Especially when you start to think that among the most prominent traits that make humans vulnerable is on the one side the self-perception of weakness (lacking things they need or just think they need) and on the other their social image of weakness (lacking things one's "supposed" to have). Thus, the rift between "being" and "having" is not shrinking by capitalism, it's growing and in fact defines corporate capitalism. The empires of advertisement businesses were the first to address such human weaknesses, however the common consensus is that advertisement is not unethical - those ads that risk to be are just getting banned.
The problem with Google is that it does not want to know what you have, what you do and what you think - it wants to know what you don't have (yet), what you don't do (yet) and what you don't think (yet), because it's the lack of those that define you as a potential customer. On the other hand, Facebook (and some say also three-letter agencies) are interested in knowing not only what you have, what you do and what you think, but also who you are, what you want to be and who your friends are. So, every aspect of our existence is covered and resistance is futile - our world is turning into a Panopticon faster that we thought it would.
IANAL, but my bet is they're going to lose the case for claiming to know Google's intent. How can one possibly know that "Google knew that most users would not understand that the privacy policy etc." without being a Google employee?
The accurate term that should be used in the TOS is "location data" and not just "location statistics". "Data" would contain (precise or approximate) location coordinates while "statistics" should contain only numbers pertaining to locations e.g. "user x was located within 100 meters of location y during month z".
The end user may read the TOS in detail but my bet is that he does not understand what he reads.
Comments' lack of mentioning Coca/Pepsi...
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
means that most did not watch the video. The "Coca Cola conspiracy", as Lustig terms it, is a compelling argument explaining much of teenage and adult obesity in first-world countries, while the the baby food data he presented are the most horrid thing I learned in 2011.
Unfortunately this is the world we are living in, it is a beta universe. Some companies (e.g. Skype) even get rid of the 'alpha' concept and choose to call all of their versions 'beta'. Can you suggest any "finished" free product that was relatively stable and bug free before the next version was released? (not that commercial products are significantly better...)
Consumers measuring technology impact judging only by their pockets reveals a very narrow mindset. For example, you might save $20 on your bill by using CFL bulbs, but you are really forcing the power plant to produce more to compensate your severely distorted electrical power factor.
As CFLs gradually gain market share, their impact on power plants' budgets will certainly force the latter to raise the prices. The most important cost is the environmental pollution technology causes. CFL bulbs suffer seriously in that direction, contrary to incandescent bulbs which are just glass and tungsten. For a global approach to CFL pros and cons, see http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm
Unfortunately, what you are really doing by using CFL bulbs is stealing from the power plant, which has to produce more to counteract your distorted power factor. Read more here: http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm
+1 insightful. This is eBay's greatest contribution to the economy (and to the planet, according to the TFA). Aprox. 90% of my stuff are 2nd hand because:
1. I pay no stupid early adopter tax 2. I pay 50% of the street price for a technology that's just 1-2 years old and performing much more than 50% of the new bling 3. I select what I buy so I don't get 2nd grade brands. 4. I just say 'no' to bargains of local superstores, which tend to offer crap. 4. If something suddenly dies, I experience 50% less grief (no realistic chances of repair/guarantees/replacements in my country)
At the school where I work I am famous for collecting all the defective units and peripherals I can find and fixing them. Salvaged units go to undergraduate labs or are donated to students, friends or family. Nothing gets wasted, their garbage are my treasures.
Google doesn't really have to buy any major music label. They could just buy a small music label like Arc that produced a viral video (Roberta Black's 'Friday'). This could serve as a jumpstart move signaling that Google is now into music production, and everybody can become a Madonna or a Springsteen. Then using their powers they could easily make the label grow and become as big as e.g. Sony BMG within less than 5 years.
This scenario is realistic because Google can not just control, but also define the whole hits/toplist/ system. Additional advantages would be: - no need to produce TV shows to reveal America's next "talent", they have their own infinite TV - no need for music recording studios, they could just accept multitrack master audio material and video and just polish it a bit. - no messing with cd production factories, it all would be a vertical digital business - no publicity costs: no launch parties, no paying/bribing music magazines and radio/TV stations, no need to find web advertisers etc. - no damages when the artists' cycle is over: nothing would have been lost, it was all zeroes and ones in the first place.
