Again, you're presuming people are seriously more desperate than they typically are. However, your example is almost meaningless. How many home-having people wouldn't trade their shirt for $50 and a bottle of vodka? I mean, unless you're wearing a crazy expensive-to-replace shirt, it's an incredibly good deal.
that device is going to be traded to whoever happens to have what the homeless guy needs at the time, be it a sandwich, a new pair of pants, a new shoe, a blanket, whatever.
Again... people are not THAT desperate. Being homeless doesn't make you retarded (although, sometimes the converse however is somewhat more likely), and it doesn't make you exceedingly desperate. Homeless people will not trade a good that they've been given unless it is a substantial trade that benefits them. At that point, who is going to make that trade?
Just think of it this way. No matter how much you give the homeless person for the hotspot, you're not going to make them not-homeless anymore. So, why should they feel justified in just giving it away to you? Seriously, homeless people do have morals just like the rest of us. They're not petty scavengers who will do anything for a buck. (Some are, but not all of them.)
The hotspot can get them tips. Hell, I've heard that people are expected to tip Sonic waiters, and all they do is carry your food from the counter to your car...
The Dover School court decision proved beyond a preponderance of evidence that ID was just repackaged Creationism, in order to cut ties with "religion" in order to get around a Supreme Court ruling that Creationism is religious dogma, and thus has no place in public education. The people who were "creation scientists" prior to the supreme court ruling are now "design proponents".
You speak of the honesty of ID proponents, but fail to acknowledge that ID wasn't even a thing until the Supreme Court ruled that Creationism was religious dogma, and thus cannot be taught in schools (outside of studies of religion). ID proponents that are pushing so actively towards dismissing the most well supported theory in science (beyond even the theory of gravitation, because the theory of gravitation lacks details), yet will rush to cut off connection to people who believe in alien design, rather than divine design.
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. (..) As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } (...) it is not a protected status
Eye color is definitively genetic, I think left handedness too so one of those statements must be false.
Just because it is genetically deterministic does not mean that it is definitively protected. As originally designed, they would have to secure your genetic material and analyze it for the specific gene in order for it to fall under the original design of the law. The issues with "but it's genetically determined" weigh heavily, see the cousin post by me.
As a specific to your argument, there's some indication that homosexuality has some genetic predisposition, in that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the sexual orientation of identical twins. Does that mean that sexual orientation is now a federal protected status, because it is partly genetically determined? (The answer is a resounding "yes", if they're scanning your DNA for a supposed "gay" gene, but the answer is a resounding "no", if they're just targeting you because you say that you're homosexual.)
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes.
Umm, wouldn't those fall under racial/genetic/color protections?
It wouldn't qualify under racial protections, as long as it is applied to everyone. Namely, you fire black and white people if they have green eyes, or are left-handed. Unless you can prove that it was specifically done to exclude or unduly affect a specific race. Like firing anyone with black hair, knowing that it will exclude almost all black people.
As for color, I'm willing to suppose that a court would likely totally agree that eye color fits this protected class.
Now, as for genetic?... Eh... this is a harder one. The law was specifically written to prevent employers from gaining genetic material from people and analyzing it to make employment decisions. But there are a lot of things that people are genetically predisposed to that would be reasonable terms under which to fire someone, if you did not gain the information about their condition through genetic testing.
Let's presume for a second that psychopaths and sociopaths are 100% genetically determined (I know they're not, we're assuming things here for hypothetical purposes to construct a test case). Would it be wrong for an employer to then fire someone when they found out that they were a psychopath through the behavior of the psychopath? I mean, if the psychopath starts throwing people under buses (figuratively) and creating workplace tension, and conflict, then it would be perfectly reasonable to fire them. "But they are genetically determined to such behavior, so you can't fire them for that!" Indeed... I couldn't look at their genetic sequence and fire them just because they have the gene for being a psychopath, but that doesn't mean that I can't fire them for their behavior.
As such, firing people for being left-handed is an interesting question that a court would have to evaluate, and has not yet evaluated. I'm currently unaware of any suits that involve genetic information discrimination that was obtained through non-genetic analysis. But then I will admit that I haven't gone out of my way to look...
