The original argument was that there is one person smoking so we should enforce a ban on it. Your analogy has two flaws: 1. Your ban needs to be against tigers in all bedrooms. 2. You need to demonstrate that your cost free ban actually stops someone who would otherwise bring tigers into their bedroom.
First you have to locate that person. Second you have to show that your ban (currently in effect) is working.
Locating may be easy. I present to you the ex-Vegas act of Sigfried and Roy. They may very well have tigers in their bedroom. Your ban is not stopping them.
If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
I disagree. There is a societal cost to the damage smoking causes in young people in the form of increased medical burden. There is also a societal cost in enforcing an under 18 ban on smoking. If the cost of the ban is less than the cost eliminated by the ban then the ban is good for society and should be enacted. If the cost of the ban is more than the cost eliminated by the ban then the ban is a waste and should not be enacted.
A ban that affects a single person has to identify that person and enforce the rule. That is not very cost effective and is bad for society. If we looked at all the of the ways that minors die, I am sure we would find all sorts of crazy scenarios. That does not mean we should pass a law banning each and every one of those scenarios.
Price competition and lack of a better alternative. I don't have loyalty to any store. If they offer a better price then I will take advantage of it. For a while we were taking advantage of their reward points card to get discounts. I would buy CDs or video games. Then they changed the program so that it wasn't as good and some of our points went missing (when we helped my father-in-law a 24" LCD HDTV no less). So I'm not doing that any more. Other than the tv, I can't remember the last time I bought anything for more than $100 there. I'm also paranoid about buying stuff. If it looks like it could have been resealed and costs more than $30, I ask the cashier if I can open the box up and make sure that what I want is actually in there. Then I tell the story above.
Once I bought memory at Best Buy. When I got home, the box contained a chips with 1/16th the amount it should. I tried to return it and the store treated me like a liar. It wasn't until I showed them the shrink wrap it was in (which I had brought with me) and they saw evidence that it had been rewrapped, were they willing to give me a return. It was a horrible, horrible experience and I didn't go back to Best Buy for several years.
The real way to attack this is to get rid of advertising in real-life places like subways. Then the game makers won't have the "more realistic" excuse to put ads in-game.
I think science doesn't really know if information is preserved or destroyed from black hole evaporation. I'm sure there are some theories that are more accepted than others at the moment, but I really couldn't comment on that.
No, I am pretty sure he means our entire universe is within the event horizon of an much larger black hole. There may be a lot more stuff outside of that event horizon.
There are some theories that black holes do not destroy information. Instead it is released as Hawking's radition as the black hole eventually evaportates. When the Earth eventually evaportates into the outer-universe there may be a sufficiently advanced intelligence there to capture that information and recreate the interesting bits.
My new goal is to live an interesting life and have to have my corpse launched towards the edge of the universe.
Although the outer universe is probably within its own event horizon of an even larger black hole.
Or maybe space is really, really big and there just isn't much interaction between things unless they are local.
There is another story about how the supercollider built in Texas opened a wormhole to parallel universes (which are actually a lot closer than the nearest star). We encountered a few different species one of which is intent on colonizing as many nearby universes as possible.
It was written by one of the physicists involved in the cancelled Texas supercollider. I can't remember the name at the moment.
Your boss is wrong. The distance along the time dimension is measured in light-years. In fact, that is why light seems to take 'time' to travel from one point to another in our 3D space.
eBay makes it money by increasing the optimality of resource allocation and then taking a cut of the surplus from that increase. Increases in well presented information cause the market to behave more like basic economic theory predicts. It increases market efficiency. Adding targeted ads is simply another way of taking a slice from increase in allocation efficiency. It fits perfectly into their business model, but they are getting a smaller piece of that pie by outsourcing the ad sales and ad placement.
Google analyzed your phone use, web use, email use, workout use, eating schedule, sleeping schedule and everything else. It simulates you with uncanny accuracy (partly because it makes such great suggestions that you always follow.)
It made the reservations to Chez Panisse six months ago in anticipation of this call.
Geez... noobs...
(wait a minute... is this real? Or is it GoogleSim?)
Could you create an environment with a poison that the octane producing algea was resistant to but that would kill wild strains? Or would the genes for the poison resistance just transfer over to the wild strains?
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The original argument was that there is one person smoking so we should enforce a ban on it. Your analogy has two flaws:
1. Your ban needs to be against tigers in all bedrooms.
2. You need to demonstrate that your cost free ban actually stops someone who would otherwise bring tigers into their bedroom.
First you have to locate that person.
Second you have to show that your ban (currently in effect) is working.
Locating may be easy. I present to you the ex-Vegas act of Sigfried and Roy. They may very well have tigers in their bedroom. Your ban is not stopping them.
If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
I disagree. There is a societal cost to the damage smoking causes in young people in the form of increased medical burden. There is also a societal cost in enforcing an under 18 ban on smoking. If the cost of the ban is less than the cost eliminated by the ban then the ban is good for society and should be enacted. If the cost of the ban is more than the cost eliminated by the ban then the ban is a waste and should not be enacted.
