You're confusing "totally arbitrary" with "judgment calls." Nerds have this problem a lot--if a rule can't be implemented by a computer, we don't think it's a real rule.
No, I'm pointing out that collective 'judgement calls' do not, in fact, work.
People cannot but disagree, and, what's more, it's something that's nearly impossible to be objective on. You can't just decide how 'relevant to the universe' something is...it's always what's relevant to you.
You can actually notice this lack of objectivity when it comes to sci-fi....nerds do a disproportional amount of editing, ergo, sci-fi is massively over-represented.
I.e., what you wish is impossible. Wikipedia cannot be 'more assertive' in judgment calls, because Wikipedia is a collective, and a somewhat skewed one at that, and members of the collective make judgment calls that they've certainly going to disagree on. Even in a magical ideal Wikipedia this couldn't work, much less one where poeple with too much time on their hands stake out positions and defend them.
They could solve this by splitting into namespaces or something, by having a 'fictional wikipedia' and a 'scientific theory wikipedia' and a 'place wikipedia', and let in anything no matter how obscure.
OTOH, I'm not entirely sure why they don't let everything in currently, but I'm sure there's a reason.
The problem I have with Wikipedia is that it refuses to create strict rules and follow them. It has stupid 'Notability' nonsense instead where it's just totally arbitrary.
For example, I'd be entirely okay with the idea that fictional things do not belong on Wikipedia, period. No fictional characters, no fictional places, nothing.
But that's not the rule. You can find, for example, 'Sunnydale California' on it, the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
But I'm sure there are plenty of TV shows that don't have their setting on there, and if you tried to put them on there, you'd be removed for notability reasons. Why one fictional place is more notable than the other, I don't know.
The problem with Wikipedia is that the rules are totally arbitrary about what is and isn't on there. And enforced in a completely random manner.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if they weren't operating with a single namespace. But they are.
It claims 'If you download the Mac version, you get the PC version free'.
But it is lying. Even if you have just a PC, you can go in and get a free license. (Which makes sense, as all licenses are apparently for both.) Go to the Steam store start page, follow the link (Which is the link above) on the side, one more click, and, tada, free Portal.
It took me two tries, though, the first time the page timed out. This deal is good to the 24th, though, so if you can't get in today don't fret.
I'm not even going to bother trying to download it yet, because I assume that once I have a 'free license', as long as Stream is concerned, I own the game and can download it later.
Incidentally, I wasn't aware until just now that I could use the Steam store when not in Steam. (I've only been using Steam for a few months.) Thanks for the link.
'Smoke' is not a thing. You were almost certain imagining 'things smoking', not 'smoke' per se.
For example, seeing things 'glowing', aka 'auras', is a not uncommon effect of migraines. Your visual system adds glowing light around and things, and that moves correctly three dimensionally. (Because it's being added to objects in the processed image of your field of view.)
Other hallucinations can happen in the same way. You can hallucinate that something else is invisible. Not that you can't see it, that it's invisible but you can see it. Your brain assigns it the attribute of 'invisible'.
Or 'fake', that's a pretty common one. You can see people and think they're fake, or tables are fake, or whatever. This is often a 'hallucination', because things in photographs look real.
And you yourself might have hallucinated something 'smoking'.
But all these have one thing in common. It's your brain taking something that actually exists in your field of view, something with actual coordinates, and altering it in some manner. Of course this object moves correctly in space, because it's actually there, you're just seeing it wrong.
Of course, there is a way to hallucinate and add things, but you add things everywhere. For example, you can imagine a room is full or water, or full of, tada, smoke. (An especially terrifying one is the entire room being full of fire.) Maybe that's what happened with you.
That is pretty much the only two ways your brain can 'add' things. Either it edits something else or it adds them everywhere...or they're clearly hallucinations because they don't occupy space correctly. (Or, like I said, were so dream-like they don't occupy space at all, they're just 'here'.)
Your brain has no ability to add thing that exist at certain unoccupied points in space and keep up with them as you move around and look at them from different directions. There simply is no possible brain mechanism to do that. It would requite you running your visual cortex backwards or something.
OTOH, you could be so screwed up you couldn't actually tell that said objects weren't occupying space correctly, but that would require such a high level of 'broken brain' that it would be fairly obvious if witnesses to ball lightning were that.
Hallucinations only appear to have 'real locations' if your brain is generated them, aka, you're mentally ill.(1) The eyes or the visual cortex generating them is pretty easy to figure out. Moving your head or eyes would, due, make the object move in sync. So I have trouble seeing anyone getting fooled by that at all.
If you only see if for a second or so, sure, you can get fooled...we've all thought we saw something out of the corner of our eye, or opened a door and perceived something that wasn't there before our brain corrected itself.
But not only does 'ball lightning' show up for longish periods of time, I have trouble conceiving that people would actually be this stupid in the first place if it didn't...if I see some bright flash and it goes away, I assume, duh, that was some trick of my eyes.
1) And it doesn't even really work like that. You just 'perceive' them without them really being in any location or whatever. It's like dream logic, where your bicycle ride can somehow include a conversation with your aunt. Somehow, they are there, talking to you.
Seeing invisible-to-everyone-else people walking around in your environment is just TV. Same with seeing a floating glowing ball that you can wander around and look at from multiple sides. Not one has ever imagined that, using their eyes, visual cortex, or brain. There is simply no possible biological way to do that.
There are a few phenomenon that are known to cause things like ball lighting.
St. Elmo's Fire, for example, can look like a floating ball. Not usually, but it can, if it forms on an unseen point like a tree branch.
There's probably other forms of ionization that we simple don't know about. There's plenty of ways to generate things that look likeball lightning is supposed to look, you can do it in your microwave. (Although that method does not seem likely to occur in nature.)
And I love the idea that Will-o-wisps aren't real. Yes, half the cultures in the world independently invented the idea of lights rising up from marshy water. It's like that old world-wide myth that the stars could fall out of the sky, which, of course, we know is absurd, stars streaking across the sky and plummeting to earth is obviously crazy talk.
I'm frankly astonished at all the people here who apparently think it's all a hallucination, which is, frankly, just stupid. Plenty of ball lightning has multiple observers and has been tracked for moderate distances.
