Why? Kyoto didn't impose any real restrictions on developing nations, and it's not the US's job to play hero all the time. If everyone is going to get behind reducing emissions, fine, but there's no reason for us to suffer if there isn't going to be any global net gain. Recall, if you will, that China now surpasses us in total CO2 emissions. So what, exactly, would have been the point? Yes, according to estimates made by BP China is the cheif emitter. The 2004 data show that at that point the USA was teh chief emitter with China a close second. However, it is probably worth remembering that China has 4-5x the population, as well as a large proportion of the world's industry so it is really not expected that they should have the same carbon emissions. After all, the USA probably would not aim to have its carbon emissions as low as, say, New Zealand's. Not because NZ is particularily environmentally friendly, but because it would mean that the resources available for each person in the US would be significantly less than those available to people in NZ so that we could have some magic number being the same behind some artificial lines on a map.
But I gather the point that you are trying to make is that your objection is more about the fact that developing countries do not have the same restrictions on them as industrialised countries. That is not quite true either; my understanding of Kyoto is that eventually all countries will have caps on their carbon emissions, but for those non-first world countries that are developing have those caps in place in around 10 years time. The rationale for this is that first-world countries already have large economies they built out of using the world's resources, and we should allow other nations to build their economies as well. You can debate the wisdom of this strategy, but it is not the blantant hipocracy that some seem to think it is.
First-world nations could, if they so choose, take it as an opportunity. By developing green technologies now, they will be in a position to sell them to developing nations later. There is money to be made in green, of we are willing to innovate.
In addition they have to pay a special Non-Resident Alien tax on their income (NRA tax on the paystub). It is not much -- around $30 a month -- but remember it is a tax specifically for those that have no representation.
I did. It mentioned common law, and I checked some wikipedia articles on it. Common law is when the rulings of a judge are essentially codified into law. I was under the (mistaken) understanding that most of the US system was under common law. I was not trying to be a lawyer, or trying to give a legal opinion. I was expressing the fact that I did not understand the law, pointed out where the possible problems were (e.g. the definition of common law) and asked for any help in what the article meant.
It is not your job to educate me on such matters, but your rudeness is uncalled for. The first reply I got gave me an area to look into to discern the difference and help me in my understanding of the law. I can understand your response if my post had gone out and claimed that the judge was completely wrong in his ruling and that a cursory reading of the constitution told you the judge was an idiot. However, what I said was I did not understand why the seventh amendent did not apply, and asked for help with my lack of understanding.
If you don't want to help people understand, and they are not propogating misinformation, why the need to be so rude?
This is something that has confused me before, so I will ask it again in this context. The seventh amendment states
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law. I am also aware that corporations are treated much like persons, and the amount in question certainly comes to more than $20, so why are they not guaranteed the right to trial by jury if they request it?
The answers I got when I asked about this last time (it was about people) was that someone could request a jury trial for civil matters, but they would have to pay huge court expenses. One argument may by that a corporation does not have the same rights as a person. After all, the USSC has ruled that "free speechquot; and commerical speech are quite different, and commercial speech is the only type of speech a corporation is likely to be involved in. Or is it that the costs to SCO would be too high? Or is it a technical definition of the words common law that I am missing?
(1) That's the thing. It's a private establishment. They don't have to have any sort of cause to search your bag in their store. The 4th Amendment only applies to governmental industries. Now, when they directed the police to search there, I'm going to say that the police, relying on the sworn statements of store employees, had probable cause to conduct a search, even though they found nothing. Yes, it is a private establishment. My bag is my private property. I don't have to let someone look in it if I do not want to, unless they are authorised to do so (i.e. the government or their appointed officials). Thus we have a conflict of rights. The way that this is resolved to the best of my knowledge:
If the store has someone at the door who informs me that I cannot bring my bag onto private property, then I may leave.
If I enter the store and they tell me that I have to let them inspect my bag, then I can refuse to do so (it is my private property, and they are a private entity). They are free to tell me to leave their private property at that point
After all, if I invite you around for dinner at my house I am not permitted to frisk you before I allow you to leave. I am within my rights to demand that you leave if you are not willing to be frisked...
....just not a Mandatory National ID Card like every other country in the world has. Really? Quick quiz:
What is New Zealand's national identification card?
Answer: It does not have one. We do have a IRD number (like an SSN) but it is not used for identification purpose except to the Inland Revenue department.
What is Australia's national identification card?
Answer: (at least to the mid 80s) It does not have one.
Unless, "by all countries" you really meant all countries that have a national ID....?
In most places with a separate small claims court, no lawyers are allowed. Virginia has something similar to what you are describing, which is its General District Court. The GDC sits without a jury and has looser procedural rules than the Circuit Court, which is the trial court that can have juries and has more power. The Circuit Court cannot hear cases from $4,500 down. The GDC cannot hear cases over $15,000. You can have a lawyer in either of those courts. There is also a small claims division within the GDC, which cannot hear cases above $5,000 and where lawyers are not allowed. Even when they let someone other than the actual party go to small claims court on the party's behalf (incapacitated people, corporations, etc.), they generally let you have anyone go except for lawyers.
