> saving under your pillow, especially if you had a non-inflating currency, isn't good for the economy.
It actually is. It you earn $100, by producing $100 worth of goods for the economy, and you don't spend it, you're producing more than you consume. This increases the supply of all goods on the market, decreasing the price, effectively making the entire world richer by that amount. Other people can use that extra money partly to increase their consumption and partly for investment purposes. When you take your $100 out of your pillow and spend it, you're then having the opposite effect. So in the end, you're allowing people to consume more at an earlier time (when you put the money in) and less at a later time (when you're taking it out). This is a very valuable service, as shown by the fact that people are willing to take out loans where they pay money (interest) for the ability to temporally distort their consumption patterns in this way. Some people can even use the temporary possession of additional goods as capital to generate permanent wealth.
A constant pattern of people saving under their pillow will simply reduce prices by a certain percentage and hold it there. If deflation is small, then this secondary price reduction will be lower than the primary reduction and the economy will remain stable. The problem only arises when deflation becomes too high - then, the secondary reduction becomes greater than the primary reduction, and causes a still greater tertiary reduction, leading to a deflationary spiral (ie. bubble), which screws up the economy until it inevitably pops, but if deflation is within reasonable margins it should not be an issue.
> Even if it should be encouraged, it doesn't matter the logic of it, people won't accept making less and less money over time.
How do we know this? One could imagine a deflationary society where people ask how people could possibly stand their money buying less and less over time.
Philosophical question - why do people with disabilities have the right to higher priority than everyone else? Let's say you've calculated that there are 4000 blind people who might be interested in your website, but 11000 Spanish speakers, 9000 Korean speakers and 7000 Portuguese speakers. If someone comes to complain about accessibility for the blind, won't it be perfectly reasonable to answer (in more polite terms) "no, we won't handle you, we're going to do a Spanish translation first, then implement UTF-8 so we can do a Korean translation, then do the Portuguese translation, and only then maybe get to you"?
I agree. If I got an email with "lawyer pomposity" in it, I would likely pretend I never got it and deliberately push back any accessibility plans out of spite. You don't have to stick "please" in every sentence, but you have to phrase things correctly. If it's phrased as a request, I would see an opportunity to make people happy and gladly go along. If it's phrased as an order, I would probably perceive it as an affront to my individual sovereignty and would be motivated to fight back rather than capitulate.
Isn't the fact that entropy increases over time itself just a result of a priori statistical laws and the condition of zero entropy at the Big Bang 13 billion years ago, rather than a physical law of the universe?
Stalinism has two widely known parts to it. One part is starving millions of people. This is not happening. Another part is killing enemies of the state. This, and some other high-profile political murders in and relating to Russia, fits that second definition perfectly, and in that way it is Stalinist.
Bias your comment ordering system in favor of new comments so that every comment gets its 5 minutes of fame before staying around with a good score or floating to the bottom with a bad score. it's not perfect, but it should mitigate the problem.
For the website, I would recommend putting some of the non-content bits (links, buttons, login, etc.) on the side, not on the top. Studies have shown that reading is faster and more comfortable with narrower columns, and the 30-45 cm found in modern laptops is way too wide. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of vertical screen space though.
I have written very many games using Python and Pygame. Very nice language (I like the syntax much better than the C-like languages) and tools.
If you're going to do this, there is one very important tip: use psyco. It ( http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ ) magically speeds up all Python execution by about 3-4x. In one of my games ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/slasha/ , still in its early stages) the millisecond per frame count went from 25-300 to 15-80 (drawing the desktop seems to take an unavoidable 7-10 ms).
As for what you learn doing this kind of thing, you use trigonometry a lot, you use the pythagorean theorem a lot, my game here is the way I thought up of the pathfinding algorithm.
