Righteo. Specifically, assuming Google's PageRank algorithm is at work, a more "popular" candidate presumably would get linked more. So, is the popularity creating the links, or are the links producing the popularity?
But it's not just "creating" popularity -- it's SUSTAINING it. If something is linked a lot, those links don't die overnight -- but election dynamics change. Do search engine link rankings change fast enough to keep up? Or do they end up reinforcing the status quo?
It's the reason I stopped using Google back in 2012. I had heard about the filter bubble effects, but I saw it firsthand. Some people may remember the Ron Paul fiascos in some of the Republican primaries back in 2012. I wasn't really a Ron Paul supporter, but I got interested in the story. So, I'd periodically Google "Ron Paul" or whatever to see what new things might have happened or commentary might be out there.
After a few weeks, I suddenly started to see Ron Paul links show up higher in my search results. Google News would start showing me a lot of Ron Paul headlines, even if I just browsed the Google News homepage (without any search terms at all). I compared my results with a friend and saw that my hits and link rankings were being tailored to what Google thought must be "what I want to see."
I didn't want my news skewed in that way, but Google "helpfully" tried to appease me (without asking and without a transparent way to control it).
So, the effects on elections won't just be swaying voters toward more popular candidates. With "personalization" and "history-based" rankings, search engines can become a sort of personal feedback loop for political views... what you're interested in becomes reinforced.
To me, that process is perhaps even more dangerous in elections than random ranking effects in search engines. It leads to polarization and extremism. It leads to people always seeing "what they want to see" and not having to confront conflicting perspectives on issues and candidates who don't agree with them. That generally isn't a good path to nuanced political discussion.
This is exactly the point of doing the "unlimited" time off policies.
It's the point of almost ALL "unlimited" business policies of any kind.
Guilt is a powerful emotion.
The company can say they have "unlimited" x and employees feel proud to have "unlimited" x and people who abuse the system will be dealt with... all around win by simple exploitation of guilt...
While guilt may be one factor, I doubt it's the only thing (or even the primary thing) at work here. Guilt explains why someone won't take advantage of an "unlimited" system in this case perhaps, but it doesn't explain why the overall use of vacation time goes DOWN.
In many (though not all) circumstances, if you offer someone a fixed amount of something, a lot of people will try to "use it all up" to get a good value. If you give them "unlimited," they will stop worrying about maximizing value.
It's the reason Netflix's early business model worked -- "unlimited" DVDs for X dollars/month. If they said "Rent 8 DVDs per month," you'll get people looking at their calendars and making sure to watch a movie to get close to their 8 movies in. If you say "unlimited," many people just let the DVDs sit on the counter and wait weeks until they get around to watching them. On average, they end up renting fewer DVDs than if you priced each rental competitively.
Or, you're running a buffet -- do you say "Only two passes at the buffet" or do you say "all you can eat"? With "two passes," you'll get people maximizing their value, stuffing their plates with more expensive things, not finishing the second plate, etc. With "unlimited," many people stop trying to cram their plates with the most expensive stuff on the buffet and just eat -- and they get full and most might barely have seconds. Yeah, you get the huge dude who will come back 4-5 times, but you'll also get loads of smaller, thinner people who just come up for one plate and be done. Everyone feels like they got "value" with an "unlimited" deal, even though they probably wasted less food (and ate a variety of things, rather than just the expensive stuff).
People like the sound of "unlimited," but any marketing guy will tell you that in many business models, it can actually reduce usage of products and services overall. You'll get a few people who "max out" their unlimited use, but 95% of people just stop worrying about "getting value" out of the service and often use less of it than they would if services were doled out at a fixed rate.
Oh, you silly kids! What the OSS fanatics fail to understand is that once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world" that time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example.
I understand exactly what you're talking about, and I agree that cost-benefit analyses have to be made.
But there is also a problem in corporate culture where cost-benefit analyses are focused too much on the immediate future. Paying $100/year to license software may seem worth it if you're just using that software for a year and retraining may require a few hours.
But what about after 3 years? Or 5 years? Or 10 years? And what about other fringe benefits of OSS, like your ability to customize the code yourself if you want a new feature? If you're a big business and you want to complain that you lack feature X in LibreOffice, you could either pay Microsoft thousands of dollars annually (perhaps tens of thousands, in a big company), or you could use that money to pay a developer to add feature X to LibreOffice and customize it to do exactly what you want (rather than what Microsoft gives you).
And then there's end-of-life concerns, too. Do you want to pay to retrain all your employees when Microsoft decides whatever its next random mutation of UI happens? Or do you pay Microsoft extra to continue security patches after your version is no longer supported? Or do you just use that money to pay people who can patch your free OSS suite, which can be maintained by anyone since the source is available?
These are all cost-benefit analyses. But often they aren't actually decided on that basis by large corporations -- they are decided because "Microsoft Office is the standard" and people in power to make decisions don't want to have to deal with the switch or don't believe "free" could possibly be as good, or they don't consider alternatives to get the features they want in OSS that might be cheaper than paying licensing fees for many years.
Except, it doesn't apply. This case is about videos that are shown to be about factual events that are displayed in a truthful format that are both covered under the 1st amendment and would likely also be protected under whistleblower laws. The "abortion tissue" videos aren't covered under either.
I absolutely agree with you that the abortion videos are being released in a highly edited and misleading way, and I don't disagree with the temporary restraining order.
However, your ideology is also blinding you to parallels here. These state laws were not passed out of fear of some nice documentary crew coming onto a farm and making a pleasant and balanced video presentation of what goes on.
They were passed because of previous incidents where people from PETA and similar organizations have done EXACTLY what these anti-abortion folks have done, i.e., they have lied or pretended to be someone they weren't to gain access, then taken videos, and then edited them to make the most of the "gory bits," regardless of whether those particular video segments were illegal or standard business practice or whatever. PETA and similar groups are not interested in "factual events that are displayed in a truthful format" -- they have an agenda to shut down any farm that kills animals, and they'll happily spin things to do it.
And I'm sure those misleading videos which take things out of context were the primary concern of those who passed these laws, just as you are currently concerned about abortion provider statements and images taken out of context.
The problem with the laws about the farms, of course, is that they are a complete overreach and deserve to be overturned. But your idea that there isn't a parallel motivation for abortion providers and farm owners to protect their businesses from unfairly edited videos is just failing to look at the bigger picture here.
Let me first be clear that I absolutely agree such laws are terrible and should be struck down. However...
How were these clearly bogus laws voted in, in the first place? It seems pretty obvious that documenting health/safety violations would be protected from legal retaliation, much like how truth is an absolute defense against libel charges.
You actually answered your own question at the end there, because what you said is NOT strictly the case. Contrary to popular belief, truth is NOT always an absolute defense against libel charges. The legal standard is generally actual malice, which means that the standard includes "reckless disregard" of whether something is true or false, not just actual truth or falsehood.
What this also means is that in some states it is possible to sue people for publishing claims that may be misleading (though technically true) or which bring undue attention that invades someone's privacy without cause. Basically, telling the "truth" without appropriate context in a public forum can be misleading and, under some circumstances, can be considered libel, defamation, or a related actionable tort.
Just as a simple example -- if I published a front-page newspaper headline which said, "Happy Apple Farms Sells Fruit which Contains POISON!" and then wrote an in-depth article about the horrifying fact that Happy Apple Farms sells food products with cyanide... well, that might be considered defamation if I left out the fact that, well, all apples contain similar small amounts of cyanide, and it isn't considered harmful at that scale. I unfairly singled out a company with misleading (though technically true) information, which would actually apply to all similar products and businesses.
I'm sure this is part of the justification behind these laws. I don't agree with that justification in this case, but the fact is that factory farms do nasty things which would look horrifying to many members of the public, even when they are "up to code." Some of this is because factory farms are horrible monstrosities, but some of it is also because most members of the public are so divorced from butchering and meat preparation these days that they find standard butchering practices difficult to watch.
Again, I do NOT think this justifies such laws. But the idea that standard business practices taken out of context might offend public sensibilities is very real in this case.
(Personally, I think that's up for the public to decide: and if we collectively view videos of these things and demand the farms to shut down -- or provide a bucolic vision of green pastures for every happy cow -- that's our choice to make.)
Anyone can get lucky and have something happen that gives them a boost. Sustaining it over time, however, takes what most would call leadership.
The problem is that, given standard corporate culture, it can be really hard to differentiate "leadership" from sustained luck.
Why? Think about it a minute. Corporate culture rewards risk-takers, i.e., people who don't "play it safe," but actively do things that are statistically less likely to pay off (but could pay off a LOT if they do pay off).
If you have tens of thousands of low-level employees with business degrees and MBAs trying to "one-up" each other, there are bound to be some who get lucky and get promoted. And out of thousands and thousands of mid-level management taking such risks each year to get an advantage over their colleagues, a few of them are bound to have a string of successes. And they will get promoted.
I'm absolutely NOT saying "it's all luck," but in a situation where we promote people who produce statistically unlikely events, we're bound to promote quite a few people whose success was partly or largely due to chance.
The trick is getting a long-enough string of successes that you reach the top-level execs. Then, you're generally protected a bit -- and even if your luck turns significantly, you can just be handed a "golden parachute."
There are studies which have looked at this behavior at high levels of management. There are plenty of examples where CEOs have been blamed and fired for some random turn of luck, only to move on to their next company and make a huge success. Are they a failure or a genius with "leadership" and "vision"? Or did their luck just change? Or -- as happens quite often -- did they inherit policies in their new company which were already started when a predecessor was fired, but the results only became clear under the new manager, who then claimed the credit?
