You can get a good idea by comparing crime rates before and after laws change, and crime rates in otherwise similar locations with different laws. There are plenty of such studies available (in full or in summary) online; I encourage you to find them and decide on their accuracy for yourself.
Spoiler: the death penalty, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to have much effect on crime rates.
Population growth is slowing, and the earth is likely to achieve zero (human) population growth this century. So while I cannot call this a solved problem, it doesn't seem like a critical one to worry about.
It was once the height of politeness to treat people of inappropriate religions or skin colors as if they were simpleminded or disgusting. It was once appropriate to treat women like property. No, public (and private) etiquette could be far worse.
I suppose the bigger question is - why have manners deteriorated to the point that the general public feels it's necessary to take technological measures to fix social problems? The purchase and use of jammers is just a symptom of an underlying societal problem
I don't think manners have changed at all. People have always felt that "good manners" allows them to decide how others should behave. A woman wearing "inappropriate" clothing on a bus will often be hassled by Those Who Decide, whether it's an exposed ankle years ago or a see-thru top now. We all know how people felt the need to keep people of inappropriate color from sitting in inappropriate seats on the bus. If there was a technological way to keep a pierced and mohawked goth from getting on the bus, you know people would try to use it.
I myself have often wished for a baby jammer, to shut up the kids whose parents tune out their loud antics. But sadly, it's a public bus, so all I can to is use my noise-isolating headphones to play an audiobook a bit louder.
Using technological means to control your interaction with others? Good. Using technological means to control others actions? Bad.
I've always thought that the causality problems (time travel) which FTL makes possible will be a far bigger issue than the ability to kill some people. I mean, we can already make nuclear weapons; this is not likely to be any worse than that.
Dunno about those things, but you can see that the poor math skills are already here in the States when people argue that lowering taxes will help the deficit, or that those scientists are making up their climate change data, or that abstinence education reduces teen pregnancy. Some simple addition and statistics training would fix that right up, but it seems that the more afflicted you are, the more you believe that you don't need more training. Tragic, both for the person and for the rest of us.
I completely agree. Just like my inability to see well is mostly caused by laziness; if I just got off my ass and tried harder, I could finally get rid of these thick glasses.
Interesting; I've never seen any strong correlation (positive or negative) between physical attributes and mental abilities. I'm rather overweight, but am fairly successful, well read, and enjoy statistics and the theory behind algorithms. My co-workers are all quite smart and successful but also have a wide range of body types.
I've certainly seen correlations between education and other mental skills, though I believe that that is only partially causation. Education can teach you to read and calculate better, but the mental machinery which makes math easy and reading a pleasure also makes school easier.
Really? Your complaints about the iPhone 4s are "hard to use interface", "short battery life", and "short included cable"? Talk about praising with faint damns!
My Galaxy Nexus's interface is slightly harder to use than my iPad's (not a huge deal, but it's certainly not "easier" by any rational definition). Its battery life is about the same as my girlfriend's iPhone 4S, and it came with a charge cable of about the same length. (I bought us both long cables from monoprice.com for a few bucks, so not a big problem.)
Odd, I thought that travel via plane required you to pass the TSA gauntlet ("Show me your papers! And your naked body...") and the no-fly list. I suppose you could take a boat from San Juan to Honolulu without needing papers, if you have an extra month or three, but that's hardly feasible for most people. Nor is chartering a plane for that distance a reasonable thing, unless you meant "you're free to travel as long as you're rich; otherwise, sucks to be you."
No, I'm not saying that the USA is as bad as places with truly restrictive governments, but "without having to tell anybody, let alone ask permission" is an odd choice of words when you're required to have your legal name on your ticket and to show photo ID before boarding the plane.
Your use of the term "fondleslab" implies that you don't want to learn, you just want someone to answer so you can reply and show how you're smart and they're not. (I apologize if I'm wrong, but in that case you should not use such charged terms.)
