While criticizing the media for its usual stupidity, we shouldn't forget the equally stereotypical self-aggrandizement of hordes of old programmers who claimed they foresaw the problem way back in 197X and how no one would listen to them.
I can't tell you how many gray-haired Cobol programmers tried to make themselves out to be prophetic heroes in last few years before 2000.
The lesson to be learned? Most people are idiots, and the rest of us are somebody's idiot at least some of the time.
I agree with your post for the most part, but your comparison is flawed. An individual following another individual around and taking pictures clearly intends something entirely different from Street View. It's not enough that two actions are similar, though in this case, the similarities aren't massive, but let's say they are, the intent needs to be similar as well.
Not funny, just stupid. When people use it to justify government activity they are misunderstanding the constitution, which exhaustively and explicitly enumerates the powers of government rather than the rights of citizens. They even added an amendment so the slow witted would pick up on that. So, the government must prove that any powers it exercises are both legal and necessary.
How is it exactly that this fallacious notion is somehow valid, when applied to individuals?
well, I went through the trouble of "opting out" with Comcast this morning, but later, it came back.
The two things that were different about the later situation were 1) I used MacCleanse to clean out caches, cookies, etc.; 2) I had to do a cold restart, because my MBP is getting old.
I have no clue how this could result in undoing my opt out, but apparently it did.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who replaces them almost instantly. On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone would use any mouse you actually have to move around, even if it has two buttons.
Do you think the discarded Apple mice end up in the same place as missing dryer socks? There must be a million-strong herd of them out there somewhere?
That's Vedic Sanskrit, as opposed to Epic and Classical Sanskrit, or you can be really obscure and refer to Old Indo-Aryan. No one talks about "Ancient Sanskrit" the way you would "Ancient Greek."
If you do find a copy of Word that does Devanagari easily, with all the old ligatures and such, I'll gladly buy it from you.
This bit of trivia brought to you by your Friendly Neighborhood Philologist.
Just because it's not completely useless, doesn't mean valuable time should be spent teaching it. I certainly don't see how being able to write bad emo poetry in a journal is a necessary, real-world skill.
The point is that educators justified hours and hours of teaching cursive for decades by claiming it was a necessary skill, like basic arithmetic. If it ever was such a skill, it certainly isn't now.
To say that "nothing in the real world uses cursive" may be hyperbolic, but it's a decent response to the rhetoric that has been used in its defense. To come out railing against that, and then use as an example your personal journal, not only fails to justify your disagreement with its non-importance, it's almost laughable. All you have are 1) anecdotal bullshit (so, out of your ass instead of "out of the air"), and 2) some purely personal use.
You follow it up then with snarkiness? "Just because you are bad at it"? Well, just because you care about it doesn't mean it's useful either.
Religion doesn't have to make sense; it just has to keep you in your place.
Then again, governments use the same tactic: "There's a threat, an invisible threat, your freedom must be restricted. See? You weren't harmed by the threat only I can see. I saved you. Now, go back to work."
Yep. As the Wikipedia article notes
"Before 1986, people often did not have a Social Security number until the age of about 14, since they were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income. In 1986, American taxation law was altered so that individuals over 5 years old without Social Security numbers could not be successfully claimed as dependents on tax returns; by 1990 the threshold was lowered to 1 year old, and was later abolished altogether. Since then, parents have often applied for Social Security numbers for their children soon after birth; today, it can be done on the application for a birth certificate."
It was also once the case that a SSN was explicitly not to be used as a means of identification, but now it's the index to our very existence.
Why require people to have an official I.D., when you can just force them to apply for one?
Yes, yes, it's all music and games fault, after all, before music and games there was no crime and no violence.
"Witch" burning only happened after a Burn the Witch video-game and war and massacre only happened after we got a song telling us to do it.
Correction: the Anglo-American tradition was to hang witches. Continental Europeans burned them. Had the Puritans not had video games and spent their time reading the bible, by contrast, they would have just stoned them to death, which is so much less violent and more Christian.
It seems that every piece of technology gets accused of this.
That's because the constant is our stupidity, not the technology showcasing it.
