Apple has never been relevant enough on the desktop to kill any desktop technology. PC CD-Rs and then the internet killed floppy drives.
If anything, one of the reasons I refused to buy an Apple back in those days was the lack of a floppy disk. I stayed with a floppy drive right up until USB flash drives were cheap enough and front-facing USB ports were ubiquitous. Actually, I stayed with them a little bit longer, until it was possible to flash my motherboard's bios with a thumb drive.
I own apple computers now though (when they switched to Intel and I knew I could dual-boot windows).
The latest Cyanogen includes the ability to revoke privileges. You need access to my contacts? Sandboxed fake contacts okay? Cool.
I've been running Cyanogenmod and have been using the revoked privileges feature. Where can I enable the fake data feature? Some programs refuse to work when you revoke privileges to something like your contact list, it'd be great to just feed it false info instead.
There are a huge number of times when someone with a few days of experience behind them would stab the person who just turned their back in a flashy move that exposed most of their body without a guard. It made me cringe watching them. Someone with jedi reflexes should have ended any one of the fight scenes in the first 10 seconds.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, in every movie in which he fights does a spin exposing his back to an opponent who, paradoxically, will also spin at the exact same time instead of just taking the opportunity to hit him.
At least they're consistent about it. It happens in ANH as well as the prequels.
Yes, you did. Basically the part where Amazon does pay state taxes on the money they earn. If they have a warehouse in a state, they may not be paying sales tax (or rather, their customers aren't paying sales tax), but they are paying corporate income tax, to cover the services you mentioned.
In this case, we're requesting that an author pick a less-demeaning name for a software package
I know, and I don't have a problem with the way they're handling this. In fact, I think they're handling it exactly right. I think the point of this discussion is whether they should be doing something MORE. In my opinion, they shouldn't.
(IMO, the fact that he goes and picks a name associated with child upskirt shots, then says "Nyah, can't prove anything!" just goes to show how childish he really is.)
Yeah, I thought about that, but I couldn't determine intent. I think it is likely that he's just being childish like you said, but there is a possibility that he's actually making the insightful point that words are words, and people can choose to be offended or not. You certainly could choose to interpret 'Misaka' as something innocent, despite the fact that the author didn't intend it to be innocent.
I understand that the party-line around here is "Censorship = Bad," but honestly, you need a more nuanced understanding of it than that. While I support your constitutional right to free speech, certainly you can see that a post consisting of the word "COCKS" copy-pasted over and over again doesn't belong on a message board, and that the moderators probably should delete it. This isn't about silencing the minority "cocks" opinion, it's about holding a community to a higher set of standards than the bare-minimum that are constitutionally allowed.
I think the slashdot moderation system is a good way to handle that. Community standards means that the post will get modded down and nobody needs to see it. If someone does, however, want to hear from the "cocks" lobby, they're free to browse at -1. Slashdot is not entirely perfect, though: I dislike the lameness filter and the limits to how often you can post in a discussion.
I feel that I also should clarify that I personally support free speech, not just the constitutional right to free speech. I think it goes beyond, "government will not infringe upon it." I believe it is a virtue. I believe I have the right to not listen to the message if it offends me, but I think it says something important about our community when we can agree to merely ignores those that offend us, instead of taking steps to silence them.
I'm not proposing new guidelines. I'm saying that if the maintainers decide that they want to avoid the offense by forcing a name change, they can mitigate the risks of a "slippery slope" by establishing guidelines for why the name change is justified, rather than doing it in an ad hoc way (that would then support further ad hoc policies).
in short, when it comes to policy, slippery slopes are only slippery if you let them become that way.
Fair enough. I stand corrected and agree with your assessment.
Easiest way to avoid a slippery slope is to build a fence. Establish guidelines, enforce them, and suddenly your slippery slope becomes quite navigable.
Until you build so many fences that navigating the path becomes akin to navigating a maze.
They have established guidelines and are enforcing them. The guidelines say, 'there will be no censorship.' They would rather people didn't abuse their freedoms, but will not remove those freedoms because a minority do choose to abuse it. What you're proposing is that they establish new guidelines because people were offended. If they do that everyone is offended, soon there will be a 40-page document on guidelines on how to name your software package, and you'll spend 20% of your development time trying to figure out a name.
The name refers to a non-consensual sexual intrusion, something you might consider light rape.
What the hell is "light rape"? Is that something like the George Bluth's "light treasons"?
There's a big difference between this and something adolescent and immaturely sexual, but not horribly offensive like, oh, 'booblib'.
'booblib' might not be terribly offensive to YOU, but I'm sure it's incredibly offensive to quite a few people. The question isn't even, "how do we decide where the line is", but rather "how do we decide who decides where the line is."
Look, I agree with you. It's misogynistic. It's immature. It's not funny in any way. It is your right to be offended by it.
That's a very self-centered view. Not evil, but just thinking about yourself.
Some of us like the knowledge that there is someone permanent around who is willing to help. Someone to talk to. Someone who gives a shit. You can't buy that last two. You can buy a helper, you can buy sex, but you can only buy people who pretend to care about you or about what you say. If they are in it for the money, they don't care about you. Rather, they only care about your money.
And, some of us are willing to actually pay attention to someone and to give a shit about them, in exchange. You can call it love, you can call it partnership, you can call it whatever you want.