As has been pointed out, visual hallucinations are pretty easy to recognize as such, considering they either follow the field of view, if generated in the optic nerve, or the eyes, if some sort of vision after-effect.
People who see fake lights and don't recognize them as such after about ten seconds as such are, quite likely, schizophrenic or have some other mental illness. Hallucination and optical illusions do not work that way in normal people.
It's only when it's the brain itself generates stuff that it appears even slightly consistent with reality. No one can walk around tracking an optical glitch and think it's an actual floating ball in space.
Especially as they were forced to make the 'safe harbor' provision in the DMCA to be allowed some of the more egregious stuff.
'Safe harbor' may seem to be fair and sane to most people, but it's important to note it's not particularly supposed to be fair, it's actually intended to be rather lax. It's a compromise reached to allow tougher laws against people who knowingly facilitate the distribution of copyrighted material.
And now they're bitching and whining about it, complaining it is doing exactly what it was intended to do...not require companies to police their customers.
So, of course, now they want to use the harsher laws that they only have because of 'safe harbor' to go after YouTube.
We might all whine about companies issuing DMCA takedown notices, but at least those are under the threat of perjury and are actual filed legal documents. Too many people have forgotten about the universe before that, when companies would call other companies and have some non-lawyer hint heavily about lawsuits and have them remove content that they had no legal ability to object to or sue over, but the host company didn't want to risk it.
I am, of course, in favor of actually filing some perjury charges here and there over obviously bogus takedown notices, but even without that, the system is still better, both for hosting companies and end users. So of course content providers object to it.
I don't have any problem with your argument, I just don't know how far you're going to get with it.
People always have a hard time accepting the fact that, in almost every system, something like 75% of the problems can be blamed on 10% of the users.
That is true almost anywhere we haven't already weeded out the problem, that a tiny fraction of bad operators cause almost all the problems we have, but people are constantly unwilling to do anything about it.
Instead, they decided to go after groups, like young people, with slighter higher accident ratings on average. Which is stupid.
I say that as someone who actually got slapped under one of those 'punish the young' laws. I got hit going 29 MPH over the speed limit when I was 19, and had my license revoked for six months under a law doing that if you're 25MPH or over and under 21 years old. Of course, I was driving downhill, on a 40MPH road that is at least 15 miles under what it should be (And the speed limit has since been raised 10 MPH and everyone goes 60 on it.), I actually did have a broken speedometer, and I could have easily gotten the ticket reduced by at least 10MPH if anyone had bothered to inform me before I plead guilty to it.
Like I said, instead of trying to find actual bad drivers, we've apparently noticed that, *gasp*, new drivers tend to be in more traffic accidents than others, and since people tend to drive as soon as they are able, that tends to be young people. So we've apparently decided we will punish young people more.
When, of course, it had little to do with age, and everything to do with experience. Yes, teenagers can be slightly more reckless in general, but I suspect 'accidents by people in the fist five years of driving' would not change by more than 15% if we moved the starting driving age up to 30.
But, anyway, I'm all for some sort of 'repeat offender' driving category, and I'm all for having some sort of way to detect people driving like lunatics and counting that towards 'repeat offender'. That is, in fact, what the entire 'points' system is supposed to do, but we give points for things that aren't reckless (Like minor speeding tickets.) and it's too easy to start over. I'm not against having reckless drivers actually take a real, comprehensive course, actually learning their lesson, and really starting over, but it should be rather like 'parole' for a couple of years for them.
Sadly, paying more cops won't help track down reckless people, as most drivers entirely change their driving behavior around cops, and will continue to do so until the majority of drivers aren't breaking the law by speeding. (Or, rather, until the law changes.)
That, I think, is essentially the real problem. Bad drivers do not know they are are bad drivers. They think, because everyone breaks the law when driving, everyone is as reckless as them.
If everyone was not breaking the law, either a) reckless drivers would not be able to rationalize their recklessness as they realized everyone doesn't drive like them, or b) they'd not realize that and not change their behavior when cops were around. Or at least c) not have quite such an obvious notification to 'stop driving like a lunatic' because everyone else slowed down.
But, hell, if we're willing to throw a terrorism-fighting level of money at the problem, we could, at the very least, reduce accidents by reducing the number of drivers on the road in total via mass transit projects.
Oh, a YouTube App. Why, on an iPod Touch, that takes several seconds to launch!
Or play J2ME games on it.
You can play J2ME games on your internet radio hardware? Weird.
Or make phone calls.
You can make phone calls on your internet radio hardware? What, using Skype?
Or make photos.
You can make photos on your internet radio hardware? Isn't it awkward having to get everyone in the right room in the right place? Can't your cell phone just take a picture wherever you are?
Or install what you like.
Hey, look, that might actually be possible, if you get, for example, a Sony Dash.
Or have infinite space trough a memory card slot.
...why do you need space on internet radio hardware? Yes, yes, local music, but a NAS really sounds like a saner plan.
I’m just saying that my mobile phone does all of the above, and lots more, costs less, and the sound quality is great.
The sound quality better be great if you're using a damn mobile phone for an internet radio!
I use a Internet flat-rate with it that costs me 20€ a month.
Do you not have an internet connection in your house already? Why on earth would you pay a fee on top of that, for a shittier connection no less?
And I can stream my whole collection from home.
WOW! You can access your home music from home! That's amazing!
Perhaps you should actually learn what this entire damn article and discussion is about, and what an iPod Touch is. Hint: iPod Touchs have no monthly fee at all, and do not not come with an internet connection.
We are discussing pieces of hardware you install on a home network to listen to music both from the internet and on said network. We are not discussing cell phones. Someone mentioned a device, which is not a cell phone, called an iPod Touch that can get on a local network via wifi and present a music-playing interface.
It was a generally stupid idea, because an iPod Touch is at least twice as expensive as dedicated devices without batteries and smaller screens and whatnot, but at least it made sense, and might be reasonable for people who want both a portable mp3 player and an internet radio...get them both as one thing. Likewise, smartphones, with wifi, might be a good choice. Not to buy one for this purpose, but if you have one, put it in a dock in a good location, hook it to your stereo, and fire up a streaming radio app.
Your suggestion of 'a standard cell phone' does not make sense, as standard cell phones do not have wifi.