Obviously there are very smart people who also have "leadership" and "vision" and whatever. But it you examine the actual dynamics of corporate business models, it becomes clear that people frequently get rewarded and lauded for chance events, as well as blamed and fired for chance events. In such a competitive environment which deliberately seeks statistically improbable successes, luck clearly will be a factor, even among those who seem to "sustain" a trend for a while. (If they are lucky enough and become a "great man," then occasional failures become easier to overlook.... which is yet another problem with the "great man myth.")
Musicians. I keep an android tablet on my piano too, but a lot of the time it's more convenient to print out the sheet music that I'm currently using and lay the pages side by side on the stand instead of working with a smaller tablet screen.
And there's also the flexibility in marking up paper copies. Musicians need to frequently make notations, since real-time performance from sheet music requires flexibility and adaptability in the markup on the medium.
Electronic markup tools keep getting better, but as a musician, sometimes you just want to put a very specific kind of markup, or add a few notes, or whatever... music notation is a unique typesetting/markup challenge, and standard PDF markup tools or whatever aren't ideal.
"Jigawat" is the accepted pronunciation for the term involving electricity.
No -- it's a pronunciation that's often listed first in older dictionaries and is now out of date. Back in the 1960s through the early 80s, some official standards documents suggested "jigga" as a pronunciation for the SI prefix "giga-". However, this was before such units were in common everyday use. When people actually started using the prefix more regularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s (particular with gigabytes), for whatever reason the hard G became the common pronunciation.
" Back to the Future" was in the late part of the era before the prefix became popular, so many scientists of the time would have pronounced any SI units with that prefix like that (though I believe it was inconsistent). But nowadays that pronunciation sounds like an error to most people: even scientists I know who were trained back in the 60s or 70s have switched their pronunciation.
While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
Indeed. Additionally, we need to consider that the performance of a self-selecting group of students taking a course voluntarily may NOT necessarily reflect a general trend that would be applicable to ALL students when a course is required.
In other words, even IF programming does help develop logical thinking in students who are interested in it, it does not necessarily follow that these performance gains would happen with all students.
We need only look at the history of geometric proofs in high-school curricula to see the large-scale failure of another attempt to teach logical thinking indirectly in a high-school course. From the mid-1800s until the late 1900s, a full-year course in Euclidean geometry with emphasis on proofs was a standard part of most high-school curricula in the U.S. Yet a number of studies done in the past few decades have concluded that the logical skills actually developed in such courses were nearly non-existent outside a small group of students, most of whom probably already possessed significant logic and abstract thinking skills before taking the course. (Many studies concluded that the majority of students left such courses with little to no abilities to actually do mathematical proofs, and -- more disturbingly -- they also left the courses with profound misunderstandings about the nature of logic.)
I'm NOT saying that teaching logical thinking is hopeless, but it requires a combination of a good teacher and good student engagement, as well as a curriculum that is not "dumbed down" to accommodate "the lowest common denominator" of student. (This was a problem that many critics raised about geometrical proofs -- that they were taught in a way to make them "accessible" to everyone, but in the process they were dumbed down to a point that they no longer taught critical thinking very well. And the exercises were boring to those students who actually had an aptitude for such things.)
In sum, even if the measured skills show real improvements (not just selecting students already good at these things), it may be quite difficult to extend such improvements to uninterested students required to take a course, or to all students of all ability levels. We have loads of data on such attempts to teach abstract thought from math curricula reform over the past century or so... it rarely works as intended.
Your post is informative and makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, I think there are plenty of new types of errors which can be created with electronic systems. In particular, when you abstract data from records and substitute codes in, you make it easier for people to stop looking at original records. Those original records might also contain contextual information that would prevent some errors. In most cases, I imagine the benefits of electronic records outweigh the problems, but when you depend on a computer system to check a bunch of codes, it's harder to realize there's an error in the coding compared to a paper record with context.
Finally, it's really hard to bill correctly if all of your documentation is on paper. If the coder going over the clipboard misses a charge, the hospital loses out on money. If the coder invents a charge, you lose out on money. If the coder can't find whatever documentation a kafkaesque insurance company demands to justify a procedure, you both lose out on money. Also harder to reject a claim for not being written in blue pen with block caps when the claim is electronic.
I'd actually like a citation showing the medical billing has improved since the system became all-electronic. Most studies seem to agree that the majority of medical bills these days contain errors. I never realized how bad it was until I switched to a high-deductible plan (for various reasons) a few years ago. Since I had to pay out-of-pocket for almost everything, I started paying detailed attention to medical bills.
And out of all the interactions my family has had with doctors in the past 3 years, at least 75% of them have had billing errors. And it's not just your "kafkaesque insurance company" -- I think we've seen at least 8 different providers, and the majority of them have made billing errors. I'd say the insurance company was responsible for maybe 1/3 of errors at most... it's primarily the providers.
As part of my plan, I'm supposed to receive a free annual physical. The first year, my doctor's office filed the claim FOUR TIMES and each time made different coding errors. Finally, the last time they ended up double-crediting me on something, and I ended up $5 ahead of what I was supposed to pay, so I just gave up. Last year, I tried to fix this problem by bringing in a copy of the relevant page from my benefits booklet explaining exactly what was covered in a routine exam, and requesting that the office ONLY perform those procedures. They still screwed something up. A family member saw a different doctor and did the same thing, and both the insurance company and the doctor's office made errors -- which combined resulted in four charges we weren't actually responsible for.
Medical billing in the U.S. is a disaster. I don't think most people seem to notice, because insurance "covers it" and so people just pay their $20 co-pay for most things and moves on. For those poor people who actually need to pay bills (and people who elect to through a high-deductible plan), it's beyond kafkaesque.
I'm not saying clipboards would fix this problem. But if documentation were actually attached to most things, rather than existing only as random billing and procedure codes, I'd imagine it would be easier to track things down. As it is, I find it next-to-impossible to even resolve billing errors because all the statements I receive from the physician and insurance company have a bunch of numbers and too little explanation of what they are actually doing. I have spent hours examining the bills, matching up charges (since they aren't reported the same), then querying the insurance company (who, when pressed, will actually tell me what the diagnostic codes mean), which I then have to call the doctors office and force them to code them correctly, rather than using some random diagnostic code for something I didn't even have.
If we all went vegetarian and killed off the domesticated cattle, then we'd make a huge difference! Kill a cow today!
Well, to look at it from a different perspective, it's the vegetarians who are the problem. The vegans don't consume animal products, but most vegetarians consume large amounts of dairy -- milk, cheese, etc. -- as sources for protein and various nutrients.
So, the vegetarians of the world are forcing us to keep a bunch of cows alive to support them, cows that are belching out their greenhouse gases daily. Meanwhile, the meat-eaters are doing their part against global warming by killing cows every day for some juicy steaks. It's not their fault that the cows seems to keep reproducing and making more cows -- that just means we need to eat MORE steak to fight global warming!
It's the meat-eaters who should be smug -- it's those pesky vegetarians who are the problem!
I'm guessing Time Warner is going to be giving all those royalties back?
That's what Good Morning to You Productions is demanding in the lawsuit.
I know this would never happen, but the damages here should have to go further than just returning the money. How many movies and TV shows over the years have been forced to not film a birthday scene to avoid royalties? How many people have been deprived of the standard birthday song at a restaurant or other public celebration, because the staff was not licensed for public performance?
Birthdays are important events. Movies and films often have scenes that want to show such events. Time Warner has deliberately impeded the "progress of the arts" which was the entire point of the Constitution by artificially limiting the production of such scenes in films and movies.
Every filmmaker who has ever filmed a birthday scene without the song or who had a birthday scene in a script by cut it because of royalty concerns should join in a class-action lawsuit and seek damages. Every person who wanted to hear "Happy Birthday" at a restaurant but got some crappy weird song from the waitstaff should sue them for damages. I imagine the cumulative amount, with damages, should come to billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
Only then will justice truly have been done. Only then will we begin to turn the tide against copyright trolls and those who would falsely claim copyright.
But that interpretation is not possible in context. Read it again:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So, copyright terms can only be justified if they "promote progress." Which basically occurs if the specified "authors and inventors" are encouraged to create more things. A 1000-year copyright term doesn't encourage more "progress" -- it only rewards someone (and that person's descendants) lucky enough to come up with something really popular.
A copyright term longer than a lifespan is thus not justified by the Constitution.
If I said to an artist or inventor, "You've done really cool things: I'll pay you X dollars per month starting now 'to promote progress' in your science/arts" and all you do is sit on your butt for the rest of your life and collect your check, have you done what I asked for? If you die and send some random guy to collect your check every month, are YOU (the artist/inventor) "promoting progress" in your science/art? So a 1000-year copyright term cannot achieve what the text of the law demands.
Copyright should be renewable forever upon payment of a fee every ten years or so. If a property is so valuable that it generates income, fine. Keep paying the fee and keep the property.
NO. The whole point of copyright was to encourage writers and publishers and artists to invest time in making a good product. It originated because publishers who tried to print a book had to invest a lot of money in things like manual typesetting and proofreading -- but the better-known publisher down the street could just buy the first copy, recreate it (cheaper, with more errors, but good enough), and make all the money (because they make it on the cheap), while the first (lesser-known) publisher goes out of business.
The whole idea is to allow time for people to recoup their time and investment in creating a quality product. Unlike most professions where you get paid at the end of the week or the month, a novelist may spent months or years creating a book, and a publisher (in the olden days) might spend months typesetting it... in hopes to recoup that investment of time and resources.
Most copyrights back when they started (in the late 1400s) were 7-10 years. That's plenty, in my view. But I'd be happy to go back to the original 1790 Copyright Act: 14 years, plus the possibility of a single renewal. That is MORE THAN ENOUGH. If you can't recoup your expenses in 14 years or produce something else in those 14 years that keeps your business going, you deserve to go out of business.
The idea of copyright was never that somebody would do one thing and live off of the profits forever. It was to provide payment for services rendered, which would encourage creators to make more quality products in the future.
