Statistically Impossible may well have meaning. In Cosmology, various people at various times (Hawking, Guth, Dirac, and Einstein (1n the late 40's working with Minkowski and Godel), all found that they had to write a few pages on whether very improbable events were distinguishable from zero probability events before they could justify using some of their math. All were working on their own takes on the origin of the Cosmos problem at the time. Most of them decided that any event with a probability of less than 1 in the whole lifetime of the Cosmos was 'statistically impossible' and not just 'improbable'. Rosen later argued that it was better to phrase it in terms of less than 1 during that part of the cosmos's lifetime when entropy was low enough to allow other events of that same energetic magnitude to happen normally rather than the whole lifetime, and others have debated the point various ways, but it's still common to call some things statistically impossible when doing fundamental cosmology.
Oh, and I need a new spoon.
The law lets us blame more than one person for a death. It' is perfectly normal to give the guy who drove the get-away car 20 years after having already sentenced the guy who actually pulled the trigger. We even have laws against assisting in a suicide.
If someone kills themselves by not getting a doctor's opinion on a suspicious symptom, but relying on quack remedies, we have frequently prosecuted the people who push those quack remedies, even if their victim 'did it to himself'. Some of those quacks were quite sincere in believing their quack remedies really worked - the law doesn't really care much whether they were deliberately lying or mistaken.
It appears as though you are arguing the opinion that the government should be exempt from being treated that way - I really hope that isn't what you mean. Just because the government is (supposedly) trying to help doesn't justify lying. (And some of us think the government is doing such a bad job of 'fighting the war on drugs' because it isn't really sincere about the effort and would rather keep the prisons full). When a group of MDs come to a conclusion involving medicine, or a group of scientists about chemistry, and a group of non MD's and non scientists override the claims made and substitute what they want the reports to say, they would be prosecuted for practicing without a license if they didn't represent the government and the anti-drug party-line. If your argument is that they aren't deliberately lying, but sincerely mistaken, well, the US sentenced people such as Dr. Reich to multiple life terms for that.
Beyond that, rather than argue the facts, you call someone who disagrees an idiot and ignore the facts they based their argument on by your use of the word "feel". That's dirty debating.
The last study I saw compared Pot to Alcohol and Cigarettes, and came to the conclusion that booze is the most 'gatewayish' drug, with Nicotine second. From what I remember, the study also compared the sample population by breaking it down into different age groups, some where all the drugs in question were illegal, some of ages where nicotine and alcohol were legal. Crunching those numbers was intended to help screen out some of the effects of differences in legal standing and get results that probably better reflected the real chemical properties of the drugs involved. Sorry I don't remember the name of the study.
Anyway, that study suggests your reasons why social or legal factors (like the government's resorting to propaganda it knows is distorted) matter are at least somewhat true, but only partially, and that there's also a purely chemical effect that makes alcohol a much bigger gateway drug than THC.
I'd like to thank you for using your posting nym and responding fairly to the criticism offered before you crawled back into your hole. In fact, I shall refrain from grammar nazi-ing your obviously inadvertent typo out of respect for your display of integrity. Have a modest but sincere "Bravo."
The total working group for this test was around 16,000 people. Only 125 actually became infected with HIV during those 3 years. The infected portion shows about 1/3 more in the placebo group. So yes, the sample is statistically significant, and someone wasted a mod point.
I don't think you can associate Wii use with excessive force unless they didn't use the wrist straps properly. But, yes, these particular cops do not deserve our thanks. They've acted in such a way that they make the whole team look unprofessional. The cost of prosecuting this particular case will be much higher, and there looks to be a fair chance it will result in an acquittal.
What if one of the cops who violated procedure was also in custody of the evidence at some point. Maybe he didn't follow procedure there either? If you were on the jury for this case, would you still take that particular cop's word over the supposed perp's? Would you, knowing the cop either wilfully ignores proper procedure, or is so poorly trained he ignores it randomly?
It's not a case of a lesser sentence, it's a case of complete acquittal if conviction rests on these particular cops testimonies.
It's also not about "completely un-related shenannigans" These shenanigans are closely related when it comes to the reliability of these particular cops. Do you somehow know for a fact that these particular cops don't have any testimony that would affect the case?
Slashdot, where you can get a +5 insightful for saying something that would get you thrown out of a jury pool.
The defending attorney simply claims that this proves the police were either poorly trained, or often deliberately went against training. Then the prosecution is caught in a forking argument where trying to prove the police aren't incompetent makes them look wilfully malicious instead, and vice versa. Anything else a cop says afterwards that relates to following procedures, why should the jury believe them?
