When I was in high school our science teacher showed us representation of molecules using just plastic balls. These damned spectroscopes are just for sissies who do not know how to do chemistry with plastic balls!
And of course all that a chem lab ever needs is a couple of bunsen burners and a few flasks. And the computer power can be provided by a 80386.
I have worked with location data provided by carriers to an emergency management system, and here are my thoughts:
First, and main, the location info provided by carriers is not what you see at the movies. It is not a blinking dot in a map showing if the phone is in the men's toilet or the ladies'one. Regularr cell towers have three arrays of antennas placed in a triangles, at most the cell company knows which antenna is receiving and the power. Add to that that EM waves can be affected by environment (EM noise, buildings) and all that they give us is a wide area where there is a probability that the phone is.
Also, cell towers are designed to serve an area as wide as possible. In cities the area is smaller due to the high density of phones (each cell tower has maximum capacity due to frequency hopping) and because there are more obstacles, but it is still big.
So, the FBI probably needed custom equipment to locate the phone more precisely.
As for the basis of the article, I think the real issue is if they processed calls from some other people, or if they only allowed the device they were searching for into their equipment. If it is the former, they seriously stepped out of bonds and that technic should be illegal (it will be akin to get an order to register the house of "Mr X" and using it to register all the houses in town because they don't know where Mr. X lives). If it is the later, it is more a technicism (if it is really a search or a wiretap? Anyway, most judges warranting a search would need not a lot more for warranting a wiretap), so it is important for this particular case in particular but not for others.
Correction... if it takes over 100 hours a week it is industrial. Except for a few exceptions (preparing the terrain, seeding, harvesting), farming is not that labour intensive.... The size of the terrain that would need 100 hours a week constantly for just one inmate is so big (keep in mind that terrain would need to be watched as closely as the prison itself) as to doubt about your claim.
Oh boy, breathe a little until the red color in your sight disappear....
First, you are missing the whole point just to rant a little (the sentence time has nothing to do about that).
Inmates have some rights (if it disturbs you, then you can go fuck yourself). They are sentenced to x time of privation of liberty, not x time of torture or assault by other inmates or living in a dangerous environment. Do you think it is too soft? Vote one of those demagogues that promise a "hard line" (but don't be surprised when they apply it to you).
Since you don't seem to bother to even RTFS, I'll explain it to you dumbed down: Inmates are allowed certains gadgets based on some given rules. Inmate asks that he is allowed a gadget that does not follow the rules. It is denied. Inmate sues. Inmate loses.
So, what is the reason for the rant (other than showing us your poor reading skills)? Showing off your righteous indignation? We are not really impressed, can't you see it?
A few months later I saw an article in the local paper pointing out that approximately 1 ton of lead fishing tackle is lost in Minnesota lakes each year. This value I am sure shocked lots of people as 1 ton sounds like a lot of material, but when put in the perspective that this is only about 1 cubic foot spread across all the 15,000+ lakes in the state it is really a trivial amount. I do my part and use bismuth or tungsten tackle as I don't want to add to the problem.
The issue is not only amount, but location and form (v.g., a few grams of lead going straight to your heart is a big problem), and the fact that heavy metal poisoning is cumulative (once it gets in your organism it remains there forever, because your body has no ways of dealing with it). It is not a problem in the sense that it is so much that there will be shortage of lead for other users or that you will see lead everywhere, but it is really a problem worth informing about (that I am not saying that everyone is going to die out of lead poisoning) so people can do something about that (as you do).
To put an analogy, someone could say that a CO concentration of 0,084% is trivial. But at that concentration, your available oxygen drops to half the usual levels (even if in the air the O2 is at the usual 21% concentration). Magnitudes for poisons are just... different.
Ignoring the people from other countries who speaks English:
If Russians invaders killed most of the people currently living in the USA(*), and the survivors had to deal with Russian occupation authorities, you would surprised how quickly all of the books in Library of Congress become "cryptic scribblings".
*: Remember than until recently only a minority of people knew to read and write.
Because the official history is the Europeans built a country in a place where there was nothing before them.
If you do not phrase it correctly, then history could point out that the USA has the same legality than, say, the German occupation of Poland, and far less than Vichy France.
Anyway my point is not against the USA (you could say exactly the same of all of the countries in the world). My point is that some people thinks (rightly?) that the mass of the people need a "polished" story, with good vs evil and that kind of things. And then, later, the mass of people goes to vote on election day....
Sad.
