Who cares if we interfere with nature? It sounds like fun to me. We already "interfere" with it by contributing to said evolution; doing things such as, for instance, hunting the mammoth to extinction.
Evolution itself is a blind entity, like the idealized lady justice. It doesn't care why something is adaptive. If humans strive to keep panda bears alive because humans think panda bears are cute, then the panda bear cuteness is an adaptive attribute! Behold; evolution in action!
Without broadcast TV, how can we use Fox news to market our political party to the least educated, poorest part of society!? We are talking like millions of votes here, man! Get a hold of yourself!
"While Tritium has several different experimentally-determined values of its half-life, the NIST recommends 4500±8 days (approximately 12.32 years)." Linkzor
I buy the part about the electronics. But there's got to be plenty of unemployed Russian scientists out there who would know how to maintain that sort of thing... leftovers from the USSR and all. Hell, apparently even you know a thing or two about it, and look at how easy it was for me to find you.
Of course that's totally conspiracy-theory worthy without any evidence to back it up, but if the nukes are out there it's within the realm of possibility. I bet it'd be more likely that we would see a nuke from other source, though, if one were ever used against us; something somebody built themselves and then handed off to a bunch of radicals, or possibly had the decency to shoot at us onboard an ICBM, ahead of an official declaration of war.
Psh, to the asshole who modded me Troll and any other who would have -- tell me, on your OS of choice, do you not use a third-party virus detection software?
Certain that all 12 of the missing nuclear devices are no longer functional. I mean, that'd be the most likely scenario, but if I were the one responsible for those devices, I'd be a little concerned.
No worries, I never really expected my question to get a straight or thorough answer, I just like to challenge people's assumptions by asking hard questions.
3 of your links are 404. The rest are just anecdotal. Pointing out flaws in system A doesn't rule out the possibility that there are similar flaws in system B. Without a thorough comparison it doesn't support the hypothesis that system A is "the worst." Additionally, "putting on the net" is ill-defined. By "put on the net," do you mean, run a malicious executable? That could potentially reduce any system to a pile of slag, REGARDLESS of the OS installed, and many users practically do it willfully by running executables from unreliable sources. Of course, a comptent user can recover from any worst-case scenario (on any OS) simply by wiping the drive and re-installing the OS of their choosing.
I guess my point is... yeah, I do need more proof, actually. You can't just show that someone exploited Windows. You have to show that Windows was categorically exploited more than other Operating Systems. To do that you'll need aggregate data. You also have to show that this is due to inherent flaws in the Windows system, and not merely due to the fact that malicious hackers (who like things like bank account passwords and credit card numbers) wanted to target the most widely distributed Operating System known to man in order to maximize their profit.
MS has supplied bad code for so long that an entire market has evolved around keeping that creaky wagon a bit safe
Do you have any evidence that this is any way Microsoft's fault, or does the fault lie with malicious hackers and uneducated users, which any mainstream operating system would be subjected to?
Suppose you come across a pending patent that's similar to something you're working on
If that patent is granted, and you are later sued for violating it
I don't think the people planning on submitting prior art objections to these patents actually work in the fields or industries of the patents they're investigating, and therefore this would be a meaningless threat to them. They're just scientists for hire (and in this economy there's probably a lot of those). Or, at the very least, only working on patents outside your professional arena is a way around this issue you've foreseen.
was evidently required to bump you from name-calling into a more reasonable frame of mind
Ah, "crazy old coot" was mostly for the humor. If I'm upset there will be real profanity. And the reason I didn't open up with the whole (sloppily, quickly written) "on money" dialog was simply because of the time of day I was writing my post... I wanted sleep!
You make a series of valid points and I think we're on the same page. Lending is an important function of society, but I think the real problem arises when money is lent to Checking account B from Checking account A, and then more money from Checking account B is lent to Checking account C, thereby lending one dollar twice. Of course, reserve requirements implicitly put a cap on the number of times this can happen. So I think the answer to this concern is effective reserve requirements, and sensible money printing policies. Also, the "money multiplier effect" (the magic you refer to) is because of that exponential lending of a single dollar; not due to the fact that there is interest on loans, people pay that interest out of money they personally hold for their work (or, in the case of the Hilton sisters, the work of their ancestors). The interest is tangible; runaway lending is not.
