The benefits and costs of exercise are mostly internal. The person who gets the benefits of exercise also bears the costs. It's not nearly so obvious that the state should intervene as when the benefit recipient is one person and the cost bearers are a diffuse set of others.
Why just carbon emissions? Fossil fuel based transport also causes considerable externalities through accidents, congestion, noise, health damage from local pollutants and damage to buildings and crops through pollutants and vibration. These are often larger in cities than less densely populated areas, further pushing the balance towards trains there. This: http://econ.yorku.ca/~jametti/4080/Parry_etal_06.pdf (page 54, PDF page 57), for example, estimates that the greenhouse gas costs are much smaller than these other costs. I can't vouch for it's accuracy and I haven't read it thoroughly, but it's a good bet that the other costs are very significant even if not on that sort of scale.
Or have an extra set of wheels that drop down when necessary. Or go all the way and fit rockets (plus some on the sides for cornering). What could possibly go wrong?
This whole "plugins are derivative works" lie needs putting to bed once and for all. They are not. The final system including plugins is a derivative work but its one created by an end-user. If GPL people want to push this they'll need to go all RIAA on the asses of end-users.
I didn't think the GPL prohibited end users from doing this. Isn't the requirement: if you distribute a derived work to anyone then you must also distribute the source and do so under the GPL. If you don't distribute you don't need to grant a GPL to anyone, you can keep your private modifications private. Copying from disk to memory is still copying, so it could restrict this and commercial licences use this interpretation to restrict use of their software, but I don't think it does.
I'm sure that given a choice between it losing him money and it not existing, he'd choose the latter. If few are prepared to pay for news for as long as there is at least one decent free source then that may even be the outcome. Maybe that's why he hates the BBC so much.
Some do. Avoid them. How is it supposed to help you, anyway? Some use something similar to charge particles in the air and make them stick better to a filter, but emit almost no ozone. Unsurprisingly, HEPA filter air purifiers (which actually work) are quite a lot more expensive.
For professions like law, and many others, employers don't go for Oxford history graduates because they think that being trained in history makes them better lawyers. They do it because it proves that this individual is capable of getting through a tough admissions process, is prepared to work hard for later reward, is intelligent, is capable of careful extended study, is intellectually curious and ambitions, and wants to be good at what they do. It does this without the employer having to invest lots of time in testing for these things, which they have only a limited ability to do anyway.
It doesn't have to be Oxford for this to work, any university thought of as a 'proper' university will do for most employers. This does, of course, leave lots of room for prejudice about universities by employers - employers are not going to assess the quality of every university themselves - so it's easy for a lazy employer to abuse this. That doesn't make it go away, and it doesn't make it irrelevant. Besides, if you've got fifty applicants and plenty are from universities you already know or trust as good proof of these things, why would you spend your time finding out about the universities you don't know about?
Choose a university and course that's going to be difficult but possible for you, and that everyone else knows is difficult. For those who can only manage a media studies degree at the university of south west Clapham I'd say 'Don't bother, unless you want it for personal reasons only': there's not point getting a certificate that proves you're capable of something everyone sees as easy.
There's a difference between noticing and assessing something and memorizing a description.And have you ever seen someone look at their watch, asked the time and then seen him look at his watch again? Besides, You're probably scanning faces for emotional state, health status and sexual fitness - not all too strongly related to eye colour.
No, because some people have invalid but working e-mail addresses. I've used open source regexes copied from somewhere before. Refusing to sell someone something from your online shop because someone has let them set up a technically invalid address leads to awkward questions. The same is true if your filter turns out to be wrong. And it's pointless....why do you care if the hostname has an underscore in it, for example?
What's most important is to try to catch likely mistakes. You can catch a few - no @, a ',' instead of a '.' before the TLD - but most typos will pass your filter anyway. If you REALLY want to be helpful and don't mind the load, a DNS lookup would do far more.
Besides, your customer will be a lot more understanding of not getting an e-mail because he mistyped his address than being refused service because your software disapproves of it.
How old is the earth?
I don;t know of any religion that asks or answers that. That six thousand year figure is in no bible, and itslef is historically recent.
It's sort of implied, though, and theologians certainly try to ask and answer that question in a religious way from religious sources.
How did humans come to exist?
"Made of clay" and breathed to life pretty much sounds like lifeless chemicals somehow coming to life, and science still hasn't answered how life first occurred.
No, science hasn't answered it yet, but science and religion both seek to answer it. That's my point: there are many questions purported to be answered by religions which are ALSO scientific questions. The post I was answering contained a claim that science and religion ask and answer different questions. I disagree and the list I gave are my counter-examples. I'm not claiming that there are, as yet, accepted scientific answers.
The Jewish Torah, which is the Christain new testament, as largely a history of the ancient Jewish people. There were certainly large enough floods in the last several thousand years to have been percieved by eyewitnesses as global in scope. Not science, history.
You'd expect signs of these floods, however. Geology does sound rather like a science, so I think it's a scientific question, too.
What is the source and purpose of human morality?
You can name a scientific research about this? I've never heard of any.
Some biologists are interested in it - is there an evolutionary advantage that caused it to be selected for?, does it come from group or individual selection? is it present in other apes?, what characteristics does it have? what aspects are inherent and what aspects are cultural? etc. Moral Minds by Marc Hauser is good (it's written for non-specialists and doesn't take any position on religion - it's well worth reading). It's quite refreshing compared to philosophers trying to answer the same question and never really establishing anything much.
