Why buy new? I buy used copies. They only need to work once for me to successfully rip them. After that, the disc goes on a shelf and we watch the ripped copy from Plex.
Agreed, hence my use of italics in "temporary privacy" in my last comment. The "temporary" part is important. While privacy is certainly more open than secrecy, it too can be abused, as you said.
Yeah, I wish I could claim credit for it, but I think I picked it up from the professor for an ethics class I was TAing during grad school. It perfectly encapsulates the idea in terms that everyone understands, so it's served me very well over the years.
The Brits don't do it all right (CCTV unleashed, Brexit, etc)
Completely agree. They get a lot of stuff very wrong (as do we, just to be clear), but this is one thing they certainly do better than us.
Which is worse, trial by media or trial in secret? I'm sure that there are subtleties here that I'm missing by being an American, but I wonder...
As a fellow American, I think the subtleties you're missing here are that: A) Contrary to the two extremes you presented, the Brits struck a middle-ground: temporary privacy.
B) The danger of secret courts is that they undermine actual justice by preventing the public from even having an awareness of the actions of a judiciary that is supposed to be serving their interests. In contrast, having privacy until the case concludes has no such problem, because the judiciary will be scrutinized and held to account for its actions in a timely manner.
C) When you excuse yourself from dinner and head towards the restroom, everyone knows what you're about to do (i.e. it's not a secret), but that doesn't mean there's a camera in the bathroom that records the details of your activities in there (i.e. it's still private). The two are distinct, and privacy, even in courts, can be a good thing. There's no legitimate reason to allow voyeurs tune in to family court proceedings, nor for people's names to be dragged through the mud for crimes they didn't commit. Rather than being concerned with the false dichotomy of "trial by media or trial in secret", why not be concerned with a real problem: that "innocent until proven guilty" rings hollow if your name will forever be tied to crimes you didn't commit?
Then Disney must have licensed/bought the rights back, because they've confirmed that the original trilogy will be available on day one when Disney+ launches.
There are several big differences that I'm aware of: 1) It sounds like Assange is being accused of actively soliciting classified data, which is crossing the line, legally speaking, whereas the NYT and other publications were not accused of doing so. They've received classified documents, but they don't encourage people to steal documents, nor do they walk their sources through the steps necessary to exfiltrate classified data, both of which Assange is being accused of, from what I can gather.
2) Whereas Ellsberg (and Snowden) did his due diligence by raising concerns with his superiors in an attempt to resolve the issues internally before going public, Manning made no such attempt. Likewise, whereas there were specific concerns that Ellsberg (and Snowden) hoped could be resolved by making those concerns public, Manning seemingly had no awareness of the contents of the data he exfiltrated, nor of any specific threat to the public's wellbeing. Those distinctions are both legally and morally important when drawing the line between "whistleblowers" and "leakers". Whistleblowing is a final step that is taken in the public interest in response to a specific threat after all other avenues have been exhausted. Leaking is something that anyone can do at any time for any reason. As such there are good reasons why the one is (at least somewhat) protected, while the other is not.
3) The NYT (and the multitude of other papers that published content from the Papers, as well as those reporting on Snowden's data) exercised editorial discretion in what they actually published. It's estimated that they only printed 5% of the Papers' actual contents. In contrast, wantonly dumping classified leaks online without fully vetting them, as Wikileaks has done numerous times with Manning's data, demonstrates a gross disregard for the lives, safety, and property of those who may be affected. Legally, this may or may not make a difference (I don't know either way), but morally it's reprehensible.
All of which is to say, while I think that Assange and Wikileaks have acted reprehensibly, I also think the world needs something like Wikileaks, or at the very least a free and unrestrained press. Likewise, while I think that Manning failed to do his duty both as a service member and a "whistleblower", I think there are others who have faithfully fulfilled their legal and/or moral obligations, such as Ellsberg and quite possibly Snowden.
Apple forked KHTML from KDE project to create WebKit to use in Safari. Please do some background check prior posting it.
Sure, but KHTML originally operated on Linux, for which we can thank Linus Torvalds. Or didn’t you know that?
Which is to say, I’m well aware of the information you just shared, but it has no relevance to the point at hand. I intentionally constrained my comment to recent history, from the forks onward, because that’s the only part of their history that was relevant. Why talk about Julius Caesar when you’re correcting someone’s understanding of the French Revolution?
