I heard Microsoft sends guys in black suits to provide free beer, so as to lower code quality at hackathons.

Why is compensation for penis size the canonical example? It doesn't take an idiot to not upgrade your own ram. If your time is worth more than a certain amount, it isn't even worth looking up how to do it. It is cheaper to just click the little "Upgrade RAM" button on the HP or Dell website and have them do it for you.

A lot of Americans are that rich. Many more think they are, but are uninformed. This has nothing to do with "compensation" for "deficiencies".

Similarly, here's a market for red sports cars for 50 year olds because they have wanted them since they were in their 20s, and can suddenly afford them as middle aged Boomers. The world isn't fair. Throwing stereotypes out there isn't making it any more fair.

Pay for what you want, not what you don't want.

Am I the only one who took Economics 100? Actually, my "corrected" summary is wrong. You should pay so that the marginal costs and benefits of the things you want are all equal. It doesn't take an infinite budget to do that.

You should learn how to use "abstract interpretation". "6 months ago" is a terrible excuse not to use a language. If you can express a complex idea quickly, by using "weird" operators, interpreting the idea is easy, specifically by ignoring the "weird" operators and focusing on the types/semantics of the things they combine. There are only so many sensible ways to combine values, so there are exactly that many possible semantics for the combinators that combine them.

"6 months ago" is the best reason to use a strongly typed programming language, so that you can be absolutely sure that abstract interpretation will work on parametric operators.

Perl5 is a lovely, expressive language, with a variety of strong abstraction operators. Perl6 brings all of Perl5 in, and extends the language with a built-in object system (using what experience with Perl5 hacking has shown to be the most useful)

I thought his point was that 5 minutes was unrealistically long.

Exactly. The telcos have no business snooping around in what I do on the web.

That is their business, full stop. If they are to optimize their network for real-life traffic patterns, they must "snoop".

Imagine if they did this to voice. Calling work is premium, immediate relatives sort of premium but distant relatives we'll give you at the base rate. You can call our business partners for a reduced rate, calling our competitors will cost triple.

Ever heard of "long distance"? "Calling our competitors" cost a lot more than triple, not too long ago.

A sovereign state is supposed to be able to defend its borders. If a state is not able to defend its borders, it is not sovereign. Yes, the argument was lost when other states invaded.

This is not health care. This is insurance. They are not the same. Insurance is a risk reduction strategy for preventing catastrophic loss of net worth.

They are the same thing at a national level. The healthcare provider/government must use the same risk management strategies as an insurance company does. They must have a predictable budget to pay out for all the flows. The budget is derived using the same mathematics an insurance company uses.

The government has several advantages over private insurance. The most important of which is that a competitive insurance industry raises costs for everyone involved, with mathematical force. The pool of risk is carved up, the pools' predictability declines, so they have to tie up more capital (at the cost of capital) to potentially pay claims, etc. And also, each company represents an administrative cost sink. In the limit, consider a world where everybody administers their own "competitive" health insurance plan. They would need to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars, just in case they get a 1 in 100,000 case of cancer.

Going off on a tangent, I am reminded of the phrase "There's no such thing as a free lunch." I find that people cling on to their first interpretation. Yes, we will pay for our lunch. But there is an important question to be answered: is the lunch deployment mechanism the cheapest one available for the quality of lunch we want? If the answer is no, we should find a new lunch deployment mechanism. Arguments for competition do not apply to insurance as it is currently structured, because the industry does not satisfy the competitive market axioms.

Read Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.

Republicans like insurance, yes? And they like things to be as inexpensive as possible, yes?

Then Republicans ought to love nationalized health care, as it reduces costs with the power of economic force. Statistics (you know, what people are, from an insurance company's perspective) become more predictable and thus cheaper as the pool of risk grows. Competition is counter-productive in this sphere, because it carves up the pool of risk, and increases the administrative burden. Insurance is not and cannot be a competitive industry. The market just does not satisfy the competitive market axioms.

Somehow, this is lost on many Americans.

Anything that leaves more rampant tottie for us straight guys is a good thing.

Is it "wrong" that worker bees can't reproduce? Of course not.

No, you can prove anything if your postulates are contradictory. "False" and "True" are words that don't apply to postulates. Is Euclid's parallel postulate true? How about Zorn's Lemma?

Sneaky. Most people don't know what Zorn's Lemma is, or how it is equivalent to AC, or even what AC is.

Oh well, at least you are right. The claim that "logic has no semantics" is utterly false. The whole point of logic is to bridge the syntactic constructs of formal systems with the semantic constructs of models via "interpretation functions". Not that I need to tell you that. ;0)

Dare I say it?

slashdot = stagnated

Now, if you want legitimate arrogance, just look at those guys with their "string theory." It's been decades and they still haven't managed tho have a single testable hypothesis coincide with their ideas. A lot of things look good on paper as theory and then completely disintegrate when applied to the real world.

String theory is the mathematical/logical synthesis of theories. As such, it can only predict what the logical closure of its sub-theories predict.

String theory cannot make any new testable hypotheses, because any testable hypotheses will be a testable hypothesis of the old sub-theory. String theory is still falsifiable: it is as falsifiable as General Relativity, Quantum theory, and the rest. Because it is them, taken together, and expressed in a unified mathematical framework.

Nevermind, I'm wrong about red dwarves.

You're ignoring something important. The laws of conservation of matter and energy.

These are stars that went supernova, but for which the remaining gravitationally bound matter did not turn into a black hole. It takes a lot of matter for a star to nova, and it doesn't just disappear.

In short, they tripled the number of stars that were at one time on the order of 10 times more massive than average.