Where do you start? What do you start with? We're foveated animals with brains that seem to have much to do with 'where' and 'what', or, 'object' and 'place'. That's a ridiculously broad epistemology to try whittling down to a point and click understanding of statistics. Do people not understand statistics, or, do they not understand sampling and false positives; or, do they just not understand being detained, strip searched and subjected to a body cavity search, no matter the underlying science. Statistics is fairly intuitive and, as such, is amenable to the fundamental maths' concept of inspection. Inspection as I understand it is alot like Yogi Berra saying you can observe alot just by watching. If you buy fresh, bagged vegetables you pretty much understand sampling the visible attributes and inferring the nonvisible ones, and, anyone whose done so has gotten home and found at least one bad apple (fruit, vegetable, whatever). Buy the same brand of bagged vegetables and discover what you consider to be a disproportionate number of unseen, unwanted attributes and you'll switch brands. The hidden problem maybe that people think they're being flagged by a machine, by an AI, and, maybe they are, but they'll most likely be apprehended by a person and it may be that the point and method of apprehension is where a quick explanation needs to be inserted, like being Mirandized, only explaining "the computer" has selected them based upon yada yada...
Maths, to most people is anathema (anathemathtic). I recently undertook a review of maths via, Jason Gibson, NASA rocket scientist, and his MathTutorDVD stuff plus a bunch of other stuff. How do you explain maths is mostly straight forward to people who have what amounts to a mental block against abstracted symbol manipulation? The human limbic system incorporates our reward system and that system is pretty wet stuff, not too interested in abstract logic. Recently intelligence has been liked to networked neurons in the association pathways. This may indicate that most healthy, normal people intuitively and rightly avoid intelligent explanations and intelligent people in favour of wet, warm, limbic, puppy love. I hold we're formulating a new mythology wherein the old Dionysian way of ecstasy most famously iconographed by the Dionysian sacred, disease of epilepsy is being replaced by the new sacred of Asperger's Syndrome exhibited by dry, maths types. It's just a matter of a few thousands of years of evolution.
If you download the 2009 intro to General Principles of Chemistry from the mit OpenCourseWare offerings you'll get some pretty good stuff on the relationship of Quantum Mechanics and Classical Physics. IIRC the wave descriptions of big league fast balls are used (lectures 4 & 5). I'll leave it there as any attempt by me to go into the particulars will go high and outside.
The Iranian, Farsi speaking people have a complex and fascinating history. Farsi, like English, is an Indo-European language, and, the Persian Empire could be said to be the catalyst driving the birth of Europe. The Spartan and Athenian alliance bringing the victory of the Persian Wars was thought by the Greeks to be caused by the Gods as the Persians were seen as Asians and, it was thought, the Gods would never allow one people to rule both Europe and Asia. The matter grows complex as Alexander Hellenized the Persian world. Although in Persia lower caste people would abase themselves before someone seen to be a superior, but the Greeks only bowed to a God and thus the Persian custom was seen as Alexander elevating himself to the ranks of the Gods. But for my money the big fillip was introduced, perhaps by the Jews, when sin was passed from the King to the people. Some ancient civilizations were known to have beaten the statues of Gods when things went wrong and, further down the road, Kings and priests were punished when things went wrong as it was thought they were custodians and servants of the Gods and thus responsible if the Gods should be made angry. Some tyrant, somewhere, came up with the truly remarkable idea that if sin was ascribed to the people s/he ruled, then, if the Gods punished the people it was the peoples fault. This ascription of sin to the populous was one of the neatest tricks a ruling elite ever effected on an enslaved population. I think all western theocracies are supported by this central idea, that each person is born into sin and is a sinner and thus accountable for anything and everything that goes wrong.
We're creatures of context and our ideologies are drawn from and enforced by the symbols that surround us. From this it follow that freedom of speech is fundamental to democracy and personal growth. If Iran is to grow and the Iranian people free themselves, then they must always have available to them the symbols of freedom.
Just my loose change, btw "hello", a decade or so ago we exchanged what I enjoyed as some interesting posts here when I was new to Linux and/., but that was another incarnation.
