Indeed. Friends of ours keep having this recurring conversation about having another child. Their previous children were difficult babies in different ways. The wife keeps saying things like, "But we'll probably have a good one this time. We're due." I keep pointing out that her chances are neither better, nor worse, which she doesn't seem to quite get, despite being a rather intelligent person.
For those who don't get it - the disposition, or ease/difficulty of each child is an independent random variable. The first N outcomes bear absolutely no influence on the N+1th outcome.
Reminds me of a story when I was playing D&D with a friend. He needed to row at least a 6 on a 20-sided die. He rolled three times and got less than 6. Then, on the fourth time, he again took the same action. Another guy said something like, "well, at least your odds of failing are really low right now." My friend looked at him with an annoyed look and said, "It's 1 in 4, exactly the same as all the other times."
I find that people who do this are intelligent people, they just have one simple misconception, so you can try to use that to explain it them. You see, people correctly compute that getting a string of 25% chance events 4 times in a row is 0.25^4. What they have difficulty grasping is that once you already got a string of 3 in a row, the odds of getting the fourth one is just the 25%. This because the odds of getting the first three are now 100%, you're already gotten them! If you explain it this way, it usually clicks.
I think it's more about the fun of it, the psychology, than math reasoning. I keep pointing out to my coworker that one is more likely to get struck by lightning than win the big-pot lottery, but she still plays it anyhow because of the thrill. She never disputed my lightning analysis.
People can accept the odds without really understanding them. Most people will agree with you there, but they're also thinking, "people DO get hit by lightning, and people DO win the lottery. This time it could be me." They're not wrong, they could win, but they really don't understand just how unlikely that could be. When it comes to odds, most people file things under four categories: happens 100% of the time, happens often, happens rarely, never happens. They make absolutely no distinction between the things that happen rarely, it's all essentially the some possibility to them, whether it's 1 in 100 odds or 1 in 195,249,054. It's not that they don't understand one is technically larger than the other, it's that they don't grasp the reality of what it truly means. It's all just, "unlikely, but possible."
If the Charlie Chaplin movie already had the time traveling as an extra in the background (since it happened decades ago), why would the time traveler need to travel back in time to put himself in the movie?
Time travel paradoxes...yay. Well, maybe they were using the time-travel equation tatooed to Fry's butt in that futurama movie, which is paradox-free. In which case, the paradox resolved itself in that the filmmakers never decided to use that footage. In fact, it's in the DVD's "unused footage" sections. So the time-traveler, who had seen the movie, but never checked out the extras, traveled back in time to insert himself in the movie, but was only partially successful, as he came to find out only after his return.
I mean, do you really want me to sit here and keep coming out with plausible explanations? As long as they're not falsifiable, I can do it all day:)
Who was she talking to? (considering the lack of cell-phone towers)
Ugh.
Not that I believe in this, but if you were time-traveling to the past to be an extra in a Charlie Chaplin movie (which is a plausible thing for any film buff), it's perfectly reasonable that such a person would whip out their cell phones just to be filmed pretending to talk on it. They could then point it out to their friends once they return to their time.
Sorry, I was speaking of the geekworld in general in that bit.:-) You have to admit those qualifiers seem to be bolted on to a lot of comments.
Like I said, I understand the sentiment. Although I have to say, "Dug Babylon 5, except season 5 which was worse than all the Nazi atrocities combined," was pretty funny, and I chuckled.
OK. I guess I expect the worst, so I try to enjoy the journey while it lasts.
Well, I thought about all the horrible explanations they could have come up with, but if I were actually expecting them to go through with any of them, I wouldn't have watched it to begin with.
Am I the only one who saw the final episode, thought "well, that was unsatisfying" and walked away from it to other things? It's a new geek meme now to say you liked the series but despised (*DESPISED*, I tell you!) the ending. It joins the others such as "I liked the Matrix, but the sequels were crimes against humanity" and "Dug Babylon 5, except season 5 which was worse than all the Nazi atrocities combined."