Like these, you mean?: How old is the earth? How did humans come to exist? Did Christ/Mohammed/Moses/whoever really exist, whatever his status as deity? Has there ever been a global flood (and how did the fresh-water fish survive:) )? What is the source and purpose of human morality? And of consciousness? I'm sure there is no shortage of other questions which religion has claimed to answer but which science (or history or archaeology) also target.
The answer to 'Is this stone heavy?' doesn't depend on measuring apparatus, it depends on (implied) context. If you're moving lots of stones at the time it means 'Is this stone heavy compared to the other stones?'. If you're moving lots of objects it means 'compared to the other objects'. If you're about to pick it up it means 'compared to objects I might normally be expected to pick up'. Without the context there's no obvious answer, or at least no answer that doesn't guess at a context and supply it ('It's too heavy for one person to lift'). But if you take away any specification of which stone you're asking about, then the question is incomplete.
I don't believe that your example moral question, "should this unmarried couple have sex in these particular circumstances?", is complete, as you do. I'm arguing that moral questions need at least two parameters: the morally charged act, and the moral actor who will judge it. I'd also argue that such a question is not primarily a question about the act, but about the moral actor - even if that person is only implied by the question.
You're arguing that you can come up with an answer without specifying a particular moral judge by asking 'how much do people in general believe this to be moral?'. I don't think that many people's opinions can be integrated to produce a definitive result...just look at the literature on voting systems, for example. I think what you end up with is an imperfect summary of many people's opinions. Besides, some questions ('which god is it moral to worship?', 'is homosexuality acceptable?', etc) will produce widespread conflict - and much resulting behaviour will come out of the existence of the conflict, not from some sort of 'average'. You might as well ask which element the sea is made out of. No element you could choose would be correct: it's made of many, in a particular arrangement, and saying 'oxygen' because it most corresponds (in the sense of most of the weight being made up of oxygen) doesn't get you a sensible answer.
Maybe you could get a practical answer by asking about the societal outcome ('is it illegal?', 'will the people around me refuse to deal with me?'), but I don't think that's an answer in principle. It's just something you can use to inform your behavioural choices. It'd be perfectly legitimate to disagree with it, too.
Your last paragraph becomes irrelevant in my (current) view of things. I'm arguing that normative questions ARE factual questions - they're factual questions about a person, or a group of people (though you then have to accept a statistical answer, not an absolute one). If you could present a person with the situation and measure his emotional state, via his brain (with a scanner, or by asking and hoping he doesn't lie), then you have your answer.
But it WASN'T sudden, it was continuous and sustained over many years. People saw other people buying lots of property and nothing bad happening, and people saw public predictions of crashes that didn't come.
You're sort of right about the limits on what people can pay for housing, but few people think enough about it to relate the value and price of housing services (the right to live in a house for, say, a month) to the price of whole houses.
Why is a house valuable? Because you can live in it. What's a year of housing services worth? Look at the rental market, and you will see (roughly, living in a house you own may be worth a little more). So what's a house worth? The present value of all future rental payments.
Or, to put it another way, imagine you have a bank account. If you know what the future interest payments (equivalent to rents) are, and you know what the future interest rates are, then you can calculate what the current balance (equivalent to house prices) should be.
That leaves a lot of guessing about future interest rates and rents (and tax regimes, risk levels, local factors, and so on)...but there comes a point when the numbers become implausible. And that point was long before prices stopped rising.
People don't think like that. People judge whether a house is expensive by comparing it to other houses, and by comparing mortgage payments to incomes as you have done, not by comparing prices to the value extracted from living in it. People impute momentum to house prices, too. 'Brainless' is harsh, most people don't have an economist's perspective because they don't think about that sort of thing very often. And the media sure as hell isn't going to help, it's far too complicated and boring for television.
Won't work. Pretty much anybody with any brains knew the housing thing was a bubble but nobody wants to pull out of a bubble before it peaks. Imagine if you pull out and have to sit and watch everybody else make money if the bubble lasts another year.
Most people don't have brains (or the necessary mental tools, anyway), and that can make things unpredictable. Even those with planet-sized brains can't predict the outcome when it's at the mercy of the brainless masses. All bubbles may burst, but not necessarily in your lifetime.
Besides, even fairly sensible people get scared. No-one thinks 'one day, I too will own Microsoft shares', but people DO think that about houses. When you see prices going up and up you can start to worry that you'll be locked out of the market forever if you don't buy/sell now. You might think it's almost certainly a bubble, but are you really REALLY sure? It can feel like a very personal risk in a way that not buying Microsoft shares does not.
The Doctors are the people directing the medical care of patients, why should they become accountants?
They don't need to become accountants, but all spending in the NHS in one area takes it away from another. Spend more time or money on one test, there's less left for another. Spend more on drugs, there's less for tests. More on tests, less for nurses. More on nurses, less for something else, etc. Decisions on what the limited budget and limited staff time is spent on have to be made, balancing different possible uses for best clinical effect. Who would you rather do it? Accountants or doctors?
(OK, false simplification, it has to be made in many places by many people doing many different jobs at many levels, but you can't simply say 'doctors should never care about the resources they're using'. Doctors shouldn't be adding up figures in their head to see if they can afford the test from their budget, but they should have some idea of what's expensive and what's not).
It's an obvious attempt at rationing care services, and yes if overnight bloods haven't been done when a doctor has stipulated needing them done for specific patients due to a clinical need for that patient then patient welfare is put at risk!
