He's paraphrasing Pascal's wager, and Pascal was one of the first people thinking logically about probability. Pascal wanted an example of how you should treat situations where one outcome was infinitely better or worse than all the others. Even though Pascal was religious, no one is really sure if he came up with the argument to try and convert people, or just as an example of the kind of situation where infinity was part of probability calculation. Hopefully, people don't change their beliefs because of Pascal's Wager anymore, if anyone really did.
Now Kurt Godel, who was probably a better mathematician than Pascal, had three great proofs. The second is famous for showing, as just one interpretation, how Provability in a formal system is different than Truth, and people often say that proof alone revolutionised the 20th century in the same way as Einstein. Godel's third proof is a demonstration of the existence of God, using Modal Logic. It avoids the glitches in Pascal's proof. Anyone who passed a good college course in Symbolic Logic can spend about a year studying some of the detailed areas of Modal Logic, really just picking up all the notation basics and such, and then follow Godel's proof and come to their opwn conclusion. I don't recommend bothering, as once you don't need faith to know there is a God anymore, you just need yet more faith to believe that Heaven is not just a place for six or seven old guys who were very good at math, and nobody else.
This is a logical fallacy, one heavily promoted by Carl Sagan among other atheists, but still just plain wrong. Science doesn't hold that everything must have an origin. If it did, the Steady State theory of Cosmology would have never been seriously considered and the Big Bang would have won out automattically before anyone ever actually gathered evidence. Instead of giving Penzias and Wilson a Nobel, we would have just yawned. The real issue is, for the particular way we think the universe works now, it has a first moment of creation. That doesn't mean the alternate theory wasn't scientific.
Further, most people who believe in God specifically believe He is eternal and has no first moment of creation, so if your proof was actually logical, all you would have proved is that the kind of God most people don't believe in cannot exist. That's about like proving that people are wrong to believe in four sided triangles. Who actually does? But, hey, this is slashdot, where you can get a +5 insightful for devastating a straw man.
It's widely recognised legally that awarding a patent IS giving a monopoly on the use of an idea, BUT for a limited time, and with other requirments such as disclosure. What the European court seems to have the most trouble with is an entity getting all the benefits of a patent by invoking some other form of "Intellectual Property" that doesn't have the same limitations. That's not as good as excellent laws in each specific area of IP, but at least it's something.
It's not just a matter of "obscure related topics", as you put it, although you're quite right, obscurity will definitely matter in many cases. It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic. For example, it's become a widepsread tactic for the right wing to call the Democratic party the "Democrat Party" instead. Google for that phrase, and you will see an enquiry offering the user a chance to search for Democratic party instead and most of the initial links will come up with the name "corrected". Wikipedia uses a disambiguation page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_party to offer the searcher various choices for the same phrase. Note that a disambiguation page is an external way to try and fight bias (in this case, at least). It exists outside the articles, and has to be created separately where somebody thinks it's needed. So another good question is: Is the use of such disambiguation pages proof that articles aren't being corrected for initial bias internally, or just a second line of defense in the overall struggle to reduce bias?
Interested readers might note that the disambiguation page explains in a fairly simple way that the phrase "Democrat party" is an epithet when used for the US party, but if the reader doesn't know what an epithet is and clicks that link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithet they have to read through over a dozen paragraphs to find out that there is a contemporary usage of the term and that while Shakespeare and Homer used epithets without meaning to be insulting, abusive or derogatory, the modern useage is all of these things. So much for being unbiased.
There conceivably could be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, but there's a real philosophical problem with that. So long as we use the real physicists definitions and not something out of Stargate SG1, those parallels will always remain undetectable. SF writers tell stories about interacting with other universes - physicists define them in ways that show they can't be interacted with to be verified.
An untestable idea isn't part of science. If it can't be disproven, it's philosophy or religion or something instead. An infinite number of untestable ideas is even worse. Philosophers get to whip out Occam's Razor at that point. If I claim that there is not only a God, but 7 different orders of angels totaling 144,000 beings working for him, those numbers are still simpler, in the sense Occam's Razor usually means, and so are to be preferred as a hypothesis. The same goes for a Million gods with an avarage of four arms each and a bunch of hidden cyclic time periods totalling quintillions of years for them to do their work in, or any of those models with a reasonably sized bunch of gods, and maybe some giants, dwarfs, dark elves, ninja turtles piza delivery robots, a billion clones of an invisible pink unicorn who died for your sins, riding on a gigantic fiberglass replical of L. Ron Hubbard, and so on. Just about any other idea looks preferrable to an idea that postulates an infinite number of unverifiable consequents.
Letting nature control population means relying on one or more of nature's methods. These are also known as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Human choices of control are preferrable if they beat nature's. By beat, we could be talking about "less wasteful", "kinder", or somehow "ethically fairer", and the exact conclusion will vary depending on which we emphasize. In fact, we could be trying to balance many such goals. You may be arguing from some definition of "ethically fairer", "less wasteful", "less arbitrary", or some other standard. So if you really want somebody to tell you what's faulty about your proposal, until you can explain what you are trying to accomplish better than by just letting nature take its course you don't really have any logic behind your claim to refute. Without that understanding, your proposal is an emotional argument disguised as a reasoned conclusion.
Knocking out aging actually has relatively little effect on population growth in some ways, for example women still stop having fertile eggs at menopause even if they typically live much longer. How many of those opportunities to fertilize an egg actually get used has a direct effect on population that is really larger than any possible additional lifespan.
