I agree. When I was in seventh or eighth grade (mid-80s) we had a home economics class, which was required for everybody (boys and girls both). It was in three segments: how to cook, how to sew, and how to shop. The shopping part included stuff like how to fill out a check, what a loss leader is, how to recognize a bait-and-switch, and so on. In terms of long-term usefulness, it was one of the best classes I ever took. Something like that class really should be required in every school.
That's not really true. Before the war, the South had many wealthy individuals, but remember that their economy was entirely agricultural and they were totally dependent on only three cash crops (tobacco, sugar, and cotton.) By contrast, the North was heavily industrialized, had a much larger population, and had a much more diverse economy, and thus a much broader tax base. In fact, among the reasons the North won the war is that they were so much better financed.
Well, what that actually shows, I think, is that Oppenheimer was very, very good at talking his way out of trouble. Consider that after he tried to murder his graduate advisor, all that happened to him was that he had to see a psychiatrist for the 1920s equivalent of anger management. He received no other punishment and in fact he completed his graduate work at the same university.
Consider further that General Groves selected him to run the Manhattan Project even though he had all the following black marks against him: he was only 38, and would have to be in charge of many people senior to him; he was a theoretical physicist, and would have to be in charge of applied scientists; he had no administrative experience whatever; he had no mechanical aptitude at all and was helpless with the simplest machine; he was a leftist and all his friends were open Communists; and oh yeah, he tried to murder his graduate advisor. The lesson: it's really important to be a good interview.
You are correct that it is a holdover from British law, but it does not refer only to the Lords. It comes from the 39th Article of the Magna Carta, which reads:
Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super cum ibimus, nec super cum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terre.
legale judicium parium ("the lawful judgment of his peers") means exactly what the parent thinks it means: that the defendant shall be judged by a jury of people of his own condition. A commoner would have a jury of commoners, a lord would have a jury of lords. Since the United States Constitution does not recognize differences among the condition of citizens in the sense that Great Britain does, by definition any American citizen is the peer of any other. So every defendant in every American jury trial gets a "jury of his peers".
Most nurses spent at least part of their time in the kitchen, which was viewed as more important.
To be fair, at the time it really was more important. The state of surgery and medicine in general at that time was abysmal, and nurses had much more of an effect on soldiers by making their conditions, including the food, sanitary, than by assisting in surgery. To quote historian Barbara Haber: "But for most nurses in the North and South their greatest challenge...came from finding ways to prepare nourishing food for wounded soldiers. This work, sometimes performed in defiance of male hospital authorities, saved far more lives than primitive Civil War surgery."
According to The Bookseller of Kabul, the Taliban were preferable to the Communists in at least one way: Communist soldiers were mostly literate, while Taliban soldiers were not. So when the Communists raided Sultan Khan's bookshop, they knew what was what, and burned anything that was not state-approved. But when the Taliban soldiers raided his bookshop, they didn't know which books were which, and didn't want to risk burning something holy, so instead they only burned books with pictures in them (because making images of living things is haram, ritually forbidden.) So Sultan Khan could save his books from the Taliban by pasting index cards over the pictures; that didn't work against the Communists. Look for a silver lining where you can, I guess.
It isn't out of context. In that speech Cade is listing all the great things that will happen, come the revolution: two chickens in every pot, free beer for everybody, we'll make Friday part of the weekend and give every new baby a chocolate eclair. And the very first thing, of all these great things we're going to do, is kill all the lawyers. It means exactly what it sounds like, and Cade said it because he was a populist and he knew it was what everybody wanted to hear.
But if he does not want a movie made then why did he sell the rights!
He didn't. He's never had those rights. Those rights were held (and still are) by Warner Brothers, which owns DC Comics. Moore wrote Watchmen as a work-made-for-hire. The only rights he has are rights to a contractually-specified share of revenue from certain uses DC makes of his work. (Not all uses. There was a big stink in the eighties when Moore didn't get any share of the money for Watchmen merchandising because DC said that was promotional revenue, to which Moore is not entitled under the terms of the work-made-for-hire contract.)
