Also, to be fair, the linked article refers to an obese man who played for "most of a week", which seems like it could be a different scenario from both this and the earlier Korean case, which both involved non-stop playing otherwise apparently reasonably healthy individuals.
Thanks for the link. I was not being rhetorical when I asked if I had missed something; I was seriously wondering if I had missed something, and it seems I did. I appreciate the link, if not the tone of voice it was provided in.:)
Did I miss something? As far as I've heard, the only other case of death from gaming exhausting happened in Korea, but the submitter says "another Chinese man"...
Iirc, in the study I read, they address the pilot issue by saying that pilot conversations are half-duplex, push-to-talk, instead of full-duplex, both people talking at once. Apparently, the two have very different psychological effects, with full-duplex conversations somehow being much more distracting, and causing you to focus on the "world" of the conversation much more.
It bugs me that the clockwise and anti-clockwise buttons are not symmetric. The very fact that one of the buttons is on the left and another in the center might bias people toward clicking one more often than the other, I think?
The easy way to solve this would be display each image to users as the original 50% of the time, and as the mirror image 50% of the time, reversing interpretation of the user input where appropriate. Then any biases should cancel out. But, if their grid overlay is accurate, they don't seem to be doing this.
They've probably already considered this and found it not to be a problem, I imagine, but maybe they haven't, and then the results might not be valid..
1) Someone who commits a crime does not necessarily have lower standards of ethics than someone who doesn't. Committing a crime is a mixture of ethics and incentive, and someone whose belly is full has less incentive, even though they might have lower moral standards.
2) White collar crime can potentially cause a lot more harm. Note how the other post mentions Kenneth Lay.
3) Crime among the middle classes is underreported and underprosecuted compared to crime among the lower classes. I don't have a link handy, (and this sort of mixes class and race, which have a complex relationship in the US) but I recall reading that there are more middle-class white people who use drugs than lower-class black people, yet the vast majority of people who've been imprisoned for possession are black.
Now, back to the original post, which was about comparing the relative moralities of IT guys, parking lot attendants, and car washers. I simply see no reason to expect that parking lot attendants and car washers have inherently lower moral standards than IT guys, or, for that matter, than software engineers or other more educated and wealthy people.
You expect these people, who are the low-paid,
bottom-of-the-IT-food-chain to have ethics? Why are they any different
from a parking lot attendant or car wash guy?
That's a terribly classist thing to say. Why do you assume that poor people have a lower standard of moral fiber?
is that they put the gasoline in there because they thought the world would be so advanced in the 21st century that we would've moved way beyond that.:P
What about when people have general anaesthesia? I don't really know what happens in the brain then, I guess, but I imagine a fair amount of it might shut down? This is one of the reasons general anaesthesia freaks me the hell out.:P
But it seems to me that 'transporting' data, whether or not using quantum entanglement, isn't quite the same thing as transporting matter and really brings us no close the 'transporter' technology as seen on Star Trek.
Are they really different though? In Star Trek, the idea is that your body gets broken down into "energy" first, and then you're "reassembled" at the destination. But if you're broken down into constituent parts, does it really matter if the same actual photons or whatnot are the ones that get reassembled? On photon is just as good as another. What really matters is the DATA that gets recorded when you're broken down. It's the DATA that allows those photons to be reconstructed into you at the other end.
So really all a Star Trek transporter does is record your makeup (which might not really be possible, Uncertainty Principle and all), disintegrate you (i.e. killing you), and then creating a copy of you somewhere else. (Whether the copy is made from the same particles from the disintegrated you or not is pretty much irrelevant.)
At least, that's how I've always seen it. Now the REALLY interesting question is whether it actually makes a difference to your consciousness if you get killed in one place and reconstructed somewhere else or not. It might not be so different from waking up from a coma or something, right? Or even sleep. Maybe every time you sleep, your brain actually dies, and a new you is reconstructed. Who knows! And does it matter?
I think we'll find that, in the end, all that really matters is information. All that really matters is the data.
In yet other countries, monthly plans were popular and it is still cheaper to text
But my point was that monthly plans make talking FREE most of the time. How can texting be cheaper than free? The point is that for most people in the US, talking is already included in their plan, and thus the marginal cost of talking is free, whereas texting is not included in their plan, and so it's not free. You can add a texting plan, but that costs more money. And no one has a texting-only plan with no talking plan.
