The problem is the implication that a lack of discovery is "That's not interesting...". There is certainly very strong evidence that publication bias exists and is a tremendous problem in the academic world. While plenty of negative papers do get published the vast majority of published papers have some positive results. As has been discussed already when you get negative results and you want them published you write them out as if they were positive - there is a reason for this, and it's just how people work.
Obligatory car analogy: if someone says "Look! A Ferrari 612!" you look, and you remember (I'm assuming we care about Italian supercars). If someone says "Look! We can't see a single Fiat 500!" (insert local version of very common car here if necessary) then you might go "Hmm. That's a little odd." but you'd need a bit more than that to make it memorable or even interesting.
Well, we know what Steve Jobs said about Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra--"It's bullshit." Or, "a load of crap," depending on your source.
Is that actually based on anything though?
Yes - it's based on one rich guy being annoyed that another rich guy threatened to take some of his richness. From the linked article:
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.
Steve Jobs wasn't making some deep point about Google's manipulation of FOSS, he was just ranting about unfair competition (for 'unfair competition to Apple in the eyes of Steve Jobs' read 'Giant, friendly, happy-go-lucky Silicon Valley company treating design and user experience as important'). He may as well have just complained that Google won't share their toys.
Exactly why do Europeans care that we do not have national healthcare? They care because they see it as the US rejecting their ideals. I see the same people posting that they will be happy when the US collapses and it's people talk about how we should all have national healthcare.
Nothing these people say make me think that they give a damn about us.
Seriously? I don't like people dying. I really don't like people dying of easily preventable causes. I hate people dying in hospitals of easily preventable causes because they aren't millionaires. I couldn't care less about what you want to do with your life, if you're doing ok, but if you use "I'm alright" as an answer to "Why are you letting all these people die?" then you are morally reprehensible. If you are just happy to have people die through lack of money in the richest country in the world when much poorer countries do much better, then that's fine.
The New Scientist had a brilliant graph plotting expected lifespan against annual government spending on healthcare. Guess who spent the most? The US. Guess who had the shortest lifespan? The US. Guess what the only explanation is? Profits on such an epic scale even European levels of corruption don't achieve them.
Not all Europeans are like this. In fact, I imagine that the majority of Europe either likes the US or is apathetic to us. But there is a strong and loud anti-US online sentiment that drowns out the rational ones.
The majority of Europe hates America. Really, really hates America. However, most European people understand that most American people are alright. The basic values of the Founding Fathers are pretty noble and good.
But
Your country and its citizens dare to lecture China on human rights when you don't recognise the International Criminal Courts, you hold unnamed suspects with no evidence and no charges against them for unlimited amounts of time with no access to legal representation. You invade sovereign nations in the name of regime change. You defend these invasions with the words freedom and liberty, and yet have no care for the millions dying in far worse regimes throughout Africa and Asia. You announce wars on abstract ideas like 'terror' or 'drugs' - unwinnable wars that nevertheless get people whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy.
You know what the worst part is, though? The reason people throughout Europe really, really hate the US? Our governments copy you like fscking monkeys, spending more in order to get less, joining in with your pointless wars in far off lands - at least you have companies that profit from rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. Our school systems get more and more like yours, even though our schools have always turned out smarter kids. Nationalised public services start being seen as some left-wing ideal, rather than centrist and part-of-the-basic-ideals-of-the-free-market.
The truth is that the venting you get on the interwebs is actually pretty mild compared with the venting you get at dinner parties, in pubs - basically wherever there aren't Americans, because you bastards are all so fscking nice.
Great - while you install the gun locks your kids can fall out of the window! Y'know, since you let them just wander around and haven't bothered teaching them basic safety and responsibility. The point Neoprofin was trying to make was that if you're a crappy parent your kids are going to get in trouble, whether it's crossing the street without looking or shooting themselves in the face. And, as far as I'm aware, in most places isn't it currently illegal to put your kids in a safe?
Their claim of lost sales is bogus, we all know that, but so is the claim that it's not stealing since you wouldn't have bought it anyway. If you wouldn't have bought it anyway then simply don't listen to it or watch it.
Ok then, mister infinite-money-man, why don't you buy all that stuff for me? I don't happen to have infinite resources in my pockets right now, but since you are so fabulously wealthy I'm sure you can reimburse those poor starving millionaires I'm stealing from.
In this particular case IMHO both parties need to change their behavior and work together to solve the problem. You can't have something for free, it costs money to produce and the people doing it need to be paid
I'm a musician, and I'm a geek. When I build someone a website or some other creative work, I don't claim that they must pay me for the high-spec gaming PC I (may have) used, because that just happened to be the computer that I had. Similarly, when I finish the album I'm working on, I'm not planning on charging for the instruments I used, the high-spec gaming rig I used, etc etc. That is what makes the recording industry expensive - that and marketing. And I can't remember the last time I saw an advert for a band that I like.
Seriously, you think it actually costs a hundred thousand dollars to make an album? You (well, I) can make a professional sounding, even-a-professional-can't-tell-the-difference recording for ten dollars, and that includes the cost of pizza and beer. So I've spent maybe two or three thousand dollars on equipment over the years - so what? I don't think I'll ever make any proper money out of it. I didn't buy the stuff as an investment, and anyone that does is an asshat.
