Not at all. Given X amount of money, there exist n different ways to spend it, not all of which bring the same benefit to society or have the same multiplier effect.
But the previous poster is also right. Either way, that money will end up benefitting a number of people.
I'm arguing that the money in the hands of a charitable foundation will likely have a much more beneficial effect on society than the same amount of money in the hands of an heir.
When the son is "frittering away the wealth his father acquired," that is A Good Thing. Who is getting this wealth he "fritters away"?
Consider this: Rich man passes company to son. Son mismanages company, company loses half its value.
Also find out what "fritter" means. To "fritter" means that the money is not wisely invested and put to productive use, but merely consumed.
This money, of course, disappears into the ether, never to seen by society again.
As other posters have pointed out, the charitable foundation invests the money, presumably wisely, and uses some of the proceeds for worthy causes. The same cannot necessarily be said for an heir of no special merit.
1. Rich man dies. Passes equity, property to son, who promptly spends the rest of his life partying and frittering away the wealth his father acquired.
2. Rich man dies. Equity, property is sold to some other rich man. Money obtained is used to set up charitable foundation. Note that the equity, property is not "destroyed" but is in fact in better hands than in scenario 1.
The shooting room paradox, taken from the site you linked to, seems to be the best refutation of the doomsday argument:
In the shooting room experiment we are to imagine a room of infinite capacity. First a batch of ten people are led into this room. A pair of dice is thrown in front of their eyes. If a double six comes up they are all shot. Otherwise they leave the room safely and a new batch, this one containing a hundred people, is thrust in. The process continues, with each consecutive batch ten times larger than the previous one, until there is a double six; whereupon the people in the room at that time are shot and the experiment ends.
Suppose you have been thrust into the room. You are asked to estimate the odds of leaving safely. One the one hand, since whether you will leave or not will be determined by the throw of a fair pair of dice, it seems that you have a 35/36 chance of exiting alive. On the other hand, 90% of all people who are in your situation will be shot, so it seems you have only a 10% chance of exiting alive. That is the paradox.
The connection to the DA is obvious. Except for the fact that each consecutive batch in the shooting room is postulated to be ten times bigger than its predecessor (which corresponds to an indefinite exponential population growth in the case of the DA), the two situations are structurally very similar.
I think the key idea is that given that I exist at this point in time, the probability that I survive is independent of what came before, 35/36 - in fact, the probability that each subsequent generation survives may be higher since it is more difficult for a catastrophy to wipe out a larger than smaller number of people (barring weapons of mass destruction).
I was trying to figure out what you were talking about when I saw another post you wrote and realised that you didn't have a clue about signal processing...
You can reconstruct a signal sampled at the Nyquist rate ONLY by using sinc interpolation functions. These functions do not have compact support (that is they live on the whole real line) and therefore you can never create them and use them.
Yes, but in any case a band limited signal will not be time limited, so perfect reconstruction is not possible.
You use something similar, something close but then you can't reconstruct exacly. The "solution"? Sample at a frequency higher than the Nyquist rate.
Yes, a higher sampling rate will allow the use of a sloppier interpolation filter. But it still won't be exact reconstruction because a time limited interpolation filter will not be frequency limited.
Nyquist's theorem does not imply, however, that the representation of the maximum [or near maximum] frequencies will be highly accurate as far as the shape of the wave form is concerned.
That's incorrect. If the signal is sampled at twice its highest frenquency, the signal can be reconstructed exactly. This assumes that the samples are recorded precisely without quantization, and that the signal is truly bandlimited.
This is why higher sampling frequencies ARE relevent to higher audio fidelity. Higher bit resolutions are arguable though...
No. Higher sampling frequencies allow you to get away with fewer number of bits per sample, and this usually simplifies the electronics. e.g. With delta sigma modulation, the signal is sampled with 1 bit per sample at a very high sampling rate. The bit sample essentially encodes the change between successive samples., i.e. an increase or decrease, and if the sampling rate is high enough, the original signal can be reconstructed from this information fairly accurately.
When I played D&D in the past, my friends and I have always found it much more fun for the DM to improvise a story in real time than to follow the prewritten script given in some book. I'm wondering, do most people prefer to improvise, or to plan out a detailed scenario including maps etc. beforehand?
Folks, their species are dying for a reason, because they can't adapt to the changing environment (most likely the encroachment of man).
Right, we should let the beautiful creatures die, and keep instead those species that can adapt to the enroachment of man. Like cockroaches, rats, and house lizards.