Maybe there are other courts that you have not mentioned, but if not I do not understand this statement. The 7th amendment, as well as encoding double jeopardy, allows one to insist on a jury trial for any case where the damages are in excess of $20.
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
There may be an amendment (I am not from the US, and don't know all the amendments) but I have never understood why this does not bog down the court system with people demanding jury trials (which cannot then be appealed). Is it that this does fall under common law?
The problem comes about because using a car (for example) is required by law if you wish to drive. People (and in particular employers) will assume that you are able to drive. Inability to get income will cut out many jobs; not so much for the Wall Street types but for the pizza delivery guy, the mover, the trucker,... i.e. the people who generally earn a lower income.
The problem arises that people who cannot afford insurance may not be able to get jobs either. This is very different from a casino, because there is very few careers require you to play in a casino. The government does not insist that as a requirement of doing something else you must play at a casino. Because the government is a large part of why people are insured, it is appropriate that they look into legislation on how new discrimantory information may be used.
If you wish to have a free market solution a better way is to have non-discimatory government (basic) insurance, and then allow commercial insurers to have whatever policies they want. That way you have removed a legal protected oligopoly and can allow effective free market solution.
A free market operates in pareto efficiency, the most efficient form a market can hope to attain. This means it operates at a level of 99.9999999999% efficiency (ten signifigant digits).
Where does a figure of this accuracy come from? This does not mean the same thing as a Pareto efficiency. A Pareto efficienct solution is one where there are no solutions that leave no one worse off. For example, let us *start* with making me the grand high ruler of everything, and everyone does what I say. This is an incredibly inefficient system, but any change too far would be beneficial to most, but disadvantageous to me. This system is at least close to a Pareto optimal point, but in terms of total efficiency it is lousy. While this is a strawman, it does illustrate that Pareto efficient != efficient.
Where does your figure to your boasted 10 "significant figures" come from? I see you actually citied 12 sig figures, and that you may wish to consider
# decimal places != # significant figures That is a rather extraordinary precision, and yet there is no justification for it. Then again, you seem to have trouble with related but distinct concepts (Pareto efficiency vs efficiency, sig fig vs decimal places) so my guess would be that you made up this number to justify your argument.
The criticism of monopolies existing is nearly baseless. There are three ways a monopoly can form. The first, which we see in present day, is though government favor such as bailouts and tax credits. The second is in control of a limited natural resource, such as drinking water. The third is that the monopoly provides a service its customers enjoy so thoroughly no other entity can provide that service better for the same price.
The reasons are a good list for how monopolies can form. But consider that one of the first things that Adam Smith did when doing economics was look at the economics of monopoly. He showed that monopolies control the supply, and therefore a profit making monopoly would be better off making less than demanded so the price would be higher. Because they are the only player in town, they would be able to sell all there stock at this high price. In a competitive marketplace, others would be attracted by the high profits and compete to lower the cost of goods. So monopolies intoduce inefficiencies into the economy.
If a monopoly ever gets established, then they will try and hold onto that monopoly by fair market rules (i.e. do what is best for me). The free market *does* get trapped in local maxima.
If you are interested in this stuff, good for you. But I would recommend picking up an economics textbook and working through it.
I did not support the war, I felt that the evidence was flimsy but I think that you are being unfair to those that did.
You are correct that there was evidence presented. For example the aluminium tubes were presented and were real. However, there was other "evidence" (testimony) that was completely bogus: such as claiming the only purpose for those aluminium tubes could be the manufacture of weapons grade plutonium. Now in this case, you may say that any rational, thinking person should be responsible enough to tell the difference between physical evidence and someones opinion. There would be a real problem if physical evidence was fabricated, but it wasn't. As I understand your position, it is simply the case that the implications and conclusions drawn from the physical evidence was overstated.
The reason that I disagree with your sentiment is that much of the evidence that compells governments to say "we know that [country X] was behind/ has/ did [Y]" is classified. They say "trust us". The overplayed example of the Twin Towers is a good example of this. How did we (the public) know that the Taliban played a key role in the Twin Towers incident? There is lots of information now about why that conclusion can be drawn, but it was relatively sparse at the time. In New Zealand, where I was living, the government pledged its support to the US and explained that it knew because of "classified information". I was against NZ going into Afganistan because I felt that they had not proven their point. As it turns out, the evidence they were working off was reliable -- or, more precisely, the conclusions they drew from the evidence presented are the same as the conclusions one can draw from the reasonably reliable information now publically avialable.
The real question is this: how can the public make an informed decision about the validity of the conclusions drawn if the evidence itself is classified? For this reason I believe that the US government bears far greater responsibility and did lie to the population when they said over-and-over that "we know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction".
The other point which is continually raised is
People voted for the war because Sadam was a really bad buy, Iraq was a state sponsor of terror, and a lot of people here felt like we had unfinished business from the end of the first war. The WMDs were just an excuse to claim that their was an eminent threat that needed to be eliminated. That's why people did not scrutinize the evidence.
I agree that Saddam is a bad guy, and I think that you would be hard pressed to find someone who disagrees. But, if that is sufficient for making the case for an invasion, sell your invasion on that basis. Then people are able to have a rational discussion of what the costs and benefits are to their country and the Iraqi's of invading Iraq and disposing of Saddam. To try and scare people into agreeing with you and your plan of action by creating an imagined threat off flimsy evidence is dishonest. It amounts to being lied to.
