So, there's so much ignorance in your post that I can't possibly begin to address all of it without pulling what little hair I have left out of my head, and therefore I'll just stick to one thing.
I have a better idea. It's called Capitalism. You work for your own success. Your achievements are YOUR doing, they are not predicated on someone (certainly not the Federal Government) giving you a handout.
You're wrong because of the inheritance laws. Did Paris Hilton achieve any of what she has? Sure, they gave away tens of billions of that forture, but the girls still got millions. How is that efficient, never mind equitable?
Also, I don't see how hanging out with someone who has criticized America invalidates you for the presidency. If anything I'd like to elect a President who can think of criticisms to direct at our administration. After all, we want to elect someone who will do something different, not what's been done for the past 8 years, right?
And why is it bad for a President to be diplomatic with terrorist organizations? There's no harm in talking to people, and to say otherwise is to adopt a "shoot first, ask questions later" policy. That will end in war on our home soil, and I don't want that, and neither do you.
Maybe I should be killing you to protect America. I mean, McCain, really? Man, you're stupid.
They just don't know how to compete. Gears of War did better on the consoles because it had less competitors. In the PC market, they're getting shut out by giants like Valve and Crytek in the FPS market.
By its very nature it is not subject to free market forces, and you may not rely on free market forces to influence it.
I've already refuted this point of yours in about 3 or 4 different posts... should I really bother reprinting my arguments here? Nah, probably not.
Actually, macroeconomics is a fairly well-defined field of study. You cannot just come in as a newbie and call things whatever you want. You will be laughed at.
Wow, you're a pompous bitch. Don't throw stones in glass houses.
We can rely on them not to inflate prices (for any significant length of time) if their market has no barriers to entry, because firms will move to join the market if the monopoly becomes decadent and raises price or lowers quality. They will do this for the very reason that you think we can't rely on them -- they are profit maximizing, like every other entity or organism.
If you want to understand economics well enough to become anything more than just an armchair federal regulator that spits and rants and raves on slashdot, you'll need to learn the difference between contestable and incontestable markets.
You're a fool. It remains a free market as long as it can still be contested -- that is, as long as the market still has low barriers to entry for new competitors. If there are low barriers to entry and the product is relatively homogeneous (as in the online advertising business), then an unreasonable hike in prices on the part of the monopoly or oligopoly will cause new firms to form, and these new firms will "invisible hand" the price back to a fair market value.
The monopoly can only raise prices at will if it can guarantee that no new competitors can join the market. This is why De Beers, for example, is scared shitless by companies like Gemesis and Apollo. De Beers has always been able to maintain its monopoly on diamonds and inflate diamond prices because it controls something like upwards of 90% of all the world's diamond reserves and mines. Since the diamond is a limited, finite, tangible resource (UNLIKE technology services), De Beers can guarantee that new competitors can't "invisible hand" the price back to a fair value. Gemesis and Apollo, as you may or may not know, have designed ways to produce chemically pure diamond gemstones in a factory from raw carbon. Obviously, these man-made "cultured" diamonds are much cheaper than a mined diamond from De Beers. Even though there was already a monopoly, someone eliminated a key barrier to entry, and now the market is contested. The price is dropping.
On paper, in a textbook, perhaps on a college economics multiple-choice test, all of your assumptions about monopolies would be valid. But you really haven't thought it out that well.
Then why aren't others doing it? Are you going to try to tell me that they haven't thought of it? Or that it's too new? Yeah right.
More pedantry out of you. This is just a nay-saying attitude; "it hasn't been done before so it can't be done! I'm a helpless person who thinks only in terms of what I can't do!"
A monopoly (or near-monopoly) is still a monopoly, no matter how it got there. Once it does, it can choose to play by the capitalist rules, or remain a monopoly.
Or, just maybe, some business executives somewhere caught wind of this whole "federal anti-monopoly regulation" trend and realized that they can't abuse pricing if they want to retain a majority market share? Like a classical economist, you seem to assume that everything always happens in exactly the same way and that human innovation and folly can't possibly cause some variation. You're probably one of those tools that believes in the concept of the "rational agent."
Sadly, Google has some chinks in its "do no evil" armor. And they are pretty damned big.
