I want a digital camera to do what my 35mm camera does best. Multiple shots in quick succession and ability to adjust F stop and shutter speed.
Ah, but the problem here isn't really digital vs. 35mm. Cameras since about 1985 are much harder to use manually in general, since the manufacturers started going to electronic controls and automatic focus. The electronic controls mean that instead of having separate knobs to control things like aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you have one "control dial" and a dozen tiny little buttons with hardly any tactile feedback; to change anything, it becomes a game of pressing one button at the same time that you turn the one dial. With automatic focus, the lenses were remade so that they don't have the damped focusing ring of old days, and the viewfinders of the cameras aren't very well suited for judging focus by eye.
Now digital adds new problems on top of that, with menu hell and small APS-C sensors that result in tiny viewfinders that are even harder to focus. And what's worse, lots of lenses nowadays don't have focus distance nor depth-of-field scales, making it impossible to use all of the prefocusing techniques available in manual focus mode.
All the automation added to SLR cameras since about 1985 makes them easier to use for beginners, but in the end, much slower to use for most experienced photographers. There are some exceptions, sure, for example, sports photography. But fiddling with autofocus and exposure compensation before every shot just means that you'll be too slow to take good spontaneous shots of people.
"The authors recommended that universities and companies create options for women with math talents who want to pursue math-intensive careers. These could include deferred start-up of tenure-track positions and part-time work that segues to full-time tenure-track work for women who are raising children, and courtesy appointments for women unable to work full time but who would benefit from use of university resources (e-mail, library resources, grant support) to continue their research from home."
Ah, so when feminists talk about 'equality' what they really mean is, "we want special treatment so that we get equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity based on the same starting point".
The problem with your criticism here is that feminists want to make these options available for men too. The description you cite is very misleading, I'll grant: it's described as "options for women" because the proposals would have a bigger effect on women than on men. Feminists in fact would be quite delighted if men took the option described in larger numbers, instead of treating child rearing as their women's responsibility...
At least insurance is voluntary. I choose not to buy any, since I think it's cheaper to "pay as you go" when the bills roll in. Paying my current ~$100 a year health expenses is cheaper than paying the insurance dues.
...and then the day you find yourself needing long-term coverage you cannot afford, you'll find that there is no insurance available that can protect you from that risk, because of all of the idiots like you whose adverse selection made it impossible to insure against that risk.
Absolutely, many jurisdictions have variations. My point was that it appears to be more about disclosing private information than about actual libel.
And now you're repeating the mistake. You can't call it "actual libel" just like that; there isn't an authoritative concept of "libel" outside of the laws of the many jurisdictions that have torts or offences called "libel." Libel is what the law says libel is, not whatever Wikipedia does, and the law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
You are making two errors here that I addressed in separate posts:
Misusing Wikipedia's legal articles. In short, you can't reason about actual cases or law using Wikipedia definitions. Wikipedia's a decent guide to what kinds of acts are covered by the laws of most jurisdictions, but not necessarily to the actual details of the law of most jurisdictions.
Failing to consider edge cases that the law will consider. There are court rulings that provide for situations where true statements can be libelous or defamatory. The easiest examples to understand are statements made with a reckless disregard for the truth. You can libel somebody with nothing but true statements if your motives were so that you didn't actually care whether they were true. My example from the post: accusing a man of being homosexual without actual knowledge, who then does turn out to actually be so.
The law is different in every state, and even often within different counties of the same state. You cannot apply Wikipedia's definitions of crimes and torts to cases that are being disputed under the law of one specific jurisdiction, because there's a very good chance that the definitions and case law is not the same.
Wikipedia's definitions of crimes and torts are a usually a sort of lowest common denominator to help you understand the overall landscape of what general types of acts jurisdictions treat as crimes or torts; so, yes, jurisdictions normally have laws that deal with the public disclosure of private facts. The precise classification is always jurisdiction-specific; some jursidictions might have a separate tort or offense for it, some might treat it as one subcase of other offenses.
Strictly speaking, that aspect should not be contained in the libel law because a true statement cannot be a libelous statement.
No, that's just not true, and limiting libel to false statements would be very wrong. The SCOTUS definition of "actual malice" includes a very important case that shows why: "reckless disregard for truth."
