I wonder if perhaps it's a good thing that rich people can pay to use handicapped spots. We could just think of them as "priority parking", and the regular priority parking ticket costs $x while handicapped people get a coupon entitling them to free access. After all, the intention isn't to prevent healthy people using them, it's to prevent them becoming unavailable - a gaggle of handicap convention attendees would cause more trouble than an occasional CEO buying his own groceries.
While I agree with you, the situation is also abused somewhat (in the UK at least).
A girl in my university class had some kind of wrist problem. She wrote slow because of it, though no slower than me - I am just a slow writer. She was officially classed as disabled and could have had access to such parking, as well as extra time in exams. Does she really need access to disabled parking spots? She was fit and healthy otherwise.
The other person I spoke to who had access to disabled parking "borrowed the permit from his aunt".
How is that different from abusing the system by parking in it with no permit? Except that you are not as likely to be fined?
The question is, so what? Does the degree of abuse mean we should let more people park in disabled spots? Or should we enforce the rules more stringently?
Also, it is unhelpful to judge whether someone is 'fit and healthy' from seeing them. There are many hidden disabilities. And people with them are often accused (to their faces) of faking it, gaming the system, etc. The UK is currently suffering under a growing culture that assumes people on 'benefit' are scroungers. As a disabled person, I rely on Mobility and Care provision through Disability Living Allowance (I work, so I claim no disability benefit, or similar), I've felt the chilling effect of the disability doubt zeitgeist.
You don't get to keep waiting for a prediction to finally come true when it doesn't come with a deadline. It already didn't happen despite all our labor saving technology so far (we don't even weave cloth by hand anymore!). Sure it might happen in another 100 years, or another 1000. But that's almost a given for most predictions.
They're not great on paper. They ignore some powerful personal human motivation that we know exists. Perhaps you should say "They're great for robots that can be programmed to think in whatever way is convenient for the academic imagining them".
I don't understand what is being optimized by minimizing the product rw. Reducing w reduces the number of digits, but how does reducing the radix r help with component count? Surely a memory cell that could store 1,000,000 different values in a base-1-million system is just one component, even if it is quite difficult to make. Are they talking about the components needed to perform calculations?
I'd say, your base-1-million system is virtually impossible to make...
But you are right: what counts is how much information you can store or process per square inch / per Watt, not really how many components you need to achieve this.
While w measures the number of cells you need, r is a coarse approximation of the complexity of each cell.
In practice people never got a ternary cell that cost only 3/2 of the best binary cells (in both space, power and money). That's why research dried up. But there's no reason to think this is fundamental.
windows also comes with the well-hidden "Problem Steps Recorder" that takes a sequence of screen shots whenever you click something. Doesn't do the text overlay but it's already installed with Windows which makes some things easier.
Next, I hope somebody hacks the Tesla Model S low-battery-capacity model to provide full battery capacity without having to pay for it. After all Tesla is using evil DRM to force people to pay a premium to use what they already have.
Edit: I see they don't offer that option anymore. Problem solved :)
It's hard to understand why spoofing would be illegal. If it fools traders who are relying on buy orders to judge the price, then why don't those traders just accept spoofing exists and not rely so heavily on the unfilled buy orders?
If it's illegal to cancel a buy order immediately after placing it, then perhaps exchanges shouldn't provide that facility? Perhaps there's some legal reason you would immediately cancel an order, and this action somehow doesn't destabilize the market or screw over other traders?
Spoofing is illegal mostly because we said it should be. The reason we as a community decided it should be, is that we like that the markets are very good at finding accurate prices and spoofing is specifically built to prevent that.
To your points:
- Spoofers impact all orders, buy and sell equally.
- All market participants rely on the market to judge price, that's how the markets work.
- Market makers, who spoofers are targeting, have already stopped relying on unfilled orders (or more specifically they've gotten more sophisticated about predicting spoofing). This is very expensive and that cost is being passed on to everyone else in the market place. The problem is, what else should they rely on to determine the fair price of a security other than supply and demand?
Finally, spoofing is not about when you cancel an order. There is nothing illegal or even objectionable about canceling an order immediately after placing it. Spoofers put in orders over a wide period of time and then pull them all at once. Even that isn't in itself illegal or even objectionable, it's their intent when they put the orders in the book that is illegal.
I know from a similar German project (http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de) and they have two independent non-German speakers transcribe the digital facsimiles to ensure that the transcriptions are as accurate as possible.
In fact, those mistakes look more like accurate transcriptions of Early Modern manuscripts - with their looser spelling rules and often idiosyncratic use of letters.
It's kind of interesting that they look like the same errors as those generated by OCR.
The difficulty of deciphering the text makes this huge task even more impressive!
It's precisely those idiosyncrasies of early modern orthography which make it difficult to use an off-the-shelf OCR package, which is presumably why these are hand-transcribed instead.
Perhaps there is a specialist antiquarian OCR package which can deal with long s, interchangeable u and v, non-standardised spelling, etc, but I have yet to come across one.
