And if they're communicating by some mechanism that we can't read? E.g. the equivalent of "subspace radio".
Or maybe it's a point to point via laser (see Niven's Known Universe).
This is an excellent point. Omnidirectional broadcast is quite wasteful, and as a civilization gets more advanced, it is likely that they will become more energy-bound, which means they would be wise to do everything in the most efficient way possible. As far as communication goes, this probably means either directly wired communication (as we're increasingly moving towards with the internet) or very focused communication for longer distances, which probably means laser.
Add to energy arguments security and privacy considerations, and it's fairly likely that it's only the youngest of "advanced" civilizations that would output omnidirectional communications at frequencies that we could read from here, which would cut down that 1000 year estimate considerably. I'd be somewhat surprised if 100 years from now we still had a significant radio footprint outside of a small radius from our planet.
I don't even know where to begin. Perhaps with a suggestion: before you rail against someone for not understanding part of the Constitution, at least do them the courtesy of looking the relevant bits over to make sure they say what you need them to for your argument. Because in this case, you are sorely mistaken about the content of the text, and you were quite rude about it. You only get to call people "clueless" if you're right, and it's particularly offensive to be lectured about my ignorance when you couldn't even be bothered to Google the very thing you were accusing me of mis-understanding.
By your exact same logic, banning interracial marriage is Just Fine, since black men have exactly the same rights as white men - they can marry someone of their own race.
Only if you want to show your ignorance and ignore the effects if the 15th amendment has on the 14th.
My ignorance is quite happy to air itself when appropriate. Alas, this is not one of those cases, as I am fully aware of the relation between and content of these amendments.
The full text of the amendments would be good here; the 14th unfortunately is long, so allow me to summarize each clause (feel free to object if you feel I'm off here):
Anyone born or naturalized is a citizen. States can't screw over citizens or deprive them of equal protections (this is probably the bit you're referring to, so I've quoted it in full later - there is no mention of race in it, though).
If states remove people's rights to vote, the states proportionally lose reps in the House.
Rebels and ex-rebels cannot hold certain offices unless Congress grants an exception with 2/3 vote.
US debt is not to be questioned, unless it involves the rebellion or slaves, in which case it's null and void.
Congress can enforce the provisions.
Hm. No specific mention of race. Maybe the 15th is more relevant (full text here):
1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
That's got race, but hmm...it only covers voting, not rights overall (this was mainly to close the loophole allowing racial discrimination in part 2 of amendment 14, btw).
The 15th amendment forbids the use in race in separation.
No, it forbids the use of race in voting. It says nothing about anything else.
The effect it had on the 14th was that it stopped any bans on interracial marriage because you couldn't use race to distinguish permissible acts within the law. There is no amendment for gays so the same concept doesn't apply.
No, that's flat out wrong, it went a lot further than that, as a glance at the relevant text (article 1 of amendment 14) will clearly indicate:
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
(Highlights mine) Note that there is absolutely no mention of race in that passage. This did not establish race as a special protected class, rather it stated that everyone receives equal protections under the law. Including gays. I'll agree that the effect was to make gov
Then there's the government of the states, and local governments.
And let's not forget that from a "free market" point of view, companies themselves, may, in fact, disrupt markets by acting as micro-governments, any time they interfere with the process by which a group of self-interested people acting as a group turns into a self-interested group (which, if you haven't considered this before, is a pre-requisite to being able to talk about a large scale free market, since otherwise you can no longer consider companies to be rational entities).
The key example of this is when banks offered traders year end performance based bonus packages, which skewed the payoffs for the traders so that they had unlimited upside and finite downside, thus providing an incentive for the individual traders to take on ungodly amounts of risk that threatened the survival of the companies that they worked for - that the traders did this was not stupid, it was entirely rational from an individual point of view (I encourage you to work out the expected payoffs if you doubt this, every time I've done it I come the the inevitable conclusion that as a trader you should take on as much risk in fairly "safe" bets as possible (you want fairly safe bets so that you're allowed to take on a ton of them without hurting your individually measured risk profile)...turns out, a great way to do this is by dipping into the CDO market like CRAZY!). That is a free-market violation, which ironically enough emerged through free market negotiations.
A perfectly free market is a wonderful theoretical entity; so is a perfectly benevolent and prescient dictator. Unfortunately neither one tends to be sustainable in practice, so we have to do our best to maintain a productive balance between the two extremes. Such is the fundamental problem of governance, and the reason that extremists of any stripe are always wrong.
Coincidentally, you could say the exact same thing about the Bible. Of course, many people seem to think the Bible is also a governing document of this nation, so I suppose it's fitting that they would treat the two the same way.
Quite true - anyone that doubts that this is explicitly true should read the comments posted at a discussion over the "In God We Trust" removal attempt. Probably a good 70% of the anti-removal comments are of the form "Fuck liberal hippies, this is a Christian country and the government should not take away our right to have Christianity in the government, if you don't like it MOVE TO CHINA." Er...well, kind of like that, except with more spelling errors.
I particularly like the implication that it's only the liberals that want the government to remain as secular as possible; apparently the so-called "conservatives" making these arguments have forgotten what the tradition really stands for...
Gays already have the same rights everyone else has, they can marry a person of the opposite sex. The blacks and so on were actually barred from marrying into interracial marriages at one time which is completely different then gay marriage. As long as a Gay man can do what a straight man can do (marry someone of the opposite sex) then they have the same rights. Lesbians are the same (marry a man). The fact that they don't want to or want to do something else. The 14th doesn't apply to that situation.
By your exact same logic, banning interracial marriage is Just Fine, since black men have exactly the same rights as white men - they can marry someone of their own race.
