linschn

> When you type to UNIX,a gnome deep in the system is gathering your characters and saving them in a secret place. The characters will not be given to a program until you type a return (or new-line), as described above in Logging in.

> Aquitaine passed to France in 1137 when the duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine married Louis VII of France, but their marriage was annulled in 1152. When Eleanor's new husband became King Henry II of England in 1154, the area became an English possession, and the cornerstone of the so-called Angevin Empire. Aquitaine remained English until the end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453, when it was annexed by France.

Even statistical anomalies like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs got more money, once they became slightly rich, from the capital they owned than from the work they produced.

Picketty's explanation is that capital's reward is higher than work's, but I'm not bent on defending that explanation (even if until a better one comes up, I'll stick to Picketty's).

As far as I know there is no counter example of the phenomenon itself (whatever the underlying reason is).

I even acknowledge that the poor are getting richer. The problem is just that they are getting richer at a slower pace than the rich, and unless this problem is addressed through taxation, then it will lead to economic stagnation or worse.

As for Picketty, the only serious criticism I'm aware of had to do with his explanation about why wealth begets wealth, not on the fact that there is a preferential accretion mechanism for wealth inherent to capitalism.

If you have any source or example where capital holders do not increase their share faster than non capital holders (say, e.g. workers) then I'd be happy to know about it.

Because capitalism is a system in which the rich get richer. This preferential accumulation of wealth where wealth already is is an inherent feature of capitalism.

The same kind of phenomenon can be seen in the population of cities for example: the more people there are in a city, the more other people are likely to move there.

If you want to know more about this, see, e.g. Picketty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...)

Also, profound inequality is bad for growth (The IMF says so, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/I...): "when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down.".

So given that there is a runaway feedback loop that make the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer, and given that profound inequality is detrimental to the economy at large, it logically follows that there must exist some scheme to redistribute a part of the wealth of the extra-rich to the rest of society.

Taxation is (or should be) such a shame.

Note that there is no moral argument here. No finger pointing, no entiltement. Just a systemic view of things: it is detrimental to all to let a runaway feedback loop increase inequalities.

I may be mistaken,but my understanding is that userspace servers accessible through the use of the fopen/fread/fwrite, etc. system calls was an idea that originated in Plan 9.

Furthermore, some people who worked at Bell Labs at the time now work at Google.

Plan 9 is not dead, it ideas live on in other projects.

  $  perl6 -e 'say VII * 2'
  ===SORRY!=== Error while compiling -e
  Two terms in a row
  at -e:1
  ------> say VII *⏏ 2
     expecting any of:
         infix
         infix stopper
         postfix
         statement end
         statement modifier
         statement modifier loop

:)

No computer science yet :/ Finding grants and applying truly is a time sink.

Leo Szilard predicted it years ago:

> “but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”

> “That I would very much like to do,” Mark Gable said, “but how do I go about it?”

> “Well,” I said, “I think that shouldn’t be very difficult. As a matter of fact, I think it would be quite easy. You could set up a foundation, with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could mail out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each committee, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairman at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year. This is just about all you would have to do.

From wikipedia on Trickle-down economics:

> A 2015 report by the International Monetary Fund argues that there is no trickle-down effect as the rich get richer:

>> [I]f the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth.[19]

It just assumes that trickle down economics works, and repeats this "lesson" ad nauseam chapter after chapter.

However, it is very clear historically that trickle down economics does not work, and that completely unregulated markets lead to human rights abuse.

Picketty is much more enlightening.

The moral standpoint is very different than with movie or music pirating.

Because what is trumpeted as a breakthrough may in fact be so narrow in scope that it may not even be possible to use it in a flight combat video game without a lot of work, let alone any real life environment.

It is absolutely, very closely tied to the mathematical model of aerial combat that they devised and can not easily be made to accommodate new insights, or new challenges.

For small scale problem where most of the variables are well understood, this kind of approaches work beautifully. Big problem are better tackled by a more generic approach (maybe with some ad-hoc adaptations, such as mixed approach between expert systems and statistical algorithms, feature engineering, etc.) because these approaches will be more resilient to an exposure to the real world, and the manpower invested in them is useful in more than one problem domain.

To address your last point, there is an extensive body of work on data-scarce environments. I've even seen a talk about applying reinforcement learning to endangered species preservation, where you only get a single digit number of interaction with the system !

What I found did not convince me that it would fare better than an off-the-shelf (somewhat) non-interpretable statistical supervised learning algorithm.

It can be a nice way of bootstrapping the rule writing process, or to go the other way : to discover and analyze new expert knowledge by looking at the rules.

But performance-wise, I would go the machine learning way anytime.

Also, Inverse Reinforcement Learning seems to be very promising : one guesses the reward function by observing the expert acting.

This makes (clever) use of hundreds, if not thousands, man hours of painstakingly entering expert rules if the form IF <some input value is above or below some threshold> THEN <put some output value in the so and so range>.

The mathematical model of Fuzzy Trees is nice, but this is completely ad-hoc to the specific modelization of the problem, and will fail to generalize to any other problem space.

This kind of techniques has some nice properties (its "reasonings" are understandable and thus kind of debuggable and kind of provable, it smoothes some logic rules that would otherwise naively lead to non smooth control, etc.) but despite the advances presented here that seem to make the computation of the model tractable, I don't see how it could make the actual definition of model anywhere near tractable.

Also, I dislike having to wade though multiple pages of advertising before I can find the (very light) scientific content.

-- Edit: I realize I am very negative here. I do not mean to disparage the work done by the authors. It's just that the way it is presented make it sound way more impressive than it is. It's still interesting and novative work.

So, let's look at how we can safely store coal/oil waste. We can't, it goes straight in the air, or in the sea. So in this sense, I'd argue even simply dumping our nuclear waste in the Mariana Trench would be safer.

The french law you are talking about gives the same force to the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials as all other justice decisions. We call that "autorité de la chose jugée".

You can still discuss the body count.