It's not enough to make statements that just happen to be true; you must make statements that you are justified in believing. So, for example, suppose you wanted to discredit Joe Blow, so you went around spreading the "lie" that Joe Blow is gay and slept with the mayor's son (who is known to be gay). You had no particular reason to believe either statement at the time. Joe Blow accuses you of libel, defamation or whatever other thing is applicable in this case. It then is discovered that Joe is actually gay, and did sleep with the mayor's son, so your allegations against him were actually true.
You should not be able to win the case. When you accused Joe, you didn't care whether the accusations were true or false. All you cared about was the effect that the accusations would have on Joe and his dealings with others.
Casting from a container of Derived to a container of Base should be safe.
Not if your container supports an operation to add elements to the collection. If you could do that cast, you could cast the Container of Derived to Container of Base and add an arbitrary element of type Base, but not of type Derived.
More generally, if X(Y) is a type parametrized over Y, and Z is a subtype of Y, then asserting that X(Z) is a subtype of X(Y) fails, because X might have an operation that takes an argument of the parameter type.
Meanwhile, the topic "why can't I cast List to List - this must be broken!" is recurring on microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp probably about every two weeks.
My understanding is that OP's formulation of the LSP just won't work, because the term "behavior" is too broad. (For reference, here's the formulation I'm referring to: "If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behavior of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T.")
The Wikipedia article has a better formulation, in terms of properties proveable of objects of the types in question (which I suspect is still not quite right, but that's another topic). Basically, for your supertype Publisher, there is some set of properties that should be proveable of every object of that type; for example, the type signature of the methods in question, and invariants that the operations on the type respect. Those properties should be respected by the subtypes for them to be correctly called subtypes at all.
In your example, given the premise that an object is of type Publisher, then it can be proven that the object has the operation publish(). Given that premise, however, it cannot be proven that the publish() operation sends either email or SMS.
A violation of the principle would be to implement SMSPublisher as a subclass of EmailPublisher. In that case, given the premise that an object is of type EmailPublisher, then it can be proven that its publish() method sends email. However, given the premise that an object is of type SMSPublisher, it cannot be proven that its publish() method sends email; therefore, SMSPublisher is not semantically a subtype of EmailPublisher.*
* I don't think this argument is quite right, actually, because we haven't defined very clearly what we mean by "object" and "type" very well. A better, but less precise formulation is that if your code relies on the invariant (i.e., proveable property) that objects of type EmailPublisher send email, then making SMSPublisher a subclass of EmailPublisher will break your code.
You don't get to assign yourself unique status under the system. A coherent universal system applies to you on the same terms it applies to everyone else. I do not want you to kill me, I consider it "evil" for you to kill me, therefore it is immediately obvious that I shouldn't go around killing people.
So you say that if I consider X "evil" when you do it to me, then I should consider X to be evil when I do it to others. And because of that, I should not do X to others. Problems:
Why should I consider anything "evil" when done to me, to start with? I know you said that you were not going to lay out a complete system to me, but I think that's just disingenious; you've given me the recursive rule without giving me any of the base cases, so to speak.
What about genuine disagreements between people as to what things they should judge to be "evil" when done to them? The extreme case would be a person who thinks it would not be evil of others to murder him, and therefore, fails to find any ground under your principle of symmetry to conclude that it is evil to murder others.
More modest examples are easy to construct, because this is in fact a common, everyday type of moral argument. Joe complains when Tom does X to him, and says that he shouldn't do that because he wouldn't like it if somebody did it to him. Tom answers that he wouldn't object if somebody did it to him. Joe then answers that Tom should object to somebody doing X to him.
A variant of the previous one: what happens when I think it's evil for others to do X to me, but nobody shares my judgement? And what's worse, what if I'm right? E.g., what if I was the only person who believed that murder is evil, and therefore, was the only person who refrained from murdering others?
Aren't there asymmetrical moral prohibitions? There are many things that parents are judged to be in the right when they do them to their children, but the children would be judged in the wrong if they did them to their parents. For example, if the parents would consider it evil to have somebody restrict their freedom of movement and association, how can they not conclude that grounding their daughter would be evil?