Lucky for us, it was quickly decided that the way that is phrased is ridiculous, as it's always possible to put some "separate but equal" bullshit spin on any sort of discrimination to make it sound like it's fair.
In other words, you're arguing against your own point by making the connection to interracial marriage (which, by the way, is exactly the comparison we should be making, IMO, as the situations are depressingly similar). The question that we should be asking is "Can gay men do what straight women can do?", not "Can gay men do what straight men can do?"
In any case, the government should get the hell out of the marriage business anyways, and only offer civil unions. And yes, these should be offered to any adult, regardless of sex or preference, and probably regardless of prior arrangements (in other words, yup, the government probably should allow polygamous civil unions, apart from religious objections there's really no reason the contractual engagements such a thing implies should be limited to one pairing per person). Leave marriage as a religious commitment, which is what it really should be. Then the religious aspect of the debate can be settled in its proper place, on a church-by-church basis, with no spillover into the rest of the country.
Of course, since that will never happen, the only reasonable solution is to allow gays to marry. And yes, this would seem to imply that the next slide down the slope would be polygamy, but fear not - polygamists are so underrepresented in this country (plus they're too intimately related to child polygamists) that they'll never be able to kick up enough fuss to get their way. But trust me, even if gay marriage is not settled in favor of the gays within the next 10 years or so, it will happen within 20 or 30 - the generation coming up right now just doesn't hold the same anti-gay sentiment that their parents still do, much like their parents didn't hold the same level of anti-black sentiment that their parents did.
There will be holdouts and they'll complain about their rights (um...the "right" not to be disgusted by seeing people doing things they think are immoral, I suppose?) being trampled, but they'll just have to learn to deal with it, and soon enough they'll die off and the rest of the people will never look back. Within a couple generations, people will look back with amusement on the fact that we even had to have this discussion.
IMO, the problem with "rationality" as applied to the current fiasco is that rational agents act in their own interests - in this case, this means that the individual traders do what's best for the individual traders, and their managers do what's best for them, and so on. I have yet to see any indication that this combination of self interest generally results in the group functioning optimally as a rationally acting company in the real world, particularly in the face of the yearly individual compensation packages that traders receive - to some extent, company management functions as a small scale equivalent of government meddling, which is why I'm surprised libertarians tend to think that self interested people necessarily mean that the companies end up self interested.
In fact, there's good reason to think that it doesn't work, because traders are exposed to unlimited upside potential and limited downside (they can only lose their jobs, which just means they move on to the next job), which provides incentive to take on MASSIVE risk, literally as much as you're allowed. Couple that with the fact that there are very easy ways to shuffle risk so that you have, on average, a good year or two before your trades implode and take the company down, and you have a recipe for disaster, despite the fact that everyone is acting rationally and is perfectly well informed.
FTA, and I think this really gets to the heart of the problem (it's talking about the execs and regulators that didn't really understand what the numbers they were looking at meant):
There was everyone, really, who, over time, forgot that the VaR number was only meant to describe what happened 99 percent of the time. That $50 million wasn't just the most you could lose 99 percent of the time. It was the least you could lose 1 percent of the time.
If you want to go the Java route, start with Processing instead of pure Java if you really want things to be easy - things like drawing take no work ("line(10,10,100,150);" on a line by itself in an empty Processing file will draw a line, just like any extreme beginner would expect...), and it's very easy to transition to real Java later on (and also possible to use it within Processing, for that matter, so you lose very little). There's also lots of 3D stuff and libraries for advanced students, and as an additional bonus you don't have to hit kids with something as complex as Eclipse or Netbeans when they're just trying to write "Hello, World!".
Sounds like a gimmick taped onto the wayback machine, or any other internet archive, to me.
Sometimes a gimmick is the difference between something being a major pain in the ass to use and a useful tool, though. Simple user interface improvements can be key, and the wayback machine has a pretty terrible UI (as in, it's very difficult to quickly see how something has changed over days/weeks/months without many, many clicks).
I, for one, would definitely use this to assist with data scraping, which is something I have to do a lot.
You must go to crappy restaurants.. I do it all the time with coworkers.
either that, or the waitstaff there are complete morons and cant figure out the credit card machine.
In my experience, it's not that they are idiots, it's that they are very busy and splitting up a check means an extra 30 seconds or so (depending on the size of the group) waiting for credit card receipts to print out. That's a pain in the ass for them, so they often prefer to just pretend they can't do it.
Let's be clear about what these results actually mean, because both the summary and the article are extremely misleading.
All quantum field theories presume that the laws of special relativity hold, and couldn't even be written down if the assumptions of special relativity were not correct (to the relevant approximation, at least). They are formulated over 4 dimensional space-time with the usual Minkowsi metric (ds^2 = dt^2 - dx^2 - dy^2 - dz^2), and really couldn't be formulated any other way, that's how tied they are to relativistic physics. E = mc^2 is a special case of the equation for 4-momentum, and is just a definition of we mean when we use the word "mass." There's nothing even remotely interesting or questionable about it, let alone something that needs to be verified.
However, in QCD, the equations that actually determine the effective energies in real matter are so damn complicated that nobody knows how to solve them except by approximating them. So while no scientist in his right mind had any doubt that E = mc^2 was "correct" in the context of QCD (it's assumed to be true in the construction of the theory, dammit!), it was never proven that whole system of quarks and gluons in QCD could account for the full observed proton and neutron masses. So much of the observed mass is assumed to arise from quantum field fluctuations that it was never clear that the theory could give us the numbers that we actually measure in the lab. In this respect, it was not relativity that was being "verified," it was QCD itself.