Eh, as someone who—like many of us here—was routinely at the top of his class and then went on to pursue a "thinking" career, but who also has had natural monovision since junior high (i.e. one eye can see far better than the other, to the point that during college a new-to-me optometrist saw the difference in the prescription for my eyes and immediately asked with a great deal of concern in his voice whether I suffered migraines, vomiting, seizures, blackouts, or falls on a regular basis; I don't, for the record), I'm not so convinced there's a link. That your eyes are declining as you notice a cognitive decline strikes me as a correlation without causation sort of thing, though I could see how it might psychologically contribute to a sense of confusion or feeling like things are out of joint, even if the two aren't necessarily physiologically linked.
I'm not sure why you think those three browsers are repackaged versions of each other. Apple forked WebKit in 2010 as WebKit2 for use in Safari, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. Google forked WebKit in 2013 as Blink for use in Chromium/Chrome, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. In the last few years, Chromium has been adopted by Opera and Microsoft, but Safari—despite having started at the same place that Chrome started—today remains on a different foundation. That Safari is making this change at the same time as the others is due to political/corporate maneuvering, not technical changes.
Also, while there are valid arguments to be made against a browser monoculture—a problem that WebKit-based browsers are contributing to—that doesn't mean that the rendering engines themselves are bad. Far from it, I think most people would agree that on their technical merits, WebKit-based engines are among the best we have, and certainly aren't bad enough to justify your vitriolic frothing against them.
"If you can" being the critical question: can you float _over_ the surge when your "island" is chained to the sea floor?
Seems like you'd be praying to float _through_ the surge(s)
While that is a problem that needs consideration (e.g. ships tied to fixed docks do indeed sink if surge/tide gets bad enough), it's one we've had answers to for several millennia (e.g. leave slack in the anchor chain, pull the anchor up, use floating docks, sail around the storm, etc.), so I'm not too worried about it. They'd likely just leave some slack in the chain so that it can account for any surge. Plus, there's nothing saying they can't let out some more chain in the case that a storm is coming through and then pull it back in afterwards. The anchor chain can grow and shrink with the weather. Alternatively, if they're rigidly anchored to the ocean floor, they'd simply do what oil rigs (and other platforms, e.g. Sealand) do and build the platform high enough to be above any surge.
especially when it is a 4 acre surface: what's the waveform length of a typical hurricane ocean surge?
That's an interesting question. Bad storm surges can span hundreds or thousands of square miles with "waves" that are 100-200 miles wide and 0-50 feet above normal sea level at their peak (the worst recorded storm surge in history is from 1899 and was 50 feet high, but in practice they're rarely more than 25 ft). Assuming the worst case, we're dealing with an incline of 1 foot per mile (i.e. 50 feet/50 miles, since we're talking about a 50 foot surge at the center point of a 100 mile "wave"). Meanwhile, a 4-acre square is 417.5 ft long on each side (and, just for scale, covers only 1/160th of a square mile). If that square, 4-acre settlement was straddling a rigid peak with that incline, it wouldn't even need to flex 0.5 inches from its edges to its center (i.e. 0.5 inches per 208.75 ft). In reality, storm surge isn't rigid (or peaked like that), so it'd be a far easier task for the settlement to deal with, even in the worst case scenarios, and because normal waves rise and fall orders of magnitude faster than that, it's doubtful they'd even notice a half inch difference from the edge of the platform to its center.
if you were a member of a Chicago gang, violence is not only common place but ethical. It really doesn't matter how outsiders judge you, you live by your own group.
Not really. While groups may have ethics (e.g. I spent three semesters in grad school as a TA for my university's senior-level engineering ethics course, helping teach about 2000 engineering students during that time), those group ethics only work inasmuch as they hold their members to a higher standard without placing any burden on outsiders. Anything else falls apart the moment its group members interact with anything outside their group.
As such, while living by your group's code is a number of things, it isn't the same thing as ethics. In fact, the idea that ethics are determined by our group affiliations (I assume you mean immediate groups, to the exclusion of broader ones) is actually fairly easily disproven. Consider these three statements: 1) Ethics (by definition) deals with separating right from wrong. 2) A person can belong to multiple groups. 3) Group affiliation determines ethics.
For your theory to be true, all three of those must be reconcilable. If #1 fails, you don't have an ethical system to begin with. If #2 fails, you have a system that doesn't function in the real world. If #3 fails, your statement doesn't hold water.
