newt0311

"About China, includes even a history lesson for you: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=14...

Read your source again. Maybe go beyond the title this time. Here is a nice excerpt: "The lifetime prevalence rates of illicit drug use among residents age 15 years or older in high-prevalence Chinese cities increased from 1.1% in 1993 to 1.6% in 1996, and the 1-year prevalence rate increased from 0.9% to 1.2% during this period [10,11]."

Now go read that again and notice that in high-prevalence regions, use is ~1-2%. Wonder what it is in the low-prevalence regions... If the US had that kind of usage statistics, every anti-drug activist in the US and I would be very happy. Even happier if use went lower.

"Last time I checked there was no data from Singapore because their government is not particularly interested in allowing independent studies to be made. There is data about their execution rate (death penalty), though. Amnesty international considers it to be amongst the highest worldwide."

First point: Singapore gives the death penalty for quite a few crimes. By itself, it is not a useful statistic. Furthermore, AI is far from a "neutral observer" on these issues. Lastly, what exactly is the problem with a high execution rate? The lack of crime?

Second point: from the CIA Factbook on Singapore: "drug abuse limited because of aggressive law enforcement efforts"

No but most suppliers are and if the users aren't removed from the situation, we will continue to get suppliers: supply-vs-demand all over again.

Um... All those are legal. Also, the first and third have known beneficial medical effects which would still be allowed if my proposal is enacted.

If you really want, limit it to people in immediate knowing possession of the drugs. However the initial massacre is necessary to establish a precedent. If the US government had not squandered its credibility in law enforcement matters, this would not be necessary. We could instead offer unconditional amnesty to current users and dealers. Give them some small time period (like a week or a month -- less than half a year) to clean up their act and then put these laws into effect. As it is, it is a recognized fact that the government will not take extreme action without the n to the nth-level of bureaucratic paperwork and thus to establish an effective deterrent, the punishment needs to be exercised.

[Edit 1]: Naturally, this policy would be continued in the future. If anybody is ever found to be knowingly in possession of illegal drugs, they are shot.

Nope. The reasoning is that continued use of this policy will convince possible dealers that the action is not worth the effort. Econ 101. If you want to reduce some activity, increase the costs of engaging in it. That is exactly what this does.

"While you're at it, why not shoot all the people who skip the bus fare?"

Because people who skip bus fare are usually not involved in large organized crime units. Also, skipping bus fair is not addictive (in the medical sense of the word).

"Also enforce proper adherence to schedules under the same technique. The buses, trains and planes will finally run on time, can you imagine that?"

See criticism above.

Nope. I have never used or dealt in drugs. Nor do I plan to. How about you?

"There are indeed places where drug dealing or use is punishable with death.

These places still have pervasive drug use -- in fact, greater use than places without such penalties."

Examples please. I have examples to the contrary: Singapore and China. What are yours?

At which point, we kill them as well. And yes, I really am being serious.

For countries which have implemented this proposal or slightly watered down versions: see Singapore and China and note that even though they are in the middle of a drug heavy region, they have still managed to keep their countries relatively drug free.

Here is another way: line up all the drug dealers and shoot them.

Then line up all the drug users and shoot them.

Problem solved.

(I am being serious.)

In my case, I am actually much more interested in econ. and business. CS is just something I do as well, thus my interest in banking regulation, accounting, and valuations techniques (though I am, by no means, an expert on any of those subjects...).

As it so happens, CS people are much better at computers than economists etc... though there are some excellent econ. blogs on the internet which I enjoy reading.

Its a matter of specialization. I just happen to have banks as on of the things I try to specialize in.

Prolog is a language where easy things are hard and hard things are easy. It will expand your mind in ways that even lisp cannot manage.

This is basically logic programming. If you really want to do something like this, you are far better off just using a logic language like prolog and saving yourself the trouble.

Baahh... Its the old Risk v. Rewards thing all over again. Also easily explainable by standard economic theory. If some career/job/etc... carries a high risk of failure then those who succeed have to be richly rewarded to main the expected value at about the same.

