I also like to argue that if creators and their descendants should be able to gain income throughout the creator's life, plus for 70 years after the creator's death, then why shouldn't criminals and felons and their descendants have to pay fines for the lawbreaker's life, plus for 70 years after the lawbreaker's death? I'm sympathetic to your point, but there is an answer to that: criminals have a poor shadow of the future, which is part of the reason why they're criminals (even if they don't get caught, they will have a lifestyle that is worse than the non-criminal's). Thus there's little incentive created by such a regime.
Actually, this is part of the reason why our desire to punish is only modestly effective in reducing crime. Changes in law give small changes in behaviour. Maybe, anarchism wouldn't be much worse than what we have now, and in some ways, be considerably better?
Part of the spec appears to be that the right to connect can be recinded, and the laptop disabled, so the incentive to steal one is small. Add that commercial ones (if any) would be a different colour, and it would be obvious that your laptop wasn't kosher, unless you had a direct link with the OLPC.
The OLPC could make things even easier by making sure that helpers got the adult/commercial version, so that there was no ambiguity.
Yes, any black hole created by us would initially have negligible mass. But, since it's not created in a vacuum, wouldn't it start accumulating mass fairly quickly? I should think it would start pulling in bits from the atmosphere.
Practically speaking, it would evaporate through Hawking Radiation in no time, however, whenever this comes up, someone points out that we're playing God, and don't really know what will happen (probably fresh from watching some disaster movie).
So assuming that this Hawking Radition (that we actually observe) doesn't exist, you have a point concentration of mass (a black hole) with (say) the mass of a grain of salt. Not only is the pulling power of a grain of salt pretty small, but a particle that is attracted to it has to actually hit the miniscule event horizon. This won't happen very often.
I suppose that eventually, if very slowly, it would grow, but you wouldn't know it since it would only attract as much as the mass that it contains would. Perhaps then it could go to the centre of the earth and eat the mantle.
Still, since Hawking Radition does exist, this won't happen; the black hole will last the smallest fraction of a second. Maybe I'm being blasée and too easily dismissive, but this is really sci-fi stuff: rubber-tentacled monsters are coming to eat us all!
Black holes "suck" only as much as the mass that they contain does.
Any black hole created in a lab on earth is going to have negligable sucking power, since the mass in them will be tiny. The vision of a black hole forming and swallowing the earth is great sci-fi, but (happily) poor science. At worst, it will hang around, swallowing the odd electron at very rare intervals.
I think that macro-evolution also has strong evidence; it's not that hard to figure out; natural selection makes for a very biased coin, so that the "chance" isn't "random" over any reasonable period of time, and in any case, the shift to "Theists should not believe evolution" is a recent one. Finding it hard to imagine how complexity is handled is a problem for "both sides" on this issue, though.
As this topic tend not to go very far, I'll point you to an interesting post on the topic, on the assumption that your difficulty to imagine the mechanisms for complexity is in good faith.
I consider myself a pantheist, though, so I am inclined to see evolution as a manifestation of, and a mechanism of the intelligence of the universe, much as the mind emerges from the brain.
If you think fundamentalist religion is a cause of suffering and atheism isn't, eugenics must not be in your vocabulary.
Fundementalism is generally a bad idea. "Any excuse will serve a tyrant"; it's probably better to ask what is true, rather than which ideas have been least misused. It's likely to get us further. Also, a sincere search for truth must include at least some respect for other's ideas.
It amazes me how this is news at all. This has been all over Slashdot, and repeatedly referred to. I got into an argument with someone who claimed that because this article was cited by people who pirated, it somehow wasn't valid data (!?) Somehow the oldness of the news also meant that people stopped treating the data as compelling, as if old data loses accuracy. Besides the pro-piracy lobby wanted to say "(intellectual) property is theft", which, you'll have to admit is a lot more dramatic.
The argument has moved on a little since then, but not a lot. Notably, the music industry "hit back" with a paper called "Piracy on the High 'C's", who's central contention was that students did spend less on music. A barely mentioned acedemic paper that I discovered when researching the issue mayself had a response to that: older people who pirate buy more, and younger people buy less.
This is probably something to do with income, IMO, together with the effect that nurturing an interest has upon one's purchases. Links and further analysis can be found in a post that I made in an old journal of mine.
The Grandparent was saying that pirates don't pass on viruses because it's against their own self-interest, hardly a point about ethics.