Here, let me nudge your imagination. Under defense cross-exam, a police witness says "I took all the seized narcotics directly to the evidence room. I watched as the evidence locker custodian weighed the drugs, and logged the ticket showing that weight, and made sure he gave me a copy for the record book." The attorney simply asks "Is that standard procedure?". "Yes". The defense attorney than says "Are you sure you know standard procedure - Earlier, with the Wii, you indicated you didn't?.", and maybe makes closing remarks about how the police have flip-flopped on how well they follow procedure to where their testimony is 'deeply flawed'.
Alternately, the attorney asks "And do you always follow procedure?" knowing that the policeman in question has already admitted he didn't with the Wii, and is going to have to say "No." or perjure himself.
That last is one of the biggest advantages possible for the defense if they can get it. It's great to cross-examine witnesses who are constantly worried they are going to sink their careers, make their whole department look like fools when the press gets hold of it, or actually get themselves charged with perjury (although the last is very rare for cops, even if occasionally deserved.).
Those particular cops can expect to be cross examined at least twice as long as the others, and if the defense is any good they will pounce on anything else said that can be used to make it worse for the prosecution. That's another advantage for the defense - they already know of some witnesses that are particularly likely to screw up, and to look bad to the jury.
1. A Prenuptual agreement is technically a form of asset protection. Putting assets into some forms of trusts for dependants or descendants is also. In general, when there's a marriage or a child involved, or a business partnership, a second person's rights to privacy may mean a creditor has at best limited rights to know about assets, particularly ones they also can't legally claim. In the ordinary course, there shouldn't be legally shielded assets that a creditor could somehow legally claim if they only knew more about them. But there are often legally shielded assets that the creditor either believes aren't really shielded or that the creditor would try to take if he or she could get the debt resolved that way. If you've heard the phrase "Possession is nine tenth's of the law", maybe that explains how legal asset protection actions are possible.
2. One reason for people to form LLCs is having multiple income sources. For example, if you run a dog grooming clinic and an auto repair service, separate limited liability corps are a perfectly legal way to limit damages you can be sued for. A lawsuit effectively can't take more than the related S-corp's total assets, So if you were, for example, sued for an inadequate repair job, they can't garnish the money that comes from the dog grooming business. Note that there are ways to get around this sometimes if the case rises to criminal negligence or there's other proof the corporate structure was itself intended for criminal purposes, but the basic idea here is legal.
The whole ND aspect of the cold war involved calculated appearances of insanity by both sides leaders. What "Perimiter" proves is that you can't expect the other side to fake crazy the same way you would fake crazy. This long after the fact, nobody in the US knows how President Reagan's moves were interpreted by the USSR nor how sincere they were in developing an automated response.
The cost of going down that path is incalcuable. Both sides spent themselves dry funding responses to every conceivable attack, and trying to detect which responses were fake insane and which might be real insane.
A solar Cell is definitely not the same as a Photo(emitting)diode. (and most of the time, when someone says photo-diode that's what they mean). Whether you could justly call a photo(converting)diode a solar cell with built in unidirectional output is really a matter of semantics. I'd go with not conflating the two simply because it's potentially confusing, but then, most people say LED instead of photo-diode these days so maybe the usage is legitimate.
The problem with that is, Economic Efficiency is a non-stable and non-quantifiable metric. Trying to calculate economic efficiency results in absurd conclusions.
In the real world, such calculations have 'proved' that the United States doesn't need high speed cargo rail, it just needs to keep subsidising the airlines. It's 'proved' that shipping from say, Nice to Tuniz by truck, through nations such as Lebanon, in time of war, is 'better' than shipping straight across the sea by blimp. It's 'proved' that communications sattelites could never be successful unless only done by various governments. It's 'proved' that putting small tiles on the belly of your space-shuttle instead of casting large sections could never possibly cause an accident worth getting excited about.
In more abstract situations, a professional cost accountant will tell you quite literally that NO consequence is bad enough to make you not take an offer, IF the consequence occurs far enough in the future. If a new chemical process will make billions in the next few years, but render all mammalian species totally sterile 200 years from now, we should do it, because the negative consequences are so remote, no matter how devastating or inevitable.
This was once pointed out by John W Campbell Jr. back in the early 1950's. He put some extreme scenarios to several economic efficiency experts and had them use their usual mathematical tools to analyse just how much immediate profit would justify taking the offer, with accompanying Campbell selected long term consequences described as inevitable. Every one of the subjects found some level of immediate profit that made the offer a good one even though the long term outcome was something such as putting everyone over age 50 into a meat grinder, shooting all males of our species, or other such horrible ultimate outcomes. Several of the respondents said they were only willing to let him have their results because they believed no one would actually act on them, or something else would intervene before we had to pay out. Five of them put something in their responses to the tune of "Thank God Hitler's dead so there's nobody crazy enough to actually try this". (Hope that doesn't Godwin the thread).
Buckminster Fuller has written quite a bit about why realistic economic rules would always include either energy efficiency or total energy budget values, and from what I gather, he generally expected both were vitally important in all but a few degenerate calculations.
