1) "This ignores the cube-square law and is not as simple as multiplying the beam's thickness by 1 2/3."
You're saying the question is bad because you can think of an answer that's wrong?
2) "Not enough information, such as call volume and the number of employees, phones, & phone lines."
Sorry, I thought "one phone, answered whenever it rings" was easy enough to read in. Call volume? Well, how are you going to measure that?
"Additionally, telephone calls (despite having what you can call an average call time and average idle time) follow a poisson distribution."
Did someone say they didn't?
"Given the right information, and using an Erlang-C formula to figure this out would yield a result much different from expectations from just doing the math on the averages you supplied."
So your answer is that there is insufficient information?
3)"This has way too many unstated factors to be answered successfully."
Yeah, that one was kind of open-ended. I should have marked it "discussion" or something.
It's easy for me to scoff at this; I'm good at math. But...
The author makes a strong case that math is a major hurdle for students, but he does not make much of a case at all that algebra is not valuable. He simply says there's no case that it is ("nor is it clear", "there's no evidence", "I haven't found a compelling answer").
One sentence caught my eye: "Certification programs for veterinary technicians require algebra, although none of the graduates I've met have ever used it in diagnosing or treating their patients."
They've never used it? How do they know? One consequence of mathematical training I've seen is that it sharpens intuition. Maybe I'm confusing correlation with causation, but people who have studied a lot of math seem able to see the solutions to problems without writing out the equations. They can't explain how they do it, it's just there.
So let's do an experiment. Let's test students with real-world mathematical problems, e.g.:
An elephant stands on a platform supported by a beam. If you need a beam four inches thick to support an elephant six feet tall, how thick a beam do you need to support a ten-foot elephant?
A pizzeria takes telephone orders. Taking one order takes one minute. During peak hours, the telephone is silent for an average of two minutes between orders. How many orders are lost during peak hours because the phone's busy?
Which gets heatstroke faster, a large short-haired dog, or a small long-haired dog?
We'll test three groups: students who have passed algebra, students who have flunked algebra, and students who have taken "citizen statistics" classes instead. Now let's have a show of hands, who can tell me why I'm using three groups instead of two?...
Apparently you didn't read what I wrote about the thought experiment. And killing you was Michael Long's idea, not mine. And I am very much opposed to the drug war and idiotic policies like mandatory minimum sentences for possession of marijuana, but that really isn't relevant. And actually I do go out of my way to help disabled people -- taking great care not to rob them of their dignity in the process.
In fact I am so mindful of the dignity of disabled people, that I will not do you the injustice of pardoning the flaws in your reasoning out of cloying sympathy. You haven't bothered to use your brain in this discussion, even to use correct punctuation or keep track of who said what, your arguments alternate between arrogant entitlement and disgusting self-pity, and the less said about your attempts at logic the better. If you've shown us a fair sample of your thinking, then even if you were magically healed of your physical maladies this very day and given the physique of an olympic athlete, you still wouldn't be good for much but lifting heavy things. If your wits are all that nature has left you, then for heaven's sake, man, learn to use them better!
Umm... He could buy insurance against (3), diversify his investments against (2), and if he's been doing anything close to prudent saving, his family will not be "on the street and starving" if he loses his job (1), even without unemployment benefits.
Putting him in that state would most likely require a nationwide (or worldwide) disaster that would put an immediate end to "unemployment, SS, Medicare, and other programs", and it's unlikely that anyone walking by would be in a position to support his family on a charitable impulse.
"Later on when... you turn to that fund you thought had been socked away for a rainy day and find the sock had a huge hole in it you will wonder why you let all the liability be shifted to you while all the profit was shifted to someone else."
Doesn't that apply equally well to a government-managed Social Security "Trust Fund"?
Except that I wouldn't be inflicting anything on him. I didn't give him his arthritis.
And I notice you didn't put any requirements on him, if he decides to inflict terrible life-long hardship on me.
I think if you forced a choice like that on me, "be my slave or cut my throat", I'd be perfectly justified in choosing to kill you (though I doubt I could bring myself to do it).
It's not the hawks who are keeping military spending high, it's the defense industries.
Imagine you're a member of Congress considering a new defense contract for a new submarine or something. If it means jobs in your state, intellectually lazy voters will love you for it, even if the submarine isn't worth the cost -- which will be borne by the whole country, not just your state. They won't think through the consequences of many states playing the same game, making everyone poorer. That's why a new military system tends to have different components manufactured all over the map; it's not because the machinists in those land-locked states are particularly good at making submarine parts, it's just that everyone in Congress who supports the appropriation wants voter support in return. The same goes for recruitment, training, stationing-- from the point of view of the people making the decisions, the money spent isn't a cost, it's a benefit.