(Yes, try the math. Increase the lifespan to a blisteringly worst case full 800 years, which would be about the average if we assume nobody dies of anything except violent accidents and deliberates such as being struck by a bus or shot in a war, and add some additional worst case for population assumptions such as that most of the people who kill themselves either do it early or wouldn't do it at all if they had their health. Assume ALL fatal diseases are cureable, and all people enjoy a biological age of about 25 for as long as they live, but women still stop being fertile about 45 to 50. Now instead assume current longevity prevails, but take the worldwide reproductive rate back up to about 4.2 children per generation, add that we can somehow feed all those kids for a few generations and so the rate can (temporarily, from a long enough perspective) stay that high, and now guess which group eventually gets bigger than the other way.).
By the way, surgical sterilization is seldom reversable. The usual effect is that closing off the tubes (for either gender) triggers internal scarring and often within a couple of years an autoimmune reaction sets in which causes the eggs to become infertile or the sperm to not fully form. The odds of a pregnancy resulting from a successful reversal are as low as 20% for the most common methods of female sterilization, although there is a procedure involving simply banding the tubes with clips or rings and doing no cutting and this gives odds as high as 70%. Male sterilization reversal has slightly better odds than that, but this assumes the surgeon did the original procedure with an eye towards eventual reversal, the reversal can include more than a simple reconnection but be followed as necessary with a complete epididymal repair (with a doctor who can determine on the fly which of three different procedures should be used after he or she actually gets in there) and the auto immune reation didn't happen. We're talking about a great success rate if you have one of a few dozen extremely skilled doctors who can do that work, but those guys are a bit like heart transplant surgeons - they don't grow on trees, and they don't come cheap. If you pay a doctor public clinic wages to bulk sterilize poor people, he or she won't be a doctor with that sort of success rate on reversals. You're making something sound simple and reliable which is actually pretty much experimental rocket science, and nobody should get sterilized with the idea that it can reliably be fixed if they change their mind or circumstances..
When a Kickstarter project is for a physical device, it generally aims to take advantage of economies of scale. I saw one for an aluminum bodied flashlight with a hexagonal cross section (presumably to make it less likely to roll when laid down). The creator showed how much cheaper it would be to make if he had precommitments for at least a thousand units, and if I recall, for 5000 and so on. This suggests to me that people who don't understand the kickstarter approach would be saying the same thing about all sorts of newer economics related ideas, such as print on demand, or selling excess solar power back to the grid. There's a difference between saying "Don't believe a stranger offering to sell you the Brooklyn bridge!", and "Don't believe bridges have any economic utility!".
The use of nuclear weapons against Israel presumably has to potentially include Jerusalem as a target. Nuking 'just' one location, such as Tel Aviv, means starting a war of total distruction with the surviving elements of the Israeli military, so it makes no more sense than, say, nukeing just New York and expecting the US to say "Oh, if it's only NY, we won't use nukes back." Ergo, use nukes at all and it's necessary to hit the Jerusalem area to kill Israeli military assets that will otherwise be nukeing you back. That means one of your hypothetical Iranian bombs takes out one of the most major Muslim holy sites (The Dome of the Rock). It also opens the door to retaliation against Islamic sites in general, presumably including even Mecca itself, as a risk. The question becomes, how far would Israel go with a 50% population loss? The real answer is, there's a reasonable likelyhood of a nuclear power using its weapons in response to just fallout from being downwind of a target nation, or similar possible triggers, let alone being faced with genocide and the possible total distruction of their nation. Asking what people would rationally do in such cases is starting from a false assumption that people in such cases remain rational if they started out that way .
So yes, you are drawing a reasonable inference when you question how much Ahmadinejad is like Hitler or Stalin, as one of the major questions is "Is he crazier than either of those two?". Probably not, but he does what the Grand Ayatollahs direct, maybe with some other influences, but just who those might be is terribly unsure from outside Iran. The real question may be how crazy a bunch of mostly 70 yeal old + spiritual leaders are.
However, you should keep in mind that most Iranians are not Arabs, although most are Muslims. Actual Arabs are only about 2% of the Iranian population according to the CIA world factbook. People who even speak fluent Arabic in the region total only about 3%, from the same source. Add to this that the version of Islam endorsed in Iran is Shia, while the majority of Palestinian Islamic practitioners are Sunni, and there are not as many ties between these peoples as most assume. There may well be Iranian hardliners who regard the Sunni as damnable heretics anyway, or, more secularly, strongly resent the occasional Sunni tendency (as seen particularly in Wahhabism, which is a Sunni/Saudi based half religion/half nationalism splinter), to treat all non-arab Muslims as second class Muslims.
You "Young Internet" creationists are ignoring the evidence for Netvolution, which clearly shows that the Internet has been developing from simpler structures for nearly 4.2 Billion years (Note that I am using the US 'Billion', that is One Thousand Millions - British style Billions would be silly in this context. I'd use scientific notation, but that would obviously confuse any persons who still listen to the absurd claims that "No one can show an intermendiate transition networking schema", and such.).
People see license plates all the time, but they don't normally stand there logging them for hours each day. There's lots of data where this sort of distinction matters.
For example, I'm a type 2 Diabetic. I voluntarily disclose this, and that I use a blood glucose meter and take Metformin for this condition. Now suppose somebody, perhaps working for my insurer, wants to check such data as what dates I refill my prescription, and what times of day I test, how regularly, and so on. There's several potential problems here. First, if my insurer wants to claim that I have been getting refills irregularly, it's in their interest if there's a law keeping me from stockpiling my medications, because that might be an alternate explanation for why I might go more than 1 month between refilling a 30 day supply.. Sure enough, there are an increasing number of drugs which don't have any known abuse potential, but that the prescriptions can only be filled for 1 month at a time, by law. The Insurers are not just interested in writing their rules so they don't pay out for multiple months at a time, but getting states to actually pass laws, which suggests to some of us that they really are trying to track such data in hopes of denying more claims. Then the test strips and lancets themselves are available in at least most states without a prescription. Again, there's no real abuse potential there, but again, there have been insurance lobbyists advocating making these items prescription only.
