I don't get network neutrality. Could someone explain it to me? This is not a troll, this is an honest attempt to understand a different point of view.

I call myself a 'conservatively liberal libertarian' which means I believe markets are great as long as they're reasonably regulated to prevent collusion and outright theft, but I'm not an Ayn-Rand syncophant. I just don't see what the harm in letting people who own pipes on the internet give preference to different traffic on those pipes. I'd gladly pay more to have my starcraft traffic given preference to someone else's email messages or porn downloads. What's the harm in that?

If you say that the prices will go through the roof because companies can charge whatever they want, I really don't think you understand how markets work.

I think the key to winning the evoultion vs. creationism argument is to have respect for the other side. I know this is hard to do when creationism seems so ludicrous, but keep a few things in mind.

Firstly, properly constructed creationist theories are not falsifiable. If I said that God created the universe 5,000 years ago, but he made it look as if it'd been around for billions of years in order to test our faith, you couldn't prove me wrong. Radio-Carbon dating is based upon the assumption that at one time the ratio of carbon isotopes was at a certain level - you can't use it to prove the age of an object unless you first posit that the object had, at one time, a certain ratio of isotopes. If I just claimed that the object never had that ratio because it was never alive (i.e. that fossil was created as a fossil), you couldn't prove me wrong. Falsifiability is KEY to science, which means creationism can never be science, but it also means that creationism can never be shown to be wrong.

Second, There are intelligent creationists out there. I am working with a guy who got a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at Stanford. He's absolutely brilliant, and he's also a young earth creationist. You're never going to win a guy like that over by telling him he's stupid and that he's destroying science.

The ONLY way to win someone's mind over is to be patient and respectful. Every human being (even creationists and republicans) deserves that much.

It's pretty easy to derive this result.

Suppose you have an alphabet with 'S' different Symbols. There are S^N possible strings of length N. The authors say of that paper claim that the difficulty in reading an N digit string is proportional to the product SN. Therefore, what we'd like to do is minimize the product SN while keeping S^N Constant.

That means we define k = S^N, and therefore ln k = N ln S, so N = (ln k / ln S). That means we're trying to choose an S to minimize f(S) = S * (ln k / ln S).

If f(S) = (S / ln S) * ln(k), then
f'(S) = (S*(-1/S) + + ln(-S))* ln k
f'(S) = (-1 + ln(-S)) * ln k

The function reaches its minimum when the derviative is 0, so:

0 = (-1 + ln(-S))* ln k
1 = ln(-S)
1 = 1/ln(S)
ln(S) = 1
S = e