"Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever"
Bunk. When I was with the fire service when at the fire hall we were not 'on call'. The guys who were at home with a pager - and who only came in if the resources on duty were stressed, were on call and they were paid a percentage of their wage for those hours and had some restrictions placed on their time (i.e, they were not allowed to drink or to travel outside the city).
Our service had two 12 hour shifts, one for day, one for night. The 'on call' shift was the day shift at night; and the night shift at day. There were four shifts in total. So, work a week - a duty shift and an on call shift, then get a week off.
Welcome to the world of the white collar proletariat. On call without compensation 24/7 - get *&^&*Y*(&^!
Log me in keeps my mom happy downloading the entire internet after she fills all the HD and wonders why there are error messages.
Anyway, the log me ipod app is well thought out too and works very well.
When you lift the nib off the paper and put it back down again (as in printing) a fountain pen tends to leave a sometimes large drop of ink. But cursive writing does not have the pen leave the page for each and every letter or for that matter the independent strokes for each letter. Hence cursive writing's purpose.
Since people rarely use fountain pens or quill pens but rather use ball point pens (which are supposed to control the flow of ink and prevent the drops from forming when pressing and lifting the pen from the page) there is little reason for cursive writing save for the pedants who confuse the appearance of style with substance.
The universe means 'all that there is'. So nothing can be outside of it; and there cannot be more than one.
This whole theory is bad metaphysics with some equations to distract people from the fact that its bad metaphysics.
Modal logic's possible world semantics does not imply the existence of other worlds or universes even if we can make meaningful statements about them. They are nothing more than useful fictions without ontological status.
Not all grammatical subjects have objects (e.g., 'the present king of France is bald' is not true, but not because he has hair).
...where i just moved from Canada my Internet connection is the envy of my nerd friend back home: i pay about 30 dollars a month, I can upload at 9mb/s and download at 20mb/s... The ratio on my private torrent trackers are all in the black now to say the least.
Since the 12 of october when I started running a little app called bitmeter to track my usage I have uploaded 229 GB (though 70gb of that was just one one day) in about 13 days and no nasty letters or slow downs.
My laptop's cpu gets taxed pretty heavy and the machine starts to bog down when utorrent starts sending out data higher than 7mb/s; my little 1.4 celeron M is in need of an upgrade (though when i run my linux partition it goes a little better - I think the virus scanner is what bogs the cpu down scanning all the incoming and outgoing data...).
Yes, its true: modern Canadians are mindless sheep that fail to secure their own self-interests with a bit of practical forethought and need the nanny state to protect them from the evil internet that they willingly post their own private data to. Great.
That which needs to be explained is the power that mathematics provides vis a vis practical life. Mathematical forms in this regard are said to be normative. So if bald platonism is rejected then the question remains: what explains the normative power of mathematics?
The nominalists raised these objections centuries ago - then the post-modernists: these forms are just 'flatus vocis,' empty sounds, symbols without that which is symbolized.
Needless to say these two groups can't explain the normative power of mathematics either.
Extreme Platonism may be unfashionable, but at least it offers some sort of explaination that the 'invented' camp cannot provide.
...then you fail," where F 49
That's what I told undergraduates in my lectures.
"If you plagerize wikipedia then you fail," where F = 0. Google the odd sentence or paragraph or two in a research paper and up pops wikipedia all higlighted in the search colours of google's cache; then hit alt+PrtSc - makes for great proof that the student is a lazy stupid cheat for the dean.
I will not be responsible for producing a generation of lazy stupid idiots - though I am afraid we will lose this battle.
A well seeded torrent of van Gogh's 'Submission,' at least part one; the rest is easy to find.
'Obession' is another informative documentry - its easy to find on the torrents too.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4057736/Submission_Part_I_-_Theo_van_Gogh_-_DVD_PAL
Hopefully I will not get my head chopped for posting this.
"Is it reasonable to assume that every student will carry out their homework assignment in isolation? I don't think it is."
True - but irrelevant.
The assignment said: don't collaborate. They did; and they were caught.
People need to be precise and listen to instructions - but stupid undergraduates usually are not good at listening or following instuctions; I have had to fail many students for not following the rules of the assignment and I have caught many undergraduates cheating on exams or other assignments.
That this occured on facebook is not relevant either - except to show how stupid this kid is by making public the fact that the rules were not followed.
They all get what they deserve.
"But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials," he said."
The quote from the article shows that, even after being caught, they still can't understand that the rule of the assignment said the work must be done independently - so the inference about the tutorials and other programs is not sound.
For computer science students they should have a better grasp of truth conditons and inferences.
'Ethics' and discussions around it are pretty much useless unless the concept is precisely defined. This latter activity is called meta-ethics.
