First, you say that you don't already know where you'd draw the line for yourself, morally speaking. I do. I would say that most do. The people that don't, I have no problem with judging. Especially people who have authority over me. This is not being idealistic or evading reality.
As to our glorious leaders, they don't just "have" great responsibility. We gave it to them. We can take it away.
Also, our government was structured in such a way as to mitigate the failings of any one individual (limited terms, interdependent branches). They aren't failing to be perfect, they're succeeding in gaming the system. They need to be held accountable, not defended.
QFT.
It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.
People who live in blue states should be voting third-party. Obama may be better than McCain on these issues, but he's no savior, and the Democrats as whole are either too selfish or careless to stop this one.
1. The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution. It's one of those "Amendment" things.
2. He said protected. Protected looks nothing like granted. Seems like you had some stock response ready and you accidentally pulled the trigger. Better luck next time.
3. Why do people try so hard to weasel out of the clear language of our forefathers? "Shall not be infringed" seems pretty damn clear to me.
In short, a hypothesis. Data either supports your hypothesis, or the null hypothesis. Where the problems of logic creep in are at the hypothesis. Throwing more data at is actually worse, since it makes the argument look stronger, regardless of any flaws in it.
My hypothesis: Chris Anderson should have stayed awake in high school.
The problem is that science is not their goal, controversy is.
ID is like the shill in the snake oil demonstration. Hey, look at that guy! He wrote a paper! Just like y'all! It's got citations an' everything! It says...science is really just a religion called naturalism? WTF?
Absolutely right, but I tend to draw a line somewhere between Creationists and IDers. The IDers are pretending at science, and as such, they do not get the luxury of appealing to anything outside of the scientific method. Data or GTFO. A creationist could always just back up the point of creation until it's no longer a falsifiable claim. IDers have something specific to say (supposedly).
Of course, I don't think many here fail to see that any specific claim or point of evidence they put forward is immaterial. They seek to manufacture a controversy so that they can teach that manufactured controversy.
Luckily, this is exactly the sort of thing that the scientific method was designed to address.
I'm sure it's different with a publicly traded company, but my experience is that a large amount of money is still a large amount of money. You don't stay on top by throwing $10m to this guy and $10m to that guy. And I'm assuming that Google has a legal team ready and waiting, so they'd be throwing that money away twice. The case may very well cost less than that to take to court.
There's lots of other variables, like whether its worth it for Google stock-price-wise to stay out of the lawsuit headlines where possible, but my point is that I doubt Google has a $10 million check signed and waiting for everyone who complains about them. $1000, maybe...
You definitely can notice it, and it's my sincere hope that most people will exercise the will-power necessary to reasonably examine themselves.
Rather, I was trying to get at the idea that there isn't any test which which you could sweep Wikipedia and then conclude, "OK, that's the last of 'em, no biases here."
I obviously don't trust myself to see into every situation with perfect insight, but I don't trust WP there either because, for one thing, how would you know?
I think it'd send a clearer message if people didn't buy *or* play the game. Someone who downloads it for free is mainly just saying "hey, not only am I cheap, but I'm unwilling to sacrifice a little entertainment for what I believe to be the right thing".
I think what you say about money spent on DRMed games going towards more DRM. But people need to be principled here, one reason being that, from the perspective of the manufacturer, there's no good reason to assume that the downloaders are motivated by anything other than the promise of free stuff. A real boycott means going without.
I'm in much the same position, but I don't see my goal so much as keeping current, as becoming as knowledgeable as possible about the software and hardware that I have to oversee. I could care less what Yahoo! is trading at. There's security news to keep up on but we don't run any outside services, so I find that my time is better spent digging deeper into GPOs, deploying software and whatnot.
Learn as much as you can stomach about networks. Just grab one of the certification course books, like for the CCNA. You have to keep up-to-date with hardware and OS because things will change, but hopefully not too quickly, and the nice thing about being in charge of IT, is those changes happen through you.
Political though it may be, Thurrott's supersite has good info a lot of the time.
I think you're on the right track, but I'll try to elaborate a little based on what I know.
First of all, RGB is device-dependent. Monitors have phosphors that are imperfect, much like the inks are. We use ICC profiles (gamma curves) to tie them back to a standard RGB. Apple uses Apple RGB, Microsoft uses sRGB. On top of this, there are hardware adjustments that the manufacturer makes, as well as the consumer, in both hardware and software. So, to (over)simplify, there is no "RGB"...there's things like sRGB, which attempt to cover as much of the visible spectrum as possible, but do not cover all of it, nor cover any of it "evenly".
