First amendment protection (freedom of association) applies to the bank to let them decide whether or not they want to engage in specific financial transaction. Further, you enter an agreement with the banks when you are borrowing money from them or using their services, so you allow them to have some degree of control.
There is, hoever the related concept of freedom of speech. This is not is much abnout legal obligations as it is about a moral belief that all opions should be heard even if some people find it offensive.
Free speech includes the right for private entities to not speak a message they do not agree with. All opinions should be heard, but that doesn't mean any individual should be forced to express all those opinions.
People fragmenting away from an organization that has shown it upholds moral law
Whose morality? Perhaps they feel WikiLeaks is not responsibly wielding its power by publishing information in a punitive manner, or with little regards to public importance.
Release all of the raw data to the public or you're no better than Fox News and Huffington Post.
WikiLeaks doesn't release ALL the raw data it gets. It goes through an editorial process, where they pick and choose what, how, and when to release. If WikiLeaks was truly open they wouldn't be saving the really interesting information for extortion. Further, they've demonstrated they will go beyond the bounds of government whistle blowing into the records of private individuals and organizations as they see fit. WikiLeaks is just as guilty as Fox News in using information as a political weapon.
The analogy is flawed because governments are not private individuals. As an individual, you have an essential right to keep secrets: it's called privacy, and it's critical for liberty. Yes, I have the right to hide even if i didn't do anything wrong.
WikiLeaks doesn't necessarily respect the privacy of individuals if the information is deemed important to their agenda. They do not limit themselves to government whistleblowing. I supported WikiLeaks, but now I'm wary of them. They have demonstrated they will release data regardless of importance to public interest - names, addresses, telephone numbers of friends and family of political organziation members. Imagine if a news organization published the names, addresses, and bank account information of WikiLeaks donors (I surely would hope that remained secret in the current climate). Government is dangerous, but so is any organization that controls massive amounts of information, and is willing to use it in a punitive manner. We should at least take pause and question the power that WikiLeaks or similar site potentially could become.
They could actually aim to hire minimum-wage non-technical employees in advance in order to reduce the proportion of H1B workers. It could still be more cost-effective than hiring skilled labor from local applicants.
Considering taxes, management, training, healthcare, and all the other costs associated with hiring and retaining an employee, it doesn't make much sense to do so to stay under the 50% cap even at minimum wage.
There are plenty of "musicians" who get rich working with the RIAA. They just don't count on the revenue from songs and instead leverage the exposure to create a brand. Whether it's sports, music, or movies, Selling your image for corporate advertising nets more money than actually performing.
Do economists not understand mathematical models?
Not as well as a mathematician.
Do they not understand statistics?
Not as well as a statistician.
Actually it's the other way around. An economist empirically understands many of the shortcomings of economic models and can best translate the statistics into conclusions. A physicist for example would understand better Schrodinger's equation or the Ideal Gas Law, though a statistician/mathematician could provide insights.
Not by much, that's for sure, but the point was that if you want a study of society, get a sociologist.
A lot of disciplines overlap each other. Human behavior isn't just studied by sociology. Psychology, medicine, economics, and neurology, are all intimately linked. If this was about self-esteem I'd agree with you, but it was and the educational return on investment of computers.
If a medical researcher experimented on subjects like economists do with rhis planet and its inhabitants, they would either be in prison or kicked out of the discipline. Same for psychologists or sociologists. I find most economists to be immoral as well as unethical, IMO.
Medicine doesn't exactly have a clean record sheet. Medical treatments are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. There's no bankruptcy or bailout plan that can bring a person back to life. Medicine at least has the luxury of testing on pretty good proxies in the form of animals, as well as the ability to limit experiments to a specific set of people. Economics and other social sciences, haven't had such options. Unless you want no social progress, live experimentation once you've done everything you can offline is the only way to go.
If you take a statisticl approach you have nothing like what Newton, Gallileo and a host of others gave to physics or chemistry.
Taking a statistical approach makes the same uncertainty concession that modern physics does, at some point measurement of the fundamental foundations become "random". The randomness of individual events can still be modeled by a statistical distribution
For economics to be a science there also must be a way to test hypotheses. To date I haven't seen anything like this.
You're living in a giant ongoing economics experimental sandbox. People are constantly coming up with and testing ways to manage the balance between profit and risk, for example Long-Term Capital Management was a failed experiment with certain mathematical models of the market.
