bascule

Well, I suppose it's a bit confusing as domain models can be described with UML diagrams too: My gut reaction is this is an overly complex way to represent these entities. Part of that is my reaction as a Rubyist of not having singleton classes/metaclasses to stick methods which query entities into. Why, for example do you have a "removeBook" method in your "Inventory" class, as opposed to having "remove" be a method on Book itself? I am not sure where to factor "addBook" in that case though... in Ruby I'd stick it into the "singleton class" which is similar to what you'd get back from getClass() on an object in Java. Then you can simply do Book.add() in Ruby, which is a "factory" method for creating Book objects. I suppose also I am used to dealing with domains which exist upon Object/Relational Mappers (ORMs), and thus you have the full power of an RDBMS to perform your queries. It's a nice compromise. That said, I do have some initial concerns right off the bat: Why do you have a bunch of enumerations instead of, say, a Category class (with a Subcategory subclass?) That's certainly how myself and others represent such things in a real Content Management System. I may be rather opinionated about this subject because you are effectively designing a CMS for a library which is what I work on myself every day.

I strongly recommend this book as well. It was certainly my first introduction to some of the more advanced concepts of quantum physics. If you're not afraid of the maths (like I am) try Roger Penrose's Road to Reality. That book is truly an end-to-end physics textbook, which starts by teaching you all the requisite math you need to understand the physics. It's not for the weak at heart but I'm told if you read it in its entirety you'll leave with a decent understanding of classical, quantum, and relativistic physics.

Does it slice and dice?

Is that meant to be a domain model, or just some UML diagram of the class structure?

Considering computers are universal and can be used to do anything, any and all aspects of mathematics have potential applications in computer science. You're going to have to be more specific in your question to get a response, sorry. For example, I work with singular value decomposition as a method of collaborative filtering. Most computer programmers have never heard of SVD and will never use it because they don't have a potential application.

It's another case of Kenneth Parcel's argument: "Why should we listen to what a bunch of scientists have to say?" Science has been wrong in the past and it will be wrong in the future!

Glenn Beck arguing with scientists... I would love to see him take on evolution. "Look, it's Charles Darwin, except with the body of a monkey. Charles Darwin thinks we came from monkeys! Let's laugh at him because he looks so ridiculous! Haw haw!"

Apparently many people in America are able to see a Moonbow right now: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=moon+halo

You're silly, clearly it taps into the Zero Point Field and leverages the Schumann Resonance to give you infinite free energy, duh!

Good question. People can PM you their email and you can individually invite them.

No. He should be free to say what he said. As in the case of Glenn Beck, his advertisers will look at the size of the audience, compare that to the volume of angry phone calls, laugh, and shrug it off. Speaking of Fox News and their advertisers, anyone been watching it lately? Their ads certainly appeal to what I'll call the "Wal-Mart audience". (not that Wal-Mart is bad, but I prefer to shop at Target. Guess I'm just an elitist.) I mean, jeezus, they were running ads for KY jelly, and I am not kidding. I also saw an ad for some sort of telecourse on how to settle criminal charges out of court with the DA, "Beat The System - And Win!" or something like that. Also some ad for some plastic trinket to stick in your hair to add volume, because apparently you're too dumb to operate a bottle of hairspray. And some sort of tool for cleaning disgusting hair clogs out of your drain, which repeatedly pictured disgusting hair clogs. Wow, really makes me want to buy your product.

Is there an official SFN wave yet?

To reiterate iNow, nobody said it was a "constitutional right". However, the "promote the general Welfare" part of the preamble outlays the idea that the government should provide services, especially of the sort that are applicable to every American. It's up to Congress to decide what those services should be. Psst, 1 in 8 Americans is living off food stamps at the moment

Probably roughly the same as the US government soaking up the debt, only far less bad and with lessons learned. I do not find this outlook to be remotely in line with reality. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Brooksley Born, head of the CFTC, moved to regulate derivatives in the late '90s. Greenspan opposed her, because, well, REGULATION BAD! I believe such legislation would've helped mitigate and possibly prevent the financial crisis. (Watch the Frontline video plztks)

The Democrats are now pushing for a "war tax" on people who make over $250,000. I continue to support the Democrats policy of "tax and spend" over the Republicans' policy of "don't tax and spend" One of the first things Clinton did upon entering office was to raise taxes. The bill passed without a single Republican vote. 8 years later, Republicans were patting themselves on the back for how they balanced the budget. *sigh*

