This. I have zero interest in watching a five minute video just to get the same content I could read in thirty seconds.
THIS.
Perhaps the two most important features of text which aren't mentioned in TFS -- (1) we generally read faster than we speak, so we can usually gather information faster from text, and (2) text is much more skimmable.
Trying to get information from a video often drives me nuts: you can try to fast-forward or skip ahead (then wait for it to buffer each time), only to find you went too far, or maybe the person doesn't talk about what you want in that segment or whatever. It's a pain in the neck. Video is good for what it is: showing visual stuff in time. If you need a tutorial on how to do some physical skill, then sure, make a video. If you want to explain an abstract concept, video just slows down things for your audience.
I first realized the problem with video (and audio) with audio podcasts that have transcripts available online. I'd start listening to a podcast, and realize I didn't care so much about the delivery, but I wanted to know the gist of the topic... and if there's an online transcript, I can often skim an hour-long program in a few minutes and find the relevant bits to read in depth. MUCH more efficient. Sure, it's fun to listen to a podcast when I'm busy doing something else that's rather mindless, but if I actually want information efficiently, text is FAR superior as a delivery method.
But beyond the efficiency, what concerns me more about this trend is the potential for manipulation that comes from video. I remember seeing a couple of studies years ago showing the difference between people who watched an opinion/news report on something vs. reading a short passage about it. When they were asked to express opinions, a number of disturbing trends came out. (For example, video viewers expressed a higher confidence in their understanding, even though it wasn't better than those who read text.) But most worryingly, the people who watched the video were less able to critically evaluate the information that was presented to them. That is, if they watched a news anchor present an opinion on a controversial issue, they were more likely to be persuaded by a weak argument from a video than they were from text.
That last part doesn't surprise me at all -- after all, we love TV news "personalities," who dress up and look attractive as they tell us the news. Why wouldn't we trust what they say? And with video, it's harder to go back and review parts that maybe weren't quite thought-through. If you're reading an argument, you can stop and think over parts that don't make sense, perhaps even go back a few sentences and re-read. With a video, you're forced to listen at the pace of the speaker, and they obviously will alter their delivery in ways to emphasize their positive points while downplaying or muddling the negatives.
So, a move toward video isn't just decreasing efficiency of content delivery -- it's potentially making the population stupider, more malleable, and less capable of critical thought. That's NOT a good trend overall.
I just don't get _why_ advertising works; it's annoying!
Yes, when it's too intrusive or "in your face." But marketing research for many decades has shown that "unconscious" (or "subconscious") processing for ads still has significant effects.
It's particularly prominent for simple things like brand familiarity. You may not be actively watching a TV commercial as you talk to a friend during the ad, but if your eye goes across the screen, you might see a product name. Or hear the product name mentioned repeatedly. Same thing with glancing through a newspaper or magazine -- you might not stop and read the ad, but repeated exposure to name brands will eventually register familiarity... even if you're not consciously thinking very much about it.
And thus when you go to the store, you start looking at the shelf for detergent and you see Tide. You've never really thought about laundry detergent consciously, but this name looks more familiar. So perhaps you're more likely to buy it.
It doesn't make (smart) people more willing to buy your product!
DING DING DING!!
Smart people are NOT the target audience for most ads. Smart people do weird stuff like research what laundry detergent might actually work better BEFORE they even go to the store. They might stop and read material and ingredients lists on the detergent before buying. They might even pull out their phone and verify that the claim to have "natural" ingredients even means anything, or if the detergent is just selling the same basic crap at twice the price for a "natural" label. (Pretty common practice these days.)
Smart people use and seek outinformation to influence a purchase. Advertising is all about finding ways to convince you to buy something on the basis of something other than rational thought and valid information. If it were about those things, the best ads would just consist of a list of specs for good products... and obviously they don't.
Even if she personally drove each drone and murdered a bunch of people, I'd still vote for her over Trump.
This year is the perfect example of why we need to get rid of "first past the post" voting. It's too bad it couldn't happen because the two major parties have themselves "locked in" and control the system.
Both of the major parties are on track to nominate candidates who are hated by more Americans than they are liked. This has never happened in the history of modern polling.
Under a different and more fair voting system that is determined to select a winner that would be considered qualified by a majority of Americans, this election so far would be very likely to lead to a 3rd-party president.
And anyone with even the simplest understand of the Bible understands that this is Mosaic Law, which A: was only given to the Jews for their society, and B: Christians are not under.
And anyone with even the simplest knowledge of history understands that (A) numerous Christians, including many conservative Christian sects today, cite this passage all the time to justify hatred against homosexuals, and (B) for a large portion of the past 2000 years this Levitical verse was used as justification in most European (Christian!) nations and their colonies to make homosexuality a capital crime.
Christianity over the centuries has always had an interesting relationship with Mosaic law. Sure, most theologians would say Christians are not bound by it, but historically Christian leaders will happily quote laws of the Old Testament to support their perspective on some issue.
And which Christian priest or Rabby has recently radicalized a young follower with it?..
Are you serious? Do you have any clue of the amount of violence perpetrated every year against LGBT people in most Christian countries? (You might start reading with the Wikipedia article.) A lot of it is justified by this biblical passage. Conservative preachers in the US trot it out a lot. Eastern Europe and Russia have period riots (with violence) against homosexuals who practice openly. Lots of other countries too. If you look over this list of violent acts against LGBT people, you'll find many, many in predominately Christian countries, perpetrated by Christians.
Have there been incidents on the scale of this recent attack? Not to my knowledge. But numerous individual assaults and murders are perpetrated on gays by Christians every year, many of them justified by what they are taught explicitly in their churches. Heck, look at the reactions of many conservative American Christians on Twitter after this recent incident -- lots are willing to praise the attack, even though it was an act of terrorism perpetrated by a Muslim!
Wrong. I'm comparing modern interpretation of Judaism and Christianity â" you got that part right â" with the modern interpretation of Islam.
Please note that the post you originally replied to (and which served as the topic for my reply to you) was concerned about the history of the last 2000 years in the Abrahamic religions, not just what these religions endorse today. In particular, the person you originally replied to claimed that all of these Abrahamic religions had been teaching against homosexuality for the past 2000 years.
You claimed that wasn't true and that Islam is different. It's true that the percentage of Islamic folks who believe it's right to kill gays today is likely greater than the percentage of Christian or Jewish folks who believe it's right to kill gays. But this was not really true for the past 2000 years, which is what our present thread is about.
For roughly 1800 of the past 2000 years, all three Abrahamic religions agreed that homosexuality should be punishable by death, and for roughly 1950 of the past 2000 years all three religions agreed that this moral principle should be criminalized, and in many places it was incorporated into secular law largely due to Christian efforts.
But Jews remain Jews living under other governments â" unlike Islam, neither Judaism nor Christianity make government structure part of the scripture.
Huh? Have you even read the Torah? There is no distinction made there between civil and religious government. Many conservative Jewish communities today in whatever country believe that they should essentially be self-policing, giving out punishments among their own people as designated by their law... regardless of the larger civil law. And while the New Testament does in a few places make a distinction between civil and religious principles, in practice through most of European (and American) history there was a great "bleed through" of religious Christian moral principles in structuring the government and laws. Christians took over the Roman empire, then when the first major European power structure emerged after the Western Empire's collapse (under Charlemagne) the pope insisted on crowning him Holy Roman Emperor to make clear the place of political dominions within religious control. All of this basically continued throughout Europe until the Reformation, and even among Reformed nations, many of them continued to explicitly evoke Christian theology in the structuring of law and government (and many still do).
Basically, many Islamic nations may be somewhere between 50 and 250 years "behind" the evolution of law and the divorcing of morality from fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts compared to Christian nations. But if you look at the past 2000 years (as this thread was originally about), the three don't look that different... except, well, Jews didn't really have a good opportunity to take over political power on a national scale since antiquity until recently. (Also, in fact, it might be important to note that in medieval times, Islamic nations were actually often MORE tolerant toward other religions and groups living under their political frameworks than Christian nations of the time were of Jews or Muslims.)
because Abrahamic religions in general and Islam in particular have been saying that for 2000 years
Judaism is a lot older than that, actually, while Islam is a lot younger.
Well, it's a reasonably good average. The beginnings of Judaism are difficult to ascertain, but organized Judaism (and our extant religious texts) probably go back 2500 years or so. Christianity was obviously founded about 2000 years ago. Islam is roughly 1600 years old. 2000 years is pretty much right in the middle, and ALL three were a LONG time ago.
More importantly, Islam - uniquely among Abrahamic religions - compels the followers to do something about it. A Christian can be a "good Christian" if he merely prays for the sinners' salvation. A Muslim must act
Well, what you're actually comparing is the modern interpretation of Judaism and Christianity with the worst interpretations of Islam.
There are plenty of passages in the Bible (particularly Old Testament) that require action. Traditional Jewish law required homosexuals to be put to death (Leviticus 20:13). It's right there in the Torah. But various practices in Jewish law have basically been "suspended" after the destruction of the Temple; hence no more sacrifices, etc. as required by Leviticus are done either. (In fact, there are plenty of capital crimes listed in the Torah, many of which we might dispute today, from adultery to disobeying a parent.)
But there's nothing actually in the Torah which says you can ignore these laws. It's just rabbinical tradition, that gradually came around to avoiding the issue almost entirely by instituting a system of checks-and-balances that effectively makes it impossible to execute someone. But if you look at the Torah text itself (the equivalent of looking at the Quran alone), it's pretty darn clear that we should also be stoning homosexuals or something.
And as for Christianity, well, it generally followed the plain text of the Old Testament for the first 1800 years or so of its existence, with many Christian countries instituting a death penalty for homosexuality on the basis of the Bible. (In ancient Rome, it was by public burning, under Justinian law it "merely" required castration, and in most medieval and early modern Europe, it required death. In general, criminalization of homosexuality in Europe correlates well with the spread of Christianity.) It was only around the time of the American Revolution that states in the U.S. started abolishing the death penalty for homosexuality... though homosexuality remained a capital crime in South Carolina until 1873 (12 years after England had dropped the death penalty for it).
