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Comment Re:Simple solution... (Score 1) 1108

2. A fall in average temperatures while greenhouse gasses remain at constant levels
3. Well we could reduce our greenhouse emissions, if they aren't effected by human action then our reduction of greenhouse emissions would have no effect (or a statistically minor effect) on the current rate of increase. Since this would require actually reducing our greenhouse emissions I doubt its going to be a popular test though.

Comment Re:Finite wisdom of a state legislature (Score 1) 1108

So where did God come from then ? I mean if you're going to posit that man has to have come from somewhere and that was God (as opposed to evolution because something as complex as man requires design) then it seems to follow that something as complex as God also requires design.

Comment Re:At last... (Score 1) 93

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, sorry, so I feel the need to ask: Are you saying that being pro-big business is part of the Libertarian ideal and that they'd be in favor of large government in support of it ?

Because as I understand the concept, their desire for any part of government being huge would disqualify them from actually being Libertarian in the strict sense (also their social policy is not compatible with small government at all, they support several "moral issue" bans that like all "moral issue" bans mandates a massive system to enforce) .

Comment Re:At last... (Score 3, Interesting) 93

I think you're confused about what a request/motion from a Senator is. Its not asking politely, its essentially proposing that the matter be considered by that House (and as such it needs to be voted on, even if it gets voted down) and the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate, and our major parties are so polarized at the moment that they'll vote against something just because the other side votes for it, it'd be pretty difficult to dismiss it out of hand anyway in any practical sense.

Comment Re:At last... (Score 2) 93

I think you might have the Liberals confused with someone else, there social policy is not precisely Libertarian (its Replublican-ish,), nor are they a single issue party, they are essentially the ruling half (at the Federal Level, at the state level the Nationals sometimes lead) of our Liberal/National coalition who represent the Conservative side of politics here.

The Social Democrats have not to my knowledge ever held the balance of power (in fact I'm not even sure if that group exists?, I know there are both Labour Democrats and Liberal Democrats), you might be thinking of the Democrats who held the role the Greens currently do (ie the largest party not part of the 2 major groups), up until the late 90s. We have a bunch of parties who feature the word Democrat in their titles, some because they were spin offs of the Democrats, others because it seems like a nice word to have in your title in a democracy.

Also there's not really a Christian Conservative single issue group, there's 2 parties playing that card at the moment Katter's Australian Party (which is new) and Family First. The 2nd is actually pretty much a Christian Conservative group, the former is hard to explain, since he span of one of our major Conservatve Parties his policies are pretty wide ranging but largely conservative, in favour of farming and hunting , and Christian.

Sorry if you were trying to describe ideologies rather than parties but since some of party definitions and names are very different (Our Liberal Party would usually be considered Conservative) I felt the need to qualify.

Disclaimer: I don't care much for any of the major political parties at the moment, but my social positions are Left (significantly left of even our Left party really), I apologize if my bias has slipped in anywhere, I tried to be as factual as possible.

Comment Re:Sony is a Profit-Oriented Corporation (Score 1) 507

Yeah. I'm aware of that. I think my point is more that in the case of infinite supply there's no reason demand should increase the price, profits would naturally increase from the higher demand anyway (and by increasing the price for no reason they should in theory decrease the demand). It just does because we're accustomed to thinking of it working that way with things that have limited supply and companies are more than willing to take advantage of that in order to make a profit.

This is basically one of those circumstances where capitalism doesn't work properly ,and encourages unethical behavior, because people aren't rational agents, if they were they'd simple wait for the price to go back down before they bought it.

I don't think plane ticket ordering is the best analogy, its a reasonable assumption that a surge in demand would cause a limit of supply in such cases (there's a finite number of seats), so the price increase is still sort of tied to a finite supply.

Comment Re:Sony is a Profit-Oriented Corporation (Score 1) 507

There is no Supply vs Demand here, the supply of digital items is effectively infinite, so the idea of automated price increases based on such doesn't make sense.

And some people might have rushed out to buy it because of the publicity her death generated ie this is the first time they've heard of her, or they heard some of her music they wanted to on one of the news clips.

Comment Re:Sony is a Profit-Oriented Corporation (Score 1) 507

There's a problem with capitalist theory though , people aren't rational agents with perfect knowledge (the vast majority of people will never even hear about this). If they were things like market dominance and regulatory capture couldn't happen. This is how capitalism , as it is practiced, can actually reward unethical behavior.

Comment Re:Curious (Score 1) 445

Not really, was tired when I wrote that,so I could easily be wrong about why.

But starting at both ends won't optimize that algorithm in the general case, it is the most efficient algorithm known for the task it solves (there are optimizations for Djikstra's Algorithm but they are for reduced classes like spase graphs, or are heuristic and thus aren't guaranteed to find an optimal solution).
 

Comment Re:Fragile development (Score 1) 445

I think the problem there is the "on Friday" bit. "Good enough" can be any threshold you set, including rigorous security and maintainability thresholds where necessary, the arbitrary deadline isn't a part of the Agile process any more than its part of the Waterfall Model.

Also I'd have to say your answer is a bit flawed, a project that is 6000 lines of code shouldn't have a documentation trail the size of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. That's the attitude that drives people away from documentation heavy models, and its one of the great flaws with University teaching of Software Engineering, they require you to do rigorous documentation of a toy task, so the only thing it teaches people is that rigorous documentation is a pointless nuisance and waste of time.

Essentially appropriate documentation and testing for the task is the correct answer, you don't want to little or to much. If you're developing a life support system for hospitals everything should be documented and tested to the utmost extent.

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