I understand your feelings on the matter, but I'm not sure exactly what it is that I said which fits in that category. What, I'm not allowed to despise something? I found it significantly worse than unsatisfying. I didn't say things like, "my childhood was raped" just that I really hated it.
Then I regretted having wasted so much time on it
Why? if you enjoyed yourself at the time, how does the ending change that? It's just a fantasy show. Who cares?
Because it was a continuing storyline. What you learned on that final episode affects the story of the episodes I had previously enjoyed. The first time I watched them, it seemed interesting and I wanted to know what it meant. When they showed me what it meant, now I know it wasn't interesting at all.
How about the failed sustainability of a bad spin-off of a great series?
Eh. More like the failed sustainability of the spin-off of a series that pissed everyone off with its horrible ending. I followed Galactica religiously right up until the last episode. Then I regretted having wasted so much time on it, and sure as hell wasn't willing to give Caprica a chance.
Building up the story to make ever more interesting episodes is only a good thing if you actually know how you're going to wrap it all up ahead of time. Leaving it up to the writers to come up with an explanation that ties everything together at the last minute will inevitably result in crap that cheapens the entire series.
I've got four words for you: patents, patents, patents, patents.
These patents are pretty useless as by distribution under GPLv2 everyone and his dog have already received licenses for them. The only thing that's left is to go after those implementations not derived of Sun's codebase (read: Google). But I somehow doubt that such a patent racketeering will bring in enough money to make the Sun acquisition a smart investment.
The GPLv2 doesn't deal with patents at all. That was, in fact, a big part of the motivation behind the GPLv3, and it's why v3 is so important. The Java patent license grant was given by Sun completely separate from the GPL.
You're not listening. I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.
OSS is a triviality to Oracle. They're out to make money. I'm not trying to be mean or stupid--> this is what they do. If it doesn't serve that purpose, kiss it goodbye. This is what some of us old-timers were trying to warn of; Oracle is a totally mercenary army. Join up, or you're probably the enemy or at least in their way.
No, you're not listening. He didn't say anything about morals. He said Oracle is ruining their ability to make money in the long-term. They're doing everything to maximize the amount of money they can make now, but if they continue this path, they can't possibly succeed in 5-10 years.
You can certainly succeed by being a proprietary software company...that's what the vast majority of the companies do. But you can't succeed by closing off already open source projects. They'll just fork and compete against you. So in 5-10 years, everybody will be using the forked Sun products, or something else entirely, but not whatever Oracle is peddling. They'll be out of the market they paid so much money to enter.
They'll still be OK, because everybody will still be running Oracle databases...but they won't have gained anything (as in money) from the purchase of Sun.
Yeah, I agree. That's why I said that as a user, I much prefer this model. The problem is that you're giving them a 30% cut, which the poster I originally replied to justified because apple is putting his app "in front of 50 million mac owners." Apple is not doing marketing for you, they're just hosting a website wrapped around an application.
I like that the apps are even, I just don't agree that the service is worth that cut. It works in the iPhone world because it's the only game in town, but I think developers can do better with a website and a google checkout account.
If you can get my app in front of 50 million Mac owners, and handle application delivery AND payment processing...
You say that as if they're giving you some type of visibility advantage. What they are doing is putting your app AND 300 other alternatives in front of their users. As a user, I welcome the competition, which leads to better and cheaper applications, but it's far from what you want to see as the seller who is giving them a cut of his 30%. Apple doesn't really care whose 30% they take...
The war on drugs is a failure because the majority of the country does drugs, its trivial to not get caught, and best of all, a good portion of the people doing the 'enforcement' are drug users themselves.
Well, five minutes of googling got me to Center for Substance Abuse Research from the University of Maryland. They compiled these stats for the state of Maryland (unfortunately I couldn't find nationwide stats, but feel free to reply with numbers and citations if you find that they look significantly different). In 2005, 17.1% of all adult arrests were drug related. Out of those, 76.9% were possession-related, and only the remaining 23.1% were sales-related.
