We have individuals born with psychological illnesses that make them a danger to themselves or others, why not treat and cure these individuals at the fetus stage so that they and we need not suffer from the impact of inaction?
And why stop there!?! Why not "cure" deficient fetuses suffering from complications such as: homosexuality, aspergers, short height, dark skin, small ears, low IQs, obesity, ugliness, pug noses, and whichever other deficiencies the gene astrologers claim they can detect. Let us not suffer from the impact of inaction by not terminating these sub-human types before they quicken in their mother's womb. Towards an enlightened tomorrow.
Gold-backed currency needs to have people believing that the government is actually going to turn the currency into gold
More fundamentally, it needs people to believe that Gold is actually worth something. At the end of the day, Gold is just another metal, and not even an especially rare one. While it has several advantages, most of Gold's monetary values derives from cultural factors, not the inherent rarity or utility of the metal. The spike we're seeing right now in the price of Gold has nothing to do with the supply or industrial demand for it, but rather is solely down to it being perceived as a safe harbour in uncertain times. And it is seen as such only because it is seen as such--circular logic being all too common in finance.
The day someone discovers vast gold deposits somewhere, a cheaper method of mining, or a more desirable material, gold too will go the way of so called "fiat currencies".
I can't even find the PepsiCo blog to read it to see what was so terrible about it, and everything I read just says "IT WAS FROM AN EVIL CORPORATION" which doesn't say shit about the content or the quality of its science.
High quality science can come out of corporate labs, but only when it is in the interests of the company. There is little doubt that PepsiCo scientists are well aware of the health effects of their companies products, but there isn't a snowball's chance in a sauna that such information will ever be released on their blog. In the meantime, the carefully controlled flow of information putting the company and its products in a positive light gains credence and respectability by being on a credible site such a Scienceblogs, and all the while every other blog on the site loses credence by having this propaganda held up next to their content.
This has been dubbed corporate propaganda, and it's a succinct and insightful description. The entity known as PepsiCo may have been granted the human freedom of speech to engage in this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean other people have to associate themselves with it.
Probably 98% of blogs are personal opinions with no factual, scientific basis.
And what makes you think the situation for traditional media sources is any better? Personally, I think blogs do a far better job than traditional media sources in providing high quality, relevant and original content.
That is jumping off a cliff into cartoonish insane evil mega-corporation territory.
More and more, it's becoming obvious that even the most outlandish dystopian works are still trumped by the maxim that "truth is stranger than fiction". The abuses of corporations imagined by sci-fi authors are nothing compared to the ruthless ingenuity of real world corporations and their employees.
Nevermind that you can never, ever, get back the helium you loose on the surface of the planet.
I don't mean to burst your Helium bubble, but the stuff is actually produced naturally by radioactive decay in the crust, etc. You may have heard of things called alpha particles, which sometimes have the symbol He2+. All you need to do to get Helium at this point is add 2 electrons, and we're not short on those.
If ever there was an example of shallow, inane, uncritical and utterly monochrome thinking, this is it. The thinking of this elected representative has gone somthing like this:
Asbestos is bad. Rock is associated in some way with Asbestos. Therefore rock is bad. Ban rock.
Students of basic logic/philosophy may weep, but this is not only the thinking of the representative, but also of a substantial portion of the California electorate and indeed the electorate throughout the western world. This pantomime logic characterizes many of the reasons for why California in particular is the way it is. Politicians and voters who are opinionated, vocal and hubristic, yet simultaneously uncritical, gullible and capricious.
To compound matters Californians decided that this irresponsible electorate should have the ability to override any and all other checks and balances in the state, from the courts to the government to the civil service. And they did; and the state is all but a wreck as a result. This is what comes from placing the will of the people on a pedestal.
The old Greek theory divided governments into three basic forms; rule by the people, rule by a select group, and rule by a single person. What's often forgotten is that each of the three forms had both virtues and vices. A single dictator might be cruel, but could also be a decisive leader. Similarly, the people could rule for the benefit of all, but they could also degenerate into rule by the mob or by demagogues. The western form of Government is(really was) an attempt to blend all three governments; a lower house and referendums to represent the people, a largely appointed upper house to represent select groups, and a single president/kind to represent a single person.
The Californians have forsaken these lessons and history by giving all power to the people and allowing no other checks and balances. If nothing else, the state is a textbook case of what happens when a state loses balance in its form of government.
Yet, the failure of the PSP Go suggest the exact opposite; some people like their physical media.