A little while ago I calculated how much I would have spent on various media if I'd paid for everything I consumed in the way that I should have. After revising the £20 000 to closer to £30 000 ($48 426.85) because I missed out e-books and various foreign media, I would like to point out that I do not have £30 000. I never have had £30 000. If I took all the money me and my girlfriend get in a year, and didn't bother taking out bills or rent or anything, I would just about have half that. Except that I live in North London, so after rent and bills we have pretty much nothing.
I also added another interesting mental excercise - since I can't buy many of the films I want on anything smaller than a DVD I would need an extra room in my flat to keep all of them. And since I don't have time to keep them in order and archive them properly, with notes and cards and such, I would need a part-time archivist to come in and keep it tidy. After those expenses, we're talking around £50 000 ($80 000+) that I don't have.
How can people forget so quickly that the people who pirate are the ones who spend a large portion of their disposable income on media, and most people who spend a large portion of their disposable income on media also pirate, because the large majority of people in even fairly wealthy countries don't make £120 000 (before tax etc.)? I find the idea that I have somehow stolen £50 000 from someone preposterous, since I didn't take anything from them. I find the argument that I should have paid preposterous, since I don't have any money to pay them with. And I find the idea that I should do without if I can't pay preposterous, since I'm not a socially-right-wing nutjob.
Although I do not have recourse to all public funds with my student visa, and definitely do not have access to benefits, I still have unfettered access to NHS and other quite pricey public services.
I know we here in the UK have a pretty bad rep at the minute, and much of that is deserved, but I believe what you are referring to is a little known concept called civilization. It is the end result of the philosophical stance that people dying for no real reason other than not being fabulously wealthy is probably bad in some way. Similarly, many people that could probably survive without them can get certain benefits, such as housing benefit or Disability Living Allowance.
I believe a large part of the issue that isn't really talked about very much is the same problem that insurance companies face - the cost of checking versus the cost of just paying up. Of course, the more checking you do the greater the chance you will stop fraudulent claims, but unless you do it very very well you will catch a few needy people in there too. In fact, since the cost of checking these things is being driven down, while the amount of checking being done is necessarily increasing due to economic- and population-related issues, the quality of the checks decreases, forcing more and more deserving people off the benefits, to the net benefit of frothing-at-the-mouth fools who have neither a grasp of basic social theory nor a conscience.
Like I said, much of the bad rep is deserved. *sigh*
Why the hell do you need icons in the first place? You can change the interface for a given language with localization files. You can use simple declarative text in a button with less ambiguity.
Icons speed understanding and free up screen space. The first example I can see in front of me is that of a web browser. If the 'back' button was large enough to have 'back' written on it in readable text, it would be three or four times the size with reduced functionality, since a foreigner would have to find their way into the language options to be able to tell what it did. When we get on to buttons like 'refresh' or 'close tab', I think you can see how quickly screen space would be used up.
Additionally, I can glance up at the toolbar in pretty much any web browser on anyone's computer and tell what the buttons do almost instantly, without having to read what each one says. Reading actually takes quite a long time, in terms of brain functions - of course it is tremendously useful for fairly complex concepts and interactions such as this one, but there is a necessity for ideas like 'refresh page' to have simple representations so that when I'm at a friend's house I can use their browser much more intuitively. Also, if I'm visiting Germans or Italians I can jump on their computer and navigate to English language websites without knowing their language well enough to change their preferences.
That's the problem with this sort of comparison - it's completely subjective. Until pretty recently I simply had no reason to use pen and paper, but used a keyboard all the time, so my typing speed was respectable but my writing speed was atrocious. However, I have recently forced myself to rediscover the wonders of writing by hand, and I know I could write with pen and paper faster than plenty of people can type. Professional typists could have typed his example text in, what, a little over a minute? People who need to keep notes professionally, PAs or scribes or whatever, could probably get it written in about the same time. I think keyboards are logically bound to be slightly faster, but if you think pen and paper is slow you've never seen my girlfriend write in a hurry. Of course, a keyboard tends to produce fairly readable text, but that's a different (but related) issue...
Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read
www.bbc.co.uk
or www.telegraph.co.uk
or theregister.co.uk
or www.zeit.de
or cnn.com
or slashdot.org
or www.dailymail.co.uk
or and the list goes on.
This is the whole problem, of course - the more sites go paywalled, the more incentive there is for the others to stay free. Very few media sources I've found actually provide a significantly better service than many other sources, so it simply doesn't make sense for me as a consumer to pay for product I can get for free. Of course, there are those that say that my way of thinking will kill journalism / music / whatever, but I'll pay as soon as there is significant incentive to (ie. if they actually start dying off).
I apologise if reading my post caused you to feel I was making light of the condition. However, you must accept that anyone that can toilet themselves, feed themselves, and function on a basic level in the real world, suffers very, very mild ASD - additionally, around 80% of ASD people suffer additional severe learning difficulties. The average mental age of a sufferer of ASD is roughly 8 to 10 years old without taking the autism into account.
