If humans are accelerating the change in equilibrium conditions on Earth, that is against our own interests, as we are adapted to current conditions. We should, in that case, be interested in how to stop doing that.
On the other hand, if the equilibrum conditions on Earth are changing naturally, then allowing that to happen unchecked is against our interests, as we are adapted to current conditions. We should, in that case, be interested in how to slow those naturally-occuring changes.
"I like how you automatically assume that the people who wrote in Colbert's name have no interest in the matter"
And I like how you presume to tell me my thought process. Too bad you're wrong. FWIW, telling other people what they think is a game anyone can play when they want to sound good. I could say "you're rationalizing your decision to cast a frivolous vote", but I won't.
You're also mis-characterizing what I said. Had I said "nobody with an interest in the matter would write in Colbert", then you might have a point. Had I suggested, as another poster did, that we should assume none of those votes were serious, you might have a point. But I didn't say those things, did I? (Or were you too lazy to realize that I'm not the same person as v1?) So your anecdote, while it would be a nice counter-example to a claim I never made, has nothing to do with what I actually did say.
But I digress. If you want to believe that everyone who voted Colbert was sitting in front of their TV when he made his pitch, and thought "yes, I am interested in what the module is named and think the most beneficial thing to name it is 'Colbert'", then you go right on thinking that.
"Some channels without spam is better than no channels"
That doesn't address the issue. Before you can say "drop email in favor of X, Y, and Z", you need X, Y, and Z to be a suitable replacement for email. You don't have that. For a certain, small fraction of the activity that is done by email today, those other services would be suitable replacements; but people are already migrating to them for those activities anyway.
Besides, what we have today is: some channels without (or actually, with little) spam. Do away with email and you will accelerate the pace at which those channels start getting more spam. It's as simple as that.
"spam is not 95% of SMS traffic"
Spam is not 95% of SMS yet, because email spam is still the easier option. As I noted before, if you take email out of the picture, other services will get increased spam. I get as much SMS spam today, as I got email spam in the mid 90's.
"you need a verified phone account (in most cases) to use SMS"
Even if that were true today (it's not): In the mid 90's people would've talked about how you had to have a registered email account and people would know who you were, so spammers would be easy to shut down.
You're trying to use tool choice to solve a social problem. It isn't going to work.
I'm not so sure about what you're saying. I think there is a significant difference between a campaign ad that affects people's votes because it colors their view of what's in their own interest (how campaign ads in real elections work, and a valid part of the election process), vs. Colbert's request that affects votes of people who have no interest in the matter. If you don't see that difference, then consider this: how much luck has Colbert had getting people to write his name in for any actual public election?
So NASA set the rules and they should live by them, right? If they didn't want to be stuck naming the module Colbert, they should've set the rules so it wouldn't happen, right? Well, they did exactly that -- they made it clear that the vote was non-binding. Sure there are other ways they could've done it... so what?
The fact is, this wasn't a regulated election. Drawing connections to campaigning, or the electoral college, or any other trapping of a real election is just silly. This was a NASA publicity stunt that Colbert leveraged into a Colbert publicity stunt. NASA should do what they want; it'll give Colbert something to rant about for a while.
1) Those services are not suitable for some types of communication.
2) All of those media are susceptible to spam. As soon as email spam becomes less profitable (e.g. if email were to disappear off the face of the Earth), this will become evident. Even today I get SMS spam.
Others have covered the "big picture" reasons why filtering isn't a perfect answer; but even ignoring that, and conceding that filtering improves the user experience (relative to receiving 94% spam), I would still say that filtering for spam also creates a significant problem with my user experience (relative to not having a spam problem to start with).
Why? Well, I agree that false negatives are relatively rare -- though for me that still means one every couple days, and it seems to be increasing. And rare false negatives aren't a problem.
False positives are also pretty rare, but they can be a big problem even when they are rare. I recently had a time-sensitive transaction delayed by several days because I thought I hadn't received an invoice. Eventually I found the invoice in my spam folder. I'll know in a week or so whether the transaction is still able to complete in time.
Well, from m-w.com: a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated ; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind
Perhaps you didn't mean that you wanted a definition, but rather were implying that GP used the word incorrectly; in which case you can see from the above defintiion that you'd be mistaken. ('Functional' is indeed an example of a programming paradigm.)
"Or, better yet, just don't use the word."...because you don't understand and/or like it? I'll take that under advisement.