And while my point about markets adjusting themselves through exchange rates and inflation is valid, so is your point about the two slaves and the crust of bread. If X country decides to print a ton of money, that will have effects on their economy and the value of their currency. So X county is really not doing itself any additional favors by printing the money; it's a wash for the government. However, the people OF that government typically have no recourse against this practice: if the gov't has $100 and I have $10, and the gov't prints $900 more, so now they have $1000 and I have $10, suddenly my "share" of the economy is much smaller. They've effectively stolen from me in order to increase their proportionate influence on the economy. So from the perspective of nation-states there isn't a problem with the current system; but the little guy is definitely victimized when money is created from nowhere.
I can always mark the ones who are going to take that as a cue to bite back
All of your silly posturing aside, I don't think you're talking to who you think you're talking to. I'm not the OP.
On money...
If we didn't have a common medium of exchange, the world would be plunged into a dark age the likes of which you can not comprehend, presuming we didn't adopt some egalitarian and utopian system of resource distribution (and half of the world seems ready to fight to the death to keep that from happening, so I don't see it happening). The difficulty of finding a double coincidence of wants, a prerequisite for trade in a barter economy, would preclude the existence of many highly intelligent and skilled professionals that our society currently supports.
Good luck finding someone who wants to trade food for an economics lecture, or someone who will fix your toilet for a statistical analysis. And you can't even comprehend the difficulty that would arise in taxation; we'd end up in a practically medieval system, most likely, paying our taxes in bales of wheat or hay. And how are you going to hire people to provide public services, like police protection, firefighting, water & power utilities... when all you have to offer are odds and ends collected from the population?
I disagree with the practices of runaway fiat currency printing, but it's also been shown that when a country prints tons and tons of money, their currency tends to inflate rapidly. The money is valued by other people based on what they can get for it, and if there's too much money in your economy, there's less and less you can do with it.
The money multiplier is an important resource to society... it moves excess resources from those who have too much to those who need resources in an efficient manner, and with the bank as a broker the investments are relatively secure. Getting a loan for anything before banking would have been next to impossible; the idiosyncratic risk is too much. Of course, lending can go too far; banks can shell out way too much of their reserves and end up with no money to pay anyone. That was one of the fears of the subprime crisis; as people declare bankruptcy and hand their depreciated homes to the bank, the bank runs a risk of not being able to pay it's debts, both to depositors and other banks. Of course, we learned all about this in the 1930's; that's why we have federal reserve requirements for the banks now. In my opinion, they shouldn't lend money that people didn't want to lend; savings and checking accounts shouldn't be touched for investment purposes, just CD's and money market accounts. However, even despite this minor complaint I have, the system is still relatively stable and provides our economy with tangible growth and efficiency.
In short, money problems aren't imaginary, and without money our specialized economy would crumble and thousands would die of famine. The system isn't perfect but it's more of a benefit than a detriment. Runaway money printing is a despicable practice, but the money markets correct this sort of abuse rather quickly through exchange rates and price inflation... so on the whole your worries and complaints are just chicken little "the sky is falling" rhetorics.
You're right, no big deal at all. Just 12 weapons of mass destruction. I have full faith in the department of war! Er, I mean department of defense. Ministry of defense?
Hey, I heard that (insert favorite enemy dictator here) has weapons of mass destruction! Let's kick his ass and take him to the gallows!
Yeah, there's nothing Orwellian going on here at all.
I live in a pretty bustling city and I don't encounter TV, ever, aside from maybe your local restaurant lobby.
I wouldn't hand you three pages of howling rhetoric, but I might bust out an old "money & banking" textbook. I'm an economics major and a laurels scholar, you know.
Oh, yeah, I figured out what fag packet meant. Of course, if you walked into a southern bar in the U.S.A. and asked the barkeep for a fag packet, he might think those were fightin' words.
You crazy old coot. So what, you live in the woods or something now? It's not like the TV can just grow legs and walk into your room and turn itself on. Even if they give away the cable for free, that doesn't mean you have to hook a TV up to it.
I won't even touch the idea that money = nothing, I don't have the time to write a 3-page essay.
Dude, the school wasn't trying to discredit Darwin, they were making him sound more plausible by presenting a more ridiculous theory as a juxtaposition.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares if we interfere with nature? It sounds like fun to me. We already "interfere" with it by contributing to said evolution; doing things such as, for instance, hunting the mammoth to extinction.
Evolution itself is a blind entity, like the idealized lady justice. It doesn't care why something is adaptive. If humans strive to keep panda bears alive because humans think panda bears are cute, then the panda bear cuteness is an adaptive attribute! Behold; evolution in action!
I can't decide.