I honestly don't know how I got here. I just woke up and here I am in your universe, AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE TO MY OWN HOME UNIVERSE. IT'S TRUE! You can't imagine how glad I am to be here. I'm definitely not going back. Things are bad where I come from.
uuhmm... death? I recently, (the past +2yrs), tried to review and fathom the whole 'What is Life?' issue. I came up all but dumb but did come away with a new way to look at the issues. First developmental biology provides a compartment in terms of the initial programme. I found evo-devo (evolutionary biology) to be a big boon in terms of grasping the how of the what, so to speak. R. Raff's book 'The Shape of Life' is a good starting point. 'Fins into Limbs' edited by B. Hall when read in conjunction with Raff's book is really superb. For all my efforts I came away envisioning our genetic programme as a Bach Fugue that develops various voices from an initial set of themes. E.O. Wilson said we evolved to reproduce, not to be happy. As, perhaps, neotenic apes, once our initial programme runs we begin to run down and that's where things seem to get really complex and go wrong.
Oops! My bad, thanks for the refresher. It took a night's sleep for the particulars to creep back in. Refreshed in memory it wasn't at all badly produced.
You wrote: "This may be where some creationists get confused, thinking of dogs and cats and fish, etc in terms of some sort of central "essence" of an animal, when in reality the borders exist mostly in human minds."
The idea of essence in church thinking seems to have originated mostly from Aristotle who was an avid biologist. Alexander, tutored by Aristotle, was said to have sent Aristotle specimens from conquered lands. Aristotle was the leading philosopher of church thought for many centuries. He championed reasoning by deduction as famous by the Aristotelian syllogisms. IIRC he most thought in terms of quintessences. Plato, OTOH, was perhaps more of an essence kind of a guy with his ideal plates laid up in heaven but I was never able to really grasp Platonic thought other than to figure Platonists were mostly made up of guys who actually buy penis enlargement supplements. Aristotle's hold over church thought for so long may be the root cause of godly sorts thinking in terms of essences. I think it took Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Galileo to kick start observation, description, mathematical measurement and experimental verification.
I don't welcome greater government oversight in my private life but I do welcome a more refined two way grid because it may facilitate a "nano" economics and the necessary infrastructure. I just made up the term nano economics and may I rot in hell if it catches on as yet another catch phrase but the idea of individuals and small groups having the means necessary to incorporate into larger entities and supply small quantities of resources for exchange over a grid or in a larger project has many attractive features. Recently/. ran a story on music indies being under fire from large corporations trying to corner markets. A sort of nano economics could have positive benefits from small business startups to undermining unconscionable copyright laws. One of the things missing is a government interface such as might develop from managing power grids at the micro level and burgeoning into a nests set of systems that would allow for a broader array of nano economic possibilities. Some developing countries have experimented with micro banking wherein community members pool small sums of monies to help startups get going. I think a nano economic revolution is available via the current technology but will require the necessary government infrastructure and a shift in thinking and practise on the part of the public. Perhaps mature, industrial countries with the requisite resources and an educated working class could bootstrap such a micro revolution.
There are complexities inherent in these issues that make an immediate set of solutions highly unlikely. Philosophically it should be argued we're social creatures and all have a share in the universe of ideas we've engendered. Even the most creative people are subject to a sort of ideological horizon in place during their creative lifetime that delimits the content and reception of their output. Given ideas as universally shared social artifacts there is still the question of reimbursing creative people for their output. J.S.Bach, in his time, was unconstrained in his use of the ideas of others and others weren't constrained in their use of Bach's output. One of his sons C.P.Bach, (IIRC), was famous for loitering under Beethoven's window and stealing musical ideas literally as Beethoven struggled to create them. C.P.Bach would then incorporate Beethoven's ideas in his, often, farcical works before Beethoven had finished fully developing the ideas C.P. Bach had stolen. Copyright laws we're meant to give some measure of protection to intellectual property and justly so, but, also property is integral to most western concepts of democracy. I recall it's in the works of Locke that property rights and property owners are seen as fundamental to defining entitlement to democratic rights and privileges. Although I don't remember Locke addressing intellectual property. Today much of the impetus pushing legislation is driven by job creation and the generation of tax revenue. Intellectual property rights are being exaggerated in the name of jobs and tax revenue. Perhaps a further complicating factor is that the PC has been turned into a digital aggregator of once analogue, disparate information sources. The PC with an internet connection is a TV, Radio, Newspaper, Telephone, Postal Carrier...inter alia and all those old conduits are struggling to make sure their old piece of pie isn't downsized in the change over. With all this stuff in the pot it's unlikely a solution set will be soon in place.