Health care must be rationed somehow. Spend 100% of GDP on health care and someone somewhere will want more. The NHS can not remove all health risk, but it must try to remove as much as it can with it's budget. You can't do that by labelling everything top priority. I doubt the world can be divided in to 'clinical need for overnight results' and 'no clinical need' anyway, even it it's sometimes obvious. To a doctor filling in tick-boxes on a form in a busy environment, ticking a box marked 'urgent' is an easy and safe (in a CYA and personal pride in outcomes way) thing to do. Doing it when it's not necessary will come at the expense of other patients' care. Getting hospitals and doctors, collectively, to balance things the right way is not an easy problem.
But making them write 'please' is still just a plain stupid way to try to do it. Assuming it's even true, and not just that one uppity nurse or technician did it once on his own initiative.
I didn't mean to say that, say, 'Unmarried couples should not have sex' refers to an object that is or isn't out there, that I could go and bang my head on or put in a bag. What I meant to suggest was that 'Should unmarried couples have sex?' is a statement which doesn't have a response which could be considered a correct answer. Not in the way that 'how tall is the Eiffel tower' could. I suppose
I'm asking if the concept of a 'correct answer' does or doesn't apply. Are there only responses, which could be ranked according to relevance, or coincidence with a particular response such as your own, but not be evaluated for quality in any other sense? Could it even be like 'asking' 'Pink geraniums are eating bananas.' - no statement could be considered an answer, because it's not really a question.
I'm then suggesting that a question like 'Should unmarried couples have sex?' is incomplete - in the same way that 'how tall is the tower' is incomplete if you don't specify which tower. Or perhaps like 'would you like a banana?' but without the 'you' (our language can't construct that sentence very well, 'are bananas likeable?' in a context with no implied 'to whom' is perhaps the closest). It's
missing a parameter - the person whose moral response you wish to solicit (though, of course, if I asked specifically you the question then it would be implied that that person is you). Even once the person is specified, I'm thinking that the question is equivalent to a question along the lines of 'Does the thought of an unmarried couple having sex induce feelings of disgust or anger in you, or would knowing that you yourself had engaged in this induce feelings of guilt or shame?'. (In the same way 'would you like a banana?' is like asking 'does the prospect of eating a banana induce feelings of pleasure or satisfaction in you right now?'). This reduces the question to one of observable fact, at least potentially. A sufficiently sophisticated machine could measure every detail of your brain and determine the answer. That still leaves unanswered questions (the answers to which would have to be programmed in to this machine) such as exactly which emotions count and what, within a brain, counts as those emotions - it still leaves the problem of people agreeing on what the world is like, as you put it. But that's ALL they're having to agree on. There's no 'moral answer' that's some special kind of answer to a special kind of question. These are not different realms of questions, factual and moral, just funny ways of phrasing them.
Naturally, you could ask a question such as 'Do people in general think that unmarried couple should have sex?', and answer it in the same way you could answer 'How tall are 14th century towers, typically?' - by giving a range or information about the distribution of answers. You could even, in principle, ask the question with (a) god as the moral subject, were a personal god to exist. You might even be able to ask the question with a fictional person as the moral subject, given enough information about emotional responses to morally charge situations in the fictional world. 'Is eating kittens immorral for Lord Voldemort?', say, or 'Is extra-marital sex immoral for the Christian god?'. But the answers are statements about the fiction (and your interpretation and extensions of it), not the moral question. I suppose, in that framework, religious moral answers would be like specifying that the moral agent for whose emotional response you are asking is always, implicitly, god.
If that were all correct I think there'd be no sense in which a standard method of answering moral questions analogous to the scientific method could arise. Answers to moral questions could be measured, given a paricular individual, and measured better and better with technological progress. But there'd be no sense in which there'd be moral progression, no equivalent to, say, forming theories of star formation based on theories of gravity, temperature and pressure and nuclear reactions. You couldn't develop new principles, put together earlier results with logic to produce a new model, or come to an improved theoretical understanding. There'd just be the equivalent of measuring a particular constant ever more accurately.
Are there are any good arguments that there IS an 'ought', that it exists at all? Or for what sort of thing it is?
Perhaps, for example, 'ought' is the emotional result of feeding a representation of a moral question in to the morality-processing part of a human brain? (Or in to a whole brain, since it'd be better not to go assuming that bits of it are separable like that). Then 'ought' becomes something you could determine empirically, and different for each person. In principle you could then lay down a new brain, neuron by neuron, inside a manufactured body fed with the right experiences, that could have a wide variety of 'ought's-to-order come out of it.
Whatever it is that determines these things, there's apparently some sort of cultural paramaterization of how humans make moral judgements, and some parts of the mechanism that are part of our species. So there's bound to be some commonality of human moral responses within a culture...constantly changing as individuals and events influence the culture and vice versa. No end of argument over voting systems or economists' social welfare functions has ever come up with an obviously correct way of integrating a bunch of individuals' opinions or interests. I can't see why moral positions would be different. It'd just be a big continuous argument, with no conclusion, no 'answers', just outcomes.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
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Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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If the CEO of that mining company that was fined time and time again for the very conditions that caused the catastrophe that killed two dozen miners, and the CEO of BP both went to prison for negligent homicide (as they should, IMO) then I wouldn't complain about their excessive pay.
So you wish to turn being CEO of such a corporation in to a job the provides very high income in exchange for accepting high personal risk.
