Does this longevity include a increased period of fertility? If not then I wonder if the biological imperative to reproduce will produce a conflict that is not so easy to "cure" and I don't mean the incresing population, I mean the deep seated drive to make offspring being tempered by teh reality that 1100 years is a lot of offspring that one almost certainly cannot actually afford to raise. It might lead to some very complex problems. Even more weird if you live for 1100 years but can only produce offspring for the first 5% of them. Might make you go made. Might be very different for men and women. Might be _very_ scary.
Jeez, people. All this demand for "paper trails" in electronic voting is just neo-luddite crap. How do you think scruitineering works in reality anyway? Most scrutineers will watch the count with their exit polls in their hot little hand and a fairly good idea about how that electorate has voted in the past (that's why they are often the oldest hands in the process). They might from time to time check the tallying process being performed by the various counters but generally the results are being monitored by all sides and everyone knows when something doesn't smell right, because it is so at odds with the result they expect. This is why exit polling and the like are an integral part of the process.
The whole thing is about trust. What is needed is an acceptable, _permanent_, _public_ record of the votes cast. We can even design a means by which this public record can store a means of allowing a voter to identify their vote (there should be no need to store the identity of the voter with the vote). That way if the returning officer has doubts about the result (via their own suspicions or complaints raised by candidates) then they can return to the public record and if the worst comes to the worst get those that are worried about the result to confirm their votes. You see, if the votes tallied are not the same as the votes cast then some of the complainant voters _must_ have had their vote recorded incorrectly. Identify one such voter and then the result in that polling station is clearly problematic and should be passed further up the process in the court of disputed returns (or whatever it is called in your jurisdiction). This scenario can only really occur in the case of fraud or a bug in the software. In either case, the CoDR should have the legislative framework to enable it to act upon the scenario and resolve the issure even if that means a new election for that station should be the result if it matters (remember a given polling station may have no impact on the result of an election, depending on the voting mechanism).
Needing to have a paper trail is really a lack of trust in using technology in the process. Which is fine if thats what you want, but in that case let it go and just use paper ballots. However, technology can really make democracy very effective in a number of ways... Simplifying the distribution of the voting apparatus to remote locations, counting votes on a huge scale, rapid and accurate results to name but three. That is without even considering the potential to have many more decision passed through plebecite vote if the tech could make it really simple. Which it can. I think?
Actually more like an anarcho syndaclist commune, where we each take it in turns to serve on an executive where all day to day administrative decisions are made but any policy determination has to be ratified by a two thirds majority of eligible voters at the next monthly general assembly. Unless of course the...
I went to university in the eighties to learn comp sci having played wth basic for a number of years before hand. It took me a bit of time to grok procedural programming over the years of my degree program e went from pascal to prolog and throughout the whole thing the best lessons came from knowing the math of logic.
Seriously, if you want to teach your mum (sorry, mom) to program start by teaching her the basics of logic. From there you can use any language, java, javascript, scheme, haskel to demonstrate the specific implementation details until she gets the bug and picks a project to run with.
This used to be true, but it seems to be getting more and more commercial now. the "Walking With..." set of series, for example, seemed to be geared for DVD sales right from the beginning.
Which is a wonderful thing. If you can get gigabytes of data on a DVD then the whole experience of watching the series can be turned on its head
Some of the things they are doing with interactive TV are wonderful. I was watching some show about bats and by "pressing the red button" I was taken out of the live TV into some kind of live video based game where I could try and help the bat sonar locate the moth. Bloody extraordinary. If this also means that they can make this link work with the DVD, then more power to them.
Their role as a public institution enables them to develop these technologies for everyone then to use. Great value for the license fee IMHO.
I am struggling to see the benefit of this level of encryption.
If you are going to deploy the encrypted data into an untrusted location then you have a huge problem. If the data needs to be there in the first place then it must be unencrypted in order to be acted upon and then it is vulnerable anyway.
If you are going to deploy the encrypted data to a trudted location via an untrusted channel then a better solution is to encrypt the channel.
If you are going to store data from third parties in a central location and encrypt it to prevent unauthorised access then just let the third party submit encrypted data, however the RDBMS cannot use its RDBness on the data since it is encrypted.
If you are going to store third party data and act upon it then you have to decrpyt it, therefor have the keys, therefore the database itself is trusted, therefore just use access control rather than encryption. Encryption is 100% overhead.