Well, actually the current state of the economy is proof enough that "these guys who spend their entire lives predicting financial markets" aren't god at predicting financial markets.
You mean the guys who made millions in bonuses selling risky investments, then made their friends' firms billions when the risky loans they made went bad. The reason they can't predict soccer games is because they don't control everybody involved. The financial markets are more like professional wrestling than an actual sport.
There's this unfortunate bias in the language here, which I've seen other places, where a failure on the part of human beings to behave predictably and rationally is framed as a "fuck-up" or a mistake or as undesirable and destructive. IMHO, unpredictability and unreliability is merely an aspect of being human, and is probably a long-term desirable trait.
IMHO the reason unpredictability and unreliability of people is a shortcoming in the modesl, and not an actual trait. If computer models predict it's going to rain and the day is just overcast, we don't say the weather "fucked up" or claim it is behaving irrationally. The problem is trying to distill extremely complex systems into something computable isn't an easy task.
Science has become politicized; sure the US already did these experiments but it doesn't guarantee European scientists get timely access. Gathering your own information offers a competitive advantage, whether it's for the prestiege of discovery, industrial value, or the ability to interpret data first to further political goals
You're missing the point. All of these highly educated fund managers missed the boat on the real estate crash.
All those highly educated NASA engineers have missed the boat and blown up several billion dollars of equipment over the years. Mistakes happen to even the best of us, doesn't mean the people don't serve a purpose.
Even accepting the claim of his repeated attempts to contact Apple about the phone, once he asked for $5000 the whole good samaritan argument falls apart. Worse even after selling it, he was greedy and tried to convince another news oulet to pay more for it. Maybe initially he was trying to do the right thing, but in the end he saw dollar signs.
He could have saved himself a lot of problems by just contacting the police, or telling his sad story to a news agency becase he lacked the resources to find the real owner. Now he potentially faces charges for dealing stolen goods, conspiracy, state unauthorized computer access, and federal computer fraud (shouldn't have looked at Facebook), theft of trade secrets, and I'm sure a half-dozen more electronics and telecommunications charges because it's a computer/phone, a few more wire fraud related ones because he communicated with Gizmodo and Engadget, and I'm sure some banking ones for receiving $5k from the former. Just hope he didn't mail it and commit mail fraud too.
The un-named finder of the lost iPhone can't count on the Gawker folks to keep his name hidden, because once they took possession of the stolen phone and became a party to the criminal activity, they lost their Shield Law protections. There's no whistleblower or other similar protections either, because the story was about a gadget, there was no compelling public interest -- unless it had a memo of Steve Jobs talking about child labor or how he expected 1/10,000 to explode or something. Gawker should have paid for the "story." Interview the guy, have him bring over the phone for inspection and verify his claims. Just don't take possession of the damn thing, and everybody would have been better off.
I'm guessing they are going after both. The source is not necessarily protected in this case, as many shield law protections are forfeit if the journalist is a party to a crime. Gawker's protections went out the window once they took possession of the phone. All the prosecutor needs to do is file consipiracy charges (easy if they can show negotiations for the purchase) against Gawker & Mr. "Un-named" and his protections evaporate as well. The whole story was handled in a very amateurish way. If they paid for access to the hardware to verify the guy's claim that he had an iPhone prototype, they could have published the same information and kept their hands clean.
I suspect that wilderness courses will become more and more popular as people learn that constant social interaction leaves them with no time to think, to read books or to enjoy their own company. I suspect that the massive growth of Internet narcissism through social media is going to produce people who show clear symptoms of psychological distress and incipient mental disturbance.
The whole "people losing touch with nature" was said 150 years ago with industrial urbanization. Generally people adapt and accept the increasing connection technology allows.
The downside is that it strengthens the power of the rights holder and limits the options for the consumer. The ruling means whether its the artist or the big label, whoever holds the contract rights can enforce bundling as the only option in the marketplace. Imagine if suddenly you had to spend an extra $2.99 and buy the video to get access to a song because it's the only way to fully enjoy the "experience"
Or you could do a kind of risk analysis and say that even if there's only a 1% chance that the universe is real, and a 99% chance that it's not, then going with the 1% shot gives you a 99% chance of losing nothing. Going with the nothing gives you a 1% chance of losing everything. Assuming the world doesn't exist only has risk, and assuming it does only has gain.
