I visited Beijing with a friend about 4 years ago, and when we first arrived, we were shocked to see how beautiful the weather was. We had expected to be swimming in some murk of perpetual twilight, but were instead greeted with rich blue skies, fluffy clouds, and vibrant colors. However, two days later, the gloom descended upon the city. Its major thoroughfares are quite straight, which makes it all the more depressing, since you can see how quickly buildings are swallowed by the haze. We couldn't see more than a couple of blocks, and the gray pollution had bleached the surroundings of its color. We even got caught in a rainstorm because we had no indicators that it would rain (well, no indicators that a newly-arrived tourist could observe, that is). There was no sky.
Beijing is taking steps -- I find it unlikely that they'll be a sparkling paragon of environmentally friendly cities any time soon, but we certainly observed that buses burn much more cleanly than we had observed elsewhere in Asia. The Olympics are a major incentive for the government to act as well -- I hope they don't lose some of their resolve after the games. And hey, ever since SARS, the government has been strongly discouraging spitting on the streets! You now only hear somebody hocking up a loogie once every few minutes!
I was wondering about that, too. It seemed more like a tour of the world's types of pollution than the absolute top 10 cities with the greatest negative impact of your health. They cover acid rain, fecal contamination of water, lead poisoning, chemical and pesticide production, even pollution inherited from other locations. So is dying of cancer in Azerbaijan more likely than dying of lead poisoning in Zambia? Then again, "top 10" lists are kind of the thing to do these days...
But the company directly paid for junk mail to be delivered to your door, and you can also typically call said company to tell them to buzz off, though I'm aware there are plenty of counter-examples of companies ignoring consumers' requests for removal. However, they are mostly accountable for their acts and they've actually paid for the mailman to deliver the information. The cost to the spammer for delivering more of their spam typically rises in proportion to the amount they want to deliver, as well.
The servers, networks, and end-users who deal with this are the parties who pay in the case of a spammer. Many spammers simply utilize botnets, meaning they don't even pay to run their own machines, completely freeloading off the network. The cost to deliver more spams is usually neglible to the spammer while increasingly burdensome to the network unwillingly supporting it. There's a significant difference between the activities of a spammer and that of physical junk mailer, even if I find both of them annoying!
*ugh*. I saw Cafferty make that remark and was embarrassed. Is that what passes for journalism these days? I've been out of the loop for a while, but since when has CNN become such a platform for foaming-at-the-mouth rabble rousing? You've got it covered daily with Lou Dobbs' deplorable show, complete with "poll" questions like this:
Are you surprised the Bush administration and Department of Homeland Security caved to special interest groups and will negotiate federal immigration policy with open borders and amnesty groups?
I won't dispute that China is a paranoid nation, but they've got a pretty good basis for it. Western imperial interests continually exploited the country, bickered over ports that didn't even belong to them, smashed up and burned down national treasures, and imported opium to enslave China's economy.
The Chinese are good at holding grudges, and their memory goes back a long way. While the new generation is hopefully putting the scars behind them in the optimistic world of a shiny new China, the old guard hasn't forgotten, and they don't want to forget. They've been horribly abused by the west's meddlesome practices before, and now that they're rising in power, many of them don't see any need to be manipulated and pressured by the West again.
China does indeed consider Taiwan to be one of its territories, but I don't think the issue is as simple as China fearing war with the U.S. Right now, Taiwan is a valuable economic asset, and both countries (er, I'll be referring to Taiwan as a country here, sorry) are benefiting greatly from their relationship. If China were suddenly to bomb the infrastructure of the island into the stone age, the island would have no worth other than the small scrap of national pride they saved in retaining the island. Add to that the fact that many Chinese citizens live, work, and visit the country -- it's bad business all around to destroy that.
The big stick of the U.S. is certainly a deterrent to forcibly appropriating Taiwan, but at this point in time, I'm not even sure it's the primary deterrent.
Wow, for me, that's just one of the "whys!" With Microsoft's relative dominance of the browser market and Firefox's slow but steady gains, I don't really understand what sort of a market AT&T thinks they're breaking into. Firefox is gaining because of its simplicity and flexibility, not bloat. Then again, I don't think the Slashdot crowd is the target demographic for this product.
If AT&T can start bundling this browser with its telecommunications suites, I suppose it could gain some traction there... but I'm still not seeing it. Are they going to eventually integrate it with some hardware to allow for browsing with your TV? Can somebody with a bit more insight into AT&T's brain illuminate this?
I completely agree. When you're questing, the hit in time is annoying. And even then it feels like an overkill, because on PvP servers, watching some Night Elf dance gleefully atop my corpse is deterrent enough from dying.