I think this kind of proposal is 100% buzword compliance with no benefit whatsoever. The occasion where we encrypted rows in a table, we found the performance of the system was slaughtered and we were completely memory resident and used caching to ensure that we minimised the encryptions during a given transaction. Secondly we found that in the circumstances where we had some sensitive data that was needed on the client side to do calculations that are expensive, we had to reveal some aspect of the data in order to make it work and I am sure this will be true in any case. If you need to use the data, you need to decrypt it. We even thought about building an API that would implement a bunch of accessors that would return results based on the hidden data, but it was then that we had to reveal the common attributes of individual instances of the data. So instead we had to do it in the trusted environment.
What do all these experiences show? That if the client isn't trusted then there is no point encrypting. Which perhaps reveals Microsofts motive... to provide another lockout for those who do not subscribe to their trusted computing initiative!
However, the ODDS of getting one over the other is tremendous, sometimes a multiple of the hand that is but one step below it.
You have identified an interesting point (ignore the twat AC who replied) but if you think about it the only way your observation can have an impact is over a series of hands. In other words in 1 million hands of poker one would expect the winning hand to be a full house many times lest than the winning hand being two pair. The probability of your flush being beaten by a full house is even smaller. I think the only way that one could make money out of this anomoly would be if side betting was allowed. And there is an interesting thought, side bets on poker, or even better derivatives based on poker.
I wonder if there is some commercial advantage in offering hedge positions for pot size or hand quality? First one would have to identify if there was a benefit to the player, in which case one could offer the product ot the player, but the other side of it would be (as is the case with a lot of financial derivatives) a very separate market in the derived products. The added complexity os pricing the underlying products volatility, this is particularly problematic with a game since there is bluffing involved which means the metric probably needs to be independent of the hand being played.
Some intriguing possibilities, but the most logical application is "pot insurance" for an actual player who has a great hand (actually, no bluff) the premiums would be quite expensive though.
Playing against the house is like standing 5 paces away from a precipice and tossing a coin. Heads you take one pace towards the edge, tails one pace away. You will die it is just a question of time. Games where you pay the house commission and take money from other punters is the only way to skill your way out in front. So forget blackjack and focus on poker, as with all "gambling" if you can be the shark then you should come out in front. In fact with most gambling, you can make a decent living feeding of the scraps of the sharks, even when you don't have the same benefits they do (big teeth, swim fast etc:-) as long as you don't make prey like mistakes.
Even through book makers or betting exchanges there are plenty of bets to be found where you can identify a fish that is betting with their heart and not their head. Sports is the bestest example in the world.
Here is my free tip for making some money. Look at the 2004 European football championships and get accounts with sports books located in the some of the key European jurisdictions, then find the arbitrage opportunities between the book in one country and the book in the other country when the two countries meet in the tournament. I reckon this will be a license to print a little (maybe a lot) of money. Particularly if England underperform as usual:-)
Look, the argument about ROI is completely facile. OSS will always win. Take a step back from the issue and think for a minute. Itemise all the tasks that need to be done wrt to software. Does, buying proprietary software make those tasks disappear? Of course not. There is probably a strong case to say that proprietary software has more tasks associated with it. Even in a world where you take the Keynsian view on government expenditure, the economic utility from spending one more dollar on a platform that is standards based and universally available is a dollar better spent than if it were spent on something proprietary and that is even before one takes the margin out of the sale and repatriates the profit to the jusridiction of the vendor. That's before thinking about the fact that every dollar spent improving a piece of free software is a dollar that does not need to be respent by another department, or another government. Leaving all those extra dollars to improve other software or decrease the marginal cost of government, all of which improves net social utility.
So without even considering the actual cost of the software, the economics of the public sector make free software make sense. I would go further and say that we must _demand_ that public institutions use free software since to do otherwise is fiscally irresponsible.
Any proprietary organisation can pull as many TCO surveys out of their ass as they like, the issue issue, in my view, is not one of economic rationalism (well at least not short term economic rationalism becuase I think my argument is economically rational in the long term at least) but one of public policy. It is contrary to good public policy to pay for proprietary software. Once the problems that a public institution has to solve have been solved, those solutions (the software, and that is not the only example) should be available to everyone to increase the net benefit to society as a whole. That is what public institutions are for!
I had a think about this kind of library model before and I reckon that you can even do it without needing to record who currently has the book. Just record that person X has a book of value Y out (and the terms of use can make them liable for this replacement cost) and that book Z is due back on the given date. You can even send reminders to person X about late books, just not which books they are.
You can "infer" some information about who has what book by value and due dates, but the value can be onscured by banding and the due date is obscured by the volume of books.
Interesting. It would appear that the economies in online games are in a state of hyperinflation. Which is leading to a rampant devaluation in the purchasing power of the in game commodity. This is a state in which real world economies have found (and continue to find) themselves from time to time. Mostly these are tin pot economies, but almost always the econmy cannot work its way out of this state and there is a schism that takes place beofre the conomy is fixed. In on-line gaming speak this schism is probably the critical mass leaving the gaem and leading to its death
"isn't this like valuing every ticket in a theatre based on the price the touts are charging outside the event?"
