First off, it's not specific to US it's entirely universal human behaviour. You don't win friends and influence people by being critical. Poeple most like to hear stuff that is complementary. Even more so in a crisis. However, deny people access to something and it suddenly becomes hugely desirable.
Secondly, in UK one gets easy access to most US media. Eg, one can watch CNN, MSNBC, etc with basic cable. One can read washington post, NYTimes online or even buy them in larger newsagents if one cares too.
There is a vicious circle at work. The main reason that Americans are so patriotic is that throughout their lives almost everything they hear reinforces the notion that America is the best (richest, most free, most tolerant, etc) country on earth, so why shouldn't they be proud of that. Moreover, since the majority believes this completely, it is unwise for a publication that wishes to be bought or even believed to say anything that reflects too badly on America. The media will happily complain about things like crime, drugs, morality - these are internal issues and there's no point denying they exist. There's nothing unpatriotic about discussing one's problems. However you'll never see a mainstream newspaper article saying: "if a foreign power maintained a large military presence in my country to prop up a corrupt, repressive and unpopular regime, to ensure a better deal for their corporations, I would be pretty pissed off too". That wouldn't go down well. No, the reason al-Quaida hate America is "they hate our freedom".
Foreign news is virtually never mentioned on US television unless it's in such a way as to reflect well upon America. For example, you'll get a story like - "American troops fly into East Timor to protect the natives from gangs of thugs." The earlier story: "US trained and funded death squads kill 1/3rd of population of East Timor to supress an independence movement that could damage the interests of US oil companies in nearby waters" is much less likely to make people feel good about themselves, happy with your publication, and likely to read you again. This phenomena is not unique to US by any means, but is more pronounced there than other places I've stayed.
> The reason banks are in business is because they claim to be better than you at managing your money
Nah, that's not it. The reason banks are in business is that they (temporarily) invent money. It's kind of weird, but look up what fractional reserve banking means some time. When you write a check, you're really using a form of currency created by banks. Money needs to be invented constantly and in current system this is done by banks.
What the heck are you on about ? The crucial problem is that one can express a paradox.
while (this_program_halts()) {}
where this_program_halts() returns true if the preceeding program terminates.
Personally I think the whole thing is a crock of shit anyway, brought about by a refusal to recognise that supposedly yes/no questions sometimes have 3 possible answers (yes,no,paradox). It is pretty difficult to determine whether a program will halt even if one avoids paradox, it's an arbitarily difficult problem which you won't find a simple algorithm for. However, the pretence that the paradox tells us anything profound says more about the limitations of mathematicians than anything else.
It's real simple. If the reader can't tell what the code does from reading it, either it's written badly, or the reader is incompetent. In either case, comments won't help. If I see too many obvious comments, it's a clue that the author was clueless and I should probably just throw the code away because it will cause more trouble than it fixes.
When comments are useful is to fill in information that is obvious to the author but not obvious to anyone else reading the code. When the author wrote the class/function he knew why he was doing it, why the function was needed at all, this kind of information allows a new developer to get an overall understanding of the project much faster.
Watch those end credits again, notice how it says: An enigma was captured by Allied ship blablabla in 1941. Such and such was done by Allied in 194x, and such such was done by Americans in 1944. Kinda weird, when it was non Americans it was credited as part of allied team, when American is was American. It's not important, but even the end credits seemed to indicate a "what's yours is ours whats mine is mine" attitude.
Hmm, good point, it would be hard to advocate a ban on advertising while maintaining a belief in free speech.
Network television uses valuable frequencies to push it's poison. If they want exclusive access to such valuable public assets they should be subject to regulation. With cable companies, it's different: they're providing a service, using no public resources, which you are free to avoid. So, they should have the right to offer that service. Caveat emptor. I have a similar attitude to drug dealers.
However, when advertisers argue that they should get legal protection from devices that allow people to block their insidious and damaging drivel, the wider effects of their "service" should be considered.
For me, it's not a question of whether PVRs which skip ads should be allowed. It's more a question of whether ads themselves should be allowed. The whole point of advertising is to increase desire for things you don't have, and are often better off without.