Ethics, then, is simply applied meta-ethics. Once the meta-ethical definitions are articulated it is often simply a matter deduction from the definition to spit out a decision of action.
Generally in business the meta-ethical orientation is deontology, a non-consequentialist, duty based orientation. The specific duty is the fudiciary duty to shareholders in the small instance and stakeholders in the larger. Your duty is to maximize the shareholder revenue. Any action conducive to this passes the test.
The challenge to the individual in business is to know when to change the meta-ethical orientation - employees wear many hats, so to speak; and what is good for maximizing shareholder revenue may not be good for the community at large. For example, pollution: those old PCs could be expensively recycled or money could be saved by throwing them into the creek; but the consequences would be pollution of the local community, that is, bad consequences come from pollution. Obviously if only considering one meta-ethical orientation what would be 'ethical' in this case is the cheaper route; but if the meta-ethical orientation included consequences to non-shareholders polluting would not be ethical.
The point here is that ethics is not as important as how you go about picking your meta-ethical orientation. But that can't be 'ethics,' for the term and its cognates 'good,' 'right' and so on lack any meaning at this point.
Choosing a meta-ethic is a philosophical task, not an ethical one...
The universe is all that there is.
So there cannot be more than one, for by definition the universe is everything.
People who say there are more than one universe are contradicting the meaning of the term.
Everett and Wheeler's 'many-worlds' hypothesis is getting a little out of hand nowadays. It is ridiculous to explain one scientific problem (wave function collapse and quantum decoherence) with a more problematic explanation ('many worlds').
Besides not all possible situations can come to be for some of these are themselves incompossible.
Scientists and science reporters need to learn how to distinguish between scientific claims and metaphysics and ontology; calling bad metaphysics and ontology 'scientific' does not make the claims any more reasonable.
Given that I am not obligated to read ads the consequences you cite are not relevant. If people are too stupid to install ad blockers let them waste their internet connection and time.
Lots of U.S. movies are filmed in Canada - and the governments up here give significant tax incentives to U.S. filmakers to come up here and put Canadians to work. This is why the american movie industry will have clout - though given the shape of the US dollar versus the Canadian dollar the incentive is not as great as it was a few years ago.
Still, there cannot be that much illegal copying going on up here in Canada - after all there are more people in California (36 million) than in all of canada (33 million) plus alot of Canada - even within an hour or two of Toronto (population about 2 million) - is still on dial-up!
Moreover I think the government actually likes it when Canadians bootleg American films - its stops Canadians from sending our gold to Hollywood; I bet these DRM restrictions will come in as fast as super-touph anti-marijuana laws - I bet the government likes it when Canadians smuggle pot into the U.S. - that brings a lot of US gold up here (we have to watch that 'balance of trade'). Too bad about Marc Emery though.
The early christian church inherited their metaphysics from the plantonists, as anyone who has read Augustine's 'Confessions' knows.
The emphasis on unchanging enternal and transcendent forms in Christian metaphysics is really a hold-over from the greek pagan influence upon the early christians, just as the emphasis on telology and final causation in physics was a hold over from Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology.
Now final causation and telology was purged from physics by Descartes, and telology and final causation and unchanging forms was purged from biology by Darwin.
A real christian - one who understands its intelectual history - knows that evolution is the proper christian view of biology and that creationism and unchanging forms in biology is pagan.
There is no necessity to interpret the 'each after its own kind' from genesis in accordance with Plato's or Aristotle's metaphysics.
Unfortunatly most creationism advocates or lay christians know little of the intellectual and philosophical history of their own religion, and they end up looking like dumb-asses to those people who do.
MB Foster's article sheds some light on the purge of telology in physics (and I would claim that Darwin does for Biology what Descartes did for physics):
"The avoidance of final explanations by the physicist is not cited as a fact, but prescribed as a rule. The scientist, he [Descartes] says, ought to abjure the search for final explanations because the purposes of God are in-scrutable. This argument is an enthymeme of which the premises
to be supplied are that nature is created by God, and that the
activity of creation is not directed by an intelligible purpose.
So that Descartes' prescription to the physicist is based upon the
metaphysical implications of Christian dogma."
See
The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science
M. B. Foster
Mind, New Series, Vol. 43, No. 172 (Oct., 1934), pp. 446-468
Use JSTOR or
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/871262_6rahe/mbfoster.pdf%5Dmbfoster.pdf
Slashdot Mirror
It could end up producing a grey ecology with a distorted space-time just as easily. See the argument given by Paul Virilio in Open Sky: http://books.google.ca/books?id=OF_cPrltMmsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=open+sky&source=bl&ots=6LTgd95t6S&sig=svNqi6GKruEYnHufc1BxMSZtgVE&hl=en&ei=O6KUS-CXHJSSsgPM3eT8Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=16&ved=0CDIQ6AEwDw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjO4duhMRZk&feature=related i suppose that can apply to this cult too...
"Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever" Bunk. When I was with the fire service when at the fire hall we were not 'on call'. The guys who were at home with a pager - and who only came in if the resources on duty were stressed, were on call and they were paid a percentage of their wage for those hours and had some restrictions placed on their time (i.e, they were not allowed to drink or to travel outside the city). Our service had two 12 hour shifts, one for day, one for night. The 'on call' shift was the day shift at night; and the night shift at day. There were four shifts in total. So, work a week - a duty shift and an on call shift, then get a week off. Welcome to the world of the white collar proletariat. On call without compensation 24/7 - get *&^&*Y*(&^!
Log me in keeps my mom happy downloading the entire internet after she fills all the HD and wonders why there are error messages. Anyway, the log me ipod app is well thought out too and works very well.
...what is the purpose of these standard email account necessities if not to secure my privacy?
When you lift the nib off the paper and put it back down again (as in printing) a fountain pen tends to leave a sometimes large drop of ink. But cursive writing does not have the pen leave the page for each and every letter or for that matter the independent strokes for each letter. Hence cursive writing's purpose. Since people rarely use fountain pens or quill pens but rather use ball point pens (which are supposed to control the flow of ink and prevent the drops from forming when pressing and lifting the pen from the page) there is little reason for cursive writing save for the pedants who confuse the appearance of style with substance.
Use torrents: itunes.anywhere not needed.
The universe means 'all that there is'. So nothing can be outside of it; and there cannot be more than one. This whole theory is bad metaphysics with some equations to distract people from the fact that its bad metaphysics. Modal logic's possible world semantics does not imply the existence of other worlds or universes even if we can make meaningful statements about them. They are nothing more than useful fictions without ontological status. Not all grammatical subjects have objects (e.g., 'the present king of France is bald' is not true, but not because he has hair).
...where i just moved from Canada my Internet connection is the envy of my nerd friend back home: i pay about 30 dollars a month, I can upload at 9mb/s and download at 20mb/s... The ratio on my private torrent trackers are all in the black now to say the least. Since the 12 of october when I started running a little app called bitmeter to track my usage I have uploaded 229 GB (though 70gb of that was just one one day) in about 13 days and no nasty letters or slow downs. My laptop's cpu gets taxed pretty heavy and the machine starts to bog down when utorrent starts sending out data higher than 7mb/s; my little 1.4 celeron M is in need of an upgrade (though when i run my linux partition it goes a little better - I think the virus scanner is what bogs the cpu down scanning all the incoming and outgoing data...).
Yes, its true: modern Canadians are mindless sheep that fail to secure their own self-interests with a bit of practical forethought and need the nanny state to protect them from the evil internet that they willingly post their own private data to. Great.
That which needs to be explained is the power that mathematics provides vis a vis practical life. Mathematical forms in this regard are said to be normative. So if bald platonism is rejected then the question remains: what explains the normative power of mathematics? The nominalists raised these objections centuries ago - then the post-modernists: these forms are just 'flatus vocis,' empty sounds, symbols without that which is symbolized. Needless to say these two groups can't explain the normative power of mathematics either. Extreme Platonism may be unfashionable, but at least it offers some sort of explaination that the 'invented' camp cannot provide.
...then you fail," where F 49 That's what I told undergraduates in my lectures. "If you plagerize wikipedia then you fail," where F = 0. Google the odd sentence or paragraph or two in a research paper and up pops wikipedia all higlighted in the search colours of google's cache; then hit alt+PrtSc - makes for great proof that the student is a lazy stupid cheat for the dean. I will not be responsible for producing a generation of lazy stupid idiots - though I am afraid we will lose this battle.
A well seeded torrent of van Gogh's 'Submission,' at least part one; the rest is easy to find. 'Obession' is another informative documentry - its easy to find on the torrents too. http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4057736/Submission_Part_I_-_Theo_van_Gogh_-_DVD_PAL Hopefully I will not get my head chopped for posting this.
"Is it reasonable to assume that every student will carry out their homework assignment in isolation? I don't think it is." True - but irrelevant. The assignment said: don't collaborate. They did; and they were caught. People need to be precise and listen to instructions - but stupid undergraduates usually are not good at listening or following instuctions; I have had to fail many students for not following the rules of the assignment and I have caught many undergraduates cheating on exams or other assignments. That this occured on facebook is not relevant either - except to show how stupid this kid is by making public the fact that the rules were not followed. They all get what they deserve. "But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials," he said." The quote from the article shows that, even after being caught, they still can't understand that the rule of the assignment said the work must be done independently - so the inference about the tutorials and other programs is not sound. For computer science students they should have a better grasp of truth conditons and inferences.
does this mean the cost of gas will down?