I'm all for that, but you don't need marriage or commitment for that. I believe it's far more meaningful to have a relationship where both people involved know that the other person could up and leave at any moment and yet they choose not to. Keeps you from taking the relationship for granted.
I wish I had mod points. I totally agree that Google is not going to respect my privacy.
Why not? They've been pretty good about that thus far. When was the last time google shared your information with a third party?
Hell, their business model depends on keeping information about people to themselves. They don't want the advertisers to know who might be interested in their product. If they had a list, they'd advertise straight to us, and skip google as the middle-men. They want to tell the advertisers, "we know of people's habits and know people who might interested in buying from you. Pay us money and we'll display your ads to those people. In fact, let them pay you through google checkout, and we'll keep their e-mail address and credit card info from you as well, even if they become your customers.
Specifically, it takes me back to high school. It's fine and dandy, but half the goal of social networks is to keep networking, not to lock oneself to certain groups and isolate those groups from each other.
Then put everyone on the same circle.
A whole lot of people like to be in isolated groups, however. We're not looking to "expand our own social circles", we're just looking for a way to better communicate with our existing social circles. I pretty much created three different facebook accounts because there were three very different groups of people I hang with, and I never, absolutely NEVER wanted to post anything on one of those groups that I also wanted to post on another. None of those accounts include people I've never met in real life. Hell, they don't even include acquaintances. I've got to know them pretty well in real life, and then facebook is just a way to keep in touch.
Do you have any idea what slave labor is? Sitting in an air conditioned office with free cokes while you sort papers does not quite compare to being tied in chains and forced to work in a diamond mine.
The fact you even compare the two is sickening.
Do you have any idea what assault is? Getting punched in the face once does not compare to getting jumped by three people with aluminum bets and having to spend the next six months in a hospital.
You're an idiot. Just because one thing is worse than another doesn't mean they can't both be described using the same terms.
Why should a company claim to offer "training" as payment and get a free employee?
For the same reason college sports teams get away with paying their employees with "education". Internships are hands-on practical courses done to supplement a field of study.
Students are paying their universities for education. Once you graduate and get a real job, you'll likely receive hands-on practical training on your job and get paid. You don't get asked to work for three months in your new job for free, until you start becoming productive.
Internships are supposed to be a way to benefit both the the employer and the student. The employer hires an intern at less than they would pay someone who has graduated. The student delays his graduation to get some practical training and to learn what the industry is like, in exchange for a paycheck and a possible job offer. The employer gets to examine several of these interns, pick out the best of them, and hire some after they graduate who will require less training.
That's exactly how it works in my field, anyway. Every electrical engineering student I see getting an internship is pulling ~$1,000 / week.
That's the whole point, though, isn't it? If you can strike down California's anti-violent-game bill because of the First Amendment, all anti-pornography laws should be struck down on the same basis.
You're right, that is the point, and it's what this article is about. I'd be in favor of that. If as a parent you want to protect your children from pornography, then you need to do that, not ask the government to do it for you.
LateArthurDent, thank you for your calm, and insightful post. I appreciate it.
I didn't personally think my post was that special. Thanks for reading and actually thinking about what I've said, people have a tendency to ignore arguments that go against their beliefs, and you have obviously not done that.
Unfortunately there was no WHOOSH, my post was entirely serious and emotionally-based.
Nothing unfortunate about it. I mentioned it because sarcasm can be extremely difficult to detect in written form, and I've been victim to it before, not because I thought your opinion must have been a joke. If I had thought that, I wouldn't have bothered to respond.
That Fatality offended me on a deep, visceral level, to a degree strong enough that I don't give a flying fuck about what Logic and Reason say I should be responding. I want a damn good explanation/justification for why that was created. And if there isn't one, then I will find myself saying "Fuck the First Amendment, Fuck Reason, Fuck Logic, I want that shit canned and those designers fired because that was Blasphemy to me".
I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling that way. We can't control how we feel when exposed to certain things. I feel that way about hate speech, of the type that actually attempts to incite hatred and violence. The problem is when you actually act on your feelings and try to silence others. I would defend the rights of others to spout hate speech, despite how it makes me feel. I do that for two reasons:
First, when you open the doors to allow government to silence speech, you're not guaranteed they won't go after something you believe in. In your earlier post you said that we shouldn't conflate this kind of violence with pornography, but there are quite a few people out there who would tell you that pornography is much, much worse than pixelated violence. You don't agree with them, I don't agree with them, but they're out there lobbying for legislation. If we open the gates for the type of legislation that would prohibit violent games, we're opening the gates for everyone who disagrees with any other form of speech.
Second, there are more effective ways to fight speech you dislike: through speech of your own. Trying to silence hate speech, for example, is ineffective because it allows the bigoted to shift the discussion away from their views to whether they have the right to talk about their views. It gets them allies where otherwise there would be none. It gets them publicity and a bigger platform to stand on and talk about their beliefs, thus reaching more people. If you're going to attack their views, you'll be far more successful if you actually attack their views.
To me, the flaw in your argument is that you argue presuming the Constitution and the Free Speech Amendment are sacrosanct. What I believe you are forgetting is that We The People do not serve the Constitution, The Constitution serves us. We, The People, are the ultimate authority in our land.
