Somewhere I saw a recipe of how to make a supertoxin ( think nerve gas et al ) out of BHT. It's nice to know a source of the pure stuff.
I think the recipe was credible, and it sorta makes sense that something that is supertoxic to food spoilage germs could be altered to make it supertoxic to people.
I don't see anyone selling physical items, and making all their customers sign contracts sayign they can't sell them below a certain price. The consumer can do any damn thing they please with the stuff that they own completely and without restriction.
Lifetime labor? I personally avoid warantees and maintenance contracts like the plague as they are almost invariably filled with terms and conditions that make using them next to impossible. ( the first barrier to getting anything for the money you paid for the warrantee/maintenance contract is: do you have your recipt/copy-of-said-warrantee-or-contract )? If the thing breaks past 30 days, odds are I don't have it. )
Even if there is 'no extra charge' for a warrantee, that's a red flag that I am likely to find the same product for cheaper somewhere that does charge extra for the warantee, or bundle the surcharge into the price of the good so it can be sold for 'no-extra-charge'. I can probably just buy the product, and not the warantee, which amounts to an overly expensive insurance policy. ( And insurance is always a bad deal game theory wise, because the insurance company couldn't make a profit otherwise. I am financially strong enough to be self insured with respect to the possibility of having a broken TV. Worse comes to worse, I will just not watch TV for a while. )
When I buy something, I don't want to pay to protect some certain retail outlet who happens to be a powerful enough customer of the manufacurer to warrant protecting eg, WAL*MART. If Mom and Pop can beat WAL*MART, then that's who I want to buy from. ( And I like WAL*MART ) but if enough crap like MAPs is allowed to accumulate in the gears of the market, then WAL*MART will turn into just another K-Mart with not-so-low prices all the time.
IMHO, MAPs and other such power plays have no socially redeeming value. Being power plays, they are merely ways for those with the power to reach into everyone's pockets and get more power/money.
First let me say that whoever modded the parent post offtopic is a moron. Let the meta-moderation begin....
Of course it's an invasion of the rights of the owners of internet cafes to MAKE them install any particular software, but this is China, and that is small potatos.
I wonder, though, if Red Flag becomes ubiquitous in China, how soon spamware/spyware/botnet creators will start to target that platform, and Linux in general. The Linux home user who may not be as up-to-date on patches or careful security wise as they would be using Windows ( That's part of the appeal of Linux at home ) may have to clean up their acts soon.
Sigh... Then again, I think there is less incentive for OSS to leave open holes at the behest of the ( nonexistant in the case of OSS ) marketing department.
I'm an athiest, and have been all my life. Both of my parents were fairly well adjusted athiests, not the rabid kind. They didn't care if I chose to believe in a religion, and were fairly unthreatened by it. They even enrolled me in a day-care run by a, and held in the basement of a church we didn't attend, where religious classes were done as part of the day because it was the most practical and affordable option that was clean and safe. This while being athiests themselves. My grandparents ( all four of them ) if you asked them would probably say they were christians, but they didn't go to church.
I have to say a few things after reading your post. Ideologies suck. One of the reasons is one of the things you said, namely that there is no moral boundary that will not be crossed. However an ideology merely masks this fact. Ideologies mostly hide and/or justify the crossing of moral boundaries.
There isn't proof of much in this world. That's another reason why ideologies suck. They are based on baseless a priori assumptions, and therefore suffer from the GIGO principal. If you are a subscriber, unless you are ripping them apart by using them in the most mendacious and self serving way possible, they are ripping you apart by making your worldview and actions inconsistent with observed reality.
My beliefs are: People act out of self interest period. There is no such thing as altruism - period. Real good and evil are always relative to a given entities point of view. ( Eg: Steaks are good for me, but bad for the cow, but they really are good for me and really are bad for the cow. However it would be an error to say that steaks are inherently good or bad in an absolute sense, because I don't believe in an absolute moral coordinate system.
The world which runs this way is evidently filled with all the love and other good-stuff-in-life, as well as the bad stuff too. And I never met a God, so I assume no such thing exists until I see evidence to the contrary. Real goodness exists, but I assume it has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence, and real evil exists which likewise I assume has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence to the contrary.
If I am a caveman, a sabertooth tiger is a bad guy. I will unashamedly say it, and act accordingly, without regard for the cute little sabertooth tiger cubs that may be orphaned when I push a rock off a cliff onto it's head so that it doesn't later sneak up on and eat me or someone I care about.