So yeah, while this principle sounds like a useful rule of thumb that's valid in many situations, I remain very skeptical that this principle is as central as you make it to be. Not to mention that you've not answered the big question, which is: how do you know if alternatives in a situation are good or evil?
The fact is that atheists are quite significantly UNDER-represented in the prison population. It seems to me that there are only two ways to explain those statistics. Either (1) atheists are *more* moral than theists, at least to the extent that crime accurately approximates morality levels, or (2) atheists are equally or more criminal/immoral as theists, but that atheists are incredible supra-geniuses in crime and aren't getting caught.
(3) Atheists are, as a group, more highly educated, have better jobs, etc.; more generally, they fit into a number of social categories that convicted felons do not. Do you have any data that controls for these factors?
I'm a decent, law-abiding citizen because I know it's the right thing to be, the best way to live.
How do you know it's the right thing to be? Aren't you just repeating the beliefs that were inculcated into you as part of your upbringing?
It's not because I'm afraid of the wrath of some supernatural boogey creature who floats around in the sky wearing a toga and throwing lightning bolts around.
That's a strawman.
Stealing is wrong. Rape is wrong. Murder is wrong. Cheating, lying, armed robbery, torturing small animals, lots of stuff are wrong. It's why we have laws against such things, with stiff penalties for those who breach them.
We have laws against them because of the general belief that they are wrong. But, again, how do you know that they are wrong?
Grow up and accept that we're on our own and the decisions are ours to make without input from the non-existent supernatural. But your question makes it plain that you'll have a tough time of that.
No, my question is a way of pointing out that your grounds for believing that murder is wrong are no better than the theist's grounds for believing in a deity. You believe that murder is wrong because of your upbringing, just as the theist does. Therefore, you shouldn't act high and mighty like you're so much smarter and rational than the believer. You've got plenty of beliefs very important to you that you can no more justify than the theist can justify their belief in God.
Actually, I take it back. In fear that you may actually go ahead and get a harm quantification proposal of your own implemented, I wish you the worst of luck doing that.
Um, you seem to be under two serious misconceptions: (a) that I claim that Dawkins goes around directly insulting specific people; (b) that I am a theist. I'm an atheist who thinks that Dawkins is an arrogant, pompous, and more importantly, ignorant ass.
Any language that is truly unambiguous is uninteresting. Firstly, you've got Goedel incompleteness to worry about (which stems from statements that are fundamentally ambiguous as to their interpretation, such as "this statement is false").
You don't understand the notion of "ambiguity." A Gödel sentence for an axiomatization of arithmetic is not ambiguous. Its meaning is defined as precisely as any other sentence in the proof system's language. The deal with such a sentence is that if it's true, then it is also unproveable.
"Ambiguity," in the technical sense that's relevant to linguistics and logic, is the inability to assign one unique meaning to every expression in the language. And there we need to get technical about what "assigning a unique meaning" is, because that doesn't mean a single use--just because a sentence may be used appropriately in two different situations doesn't make the sentence ambiguous; e.g., if you have the sentence "I saw a dog," the fact that the sentence doesn't say whether the dog was brown or black isn't a sufficient condition for it to be ambiguous. That's called "vagueness," which, intuitively, has to do with how a sentence meaning doesn't have a unique application.
So, to repeat: an unambiguous language would have a one-to-one relationship with meanings. But because of vagueness, meanings would still have a one-to-many relationship to situations.
I believe he was pointing out the idiocy of the article author, not necessarily theists in general.
I believe my reading of the remark was more reasonable than yours. The remark says that it is ironic if a theist accuses an atheist of being intellectually lazy. It doesn't in any way single out the article author, nor provide any particular reason for us to conclude that the remark must have been meant to single out the article author.
But we're still waiting for examples of Dawkins bashing someone.
Well, the problem here is that the participants in this discussion are being quite unspecific about what they mean by "bashing someone." I certainly know for sure that Dawkins regularly labels theists as being, as a general rule, superstitious, ignorant, unintelligent, unsubtle, simpletons, archaic, unprogressive, etc. And what's more, he seems to be in a crusade to go all over the world giving talks where he does so.
