And your point is what precisely? Report it to the CC issuer and get it cut off. Breaking the law himself isn't justified just because the police aren't able to do anything.
That's a matter of semantics. He reported it to the police and there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Yes, that sucks, but vigilantism isn't going to solve the problem nor is trying to prosecute with insufficient evidence.
Based upon what I've read they could get him for at most receiving stolen goods and charging a small amount on somebody elses credit card. Most likely it's the British equivalent of a misdemeanor and the so called evidence that he has is unlikely to be admissible in court as the rules of evidence are unlikely to allow for that.
So, yes, he's operating outside of the courts and he had better hope that the person that he's outing doesn't realize that he can sue for libel as that appears to be exactly what's going on.
It doesn't really matter what the links are, I never click on them. And most of the time I don't even bother reading the summary. I think the next step is that I'm just going to post without even bothering to read any of the comments.
He's a vigilante and deserves no more consideration than the alleged mugger. Bottom line is that the UK has a system of courts to deal with situations like this. You can't go outside the system and then claim to be somehow better than the other people outside the system.
That might well be, but it's pretty clear that the "victim" in all of this has himself broken the law and is liable at bare minimum for libel, if not various other laws.
It's unfortunate the the mugger would get away, but ultimately, the UK has a system of laws and you don't get to break them just because somebody else has broken them first. That would lead to anarchy, oddly enough in the UK.
What are you talking about? This doesn't change anything. You were supposed to be paying that tax anyways, if you live in a state with sales and use taxes. All this does is make it so that your state and local governments get the taxes they're owed.
If you don't like this, then push your officials to change over to an income tax from a sales tax.
Yes, but the states had that right already as they weren't regulating interstate commerce with the taxation. They were taxing in and out of state retailers the same based upon where the items were being shipped to and the person buying the goods was the one being taxed.
The federal government is just stepping in to provide an enforcement mechanism that the states didn't have due to a lack of jurisdiction over the retailer.
The only change here is that the states will be paid for the money that they were supposed to be paid for because nobody bothered to keep track of it. Indeed it would be a crushing obligation as I'm not even sure how much I was supposed to pay as I'd have to go through however many transactions and add up all of the tax on there to report it to the state on a form that I don't even know where to find.
As for what about it is "unconstitutional" the answer is that it upsets RWNJs so it's clearly unconstitutional. Sometimes you have to read literally what the constitution says and other times you have to infer, whichever gives you what the RWNJs want.
You have to balance it. In order for interdisciplinary teams to work you have to have familiarity with their specialty. Trying to work where you know nothing of their specialty just leads to problems like mistakes being made between fields.
True, but statistics usually requires intermediate algebra and could probably be taught in highschool without too much trouble. And the bottom line is that the formal theory is neither necessary nor sufficient for somebody to look at the data and see meaningful patterns. As long as you have somebody on the team that can whip up a model to fit the data that you can then test against future experiments, you're fine. There's no particular reason why any particular scientist needs that specialty.
And anyways, it's not just the statistics, it's the experience of having crunched many numbers and found many errors in the past. Realistically a specialist is much more likely to find the problem in an efficient manner than the other team members. Do enough math and eventually you can pretty much see the errors without even trying.
That being said, everybody really should have that class as part of their education as it's so helpful during the 99.9999% of your life where you don't have a statistician on hand to analyze your data for you.
I was a natural sciences major in college and what you're talking about is one or maybe 2 classes worth of math. You don't need calculus or anything beyond that in most cases to design an experiment, obviously depending upon the particular field of study. Statistics itself is heavily derived from a set of formulas that you can look up in a book and the reasoning behind it requires at most intermediate algebra to understand.
I definitely agree that you need an understanding of statistics to design your experiments, but really, the amount of math you really need is surprisingly small given that you're going to want to bring in an expert that's experienced in the specific area you're working anyways. Now, were we to go back in time to days when there wasn't a huge team, that would presumably be a different matter. But, understanding doesn't really require that much math.
TL:DR, you're going to want an expert in dealing with modelling and data of the type you're looking at. It makes more sense than reinventing the wheel every time you do an experiment and forcing people to master not just one specialty, but several of them, and ultimately it's unlikely that they'll achieve a level high enough to compete with the best in both fields.
I don't buy that. The problem is that you don't receive additional instruction for being a couple months older and this isn't supposed to be a test of how well you were prepared by your parents prior to going to school. What's more, at that age it's difficult to differentiate between being developmentally advanced for the age and having a more durable level of talent.