Time travel is an irritating waste of time, but I wonder if it was put in for more than just to convey the immensity of the world.
In Warcraft, there's often a game of one-upsmanship in the PvP world. My level 20 warlock is out hacking a Puma Lord when all of a sudden a level 30 priest ganks me. Well, then I pull out my level 70 rogue to clobber him, then he comes back with his guildmates to crush me and corpsecamp. If teleportation between locations were instantaneous, this would happen all the time. At least when the travel time is a consideration, there is more of an emphasis on gameplay and progress, and less emphasis on instant vengeance and constant high blood pressure. It's not perfect, but perhaps that was one reason why Blizzard chose not to use portals everywhere.
Come onn "Rely on critics"? I have never seen they do that.
Actually, the latest patch has a "fix" that is most certainly a response to a contentious issue in Warcraft -- Premades. In various battlegrounds, you can queue to play as an individual or form a team to enter the battleground together as a premade. Unfortunately for the pick-up-groups, or PUGs, the premades usually have better communication, better gear, and completely trash the other team. They also earned a bad reputation, as some premades took it further and camped in the graveyard, slaughtering hapless players as soon as they spawned. Now, I don't want to debate whether or not premades in general are honorable or objectionable, but there was enough of an uproar amongst the casual players that Blizzard actually stepped in and changed the queueing process so that large groups are now shunted to a special queue just for premades, while individual players and small parties still go to the PUG queues. Premades battle premades, PUGs battle PUGs.
Apart from some very irritated players who now have to wait longer times in the premade queues, all of the casual players can breathe a sigh of relief. The queues flow faster and the games are a lot more fun. Depending upon your side of the fence, you can argue that Blizzard did the wrong thing, or that it was a brilliant and timely change, but they were directly addressing the "critics."
I remember watching a television program on this very subject, where a plastic surgeon had developed a "golden ratio" framework to overlay on top of faces to figure out where a face needed "work." The interesting thing is that when it was overlaid atop the image of Tom Cruise, everything lined up -- eyes, jawbone, nose, basically all of the key features. Now some readers here may complain that he's not good looking, but he's enormously popular, and I doubt that the number one reason for his popularity is his virtuoso acting ability.
To me, the golden ratio really does seem to be an adequate rule of thumb. If nothing else, it sure makes for an interesting framework to work within when judging why somebody falls short of perfection!
I pretty much agree that the Olympics are going to be a huge expenditure with few tangible results, but I find it pretty unsurprising China is so gung-ho about this. In my opinion, hosting the Olympic games satisfies several agendas:
It's great for mianzi ("face"). Saving face, losing face, gaining face is a big deal in China. I used to think it wasn't that big of a deal and that it was really just another term for what Westerners go through, but it's got a surprising force in China. Even in Taiwan, which I would think is more westernized, I encountered behavior based primarily on face that defied common sense. It's not uncommon to ask for directions and get the completely wrong answer, not because that person was mistaken, but because they didn't want to tell you "I don't know." Winning in an Olympic event is big for China, but being the master of ceremony has to be even more prestigious. Add the home court advantage, and it's win-win!
It also fits China's massive industrialization and modernization agenda. The Three Gorges Dam and the intense infrastructure development in the west are just a couple of these large scale projects. Modernizing for the Olympics works well in Bejing: they've been purging the hutong (small residential collectives) for a while now, and under the flag of the Olympics, they can step up this agenda for an ostensibly noble cause. On a more positive note, it gives the government a good opportunity to make inroads against pollution. I visited a few years ago, and I was surprised at how clean the bus emissions were, given Beijing's dire pollution reputation.
In relation to the above, Bejing is a huge and marvelous city and is the symbol of the Chinese government. While Shanghai and Hong Kong may retain some of the glitter of being cities of international trade, there is no other city in China like Beijing, which blends culture, government, and military in such a peculiarly balanced way. Beijing means authority, and hosting the Olympics only adds to this majesty.
Finally, China strives for unity as much as it shuns dissent. The Olympics are a fantastic pretense for this. It makes the nation look strong as a whole, tells places like Taiwan "see what you're missing?", distracts the populace from idle mischief. In some ways, there's nothing wrong with this -- what's a little national pride? But in China, national pride often seems to be a bit more engineered than in Western countries, and the Olympics is no exception.