Somewhere in the idle backwaters of my life I've a copy of 'Revolution OS'. I can't remember the year it came out but/. was big on it, probably because Taco had a cameo. Redhat and linus were the darlings of the show with RMS doing a walk on but the punchline was the big noise the Redhat IPO made, followed but the nearly instantaneous downward spiral of it's stock price. Redhat, like Linux has stood the test of time and can rightly take a place on the S&P. Linux, like Redhat has gone from a wunderkind, to a dicey proposition, to a viable, entrenched market player. So maybe the 'Revolution OS' has come full circle and is ready to move on with a new face, but hopefully one still mired in remnants of Dungeons & Dragons lore.
Say what you will, when it comes to instilling righteous behaviour in boys the power of the 11 Commandments pays off. 11? Ya, it's the 11th Commandment that's crucial, 11th Commandment: Don't get Caught. Current theories on development have taken on as commonplace the idea that we abstract morals, or, social conventions from our environment much as we abstract a subset of language universals and we do so more or less concurrently during the window we have for developing language skills. Studies have shown increases in learning ability can be garnered from placing slower students in with quicker students and that social status plays a significant part in learning. Poorer, lower status students will perform better if placed with more socially advantaged students, but, if initially disadvantaged students are returned to their milieu, their performance gains disappear. mit open course ware has a recent set of lectures on introductory psychology by Professor Wolfe that addresses some of these issues.
Not my bailiwick but apoptosis is an abiding interest of mine. There's a quirky, little, award winning film titled "Death by Design" that gives a descent intro. The overarching, take away message seems to be that cells run a self destruct programme when they stop receiving input requiring them to continue on with whatever it is there supposed to be doing. Apoptosis is fascinating stuff and interesting from an evolutionary viewpoint. Although it's bad news for nerds if positive, life affirming feedback is necessary to stop you from running a self destruct programme. Maybe your mom yelling down into the basement telling you to stop watching porn and playing with yourself is enough to stop your cells from popping. Maybe...
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake
Given that I'm a strong environmentalist my bias is unabashedly strong, but as a confirmed atheist even I can say that if we loose this species by way of our ignorance and greed we may have grounds for establishing original sin in our kind.
In other news apparently some species of bullfrogs have neurons that can identify the size of another, near by bullfrog by the sound it makes when it belly flops into the pond. Extrapolating from specific activity to broad claims of a nonhuman speech faculty is just good, old idle gossip. I think Steven Pinker's, now dated book, "The Language Instinct" still provides a pretty good but damning critique of the business gleaned from monkey talk. Although I always feel sympathy for scientists whose works are summarized for popular consumption and most likely badly served in the process. We're the only species with true language faculties and the only species that makes use of complex symbolic communication. Terrance Deacon's book, "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain", is an excellent read in this area.
Have we arrived at a point where the average person is better off having had their identity stolen? With so much identity theft having taken place and, perhaps, a great deal of stolen identities unreported, wouldn't one be better served having had their identity stolen. Being able to establish that one's identity has been stolen may be the most expeditious defense against actions brought resulting from stolen identity. There's security in numbers, unless of course those numbers are stored on a computer.
This has probably been covered but I'm putting in time waiting for a download to complete (mobin img) on my Aspire netbook, soooooo. Under contractual law my law courses in Canada would suggest there would have to be "Consideration", e.g. $1.00 or some other form of value before a contract would be found to be in existence and as such be grounds for a suit. My prof touched upon something I remember as "injurious reliance" wherein a law suit could have merit under laws of tort or negligence. If you buy something or rely upon something and then suffer some sort of injury or loss because of your reliance you can then bring a suit under the guise of injurious reliance. Lastly, if you've been foolish enough to follow along on my untotal recall of law courses, there's an onus on the injured party bringing a law suit to mitigate against losses. You have to do what you can to stem losses as soon as possible.