Or it could be the lure of the flashy soapbox for all too many scientists, self-styled analysts, and reactionary thinkers overall. I mean, in the face of technology you don't understand, how do you stay relevant? You claim it's a horrible danger and get people worried.
Writing (if you're willing to consider writing as technology). The ancient Greeks (Homer era and before) were said to be able to perform what we today would consider absolutely incredible feats of memory.
Of course that's not to say that writing didn't come with its attendant benefits, too...
Of course, what counted as memorizing then was more than slightly less accurate than what we would consider acceptable today. I don't mean oral formulaic compositions, rather quotes tended to be close but not quite accurate. Strict accuracy wasn't even really an issue for them.
Moreover, you have to wonder what the average person actually memorized, if it's much greater than what the average person in a developed country can recall about professional sports, television shows, music, etc.
The transition from an oral culture starts with "Homer" and doesn't really end until the fourth-century BCE, as it's usually mapped. "Before Homer" means the Dark Ages of Archaic Greece, when for all we know they had the internet, because there's just no evidence, and I don't believe any references to memory actually refer to that period.
...how about you bid for the ivory, then tell the sellers that you will pick it up.
Home pickup is not an option for most sales on eBay. Lots of sellers like to remain anonymous, whether selling ivory or homemade tablecloths. Your idea simply would not work.
Upon the receiving the ivory, they'd be able to give law enforcement probable cause to find out who the seller is and charge them. So, home delivery is a bad example, but the overall idea is sound.
Jeeze, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft picked up on one of these as well. Imagine if IE actually used the same standards as the browsers us open sourcies like to use.
Wouldn't the effect of such compliance threaten the fabric of the space-time continuum or something?
I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this.
It's highly tendentious to characterize the ISO as a "victim." It would be just as easy to call it a body of accomplices. What use is such an organization, if they can't even handle the entities whose products they are supposed to judge? At best, they're incompetent, not poor victims bedazzled by city slickers.
This "victim" crap is the same trope people trot out to excuse failures on the part of people who belong to some group many are afraid to criticize. You want to blame Microsoft; you don't want to blame the ISO, so suddenly this standards body is a poor passive entity tossed hither and thither by forces too great for it to withstand. You get the exact same crap, when someone from a marginalized segment of society fails in some major way. Oh, it's not their fault, they are just at the whim of greater forces, no responsibility, no blame. BS.
If you want them to be "victims," then you have to accept their weakness and incompetence, which condemns them just as thoroughly as if they are knowingly complicit.
The can is definitly a better use of space.
But the bag, uses about the same amount of plastic as the cap of a pringles can, so there is much less waste, and is cheaper to produce.
Although the can can be used again, it rarely is, especially by people who eat Pringles often.
Well, the point of the can design originally was to ship larger amounts of chips in less space. So, perhaps the bag is cheaper to produce, but you have to factor in lower fuel costs for shipping, not to mention savings on cardboard and the like, since you want need so many boxes.
Do the people in Canada have the same mindset as we do in the USA?
Err, since when does the population of the U.S. have a single mindset? Oh, we're all subjected to the same ludicrous rhetoric at the federal level, but there's hardly a shared mindset/culture/ideology/self-representation.
If nothing else, we need to distinguish between the West Coast and the East Coast and between either Coast and the states not blessed by oceans. There are many populous areas of the U.S. where no one agrees with the bull that usually ends up as fodder for people elsewhere in the world to bitch about the U.S. And yet, thanks to our fake democracy, voters from the middle of nowhere who contribute next to nothing to the GDP get 7 times the representation I do in the Senate. Lovely, ain't it?
Hey, yeah, maybe we should discount the price of oil and gold for third world countries too. Everything knows that nothing costs anything and prices are completely arbitrary.
We already subsidize their pharmaceuticals. What I don't get is how people can see any of the corporations as "American." Megacorps sneer at national sovereignty and screw everyone. How deluded do you have to be to think that because a corp says it is based in a given country, that corp is somehow on the side of the citizens of said country?
Valid point, but our guys(and ladies!) in Iraq have a hard enough time getting normal equipment. What makes you think a soldier's life is worth what these exoskeletons are going to cost? I don't see that as a reasonable application of the technology.
