No, it's not that dire. As long as you don't look guilty as sin -- by showing up at the bank with a large amount of money, then obviously changing your mind about your deposit amount -- no one will care.
Well, in your example, the logic is fine but the argument is false.
Premise 2, that "in general, the future will be like the past" is just false. Inductive arguments, in order to be strong, have to specify in what ways and to what degree of confidence the future is likely to be like the past.
I don't want my government looking into my financial affairs either. But you have to understand the letter and spirit of the law against structuring. You are *not* flagged simply for depositing $9999.99. You are flagged if
(a) You show up at the bank with $15k, (b) The teller asks you to fill out the CTR form, (c) and you try to restructure your deposit to avoid the CTR requirement.
You *know* that some law like this had to be on the books to try to minimally enforce filing requirements.
If you don't like it, don't try to deposit all at once. Problem solved.
I would beg to differ that inductive reasoning is not logical. It's not certain, but the rules of logic still apply.
Well, from a rigorously philosophical position, inductive reasoning is not logical. That doesn't mean that inductive arguments are false; it simply means that they can't be evaluated by logic and classed as "valid" or "invalid." They *can* be classed as "strong" or "weak" by means of statistics, however.
Example: I flip the light switch three times. The light comes on each time. I hypothesize that the light will come on every time that I flip the switch.
I've often had those of a religious nature say to me that I use faith all the time in my life - for example, when I flick a light switch I have faith that the light is going to come on. This - like your definition - is incorrect.
It's poorly worded, but they have a point. Your belief that the light will come on is a form of inductive reasoning. You've accumulated what counts in your mind as enough instances (probably one or two!) of flipping the switch to believe that the next time will give the same result. But if someone pressed you to prove logically that you would get the same result by flipping the same switch, you'd be SOL. In fact, with light switches, there are simple cases where the future isn't like the past -- such as multi-switch setups, switches that are at the end of their useful life (I just replaced one of those!), etc.
In short, inductive reasoning is not deductive; it isn't logical but rather is based on a confidence that the future will look like the past. It is this confidence that is being labeled as "faith" by your religious acquaintances.
Their confidence, meanwhile, is that God will continue to take care of them and be faithful to his promises, just as he has in the past. It is a different form of inductive reasoning. It is most emphatically *not* expecting the future to look exactly opposite from the past, which is your definition. I don't know a single religious person who would accept your examples a genuine faith.
Still and all, I would agree with you that your confidence is not the same as biblical faith. For one thing, you have many more opportunities for testing; for another, you can (probably reasonably) limit the scope of your testing to local causes rather than global; religious faith can't carry out the same local causation testing because God is, well, omnipresent in most models.
Religious people aren't irrational; they're just out of fashion these days. Consider the large number of religious people who have (and some who continue) to contribute to the scientific endeavor, and then ask whether it is reasonable to project irrationality as the definition of faith.
My Pastor, Shane, didnt appreciate me pointing out the errors in the hairy dog model. "It's what I remember from High School" he said. Other people around him agreed.
Bummer, dude. It's discouraging when you're put in the position of being either (a) a heretic, or (b) unable to reconcile seemingly obviously false stuff.
This is an odd claim, considering that an oft-repeated atheist mantra is "I don't believe that God doesn't exist... I just don't believe that he does exist."
er, that's agnostic, not atheist.
Well, I agree - it *should* be called an "agnostic" position. But it is commonly called the "weak atheist" position. See here, e.g.
I disagree about the strength of the positions, BTW, but that's another story.
If you say "Evolution is just too unbelievable" then you're siding with an alternative, which is strange considering THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVE THEORIES.
This is an odd claim, considering that an oft-repeated atheist mantra is "I don't believe that God doesn't exist... I just don't believe that he does exist."
Surely one could be skeptical of current evolutionary theory without committing to an alternative. If I am skeptical about string theory, does that require me to have an alternative?
Ob. Princess Bride ref: "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
The Reformers definitely did *not* mean by "Sola Scriptura", "the right of every man to define scripture for themselves." If they had, then they would have accepted the Anabaptist movements and even would have had no real argument against the Catholic apologists.
