Parent poster didn't do his research, preferring to post what fit his ideological preconceptions instead.
I've actually read a number of treatises written by the founders of eugenics in the mid-1800s through its heyday in the early 1900s, including all of the literature on cultural "degeneration" etc. that led to targeting of Jews, Roma, poor people, stupid people, etc. on the basis of incredibly shaky science. Have you?
I suggest before going around suggesting that someone hasn't done research that you do your own. There are some hints at eugenics by a small number of people today (including people like James Watson, who unfortunately has succumbed to some pretty weird ideas in his old age), but it was most popular historically -- and the vast majority of people who were in favor of it were not participating in a scientific enterprise.
Whoa! Phrenology has no scientific basis, but Eugenics certainly does. If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them, you will have fewer of those traits in the next generation.
While it is certainly true that selective breeding is a scientific fact, almost all historical eugenicist movements have NOT been based on scientifically verified traits. Take some time and read about the nonsense criteria that eugenics people would use -- measuring ear size or facial characteristics to determine "degenerate" people more likely to be stupid or commit crimes.
You seem to think that "eugenics" is just a synonym for "selective breeding" or something. While the proponents of eugenics often claim that, in fact their criteria for selection were generally based on bogus "science" (even phrenology) and generally tend to be motivated more by politics or class distinctions than science.
So, no, actual eugenics as practiced does NOT have a scientific basis, even if the general principle might theoretically work.
So the only difference from the basic experiment was the presence of the button which offered entertainment and also enlightenment -- in the form of providing the subject an opportunity to test and prove they could endure the shock, a new and unfamiliar experience.
Yeah, except it wasn't actually "new and unfamiliar." Those who did this phase of the study were selected because they had been previously shocked AND had found the previous experience SO disagreeable that they were willing to PAY not to endure it again.
What the experiment did prove is that given time alone to think and reflect -- people will reevaluate their own aversion to an "unpleasant" sensation and decide to take advantage of an opportunity to better themselves by proving (to themselves) they can endure it.
What evidence do you have of this? Did you interview the subjects yourself and ask about their motivations? If not, how is your theory about why they acted any better than the one offered by the researchers?
The subjects were asked to sit quietly and think. The button may have been presented, but they certainly weren't encouraged to press it. In fact, they previously had indicated how much they hated the sensation of pressing it, so it seems rather strange to assume that the subjects would feel like they were in any sense being encouraged to press it now. Regardless of their motivation (either simple boredom or some noble "learning" or "conquering" narrative in your elaborate made-up accounts of potential psychological motivation), the net result is the same: even though asked to simply sit quietly and think, the subjects often chose to revisit a stimulus they previously had found very disagreeable instead of just thinking.
This is SO DIFFERENT from the conclusion that people are little scardie-rabbits who cannot endure being alone with themselves, these researchers should be ashamed of themselves for irresponsibly portraying this, or permitting this to be portrayed in the news without rebuttal. They should apologize and re-do the experiment.
You are being more than a little crazy here. You've concocted an elaborate story about what you're absolutely positive these subjects MUST have been thinking, and therefore you've decided the researchers are not only morons, but immoral people.
Do you know whether the subjects participated in any exit interviews? Do you have evidence to support your ideas? If not, your insane rant isn't any more likely than other explanations.
And even if you're right, and you're giving a detailed and accurate portrayal of how some (or most) subjects were feeling, the researchers' conclusion is still correct. It's not like the researchers said that the subjects may not have various motivations -- but the point is that the subjects chose painful "entertainment" (as you put it) that they had previously said they would avoid, rather than following the basic task they were asked to do (simple sit quietly and think).
Democratic-Republicans -- usually called Republicans -- if you please. Jefferson's party is the parent of both parties today, though he'd hardly recognize either.
Not quite. Yes, the Democratic-Republicans were generally referred to as simply "Republicans," but they have no direct relationship to modern Republicans at all. The Democratic-Republicans eventually split into the Democrats and the Whig Party (anti-Jacksonians) in the 1830s. In the 1850s, a new party -- who took up the defunct "Republican" name, aka the Grand Old Party (GOP) -- emerged and supplanted the Whigs. Since this new party emerged from a coalition of various fragmented parties after the Whigs destructed in 1852, it doesn't really make sense to connect them to the earlier Democratic-Republicans.
I've not read the article, but the thought that immediately occurred to me was whether there was a curiosity element involved. i.e. did people really shock themselves because they were bored, or did they shock themselves out of curiosity to see if it really did hurt as much as they were told it would?
Maybe next time try reading TFA before commenting:
All of these participants had received a sample of the shock and reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again.
"What is striking," the investigators write, "is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid."
Let me reiterate this: these people NOT only received a sample shock, but said they would PAY not to receive one again. (There apparently were participants who didn't find the shock disturbing enough that they'd pay -- and they were excluded from this phase of the experiment. So, it's clear that this group of people were a self-selecting group who had been identified as severely disliking electric shocks.)
Reduced stimulus is EXACTLY classic sensory deprivation.
Maybe you're confusing it with total sensory deprivation.
Sorry, but what the heck are you talking about?
Sensory deprivation is SENSORY deprivation -- i.e., you make it impossible to SENSE anything, usually through a particular SENSE (e.g., sight or hearing, etc.).
Here, let's read a definition:
Sensory deprivation or perceptual isolation is the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. Simple devices such as blindfolds or hoods and earmuffs can cut off sight and hearing, while more complex devices can also cut off the sense of smell, touch, taste, thermoception (heat-sense), and 'gravity'.
Sensory deprivation is NOT sitting in your house, with freedom to experience the world around you through all your normal senses, no matter how broadly you want to read the term. Just because you don't provide continuous active entertainment to someone through all of their senses does NOT make is "sensory deprivation."
People already have too little motivation to do the right thing. Their misdeeds must be recorded for posterity. As well, too many people take stupid shit too seriously. The fact that it's just stupid shit must also be recorded for posterity, so that we can get over the stupid shit.
What about when the "truth" is incredibly misleading? What if there were actually no "misdeeds," but there is an implication that there were?
Also, many of the cases so far seem to be dealing with media reporting. Do we really believe that the media always gets it 100% correct -- and, more importantly, that they care about giving enough context that a reasonable reader would draw the correct conclusions?
For a really common example, what about people who are arrested, but no charges are ever filed (perhaps it was just an overzealous policeman)? Or people who have charges filed but are ultimately dropped because of lack of evidence or the realization that the person didn't commit the crime? Or people who go to trial, but are acquitted? Or people who are even convicted, but only for some small number of charges compared to the original case?
The news media, in almost all cases, tends to be more vigilant about reporting potential evil-doing, than it is about correcting or following up on previous stories when people are just released, charges dropped, etc. You're much more common to see a long story about how a person was arrested and charged with some crime (child abuse, child molestation, rape, whatever...), but the story of charges dropped or an acquittal may be buried on page 10 or not even reported at all.
Even though an original story about an arrest inevitably contains "alleged" and thus is technically not false, it can be incredibly misleading to someone who happens upon it in a web search.
Now, you can argue that this is the fault of readers -- that we should presume innocence or whatever. I agree. But in the REAL WORLD, most people don't presume innocence when they read a story about someone arrested for rape or child abuse or something. Before the internet, the person would be acquitted or charges might even be dropped, and the only easy way to know about it is if you actually remembered the original reporting -- otherwise, you'd have to go digging through some library microfilm of old newspapers or something.
But now, it's fairly common to be able to find old and incredibly misleading media articles in a normal internet search, particularly for someone with an unusual name and without any other significant online presence.
This is an extreme case of someone potentially accused of something heinous but cleared of charges (which may never have been reported in the media), but what about the many other little issues with media reporting... slight exaggerations or things thought true at the time, or whatever, all of which could give an inaccurate impression of someone's reputation?
It's not just recording stupid stuff that people did -- it's all the records of stuff people DIDN'T do (but it may be implied that they did) that are the bigger concern, to my mind.
"J'accuse!" quoth L4t3r4lu5, "A bibliophage is upon us!" As Jesus saith, cast him into the stygian periphery, where there shall be lachrymating and gnashing of dentitions.
Sensory deprivation experiments, partial or full, have been going on for decades. How is this 'news' to the scientific community?
Maybe because this isn't really about classic "sensory deprivation." In one phase of the experiment, they even let people sit in their own homes and just asked them to just think quietly for 6 to 15 minutes. I'd hardly call that "sensory deprivation." Most people apparently HATED the experience (even more than they hated sitting quietly in a lab setting).
I'm familiar with sensory deprivation studies, but personally I find it shocking (pardon the pun) that people are willing to self-administer painful shocks just to avoid being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. Don't you? Clearly the researchers did, given what they said in TFA. They even questioned why they should bother with the shock test, because they thought NO ONE would shock themselves. And yet nearly half did.
Tor on the other hand, is explicitly designed to allow people to remain anonymous, to prevent detection.
Amazing how faulty logic can be disguised by just putting a comma into a sentence. If you had an "AND" or "OR" at the end of the sentence, I might have agreed with you.
But by using a comma, you implicitly claim that "to remain anonymous" = "to prevent detection." Those are not the same at all. There are all sorts of reasons people might want to remain anonymous, most notably just because they believe in something called "privacy" and don't want other people (governments, online businesses, internet ad companies, whatever) collating information on them for no apparent reason.
But when you say "to prevent detection," that implies there is something to "detect," or something that you're deliberately trying to hide or avoid someone finding out. But you can simply want to be a private person without necessarily implying that you're trying to hide something. (I know that sounds like a crazy statement to some people these days, but it's actually true. Before the past couple decades, most people probably assumed that it would be really weird if there were various businesses and government agencies maintaining databases that profiled you.)