I've worked on computers since the late 80s, and these days I specialize in Unix servers. I wired my house with thinnet in the mid 90s so I could have a computer wherever I was sitting if I wanted. And these days, 90% of my non-work computer use is on an iPad.
Sure, you cannot code on a tablet. But most of my web-browsing is on it. All of my notes are on it (synced with my laptop and my server). Most of my email is read and answered on it. Why? Because it's always with me. When I'm bored I play games or browse slashdot. When I'm traveling it holds maps and tickets. When I checked into a hotel today I found I had forgot my frequent-traveler card, so I got it from my password store (encrypted and synced between all devices plus my android cell phone). On the drive to the hotel the iPad played music from Pandora the whole 6 hour trip. The battery life is amazing. I read books on it, I write slashdot posts on it.
It's like someone saying "why would I use a computer? I have books, notepads, a calculator and a telephone. What can my computer do that. I cannot?"
Brilliant! Just like a Swiss Army Knife, it's rarely the best tool for the job, but it's always handy and works well enough for most purposes. Plus, people can use it without cutting off their own fingers.
Really? Given google's track record (see http://www.dataliberation.org/ ) you will probably be able to export it as a comma-delimited file or some other standard format. Of course, IE probably won't have a way to import that, but that's hardly google's problem.
Many things about google are scary, but lock-in? The world has enough real problems, no need to make up fake ones!
Factory conditions in the US in the late 1800s were as bad as they are in China now until unions and strikes came around. (Worse, possibly. It makes the news when an industrial accident kills a dozen workers now.) No-one has any incentive to enforce labor laws except for the workers, and without a union workers are powerless and replaceable.
Unions with support from outside (the UN, trade deals, etc) are the only thing which will work.
It's worded a bit awkwardly, but I read it as "the iPad 2 will continue to be sold, but at $200 rather than $500, to compete..."
I highly doubt that the price will drop 60%, but I think that you are complaining about your mis-reading of the message rather than the actual content.
I'm curious; do all other smartphone manufacturers offer 24 month warranties? Warranty length doesn't seem to be well-documented on web sites, but it looks like a lot of high-end Android phones come with 12 month factory warranties, same as the iPhone. Is this the case?
I know my girlfriend's son regularly destroys his phone after 8-12 months, and spends the next year complaining about how the (US) carrier won't replace it.
You have nobody to thank for this but a: the carriers and b: apple.
It is they, who in collusion, raised the price of buying a phone to astronomical levels. Remember when the highest price for an unlocked phone was usually $200? What phone broke that trend? Iphone.
Well, either that, or you didn't notice expensive phones before the iPhone, since unlocked Treos were $600 in 2006. But sure, you dislike Apple so it's probably Apple's fault.
What other company is opt-in? Are there regular slashdot bitch-fests about how Microsoft does this? Or Mastercard? Or any of the companies that put out "rewards cards" (my girlfriend has a stack of these cards more than an inch thick)? When was the last multiple-compaint-stories-per-week for the credit rating agencies, or Lexus Nexus (all far scarier, far more damaging, and less accountable than Google)?
I think that people complain about Google's privacy for the same reason that they complain about Apple's Foxconn factories: It's far easier to complain about the companies who are open about their issues and try to do the right thing, than it is to complain about the dozens of other companies who just sweep their issues under the rug.
Today, the Red Cross is a humanitarian group which helps disaster victims, but tomorrow they would easily issue assault weapons to their volunteers and declare jihad against the USA, right? Rather than inventing hypothetical futures, you should probably read the new security policy and add a leavening of past behavior.
The new policy doesn't entirely make me happy, but it seems reasonable and is 100x more accessible than the previous muddle of "policy per service".
Honestly, I don't care either way -- I haven't seen the movies and barely remember the books. But your argument is ridiculous. A movie version of LoTR should be LoTR; not some other story about "heart and courage."
So changing it from "ancient northern slightly-magical sword from a barrow-down" to "ancient northern slightly-magical sword which the rangers preserved for time of need" makes it not LoTR? What an amazing shallow view.