Side note: The historical evidence shows that complete anarchy leads to government. Lack of government or order doesn't lead to a blowup. It is precisely the order in a system that is the blowup. Think about a hurricane. That is a blowup of order out of disorder. Ideologies form the same way mostly. They change and are reinterpreted to fit the self interests of important people. So out of randomness the ideology itself is the order. The same with government. It's probably as useless to try and stop these phenomena as it is to try and stop a hurricane from inevitably forming over the warm ocean in August, but you don't have to get caught up in it.
Also, evolution can be a guiding principal to healthy happy living. You were born with genes that have survived so far. You are wired to want to be happy. If striving for happiness were something that tended to be selected against throughout history, then you likely wouldn't be wired to seek happiness. Therefore those behaviors that are selected for are likely to be associated with seeking happiness, but also seeking happiness is likely to cause behaviors that *have been* selected for. If you don't have a good idea about how to go about seeking happiness, evolution can serve a guiding principal. Think about what behaviors have been selected for, and against, and you might get insight or ideas about how to go about seeking happiness if you have some perspective to salt them with.
Long ago, I bought a red book by Bishop about neural networks ( can't remember the title ). I found it pretty hard to digest, especially trying to understand backpropagation. It was full of statistics, and unsatisfying if you are wondering why X solution is the best. This last point may be due to the neural networks approach to AI being to start with the 'neuron' ( which biology isn't even close to fully understanding ) and see what you can build with it, justifying your designs with statistical analysis.
I think that if I were a PHd student, which I will never be as I am now long committed to another life-path, ( I have a Math BA ), I would spend some months browsing wikipedia.
Your whole teenage life, you read about this and that without any pressure to pass a test on it, just browsing. Then you get interested in something, and you major in it. They teach you more of it than you knew existed, but you end up with a degree without really having a good idea of what is out there at the next level. You know basically what you were taught, and it hasn't had time to stew. With more than ample new data to process having been fed into your head over the past few years, you haven't had time to ask your own questions and become curious. You haven't had time to get interested in stuff at the next level. I think the many wikipedia articles are a good way to get a 10000 mile high view of the stuff out there, and an appreciation of what might be interesting to study further without going through the effort gaining in depth knowlege of all the areas ( something you will have time for in the years after you get your PHd ).
If I had it to do again, I would never have switched majors from biology ( which I found easy ) to math ( my worst subject ). I did this because I thought ( wrongly ) at the time that I was no good at dealing with people which doctors do in their jobs, and 'medical doctor' was the only well paying career path for a bio major, ( BS in Bio won't get you paid much at all and you have to move to where there is demand even then if you want to work in your field. ) so a Bio major basically would have committed me to more years of school than I was wanted to commit to while math left the option I took, of computer programming after just a BA )
Really job wise, computer programming has decent pay, good hours ( except sometimes ) and enough demand to work in many places if you aren't picky about what you are doing. Don't expect to get rich by skill. The ONLY way to get rich in this world is by being lucky, and stupid helps, though the disadvantage of stupidness is that, while it increases your chances of getting rich, it increases your chance of being poor far more.
However, as an adult, I can see that Medical Doctor is really a jewel of a job. You can live anywhere you want because there are sick people everywhere. No need to leave family behind to move to where your job is. ( Professors must do this, and anyone ( medical doctors included ) who wants to make top dollar at what they do, however medical doctors make enough to be able to sacrifice some earning power for other benefits without being uncomfortable )
Doctors can't telecommute. You don't have to compete for salary with people living where a third of your wage is a princely sum. Medical doctors are paid nicely, where nicely is relative to where they live.
I don't think doctors have to do much rat racing to just stay still. If you aren't too ambitious, I don't think you have to work 80 hour weeks constantly to do decently. ( I am probably wrong here, but that's only perception of someone outside doctordom ) Certainly doctors don't work as hard as say Lawyers.
Sitting on your duff ( rent seeking ) is precisely what making a piece of canned pay-for software lets you do.
Basically, you want to create some customers that need what you have to offer, and barriers to others creating something just as good for less.
Barriers can be added functionality ( the consumer wins here ), or even just interoperability barriers which have no socially redeeming value.
Because copies of existing software cost zero to make, the marginal cost of a copy of a piece of software is zero.
This means that any price above zero is monopolistic price setting and the economic damage done by this is the deadweight loss. ( see monopoly. The producer surplus that the software maker earns may also be 'economic damage' if it goes towards creating interoperability barriers that do not help consumers, though it might also be used for adding useful features.
I can't think of two pieces of pay for canned software with nothing to differentiate them that have remained that way for long. When that happens, the price drops to near zero until and unless, or one firm adds features the other's product lacks. Maybe the products diverge with diffent sets of features tailored to different segments of the market, or one company goes out of business. Incidentally, sometimes the loser open sources their code in that case.
In the case of rent seeking, there can be only one.