For instance, consider a dirty cop in the pocket of the mob who goes home to ponder what he should do after he's told by the mob to kill a member of his white nationalist cell. If we start with the assumption that #3 is true, we have to sacrifice either #1 or #2. After all, the cop has multiple affiliations, just like we all do, and none of them are more immediate than the others, meaning no particular affiliation trumps the others. Your system could try denying his multitude of affiliations, but that renders the system useless; like an unheard tree falling in a forest, if a system can't be used to answer real ethical questions, is it a real system of ethics? Alternatively, your system could say that him killing (and not killing) is both right (and wrong) at the same time, but at that point it fails to do the one thing that every ethics system MUST do, meaning it, by definition, is not a system of ethics. It's a system of something else.
Depending on the circumstances, what you're describing could be better described in any number of different ways—commonplace, honorable, Omerta, routine, expected, obligatory—but it certainly isn't synonymous with ethical.
It's almost as if you're unaware that two entities might do the same thing for very different reasons. In some ways, their two problems are polar opposites of each other's, yet opening their portfolios made sense in both cases.
Toyota's problem was that they were sitting on technology and tooling that had an increasingly bleak outlook. Rather than clinging to it pointlessly as it brings in less and less profit, they opted to open it up so that they could increase profits before the window passes them by. Doing so may even stretch out the length of time before those parts become obsolete, thus helping them maximize profits even more. It was a smart business move.
Tesla's problem was that they were sitting on technology that had an increasingly bright outlook, but they lacked the ability to capitalize on it effectively due to their small stature within the industry. Their first-mover advantage afforded them an ever-shrinking window in which to establish themselves as a major player before significant competition arrived, so they opted to open up their patents in order to spur the sort of growth that would establish them while that opportunity was still around. That meant sacrificing short-term profits in exchange for spurring long-term growth. It was a smart business move.
You read that sentence totally wrong. And whoever modded you up are idiots who read it wrong as well. They are talking about hybrids at the end, not EVs.
I read that sentence exactly the same way you did: as referring to hybrids, not EVs. What of it? Despite agreeing with you on the interpretation of that phrase, I stand by everything I said and I don't know how or why you would have jumped to the incorrect conclusion you did. After all, the interpretation of that clause has no material impact on anything I said in the first place.
Toyota's move to unlock its patents underlines its belief that hybrids are an effective alternative to all-battery EVs, given a fuel efficiency roughly double that of gasoline cars, lower cost and that they do not need charging infrastructure.
Sounds to me like it underlines their belief that hybrids have no place in a future made almost entirely of EVs, so they've done the math and realized that there's no sense in clinging to patents that don't have a future. Better to cash in now by giving the patents away and making some money on the component/part purchases they'll receive during the shrinking window in which those patents remain relevant.
Most of the damage from hurricanes (at least in developed countries) is from storm surge, since modern engineering is generally up to the task of handling wind damage. If you can literally just float over the surge, that risk goes away.
It's one thing for package thieves to drive around looking for unattended packages. It's a much different thing to notify them of a delivery using a car-sized balloon with the amazon logo on it floating high over a neighborhood.
This sort of thinking bothers me, because it suggests X won't work because X has a problem, without regard for the fact that the current situation is FAR worse.
As things stand now, thieves don't need to spot the delivery vehicles or see them making their deliveries in order to steal their packages. They don't need to enter private areas or loiter in ways that would make them obvious to observant neighbors. They don't even need to have any special knowledge or awareness, since any given neighborhood will be ripe for the picking in the early-to-mid afternoon, before people start getting home from work. A thief can be in and out of a neighborhood in a matter of minutes, potentially hitting multiple neighborhoods a day for dozens or hundreds of packages.
Contrast that with Amazon's drones, which are intended to land in back yards as much as possible: - Any given delivery nets the thief just one package, so the payoff is far lower - If the thief doesn't observe the actual delivery, they can't easily locate the (back yard) package later, so it's safe - Even if the thief knows where the delivery happened, grabbing packages from back yards is far more conspicuous than a casual walk-by - The balloon only gets deployed at low altitudes (i.e. below the roofline if you're a few houses away), so thieves will have to already be in the proximity of the delivery in order to observe it, thus limiting the scope of their operations and making them more conspicuous - Deliveries don't arrive on a schedule and can come in from any heading, so observing the delivery will require hours of loitering in a neighborhood while continuously scanning the sky, making them significantly more conspicuous while also requiring a lot more work
Or, in short, it's a lot more work for a lot less payoff. Even if they were to do it in front yards, the fact that the deliveries would be coming in constantly throughout the day means that if you wanted more than one package, you'd have to swing through the neighborhood multiple times a day rather than being able to do a quick drive-by-and-grab. Doing something like that is almost certain to get you caught quickly.
they just enforce what the developers and publishers demand.
