Lots of people are messed up about protecting children from every imaginable thing, so I'd think at least some politicians are afflicted as well. Reasons don't have to be manipulative just because they are stupid, maybe the person giving those reasons is just messed up. Of course they can be.
They have been given an unlimited budget to perform a task that is already performed by other agencies. The outcome of that is that they need to be seen to be doing something with all that money, yet there is nothing sensible for them to do. So we get full body scanners, gropings and inspections to determine if you are carrying shampoo.
Wikipedia: "The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 Sv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 Sv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 Sv (2 mrems) - 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to US regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure".[11]"
I were saying that you already get exposed to radiation when you fly and that's it. I now add that if the additional radiation from these devices really are much less than that, then if that represents a health hazard, then flying would be much more of a hazard. It would be like worrying about getting your skin wrinkled from the water while a shark is eating you. The issue here is not that these devices are unsafe, because they are safe enough, the issue is that they are a completely idiotic waste of time and money that could be spent on actually productive endeavors. Reallocating these resources to cleaning roads with toothbrushes would be a significant decrease in idiocy.
I'm one of the people who have opted to drive instead of flying several times this year precisely because of the issues with airports, and the security theater is definitely a main part of that. Though just getting rid of the new scanners and intrusive pat-downs isn't nearly enough to fix security theater.
The amount of atmosphere above you is decreased when you fly, and hence you are less protected than at sea level. If you worry about small exposures you should also stay away from buildings with concrete in them.
Seeing as it is coming from Mozilla you'd think these apps would be written for use on Mozilla browsers using their XUL platform. In that case these apps should as well or as poorly as the Mozilla browser itself does. The one problem might be apps requiring more processing power or ram than your phone has, which is the exact same issue on PCs.
Yep, and it goes further when Bob purchases something from Celia for the money he loaned, and Celia then puts those 250$ in the bank. The bank now again has 1000$ that it can lend. The bank is required to keep a fraction of the money in reserve, so this doesn't continue into infinity money for the bank since the reserve fraction gets locked down again each time around.
One idea is that YOU observe something when the outcome of that thing has an effect on you. So observing is not a global thing, it is relative to you, and when you observe you create your own world in which the outcome of the observation is fixed. So it's not about consciousness having a privileged capacity to observe - a rock can observe something just as well as you can, but that doesn't count to you since you haven't observed it, so in your world the rock just enters a superposition. As far as I know this interpretation is the only one that fully fits how Quantum Mechanics actually works, the problem is just that it is hard to accept.
I'd say it was the other way around - making up tests as you go is irresponsible even if it is necessary for most teachers to do that because of a lack of good tests. The people who prepare tests have that as their specialty and so should be better at it. Do you also complain that your pilot didn't assemble the airplane you're flying in himself? On the contrary, seeking out well prepared tests as opposed to making stuff up as you go is the right thing to do. He may or may not have chosen a poor place to get his tests, that I don't know, just as a pilot can fly a poor plane. The problem is then in the quality of the plane and not in that the pilot didn't assemble the plane himself.
Discovery = invention. The distinction between the two is a distinction without a difference. Yes, I'm saying that you can say that you invented America when you found it, and that you discovered the automobile if you invented it. It's just that we like to use one word in some circumstances and the other word in other circumstances. However, this reflects only our own idiosyncrasies and reflects nothing about reality. In that way the distinction is like that between "is" and "are". It's about what we like to do rather than reality.
Then we could also consider Earth itself to be celestial since all the matter that makes it up used to be something else, and all of it came from space before it became Earth. The meaning is clear: something collected from space by us and then shielded from being altered when brought back to Earth, such as by not allowing it to come into contact with our atmosphere.
That's what I told my plumber the other day too. He is accumulating experience while performing the work I requested, and I expect him to pay me back for that in the course of the rest of his life. He told me I hired him to fix my plumbing and then sent me a bill - the nerve of these people!:(
It's not that there is no intention of staying in the US, it's that it is impossible to stay due to a rule that you must return to your home country for at least 2 years before you can apply to go to the US again.
Academic cheating is breaking the rules, usually in ways that favor you in some way. Collaborative writing of graded papers that are given to be solved on one's own are then cheating. That's just by definition, so there isn't much space for arguing against that. What it seems you want to say is that some kinds of cheating are OK, except you don't want to come out and say it that way. Your post would have made a stronger argument by stating your position clearly and then given a proper rationale for that. E.g. you could say that the rules of some academic institutions ought to be different, and therefore cheating by breaking those rules is OK, even if that puts non-cheating students at a disadvantage.
