That's an ironic comment on Posner who champions judicial pragmatism which, so far as I can tell, is what used to be called legal realism back in the days of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The chief tenet of this judicial philosophy is that law is nothing more than a prediction of how judges will rule and the state will enforce the laws. The theoretical content is minimal. Everything is reduced that which actually happens.
In this view, any `intent' by the framers of a law is only as relevant as the police and judges hold it to be. No more, no less.
Most scholars think that the last of Gospels was complete within a hundred years of Jesus having died and it's quite likely that the earliest Gospels were complete within 50 years of his death.
``It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches.''
It is based on an ideological interpretation of what is said in the New Testament which, itself, is a collection of sources put together by ideologues. To presume that the Gospels record what Jesus said and did accurately is a ideological judgment. It's one that I agree with. But it isn't objective in the same way that sources from more recent figures are objective. We do not have any correspondance between Jesus and his contemporaries. We do not have authentic works that claim to be written by the hand of Jesus. We have the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, John, and James, and a whole slew of works that never made the canon. At the very best, from a historiographical perspective of what Jesus said, these are all secondary or tertiary sources rather than a primary source. Moreover, all are from admittedly biased sources. This does not mean that they aren't accurate. They may very well be. (And I believe that they are.) But their accuracy is not ascertainable in an objective fashion given the ideological nature of their source.
.... `ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste'
The distortions were already creeping in during his lifetime. But, to be fair, his writing had certain ambiguities and tensions that lends itself to being misunderstood.
Jesus is an entirely different story. Briefly put, there just isn't enough evidence to make any sort of objective judgment. To say that Jesus would have rejected (or accepted) modern Christianity is to make a judgment founded upon ideological principles.
The case of Aristotle is pretty interesting. In some ways, Aristotle was very empirically minded. In other ways, not so much. But what happened in the medieval era was the flip side of Feyerabend's observation that any science without a metaphysics becomes a rigid metaphysics on its own. Aristotlean metaphysics ceased to be metaphysics and was adopted as a science.
In any case, Jobs is nowhere close to the league in which you'll find Aristotle, Marx, and Jesus. Fifty years from now might get a couple of paragraphs in some text books. But in the end, his innovation wasn't anywhere near as world changing as any of the others under discussion.
No kidding. HFCS in soda is precisely an example of your point. Soda manufacturers moved to HFCS because of high tariffs on cane sugar designed to protect domestic production. Make the HFCS, and all the other alternatives, just as expensive and eventually the price of soda will rise. But now we've got trade wars going on because part of making this so expensive is unilateral tariffs on all kinds of sweeteners from honey and molasses to corn syrup.
So it seems simpler just to tax certain products, like soda, in the same way that the first US Congress taxed certain products, like whiskey.
My current employer writes its contracts so that clients who pay an annual support fee get bug fixes for free but they still have to pay for implementation costs for upgrading to the version with the bug fix. It's the software that's free, not the hours it takes us to get them upgraded. That's one way to do things.
Another way is that software is delivered as is and the support contracts specifies the rate at which bugfixes will be delivered if bugs are reported.
Another way is that some bug fixes will be free because of their magnitude but that others will be in future releases of the software that must be purchased.
Basically there is more than one way to do it. But, like other commenters have noted, if you've already sold the software and are now negotiating how to handle bug fixes, it may be too late. These sorts of things should be negotiated up front as part of the initial contract. If you didn't, then you probably need a competent IP lawyer with experience in the IT sector to tell you the relevant case law and commercial code concerning liability for software with defects.
Let's roll with your suggestion that intrinsic value exists because people value a thing for what it is. If this is what intrinsic value, then gold is no different than paper money. People want both for what it is, money. The vast majority of people working for money don't really care if they get paid in paper dollars vs. gold coins. For them, it spends the same. It has the same value. People want it. They do crazy things to get it. Some people want it so much that they rack up far more of it than they could even hope to spend in their lifetimes.