By that logic, the mafia's goons aren't culpable for their crimes since they're merely enforcing what their bosses are demanding of them.
Without regard for whether or not Valve is actually at fault here, one thing I can say definitively is that engaging in an activity at someone else's request doesn't magically absolve you of your legal responsibilities.
And yet, it's not. He's completely correct. Consult any English dictionary and you'll find a similar definition to the one he provided. Lots of people get it confused because "discriminate" can be used in multiple ways, but "discriminatory" always carries a negative meaning. If you're looking to use "discriminate" as an adjective, the word you want is "discriminative", not "discriminatory" (also not "discriminating", which means something else entirely).
Like lots of English words, there are multiple meanings. It's not solely the negative.
Actually, "discriminatory" only has one meaning and it's always negative. Your confusion is understandable.
1) Discriminatory: an adjective that always carries a negative meaning. 2) Discriminative: an adjective that carries multiple meanings. 3) Discriminating: an adjective with an unrelated meaning.
They may all be adjectives that derive from the same root, but discriminatory != discriminative != discriminating. Feel free to fact check me if you doubt what I'm saying, but you'll find I'm correct.
Discriminatory when you're talking abstractly is not "unfair" by default.
Actually, it is. While "discriminate" and many of its derivations carry both meanings—the ability to draw a distinction or making a prejudicial/unfair distinction—you happened to pick the one word that always carries the latter meaning. For your reference:
Both Meanings - Discriminate - Discriminative - Discriminately
Prejudicial/Unfair Meaning Only - Discriminatory
Something Else Altogether - Discriminating (a refined taste) - Indiscriminately (without care or judgment)
Feel free to consult your local English dictionary if you think I'm wrong (I'm not), but it's in your best interest to use these words correctly, given that your choice could make the difference between a grave insult and a simple description of practices.
You’re thinking backwards. OP is saying that if you somehow managed to achieve a perfect vacuum in the balloon (i.e. the ideal hypothetical condition), it’d still only displace such-and-such air, meaning it could only achieve that much buoyancy. Having established the best case buoyancy possible, filling the balloon with anything more than a vacuum will merely add weight that will then count against that buoyancy, thus reducing your cargo limit.
That said, I don’t see the problem that the OP sees. Who says the balloon can’t be the size of a doorway or MUCH bigger? If you’re dropping a package off at a designated landing site that’s open to the sky in a person’s yard, which is what Amazon has been suggesting all along, the balloon can be practically the size of the entire yard.
The four big companies—Apple, Adobe, Google, and Intel—settled for $415 million. The smaller ones—Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm—settled years earlier for $20 million. If you were an employee at one of those seven companies during the time period in question (2005-2010), you would have already been contacted by the lawyers representing the class. The fact that you were neither contacted nor aware of this makes it fairly evident that your claim to being owed back wages has no basis in reality.
Also, millions of workers? You're off by an order of magnitude or more. At the time the suit was filed, there were less than 200K employees at Apple, Adobe, Google, and Intel combined, of which the actual number of affected employees was but a small fraction. The court eventually determined that there were only 65K members in the class (which included employees at the smaller companies), since most employees either weren't affected by the illegal practices to begin with or weren't present at those companies at the time in question.
King Solomon worshiped Satan. Read the book yourself if you don't believe me.
Meh, I'll bite since this is some creatively "out there" trolling. You seem to be unaware that the book you're referring to, which is fictitiously/falsely attributed to Solomon by its actual author, was written a millennium or more after Solomon's death in a language that didn't even exist at the time of his reign. If you actually read it, you should have noticed the readily apparent Greek influence (e.g. mythological, thematic, and linguistic) that should have been a dead giveaway that it came much later and wasn't something he authored.
But hey, if you think that book is historically accurate, I've got a few other historicalaccounts that might interest you and are of similar levels of historicity. They really provide some insight into the period conditions of their respective times and places.
On the plus side, today I learned a new word from that first link: pseudepigraphical.
Slashdot Mirror
Why buy new? I buy used copies. They only need to work once for me to successfully rip them. After that, the disc goes on a shelf and we watch the ripped copy from Plex.