I don't mean to be overly cynical about the whole affair -- I had several Chinese friends who were ecstatic when it was announced that China would host the Olympics, and I'm happy for them. But in response to the original post, the Olympics often seem to be huge expenditures that may or may not pay off. Not to be unfair to developing nations, but... why do we constantly have to build new stadiums to accommodate the Olympics? Can't we just use the old ones we built, and focus more on the games and less on the "boom and bust" economics of building the infrastructure every 4 years?
Well, I mostly agree that anything and everything can be spun, but non-profit groups like the Humane Society advertise for folks to spay or neuter their pet, and for the most part, their goals are for the well-being of the critters they protect rather than trying to delude people into ruining their pet's chances for posterity. Of course, my remark is not cynicism-proof -- one could easily speculate that they're bankrolled by greedy vets funding their yacht payments through costly and unnecessary surgeries.
If we're just talking about products, I'd have less of a foot to stand on, but the original poster was speaking of advertisements in a general sense, I believe.
This may be true, and it's unfortunately exacerbated by the fact that with the rapid-fire accessibility of the Internet, it's much easier to spam one's resume to a large amount of companies in a small amount of time. In addition to this, the prevailing wisdom amongst people I've talked to is that companies often ask for more in a job posting than applicants can achieve. This likely varies from company to company (it may not even be true!), but the end result is that the poster may spam resumes out to jobs that they're unqualified for simply because it's fast and easy -- and why not? Some chance is better than no chance at all.
The result is bad for both parties. As an applicant, it's depressing to receive such a small response to the numerous positions applied for, and the employer must sift through a burdensome pile of mostly unnecessary applications. As glad as I am that job postings are more readily accessible, it's also created a very impersonal and disheartening screening process due to the sheer bulk of applications that must be processed.
I agree about the tone of the request; I don't even think he wanted a reasonable explanation. He wrote to a front-line tech support representative in a heated and somewhat abstruse missive. In all honesty, I didn't feel like he made it abundantly clear in his original request that he was using Linux:
Why, exactly, is "Full" disabled if one masks "Win" as the OS in the User Agent string, considering that Firefox doesn't use any Windows subsystem other than the TCP/IP stack and GDI? On Windows XP, hiding the fact that I'm using Windows in the UA string disables "Full", while masquerading as Firefox for Windows under Linux X86-64 (and a 64-bit build of Firefox) "Full" works very well.
He could simply have said "I use Linux." Instead it is buried under dizzying terms such as TCP/IP stack, GDI, subsystem, X86-64... He was looking for a fight and an opportunity to expose Microsoft idiocy, and what do you know? He found it! Well done!
I don't think that the poster you replied to was really suggesting that having an Internet connection in Iran meant an idyllic unfettered freedom of information for its populace; instead, not having any glimpse into the outside world makes the citizens more susceptible to hatemongering propaganda, stilted views, and the like. To think that cutting off an Internet connection to Iran would actually improve political tensions would be naive.
I was also a bit disturbed that war seems to be the only alternative to sanctions. If the U.S. didn't routinely traipse into the Middle East and assert itself violently, would we have fomented as much hate as we receive now? Israel, Desert Storm, the Iraq conflict... it's enough to make Arab states feel pretty threatened. They can't compete with the scale of the United States military, but a nuclear device sure gets our attention and would make us think twice. I'm not necessarily debating the utility of our past military offensives, but to say that outright war is the only alternative to sanctions strikes me as pretty simplistic!
Perhaps we're arguing the same point, however: we've stirred up such a hornet's nest in the Middle East now that perhaps it really has come to suppression via sanctions or via war. I just wonder what that area of the world would look like if we had been less meddlesome and more supportive in the first place.
Nice information, thanks!
One thing I want to add is that there's not much chance that Paul will run as a third party candidate. NPR had an interview with one of his staff, who said Paul had no interest in the prospect. It would apparently be a very expensive move. The weather changes quickly in the presidential race (this one more than many!), but I wouldn't count on him running for anything other than the Republican party.
I don't think the poster was joking -- I nodded with appreciation when he mentioned GlaDOS and the credit song as well. Maybe it's not 100% original... but fresh? There is something much more rewarding about GlaDOS as a antagonist with her split personalities and peculiar musicianship. I found her to be one of the best adversaries in just about any game I've played, and it highlights Valve's ability to create amazing, immersive scenarios with a great deal of depth. Unlike Shub-Niggurath in Quake, or whoever that generic demon was, GlaDOS had a strange attraction in that she (well, discounting the cannons) was the only one who interacted with you in the sterile surroundings, and a certain co-dependency arose between her and Chell.
