You don't have a right to fly; your constitutional right to travel works whether you walk, drive, take a bus or a train, or fly. If you choose to fly, you submit to a different set of security measures than if you walk, drive, etc.
I fully agree with everyone saying how pointless these devices are, just as with the fluid bans, the taking your shoes off, etc. But just because they're pointless doesn't mean they're unconstitutional; just stupid.
What happens in 20 years when EA is no longer around or they stop hosting the verification server?... Well, the same thing that happens today when multiplayer servers for unpopular games go offline: they stop being functional. If users of Mass Effect and Spore are lucky, EA (or whomever) will simply disable the DRM as their company dies.
Didn't he say that matter could NOT escape a black hole? This isn't matter escaping a black hole. This is matter, outside the black hole, being accelerated and hurtled outwards by the forces of the black hole.
So, in other words: if you use the game as a tool to relax, it relaxes you; while if you use the game as an outlet for your violent urges, it makes you more violent.
Shocking that a tool could be used in multifarious ways.
He's wrong: the singularity itself has to distort into a torus, because otherwise it couldn't have rotational momentum: this is the basic problem. A rotating point object - with literally no dimension to it - cannot be distinguished from a non-rotating point object. That's why the object distorts into a torus.
He may have been thinking of the accretion disc: around a singularity there is the black hole, a spherical field of blackness, but on the edge of the black hole and lying on the plane of rotation there is an accretion disc of matter which orbits the hole. This disc is actually the most visible part of the phenomenon.
Not incidentally, one of Hawking's most amazing insights was that the accretion disc is the measure of entropy of the black hole: as information appears to be lost as it falls into the singularity, we find that the entropy of the accretion disc increases precisely to even it out (thus conserving the Law of Entropy).
Actually, that's only true of a non-rotating (or Kerr) singularity. All natural black holes will be rotating (the black hole maintains the rotational momentum of the pre-collapse mass). In a rotating black hole, the singularity is actually a ring (or torus). Inside that ring/torus, there is a tear in space.
It was this tear that lead, if I recall, to the original conjectures of a white hole, and the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
"-being able to be -EASILY- used as a modem for a portable computer via USB/BlueTooth (especially with the added 3G support)"
So, you want to be able to tether it, taking advantage of the free broadband, despite the fact that they sell that feature for other devices at an entirely different price structure? Not familiar with the issue users have had with this plan on every other carrier?
"-same functionality as my iPod. Play music from iTunes on any computer you connect the iPhone too."
Your grammar here makes it impossible to tell exactly what you mean; are you suggesting that any computer should be able to read the iPhone, such that the computer's install of iTunes would be able to play the iPhone's contents' as a normal library source?
"-drag music from any iTunes to the iPhone"
You're asking for the ability to - contrary to the rules with all iPods - be synchronized with more than one library?
I don't believe you are acknowledging the distinction between "faith" and "blind faith".
"Faith" is saying "I have some evidence to believe X, but not sufficient evidence to demonstrate X to be 100% true." "Blind faith" is saying "I have no evidence to believe X, but I choose to believe X, nonetheless."
For some religious people, they willfully and proudly ascribe to pure blind faith. For other religious people, they ascribe to faith in the sense that they see 'signs' or evidence of a deity's hand in things like the absurdly improbable existence of life, the complexity of the universe, etc.
There is a clear difference, though, between having faith in a belief based on an iota of evidence, and having faith in a belief based on 99.9% of the evidence required to demonstrate it as an incontrovertible reality.
You may look at the complexity of the genome and say "that's a little evidence for a god, so I choose to have faith in a god", but that is orders of magnitude away from looking at the enormous quantity of undeniable data that supports faith in quantum mechanics, relativity, etc.
Among other things, items of belief which are testable (e.g. the testable predictions of GR and QM) carry much, much more weight than items of belief which are intrinsically untestable (e.g. the existence of an afterlife). This should be obvious on its face: testable hypothesis are more powerful evidence.
Now, let's be honest: all faith, period, is quasi-irrational by definition. After all, you're making a conclusion based on what you know to be insufficient data to make the conclusion with 100% certainty. That said, as discussed above, we cannot confuse the degree of uncertainty of faith in GR or QM with the degree present in any religion. Moreover, faith in an item of belief which includes the claim "this item of belief cannot be disproven" is of a different sort than faith in an item of belief which includes the claim "you must abandon this item of belief if the evidence shows that an alternative is better". I think you know which faiths involve which claims.