When I surf the internet, for example, I tend to use "private browsing mode" or whatever it's called in various browsers. I do so because I find it mildly disturbing that there are so many people out there that have some weird urge to track my every move (years ago, people that wanted to track people used to be known as the "town gossip" who was in everyone else'e business, and this was not a positive thing), and I really don't have enough websites where I "log in" or need a cookie to track me all the time for convenience that it makes sense to keep that history around. (And there are workarounds to keep cookies on a few specific sites I really want to.) So, I find it just cleaner to have everything be erased after I close my browser.
I'm not trying to hide anything, and if it weren't for so many random cookies and scripts running all the time to track me on the internet, I probably would actually like to have a browser history, for those once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when I think, "Gee, there was that website I saw last week that was really useful, but I can't remember it... I wish I could search for it in my history." But the times I wish I had a browser history are so few and far between that the minor benefit is outweighed by tracking. Same thing with using various browser plug-ins to control scripts and cookies -- you don't need to want to "avoid detection" just because you don't want random websites storing tracking files on your computer.
But you probably look at me and assume that I must be doing this for nefarious reasons -- I've heard some people even call the "private browsing mode" something else, like "porn mode," because they assume that's all it's for.
Anyhow, there's a real difference between simply desiring "privacy" or "anonymity" vs. "trying to avoid detection." Tor is designed for the former, though it can be used for the latter. I don't know how often or what percentage of Tor traffic is for people "trying to avoid detection," but even if it's the majority of Tor traffic, it doesn't imply that Tor is only designed for that. It's designed to maintain anonymity, and we should not assume there is any illegal intent in that. Privacy used to be the assumed default; tracking your every move used to be considered weird. Thus, the car analogy is not the best one, but it gets that point across.
The judge made the assumption that anyone who wants to be untraceable to law enforcement must be a criminal, which is actually not such a huge stretch.
Fascinating. And here I thought "Papers, please!" was not an acceptable law enforcement tactic in Austria anymore.
(In case this is unclear -- the default in most democratic countries has generally been that people are effectively "untraceable to law enforcement." I know that may seem completely crazy in this new era of continuous surveillance, fingerprint and DNA databases (even for non-criminals), etc., but it's actually how the world mostly was until just the past couple decades. Exactly why should the government need to keep track of you, unless you are suspected of a crime or a known threat? Why should desiring to have that anonymous status -- which has been the historical default in democratic countries -- be viewed as "not such a huge stretch" that you "must be a criminal"?)
The problem is that you can't just swap in a different cooking method and expect the same results.
Umm, I'm not sure you understand what I'm talking about. Have you actually looked at some of these old cookbooks? They didn't just "swap in a different cooking method" with the same old recipes. They often significantly altered recipes and tested them in great detail to try to get them to work in microwaves.
Ultimately, though, the changes in flavor and texture were generally undesireable. Or they required even more finicky steps in microwave cooking than you'd do in a conventional recipe. And thus, within a decade after the microwave became common in people's kitchens, it was relegated to TV dinners, reheating meals, and a few other general heating tasks where texture and flavor either didn't matter or were already developed in previous cooking.
I own a microwave. It's convenient for a few tasks, as I mentioned, because it can be faster and require less cleaning of pots/pans. But it doesn't actually enable me to cook anything better or with more precision. Many of Myhrvold's ideas could enable me to cook better and with more precision, but the gains are either marginal, or I'd be able to simulate his technology (with minor losses in precision) with something that probably would cost a tiny fraction of his technology.
Microwaves make food worse but are more convenient. Myhrvold's ideas would mostly help to make food better but would require ridiculous cost increases (and are thus less convenient).
What country was this? In the US, truth is most absolutely an absolute defense in defamation cases.
No, that's not the standard, though it's often pretty hard to win a libel case against something true. The legal standard for "public figures" is actual malice, which does not require malicious intent -- instead, "actual malice" is just a legal term that means that someone published information with knowledge that the information was false or "with reckless disregard" to whether the information is true or false.
That last thing means that if someone goes on a campaign to smear someone's name deliberately and starts digging up any information that can be found and recklessly publishing it without checking it out, it could be considered libelous, even if true.
For private persons or lesser known figures, there also is a false light tort available in some states (other states group such claims under regular defamation or libel claims). This can also apply when true statements are used in a misleading way or bring attention to someone in a misleading way. (For an extreme example, if you published a photo of John Doe with the caption "John Doe, New York Resident" next to a headline "Sex Offenders Go Free in New York," even though everything was "true," it could mislead readers.)
Were either of these situations likely in GP's case. I don't know. But truth is NOT an absolute defense against libel in all cases.
Yes, that is also true. But why do motorists get a yellow phase while pedestrians have no yellow phase and two red phases (flashing don't walk and solid don't walk)?
Huh? The flashing red crosswalk sign IS effectively the equivalent of the yellow. It's a caution sign indicating that you should not start crossing the intersection if possible.
Technically, yes, that's the equivalent of a red light, I suppose, but this is because the two things move at different speeds. To wit:
For cars:
Green - go through intersection
Yellow - if far enough in advance of intersection, come to a stop; if not far away enough to stop safely, proceed with caution
Red - do not enter intersection; if already in intersection, proceed out of intersection as quickly as possible with utmost caution**
For pedestrians:
White/green/blue/count - go through intersection
Flashing red - Do not enter intersection; if already crossing street, proceed quickly to other side
Red - Do not enter intersection
The difference is that cars need to know in advance that they will have to come to a stop to avoid running through a red light. Pedestrians generally do not need to know this in advance, but they generally need more time to clear the intersection than cars, so they get a flashing red -- which is equivalent to the very beginning of the red light for cars (i.e., clear intersection, if you're still there).
The colors thus mean basically the same thing. A yellow light would have no meaning for pedestrians, since it doesn't take them more than a brief instant to slow to a stop.
(**Note: This is true in states which officially have a "permissive yellow" law, which allows drivers to enter the intersection at any time during the yellow light. In other states, being in the intersection even at the beginning of a red light is technically an offense, but you're generally unlikely to be charged with anything unless you entered after the light turned red or could reasonably have stopped before the red light.)
Do you have any data to support this assertion? The data we do have clearly shows that highway fatalities have dropped DRAMATICALLY since seatbelt installation, and later use, became mandatory.
This is a rather complicated issue. After I got into an extended discussion a few years ago with a friend who was convinced that seatbelts weren't useful, I really dug into the stats. Here's what I came up with:
(1) GP is correct that there are a few studies which claim to show that people drive faster (and perhaps more recklessly) when they are asked to wear seatbelts after not wearing them. To my knowledge, these studies haven't taken into account long-term usage, only the way people drove differently immediately after being told they have to wear seat belts.
(2) There also are a few studies which corroborate point (1) above by showing that pedestrian and cyclist fatalities MAY have increased slightly upon the introduction of mandatory seat-belt laws. This may suggest that while motorists were protected by belts, they also drove in a way that endangered more people. Overall, traffic fatalities still decreased (so GP is incorrect), and some other studies have disputed the claims about increased pedestrian fatalities. Nevertheless, some people have made this claim.
(3) Vehicle safety in general has improved significantly since the 1960s, as has increased penalties and enforcement for drunk driving, etc. Attributing all of the reduction in vehicle fatalities to seat belts is not reasonable -- however, seat belts most definitely were a very significant factor.
(4) Data clearly show that seat belts prevent fatalities for motorists. The question of seat belt LAWS is a little more confusing, and actually there's not inconsistent data to show that having stronger seat belt LAWS will actually reduce fatalities. Personally, I was rather shocked when I saw these claims, so I dumped in data from recent years on various states and tried to find correlations. It's true that states with tougher laws have higher seat belt use. And there is a small (but significant) correlation with higher seat belt use and overall fatality rates. On the other hand, there is NO significant correlation between stronger seat belt laws and decreased fatalities when you compare states. In fact, New Hampshire, which is the only state without a mandatory seat belt law for adults, is almost always in the top 5 *safest* states in terms of fatalities per miles traveled. (And yes, I tried to account for urban vs. rural and other stats too.)
This would tend to support the other points above -- what makes people safer is probably voluntarily wearing seat belts. In states where we are mandating seat belt use (i.e., states where you actually can pull people over and ticket them for not wearing a seat belt), drivers who don't think the belts are necessary may in fact drive more recklessly while wearing them and thus negate many of the gains. (At least, that would be one way to explain seeming contradictory data.)
(5) I would lastly note that most comparisons involve fatality rates. While saving lives is great, to really see the net impact of seat belts, we'd have to look at injury and accident rates, too. And the data often gets more murky and harder to analyze. Undoubtedly, seat belts do save lives, but even if they did, it doesn't mean that people don't drive more recklessly and/or get into more crashes -- since seat belts will generally prevent them from DYING unless they do something really stupid. I haven't spent as much time looking at injury and accident stats, but my sense is the impact of seat belts is a lot less clear than on fatality rates.
IN SUM: I'd say both you and GP have correct points. Seat belts overall have produced a significant net gain for highway safety, especially in terms of saving lives and preventing SERIOUS injuries. But there is also some evidence out there that seat belts can lead to more reckless driving, and particularly forcing people to wear seat belts when they don't want to seems to negate some of the safety gains in some cases.
So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site? Like, seriously, WTF?!
It's not, really. I mean, some people here have to deal with maintaining time zone changes on servers and such, so it will be relevant to a few.