Also, one last matter. Say someone is genetically disposed to being apathetic, and unmotivated, and thus requires constant supervision to keep them on task. (Basal ganglia deformation.) More coloquially, people just label such people as "lazy". Should a company be able to fire someone for being lazy, if it is possible that their laziness is actually a neurological condition? (The current answer is that one must usually self-report a disability to the HR department in order to receive protection, and reasonable accommodations... but should a company have to make reasonable accommodations to support someone who is lazy, even if it is a neurological disorder?)
Sure, "At Will Employment" is just that, at the (your will && employer's will) == true intersection. That said, if you believed Pi was 3.00 and you dutifully used 3.14 in your calculations, then I highly doubt that your employer would bother using that as the grounds for termination. Logically possible, yes, probable? not so much. -nB
Well, most people are reasonable employers. Or at least they are until they want to fire someone...
I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory.
Ah yes, indeed. I forgot about the perceived part of "real or perceived" in the protected status codes.
This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.
Yeah, I wasn't making any sort of argument to dismiss the case legally, but rather pointing to the unintended consequences of claiming that it is a religious belief, (or perceived as a religious belief) while at the same time other advocates are doing everything possible to claim it is not a religious belief.
the paradox is that the same people who are critical of this guy for pushing his views on others, are the same ones who push their views on others here at/.
Well, it depends on which views that they're pushing. If they're pushing the scientifically validated point of view that the Earth is quite old, that the species originated due to evolutionary selection, and that global warming is happening... then it's not our own views, we're just assaulting people with reality.
However, indeed, there are a lot of people here on/. bludgeoning people with non-(scientifically validated) points of view (also known as "opinions"), but I don't think the people complaining about this guy are the same people who are berating people for being liberals, conservatives, non-objectivists, non-austrian school, or non-distributivists...
If you insist on using 3.00000000000 where your employer wants you to use 3.14... then you may be terminated.
Actually, you don't even need to have it impact your work performance. An employer can generally fire you for insisting that pi is 3 without it even impacting your work performance.
Everyone is so into this post-discrimination "you can only be fired for work performance issues", that they forget that employers (generally) still have wide latitude to fire you for anything except for a very narrow range of circumstances where discrimination has been heavy and socially disapproved of.
Yes, that is what it is. I had some other phrase there, but then I changed it to "between" and just assumed the rest of the phrase would make sense. I should have proofread more.
As an atheist, I accept that it is entirely possible that an impersonal absent god really does exist... but if he doesn't, I'm not going to live my life in praise of a absent "parent".
As such, Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. Until such a being's existence makes its presence self-evident and intrusive in my life, it doesn't deserve recognition.
In America, we're pretty much allowed to believe whatever we want
Yes, we are.
the only employers that are allowed to discriminate based upon beliefs are religious institutions.
The only employers who are allowed to violate the PROTECTED beliefs are religious institutions. Religious beliefs are protected beliefs, but non religious beliefs are not protected beliefs. (The law only protects adverse employment actions against people's "religion", not all beliefs.)
Employers can fire you because you smoke. They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. They can fire you for ANY AND ALL REASONS that are not explicitly protected by law.
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } and depending upon the state { sexual orientation, gender identity }, it is not a protected status, and thus is fair game for adverse employment actions.
And he was already suing before he was fired, so this is an on-going thing. I think with a lawsuit in progress, they'd have to be pretty ballsy to fire him over the thing he was suing about, unless they had really, really good reason for it. A court will have to make that determination, though, as we don't have all the evidence. What evidence I've seen isn't pointing in a direction he'd like, though.
No, a court won't decide on the issues. NASA will settle, just like every other corporation accused of discrimination, or harassment. And there will be an NDA entwined with the settlement that means that no one can talk about it either.
I think the grandparent post is confusing "deism" with "agnosticism".
Einstein was not a Christian, and as such did not believe in the "God", but he did believe in a god.
The problem comes in that Christians have kind of co-opted the word "god" to mean their god. Making it difficult for deists to actually express a belief in an unfalsifiable impersonal deity, without Christians assume that they're talking about the same god. (Which they're not.) In the formation of the country, they took to referring to this impersonal deity with oblique terms like "Creator". (After all, this was well before the origin of species, at the time the best most learned belief of the origin of the species was special creation.)
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Indeed... really the only way he would have a case in the first place is if Intelligent Design is admittedly religious belief. I know that the Dover School trial established that it was, but ID proponents keep trying to argue that it has nothing to do with religion, in an effort to get it into the schools.