The best thing I think that people should take out of your post is that there is an absolute need to question your government and not believe them. However, to try and get reliable information we should also be holding them responsible for misrepresenting information and actively engaging in spreading things they knew not to be true (see grandparent post about Cheney last week connecting AQ and Iraq). To dismiss these lies as acceptable because people should be questioning their government (and they should be!) is counter-productive.
CEO: "We are not going to lay off 500 workers." English: "We are going to lay off 510 workers. Or 490. Just not 500."
Ummm.. If you lay off 510 workers, you are laying off 500 workers. You are also laying off an additional 10 workers. It is like that riddle "I have two coins in my pocket, the total of which is thirty cents. One of those coins is not a quarter."
Such a statement means that they can lay off up to 499 workers without lying; after that 500 workers have been laid off even if the figure is not only 500 workers.
But why not argue the points that you actually believe? There are (at least) three independent things here
Global warming/climate change is happening
Changing our behaviour can have a significant impact on the environment
That the Kyoto protocol/wind farms/nuclear power/... a good idea
(On second thought, the combination 1: any, 2: F and 3: T false may be a logical possibility but hard to find people who believe in it).
Even the people that argue that the global climate change is caused by the sun agree with point 1, although they may disagree with points 2 and 3. A lot of your post explaining the Republician position is saying that Kyoto is bad in your point of view, and that environmentalists argue about other policies amongst themselves so how can the Republicians pick a responsible stance?
The problem is that those are attacks on policies aimed at resolving the issue of global warming (amongst others). I believe the question that was being asked originally (or at least, the one I think should have been asked) is why there is so much disagreement on points 1 and 2 from the GOP, when there is an abundance of evidence for them? IF you then wish to point out that a particular policy is bad (e.g. Kyoto) or that environmentalists don't have a coherent policy, then why isn't the GOP platform: Yes its happening, now we should decide what we should do about it and what we are willing to give up.
Reducing questions of what we should do with the question of existence of the problem is intellectually dishonest (and, regrettably, something that seems to be shared between both of the major parties in the US)
Ummmm, right... That's a good plan. Economically present yourself to the international community for castration. IF they want to propose rules, then present a flat playing field where no-one derives an economic, political, or strategic advantage, or it's not a tenable solution.
But the point is that it is supposed to level the playing field. At the moment we have many first-world nations that have a large infrastructure by burning a lot of oil and resources. Doing so has left them in the position of being able to have higher productivity and thus a higher quality of life. The resources we took were taken from everyone as a whole, similarly the impact on the environment impacts everyone as a whole. The CO2 in one area spreads out over other areas.
The rationale behind making developing nations have different standards is that it levels the playing field. If everyone was subject to the same controls then the people who got in first would enjoy all the advantages of getting "dirty" production and then using it to prop up future production. What you seem to be saying is "Come too late? Sorry, should have started producing and polluting sooner like us!"
That is all there is to it. It is not even that China and India are completely exempt. It is just that the timeframe for them to work on emissions is different, precisely to allow them to build up an infrastructre to support their economy.
If you feel so adamant about "your economy", this is actually a huge opportunity for the developing nations to innovate new green technologies and sell them off to the rest of the world. After all, the Kyoto protocol will kick in for everyone eventually.
The problem with doing nothing is that it hurts eveyone.
One idea that comes to mind is a two-tiered high school degree. One basic high school diploma, and one advanced high school diploma which is awarded to students to excel in standard courses or does average in advanced placement courses.
Or you could do what Britan has been doing for years with their O and A levels. Test twice during high school, and instead of SATs which test introductory high school have the exams at the end of the school be based on the material they were supposed to learn. Have an exam for end of year history, end of year physics, and have it standardised across the nation.
Or introduce something like New Zealand's unit standards. Personally I don't like this approach as you compartmentalise information, whereas most interesting problems rely on your ability to combine information that you have learnt. YMMV. But the basic idea is break each subject into "units", and then get students to pass or fail those units separately.
In essence, I think one of the big problems is that in the US one can get a high school "diploma" just by showing up. Because everyone has one, it doesn't mean anything. Make students work for it, and tax to make the people pay for it (i.e. still break into tiers, but pay the most money to the poorest schools). An educated populace benefits all!
Since every package modifies the base system, the only way to prove that a package will work is to test it against every possible package configuration available! In case you're wondering, the math for that is P * P, where P is the number of packages available. A mere 100 packages could potentially result in 10,000 available configurations!
It is worse than a possible P*P = P^2 number of combinations. Each package can either be there, or not. You can represent this as a P-digit binary number, where the i-th digit tells you if the i-th pacakge is installed or not. For example, for only three packages you can represent a combination as 011 (not package 1, but both packages 2 & 3). The total number of such combinations is 2^P, or in the case of three packages this is 8 possible configurations!
For the 100 packages you were mentioning this is approximately 10^30 possible configs.
(The P^2 gives you close to the right answer if the question is "how many configurations are there if I install 2 packages from these 100". The answer is then P(P-1)/2, which is roughly a factor of 2 out from P^2 for large P)
Many people are pointing out that we really do not know what is going on at these sort of energies, and should we be playing with this if it hsa even the smallest chance of destroying the planet, etc. etc.