For Luther and Calvin, "Sola Scriptura" meant that Scripture alone -- not even the individual's conscience -- was the supreme authority in matters of faith and doctrine. The *interpretation* of Scripture was still carried out in community, with considerable deference given to the church fathers.
A really good work on this exact topic is The Shape of Sola Scriptura by Keith Mathison.
Before you get too self-righteous about those old fuddy-duddy thinkers, perhaps you ought to do the following:
1) Try to grade a set of English papers. 2) Read Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell. 3) Stop and contemplate whether it is really in the best interest of the younger generation to speak and write in a way that makes them uncomprehesible to the older generation.
Then ask yourself: is the language changing in order to become more flexible (a la Shakespeare), or is the language changing in order to accommodate more sloppy thinking? Both could be true in different cases, of course, but on average -- which is the case?
Language is a tool, no more and no less. If you want to mod the tool, then fine. But if in the process you wreck that tool, then your mods need some more thought.
I think it would be an interesting study if someone could compare the old paper ballots (where you completed the arrow with the special black pen) and the touch-screen ballots to see whether there is a change in the rate of people who vote randomly.
Think about it: you go in knowing who you want for governor and senator. Then they ask you about board of education candidates, and you haven't done your homework (pun intended). So... do you leave it blank or vote randomly?
I'm willing to bet that people who are used to zipping past EULAs are probably willing to punch in random candidates for board of ed.
Not sure what county you live in, but I voted in 2004 in Frederick Co., MD, and I *had* to use a touch-screen. Complaining to the election official got me a condescending smile.
1) Use comments -- good ones! -- liberally. Check out a programming style guide. There's nothing worse than coming back to your code a year later and asking, "What the *&$#^& was I thinking here?"
2) Learn how to make your code general enough to be reusable. Limit your imbedded constants to a minimum. Write functions to solve the general case. Your code might run slower, but unless you are doing serious number-crunching or searching, it won't matter.
The problem with that argument is that it hijacks the term "Fundamentalist" and uses it to mean "anyone that opposes freedom." Unfortunately for the argument, Fundamentalism has a much different history -- Google for it -- and could in *no* way apply to Chinese communism.
What's the point of trying to re-write the meaning of a word (unless you are trying to make an ad hominem argument)?
Copper, iron, energy and food doesn't just pop into existance, it's produced by people. You need people to invent and find new resources too.
Not all of these are on the same par. Copper and iron not only "don't pop into existence", but they don't pop out of existence, either. Instead, they are recycled, either from existing iron and copper products, or from iron and copper ore already in the planet. The only limiting factor on them is the amount of energy it takes to "produce" them.
Food is genuinely produced, with the limiting factors being space and fertilizer.
And energy... well, energy is actually consumed, and then lost as heat. The only long-term hope for energy is that we might consume it more efficiently. But a *short-term* hope for energy is to harness really really big sources of it: basically, fusion and solar.
Windows is unreliable because it uses a Registry - an updateable Registry at that. That was the worst design decision Microsoft ever made.
Ah yes, of course. Windows would be much better if it's hive of settings and preferences was read-only. How useful! Oh, and storing user settings in a single place which is easy to copy, export, and update is incredibly bad. Bad!
I'm not interested in joining the flamefest. I've used and maintained Unix, Windows, and Linux, and have a slight preference for Linux.
But the thing I love to hate is the Windows registry, as implemented in WinXP. Because many, many apps have to store settings in the registry, it becomes impossible to have users be able to run their apps without giving them elevated privileges. This one fact alone contributes to a heckuva lot of security problems. It would have been much nicer to have individual.ini files for apps within each user's account, and then (if you like) a single utility to "copy, export, and update" them.
"Now: would Verizon actually profit from a tiered system? Well -- it already does. Business-class DSL offers twice the bandwidth of Consumer-class DSL. Would they love to charge even more for a higher-differentiated tier system? Sure. Anyone surprised?"
That is a remarkably disingenuous statement. You're trying to remove the distinction between bandwidth as a commodity service, and bandwidth which is tailored per site, depending on whether or not the website owners have paid their tithe to the telcos. These are fundamentally different things, and only the latter has any relevance whatsoever to this discussion.