Bottom line the decisions should be put off a few years until the difference of a few days or a few months is a bit less meaningful. Choosing winners and losers in elementary school ultimately affects a student's academic performance for years to come. Seems to me that there should be a lot more concern paid to the scientific aspect of the evaluations seeing as it has life long consequences for those that are miscategorized.
Precisely. Sounds like they need to go back and review their methodology. And probably put off the assessment until later on.
I remember going through something similar as a child. Most of my friends had birthdays in the spring and summer, which meant that on these screenings they required a lower score in order to qualify, even though they had the same amount of time in class as I did. Consequently I think 2 of the 5 got into the gifted program and I didn't. But, the kicker is that as an adult, I'm so far ahead of any of them intellectually that they're unlikely to ever catch up.
Assessment is tricky business, but when the scores are being used for anything other than screening for a more thorough evaluation, you invariably make many, many mistakes. And for the most part we don't really understand enough about the brain to really get what we should be looking for in the first place.
And let's not forget that in the K-3 range it's easy to miss a learning disorder that throws the whole score off.
That's more or less my point. At the K-3 level there's very little that can be said usefully for future development.
I don't really get why we're still evaluating students at such an early age for giftedness when it doesn't become reliable until later on. Evaluate for learning disorders as soon as you can, sure, but separating out the gifted students before you really know who is and isn't causes all sorts of problems. And age really shouldn't be a factor, if it matters which month you're born in, that should be a substantial reason to question the validity of the testing regime.
Ultimately, you get a system where you're rewarding students for having been fortunate enough to develop early when you're trying to reward students for being fortunate enough to be gifted. Which as you note isn't necessarily the same thing in all cases.
Why are we measuring age with regards to giftedness? The age at which students are permitted to enroll in classes does not permit students born in September to enroll early, but if you are born in August you get to enroll, then when it comes to the standardized tests students who were permitted early entry get a lower bar with regards to entrance.
Since things are in flux to the point where a few days make a difference, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until there's some validity to the testing being done? As far as I know there's no validity to the notion that early testing leads to the right decisions being made. Some folks just develop early, but don't hit a particularly high mark, and some take longer to develop and ultimately to a higher level.
I remember when I was a kid getting screwed over because of my age, if a couple of months are that significant, then the testing shouldn't be done.
Because society places a higher value on women than it does on me? It's generally acceptable to treat men like cannon fodder, but it's quite unusual to have the same zeal for war when it involves sending women to their doom over stupid things.
If you're talking about the US, then there is no such bias against women.
You see the same lack of women at the bottom of society that you do at the top of society. It's called the Apex Fallacy and it's complete horseshit. You have a different clustering of jobs between men and women and thanks to societal changes that disproportionately reward people at the top, you see a bit of an income disparity between men and women.
Ultimately, if we control for the distribution of income you'll find that the income differences between men and women are quite small indeed, it's just that since income is skewed towards the rich that the men that are poorer than their female counterparts don't add as much to the calculation.
What's more, most college students are female by about a 2:1 ratio and they basically get away with murder. I've sat through many "sex discrimination" lectures over the years which were basically just excuses to bash men for all the imagined slights and to just use sound bite quotes with no understanding of where they came from and why to rationalize it.
Sure it is. And you don't see positive discrimination without also seeing negative discrimination at the same time aimed at the same group. If you think that women need the help, then you implicitly view them as inferior and incapable of taking care of themselves.
The healthy approach is to ensure a level playing field, or one that's level enough that women can take care of the problem for themselves. But, forcing employers to hire more women, regardless of qualification, just means there's more resentment and resistance to change.
In the games industry you're expected to basically give up any hope of an outside life and probably burn a lot of the time that you would have available for marrying and having children. Unfortunately a woman's biological clock is less negotiable than a man's. It's something you do see in many other industries where the choices about how to handle family life and where the balance is tends to favor women at home and men at work. Regardless of what women's groups suggest, that's ultimately a legitimate aspect that companies look at when hiring, firing and promoting. If an individual shows no loyalty, they're going to be on the short end of things.
Not saying that it had anything to do with it, but women do tend to be more interested in having social lives and such than men are, and men tend to be socialized to be more tolerant of poor working conditions.
Unless there's some evidence that HR isn't hiring the best candidates or the applicant pool doesn't represent the balance in the industry, there's very little that an individual company can do that is going to solve the problem. At best they can discriminate against men to artificially appear like they're interested in treating women with respect.
You mean except for that fact that having currencies with volatility leads to great levels of economic instability as well.