It is only if we separate that someone values a thing for whatever reason from the value that a thing has as what it is that the idea that intrinsic value makes sense. So the autographed picture of Donald Trump has a very low, if any, intrinsic value even though there may be some people that want it very much and are willing to pay top dollar for it. As an object, it just does not have much value in and of itself.
Exchange value, however, depends very much on people valuing a certain item. Exchange value is very much why people want money and, outside of certain industries such as jewelry making and electronics manufacturing, why people want gold. For the most part, gold only has inherent value to people who use it as a raw material to make other things. For most us, gold has little to no inherent value. It only has exchange value.
Aristotle is the first author known to have explicitly made this distinction. And this distinction has been used in most economic theories ever since.
``accepted as a medium of exchange'' == exchange value
``combination of their rarity and the labor/production costs'' != intrinsic value
Many things are rare and expensive to produce, for example, an autographed Donald Trump photograph from before the first time he declared bankruptcy. This does not mean that such has intrinsic value.
Having intrinsic value means that something has value for it's own sake. For example, shoes have intrinsic value because I can wear them as shoes. Gold does not have this kind of value unless you happen to be a capitalist that uses gold as an input to make some product.
At least not for most of us, anyway. The only use outside of exchange that I would have for a bar of gold is to use as a bookend. Gold only has intrinsic value as a raw material for people who make things from it. For everybody else, it's only value is in exchange. Consequently, it's not really different in kind than paper money.
And holds its value against inflation? For the past few years, sure. But if you bought gold at its peak in the seventies, you almost certain lost far more value than anyone lost due to inflation.
Please show me the restaurant or movie theater in the US presently offering 64 oz or larger beers packaged for immediate consumption by a single individual. The largest I've seen is 22 or 24 oz.
Granted, 20 oz beers are not all that uncommon in restaurants in the US. But 16 oz is far more typical for beer.
I worked in desktop support for a number of different companies. (I've also done software testing, and programming.) Currently, I do end user support for a vertical software package.
Anyway, in ten years across four different firms supporting everything from commodity hardware to custom software, one thing has remained constant. Most support calls aren't for the sort of configuration and installation issues that the cloud solves. Rather, most support calls are for users that are unable (or unwilling) to read the manual or to show the user how to do things that are either too basic or too complicated to have been included in the manual.
Moving to the cloud isn't going to magically make a user understand the difference between a short cut and a file. Nor is it going to explain to them what those numbers in that report that hits that one table in the database means.
Uh, that idea isn't testable. Seriously, the idea that falsifiability is the demarkation between science and non-science is no more falsifiable than an infinity of possible worlds.
Moreover, if you look at the history of how science is done, many of the singular advancements in science (the Copernican turn, relativity, et cetera) were accomplished in a fashion that paid no attention to falsification. Take Galileo as an example. HIs theories were trivially falsifiable by his own observations. Yet he continued on in a counter-inductive fashion, ignoring the evidence.
CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC are not free. You might not pay a subscription for them. But your cable provider does pay for the rights to broadcast them to you. Most basic cable channels are like this. The Discovery Channels, Sci-Fy, USA, TBS and so on make most of their money from subscription fees from cable companies.
Television news has largely been a loss leader that local stations and networks both provided as a public service for a long time. It wasn't really until the advent of cable and CNN that broadcasters got the idea that news could be a profitable endeavor rather than something that brings prestige. Prior to that, the largest value of news programs was seen as a lead in to the shows that came in after the news.
And, look at what happened to the quality of local and network news once that turn was made to viewing them as profit centers.
Those sorts of bases are already permitted by the treaty. National and private ownership real estate is disallowed. Building structures does not give claim to the real estate under those structures. Military bases are disallowed. Exploitation of minerals and the like for national or private paries is disallowed.
But there is no blanket prohibition against building research bases or even a colony of sorts.
Military bases along with national (or private) ownership of the moon real estate are forbidden by the treaty. But research bases such as the ones in Antarctica are permissible.