It's not just GlaDOS, it's the environment, the austerity of the surroundings, the hints of the madness of the other subjects, the glimpses behind the scenes, and the different modules you whack off of GlaDOS that illustrated facets of her character. It was great storytelling in a video game -- perhaps that's the innovation more than the fact that she was basically a HAL 9000 variant. But that end song -- how could you deny its innovative coolness??
To Steam's credit, they've been imposing interesting metrics (like logging where and how frequently people die on maps in various levels) and have interesting surveys revealing computer specs. In the end, it will probably result in a better game and an awesome Episode 3.
That being said, I find Steam highly annoying as well. When playing my single-player HL2 campaign, it sometimes took forever to load, while at other times it loaded up as quickly as any other FPS game should. I suspect that the slowdown was due to peak usage times, but doing so can make reloading a saved game highly frustrating. I don't understand why it needs the server's permission just to load scenarios in a single-player game, and even if I did understand, it's a significant enough imposition to find pretty infuriating on dangerous levels where dying (and reloading) can be frequent.
Sadly, Portal was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had, so it's with a twinge of shame that I declare my principles have been compromised in enslaving myself the Steam-dependent Orange Box.
No kidding -- the MMORPG grind scheme is successful, just like it is in gambling. In behavioral psychology, there are various schedules of reinforcement. The schedule most frequently used by casinos and MMORPGs is the "variable ratio schedule," where the subject is rewarded on a random basis for their efforts. In that sense, we're not much more sophisticated than the rats with electrodes inserted into the brain's pleasure centers, pushing levers for a kibble of food.
There's a nifty chart about the efficacy of these schedules (unfortunately on PDF) here.
Incidentally, the B.F. Skinner in the article was also the scientist who tried to market a weapons technology to the military involving a homing pigeon housed in the nose of a warhead, pecking at various controls to guide the missile to its target. It was also resistant to jamming, I guess as long as the Nazis didn't strew a nearby target with birdseed. Unfortunately, he didn't get funding.
"Spamvertising" is exactly what crossed my mind the first time I heard about this as well. At the local Shell station, all the gas pumps have been set up with video monitors that deluge you with ads as soon as you start pressing buttons on the panel. Yet strangely, the prices at the Shell station are no cheaper than those of stations without video advertising. I already find "membership" cards at supermarkets rather repugnant -- their receipts proudly proclaim "You saved $3.12 today!" when in actuality that's the amount you didn't get gouged for as a non-member.
If the screen isn't in an obnoxious position and (dear god) doesn't have audio, I won't put up much of a fight. Somehow I don't see that happening. Even the guy in the article says "This is not all necessarily about bombarding consumers, about targeting advertising." To me that seems to imply that it's at least partially necessarily about bombaring customers.
While I completely agree that parents should shoulder the majority of the discipline of a student, there are parents who would not be comfortable with that. When I was teaching (primary grades, mind you), some parents delivered their child to the school in the hope that we would discipline the student and succeed where they had failed (if they had tried at all). School admins are sometimes in impossible positions, where parents bellyache when a school does nothing to discipline a student but later decries a teacher's interference in a matter, and districts walk a tightrope of litigation every day with the hope that an overzealous parent will not fly off the handle at a situation.
Schools have enough to do, but the differing expectations of parents regarding discipline can make even simple issues draining and contentious. Many decisions that schools make seem arbitrary but are often based (unfortunately) on legal matters. Many peculiar and seemingly pointless questions that you answer on school enrollment forms are the direct result of a lawsuit brought against a district, a state, or even the U.S. The action the administrators took may seem draconian and meddlesome, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow bound to act based on the "evidence" that had been delivered to them (if they truly received it as a CD). I certainly would have been surprised if they had not consulted one of their district lawyers before they acted.
That was one of the questions on my mind as I read the article: "Where are the parents in all of this?" The school does have a responsibility to provide a moral beacon for the students, but (hopefully) it's ultimately the parents who can provide more intensive monitoring and disciplining regarding this. Sidestepping the parents and proceeding directly to whipping the students may teach them consequences, but it's also likely to teach them great resentment for this rather arbitrary alcoholic witch hunt.
By issuing a blanket punishment to any and all of the students implicated in drinking, they are merely sending the message "don't drink underage.... or ELSE!" But an important part of discipline is "why" the discipline is necessary, and I just don't see that here. Parents are a much better vessel for that message -- they can convey disappointment, give more relevant and personal anecdotes, show concern, be nurturing, and have much more time at their disposal to work with the student. This approach can be vital to turning a kid around and can ultimately be more effective than summarily stripping them of a scholarship and derailing their life.
Hopefully, the school is involving the parents and it wasn't covered in the article due to its inherent lack of sensationalism.