I can only conclude that either you've utterly missed the point of the whole article, or that you're deliberately seeking to confuse the issue.
Let's put your point another way... here is one of the devices under consideration. It limits bandwidth based on packet content. So I agree with you: it makes it possible for telcos to limit bandwidth to "silver" level sites. On the other hand, how is that different from the situation that exists now? My business only gets a certain amount of bandwidth from Comcast, even though the pipes could receive more. Most cable users get more download bandwidth than upload bandwidth, even though the pipes could handle more. Verizon forbids me to run a website using my residential service, which is essentially an upload bandwidth restriction. Those are all bandwidth restrictions based on the fees paid.
My complaint with the article is that it claims that the telcos want to place hard caps on #s of downloads, #s of e-mails, etc.
FTA,...establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.
Some execs may be considering those schemes, but they won't work. Schemes like that were tried back in the days of dial-up, and the consumers balked. The largest complaint was that users' e-mail quotas were taken up with spam. Similar complaints would be made now about bandwidth consumed by unwanted pop-ups or DOS attacks.
Look, I don't like the telcos' marketing ideas either. It's just that the article overstates the dangers. A more straightforward article, like "Telcos to raise fees for bandwidth" would have made more sense and been more defensible.
Um...Who said that I evaluated the slant *before* I read the article? Not me. And, why *shouldn't* I know about the slant of a writer when I read what he has to say? Doesn't that inform the questions I want to ask myself as I read?
This statement is either remarkably misinformed or downright deceptive. The web page on the Center for Digital Democracry site offers fourteen links to primary sources, such as original marketing materials that describe the new 'service offering' as well as FEC filings by AT&T, Bell South and Verizon. If those don't count as primary sources, I don't know what does.
I stand by my statement. Go back and look at the links. They don't point to source documents hosted by the supposed originators. They point to source documents hosted by www.democraticmedia.org. Those DO NOT count as primary sources, even if the documents are genuine.
That is a remarkably disingenuous statement. You're trying to remove the distinction between bandwidth as a commodity service, and bandwidth which is tailored per site, depending on whether or not the website owners have paid their tithe to the telcos. These are fundamentally different things, and only the latter has any relevance whatsoever to this discussion.
I'm sorry, I don't understand you. The website owners purchase upload bandwidth like everyone else, and that bandwidth is already tiered. That seems like a commodity to me. Could you elaborate?
Ya know, I teach my students about evaluating sources.
TFA is from "The Nation", which has a particular slant... antiBigCorporation, TheSkyIsFallingBecauseWalMartIsTakingOver. Which has some merit, but can occasionally (and in this case definitely) be overly alarmist.
TFA furthermore makes references to white papers, but the link takes you NOT to primary source white papers, but to "democracticmedia.org", which links to "white papers" that are... kept on the same site.
In other words: No primary source material. No proof other than innuendo and hype.
Now: would Verizon actually profit from a tiered system? Well -- it already does. Business-class DSL offers twice the bandwidth of Consumer-class DSL. Would they love to charge even more for a higher-differentiated tier system? Sure. Anyone surprised?
But now, the article would have us believe that in addition to a price tier for bandwidth, the telcoms are going to have a price tier for total usage (presumably per month, which is a type of bandwidth in a way). NONSENSE. It's unprofitable for the simple reasons that
(a) keeping the meter running on each little packet is a waste of their servers, (b) customers are going to be very ticked when either they are "cut off" when they reach their limit or else are charged extra every month for overage (do you keep your cell phone plan if you get charged for extra minutes every month?), (c) customers are going to be really ticked when little Johnny plays WoW for 36 hours straight and runs up a $130 bill.
As a result, sub-providers will spring up: people who pay Platinum for unlimited access -- and you know that telcos will have to have that top level available -- and then allow subscribers to tap in for a flat fee.
There is simply no way that a use-limited tiering system will prevent itself from collapsing.
Is it *possible* to retain market share without being "evil"?
I'm not asking that in a wide-eyed naive way, but rather in a realpolitik way: Can a company make compromises with the "keepers of the keys" without losing its core values?
