Functional languages work by simplifying functional expressions according to the rules of the lambda calculus. Logic languages work by searching for combinations of values that satisfy a predicate, according to the rules of propositional logic (with predicate symbols, but without quantifiers).
Yeah, I know, that's kinda technical. Here's a more concrete example:
I've written production code using backtracking in Scheme, implemented with call/cc. In Ruby, IIRC, there's a library that uses callcc to convert Ruby-style internal iterators (that take a block as an argument and call it with each element of the sequence) to Python-style external iterators (where the iterator client advances it manually by using a next() operation on the iterator).
This is just one example of a more general use of call/cc--inversion of control. You have a piece of code that's designed in such a way that it wants to be the main routine, and use your code as a subroutine. You actually need the thing to work the other way around. Call/cc is an operator that allows you to solve this problem: you start up the other code's main loop, but you capture its continuation, which allows you to suspend its execution; then the bossy code calls back another piece of your code that captures a continuation that resumes bossycode, and invokes the suspend one.
The example that's been cited in this thread, continuation-based web frameworks, fits exactly into this framework. A servlet container (to use the Java term) is a bossy piece of code that expects your code to be written as stuff that it calls. However, you want to write your servlet as if it was the boss, with its own main loop that stays alive during multiple requests. So, your servlet captures a continuation that escapes back to the container, captures a second continuation that resumes the servlet's loop's execution, and uses the first captured continuation to return back to the container. When the container invokes your servlet again, it uses the second captured continuation to restore the servlet's loop.
Of course, the big problem is that there are very few production languages that implement call/cc efficiently...
I gotta disagree. I live in the deep south myself. The days of intimidation of a community, say the black one...is a thing of the past.
Well, I guess those kids in Jena, LA who put the noose on that tree in the school didn't get the memo.
Killing a black man is worse than the killing of a hispanic man? That sounds to me like giving one profile greater worth under the law than the other.
Um, your comment here sure makes it sound like hate crime laws cover crimes against black people, but not hispanics. (You also make it sound like you believe hispanics are not black, which is not always the case, but I digress.) If you beat up a Mexican and spray-paint "death to wetbacks" on his car after doing it, you're probably going to get prosecuted for a hate crime, you know.
Murder is murder...someone ends up dead, and it is horrible and needs to be punished...the same.
But the point of hate crimes laws is that different instances of the same crime have different effects on the community, and the motives and effects of some cases are especially toxic. Again, the same example: beat up a Mexican guy and spray-paint "death to wetbacks" on their car. This has the following kinds of effects:
Intimidating people who are classified like the victim. They refrain from participating in public life, because of fears for their safety. For example, they don't go to council meetings, or don't go vote when they otherwise would. Many become mistrustful of people who aren't like them--partly because of fear, partly also because being isolated makes it hard to gauge how accurate your ideas about others are.
Encouraging other folks to do further violence to people classified as the victim.
Polarizing the community into mutually hostile groups.
And lynching anyone or raping them for whatever reason...be it the lunar cycle, or due to race or sexuality...is still a crime. The reason it was done does NOT make it any worse!!
See, but here you're just thoroughly wrong.
Why do you think we have a distinction between crimes like manslaughter and murder? Why do you think we have different degrees of those crimes, calling for different punishments? Why do you think that insanity and self-defense are defenses against prosecutions for these crimes? Well, because the reason why somebody commits a homicide is crucially important in determining whether they should be convicted at all, and if so, what punishment they should get.
Hate crime laws are not just about motives for committing crimes; as I say above, they're also about the effect that crimes thus motivated have on the community.
What makes you think that the the difference between an plain old murder and a hate crime hinges on the motives of the perpetrator, and not the effect of the crime? Suppose I beat up an Elbonian who pissed me off because he parked on my favorite spot, and then I spray paint "death to Elbonians" on his car. Suppose I convincingly argue in court that my motive in beating the guy up was simply the fact that he angered me by taking my spot. Don't my actions still have the same effect on the community?
There's a delicate balance between holding people responsible for unintended effects of their actions, and excusing them because of their motives. Do you really think that balance is trivial to apply in hate crime cases?
