Re: the traffic lights, they may well be. It may not be poor performance, it may be doing what it's designed to do. It's better that you have to stop at every set than one guy, who comes to the first set at the end of the cycle and races the amber, has to keep racing the amber to stay ahead of the stop lights. I know, I know, he shouldn't be doing it. But he will. And I suppose it keeps drivers alert.
I *pay* for the BBC, you insensitive clods. You can send me your portion of the licence fee (about 250 of your American dollars), and I will pass that money on to the BBC for you.
You've never downloaded any illegal media? As in, you've never downloaded via BitTorrent, or because you pay the levy, nothing you download is illegal? If I paid a levy on sales media, I would download without compunction.
Interesting question, although, as far as I can tell, EULAs are still relatively hotly contested in and of themselves as being a legally binding agreement.
As a side-note, I'm not sure you made it very clear, but I think what you were trying to say is that it has no effect on US users (in order to be in breach of the EULA, the user has to be already breaking the law), it only has an effect in countries where the EULA holds as a binding agreement, but laws are different. The best example I can think of this is (probably) Canada, where filesharing is legal, and comes under fair-use (I believe). However, in the US, this constitutes copyright infringement, and is against the law. That means a Canadian who has perfectly legally acquired music in their country who uses iTunes is in breach of the EULA.
If I'm wrong, sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it's an interesting point regardless.
If you'd said all that in the first place, then I wouldn't have said anything. It was just your superior attitude that bothered me. Now we can actually get to the main point of the discussion.
I don't agree that a decision based on emotion is ever poor ethically. There is definitely an argument that somebody who responds less to emotional stimuli will make more balanced choices than someone who responds more to emotional stimuli, as in the example you gave. However, in terms of pure rationality, say there is a crew of six. An oxygen tank explodes, and suddenly, their chances of survival are reduced to fifty-fifty. Somebody with an impaired VMPFC may well rationalise that if one member of the crew is killed, the chances of survival of the rest of the crew increase to 75 -25. Logically, nothing wrong with that argument, but I think that ethically and morally, under those circumstances, killing the one to increase the chances of survival of the rest is unacceptable. A neurotypical person will fall back to protecting individuals, which is a safer fallback than falling back to protecting a group. The group should make a decision about protecting the greatest number of people together.
How about a similar situation you put our Martian explorers in, except this time, either one of two individuals can make a decision. With six again. Person one knows that if he allows person two and another person to die, he can save the other three. Person two knows that if he presses button C, he can save the entire crew, but person one does not have enough information to know that. They are both able to make a decision, but they have split seconds to do it, and not time to communicate. With neurotypical people, the entire crew survive. With people with VMPFC impairments, a third of the crew die. Emotional irrationality serves a purpose. It makes it difficult to sacrifice people. It's an interesting debate though, and I think there are probably arguments both ways.
And for those who like their advice for choosing the best cosmonauts for extended missions without a healthy dose of know-it-all-ism, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain that is in some way (that is not yet properly understood) involved in decision making. Personally, I would rather my cosmonauts to be able to make decisions. But hey, macraig obviously just wants them to be wowed by his use of long scientific-sounding-although-poorly-defined words, and then use of non-standard abbreviations for them.
In a more direct attack on your suggestion, macraig, VMPFC dysfunction leads to lack of empathy. Locking up five people who don't empathise with each other in a capsule for months, (especially with a distorted sense of right and wrong) and expecting them not to kill each other is a ridiculous suggestion. So, stop being a self-important cock, talk in plain English, but most importantly, know what you're talking about.
If you bought a book, and started handing out copies of the book you make one page at a time, sure, it's copyright infringement. If you buy a book, make a load of copies in postcard format, and say post it a page at a time to a friend, then the mail company can't be expected to know that you're infringing copyright, even though they know what each individual item you send is.
I'm pretty sure this is the crux of the argument. Not that their customers weren't violating copyright, merely that they had no proof, no reason to believe, that this was the case.
I can't think of any reason a strip search could ever be justified by a school, regardless of what the child may be concealing. Let's say it's not just ibuprofen, let's say it's crystal meth. Then you call the police. If you are worried about the child's immediate safety, you supervise her, and don't let them out of your sight. But under no circumstances do you have the right to strip-search her. Even if you see her hide a gun in her underwear as she walks into the school, you have no right to take it out. You restrain her until someone with the authority to perform a strip-search comes.
HOWEVER, in a situation where you see with your own eyes that she has hidden a gun in her underwear, then fair enough, I would be prepared to say "OK, so you were in the wrong, but it's a reasonable mistake to make".