CMYK is much the same. It's true that black is necessary because existing C, M, & Y pigments are not "saturated" enough and do not mix to make pure black. Same story: physical limitations, compounded by differences between paper, finishes, where you buy ink from, what chemicals are in it, what sort of press, and on and on. For instance, deep blacks on paper require a glossy finish, same as with monitors. Many device-independent color spaces for CMYK exist as well, one of which is SWOP. It has its own set of assumptions and compromises to go with it. Printers can try to calibrate to this if they want.
Side note: let's say I don't care about any of this, because I'm using mspaint, I'm picking colors by RGB value, and not attaching color profiles to my work. Well, it won't look the same on a Mac...it certainly won't look the same on a printer. Why should I care about the data in the file? About the purity of the theory? At the end of the day, I got three different results for one file, which is unacceptable.
But the main challenges here are that CMYK has a smaller gamut, and there is not in fact one definitive CMYK gamut. Maybe the color space I chose to convert to nailed the blues, but screwed up the reds. Or orange got washed out but not green, and everything that's greyscale is now sort of sepia. We're converting color information between differently weighted, differently compromised systems, then displaying the results on machines that have to be calibrated to match those systems. And we all have different eyes. Someone's gotta decide exactly what blue looks like. Which is why Pantone is used so widely in print. You can avoid all the conversion crap, just tell your printer you want this exact color red, and they'll get as close to it as they can.
Real-world color conversion takes a good eye, as well as knowledge of the black arts. However you get your CMYK "plates" done, they need to preserve that particular piece of work, on a particular printer. Having proofs before you sign off on the print job is very important. You simply cannot trust the math...sometimes a particular conversion will look good, other times it wont.
BUT WAIT! That changed when Wikipedia came out with their magic bullet RGB to CMYK formula version 1.1! None of the mathematical weirdness of LAB and ProPhoto, which have to contain imaginary colors in order to better accommodate the real ones. Here's the secret genius: #00FFFF = Cyan!! #FF00FF = Magenta!! #FFFF00 = Yellow!! #000000 = Black!! Yay! I hope it's clear that putting this information on Wikipedia and calling it a CMYK to RGB formula is about as useful as squagles*. Just because we *call* #0FF cyan, does not mean that it is the same color as printer's cyan (which is really a deep dark blue).
Piano tuning is much the same...all about compromise, balance, unique instruments, having a good ear, and the complete lack of a certain set of pitches that are mathematically in tune with each other. Doesn't exist. Don't ask me why.
Bias is a slippery beast. By its nature it is only visible in the opinions of others. Like how accents are "heard but not spoken". I do agree with your sentiment, but calling WP (or anything) less biased is basically unfalsifiable. How could we be sure? How could we even measure something like that?
Personally, I have some faith in the "marketplace of ideas", but can't forget John Stuart Mill, who not only talked about the "tyranny of the majority" but also insisted that free discourse is only a means to an end -- someone with a wrong idea must come to understand *why* it's wrong, someone with the right idea must understand why that one's right.
Where I feel that Wikipedia falls short are the times when popular opinion is just wrong, or misled. It's hard for one expert to shout down 20 people who think they know better. For a very long time, the WP article on CMYK had a "formula" for converting CMYK to RGB. This formula was not wrong in the sense of being inaccurate. It was simply illogical...it had no basis in reality. The reasons why are subtle and require that someone understand that they're not just numbers -- they represent different and unrelated physical phenomena. But compare the number of color theorists out there with the number of people with photoshop, and you see where the problem creeps in.
To Wikipedia's credit, the thing was finally removed, but I have to wonder how many more of these landmines exist in there. And even though the quality of WP may be going up over time, there are new articles coming in every day as well.
Again, there are those cases where the majority gets it wrong. Wikipedia's only defense against this to wall itself off, which is even worse.
Absolutely. But the farther you stray from a primary source, the more likely you are to introduce editorial mistakes that are not your own. The best reason not to cite WP is that there's no original research there (supposedly). So everything that's on there you can get more directly, in a version that isn't summarized. Writing essays of any caliber requires that you read the "genuine articles" and form your own opinion.
I'm not going to get into the vulture-editors that circle "their" articles and the legions of bots that do the majority of WP edits, or the notability requirements that somehow don't apply to Pokemon or internet memes.
Anyway, the point is that the closer you can get to someone's original research/writings, the more qualified you are to write about your take on them.
Slashdot Mirror
First, you say that you don't already know where you'd draw the line for yourself, morally speaking. I do. I would say that most do. The people that don't, I have no problem with judging. Especially people who have authority over me. This is not being idealistic or evading reality.
As to our glorious leaders, they don't just "have" great responsibility. We gave it to them. We can take it away.
Also, our government was structured in such a way as to mitigate the failings of any one individual (limited terms, interdependent branches). They aren't failing to be perfect, they're succeeding in gaming the system. They need to be held accountable, not defended.