Side note: Here in Spain, at school we are reminded of the heroic history of Numantia, an Iberian city who chose to die before surrending to Romans. There is even a football club by this name, "Numancia". The funny thing is that, if the Numantines died to the last and romans won, then we are descendent of the Romans and no one is descendent of the Numantians...:-D
Yes, but the question is that at the time Ptolomy had been corrected. By the knowledge of the era, there was nothing but sea there.
The fact that he had a map and chose to use Ptolomy data points that someone got there and reported land. Not knowing better (and because everybody wanted to get to Asia), they just labelled that land "Asia" and then chose the theory that would prove them right.
Yes. In fact the fast expansion of the Spaniards was helped by the natives civil wars and by the fact that many tribes chose to side with the Spaniards against the Aztec, Inca yokes.
I understand that to a kid you need to teach a simple history. I hope that when students grow older, these histories are improved by showing the hidden complexity, not by chosing just a different, simple, POV.
Columbus is the first recorded traveller to America.
Lots of facts points to previous knowledge:
He disregarderd the scientifical knowledge of his time, that knew that the Earth was too big and Asia would not be reachable by the West, with their ships.
Instead, he defend an Earth size too small but that situated Asia East coast where America was.
IMHO, Americo Vespuccio (the man who realized that those lands were not Asia) should deserve more credit.
That said, do not subestimate Columbus. Getting in the ships of these days and getting deep into the ocean, hoping that the data that has arrived to you is correct and you do not die of starvation, thirst or scurvy is not a little show of courage...
Living or dead tissue, the carbon remains in the tree.
IMHO, the real issue is that young trees grow both horizontally AND vertically. There is a limit as how tall a tree can be (difficulty in getting water to the top, structural tensions).
Well, maybe it is just my ludite side showing up, but I think that the first step should be stop unearthing and burning all the carbon already sequestred (sequestrated?) underground.
If you want to improve it, then just get the carbon out of the trees (pressure + heat with no oxygen) and bury it.
Just like cheating with electronic voting machines is orders of magnitude more difficult than paper ballots?
Uh? Where did you get that analogy from? Can you get your money back?
I'll write my second paragraph AGAIN, but this time a little slower so ANYBODY can get it...
This article is about providing help to decide about something that can be difficult to evaluate (was the ball received before or after the base was reached? was it thrown well enough?) Put two umpires to evaluate a situation, you can get two different answers and it does not mean any of them is not honest (subjectivity). This subjectivity meant a loss of accountability(bad faith decisions can be masked as honest errors), offset by the fact that the games are in public and recently saved so an obvious interference could be noticed and acted upon.
With ballots, there are clearer rules (the ballot goes for A, for B, is void....). So, the "fact" can be easily stated (objectivity). Accountability was the usual problem, and it was obtained by mixing enough people in the process so it would be difficult to all of them to agree to anything (not that it did always work).
In the first case, the issue to treat was subjectivity / point of view, and that solution will mean that certain additional accountability measures are to be set. In the second one, accountability.
In essence, you are comparing solutions designed to solve different problems. It is like saying that trucks are useless because it is more efficient for you to commute in a compact car. That is missleaded enough, but you are also ignoring that there are electronic voting solutions that provide "old-fashioned" accountability by receipt printing.
Mmmmm... first, the issue that from your words it looks like every umpire in every game in every sport is being bribed, or in risk of being. So much for conspiracy theories. There are economic interests in the game and when this happens there is always a risk of illegal behavior, ok. Jumping from that to "the system looks legit because there are too many groups trying to rig it" is quite unfounded. We know that for some people "free market" is the blanket answer to every question, but this is ridiculous.
Second. Right now, if someone bribes an umpire, it cannot be proven other than by the money movement. An umpire does fail? It was not a good day for him. The fails favour only one of the sides? Bad luck. Change that against "the robot code is calibrated before the game, the SHA1 of the code compared with the official one, then calibrated again after the game and stored for independ review" and you get that cheating with robots is orders of magnitude more difficult than with human umpires. Changes in robots are traceable. An incorrect decision? Go to the program, feed the same input, find if it is a software bug or manipulation. You would need to have a signficant part of the organization in your pocket for it to work. If you think that someone can get away with it, I think it is safe to assume that "that someone" can already be owning all of the umpires, all of the officials, all of the teams, all of the games now.
The trick is that, if the host of the content does not accept your request you have to sue.
In practice, the law is equal to everyone. But now, if you say something bad about someone (let's call him Mr. Berlus, or Mr. Coni), as he can pay for a lawyer (or lots of them) you are in Mr. Berlus'hands, because if you do not write what he wants you'll be looking at the bad end of his lawyers.