Er, perhaps but how is that inaccurate. If the resource is scarce, a tout's price is the true price. Indeed there is a very interesting study to be made of the prices charged for tickets to events. This is particularly true when the audience are from different identifiable groups who have very different socioeconomic means. But that is a question for another time.
It is certainly true that if you tried to sell every EP piece on the net the marginal value would decrease but the analysis could be modified to model that. In other words rather than the raw value ascribed to each EP from the author one could examine the proportion of the EQ economy that is "liquid" (ie trading) and then discount the total value of the economy based on the marginal decrease in value of the floating portion as the amount of floated portion increases. This sounds pretty simple to me.
Puh-lease. Bayes died in th 18th century. He was ordained a _non-conformist_ minister (Wesley) which was in itself an interesting theological issue. But regardless people of the 18th century were almost exclusively religious. Athiesm was culturally difficult if not imposssible. In todays godless pluralism (as the godly would have us describe it) people like Bayes would proably not be quite so godly.
There are no [yale.edu] shortage [duke.edu] of [nd.edu] top [ox.ac.uk] universities [uchicago.edu] that have excellent theology or divinity departments. Some of the world's most influential and interesting thinkers have been theologians.
Whilst your post seems trollish, I shall bite simply because it gives me a chance to quote "Yes Minister". But your assertion about the contribution of theologians to science is somewhat specious. It is certainly true up until the industrial revolution when the church had pretty much a monopoly on the ability to do research due to the nature of the human condition at the time. Less so up until the time of the late victorian period and I would say almost non-existent in the 20th century and later (perhaps the first world war did more to kill the role of god in science than any other single event). By any measure, the marginal change of theologians contributing to science is negative and increasingly so.
Not that I am saying that no scientist belives in god (I certainly believe to do so is a flaw and in a scientist particularly so, but there are smarter persons than I that do believe and so who am I to judge:-) Besides studying divinity, even being a member of the clergy does not have a prerequisite of belief in God; (various "Yes Minister" quotes from "The Bishop's Gambit")
"An atheist clergyman could not continue to draw his stipend, so when they stop believing in God they call themselves 'modernists'."
"The bench of bishops should have a proper balance between those who believe in God and those who don't."
"Theology is a device for helping agnostics to stay within the Church of England."
There is a lot of bunk in the replies to this post about "unclean hands" and the unenforceablility of illegal contracts. But the real problem for the "team" (IANAL) is that they have misrepresented the value of the goods sent and in the two jurisdictions in question that is probably an offence. Probably a strict liability offence as well (which means motive is irrelevant). However, they are unlikely to ever be prosecuted and even if they were, a guilty plea would probably get a "no conviction recorded" and they could sell the story to the papers for thousands to cover any fine they might pay (although that would be a bit dodgy as well:-)
Look, the whole issue with IPOs in the traditional sense is that NewCo (the company to be listed) goes to a big institutional broker to build a book form them. For this privelige NewCo pays the broker one regular sized bucket load of money. The broker then goes to all their friends (the ones that shift lots of stock for them and pay for all the golfing weekends in spain) and says yould you like to buy a million shares.... They construct a book that is almost always undervalued because other wise they could never get the capital from the investers to build the book in the first place and thus fund NewCo. The stock moves from IPO (Initial Public Offering BTW, how ironic is that!!) to secondary trading and a certain bunch of the book built positions are traded out for a profit (the return on the capital they fronted to buuild the book) as the public buys the stock and the true price is found (note, not value, but price:-).
Google has short circuited this entire process by offering a dutch (sinlge price) auction which will (hopefully) use a maximal clearing volume algorithm to determine the price at which the maximum volume of stock will clear. The other constratints of this algorithm will determine that at the end of the auction there will be no unsatisfied demand at a price that is better than the one at which the stock traded and as such there will be no immediate price pressure on initial secondary trading. So it should stay around the price at which it opens.
What will that price be? Well thats a good question, but it Google publishes the state of the book over the weeks before the IPO then we can run the MCV algorithm and determine the "if it opened today" price which is usually a very good indicator of the final price as the IPO time approaches (well obviously really:-).
It is really a very interesting approach and on that the intitutional brokers will not really like very much at all. I wish them good luck.
Quite apart from being a remarkably funny post. It is unfortunately true that the "tiddlywinks" motif has actually been looked at seriously, dropping specially shaped cupronickel (IIRC) discs from aircraft that heat up and reform into nice pointy molten metal bullets that tend to turn tanks into smoldering lumps of swiss cheese is a weapon that was mooted some years (20??) ago.