Could you cite a source, please? Not that I care. The human race as a whole has some pretty big chinks in its "do no evil" armor; it is terribly self-serving and self-centered, often under the guise of philanthropy. And honestly, what I dislike about Google more than anything is it's trite "do no evil" motto. They're simply engaging in the behavior that produces the greatest reward; supporting social contracts. They realize that supporting social contracts is more efficient than undermining them, so they are still just profit maximizing when they "do no evil." And if you believe that greed = evil, then that means that "do no evil" = evil.
Moral definitions are so weak and vague that they don't stand up to rigorous analysis. They are a symptom of a bygone era of deity worship, and a belief in an inherent purpose and morality imbuing the universe. If we want to retain our rationality, we must admit that the human race is self-serving, and think of morals simply as social contracts that produce the greatest amount of reward and efficiency for our race.
But I've gotten off topic. I've started to criticize the entire concept of morality, as opposed to just criticizing your highly theoretical, unsubstantiated, and unsupported economic arguments.
No, it was you. Your basic line of logic was as thus: The American economy is in decline. Russian regulators blocked a Google acquisition. Therefore, the American economy is in decline because they did not block big business acquisitions.
Maybe there is some evidence or argument supporting your assertion, somewhere, but it certainly isn't in your post. Your post is simply post hoc ergo propter hoc. You need to say why what Russia is doing is better than what the U.S. is doing.
Psh, who appointed those guys as the philosophical guide to all those who code? Saying "we" have a code of ethics like you're some holier-than-thou order of knights is a little fantastical, don't you think? Coders are just people, like anyone else, and sometimes people lack ethics.
That makes sense. "Flanking is one of our options" != "If we see the enemy, we MUST flank them."
I just took objection to the OP's "people who think they know about war" comment. I mean, granted, battlefield tactics don't always translate into a game simply because every feature of real life is not emulated, but the way the guy was talking, he made it sound like real armies don't flank and don't use diversions. Those are great tactics -- against human opponents.
As if.PDF isn't a de facto standard as well by now. Really, have you totally lost your mind? Many documents and forms are distributed in.PDF format now, even from government agencies online such as the IRS. If you lose a job because somebody can't open a.PDF, they're the ones losing out because of incompetence, not you.
In Lotro PvMP one of the basics is "you need numbers". A complex task is to try stategies like creating a diversion, flanking etc etc. Everyone who thinks they know about war might think these are valid tactics but forget one thing. KISS. Even an attempt at flanking the enemy is FAR to complex to pull off.
It might be "FAR too complex" in your videogame, but people fighting an actual war realize the value of flanking.
Flanking is valuable because of KISS - when the enemy has to cover his 12 and his 6 at the same time, vs. two of your units that only have to cover their 12, he covers both less adeptly than he would cover one. It's a win for you.
It's likely that private citizens, not acting on behalf of their government, were trying to see if they could dig up dirt on a political candidate not associated with their political views. Think about it - the child support agency could possibly dig up dirt about a scandalous affair if "Joe" happened to have a love child. And the Toledo PD could dig up dirt if they found that "Joe" had an outstanding warrant, or even a criminal history that he had already atoned for.
It's unfortunate that it happened, but as long as these kinds of records exist and people have access to them, abuses will happen.
Everybody is so busy hating on their big-brother government that they can't possibly see any legitimate use for a group of robots that would hunt down a human.
What, then, I might ask, is the purpose of a SWAT team? And why must SWAT officers die saving innocent hostages, thwarting bank robberies, and so forth, when we could use robots instead?
so if you don't list the ISBN because it looks "nasty", you can't complain that people don't know what version you mean.
Reference the edition.
You're right in saying that Wikipedia has the same issues as any other Encyclopedia. However, I criticize those sources equally.
Perhaps I should clarify something. The primary reason I devalue Wikipedia as a valid reference is that it's a secondary source. Generally speaking, when writing an academic paper, it is desirable to use mostly primary sources as opposed to secondary sources.
You're right that it isn't the fault of Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, I love Wikipedia. But I feel that people who are using it as a direct reference in academic papers are mislead, and the people saying you can't use it for research are also mislead.
In summary/clarification, we should use Wikipedia to find primary sources, and then cite those primary sources. I only said "in-print" because most primary sources are still distributed in print format -- there is no "Statistic-ipedia."