'Ethics' and discussions around it are pretty much useless unless the concept is precisely defined. This latter activity is called meta-ethics. Ethics, then, is simply applied meta-ethics. Once the meta-ethical definitions are articulated it is often simply a matter deduction from the definition to spit out a decision of action. Generally in business the meta-ethical orientation is deontology, a non-consequentialist, duty based orientation. The specific duty is the fudiciary duty to shareholders in the small instance and stakeholders in the larger. Your duty is to maximize the shareholder revenue. Any action conducive to this passes the test. The challenge to the individual in business is to know when to change the meta-ethical orientation - employees wear many hats, so to speak; and what is good for maximizing shareholder revenue may not be good for the community at large. For example, pollution: those old PCs could be expensively recycled or money could be saved by throwing them into the creek; but the consequences would be pollution of the local community, that is, bad consequences come from pollution. Obviously if only considering one meta-ethical orientation what would be 'ethical' in this case is the cheaper route; but if the meta-ethical orientation included consequences to non-shareholders polluting would not be ethical. The point here is that ethics is not as important as how you go about picking your meta-ethical orientation. But that can't be 'ethics,' for the term and its cognates 'good,' 'right' and so on lack any meaning at this point. Choosing a meta-ethic is a philosophical task, not an ethical one...
The universe is all that there is. So there cannot be more than one, for by definition the universe is everything. People who say there are more than one universe are contradicting the meaning of the term. Everett and Wheeler's 'many-worlds' hypothesis is getting a little out of hand nowadays. It is ridiculous to explain one scientific problem (wave function collapse and quantum decoherence) with a more problematic explanation ('many worlds'). Besides not all possible situations can come to be for some of these are themselves incompossible. Scientists and science reporters need to learn how to distinguish between scientific claims and metaphysics and ontology; calling bad metaphysics and ontology 'scientific' does not make the claims any more reasonable.
Given that I am not obligated to read ads the consequences you cite are not relevant. If people are too stupid to install ad blockers let them waste their internet connection and time.
Lots of U.S. movies are filmed in Canada - and the governments up here give significant tax incentives to U.S. filmakers to come up here and put Canadians to work. This is why the american movie industry will have clout - though given the shape of the US dollar versus the Canadian dollar the incentive is not as great as it was a few years ago. Still, there cannot be that much illegal copying going on up here in Canada - after all there are more people in California (36 million) than in all of canada (33 million) plus alot of Canada - even within an hour or two of Toronto (population about 2 million) - is still on dial-up! Moreover I think the government actually likes it when Canadians bootleg American films - its stops Canadians from sending our gold to Hollywood; I bet these DRM restrictions will come in as fast as super-touph anti-marijuana laws - I bet the government likes it when Canadians smuggle pot into the U.S. - that brings a lot of US gold up here (we have to watch that 'balance of trade'). Too bad about Marc Emery though.
The early christian church inherited their metaphysics from the plantonists, as anyone who has read Augustine's 'Confessions' knows. The emphasis on unchanging enternal and transcendent forms in Christian metaphysics is really a hold-over from the greek pagan influence upon the early christians, just as the emphasis on telology and final causation in physics was a hold over from Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology. Now final causation and telology was purged from physics by Descartes, and telology and final causation and unchanging forms was purged from biology by Darwin. A real christian - one who understands its intelectual history - knows that evolution is the proper christian view of biology and that creationism and unchanging forms in biology is pagan. There is no necessity to interpret the 'each after its own kind' from genesis in accordance with Plato's or Aristotle's metaphysics. Unfortunatly most creationism advocates or lay christians know little of the intellectual and philosophical history of their own religion, and they end up looking like dumb-asses to those people who do. MB Foster's article sheds some light on the purge of telology in physics (and I would claim that Darwin does for Biology what Descartes did for physics): "The avoidance of final explanations by the physicist is not cited as a fact, but prescribed as a rule. The scientist, he [Descartes] says, ought to abjure the search for final explanations because the purposes of God are in-scrutable. This argument is an enthymeme of which the premises to be supplied are that nature is created by God, and that the activity of creation is not directed by an intelligible purpose. So that Descartes' prescription to the physicist is based upon the metaphysical implications of Christian dogma." See The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science M. B. Foster Mind, New Series, Vol. 43, No. 172 (Oct., 1934), pp. 446-468 Use JSTOR or http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/871262_6rahe/mbfoster.pdf%5Dmbfoster.pdf