On a slightly different tack now, I can believe easily that a 13 year old girl trying to conceal contraband would put it down her pants. The fact that this wasn't the case is a relatively moot point here, all I'm saying is that if they had reasonable grounds to suspect she had contraband, they had reasonable grounds to suspect it was hidden in her pants. Doesn't mean that they have the right to go and find out. I have reasonable grounds to believe that my neighbour smokes weed (I smell it every now and then). Does that give me the right to break into his house, and go hunting around for his stash? No.
Assistant principal at a school != Policeman. School nurse != Policeman. They don't have the same rights, should know that, and there should be no allowances made for their ignorance (assuming they were not malicious). Custodial sentences, please.
Don't want to piss on your wank or anything, but here in the UK, we still use feet, inches, stones, pounds, pints (although only for drinks, we use litres at the petrol pumps), yards, miles, ounces, and so on. Admittedly, shops are supposed to sell things by the kilogram/litre/whatever, but what that means practically is that they just sell things in strange amounts (like 568ml, which is a pint).
So to be frank, as long as you have a working knowledge of metric (which, to be fair, you can get in minutes), I don't see the point in accustomising yourself to it.
Actually, Estonia are not as poor as their Baltic neighbours, and are surprisingly Westernised in terms of their attitudes. Estonia have no excuse for allowing this sort of thing to happen. The only possible excuse is that their neighbours are considerably poorer than them, which has perhaps resulted in bottlenecks coming into the country, which are totally unavoidable.
Also, please, learn the difference between Balkan and Baltic. Baltic is north-east Europe, countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. The Balkans are another area completely, with countries such as Bosnia, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, and so on, in south eastern Europe. The Baltic states are pretty stable, whereas the Balkans are not.
Surely the kid can get around it like this? Ask European courts to make a judgement on whether Scientology is a cult or a religion, because I'm pretty damn sure the Germans aren't backing down.
It certainly hasn't been secret - the project was made available as a facebook app, so you could track your whereabouts, and see who you hung out with most often (pretty shitty stuff, but still...) I would bet that most of the data weren't even collected by Bath University themselves, but by third party "hotspots" who thought it was a cool idea.
I reckon I first encountered the Facebook app about a year ago. Also, if you're wandering round with your Bluetooth on, someone seeing where you are is probably about the least invasive thing they could do. It's also almost certainly legal to pick up what someone else is broadcasting, unencrypted, within 50 yards of your current location, regardless of whether or not you feel that it should be.
Sorry, on what basis are those two initial statements formed? (completely determined process, action -> reaction; completely random process, governed by random quantum effects.) You cannot say definitively that there is not a third class of action, mostly undetermined process, governed by a choice. Fifty years ago, people had no concept of quantum randomness. What makes you so sure that we have reached the pinnacle of understanding here? And anyway, even if you are right, and there are only two possible types of process, perhaps "choice" is the ability to combine the processes in such a way that it produces a different outcome For example, water flowing down a hill chooses the path of least resistance. This is simple action -> reaction stuff, but even though water is flowing down the hill in a predictable way, it is still random where each electron in the stream will be, within reasonable boundaries. You can't say that any individual electron is DETERMINED to be in any particular place, but equally, you can't say that it is completely random. Using a combination of the two possible processes leads to the potential for us to randomly choose between a set of predetermined outcomes. Now that the possibility to choose between possible outcomes has been established, we can further choose to eliminate possible outcomes, until we arrive at an outcome we are happy with. I believe my reasoning is sound, although I'm prepared to accept that I may have misunderstood what you were saying, or I may have made an error. If this is the case, I apologise, please point it out to me for reconsideration.
Note: I'm sorry I didn't use a car analogy. I tried to think of one, but I wasn't able.
I read somewhere (ie: take this with a pinch of salt, I can't remember the source, and so can't verify it) that in the U.S., you can buy stickers to put on illegal goods (ie: drugs) that you are smuggling into the country, so you can only be caught for the crime of smuggling contraband, not for smuggling to avoid paying tax. As I said, this may not be true, although I remember believing it at the time (maybe I'm just gullible though).
No. In order for buckyballs to hold as much hydrogen as the centre of Jupiter, they would need to have a similar volume as the centre of Jupiter, because they are of a comparable density. Therefore, they're just as non-portable (is that even a word?) as the centre of Jupiter. It was intended as a joke, however, seems I didn't clarify as much as I should have. Sorry.
Summary doesn't make it clear, because it's not true. If you have enough buckyballs to hold as much hydrogen as the centre Jupiter, they'll be just as inconvenient to pop in your briefcase.