There are comparisons sometimes. Right now, one party is clearly over the top, but that doesn't mean the other doesn't occasionally make the same mistakes. And if I was smoking something, that's just why I would be bitching about how I couldn't tell one party from the other, as there's a lot of corporate control being exercised over the DEA no matter who gets in.
The US is the point here, as in: Right now, US industries have pushed for some ultra restrictive laws such as the DMCA which cut our economic growth rate and give nations that ignore them a competitive advantage. Since the US won't recognise using a straight forward place name or item name that is in common use as a trademarkable, if Europe or South East Asia accept this, the US gets a more favorable balance of trade out of the situation. As a US citizen, I certainly appreciate the whole rest of the world saddling themselves with whatever incredibly boneheaded regulations the Indonesian government wants them to adopt, just so my nation isn't dumb enough to lead the jump off this particular bridge for once.
Why just musicians descendants? Let's extend it a little.
I am of predominantly English and Scottish extraction, and have traced my descent from several of the most prominent inventors of the 17th through 19th centuries. If we could only make this scheme universal, For just one, I am probably close enough to both Fulton and Babbage to be able to collect royalties on some of the biggest developments in both power generation and computation in human history. There are probably a thousand people living who are closer to some such persons, but I would definitely fall in the range where my tiny fractional share of a mere 0.3 to 0.5% royalty for use on some of my ancestor's basic ideas would literally mean I could quit working, kick back, and clip certificates to the tune of 10 million dollars a year or so.
Making money from Beethoven or even Cola bases soft drinks would be trivial for most heirs compared to what perpetual rights to certain basic inventions assigned proportionately in the absence of a contraindicating will would be worth once the world's legal systems simply adopted this rule universally.
I'm also distantly related to Wittgenstein - how do I make money off of that?
Except that radio frequencies have very low energies by certain basic laws of Physics, and no one has proposed a mechanism by which they could cause any long term damage that doesn't violate these basic laws. These claims tend to amount to saying "If quantum mechanics doesn't work, so the teeny tiny amounts of energy at these wavelengths could all add up to do damage, then these frequencies could be damaging in the same way as ultraviolet or x-rays.". Yes, and your TV wouldn't work, and neither would H-bombs.
That position makes science itself entirely useless.
(Unless you can prove scientifically that science is the best way of determining objective truth, and neither we, nor any hypothetical beings living anywhere else in the universe, no matter how powerful their minds are, can ever invent anything better than the scientific method.).
Popper's falsification was a philosophical concept, and might be falsifiable by logic or philosophical debate, but it's not part of science itself, any more than the claim that science works better than every possible alternative could itself be science.
For more on this, try Godel. A sufficiently powerful formal system contains or generates propositions whose truth or falsity cannot be proved within the system. You have to prove some of the claims about science using something besides science itself - If that wasn't necessary, science would be insufficiently powerful to rely upon as a guide to anything important, in much the same way as you couldn't do economics with an arithmetic that didn't include fractions or negative numbers.
I'm really starting to hate the Santa Claus metaphor. There really was a historical person, Nicholas of Cusa, who was Bishop Nicholas in life but became known after his death as Saint Nicolas. That title got shortened and linguistically shifted to Santa Claus.* So technically, there was a Santa Claus, and its just some of the claims made, like his continuing to live today, having flying reindeer or residing at the north pole, that are contra-factuals. Some of the claims, such as his giving a great deal to many people, are facts. Some others, such as giving to the nice and not the naughty as best he could determine, may be factual as well.
* Copernicus never spelled his own name that way, it's a translation to some sort of approximate Latinate/English. The same goes for Christopher Columbus, So if you want to argue that technically Santa Claus never existed under that exact name, fine, but you can do the same for all the other people who are referred to historically by a nick-name.
Jack Skellington is an entirely fictional character, as are Frodo Baggins, Moll Flanders, and the Easter Bunny. Saint Nicholas is a historical person who has simply had more myths and legends attach themselves to him than has George Washington, also still a historical person despite the Cherry Tree and Dollar across the Potommac stories.
The theoretical reasons, in this case, include General Relativity, as your first link points out. That's passed a lot of other tests, and dropping it would take some big reasons. Trouble confirming just one of many predictions? Interesting, but not excuse enough to abandon a highly successful theory, not at all. Get a competing theory that has substantially more predictive power, and makes substantially fewer untestable claims, and scientists will generally switch, but none of the electric universe models and such proposed are doing any better than GR, and in fact are generally much worse. You've read Sir Karl, but you might want to look at Thomas Kuhn, particularly about how much better a new theory has to be before scientists switch in mass.