Without broadcast TV, how can we use Fox news to market our political party to the least educated, poorest part of society!? We are talking like millions of votes here, man! Get a hold of yourself!
Oh, shi-
"While Tritium has several different experimentally-determined values of its half-life, the NIST recommends 4500±8 days (approximately 12.32 years)." Linkzor
I buy the part about the electronics. But there's got to be plenty of unemployed Russian scientists out there who would know how to maintain that sort of thing ... leftovers from the USSR and all. Hell, apparently even you know a thing or two about it, and look at how easy it was for me to find you.
Of course that's totally conspiracy-theory worthy without any evidence to back it up, but if the nukes are out there it's within the realm of possibility. I bet it'd be more likely that we would see a nuke from other source, though, if one were ever used against us; something somebody built themselves and then handed off to a bunch of radicals, or possibly had the decency to shoot at us onboard an ICBM, ahead of an official declaration of war.
Psh, to the asshole who modded me Troll and any other who would have -- tell me, on your OS of choice, do you not use a third-party virus detection software?
Certain that all 12 of the missing nuclear devices are no longer functional. I mean, that'd be the most likely scenario, but if I were the one responsible for those devices, I'd be a little concerned.
but that argument is by now so debunked I don't have to bother.
Yes, actually, you do.
No worries, I never really expected my question to get a straight or thorough answer, I just like to challenge people's assumptions by asking hard questions.
3 of your links are 404. The rest are just anecdotal. Pointing out flaws in system A doesn't rule out the possibility that there are similar flaws in system B. Without a thorough comparison it doesn't support the hypothesis that system A is "the worst." Additionally, "putting on the net" is ill-defined. By "put on the net," do you mean, run a malicious executable? That could potentially reduce any system to a pile of slag, REGARDLESS of the OS installed, and many users practically do it willfully by running executables from unreliable sources. Of course, a comptent user can recover from any worst-case scenario (on any OS) simply by wiping the drive and re-installing the OS of their choosing.
I guess my point is ... yeah, I do need more proof, actually. You can't just show that someone exploited Windows. You have to show that Windows was categorically exploited more than other Operating Systems. To do that you'll need aggregate data. You also have to show that this is due to inherent flaws in the Windows system, and not merely due to the fact that malicious hackers (who like things like bank account passwords and credit card numbers) wanted to target the most widely distributed Operating System known to man in order to maximize their profit.
Good luck.
Are you certain of that, or just reassuring yourself? You know what happens when you make assumptions.
MS has supplied bad code for so long that an entire market has evolved around keeping that creaky wagon a bit safe
Do you have any evidence that this is any way Microsoft's fault, or does the fault lie with malicious hackers and uneducated users, which any mainstream operating system would be subjected to?
Suppose you come across a pending patent that's similar to something you're working on
If that patent is granted, and you are later sued for violating it
I don't think the people planning on submitting prior art objections to these patents actually work in the fields or industries of the patents they're investigating, and therefore this would be a meaningless threat to them. They're just scientists for hire (and in this economy there's probably a lot of those). Or, at the very least, only working on patents outside your professional arena is a way around this issue you've foreseen.
was evidently required to bump you from name-calling into a more reasonable frame of mind
Ah, "crazy old coot" was mostly for the humor. If I'm upset there will be real profanity. And the reason I didn't open up with the whole (sloppily, quickly written) "on money" dialog was simply because of the time of day I was writing my post ... I wanted sleep!
You make a series of valid points and I think we're on the same page. Lending is an important function of society, but I think the real problem arises when money is lent to Checking account B from Checking account A, and then more money from Checking account B is lent to Checking account C, thereby lending one dollar twice. Of course, reserve requirements implicitly put a cap on the number of times this can happen. So I think the answer to this concern is effective reserve requirements, and sensible money printing policies. Also, the "money multiplier effect" (the magic you refer to) is because of that exponential lending of a single dollar; not due to the fact that there is interest on loans, people pay that interest out of money they personally hold for their work (or, in the case of the Hilton sisters, the work of their ancestors). The interest is tangible; runaway lending is not.
And while my point about markets adjusting themselves through exchange rates and inflation is valid, so is your point about the two slaves and the crust of bread. If X country decides to print a ton of money, that will have effects on their economy and the value of their currency. So X county is really not doing itself any additional favors by printing the money; it's a wash for the government. However, the people OF that government typically have no recourse against this practice: if the gov't has $100 and I have $10, and the gov't prints $900 more, so now they have $1000 and I have $10, suddenly my "share" of the economy is much smaller. They've effectively stolen from me in order to increase their proportionate influence on the economy. So from the perspective of nation-states there isn't a problem with the current system; but the little guy is definitely victimized when money is created from nowhere.