I actually agree with you, which is I mentioned the recourse that the people have. If the people have such great consensus that the Constitution is wrong, we can pass amendments to the document. It's not sacred, and when we believe it should be changed, we should change it. That said, it shouldn't be easy to make these changes, because that document applies to a whole lot of people. Conservative states believe in certain things, liberal states believe in others, the Constitution applies to all of them. Anything that doesn't have universal nation-wide agreement should be left to states, towns, and your local housing association, depending on their scope.
You must therefore understand that if a substantial supermajority or even majority of people get ticked off about something, they have the right to make it Law, and not only that, but Constitutio
I think I heard a "whoosh" sound over my head, but when I looked up, I couldn't see whatever it was. If you were making a joke that I missed, disregard the response below, I'm answering as if you were serious.
I'm all for freedom of speech.
Everybody says that. Few people are, and you aren't one of them.
I don't see what the point of that Fatality was.
That's not relevant, and thinking that it is relevant is why you're not for freedom of speech. It's easy to be in favor of speech you approve of, the test is whether you think people should have the right of speech to things that utterly disgust you, to things that would make you throw up when you witness it. Nobody has the right to force you to listen, but you don't have the right to stop them from speaking it.
And society isn't just made up of gamers, it's also made up of concerned parents who aren't gamers, women who may not enjoy seeing a virtual woman get split in half, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, and a whole lotta people who'll look at that and think "Hmm... maybe I should elect a politician who'll pass a law to ban that".
Except that our particular society is supposed to be made up of people who value individual rights. It's designed to make it extremely hard for any one group, even a majority one, to start controlling what people do. As of late, this hasn't been entirely the case, but the proper response to concerned parents who don't like mortal kombat is to supervise their children and ensure they don't play the game. The proper response to women, men, Christian, Muslims, Atheists and anybody else who think a law should be passed to ban mortal kombat should be, "sorry, the Constitution says that in our society such a law cannot exist, so you'll have to be satisfied with just avoiding buying the game or accumulate a big enough consensus that you can pass a constitutional amendment." I'm pretty sure such consensus doesn't exist, otherwise MK wouldn't sell, and there wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
That's exactly how it works now... The Examiner has to provide examples of prior art, which the applicant can then rebut. The Examiner can't simply say "ehhh, obvious, and I don't need to cite any evidence" which is what grandparent suggested, and would violate due process.
What I tried to say in my previous post is that the the patent examiner would need to supply an example of prior art if they are rejecting the application based on prior art, but non-obviouslness is also a test they must apply. In that case, the examiner should very much should be able to simply say, "ehh, obvious, and I don't need to cite any evidence." It doesn't violate due process as long as the applicants can challenge this at which point the burden should be on the applicants to demonstrate why it is not obvious in court.
I mean, I understand that in many cases looking at what has been done before is necessary to explain why something is obvious. However, in a lot of these patent cases, a stamp and five seconds is all you need. Let's see, you have customer information, including credit card numbers, because they've shopped at your store before. I will use this information to allow them to shop with a single-click! Yes, that's obvious. You don't need to know anything at all about computer science or servers to know that it's a trivial concept. If it turns out the patent examiner made an error because the process is simpler than it appears, then the applicant could challenge and say, "no, I really think this isn't obvious at all" at which point experts get brought in and testify in court that they have tried to solve this problem for years, but couldn't figure out a good solution, and explain why the problem is hard.
Getting a patent is a legal process, which means it's subject to constitutional guarantees of due process. A patent examiner can't simply say, "ehhhh, no." They have to provide evidence that the invention has been done before or hasn't been done, but is obvious in view of stuff that has been done before. It's like a court - they can't simply say "eh, you're guilty" without showing sufficient evidence.
Due process is important, but you're placing the burden of proof on the wrong person. The patent examiner should be able to reject anything at any time if he thinks the invention is obvious. When challenging his decision, the applicant should demonstrate why his invention isn't obvious. Similarly, it should be easy for the patent examiner to say, "I rejected because I believe invention 'x' is prior art.' The applicant challenging should have to prove why invention 'x' doesn't count as prior art. After doing so, the patent examiner should still be able to reject it if he finds another example of prior art for which the objection raised by the applicant doesn't apply.
Furthermore, the plural of anecdotes is most certainly not statistics. Anecdotes are highly susceptible to confirmation bias. Proper sampling is a huge, very complicated field of study.
I did not write that they are stupid, instead that the high school system has failed them. The plural of anecdotes is of course statistics. Collected test results unfortunately match what those educators are observing.
There is no system conceivable that can prepare everyone for college. Socioeconomic status is highly correlated to academic success (so it's a chicken and the egg problem...we can improve economic status by improving education, but to really make a difference we need to improve quality of life in order to improve academic performance), but no school system can compensate for problems at home. Some highly motivated individuals can rise above these problems, but that's a personal thing, not an external influence. Similarly some highly unmotivated individuals can throw away all advantages and opportunities they are given. It's a personal thing, not external influences.
If you have statistics that say otherwise, corrected for the lowering of admission standards in whatever university you're collecting this from, let's see it. Everything that I've seen indicates that test scores are continuously increasing, and courses at a level previously only taught at universities are now being offered in more high schools. More high schools have an AP program now than were available in the 80s. Universities do tend to try to compensate for lack of funding by lowering admission standards and accepting people into college that wouldn't have been accepted in the 80s, so I believe that underclassman performance could be lower at universities which have done this.