So, really, creationists are stuck between a rock in a hard place. Either it's not religious so it can get into schools, or it is religious to get protected belief status. (You cannot be fired for being Christian, or expressing belief in Christian dogma. You can be fired for believing that the Loch Ness Monster actually exists.)
First, my comment was a joke. But I wouldn't be surprised if children of homeless people (or formerly homeless) are more likely to become homeless than general population. Some behavioral traits, e.g. alcoholism, are believed to be genetic.
I suspected that it was a form of joke. Regardless, indeed, the single greatest factor in how much a child will make is how much their parents make, so I wouldn't be surprised that children raised by homeless parents are more likely to be homeless themselves. However, I doubt that a great many homeless people would raise their own children. It's expensive to raise a child, and not a bill that you can just blow off.
While it is true that alcoholism might be genetic, even if it were 100% genetic, there are plenty of alcoholics who are not homeless. Alcoholism does not cause homelessness, and it likely has not driven a significant part of the homeless population into homelessness. Homeless people typically become addicted to drugs because there isn't much else to do (they can't sit around and watch TV like most people) and because their life is pretty shit to begin with, and drugs are a way to forget for a moment that your life sucks.
It's actually quite rare that drugs would cause homelessness.
The wireless antennas will be placed near the reproductive organs and work at full power on as many channels as possible. All that in order to decrease the future homeless population.
Yes... homeless people sustain their population by breeding... not by people falling through the cracks...
Homeless often means desperate, with few resources. You then give him/her a device worth $100-200, that brings no immediate benefit to him/her, not unlike giving a $100 watch. Now maybe if you reward him with a full meal and a night's stay for each day he brings back the device, I could see that begin to work. But otherwise, under those conditions, it seems more likely that he will try to trade that device for something much more useful to him, and I WOULDN'T blame him, nor consider it "dishonest". It is no more dishonest than you being in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and rummaging around other people's houses for food, supplies, water, etc. You wouldn't feel it to be dishonest -- not to the point of not doing it... its about survival, not ethics.
Right... and how much do you really think that wifi hotspot is going to go for at a pawn shop? Seriously. If it retails for $100~200, you could probably expect $10~20 dollars.
Selling this thing isn't going to get them off the streets. Meanwhile, collecting tips in addition to the paid access for the hotspot itself would easily make them enough money to cover how much they would get from trading in the device...
The whole matter that you equate this to the zombie apocalypse level of survival is crazy. Homeless people aren't THAT close to the edge of survival. No bills, no demanding payments or anything like that... so something that is generating money for them (tips... don't try and tell me they won't collect some tips) would be valuable, especially when they don't particularly need a whole lot of work to accomplish it.
The proofs are based on showing that the problem of deciding if a goal point is reachable from a starting point is NP-hard. The games are also generalized in that the size of the board is increased.
But the goal points are always reachable from the starting point... otherwise it would be a really shitty computer game.
The fact that the games are not randomized every play-through, and of limited size...
Grr... "NP-Hard" doesn't mean actually hard to solve... There is a proper subset of generalized NP-Hard (NP-Complete even) problems that are not particularly difficult to solve.
While the original Super Mario Brothers may have had one level that has an actual real maze to it, and as such, the underlying principles of the game may be extrapolated to be NP-hard, the first level of Super Mario Brothers is clearly not. In fact, most of the original Super Mario Brothers doesn't have any splits or deviations from the linear path that do anything but take you to a point further along in the linear path.
What I'm saying is, it seems like they generalized at least some of the games beyond all meaningful criteria... especially when these early games were specifically constructed to ensure that they the goals remained always potentially reachable.
Yes but taking advantage of entropic heat to generate coherent light would appear to violate the second law.
No, it doesn't, as long as the entropic heat being exploited costs more to organize than to disperse in the first place.
Namely: it would take more than the 39 picowatts of energy being generated to produce the heat to provide the additional 39 picowatts of energy.
The world is full of things that naively contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because people misunderstand that you can have a localized violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as long as the entire closed system that it is in counters that localized violation.
Slashdot Mirror
You would be surprised what some homeless won't do for money.
Again, you're presuming people are seriously more desperate than they typically are. However, your example is almost meaningless. How many home-having people wouldn't trade their shirt for $50 and a bottle of vodka? I mean, unless you're wearing a crazy expensive-to-replace shirt, it's an incredibly good deal.
that device is going to be traded to whoever happens to have what the homeless guy needs at the time, be it a sandwich, a new pair of pants, a new shoe, a blanket, whatever.
