uninhabited moons of Jupiter. The most remarkable thing about that short story was the usage of the word normal. Some space capsule gets lost, and was there is a mad scramble to locate it between the humans and aliens. The key to capturing it lay in understanding the word "normal" had a mathematical meaning (not tangential) as well as a common meaning
If you claim the right to be annoyed by Google and find some justification to be vocal about it that it warns others, well, recurse one more level. It gives me the same right to by annoyed by your expressions of annoyance and point out to the same general public that your annoyance is unreasonable.
In India, China, Europe etc all the incoming calls/tests are fee. The caller pays for them. Looks like Google was providing a toll-free-800-number like service where the outgoing search queries were also free and the search results came back as free texts. Explains why I have not used this service much in usa.
Yes, it is annoying. So google should not annoy you? Are you some kind of special being? Do we have an obligation not to annoy Your Snootiness?
Even if it is true that google is making money off you, you should realize they will stop giving you service if and when they decide you are not making enough money.
We clearly don't have all we need. I was just pointing to the fact "evolution has achieved the maximum efficiency" is a false statement. Usually they will play with the definition, and it is a warning sign. In this case they define "perfection" as the ability of the plants to emit an elector for each photon captured. But leaves and structures do not capture all the photons. They reflect most of it, not unlike solar cells. But in solar cell we define efficiency as the energy delivered to the wire to the solar energy incident on that surface.
OK, coming down further, plants do not use all the electrons, since they are trying to do an energy absorbing chemical reaction using that energy. Apples to solar cell comparisons show that photosynthesis is about 2% efficient in most plants, sugarcane reaches a peak of 7%.
But we can define cost efficiency to account for the cost of making it more efficient. If it is bio mass, that grows, replicates by itself and sustains itself, the cost of "manufacturing" the cell is practically zero. Cost of input energy is zero. Economically speaking bio mass, based on switch grass or algae must become cost efficient and competitive. It basically the interest on the cost of installation that determines economic viability of such projects. When other forms of renewable energy harvesting has such long history and hard data, this new fangled thing that has carbon nanotubes woven into leaf structure, is novel, interesting and might prove useful in a decade or two. But that is all that it is. A novelty. Nothing to get over excited about in the field of renewables.
The breakthrough we are all waiting for in renewables is not technical/scientific anymore. It is economic. Cheap natural gas is making coal too expensive. It is a good news bad news situation. Coal is not going to be economically viable soon. So powerplants grand fathered out of clean energy act which are steadfastly refusing to upgrade pollution control still burning coal all will switch to natural gas reducing pollution. But the bad news is, coal is replaced by even cheaper natural gas. The renewables must now beat even more cheap source of energy.
From what I understand the efficiency of photosynthesis used by the plants is quite poor. Just about 2% or so. Even the chemistry used in photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum of 25%. Compare that to theoretical maximum efficiency of ideal Carnot engines at around 57% for typical gas engine source/sink temperatures and the 38%(? not very sure of this number, too lazy to look up) or so theoretical maximum efficiency for windmills.
This is not how bank fraud should be done. The right and proper way is to become too big to fail, to big to jail, rig the LIBOR rates, create systematic rigging, award oneself huge salaries and bonuses, threaten worldwide economic collapse, hold governments to ransom and get huge bail out money. The master criminals running the banks are dismayed by petty criminals stealing from them.
They should also create fake user accounts, with fake social security numbers, fake credit card numbers etc etc. Then the thieves would waste so much of time pursuing these fake data and eventually give up not being able to tell a really dumb user with a dumb password and a fake account with a dumb password.
But it is not new. I have done something similar. But my lips are sealed about that project.
Very carefully you chose not to dwell on the constitutionality of the draft. Government has the power to compel you to risk your life and limb in a war that you may or may not agree with, declared by a congress you might have or might not have voted for. For all that talk about liberty, men between 18 and 40 years of age can be drafted, and if they go AWOL, they can be summarily executed by their commanding officers. It has been enforced rarely but the fact is, such denial of liberty is legal, and has been ruled constitutional.