I have no idea why you think PCs can't have speakers built in, or why you have to have the TV on.
A lot of people seem very confused about how a HTPC 'must' operate. There is absolutely nothing stopping an HTPC from operating without the screen on. There is nothing stopping them from having tiny LED displays for when the TV is off. There's nothing stopping them from having control buttons on the front.
In fact, plenty of them already fit all those qualifications.
If you want an internet radio device just does audio, well, that's fine. It's good to know there are low-power devices that can be cannibalized into them, especially cheap ones.
But there's no need to go inventing reasons that HTPCs are impractical. There's nothing stopping anyone from having them do anything that article described. Hell, you can even fit them in cases that small. (Although a lot of that space was wasted in that article. Obviously, devices based off routers can be smaller that devices based off PCs.)
An HTPC will just be more expensive, use more power, and probably be bigger than an audio-only device. All valid concerns.
Seriously, do you know what an HTPC is? It's a computer with an interface that's operated by remote control control, usually running a single application. It's a damn custom built 'Tivo', except many of them don't do any recording.
People who build HTPC use something like XBMC, which can, tada, be operated via HTTP requests, so it would be trivially easy to have it start doing anything at any time you wanted. If timing it's not built in it's easy enough to run wget from the cron.
Plenty of HTPCs already know enough to turn themselves on at secific times, to record shows.
And of course trying to figure out the 'tricky' problem of how have some sort of 'remote control' over an HTPC is akin to figure out how to have some sort of 'remote control' over a television...I wonder how that could possibly work.
The problem the parent has is that apparently he doesn't have an HTPC near his bed, and doesn't want to set one up.
No, 'MSRP' is manufacturer's suggested retail price. You can tell because the first letters in 'manufacturer's suggested retail price' spell 'MSRP'. Sometimes just 'SRP' without the 'manufacturer's' at the start, because, duh, who else would be suggesting a price?
It can also be called a 'list price', as in, the price that resellers should list it at.
'Pricepoint' is something some douchebag economist invented to sound doucher.
The car crash statistic is stupid. Cars actually serve some purpose, and while we could probably reduce car crashes, there's not really any way we could get rid of them.
A better statistic is tobacco use, which kills something like 435,000 Americans a year. Yes, ten times as many as cars, 150 times a year as many as 9/11. 1200 a day.
Or, to put it another way, the first plane hit the first tower at 8:46 AM on September 11. From that point to 8:46 on PM 9/13, more Americans died of tobacco deaths than were killed by terrorism. That's a span of just 60 hours. Two and half days. Tobacco kills slightly more Americans as 9/11 did...every 2.5 days.
Now, think what you want about tobacco, but worry about terrorism is just dumb. Period. It's dumb for people, and it's dumb for countries.
Thank goodness. I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering why the hell that would be 'curious' argument.
It could be a wrong argument...perhaps we are just as unsafe as before, or perhaps, having moved some of our resources, we are less safe.
Those are, of course, possible. In fact, there's a very good argument that our actions after 9/11 have made us more likely to be targeted by terrorists, although, strictly speaking, that's not the same thing as 'less safe'. (Because we could have increased our protectiveness more than the increase in people targeting us.)
Likewise, some of our responses have proven self-defeating, and actually resulted in it being easier to terrorize us. I'm reminded of a city going ape-shit over stupid Cartoon Network ads.
But it is the expected outcome, that after being attacked, that you tend to be more prepared for later attacks. As preparation is usually helpful, you are expected to be 'safer'.
I.e., it's possible to argue that Schneier is incorrect, but it's really strange to argue that his argument is 'curious' when it's normal position. It's like arguing that it's 'curious' someone bought food when they went to the grocery store, or 'curious' that a married couple sleep in the same bed.
Hey, moron, just saying it's 'more effective' does not actually prove your point.
The problem with profiling is, as Schneier points out every time it is mentioned, that any known focus on certain entities means there's now known to be less focus on specific other entities.
This isn't some problem with it being done 'badly', this is how that works. By definition, focus in one area removes focus in other areas. Saying 'we will profile these people' is the same as saying 'We are not going to look as closely at people who are not those people'.
Which, as even utter morons should realize, means that terrorists will either use said people, or at least faking being said people.
Ergo, the only profiling that doesn't reduce security is profiling of things that are unalterable and unforgable.
Behavioral profiling, for example, makes sense...it's very very hard to train people not to act nervously. Ergo, singling people out on the basis of that might make sense. Or might not...it's just a possibility of what might be a good idea, as opposed to profiling on the basis of people wearing red shirts, which would obviously be stupid.
Some other stuff makes sense...for example, terrorists need to be trained, and for various reasons, said training can only happen in a few countries, so we can increase security on this people. Although, like I said, once we start doing that it wouldn't be long until they're using people who we don't know went to those countries. But that, at least, has a moderately high fence to climb, and requires prep work we can catch them in.
Of course, your idea about how profiling works and the idea we can profile 'Muslims' is actually even stupider. We actually could profile everyone under five feet tall, although, duh, terrorists would either buy lifts or just use tall people, so that would be stupid.
But we couldn't profile 'Muslims', even if it wasn't a stupid idea. There's no magical indicator what religion people follow. Hell, they don't even have to 'fake' being another religion. It's like profiling people who 'have a pet cat'...the government has no idea who the hell has a pet cat. I guess we could start registering people for that, but, constitutional questions about having to register your religion aside, I suspect terrorists would just lie.
Although we could profile 'People with obvious external Muslim indicators', which manages to be even stupider. It's like profiling people flying with cat food. Quick, throw your prayer mats in the trash, we have to get on the plane!
I suspect you mean we'd profile Arabs, and have apparently completely forgotten the fact that something like half of all Muslims in the world are non-Arabic. In fact, in the US, Muslims are 26% Arab, 34% South Asian, 24% African-American, and 15% other. Now, in the US, we usually mistake 'South Asian' for Arabic, but even then, that still leaves 40% of all Muslims unaccounted for. (And before you say 'They aren't terrorists', two words: DC Sniper.)
And plenty of Arabs aren't Muslims, and there are other swarthy ethnicities that are often hard to distinguish from Arab. Are you going to start profiling Hindus (Aka, South Asians.) and Hispanics? No? Well, Arab terrorists will use those identities.