I don't think that's the motivation behind hate crime laws. IIRC, the argument is that a crime that's targets at a member of a minority because of their ethnic or religious affiliation has a chilling effect on that community. E.g., if somebody beats up somebody's who's Jewish, and a reasonable person would conclude that the victim's being Jewish was a motive for the beating, then this makes other potential victims feel unsafe, and less willing to participate in the broader community.
Remember that, historically, racist violence against blacks in the American south had as, one of its aims, to intimidate African Americans into acquiescing to second-class citizen status, by making them too scared to do things like, for example, vote.
Re:What about his fellow travelers?
on
Kimchi in Space
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· Score: 1
It's not about _my_ being ethnocentric - it's about trying to have a lack of ethnocentric foods in space.
And of course, all the food choices that you'll find "not ethnocentric" will be from your culture. Like, say, tomatoes.
I'm not ashamed of anything in my medical records [...]
You're failing to understand that you cannot predict which people will find which information about you discreditable in what way, and what they will do or not do about it. Whether you're "ashamed" or not is irrelevant--plenty of people who aren't in any way ashamed of some trait of theirs still would prefer to control who gets to know about it, because they would likely face discrimination about it if disclosed.
Two obvious examples are sexual orientation for out-of-the-closet gays, and race for job applicants (if potential employers can infer from your resume that you're black, you're less likely to get called back; no, I'm not making this up). Another example from articles linked in some comments in this discussion: diabetes.
That would just be a moving-the-goalpost fallacy. They ask for speciation and we show it but then the ask for something else.
No, because they didn't ask for "speciation" in the sense that you're claiming they did. They weren't precise about what they demand (which is a real problem), but their examples show exactly what they're skeptical about, and it's not addressed by the studies you cite.
And you're still missing the point. Let's grant for the sake of argument that it is indeed a "moving-the-goalpost fallacy" (a "fallacy" that bothers me: can't people legitimately move goalposts as they learn more about the topic of argument? why call it "moving the goalpost," and not "refining their questions so that they better reflect what bothers them"?). Why do you want to chase after the goalpost, then? Go after the root of the problem: they're skeptical of any evidence for natural selection that isn't observable in live populations in a human timescale.
Individually there may be some skepticism but collectively there isn't. And I mean skepticism about whether evolution exists. Of course there is plenty of healthy skepticism within the evolution community but nothing that flat out denies the glaring obvious.
...and you're still missing the point if you call any of this "obvious." You need to try, as an exercise, seriously thinking through the consequences of the negation of something "obvious."
And even if there is doubts within the community that should not trickle down to the high schools. It should be worked out at the university level first.
Yup. High school biology courses should be simplified versions of the material taught in college intro to biology courses. No question there.
But note that there's more to this: it follows that the high school biology courses should teach this material even if it's false. So, as it turns out, whether evolution is "a fact" or not is irrelevant to the political issue. The real political issue is whether we should teach biology to high school students, and whether right-wing fundamentalist christians are allowed to censor or impose their commentary on the material.
Seriously? You literally see the Earth exert a force on a rock that's proportional to the product of the masses of the rock and the Earth, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the center of mass of each? What does it look like--does it look like the Earth extending an invisible tentacle that pulls the rock with all of its strength?
No you don't. What you see is a rock falling, not "gravity in operation."
Now here's your problem: why should the people who dispute "macroevolution" accept those studies as evidence that macro-evolution exists? The simplest retort that they have simply is to say that reproductively isolated populations are not a sufficient condition for the two populations to count as separate species in the sense required by the examples that they label as "macroevolution." Or, in other words, they don't have to accept the definition of "species" that's implicit in your argument, and your examples don't work unless they do.
While I agree with you that these people are wrong, I must say that the evidence you offer of speciation does not charitably address their argument. To put it simply, they can very well grant that natural selection can take some critters and change them into critters that are almost alike to the original ones, but no longer able to breed with their "cousins." What they really are skeptical about are claims that natural selection can turn fish-like creatures into dogs and apes and all other highly distinct mammal populations.