Just ask any of those graduate students that come from elsewhere about the students they are tutoring if you want to get some anecdotes about how the high school system has failed a lot of those students.
The plural of anecdote isn't data, and all that.
I taught some courses while in grad school and can certainly give you some hilarious anecdotes about engineering students who don't understand basic middle-school math. That said, I also had brilliant students who made me try harder and prepare more for class because I didn't want to be embarrassed in the event of them catching me off guard on a particular topic. I'm ok with answering, "I don't know, I'll look that up for you and bring an answer next class," but I wanted to make sure that I understood everything I was directly explaining to the point of deriving any equations from the basic physics laws that guide them...because I knew there were people in my class who could do that on the spot.
There were also people in my class who couldn't plug in numbers into equations right in front of them to get a numerical answer. With a calculator.
My point is that, just like in high school, college has a variety of people. Some are wicked smart, some you wonder how they got past the admission process, most are somewhere in between. Which school they're coming from sometimes matters, sometimes doesn't. The level of education from their parents is usually a much better indicator (although exceptions abound there too). The school system can certainly be improved, but can never improve it to the point where those "stupid student" anecdotes disappear.
I should clarify, by crackpot I mean they find actual lunatics who claim to have invented perpetual motion machines or be able to send messages back in time. Seriously, there was a guy who claimed he could send himself messages in the past by encoding them on lasers that passed through rotating magnetic fields or some such nonsense, and his reasoning was basically lifted from Superman where you "rotate" the laser and thus alter the speed of light and make it go backwards. Complete bat-shit.
There was another guy more recently who was trying to live to age 150 by taking over 40 different drugs daily. He claimed to be a doctor but I'm guessing he got his medical license off the internet. Rule 1 of any kind of medical trial is you don't experiment on yourself.
Ugh. They're putting things like that in documentaries now? I guess I've been lucky enough to just not come across them.
I completely agree with you. I think I misunderstood you the first time, but I was mostly just arguing that sometimes the story of how the non-crackpot scientific theories came to be is extremely interesting material for a documentary on science. The worst I've seen in modern science documentaries is that they're trying to phrase everything in an overly dramatized fashion. For example, the life cycle of stars become, "One of the ways in which all life on Earth could end is when our sun burns through most of its hydrogen fuel and becomes a red giant. The sun will expand, engulfing the inner planets and the oceans will boil..." It's not factually incorrect, and I don't object to any of the information, but they just orient and market the show as "How the Earth will be Destroyed" and "How the universe will end!" It's like we can't have a science discussion that doesn't involve giant catastrophes anymore.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but PBS is funded by donations and public funding. That's fixed income regardless of content and thus ratings cannot be financially influential. Like all their other reports, their shows are based on current global, national, and regional concerns, and not influenced, like other networks, by advertisers.
Your premise is true, but not your conclusion. The more viewers PBS has, the more donations they're likely to get.
That said, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I think PBS does an incredible job at remaining a trustworthy source of news and other information and, like you said, they don't appear influenced by advertisers. Best TV in the US, by far. I'm just saying if anyone would make the argument that the show is a snuff film, they can successfully make a financial argument, whether it's true or not. The invalid argument is going to be the whole "liberal brainwashing" argument which unfortunately would also be quite likely to be raised.
Up to the 80s they would get some knowledgeable person to talk about the subject, maybe interview some key people and use some explanatory graphics. In the 90s they started making documentaries into dramas, pitching them as the story of how the people involved came up with rival theories and argued and then someone else came along with a "revolutionary" idea... All aided by fancy presentation, breathless voice overs and a lineup of crackpot theories to flesh it out.
Well, the crackpot theories are the bad part of this, but the history of how the real theories came to be, including any drama associated with it, is incredibly relevant and important. Since you don't like the new documentaries (and I mostly agree with you that they are inferior due to over-dramatizing of content), let's take Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Talking about how Eratosthenes reasonably accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth in frigging 240 BC is incredibly awe inspiring. Talking about Johannes Kepler's inability to give up his platonic solid model for the solar system orbits while still being an honest scientist who wouldn't let what he wanted to be true triumph over observation and simply made corrections to his theory to match the observations and thus got us closer to the truth is important. It does far more to instill an eagerness to learn than simply having some dude state the circumference of the Earth or Kepler's Laws.
As someone who has watched almost every single online-viewable Frontline report (including The Suicide Tourist), I was surprised to see you note that some people argue that this is a snuff film. The fact of the matter is that the report shows all aspects of living with a debilitating condition, being near death, leaving behind a family, seeking respite, and then, finally, choosing to travel to Switzerland for an assisted suicide.
Yes, you see the man die. Yes, it is a very, very weird feeling watching as someone transitions from alive to dead. But it's definitely no snuff film. There's no financial exploitation of the subject nor is there any amount of entertainment value -- the entire report leading up to the event makes sure of that. It's education, pure and simple.
I most certainly don't agree with this opinion, but those who label it as snuff film would argue that there most certainly is financial exploitation of the subject as the network is usually able to get increased ratings by broadcasting such a controversial topic.
As I see it, it's the job of the media to make sure we actually have a discourse about controversial topics, instead of just assuming a position without being thoroughly informed.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has never been relevant enough on the desktop to kill any desktop technology. PC CD-Rs and then the internet killed floppy drives.