The first page you link to characterises the next step in current research as a shift to looking at the noise, when the researchers themselves call it looking at stochastic effects. Stochastic processes must have random elements by definition, and noise, (either literal as in sound or more generally as in signal to noise ratios for all communication) has random aspects as well, but stochastic properties in data are NOT the same thing as noise in communication/observation - In this case, noise in the observations we have on the CBR is probably very different from stochastic effects that may have modulated that same CBR at the time it was emitted. Now it may be possible to prove the two are in fact inextricably linked, which would be a proof on a level with the one showing the total information contained in a black hole is directly related to its surface area. Nice if someone can actually craft the math, but last I looked, no one had succeeded. Without that, the page is too strident for the facts.
The claim that there is no good system is just the sort of claim that gets quoted out of context, and when it happens, supposedly expert technical people will be the ones making the mistakes.
Think of it like politics. Someone writes a story specifically about the Democratic party in Ohio. Five paragraphs in, they say "There are no particularly distinguished front runners for the upcoming election.". What happens when that gets quoted by itself - is there much chance at all that someone will put (for the 2012 Ohio governor's race) after the quote? It seems far more likely that someone will claim the original author said there were no distinguished candidates for the whole democratic party this time around, or misapply it to the presidential election, or maybe someone with different biases will apply it to both major parties nationwide.
Authors, when they are trying to be fact-focused, fair, and rational, frequently go over their manuscripts looking for likely quotes that won't look right if quoted out of context, and insert internal context (In this case it would be something such as 'there's no good system in Windows for patching them'). It's often a mistake to rely on context from outside the immediate quote to keep things clear.
Editors, often take these modifications back out for brevity, but I've known several professional editors who had to deal with the results (i.e. a libel suit over something that wasn't libelous in full context) and have started encouraging such additional context instead.
So you're right - the problem hasn't been solved for Microsoft products. And the parent poster is right - the article is easy to misquote, and that hurts its overall creditability.
You're better off. Richard Gere didn't do anything. A person who looked (sort of) like him was admitted to a mid-western hospital with an embarrassing situation, and a rumor got started that it was Richard himself. That rumor has followed the poor man for over 20 years, despite being traced to its origin. That's probably what will happen in this case. The sports officials will run tests until they get to some sort of conclusion, and the rumors will fly until nobody knows what the decision actually was.
So you're saying that the RIAA lawsuits are an attempt to mandate Atheism as manditory? Or is this a claim that Christians should be opposed to RIAA practices as a fundamental evil?
I'm sorry, but you can't logically claim something is neutral with respect to religion and the religious are a bunch of brainwashed zealots. Doesn't work. Try it: "OK, side A is rationally right, and side B is irrationally, dangerously and fanatically wrong. I figured that out by not having a strong bias for or against side B, as I shall now show in my second portion."
Yeah, you don't mean any of it THAT way. So? Let's imagine you have a lot of power or influence, like you own a TV network and can expect your message to get to millions of people, or you are personally famous. You think the protests against the RIAA are illogical, the RIAA has a right to protect their intellectual property, and the slashdot groupthink is just because a lot of people are lazy thieves. I submit that, if you started with a huge advantage or three in winning the debate, your claims would still lose the debate for the RIAA, because you can't resist dragging something completely unrelated into it. The RIAA would probably feel that, with friends like you, who needs enemies? And since you don't have that sort of influence, why do you expect your position to do any good at all? It's like being 5'3" and showing up to join the Lakers.
Ah, that clarifies what you meant by 'sloppy' earlier, and it seems I guessed right. For all sorts of people trying to discuss this, words such as revenues or profits are generally qualified if you want to convey meaning, or there's really no point in using them. Gross and Net profits will work for many cases, or Pretax Revenues, Operational Profits, or even Ordinary and Passive profits in some cases. Ordinary and Capital Revenues, or Ordinary and Special Revenues, are also occasionally seen qualifications. For many corporations reconciling Book Revenues with Reportable Revenues is the issue, and I've frequently seen this referred to as Book Profits vs. Actual Profits too.
To put it more simply, Revenues can definitely be used to mean the same thing as Profits in some cases but the two cannot possibly be the same thing in all cases. To explain that in detail is the trick - I'd rather teach something simple like Quantum Chromodynamics than U.S. Title 26.
I would flat out guarantee you, if you use the general term 'revenues' to mean gross, ordinary or pretax revenues (any of which is also sometimes called gross, ordinary, or pretax profits), any competent judge, contract lawyer or IRS agent will make you spell out which one you really mean, and use it consistently from then on. The IRS guy is likely to just tell you what terms you must use in an audit instead, and in such case he or she can theoretically fine you every single time you slip. You are insisting that your use of the words is correct and someone else's is wrong - but you've acquired a colloquial shorthand that is no closer to professional usage than the person's you are 'correcting'.
