Mozart died in poverty and had his body dumped in a pauper's grave, John Fogerty wrote the anthems of a generation and later worked as a DJ while other reaped benefit of his songs. The list of artists who created art that made millions FOR SOMEONE ELSE is legion.
While I understand the sentiment (as I once had it), I really have to ask: so what?
Consider the economics of the record industry vs. artists. The record industry owns production facilities for records, together with distribution and promotion networks for selling the content. These things are in extremely high demand: millions and millions of folks out there would like to contract with the record label to do this. Of these millions of folks, let's assume that 10% are actually good enough that others would be willing to pay for their music; let's also assume that this number exceeds the amount of music that the public is actually willing to buy (or even have time to listen to!). What follows is the following: the record label sells products and services for which the demand far outstrips the supply, while the artist sells something for which the supply far exceeds the demand. You can guess who loses.
So the problem with your sentiment that the artist should be the most highly paid part of the chain that lets you buy music is that you're asking us to exempt music from the laws of economics. For every John Fogerty that the labels do hire, there's a bunch of other folks that would have been just as good, but were never hired. This is why John Fogerty couldn't command a high price for his work: the label could have hired somebody else.
There's one major consequence here for artists: they should evaluate what services the record industry is providing them and at what cost, and rationally decide whether the cost is worth it; for example, whether they can do stuff cheaper on their own. Music is a business, and artists who wish financial success from music must treat it as such.
If IPv6 were really/needed/ the market would have already done far more to bring it into wider use. The fact of the matter is, everyone is getting along just fine on IPv4.
That argument doesn't work. Why? Because the problem with IPv6 adoption is that it's a costly choice that doesn't pay off unless your counterparts also voluntarily choose the same way. None of the benefits of IPv6 are worth anything if you don't have other folks' IPv6 nodes to talk with.
It's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. If everybody cooperates, everybody ends up better off than in any other outcome; but if you cooperate and everybody else defects, you end up worse than everybody else. This means that everybody will defect, because they are unwilling to bear the risk that others will defect if they cooperate.
Note that I'm not arguing that IPv6 does in fact offer compelling advantages to everybody. What I'm arguing is that even if a significant number of folks could benefit from it, the market might still not offer it.
When I try to discuss this topic with my friends, they are either not scientifically minded enough to follow through, or just can't accept the fact that, as physical beings, we would be absolutely determined in our behaviour and actions.
Your problem here is that you've taken physics, which provides nothing more than a really good description of many aspects of the world, and surreptitiously promoted it to a metaphysics, i.e., something that is expected to provide the one true description of the world.
Let's assume that it is true that if all we are is physical beings, then we would be absolutely determined in our behavior and actions. Well, one answer to that argument is that we're not just physical beings. Which leads us to:
And then, there's the concept of "soul" that, so far, has only helped to muddy the waters of reasoning in this topic. I'd really like to see a way that the concept of "soul" could be included in the discussion of free will in a physical world, I just don't know of any scientifically minded philosopher who had done it.
The argument that we're not just physical beings doesn't need to rely on a vague sense of the term "soul." We can frame such an argument in terms of knowledge. For the sakes of the present argument, we don't need to define knowledge any better than saying that it is justified true belief, a kind of relation between a knowing subject and an object of knowledge.
So, suppose somebody, let's call him Joe, claims to know that people are nothing more than physical objects. Now the problem is that by claiming to know that, Joe must commit himself to the claim that knowlegde is a physical relation between physical objects, justified by appeal to theories of physics. But what justifies those theories of physics? Physics itself? That would be circular.
In short, the claim that people are just physical beings is epistemologically self-defeating because to possess the knowledge of physics, we must have non-physical grounds that justify our belief in that knowledge. So, we don't have to appeal to a soul to shoot down the claim--we just have to ask how it is possible to know such a thing for the claim to fall down to pieces. (Note that the argument doesn't support any particular notion of "soul" either; all it really assumes is that people can know stuff like physics.)
What's the chance that a 7 year old in 1981 had a discretionary budget that allowed them to buy $670's worth of Star Wars toys?
If you insist on being so picky about this, let's put it this way: if the original poster was 7 in 1981, should his parents have bought him $670's worth of Star Wars toys, or $670 worth of the Vanguard 500? (If it was up to me, I'd say $500 of the index fund, $170 in toys. The kid's gotta play too...)