Additionally, it is still pretty common to care about your friends, family, and community above those from far afield (such as those profiting from the sales of "originals"). The equality of all near and far is rarely held as an ideal; indeed pacifists (one group who conspicuously hold to this ideal) are often sneared at.
To have ethics isn't to be perfect, but simply to care more than merely self-interest (which isn't required here anyway). Indeed perfect ethics (as with my example of pascifism) are likely to be unsustainable, given the world in which we live.
In the abscence of the capability to analyse the science itself, you have no chance of forming any worthwhile judgement of the science -- no matter what you know about the funding. It depends upon whether you're talking "balance of probability" or certainties. Funding is data in analysing the quality of the research; scientists who get their funding from elsewhere taking on the conclusions is additional data allowing one to revise one's initial assessment.
The only possible way around this is if you put your faith in a particular scientist of exceptional credibility who has the ability to make an objective analysis of it. But then it is still just faith. Not so. Any scientist is falsifiable when the balance of probabilities turn against them. The totality of information available is your best guide, once analysed correctly. To rely upon a single point of reference is contrary to the scientific method.
Untimately, Baysian analysis regresses to how much you trust your senses, but given that you do, you can cross-correlate what you know from different sources to form a probability distribution of likely truth about the world.
Certainly, not every individual will reach the same conclusions, even given perfect mastery of probability and analysis; the divergent courses of their lives will lead them to form different theories, but you would expect long-term convergence, assuming the unity of underlying reality.
Just because ExxonMobil paid someone, does not mean the arguments the scientist made are not valid, although they might as well be; same goes for the people who worked at the IPCC report. Let's stick to the actual arguments and data, instead of making cheap ad hominem attacks.
What you're saying makes perfect sense concerning the debate amoungst scientists, but when it comes to the popular debate, large amounts of funding will result in a proportional amount of material. Since the population at large don't have the wherewithall to analyse the findings, they look instead to the volume of the work produced and the reputation of those producing it.
In the abscence of the capability to analyse the science itself, it help to know where the funding comes from. If the science is then picked up by a scientist who's sources appear not to be compromised, then it is reasonable to assume that it was sound science in the first place. This filter layer is the meaning of peer review. In the abscence of this filter layer, it is reasonable for the population to know that the funding is selecting for particular conclusions, thus possibly prejudicing the data or the analysis of that data.
Knowledge of funding is part of the mechanism by which the non-scientist protects him or herself against junk science.
Followup: Confirmed in at least one scenario. I did a little poking around with Google. In the case of a life insurance perk, there is something called a Section 162 Double Bonus Plan. Here the company pays not only the premium and employee's tax on that benefit, but also the tax on the tax. Is this process really iterated further? Yes, judging by the $166,667 example in this article (since 1 + 0.4 + 0.4^2 + 0.4^3 +... = 1.66667): Which is, of course, 1/(0.4), ie. the sum which a 40% tax would restore unity.
Most likely, this process isn't iterated, so that you're still left paying over 10% on the original sum. Paying "tax on tax" is a clever way of shirking that last bit, IMO, since they could instead have offered to pay enough to cover the loss in benefit, after taking tax into account.
In Britian, calculations for VAT involve an awareness of ratios when processing turnover (7/47 of the sale price instead of 7/40 of the original); using a different perspective and applying the fraction that applies for the first perspective looks to me to be a simple con.
The UK may have to hand over a scummy billionaire who profited immensely off of the rush to privatize Russia, which would be cool: two scumbags busted for the price of one. This billionaire might indeed be scummy, but he wouldn't receive a fair trial, according to English Courts, so extradition is off. As the article says, the Russians will, most likely, not accept this as an excuse.
In fact, this is the whole problem: to Russia, the concept of an independent judiciary is not credible.
I'm not sure that they're scientists. The weathermen have a licence to practice from the AMS that is a qualification in itself.
It's similar to whether teachers should be teaching good current science.
To be honest, I don't know which side I hold on this issue. I believe that AMS has the right, but don't like to stifle debate. People shouldn't be presenting bad science and be endorsed, but it's not nice to be gagged if you want to keep your job, which doesn't, in itself, rely upon that opinion.
It would certainly be wrong to decertify scientists, for they have the knowledge, and should have the freedom to make their own decisions. But if your job is to communicate (the implications of) current science, that isn't the same thing as science research.
And I should know better; I have a diagnosis for Aspergers. With this misplaced sentence, I distracted from my entire point, which is simply that we shouldn't be prejudiced against any individual, but we should also be weary of "feminising science".