If Mr. Berlus or one of his cons writes something bad about you and you can not afford a lawyer, then Mr. Berlus can just ignore you. Even if you can get the lawyer, Mr. Berlus has all that he need to delay the procedures in court (several embezzlement charges against some Italian Prime Minister were discarded this way).
First of all, we are not talking about religion but morality. In this aspects, religions are just one more tool in order to force a more or less coherent morality in a group of people; instead of carefuling arguing about the pros and cons of killing your neighbour while he is sleeping, you say: "Thou shall not kill, because if you kill you will suffer a lot and if you do not kill you will be ok. And this is say by an almighty God so you can't evade the consequences".
Examples of a morality not focused at stability? Well, if you find that the Vikings were an example of a moral directed at stability... Usually these appears between young people, and in frontier / nomadic communities. The first centuries of Islam could be a good example, and the age of discoveries.
Of course, I already put you an example of a different morality and you just disregarded it, because it did not follow your morality tenets... and then asked for more examples. LOL. The essence of what I am saying is that you cannot say that any other people morality is "wrong" or "right", because all of them (even yours, even mine) have a subjetive base. It is like saying that Mars gravity is "wrong" because the weight of a given object on Earth does not match its weight on Earth. At most what you can say is that you "like" or "don't like" them, principally based in how similar they are to your own morality.
That said, to avoid yet more circular reasoning I am not going to follow in this thread anymore, as I have already made my point (regardless of if you have seen / accepted it).
....The US was democratic when it had slaves...
For values of democratic low enough. Another example of how morality changes.
Again, not. You chose an utilitarian morality, and as your utilitarian point of view sees safety or comfort as paramount, you conclude that a morality that servers both is the best. And, not surprisingly, that morality is an utilitarian one.
And saying that a moral is the best because it is "stable". First, it is another assumption you make out of nowhere, and second... well, modern democratic moralities have a couple of centuries, at best. The european feudal system lasted almost one millenia, the Indian caste system probably twice, Confucianism in China a little less...
Do not get me wrong. probably your morality or mine is not that different; after all both of us probably a common set of influences so the outcomes will be similar. But if someone sees the world in another view, I am not the owner of the "right" or "god given" or "more natural" morality. Yet, the fact that I cannot give an absolute theory for my principles does not mean a thing; they are still my principles and in no way inferior to anybody else principles.
Minimization of harm + golden rule. The slavery example wouldn't pass that because people wouldn't agree to enslave themselves
That's the morality that you want to apply. The slavers used another morality. Maybe my morality is different, too. Can you argue with that (other than saying which one do you prefer)?
Well, not that I am religious at all, but you should try to look at the story at a different angle.
First, the daughters were not "cattle". The story is told to show how "moral" Lot was. So it implies that offering the daughters was a sacrifice. If Lot had offered the mob free beer, then we would have no conflict, no story.
Second, the value of hospitality has varied with times. In Lot times, not offering shelter to someone might very well mean that that person ended up dead (no police, no restaurant/hotel/water everywhere, no phone to call for help or ATM to get money). Also, giving hospitality to the wrong people could mean death to inhabitants. So, a very strict code was in place, and it was not unheard of that all the shelterer family fought to the dead to defend the sheltered.
About the fact that if the mob could force Lot to give his daughters, the mob would have obtained anything, this is misleading. These mobs went against the foreigners because they were foreigner, and hence they thought nobody in the town would care and the foreigner would be defenseless. It is a different thing to target someone of the town at random, even the most clumsy in the mob would have found that it created a dangerous precedent against them. The choice was not daughters vs foreigners, but daughters vs dying (with all of his family) defending the foreigners (because Lot was righteous and would have honored his duties).
Of course even in Lot times there would be some people who would have just given the foreigners away. That is the main point of the story, Lot took a dificult decission in order to do the right thing. Of course, nowadays the family security is more important than the security of any host, so the right thing would be just the opposite. But that does not mean that giving to a mob an innocent man holed in you house is a small thing, neither.
Slashdot Mirror
Without any genre of doubt, these clouds are the most boring objects of the universe to live in...
Oh man, how right are you.
When I was in high school our science teacher showed us representation of molecules using just plastic balls. These damned spectroscopes are just for sissies who do not know how to do chemistry with plastic balls!
And of course all that a chem lab ever needs is a couple of bunsen burners and a few flasks. And the computer power can be provided by a 80386.