If anything, one of the reasons I refused to buy an Apple back in those days was the lack of a floppy disk. I stayed with a floppy drive right up until USB flash drives were cheap enough and front-facing USB ports were ubiquitous. Actually, I stayed with them a little bit longer, until it was possible to flash my motherboard's bios with a thumb drive.
I own apple computers now though (when they switched to Intel and I knew I could dual-boot windows).
The latest Cyanogen includes the ability to revoke privileges. You need access to my contacts? Sandboxed fake contacts okay? Cool.
I've been running Cyanogenmod and have been using the revoked privileges feature. Where can I enable the fake data feature? Some programs refuse to work when you revoke privileges to something like your contact list, it'd be great to just feed it false info instead.
There are a huge number of times when someone with a few days of experience behind them would stab the person who just turned their back in a flashy move that exposed most of their body without a guard. It made me cringe watching them. Someone with jedi reflexes should have ended any one of the fight scenes in the first 10 seconds.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, in every movie in which he fights does a spin exposing his back to an opponent who, paradoxically, will also spin at the exact same time instead of just taking the opportunity to hit him.
At least they're consistent about it. It happens in ANH as well as the prequels.
Oh, wait. I think I got something wrong there.
Yes, you did. Basically the part where Amazon does pay state taxes on the money they earn. If they have a warehouse in a state, they may not be paying sales tax (or rather, their customers aren't paying sales tax), but they are paying corporate income tax, to cover the services you mentioned.
In this case, we're requesting that an author pick a less-demeaning name for a software package
I know, and I don't have a problem with the way they're handling this. In fact, I think they're handling it exactly right. I think the point of this discussion is whether they should be doing something MORE. In my opinion, they shouldn't.
(IMO, the fact that he goes and picks a name associated with child upskirt shots, then says "Nyah, can't prove anything!" just goes to show how childish he really is.)
Yeah, I thought about that, but I couldn't determine intent. I think it is likely that he's just being childish like you said, but there is a possibility that he's actually making the insightful point that words are words, and people can choose to be offended or not. You certainly could choose to interpret 'Misaka' as something innocent, despite the fact that the author didn't intend it to be innocent.
I understand that the party-line around here is "Censorship = Bad," but honestly, you need a more nuanced understanding of it than that. While I support your constitutional right to free speech, certainly you can see that a post consisting of the word "COCKS" copy-pasted over and over again doesn't belong on a message board, and that the moderators probably should delete it. This isn't about silencing the minority "cocks" opinion, it's about holding a community to a higher set of standards than the bare-minimum that are constitutionally allowed.
I think the slashdot moderation system is a good way to handle that. Community standards means that the post will get modded down and nobody needs to see it. If someone does, however, want to hear from the "cocks" lobby, they're free to browse at -1. Slashdot is not entirely perfect, though: I dislike the lameness filter and the limits to how often you can post in a discussion.
I feel that I also should clarify that I personally support free speech, not just the constitutional right to free speech. I think it goes beyond, "government will not infringe upon it." I believe it is a virtue. I believe I have the right to not listen to the message if it offends me, but I think it says something important about our community when we can agree to merely ignores those that offend us, instead of taking steps to silence them.
I'm not proposing new guidelines. I'm saying that if the maintainers decide that they want to avoid the offense by forcing a name change, they can mitigate the risks of a "slippery slope" by establishing guidelines for why the name change is justified, rather than doing it in an ad hoc way (that would then support further ad hoc policies).
in short, when it comes to policy, slippery slopes are only slippery if you let them become that way.
Fair enough. I stand corrected and agree with your assessment.
Easiest way to avoid a slippery slope is to build a fence. Establish guidelines, enforce them, and suddenly your slippery slope becomes quite navigable.
Until you build so many fences that navigating the path becomes akin to navigating a maze.
They have established guidelines and are enforcing them. The guidelines say, 'there will be no censorship.' They would rather people didn't abuse their freedoms, but will not remove those freedoms because a minority do choose to abuse it. What you're proposing is that they establish new guidelines because people were offended. If they do that everyone is offended, soon there will be a 40-page document on guidelines on how to name your software package, and you'll spend 20% of your development time trying to figure out a name.
The name refers to a non-consensual sexual intrusion, something you might consider light rape.
What the hell is "light rape"? Is that something like the George Bluth's "light treasons"?
There's a big difference between this and something adolescent and immaturely sexual, but not horribly offensive like, oh, 'booblib'.
'booblib' might not be terribly offensive to YOU, but I'm sure it's incredibly offensive to quite a few people. The question isn't even, "how do we decide where the line is", but rather "how do we decide who decides where the line is."
Look, I agree with you. It's misogynistic. It's immature. It's not funny in any way. It is your right to be offended by it.
That said, it's still not right to censor it.
That's a very self-centered view. Not evil, but just thinking about yourself.
Some of us like the knowledge that there is someone permanent around who is willing to help. Someone to talk to. Someone who gives a shit. You can't buy that last two. You can buy a helper, you can buy sex, but you can only buy people who pretend to care about you or about what you say. If they are in it for the money, they don't care about you. Rather, they only care about your money.