But it's mostly to draw out two major types of people who love to debate time issues on Slashdot: (1) people who want to have the perpetual debate about whether Daylight Time EVER makes sense (or whether it ever "saves" anything), and (2) the people who love to propose their favorite "NEW" alternative time and calendar initiatives that are generally very similar to ones that have been debated by weirdos for hundreds of years and have absolutely no chance of being widely adopted.
Just wait... that's the sort of discussion to expect whenever anyone brings up time standards.
The temperature of the oven is irrelevant to the temperature of the food. Replaceable probes that stick into the food and still work at 300deg C (800 LOL) would be vastly more important than anything else.
Depends on what you're making. Lots of baking is done in a relatively short timeframe (less than an hour) and the interior of foods needs to achieve the right temperature before the surface of the food burns. That's usually the reason for the difference between recipes that recommend various oven temperatures: it's always a race against time to get the inside cooked before the outside burns.
Now, you might say, we could just pay attention to the inside, and turn the oven down if the inside temperature isn't rising fast enough. I myself have done this in the process of baking, but temperature rises unpredictably in many foods, and the rate will be altered every time you change the oven temperature. It's really hard to predict this, so most people rely on a reasonably consistent oven temperature.
Also, there are plenty of foods where certain chemical changes happen in the exterior in a very short time-frame and need to be coordinated with the interior, particularly when leavened (some examples of sensitive foods -- bread, pastry, souffles, cakes, etc.). Screw up the oven temperature, and the things will never rise properly, have a terrible crust, and/or end up dried out or underdone in the middle.
If neo-Luddites like you and the GP had been alive in the 1950s, you'd undoubtedly have been deriding the microwave oven as impractical and useless as well.
A microwave *IS* "useless and impractical" for most cooking. All of those commercials from the 1960s showed happy housewives cooking up their family's turkey dinner with all the trimmings in the new microwave. I actually own some of the old cookbooks that even tell you how to do it. Guess what? That never came to pass. Because most food cooked in the microwave is *terrible*.
It's good for heating up TV dinners and some leftovers that are moist enough (anything else I'll pop in the toaster oven or a pan to reheat), and for occasional small tasks like melting butter that I'd prefer not to waste a pan on. Otherwise, I never use my microwave. There's not a single dish that I can think of which it improves in flavor or texture, and the vast majority it ruins or at least worsens. Almost any serious cook you ask would agree with me. And believe me, I've tried. I spent most of college only cooking with a microwave in my room, and I never found anything it was actually better at that a regular stove.
Is a microwave more convenient? Sure. If you need to heat up a can of soup for lunch, it's fast, and you avoid dirtying a pan. But your 1950s luddites were actually somewhat right: the microwave is useless for serious cooking.
Anyhow, I finding it funny that you call someone whose kitchen is fully of high-tech equipment (as I mentioned) to be a "luddite." There's a difference between useful tech and gadgets that really don't make anything better, but just cost more for marginal improvement.
As I said at the end of my post, a lot of Myhrvold's ideas are interesting, and if I could get them all in my oven for an extra $100 or so, sure, I'd probably do it. But since I can't, I have other ways of basically doing the things he says. And -- the most important point -- a process is only as precise as the least precise element. Most of my ingredients will never be controllable with the kind of precision that would make many of his goals worthwhile. I'd love to play around with some of his features. But I'm not going to pay thousands of dollars more for an oven that can do these things when at best they'll be a marginal improvement to an already inexact process with too many variables.
Because the incremental improvement adding all of these optics and electronics, make it robust, and make it work is not cheap. And most cooks do pretty darn good with just what they have.
This is spot-on. The suggestions in this article mostly range from the impractical and expensive to the barely useful and ludicrously expensive.
I do a LOT of baking, roasting, braising, etc. in my oven. I'm also the kind of guy who owns multiple probe thermometers with different sensitivities and speeds, multiple kitchen scales with different accuracies for different quantities, a pH meter for kitchen use, hydrometers for fermentation, miscellaneous lab glassware for accurate measuring (and often convenient pouring), etc.
Basically, I know there's a lot of room for precision in the kitchen, and I make use of it all the time.
On the other hand, I'm also the kind of guy who throws in a handful of some herb and a couple pinches of another spice while I'm cooking or baking -- I recognize that there are sometimes when precision is warranted, and sometimes when it doesn't really make a huge difference becauses there are other variables in play. (How fresh is the herb or spice, is it small new leaves or large old leaves, etc.? -- sure, I could weigh a small amount of it, but those variations mean that a "handful" is probably about as reasonably precise as I'm going to get in terms of flavor potential.)
Cooking and baking generally involves a lot of ingredients that have significant variation to them -- it's not like you order "laboratory grade" spices that have stable flavor profiles and are 99.99% pure or whatever. And kitchen conditions are variable enough in temperature and humidity that even if you had the perfect yeast that always started out exactly the same, by the time your dough ferments for a couple hours in your kitchen, each batch is going to be a little different. (Even with my temperature-controlled proofing box for proofing dough, my pizza timing and process will require adjustment from batch-to-batch.)
So why exactly am I going to pay a ridiculous premium for these features on my oven? Most of them can be easily approximated with cheap fixes for those who care. If I want to have higher humidity in my oven, I put a steam pan in. Great. Whee. Cost of a few bucks for a cheap pan. If I want bursts of steam like a commercial bread oven, I can use a water kettle and a piece of tubing that costs me a couple bucks -- a valve too, if I want to be fancy about it. Myhrvold worries about how some of these "fancy" ovens can produce high humidity, but what if you want to brown your food and need to get rid of the humidity, which the oven isn't designed for. What the heck? Take my $5 steam pan out of the freakin' oven after I'm done with the steaming phase. What is so hard about this?
Or I could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for some ridiculous improvements to have precision equipment when I'm not generally using ingredients or cookware or whatever else that are built to the same precise tolerances... so I'm wasting money. The biggest improvement to my pizza-baking, for example, came NOT from precision measuring instruments for ingredients or from my special proofing box (both of which need to be adjusted according to variances in ingredients and kitchen conditions), but from buying a cheap steel plate to bake my pizza on (a suggestion that originated with Myrhvold's book, by the way).
I'm not saying that ovens can't be improved. Many of his ideas would be interesting for general features, but his obsession with precision is just ridiculous.
Just think about it. The question's really not that difficult, and you don't have to invoke either the hucksterism of philosophy or the juju of religion to resolve it cleanly and ethically.
Wow -- fantastic! 3000+ years of scientists, philosophers, and theologians debating what "life" is, what constitutes "suffering," what constitutes a "human" or "consciousness" or whatever -- and you have the solution! "Just think about it" and I can "resolve it cleanly and ethically"! WOW. I'm so glad I came on Slashdot today to meet such a great sage.
Now, let's see what you have to say:
The question is, and or at least definitely should be, are you doing harm to something that can suffer?
Why should that "definitely" be the question? Woah, I'm starting to have doubts here. Aren't you making a few assumptions here? Why should "ability to suffer" be the primary criterion? What is "suffering"?
Let's even restrict it for the moment to adult humans, whom almost everyone would agree should not be arbitrarily tortured or killed. Suppose someone is paralyzed from the legs down and can't feel anything in their legs. Does that mean I can morally just walk up and beat the crap out of their legs, break them to pieces, etc.? After all the person feels no pain or suffering from it? Oh, you're concerned about infections and such that could lead to suffering... well, let's say you hired a surgeon to amputate the legs after you were done beating them to a bloody pulp. After all, there's no active nervous system to sense any suffering there, so why not?
I know you'll probably object to this extreme example, but I could come up with a dozen others off the top of my head. Most people intuitively believe that there's more to it than whether a person or thing can feel pain -- there's often some boundary line dealing with what that person or thing "is" which relates to how we treat it morally. But... well, that would require talking about issues of philosophy, and we know that's just "hucksterism."
here's the key issue: Does it have a nervous system, and does that nervous system couple to something sophisticated enough to convert those signals into suffering?
Interesting. So, it's not just "suffering." It has to do with a "nervous system." How exactly do you know that only things with nervous systems can "suffer"? For example, even plants have been shown to avoid things that will harm them, and in certain circumstances they can even "remember" such harm for days or weeks and continue to avoid something even when the stimulus is no longer directly present. Is this evidence that they sensed "suffering" when they were harmed and are now avoiding that harm? Are we just biased against them because they don't have a nervous system and move slowly over periods of days or weeks rather than seconds?
Or, to go the other way, do we really believe that all things with nervous systems "suffer"? Is "suffering" just a response to a harmful stimulus (like the plants), or does it require "pain receptors," or does it require a "conscious" (whatever that means) nervous system that acknowledged the painful stimulus in some way and understands it? Obviously many humans don't believe that lower forms of animals matter, even if they have fairly advanced nervous systems -- we torture lab animals like mice all the time in the name of scientific research, and most people find that moral. So, I'd hardly say that most people can just use your criteria to sort things out "cleanly and ethically" since most people don't actually agree with your conclusions... or, if they do, they clearly think causing suffering is okay in certain circumstances or for certain animals or for certain goals.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Philosophy is not "hucksterism" -- it's actually dealing with real problems that come up when you try to justify broad ethical and moral statements, like the ones you made. S
Completely, 100% wrong. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. That's all it is. Anything else, *anything*, is an add on from some other idea.
False. "Atheism" is ambiguous. See here. For some people, atheism is simply absence of belief in a god or gods. This is commonly referred to as "negative/weak/soft" atheism. Other atheists actually go further and believe that gods do not exist (though this statement is usually taken to be unprovable). Such atheism is often referred to as "positive/strong/hard" atheism.