What's scary is, once I picked up on your terminology, your post probably deserves an insightful mod or two. But, I couldn't have argued if anyone had flamebate modded you instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Statistically Impossible may well have meaning. In Cosmology, various people at various times (Hawking, Guth, Dirac, and Einstein (1n the late 40's working with Minkowski and Godel), all found that they had to write a few pages on whether very improbable events were distinguishable from zero probability events before they could justify using some of their math. All were working on their own takes on the origin of the Cosmos problem at the time. Most of them decided that any event with a probability of less than 1 in the whole lifetime of the Cosmos was 'statistically impossible' and not just 'improbable'. Rosen later argued that it was better to phrase it in terms of less than 1 during that part of the cosmos's lifetime when entropy was low enough to allow other events of that same energetic magnitude to happen normally rather than the whole lifetime, and others have debated the point various ways, but it's still common to call some things statistically impossible when doing fundamental cosmology.
Oh, and I need a new spoon.
It's the new Evil paradigm - These days, it seems like all the Evil Corporations are Evil Pass-thrus or Evil Sole Proprietorships.
The law lets us blame more than one person for a death. It' is perfectly normal to give the guy who drove the get-away car 20 years after having already sentenced the guy who actually pulled the trigger. We even have laws against assisting in a suicide.
If someone kills themselves by not getting a doctor's opinion on a suspicious symptom, but relying on quack remedies, we have frequently prosecuted the people who push those quack remedies, even if their victim 'did it to himself'. Some of those quacks were quite sincere in believing their quack remedies really worked - the law doesn't really care much whether they were deliberately lying or mistaken.
It appears as though you are arguing the opinion that the government should be exempt from being treated that way - I really hope that isn't what you mean. Just because the government is (supposedly) trying to help doesn't justify lying. (And some of us think the government is doing such a bad job of 'fighting the war on drugs' because it isn't really sincere about the effort and would rather keep the prisons full). When a group of MDs come to a conclusion involving medicine, or a group of scientists about chemistry, and a group of non MD's and non scientists override the claims made and substitute what they want the reports to say, they would be prosecuted for practicing without a license if they didn't represent the government and the anti-drug party-line. If your argument is that they aren't deliberately lying, but sincerely mistaken, well, the US sentenced people such as Dr. Reich to multiple life terms for that.
Beyond that, rather than argue the facts, you call someone who disagrees an idiot and ignore the facts they based their argument on by your use of the word "feel". That's dirty debating.
The last study I saw compared Pot to Alcohol and Cigarettes, and came to the conclusion that booze is the most 'gatewayish' drug, with Nicotine second. From what I remember, the study also compared the sample population by breaking it down into different age groups, some where all the drugs in question were illegal, some of ages where nicotine and alcohol were legal. Crunching those numbers was intended to help screen out some of the effects of differences in legal standing and get results that probably better reflected the real chemical properties of the drugs involved. Sorry I don't remember the name of the study.
Anyway, that study suggests your reasons why social or legal factors (like the government's resorting to propaganda it knows is distorted) matter are at least somewhat true, but only partially, and that there's also a purely chemical effect that makes alcohol a much bigger gateway drug than THC.
I'd like to thank you for using your posting nym and responding fairly to the criticism offered before you crawled back into your hole. In fact, I shall refrain from grammar nazi-ing your obviously inadvertent typo out of respect for your display of integrity. Have a modest but sincere "Bravo."
You mean, as in all the air in your room jumps to one side and you do a total recall impersonation before it jumps back = 'fairly unlucky'.
The total working group for this test was around 16,000 people. Only 125 actually became infected with HIV during those 3 years. The infected portion shows about 1/3 more in the placebo group. So yes, the sample is statistically significant, and someone wasted a mod point.
I don't think you can associate Wii use with excessive force unless they didn't use the wrist straps properly. But, yes, these particular cops do not deserve our thanks. They've acted in such a way that they make the whole team look unprofessional. The cost of prosecuting this particular case will be much higher, and there looks to be a fair chance it will result in an acquittal.
What if one of the cops who violated procedure was also in custody of the evidence at some point. Maybe he didn't follow procedure there either? If you were on the jury for this case, would you still take that particular cop's word over the supposed perp's? Would you, knowing the cop either wilfully ignores proper procedure, or is so poorly trained he ignores it randomly?
It's not a case of a lesser sentence, it's a case of complete acquittal if conviction rests on these particular cops testimonies.
It's also not about "completely un-related shenannigans" These shenanigans are closely related when it comes to the reliability of these particular cops. Do you somehow know for a fact that these particular cops don't have any testimony that would affect the case?
Slashdot, where you can get a +5 insightful for saying something that would get you thrown out of a jury pool.
The defending attorney simply claims that this proves the police were either poorly trained, or often deliberately went against training. Then the prosecution is caught in a forking argument where trying to prove the police aren't incompetent makes them look wilfully malicious instead, and vice versa. Anything else a cop says afterwards that relates to following procedures, why should the jury believe them?