People who live in blue states should be voting third-party. Obama may be better than McCain on these issues, but he's no savior, and the Democrats as whole are either too selfish or careless to stop this one.
Not sure what this one even is. A search on GovTrack.us turned up no hits.
A search on google turned up 9,000. Are you saying that it "might not exist" because you hadn't heard of it before?
Some fine arguing there.
1. The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution. It's one of those "Amendment" things.
2. He said protected. Protected looks nothing like granted. Seems like you had some stock response ready and you accidentally pulled the trigger. Better luck next time.
3. Why do people try so hard to weasel out of the clear language of our forefathers? "Shall not be infringed" seems pretty damn clear to me.
Pop quiz, hotshot! Does EAC go under hardware, or media? What do you do?
What do you do?
I think it was the time cube guy, actually.
Science 2.0! Now with more datamining in social networks! And ajax! And of course, the same politicized funding that you know and love.
In short, a hypothesis. Data either supports your hypothesis, or the null hypothesis. Where the problems of logic creep in are at the hypothesis. Throwing more data at is actually worse, since it makes the argument look stronger, regardless of any flaws in it.
My hypothesis: Chris Anderson should have stayed awake in high school.
The problem is that science is not their goal, controversy is.
ID is like the shill in the snake oil demonstration. Hey, look at that guy! He wrote a paper! Just like y'all! It's got citations an' everything! It says...science is really just a religion called naturalism? WTF?
Absolutely right, but I tend to draw a line somewhere between Creationists and IDers. The IDers are pretending at science, and as such, they do not get the luxury of appealing to anything outside of the scientific method. Data or GTFO. A creationist could always just back up the point of creation until it's no longer a falsifiable claim. IDers have something specific to say (supposedly).
Of course, I don't think many here fail to see that any specific claim or point of evidence they put forward is immaterial. They seek to manufacture a controversy so that they can teach that manufactured controversy.
Luckily, this is exactly the sort of thing that the scientific method was designed to address.
Might does not automatically mean right.
Can does not automatically mean should.
And nobody owes you anything.
(It's not like I don't download stuff, but I'm not cavalier about it either. The right thing doesn't stop being right when it stops being easy.)
Well, if the knife had free will, maybe a little of both.
I'm sure it's different with a publicly traded company, but my experience is that a large amount of money is still a large amount of money. You don't stay on top by throwing $10m to this guy and $10m to that guy. And I'm assuming that Google has a legal team ready and waiting, so they'd be throwing that money away twice. The case may very well cost less than that to take to court.
There's lots of other variables, like whether its worth it for Google stock-price-wise to stay out of the lawsuit headlines where possible, but my point is that I doubt Google has a $10 million check signed and waiting for everyone who complains about them. $1000, maybe...
Hmm...you got modded down because it's an old gag, but honestly I think you breathed new life into it :D
You definitely can notice it, and it's my sincere hope that most people will exercise the will-power necessary to reasonably examine themselves.
Rather, I was trying to get at the idea that there isn't any test which which you could sweep Wikipedia and then conclude, "OK, that's the last of 'em, no biases here."
I obviously don't trust myself to see into every situation with perfect insight, but I don't trust WP there either because, for one thing, how would you know?
Should be "I like what you said" or "I think...is very true", or something. Sorry for being an idiot.
I think it'd send a clearer message if people didn't buy *or* play the game. Someone who downloads it for free is mainly just saying "hey, not only am I cheap, but I'm unwilling to sacrifice a little entertainment for what I believe to be the right thing".
I think what you say about money spent on DRMed games going towards more DRM. But people need to be principled here, one reason being that, from the perspective of the manufacturer, there's no good reason to assume that the downloaders are motivated by anything other than the promise of free stuff. A real boycott means going without.
Skepticism, then?
Maybe it's just a quick way of showing someone that you're not from HR!
I'm in much the same position, but I don't see my goal so much as keeping current, as becoming as knowledgeable as possible about the software and hardware that I have to oversee. I could care less what Yahoo! is trading at. There's security news to keep up on but we don't run any outside services, so I find that my time is better spent digging deeper into GPOs, deploying software and whatnot.
Learn as much as you can stomach about networks. Just grab one of the certification course books, like for the CCNA. You have to keep up-to-date with hardware and OS because things will change, but hopefully not too quickly, and the nice thing about being in charge of IT, is those changes happen through you.
Political though it may be, Thurrott's supersite has good info a lot of the time.
I think you're on the right track, but I'll try to elaborate a little based on what I know.
:)
First of all, RGB is device-dependent. Monitors have phosphors that are imperfect, much like the inks are. We use ICC profiles (gamma curves) to tie them back to a standard RGB. Apple uses Apple RGB, Microsoft uses sRGB. On top of this, there are hardware adjustments that the manufacturer makes, as well as the consumer, in both hardware and software. So, to (over)simplify, there is no "RGB"...there's things like sRGB, which attempt to cover as much of the visible spectrum as possible, but do not cover all of it, nor cover any of it "evenly".