Yet, it does not follow that bases on the moon are necessarily forbidden. The 1979 Agreement prohibits the establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications (Article 3(4)) but it explicitly permits the establishment of ”manned and unmanned stations.” (Article 9(1))...
What the 1979 Agreement is clear upon is that “the moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” (Article 11(2)) and “the placement of personnel, space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on or below the surface of the moon, including structures connected with its surface or subsurface, shall not create a right of ownership over the surface or the subsurface of the moon or any areas thereof.” (Article 11(3)) Moreover, the resources of the moon are declared to be the common heritage of mankind (Article 11(1)) which should be subject to an international regime for their exploitation (Article 11(5).
I was thinking more of evangelism than procreation.
Unless I'm mistaken LDS theology posits extraterrestrial life. The Church of Rome started making headlines somewhere around the late nineties or early 00s about allowing that extraterrestrial life might exist and be sentient.
... if this were some random Joe Tech using social engineering to retrieve his stolen iThingamabob, then we would be singing the praises of the craftiness of the scheme and the cleverness of Joe Tech. But since it is the black hat of our spaghetti western that was doing the social engineering, it's evidence that they're little more than hoodlums and bullies.
This is human nature. We do the same thing with James Bond movies. We laud Bond for the same behaviors for which we castigate the spies on the other side.
I think this is true in general. I don't think any major war is now winnable. The sorts of tactics and strategy that won WWII (e.g. firebombing of Dresden, nuking of Hiroshima) would get a modern US president a war crimes trial.
My previous comment upstream on this thread was modded down as a troll but there are at least two private organizations with the means and the motivation for not-for-profit space exploration: the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Between the Mormons and the Catholics, I think there will be plenty of motivation for the sort of deep space exploration that for-profit concerns may not be interested in.
Another way to look at it is that once manned space flight is a reality for private firms, the resulting complications that arise from conflicting interests will result in NASA being re-engineered at least in part as a law enforcement agency. And, once that happens, they will be in a veritable arms race with private concerns. That will drive all sorts of new research and development.
Slashdot Mirror
Because illegal aliens tend to be anti-nuke?
How can you seriously conclude that the judge is ``overstepping his authority'' if you `` havn't read the case materials''?
That's idiocy of the highest order.
That's an ironic comment on Posner who champions judicial pragmatism which, so far as I can tell, is what used to be called legal realism back in the days of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The chief tenet of this judicial philosophy is that law is nothing more than a prediction of how judges will rule and the state will enforce the laws. The theoretical content is minimal. Everything is reduced that which actually happens.
In this view, any `intent' by the framers of a law is only as relevant as the police and judges hold it to be. No more, no less.
Most scholars think that the last of Gospels was complete within a hundred years of Jesus having died and it's quite likely that the earliest Gospels were complete within 50 years of his death.
``It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches.''
It is based on an ideological interpretation of what is said in the New Testament which, itself, is a collection of sources put together by ideologues. To presume that the Gospels record what Jesus said and did accurately is a ideological judgment. It's one that I agree with. But it isn't objective in the same way that sources from more recent figures are objective. We do not have any correspondance between Jesus and his contemporaries. We do not have authentic works that claim to be written by the hand of Jesus. We have the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, John, and James, and a whole slew of works that never made the canon. At the very best, from a historiographical perspective of what Jesus said, these are all secondary or tertiary sources rather than a primary source. Moreover, all are from admittedly biased sources. This does not mean that they aren't accurate. They may very well be. (And I believe that they are.) But their accuracy is not ascertainable in an objective fashion given the ideological nature of their source.
.... `ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste'
The distortions were already creeping in during his lifetime. But, to be fair, his writing had certain ambiguities and tensions that lends itself to being misunderstood.
Jesus is an entirely different story. Briefly put, there just isn't enough evidence to make any sort of objective judgment. To say that Jesus would have rejected (or accepted) modern Christianity is to make a judgment founded upon ideological principles.