The weak link to this business model is piracy: Ironically, Google results would lead first to pirated copies rather than to their own original content for purchase. Unless of course they decide to tweak their own search algorithms to avoid this (which reminds me that the fact they are reluctant to do so is already an indirect attack to the music industry: they both deny to defend them and get their advertisement money!).
The sad thing is that such a Google move would signal the total decline of quality in music - in the best case it would be only as good as the quality of their search results.
While your idea looks interesting, in fact it's the equivalent of an internet kill switch: Imagine you are browsing a news site and all of a sudden you get redirected to a warning site. All alternatives you might try to find more information about the "threat" would also redirect to the same warning site, so in effect you'd be blind and receiving information/updates only at a need-to-know basis. Would you like that?
It's even worse: when my dad's health was deteriorating due to multiple heart/circulation/obesity problems, he had to take about 20 pills per day. Most of them were used to prevent the side effects of the main active ingredients. Sometimes you will see in the same pill both the active ingredient targeting the problem together with its side-effect inhibitor. It's a whack-a-mole situation.
However, risking your health to get some more hair on your scalp is totally insane. People may be stupid, but pharma companies are criminals to exploit their stupidity.
IIRC many drugs were discovered this way - through a side effect they had while targeting a different problem.
The irony of it is that one wants to stop baldness to get more chicks, while the end result is putting themselves out of the genetic pool. Evolution is an evil bitch.
using the same methodology, sample and tools to investigate the current uses of netbooks (or laptops)? I'd like to see the impact of the form factor on people's patterns of device use.
Personally, I have some pet theories regarding tablet use:
1. Games & apps for tablets seem to be a LOT cheaper than their netbook/laptop/desktop equivalents. (I have in mind a Photoshop plugin called Athentech Perfectly Clear, used to enhance pictures. The PC version is $199, while the iPad version is $5.99!). This means that people who wouldn't normally risk purchasing a PC game at say $70 are more likely to purchase 10 tablet games at $3. So, having downloaded more tablet games it's inevitable that people will spend more time to explore them and enjoy them e.g. on the sofa, in the kitchen, in bed or in the WC.
2. Another factor is the psychological one: Subconsciously we tend to associate our laptop/netbook (not to mention our desktop PCs) mainly with doing work and therefore we feel a certain kind of guilt when playing games or procrastinating on them. The tablet helps transfer the feeling of guilt onto a new device, which gradually becomes associated more and more with recreational activities rather than work-like activities.
3. Either way, the tablet is becoming the vehicle (or the substitute) of the dream about the future of our society: less work, more free time. I remember several articles/books of the past decades predicting that in the future (meaning the 21st century), technology will change the way we work, resulting in e.g. a 3 hours per day work, leaving the the rest of the day free for recreation/family/self fulfillment. Thus, the tablet presently materializes The Imaginary function of technology according to Lacan's point of view - living in a future, better, merrier world now and not later (this after all is the Desire driving all early adopters).
Please check your links before posting, the WP links have no information whatsoever about the "story of the resistance to two australian's path to the nobel prize". I have read that sad story some years ago, and I bet the relevant cheesy details were edited out from the respective articles.
To provide some support to your argument, yes, there's plenty of historical evidence that there is an orthodoxy in science, to the point that when the data do not match the current paradigm, they are 'cleverly' ignored and debunked. Every scientific revolution, in addition to Kuhn's and Lakatos' viewpoints, can be analyzed as a new religion overthrowing an old one. Don't get me started here, weren't there several scientific proofs that no vessels heavier than air could ever fly?
What exactly is the "outrageous meaning and far-reaching consequences" that you imply? Yahoo (and I bet Google and Bing are next sooner or later) will just have to not display search results that include any film's title together with additional keywords such as dvdrip, brrip, xvid, aac, mkv, hdtv, x264, etc. I'm suspecting this does not require more than a few lines of code and while not sufficient to block 100% of infringing results, it will be quite a proof of good intention and willingness to comply with the judge's decision.