The deal with the PRC to censor certain anti-China items comes to mind. According to Google, the situation is "better with them there than not." At what point does a rationale become a self-serving rationalization?
I'm sorry to accuse you of trollery, but considering that you cut-and-pasted directly from this site without giving proper credit, it's hard to understand your intentions otherwise.
Your (his?) claim that "There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease" is refuted here and here, the latter of which links is an anti-vaccine site. this link gives references to more scientific studies. And this link also responds to your claims.
And, it's blazingly obvious that smallpox, pertussis, and polio have responded to vaccine regimes. In areas that lacked polio vaccine, polio cases continued. When those areas began to receive the vaccine through WHO (including Europe), the cases reduced or stopped altogether. Case closed.
Vaccination also fits well with the established mechanism of disease resistance. Those who have received vaccination show an increased level of antibodies to the disease vaccinated against; the antibodies are the proteins used by white cells to identify and then destroy the invading pathogens.
I recommend getting your information from medical journals and sites instead of scare websites.
And if you have a child, PLEASE get your vaccination information from repuatable sources.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not that dire. As long as you don't look guilty as sin -- by showing up at the bank with a large amount of money, then obviously changing your mind about your deposit amount -- no one will care.
Premise 2, that "in general, the future will be like the past" is just false. Inductive arguments, in order to be strong, have to specify in what ways and to what degree of confidence the future is likely to be like the past.
(a) You show up at the bank with $15k,
(b) The teller asks you to fill out the CTR form,
(c) and you try to restructure your deposit to avoid the CTR requirement.
You *know* that some law like this had to be on the books to try to minimally enforce filing requirements.
If you don't like it, don't try to deposit all at once. Problem solved.
Well, from a rigorously philosophical position, inductive reasoning is not logical. That doesn't mean that inductive arguments are false; it simply means that they can't be evaluated by logic and classed as "valid" or "invalid." They *can* be classed as "strong" or "weak" by means of statistics, however.
Example: I flip the light switch three times. The light comes on each time. I hypothesize that the light will come on every time that I flip the switch.
That's not logical, but it is strong.
It's poorly worded, but they have a point. Your belief that the light will come on is a form of inductive reasoning. You've accumulated what counts in your mind as enough instances (probably one or two!) of flipping the switch to believe that the next time will give the same result. But if someone pressed you to prove logically that you would get the same result by flipping the same switch, you'd be SOL. In fact, with light switches, there are simple cases where the future isn't like the past -- such as multi-switch setups, switches that are at the end of their useful life (I just replaced one of those!), etc.
In short, inductive reasoning is not deductive; it isn't logical but rather is based on a confidence that the future will look like the past. It is this confidence that is being labeled as "faith" by your religious acquaintances.
Their confidence, meanwhile, is that God will continue to take care of them and be faithful to his promises, just as he has in the past. It is a different form of inductive reasoning. It is most emphatically *not* expecting the future to look exactly opposite from the past, which is your definition. I don't know a single religious person who would accept your examples a genuine faith.
Still and all, I would agree with you that your confidence is not the same as biblical faith. For one thing, you have many more opportunities for testing; for another, you can (probably reasonably) limit the scope of your testing to local causes rather than global; religious faith can't carry out the same local causation testing because God is, well, omnipresent in most models.
Religious people aren't irrational; they're just out of fashion these days. Consider the large number of religious people who have (and some who continue) to contribute to the scientific endeavor, and then ask whether it is reasonable to project irrationality as the definition of faith.
Bummer, dude. It's discouraging when you're put in the position of being either (a) a heretic, or (b) unable to reconcile seemingly obviously false stuff.
Jes' sayin'.
Which conference, which biologists? Just curious.
er, that's agnostic, not atheist.
Well, I agree - it *should* be called an "agnostic" position. But it is commonly called the "weak atheist" position. See here, e.g.
I disagree about the strength of the positions, BTW, but that's another story.
This is an odd claim, considering that an oft-repeated atheist mantra is "I don't believe that God doesn't exist ... I just don't believe that he does exist."
Surely one could be skeptical of current evolutionary theory without committing to an alternative. If I am skeptical about string theory, does that require me to have an alternative?