This sort of data is routinely observed by at least one other person (the clerk) any time I buy these medications. There are other people, such as my doctor and the pharmacy staff who may sometimes ask me if I'm testing regularly or remind me about proper use of the test kit and meds. But the insurer isn't just some party that presumably has my interests at heart in the general sense, they are an entity which might want to deny a claim if my disease gets worse, by claiming that it's my own fault for not following all the instructions adequately. The insurers are also people who have already lobbied for laws which would make my life a little more difficult. (For example, if I have to get a prescription for test strips and lancets, then I have to contact my doctor if my meter breaks and tell him what type I buy as a replacement before I can start using it.). So, the individual data is not kept particularly private. I'd let my doctor or pharmacist see the meter and page through the log stored on its SD card pretty much on request, and if I have the insurer pay for my meds, they presumably can see what dates I've filled the prescriptions and could track them easily. Yet, there's still problems with the access they already have, and piecing together that data gives them the power to do some things that can be a real pain.Piecing together more data is likely to open up new areas for abuse.
"Should be" sounds like a moral evaluation, like you are claiming that with more free and open source alternatives piracy should drop because there's less temptation. The real point here is that it has become so much easier to get free software that does everything the user wants from the expensive alternatives, and the hassles of getting pirated copies have supposedly increased due to DRM systems and such, so how could the real numbers NOT be going down? What the BSA seems to be claiming is not just that people have become, overall, less moral, but that they have become selectively stupider. They will try even harder to get illegal software if there's more legal alternatives, they will put up with increasing risks of arrest, of pirated copies with embedded malware, and of having any pirate software get inactivated at possibly inopportune times, just to stick with using those illegal copies, just BECAUSE they don't really need to as much as the last time the BSA looked at the problem.
People try weird things such as Laetrile in increasing numbers when they are told there is no conventional treatment for their cancer - they don't go desperately searching for bank account draining quack treatments in unlicensed third world clinics when they are told there is now a cheap cure available in a nice, clean local doctors office. In the same way, Linux or Libreoffice or Chrome may or may not make piracy actually go down, but its pretty strange to say their presence has been accompanied by piracy percentages going up.
If the numbers are being honestly reported, yes piracy should begin dropping. But the claim that the numbers are being honestly reported is itself an extraordinary claim, given what else we know. It's not just a matter of free software either. Microsoft has extended customer support several times for people with legitimate copies of their older operating systems. The BSA seems to be showing that not being under as much pressure to get a legal copy of whatever is newer from MS at the time actually has made MS OS piracy increase. Maybe this younger generation is somehow both 'less moral' and dumber about the risks, but that's a pretty strong claim given what else we know.
I can see why you would argue there is, or should be, no real difference between filming straight or gay sex, but why is that an issue? Filming somebody having any kind of sex where they have an expectation of privacy and haven't consented is usually criminal. Depending on jurisdiction, it may be a felony. So, the question of wrongful death depends on whether the crime rose to the level of such other crimes as bank robbery where society now holds a criminal committing that crime responsible for consequences such as a bank guard's having a fatal heart attack during the robbery. If photographing via hidden camera and releasing the results are not crimes that fall on the list of felonies that can result in additional charges if someone dies, or if the law doesn't include the case of someone dieing via suicide, then in either case, there's no issue with not convicting the criminal of the additional charges. But, this doesn't mean action has to be 'direct' as you put it, and it doesn't mean that the straight vrs. gay aspect has any significance as to penalties.
There's a difference between waiting a year or longer for a released DVD (game in your example) to come down in price, and waiting a year (or more) for it to be released at full price, and start that year or more discounting process. When you're waiting on, for just one example, someone who bought the game at full price to put it up for sale used, any time involved will depend on what are genuinely free market factors (such as how many other people evaluate that product as worth more than you do and snap up used copies before the average price gets down to your amount "X"). But waiting on the initial release itself seems to have little or no correlation with such market factors. I'm a bit of a fan of Fringe. I'm waiting on the DVD sets for season 4 and eventually 5, and have bought all the others. I'm rather glad that Fringe is getting that 5th season, a thing which was far from certain. However, I have no way of knowing if my choosing to buy seasons 1, 2, and 3 at full price when they came out had any effect at all on whether Fox decided to go with the 5th season. That's literally an anti free-market situation. Good old Adam Smith's very definition of what a free market is says that parity of information for all parties is what improves market efficiency and results in the greatest good for the greatest number. Fox chose to deliberately not give out information that would help fans know if they were encouraging the show to continue if they bought the DVD sets new rather than buying used or downloading them. So, add to the physical price, and to various other prices imposed such as region encoding, that I don't know if buying at full price and before a certain date will actually encourage the creators to keep the show on the air, or have no affect at all.
Now Fox treated the fans of Fringe with considerable respect in the end - much better than in several past cases such as Babylon 5. For that matter, in the end, the situation for Fringe has involved more mutual respect for various parties than we've seen for literally hundreds of other shows with mediocre to poor ratings. But that means for the more typical show, any problems the fans have in being able to plan for DVD releases and similar are going to be much greater. That's an additional price for waiting on legitimate channels to play catchup. That says the cost of doing things by the book isn't just a year (or whatever), but a year and uncertainty penalties about whether the wait will eventually terminate, and when.