And, some of us are willing to actually pay attention to someone and to give a shit about them, in exchange. You can call it love, you can call it partnership, you can call it whatever you want.
I'm all for that, but you don't need marriage or commitment for that. I believe it's far more meaningful to have a relationship where both people involved know that the other person could up and leave at any moment and yet they choose not to. Keeps you from taking the relationship for granted.
I wish I had mod points. I totally agree that Google is not going to respect my privacy.
Why not? They've been pretty good about that thus far. When was the last time google shared your information with a third party?
Hell, their business model depends on keeping information about people to themselves. They don't want the advertisers to know who might be interested in their product. If they had a list, they'd advertise straight to us, and skip google as the middle-men. They want to tell the advertisers, "we know of people's habits and know people who might interested in buying from you. Pay us money and we'll display your ads to those people. In fact, let them pay you through google checkout, and we'll keep their e-mail address and credit card info from you as well, even if they become your customers.
Specifically, it takes me back to high school. It's fine and dandy, but half the goal of social networks is to keep networking, not to lock oneself to certain groups and isolate those groups from each other.
Then put everyone on the same circle.
A whole lot of people like to be in isolated groups, however. We're not looking to "expand our own social circles", we're just looking for a way to better communicate with our existing social circles. I pretty much created three different facebook accounts because there were three very different groups of people I hang with, and I never, absolutely NEVER wanted to post anything on one of those groups that I also wanted to post on another. None of those accounts include people I've never met in real life. Hell, they don't even include acquaintances. I've got to know them pretty well in real life, and then facebook is just a way to keep in touch.
Do you have any idea what slave labor is? Sitting in an air conditioned office with free cokes while you sort papers does not quite compare to being tied in chains and forced to work in a diamond mine.
The fact you even compare the two is sickening.
Do you have any idea what assault is? Getting punched in the face once does not compare to getting jumped by three people with aluminum bets and having to spend the next six months in a hospital.
You're an idiot. Just because one thing is worse than another doesn't mean they can't both be described using the same terms.
For the same reason college sports teams get away with paying their employees with "education". Internships are hands-on practical courses done to supplement a field of study.
Students are paying their universities for education. Once you graduate and get a real job, you'll likely receive hands-on practical training on your job and get paid. You don't get asked to work for three months in your new job for free, until you start becoming productive.
Internships are supposed to be a way to benefit both the the employer and the student. The employer hires an intern at less than they would pay someone who has graduated. The student delays his graduation to get some practical training and to learn what the industry is like, in exchange for a paycheck and a possible job offer. The employer gets to examine several of these interns, pick out the best of them, and hire some after they graduate who will require less training.
That's exactly how it works in my field, anyway. Every electrical engineering student I see getting an internship is pulling ~$1,000 / week.
That's the whole point, though, isn't it? If you can strike down California's anti-violent-game bill because of the First Amendment, all anti-pornography laws should be struck down on the same basis.
You're right, that is the point, and it's what this article is about. I'd be in favor of that. If as a parent you want to protect your children from pornography, then you need to do that, not ask the government to do it for you.
LateArthurDent, thank you for your calm, and insightful post. I appreciate it.
I didn't personally think my post was that special. Thanks for reading and actually thinking about what I've said, people have a tendency to ignore arguments that go against their beliefs, and you have obviously not done that.
Unfortunately there was no WHOOSH, my post was entirely serious and emotionally-based.
Nothing unfortunate about it. I mentioned it because sarcasm can be extremely difficult to detect in written form, and I've been victim to it before, not because I thought your opinion must have been a joke. If I had thought that, I wouldn't have bothered to respond.
That Fatality offended me on a deep, visceral level, to a degree strong enough that I don't give a flying fuck about what Logic and Reason say I should be responding. I want a damn good explanation/justification for why that was created. And if there isn't one, then I will find myself saying "Fuck the First Amendment, Fuck Reason, Fuck Logic, I want that shit canned and those designers fired because that was Blasphemy to me".
I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling that way. We can't control how we feel when exposed to certain things. I feel that way about hate speech, of the type that actually attempts to incite hatred and violence. The problem is when you actually act on your feelings and try to silence others. I would defend the rights of others to spout hate speech, despite how it makes me feel. I do that for two reasons:
First, when you open the doors to allow government to silence speech, you're not guaranteed they won't go after something you believe in. In your earlier post you said that we shouldn't conflate this kind of violence with pornography, but there are quite a few people out there who would tell you that pornography is much, much worse than pixelated violence. You don't agree with them, I don't agree with them, but they're out there lobbying for legislation. If we open the gates for the type of legislation that would prohibit violent games, we're opening the gates for everyone who disagrees with any other form of speech.
Second, there are more effective ways to fight speech you dislike: through speech of your own. Trying to silence hate speech, for example, is ineffective because it allows the bigoted to shift the discussion away from their views to whether they have the right to talk about their views. It gets them allies where otherwise there would be none. It gets them publicity and a bigger platform to stand on and talk about their beliefs, thus reaching more people. If you're going to attack their views, you'll be far more successful if you actually attack their views.
To me, the flaw in your argument is that you argue presuming the Constitution and the Free Speech Amendment are sacrosanct. What I believe you are forgetting is that We The People do not serve the Constitution, The Constitution serves us. We, The People, are the ultimate authority in our land.