The movie was, all-in-all, closer to the book than 99.9% of adaptations (including ones where the author was involved, like the Game of Thrones mini-series and the Coraline movie). But it really doesn't matter; since you haven't seen it yourself, your opinion is worth exactly as much a non-climatologist's opinion on the details of climate change or my dog's opinion on why the sun comes up every day. I'm not sure why you feel compelled to weigh in on a discussion about the movies, but then I'm not sure why I replied to someone who is speaking out of their rear mouth, so I guess we're even.
It didn't actually happen like that in the book. Merry had discovered an ancient sword in the barrow-wight's lair (and even completely left out of the movies). It was one of the few weapons that could actually harm the Witch-king, and when Merry stabbed him in the back of the knee with it, it damaged him so badly that anyone could have finished him off.
You are completely correct, and even more completely wrong.
We're geeks, so we like to worry about which magic item could work against which foe. Tolkien cared about people. The important part of that (amazingly awesome) scene in the book was that all of the mighty warrior "men" (well, those left standing) fled in fear from the Witch-king. Only the lowly hobbit and the woman had the heart to face the Witch-king, and not just face but strike at him. What killed the Witch-king? Logically, a magic sword. Thematically, heart and courage.
The movie did just fine. The "woman not a man" thing resonates more these days than in Tolkien's time, and the hobbit's critical role is a bit diminished, but overall it nicely captures what (I think) Tolkien wanted. Just like the myths which Tolkien was emulating, the magic weapon wasn't the important bit, but the hand/heart who wielded the weapon.
Many of the changes in the movie bother me, but overall it condensed and translated an insanely complicated plot down to something which people who are not Tolkien scholars can enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
You can get a good idea by comparing crime rates before and after laws change, and crime rates in otherwise similar locations with different laws. There are plenty of such studies available (in full or in summary) online; I encourage you to find them and decide on their accuracy for yourself.
Spoiler: the death penalty, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to have much effect on crime rates.
Population growth is slowing, and the earth is likely to achieve zero (human) population growth this century. So while I cannot call this a solved problem, it doesn't seem like a critical one to worry about.
Neither was alta-vista's. And most search engines had "minimal" pages you could bookmark and use.
I liked google because it was more likely to give me results that I wanted than any other engine.
It was once the height of politeness to treat people of inappropriate religions or skin colors as if they were simpleminded or disgusting. It was once appropriate to treat women like property. No, public (and private) etiquette could be far worse.
I suppose the bigger question is - why have manners deteriorated to the point that the general public feels it's necessary to take technological measures to fix social problems? The purchase and use of jammers is just a symptom of an underlying societal problem
I don't think manners have changed at all. People have always felt that "good manners" allows them to decide how others should behave. A woman wearing "inappropriate" clothing on a bus will often be hassled by Those Who Decide, whether it's an exposed ankle years ago or a see-thru top now. We all know how people felt the need to keep people of inappropriate color from sitting in inappropriate seats on the bus. If there was a technological way to keep a pierced and mohawked goth from getting on the bus, you know people would try to use it.
I myself have often wished for a baby jammer, to shut up the kids whose parents tune out their loud antics. But sadly, it's a public bus, so all I can to is use my noise-isolating headphones to play an audiobook a bit louder.
Using technological means to control your interaction with others? Good. Using technological means to control others actions? Bad.
I've always thought that the causality problems (time travel) which FTL makes possible will be a far bigger issue than the ability to kill some people. I mean, we can already make nuclear weapons; this is not likely to be any worse than that.
Dunno about those things, but you can see that the poor math skills are already here in the States when people argue that lowering taxes will help the deficit, or that those scientists are making up their climate change data, or that abstinence education reduces teen pregnancy. Some simple addition and statistics training would fix that right up, but it seems that the more afflicted you are, the more you believe that you don't need more training. Tragic, both for the person and for the rest of us.
I completely agree. Just like my inability to see well is mostly caused by laziness; if I just got off my ass and tried harder, I could finally get rid of these thick glasses.