From the above stats, it doesn't look like the cops, in Maryland at least, are taking it easy on the drug-using population. I'm also willing to bet that once these people leave jail, they're not going to start living clean lives, again, feel free to look up info on how many of these people are repeat offenders. If you try to argue that their time in jail just wasn't punishment enough, I invite you to google up living conditions in one of those places. If you argue that they're not spending enough time in jail, I suggest you look up the relative sentence time and compare them to theft, or violent crimes.
The world isn't black and white, this is true, but your still a pussy and I'd be willing to bet you exert 0 control over the people around you. I'd put $100 on saying that you get used as a door mat on a daily basis, even if you don't' realize it.
I strive to exert zero control over the people around me. I don't believe I have any right to exert any more than that. In a consistent manner, I'm very resistant to attempts by others to control my life, so I'm fairly certain that, at the very least, I wouldn't get used as a door mat by you.
I came from the shitty 'back to the wall about to starve death' situation, I got out without breaking the law. The friends I had which instead turned into thieves and murders (yes, murderers) are in fact still in the same situation they were in to start with.
Fantastic. I think we can all agree you are a better man than your friends are. Nevertheless, those people with weaker moral character exist, and you haven't shown me any evidence that they would have turned out any different if they had been punished more severely. So you have enough character to not turn to crime when your back is to the wall. The problem is that there are many people who are not as strong-willed. If we can prevent the crime by making sure their back isn't to the wall, and removing the temptation, it's a win for everyone.
I lived in Brazil for a few years as a child, and we used to be taught there were 5 continents. They didn't count Antarctica because it's not populated, thus "entirely different meaning." They were in the process of changing that while I was still in school, as newer books seemed to include Antarctica. I think everyone would answer 6 these days, but I'm not sure. Haven't talked to anyone from there in a very long time. They definitely didn't consider "south" and "north" America to be separate continents, though.
everybody in the world knows that if you say America or "I'm from America" or "I'm an American" you are referring not two the two continents, but to the United States of America.
Well, I don't think so. Again, things may have changed, but whenever I said "I'm from America", Brazilians seemed confused, and asked which country in America. They figured either the US or Canada, based on the fact that I spoke English, but they didn't know which I meant. They understood "I'm American" just fine though, as that is their word for someone from the US. That is unlike most other countries in Latin America where the word for "American" is "North-American", and some get offended if you just say "American"...which is ironic, because North-American is still ambiguous if you applied their reasoning.
Dude, it is one of the basic tenets in computer security to not click on links in e-mails that take you to websites where you enter login credentials.
Those kinds of e-mails are known as phishing and spear phishing attacks. They are very common and very dangerous.
Facebook has had no end of security problems. Now with the publicity that they will be sending out e-mails that have a link, wait a few days and see what hits in computer security news.
If you're going to train people to be security conscious, you can't half-ass it. "Don't click on e-mails that take you to websites where you enter login credentials" is most definitely the wrong message. Just because there are lots of phishing e-mails doesn't mean that every such e-mail is phishing, and it actually trains people to start drawing invalid conclusions: "well, this link didn't come by e-mail, so it's ok." Phishing websites can just as easily lead you to a malicious page where you enter your credentials.
What you actually need to be teaching people is to go to the link from the e-mail, grab the ssl certificate and check the the company name, the verifying authority, and the fingerprint. The independently go to the main website where the e-mail claims to be from, in this case Facebook, and see if the signature matches. If it does, you can type in your credentials. There is no half-assing this procedure. Anything short of it is vulnerable to the attacks you are so concerned about.
In your case, you claim, without cause, that a business shouldn't have a say in law that deeply affects it
It is not without cause. A business is made of people, and if these people, individually, want to have a say, I'm all for that. However, the point of "one person one vote" is that they shouldn't have a greater say than I do. I agree with you about the California thing. However, if they don't like the laws their representatives are passing, then they have their say when they individually vote for their opponents. They shouldn't have a say in the law. Nothing about the process is more fair when you only allow the people who own massive amounts of stock in a corporation, enough to help dictate their direction, to have any say.