The truty is, it's not all that black-and-white anyway. There are degrees of "protected" when it comes to protected speech, and in any given case there's a seemingly-subjective 'weighing' of how "protected" the speech is against other concerns.
e.g. speech considered 'functional' is less protected than speech considered 'expressive' IIRC, and in any case speech considered 'political' in nature is always more protected than if it weren't political...
Look, I like Mythbusters, but I've always said that I think they draw some sloppy conclusions and shoot from the hip sometimes when they really shouldn't.
The thing everyone's focusing on is whether they did anticipate this result. The question nobody's asking is whether they should have anticipated it.
Let's assume they had no basis to know going in how big the explosion would be. (As I've said elsewhere, I don't believe that; but others seem to think so... ok...) Then it's their job, before conducting the experiment, to find out. The type of explosive they used is pretty well known. If they didn't know how to estimate the size of the explosion, they should've been able to find someone that could. If they couldn't... then conducting the test was reckless.
Throwing as much explosive as you can in a pile and setting it off with at best a guess as to what the yield will be is not responsible, even if you do have the local fire brigade on hand.
At least they had the sense to repair the damage they did after the fact. (And to those who suspect they fell victim to fraud in the process: if so, it's their own fault.) Luckily nobody was standing near a window that shattered.
So, no harm no foul? Maybe. I hope they learn from this experience, though, as it sounds like they didn't learn much from previous demolitions tests on their show.
It seems a lot of posters want to "imagine" what would've happened. But keep in mind, it's nothing but that -- your imagination.
Nobody can say what would've happeend, and all anyone's revealing by speculating is their own biases. Might the woman have had a hard time? Maybe, maybe not.
All we know is what did happen - the authorities saw that there were inconsistencies in the evidence, and somehow realized that an innocent explanation tied it all together. i.e. what you would hope would happen.
I, for one, worry less about how this "might have" played out, and more about the fact that people take a case where the authorities did things right and reached an accurate conclusion, as evidence of how scary is the worst-case scenario where they could've gotten things wrong.
Right, I'm pretty sure that's what this feature is for -- correcting the mistakes you inevitably notice just as you hit Send. (Of course, a little discipline about doing a final proof-read would have nearly the same effect.)
In particular if you hit Reply to All when you mean Reply, this is meant to let you recover; I don't guess any amount of proof-reading would help with that.
I think TFS misses the point when it talks about "changing your mind" in that 5-second window. YMMV.
So now not only is ISP service a necessity, but specifically broadband service is a necessity?
Fricking kids these days.
BTW, there are sat-based services that are available everywhere. Just because you're only aware of one option, doesn't mean there's only one option. (And no, I don't care about reasons why you might not like that option; monopoly means you don't have another option.)
Oh, and if your local government somehow created a monopoly (a very much doubt they have that authority, but for the sake of argument), then it would be your local government's job to regulate that company's action within its jurisdiction. Good luck with that.
I see that as a lack of perspective. I think you'd be surprised at the percentage of people who don't have this "basic necessity".
Probably the best example of why I think you're wrong, though, is cars. People's dependence on cars is a lot more engrained than their dependence on Internet service in this country, and has been for a long, long time. But if someone doesn't want to sell you a car, or gas, or repair service... they don't have to.
That is correct. Shares are publically bought and sold, and AT&T is privately owned by the shareholders. In other words, like almost all publically-traded companies, they are a private company.
"Second, AT&T cannot do whatever they want"
I never said they could 'do whatever they want'. I said they can terminate their contract with a customer without legal procedings; which they can.
"There are laws in place that govern everything from employment to the actual business of communications that prevent "private companies" from running afoul of the consumer's rights."
And which of those is appilcable to the topic at hand? Be specific.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, what does the FBI do when Person X calls up and say "Person Y committed a crime and I have proof"?
They investigate.
Yes. And, so?
If humans are accelerating the change in equilibrium conditions on Earth, that is against our own interests, as we are adapted to current conditions. We should, in that case, be interested in how to stop doing that.
On the other hand, if the equilibrum conditions on Earth are changing naturally, then allowing that to happen unchecked is against our interests, as we are adapted to current conditions. We should, in that case, be interested in how to slow those naturally-occuring changes.
And they can only sue one because...?
The point of a write-in is that you don't have to be on the ballot.
Colbert's fans in SC knew he tried to get on the ballot. How many voted for him as a write-in?