I think medical science can define this as incurable (for the moment) because it isn't a disease, and doesn't fit into standard models of medical disorders. Curing amputation, which you offer as a comparison, is trivial in comparison - we know what needs doing and we know the theory of how to do it. With ASD not only do we not know what causes it, it is from a young age such a vast part of an individual's personality that meaningful recovery is meaningless - giving an amputee a leg or a blind person sight is meaningful, because these things do not define who those people are. Autism defines the very essence of a person so deeply that removing it would be similar to removing my existential dread and anguish and the drive it gives me to do good - what would be left would be less me than what was taken away.
If anyone wants to learn a little about ASD, check out Aspies For Freedom - obviously the people on this site are extremely high functioning, but check out some conversations on the forums. It can be truly enlightening to see what people have to go through just to make themselves understood.
Then again, if you had fragile X syndrome you wouldn't actually have autism. This is a deeply misleading article title and summary, since Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) covers a wide range of psychological profiles and is deeply misunderstood by most people - even plenty of people who work with it every day. You will notice, reading the article (yeah, I must be new here) that none of the scientists mention ASD. The guy who wrote this piece just thought that would give him an angle, since no one has heard of fragile X syndrome, but everyone loves a good autism story, despite (because of?) most people never having met someone with serious levels of ASD.
Just to clear things up, fragile X syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality that causes various physical deformities and some forms of mental retardation. This is acceptable of you want to know more. There is some limited evidence that correlation exists between some forms of ASD and fragile X syndrome, but causality is far from demonstrated.
Additionally, ASD is defined as being a "pervasive developmental disorder", meaning that a) symtoms must be present from fairly early on in life and b) autism is an innate part of the person suffering from it, and a cure not only doesn't exist - the concept of a cure is nonsensical. Don't get me wrong, I would love there to be a cure for ASD, but medical science currently defines it as uncurable. As an analogy, it would be like trying to 'cure' someone of having social function and being capable of imaginitive play - you could teach them limited functions to appear like they had no grasp of the abstract, but you couldn't turn them autistic.
The media, and people in general, need to cease this endless obsession with autism - it's an incredibly complex subject, and studying it for years only allows you to scratch the surface (trust me on this). Being crap with people suggests some form of social, behavioural, or anxiety disorder. ASD is a serious disorder with serious consequences. Rainman does not exist. As a rule of thumb, if you can put together a fully formed sentence, you almost certainly don't have meaningful levels of ASD. If you can read facial expressions without spending years actually consciously memorising what faces mean what, you don't have meaningful levels of ASD. Okay, if you've gotten this far you might have comparatively mild Asperger's or something on that end of the spectrum, but it'll be clinically relevant only in a small fraction of a percent of that already small group.
While I agree that music is much less annoying than the noise of other people trying to get their jobs done, sometimes when I'm coding alone in my house I need to crank some Aphex Twin or other discordant mentalism just for a base level of distraction - I find if 10% of my mind is trying not to get distracted it helps the other 90% just get on with the job in hand.
I suppose it's sort of like chewing gum or fiddling with stationary - there's just a bit of your mind dedicated to looking out for tigers, and if you're confident there are no tigers in your office you need to give it something else to do.
Please don't insult those of us who actually like science - these guys were not and are not scientists. They're just some people with university-level education and a load of fancy gadgets. No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head.
I think partly the issue is one of specificity. People with claims to make are always 'scientists'. Found a new subatomic particle? Scientist. Got a probiotic yoghurt to sell? Scientist. It feels to me like calling anyone who makes things a builder, whether they make fine wines or aircraft carriers.
The point that people overlook when comparing science to religion is that science doesn't want your belief. It doesn't want your respect. It wants you to look at the evidence, try to reproduce it, try to touch it and play with it, and see if you agree. I hate saying I believe in science, because I don't. However, in my experince and the experience of others whom I respect, the scientific method is the most valid way - nay, the only valid way - to reach conclusions, whether they be huge and far reaching ("The Higgs is here! We found it!") or entirely meaningless ("I leaned back on my chair and a siren went off! My chair must have developed a siren!" vs "I leaned back on my chair and a siren went off. Hmm... Lean forward, lean back, lean forward, lean back... Just a coincidence. OK then.").
Einstein questioned "valid" laws of science and look what it got him.
Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time. Gradually, through debate and observation and experimentation, more and more people realised he had made a series of logical points that disproved the old ways of doing things.
Let us compare this to the argument from incredulity - the equivalent would have been Einstein saying, "But I don't understand it! How does it work? No, look, see, the feather and the hammer land at different times! Ha! Scientists are dumb!" in which case I doubt he would have quite the same status in the history books.
The number of times I've had to explain to my ISPs tech support that they just need to tell me what they want, as opposed to which button in XP to click, at one point got so bad that I feel I was justified in pirating Windows just so I could dual boot into it for those idiots. I had a friend once who was getting a slow connection speed from his router to the ISP, and they told him he'd have to get Windows before they could help him, because they don't support Linux.
Normally with these places the answer is that you just ask, 'What's your favourite distro?' as soon as they pick up, and if they say anything along the lines of, 'Umm...' or, 'What?' just hang up there and then - that's what the redial button is for. With a staff of 40, unless they're thinking of paying network-admin-level Euros, maybe two of these people is gonna have a frickin' clue how to troubleshoot malware on Linux, if the Germans are lucky.