So all this really tells us is that QCD may be consistent with the world that we actually see. Which shouldn't surprise any of us, as it's pretty widely considered to be the only viable theory of the strong force at the energy scales we're working with. But of course a science reporter could never get something that boring published, so they try to sex it up by pretending it has something to do with Einstein and the one physical equation that the public actually recognizes...
You're missing something important. Why is our government granting monopolies to private businesses in the first place? It's unfortunate that a lot of people see what telcos, railcos, toll-road-cos, cablecos, etc are doing, and mistake it for a deficiency of the market. But it isn't a market, it never was in the first place. Because governmental bodies, whether, fed, state, or local, granted private businesses rights over the (private property of others | public property at large), whichever way you want to look at it.
Government has absolutely nothing to do with the emergence of these monopolies, other than the fact that it constantly tries to sue to break them up.
I agree with you that there's no market in the Internet connectivity space, but it's not caused in the least by any regulation - I'm certainly free to attempt to compete with Comcast, it's just that the economics of the business they are in would make me a fool to try. I have no prior infrastructure and no money to build a new one, so I couldn't hope to compete. This is not the government's doing, it's just a textbook example of classical barrier to entry.
With the telcos, yes, the government has been meddling for a while now, but not in the way you suggest. If you'll recall, that meddling began at the turn of the 20th century primarily because the unregulated AT&T already had a monopoly over the long distance telephone lines and refused to allow competitors to connect. How you can claim that's a government imposed monopoly, I don't know, because the government was completely uninvolved until then, and the actions were taken in a mere attempt to break the monopoly that had naturally evolved.
Most of the rest of the history of telecom involves the government suing the telcos for abusive anti-competitive practices, not imposing limits on competition; you're more correct if you're thinking of other public utilities like water and electricity, where there are explicit prohibitions on competition, and I'd agree with you that stuff like that is unacceptable, but there are no such regulatory barriers for the communications industry, all those barriers to competition are practical and naturally occurring. To me, the history of telecom suggests that particularly in the area of communications monopolies are destined to arise, and absolutely require intervention - every time they get broken, they split for a few years and then start to re-form, so there is a clear tendency towards conglomeration, not competition.
Generally speaking I agree with you - I don't think that we need to regulate situations where free markets exist except in the most extreme situations. But I think if a market fails to emerge, we need to acknowledge that in some cases, at least, it's a natural consequence of the nature of that business, and we must either do something to ensure that a free market can emerge or regulate the monopolists that currently control the market. The strict libertarian POV tends to ignore the realities of situations like this and just pretend that if we removed all regulations a free market would miraculously materialize, and I think that is little more than wishful thinking - most of these monopolies were born when these markets were nascent and unregulated, so there is no evidence whatsoever that removing the regulations that have evolved as a consequence of monopolistic abuse would somehow make the markets any more competitive or free. It would be nice if that was the case, but reality seems to indicate otherwise, so...
Just because the federal government's solution to this debacle is more regulation and bailouts doesn't mean there were zero before.
My point was that in the situation that mattered, namely the maintenance of proper cash reserves as a buffer against market movements that the banks were exposed to, the banks that failed were essentially unregulated, in that they were able to take on massively risky positions without the cash on hand to back them against reasonable market movements. It may be the case that some regulations helped push the banks to want to take these risks, but it's also the case that one additional one could have kept them from doing it, and probably with a lot less friction and uncertainty than it would have taken to remove all the other regulations which had varying and disputed causative roles in this.
Apparently the key to arguing against libertarians is to attack libertarians using a straw-man, rather than trying to defend your own views on why it's a good idea for the federal government to interfere in free markets.
No, that's not how to argue against libertarians, it is how to criticize their refutations of your arguments against them. The "straw-man" comment is not accurate, as it is a common libertarian claim that any perceived problem with the free market is actually a problem with the regulations already in place, and that the free market would function fine if only it were less regulated. Which, as if on cue, is exactly what you are arguing when you say...
Imagine if instead of this, the government wasn't involved with the mortgage market in any way. If the cost of borrowing money was in line with the risk of lending it. If you knew that if your company failed, it failed, no bailout available.
Do you really think we'd be in this mess?
And yes, I absolutely do. Why? Because it was profitable for quite a long time to make those loans, and whenever something is profitable over a long enough period people will leverage the hell out of it; conveniently enough, the government lifted the cash requirements on the biggest banks a few years back, which is what let them push all the way up to 30-1.
Now, you may continue to argue that the reason it was initially profitable was due to the cheap money, and that's due to the Fed's existence, and so on. And you may even be right - regulation is a tricky beast, and it's very hard to say which regulations can stand on their own and which ones must either stay or go in groups.
But again, the problem with that argument is that the ultimate conclusion tends to be that in order to avoid any mess, we would need to have practically no government whatsoever, which is as unrealistic and unproductive as suggesting that for communism to work we'd need a totally benevolent ruling government in power with control over everything. Neither one is going to happen, and either one might work (who knows? Nobody's ever actually seen either in practice...). In the libertarian "utopia" in order to avoid bubbles and crashes like this one we'd still need to rely on the free market to somehow keep firms from leveraging up the way they like to, and I've still yet to hear a plausible mechanism that would keep them from doing that (clearly their fear of potential failure is not enough to do it - to a certain extent they were doing the right thing, particularly from the individual traders points of view, since they walked away with several years of enormous bonuses before they lost their jobs, and it was probably a net win for many, if not most of the traders).