As has already been mentioned, thats not a function, it is a functor. It indicates a relation between two objects. Specifically, it tells the prolog runtime that a list appended to an empty list is just the list itself and that the resultant list and the first list argument should have the same prefix. Another thing to note is that the append function piggy-backs on the prolog version of list-appended cons-cells so that append function example is a bit deceiving. However, the power of prolog should not overlooked. For example, a call to append(X, Y, [1, 2, 3]) would have returned all possible values of X and Y which append to [1, 2, 3]. Something much harder in other languages.

An extremely (imho) good source for information on logic programs and how they are implemented is here: http://www.ida.liu.se/~ulfni/lpp/

A more practical guide to actually compiling these logic programs efficiently (or as efficient as they can be) is documented in Modern Compiler Design by Dick Grune et al. They actually describe the workings of a somewhat simplified workings of a Warren Abstract Machine (WAM) which can (to my knowledge) now approach to within an order of magnitude of standard programming languages. Pretty amazing when the generality of logic programming is considered. Details on the WAM here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Abstract_Machine

"Edit; It looks like it has been sold to an Abu Dhabi holding company, probably since the book was written, but it was formerly owned by AIG. I'm not sure why their website says they're still owned by AIG. Strangely, for a bank he claims has multiple billionaire clients, it was sold for only $254 million."

Not really. Chase has ~800 billion in deposits. You don't see it being valued at $800 billion. That is because every deposit is a liability just like how cash is an asset and most of the cash is loaned out which turns it into more assets. In a well run bank, these assets and liabilities cancel each-other out very closely (wrt banking reserve requirements etc...) and don't factor directly into the value of the bank.

Very extreme jpeg pre 2000 compression would probably do considerably worse as it would degenerate into drawing in boxes of averaged color. jpeg200 would absolutely destroy this compression technique as it specifically uses a form of fourier analysis (wavelet analysis) which is provably optimal for this kind of compression. In fact, AFAIK jpeg2000 is designed so that as more bit are read from a file, it is possible to get a better and more accurate picture -- one of the benefits of using a fourier-analysis like technique. Sort of like a compression on steroids. Getting a lower res. picture is only slightly more complicated than truncating the file and requires minimal processing.

Now if only we could make software companies do something similar...

Already have: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html

But thats the problem. Obama has already changed the lives of the 300M people in this country or at least helped in the process. The stimulus bill that he helped pass has permanently expanded the US federal government. His budget will go even farther in that direction.

There is a reason that nearly every book ever sold used black text on white background even in the 20th century when that was no longer the only choice. I only wish that websites would heed this advice more often.

Thats for people using SQL. ORMs screw the entire process up. Another reason why ORMs are a bad idea.

ORMs are basically trying to recreate SQL in their own special non-portable immature bug-ridden manner. Thus, even the schema has to be defined in the ORM and that is where the problem comes in.

Works for me. Using SBCL 1.0.14-gentoo on x86. Which common lisp runtime are you using?

And yeah... Lisp-2 is a stupid idea.

Um doesn't tsv = csv with separator=tab?

I have always found this curious: In general, criminals cause significantly more damage than police. Then where is the outcry against politicians who are soft on crime and thus allow these increased rates of crime?

Thats what I am really worried about. That without good newspapers, politicians who allow an increase in crime through their policies will go unaccountable. (Whether that is already a problem is a matter of much debate).

Indeed. This is not a RDBMS problem. Its a MySQL problem and the correct solution is to use a mature DB.

Agreed. The author needs to look at Hotspot's parallel server GCs and the upcoming G1 collector.

A far better analysis of the issue (with primary sources!!): http://www.discriminations.us/2009/02/politicizing_science_a...

The guy who designed these has a webpage here: http://www.math.drexel.edu/~ahicks/. One of the links on the page lead to more information on the design of the mirrors.