Many people do not understand this distinction, and hence this stupid discussion comes up on Slashdot every so often where people debate a term that is fundamentally ambiguous. Some people use the term "atheism" to mean absence of belief, others use it to mean a belief that gods actually do not exist. Both of these definitions of atheism are correct -- hence the additional qualifiers some people tack on to justify the difference.
Some people claim that negative/soft/weak atheism isn't actually atheism at all. Instead, they claim this is "agnosticism." But, at least traditionally, that's not what this term refers to.
Agnosticism was specifically coined as a term to refer to a philosophical belief that it is IMPOSSIBLE to know whether god exists, i.e., we do not have sufficient evidence one way or another and perhaps CANNOT know. Today, to add to the confusion, some people use the word "agnosticism" to mean "weak atheism" but it's actually dealing with something else. It's possible to be an "agnostic theist" ("I believe God exists, but I also know I'm unable to prove it in any way") or an "agnostic weak atheist" ("I don't know whether God exists, and I think it's impossible to prove it one way or another") or an "agnostic strong atheist" ("I believe God does NOT exist, but I know I can't prove it").
And there are other possibilities too.
Anyhow, lots of these terms are ambiguous, and many people use them imprecisely. Your comment and those responding to you usually don't recognize that a term like "atheist" is actually incredibly non-specific in terms of what it really means when used in various contexts.
If a group of people breach a contract, you can sue them and they will have to pay you back from their own assets. If a corporation breaches a contract, you can only touch corporate assets.
Generally true, unless the contract is poorly written or invalid from a legal perspective. For example, contracts generally cannot exempt people from criminal wrongdoing, regardless of whether they're part of a corporation or not.
If a group of people dump toxins into the environment, they can be personally fined and put in jail. If a corporation dumps toxins into the environment, the corporation pays a fine and the people who initiated the dumping don't get touched.
False, if criminal actions were involved. The problem with prosecuting groups of people who commit actions is proving exactly who is responsible. That's why corporations often are just charged fines -- not because it's the only course of action, but because it's often quite difficult to disentangle who exactly at fault in complex decision-making process. And fining a company is actually an additional remedy that can be levied against a group of people, even when individual culpability is less certain. It actually in some cases makes it EASIER to punish groups of people in cases of uncertain personal liability
Anyhow, if major criminal violations took place and created environmental damage, individual members of a corporation in charge of decisions or directly responsible for the criminal actions CAN end up in jail.
If a group of people destroy the economy through fraud, they can be fined and put in jail. If a corporation destroys the economy through fraud, it gets a slap on the wrist from the SEC.
False. Yeah, tell that to the executives of Enron who ended up in jail.
Again, from a practical matter, it's harder to figure out who in a group of people is primarily responsible for actions -- whether those people are members of a corporation or not.
But if CRIMINAL fraud has taken place, and prosecutors can prove that certain individuals are primarily responsible for it, they can be personally fined and put in prison.
IN SUM: Being part of a group of people (whether in a corporation or not) can make it easier to hide and more difficult to determine culpability, but individuals are NOT absolved from criminal liability simply because they are part of a corporation.
The law treats corporations differently from "groups of people" in many respects.
That is certainly true. But if you want to talk about this, you'd be better off using examples which are actually correct.
How will the Repubmocrats keep 100% power against independents, tea party and other radical despots competing against the chosen ones?
It's called 'First Past the Post', and Facebook has nothing to do with it.
You're right that "first past the post" is a big part of the problem. But that's far from the whole story.
For one thing, "Repubmocrats" do NOT have 100% of the power. It may be near 100%, but it isn't 100% -- for example currently two U.S. senators, four major city mayors, and hundreds of state and local officials across the U.S. are elected independents or members of 3rd parties.
That means that quite a few voters across the U.S. have actual experience in ELECTING someone who is not a member of the two major parties. Those sorts of successes can make it more easier for some voters to justify taking a chance on a 3rd-party candidate.
Also, the Tea Party (for another example) has made huge inroads into mostly Republican territory in recent elections. One can argue that this has created huge problems for the traditional Republican leadership that disagrees with Tea Party ideology. In some elections, this has resulted in long-standing prominent members of the Republican party losing primaries and/or general elections.
The video you posted labels this the "spoiler effect" when it leads to, say, a Democrat being elected. But the very term "spoiler effect" is not a neutral term -- it's a propaganda term used by the 2 major parties to convince people to keep them in power.
We could, instead, call this the "disenfranchisement effect," where the two-party system focus on candidates A and B might disenfranchise voters who hate both and would prefer to vote for C. According to the spoiler effect logic (and your video), the C voters supposedly should learn between elections that their votes were "wasted" by voting for C, and thus come back and vote for A or B in the next election.
But that's not the only choice the C voters have. They could also (1) not vote at all, because they believe they've been effectively disenfranchised by the two parties or (2) continue to vote for a candidate like C, as the only candidate who represents their views. (One could certainly argue that at least condition (1) is incredibly important in the U.S. today, given the "get out the vote" efforts both parties employ, and also the fact that most adults don't even bother to vote in most U.S. elections.)
The point of all this is that while "first past the post" gives a mathematical tendency toward two party domination, it does NOT guarantee that the two parties will always stay the same -- one could eventually be replaced by another, or (more often) one or both parties could shift ideological ground significantly to retain members in the face of increasing defections in major elections.
This in fact has happened many places with the Republicans for example, where Tea Party affiliates have forced the Republican party candidates to change their ideologies or else lose elections. Rather than seeing it as a "spoiler" effect to lose an election, many voters instead see it as effective "disenfranchisement" and refuse to continue voting for candidates they hate. The only choice of the Republicans is to nominate candidates that have a chance of winning... and thus, to retain power, they must actually respond to those voters who cast votes for 3rd parties (or didn't even vote at all).
So, it's not quite as dire as people make it out to be. Yes, "first past the post" sets up some unhelpful constraints, but significant change is still possible. We can start by refusing to use 2-party propaganda terms like "spoiler effect," since that implies that one of the top two candidates somehow "deserves" to win. Untrue. If a 3rd-party candidate draws enough votes away from one of the top 2 candidates, the major party candidate FAILED to attract enough votes to win. That's not a 3rd-party candidate "spoiling" an election -- that's a major party "losing" an election by failing to satisfy enough of the electorate.
So a group of rich nerds who freely admit their companies consist almost solely of overworked white males with no life and have absolutely no background in education are going to pay their way to changing the education system they don't understand?
What could possibly go wrong?
Lots of things. But it's important to note that this is basically an American tradition by this point.
Lots of education reform was recommended in the late 19th and early 20th century by big heads of corporations at the time (remember, those guys like Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.?). The general goal of education they wanted at the time was to promote obedient workers -- hence educational reforms like short class "periods" with bells to force everyone to get up and move from task to task, just as they'd be expected to do on the factory floor. That's just one example. We live with their ideas still today in our educational system.
Then, in the 1960s, we had another group of "overworked white males with no life and have absolutely no background in education" step in and redesign our math and science curricula as part of the "Space Race" to win the Cold War. Suddenly, math curricula (for example) were redesigned by math professors and science professors, with no previous experience in teaching young children, to be much more theoretical in primary and secondary school. So even if few students went on into science or other math-heavy fields, they still were treated to many years of abstract high-school math that would be completely irrelevant to their lives... while dropping or discouraging practical math education in things like finance, home "economics," business math, etc. (Some disasters, like the stuff labeled the "New Math" was eventually dropped.) Once again, we still live with that legacy today. Arguably, one might say it even has led to the modern crisis of credit, inability of people to understand loans and mortgages, etc., because those practical math elements were expunged or downplayed in the new curriculum.
Now we have a new generation of corporate foundations seeking to interfere with education and put their mark on it. I'm sure they'll do a few good things, as all the previous reforms did, but they'll also have some disastrous long-term consequences, as the previous reforms continue to have....
Up next on the chopping block are going to be multi-room DVRs, Slingbox technology, and probably anything that delivers video to your computer. The judgement was not very clear on an even less clear law; and "past-precedent" will be used to get all kinds of new technology illegal.
What are you talking about? Nobody made Aereo's technology "illegal." The Supreme Court simply said that if they want to keep doing what they're doing, they have to pay licensing fees, just like any cable TV company does, and just like streaming services the license content (like Hulu) do.
Keeping personal copies of over-the-air content to replay for yourself has a long legal history in the courts (going back to VCRs and cassette tapes) -- "private, non-commercial timeshifting in the home" has clearly been an established precedent. It's hard to imagine that idea of recording a VCR tape at home and playing it at home (perhaps on another TV) wouldn't extend to the idea of multi-room DVRs for non-commercial use within your home.
Now, I suppose you could argue about something like Slingbox, since it requires retransmission through the internet. But on the other hand, if the content is kept private and noncommercial, it could still fall under the previous precedent.
Anyhow, the point is that Aereo is a completely different sort of case, since it involved a company making a profit (i.e., commercial gain) off of rebroadcasting content to huge numbers of users. That's very different from transferring content you've recorded privately for yourself to yourself... and the Supreme Court explicitly said the Aereo ruling wasn't meant to be interpreted broadly.
So, while anything's possible, the law is already reasonably clear on such things. No one with half a brain should have thought Aereo could've gotten away with what they're doing under established legal precedent, and no one with half a brain should be concerned that recording and playing a video back for yourself within your own home for noncommercial purposes will be threatened under established legal precedent.
