No, the joke should have been about the reliability of Radio Shack's TRS-DOS for the model 1.
(Hint: it was $15, all the competition OS's were around $80-$100, and everyone knowledgeable about the issues thought that the prices were just about right, radio shack's dos possibly overpriced.)
You guys argue that people who have insurance should pay their premiums in proportion to how likely they are to use it. You consider that the fairest possible payment system. However, if you take that to its logical conclusion, you should only charge people who actually end up using it. So you should go ahead and eliminate insurance altogether, and you have the fairest model possible: only people who get into car accidents pay the costs, only people who get sick pay medical costs, only people who get robbed suffer their losses.
The entire point of insurance is to make the payment unfair in order to diminish the payment by spreading the risk among everyone. You agree to pay something, even though you hope to never have to cash in on the insurance, so that if you do have to cash in, everybody else who doesn't need to cash in subsidizes you, and you pay less.
The proper pricing model for insurance is based on percentage chance of using it. Do you have a 5% chance of using insurance? Then you should pay 5% plus profit margin in premiums.
Does someone who smokes have a higher chance of using insurance, and paying more for medical care? Yes? Ok, charge them more.
Does someone who has genes for issue X -- and lets say that they are active, expressed genes -- have a higher chance of using insurance and paying more for medical care? Yes? Ok, so
Now we get into the first set of tricky questions. You can choose to smoke or not. You can't choose your genes. Do we penalize people for some things that they cannot control?
And why did we look at gene X -- there are hundreds of thousands of issues with genes. Potentially, every protein that can fold in more than one shape, or that can be generated in multiple slightly variant sequences could turn out to affect disease -- yet we only have some of them analized. Does it make sense to say "We know you are worse because of X, we don't know about Y, so we're giving you penalty for X, but not giving you a discount for Y"?
And who decides to study X and not Y? Is there a correlation between european genes vs african genes? "Race is only skin deep" is false -- the people who migrated out of africa did get different genes as a result. Should we not give penalties to people who have lost the malaria protection in their blood?
That last question is deliberately loaded, deliberately phrased. If you didn't understand it: The same sickle cell that gives you protection against malaria from mosquitoes also causes anemia from a lack of oxygen in other situations. How do you tell what's the benefit or the penalty?
And I haven't even gotten to the statistical abuse of several "different" issues that actually overlap to the point that you are double- or triple- surcharging for what is really a single issue.
Insurance pricing is not nearly as clear-cut as people want to make it seem.
Simple example: Under the affordable health care act, the stated goal is to get enough young, healthy people signed up to cover the costs of insuring the elderly. So the stated goal is to have younger people overpay -- pay higher than the expected usage costs -- to reduce the costs charged to older people.
Fairness? Charging people less for being healthy? How do you determine healthy? How do you determine fairness? Why do you deliberately overcharge group A to subsidize group B? Why permit this on age? How do you prevent it from being racial in disguise as soon as you look at genes?
This topic was on privacy. So where's the line?
If I want my genes to be private, and out of the insurance company, why not?
If I want my actions to be private, and out of the insurance company, why not?
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Car insurance companies finally seem to have the right model. You can get a discount if you voluntarily reveal your driving habits, but you don't have to if you don't want to.
Now, all we need is what I understand to be existing conversion law. That data is provided to you only for the purpose of calculating my insurance, and any other use is in violation of the law.
Thank you.
Now, do you have a good way to deal with messages that are two-lines instead of one line?
And what's wrong with apple's grep? I've been using the gnu one, just because the macports gnu base package installs so many things...
Alright, can you provide your scripts that generate the log checkers?
I can use that.
You will be truly amazed by the number of people who copy a not-working example...
You mean when Microsoft distributes a sample driver with a bug in it?
I think that this is a great article, but...
It is obvious that there are parts of the universe that are not (and never have been) causally connected with our universe.Those are just the parts of our universe we can't see, which are inevitable in an infinite universe with a finite duration and a finite speed of light. You don't need either quantum mechanics or inflation for that, and it has never been called the "multiverse."
So let me try to explain it this way.
We have an observable universe.
If you were at the far end of our observable universe, and asked "what is the observable universe from here?", you'd get a different observable universe.
Repeat this process. You have many different observable universe patches that overlap.