I disagree that collaboration on school projects should always be allowed. The point of a test is to test you, not to test your friends. Not that I think group work is bad - on the contrary it's important. It's just that I won't think very highly of a place where every or even most tests are collaborative (unless for some reason that is unavoidable). If you don't understand something that the course requires you to understand at the test on your own, then you don't understand it. It does nothing to improve that situation that your friend understands it, because he won't be there throughout your career to do your work for you. Now collaborating on understanding the books and materials of the course, that's better than OK, that's downright the best way to do it, but the thing to take away from that is independent understanding, not understanding defined as "I can ask my friend to solve this for me if it comes up."
Where this really comes up for some students is when ALL the studying and homework they do is for the graded content of a course. Then there IS nothing else they can collaborate on, because it really is ALL they do. If that's your situation, and the source of your problems with non-collaborative work, then you are doing it wrong. You are supposed to spend more time on your courses.
On second thought, I stated that you employed ad hominem, and that isn't true. You were instead mixing poor argumentation and rudeness, but your poor argumentation did not depend on being rude, it merely coincided with rudeness and that isn't ad hominem. It becomes no more interesting to engage with for not being ad hominem, though.
It's hard to get a group of millions of people to cooperate in a Prisoner's Dilemma especially when most don't understand the issue until it bites them in the ass.
I'm talking about the reaction people have to specifically clubbing baby seals, i.e. the method of killing, not the status of the species as endangered. People object to it because baby seals are cute and they are cute because the look a little like human babies - they appeal to our emotions more and so we don't like the thought of them being clubbed to death. Rats are annoying and not cute, so club away, is what is going on there. In the same way parents are miswired to consider child deaths to be more serious than other deaths, because child deaths threaten their genes' investment in having children - this is so strong that it even extends to baby seals.
Any other reasons are stories we make up to justify that. E.g. the circumstances of a murder already play into how we view it and how it is punished, so there would need be no special status for killing children other than in that that may correlate with certain circumstances. That's not what it is about, e.g. according to your argument that children are less likely to carry money we should view a contract killing of a child as less serious than otherwise. I don't see how that makes sense, in fact I'd expect contract killings to be punished more harshly. The defenseless part is a red herring too - everyone is defenseless to being killed by a non-moron with access to guns. It is also not about years left to live, as we don't consider a killing of a 30 year old to be less serious than a killing of a 25 year old, and people don't get reduced sentences for killing 50 year olds either. It is about the emotions parents have about children, and those parents vote and hold positions of power.
I would expect someone who shot a random 5 year old to get a worse sentence than someone who shot a random 30 year old because the former crime is far worse, despite the only difference being the victim.
Huh, I'd put it the other way around. Is this kind of like how clubbing a baby seal is worse than clubbing a baby raccoon or baby rat? I don't think clubbing any kind of animal is a good thing to do, but being cute or otherwise emotionally appealing doesn't make it worse or better. Do you have some other reasoning? The benefit to society of a 30 year old is higher because such a person is likely to have special skills that can make a contribution, while the 5 year old will have to be heavily invested in to reach that point (with high enough age that relationship reverses). In fact I bet fewer people are likely to shoot 5 year olds than 30 year olds, despite the fact that children are less capable of defending themselves, so that there in fact is more of a need for discouraging the shooting of 30 year olds. I'd put the two things as about equal in terms of deserving or needing punishment, but if there had to a distinction, shooting the 30 year old is worse because it is equally damaging to the victim and more damaging to society. I'm thinking you are a parent, is that true?
If you are selling at the optimal price, then you'd just be making even more of a loss selling at any other price, by definition, and fixed costs do not affect the optimal price directly. If you can predict that the optimal price is going to put you in the red, then you won't offer the product at all. Fixed costs are not relevant to price other than in reducing competition, though it's role in reducing competition can be significant and so the indirect effect can be significant. The drug companies sell at a high price because that makes them the most money. Think of it this way: do you believe that drug companies would reduce prices if they had no fixed costs, in cases where they have no competition due to a patent? Why would they do that?
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Lots of people are messed up about protecting children from every imaginable thing, so I'd think at least some politicians are afflicted as well. Reasons don't have to be manipulative just because they are stupid, maybe the person giving those reasons is just messed up. Of course they can be.