Let me start with this as it's the main line I keep hearing out of Austrian school people who apparently don't understand how the financial crisis came about: Nobody ever "let people know they won't be held accountable". The Fed let Lehman Brothers fail. Please read that again: The Fed let Lehman Brothers fail. They held them accountable. They did not bail them out. They let them collapse. They were trying to do exactly what the Austrian School people would've suggested in that situation. Lehman Brothers put themselves at risk. The Fed let the market take its course. Then what happened? The worldwide financial system almost collapsed as an institution with $613 billion in debt declared bankruptcy. You are aware of this, right? The Fed doesn't automatically give these institutions a "get out of debt free" card. The bailout plan came in full 20/20 hindsight of the effect the collapse of Lehman Brothers had on the worldwide financial system. They were trying to let it fail. They did an experiment. The experiment was a failure. Would you prefer the Fed let the other institutions with more debt fail as well, expecting different results? Incorrect. The risks associated with CDOs allow the person who constructed them to hide toxic debt inside of them in a way that the buyer cannot discover: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/appel/intractability-financial-derivatives Trading in derivatives brought down Lehman Brothers, AIG, and many other buyers, based on mistaken assumptions about the independence of the underlying asset prices; they underestimated the danger that many mortgages would all default at the same time. But the new paper shows that in addition to that kind of danger, risks can arise because a seller can deliberately construct a derivative with a booby trap hiding in plain sight. It's like encryption: it's easy to construct an encrypted message (your browser does this all the time), but it's hard to decrypt without knowing the key (we believe even the NSA doesn't have the computational power to do it). Similarly, the new result shows that the seller can construct the CDO with a booby trap, but even Goldman Sachs won't have enough computational power to analyze whether a trap is present. This is a very different type of risk and one which wasn't known at the time. Buyers of derivatives place themselves at risk of purchasing something which was maliciously constructed to pass along toxic debt in a way they can't discover or realize. A simple solution would be to regulate the derivatives market, but Greenspan was adamantly opposed. Incorrect. At least in the case of Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup, they were loaned money by the government, and they repaid it. The government isn't holding $3.6 trillion in debt from them. You keep downplaying the alternative, which is a collapse of the worldwide financial system and a deep global depression. I will take "maintaining the excesses" as at least something to try in order to prevent a deep global depression. I do not see a deep global depression as a superior alternative, even if to the Austrian School that, in some way, looks better on paper.

At the very least, I would say such a program is Constitutional. Write your Senator and see if he'll create a bill for you

That he certainly did, and it played a role in the financial crisis. But it was not the direct cause. Unregulated markets, an assumption of too much toxic debt by individual organizations, and complex financial instruments no one understood were the direct causes. Greenspan stringently opposed attempts to regulate derivatives and securities. It was the collateralized debt obligations backed by mortgages which became incredibly toxic after the housing bubble burst which lead to the financial crisis. Have you seen this video: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=45258 What role do you think derivatives and securities had in the financial crisis? No, the let it fail option doesn't look any worse, because it continues to be, in my mind, the worst possible outcome: a total collapse of the worldwide financial system. It would represent total credit gridlock and have some of the most dire economic consequences imaginable. Our daily lives would've been dramatically altered. I certainly wouldn't be looking to buy a new house now, because there's no way I could ever get a mortgage. Why is delaying the collapse of something worse than letting it collapse? How could the collapse possibly get any worse, not in terms of vague economic factors, but in the day-to-day impact on everyone's lives? Do you have any concept of the total value these institutions hold? (and these figures are after the financial crisis) AIG: $830 billion Goldman Sachs: $885 billion CitiGroup: $1.93 trillion Just these three institutions alone command $3.6 trillion in assets. That's approximately 26% of the US GDP. And following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which had $613 billion in assets at the time, they were all in danger of collapse. What do you think would've happened to the US and the world if multiple financial institutions collapsed leaving $3.6 trillion in debt?

Yes, again, the situation would be different if he were to say "I call upon the US military to detain President Obama when he gives his speech at West Point"

No, but the OP suggested it was legitimately possible for the US government to go bankrupt. It is in nobody's best interest for the US government to go bankrupt, with the possible exception of some developing African nations who can't compete with the US in markets like agriculture.

As an American, I will say my problem is the need to move to a less regulated economy. That was the grand experiment undertaken by Greenspan, and in his post mortem following the financial crisis, Greenspan notes his experiment was a failure. Greenspan was a central regulator who tried to move us away from central regulation. If he couldn't do it, who can? Say what you want about central regulation... it's unrealistic America can move off of it. Have you seen the video in this thread? It provides an excellent synopsis of the entire debacle from the '90s on: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=45258 I'm not going to say the Austrian School is "wrong" outright, but I find it immensely impractical to attempt in a country like the US. It's been tried to move us closer to a free market system and the result was the financial crisis. What about the issue of systemic risk, such as the state the financial system was in following the failure of Lehman Brothers? Does the Autstrian School have a better answer for that then "let it fail"? Do you think, had we let Lehman Brothers fail, which would've inevitably taken a number of other institutions with it including AIG, Goldman Sachs, and CitiGroup, that we would be in a better position than we are now?

Not to suggest that correlation implies causation, but I noticed Prof Fred Singer from this thread has been a consultant to companies including GE, Ford, GM, Exxon, Shell, Sun Oil, Lockheed Martin and IBM.

Who is making that assumption? Laymen? Nonlinearities! That makes tree rings as a proxy worthless. Let's just toss the baby out with the bathwater. Look, I don't know what your spooky FUD deleted data is all about. Some people are douchebags. Just because some people are douchebags doesn't make the science wrong. It would be helpful in responding to this stuff if you could provide a link/context for a graph like this, rather than "some random douchebag deleted his data... SEE!" (graph, not real data) Just because trees responses to climate changes are nonlinear doesn't make them worthless as a proxy, as you seem to be insinuating. Or provided your model output matches expected tree ring results?

So... case closed?

You seem to be under some sort of delusion that everything the government does must promote the general Welfare. If that were the case, then we'd never go to war. The preamble says that promoting the general Welfare is one of the things the government should do, but sometimes, such as in wars, or other circumstances, the government must do things that are contrary to the general Welfare. That acknowledged, yes, I do believe deficit spending has been used to promote the general Welfare. Do you honestly think the US government is in danger of going "bankrupt"?