I think the most problematic issue for the dogmatic, certainly judeo-christian and probably islamic is the concept that god create mankind in his own image. But there is a simple answer for them and that is that god also create the beasts for mankind to exploit. The aliens would just be beasts in this context. Intelligence is no bar for falling into the beast category (and exploit isn't judgmental, just a corollary fro "use")
You're fine on the Free Software front. With FS the "tangible personal property transferred with the software" is nothin. That is, you transfer no property, therefore it's value is irrelevant. Regardless of whether the state deigns it to be in excess of the actual price paid.
Jeez, at least get your facts straight. In Australia at least, it stands for Goods and Services Tax. The citation of the act that created the GST in Australia is "A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999".
Makes the subject matter of the tax pretty obvious. Personally, I advocate the use of GST style taxes in all circumstances. I believe that from an administrative perspective they are preferrable but most of all from an ideological perspective they are levied on expenditure rather than on earnings which is in line with my personal politics. Solve the problem in Illinois by just taxing all services (including the lawyers:-) and the discrimination issue goes away. Frankly as far as the impact on vendors in Illinois is concerned, I am not a US state tax expert, but can't they just demand that the tax is poaid by every consumer of these services and so the domicile of the vendor is irrelevant. No real issue there I'd reckon.
It is even more than hopeful. One things the Americans never really grokked (and to some extent for good reason) is the power of a great public institution. I love the BBC. It has flaws and makes mistakes both in specific cases and at an institutional level, but the one thing that makes it great is the "public utility mandate".
The reason for this greatness is that these mandates mean that there is the potential to use its clout to formulate these kind of public standards, codecs, browser standards, document formats etc etc. Whilst I do not believe that they have yet grasped this opportunity, I belive they have a great potential to provide an alternative to the corporate model that seems to so powerfully drive the US experience. It also means that it can spend money on things that may or may not be commercially successful, but that needed to be tried in order to "stretch" societies expectations. What is interesting is that this ability to create confronting drama, documentary, news and even comedy has empowered the commercial networks to try the same kind of things (witness the Brass Eye paedophile program incident).
Well the same kind of "stretching" can take place in technology and perhaps a codec is just the start. The tragedy is that they are about to outsource all their technology by selling off their technology division to one of Accenture, CSC or Siemens. This is a mistake resulting from one of those "flaws" I mentioned before. Hopefully it will not stop the ability of the organisation to continue to drive these kind of technical innovations.
I think that finding the measure of geekiness in a given sport is not so obvious. If once is to accept that it is the amount of "analysis" that can be done without actually participating in the game, then it probably comes down to cricket versus baseball in terms of the degree of geekiness. However one must make a proviso exception to horse racing, because of it's questionable definition as a sport. However if you accept it as a sport then it may well win, because the studying of form is one of _THE_ geekiest things in the world. Even down to its own little geek code, racing parlance, that is just fantastic. Phrases like "would do better in lesser company" are just perfect to stick the boot in where it is deserved in real life:-). However that is about it, I have thought about a whole bunch of other sports and whilst I think that snooker is the geekiest game in which to participate, the physics and strategy are remarkable it isn't really what I would call a sport.
I find cricket a far superior game to baseball, but I think that just watching baseball with a good commentator reveals a facet of the game that wins out in the geek stakes, the number of times that a particular play or even a particular pitch is called by the commentator as the "definitive" action and that action takes place, suggests that there is a high level of structure in the game that would lend itself to statistical analysis.
Re:Insight, no.... Programming Yes
on
Those Eureka Moments
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I found cryptic crosswords (a corollary to the NYT Saturday Xword) an excellent life lesson. Until I started doing them, I had always found that working away at a problem would eventually lead to a solution, Eureka moment or not. However with cryptics, particularly as I was learning them (or a new compiler) I found that some clues just I could not grok and learning to give up was a wonderful lesson.
I firmly believe that insight is one of the more wonderful gifts that one can have and something that makes human beings extremely powerful. for example apocryphal or not, the falling apple that lead to gravity or the tram travelling away from the clock on the station building for time dilation are two examples of moments that depend on extraordinary insight.
I think that insight represents our ability to see abstract patterns in things and recognise those patterns in many forms. One of my favourite examples is the proof that a complex number (rcis[theta])^n can be expressed as r^ncisn[theta] in cis notation the proof is complex and nasty but just the simple insight that it can be expressed as (re^i[theta])^n makes the proof trivial. Recognise the pattern and proceed with the discovery.