You have not listed one example of "children being indoctrinated"
Yes, I did. You just ignored my examples.
Only telling them half of the truth about our Nation's mixed history of foreign policy is just as good as telling them a lie. They need to realize that America was hostile towards the Native Americans and Mexicans.
You say it isn't relevant, but then why do we teach them about Thanksgiving? How is that, or any other kind of history, "relevant" according to your standards?
I wouldn't deem it so important if we weren't spending so much time telling them all about how America has always been the valiant savior of the downtrodden.
P.S. On the "definition of ignorance," you're just being a petty asshole looking for the last word on an irrelevant issue. However, saying that ignorance is not related to open mindedness is just silly. Of course it is. The ignorant are more likely to minimize cognitive dissonance by ignoring information that doesn't fit their assumptions, instead of adjusting their assumptions.
No, because my response was "you might be right." A rather rational response, no? The cure for ignorance isn't being infallible, it's keeping an open mind.
You can quote the dictionary. How cute. Did you have a point, though? About our children being indoctrinated with sugar-coated crap?
"My research interests are in the fileds of protection of biometric information, coding theory and cryptography and secure spontaneous interaction." Misspelling hers. Maybe they don't have good spellcheckers in the Netherlands? Somebody should tell her to use Firefox or something.
Most countries have given up their guns. The United States, for example.
"But I have a gun!" you cry. Well, sure. But tell me this...
Do you have a fully automatic gun with a 30-round magazine?
Do you have a tactical mortar?
Do you have fragmentation grenades?
Do you have a tank?
Do you have a nuclear-equipped ICBM?
Do you have a biological weapons facility that maintains live strains of anthrax, smallpox, and god knows what else?
The Constitution might say that we all have a right to "bear arms," but modern interpretation has lead that to really mean "only these arms." You might have a gun...
But it is just a security blanket, and only effective against thieves (enemies of our big brother government, no less).
Slashdot Mirror
I have a better idea. It's called Capitalism. You work for your own success. Your achievements are YOUR doing, they are not predicated on someone (certainly not the Federal Government) giving you a handout.
You're wrong because of the inheritance laws. Did Paris Hilton achieve any of what she has? Sure, they gave away tens of billions of that forture, but the girls still got millions. How is that efficient, never mind equitable?
Also, I don't see how hanging out with someone who has criticized America invalidates you for the presidency. If anything I'd like to elect a President who can think of criticisms to direct at our administration. After all, we want to elect someone who will do something different, not what's been done for the past 8 years, right?
And why is it bad for a President to be diplomatic with terrorist organizations? There's no harm in talking to people, and to say otherwise is to adopt a "shoot first, ask questions later" policy. That will end in war on our home soil, and I don't want that, and neither do you.
Maybe I should be killing you to protect America. I mean, McCain, really? Man, you're stupid.
They just don't know how to compete. Gears of War did better on the consoles because it had less competitors. In the PC market, they're getting shut out by giants like Valve and Crytek in the FPS market.
By its very nature it is not subject to free market forces, and you may not rely on free market forces to influence it.
I've already refuted this point of yours in about 3 or 4 different posts ... should I really bother reprinting my arguments here? Nah, probably not.
Actually, macroeconomics is a fairly well-defined field of study. You cannot just come in as a newbie and call things whatever you want. You will be laughed at.
Wow, you're a pompous bitch. Don't throw stones in glass houses.
We can rely on them not to inflate prices (for any significant length of time) if their market has no barriers to entry, because firms will move to join the market if the monopoly becomes decadent and raises price or lowers quality. They will do this for the very reason that you think we can't rely on them -- they are profit maximizing, like every other entity or organism.
If you want to understand economics well enough to become anything more than just an armchair federal regulator that spits and rants and raves on slashdot, you'll need to learn the difference between contestable and incontestable markets.
You're a fool. It remains a free market as long as it can still be contested -- that is, as long as the market still has low barriers to entry for new competitors. If there are low barriers to entry and the product is relatively homogeneous (as in the online advertising business), then an unreasonable hike in prices on the part of the monopoly or oligopoly will cause new firms to form, and these new firms will "invisible hand" the price back to a fair market value.