That's it, that's all I got
cheers
Euclid "The Elements" trans T.L. Heath 3 vols. and
"The Almagest" by Ptolemy...best represent the core world view of the ancients although, in the Almagest, you have to slog through all the mystical stuff. The Almagest held sway as one of the most read seminal books up to Newton's time.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you start? What do you start with? We're foveated animals with brains that seem to have much to do with 'where' and 'what', or, 'object' and 'place'. That's a ridiculously broad epistemology to try whittling down to a point and click understanding of statistics. Do people not understand statistics, or, do they not understand sampling and false positives; or, do they just not understand being detained, strip searched and subjected to a body cavity search, no matter the underlying science. Statistics is fairly intuitive and, as such, is amenable to the fundamental maths' concept of inspection. Inspection as I understand it is alot like Yogi Berra saying you can observe alot just by watching. If you buy fresh, bagged vegetables you pretty much understand sampling the visible attributes and inferring the nonvisible ones, and, anyone whose done so has gotten home and found at least one bad apple (fruit, vegetable, whatever). Buy the same brand of bagged vegetables and discover what you consider to be a disproportionate number of unseen, unwanted attributes and you'll switch brands. The hidden problem maybe that people think they're being flagged by a machine, by an AI, and, maybe they are, but they'll most likely be apprehended by a person and it may be that the point and method of apprehension is where a quick explanation needs to be inserted, like being Mirandized, only explaining "the computer" has selected them based upon yada yada... Maths, to most people is anathema (anathemathtic). I recently undertook a review of maths via, Jason Gibson, NASA rocket scientist, and his MathTutorDVD stuff plus a bunch of other stuff. How do you explain maths is mostly straight forward to people who have what amounts to a mental block against abstracted symbol manipulation? The human limbic system incorporates our reward system and that system is pretty wet stuff, not too interested in abstract logic. Recently intelligence has been liked to networked neurons in the association pathways. This may indicate that most healthy, normal people intuitively and rightly avoid intelligent explanations and intelligent people in favour of wet, warm, limbic, puppy love. I hold we're formulating a new mythology wherein the old Dionysian way of ecstasy most famously iconographed by the Dionysian sacred, disease of epilepsy is being replaced by the new sacred of Asperger's Syndrome exhibited by dry, maths types. It's just a matter of a few thousands of years of evolution.
Husky, 36" bar, skiptooth chain.
If you download the 2009 intro to General Principles of Chemistry from the mit OpenCourseWare offerings you'll get some pretty good stuff on the relationship of Quantum Mechanics and Classical Physics. IIRC the wave descriptions of big league fast balls are used (lectures 4 & 5). I'll leave it there as any attempt by me to go into the particulars will go high and outside.
The Iranian, Farsi speaking people have a complex and fascinating history. Farsi, like English, is an Indo-European language, and, the Persian Empire could be said to be the catalyst driving the birth of Europe. The Spartan and Athenian alliance bringing the victory of the Persian Wars was thought by the Greeks to be caused by the Gods as the Persians were seen as Asians and, it was thought, the Gods would never allow one people to rule both Europe and Asia. The matter grows complex as Alexander Hellenized the Persian world. Although in Persia lower caste people would abase themselves before someone seen to be a superior, but the Greeks only bowed to a God and thus the Persian custom was seen as Alexander elevating himself to the ranks of the Gods. But for my money the big fillip was introduced, perhaps by the Jews, when sin was passed from the King to the people. Some ancient civilizations were known to have beaten the statues of Gods when things went wrong and, further down the road, Kings and priests were punished when things went wrong as it was thought they were custodians and servants of the Gods and thus responsible if the Gods should be made angry. Some tyrant, somewhere, came up with the truly remarkable idea that if sin was ascribed to the people s/he ruled, then, if the Gods punished the people it was the peoples fault. This ascription of sin to the populous was one of the neatest tricks a ruling elite ever effected on an enslaved population. I think all western theocracies are supported by this central idea, that each person is born into sin and is a sinner and thus accountable for anything and everything that goes wrong.
We're creatures of context and our ideologies are drawn from and enforced by the symbols that surround us. From this it follow that freedom of speech is fundamental to democracy and personal growth. If Iran is to grow and the Iranian people free themselves, then they must always have available to them the symbols of freedom.
Just my loose change, btw "hello", a decade or so ago we exchanged what I enjoyed as some interesting posts here when I was new to Linux and /., but that was another incarnation.