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Parent poster didn't do his research, preferring to post what fit his ideological preconceptions instead.
I've actually read a number of treatises written by the founders of eugenics in the mid-1800s through its heyday in the early 1900s, including all of the literature on cultural "degeneration" etc. that led to targeting of Jews, Roma, poor people, stupid people, etc. on the basis of incredibly shaky science. Have you?
I suggest before going around suggesting that someone hasn't done research that you do your own. There are some hints at eugenics by a small number of people today (including people like James Watson, who unfortunately has succumbed to some pretty weird ideas in his old age), but it was most popular historically -- and the vast majority of people who were in favor of it were not participating in a scientific enterprise.
Whoa! Phrenology has no scientific basis, but Eugenics certainly does. If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them, you will have fewer of those traits in the next generation.
While it is certainly true that selective breeding is a scientific fact, almost all historical eugenicist movements have NOT been based on scientifically verified traits. Take some time and read about the nonsense criteria that eugenics people would use -- measuring ear size or facial characteristics to determine "degenerate" people more likely to be stupid or commit crimes.
You seem to think that "eugenics" is just a synonym for "selective breeding" or something. While the proponents of eugenics often claim that, in fact their criteria for selection were generally based on bogus "science" (even phrenology) and generally tend to be motivated more by politics or class distinctions than science.
So, no, actual eugenics as practiced does NOT have a scientific basis, even if the general principle might theoretically work.
So the only difference from the basic experiment was the presence of the button which offered entertainment and also enlightenment -- in the form of providing the subject an opportunity to test and prove they could endure the shock, a new and unfamiliar experience.
Yeah, except it wasn't actually "new and unfamiliar." Those who did this phase of the study were selected because they had been previously shocked AND had found the previous experience SO disagreeable that they were willing to PAY not to endure it again.
What the experiment did prove is that given time alone to think and reflect -- people will reevaluate their own aversion to an "unpleasant" sensation and decide to take advantage of an opportunity to better themselves by proving (to themselves) they can endure it.
What evidence do you have of this? Did you interview the subjects yourself and ask about their motivations? If not, how is your theory about why they acted any better than the one offered by the researchers?
The subjects were asked to sit quietly and think. The button may have been presented, but they certainly weren't encouraged to press it. In fact, they previously had indicated how much they hated the sensation of pressing it, so it seems rather strange to assume that the subjects would feel like they were in any sense being encouraged to press it now. Regardless of their motivation (either simple boredom or some noble "learning" or "conquering" narrative in your elaborate made-up accounts of potential psychological motivation), the net result is the same: even though asked to simply sit quietly and think, the subjects often chose to revisit a stimulus they previously had found very disagreeable instead of just thinking.
This is SO DIFFERENT from the conclusion that people are little scardie-rabbits who cannot endure being alone with themselves, these researchers should be ashamed of themselves for irresponsibly portraying this, or permitting this to be portrayed in the news without rebuttal. They should apologize and re-do the experiment.
You are being more than a little crazy here. You've concocted an elaborate story about what you're absolutely positive these subjects MUST have been thinking, and therefore you've decided the researchers are not only morons, but immoral people.
Do you know whether the subjects participated in any exit interviews? Do you have evidence to support your ideas? If not, your insane rant isn't any more likely than other explanations.
And even if you're right, and you're giving a detailed and accurate portrayal of how some (or most) subjects were feeling, the researchers' conclusion is still correct. It's not like the researchers said that the subjects may not have various motivations -- but the point is that the subjects chose painful "entertainment" (as you put it) that they had previously said they would avoid, rather than following the basic task they were asked to do (simple sit quietly and think).
Democratic-Republicans -- usually called Republicans -- if you please. Jefferson's party is the parent of both parties today, though he'd hardly recognize either.
Not quite. Yes, the Democratic-Republicans were generally referred to as simply "Republicans," but they have no direct relationship to modern Republicans at all. The Democratic-Republicans eventually split into the Democrats and the Whig Party (anti-Jacksonians) in the 1830s. In the 1850s, a new party -- who took up the defunct "Republican" name, aka the Grand Old Party (GOP) -- emerged and supplanted the Whigs. Since this new party emerged from a coalition of various fragmented parties after the Whigs destructed in 1852, it doesn't really make sense to connect them to the earlier Democratic-Republicans.
I've not read the article, but the thought that immediately occurred to me was whether there was a curiosity element involved. i.e. did people really shock themselves because they were bored, or did they shock themselves out of curiosity to see if it really did hurt as much as they were told it would?
Maybe next time try reading TFA before commenting:
All of these participants had received a sample of the shock and reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again.
"What is striking," the investigators write, "is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid."
Let me reiterate this: these people NOT only received a sample shock, but said they would PAY not to receive one again. (There apparently were participants who didn't find the shock disturbing enough that they'd pay -- and they were excluded from this phase of the experiment. So, it's clear that this group of people were a self-selecting group who had been identified as severely disliking electric shocks.)
Reduced stimulus is EXACTLY classic sensory deprivation.
Maybe you're confusing it with total sensory deprivation.
Sorry, but what the heck are you talking about?
Sensory deprivation is SENSORY deprivation -- i.e., you make it impossible to SENSE anything, usually through a particular SENSE (e.g., sight or hearing, etc.). Here, let's read a definition:
Sensory deprivation or perceptual isolation is the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. Simple devices such as blindfolds or hoods and earmuffs can cut off sight and hearing, while more complex devices can also cut off the sense of smell, touch, taste, thermoception (heat-sense), and 'gravity'.
Sensory deprivation is NOT sitting in your house, with freedom to experience the world around you through all your normal senses, no matter how broadly you want to read the term. Just because you don't provide continuous active entertainment to someone through all of their senses does NOT make is "sensory deprivation."
People already have too little motivation to do the right thing. Their misdeeds must be recorded for posterity. As well, too many people take stupid shit too seriously. The fact that it's just stupid shit must also be recorded for posterity, so that we can get over the stupid shit.
What about when the "truth" is incredibly misleading? What if there were actually no "misdeeds," but there is an implication that there were?
Also, many of the cases so far seem to be dealing with media reporting. Do we really believe that the media always gets it 100% correct -- and, more importantly, that they care about giving enough context that a reasonable reader would draw the correct conclusions?
For a really common example, what about people who are arrested, but no charges are ever filed (perhaps it was just an overzealous policeman)? Or people who have charges filed but are ultimately dropped because of lack of evidence or the realization that the person didn't commit the crime? Or people who go to trial, but are acquitted? Or people who are even convicted, but only for some small number of charges compared to the original case?
The news media, in almost all cases, tends to be more vigilant about reporting potential evil-doing, than it is about correcting or following up on previous stories when people are just released, charges dropped, etc. You're much more common to see a long story about how a person was arrested and charged with some crime (child abuse, child molestation, rape, whatever...), but the story of charges dropped or an acquittal may be buried on page 10 or not even reported at all.
Even though an original story about an arrest inevitably contains "alleged" and thus is technically not false, it can be incredibly misleading to someone who happens upon it in a web search.
Now, you can argue that this is the fault of readers -- that we should presume innocence or whatever. I agree. But in the REAL WORLD, most people don't presume innocence when they read a story about someone arrested for rape or child abuse or something. Before the internet, the person would be acquitted or charges might even be dropped, and the only easy way to know about it is if you actually remembered the original reporting -- otherwise, you'd have to go digging through some library microfilm of old newspapers or something.
But now, it's fairly common to be able to find old and incredibly misleading media articles in a normal internet search, particularly for someone with an unusual name and without any other significant online presence.
This is an extreme case of someone potentially accused of something heinous but cleared of charges (which may never have been reported in the media), but what about the many other little issues with media reporting... slight exaggerations or things thought true at the time, or whatever, all of which could give an inaccurate impression of someone's reputation?
It's not just recording stupid stuff that people did -- it's all the records of stuff people DIDN'T do (but it may be implied that they did) that are the bigger concern, to my mind.
"J'accuse!" quoth L4t3r4lu5, "A bibliophage is upon us!" As Jesus saith, cast him into the stygian periphery, where there shall be lachrymating and gnashing of dentitions.
Sensory deprivation experiments, partial or full, have been going on for decades. How is this 'news' to the scientific community?
Maybe because this isn't really about classic "sensory deprivation." In one phase of the experiment, they even let people sit in their own homes and just asked them to just think quietly for 6 to 15 minutes. I'd hardly call that "sensory deprivation." Most people apparently HATED the experience (even more than they hated sitting quietly in a lab setting).
I'm familiar with sensory deprivation studies, but personally I find it shocking (pardon the pun) that people are willing to self-administer painful shocks just to avoid being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. Don't you? Clearly the researchers did, given what they said in TFA. They even questioned why they should bother with the shock test, because they thought NO ONE would shock themselves. And yet nearly half did.
Tor on the other hand, is explicitly designed to allow people to remain anonymous, to prevent detection.
Amazing how faulty logic can be disguised by just putting a comma into a sentence. If you had an "AND" or "OR" at the end of the sentence, I might have agreed with you.
But by using a comma, you implicitly claim that "to remain anonymous" = "to prevent detection." Those are not the same at all. There are all sorts of reasons people might want to remain anonymous, most notably just because they believe in something called "privacy" and don't want other people (governments, online businesses, internet ad companies, whatever) collating information on them for no apparent reason.
But when you say "to prevent detection," that implies there is something to "detect," or something that you're deliberately trying to hide or avoid someone finding out. But you can simply want to be a private person without necessarily implying that you're trying to hide something. (I know that sounds like a crazy statement to some people these days, but it's actually true. Before the past couple decades, most people probably assumed that it would be really weird if there were various businesses and government agencies maintaining databases that profiled you.)