My problem with that is very simple: while I very much agreed with him when I was around 18, over the past 12 years or so I've gradually come to see that Dawkins, while quite intelligent, isn't really very knowledgeable outside a very narrow field, but goes around acting as if he is, and won't listen to reason when people try to enlighten him about his errors and misunderstandings. He doesn't know enough about, for example, philosophy or the social sciences to understand that the scientistic, atheistic worldview he's crusading for is not nearly as solid as he thinks it is. It's like he lives in a time-warp where none of the philosophy of the second half of the 20th century happened. No Wittengstein; no Quine-Duhem hypothesis; no anti-foundationalism; no Kuhn, Lakatos nor Feyerabend.
Once you realize how many problems Dawkins' whole worldview has, you start to think that perhaps he is a bit intellectually lazy. Basically, he picks on the theistic crowd very loudly while pretending that there are no serious secular objections to what he wants us to believe.
You can still be moral and ethical and just plain good without worshipping gods or fearing demons.
How? More precisely: when faced with the various choices presented to you in life, how can you know which of the alternatives are good and which are evil? The way I see it, this is a question atheists have no good answer for, period. You can't any more or less appeal to your upbringing as providing the answers than the theist can appeal to his upbringing to justify his belief.
Not that the theist is doing great with regard to this problem either: he's basically traded the problem of knowing what's good for the problem of knowing what God wants.
Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article about it. See the quotes by contemporary religious leaders, as well as the biblical quotes.
Like this one?
"If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me."
--Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
The critical quotes are mostly from Protestants--not exactly the thing to cite when you're discussing what was wrong with the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo.
The Church, by its own standards, acted in error when it censored Galileo. The whole affair is a textbook case for separation of church and state; the Church shouldn't have had the power to censor Galileo in the first place, period. However, the claim that the Church rejected heliocentrism just because it contradicted the bible is wrong. The strongest claim you can make is that they subjected it to a higher standard of evidence because of some biblical passages; but they did consider it on its own merits as a scientific alternative to the geocentric models, and found it wanting.
And there's also the fact that they left an out for Galileo to continue his research and publications about his theory ("teach it as a hypothesis, not as the truth"). In the broader view, of course, Galileo shouldn't need approval from the church to pursue his theory; again, this is a textbook case for separation of church and state. Let's just not morph it into an ahistorical myth of an anti-scientific church.
The only thing we've learned which "contradicts" this is that it is simpler to consider the motions of the planets from the Sun's frame of reference.
I am not sure that is the case. The first thing to take in mind is that both geocentrism and heliocentrism are families of models; there are several historical models that fall under each of the two categories. The Ptolemaic model isn't the same thing as the Thychonic system, no more than the Copernican model is the same as the Keplerian one, or the various Newtonian models. Some historical heliocentric models were no simpler than their geocentric counterparts.
Also, Friedrich Bessel's research in 1838 disproved the Ptolemaic system (and I think the Tychonic system too). So yeah, it is quite possible to learn things that contradict specific geocentric models.
It is possible to use the Earth as a frame of reference, it's just not intuitive (isn't part of the basis of the theory of relativity that all frames of reference are created equal?).
But here you're getting close to a really important point: to put it in our modern day, Newtonian terminology, in Aristotelian mechanics there is an implicitly privileged frame of reference relative to which objects are "truly" moving or "truly" at rest; and the Earth is at rest relative that privileged reference frame. So in Aristotelian mechanics, it's not just intuitive to use Earth as the frame of reference, it is obligatory; using the Sun as the frame of reference would entail that all objects on Earth are systematically in real motion, despite being at apparent rest. That would be very, very un-Aristotelian.
The change from geocentrism to heliocentrism was only really possible by changing from Aristotelian mechanics to Newtonian mechanics.
You don't have to be a drooling moron to be Just Plain Wrong. Sometimes intelligent, honest people are Just Plain Wrong. Hundreds of years ago, the religious also honestly believed based on biblical evidence that the Sun revolved around the Earth.
Um, "biblical evidence"? Ptolemy and Aristotle?
Not to say that the authors of the bible were heliocentrists, but the church in the time of Copernicus and Galileo rejected heliocentrism for scientific reasons: it contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and was not predictively superior to geocentrism. This is one of the reasons Newton was successful where Galileo wasn't--Newton provided a alternative to Aristotelian mechanics that had a number of very clear advantages; Galileo was trying to do so, but didn't get nearly as far.