Agreed -- I found it amusing that one of the students commented "I think it's a huge invasion of privacy" when they're posting these images to one of the most highly-trafficked websites on this planet.
At the risk of seeming old and curmudgeonly, I think the term "invasion of privacy" must have a different semantic meaning to their generation. To me, someone invading my privacy is a person going out of their way to access aspects of my life that are normally private (as in, not known to many) and exclusive to me. To the students, the administration has taken an interest in a very publicized aspect of their life that lies outside the scope of their responsibilities while at school. This trespass is the "huge invasion of privacy."
I'm not approving of the school's initiative, I just am surprised that some of the students feel like some trust has been violated after wantonly posting their bacchanals to the Internet. Now, if the school had tapped their cell phones, intercepted all IMs and planted moles at their parties, that would be a huge invasion of privacy!
Slashdot Mirror
I visited Beijing with a friend about 4 years ago, and when we first arrived, we were shocked to see how beautiful the weather was. We had expected to be swimming in some murk of perpetual twilight, but were instead greeted with rich blue skies, fluffy clouds, and vibrant colors. However, two days later, the gloom descended upon the city. Its major thoroughfares are quite straight, which makes it all the more depressing, since you can see how quickly buildings are swallowed by the haze. We couldn't see more than a couple of blocks, and the gray pollution had bleached the surroundings of its color. We even got caught in a rainstorm because we had no indicators that it would rain (well, no indicators that a newly-arrived tourist could observe, that is). There was no sky.
Beijing is taking steps -- I find it unlikely that they'll be a sparkling paragon of environmentally friendly cities any time soon, but we certainly observed that buses burn much more cleanly than we had observed elsewhere in Asia. The Olympics are a major incentive for the government to act as well -- I hope they don't lose some of their resolve after the games. And hey, ever since SARS, the government has been strongly discouraging spitting on the streets! You now only hear somebody hocking up a loogie once every few minutes!
I was wondering about that, too. It seemed more like a tour of the world's types of pollution than the absolute top 10 cities with the greatest negative impact of your health. They cover acid rain, fecal contamination of water, lead poisoning, chemical and pesticide production, even pollution inherited from other locations. So is dying of cancer in Azerbaijan more likely than dying of lead poisoning in Zambia? Then again, "top 10" lists are kind of the thing to do these days...
But the company directly paid for junk mail to be delivered to your door, and you can also typically call said company to tell them to buzz off, though I'm aware there are plenty of counter-examples of companies ignoring consumers' requests for removal. However, they are mostly accountable for their acts and they've actually paid for the mailman to deliver the information. The cost to the spammer for delivering more of their spam typically rises in proportion to the amount they want to deliver, as well.
The servers, networks, and end-users who deal with this are the parties who pay in the case of a spammer. Many spammers simply utilize botnets, meaning they don't even pay to run their own machines, completely freeloading off the network. The cost to deliver more spams is usually neglible to the spammer while increasingly burdensome to the network unwillingly supporting it. There's a significant difference between the activities of a spammer and that of physical junk mailer, even if I find both of them annoying!
*ugh*. I saw Cafferty make that remark and was embarrassed. Is that what passes for journalism these days? I've been out of the loop for a while, but since when has CNN become such a platform for foaming-at-the-mouth rabble rousing? You've got it covered daily with Lou Dobbs' deplorable show, complete with "poll" questions like this:
Are you surprised the Bush administration and Department of Homeland Security caved to special interest groups and will negotiate federal immigration policy with open borders and amnesty groups?How do you even answer that question?
I won't dispute that China is a paranoid nation, but they've got a pretty good basis for it. Western imperial interests continually exploited the country, bickered over ports that didn't even belong to them, smashed up and burned down national treasures, and imported opium to enslave China's economy.
The Chinese are good at holding grudges, and their memory goes back a long way. While the new generation is hopefully putting the scars behind them in the optimistic world of a shiny new China, the old guard hasn't forgotten, and they don't want to forget. They've been horribly abused by the west's meddlesome practices before, and now that they're rising in power, many of them don't see any need to be manipulated and pressured by the West again.
China does indeed consider Taiwan to be one of its territories, but I don't think the issue is as simple as China fearing war with the U.S. Right now, Taiwan is a valuable economic asset, and both countries (er, I'll be referring to Taiwan as a country here, sorry) are benefiting greatly from their relationship. If China were suddenly to bomb the infrastructure of the island into the stone age, the island would have no worth other than the small scrap of national pride they saved in retaining the island. Add to that the fact that many Chinese citizens live, work, and visit the country -- it's bad business all around to destroy that.