I suspect the difference here is in how PC and Console players view their purchases. With PC games, a game is understood to be a software purchase, something that has to be installed and configured, typically on only one machine and thereafter tied to that device. There has never been a resale market on PC games and they're not exactly the kind of thing you loan to a friend. The view of a PC game is therefore closer to the view of a MS Office disc.
However with console games the situation is different. Console games have always been understood to be concrete "physical" purchases, not software. You didn't buy a program running Super Mario Bros, and you didn't really buy the "game"; what you bought was the cartridge, the physical product which contained that software. And that cartridge could be used on any NES system in virtually the same way as a tape or CD could be used on any respective player. (Tapes and CDs have since been replaced with mp3s, but I would argue that while they are digital, mp3s still retain a measure of tangibility for most users)
Nowadays, the cartridge has been replaced with a disc but the concept remains. When you buy a console game, you buy a physical product like a DVD which can be used on _any_ compatible system. You didn't (explicitly) buy software. There's a whole culture surrounding this subtle distinction: people take games to their friends houses, or loan them to others; they resell the games they have; people have game librarys with shelves and shelves of titles which can all still be played as long as a compatible device is available. Console game ownership is in this sense far closer to book ownership. And like books, console gamers will prefer to own a tangible hardcopy of a game rather than an e-version.
PC games do not appear to have this same culture. You might keep the discs etc, but your PC game collection is not going to be on a shelf in your living room, ready to be popped into a player. The requirements of re-installation, product codes, compatibility and DRM all mean that a PC title does not have the same level of direct association of product->game that is seen with consoles. Therefore, PC game players will not associate their game DVDs with the game itself as strongly as a console player would.
So for this reason, digital downloads can succeed for PC games while still falling short in the console world. However, if PC games should ever reach the same level of convenience/modularity as console games, this situation may change. So, if Microsoft ever get their act together about Windows gaming, Steam might see significant fall off.
Too complicated. The best analogy is simply to say that GS, etc al are filled with shallow crooks who can and will trick and con everyone they meet out of every cent they have.
Every couple of years, we hear about how "scientists have discovered that coffee is bad for you!" A couple years later, we hear "scientists have discovered that coffee is good for you!" It just alternates every couple of years...... Give people a couple decades of that, and of course they're going to be mistrustful.
Precisely. As a profession, scientists have failed to protect their own reputations. Standards were allowed to slip when shoddy science was given headlines without being challenged. The public has--rightfully--gained scepticism of contemporary science because contemporary science is rife with shoddy work, junk science, and charlatans, all of which go completely uncontested. Science has become a kind of market for lemons and the blames lies at the feet of professional scientists who allowed their fields to be undermined.
The only difference is that your payment came (and comes) in the form of taxes, rather than student loans (or whatever else).
I pay it gladly.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing?
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
Well the claim its your own work, when its the work of somewone else is where its plagarism.
Sorry, the Work for Hire principle trumps your ethical principles. If you pay someone for the copyright of their work then the work belongs to you in its entireity just as thought you had written it yourself. Plagiarism does not apply--at least legally.
Academic fraud perhaps. But this isn't plagiarism by a long shot.
Homosexuality isn't like robbery or assault, it doesn't affect anyone except for those that participate in it.
It affects the people who are offended by it. They are offended--outraged even. And in a democratic society, these outraged people have a voice, and these voices in total are loud enough to force governments to punish the people who's behavior caused the offended people to become offended.
In fact, offense doesn't even really come into it. You can just have enough people who simply don't like another group and who will vote in punitive laws that will punish that group for simply existing. This is Democracy 101, otherwise known as the Tyranny of the Majority or at least the tyranny of the people who control the majority.
And this is largely how democracy is practiced today. And in case you think this only works one way, consider other things which have been banned/restricted like indoor smoking, fox hunting and chemical equipment ownership. In an age where the will of the people is absolute, people get what they vote for; or what other people paid to get them to vote for.
Can anyone suggest how punctuation or outright surgery can make this headline better, because it just melted into a puddle of of words the first few times I read it. By the way, it's not just Slashdot that's prone to constructing these liquidized headlines. You even see this sort of confusing thing in the BBC News headlines.
Do you folks compulsively open every link in a new tab?
Not every link, but certainly any link which "branches" from the current page workflow if you will. For example, when reading a Slashdot comment page, I would open a comment tree in a new tab, or a reply to comment in a new tab rather than overwriting the main discussion thread(which I'm still reading).