In short, profiling is another word for 'Making a list of people who go through less security screening', and profiling 'Muslims' is, well, pretty clear evidence you'd an idiot. Even 'people who look Arabic' would be pretty stupid, but 'Muslim' is, well, so stupid you just need to shut up forever.
Heh, and I thought I understood what happened pretty well, but you've managed to explain the part I never understood: Why on earth anyone in the banking industry thought that these were good deals?
I could see why banks were making such NINJA loans (They could sell them), I could see why banks would purchase them and repackage them into such instruments (They could sell them.), I just couldn't see why other banks would buy them. Nor could I figure out why rating agencies thought these were reasonable. (Hey, how did that union lawsuit against the rating agencies work out?) I heard about a 'mathematical formula', but didn't really understand.
So you're essentially saying that the ratings of such instruments became based on...nothing at all. Or, rather, the price was (Like always) based on the estimated risk, but this time the (misestimated) risk was based on the price.
The real joke, of course, is that such instruments didn't even need to exist at all. They serve no purpose at all. Non-risky mortgages are already handled by the market quite well (Often bought by Freddie and Fannie) and mortgages that are too risky for that should be traded only individually because there are too many factors to have a 'market' for them. Inventing a new market to 'trade stuff we can't assess the risk of' seems, um, stupid.
Of course, they thought they could assess the risk. I mean, they were willing to buy it, and pay X dollars for it, so logically it couldn't be that much riskier than other things they pay X dollars for. Man, that sounds even stupider when I say it like that.
The real real joke is, unlike previous market stupidity that just affects people in the market, this stupidity resulted in a bunch of people with who got mortgages they couldn't pay. In fact, even if this had worked, those mortgages would still be as bad.
I think a lot of people missed that. The market created a demand for bad loans. These loans did not subsequently fail because of the market, they failed because they were bad loans. They would have failed regardless of what the market did...the market just, delusionally, thought that the playing around with 'bad loan securities' was smarter than it was. They're arsonists who didn't make it out of the house they lit on fire...burning down the house was part of the plan.
This rather clearly shows the ruthlessness of the market, and how they should be kept the hell away from anyone who doesn't choose to play their stupid little games. Which is why I'm in favor of separating out investment banks again, and why I'm in favor of not letting banks resell risky mortgages.(That is, if a mortgage doesn't fit within certain parameters, even if it's legal to make, they can't actually sell that mortgage to another bank, they have to hold it themselves. If they want to make 'exceptional' mortgages, fine...it's their neck on the line if there's a default.)
All you 'incredibly smart people who invent nonsense out of thin air and make money of it' stay the hell away from my actual money.
Why is it easier and faster to sell 10% of a multi-billion dollar company than it is to sell my car? (Which requires me going to the courthouse to transfer title.)
The stock market is a casino, and stockholders hire CEOs that make the stock go up for short periods of time.
Not 'Make a long-term profit', not even 'make a short-term profit', hell, not even 'make the stock go up semi-permanently'.
No, they just want a damn bump so they can sell. In, fact, the bumpier the stock price the better...they can sell when high and buy when low.
The whole thing is goddamn absurd. It's like if we had a horserace where the people who had the most bets in choose the jockeys. That might be an entertaining little game, but the point of a horserace is to get to the finish line as fast as possible.
Likewise, the point of a company is to make money. Which they can then use to pay their workers and make stuff. It's capitalism, and while it might sometimes be cold and heartless, it does actually serve a purpose. And in general people live under it, doing their job, getting paid, and demanding more money, which they sometimes get.
The stock price, however, is entirely orthogonal to that, and yet that is, for some inexplicably reason, what the company is being managed to maximize. Companies are doing things that harm them, but push up a completely unrelated value of 'what random other people think the stock of this company is worth at this exact moment in time'.
Yeah, thieves don't even look for hidden-outside car keys. Hell, half the time I bet they don't even check if the door is locked. Just *bam*, window smashed, reach in and grab.
People actually stealing a car tend to take a bit more care, because hotwiring takes time and people might notice them hotwiring a car if the window is smashed.
So they might, might, check the front right wheel-well for a key. And probably walk past on the other side once to see if the door is actually locked. However, when they don't find it, they'll pull out the slim jim and unlock your car door in five seconds, not feel around under the rest of your car to find the key.
However, I have a fun surprise for any stupid car thieves who would steal my 92 Pontiac Sunbird. (Yeah, pretty unlikely, I know.)
Whenever I feel the slightest chance of car theft, I pull off the gear shift knob, pull out the rod that the button pushes downward to let the car shift, put it in my center console, and put the knob back. Good luck shifting the car into drive without spending ten minutes figuring out what's wrong, and either recognizing the rod or shifting gears via sticking a pencil in there.
I've always heard you shouldn't lock your sliding glass door for exactly this reason.
Either the thief will break it, which is expensive to fix, or he will 'untrack' it, which is really expensive to fix.
For a while they had sliding glass doors with bars in them, to keep people from breaking them, but then criminals would just yank them off the track, which tends to require you replacing the entire frame to the door. Usually requiring you to buy a new door anyway, as it's not like they're interchangeable between frames.
What, do you have some sort of reading comprehension problem? Do you need some sort of rudimentary logic class?
I quoted exactly that line. He specifically stated, and I quoted, and you quoted, the fact that he has a problem with devices when he can't install 'software he wants to install'.
He does not have 'software he wants to install' on a microwave or TV(1), ergo, he does not have a problem with those devices. (At least, not for that reason. He could have other problems with them, of course.)
QED
1) Because no one has 'software they want to install' on those devices, because there is actually no third-party software for those devices. It does not exist, thus no one can have it. Probably because, as I said, those devices are incredibly shitty in the hardware department, but I can't prove the reasons of software developers to choose other platforms.
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You're confusing "totally arbitrary" with "judgment calls." Nerds have this problem a lot--if a rule can't be implemented by a computer, we don't think it's a real rule.
No, I'm pointing out that collective 'judgement calls' do not, in fact, work.
People cannot but disagree, and, what's more, it's something that's nearly impossible to be objective on. You can't just decide how 'relevant to the universe' something is...it's always what's relevant to you.
