Representation was invented because the public was considered too unweildy to come to quick decisions. Pollsters have changed that, and it's very likely that much of their influence is utterly invisible--and would make great reading.
Of course, you're forgetting that polls are heavily influenced simply by the way their questions are worded, and that a good pollster can make the results say virtually anything based on this fact. One must find truly impartial people to develop polls in order for them to have any worth...
More SETI information, eh? I'll admit, I've seen some REALLY strange/bizarre stuff come out of Hoe, but I never realized the damn thing was written by extraterrestrials.
The laws relating to telemarketing in the US are a little different, I believe. If you say "I'm not interested," they *are* allowed to continue the conversation. (I once worked as a telemarketer (I'm a poor college student, and I was desperate - forgive me) and if I said goodbye after the first "not interested" I would have to take flak from my boss. In fact, most of my "sales" came *after* someone said "not interested" and I continued to talk to them).
They can call any time between 9am and 9pm in most areas. The only state I know of with its own strict set of restrictions is Florida, which has some kind of government-run "no-call" list that you can ask to be added to, but other than that, there are few real restrictions in most other states.
Yet another in the recent barrage of articles regarding what exactly constitutes "property" (in terms of information) as it applies to the internet.
I think that without a doubt (and it's been stated many times before, in other articles) a completely new set of laws related to these internet property issues must be devised. The only problem is, do we really want the US Congress (for those of us in the US) to be the deciding factor in issues like this? We also don't need to see another Communications Decency Act.
Solution: The government should appoint Slashdot as the official legislating group in all matters related to the internet, since we always know what's best.:)
I just wish we could do something about all the telemarketers...in my opinion these people are far more annoying than spammers. At least spam doesn't start arguing with you when you hit "delete".
But as far as suing the spammers goes, I can't say I agree with it (especially with the suit coming from such a large company). We have enough frivolous lawsuits in this country as it is - we don't need AOL to start suing all the millions of spammers out there.
While I do agree that something should be done about spamming, there aren't really any effective solutions at this point...even with 99.9% of us ignoring all the spam, you still have that.1% that goes and ruins it for the rest of us by responding/buying/etc.
Actually, this has just brought to mind an interesting solution: instead of killing all the spammers, we could simply kill anyone who's ever replied to spam.:)
Here in the UK their are health and saftey rules preventing power and data cables being put in the same coduit. I wonder if this would pose a problem for this kind of technology.
It's using the existing power cable itself (more specifically, the magnetic field surrounding it if I understood their diagrams correctly), rather than adding any additional cable or wiring. So, there's actually no separate "data cable"...I assume it wouldn't pose a problem in that case, although I don't know anything about the UK law specifically.
Ok, let's just assume for a second that it's just about anyone other than the US Government supplying funding for NASA...
"Yes, it's true...our $10 million (exact dollar value not looked up out of laziness and irrelevance) spacecraft did just crash on Mars...yes, two of them in fact. But, well, we'd really like to send one out to Europa. We're somewhat sure that it might work this time..."
I don't know about you, but *I'd* certainly hesitate before committing funding to something like this...
What I really don't understand is how NSI managed to turn something which theoretically should be fairly simple (access the domain name, change the ownership/nameserver information) into such a disaster - and the fact that they managed to make the mistake not once, but twice!
While I think it's unfortunate that this happened, and unfortunate that there's no way NSI can be held responsible, I also don't see what would be so bad about simply taking a different domain name - sure, "races.com" would have been nice, but there are plenty of other names out there that would work just as well.
I've read the story you mention. The main difficulty wasn't in the fact that he wasn't "confident" enough in using his vision, it was the fact that he didn't know *how* to use his vision.
His brain, having almost no training in decoding visual images, didn't know how to do many things that we take for granted, such as determining the difference between a dog and a cat (without touching/hearing it, of course). I recall it being mentioned that learning colors was fairly easy for him, but shapes were difficult. He couldn't tell the difference between a circle and a square, for example. If anyone else is interested in this topic, the story is excellently written and is very thought-provoking. It's very interesting to imagine what sight would be like to a person who had no idea what he was seeing...
Slashdot Mirror
Representation was invented because the public was considered too unweildy to come to quick decisions. Pollsters have changed that, and it's very likely that much of their influence is utterly invisible--and would make great reading.