The monopoly can only raise prices at will if it can guarantee that no new competitors can join the market. This is why De Beers, for example, is scared shitless by companies like Gemesis and Apollo. De Beers has always been able to maintain its monopoly on diamonds and inflate diamond prices because it controls something like upwards of 90% of all the world's diamond reserves and mines. Since the diamond is a limited, finite, tangible resource (UNLIKE technology services), De Beers can guarantee that new competitors can't "invisible hand" the price back to a fair value. Gemesis and Apollo, as you may or may not know, have designed ways to produce chemically pure diamond gemstones in a factory from raw carbon. Obviously, these man-made "cultured" diamonds are much cheaper than a mined diamond from De Beers. Even though there was already a monopoly, someone eliminated a key barrier to entry, and now the market is contested. The price is dropping.
On paper, in a textbook, perhaps on a college economics multiple-choice test, all of your assumptions about monopolies would be valid. But you really haven't thought it out that well.
Then why aren't others doing it? Are you going to try to tell me that they haven't thought of it? Or that it's too new? Yeah right.
More pedantry out of you. This is just a nay-saying attitude; "it hasn't been done before so it can't be done! I'm a helpless person who thinks only in terms of what I can't do!"
A monopoly (or near-monopoly) is still a monopoly, no matter how it got there. Once it does, it can choose to play by the capitalist rules, or remain a monopoly.
Or, just maybe, some business executives somewhere caught wind of this whole "federal anti-monopoly regulation" trend and realized that they can't abuse pricing if they want to retain a majority market share? Like a classical economist, you seem to assume that everything always happens in exactly the same way and that human innovation and folly can't possibly cause some variation. You're probably one of those tools that believes in the concept of the "rational agent."
Sadly, Google has some chinks in its "do no evil" armor. And they are pretty damned big.
Could you cite a source, please? Not that I care. The human race as a whole has some pretty big chinks in its "do no evil" armor; it is terribly self-serving and self-centered, often under the guise of philanthropy. And honestly, what I dislike about Google more than anything is it's trite "do no evil" motto. They're simply engaging in the behavior that produces the greatest reward; supporting social contracts. They realize that supporting social contracts is more efficient than undermining them, so they are still just profit maximizing when they "do no evil." And if you believe that greed = evil, then that means that "do no evil" = evil.
Moral definitions are so weak and vague that they don't stand up to rigorous analysis. They are a symptom of a bygone era of deity worship, and a belief in an inherent purpose and morality imbuing the universe. If we want to retain our rationality, we must admit that the human race is self-serving, and think of morals simply as social contracts that produce the greatest amount of reward and efficiency for our race.
But I've gotten off topic. I've started to criticize the entire concept of morality, as opposed to just criticizing your highly theoretical, unsubstantiated, and unsupported economic arguments.
No, it was you. Your basic line of logic was as thus: The American economy is in decline. Russian regulators blocked a Google acquisition. Therefore, the American economy is in decline because they did not block big business acquisitions.
Maybe there is some evidence or argument supporting your assertion, somewhere, but it certainly isn't in your post. Your post is simply post hoc ergo propter hoc. You need to say why what Russia is doing is better than what the U.S. is doing.
Psh, who appointed those guys as the philosophical guide to all those who code? Saying "we" have a code of ethics like you're some holier-than-thou order of knights is a little fantastical, don't you think? Coders are just people, like anyone else, and sometimes people lack ethics.
Oh, whoops, I guess the OP was you. My bad. lol.
That makes sense. "Flanking is one of our options" != "If we see the enemy, we MUST flank them."
I just took objection to the OP's "people who think they know about war" comment. I mean, granted, battlefield tactics don't always translate into a game simply because every feature of real life is not emulated, but the way the guy was talking, he made it sound like real armies don't flank and don't use diversions. Those are great tactics -- against human opponents.
I thought we used computer analogies. I get football analogies better than car analogies ... I think he deserves +1 insightful.
As if .PDF isn't a de facto standard as well by now. Really, have you totally lost your mind? Many documents and forms are distributed in .PDF format now, even from government agencies online such as the IRS. If you lose a job because somebody can't open a .PDF, they're the ones losing out because of incompetence, not you.