Again... people are not THAT desperate. Being homeless doesn't make you retarded (although, sometimes the converse however is somewhat more likely), and it doesn't make you exceedingly desperate. Homeless people will not trade a good that they've been given unless it is a substantial trade that benefits them. At that point, who is going to make that trade?
Just think of it this way. No matter how much you give the homeless person for the hotspot, you're not going to make them not-homeless anymore. So, why should they feel justified in just giving it away to you? Seriously, homeless people do have morals just like the rest of us. They're not petty scavengers who will do anything for a buck. (Some are, but not all of them.)
The hotspot can get them tips. Hell, I've heard that people are expected to tip Sonic waiters, and all they do is carry your food from the counter to your car...
The Dover School court decision proved beyond a preponderance of evidence that ID was just repackaged Creationism, in order to cut ties with "religion" in order to get around a Supreme Court ruling that Creationism is religious dogma, and thus has no place in public education. The people who were "creation scientists" prior to the supreme court ruling are now "design proponents".
You speak of the honesty of ID proponents, but fail to acknowledge that ID wasn't even a thing until the Supreme Court ruled that Creationism was religious dogma, and thus cannot be taught in schools (outside of studies of religion). ID proponents that are pushing so actively towards dismissing the most well supported theory in science (beyond even the theory of gravitation, because the theory of gravitation lacks details), yet will rush to cut off connection to people who believe in alien design, rather than divine design.
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. (..)
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } (...) it is not a protected status
Eye color is definitively genetic, I think left handedness too so one of those statements must be false.
Just because it is genetically deterministic does not mean that it is definitively protected. As originally designed, they would have to secure your genetic material and analyze it for the specific gene in order for it to fall under the original design of the law. The issues with "but it's genetically determined" weigh heavily, see the cousin post by me.
As a specific to your argument, there's some indication that homosexuality has some genetic predisposition, in that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the sexual orientation of identical twins. Does that mean that sexual orientation is now a federal protected status, because it is partly genetically determined? (The answer is a resounding "yes", if they're scanning your DNA for a supposed "gay" gene, but the answer is a resounding "no", if they're just targeting you because you say that you're homosexual.)
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes.
Umm, wouldn't those fall under racial/genetic/color protections?
It wouldn't qualify under racial protections, as long as it is applied to everyone. Namely, you fire black and white people if they have green eyes, or are left-handed. Unless you can prove that it was specifically done to exclude or unduly affect a specific race. Like firing anyone with black hair, knowing that it will exclude almost all black people.
As for color, I'm willing to suppose that a court would likely totally agree that eye color fits this protected class.
Now, as for genetic? ... Eh... this is a harder one. The law was specifically written to prevent employers from gaining genetic material from people and analyzing it to make employment decisions. But there are a lot of things that people are genetically predisposed to that would be reasonable terms under which to fire someone, if you did not gain the information about their condition through genetic testing.
Let's presume for a second that psychopaths and sociopaths are 100% genetically determined (I know they're not, we're assuming things here for hypothetical purposes to construct a test case). Would it be wrong for an employer to then fire someone when they found out that they were a psychopath through the behavior of the psychopath? I mean, if the psychopath starts throwing people under buses (figuratively) and creating workplace tension, and conflict, then it would be perfectly reasonable to fire them. "But they are genetically determined to such behavior, so you can't fire them for that!" Indeed... I couldn't look at their genetic sequence and fire them just because they have the gene for being a psychopath, but that doesn't mean that I can't fire them for their behavior.
As such, firing people for being left-handed is an interesting question that a court would have to evaluate, and has not yet evaluated. I'm currently unaware of any suits that involve genetic information discrimination that was obtained through non-genetic analysis. But then I will admit that I haven't gone out of my way to look...
Also, one last matter. Say someone is genetically disposed to being apathetic, and unmotivated, and thus requires constant supervision to keep them on task. (Basal ganglia deformation.) More coloquially, people just label such people as "lazy". Should a company be able to fire someone for being lazy, if it is possible that their laziness is actually a neurological condition? (The current answer is that one must usually self-report a disability to the HR department in order to receive protection, and reasonable accommodations... but should a company have to make reasonable accommodations to support someone who is lazy, even if it is a neurological disorder?)
Sure, "At Will Employment" is just that, at the (your will && employer's will) == true intersection.