What they are not pointing out is that collisions at the TeV scale are happening in our atmosphere, and if the theory about microscopic black holes are correct then they are being produced now. The flux of them is simply not great enough to be detected yet, but people keen on extra dimensions are hoping that they will be soon as more detectors come online (in particular, neutrino detectors at the poles).
The possibilities: 1) We can get black holes on this scale => no problem, nature does it anyway 2) Gravity is modified at this scale, and none are produced/obey the usual assumptions. As cosmic rays are colliding at TeV energies with the atmosphere with no ill-effect, we should be able to do it too.
And in reply: I really hate comments like this. Do you have any real evidence proving that there was no plot?
I think part of the point is that we don't need real evidence proving that there was no plot. Circumstantial evidence points toward it not working, and the burden of proof should fall to the government.
While terrorism is a threat to people's safety, so are many other things. The opinion of how many freedoms should be given up, or rights should be exchanged will vary from person to person (see the comments here). But to form an opinion we need a realistic idea of what the dangers are and how probable they are, and many people do not trust the British or American governments not to lie to them to make the dangers seem worse and grant them extra powers.
As governments in general do have a history of doing just this, it is not unreasonable to ask them to show the odds are as bad as they say they are, so the populace can make an educated decision about our rights, freedoms and safety.
(I, like most others, have strong opinions on where the lines should be drawn but me personal views are not the issue. Disemmination of information is)
Sort of. The technical statement in the paragraph above is completely correct -- yoy cannot escape back out to future null infinity. You can, as you point out, pass through a ring singularity into another universe if the black hole is charged or rotates. A black hole can act as a passage from one spacetime to another, but not [simply by defintion] into the same region. The name for this sort of object is an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
The trouble is that while they work in principle, they are highly unstable. Any light (or anything else that carries energy) that you send through this tunnel tends to cause a gravitational blue-shifting meaning that the particle has more and more energy (relative to someone "at rest with respect to the distant stars"). This destroys the bridge (see work by Isreal and others on "mass inflation").
You can stop this by threading the throat with exotic matter, as long as you do it before an event horizon forms. Then you no longer have a black hole, you have a wormhole. Two problems:
1) Exotic matter is not known to exist in bulk quantities
2) This may allow time travel (see Visser's boko "Lorentzian wormholes" for GR, or Kip Thorne's "Black holes and time warps" for a popular account).
The definition of a black hole does NOT require a singularity. What the strict defintion requires (as in Hawking and Ellis, or Wald's "General relativity) is that the black hole region in an asymptotically simple spacetime is the region that is causally disconnected from future null infinity.
In English: once you go into one, you can never get back out if you believe that nothing can travel faster than light. If you CAN get out, the thing you started with was not a black hole!
Notice that for the concept of black hole to make sense, you do not need general relativity. You do need to believe that there is an ultimate speed limit, and then the black hole of any theory is the region you cannot escape from.
It is then a THEOREM of (classical) general relativity that such a region contains a singularity. If GR is corrected by some version of quantum gravity where there are no singularities, then this theory can still have black holes (regions of no escape).
Now this is a stricter sense in which black holes are talked about currently. The article mentions Hawking and Thorne's disagreement: is information carried off by Hawking radiaiton? The answer is no: if the information goes in then it cannot come out by (the strict) definition of what a black hole is. Technically, the argument about the information loss problem is whether or not black holes (as originally defined) exist at all!
However, this is an arguement purely at the level of sematics. There is very little observational difference between a real black hole [one that locks information up forever] and an information returning black hole [one that locks up and processes particles for a long period of time, but the end result of this process is re-emission as Hawking radiaiton]. Because the definition given above is one made for convience, most researchers in the field take a somewhat more pragmatic definition of a black hole.
The theory of MECOs seems to still be built on General Relativity. It claims that radiation increases to stop complete collapse. This does not preclude the existence of black holes! It just means that they are unlikely to form as the end result of astrophysical processes. However, there are situations where you can make black holes at very low temperatures, or ones that you can do in flat space (although these tend to be somewhat artificial).
The moral is
* MECOs are built on GR. If MECOs exist, then black holes are still solutions to GR
* The MECO advocates claim that this is a universal process for very hot and dense gas. We should not expect that black holes are a typical end of stellar product.
* MECOs may exist, but the process may not be universal (i.e. it may require particular thresholds of energy/pressure). This would allow a mix of black holes and MECOs.
* There may be no MECOs at all.
Personally I am dubious that MECOs exist at all. Pressure *can* support a star against collapse, but only to a certain extent in GR. After a while, the pressure required also acts as a stronger source of gravity and ends in a runaway reaction causing collapse. See this paper of mine for more details: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0306038
Depends on where you live on the legallity of it. Some countries (e.g. New Zealand) have interest free students loans, and you can use the living allowance part however you wish (there is a separete part that deals with the tuition costs; those HAVE to be paid to a tuition provider)
How ethical this is as a course of action is certainly up for questioning. However just because it is illegal where you are does not mean it is illegal everywhere.