It's a case of king of the mountain. You get to collect the rent at the top of the mountain you've built until someone else knocks you off. If you screw your customers hard enough, it will be some of them that knock you off by writing open source software. You will then be forced to build another little hill from which you can collect possibly less rent.
Open source software is how the world consolidates it's ownership of the code that has already been written, and which has already been paid for in full.
Canned software must either spend some of that producer surplus they collect on useful innovation or fighting amongst themselves. Hopefully things are rigged so as to make innovation better rewarded than 'advertising'.
Most software development is done not at canned software houses, but for companies with custom needs that are best met by custom development by usually in-house developers. Developers of widely used canned software are a tiny minority. Unless something is delivered that is truely hard to produce when compared to the amount of money charged for it, then it will be worth it to someone to try to knock you off your mountain.
Releasing open source should be done by canned software houses as a tool to foil those who would use huge money warchests to catch up and overtake you. If you see this coming, you can open source your base code and concentrate exclusively on the new stuff ( the new little mountains ). When the big money sees the size of the chargable mountain starts not at sea level but from the tree-line, then they might not try to take over your recent additions. But you will have to charge less, because you now deliver less that is not free. Your customers have paid for the development of the code that was open sourced and it is now the property of the world. If you have nothing else to sell, then you should have spent more dollars on features and fixes and less on advertising.
Throw a lump of antimatter into a lake and answer the most important question related to antimatter:
Does it sink or does it float?
Seriously, although most physicists would say that antimatter is attracted to matter via gravity, nobody has ever been able to do the experiment to find out if antimatter falls up or down.
There is at least a small chance that a lump of antimatter would rocket upward, annihilating against the atmosphere as it went. If the atmosphere annihilating against the lump broke it up into little bits, it would create a cone shaped explosion over your head. One would expect the little bits to break up faster, as they have more surface area per volume. As the force of the 'explosion' disintegrated the antimatter lump, the tiny particles would annihilate more rapidly. Unless of course, the explosion drove away any atmosphere from the immediate vicinity. Maybe that force would be enough to make a shield around the antimatter lump allowing it to survive until it got to outer space relatively unscathed. Who the hell knows?
But if it were attracted to matter via gravity, then it would sizzle, but also likely break up very soon. The little pieces would have more surface area than the big lump, and so would annihilate, ( and break up ) faster. The force of neighboring annihilations may contribute to speeding the breakup of the bits. It might be that the end result is a sort of conflagration that increases rapidly in rate.
gives 23.365651177125987076 . So 23 grams of antimatter could fill up your SUV. Pretty cool eh? That's 455 kilos of TNT equivalent, or 928 McDonalds Big Macs.
A 60 megaton blast from an H-Bomb is equivalent to 111 billion McDonalds big Macs or 2.79 kg of antimatter annihilated.
Caveat read-or: I am not a physicist. When you annihilate antimatter to make energy, you do so with the equivalent amount of matter. So to annihilate 1 kg of antimatter, you need 1 kg of matter. So possibly, the amounts of antimatter above should be halved, since really, to annihilate 2 kgs of mass you need 1 kg of matter and 1 kg of antimatter. But, whatever, you get the idea.
Here are 2 items approved for over the counter sale: Tylenol and Ny-Quil.
If I happen to be filling a prescription for antibiotics, and the pharmacist offers to ring me up, they might ask: Are you planning on taking the tylenol and the ny-quil together?
If I answer yes, then I want the pharmacist to warn me that ny-quil contains a full dose of acetominophen, and that I should not take the tylenol at the same time.
If ( crazily ) I declare that I am going to take them, then the pharmacist should decide that I am suicidal, and not sell me either of the drugs, and phone an ambulance to take me to the loony bin.
Also, what about the decongestants made of what sudafed used to be made of that gets purchased by those wishing to brew methamphetamine? I think it's pseudoeffedrine? That's over-the-counter, but it very well may be stored on the other side of the counter to prevent it from being stolen. You might have to go through a pharmacist, who might very well refuse to sell it to you.
I'm all for a pharmacist giving an interview and refusing to sell the drugs if they are not happy with the answers given. If I am filling 2 prescriptions for incompatible drugs, I want the pharmacist to warn me, ask me if I understand that taking these two together will kill me, and then refuse to sell me one or the other.
It is entirely appropriate for a pharmacist to explain how to take the morning after pill, including interviewing the patient to determine if for instance, the possible pregnancy is within the window for aborting with the morning after pill. You KNOW there are idiots that will try taking the morning after pill at three months pregnant. A pharmacist can and should prevent this. Don't antibiotics mess with the pill? Are you taking antibiotics seems like a great interview question to ask...