Is there a reason you never close a tab when you're done with it?
When are you "done" with a tab? Certainly I will close down some if it's obvious I'm finished with them, but sometimes I either forget or just leave them by. And going through a tab list to see what's still being used and what isn't would be a pretty laborious process (usually I either "close all other tabs" or restart the session when things get too stale.) Keep in mind that the Firefox session may be running for days or even weeks, so things can accumulate, and while knowning when to open tabs is a clear task, knowing when to close them is not so straightforward.
Compare this problem to a filesystem with many open files. If a program has opened many files, and hasn't used them in a while, how do you know if they should be closed?
In either case the gender of one child is known...
Not exactly. In one case this is so; the gender of one child is known. But in the other the gender of a (specific) child is known. The difference here is between saying something about a set of elements and saying something about an instance of an element. One allows the element to bet any element in the set, but the other explicitly fixes the element, amount (I believe) to sampling without replacement before the question is even posed.
But who knows... confronted with a pile of $150k, tax free...
Effectively this is exactly what actual prostitutes are confronted with every single day. And this is the problem with adopting the position that prostitution is always wrong.
You can say its demeaning, or that greed should not justify selling yourself to others for the evening. But the reality is that most professional prostitutes earn more money doing what they do than they could otherwise. When you make prostitution illegal, you effectively tell these people that they must give up their better paying positions and take on often far lower paying ones simply because you disapprove of what they do.
You're free to disapprove, but is it right to take away someones income for that reason alone? Going back to the topic, these people have made money out of this internet video. A lot of money in fact, that can be used to give a better life to David and the rest of his family. If we claim that David's misfortune is being exploited and that this shouldn't be allowed, will it be right to take away the benefits that this video brought to spare feelings?
Who should be making these decisions? Society or individuals?
It looks to me like it's the established music (and film as well) industry whose position on copyright is radical and extreme.
Moreover, their own extreme position is the real motivator behind their opinion of the opposite side of the debate. It's similar to debates in the culture wars or similar debates where one side accuses the other of having an "agenda" when in reality it is they who have ulterior motives beyond the matters at hand.
Essentially what is going on here is that the copyright industry is trying to label those in favour of reform as extremists in an effort to shut them out. It's actually surprising that its taken them this long to reach this strategy. As history has shown, such tactics work very well--in the US in particular--where you can turn a debate completely on its head by proclaiming the exact opposite of what's going on. The best example of this is: "The Media has a Liberal Bias."
The ultimate objective here is to make copyleft illegal and ensure that copyright is legally the only game in town. It's not implausible that ASCAP et al may succeed in this endeavor.
I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
I would typically have about 100+ tabs open towards the end of any given browsing day. Towards the end, opening say a Slashdot page would typically bring Firefox to a halt and running flash of any kind (they run anyway despite flashblock) will likely make the browser crash. How much of this is system issues (especially with sound) and how much is Firefox I cannot say, but I can tell you this: Firefox gets slower the more you use the instance. But I can also tell you that Firefox is not using noticeably more memory at the end of the day that at the beginning.
My opinion is that Firefox has a memory fragmentation problem, not a leak problem.
You would be right if the question had been phrased "I have two children and Dennis is my son. What is the probability that he has a brother?". And by the way, this is exactly how most people will read the question as "boy" is generally understood to refer to a specific instance, not a template. Dennis here is indeed a named boy, distinct from all other boys (and girls).
But the question was not meant to be understood in this way by the questioner (who was out to fool people). The question can be read in this this way (and if so the questioner gets to feel smug about themselves). "I have two children and I have at least one son. What is the probability that I have two sons?".
So to clarify. Most people will effectively understand the question to mean: 1) "I have two children and a boy is my son. What is the probability that he has a brother?" The questioner will claim that his question really meant: 2) "I have two children and I have at least one son. What is the probability that I have two sons?" Two very different questions with two different answers (1/2 and 1/3 respectively). The problem here is less people's mathematics than the imprecision of the questioner.
In fact, reading the actual question: "I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?" This to me appears closer to 1) rather than 2) above. The boy in this question seems to me to be a particular instance rather than an element of a group.
Do you see anywhere that Congress has made a law that says visible tattoos are bad?..... This is a corporate policy.