A perpetually growing economy usually involves the average wage rising so average people can buy more stuff while still working less.
Presumably you mean 'mean real wage' (average wage figures seem to be medians, unless specified). Exports count as part of GDP, so it's possible for consumption to fall whilst output rises, at least until you've exported enough to pay for the some of the excess imports your economy has been consuming for the past few decades. Imports count negatively, so consuming less of them can make GDP larger. Assuming, that is, you meant something like 'the US economy' and not the world economy. It's also not necessary that people work less for there to be perpetual growth, although it could be true.
Have you looked around lately ? In fact you are right in some way: every year we need less people, so by the market rule, the average wage goes down relatively to what you can buy for a dollar on average, especially food and lodging.
'Need' less people? You've obviously not noticed the Xelah rule of unemployment: there's no shortage of stuff worth doing in the world. The problem we have right now is that the economy is not arranging for it to be done.
That's because it's an already imperfect control system gone wrong, not because there's something fundamentally wrong with growth.
Well at least, they seem to start to realize that perpetual growth is impossible to achieve in a finite universe. For us, right now, this means our planet.
Economic growth = growth in the value of everything an economy produces, not the physical quantity it produces. Making faster computers with fewer inputs compared to forty years ago is an obvious example. The heat death of the universe might be a teensy bit of a barrier, but it's not obvious that finite resources imply that growth must fall to zero on human or historical time-scales, just that technological progress is going to be required.
The purpose of an economy is to produce economic welfare, so the desirability of any given level of growth is a different matter (consider lower/negative growth for increased leisure time or an improved environment for everyone, for example).
Since they seem to begin to realize that perpetual growth is impossible and that trading is what they have done all their life, they need to keep the profits coming in anyway. So they figured that by using "high-frequency algorithmic trading" they could keep the profits coming in.
You appear to be saying that trading profits will disappear in the absence of perpetual growth, unless "high-frequency algorithmic trading" is used. Why do you believe this?
Well, at the expense of whom ? How long can this trend be maintained before major problems arise in the economy ?
In theory anyway, the direct effect of the stock market and its prices on the (real) economy is through changes in decisions by savers and businesses. Who runs business ? How much should I save for retirement rather than spend? Which industries and companies have to pay how much for capital, determining which investment projects are worth undertaking and which are not? If our economy makes these decisions well then it will grow faster (because it invests in good projects, not, say, pointless dot coms, back-yard forges that don't work, rice planted too close together, cheese-mountains, or houses no-one needs) and give people better choices over how to spread their consumption through their life. (The stock market doesn't have a monopoly on making these choices).
These are quite long term decisions - weeks to decades. High frequency traders buy something and sell it a very short time later. They're probably only affecting the high-frequency components of price movements. So I think the biggest economic arguments against them are that they're a lot of pointless effort because they're unlikely to affect the economy's investment decisions, and that they increase income inequality in the process.
I doubt that would be especially effective, except at making sure that no-one forward looking or risk averse enters the industry. If 'there's a tiny risk of causing huge environmental damage and vast
financial cost to my employer, and tainting or ruining my and my employer's reputation forever' isn't enough, then legal sanctions on top probably won't discourage it much more. Humans don't work well
when assessing tiny risks with big penalties.
You need small penalties, frequently applied whenever the risk is taken, not big ones only applied only very occasionally when it goes bad. It won't sate anger in the same way, but it'll be more effective at changing behaviour.
I think there is no reason for child erotica - meaning nudity without sex acts - to be illegal at all. And after 14, anything goes. Pervert? No, realist. Or even the opposite, idealist -- expecting the laws to conform to REAL LIFE, rather than mad religion-based prudish standards.
I think you have to consider ability to consent a little more. A picture can last a long long time....to varying extents children need to be protected from making (or being talked in to) poor decisions which may negatively affect them for life. I don't think that two 14 year olds exchanging naked pictures with each other in a non-abusive consensual way should be met with criminal penalties because that's not an effective way to increase the welfare of children. (A 14 year old with a hidden camera should be a criminal, just like an adult would be, and treated like any other child accused of a crime). Permitting adults to talk under 18-year-olds in to posing for commercial photographs, or to publish them, is a rather different matter.
And now you and the original AC are guilty of doing exactly what he's criticizing. In extremis, it leads to this sort of thing: Two 17 year olds sending each other pictures => child pornography according to law => 'paedophile' label => raping babies => eject them from our society forever. Maybe someone accused of that is genuinely guilty of raping babies, or maybe guilty of something much less, or guilty of something criminal but non-abusive, or maybe not guilty at all....but you can't get over your idea of the label for long enough to want to find out or assess the quality of the law and its response.
You missed out 'How out was the perpetrator? The same age as the victim? Or even the same person? Was the perpetrator in a relationship with the victim, or even married?'.
People love labels, don't they? Then it's easy to insist 'we clamp down on child porn', by increasing the penalties and broadening the definition. Then, in your head, everyone with the label attached can be guilty of what you consider representative of the label without you ever stopping to think what you're actually making happen at the other end of the justice system.....like teenagers going to prison for sexual activity with each other.
1) There was a sale of goods, and therefore an implied contract term that the goods were fit for purpose.