Or on the other hand we could just suggest that the government limit the leverage ratios like they used to, and require that anyone dealing in CDOs have enough cash on hand to deal with the obligations. Yes, it might be paternalistic, but as we've seen, these things spread far beyond the companies themselves since our whole country runs on credit, so if the banks can't be trusted to accurately assess their own risks, we are within our rights to set some limits for them. To me that seems like a much more practical and straightforward solution than ripping the system that we have to shreds, which won't happen anyways.
The credit problems and the various bubbles are rooted in a few generic problems: 1. People taking part in the markets are often poorly informed and irrational. 2. Over a short period some people can cheat a market for higher profits and often escape the consequences of doing so.
I'd add to that list 3) banks taking on upwards of a 30:1 debt to equity ratios. If we all buy 30 times as much stuff as we can pay for, we should not be shocked when a little while later we look at the shit we just bought and realize that it's not worth nearly as much as the artificially increased demand at the time caused us to pay for it...
These very same banks were required, by regulation, to provide bad loans.
Whether that's the case or not, the banks had a financial motive that made them take on a lot of them, and it's called "making oodles of money." Which, if you'll recall, is at the heart of capitalism.
A hiccup in the default rate was a catalyst for this, to be sure, but it only changed by a few percent, not even close to enough to dent our economy. Except for the fact that that few percent was leveraged forty to one through the swaps that banks were passing back and forth like candy, and it turned out that nobody could actually pay them out, or even value them once the market dried up.
Unregulated and super-leveraged derivatives are what caused this mess, not bad loans. House prices were merely the tulip-bulb-of-the-week that people thought would keep going up forever and were willing to take as much risk in as they were allowed. These things always tumble, and what's at fault is not the particular asset that tumbles in the end, or any regulations or lack thereof surrounding those assets, it's the process that allows the bubble to inflate so damn big in the first place, and that's called "leverage."
Unfortunately, the only way to fight leverage is through regulation.
Our recent meltdown is due to regulations that encouraged bad loans. Our future meltdowns will be due to the assumptions by banks that they don't need to be responsible because the government will step in with billions of dollars to bail them out if anything goes wrong.
I totally agree that a bailout sends a terrible message to banks, that you merely need to be "too big to fail" and then your bad bets will just be taken on by the taxpayer.
But I keep hearing the line that the government encouraged bad loans and that's what caused this, and I have no freaking idea what you guys are talking about. Banks do not make loans that they don't expect to make money on. They took on bad loans because for a long time they were making loads of money off of them due to the relentlessly climbing housing prices, which meant that pretty much anyone that could sign the paper could afford to pay off the mortgage.
And hey, thanks to the magic of CDSes, the banks don't even need to worry about what happens if people don't pay them off, because they can pay someone else to take on all the risk! Yay! It's like insurance, except that the people offering it don't actually have to have any money! Hmm, I wonder how that could go wrong?
It's silly to blame the current mess on lack of regulation when the banks, financial lenders, and mortgage provides were regulated.
Yeah, because it would be totally silly to oh, say, create regulation that would require insurance providers to have money on hand to pay out claims that arise. And it would be downright Communist to suggest that the lack of such requirements had anything to do with the mess we're in now - let's just forget all those little details and make ourselves a nice little strawman called "affirmative action lending" so that we can blame it all on the black people...
If banks were allowed to act in their own best interest, they would have. Sadly, the Democrats (and Barney Frank in particular) refused to allow the banks to act in their own self interest.
Please elaborate - what exactly were the banks coerced into doing that they didn't think was in their self interest? Because everyone that I know in the industry was thrilled to be offering easy loans to anyone and trading CDOs left and right, mainly because they saw massive returns on their investments while the housing market was booming, not because some Democrat held a gun to their head and told them they had to.
I know a lot of people that were in the middle of this, and many that are now unemployed as a result, and I have yet to hear any of them seriously claim that this was caused by anything but a bunch of risky and difficult to price assets spiraling off each other and running things into the ground...
I couldn't agree more. I'm tired of all economic libertarians saying the market will rule itself despite many examples showing just the oposite.
The key to arguing for the pure libertarian point of view is that whenever you're presented with an example of the market failing, you figure out some minor way in which it is regulated, and blame that for the failure rather than the lack of stronger protections.
For instance, if a monopoly becomes abusive, it's not happening because they are unregulated and haven't been restrained from anti-competitive practices, it's because the tax system has made it impossible for smaller companies to effectively compete with the monopoly. Or maybe it's that the minimum wage has increased the cost of the monopolist's labor to the point where they must charge abusive prices in order to stay in business.
Or if a financial industry falls all over it's ass by making stupid bets left and right, it's not that the industry went wild taking on too many risks, it's that entitlement programs sent them the...uhh...implicit message that they should...lend money to people that will never pay it back..?...yeah, something like that! Maybe. Oh wait, I meant Sarbanes Oxley, err maybe the Fed's meddling...whatever, the specific reason doesn't matter, just say it forcefully enough and people will lap it up!
It's a neat trick, actually - any time one element of your preferred extremist approach turns out to fail, you simply claim that it's because the whole thing must be implemented at once, and any deviation from that can bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
Unfortunately it's also exactly the same philosophical bullshit that Communists have been arguing since their first failed attempts at Utopia. I'm really getting tired of people failing to understand that balance is necessary in all things, including the level of regulation...I even tend to lean libertarian on a lot of these issues, as I don't think much government meddling is usually a good thing, but the tendency to pretend that there are no situations where it's appropriate seems just as deluded as the idea that the government should control everything. We should be pushing to roll back the right regulations, not abolish them wholesale without considering that some of them may actually be helping us.
The assumption is that they will be responsible and only provide secure financial investment. ie low risk loans
The problem is that most bank didn't and they provided too many bad loans.
...hence the initial assumption that we should trust the banks to look after themselves failed, and the idea that they are better off with zero regulation is ridiculous.