You can actually notice this lack of objectivity when it comes to sci-fi....nerds do a disproportional amount of editing, ergo, sci-fi is massively over-represented.
I.e., what you wish is impossible. Wikipedia cannot be 'more assertive' in judgment calls, because Wikipedia is a collective, and a somewhat skewed one at that, and members of the collective make judgment calls that they've certainly going to disagree on. Even in a magical ideal Wikipedia this couldn't work, much less one where poeple with too much time on their hands stake out positions and defend them.
They could solve this by splitting into namespaces or something, by having a 'fictional wikipedia' and a 'scientific theory wikipedia' and a 'place wikipedia', and let in anything no matter how obscure.
OTOH, I'm not entirely sure why they don't let everything in currently, but I'm sure there's a reason.
Hey, moron, by that definition, everything is notable, as everything is capable of being noted.
And everything is noticeable. I'm pretty certain you notice the setting any story is set in.
I'm pretty sure that's not Wikipedia's definition of the word. Wikipedia uses the circular definition 'worthy of notice'.
By definition, all contrafibulations are sincere. They have to be, they're the opposite of lies.
The problem I have with Wikipedia is that it refuses to create strict rules and follow them. It has stupid 'Notability' nonsense instead where it's just totally arbitrary.
For example, I'd be entirely okay with the idea that fictional things do not belong on Wikipedia, period. No fictional characters, no fictional places, nothing.
But that's not the rule. You can find, for example, 'Sunnydale California' on it, the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
But I'm sure there are plenty of TV shows that don't have their setting on there, and if you tried to put them on there, you'd be removed for notability reasons. Why one fictional place is more notable than the other, I don't know.
The problem with Wikipedia is that the rules are totally arbitrary about what is and isn't on there. And enforced in a completely random manner.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if they weren't operating with a single namespace. But they are.
Yup.
It claims 'If you download the Mac version, you get the PC version free'.
But it is lying. Even if you have just a PC, you can go in and get a free license. (Which makes sense, as all licenses are apparently for both.) Go to the Steam store start page, follow the link (Which is the link above) on the side, one more click, and, tada, free Portal.
It took me two tries, though, the first time the page timed out. This deal is good to the 24th, though, so if you can't get in today don't fret.
I'm not even going to bother trying to download it yet, because I assume that once I have a 'free license', as long as Stream is concerned, I own the game and can download it later.
Incidentally, I wasn't aware until just now that I could use the Steam store when not in Steam. (I've only been using Steam for a few months.) Thanks for the link.
'Smoke' is not a thing. You were almost certain imagining 'things smoking', not 'smoke' per se.
For example, seeing things 'glowing', aka 'auras', is a not uncommon effect of migraines. Your visual system adds glowing light around and things, and that moves correctly three dimensionally. (Because it's being added to objects in the processed image of your field of view.)
Other hallucinations can happen in the same way. You can hallucinate that something else is invisible. Not that you can't see it, that it's invisible but you can see it. Your brain assigns it the attribute of 'invisible'.
Or 'fake', that's a pretty common one. You can see people and think they're fake, or tables are fake, or whatever. This is often a 'hallucination', because things in photographs look real.
And you yourself might have hallucinated something 'smoking'.
But all these have one thing in common. It's your brain taking something that actually exists in your field of view, something with actual coordinates, and altering it in some manner. Of course this object moves correctly in space, because it's actually there, you're just seeing it wrong.
Of course, there is a way to hallucinate and add things, but you add things everywhere. For example, you can imagine a room is full or water, or full of, tada, smoke. (An especially terrifying one is the entire room being full of fire.) Maybe that's what happened with you.
That is pretty much the only two ways your brain can 'add' things. Either it edits something else or it adds them everywhere...or they're clearly hallucinations because they don't occupy space correctly. (Or, like I said, were so dream-like they don't occupy space at all, they're just 'here'.)
Your brain has no ability to add thing that exist at certain unoccupied points in space and keep up with them as you move around and look at them from different directions. There simply is no possible brain mechanism to do that. It would requite you running your visual cortex backwards or something.
OTOH, you could be so screwed up you couldn't actually tell that said objects weren't occupying space correctly, but that would require such a high level of 'broken brain' that it would be fairly obvious if witnesses to ball lightning were that.
Yeah, I pointed that out above.
Hallucinations only appear to have 'real locations' if your brain is generated them, aka, you're mentally ill.(1) The eyes or the visual cortex generating them is pretty easy to figure out. Moving your head or eyes would, due, make the object move in sync. So I have trouble seeing anyone getting fooled by that at all.
If you only see if for a second or so, sure, you can get fooled...we've all thought we saw something out of the corner of our eye, or opened a door and perceived something that wasn't there before our brain corrected itself.
But not only does 'ball lightning' show up for longish periods of time, I have trouble conceiving that people would actually be this stupid in the first place if it didn't...if I see some bright flash and it goes away, I assume, duh, that was some trick of my eyes.
1) And it doesn't even really work like that. You just 'perceive' them without them really being in any location or whatever. It's like dream logic, where your bicycle ride can somehow include a conversation with your aunt. Somehow, they are there, talking to you.
Seeing invisible-to-everyone-else people walking around in your environment is just TV. Same with seeing a floating glowing ball that you can wander around and look at from multiple sides. Not one has ever imagined that, using their eyes, visual cortex, or brain. There is simply no possible biological way to do that.
I've always figured that ball lightning explained a lot of UFO sightings.
There are a few phenomenon that are known to cause things like ball lighting.
St. Elmo's Fire, for example, can look like a floating ball. Not usually, but it can, if it forms on an unseen point like a tree branch.
There's probably other forms of ionization that we simple don't know about. There's plenty of ways to generate things that look likeball lightning is supposed to look, you can do it in your microwave. (Although that method does not seem likely to occur in nature.)
And I love the idea that Will-o-wisps aren't real. Yes, half the cultures in the world independently invented the idea of lights rising up from marshy water. It's like that old world-wide myth that the stars could fall out of the sky, which, of course, we know is absurd, stars streaking across the sky and plummeting to earth is obviously crazy talk.
I'm frankly astonished at all the people here who apparently think it's all a hallucination, which is, frankly, just stupid. Plenty of ball lightning has multiple observers and has been tracked for moderate distances.