The big stick of the U.S. is certainly a deterrent to forcibly appropriating Taiwan, but at this point in time, I'm not even sure it's the primary deterrent.
Wow, for me, that's just one of the "whys!" With Microsoft's relative dominance of the browser market and Firefox's slow but steady gains, I don't really understand what sort of a market AT&T thinks they're breaking into. Firefox is gaining because of its simplicity and flexibility, not bloat. Then again, I don't think the Slashdot crowd is the target demographic for this product.
If AT&T can start bundling this browser with its telecommunications suites, I suppose it could gain some traction there... but I'm still not seeing it. Are they going to eventually integrate it with some hardware to allow for browsing with your TV? Can somebody with a bit more insight into AT&T's brain illuminate this?
But it's through words like cromulent that we embiggen our vocabulary!
I completely agree. When you're questing, the hit in time is annoying. And even then it feels like an overkill, because on PvP servers, watching some Night Elf dance gleefully atop my corpse is deterrent enough from dying.
Time travel is an irritating waste of time, but I wonder if it was put in for more than just to convey the immensity of the world.
In Warcraft, there's often a game of one-upsmanship in the PvP world. My level 20 warlock is out hacking a Puma Lord when all of a sudden a level 30 priest ganks me. Well, then I pull out my level 70 rogue to clobber him, then he comes back with his guildmates to crush me and corpsecamp. If teleportation between locations were instantaneous, this would happen all the time. At least when the travel time is a consideration, there is more of an emphasis on gameplay and progress, and less emphasis on instant vengeance and constant high blood pressure. It's not perfect, but perhaps that was one reason why Blizzard chose not to use portals everywhere.
Actually, the latest patch has a "fix" that is most certainly a response to a contentious issue in Warcraft -- Premades. In various battlegrounds, you can queue to play as an individual or form a team to enter the battleground together as a premade. Unfortunately for the pick-up-groups, or PUGs, the premades usually have better communication, better gear, and completely trash the other team. They also earned a bad reputation, as some premades took it further and camped in the graveyard, slaughtering hapless players as soon as they spawned. Now, I don't want to debate whether or not premades in general are honorable or objectionable, but there was enough of an uproar amongst the casual players that Blizzard actually stepped in and changed the queueing process so that large groups are now shunted to a special queue just for premades, while individual players and small parties still go to the PUG queues. Premades battle premades, PUGs battle PUGs.
Apart from some very irritated players who now have to wait longer times in the premade queues, all of the casual players can breathe a sigh of relief. The queues flow faster and the games are a lot more fun. Depending upon your side of the fence, you can argue that Blizzard did the wrong thing, or that it was a brilliant and timely change, but they were directly addressing the "critics."
I remember watching a television program on this very subject, where a plastic surgeon had developed a "golden ratio" framework to overlay on top of faces to figure out where a face needed "work." The interesting thing is that when it was overlaid atop the image of Tom Cruise, everything lined up -- eyes, jawbone, nose, basically all of the key features. Now some readers here may complain that he's not good looking, but he's enormously popular, and I doubt that the number one reason for his popularity is his virtuoso acting ability.
To me, the golden ratio really does seem to be an adequate rule of thumb. If nothing else, it sure makes for an interesting framework to work within when judging why somebody falls short of perfection!
I pretty much agree that the Olympics are going to be a huge expenditure with few tangible results, but I find it pretty unsurprising China is so gung-ho about this. In my opinion, hosting the Olympic games satisfies several agendas:
I don't mean to be overly cynical about the whole affair -- I had several Chinese friends who were ecstatic when it was announced that China would host the Olympics, and I'm happy for them. But in response to the original post, the Olympics often seem to be huge expenditures that may or may not pay off. Not to be unfair to developing nations, but... why do we constantly have to build new stadiums to accommodate the Olympics? Can't we just use the old ones we built, and focus more on the games and less on the "boom and bust" economics of building the infrastructure every 4 years?
Well, I mostly agree that anything and everything can be spun, but non-profit groups like the Humane Society advertise for folks to spay or neuter their pet, and for the most part, their goals are for the well-being of the critters they protect rather than trying to delude people into ruining their pet's chances for posterity. Of course, my remark is not cynicism-proof -- one could easily speculate that they're bankrolled by greedy vets funding their yacht payments through costly and unnecessary surgeries.
If we're just talking about products, I'd have less of a foot to stand on, but the original poster was speaking of advertisements in a general sense, I believe.