For anyone that doesn't have the effort to slog through 36 pages of Internet history that more or less tells us what we already know (that up until now, the internet has been pretty open), the gist of the conclusion is "We shouldn't bother with network neutrality regulation or worry about those in charge abusing their local near-monopoly status, because hey, the market will work it out!"
There's also a nice helping of "The government is the worst monopoly of all, and we should never allow them to pass laws to restrain the actions of near-monopolies, because hey, the market will work it out!"
In other words, we should trust that despite the massive amount of money and energy the companies controlling our "tubes" are putting into fighting network neutrality legislation, they won't ever abuse the privilege to screw us if we just leave things the way they are. But if they are not allowed to screw us, that's when we have to worry about monopolistic behavior!
Color me unimpressed by the overwhelming force of logic there...
So in short, instead of optimizing their primary and widely used compiler used by hundred of thousands of people every day (AS3) they created a better compiler for a language most people will never use to write flash apps just to show that if they wanted to put some their mind to it they could do something better for AS3.. kind of annoying.;)
Nope, it looks like their claiming general speed increases.
Makes sense, to some extent - if you start with something where everything is explicitly typed like C, then you can make a lot of assumptions that you can't with AS3 code, where explicit typing is optional. You can also bypass a lot of garbage collection and stuff like that.
Unless the flash script language is really badly written, the performance will be even worse than programs that were manually written in flash.
Supposedly performance increases of up to 10x are expected between code compiled in this way as compared to hand coded in AS3.
So yes, AS3 is pretty badly written, if you prefer to look at it that way; then again, this new tool apparently uses undocumented bytecodes that are not yet used by the AS3 compiler to achieve speed gains, so if and when these are mainlined into the regular AS3 compiler, we may see similar gains there.
The mutations were thought to be random, but now there's (supposedly) evidence that there's some kind of rudimentary optimization going on at the mutation level.
FWIW, this type of thing is commonplace in CS - people have for a long time used gradient descent mixed with a tunable "noise" parameter to optimize over multidimensional spaces. The gradient descent gets you through the "easy" pieces towards local mins, and the noise makes sure that you test a decent amount of parameter space so that you don't get stuck in those local mins. Sometimes you might even couple this with some flavor of momentum to keep things moving along in case you get stuck.
Frankly I'd be a bit surprised if evolution didn't have something along these lines working for it, as it's algorithmically very simple and can be a lot more effective than either approach (simple descent or a mere random walk) at feeling out a complicated high dimensional constantly changing space for local minima/maxima.
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This is an excellent point. Omnidirectional broadcast is quite wasteful, and as a civilization gets more advanced, it is likely that they will become more energy-bound, which means they would be wise to do everything in the most efficient way possible. As far as communication goes, this probably means either directly wired communication (as we're increasingly moving towards with the internet) or very focused communication for longer distances, which probably means laser.
Add to energy arguments security and privacy considerations, and it's fairly likely that it's only the youngest of "advanced" civilizations that would output omnidirectional communications at frequencies that we could read from here, which would cut down that 1000 year estimate considerably. I'd be somewhat surprised if 100 years from now we still had a significant radio footprint outside of a small radius from our planet.
My ignorance is quite happy to air itself when appropriate. Alas, this is not one of those cases, as I am fully aware of the relation between and content of these amendments.
The full text of the amendments would be good here; the 14th unfortunately is long, so allow me to summarize each clause (feel free to object if you feel I'm off here):
Hm. No specific mention of race. Maybe the 15th is more relevant (full text here):
That's got race, but hmm...it only covers voting, not rights overall (this was mainly to close the loophole allowing racial discrimination in part 2 of amendment 14, btw).
No, it forbids the use of race in voting. It says nothing about anything else.
No, that's flat out wrong, it went a lot further than that, as a glance at the relevant text (article 1 of amendment 14) will clearly indicate:
(Highlights mine) Note that there is absolutely no mention of race in that passage. This did not establish race as a special protected class, rather it stated that everyone receives equal protections under the law. Including gays. I'll agree that the effect was to make gov
And let's not forget that from a "free market" point of view, companies themselves, may, in fact, disrupt markets by acting as micro-governments, any time they interfere with the process by which a group of self-interested people acting as a group turns into a self-interested group (which, if you haven't considered this before, is a pre-requisite to being able to talk about a large scale free market, since otherwise you can no longer consider companies to be rational entities).
The key example of this is when banks offered traders year end performance based bonus packages, which skewed the payoffs for the traders so that they had unlimited upside and finite downside, thus providing an incentive for the individual traders to take on ungodly amounts of risk that threatened the survival of the companies that they worked for - that the traders did this was not stupid, it was entirely rational from an individual point of view (I encourage you to work out the expected payoffs if you doubt this, every time I've done it I come the the inevitable conclusion that as a trader you should take on as much risk in fairly "safe" bets as possible (you want fairly safe bets so that you're allowed to take on a ton of them without hurting your individually measured risk profile)...turns out, a great way to do this is by dipping into the CDO market like CRAZY!). That is a free-market violation, which ironically enough emerged through free market negotiations.
A perfectly free market is a wonderful theoretical entity; so is a perfectly benevolent and prescient dictator. Unfortunately neither one tends to be sustainable in practice, so we have to do our best to maintain a productive balance between the two extremes. Such is the fundamental problem of governance, and the reason that extremists of any stripe are always wrong.
Quite true - anyone that doubts that this is explicitly true should read the comments posted at a discussion over the "In God We Trust" removal attempt. Probably a good 70% of the anti-removal comments are of the form "Fuck liberal hippies, this is a Christian country and the government should not take away our right to have Christianity in the government, if you don't like it MOVE TO CHINA." Er...well, kind of like that, except with more spelling errors.