Listen. Pacifism only works when you defend it. Pacifism without defense isn't pacifism -- it's denial.
Well... currently the US still has to get to the "Pacifism without offense" part...
I have worked with location data provided by carriers to an emergency management system, and here are my thoughts:
First, and main, the location info provided by carriers is not what you see at the movies. It is not a blinking dot in a map showing if the phone is in the men's toilet or the ladies'one. Regularr cell towers have three arrays of antennas placed in a triangles, at most the cell company knows which antenna is receiving and the power. Add to that that EM waves can be affected by environment (EM noise, buildings) and all that they give us is a wide area where there is a probability that the phone is.
Also, cell towers are designed to serve an area as wide as possible. In cities the area is smaller due to the high density of phones (each cell tower has maximum capacity due to frequency hopping) and because there are more obstacles, but it is still big.
So, the FBI probably needed custom equipment to locate the phone more precisely.
As for the basis of the article, I think the real issue is if they processed calls from some other people, or if they only allowed the device they were searching for into their equipment. If it is the former, they seriously stepped out of bonds and that technic should be illegal (it will be akin to get an order to register the house of "Mr X" and using it to register all the houses in town because they don't know where Mr. X lives). If it is the later, it is more a technicism (if it is really a search or a wiretap? Anyway, most judges warranting a search would need not a lot more for warranting a wiretap), so it is important for this particular case in particular but not for others.
Correction... if it takes over 100 hours a week it is industrial. Except for a few exceptions (preparing the terrain, seeding, harvesting), farming is not that labour intensive.... The size of the terrain that would need 100 hours a week constantly for just one inmate is so big (keep in mind that terrain would need to be watched as closely as the prison itself) as to doubt about your claim.
Oh boy, breathe a little until the red color in your sight disappear....
First, you are missing the whole point just to rant a little (the sentence time has nothing to do about that).
Inmates have some rights (if it disturbs you, then you can go fuck yourself). They are sentenced to x time of privation of liberty, not x time of torture or assault by other inmates or living in a dangerous environment. Do you think it is too soft? Vote one of those demagogues that promise a "hard line" (but don't be surprised when they apply it to you).
Since you don't seem to bother to even RTFS, I'll explain it to you dumbed down: Inmates are allowed certains gadgets based on some given rules. Inmate asks that he is allowed a gadget that does not follow the rules. It is denied. Inmate sues. Inmate loses.
So, what is the reason for the rant (other than showing us your poor reading skills)? Showing off your righteous indignation? We are not really impressed, can't you see it?
A few months later I saw an article in the local paper pointing out that approximately 1 ton of lead fishing tackle is lost in Minnesota lakes each year. This value I am sure shocked lots of people as 1 ton sounds like a lot of material, but when put in the perspective that this is only about 1 cubic foot spread across all the 15,000+ lakes in the state it is really a trivial amount. I do my part and use bismuth or tungsten tackle as I don't want to add to the problem.
The issue is not only amount, but location and form (v.g., a few grams of lead going straight to your heart is a big problem), and the fact that heavy metal poisoning is cumulative (once it gets in your organism it remains there forever, because your body has no ways of dealing with it). It is not a problem in the sense that it is so much that there will be shortage of lead for other users or that you will see lead everywhere, but it is really a problem worth informing about (that I am not saying that everyone is going to die out of lead poisoning) so people can do something about that (as you do).
To put an analogy, someone could say that a CO concentration of 0,084% is trivial. But at that concentration, your available oxygen drops to half the usual levels (even if in the air the O2 is at the usual 21% concentration). Magnitudes for poisons are just... different.
Ignoring the people from other countries who speaks English:
If Russians invaders killed most of the people currently living in the USA(*), and the survivors had to deal with Russian occupation authorities, you would surprised how quickly all of the books in Library of Congress become "cryptic scribblings".
*: Remember than until recently only a minority of people knew to read and write.
Because the official history is the Europeans built a country in a place where there was nothing before them.
If you do not phrase it correctly, then history could point out that the USA has the same legality than, say, the German occupation of Poland, and far less than Vichy France.
Anyway my point is not against the USA (you could say exactly the same of all of the countries in the world). My point is that some people thinks (rightly?) that the mass of the people need a "polished" story, with good vs evil and that kind of things. And then, later, the mass of people goes to vote on election day....
Sad.
