It's not racism, it's realism. One of the major reasons that there is still a racial divide in our country is because minority groups are statistically more likely to be poor. Black people only got full rights a couple generations ago and many other racial groups are largely made up of 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants.
Even in the 'land of opportunity', it takes a good hundred years of honest work with full legal protections to make something of yourself (or in this case, make something of your great grandchildren). Student loans and grants only go so far and parents tend to expect only slightly more out of their children than they accomplished themselves.
this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
Only if the ISP's are lying about 1% of users using 90% of bandwidth. If they're telling the truth with that statistic 99% of users will see their bills drop significantly because they will no longer be subsidizing the 1% that are power-users.
Besides, if you want real democracy in the Middle East this is the best thing you could possibly hope for; thousands of Iranians marching in the streets demanding to be heard. The Iranian people, it would seem, actually want this to happen for themselves, as opposed to someone else doing it for them. The US should keep lines of communication open when they have jurisdiction over them, say to the world 'We sure hope the rightfully elected leader will come out on top', and stay the hell out of it.
If you want to boycott what you see as their unfair practices and deprive them of revenue that's fine. But that hardly gives you the right to go and download their product for free and claim that you're doing it 'in protest' of their practices. It should be noted that boycots are about sacrifice too; it's showing the company you're boycotting that you don't need their product. Everytime someone says they won't buy a movie because of [your reason here] and then goes out and downloads it, that just tells the movie studios that they need better DRM to prevent you from downloading it since you obviously want to watch it and are willing to take a certain amount of risk to do so.
How many patients routinely find the cause of their illness' before the medical profession does, like this woman did?
Another good question would be 'how many patients do ten minutes of googling and decide that they have some horrible disease when all they really have is a cold?'. My point is that this cuts both ways.
There's a reason that doctors use statistics to diagnose patients, it works the majority of the time. Where you get into problems is when people have a difficult to diagnose, chronic disease that isn't immediately life threatening. When you're at the doctor several times a year and several doctors aren't able to treat your condition, future doctors will often assume that you are a hypochondriac or an attention seeker. My college roommate lived with Chron's for almost 15 years of his life, until he finally got sick enough that he was admitted to the hospital, 24 hours later he had a correct diagnosis.
That depends on what the 'Computer Maker' companies choose to do with this. They very well could assume that people will want what they are used to and ship IE anyway, and in all honesty that is probably a safe bet. The people who don't care already know IE and the people that do care know how to get their alternative. Of the people that don't care, I bet 50% of them would have to call up their family computer wizz because they couldn't find the little 'e' on their desktop.
IMO, the best result would be a wizard on startup that asks the user which browser they would like to install with a list of the top 5, but leave the default as IE.. Give each company/organization a small space to spell out what they think makes their product preferable and let the user make a choice.
What's interesting to me is that the joke actually started out with the horrible word being 'fuck' and Adams was forced to change it by his editors, censoring and watering down his joke about censorship. To me, the joke works better with 'Belgium' as the outlawed word because it points out how arbitrary and meaningless our definition of curse words are.
Yes, it would be almost impossible for someone to buy the same pair of shoes (using cash of course) and sneak into someone's backyard while they are at work. It's not about the vigilantes fabricating evidence, it's about someone fabricating evidence against someone they don't like. If they were crafty enough, they can even 'help' the vigilantes along by supplying key information at the right times. It's just like putting child porn on your enemies computer; all too easy compared to the amount of damage it can do.
The difference between this and a convict is that the convict was found guilty in a court of law. Say what you will about the fairness of the system, but at least the convicts got a chance to tell their side of the story and have the evidence judged. You don't know the facts about any of these cases and while some may be pretty clear cut (torturing animals on video) others aren't nearly so much simple.
Take the woman who committed suicide 'because' her husband was cheating on her. How many men cheat on their wives every year? Do they all deserve to be harassed daily, fired from their jobs, and scorned by their friends? Even if their wife is chronically depressed and has been distant and unloving for years? For all you know, the guy's wife regularly beat him with a stick.
Take the girl who very, very selfishly whined about the earthquake in China. Does she really deserve the same punishment as a convicted criminal?
Finally, just because no one has fabricated evidence yet doesn't mean that it won't be done in the future. That's like saying "Well, the government didn't abuse its warrantless wiretaps this time, so we'll let them keep doing it". It's short sighted and negligent. Just because this threat to privacy comes from the mob instead of the government doesn't mean it should be any less concerning.
It's science, not scouting out new planets to live on. This discovery would support the idea that planets can be found around stars in other galaxies. Specifically, it supports the Cosmological Principle, that there's nothing particularly special about our corner of the universe. It might seem like it is obvious that there are planets everywhere in the universe, but that is hardly a given. It's about removing assumptions from our models and getting down to actual facts.
