Serious question here - Is cyber-bullying even illegal? TFS asks whether or not flaming/trolling qualify, but what difference does it make? I realize that there could be libel (or slander?) problems if I make offensive false allegations. And possible issues if I encourage violence or rioting or some-such. But if I just call Anonymous Coward an ass-hole and say that his hair looks funny, surely that's legal cyber-bullying, right? And I don't have to worry about a visit from the cyber-dolphin or my tax $$ being spent on law enforcement reviewing whether or not AC actually IS an ass-hole or whether his hair actually DOES look funny?
That comparison works if you're assuming that each neuron is running at full power all the time, but if B consumes more power to simply relay a message from point A to point C than if it was doing nothing, then you'll continue to have non-linear growth even after maximizing your number of local connections.
For your analogy, assume that the cost to repave roads scales directly with the amount of traffic traversing them. Even if a city has maximized its practical number of local connections, road maintenance will still increase when other distant cities are added simply because of the traffic passing through. It should be closer to being linear than when you're adding more direct connections, but still higher.
You assume all neurons are connected to all other neurons. My brain does not work like that...
Are you sure? I know that all of the neurons in your brain are not directly connected, but that doesn't imply that there's no path between them. So, while the power consumption involved with neuron interaction may not increase quite as much per added neuron as if you had direct connections between each of them, it still seems that it would be more complicated than a direct linear correlation.
Basically what I am saying is that technology makes things less personal....it just doesn't have the same feeling.
I think you just summarized every analysis in TFA. "The old stuff is better 'cuz it has an old-timey feel to it." Personally, I appreciate being able to communicate half-way across the country w/o having to run to the telegraph station and blow a half-day's pay even if it's less personal. I like that Swine Flu is less deadly than the Plague, even if that's not as scary. I like that I can re-spawn after dying in some game rather than getting my head lopped off in battle, even if it's less manly.
But that's just me... Now, I'm off to take a leak in the street because that's more neighborly than "modern" sanitation.
Now that's patently unfair. Saying that I'm spineless implies that I'm either cowardly or an invertebrate. I submit that I'm not an invertebrate, as I've yet to meet on that can type. I also believe that I'm no coward, but as I pointed out my soul is certainly up for sale. Making a conscious decision to participate in a transaction that is marginally evil is not cowardly - It's just marginally evil. Sometimes being evil takes balls of steel (buying from Amazon doesn't qualify obviously). And, again as I pointed out, I don't even have enough information here to know whether Amazon is being evil or innovative in this case - My guess is that MOST people jumping on the hate-Amazon bandwagon here are in the same boat. About the only folks that I've seen post so far that seem to have solid opinions are the ones saying that ALL patents are out of control and need to be wiped - Everyone else is speculating on this nebulous move. And, in that case, should we boycott all companies holding patents?
If principles can be easily sacrificed for a few bucks here and there, you tacitly approve of the evil you describe.
I described no evil, I just admitted to being ignorant as to whether there was any (and admitted that I valuate my soul at about $50k - But that was obviously intended as a joke). Yes, if you're buying stolen goods off the back of a truck, you're supporting theft. Yes, if you buy a bootlegged DVD or download pirated music/video from a site where you viewed an ad, you're supporting copyright infringement. Yes, if you buy shoes made in sweat-shops, you're supporting sweat-shops. And yes, if you shop somewhere that holds patents obtained through a broken patent system, you're in some way supporting the broken patent system.
Boycott Amazon? No way. They've got low prices, typically fast, free shipping (especially if you're sharing an Amazon Prime account), and one of the best on-line shopping interfaces around. Now if they get big enough that they start abusing their power and are no longer the cheapest/fastest/easiest solution around, I'll shift over to whoever is. They may have buried their competition, but more will emerge if they get too greedy.
And if they pull shady stuff (and frankly I don't know enough about this move to make an intelligent call on whether they're being evil or innovative in this case), and want to tack on 0.01% of my soul to the purchase price but still save me $5, I'd say that's a generous offer for a small share of a liberally tarnished soul.
I would argue that musicians work for whatever they want to work for. Some do it for the prestige, some do it for the money, some do it just for the sake of making music.
You've got 200 Dell workstations at your office all running licensed copies of Windows. You, as an IT guy, find out that 100 of these machines are running pirated copies of Office, AVG Free, and trial versions of Winzip.