Signal 11's tale about deliberately "engineering or hacking the system" is hogwash. He realizes now what an idiot he looked like, so he cooked up this story to make it look like everything was part of his grand scheme.
I remember when he first joined slashdot - he would gunk up every discussion with his oh-so-"insightful" posts. But he was completely serious about it - he would boast and brag about his karma, and get into "my-karma-is-higher-than-yours" arguments.
You're right, Slashdot isn't dying. Rather, it's the people who have changed and moved on, and then looked back and found that Slashdot wasn't the same for them anymore. Let me explain:
I started reading Slashdot several years back, when I was still in college. I posted fairly regularly, tried to get moderated up. The issues on Slashdot seemed vivid and important.
In the words of Kafka:
"I was still quite a puppy, everything pleased me, everything was my concern. I believed that great things were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my voice, things which must be wretchedly thrown aside if I did not run for them and wag my tail for them."
I left college, moved on in life. Life is hard and fraught with difficulties. Suddenly, whether Windows was better than Linux, or whether KDE was better than Gnome didn't seem that important after all. The discussions on Slashdot? Silly and inane.
Signal 11 and other long time regular Slashdot posters are probably experiencing the same jadedness. Slashdot isn't dying, but there comes a time when people move on.
The legal term of art "unobviousness" refers to the provisions of 35 U.S.C. s. 103, and it doesn't mean what you think it means.
What makes you think so? How do you know what I think it means?
obviousness is a highly technical legal issue
Obviousness isn't a highly technical legal issue. It's the most subjective and debatable aspect of any patent - despite the mythical "person of ordinary skill in the field, and omniscient of all prior art", there doesn't exist a N point rule to decide on the obviousness of a supposed invention.
I did an internship as a programmer after graduating from college earlier this year, and the experience has convinced me that if I had to work in a company, I would like to take on hybrid technical/management roles, instead of pure technical roles.
Why? The role and domain of influence of an individual programmer is pretty limited - the feeling is too much like a cog in a giant machine. You work on tasks assigned by the management, and unlike independent research work, there's little room for individual creativity. And the final outcome depends little on your individual contribution. Extremely boring and very dismal.
I think that's called an O visa. I heard of a young 20 something year old guy who got it by mistake, and the immigration official at the customs was astonished that he had an O status at such an early age.
While there may be certain (numerous) problems with your car that you *can* fix, most modern cars are complicated enough that you will not be able to fix many of the significant problems that could occur. If you're really into fixing your car's ABS system, please, let everyone else know where you drive so we can steer clear.
Yes, so? The analogy to fixing your own computer is perfectly valid, where 'fixing' usually means replacing the broken part with a new one.
I think that most of us could, assuming that there would be decent HOWTO's. I myself can - a car or a stove is not that complicated after all.
You can find plenty of information on the web. My roommate fixed his own car after it broke down, using information found on the web and the car manual. The information is no more inaccessible than a Linux HOWTO. No different from setting up software or fixing your own computer right?
Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof.
This sounds suspiciously like something out of an economics textbook: if you're at an equilibrium, utility maximizing point, you can't gain something without giving up something else in return.
However, the above is true only if you're at an equilibrium point, when all factors are in balance and you're forced to trade off one for another. The fact of the matter is, most software is difficult to use simply because it is poorly designed, with skill or little thought given to the end user experience -- end of story.
You're being simplistic. Just because the CD market shows some elements of monopolistic competition does not mean that one factor explains everything. There is tons of music available, and it is quite substitutable in each genre (ever stood next to a jukebox?), not to mention many more bands waiting in the wings.
Quite, but not perfectly substitutable. People would rather pay to listen to a band they like than listen to music they don't like for free.
Same goes with books, computer games, movies, etc.
However, by colluding to restrict the supply of music, the record companies minimize their costs and ensure high prices.
Yes, there are monopoly forces at work here - it's called intellectual property.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the guys point.
Not at all. Given X amount of money, there exist n different ways to spend it, not all of which bring the same benefit to society or have the same multiplier effect.
But the previous poster is also right. Either way, that money will end up benefitting a number of people.
I'm arguing that the money in the hands of a charitable foundation will likely have a much more beneficial effect on society than the same amount of money in the hands of an heir.
When the son is "frittering away the wealth his father acquired," that is A Good Thing. Who is getting this wealth he "fritters away"?
Consider this: Rich man passes company to son. Son mismanages company, company loses half its value.