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Stuck between 10 minutes of inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you are subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted manipulation inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Simply by increasing obesity, advertising is responsible for more deaths than heroin. See this [guardian.co.uk]. One could argue that it should be banned entirely, like heroin. Personally I think dangerous and destructive things (like adverts or heroin) should be regulated rather than banned outright.
One valid argument against legalised heroin is that sometimes people's choices harm others. For instance, if I end up having to foot the medical bills of heroin users, then it *is* my business what other people do in the privacy of their own homes. So, along with legal drugs I would also support education to warn people of dangers. It would seem a bit off to me if far more effort went into trying to persuade people to take heroin than was being spent telling them it might not be such a good idea. I don't believe in stopping people from doing stupid things, but I do have a problem with relentless propoganda telling them that stupid things are a good idea.
The existence of adverts on TV effects me adversely even if I don't watch it. For instance, the advertising for PizzaHut leads to increased obesity, the additional burden on medicaid and welfare which increases my taxes. I would be willing to pay money to educate people about dangers of eating high-sugar high-fat diets because education is cheaper than cure. By the same token, I would be prepared to pay extra not just to avoid adverts myself, but to avoid your exposure to adverts.
In general advertising leads to increased consumerism: more roads, driving, shops, stress and pollution. In fact, it leads to what is hilariously called "progress". The direction it leads people in has only got the faintest association with this idea of "choice". The only "choices" proposed in adverts are ones which will make the advertiser richer.
For a purely capitalist solution, we need to somehow calculate the true costs of advertising. So, by all means: persuade people to buy that new BMW or pizza, that is perfectly fair - just make sure the cost of the extra death, pollution, congestion, road accidents, etc is paid by the advertiser.
It looks like PVRs will destroy the current business model of TV companies. Excellent: good riddance to bad rubbish. If they want to lobby for legislation regarding advertising, they should get some backlash.
Sounds reasonable. So, you're basically an anarchist libertarian then ? Or, are there any laws you do agree with. For instance, do you approve of laws demanding that you pay taxes in order to fund a police force and an army. You may object to paying taxes to pay welfare recipients, while others may object to funding an army and subsidising the tech/engineering industrial complex.
Then there are secondary questions - should roads be maintained by government, or should they all be build and tolled by private companies ? How about broadcast frequencies, should they be managed or just left as free for all ?
For a couple of decades a loooong time ago, some American comics were subtly subversive. The truly inspiration Krazy Kat springs to mind. Then we had WWII followed by McCarthyism. The genuinely thoughtful comics dissappeared and the vast majority of comics, became revoltingly wholesome and patriotic, even jingoistic.
Far from being subversive, comics formed one of the most powerful and blatant mechanisms for establishing concensus. Had the government produced a deliberate plan to mould the minds of children so that they would grow into unquestionly patriotic and gung ho cannon fodder in preparation for the next war, I doubt they could have done any better. Try reading mainstream 50s 60s or 70s comics after "sed s/America/Russia/g" and imagine that you were looking at soviet propoganda. You would be horrified by the crudity and bias.
This changed later on of course, but how you can call the "golden period" of American comics subversive is beyond me.
No, you've misunderstood me. What I'm focusing on is the difference between language and other forms of communication.
Agreed: CLI/GUI is a stupid argument, one needs a mixture. Your argument about click versus type url shows difference nicely. I can click a link faster than typing a url, but if I want to be able to choose any one of a billion web pages in 10 seconds, I type the URL. That's what I mean by the information content of language grows exponentially with the length of the message.
With all due respect to the University of Maryland's Ben Shneiderman, either he has been misreported or he's a fuckwit.
> He's convinced our eyes will do better than our voices at helping us control the digital machinery of the 21st century.
It's really very simple. There are two sides to HCI, computer->human, and human->computer. Now visual stuff is great for computer->human communication, but not for human->computer communication. Or to put it another way, the eye is a higher bandwidth input port than the ear, but the eye is no use for output. We cannot effectively communicate our needs to a computer by drawing pictures. Although simple, this is not understood which is why every so often some twit produces an abortive attempt at a "visual programming language". It's also why purely visual interfaces are fundamentally less powerful than command line interfaces.
I'm not convinced visual methods always win for computer->human either. Even though our eyes are higher bandwidth than our ears, we are not used to processing purely visual information in a cummalitive way. With language the information content of the message can grow exponentially with the length of the message.