It would seem to me that there is some significant qualitative difference between humans and rocks. Extending that further, it seems there exists differences between bacteria and rocks.
Yes, there are countless differences there. But let's assume the number of logically independent differences between a bacteria and a rock is N. This means that there are 2^N - 1 logically intermediate cases between bacteria and rocks. Now we're supposed to draw a line that says that some of those cases are definitely "life," and that some are not.
What's worse is that the exercise of drawing that line adds nothing to our knowledge.
Essentially, the question is what is the largest subset of differences that can be used to distinguish between something that is alive and something that has never been alive.
The problem here is simple. Your list is either going to be arbitrary, or it's going to admit of intermediate cases. (And do note that, from the point of view of modern biology, the existence of intermediate cases between paradigm examples of "living" and "nonliving" things is, if not required, at least very convenient for the theory that all uncontroversial "living" things evolved from uncontroversial "nonliving" things.)
A question arising from the previous one is, what is it exactly that separates life from death. We can't even detect life - only the by-products of what we define as life. Thus we define death as the absence of those by-products of something that at one point had displayed those by-products.
Again. You identify N by-products. Then some dude discovers a thing that has N-1 of those byproducts, some other dude discovers one that has N/2, and a third one discovers a thing that has (N/2)+1 of them.
So I would disagree that the question is flawed. I think it might be oversimplified sometimes, but that at its core, it captures a very fundamental set of questions which essentially, arise from, "What does it mean to be human?" and "What is intelligence?"
But those are cosmological questions, not empirical ones. Please spare us from your attempt to force your cosmology on us by disguising it as biology. If you wanna talk about biology, let's stick to our understanding of empirical matters.
A lot of times in school, I was told viruses aren't alive because they can't reproduce. I always wondered if this would apply to eunichs or mule.
For the debate over whether viruses are "alive" to make any sense, there has to be some literally essential difference between things that are alive and things that are not. The past 200 years or so of biology ought to have taught us that, contrary to what seemed evident to the ancients, there isn't any such essential difference. Organic matter is just a form of organization of inorganic manner. From the point of view of what the ancients knew, there was a huge gulf between everyday living beings and inert objects. From the point of view of what we know, there are many intermediate cases.
So, instead of wasting time trying to decide whether viruses are "really" alive or not, you should just accept the fact that our knowledge today is advanced enough to show that the question--which we inherited from people who knew less than we do--is flawed.
Very few things outside mathematics or physics have an absolute carved in stone definition. This is either because theres a whole spectrum of similar things with no clear demarcation anywhere , or , simply because of limitations of human language. Law courts must take this into account and this applies when talking about the internet.
There is a common intellectual fallacy, that we ultimately inherit from the ancient Greeks, that there is such a thing as the definite classification of all the kinds of things that exist in the world, according to their essences. One example that's in the news a lot in recent years is the (pseudo-)question as to whether Pluto is a planet or not; too much of the debate about it presupposes that there is some essential sense in which Pluto really is or not a planet.
We should all reject that kind of thinking, because rejecting it clears the intellectual muddle that I think you're suffering here. The problem isn't that clear demarcations cannot be made; the problem is that clear demarcations can only be made for equally clear purposes, and that the demarcations made for one purpose may not be applicable for other purposes.
In the case of cars and vehicles, the relevant context is provided by the law in which the terms appear. In the case of court cases about "web sites," then the correct distinctions to apply for that case will depend on the body of law that the judge decides to apply to the case.
I suspect, however, that in a lot of cases, a good judge will have to conclude that the cases brought before them don't hinge on the meaning of the term "web site." I bet you most cases really hinge over who has what control over the content that is shown to other parties over the Internet, and what responsibilities are implied by that control. In a typical blog, for example, the blog's admins have the power to publish and retract entries, and to decide how user comments are handled. Readers may or may not have the power to cause comments to be added to blog entries right away. The admins have the power to delete comments after the fact, and may have legal obligations to delete some such comments within a reasonable time after coming to learn of them.
[A website is] all files available from a particular domain. Note that multiple, distinct websites may be served from a single computer, that a single person can own many different websites, and that multiple domains can be aliases for the same website.