Agreed, hence my use of italics in "temporary privacy" in my last comment. The "temporary" part is important. While privacy is certainly more open than secrecy, it too can be abused, as you said.
I'm going to borrow that dinner/bathroom analogy
Yeah, I wish I could claim credit for it, but I think I picked it up from the professor for an ethics class I was TAing during grad school. It perfectly encapsulates the idea in terms that everyone understands, so it's served me very well over the years.
The Brits don't do it all right (CCTV unleashed, Brexit, etc)
Completely agree. They get a lot of stuff very wrong (as do we, just to be clear), but this is one thing they certainly do better than us.
Which is worse, trial by media or trial in secret? I'm sure that there are subtleties here that I'm missing by being an American, but I wonder...
As a fellow American, I think the subtleties you're missing here are that:
A) Contrary to the two extremes you presented, the Brits struck a middle-ground: temporary privacy.
B) The danger of secret courts is that they undermine actual justice by preventing the public from even having an awareness of the actions of a judiciary that is supposed to be serving their interests. In contrast, having privacy until the case concludes has no such problem, because the judiciary will be scrutinized and held to account for its actions in a timely manner.
C) When you excuse yourself from dinner and head towards the restroom, everyone knows what you're about to do (i.e. it's not a secret), but that doesn't mean there's a camera in the bathroom that records the details of your activities in there (i.e. it's still private). The two are distinct, and privacy, even in courts, can be a good thing. There's no legitimate reason to allow voyeurs tune in to family court proceedings, nor for people's names to be dragged through the mud for crimes they didn't commit. Rather than being concerned with the false dichotomy of "trial by media or trial in secret", why not be concerned with a real problem: that "innocent until proven guilty" rings hollow if your name will forever be tied to crimes you didn't commit?
Inconceivable!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Then Disney must have licensed/bought the rights back, because they've confirmed that the original trilogy will be available on day one when Disney+ launches.
There are several big differences that I'm aware of:
1) It sounds like Assange is being accused of actively soliciting classified data, which is crossing the line, legally speaking, whereas the NYT and other publications were not accused of doing so. They've received classified documents, but they don't encourage people to steal documents, nor do they walk their sources through the steps necessary to exfiltrate classified data, both of which Assange is being accused of, from what I can gather.
2) Whereas Ellsberg (and Snowden) did his due diligence by raising concerns with his superiors in an attempt to resolve the issues internally before going public, Manning made no such attempt. Likewise, whereas there were specific concerns that Ellsberg (and Snowden) hoped could be resolved by making those concerns public, Manning seemingly had no awareness of the contents of the data he exfiltrated, nor of any specific threat to the public's wellbeing. Those distinctions are both legally and morally important when drawing the line between "whistleblowers" and "leakers". Whistleblowing is a final step that is taken in the public interest in response to a specific threat after all other avenues have been exhausted. Leaking is something that anyone can do at any time for any reason. As such there are good reasons why the one is (at least somewhat) protected, while the other is not.
3) The NYT (and the multitude of other papers that published content from the Papers, as well as those reporting on Snowden's data) exercised editorial discretion in what they actually published. It's estimated that they only printed 5% of the Papers' actual contents. In contrast, wantonly dumping classified leaks online without fully vetting them, as Wikileaks has done numerous times with Manning's data, demonstrates a gross disregard for the lives, safety, and property of those who may be affected. Legally, this may or may not make a difference (I don't know either way), but morally it's reprehensible.
All of which is to say, while I think that Assange and Wikileaks have acted reprehensibly, I also think the world needs something like Wikileaks, or at the very least a free and unrestrained press. Likewise, while I think that Manning failed to do his duty both as a service member and a "whistleblower", I think there are others who have faithfully fulfilled their legal and/or moral obligations, such as Ellsberg and quite possibly Snowden.
Apple forked KHTML from KDE project to create WebKit to use in Safari. Please do some background check prior posting it.
Sure, but KHTML originally operated on Linux, for which we can thank Linus Torvalds. Or didn’t you know that?
Which is to say, I’m well aware of the information you just shared, but it has no relevance to the point at hand. I intentionally constrained my comment to recent history, from the forks onward, because that’s the only part of their history that was relevant. Why talk about Julius Caesar when you’re correcting someone’s understanding of the French Revolution?