Many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".
Hmm, I appear to have overstated the case, but I am not the only person with this misconception. Most company directors (myself included) believe that a corporation's sole raison d'etre is to make a profit. Corporate directors only have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value when a bona fide offer is made for their stock. However, in practice this means that a board which does not focus on maximising shareholder value will quickly be displaced by one which does. There is no realistic place for ethics in corporate behaviour.
> Further, donations are protected speech in the U.S. Don't like it? Tough! Go whine to the Supreme Court.
I *know* that and if your reading comprehension level is at 5th grade or above you could see that from my post. It's a pretty tenuous argument in my opinion, but I'm generally in favour of expanding 1st ammendment rights. The point I was making was that it is preposterous for corporations to have the rights of a human when they don't have the limitations or ethics of a human.
> All companies make contributions to political fundraisings. This is nothing new or unethical.
It's not very new, but I don't think it's ethical.
A company is legally obliged to maximize shareholder profit. This means that it is effectively illegal for a company to make a decision on ethical grounds. For the donation to be legal anything, they must have reasonable grounds to believe they are getting somthing in return.
The argument that money is speech is rather preposterous, but even if one buys it, it doesn't make corporate political donations OK. If companies had the same constraints, eg if they could be jailed or executed, then maybe they would deserve the same rights as individuals.
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Stuck between 10 minutes of inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you are subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted manipulation inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Simply by increasing obesity, TNT's advertising is responsible for more deaths than heroin. See this. One could argue that it should be banned entirely, like heroin. Personally I think dangerous and destructive things (like adverts or heroin) should be regulated rather than banned outright.
One valid argument against legalised heroin is that sometimes people's choices harm others. For instance, if I end up having to foot the medical bills of heroin users, then it *is* my business what other people do in the privacy of their own homes. So, along with legal drugs I would also support education to warn people of dangers. It would seem a bit off to me if far more effort went into trying to persuade people to take heroin than was being spent telling them it might not be such a good idea. I don't believe in stopping people from doing stupid things, but I do have a problem with relentless propoganda telling them that stupid things are a good idea.
The existence of adverts on TNT effects me adversely even if I don't watch it. For instance, the advertising for PizzaHut leads to increased obesity, the additional burden on medicaid and welfare which increases my taxes. I would be willing to pay money to educate people about dangers of eating high-sugar high-fat diets because education is cheaper than cure. By the same token, I would be prepared to pay extra not just to avoid adverts myself, but to avoid your exposure to adverts.
In general advertising leads to increased consumerism: more roads, driving, shops, stress and pollution. In fact, it leads to what is hilariously called "progress". The direction it leads people in has only got the faintest association with this idea of "choice". The only "choices" proposed in adverts are ones which will make the advertiser richer.
The desires of humanity are being manipulated and shaped by those with a short term money making agenda. If you want a purely capitalist solution, you need to somehow calculate the true costs of advertising. So, by all means: persuade people to buy that new BMW or pizza, that is perfectly fair - just make sure that the full cost of the extra death, pollution, congestion, noise, road accidents, etc is paid by the advertiser.
In summary, PVR's should be subsidised by extra taxes on advertisers, and TNT can go fuck themselves.
What the hell is the point of trying to classify policies as left or right ?
There are a million issues, even if they were all simple binary choices, there are 2^N different opinions a person could have. Sure, there are certain correlations between issues. If you believe in death penalty, you are more likely to believe in corporal punishment, but are not certain to.
Since you only get to choose between two options at election time, it suits people to pretend that everything is either "left" or "right". Then they get confused about whether a policy is left or right. It's an extraordinary mass psychosis.
> Porn is an addiction, looking at virtual child porn will just lead the pervent to want more and more.
Will it ?
Personally I have no fucking clue whether it would or wouldn't, and I hope you don't actually know either.
Why do people introduce analogies into situations where they don't help ? You have a situation you're trying to judge, so say it's like X so conclusion is Y. But you have to decide whether the situation is really like X, this is often harder than trying to figure out the actual problem. It's so annoying to see conflicting camps swapping analogies ad infinitum without anybody thinking about the actual *case*.
It's like dunking a donut in shit instead of chocolate to prove that donuts are nasty.... Hey, I've used an analogy, I must be right.
