I don't know anything about Alibaba as a company, or about their stock arrangements. But I do know that over the years the website has worked to become more buyer-friendly and to earn buyer trust. My main concern about this is that they don't go overboard with growth and ruin what so far seems to be a good thing.
How about a stipulation that any project that fails must release applicable resources to the public domain, as well as records on the use of applicable funds.
That public domain clause would include source code, artwork, template designs, patents, etc etc. The records, well, that just helps know that funding didn't pay for somebody's vacation and/or drug+alcohol habit.
eh? I've still gotten OS updates for Samsung devices after the new models came out (except for the rooted/custom devices).
If the manufacturer fails to provide the update, Cyanogenmod tends to be a good option afterwards. They're still building nightlies for my old i9100 (Galaxy S2)
That is not a rigorous distinction. Why do humans have appendices? Science gives an answer to that "why" question: A common ancestor had an appendix and mutations in more recent common ancestors sufficient for its disappearance have not occurred since the time of that older common ancestor.
Same with the statement that there are no falsifiable statements concerning the "purpose of life, the universe, and everything".
Example 1: Let's say I have a religious belief that "purpose of life, the universe, and everything" is what Paul teaches in his writing of 2 Timothy. Let's say it's discovered that Paul did not write 2 Timothy (as indeed most researchers now agree, except for fundamentalists and extremely conservative evangelicals). Then my statement is falsified: Because it is shown false that the "purpose of life, the universe, and everything" is what Paul teaches in his writing of 2 Timothy, because Paul has no writing of 2 Timothy.
Example 2: Let's say I have a religious belief that the "purpose of life, the universe, and everything" is to gather the will and the means to rescue the humans that are trapped in a terrible prison of Hades in the Earth's crust (like a large-scale Orpheus operation). We do some seismology and drilling to locate this Hades, but after making a complete map of the crust we show that no such place exists. Which falsifies the belief, because there are no means to rescue those humans, because there aren't any such humans.
Just because some people have unfalsifiable beliefs about "purpose" does not mean that all beliefs about purpose are unfalsifiable. Indeed, many beliefs may just be so conceptually muddled that whether they are falsifiable or not is impossible to tell because they have no clear meaning.
Everyone on the planet (or in orbit, for that matter) has those rights. It's just that some people live in jurisdictions whose government fails to recognize them.
"Superstorm"* Sandy
* So named because it wasn't even strong enough to count as a real hurricane...
On the contrary, Sandy was a category 2 hurricane when it made landfall on Cuba. Moreover, it still had hurricane-force winds when it made landfall in New Jersey; the only reason it wasn't called a "hurricane" was that it was post-tropical. In other words, it was as severe as a hurricane, but a different kind of storm.
The piece is mumbo-jumbo. Yes, Bacon eschewed the "Aristotelian" search for final causes. Does that mean that Baconian science doesn't try to determine the truth? Of course not.
The history of philosophy/history of science done in this piece is clap trap. He says that Galileo used experiment, whereas Aristotle did not. And that's why Aristotle thought that "heavier objects should fall faster than light ones". Supposedly. The problem: Aristotle didn't use "abstract reasoning" to come to that incorrect conclusion. He just didn't control his variables adequately. Not controlling variables adequately can happen to the very best of experimentalists.
"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. [...] Scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge, since it is knowledge about only specific empirical propositions"
So how does this argument run? Scientific knowledge is knowledge about specific empirical propositions. Therefore, scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge. Therefore, science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth? That's a terrible argument. This seems like just a case of begging the question from the author where he has an unargued "definition" of what "Truth" is. Why anyone else is beholden to this definition, of course, is a mystery.
"Bacon, who had a career in politics and was an experienced manager, actually wrote that scientists would have to be misled into thinking science is a pursuit of the truth, so that they will be dedicated to their work, even though it is not."
I highly doubt Bacon ever said this. Of course, there is no citation to check. I think the author has confused Bacon's model of Bensalem, where he has the houses of specialists hide their operation from others, so that the others don't come to conclusions based on partial understandings, before the work of the specialists is completed.
"by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them"
Who made these "definitions"? No one in sight.
"This is how you get the phenomenon of philistines like Richard Dawkins"
Oh I see, Dawkins, a great evolutionary biologist, is a philistine. The evidence? I guess because the author disagrees with Dawkins about God. No argument is given.
...the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference.