Side note: Here in Spain, at school we are reminded of the heroic history of Numantia, an Iberian city who chose to die before surrending to Romans. There is even a football club by this name, "Numancia". The funny thing is that, if the Numantines died to the last and romans won, then we are descendent of the Romans and no one is descendent of the Numantians... :-D
Yes, but the question is that at the time Ptolomy had been corrected. By the knowledge of the era, there was nothing but sea there.
The fact that he had a map and chose to use Ptolomy data points that someone got there and reported land. Not knowing better (and because everybody wanted to get to Asia), they just labelled that land "Asia" and then chose the theory that would prove them right.
Yes. In fact the fast expansion of the Spaniards was helped by the natives civil wars and by the fact that many tribes chose to side with the Spaniards against the Aztec, Inca yokes.
I understand that to a kid you need to teach a simple history. I hope that when students grow older, these histories are improved by showing the hidden complexity, not by chosing just a different, simple, POV.
Columbus is the first recorded traveller to America.
Lots of facts points to previous knowledge:
IMHO, Americo Vespuccio (the man who realized that those lands were not Asia) should deserve more credit.
That said, do not subestimate Columbus. Getting in the ships of these days and getting deep into the ocean, hoping that the data that has arrived to you is correct and you do not die of starvation, thirst or scurvy is not a little show of courage...
Compress and heat it without oxygen, get carbon, bury the carbon.
Of course it would make more sense if we stopped unearthing the buried carbon first.
Living or dead tissue, the carbon remains in the tree.
IMHO, the real issue is that young trees grow both horizontally AND vertically. There is a limit as how tall a tree can be (difficulty in getting water to the top, structural tensions).
Well, maybe it is just my ludite side showing up, but I think that the first step should be stop unearthing and burning all the carbon already sequestred (sequestrated?) underground.
If you want to improve it, then just get the carbon out of the trees (pressure + heat with no oxygen) and bury it.
In fact, even Columbus "tried" to get into that route. Another smoking gun pointing to the possibility that there had been previous travellers.
Between 70 and 90 percent of **EVERYONE** between Tierra del Fuego and Point Barrow died in the course of 150 years.
Wow, people really lived a lot of years then... Nowadays, in 150 years, the mortality rate is 100%.
Yes, I know you meant that 70-90% died of Old World diseases... but I saw your wording and could not resist, sorry.
Just like cheating with electronic voting machines is orders of magnitude more difficult than paper ballots?
Uh? Where did you get that analogy from? Can you get your money back?
I'll write my second paragraph AGAIN, but this time a little slower so ANYBODY can get it...
This article is about providing help to decide about something that can be difficult to evaluate (was the ball received before or after the base was reached? was it thrown well enough?) Put two umpires to evaluate a situation, you can get two different answers and it does not mean any of them is not honest (subjectivity). This subjectivity meant a loss of accountability(bad faith decisions can be masked as honest errors), offset by the fact that the games are in public and recently saved so an obvious interference could be noticed and acted upon.
With ballots, there are clearer rules (the ballot goes for A, for B, is void....). So, the "fact" can be easily stated (objectivity). Accountability was the usual problem, and it was obtained by mixing enough people in the process so it would be difficult to all of them to agree to anything (not that it did always work).
In the first case, the issue to treat was subjectivity / point of view, and that solution will mean that certain additional accountability measures are to be set. In the second one, accountability.
In essence, you are comparing solutions designed to solve different problems. It is like saying that trucks are useless because it is more efficient for you to commute in a compact car. That is missleaded enough, but you are also ignoring that there are electronic voting solutions that provide "old-fashioned" accountability by receipt printing.
I hope to have answered your question...
Mmmmm... first, the issue that from your words it looks like every umpire in every game in every sport is being bribed, or in risk of being. So much for conspiracy theories. There are economic interests in the game and when this happens there is always a risk of illegal behavior, ok. Jumping from that to "the system looks legit because there are too many groups trying to rig it" is quite unfounded. We know that for some people "free market" is the blanket answer to every question, but this is ridiculous.
Second. Right now, if someone bribes an umpire, it cannot be proven other than by the money movement. An umpire does fail? It was not a good day for him. The fails favour only one of the sides? Bad luck. Change that against "the robot code is calibrated before the game, the SHA1 of the code compared with the official one, then calibrated again after the game and stored for independ review" and you get that cheating with robots is orders of magnitude more difficult than with human umpires. Changes in robots are traceable. An incorrect decision? Go to the program, feed the same input, find if it is a software bug or manipulation. You would need to have a signficant part of the organization in your pocket for it to work. If you think that someone can get away with it, I think it is safe to assume that "that someone" can already be owning all of the umpires, all of the officials, all of the teams, all of the games now.