There is an important, albeit subtle, distinction between living as if there were "some meaning and consequence", and living as if there were some deity. This is, actually, a logical result of my argument: if there is no afterlife, then the consequences and meaning of our actions are 100% found in the material world. Our impact on the world around us - including the people, is our "meaning and consequence". Thus, we all should live life as if it has meaning and consequence because it does have meaning and consequence as an empirical, demonstrable reality.
You appear to be mistaking "living as if there were a particular deity, with a particular set of rules" with "living as if there is some meaning or purpose in life". The former is what is contemplated by Pascal's Wager, while the latter is just an aspect of moral philosophy.
That's nonsense: the word "religious" is an intrinsic part of the point being made, and so it cannot be removed.
If I said "Murder is the malicious act of killing someone else" and you said "take out the word 'malicious' and that means manslaughter is always murder" it would obviously be nonsense.
Hi, I think you might want to have a word with all the Hindu out there who would challenge your "typically" comment. There are around a billion of them, if I remember correctly.
The question of wealth going to benefit members or society is an odd one, if we consider indirect benefits: if you're a believer in X religion, don't you intrinsically benefit (and believe society to benefit) when X's reach expands?
In concrete terms, doesn't every Christian believe that the growth of their particular church benefits both that Christian individually and society as a whole?
As a disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the Mormon church.
I would definitely say that if we call LDS a cult, we must continue to call the Catholic Church a cult. The principle is the same: a religious group built around a cult of personality, where the original leader is subsequently replaced by a series of leaders chosen according to the originator's alleged principles.
The only difference - and I mean this honestly and without irony or sarcasm - between the cult/religion status of the Mormon and Catholic churches is time. That doesn't mean they aren't perceived differently, but it does mean that many people aren't being fair to LDS.
Your grandmother referred to what is known as "Pascal's Wager": if you believe in God and are wrong, you pay no price, whereas if you do not believe in God and are wrong, you pay the price of Eternal Damnation.
The wager is uniformly understood by anyone with a passing understanding of logic to be facially invalid and incorrect.
The reason is simple: the wager makes the blatantly false assumption that believing in God while alive has no cost. Moreover, it fails to account for the fact that the 'value' of a cost paid over time is intrinsically linked to the duration of your existence (i.e. your 'life' plus any 'afterlife' you may have). If God doesn't exist, and you believe in God while alive, you pay the maximal price of wasting all that time and energy (along with all the missed opportunities this entails) during the entirety of your existence. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that this cost is not greater than living an actual life of happiness without a deity followed by an afterlife of 'hell'.
Moreover, belief out of fear of the results of being wrong is no belief at all: it is a shallow, deceitful pretense of belief. It is an insult to the very God you would claim to believe in, by virtue of saying that the only reason you believe is that you think it would be too costly not to believe. This is like a person who abstains from murder not out of respect for life, but rather out of avoidance of the prison-sentence. That person is a monstrous imitation of morality, not a moral man.
Belief, if you value it at all, must spring from an honest embrace of some purported truth. It cannot spring from a callow desire to avoid consequences.
That may be said, but it doesn't make it the law. The concept of "expert testimony" as a legally distinct thing from "non-expert testimony" is very important, and affects both the admissibility and applicability of evidence.
I don't agree: the professors ARE paid to train students for the "real world", by virtue of treating them like adults. This means that, in an environment where person X sets the rules, then all persons underneath X must abide by those rules. It is a part of college/university as a whole to learn to be an adult, and how can you do that when the school presents a context completely alien to the adult world?
Part of the adult world is following the orders of your superiors (where appropriate), and learning the consequences of failing to do so (for better or for worse).
It may be an issue of scale: it's easier for them to demonstrate his FULL complicity in all the 'cheating' by virtue of his admin status, whereas for each individual student they would have to document exactly what they contributed.
This may even be a test case: if they succeed against the admin, THEN they take the time to proceed against the individual members of the group.
I don't think you understand how 'education' works for 99% of the population. For every person who can actually successfully identify a gap in their knowledge AND successfully seek out the appropriate source of information to fill that gap (i.e. the autodidact), there are many, many orders of magnitude more people who need assistance in one or both of those areas.