I was so pissed off with music industry after napster was closed down / DMCA was introduced, I boycotted all CD purchases from stores. I only buy CDs from bands with websites selling CDs directly. If the profits from CD sales are going to be used to try and destroy our freedoms, then it's immoral to give them money.
Now, I think the crappy music or economic downturn is a more likely cause of declining record sales, but and many people's interest in music slumped after Napster, but I would like to think enough napster users were similarly pissed off to have made a difference. Napster shutdown probably contributed to CD sales decline.
Overstated by who ? The press *are* media conglumerates. Besides, the real problem is the control the PR industry has on the press. It's cheaper to print the stories sent in by the PR guys whose salary is paid for by the corporations they work for than it is to pay journalists to actually do anything. When television news covers anything related to an industry, the footage is largely assembled from segments sent in by those with a vested interest in telling a particular story.
You really need to read "Toxic sludge is good for you" to see just how messed up our media is.
They really have a thing about concrete there. I met some cute chick Huntsville U at SGI developers conference a while back. All she wanted to talk about were her concrete canoe activities. Now, I've been to Huntsville and the best entertainment available is to gorp at the folks with lots of first names at establishments like the Chicken Shack [ typical converation: "hi, I'm billy bob jimmy jack" "er, is this a multiple personality thing or y'all just rednecks ?" "you got a pretty mouth, boy"]
There doesn't seem to be a heck of a lot to do in Huntsville, so they make their own entertainment. I guess blasting things off into outer space is a good thing to do on a slow afternoon, but I'm not sure where the concrete fixation comes from.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, it's not specific to US it's entirely universal human behaviour. You don't win friends and influence people by being critical. Poeple most like to hear stuff that is complementary. Even more so in a crisis. However, deny people access to something and it suddenly becomes hugely desirable.
Secondly, in UK one gets easy access to most US media. Eg, one can watch CNN, MSNBC, etc with basic cable. One can read washington post, NYTimes online or even buy them in larger newsagents if one cares too.
There is a vicious circle at work. The main reason that Americans are so patriotic is that throughout their lives almost everything they hear reinforces the notion that America is the best (richest, most free, most tolerant, etc)
country on earth, so why shouldn't they be proud of that. Moreover, since the majority believes this completely, it is unwise for a publication that wishes to be bought or even believed to say anything that reflects too badly on America. The media will happily complain about things like crime, drugs, morality - these are internal issues and there's no point denying they exist. There's nothing unpatriotic about discussing one's problems. However you'll never see a mainstream newspaper article saying: "if a foreign power maintained a large military presence in my country to prop up a corrupt, repressive and unpopular regime, to ensure a better deal for their corporations, I would be pretty pissed off too". That wouldn't go down well. No, the reason al-Quaida hate America is "they hate our freedom".
Foreign news is virtually never mentioned on US television unless it's in such a way as to reflect well upon America. For example, you'll get a story like - "American troops fly into East Timor to protect the natives from gangs of thugs." The earlier story: "US trained and funded death squads kill 1/3rd of population of East Timor to supress an independence movement that could damage the interests of US oil companies in nearby waters" is much less likely to make people feel good about themselves, happy with your publication, and likely to read you again. This phenomena is not unique to US by any means, but is more pronounced there than other places I've stayed.
> The reason banks are in business is because they claim to be better than you at managing your money
Nah, that's not it. The reason banks are in business is that they (temporarily) invent money. It's kind of weird, but look up what fractional reserve banking means some time. When you write a check, you're really using a form of currency created by banks. Money needs to be invented constantly and in current system this is done by banks.
What the heck are you on about ? The crucial problem is that one can express a paradox.
while (this_program_halts()) {}
where this_program_halts() returns true if the preceeding program terminates.
Personally I think the whole thing is a crock of shit anyway, brought about by a refusal to recognise that supposedly yes/no questions sometimes have 3 possible answers (yes,no,paradox). It is pretty difficult to determine whether a program will halt even if one avoids paradox, it's an arbitarily difficult problem which you won't find a simple algorithm for. However, the pretence that the paradox tells us anything profound says more about the limitations of mathematicians than anything else.
Bah, I bet you're a vi (as opposed to ed) man.
wget is the way to do it.