Here, let me nudge your imagination. Under defense cross-exam, a police witness says "I took all the seized narcotics directly to the evidence room. I watched as the evidence locker custodian weighed the drugs, and logged the ticket showing that weight, and made sure he gave me a copy for the record book." The attorney simply asks "Is that standard procedure?". "Yes". The defense attorney than says "Are you sure you know standard procedure - Earlier, with the Wii, you indicated you didn't?.", and maybe makes closing remarks about how the police have flip-flopped on how well they follow procedure to where their testimony is 'deeply flawed'.
Alternately, the attorney asks "And do you always follow procedure?" knowing that the policeman in question has already admitted he didn't with the Wii, and is going to have to say "No." or perjure himself.
That last is one of the biggest advantages possible for the defense if they can get it. It's great to cross-examine witnesses who are constantly worried they are going to sink their careers, make their whole department look like fools when the press gets hold of it, or actually get themselves charged with perjury (although the last is very rare for cops, even if occasionally deserved.).
Those particular cops can expect to be cross examined at least twice as long as the others, and if the defense is any good they will pounce on anything else said that can be used to make it worse for the prosecution. That's another advantage for the defense - they already know of some witnesses that are particularly likely to screw up, and to look bad to the jury.
Not all forms of asset protection are illegal:
1. A Prenuptual agreement is technically a form of asset protection. Putting assets into some forms of trusts for dependants or descendants is also. In general, when there's a marriage or a child involved, or a business partnership, a second person's rights to privacy may mean a creditor has at best limited rights to know about assets, particularly ones they also can't legally claim. In the ordinary course, there shouldn't be legally shielded assets that a creditor could somehow legally claim if they only knew more about them. But there are often legally shielded assets that the creditor either believes aren't really shielded or that the creditor would try to take if he or she could get the debt resolved that way. If you've heard the phrase "Possession is nine tenth's of the law", maybe that explains how legal asset protection actions are possible.
2. One reason for people to form LLCs is having multiple income sources. For example, if you run a dog grooming clinic and an auto repair service, separate limited liability corps are a perfectly legal way to limit damages you can be sued for. A lawsuit effectively can't take more than the related S-corp's total assets, So if you were, for example, sued for an inadequate repair job, they can't garnish the money that comes from the dog grooming business. Note that there are ways to get around this sometimes if the case rises to criminal negligence or there's other proof the corporate structure was itself intended for criminal purposes, but the basic idea here is legal.
The whole ND aspect of the cold war involved calculated appearances of insanity by both sides leaders. What "Perimiter" proves is that you can't expect the other side to fake crazy the same way you would fake crazy. This long after the fact, nobody in the US knows how President Reagan's moves were interpreted by the USSR nor how sincere they were in developing an automated response.
The cost of going down that path is incalcuable. Both sides spent themselves dry funding responses to every conceivable attack, and trying to detect which responses were fake insane and which might be real insane.
A solar Cell is definitely not the same as a Photo(emitting)diode. (and most of the time, when someone says photo-diode that's what they mean). Whether you could justly call a photo(converting)diode a solar cell with built in unidirectional output is really a matter of semantics. I'd go with not conflating the two simply because it's potentially confusing, but then, most people say LED instead of photo-diode these days so maybe the usage is legitimate.
The problem with that is, Economic Efficiency is a non-stable and non-quantifiable metric. Trying to calculate economic efficiency results in absurd conclusions.
In the real world, such calculations have 'proved' that the United States doesn't need high speed cargo rail, it just needs to keep subsidising the airlines. It's 'proved' that shipping from say, Nice to Tuniz by truck, through nations such as Lebanon, in time of war, is 'better' than shipping straight across the sea by blimp. It's 'proved' that communications sattelites could never be successful unless only done by various governments. It's 'proved' that putting small tiles on the belly of your space-shuttle instead of casting large sections could never possibly cause an accident worth getting excited about.
In more abstract situations, a professional cost accountant will tell you quite literally that NO consequence is bad enough to make you not take an offer, IF the consequence occurs far enough in the future. If a new chemical process will make billions in the next few years, but render all mammalian species totally sterile 200 years from now, we should do it, because the negative consequences are so remote, no matter how devastating or inevitable.
This was once pointed out by John W Campbell Jr. back in the early 1950's. He put some extreme scenarios to several economic efficiency experts and had them use their usual mathematical tools to analyse just how much immediate profit would justify taking the offer, with accompanying Campbell selected long term consequences described as inevitable. Every one of the subjects found some level of immediate profit that made the offer a good one even though the long term outcome was something such as putting everyone over age 50 into a meat grinder, shooting all males of our species, or other such horrible ultimate outcomes. Several of the respondents said they were only willing to let him have their results because they believed no one would actually act on them, or something else would intervene before we had to pay out. Five of them put something in their responses to the tune of "Thank God Hitler's dead so there's nobody crazy enough to actually try this". (Hope that doesn't Godwin the thread).