The case of Aristotle is pretty interesting. In some ways, Aristotle was very empirically minded. In other ways, not so much. But what happened in the medieval era was the flip side of Feyerabend's observation that any science without a metaphysics becomes a rigid metaphysics on its own. Aristotlean metaphysics ceased to be metaphysics and was adopted as a science.
In any case, Jobs is nowhere close to the league in which you'll find Aristotle, Marx, and Jesus. Fifty years from now might get a couple of paragraphs in some text books. But in the end, his innovation wasn't anywhere near as world changing as any of the others under discussion.
No kidding. HFCS in soda is precisely an example of your point. Soda manufacturers moved to HFCS because of high tariffs on cane sugar designed to protect domestic production. Make the HFCS, and all the other alternatives, just as expensive and eventually the price of soda will rise. But now we've got trade wars going on because part of making this so expensive is unilateral tariffs on all kinds of sweeteners from honey and molasses to corn syrup.
So it seems simpler just to tax certain products, like soda, in the same way that the first US Congress taxed certain products, like whiskey.
My current employer writes its contracts so that clients who pay an annual support fee get bug fixes for free but they still have to pay for implementation costs for upgrading to the version with the bug fix. It's the software that's free, not the hours it takes us to get them upgraded. That's one way to do things.
Another way is that software is delivered as is and the support contracts specifies the rate at which bugfixes will be delivered if bugs are reported.
Another way is that some bug fixes will be free because of their magnitude but that others will be in future releases of the software that must be purchased.
Basically there is more than one way to do it. But, like other commenters have noted, if you've already sold the software and are now negotiating how to handle bug fixes, it may be too late. These sorts of things should be negotiated up front as part of the initial contract. If you didn't, then you probably need a competent IP lawyer with experience in the IT sector to tell you the relevant case law and commercial code concerning liability for software with defects.
You're still confused.
Let's roll with your suggestion that intrinsic value exists because people value a thing for what it is. If this is what intrinsic value, then gold is no different than paper money. People want both for what it is, money. The vast majority of people working for money don't really care if they get paid in paper dollars vs. gold coins. For them, it spends the same. It has the same value. People want it. They do crazy things to get it. Some people want it so much that they rack up far more of it than they could even hope to spend in their lifetimes.
It is only if we separate that someone values a thing for whatever reason from the value that a thing has as what it is that the idea that intrinsic value makes sense. So the autographed picture of Donald Trump has a very low, if any, intrinsic value even though there may be some people that want it very much and are willing to pay top dollar for it. As an object, it just does not have much value in and of itself.
Exchange value, however, depends very much on people valuing a certain item. Exchange value is very much why people want money and, outside of certain industries such as jewelry making and electronics manufacturing, why people want gold. For the most part, gold only has inherent value to people who use it as a raw material to make other things. For most us, gold has little to no inherent value. It only has exchange value.
Aristotle is the first author known to have explicitly made this distinction. And this distinction has been used in most economic theories ever since.
You're confused.
``accepted as a medium of exchange'' == exchange value
``combination of their rarity and the labor/production costs'' != intrinsic value
Many things are rare and expensive to produce, for example, an autographed Donald Trump photograph from before the first time he declared bankruptcy. This does not mean that such has intrinsic value.
Having intrinsic value means that something has value for it's own sake. For example, shoes have intrinsic value because I can wear them as shoes. Gold does not have this kind of value unless you happen to be a capitalist that uses gold as an input to make some product.
At least not for most of us, anyway. The only use outside of exchange that I would have for a bar of gold is to use as a bookend. Gold only has intrinsic value as a raw material for people who make things from it. For everybody else, it's only value is in exchange. Consequently, it's not really different in kind than paper money.
And holds its value against inflation? For the past few years, sure. But if you bought gold at its peak in the seventies, you almost certain lost far more value than anyone lost due to inflation.
This is true, but I'd rather not have to pay $500 in private tolls just to get to the movie theater.
So I'm not voting Libertarian any time soon.