Eh, as someone who—like many of us here—was routinely at the top of his class and then went on to pursue a "thinking" career, but who also has had natural monovision since junior high (i.e. one eye can see far better than the other, to the point that during college a new-to-me optometrist saw the difference in the prescription for my eyes and immediately asked with a great deal of concern in his voice whether I suffered migraines, vomiting, seizures, blackouts, or falls on a regular basis; I don't, for the record), I'm not so convinced there's a link. That your eyes are declining as you notice a cognitive decline strikes me as a correlation without causation sort of thing, though I could see how it might psychologically contribute to a sense of confusion or feeling like things are out of joint, even if the two aren't necessarily physiologically linked.
I'm not sure why you think those three browsers are repackaged versions of each other. Apple forked WebKit in 2010 as WebKit2 for use in Safari, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. Google forked WebKit in 2013 as Blink for use in Chromium/Chrome, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. In the last few years, Chromium has been adopted by Opera and Microsoft, but Safari—despite having started at the same place that Chrome started—today remains on a different foundation. That Safari is making this change at the same time as the others is due to political/corporate maneuvering, not technical changes.
Also, while there are valid arguments to be made against a browser monoculture—a problem that WebKit-based browsers are contributing to—that doesn't mean that the rendering engines themselves are bad. Far from it, I think most people would agree that on their technical merits, WebKit-based engines are among the best we have, and certainly aren't bad enough to justify your vitriolic frothing against them.
"If you can" being the critical question: can you float _over_ the surge when your "island" is chained to the sea floor?
Seems like you'd be praying to float _through_ the surge(s)
While that is a problem that needs consideration (e.g. ships tied to fixed docks do indeed sink if surge/tide gets bad enough), it's one we've had answers to for several millennia (e.g. leave slack in the anchor chain, pull the anchor up, use floating docks, sail around the storm, etc.), so I'm not too worried about it. They'd likely just leave some slack in the chain so that it can account for any surge. Plus, there's nothing saying they can't let out some more chain in the case that a storm is coming through and then pull it back in afterwards. The anchor chain can grow and shrink with the weather. Alternatively, if they're rigidly anchored to the ocean floor, they'd simply do what oil rigs (and other platforms, e.g. Sealand) do and build the platform high enough to be above any surge.
especially when it is a 4 acre surface: what's the waveform length of a typical hurricane ocean surge?
That's an interesting question. Bad storm surges can span hundreds or thousands of square miles with "waves" that are 100-200 miles wide and 0-50 feet above normal sea level at their peak (the worst recorded storm surge in history is from 1899 and was 50 feet high, but in practice they're rarely more than 25 ft). Assuming the worst case, we're dealing with an incline of 1 foot per mile (i.e. 50 feet/50 miles, since we're talking about a 50 foot surge at the center point of a 100 mile "wave"). Meanwhile, a 4-acre square is 417.5 ft long on each side (and, just for scale, covers only 1/160th of a square mile). If that square, 4-acre settlement was straddling a rigid peak with that incline, it wouldn't even need to flex 0.5 inches from its edges to its center (i.e. 0.5 inches per 208.75 ft). In reality, storm surge isn't rigid (or peaked like that), so it'd be a far easier task for the settlement to deal with, even in the worst case scenarios, and because normal waves rise and fall orders of magnitude faster than that, it's doubtful they'd even notice a half inch difference from the edge of the platform to its center.
if you were a member of a Chicago gang, violence is not only common place but ethical. It really doesn't matter how outsiders judge you, you live by your own group.
Not really. While groups may have ethics (e.g. I spent three semesters in grad school as a TA for my university's senior-level engineering ethics course, helping teach about 2000 engineering students during that time), those group ethics only work inasmuch as they hold their members to a higher standard without placing any burden on outsiders. Anything else falls apart the moment its group members interact with anything outside their group.
As such, while living by your group's code is a number of things, it isn't the same thing as ethics. In fact, the idea that ethics are determined by our group affiliations (I assume you mean immediate groups, to the exclusion of broader ones) is actually fairly easily disproven. Consider these three statements:
1) Ethics (by definition) deals with separating right from wrong.
2) A person can belong to multiple groups.
3) Group affiliation determines ethics.
For your theory to be true, all three of those must be reconcilable. If #1 fails, you don't have an ethical system to begin with. If #2 fails, you have a system that doesn't function in the real world. If #3 fails, your statement doesn't hold water.