But if those low rates were offered to the old occupants, I bet they would not have had to move out... Even from a greed standpoint, that kind of crap didn't seem to make sense to me. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to cut the original owners the deal, instead of repossessing and reselling at the lower monthly rates? And paying for advertising about the low rates?
The issue here is that the old occupants, from the point of view of the bank, have already proven themselves to be uncreditworthy by defaulting on their mortgage. The bank would very much rather stop dealing with them, and deal with somebody with better credit.
Now of course the problem with that is that the banks now all simultaneously want to deal with people with much better credit than they did two years ago, but they just spent a few years ruining tons of people's credit by agreeing to give them too much mortgage on overvalued collateral.
I don't understand how it would even happen. Surely most landlords charge at LEAST enough rent to cover their payments on the property, don't they?
Price-to-rent ratio is a housing market statistic that is kept regularly, and that can be used to address your question.
Look at the chart in this blog entry. Basically, over the past few years, we had a real estate bubble that sent house prices very far up, without a proportional increase in rents. So yes, many properties bought over the past few years are being rented below the cost of the mortgage and other expenses.
Because drawing the line "here" (as in Pluto not being a planet because it hasn't cleared its orbit of debris, among other things) makes it much easier to decide than drawing the line "there" (as in "we found this big spheroid and we decided it was a planet, and now we know there are many things around the same size or bigger, but we don't want to turn back").
This begs the question of why draw any line at all. Nature doesn't draw a line between planets and non-planets; why should scientists be so gung-ho on drawing one? All of the differences are differences of degree; why try to shoehorn everything into a difference of kind? The facts about the objects of either pseudo-kind will in the end be explained by appeal to the same laws of physics. The distinction has no predictive value at all.
In addition, how does the criterion you single out it make it any easier to decide where to draw the line? The decision was and still is controversial, which, prima facie, contradicts your claim that that criterion made it easier to decide. Isn't it probably the case that the only people who think the criterion makes it "much easier" to decide are probably those who agree with the criteria anyway? That would, once more, beg the question, because of course, it is very easy to agree with something you already agree with, isn't it?
If Pluto gets called a planet, then Eris would also be called a planet, since it is bigger than Pluto. Otherwise "Planet" would be a very arbitrary definition.
But the deeper point is that, given our knowledge of astronomy, pretty much any definition of "planet" is arbitrary.
There's tons of stuff moving around in space, at all sorts of sizes, shapes, physical compositions, distributions of matter, trajectories, etc. They're trying to draw a line such that space-stuff on one side of the line count as "planets," and space-stuff on the other doesn't. No matter how carefully and precisely they draw the line, it is still hopelessly arbitrary: why draw the line here and not there?
The laws of physics really do not care whether any particular aggregate of stuff floating around in space is a "planet" or not. We can exhaust the actual facts that we can discover about space-stuff without settling the question of which of them are "planets.'
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the problem here isn't really digital vs. 35mm. Cameras since about 1985 are much harder to use manually in general, since the manufacturers started going to electronic controls and automatic focus. The electronic controls mean that instead of having separate knobs to control things like aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you have one "control dial" and a dozen tiny little buttons with hardly any tactile feedback; to change anything, it becomes a game of pressing one button at the same time that you turn the one dial. With automatic focus, the lenses were remade so that they don't have the damped focusing ring of old days, and the viewfinders of the cameras aren't very well suited for judging focus by eye.
Now digital adds new problems on top of that, with menu hell and small APS-C sensors that result in tiny viewfinders that are even harder to focus. And what's worse, lots of lenses nowadays don't have focus distance nor depth-of-field scales, making it impossible to use all of the prefocusing techniques available in manual focus mode.
All the automation added to SLR cameras since about 1985 makes them easier to use for beginners, but in the end, much slower to use for most experienced photographers. There are some exceptions, sure, for example, sports photography. But fiddling with autofocus and exposure compensation before every shot just means that you'll be too slow to take good spontaneous shots of people.
The problem with your criticism here is that feminists want to make these options available for men too. The description you cite is very misleading, I'll grant: it's described as "options for women" because the proposals would have a bigger effect on women than on men. Feminists in fact would be quite delighted if men took the option described in larger numbers, instead of treating child rearing as their women's responsibility...