So in other words, your reputation is more important than your actual work
No -- Your reputation *is* your actual work. Since I will never meet most OSS developers, or have any personal interaction with them at all, I must base my perception of them 100% on the quality and performance of their code.
In 1905 the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, decided to end the college's football program because he thought it was teaching the students the wrong lesson: namely, that winning is more important than doing your best. It took the intervention of the US President (Teddy Roosevelt) to get him to allow football to continue.
Personally I think Eliot was right. I followed sports closely when I was younger, but I don't any more, largely because I don't like the win-at-any-cost mentatlity that is responsible for the steroid issue as well as many others. I don't think I need to defend my position, either. I had no rational reason to follow sports in the first place (neither does anyone else), so I don't need a rational reason to stop.
Essentially, nobody believes that is a fair price for the app. Hence, the price is dishonest.
*I* believe the price is fair. Obviously the seller and the people who bought it agree with me. If I wanted the app, I'd buy it and I would not believe I had been cheated -- just like if I wanted to wear expensive jewelry, I'd buy that too.
That's a false analogy. The Katrina survivors in your example will pay anything they have to for water because they would die without it. The seller is taking advantage of their desperate need. This has no relation to the customers of the 'gem' app, who have no need for the product whatever -- in fact that's the whole point of buying it.
A 1k price does not correspond to the time, materials, and fair profit for the 'gem' app is represented well by a 1k price
Says who? Obviously some people think a 1k price does so correspond, because they willingly paid it. What makes you right and them wrong?
It is a misprepresentation.
Misrepresenting what? To whom? When you set a price on something, you're saying "Here is what I think is a fair price for this. If you agree, pay it; if you don't, don't." To borrow a phrase from another context, this was an honest exchange between consenting adults. No one involved did anything immoral or even objectionable.
And this '$999 gem' app was misrepresented -- by its price, if nothing else.
No it wasn't. The seller explicitly, honestly, and fully described the product. The people who bought it fully understood its function. It wasn't that they thought they were getting one thing but in fact were getting something different. What they got -- an app that puts a picture of a glowing gem on your phone and nothing else -- was exactly what they expected to get. They weren't suckers. They knew what they were getting and were willing to pay for it.
Just because you and I think this app has no value doesn't mean other people agree. Obviously some people think it has a great deal of value, since they were willing to pay a thousand dollars for it.
I once saw a sculpture by some modern artist that I thought was just awful. I wouldn't take it if it were free. But some guy (whose ideas about art are different to mine) thought it was great and willingly paid lots and lots of money for it. That guy wasn't a sucker. Just because I think that sculpture is worthless, that doesn't mean no one else is allowed to want it. Everyone sets his own values on different things. That's how the market works.
and didn't care about beeing sued for malpractice.
See? Fixed that for you...
That wouldn't be an issue in this case, since the patient was dying. In the USA, under the Good Samaritan Act, the "responder is not legally liable for the death, disfigurement or disability of the victim as long as the responder acted rationally, in good faith, and in accordance with his level of training."
Suppose the home-made device failed and the patient died. Since the patient would certainly have died if he had not acted, but might have lived if the doctor's plan had worked, that obviously qualifies as acting rationally and in good faith.
(The part about "in accordance with his level of training" is irrelevant in this case, because the "responder" was a qualified doctor. That caveat is meant to apply to non-doctors. For example, I'm not a doctor. So if your heart stops, and I break your ribs while giving you CPR, you can't sue me. But if you have a heart attack, and I attempt open-heart surgery on the spot, and you die, your estate can sue me.)
If you'd RFTA (but why should you be different?) you would have seen that the UK, just like the US, does indeed have miniature dialysis machines designed for children. However, this child -- weighing less than six pounds at birth -- was too small to use them. Not just the UK ones -- she was too small to use any existing dialysis machine anywhere in the world.
So, had this happened in the US, she would have been OK, just as long as she had a doctor who was willing to spend his own time and his own money inventing a new machine and building it himself in time to save her life.