You say, "Ignoring, no. I understand that many SCOTUS decisions are wrong and ought to be overturned.". You seem to miss the basic point,
you don't get to decide what is constitutional, right and what is wrong. If the SCOTUS says "it is constitutional" it is. You have the right to disagree. But all you can do is to express an opinion that you disagree that is all. You are still bound by that decision. And if that decision compels you to pay a tax that you find abhorrent, unreasonable, or unconstitutional, tough luck. You pay or you are a felon.
Sorry for being so blunt as to sound arrogant. But I have read and know more about the US constitution, military history, US history, US laws than most native born Americans. You could very well belong to the minority and be more widely read than I am. But you are being blindsided because you are reading it theoretically and without the perspective of someone who had lived under a different system of laws. I had never been subjected to the draft. Taking up US citizenship means surrendering my liberty not to bear arms against my will. Did you ever think about this issue at all, before I brought it up?
You are also confusing the symptom with the disease. Corrupt judges and legislatures are just the symptom. The disease affecting American democracy is the apathy of its citizenry. You are part of the cure. I will most likely disagree with you on most issues. But I do wish there are more Americans like you.
You dont get to decide what is constitutional and what is not. And, the federal government has the authority to regulate and tax interstate commerce. The federal government can force all out of state purchases to be taxed. It is immaterial whether the proceeds are given back to the states to mitigate the loss of sales tax revenue or not. The feds can tax interstate commerce. And if you don't pay you are simply a common criminal, not a patriot.
We put that money in your pocket. If you have worked just as hard, and are just as smart, in another country you would not have had the same amount of money. It is we, the taxpayers of America, who built a society of laws, non violent dispute resolution process, peace and prosperity. All our citizens, including blowhards and wingnuts like you, benefit. It is fitting, proper and constitutional to charge you to pay for the upkeep of our government. Don't like it? Vote for people who would repeals laws like this. Shout in anger about the injustice of it all, all you want. But as long as the tax is on the books, you make damn sure you pay it. Else you are a tax dodging selfish cheater.
Some guy who was working on early models of the toy Furby got a friendly call from the FBI. This time it slipped through, but you might not be that lucky.
First of all code quality is difficult to measure, and the number of (known) defects per 1000 lines of code is a very poor metric. I could do more (good and bad) in one line of code than a novice who write voluminous code. Leaving that aside, what drives/motivates creating good quality code?
In open source, a defect gets fixed when someone feels the urge to fix it. Most of the time it is because it is their own dog food. Many open source projects are actually used by their own developers and they fix the issues that irritate them most. And rest of the bugs are based on impact on other users and passion about the software project
In a closed source project, it is often the bugs that affect the loudest paying customer gets fixed. If it is not going to advance sales, it wont get fixed.
Given this dynamic it is not at all surprising both methods have similar levels of that elusive "quality". I think software development should eventually follow the model of academic research. There is scientific research done by the universities that have no immediate application or exploitation potentials. The tenured academic professors teach courses and do research on such topics. Then as the commercialization potential gets understood, it starts going towards sponsored projects and eventually it goes into commercial R&D and product development.
Similarly we could envision people who teach programming languages to college maintaining open source projects. The students
develop features and fix bugs for course credit. As the project matures, it might go commercial or might stay open source or it could become
a fork. The professors who maintain such OSS projects should get similar bragging rights and prestige like professors who publish academic research on language families or bird migration or the nature of urban planning in ancient Rome.
They are on the damned internet ok? There will be a service that will calculate the tax for them. (Yes, i know it won't be free. they will be able to deduct the cost of employing their service from their tax bill as business expense). The real problem is not the cost of compliance. They have been selling for people who dodge taxes. Now they will lose that business. That is what they are afraid of. I have no sympathy for these businesses whose very existence is due to government spending in R&D and infrastructure now balk at paying their fair share.
Slashdot Mirror
It is all well and good when you want to learn something over the net. But if you start giving degrees over the net, the system will be gamed almost instantly. Already in traditional universities, there is cheating going on. There are people in India with advanced degrees willing to do your homework for you for ridiculously low prices. Now they will do your entire coursework for you on a turn key basis. Send in a cheque, and they do all the work and you get the degree.