So, sorry, but all the Abrahamic religions required homosexuals to be killed according to their original religious texts. Islam may only be "behind the times" in that some of its followers are a couple of centuries behind Christianity in deciding to completely ignore many tenets of its religious texts. Nevertheless, only 7 Muslim nations have a death penalty for homosexuality (a lot less of a percentage than major Christian nations a few centuries ago), and 20 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations have no criminal prohibition against homosexuality at all.
I'm NOT at all defending the traditional Islamic stance, only noting that historically the other Abrahamic religions weren't better. They've only just decided to ignore their founding texts earlier in history (as more and more Muslims are doing these days too -- but for some reason anti-Muslim folks just love citing the Quran as though no Muslim could ever disagree with it, while the vast majority of Jews and Christians ignore the plain text of the Levitical law and few would claim that their religion "requires them to act").
as for permit carriers actually stopping crimes, for every gun used in self defense, 34 people die.
and yes, the FBI and CDC has statistics.
Just to be clear, your statistics don't justify your previous claim. (And I say this as someone who is in favor of greater gun regulation. I just don't think it's a good idea to use misleading statistics to support an argument.)
That works out to one justifiable gun death for every 34 unjustifiable gun deaths. [snip] That works out to one self-defense killing for every 78 gun suicides. CDC data show that there were more than twice as many accidental gun fatalities as as justifiable killings.
What you've shown is the ratio of justifiable killings to (unjustified) murders... or suicides or whatever.
That has little basis for a comparison of "every gun used in self-defense," which is where you started your argument. One would hope (and there are definitely statistics showing) that the vast majority of guns used in self-defense did NOT result in death -- either because simply brandishing the weapon deterred the assailant, or because the victim simply wounded the assailant.
And, in fact, if you want to find statistics supporting the "other side," you can easily do so. There are well-known FBI statistics out there from various reports suggesting that there are millions of uses of guns in self-defense every year, though the vast majority of them never result in a shot fired.
I don't buy those statistics, either -- and there are various ways that critics have picked them apart. On the basis of "studies" and "data," we can only definitively say that the number of "defensive gun uses" in the U.S. per year is somewhere between 50,000 and 5,000,000. That's a big range. (But, I'd note that even the lowest estimate from a reputable study is well over 100 times what your argument implies.)
Basically, when it comes to gun politics in the U.S., I've come to believe that anyone who is a strong advocate on either side will cherry-pick statistics that really don't answer the questions we need to consider. Your post is no exception.
And while I agree with you that better studies and funding for them is a good idea, I also recognize that the vast majority of gun studies out there seem to be run with a strong agenda in mind for one side or the other. Thus, you'll still just end up with a battle of conflicting statistics, even with more data.
The only way to really resolve such an argument is to have a strong education in statistics, an understanding of how they can be manipulated, and the kinds of flaws inherent in various population studies. Most people arguing for one side or the other in this debate aren't interested in such nuance. But when you look at it that way, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle: guns ARE used a lot in self defense (a lot more than your statistics suggest), but they also are responsible for a lot of possibly preventable deaths (particularly suicides and accidental shootings).
I think there's some confusion in terminology here.
It is a belief. It is an affirmative belief. It might qualify as a religion or creed depending on how you define those words.
There are traditionally philosophical distinctions made between "strong" (or "positive") atheism vs. "weak" (or "negative") atheism. "Strong atheists" have a positive belief that no gods exist. Most atheists are merely "weak atheists," who don't actively believe in gods -- and may think they sound unlikely -- but don't have an (unprovable) belief in their non-existence.
Lack of belief in something doesn't necessarily entail a positive (and equally unprovable) belief in an opposite.
It is a belief because you can't prove something doesn't exist. It's a consequence of logic. All reason is necessarily based on a foundation of beliefs.
This is a bit of a different issue, which is more related to the traditional definition of agnosticism. A traditional agnostic is someone who has a positive belief that the answers to some questions are unknowable. ("Gnostic" refers to knowledge, an agnostic believes that one can't have that knowledge.)
These days the word "agnostic" is often used for weak atheism, but it's actually a separate issue. An agnostic traditionally is someone who believes we CANNOT know whether God exists -- it's just not a question that can be verified one way or another on the basis of normal empirical evidence. (Philosophers sometimes draw a distinction between "strong" and "weak" agnosticism too.)
An agnostic is someone that neither believes in the supernatural nor does not believe in it. They are undecided or uncommitted.
Again, that's not the word traditionally meant. What you're describing is what philosophers and theologians would generally call weak atheism (i.e., lack of a "theist" belief, hence a-theism). Agnosticism is about what we ALL could possibly know on the basis of evidence, and whether we have sufficient grounds to justify belief, not about whether an individual believes or not.
People colloquially use the label atheist when they mean a person that atheist or agnostic since to them both are guilty.
Agreed, though as I noted -- there are even more distinctions that you make. Using these terms the way philosophers would, it's quite possible to be a gnostic atheist (i.e., a person who has a positive belief that God by definition doesn't exist and believes that he has certain knowledge of this fact), or an agnostic theist (i.e., a person who believes that God exists, but believes it is outside the possibility of science to prove it), or even other stranger combinations.
Most people are agnostic no matter how much say they are atheistic and will readily prey when faced with imminent death.
This is again a separate issue. If I were dying of starvation, I'd definitively prey on animals to survive... sure.
In the 1930s, chemical warfare was looked on the same way. It was just assumed that the next war would be chemical. Remember all the gas masks that were issued during the London Blitz?
I don't know why this belief seems "bizarre" at all.
Given the widespread use of chemical weapons during WWI (despite the fact that the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited them and made their use a war crime), I think it was pretty reasonable for people to make preparations that assumed they might be used in a future war.
It looks bizarre to modern eyes as chemical weapons were not used during WWII but everyone certainly expected it.
Huh? The Japanese made widespread use of them in WWII, just not against Western troops (for fear of retaliation). But in their invasions of Asian countries (particularly China), they used them on a number of occasions... so much so that FDR threatened that America would use chemical weapons against Japan if they kept doing it. Note that the U.S. also had NOT ratified the Geneva Protocol prohibiting use of chemical weapons. (Just the number of unused abandoned chemical weapons shells the Japanese left behind in China probably number in the millions. Australia was so concerned that they'd be used in a Japanese invasion that they secretly imported and stockpiled nearly a million chemical munitions, since the Australians knew the only reason Japan targeted China with them was because the Chinese had none and couldn't retaliate with them.)
And both the Germans and the Allies seriously considered deploying them -- but unlike in WWI (where a gradual escalation of their use against treaties by both sides eventually led to open warfare -- at first the Germans merely opened up gas canisters when the wind was favorable, arguing that the international law only prohibited chemical shells) in WWII neither side was willing to be "the first." Instead they took up firebombing and other new methods to intimidate the enemy.
I blame the translation - I'm sure it sounded much more coherent in the original Klingon.:)
While I know this comment is meant to be funny, there's potentially something really insightful here. Thinking about this comment after watching a bit of the film here made me think about a rough analog to this film in comedy, namely the classic stand-up act where a comedian "imitates" a foreign language without actually knowing how to speak it. Sid Caesar, for example, was particularly well-known for this. (If you've never seen what I'm talking about, here's an example of Sid Caesar doing this schtick.)
In his act, Caesar would make it sound (sort of) like another language by doing two things: (1) throwing in a few random words, names, or phrases that might be known to tourists or might be associated with the language (e.g., proper names), and (2) filling up the rest of the stuff around these actual foreign words with gibberish that incorporated some of the sounds and cadences of native speakers. (How successful he was at this gibberish imitation is of course up for debate; but it was close enough to work for comedy.)
Anyhow, the ONLY difference I can see between Sid Caesar's gibberish and this screenplay (and most "AI chatbot" output these days, for that matter) is that the constituent parts of the language to create the "gibberish" are larger. For Sid Caesar, he didn't know the languages, and memorizing thousands of words or phrases in the language for a comedy schtick would sort of defeat the purpose of the act.
But for a computer, it's trivial to feed in millions of words and phrases in English (or whatever language), or even millions of words and phrases from various sci-fi screenplays. So, rather than gibberish happening on the level of a phoneme or the level of a few syllables that sound like common words in a language (as in Sid Caesar), instead we have gibberish happening on the level of combinations of words, phrases, and whole sentences -- which sound like they're thrown together somewhat haphazardly.
The other thing that "sells" Sid Caesar's routine are those "anchor words" or proper names that do carry at least some meaning (often random or nonsensical, but at least they're familiar to the audience). Same thing with this AI: there is a spark of familiarity to sci-fi dialogue or phrasing in places, which in a better film might be an allusion to another movie or something, but here it often just sounds weird and arbitrary (like Sid Caesar's routine).
And the last thing that one needs to make Sid Caesar's routine work is his acting -- the way he declaims and shapes the sounds, as well as his body language and gesturing, is also what adds a cultural note that makes it all more "human." That's what the actors add in this filmed version too: if you just look at the text screenplay, it all seems like nonsense. But the actors here TRY their best to make SOME sense out of it.
I think it's very telling that some people are trying to characterize this as "hilarious," while other people in this thread have compared it to bad art films or something. I think zany comedies and art films can contain a lot of stuff that seems confusing or random, often because they're deliberately defying convention (or sometimes deliberately alluding to another film or cultural idea). The randomness in zany comedy comes from the knowing juxtaposition of elements that will seem bizarre. The confusing elements of art-house film to those "not in the know" are often due to knowing frustrating of convention or allusion to a complex web of previous films or whatever.
This screenplay has these random elements -- except not because the AI is deliberately going away from conventions, of course. The AI just doesn't "understand" ANYTHING. So, it comes across as a really bad imitation of zany comedy combined with "art" cinema, since the reference
Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
I know this is probably obvious, but for some people, money isn't everything. Also, until recent decades, going to college wasn't about maximizing lifelong profits either. (This is a big misperception of correlation vs. causation: a century or more ago, aristocrats who already had wealth sent their kids to college because that's what rich people did; at some point people made the incorrect assumption that college made people rich, rather than the reality which is that most college students were rich before they attended and likely would have stayed rich anyway.)
