He is the guy who believes businesses are sacrosanct and if they want to ban blacks from sitting in lunch counters, they should be able to. He thinks such businesses would naturally go bankrupt without any government intervention, and civil rights legislation went too far.

In the long run of history, such businesses would go bankrupt, but the invisible hand of the economy dispenses justice in a collective average statistical sense over a long period of time. Generations of blacks would go discriminated against for decades before the invisible hand acts against the bad actors.

Humanity has experienced such total free economy. It took 1000 years for Europe to break out of the feudal system where inherited property based on land concentrated power at the very top. It took four centuries of combined effects of the renaissance, age of exploration, the industrial revolution and new found serfs in the colonies to break the feudal system. Pure libertarian solutions take centuries to take effect, they require seismic paradigm shifts and the breakdown is very violent. Culminating in a 30 year world war. (According to Churchill world war I and II are just one war spread over three decades).

Pure libertarianism is just marginally more practical than communism. Communism simply will not work because it disconnects incentives from effort. Libertarianism naturally leads to oligarchy. Liberal democracy, founded on acknowledging the usefulness and sinlessness of the profit motive to the society but moderated by large number collectively holding more power than any small group of oligarchs is what would work to give justice, peace and liberty to most people.

People fail to see the positives and always focus on the negative. Take this story for example. People should appreciate the fact that science holds the possibility... that somewhere sometime ... given the right circumstances ... non poisonous fecal cocktails could exist. Take heart folks.

Agile development will definitely come to the rescue of IBM and pull it out of failure. In fact so many companies have made tons and tons of money using Agile methodology.

The only thing they have to make sure to succeed is: "Sell/push/hawk/promote agile development tools".

But, when it comes to, the buyers and users of the Agile tools and methodology, the results are mixed.

Agile proponents have managed to sell the "no true scotsman" argument convincingly, probably because the management is willing let itself believe, "All we have to do is to give a few million dollars to this latest vendor selling the latest tools, all our problems will magically disappear".

It works well enough for me. Battery lasts almost two days. But I don't push it very hard.

Back when IBM executive predicted "the world will probably need six computers", the main computing model was a mainframe at a distant location and time share on it via (overpriced) telephone lines and VT-100 terminals. Eventually workstations appeared and the move was to get off the mainframe and do local computing. Then came along Sun, "The network is *the* computer" and diskless workstations that would boot into an X-11 display terminal off a distant server. Well, PCs came along and desktop became powerful enough to run even fluid mechanics simulations. Then came high performance computing, and now the cloud.

A bigger machine in a far away place always had the cost advantages of the economy of scale. Everytime there is a jump in connection speeds and bandwidth some customers found it cheaper to "out source" computing to a remote machine. But eventually the advantages of local storage and local computation adds up. So let us see how long this iteration lasts.

Can't you just wrap it in Aluminium foil and block the signals from getting in? Just put it inside the tin-foil hat and it should be able to go off line/

It is based on raw eggs, wocestershire sauce and red pepper.

For a moment you would feel as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down your throat with a lighted torch, and then everything would suddenly seem to get all right. The sun would shine in through the window; birds would twitter in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope would dawn once more.

It is time tested and well recorded. Really, there is an actual historical record of this recipe working its magic in the morning after an incredible bacchanalian revelry in the Drones club to celebrate the engagement of Augustus Fink-Nottle to Madeline Bassett.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I feared something terrible has happened, but dismissed it as the burrito I had for lunch at the Taco Bell. It does really look like some planet *was* destroyed. mm.. Should learn to trust the Force more.

Two minutes on google, GDP China India before industrial revoltion gets you: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2... India fell steadily all the way to 5% of the world by 1970. From > 25 in 1800. China fell fro 33% in 1820 all the way to 5% by 1970. Now please go ahead and nit pick India was above 5% at independence etc etc. Over the long arc of history, industrialization destroyed more jobs world wide than it created. Only if you limit yourself to industrialized countries you could argue it created as many as it destroyed.

Read Gandhi, Indian independence movement, and why to this day wearing handloom fabric is considered a sign of patriotism in large parts of India and all the corrupt politicians of India would not be caught dead in anything other than brilliant white handloom clothes. Gandhi talked so much about the power of the West coming from their ability to dump their goods into the colonies. Boycotting foreign made goods was an integral part of the movement.

The dumping of goods produced at mass scale by industrialized Europe into the colonies decimated the local jobs. By the millions the local artisans who made pots, pans, knives, smelted metal, rolled sheet-metal, all went jobless. There was no protection from their government, they had no idea who they were dealing with. All the wealth accumulated by India by exporting spices for two millennia were gone in less than 200 years.

By the time Gandhi came around, it was down to farming the plant that gave indigo dye and handloom cloth. Almost all the native mettalurgists and metal working jobs were gone. More than the loss of jobs, the loss of the pride was more profound.

The view that industrial revolution destroyed cheap labor intensive jobs while creating more value added higher paying jobs and more high paying jobs were created than destroyed is a very Euro-centric view. Industrial revolution in Europe was an unmitigated disaster for India, China and other places. Before industrial revolution, Europe, India and China each had about 20 to 25% of the world GDP. Arab traders and other countries made up for the rest.

India and China were devastated, they had no clue of what was hitting them, they were reduced abject poverty and penury, to less than 5% of the GDP. The high paying jobs were created in Europe, and the number of higher paying jobs created were far less than the number destroyed if you take a global view. Only if you limit yourself to Europe you would see comparable number of new jobs being created. The Luddites were right.

Now finally it is lapping up the shores of the so called developed countries too. Finally it is affecting the upper middle class. Upper middle class are the real henchmen for the super rich. Without the upper middle class professionals siding up with the super rich, they could not stack the system in their favor. The super rich got too greedy and now they are taking from the 99% to 99.5% too. As long as they took from the bottom 95% and left enough for the 95% to 99.5% they could continue to grow. But when the life time earnings of a surgeon or a dentist or a CPA or midlevel MBA does not put them in the top 1% by net worth, they are going to rebel. And they are the ones who would succeed in such revolution without destroying everything else in the process.

Didn't Marconi steal the notebook of Jagdish Chandra Bose and came up with the idea of the "coherer"? So wonder where he pinched this idea from.

Thanks for the correction. It would have been so easy to check it using the calci lying on the table, but I was just too lazy.

Ages ago, seems like bronze age to me now, I was a freshman in college and got my first calculator. A tiny Casio-Fx48 creditcard sized one. It was only 9 decimal digits accurate, but its floating point number range went all the way up to a googol, 9.9999999e+99. That number is so huge, it is more than the number of subatomic particles in the known universe. Ming bogglingly huge number. In math such things are so common. For example the function factorial, reaches a googol at 79. Yup, Factorial (79) > number of subatomic particles in the known universe.

I read the book "Fun With Numbers" by Mir publications, Moscow in 10th grade. It talked about simple things like immensity of a number like pow(2,64) explained in a simple language a 10th grader could get. (pow(2,64) rice grains would need a barn 3 meter wide, 3 meters tall and several times the distance of Earth to Moon or something like that).

So Mandelbrot set could exceed the resolution of the known universe, by some version of the definition of these terms, in as little as 64 iterations.

Yeah, I know about java security model being completely broken as a plug-in. It has been two years since the advisory came out. Still our vpn vendor is pushing a java-plug-in based solution and our IT is still buying that load of crap. What to do?