You're accepting a 99% chance of following something that is false for the sake of hedging risk. You just showed why religion exists. Believe in the cloud guy and his water walking kid and you have an infintesimal chance for immortality versus following what is more probably true and give up that opportunity. Either way you'll probably end up as worm food.
But you can't just say "A big, happy white guy with a beard up in the sky says that everything in hunky dory, so I'm gonna go with it!" That's just ridiculous, even if B is true for some other, unknown reason.
Again, it's not what proposition you start with, but the utility of what gets derived. For example the Ideal Gas Law is based on assumptions which are known to be false, however, making those assumptions allows you to create a useful model. It doesn't matter if you start with bearded guy, earth mother, social contract, or whatever; the cross cultural acceptance of many human rights shows the utility of the implications regardless of how they originally came about.
If you establish the benefit of society as an arbitrary goal (or use a similar, reasonable analysis to determine it a worthwhile goal), then that same conclusion is found without resorting to meaningless assumptions.
You need to start with defining "benefit of society," which will lead you to unprovable propositions. If the purpose is to make everybody happy, you might end up with different conclusions than ensuring everybody is secure from harm.
I guess that means:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
and:
"No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned,...or in any other way destroyed...except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." are meaningless becaused the declarations they appear in are based on the unprovable (not necessarily false) idea of God/Creator
While you may not accept the initial proposition, rather than rejecting the argument altogether, consider it more as a way to place perspective on the problem at hand. The role of "God" is to identify that there is somthing greater than those with power, a secular replacement could be the idea of "natural law," which also is unprovable. More important is many of the resulting concepts (equality, habeas corpus, legal accountability of all, self-determination, etc.), have significant social value without regard to the validity of the proposition from where they are derived.
If A implies B, B can still be true even if A is false.
Totally agree with you, the iPad needs to be looked at in terms of a media delivery platform. Unfortunately, Jobs put it squarely in competition with netbooks, which this would not replace for many users. The iPad lacks the capabilities and flexibility to really replace a good keyboard and touchpad device. At it's size it's not a phone, it's not a camera, and not really a convenient music player. I see this device in its basic form aimed at replacing the portable DVD player and ebook reader. The community will ultimately decide whether it's just a bigger iPod meant for video and books, or if it truly is a breakthrough product. It has a lot of things going for it in terms of form factor and computing power. A few great apps will make this device compelling in a number of different markets.
You ignore that it also takes more time and resources. There's a marketing window for most projects, whether it's a tie-in to a sport/movie/show or making sure your game isn't considered outdated upon release. Software as a business is about releasing a product that is "good enough." Spending more time costs money, both in actual cost and potential costs (you could have the same dev team working on another project). Tweaking may get more eyes, but it doesn't necessarily mean more money.
he's not using light to synchronize the clocks, he states that it is a thought experiment and you START with synchronized clocks. The fact that you cannot do this in practice is irrelevant.
Einstein's method is to use light for clock synchronization, which leads to a logical circle. As stated before the conclusions of the thought experiment were later demonstrated using alternative methods of synchronization.
To minimize his discoveries by saying he made a lot of mistakes either means you don't understand what he was doing or are arrogant beyond belief.
To deify Einstein or any other great mind is to minimize the difficulty of their accomplishments. Even the best don't get the workings of the universe right. It demonstrates that advancement is not just accomplished by the divine inspiration of a few, but rather a long process of thought and error shared in the community.
Slashdot Mirror
First amendment protection (freedom of association) applies to the bank to let them decide whether or not they want to engage in specific financial transaction.
Further, you enter an agreement with the banks when you are borrowing money from them or using their services, so you allow them to have some degree of control.
They have no more moral obligation to carry WikiLeaks as they do apps which contain hate speech, pornography, spam, religious or political views, etc.
Free speech includes the right for private entities to not speak a message they do not agree with. All opinions should be heard, but that doesn't mean any individual should be forced to express all those opinions.
Whose morality? Perhaps they feel WikiLeaks is not responsibly wielding its power by publishing information in a punitive manner, or with little regards to public importance.