Why should I buy a car today for $20 000 if tomorrow I expect that the real cost of the car will be only $18 000 in today's dollars? Some fluctuation is normal and acceptable in any economy where the government doesn't define all the prices for everything. But, unpredictable volatility is bad. It makes it hard for businesses to plan for their future, it means that consumers don't know when to buy things. And it sets up a secondary market for arbitrage by returning things for a profit, which causes its own problems with return policies.
Bottom line is that a volatile currency is a really, really bad thing to have as it greatly diminishes the ability of the economy to function with any clarity.
You can't buy anything with BTC without converting them between it and another currency. And few currencies see the level of instability that the BTC does. When you can see up to 50% fluctuations in the buying power, that's not a good thing for anybody other than fraudsters and speculators.
What's more, there is no government forcing people to take BTC which means that there isn't anything that's keeping the system stable and as far as I know you can't be paid in BTC unless you're a contractor, but you still have to pay out salaries in USD or some other real currency.
No, it doesn't. It's sort of like if I were paid in Euros and had all my expenses to be paid in USD, CAD or RMB, except that the relationship between the currencies were fluctuating by up to 50% on any given day with little or no predictability.
Bottom line is that the people who throw out fiat currency in relationship to the USD are being disingenuous when they suggest that USD is subject to the same level of instability. Sure it is slightly unstable, but we're not talking about hyperinflation or hyperdeflation, which is something that could definitely happen with BTC. And the amount of money you make tends to rise with inflation in general, assuming some sort of sane monetary policy.
What's more, since nobody is forced to take BTC for anything, you can very easily wind up in a situation where the BTC economy grinds to a halt because people think their money is going to be worth more the next day or in a month.
Yes, but what's the point of comparing it with Google's fiber when they aren't even in the same part of the world?
Unless they're planning to set up their network in a part of the world where Google is also thinking about setting up a network, the comparison is completely meaningless.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Japan already have better connection options than the US? I know that it's fast, but how is this particularly notable?
Indeed and it's shocking at how many older movies aren't available at this point. I'm not even talking classics either, often times the older films I want to see are only available via DVD. Which is one of the reasons I was so shocked when they tried to spin off the DVD business because the selection of streaming videos was so poor, and it's only shrunk since then.
There's a requirement that you accept them for any debts public or private. And if people start refusing to accept payment denominated in USD then the government will step in to mandate it.
Bottom line, BTC has no guarantee that in the next month you'll be able to do something with it, which is something that one should be concerned with.
Slashdot Mirror
And your point is what precisely? Report it to the CC issuer and get it cut off. Breaking the law himself isn't justified just because the police aren't able to do anything.
That's a matter of semantics. He reported it to the police and there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Yes, that sucks, but vigilantism isn't going to solve the problem nor is trying to prosecute with insufficient evidence.
Based upon what I've read they could get him for at most receiving stolen goods and charging a small amount on somebody elses credit card. Most likely it's the British equivalent of a misdemeanor and the so called evidence that he has is unlikely to be admissible in court as the rules of evidence are unlikely to allow for that.
So, yes, he's operating outside of the courts and he had better hope that the person that he's outing doesn't realize that he can sue for libel as that appears to be exactly what's going on.
It doesn't really matter what the links are, I never click on them. And most of the time I don't even bother reading the summary. I think the next step is that I'm just going to post without even bothering to read any of the comments.
Seems to me to be the next logical step.
He's a vigilante and deserves no more consideration than the alleged mugger. Bottom line is that the UK has a system of courts to deal with situations like this. You can't go outside the system and then claim to be somehow better than the other people outside the system.
That might well be, but it's pretty clear that the "victim" in all of this has himself broken the law and is liable at bare minimum for libel, if not various other laws.
It's unfortunate the the mugger would get away, but ultimately, the UK has a system of laws and you don't get to break them just because somebody else has broken them first. That would lead to anarchy, oddly enough in the UK.
What are you talking about? This doesn't change anything. You were supposed to be paying that tax anyways, if you live in a state with sales and use taxes. All this does is make it so that your state and local governments get the taxes they're owed.
If you don't like this, then push your officials to change over to an income tax from a sales tax.
Yes, but the states had that right already as they weren't regulating interstate commerce with the taxation. They were taxing in and out of state retailers the same based upon where the items were being shipped to and the person buying the goods was the one being taxed.
The federal government is just stepping in to provide an enforcement mechanism that the states didn't have due to a lack of jurisdiction over the retailer.
The only change here is that the states will be paid for the money that they were supposed to be paid for because nobody bothered to keep track of it. Indeed it would be a crushing obligation as I'm not even sure how much I was supposed to pay as I'd have to go through however many transactions and add up all of the tax on there to report it to the state on a form that I don't even know where to find.