I particularly like the implication that it's only the liberals that want the government to remain as secular as possible; apparently the so-called "conservatives" making these arguments have forgotten what the tradition really stands for...
By your exact same logic, banning interracial marriage is Just Fine, since black men have exactly the same rights as white men - they can marry someone of their own race.
Lucky for us, it was quickly decided that the way that is phrased is ridiculous, as it's always possible to put some "separate but equal" bullshit spin on any sort of discrimination to make it sound like it's fair.
In other words, you're arguing against your own point by making the connection to interracial marriage (which, by the way, is exactly the comparison we should be making, IMO, as the situations are depressingly similar). The question that we should be asking is "Can gay men do what straight women can do?", not "Can gay men do what straight men can do?"
In any case, the government should get the hell out of the marriage business anyways, and only offer civil unions. And yes, these should be offered to any adult, regardless of sex or preference, and probably regardless of prior arrangements (in other words, yup, the government probably should allow polygamous civil unions, apart from religious objections there's really no reason the contractual engagements such a thing implies should be limited to one pairing per person). Leave marriage as a religious commitment, which is what it really should be. Then the religious aspect of the debate can be settled in its proper place, on a church-by-church basis, with no spillover into the rest of the country.
Of course, since that will never happen, the only reasonable solution is to allow gays to marry. And yes, this would seem to imply that the next slide down the slope would be polygamy, but fear not - polygamists are so underrepresented in this country (plus they're too intimately related to child polygamists) that they'll never be able to kick up enough fuss to get their way. But trust me, even if gay marriage is not settled in favor of the gays within the next 10 years or so, it will happen within 20 or 30 - the generation coming up right now just doesn't hold the same anti-gay sentiment that their parents still do, much like their parents didn't hold the same level of anti-black sentiment that their parents did.
There will be holdouts and they'll complain about their rights (um...the "right" not to be disgusted by seeing people doing things they think are immoral, I suppose?) being trampled, but they'll just have to learn to deal with it, and soon enough they'll die off and the rest of the people will never look back. Within a couple generations, people will look back with amusement on the fact that we even had to have this discussion.
IMO, the problem with "rationality" as applied to the current fiasco is that rational agents act in their own interests - in this case, this means that the individual traders do what's best for the individual traders, and their managers do what's best for them, and so on. I have yet to see any indication that this combination of self interest generally results in the group functioning optimally as a rationally acting company in the real world, particularly in the face of the yearly individual compensation packages that traders receive - to some extent, company management functions as a small scale equivalent of government meddling, which is why I'm surprised libertarians tend to think that self interested people necessarily mean that the companies end up self interested.
In fact, there's good reason to think that it doesn't work, because traders are exposed to unlimited upside potential and limited downside (they can only lose their jobs, which just means they move on to the next job), which provides incentive to take on MASSIVE risk, literally as much as you're allowed. Couple that with the fact that there are very easy ways to shuffle risk so that you have, on average, a good year or two before your trades implode and take the company down, and you have a recipe for disaster, despite the fact that everyone is acting rationally and is perfectly well informed.
If you want to go the Java route, start with Processing instead of pure Java if you really want things to be easy - things like drawing take no work ("line(10,10,100,150);" on a line by itself in an empty Processing file will draw a line, just like any extreme beginner would expect...), and it's very easy to transition to real Java later on (and also possible to use it within Processing, for that matter, so you lose very little). There's also lots of 3D stuff and libraries for advanced students, and as an additional bonus you don't have to hit kids with something as complex as Eclipse or Netbeans when they're just trying to write "Hello, World!".
Sometimes a gimmick is the difference between something being a major pain in the ass to use and a useful tool, though. Simple user interface improvements can be key, and the wayback machine has a pretty terrible UI (as in, it's very difficult to quickly see how something has changed over days/weeks/months without many, many clicks).
I, for one, would definitely use this to assist with data scraping, which is something I have to do a lot.
In my experience, it's not that they are idiots, it's that they are very busy and splitting up a check means an extra 30 seconds or so (depending on the size of the group) waiting for credit card receipts to print out. That's a pain in the ass for them, so they often prefer to just pretend they can't do it.
Let's be clear about what these results actually mean, because both the summary and the article are extremely misleading.
All quantum field theories presume that the laws of special relativity hold, and couldn't even be written down if the assumptions of special relativity were not correct (to the relevant approximation, at least). They are formulated over 4 dimensional space-time with the usual Minkowsi metric (ds^2 = dt^2 - dx^2 - dy^2 - dz^2), and really couldn't be formulated any other way, that's how tied they are to relativistic physics. E = mc^2 is a special case of the equation for 4-momentum, and is just a definition of we mean when we use the word "mass." There's nothing even remotely interesting or questionable about it, let alone something that needs to be verified.
However, in QCD, the equations that actually determine the effective energies in real matter are so damn complicated that nobody knows how to solve them except by approximating them. So while no scientist in his right mind had any doubt that E = mc^2 was "correct" in the context of QCD (it's assumed to be true in the construction of the theory, dammit!), it was never proven that whole system of quarks and gluons in QCD could account for the full observed proton and neutron masses. So much of the observed mass is assumed to arise from quantum field fluctuations that it was never clear that the theory could give us the numbers that we actually measure in the lab. In this respect, it was not relativity that was being "verified," it was QCD itself.
So all this really tells us is that QCD may be consistent with the world that we actually see. Which shouldn't surprise any of us, as it's pretty widely considered to be the only viable theory of the strong force at the energy scales we're working with. But of course a science reporter could never get something that boring published, so they try to sex it up by pretending it has something to do with Einstein and the one physical equation that the public actually recognizes...