This law deeply influences their business. However, their business involves networks which are laid out in public land. Who is speaking out for their customers? The people who will suddenly find vonage will start to suck because Time Warner wants to give priority to their own more expensive voip service? Or when all the ISPs start charging vonage more in order to give their packets priority, such that vonage's operating costs go up and put them in a disadvantage against the ISPs own offerings?
Like you said, people don't necessarily know or care that this will affect them. It's the job of the people representing them to know that it does. In this case, it most certainly does.
yet "the public", many whom can't be bothered to vote, should have a say.
Not bothering to vote is the second most important civic duty there is. The first one is to actually do your research, be extremely informed about all the candidates, their position on the issues that matter to you, and their history. That takes a whole lot of work, and people who do the whole, "get out and vote" campaigns are doing a disservice. If you're not extremely, through painstaking months-long research well-informed about all of the candidates, not only the major party ones, then please stay home. This way your vote won't offset the vote of somebody who actually did do their research.
Let's not get hasty here. The US is not a full-blown democracy for a reason. I find the current system, where the political class actually bothers to "negotiate" with the targets of legislation, who I might add are among the few knowledgeable in the area, seems a lot better than a majority vote from a zillion clueless people.
You do realize what you're doing, right? If the people you elect do something without consulting the corporations, they are being undemocratic. If they consult everyone, it's rule of the majority chaos.
Why don't I spell it out using this particular instance? This law is against the ISPs interests. It's supposed to be against their interests. The point is that they are trying to leverage their pipes in a way which is not open and against the general interest of everybody else. That would make the more money, at the cost of everyone else. Consulting with them is like consulting with Richard Stallman before enacting copyright laws: they are an extremely biased group that do not accurately reflect the values of the constituency those politicians are supposed to represent.
(P.S. I was going to say that it's like consulting with NAMBLA on what the age of consent should be, which I think is a far more hilarious analogy, but I didn't want to be accused of pulling the "think of the children" card:).)
Well where's the damn solution? I hate having to change the volume every 7-12 minutes, then 2-5 minutes after that, in an endless cycle. I can't go to sleep at night. I, no lie, TRIED BUYING a TV one month ago with this feature, and the guy at the store had no idea what I was talking about.
I've been waiting for the free market to solve the problem. It hasn't yet.
Why would you ask a TV salesman? Just google for it. Here's a $30 solution that doesn't involve buying a new TV. As for TV's with the feature built-in, just about every manufacturer offers it. Magnavox calls it "Smart Sound", other manufacturers call it different things.
P.S. Technically this law does restrict the freedom of the TV/cable/advertisers, but in the same way that a dairy farmer is restricted in his or her freedom from selling you milk that has been left out in the sun for a week.
Really? The same way? The advertisers are taking money from you with the promise to sell you ads at correct volumes, but giving you loud ads instead, which could put you in the hospital if you listen to it?
Their owners, employees, and customers do. Passing law without consulting the target of the law is inherently undemocratic.
So then you need a general referendum, to make sure that the owners, employees, customers of the corporation, as well as everyone else that could be affected, all get a say. Consulting with the corporation is even less democratic than congress alone doing it. At least we've voted them to represent us. The only people who voted on the members of the board for those corporations are the ones who own stock in them.
Ah, but you see, it is. It's the job of the government to do what's in the best interests of its citizens. And it's in our collective best interest to not be annoyed by blaring commercials. Is it a minor issue? Yes. But it's still an issue.
The problem is that there are a lot of citizens and we don't all agree on what's best for us. So when the government "helps" you with this issue, they get in the way of everybody else who doesn't agree with you. So generally speaking, the government should stay out of minor issues. They introduce enough problems with the big ones.
A technological solution to this problem is much preferred. As many others have posted there are tv's which do this automatically. Also, MythTV uses several algorithms to determine when there are ads, so they may be automatically skipped. I wonder if audio volume is one of them. If it is, that just got worse.
Obviously you don't have children. When you spend 2 hours trying to get your kid to sleep, and then turn on your favorite show while you finally have some down time, the last thing you want is Billy Mays waking your kid up before you can mute the TV.
It's not the job of government to help you with that.