As for what about it is "unconstitutional" the answer is that it upsets RWNJs so it's clearly unconstitutional. Sometimes you have to read literally what the constitution says and other times you have to infer, whichever gives you what the RWNJs want.
You have to balance it. In order for interdisciplinary teams to work you have to have familiarity with their specialty. Trying to work where you know nothing of their specialty just leads to problems like mistakes being made between fields.
True, but statistics usually requires intermediate algebra and could probably be taught in highschool without too much trouble. And the bottom line is that the formal theory is neither necessary nor sufficient for somebody to look at the data and see meaningful patterns. As long as you have somebody on the team that can whip up a model to fit the data that you can then test against future experiments, you're fine. There's no particular reason why any particular scientist needs that specialty.
And anyways, it's not just the statistics, it's the experience of having crunched many numbers and found many errors in the past. Realistically a specialist is much more likely to find the problem in an efficient manner than the other team members. Do enough math and eventually you can pretty much see the errors without even trying.
That being said, everybody really should have that class as part of their education as it's so helpful during the 99.9999% of your life where you don't have a statistician on hand to analyze your data for you.
I was a natural sciences major in college and what you're talking about is one or maybe 2 classes worth of math. You don't need calculus or anything beyond that in most cases to design an experiment, obviously depending upon the particular field of study. Statistics itself is heavily derived from a set of formulas that you can look up in a book and the reasoning behind it requires at most intermediate algebra to understand.
I definitely agree that you need an understanding of statistics to design your experiments, but really, the amount of math you really need is surprisingly small given that you're going to want to bring in an expert that's experienced in the specific area you're working anyways. Now, were we to go back in time to days when there wasn't a huge team, that would presumably be a different matter. But, understanding doesn't really require that much math.
TL:DR, you're going to want an expert in dealing with modelling and data of the type you're looking at. It makes more sense than reinventing the wheel every time you do an experiment and forcing people to master not just one specialty, but several of them, and ultimately it's unlikely that they'll achieve a level high enough to compete with the best in both fields.
I don't buy that. The problem is that you don't receive additional instruction for being a couple months older and this isn't supposed to be a test of how well you were prepared by your parents prior to going to school. What's more, at that age it's difficult to differentiate between being developmentally advanced for the age and having a more durable level of talent.
Bottom line the decisions should be put off a few years until the difference of a few days or a few months is a bit less meaningful. Choosing winners and losers in elementary school ultimately affects a student's academic performance for years to come. Seems to me that there should be a lot more concern paid to the scientific aspect of the evaluations seeing as it has life long consequences for those that are miscategorized.
Precisely. Sounds like they need to go back and review their methodology. And probably put off the assessment until later on.
I remember going through something similar as a child. Most of my friends had birthdays in the spring and summer, which meant that on these screenings they required a lower score in order to qualify, even though they had the same amount of time in class as I did. Consequently I think 2 of the 5 got into the gifted program and I didn't. But, the kicker is that as an adult, I'm so far ahead of any of them intellectually that they're unlikely to ever catch up.
Assessment is tricky business, but when the scores are being used for anything other than screening for a more thorough evaluation, you invariably make many, many mistakes. And for the most part we don't really understand enough about the brain to really get what we should be looking for in the first place.
And let's not forget that in the K-3 range it's easy to miss a learning disorder that throws the whole score off.
That's more or less my point. At the K-3 level there's very little that can be said usefully for future development.
I don't really get why we're still evaluating students at such an early age for giftedness when it doesn't become reliable until later on. Evaluate for learning disorders as soon as you can, sure, but separating out the gifted students before you really know who is and isn't causes all sorts of problems. And age really shouldn't be a factor, if it matters which month you're born in, that should be a substantial reason to question the validity of the testing regime.
Ultimately, you get a system where you're rewarding students for having been fortunate enough to develop early when you're trying to reward students for being fortunate enough to be gifted. Which as you note isn't necessarily the same thing in all cases.
Why are we measuring age with regards to giftedness? The age at which students are permitted to enroll in classes does not permit students born in September to enroll early, but if you are born in August you get to enroll, then when it comes to the standardized tests students who were permitted early entry get a lower bar with regards to entrance.
Since things are in flux to the point where a few days make a difference, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until there's some validity to the testing being done? As far as I know there's no validity to the notion that early testing leads to the right decisions being made. Some folks just develop early, but don't hit a particularly high mark, and some take longer to develop and ultimately to a higher level.
I remember when I was a kid getting screwed over because of my age, if a couple of months are that significant, then the testing shouldn't be done.
Because society places a higher value on women than it does on me? It's generally acceptable to treat men like cannon fodder, but it's quite unusual to have the same zeal for war when it involves sending women to their doom over stupid things.