In the case of hobbyist software
1) there is no sale of goods and no contract (an open source license is not a contract)
What I'm not clear on is whether this changes the status of licences. The last I read, licences alone were not goods. My brief scan of the judgement made me think there WERE goods (and support and training) involved in this contract as well as the licence. So I think there's a fourth reason to think that OSS might not be affected, even if it was sold: no goods are involved, only licences. I certainly wouldn't want to assume I could sue an off-the-shelf software supplier if its product was unusable.
Is there a lawyer here who knows the status of licences better than me?
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The benefits and costs of exercise are mostly internal. The person who gets the benefits of exercise also bears the costs. It's not nearly so obvious that the state should intervene as when the benefit recipient is one person and the cost bearers are a diffuse set of others.
Why just carbon emissions? Fossil fuel based transport also causes considerable externalities through accidents, congestion, noise, health damage from local pollutants and damage to buildings and crops through pollutants and vibration. These are often larger in cities than less densely populated areas, further pushing the balance towards trains there. This: http://econ.yorku.ca/~jametti/4080/Parry_etal_06.pdf (page 54, PDF page 57), for example, estimates that the greenhouse gas costs are much smaller than these other costs. I can't vouch for it's accuracy and I haven't read it thoroughly, but it's a good bet that the other costs are very significant even if not on that sort of scale.
Or have an extra set of wheels that drop down when necessary. Or go all the way and fit rockets (plus some on the sides for cornering). What could possibly go wrong?
This whole "plugins are derivative works" lie needs putting to bed once and for all. They are not. The final system including plugins is a derivative work but its one created by an end-user. If GPL people want to push this they'll need to go all RIAA on the asses of end-users.
I didn't think the GPL prohibited end users from doing this. Isn't the requirement: if you distribute a derived work to anyone then you must also distribute the source and do so under the GPL. If you don't distribute you don't need to grant a GPL to anyone, you can keep your private modifications private. Copying from disk to memory is still copying, so it could restrict this and commercial licences use this interpretation to restrict use of their software, but I don't think it does.
I'm sure that given a choice between it losing him money and it not existing, he'd choose the latter. If few are prepared to pay for news for as long as there is at least one decent free source then that may even be the outcome. Maybe that's why he hates the BBC so much.
Some do. Avoid them. How is it supposed to help you, anyway? Some use something similar to charge particles in the air and make them stick better to a filter, but emit almost no ozone. Unsurprisingly, HEPA filter air purifiers (which actually work) are quite a lot more expensive.
For professions like law, and many others, employers don't go for Oxford history graduates because they think that being trained in history makes them better lawyers. They do it because it proves that this individual is capable of getting through a tough admissions process, is prepared to work hard for later reward, is intelligent, is capable of careful extended study, is intellectually curious and ambitions, and wants to be good at what they do. It does this without the employer having to invest lots of time in testing for these things, which they have only a limited ability to do anyway.
It doesn't have to be Oxford for this to work, any university thought of as a 'proper' university will do for most employers. This does, of course, leave lots of room for prejudice about universities by employers - employers are not going to assess the quality of every university themselves - so it's easy for a lazy employer to abuse this. That doesn't make it go away, and it doesn't make it irrelevant. Besides, if you've got fifty applicants and plenty are from universities you already know or trust as good proof of these things, why would you spend your time finding out about the universities you don't know about?
Choose a university and course that's going to be difficult but possible for you, and that everyone else knows is difficult. For those who can only manage a media studies degree at the university of south west Clapham I'd say 'Don't bother, unless you want it for personal reasons only': there's not point getting a certificate that proves you're capable of something everyone sees as easy.
There's a difference between noticing and assessing something and memorizing a description.And have you ever seen someone look at their watch, asked the time and then seen him look at his watch again? Besides, You're probably scanning faces for emotional state, health status and sexual fitness - not all too strongly related to eye colour.
No, because some people have invalid but working e-mail addresses. I've used open source regexes copied from somewhere before. Refusing to sell someone something from your online shop because someone has let them set up a technically invalid address leads to awkward questions. The same is true if your filter turns out to be wrong. And it's pointless....why do you care if the hostname has an underscore in it, for example?
What's most important is to try to catch likely mistakes. You can catch a few - no @, a ',' instead of a '.' before the TLD - but most typos will pass your filter anyway. If you REALLY want to be helpful and don't mind the load, a DNS lookup would do far more.
Besides, your customer will be a lot more understanding of not getting an e-mail because he mistyped his address than being refused service because your software disapproves of it.
How old is the earth? I don;t know of any religion that asks or answers that. That six thousand year figure is in no bible, and itslef is historically recent.
It's sort of implied, though, and theologians certainly try to ask and answer that question in a religious way from religious sources.
How did humans come to exist? "Made of clay" and breathed to life pretty much sounds like lifeless chemicals somehow coming to life, and science still hasn't answered how life first occurred.
No, science hasn't answered it yet, but science and religion both seek to answer it. That's my point: there are many questions purported to be answered by religions which are ALSO scientific questions. The post I was answering contained a claim that science and religion ask and answer different questions. I disagree and the list I gave are my counter-examples. I'm not claiming that there are, as yet, accepted scientific answers.
The Jewish Torah, which is the Christain new testament, as largely a history of the ancient Jewish people. There were certainly large enough floods in the last several thousand years to have been percieved by eyewitnesses as global in scope. Not science, history.
You'd expect signs of these floods, however. Geology does sound rather like a science, so I think it's a scientific question, too.
What is the source and purpose of human morality? You can name a scientific research about this? I've never heard of any.