Science is not a "method". Feyrabend was more nearly right than he realized when he said the cardinal rule of science is, "Anything goes": we can use any clever tricks that pass the tests to change the posterior plausibility of an idea, and they do not have to adhere to some philosopher's notions of method.
Science is a discipline, and like any other discipline has to be practiced to get good at it. Methods in science are like katas in fighting disciplines: valuable training devices, but not anything like sufficient to win a real fight.
Furthermore, as a discipline, science does not explain anything and has no content: the sciences (biology, physics, geology...) do, but not the overarching discipline of science itself.
The discipline of science can be practiced by anyone, although history has shown that education can help (try inventing any fighting discipline on your own and you'll see how much better off you'd be learning from someone else.) The scope of science is unlimited, and it is the only way of creating knowledge. It is not "scientism" to practice the discipline of science when testing ideas about human behaviour or society: it is just science.
Because science is Bayesian, it does not produce certainty. Bayes' rule cannot generate a plausibility of 0 or 1 for any proposition, and it identifies anyone who assigns a plausibility of 0 or 1 as being in a state of sin... err... error.
A proposition that has 0 or 1 plausibility cannot have its plausibility changed by further applications of Bayes rule, so it is beyond correction, opaque to any further evidence, cut off from the world it claims to apply to.
The technical term for a belief held in such an erroneous fashion is "faith".
It would be the government is now regulating the actual traffic on the internet
You are a liar, doing nothing but spreading FUD.
Regulating ISPs as Common Carriers would "regulate the actual traffic on the Internet" exactly as much as regulating phone companies as Common Carriers censors the content of telephone calls -- which is to say, not in the slightest.
Again, it the trends, not individual weather on any specific year that matters
Except that after every single warm snap or hurricane the same people who were smugly reminding us that "weather is not climate" are busy pointing to the event as "evidence" of AGW, which it is not. Distributions are evidence, events are not, because the science shows that the AGW/no-AGW distributions substantially overlap in our current situation, particularly with regard to extreme weather events.
So only a person who does not understand science and statistics would ever suggest that any single event or small handful of events is worth mentioning as evidence either way. And yet Warmists are always out in force after any given extremum telling us it "proves" AGW.
Don't get me wrong: AGW is real, although there are some pretty well-proven techniques for reducing it (notably carbon taxes, which also have the benefit of reducing corporate and income taxes, so you'd have to be some anti-capitalist nut-job to oppose them). But anyone who ever opens their mouth to point at a single event as if it was somehow worth the bother of discussing is an anti-science wing-nut, and adds only heat, not light, to the discussion.
Who are the stakeholders? Well, let's see:
Only one of these "stakeholders" have opinions that actually matter, and that stakeholder sent "a groundswell of 3 million citizen comments, most of them, presumably, against the FCC's approach" [and in support of regulating ISPs as Common Carriers].
I think we're done here.
In your foaming response, please describe _exactly_ what you find so objectionable about the Affordable Care Act.... If you have corporate health insurance, describe exactly how the ACA affected your coverage.
My problem with the ACA is that it failed to end employer-provided health insurance, which serves to do exactly nothing except make it harder to change jobs.
My health insurance is paid 100% by my employer. My wife's insurance is paid 50% by my employer. However, as I understand it, because my employer offers health insurance for my wife, she's not eligible for the subsidized rate she would otherwise get for an exchange-based plan. I'm reasonably certain that the 50% of the premiums we pay is more than a subsidized ACA plan would cost, but less than an unsubsidized one would cost, so we're forced to overpay for the "privilege" of having a "choice."
What the ACA should have done is let employers wishing to offer health benefits pay into a FSA or HSA-like account, which the employee could use to pay the premium of the insurance plan of his choosing.
Someone who can blame Obamacare on Republicans is someone who can blame anything on them.
First of all, Obamacare is the Republicans' fault. You can tell because A) they liked it when it was called Romneycare, and B) it's a shit solution (compared to "single payor" where said payor is either the government (i.e., a socialist solution) or the individual patient (i.e., a libertarian solution)) that only serves to entrench and enrich the middlemen. The Democrats would have designed a much more socialist program had they not been trying to appease the Republicans.
Second, your claim is a fallacy. There is absolutely no reason why, just because Obamacare is legitimately the Republicans' fault, that any of the other stupid shit Obama and/or the Democrats have done could be also. For example, here's a partial list of things for which the Republicans can not be blamed:
Yes, 90 days late is a disaster! How is it ever not?!
I think what he's saying is that you should be trying to affect the portion of your government called the "Pennsylvania Insurance Department."
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel
