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ydoaPs

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Everything posted by ydoaPs

  1. How do you square that with the fact that trying to overthrow the government is an instance of the only crime detailed in the Constitution and that making its punishment more efficient is the stated purpose of the amendment in question?
  2. Tweet text: ".@Judgenap: Why do we have a Second Amendment? It's not to shoot deer. It's to shoot the government when it becomes tyrannical!"(6/23/16, 12:48PM). What do you think? Is he right? Is there a right? I'm arguing that not only is he wrong, he's the exact opposite of right. The purpose, rather than to allow us to shoot at the government, is to stop us from shooting at the government. As we know from the Heller decision, "The Amendments prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause.". So, to find the stated purpose, we just need to look at the part of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. The Second Amendment is as follows: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." So, while there may be more purposes for the second amendment, the only one we know incontrovertibly is to secure a free state via a well-functioning militia. But what's a militia? Luckily for us, the Constitution defines it for us. Article 1 Section 8: "To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;" Article 2 Section 2: "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States;" The Constitution also happens to define one and only one crime: Article 3 Section 3: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort" So the militia is a paramilitary force organized by the states and controlled by both the states and by POTUS. It's the equivalent of the National Guard. That alone should be enough to question Paul's narrative, but, luckily for us, Article 1 Section 8 also gives us the purposes of the militia. One of the explicitly stated purposes of the militia is to quell insurrection. So rather than being the people taking up arms against a tyrannical government, the militia the the vehicle through which said tyrannical government wipes out those raising arms against it. That means the stated purpose of the second amendment is to ensure national security by making sure the people who kill those shooting at the government can do so efficiently. Yet Paul wants us to believe that one of the present but not stated purposes is to condone the only crime outlined in the Constitution and whose punishment is ensured by the stated purpose of the amendment. I find that to be highly unlikely. Am I wrong? Is Paul wrong? Are we both wrong?
  3. ydoaPs

    Tipping

    It's a little complicated in the US. Tipped workers are minimum wage workers. Excluding tips for a moment, they make the same as any other job that pays minimum wage. Being in the class of tipped employees, the tips make things a little weird. The employer is allowed to use a certain amount of the tips as a credit against the wages, within limits. There's a maximum that the employer can use of the tips as wages. If the employer's minimum contribution plus the tips do not at least equal the minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. If the employer's minimum contribution plus the tips do at least equal the minimum wage, the employee gets to keep the extra (though it is be subject to tax).
  4. It's all about evidence and how it impacts how likely things are. To incorporate new information into a probability, we use something called "Bayes's Rule": [math]P(hypothesis|evidence) = \frac{P(evidence|hypothesis)\times{P(hypothesis)}}{P(evidence)}[/math] Now, the question is: "How likely is it that Christianity is true?". We can come up with a minimal version of Christianity. As far as I am concerned, anything that is properly called "Christianity" has at least these things in common, though I'm sure many people would require many more: Jesus was the product of a virgin birth Jesus rose from the dead after 3 days God exists That means we're looking to see how we can estimate P(Jesus was born of a virgin AND Jesus rose from the dead AND God exists). When you're looking at the probability of a conjunction, you're looking at multiplication of fractions. There s no way around that. We know right off the bat that the answer will be (a number less than 1)x(another number less than one)x(yet another number less than one). If we say that each of them has the probability of 75%, then we end up with a probability of 42%. But we're not talking about things with probability anywhere near 75%. 75% of the people you meet aren't born of a virgin. 