Just because you say so, Mr. I-Decide-What-The-Hell-Words-Must-Mean? So I guess that all these years I've been wrong to think that all those Geocities accounts were separate websites, when in fact, they are all the same site!
Come to think of it, actually, I once got a Geocities account on the basis of representations, made by Geocities, that such an account constituted a "website." Can I now sue Geocities for misrepresentations, or can they be otherwise penalized by making such misrepresentations to customers?
The term "website" has no more of a definite sense than "book." Is the Bible one book, many books, or both? Is the OED one book, or many books? What about a one-volume edition of the collected works of Shakespeare?
So, never wrote string manipulation in C then? (And people like Kernighan and Plauger - pah, what do they know, eh?)
Um, C-style zero-terminated strings is one of the worst design decisions in C. The simplest alternative is Pascal-style strings, where the first machine word of each string's memory data is a length marker. This avoids all those algorithms that require you to sequentially scan the string to find its length, and doesn't forbid null characters in strings.
You know, I remember my first programming teacher explaining the same concept, back in high school... but he told us to use values like -1 that were actually invalid for the field in question.
That is still often a problem, in that sometimes people sometimes make a mistake about what values are supposed to be valid for the fields.
The big problem is that most languages fail to provide enough support for types that allow you to reliably signal out-of-band conditions. For an example of the kind of features that make this possible to do, look no further than variant types in Haskell or OCaml.
Yes, the argument that people should only be penalized for health risks they have control over leads to the conclusion that it is fair to charge smokers and heavy drinkers more for health insurance (as long as no other right of theirs is violated). Also, it is fair to give discounts to people who exercise regularly.
Asking higher-risk customers to pay more for insurance is a form of risk-based pricing.
The problem is that in the realm of insurance, risk-based pricing is really only fair for risks that people can avoid. In the case of auto insurance, you can choose to drive carefully, not to buy car models with bad safety records, and so on. In the realm of health, however, there is relatively little you can do. You can avoid smoking, heavy drinking and drug use, and you can exercise regularly. However, that's no help if you, for example, have a congenital condition that doesn't reveal itself until you're an adult.
The conclusion this leads to is that health insurers should not vary premiums on just absolute medical risk, but rather, voluntary customer behaviors that unambiguously lead to higher health risk. E.g., it's OK if smokers pay more than non-smokers, or if the insurance company gives you a discount for going to the gym regularly. It's not OK if folks with congenital conditions can't get any health insurance at all because insurers basically set the price precisely so that such patients cannot afford it (because the company doesn't want them).
Snopes doesn't do too bad of a job there with the myth of the Chevrolet Nova, but they just miss the most glaring problem with the story: who would seriously believe that Spanish speakers would avoid buying a foreign car just because its name would be a pun for "no go" in Spanish? It's like the Americans who believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all stupid simpletons. (Hmmm, I might be on to something there...)
It is true, as Snopes points out, that the normal way to describe in Spanish a car that doesn't work would be something like "no funciona," "no marcha" or "no camina," and not "no va." However, you can also be pretty sure that, more than once, the hapless owner of a broken down Chevy Nova has jokingly described it with a pun: "Mi Nova no va"; "Tengo que vender el Nova y comprarme un Siva" (I gotta sell my "no-go" and buy a "yes-go"); etc. It's like the Americans who don't believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all humorless literalists. (Hmmm...)
But the reason the crisis has exacerbated, and badly hurt major financial institutions (CitiBank, IndyMac) is because the process of debt selling allowed bad debt to be masked as good debt. There were insufficient safeguards to make sure that the people (investors, businesses, financial institutions, etc.) that put their money into these debts knew that they were as risky as they truly were.
It's subtler than that. I object to the notion that bad debt was being "masked" as good debt. Nobody was hiding the fact that a lot of these mortgage-backed bonds were backed by subprime mortgages. They diversified the regional exposure of their mortgage-backed bonds, structured the bonds into multiple tiers so that a higher tier couldn't default unless all lower ones did, used complex mathematical models and financial to estimate the actual risk of the mortgage pools that backed the bonds, and used the structure of the bonds and the results of the models to convince the rating agencies to give them high ratings.