This may be true, and it's unfortunately exacerbated by the fact that with the rapid-fire accessibility of the Internet, it's much easier to spam one's resume to a large amount of companies in a small amount of time. In addition to this, the prevailing wisdom amongst people I've talked to is that companies often ask for more in a job posting than applicants can achieve. This likely varies from company to company (it may not even be true!), but the end result is that the poster may spam resumes out to jobs that they're unqualified for simply because it's fast and easy -- and why not? Some chance is better than no chance at all.
The result is bad for both parties. As an applicant, it's depressing to receive such a small response to the numerous positions applied for, and the employer must sift through a burdensome pile of mostly unnecessary applications. As glad as I am that job postings are more readily accessible, it's also created a very impersonal and disheartening screening process due to the sheer bulk of applications that must be processed.
I agree about the tone of the request; I don't even think he wanted a reasonable explanation. He wrote to a front-line tech support representative in a heated and somewhat abstruse missive. In all honesty, I didn't feel like he made it abundantly clear in his original request that he was using Linux:
Why, exactly, is "Full" disabled if one masks "Win" as the OS in the User Agent string, considering that Firefox doesn't use any Windows subsystem other than the TCP/IP stack and GDI? On Windows XP, hiding the fact that I'm using Windows in the UA string disables "Full", while masquerading as Firefox for Windows under Linux X86-64 (and a 64-bit build of Firefox) "Full" works very well.He could simply have said "I use Linux." Instead it is buried under dizzying terms such as TCP/IP stack, GDI, subsystem, X86-64... He was looking for a fight and an opportunity to expose Microsoft idiocy, and what do you know? He found it! Well done!
I don't think that the poster you replied to was really suggesting that having an Internet connection in Iran meant an idyllic unfettered freedom of information for its populace; instead, not having any glimpse into the outside world makes the citizens more susceptible to hatemongering propaganda, stilted views, and the like. To think that cutting off an Internet connection to Iran would actually improve political tensions would be naive.
I was also a bit disturbed that war seems to be the only alternative to sanctions. If the U.S. didn't routinely traipse into the Middle East and assert itself violently, would we have fomented as much hate as we receive now? Israel, Desert Storm, the Iraq conflict... it's enough to make Arab states feel pretty threatened. They can't compete with the scale of the United States military, but a nuclear device sure gets our attention and would make us think twice. I'm not necessarily debating the utility of our past military offensives, but to say that outright war is the only alternative to sanctions strikes me as pretty simplistic!
Perhaps we're arguing the same point, however: we've stirred up such a hornet's nest in the Middle East now that perhaps it really has come to suppression via sanctions or via war. I just wonder what that area of the world would look like if we had been less meddlesome and more supportive in the first place.
Nice information, thanks! One thing I want to add is that there's not much chance that Paul will run as a third party candidate. NPR had an interview with one of his staff, who said Paul had no interest in the prospect. It would apparently be a very expensive move. The weather changes quickly in the presidential race (this one more than many!), but I wouldn't count on him running for anything other than the Republican party.
I don't think the poster was joking -- I nodded with appreciation when he mentioned GlaDOS and the credit song as well. Maybe it's not 100% original... but fresh? There is something much more rewarding about GlaDOS as a antagonist with her split personalities and peculiar musicianship. I found her to be one of the best adversaries in just about any game I've played, and it highlights Valve's ability to create amazing, immersive scenarios with a great deal of depth. Unlike Shub-Niggurath in Quake, or whoever that generic demon was, GlaDOS had a strange attraction in that she (well, discounting the cannons) was the only one who interacted with you in the sterile surroundings, and a certain co-dependency arose between her and Chell.
It's not just GlaDOS, it's the environment, the austerity of the surroundings, the hints of the madness of the other subjects, the glimpses behind the scenes, and the different modules you whack off of GlaDOS that illustrated facets of her character. It was great storytelling in a video game -- perhaps that's the innovation more than the fact that she was basically a HAL 9000 variant. But that end song -- how could you deny its innovative coolness??
To Steam's credit, they've been imposing interesting metrics (like logging where and how frequently people die on maps in various levels) and have interesting surveys revealing computer specs. In the end, it will probably result in a better game and an awesome Episode 3.
That being said, I find Steam highly annoying as well. When playing my single-player HL2 campaign, it sometimes took forever to load, while at other times it loaded up as quickly as any other FPS game should. I suspect that the slowdown was due to peak usage times, but doing so can make reloading a saved game highly frustrating. I don't understand why it needs the server's permission just to load scenarios in a single-player game, and even if I did understand, it's a significant enough imposition to find pretty infuriating on dangerous levels where dying (and reloading) can be frequent.