I suspect the point is, saying the CoS didn't succeed at using or abusing the law because it isn't a nation state implies that religions are something "lesser" in terms of social power, and there are certainly counter-examples to that.
In the US, at least, the concept of being presumed innocent carries great weight. Even if the bill of rights doesn't specifically require it, most of us feel it's within the spirit that It should be up to anyone claiming that some software is used mostly, or even substantially, for infringment, to bear the burden of proof rather than to just give that point of debate to a biased party and have it lead to possibly railroading some actual accused human being.
Anecdotes are not data. We need to test this with a statistically significant sample of the total population. I volunteer! (Note the current experiment is flawed by having a control group 99.9 times as large as the test group.).
It's not working. What repository do I need to add? I'm assuming I'll need to 'sudo' first for my Kubuntu box, so maybe I'll just put it on my old Puppy linux box. Does 'alter-universe' still work with Debian?
There are known solutions for employees doing stupid stuff, but three of the most functional are building public spiritedness, a high esperit de corps, and intense, realistic training. All tend to cost a lot. Companies therefore tend to pick the exact opposite options: For example, all outsourcing across national boundaries means giving work to people who live far away from the people their mistakes might affect. They have to give a damn, not about the people they see as they go to and from work, but about customers in a distant country, who may have odd sounding names and exotic cultural practices and whom they may know largely as stereotypes and the occasional annoying tourist. They have to give a damn about what some nation may do to some other distant nation, rather than their own. That's practically a formula for ethical failure. Outsourcing, in effect, proves that companies won't generally do the right thing in providing sufficient training, in encouraging their own employees to be ethical, or in paying for quality employees. If the companies were willing to incur any extra costs there, they'd also be willing to limit outsourcing sensitive information access.
The universe, as we think it works now, has an instant of creation, a first moment. That doesn't mean everything else which can be considered scientifically has to have one. If the Steady State theory had better stood up to scientific scrutiny, we'd be discussing the universe as a scientific concept but saying there was no need to postulate a creator for it, or to theorize anything about its creation, since it has been around forever and so doesn't have a creation (or presumably, need a creator). If God exists, there it's perfectly scientific to suggest 'He" might be the sort of thing that has been around forever and so does not need to have been created. If that isn't logical, as you seem to be claiming, then the debate between the Steady State and Big Bang models didn't need to be settled by accumulating more data and eventually awarding a nobel to Penzias and Wilson, as the Steady State should have been automatically rejected as unscientific or illogical from the very beginning, without anyone bothering to actually do any science.
I've never understood how some people can be so dogmatically sure about the existence of an objective reality. Not to say there isn't one. but I've actually heard some people claim that 100% of their own experience supports an objective reality external to themselves. That would imply that a persons dreams, hallucinations, emotions, being fooled by optical illusions, and other such things were all proof of something about the nature of that reality. A little bit of introspection here soon shows that, however convinced you are of there being an objective reality or however certain you are that your experiences support it, you simply can't, in reason, claim that every single experience you have proves something about the nature of that reality.
Hell, most people don't learn that their 'self' is running on a physical substrate normally called a brain, until they are at least eight to ten years old. All those other experiences up until then certainly didn't reveal much about the underlying nature of any objective external reality until then, did they? That's a pretty damned important fact about the supposed objective external reality, considreing that brain will have litterally trillions of sensory experiences before it ever even possibly gets to a state where it can become aware of its true nature, and then only if it grows up in a society that has learned modern medicine.
It amazes me still that so many people can think kicking a stone really refutes Bishop Berkeley.
The evidence that QM is more than a mathematical trick mounts. It's worth noting that, at the beginning of the 20th century, most scientists weren't at all sure atoms were real and not just a mathematical convenience. It took Einstein's paper on Brownian motion to convert many scientists to the viewpoint that atoms were more than a convenient simplifying model. If this work holds up as well as Einstein's, it may be equally respected in the judgment of history.
I took 'She who technically doesn't have to be obeyed but try telling her that' (Ms. ExArtifakt), to see it Monday night. 3D at $10.50 a ticket, maybe 25 people in the theatre, and canned sodas from a machine inside the place at $1 each. Clean floors, a ruly crowd, and not a single 'jerk with cell phone' issue.
The Avengers is technically a sequel to "Iron Man", "Iron Man 2", "The Hulk", "Captain America", and "Thor". Those movies are (critically and financially) a mixed bag. The Avengers is (at least critically and financially) better than several of these prequels. I'd figure just offhand that a higher percentage of potential customers than usual might want to sample The Avengers and see which of its predecessors it most resembles before going. In other words, there's a reason to think pirate copies of The Avengers had less loss effect than usual for blockbusters on sales or maybe even added to sales, but if the film had been full of the badder bits from all the prequels, the same piracy might have had more effect than normal.
Remember, the damages the MPAA and RIAA claim in civil suits are statutory damages. That means congress gave them a special number to reflect how big the damages supposedly are, how hard it is to catch violators, and so on. If the real world numbers are a whole lot smaller than the hypothetical claims, those special numbers are based on a vast series of lies. It's easy to call the uploaders and torrenters thieves, but lieing to congress is a crime, and surely most of the people who think stealing is immoral also think lieing, particularly bearing false witness under oath, is immoral as well. So why are there people who want to come on Slashdot and say, in effect "Oooh, One side here is all made up of all bad people and the other side is all good people"?
Slashdot Mirror
He's paraphrasing Pascal's wager, and Pascal was one of the first people thinking logically about probability. Pascal wanted an example of how you should treat situations where one outcome was infinitely better or worse than all the others. Even though Pascal was religious, no one is really sure if he came up with the argument to try and convert people, or just as an example of the kind of situation where infinity was part of probability calculation. Hopefully, people don't change their beliefs because of Pascal's Wager anymore, if anyone really did.
Now Kurt Godel, who was probably a better mathematician than Pascal, had three great proofs. The second is famous for showing, as just one interpretation, how Provability in a formal system is different than Truth, and people often say that proof alone revolutionised the 20th century in the same way as Einstein. Godel's third proof is a demonstration of the existence of God, using Modal Logic. It avoids the glitches in Pascal's proof. Anyone who passed a good college course in Symbolic Logic can spend about a year studying some of the detailed areas of Modal Logic, really just picking up all the notation basics and such, and then follow Godel's proof and come to their opwn conclusion. I don't recommend bothering, as once you don't need faith to know there is a God anymore, you just need yet more faith to believe that Heaven is not just a place for six or seven old guys who were very good at math, and nobody else.
The way which can be pointed to is not the true Way.
This is a logical fallacy, one heavily promoted by Carl Sagan among other atheists, but still just plain wrong. Science doesn't hold that everything must have an origin. If it did, the Steady State theory of Cosmology would have never been seriously considered and the Big Bang would have won out automattically before anyone ever actually gathered evidence. Instead of giving Penzias and Wilson a Nobel, we would have just yawned. The real issue is, for the particular way we think the universe works now, it has a first moment of creation. That doesn't mean the alternate theory wasn't scientific.
Further, most people who believe in God specifically believe He is eternal and has no first moment of creation, so if your proof was actually logical, all you would have proved is that the kind of God most people don't believe in cannot exist. That's about like proving that people are wrong to believe in four sided triangles. Who actually does? But, hey, this is slashdot, where you can get a +5 insightful for devastating a straw man.
It's widely recognised legally that awarding a patent IS giving a monopoly on the use of an idea, BUT for a limited time, and with other requirments such as disclosure. What the European court seems to have the most trouble with is an entity getting all the benefits of a patent by invoking some other form of "Intellectual Property" that doesn't have the same limitations. That's not as good as excellent laws in each specific area of IP, but at least it's something.
It's not just a matter of "obscure related topics", as you put it, although you're quite right, obscurity will definitely matter in many cases. It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic. For example, it's become a widepsread tactic for the right wing to call the Democratic party the "Democrat Party" instead. Google for that phrase, and you will see an enquiry offering the user a chance to search for Democratic party instead and most of the initial links will come up with the name "corrected". Wikipedia uses a disambiguation page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_party to offer the searcher various choices for the same phrase. Note that a disambiguation page is an external way to try and fight bias (in this case, at least). It exists outside the articles, and has to be created separately where somebody thinks it's needed. So another good question is: Is the use of such disambiguation pages proof that articles aren't being corrected for initial bias internally, or just a second line of defense in the overall struggle to reduce bias?
Interested readers might note that the disambiguation page explains in a fairly simple way that the phrase "Democrat party" is an epithet when used for the US party, but if the reader doesn't know what an epithet is and clicks that link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithet they have to read through over a dozen paragraphs to find out that there is a contemporary usage of the term and that while Shakespeare and Homer used epithets without meaning to be insulting, abusive or derogatory, the modern useage is all of these things. So much for being unbiased.
There conceivably could be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, but there's a real philosophical problem with that. So long as we use the real physicists definitions and not something out of Stargate SG1, those parallels will always remain undetectable. SF writers tell stories about interacting with other universes - physicists define them in ways that show they can't be interacted with to be verified.
An untestable idea isn't part of science. If it can't be disproven, it's philosophy or religion or something instead. An infinite number of untestable ideas is even worse. Philosophers get to whip out Occam's Razor at that point. If I claim that there is not only a God, but 7 different orders of angels totaling 144,000 beings working for him, those numbers are still simpler, in the sense Occam's Razor usually means, and so are to be preferred as a hypothesis. The same goes for a Million gods with an avarage of four arms each and a bunch of hidden cyclic time periods totalling quintillions of years for them to do their work in, or any of those models with a reasonably sized bunch of gods, and maybe some giants, dwarfs, dark elves, ninja turtles piza delivery robots, a billion clones of an invisible pink unicorn who died for your sins, riding on a gigantic fiberglass replical of L. Ron Hubbard, and so on. Just about any other idea looks preferrable to an idea that postulates an infinite number of unverifiable consequents.
Letting nature control population means relying on one or more of nature's methods. These are also known as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Human choices of control are preferrable if they beat nature's. By beat, we could be talking about "less wasteful", "kinder", or somehow "ethically fairer", and the exact conclusion will vary depending on which we emphasize. In fact, we could be trying to balance many such goals. You may be arguing from some definition of "ethically fairer", "less wasteful", "less arbitrary", or some other standard. So if you really want somebody to tell you what's faulty about your proposal, until you can explain what you are trying to accomplish better than by just letting nature take its course you don't really have any logic behind your claim to refute. Without that understanding, your proposal is an emotional argument disguised as a reasoned conclusion.
Knocking out aging actually has relatively little effect on population growth in some ways, for example women still stop having fertile eggs at menopause even if they typically live much longer. How many of those opportunities to fertilize an egg actually get used has a direct effect on population that is really larger than any possible additional lifespan.