Apart from internal IT management, who do you call that cares enough that they'll take action? Who are "the police" that you're supposed to call? Note - Microsoft, AVG, and Winzip are all WRONG answers, as none of them will bother except to possibly forward your e-mail to management with a note that says, "sbeckstead tells us that you're using our product improperly. Please see our EULA _HERE_ and rectify this situation at your earliest convenience."
"Call the police" is pretty worthless advice as "the police" is a pretty nebulous metaphor for... well... nobody...
...don't forget that the misuse of secret technology was a specialty of all parties involved in the war; Japan was making better suicide planes...
Actually, for the purposes for which they were designed, "suicide planes" were a pretty practical weapon. They knew that many planes weren't coming back. A piloted plane diving onto a boat is both dangerous and terrifying. It inspires local forces as much as it intimidates the enemy. AFAIC, it's a great example of hive think. And, simultaneously, a travesty of humanity and an example of focusing on strategy and practicality to the point of completely neglecting any other goals.
A little tangential here, but it may be interesting to engineering nerds.
I got a description of some of the workings of standard carrier catapults from a co-worker who used to be stationed on one. This is maybe 20 years old, so our tech may have changed since then. Apparently they have (had?) a supply of hour-glass shaped steel widgets on board color-coded to match the aircraft being launched. When it was time to launch, they would grab the appropriate size/color and insert it as an intentional weak-link in line with the cable before firing up the winch. When the cable was properly tensioned, the steel widget would break and release the cable throwing the plane into the air.
Kind of a neat design idea if you can't just haul the cable along fast enough to throw the plane.
Whether it's criminal or civil doesn't matter much regarding the advice, "call the police." If the cops show up and you tell them that somebody kicked in your front door and stole your stereo, they'll take a report and tell you that they'll let you know if it shows up. Then you can write off your stereo and collect your homeowners insurance and move on with your life.
If you call the cops and tell them that somebody half-way across the country copied a CD with something you wrote on it without asking your permission first, they'll tell you to go to hell and stop wasting their time.
Hell, even if you go to the almighty MS and tell them that half of the Office licenses at your business are pirated, they may do the math and decide that the $$ they've collected on the XP licenses and legit Office installs is enough to avoid rocking the boat and blow it off.
Sometimes - Depending on what we're buying and at what volume. A couple of hundred bolts? Buy reputable. Several kilometers of expensive, high-tensile steel chain? Worth doing the math for.
However, if we could go back in time and recoup all of the exploratory work identifying the source of the problem, I'd like to believe that we wouldn't make the same mistake (although I have my doubts). Who knows though? When you have to take bids and accept the lowest per policy, sometimes you're forced by policy to buy crap.
A wind farm as described might put out a few hundred megawatts for parts of the day. Actual power plants have to be ready to compensate when the wind dies down.
We're talking about the Chinese - That's just the way it is. The power's great while you're using it. But then, just a couple of hours later, you find yourself wanting to go back for more...
That's not entirely true. You're partially right that, for Wal-Mart fodder, the vendor just says "Make something that looks like this as cheaply as possible." So, naturally, they supply crap that Wal-Mart can sell very inexpensively and their customers can use for 3 months and send to a landfill.
However, even when specs say "We need this to last for 1000 years" or "We need baby formula - Poison-free, please", the Chinese are some of the worst offenders about using counterfeit goods. Using under-rated bolts and chains has been a major hassle for us. We've bought stuff with strict specs and have had failures under use that should have been well within the capabilities of the equipment. Fortunately (so far) the field failures haven't been catastrophic, but determining the cause of the failures is enormously expensive. They save a few bucks by using sub-standard steel and we spend thousands tracking down the cause of failure to "This isn't a 2000 lb load chain - It's failing at 1200 lbs." That also means that (now) when we buy stuff from Chinese vendors we have to do acceptance QA testing that would be redundant if we were buying from a more reputable source.
So, in short, the Chinese do not always "build judiciously to spec".
You can't just arbitrarily change the rates but, if you're big enough, you can set yourself up so that your borrower is completely dependent on your line of credit to maintain their lifestyle. Then (assuming that your lifestyle isn't somehow mutually dependent on the lifestyle of the entity borrowing from you), you can stop loaning them $$ unless they agree to higher rates.