Buckminster Fuller has written quite a bit about why realistic economic rules would always include either energy efficiency or total energy budget values, and from what I gather, he generally expected both were vitally important in all but a few degenerate calculations.
There are comparisons sometimes. Right now, one party is clearly over the top, but that doesn't mean the other doesn't occasionally make the same mistakes. And if I was smoking something, that's just why I would be bitching about how I couldn't tell one party from the other, as there's a lot of corporate control being exercised over the DEA no matter who gets in.
The US is the point here, as in:
Right now, US industries have pushed for some ultra restrictive laws such as the DMCA which cut our economic growth rate and give nations that ignore them a competitive advantage. Since the US won't recognise using a straight forward place name or item name that is in common use as a trademarkable, if Europe or South East Asia accept this, the US gets a more favorable balance of trade out of the situation. As a US citizen, I certainly appreciate the whole rest of the world saddling themselves with whatever incredibly boneheaded regulations the Indonesian government wants them to adopt, just so my nation isn't dumb enough to lead the jump off this particular bridge for once.
Why just musicians descendants? Let's extend it a little.
I am of predominantly English and Scottish extraction, and have traced my descent from several of the most prominent inventors of the 17th through 19th centuries. If we could only make this scheme universal, For just one, I am probably close enough to both Fulton and Babbage to be able to collect royalties on some of the biggest developments in both power generation and computation in human history. There are probably a thousand people living who are closer to some such persons, but I would definitely fall in the range where my tiny fractional share of a mere 0.3 to 0.5% royalty for use on some of my ancestor's basic ideas would literally mean I could quit working, kick back, and clip certificates to the tune of 10 million dollars a year or so.
Making money from Beethoven or even Cola bases soft drinks would be trivial for most heirs compared to what perpetual rights to certain basic inventions assigned proportionately in the absence of a contraindicating will would be worth once the world's legal systems simply adopted this rule universally.
I'm also distantly related to Wittgenstein - how do I make money off of that?
Except that radio frequencies have very low energies by certain basic laws of Physics, and no one has proposed a mechanism by which they could cause any long term damage that doesn't violate these basic laws. These claims tend to amount to saying "If quantum mechanics doesn't work, so the teeny tiny amounts of energy at these wavelengths could all add up to do damage, then these frequencies could be damaging in the same way as ultraviolet or x-rays.". Yes, and your TV wouldn't work, and neither would H-bombs.
That position makes science itself entirely useless.
(Unless you can prove scientifically that science is the best way of determining objective truth, and neither we, nor any hypothetical beings living anywhere else in the universe, no matter how powerful their minds are, can ever invent anything better than the scientific method.).
Popper's falsification was a philosophical concept, and might be falsifiable by logic or philosophical debate, but it's not part of science itself, any more than the claim that science works better than every possible alternative could itself be science.
For more on this, try Godel. A sufficiently powerful formal system contains or generates propositions whose truth or falsity cannot be proved within the system. You have to prove some of the claims about science using something besides science itself - If that wasn't necessary, science would be insufficiently powerful to rely upon as a guide to anything important, in much the same way as you couldn't do economics with an arithmetic that didn't include fractions or negative numbers.
I'm really starting to hate the Santa Claus metaphor. There really was a historical person, Nicholas of Cusa, who was Bishop Nicholas in life but became known after his death as Saint Nicolas. That title got shortened and linguistically shifted to Santa Claus.* So technically, there was a Santa Claus, and its just some of the claims made, like his continuing to live today, having flying reindeer or residing at the north pole, that are contra-factuals. Some of the claims, such as his giving a great deal to many people, are facts. Some others, such as giving to the nice and not the naughty as best he could determine, may be factual as well.
* Copernicus never spelled his own name that way, it's a translation to some sort of approximate Latinate/English. The same goes for Christopher Columbus, So if you want to argue that technically Santa Claus never existed under that exact name, fine, but you can do the same for all the other people who are referred to historically by a nick-name.
Jack Skellington is an entirely fictional character, as are Frodo Baggins, Moll Flanders, and the Easter Bunny. Saint Nicholas is a historical person who has simply had more myths and legends attach themselves to him than has George Washington, also still a historical person despite the Cherry Tree and Dollar across the Potommac stories.
The theoretical reasons, in this case, include General Relativity, as your first link points out. That's passed a lot of other tests, and dropping it would take some big reasons. Trouble confirming just one of many predictions? Interesting, but not excuse enough to abandon a highly successful theory, not at all. Get a competing theory that has substantially more predictive power, and makes substantially fewer untestable claims, and scientists will generally switch, but none of the electric universe models and such proposed are doing any better than GR, and in fact are generally much worse. You've read Sir Karl, but you might want to look at Thomas Kuhn, particularly about how much better a new theory has to be before scientists switch in mass.