(Yes, try the math. Increase the lifespan to a blisteringly worst case full 800 years, which would be about the average if we assume nobody dies of anything except violent accidents and deliberates such as being struck by a bus or shot in a war, and add some additional worst case for population assumptions such as that most of the people who kill themselves either do it early or wouldn't do it at all if they had their health. Assume ALL fatal diseases are cureable, and all people enjoy a biological age of about 25 for as long as they live, but women still stop being fertile about 45 to 50. Now instead assume current longevity prevails, but take the worldwide reproductive rate back up to about 4.2 children per generation, add that we can somehow feed all those kids for a few generations and so the rate can (temporarily, from a long enough perspective) stay that high, and now guess which group eventually gets bigger than the other way.).
By the way, surgical sterilization is seldom reversable. The usual effect is that closing off the tubes (for either gender) triggers internal scarring and often within a couple of years an autoimmune reaction sets in which causes the eggs to become infertile or the sperm to not fully form. The odds of a pregnancy resulting from a successful reversal are as low as 20% for the most common methods of female sterilization, although there is a procedure involving simply banding the tubes with clips or rings and doing no cutting and this gives odds as high as 70%. Male sterilization reversal has slightly better odds than that, but this assumes the surgeon did the original procedure with an eye towards eventual reversal, the reversal can include more than a simple reconnection but be followed as necessary with a complete epididymal repair (with a doctor who can determine on the fly which of three different procedures should be used after he or she actually gets in there) and the auto immune reation didn't happen. We're talking about a great success rate if you have one of a few dozen extremely skilled doctors who can do that work, but those guys are a bit like heart transplant surgeons - they don't grow on trees, and they don't come cheap. If you pay a doctor public clinic wages to bulk sterilize poor people, he or she won't be a doctor with that sort of success rate on reversals. You're making something sound simple and reliable which is actually pretty much experimental rocket science, and nobody should get sterilized with the idea that it can reliably be fixed if they change their mind or circumstances..
When a Kickstarter project is for a physical device, it generally aims to take advantage of economies of scale. I saw one for an aluminum bodied flashlight with a hexagonal cross section (presumably to make it less likely to roll when laid down). The creator showed how much cheaper it would be to make if he had precommitments for at least a thousand units, and if I recall, for 5000 and so on. This suggests to me that people who don't understand the kickstarter approach would be saying the same thing about all sorts of newer economics related ideas, such as print on demand, or selling excess solar power back to the grid. There's a difference between saying "Don't believe a stranger offering to sell you the Brooklyn bridge!", and "Don't believe bridges have any economic utility!".
The use of nuclear weapons against Israel presumably has to potentially include Jerusalem as a target. Nuking 'just' one location, such as Tel Aviv, means starting a war of total distruction with the surviving elements of the Israeli military, so it makes no more sense than, say, nukeing just New York and expecting the US to say "Oh, if it's only NY, we won't use nukes back." Ergo, use nukes at all and it's necessary to hit the Jerusalem area to kill Israeli military assets that will otherwise be nukeing you back. That means one of your hypothetical Iranian bombs takes out one of the most major Muslim holy sites (The Dome of the Rock). It also opens the door to retaliation against Islamic sites in general, presumably including even Mecca itself, as a risk. The question becomes, how far would Israel go with a 50% population loss? The real answer is, there's a reasonable likelyhood of a nuclear power using its weapons in response to just fallout from being downwind of a target nation, or similar possible triggers, let alone being faced with genocide and the possible total distruction of their nation. Asking what people would rationally do in such cases is starting from a false assumption that people in such cases remain rational if they started out that way .
So yes, you are drawing a reasonable inference when you question how much Ahmadinejad is like Hitler or Stalin, as one of the major questions is "Is he crazier than either of those two?". Probably not, but he does what the Grand Ayatollahs direct, maybe with some other influences, but just who those might be is terribly unsure from outside Iran. The real question may be how crazy a bunch of mostly 70 yeal old + spiritual leaders are.
However, you should keep in mind that most Iranians are not Arabs, although most are Muslims. Actual Arabs are only about 2% of the Iranian population according to the CIA world factbook. People who even speak fluent Arabic in the region total only about 3%, from the same source. Add to this that the version of Islam endorsed in Iran is Shia, while the majority of Palestinian Islamic practitioners are Sunni, and there are not as many ties between these peoples as most assume. There may well be Iranian hardliners who regard the Sunni as damnable heretics anyway, or, more secularly, strongly resent the occasional Sunni tendency (as seen particularly in Wahhabism, which is a Sunni/Saudi based half religion/half nationalism splinter), to treat all non-arab Muslims as second class Muslims.
You "Young Internet" creationists are ignoring the evidence for Netvolution, which clearly shows that the Internet has been developing from simpler structures for nearly 4.2 Billion years (Note that I am using the US 'Billion', that is One Thousand Millions - British style Billions would be silly in this context. I'd use scientific notation, but that would obviously confuse any persons who still listen to the absurd claims that "No one can show an intermendiate transition networking schema", and such.).
People see license plates all the time, but they don't normally stand there logging them for hours each day. There's lots of data where this sort of distinction matters.
For example, I'm a type 2 Diabetic. I voluntarily disclose this, and that I use a blood glucose meter and take Metformin for this condition. Now suppose somebody, perhaps working for my insurer, wants to check such data as what dates I refill my prescription, and what times of day I test, how regularly, and so on. There's several potential problems here. First, if my insurer wants to claim that I have been getting refills irregularly, it's in their interest if there's a law keeping me from stockpiling my medications, because that might be an alternate explanation for why I might go more than 1 month between refilling a 30 day supply.. Sure enough, there are an increasing number of drugs which don't have any known abuse potential, but that the prescriptions can only be filled for 1 month at a time, by law. The Insurers are not just interested in writing their rules so they don't pay out for multiple months at a time, but getting states to actually pass laws, which suggests to some of us that they really are trying to track such data in hopes of denying more claims. Then the test strips and lancets themselves are available in at least most states without a prescription. Again, there's no real abuse potential there, but again, there have been insurance lobbyists advocating making these items prescription only.