I get that you want the best possible sound... and in some cases the placebo effect may actually help you enjoy your music more... but are there really enough of these people to base a business on?
If you're effectively making a cable that costs maybe $10 to manufacture, but selling it for $340, you don't need many "audiophiles" to make a significant profit. If you have a few hundred of them, you're already making 6-figure profits. (Obviously some cables may cost a little more to manufacture, but certainly not anywhere near as much as they are charging.)
It's kinda like wine. There have been studies that show that if you serve cheap wine in expensive bottles, people like it better. There have been studies that show that many wine prizes are awarded so haphazardly that you might as well choose them at random. There have been studies that show that actual wine judges at a major competition could barely rate the same wine with consistency above random chance on consecutive days.
And yet, people still will pay hundreds of dollars for some bottles. Recent studies have even shown that people literally get a better "pleasure" response in their brain when they are told a wine is expensive, compared to when it is supposedly cheap. It's more than a casual "placebo effect" -- it's something that people will pay hundreds of dollars to experience, even if most of that effect comes from the act of paying the hundreds of dollars rather than the product itself.**
I'm sure most audiophiles have a similar experience -- they literally receive more pleasure when they listen through an expensive cable. They want to pay more for that experience. So why not let them, I suppose? It's not like faith healers or psychics, who might do real damage with their charlatanism... the only damage these cable dealers could do, I suppose, would be with some obsessed audiophile who goes and throws his money away on expensive cables while his family starves. Maybe there's a couple people like that in the world, but it's certainly not a common problem.
And these sorts of "tests" won't convince anyone. I'm not sure what the point is anymore. It's like James Randi going after Uri Gellar -- true "believers" don't give a crap what the tests of "skeptics" say... they'll just keep believing. Let 'em enjoy their magic cables.
[**NOTE: To be clear, I am NOT saying all wine is the same. There are a lot of different varieties and flavors. But I do believe you should just buy what you like. There are $5 wines that have easily beat out $100 wines at blind tastings. So, if you like a wine and discover it's only $5, keep buying and enjoying it. If you like the $100 wine, and you like the taste enough to pay $100, fine.]
it's part of history. Any sensible person and most insensible people know the difference between being accused of something and actually being convicted for it.
Maybe "sensible" people recognize that distinction.
But, be honest here -- if you were a young woman, and you searched for a guy you were considering dating and saw he had been "accused of" rape, would you go out with him? Would you even bother asking for his story? Or would just say, "Uh... no thanks"?
If you were in charge of hiring someone for a position, and you did a search and saw a guy was "accused of" rape, would you think twice about hiring the guy? If you had 50 applicants for the job, wouldn't you just skip to the next guy? Even if you'd be okay hiring him, if you were at a prominent company, would you be concerned that people looking up your employees might come upon such a record about this guy? Maybe you'd be okay working with him, but would your customers be? Is the risk worth it?
Is it legal to discriminate on this basis? Probably not. But if you have 50 other candidates for a job, you'll probably just move onto the next candidate... and no one will know why you passed this guy over.
And if your response is to say, "Well, you should find out the whole story" -- well, most "sensible" people probably have other things they need to do with their lives other than researching someone else's past in detail. They look for the most prominent stuff that comes up in a search engine hit -- "ooh, he was a suspected rapist." Boom. Why go further? And it might not even be easy to go further, since news media sources are much more likely to report prominently when someone is arrested for some heinous crime... when the charges are dropped a few weeks later, you're lucky to see a few sentences on page 10, if that.
I do NOT think the current implementation of "right to be forgotten" laws work right, but just acting like there is no problem and "it's all part of history that sensible people should understand" is just ridiculous... particularly if it comes to inaccurate or misleading accusations of something particularly egregious. Facts taken out of context are often misleading. Most of those facts just would disappear from the public eye a couple decades ago (unless you specifically went digging in an archive), but now they can be instantly available for many years. Our public morality and ethics have not caught up with this.
Actually, that's not at all true, at least in the meaning of "history" before the internet. History is traditionally a narrative created about the past, usually derived from reliable sources (or at least what were considered reliable by the author of the narrative). A random recollection of some dude about some other dude was not "history" -- it was "gossip" at best. It only became "history" if someone wrote down the account and gave it credibility.
In the past, reliable records about the vast majority of events and people were scant. There are major figures of medieval Europe, for example, where we have almost no actual records from their lifetime -- maybe a baptismal record, or a record that they were paid once by some guy at some point, but that might be it.
The fact that little Jimmy went pee in his pants during gym class in 3rd grade didn't used to be "history." Maybe a few of the kids in his class might remember that incident a couple decades later, but it was generally forgotten by everyone else. Nowadays, one of those kids might take out a cell phone and take a picture of little Jimmy's wet pants, text it to some other kids, and the picture might end up on the internet if it's sufficiently entertaining to some stupid kid.
Now Jimmy's pee-filled pants are an official durable record that might persist on the internet for decades, available to anyone with sufficient skills at searching.
We used to have a historical "filter" that would get rid of the random quotidian minutiae of our lives, simply because it wasn't recorded in durable form. "History" would only record "important" stuff.
Now just about any event can be photographed, videotaped, or otherwise documented to become a "meme" or at least passed around among hoards of people (and thereby become a somewhat permanent record).
The problem here is that we ALL do crap in everyday life that would look bad out of context. And once that crap "bubbles up" somewhere on the internet, it really does become a part of "history" in the old sense, because search engines are our new machines that curate historical records... rather than historians digging in archives and collecting records which would be turned into a narrative.
I'm NOT saying any of this is "bad," only that is VERY different from what "history" was even just a couple decades ago.
It starts with misunderstandings and people saying "they were a kid when they did that" and ends with inconvenient facts about what people did before their "views evolved" being forcibly erased for the convenience of the one wanting their past hidden.
You have a good point, though I doubt that anyone can succeed these days in having something "forcibly erased" from the entire internet AND all public databases AND all paper records.
What some people are proposing -- and what people are asking for in the "right to be forgotten" -- is to consider that some information be removed from prominent locations in major search engines, which (as I said) have become our default curators of "history." Note that it is "curating," not merely keeping records -- search engines need to decide what the top links are. And the algorithms they use may bring undue weight to random events that would largely have been forgotten a couple decades ago.
To be clear: I think the "right to be forgotten" actions against Google are NOT a good solution to this problem. I don't have a better solution myself either. But we do need to recognize that we live in a different world, where "history" is very different than it was just a few years ago. How we deal with that is yet to be determined, but our social mores and standards certainly haven't caught up yet in how to evaluate the new kind of "history" available to us.
And making some rant and slippery slope argument that making search engine hits less prominent will necessarily lead to the "forcible erasure" of history is just ridiculous, especially in the age where anyone can duplicate and store information in multitudes of places on the internet.
You need to stop confusing "ingredient list" with "chemical composition." As an ingredient, "sugar" means "refined sugar," but there's sugar in everything.
I know the difference between "ingredient list" and "chemical composition." Do you? All ingredients, even "processed" ones, have impurities. The label doesn't need to care about those impurities, but it should reflect the composition relatively accurately.
"Evaporated cane juice" is about 99% sucrose. It's not added to foods for its nutrients or for its flavor. it's usually a whitish powder that tastes just like sugar... because it IS sugar, with a few more impurities that aren't removed in processing compared to regular sugar. The ONLY reason anyone uses it is to disguise the fact that they are using sugar. If they want to call it "evaporated cane juice," I suppose that might be defended by the different processing. But adding an additional label like "no sugar added" is just bogus nonsense. A company deliberately added a processed product that is 99+% sugar to sweeten the result. Putting a big sign on the front saying "no sugar added" is incredibly deceptive... and we have laws in advertising to prevent this kind of weaseling deception. Same with "organic brown rice syrup." Yes, sometimes it can be used specifically for its maltose flavor. But again, it's basically sugar and used in place of sugar or HFCS or honey or whatever because it can have "organic" and "brown" in front of it.
Again, I'm not saying that the ingredient label should be a chemical analysis. My problem is more with companies that deliberately use these things and then claim that there are "no added sugars." That's definitely misleading. Ideally, obscure ingredients should be labeled when possible for their primary function in the food -- that would help a lot. We already see that a lot: "lecithin (an emulsifier)" or whatever.
(By the way, I'm not against sugar. I personally don't buy a lot of stuff with added sugar, because I cook and bake for myself. But if someone actually wants to try to avoid stuff with high doses of deliberately added sweetening agents, they should be able to determine that without seeing labels that say "no added sugar" when it's clearly there and deliberately added for only that purpose.)
you yanks need to learn that "caveat emptor" is supposed to be a warning, not a fucking business model.
Umm, you do realize that I wrote an entire post criticizing this business model, right?
I'm totally against this sort of nonsense, which is why I tried to inform people about it. But I'm also against natural foods wackoism, which is what drives companies to do this crap in the first place. "I'll buy anything that doesn't have sugar or HFCS in it" leads companies to come up with "evaporated cane juice" and "brown rice syrup" and all this other BS.
I'm NOT blaming consumers for a disgusting, dishonest business practice. But I am blaming them for being idiots and flocking to buy stuff that has meaningless labels saying something is "all natural," while often paying 2-5 times as much for the same old crap. They are DRIVING businesses to try this crap.
Instead -- if you really want less processed foods, well STOP BUYING CRAP WITH A LIST OF INGREDIENTS YOU NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE. If you look at a label and see "evaporated cane juice," your reaction shouldn't be, "Ah, well I don't see sugar or HFCS, so this must be healthy!" You should instead say to yourself, "Hmm, I've never seen 'cane juice' on the supermarket shelves, so maybe I shouldn't buy this, or at least I should look up what it is before eating it." If you see "concentrated celery juice" in your bacon and hot dogs, you should start to wonder, "Why are they putting celery in my bacon? And why is it concentrated?"