They have been given an unlimited budget to perform a task that is already performed by other agencies. The outcome of that is that they need to be seen to be doing something with all that money, yet there is nothing sensible for them to do. So we get full body scanners, gropings and inspections to determine if you are carrying shampoo.
Can we agree that 200x is "much"?
Wikipedia: "The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 Sv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 Sv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 Sv (2 mrems) - 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to US regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure".[11]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray#Health_effects
Is acid rain in the ocean bad?
I were saying that you already get exposed to radiation when you fly and that's it. I now add that if the additional radiation from these devices really are much less than that, then if that represents a health hazard, then flying would be much more of a hazard. It would be like worrying about getting your skin wrinkled from the water while a shark is eating you. The issue here is not that these devices are unsafe, because they are safe enough, the issue is that they are a completely idiotic waste of time and money that could be spent on actually productive endeavors. Reallocating these resources to cleaning roads with toothbrushes would be a significant decrease in idiocy.
I'm one of the people who have opted to drive instead of flying several times this year precisely because of the issues with airports, and the security theater is definitely a main part of that. Though just getting rid of the new scanners and intrusive pat-downs isn't nearly enough to fix security theater.
The amount of atmosphere above you is decreased when you fly, and hence you are less protected than at sea level. If you worry about small exposures you should also stay away from buildings with concrete in them.
Seeing as it is coming from Mozilla you'd think these apps would be written for use on Mozilla browsers using their XUL platform. In that case these apps should as well or as poorly as the Mozilla browser itself does. The one problem might be apps requiring more processing power or ram than your phone has, which is the exact same issue on PCs.
Yep, and it goes further when Bob purchases something from Celia for the money he loaned, and Celia then puts those 250$ in the bank. The bank now again has 1000$ that it can lend. The bank is required to keep a fraction of the money in reserve, so this doesn't continue into infinity money for the bank since the reserve fraction gets locked down again each time around.
One idea is that YOU observe something when the outcome of that thing has an effect on you. So observing is not a global thing, it is relative to you, and when you observe you create your own world in which the outcome of the observation is fixed. So it's not about consciousness having a privileged capacity to observe - a rock can observe something just as well as you can, but that doesn't count to you since you haven't observed it, so in your world the rock just enters a superposition. As far as I know this interpretation is the only one that fully fits how Quantum Mechanics actually works, the problem is just that it is hard to accept.
I'd say it was the other way around - making up tests as you go is irresponsible even if it is necessary for most teachers to do that because of a lack of good tests. The people who prepare tests have that as their specialty and so should be better at it. Do you also complain that your pilot didn't assemble the airplane you're flying in himself? On the contrary, seeking out well prepared tests as opposed to making stuff up as you go is the right thing to do. He may or may not have chosen a poor place to get his tests, that I don't know, just as a pilot can fly a poor plane. The problem is then in the quality of the plane and not in that the pilot didn't assemble the plane himself.
Discovery = invention. The distinction between the two is a distinction without a difference. Yes, I'm saying that you can say that you invented America when you found it, and that you discovered the automobile if you invented it. It's just that we like to use one word in some circumstances and the other word in other circumstances. However, this reflects only our own idiosyncrasies and reflects nothing about reality. In that way the distinction is like that between "is" and "are". It's about what we like to do rather than reality.
Then we could also consider Earth itself to be celestial since all the matter that makes it up used to be something else, and all of it came from space before it became Earth. The meaning is clear: something collected from space by us and then shielded from being altered when brought back to Earth, such as by not allowing it to come into contact with our atmosphere.
That's what I told my plumber the other day too. He is accumulating experience while performing the work I requested, and I expect him to pay me back for that in the course of the rest of his life. He told me I hired him to fix my plumbing and then sent me a bill - the nerve of these people! :(
It's not that there is no intention of staying in the US, it's that it is impossible to stay due to a rule that you must return to your home country for at least 2 years before you can apply to go to the US again.
They do when it comes to studying, they don't when it comes to testing individual performance. Is that strange?
Academic cheating is breaking the rules, usually in ways that favor you in some way. Collaborative writing of graded papers that are given to be solved on one's own are then cheating. That's just by definition, so there isn't much space for arguing against that. What it seems you want to say is that some kinds of cheating are OK, except you don't want to come out and say it that way. Your post would have made a stronger argument by stating your position clearly and then given a proper rationale for that. E.g. you could say that the rules of some academic institutions ought to be different, and therefore cheating by breaking those rules is OK, even if that puts non-cheating students at a disadvantage.