I love the idea of a malware support line not being aimed at Windows users - I mean, come on. Seriously. We can debate why, we can debate how, we can debate many, many things, but we cannot possibly pretend that malware is a serious problem for every single user of Linux or Mac or whatever that hasn't spent hours upon hours setting up security buffers and manually hacking virtualized Windows so that they can save flashsites and then run them on the virtualized system-within-a-system; that's what you get with Windows. At least, that's what I get with Windows, and I have spent more of my life than I care to think about installing firewalls and AVs and giving them custom configs and then realizing too late that I have to do it again and I should have saved the config since I regularly (see: ~ once per year) have to reinstall Windows to get some speed back...
I hope the CRIA is found liable for every penny of the $60 billion and is put out of business once and for all.
This is so naive it very nearly pains me. Not because you think the CRIA might lose - I think of that as optimism. No, rather because you think that $60 billion is a lot of money, and that they will have to pay it. Now, IANAL, but I am pretty sure that once a company declares itself bankrupt and disappears from the face of the Earth, that's it. Gone.
Two weeks later, the Canadian Association for the Recording Industry will pop up, and lo and behold! All the same employees, bar the dead wood they were trying to shift in the first place!
Of course, I sincerely hope I am wrong. I like to think of myself as quietly optimistic, and as such I look to a future where the greedy and the vicious are chastened by society's scorn and live lives of charity and humility. Unfortunately, while that bit of my brain is being quietly optimistic, there's another bit shouting DON'T BE SO STUPID!
I was going to go to the doctor about these voices in my head, but if the RIAA hear about them singing that Miley Cyrus song I'll be done for. No, better off just keeping quiet, like they want...
Here's another point - he is rich and white - the only way he could (statistically) live longer is be female or live in any other developed nation. Because of this, a year to him is worth less, since he'll be getting blowjobs from cybwhorgs and swallowing a pill for dinner long after I've kicked the proverbial. Since his time is worth less, he should spend much longer in prison than a normal human. QED.
I take it you didn't see that study recently that showed that America alone wastes 1 400 kilocalories per person per day, or 150 trillion kilocalories per year. It takes roughly 1 000 kilocalories per day to reverse malnutrition in children. So, just taking food from America's trash, we could eradicate hunger in children. Of course, then they'd be poisoned by all the crap in fast food, but nevertheless.
Alternatively, you could just read this.doc file, pointing out that we already produce enough food to feed double the population of the world? I know, accepting the idea that people starve because of the greed and apathy of wealthy nations combined with the corrupt governments of rich and poor nations, rather than because of some complex socio-economic problem, but it simply isn't true that world hunger is a complex problem.
tl;dr: the world produces enough food to make everyone in the world fat, we just throw it away instead of feeding the 1 000 000 000 starving people.
I would take that point, but pretty much reverse it - if you walk into an Apple shop and try to buy the equivalent of the laptop I'm using right now, you'd be spending more than double (£800 versus £1699; $1322 vs $2808; yes, electronics are expensive here). For that kind of cash for a high-mid-range laptop I'd expect ruggedization, water-resistance... Well, to be honest I just wouldn't spend that on a high-mid laptop. For the price you pay for Apple products, I'd expect them to be completely fucking bulletproof.
... Really, who do you trust more - the NSA employees with high security clearances or the dipshits that work at Microsoft?
That depends what you mean - who do I trust more to know what they're doing? The NSA.
Who do I trust more to tell me the truth about what they are doing? Hmm... Do I trust the Pope or Ayatollah Khamenei more to help my kids learn about safe sex? To make a bad car analogy, what do I trust more to fix my car - the patch of rust on the chassis, or the kid that wants to hotwire said car?
So most MS employees are competent, just chronically mismanaged, and most NSA employees are very definitely competent to do their jobs - I just wouldn't trust them as far as the average slashdotter could throw them, ie at all. All I can say is, if I was a completely amoral security agency specialising in computers, and I got called in to work on the code for the world's most common OS brand - as used by many in the Chinese government - I'd stick a back door in there before I said hello to the dude in the office next to mine.
In my opinion, the missing uninstall button is a Firefox problem. How could they let you install software and list it as is installed software, but provide no method to uninstall?
Simple. Go to your FF address bar and type file:///C: then click on Program Files. You will be faced with a long list of software that FF is claiming is installed on your system, but can't just uninstall. I find it odd that you seem to think a few developers of a piece of software should be able to override the makers of the operating system. Maybe you also think that all the viruses and rootkits and trojans Windows gets from the web is a Firefox problem too?
A while ago there was a fuss about the Dalai Lama's computers getting hacked by Chinese dudes, and one of the guys asked for advice here. The overriding issue was that pretty much any modern software is hackable, if you have a team of experts working on it. MS has such a team, and they chose to target a specific program running within their own operating system - how were the FF devs supposed to stop them? OK, so they make good software, but they can't force you to use a different/better operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the implication that a lack of discovery is "That's not interesting...". There is certainly very strong evidence that publication bias exists and is a tremendous problem in the academic world. While plenty of negative papers do get published the vast majority of published papers have some positive results. As has been discussed already when you get negative results and you want them published you write them out as if they were positive - there is a reason for this, and it's just how people work.