I remember seeing some plot of IQ vs. adult income years ago, where the highest income peaked at maybe a couple standard deviations above mean. For IQ above that, the average income descended quite a bit.
As someone who hangs out with a lot of academics, it's well worth it to most of them to be in community of like-minded people doing what they love. It also takes a certain intellectual openness to get to that point, to realize that the modern quest for more money and more "stuff" at all costs is ultimately a bit pointless.
I'm not at all criticizing people who choose other paths -- if that big salary, giant house, fancy car, boat, etc. are valuable to you, enough to do what many do (work long hours, never see their kids, never take vacations, never have time for significant hobbies or time to learn something new outside of work, etc.)... well, that's a choice. It's your life, and everyone can find their own way to maximize their own happiness.
But I don't find it ironic at all that people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude might value a life of intellectual activity higher than maximizing monetary gain.
I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
If that's true, you may have chosen poorly for college. (Either that, or you went to one of the most elite high schools with super high standards.)
Well, actually, I'm not going to say you chose poorly -- it's up to everyone to choose their own path. For me, in life I've found that I enjoy challenging myself more than just taking easy routes, particularly academically. If I showed up at a college and it was easier than my high school, I would have concluded that it wasn't worthwhile and would try to transfer to somewhere better.
Everyone does not struggle. There are reasons you have difficulty--not that you're too stupid for college, or that the next guy has a better brain; it's that you're using the wrong methods, and you're entering an unfamiliar environment.
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a lack of structured study skills or inability to manage time efficiently.
But there are also distinctive other problems that tend to be more common among "disadvantaged students," particularly those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Number one is probably the fact that many of these students simply have fewer resources than other college students. They are more likely to have to work part-time (even multiple part-time jobs) while taking classes, just to pay for school. They are more likely to have more complicated family responsibilities at a younger age, which also sucks up a lot of time. They are more likely to live at home and commute rather than living in a dorm on-campus, which may occupy a couple hours or more per day just to get back and forth to classes. Because they're disconnected from campus life, it's often harder for them to make friends, build "study groups" they can use as resources, and the isolation can lead to depression, along with an inability to understand how different the lives of the "on-campus" students are and how they (more successfully) manage their struggles. Etc., etc.
In other words, sometimes students pick up or take advantage of the study skills of others -- but "disadvantaged" students can find it harder to be a part of that.
Also, in the name of "diversity," many schools try to bring in students who are "disadvantaged." Yes, in many cases these are also minority students, but many elite schools also like to try to find those unusual students from the crappy public school that have the potential to excel.
These students sometimes experience a "mismatch" effect -- not only are they more likely to experience a much more sudden increase in level of material than the upper-middle-class kid who went to the elite prep school, but "diversity" measures often also target minority students who may be on the lower end of the curve of admitted students. So, beyond a possible lack of study/time skills, disadvantaged students may also be dealing with a much greater initial learning curve to catch up to the level of college life than others.
Besides all of this, the geniuses among us are only using competent mental techniques. These range from scheduling and reframing as above to structured study techniques (SQW4R, OK4R), casual or systemic mnemonics (simple visualization up through mind palaces and other systems), and even structured note-taking systems (Cornell notes are the best generic; there are better systems for certain specific materials). Developing and exercising the correct skills *vastly* reduces the difficulties faced in college because time spent studying is optimized: less effort and less time produces more complete understanding and better grades.
SOME "geniuses among us" use deliberate structured techniques like this. Other people depend on innate abilities that they don't have to think about. (And when I say "innate," I don't necessary mean they were born with it: I also include things that for whatever reason a talented kid may have figured out in processing the world when he/she was very young, and it's become so ingrained in the very way they think and process information that they are completely unaware of how different it is from other people.)
Obviously these structured techniques can be helpful to some. But I'd really hesitate to say that all smart people are "only using mental techniques" of the kind you mention... certainly not consciously or deliberately.
Telling people to grin and bear it because college is hard is idiotic.
To some extent, I agree. But as I noted above, sometime for "disadvantaged" students the problems aren't just a lack
Just some of the things that had to happen for us to be where we are now:
This is an interesting list, and as you note, there are all sorts of "other things that could fit in between those points."
However, your conclusion CANNOT follow, i.e., a technological civilization that can broadcast information is "very VERY unlikely." You have no basis to say it is "unlikely" nor "likely," because we have one data point -- Earth. One cannot extrapolate from one data point.
And that's why articles like this one always bug me a bit. "Researchers Say the Aliens Are Silent Because They Are Extinct." First of all, even the name "researchers" is problematic for a topic like this. What research did they do? Look at Earth's history. What other examples of evolution of life did they study??... oh wait, we know of none, so they didn't have anything else to study.
A better way of viewing this research would be as a continual improvement of understanding the complex history of Earth and life's interaction with the planet. Claiming that this relates in any way to arguments about aliens makes a bunch of currently unsupportable assumptions. Just because Carl Sagan imagined life must be everywhere and common because the universe is just so darn big is NOT a scientific argument.
For example, take the first item on parent's list: "1) Life had to evolve." We have no freakin' clue how easy or hard it may be for abiogenesis to occur. We did some experiments starting back in the 1950s that showed under conditions that may have been like early Earth, we can get amino acids and other similar molecules. That's a LONG way from even the simplest "life form" we can imagine. And there are lots of elements of complexity theory from the past couple decades that have sought to show how complex systems could self-organize, but again most of this is speculative -- and again we just have no clue how "likely" or "unlikely" all of the steps might be.
It could be that if you have a planet in a "Goldilocks zone" with roughly the right mixture of elements and roughly the right amount of water or whatever that abiogenesis happens 90% of the time over a billion years. OR, it could be that there are all sorts of little factors that really have to come together to make it work -- maybe if the temperature is 20 degrees hotter or cooler, the reactions become a billion times less likely. Maybe if some element in the mixture is off by 0.1%, the reactions become a billion times less likely. Maybe if gravity is 10% stronger or weaker, density causes different types of stratification which makes the reactions a billion times less likely. Maybe it wasn't relatively stable conditions over millions of years that led to abiogenesis, but instead one pond over a much shorter period of time that had just the right unusual mixture.
We just have no clue. And the typical response I usually hear is, "Well, but you are simply not considering how freakin' HUGE the universe is -- how many galaxies, stars, planets, etc. The chances that we're alone are miniscule!!!"
Except none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the probability of intelligent life evolving. Maybe that's 90% of the Goldilocks planets. Maybe it's 1 in 100 trillion of the Goldilocks planets, because of all sorts of factors we haven't quantified yet.
Incredibly unlikely events happen every day. If I shuffle a deck of 52 cards, the chances of the particular order I end up with are 1 in 8x10^67. Assuming around 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and assuming the number of stars in our galaxy in each one, we end up with something like 10^24 stars. Let's assume that on average each of those stars has a planet in the Goldilocks zone (probably overgenerous, but let's run with it). Let's assume a population of 10 billion imaginary aliens on each of those planets, each of whom shuffles a deck of cards every second. Even with all of that, on average those
You mean a password manager like KeePass, where the developer has explicitly and publicly chosen ad revenue over security?
Apparently... This issue has been addressed now by the developer, a testing version of the fix is available and is undergoing testing, and the security recommendations made will be included in the next version of software. There is already a digital signature included in any update that should raise a flag if anyone were to download a bad file from an insecure source.
I'm not sure what the whole story is (and don't really care enough to read through the endless internet commentary to find out), but it sounds like the guy was dealing with some web hosting constraints for the website, and he didn't want to implement a half-assed solution. But people complained, and he responded. After only a few days of complaints, he appears to have implemented the solution... which is a lot better than I can say for most free software.
(And just as a sidenote -- anyone who downloads a security product or an update to one without checking to see that it's legit already is engaging in potentially dangerous security protocols. If they are doing this with random software, they could easily be installing a keylogger or something on their machine which could undermine KeePass's security, whether or not it had anything to do with a KeePass update or some other random software asking to install. I agree the developer's attitude was problematic, but his original recommended fix of actually verifying the legitimacy of any updates to security software is actually a BETTER policy than just depending on the fix to KeePass itself.)
I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking
I know it's against the national creed, but you know, you could just WALK instead !!!
I don't think anyone "required" you to drive, did they?
I know you're posting as AC, but you know, that doesn't mean you HAVE to be a moronic jerk.
For the record, I DID walk mostly. Despite the fact that this city didn't have the best public transport to outlying residential areas and I had to walk about 20 minutes to get on to the nearest subway stop, I did mostly walk because traffic was so bad. (And I actually prefer walking.) In fact, at the time I had to walk about 3 miles one way to get to work by skipping the subway, and that's what I generally ended up doing (since it wasn't really faster to take the subway). Do you walk 6 miles every day just as part of your normal work routine?
On the other hand, at some point I had a family, and for various logistical reasons I was forced to drive more (because I needed to take an infant or small child to places even further from public transport). So yeah, then I did need to drive a little more... But I still prefer walking and really hate that I can't really live in a place right now where I could primarily walk to most things.
for the road to handle a certain amount of traffic. In theory if more traffic was expected more money would be spent.
Actually, if this continues, I imagine what will happen is what happened in my old neighborhood.
I used to live in a large city that had a lot of residential neighborhoods, and traffic was terrible so people would be tempted to cut through them rather than taking major routes.
What happened was -- the city adopted a series of rules to actively tie up traffic on residential streets, in an escalating chain of snarling effects.
I forget what all the stages were, but it was something like:
- put in more crosswalks, add warning signs, make lanes narrower
- put in speed zones, create turning restrictions and commercial vehicle restrictions
- create more one-way streets, have one-way streets terminate in consecutive blocks forcing traffic to wind around in a serpentine fashion
- if there's still too much traffic, then the badness really started: deliberate choking points, raised intersections, speed humps, etc.