Of course, we know how well those mathematical risk models worked out: they were way too optimistic, and what's worse, in precisely the way that fit the bond issuers' short term profit. But the ratings agencies ought to have been more skeptical.
Of course a balanced workout including weight training is obviously the final goal. But if the immediate goal is weight loss, weight training isn't going to accomplish it nearly as fast as running or biking.
I think we should be questioning the idea that the submitter should seek weight loss as an immediate goal; rather, s/he should be encouraged to adopt a complete exercise routine for the long term. In the end, long-term fitness is more important than immediate weight loss. And by fit, I mean the following distinct things, each of which requires a different kind of exercise:
Software has approximately zero manufacturing cost and production ramp-up time. You don't need protection for while you get factories up to speed or shop around for capital.
So what? The development costs for software can be pretty huge. You still need folks to figure out which problems really need solving, and folks to figure out how to best solve those problems; that's gonna cost you. And suppose you've paid that cost, and are working hard to sell your solution. Well, guess what, some bigger fish can come along and build the same thing for cheaper (since they can copy the design that cost you so much to make), and beat you.
Really, the problem with software patents is that they're being awarded at the wrong level of granularity, and for things that are too obvious. For example, a patent for a simple compression algorithm is something that's too fine-grained; while a patent for something like one-click purchases is too obvious. A patent for a novel approach at using software to manage a specific kind of supply chain problems by increasing the efficiency of one kind of factor? Now that sounds better.
There's also the Grokster case, where the Supreme Court of the United States said that Grokster was liable because its business model, basically, was to encourage people to break the law.
Why did the DA even have access to these passwords? Why were they not in hash form? Did Child's have anything to do with that part?
From the article:
The passwords, discovered on Childs' computer, pose an "imminent threat" to the city's computer network, according to the court filing. Childs could use the names and passwords to "impersonate any of the legitimate users in the City by using their password to gain access to the system," the motion against the bail reduction states.
So, in answer to your questions: probably because the police found them as a result of their investigation, because Childs allegedly kept them in plaintext, and yes, allegedly, Childs had plenty to do with it.
Do you have any other questions? Perhaps the article answers them.
If you have something like this to demonstrate that there are differences between the genders, then making decisions based on those differences is qualified.
No, it is only qualified if the differences between the genders are independent of the decisions justified by said differences. If the decisions have the perverse consequence of causing even more differences, then you have to bring the decisions into question.
The Pygmalion effect means that you can't separate performance from expectation of performance. Expectations of superior performance are, all too often, self-fulfilling prophecies.
If a stock doesn't pay dividends is there any point in owning it beyond hoping that some sucker will pay more for it than you?
Yes. What makes stock valuable is the expecation that at some point in the future, the company will pay out profits. That point in time can be deferred indefinitely, but the one thing that is clear is the following: the only way the shares of a company can be truly worthless is if it it certain that the company will never pay any profits.
Another factor that's important here is that stock normally also gives you a proportionate say in electing the board of the corporation, and that by electing a board that will pay dividends, the majority of shareholders can force the corporation's profits to be paid out.
Let's start a simple but uncommon case: imagine you personally hold a majority of the shares in a corporation. In this case, you quite simply have the power to have the company pay out a dividend whenever you want. As long the company does produce profits, your stock is of unquestionable, immediate value.
Of course, very few of us have controlling interests in a corporation; most shareholders are still minority shareholders. In that case, however, if anybody wants to accumulate enough stock in the company to force it to pay out undistributed profits, then those people must buy shares from folks like you, driving up the price of your shares. In effect, if the company has undistributed profits, and somebody wants to get their hands on those profits, they must buy the undistributed profits from you, because you own them.
The consequence, again, is that as long as the possibility exists that the company will pay out profits at some point in the future, the company's stock is valuable.
Why is stock that doesn't pay dividends valuable to anyone?
Because a profitable company is capable of paying dividends, even if it doesn't do it right away. An asset that can pay you dividends, even if it doesn't do so at present, is a valuable asset.
Think of it this way: the majority shareholders of a company, to the extent that they can agree among themselves to do so, hold a never-expiring option to pay themselves the company's profits in any quarter they agree to do so. Your shares in a company are valuable because either you can vote with your fellow shareholders to pay yourselves a dividend, or if you can't, you can sell your shares to somebody who has the clout to make it happen.