That said, if you believed Pi was 3.00 and you dutifully used 3.14 in your calculations, then I highly doubt that your employer would bother using that as the grounds for termination. Logically possible, yes, probable? not so much.
-nB
Well, most people are reasonable employers. Or at least they are until they want to fire someone...
I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory.
Ah yes, indeed. I forgot about the perceived part of "real or perceived" in the protected status codes.
This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.
Yeah, I wasn't making any sort of argument to dismiss the case legally, but rather pointing to the unintended consequences of claiming that it is a religious belief, (or perceived as a religious belief) while at the same time other advocates are doing everything possible to claim it is not a religious belief.
lol, no problem with that either.
the paradox is that the same people who are critical of this guy for pushing his views on others, are the same ones who push their views on others here at /.
Well, it depends on which views that they're pushing. If they're pushing the scientifically validated point of view that the Earth is quite old, that the species originated due to evolutionary selection, and that global warming is happening... then it's not our own views, we're just assaulting people with reality.
However, indeed, there are a lot of people here on /. bludgeoning people with non-(scientifically validated) points of view (also known as "opinions"), but I don't think the people complaining about this guy are the same people who are berating people for being liberals, conservatives, non-objectivists, non-austrian school, or non-distributivists...
Again, people seem to keep calling into this wonderful Utopian belief that you can only be fired for issues impacting your work performance.
I'd love for the whole world to be on this train. But not everyone is, and there is generally no legal requirement for this to be the case in the USA.
If you insist on using 3.00000000000 where your employer wants you to use 3.14... then you may be terminated.
Actually, you don't even need to have it impact your work performance. An employer can generally fire you for insisting that pi is 3 without it even impacting your work performance.
Everyone is so into this post-discrimination "you can only be fired for work performance issues", that they forget that employers (generally) still have wide latitude to fire you for anything except for a very narrow range of circumstances where discrimination has been heavy and socially disapproved of.
stuck between a rock *and* a hard place
Yes, that is what it is. I had some other phrase there, but then I changed it to "between" and just assumed the rest of the phrase would make sense. I should have proofread more.
As an atheist, I accept that it is entirely possible that an impersonal absent god really does exist... but if he doesn't, I'm not going to live my life in praise of a absent "parent".
As such, Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. Until such a being's existence makes its presence self-evident and intrusive in my life, it doesn't deserve recognition.
Meteørite bites kan be pretty nasti.
Doncha no...
Not christian, but Jewish.
Ah, good catch. Christocentrism is prevalent in even the non-Christian population of the US...
In America, we're pretty much allowed to believe whatever we want
Yes, we are.
the only employers that are allowed to discriminate based upon beliefs are religious institutions.
The only employers who are allowed to violate the PROTECTED beliefs are religious institutions. Religious beliefs are protected beliefs, but non religious beliefs are not protected beliefs. (The law only protects adverse employment actions against people's "religion", not all beliefs.)
Employers can fire you because you smoke. They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. They can fire you for ANY AND ALL REASONS that are not explicitly protected by law.
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } and depending upon the state { sexual orientation, gender identity }, it is not a protected status, and thus is fair game for adverse employment actions.
And he was already suing before he was fired, so this is an on-going thing. I think with a lawsuit in progress, they'd have to be pretty ballsy to fire him over the thing he was suing about, unless they had really, really good reason for it. A court will have to make that determination, though, as we don't have all the evidence. What evidence I've seen isn't pointing in a direction he'd like, though.
No, a court won't decide on the issues. NASA will settle, just like every other corporation accused of discrimination, or harassment. And there will be an NDA entwined with the settlement that means that no one can talk about it either.
If you're speaking German then it's Time Manner Place. But if you're speaking English then it's Place Manner Time. ...
Oh wait... I don't think that was what you were talking about...
I think the grandparent post is confusing "deism" with "agnosticism".
Einstein was not a Christian, and as such did not believe in the "God", but he did believe in a god.
The problem comes in that Christians have kind of co-opted the word "god" to mean their god. Making it difficult for deists to actually express a belief in an unfalsifiable impersonal deity, without Christians assume that they're talking about the same god. (Which they're not.) In the formation of the country, they took to referring to this impersonal deity with oblique terms like "Creator". (After all, this was well before the origin of species, at the time the best most learned belief of the origin of the species was special creation.)