Also find out what "fritter" means. To "fritter" means that the money is not wisely invested and put to productive use, but merely consumed.
This money, of course, disappears into the ether, never to seen by society again.
As other posters have pointed out, the charitable foundation invests the money, presumably wisely, and uses some of the proceeds for worthy causes. The same cannot necessarily be said for an heir of no special merit.
Two scenarios:
1. Rich man dies. Passes equity, property to son, who promptly spends the rest of his life partying and frittering away the wealth his father acquired.
2. Rich man dies. Equity, property is sold to some other rich man. Money obtained is used to set up charitable foundation. Note that the equity, property is not "destroyed" but is in fact in better hands than in scenario 1.
So in which scenario does society benefit more?
The shooting room paradox, taken from the site you linked to, seems to be the best refutation of the doomsday argument:
In the shooting room experiment we are to imagine a room of infinite capacity. First a batch of ten people are led into this room. A pair of dice is thrown in front of their eyes. If a double six comes up they are all shot. Otherwise they leave the room safely and a new batch, this one containing a hundred people, is thrust in. The process continues, with each consecutive batch ten times larger than the previous one, until there is a double six; whereupon the people in the room at that time are shot and the experiment ends.
Suppose you have been thrust into the room. You are asked to estimate the odds of leaving safely. One the one hand, since whether you will leave or not will be determined by the throw of a fair pair of dice, it seems that you have a 35/36 chance of exiting alive. On the other hand, 90% of all people who are in your situation will be shot, so it seems you have only a 10% chance of exiting alive. That is the paradox.
The connection to the DA is obvious. Except for the fact that each consecutive batch in the shooting room is postulated to be ten times bigger than its predecessor (which corresponds to an indefinite exponential population growth in the case of the DA), the two situations are structurally very similar.
I think the key idea is that given that I exist at this point in time, the probability that I survive is independent of what came before, 35/36 - in fact, the probability that each subsequent generation survives may be higher since it is more difficult for a catastrophy to wipe out a larger than smaller number of people (barring weapons of mass destruction).
I was trying to figure out what you were talking about when I saw another post you wrote and realised that you didn't have a clue about signal processing...
You can reconstruct a signal sampled at the Nyquist rate ONLY by using sinc interpolation functions. These functions do not have compact support (that is they live on the whole real line) and therefore you can never create them and use them.
Yes, but in any case a band limited signal will not be time limited, so perfect reconstruction is not possible.
You use something similar, something close but then you can't reconstruct exacly. The "solution"? Sample at a frequency higher than the Nyquist rate.
Yes, a higher sampling rate will allow the use of a sloppier interpolation filter. But it still won't be exact reconstruction because a time limited interpolation filter will not be frequency limited.
Nyquist's theorem does not imply, however, that the representation of the maximum [or near maximum] frequencies will be highly accurate as far as the shape of the wave form is concerned.
That's incorrect. If the signal is sampled at twice its highest frenquency, the signal can be reconstructed exactly. This assumes that the samples are recorded precisely without quantization, and that the signal is truly bandlimited.
This is why higher sampling frequencies ARE relevent to higher audio fidelity. Higher bit resolutions are arguable though...
No. Higher sampling frequencies allow you to get away with fewer number of bits per sample, and this usually simplifies the electronics. e.g. With delta sigma modulation, the signal is sampled with 1 bit per sample at a very high sampling rate. The bit sample essentially encodes the change between successive samples., i.e. an increase or decrease, and if the sampling rate is high enough, the original signal can be reconstructed from this information fairly accurately.
Still doesn't work for me. I got the plugin, installed it, rebooted, but still no java for mozilla.
When I played D&D in the past, my friends and I have always found it much more fun for the DM to improvise a story in real time than to follow the prewritten script given in some book. I'm wondering, do most people prefer to improvise, or to plan out a detailed scenario including maps etc. beforehand?
Alright, how do I get mozilla working with Java? I've downloaded the Java plugin, it installed, but still no Java. I'm using windows.
No.
Folks, their species are dying for a reason, because they can't adapt to the changing environment (most likely the encroachment of man).
Right, we should let the beautiful creatures die, and keep instead those species that can adapt to the enroachment of man. Like cockroaches, rats, and house lizards.
Signal 11's tale about deliberately "engineering or hacking the system" is hogwash. He realizes now what an idiot he looked like, so he cooked up this story to make it look like everything was part of his grand scheme.