Why is stock that doesn't pay dividends valuable to anyone?
Because a profitable company is capable of paying dividends, even if it doesn't do it right away. An asset that can pay you dividends, even if it doesn't do so at present, is a valuable asset.
Think of it this way: the majority shareholders of a company, to the extent that they can agree among themselves to do so, hold a never-expiring option to pay themselves the company's profits in any quarter they agree to do so. Your shares in a company are valuable because either you can vote with your fellow shareholders to pay yourselves a dividend, or if you can't, you can sell your shares to somebody who has the clout to make it happen.
Hi, I'm a white male. I CURRENTLY HAVE THE MOST DIFFICULT TIME GETTING INTO COLLEGES, HAVE THE LEAST SCHOLORSHIPS AVAILABLE TO ME, AND WHEN MATCHED AGAINST ANYBODY WITH MATCHING CREDENTIALS THAT IS NOT ALSO A WHITE MALE WILL LOSE THAT CONTEST.
If this is truly, so, then please explain HOW THE FUCK IS IT ALSO THE CASE THAT THERE ARE SO MANY OF YOU GUYS IN THE TOP UNIVERSITIES, HOW COME THE PROFESSORS ARE ALL FOLKS LIKE YOU, AND HOW COME YOU GET PAID MORE THAN OTHER FOLKS FOR DOING THE EXACT SAME JOB.
Personally I always thought of it as the other way around. Culture didn't force women to have less valuable interests, but rather it took interests that women already had and devalued them socially.
Why do you assume that the causality must be in one direction but not the other? Culture doesn't work that way. The devaluation of certain social roles because they're played by women, and the devaluation of women because they play those roles, mutually support each other as a vicious circle.
In a male dominated society, of course you'd expect a widespread belief that male interests and are superior and therefore "more rewarding" and "valuable". So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
Um, misogyny? WTF?
Again, the problem is that you're thinking linearly. Because you believe that which specific interests women have is logically prior to whether society devalues these interests, you are now arguing that we should focus on correcting the devaluation of women's interests, and not in getting women to play traditionally male roles. If the causality goes both ways, however, we should be doing both things.
Slashdot Mirror
While I understand the sentiment (as I once had it), I really have to ask: so what?
Consider the economics of the record industry vs. artists. The record industry owns production facilities for records, together with distribution and promotion networks for selling the content. These things are in extremely high demand: millions and millions of folks out there would like to contract with the record label to do this. Of these millions of folks, let's assume that 10% are actually good enough that others would be willing to pay for their music; let's also assume that this number exceeds the amount of music that the public is actually willing to buy (or even have time to listen to!). What follows is the following: the record label sells products and services for which the demand far outstrips the supply, while the artist sells something for which the supply far exceeds the demand. You can guess who loses.
So the problem with your sentiment that the artist should be the most highly paid part of the chain that lets you buy music is that you're asking us to exempt music from the laws of economics. For every John Fogerty that the labels do hire, there's a bunch of other folks that would have been just as good, but were never hired. This is why John Fogerty couldn't command a high price for his work: the label could have hired somebody else.
There's one major consequence here for artists: they should evaluate what services the record industry is providing them and at what cost, and rationally decide whether the cost is worth it; for example, whether they can do stuff cheaper on their own. Music is a business, and artists who wish financial success from music must treat it as such.
That argument doesn't work. Why? Because the problem with IPv6 adoption is that it's a costly choice that doesn't pay off unless your counterparts also voluntarily choose the same way. None of the benefits of IPv6 are worth anything if you don't have other folks' IPv6 nodes to talk with.
It's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. If everybody cooperates, everybody ends up better off than in any other outcome; but if you cooperate and everybody else defects, you end up worse than everybody else. This means that everybody will defect, because they are unwilling to bear the risk that others will defect if they cooperate.
Note that I'm not arguing that IPv6 does in fact offer compelling advantages to everybody. What I'm arguing is that even if a significant number of folks could benefit from it, the market might still not offer it.
Your problem here is that you've taken physics, which provides nothing more than a really good description of many aspects of the world, and surreptitiously promoted it to a metaphysics, i.e., something that is expected to provide the one true description of the world.