For instance, consider a dirty cop in the pocket of the mob who goes home to ponder what he should do after he's told by the mob to kill a member of his white nationalist cell. If we start with the assumption that #3 is true, we have to sacrifice either #1 or #2. After all, the cop has multiple affiliations, just like we all do, and none of them are more immediate than the others, meaning no particular affiliation trumps the others. Your system could try denying his multitude of affiliations, but that renders the system useless; like an unheard tree falling in a forest, if a system can't be used to answer real ethical questions, is it a real system of ethics? Alternatively, your system could say that him killing (and not killing) is both right (and wrong) at the same time, but at that point it fails to do the one thing that every ethics system MUST do, meaning it, by definition, is not a system of ethics. It's a system of something else.
Depending on the circumstances, what you're describing could be better described in any number of different ways—commonplace, honorable, Omerta, routine, expected, obligatory—but it certainly isn't synonymous with ethical.
It's almost as if you're unaware that two entities might do the same thing for very different reasons. In some ways, their two problems are polar opposites of each other's, yet opening their portfolios made sense in both cases.
Toyota's problem was that they were sitting on technology and tooling that had an increasingly bleak outlook. Rather than clinging to it pointlessly as it brings in less and less profit, they opted to open it up so that they could increase profits before the window passes them by. Doing so may even stretch out the length of time before those parts become obsolete, thus helping them maximize profits even more. It was a smart business move.
Tesla's problem was that they were sitting on technology that had an increasingly bright outlook, but they lacked the ability to capitalize on it effectively due to their small stature within the industry. Their first-mover advantage afforded them an ever-shrinking window in which to establish themselves as a major player before significant competition arrived, so they opted to open up their patents in order to spur the sort of growth that would establish them while that opportunity was still around. That meant sacrificing short-term profits in exchange for spurring long-term growth. It was a smart business move.
You read that sentence totally wrong. And whoever modded you up are idiots who read it wrong as well. They are talking about hybrids at the end, not EVs.
I read that sentence exactly the same way you did: as referring to hybrids, not EVs. What of it? Despite agreeing with you on the interpretation of that phrase, I stand by everything I said and I don't know how or why you would have jumped to the incorrect conclusion you did. After all, the interpretation of that clause has no material impact on anything I said in the first place.
Toyota's move to unlock its patents underlines its belief that hybrids are an effective alternative to all-battery EVs, given a fuel efficiency roughly double that of gasoline cars, lower cost and that they do not need charging infrastructure.
Sounds to me like it underlines their belief that hybrids have no place in a future made almost entirely of EVs, so they've done the math and realized that there's no sense in clinging to patents that don't have a future. Better to cash in now by giving the patents away and making some money on the component/part purchases they'll receive during the shrinking window in which those patents remain relevant.
Most of the damage from hurricanes (at least in developed countries) is from storm surge, since modern engineering is generally up to the task of handling wind damage. If you can literally just float over the surge, that risk goes away.
I stand corrected. While I may not enjoy it, I always appreciate when someone calls me out, so I thank you for doing so.
It's one thing for package thieves to drive around looking for unattended packages. It's a much different thing to notify them of a delivery using a car-sized balloon with the amazon logo on it floating high over a neighborhood.
This sort of thinking bothers me, because it suggests X won't work because X has a problem, without regard for the fact that the current situation is FAR worse.
As things stand now, thieves don't need to spot the delivery vehicles or see them making their deliveries in order to steal their packages. They don't need to enter private areas or loiter in ways that would make them obvious to observant neighbors. They don't even need to have any special knowledge or awareness, since any given neighborhood will be ripe for the picking in the early-to-mid afternoon, before people start getting home from work. A thief can be in and out of a neighborhood in a matter of minutes, potentially hitting multiple neighborhoods a day for dozens or hundreds of packages.
Contrast that with Amazon's drones, which are intended to land in back yards as much as possible:
- Any given delivery nets the thief just one package, so the payoff is far lower
- If the thief doesn't observe the actual delivery, they can't easily locate the (back yard) package later, so it's safe
- Even if the thief knows where the delivery happened, grabbing packages from back yards is far more conspicuous than a casual walk-by
- The balloon only gets deployed at low altitudes (i.e. below the roofline if you're a few houses away), so thieves will have to already be in the proximity of the delivery in order to observe it, thus limiting the scope of their operations and making them more conspicuous
- Deliveries don't arrive on a schedule and can come in from any heading, so observing the delivery will require hours of loitering in a neighborhood while continuously scanning the sky, making them significantly more conspicuous while also requiring a lot more work
Or, in short, it's a lot more work for a lot less payoff. Even if they were to do it in front yards, the fact that the deliveries would be coming in constantly throughout the day means that if you wanted more than one package, you'd have to swing through the neighborhood multiple times a day rather than being able to do a quick drive-by-and-grab. Doing something like that is almost certain to get you caught quickly.
they just enforce what the developers and publishers demand.