Schools - university or otherwise - exist to guide students through pathways of learning, ideally providing both opportunities to explore alternate pathways, but also advice and counsel as to how to pick those pathways. It isn't about being the exclusive source of information. Teachers in general exist because our world's cluster-model of exchange of information (e.g. Wikipedia) has been documented to quite undeniably rely on the extremely specialized knowledge of a tiny sub-set of the users. Jimmy Wales noted that 50% of the Wikipedia edits comes from 0.7%, and 72% of the articles were written by 1.8% of the users. Without those super-contributors, the rest of Wikipedia's audience would have nearly nothing. Those super-contributors are 'teachers', just using a different medium.
I honestly don't understand the complaint by the school here, if just because the language quoted in the article doesn't seem to prohibit study groups. However, I wouldn't be comfortable making a judgment until I heard at least a few other key facts, e.g. whether the Prof. had specifically advised students not to collaborate. That said, the University's response is interesting in that it appears to view itself as targeting a source of corrosive behavior in the school.
To clarify: the school (at least as it appears to me) viewed this study group as corroding the learning experience by both encouraging and facilitating cheating of some sort (i.e. sharing of answers, methods, etc.), and the school took action to prevent this damage. From their perspective, cheaters do not merely hurt themselves (by depriving themselves of education) but in fact hurt others (by distorting the curve, distorting the perceived success of the Prof.'s performance, etc.).
The problem, as I understand it, is that the iPhone only has room for one flash chip, not two. This means that instead of using two 8 gig chips to give the iPhone 16 gigs, they need to use a single 16 gig chip. The iPod touch, on the other hand, has room for two chips. That's why the cost-to-added-gigs ratio is different.
Again, not necessarily: if the use of his image/likeness are clearly an inextricable part of the satire (and thus not some secondary misappropriation), he's probably doomed.
This is, basically, no different than The Onion including an actual image of Steve Jobs in a fictional article about his latest device conquering the world. It's satire, and Jobs' image is a part of it. Here, the name and image of Chuckles is inextricable from the satire, so it shouldn't be an issue.
I can't figure out what the point of your post is. My original post - the one you quoted, including the language in particular you included - involved this very point.
What do you think you were adding here? How does your point contribute to the original topic of whether the burdens of proof now lie on the accused?
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You don't have a right to fly; your constitutional right to travel works whether you walk, drive, take a bus or a train, or fly. If you choose to fly, you submit to a different set of security measures than if you walk, drive, etc.
I fully agree with everyone saying how pointless these devices are, just as with the fluid bans, the taking your shoes off, etc. But just because they're pointless doesn't mean they're unconstitutional; just stupid.
Near as I understand it, this confirms Hawkings' theories.
So, in other words: if you use the game as a tool to relax, it relaxes you; while if you use the game as an outlet for your violent urges, it makes you more violent.
Shocking that a tool could be used in multifarious ways.
He's wrong: the singularity itself has to distort into a torus, because otherwise it couldn't have rotational momentum: this is the basic problem. A rotating point object - with literally no dimension to it - cannot be distinguished from a non-rotating point object. That's why the object distorts into a torus.
He may have been thinking of the accretion disc: around a singularity there is the black hole, a spherical field of blackness, but on the edge of the black hole and lying on the plane of rotation there is an accretion disc of matter which orbits the hole. This disc is actually the most visible part of the phenomenon.
Not incidentally, one of Hawking's most amazing insights was that the accretion disc is the measure of entropy of the black hole: as information appears to be lost as it falls into the singularity, we find that the entropy of the accretion disc increases precisely to even it out (thus conserving the Law of Entropy).
Actually, that's only true of a non-rotating (or Kerr) singularity. All natural black holes will be rotating (the black hole maintains the rotational momentum of the pre-collapse mass). In a rotating black hole, the singularity is actually a ring (or torus). Inside that ring/torus, there is a tear in space.
It was this tear that lead, if I recall, to the original conjectures of a white hole, and the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
"-being able to be -EASILY- used as a modem for a portable computer via USB/BlueTooth (especially with the added 3G support)"
So, you want to be able to tether it, taking advantage of the free broadband, despite the fact that they sell that feature for other devices at an entirely different price structure? Not familiar with the issue users have had with this plan on every other carrier?
"-same functionality as my iPod. Play music from iTunes on any computer you connect the iPhone too."