Let's assume that it is true that if all we are is physical beings, then we would be absolutely determined in our behavior and actions. Well, one answer to that argument is that we're not just physical beings. Which leads us to:
The argument that we're not just physical beings doesn't need to rely on a vague sense of the term "soul." We can frame such an argument in terms of knowledge. For the sakes of the present argument, we don't need to define knowledge any better than saying that it is justified true belief, a kind of relation between a knowing subject and an object of knowledge.
So, suppose somebody, let's call him Joe, claims to know that people are nothing more than physical objects. Now the problem is that by claiming to know that, Joe must commit himself to the claim that knowlegde is a physical relation between physical objects, justified by appeal to theories of physics. But what justifies those theories of physics? Physics itself? That would be circular.
In short, the claim that people are just physical beings is epistemologically self-defeating because to possess the knowledge of physics, we must have non-physical grounds that justify our belief in that knowledge. So, we don't have to appeal to a soul to shoot down the claim--we just have to ask how it is possible to know such a thing for the claim to fall down to pieces. (Note that the argument doesn't support any particular notion of "soul" either; all it really assumes is that people can know stuff like physics.)
What's the chance that a 7 year old in 1981 had a discretionary budget that allowed them to buy $670's worth of Star Wars toys?
If you insist on being so picky about this, let's put it this way: if the original poster was 7 in 1981, should his parents have bought him $670's worth of Star Wars toys, or $670 worth of the Vanguard 500? (If it was up to me, I'd say $500 of the index fund, $170 in toys. The kid's gotta play too...)
Yes, there are countless differences there. But let's assume the number of logically independent differences between a bacteria and a rock is N. This means that there are 2^N - 1 logically intermediate cases between bacteria and rocks. Now we're supposed to draw a line that says that some of those cases are definitely "life," and that some are not.
What's worse is that the exercise of drawing that line adds nothing to our knowledge.
The problem here is simple. Your list is either going to be arbitrary, or it's going to admit of intermediate cases. (And do note that, from the point of view of modern biology, the existence of intermediate cases between paradigm examples of "living" and "nonliving" things is, if not required, at least very convenient for the theory that all uncontroversial "living" things evolved from uncontroversial "nonliving" things.)
Again. You identify N by-products. Then some dude discovers a thing that has N-1 of those byproducts, some other dude discovers one that has N/2, and a third one discovers a thing that has (N/2)+1 of them.
But those are cosmological questions, not empirical ones. Please spare us from your attempt to force your cosmology on us by disguising it as biology. If you wanna talk about biology, let's stick to our understanding of empirical matters.
For the debate over whether viruses are "alive" to make any sense, there has to be some literally essential difference between things that are alive and things that are not. The past 200 years or so of biology ought to have taught us that, contrary to what seemed evident to the ancients, there isn't any such essential difference. Organic matter is just a form of organization of inorganic manner. From the point of view of what the ancients knew, there was a huge gulf between everyday living beings and inert objects. From the point of view of what we know, there are many intermediate cases.
So, instead of wasting time trying to decide whether viruses are "really" alive or not, you should just accept the fact that our knowledge today is advanced enough to show that the question--which we inherited from people who knew less than we do--is flawed.
There is a common intellectual fallacy, that we ultimately inherit from the ancient Greeks, that there is such a thing as the definite classification of all the kinds of things that exist in the world, according to their essences. One example that's in the news a lot in recent years is the (pseudo-)question as to whether Pluto is a planet or not; too much of the debate about it presupposes that there is some essential sense in which Pluto really is or not a planet.
We should all reject that kind of thinking, because rejecting it clears the intellectual muddle that I think you're suffering here. The problem isn't that clear demarcations cannot be made; the problem is that clear demarcations can only be made for equally clear purposes, and that the demarcations made for one purpose may not be applicable for other purposes.
In the case of cars and vehicles, the relevant context is provided by the law in which the terms appear. In the case of court cases about "web sites," then the correct distinctions to apply for that case will depend on the body of law that the judge decides to apply to the case.