By using terms that are one removed from gender, it becomes easier to achieve both ends. The term describes a trait (much as Aspergers does), and despite a strong tendency to asymetrical expression between the sexes, is not exclusive to the respective sex, so that describing science as a "Yang activity" (say), you are neither excluding women, nor are you opening it up to be "Yinified". This separation allows the best of both worlds, IMO.
Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt.
Then you have kids and you realize that most of it was inate after all.
Luckily this doesn't matter. The point of abstraction is that one can look to desirable qualities for (eg.) science without approaching with the same prejudice when faced with a specific man or woman. Those who have skills in the realm of the "wrong sex" are no longer treated as being "unnatural", but rather simply as having more of the relevant qualities than is usual for their sex.
Without the abstraction, the unusually skilled will have to deal with eg. "unfemininity", implying that a woman is less of a woman. To be more "Yang" takes the focus away from sex and onto the task in hand. It's far better to do this than to try making science more "Yin", IMO!
It's the old Yin/Yang thing. Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt. Using terms such as Yin and Yang, rather than feminine and masculine could reasonably be used to reference the qualities without referring to sex.
It is of course an irony that promoting "Yin" over "Yang" has become part of the agenda of many who wish to strengthen the role of women, and this appears to have come at the expense of science, and other beneficial risk-taking throughout society. What happened to the promotion of strong, creative women?
I suspect that the real force at work here isn't feminism, but Marxism. The many are promoted above the few, and disruptive thinkers are discouraged. The blending with Womens' rights, according to this theory, would be an accident of history. Those promoting the underdog form a synthesis of the underdogs' interests, so as to present a single alternative to the evils of "capitalism".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is part of the reason why our desire to punish is only modestly effective in reducing crime. Changes in law give small changes in behaviour. Maybe, anarchism wouldn't be much worse than what we have now, and in some ways, be considerably better?
Part of the spec appears to be that the right to connect can be recinded, and the laptop disabled, so the incentive to steal one is small. Add that commercial ones (if any) would be a different colour, and it would be obvious that your laptop wasn't kosher, unless you had a direct link with the OLPC.
The OLPC could make things even easier by making sure that helpers got the adult/commercial version, so that there was no ambiguity.
So assuming that this Hawking Radition (that we actually observe) doesn't exist, you have a point concentration of mass (a black hole) with (say) the mass of a grain of salt. Not only is the pulling power of a grain of salt pretty small, but a particle that is attracted to it has to actually hit the miniscule event horizon. This won't happen very often.
I suppose that eventually, if very slowly, it would grow, but you wouldn't know it since it would only attract as much as the mass that it contains would. Perhaps then it could go to the centre of the earth and eat the mantle.
Still, since Hawking Radition does exist, this won't happen; the black hole will last the smallest fraction of a second. Maybe I'm being blasée and too easily dismissive, but this is really sci-fi stuff: rubber-tentacled monsters are coming to eat us all!
Any black hole created in a lab on earth is going to have negligable sucking power, since the mass in them will be tiny. The vision of a black hole forming and swallowing the earth is great sci-fi, but (happily) poor science. At worst, it will hang around, swallowing the odd electron at very rare intervals.
As this topic tend not to go very far, I'll point you to an interesting post on the topic, on the assumption that your difficulty to imagine the mechanisms for complexity is in good faith.
I consider myself a pantheist, though, so I am inclined to see evolution as a manifestation of, and a mechanism of the intelligence of the universe, much as the mind emerges from the brain.
I did mean fundementalist atheism, as well as other forms...
The argument has moved on a little since then, but not a lot. Notably, the music industry "hit back" with a paper called "Piracy on the High 'C's", who's central contention was that students did spend less on music. A barely mentioned acedemic paper that I discovered when researching the issue mayself had a response to that: older people who pirate buy more, and younger people buy less.
This is probably something to do with income, IMO, together with the effect that nurturing an interest has upon one's purchases. Links and further analysis can be found in a post that I made in an old journal of mine.
Follow the link ;o)
Romani Ite Domum x100
Additionally, it is still pretty common to care about your friends, family, and community above those from far afield (such as those profiting from the sales of "originals"). The equality of all near and far is rarely held as an ideal; indeed pacifists (one group who conspicuously hold to this ideal) are often sneared at.
To have ethics isn't to be perfect, but simply to care more than merely self-interest (which isn't required here anyway). Indeed perfect ethics (as with my example of pascifism) are likely to be unsustainable, given the world in which we live.
What you are saying, in essence, is that Bayesian inferencing is useless.