Interesting; I've never seen any strong correlation (positive or negative) between physical attributes and mental abilities. I'm rather overweight, but am fairly successful, well read, and enjoy statistics and the theory behind algorithms. My co-workers are all quite smart and successful but also have a wide range of body types.
I've certainly seen correlations between education and other mental skills, though I believe that that is only partially causation. Education can teach you to read and calculate better, but the mental machinery which makes math easy and reading a pleasure also makes school easier.
That is not the purpose anyway, the whole Laffer curve argument relies on that Jedi hand wave.
Or the far more powerful Jedi Lobbyist Money Wave,
I wonder, did facebook hire a PR agency to smear google again?
No need; Rupert Murdoch hates Google, so all media under his control seems to have a "anti-google rant per week" minimum quota.
Really? Your complaints about the iPhone 4s are "hard to use interface", "short battery life", and "short included cable"? Talk about praising with faint damns!
My Galaxy Nexus's interface is slightly harder to use than my iPad's (not a huge deal, but it's certainly not "easier" by any rational definition). Its battery life is about the same as my girlfriend's iPhone 4S, and it came with a charge cable of about the same length. (I bought us both long cables from monoprice.com for a few bucks, so not a big problem.)
Odd, I thought that travel via plane required you to pass the TSA gauntlet ("Show me your papers! And your naked body...") and the no-fly list. I suppose you could take a boat from San Juan to Honolulu without needing papers, if you have an extra month or three, but that's hardly feasible for most people. Nor is chartering a plane for that distance a reasonable thing, unless you meant "you're free to travel as long as you're rich; otherwise, sucks to be you."
No, I'm not saying that the USA is as bad as places with truly restrictive governments, but "without having to tell anybody, let alone ask permission" is an odd choice of words when you're required to have your legal name on your ticket and to show photo ID before boarding the plane.
Is that like how Lexus discriminates against people who can only afford Toyotas, or scooters, or bicycles?
I don't like the current patent system, but an argument that boils down to "I can't afford it, so I can take it for free" is not very compelling.
Your use of the term "fondleslab" implies that you don't want to learn, you just want someone to answer so you can reply and show how you're smart and they're not. (I apologize if I'm wrong, but in that case you should not use such charged terms.)
I've worked on computers since the late 80s, and these days I specialize in Unix servers. I wired my house with thinnet in the mid 90s so I could have a computer wherever I was sitting if I wanted. And these days, 90% of my non-work computer use is on an iPad.
Sure, you cannot code on a tablet. But most of my web-browsing is on it. All of my notes are on it (synced with my laptop and my server). Most of my email is read and answered on it. Why? Because it's always with me. When I'm bored I play games or browse slashdot. When I'm traveling it holds maps and tickets. When I checked into a hotel today I found I had forgot my frequent-traveler card, so I got it from my password store (encrypted and synced between all devices plus my android cell phone). On the drive to the hotel the iPad played music from Pandora the whole 6 hour trip. The battery life is amazing. I read books on it, I write slashdot posts on it.
It's like someone saying "why would I use a computer? I have books, notepads, a calculator and a telephone. What can my computer do that. I cannot?"
It is the Swiss Army Knife of the PC world.
Brilliant! Just like a Swiss Army Knife, it's rarely the best tool for the job, but it's always handy and works well enough for most purposes. Plus, people can use it without cutting off their own fingers.
Really? Given google's track record (see http://www.dataliberation.org/ ) you will probably be able to export it as a comma-delimited file or some other standard format. Of course, IE probably won't have a way to import that, but that's hardly google's problem.
Many things about google are scary, but lock-in? The world has enough real problems, no need to make up fake ones!
d) Unions
Factory conditions in the US in the late 1800s were as bad as they are in China now until unions and strikes came around. (Worse, possibly. It makes the news when an industrial accident kills a dozen workers now.) No-one has any incentive to enforce labor laws except for the workers, and without a union workers are powerless and replaceable.
Unions with support from outside (the UN, trade deals, etc) are the only thing which will work.