Not that I back Hasbro, but purchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
Also known as "Do our R & D for us for free, and we'll give you money if you come up with something really good." That's I message I wouldn't just send, I'd broadcast it at top volume.
Mathematics is not a science. Science employs inductive reasoning, while mathematics employs deductive reasoning. That's why my university had a "Department of Math and Science".
Software is not "an engineering discipline." The process of writing software is an engineering discipline. Software itself is a self-consistent logical construct following a strict syntax -- in other words, it's math.
Yeah, but isn't that the same as saying "I don't care about privacy because I don't have anything to hide?" I don't watch pirated content on Youtube either (because I find television uninteresting) but I resent the idea of someone inspecting my viewing data. Not because I'm hding anything, but because it's none of their business.
As I understand it, Google bought Youtube *specifically because* Viacom was going to sue. Youtube didn't have the resources to fight a lawsuit from Viacom, so they would have had to settle and the most likely outcome would be that Viacom would end up owning Youtube's technology (which they would shelve) and patents (which they would use to stop other companies, Google included, from developing a Youtube equivalent.) So Google bought Youtube in order that Viacom would have to sue Google, which does have the resources to fight the lawsuit (also, presumably, Google thinks it can win it) and Google will wind up owning the technology and free from patent interference.
Exactly. I read Ringworld when I was about ten and all the sex stuff just went over my head. (I was aware that something I didn't quite get was happening, but that was all.)
This is also why my experience of Stephen R. Donaldson's work was rather different than most people's: when I read it, at age ten, I had never heard the word "rape" and didn't know what it meant, and so I never realized what actually happened at the start of the story, and never understood why everyone was so mad at Thomas Covenant.
So I wouldn't worry about it. Kids usually just let things go when they don't understand them. They won't be scarred for life.
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I agree. When I was in seventh or eighth grade (mid-80s) we had a home economics class, which was required for everybody (boys and girls both). It was in three segments: how to cook, how to sew, and how to shop. The shopping part included stuff like how to fill out a check, what a loss leader is, how to recognize a bait-and-switch, and so on. In terms of long-term usefulness, it was one of the best classes I ever took. Something like that class really should be required in every school.
That's not really true. Before the war, the South had many wealthy individuals, but remember that their economy was entirely agricultural and they were totally dependent on only three cash crops (tobacco, sugar, and cotton.) By contrast, the North was heavily industrialized, had a much larger population, and had a much more diverse economy, and thus a much broader tax base. In fact, among the reasons the North won the war is that they were so much better financed.
Well, what that actually shows, I think, is that Oppenheimer was very, very good at talking his way out of trouble. Consider that after he tried to murder his graduate advisor, all that happened to him was that he had to see a psychiatrist for the 1920s equivalent of anger management. He received no other punishment and in fact he completed his graduate work at the same university.
Consider further that General Groves selected him to run the Manhattan Project even though he had all the following black marks against him: he was only 38, and would have to be in charge of many people senior to him; he was a theoretical physicist, and would have to be in charge of applied scientists; he had no administrative experience whatever; he had no mechanical aptitude at all and was helpless with the simplest machine; he was a leftist and all his friends were open Communists; and oh yeah, he tried to murder his graduate advisor. The lesson: it's really important to be a good interview.
You are correct that it is a holdover from British law, but it does not refer only to the Lords. It comes from the 39th Article of the Magna Carta, which reads:
Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super cum ibimus, nec super cum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terre.
legale judicium parium ("the lawful judgment of his peers") means exactly what the parent thinks it means: that the defendant shall be judged by a jury of people of his own condition. A commoner would have a jury of commoners, a lord would have a jury of lords. Since the United States Constitution does not recognize differences among the condition of citizens in the sense that Great Britain does, by definition any American citizen is the peer of any other. So every defendant in every American jury trial gets a "jury of his peers".
Most nurses spent at least part of their time in the kitchen, which was viewed as more important.