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Does this longevity include a increased period of fertility? If not then I wonder if the biological imperative to reproduce will produce a conflict that is not so easy to "cure" and I don't mean the incresing population, I mean the deep seated drive to make offspring being tempered by teh reality that 1100 years is a lot of offspring that one almost certainly cannot actually afford to raise. It might lead to some very complex problems. Even more weird if you live for 1100 years but can only produce offspring for the first 5% of them. Might make you go made. Might be very different for men and women. Might be _very_ scary.
Jeez, people. All this demand for "paper trails" in electronic voting is just neo-luddite crap. How do you think scruitineering works in reality anyway? Most scrutineers will watch the count with their exit polls in their hot little hand and a fairly good idea about how that electorate has voted in the past (that's why they are often the oldest hands in the process). They might from time to time check the tallying process being performed by the various counters but generally the results are being monitored by all sides and everyone knows when something doesn't smell right, because it is so at odds with the result they expect. This is why exit polling and the like are an integral part of the process.
The whole thing is about trust. What is needed is an acceptable, _permanent_, _public_ record of the votes cast. We can even design a means by which this public record can store a means of allowing a voter to identify their vote (there should be no need to store the identity of the voter with the vote). That way if the returning officer has doubts about the result (via their own suspicions or complaints raised by candidates) then they can return to the public record and if the worst comes to the worst get those that are worried about the result to confirm their votes. You see, if the votes tallied are not the same as the votes cast then some of the complainant voters _must_ have had their vote recorded incorrectly. Identify one such voter and then the result in that polling station is clearly problematic and should be passed further up the process in the court of disputed returns (or whatever it is called in your jurisdiction). This scenario can only really occur in the case of fraud or a bug in the software. In either case, the CoDR should have the legislative framework to enable it to act upon the scenario and resolve the issure even if that means a new election for that station should be the result if it matters (remember a given polling station may have no impact on the result of an election, depending on the voting mechanism).
Needing to have a paper trail is really a lack of trust in using technology in the process. Which is fine if thats what you want, but in that case let it go and just use paper ballots. However, technology can really make democracy very effective in a number of ways... Simplifying the distribution of the voting apparatus to remote locations, counting votes on a huge scale, rapid and accurate results to name but three. That is without even considering the potential to have many more decision passed through plebecite vote if the tech could make it really simple. Which it can. I think?
Actually more like an anarcho syndaclist commune, where we each take it in turns to serve on an executive where all day to day administrative decisions are made but any policy determination has to be ratified by a two thirds majority of eligible voters at the next monthly general assembly. Unless of course the ...
(or something like that)
I went to university in the eighties to learn comp sci having played wth basic for a number of years before hand. It took me a bit of time to grok procedural programming over the years of my degree program e went from pascal to prolog and throughout the whole thing the best lessons came from knowing the math of logic.
Seriously, if you want to teach your mum (sorry, mom) to program start by teaching her the basics of logic. From there you can use any language, java, javascript, scheme, haskel to demonstrate the specific implementation details until she gets the bug and picks a project to run with.
Don't go south of the river. Don't go outside zone 1. If you must go outside zone one, don't take more than you can sprint with
This used to be true, but it seems to be getting more and more commercial now. the "Walking With..." set of series, for example, seemed to be geared for DVD sales right from the beginning.
Which is a wonderful thing. If you can get gigabytes of data on a DVD then the whole experience of watching the series can be turned on its head
Some of the things they are doing with interactive TV are wonderful. I was watching some show about bats and by "pressing the red button" I was taken out of the live TV into some kind of live video based game where I could try and help the bat sonar locate the moth. Bloody extraordinary. If this also means that they can make this link work with the DVD, then more power to them.
Their role as a public institution enables them to develop these technologies for everyone then to use. Great value for the license fee IMHO.
I am struggling to see the benefit of this level of encryption.
If you are going to deploy the encrypted data into an untrusted location then you have a huge problem. If the data needs to be there in the first place then it must be unencrypted in order to be acted upon and then it is vulnerable anyway.
If you are going to deploy the encrypted data to a trudted location via an untrusted channel then a better solution is to encrypt the channel.
If you are going to store data from third parties in a central location and encrypt it to prevent unauthorised access then just let the third party submit encrypted data, however the RDBMS cannot use its RDBness on the data since it is encrypted.
If you are going to store third party data and act upon it then you have to decrpyt it, therefor have the keys, therefore the database itself is trusted, therefore just use access control rather than encryption. Encryption is 100% overhead.