If a pharmacist won't give a clear answer as to why they are refusing to sell the drugs, then it's up to the patient to find a pharmacist who will. If there is no medical reason why the first pharmacist refused to sell the drugs, then there will be no problem finding a pharmacist that will sell them. If there is some bible belt conspiracy of pharmacists to not sell the morning after pill, then there needs to be something like Planned Parenthood around to point to a pharmacist that will sell the morning after pill.
The days of cramming crocodile dung up your snaz as birth control are over, effective as that may have been...
This kind of request means that the NSA doesn't already HAVE a quantum computer that it uses to break codes. For now, your strong crypto is strong even from them given a large enough number of bits.
They want to know just how many bits and what algorithms THEY need to use to remain secure even should the enemy get create a quantum computer codebreaking machine.
And of course they want a quantum codebreaking machine so they can read everyone's email.
They also would not want the senders of such email to know the NSA could read it. That way, they would keep sending such email. Petty criminals have no need to worry as they wouldn't tip their hand. However they might tip the FBI which could then catch you by more conventional means if they should follow up. Really, the NSA might very well make this sort of request so as to mislead their enemies into thinking they didn't already have this capability, but this seems less likely than that the NSA doesn't have a sci-fi-quantum-codebreaker, but fears someone else may soon have one.
Yes, not doing sleazy stuff to the search results certainly helps them dominate search, but I wonder it it is really Page Rank and their patent on it that is to blame for their dominance.
Maybe indexing the web as well as google without infringing on the page rank patent is impossible.
Maybe it is possible to be almost as good as google, but the fact that google doesn't actively try to drive it's users away means that there is as yet no compelling reason for users to switch from google.
It will be very interesting to see what happens when the pagerank patent expires.
Japan owns 600 billion of US Treasury Securities, and China owns 500 billion.
Why? Japan wants to export it's deflation problem via the carry trade which is when Japanese Yen savings are used to buy Dollars which are then used to buy US Treasury Securities which yield higher interest than Japanese banks must pay to Japanese savers.
The US loves this because buying dollars with yen supports the US dollar keeping inflation down, while the Fed 'stimulates the economy' with loose monetary policy. Meanwhile Japanese exports are helped by devaluing the Yen. Japan must devalue the Yen for it's exports to be competitive with China.
China devalues the Renminbi ( Yuan ) by more complicated means, but like Japan, the result is accumulated Foreign Currency Reserves, including US Treasury Securities. Devaluing the Renminbi ( Yuan ) makes Chinese exports more competitive. Also, the restrictions on foreign investment necessary for China to control the value of the Renminbi ( Yuan ) allow some measure of central government control in how the Chinese economy develops.
Moreover, devaluing the Renminbi ( Yuan ) allows China to accumulate huge foreign currency reserves ( 2 trillion dollars worth so far ) that it can use for checkbook diplomacy, such as loaning to the third world or deals with Hugo Chavez or the Iranians.
It is worth noting that the Foreign Currency Reserves are aquired by the Chinese Government at the expense of the average Chinese citizen. The buying power of the Renminbi ( Yuan ) that the average Chinese worker is paid in has been appropriated by their government by their artificial devaluation of the Chinese Currency.
Not that there is any moral difference between that and a tax.
Anyway, if one of Japan or China started selling US Treasury securities they would shoot themselves in the foot. It would likely trigger a fire sale that would wreck the dollar and hurt the US, China, and Japan severely.
However, there has to be balanced trade sometime. Pressure will build and build until it inexorably happens somehow.
If you percieve 'too many people doing this' then you might convince them that meeting their emotional or social needs requires that their worldview be consistent with scientific epistemology, or that there emotional and social gains to be had though scientific epistemology. Then you can go be a therapist or something.
Them being able to pull a B without attending shows any onlookers that their needs are not being served. They MUST attend the class so as to hide the fact that their needs are not being served by the class. If they leave the class then so does their portion of the money allocated for them.
Now at your former high school they can no longer skip school. Neither are they singled out for advanced studies. They merely have to sit there bored out of their minds for no useful purpose whatsoever. Sigh...
That's what NASA needs to be doing. Spending all the money they are spending on the ISS and Space Shuttle and useless Moon and Mars missions on FINDING SOMETHING BETTER THAN ROCKETS!!!
This seems interesting enough to at least be building small scale prototypes of.
I think the lazy/eager divide is not so important. You can make a lazy language perform an eager calculation or an eager language compute something lazily. It's merely a question of what is the default behavior.
If I had to bet on a weird new language taking the world by storm it would have to be OZ.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere I saw a recipe of how to make a supertoxin ( think nerve gas et al ) out of BHT. It's nice to know a source of the pure stuff. I think the recipe was credible, and it sorta makes sense that something that is supertoxic to food spoilage germs could be altered to make it supertoxic to people.
