stavrianos

How about if Barnes and Noble decides it only wants to sell fiction by authors whose skin is of a certain shade?

It's terrifically easy to solve a problem you know next-to-nothing about.

given the similarities in the environments we and they evolved in, (ie Earth) I think it's likely that you have wildly more in common with these lifeforms than with any you'd find elsewhere.

less "why" and more "how". Which is a shame, because "why" would be interesting.

I think that book publishers really DO have something to fear from piracy. Not right now, obviously- real books are hands-down a better experience than reading on a computer. But the digital means are going to get more and more compelling over the next few years, and a generation is going to grow up with a different concept of "book".

disclaimer: I've never used an ebook reader. I have read books on my computer screen.

So, when I buy a TV, it's effectively being subsidized by other people's cable purchases.

because they're so very shy about that.

How many years of study does it take to know the law of the land now? Transaction costs are already enormous.

It's only hugely impractical because it should have been in place from the beginning.

screw "minimize" - any law that would be selectively enforced should (in a perfect, unattainable world) be eliminated

Definitely. if we're going to talk about weight, anything that any country (except haiti, obviously) pulls is above and beyond "their" weight

I haven't been blown away by democracy's ability to build competent governments, and the self-selection biases are terrible. Hard to see how chance could be much worse.

this chart clearly shows that everything you can do with Google wave can already be done with other tools.

Anyone have any idea how this works? The images are very bright, and there don't seem to be any issues with the buildings casting shadows on themselves.

If this is just a projector in front of the building, I've never seen a projector that powerful. And the effect will break down at any other viewing angle.

it sounds to me like the people who find problems might already have found a balance, and are canceling out anything that might disrupt it.

and if you were part of that sector, wouldn't it be deliciously ironic to promote, pay for, and profit from the piece?

no Quarantine?

if ya put it like that, it sounds more like a fundamental failing

"It's really only more difficult because people don't know how to do it"

Fair challenge. I don't think there have been any democracies that promoted competence, so any examples I can think of will be monarchies that happened to get a good king that one time, or something to that nature. Tightly centralized government isn't dragged down to the average, so they can pull stunts like that from time to time.

I hadn't considered the economic tradeoff involved in health care (I'm canadian, didn't occur to me). Obviously doctors shouldn't control your spending. Or politicians, for that matter.

Doctors obviously shouldn't have access to your wallet, but they SHOULD tell you without pussy-footing around, this will save your life, that is stupid and unnecessary, that one over there will kill you.

If you want to buy drugs without a doctor interjecting good sense, it really is a pharmacist you need.

And since libertarian governments are forged from pure unobtainium anyways, they might as well be competent. I think it's a smaller jump from here to qualified politicians than it is from here to politicians who don't meddle in people's lives.

You're thinking of a pharmacist.

MDs and politicians should absolutely be doing cost-benefit tradeoffs. I'd go so far as to say that's basically their job. I go to a doctor because they have skills and knowledge I don't possess.

That doctors (being experts) so often don't apply their judgment, and politicians (often being charismatic amateurs) so often do is lamentable. Politicians should be required to be experts. Doctors should be (aren't they?) required to exhibit judgment on behalf of their patients.

Expecting everyone to be able to exhibit the judgment of a professional in every field is so wildly implausible that I've obviously mistaken your meaning.

Another moral question is made moot! Science, you've done it again!

Wireheading's great and all, but really what you're talking about is an IV drip of heroin. Why wait? It's cheap, it's available, and the world sucks now!

In all seriousness, I have a certain grudging respect for the directness of the addict's solution to the Happiness Problem. My indoctrination was thorough enough as a child that I've no interest in it for myself, though.

luck (exceptional skill?) is a valid road to success

Reality begs to differ.

I'm fascinated by your use of the word "hope"

because one important difference between judges and compilers is, judges are generally clever enough to screen out technically correct exploitations of egregious edge cases

I think the jump is because of the cut-off. If the X were allowed to continue smoothly past 200k, the scores might have followed the same curve all the way up.

if it's unclear enough what the code does that you need to do this, maybe some speculative commenting in the main branch actually would be an improving.