- and finally the ultimate measures: turn streets into random cul-de-sacs by closing off ends of blocks, or in worst case scenarios institute mid-block street closures
I know a number of municipalities do this sort of stuff deliberately already to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods, but it tends mostly to be large cities. If Waze continues to route traffic this way, believe me -- more and more municipalities will catch on and start doing this stuff.
And having lived in a neighborhood like this for several years, I can say it's a pain in the neck. I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking.
But it was still much better than having rush-hour traffic going by my front door every morning and evening. The money won't be spent to improve these streets -- it will be to set up barriers to make these streets so awful that people will rather sit in traffic on the highway.
it is the fault of the legal system that allowed it in the first place. Any sane judge should have just awarded one of them $40,
Actually, the small claims court dismissed the case because it appears that Zavodnik got rid of the printer in an attempt to destroy evidence. (That's what the superior court ruling says.)
any sane court of appeal should just have told the person who filed the appeal, stop wasting our time, and charged them a couple of hundred dollars in admin fees.
There was a minor procedural flaw that allowed the dismissal to be appealed and reinstated. When that happened, Zavodnik forced a number of judges to recuse themselves from the case after accusing them repeatedly of doing things like conspiring with the defendant. It's perhaps not surprising that he eventually found one willing to listen if for nothing else than to get the damn thing over with.
This is most certainly primarily the fault of Zavodnik, who repeatedly abused the court system in all sorts of ways. Obviously he should have had the right to sue someone for $40 in small claims court, but he basically tried every random loophole he could to tie things up for as long as possible in the courts, including forcing it to act in ways that were less efficient in hopes of keeping his case alive.
Many of the things he exploited are actually important loopholes in our system that prevent various abuses -- like actual overzealous or corrupt judges. Getting rid of those processes would likely be bad for everyone. But Zavodnik used them instead to further a fruitless cause after he seems to have destroyed the only evidence that would have even allowed him to recover his $40.
Admittedly, someone should have put a stop to all of this sooner -- and the court system did try. They were only constrained by the lunacy of the plaintiff in doing things that no actual attorney would ever try (if an attorney did this sort of crap multiple times, they would be sanctioned and perhaps eventually disbarred).
We do not know, whether the plaintiff's intent was to expose the flaws in the state's legal system.
Actually, we do know the intent of the plaintiff. He is well-known by the court system (which comes up repeatedly in rulings) for buying stuff online and then suing people. Perhaps he's trying to make a living out of it. But his so-called "exposure" of the "flaws" in Rule 36 only came very late in the process after he had already sought ridiculous action in small claims court and the case had been dismissed. Are you seriously claiming that he filed a case in small claims court under a ridiculous premise so it could be dismissed and then several years later he could take another action to "expose the flaws in the state's legal system"?
Nor do we know, the target really was innocent, actually.
Actually, we do know that the "target" was "innocent," because this is a civil action. The DEFENDANT was either found LIABLE or NOT. (You may want to bother to learn some legal terminology before commenting on what you think is wrong with the system.)
But, even IF the defendant was liable, there is no possible circumstance under which I can imagine that a person should be found liable for a defective $40 printer and have to pay out $6000 to a plaintiff (which was asked for in the first case in small claims court), let alone the $30,000 adjudicated in the later court case. Well, I suppose if the defendant had deliberately and maliciously made modifications to the printer to cause serious injury to the person he sold it to (e.g., printer has new installation that shoots strong acid out at user when turned on), MAYBE I could that -- but there was no claim of anything so dire except the printer may have been defective. At most, the plaintiff should be entitled to the cost of replacement plus a nominal fee for his trouble, no more than a few hundred dollars at most.
This whole thing was ridiculous from the very beginning.
Quite possibly, pan Zavodnik had a valid case â" and if he didn't, Indiana should've dismissed his cases (he filed many) years ago.
Did you even bother reading TFA?? Indiana DID dismiss the case he filed in small claims court. It's unclear why it was even allowed to go forward in a superior court, except that the plaintiff appears to be a lunatic who pestered and annoyed judges and filed motions to have them recused so much that many finally relented... and he probably eventually got a judge who agreed to let them matter go forward. That sounds like blatant abuse of the court system by the plaintiff, not the other way around.
But I'd be happy to hear your proposals on how to correct flaws in such a system... Raise awareness, perhaps? Print buttons, colored ribbons, and bumper stickers: "Abolish Rule #36"?
Uh, once again, RTFA. Also, follow the link in the article to read the actual court ruling... you might learn something. For example, you might learn that Rule 36 actually sounds pretty reasonable as written -- and in its text EXPLICITLY gives discretion to the courts about when to throw out these sorts of demands. And there have been conflicting rulings in the past (which were cited by the higher court ruling) that make the lower court's award of $30,000 a bit ridiculous. The lower court chose a particular reading of Rule 36 that seems incongruous with the way it has often been interpreted... which is why it was reversed on appeal.
Sometimes there's nothing wrong with Rule 36 -- sometimes it's just a judge in error. (And, in this case, it wouldn't surprise me that a judge screwed something up given how much the plaintiff participated in blatant judge shopping.)
Every time someone uses the legal system to get at someone else in a way we deem "unjust", the bulk of our anger must be aimed not at the hacker, but at the system itself. Because as long as it remains there, it could be used against a
In the imaginary made-up world of USAToday journalism. This was a civil lawsuit, which doesn't even have a concept of "guilt" and "innocence".
Uh, Bill, could you please point to the statement in the USA Today article which uses the word "guilt" or "innocence"?? (Hint: those words never appear.)
I have don't know what actually happened, but it certainly wasn't what TFA described. My best guess is that he failed to respond to interrogatories.
Well, uh, that's precisely what TFA says -- the plaintiff supposedly sent the defendant statements asking him to admit liability, and the defendant never responded. Whether there was no response because the defendant never received them (as he claimed) or because he was just tired of this BS after the case had already been dismissed multiple times, the defendant never admitted liability.
Nevertheless, there was some BS law in Indiana that was interpreted as an admission of liability (not of "guilt" -- and USA Today doesn't use that term a single time).
Oh, and Bill, if you think USA Today is inaccurate, they give a link to the final court decision in the article (which you can find here), which basically summarizes the case pretty similarly to the article.
If you want to bitch about TFA, at least RTFA. If you want to bitch about GP's misuse of terminology, then realize that's GP's fault.
The Loony Left (as you call it) is actually trying to suppress free speech, or haven't you seen pictures of the Left wing rioting and attacking of Trump supporters for being nothing but Trump Supporters.
These are no more representatives of "the Left" any more than the random racists were a representative sample of the "Tea Party" activists or a KKK rally with confederate flags is representative of "the Right."
Or, frankly, the few psychopaths who blow things up are also not representative of "Muslims" (or "Christians" -- see other terrorist acts -- or whomever).
A small minority of idiots and wackos are not evidence that any large mainstream group is "trying to suppress free speech" or that "all Republicans are racist" or that "all Muslims are terrorists."
And there are people on all places of the political spectrum who abhor the violent outbursts at Trump rallies or Bernie rallies or whatever. On the other hand, I do have to say that the entire Trump persona seems to encourage this sort of discourse -- he acts like a bully, so it's not surprising to me that some people who dislike him act out in return. I'm not excusing the violence, only noting why it may seem to be somewhat greater around a guy who taunts others.
But this does not require them to license their developer API to anyone and everyone, for any purpose.
Agreed.
I'm not aware of any commercial enterprise that licenses their API for use by competitors.
This isn't a competitor, in the normal sense of the word. It's a price comparison service. The company advertises itself as the "Kayak" of ride services.
While I absolutely agree that Uber may have no obligation to provide this, it seems like a really stupid business decision to do what they're doing. If they are offering better rates than most other services, this is a missed opportunity for business. If they are offering worse rates (or rates that vary and are sometimes more, sometimes less), lots of people will eventually realize this and use the app to find alternatives rather than paying an "Uber premium."
Either way, the only ways a business can survive this sort of thing is by (1) already having "cornered the market" so there's a majority customer base that's dedicated to your brand, or (2) providing a service that's so superior that customers will continue to flock to your brand and not even wonder about comparisons to other (potentially cheaper) options.
I don't think Uber has either one of these going for it -- it's a relatively new market. It seems that an app like this is begging to go viral -- particularly given complaints about "surge pricing," etc. Once people realize the premium they are paying over a cab or other alternative, they may make different choices... and thus more and more people may be drawn to use an app like this for comparison. If Uber shuts itself out of competition now, it may just find itself left out of the loop completely in a few years.
A simple routing of all power and data through a certain point, and a physical switch at that point, should fix the problem.
You obviously haven't seen the numerous science fiction stories, tv shows, movies, etc. in scenarios where the AI anticipates this and gets around it. (Think Superman III or heck, even the eponymous X-Files episode Kill Switch.
We're still VERY far away from any scenario like that, though. So yeah, Google's "kill switch" idea for software seems asinine.
Of all the various ways in which attackers can gain passwords, only two involve cracking them (brute-force and cracking a password database). One of them should be a non-issue, because any software or service that doesn't protect against brute-force is fundamentally broken and shouldn't be trusted with your password anyway. Make your password "a", save everyone the trouble. For a password database crack, firstly the security of the server already failed, and then you're at their mercy a second time because if the password is stored unencrypted, you're fucked. If the password is stored hashed but not salted, you are pretty much fucked. And if the password is properly hashed and salted, congratulations you have the one scenario where a good password actually matters.
In all other attacks on your password, from phishing to shoulder-surfing and keyloggers, it doesn't matter how good your password is, how long it is or how complex it is.
Yes -- and this is all a very strong argument against password reuse, rather than so much concern about "strong passwords" in most cases to begin with.
It's rare that someone will actually bother to try to brute-force your SECURED password unless you are untrusted with significant power or secrets or whatever. It's much, much more likely that a hacker will get your password through a compromised system, where it often doesn't matter if your password is "strong" or not.
So, the only defense at that stage is to limit the damage the hacker can do -- and the most significant way is to NOT have that password be the same one you used on a dozens of other accounts/sites.