I don't see anyone selling physical items, and making all their customers sign contracts sayign they can't sell them below a certain price. The consumer can do any damn thing they please with the stuff that they own completely and without restriction.
Lifetime labor? I personally avoid warantees and maintenance contracts like the plague as they are almost invariably filled with terms and conditions that make using them next to impossible. ( the first barrier to getting anything for the money you paid for the warrantee/maintenance contract is: do you have your recipt/copy-of-said-warrantee-or-contract )? If the thing breaks past 30 days, odds are I don't have it. )
Even if there is 'no extra charge' for a warrantee, that's a red flag that I am likely to find the same product for cheaper somewhere that does charge extra for the warantee, or bundle the surcharge into the price of the good so it can be sold for 'no-extra-charge'. I can probably just buy the product, and not the warantee, which amounts to an overly expensive insurance policy. ( And insurance is always a bad deal game theory wise, because the insurance company couldn't make a profit otherwise. I am financially strong enough to be self insured with respect to the possibility of having a broken TV. Worse comes to worse, I will just not watch TV for a while. )
Isn't it funny that where monopolies and price fixing aren't done by the manufacturers, whole companies crop up to do it for them.
When I buy something, I don't want to pay to protect some certain retail outlet who happens to be a powerful enough customer of the manufacurer to warrant protecting eg, WAL*MART. If Mom and Pop can beat WAL*MART, then that's who I want to buy from. ( And I like WAL*MART ) but if enough crap like MAPs is allowed to accumulate in the gears of the market, then WAL*MART will turn into just another K-Mart with not-so-low prices all the time.
IMHO, MAPs and other such power plays have no socially redeeming value. Being power plays, they are merely ways for those with the power to reach into everyone's pockets and get more power/money.
First let me say that whoever modded the parent post offtopic is a moron. Let the meta-moderation begin....
Of course it's an invasion of the rights of the owners of internet cafes to MAKE them install any particular software, but this is China, and that is small potatos.
I wonder, though, if Red Flag becomes ubiquitous in China, how soon spamware/spyware/botnet creators will start to target that platform, and Linux in general. The Linux home user who may not be as up-to-date on patches or careful security wise as they would be using Windows ( That's part of the appeal of Linux at home ) may have to clean up their acts soon.
Sigh... Then again, I think there is less incentive for OSS to leave open holes at the behest of the ( nonexistant in the case of OSS ) marketing department.
I'm an athiest, and have been all my life. Both of my parents were fairly well adjusted athiests, not the rabid kind. They didn't care if I chose to believe in a religion, and were fairly unthreatened by it. They even enrolled me in a day-care run by a, and held in the basement of a church we didn't attend, where religious classes were done as part of the day because it was the most practical and affordable option that was clean and safe. This while being athiests themselves. My grandparents ( all four of them ) if you asked them would probably say they were christians, but they didn't go to church.
I have to say a few things after reading your post. Ideologies suck. One of the reasons is one of the things you said, namely that there is no moral boundary that will not be crossed. However an ideology merely masks this fact. Ideologies mostly hide and/or justify the crossing of moral boundaries.
There isn't proof of much in this world. That's another reason why ideologies suck. They are based on baseless a priori assumptions, and therefore suffer from the GIGO principal. If you are a subscriber, unless you are ripping them apart by using them in the most mendacious and self serving way possible, they are ripping you apart by making your worldview and actions inconsistent with observed reality.
My beliefs are: People act out of self interest period. There is no such thing as altruism - period. Real good and evil are always relative to a given entities point of view. ( Eg: Steaks are good for me, but bad for the cow, but they really are good for me and really are bad for the cow. However it would be an error to say that steaks are inherently good or bad in an absolute sense, because I don't believe in an absolute moral coordinate system.
The world which runs this way is evidently filled with all the love and other good-stuff-in-life, as well as the bad stuff too. And I never met a God, so I assume no such thing exists until I see evidence to the contrary. Real goodness exists, but I assume it has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence, and real evil exists which likewise I assume has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence to the contrary.
If I am a caveman, a sabertooth tiger is a bad guy. I will unashamedly say it, and act accordingly, without regard for the cute little sabertooth tiger cubs that may be orphaned when I push a rock off a cliff onto it's head so that it doesn't later sneak up on and eat me or someone I care about.
Side note: The historical evidence shows that complete anarchy leads to government. Lack of government or order doesn't lead to a blowup. It is precisely the order in a system that is the blowup. Think about a hurricane. That is a blowup of order out of disorder. Ideologies form the same way mostly. They change and are reinterpreted to fit the self interests of important people. So out of randomness the ideology itself is the order. The same with government. It's probably as useless to try and stop these phenomena as it is to try and stop a hurricane from inevitably forming over the warm ocean in August, but you don't have to get caught up in it.