To be fair, at the time it really was more important. The state of surgery and medicine in general at that time was abysmal, and nurses had much more of an effect on soldiers by making their conditions, including the food, sanitary, than by assisting in surgery. To quote historian Barbara Haber:
"But for most nurses in the North and South their greatest challenge...came from finding ways to prepare nourishing food for wounded soldiers. This work, sometimes performed in defiance of male hospital authorities, saved far more lives than primitive Civil War surgery."
According to The Bookseller of Kabul, the Taliban were preferable to the Communists in at least one way: Communist soldiers were mostly literate, while Taliban soldiers were not. So when the Communists raided Sultan Khan's bookshop, they knew what was what, and burned anything that was not state-approved. But when the Taliban soldiers raided his bookshop, they didn't know which books were which, and didn't want to risk burning something holy, so instead they only burned books with pictures in them (because making images of living things is haram, ritually forbidden.) So Sultan Khan could save his books from the Taliban by pasting index cards over the pictures; that didn't work against the Communists. Look for a silver lining where you can, I guess.
Well, in my own case it's because all the diesel cars I've had experience with wouldn't start when the temperature was below freezing.
Well, sure, but by the same logic everyone who gets paid by Apple to do anything is getting a share of the proceeds from the sale of iPods.
It isn't out of context. In that speech Cade is listing all the great things that will happen, come the revolution: two chickens in every pot, free beer for everybody, we'll make Friday part of the weekend and give every new baby a chocolate eclair. And the very first thing, of all these great things we're going to do, is kill all the lawyers. It means exactly what it sounds like, and Cade said it because he was a populist and he knew it was what everybody wanted to hear.
Stephenson is, thank God, no Heinlein.
But if he does not want a movie made then why did he sell the rights!
He didn't. He's never had those rights. Those rights were held (and still are) by Warner Brothers, which owns DC Comics. Moore wrote Watchmen as a work-made-for-hire. The only rights he has are rights to a contractually-specified share of revenue from certain uses DC makes of his work. (Not all uses. There was a big stink in the eighties when Moore didn't get any share of the money for Watchmen merchandising because DC said that was promotional revenue, to which Moore is not entitled under the terms of the work-made-for-hire contract.)
So in other words, your reputation is more important than your actual work
No -- Your reputation *is* your actual work. Since I will never meet most OSS developers, or have any personal interaction with them at all, I must base my perception of them 100% on the quality and performance of their code.
In 1905 the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, decided to end the college's football program because he thought it was teaching the students the wrong lesson: namely, that winning is more important than doing your best. It took the intervention of the US President (Teddy Roosevelt) to get him to allow football to continue.
Personally I think Eliot was right. I followed sports closely when I was younger, but I don't any more, largely because I don't like the win-at-any-cost mentatlity that is responsible for the steroid issue as well as many others. I don't think I need to defend my position, either. I had no rational reason to follow sports in the first place (neither does anyone else), so I don't need a rational reason to stop.
Essentially, nobody believes that is a fair price for the app. Hence, the price is dishonest.
*I* believe the price is fair. Obviously the seller and the people who bought it agree with me. If I wanted the app, I'd buy it and I would not believe I had been cheated -- just like if I wanted to wear expensive jewelry, I'd buy that too.
A 1k price does not correspond to the time, materials, and fair profit for the 'gem' app is represented well by a 1k price
Says who? Obviously some people think a 1k price does so correspond, because they willingly paid it. What makes you right and them wrong?
It is a misprepresentation.
Misrepresenting what? To whom? When you set a price on something, you're saying "Here is what I think is a fair price for this. If you agree, pay it; if you don't, don't." To borrow a phrase from another context, this was an honest exchange between consenting adults. No one involved did anything immoral or even objectionable.
And this '$999 gem' app was misrepresented -- by its price, if nothing else.
No it wasn't. The seller explicitly, honestly, and fully described the product. The people who bought it fully understood its function. It wasn't that they thought they were getting one thing but in fact were getting something different. What they got -- an app that puts a picture of a glowing gem on your phone and nothing else -- was exactly what they expected to get. They weren't suckers. They knew what they were getting and were willing to pay for it.