For "Scenario #3: Power Consumption on News Site", try to watch your CPU usage when you go to cnn.com (or amazon.com or ebay.com). In my humble experience, I get very high CPU usage just after I visit the page and during the page rendering process, especially when it's a java-intensive news site. Looking at the Scenario #3 graphs, I expect to see a high transient power (or energy) peak in the beginning which falls gracefully when the page has finished rendering. I don't expect to see a flat line (plus-minus background task consumption noise) the whole time through. This makes me think that they actually plotted only the power consumed after the page has been fully loaded, meaning that all Scenario #3 graphs actually do not include data after the true time origin (0.0 min).
The above flatline illusion is carefully staged by Scenario #2: about:blank. It is a flat line, but that's normal - about:blank rendering uses negligible CPU or GPU. Therefore Scenario #2 is used to prime your perception with the illusion that there are no transients in such graphs. In Scenario #3, the time origins in graphs might well be the true ones.
In conclusion: scenarios #1, #2 and #3 seem to represent steady state consumption rates after the pages have finished rendering. Scenarios #4 and #5 also feature steady state graphs, but these are more meaningful because they're HTML5 animations.
In addition, when browsing news sites, you have to scroll a lot to read a long article. Scrolling seems to consume a lot of CPU if your gfx card is rather old. In addition, scrolling on GPU-accelerated browsers will reduce CPU usage, but increase GPU processing. I'd really like to see some scrolling power requirements, which IMHO represent the realistic use of a browser (rather than that of men staring goats.)
Finally: What's the use of making graphs of 7 minutes of staring at a blank page, or the same news page in scenario 3? Are browsers expected to suddenly change behavior and begin consuming power after say 5 minutes of staring at a blank page?
If they opted to measure energy and not power consumption (like member tonywestonuk insightfully remarked a few comments above), they'd have to produce cumulative energy charts starting at true zero origins and my bet is that the final picture would be much different...
Jacob must be the male equivalent of "Phoebe in Wonderland" - an excellent movie on a non-geeky deviation from "normality" which was attributed to Tourette's syndrome. The success of this film is that we don't see Phoebe doing anything much abnormal, she just seems to overreact a bit to her environment.
However, after having read Foucault's History of Madness I am not totally convinced these cases are truly "syndromes", in the sense of pathological deviations from 100% healthy humans. The fortunate thing is that Jacob's parents were not idiots and had the guts to ask university professors whether their son's gibberish made any sense. I welcome such stories getting media coverage because I don't think that the majority of parents would ever consider the case their erratically misbehaving children might be savants and not psychopaths.
I hate to see the first/. comment on a story like this being a "geeky" joke. Couldn't you just wait a few minutes so that your sick humour gets lost in the comment noise and does not serve as a mirror of our undescript society?
When I first saw this last week, I was weeping in silence the whole day through.
" Nuclear Ginza" - Japanese 25 min documentary (english narration & subtitles) from 1995 on poor ignorant people working to maintain Japan's reactors. Warning: cannot be unseen.
Giving up mod points in this thread just to say that I don't care which gfx card in the universe is faster. What matters to me is that AMD is kept alive and kicking, so that competition stays healthy & fierce for the benefit of all of us.
What do you think would happen to Intel & Nvidia prices if AMD went bankrupt? This is why I still buy and recommend AMD gear.
These types of things, and these ruins specifically, tell kids that maybe getting an education is overrated. All the people involved in the SSC project had an education, but apparently not the power to prevent it from becoming a dollar black hole.
If I were a US citizen, I'd demand. that these installations totally disappear from the map and all references to it be removed from press, books and the internet, because the SSC incident represents a national science hall of shame.