If that’s what he was driving at, it’s no different from the difference between my perception of the color blue and the color orange. They just trigger different chemical receptors in my eyes and my brain perceives them as different colours. And who’s even to say that my perception of blue is the same as anyone else’s? We call it the same thing, sure, but what’s to say really?
It is what I was driving at, and you are right. You can't be sure that I perceive blue the same way you perceive blue. However, there are reasons to assume that's the case. When you see someone experiencing the emotion of happiness, you can identify it as happiness because you probably share many of the same physical reactions to it...smiling for example. Basically, we're all human, meaning we share a whole lot of DNA and our brains are wired similarly.
If somebody is experiencing an emotion you don't have, how do they explain that to you? How would you explain happiness to an alien being that has no equivalent emotion? You can't say, "he's smiling." You can perform the physical act of smiling without being happy. You can't say, "I feel good" because that includes other emotional states too...getting a message "feels good" in a completely different way than it feels when you win a game of chess against someone that you have never beaten before. I would be more likely to describe the first as "relaxed" than "happy". Any description of happiness you can come up with is basically either a synonym or a reference to things we all share when we feel happy.
In the case of the original poster, if his neurons fired in such an unusual way during his epileptic seizure such that he experienced an emotional state that just doesn't happen otherwise, what can he use to explain the emotion to someone who has never felt it? He did give you an explanation similar to your color filters explanation...the technical reason is that he was having a brain seizure. That doesn't help you understand what he felt unless you were to have the exact same type of seizure. If it made him feel things that are similar to how you would feel in more common circumstances, that would help, but apparently it wasn't the case, because the experience was sufficiently novel.
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Indeed. Friends of ours keep having this recurring conversation about having another child. Their previous children were difficult babies in different ways. The wife keeps saying things like, "But we'll probably have a good one this time. We're due." I keep pointing out that her chances are neither better, nor worse, which she doesn't seem to quite get, despite being a rather intelligent person.
For those who don't get it - the disposition, or ease/difficulty of each child is an independent random variable. The first N outcomes bear absolutely no influence on the N+1th outcome.
Reminds me of a story when I was playing D&D with a friend. He needed to row at least a 6 on a 20-sided die. He rolled three times and got less than 6. Then, on the fourth time, he again took the same action. Another guy said something like, "well, at least your odds of failing are really low right now." My friend looked at him with an annoyed look and said, "It's 1 in 4, exactly the same as all the other times."
I find that people who do this are intelligent people, they just have one simple misconception, so you can try to use that to explain it them. You see, people correctly compute that getting a string of 25% chance events 4 times in a row is 0.25^4. What they have difficulty grasping is that once you already got a string of 3 in a row, the odds of getting the fourth one is just the 25%. This because the odds of getting the first three are now 100%, you're already gotten them! If you explain it this way, it usually clicks.
I think it's more about the fun of it, the psychology, than math reasoning. I keep pointing out to my coworker that one is more likely to get struck by lightning than win the big-pot lottery, but she still plays it anyhow because of the thrill. She never disputed my lightning analysis.
People can accept the odds without really understanding them. Most people will agree with you there, but they're also thinking, "people DO get hit by lightning, and people DO win the lottery. This time it could be me." They're not wrong, they could win, but they really don't understand just how unlikely that could be. When it comes to odds, most people file things under four categories: happens 100% of the time, happens often, happens rarely, never happens. They make absolutely no distinction between the things that happen rarely, it's all essentially the some possibility to them, whether it's 1 in 100 odds or 1 in 195,249,054. It's not that they don't understand one is technically larger than the other, it's that they don't grasp the reality of what it truly means. It's all just, "unlikely, but possible."
If the Charlie Chaplin movie already had the time traveling as an extra in the background (since it happened decades ago), why would the time traveler need to travel back in time to put himself in the movie?
Time travel paradoxes...yay. Well, maybe they were using the time-travel equation tatooed to Fry's butt in that futurama movie, which is paradox-free. In which case, the paradox resolved itself in that the filmmakers never decided to use that footage. In fact, it's in the DVD's "unused footage" sections. So the time-traveler, who had seen the movie, but never checked out the extras, traveled back in time to insert himself in the movie, but was only partially successful, as he came to find out only after his return.