I think this kind of proposal is 100% buzword compliance with no benefit whatsoever. The occasion where we encrypted rows in a table, we found the performance of the system was slaughtered and we were completely memory resident and used caching to ensure that we minimised the encryptions during a given transaction. Secondly we found that in the circumstances where we had some sensitive data that was needed on the client side to do calculations that are expensive, we had to reveal some aspect of the data in order to make it work and I am sure this will be true in any case. If you need to use the data, you need to decrypt it. We even thought about building an API that would implement a bunch of accessors that would return results based on the hidden data, but it was then that we had to reveal the common attributes of individual instances of the data. So instead we had to do it in the trusted environment.
What do all these experiences show? That if the client isn't trusted then there is no point encrypting. Which perhaps reveals Microsofts motive... to provide another lockout for those who do not subscribe to their trusted computing initiative!
However, the ODDS of getting one over the other is tremendous, sometimes a multiple of the hand that is but one step below it.
You have identified an interesting point (ignore the twat AC who replied) but if you think about it the only way your observation can have an impact is over a series of hands. In other words in 1 million hands of poker one would expect the winning hand to be a full house many times lest than the winning hand being two pair. The probability of your flush being beaten by a full house is even smaller. I think the only way that one could make money out of this anomoly would be if side betting was allowed. And there is an interesting thought, side bets on poker, or even better derivatives based on poker.
I wonder if there is some commercial advantage in offering hedge positions for pot size or hand quality? First one would have to identify if there was a benefit to the player, in which case one could offer the product ot the player, but the other side of it would be (as is the case with a lot of financial derivatives) a very separate market in the derived products. The added complexity os pricing the underlying products volatility, this is particularly problematic with a game since there is bluffing involved which means the metric probably needs to be independent of the hand being played.
Some intriguing possibilities, but the most logical application is "pot insurance" for an actual player who has a great hand (actually, no bluff) the premiums would be quite expensive though.
Playing against the house is like standing 5 paces away from a precipice and tossing a coin. Heads you take one pace towards the edge, tails one pace away. You will die it is just a question of time. Games where you pay the house commission and take money from other punters is the only way to skill your way out in front. So forget blackjack and focus on poker, as with all "gambling" if you can be the shark then you should come out in front. In fact with most gambling, you can make a decent living feeding of the scraps of the sharks, even when you don't have the same benefits they do (big teeth, swim fast etc :-) as long as you don't make prey like mistakes.
:-)
Even through book makers or betting exchanges there are plenty of bets to be found where you can identify a fish that is betting with their heart and not their head. Sports is the bestest example in the world.
Here is my free tip for making some money. Look at the 2004 European football championships and get accounts with sports books located in the some of the key European jurisdictions, then find the arbitrage opportunities between the book in one country and the book in the other country when the two countries meet in the tournament. I reckon this will be a license to print a little (maybe a lot) of money. Particularly if England underperform as usual
Look, the argument about ROI is completely facile. OSS will always win. Take a step back from the issue and think for a minute. Itemise all the tasks that need to be done wrt to software. Does, buying proprietary software make those tasks disappear? Of course not. There is probably a strong case to say that proprietary software has more tasks associated with it. Even in a world where you take the Keynsian view on government expenditure, the economic utility from spending one more dollar on a platform that is standards based and universally available is a dollar better spent than if it were spent on something proprietary and that is even before one takes the margin out of the sale and repatriates the profit to the jusridiction of the vendor. That's before thinking about the fact that every dollar spent improving a piece of free software is a dollar that does not need to be respent by another department, or another government. Leaving all those extra dollars to improve other software or decrease the marginal cost of government, all of which improves net social utility.
So without even considering the actual cost of the software, the economics of the public sector make free software make sense. I would go further and say that we must _demand_ that public institutions use free software since to do otherwise is fiscally irresponsible.
Any proprietary organisation can pull as many TCO surveys out of their ass as they like, the issue issue, in my view, is not one of economic rationalism (well at least not short term economic rationalism becuase I think my argument is economically rational in the long term at least) but one of public policy. It is contrary to good public policy to pay for proprietary software. Once the problems that a public institution has to solve have been solved, those solutions (the software, and that is not the only example) should be available to everyone to increase the net benefit to society as a whole. That is what public institutions are for!
I had a think about this kind of library model before and I reckon that you can even do it without needing to record who currently has the book. Just record that person X has a book of value Y out (and the terms of use can make them liable for this replacement cost) and that book Z is due back on the given date. You can even send reminders to person X about late books, just not which books they are.
You can "infer" some information about who has what book by value and due dates, but the value can be onscured by banding and the due date is obscured by the volume of books.