Creating a company costs some 150$ or so. Can Tesla Motor Corporation set up a wholly owned subsidiary Tesla Motor Sales and Service Corporation of North Carolina and sell it through them? Corporations are people, but it is lot harder (and more fun) to create real people than corporations.
Napoleon's troops in Egypt were using the Sphinx for target practice. But it is not always racist. Chinese have been quarrying their great wall for bricks for ages. Many Italian homes were built using recycled bricks from the aqueducts. Stone tablets inscribed with royal decrees being used as washing stones...
Most juries take a dim view of porn and porn makers, their eyes glaze over and fall asleep if you try to explain the intricacies of copyright laws, but they do understand slander. They might get sued for slander and get into very hot water.
OIL, Coal, Microsoft Windows, inkjet printers, Fiat Currencies...
TEA BAG ALERT!
Tea bagger or someone who invested his life savings in bitcoin?
they give society a net gain.
In this particular case, the net gain to the society is mostly around the hips, upper thighs and lower bellies. USA is one of the few countries in the world where obesity is correlated wit poverty, not wealth. The super cheap corn, and HFCS contribute to that a lot. And corn became super cheap because it was engineered to be roundup ready.
Wait till that gene transfers to the weeds. Then there will be famine and all the gain the society would make it catastrophic.
Whatever said and done in public, these college drop outs, they are a thick bunch. They stand up for one another.
Yup, fair enough and we are in endless recursion now ;-)
Let me throw an exception and bring this sad saga to an end.
I recently got a 500 MB per month high speed data plan. I used the speed test app to test the speed. I blew through half my quota in speed tests alone. The test was for a fixed duration, not the fixed amount of data. At 1Gbps speed, I would have gone over the limit in just test!
You compete with the rich on their pet things like Ivy League degree, you will lose the bidding war. But that is not the end of the world. Harvard is over rated. And if Harvard keeps prostituting itself to get more and more spoiled rich kids, it would lose its aura. The best way to teach a lesson to these univs is not to play the game they have set up. Ignore them, go to state schools, do well in the job market, the very same free market will rein in Harvard and its peers.
If you claim the right to be annoyed by Google and find some justification to be vocal about it that it warns others, well, recurse one more level. It gives me the same right to by annoyed by your expressions of annoyance and point out to the same general public that your annoyance is unreasonable.
In India, China, Europe etc all the incoming calls/tests are fee. The caller pays for them. Looks like Google was providing a toll-free-800-number like service where the outgoing search queries were also free and the search results came back as free texts. Explains why I have not used this service much in usa.
Even if it is true that google is making money off you, you should realize they will stop giving you service if and when they decide you are not making enough money.
It never made official release. It was in beta for ages, no wonder it got pulled. It is reel or cut bait.
OK, coming down further, plants do not use all the electrons, since they are trying to do an energy absorbing chemical reaction using that energy. Apples to solar cell comparisons show that photosynthesis is about 2% efficient in most plants, sugarcane reaches a peak of 7%.
But we can define cost efficiency to account for the cost of making it more efficient. If it is bio mass, that grows, replicates by itself and sustains itself, the cost of "manufacturing" the cell is practically zero. Cost of input energy is zero. Economically speaking bio mass, based on switch grass or algae must become cost efficient and competitive. It basically the interest on the cost of installation that determines economic viability of such projects. When other forms of renewable energy harvesting has such long history and hard data, this new fangled thing that has carbon nanotubes woven into leaf structure, is novel, interesting and might prove useful in a decade or two. But that is all that it is. A novelty. Nothing to get over excited about in the field of renewables.
The breakthrough we are all waiting for in renewables is not technical/scientific anymore. It is economic. Cheap natural gas is making coal too expensive. It is a good news bad news situation. Coal is not going to be economically viable soon. So powerplants grand fathered out of clean energy act which are steadfastly refusing to upgrade pollution control still burning coal all will switch to natural gas reducing pollution. But the bad news is, coal is replaced by even cheaper natural gas. The renewables must now beat even more cheap source of energy.
Windmill theoretical max is 59.3%. Not 38%.