The vast majority of people (even fairly intelligent people) aren't willing to do the work to find out what's in the crap they are voluntarily buying and eating. That doesn't mean they are to blame for deceptive business practices, but they are partially to blame for what they eat when they mindlessly support that business model... even when the ingredients are listed on the bloody label.
Bugs happen. If you've got code that seems to work and then you investigate and it doesn't work on one particular brand of drive, it would be a reasonable suspicion that there is something funny with those drives.
It's hard to evaluate exactly what went on here. If you read the original report of the discovery (which I did last month and is still the first link in TFS), you see this explanation:
Poking around in the source code of the kernel looking for the trim related code, we came to the trim blacklist. This blacklist configures a specific behavior for certain SSD drives and identifies the drives based on the regexp of the model name. Our working SSDs were explicitly allowed full operation of the TRIM but some of the SSDs of our affected manufacturer were limited. Our affected drives did not match any pattern so they were implicitly allowed full operation.
In other words, they didn't know what was going on. Then they happened upon some code in the Linux kernel that explicitly blacklisted certain model segments from certain manufacturers. So, at some point someone made the assumption that this must be related to certain models from certain manufacturers, based on code in the Linux kernel.
This could easily have led to confirmation bias in a situation where errors were not occurring frequently. (Note the further explanation that when they first informed Samsung, Samsung was unable to reproduce the issue until they started using a custom "much more intensive script" to increase the error rate of the problem.)
So, I don't claim to know the full situation, but my guess is that Samsung wouldn't have been blamed for this at all if this blacklisting code hadn't already been seen in the Linux kernel.
I'm not trying to place the blame on anyone in particular. But in this case there were various reasons they probably started thinking manufacturers were the problem other than just simple logic, and the "aha" moment apparently was based on looking at code in the Linux kernel already, not on actual prior observation that certain brands of drives were failing. (Otherwise, they would have probably suspected a hardware problem earlier... but instead the post describes a lot of time searching for software issues before they discovered the blacklist.)
The problem with slashdot crowd-sourced comment moderation is that if you say something that the in-crowd disagrees with, you can be banned. By other users!
Only temporarily. Your post may be downvoted, and perhaps your karma will be hurt if you keep doing it repeatedly. If you build up a reputation as a complete jerk or shill, you may just have to abandon your uid and start over... and that's what you deserve if you end up that way.
It is not about spam. It is about groupthink.
Here's the reality: I've posted MANY things here that disagree with the normal "groupthink" of the Slashdot community, and I've gotten +5 insightful. Why? Because when I do so, I support my points. I explain my position. I often cite reputable sources, particularly when I'm addressing something that's particularly contentious.
You do that here, and people appreciate it. If you provide good information, you WILL get upvoted. Over the years, I've found this site to have some of the most open-minded mods anywhere, as long as you back up what you say. Sure, there have been a few times I've had such a post modded down into oblivion, but only a few. The vast majority of the time when I am reasonable (not a jerk), present rational arguments and evidence, etc., an informative post will get modded up, regardless of whether it agrees with the majority opinion here.
Does it get tiresome to keep having to explain myself and minority opinions or unknown facts over and over? Sure -- but that's what true discussion requires.
companies use all sorts of tricks to hide stuff like that. Soup companies use yeast to put MSG in Soup without reporting it (it's a by product of the yeast, which serves no other purpose).
And recently there has been the phenomenon where companies try to hide things by using confusing nomenclature. E.g., "evaporated cane juice" in products with "no added sugar." Yeah -- "cane juice" -- it must be good for you, since they call it "juice"! Well, it's just another form of sugar... processed slightly differently, but still basically sucrose.
Basically, it's just a game... try to make things sound "natural" and "wholesome" when they're basically the same old crap. Same thing goes for "brown rice syrup" used as a sweetener in many things... basically sugar. But it's "brown rice"!! (Of course, brown rice also often has elevated levels of arsenic and other things... but hey, it's "natural" and "brown," so it must be good!)
You know how we found out sodium nitrate causes cancer?
Funny that you bring nitrates up, because that's one of my favorite examples of nonsense labeling. First, we get most of our nitrates from vegetables, so worrying about the small amounts in bacon and cured meats is probably not as big a deal as people make of it. (Yes, yes... cooking does other things to the nitrates and can make them bad, but proper curing also deactivates most of them too... we could argue this all day.)
But regardless of that, my favorite misleading labeling is all the "uncured" meats you see these days: "uncured bacon," "uncured salami," etc. Yeah, except these almost always contain huge amounts of "concentrated celery juice" (or sometimes another agent) which contains more nitrates than the standard salts used traditionally to cure meat. (And no -- to those natural foods wackos -- there's no evidence to support the idea that somehow those nitrates are better for you in the concentrated celery juice... basically because "natural" celery juice has unpredictable amounts of nitrates, they need to add more of them than they would for tradition curing salts.)
People just want stuff called "natural" with "juice" and "brown X" and "natural flavors" in it. It's almost all bogus nonsense, and often you end up paying a huge premium for something that could very well be worse for you.
Moral of the story: Labels frequently don't work to tell people what's actually better. Not saying we shouldn't try to use them, but companies will weasel their way around anything to appeal to customers.
(By the way, I'm all in favor of cooking for yourself with whole ingredients, using less "processed" foods, etc. But bogus "natural foods" nonsense is bogus nonsense.)
Instead of going through the draconian methods that would be required to maintain privacy, society will simple learn to accept a world without it.
Perhaps that will come to pass, but likely not for a couple generations.
Basically, for people to ignore all that stuff, you'll need the "people in power" to be okay with it. Most of the people in power are middle-aged or older. Social media stuff has only been the norm for about a decade, so I'd say we'll need to wait at least 20-30 years before most of the "people in power" will have grown up with it.
And then, guess what -- there's a filtering process for the "people in power" where the old "people in power" decide who the new ones will be. And so there will be an even greater lag, where the first generation of "social media natives" will still be shamed as they try to build careers, so in 20-30 years, the "people in power" will be "social media natives," but they'll mostly be selected by the previous generation and thus will hold a "higher standard" -- i.e., the kids who didn't do most of the "nasty stuff" when they where kids.
Maybe when you get about 40-50 years from now, you'll get a true transformation like you describe, assuming current trends continue (which, well... who would have predicted this current world 50 years ago?).
By the way, you can look for this sort of morality issue in various political campaigns, etc. What most of the "cool kids" were doing in the 60s (in terms of drugs, sexual practices, etc.) was definitely not acceptable even when that generation came to power in the 80s and 90s. Maybe in the past few years, we've finally started to see a majority of the public okay with some drugs, etc., but that's been a really slow transformation, as I described above.
A 6 year old girl isn't really terribly safe and would not be able to fight off a kidnapper, that is all I was saying.
Neither could most 6-year-old boys... or 10-year-old girls. Or boys. And even many teenage girls would have difficulty fighting off a dedicated kidnapper.
But all of that is a bit irrelevant, because what really needs to be considered here is prevalence of stranger kidnappings... which is ridiculously low. Something like 0.01% of all kids reported missing are abducted and murdered by strangers. Something less than 1% of all kids who are actually abducted (as opposed to reported missing because they got lost or ran away or whatever) are abducted by strangers.
We're talking about ~100 kids per year in the U.S. who are abducted and killed. And the majority of those kids are abducted and killed by family members or other people they know well, not be random strangers. (Most kids abducted by a stranger are returned relatively unharmed.) Am I saying we shouldn't be concerned about it? Of course we should be concerned about it. But the risks are blown completely out of proportion.
Kids are about 50 times more likely to be killed in a motor vehicle than by an abductor. Kids are about 10 times more likely to drown or suffocate, 8 times more likely to take poison accidentally, 4 times more likely to die in a fire, etc., etc.
You're vastly more likely to cause your child to die because you got into a motor vehicle accident while not paying attention (or didn't get enough sleep, or were distracted by a phone or texting or whatever) than you are by letting them wander the streets alone.
And even if you are worried about your kid getting abducted and abused or killed, you should be MUCH more worried about the kid's uncle or brother or father or teacher than some random stranger grabbing them off the street.
If you aren't supervising your kids around people they know out of fear of abuse and abduction (where the VAST majority of abuse occurs), worrying about random strangers shouldn't be on your list.
I am not trying to claim that it is always true that letting her wander the neighborhood on her own is bad. I think that a mile or so hike from the park may be a bit much for a kid of her age though as well.
It's much more likely that a child of that age will encounter some other random problem -- accidental injury, getting lost, etc. -- than being kidnapped. Those are the primary fears parents should be evaluating for kids. All kids are different, and parents should pay use judgment to determine when kids are ready to be out alone. I've read stories of police questioning parents for letting a 6-year-old play alone in his own fenced-in backyard!
Anyhow, I don't know the details of the case you're discussing or the maturity of the kid in question. Regardless, though, we should be concerned about this kid because young kids often need supervision in general -- not because of some (likely non-existent) "bad guy" grabbing her on the street.
Child abduction rates in the U.S. have been declining steadily for at least 40 years. Kids are safer than ever. The hysteria needs to stop.
I agree with you about the stupid character set problem and the need for better editors/editing, but almost everything else you complain about is actually what makes moderation here vastly superior to just about any other site. It's certainly not perfect, and there are perhaps tweaks to be done to moderation, but if we did what you suggest, it would completely fill the site with crap posts and allow the moderation to be gamed as on every other internet site.
Most of your complaints could be solved by not posting AC and by contributing positively to the site (and thus getting good karma). If users can't be bothered to do that, I don't want to see their posts. I only want to see an AC if it's a really superior post, so the default moderation levels are about right. Again, it's not perfect, but it's superior to most sites and to almost everything you're proposing.
Slashdot Mirror
First "Correlation is not causation" post!