Please show me the restaurant or movie theater in the US presently offering 64 oz or larger beers packaged for immediate consumption by a single individual. The largest I've seen is 22 or 24 oz.
Granted, 20 oz beers are not all that uncommon in restaurants in the US. But 16 oz is far more typical for beer.
I worked in desktop support for a number of different companies. (I've also done software testing, and programming.) Currently, I do end user support for a vertical software package.
Anyway, in ten years across four different firms supporting everything from commodity hardware to custom software, one thing has remained constant. Most support calls aren't for the sort of configuration and installation issues that the cloud solves. Rather, most support calls are for users that are unable (or unwilling) to read the manual or to show the user how to do things that are either too basic or too complicated to have been included in the manual.
Moving to the cloud isn't going to magically make a user understand the difference between a short cut and a file. Nor is it going to explain to them what those numbers in that report that hits that one table in the database means.
Uh, that idea isn't testable. Seriously, the idea that falsifiability is the demarkation between science and non-science is no more falsifiable than an infinity of possible worlds.
Moreover, if you look at the history of how science is done, many of the singular advancements in science (the Copernican turn, relativity, et cetera) were accomplished in a fashion that paid no attention to falsification. Take Galileo as an example. HIs theories were trivially falsifiable by his own observations. Yet he continued on in a counter-inductive fashion, ignoring the evidence.
CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC are not free. You might not pay a subscription for them. But your cable provider does pay for the rights to broadcast them to you. Most basic cable channels are like this. The Discovery Channels, Sci-Fy, USA, TBS and so on make most of their money from subscription fees from cable companies.
Television news has largely been a loss leader that local stations and networks both provided as a public service for a long time. It wasn't really until the advent of cable and CNN that broadcasters got the idea that news could be a profitable endeavor rather than something that brings prestige. Prior to that, the largest value of news programs was seen as a lead in to the shows that came in after the news.
And, look at what happened to the quality of local and network news once that turn was made to viewing them as profit centers.
Those sorts of bases are already permitted by the treaty. National and private ownership real estate is disallowed. Building structures does not give claim to the real estate under those structures. Military bases are disallowed. Exploitation of minerals and the like for national or private paries is disallowed.
But there is no blanket prohibition against building research bases or even a colony of sorts.
Military bases along with national (or private) ownership of the moon real estate are forbidden by the treaty. But research bases such as the ones in Antarctica are permissible.
http://internationallawobserver.eu/2012/01/28/moon-colonies-and-international-law/
I was thinking more of evangelism than procreation.
Unless I'm mistaken LDS theology posits extraterrestrial life. The Church of Rome started making headlines somewhere around the late nineties or early 00s about allowing that extraterrestrial life might exist and be sentient.
Both the LDS and the Church of Rome allow for the existence of extraterrestrials and both emphasize evangelism.
See where I'm going with this now?
... if this were some random Joe Tech using social engineering to retrieve his stolen iThingamabob, then we would be singing the praises of the craftiness of the scheme and the cleverness of Joe Tech. But since it is the black hat of our spaghetti western that was doing the social engineering, it's evidence that they're little more than hoodlums and bullies.
This is human nature. We do the same thing with James Bond movies. We laud Bond for the same behaviors for which we castigate the spies on the other side.
I think this is true in general. I don't think any major war is now winnable. The sorts of tactics and strategy that won WWII (e.g. firebombing of Dresden, nuking of Hiroshima) would get a modern US president a war crimes trial.
My previous comment upstream on this thread was modded down as a troll but there are at least two private organizations with the means and the motivation for not-for-profit space exploration: the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Between the Mormons and the Catholics, I think there will be plenty of motivation for the sort of deep space exploration that for-profit concerns may not be interested in.
Another way to look at it is that once manned space flight is a reality for private firms, the resulting complications that arise from conflicting interests will result in NASA being re-engineered at least in part as a law enforcement agency. And, once that happens, they will be in a veritable arms race with private concerns. That will drive all sorts of new research and development.