Look at the federal budget. Military spending, is the biggest portion, bigger than all entitlements combined.
Social security and medicare/medicade are both individually more expensive than defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
Thanks. From now on I'm googling the full text of every post I reply to, just in case it happens to reference some obscure civil war quote.
No way, it's totally ridiculous to try to understand someone's post before you publicly call them a moron.
I wish I had mod points, parent post is actually a pretty interesting list of topics that the scientific consensus has reversed course on. He's not saying that all science is garbage or even saying that this list should make you doubt science (maybe it should instill faith in science that it catches its mistakes). Anyway it's an interesting list.
But because he's on the wrong end of the mob on this topic he get's modded to 0 and a couple replies that basically say "Wrong, you're an idiot" get +5.
Also, how is the 3d effect in general? Even worth it? Last 3d thing I owned was the (lol) iglasses in like 1996, with an amazing resolution of like 320x200 or something ridiculous. it was fucking horrible. =/
My current computer has version 1 of the Nvidia 3D vision. I only used it a few days for novelty's sake and have no intention of using it again. Here are my reasons:
Anyway, above are my experiences with 3D gaming, and why I won't be doing any more of it. However, all my reasons are pretty specific to me. The stuff does work pretty much as advertised and it's probably a good product for some people.
Apart from the occasional idiot who never learns, you can only take people for a ride so often. Eventually people are going to get a feel for these cash-sucking parasites
Yep, that's why no one does hard drugs today.
is that we have to sue our own government in an attempt to force them to tell us about the laws they are enforcing against us. That alone indicates a huge problem with the system, regardless of the nature of the laws themselves.
Totally agree, but that may be just how messed up our system is. I think it's an example of why at least some of the money that traditionally went to newspapers was helpful. If the NY Times didn't do this I doubt there'd be a long line of bloggers and community news aggregators with the money and ability to sue the government for this information.
People just dismiss the problem and say "the press needs to adapt or die". I hope they don't just die and take with them a vital source of pressure on the government.
I guess I still don't get your point that it's "insane" that food isn't part of the CPI.
True, it is not part of core inflation. However, it's not insane to have a separate measure that excludes food and energy. For some purposes (e.g. some monetary analyses) you want to factor out the effects of, for instance, a bad harvest or an oil refinery explosion. It's OK to have a separate measure that excludes these things as long as you don't use it to index important payments, such as Social Security. But as mentioned above, those are based on the CPI, not core inflation.
Oh, but I forgot... food is no longer part of the official government Consumer Price Index. How insane is that? The fact is that the "inflation" figures being fed to you by the government don't even remotely reflect reality.
Actually, food, energy, and medical expenses are all part of the CPI. (Food is 17% of it according to wikipedia.) Somehow the government gets blamed for substituting hamburger for steak AND for not including food at all.
Some of the confusion is because there is another index called core inflation which doesn't include food or gas. This is useful for some purposes, but the CPI is more important because it is intended to reflect actual spending, and because inflation-adjusted payments (such as Social Security checks and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities coupons) are generally keyed off the CPI.
Berkshire Hathaway ($101250!).
101250! = 6.7994476169830511727851464589251787226197877510690... Ã-- 10^462826
Wow no wonder Warren Buffett is so rich
The Dow Jones is an older index in which each company's weight in the index is determined by its stock price. In more recent indicies like the S&P500, stocks are weighted by market capitalization. Assigning weights by stock price is silly because it makes no intuitive sense and means extra work is needed to prevent events like stock splits from moving the index around.
So anyway, this isn't really about Apple, it's just a technical detail about a legacy index. Apple's share price is high ($412 as I type this), but so are plenty of other companies like Google ($539) and Berkshire Hathaway ($101250!).
According to the wiki page, it just selects canned responses from its database. I think this approach just gets you garbage, or at the very least is a dead-end in trying to beat the Turing test.
The best Turing Test is probably the Loebner Prize and at least the contestants seem much better than Cleverbot. There's an example conversation from Suzette (the latest winner) here. (But it's hard to tell if that is typical or simply a lucky exchange for the computer.) But anyway, as is clear from this interesting story written by a contestant about the Loebner prize, bots are no where near winning that version of the Turing test, as long as the humans are paying attention.
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.