Righteo. Specifically, assuming Google's PageRank algorithm is at work, a more "popular" candidate presumably would get linked more. So, is the popularity creating the links, or are the links producing the popularity?
But it's not just "creating" popularity -- it's SUSTAINING it. If something is linked a lot, those links don't die overnight -- but election dynamics change. Do search engine link rankings change fast enough to keep up? Or do they end up reinforcing the status quo?
It's the reason I stopped using Google back in 2012. I had heard about the filter bubble effects, but I saw it firsthand. Some people may remember the Ron Paul fiascos in some of the Republican primaries back in 2012. I wasn't really a Ron Paul supporter, but I got interested in the story. So, I'd periodically Google "Ron Paul" or whatever to see what new things might have happened or commentary might be out there.
After a few weeks, I suddenly started to see Ron Paul links show up higher in my search results. Google News would start showing me a lot of Ron Paul headlines, even if I just browsed the Google News homepage (without any search terms at all). I compared my results with a friend and saw that my hits and link rankings were being tailored to what Google thought must be "what I want to see."
I didn't want my news skewed in that way, but Google "helpfully" tried to appease me (without asking and without a transparent way to control it).
So, the effects on elections won't just be swaying voters toward more popular candidates. With "personalization" and "history-based" rankings, search engines can become a sort of personal feedback loop for political views... what you're interested in becomes reinforced.
To me, that process is perhaps even more dangerous in elections than random ranking effects in search engines. It leads to polarization and extremism. It leads to people always seeing "what they want to see" and not having to confront conflicting perspectives on issues and candidates who don't agree with them. That generally isn't a good path to nuanced political discussion.
This is exactly the point of doing the "unlimited" time off policies.
It's the point of almost ALL "unlimited" business policies of any kind.
Guilt is a powerful emotion.
The company can say they have "unlimited" x and employees feel proud to have "unlimited" x and people who abuse the system will be dealt with... all around win by simple exploitation of guilt...
While guilt may be one factor, I doubt it's the only thing (or even the primary thing) at work here. Guilt explains why someone won't take advantage of an "unlimited" system in this case perhaps, but it doesn't explain why the overall use of vacation time goes DOWN.
In many (though not all) circumstances, if you offer someone a fixed amount of something, a lot of people will try to "use it all up" to get a good value. If you give them "unlimited," they will stop worrying about maximizing value.
It's the reason Netflix's early business model worked -- "unlimited" DVDs for X dollars/month. If they said "Rent 8 DVDs per month," you'll get people looking at their calendars and making sure to watch a movie to get close to their 8 movies in. If you say "unlimited," many people just let the DVDs sit on the counter and wait weeks until they get around to watching them. On average, they end up renting fewer DVDs than if you priced each rental competitively.
Or, you're running a buffet -- do you say "Only two passes at the buffet" or do you say "all you can eat"? With "two passes," you'll get people maximizing their value, stuffing their plates with more expensive things, not finishing the second plate, etc. With "unlimited," many people stop trying to cram their plates with the most expensive stuff on the buffet and just eat -- and they get full and most might barely have seconds. Yeah, you get the huge dude who will come back 4-5 times, but you'll also get loads of smaller, thinner people who just come up for one plate and be done. Everyone feels like they got "value" with an "unlimited" deal, even though they probably wasted less food (and ate a variety of things, rather than just the expensive stuff).
People like the sound of "unlimited," but any marketing guy will tell you that in many business models, it can actually reduce usage of products and services overall. You'll get a few people who "max out" their unlimited use, but 95% of people just stop worrying about "getting value" out of the service and often use less of it than they would if services were doled out at a fixed rate.
Oh, you silly kids! What the OSS fanatics fail to understand is that once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world" that time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example.
I understand exactly what you're talking about, and I agree that cost-benefit analyses have to be made.
But there is also a problem in corporate culture where cost-benefit analyses are focused too much on the immediate future. Paying $100/year to license software may seem worth it if you're just using that software for a year and retraining may require a few hours.
But what about after 3 years? Or 5 years? Or 10 years? And what about other fringe benefits of OSS, like your ability to customize the code yourself if you want a new feature? If you're a big business and you want to complain that you lack feature X in LibreOffice, you could either pay Microsoft thousands of dollars annually (perhaps tens of thousands, in a big company), or you could use that money to pay a developer to add feature X to LibreOffice and customize it to do exactly what you want (rather than what Microsoft gives you).
And then there's end-of-life concerns, too. Do you want to pay to retrain all your employees when Microsoft decides whatever its next random mutation of UI happens? Or do you pay Microsoft extra to continue security patches after your version is no longer supported? Or do you just use that money to pay people who can patch your free OSS suite, which can be maintained by anyone since the source is available?
These are all cost-benefit analyses. But often they aren't actually decided on that basis by large corporations -- they are decided because "Microsoft Office is the standard" and people in power to make decisions don't want to have to deal with the switch or don't believe "free" could possibly be as good, or they don't consider alternatives to get the features they want in OSS that might be cheaper than paying licensing fees for many years.
Except, it doesn't apply. This case is about videos that are shown to be about factual events that are displayed in a truthful format that are both covered under the 1st amendment and would likely also be protected under whistleblower laws. The "abortion tissue" videos aren't covered under either.
I absolutely agree with you that the abortion videos are being released in a highly edited and misleading way, and I don't disagree with the temporary restraining order.
However, your ideology is also blinding you to parallels here. These state laws were not passed out of fear of some nice documentary crew coming onto a farm and making a pleasant and balanced video presentation of what goes on.
They were passed because of previous incidents where people from PETA and similar organizations have done EXACTLY what these anti-abortion folks have done, i.e., they have lied or pretended to be someone they weren't to gain access, then taken videos, and then edited them to make the most of the "gory bits," regardless of whether those particular video segments were illegal or standard business practice or whatever. PETA and similar groups are not interested in "factual events that are displayed in a truthful format" -- they have an agenda to shut down any farm that kills animals, and they'll happily spin things to do it.
And I'm sure those misleading videos which take things out of context were the primary concern of those who passed these laws, just as you are currently concerned about abortion provider statements and images taken out of context.
The problem with the laws about the farms, of course, is that they are a complete overreach and deserve to be overturned. But your idea that there isn't a parallel motivation for abortion providers and farm owners to protect their businesses from unfairly edited videos is just failing to look at the bigger picture here.
Let me first be clear that I absolutely agree such laws are terrible and should be struck down. However...
How were these clearly bogus laws voted in, in the first place? It seems pretty obvious that documenting health/safety violations would be protected from legal retaliation, much like how truth is an absolute defense against libel charges.
You actually answered your own question at the end there, because what you said is NOT strictly the case. Contrary to popular belief, truth is NOT always an absolute defense against libel charges. The legal standard is generally actual malice, which means that the standard includes "reckless disregard" of whether something is true or false, not just actual truth or falsehood.
What this also means is that in some states it is possible to sue people for publishing claims that may be misleading (though technically true) or which bring undue attention that invades someone's privacy without cause. Basically, telling the "truth" without appropriate context in a public forum can be misleading and, under some circumstances, can be considered libel, defamation, or a related actionable tort.
Just as a simple example -- if I published a front-page newspaper headline which said, "Happy Apple Farms Sells Fruit which Contains POISON!" and then wrote an in-depth article about the horrifying fact that Happy Apple Farms sells food products with cyanide... well, that might be considered defamation if I left out the fact that, well, all apples contain similar small amounts of cyanide, and it isn't considered harmful at that scale. I unfairly singled out a company with misleading (though technically true) information, which would actually apply to all similar products and businesses.
I'm sure this is part of the justification behind these laws. I don't agree with that justification in this case, but the fact is that factory farms do nasty things which would look horrifying to many members of the public, even when they are "up to code." Some of this is because factory farms are horrible monstrosities, but some of it is also because most members of the public are so divorced from butchering and meat preparation these days that they find standard butchering practices difficult to watch.
Again, I do NOT think this justifies such laws. But the idea that standard business practices taken out of context might offend public sensibilities is very real in this case.
(Personally, I think that's up for the public to decide: and if we collectively view videos of these things and demand the farms to shut down -- or provide a bucolic vision of green pastures for every happy cow -- that's our choice to make.)
Anyone can get lucky and have something happen that gives them a boost. Sustaining it over time, however, takes what most would call leadership.
The problem is that, given standard corporate culture, it can be really hard to differentiate "leadership" from sustained luck.
Why? Think about it a minute. Corporate culture rewards risk-takers, i.e., people who don't "play it safe," but actively do things that are statistically less likely to pay off (but could pay off a LOT if they do pay off).
If you have tens of thousands of low-level employees with business degrees and MBAs trying to "one-up" each other, there are bound to be some who get lucky and get promoted. And out of thousands and thousands of mid-level management taking such risks each year to get an advantage over their colleagues, a few of them are bound to have a string of successes. And they will get promoted.
I'm absolutely NOT saying "it's all luck," but in a situation where we promote people who produce statistically unlikely events, we're bound to promote quite a few people whose success was partly or largely due to chance.
The trick is getting a long-enough string of successes that you reach the top-level execs. Then, you're generally protected a bit -- and even if your luck turns significantly, you can just be handed a "golden parachute."
There are studies which have looked at this behavior at high levels of management. There are plenty of examples where CEOs have been blamed and fired for some random turn of luck, only to move on to their next company and make a huge success. Are they a failure or a genius with "leadership" and "vision"? Or did their luck just change? Or -- as happens quite often -- did they inherit policies in their new company which were already started when a predecessor was fired, but the results only became clear under the new manager, who then claimed the credit?
Obviously there are very smart people who also have "leadership" and "vision" and whatever. But it you examine the actual dynamics of corporate business models, it becomes clear that people frequently get rewarded and lauded for chance events, as well as blamed and fired for chance events. In such a competitive environment which deliberately seeks statistically improbable successes, luck clearly will be a factor, even among those who seem to "sustain" a trend for a while. (If they are lucky enough and become a "great man," then occasional failures become easier to overlook.... which is yet another problem with the "great man myth.")