The argument that the evolution skeptics are making, when dissected to its bare form, is actually quite trivial. It really boils down to the following: while we have all sorts of contemporary evidence that natural selection can make "small" changes to organisms, we don't have the same kind of evidence for the larger changes that are attributed to natural selection, like turning fish into people. To get embroiled in a sub-argument about what "species" means and whether some phenomena observed within our lifetime counts as "speciation" is a waste of time, because it fails to address the real issue: what other kinds of evidence there is for the "macroevolutionary" claims, and why that evidence should be accepted as supporting the macroevolutionary claims.
And even that is missing the point. Skepticism about evolution, if you ask me, is not a big deal by itself; it's a healthy exercise everybody should indulge in every so often, to remind themselves that knowledge is fragile and fallible, and once upon a while, to discover something new. The big problem is the creationists' politics, which seeks to undo a good chunk of the good things about the Enlightenment.
I cannot conclude that the theory of gravity is immutable, no, but I can conclude that the existance of the phenomena of gravity is an immutable fact.
You're equivocating in a very subtle manner here. What you observe is that the rock falls at the ground; you don't observe the Earth exerting a gravitational force on the rock towards the center of the Earth. The only thing that allows you to label what you see (the rock falling) as "the phenomena of gravity" is the assumption that what you see is indeed caused by the action of a force called gravity, which behaves as your theory says.
Once you admit that we may revise or discard the theory of gravity and explain the rock's fall in another way (as you put it, that "the theory of gravity is [not] immutable"), then you have to admit that your justification for labeling the rock's fall as "the phenomena of gravity" can be taken away.
The fact that you're labeling the rock's fall as "the phenomena of gravity" is, incidentally, a great example of one of the central ideas of modern philosophy of science (a topic you do not seem to grasp at all): that observation is always theory-laden. It follows that, contra your argument in this thread, observations can in general be revised, because the background theories required to make the observation can be revised.
There is a theory of Evolution just like there is a theory of Gravity, each explaining the factual phenomena for which they are named.
Um, no. The theory of gravity isn't named after an observed phenomena that was already named "gravity" beforehand. The phenomena that the theory of gravity addresses (in crucial conjunction with the theory of Newtonian mechanics), if we really have to name them, are called Stuff Falls to the Ground, and Lights in the Sky Move in these Plane Trajectories.
Newton's laws are CALLED laws but they're really theories, like everything else. It's entirely possible that someone will come up with a better explanation of inertia next week, for instance.
No, not quite. Newton's laws are not theories. Newtonian mechanics is a theory of motion. Newton's laws are statements that are part of the theory. Newtonian mechanics hinges on how its laws of motion work together: it's all about how bodies will move given the net forces acting upon them. Put the theory of mechanics together with the theory of gravity, and you can unify the explanation of the motions of earthly and heavenly objects, which classically were the subjects of different theories.
Also, newtonian mechanics doesn't explain inertia; inertia is part of the explanation of why bodies move the way they do.
I was actually arguing with someone last week about why Java is the WRONG language to use for a once-off program to edit a column in a database. His response was "but Java is common and everyone knows it AND it's a database language, who knows Perl?". Shows how much he knows - a simple Perl script (or $DEITY help us a Bash script) that read, modified and updated each row according to the desired (not-quite-trivial) operation would have sufficed.
Vague allusions to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems will only lead you to being mocked by people who understand them. Now, with that out of the way...
As I was reading this, the first thing that came to mind was Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I don't understand it much at all, but essentially it was saying that no one could design a useful ruleset (i.e., axiomatic system) that was entirely self-consistent.
Gödel's theorems don't say that. The theorem is not about consistency of axiomatic systems in general, it's about whether arithmetic (one specific axiomatic system) is complete. An axiomatic system is complete, in short, if its all of its theorems are true in all of the models for its language, and all of the statements true in all of its models are provable as theorems. Additionally, Gödel's theorems show that no consistent axiomatic system can prove its own consistency--you need to prove it "from the outside," so to speak.
Note that:
Arithmetic is a consistent axiomatic system.
Just because arithmetic is incomplete, doesn't mean all other axiomatic systems are so. First order logic is complete (a proof that we owe, ironically enough, to Gödel.)