Obligatory car analogy: if someone says "Look! A Ferrari 612!" you look, and you remember (I'm assuming we care about Italian supercars). If someone says "Look! We can't see a single Fiat 500!" (insert local version of very common car here if necessary) then you might go "Hmm. That's a little odd." but you'd need a bit more than that to make it memorable or even interesting.
Well, we know what Steve Jobs said about Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra--"It's bullshit." Or, "a load of crap," depending on your source.
Is that actually based on anything though?
Yes - it's based on one rich guy being annoyed that another rich guy threatened to take some of his richness. From the linked article:
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.
Steve Jobs wasn't making some deep point about Google's manipulation of FOSS, he was just ranting about unfair competition (for 'unfair competition to Apple in the eyes of Steve Jobs' read 'Giant, friendly, happy-go-lucky Silicon Valley company treating design and user experience as important'). He may as well have just complained that Google won't share their toys.
Exactly why do Europeans care that we do not have national healthcare? They care because they see it as the US rejecting their ideals. I see the same people posting that they will be happy when the US collapses and it's people talk about how we should all have national healthcare.
Nothing these people say make me think that they give a damn about us.
Seriously? I don't like people dying. I really don't like people dying of easily preventable causes. I hate people dying in hospitals of easily preventable causes because they aren't millionaires. I couldn't care less about what you want to do with your life, if you're doing ok, but if you use "I'm alright" as an answer to "Why are you letting all these people die?" then you are morally reprehensible. If you are just happy to have people die through lack of money in the richest country in the world when much poorer countries do much better, then that's fine.
The New Scientist had a brilliant graph plotting expected lifespan against annual government spending on healthcare. Guess who spent the most? The US. Guess who had the shortest lifespan? The US. Guess what the only explanation is? Profits on such an epic scale even European levels of corruption don't achieve them.
Not all Europeans are like this. In fact, I imagine that the majority of Europe either likes the US or is apathetic to us. But there is a strong and loud anti-US online sentiment that drowns out the rational ones.
The majority of Europe hates America. Really, really hates America. However, most European people understand that most American people are alright. The basic values of the Founding Fathers are pretty noble and good.
But
Your country and its citizens dare to lecture China on human rights when you don't recognise the International Criminal Courts, you hold unnamed suspects with no evidence and no charges against them for unlimited amounts of time with no access to legal representation. You invade sovereign nations in the name of regime change. You defend these invasions with the words freedom and liberty, and yet have no care for the millions dying in far worse regimes throughout Africa and Asia. You announce wars on abstract ideas like 'terror' or 'drugs' - unwinnable wars that nevertheless get people whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy.
You know what the worst part is, though? The reason people throughout Europe really, really hate the US? Our governments copy you like fscking monkeys, spending more in order to get less, joining in with your pointless wars in far off lands - at least you have companies that profit from rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. Our school systems get more and more like yours, even though our schools have always turned out smarter kids. Nationalised public services start being seen as some left-wing ideal, rather than centrist and part-of-the-basic-ideals-of-the-free-market.
The truth is that the venting you get on the interwebs is actually pretty mild compared with the venting you get at dinner parties, in pubs - basically wherever there aren't Americans, because you bastards are all so fscking nice.
Have a nice day.
Great - while you install the gun locks your kids can fall out of the window! Y'know, since you let them just wander around and haven't bothered teaching them basic safety and responsibility. The point Neoprofin was trying to make was that if you're a crappy parent your kids are going to get in trouble, whether it's crossing the street without looking or shooting themselves in the face. And, as far as I'm aware, in most places isn't it currently illegal to put your kids in a safe?
Their claim of lost sales is bogus, we all know that, but so is the claim that it's not stealing since you wouldn't have bought it anyway. If you wouldn't have bought it anyway then simply don't listen to it or watch it.
Ok then, mister infinite-money-man, why don't you buy all that stuff for me? I don't happen to have infinite resources in my pockets right now, but since you are so fabulously wealthy I'm sure you can reimburse those poor starving millionaires I'm stealing from.
In this particular case IMHO both parties need to change their behavior and work together to solve the problem. You can't have something for free, it costs money to produce and the people doing it need to be paid
I'm a musician, and I'm a geek. When I build someone a website or some other creative work, I don't claim that they must pay me for the high-spec gaming PC I (may have) used, because that just happened to be the computer that I had. Similarly, when I finish the album I'm working on, I'm not planning on charging for the instruments I used, the high-spec gaming rig I used, etc etc. That is what makes the recording industry expensive - that and marketing. And I can't remember the last time I saw an advert for a band that I like.
Seriously, you think it actually costs a hundred thousand dollars to make an album? You (well, I) can make a professional sounding, even-a-professional-can't-tell-the-difference recording for ten dollars, and that includes the cost of pizza and beer. So I've spent maybe two or three thousand dollars on equipment over the years - so what? I don't think I'll ever make any proper money out of it. I didn't buy the stuff as an investment, and anyone that does is an asshat.