Musicians. I keep an android tablet on my piano too, but a lot of the time it's more convenient to print out the sheet music that I'm currently using and lay the pages side by side on the stand instead of working with a smaller tablet screen.
And there's also the flexibility in marking up paper copies. Musicians need to frequently make notations, since real-time performance from sheet music requires flexibility and adaptability in the markup on the medium.
Electronic markup tools keep getting better, but as a musician, sometimes you just want to put a very specific kind of markup, or add a few notes, or whatever... music notation is a unique typesetting/markup challenge, and standard PDF markup tools or whatever aren't ideal.
"Jigawat" is the accepted pronunciation for the term involving electricity.
No -- it's a pronunciation that's often listed first in older dictionaries and is now out of date. Back in the 1960s through the early 80s, some official standards documents suggested "jigga" as a pronunciation for the SI prefix "giga-". However, this was before such units were in common everyday use. When people actually started using the prefix more regularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s (particular with gigabytes), for whatever reason the hard G became the common pronunciation.
" Back to the Future" was in the late part of the era before the prefix became popular, so many scientists of the time would have pronounced any SI units with that prefix like that (though I believe it was inconsistent). But nowadays that pronunciation sounds like an error to most people: even scientists I know who were trained back in the 60s or 70s have switched their pronunciation.
While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
Indeed. Additionally, we need to consider that the performance of a self-selecting group of students taking a course voluntarily may NOT necessarily reflect a general trend that would be applicable to ALL students when a course is required.
In other words, even IF programming does help develop logical thinking in students who are interested in it, it does not necessarily follow that these performance gains would happen with all students.
We need only look at the history of geometric proofs in high-school curricula to see the large-scale failure of another attempt to teach logical thinking indirectly in a high-school course. From the mid-1800s until the late 1900s, a full-year course in Euclidean geometry with emphasis on proofs was a standard part of most high-school curricula in the U.S. Yet a number of studies done in the past few decades have concluded that the logical skills actually developed in such courses were nearly non-existent outside a small group of students, most of whom probably already possessed significant logic and abstract thinking skills before taking the course. (Many studies concluded that the majority of students left such courses with little to no abilities to actually do mathematical proofs, and -- more disturbingly -- they also left the courses with profound misunderstandings about the nature of logic.)
I'm NOT saying that teaching logical thinking is hopeless, but it requires a combination of a good teacher and good student engagement, as well as a curriculum that is not "dumbed down" to accommodate "the lowest common denominator" of student. (This was a problem that many critics raised about geometrical proofs -- that they were taught in a way to make them "accessible" to everyone, but in the process they were dumbed down to a point that they no longer taught critical thinking very well. And the exercises were boring to those students who actually had an aptitude for such things.)
In sum, even if the measured skills show real improvements (not just selecting students already good at these things), it may be quite difficult to extend such improvements to uninterested students required to take a course, or to all students of all ability levels. We have loads of data on such attempts to teach abstract thought from math curricula reform over the past century or so... it rarely works as intended.
Clipboards have a bunch of known deficiencies.
Your post is informative and makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, I think there are plenty of new types of errors which can be created with electronic systems. In particular, when you abstract data from records and substitute codes in, you make it easier for people to stop looking at original records. Those original records might also contain contextual information that would prevent some errors. In most cases, I imagine the benefits of electronic records outweigh the problems, but when you depend on a computer system to check a bunch of codes, it's harder to realize there's an error in the coding compared to a paper record with context.
Finally, it's really hard to bill correctly if all of your documentation is on paper. If the coder going over the clipboard misses a charge, the hospital loses out on money. If the coder invents a charge, you lose out on money. If the coder can't find whatever documentation a kafkaesque insurance company demands to justify a procedure, you both lose out on money. Also harder to reject a claim for not being written in blue pen with block caps when the claim is electronic.
I'd actually like a citation showing the medical billing has improved since the system became all-electronic. Most studies seem to agree that the majority of medical bills these days contain errors. I never realized how bad it was until I switched to a high-deductible plan (for various reasons) a few years ago. Since I had to pay out-of-pocket for almost everything, I started paying detailed attention to medical bills.
And out of all the interactions my family has had with doctors in the past 3 years, at least 75% of them have had billing errors. And it's not just your "kafkaesque insurance company" -- I think we've seen at least 8 different providers, and the majority of them have made billing errors. I'd say the insurance company was responsible for maybe 1/3 of errors at most... it's primarily the providers.
As part of my plan, I'm supposed to receive a free annual physical. The first year, my doctor's office filed the claim FOUR TIMES and each time made different coding errors. Finally, the last time they ended up double-crediting me on something, and I ended up $5 ahead of what I was supposed to pay, so I just gave up. Last year, I tried to fix this problem by bringing in a copy of the relevant page from my benefits booklet explaining exactly what was covered in a routine exam, and requesting that the office ONLY perform those procedures. They still screwed something up. A family member saw a different doctor and did the same thing, and both the insurance company and the doctor's office made errors -- which combined resulted in four charges we weren't actually responsible for.
Medical billing in the U.S. is a disaster. I don't think most people seem to notice, because insurance "covers it" and so people just pay their $20 co-pay for most things and moves on. For those poor people who actually need to pay bills (and people who elect to through a high-deductible plan), it's beyond kafkaesque.
I'm not saying clipboards would fix this problem. But if documentation were actually attached to most things, rather than existing only as random billing and procedure codes, I'd imagine it would be easier to track things down. As it is, I find it next-to-impossible to even resolve billing errors because all the statements I receive from the physician and insurance company have a bunch of numbers and too little explanation of what they are actually doing. I have spent hours examining the bills, matching up charges (since they aren't reported the same), then querying the insurance company (who, when pressed, will actually tell me what the diagnostic codes mean), which I then have to call the doctors office and force them to code them correctly, rather than using some random diagnostic code for something I didn't even have.
I've talked to ot
If we all went vegetarian and killed off the domesticated cattle, then we'd make a huge difference! Kill a cow today!
Well, to look at it from a different perspective, it's the vegetarians who are the problem. The vegans don't consume animal products, but most vegetarians consume large amounts of dairy -- milk, cheese, etc. -- as sources for protein and various nutrients.
So, the vegetarians of the world are forcing us to keep a bunch of cows alive to support them, cows that are belching out their greenhouse gases daily. Meanwhile, the meat-eaters are doing their part against global warming by killing cows every day for some juicy steaks. It's not their fault that the cows seems to keep reproducing and making more cows -- that just means we need to eat MORE steak to fight global warming!
It's the meat-eaters who should be smug -- it's those pesky vegetarians who are the problem!
[/sarcasm]
I'm guessing Time Warner is going to be giving all those royalties back?
That's what Good Morning to You Productions is demanding in the lawsuit.
I know this would never happen, but the damages here should have to go further than just returning the money. How many movies and TV shows over the years have been forced to not film a birthday scene to avoid royalties? How many people have been deprived of the standard birthday song at a restaurant or other public celebration, because the staff was not licensed for public performance?
Birthdays are important events. Movies and films often have scenes that want to show such events. Time Warner has deliberately impeded the "progress of the arts" which was the entire point of the Constitution by artificially limiting the production of such scenes in films and movies.
Every filmmaker who has ever filmed a birthday scene without the song or who had a birthday scene in a script by cut it because of royalty concerns should join in a class-action lawsuit and seek damages. Every person who wanted to hear "Happy Birthday" at a restaurant but got some crappy weird song from the waitstaff should sue them for damages. I imagine the cumulative amount, with damages, should come to billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
Only then will justice truly have been done. Only then will we begin to turn the tide against copyright trolls and those who would falsely claim copyright.
1000 years is still a "limited Time"
But that interpretation is not possible in context. Read it again:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So, copyright terms can only be justified if they "promote progress." Which basically occurs if the specified "authors and inventors" are encouraged to create more things. A 1000-year copyright term doesn't encourage more "progress" -- it only rewards someone (and that person's descendants) lucky enough to come up with something really popular.
A copyright term longer than a lifespan is thus not justified by the Constitution.
If I said to an artist or inventor, "You've done really cool things: I'll pay you X dollars per month starting now 'to promote progress' in your science/arts" and all you do is sit on your butt for the rest of your life and collect your check, have you done what I asked for? If you die and send some random guy to collect your check every month, are YOU (the artist/inventor) "promoting progress" in your science/art? So a 1000-year copyright term cannot achieve what the text of the law demands.
Copyright should be renewable forever upon payment of a fee every ten years or so. If a property is so valuable that it generates income, fine. Keep paying the fee and keep the property.
NO. The whole point of copyright was to encourage writers and publishers and artists to invest time in making a good product. It originated because publishers who tried to print a book had to invest a lot of money in things like manual typesetting and proofreading -- but the better-known publisher down the street could just buy the first copy, recreate it (cheaper, with more errors, but good enough), and make all the money (because they make it on the cheap), while the first (lesser-known) publisher goes out of business.
The whole idea is to allow time for people to recoup their time and investment in creating a quality product. Unlike most professions where you get paid at the end of the week or the month, a novelist may spent months or years creating a book, and a publisher (in the olden days) might spend months typesetting it... in hopes to recoup that investment of time and resources.
Most copyrights back when they started (in the late 1400s) were 7-10 years. That's plenty, in my view. But I'd be happy to go back to the original 1790 Copyright Act: 14 years, plus the possibility of a single renewal. That is MORE THAN ENOUGH. If you can't recoup your expenses in 14 years or produce something else in those 14 years that keeps your business going, you deserve to go out of business.
The idea of copyright was never that somebody would do one thing and live off of the profits forever. It was to provide payment for services rendered, which would encourage creators to make more quality products in the future.