Also, evolution can be a guiding principal to healthy happy living. You were born with genes that have survived so far. You are wired to want to be happy. If striving for happiness were something that tended to be selected against throughout history, then you likely wouldn't be wired to seek happiness. Therefore those behaviors that are selected for are likely to be associated with seeking happiness, but also seeking happiness is likely to cause behaviors that *have been* selected for. If you don't have a good idea about how to go about seeking happiness, evolution can serve a guiding principal. Think about what behaviors have been selected for, and against, and you might get insight or ideas about how to go about seeking happiness if you have some perspective to salt them with.
Long ago, I bought a red book by Bishop about neural networks ( can't remember the title ). I found it pretty hard to digest, especially trying to understand backpropagation. It was full of statistics, and unsatisfying if you are wondering why X solution is the best. This last point may be due to the neural networks approach to AI being to start with the 'neuron' ( which biology isn't even close to fully understanding ) and see what you can build with it, justifying your designs with statistical analysis.
I think that if I were a PHd student, which I will never be as I am now long committed to another life-path, ( I have a Math BA ), I would spend some months browsing wikipedia.
Your whole teenage life, you read about this and that without any pressure to pass a test on it, just browsing. Then you get interested in something, and you major in it. They teach you more of it than you knew existed, but you end up with a degree without really having a good idea of what is out there at the next level. You know basically what you were taught, and it hasn't had time to stew. With more than ample new data to process having been fed into your head over the past few years, you haven't had time to ask your own questions and become curious. You haven't had time to get interested in stuff at the next level. I think the many wikipedia articles are a good way to get a 10000 mile high view of the stuff out there, and an appreciation of what might be interesting to study further without going through the effort gaining in depth knowlege of all the areas ( something you will have time for in the years after you get your PHd ).
If I had it to do again, I would never have switched majors from biology ( which I found easy ) to math ( my worst subject ). I did this because I thought ( wrongly ) at the time that I was no good at dealing with people which doctors do in their jobs, and 'medical doctor' was the only well paying career path for a bio major, ( BS in Bio won't get you paid much at all and you have to move to where there is demand even then if you want to work in your field. ) so a Bio major basically would have committed me to more years of school than I was wanted to commit to while math left the option I took, of computer programming after just a BA )
Really job wise, computer programming has decent pay, good hours ( except sometimes ) and enough demand to work in many places if you aren't picky about what you are doing. Don't expect to get rich by skill. The ONLY way to get rich in this world is by being lucky, and stupid helps, though the disadvantage of stupidness is that, while it increases your chances of getting rich, it increases your chance of being poor far more.
However, as an adult, I can see that Medical Doctor is really a jewel of a job. You can live anywhere you want because there are sick people everywhere. No need to leave family behind to move to where your job is. ( Professors must do this, and anyone ( medical doctors included ) who wants to make top dollar at what they do, however medical doctors make enough to be able to sacrifice some earning power for other benefits without being uncomfortable )
Doctors can't telecommute. You don't have to compete for salary with people living where a third of your wage is a princely sum. Medical doctors are paid nicely, where nicely is relative to where they live.
I don't think doctors have to do much rat racing to just stay still. If you aren't too ambitious, I don't think you have to work 80 hour weeks constantly to do decently. ( I am probably wrong here, but that's only perception of someone outside doctordom ) Certainly doctors don't work as hard as say Lawyers.
Sitting on your duff ( rent seeking ) is precisely what making a piece of canned pay-for software lets you do.
Basically, you want to create some customers that need what you have to offer, and barriers to others creating something just as good for less.
Barriers can be added functionality ( the consumer wins here ), or even just interoperability barriers which have no socially redeeming value.
Because copies of existing software cost zero to make, the marginal cost of a copy of a piece of software is zero.
This means that any price above zero is monopolistic price setting and the economic damage done by this is the deadweight loss. ( see monopoly. The producer surplus that the software maker earns may also be 'economic damage' if it goes towards creating interoperability barriers that do not help consumers, though it might also be used for adding useful features.
I can't think of two pieces of pay for canned software with nothing to differentiate them that have remained that way for long. When that happens, the price drops to near zero until and unless, or one firm adds features the other's product lacks. Maybe the products diverge with diffent sets of features tailored to different segments of the market, or one company goes out of business. Incidentally, sometimes the loser open sources their code in that case.
In the case of rent seeking, there can be only one.
It's a case of king of the mountain. You get to collect the rent at the top of the mountain you've built until someone else knocks you off. If you screw your customers hard enough, it will be some of them that knock you off by writing open source software. You will then be forced to build another little hill from which you can collect possibly less rent.