As has been pointed out, visual hallucinations are pretty easy to recognize as such, considering they either follow the field of view, if generated in the optic nerve, or the eyes, if some sort of vision after-effect.
People who see fake lights and don't recognize them as such after about ten seconds as such are, quite likely, schizophrenic or have some other mental illness. Hallucination and optical illusions do not work that way in normal people.
It's only when it's the brain itself generates stuff that it appears even slightly consistent with reality. No one can walk around tracking an optical glitch and think it's an actual floating ball in space.
Cry me a freaking river.
Especially as they were forced to make the 'safe harbor' provision in the DMCA to be allowed some of the more egregious stuff.
'Safe harbor' may seem to be fair and sane to most people, but it's important to note it's not particularly supposed to be fair, it's actually intended to be rather lax. It's a compromise reached to allow tougher laws against people who knowingly facilitate the distribution of copyrighted material.
And now they're bitching and whining about it, complaining it is doing exactly what it was intended to do...not require companies to police their customers.
So, of course, now they want to use the harsher laws that they only have because of 'safe harbor' to go after YouTube.
We might all whine about companies issuing DMCA takedown notices, but at least those are under the threat of perjury and are actual filed legal documents. Too many people have forgotten about the universe before that, when companies would call other companies and have some non-lawyer hint heavily about lawsuits and have them remove content that they had no legal ability to object to or sue over, but the host company didn't want to risk it.
I am, of course, in favor of actually filing some perjury charges here and there over obviously bogus takedown notices, but even without that, the system is still better, both for hosting companies and end users. So of course content providers object to it.
I don't have any problem with your argument, I just don't know how far you're going to get with it.
People always have a hard time accepting the fact that, in almost every system, something like 75% of the problems can be blamed on 10% of the users. That is true almost anywhere we haven't already weeded out the problem, that a tiny fraction of bad operators cause almost all the problems we have, but people are constantly unwilling to do anything about it.
Instead, they decided to go after groups, like young people, with slighter higher accident ratings on average. Which is stupid.
I say that as someone who actually got slapped under one of those 'punish the young' laws. I got hit going 29 MPH over the speed limit when I was 19, and had my license revoked for six months under a law doing that if you're 25MPH or over and under 21 years old. Of course, I was driving downhill, on a 40MPH road that is at least 15 miles under what it should be (And the speed limit has since been raised 10 MPH and everyone goes 60 on it.), I actually did have a broken speedometer, and I could have easily gotten the ticket reduced by at least 10MPH if anyone had bothered to inform me before I plead guilty to it.
Like I said, instead of trying to find actual bad drivers, we've apparently noticed that, *gasp*, new drivers tend to be in more traffic accidents than others, and since people tend to drive as soon as they are able, that tends to be young people. So we've apparently decided we will punish young people more.
When, of course, it had little to do with age, and everything to do with experience. Yes, teenagers can be slightly more reckless in general, but I suspect 'accidents by people in the fist five years of driving' would not change by more than 15% if we moved the starting driving age up to 30.
But, anyway, I'm all for some sort of 'repeat offender' driving category, and I'm all for having some sort of way to detect people driving like lunatics and counting that towards 'repeat offender'. That is, in fact, what the entire 'points' system is supposed to do, but we give points for things that aren't reckless (Like minor speeding tickets.) and it's too easy to start over. I'm not against having reckless drivers actually take a real, comprehensive course, actually learning their lesson, and really starting over, but it should be rather like 'parole' for a couple of years for them.
Sadly, paying more cops won't help track down reckless people, as most drivers entirely change their driving behavior around cops, and will continue to do so until the majority of drivers aren't breaking the law by speeding. (Or, rather, until the law changes.)
That, I think, is essentially the real problem. Bad drivers do not know they are are bad drivers. They think, because everyone breaks the law when driving, everyone is as reckless as them.
If everyone was not breaking the law, either a) reckless drivers would not be able to rationalize their recklessness as they realized everyone doesn't drive like them, or b) they'd not realize that and not change their behavior when cops were around. Or at least c) not have quite such an obvious notification to 'stop driving like a lunatic' because everyone else slowed down.
But, hell, if we're willing to throw a terrorism-fighting level of money at the problem, we could, at the very least, reduce accidents by reducing the number of drivers on the road in total via mass transit projects.
Except for the ability to use YouTube on it.
Oh, a YouTube App. Why, on an iPod Touch, that takes several seconds to launch!
Or play J2ME games on it.
You can play J2ME games on your internet radio hardware? Weird.
Or make phone calls.
You can make phone calls on your internet radio hardware? What, using Skype?
Or make photos.
You can make photos on your internet radio hardware? Isn't it awkward having to get everyone in the right room in the right place? Can't your cell phone just take a picture wherever you are?
Or install what you like.
Hey, look, that might actually be possible, if you get, for example, a Sony Dash.
Or have infinite space trough a memory card slot.
I’m just saying that my mobile phone does all of the above, and lots more, costs less, and the sound quality is great.
The sound quality better be great if you're using a damn mobile phone for an internet radio!
I use a Internet flat-rate with it that costs me 20€ a month.
Do you not have an internet connection in your house already? Why on earth would you pay a fee on top of that, for a shittier connection no less?
And I can stream my whole collection from home.
WOW! You can access your home music from home! That's amazing!
Perhaps you should actually learn what this entire damn article and discussion is about, and what an iPod Touch is. Hint: iPod Touchs have no monthly fee at all, and do not not come with an internet connection.
We are discussing pieces of hardware you install on a home network to listen to music both from the internet and on said network. We are not discussing cell phones. Someone mentioned a device, which is not a cell phone, called an iPod Touch that can get on a local network via wifi and present a music-playing interface.
It was a generally stupid idea, because an iPod Touch is at least twice as expensive as dedicated devices without batteries and smaller screens and whatnot, but at least it made sense, and might be reasonable for people who want both a portable mp3 player and an internet radio...get them both as one thing. Likewise, smartphones, with wifi, might be a good choice. Not to buy one for this purpose, but if you have one, put it in a dock in a good location, hook it to your stereo, and fire up a streaming radio app.
Your suggestion of 'a standard cell phone' does not make sense, as standard cell phones do not have wifi.