When I surf the internet, for example, I tend to use "private browsing mode" or whatever it's called in various browsers. I do so because I find it mildly disturbing that there are so many people out there that have some weird urge to track my every move (years ago, people that wanted to track people used to be known as the "town gossip" who was in everyone else'e business, and this was not a positive thing), and I really don't have enough websites where I "log in" or need a cookie to track me all the time for convenience that it makes sense to keep that history around. (And there are workarounds to keep cookies on a few specific sites I really want to.) So, I find it just cleaner to have everything be erased after I close my browser.
I'm not trying to hide anything, and if it weren't for so many random cookies and scripts running all the time to track me on the internet, I probably would actually like to have a browser history, for those once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when I think, "Gee, there was that website I saw last week that was really useful, but I can't remember it... I wish I could search for it in my history." But the times I wish I had a browser history are so few and far between that the minor benefit is outweighed by tracking. Same thing with using various browser plug-ins to control scripts and cookies -- you don't need to want to "avoid detection" just because you don't want random websites storing tracking files on your computer.
But you probably look at me and assume that I must be doing this for nefarious reasons -- I've heard some people even call the "private browsing mode" something else, like "porn mode," because they assume that's all it's for.
Anyhow, there's a real difference between simply desiring "privacy" or "anonymity" vs. "trying to avoid detection." Tor is designed for the former, though it can be used for the latter. I don't know how often or what percentage of Tor traffic is for people "trying to avoid detection," but even if it's the majority of Tor traffic, it doesn't imply that Tor is only designed for that. It's designed to maintain anonymity, and we should not assume there is any illegal intent in that. Privacy used to be the assumed default; tracking your every move used to be considered weird. Thus, the car analogy is not the best one, but it gets that point across.
The judge made the assumption that anyone who wants to be untraceable to law enforcement must be a criminal, which is actually not such a huge stretch.
Fascinating. And here I thought "Papers, please!" was not an acceptable law enforcement tactic in Austria anymore.
(In case this is unclear -- the default in most democratic countries has generally been that people are effectively "untraceable to law enforcement." I know that may seem completely crazy in this new era of continuous surveillance, fingerprint and DNA databases (even for non-criminals), etc., but it's actually how the world mostly was until just the past couple decades. Exactly why should the government need to keep track of you, unless you are suspected of a crime or a known threat? Why should desiring to have that anonymous status -- which has been the historical default in democratic countries -- be viewed as "not such a huge stretch" that you "must be a criminal"?)
The problem is that you can't just swap in a different cooking method and expect the same results.
Umm, I'm not sure you understand what I'm talking about. Have you actually looked at some of these old cookbooks? They didn't just "swap in a different cooking method" with the same old recipes. They often significantly altered recipes and tested them in great detail to try to get them to work in microwaves.
Ultimately, though, the changes in flavor and texture were generally undesireable. Or they required even more finicky steps in microwave cooking than you'd do in a conventional recipe. And thus, within a decade after the microwave became common in people's kitchens, it was relegated to TV dinners, reheating meals, and a few other general heating tasks where texture and flavor either didn't matter or were already developed in previous cooking.
I own a microwave. It's convenient for a few tasks, as I mentioned, because it can be faster and require less cleaning of pots/pans. But it doesn't actually enable me to cook anything better or with more precision. Many of Myhrvold's ideas could enable me to cook better and with more precision, but the gains are either marginal, or I'd be able to simulate his technology (with minor losses in precision) with something that probably would cost a tiny fraction of his technology.
Microwaves make food worse but are more convenient. Myhrvold's ideas would mostly help to make food better but would require ridiculous cost increases (and are thus less convenient).
What country was this? In the US, truth is most absolutely an absolute defense in defamation cases.
No, that's not the standard, though it's often pretty hard to win a libel case against something true. The legal standard for "public figures" is actual malice, which does not require malicious intent -- instead, "actual malice" is just a legal term that means that someone published information with knowledge that the information was false or "with reckless disregard" to whether the information is true or false.
That last thing means that if someone goes on a campaign to smear someone's name deliberately and starts digging up any information that can be found and recklessly publishing it without checking it out, it could be considered libelous, even if true.
For private persons or lesser known figures, there also is a false light tort available in some states (other states group such claims under regular defamation or libel claims). This can also apply when true statements are used in a misleading way or bring attention to someone in a misleading way. (For an extreme example, if you published a photo of John Doe with the caption "John Doe, New York Resident" next to a headline "Sex Offenders Go Free in New York," even though everything was "true," it could mislead readers.)
Were either of these situations likely in GP's case. I don't know. But truth is NOT an absolute defense against libel in all cases.
Yes, that is also true. But why do motorists get a yellow phase while pedestrians have no yellow phase and two red phases (flashing don't walk and solid don't walk)?
Huh? The flashing red crosswalk sign IS effectively the equivalent of the yellow. It's a caution sign indicating that you should not start crossing the intersection if possible.
Technically, yes, that's the equivalent of a red light, I suppose, but this is because the two things move at different speeds. To wit:
For cars:
Green - go through intersection
Yellow - if far enough in advance of intersection, come to a stop; if not far away enough to stop safely, proceed with caution
Red - do not enter intersection; if already in intersection, proceed out of intersection as quickly as possible with utmost caution**
For pedestrians:
White/green/blue/count - go through intersection
Flashing red - Do not enter intersection; if already crossing street, proceed quickly to other side
Red - Do not enter intersection
The difference is that cars need to know in advance that they will have to come to a stop to avoid running through a red light. Pedestrians generally do not need to know this in advance, but they generally need more time to clear the intersection than cars, so they get a flashing red -- which is equivalent to the very beginning of the red light for cars (i.e., clear intersection, if you're still there).
The colors thus mean basically the same thing. A yellow light would have no meaning for pedestrians, since it doesn't take them more than a brief instant to slow to a stop.
(**Note: This is true in states which officially have a "permissive yellow" law, which allows drivers to enter the intersection at any time during the yellow light. In other states, being in the intersection even at the beginning of a red light is technically an offense, but you're generally unlikely to be charged with anything unless you entered after the light turned red or could reasonably have stopped before the red light.)
Do you have any data to support this assertion? The data we do have clearly shows that highway fatalities have dropped DRAMATICALLY since seatbelt installation, and later use, became mandatory.
This is a rather complicated issue. After I got into an extended discussion a few years ago with a friend who was convinced that seatbelts weren't useful, I really dug into the stats. Here's what I came up with:
(1) GP is correct that there are a few studies which claim to show that people drive faster (and perhaps more recklessly) when they are asked to wear seatbelts after not wearing them. To my knowledge, these studies haven't taken into account long-term usage, only the way people drove differently immediately after being told they have to wear seat belts.
(2) There also are a few studies which corroborate point (1) above by showing that pedestrian and cyclist fatalities MAY have increased slightly upon the introduction of mandatory seat-belt laws. This may suggest that while motorists were protected by belts, they also drove in a way that endangered more people. Overall, traffic fatalities still decreased (so GP is incorrect), and some other studies have disputed the claims about increased pedestrian fatalities. Nevertheless, some people have made this claim.
(3) Vehicle safety in general has improved significantly since the 1960s, as has increased penalties and enforcement for drunk driving, etc. Attributing all of the reduction in vehicle fatalities to seat belts is not reasonable -- however, seat belts most definitely were a very significant factor.
(4) Data clearly show that seat belts prevent fatalities for motorists. The question of seat belt LAWS is a little more confusing, and actually there's not inconsistent data to show that having stronger seat belt LAWS will actually reduce fatalities. Personally, I was rather shocked when I saw these claims, so I dumped in data from recent years on various states and tried to find correlations. It's true that states with tougher laws have higher seat belt use. And there is a small (but significant) correlation with higher seat belt use and overall fatality rates. On the other hand, there is NO significant correlation between stronger seat belt laws and decreased fatalities when you compare states. In fact, New Hampshire, which is the only state without a mandatory seat belt law for adults, is almost always in the top 5 *safest* states in terms of fatalities per miles traveled. (And yes, I tried to account for urban vs. rural and other stats too.)
This would tend to support the other points above -- what makes people safer is probably voluntarily wearing seat belts. In states where we are mandating seat belt use (i.e., states where you actually can pull people over and ticket them for not wearing a seat belt), drivers who don't think the belts are necessary may in fact drive more recklessly while wearing them and thus negate many of the gains. (At least, that would be one way to explain seeming contradictory data.)
(5) I would lastly note that most comparisons involve fatality rates. While saving lives is great, to really see the net impact of seat belts, we'd have to look at injury and accident rates, too. And the data often gets more murky and harder to analyze. Undoubtedly, seat belts do save lives, but even if they did, it doesn't mean that people don't drive more recklessly and/or get into more crashes -- since seat belts will generally prevent them from DYING unless they do something really stupid. I haven't spent as much time looking at injury and accident stats, but my sense is the impact of seat belts is a lot less clear than on fatality rates.
IN SUM: I'd say both you and GP have correct points. Seat belts overall have produced a significant net gain for highway safety, especially in terms of saving lives and preventing SERIOUS injuries. But there is also some evidence out there that seat belts can lead to more reckless driving, and particularly forcing people to wear seat belts when they don't want to seems to negate some of the safety gains in some cases.
So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site? Like, seriously, WTF?!
It's not, really. I mean, some people here have to deal with maintaining time zone changes on servers and such, so it will be relevant to a few.