This sort of data is routinely observed by at least one other person (the clerk) any time I buy these medications. There are other people, such as my doctor and the pharmacy staff who may sometimes ask me if I'm testing regularly or remind me about proper use of the test kit and meds. But the insurer isn't just some party that presumably has my interests at heart in the general sense, they are an entity which might want to deny a claim if my disease gets worse, by claiming that it's my own fault for not following all the instructions adequately. The insurers are also people who have already lobbied for laws which would make my life a little more difficult. (For example, if I have to get a prescription for test strips and lancets, then I have to contact my doctor if my meter breaks and tell him what type I buy as a replacement before I can start using it.). So, the individual data is not kept particularly private. I'd let my doctor or pharmacist see the meter and page through the log stored on its SD card pretty much on request, and if I have the insurer pay for my meds, they presumably can see what dates I've filled the prescriptions and could track them easily. Yet, there's still problems with the access they already have, and piecing together that data gives them the power to do some things that can be a real pain.Piecing together more data is likely to open up new areas for abuse.
"Should be" sounds like a moral evaluation, like you are claiming that with more free and open source alternatives piracy should drop because there's less temptation. The real point here is that it has become so much easier to get free software that does everything the user wants from the expensive alternatives, and the hassles of getting pirated copies have supposedly increased due to DRM systems and such, so how could the real numbers NOT be going down? What the BSA seems to be claiming is not just that people have become, overall, less moral, but that they have become selectively stupider. They will try even harder to get illegal software if there's more legal alternatives, they will put up with increasing risks of arrest, of pirated copies with embedded malware, and of having any pirate software get inactivated at possibly inopportune times, just to stick with using those illegal copies, just BECAUSE they don't really need to as much as the last time the BSA looked at the problem.
People try weird things such as Laetrile in increasing numbers when they are told there is no conventional treatment for their cancer - they don't go desperately searching for bank account draining quack treatments in unlicensed third world clinics when they are told there is now a cheap cure available in a nice, clean local doctors office. In the same way, Linux or Libreoffice or Chrome may or may not make piracy actually go down, but its pretty strange to say their presence has been accompanied by piracy percentages going up.
If the numbers are being honestly reported, yes piracy should begin dropping. But the claim that the numbers are being honestly reported is itself an extraordinary claim, given what else we know. It's not just a matter of free software either. Microsoft has extended customer support several times for people with legitimate copies of their older operating systems. The BSA seems to be showing that not being under as much pressure to get a legal copy of whatever is newer from MS at the time actually has made MS OS piracy increase. Maybe this younger generation is somehow both 'less moral' and dumber about the risks, but that's a pretty strong claim given what else we know.
I can see why you would argue there is, or should be, no real difference between filming straight or gay sex, but why is that an issue? Filming somebody having any kind of sex where they have an expectation of privacy and haven't consented is usually criminal. Depending on jurisdiction, it may be a felony. So, the question of wrongful death depends on whether the crime rose to the level of such other crimes as bank robbery where society now holds a criminal committing that crime responsible for consequences such as a bank guard's having a fatal heart attack during the robbery. If photographing via hidden camera and releasing the results are not crimes that fall on the list of felonies that can result in additional charges if someone dies, or if the law doesn't include the case of someone dieing via suicide, then in either case, there's no issue with not convicting the criminal of the additional charges. But, this doesn't mean action has to be 'direct' as you put it, and it doesn't mean that the straight vrs. gay aspect has any significance as to penalties.
There's a difference between waiting a year or longer for a released DVD (game in your example) to come down in price, and waiting a year (or more) for it to be released at full price, and start that year or more discounting process.
When you're waiting on, for just one example, someone who bought the game at full price to put it up for sale used, any time involved will depend on what are genuinely free market factors (such as how many other people evaluate that product as worth more than you do and snap up used copies before the average price gets down to your amount "X"). But waiting on the initial release itself seems to have little or no correlation with such market factors.
I'm a bit of a fan of Fringe. I'm waiting on the DVD sets for season 4 and eventually 5, and have bought all the others. I'm rather glad that Fringe is getting that 5th season, a thing which was far from certain. However, I have no way of knowing if my choosing to buy seasons 1, 2, and 3 at full price when they came out had any effect at all on whether Fox decided to go with the 5th season. That's literally an anti free-market situation. Good old Adam Smith's very definition of what a free market is says that parity of information for all parties is what improves market efficiency and results in the greatest good for the greatest number. Fox chose to deliberately not give out information that would help fans know if they were encouraging the show to continue if they bought the DVD sets new rather than buying used or downloading them. So, add to the physical price, and to various other prices imposed such as region encoding, that I don't know if buying at full price and before a certain date will actually encourage the creators to keep the show on the air, or have no affect at all.
Now Fox treated the fans of Fringe with considerable respect in the end - much better than in several past cases such as Babylon 5. For that matter, in the end, the situation for Fringe has involved more mutual respect for various parties than we've seen for literally hundreds of other shows with mediocre to poor ratings. But that means for the more typical show, any problems the fans have in being able to plan for DVD releases and similar are going to be much greater. That's an additional price for waiting on legitimate channels to play catchup. That says the cost of doing things by the book isn't just a year (or whatever), but a year and uncertainty penalties about whether the wait will eventually terminate, and when.