If you want to cite some supar-intellectual thinker thing that's relevant to this, I recommend Wittgenstein.
Randy Barnett in "Restoring the Lost Constitution" (ISBN 0691123764) argues that the law should be interpreted as a reasonable person would at the time of enactment (original meaning). Not the intent of the writers, but the meaning.
So what makes you think that we'll be able to figure out accurately the nuances of English from 225 years ago? And more importantly, what makes you think that the "meaning" of those laws can be definitely fixed by appeal to that criterion? Do you think that the people who approved the laws didn't disagree among themselves about what those laws meant, at any point?
There are many common phrases from many years ago that people currently misunderstand, for example, "one nation under God". So we will most certainly need experts in a specialized field to read laws. (Hey, don't we have those already?) And those experts will be fallible, and will often disagree about how to read a text.
Think of it this way in terms of contracts: contracts are written down so it is understood what the parties agreed to. If the meaning of the contract can change over time based on who reads it then the whole point and premise of writing it down is lost. The only way to maintain a contract's validity is to interpret based on the meaning of when it was written down.
The problem here is that no document can fix its own meaning, no matter how carefully you write it or read it. Therefore all your talk about the "meaning" of a contract or of the constitution begs the question that it had a fixed meaning when it was written down. How can a contract or a law have a meaning beyond the concrete applications that are made of it? (This is all Wittgenstein 101, applied to law...)
The more thoroughly you define something, the more likely it'll be consistent and the more likely we would have to actually amend the law rather than just reinterpret the law.
A few things:
I'm not sure that you and GP are using the term "consistent" in the same way. I think by "consistent" you mean that the law will be free of contradictions. I think what GP was questioning was the assumption that various interpreters, or the same interpreter at various times, will interpret the law in the same way.
The more elaborately you define something, actually, the more likely you are to introduce a logical inconsistency, either within the definition itself, or between it and some other assumption you've made elsewhere. (Unless by "thoroughly" you mean something that presupposes that you'll be logically consistent, in which case the whole statement smacks of circularity.)
Typically, by the time that problems are discovered with a law, it is too late to amend, because the discovery arises in the context of its application to a case at hand. What do we do when, in the process of judging whether Joe committed some specific crime, discover a flaw in the relevant statute that would make him guilty? Do we find him guilty, sentence him to prison, and then amend the law (and do we free him retroactively? and what if the amended version has an error that requires us to free people who were rightly imprisoned)? Or do we leave him in a legal limbo while the legislature amends the law?
The law isn't the same thing as statutes. Learn the difference.
As for the constitution, it draws up some really grand lines and was also in part a sales pitch for the United States but could with advantage have been expressed in more detail at times.
Yup, it could have been expressed in more detail. The problem is that it would quite likely not have been ratified, in that case.
I'm not quite sure it's going to change how we think about learning, as they state in TFA. I majored in linguistics, and even way back then, it was well understood by researchers in language acquisition that context played a significant role in both first and second language acquisition, but especially first.
You didn't spend a lot of time with Chomskians, right?
Your threat is empty. Yahoo's management doesn't make the decision whether to merge with Microsoft. There are two ways it can happen:
Yahoo's board (not the management!) agrees to a buyout offer from Microsoft. This is called "friendly takeover."
Microsoft, without approval from Yahoo's board, buys enough Yahoo stock in the open market so as to be able to kick out the current board, and choose their own replacement. This is called a "hostile takeover."
So yeah, don't waste your time barking up the wrong tree.
I don't think the precise numbers around all of this are understood yet, but the numbers out there are a 5 billion Euro loss from unwinding futures positions with a nominal value of 33 billion Euro; in USD, roughly, 7 billion and 50 billion. So if the market is worth 1,000 billion USD (yeah, I know it's not), it's as if somebody sold off 5% of the market.
You're certainly not the only one who thinks the losses on that Monday could've been caused by SocGen unwinding, there are stories of that in the news. I remember that one of them said that SocGen's positions didn't amount to more than 8% of any of the markets they were in.
Take into account the following things:
These positions, as far as I know, were in index derivatives for European markets. The market impact is to be computed by the market cap of the index.