(The government should have a better grasp of economics however; in dealing with large numbers of people you don't know personally it is almost inevitable that some of them will take advantage of such a scheme.)
which quickly turns into a passive-aggressive "I can be in the left lane because I'm doing the speed limit" game
I am always puzzled by this. It is illegal to go faster than the speed limit. It is also (in most places) illegal to aid someone in breaking the law.
I do not believe that just because something is illegal necessarily makes it immoral or dangourous. Breaking the law, when done because the law is unjust and other avenues do not work is a civic duty!
Yet I do not understand why exceeding the speed limit falls into this category. I know that the speed limit is not always designed according to traffic engineers recommendations (it should be set at the 66th percentile of driving speeds, according to a slashdot artice a couple of months back. Prehaps the editors would be kind enough to dupe it for us ^^). But the 66th percentile is set by how we drive: if we try and ingrain the speed limit and stick to it, then if we feel it is too low we should appeal to the local authorities to change it. Not make it up as we go along.
Maybe someone can explain to me why driving above the speed limit is acceptable? There is nothing in the law (at least where I live) that says the left lane is for people that wish to speed.
In response to the idea that programmers should just stick to writing code, it was written:
Yes, they should. One of the major problems in software companies is that programmers get promoted to positions of management because they excelled at what they did, but they lack management skills. So you've taken someone out of a position they excel at, and put them into a position they need to learn. I forget the term for this.
The term is "the Peter principle". It states that every worker shall rise to his or her level of incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
But I gather the point that you are trying to make is that your objection is more about the fact that developing countries do not have the same restrictions on them as industrialised countries. That is not quite true either; my understanding of Kyoto is that eventually all countries will have caps on their carbon emissions, but for those non-first world countries that are developing have those caps in place in around 10 years time. The rationale for this is that first-world countries already have large economies they built out of using the world's resources, and we should allow other nations to build their economies as well. You can debate the wisdom of this strategy, but it is not the blantant hipocracy that some seem to think it is.
First-world nations could, if they so choose, take it as an opportunity. By developing green technologies now, they will be in a position to sell them to developing nations later. There is money to be made in green, of we are willing to innovate.
In addition they have to pay a special Non-Resident Alien tax on their income (NRA tax on the paystub). It is not much -- around $30 a month -- but remember it is a tax specifically for those that have no representation.
I did. It mentioned common law, and I checked some wikipedia articles on it. Common law is when the rulings of a judge are essentially codified into law. I was under the (mistaken) understanding that most of the US system was under common law. I was not trying to be a lawyer, or trying to give a legal opinion. I was expressing the fact that I did not understand the law, pointed out where the possible problems were (e.g. the definition of common law) and asked for any help in what the article meant.
It is not your job to educate me on such matters, but your rudeness is uncalled for. The first reply I got gave me an area to look into to discern the difference and help me in my understanding of the law. I can understand your response if my post had gone out and claimed that the judge was completely wrong in his ruling and that a cursory reading of the constitution told you the judge was an idiot. However, what I said was I did not understand why the seventh amendent did not apply, and asked for help with my lack of understanding.
If you don't want to help people understand, and they are not propogating misinformation, why the need to be so rude?
The answers I got when I asked about this last time (it was about people) was that someone could request a jury trial for civil matters, but they would have to pay huge court expenses. One argument may by that a corporation does not have the same rights as a person. After all, the USSC has ruled that "free speechquot; and commerical speech are quite different, and commercial speech is the only type of speech a corporation is likely to be involved in. Or is it that the costs to SCO would be too high? Or is it a technical definition of the words common law that I am missing?
Any insight would be appreciated!
After all, if I invite you around for dinner at my house I am not permitted to frisk you before I allow you to leave. I am within my rights to demand that you leave if you are not willing to be frisked...
You'll be pleased to learn that the question regarding homosexuality has been softened up.
Old question: Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?
New question: Are coffee, salmon, and moccha foods or colors? Yes. Next question please.
....just not a Mandatory National ID Card like every other country in the world has. Really? Quick quiz:Answer: It does not have one. We do have a IRD number (like an SSN) but it is not used for identification purpose except to the Inland Revenue department.
Answer: (at least to the mid 80s) It does not have one.
Unless, "by all countries" you really meant all countries that have a national ID....?
Maybe there are other courts that you have not mentioned, but if not I do not understand this statement. The 7th amendment, as well as encoding double jeopardy, allows one to insist on a jury trial for any case where the damages are in excess of $20.
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
There may be an amendment (I am not from the US, and don't know all the amendments) but I have never understood why this does not bog down the court system with people demanding jury trials (which cannot then be appealed). Is it that this does fall under common law?
Anybody enlightenment appreciated!
The problem comes about because using a car (for example) is required by law if you wish to drive. People (and in particular employers) will assume that you are able to drive. Inability to get income will cut out many jobs; not so much for the Wall Street types but for the pizza delivery guy, the mover, the trucker, ... i.e. the people who generally earn a lower income.
The problem arises that people who cannot afford insurance may not be able to get jobs either. This is very different from a casino, because there is very few careers require you to play in a casino. The government does not insist that as a requirement of doing something else you must play at a casino. Because the government is a large part of why people are insured, it is appropriate that they look into legislation on how new discrimantory information may be used.