I disagree that collaboration on school projects should always be allowed. The point of a test is to test you, not to test your friends. Not that I think group work is bad - on the contrary it's important. It's just that I won't think very highly of a place where every or even most tests are collaborative (unless for some reason that is unavoidable). If you don't understand something that the course requires you to understand at the test on your own, then you don't understand it. It does nothing to improve that situation that your friend understands it, because he won't be there throughout your career to do your work for you. Now collaborating on understanding the books and materials of the course, that's better than OK, that's downright the best way to do it, but the thing to take away from that is independent understanding, not understanding defined as "I can ask my friend to solve this for me if it comes up."
Where this really comes up for some students is when ALL the studying and homework they do is for the graded content of a course. Then there IS nothing else they can collaborate on, because it really is ALL they do. If that's your situation, and the source of your problems with non-collaborative work, then you are doing it wrong. You are supposed to spend more time on your courses.
It's like measuring coder output by the number of nods you get from the customer when presenting a non-interactive demo of the software.
On second thought, I stated that you employed ad hominem, and that isn't true. You were instead mixing poor argumentation and rudeness, but your poor argumentation did not depend on being rude, it merely coincided with rudeness and that isn't ad hominem. It becomes no more interesting to engage with for not being ad hominem, though.
Rabbits are not clubbed to death. For the rest, ad hominem isn't an argument.
It's hard to get a group of millions of people to cooperate in a Prisoner's Dilemma especially when most don't understand the issue until it bites them in the ass.
Nor is it possible for a consensus to be uninformed, if it includes anyone who is informed.
Can you elaborate on that argument?
I'm talking about the reaction people have to specifically clubbing baby seals, i.e. the method of killing, not the status of the species as endangered. People object to it because baby seals are cute and they are cute because the look a little like human babies - they appeal to our emotions more and so we don't like the thought of them being clubbed to death. Rats are annoying and not cute, so club away, is what is going on there. In the same way parents are miswired to consider child deaths to be more serious than other deaths, because child deaths threaten their genes' investment in having children - this is so strong that it even extends to baby seals.
Any other reasons are stories we make up to justify that. E.g. the circumstances of a murder already play into how we view it and how it is punished, so there would need be no special status for killing children other than in that that may correlate with certain circumstances. That's not what it is about, e.g. according to your argument that children are less likely to carry money we should view a contract killing of a child as less serious than otherwise. I don't see how that makes sense, in fact I'd expect contract killings to be punished more harshly. The defenseless part is a red herring too - everyone is defenseless to being killed by a non-moron with access to guns. It is also not about years left to live, as we don't consider a killing of a 30 year old to be less serious than a killing of a 25 year old, and people don't get reduced sentences for killing 50 year olds either. It is about the emotions parents have about children, and those parents vote and hold positions of power.
I would expect someone who shot a random 5 year old to get a worse sentence than someone who shot a random 30 year old because the former crime is far worse, despite the only difference being the victim.
Huh, I'd put it the other way around. Is this kind of like how clubbing a baby seal is worse than clubbing a baby raccoon or baby rat? I don't think clubbing any kind of animal is a good thing to do, but being cute or otherwise emotionally appealing doesn't make it worse or better. Do you have some other reasoning? The benefit to society of a 30 year old is higher because such a person is likely to have special skills that can make a contribution, while the 5 year old will have to be heavily invested in to reach that point (with high enough age that relationship reverses). In fact I bet fewer people are likely to shoot 5 year olds than 30 year olds, despite the fact that children are less capable of defending themselves, so that there in fact is more of a need for discouraging the shooting of 30 year olds. I'd put the two things as about equal in terms of deserving or needing punishment, but if there had to a distinction, shooting the 30 year old is worse because it is equally damaging to the victim and more damaging to society. I'm thinking you are a parent, is that true?
If you are selling at the optimal price, then you'd just be making even more of a loss selling at any other price, by definition, and fixed costs do not affect the optimal price directly. If you can predict that the optimal price is going to put you in the red, then you won't offer the product at all. Fixed costs are not relevant to price other than in reducing competition, though it's role in reducing competition can be significant and so the indirect effect can be significant. The drug companies sell at a high price because that makes them the most money. Think of it this way: do you believe that drug companies would reduce prices if they had no fixed costs, in cases where they have no competition due to a patent? Why would they do that?