Around here, a batallion chief seems to show up at everything, I guess they'd have nothing to do otherwise. Maybe the firefighters were bored. They were probably so excited about finally getting a/genuine/ fire they sent in all they had just for the hell of it. The chief might have come along just to reminisce about the one time when he, too, was called out to what actually/was/ a real fire:-)
The mortality rate for flu is around 0.1%. For SARS it was close to 20%. Personally I'd think that was reason enough to panic. We would also need to know the respective infection rates though. If flu infects 200 times more easily, then the two are about equally dangerous (which is to say, not very much). We should probably also take propagation into account, but that's about where my scant virology knowledge ends so we might as well not.
The problem is not when the unions represent the employees to the companies. That's what the unions were created for, and what they are supposed to be. This is why I assumed a well-behaved one in my discussion. Poorly behaved unions can presumably be arbitrarily detrimental for everyone concerned. I only know of horrid unions from (possibly exaggarated) Hollywood portrayals and from our own national elevator technicians guild(s?). The latter earned general scorn as some sort of cross between the KGB and the mafia after a few highly publicized stalking incidents several years back.
Offering to feed peoples children, on the condition that they convert to christianity would be wrong.
Offering a woman who is in the wilderness with a broken leg a ride to the nearest hospital, on the condition that she give you a blowjob would be wrong.
Offering someone whose family is starving $2/day, on the condition that they work as slaves for you is wrong.
Yes, in each of these cases, not doing anything at all could be argued to be even worse. But that ain't enough. By that you've just demonstrated that the action is not the worst-possible-action. But there's a long step from being "not-the-worst" and to being "good".
The second example is particularily interesting; it would actually be a *crime* not to help a helpless person in such a situation. For all of your examples, choosing to help the people involved is not something that you are obliged to do in any way. Yes, you could establish your altruism by aiding them with no strings attached but you are not required to do so. (Some nations will probably have laws that require you to aid people in distress even if this comes at some cost to you - this changes things as you note.)
Assuming that you are not an altruist, however, then/not/ making any offer to help the people mentioned has to be/worse/ than making the morally questionable offers that you suggest. Since you are not actually forcing them to accept by threatening further distress should they not take up your offer, making those offers can only improve their situation or, at worst, maintain the status quo. Since not making the offer is "worse", then making it must be "better".
Whether this becomes "good" or just remains "better" is entirely a subjective assessment. I would tend to think that so long as you are candid about what your offer entails, then giving more options is a good thing even if you are offering them for entirely selfish reasons. Whether that makes you a "good" person is a different question altogether, but that has no bearing on whether or not the offer should have been made.
As an example, if I were in grave debt I might be happy to hear the offering from the local loan shark with tendencies towards knee breaking so long as he's up front about his interest rates and methods of sanction. I might end up not accepting the offer, but at least I have it on the table along with all my other options.
If we can create gravitons and send them to another dimension, and detect that, doesn't that mean that if people in the other dimensions can do the same, we can communicate with them? If there exists a fourth spacial dimension, then all of us already do live in that dimension. We just don't perceive it because it's incredibly small , as they theory goes.
Also, just because you can move around a particle along the axis of the fourth dimension doesn't mean that you magically get to ignore the other three. If you want your particle that you manipulate in New York to be observable by your friend in Sydney then the three classical dimensions will need to be traversed before he can see it no matter where in the fourth dimension the particle is located.
Or, to be brief, it's not "a different" dimension - it's "an additional" dimension.
Didn't Java have a reference standard? I believe you were able to get the source code for that though (under a "research" license or somesuch).
The real question, though, is how willing the vendor is to fix bugs in the reference implementation. If the vendor has intentionally made the standard incompatible with the reference implementation and/or is unwilling to bring the reference in line with the standard (or vice versa) and/or is unwilling to tell you what it is, exactly, that the reference is doing/expecting then you're out of luck. If, on the other hand, you have a vendor who is willing to discuss these issues with you, you can probably work it out without too much work.
Which is these applies to Microsoft wrt OOXML I do not know. I would have thought that Sun had some incentive to being of the cooperative variety wrt Java, but I don't really know that either.
I'm of the completely opposite viewpoint here. You have a right to your own life, but that right is not a blank check to force others to provide for your survival. If socialized health care is a viable, long-term solution then I expect it will be not because of some fundamental right, but simply because it's a good socio-economical idea. That is, if the direct and indirect cost to society at large from poor health is such that it far exceeds what it would cost society to keep people healthy, then socialized health care is a good idea and should be pursued.