I actually agree with you, which is I mentioned the recourse that the people have. If the people have such great consensus that the Constitution is wrong, we can pass amendments to the document. It's not sacred, and when we believe it should be changed, we should change it. That said, it shouldn't be easy to make these changes, because that document applies to a whole lot of people. Conservative states believe in certain things, liberal states believe in others, the Constitution applies to all of them. Anything that doesn't have universal nation-wide agreement should be left to states, towns, and your local housing association, depending on their scope.
You must therefore understand that if a substantial supermajority or even majority of people get ticked off about something, they have the right to make it Law, and not only that, but Constitutio
I think I heard a "whoosh" sound over my head, but when I looked up, I couldn't see whatever it was. If you were making a joke that I missed, disregard the response below, I'm answering as if you were serious.
I'm all for freedom of speech.
Everybody says that. Few people are, and you aren't one of them.
I don't see what the point of that Fatality was.
That's not relevant, and thinking that it is relevant is why you're not for freedom of speech. It's easy to be in favor of speech you approve of, the test is whether you think people should have the right of speech to things that utterly disgust you, to things that would make you throw up when you witness it. Nobody has the right to force you to listen, but you don't have the right to stop them from speaking it.
And society isn't just made up of gamers, it's also made up of concerned parents who aren't gamers, women who may not enjoy seeing a virtual woman get split in half, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, and a whole lotta people who'll look at that and think "Hmm... maybe I should elect a politician who'll pass a law to ban that".
Except that our particular society is supposed to be made up of people who value individual rights. It's designed to make it extremely hard for any one group, even a majority one, to start controlling what people do. As of late, this hasn't been entirely the case, but the proper response to concerned parents who don't like mortal kombat is to supervise their children and ensure they don't play the game. The proper response to women, men, Christian, Muslims, Atheists and anybody else who think a law should be passed to ban mortal kombat should be, "sorry, the Constitution says that in our society such a law cannot exist, so you'll have to be satisfied with just avoiding buying the game or accumulate a big enough consensus that you can pass a constitutional amendment." I'm pretty sure such consensus doesn't exist, otherwise MK wouldn't sell, and there wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
That's exactly how it works now... The Examiner has to provide examples of prior art, which the applicant can then rebut. The Examiner can't simply say "ehhh, obvious, and I don't need to cite any evidence" which is what grandparent suggested, and would violate due process.
What I tried to say in my previous post is that the the patent examiner would need to supply an example of prior art if they are rejecting the application based on prior art, but non-obviouslness is also a test they must apply. In that case, the examiner should very much should be able to simply say, "ehh, obvious, and I don't need to cite any evidence." It doesn't violate due process as long as the applicants can challenge this at which point the burden should be on the applicants to demonstrate why it is not obvious in court.
I mean, I understand that in many cases looking at what has been done before is necessary to explain why something is obvious. However, in a lot of these patent cases, a stamp and five seconds is all you need. Let's see, you have customer information, including credit card numbers, because they've shopped at your store before. I will use this information to allow them to shop with a single-click! Yes, that's obvious. You don't need to know anything at all about computer science or servers to know that it's a trivial concept. If it turns out the patent examiner made an error because the process is simpler than it appears, then the applicant could challenge and say, "no, I really think this isn't obvious at all" at which point experts get brought in and testify in court that they have tried to solve this problem for years, but couldn't figure out a good solution, and explain why the problem is hard.
Getting a patent is a legal process, which means it's subject to constitutional guarantees of due process. A patent examiner can't simply say, "ehhhh, no." They have to provide evidence that the invention has been done before or hasn't been done, but is obvious in view of stuff that has been done before. It's like a court - they can't simply say "eh, you're guilty" without showing sufficient evidence.
Due process is important, but you're placing the burden of proof on the wrong person. The patent examiner should be able to reject anything at any time if he thinks the invention is obvious. When challenging his decision, the applicant should demonstrate why his invention isn't obvious. Similarly, it should be easy for the patent examiner to say, "I rejected because I believe invention 'x' is prior art.' The applicant challenging should have to prove why invention 'x' doesn't count as prior art. After doing so, the patent examiner should still be able to reject it if he finds another example of prior art for which the objection raised by the applicant doesn't apply.
Furthermore, the plural of anecdotes is most certainly not statistics. Anecdotes are highly susceptible to confirmation bias. Proper sampling is a huge, very complicated field of study.
I did not write that they are stupid, instead that the high school system has failed them.
The plural of anecdotes is of course statistics. Collected test results unfortunately match what those educators are observing.
There is no system conceivable that can prepare everyone for college. Socioeconomic status is highly correlated to academic success (so it's a chicken and the egg problem...we can improve economic status by improving education, but to really make a difference we need to improve quality of life in order to improve academic performance), but no school system can compensate for problems at home. Some highly motivated individuals can rise above these problems, but that's a personal thing, not an external influence. Similarly some highly unmotivated individuals can throw away all advantages and opportunities they are given. It's a personal thing, not external influences.
If you have statistics that say otherwise, corrected for the lowering of admission standards in whatever university you're collecting this from, let's see it. Everything that I've seen indicates that test scores are continuously increasing, and courses at a level previously only taught at universities are now being offered in more high schools. More high schools have an AP program now than were available in the 80s. Universities do tend to try to compensate for lack of funding by lowering admission standards and accepting people into college that wouldn't have been accepted in the 80s, so I believe that underclassman performance could be lower at universities which have done this.