Have you looked at The Early Modern OCR project? My understanding is that they're working on exactly that as well as simply better tools for reviewing & retraining on a large scale:
It's quite tractable, stop voting for the same two parties that keep causing the problems over and over again. The trouble is, most of your voting neighbors don't mind so they perpetuate the problem - there's the downside of democracy, two wolves and a sheep.
Not sure why you got downvoted, but you make a good point.
Political parties change their "offerings" when they lose votes.
Analogy: When 2 large competing grocery chains start loosing business to small organic stores the big stores will start carrying organic food. The small organic store will never dominate the big stores but they can cause the big guys to
change.
C.G.P. Grey has an entire series on why our voting system forces a two-party system. The issue isn't getting your neighbour to change their voting habits, the issue is changing the system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422579428&v=s7tWHJfhi...
I fully agree that voting for third parties is the way to go, but currently the public has been propagandized to believe that voting third party is wasting your vote, or even worse, causing harm.
They are convinced that their vote is wasted by a propaganda video going around that describes the US system as a "first past the post", in which it is impossible for third parties to win. They are convinced that third party voting is harmful as it supposedly causes a spoiler effect.
As long as people are brainwashed against voting third party by these flawed memes, the problem will remain intractable.
There are multiple factors that make it unlikely for a third party to win, and "first past the post" is a lesser contributor.
Of far more concern are ballot access laws that make even the formation of a third party a colossal waste of time, and partisan redistricting that even makes it impossible for the second party to win. I won't even delve into ridiculously insecure electronic voting tabulators, because I'm too likely to devolve into paranoid conspiracy nonsense from there.
Eliding over all that, the spoiler effect is what forces the two major parties to make changes to their platform in your locale. If a party believes that your vote for another party caused them to lose an election, they will certainly make an effort to kiss your ass at least once in the next cycle, becoming more like the party you voted for. It is easy to argue that voting for either of the two major parties means that you don't want them to change their platform or policies.
Voting for the party in power means you are happy with the status quo. If you are not happy, and you find the second party to be more objectionable, voting for a third party that puts you between them and the party in power on the political spectrum is the correct move. If that party is scared enough by votes bleeding from them to that party, they will shift in that direction, perhaps enough that you will be happy voting for them again.
You're getting into game theory territory. At present, it might be the case that voting for the third party helps to change the platforms of the dominant parties, but if this idea becomes well enough known to significantly impact voting behavior, then the dominant parties will likely pick up on it and adjust accordingly. That is to say that if they see (through polling, exit interviews and statistical analysis) that this is a significant effect, it also likely implies that the people who employ this strategy are significantly less gettable by platform changes, because a party that can taylor itself to the issues they feel strongest about will always be more attractive than the two parties that have to satisfy everyone. So you might see a Nash equilibrium develop that nullifies the effect of this strategy.
The current equilibrium is stuck at candidates pretending to be further from the political barycenter to win their party primary, then pretending to be closer to the barycenter in the general election. Any person holding a consistent position over the entire elections cycle--which is to say anyone that has non-negotiable personal principles--is eliminated from consideration. Campaign promises are rarely honored. Nothing of genuine importance--like debt, systemic unemployment, inflation, or even just passing a budget bill for the year--is ever seriously considered.
If a new non-optimal Nash equilibrium is reached, that's fine with me, because the one we have now is absolutely terrible, in my opinion. perhaps it will inspire new political strategies that do not leave huge segments of the populace effectively disenfranchised.
History - while America has always been governed primarily by two parties, that set of two has changed a couple of times.
Originally, it was the Whigs and the Democratic Republicans. In the mid-1800s, the Republicans were a new party, and Lincoln wound up being the first president from that party.
Interesting to note that the guy who freed the slaves was a Republican, while it was the Democrats who tried to maintain slavery. During the Civil Rights movement, the parties got confused about who their core constituencies were, leading to the major shift leading to the alignment we see today.
While I'm far from confident that it's happening, it's entirely possible that today's problems like ubiquitous surveillance, brutality of a militarized police force, etc., together make up enough of a sea change in public opinion that the Parties are again susceptible to getting lost. Witness flip-flop of many people in condemning GWB while failing to protest Obama's own similar actions, or vice-versa.
My comment above yours might answer that (a "wasted" vote isn't wasted if it causes change).
A few years ago I watched a TV program about Ralph Nader and it changed the way I voted.
Like most people, I had been voting for the least worst guy who I thought could win. I think that you probably do so as well. I probably did that for the first 20+ years. Now ask yourself: "How is that working out for me? Has it made a long term positive difference?"
The major parties really can't afford to cater to our interests, at least not in deed. We frankly can't pay them enough. Unless they are independently wealthy, they can't afford to run for another term if they don't satisfy the wishes of their donors [their true constituents]. Side with your voters against the guys funding your campaign(s) - no more money for you!
If you voted based on mathematics, you would see that you are mistakenly conflating your individual vote with the behavior of the general populace. For example, with the presidential vote, except in a couple small districts in swing states, your vote is completely irrelevant. Your single vote is both not enough to swing the state you are in, and even if it were, it's within the error margins for that state. If it ever got close enough to where one vote decides it (and it never has), it would be a court deciding the vote anyway.
So since your individual vote doesn't matter, you might as well vote your conscience and not pragmatically.
> Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.
This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.