To use government to force a company to provide a new drug at a discounted rate is a violation of rights. That depends altogether on what set of rights your country grants theoretical constructs. In essence, a company gains only the minimal set of rights that the nation considers opportune and no more. If it seems opportune to be able to dictate drug prices, then any right the company might have been given contrary to this will, obviously, not be given.
To use government to force a doctor to treat you at a fixed cost is a violation of rights. Doctors will generally only be forced to use fixed cost to the extent that they want to receive goverment subsidy/reimbursement. If they don't care for such handouts, they should be quite free to charge as much as they like. If so, they will tend to be frequented by wealthy people who don't like standing in line (to the extent that there is a capacity problem) or else because of their excellent reputation/skill/etc.
To use government to tax others to pay for the values needed for your own survival is a violation of rights. This is really just an argument against taxation in general, which seems to be a different debate altogether.
The only way socialized medicine could be implemented here is through oppressive taxation or rationing of care. Oppressive is in the eye of the beholder. For some, one cent is oppressive. As for rationing health care - this has always been necessary and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. We cannot dismantle our hospitals just because they don't have infinite capacity.
In a world where everyone was reasonable and nobody tried to play fast and loose with the wellbeing of their employees, unions wouldn't be needed. They probably would be. Members of the union (assuming a well-behaved one) will have a much better idea of what concerns and ideas the employees have than what company management does (no matter how benevolent the management - they still tend to live in a different world from the general employee). The union would therefore still be very useful for gathering up those thoughts, filtering them, and advocating them towards the management.
If someone does something bad, there's *always* going to be something *worse* you can point to, and that magically makes the bad thing ok. So long as this worse thing is the default thing for the people involved, it seems like a rather potent argument. After all, if a person only has horrid option A and terrible option B available to him, then giving him a nasty option C to also choose from isn't actually hurting him and might even enable him to improve his life.
So, while investing claims of ESP and invisible pink unicorns might be so low on your todo list that it never happens; you are wrong if you close your mind to the possibility or ignore the finding of people who have not. If YOU witnessed the paranormal or ESP you might it suddenly rate it quite a bit higher on that todo list eh? And you wouldn't be wrong either. Unlike actual possibilities, priorities are subjective.
"ludicrous claims... allowed equal consideration with the realistic ones"
I suppose that really depends on WHY you think they are ludicrous or realistic. Yes, this is really getting to the crux of the matter. As for ESP, I consider that as its proponents have now spent over 100 years trying to show its existence in a scientific manner and have yet to produce anything resembling a useful result (while, in the mean time, other areas of scientific investigation have given us the internal combustion engine, flight, space travel, computers, nukes and - indeed - sliced bread) it is fairly safe to call it debunked. Which isn't to say that it's 100% certain to be false, but it's close enough that the difference doesn't matter.
As for extraordinary claims, there is no such thing as an extraordinary claim. So you agree, then, that the invisible pink unicorn theory is an entirely ordinary claim?
All possibilities are equal and if you believe otherwise then you have a bias that will skew your results. If it were, indeed, true that all possibilities were equal, then we really wouldn't have the entire discipline of statistics, now, would we? Why spend millions of dollars figuring out whether or not our new product is going to be well-received in the market place when you can tell us, perhaps even for free, that since the only two possible answers are "yes" and "no", each will have a 50% chance of being correct?
Claims are claims and evidence is evidence, two claims with an equal amount are supporting evidence are equally valid regardless of your subjective opinion that one is 'extraordinary'. That really depends on what you mean by "valid". If by "valid" you mean "put forth in the form of a grammatically correct sentence" then I suppose you're correct. If, on the other hand, you meant something along the lines of "probably correct" or, even, "something I can confidently base the remainder on my life upon" then you're not.
There is a great deal of evidence as previously discussed. There is no particular reason to believe otherwise and therefore the subject is still up in the air. Wild claims do not constitute evidence. They only constitute wild claims.
Make up your mind, are they pink or are they invisible? I think I made it quite clear that they are both.
It is equally irrational to disbelieve something without evidence that contradicts it. Fanatical disbelief isn't any more palatable than any other form of fanaticism. It is, however, perfectly valid to dismiss (rather than disbelieve) ludicrous claims that fail to produce the slightest shred of evidence in their favour. The idea space of possible crackpot theories is infinite and so if you didn't dismiss the unbelievable you'd basically be forced to have your life governed by all possible crackpot theories and all of their innumerable permutations since, after all, they haven't actually been disproved.