On a side note, I'd hate to be wearing one of those things and carrying around 400 pounds when it breaks down:)
Military R & D is always goofy. Hell, the government won't even replace the M-16, but they'll pour millions into supply trucks which will supposedly drive themselves for great distances.
When they do try to replace something fundamental, like fighter/attack aircraft, they opt for something that's ridiculously over engineered and expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
While criticizing the media for its usual stupidity, we shouldn't forget the equally stereotypical self-aggrandizement of hordes of old programmers who claimed they foresaw the problem way back in 197X and how no one would listen to them.
I can't tell you how many gray-haired Cobol programmers tried to make themselves out to be prophetic heroes in last few years before 2000.
The lesson to be learned? Most people are idiots, and the rest of us are somebody's idiot at least some of the time.
I agree with your post for the most part, but your comparison is flawed. An individual following another individual around and taking pictures clearly intends something entirely different from Street View. It's not enough that two actions are similar, though in this case, the similarities aren't massive, but let's say they are, the intent needs to be similar as well.
Not funny, just stupid. When people use it to justify government activity they are misunderstanding the constitution, which exhaustively and explicitly enumerates the powers of government rather than the rights of citizens. They even added an amendment so the slow witted would pick up on that. So, the government must prove that any powers it exercises are both legal and necessary.
How is it exactly that this fallacious notion is somehow valid, when applied to individuals?
I had a vision once of server farming becoming a family tradition among people in certain parts of the world, replacing agriculture.
Server farmer's almanac? heh heh
well, I went through the trouble of "opting out" with Comcast this morning, but later, it came back.
The two things that were different about the later situation were 1) I used MacCleanse to clean out caches, cookies, etc.; 2) I had to do a cold restart, because my MBP is getting old.
I have no clue how this could result in undoing my opt out, but apparently it did.
I'm just guessing, but thought-controlled mice probably went away, when you graduated from college and stopped dropping all that acid.
Just saying...
:)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who replaces them almost instantly. On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone would use any mouse you actually have to move around, even if it has two buttons.
Do you think the discarded Apple mice end up in the same place as missing dryer socks? There must be a million-strong herd of them out there somewhere?
That's Vedic Sanskrit, as opposed to Epic and Classical Sanskrit, or you can be really obscure and refer to Old Indo-Aryan. No one talks about "Ancient Sanskrit" the way you would "Ancient Greek."
If you do find a copy of Word that does Devanagari easily, with all the old ligatures and such, I'll gladly buy it from you.
This bit of trivia brought to you by your Friendly Neighborhood Philologist.
Just because it's not completely useless, doesn't mean valuable time should be spent teaching it. I certainly don't see how being able to write bad emo poetry in a journal is a necessary, real-world skill. The point is that educators justified hours and hours of teaching cursive for decades by claiming it was a necessary skill, like basic arithmetic. If it ever was such a skill, it certainly isn't now. To say that "nothing in the real world uses cursive" may be hyperbolic, but it's a decent response to the rhetoric that has been used in its defense. To come out railing against that, and then use as an example your personal journal, not only fails to justify your disagreement with its non-importance, it's almost laughable. All you have are 1) anecdotal bullshit (so, out of your ass instead of "out of the air"), and 2) some purely personal use. You follow it up then with snarkiness? "Just because you are bad at it"? Well, just because you care about it doesn't mean it's useful either.
One of the coolest things ever. Now, if only it came with preset free porn bookmarks and a map to Anton Lavey's tombstone...
Religion doesn't have to make sense; it just has to keep you in your place. Then again, governments use the same tactic: "There's a threat, an invisible threat, your freedom must be restricted. See? You weren't harmed by the threat only I can see. I saved you. Now, go back to work."
They could farm gold in WOW to offset the cost of the trip.
Yep. As the Wikipedia article notes "Before 1986, people often did not have a Social Security number until the age of about 14, since they were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income. In 1986, American taxation law was altered so that individuals over 5 years old without Social Security numbers could not be successfully claimed as dependents on tax returns; by 1990 the threshold was lowered to 1 year old, and was later abolished altogether. Since then, parents have often applied for Social Security numbers for their children soon after birth; today, it can be done on the application for a birth certificate." It was also once the case that a SSN was explicitly not to be used as a means of identification, but now it's the index to our very existence. Why require people to have an official I.D., when you can just force them to apply for one?