In Lotro PvMP one of the basics is "you need numbers". A complex task is to try stategies like creating a diversion, flanking etc etc. Everyone who thinks they know about war might think these are valid tactics but forget one thing. KISS. Even an attempt at flanking the enemy is FAR to complex to pull off.
It might be "FAR too complex" in your videogame, but people fighting an actual war realize the value of flanking.
Flanking is valuable because of KISS - when the enemy has to cover his 12 and his 6 at the same time, vs. two of your units that only have to cover their 12, he covers both less adeptly than he would cover one. It's a win for you.
It's likely that private citizens, not acting on behalf of their government, were trying to see if they could dig up dirt on a political candidate not associated with their political views. Think about it - the child support agency could possibly dig up dirt about a scandalous affair if "Joe" happened to have a love child. And the Toledo PD could dig up dirt if they found that "Joe" had an outstanding warrant, or even a criminal history that he had already atoned for.
It's unfortunate that it happened, but as long as these kinds of records exist and people have access to them, abuses will happen.
Hey, I will sell you this rock that keeps tigers away. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, right?
Uh, scarcity? I don't think that the issue of scarcity is one that you can easily solve, and to trivialize it as easy would be practically ignorant.
Everybody is so busy hating on their big-brother government that they can't possibly see any legitimate use for a group of robots that would hunt down a human.
What, then, I might ask, is the purpose of a SWAT team? And why must SWAT officers die saving innocent hostages, thwarting bank robberies, and so forth, when we could use robots instead?
so if you don't list the ISBN because it looks "nasty", you can't complain that people don't know what version you mean.
Reference the edition.
You're right in saying that Wikipedia has the same issues as any other Encyclopedia. However, I criticize those sources equally.
Perhaps I should clarify something. The primary reason I devalue Wikipedia as a valid reference is that it's a secondary source. Generally speaking, when writing an academic paper, it is desirable to use mostly primary sources as opposed to secondary sources.
You're right that it isn't the fault of Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, I love Wikipedia. But I feel that people who are using it as a direct reference in academic papers are mislead, and the people saying you can't use it for research are also mislead.
In summary/clarification, we should use Wikipedia to find primary sources, and then cite those primary sources. I only said "in-print" because most primary sources are still distributed in print format -- there is no "Statistic-ipedia."
You have not listed one example of "children being indoctrinated"
Yes, I did. You just ignored my examples.
Only telling them half of the truth about our Nation's mixed history of foreign policy is just as good as telling them a lie. They need to realize that America was hostile towards the Native Americans and Mexicans.
You say it isn't relevant, but then why do we teach them about Thanksgiving? How is that, or any other kind of history, "relevant" according to your standards?
I wouldn't deem it so important if we weren't spending so much time telling them all about how America has always been the valiant savior of the downtrodden.
P.S. On the "definition of ignorance," you're just being a petty asshole looking for the last word on an irrelevant issue. However, saying that ignorance is not related to open mindedness is just silly. Of course it is. The ignorant are more likely to minimize cognitive dissonance by ignoring information that doesn't fit their assumptions, instead of adjusting their assumptions.
but the actual people manning those weapons are citizens and neighbors too.
Isn't that always the case, though, when the military is used to suppress the population?
No, because my response was "you might be right." A rather rational response, no? The cure for ignorance isn't being infallible, it's keeping an open mind.
You can quote the dictionary. How cute. Did you have a point, though? About our children being indoctrinated with sugar-coated crap?
Bad Data is Bad!
10/10, I lol'd
"My research interests are in the fileds of protection of biometric information, coding theory and cryptography and secure spontaneous interaction." Misspelling hers. Maybe they don't have good spellcheckers in the Netherlands? Somebody should tell her to use Firefox or something.
Most countries have given up their guns. The United States, for example.
"But I have a gun!" you cry. Well, sure. But tell me this ...
Do you have a fully automatic gun with a 30-round magazine?
Do you have a tactical mortar?
Do you have fragmentation grenades?
Do you have a tank?
Do you have a nuclear-equipped ICBM?
Do you have a biological weapons facility that maintains live strains of anthrax, smallpox, and god knows what else?
The Constitution might say that we all have a right to "bear arms," but modern interpretation has lead that to really mean "only these arms." You might have a gun ...
But it is just a security blanket, and only effective against thieves (enemies of our big brother government, no less).