If you're talking about the US, then there is no such bias against women.
You see the same lack of women at the bottom of society that you do at the top of society. It's called the Apex Fallacy and it's complete horseshit. You have a different clustering of jobs between men and women and thanks to societal changes that disproportionately reward people at the top, you see a bit of an income disparity between men and women.
Ultimately, if we control for the distribution of income you'll find that the income differences between men and women are quite small indeed, it's just that since income is skewed towards the rich that the men that are poorer than their female counterparts don't add as much to the calculation.
What's more, most college students are female by about a 2:1 ratio and they basically get away with murder. I've sat through many "sex discrimination" lectures over the years which were basically just excuses to bash men for all the imagined slights and to just use sound bite quotes with no understanding of where they came from and why to rationalize it.
Sure it is. And you don't see positive discrimination without also seeing negative discrimination at the same time aimed at the same group. If you think that women need the help, then you implicitly view them as inferior and incapable of taking care of themselves.
The healthy approach is to ensure a level playing field, or one that's level enough that women can take care of the problem for themselves. But, forcing employers to hire more women, regardless of qualification, just means there's more resentment and resistance to change.
In the games industry you're expected to basically give up any hope of an outside life and probably burn a lot of the time that you would have available for marrying and having children. Unfortunately a woman's biological clock is less negotiable than a man's. It's something you do see in many other industries where the choices about how to handle family life and where the balance is tends to favor women at home and men at work. Regardless of what women's groups suggest, that's ultimately a legitimate aspect that companies look at when hiring, firing and promoting. If an individual shows no loyalty, they're going to be on the short end of things.
Not saying that it had anything to do with it, but women do tend to be more interested in having social lives and such than men are, and men tend to be socialized to be more tolerant of poor working conditions.
Unless there's some evidence that HR isn't hiring the best candidates or the applicant pool doesn't represent the balance in the industry, there's very little that an individual company can do that is going to solve the problem. At best they can discriminate against men to artificially appear like they're interested in treating women with respect.
You mean except for that fact that having currencies with volatility leads to great levels of economic instability as well.
Why should I buy a car today for $20 000 if tomorrow I expect that the real cost of the car will be only $18 000 in today's dollars? Some fluctuation is normal and acceptable in any economy where the government doesn't define all the prices for everything. But, unpredictable volatility is bad. It makes it hard for businesses to plan for their future, it means that consumers don't know when to buy things. And it sets up a secondary market for arbitrage by returning things for a profit, which causes its own problems with return policies.
Bottom line is that a volatile currency is a really, really bad thing to have as it greatly diminishes the ability of the economy to function with any clarity.
You can't buy anything with BTC without converting them between it and another currency. And few currencies see the level of instability that the BTC does. When you can see up to 50% fluctuations in the buying power, that's not a good thing for anybody other than fraudsters and speculators.
What's more, there is no government forcing people to take BTC which means that there isn't anything that's keeping the system stable and as far as I know you can't be paid in BTC unless you're a contractor, but you still have to pay out salaries in USD or some other real currency.
No, it doesn't. It's sort of like if I were paid in Euros and had all my expenses to be paid in USD, CAD or RMB, except that the relationship between the currencies were fluctuating by up to 50% on any given day with little or no predictability.
Bottom line is that the people who throw out fiat currency in relationship to the USD are being disingenuous when they suggest that USD is subject to the same level of instability. Sure it is slightly unstable, but we're not talking about hyperinflation or hyperdeflation, which is something that could definitely happen with BTC. And the amount of money you make tends to rise with inflation in general, assuming some sort of sane monetary policy.
What's more, since nobody is forced to take BTC for anything, you can very easily wind up in a situation where the BTC economy grinds to a halt because people think their money is going to be worth more the next day or in a month.
Yes, but what's the point of comparing it with Google's fiber when they aren't even in the same part of the world?
Unless they're planning to set up their network in a part of the world where Google is also thinking about setting up a network, the comparison is completely meaningless.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Japan already have better connection options than the US? I know that it's fast, but how is this particularly notable?
Indeed and it's shocking at how many older movies aren't available at this point. I'm not even talking classics either, often times the older films I want to see are only available via DVD. Which is one of the reasons I was so shocked when they tried to spin off the DVD business because the selection of streaming videos was so poor, and it's only shrunk since then.
There's a requirement that you accept them for any debts public or private. And if people start refusing to accept payment denominated in USD then the government will step in to mandate it.
Bottom line, BTC has no guarantee that in the next month you'll be able to do something with it, which is something that one should be concerned with.