From what I understand the efficiency of photosynthesis used by the plants is quite poor. Just about 2% or so. Even the chemistry used in photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum of 25%. Compare that to theoretical maximum efficiency of ideal Carnot engines at around 57% for typical gas engine source/sink temperatures and the 38%(? not very sure of this number, too lazy to look up) or so theoretical maximum efficiency for windmills.
This is not how bank fraud should be done. The right and proper way is to become too big to fail, to big to jail, rig the LIBOR rates, create systematic rigging, award oneself huge salaries and bonuses, threaten worldwide economic collapse, hold governments to ransom and get huge bail out money. The master criminals running the banks are dismayed by petty criminals stealing from them.
But it is not new. I have done something similar. But my lips are sealed about that project.
You say, "Ignoring, no. I understand that many SCOTUS decisions are wrong and ought to be overturned.". You seem to miss the basic point, you don't get to decide what is constitutional, right and what is wrong. If the SCOTUS says "it is constitutional" it is. You have the right to disagree. But all you can do is to express an opinion that you disagree that is all. You are still bound by that decision. And if that decision compels you to pay a tax that you find abhorrent, unreasonable, or unconstitutional, tough luck. You pay or you are a felon.
Sorry for being so blunt as to sound arrogant. But I have read and know more about the US constitution, military history, US history, US laws than most native born Americans. You could very well belong to the minority and be more widely read than I am. But you are being blindsided because you are reading it theoretically and without the perspective of someone who had lived under a different system of laws. I had never been subjected to the draft. Taking up US citizenship means surrendering my liberty not to bear arms against my will. Did you ever think about this issue at all, before I brought it up?
You are also confusing the symptom with the disease. Corrupt judges and legislatures are just the symptom. The disease affecting American democracy is the apathy of its citizenry. You are part of the cure. I will most likely disagree with you on most issues. But I do wish there are more Americans like you.
You dont get to decide what is constitutional and what is not. And, the federal government has the authority to regulate and tax interstate commerce. The federal government can force all out of state purchases to be taxed. It is immaterial whether the proceeds are given back to the states to mitigate the loss of sales tax revenue or not. The feds can tax interstate commerce. And if you don't pay you are simply a common criminal, not a patriot.
We put that money in your pocket. If you have worked just as hard, and are just as smart, in another country you would not have had the same amount of money. It is we, the taxpayers of America, who built a society of laws, non violent dispute resolution process, peace and prosperity. All our citizens, including blowhards and wingnuts like you, benefit. It is fitting, proper and constitutional to charge you to pay for the upkeep of our government. Don't like it? Vote for people who would repeals laws like this. Shout in anger about the injustice of it all, all you want. But as long as the tax is on the books, you make damn sure you pay it. Else you are a tax dodging selfish cheater.
Some guy who was working on early models of the toy Furby got a friendly call from the FBI. This time it slipped through, but you might not be that lucky.
In open source, a defect gets fixed when someone feels the urge to fix it. Most of the time it is because it is their own dog food. Many open source projects are actually used by their own developers and they fix the issues that irritate them most. And rest of the bugs are based on impact on other users and passion about the software project
In a closed source project, it is often the bugs that affect the loudest paying customer gets fixed. If it is not going to advance sales, it wont get fixed.
Given this dynamic it is not at all surprising both methods have similar levels of that elusive "quality". I think software development should eventually follow the model of academic research. There is scientific research done by the universities that have no immediate application or exploitation potentials. The tenured academic professors teach courses and do research on such topics. Then as the commercialization potential gets understood, it starts going towards sponsored projects and eventually it goes into commercial R&D and product development.
Similarly we could envision people who teach programming languages to college maintaining open source projects. The students develop features and fix bugs for course credit. As the project matures, it might go commercial or might stay open source or it could become a fork. The professors who maintain such OSS projects should get similar bragging rights and prestige like professors who publish academic research on language families or bird migration or the nature of urban planning in ancient Rome.
They are on the damned internet ok? There will be a service that will calculate the tax for them. (Yes, i know it won't be free. they will be able to deduct the cost of employing their service from their tax bill as business expense). The real problem is not the cost of compliance. They have been selling for people who dodge taxes. Now they will lose that business. That is what they are afraid of. I have no sympathy for these businesses whose very existence is due to government spending in R&D and infrastructure now balk at paying their fair share.