It's real simple. If the reader can't tell what the code does from reading it, either it's written badly, or the reader is incompetent. In either case, comments won't help. If I see too many obvious comments, it's a clue that the author was clueless and I should probably just throw the code away because it will cause more trouble than it fixes.
When comments are useful is to fill in information that is obvious to the author but not obvious to anyone else reading the code. When the author wrote the class/function he knew why he was doing it, why the function was needed at all, this kind of information allows a new developer to get an overall understanding of the project much faster.
Watch those end credits again, notice how it says:
An enigma was captured by Allied ship blablabla in 1941. Such and such was done by Allied in 194x, and such such was done by Americans in 1944.
Kinda weird, when it was non Americans it was credited as part of allied team, when American is was American. It's not important, but even the end credits seemed to indicate a "what's yours is ours whats mine is mine" attitude.
Well duh, it amazes me that you even bother to point this out.
It's a bit like saying, you know what, ACs aren't always right.
Hmm, good point, it would be hard to advocate a ban on advertising while maintaining a belief in free speech.
Network television uses valuable frequencies to push it's poison. If they want exclusive access to such valuable public assets they should be subject to regulation. With cable companies, it's different: they're providing a service, using no public resources, which you are free to avoid. So, they should have the right to offer that service. Caveat emptor. I have a similar attitude to drug dealers.
However, when advertisers argue that they should get legal protection from devices that allow people to block their insidious and damaging drivel, the wider effects of their "service" should be considered.
For me, it's not a question of whether PVRs which skip ads should be allowed. It's more a question of whether ads themselves should be allowed. The whole point of advertising is to increase desire for things you don't have, and are often better off without.
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Stuck between 10 minutes of inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you are subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted manipulation inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Simply by increasing obesity, advertising is responsible for more deaths than heroin. See this [guardian.co.uk]. One could argue that it should be banned entirely, like heroin. Personally I think dangerous and destructive things (like adverts or heroin) should be regulated rather than banned outright.
One valid argument against legalised heroin is that sometimes people's choices harm others. For instance, if I end up having to foot the medical bills of heroin users, then it *is* my business what other people do in the privacy of their own homes. So, along with legal drugs I would also support education to warn people of dangers.
It would seem a bit off to me if far more effort went into trying to persuade people to take heroin than was being spent telling them it might not be such a good idea. I don't believe in stopping people from doing stupid things, but I do have a problem with relentless propoganda telling them that stupid things are a good idea.
The existence of adverts on TV effects me adversely even if I don't watch it. For instance, the advertising for PizzaHut leads to increased obesity, the additional burden on medicaid and welfare which increases my taxes. I would be willing to pay money to educate people about dangers of eating high-sugar high-fat diets because education is cheaper than cure. By the same token, I would be prepared to pay extra not just to avoid adverts myself, but to avoid your exposure to adverts.
In general advertising leads to increased consumerism: more roads, driving, shops, stress and pollution. In fact, it leads to what is hilariously called "progress". The direction it leads people in has only got the faintest association with this idea of "choice". The only "choices" proposed in adverts are ones which will make the advertiser richer.
For a purely capitalist solution, we need to somehow calculate the true costs of advertising. So, by all means: persuade people to buy that new BMW or pizza, that is perfectly fair - just make sure the cost of the extra death, pollution, congestion, road accidents, etc is paid by the advertiser.
It looks like PVRs will destroy the current business model of TV companies. Excellent: good riddance to bad rubbish. If they want to lobby for legislation regarding advertising, they should get some backlash.
Sounds reasonable. So, you're basically an anarchist libertarian then ? Or, are there any laws you do agree with. For instance, do you approve of laws demanding that you pay taxes in order to fund a police force and an army. You may object to paying taxes to pay welfare recipients, while others may object to funding an army and subsidising the tech/engineering industrial complex.
Then there are secondary questions - should roads be maintained by government, or should they all be build and tolled by private companies ? How about broadcast frequencies, should they be managed or just left as free for all ?
Just curious, where would you draw the line ?
For a couple of decades a loooong time ago, some American comics were subtly subversive. The truly inspiration Krazy Kat springs to mind. Then we had WWII followed by McCarthyism. The genuinely thoughtful comics dissappeared and the vast majority of comics, became revoltingly wholesome and patriotic, even jingoistic.