Fortunately, human flesh search engines don't end the lives of their victims, like the witch-hunts or lynching of the past.
No, they just make it impossible to ever live a normal life ever again. They ruin your career and alienate your friends and family. They force you to live through humiliation and shaming every day, often for weeks or months at a time.
All based on a single, often easily fabricated, piece of evidence. That isn't justice, it's just a mob being a mob and harrassing other people for the fun of it.
He's right as far as he goes, it's just that he doesn't go far enough. Google tends to open up their APIs and say to the developer world "Go play with this", Microsoft chooses not to take that risk (and yeah, it is a risk) and keeps a tighter lid on their software. It is absolutely true that this gives Microsoft more control over their brand image and software.
Where he stops short, however, is not looking at the final results. He just doesn't get that open source and open APIs work. Letting the developer world play with your product produces dozens of ideas that would never have occurred to the people who created it in the first place. That's what Microsoft has never understood.
The cable company pays them for the right to carry the service/channel. By bundling the paywall in with your cable, they (in all fairness) open up a cheap and legal means for a large number of people to watch network shows online. On the downside (and more cynical side), this is now being bundled with your cable bill whether you like it or not, essentially forcing all cable subscribers to subsidize the program.
The "we don't want the kids to imitate" argument doesn't work here.
Yes it does. Parents know that their children aren't going to go out and shoot someone in cold blood. Parents also know that, given the opportunity, their children will have sex. It would seem that the subconscious decision by parents is that if a child is not likely to do something, watching it on TV won't make them do it; but, if a child is likely to do something, watching it on TV will make it more likely. I'm not saying that is true, I'm just pointing out that a consistent logical system can explain the behavior.
And 99.999% of the Earth isn't an airplane in flight. If there's a 1/20 chance that an airplane would be brought down by a meteor in the past 20 years, I would think that there would be several dozen building hit over the same period.
Who ever said that this technology was going to replace the officers doing the work right now? I could definately imagine a system where low profile cases are automatically checked with this software and if anything is found it is flagged for review by an expert. High profile cases would, obviously, always be investigated by someone who knew what they were doing.
The problem there is that locking out third party codecs doesn't do anything to solve the problem because 99% of users won't know that the codec/plugin they're told to download won't work. You could even find a way, I'm sure, to allow the video to play only after they've installed your malware if you wanted to be really sneaky about it.
That's maybe true when you're talking about high school math programs, but TFA also mentions the gaps closing in under and post graduate work as well. The guidance counselor might convince you to take calc your senior year, but I don't think anyone is going to convince you to make a career out of a subject you hate.
The with the vertical posture is blood pressure and the energy required to move blood to the head. Supposedly, just moving blood up the neck to the head would require have the dinosaurs energy and a heart 15 times bigger (as a ratio of body mass) than the hearts of other large animals.
In 2006, the American PBS program "Frontline" broadcast a segment filmed at Peking University, many of whose students participated in the 1989 protests. Four students were shown a picture of the Tank Man, but none of them could identify what was happening in the photo. Some responded that it was a military parade, or an artwork.
From Wikipedia, but still illustrates the point, young people in China don't know much about the Tienanmen Square incident unless they get it from hearsay or from people abroad. How often does the Kent State incident come up in day to day conversation for you? Would you even know about it if you weren't taught about it in a Modern US History class? How many Americans would look at you confused if you started talking about an incident where the US military shot and killed unarmed US civilians?
I believe what she's trying to put across here is that a person who grew up as a poor minority woman is more likely to reach a fair conclusion than an old money white male would. Specifically, I think she's referring here to questions about those issues: poverty and discrimination.
It's equivalent to saying "I think an IT expert turned judge would be more likely to reach a fair decision in technology cases than an a judge that doesn't know how to send email would".
"The Catholic church has historically been much worse than Scientology"
Historically is the key word, if Scientology stops ruining people's lives and charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a full member, in a couple hundred years it could be considered a legitimate church. Besides, inquisition and excommunication was the result of a de facto theocracy, not cult like behavior. If you're going to complain about cult like behavior in modern Catholicism, you need to look into things like child abuse at Irish schoolhouses, protecting known child molesters, and bribing/blackmailing victims (and this is coming from an active Catholic).
The key word here is 'appear'. Meta-materials (which is what this is, just on a large scale) appear to violate the laws of physics but if you look more closely they don't. The point is that if you showed it to a college undergrad with decent physics knowledge they would say it violates the laws of physics, that doesn't mean the college kid is right.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not racism, it's realism. One of the major reasons that there is still a racial divide in our country is because minority groups are statistically more likely to be poor. Black people only got full rights a couple generations ago and many other racial groups are largely made up of 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants.