The really scary part is that both the authorities think they are properly protecting citizens by sending electronic messages and the the citizens think they are properly protected by receiving said warnings. To the point that if authorities don't send any they are considered accountable or accomplices and if citizens don't receive any they are feeling safe.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 insightful
Especially when you start to think that among the most prominent traits that make humans vulnerable is on the one side the self-perception of weakness (lacking things they need or just think they need) and on the other their social image of weakness (lacking things one's "supposed" to have). Thus, the rift between "being" and "having" is not shrinking by capitalism, it's growing and in fact defines corporate capitalism. The empires of advertisement businesses were the first to address such human weaknesses, however the common consensus is that advertisement is not unethical - those ads that risk to be are just getting banned.
The problem with Google is that it does not want to know what you have, what you do and what you think - it wants to know what you don't have (yet), what you don't do (yet) and what you don't think (yet), because it's the lack of those that define you as a potential customer. On the other hand, Facebook (and some say also three-letter agencies) are interested in knowing not only what you have, what you do and what you think, but also who you are, what you want to be and who your friends are. So, every aspect of our existence is covered and resistance is futile - our world is turning into a Panopticon faster that we thought it would.
IANAL, but my bet is they're going to lose the case for claiming to know Google's intent. How can one possibly know that "Google knew that most users would not understand that the privacy policy etc." without being a Google employee?
The accurate term that should be used in the TOS is "location data" and not just "location statistics". "Data" would contain (precise or approximate) location coordinates while "statistics" should contain only numbers pertaining to locations e.g. "user x was located within 100 meters of location y during month z".
The end user may read the TOS in detail but my bet is that he does not understand what he reads.
means that most did not watch the video. The "Coca Cola conspiracy", as Lustig terms it, is a compelling argument explaining much of teenage and adult obesity in first-world countries, while the the baby food data he presented are the most horrid thing I learned in 2011.
Unfortunately this is the world we are living in, it is a beta universe. Some companies (e.g. Skype) even get rid of the 'alpha' concept and choose to call all of their versions 'beta'. Can you suggest any "finished" free product that was relatively stable and bug free before the next version was released? (not that commercial products are significantly better...)
Consumers measuring technology impact judging only by their pockets reveals a very narrow mindset. For example, you might save $20 on your bill by using CFL bulbs, but you are really forcing the power plant to produce more to compensate your severely distorted electrical power factor.
As CFLs gradually gain market share, their impact on power plants' budgets will certainly force the latter to raise the prices. The most important cost is the environmental pollution technology causes. CFL bulbs suffer seriously in that direction, contrary to incandescent bulbs which are just glass and tungsten. For a global approach to CFL pros and cons, see http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm
Unfortunately, what you are really doing by using CFL bulbs is stealing from the power plant, which has to produce more to counteract your distorted power factor. Read more here: http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm
+1 insightful. This is eBay's greatest contribution to the economy (and to the planet, according to the TFA). Aprox. 90% of my stuff are 2nd hand because:
1. I pay no stupid early adopter tax
2. I pay 50% of the street price for a technology that's just 1-2 years old and performing much more than 50% of the new bling
3. I select what I buy so I don't get 2nd grade brands.
4. I just say 'no' to bargains of local superstores, which tend to offer crap.
4. If something suddenly dies, I experience 50% less grief (no realistic chances of repair/guarantees/replacements in my country)
At the school where I work I am famous for collecting all the defective units and peripherals I can find and fixing them. Salvaged units go to undergraduate labs or are donated to students, friends or family. Nothing gets wasted, their garbage are my treasures.
Google doesn't really have to buy any major music label. They could just buy a small music label like Arc that produced a viral video (Roberta Black's 'Friday'). This could serve as a jumpstart move signaling that Google is now into music production, and everybody can become a Madonna or a Springsteen. Then using their powers they could easily make the label grow and become as big as e.g. Sony BMG within less than 5 years.
This scenario is realistic because Google can not just control, but also define the whole hits/toplist/ system. Additional advantages would be:
- no need to produce TV shows to reveal America's next "talent", they have their own infinite TV
- no need for music recording studios, they could just accept multitrack master audio material and video and just polish it a bit.
- no messing with cd production factories, it all would be a vertical digital business
- no publicity costs: no launch parties, no paying/bribing music magazines and radio/TV stations, no need to find web advertisers etc.
- no damages when the artists' cycle is over: nothing would have been lost, it was all zeroes and ones in the first place.