Far from being subversive, comics formed one of the most powerful and blatant mechanisms for establishing concensus. Had the government produced a deliberate plan to mould the minds of children so that they would grow into unquestionly patriotic and gung ho cannon fodder in preparation for the next war, I doubt they could have done any better. Try reading mainstream 50s 60s or 70s comics after "sed s/America/Russia/g" and imagine that you were looking at soviet propoganda. You would be horrified by the crudity and bias.
This changed later on of course, but how you can call the "golden period" of American comics subversive is beyond me.
No, you've misunderstood me. What I'm focusing on is the difference between language and other forms of communication.
Agreed: CLI/GUI is a stupid argument, one needs a mixture. Your argument about click versus type url shows difference nicely. I can click a link faster than typing a url, but if I want to be able to choose any one of a billion web pages in 10 seconds, I type the URL. That's what I mean by the information content of language grows exponentially with the length of the message.
With all due respect to the University of Maryland's Ben Shneiderman, either he has been misreported or he's a fuckwit.
> He's convinced our eyes will do better than our voices at helping us control the digital machinery of the 21st century.
It's really very simple. There are two sides to HCI, computer->human, and human->computer. Now visual stuff is great for computer->human communication, but not for human->computer communication. Or to put it another way, the eye is a higher bandwidth input port than the ear, but the eye is no use for output. We cannot effectively communicate our needs to a computer by drawing pictures. Although simple, this is not understood which is why every so often some twit produces an abortive attempt at a "visual programming language". It's also why purely visual interfaces are fundamentally less powerful than command line interfaces.
I'm not convinced visual methods always win for computer->human either. Even though our eyes are higher bandwidth than our ears, we are not used to processing purely visual information in a cummalitive way. With language the information content of the message can grow exponentially with the length of the message.
Many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".
Hmm, I appear to have overstated the case, but I am not the only person with this misconception. Most company directors (myself included) believe that a corporation's sole raison d'etre is to make a profit. Corporate directors only have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value when a bona fide offer is made for their stock. However, in practice this means that a board which does not focus on maximising shareholder value will quickly be displaced by one which does. There is no realistic place for ethics in corporate behaviour.
> Further, donations are protected speech in the U.S. Don't like it? Tough! Go whine to the Supreme Court.
I *know* that and if your reading comprehension level is at 5th grade or above you could see that from my post. It's a pretty tenuous argument in my opinion, but I'm generally in favour of expanding 1st ammendment rights. The point I was making was that it is preposterous for corporations to have the rights of a human when they don't have the limitations or ethics of a human.
> All companies make contributions to political fundraisings. This is nothing new or unethical.
s .h tml
It's not very new, but I don't think it's ethical.
A company is legally obliged to maximize shareholder profit. This means that it is effectively illegal for a company to make a decision on ethical grounds. For the donation to be legal anything, they must have reasonable grounds to believe they are getting somthing in return.
The argument that money is speech is rather preposterous, but even if one buys it, it doesn't make corporate political donations OK. If companies had the same constraints, eg if they could be jailed or executed, then maybe they would deserve the same rights as individuals.
http://www.corporatewatch.org/pages/corporation
er, I meant navy..
Piracy should be dealt with by the coast guard, or in extreme cases by the nazy.
Or were you talking about unauthorised copying ?
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Stuck between 10 minutes of inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you are subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted manipulation inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Simply by increasing obesity, TNT's advertising is responsible for more deaths than heroin. See this. One could argue that it should be banned entirely, like heroin. Personally I think dangerous and destructive things (like adverts or heroin) should be regulated rather than banned outright.
One valid argument against legalised heroin is that sometimes people's choices harm others. For instance, if I end up having to foot the medical bills of heroin users, then it *is* my business what other people do in the privacy of their own homes. So, along with legal drugs I would also support education to warn people of dangers.
It would seem a bit off to me if far more effort went into trying to persuade people to take heroin than was being spent telling them it might not be such a good idea. I don't believe in stopping people from doing stupid things, but I do have a problem with relentless propoganda telling them that stupid things are a good idea.