The first page you link to characterises the next step in current research as a shift to looking at the noise, when the researchers themselves call it looking at stochastic effects. Stochastic processes must have random elements by definition, and noise, (either literal as in sound or more generally as in signal to noise ratios for all communication) has random aspects as well, but stochastic properties in data are NOT the same thing as noise in communication/observation - In this case, noise in the observations we have on the CBR is probably very different from stochastic effects that may have modulated that same CBR at the time it was emitted. Now it may be possible to prove the two are in fact inextricably linked, which would be a proof on a level with the one showing the total information contained in a black hole is directly related to its surface area. Nice if someone can actually craft the math, but last I looked, no one had succeeded. Without that, the page is too strident for the facts.
The claim that there is no good system is just the sort of claim that gets quoted out of context, and when it happens, supposedly expert technical people will be the ones making the mistakes.
Think of it like politics. Someone writes a story specifically about the Democratic party in Ohio. Five paragraphs in, they say "There are no particularly distinguished front runners for the upcoming election.". What happens when that gets quoted by itself - is there much chance at all that someone will put (for the 2012 Ohio governor's race) after the quote? It seems far more likely that someone will claim the original author said there were no distinguished candidates for the whole democratic party this time around, or misapply it to the presidential election, or maybe someone with different biases will apply it to both major parties nationwide.
Authors, when they are trying to be fact-focused, fair, and rational, frequently go over their manuscripts looking for likely quotes that won't look right if quoted out of context, and insert internal context (In this case it would be something such as 'there's no good system in Windows for patching them'). It's often a mistake to rely on context from outside the immediate quote to keep things clear.
Editors, often take these modifications back out for brevity, but I've known several professional editors who had to deal with the results (i.e. a libel suit over something that wasn't libelous in full context) and have started encouraging such additional context instead.
So you're right - the problem hasn't been solved for Microsoft products. And the parent poster is right - the article is easy to misquote, and that hurts its overall creditability.
You're better off. Richard Gere didn't do anything. A person who looked (sort of) like him was admitted to a mid-western hospital with an embarrassing situation, and a rumor got started that it was Richard himself. That rumor has followed the poor man for over 20 years, despite being traced to its origin. That's probably what will happen in this case. The sports officials will run tests until they get to some sort of conclusion, and the rumors will fly until nobody knows what the decision actually was.
So you're saying that the RIAA lawsuits are an attempt to mandate Atheism as manditory? Or is this a claim that Christians should be opposed to RIAA practices as a fundamental evil?
I'm sorry, but you can't logically claim something is neutral with respect to religion and the religious are a bunch of brainwashed zealots. Doesn't work. Try it: "OK, side A is rationally right, and side B is irrationally, dangerously and fanatically wrong. I figured that out by not having a strong bias for or against side B, as I shall now show in my second portion."
Yeah, you don't mean any of it THAT way. So? Let's imagine you have a lot of power or influence, like you own a TV network and can expect your message to get to millions of people, or you are personally famous. You think the protests against the RIAA are illogical, the RIAA has a right to protect their intellectual property, and the slashdot groupthink is just because a lot of people are lazy thieves. I submit that, if you started with a huge advantage or three in winning the debate, your claims would still lose the debate for the RIAA, because you can't resist dragging something completely unrelated into it. The RIAA would probably feel that, with friends like you, who needs enemies? And since you don't have that sort of influence, why do you expect your position to do any good at all? It's like being 5'3" and showing up to join the Lakers.
Ah, that clarifies what you meant by 'sloppy' earlier, and it seems I guessed right. For all sorts of people trying to discuss this, words such as revenues or profits are generally qualified if you want to convey meaning, or there's really no point in using them. Gross and Net profits will work for many cases, or Pretax Revenues, Operational Profits, or even Ordinary and Passive profits in some cases. Ordinary and Capital Revenues, or Ordinary and Special Revenues, are also occasionally seen qualifications. For many corporations reconciling Book Revenues with Reportable Revenues is the issue, and I've frequently seen this referred to as Book Profits vs. Actual Profits too.
To put it more simply, Revenues can definitely be used to mean the same thing as Profits in some cases but the two cannot possibly be the same thing in all cases. To explain that in detail is the trick - I'd rather teach something simple like Quantum Chromodynamics than U.S. Title 26.
I would flat out guarantee you, if you use the general term 'revenues' to mean gross, ordinary or pretax revenues (any of which is also sometimes called gross, ordinary, or pretax profits), any competent judge, contract lawyer or IRS agent will make you spell out which one you really mean, and use it consistently from then on. The IRS guy is likely to just tell you what terms you must use in an audit instead, and in such case he or she can theoretically fine you every single time you slip. You are insisting that your use of the words is correct and someone else's is wrong - but you've acquired a colloquial shorthand that is no closer to professional usage than the person's you are 'correcting'.
What's scary is, once I picked up on your terminology, your post probably deserves an insightful mod or two. But, I couldn't have argued if anyone had flamebate modded you instead.