If you have the same carrier, the calls are often completely free and unlimited, and let's not forget about free nights and weekends. Those two things in combination often make cell phone calls the cheapest option by PRICE, even though I'm sure they COST the most. When calls are already free, and you have to pay more for texting, that doesn't exactly encourage texting. In many other countries, monthly plans weren't as popular, so you actually paid less to text, which really made more sense.
What's even more ridiculous is that I often find myself calling a friend with my cell phone at night because it's free instead of using my landline because using my landline for domestic long distance is more expensive.... even though it probably costs less to operate. I CAN get unlimited landline domestic long distance, but, just as with getting unlimited texting, it would be an added cost, when using my cell is good enough.
I'm rambling, but I think my point is that the cell phone industry is a perfect example of where price is not correlated with cost.
Tolerence isn't allowing people you agree with to do things you approve of, it is permitting people you don't like to do things you disapprove of so long as they don't use force or fraud against others.
I think the problem here is the definition of "force". In a very real way, discriminating landlords are "forcing" potential tenants to live somewhere else. I don't think of it as much different from making black people sit at the back of the bus. (Yes, there might be a difference between public-run buses and private housing, but I'm pretty sure a private bus company couldn't get away with telling black people to sit at the back of their buses, either.)
Furthermore, housing discrimination affects not just the denied tenant, but, on a larger scale, the housing market and opportunities for many other tenants.
So I would actually mostly agree with your statement there, but instead of "force or fraud", I'd say people can do what I disapprove of as long as it doesn't AFFECT others. Yes, that's rather broad, but there are many cases where I think people should be able to do what I disapprove of even if they do affect me. They simply no longer get a blanket pardon once they do.
Re:Now there's the Slashdot I know and love!
on
Jack Valenti, Dead at 85
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes yes, I fully understand the issues involved. AND I DISAGREE WITH HIM. I could quote you Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. I'm all for treating copyrights as the temporary monopolies they were originally intended to be instead of everlasting rights. I feel queasy when I hear the term "intellectual property". A lawyer friend of mine has even asked me questions about the DMCA.
Again, the point is that I disagree with him, but I certainly don't think the issues at stake are serious enough to CELEBRATE HIS DEATH over.
The lack of compassion and respect for human life some people are showing here scares me far more than any lack of compassion for consumer rights the MPAA has shown. Hell, the closest thing I can think of is when one of the RIAA's targets died, and they went after their family. Even they called that off after public uproar.
And even if they did want all copyright infringers dead, that's no reason to emulate such behavior.
I respect fair use and consumer rights, but I respect human life even more.
Now I remember why commenting on/. wore me out back in the day.:P
You know, in recent years, I had been feeling that the quality of discourse on/. has been going up. People usually have been taking things in perspective, even when the topic is Microsoft.
But now there are suggestions of celebrating a person's DEATH, and desecrating his grave, just because he didn't want you to watch some movies for free. Now, I'm a big advocate of copyright reform--I even donate to the EFF--but to show such hatred that you're happy about the end of a human life? Just because you disagree with him about copyright law? Wow.
Just, wow. Now there's the/. I've always known and loved! It's back, baby!:):P
I don't know why parent is modded as Funny. At my high school, we did exactly that; you had your "unweighted GPA" and your "weighted GPA", where, in the latter, honors and advanced placement grades were one point higher, so you'd have a 4.0 with a B average in all your honors classes, and your GPA could actually go above 4.0. It seemed to make a lot of sense to me.
Maybe the guy who said Oriental is British? In the UK, they still use "Oriental" to refer to East Asians, and it's not considered politically incorrect there. In fact, "Asian" there means "South Asian" (Bangladeshi/Indian/Pakistani/etc). I'm East Asian myself and was pretty surprised by the usage when I went to visit, but keep in mind that/. has international visitors before jumping to conclusions about politically incorrect usage.
I think they DO believe that individual track sales hurts them, and it's public knowledge that they've been trying to convince Apple to let them sell popular singles for more than 99¢ for a while now, but Apple has not been budging because they think that would turn people off of iTunes altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get how this is a pun. Is Microsoft a shark? I don't know of any puns about Bungie and sharks? What am I missing?