Ob. Princess Bride ref: "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
The Reformers definitely did *not* mean by "Sola Scriptura", "the right of every man to define scripture for themselves." If they had, then they would have accepted the Anabaptist movements and even would have had no real argument against the Catholic apologists.
For Luther and Calvin, "Sola Scriptura" meant that Scripture alone -- not even the individual's conscience -- was the supreme authority in matters of faith and doctrine. The *interpretation* of Scripture was still carried out in community, with considerable deference given to the church fathers.
A really good work on this exact topic is The Shape of Sola Scriptura by Keith Mathison.
/digression
1) Try to grade a set of English papers.
2) Read Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell.
3) Stop and contemplate whether it is really in the best interest of the younger generation to speak and write in a way that makes them uncomprehesible to the older generation.
Then ask yourself: is the language changing in order to become more flexible (a la Shakespeare), or is the language changing in order to accommodate more sloppy thinking? Both could be true in different cases, of course, but on average -- which is the case?
Language is a tool, no more and no less. If you want to mod the tool, then fine. But if in the process you wreck that tool, then your mods need some more thought.
Think about it: you go in knowing who you want for governor and senator. Then they ask you about board of education candidates, and you haven't done your homework (pun intended). So ... do you leave it blank or vote randomly?
I'm willing to bet that people who are used to zipping past EULAs are probably willing to punch in random candidates for board of ed.
Not sure what county you live in, but I voted in 2004 in Frederick Co., MD, and I *had* to use a touch-screen. Complaining to the election official got me a condescending smile.
1) Use comments -- good ones! -- liberally. Check out a programming style guide. There's nothing worse than coming back to your code a year later and asking, "What the *&$#^& was I thinking here?"
2) Learn how to make your code general enough to be reusable. Limit your imbedded constants to a minimum. Write functions to solve the general case. Your code might run slower, but unless you are doing serious number-crunching or searching, it won't matter.
What's the point of trying to re-write the meaning of a word (unless you are trying to make an ad hominem argument)?
Not all of these are on the same par. Copper and iron not only "don't pop into existence", but they don't pop out of existence, either. Instead, they are recycled, either from existing iron and copper products, or from iron and copper ore already in the planet. The only limiting factor on them is the amount of energy it takes to "produce" them.
Food is genuinely produced, with the limiting factors being space and fertilizer.
And energy ... well, energy is actually consumed, and then lost as heat. The only long-term hope for energy is that we might consume it more efficiently. But a *short-term* hope for energy is to harness really really big sources of it: basically, fusion and solar.
Ah yes, of course. Windows would be much better if it's hive of settings and preferences was read-only. How useful! Oh, and storing user settings in a single place which is easy to copy, export, and update is incredibly bad. Bad!
I'm not interested in joining the flamefest. I've used and maintained Unix, Windows, and Linux, and have a slight preference for Linux.
But the thing I love to hate is the Windows registry, as implemented in WinXP. Because many, many apps have to store settings in the registry, it becomes impossible to have users be able to run their apps without giving them elevated privileges. This one fact alone contributes to a heckuva lot of security problems. It would have been much nicer to have individual .ini files for apps within each user's account, and then (if you like) a single utility to "copy, export, and update" them.
Just my $0.02.
That is a remarkably disingenuous statement. You're trying to remove the distinction between bandwidth as a commodity service, and bandwidth which is tailored per site, depending on whether or not the website owners have paid their tithe to the telcos. These are fundamentally different things, and only the latter has any relevance whatsoever to this discussion.
I can only conclude that either you've utterly missed the point of the whole article, or that you're deliberately seeking to confuse the issue.
Let's put your point another way ... here is one of the devices under consideration. It limits bandwidth based on packet content. So I agree with you: it makes it possible for telcos to limit bandwidth to "silver" level sites. On the other hand, how is that different from the situation that exists now? My business only gets a certain amount of bandwidth from Comcast, even though the pipes could receive more. Most cable users get more download bandwidth than upload bandwidth, even though the pipes could handle more. Verizon forbids me to run a website using my residential service, which is essentially an upload bandwidth restriction. Those are all bandwidth restrictions based on the fees paid.