Just ask any of those graduate students that come from elsewhere about the students they are tutoring if you want to get some anecdotes about how the high school system has failed a lot of those students.
The plural of anecdote isn't data, and all that.
I taught some courses while in grad school and can certainly give you some hilarious anecdotes about engineering students who don't understand basic middle-school math. That said, I also had brilliant students who made me try harder and prepare more for class because I didn't want to be embarrassed in the event of them catching me off guard on a particular topic. I'm ok with answering, "I don't know, I'll look that up for you and bring an answer next class," but I wanted to make sure that I understood everything I was directly explaining to the point of deriving any equations from the basic physics laws that guide them...because I knew there were people in my class who could do that on the spot.
There were also people in my class who couldn't plug in numbers into equations right in front of them to get a numerical answer. With a calculator.
My point is that, just like in high school, college has a variety of people. Some are wicked smart, some you wonder how they got past the admission process, most are somewhere in between. Which school they're coming from sometimes matters, sometimes doesn't. The level of education from their parents is usually a much better indicator (although exceptions abound there too). The school system can certainly be improved, but can never improve it to the point where those "stupid student" anecdotes disappear.
I should clarify, by crackpot I mean they find actual lunatics who claim to have invented perpetual motion machines or be able to send messages back in time. Seriously, there was a guy who claimed he could send himself messages in the past by encoding them on lasers that passed through rotating magnetic fields or some such nonsense, and his reasoning was basically lifted from Superman where you "rotate" the laser and thus alter the speed of light and make it go backwards. Complete bat-shit.
There was another guy more recently who was trying to live to age 150 by taking over 40 different drugs daily. He claimed to be a doctor but I'm guessing he got his medical license off the internet. Rule 1 of any kind of medical trial is you don't experiment on yourself.
Ugh. They're putting things like that in documentaries now? I guess I've been lucky enough to just not come across them.
I completely agree with you. I think I misunderstood you the first time, but I was mostly just arguing that sometimes the story of how the non-crackpot scientific theories came to be is extremely interesting material for a documentary on science. The worst I've seen in modern science documentaries is that they're trying to phrase everything in an overly dramatized fashion. For example, the life cycle of stars become, "One of the ways in which all life on Earth could end is when our sun burns through most of its hydrogen fuel and becomes a red giant. The sun will expand, engulfing the inner planets and the oceans will boil..." It's not factually incorrect, and I don't object to any of the information, but they just orient and market the show as "How the Earth will be Destroyed" and "How the universe will end!" It's like we can't have a science discussion that doesn't involve giant catastrophes anymore.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but PBS is funded by donations and public funding. That's fixed income regardless of content and thus ratings cannot be financially influential. Like all their other reports, their shows are based on current global, national, and regional concerns, and not influenced, like other networks, by advertisers.
Your premise is true, but not your conclusion. The more viewers PBS has, the more donations they're likely to get.
That said, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I think PBS does an incredible job at remaining a trustworthy source of news and other information and, like you said, they don't appear influenced by advertisers. Best TV in the US, by far. I'm just saying if anyone would make the argument that the show is a snuff film, they can successfully make a financial argument, whether it's true or not. The invalid argument is going to be the whole "liberal brainwashing" argument which unfortunately would also be quite likely to be raised.
Up to the 80s they would get some knowledgeable person to talk about the subject, maybe interview some key people and use some explanatory graphics. In the 90s they started making documentaries into dramas, pitching them as the story of how the people involved came up with rival theories and argued and then someone else came along with a "revolutionary" idea... All aided by fancy presentation, breathless voice overs and a lineup of crackpot theories to flesh it out.
Well, the crackpot theories are the bad part of this, but the history of how the real theories came to be, including any drama associated with it, is incredibly relevant and important. Since you don't like the new documentaries (and I mostly agree with you that they are inferior due to over-dramatizing of content), let's take Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Talking about how Eratosthenes reasonably accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth in frigging 240 BC is incredibly awe inspiring. Talking about Johannes Kepler's inability to give up his platonic solid model for the solar system orbits while still being an honest scientist who wouldn't let what he wanted to be true triumph over observation and simply made corrections to his theory to match the observations and thus got us closer to the truth is important. It does far more to instill an eagerness to learn than simply having some dude state the circumference of the Earth or Kepler's Laws.
As someone who has watched almost every single online-viewable Frontline report (including The Suicide Tourist), I was surprised to see you note that some people argue that this is a snuff film. The fact of the matter is that the report shows all aspects of living with a debilitating condition, being near death, leaving behind a family, seeking respite, and then, finally, choosing to travel to Switzerland for an assisted suicide.
Yes, you see the man die. Yes, it is a very, very weird feeling watching as someone transitions from alive to dead. But it's definitely no snuff film. There's no financial exploitation of the subject nor is there any amount of entertainment value -- the entire report leading up to the event makes sure of that. It's education, pure and simple.
I most certainly don't agree with this opinion, but those who label it as snuff film would argue that there most certainly is financial exploitation of the subject as the network is usually able to get increased ratings by broadcasting such a controversial topic.
As I see it, it's the job of the media to make sure we actually have a discourse about controversial topics, instead of just assuming a position without being thoroughly informed.