Also, to be fair, the linked article refers to an obese man who played for "most of a week", which seems like it could be a different scenario from both this and the earlier Korean case, which both involved non-stop playing otherwise apparently reasonably healthy individuals.
Thanks for the link. I was not being rhetorical when I asked if I had missed something; I was seriously wondering if I had missed something, and it seems I did. I appreciate the link, if not the tone of voice it was provided in. :)
Did I miss something? As far as I've heard, the only other case of death from gaming exhausting happened in Korea, but the submitter says "another Chinese man"...
Nah, he should just hit 5, aim up, and click. :P
Okay, that was my guess, but someone said it was actually a Bradbury quote, and I was confused.
My only question about that quote is: Who is Maruputo? I tried googling, but all I can find are more instances of that quote.
I think the grandparent post was referring to how the MLB tried to convince the courts that player stats are under copyright.
Iirc, in the study I read, they address the pilot issue by saying that pilot conversations are half-duplex, push-to-talk, instead of full-duplex, both people talking at once. Apparently, the two have very different psychological effects, with full-duplex conversations somehow being much more distracting, and causing you to focus on the "world" of the conversation much more.
It bugs me that the clockwise and anti-clockwise buttons are not symmetric. The very fact that one of the buttons is on the left and another in the center might bias people toward clicking one more often than the other, I think?
The easy way to solve this would be display each image to users as the original 50% of the time, and as the mirror image 50% of the time, reversing interpretation of the user input where appropriate. Then any biases should cancel out. But, if their grid overlay is accurate, they don't seem to be doing this.
They've probably already considered this and found it not to be a problem, I imagine, but maybe they haven't, and then the results might not be valid..
I'll bite.
1) Someone who commits a crime does not necessarily have lower standards of ethics than someone who doesn't. Committing a crime is a mixture of ethics and incentive, and someone whose belly is full has less incentive, even though they might have lower moral standards.
2) White collar crime can potentially cause a lot more harm. Note how the other post mentions Kenneth Lay.
3) Crime among the middle classes is underreported and underprosecuted compared to crime among the lower classes. I don't have a link handy, (and this sort of mixes class and race, which have a complex relationship in the US) but I recall reading that there are more middle-class white people who use drugs than lower-class black people, yet the vast majority of people who've been imprisoned for possession are black.
Now, back to the original post, which was about comparing the relative moralities of IT guys, parking lot attendants, and car washers. I simply see no reason to expect that parking lot attendants and car washers have inherently lower moral standards than IT guys, or, for that matter, than software engineers or other more educated and wealthy people.
That's a terribly classist thing to say. Why do you assume that poor people have a lower standard of moral fiber?
is that they put the gasoline in there because they thought the world would be so advanced in the 21st century that we would've moved way beyond that. :P
What about when people have general anaesthesia? I don't really know what happens in the brain then, I guess, but I imagine a fair amount of it might shut down? This is one of the reasons general anaesthesia freaks me the hell out. :P
Are they really different though? In Star Trek, the idea is that your body gets broken down into "energy" first, and then you're "reassembled" at the destination. But if you're broken down into constituent parts, does it really matter if the same actual photons or whatnot are the ones that get reassembled? On photon is just as good as another. What really matters is the DATA that gets recorded when you're broken down. It's the DATA that allows those photons to be reconstructed into you at the other end.
So really all a Star Trek transporter does is record your makeup (which might not really be possible, Uncertainty Principle and all), disintegrate you (i.e. killing you), and then creating a copy of you somewhere else. (Whether the copy is made from the same particles from the disintegrated you or not is pretty much irrelevant.)
At least, that's how I've always seen it. Now the REALLY interesting question is whether it actually makes a difference to your consciousness if you get killed in one place and reconstructed somewhere else or not. It might not be so different from waking up from a coma or something, right? Or even sleep. Maybe every time you sleep, your brain actually dies, and a new you is reconstructed. Who knows! And does it matter?
I think we'll find that, in the end, all that really matters is information. All that really matters is the data.