It may be true that it is a company's legal responsibility to serve its shareholders first, but that's not the way it should be. With this mentality, corporations will minimally follow the law (if the fine is less than the profits, the corporation may be legally required to break the law!) and do whatever they can in their own interests. Society as a whole would benefit massively if caring for others and society in general was regarded as a good thing.
And what is wrong with commoditizing the complement? Google's working hard to make operating systems free and we'll probably see Microsoft working hard to open up search engines. End result: both operating systems and search engines will be open and the consumer benefits.
We don't just kick them out without basic economic support. Especially for some classes of criminals, like sex offenders, we put a large sign on their back saying "I'M DANGEROUS". We ostracize them from society and make them feel like they don't belong. So it's only natural for them to want to go back to prison, where their troubles are the same as the troubles of the guy next to them and where they feel like they do belong.
I don't mean the big missile, I mean the payload that InclinedPlane's strategy described - a missile shooting out a few thousand mininukes a short distance away. Such small payloads, even if we give them engines (which also makes them shine brightly to anti-missile lasers) are simply too small to outrun a ship - small engines tend to be very inefficient and slow.
You could put some water or other substance and have it swimming around the ship and when you use weapons or engines send it through them and fire it out the back of the ship. It's a limited supply, but so is whatever is powering the engines and lasers in the first place.
I would imagine that depends a lot on what the distance is. Release too close and you get blown up by a laser before you can release. Release too far and by the time they get there the ship will have moved away.
Don't think of changing direction, think of changing velocity. Space is a Newtonian movement system, so accelerating 20 meters per second in some direction is just as easy at 0 km/sec as it is at 10000 km/sec.
As for missiles, I really don't like the idea. If I were tasked with building a 22-nd century warship, I would put a few hundred automated anti-missile lasers everywhere, which would fry the missiles before any of them get close enough to darken the hull.
Anything that doesn't travel at 299792458 meters per second will not be a viable weapon in space. Two spaceships coming toward each other will be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away when they start firing on each other. The time lag will be over one second for lasers, so if the two ships are maneuvering randomly many laser shots will actually miss. Kinetic weapons will take minutes or hours to get there, making them essentially useless. With missiles (I'll assume missiles are nuclear here), not only are they slow but you can also set up computer controlled lasers to fry their control circuitry. Nukes require very specific detonation conditions and if you fry the explosive material it won't explode like a conventional weapon, it will just fail.
Also, with ships punching a hole in the bottom is enough to sink one - most ships hit by a one-shot-kill missile take a few minute to do down because they're sinking, not exploding. In space, this doesn't exist. You have fuel tanks and engines, but those can be safely put at the back of the ship, and in a battle you'll just rotate your ship so that the front faces the enemy.
It actually is. It you earn $100, by producing $100 worth of goods for the economy, and you don't spend it, you're producing more than you consume. This increases the supply of all goods on the market, decreasing the price, effectively making the entire world richer by that amount. Other people can use that extra money partly to increase their consumption and partly for investment purposes. When you take your $100 out of your pillow and spend it, you're then having the opposite effect. So in the end, you're allowing people to consume more at an earlier time (when you put the money in) and less at a later time (when you're taking it out). This is a very valuable service, as shown by the fact that people are willing to take out loans where they pay money (interest) for the ability to temporally distort their consumption patterns in this way. Some people can even use the temporary possession of additional goods as capital to generate permanent wealth.
A constant pattern of people saving under their pillow will simply reduce prices by a certain percentage and hold it there. If deflation is small, then this secondary price reduction will be lower than the primary reduction and the economy will remain stable. The problem only arises when deflation becomes too high - then, the secondary reduction becomes greater than the primary reduction, and causes a still greater tertiary reduction, leading to a deflationary spiral (ie. bubble), which screws up the economy until it inevitably pops, but if deflation is within reasonable margins it should not be an issue.
> Even if it should be encouraged, it doesn't matter the logic of it, people won't accept making less and less money over time.
How do we know this? One could imagine a deflationary society where people ask how people could possibly stand their money buying less and less over time.