I honestly don't know how I got here. I just woke up and here I am in your universe, AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE TO MY OWN HOME UNIVERSE. IT'S TRUE! You can't imagine how glad I am to be here. I'm definitely not going back. Things are bad where I come from.
uuhmm... death? I recently, (the past +2yrs), tried to review and fathom the whole 'What is Life?' issue. I came up all but dumb but did come away with a new way to look at the issues. First developmental biology provides a compartment in terms of the initial programme. I found evo-devo (evolutionary biology) to be a big boon in terms of grasping the how of the what, so to speak. R. Raff's book 'The Shape of Life' is a good starting point. 'Fins into Limbs' edited by B. Hall when read in conjunction with Raff's book is really superb. For all my efforts I came away envisioning our genetic programme as a Bach Fugue that develops various voices from an initial set of themes. E.O. Wilson said we evolved to reproduce, not to be happy. As, perhaps, neotenic apes, once our initial programme runs we begin to run down and that's where things seem to get really complex and go wrong.
I say just let the dummies die. There's far too many of them walking around as it is.
Oops! My bad, thanks for the refresher. It took a night's sleep for the particulars to creep back in. Refreshed in memory it wasn't at all badly produced.
You wrote: "This may be where some creationists get confused, thinking of dogs and cats and fish, etc in terms of some sort of central "essence" of an animal, when in reality the borders exist mostly in human minds." The idea of essence in church thinking seems to have originated mostly from Aristotle who was an avid biologist. Alexander, tutored by Aristotle, was said to have sent Aristotle specimens from conquered lands. Aristotle was the leading philosopher of church thought for many centuries. He championed reasoning by deduction as famous by the Aristotelian syllogisms. IIRC he most thought in terms of quintessences. Plato, OTOH, was perhaps more of an essence kind of a guy with his ideal plates laid up in heaven but I was never able to really grasp Platonic thought other than to figure Platonists were mostly made up of guys who actually buy penis enlargement supplements. Aristotle's hold over church thought for so long may be the root cause of godly sorts thinking in terms of essences. I think it took Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Galileo to kick start observation, description, mathematical measurement and experimental verification.
I don't welcome greater government oversight in my private life but I do welcome a more refined two way grid because it may facilitate a "nano" economics and the necessary infrastructure. I just made up the term nano economics and may I rot in hell if it catches on as yet another catch phrase but the idea of individuals and small groups having the means necessary to incorporate into larger entities and supply small quantities of resources for exchange over a grid or in a larger project has many attractive features. Recently /. ran a story on music indies being under fire from large corporations trying to corner markets. A sort of nano economics could have positive benefits from small business startups to undermining unconscionable copyright laws. One of the things missing is a government interface such as might develop from managing power grids at the micro level and burgeoning into a nests set of systems that would allow for a broader array of nano economic possibilities. Some developing countries have experimented with micro banking wherein community members pool small sums of monies to help startups get going. I think a nano economic revolution is available via the current technology but will require the necessary government infrastructure and a shift in thinking and practise on the part of the public. Perhaps mature, industrial countries with the requisite resources and an educated working class could bootstrap such a micro revolution.
There are complexities inherent in these issues that make an immediate set of solutions highly unlikely. Philosophically it should be argued we're social creatures and all have a share in the universe of ideas we've engendered. Even the most creative people are subject to a sort of ideological horizon in place during their creative lifetime that delimits the content and reception of their output. Given ideas as universally shared social artifacts there is still the question of reimbursing creative people for their output. J.S.Bach, in his time, was unconstrained in his use of the ideas of others and others weren't constrained in their use of Bach's output. One of his sons C.P.Bach, (IIRC), was famous for loitering under Beethoven's window and stealing musical ideas literally as Beethoven struggled to create them. C.P.Bach would then incorporate Beethoven's ideas in his, often, farcical works before Beethoven had finished fully developing the ideas C.P. Bach had stolen. Copyright laws we're meant to give some measure of protection to intellectual property and justly so, but, also property is integral to most western concepts of democracy. I recall it's in the works of Locke that property rights and property owners are seen as fundamental to defining entitlement to democratic rights and privileges. Although I don't remember Locke addressing intellectual property. Today much of the impetus pushing legislation is driven by job creation and the generation of tax revenue. Intellectual property rights are being exaggerated in the name of jobs and tax revenue. Perhaps a further complicating factor is that the PC has been turned into a digital aggregator of once analogue, disparate information sources. The PC with an internet connection is a TV, Radio, Newspaper, Telephone, Postal Carrier...inter alia and all those old conduits are struggling to make sure their old piece of pie isn't downsized in the change over. With all this stuff in the pot it's unlikely a solution set will be soon in place.