I suspect the point is, saying the CoS didn't succeed at using or abusing the law because it isn't a nation state implies that religions are something "lesser" in terms of social power, and there are certainly counter-examples to that.
Surprising it didn't work on you, then.
In the US, at least, the concept of being presumed innocent carries great weight. Even if the bill of rights doesn't specifically require it, most of us feel it's within the spirit that It should be up to anyone claiming that some software is used mostly, or even substantially, for infringment, to bear the burden of proof rather than to just give that point of debate to a biased party and have it lead to possibly railroading some actual accused human being.
Anecdotes are not data. We need to test this with a statistically significant sample of the total population. I volunteer! (Note the current experiment is flawed by having a control group 99.9 times as large as the test group.).
It's not working. What repository do I need to add? I'm assuming I'll need to 'sudo' first for my Kubuntu box, so maybe I'll just put it on my old Puppy linux box. Does 'alter-universe' still work with Debian?
There are known solutions for employees doing stupid stuff, but three of the most functional are building public spiritedness, a high esperit de corps, and intense, realistic training. All tend to cost a lot. Companies therefore tend to pick the exact opposite options: For example, all outsourcing across national boundaries means giving work to people who live far away from the people their mistakes might affect. They have to give a damn, not about the people they see as they go to and from work, but about customers in a distant country, who may have odd sounding names and exotic cultural practices and whom they may know largely as stereotypes and the occasional annoying tourist. They have to give a damn about what some nation may do to some other distant nation, rather than their own. That's practically a formula for ethical failure. Outsourcing, in effect, proves that companies won't generally do the right thing in providing sufficient training, in encouraging their own employees to be ethical, or in paying for quality employees. If the companies were willing to incur any extra costs there, they'd also be willing to limit outsourcing sensitive information access.
The universe, as we think it works now, has an instant of creation, a first moment. That doesn't mean everything else which can be considered scientifically has to have one. If the Steady State theory had better stood up to scientific scrutiny, we'd be discussing the universe as a scientific concept but saying there was no need to postulate a creator for it, or to theorize anything about its creation, since it has been around forever and so doesn't have a creation (or presumably, need a creator). If God exists, there it's perfectly scientific to suggest 'He" might be the sort of thing that has been around forever and so does not need to have been created. If that isn't logical, as you seem to be claiming, then the debate between the Steady State and Big Bang models didn't need to be settled by accumulating more data and eventually awarding a nobel to Penzias and Wilson, as the Steady State should have been automatically rejected as unscientific or illogical from the very beginning, without anyone bothering to actually do any science.
I've never understood how some people can be so dogmatically sure about the existence of an objective reality. Not to say there isn't one. but I've actually heard some people claim that 100% of their own experience supports an objective reality external to themselves. That would imply that a persons dreams, hallucinations, emotions, being fooled by optical illusions, and other such things were all proof of something about the nature of that reality. A little bit of introspection here soon shows that, however convinced you are of there being an objective reality or however certain you are that your experiences support it, you simply can't, in reason, claim that every single experience you have proves something about the nature of that reality.
Hell, most people don't learn that their 'self' is running on a physical substrate normally called a brain, until they are at least eight to ten years old. All those other experiences up until then certainly didn't reveal much about the underlying nature of any objective external reality until then, did they? That's a pretty damned important fact about the supposed objective external reality, considreing that brain will have litterally trillions of sensory experiences before it ever even possibly gets to a state where it can become aware of its true nature, and then only if it grows up in a society that has learned modern medicine.
It amazes me still that so many people can think kicking a stone really refutes Bishop Berkeley.
The evidence that QM is more than a mathematical trick mounts. It's worth noting that, at the beginning of the 20th century, most scientists weren't at all sure atoms were real and not just a mathematical convenience. It took Einstein's paper on Brownian motion to convert many scientists to the viewpoint that atoms were more than a convenient simplifying model. If this work holds up as well as Einstein's, it may be equally respected in the judgment of history.
I took 'She who technically doesn't have to be obeyed but try telling her that' (Ms. ExArtifakt), to see it Monday night. 3D at $10.50 a ticket, maybe 25 people in the theatre, and canned sodas from a machine inside the place at $1 each. Clean floors, a ruly crowd, and not a single 'jerk with cell phone' issue.
The Avengers is technically a sequel to "Iron Man", "Iron Man 2", "The Hulk", "Captain America", and "Thor". Those movies are (critically and financially) a mixed bag. The Avengers is (at least critically and financially) better than several of these prequels. I'd figure just offhand that a higher percentage of potential customers than usual might want to sample The Avengers and see which of its predecessors it most resembles before going. In other words, there's a reason to think pirate copies of The Avengers had less loss effect than usual for blockbusters on sales or maybe even added to sales, but if the film had been full of the badder bits from all the prequels, the same piracy might have had more effect than normal.
Remember, the damages the MPAA and RIAA claim in civil suits are statutory damages. That means congress gave them a special number to reflect how big the damages supposedly are, how hard it is to catch violators, and so on. If the real world numbers are a whole lot smaller than the hypothetical claims, those special numbers are based on a vast series of lies. It's easy to call the uploaders and torrenters thieves, but lieing to congress is a crime, and surely most of the people who think stealing is immoral also think lieing, particularly bearing false witness under oath, is immoral as well. So why are there people who want to come on Slashdot and say, in effect "Oooh, One side here is all made up of all bad people and the other side is all good people"?