If China wasn't still largely dependent on us being gluttons, they would probably like to cut us off altogether.
This move, however, seems to be mutually beneficial. We get stronger through renewable power (although I'd still rather see nukes than wind) and they get $$ and a chance to sell hardware. Seems like a good move all the way around.
Your post makes sense except that "more accurate" implies that "proved wrong tomorrow" is somehow better than "proved wrong today".
"Proved wrong tomorrow" IS better than "proved wrong today". "Proved wrong tomorrow" means that we've got nothing contradicting it yet and it's the best we've got. I'm perfectly happy to accept that everything we know is wrong and go through life using our best-available models for how the world works. If you wait for a perfect model of everything before you start using the models at hand, you'll never get anything done. So what's wrong accepting what we've got as a possibly-flawed, but best-available model and refining it as we learn more?
Either its right, and will never be proved wrong, or it is wrong, and may eventually be proved as such.
You left out an important option. There's "right", "wrong", and "unproven but useful and not yet proven wrong". Very few things in science or life can really be "proven" right. A lot of science is made of reasonable (sometimes radical) guesses that haven't yet been discredited. Even the "law" of gravity is still just a theory, but that fact doesn't make me mistrust my scale because we may be able to refine our knowledge of heavy-body attraction in the future.
Not true. If we know that the event that generated the rays lasted only 2.2 seconds and we have a theory that would delay one of the rays by more than 3.1 seconds (2.2 + 0.9) relative to the other, we can invalidate that theory. From my understanding, that is exactly the case we're dealing with. You are correct though that this cannot completely validate any specific theory - All it can do is reinforce the assumption that our current theory is more accurate than some others proposed and eliminate some competing ideas.
Yes, AC, but classifying you as 'positive', 'negative', or 'neutral' has baffled even our most proficient data mining experts here in Langley. That's why we had to contract out. One of my direct reports came to me the other day near tears:
"Sir, we just can't figure him out! One day he's writing insightful commentary with informative links correcting somebody who had made a simple mistake. The next day he was making harmless snarky jokes. And this morning he posted a long list of instructions on... On... On 'owning a nigger' sir. Either Anonymous Coward is completely insane, or facing a massive conspiracy."
How would they rate something like this: "The last president sucked big time - and he's a stooge for oil barons!"
They wouldn't rate it at all. As soon as their filters hit "The last president sucked...", the signal to noise ratio will fall to zero and they'll abandon the Tweet.
Exactly right. If you're posting for the world to see, even if you're using an alias, you'd better be flying the straight and narrow and be cautious enough to avoid posting anything that would allow identity theft.
Still, this kind of intrusion infuriates me to the point that I'm going to log in to my Amazon account (cleverly disguised user name surfergrrrl123), buy a bunch of peroxide and acetone, build myself a heckuva bomb in the garage of 1313 Mockingbird Ln (an abandoned house - not my address - Ha - Catch me now!), and then drive the 13.6 miles from my house to the CIA building in Birmingham to blow it up.
That way, those less cautious than I am will remain safe.
Here are a couple contrived examples on why you should care why your car gets good gas mileage:
"So, Mr Mechanic, why does this vehicle get such good gas mileage?" * Because it only has 55 HP. I'd stay away from hills.
* Because it's been stripped down to reduce weight. In a wreck with a Scwinn, it'll crumple like an aluminum can, but the kid on the Scwinn might give you a ride to the hospital on his handle bars once he dusts his bike off.
* Because the air compressor's broken and you haven't been able to turn it on for several weeks. Have you noticed that it's been uncomfortably warm in your car?
* Because it was made by exploiting the natural resources of third world nations and it is terribly politically incorrect to drive. You know those dark-skinned kids pushing your car and making 'Vroom vroom' noises? Not cool, man.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, obviously this guy supports child pornography.
Either that OR he wants to make sure that the censorship law is congruent with the German constitution.
Take a wild guess which of those two options is going to dominate headlines...
That's kind of the reaction I had.