Even in the 'land of opportunity', it takes a good hundred years of honest work with full legal protections to make something of yourself (or in this case, make something of your great grandchildren). Student loans and grants only go so far and parents tend to expect only slightly more out of their children than they accomplished themselves.
this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
Only if the ISP's are lying about 1% of users using 90% of bandwidth. If they're telling the truth with that statistic 99% of users will see their bills drop significantly because they will no longer be subsidizing the 1% that are power-users.
Besides, if you want real democracy in the Middle East this is the best thing you could possibly hope for; thousands of Iranians marching in the streets demanding to be heard. The Iranian people, it would seem, actually want this to happen for themselves, as opposed to someone else doing it for them. The US should keep lines of communication open when they have jurisdiction over them, say to the world 'We sure hope the rightfully elected leader will come out on top', and stay the hell out of it.
If you want to boycott what you see as their unfair practices and deprive them of revenue that's fine. But that hardly gives you the right to go and download their product for free and claim that you're doing it 'in protest' of their practices. It should be noted that boycots are about sacrifice too; it's showing the company you're boycotting that you don't need their product. Everytime someone says they won't buy a movie because of [your reason here] and then goes out and downloads it, that just tells the movie studios that they need better DRM to prevent you from downloading it since you obviously want to watch it and are willing to take a certain amount of risk to do so.
How many patients routinely find the cause of their illness' before the medical profession does, like this woman did?
Another good question would be 'how many patients do ten minutes of googling and decide that they have some horrible disease when all they really have is a cold?'. My point is that this cuts both ways.
There's a reason that doctors use statistics to diagnose patients, it works the majority of the time. Where you get into problems is when people have a difficult to diagnose, chronic disease that isn't immediately life threatening. When you're at the doctor several times a year and several doctors aren't able to treat your condition, future doctors will often assume that you are a hypochondriac or an attention seeker. My college roommate lived with Chron's for almost 15 years of his life, until he finally got sick enough that he was admitted to the hospital, 24 hours later he had a correct diagnosis.
That depends on what the 'Computer Maker' companies choose to do with this. They very well could assume that people will want what they are used to and ship IE anyway, and in all honesty that is probably a safe bet. The people who don't care already know IE and the people that do care know how to get their alternative. Of the people that don't care, I bet 50% of them would have to call up their family computer wizz because they couldn't find the little 'e' on their desktop.
IMO, the best result would be a wizard on startup that asks the user which browser they would like to install with a list of the top 5, but leave the default as IE.. Give each company/organization a small space to spell out what they think makes their product preferable and let the user make a choice.
What's interesting to me is that the joke actually started out with the horrible word being 'fuck' and Adams was forced to change it by his editors, censoring and watering down his joke about censorship. To me, the joke works better with 'Belgium' as the outlawed word because it points out how arbitrary and meaningless our definition of curse words are.
Just another planet firing up their LHC, nothing to see here.
Yes, it would be almost impossible for someone to buy the same pair of shoes (using cash of course) and sneak into someone's backyard while they are at work. It's not about the vigilantes fabricating evidence, it's about someone fabricating evidence against someone they don't like. If they were crafty enough, they can even 'help' the vigilantes along by supplying key information at the right times. It's just like putting child porn on your enemies computer; all too easy compared to the amount of damage it can do.
The difference between this and a convict is that the convict was found guilty in a court of law. Say what you will about the fairness of the system, but at least the convicts got a chance to tell their side of the story and have the evidence judged. You don't know the facts about any of these cases and while some may be pretty clear cut (torturing animals on video) others aren't nearly so much simple.
Take the woman who committed suicide 'because' her husband was cheating on her. How many men cheat on their wives every year? Do they all deserve to be harassed daily, fired from their jobs, and scorned by their friends? Even if their wife is chronically depressed and has been distant and unloving for years? For all you know, the guy's wife regularly beat him with a stick.
Take the girl who very, very selfishly whined about the earthquake in China. Does she really deserve the same punishment as a convicted criminal?
Finally, just because no one has fabricated evidence yet doesn't mean that it won't be done in the future. That's like saying "Well, the government didn't abuse its warrantless wiretaps this time, so we'll let them keep doing it". It's short sighted and negligent. Just because this threat to privacy comes from the mob instead of the government doesn't mean it should be any less concerning.
Apologies for the double post, make that the Copernican/Mediocrity principle rather than the Cosmological principle.
It's science, not scouting out new planets to live on. This discovery would support the idea that planets can be found around stars in other galaxies. Specifically, it supports the Cosmological Principle, that there's nothing particularly special about our corner of the universe. It might seem like it is obvious that there are planets everywhere in the universe, but that is hardly a given. It's about removing assumptions from our models and getting down to actual facts.