Your grammar here makes it impossible to tell exactly what you mean; are you suggesting that any computer should be able to read the iPhone, such that the computer's install of iTunes would be able to play the iPhone's contents' as a normal library source?
"-drag music from any iTunes to the iPhone"
You're asking for the ability to - contrary to the rules with all iPods - be synchronized with more than one library?
""
I don't believe you are acknowledging the distinction between "faith" and "blind faith".
"Faith" is saying "I have some evidence to believe X, but not sufficient evidence to demonstrate X to be 100% true." "Blind faith" is saying "I have no evidence to believe X, but I choose to believe X, nonetheless."
For some religious people, they willfully and proudly ascribe to pure blind faith. For other religious people, they ascribe to faith in the sense that they see 'signs' or evidence of a deity's hand in things like the absurdly improbable existence of life, the complexity of the universe, etc.
There is a clear difference, though, between having faith in a belief based on an iota of evidence, and having faith in a belief based on 99.9% of the evidence required to demonstrate it as an incontrovertible reality.
You may look at the complexity of the genome and say "that's a little evidence for a god, so I choose to have faith in a god", but that is orders of magnitude away from looking at the enormous quantity of undeniable data that supports faith in quantum mechanics, relativity, etc.
Among other things, items of belief which are testable (e.g. the testable predictions of GR and QM) carry much, much more weight than items of belief which are intrinsically untestable (e.g. the existence of an afterlife). This should be obvious on its face: testable hypothesis are more powerful evidence.
Now, let's be honest: all faith, period, is quasi-irrational by definition. After all, you're making a conclusion based on what you know to be insufficient data to make the conclusion with 100% certainty. That said, as discussed above, we cannot confuse the degree of uncertainty of faith in GR or QM with the degree present in any religion. Moreover, faith in an item of belief which includes the claim "this item of belief cannot be disproven" is of a different sort than faith in an item of belief which includes the claim "you must abandon this item of belief if the evidence shows that an alternative is better". I think you know which faiths involve which claims.
There is an important, albeit subtle, distinction between living as if there were "some meaning and consequence", and living as if there were some deity. This is, actually, a logical result of my argument: if there is no afterlife, then the consequences and meaning of our actions are 100% found in the material world. Our impact on the world around us - including the people, is our "meaning and consequence". Thus, we all should live life as if it has meaning and consequence because it does have meaning and consequence as an empirical, demonstrable reality.
You appear to be mistaking "living as if there were a particular deity, with a particular set of rules" with "living as if there is some meaning or purpose in life". The former is what is contemplated by Pascal's Wager, while the latter is just an aspect of moral philosophy.
That's nonsense: the word "religious" is an intrinsic part of the point being made, and so it cannot be removed.
If I said "Murder is the malicious act of killing someone else" and you said "take out the word 'malicious' and that means manslaughter is always murder" it would obviously be nonsense.
Hi, I think you might want to have a word with all the Hindu out there who would challenge your "typically" comment. There are around a billion of them, if I remember correctly.
The question of wealth going to benefit members or society is an odd one, if we consider indirect benefits: if you're a believer in X religion, don't you intrinsically benefit (and believe society to benefit) when X's reach expands?
In concrete terms, doesn't every Christian believe that the growth of their particular church benefits both that Christian individually and society as a whole?
As a disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the Mormon church.
I would definitely say that if we call LDS a cult, we must continue to call the Catholic Church a cult. The principle is the same: a religious group built around a cult of personality, where the original leader is subsequently replaced by a series of leaders chosen according to the originator's alleged principles.
The only difference - and I mean this honestly and without irony or sarcasm - between the cult/religion status of the Mormon and Catholic churches is time. That doesn't mean they aren't perceived differently, but it does mean that many people aren't being fair to LDS.
Your grandmother referred to what is known as "Pascal's Wager": if you believe in God and are wrong, you pay no price, whereas if you do not believe in God and are wrong, you pay the price of Eternal Damnation.
The wager is uniformly understood by anyone with a passing understanding of logic to be facially invalid and incorrect.
The reason is simple: the wager makes the blatantly false assumption that believing in God while alive has no cost. Moreover, it fails to account for the fact that the 'value' of a cost paid over time is intrinsically linked to the duration of your existence (i.e. your 'life' plus any 'afterlife' you may have). If God doesn't exist, and you believe in God while alive, you pay the maximal price of wasting all that time and energy (along with all the missed opportunities this entails) during the entirety of your existence. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that this cost is not greater than living an actual life of happiness without a deity followed by an afterlife of 'hell'.