A ban that affects a single person has to identify that person and enforce the rule. That is not very cost effective and is bad for society. If we looked at all the of the ways that minors die, I am sure we would find all sorts of crazy scenarios. That does not mean we should pass a law banning each and every one of those scenarios.
Price competition and lack of a better alternative. I don't have loyalty to any store. If they offer a better price then I will take advantage of it. For a while we were taking advantage of their reward points card to get discounts. I would buy CDs or video games. Then they changed the program so that it wasn't as good and some of our points went missing (when we helped my father-in-law a 24" LCD HDTV no less). So I'm not doing that any more. Other than the tv, I can't remember the last time I bought anything for more than $100 there. I'm also paranoid about buying stuff. If it looks like it could have been resealed and costs more than $30, I ask the cashier if I can open the box up and make sure that what I want is actually in there. Then I tell the story above.
Once I bought memory at Best Buy. When I got home, the box contained a chips with 1/16th the amount it should. I tried to return it and the store treated me like a liar. It wasn't until I showed them the shrink wrap it was in (which I had brought with me) and they saw evidence that it had been rewrapped, were they willing to give me a return. It was a horrible, horrible experience and I didn't go back to Best Buy for several years.
My gut tells me it is not illegal.
The real way to attack this is to get rid of advertising in real-life places like subways. Then the game makers won't have the "more realistic" excuse to put ads in-game.
You know that corporations are made of people, right?
Just like soylent green.
It is even easier for two people to do that online. They can even talk on the phone and don't need secret signals.
Your metaphor is flawed.
The problem is that MS is under the gun. Sometimes they release too soon, and blam it shoots them in the butt.
There. I've fixed it for you.
I don't really know what I'm talking about and am just an armchair physicist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
I think science doesn't really know if information is preserved or destroyed from black hole evaporation. I'm sure there are some theories that are more accepted than others at the moment, but I really couldn't comment on that.
No, I am pretty sure he means our entire universe is within the event horizon of an much larger black hole. There may be a lot more stuff outside of that event horizon.
There are some theories that black holes do not destroy information. Instead it is released as Hawking's radition as the black hole eventually evaportates. When the Earth eventually evaportates into the outer-universe there may be a sufficiently advanced intelligence there to capture that information and recreate the interesting bits.
My new goal is to live an interesting life and have to have my corpse launched towards the edge of the universe.
Although the outer universe is probably within its own event horizon of an even larger black hole.
Or maybe space is really, really big and there just isn't much interaction between things unless they are local.
There is another story about how the supercollider built in Texas opened a wormhole to parallel universes (which are actually a lot closer than the nearest star). We encountered a few different species one of which is intent on colonizing as many nearby universes as possible.
It was written by one of the physicists involved in the cancelled Texas supercollider. I can't remember the name at the moment.
Your boss is wrong. The distance along the time dimension is measured in light-years. In fact, that is why light seems to take 'time' to travel from one point to another in our 3D space.
15 minutes is more like 167,654,157 miles.
Tell your boss to take a hike.
A very, very long hike.
(Yesterday is so very far away)
eBay makes it money by increasing the optimality of resource allocation and then taking a cut of the surplus from that increase. Increases in well presented information cause the market to behave more like basic economic theory predicts. It increases market efficiency. Adding targeted ads is simply another way of taking a slice from increase in allocation efficiency. It fits perfectly into their business model, but they are getting a smaller piece of that pie by outsourcing the ad sales and ad placement.
Google analyzed your phone use, web use, email use, workout use, eating schedule, sleeping schedule and everything else. It simulates you with uncanny accuracy (partly because it makes such great suggestions that you always follow.)
It made the reservations to Chez Panisse six months ago in anticipation of this call.
Geez... noobs...
(wait a minute... is this real? Or is it GoogleSim?)
For quite some time now, I've been wanting to see a "Justice Legue" style show with all of the 80's TV action heroes working together to fight crime.
And don't forget about Automan! That remake could be awesome!
Manimal, too!
(Manimal Two?)
I was watching Dr. Who when Knight Rider was originally aired.
I was also watching Knight Rider.
I was also watching Automan.
And also my taste in entertain was particularly refined in my late preteens or however old I was when Knight Rider was on.
Are you proposing that as the slashdot theme song?
Could you create an environment with a poison that the octane producing algea was resistant to but that would kill wild strains? Or would the genes for the poison resistance just transfer over to the wild strains?
When start speaking like Yoda did you?
Not according to the insurance policy I have locked up in my safe deposit box.
Alien force field technology. ...er, I mean four words.
No, eight.
Ten!
Twelve!
When you say "geometric increase", do you mean as in a geometric sequence?
n
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progressio
How is that not exponential growth over time?
If processing power doubles every 24 months then P=2^(t/24). That is an exponential function.
It was intended more as a thought provoking joke, really.
And it is true that if you have expoentially increasing computational resources you can solve NP problems in polynomial time.