...and then the day you find yourself needing long-term coverage you cannot afford, you'll find that there is no insurance available that can protect you from that risk, because of all of the idiots like you whose adverse selection made it impossible to insure against that risk.
And now you're repeating the mistake. You can't call it "actual libel" just like that; there isn't an authoritative concept of "libel" outside of the laws of the many jurisdictions that have torts or offences called "libel." Libel is what the law says libel is, not whatever Wikipedia does, and the law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
You are making two errors here that I addressed in separate posts:
The law is different in every state, and even often within different counties of the same state. You cannot apply Wikipedia's definitions of crimes and torts to cases that are being disputed under the law of one specific jurisdiction, because there's a very good chance that the definitions and case law is not the same.
Wikipedia's definitions of crimes and torts are a usually a sort of lowest common denominator to help you understand the overall landscape of what general types of acts jurisdictions treat as crimes or torts; so, yes, jurisdictions normally have laws that deal with the public disclosure of private facts. The precise classification is always jurisdiction-specific; some jursidictions might have a separate tort or offense for it, some might treat it as one subcase of other offenses.
No, that's just not true, and limiting libel to false statements would be very wrong. The SCOTUS definition of "actual malice" includes a very important case that shows why: "reckless disregard for truth."
It's not enough to make statements that just happen to be true; you must make statements that you are justified in believing. So, for example, suppose you wanted to discredit Joe Blow, so you went around spreading the "lie" that Joe Blow is gay and slept with the mayor's son (who is known to be gay). You had no particular reason to believe either statement at the time. Joe Blow accuses you of libel, defamation or whatever other thing is applicable in this case. It then is discovered that Joe is actually gay, and did sleep with the mayor's son, so your allegations against him were actually true.
You should not be able to win the case. When you accused Joe, you didn't care whether the accusations were true or false. All you cared about was the effect that the accusations would have on Joe and his dealings with others.
Not if your container supports an operation to add elements to the collection. If you could do that cast, you could cast the Container of Derived to Container of Base and add an arbitrary element of type Base, but not of type Derived.
More generally, if X(Y) is a type parametrized over Y, and Z is a subtype of Y, then asserting that X(Z) is a subtype of X(Y) fails, because X might have an operation that takes an argument of the parameter type.
Did Slashdot swallow your angle brackets?
My understanding is that OP's formulation of the LSP just won't work, because the term "behavior" is too broad. (For reference, here's the formulation I'm referring to: "If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behavior of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T.")
The Wikipedia article has a better formulation, in terms of properties proveable of objects of the types in question (which I suspect is still not quite right, but that's another topic). Basically, for your supertype Publisher, there is some set of properties that should be proveable of every object of that type; for example, the type signature of the methods in question, and invariants that the operations on the type respect. Those properties should be respected by the subtypes for them to be correctly called subtypes at all.
In your example, given the premise that an object is of type Publisher, then it can be proven that the object has the operation publish(). Given that premise, however, it cannot be proven that the publish() operation sends either email or SMS.
A violation of the principle would be to implement SMSPublisher as a subclass of EmailPublisher. In that case, given the premise that an object is of type EmailPublisher, then it can be proven that its publish() method sends email. However, given the premise that an object is of type SMSPublisher, it cannot be proven that its publish() method sends email; therefore, SMSPublisher is not semantically a subtype of EmailPublisher.*
* I don't think this argument is quite right, actually, because we haven't defined very clearly what we mean by "object" and "type" very well. A better, but less precise formulation is that if your code relies on the invariant (i.e., proveable property) that objects of type EmailPublisher send email, then making SMSPublisher a subclass of EmailPublisher will break your code.
So you say that if I consider X "evil" when you do it to me, then I should consider X to be evil when I do it to others. And because of that, I should not do X to others. Problems:
More modest examples are easy to construct, because this is in fact a common, everyday type of moral argument. Joe complains when Tom does X to him, and says that he shouldn't do that because he wouldn't like it if somebody did it to him. Tom answers that he wouldn't object if somebody did it to him. Joe then answers that Tom should object to somebody doing X to him.
So yeah, while this principle sounds like a useful rule of thumb that's valid in many situations, I remain very skeptical that this principle is as central as you make it to be. Not to mention that you've not answered the big question, which is: how do you know if alternatives in a situation are good or evil?