However, it is probably easier to stuff buckyballs with hydrogen than trying to cut off pieces of Jupiter.
I study languages, which I accept, is not the same, but I would be absolutely stuffed I weren't allowed to work on the homework in groups. I do understand that learning languages does to some degree require speaking and listening skills though, which is why the group work is so useful to me. However, I also know that if I just copy the answers off someone, I've learned nothing, and whatever I write will not sink in.
I can't see that being any different for a science subject. When I used to study maths, sometimes, the best learning resource for me was the problem, and the answer, on the same page. This meant that I never got anything wrong, but if I didn't understand something, I knew about it (because I couldn't get the correct answer). If I weren't allowed to use the answers, I'd have got stuff wrong, but I wouldn't have known that I needed help understanding it until two weeks later once my work had been marked, by which time, we'd have moved on to something else, and I wouldn't have the time to revisit the topic I didn't understand until just before exams. If I don't bother learning the stuff, I expect to fail the exam, so if I copy work of somebody, it's only me that suffers. Sometimes though, it's nice to get verification that your answer is right, and that you understand the material properly.
I hope that was a joke! If a car that's just cut you up stalls, then you're going to go straight into the back of him - that's pretty much the definition of cutting someone up (ie: moving in front of you from another lane leaving so little space that you can't react to what his vehicle does). An accident would take a lot longer to deal with than a simple wave type jam like this. And insurance premiums would go through the roof.
Such as, say, Rugby? You take a perfectly good sport, give people armour, require a pause between EACH phase, and make it so dull as to be unwatchable. That, and for example, tea? Take a perfectly good drink, swap milk for cream, and put in twenty odd sugars. The only thing you do better than us is war, and that's purely because you've got more resources to throw at it... We should come over there and sort you out;o)
I'm not saying science can't walk and chew gum at the same time, I'm talking about the MONEY that's being invested into science should be lower, and the rest should be used to sort out the problems we've caused.
Forgive me for being dubious about your source, but aluminium is not exactly rare, and that book doesn't exactly look like a huge seller. And actually, I'd argue that while aluminium is still plentiful, maybe we could look to feeding the third world, rather than trying to find a substance that will let us stick a whole bunch of crap up in space. *shrug* maybe I'm just a crazy left-wing nut though.
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Re: the traffic lights, they may well be. It may not be poor performance, it may be doing what it's designed to do. It's better that you have to stop at every set than one guy, who comes to the first set at the end of the cycle and races the amber, has to keep racing the amber to stay ahead of the stop lights. I know, I know, he shouldn't be doing it. But he will. And I suppose it keeps drivers alert.
I *pay* for the BBC, you insensitive clods. You can send me your portion of the licence fee (about 250 of your American dollars), and I will pass that money on to the BBC for you.
You've never downloaded any illegal media? As in, you've never downloaded via BitTorrent, or because you pay the levy, nothing you download is illegal? If I paid a levy on sales media, I would download without compunction.
Interesting question, although, as far as I can tell, EULAs are still relatively hotly contested in and of themselves as being a legally binding agreement.
As a side-note, I'm not sure you made it very clear, but I think what you were trying to say is that it has no effect on US users (in order to be in breach of the EULA, the user has to be already breaking the law), it only has an effect in countries where the EULA holds as a binding agreement, but laws are different. The best example I can think of this is (probably) Canada, where filesharing is legal, and comes under fair-use (I believe). However, in the US, this constitutes copyright infringement, and is against the law. That means a Canadian who has perfectly legally acquired music in their country who uses iTunes is in breach of the EULA.
If I'm wrong, sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it's an interesting point regardless.
If you'd said all that in the first place, then I wouldn't have said anything. It was just your superior attitude that bothered me. Now we can actually get to the main point of the discussion.
I don't agree that a decision based on emotion is ever poor ethically. There is definitely an argument that somebody who responds less to emotional stimuli will make more balanced choices than someone who responds more to emotional stimuli, as in the example you gave. However, in terms of pure rationality, say there is a crew of six. An oxygen tank explodes, and suddenly, their chances of survival are reduced to fifty-fifty. Somebody with an impaired VMPFC may well rationalise that if one member of the crew is killed, the chances of survival of the rest of the crew increase to 75 -25. Logically, nothing wrong with that argument, but I think that ethically and morally, under those circumstances, killing the one to increase the chances of survival of the rest is unacceptable. A neurotypical person will fall back to protecting individuals, which is a safer fallback than falling back to protecting a group. The group should make a decision about protecting the greatest number of people together.