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Indeed... really the only way he would have a case in the first place is if Intelligent Design is admittedly religious belief. I know that the Dover School trial established that it was, but ID proponents keep trying to argue that it has nothing to do with religion, in an effort to get it into the schools.
So, really, creationists are stuck between a rock in a hard place. Either it's not religious so it can get into schools, or it is religious to get protected belief status. (You cannot be fired for being Christian, or expressing belief in Christian dogma. You can be fired for believing that the Loch Ness Monster actually exists.)
First, my comment was a joke. But I wouldn't be surprised if children of homeless people (or formerly homeless) are more likely to become homeless than general population. Some behavioral traits, e.g. alcoholism, are believed to be genetic.
I suspected that it was a form of joke. Regardless, indeed, the single greatest factor in how much a child will make is how much their parents make, so I wouldn't be surprised that children raised by homeless parents are more likely to be homeless themselves. However, I doubt that a great many homeless people would raise their own children. It's expensive to raise a child, and not a bill that you can just blow off.
While it is true that alcoholism might be genetic, even if it were 100% genetic, there are plenty of alcoholics who are not homeless. Alcoholism does not cause homelessness, and it likely has not driven a significant part of the homeless population into homelessness. Homeless people typically become addicted to drugs because there isn't much else to do (they can't sit around and watch TV like most people) and because their life is pretty shit to begin with, and drugs are a way to forget for a moment that your life sucks.
It's actually quite rare that drugs would cause homelessness.
The wireless antennas will be placed near the reproductive organs and work at full power on as many channels as possible. All that in order to decrease the future homeless population.
Yes... homeless people sustain their population by breeding... not by people falling through the cracks...
Homeless often means desperate, with few resources. You then give him/her a device worth $100-200, that brings no immediate benefit to him/her, not unlike giving a $100 watch. Now maybe if you reward him with a full meal and a night's stay for each day he brings back the device, I could see that begin to work. But otherwise, under those conditions, it seems more likely that he will try to trade that device for something much more useful to him, and I WOULDN'T blame him, nor consider it "dishonest". It is no more dishonest than you being in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and rummaging around other people's houses for food, supplies, water, etc. You wouldn't feel it to be dishonest -- not to the point of not doing it... its about survival, not ethics.
Right... and how much do you really think that wifi hotspot is going to go for at a pawn shop? Seriously. If it retails for $100~200, you could probably expect $10~20 dollars.
Selling this thing isn't going to get them off the streets. Meanwhile, collecting tips in addition to the paid access for the hotspot itself would easily make them enough money to cover how much they would get from trading in the device...
The whole matter that you equate this to the zombie apocalypse level of survival is crazy. Homeless people aren't THAT close to the edge of survival. No bills, no demanding payments or anything like that... so something that is generating money for them (tips... don't try and tell me they won't collect some tips) would be valuable, especially when they don't particularly need a whole lot of work to accomplish it.
The proofs are based on showing that the problem of deciding if a goal point is reachable from a starting point is NP-hard. The games are also generalized in that the size of the board is increased.
But the goal points are always reachable from the starting point... otherwise it would be a really shitty computer game.
The fact that the games are not randomized every play-through, and of limited size...
Grr... "NP-Hard" doesn't mean actually hard to solve... There is a proper subset of generalized NP-Hard (NP-Complete even) problems that are not particularly difficult to solve.
While the original Super Mario Brothers may have had one level that has an actual real maze to it, and as such, the underlying principles of the game may be extrapolated to be NP-hard, the first level of Super Mario Brothers is clearly not. In fact, most of the original Super Mario Brothers doesn't have any splits or deviations from the linear path that do anything but take you to a point further along in the linear path.
What I'm saying is, it seems like they generalized at least some of the games beyond all meaningful criteria... especially when these early games were specifically constructed to ensure that they the goals remained always potentially reachable.
Indeed.
Yes but taking advantage of entropic heat to generate coherent light would appear to violate the second law.
No, it doesn't, as long as the entropic heat being exploited costs more to organize than to disperse in the first place.
Namely: it would take more than the 39 picowatts of energy being generated to produce the heat to provide the additional 39 picowatts of energy.
The world is full of things that naively contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because people misunderstand that you can have a localized violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as long as the entire closed system that it is in counters that localized violation.
Which sounds too much like Dutch. Granted it is a big just from Deutsche to German.
"Dutch" is also a poor name choice for the people from the Netherlands. (They call themselves and their language "Nederlands".)