But it's mostly to draw out two major types of people who love to debate time issues on Slashdot: (1) people who want to have the perpetual debate about whether Daylight Time EVER makes sense (or whether it ever "saves" anything), and (2) the people who love to propose their favorite "NEW" alternative time and calendar initiatives that are generally very similar to ones that have been debated by weirdos for hundreds of years and have absolutely no chance of being widely adopted.
Just wait... that's the sort of discussion to expect whenever anyone brings up time standards.
The temperature of the oven is irrelevant to the temperature of the food. Replaceable probes that stick into the food and still work at 300deg C (800 LOL) would be vastly more important than anything else.
Depends on what you're making. Lots of baking is done in a relatively short timeframe (less than an hour) and the interior of foods needs to achieve the right temperature before the surface of the food burns. That's usually the reason for the difference between recipes that recommend various oven temperatures: it's always a race against time to get the inside cooked before the outside burns.
Now, you might say, we could just pay attention to the inside, and turn the oven down if the inside temperature isn't rising fast enough. I myself have done this in the process of baking, but temperature rises unpredictably in many foods, and the rate will be altered every time you change the oven temperature. It's really hard to predict this, so most people rely on a reasonably consistent oven temperature.
Also, there are plenty of foods where certain chemical changes happen in the exterior in a very short time-frame and need to be coordinated with the interior, particularly when leavened (some examples of sensitive foods -- bread, pastry, souffles, cakes, etc.). Screw up the oven temperature, and the things will never rise properly, have a terrible crust, and/or end up dried out or underdone in the middle.
If neo-Luddites like you and the GP had been alive in the 1950s, you'd undoubtedly have been deriding the microwave oven as impractical and useless as well.
A microwave *IS* "useless and impractical" for most cooking. All of those commercials from the 1960s showed happy housewives cooking up their family's turkey dinner with all the trimmings in the new microwave. I actually own some of the old cookbooks that even tell you how to do it. Guess what? That never came to pass. Because most food cooked in the microwave is *terrible*.
It's good for heating up TV dinners and some leftovers that are moist enough (anything else I'll pop in the toaster oven or a pan to reheat), and for occasional small tasks like melting butter that I'd prefer not to waste a pan on. Otherwise, I never use my microwave. There's not a single dish that I can think of which it improves in flavor or texture, and the vast majority it ruins or at least worsens. Almost any serious cook you ask would agree with me. And believe me, I've tried. I spent most of college only cooking with a microwave in my room, and I never found anything it was actually better at that a regular stove.
Is a microwave more convenient? Sure. If you need to heat up a can of soup for lunch, it's fast, and you avoid dirtying a pan. But your 1950s luddites were actually somewhat right: the microwave is useless for serious cooking.
Anyhow, I finding it funny that you call someone whose kitchen is fully of high-tech equipment (as I mentioned) to be a "luddite." There's a difference between useful tech and gadgets that really don't make anything better, but just cost more for marginal improvement.
As I said at the end of my post, a lot of Myhrvold's ideas are interesting, and if I could get them all in my oven for an extra $100 or so, sure, I'd probably do it. But since I can't, I have other ways of basically doing the things he says. And -- the most important point -- a process is only as precise as the least precise element. Most of my ingredients will never be controllable with the kind of precision that would make many of his goals worthwhile. I'd love to play around with some of his features. But I'm not going to pay thousands of dollars more for an oven that can do these things when at best they'll be a marginal improvement to an already inexact process with too many variables.
Because the incremental improvement adding all of these optics and electronics, make it robust, and make it work is not cheap. And most cooks do pretty darn good with just what they have.
This is spot-on. The suggestions in this article mostly range from the impractical and expensive to the barely useful and ludicrously expensive.
I do a LOT of baking, roasting, braising, etc. in my oven. I'm also the kind of guy who owns multiple probe thermometers with different sensitivities and speeds, multiple kitchen scales with different accuracies for different quantities, a pH meter for kitchen use, hydrometers for fermentation, miscellaneous lab glassware for accurate measuring (and often convenient pouring), etc.
Basically, I know there's a lot of room for precision in the kitchen, and I make use of it all the time.
On the other hand, I'm also the kind of guy who throws in a handful of some herb and a couple pinches of another spice while I'm cooking or baking -- I recognize that there are sometimes when precision is warranted, and sometimes when it doesn't really make a huge difference becauses there are other variables in play. (How fresh is the herb or spice, is it small new leaves or large old leaves, etc.? -- sure, I could weigh a small amount of it, but those variations mean that a "handful" is probably about as reasonably precise as I'm going to get in terms of flavor potential.)
Cooking and baking generally involves a lot of ingredients that have significant variation to them -- it's not like you order "laboratory grade" spices that have stable flavor profiles and are 99.99% pure or whatever. And kitchen conditions are variable enough in temperature and humidity that even if you had the perfect yeast that always started out exactly the same, by the time your dough ferments for a couple hours in your kitchen, each batch is going to be a little different. (Even with my temperature-controlled proofing box for proofing dough, my pizza timing and process will require adjustment from batch-to-batch.)
So why exactly am I going to pay a ridiculous premium for these features on my oven? Most of them can be easily approximated with cheap fixes for those who care. If I want to have higher humidity in my oven, I put a steam pan in. Great. Whee. Cost of a few bucks for a cheap pan. If I want bursts of steam like a commercial bread oven, I can use a water kettle and a piece of tubing that costs me a couple bucks -- a valve too, if I want to be fancy about it. Myhrvold worries about how some of these "fancy" ovens can produce high humidity, but what if you want to brown your food and need to get rid of the humidity, which the oven isn't designed for. What the heck? Take my $5 steam pan out of the freakin' oven after I'm done with the steaming phase. What is so hard about this?
Or I could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for some ridiculous improvements to have precision equipment when I'm not generally using ingredients or cookware or whatever else that are built to the same precise tolerances... so I'm wasting money. The biggest improvement to my pizza-baking, for example, came NOT from precision measuring instruments for ingredients or from my special proofing box (both of which need to be adjusted according to variances in ingredients and kitchen conditions), but from buying a cheap steel plate to bake my pizza on (a suggestion that originated with Myrhvold's book, by the way).
I'm not saying that ovens can't be improved. Many of his ideas would be interesting for general features, but his obsession with precision is just ridiculous.
Just think about it. The question's really not that difficult, and you don't have to invoke either the hucksterism of philosophy or the juju of religion to resolve it cleanly and ethically.
Wow -- fantastic! 3000+ years of scientists, philosophers, and theologians debating what "life" is, what constitutes "suffering," what constitutes a "human" or "consciousness" or whatever -- and you have the solution! "Just think about it" and I can "resolve it cleanly and ethically"! WOW. I'm so glad I came on Slashdot today to meet such a great sage.
Now, let's see what you have to say:
The question is, and or at least definitely should be, are you doing harm to something that can suffer?
Why should that "definitely" be the question? Woah, I'm starting to have doubts here. Aren't you making a few assumptions here? Why should "ability to suffer" be the primary criterion? What is "suffering"?
Let's even restrict it for the moment to adult humans, whom almost everyone would agree should not be arbitrarily tortured or killed. Suppose someone is paralyzed from the legs down and can't feel anything in their legs. Does that mean I can morally just walk up and beat the crap out of their legs, break them to pieces, etc.? After all the person feels no pain or suffering from it? Oh, you're concerned about infections and such that could lead to suffering... well, let's say you hired a surgeon to amputate the legs after you were done beating them to a bloody pulp. After all, there's no active nervous system to sense any suffering there, so why not?
I know you'll probably object to this extreme example, but I could come up with a dozen others off the top of my head. Most people intuitively believe that there's more to it than whether a person or thing can feel pain -- there's often some boundary line dealing with what that person or thing "is" which relates to how we treat it morally. But... well, that would require talking about issues of philosophy, and we know that's just "hucksterism."
here's the key issue: Does it have a nervous system, and does that nervous system couple to something sophisticated enough to convert those signals into suffering?
Interesting. So, it's not just "suffering." It has to do with a "nervous system." How exactly do you know that only things with nervous systems can "suffer"? For example, even plants have been shown to avoid things that will harm them, and in certain circumstances they can even "remember" such harm for days or weeks and continue to avoid something even when the stimulus is no longer directly present. Is this evidence that they sensed "suffering" when they were harmed and are now avoiding that harm? Are we just biased against them because they don't have a nervous system and move slowly over periods of days or weeks rather than seconds?
Or, to go the other way, do we really believe that all things with nervous systems "suffer"? Is "suffering" just a response to a harmful stimulus (like the plants), or does it require "pain receptors," or does it require a "conscious" (whatever that means) nervous system that acknowledged the painful stimulus in some way and understands it? Obviously many humans don't believe that lower forms of animals matter, even if they have fairly advanced nervous systems -- we torture lab animals like mice all the time in the name of scientific research, and most people find that moral. So, I'd hardly say that most people can just use your criteria to sort things out "cleanly and ethically" since most people don't actually agree with your conclusions... or, if they do, they clearly think causing suffering is okay in certain circumstances or for certain animals or for certain goals.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Philosophy is not "hucksterism" -- it's actually dealing with real problems that come up when you try to justify broad ethical and moral statements, like the ones you made. S
Completely, 100% wrong. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. That's all it is. Anything else, *anything*, is an add on from some other idea.
False. "Atheism" is ambiguous. See here. For some people, atheism is simply absence of belief in a god or gods. This is commonly referred to as "negative/weak/soft" atheism. Other atheists actually go further and believe that gods do not exist (though this statement is usually taken to be unprovable). Such atheism is often referred to as "positive/strong/hard" atheism.