Some biologists are interested in it - is there an evolutionary advantage that caused it to be selected for?, does it come from group or individual selection? is it present in other apes?, what characteristics does it have? what aspects are inherent and what aspects are cultural? etc. Moral Minds by Marc Hauser is good (it's written for non-specialists and doesn't take any position on religion - it's well worth reading). It's quite refreshing compared to philosophers trying to answer the same question and never really establishing anything much.
Like these, you mean?: How old is the earth? How did humans come to exist? Did Christ/Mohammed/Moses/whoever really exist, whatever his status as deity? Has there ever been a global flood (and how did the fresh-water fish survive :) )? What is the source and purpose of human morality? And of consciousness? I'm sure there is no shortage of other questions which religion has claimed to answer but which science (or history or archaeology) also target.
The answer to 'Is this stone heavy?' doesn't depend on measuring apparatus, it depends on (implied) context. If you're moving lots of stones at the time it means 'Is this stone heavy compared to the other stones?'. If you're moving lots of objects it means 'compared to the other objects'. If you're about to pick it up it means 'compared to objects I might normally be expected to pick up'. Without the context there's no obvious answer, or at least no answer that doesn't guess at a context and supply it ('It's too heavy for one person to lift'). But if you take away any specification of which stone you're asking about, then the question is incomplete.
I don't believe that your example moral question, "should this unmarried couple have sex in these particular circumstances?", is complete, as you do. I'm arguing that moral questions need at least two parameters: the morally charged act, and the moral actor who will judge it. I'd also argue that such a question is not primarily a question about the act, but about the moral actor - even if that person is only implied by the question.
You're arguing that you can come up with an answer without specifying a particular moral judge by asking 'how much do people in general believe this to be moral?'. I don't think that many people's opinions can be integrated to produce a definitive result...just look at the literature on voting systems, for example. I think what you end up with is an imperfect summary of many people's opinions. Besides, some questions ('which god is it moral to worship?', 'is homosexuality acceptable?', etc) will produce widespread conflict - and much resulting behaviour will come out of the existence of the conflict, not from some sort of 'average'. You might as well ask which element the sea is made out of. No element you could choose would be correct: it's made of many, in a particular arrangement, and saying 'oxygen' because it most corresponds (in the sense of most of the weight being made up of oxygen) doesn't get you a sensible answer.
Maybe you could get a practical answer by asking about the societal outcome ('is it illegal?', 'will the people around me refuse to deal with me?'), but I don't think that's an answer in principle. It's just something you can use to inform your behavioural choices. It'd be perfectly legitimate to disagree with it, too.
Your last paragraph becomes irrelevant in my (current) view of things. I'm arguing that normative questions ARE factual questions - they're factual questions about a person, or a group of people (though you then have to accept a statistical answer, not an absolute one). If you could present a person with the situation and measure his emotional state, via his brain (with a scanner, or by asking and hoping he doesn't lie), then you have your answer.
But it WASN'T sudden, it was continuous and sustained over many years. People saw other people buying lots of property and nothing bad happening, and people saw public predictions of crashes that didn't come.
You're sort of right about the limits on what people can pay for housing, but few people think enough about it to relate the value and price of housing services (the right to live in a house for, say, a month) to the price of whole houses.
Why is a house valuable? Because you can live in it. What's a year of housing services worth? Look at the rental market, and you will see (roughly, living in a house you own may be worth a little more). So what's a house worth? The present value of all future rental payments.
Or, to put it another way, imagine you have a bank account. If you know what the future interest payments (equivalent to rents) are, and you know what the future interest rates are, then you can calculate what the current balance (equivalent to house prices) should be.
That leaves a lot of guessing about future interest rates and rents (and tax regimes, risk levels, local factors, and so on)...but there comes a point when the numbers become implausible. And that point was long before prices stopped rising.
People don't think like that. People judge whether a house is expensive by comparing it to other houses, and by comparing mortgage payments to incomes as you have done, not by comparing prices to the value extracted from living in it. People impute momentum to house prices, too. 'Brainless' is harsh, most people don't have an economist's perspective because they don't think about that sort of thing very often. And the media sure as hell isn't going to help, it's far too complicated and boring for television.
Won't work. Pretty much anybody with any brains knew the housing thing was a bubble but nobody wants to pull out of a bubble before it peaks. Imagine if you pull out and have to sit and watch everybody else make money if the bubble lasts another year.
Most people don't have brains (or the necessary mental tools, anyway), and that can make things unpredictable. Even those with planet-sized brains can't predict the outcome when it's at the mercy of the brainless masses. All bubbles may burst, but not necessarily in your lifetime.
Besides, even fairly sensible people get scared. No-one thinks 'one day, I too will own Microsoft shares', but people DO think that about houses. When you see prices going up and up you can start to worry that you'll be locked out of the market forever if you don't buy/sell now. You might think it's almost certainly a bubble, but are you really REALLY sure? It can feel like a very personal risk in a way that not buying Microsoft shares does not.
The Doctors are the people directing the medical care of patients, why should they become accountants?
They don't need to become accountants, but all spending in the NHS in one area takes it away from another. Spend more time or money on one test, there's less left for another. Spend more on drugs, there's less for tests. More on tests, less for nurses. More on nurses, less for something else, etc. Decisions on what the limited budget and limited staff time is spent on have to be made, balancing different possible uses for best clinical effect. Who would you rather do it? Accountants or doctors?