Serious question here - Is cyber-bullying even illegal? TFS asks whether or not flaming/trolling qualify, but what difference does it make? I realize that there could be libel (or slander?) problems if I make offensive false allegations. And possible issues if I encourage violence or rioting or some-such. But if I just call Anonymous Coward an ass-hole and say that his hair looks funny, surely that's legal cyber-bullying, right? And I don't have to worry about a visit from the cyber-dolphin or my tax $$ being spent on law enforcement reviewing whether or not AC actually IS an ass-hole or whether his hair actually DOES look funny?
That comparison works if you're assuming that each neuron is running at full power all the time, but if B consumes more power to simply relay a message from point A to point C than if it was doing nothing, then you'll continue to have non-linear growth even after maximizing your number of local connections.
For your analogy, assume that the cost to repave roads scales directly with the amount of traffic traversing them. Even if a city has maximized its practical number of local connections, road maintenance will still increase when other distant cities are added simply because of the traffic passing through. It should be closer to being linear than when you're adding more direct connections, but still higher.
You assume all neurons are connected to all other neurons. My brain does not work like that...
Are you sure? I know that all of the neurons in your brain are not directly connected, but that doesn't imply that there's no path between them. So, while the power consumption involved with neuron interaction may not increase quite as much per added neuron as if you had direct connections between each of them, it still seems that it would be more complicated than a direct linear correlation.
Basically what I am saying is that technology makes things less personal. ...it just doesn't have the same feeling.
I think you just summarized every analysis in TFA. "The old stuff is better 'cuz it has an old-timey feel to it." Personally, I appreciate being able to communicate half-way across the country w/o having to run to the telegraph station and blow a half-day's pay even if it's less personal. I like that Swine Flu is less deadly than the Plague, even if that's not as scary. I like that I can re-spawn after dying in some game rather than getting my head lopped off in battle, even if it's less manly.
But that's just me... Now, I'm off to take a leak in the street because that's more neighborly than "modern" sanitation.
You have the spine of wet spaghetti.
Now that's patently unfair. Saying that I'm spineless implies that I'm either cowardly or an invertebrate. I submit that I'm not an invertebrate, as I've yet to meet on that can type. I also believe that I'm no coward, but as I pointed out my soul is certainly up for sale. Making a conscious decision to participate in a transaction that is marginally evil is not cowardly - It's just marginally evil. Sometimes being evil takes balls of steel (buying from Amazon doesn't qualify obviously). And, again as I pointed out, I don't even have enough information here to know whether Amazon is being evil or innovative in this case - My guess is that MOST people jumping on the hate-Amazon bandwagon here are in the same boat. About the only folks that I've seen post so far that seem to have solid opinions are the ones saying that ALL patents are out of control and need to be wiped - Everyone else is speculating on this nebulous move. And, in that case, should we boycott all companies holding patents?
If principles can be easily sacrificed for a few bucks here and there, you tacitly approve of the evil you describe.
I described no evil, I just admitted to being ignorant as to whether there was any (and admitted that I valuate my soul at about $50k - But that was obviously intended as a joke). Yes, if you're buying stolen goods off the back of a truck, you're supporting theft. Yes, if you buy a bootlegged DVD or download pirated music/video from a site where you viewed an ad, you're supporting copyright infringement. Yes, if you buy shoes made in sweat-shops, you're supporting sweat-shops. And yes, if you shop somewhere that holds patents obtained through a broken patent system, you're in some way supporting the broken patent system.
Boycott Amazon? No way. They've got low prices, typically fast, free shipping (especially if you're sharing an Amazon Prime account), and one of the best on-line shopping interfaces around. Now if they get big enough that they start abusing their power and are no longer the cheapest/fastest/easiest solution around, I'll shift over to whoever is. They may have buried their competition, but more will emerge if they get too greedy.
And if they pull shady stuff (and frankly I don't know enough about this move to make an intelligent call on whether they're being evil or innovative in this case), and want to tack on 0.01% of my soul to the purchase price but still save me $5, I'd say that's a generous offer for a small share of a liberally tarnished soul.
That depends on the OS.
You do have a point there. But I can count on 1 finger how many OS's Microsoft is targeting with IE.
I was under the impression that all twins were maternal twins. If I have a paternal twin, then dad must have had a wild night.
Perhaps you're thinking of identical twins as opposed to fraternal twins?
Sorry for the nit-pick. My head's just swimming around trying to figure out how to create paternal twins...