The author of the article doesn't get it
Fortunately, human flesh search engines don't end the lives of their victims, like the witch-hunts or lynching of the past.
No, they just make it impossible to ever live a normal life ever again. They ruin your career and alienate your friends and family. They force you to live through humiliation and shaming every day, often for weeks or months at a time.
All based on a single, often easily fabricated, piece of evidence. That isn't justice, it's just a mob being a mob and harrassing other people for the fun of it.
He's right as far as he goes, it's just that he doesn't go far enough. Google tends to open up their APIs and say to the developer world "Go play with this", Microsoft chooses not to take that risk (and yeah, it is a risk) and keeps a tighter lid on their software. It is absolutely true that this gives Microsoft more control over their brand image and software.
Where he stops short, however, is not looking at the final results. He just doesn't get that open source and open APIs work. Letting the developer world play with your product produces dozens of ideas that would never have occurred to the people who created it in the first place. That's what Microsoft has never understood.
The cable company pays them for the right to carry the service/channel. By bundling the paywall in with your cable, they (in all fairness) open up a cheap and legal means for a large number of people to watch network shows online. On the downside (and more cynical side), this is now being bundled with your cable bill whether you like it or not, essentially forcing all cable subscribers to subsidize the program.
The "we don't want the kids to imitate" argument doesn't work here.
Yes it does. Parents know that their children aren't going to go out and shoot someone in cold blood. Parents also know that, given the opportunity, their children will have sex. It would seem that the subconscious decision by parents is that if a child is not likely to do something, watching it on TV won't make them do it; but, if a child is likely to do something, watching it on TV will make it more likely. I'm not saying that is true, I'm just pointing out that a consistent logical system can explain the behavior.
And 99.999% of the Earth isn't an airplane in flight. If there's a 1/20 chance that an airplane would be brought down by a meteor in the past 20 years, I would think that there would be several dozen building hit over the same period.
Who ever said that this technology was going to replace the officers doing the work right now? I could definately imagine a system where low profile cases are automatically checked with this software and if anything is found it is flagged for review by an expert. High profile cases would, obviously, always be investigated by someone who knew what they were doing.
The problem there is that locking out third party codecs doesn't do anything to solve the problem because 99% of users won't know that the codec/plugin they're told to download won't work. You could even find a way, I'm sure, to allow the video to play only after they've installed your malware if you wanted to be really sneaky about it.
That's maybe true when you're talking about high school math programs, but TFA also mentions the gaps closing in under and post graduate work as well. The guidance counselor might convince you to take calc your senior year, but I don't think anyone is going to convince you to make a career out of a subject you hate.
The with the vertical posture is blood pressure and the energy required to move blood to the head. Supposedly, just moving blood up the neck to the head would require have the dinosaurs energy and a heart 15 times bigger (as a ratio of body mass) than the hearts of other large animals.
In 2006, the American PBS program "Frontline" broadcast a segment filmed at Peking University, many of whose students participated in the 1989 protests. Four students were shown a picture of the Tank Man, but none of them could identify what was happening in the photo. Some responded that it was a military parade, or an artwork.
From Wikipedia, but still illustrates the point, young people in China don't know much about the Tienanmen Square incident unless they get it from hearsay or from people abroad. How often does the Kent State incident come up in day to day conversation for you? Would you even know about it if you weren't taught about it in a Modern US History class? How many Americans would look at you confused if you started talking about an incident where the US military shot and killed unarmed US civilians?
I believe what she's trying to put across here is that a person who grew up as a poor minority woman is more likely to reach a fair conclusion than an old money white male would. Specifically, I think she's referring here to questions about those issues: poverty and discrimination.
It's equivalent to saying "I think an IT expert turned judge would be more likely to reach a fair decision in technology cases than an a judge that doesn't know how to send email would".
"The Catholic church has historically been much worse than Scientology"
Historically is the key word, if Scientology stops ruining people's lives and charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a full member, in a couple hundred years it could be considered a legitimate church. Besides, inquisition and excommunication was the result of a de facto theocracy, not cult like behavior. If you're going to complain about cult like behavior in modern Catholicism, you need to look into things like child abuse at Irish schoolhouses, protecting known child molesters, and bribing/blackmailing victims (and this is coming from an active Catholic).
The key word here is 'appear'. Meta-materials (which is what this is, just on a large scale) appear to violate the laws of physics but if you look more closely they don't. The point is that if you showed it to a college undergrad with decent physics knowledge they would say it violates the laws of physics, that doesn't mean the college kid is right.