A little while ago I calculated how much I would have spent on various media if I'd paid for everything I consumed in the way that I should have. After revising the £20 000 to closer to £30 000 ($48 426.85) because I missed out e-books and various foreign media, I would like to point out that I do not have £30 000. I never have had £30 000. If I took all the money me and my girlfriend get in a year, and didn't bother taking out bills or rent or anything, I would just about have half that. Except that I live in North London, so after rent and bills we have pretty much nothing.
I also added another interesting mental excercise - since I can't buy many of the films I want on anything smaller than a DVD I would need an extra room in my flat to keep all of them. And since I don't have time to keep them in order and archive them properly, with notes and cards and such, I would need a part-time archivist to come in and keep it tidy. After those expenses, we're talking around £50 000 ($80 000+) that I don't have.
How can people forget so quickly that the people who pirate are the ones who spend a large portion of their disposable income on media, and most people who spend a large portion of their disposable income on media also pirate, because the large majority of people in even fairly wealthy countries don't make £120 000 (before tax etc.)? I find the idea that I have somehow stolen £50 000 from someone preposterous, since I didn't take anything from them. I find the argument that I should have paid preposterous, since I don't have any money to pay them with. And I find the idea that I should do without if I can't pay preposterous, since I'm not a socially-right-wing nutjob.
Although I do not have recourse to all public funds with my student visa, and definitely do not have access to benefits, I still have unfettered access to NHS and other quite pricey public services.
I know we here in the UK have a pretty bad rep at the minute, and much of that is deserved, but I believe what you are referring to is a little known concept called civilization. It is the end result of the philosophical stance that people dying for no real reason other than not being fabulously wealthy is probably bad in some way. Similarly, many people that could probably survive without them can get certain benefits, such as housing benefit or Disability Living Allowance.
I believe a large part of the issue that isn't really talked about very much is the same problem that insurance companies face - the cost of checking versus the cost of just paying up. Of course, the more checking you do the greater the chance you will stop fraudulent claims, but unless you do it very very well you will catch a few needy people in there too. In fact, since the cost of checking these things is being driven down, while the amount of checking being done is necessarily increasing due to economic- and population-related issues, the quality of the checks decreases, forcing more and more deserving people off the benefits, to the net benefit of frothing-at-the-mouth fools who have neither a grasp of basic social theory nor a conscience.
Like I said, much of the bad rep is deserved. *sigh*
Dude, H.264 is proprietary, and that's what Apple want as part of the HTML5 specs. Also, it's what the Youtube et al HTML5 betas are running.
Why the hell do you need icons in the first place? You can change the interface for a given language with localization files. You can use simple declarative text in a button with less ambiguity.
Icons speed understanding and free up screen space. The first example I can see in front of me is that of a web browser. If the 'back' button was large enough to have 'back' written on it in readable text, it would be three or four times the size with reduced functionality, since a foreigner would have to find their way into the language options to be able to tell what it did. When we get on to buttons like 'refresh' or 'close tab', I think you can see how quickly screen space would be used up.
Additionally, I can glance up at the toolbar in pretty much any web browser on anyone's computer and tell what the buttons do almost instantly, without having to read what each one says. Reading actually takes quite a long time, in terms of brain functions - of course it is tremendously useful for fairly complex concepts and interactions such as this one, but there is a necessity for ideas like 'refresh page' to have simple representations so that when I'm at a friend's house I can use their browser much more intuitively. Also, if I'm visiting Germans or Italians I can jump on their computer and navigate to English language websites without knowing their language well enough to change their preferences.
That's the problem with this sort of comparison - it's completely subjective. Until pretty recently I simply had no reason to use pen and paper, but used a keyboard all the time, so my typing speed was respectable but my writing speed was atrocious. However, I have recently forced myself to rediscover the wonders of writing by hand, and I know I could write with pen and paper faster than plenty of people can type. Professional typists could have typed his example text in, what, a little over a minute? People who need to keep notes professionally, PAs or scribes or whatever, could probably get it written in about the same time. I think keyboards are logically bound to be slightly faster, but if you think pen and paper is slow you've never seen my girlfriend write in a hurry. Of course, a keyboard tends to produce fairly readable text, but that's a different (but related) issue...
Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read www.bbc.co.uk or www.telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk or www.zeit.de or cnn.com or slashdot.org or www.dailymail.co.uk or and the list goes on.
This is the whole problem, of course - the more sites go paywalled, the more incentive there is for the others to stay free. Very few media sources I've found actually provide a significantly better service than many other sources, so it simply doesn't make sense for me as a consumer to pay for product I can get for free. Of course, there are those that say that my way of thinking will kill journalism / music / whatever, but I'll pay as soon as there is significant incentive to (ie. if they actually start dying off).
I apologise if reading my post caused you to feel I was making light of the condition. However, you must accept that anyone that can toilet themselves, feed themselves, and function on a basic level in the real world, suffers very, very mild ASD - additionally, around 80% of ASD people suffer additional severe learning difficulties. The average mental age of a sufferer of ASD is roughly 8 to 10 years old without taking the autism into account.