How about a similar situation you put our Martian explorers in, except this time, either one of two individuals can make a decision. With six again. Person one knows that if he allows person two and another person to die, he can save the other three. Person two knows that if he presses button C, he can save the entire crew, but person one does not have enough information to know that. They are both able to make a decision, but they have split seconds to do it, and not time to communicate. With neurotypical people, the entire crew survive. With people with VMPFC impairments, a third of the crew die. Emotional irrationality serves a purpose. It makes it difficult to sacrifice people. It's an interesting debate though, and I think there are probably arguments both ways.
And for those who like their advice for choosing the best cosmonauts for extended missions without a healthy dose of know-it-all-ism, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain that is in some way (that is not yet properly understood) involved in decision making. Personally, I would rather my cosmonauts to be able to make decisions. But hey, macraig obviously just wants them to be wowed by his use of long scientific-sounding-although-poorly-defined words, and then use of non-standard abbreviations for them.
In a more direct attack on your suggestion, macraig, VMPFC dysfunction leads to lack of empathy. Locking up five people who don't empathise with each other in a capsule for months, (especially with a distorted sense of right and wrong) and expecting them not to kill each other is a ridiculous suggestion. So, stop being a self-important cock, talk in plain English, but most importantly, know what you're talking about.
If you bought a book, and started handing out copies of the book you make one page at a time, sure, it's copyright infringement. If you buy a book, make a load of copies in postcard format, and say post it a page at a time to a friend, then the mail company can't be expected to know that you're infringing copyright, even though they know what each individual item you send is.
I'm pretty sure this is the crux of the argument. Not that their customers weren't violating copyright, merely that they had no proof, no reason to believe, that this was the case.
I can't think of any reason a strip search could ever be justified by a school, regardless of what the child may be concealing. Let's say it's not just ibuprofen, let's say it's crystal meth. Then you call the police. If you are worried about the child's immediate safety, you supervise her, and don't let them out of your sight. But under no circumstances do you have the right to strip-search her. Even if you see her hide a gun in her underwear as she walks into the school, you have no right to take it out. You restrain her until someone with the authority to perform a strip-search comes.
HOWEVER, in a situation where you see with your own eyes that she has hidden a gun in her underwear, then fair enough, I would be prepared to say "OK, so you were in the wrong, but it's a reasonable mistake to make".
On a slightly different tack now, I can believe easily that a 13 year old girl trying to conceal contraband would put it down her pants. The fact that this wasn't the case is a relatively moot point here, all I'm saying is that if they had reasonable grounds to suspect she had contraband, they had reasonable grounds to suspect it was hidden in her pants. Doesn't mean that they have the right to go and find out. I have reasonable grounds to believe that my neighbour smokes weed (I smell it every now and then). Does that give me the right to break into his house, and go hunting around for his stash? No.
Assistant principal at a school != Policeman. School nurse != Policeman. They don't have the same rights, should know that, and there should be no allowances made for their ignorance (assuming they were not malicious). Custodial sentences, please.
Don't want to piss on your wank or anything, but here in the UK, we still use feet, inches, stones, pounds, pints (although only for drinks, we use litres at the petrol pumps), yards, miles, ounces, and so on. Admittedly, shops are supposed to sell things by the kilogram/litre/whatever, but what that means practically is that they just sell things in strange amounts (like 568ml, which is a pint).
So to be frank, as long as you have a working knowledge of metric (which, to be fair, you can get in minutes), I don't see the point in accustomising yourself to it.
Actually, Estonia are not as poor as their Baltic neighbours, and are surprisingly Westernised in terms of their attitudes. Estonia have no excuse for allowing this sort of thing to happen. The only possible excuse is that their neighbours are considerably poorer than them, which has perhaps resulted in bottlenecks coming into the country, which are totally unavoidable.
Also, please, learn the difference between Balkan and Baltic. Baltic is north-east Europe, countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. The Balkans are another area completely, with countries such as Bosnia, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, and so on, in south eastern Europe. The Baltic states are pretty stable, whereas the Balkans are not.
Surely the kid can get around it like this? Ask European courts to make a judgement on whether Scientology is a cult or a religion, because I'm pretty damn sure the Germans aren't backing down.
It certainly hasn't been secret - the project was made available as a facebook app, so you could track your whereabouts, and see who you hung out with most often (pretty shitty stuff, but still...) I would bet that most of the data weren't even collected by Bath University themselves, but by third party "hotspots" who thought it was a cool idea.
I reckon I first encountered the Facebook app about a year ago. Also, if you're wandering round with your Bluetooth on, someone seeing where you are is probably about the least invasive thing they could do. It's also almost certainly legal to pick up what someone else is broadcasting, unencrypted, within 50 yards of your current location, regardless of whether or not you feel that it should be.