I can always mark the ones who are going to take that as a cue to bite back
All of your silly posturing aside, I don't think you're talking to who you think you're talking to. I'm not the OP.
On money ...
If we didn't have a common medium of exchange, the world would be plunged into a dark age the likes of which you can not comprehend, presuming we didn't adopt some egalitarian and utopian system of resource distribution (and half of the world seems ready to fight to the death to keep that from happening, so I don't see it happening). The difficulty of finding a double coincidence of wants, a prerequisite for trade in a barter economy, would preclude the existence of many highly intelligent and skilled professionals that our society currently supports.
Good luck finding someone who wants to trade food for an economics lecture, or someone who will fix your toilet for a statistical analysis. And you can't even comprehend the difficulty that would arise in taxation; we'd end up in a practically medieval system, most likely, paying our taxes in bales of wheat or hay. And how are you going to hire people to provide public services, like police protection, firefighting, water & power utilities ... when all you have to offer are odds and ends collected from the population?
I disagree with the practices of runaway fiat currency printing, but it's also been shown that when a country prints tons and tons of money, their currency tends to inflate rapidly. The money is valued by other people based on what they can get for it, and if there's too much money in your economy, there's less and less you can do with it.
The money multiplier is an important resource to society ... it moves excess resources from those who have too much to those who need resources in an efficient manner, and with the bank as a broker the investments are relatively secure. Getting a loan for anything before banking would have been next to impossible; the idiosyncratic risk is too much. Of course, lending can go too far; banks can shell out way too much of their reserves and end up with no money to pay anyone. That was one of the fears of the subprime crisis; as people declare bankruptcy and hand their depreciated homes to the bank, the bank runs a risk of not being able to pay it's debts, both to depositors and other banks. Of course, we learned all about this in the 1930's; that's why we have federal reserve requirements for the banks now. In my opinion, they shouldn't lend money that people didn't want to lend; savings and checking accounts shouldn't be touched for investment purposes, just CD's and money market accounts. However, even despite this minor complaint I have, the system is still relatively stable and provides our economy with tangible growth and efficiency.
In short, money problems aren't imaginary, and without money our specialized economy would crumble and thousands would die of famine. The system isn't perfect but it's more of a benefit than a detriment. Runaway money printing is a despicable practice, but the money markets correct this sort of abuse rather quickly through exchange rates and price inflation ... so on the whole your worries and complaints are just chicken little "the sky is falling" rhetorics.
You're right, no big deal at all. Just 12 weapons of mass destruction. I have full faith in the department of war! Er, I mean department of defense. Ministry of defense?
Hey, I heard that (insert favorite enemy dictator here) has weapons of mass destruction! Let's kick his ass and take him to the gallows!
Yeah, there's nothing Orwellian going on here at all.
I live in a pretty bustling city and I don't encounter TV, ever, aside from maybe your local restaurant lobby.
I wouldn't hand you three pages of howling rhetoric, but I might bust out an old "money & banking" textbook. I'm an economics major and a laurels scholar, you know.
Oh, yeah, I figured out what fag packet meant. Of course, if you walked into a southern bar in the U.S.A. and asked the barkeep for a fag packet, he might think those were fightin' words.
In the end, I had to move to get away from TV.
You crazy old coot. So what, you live in the woods or something now? It's not like the TV can just grow legs and walk into your room and turn itself on. Even if they give away the cable for free, that doesn't mean you have to hook a TV up to it.
I won't even touch the idea that money = nothing, I don't have the time to write a 3-page essay.
Dude, the school wasn't trying to discredit Darwin, they were making him sound more plausible by presenting a more ridiculous theory as a juxtaposition.
whose entropy are we increasing in order to eat? There's a simpler question for you.
I do a LOT of work on refuse disposal options, principally for the UK food industry
A back of the metaphorical fag packet calculation
Oh, you brits and your wacky words and silly sayings. As a yank, I never cease to be amused by it.
Needs citation.
You obviously haven't heard much about The 1918 Flu Pandemic
Agreed; I just thought it was amusingly Orwellian that the world has gotten so big that a dozen missing nuclear warheads is "no big deal."
only about a dozen or so are left unaccounted for.
You're right, we shouldn't be afraid and angry ... there's only about a dozen missing nukes! Everything is O.K.! It's for your protection!