How do you know it's the right thing to be? Aren't you just repeating the beliefs that were inculcated into you as part of your upbringing?
That's a strawman.
We have laws against them because of the general belief that they are wrong. But, again, how do you know that they are wrong?
No, my question is a way of pointing out that your grounds for believing that murder is wrong are no better than the theist's grounds for believing in a deity. You believe that murder is wrong because of your upbringing, just as the theist does. Therefore, you shouldn't act high and mighty like you're so much smarter and rational than the believer. You've got plenty of beliefs very important to you that you can no more justify than the theist can justify their belief in God.
Good luck quantifying "harm," dude.
Actually, I take it back. In fear that you may actually go ahead and get a harm quantification proposal of your own implemented, I wish you the worst of luck doing that.
Um, you seem to be under two serious misconceptions: (a) that I claim that Dawkins goes around directly insulting specific people; (b) that I am a theist. I'm an atheist who thinks that Dawkins is an arrogant, pompous, and more importantly, ignorant ass.
You don't understand the notion of "ambiguity." A Gödel sentence for an axiomatization of arithmetic is not ambiguous. Its meaning is defined as precisely as any other sentence in the proof system's language. The deal with such a sentence is that if it's true, then it is also unproveable.
"Ambiguity," in the technical sense that's relevant to linguistics and logic, is the inability to assign one unique meaning to every expression in the language. And there we need to get technical about what "assigning a unique meaning" is, because that doesn't mean a single use--just because a sentence may be used appropriately in two different situations doesn't make the sentence ambiguous; e.g., if you have the sentence "I saw a dog," the fact that the sentence doesn't say whether the dog was brown or black isn't a sufficient condition for it to be ambiguous. That's called "vagueness," which, intuitively, has to do with how a sentence meaning doesn't have a unique application.
So, to repeat: an unambiguous language would have a one-to-one relationship with meanings. But because of vagueness, meanings would still have a one-to-many relationship to situations.
I believe my reading of the remark was more reasonable than yours. The remark says that it is ironic if a theist accuses an atheist of being intellectually lazy. It doesn't in any way single out the article author, nor provide any particular reason for us to conclude that the remark must have been meant to single out the article author.
Well, the problem here is that the participants in this discussion are being quite unspecific about what they mean by "bashing someone." I certainly know for sure that Dawkins regularly labels theists as being, as a general rule, superstitious, ignorant, unintelligent, unsubtle, simpletons, archaic, unprogressive, etc. And what's more, he seems to be in a crusade to go all over the world giving talks where he does so.
My problem with that is very simple: while I very much agreed with him when I was around 18, over the past 12 years or so I've gradually come to see that Dawkins, while quite intelligent, isn't really very knowledgeable outside a very narrow field, but goes around acting as if he is, and won't listen to reason when people try to enlighten him about his errors and misunderstandings. He doesn't know enough about, for example, philosophy or the social sciences to understand that the scientistic, atheistic worldview he's crusading for is not nearly as solid as he thinks it is. It's like he lives in a time-warp where none of the philosophy of the second half of the 20th century happened. No Wittengstein; no Quine-Duhem hypothesis; no anti-foundationalism; no Kuhn, Lakatos nor Feyerabend.
Once you realize how many problems Dawkins' whole worldview has, you start to think that perhaps he is a bit intellectually lazy. Basically, he picks on the theistic crowd very loudly while pretending that there are no serious secular objections to what he wants us to believe.
How? More precisely: when faced with the various choices presented to you in life, how can you know which of the alternatives are good and which are evil? The way I see it, this is a question atheists have no good answer for, period. You can't any more or less appeal to your upbringing as providing the answers than the theist can appeal to his upbringing to justify his belief.
Not that the theist is doing great with regard to this problem either: he's basically traded the problem of knowing what's good for the problem of knowing what God wants.
Um, what? Do you seriously believe that theists are, as a general rule, intellectually lazy, and atheists are not?
Like this one?
The critical quotes are mostly from Protestants--not exactly the thing to cite when you're discussing what was wrong with the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo.