WikiLeaks doesn't release ALL the raw data it gets. It goes through an editorial process, where they pick and choose what, how, and when to release. If WikiLeaks was truly open they wouldn't be saving the really interesting information for extortion. Further, they've demonstrated they will go beyond the bounds of government whistle blowing into the records of private individuals and organizations as they see fit. WikiLeaks is just as guilty as Fox News in using information as a political weapon.
WikiLeaks doesn't necessarily respect the privacy of individuals if the information is deemed important to their agenda. They do not limit themselves to government whistleblowing.
I supported WikiLeaks, but now I'm wary of them. They have demonstrated they will release data regardless of importance to public interest - names, addresses, telephone numbers of friends and family of political organziation members. Imagine if a news organization published the names, addresses, and bank account information of WikiLeaks donors (I surely would hope that remained secret in the current climate).
Government is dangerous, but so is any organization that controls massive amounts of information, and is willing to use it in a punitive manner. We should at least take pause and question the power that WikiLeaks or similar site potentially could become.
Considering taxes, management, training, healthcare, and all the other costs associated with hiring and retaining an employee, it doesn't make much sense to do so to stay under the 50% cap even at minimum wage.
Comedy = Tragedy + Timing
There are plenty of "musicians" who get rich working with the RIAA. They just don't count on the revenue from songs and instead leverage the exposure to create a brand. Whether it's sports, music, or movies, Selling your image for corporate advertising nets more money than actually performing.
Actually it's the other way around. An economist empirically understands many of the shortcomings of economic models and can best translate the statistics into conclusions. A physicist for example would understand better Schrodinger's equation or the Ideal Gas Law, though a statistician/mathematician could provide insights.
A lot of disciplines overlap each other. Human behavior isn't just studied by sociology. Psychology, medicine, economics, and neurology, are all intimately linked. If this was about self-esteem I'd agree with you, but it was and the educational return on investment of computers.
Medicine doesn't exactly have a clean record sheet. Medical treatments are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. There's no bankruptcy or bailout plan that can bring a person back to life.
Medicine at least has the luxury of testing on pretty good proxies in the form of animals, as well as the ability to limit experiments to a specific set of people. Economics and other social sciences, haven't had such options. Unless you want no social progress, live experimentation once you've done everything you can offline is the only way to go.
Taking a statistical approach makes the same uncertainty concession that modern physics does, at some point measurement of the fundamental foundations become "random". The randomness of individual events can still be modeled by a statistical distribution
You're living in a giant ongoing economics experimental sandbox. People are constantly coming up with and testing ways to manage the balance between profit and risk, for example Long-Term Capital Management was a failed experiment with certain mathematical models of the market.
You mean the guys who made millions in bonuses selling risky investments, then made their friends' firms billions when the risky loans they made went bad.
The reason they can't predict soccer games is because they don't control everybody involved. The financial markets are more like professional wrestling than an actual sport.
IMHO the reason unpredictability and unreliability of people is a shortcoming in the modesl, and not an actual trait. If computer models predict it's going to rain and the day is just overcast, we don't say the weather "fucked up" or claim it is behaving irrationally.
The problem is trying to distill extremely complex systems into something computable isn't an easy task.
Science has become politicized; sure the US already did these experiments but it doesn't guarantee European scientists get timely access. Gathering your own information offers a competitive advantage, whether it's for the prestiege of discovery, industrial value, or the ability to interpret data first to further political goals
All those highly educated NASA engineers have missed the boat and blown up several billion dollars of equipment over the years. Mistakes happen to even the best of us, doesn't mean the people don't serve a purpose.
Even accepting the claim of his repeated attempts to contact Apple about the phone, once he asked for $5000 the whole good samaritan argument falls apart. Worse even after selling it, he was greedy and tried to convince another news oulet to pay more for it. Maybe initially he was trying to do the right thing, but in the end he saw dollar signs.
He could have saved himself a lot of problems by just contacting the police, or telling his sad story to a news agency becase he lacked the resources to find the real owner. Now he potentially faces charges for dealing stolen goods, conspiracy, state unauthorized computer access, and federal computer fraud (shouldn't have looked at Facebook), theft of trade secrets, and I'm sure a half-dozen more electronics and telecommunications charges because it's a computer/phone, a few more wire fraud related ones because he communicated with Gizmodo and Engadget, and I'm sure some banking ones for receiving $5k from the former. Just hope he didn't mail it and commit mail fraud too.