Government has absolutely nothing to do with the emergence of these monopolies, other than the fact that it constantly tries to sue to break them up.
I agree with you that there's no market in the Internet connectivity space, but it's not caused in the least by any regulation - I'm certainly free to attempt to compete with Comcast, it's just that the economics of the business they are in would make me a fool to try. I have no prior infrastructure and no money to build a new one, so I couldn't hope to compete. This is not the government's doing, it's just a textbook example of classical barrier to entry.
With the telcos, yes, the government has been meddling for a while now, but not in the way you suggest. If you'll recall, that meddling began at the turn of the 20th century primarily because the unregulated AT&T already had a monopoly over the long distance telephone lines and refused to allow competitors to connect. How you can claim that's a government imposed monopoly, I don't know, because the government was completely uninvolved until then, and the actions were taken in a mere attempt to break the monopoly that had naturally evolved.
Most of the rest of the history of telecom involves the government suing the telcos for abusive anti-competitive practices, not imposing limits on competition; you're more correct if you're thinking of other public utilities like water and electricity, where there are explicit prohibitions on competition, and I'd agree with you that stuff like that is unacceptable, but there are no such regulatory barriers for the communications industry, all those barriers to competition are practical and naturally occurring. To me, the history of telecom suggests that particularly in the area of communications monopolies are destined to arise, and absolutely require intervention - every time they get broken, they split for a few years and then start to re-form, so there is a clear tendency towards conglomeration, not competition.
Generally speaking I agree with you - I don't think that we need to regulate situations where free markets exist except in the most extreme situations. But I think if a market fails to emerge, we need to acknowledge that in some cases, at least, it's a natural consequence of the nature of that business, and we must either do something to ensure that a free market can emerge or regulate the monopolists that currently control the market. The strict libertarian POV tends to ignore the realities of situations like this and just pretend that if we removed all regulations a free market would miraculously materialize, and I think that is little more than wishful thinking - most of these monopolies were born when these markets were nascent and unregulated, so there is no evidence whatsoever that removing the regulations that have evolved as a consequence of monopolistic abuse would somehow make the markets any more competitive or free. It would be nice if that was the case, but reality seems to indicate otherwise, so...
My point was that in the situation that mattered, namely the maintenance of proper cash reserves as a buffer against market movements that the banks were exposed to, the banks that failed were essentially unregulated, in that they were able to take on massively risky positions without the cash on hand to back them against reasonable market movements. It may be the case that some regulations helped push the banks to want to take these risks, but it's also the case that one additional one could have kept them from doing it, and probably with a lot less friction and uncertainty than it would have taken to remove all the other regulations which had varying and disputed causative roles in this.
No, that's not how to argue against libertarians, it is how to criticize their refutations of your arguments against them. The "straw-man" comment is not accurate, as it is a common libertarian claim that any perceived problem with the free market is actually a problem with the regulations already in place, and that the free market would function fine if only it were less regulated. Which, as if on cue, is exactly what you are arguing when you say...
And yes, I absolutely do. Why? Because it was profitable for quite a long time to make those loans, and whenever something is profitable over a long enough period people will leverage the hell out of it; conveniently enough, the government lifted the cash requirements on the biggest banks a few years back, which is what let them push all the way up to 30-1.
Now, you may continue to argue that the reason it was initially profitable was due to the cheap money, and that's due to the Fed's existence, and so on. And you may even be right - regulation is a tricky beast, and it's very hard to say which regulations can stand on their own and which ones must either stay or go in groups.
But again, the problem with that argument is that the ultimate conclusion tends to be that in order to avoid any mess, we would need to have practically no government whatsoever, which is as unrealistic and unproductive as suggesting that for communism to work we'd need a totally benevolent ruling government in power with control over everything. Neither one is going to happen, and either one might work (who knows? Nobody's ever actually seen either in practice...). In the libertarian "utopia" in order to avoid bubbles and crashes like this one we'd still need to rely on the free market to somehow keep firms from leveraging up the way they like to, and I've still yet to hear a plausible mechanism that would keep them from doing that (clearly their fear of potential failure is not enough to do it - to a certain extent they were doing the right thing, particularly from the individual traders points of view, since they walked away with several years of enormous bonuses before they lost their jobs, and it was probably a net win for many, if not most of the traders).
Or on the other hand we could just suggest that the government limit the leverage ratios like they used to, and require that anyone dealing in CDOs have enough cash on hand to deal with the obligations. Yes, it might be paternalistic, but as we've seen, these things spread far beyond the companies themselves since our whole country runs on credit, so if the banks can't be trusted to accurately assess their own risks, we are within our rights to set some limits for them. To me that seems like a much more practical and straightforward solution than ripping the system that we have to shreds, which won't happen anyways.
I'd add to that list 3) banks taking on upwards of a 30:1 debt to equity ratios. If we all buy 30 times as much stuff as we can pay for, we should not be shocked when a little while later we look at the shit we just bought and realize that it's not worth nearly as much as the artificially increased demand at the time caused us to pay for it...
Whether that's the case or not, the banks had a financial motive that made them take on a lot of them, and it's called "making oodles of money." Which, if you'll recall, is at the heart of capitalism.
A hiccup in the default rate was a catalyst for this, to be sure, but it only changed by a few percent, not even close to enough to dent our economy. Except for the fact that that few percent was leveraged forty to one through the swaps that banks were passing back and forth like candy, and it turned out that nobody could actually pay them out, or even value them once the market dried up.