Slashdot Mirror
This. I have zero interest in watching a five minute video just to get the same content I could read in thirty seconds.
THIS.
Perhaps the two most important features of text which aren't mentioned in TFS -- (1) we generally read faster than we speak, so we can usually gather information faster from text, and (2) text is much more skimmable.
Trying to get information from a video often drives me nuts: you can try to fast-forward or skip ahead (then wait for it to buffer each time), only to find you went too far, or maybe the person doesn't talk about what you want in that segment or whatever. It's a pain in the neck. Video is good for what it is: showing visual stuff in time. If you need a tutorial on how to do some physical skill, then sure, make a video. If you want to explain an abstract concept, video just slows down things for your audience.
I first realized the problem with video (and audio) with audio podcasts that have transcripts available online. I'd start listening to a podcast, and realize I didn't care so much about the delivery, but I wanted to know the gist of the topic... and if there's an online transcript, I can often skim an hour-long program in a few minutes and find the relevant bits to read in depth. MUCH more efficient. Sure, it's fun to listen to a podcast when I'm busy doing something else that's rather mindless, but if I actually want information efficiently, text is FAR superior as a delivery method.
But beyond the efficiency, what concerns me more about this trend is the potential for manipulation that comes from video. I remember seeing a couple of studies years ago showing the difference between people who watched an opinion/news report on something vs. reading a short passage about it. When they were asked to express opinions, a number of disturbing trends came out. (For example, video viewers expressed a higher confidence in their understanding, even though it wasn't better than those who read text.) But most worryingly, the people who watched the video were less able to critically evaluate the information that was presented to them. That is, if they watched a news anchor present an opinion on a controversial issue, they were more likely to be persuaded by a weak argument from a video than they were from text.
That last part doesn't surprise me at all -- after all, we love TV news "personalities," who dress up and look attractive as they tell us the news. Why wouldn't we trust what they say? And with video, it's harder to go back and review parts that maybe weren't quite thought-through. If you're reading an argument, you can stop and think over parts that don't make sense, perhaps even go back a few sentences and re-read. With a video, you're forced to listen at the pace of the speaker, and they obviously will alter their delivery in ways to emphasize their positive points while downplaying or muddling the negatives.
So, a move toward video isn't just decreasing efficiency of content delivery -- it's potentially making the population stupider, more malleable, and less capable of critical thought. That's NOT a good trend overall.
I just don't get _why_ advertising works; it's annoying!
Yes, when it's too intrusive or "in your face." But marketing research for many decades has shown that "unconscious" (or "subconscious") processing for ads still has significant effects.
It's particularly prominent for simple things like brand familiarity. You may not be actively watching a TV commercial as you talk to a friend during the ad, but if your eye goes across the screen, you might see a product name. Or hear the product name mentioned repeatedly. Same thing with glancing through a newspaper or magazine -- you might not stop and read the ad, but repeated exposure to name brands will eventually register familiarity... even if you're not consciously thinking very much about it.
And thus when you go to the store, you start looking at the shelf for detergent and you see Tide. You've never really thought about laundry detergent consciously, but this name looks more familiar. So perhaps you're more likely to buy it.
It doesn't make (smart) people more willing to buy your product!
DING DING DING!!
Smart people are NOT the target audience for most ads. Smart people do weird stuff like research what laundry detergent might actually work better BEFORE they even go to the store. They might stop and read material and ingredients lists on the detergent before buying. They might even pull out their phone and verify that the claim to have "natural" ingredients even means anything, or if the detergent is just selling the same basic crap at twice the price for a "natural" label. (Pretty common practice these days.)
Smart people use and seek out information to influence a purchase. Advertising is all about finding ways to convince you to buy something on the basis of something other than rational thought and valid information. If it were about those things, the best ads would just consist of a list of specs for good products... and obviously they don't.
Even if she personally drove each drone and murdered a bunch of people, I'd still vote for her over Trump.
This year is the perfect example of why we need to get rid of "first past the post" voting. It's too bad it couldn't happen because the two major parties have themselves "locked in" and control the system.
Both of the major parties are on track to nominate candidates who are hated by more Americans than they are liked. This has never happened in the history of modern polling.
Under a different and more fair voting system that is determined to select a winner that would be considered qualified by a majority of Americans, this election so far would be very likely to lead to a 3rd-party president.
And anyone with even the simplest understand of the Bible understands that this is Mosaic Law, which A: was only given to the Jews for their society, and B: Christians are not under.
And anyone with even the simplest knowledge of history understands that (A) numerous Christians, including many conservative Christian sects today, cite this passage all the time to justify hatred against homosexuals, and (B) for a large portion of the past 2000 years this Levitical verse was used as justification in most European (Christian!) nations and their colonies to make homosexuality a capital crime.
Christianity over the centuries has always had an interesting relationship with Mosaic law. Sure, most theologians would say Christians are not bound by it, but historically Christian leaders will happily quote laws of the Old Testament to support their perspective on some issue.
And which Christian priest or Rabby has recently radicalized a young follower with it?..
Are you serious? Do you have any clue of the amount of violence perpetrated every year against LGBT people in most Christian countries? (You might start reading with the Wikipedia article.) A lot of it is justified by this biblical passage. Conservative preachers in the US trot it out a lot. Eastern Europe and Russia have period riots (with violence) against homosexuals who practice openly. Lots of other countries too. If you look over this list of violent acts against LGBT people, you'll find many, many in predominately Christian countries, perpetrated by Christians.
Have there been incidents on the scale of this recent attack? Not to my knowledge. But numerous individual assaults and murders are perpetrated on gays by Christians every year, many of them justified by what they are taught explicitly in their churches. Heck, look at the reactions of many conservative American Christians on Twitter after this recent incident -- lots are willing to praise the attack, even though it was an act of terrorism perpetrated by a Muslim!
Wrong. I'm comparing modern interpretation of Judaism and Christianity â" you got that part right â" with the modern interpretation of Islam.
Please note that the post you originally replied to (and which served as the topic for my reply to you) was concerned about the history of the last 2000 years in the Abrahamic religions, not just what these religions endorse today. In particular, the person you originally replied to claimed that all of these Abrahamic religions had been teaching against homosexuality for the past 2000 years.
You claimed that wasn't true and that Islam is different. It's true that the percentage of Islamic folks who believe it's right to kill gays today is likely greater than the percentage of Christian or Jewish folks who believe it's right to kill gays. But this was not really true for the past 2000 years, which is what our present thread is about.
For roughly 1800 of the past 2000 years, all three Abrahamic religions agreed that homosexuality should be punishable by death, and for roughly 1950 of the past 2000 years all three religions agreed that this moral principle should be criminalized, and in many places it was incorporated into secular law largely due to Christian efforts.
But Jews remain Jews living under other governments â" unlike Islam, neither Judaism nor Christianity make government structure part of the scripture.
Huh? Have you even read the Torah? There is no distinction made there between civil and religious government. Many conservative Jewish communities today in whatever country believe that they should essentially be self-policing, giving out punishments among their own people as designated by their law... regardless of the larger civil law. And while the New Testament does in a few places make a distinction between civil and religious principles, in practice through most of European (and American) history there was a great "bleed through" of religious Christian moral principles in structuring the government and laws. Christians took over the Roman empire, then when the first major European power structure emerged after the Western Empire's collapse (under Charlemagne) the pope insisted on crowning him Holy Roman Emperor to make clear the place of political dominions within religious control. All of this basically continued throughout Europe until the Reformation, and even among Reformed nations, many of them continued to explicitly evoke Christian theology in the structuring of law and government (and many still do).
Basically, many Islamic nations may be somewhere between 50 and 250 years "behind" the evolution of law and the divorcing of morality from fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts compared to Christian nations. But if you look at the past 2000 years (as this thread was originally about), the three don't look that different... except, well, Jews didn't really have a good opportunity to take over political power on a national scale since antiquity until recently. (Also, in fact, it might be important to note that in medieval times, Islamic nations were actually often MORE tolerant toward other religions and groups living under their political frameworks than Christian nations of the time were of Jews or Muslims.)
because Abrahamic religions in general and Islam in particular have been saying that for 2000 years
Judaism is a lot older than that, actually, while Islam is a lot younger.
Well, it's a reasonably good average. The beginnings of Judaism are difficult to ascertain, but organized Judaism (and our extant religious texts) probably go back 2500 years or so. Christianity was obviously founded about 2000 years ago. Islam is roughly 1600 years old. 2000 years is pretty much right in the middle, and ALL three were a LONG time ago.
More importantly, Islam - uniquely among Abrahamic religions - compels the followers to do something about it. A Christian can be a "good Christian" if he merely prays for the sinners' salvation. A Muslim must act
Well, what you're actually comparing is the modern interpretation of Judaism and Christianity with the worst interpretations of Islam.
There are plenty of passages in the Bible (particularly Old Testament) that require action. Traditional Jewish law required homosexuals to be put to death (Leviticus 20:13). It's right there in the Torah. But various practices in Jewish law have basically been "suspended" after the destruction of the Temple; hence no more sacrifices, etc. as required by Leviticus are done either. (In fact, there are plenty of capital crimes listed in the Torah, many of which we might dispute today, from adultery to disobeying a parent.)
But there's nothing actually in the Torah which says you can ignore these laws. It's just rabbinical tradition, that gradually came around to avoiding the issue almost entirely by instituting a system of checks-and-balances that effectively makes it impossible to execute someone. But if you look at the Torah text itself (the equivalent of looking at the Quran alone), it's pretty darn clear that we should also be stoning homosexuals or something.
And as for Christianity, well, it generally followed the plain text of the Old Testament for the first 1800 years or so of its existence, with many Christian countries instituting a death penalty for homosexuality on the basis of the Bible. (In ancient Rome, it was by public burning, under Justinian law it "merely" required castration, and in most medieval and early modern Europe, it required death. In general, criminalization of homosexuality in Europe correlates well with the spread of Christianity.) It was only around the time of the American Revolution that states in the U.S. started abolishing the death penalty for homosexuality... though homosexuality remained a capital crime in South Carolina until 1873 (12 years after England had dropped the death penalty for it).