75% of the people you meet aren't going to pop out of their graves after three days. There have been about 100billion people on Earth thusfar. Let's be extremely generous and say that 100 have been born of a virgin and 100 have risen from the dead after three days. That means that each of them is 1 in a billion. That means that together (there's no obvious link between the two causing one to be more likely in the presence of the other, so I'll treat them as independent)the probability is 1 in one quintillion. And since we need to factor in the existence of God on top of that, we know it will be some fraction of that. But how likely is the existence of God? We can figure that out by thinking about the relation between mind and matter. If everything (including mind) comes from matter, that's called "Source Materialism". If everything comes from mind, then that's called "Source Idealism". There's no reason to think that one is inherently more important than the other, so we can have them starting with equal sized parts of the probability space. But theism isn't the only thing in source idealism. There are nontheistic source idealistic hypotheses. So we know that broad theism is less than 1/2. We're talking about something more specific than broad theism in the case of Christian theism, though. We're talking about the interactionist big 3-O God: Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent. These theses are obviously fairly independent if not completely independent. There's nothing about being all powerful that implies that you'd be all good or even care about people at all. In fact, in humans at least, power tends to corrupt. So lets treat the attributes as independent. We've got Christian theism at less than (1/2)x(1/2)x(1/2)x(1/2). So we've got our "prior probability" of theism as less than 1 in 16 quintillion. What sort of evidence do you have that can bring that up to a coin flip? I should mention, however, that literally every possible observation is evidence against the existence of an interactionist deity. For any ontology, the P(observation|nontheistic version) is greater than the P(observation|theistic version) since for any potential observation, God could poke his finger in and make something different happen. That means, using the equation above by making a ratio [math]\frac{P(theism|observation)}{P(nontheism|observation)}[/math] we can see that the existence of the Christian God goes down and naturalism goes up with every observation. So, before we look at the evidence, Christianity starts with a probability of less than one in 16 quintillion. Then we look at how the evidence works and see that it starts there and continually goes down. So, short answer to the OP: I don't believe it, because it's unimaginably unlikely to be true.
  5. Humans aren't designed to do anything...yet.
  6. Great job. Do you have any other problems you need help with?
  7. So, if f(x) = 4x - 5, then f(g) = 4g - 5. Now, substitute in f(x) for g. Can you get it from there?
  8. ! Moderator Note Topic moved to Philosophy, as it falls under the purview of Experimental Philosophy You might have a look at this and this.
  9. That channel actually has a lot of good content. If you liked that, there's a lot of good stuff there you might also like.
  10. Can you show us whatever code and/or project notes that you already have for this assignment? A big thing to remember here is that you're modelling something. You should learn all that you can about the thing you model before you model. Maybe even play a few times. When you're modelling something, you need to decide what aspects of the thing being modeled are important enough for you to include. Do we need to model that the game is made of plastic? Probably not. Do we need to model that it is a 2 dimensional grid? Probably. If you've covered classes yet, modelling is a great time to show off what you know, as there are usually quite a few "has a", "is a" and "can" relationships that you can model. This project won't be terribly complicated, but using classes will show off that you know what they are and that you understand when you should use them. The biggest thing is just like every program you will ever write: break it down into big chunks. Then break those chunks down as you go. And break those chunks down. Eventually, you'll get to steps small enough that they'll be manageable. The project probably just wants local multiplayer.
  11. We won't write it for you, but we'll help. How should we represent the board? How should we represent the pieces of the two different players? Should it print a new version of the board after every move? Personally, I'd go with a board being a list of lists and the pieces being either 'x's or 'o's. With that as a start, what kind of functions do we need to move our pieces on the board? How Should the program tell is there are 4 like pieces in a row? Connect Four is a children's game played with a plastic vertical lattice and checkers pieces. The players take turns putting their pieces in the lattice. The object is to get 4 of your pieces in a row (vertically, horizontally, or diagonally) while your opponent tries to stop you and get 4 of theirs in a row. Sort of like tic tac toe, but with 4 in a row instead of 3 and with a gravity action pulling the pieces down.
  12. If you use an alternate way to get on, the room works, somehow. http://chat.cobaltirc.org/ connect to #sfn I've opened a topic in the section for the overlords, so we'll get the client sorted out as soon as we can. It looks like there was a switch from blackcobalt.net to cobaltirc.org where they were both active for a while and then blackcobalt finally came down.
  13. The number of members of a set is a different property than the "distance". What you're looking for is called "measure" or "metric", depending on what exactly you mean.