Corporations exist because of the laws that Congress passes, and so their corporate "policies"--which increasingly dictate the lives of millions--also exist because of the laws that the government passes. I don't regard this argument as a stretch of the imagination, as because corporations are not people, literally everything they do must essentially be preapproved by the government via some legal framework.
Note that my argument here says nothing about individuals or unlimited businesses disallowing people with tattoos, etc. As you say, the Government has made no law against that. However, what the Government has done is passed laws allowing corporations to be formed which can disallow people for this reason. Every corporation has a government charter which allowing it to do business, and hence allowing it to disallow people with tattoos.
When everything they do is by some writ of Government, it's hard to argue that the Government is not a party to what corporations get up to.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless we're doing integration, in which case we call it "quadrature" to save face.
Because 90+% of the infrastructure you use daily was funded by other people too.
And why stop there!?! Why not "cure" deficient fetuses suffering from complications such as: homosexuality, aspergers, short height, dark skin, small ears, low IQs, obesity, ugliness, pug noses, and whichever other deficiencies the gene astrologers claim they can detect. Let us not suffer from the impact of inaction by not terminating these sub-human types before they quicken in their mother's womb. Towards an enlightened tomorrow.
More fundamentally, it needs people to believe that Gold is actually worth something. At the end of the day, Gold is just another metal, and not even an especially rare one. While it has several advantages, most of Gold's monetary values derives from cultural factors, not the inherent rarity or utility of the metal. The spike we're seeing right now in the price of Gold has nothing to do with the supply or industrial demand for it, but rather is solely down to it being perceived as a safe harbour in uncertain times. And it is seen as such only because it is seen as such--circular logic being all too common in finance.
The day someone discovers vast gold deposits somewhere, a cheaper method of mining, or a more desirable material, gold too will go the way of so called "fiat currencies".
High quality science can come out of corporate labs, but only when it is in the interests of the company. There is little doubt that PepsiCo scientists are well aware of the health effects of their companies products, but there isn't a snowball's chance in a sauna that such information will ever be released on their blog. In the meantime, the carefully controlled flow of information putting the company and its products in a positive light gains credence and respectability by being on a credible site such a Scienceblogs, and all the while every other blog on the site loses credence by having this propaganda held up next to their content.
This has been dubbed corporate propaganda, and it's a succinct and insightful description. The entity known as PepsiCo may have been granted the human freedom of speech to engage in this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean other people have to associate themselves with it.
And what makes you think the situation for traditional media sources is any better? Personally, I think blogs do a far better job than traditional media sources in providing high quality, relevant and original content.
More and more, it's becoming obvious that even the most outlandish dystopian works are still trumped by the maxim that "truth is stranger than fiction". The abuses of corporations imagined by sci-fi authors are nothing compared to the ruthless ingenuity of real world corporations and their employees.
I don't mean to burst your Helium bubble, but the stuff is actually produced naturally by radioactive decay in the crust, etc. You may have heard of things called alpha particles, which sometimes have the symbol He2+. All you need to do to get Helium at this point is add 2 electrons, and we're not short on those.
If ever there was an example of shallow, inane, uncritical and utterly monochrome thinking, this is it. The thinking of this elected representative has gone somthing like this:
Asbestos is bad. Rock is associated in some way with Asbestos. Therefore rock is bad. Ban rock.
Students of basic logic/philosophy may weep, but this is not only the thinking of the representative, but also of a substantial portion of the California electorate and indeed the electorate throughout the western world. This pantomime logic characterizes many of the reasons for why California in particular is the way it is. Politicians and voters who are opinionated, vocal and hubristic, yet simultaneously uncritical, gullible and capricious.
To compound matters Californians decided that this irresponsible electorate should have the ability to override any and all other checks and balances in the state, from the courts to the government to the civil service. And they did; and the state is all but a wreck as a result. This is what comes from placing the will of the people on a pedestal.
The old Greek theory divided governments into three basic forms; rule by the people, rule by a select group, and rule by a single person. What's often forgotten is that each of the three forms had both virtues and vices. A single dictator might be cruel, but could also be a decisive leader. Similarly, the people could rule for the benefit of all, but they could also degenerate into rule by the mob or by demagogues. The western form of Government is(really was) an attempt to blend all three governments; a lower house and referendums to represent the people, a largely appointed upper house to represent select groups, and a single president/kind to represent a single person.
The Californians have forsaken these lessons and history by giving all power to the people and allowing no other checks and balances. If nothing else, the state is a textbook case of what happens when a state loses balance in its form of government.
Yet, the failure of the PSP Go suggest the exact opposite; some people like their physical media.
I suspect the difference here is in how PC and Console players view their purchases. With PC games, a game is understood to be a software purchase, something that has to be installed and configured, typically on only one machine and thereafter tied to that device. There has never been a resale market on PC games and they're not exactly the kind of thing you loan to a friend. The view of a PC game is therefore closer to the view of a MS Office disc.
However with console games the situation is different. Console games have always been understood to be concrete "physical" purchases, not software. You didn't buy a program running Super Mario Bros, and you didn't really buy the "game"; what you bought was the cartridge, the physical product which contained that software. And that cartridge could be used on any NES system in virtually the same way as a tape or CD could be used on any respective player. (Tapes and CDs have since been replaced with mp3s, but I would argue that while they are digital, mp3s still retain a measure of tangibility for most users)
Nowadays, the cartridge has been replaced with a disc but the concept remains. When you buy a console game, you buy a physical product like a DVD which can be used on _any_ compatible system. You didn't (explicitly) buy software. There's a whole culture surrounding this subtle distinction: people take games to their friends houses, or loan them to others; they resell the games they have; people have game librarys with shelves and shelves of titles which can all still be played as long as a compatible device is available. Console game ownership is in this sense far closer to book ownership. And like books, console gamers will prefer to own a tangible hardcopy of a game rather than an e-version.
PC games do not appear to have this same culture. You might keep the discs etc, but your PC game collection is not going to be on a shelf in your living room, ready to be popped into a player. The requirements of re-installation, product codes, compatibility and DRM all mean that a PC title does not have the same level of direct association of product->game that is seen with consoles. Therefore, PC game players will not associate their game DVDs with the game itself as strongly as a console player would.
So for this reason, digital downloads can succeed for PC games while still falling short in the console world. However, if PC games should ever reach the same level of convenience/modularity as console games, this situation may change. So, if Microsoft ever get their act together about Windows gaming, Steam might see significant fall off.
You mean, people actually read Youtube comments enough to warrant this addon?
Everyone knows the numbers from 0-9 too, but that doesn't mean we should go back to using numbers only instead of domain names.
Too complicated. The best analogy is simply to say that GS, etc al are filled with shallow crooks who can and will trick and con everyone they meet out of every cent they have.
Precisely. As a profession, scientists have failed to protect their own reputations. Standards were allowed to slip when shoddy science was given headlines without being challenged. The public has--rightfully--gained scepticism of contemporary science because contemporary science is rife with shoddy work, junk science, and charlatans, all of which go completely uncontested. Science has become a kind of market for lemons and the blames lies at the feet of professional scientists who allowed their fields to be undermined.
I pay it gladly.
Sorry, the Work for Hire principle trumps your ethical principles. If you pay someone for the copyright of their work then the work belongs to you in its entireity just as thought you had written it yourself. Plagiarism does not apply--at least legally.
Academic fraud perhaps. But this isn't plagiarism by a long shot.
It affects the people who are offended by it. They are offended--outraged even. And in a democratic society, these outraged people have a voice, and these voices in total are loud enough to force governments to punish the people who's behavior caused the offended people to become offended.
In fact, offense doesn't even really come into it. You can just have enough people who simply don't like another group and who will vote in punitive laws that will punish that group for simply existing. This is Democracy 101, otherwise known as the Tyranny of the Majority or at least the tyranny of the people who control the majority.
And this is largely how democracy is practiced today. And in case you think this only works one way, consider other things which have been banned/restricted like indoor smoking, fox hunting and chemical equipment ownership. In an age where the will of the people is absolute, people get what they vote for; or what other people paid to get them to vote for.
G to A to C a T for Y.
Meaning presumably,
$NOUN1 to $VERB1 to $VERB2 a $NOUN2 for $NOUN3.
Can anyone suggest how punctuation or outright surgery can make this headline better, because it just melted into a puddle of of words the first few times I read it. By the way, it's not just Slashdot that's prone to constructing these liquidized headlines. You even see this sort of confusing thing in the BBC News headlines.
Not every link, but certainly any link which "branches" from the current page workflow if you will. For example, when reading a Slashdot comment page, I would open a comment tree in a new tab, or a reply to comment in a new tab rather than overwriting the main discussion thread(which I'm still reading).