Of course, you're forgetting that polls are heavily influenced simply by the way their questions are worded, and that a good pollster can make the results say virtually anything based on this fact. One must find truly impartial people to develop polls in order for them to have any worth...
More SETI information, eh? I'll admit, I've seen some REALLY strange/bizarre stuff come out of Hoe, but I never realized the damn thing was written by extraterrestrials.
It all makes so much more sense now...
The laws relating to telemarketing in the US are a little different, I believe. If you say "I'm not interested," they *are* allowed to continue the conversation. (I once worked as a telemarketer (I'm a poor college student, and I was desperate - forgive me) and if I said goodbye after the first "not interested" I would have to take flak from my boss. In fact, most of my "sales" came *after* someone said "not interested" and I continued to talk to them).
They can call any time between 9am and 9pm in most areas. The only state I know of with its own strict set of restrictions is Florida, which has some kind of government-run "no-call" list that you can ask to be added to, but other than that, there are few real restrictions in most other states.
Yet another in the recent barrage of articles regarding what exactly constitutes "property" (in terms of information) as it applies to the internet.
:)
I think that without a doubt (and it's been stated many times before, in other articles) a completely new set of laws related to these internet property issues must be devised. The only problem is, do we really want the US Congress (for those of us in the US) to be the deciding factor in issues like this? We also don't need to see another Communications Decency Act.
Solution: The government should appoint Slashdot as the official legislating group in all matters related to the internet, since we always know what's best.
I just wish we could do something about all the telemarketers...in my opinion these people are far more annoying than spammers. At least spam doesn't start arguing with you when you hit "delete".
.1% that goes and ruins it for the rest of us by responding/buying/etc.
:)
But as far as suing the spammers goes, I can't say I agree with it (especially with the suit coming from such a large company). We have enough frivolous lawsuits in this country as it is - we don't need AOL to start suing all the millions of spammers out there.
While I do agree that something should be done about spamming, there aren't really any effective solutions at this point...even with 99.9% of us ignoring all the spam, you still have that
Actually, this has just brought to mind an interesting solution: instead of killing all the spammers, we could simply kill anyone who's ever replied to spam.
Here in the UK their are health and saftey rules preventing power and data cables being put in the same coduit. I wonder if this would pose a problem for this kind of technology.
It's using the existing power cable itself (more specifically, the magnetic field surrounding it if I understood their diagrams correctly), rather than adding any additional cable or wiring. So, there's actually no separate "data cable"...I assume it wouldn't pose a problem in that case, although I don't know anything about the UK law specifically.
Many of you may also be interested in the current dispute of northernlight.com vs. northernlights.com. For information, go here:
http://www.northernlights.com/new/
Ok, let's just assume for a second that it's just about anyone other than the US Government supplying funding for NASA...
"Yes, it's true...our $10 million (exact dollar value not looked up out of laziness and irrelevance) spacecraft did just crash on Mars...yes, two of them in fact. But, well, we'd really like to send one out to Europa. We're somewhat sure that it might work this time..."
I don't know about you, but *I'd* certainly hesitate before committing funding to something like this...
What I really don't understand is how NSI managed to turn something which theoretically should be fairly simple (access the domain name, change the ownership/nameserver information) into such a disaster - and the fact that they managed to make the mistake not once, but twice!
While I think it's unfortunate that this happened, and unfortunate that there's no way NSI can be held responsible, I also don't see what would be so bad about simply taking a different domain name - sure, "races.com" would have been nice, but there are plenty of other names out there that would work just as well.
I've read the story you mention. The main difficulty wasn't in the fact that he wasn't "confident" enough in using his vision, it was the fact that he didn't know *how* to use his vision.
His brain, having almost no training in decoding visual images, didn't know how to do many things that we take for granted, such as determining the difference between a dog and a cat (without touching/hearing it, of course). I recall it being mentioned that learning colors was fairly easy for him, but shapes were difficult. He couldn't tell the difference between a circle and a square, for example. If anyone else is interested in this topic, the story is excellently written and is very thought-provoking. It's very interesting to imagine what sight would be like to a person who had no idea what he was seeing...