I think medical science can define this as incurable (for the moment) because it isn't a disease, and doesn't fit into standard models of medical disorders. Curing amputation, which you offer as a comparison, is trivial in comparison - we know what needs doing and we know the theory of how to do it. With ASD not only do we not know what causes it, it is from a young age such a vast part of an individual's personality that meaningful recovery is meaningless - giving an amputee a leg or a blind person sight is meaningful, because these things do not define who those people are. Autism defines the very essence of a person so deeply that removing it would be similar to removing my existential dread and anguish and the drive it gives me to do good - what would be left would be less me than what was taken away.
If anyone wants to learn a little about ASD, check out Aspies For Freedom - obviously the people on this site are extremely high functioning, but check out some conversations on the forums. It can be truly enlightening to see what people have to go through just to make themselves understood.
Then again, if you had fragile X syndrome you wouldn't actually have autism. This is a deeply misleading article title and summary, since Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) covers a wide range of psychological profiles and is deeply misunderstood by most people - even plenty of people who work with it every day. You will notice, reading the article (yeah, I must be new here) that none of the scientists mention ASD. The guy who wrote this piece just thought that would give him an angle, since no one has heard of fragile X syndrome, but everyone loves a good autism story, despite (because of?) most people never having met someone with serious levels of ASD.
Just to clear things up, fragile X syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality that causes various physical deformities and some forms of mental retardation. This is acceptable of you want to know more. There is some limited evidence that correlation exists between some forms of ASD and fragile X syndrome, but causality is far from demonstrated.
Additionally, ASD is defined as being a "pervasive developmental disorder", meaning that a) symtoms must be present from fairly early on in life and b) autism is an innate part of the person suffering from it, and a cure not only doesn't exist - the concept of a cure is nonsensical. Don't get me wrong, I would love there to be a cure for ASD, but medical science currently defines it as uncurable. As an analogy, it would be like trying to 'cure' someone of having social function and being capable of imaginitive play - you could teach them limited functions to appear like they had no grasp of the abstract, but you couldn't turn them autistic.
The media, and people in general, need to cease this endless obsession with autism - it's an incredibly complex subject, and studying it for years only allows you to scratch the surface (trust me on this). Being crap with people suggests some form of social, behavioural, or anxiety disorder. ASD is a serious disorder with serious consequences. Rainman does not exist. As a rule of thumb, if you can put together a fully formed sentence, you almost certainly don't have meaningful levels of ASD. If you can read facial expressions without spending years actually consciously memorising what faces mean what, you don't have meaningful levels of ASD. Okay, if you've gotten this far you might have comparatively mild Asperger's or something on that end of the spectrum, but it'll be clinically relevant only in a small fraction of a percent of that already small group.
While I agree that music is much less annoying than the noise of other people trying to get their jobs done, sometimes when I'm coding alone in my house I need to crank some Aphex Twin or other discordant mentalism just for a base level of distraction - I find if 10% of my mind is trying not to get distracted it helps the other 90% just get on with the job in hand.
I suppose it's sort of like chewing gum or fiddling with stationary - there's just a bit of your mind dedicated to looking out for tigers, and if you're confident there are no tigers in your office you need to give it something else to do.
Please don't insult those of us who actually like science - these guys were not and are not scientists. They're just some people with university-level education and a load of fancy gadgets. No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head.
I think partly the issue is one of specificity. People with claims to make are always 'scientists'. Found a new subatomic particle? Scientist. Got a probiotic yoghurt to sell? Scientist. It feels to me like calling anyone who makes things a builder, whether they make fine wines or aircraft carriers.
The point that people overlook when comparing science to religion is that science doesn't want your belief. It doesn't want your respect. It wants you to look at the evidence, try to reproduce it, try to touch it and play with it, and see if you agree. I hate saying I believe in science, because I don't. However, in my experince and the experience of others whom I respect, the scientific method is the most valid way - nay, the only valid way - to reach conclusions, whether they be huge and far reaching ("The Higgs is here! We found it!") or entirely meaningless ("I leaned back on my chair and a siren went off! My chair must have developed a siren!" vs "I leaned back on my chair and a siren went off. Hmm... Lean forward, lean back, lean forward, lean back... Just a coincidence. OK then.").
Einstein questioned "valid" laws of science and look what it got him.
Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time. Gradually, through debate and observation and experimentation, more and more people realised he had made a series of logical points that disproved the old ways of doing things.
Let us compare this to the argument from incredulity - the equivalent would have been Einstein saying, "But I don't understand it! How does it work? No, look, see, the feather and the hammer land at different times! Ha! Scientists are dumb!" in which case I doubt he would have quite the same status in the history books.
This. This this this.
The number of times I've had to explain to my ISPs tech support that they just need to tell me what they want, as opposed to which button in XP to click, at one point got so bad that I feel I was justified in pirating Windows just so I could dual boot into it for those idiots. I had a friend once who was getting a slow connection speed from his router to the ISP, and they told him he'd have to get Windows before they could help him, because they don't support Linux.
Normally with these places the answer is that you just ask, 'What's your favourite distro?' as soon as they pick up, and if they say anything along the lines of, 'Umm...' or, 'What?' just hang up there and then - that's what the redial button is for. With a staff of 40, unless they're thinking of paying network-admin-level Euros, maybe two of these people is gonna have a frickin' clue how to troubleshoot malware on Linux, if the Germans are lucky.