Moreover, belief out of fear of the results of being wrong is no belief at all: it is a shallow, deceitful pretense of belief. It is an insult to the very God you would claim to believe in, by virtue of saying that the only reason you believe is that you think it would be too costly not to believe. This is like a person who abstains from murder not out of respect for life, but rather out of avoidance of the prison-sentence. That person is a monstrous imitation of morality, not a moral man.
Belief, if you value it at all, must spring from an honest embrace of some purported truth. It cannot spring from a callow desire to avoid consequences.
That may be said, but it doesn't make it the law. The concept of "expert testimony" as a legally distinct thing from "non-expert testimony" is very important, and affects both the admissibility and applicability of evidence.
I don't agree: the professors ARE paid to train students for the "real world", by virtue of treating them like adults. This means that, in an environment where person X sets the rules, then all persons underneath X must abide by those rules. It is a part of college/university as a whole to learn to be an adult, and how can you do that when the school presents a context completely alien to the adult world?
Part of the adult world is following the orders of your superiors (where appropriate), and learning the consequences of failing to do so (for better or for worse).
It may be an issue of scale: it's easier for them to demonstrate his FULL complicity in all the 'cheating' by virtue of his admin status, whereas for each individual student they would have to document exactly what they contributed.
This may even be a test case: if they succeed against the admin, THEN they take the time to proceed against the individual members of the group.
I don't think you understand how 'education' works for 99% of the population. For every person who can actually successfully identify a gap in their knowledge AND successfully seek out the appropriate source of information to fill that gap (i.e. the autodidact), there are many, many orders of magnitude more people who need assistance in one or both of those areas.
Schools - university or otherwise - exist to guide students through pathways of learning, ideally providing both opportunities to explore alternate pathways, but also advice and counsel as to how to pick those pathways. It isn't about being the exclusive source of information. Teachers in general exist because our world's cluster-model of exchange of information (e.g. Wikipedia) has been documented to quite undeniably rely on the extremely specialized knowledge of a tiny sub-set of the users. Jimmy Wales noted that 50% of the Wikipedia edits comes from 0.7%, and 72% of the articles were written by 1.8% of the users. Without those super-contributors, the rest of Wikipedia's audience would have nearly nothing. Those super-contributors are 'teachers', just using a different medium.
I honestly don't understand the complaint by the school here, if just because the language quoted in the article doesn't seem to prohibit study groups. However, I wouldn't be comfortable making a judgment until I heard at least a few other key facts, e.g. whether the Prof. had specifically advised students not to collaborate. That said, the University's response is interesting in that it appears to view itself as targeting a source of corrosive behavior in the school.
To clarify: the school (at least as it appears to me) viewed this study group as corroding the learning experience by both encouraging and facilitating cheating of some sort (i.e. sharing of answers, methods, etc.), and the school took action to prevent this damage. From their perspective, cheaters do not merely hurt themselves (by depriving themselves of education) but in fact hurt others (by distorting the curve, distorting the perceived success of the Prof.'s performance, etc.).
Not necessarily: the 'sent' apps may only function while tethered to the computer, etc.
I love that movie...just watched the Final Cut version last night.
The problem, as I understand it, is that the iPhone only has room for one flash chip, not two. This means that instead of using two 8 gig chips to give the iPhone 16 gigs, they need to use a single 16 gig chip. The iPod touch, on the other hand, has room for two chips. That's why the cost-to-added-gigs ratio is different.
I thought this "phantom matter" had already been referred to as "exotic matter" by people like Stephen Greene...
Again, not necessarily: if the use of his image/likeness are clearly an inextricable part of the satire (and thus not some secondary misappropriation), he's probably doomed.
This is, basically, no different than The Onion including an actual image of Steve Jobs in a fictional article about his latest device conquering the world. It's satire, and Jobs' image is a part of it. Here, the name and image of Chuckles is inextricable from the satire, so it shouldn't be an issue.
I can't figure out what the point of your post is. My original post - the one you quoted, including the language in particular you included - involved this very point.
What do you think you were adding here? How does your point contribute to the original topic of whether the burdens of proof now lie on the accused?