By that logic, the mafia's goons aren't culpable for their crimes since they're merely enforcing what their bosses are demanding of them.
Without regard for whether or not Valve is actually at fault here, one thing I can say definitively is that engaging in an activity at someone else's request doesn't magically absolve you of your legal responsibilities.
That definition seems bogus.
And yet, it's not. He's completely correct. Consult any English dictionary and you'll find a similar definition to the one he provided. Lots of people get it confused because "discriminate" can be used in multiple ways, but "discriminatory" always carries a negative meaning. If you're looking to use "discriminate" as an adjective, the word you want is "discriminative", not "discriminatory" (also not "discriminating", which means something else entirely).
Like lots of English words, there are multiple meanings. It's not solely the negative.
Actually, "discriminatory" only has one meaning and it's always negative. Your confusion is understandable.
1) Discriminatory: an adjective that always carries a negative meaning.
2) Discriminative: an adjective that carries multiple meanings.
3) Discriminating: an adjective with an unrelated meaning.
They may all be adjectives that derive from the same root, but discriminatory != discriminative != discriminating. Feel free to fact check me if you doubt what I'm saying, but you'll find I'm correct.
Discriminatory when you're talking abstractly is not "unfair" by default.
Actually, it is. While "discriminate" and many of its derivations carry both meanings—the ability to draw a distinction or making a prejudicial/unfair distinction—you happened to pick the one word that always carries the latter meaning. For your reference:
Both Meanings
- Discriminate
- Discriminative
- Discriminately
Prejudicial/Unfair Meaning Only
- Discriminatory
Something Else Altogether
- Discriminating (a refined taste)
- Indiscriminately (without care or judgment)
Feel free to consult your local English dictionary if you think I'm wrong (I'm not), but it's in your best interest to use these words correctly, given that your choice could make the difference between a grave insult and a simple description of practices.
You’re thinking backwards. OP is saying that if you somehow managed to achieve a perfect vacuum in the balloon (i.e. the ideal hypothetical condition), it’d still only displace such-and-such air, meaning it could only achieve that much buoyancy. Having established the best case buoyancy possible, filling the balloon with anything more than a vacuum will merely add weight that will then count against that buoyancy, thus reducing your cargo limit.
That said, I don’t see the problem that the OP sees. Who says the balloon can’t be the size of a doorway or MUCH bigger? If you’re dropping a package off at a designated landing site that’s open to the sky in a person’s yard, which is what Amazon has been suggesting all along, the balloon can be practically the size of the entire yard.
The four big companies—Apple, Adobe, Google, and Intel—settled for $415 million. The smaller ones—Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm—settled years earlier for $20 million. If you were an employee at one of those seven companies during the time period in question (2005-2010), you would have already been contacted by the lawyers representing the class. The fact that you were neither contacted nor aware of this makes it fairly evident that your claim to being owed back wages has no basis in reality.
Also, millions of workers? You're off by an order of magnitude or more. At the time the suit was filed, there were less than 200K employees at Apple, Adobe, Google, and Intel combined, of which the actual number of affected employees was but a small fraction. The court eventually determined that there were only 65K members in the class (which included employees at the smaller companies), since most employees either weren't affected by the illegal practices to begin with or weren't present at those companies at the time in question.
King Solomon worshiped Satan. Read the book yourself if you don't believe me.
Meh, I'll bite since this is some creatively "out there" trolling. You seem to be unaware that the book you're referring to, which is fictitiously/falsely attributed to Solomon by its actual author, was written a millennium or more after Solomon's death in a language that didn't even exist at the time of his reign. If you actually read it, you should have noticed the readily apparent Greek influence (e.g. mythological, thematic, and linguistic) that should have been a dead giveaway that it came much later and wasn't something he authored.
But hey, if you think that book is historically accurate, I've got a few other historical accounts that might interest you and are of similar levels of historicity. They really provide some insight into the period conditions of their respective times and places.
On the plus side, today I learned a new word from that first link: pseudepigraphical.