The only possible way around this is if you put your faith in a particular scientist of exceptional credibility who has the ability to make an objective analysis of it. But then it is still just faith. Not so. Any scientist is falsifiable when the balance of probabilities turn against them. The totality of information available is your best guide, once analysed correctly. To rely upon a single point of reference is contrary to the scientific method.Untimately, Baysian analysis regresses to how much you trust your senses, but given that you do, you can cross-correlate what you know from different sources to form a probability distribution of likely truth about the world.
Certainly, not every individual will reach the same conclusions, even given perfect mastery of probability and analysis; the divergent courses of their lives will lead them to form different theories, but you would expect long-term convergence, assuming the unity of underlying reality.
What you're saying makes perfect sense concerning the debate amoungst scientists, but when it comes to the popular debate, large amounts of funding will result in a proportional amount of material. Since the population at large don't have the wherewithall to analyse the findings, they look instead to the volume of the work produced and the reputation of those producing it.
In the abscence of the capability to analyse the science itself, it help to know where the funding comes from. If the science is then picked up by a scientist who's sources appear not to be compromised, then it is reasonable to assume that it was sound science in the first place. This filter layer is the meaning of peer review. In the abscence of this filter layer, it is reasonable for the population to know that the funding is selecting for particular conclusions, thus possibly prejudicing the data or the analysis of that data.
Knowledge of funding is part of the mechanism by which the non-scientist protects him or herself against junk science.
Most likely, this process isn't iterated, so that you're still left paying over 10% on the original sum. Paying "tax on tax" is a clever way of shirking that last bit, IMO, since they could instead have offered to pay enough to cover the loss in benefit, after taking tax into account.
In Britian, calculations for VAT involve an awareness of ratios when processing turnover (7/47 of the sale price instead of 7/40 of the original); using a different perspective and applying the fraction that applies for the first perspective looks to me to be a simple con.
Still, it's our own courts that did it on both occasions, even if they are being inconsistent.
In fact, this is the whole problem: to Russia, the concept of an independent judiciary is not credible.
So, once again. The state of research on the effects of file-sharing.
It's similar to whether teachers should be teaching good current science.
To be honest, I don't know which side I hold on this issue. I believe that AMS has the right, but don't like to stifle debate. People shouldn't be presenting bad science and be endorsed, but it's not nice to be gagged if you want to keep your job, which doesn't, in itself, rely upon that opinion.
It would certainly be wrong to decertify scientists, for they have the knowledge, and should have the freedom to make their own decisions. But if your job is to communicate (the implications of) current science, that isn't the same thing as science research.
By using terms that are one removed from gender, it becomes easier to achieve both ends. The term describes a trait (much as Aspergers does), and despite a strong tendency to asymetrical expression between the sexes, is not exclusive to the respective sex, so that describing science as a "Yang activity" (say), you are neither excluding women, nor are you opening it up to be "Yinified". This separation allows the best of both worlds, IMO.
Then you have kids and you realize that most of it was inate after all.
Luckily this doesn't matter. The point of abstraction is that one can look to desirable qualities for (eg.) science without approaching with the same prejudice when faced with a specific man or woman. Those who have skills in the realm of the "wrong sex" are no longer treated as being "unnatural", but rather simply as having more of the relevant qualities than is usual for their sex.Without the abstraction, the unusually skilled will have to deal with eg. "unfemininity", implying that a woman is less of a woman. To be more "Yang" takes the focus away from sex and onto the task in hand. It's far better to do this than to try making science more "Yin", IMO!
It's the old Yin/Yang thing. Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt. Using terms such as Yin and Yang, rather than feminine and masculine could reasonably be used to reference the qualities without referring to sex.
It is of course an irony that promoting "Yin" over "Yang" has become part of the agenda of many who wish to strengthen the role of women, and this appears to have come at the expense of science, and other beneficial risk-taking throughout society. What happened to the promotion of strong, creative women?
I suspect that the real force at work here isn't feminism, but Marxism. The many are promoted above the few, and disruptive thinkers are discouraged. The blending with Womens' rights, according to this theory, would be an accident of history. Those promoting the underdog form a synthesis of the underdogs' interests, so as to present a single alternative to the evils of "capitalism".
I didn't say that my post was protected from trolling ;o)
The Red Hat statement on patents is such that they won't enforce it unless there's reason to retaliate.
Far from trolling, this is protection from trolling.
Even if sometimes good. Looking at things objectively involves recognising that "good" and "bad" are sometimes orthogonal to "true" and "false".