Somewhere in the idle backwaters of my life I've a copy of 'Revolution OS'. I can't remember the year it came out but /. was big on it, probably because Taco had a cameo. Redhat and linus were the darlings of the show with RMS doing a walk on but the punchline was the big noise the Redhat IPO made, followed but the nearly instantaneous downward spiral of it's stock price. Redhat, like Linux has stood the test of time and can rightly take a place on the S&P. Linux, like Redhat has gone from a wunderkind, to a dicey proposition, to a viable, entrenched market player. So maybe the 'Revolution OS' has come full circle and is ready to move on with a new face, but hopefully one still mired in remnants of Dungeons & Dragons lore.
Say what you will, when it comes to instilling righteous behaviour in boys the power of the 11 Commandments pays off. 11? Ya, it's the 11th Commandment that's crucial, 11th Commandment: Don't get Caught. Current theories on development have taken on as commonplace the idea that we abstract morals, or, social conventions from our environment much as we abstract a subset of language universals and we do so more or less concurrently during the window we have for developing language skills. Studies have shown increases in learning ability can be garnered from placing slower students in with quicker students and that social status plays a significant part in learning. Poorer, lower status students will perform better if placed with more socially advantaged students, but, if initially disadvantaged students are returned to their milieu, their performance gains disappear. mit open course ware has a recent set of lectures on introductory psychology by Professor Wolfe that addresses some of these issues.
Not my bailiwick but apoptosis is an abiding interest of mine. There's a quirky, little, award winning film titled "Death by Design" that gives a descent intro. The overarching, take away message seems to be that cells run a self destruct programme when they stop receiving input requiring them to continue on with whatever it is there supposed to be doing. Apoptosis is fascinating stuff and interesting from an evolutionary viewpoint. Although it's bad news for nerds if positive, life affirming feedback is necessary to stop you from running a self destruct programme. Maybe your mom yelling down into the basement telling you to stop watching porn and playing with yourself is enough to stop your cells from popping. Maybe...
William Blake
Given that I'm a strong environmentalist my bias is unabashedly strong, but as a confirmed atheist even I can say that if we loose this species by way of our ignorance and greed we may have grounds for establishing original sin in our kind.
In other news apparently some species of bullfrogs have neurons that can identify the size of another, near by bullfrog by the sound it makes when it belly flops into the pond. Extrapolating from specific activity to broad claims of a nonhuman speech faculty is just good, old idle gossip. I think Steven Pinker's, now dated book, "The Language Instinct" still provides a pretty good but damning critique of the business gleaned from monkey talk. Although I always feel sympathy for scientists whose works are summarized for popular consumption and most likely badly served in the process. We're the only species with true language faculties and the only species that makes use of complex symbolic communication. Terrance Deacon's book, "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain", is an excellent read in this area.
Have we arrived at a point where the average person is better off having had their identity stolen? With so much identity theft having taken place and, perhaps, a great deal of stolen identities unreported, wouldn't one be better served having had their identity stolen. Being able to establish that one's identity has been stolen may be the most expeditious defense against actions brought resulting from stolen identity. There's security in numbers, unless of course those numbers are stored on a computer.
This has probably been covered but I'm putting in time waiting for a download to complete (mobin img) on my Aspire netbook, soooooo. Under contractual law my law courses in Canada would suggest there would have to be "Consideration", e.g. $1.00 or some other form of value before a contract would be found to be in existence and as such be grounds for a suit. My prof touched upon something I remember as "injurious reliance" wherein a law suit could have merit under laws of tort or negligence. If you buy something or rely upon something and then suffer some sort of injury or loss because of your reliance you can then bring a suit under the guise of injurious reliance. Lastly, if you've been foolish enough to follow along on my untotal recall of law courses, there's an onus on the injured party bringing a law suit to mitigate against losses. You have to do what you can to stem losses as soon as possible. That's it, that's all I got cheers
Euclid "The Elements" trans T.L. Heath 3 vols. and "The Almagest" by Ptolemy ...best represent the core world view of the ancients although, in the Almagest, you have to slog through all the mystical stuff. The Almagest held sway as one of the most read seminal books up to Newton's time.