Again, there are far too many acccounts to simply dismiss out of hand and therefore they require an explanation. I am not saying that ESP (or the paranormal) is that explanation only that one is needed. So long as the crackpot theories (of which there are dozens at least, and an infinite number in theory) are allowed equal consideration with the realistic ones, we are unlikely to be able to find out what exactly is going on since we do not have the immense (tending towards infinite) resources required to investigate the problem.
Incidentally, this is exactly the reason why we have developed, and adopted, the scientific method. It's very good at filtering out the crud and leaving us with viable theories.
"Monitoring software that only runs on Windows" is an utterly stupid way to accomplish what they're trying to do. A separate physically sealed hardware proxy would be OS and protocol agnostic and less likely to be interfered with. A separate piece of hardware would represent an expense for the govt and so would be unlikely to have been offered in the first place. What they're basically saying is that if the pirate coughs up the cash for the appropriate OS, the govt will install its software on that machine and he can get off with less severe punishment than what would otherwise have been the case. As this represents no financial outlay for the govt, it is easy for them to make this offer - it would not have been had they needed to spend any money on it.
You do realize the exact same statement can be made about the majority of scientific research. Believing that the observations of scientists are somehow superior to the observations of other credible witnesses is simple arrogance. Of course. That's why science relies on well-defined, repeatable lab experiments and peer review. It's also why science does not rely on rumour, anecdotes and wishful thinking.
I never argued that ESP is real, I only proposed that there is not sufficient evidence to evaluate whether or not ESP is real. But that isn't in any way a useful observation. ESP is such an extraordinary claim that it requires equally extraordinary evidence in its support for it to be seriously considered as fact. This evidence has yet to materialize and so believing in it is about as rational as believing in invisible pink unicorns.
The only way in which you can rationally believe in such fantasies is if you have personally witnessed something that you fail to find any other rational explanation for. This would put you in the difficult position of being surrounded by sceptics that lack your personal experience and so will tend to disbelieve you. More likely than not, however, if you have had such an experience chances are that you were deceived either by your own senses (which literally happens all the time since all your sensory input is constantly subject to interpretation, filtering and embellishment by your brain) or by your own ignorance (people get tricked by magicians all the time because they don't know how he's doing his tricks, and some even believe that it's truly by magic).
Dhramic philosophy has never discouraged the pursuit of science, unlike it appears of Abrahamic religions (such as Chistiantiy, Islam). Christianity doesn't have a problem with science. It might have had up until ~1000CE (I don't know this, but I presume it may have been the case), but a series of philosophical developments within the church leading up to Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275) codified a doctrine in which science is basically defined to not be in conflict with faith. Only a handful of religious tenets are left as untouchable by science, and these are largely of the kind that science can't have an opinion on anyway (any theory concerning them would tend to defy falsifiability and so science wouldn't generally go anywhere near them in the first place).
That only leaves fringe fanatics and, in periods, fallout from internal power struggles within the church - but these effects aren't really religious in nature, they're human. You'll see the same problems in non-religious groups, politics, etc.
Grandparent seems to imply that there is some way you can work your way back to the drug lab once you find drug usage in a given neighborhood. The way I see it, you can only really do this by scanning for substance C and you could do/that/ upstream and then narrow in which neighbourhood it's coming from. You'd probably want to have a mobile probe to do it so you can run around the sewer system looking for C.
You could/possibly/ do it looking for drugs if actual drugs is somehow a significant constituent of C (or if drug lab workers use lots of drugs and this causes the drug lab itself to produce a noticable spike in the drug by-products of the local sewer). That is, if a drug lab dumps 10% of its drugs into the sewage for whatever reason then this might enable you to trace them.
What ever happened to civil debates? There are many civil debates - but they rarely show up as stories on Slashdot. "Scientist writes scathing review - author states such is the reviewer's perogative" just doesn't make for a very exciting headline.
He suffered a lot of failures early on because he didn't use aerospace grade wiring harnesses ("They are expensive and probably overengineered" was his reason as best I can recall) for just one example. For this to be something worthy of criticism, we need to know how many other calls of the type "X is too expensive and probably overengineered" he has made and which turned out to be true. If Carmack had successfully debunked 10 different high-cost items as unnecessarily expensive and found that aerospace harness is the one exception, then that is an excellent result and probably worth a few failures to figure out. It is not reasonable to expect that he should have been able to reason his way into such knowledge since the rest of the highly trained professional rocketry industry hasn't either.