The trick is that, if the host of the content does not accept your request you have to sue.
In practice, the law is equal to everyone. But now, if you say something bad about someone (let's call him Mr. Berlus, or Mr. Coni), as he can pay for a lawyer (or lots of them) you are in Mr. Berlus'hands, because if you do not write what he wants you'll be looking at the bad end of his lawyers.
If Mr. Berlus or one of his cons writes something bad about you and you can not afford a lawyer, then Mr. Berlus can just ignore you. Even if you can get the lawyer, Mr. Berlus has all that he need to delay the procedures in court (several embezzlement charges against some Italian Prime Minister were discarded this way).
First of all, we are not talking about religion but morality. In this aspects, religions are just one more tool in order to force a more or less coherent morality in a group of people; instead of carefuling arguing about the pros and cons of killing your neighbour while he is sleeping, you say: "Thou shall not kill, because if you kill you will suffer a lot and if you do not kill you will be ok. And this is say by an almighty God so you can't evade the consequences".
Examples of a morality not focused at stability? Well, if you find that the Vikings were an example of a moral directed at stability... Usually these appears between young people, and in frontier / nomadic communities. The first centuries of Islam could be a good example, and the age of discoveries.
Of course, I already put you an example of a different morality and you just disregarded it, because it did not follow your morality tenets... and then asked for more examples. LOL. The essence of what I am saying is that you cannot say that any other people morality is "wrong" or "right", because all of them (even yours, even mine) have a subjetive base. It is like saying that Mars gravity is "wrong" because the weight of a given object on Earth does not match its weight on Earth. At most what you can say is that you "like" or "don't like" them, principally based in how similar they are to your own morality.
That said, to avoid yet more circular reasoning I am not going to follow in this thread anymore, as I have already made my point (regardless of if you have seen / accepted it).
....The US was democratic when it had slaves...
For values of democratic low enough. Another example of how morality changes.
I'm not sure why I'm even bothering responding to some asshole...
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
Some people's anal fixation has been long studied by psychiatric science; maybe you should ask for professional help to solve that question.
Of course, IANAP and this is not medical counsel.
I hope you get better.
Again, not. You chose an utilitarian morality, and as your utilitarian point of view sees safety or comfort as paramount, you conclude that a morality that servers both is the best. And, not surprisingly, that morality is an utilitarian one.
And saying that a moral is the best because it is "stable". First, it is another assumption you make out of nowhere, and second... well, modern democratic moralities have a couple of centuries, at best. The european feudal system lasted almost one millenia, the Indian caste system probably twice, Confucianism in China a little less...
Do not get me wrong. probably your morality or mine is not that different; after all both of us probably a common set of influences so the outcomes will be similar. But if someone sees the world in another view, I am not the owner of the "right" or "god given" or "more natural" morality. Yet, the fact that I cannot give an absolute theory for my principles does not mean a thing; they are still my principles and in no way inferior to anybody else principles.
That's the morality that you want to apply. The slavers used another morality. Maybe my morality is different, too. Can you argue with that (other than saying which one do you prefer)?
In the end, just each one's wills at work.
Well, not that I am religious at all, but you should try to look at the story at a different angle.
First, the daughters were not "cattle". The story is told to show how "moral" Lot was. So it implies that offering the daughters was a sacrifice. If Lot had offered the mob free beer, then we would have no conflict, no story.
Second, the value of hospitality has varied with times. In Lot times, not offering shelter to someone might very well mean that that person ended up dead (no police, no restaurant/hotel/water everywhere, no phone to call for help or ATM to get money). Also, giving hospitality to the wrong people could mean death to inhabitants. So, a very strict code was in place, and it was not unheard of that all the shelterer family fought to the dead to defend the sheltered.
About the fact that if the mob could force Lot to give his daughters, the mob would have obtained anything, this is misleading. These mobs went against the foreigners because they were foreigner, and hence they thought nobody in the town would care and the foreigner would be defenseless. It is a different thing to target someone of the town at random, even the most clumsy in the mob would have found that it created a dangerous precedent against them. The choice was not daughters vs foreigners, but daughters vs dying (with all of his family) defending the foreigners (because Lot was righteous and would have honored his duties).
Of course even in Lot times there would be some people who would have just given the foreigners away. That is the main point of the story, Lot took a dificult decission in order to do the right thing. Of course, nowadays the family security is more important than the security of any host, so the right thing would be just the opposite. But that does not mean that giving to a mob an innocent man holed in you house is a small thing, neither.