Interesting. It would appear that the economies in online games are in a state of hyperinflation. Which is leading to a rampant devaluation in the purchasing power of the in game commodity. This is a state in which real world economies have found (and continue to find) themselves from time to time. Mostly these are tin pot economies, but almost always the econmy cannot work its way out of this state and there is a schism that takes place beofre the conomy is fixed. In on-line gaming speak this schism is probably the critical mass leaving the gaem and leading to its death
"isn't this like valuing every ticket in a theatre based on the price the touts are charging outside the event?"
Er, perhaps but how is that inaccurate. If the resource is scarce, a tout's price is the true price. Indeed there is a very interesting study to be made of the prices charged for tickets to events. This is particularly true when the audience are from different identifiable groups who have very different socioeconomic means. But that is a question for another time.
It is certainly true that if you tried to sell every EP piece on the net the marginal value would decrease but the analysis could be modified to model that. In other words rather than the raw value ascribed to each EP from the author one could examine the proportion of the EQ economy that is "liquid" (ie trading) and then discount the total value of the economy based on the marginal decrease in value of the floating portion as the amount of floated portion increases. This sounds pretty simple to me.
Which would have been a fantastic article. As it is this one is interesting on its own.
Puh-lease. Bayes died in th 18th century. He was ordained a _non-conformist_ minister (Wesley) which was in itself an interesting theological issue. But regardless people of the 18th century were almost exclusively religious. Athiesm was culturally difficult if not imposssible. In todays godless pluralism (as the godly would have us describe it) people like Bayes would proably not be quite so godly.
There are no [yale.edu] shortage [duke.edu] of [nd.edu] top [ox.ac.uk] universities [uchicago.edu] that have excellent theology or divinity departments. Some of the world's most influential and interesting thinkers have been theologians.
Whilst your post seems trollish, I shall bite simply because it gives me a chance to quote "Yes Minister". But your assertion about the contribution of theologians to science is somewhat specious. It is certainly true up until the industrial revolution when the church had pretty much a monopoly on the ability to do research due to the nature of the human condition at the time. Less so up until the time of the late victorian period and I would say almost non-existent in the 20th century and later (perhaps the first world war did more to kill the role of god in science than any other single event). By any measure, the marginal change of theologians contributing to science is negative and increasingly so.
Not that I am saying that no scientist belives in god (I certainly believe to do so is a flaw and in a scientist particularly so, but there are smarter persons than I that do believe and so who am I to judge :-) Besides studying divinity, even being a member of the clergy does not have a prerequisite of belief in God; (various "Yes Minister" quotes from "The Bishop's Gambit")
"An atheist clergyman could not continue to draw his stipend, so when they stop believing in God they call themselves 'modernists'."
"The bench of bishops should have a proper balance between those who believe in God and those who don't."
"Theology is a device for helping agnostics to stay within the Church of England."
There is a lot of bunk in the replies to this post about "unclean hands" and the unenforceablility of illegal contracts. But the real problem for the "team" (IANAL) is that they have misrepresented the value of the goods sent and in the two jurisdictions in question that is probably an offence. Probably a strict liability offence as well (which means motive is irrelevant). However, they are unlikely to ever be prosecuted and even if they were, a guilty plea would probably get a "no conviction recorded" and they could sell the story to the papers for thousands to cover any fine they might pay (although that would be a bit dodgy as well :-)
So I wouldn't lose any sleep.
Look, the whole issue with IPOs in the traditional sense is that NewCo (the company to be listed) goes to a big institutional broker to build a book form them. For this privelige NewCo pays the broker one regular sized bucket load of money. The broker then goes to all their friends (the ones that shift lots of stock for them and pay for all the golfing weekends in spain) and says yould you like to buy a million shares.... They construct a book that is almost always undervalued because other wise they could never get the capital from the investers to build the book in the first place and thus fund NewCo. The stock moves from IPO (Initial Public Offering BTW, how ironic is that!!) to secondary trading and a certain bunch of the book built positions are traded out for a profit (the return on the capital they fronted to buuild the book) as the public buys the stock and the true price is found (note, not value, but price :-).
:-).
Google has short circuited this entire process by offering a dutch (sinlge price) auction which will (hopefully) use a maximal clearing volume algorithm to determine the price at which the maximum volume of stock will clear. The other constratints of this algorithm will determine that at the end of the auction there will be no unsatisfied demand at a price that is better than the one at which the stock traded and as such there will be no immediate price pressure on initial secondary trading. So it should stay around the price at which it opens.
What will that price be? Well thats a good question, but it Google publishes the state of the book over the weeks before the IPO then we can run the MCV algorithm and determine the "if it opened today" price which is usually a very good indicator of the final price as the IPO time approaches (well obviously really
It is really a very interesting approach and on that the intitutional brokers will not really like very much at all. I wish them good luck.