But my point was that monthly plans make talking FREE most of the time. How can texting be cheaper than free? The point is that for most people in the US, talking is already included in their plan, and thus the marginal cost of talking is free, whereas texting is not included in their plan, and so it's not free. You can add a texting plan, but that costs more money. And no one has a texting-only plan with no talking plan.
If you have the same carrier, the calls are often completely free and unlimited, and let's not forget about free nights and weekends. Those two things in combination often make cell phone calls the cheapest option by PRICE, even though I'm sure they COST the most. When calls are already free, and you have to pay more for texting, that doesn't exactly encourage texting. In many other countries, monthly plans weren't as popular, so you actually paid less to text, which really made more sense.
What's even more ridiculous is that I often find myself calling a friend with my cell phone at night because it's free instead of using my landline because using my landline for domestic long distance is more expensive.... even though it probably costs less to operate. I CAN get unlimited landline domestic long distance, but, just as with getting unlimited texting, it would be an added cost, when using my cell is good enough.
I'm rambling, but I think my point is that the cell phone industry is a perfect example of where price is not correlated with cost.
Is that what you would've said to Rosa Parks? "STFU and get your own damn bus." ?
I think the problem here is the definition of "force". In a very real way, discriminating landlords are "forcing" potential tenants to live somewhere else. I don't think of it as much different from making black people sit at the back of the bus. (Yes, there might be a difference between public-run buses and private housing, but I'm pretty sure a private bus company couldn't get away with telling black people to sit at the back of their buses, either.)
Furthermore, housing discrimination affects not just the denied tenant, but, on a larger scale, the housing market and opportunities for many other tenants.
So I would actually mostly agree with your statement there, but instead of "force or fraud", I'd say people can do what I disapprove of as long as it doesn't AFFECT others. Yes, that's rather broad, but there are many cases where I think people should be able to do what I disapprove of even if they do affect me. They simply no longer get a blanket pardon once they do.
Yes yes, I fully understand the issues involved. AND I DISAGREE WITH HIM. I could quote you Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. I'm all for treating copyrights as the temporary monopolies they were originally intended to be instead of everlasting rights. I feel queasy when I hear the term "intellectual property". A lawyer friend of mine has even asked me questions about the DMCA.
/. wore me out back in the day. :P
Again, the point is that I disagree with him, but I certainly don't think the issues at stake are serious enough to CELEBRATE HIS DEATH over.
The lack of compassion and respect for human life some people are showing here scares me far more than any lack of compassion for consumer rights the MPAA has shown. Hell, the closest thing I can think of is when one of the RIAA's targets died, and they went after their family. Even they called that off after public uproar.
And even if they did want all copyright infringers dead, that's no reason to emulate such behavior.
I respect fair use and consumer rights, but I respect human life even more.
Now I remember why commenting on
You know, in recent years, I had been feeling that the quality of discourse on /. has been going up. People usually have been taking things in perspective, even when the topic is Microsoft.
/. I've always known and loved! It's back, baby! :) :P
But now there are suggestions of celebrating a person's DEATH, and desecrating his grave, just because he didn't want you to watch some movies for free. Now, I'm a big advocate of copyright reform--I even donate to the EFF--but to show such hatred that you're happy about the end of a human life? Just because you disagree with him about copyright law? Wow.
Just, wow. Now there's the
I don't know why parent is modded as Funny. At my high school, we did exactly that; you had your "unweighted GPA" and your "weighted GPA", where, in the latter, honors and advanced placement grades were one point higher, so you'd have a 4.0 with a B average in all your honors classes, and your GPA could actually go above 4.0. It seemed to make a lot of sense to me.
Maybe the guy who said Oriental is British? In the UK, they still use "Oriental" to refer to East Asians, and it's not considered politically incorrect there. In fact, "Asian" there means "South Asian" (Bangladeshi/Indian/Pakistani/etc). I'm East Asian myself and was pretty surprised by the usage when I went to visit, but keep in mind that /. has international visitors before jumping to conclusions about politically incorrect usage.
I think they DO believe that individual track sales hurts them, and it's public knowledge that they've been trying to convince Apple to let them sell popular singles for more than 99¢ for a while now, but Apple has not been budging because they think that would turn people off of iTunes altogether.
"Found to be" sounds like this was a research paper or something, but it sounds instead like just some dude blabbing in a book! I was disappointed. :\