Sorry, on what basis are those two initial statements formed? (completely determined process, action -> reaction; completely random process, governed by random quantum effects.) You cannot say definitively that there is not a third class of action, mostly undetermined process, governed by a choice. Fifty years ago, people had no concept of quantum randomness. What makes you so sure that we have reached the pinnacle of understanding here? And anyway, even if you are right, and there are only two possible types of process, perhaps "choice" is the ability to combine the processes in such a way that it produces a different outcome For example, water flowing down a hill chooses the path of least resistance. This is simple action -> reaction stuff, but even though water is flowing down the hill in a predictable way, it is still random where each electron in the stream will be, within reasonable boundaries. You can't say that any individual electron is DETERMINED to be in any particular place, but equally, you can't say that it is completely random. Using a combination of the two possible processes leads to the potential for us to randomly choose between a set of predetermined outcomes. Now that the possibility to choose between possible outcomes has been established, we can further choose to eliminate possible outcomes, until we arrive at an outcome we are happy with. I believe my reasoning is sound, although I'm prepared to accept that I may have misunderstood what you were saying, or I may have made an error. If this is the case, I apologise, please point it out to me for reconsideration.
Note: I'm sorry I didn't use a car analogy. I tried to think of one, but I wasn't able.
I read somewhere (ie: take this with a pinch of salt, I can't remember the source, and so can't verify it) that in the U.S., you can buy stickers to put on illegal goods (ie: drugs) that you are smuggling into the country, so you can only be caught for the crime of smuggling contraband, not for smuggling to avoid paying tax. As I said, this may not be true, although I remember believing it at the time (maybe I'm just gullible though).
True.. but that would have involved me actually reading more than the summary. This is /., right?
No. In order for buckyballs to hold as much hydrogen as the centre of Jupiter, they would need to have a similar volume as the centre of Jupiter, because they are of a comparable density. Therefore, they're just as non-portable (is that even a word?) as the centre of Jupiter. It was intended as a joke, however, seems I didn't clarify as much as I should have. Sorry.
Summary doesn't make it clear, because it's not true. If you have enough buckyballs to hold as much hydrogen as the centre Jupiter, they'll be just as inconvenient to pop in your briefcase.
However, it is probably easier to stuff buckyballs with hydrogen than trying to cut off pieces of Jupiter.
I study languages, which I accept, is not the same, but I would be absolutely stuffed I weren't allowed to work on the homework in groups. I do understand that learning languages does to some degree require speaking and listening skills though, which is why the group work is so useful to me. However, I also know that if I just copy the answers off someone, I've learned nothing, and whatever I write will not sink in.
I can't see that being any different for a science subject. When I used to study maths, sometimes, the best learning resource for me was the problem, and the answer, on the same page. This meant that I never got anything wrong, but if I didn't understand something, I knew about it (because I couldn't get the correct answer). If I weren't allowed to use the answers, I'd have got stuff wrong, but I wouldn't have known that I needed help understanding it until two weeks later once my work had been marked, by which time, we'd have moved on to something else, and I wouldn't have the time to revisit the topic I didn't understand until just before exams. If I don't bother learning the stuff, I expect to fail the exam, so if I copy work of somebody, it's only me that suffers. Sometimes though, it's nice to get verification that your answer is right, and that you understand the material properly.
I hope that was a joke! If a car that's just cut you up stalls, then you're going to go straight into the back of him - that's pretty much the definition of cutting someone up (ie: moving in front of you from another lane leaving so little space that you can't react to what his vehicle does). An accident would take a lot longer to deal with than a simple wave type jam like this. And insurance premiums would go through the roof.
Such as, say, Rugby? You take a perfectly good sport, give people armour, require a pause between EACH phase, and make it so dull as to be unwatchable. That, and for example, tea? Take a perfectly good drink, swap milk for cream, and put in twenty odd sugars. The only thing you do better than us is war, and that's purely because you've got more resources to throw at it... We should come over there and sort you out ;o)
I'm not saying science can't walk and chew gum at the same time, I'm talking about the MONEY that's being invested into science should be lower, and the rest should be used to sort out the problems we've caused.
Damn, that was what I meant... that'll teach me to trust my memory.
Forgive me for being dubious about your source, but aluminium is not exactly rare, and that book doesn't exactly look like a huge seller. And actually, I'd argue that while aluminium is still plentiful, maybe we could look to feeding the third world, rather than trying to find a substance that will let us stick a whole bunch of crap up in space. *shrug* maybe I'm just a crazy left-wing nut though.
No, actually, it's hunter1.
But why not just use aluminium?