The weak link to this business model is piracy: Ironically, Google results would lead first to pirated copies rather than to their own original content for purchase. Unless of course they decide to tweak their own search algorithms to avoid this (which reminds me that the fact they are reluctant to do so is already an indirect attack to the music industry: they both deny to defend them and get their advertisement money!).
The sad thing is that such a Google move would signal the total decline of quality in music - in the best case it would be only as good as the quality of their search results.
While your idea looks interesting, in fact it's the equivalent of an internet kill switch: Imagine you are browsing a news site and all of a sudden you get redirected to a warning site. All alternatives you might try to find more information about the "threat" would also redirect to the same warning site, so in effect you'd be blind and receiving information/updates only at a need-to-know basis. Would you like that?
It's even worse: when my dad's health was deteriorating due to multiple heart/circulation/obesity problems, he had to take about 20 pills per day. Most of them were used to prevent the side effects of the main active ingredients. Sometimes you will see in the same pill both the active ingredient targeting the problem together with its side-effect inhibitor. It's a whack-a-mole situation.
However, risking your health to get some more hair on your scalp is totally insane. People may be stupid, but pharma companies are criminals to exploit their stupidity.
IIRC many drugs were discovered this way - through a side effect they had while targeting a different problem.
The irony of it is that one wants to stop baldness to get more chicks, while the end result is putting themselves out of the genetic pool. Evolution is an evil bitch.
using the same methodology, sample and tools to investigate the current uses of netbooks (or laptops)? I'd like to see the impact of the form factor on people's patterns of device use.
Personally, I have some pet theories regarding tablet use:
1. Games & apps for tablets seem to be a LOT cheaper than their netbook/laptop/desktop equivalents. (I have in mind a Photoshop plugin called Athentech Perfectly Clear, used to enhance pictures. The PC version is $199, while the iPad version is $5.99!). This means that people who wouldn't normally risk purchasing a PC game at say $70 are more likely to purchase 10 tablet games at $3. So, having downloaded more tablet games it's inevitable that people will spend more time to explore them and enjoy them e.g. on the sofa, in the kitchen, in bed or in the WC.
2. Another factor is the psychological one: Subconsciously we tend to associate our laptop/netbook (not to mention our desktop PCs) mainly with doing work and therefore we feel a certain kind of guilt when playing games or procrastinating on them. The tablet helps transfer the feeling of guilt onto a new device, which gradually becomes associated more and more with recreational activities rather than work-like activities.
3. Either way, the tablet is becoming the vehicle (or the substitute) of the dream about the future of our society: less work, more free time. I remember several articles/books of the past decades predicting that in the future (meaning the 21st century), technology will change the way we work, resulting in e.g. a 3 hours per day work, leaving the the rest of the day free for recreation/family/self fulfillment. Thus, the tablet presently materializes The Imaginary function of technology according to Lacan's point of view - living in a future, better, merrier world now and not later (this after all is the Desire driving all early adopters).
What do you think?
Please check your links before posting, the WP links have no information whatsoever about the "story of the resistance to two australian's path to the nobel prize". I have read that sad story some years ago, and I bet the relevant cheesy details were edited out from the respective articles.
To provide some support to your argument, yes, there's plenty of historical evidence that there is an orthodoxy in science, to the point that when the data do not match the current paradigm, they are 'cleverly' ignored and debunked. Every scientific revolution, in addition to Kuhn's and Lakatos' viewpoints, can be analyzed as a new religion overthrowing an old one. Don't get me started here, weren't there several scientific proofs that no vessels heavier than air could ever fly?
Why not tell them to remove the link? Hotfile, for example, receives tons of such requests and removes links accordingly.
Do you imply that an US-owned business located in China should abide by the US laws and not the China ones?
What exactly is the "outrageous meaning and far-reaching consequences" that you imply? Yahoo (and I bet Google and Bing are next sooner or later) will just have to not display search results that include any film's title together with additional keywords such as dvdrip, brrip, xvid, aac, mkv, hdtv, x264, etc. I'm suspecting this does not require more than a few lines of code and while not sufficient to block 100% of infringing results, it will be quite a proof of good intention and willingness to comply with the judge's decision.