Open source software is how the world consolidates it's ownership of the code that has already been written, and which has already been paid for in full.
Canned software must either spend some of that producer surplus they collect on useful innovation or fighting amongst themselves. Hopefully things are rigged so as to make innovation better rewarded than 'advertising'.
Most software development is done not at canned software houses, but for companies with custom needs that are best met by custom development by usually in-house developers. Developers of widely used canned software are a tiny minority. Unless something is delivered that is truely hard to produce when compared to the amount of money charged for it, then it will be worth it to someone to try to knock you off your mountain.
Releasing open source should be done by canned software houses as a tool to foil those who would use huge money warchests to catch up and overtake you. If you see this coming, you can open source your base code and concentrate exclusively on the new stuff ( the new little mountains ). When the big money sees the size of the chargable mountain starts not at sea level but from the tree-line, then they might not try to take over your recent additions. But you will have to charge less, because you now deliver less that is not free. Your customers have paid for the development of the code that was open sourced and it is now the property of the world. If you have nothing else to sell, then you should have spent more dollars on features and fixes and less on advertising.
But gollum bit one off and fell into a volcano.
Should be 23 MICROgrams of antimatter would fill up your SUV.
Throw a lump of antimatter into a lake and answer the most important question related to antimatter:
Does it sink or does it float?
Seriously, although most physicists would say that antimatter is attracted to matter via gravity, nobody has ever been able to do the experiment to find out if antimatter falls up or down.
There is at least a small chance that a lump of antimatter would rocket upward, annihilating against the atmosphere as it went. If the atmosphere annihilating against the lump broke it up into little bits, it would create a cone shaped explosion over your head. One would expect the little bits to break up faster, as they have more surface area per volume. As the force of the 'explosion' disintegrated the antimatter lump, the tiny particles would annihilate more rapidly. Unless of course, the explosion drove away any atmosphere from the immediate vicinity. Maybe that force would be enough to make a shield around the antimatter lump allowing it to survive until it got to outer space relatively unscathed. Who the hell knows?
But if it were attracted to matter via gravity, then it would sizzle, but also likely break up very soon. The little pieces would have more surface area than the big lump, and so would annihilate, ( and break up ) faster. The force of neighboring annihilations may contribute to speeding the breakup of the bits. It might be that the end result is a sort of conflagration that increases rapidly in rate.
Again, who knows?
Here's a fact calculated using Frink
gives 23.365651177125987076 . So 23 grams of antimatter could fill up your SUV. Pretty cool eh? That's 455 kilos of TNT equivalent, or 928 McDonalds Big Macs.
A 60 megaton blast from an H-Bomb is equivalent to 111 billion McDonalds big Macs or 2.79 kg of antimatter annihilated.
Caveat read-or: I am not a physicist. When you annihilate antimatter to make energy, you do so with the equivalent amount of matter. So to annihilate 1 kg of antimatter, you need 1 kg of matter. So possibly, the amounts of antimatter above should be halved, since really, to annihilate 2 kgs of mass you need 1 kg of matter and 1 kg of antimatter. But, whatever, you get the idea.
Here are 2 items approved for over the counter sale: Tylenol and Ny-Quil.
If I happen to be filling a prescription for antibiotics, and the pharmacist offers to ring me up, they might ask: Are you planning on taking the tylenol and the ny-quil together?
If I answer yes, then I want the pharmacist to warn me that ny-quil contains a full dose of acetominophen, and that I should not take the tylenol at the same time.
If ( crazily ) I declare that I am going to take them, then the pharmacist should decide that I am suicidal, and not sell me either of the drugs, and phone an ambulance to take me to the loony bin.
Also, what about the decongestants made of what sudafed used to be made of that gets purchased by those wishing to brew methamphetamine? I think it's pseudoeffedrine? That's over-the-counter, but it very well may be stored on the other side of the counter to prevent it from being stolen. You might have to go through a pharmacist, who might very well refuse to sell it to you.
I'm all for a pharmacist giving an interview and refusing to sell the drugs if they are not happy with the answers given. If I am filling 2 prescriptions for incompatible drugs, I want the pharmacist to warn me, ask me if I understand that taking these two together will kill me, and then refuse to sell me one or the other.
It is entirely appropriate for a pharmacist to explain how to take the morning after pill, including interviewing the patient to determine if for instance, the possible pregnancy is within the window for aborting with the morning after pill. You KNOW there are idiots that will try taking the morning after pill at three months pregnant. A pharmacist can and should prevent this. Don't antibiotics mess with the pill? Are you taking antibiotics seems like a great interview question to ask...