The Church, by its own standards, acted in error when it censored Galileo. The whole affair is a textbook case for separation of church and state; the Church shouldn't have had the power to censor Galileo in the first place, period. However, the claim that the Church rejected heliocentrism just because it contradicted the bible is wrong. The strongest claim you can make is that they subjected it to a higher standard of evidence because of some biblical passages; but they did consider it on its own merits as a scientific alternative to the geocentric models, and found it wanting.
And there's also the fact that they left an out for Galileo to continue his research and publications about his theory ("teach it as a hypothesis, not as the truth"). In the broader view, of course, Galileo shouldn't need approval from the church to pursue his theory; again, this is a textbook case for separation of church and state. Let's just not morph it into an ahistorical myth of an anti-scientific church.
I am not sure that is the case. The first thing to take in mind is that both geocentrism and heliocentrism are families of models; there are several historical models that fall under each of the two categories. The Ptolemaic model isn't the same thing as the Thychonic system, no more than the Copernican model is the same as the Keplerian one, or the various Newtonian models. Some historical heliocentric models were no simpler than their geocentric counterparts.
Also, Friedrich Bessel's research in 1838 disproved the Ptolemaic system (and I think the Tychonic system too). So yeah, it is quite possible to learn things that contradict specific geocentric models.
But here you're getting close to a really important point: to put it in our modern day, Newtonian terminology, in Aristotelian mechanics there is an implicitly privileged frame of reference relative to which objects are "truly" moving or "truly" at rest; and the Earth is at rest relative that privileged reference frame. So in Aristotelian mechanics, it's not just intuitive to use Earth as the frame of reference, it is obligatory; using the Sun as the frame of reference would entail that all objects on Earth are systematically in real motion, despite being at apparent rest. That would be very, very un-Aristotelian.
The change from geocentrism to heliocentrism was only really possible by changing from Aristotelian mechanics to Newtonian mechanics.
Um, "biblical evidence"? Ptolemy and Aristotle?
Not to say that the authors of the bible were heliocentrists, but the church in the time of Copernicus and Galileo rejected heliocentrism for scientific reasons: it contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and was not predictively superior to geocentrism. This is one of the reasons Newton was successful where Galileo wasn't--Newton provided a alternative to Aristotelian mechanics that had a number of very clear advantages; Galileo was trying to do so, but didn't get nearly as far.
The issue here is that the old occupants, from the point of view of the bank, have already proven themselves to be uncreditworthy by defaulting on their mortgage. The bank would very much rather stop dealing with them, and deal with somebody with better credit.
Now of course the problem with that is that the banks now all simultaneously want to deal with people with much better credit than they did two years ago, but they just spent a few years ruining tons of people's credit by agreeing to give them too much mortgage on overvalued collateral.
Price-to-rent ratio is a housing market statistic that is kept regularly, and that can be used to address your question.
Look at the chart in this blog entry. Basically, over the past few years, we had a real estate bubble that sent house prices very far up, without a proportional increase in rents. So yes, many properties bought over the past few years are being rented below the cost of the mortgage and other expenses.
This begs the question of why draw any line at all. Nature doesn't draw a line between planets and non-planets; why should scientists be so gung-ho on drawing one? All of the differences are differences of degree; why try to shoehorn everything into a difference of kind? The facts about the objects of either pseudo-kind will in the end be explained by appeal to the same laws of physics. The distinction has no predictive value at all.
In addition, how does the criterion you single out it make it any easier to decide where to draw the line? The decision was and still is controversial, which, prima facie, contradicts your claim that that criterion made it easier to decide. Isn't it probably the case that the only people who think the criterion makes it "much easier" to decide are probably those who agree with the criteria anyway? That would, once more, beg the question, because of course, it is very easy to agree with something you already agree with, isn't it?
But the deeper point is that, given our knowledge of astronomy, pretty much any definition of "planet" is arbitrary.
There's tons of stuff moving around in space, at all sorts of sizes, shapes, physical compositions, distributions of matter, trajectories, etc. They're trying to draw a line such that space-stuff on one side of the line count as "planets," and space-stuff on the other doesn't. No matter how carefully and precisely they draw the line, it is still hopelessly arbitrary: why draw the line here and not there?
The laws of physics really do not care whether any particular aggregate of stuff floating around in space is a "planet" or not. We can exhaust the actual facts that we can discover about space-stuff without settling the question of which of them are "planets.'