So, sorry, but all the Abrahamic religions required homosexuals to be killed according to their original religious texts. Islam may only be "behind the times" in that some of its followers are a couple of centuries behind Christianity in deciding to completely ignore many tenets of its religious texts. Nevertheless, only 7 Muslim nations have a death penalty for homosexuality (a lot less of a percentage than major Christian nations a few centuries ago), and 20 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations have no criminal prohibition against homosexuality at all.
I'm NOT at all defending the traditional Islamic stance, only noting that historically the other Abrahamic religions weren't better. They've only just decided to ignore their founding texts earlier in history (as more and more Muslims are doing these days too -- but for some reason anti-Muslim folks just love citing the Quran as though no Muslim could ever disagree with it, while the vast majority of Jews and Christians ignore the plain text of the Levitical law and few would claim that their religion "requires them to act").
On the other hand, the di
as for permit carriers actually stopping crimes, for every gun used in self defense, 34 people die.
and yes, the FBI and CDC has statistics.
Just to be clear, your statistics don't justify your previous claim. (And I say this as someone who is in favor of greater gun regulation. I just don't think it's a good idea to use misleading statistics to support an argument.)
That works out to one justifiable gun death for every 34 unjustifiable gun deaths. [snip] That works out to one self-defense killing for every 78 gun suicides. CDC data show that there were more than twice as many accidental gun fatalities as as justifiable killings.
What you've shown is the ratio of justifiable killings to (unjustified) murders... or suicides or whatever.
That has little basis for a comparison of "every gun used in self-defense," which is where you started your argument. One would hope (and there are definitely statistics showing) that the vast majority of guns used in self-defense did NOT result in death -- either because simply brandishing the weapon deterred the assailant, or because the victim simply wounded the assailant.
And, in fact, if you want to find statistics supporting the "other side," you can easily do so. There are well-known FBI statistics out there from various reports suggesting that there are millions of uses of guns in self-defense every year, though the vast majority of them never result in a shot fired.
I don't buy those statistics, either -- and there are various ways that critics have picked them apart. On the basis of "studies" and "data," we can only definitively say that the number of "defensive gun uses" in the U.S. per year is somewhere between 50,000 and 5,000,000. That's a big range. (But, I'd note that even the lowest estimate from a reputable study is well over 100 times what your argument implies.)
Basically, when it comes to gun politics in the U.S., I've come to believe that anyone who is a strong advocate on either side will cherry-pick statistics that really don't answer the questions we need to consider. Your post is no exception.
And while I agree with you that better studies and funding for them is a good idea, I also recognize that the vast majority of gun studies out there seem to be run with a strong agenda in mind for one side or the other. Thus, you'll still just end up with a battle of conflicting statistics, even with more data.
The only way to really resolve such an argument is to have a strong education in statistics, an understanding of how they can be manipulated, and the kinds of flaws inherent in various population studies. Most people arguing for one side or the other in this debate aren't interested in such nuance. But when you look at it that way, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle: guns ARE used a lot in self defense (a lot more than your statistics suggest), but they also are responsible for a lot of possibly preventable deaths (particularly suicides and accidental shootings).
It is a belief. It is an affirmative belief. It might qualify as a religion or creed depending on how you define those words.
There are traditionally philosophical distinctions made between "strong" (or "positive") atheism vs. "weak" (or "negative") atheism. "Strong atheists" have a positive belief that no gods exist. Most atheists are merely "weak atheists," who don't actively believe in gods -- and may think they sound unlikely -- but don't have an (unprovable) belief in their non-existence. Lack of belief in something doesn't necessarily entail a positive (and equally unprovable) belief in an opposite.
It is a belief because you can't prove something doesn't exist. It's a consequence of logic. All reason is necessarily based on a foundation of beliefs.
This is a bit of a different issue, which is more related to the traditional definition of agnosticism. A traditional agnostic is someone who has a positive belief that the answers to some questions are unknowable. ("Gnostic" refers to knowledge, an agnostic believes that one can't have that knowledge.)
These days the word "agnostic" is often used for weak atheism, but it's actually a separate issue. An agnostic traditionally is someone who believes we CANNOT know whether God exists -- it's just not a question that can be verified one way or another on the basis of normal empirical evidence. (Philosophers sometimes draw a distinction between "strong" and "weak" agnosticism too.)
An agnostic is someone that neither believes in the supernatural nor does not believe in it. They are undecided or uncommitted.
Again, that's not the word traditionally meant. What you're describing is what philosophers and theologians would generally call weak atheism (i.e., lack of a "theist" belief, hence a-theism). Agnosticism is about what we ALL could possibly know on the basis of evidence, and whether we have sufficient grounds to justify belief, not about whether an individual believes or not.
People colloquially use the label atheist when they mean a person that atheist or agnostic since to them both are guilty.
Agreed, though as I noted -- there are even more distinctions that you make. Using these terms the way philosophers would, it's quite possible to be a gnostic atheist (i.e., a person who has a positive belief that God by definition doesn't exist and believes that he has certain knowledge of this fact), or an agnostic theist (i.e., a person who believes that God exists, but believes it is outside the possibility of science to prove it), or even other stranger combinations.
Most people are agnostic no matter how much say they are atheistic and will readily prey when faced with imminent death.
This is again a separate issue. If I were dying of starvation, I'd definitively prey on animals to survive... sure.
In the 1930s, chemical warfare was looked on the same way. It was just assumed that the next war would be chemical. Remember all the gas masks that were issued during the London Blitz?
I don't know why this belief seems "bizarre" at all.
Given the widespread use of chemical weapons during WWI (despite the fact that the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited them and made their use a war crime), I think it was pretty reasonable for people to make preparations that assumed they might be used in a future war.
It looks bizarre to modern eyes as chemical weapons were not used during WWII but everyone certainly expected it.
Huh? The Japanese made widespread use of them in WWII, just not against Western troops (for fear of retaliation). But in their invasions of Asian countries (particularly China), they used them on a number of occasions... so much so that FDR threatened that America would use chemical weapons against Japan if they kept doing it. Note that the U.S. also had NOT ratified the Geneva Protocol prohibiting use of chemical weapons. (Just the number of unused abandoned chemical weapons shells the Japanese left behind in China probably number in the millions. Australia was so concerned that they'd be used in a Japanese invasion that they secretly imported and stockpiled nearly a million chemical munitions, since the Australians knew the only reason Japan targeted China with them was because the Chinese had none and couldn't retaliate with them.)
And both the Germans and the Allies seriously considered deploying them -- but unlike in WWI (where a gradual escalation of their use against treaties by both sides eventually led to open warfare -- at first the Germans merely opened up gas canisters when the wind was favorable, arguing that the international law only prohibited chemical shells) in WWII neither side was willing to be "the first." Instead they took up firebombing and other new methods to intimidate the enemy.
I blame the translation - I'm sure it sounded much more coherent in the original Klingon. :)
While I know this comment is meant to be funny, there's potentially something really insightful here. Thinking about this comment after watching a bit of the film here made me think about a rough analog to this film in comedy, namely the classic stand-up act where a comedian "imitates" a foreign language without actually knowing how to speak it. Sid Caesar, for example, was particularly well-known for this. (If you've never seen what I'm talking about, here's an example of Sid Caesar doing this schtick.)
In his act, Caesar would make it sound (sort of) like another language by doing two things: (1) throwing in a few random words, names, or phrases that might be known to tourists or might be associated with the language (e.g., proper names), and (2) filling up the rest of the stuff around these actual foreign words with gibberish that incorporated some of the sounds and cadences of native speakers. (How successful he was at this gibberish imitation is of course up for debate; but it was close enough to work for comedy.)
Anyhow, the ONLY difference I can see between Sid Caesar's gibberish and this screenplay (and most "AI chatbot" output these days, for that matter) is that the constituent parts of the language to create the "gibberish" are larger. For Sid Caesar, he didn't know the languages, and memorizing thousands of words or phrases in the language for a comedy schtick would sort of defeat the purpose of the act.
But for a computer, it's trivial to feed in millions of words and phrases in English (or whatever language), or even millions of words and phrases from various sci-fi screenplays. So, rather than gibberish happening on the level of a phoneme or the level of a few syllables that sound like common words in a language (as in Sid Caesar), instead we have gibberish happening on the level of combinations of words, phrases, and whole sentences -- which sound like they're thrown together somewhat haphazardly.
The other thing that "sells" Sid Caesar's routine are those "anchor words" or proper names that do carry at least some meaning (often random or nonsensical, but at least they're familiar to the audience). Same thing with this AI: there is a spark of familiarity to sci-fi dialogue or phrasing in places, which in a better film might be an allusion to another movie or something, but here it often just sounds weird and arbitrary (like Sid Caesar's routine).
And the last thing that one needs to make Sid Caesar's routine work is his acting -- the way he declaims and shapes the sounds, as well as his body language and gesturing, is also what adds a cultural note that makes it all more "human." That's what the actors add in this filmed version too: if you just look at the text screenplay, it all seems like nonsense. But the actors here TRY their best to make SOME sense out of it.
I think it's very telling that some people are trying to characterize this as "hilarious," while other people in this thread have compared it to bad art films or something. I think zany comedies and art films can contain a lot of stuff that seems confusing or random, often because they're deliberately defying convention (or sometimes deliberately alluding to another film or cultural idea). The randomness in zany comedy comes from the knowing juxtaposition of elements that will seem bizarre. The confusing elements of art-house film to those "not in the know" are often due to knowing frustrating of convention or allusion to a complex web of previous films or whatever.
This screenplay has these random elements -- except not because the AI is deliberately going away from conventions, of course. The AI just doesn't "understand" ANYTHING. So, it comes across as a really bad imitation of zany comedy combined with "art" cinema, since the reference
Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
I know this is probably obvious, but for some people, money isn't everything. Also, until recent decades, going to college wasn't about maximizing lifelong profits either. (This is a big misperception of correlation vs. causation: a century or more ago, aristocrats who already had wealth sent their kids to college because that's what rich people did; at some point people made the incorrect assumption that college made people rich, rather than the reality which is that most college students were rich before they attended and likely would have stayed rich anyway.)