If you wish to have a free market solution a better way is to have non-discimatory government (basic) insurance, and then allow commercial insurers to have whatever policies they want. That way you have removed a legal protected oligopoly and can allow effective free market solution.
Where does a figure of this accuracy come from? This does not mean the same thing as a Pareto efficiency. A Pareto efficienct solution is one where there are no solutions that leave no one worse off. For example, let us *start* with making me the grand high ruler of everything, and everyone does what I say. This is an incredibly inefficient system, but any change too far would be beneficial to most, but disadvantageous to me. This system is at least close to a Pareto optimal point, but in terms of total efficiency it is lousy. While this is a strawman, it does illustrate that Pareto efficient != efficient.
Where does your figure to your boasted 10 "significant figures" come from? I see you actually citied 12 sig figures, and that you may wish to consider
# decimal places != # significant figures
That is a rather extraordinary precision, and yet there is no justification for it. Then again, you seem to have trouble with related but distinct concepts (Pareto efficiency vs efficiency, sig fig vs decimal places) so my guess would be that you made up this number to justify your argument.
The reasons are a good list for how monopolies can form. But consider that one of the first things that Adam Smith did when doing economics was look at the economics of monopoly. He showed that monopolies control the supply, and therefore a profit making monopoly would be better off making less than demanded so the price would be higher. Because they are the only player in town, they would be able to sell all there stock at this high price. In a competitive marketplace, others would be attracted by the high profits and compete to lower the cost of goods. So monopolies intoduce inefficiencies into the economy.
If a monopoly ever gets established, then they will try and hold onto that monopoly by fair market rules (i.e. do what is best for me). The free market *does* get trapped in local maxima.
If you are interested in this stuff, good for you. But I would recommend picking up an economics textbook and working through it.
Cheers
I did not support the war, I felt that the evidence was flimsy but I think that you are being unfair to those that did.
You are correct that there was evidence presented. For example the aluminium tubes were presented and were real. However, there was other "evidence" (testimony) that was completely bogus: such as claiming the only purpose for those aluminium tubes could be the manufacture of weapons grade plutonium. Now in this case, you may say that any rational, thinking person should be responsible enough to tell the difference between physical evidence and someones opinion. There would be a real problem if physical evidence was fabricated, but it wasn't. As I understand your position, it is simply the case that the implications and conclusions drawn from the physical evidence was overstated.
The reason that I disagree with your sentiment is that much of the evidence that compells governments to say "we know that [country X] was behind/ has/ did [Y]" is classified. They say "trust us". The overplayed example of the Twin Towers is a good example of this. How did we (the public) know that the Taliban played a key role in the Twin Towers incident? There is lots of information now about why that conclusion can be drawn, but it was relatively sparse at the time. In New Zealand, where I was living, the government pledged its support to the US and explained that it knew because of "classified information". I was against NZ going into Afganistan because I felt that they had not proven their point. As it turns out, the evidence they were working off was reliable -- or, more precisely, the conclusions they drew from the evidence presented are the same as the conclusions one can draw from the reasonably reliable information now publically avialable.
The real question is this: how can the public make an informed decision about the validity of the conclusions drawn if the evidence itself is classified? For this reason I believe that the US government bears far greater responsibility and did lie to the population when they said over-and-over that "we know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction".
The other point which is continually raised is
I agree that Saddam is a bad guy, and I think that you would be hard pressed to find someone who disagrees. But, if that is sufficient for making the case for an invasion, sell your invasion on that basis. Then people are able to have a rational discussion of what the costs and benefits are to their country and the Iraqi's of invading Iraq and disposing of Saddam. To try and scare people into agreeing with you and your plan of action by creating an imagined threat off flimsy evidence is dishonest. It amounts to being lied to.
The best thing I think that people should take out of your post is that there is an absolute need to question your government and not believe them. However, to try and get reliable information we should also be holding them responsible for misrepresenting information and actively engaging in spreading things they knew not to be true (see grandparent post about Cheney last week connecting AQ and Iraq). To dismiss these lies as acceptable because people should be questioning their government (and they should be!) is counter-productive.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
CEO: "We are not going to lay off 500 workers."
English: "We are going to lay off 510 workers. Or 490. Just not 500."
Ummm.. If you lay off 510 workers, you are laying off 500 workers. You are also laying off an additional 10 workers. It is like that riddle "I have two coins in my pocket, the total of which is thirty cents. One of those coins is not a quarter."
Such a statement means that they can lay off up to 499 workers without lying; after that 500 workers have been laid off even if the figure is not only 500 workers.
(On second thought, the combination 1: any, 2: F and 3: T false may be a logical possibility but hard to find people who believe in it).
Even the people that argue that the global climate change is caused by the sun agree with point 1, although they may disagree with points 2 and 3. A lot of your post explaining the Republician position is saying that Kyoto is bad in your point of view, and that environmentalists argue about other policies amongst themselves so how can the Republicians pick a responsible stance?
The problem is that those are attacks on policies aimed at resolving the issue of global warming (amongst others). I believe the question that was being asked originally (or at least, the one I think should have been asked) is why there is so much disagreement on points 1 and 2 from the GOP, when there is an abundance of evidence for them? IF you then wish to point out that a particular policy is bad (e.g. Kyoto) or that environmentalists don't have a coherent policy, then why isn't the GOP platform: Yes its happening, now we should decide what we should do about it and what we are willing to give up.