I would argue that musicians work for whatever they want to work for. Some do it for the prestige, some do it for the money, some do it just for the sake of making music.
I can only speak for myself here...
But I did it all for the nookie.
Yes, I realize it's a metaphor. But for what?
You've got 200 Dell workstations at your office all running licensed copies of Windows. You, as an IT guy, find out that 100 of these machines are running pirated copies of Office, AVG Free, and trial versions of Winzip.
Apart from internal IT management, who do you call that cares enough that they'll take action? Who are "the police" that you're supposed to call? Note - Microsoft, AVG, and Winzip are all WRONG answers, as none of them will bother except to possibly forward your e-mail to management with a note that says, "sbeckstead tells us that you're using our product improperly. Please see our EULA _HERE_ and rectify this situation at your earliest convenience."
"Call the police" is pretty worthless advice as "the police" is a pretty nebulous metaphor for... well... nobody...
...don't forget that the misuse of secret technology was a specialty of all parties involved in the war; Japan was making better suicide planes...
Actually, for the purposes for which they were designed, "suicide planes" were a pretty practical weapon. They knew that many planes weren't coming back. A piloted plane diving onto a boat is both dangerous and terrifying. It inspires local forces as much as it intimidates the enemy. AFAIC, it's a great example of hive think. And, simultaneously, a travesty of humanity and an example of focusing on strategy and practicality to the point of completely neglecting any other goals.
A little tangential here, but it may be interesting to engineering nerds.
I got a description of some of the workings of standard carrier catapults from a co-worker who used to be stationed on one. This is maybe 20 years old, so our tech may have changed since then. Apparently they have (had?) a supply of hour-glass shaped steel widgets on board color-coded to match the aircraft being launched. When it was time to launch, they would grab the appropriate size/color and insert it as an intentional weak-link in line with the cable before firing up the winch. When the cable was properly tensioned, the steel widget would break and release the cable throwing the plane into the air.
Kind of a neat design idea if you can't just haul the cable along fast enough to throw the plane.
Whether it's criminal or civil doesn't matter much regarding the advice, "call the police." If the cops show up and you tell them that somebody kicked in your front door and stole your stereo, they'll take a report and tell you that they'll let you know if it shows up. Then you can write off your stereo and collect your homeowners insurance and move on with your life.
If you call the cops and tell them that somebody half-way across the country copied a CD with something you wrote on it without asking your permission first, they'll tell you to go to hell and stop wasting their time.
Hell, even if you go to the almighty MS and tell them that half of the Office licenses at your business are pirated, they may do the math and decide that the $$ they've collected on the XP licenses and legit Office installs is enough to avoid rocking the boat and blow it off.
Sometimes - Depending on what we're buying and at what volume. A couple of hundred bolts? Buy reputable. Several kilometers of expensive, high-tensile steel chain? Worth doing the math for.
However, if we could go back in time and recoup all of the exploratory work identifying the source of the problem, I'd like to believe that we wouldn't make the same mistake (although I have my doubts). Who knows though? When you have to take bids and accept the lowest per policy, sometimes you're forced by policy to buy crap.
A wind farm as described might put out a few hundred megawatts for parts of the day. Actual power plants have to be ready to compensate when the wind dies down.
We're talking about the Chinese - That's just the way it is. The power's great while you're using it. But then, just a couple of hours later, you find yourself wanting to go back for more...
That's not entirely true. You're partially right that, for Wal-Mart fodder, the vendor just says "Make something that looks like this as cheaply as possible." So, naturally, they supply crap that Wal-Mart can sell very inexpensively and their customers can use for 3 months and send to a landfill.
However, even when specs say "We need this to last for 1000 years" or "We need baby formula - Poison-free, please", the Chinese are some of the worst offenders about using counterfeit goods. Using under-rated bolts and chains has been a major hassle for us. We've bought stuff with strict specs and have had failures under use that should have been well within the capabilities of the equipment. Fortunately (so far) the field failures haven't been catastrophic, but determining the cause of the failures is enormously expensive. They save a few bucks by using sub-standard steel and we spend thousands tracking down the cause of failure to "This isn't a 2000 lb load chain - It's failing at 1200 lbs." That also means that (now) when we buy stuff from Chinese vendors we have to do acceptance QA testing that would be redundant if we were buying from a more reputable source.