I mean, do you really want me to sit here and keep coming out with plausible explanations? As long as they're not falsifiable, I can do it all day :)
Who was she talking to? (considering the lack of cell-phone towers)
Ugh.
Not that I believe in this, but if you were time-traveling to the past to be an extra in a Charlie Chaplin movie (which is a plausible thing for any film buff), it's perfectly reasonable that such a person would whip out their cell phones just to be filmed pretending to talk on it. They could then point it out to their friends once they return to their time.
Sorry, I was speaking of the geekworld in general in that bit. :-) You have to admit those qualifiers seem to be bolted on to a lot of comments.
Like I said, I understand the sentiment. Although I have to say, "Dug Babylon 5, except season 5 which was worse than all the Nazi atrocities combined," was pretty funny, and I chuckled.
OK. I guess I expect the worst, so I try to enjoy the journey while it lasts.
Well, I thought about all the horrible explanations they could have come up with, but if I were actually expecting them to go through with any of them, I wouldn't have watched it to begin with.
Wait, was that irony? ;-)
No, it was a pun.
Am I the only one who saw the final episode, thought "well, that was unsatisfying" and walked away from it to other things? It's a new geek meme now to say you liked the series but despised (*DESPISED*, I tell you!) the ending. It joins the others such as "I liked the Matrix, but the sequels were crimes against humanity" and "Dug Babylon 5, except season 5 which was worse than all the Nazi atrocities combined."
I understand your feelings on the matter, but I'm not sure exactly what it is that I said which fits in that category. What, I'm not allowed to despise something? I found it significantly worse than unsatisfying. I didn't say things like, "my childhood was raped" just that I really hated it.
Then I regretted having wasted so much time on it
Why? if you enjoyed yourself at the time, how does the ending change that? It's just a fantasy show. Who cares?
Because it was a continuing storyline. What you learned on that final episode affects the story of the episodes I had previously enjoyed. The first time I watched them, it seemed interesting and I wanted to know what it meant. When they showed me what it meant, now I know it wasn't interesting at all.
Failed Sustainability of the Cable Model?
How about the failed sustainability of a bad spin-off of a great series?
Eh. More like the failed sustainability of the spin-off of a series that pissed everyone off with its horrible ending. I followed Galactica religiously right up until the last episode. Then I regretted having wasted so much time on it, and sure as hell wasn't willing to give Caprica a chance.
Building up the story to make ever more interesting episodes is only a good thing if you actually know how you're going to wrap it all up ahead of time. Leaving it up to the writers to come up with an explanation that ties everything together at the last minute will inevitably result in crap that cheapens the entire series.
I've got four words for you: patents, patents, patents, patents.
These patents are pretty useless as by distribution under GPLv2 everyone and his dog have already received licenses for them. The only thing that's left is to go after those implementations not derived of Sun's codebase (read: Google). But I somehow doubt that such a patent racketeering will bring in enough money to make the Sun acquisition a smart investment.
The GPLv2 doesn't deal with patents at all. That was, in fact, a big part of the motivation behind the GPLv3, and it's why v3 is so important. The Java patent license grant was given by Sun completely separate from the GPL.
You're not listening. I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.
OSS is a triviality to Oracle. They're out to make money. I'm not trying to be mean or stupid--> this is what they do. If it doesn't serve that purpose, kiss it goodbye. This is what some of us old-timers were trying to warn of; Oracle is a totally mercenary army. Join up, or you're probably the enemy or at least in their way.
No, you're not listening. He didn't say anything about morals. He said Oracle is ruining their ability to make money in the long-term. They're doing everything to maximize the amount of money they can make now, but if they continue this path, they can't possibly succeed in 5-10 years.
You can certainly succeed by being a proprietary software company...that's what the vast majority of the companies do. But you can't succeed by closing off already open source projects. They'll just fork and compete against you. So in 5-10 years, everybody will be using the forked Sun products, or something else entirely, but not whatever Oracle is peddling. They'll be out of the market they paid so much money to enter.