It has been suggested before, and it has a beautiful symmetry, but the consequences for the economy would be disastrous. People like to invest for their children's futures, but not many would be willing to build a fortune just to hand it over to the government. Instead most people would spend whatever they accumulated on luxuries and entertainment, earn no more than was necessary to maintain their own lifestyles, put nothing into long-term capital investment, and aim to die broke.
Just as a thought experiment, let's suppose it comes down to you and me. All the people earning money and all those who can't survive without support have paired off, and my taxes are keeping you alive.
Now I have a choice between earning a bare living as an artist and earning five times as much working 8:00-8:00 in an office. I'll get to keep roughly the same amount in either case, but only on plan B will you survive. I want to be an artist; that's what I want to do with my life.
Then are you willing to say "your life is your own and my illness is mine and your obligation to me is at an end"?
"...even if I managed to save every penny of my salary for the next 5 years, needing cancer treatment when I'm 65 (and uninsurable) would wipe that out and more."
It could, yes. And lots of people will get cancer. So we have to make a decision as a society: how much of your wealth should be forfeit if needed to pay your neighbor's medical bills?
(If your answer is equivalent to "everyone richer than me should be taxed down to my level, and then we should start letting people go untreated", then you don't really have an answer.)
1) This was cooked up by PR, as a way to soothe the nerds without taking any risk. The company has made no official statement, the message is unauthenticated and deniable, the author is not to the engineer who made the block, but Facebook can withhold that fact or reveal it, depending on how the wind blows.
2) The message is real, and unauthorized, and the author might well get fired for it.
3) The message is real, and some PR person showed rare insight in the decision to authorize it.
There's no way to know whether other sites have such a mechanism, because there's no way to know what such a mechanism is, because the court did not specify exactly what RapidShare must do.
'...The judge apparently dismissed this concern because of Rapidshare's name ("The service is called RapidShare and not RapidStore... and that says it all.")...'
To be fair, in the original text this seems to be a comment by the judge, not a justifying argument; there's nothing to indicate that he rejected RapidShare's argument because of its name.
"The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb."
To think this poor dog would never have been reunited with its owner without the marvel that is Twitter.
Unless, I don't know, maybe she had given it a subcutaneous RFID ID chip. Or a GPS tracking device. Or an ear tattoo with her email address. Or a leathern collar with a small tag bearing her telephone number.
I would think the DOJ would want him to blow his money on extravagances; it makes the public dislike him, and every dollar he wastes is a dollar he can't spend on lawyers.
(Unless, you know, the lawyers are moonlighting as strippers, but you know what I mean.)
On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?
Re: Re: my intuition tells me...
You're saying the question is bad because you can think of an answer that's wrong?
2) "Not enough information, such as call volume and the number of employees, phones, & phone lines."
Sorry, I thought "one phone, answered whenever it rings" was easy enough to read in. Call volume? Well, how are you going to measure that?
"Additionally, telephone calls (despite having what you can call an average call time and average idle time) follow a poisson distribution."
Did someone say they didn't?
"Given the right information, and using an Erlang-C formula to figure this out would yield a result much different from expectations from just doing the math on the averages you supplied."
So your answer is that there is insufficient information?
3)"This has way too many unstated factors to be answered successfully."
Yeah, that one was kind of open-ended. I should have marked it "discussion" or something.
On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?
my intuition tells me...
The author makes a strong case that math is a major hurdle for students, but he does not make much of a case at all that algebra is not valuable. He simply says there's no case that it is ("nor is it clear", "there's no evidence", "I haven't found a compelling answer").
One sentence caught my eye: "Certification programs for veterinary technicians require algebra, although none of the graduates I've met have ever used it in diagnosing or treating their patients."
They've never used it? How do they know? One consequence of mathematical training I've seen is that it sharpens intuition. Maybe I'm confusing correlation with causation, but people who have studied a lot of math seem able to see the solutions to problems without writing out the equations. They can't explain how they do it, it's just there.
So let's do an experiment. Let's test students with real-world mathematical problems, e.g.:
An elephant stands on a platform supported by a beam. If you need a beam four inches thick to support an elephant six feet tall, how thick a beam do you need to support a ten-foot elephant?
A pizzeria takes telephone orders. Taking one order takes one minute. During peak hours, the telephone is silent for an average of two minutes between orders. How many orders are lost during peak hours because the phone's busy?
Which gets heatstroke faster, a large short-haired dog, or a small long-haired dog?
We'll test three groups: students who have passed algebra, students who have flunked algebra, and students who have taken "citizen statistics" classes instead. Now let's have a show of hands, who can tell me why I'm using three groups instead of two?...
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
Re: Re: double standard
In fact I am so mindful of the dignity of disabled people, that I will not do you the injustice of pardoning the flaws in your reasoning out of cloying sympathy. You haven't bothered to use your brain in this discussion, even to use correct punctuation or keep track of who said what, your arguments alternate between arrogant entitlement and disgusting self-pity, and the less said about your attempts at logic the better. If you've shown us a fair sample of your thinking, then even if you were magically healed of your physical maladies this very day and given the physique of an olympic athlete, you still wouldn't be good for much but lifting heavy things. If your wits are all that nature has left you, then for heaven's sake, man, learn to use them better!