(OK, false simplification, it has to be made in many places by many people doing many different jobs at many levels, but you can't simply say 'doctors should never care about the resources they're using'. Doctors shouldn't be adding up figures in their head to see if they can afford the test from their budget, but they should have some idea of what's expensive and what's not).
It's an obvious attempt at rationing care services, and yes if overnight bloods haven't been done when a doctor has stipulated needing them done for specific patients due to a clinical need for that patient then patient welfare is put at risk!
Health care must be rationed somehow. Spend 100% of GDP on health care and someone somewhere will want more. The NHS can not remove all health risk, but it must try to remove as much as it can with it's budget. You can't do that by labelling everything top priority. I doubt the world can be divided in to 'clinical need for overnight results' and 'no clinical need' anyway, even it it's sometimes obvious. To a doctor filling in tick-boxes on a form in a busy environment, ticking a box marked 'urgent' is an easy and safe (in a CYA and personal pride in outcomes way) thing to do. Doing it when it's not necessary will come at the expense of other patients' care. Getting hospitals and doctors, collectively, to balance things the right way is not an easy problem.
But making them write 'please' is still just a plain stupid way to try to do it. Assuming it's even true, and not just that one uppity nurse or technician did it once on his own initiative.
I'm then suggesting that a question like 'Should unmarried couples have sex?' is incomplete - in the same way that 'how tall is the tower' is incomplete if you don't specify which tower. Or perhaps like 'would you like a banana?' but without the 'you' (our language can't construct that sentence very well, 'are bananas likeable?' in a context with no implied 'to whom' is perhaps the closest). It's missing a parameter - the person whose moral response you wish to solicit (though, of course, if I asked specifically you the question then it would be implied that that person is you). Even once the person is specified, I'm thinking that the question is equivalent to a question along the lines of 'Does the thought of an unmarried couple having sex induce feelings of disgust or anger in you, or would knowing that you yourself had engaged in this induce feelings of guilt or shame?'. (In the same way 'would you like a banana?' is like asking 'does the prospect of eating a banana induce feelings of pleasure or satisfaction in you right now?'). This reduces the question to one of observable fact, at least potentially. A sufficiently sophisticated machine could measure every detail of your brain and determine the answer. That still leaves unanswered questions (the answers to which would have to be programmed in to this machine) such as exactly which emotions count and what, within a brain, counts as those emotions - it still leaves the problem of people agreeing on what the world is like, as you put it. But that's ALL they're having to agree on. There's no 'moral answer' that's some special kind of answer to a special kind of question. These are not different realms of questions, factual and moral, just funny ways of phrasing them.
Naturally, you could ask a question such as 'Do people in general think that unmarried couple should have sex?', and answer it in the same way you could answer 'How tall are 14th century towers, typically?' - by giving a range or information about the distribution of answers. You could even, in principle, ask the question with (a) god as the moral subject, were a personal god to exist. You might even be able to ask the question with a fictional person as the moral subject, given enough information about emotional responses to morally charge situations in the fictional world. 'Is eating kittens immorral for Lord Voldemort?', say, or 'Is extra-marital sex immoral for the Christian god?'. But the answers are statements about the fiction (and your interpretation and extensions of it), not the moral question. I suppose, in that framework, religious moral answers would be like specifying that the moral agent for whose emotional response you are asking is always, implicitly, god.
If that were all correct I think there'd be no sense in which a standard method of answering moral questions analogous to the scientific method could arise. Answers to moral questions could be measured, given a paricular individual, and measured better and better with technological progress. But there'd be no sense in which there'd be moral progression, no equivalent to, say, forming theories of star formation based on theories of gravity, temperature and pressure and nuclear reactions. You couldn't develop new principles, put together earlier results with logic to produce a new model, or come to an improved theoretical understanding. There'd just be the equivalent of measuring a particular constant ever more accurately.
Are there are any good arguments that there IS an 'ought', that it exists at all? Or for what sort of thing it is?
Perhaps, for example, 'ought' is the emotional result of feeding a representation of a moral question in to the morality-processing part of a human brain? (Or in to a whole brain, since it'd be better not to go assuming that bits of it are separable like that). Then 'ought' becomes something you could determine empirically, and different for each person. In principle you could then lay down a new brain, neuron by neuron, inside a manufactured body fed with the right experiences, that could have a wide variety of 'ought's-to-order come out of it.
Whatever it is that determines these things, there's apparently some sort of cultural paramaterization of how humans make moral judgements, and some parts of the mechanism that are part of our species. So there's bound to be some commonality of human moral responses within a culture...constantly changing as individuals and events influence the culture and vice versa. No end of argument over voting systems or economists' social welfare functions has ever come up with an obviously correct way of integrating a bunch of individuals' opinions or interests. I can't see why moral positions would be different. It'd just be a big continuous argument, with no conclusion, no 'answers', just outcomes.
If the CEO of that mining company that was fined time and time again for the very conditions that caused the catastrophe that killed two dozen miners, and the CEO of BP both went to prison for negligent homicide (as they should, IMO) then I wouldn't complain about their excessive pay.
So you wish to turn being CEO of such a corporation in to a job the provides very high income in exchange for accepting high personal risk.
What sort of candidates are you hoping for?
A perpetually growing economy usually involves the average wage rising so average people can buy more stuff while still working less.