The existence of adverts on TNT effects me adversely even if I don't watch it. For instance, the advertising for PizzaHut leads to increased obesity, the additional burden on medicaid and welfare which increases my taxes. I would be willing to pay money to educate people about dangers of eating high-sugar high-fat diets because education is cheaper than cure. By the same token, I would be prepared to pay extra not just to avoid adverts myself, but to avoid your exposure to adverts.
In general advertising leads to increased consumerism: more roads, driving, shops, stress and pollution. In fact, it leads to what is hilariously called "progress". The direction it leads people in has only got the faintest association with this idea of "choice". The only "choices" proposed in adverts are ones which will make the advertiser richer.
The desires of humanity are being manipulated and shaped by those with a short term money making agenda. If you want a purely capitalist solution, you need to somehow calculate the true costs of advertising. So, by all means: persuade people to buy that new BMW or pizza, that is perfectly fair - just make sure that the full cost of the extra death, pollution, congestion, noise, road accidents, etc is paid by the advertiser.
In summary, PVR's should be subsidised by extra taxes on advertisers, and TNT can go fuck themselves.
What the hell is the point of trying to classify policies as left or right ?
There are a million issues, even if they were all simple binary choices, there are 2^N different opinions a person could have. Sure, there are certain correlations between issues. If you believe in death penalty, you are more likely to believe in corporal punishment, but are not certain to.
Since you only get to choose between two options at election time, it suits people to pretend that everything is either "left" or "right". Then they get confused about whether a policy is left or right. It's an extraordinary mass psychosis.
Hmm, let's see now. Jar jar was some caribbean sounding/moving 6' tall guy with a 18" tongue.
Maybe he holds some attraction to 13year old girls that you haven't considered.
Ah hell, it's time I burnt some karma...
> Porn is an addiction, looking at virtual child porn will just lead the pervent to want more and more.
Will it ?
Personally I have no fucking clue whether it would or wouldn't, and I hope you don't actually know either.
Why do people introduce analogies into situations where they don't help ? You have a situation you're trying to judge, so say it's like X so conclusion is Y. But you have to decide whether the situation is really like X, this is often harder than trying to figure out the actual problem. It's so annoying to see conflicting camps swapping analogies ad infinitum without anybody thinking about the actual *case*.
It's like dunking a donut in shit instead of chocolate to prove that donuts are nasty.... Hey, I've used an analogy, I must be right.
Do you listen to Rush Limbargh by any chance ?
c e/volcano.html
Volcano's:
http://www.epa.gov/docs/ozone/scien
Cows:
The carbon in cow's methane is added from plant matter which extracted it from the atmosphere in the first place - net effect, zero.
As for the TransAm, good acceleration, but damn those are ugly cars.
I was so pissed off with music industry after napster was closed down / DMCA was introduced, I boycotted all CD purchases from stores. I only buy CDs from bands with websites selling CDs directly. If the profits from CD sales are going to be used to try and destroy our freedoms, then it's immoral to give them money.
Now, I think the crappy music or economic downturn is a more likely cause of declining record sales, but and many people's interest in music slumped after Napster, but I would like to think enough napster users were similarly pissed off to have made a difference. Napster shutdown probably contributed to CD sales decline.
Overstated by who ? The press *are* media conglumerates. Besides, the real problem is the control the PR industry has on the press. It's cheaper to print the stories sent in by the PR guys whose salary is paid for by the corporations they work for than it is to pay journalists to actually do anything. When television news covers anything related to an industry, the footage is largely assembled from segments sent in by those with a vested interest in telling a particular story.
You really need to read "Toxic sludge is good for you" to see just how messed up our media is.
They really have a thing about concrete there. I met some cute chick Huntsville U at SGI developers conference a while back. All she wanted to talk about were her concrete canoe activities. Now, I've been to Huntsville and the best entertainment available is to gorp at the folks with lots of first names at establishments like the Chicken Shack
[ typical converation:
"hi, I'm billy bob jimmy jack"
"er, is this a multiple personality thing or y'all just rednecks ?"
"you got a pretty mouth, boy"]
There doesn't seem to be a heck of a lot to do in Huntsville, so they make their own entertainment. I guess blasting things off into outer space is a good thing to do on a slow afternoon, but I'm not sure where the concrete fixation comes from.