I love the idea of a malware support line not being aimed at Windows users - I mean, come on. Seriously. We can debate why, we can debate how, we can debate many, many things, but we cannot possibly pretend that malware is a serious problem for every single user of Linux or Mac or whatever that hasn't spent hours upon hours setting up security buffers and manually hacking virtualized Windows so that they can save flashsites and then run them on the virtualized system-within-a-system; that's what you get with Windows. At least, that's what I get with Windows, and I have spent more of my life than I care to think about installing firewalls and AVs and giving them custom configs and then realizing too late that I have to do it again and I should have saved the config since I regularly (see: ~ once per year) have to reinstall Windows to get some speed back...
I hope the CRIA is found liable for every penny of the $60 billion and is put out of business once and for all.
This is so naive it very nearly pains me. Not because you think the CRIA might lose - I think of that as optimism. No, rather because you think that $60 billion is a lot of money, and that they will have to pay it. Now, IANAL, but I am pretty sure that once a company declares itself bankrupt and disappears from the face of the Earth, that's it. Gone.
Two weeks later, the Canadian Association for the Recording Industry will pop up, and lo and behold! All the same employees, bar the dead wood they were trying to shift in the first place!
Of course, I sincerely hope I am wrong. I like to think of myself as quietly optimistic, and as such I look to a future where the greedy and the vicious are chastened by society's scorn and live lives of charity and humility. Unfortunately, while that bit of my brain is being quietly optimistic, there's another bit shouting DON'T BE SO STUPID!
I was going to go to the doctor about these voices in my head, but if the RIAA hear about them singing that Miley Cyrus song I'll be done for. No, better off just keeping quiet, like they want...
Here's another point - he is rich and white - the only way he could (statistically) live longer is be female or live in any other developed nation. Because of this, a year to him is worth less, since he'll be getting blowjobs from cybwhorgs and swallowing a pill for dinner long after I've kicked the proverbial. Since his time is worth less, he should spend much longer in prison than a normal human. QED.
I take it you didn't see that study recently that showed that America alone wastes 1 400 kilocalories per person per day, or 150 trillion kilocalories per year. It takes roughly 1 000 kilocalories per day to reverse malnutrition in children. So, just taking food from America's trash, we could eradicate hunger in children. Of course, then they'd be poisoned by all the crap in fast food, but nevertheless.
Alternatively, you could just read this .doc file, pointing out that we already produce enough food to feed double the population of the world? I know, accepting the idea that people starve because of the greed and apathy of wealthy nations combined with the corrupt governments of rich and poor nations, rather than because of some complex socio-economic problem, but it simply isn't true that world hunger is a complex problem.
tl;dr: the world produces enough food to make everyone in the world fat, we just throw it away instead of feeding the 1 000 000 000 starving people.
I would take that point, but pretty much reverse it - if you walk into an Apple shop and try to buy the equivalent of the laptop I'm using right now, you'd be spending more than double (£800 versus £1699; $1322 vs $2808; yes, electronics are expensive here). For that kind of cash for a high-mid-range laptop I'd expect ruggedization, water-resistance... Well, to be honest I just wouldn't spend that on a high-mid laptop. For the price you pay for Apple products, I'd expect them to be completely fucking bulletproof.
... Really, who do you trust more - the NSA employees with high security clearances or the dipshits that work at Microsoft?
That depends what you mean - who do I trust more to know what they're doing? The NSA.
Who do I trust more to tell me the truth about what they are doing? Hmm... Do I trust the Pope or Ayatollah Khamenei more to help my kids learn about safe sex? To make a bad car analogy, what do I trust more to fix my car - the patch of rust on the chassis, or the kid that wants to hotwire said car?
So most MS employees are competent, just chronically mismanaged, and most NSA employees are very definitely competent to do their jobs - I just wouldn't trust them as far as the average slashdotter could throw them, ie at all. All I can say is, if I was a completely amoral security agency specialising in computers, and I got called in to work on the code for the world's most common OS brand - as used by many in the Chinese government - I'd stick a back door in there before I said hello to the dude in the office next to mine.
Not that I want to take part in a game of oneupmanship, but round these parts we recently had a radioactive paedophile on the loose...
In my opinion, the missing uninstall button is a Firefox problem. How could they let you install software and list it as is installed software, but provide no method to uninstall?
Simple. Go to your FF address bar and type file:///C: then click on Program Files. You will be faced with a long list of software that FF is claiming is installed on your system, but can't just uninstall. I find it odd that you seem to think a few developers of a piece of software should be able to override the makers of the operating system. Maybe you also think that all the viruses and rootkits and trojans Windows gets from the web is a Firefox problem too?
A while ago there was a fuss about the Dalai Lama's computers getting hacked by Chinese dudes, and one of the guys asked for advice here. The overriding issue was that pretty much any modern software is hackable, if you have a team of experts working on it. MS has such a team, and they chose to target a specific program running within their own operating system - how were the FF devs supposed to stop them? OK, so they make good software, but they can't force you to use a different/better operating system.