Likewise, if the aerospace industry is bogged down with 1000 different "best practices", 950 of which are unnecessarily complex and expensive, then Carmack finding out that "do a drop test in the hangar before testing the automatic switchoff in an actual field landing" is one of the 50 may be worth losing a vehicle over since he's saving time and money on the other 950 he is happily ignoring.
As I haven't followed Carmack I don't know to what extent the above holds true, but I do understand he is trying to do a "hands-on" approach rather than a big-design-up-front one. It is to be expected that he will make a number of mistakes along the way since he's practically forced to invent the entire field. Some of the mistakes will be seen as obvious in retrospect, and practically all of them will be seen as avoidable if you'd just followed NASA guidelines (and poured $5G into the project in order to do so). This should not be seen as a failure of Carmack but rather as a necessary cost of trying to find a cheaper way.
Using your theory, can the company I pay to shred and dispose sensitive documents turn around and give those documents away to the highest bidder? This would presumably depend on what your contract has to say about the matter.
Well, if I understand you correctly, I don't think you can really 'check upstream' for drug labs, because the drugs aren't flowing downhill. The idea would probably be to scan the sewage for those chemicals one knows that drug labs will tend to be dumping. If mixing 1 unit of A with with 1 unit of B produces 1 unit of dope and 1 unit of C, where C is useless to the drug lab, then you'll be checking the sewage for traces of C since they'll probably just flush it.
It's not like there's one perfect strategy. The worst strategy of all is the one the enemy is expecting and prepared for. Of course. But if this is a tool that will enable your enemy to consistently expect and prepare for what would/otherwise/ have been your best strategy, then this is to your detriment.
(Of course, the tool should develop into expecting that you will avoid what would theoretically be the best strategy since you anticipate that the tool will predict this strategy, and so on and so forth. In the end, it will most likely be an expert system for helping you determine where to put your various countermeasures in order to minimize the value of your enemy's entire available strategy-space.)
Studies have repeatedly failed to establish a causal relationship between video game violence and real-life violence. Really? You mean that all those studies that show that children of wife beaters are more likely to grow up to be wife beaters were wrong? So you're basically saying that since children who play video games might grow up to become video-game-makers themselves, children should not be able to legally buy video games?
Could you please enumerate any other career choices you think children should be legally discouraged from adopting?
Once again, you have failed to learn the most important lesson of all. Slashdot: Not just one person. Duh? It may be some sort of twisted solipsism: the world consists of only me and one other person - who pretends to be 8 billion different ones. The comforting thing about this twist, I suppose, is that you can easily convince yourself that it's that/other/ guy who's really fucked up:-)
All property rights are "government-granted monopolies". No. Physical property is a natural monopoly in that it is feasible for me to employ force against anyone who tries to take my property away from me/and/ in that I will tend to be strongly inclined towards doing so because having it taken away from me will deprive me of its use.
Government property law is largely an attempt to reduce the violence inherent in this most natural form of property rights. It amounts to a codification of what has been with us since the first ape picked up a piece of rock and used it to bash in another ape's skull when the other ape tried to take it away from him.
Granting monopolies on abstract concepts, on the other hand, makes about as much sense as granting a monopoly on the colour red.
Slashdot Mirror
Offering a woman who is in the wilderness with a broken leg a ride to the nearest hospital, on the condition that she give you a blowjob would be wrong.
Offering someone whose family is starving $2/day, on the condition that they work as slaves for you is wrong.
Yes, in each of these cases, not doing anything at all could be argued to be even worse. But that ain't enough. By that you've just demonstrated that the action is not the worst-possible-action. But there's a long step from being "not-the-worst" and to being "good".
The second example is particularily interesting; it would actually be a *crime* not to help a helpless person in such a situation. For all of your examples, choosing to help the people involved is not something that you are obliged to do in any way. Yes, you could establish your altruism by aiding them with no strings attached but you are not required to do so. (Some nations will probably have laws that require you to aid people in distress even if this comes at some cost to you - this changes things as you note.)
Assuming that you are not an altruist, however, then
Whether this becomes "good" or just remains "better" is entirely a subjective assessment. I would tend to think that so long as you are candid about what your offer entails, then giving more options is a good thing even if you are offering them for entirely selfish reasons. Whether that makes you a "good" person is a different question altogether, but that has no bearing on whether or not the offer should have been made.