Unregulated and super-leveraged derivatives are what caused this mess, not bad loans. House prices were merely the tulip-bulb-of-the-week that people thought would keep going up forever and were willing to take as much risk in as they were allowed. These things always tumble, and what's at fault is not the particular asset that tumbles in the end, or any regulations or lack thereof surrounding those assets, it's the process that allows the bubble to inflate so damn big in the first place, and that's called "leverage."
Unfortunately, the only way to fight leverage is through regulation.
I totally agree that a bailout sends a terrible message to banks, that you merely need to be "too big to fail" and then your bad bets will just be taken on by the taxpayer.
But I keep hearing the line that the government encouraged bad loans and that's what caused this, and I have no freaking idea what you guys are talking about. Banks do not make loans that they don't expect to make money on. They took on bad loans because for a long time they were making loads of money off of them due to the relentlessly climbing housing prices, which meant that pretty much anyone that could sign the paper could afford to pay off the mortgage.
And hey, thanks to the magic of CDSes, the banks don't even need to worry about what happens if people don't pay them off, because they can pay someone else to take on all the risk! Yay! It's like insurance, except that the people offering it don't actually have to have any money! Hmm, I wonder how that could go wrong?
Yeah, because it would be totally silly to oh, say, create regulation that would require insurance providers to have money on hand to pay out claims that arise. And it would be downright Communist to suggest that the lack of such requirements had anything to do with the mess we're in now - let's just forget all those little details and make ourselves a nice little strawman called "affirmative action lending" so that we can blame it all on the black people...
Please elaborate - what exactly were the banks coerced into doing that they didn't think was in their self interest? Because everyone that I know in the industry was thrilled to be offering easy loans to anyone and trading CDOs left and right, mainly because they saw massive returns on their investments while the housing market was booming, not because some Democrat held a gun to their head and told them they had to.
I know a lot of people that were in the middle of this, and many that are now unemployed as a result, and I have yet to hear any of them seriously claim that this was caused by anything but a bunch of risky and difficult to price assets spiraling off each other and running things into the ground...
The key to arguing for the pure libertarian point of view is that whenever you're presented with an example of the market failing, you figure out some minor way in which it is regulated, and blame that for the failure rather than the lack of stronger protections.
For instance, if a monopoly becomes abusive, it's not happening because they are unregulated and haven't been restrained from anti-competitive practices, it's because the tax system has made it impossible for smaller companies to effectively compete with the monopoly. Or maybe it's that the minimum wage has increased the cost of the monopolist's labor to the point where they must charge abusive prices in order to stay in business.
Or if a financial industry falls all over it's ass by making stupid bets left and right, it's not that the industry went wild taking on too many risks, it's that entitlement programs sent them the...uhh...implicit message that they should...lend money to people that will never pay it back..?...yeah, something like that! Maybe. Oh wait, I meant Sarbanes Oxley, err maybe the Fed's meddling...whatever, the specific reason doesn't matter, just say it forcefully enough and people will lap it up!
It's a neat trick, actually - any time one element of your preferred extremist approach turns out to fail, you simply claim that it's because the whole thing must be implemented at once, and any deviation from that can bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
Unfortunately it's also exactly the same philosophical bullshit that Communists have been arguing since their first failed attempts at Utopia. I'm really getting tired of people failing to understand that balance is necessary in all things, including the level of regulation...I even tend to lean libertarian on a lot of these issues, as I don't think much government meddling is usually a good thing, but the tendency to pretend that there are no situations where it's appropriate seems just as deluded as the idea that the government should control everything. We should be pushing to roll back the right regulations, not abolish them wholesale without considering that some of them may actually be helping us.
For anyone that doesn't have the effort to slog through 36 pages of Internet history that more or less tells us what we already know (that up until now, the internet has been pretty open), the gist of the conclusion is "We shouldn't bother with network neutrality regulation or worry about those in charge abusing their local near-monopoly status, because hey, the market will work it out!"
There's also a nice helping of "The government is the worst monopoly of all, and we should never allow them to pass laws to restrain the actions of near-monopolies, because hey, the market will work it out!"
In other words, we should trust that despite the massive amount of money and energy the companies controlling our "tubes" are putting into fighting network neutrality legislation, they won't ever abuse the privilege to screw us if we just leave things the way they are. But if they are not allowed to screw us, that's when we have to worry about monopolistic behavior!
Color me unimpressed by the overwhelming force of logic there...
In a word - yes.
Nope, it looks like their claiming general speed increases.
Makes sense, to some extent - if you start with something where everything is explicitly typed like C, then you can make a lot of assumptions that you can't with AS3 code, where explicit typing is optional. You can also bypass a lot of garbage collection and stuff like that.
Supposedly performance increases of up to 10x are expected between code compiled in this way as compared to hand coded in AS3.
So yes, AS3 is pretty badly written, if you prefer to look at it that way; then again, this new tool apparently uses undocumented bytecodes that are not yet used by the AS3 compiler to achieve speed gains, so if and when these are mainlined into the regular AS3 compiler, we may see similar gains there.
FWIW, this type of thing is commonplace in CS - people have for a long time used gradient descent mixed with a tunable "noise" parameter to optimize over multidimensional spaces. The gradient descent gets you through the "easy" pieces towards local mins, and the noise makes sure that you test a decent amount of parameter space so that you don't get stuck in those local mins. Sometimes you might even couple this with some flavor of momentum to keep things moving along in case you get stuck.
Frankly I'd be a bit surprised if evolution didn't have something along these lines working for it, as it's algorithmically very simple and can be a lot more effective than either approach (simple descent or a mere random walk) at feeling out a complicated high dimensional constantly changing space for local minima/maxima.