I suspect, however, that in a lot of cases, a good judge will have to conclude that the cases brought before them don't hinge on the meaning of the term "web site." I bet you most cases really hinge over who has what control over the content that is shown to other parties over the Internet, and what responsibilities are implied by that control. In a typical blog, for example, the blog's admins have the power to publish and retract entries, and to decide how user comments are handled. Readers may or may not have the power to cause comments to be added to blog entries right away. The admins have the power to delete comments after the fact, and may have legal obligations to delete some such comments within a reasonable time after coming to learn of them.
Just because you say so, Mr. I-Decide-What-The-Hell-Words-Must-Mean? So I guess that all these years I've been wrong to think that all those Geocities accounts were separate websites, when in fact, they are all the same site!
Come to think of it, actually, I once got a Geocities account on the basis of representations, made by Geocities, that such an account constituted a "website." Can I now sue Geocities for misrepresentations, or can they be otherwise penalized by making such misrepresentations to customers?
The term "website" has no more of a definite sense than "book." Is the Bible one book, many books, or both? Is the OED one book, or many books? What about a one-volume edition of the collected works of Shakespeare?
Um, C-style zero-terminated strings is one of the worst design decisions in C. The simplest alternative is Pascal-style strings, where the first machine word of each string's memory data is a length marker. This avoids all those algorithms that require you to sequentially scan the string to find its length, and doesn't forbid null characters in strings.
That is still often a problem, in that sometimes people sometimes make a mistake about what values are supposed to be valid for the fields.
The big problem is that most languages fail to provide enough support for types that allow you to reliably signal out-of-band conditions. For an example of the kind of features that make this possible to do, look no further than variant types in Haskell or OCaml.
Yes, the argument that people should only be penalized for health risks they have control over leads to the conclusion that it is fair to charge smokers and heavy drinkers more for health insurance (as long as no other right of theirs is violated). Also, it is fair to give discounts to people who exercise regularly.
Asking higher-risk customers to pay more for insurance is a form of risk-based pricing.
The problem is that in the realm of insurance, risk-based pricing is really only fair for risks that people can avoid. In the case of auto insurance, you can choose to drive carefully, not to buy car models with bad safety records, and so on. In the realm of health, however, there is relatively little you can do. You can avoid smoking, heavy drinking and drug use, and you can exercise regularly. However, that's no help if you, for example, have a congenital condition that doesn't reveal itself until you're an adult.
The conclusion this leads to is that health insurers should not vary premiums on just absolute medical risk, but rather, voluntary customer behaviors that unambiguously lead to higher health risk. E.g., it's OK if smokers pay more than non-smokers, or if the insurance company gives you a discount for going to the gym regularly. It's not OK if folks with congenital conditions can't get any health insurance at all because insurers basically set the price precisely so that such patients cannot afford it (because the company doesn't want them).
Auction rate securities are not the same thing as mortgage-backed securities, or mortgage-backed CDOs in particular. The latter were not in general promoted as cash substitutes.
Snopes doesn't do too bad of a job there with the myth of the Chevrolet Nova, but they just miss the most glaring problem with the story: who would seriously believe that Spanish speakers would avoid buying a foreign car just because its name would be a pun for "no go" in Spanish? It's like the Americans who believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all stupid simpletons. (Hmmm, I might be on to something there...)
It is true, as Snopes points out, that the normal way to describe in Spanish a car that doesn't work would be something like "no funciona," "no marcha" or "no camina," and not "no va." However, you can also be pretty sure that, more than once, the hapless owner of a broken down Chevy Nova has jokingly described it with a pun: "Mi Nova no va"; "Tengo que vender el Nova y comprarme un Siva" (I gotta sell my "no-go" and buy a "yes-go"); etc. It's like the Americans who don't believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all humorless literalists. (Hmmm...)
It's subtler than that. I object to the notion that bad debt was being "masked" as good debt. Nobody was hiding the fact that a lot of these mortgage-backed bonds were backed by subprime mortgages. They diversified the regional exposure of their mortgage-backed bonds, structured the bonds into multiple tiers so that a higher tier couldn't default unless all lower ones did, used complex mathematical models and financial to estimate the actual risk of the mortgage pools that backed the bonds, and used the structure of the bonds and the results of the models to convince the rating agencies to give them high ratings.
Of course, we know how well those mathematical risk models worked out: they were way too optimistic, and what's worse, in precisely the way that fit the bond issuers' short term profit. But the ratings agencies ought to have been more skeptical.