I remember when he first joined slashdot - he would gunk up every discussion with his oh-so-"insightful" posts. But he was completely serious about it - he would boast and brag about his karma, and get into "my-karma-is-higher-than-yours" arguments.
You're right, Slashdot isn't dying. Rather, it's the people who have changed and moved on, and then looked back and found that Slashdot wasn't the same for them anymore. Let me explain:
I started reading Slashdot several years back, when I was still in college. I posted fairly regularly, tried to get moderated up. The issues on Slashdot seemed vivid and important.
In the words of Kafka:
"I was still quite a puppy, everything pleased me, everything was my concern. I believed that great things were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my voice, things which must be wretchedly thrown aside if I did not run for them and wag my tail for them."
I left college, moved on in life. Life is hard and fraught with difficulties. Suddenly, whether Windows was better than Linux, or whether KDE was better than Gnome didn't seem that important after all. The discussions on Slashdot? Silly and inane.
Signal 11 and other long time regular Slashdot posters are probably experiencing the same jadedness. Slashdot isn't dying, but there comes a time when people move on.
The legal term of art "unobviousness" refers to the provisions of 35 U.S.C. s. 103, and it doesn't mean what you think it means.
What makes you think so? How do you know what I think it means?
obviousness is a highly technical legal issue
Obviousness isn't a highly technical legal issue. It's the most subjective and debatable aspect of any patent - despite the mythical "person of ordinary skill in the field, and omniscient of all prior art", there doesn't exist a N point rule to decide on the obviousness of a supposed invention.
Are there any plans by MS to make xbox development kits available to the public?
That's not prior art. That's stretching an existing circumstance to try to relate it to a new 'invention'.
/pa tents.html
No, the original poster is completely right, that a patent has to be (in theory) non-obvious to someone "learned in the art".
e.g. see http://otl.stanford.edu/inventors
I did an internship as a programmer after graduating from college earlier this year, and the experience has convinced me that if I had to work in a company, I would like to take on hybrid technical/management roles, instead of pure technical roles.
Why? The role and domain of influence of an individual programmer is pretty limited - the feeling is too much like a cog in a giant machine. You work on tasks assigned by the management, and unlike independent research work, there's little room for individual creativity. And the final outcome depends little on your individual contribution. Extremely boring and very dismal.
I think that's called an O visa. I heard of a young 20 something year old guy who got it by mistake, and the immigration official at the customs was astonished that he had an O status at such an early age.
That's just complete bollocks, I'm afraid.
What is, my dear?
While there may be certain (numerous) problems with your car that you *can* fix, most modern cars are complicated enough that you will not be able to fix many of the significant problems that could occur. If you're really into fixing your car's ABS system, please, let everyone else know where you drive so we can steer clear.
Yes, so? The analogy to fixing your own computer is perfectly valid, where 'fixing' usually means replacing the broken part with a new one.
I think that most of us could, assuming that there would be decent HOWTO's. I myself can - a car or a stove is not that complicated after all.
You can find plenty of information on the web. My roommate fixed his own car after it broke down, using information found on the web and the car manual. The information is no more inaccessible than a Linux HOWTO. No different from setting up software or fixing your own computer right?
Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof.
This sounds suspiciously like something out of an economics textbook: if you're at an equilibrium, utility maximizing point, you can't gain something without giving up something else in return.
However, the above is true only if you're at an equilibrium point, when all factors are in balance and you're forced to trade off one for another. The fact of the matter is, most software is difficult to use simply because it is poorly designed, with skill or little thought given to the end user experience -- end of story.
You're being simplistic. Just because the CD market shows some elements of monopolistic competition does not mean that one factor explains everything. There is tons of music available, and it is quite substitutable in each genre (ever stood next to a jukebox?), not to mention many more bands waiting in the wings.
Quite, but not perfectly substitutable. People would rather pay to listen to a band they like than listen to music they don't like for free.
Same goes with books, computer games, movies, etc.
However, by colluding to restrict the supply of music, the record companies minimize their costs and ensure high prices.
Yes, there are monopoly forces at work here - it's called intellectual property.
I don't understand why is it necessary to erase memory. What if the memory size is greater than the number of gas molecules in the box?
No, it did. Here:
"The essence of the refutation is that the Demon cannot see the molecules unless he uses a flashlight, and thus spends energy."
There's another article here that says that this analysis is incorrect though: http://www.consciousness.arizo na.edu/quantum/qc2.htm and http://www.realbooks.com/revie ws/0615/braindrain.htm as well.