I get that you want the best possible sound... and in some cases the placebo effect may actually help you enjoy your music more... but are there really enough of these people to base a business on?
If you're effectively making a cable that costs maybe $10 to manufacture, but selling it for $340, you don't need many "audiophiles" to make a significant profit. If you have a few hundred of them, you're already making 6-figure profits. (Obviously some cables may cost a little more to manufacture, but certainly not anywhere near as much as they are charging.)
It's kinda like wine. There have been studies that show that if you serve cheap wine in expensive bottles, people like it better. There have been studies that show that many wine prizes are awarded so haphazardly that you might as well choose them at random. There have been studies that show that actual wine judges at a major competition could barely rate the same wine with consistency above random chance on consecutive days.
And yet, people still will pay hundreds of dollars for some bottles. Recent studies have even shown that people literally get a better "pleasure" response in their brain when they are told a wine is expensive, compared to when it is supposedly cheap. It's more than a casual "placebo effect" -- it's something that people will pay hundreds of dollars to experience, even if most of that effect comes from the act of paying the hundreds of dollars rather than the product itself.**
I'm sure most audiophiles have a similar experience -- they literally receive more pleasure when they listen through an expensive cable. They want to pay more for that experience. So why not let them, I suppose? It's not like faith healers or psychics, who might do real damage with their charlatanism... the only damage these cable dealers could do, I suppose, would be with some obsessed audiophile who goes and throws his money away on expensive cables while his family starves. Maybe there's a couple people like that in the world, but it's certainly not a common problem.
And these sorts of "tests" won't convince anyone. I'm not sure what the point is anymore. It's like James Randi going after Uri Gellar -- true "believers" don't give a crap what the tests of "skeptics" say... they'll just keep believing. Let 'em enjoy their magic cables.
[**NOTE: To be clear, I am NOT saying all wine is the same. There are a lot of different varieties and flavors. But I do believe you should just buy what you like. There are $5 wines that have easily beat out $100 wines at blind tastings. So, if you like a wine and discover it's only $5, keep buying and enjoying it. If you like the $100 wine, and you like the taste enough to pay $100, fine.]
it's part of history. Any sensible person and most insensible people know the difference between being accused of something and actually being convicted for it.
Maybe "sensible" people recognize that distinction.
But, be honest here -- if you were a young woman, and you searched for a guy you were considering dating and saw he had been "accused of" rape, would you go out with him? Would you even bother asking for his story? Or would just say, "Uh... no thanks"?
If you were in charge of hiring someone for a position, and you did a search and saw a guy was "accused of" rape, would you think twice about hiring the guy? If you had 50 applicants for the job, wouldn't you just skip to the next guy? Even if you'd be okay hiring him, if you were at a prominent company, would you be concerned that people looking up your employees might come upon such a record about this guy? Maybe you'd be okay working with him, but would your customers be? Is the risk worth it?
Is it legal to discriminate on this basis? Probably not. But if you have 50 other candidates for a job, you'll probably just move onto the next candidate... and no one will know why you passed this guy over.
And if your response is to say, "Well, you should find out the whole story" -- well, most "sensible" people probably have other things they need to do with their lives other than researching someone else's past in detail. They look for the most prominent stuff that comes up in a search engine hit -- "ooh, he was a suspected rapist." Boom. Why go further? And it might not even be easy to go further, since news media sources are much more likely to report prominently when someone is arrested for some heinous crime... when the charges are dropped a few weeks later, you're lucky to see a few sentences on page 10, if that.
I do NOT think the current implementation of "right to be forgotten" laws work right, but just acting like there is no problem and "it's all part of history that sensible people should understand" is just ridiculous... particularly if it comes to inaccurate or misleading accusations of something particularly egregious. Facts taken out of context are often misleading. Most of those facts just would disappear from the public eye a couple decades ago (unless you specifically went digging in an archive), but now they can be instantly available for many years. Our public morality and ethics have not caught up with this.
Everything everyone does is part of history.
Actually, that's not at all true, at least in the meaning of "history" before the internet. History is traditionally a narrative created about the past, usually derived from reliable sources (or at least what were considered reliable by the author of the narrative). A random recollection of some dude about some other dude was not "history" -- it was "gossip" at best. It only became "history" if someone wrote down the account and gave it credibility.
In the past, reliable records about the vast majority of events and people were scant. There are major figures of medieval Europe, for example, where we have almost no actual records from their lifetime -- maybe a baptismal record, or a record that they were paid once by some guy at some point, but that might be it.
The fact that little Jimmy went pee in his pants during gym class in 3rd grade didn't used to be "history." Maybe a few of the kids in his class might remember that incident a couple decades later, but it was generally forgotten by everyone else. Nowadays, one of those kids might take out a cell phone and take a picture of little Jimmy's wet pants, text it to some other kids, and the picture might end up on the internet if it's sufficiently entertaining to some stupid kid.
Now Jimmy's pee-filled pants are an official durable record that might persist on the internet for decades, available to anyone with sufficient skills at searching.
We used to have a historical "filter" that would get rid of the random quotidian minutiae of our lives, simply because it wasn't recorded in durable form. "History" would only record "important" stuff.
Now just about any event can be photographed, videotaped, or otherwise documented to become a "meme" or at least passed around among hoards of people (and thereby become a somewhat permanent record).
The problem here is that we ALL do crap in everyday life that would look bad out of context. And once that crap "bubbles up" somewhere on the internet, it really does become a part of "history" in the old sense, because search engines are our new machines that curate historical records... rather than historians digging in archives and collecting records which would be turned into a narrative.
I'm NOT saying any of this is "bad," only that is VERY different from what "history" was even just a couple decades ago.
It starts with misunderstandings and people saying "they were a kid when they did that" and ends with inconvenient facts about what people did before their "views evolved" being forcibly erased for the convenience of the one wanting their past hidden.
You have a good point, though I doubt that anyone can succeed these days in having something "forcibly erased" from the entire internet AND all public databases AND all paper records.
What some people are proposing -- and what people are asking for in the "right to be forgotten" -- is to consider that some information be removed from prominent locations in major search engines, which (as I said) have become our default curators of "history." Note that it is "curating," not merely keeping records -- search engines need to decide what the top links are. And the algorithms they use may bring undue weight to random events that would largely have been forgotten a couple decades ago.
To be clear: I think the "right to be forgotten" actions against Google are NOT a good solution to this problem. I don't have a better solution myself either. But we do need to recognize that we live in a different world, where "history" is very different than it was just a few years ago. How we deal with that is yet to be determined, but our social mores and standards certainly haven't caught up yet in how to evaluate the new kind of "history" available to us.
And making some rant and slippery slope argument that making search engine hits less prominent will necessarily lead to the "forcible erasure" of history is just ridiculous, especially in the age where anyone can duplicate and store information in multitudes of places on the internet.
You need to stop confusing "ingredient list" with "chemical composition." As an ingredient, "sugar" means "refined sugar," but there's sugar in everything.
I know the difference between "ingredient list" and "chemical composition." Do you? All ingredients, even "processed" ones, have impurities. The label doesn't need to care about those impurities, but it should reflect the composition relatively accurately.
"Evaporated cane juice" is about 99% sucrose. It's not added to foods for its nutrients or for its flavor. it's usually a whitish powder that tastes just like sugar... because it IS sugar, with a few more impurities that aren't removed in processing compared to regular sugar. The ONLY reason anyone uses it is to disguise the fact that they are using sugar. If they want to call it "evaporated cane juice," I suppose that might be defended by the different processing. But adding an additional label like "no sugar added" is just bogus nonsense. A company deliberately added a processed product that is 99+% sugar to sweeten the result. Putting a big sign on the front saying "no sugar added" is incredibly deceptive... and we have laws in advertising to prevent this kind of weaseling deception. Same with "organic brown rice syrup." Yes, sometimes it can be used specifically for its maltose flavor. But again, it's basically sugar and used in place of sugar or HFCS or honey or whatever because it can have "organic" and "brown" in front of it.
Again, I'm not saying that the ingredient label should be a chemical analysis. My problem is more with companies that deliberately use these things and then claim that there are "no added sugars." That's definitely misleading. Ideally, obscure ingredients should be labeled when possible for their primary function in the food -- that would help a lot. We already see that a lot: "lecithin (an emulsifier)" or whatever.
(By the way, I'm not against sugar. I personally don't buy a lot of stuff with added sugar, because I cook and bake for myself. But if someone actually wants to try to avoid stuff with high doses of deliberately added sweetening agents, they should be able to determine that without seeing labels that say "no added sugar" when it's clearly there and deliberately added for only that purpose.)
you yanks need to learn that "caveat emptor" is supposed to be a warning, not a fucking business model.
Umm, you do realize that I wrote an entire post criticizing this business model, right?
I'm totally against this sort of nonsense, which is why I tried to inform people about it. But I'm also against natural foods wackoism, which is what drives companies to do this crap in the first place. "I'll buy anything that doesn't have sugar or HFCS in it" leads companies to come up with "evaporated cane juice" and "brown rice syrup" and all this other BS.
I'm NOT blaming consumers for a disgusting, dishonest business practice. But I am blaming them for being idiots and flocking to buy stuff that has meaningless labels saying something is "all natural," while often paying 2-5 times as much for the same old crap. They are DRIVING businesses to try this crap.
Instead -- if you really want less processed foods, well STOP BUYING CRAP WITH A LIST OF INGREDIENTS YOU NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE. If you look at a label and see "evaporated cane juice," your reaction shouldn't be, "Ah, well I don't see sugar or HFCS, so this must be healthy!" You should instead say to yourself, "Hmm, I've never seen 'cane juice' on the supermarket shelves, so maybe I shouldn't buy this, or at least I should look up what it is before eating it." If you see "concentrated celery juice" in your bacon and hot dogs, you should start to wonder, "Why are they putting celery in my bacon? And why is it concentrated?"