I have no idea why you think PCs can't have speakers built in, or why you have to have the TV on.
A lot of people seem very confused about how a HTPC 'must' operate. There is absolutely nothing stopping an HTPC from operating without the screen on. There is nothing stopping them from having tiny LED displays for when the TV is off. There's nothing stopping them from having control buttons on the front.
In fact, plenty of them already fit all those qualifications.
If you want an internet radio device just does audio, well, that's fine. It's good to know there are low-power devices that can be cannibalized into them, especially cheap ones.
But there's no need to go inventing reasons that HTPCs are impractical. There's nothing stopping anyone from having them do anything that article described. Hell, you can even fit them in cases that small. (Although a lot of that space was wasted in that article. Obviously, devices based off routers can be smaller that devices based off PCs.)
An HTPC will just be more expensive, use more power, and probably be bigger than an audio-only device. All valid concerns.
'switching on TVs and amps', however, are not.
Why the fuck would you be using VLC on a HTPC?
Seriously, do you know what an HTPC is? It's a computer with an interface that's operated by remote control control, usually running a single application. It's a damn custom built 'Tivo', except many of them don't do any recording.
People who build HTPC use something like XBMC, which can, tada, be operated via HTTP requests, so it would be trivially easy to have it start doing anything at any time you wanted. If timing it's not built in it's easy enough to run wget from the cron.
Plenty of HTPCs already know enough to turn themselves on at secific times, to record shows.
And of course trying to figure out the 'tricky' problem of how have some sort of 'remote control' over an HTPC is akin to figure out how to have some sort of 'remote control' over a television...I wonder how that could possibly work.
The problem the parent has is that apparently he doesn't have an HTPC near his bed, and doesn't want to set one up.
No, 'MSRP' is manufacturer's suggested retail price. You can tell because the first letters in 'manufacturer's suggested retail price' spell 'MSRP'. Sometimes just 'SRP' without the 'manufacturer's' at the start, because, duh, who else would be suggesting a price?
It can also be called a 'list price', as in, the price that resellers should list it at.
'Pricepoint' is something some douchebag economist invented to sound doucher.
Because apparently we're retarded.
Oh, wait, it's just you.
Why do you think that people need to turn on TVs or monitors to listen to streaming radio on an HTPC?
The car crash statistic is stupid. Cars actually serve some purpose, and while we could probably reduce car crashes, there's not really any way we could get rid of them.
A better statistic is tobacco use, which kills something like 435,000 Americans a year. Yes, ten times as many as cars, 150 times a year as many as 9/11. 1200 a day.
Or, to put it another way, the first plane hit the first tower at 8:46 AM on September 11. From that point to 8:46 on PM 9/13, more Americans died of tobacco deaths than were killed by terrorism. That's a span of just 60 hours. Two and half days. Tobacco kills slightly more Americans as 9/11 did...every 2.5 days.
Now, think what you want about tobacco, but worry about terrorism is just dumb. Period. It's dumb for people, and it's dumb for countries.
Thank goodness. I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering why the hell that would be 'curious' argument.
It could be a wrong argument...perhaps we are just as unsafe as before, or perhaps, having moved some of our resources, we are less safe.
Those are, of course, possible. In fact, there's a very good argument that our actions after 9/11 have made us more likely to be targeted by terrorists, although, strictly speaking, that's not the same thing as 'less safe'. (Because we could have increased our protectiveness more than the increase in people targeting us.)
Likewise, some of our responses have proven self-defeating, and actually resulted in it being easier to terrorize us. I'm reminded of a city going ape-shit over stupid Cartoon Network ads.
But it is the expected outcome, that after being attacked, that you tend to be more prepared for later attacks. As preparation is usually helpful, you are expected to be 'safer'.
I.e., it's possible to argue that Schneier is incorrect, but it's really strange to argue that his argument is 'curious' when it's normal position. It's like arguing that it's 'curious' someone bought food when they went to the grocery store, or 'curious' that a married couple sleep in the same bed.
Hey, moron, just saying it's 'more effective' does not actually prove your point.
The problem with profiling is, as Schneier points out every time it is mentioned, that any known focus on certain entities means there's now known to be less focus on specific other entities.
This isn't some problem with it being done 'badly', this is how that works. By definition, focus in one area removes focus in other areas. Saying 'we will profile these people' is the same as saying 'We are not going to look as closely at people who are not those people'.
Which, as even utter morons should realize, means that terrorists will either use said people, or at least faking being said people.
Ergo, the only profiling that doesn't reduce security is profiling of things that are unalterable and unforgable.
Behavioral profiling, for example, makes sense...it's very very hard to train people not to act nervously. Ergo, singling people out on the basis of that might make sense. Or might not...it's just a possibility of what might be a good idea, as opposed to profiling on the basis of people wearing red shirts, which would obviously be stupid.
Some other stuff makes sense...for example, terrorists need to be trained, and for various reasons, said training can only happen in a few countries, so we can increase security on this people. Although, like I said, once we start doing that it wouldn't be long until they're using people who we don't know went to those countries. But that, at least, has a moderately high fence to climb, and requires prep work we can catch them in.
Of course, your idea about how profiling works and the idea we can profile 'Muslims' is actually even stupider. We actually could profile everyone under five feet tall, although, duh, terrorists would either buy lifts or just use tall people, so that would be stupid.
But we couldn't profile 'Muslims', even if it wasn't a stupid idea. There's no magical indicator what religion people follow. Hell, they don't even have to 'fake' being another religion. It's like profiling people who 'have a pet cat'...the government has no idea who the hell has a pet cat. I guess we could start registering people for that, but, constitutional questions about having to register your religion aside, I suspect terrorists would just lie.
Although we could profile 'People with obvious external Muslim indicators', which manages to be even stupider. It's like profiling people flying with cat food. Quick, throw your prayer mats in the trash, we have to get on the plane!
I suspect you mean we'd profile Arabs, and have apparently completely forgotten the fact that something like half of all Muslims in the world are non-Arabic. In fact, in the US, Muslims are 26% Arab, 34% South Asian, 24% African-American, and 15% other. Now, in the US, we usually mistake 'South Asian' for Arabic, but even then, that still leaves 40% of all Muslims unaccounted for. (And before you say 'They aren't terrorists', two words: DC Sniper.)