The USA is the biggest stock market in the world, with approximately 44% of the world's total market capitalization (last time I looked). The developed markets of Europe, taken together, count for about 26% (rough estimate). A 50B position in Europe is a relatively larger slice of the pie than a $50B position in the USA.
The job of a dictionary is to help you understand and make yourself understood. The job of a dictionary is not to settle questions like this. Or do you think that the lexicographers spent any serious amount of time, when writing their entry for capitalism, deciding whether it is really true that "the whole basis of a capitalist system is the idea that you are responsible for yourself"? That's not their job.
Mounted on the top of your shotgun it's perfect. intruder in your home, you have a perfect view of them before you dump a couple of 12 gauge slugs in their chest.
No you don't, because the light is too bright at close range, and it will blind you both. You want something like this for that shotgun. 60 lumens, though the bulb upgrade for 120 could well be worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
Functional languages work by simplifying functional expressions according to the rules of the lambda calculus. Logic languages work by searching for combinations of values that satisfy a predicate, according to the rules of propositional logic (with predicate symbols, but without quantifiers).
Yeah, I know, that's kinda technical. Here's a more concrete example:
The SFLC's Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects covers this. You probably want to give it a read.
Still, if it's really important, ask a lawyer, don't ask Slashdot.
I've written production code using backtracking in Scheme, implemented with call/cc. In Ruby, IIRC, there's a library that uses callcc to convert Ruby-style internal iterators (that take a block as an argument and call it with each element of the sequence) to Python-style external iterators (where the iterator client advances it manually by using a next() operation on the iterator).
This is just one example of a more general use of call/cc--inversion of control. You have a piece of code that's designed in such a way that it wants to be the main routine, and use your code as a subroutine. You actually need the thing to work the other way around. Call/cc is an operator that allows you to solve this problem: you start up the other code's main loop, but you capture its continuation, which allows you to suspend its execution; then the bossy code calls back another piece of your code that captures a continuation that resumes bossycode, and invokes the suspend one.
The example that's been cited in this thread, continuation-based web frameworks, fits exactly into this framework. A servlet container (to use the Java term) is a bossy piece of code that expects your code to be written as stuff that it calls. However, you want to write your servlet as if it was the boss, with its own main loop that stays alive during multiple requests. So, your servlet captures a continuation that escapes back to the container, captures a second continuation that resumes the servlet's loop's execution, and uses the first captured continuation to return back to the container. When the container invokes your servlet again, it uses the second captured continuation to restore the servlet's loop.
Of course, the big problem is that there are very few production languages that implement call/cc efficiently...
No, it's the Arabic word for God. What do you think Christian Arabs call God?
Well, I guess those kids in Jena, LA who put the noose on that tree in the school didn't get the memo.
Um, your comment here sure makes it sound like hate crime laws cover crimes against black people, but not hispanics. (You also make it sound like you believe hispanics are not black, which is not always the case, but I digress.) If you beat up a Mexican and spray-paint "death to wetbacks" on his car after doing it, you're probably going to get prosecuted for a hate crime, you know.
But the point of hate crimes laws is that different instances of the same crime have different effects on the community, and the motives and effects of some cases are especially toxic. Again, the same example: beat up a Mexican guy and spray-paint "death to wetbacks" on their car. This has the following kinds of effects:
See, but here you're just thoroughly wrong.
There's a delicate balance between holding people responsible for unintended effects of their actions, and excusing them because of their motives. Do you really think that balance is trivial to apply in hate crime cases?
I don't think that's the motivation behind hate crime laws. IIRC, the argument is that a crime that's targets at a member of a minority because of their ethnic or religious affiliation has a chilling effect on that community. E.g., if somebody beats up somebody's who's Jewish, and a reasonable person would conclude that the victim's being Jewish was a motive for the beating, then this makes other potential victims feel unsafe, and less willing to participate in the broader community.
Remember that, historically, racist violence against blacks in the American south had as, one of its aims, to intimidate African Americans into acquiescing to second-class citizen status, by making them too scared to do things like, for example, vote.
And of course, all the food choices that you'll find "not ethnocentric" will be from your culture. Like, say, tomatoes.