Presumably you mean 'mean real wage' (average wage figures seem to be medians, unless specified). Exports count as part of GDP, so it's possible for consumption to fall whilst output rises, at least until you've exported enough to pay for the some of the excess imports your economy has been consuming for the past few decades. Imports count negatively, so consuming less of them can make GDP larger. Assuming, that is, you meant something like 'the US economy' and not the world economy. It's also not necessary that people work less for there to be perpetual growth, although it could be true.
Have you looked around lately ? In fact you are right in some way: every year we need less people, so by the market rule, the average wage goes down relatively to what you can buy for a dollar on average, especially food and lodging.
'Need' less people? You've obviously not noticed the Xelah rule of unemployment: there's no shortage of stuff worth doing in the world. The problem we have right now is that the economy is not arranging for it to be done. That's because it's an already imperfect control system gone wrong, not because there's something fundamentally wrong with growth.
Well at least, they seem to start to realize that perpetual growth is impossible to achieve in a finite universe. For us, right now, this means our planet.
Economic growth = growth in the value of everything an economy produces, not the physical quantity it produces. Making faster computers with fewer inputs compared to forty years ago is an obvious example. The heat death of the universe might be a teensy bit of a barrier, but it's not obvious that finite resources imply that growth must fall to zero on human or historical time-scales, just that technological progress is going to be required.
The purpose of an economy is to produce economic welfare, so the desirability of any given level of growth is a different matter (consider lower/negative growth for increased leisure time or an improved environment for everyone, for example).
Since they seem to begin to realize that perpetual growth is impossible and that trading is what they have done all their life, they need to keep the profits coming in anyway. So they figured that by using "high-frequency algorithmic trading" they could keep the profits coming in.
You appear to be saying that trading profits will disappear in the absence of perpetual growth, unless "high-frequency algorithmic trading" is used. Why do you believe this?
Well, at the expense of whom ? How long can this trend be maintained before major problems arise in the economy ?
In theory anyway, the direct effect of the stock market and its prices on the (real) economy is through changes in decisions by savers and businesses. Who runs business ? How much should I save for retirement rather than spend? Which industries and companies have to pay how much for capital, determining which investment projects are worth undertaking and which are not? If our economy makes these decisions well then it will grow faster (because it invests in good projects, not, say, pointless dot coms, back-yard forges that don't work, rice planted too close together, cheese-mountains, or houses no-one needs) and give people better choices over how to spread their consumption through their life. (The stock market doesn't have a monopoly on making these choices).
These are quite long term decisions - weeks to decades. High frequency traders buy something and sell it a very short time later. They're probably only affecting the high-frequency components of price movements. So I think the biggest economic arguments against them are that they're a lot of pointless effort because they're unlikely to affect the economy's investment decisions, and that they increase income inequality in the process.
I doubt that would be especially effective, except at making sure that no-one forward looking or risk averse enters the industry. If 'there's a tiny risk of causing huge environmental damage and vast financial cost to my employer, and tainting or ruining my and my employer's reputation forever' isn't enough, then legal sanctions on top probably won't discourage it much more. Humans don't work well when assessing tiny risks with big penalties.
You need small penalties, frequently applied whenever the risk is taken, not big ones only applied only very occasionally when it goes bad. It won't sate anger in the same way, but it'll be more effective at changing behaviour.
I think there is no reason for child erotica - meaning nudity without sex acts - to be illegal at all. And after 14, anything goes. Pervert? No, realist. Or even the opposite, idealist -- expecting the laws to conform to REAL LIFE, rather than mad religion-based prudish standards.
I think you have to consider ability to consent a little more. A picture can last a long long time....to varying extents children need to be protected from making (or being talked in to) poor decisions which may negatively affect them for life. I don't think that two 14 year olds exchanging naked pictures with each other in a non-abusive consensual way should be met with criminal penalties because that's not an effective way to increase the welfare of children. (A 14 year old with a hidden camera should be a criminal, just like an adult would be, and treated like any other child accused of a crime). Permitting adults to talk under 18-year-olds in to posing for commercial photographs, or to publish them, is a rather different matter.
And now you and the original AC are guilty of doing exactly what he's criticizing. In extremis, it leads to this sort of thing: Two 17 year olds sending each other pictures => child pornography according to law => 'paedophile' label => raping babies => eject them from our society forever. Maybe someone accused of that is genuinely guilty of raping babies, or maybe guilty of something much less, or guilty of something criminal but non-abusive, or maybe not guilty at all....but you can't get over your idea of the label for long enough to want to find out or assess the quality of the law and its response.
You missed out 'How out was the perpetrator? The same age as the victim? Or even the same person? Was the perpetrator in a relationship with the victim, or even married?'.
People love labels, don't they? Then it's easy to insist 'we clamp down on child porn', by increasing the penalties and broadening the definition. Then, in your head, everyone with the label attached can be guilty of what you consider representative of the label without you ever stopping to think what you're actually making happen at the other end of the justice system.....like teenagers going to prison for sexual activity with each other.
1) There was a sale of goods, and therefore an implied contract term that the goods were fit for purpose.
In the case of hobbyist software 1) there is no sale of goods and no contract (an open source license is not a contract)
What I'm not clear on is whether this changes the status of licences. The last I read, licences alone were not goods. My brief scan of the judgement made me think there WERE goods (and support and training) involved in this contract as well as the licence. So I think there's a fourth reason to think that OSS might not be affected, even if it was sold: no goods are involved, only licences. I certainly wouldn't want to assume I could sue an off-the-shelf software supplier if its product was unusable.
Is there a lawyer here who knows the status of licences better than me?