Many people do not understand this distinction, and hence this stupid discussion comes up on Slashdot every so often where people debate a term that is fundamentally ambiguous. Some people use the term "atheism" to mean absence of belief, others use it to mean a belief that gods actually do not exist. Both of these definitions of atheism are correct -- hence the additional qualifiers some people tack on to justify the difference.
Some people claim that negative/soft/weak atheism isn't actually atheism at all. Instead, they claim this is "agnosticism." But, at least traditionally, that's not what this term refers to.
Agnosticism was specifically coined as a term to refer to a philosophical belief that it is IMPOSSIBLE to know whether god exists, i.e., we do not have sufficient evidence one way or another and perhaps CANNOT know. Today, to add to the confusion, some people use the word "agnosticism" to mean "weak atheism" but it's actually dealing with something else. It's possible to be an "agnostic theist" ("I believe God exists, but I also know I'm unable to prove it in any way") or an "agnostic weak atheist" ("I don't know whether God exists, and I think it's impossible to prove it one way or another") or an "agnostic strong atheist" ("I believe God does NOT exist, but I know I can't prove it").
And there are other possibilities too.
Anyhow, lots of these terms are ambiguous, and many people use them imprecisely. Your comment and those responding to you usually don't recognize that a term like "atheist" is actually incredibly non-specific in terms of what it really means when used in various contexts.
If a group of people breach a contract, you can sue them and they will have to pay you back from their own assets. If a corporation breaches a contract, you can only touch corporate assets.
Generally true, unless the contract is poorly written or invalid from a legal perspective. For example, contracts generally cannot exempt people from criminal wrongdoing, regardless of whether they're part of a corporation or not.
If a group of people dump toxins into the environment, they can be personally fined and put in jail. If a corporation dumps toxins into the environment, the corporation pays a fine and the people who initiated the dumping don't get touched.
False, if criminal actions were involved. The problem with prosecuting groups of people who commit actions is proving exactly who is responsible. That's why corporations often are just charged fines -- not because it's the only course of action, but because it's often quite difficult to disentangle who exactly at fault in complex decision-making process. And fining a company is actually an additional remedy that can be levied against a group of people, even when individual culpability is less certain. It actually in some cases makes it EASIER to punish groups of people in cases of uncertain personal liability
Anyhow, if major criminal violations took place and created environmental damage, individual members of a corporation in charge of decisions or directly responsible for the criminal actions CAN end up in jail.
If a group of people destroy the economy through fraud, they can be fined and put in jail. If a corporation destroys the economy through fraud, it gets a slap on the wrist from the SEC.
False. Yeah, tell that to the executives of Enron who ended up in jail.
Again, from a practical matter, it's harder to figure out who in a group of people is primarily responsible for actions -- whether those people are members of a corporation or not.
But if CRIMINAL fraud has taken place, and prosecutors can prove that certain individuals are primarily responsible for it, they can be personally fined and put in prison.
IN SUM: Being part of a group of people (whether in a corporation or not) can make it easier to hide and more difficult to determine culpability, but individuals are NOT absolved from criminal liability simply because they are part of a corporation.
The law treats corporations differently from "groups of people" in many respects.
That is certainly true. But if you want to talk about this, you'd be better off using examples which are actually correct.
How will the Repubmocrats keep 100% power against independents, tea party and other radical despots competing against the chosen ones?
It's called 'First Past the Post', and Facebook has nothing to do with it.
You're right that "first past the post" is a big part of the problem. But that's far from the whole story.
For one thing, "Repubmocrats" do NOT have 100% of the power. It may be near 100%, but it isn't 100% -- for example currently two U.S. senators, four major city mayors, and hundreds of state and local officials across the U.S. are elected independents or members of 3rd parties.
That means that quite a few voters across the U.S. have actual experience in ELECTING someone who is not a member of the two major parties. Those sorts of successes can make it more easier for some voters to justify taking a chance on a 3rd-party candidate.
Also, the Tea Party (for another example) has made huge inroads into mostly Republican territory in recent elections. One can argue that this has created huge problems for the traditional Republican leadership that disagrees with Tea Party ideology. In some elections, this has resulted in long-standing prominent members of the Republican party losing primaries and/or general elections.
The video you posted labels this the "spoiler effect" when it leads to, say, a Democrat being elected. But the very term "spoiler effect" is not a neutral term -- it's a propaganda term used by the 2 major parties to convince people to keep them in power.
We could, instead, call this the "disenfranchisement effect," where the two-party system focus on candidates A and B might disenfranchise voters who hate both and would prefer to vote for C. According to the spoiler effect logic (and your video), the C voters supposedly should learn between elections that their votes were "wasted" by voting for C, and thus come back and vote for A or B in the next election.
But that's not the only choice the C voters have. They could also (1) not vote at all, because they believe they've been effectively disenfranchised by the two parties or (2) continue to vote for a candidate like C, as the only candidate who represents their views. (One could certainly argue that at least condition (1) is incredibly important in the U.S. today, given the "get out the vote" efforts both parties employ, and also the fact that most adults don't even bother to vote in most U.S. elections.)
The point of all this is that while "first past the post" gives a mathematical tendency toward two party domination, it does NOT guarantee that the two parties will always stay the same -- one could eventually be replaced by another, or (more often) one or both parties could shift ideological ground significantly to retain members in the face of increasing defections in major elections.
This in fact has happened many places with the Republicans for example, where Tea Party affiliates have forced the Republican party candidates to change their ideologies or else lose elections. Rather than seeing it as a "spoiler" effect to lose an election, many voters instead see it as effective "disenfranchisement" and refuse to continue voting for candidates they hate. The only choice of the Republicans is to nominate candidates that have a chance of winning... and thus, to retain power, they must actually respond to those voters who cast votes for 3rd parties (or didn't even vote at all).
So, it's not quite as dire as people make it out to be. Yes, "first past the post" sets up some unhelpful constraints, but significant change is still possible. We can start by refusing to use 2-party propaganda terms like "spoiler effect," since that implies that one of the top two candidates somehow "deserves" to win. Untrue. If a 3rd-party candidate draws enough votes away from one of the top 2 candidates, the major party candidate FAILED to attract enough votes to win. That's not a 3rd-party candidate "spoiling" an election -- that's a major party "losing" an election by failing to satisfy enough of the electorate.
So a group of rich nerds who freely admit their companies consist almost solely of overworked white males with no life and have absolutely no background in education are going to pay their way to changing the education system they don't understand?
What could possibly go wrong?
Lots of things. But it's important to note that this is basically an American tradition by this point.
Lots of education reform was recommended in the late 19th and early 20th century by big heads of corporations at the time (remember, those guys like Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.?). The general goal of education they wanted at the time was to promote obedient workers -- hence educational reforms like short class "periods" with bells to force everyone to get up and move from task to task, just as they'd be expected to do on the factory floor. That's just one example. We live with their ideas still today in our educational system.
Then, in the 1960s, we had another group of "overworked white males with no life and have absolutely no background in education" step in and redesign our math and science curricula as part of the "Space Race" to win the Cold War. Suddenly, math curricula (for example) were redesigned by math professors and science professors, with no previous experience in teaching young children, to be much more theoretical in primary and secondary school. So even if few students went on into science or other math-heavy fields, they still were treated to many years of abstract high-school math that would be completely irrelevant to their lives... while dropping or discouraging practical math education in things like finance, home "economics," business math, etc. (Some disasters, like the stuff labeled the "New Math" was eventually dropped.) Once again, we still live with that legacy today. Arguably, one might say it even has led to the modern crisis of credit, inability of people to understand loans and mortgages, etc., because those practical math elements were expunged or downplayed in the new curriculum.
Now we have a new generation of corporate foundations seeking to interfere with education and put their mark on it. I'm sure they'll do a few good things, as all the previous reforms did, but they'll also have some disastrous long-term consequences, as the previous reforms continue to have....
Up next on the chopping block are going to be multi-room DVRs, Slingbox technology, and probably anything that delivers video to your computer. The judgement was not very clear on an even less clear law; and "past-precedent" will be used to get all kinds of new technology illegal.
What are you talking about? Nobody made Aereo's technology "illegal." The Supreme Court simply said that if they want to keep doing what they're doing, they have to pay licensing fees, just like any cable TV company does, and just like streaming services the license content (like Hulu) do.
Keeping personal copies of over-the-air content to replay for yourself has a long legal history in the courts (going back to VCRs and cassette tapes) -- "private, non-commercial timeshifting in the home" has clearly been an established precedent. It's hard to imagine that idea of recording a VCR tape at home and playing it at home (perhaps on another TV) wouldn't extend to the idea of multi-room DVRs for non-commercial use within your home.
Now, I suppose you could argue about something like Slingbox, since it requires retransmission through the internet. But on the other hand, if the content is kept private and noncommercial, it could still fall under the previous precedent.
Anyhow, the point is that Aereo is a completely different sort of case, since it involved a company making a profit (i.e., commercial gain) off of rebroadcasting content to huge numbers of users. That's very different from transferring content you've recorded privately for yourself to yourself... and the Supreme Court explicitly said the Aereo ruling wasn't meant to be interpreted broadly.
So, while anything's possible, the law is already reasonably clear on such things. No one with half a brain should have thought Aereo could've gotten away with what they're doing under established legal precedent, and no one with half a brain should be concerned that recording and playing a video back for yourself within your own home for noncommercial purposes will be threatened under established legal precedent.