  14. There are different sizes of infinity. There are exactly as many positive numbers as there are even positive numbers, but there are more irrational numbers than there are even positive numbers despite both sets being infinite. For your question, I think those sets are the same size, but I'm not sure. I'd have to come up with a morphism between the two to check.
  15. This is what I was telling you at the beginning of the semester. Break the problems down. A few things to think about: 1) What are the big picture steps? You're explicitly told to break the problem down into functions and call those functions in main. Your big steps are those functions. What are they? 2) Are your steps supposed to print something to console, or are they supposed to return a value for use in other functions? 3) What values (and what kind of values) do your steps need to take as inputs for them to work? Your calc() function doesn't take any inputs, so it's not getting data from the rest of the program. You need to tell it to use the provided values. So, you need: int calc(input 1 datatype input 1 name, ..., input n datatype input n name)A good rule of thumb for naming/breaking projects into parts is giving your functions the name of what it does. If you name a function 'calc', it should calculate something and only do that. If you want it to calculate AND display, the name should reflect that. Break your tasks up so the names are as short as they can be. 'calc', while not optimal (what are you calculating?) is better than 'calcanddisplay'. So put your cout code into a new function that takes the output of calc(). So you should have something like: int calc(datatype input, datatype input 2) { magic happens; return CalcOutput; } void display(datatype input) { std::cout << input << '\n'; } int main() { calc(input, input 2); display(CalcOutput); return 0; }
  16. If there's no relating the layers to each other, what's the point? If there is, then it's just modality with another name.
  17. Have you tried opening it in 2015 instead of 2012?
  18. I know you're having trouble with calculus too, so I'll help you a bit more than I probably should. It wants you do do an approximation via a Riemann sum. It's like taking an integral without taking the limit. You make your rectangles as the value of the function being one side and the step value being the other. For the exact answer, you need to take the limit of that process. Luckily for you, there's a rule you can use as a shortcut for a polynomial. If you think of the rule for polynomial differentiation, you can get the rule for integration by working it backwards. Once you have the indefinite integral, you just need to evaluate it from a to b. What do you need to store? Should you hardcode the step value or ask for it? Are there any places in the function where the value is negative? Does that mean you need to do anything differently? If so, do you need to only do the different thing where the function is negative? Once you know that kind of stuff, you can break it down into big picture pieces. What in big chunks do you need to do to solve this problem?
  19. No, my way just requires the program to be able to flag the strings for Java data types (e.g. "float"). It uses that to pick out the next string (separated by whitespace, of course) and then camelcase that (and the string following it, should it end in a comma). Once the variable names are identified in the declarations, they can be find/replaced no problem with a camelcase version. Code that can recognize datatypes and references to other files need not be a complete language parser.
  20. To be fair to the OP, Watson was specifically designed to win Jeopardy, so the quote in your post is applicable in the case in question.
  21. The variables would be strings if it is taking the program as an input in a mention modality rather than a use modality. The camelcase function wouldn't be trying to run the code, so it would want to parse the source file as a text file rather than code to interpret/compile. It doesn't require an entire language parser either. Since Java is a strongly typed language, you can use the datatypes as flags to let you know the part of the string that is a variable name. Then it's a matter of converting the variable name string into camelcase, find/replacing it, then either saving the original file or making a new one. It's a relatively easy project, especially for someone who is supposedly advancing machine vision. Though, this is really off topic, and another mod should merge the tangent with the other thread.
  22. Learn some math. Even the really basic stuff can let you do really cool things. Many of the machine learning techniques aren't all that mathematically complicated. Neural networks, for examples, are little more than optimizing weighted averages of a step (or sigmoid or something like a sigmoid) function.
  23. Actually, you could probably do some topic modelling and pull up some probability distributions based on the other words/phrases in the code. Alternatively, you could have your function not only take a source code as input but also a word bank. Now, if you're dealing with therapists of rapists, you'll still have that issue, but not with anywhere near the frequency.
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