Reducing questions of what we should do with the question of existence of the problem is intellectually dishonest (and, regrettably, something that seems to be shared between both of the major parties in the US)
Ummmm, right... That's a good plan. Economically present yourself to the international community for castration.
IF they want to propose rules, then present a flat playing field where no-one derives an economic, political, or strategic advantage, or it's not a tenable solution.
But the point is that it is supposed to level the playing field. At the moment we have many first-world nations that have a large infrastructure by burning a lot of oil and resources. Doing so has left them in the position of being able to have higher productivity and thus a higher quality of life. The resources we took were taken from everyone as a whole, similarly the impact on the environment impacts everyone as a whole. The CO2 in one area spreads out over other areas.
The rationale behind making developing nations have different standards is that it levels the playing field. If everyone was subject to the same controls then the people who got in first would enjoy all the advantages of getting "dirty" production and then using it to prop up future production. What you seem to be saying is "Come too late? Sorry, should have started producing and polluting sooner like us!"
That is all there is to it. It is not even that China and India are completely exempt. It is just that the timeframe for them to work on emissions is different, precisely to allow them to build up an infrastructre to support their economy.
If you feel so adamant about "your economy", this is actually a huge opportunity for the developing nations to innovate new green technologies and sell them off to the rest of the world. After all, the Kyoto protocol will kick in for everyone eventually.
The problem with doing nothing is that it hurts eveyone.
Or you could do what Britan has been doing for years with their O and A levels. Test twice during high school, and instead of SATs which test introductory high school have the exams at the end of the school be based on the material they were supposed to learn. Have an exam for end of year history, end of year physics, and have it standardised across the nation.
Or introduce something like New Zealand's unit standards. Personally I don't like this approach as you compartmentalise information, whereas most interesting problems rely on your ability to combine information that you have learnt. YMMV. But the basic idea is break each subject into "units", and then get students to pass or fail those units separately.
In essence, I think one of the big problems is that in the US one can get a high school "diploma" just by showing up. Because everyone has one, it doesn't mean anything. Make students work for it, and tax to make the people pay for it (i.e. still break into tiers, but pay the most money to the poorest schools). An educated populace benefits all!
Since every package modifies the base system, the only way to prove that a package will work is to test it against every possible package configuration available! In case you're wondering, the math for that is P * P, where P is the number of packages available. A mere 100 packages could potentially result in 10,000 available configurations!
It is worse than a possible P*P = P^2 number of combinations. Each package can either be there, or not. You can represent this as a P-digit binary number, where the i-th digit tells you if the i-th pacakge is installed or not. For example, for only three packages you can represent a combination as 011 (not package 1, but both packages 2 & 3). The total number of such combinations is 2^P, or in the case of three packages this is 8 possible configurations!
For the 100 packages you were mentioning this is approximately 10^30 possible configs.
(The P^2 gives you close to the right answer if the question is "how many configurations are there if I install 2 packages from these 100". The answer is then P(P-1)/2, which is roughly a factor of 2 out from P^2 for large P)
Many people are pointing out that we really do not know what is going on at these sort of energies, and should we be playing with this if it hsa even the smallest chance of destroying the planet, etc. etc.
o nathanLFeng.html
What they are not pointing out is that collisions at the TeV scale are happening in our atmosphere, and if the theory about microscopic black holes are correct then they are being produced now. The flux of them is simply not great enough to be detected yet, but people keen on extra dimensions are hoping that they will be soon as more detectors come online (in particular, neutrino detectors at the poles).
The possibilities:
1) We can get black holes on this scale => no problem, nature does it anyway
2) Gravity is modified at this scale, and none are produced/obey the usual assumptions. As cosmic rays are colliding at TeV energies with the atmosphere with no ill-effect, we should be able to do it too.
For a readable interview:
http://www.esi-topics.com/blackholes/interviews/J
For a paper on the subject:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0112247
(This shows that the limits on extra dimensions being the solution to the Heirarchy problem are becoming quite stringent).
Oh, yes...the 'liquid explosive' plot.
And in reply:
I really hate comments like this. Do you have any real evidence proving that there was no plot?
I think part of the point is that we don't need real evidence proving that there was no plot. Circumstantial evidence points toward it not working, and the burden of proof should fall to the government.
While terrorism is a threat to people's safety, so are many other things. The opinion of how many freedoms should be given up, or rights should be exchanged will vary from person to person (see the comments here). But to form an opinion we need a realistic idea of what the dangers are and how probable they are, and many people do not trust the British or American governments not to lie to them to make the dangers seem worse and grant them extra powers.
As governments in general do have a history of doing just this, it is not unreasonable to ask them to show the odds are as bad as they say they are, so the populace can make an educated decision about our rights, freedoms and safety.
(I, like most others, have strong opinions on where the lines should be drawn but me personal views are not the issue. Disemmination of information is)
"wo3 mei2 tian1 kan4 ni3 nu3 hai2zi de shi2 hou4 da3 fei1ji1."
...."
Been a while since I took Chinese, but
"Every day I see your daughter's time/how long/
the da3 fei1ji1 bit has me. By feiji do you mean airoplane?
(I am asking because I want to know; I want to get back into Chinese at some point!)
Sort of. The technical statement in the paragraph above is completely correct -- yoy cannot escape back out to future null infinity. You can, as you point out, pass through a ring singularity into another universe if the black hole is charged or rotates. A black hole can act as a passage from one spacetime to another, but not [simply by defintion] into the same region. The name for this sort of object is an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
The trouble is that while they work in principle, they are highly unstable. Any light (or anything else that carries energy) that you send through this tunnel tends to cause a gravitational blue-shifting meaning that the particle has more and more energy (relative to someone "at rest with respect to the distant stars"). This destroys the bridge (see work by Isreal and others on "mass inflation").
You can stop this by threading the throat with exotic matter, as long as you do it before an event horizon forms. Then you no longer have a black hole, you have a wormhole. Two problems:
1) Exotic matter is not known to exist in bulk quantities
2) This may allow time travel (see Visser's boko "Lorentzian wormholes" for GR, or Kip Thorne's "Black holes and time warps" for a popular account).
The definition of a black hole does NOT require a singularity. What the strict defintion requires (as in Hawking and Ellis, or Wald's "General relativity) is that the black hole region in an asymptotically simple spacetime is the region that is causally disconnected from future null infinity.
In English: once you go into one, you can never get back out if you believe that nothing can travel faster than light. If you CAN get out, the thing you started with was not a black hole!
Notice that for the concept of black hole to make sense, you do not need general relativity. You do need to believe that there is an ultimate speed limit, and then the black hole of any theory is the region you cannot escape from.
It is then a THEOREM of (classical) general relativity that such a region contains a singularity. If GR is corrected by some version of quantum gravity where there are no singularities, then this theory can still have black holes (regions of no escape).
Now this is a stricter sense in which black holes are talked about currently. The article mentions Hawking and Thorne's disagreement: is information carried off by Hawking radiaiton? The answer is no: if the information goes in then it cannot come out by (the strict) definition of what a black hole is. Technically, the argument about the information loss problem is whether or not black holes (as originally defined) exist at all!
However, this is an arguement purely at the level of sematics. There is very little observational difference between a real black hole [one that locks information up forever] and an information returning black hole [one that locks up and processes particles for a long period of time, but the end result of this process is re-emission as Hawking radiaiton]. Because the definition given above is one made for convience, most researchers in the field take a somewhat more pragmatic definition of a black hole.
The theory of MECOs seems to still be built on General Relativity. It claims that radiation increases to stop complete collapse. This does not preclude the existence of black holes! It just means that they are unlikely to form as the end result of astrophysical processes. However, there are situations where you can make black holes at very low temperatures, or ones that you can do in flat space (although these tend to be somewhat artificial).
The moral is
* MECOs are built on GR. If MECOs exist, then black holes are still solutions to GR
* The MECO advocates claim that this is a universal process for very hot and dense gas. We should not expect that black holes are a typical end of stellar product.
* MECOs may exist, but the process may not be universal (i.e. it may require particular thresholds of energy/pressure). This would allow a mix of black holes and MECOs.
* There may be no MECOs at all.
Personally I am dubious that MECOs exist at all. Pressure *can* support a star against collapse, but only to a certain extent in GR. After a while, the pressure required also acts as a stronger source of gravity and ends in a runaway reaction causing collapse. See this paper of mine for more details: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0306038
Depends on where you live on the legallity of it. Some countries (e.g. New Zealand) have interest free students loans, and you can use the living allowance part however you wish (there is a separete part that deals with the tuition costs; those HAVE to be paid to a tuition provider)
How ethical this is as a course of action is certainly up for questioning. However just because it is illegal where you are does not mean it is illegal everywhere.
(The government should have a better grasp of economics however; in dealing with large numbers of people you don't know personally it is almost inevitable that some of them will take advantage of such a scheme.)
which quickly turns into a passive-aggressive "I can be in the left lane because I'm doing the speed limit" game
I am always puzzled by this. It is illegal to go faster than the speed limit. It is also (in most places) illegal to aid someone in breaking the law.
I do not believe that just because something is illegal necessarily makes it immoral or dangourous. Breaking the law, when done because the law is unjust and other avenues do not work is a civic duty!
Yet I do not understand why exceeding the speed limit falls into this category. I know that the speed limit is not always designed according to traffic engineers recommendations (it should be set at the 66th percentile of driving speeds, according to a slashdot artice a couple of months back. Prehaps the editors would be kind enough to dupe it for us ^^). But the 66th percentile is set by how we drive: if we try and ingrain the speed limit and stick to it, then if we feel it is too low we should appeal to the local authorities to change it. Not make it up as we go along.
Maybe someone can explain to me why driving above the speed limit is acceptable? There is nothing in the law (at least where I live) that says the left lane is for people that wish to speed.
Cheers
Damien
In response to the idea that programmers should just stick to writing code, it was written:
Yes, they should. One of the major problems in software companies is that programmers get promoted to positions of management because they excelled at what they did, but they lack management skills. So you've taken someone out of a position they excel at, and put them into a position they need to learn. I forget the term for this.
The term is "the Peter principle". It states that every worker shall rise to his or her level of incompetence.