For "Scenario #3: Power Consumption on News Site", try to watch your CPU usage when you go to cnn.com (or amazon.com or ebay.com). In my humble experience, I get very high CPU usage just after I visit the page and during the page rendering process, especially when it's a java-intensive news site. Looking at the Scenario #3 graphs, I expect to see a high transient power (or energy) peak in the beginning which falls gracefully when the page has finished rendering. I don't expect to see a flat line (plus-minus background task consumption noise) the whole time through. This makes me think that they actually plotted only the power consumed after the page has been fully loaded, meaning that all Scenario #3 graphs actually do not include data after the true time origin (0.0 min).
The above flatline illusion is carefully staged by Scenario #2: about:blank. It is a flat line, but that's normal - about:blank rendering uses negligible CPU or GPU. Therefore Scenario #2 is used to prime your perception with the illusion that there are no transients in such graphs. In Scenario #3, the time origins in graphs might well be the true ones.
In conclusion: scenarios #1, #2 and #3 seem to represent steady state consumption rates after the pages have finished rendering. Scenarios #4 and #5 also feature steady state graphs, but these are more meaningful because they're HTML5 animations.
In addition, when browsing news sites, you have to scroll a lot to read a long article. Scrolling seems to consume a lot of CPU if your gfx card is rather old. In addition, scrolling on GPU-accelerated browsers will reduce CPU usage, but increase GPU processing. I'd really like to see some scrolling power requirements, which IMHO represent the realistic use of a browser (rather than that of men staring goats.)
Finally: What's the use of making graphs of 7 minutes of staring at a blank page, or the same news page in scenario 3? Are browsers expected to suddenly change behavior and begin consuming power after say 5 minutes of staring at a blank page?
If they opted to measure energy and not power consumption (like member tonywestonuk insightfully remarked a few comments above), they'd have to produce cumulative energy charts starting at true zero origins and my bet is that the final picture would be much different...
Jacob must be the male equivalent of "Phoebe in Wonderland" - an excellent movie on a non-geeky deviation from "normality" which was attributed to Tourette's syndrome. The success of this film is that we don't see Phoebe doing anything much abnormal, she just seems to overreact a bit to her environment.
However, after having read Foucault's History of Madness I am not totally convinced these cases are truly "syndromes", in the sense of pathological deviations from 100% healthy humans. The fortunate thing is that Jacob's parents were not idiots and had the guts to ask university professors whether their son's gibberish made any sense. I welcome such stories getting media coverage because I don't think that the majority of parents would ever consider the case their erratically misbehaving children might be savants and not psychopaths.
I hate to see the first /. comment on a story like this being a "geeky" joke. Couldn't you just wait a few minutes so that your sick humour gets lost in the comment noise and does not serve as a mirror of our undescript society?
When I first saw this last week, I was weeping in silence the whole day through.
" Nuclear Ginza" - Japanese 25 min documentary (english narration & subtitles) from 1995 on poor ignorant people working to maintain Japan's reactors. Warning: cannot be unseen.
Giving up mod points in this thread just to say that I don't care which gfx card in the universe is faster. What matters to me is that AMD is kept alive and kicking, so that competition stays healthy & fierce for the benefit of all of us.
What do you think would happen to Intel & Nvidia prices if AMD went bankrupt? This is why I still buy and recommend AMD gear.
+1 informative, thanks!
These types of things, and these ruins specifically, tell kids that maybe getting an education is overrated. All the people involved in the SSC project had an education, but apparently not the power to prevent it from becoming a dollar black hole.
If I were a US citizen, I'd demand. that these installations totally disappear from the map and all references to it be removed from press, books and the internet, because the SSC incident represents a national science hall of shame.
The really scary part is that both the authorities think they are properly protecting citizens by sending electronic messages and the the citizens think they are properly protected by receiving said warnings. To the point that if authorities don't send any they are considered accountable or accomplices and if citizens don't receive any they are feeling safe.