Sadly, Portal was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had, so it's with a twinge of shame that I declare my principles have been compromised in enslaving myself the Steam-dependent Orange Box.
No kidding -- the MMORPG grind scheme is successful, just like it is in gambling. In behavioral psychology, there are various schedules of reinforcement. The schedule most frequently used by casinos and MMORPGs is the "variable ratio schedule," where the subject is rewarded on a random basis for their efforts. In that sense, we're not much more sophisticated than the rats with electrodes inserted into the brain's pleasure centers, pushing levers for a kibble of food.
There's a nifty chart about the efficacy of these schedules (unfortunately on PDF) here.
Incidentally, the B.F. Skinner in the article was also the scientist who tried to market a weapons technology to the military involving a homing pigeon housed in the nose of a warhead, pecking at various controls to guide the missile to its target. It was also resistant to jamming, I guess as long as the Nazis didn't strew a nearby target with birdseed. Unfortunately, he didn't get funding.
"Spamvertising" is exactly what crossed my mind the first time I heard about this as well. At the local Shell station, all the gas pumps have been set up with video monitors that deluge you with ads as soon as you start pressing buttons on the panel. Yet strangely, the prices at the Shell station are no cheaper than those of stations without video advertising. I already find "membership" cards at supermarkets rather repugnant -- their receipts proudly proclaim "You saved $3.12 today!" when in actuality that's the amount you didn't get gouged for as a non-member.
If the screen isn't in an obnoxious position and (dear god) doesn't have audio, I won't put up much of a fight. Somehow I don't see that happening. Even the guy in the article says "This is not all necessarily about bombarding consumers, about targeting advertising." To me that seems to imply that it's at least partially necessarily about bombaring customers.
While I completely agree that parents should shoulder the majority of the discipline of a student, there are parents who would not be comfortable with that. When I was teaching (primary grades, mind you), some parents delivered their child to the school in the hope that we would discipline the student and succeed where they had failed (if they had tried at all). School admins are sometimes in impossible positions, where parents bellyache when a school does nothing to discipline a student but later decries a teacher's interference in a matter, and districts walk a tightrope of litigation every day with the hope that an overzealous parent will not fly off the handle at a situation.
Schools have enough to do, but the differing expectations of parents regarding discipline can make even simple issues draining and contentious. Many decisions that schools make seem arbitrary but are often based (unfortunately) on legal matters. Many peculiar and seemingly pointless questions that you answer on school enrollment forms are the direct result of a lawsuit brought against a district, a state, or even the U.S. The action the administrators took may seem draconian and meddlesome, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow bound to act based on the "evidence" that had been delivered to them (if they truly received it as a CD). I certainly would have been surprised if they had not consulted one of their district lawyers before they acted.
That was one of the questions on my mind as I read the article: "Where are the parents in all of this?" The school does have a responsibility to provide a moral beacon for the students, but (hopefully) it's ultimately the parents who can provide more intensive monitoring and disciplining regarding this. Sidestepping the parents and proceeding directly to whipping the students may teach them consequences, but it's also likely to teach them great resentment for this rather arbitrary alcoholic witch hunt.
By issuing a blanket punishment to any and all of the students implicated in drinking, they are merely sending the message "don't drink underage.... or ELSE!" But an important part of discipline is "why" the discipline is necessary, and I just don't see that here. Parents are a much better vessel for that message -- they can convey disappointment, give more relevant and personal anecdotes, show concern, be nurturing, and have much more time at their disposal to work with the student. This approach can be vital to turning a kid around and can ultimately be more effective than summarily stripping them of a scholarship and derailing their life.
Hopefully, the school is involving the parents and it wasn't covered in the article due to its inherent lack of sensationalism.
Agreed -- I found it amusing that one of the students commented "I think it's a huge invasion of privacy" when they're posting these images to one of the most highly-trafficked websites on this planet.
At the risk of seeming old and curmudgeonly, I think the term "invasion of privacy" must have a different semantic meaning to their generation. To me, someone invading my privacy is a person going out of their way to access aspects of my life that are normally private (as in, not known to many) and exclusive to me. To the students, the administration has taken an interest in a very publicized aspect of their life that lies outside the scope of their responsibilities while at school. This trespass is the "huge invasion of privacy."
I'm not approving of the school's initiative, I just am surprised that some of the students feel like some trust has been violated after wantonly posting their bacchanals to the Internet. Now, if the school had tapped their cell phones, intercepted all IMs and planted moles at their parties, that would be a huge invasion of privacy!