I remember seeing some plot of IQ vs. adult income years ago, where the highest income peaked at maybe a couple standard deviations above mean. For IQ above that, the average income descended quite a bit.
As someone who hangs out with a lot of academics, it's well worth it to most of them to be in community of like-minded people doing what they love. It also takes a certain intellectual openness to get to that point, to realize that the modern quest for more money and more "stuff" at all costs is ultimately a bit pointless.
I'm not at all criticizing people who choose other paths -- if that big salary, giant house, fancy car, boat, etc. are valuable to you, enough to do what many do (work long hours, never see their kids, never take vacations, never have time for significant hobbies or time to learn something new outside of work, etc.)... well, that's a choice. It's your life, and everyone can find their own way to maximize their own happiness.
But I don't find it ironic at all that people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude might value a life of intellectual activity higher than maximizing monetary gain.
I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
If that's true, you may have chosen poorly for college. (Either that, or you went to one of the most elite high schools with super high standards.)
Well, actually, I'm not going to say you chose poorly -- it's up to everyone to choose their own path. For me, in life I've found that I enjoy challenging myself more than just taking easy routes, particularly academically. If I showed up at a college and it was easier than my high school, I would have concluded that it wasn't worthwhile and would try to transfer to somewhere better.
Everyone does not struggle. There are reasons you have difficulty--not that you're too stupid for college, or that the next guy has a better brain; it's that you're using the wrong methods, and you're entering an unfamiliar environment.
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a lack of structured study skills or inability to manage time efficiently.
But there are also distinctive other problems that tend to be more common among "disadvantaged students," particularly those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Number one is probably the fact that many of these students simply have fewer resources than other college students. They are more likely to have to work part-time (even multiple part-time jobs) while taking classes, just to pay for school. They are more likely to have more complicated family responsibilities at a younger age, which also sucks up a lot of time. They are more likely to live at home and commute rather than living in a dorm on-campus, which may occupy a couple hours or more per day just to get back and forth to classes. Because they're disconnected from campus life, it's often harder for them to make friends, build "study groups" they can use as resources, and the isolation can lead to depression, along with an inability to understand how different the lives of the "on-campus" students are and how they (more successfully) manage their struggles. Etc., etc.
In other words, sometimes students pick up or take advantage of the study skills of others -- but "disadvantaged" students can find it harder to be a part of that.
Also, in the name of "diversity," many schools try to bring in students who are "disadvantaged." Yes, in many cases these are also minority students, but many elite schools also like to try to find those unusual students from the crappy public school that have the potential to excel.
These students sometimes experience a "mismatch" effect -- not only are they more likely to experience a much more sudden increase in level of material than the upper-middle-class kid who went to the elite prep school, but "diversity" measures often also target minority students who may be on the lower end of the curve of admitted students. So, beyond a possible lack of study/time skills, disadvantaged students may also be dealing with a much greater initial learning curve to catch up to the level of college life than others.
Besides all of this, the geniuses among us are only using competent mental techniques. These range from scheduling and reframing as above to structured study techniques (SQW4R, OK4R), casual or systemic mnemonics (simple visualization up through mind palaces and other systems), and even structured note-taking systems (Cornell notes are the best generic; there are better systems for certain specific materials). Developing and exercising the correct skills *vastly* reduces the difficulties faced in college because time spent studying is optimized: less effort and less time produces more complete understanding and better grades.
SOME "geniuses among us" use deliberate structured techniques like this. Other people depend on innate abilities that they don't have to think about. (And when I say "innate," I don't necessary mean they were born with it: I also include things that for whatever reason a talented kid may have figured out in processing the world when he/she was very young, and it's become so ingrained in the very way they think and process information that they are completely unaware of how different it is from other people.)
Obviously these structured techniques can be helpful to some. But I'd really hesitate to say that all smart people are "only using mental techniques" of the kind you mention... certainly not consciously or deliberately.
Telling people to grin and bear it because college is hard is idiotic.
To some extent, I agree. But as I noted above, sometime for "disadvantaged" students the problems aren't just a lack
Just some of the things that had to happen for us to be where we are now:
This is an interesting list, and as you note, there are all sorts of "other things that could fit in between those points."
However, your conclusion CANNOT follow, i.e., a technological civilization that can broadcast information is "very VERY unlikely." You have no basis to say it is "unlikely" nor "likely," because we have one data point -- Earth. One cannot extrapolate from one data point.
And that's why articles like this one always bug me a bit. "Researchers Say the Aliens Are Silent Because They Are Extinct." First of all, even the name "researchers" is problematic for a topic like this. What research did they do? Look at Earth's history. What other examples of evolution of life did they study??... oh wait, we know of none, so they didn't have anything else to study.
A better way of viewing this research would be as a continual improvement of understanding the complex history of Earth and life's interaction with the planet. Claiming that this relates in any way to arguments about aliens makes a bunch of currently unsupportable assumptions. Just because Carl Sagan imagined life must be everywhere and common because the universe is just so darn big is NOT a scientific argument.
For example, take the first item on parent's list: "1) Life had to evolve." We have no freakin' clue how easy or hard it may be for abiogenesis to occur. We did some experiments starting back in the 1950s that showed under conditions that may have been like early Earth, we can get amino acids and other similar molecules. That's a LONG way from even the simplest "life form" we can imagine. And there are lots of elements of complexity theory from the past couple decades that have sought to show how complex systems could self-organize, but again most of this is speculative -- and again we just have no clue how "likely" or "unlikely" all of the steps might be.
It could be that if you have a planet in a "Goldilocks zone" with roughly the right mixture of elements and roughly the right amount of water or whatever that abiogenesis happens 90% of the time over a billion years. OR, it could be that there are all sorts of little factors that really have to come together to make it work -- maybe if the temperature is 20 degrees hotter or cooler, the reactions become a billion times less likely. Maybe if some element in the mixture is off by 0.1%, the reactions become a billion times less likely. Maybe if gravity is 10% stronger or weaker, density causes different types of stratification which makes the reactions a billion times less likely. Maybe it wasn't relatively stable conditions over millions of years that led to abiogenesis, but instead one pond over a much shorter period of time that had just the right unusual mixture.
We just have no clue. And the typical response I usually hear is, "Well, but you are simply not considering how freakin' HUGE the universe is -- how many galaxies, stars, planets, etc. The chances that we're alone are miniscule!!!"
Except none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the probability of intelligent life evolving. Maybe that's 90% of the Goldilocks planets. Maybe it's 1 in 100 trillion of the Goldilocks planets, because of all sorts of factors we haven't quantified yet.
Incredibly unlikely events happen every day. If I shuffle a deck of 52 cards, the chances of the particular order I end up with are 1 in 8x10^67. Assuming around 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and assuming the number of stars in our galaxy in each one, we end up with something like 10^24 stars. Let's assume that on average each of those stars has a planet in the Goldilocks zone (probably overgenerous, but let's run with it). Let's assume a population of 10 billion imaginary aliens on each of those planets, each of whom shuffles a deck of cards every second. Even with all of that, on average those
You mean a password manager like KeePass, where the developer has explicitly and publicly chosen ad revenue over security?
Apparently... This issue has been addressed now by the developer, a testing version of the fix is available and is undergoing testing, and the security recommendations made will be included in the next version of software. There is already a digital signature included in any update that should raise a flag if anyone were to download a bad file from an insecure source.
I'm not sure what the whole story is (and don't really care enough to read through the endless internet commentary to find out), but it sounds like the guy was dealing with some web hosting constraints for the website, and he didn't want to implement a half-assed solution. But people complained, and he responded. After only a few days of complaints, he appears to have implemented the solution... which is a lot better than I can say for most free software.
(And just as a sidenote -- anyone who downloads a security product or an update to one without checking to see that it's legit already is engaging in potentially dangerous security protocols. If they are doing this with random software, they could easily be installing a keylogger or something on their machine which could undermine KeePass's security, whether or not it had anything to do with a KeePass update or some other random software asking to install. I agree the developer's attitude was problematic, but his original recommended fix of actually verifying the legitimacy of any updates to security software is actually a BETTER policy than just depending on the fix to KeePass itself.)
I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking
I know it's against the national creed, but you know, you could just WALK instead !!!
I don't think anyone "required" you to drive, did they?
I know you're posting as AC, but you know, that doesn't mean you HAVE to be a moronic jerk.
For the record, I DID walk mostly. Despite the fact that this city didn't have the best public transport to outlying residential areas and I had to walk about 20 minutes to get on to the nearest subway stop, I did mostly walk because traffic was so bad. (And I actually prefer walking.) In fact, at the time I had to walk about 3 miles one way to get to work by skipping the subway, and that's what I generally ended up doing (since it wasn't really faster to take the subway). Do you walk 6 miles every day just as part of your normal work routine?
On the other hand, at some point I had a family, and for various logistical reasons I was forced to drive more (because I needed to take an infant or small child to places even further from public transport). So yeah, then I did need to drive a little more... But I still prefer walking and really hate that I can't really live in a place right now where I could primarily walk to most things.
for the road to handle a certain amount of traffic. In theory if more traffic was expected more money would be spent.
Actually, if this continues, I imagine what will happen is what happened in my old neighborhood.
I used to live in a large city that had a lot of residential neighborhoods, and traffic was terrible so people would be tempted to cut through them rather than taking major routes.
What happened was -- the city adopted a series of rules to actively tie up traffic on residential streets, in an escalating chain of snarling effects.
I forget what all the stages were, but it was something like:
- put in more crosswalks, add warning signs, make lanes narrower
- put in speed zones, create turning restrictions and commercial vehicle restrictions
- create more one-way streets, have one-way streets terminate in consecutive blocks forcing traffic to wind around in a serpentine fashion
- if there's still too much traffic, then the badness really started: deliberate choking points, raised intersections, speed humps, etc.