So, in short, the Chinese do not always "build judiciously to spec".
You can't just arbitrarily change the rates but, if you're big enough, you can set yourself up so that your borrower is completely dependent on your line of credit to maintain their lifestyle. Then (assuming that your lifestyle isn't somehow mutually dependent on the lifestyle of the entity borrowing from you), you can stop loaning them $$ unless they agree to higher rates.
If China wasn't still largely dependent on us being gluttons, they would probably like to cut us off altogether.
This move, however, seems to be mutually beneficial. We get stronger through renewable power (although I'd still rather see nukes than wind) and they get $$ and a chance to sell hardware. Seems like a good move all the way around.
Your post makes sense except that "more accurate" implies that "proved wrong tomorrow" is somehow better than "proved wrong today".
"Proved wrong tomorrow" IS better than "proved wrong today". "Proved wrong tomorrow" means that we've got nothing contradicting it yet and it's the best we've got. I'm perfectly happy to accept that everything we know is wrong and go through life using our best-available models for how the world works. If you wait for a perfect model of everything before you start using the models at hand, you'll never get anything done. So what's wrong accepting what we've got as a possibly-flawed, but best-available model and refining it as we learn more?
Either its right, and will never be proved wrong, or it is wrong, and may eventually be proved as such.
You left out an important option. There's "right", "wrong", and "unproven but useful and not yet proven wrong". Very few things in science or life can really be "proven" right. A lot of science is made of reasonable (sometimes radical) guesses that haven't yet been discredited. Even the "law" of gravity is still just a theory, but that fact doesn't make me mistrust my scale because we may be able to refine our knowledge of heavy-body attraction in the future.
Not true. If we know that the event that generated the rays lasted only 2.2 seconds and we have a theory that would delay one of the rays by more than 3.1 seconds (2.2 + 0.9) relative to the other, we can invalidate that theory. From my understanding, that is exactly the case we're dealing with. You are correct though that this cannot completely validate any specific theory - All it can do is reinforce the assumption that our current theory is more accurate than some others proposed and eliminate some competing ideas.
I swear to God, Jimmy, if you bump me again while I'm driving I'll drive us into the next tree I see!
Yes, AC, but classifying you as 'positive', 'negative', or 'neutral' has baffled even our most proficient data mining experts here in Langley. That's why we had to contract out. One of my direct reports came to me the other day near tears:
"Sir, we just can't figure him out! One day he's writing insightful commentary with informative links correcting somebody who had made a simple mistake. The next day he was making harmless snarky jokes. And this morning he posted a long list of instructions on... On... On 'owning a nigger' sir. Either Anonymous Coward is completely insane, or facing a massive conspiracy."
How would they rate something like this: "The last president sucked big time - and he's a stooge for oil barons!"
They wouldn't rate it at all. As soon as their filters hit "The last president sucked...", the signal to noise ratio will fall to zero and they'll abandon the Tweet.
Exactly right. If you're posting for the world to see, even if you're using an alias, you'd better be flying the straight and narrow and be cautious enough to avoid posting anything that would allow identity theft.
Still, this kind of intrusion infuriates me to the point that I'm going to log in to my Amazon account (cleverly disguised user name surfergrrrl123), buy a bunch of peroxide and acetone, build myself a heckuva bomb in the garage of 1313 Mockingbird Ln (an abandoned house - not my address - Ha - Catch me now!), and then drive the 13.6 miles from my house to the CIA building in Birmingham to blow it up.
That way, those less cautious than I am will remain safe.
Here are a couple contrived examples on why you should care why your car gets good gas mileage:
"So, Mr Mechanic, why does this vehicle get such good gas mileage?"
* Because it only has 55 HP. I'd stay away from hills.
* Because it's been stripped down to reduce weight. In a wreck with a Scwinn, it'll crumple like an aluminum can, but the kid on the Scwinn might give you a ride to the hospital on his handle bars once he dusts his bike off.
* Because the air compressor's broken and you haven't been able to turn it on for several weeks. Have you noticed that it's been uncomfortably warm in your car?
* Because it was made by exploiting the natural resources of third world nations and it is terribly politically incorrect to drive. You know those dark-skinned kids pushing your car and making 'Vroom vroom' noises? Not cool, man.