Join them as a union. You have a "master observable universe".
No matter how much you try, you cannot cover *EVERYTHING*.
If the old view -- inflation happened, and then stopped -- were true, you would have everything. Might take you a very long time (even Einstein wasn't sure the universe was finite), but you would.
This is saying that some areas are just outside of any such overlapping collections of observable universes.
I did read the article.
In a nutshell: once you look at the inflation not as a binary yes/no behavior, but as a quantum behavior with "yes over here, no over there, sort-of way over there", you find that while inflation stops in some areas, it continues in other areas.
It assumes the same laws of physics everywhere -- specifically quantum mechanics -- and concludes that there will be areas disconnected by inflation that cannot interact, that behave like disconnected universes.
The expansion rate will vary for a universe dominated by radiation energy, matter, or vaccum energy.
And, the key lines:
But you’ve got to remember, this field that causes inflation—whatever it’s true nature is—is likely to be a quantum field/particle, like everything else in the Universe.
But if we allow inflation to be a quantum field instead—and of course it must be one—you have to calculate how quickly it spreads vs. how much the Universe inflates vs. how quickly it rolls down the hill
Although inflation will end in more than 50% of the Universe at any given time, enough of the quantum field that dictates its behavior will undergo quantum “spreading” back towards the exponentially stable expansion state so that inflation lasts an eternity. And this is true for every model of slow-roll inflation we’ve concocted!
I don't know enough to peer-check this article. But the idea -- that if a quantum effect is responsible, then it has a waveform, and is not a point-behavior but has a probability spread -- makes sense.
How should the end user identify malicious code before downloading and running it?
Easy. Load it into a sandboxed simulator, and see what it does. It can't escape the sandbox, right?
Oh, right.
Did the developer pre-mine a bunch of coins that he/she is hoarding up secretly, waiting for everyone else to "establish" the coin as a viable currency, only to dump all of it in the future and crash the market -- walking away with the loot?
This is addressed by the newspaper headline embedded in the genesis block. There's no conceivable way to embed that headline in advance. Any block that doesn't ultimately link back to the genesis block is invalid, so it doesn't matter how many blocks he previously created.
Actually, this is very serious the issue.
Early bitcoin mining was fast, cheap, and generated lots of bitcoin for very little effort.
If bitcoin had died, that would have been wasted.
Instead, it's
Instead of people who inherited, or who can manipulate the dollar, the political behavior, the banking industry, etc, gaining all the money, it's now the people who manipulate others into saying "Hey, this new currency is better" who are gaining all the money.
Either way, it's inherently biased and unfair. It's not based on the work you do / what you contribute, it's based on what you started with; who/what you knew/did early.
Apparently, supreme court justices in a speeding car can tell the police officer who they are and get away with it.
Happened at least once, and then a book was written with the incident mentioned.
(No, I don't remember the details -- this was years ago)
Why the bleep don't we fire this guy?
"shall hold their Offices during good Behavior" -- this is clear evidence of failing to do his job.
He is appointed to protect and defend the constitution. Not to protect and defend the borders.
He is unable to perform a basic function -- reading and understanding the evidence -- as well as unable to perform a basic requirement of the job -- critical analysis of what people tell him.
All of this points to failure to do his job, and possibly incompetence at his job. And, a lack of good behavior at his job.
What, are you going to say that a judge has lifetime tenure? I don't see that in the constitution. Who said that? Oh, another judge? What gave them the power to give themselves lifetime job security when the Constitution does not?
This is the sort of study that demands peer review.
It is far beyond me to understand the details of this study, and it's claims. But it is absolutely fascinating, if true, even taking the Male-only Y and Female-only Mit inheritance factors into account.
When I see things like
We used coalescent simulations
then I know enough to know that the assumptions used matter, but also that I don't know enough to evaluate those assumptions.
Actually, the 13th amendment specifically permits slavery.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Someone who has been found guilty, and sentenced to jail, can be forced to work for the government (involuntary servitude) or lose other rights besides mobility and/or liberty (slavery).
If the "3/5th" rule were enforced, then states that take the view "you are our slave" would lose representation, and have a reason to NOT make them slaves.
Aha! It does not. So if someone did follow your advice, then
(did I just feed a troll?)
"It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it." -- Henry Allen