"I like how you automatically assume that the people who wrote in Colbert's name have no interest in the matter"
And I like how you presume to tell me my thought process. Too bad you're wrong. FWIW, telling other people what they think is a game anyone can play when they want to sound good. I could say "you're rationalizing your decision to cast a frivolous vote", but I won't.
You're also mis-characterizing what I said. Had I said "nobody with an interest in the matter would write in Colbert", then you might have a point. Had I suggested, as another poster did, that we should assume none of those votes were serious, you might have a point. But I didn't say those things, did I? (Or were you too lazy to realize that I'm not the same person as v1?) So your anecdote, while it would be a nice counter-example to a claim I never made, has nothing to do with what I actually did say.
But I digress. If you want to believe that everyone who voted Colbert was sitting in front of their TV when he made his pitch, and thought "yes, I am interested in what the module is named and think the most beneficial thing to name it is 'Colbert'", then you go right on thinking that.
"Some channels without spam is better than no channels"
That doesn't address the issue. Before you can say "drop email in favor of X, Y, and Z", you need X, Y, and Z to be a suitable replacement for email. You don't have that. For a certain, small fraction of the activity that is done by email today, those other services would be suitable replacements; but people are already migrating to them for those activities anyway.
Besides, what we have today is: some channels without (or actually, with little) spam. Do away with email and you will accelerate the pace at which those channels start getting more spam. It's as simple as that.
"spam is not 95% of SMS traffic"
Spam is not 95% of SMS yet, because email spam is still the easier option. As I noted before, if you take email out of the picture, other services will get increased spam. I get as much SMS spam today, as I got email spam in the mid 90's.
"you need a verified phone account (in most cases) to use SMS"
Even if that were true today (it's not): In the mid 90's people would've talked about how you had to have a registered email account and people would know who you were, so spammers would be easy to shut down.
You're trying to use tool choice to solve a social problem. It isn't going to work.
I'm not so sure about what you're saying. I think there is a significant difference between a campaign ad that affects people's votes because it colors their view of what's in their own interest (how campaign ads in real elections work, and a valid part of the election process), vs. Colbert's request that affects votes of people who have no interest in the matter. If you don't see that difference, then consider this: how much luck has Colbert had getting people to write his name in for any actual public election?
So NASA set the rules and they should live by them, right? If they didn't want to be stuck naming the module Colbert, they should've set the rules so it wouldn't happen, right? Well, they did exactly that -- they made it clear that the vote was non-binding. Sure there are other ways they could've done it... so what?
The fact is, this wasn't a regulated election. Drawing connections to campaigning, or the electoral college, or any other trapping of a real election is just silly. This was a NASA publicity stunt that Colbert leveraged into a Colbert publicity stunt. NASA should do what they want; it'll give Colbert something to rant about for a while.
1) Those services are not suitable for some types of communication.
2) All of those media are susceptible to spam. As soon as email spam becomes less profitable (e.g. if email were to disappear off the face of the Earth), this will become evident. Even today I get SMS spam.
Others have covered the "big picture" reasons why filtering isn't a perfect answer; but even ignoring that, and conceding that filtering improves the user experience (relative to receiving 94% spam), I would still say that filtering for spam also creates a significant problem with my user experience (relative to not having a spam problem to start with).
Why? Well, I agree that false negatives are relatively rare -- though for me that still means one every couple days, and it seems to be increasing. And rare false negatives aren't a problem.
False positives are also pretty rare, but they can be a big problem even when they are rare. I recently had a time-sensitive transaction delayed by several days because I thought I hadn't received an invoice. Eventually I found the invoice in my spam folder. I'll know in a week or so whether the transaction is still able to complete in time.
Except it does have a specific meaning, as laid out by the above definition.
"Define paradigm"
Well, from m-w.com: a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated ; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind
Perhaps you didn't mean that you wanted a definition, but rather were implying that GP used the word incorrectly; in which case you can see from the above defintiion that you'd be mistaken. ('Functional' is indeed an example of a programming paradigm.)
"Or, better yet, just don't use the word." ...because you don't understand and/or like it? I'll take that under advisement.
There are obscenity laws as well.
The truty is, it's not all that black-and-white anyway. There are degrees of "protected" when it comes to protected speech, and in any given case there's a seemingly-subjective 'weighing' of how "protected" the speech is against other concerns.
e.g. speech considered 'functional' is less protected than speech considered 'expressive' IIRC, and in any case speech considered 'political' in nature is always more protected than if it weren't political...