The vast majority of people (even fairly intelligent people) aren't willing to do the work to find out what's in the crap they are voluntarily buying and eating. That doesn't mean they are to blame for deceptive business practices, but they are partially to blame for what they eat when they mindlessly support that business model... even when the ingredients are listed on the bloody label.
Bugs happen. If you've got code that seems to work and then you investigate and it doesn't work on one particular brand of drive, it would be a reasonable suspicion that there is something funny with those drives.
It's hard to evaluate exactly what went on here. If you read the original report of the discovery (which I did last month and is still the first link in TFS), you see this explanation:
Poking around in the source code of the kernel looking for the trim related code, we came to the trim blacklist. This blacklist configures a specific behavior for certain SSD drives and identifies the drives based on the regexp of the model name. Our working SSDs were explicitly allowed full operation of the TRIM but some of the SSDs of our affected manufacturer were limited. Our affected drives did not match any pattern so they were implicitly allowed full operation.
In other words, they didn't know what was going on. Then they happened upon some code in the Linux kernel that explicitly blacklisted certain model segments from certain manufacturers. So, at some point someone made the assumption that this must be related to certain models from certain manufacturers, based on code in the Linux kernel.
This could easily have led to confirmation bias in a situation where errors were not occurring frequently. (Note the further explanation that when they first informed Samsung, Samsung was unable to reproduce the issue until they started using a custom "much more intensive script" to increase the error rate of the problem.)
So, I don't claim to know the full situation, but my guess is that Samsung wouldn't have been blamed for this at all if this blacklisting code hadn't already been seen in the Linux kernel.
I'm not trying to place the blame on anyone in particular. But in this case there were various reasons they probably started thinking manufacturers were the problem other than just simple logic, and the "aha" moment apparently was based on looking at code in the Linux kernel already, not on actual prior observation that certain brands of drives were failing. (Otherwise, they would have probably suspected a hardware problem earlier... but instead the post describes a lot of time searching for software issues before they discovered the blacklist.)
The problem with slashdot crowd-sourced comment moderation is that if you say something that the in-crowd disagrees with, you can be banned. By other users!
Only temporarily. Your post may be downvoted, and perhaps your karma will be hurt if you keep doing it repeatedly. If you build up a reputation as a complete jerk or shill, you may just have to abandon your uid and start over... and that's what you deserve if you end up that way.
It is not about spam. It is about groupthink.
Here's the reality: I've posted MANY things here that disagree with the normal "groupthink" of the Slashdot community, and I've gotten +5 insightful. Why? Because when I do so, I support my points. I explain my position. I often cite reputable sources, particularly when I'm addressing something that's particularly contentious.
You do that here, and people appreciate it. If you provide good information, you WILL get upvoted. Over the years, I've found this site to have some of the most open-minded mods anywhere, as long as you back up what you say. Sure, there have been a few times I've had such a post modded down into oblivion, but only a few. The vast majority of the time when I am reasonable (not a jerk), present rational arguments and evidence, etc., an informative post will get modded up, regardless of whether it agrees with the majority opinion here.
Does it get tiresome to keep having to explain myself and minority opinions or unknown facts over and over? Sure -- but that's what true discussion requires.
companies use all sorts of tricks to hide stuff like that. Soup companies use yeast to put MSG in Soup without reporting it (it's a by product of the yeast, which serves no other purpose).
And recently there has been the phenomenon where companies try to hide things by using confusing nomenclature. E.g., "evaporated cane juice" in products with "no added sugar." Yeah -- "cane juice" -- it must be good for you, since they call it "juice"! Well, it's just another form of sugar... processed slightly differently, but still basically sucrose.
Basically, it's just a game... try to make things sound "natural" and "wholesome" when they're basically the same old crap. Same thing goes for "brown rice syrup" used as a sweetener in many things... basically sugar. But it's "brown rice"!! (Of course, brown rice also often has elevated levels of arsenic and other things... but hey, it's "natural" and "brown," so it must be good!)
You know how we found out sodium nitrate causes cancer?
Funny that you bring nitrates up, because that's one of my favorite examples of nonsense labeling. First, we get most of our nitrates from vegetables, so worrying about the small amounts in bacon and cured meats is probably not as big a deal as people make of it. (Yes, yes... cooking does other things to the nitrates and can make them bad, but proper curing also deactivates most of them too... we could argue this all day.)
But regardless of that, my favorite misleading labeling is all the "uncured" meats you see these days: "uncured bacon," "uncured salami," etc. Yeah, except these almost always contain huge amounts of "concentrated celery juice" (or sometimes another agent) which contains more nitrates than the standard salts used traditionally to cure meat. (And no -- to those natural foods wackos -- there's no evidence to support the idea that somehow those nitrates are better for you in the concentrated celery juice... basically because "natural" celery juice has unpredictable amounts of nitrates, they need to add more of them than they would for tradition curing salts.)
People just want stuff called "natural" with "juice" and "brown X" and "natural flavors" in it. It's almost all bogus nonsense, and often you end up paying a huge premium for something that could very well be worse for you.
Moral of the story: Labels frequently don't work to tell people what's actually better. Not saying we shouldn't try to use them, but companies will weasel their way around anything to appeal to customers.
(By the way, I'm all in favor of cooking for yourself with whole ingredients, using less "processed" foods, etc. But bogus "natural foods" nonsense is bogus nonsense.)
Instead of going through the draconian methods that would be required to maintain privacy, society will simple learn to accept a world without it.
Perhaps that will come to pass, but likely not for a couple generations.
Basically, for people to ignore all that stuff, you'll need the "people in power" to be okay with it. Most of the people in power are middle-aged or older. Social media stuff has only been the norm for about a decade, so I'd say we'll need to wait at least 20-30 years before most of the "people in power" will have grown up with it.
And then, guess what -- there's a filtering process for the "people in power" where the old "people in power" decide who the new ones will be. And so there will be an even greater lag, where the first generation of "social media natives" will still be shamed as they try to build careers, so in 20-30 years, the "people in power" will be "social media natives," but they'll mostly be selected by the previous generation and thus will hold a "higher standard" -- i.e., the kids who didn't do most of the "nasty stuff" when they where kids.
Maybe when you get about 40-50 years from now, you'll get a true transformation like you describe, assuming current trends continue (which, well... who would have predicted this current world 50 years ago?).
By the way, you can look for this sort of morality issue in various political campaigns, etc. What most of the "cool kids" were doing in the 60s (in terms of drugs, sexual practices, etc.) was definitely not acceptable even when that generation came to power in the 80s and 90s. Maybe in the past few years, we've finally started to see a majority of the public okay with some drugs, etc., but that's been a really slow transformation, as I described above.
A 6 year old girl isn't really terribly safe and would not be able to fight off a kidnapper, that is all I was saying.
Neither could most 6-year-old boys... or 10-year-old girls. Or boys. And even many teenage girls would have difficulty fighting off a dedicated kidnapper.
But all of that is a bit irrelevant, because what really needs to be considered here is prevalence of stranger kidnappings... which is ridiculously low. Something like 0.01% of all kids reported missing are abducted and murdered by strangers. Something less than 1% of all kids who are actually abducted (as opposed to reported missing because they got lost or ran away or whatever) are abducted by strangers.
We're talking about ~100 kids per year in the U.S. who are abducted and killed. And the majority of those kids are abducted and killed by family members or other people they know well, not be random strangers. (Most kids abducted by a stranger are returned relatively unharmed.) Am I saying we shouldn't be concerned about it? Of course we should be concerned about it. But the risks are blown completely out of proportion.
Kids are about 50 times more likely to be killed in a motor vehicle than by an abductor. Kids are about 10 times more likely to drown or suffocate, 8 times more likely to take poison accidentally, 4 times more likely to die in a fire, etc., etc.
You're vastly more likely to cause your child to die because you got into a motor vehicle accident while not paying attention (or didn't get enough sleep, or were distracted by a phone or texting or whatever) than you are by letting them wander the streets alone.
And even if you are worried about your kid getting abducted and abused or killed, you should be MUCH more worried about the kid's uncle or brother or father or teacher than some random stranger grabbing them off the street.
If you aren't supervising your kids around people they know out of fear of abuse and abduction (where the VAST majority of abuse occurs), worrying about random strangers shouldn't be on your list.
I am not trying to claim that it is always true that letting her wander the neighborhood on her own is bad. I think that a mile or so hike from the park may be a bit much for a kid of her age though as well.
It's much more likely that a child of that age will encounter some other random problem -- accidental injury, getting lost, etc. -- than being kidnapped. Those are the primary fears parents should be evaluating for kids. All kids are different, and parents should pay use judgment to determine when kids are ready to be out alone. I've read stories of police questioning parents for letting a 6-year-old play alone in his own fenced-in backyard!
Anyhow, I don't know the details of the case you're discussing or the maturity of the kid in question. Regardless, though, we should be concerned about this kid because young kids often need supervision in general -- not because of some (likely non-existent) "bad guy" grabbing her on the street.
Child abduction rates in the U.S. have been declining steadily for at least 40 years. Kids are safer than ever. The hysteria needs to stop.
NO. Just no.
I agree with you about the stupid character set problem and the need for better editors/editing, but almost everything else you complain about is actually what makes moderation here vastly superior to just about any other site. It's certainly not perfect, and there are perhaps tweaks to be done to moderation, but if we did what you suggest, it would completely fill the site with crap posts and allow the moderation to be gamed as on every other internet site.
Most of your complaints could be solved by not posting AC and by contributing positively to the site (and thus getting good karma). If users can't be bothered to do that, I don't want to see their posts. I only want to see an AC if it's a really superior post, so the default moderation levels are about right. Again, it's not perfect, but it's superior to most sites and to almost everything you're proposing.