Just because you and I think this app has no value doesn't mean other people agree. Obviously some people think it has a great deal of value, since they were willing to pay a thousand dollars for it.
I once saw a sculpture by some modern artist that I thought was just awful. I wouldn't take it if it were free. But some guy (whose ideas about art are different to mine) thought it was great and willingly paid lots and lots of money for it. That guy wasn't a sucker. Just because I think that sculpture is worthless, that doesn't mean no one else is allowed to want it. Everyone sets his own values on different things. That's how the market works.
and didn't care about beeing sued for malpractice.
See? Fixed that for you...
That wouldn't be an issue in this case, since the patient was dying. In the USA, under the Good Samaritan Act, the "responder is not legally liable for the death, disfigurement or disability of the victim as long as the responder acted rationally, in good faith, and in accordance with his level of training."
Suppose the home-made device failed and the patient died. Since the patient would certainly have died if he had not acted, but might have lived if the doctor's plan had worked, that obviously qualifies as acting rationally and in good faith.
(The part about "in accordance with his level of training" is irrelevant in this case, because the "responder" was a qualified doctor. That caveat is meant to apply to non-doctors. For example, I'm not a doctor. So if your heart stops, and I break your ribs while giving you CPR, you can't sue me. But if you have a heart attack, and I attempt open-heart surgery on the spot, and you die, your estate can sue me.)
If you'd RFTA (but why should you be different?) you would have seen that the UK, just like the US, does indeed have miniature dialysis machines designed for children. However, this child -- weighing less than six pounds at birth -- was too small to use them. Not just the UK ones -- she was too small to use any existing dialysis machine anywhere in the world.
So, had this happened in the US, she would have been OK, just as long as she had a doctor who was willing to spend his own time and his own money inventing a new machine and building it himself in time to save her life.
Not that I back Hasbro, but purchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
Also known as "Do our R & D for us for free, and we'll give you money if you come up with something really good." That's I message I wouldn't just send, I'd broadcast it at top volume.
Mathematics is not a science. Science employs inductive reasoning, while mathematics employs deductive reasoning. That's why my university had a "Department of Math and Science".
Software is not "an engineering discipline." The process of writing software is an engineering discipline. Software itself is a self-consistent logical construct following a strict syntax -- in other words, it's math.
Yeah, but isn't that the same as saying "I don't care about privacy because I don't have anything to hide?" I don't watch pirated content on Youtube either (because I find television uninteresting) but I resent the idea of someone inspecting my viewing data. Not because I'm hding anything, but because it's none of their business.
As I understand it, Google bought Youtube *specifically because* Viacom was going to sue. Youtube didn't have the resources to fight a lawsuit from Viacom, so they would have had to settle and the most likely outcome would be that Viacom would end up owning Youtube's technology (which they would shelve) and patents (which they would use to stop other companies, Google included, from developing a Youtube equivalent.) So Google bought Youtube in order that Viacom would have to sue Google, which does have the resources to fight the lawsuit (also, presumably, Google thinks it can win it) and Google will wind up owning the technology and free from patent interference.
Exactly. I read Ringworld when I was about ten and all the sex stuff just went over my head. (I was aware that something I didn't quite get was happening, but that was all.)
This is also why my experience of Stephen R. Donaldson's work was rather different than most people's: when I read it, at age ten, I had never heard the word "rape" and didn't know what it meant, and so I never realized what actually happened at the start of the story, and never understood why everyone was so mad at Thomas Covenant.
So I wouldn't worry about it. Kids usually just let things go when they don't understand them. They won't be scarred for life.
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. A brilliant, wonderful book. Don't bother with the sequels though.
From McSweeneys:
3-Line Narnia
C.S. LEWIS: Hey, a Utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals!
THE WITCH: Hello, I'm a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.
C.S. LEWIS: Aaaahhh! Kill it, lion Jesus!