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Comment Ok, but I maintain my criticism (Score 1) 297

by roguegramma (#38974455) Attached to: If You're Fat, Broke, and Smoking, Blame Language

I'm not used to regression tests enough to comment on any particular regression coefficient in the tables.

However, the data seems to be awfully clustered, see page 12. Of 76 countries considered there, fully 59 are rated low FTR(no future required). Most datasets like that would exhibit artifacts in the form of notable regression coefficients.

In addition, I believe an expert in statistics would probably find that if you study such a dataset long enough, you will find some such correlations even if the dataset was generated randomly.

The graph on page 19 looks convincing at first, but take away the outliers Luxemburg and Greece, Luxemburg because it is bascially a huge city where you can earn lots of money by being the head of a shady company that is used by rich Greeks to evade taxes, and Greece, where the state's financial situation is very bad.

The next 8 countries basically take turns between low FTR and high FTR, it isn't much different for the next ten, and then it ends bascially in a block of low FTR

Also, as mentioned in the paper, if data suggests that natives using compass directions know better where north is, why would languages discerning less between future and now work the other way around?
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The Zuckerberg Tax

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "David S. Miller writes that when Facebook goes public later this year, Mark Zuckerberg plans to exercise stock options worth $5 billion of the $28 billion that his ownership stake will be worth and since the $5 billion he will receive will be treated as salary, Zuckerberg will have a tax bill of more than $2 billion making him, quite possibly, the largest taxpayer in history. But how much income tax will Zuckerberg pay on the rest of his stock that he won’t immediately sell? Nothing, nada, zilch. He can simply use his stock as collateral to borrow against his tremendous wealth and avoid all tax. That’s what Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, did, reportedly borrowing more than a billion dollars against his Oracle shares to buy one of the most expensive yachts in the world. Or consider the case of Steven P. Jobs who never sold a single share of Apple after he rejoined the company in 1997, and therefore never paying a penny of tax on the over $2 billion of Apple stock he held at his death. Now Jobs' widow can sell those shares without paying any income tax on the appreciation before his death — only on the increase in value from the time of his death to the time of the sale — because our tax system is based on the concept of “realization.” Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains and the solution to the problem is called mark-to-market taxation. According to Miller, mark-to-market would only affect individuals who were undeniably, extraordinarily rich, only publicly traded stock would be marked to market, and a mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years."

Comment My impression summarized (Score 1) 324

by roguegramma (#38972989) Attached to: $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible

What is being said in there might be correct as far as things have been considered.

There are some problems though:

First, don't name something in a way that conflicts with the usage of the word by physicists. Example: If perceived matter is really something else that moves through something else, don't name the "something else" "matter".
Pro physicists go to great length for that reason, consider the weird names for the quarks.
Suggestion: One might be better of with prefixing everything with "dark": dark matter, dark ether, dark third field.

Regarding the calculations being made, it is really hard to tell for me whether there are new results matching existing measurements, or whether any matches are the results of tuning the free parameters that are available such that the calculations seem to match reality.

Finally, to have the new theory to be considered, it has to be able to predict something new, or at least it will be necessary to reproduce existing laws to some extent, the same way that Einsteins theories includes and matches Newtons theories for low speeds.
So the new theory will have to match Einsteins theories at least under some conditions, approximately, or as a corner case.

Good luck in your affairs!
Earth

Submission + - Meet 'Amasia,' the Next Supercontinent (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Over the next few hundred million years, the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea will disappear, and Asia will crash into the Americas forming a supercontinent that will stretch across much of the Northern Hemisphere. That's the conclusion of a new analysis of the movements of these giant landmasses.
Earth

Submission + - Next supercontinent will form on North Pole (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: In 50 million to 200 million years' time, all of Earth’s current continents will be pushed together into a single landmass around the North Pole. That is the conclusion of an effort to model the slow movements of the continents over the next tens of millions of years. (abstract http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7384/full/nature10800.html)

A supercontinent last formed 300 million years ago, when all the land masses grouped together on the equator as Pangaea, centred about where West Africa is now. After looking at the geology of mountain ranges around the world, geologists had assumed that the next supercontinent would form either in the same place as Pangaea, closing the Atlantic Ocean like an accordion, or on the other side of the world, in the middle of the current Pacific Ocean.

But now researchers have analysed the magnetism of ancient rocks to work out their locations on the globe over time, and measured how the material under Earth's crust, the mantle, moves the continents that float on its surface. They found that instead of staying near the equator, the next supercontinent — dubbed Amasia — should form 90 degrees away from Pangaea, over the Arctic.

Comment A counter argument to the "space" section (Score 1) 324

by roguegramma (#38972285) Attached to: $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible

Space can both be finite and infinite with regards to some other metric. There is no contradiction. For example consider the inside of a sphere without the shell, commonly referred to as an "open ball":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_(mathematics)

Clearly the open ball is limited, yet regardless of how close you come to the shell (but stay inside the ball), you can always come closer.

Also, there does not need to be a containment, but the nonexistance of something.

Comment two cents on ether (Score 1) 324

by roguegramma (#38972023) Attached to: $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible

Well, isn't the concept of "Higgs Bosons" similar to having some sort of "ether"?

Also, there is nothing that says ether must interact with all particles in the same way, or at all. That might sound far-fetched, but it really isn't more far fetched than proposing dark matter and dark energy with similar properties.

Comment I liked the software download center (Score 1) 176

by roguegramma (#38970593) Attached to: ReactOS 0.3.14 Released With Improved Networking Stack

It is a very useful addition.
That was when I tested their last release.

I wonder whether they have integrated the WINE code enough so one could do stupid stuff, like trying out the only DirectX 4.0 or 5.0 game that must be out there, Chaos Overlords, on it?

I'm not sure that I would go these lengths though, I'd probably have to configure the downloaded VM image I use to try ReactOS.
IT

Submission + - MongoDB In Review (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Andrew Glover provides an in-depth look at MongoDB, one of several NoSQL data stores filling the voids left by traditional relational DBs. 'Working with MongoDB is not without challenges. For starters, Mongo requires a lot of memory, preferring to put as much data as possible into working memory for fast access. In fact, data isn't immediately written to disk upon an insert (although you can optionally require this via a flag) — a background process eventually writes unsaved data to disk. This makes writes extremely fast, but corresponding reads can occasionally be inconsistent. As a result, running Mongo in a nonreplicated environment courts the possibility of data loss,' Glover writes. 'The relational database is still the staple data store for the vast majority of applications built today. But for some applications, the flexibility offered by Mongo provides advantages with respect to development speed and overall application performance.'"

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