CMYK is much the same. It's true that black is necessary because existing C, M, & Y pigments are not "saturated" enough and do not mix to make pure black. Same story: physical limitations, compounded by differences between paper, finishes, where you buy ink from, what chemicals are in it, what sort of press, and on and on. For instance, deep blacks on paper require a glossy finish, same as with monitors. Many device-independent color spaces for CMYK exist as well, one of which is SWOP. It has its own set of assumptions and compromises to go with it. Printers can try to calibrate to this if they want.
Side note: let's say I don't care about any of this, because I'm using mspaint, I'm picking colors by RGB value, and not attaching color profiles to my work. Well, it won't look the same on a Mac...it certainly won't look the same on a printer. Why should I care about the data in the file? About the purity of the theory? At the end of the day, I got three different results for one file, which is unacceptable.
But the main challenges here are that CMYK has a smaller gamut, and there is not in fact one definitive CMYK gamut. Maybe the color space I chose to convert to nailed the blues, but screwed up the reds. Or orange got washed out but not green, and everything that's greyscale is now sort of sepia. We're converting color information between differently weighted, differently compromised systems, then displaying the results on machines that have to be calibrated to match those systems. And we all have different eyes. Someone's gotta decide exactly what blue looks like. Which is why Pantone is used so widely in print. You can avoid all the conversion crap, just tell your printer you want this exact color red, and they'll get as close to it as they can.
Real-world color conversion takes a good eye, as well as knowledge of the black arts. However you get your CMYK "plates" done, they need to preserve that particular piece of work, on a particular printer. Having proofs before you sign off on the print job is very important. You simply cannot trust the math...sometimes a particular conversion will look good, other times it wont.
BUT WAIT! That changed when Wikipedia came out with their magic bullet RGB to CMYK formula version 1.1! None of the mathematical weirdness of LAB and ProPhoto, which have to contain imaginary colors in order to better accommodate the real ones. Here's the secret genius: #00FFFF = Cyan!! #FF00FF = Magenta!! #FFFF00 = Yellow!! #000000 = Black!! Yay! I hope it's clear that putting this information on Wikipedia and calling it a CMYK to RGB formula is about as useful as squagles*. Just because we *call* #0FF cyan, does not mean that it is the same color as printer's cyan (which is really a deep dark blue).
Piano tuning is much the same...all about compromise, balance, unique instruments, having a good ear, and the complete lack of a certain set of pitches that are mathematically in tune with each other. Doesn't exist. Don't ask me why.
* NSFW because of a couple of f-bombs
Bias is a slippery beast. By its nature it is only visible in the opinions of others. Like how accents are "heard but not spoken". I do agree with your sentiment, but calling WP (or anything) less biased is basically unfalsifiable. How could we be sure? How could we even measure something like that?
:D
Personally, I have some faith in the "marketplace of ideas", but can't forget John Stuart Mill, who not only talked about the "tyranny of the majority" but also insisted that free discourse is only a means to an end -- someone with a wrong idea must come to understand *why* it's wrong, someone with the right idea must understand why that one's right.
What if language itself is biased?
Where I feel that Wikipedia falls short are the times when popular opinion is just wrong, or misled. It's hard for one expert to shout down 20 people who think they know better. For a very long time, the WP article on CMYK had a "formula" for converting CMYK to RGB. This formula was not wrong in the sense of being inaccurate. It was simply illogical...it had no basis in reality. The reasons why are subtle and require that someone understand that they're not just numbers -- they represent different and unrelated physical phenomena. But compare the number of color theorists out there with the number of people with photoshop, and you see where the problem creeps in.
To Wikipedia's credit, the thing was finally removed, but I have to wonder how many more of these landmines exist in there. And even though the quality of WP may be going up over time, there are new articles coming in every day as well.
Again, there are those cases where the majority gets it wrong. Wikipedia's only defense against this to wall itself off, which is even worse.
Whoops, hadn't caught nine-times earlier (and better) statement saying the same things. :(
Absolutely. But the farther you stray from a primary source, the more likely you are to introduce editorial mistakes that are not your own. The best reason not to cite WP is that there's no original research there (supposedly). So everything that's on there you can get more directly, in a version that isn't summarized. Writing essays of any caliber requires that you read the "genuine articles" and form your own opinion.
I'm not going to get into the vulture-editors that circle "their" articles and the legions of bots that do the majority of WP edits, or the notability requirements that somehow don't apply to Pokemon or internet memes.
Anyway, the point is that the closer you can get to someone's original research/writings, the more qualified you are to write about your take on them.