It's worded a bit awkwardly, but I read it as "the iPad 2 will continue to be sold, but at $200 rather than $500, to compete..."
I highly doubt that the price will drop 60%, but I think that you are complaining about your mis-reading of the message rather than the actual content.
I'm curious; do all other smartphone manufacturers offer 24 month warranties? Warranty length doesn't seem to be well-documented on web sites, but it looks like a lot of high-end Android phones come with 12 month factory warranties, same as the iPhone. Is this the case?
I know my girlfriend's son regularly destroys his phone after 8-12 months, and spends the next year complaining about how the (US) carrier won't replace it.
You have nobody to thank for this but a: the carriers and b: apple.
It is they, who in collusion, raised the price of buying a phone to astronomical levels. Remember when the highest price for an unlocked phone was usually $200? What phone broke that trend? Iphone.
Well, either that, or you didn't notice expensive phones before the iPhone, since unlocked Treos were $600 in 2006. But sure, you dislike Apple so it's probably Apple's fault.
What other company is opt-in? Are there regular slashdot bitch-fests about how Microsoft does this? Or Mastercard? Or any of the companies that put out "rewards cards" (my girlfriend has a stack of these cards more than an inch thick)? When was the last multiple-compaint-stories-per-week for the credit rating agencies, or Lexus Nexus (all far scarier, far more damaging, and less accountable than Google)?
I think that people complain about Google's privacy for the same reason that they complain about Apple's Foxconn factories: It's far easier to complain about the companies who are open about their issues and try to do the right thing, than it is to complain about the dozens of other companies who just sweep their issues under the rug.
Today, the Red Cross is a humanitarian group which helps disaster victims, but tomorrow they would easily issue assault weapons to their volunteers and declare jihad against the USA, right? Rather than inventing hypothetical futures, you should probably read the new security policy and add a leavening of past behavior.
The new policy doesn't entirely make me happy, but it seems reasonable and is 100x more accessible than the previous muddle of "policy per service".
Honestly, I don't care either way -- I haven't seen the movies and barely remember the books. But your argument is ridiculous. A movie version of LoTR should be LoTR; not some other story about "heart and courage."
So changing it from "ancient northern slightly-magical sword from a barrow-down" to "ancient northern slightly-magical sword which the rangers preserved for time of need" makes it not LoTR? What an amazing shallow view.
The movie was, all-in-all, closer to the book than 99.9% of adaptations (including ones where the author was involved, like the Game of Thrones mini-series and the Coraline movie). But it really doesn't matter; since you haven't seen it yourself, your opinion is worth exactly as much a non-climatologist's opinion on the details of climate change or my dog's opinion on why the sun comes up every day. I'm not sure why you feel compelled to weigh in on a discussion about the movies, but then I'm not sure why I replied to someone who is speaking out of their rear mouth, so I guess we're even.
It didn't actually happen like that in the book. Merry had discovered an ancient sword in the barrow-wight's lair (and even completely left out of the movies). It was one of the few weapons that could actually harm the Witch-king, and when Merry stabbed him in the back of the knee with it, it damaged him so badly that anyone could have finished him off.
You are completely correct, and even more completely wrong.
We're geeks, so we like to worry about which magic item could work against which foe. Tolkien cared about people. The important part of that (amazingly awesome) scene in the book was that all of the mighty warrior "men" (well, those left standing) fled in fear from the Witch-king. Only the lowly hobbit and the woman had the heart to face the Witch-king, and not just face but strike at him. What killed the Witch-king? Logically, a magic sword. Thematically, heart and courage.
The movie did just fine. The "woman not a man" thing resonates more these days than in Tolkien's time, and the hobbit's critical role is a bit diminished, but overall it nicely captures what (I think) Tolkien wanted. Just like the myths which Tolkien was emulating, the magic weapon wasn't the important bit, but the hand/heart who wielded the weapon.
Many of the changes in the movie bother me, but overall it condensed and translated an insanely complicated plot down to something which people who are not Tolkien scholars can enjoy.