I think we should be questioning the idea that the submitter should seek weight loss as an immediate goal; rather, s/he should be encouraged to adopt a complete exercise routine for the long term. In the end, long-term fitness is more important than immediate weight loss. And by fit, I mean the following distinct things, each of which requires a different kind of exercise:
So what? The development costs for software can be pretty huge. You still need folks to figure out which problems really need solving, and folks to figure out how to best solve those problems; that's gonna cost you. And suppose you've paid that cost, and are working hard to sell your solution. Well, guess what, some bigger fish can come along and build the same thing for cheaper (since they can copy the design that cost you so much to make), and beat you.
Really, the problem with software patents is that they're being awarded at the wrong level of granularity, and for things that are too obvious. For example, a patent for a simple compression algorithm is something that's too fine-grained; while a patent for something like one-click purchases is too obvious. A patent for a novel approach at using software to manage a specific kind of supply chain problems by increasing the efficiency of one kind of factor? Now that sounds better.
There's also the Grokster case, where the Supreme Court of the United States said that Grokster was liable because its business model, basically, was to encourage people to break the law.
From the article:
So, in answer to your questions: probably because the police found them as a result of their investigation, because Childs allegedly kept them in plaintext, and yes, allegedly, Childs had plenty to do with it.
Do you have any other questions? Perhaps the article answers them.
No, it is only qualified if the differences between the genders are independent of the decisions justified by said differences. If the decisions have the perverse consequence of causing even more differences, then you have to bring the decisions into question.
The Pygmalion effect means that you can't separate performance from expectation of performance. Expectations of superior performance are, all too often, self-fulfilling prophecies.
Yes. What makes stock valuable is the expecation that at some point in the future, the company will pay out profits. That point in time can be deferred indefinitely, but the one thing that is clear is the following: the only way the shares of a company can be truly worthless is if it it certain that the company will never pay any profits.
Another factor that's important here is that stock normally also gives you a proportionate say in electing the board of the corporation, and that by electing a board that will pay dividends, the majority of shareholders can force the corporation's profits to be paid out.
Let's start a simple but uncommon case: imagine you personally hold a majority of the shares in a corporation. In this case, you quite simply have the power to have the company pay out a dividend whenever you want. As long the company does produce profits, your stock is of unquestionable, immediate value.
Of course, very few of us have controlling interests in a corporation; most shareholders are still minority shareholders. In that case, however, if anybody wants to accumulate enough stock in the company to force it to pay out undistributed profits, then those people must buy shares from folks like you, driving up the price of your shares. In effect, if the company has undistributed profits, and somebody wants to get their hands on those profits, they must buy the undistributed profits from you, because you own them.
The consequence, again, is that as long as the possibility exists that the company will pay out profits at some point in the future, the company's stock is valuable.
Because a profitable company is capable of paying dividends, even if it doesn't do it right away. An asset that can pay you dividends, even if it doesn't do so at present, is a valuable asset.
Think of it this way: the majority shareholders of a company, to the extent that they can agree among themselves to do so, hold a never-expiring option to pay themselves the company's profits in any quarter they agree to do so. Your shares in a company are valuable because either you can vote with your fellow shareholders to pay yourselves a dividend, or if you can't, you can sell your shares to somebody who has the clout to make it happen.
If this is truly, so, then please explain HOW THE FUCK IS IT ALSO THE CASE THAT THERE ARE SO MANY OF YOU GUYS IN THE TOP UNIVERSITIES, HOW COME THE PROFESSORS ARE ALL FOLKS LIKE YOU, AND HOW COME YOU GET PAID MORE THAN OTHER FOLKS FOR DOING THE EXACT SAME JOB.
Why do you assume that the causality must be in one direction but not the other? Culture doesn't work that way. The devaluation of certain social roles because they're played by women, and the devaluation of women because they play those roles, mutually support each other as a vicious circle.
Um, misogyny? WTF?
Again, the problem is that you're thinking linearly. Because you believe that which specific interests women have is logically prior to whether society devalues these interests, you are now arguing that we should focus on correcting the devaluation of women's interests, and not in getting women to play traditionally male roles. If the causality goes both ways, however, we should be doing both things.