As an example, if I were in grave debt I might be happy to hear the offering from the local loan shark with tendencies towards knee breaking so long as he's up front about his interest rates and methods of sanction. I might end up not accepting the offer, but at least I have it on the table along with all my other options.
Also, just because you can move around a particle along the axis of the fourth dimension doesn't mean that you magically get to ignore the other three. If you want your particle that you manipulate in New York to be observable by your friend in Sydney then the three classical dimensions will need to be traversed before he can see it no matter where in the fourth dimension the particle is located.
Or, to be brief, it's not "a different" dimension - it's "an additional" dimension.
The real question, though, is how willing the vendor is to fix bugs in the reference implementation. If the vendor has intentionally made the standard incompatible with the reference implementation and/or is unwilling to bring the reference in line with the standard (or vice versa) and/or is unwilling to tell you what it is, exactly, that the reference is doing/expecting then you're out of luck. If, on the other hand, you have a vendor who is willing to discuss these issues with you, you can probably work it out without too much work.
Which is these applies to Microsoft wrt OOXML I do not know. I would have thought that Sun had some incentive to being of the cooperative variety wrt Java, but I don't really know that either.
"ludicrous claims... allowed equal consideration with the realistic ones"
I suppose that really depends on WHY you think they are ludicrous or realistic. Yes, this is really getting to the crux of the matter. As for ESP, I consider that as its proponents have now spent over 100 years trying to show its existence in a scientific manner and have yet to produce anything resembling a useful result (while, in the mean time, other areas of scientific investigation have given us the internal combustion engine, flight, space travel, computers, nukes and - indeed - sliced bread) it is fairly safe to call it debunked. Which isn't to say that it's 100% certain to be false, but it's close enough that the difference doesn't matter.
Incidentally, this is exactly the reason why we have developed, and adopted, the scientific method. It's very good at filtering out the crud and leaving us with viable theories.
The only way in which you can rationally believe in such fantasies is if you have personally witnessed something that you fail to find any other rational explanation for. This would put you in the difficult position of being surrounded by sceptics that lack your personal experience and so will tend to disbelieve you. More likely than not, however, if you have had such an experience chances are that you were deceived either by your own senses (which literally happens all the time since all your sensory input is constantly subject to interpretation, filtering and embellishment by your brain) or by your own ignorance (people get tricked by magicians all the time because they don't know how he's doing his tricks, and some even believe that it's truly by magic).
That only leaves fringe fanatics and, in periods, fallout from internal power struggles within the church - but these effects aren't really religious in nature, they're human. You'll see the same problems in non-religious groups, politics, etc.
You could
Likewise, if the aerospace industry is bogged down with 1000 different "best practices", 950 of which are unnecessarily complex and expensive, then Carmack finding out that "do a drop test in the hangar before testing the automatic switchoff in an actual field landing" is one of the 50 may be worth losing a vehicle over since he's saving time and money on the other 950 he is happily ignoring.
As I haven't followed Carmack I don't know to what extent the above holds true, but I do understand he is trying to do a "hands-on" approach rather than a big-design-up-front one. It is to be expected that he will make a number of mistakes along the way since he's practically forced to invent the entire field. Some of the mistakes will be seen as obvious in retrospect, and practically all of them will be seen as avoidable if you'd just followed NASA guidelines (and poured $5G into the project in order to do so). This should not be seen as a failure of Carmack but rather as a necessary cost of trying to find a cheaper way.
(Of course, the tool should develop into expecting that you will avoid what would theoretically be the best strategy since you anticipate that the tool will predict this strategy, and so on and so forth. In the end, it will most likely be an expert system for helping you determine where to put your various countermeasures in order to minimize the value of your enemy's entire available strategy-space.)
Really? You mean that all those studies that show that children of wife beaters are more likely to grow up to be wife beaters were wrong? So you're basically saying that since children who play video games might grow up to become video-game-makers themselves, children should not be able to legally buy video games?
Could you please enumerate any other career choices you think children should be legally discouraged from adopting?
Slashdot: Not just one person. Duh? It may be some sort of twisted solipsism: the world consists of only me and one other person - who pretends to be 8 billion different ones. The comforting thing about this twist, I suppose, is that you can easily convince yourself that it's that
Government property law is largely an attempt to reduce the violence inherent in this most natural form of property rights. It amounts to a codification of what has been with us since the first ape picked up a piece of rock and used it to bash in another ape's skull when the other ape tried to take it away from him.
Granting monopolies on abstract concepts, on the other hand, makes about as much sense as granting a monopoly on the colour red.