If a pharmacist won't give a clear answer as to why they are refusing to sell the drugs, then it's up to the patient to find a pharmacist who will. If there is no medical reason why the first pharmacist refused to sell the drugs, then there will be no problem finding a pharmacist that will sell them. If there is some bible belt conspiracy of pharmacists to not sell the morning after pill, then there needs to be something like Planned Parenthood around to point to a pharmacist that will sell the morning after pill.
The days of cramming crocodile dung up your snaz as birth control are over, effective as that may have been...
This kind of request means that the NSA doesn't already HAVE a quantum computer that it uses to break codes. For now, your strong crypto is strong even from them given a large enough number of bits.
They want to know just how many bits and what algorithms THEY need to use to remain secure even should the enemy get create a quantum computer codebreaking machine.
And of course they want a quantum codebreaking machine so they can read everyone's email.
They also would not want the senders of such email to know the NSA could read it. That way, they would keep sending such email. Petty criminals have no need to worry as they wouldn't tip their hand. However they might tip the FBI which could then catch you by more conventional means if they should follow up. Really, the NSA might very well make this sort of request so as to mislead their enemies into thinking they didn't already have this capability, but this seems less likely than that the NSA doesn't have a sci-fi-quantum-codebreaker, but fears someone else may soon have one.
Hahahahahaa.
Yes, not doing sleazy stuff to the search results certainly helps them dominate search, but I wonder it it is really Page Rank and their patent on it that is to blame for their dominance.
Maybe indexing the web as well as google without infringing on the page rank patent is impossible.
Maybe it is possible to be almost as good as google, but the fact that google doesn't actively try to drive it's users away means that there is as yet no compelling reason for users to switch from google.
It will be very interesting to see what happens when the pagerank patent expires.
Japan owns 600 billion of US Treasury Securities, and China owns 500 billion.
Why? Japan wants to export it's deflation problem via the carry trade which is when Japanese Yen savings are used to buy Dollars which are then used to buy US Treasury Securities which yield higher interest than Japanese banks must pay to Japanese savers.
The US loves this because buying dollars with yen supports the US dollar keeping inflation down, while the Fed 'stimulates the economy' with loose monetary policy. Meanwhile Japanese exports are helped by devaluing the Yen. Japan must devalue the Yen for it's exports to be competitive with China.
China devalues the Renminbi ( Yuan ) by more complicated means, but like Japan, the result is accumulated Foreign Currency Reserves, including US Treasury Securities. Devaluing the Renminbi ( Yuan ) makes Chinese exports more competitive. Also, the restrictions on foreign investment necessary for China to control the value of the Renminbi ( Yuan ) allow some measure of central government control in how the Chinese economy develops.
Moreover, devaluing the Renminbi ( Yuan ) allows China to accumulate huge foreign currency reserves ( 2 trillion dollars worth so far ) that it can use for checkbook diplomacy, such as loaning to the third world or deals with Hugo Chavez or the Iranians.
It is worth noting that the Foreign Currency Reserves are aquired by the Chinese Government at the expense of the average Chinese citizen. The buying power of the Renminbi ( Yuan ) that the average Chinese worker is paid in has been appropriated by their government by their artificial devaluation of the Chinese Currency.
Not that there is any moral difference between that and a tax.
Anyway, if one of Japan or China started selling US Treasury securities they would shoot themselves in the foot. It would likely trigger a fire sale that would wreck the dollar and hurt the US, China, and Japan severely.
However, there has to be balanced trade sometime. Pressure will build and build until it inexorably happens somehow.
Here is a link you might find interesting
J-Lo's ass... Hmm.
I thought of what would happen if 7 of 9 farted.
If you percieve 'too many people doing this' then you might convince them that meeting their emotional or social needs requires that their worldview be consistent with scientific epistemology, or that there emotional and social gains to be had though scientific epistemology. Then you can go be a therapist or something.
Them being able to pull a B without attending shows any onlookers that their needs are not being served. They MUST attend the class so as to hide the fact that their needs are not being served by the class. If they leave the class then so does their portion of the money allocated for them.
Now at your former high school they can no longer skip school. Neither are they singled out for advanced studies. They merely have to sit there bored out of their minds for no useful purpose whatsoever. Sigh...
Just keep panning back to larger and larger scales and you will find yourself on Homer Simpson's bald head again.
That's what NASA needs to be doing. Spending all the money they are spending on the ISS and Space Shuttle and useless Moon and Mars missions on FINDING SOMETHING BETTER THAN ROCKETS!!!
This seems interesting enough to at least be building small scale prototypes of.
And space elevators too.
I think the lazy/eager divide is not so important. You can make a lazy language perform an eager calculation or an eager language compute something lazily. It's merely a question of what is the default behavior.
If I had to bet on a weird new language taking the world by storm it would have to be OZ.