You're failing to understand that you cannot predict which people will find which information about you discreditable in what way, and what they will do or not do about it. Whether you're "ashamed" or not is irrelevant--plenty of people who aren't in any way ashamed of some trait of theirs still would prefer to control who gets to know about it, because they would likely face discrimination about it if disclosed.
Two obvious examples are sexual orientation for out-of-the-closet gays, and race for job applicants (if potential employers can infer from your resume that you're black, you're less likely to get called back; no, I'm not making this up). Another example from articles linked in some comments in this discussion: diabetes.
No, because they didn't ask for "speciation" in the sense that you're claiming they did. They weren't precise about what they demand (which is a real problem), but their examples show exactly what they're skeptical about, and it's not addressed by the studies you cite.
And you're still missing the point. Let's grant for the sake of argument that it is indeed a "moving-the-goalpost fallacy" (a "fallacy" that bothers me: can't people legitimately move goalposts as they learn more about the topic of argument? why call it "moving the goalpost," and not "refining their questions so that they better reflect what bothers them"?). Why do you want to chase after the goalpost, then? Go after the root of the problem: they're skeptical of any evidence for natural selection that isn't observable in live populations in a human timescale.
...and you're still missing the point if you call any of this "obvious." You need to try, as an exercise, seriously thinking through the consequences of the negation of something "obvious."
Yup. High school biology courses should be simplified versions of the material taught in college intro to biology courses. No question there.
But note that there's more to this: it follows that the high school biology courses should teach this material even if it's false. So, as it turns out, whether evolution is "a fact" or not is irrelevant to the political issue. The real political issue is whether we should teach biology to high school students, and whether right-wing fundamentalist christians are allowed to censor or impose their commentary on the material.
Seriously? You literally see the Earth exert a force on a rock that's proportional to the product of the masses of the rock and the Earth, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the center of mass of each? What does it look like--does it look like the Earth extending an invisible tentacle that pulls the rock with all of its strength?
No you don't. What you see is a rock falling, not "gravity in operation."
Now here's your problem: why should the people who dispute "macroevolution" accept those studies as evidence that macro-evolution exists? The simplest retort that they have simply is to say that reproductively isolated populations are not a sufficient condition for the two populations to count as separate species in the sense required by the examples that they label as "macroevolution." Or, in other words, they don't have to accept the definition of "species" that's implicit in your argument, and your examples don't work unless they do.
While I agree with you that these people are wrong, I must say that the evidence you offer of speciation does not charitably address their argument. To put it simply, they can very well grant that natural selection can take some critters and change them into critters that are almost alike to the original ones, but no longer able to breed with their "cousins." What they really are skeptical about are claims that natural selection can turn fish-like creatures into dogs and apes and all other highly distinct mammal populations.
The argument that the evolution skeptics are making, when dissected to its bare form, is actually quite trivial. It really boils down to the following: while we have all sorts of contemporary evidence that natural selection can make "small" changes to organisms, we don't have the same kind of evidence for the larger changes that are attributed to natural selection, like turning fish into people. To get embroiled in a sub-argument about what "species" means and whether some phenomena observed within our lifetime counts as "speciation" is a waste of time, because it fails to address the real issue: what other kinds of evidence there is for the "macroevolutionary" claims, and why that evidence should be accepted as supporting the macroevolutionary claims.
And even that is missing the point. Skepticism about evolution, if you ask me, is not a big deal by itself; it's a healthy exercise everybody should indulge in every so often, to remind themselves that knowledge is fragile and fallible, and once upon a while, to discover something new. The big problem is the creationists' politics, which seeks to undo a good chunk of the good things about the Enlightenment.
You're equivocating in a very subtle manner here. What you observe is that the rock falls at the ground; you don't observe the Earth exerting a gravitational force on the rock towards the center of the Earth. The only thing that allows you to label what you see (the rock falling) as "the phenomena of gravity" is the assumption that what you see is indeed caused by the action of a force called gravity, which behaves as your theory says.
Once you admit that we may revise or discard the theory of gravity and explain the rock's fall in another way (as you put it, that "the theory of gravity is [not] immutable"), then you have to admit that your justification for labeling the rock's fall as "the phenomena of gravity" can be taken away.
The fact that you're labeling the rock's fall as "the phenomena of gravity" is, incidentally, a great example of one of the central ideas of modern philosophy of science (a topic you do not seem to grasp at all): that observation is always theory-laden. It follows that, contra your argument in this thread, observations can in general be revised, because the background theories required to make the observation can be revised.
Um, no. The theory of gravity isn't named after an observed phenomena that was already named "gravity" beforehand. The phenomena that the theory of gravity addresses (in crucial conjunction with the theory of Newtonian mechanics), if we really have to name them, are called Stuff Falls to the Ground, and Lights in the Sky Move in these Plane Trajectories.
No, not quite. Newton's laws are not theories. Newtonian mechanics is a theory of motion. Newton's laws are statements that are part of the theory. Newtonian mechanics hinges on how its laws of motion work together: it's all about how bodies will move given the net forces acting upon them. Put the theory of mechanics together with the theory of gravity, and you can unify the explanation of the motions of earthly and heavenly objects, which classically were the subjects of different theories.
Also, newtonian mechanics doesn't explain inertia; inertia is part of the explanation of why bodies move the way they do.
Perl? Um, have you ever heard of SQL?
Vague allusions to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems will only lead you to being mocked by people who understand them. Now, with that out of the way...
Gödel's theorems don't say that. The theorem is not about consistency of axiomatic systems in general, it's about whether arithmetic (one specific axiomatic system) is complete. An axiomatic system is complete, in short, if its all of its theorems are true in all of the models for its language, and all of the statements true in all of its models are provable as theorems. Additionally, Gödel's theorems show that no consistent axiomatic system can prove its own consistency--you need to prove it "from the outside," so to speak.
Note that:
If you want to cite some supar-intellectual thinker thing that's relevant to this, I recommend Wittgenstein.
So what makes you think that we'll be able to figure out accurately the nuances of English from 225 years ago? And more importantly, what makes you think that the "meaning" of those laws can be definitely fixed by appeal to that criterion? Do you think that the people who approved the laws didn't disagree among themselves about what those laws meant, at any point?
There are many common phrases from many years ago that people currently misunderstand, for example, "one nation under God". So we will most certainly need experts in a specialized field to read laws. (Hey, don't we have those already?) And those experts will be fallible, and will often disagree about how to read a text.
The problem here is that no document can fix its own meaning, no matter how carefully you write it or read it. Therefore all your talk about the "meaning" of a contract or of the constitution begs the question that it had a fixed meaning when it was written down. How can a contract or a law have a meaning beyond the concrete applications that are made of it? (This is all Wittgenstein 101, applied to law...)
A few things:
Yup, it could have been expressed in more detail. The problem is that it would quite likely not have been ratified, in that case.
You didn't spend a lot of time with Chomskians, right?
Your threat is empty. Yahoo's management doesn't make the decision whether to merge with Microsoft. There are two ways it can happen:
So yeah, don't waste your time barking up the wrong tree.
Two things:
I don't think the precise numbers around all of this are understood yet, but the numbers out there are a 5 billion Euro loss from unwinding futures positions with a nominal value of 33 billion Euro; in USD, roughly, 7 billion and 50 billion. So if the market is worth 1,000 billion USD (yeah, I know it's not), it's as if somebody sold off 5% of the market.
You're certainly not the only one who thinks the losses on that Monday could've been caused by SocGen unwinding, there are stories of that in the news. I remember that one of them said that SocGen's positions didn't amount to more than 8% of any of the markets they were in.
Take into account the following things:
The job of a dictionary is to help you understand and make yourself understood. The job of a dictionary is not to settle questions like this. Or do you think that the lexicographers spent any serious amount of time, when writing their entry for capitalism, deciding whether it is really true that "the whole basis of a capitalist system is the idea that you are responsible for yourself"? That's not their job.
Says who? Who appointed you and vested you with the power to decide what the basis of a capitalist economy is?
Don't try to pass value judgements as fact judgements.
No you don't, because the light is too bright at close range, and it will blind you both. You want something like this for that shotgun. 60 lumens, though the bulb upgrade for 120 could well be worthwhile.