Correction: the Anglo-American tradition was to hang witches. Continental Europeans burned them. Had the Puritans not had video games and spent their time reading the bible, by contrast, they would have just stoned them to death, which is so much less violent and more Christian.
Or it could be the lure of the flashy soapbox for all too many scientists, self-styled analysts, and reactionary thinkers overall. I mean, in the face of technology you don't understand, how do you stay relevant? You claim it's a horrible danger and get people worried.
Of course, what counted as memorizing then was more than slightly less accurate than what we would consider acceptable today. I don't mean oral formulaic compositions, rather quotes tended to be close but not quite accurate. Strict accuracy wasn't even really an issue for them.
Moreover, you have to wonder what the average person actually memorized, if it's much greater than what the average person in a developed country can recall about professional sports, television shows, music, etc.
The transition from an oral culture starts with "Homer" and doesn't really end until the fourth-century BCE, as it's usually mapped. "Before Homer" means the Dark Ages of Archaic Greece, when for all we know they had the internet, because there's just no evidence, and I don't believe any references to memory actually refer to that period.
...how about you bid for the ivory, then tell the sellers that you will pick it up.Home pickup is not an option for most sales on eBay. Lots of sellers like to remain anonymous, whether selling ivory or homemade tablecloths. Your idea simply would not work.
Upon the receiving the ivory, they'd be able to give law enforcement probable cause to find out who the seller is and charge them. So, home delivery is a bad example, but the overall idea is sound.
I do miss the Cold War sometimes. I mean, James Bond plots are just lame as hell post-Iron Curtain.
Wouldn't the effect of such compliance threaten the fabric of the space-time continuum or something?
I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this.
It's highly tendentious to characterize the ISO as a "victim." It would be just as easy to call it a body of accomplices. What use is such an organization, if they can't even handle the entities whose products they are supposed to judge? At best, they're incompetent, not poor victims bedazzled by city slickers.
This "victim" crap is the same trope people trot out to excuse failures on the part of people who belong to some group many are afraid to criticize. You want to blame Microsoft; you don't want to blame the ISO, so suddenly this standards body is a poor passive entity tossed hither and thither by forces too great for it to withstand. You get the exact same crap, when someone from a marginalized segment of society fails in some major way. Oh, it's not their fault, they are just at the whim of greater forces, no responsibility, no blame. BS.
If you want them to be "victims," then you have to accept their weakness and incompetence, which condemns them just as thoroughly as if they are knowingly complicit.
Well, the point of the can design originally was to ship larger amounts of chips in less space. So, perhaps the bag is cheaper to produce, but you have to factor in lower fuel costs for shipping, not to mention savings on cardboard and the like, since you want need so many boxes.
Hold on, you mean robots aren't already writing all that smooth jazz junk? Could've fooled me./p
Err, since when does the population of the U.S. have a single mindset? Oh, we're all subjected to the same ludicrous rhetoric at the federal level, but there's hardly a shared mindset/culture/ideology/self-representation.
If nothing else, we need to distinguish between the West Coast and the East Coast and between either Coast and the states not blessed by oceans. There are many populous areas of the U.S. where no one agrees with the bull that usually ends up as fodder for people elsewhere in the world to bitch about the U.S. And yet, thanks to our fake democracy, voters from the middle of nowhere who contribute next to nothing to the GDP get 7 times the representation I do in the Senate. Lovely, ain't it?
We already subsidize their pharmaceuticals. What I don't get is how people can see any of the corporations as "American." Megacorps sneer at national sovereignty and screw everyone. How deluded do you have to be to think that because a corp says it is based in a given country, that corp is somehow on the side of the citizens of said country?
Military R & D is always goofy. Hell, the government won't even replace the M-16, but they'll pour millions into supply trucks which will supposedly drive themselves for great distances.
When they do try to replace something fundamental, like fighter/attack aircraft, they opt for something that's ridiculously over engineered and expensive.