My complaint with the article is that it claims that the telcos want to place hard caps on #s of downloads, #s of e-mails, etc.
FTA, ...establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.
Some execs may be considering those schemes, but they won't work. Schemes like that were tried back in the days of dial-up, and the consumers balked. The largest complaint was that users' e-mail quotas were taken up with spam. Similar complaints would be made now about bandwidth consumed by unwanted pop-ups or DOS attacks.
Look, I don't like the telcos' marketing ideas either. It's just that the article overstates the dangers. A more straightforward article, like "Telcos to raise fees for bandwidth" would have made more sense and been more defensible.
Some student. Go to the back of the class.
I stand by my statement. Go back and look at the links. They don't point to source documents hosted by the supposed originators. They point to source documents hosted by www.democraticmedia.org. Those DO NOT count as primary sources, even if the documents are genuine.
That is a remarkably disingenuous statement. You're trying to remove the distinction between bandwidth as a commodity service, and bandwidth which is tailored per site, depending on whether or not the website owners have paid their tithe to the telcos. These are fundamentally different things, and only the latter has any relevance whatsoever to this discussion.
I'm sorry, I don't understand you. The website owners purchase upload bandwidth like everyone else, and that bandwidth is already tiered. That seems like a commodity to me. Could you elaborate?
TFA is from "The Nation", which has a particular slant ... antiBigCorporation, TheSkyIsFallingBecauseWalMartIsTakingOver. Which has some merit, but can occasionally (and in this case definitely) be overly alarmist.
TFA furthermore makes references to white papers, but the link takes you NOT to primary source white papers, but to "democracticmedia.org", which links to "white papers" that are ... kept on the same site.
In other words: No primary source material. No proof other than innuendo and hype.
Now: would Verizon actually profit from a tiered system? Well -- it already does. Business-class DSL offers twice the bandwidth of Consumer-class DSL. Would they love to charge even more for a higher-differentiated tier system? Sure. Anyone surprised?
But now, the article would have us believe that in addition to a price tier for bandwidth, the telcoms are going to have a price tier for total usage (presumably per month, which is a type of bandwidth in a way). NONSENSE. It's unprofitable for the simple reasons that
(a) keeping the meter running on each little packet is a waste of their servers,
(b) customers are going to be very ticked when either they are "cut off" when they reach their limit or else are charged extra every month for overage (do you keep your cell phone plan if you get charged for extra minutes every month?),
(c) customers are going to be really ticked when little Johnny plays WoW for 36 hours straight and runs up a $130 bill.
As a result, sub-providers will spring up: people who pay Platinum for unlimited access -- and you know that telcos will have to have that top level available -- and then allow subscribers to tap in for a flat fee.
There is simply no way that a use-limited tiering system will prevent itself from collapsing.
You're correct. Another way to get it:
Sum(j = 0, oo, a*r^j) = a/(1-r).
Your sum: Sum(j = 1, oo, a*r^j) = a/(1 - r) - a*r^0 = 0.2 - 0.1 = 0.1.
I'm not asking that in a wide-eyed naive way, but rather in a realpolitik way: Can a company make compromises with the "keepers of the keys" without losing its core values?
The deal with the PRC to censor certain anti-China items comes to mind. According to Google, the situation is "better with them there than not." At what point does a rationale become a self-serving rationalization?
Your (his?) claim that "There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease" is refuted here and here, the latter of which links is an anti-vaccine site.
this link gives references to more scientific studies. And this link also responds to your claims.
And, it's blazingly obvious that smallpox, pertussis, and polio have responded to vaccine regimes. In areas that lacked polio vaccine, polio cases continued. When those areas began to receive the vaccine through WHO (including Europe), the cases reduced or stopped altogether. Case closed.
Vaccination also fits well with the established mechanism of disease resistance. Those who have received vaccination show an increased level of antibodies to the disease vaccinated against; the antibodies are the proteins used by white cells to identify and then destroy the invading pathogens.
I recommend getting your information from medical journals and sites instead of scare websites.
And if you have a child, PLEASE get your vaccination information from repuatable sources.