Sure, sure.
And what do fish exhale?
If we assume that an animal stores in its body all of the CO2 from plants it eats throughout its lifetime, then I suppose so...
Castle Bravo was a bit more experimental for its time than the explosives these guys use.
Look, I like Mythbusters, but I've always said that I think they draw some sloppy conclusions and shoot from the hip sometimes when they really shouldn't.
The thing everyone's focusing on is whether they did anticipate this result. The question nobody's asking is whether they should have anticipated it.
Let's assume they had no basis to know going in how big the explosion would be. (As I've said elsewhere, I don't believe that; but others seem to think so... ok...) Then it's their job, before conducting the experiment, to find out. The type of explosive they used is pretty well known. If they didn't know how to estimate the size of the explosion, they should've been able to find someone that could. If they couldn't... then conducting the test was reckless.
Throwing as much explosive as you can in a pile and setting it off with at best a guess as to what the yield will be is not responsible, even if you do have the local fire brigade on hand.
At least they had the sense to repair the damage they did after the fact. (And to those who suspect they fell victim to fraud in the process: if so, it's their own fault.) Luckily nobody was standing near a window that shattered.
So, no harm no foul? Maybe. I hope they learn from this experience, though, as it sounds like they didn't learn much from previous demolitions tests on their show.
It seems a lot of posters want to "imagine" what would've happened. But keep in mind, it's nothing but that -- your imagination.
Nobody can say what would've happeend, and all anyone's revealing by speculating is their own biases. Might the woman have had a hard time? Maybe, maybe not.
All we know is what did happen - the authorities saw that there were inconsistencies in the evidence, and somehow realized that an innocent explanation tied it all together. i.e. what you would hope would happen.
I, for one, worry less about how this "might have" played out, and more about the fact that people take a case where the authorities did things right and reached an accurate conclusion, as evidence of how scary is the worst-case scenario where they could've gotten things wrong.
With the amount of experience these guys have causing explosions, I'm curious why they were unable to predict the size of this one in particular ...
Right, I'm pretty sure that's what this feature is for -- correcting the mistakes you inevitably notice just as you hit Send. (Of course, a little discipline about doing a final proof-read would have nearly the same effect.)
In particular if you hit Reply to All when you mean Reply, this is meant to let you recover; I don't guess any amount of proof-reading would help with that.
I think TFS misses the point when it talks about "changing your mind" in that 5-second window. YMMV.
So now not only is ISP service a necessity, but specifically broadband service is a necessity?
Fricking kids these days.
BTW, there are sat-based services that are available everywhere. Just because you're only aware of one option, doesn't mean there's only one option. (And no, I don't care about reasons why you might not like that option; monopoly means you don't have another option.)
Oh, and if your local government somehow created a monopoly (a very much doubt they have that authority, but for the sake of argument), then it would be your local government's job to regulate that company's action within its jurisdiction. Good luck with that.
I think you're confusing "phone company" with "ISP".
There are many ISP's in most places. AT&T is not a monopoly, government-granted or otherwise, in the internet access market.
You can claim that they "should" be handled like a utility, and I can (and do) disagree, but it doesn't really matter, because legally they aren't.
I see that as a lack of perspective. I think you'd be surprised at the percentage of people who don't have this "basic necessity".
Probably the best example of why I think you're wrong, though, is cars. People's dependence on cars is a lot more engrained than their dependence on Internet service in this country, and has been for a long, long time. But if someone doesn't want to sell you a car, or gas, or repair service... they don't have to.
I'm afraid this is an example of assuming a problem is easy, if you don't know what's involved in solving it.
A LAN won't scale to an Internet.
"First off, AT&T is not a private company"
You are sadly mistaken.
"It's a publicly traded company"
That is correct. Shares are publically bought and sold, and AT&T is privately owned by the shareholders. In other words, like almost all publically-traded companies, they are a private company.
"Second, AT&T cannot do whatever they want"
I never said they could 'do whatever they want'. I said they can terminate their contract with a customer without legal procedings; which they can.
"There are laws in place that govern everything from employment to the actual business of communications that prevent "private companies" from running afoul of the consumer's rights."
And which of those is appilcable to the topic at hand? Be specific.
That doesn't actually matter. If the host is willing to "do something about it", that's the host's right.