The un-named finder of the lost iPhone can't count on the Gawker folks to keep his name hidden, because once they took possession of the stolen phone and became a party to the criminal activity, they lost their Shield Law protections. There's no whistleblower or other similar protections either, because the story was about a gadget, there was no compelling public interest -- unless it had a memo of Steve Jobs talking about child labor or how he expected 1/10,000 to explode or something. Gawker should have paid for the "story." Interview the guy, have him bring over the phone for inspection and verify his claims. Just don't take possession of the damn thing, and everybody would have been better off.
I'm guessing they are going after both.
The source is not necessarily protected in this case, as many shield law protections are forfeit if the journalist is a party to a crime. Gawker's protections went out the window once they took possession of the phone. All the prosecutor needs to do is file consipiracy charges (easy if they can show negotiations for the purchase) against Gawker & Mr. "Un-named" and his protections evaporate as well.
The whole story was handled in a very amateurish way. If they paid for access to the hardware to verify the guy's claim that he had an iPhone prototype, they could have published the same information and kept their hands clean.
The whole "people losing touch with nature" was said 150 years ago with industrial urbanization. Generally people adapt and accept the increasing connection technology allows.
The downside is that it strengthens the power of the rights holder and limits the options for the consumer. The ruling means whether its the artist or the big label, whoever holds the contract rights can enforce bundling as the only option in the marketplace. Imagine if suddenly you had to spend an extra $2.99 and buy the video to get access to a song because it's the only way to fully enjoy the "experience"
You're accepting a 99% chance of following something that is false for the sake of hedging risk. You just showed why religion exists. Believe in the cloud guy and his water walking kid and you have an infintesimal chance for immortality versus following what is more probably true and give up that opportunity. Either way you'll probably end up as worm food.
Again, it's not what proposition you start with, but the utility of what gets derived. For example the Ideal Gas Law is based on assumptions which are known to be false, however, making those assumptions allows you to create a useful model. It doesn't matter if you start with bearded guy, earth mother, social contract, or whatever; the cross cultural acceptance of many human rights shows the utility of the implications regardless of how they originally came about.
You need to start with defining "benefit of society," which will lead you to unprovable propositions. If the purpose is to make everybody happy, you might end up with different conclusions than ensuring everybody is secure from harm.
I guess that means:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
and:
"No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned,...or in any other way destroyed...except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land."
are meaningless becaused the declarations they appear in are based on the unprovable (not necessarily false) idea of God/Creator
While you may not accept the initial proposition, rather than rejecting the argument altogether, consider it more as a way to place perspective on the problem at hand. The role of "God" is to identify that there is somthing greater than those with power, a secular replacement could be the idea of "natural law," which also is unprovable.
More important is many of the resulting concepts (equality, habeas corpus, legal accountability of all, self-determination, etc.), have significant social value without regard to the validity of the proposition from where they are derived.
If A implies B, B can still be true even if A is false.
Totally agree with you, the iPad needs to be looked at in terms of a media delivery platform. Unfortunately, Jobs put it squarely in competition with netbooks, which this would not replace for many users. The iPad lacks the capabilities and flexibility to really replace a good keyboard and touchpad device.
At it's size it's not a phone, it's not a camera, and not really a convenient music player. I see this device in its basic form aimed at replacing the portable DVD player and ebook reader.
The community will ultimately decide whether it's just a bigger iPod meant for video and books, or if it truly is a breakthrough product. It has a lot of things going for it in terms of form factor and computing power. A few great apps will make this device compelling in a number of different markets.
You ignore that it also takes more time and resources.
There's a marketing window for most projects, whether it's a tie-in to a sport/movie/show or making sure your game isn't considered outdated upon release.
Software as a business is about releasing a product that is "good enough." Spending more time costs money, both in actual cost and potential costs (you could have the same dev team working on another project).
Tweaking may get more eyes, but it doesn't necessarily mean more money.
Einstein's method is to use light for clock synchronization, which leads to a logical circle. As stated before the conclusions of the thought experiment were later demonstrated using alternative methods of synchronization.
To deify Einstein or any other great mind is to minimize the difficulty of their accomplishments. Even the best don't get the workings of the universe right. It demonstrates that advancement is not just accomplished by the divine inspiration of a few, but rather a long process of thought and error shared in the community.