Quite apart from being a remarkably funny post. It is unfortunately true that the "tiddlywinks" motif has actually been looked at seriously, dropping specially shaped cupronickel (IIRC) discs from aircraft that heat up and reform into nice pointy molten metal bullets that tend to turn tanks into smoldering lumps of swiss cheese is a weapon that was mooted some years (20??) ago.
I think the most problematic issue for the dogmatic, certainly judeo-christian and probably islamic is the concept that god create mankind in his own image. But there is a simple answer for them and that is that god also create the beasts for mankind to exploit. The aliens would just be beasts in this context. Intelligence is no bar for falling into the beast category (and exploit isn't judgmental, just a corollary fro "use")
You're fine on the Free Software front. With FS the "tangible personal property transferred with the software" is nothin. That is, you transfer no property, therefore it's value is irrelevant. Regardless of whether the state deigns it to be in excess of the actual price paid.
Jeez, at least get your facts straight. In Australia at least, it stands for Goods and Services Tax. The citation of the act that created the GST in Australia is "A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999".
:-) and the discrimination issue goes away. Frankly as far as the impact on vendors in Illinois is concerned, I am not a US state tax expert, but can't they just demand that the tax is poaid by every consumer of these services and so the domicile of the vendor is irrelevant. No real issue there I'd reckon.
Makes the subject matter of the tax pretty obvious. Personally, I advocate the use of GST style taxes in all circumstances. I believe that from an administrative perspective they are preferrable but most of all from an ideological perspective they are levied on expenditure rather than on earnings which is in line with my personal politics. Solve the problem in Illinois by just taxing all services (including the lawyers
It is even more than hopeful. One things the Americans never really grokked (and to some extent for good reason) is the power of a great public institution. I love the BBC. It has flaws and makes mistakes both in specific cases and at an institutional level, but the one thing that makes it great is the "public utility mandate".
The reason for this greatness is that these mandates mean that there is the potential to use its clout to formulate these kind of public standards, codecs, browser standards, document formats etc etc. Whilst I do not believe that they have yet grasped this opportunity, I belive they have a great potential to provide an alternative to the corporate model that seems to so powerfully drive the US experience. It also means that it can spend money on things that may or may not be commercially successful, but that needed to be tried in order to "stretch" societies expectations. What is interesting is that this ability to create confronting drama, documentary, news and even comedy has empowered the commercial networks to try the same kind of things (witness the Brass Eye paedophile program incident).
Well the same kind of "stretching" can take place in technology and perhaps a codec is just the start. The tragedy is that they are about to outsource all their technology by selling off their technology division to one of Accenture, CSC or Siemens. This is a mistake resulting from one of those "flaws" I mentioned before. Hopefully it will not stop the ability of the organisation to continue to drive these kind of technical innovations.
I think that finding the measure of geekiness in a given sport is not so obvious. If once is to accept that it is the amount of "analysis" that can be done without actually participating in the game, then it probably comes down to cricket versus baseball in terms of the degree of geekiness. However one must make a proviso exception to horse racing, because of it's questionable definition as a sport. However if you accept it as a sport then it may well win, because the studying of form is one of _THE_ geekiest things in the world. Even down to its own little geek code, racing parlance, that is just fantastic. Phrases like "would do better in lesser company" are just perfect to stick the boot in where it is deserved in real life :-). However that is about it, I have thought about a whole bunch of other sports and whilst I think that snooker is the geekiest game in which to participate, the physics and strategy are remarkable it isn't really what I would call a sport.
I find cricket a far superior game to baseball, but I think that just watching baseball with a good commentator reveals a facet of the game that wins out in the geek stakes, the number of times that a particular play or even a particular pitch is called by the commentator as the "definitive" action and that action takes place, suggests that there is a high level of structure in the game that would lend itself to statistical analysis.
I found cryptic crosswords (a corollary to the NYT Saturday Xword) an excellent life lesson. Until I started doing them, I had always found that working away at a problem would eventually lead to a solution, Eureka moment or not. However with cryptics, particularly as I was learning them (or a new compiler) I found that some clues just I could not grok and learning to give up was a wonderful lesson.
I firmly believe that insight is one of the more wonderful gifts that one can have and something that makes human beings extremely powerful. for example apocryphal or not, the falling apple that lead to gravity or the tram travelling away from the clock on the station building for time dilation are two examples of moments that depend on extraordinary insight.
I think that insight represents our ability to see abstract patterns in things and recognise those patterns in many forms. One of my favourite examples is the proof that a complex number (rcis[theta])^n can be expressed as r^ncisn[theta] in cis notation the proof is complex and nasty but just the simple insight that it can be expressed as (re^i[theta])^n makes the proof trivial. Recognise the pattern and proceed with the discovery.