- and finally the ultimate measures: turn streets into random cul-de-sacs by closing off ends of blocks, or in worst case scenarios institute mid-block street closures
I know a number of municipalities do this sort of stuff deliberately already to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods, but it tends mostly to be large cities. If Waze continues to route traffic this way, believe me -- more and more municipalities will catch on and start doing this stuff.
And having lived in a neighborhood like this for several years, I can say it's a pain in the neck. I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking.
But it was still much better than having rush-hour traffic going by my front door every morning and evening. The money won't be spent to improve these streets -- it will be to set up barriers to make these streets so awful that people will rather sit in traffic on the highway.
This is not the fault of Zavodnik,
It most certainly is.
it is the fault of the legal system that allowed it in the first place. Any sane judge should have just awarded one of them $40,
Actually, the small claims court dismissed the case because it appears that Zavodnik got rid of the printer in an attempt to destroy evidence. (That's what the superior court ruling says.)
any sane court of appeal should just have told the person who filed the appeal, stop wasting our time, and charged them a couple of hundred dollars in admin fees.
There was a minor procedural flaw that allowed the dismissal to be appealed and reinstated. When that happened, Zavodnik forced a number of judges to recuse themselves from the case after accusing them repeatedly of doing things like conspiring with the defendant. It's perhaps not surprising that he eventually found one willing to listen if for nothing else than to get the damn thing over with.
This is most certainly primarily the fault of Zavodnik, who repeatedly abused the court system in all sorts of ways. Obviously he should have had the right to sue someone for $40 in small claims court, but he basically tried every random loophole he could to tie things up for as long as possible in the courts, including forcing it to act in ways that were less efficient in hopes of keeping his case alive.
Many of the things he exploited are actually important loopholes in our system that prevent various abuses -- like actual overzealous or corrupt judges. Getting rid of those processes would likely be bad for everyone. But Zavodnik used them instead to further a fruitless cause after he seems to have destroyed the only evidence that would have even allowed him to recover his $40.
Admittedly, someone should have put a stop to all of this sooner -- and the court system did try. They were only constrained by the lunacy of the plaintiff in doing things that no actual attorney would ever try (if an attorney did this sort of crap multiple times, they would be sanctioned and perhaps eventually disbarred).
We do not know, whether the plaintiff's intent was to expose the flaws in the state's legal system.
Actually, we do know the intent of the plaintiff. He is well-known by the court system (which comes up repeatedly in rulings) for buying stuff online and then suing people. Perhaps he's trying to make a living out of it. But his so-called "exposure" of the "flaws" in Rule 36 only came very late in the process after he had already sought ridiculous action in small claims court and the case had been dismissed. Are you seriously claiming that he filed a case in small claims court under a ridiculous premise so it could be dismissed and then several years later he could take another action to "expose the flaws in the state's legal system"?
Nor do we know, the target really was innocent, actually.
Actually, we do know that the "target" was "innocent," because this is a civil action. The DEFENDANT was either found LIABLE or NOT. (You may want to bother to learn some legal terminology before commenting on what you think is wrong with the system.)
But, even IF the defendant was liable, there is no possible circumstance under which I can imagine that a person should be found liable for a defective $40 printer and have to pay out $6000 to a plaintiff (which was asked for in the first case in small claims court), let alone the $30,000 adjudicated in the later court case. Well, I suppose if the defendant had deliberately and maliciously made modifications to the printer to cause serious injury to the person he sold it to (e.g., printer has new installation that shoots strong acid out at user when turned on), MAYBE I could that -- but there was no claim of anything so dire except the printer may have been defective. At most, the plaintiff should be entitled to the cost of replacement plus a nominal fee for his trouble, no more than a few hundred dollars at most.
This whole thing was ridiculous from the very beginning.
Quite possibly, pan Zavodnik had a valid case â" and if he didn't, Indiana should've dismissed his cases (he filed many) years ago.
Did you even bother reading TFA?? Indiana DID dismiss the case he filed in small claims court. It's unclear why it was even allowed to go forward in a superior court, except that the plaintiff appears to be a lunatic who pestered and annoyed judges and filed motions to have them recused so much that many finally relented... and he probably eventually got a judge who agreed to let them matter go forward. That sounds like blatant abuse of the court system by the plaintiff, not the other way around.
But I'd be happy to hear your proposals on how to correct flaws in such a system... Raise awareness, perhaps? Print buttons, colored ribbons, and bumper stickers: "Abolish Rule #36"?
Uh, once again, RTFA. Also, follow the link in the article to read the actual court ruling... you might learn something. For example, you might learn that Rule 36 actually sounds pretty reasonable as written -- and in its text EXPLICITLY gives discretion to the courts about when to throw out these sorts of demands. And there have been conflicting rulings in the past (which were cited by the higher court ruling) that make the lower court's award of $30,000 a bit ridiculous. The lower court chose a particular reading of Rule 36 that seems incongruous with the way it has often been interpreted... which is why it was reversed on appeal.
Sometimes there's nothing wrong with Rule 36 -- sometimes it's just a judge in error. (And, in this case, it wouldn't surprise me that a judge screwed something up given how much the plaintiff participated in blatant judge shopping.)
Every time someone uses the legal system to get at someone else in a way we deem "unjust", the bulk of our anger must be aimed not at the hacker, but at the system itself. Because as long as it remains there, it could be used against a
In the imaginary made-up world of USAToday journalism. This was a civil lawsuit, which doesn't even have a concept of "guilt" and "innocence".
Uh, Bill, could you please point to the statement in the USA Today article which uses the word "guilt" or "innocence"?? (Hint: those words never appear.)
I have don't know what actually happened, but it certainly wasn't what TFA described. My best guess is that he failed to respond to interrogatories.
Well, uh, that's precisely what TFA says -- the plaintiff supposedly sent the defendant statements asking him to admit liability, and the defendant never responded. Whether there was no response because the defendant never received them (as he claimed) or because he was just tired of this BS after the case had already been dismissed multiple times, the defendant never admitted liability.
Nevertheless, there was some BS law in Indiana that was interpreted as an admission of liability (not of "guilt" -- and USA Today doesn't use that term a single time).
Oh, and Bill, if you think USA Today is inaccurate, they give a link to the final court decision in the article (which you can find here), which basically summarizes the case pretty similarly to the article.
If you want to bitch about TFA, at least RTFA. If you want to bitch about GP's misuse of terminology, then realize that's GP's fault.
The Loony Left (as you call it) is actually trying to suppress free speech, or haven't you seen pictures of the Left wing rioting and attacking of Trump supporters for being nothing but Trump Supporters.
These are no more representatives of "the Left" any more than the random racists were a representative sample of the "Tea Party" activists or a KKK rally with confederate flags is representative of "the Right."
Or, frankly, the few psychopaths who blow things up are also not representative of "Muslims" (or "Christians" -- see other terrorist acts -- or whomever).
A small minority of idiots and wackos are not evidence that any large mainstream group is "trying to suppress free speech" or that "all Republicans are racist" or that "all Muslims are terrorists."
And there are people on all places of the political spectrum who abhor the violent outbursts at Trump rallies or Bernie rallies or whatever. On the other hand, I do have to say that the entire Trump persona seems to encourage this sort of discourse -- he acts like a bully, so it's not surprising to me that some people who dislike him act out in return. I'm not excusing the violence, only noting why it may seem to be somewhat greater around a guy who taunts others.
But this does not require them to license their developer API to anyone and everyone, for any purpose.
Agreed.
I'm not aware of any commercial enterprise that licenses their API for use by competitors.
This isn't a competitor, in the normal sense of the word. It's a price comparison service. The company advertises itself as the "Kayak" of ride services.
While I absolutely agree that Uber may have no obligation to provide this, it seems like a really stupid business decision to do what they're doing. If they are offering better rates than most other services, this is a missed opportunity for business. If they are offering worse rates (or rates that vary and are sometimes more, sometimes less), lots of people will eventually realize this and use the app to find alternatives rather than paying an "Uber premium."
Either way, the only ways a business can survive this sort of thing is by (1) already having "cornered the market" so there's a majority customer base that's dedicated to your brand, or (2) providing a service that's so superior that customers will continue to flock to your brand and not even wonder about comparisons to other (potentially cheaper) options.
I don't think Uber has either one of these going for it -- it's a relatively new market. It seems that an app like this is begging to go viral -- particularly given complaints about "surge pricing," etc. Once people realize the premium they are paying over a cab or other alternative, they may make different choices... and thus more and more people may be drawn to use an app like this for comparison. If Uber shuts itself out of competition now, it may just find itself left out of the loop completely in a few years.
A simple routing of all power and data through a certain point, and a physical switch at that point, should fix the problem.
You obviously haven't seen the numerous science fiction stories, tv shows, movies, etc. in scenarios where the AI anticipates this and gets around it. (Think Superman III or heck, even the eponymous X-Files episode Kill Switch.
We're still VERY far away from any scenario like that, though. So yeah, Google's "kill switch" idea for software seems asinine.
Of all the various ways in which attackers can gain passwords, only two involve cracking them (brute-force and cracking a password database). One of them should be a non-issue, because any software or service that doesn't protect against brute-force is fundamentally broken and shouldn't be trusted with your password anyway. Make your password "a", save everyone the trouble. For a password database crack, firstly the security of the server already failed, and then you're at their mercy a second time because if the password is stored unencrypted, you're fucked. If the password is stored hashed but not salted, you are pretty much fucked. And if the password is properly hashed and salted, congratulations you have the one scenario where a good password actually matters.
In all other attacks on your password, from phishing to shoulder-surfing and keyloggers, it doesn't matter how good your password is, how long it is or how complex it is.
Yes -- and this is all a very strong argument against password reuse, rather than so much concern about "strong passwords" in most cases to begin with.
It's rare that someone will actually bother to try to brute-force your SECURED password unless you are untrusted with significant power or secrets or whatever. It's much, much more likely that a hacker will get your password through a compromised system, where it often doesn't matter if your password is "strong" or not.
So, the only defense at that stage is to limit the damage the hacker can do -- and the most significant way is to NOT have that password be the same one you used on a dozens of other accounts/sites.