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmm
Putting him in that state would most likely require a nationwide (or worldwide) disaster that would put an immediate end to "unemployment, SS, Medicare, and other programs", and it's unlikely that anyone walking by would be in a position to support his family on a charitable impulse.
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmm
"Later on when... you turn to that fund you thought had been socked away for a rainy day and find the sock had a huge hole in it you will wonder why you let all the liability be shifted to you while all the profit was shifted to someone else."
Doesn't that apply equally well to a government-managed Social Security "Trust Fund"?
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
double standard
And I notice you didn't put any requirements on him, if he decides to inflict terrible life-long hardship on me.
I think if you forced a choice like that on me, "be my slave or cut my throat", I'd be perfectly justified in choosing to kill you (though I doubt I could bring myself to do it).
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
different economies
Imagine you're a member of Congress considering a new defense contract for a new submarine or something. If it means jobs in your state, intellectually lazy voters will love you for it, even if the submarine isn't worth the cost -- which will be borne by the whole country, not just your state. They won't think through the consequences of many states playing the same game, making everyone poorer. That's why a new military system tends to have different components manufactured all over the map; it's not because the machinists in those land-locked states are particularly good at making submarine parts, it's just that everyone in Congress who supports the appropriation wants voter support in return. The same goes for recruitment, training, stationing-- from the point of view of the people making the decisions, the money spent isn't a cost, it's a benefit.
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
Re: Re: Re: Re: Start with a false premise.
(And it wouldn't really be the same footing-- "there will always be rich and poor".)
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Now I have a choice between earning a bare living as an artist and earning five times as much working 8:00-8:00 in an office. I'll get to keep roughly the same amount in either case, but only on plan B will you survive. I want to be an artist; that's what I want to do with my life.
Then are you willing to say "your life is your own and my illness is mine and your obligation to me is at an end"?
I have strong opinions on this topic too.
On the post: When Every Practical Economic Idea Is Political Suicide, Something's Wrong With Politics
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmm
It could, yes. And lots of people will get cancer. So we have to make a decision as a society: how much of your wealth should be forfeit if needed to pay your neighbor's medical bills?
(If your answer is equivalent to "everyone richer than me should be taxed down to my level, and then we should start letting people go untreated", then you don't really have an answer.)
On the post: Facebook Engineer Apologizes Via Reddit For Accidentally Blocking Imgur Across Facebook
interesting...
1) This was cooked up by PR, as a way to soothe the nerds without taking any risk. The company has made no official statement, the message is unauthenticated and deniable, the author is not to the engineer who made the block, but Facebook can withhold that fact or reveal it, depending on how the wind blows.
2) The message is real, and unauthorized, and the author might well get fired for it.
3) The message is real, and some PR person showed rare insight in the decision to authorize it.
On the post: German Supreme Court Suggests Cyber Lockers Need To Filter Content If Alerted To Copyright Infringement
Re:
On the post: German Supreme Court Suggests Cyber Lockers Need To Filter Content If Alerted To Copyright Infringement
fine points of grammar
To be fair, in the original text this seems to be a comment by the judge, not a justifying argument; there's nothing to indicate that he rejected RapidShare's argument because of its name.
On the post: Dear Lamar Smith & House Judiciary: Have You Learned Nothing From SOPA?
true colors
I would very much like to hear a member of the committee stand up and say this. But I suppose that would take courage.
On the post: Kim Jong Un's Mysterious Female Companion Hides The Real Issue: Piracy Of Disney Characters!
Re: Re:
On the post: NSA Chief Says NSA Doesn't Need Access To Your Info... As Whistleblowers Say They're Already Getting It
Re: I will say it once.....
On the post: NSA Chief Says NSA Doesn't Need Access To Your Info... As Whistleblowers Say They're Already Getting It
Re:
On the post: NSA Chief Says NSA Doesn't Need Access To Your Info... As Whistleblowers Say They're Already Getting It
pronoun trouble
He might more accurately have said "everything you do in cyber, we can audit."
(And I suppose I can dream of him saying "everything we do in cyber, you can audit.")
On the post: Irish Rail Uses Twitter To Help Reunite Lost Dog With Owner
our cave-man anscestors
Unless, I don't know, maybe she had given it a subcutaneous RFID ID chip. Or a GPS tracking device. Or an ear tattoo with her email address. Or a leathern collar with a small tag bearing her telephone number.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Offers To Come To The US, If DOJ Releases Funds For Legal Defense
Re: Re: Re:
(Unless, you know, the lawyers are moonlighting as strippers, but you know what I mean.)
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