When are you "done" with a tab? Certainly I will close down some if it's obvious I'm finished with them, but sometimes I either forget or just leave them by. And going through a tab list to see what's still being used and what isn't would be a pretty laborious process (usually I either "close all other tabs" or restart the session when things get too stale.) Keep in mind that the Firefox session may be running for days or even weeks, so things can accumulate, and while knowning when to open tabs is a clear task, knowing when to close them is not so straightforward.
Compare this problem to a filesystem with many open files. If a program has opened many files, and hasn't used them in a while, how do you know if they should be closed?
Not exactly. In one case this is so; the gender of one child is known. But in the other the gender of a (specific) child is known. The difference here is between saying something about a set of elements and saying something about an instance of an element. One allows the element to bet any element in the set, but the other explicitly fixes the element, amount (I believe) to sampling without replacement before the question is even posed.
Effectively this is exactly what actual prostitutes are confronted with every single day. And this is the problem with adopting the position that prostitution is always wrong.
You can say its demeaning, or that greed should not justify selling yourself to others for the evening. But the reality is that most professional prostitutes earn more money doing what they do than they could otherwise. When you make prostitution illegal, you effectively tell these people that they must give up their better paying positions and take on often far lower paying ones simply because you disapprove of what they do.
You're free to disapprove, but is it right to take away someones income for that reason alone? Going back to the topic, these people have made money out of this internet video. A lot of money in fact, that can be used to give a better life to David and the rest of his family. If we claim that David's misfortune is being exploited and that this shouldn't be allowed, will it be right to take away the benefits that this video brought to spare feelings?
Who should be making these decisions? Society or individuals?
Moreover, their own extreme position is the real motivator behind their opinion of the opposite side of the debate. It's similar to debates in the culture wars or similar debates where one side accuses the other of having an "agenda" when in reality it is they who have ulterior motives beyond the matters at hand.
Essentially what is going on here is that the copyright industry is trying to label those in favour of reform as extremists in an effort to shut them out. It's actually surprising that its taken them this long to reach this strategy. As history has shown, such tactics work very well--in the US in particular--where you can turn a debate completely on its head by proclaiming the exact opposite of what's going on. The best example of this is: "The Media has a Liberal Bias."
The ultimate objective here is to make copyleft illegal and ensure that copyright is legally the only game in town. It's not implausible that ASCAP et al may succeed in this endeavor.
I would typically have about 100+ tabs open towards the end of any given browsing day. Towards the end, opening say a Slashdot page would typically bring Firefox to a halt and running flash of any kind (they run anyway despite flashblock) will likely make the browser crash. How much of this is system issues (especially with sound) and how much is Firefox I cannot say, but I can tell you this: Firefox gets slower the more you use the instance. But I can also tell you that Firefox is not using noticeably more memory at the end of the day that at the beginning.
My opinion is that Firefox has a memory fragmentation problem, not a leak problem.
You would be right if the question had been phrased "I have two children and Dennis is my son. What is the probability that he has a brother?". And by the way, this is exactly how most people will read the question as "boy" is generally understood to refer to a specific instance, not a template. Dennis here is indeed a named boy, distinct from all other boys (and girls).
But the question was not meant to be understood in this way by the questioner (who was out to fool people). The question can be read in this this way (and if so the questioner gets to feel smug about themselves). "I have two children and I have at least one son. What is the probability that I have two sons?".
So to clarify. Most people will effectively understand the question to mean:
1) "I have two children and a boy is my son. What is the probability that he has a brother?"
The questioner will claim that his question really meant:
2) "I have two children and I have at least one son. What is the probability that I have two sons?"
Two very different questions with two different answers (1/2 and 1/3 respectively). The problem here is less people's mathematics than the imprecision of the questioner.
In fact, reading the actual question:
"I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
This to me appears closer to 1) rather than 2) above. The boy in this question seems to me to be a particular instance rather than an element of a group.
Corporations exist because of the laws that Congress passes, and so their corporate "policies"--which increasingly dictate the lives of millions--also exist because of the laws that the government passes. I don't regard this argument as a stretch of the imagination, as because corporations are not people, literally everything they do must essentially be preapproved by the government via some legal framework.
Note that my argument here says nothing about individuals or unlimited businesses disallowing people with tattoos, etc. As you say, the Government has made no law against that. However, what the Government has done is passed laws allowing corporations to be formed which can disallow people for this reason. Every corporation has a government charter which allowing it to do business, and hence allowing it to disallow people with tattoos.
When everything they do is by some writ of Government, it's hard to argue that the Government is not a party to what corporations get up to.