And plenty of Arabs aren't Muslims, and there are other swarthy ethnicities that are often hard to distinguish from Arab. Are you going to start profiling Hindus (Aka, South Asians.) and Hispanics? No? Well, Arab terrorists will use those identities.
In short, profiling is another word for 'Making a list of people who go through less security screening', and profiling 'Muslims' is, well, pretty clear evidence you'd an idiot. Even 'people who look Arabic' would be pretty stupid, but 'Muslim' is, well, so stupid you just need to shut up forever.
The anthrax attack, you idjit.
Heh, and I thought I understood what happened pretty well, but you've managed to explain the part I never understood: Why on earth anyone in the banking industry thought that these were good deals?
I could see why banks were making such NINJA loans (They could sell them), I could see why banks would purchase them and repackage them into such instruments (They could sell them.), I just couldn't see why other banks would buy them. Nor could I figure out why rating agencies thought these were reasonable. (Hey, how did that union lawsuit against the rating agencies work out?) I heard about a 'mathematical formula', but didn't really understand.
So you're essentially saying that the ratings of such instruments became based on...nothing at all. Or, rather, the price was (Like always) based on the estimated risk, but this time the (misestimated) risk was based on the price.
The real joke, of course, is that such instruments didn't even need to exist at all. They serve no purpose at all. Non-risky mortgages are already handled by the market quite well (Often bought by Freddie and Fannie) and mortgages that are too risky for that should be traded only individually because there are too many factors to have a 'market' for them. Inventing a new market to 'trade stuff we can't assess the risk of' seems, um, stupid.
Of course, they thought they could assess the risk. I mean, they were willing to buy it, and pay X dollars for it, so logically it couldn't be that much riskier than other things they pay X dollars for. Man, that sounds even stupider when I say it like that.
The real real joke is, unlike previous market stupidity that just affects people in the market, this stupidity resulted in a bunch of people with who got mortgages they couldn't pay. In fact, even if this had worked, those mortgages would still be as bad.
I think a lot of people missed that. The market created a demand for bad loans. These loans did not subsequently fail because of the market, they failed because they were bad loans. They would have failed regardless of what the market did...the market just, delusionally, thought that the playing around with 'bad loan securities' was smarter than it was. They're arsonists who didn't make it out of the house they lit on fire...burning down the house was part of the plan.
This rather clearly shows the ruthlessness of the market, and how they should be kept the hell away from anyone who doesn't choose to play their stupid little games. Which is why I'm in favor of separating out investment banks again, and why I'm in favor of not letting banks resell risky mortgages.(That is, if a mortgage doesn't fit within certain parameters, even if it's legal to make, they can't actually sell that mortgage to another bank, they have to hold it themselves. If they want to make 'exceptional' mortgages, fine...it's their neck on the line if there's a default.)
All you 'incredibly smart people who invent nonsense out of thin air and make money of it' stay the hell away from my actual money.
I figured out how to fix the stock market:
You must hold all stock for at least six months.
That is all.
Why is it easier and faster to sell 10% of a multi-billion dollar company than it is to sell my car? (Which requires me going to the courthouse to transfer title.)
The stock market is a casino, and stockholders hire CEOs that make the stock go up for short periods of time.
Not 'Make a long-term profit', not even 'make a short-term profit', hell, not even 'make the stock go up semi-permanently'.
No, they just want a damn bump so they can sell. In, fact, the bumpier the stock price the better...they can sell when high and buy when low.
The whole thing is goddamn absurd. It's like if we had a horserace where the people who had the most bets in choose the jockeys. That might be an entertaining little game, but the point of a horserace is to get to the finish line as fast as possible.
Likewise, the point of a company is to make money. Which they can then use to pay their workers and make stuff. It's capitalism, and while it might sometimes be cold and heartless, it does actually serve a purpose. And in general people live under it, doing their job, getting paid, and demanding more money, which they sometimes get.
The stock price, however, is entirely orthogonal to that, and yet that is, for some inexplicably reason, what the company is being managed to maximize. Companies are doing things that harm them, but push up a completely unrelated value of 'what random other people think the stock of this company is worth at this exact moment in time'.
Yeah, thieves don't even look for hidden-outside car keys. Hell, half the time I bet they don't even check if the door is locked. Just *bam*, window smashed, reach in and grab.
People actually stealing a car tend to take a bit more care, because hotwiring takes time and people might notice them hotwiring a car if the window is smashed.
So they might, might, check the front right wheel-well for a key. And probably walk past on the other side once to see if the door is actually locked. However, when they don't find it, they'll pull out the slim jim and unlock your car door in five seconds, not feel around under the rest of your car to find the key.
However, I have a fun surprise for any stupid car thieves who would steal my 92 Pontiac Sunbird. (Yeah, pretty unlikely, I know.)
Whenever I feel the slightest chance of car theft, I pull off the gear shift knob, pull out the rod that the button pushes downward to let the car shift, put it in my center console, and put the knob back. Good luck shifting the car into drive without spending ten minutes figuring out what's wrong, and either recognizing the rod or shifting gears via sticking a pencil in there.
I've always heard you shouldn't lock your sliding glass door for exactly this reason.
Either the thief will break it, which is expensive to fix, or he will 'untrack' it, which is really expensive to fix.
For a while they had sliding glass doors with bars in them, to keep people from breaking them, but then criminals would just yank them off the track, which tends to require you replacing the entire frame to the door. Usually requiring you to buy a new door anyway, as it's not like they're interchangeable between frames.
What, do you have some sort of reading comprehension problem? Do you need some sort of rudimentary logic class?
I quoted exactly that line. He specifically stated, and I quoted, and you quoted, the fact that he has a problem with devices when he can't install 'software he wants to install'.
He does not have 'software he wants to install' on a microwave or TV(1), ergo, he does not have a problem with those devices. (At least, not for that reason. He could have other problems with them, of course.)
QED
1) Because no one has 'software they want to install' on those devices, because there is actually no third-party software for those devices. It does not exist, thus no one can have it. Probably because, as I said, those devices are incredibly shitty in the hardware department, but I can't prove the reasons of software developers to choose other platforms.