They'll still be OK, because everybody will still be running Oracle databases...but they won't have gained anything (as in money) from the purchase of Sun.
That's how it should be
Yeah, I agree. That's why I said that as a user, I much prefer this model. The problem is that you're giving them a 30% cut, which the poster I originally replied to justified because apple is putting his app "in front of 50 million mac owners." Apple is not doing marketing for you, they're just hosting a website wrapped around an application.
I like that the apps are even, I just don't agree that the service is worth that cut. It works in the iPhone world because it's the only game in town, but I think developers can do better with a website and a google checkout account.
If you can get my app in front of 50 million Mac owners, and handle application delivery AND payment processing...
You say that as if they're giving you some type of visibility advantage. What they are doing is putting your app AND 300 other alternatives in front of their users. As a user, I welcome the competition, which leads to better and cheaper applications, but it's far from what you want to see as the seller who is giving them a cut of his 30%. Apple doesn't really care whose 30% they take...
What's wrong with all-Flash storage?
There's nothing wrong with it. It's just that solid state drives are pretty damn common now, it's not new by any stretch of the imagination.
The war on drugs is a failure because the majority of the country does drugs, its trivial to not get caught, and best of all, a good portion of the people doing the 'enforcement' are drug users themselves.
Well, five minutes of googling got me to Center for Substance Abuse Research from the University of Maryland. They compiled these stats for the state of Maryland (unfortunately I couldn't find nationwide stats, but feel free to reply with numbers and citations if you find that they look significantly different). In 2005, 17.1% of all adult arrests were drug related. Out of those, 76.9% were possession-related, and only the remaining 23.1% were sales-related.
From the above stats, it doesn't look like the cops, in Maryland at least, are taking it easy on the drug-using population. I'm also willing to bet that once these people leave jail, they're not going to start living clean lives, again, feel free to look up info on how many of these people are repeat offenders. If you try to argue that their time in jail just wasn't punishment enough, I invite you to google up living conditions in one of those places. If you argue that they're not spending enough time in jail, I suggest you look up the relative sentence time and compare them to theft, or violent crimes.
The world isn't black and white, this is true, but your still a pussy and I'd be willing to bet you exert 0 control over the people around you. I'd put $100 on saying that you get used as a door mat on a daily basis, even if you don't' realize it.
I strive to exert zero control over the people around me. I don't believe I have any right to exert any more than that. In a consistent manner, I'm very resistant to attempts by others to control my life, so I'm fairly certain that, at the very least, I wouldn't get used as a door mat by you.
I came from the shitty 'back to the wall about to starve death' situation, I got out without breaking the law. The friends I had which instead turned into thieves and murders (yes, murderers) are in fact still in the same situation they were in to start with.
Fantastic. I think we can all agree you are a better man than your friends are. Nevertheless, those people with weaker moral character exist, and you haven't shown me any evidence that they would have turned out any different if they had been punished more severely. So you have enough character to not turn to crime when your back is to the wall. The problem is that there are many people who are not as strong-willed. If we can prevent the crime by making sure their back isn't to the wall, and removing the temptation, it's a win for everyone.
I'm being as merciful as Nature, which kills the vast majority of life forms. Nature is far more ruthless than any human.
Right, which is typically why we strive to do better than nature.
Which question are you referring to?
I lived in Brazil for a few years as a child, and we used to be taught there were 5 continents. They didn't count Antarctica because it's not populated, thus "entirely different meaning." They were in the process of changing that while I was still in school, as newer books seemed to include Antarctica. I think everyone would answer 6 these days, but I'm not sure. Haven't talked to anyone from there in a very long time. They definitely didn't consider "south" and "north" America to be separate continents, though.
everybody in the world knows that if you say America or "I'm from America" or "I'm an American" you are referring not two the two continents, but to the United States of America.
Well, I don't think so. Again, things may have changed, but whenever I said "I'm from America", Brazilians seemed confused, and asked which country in America. They figured either the US or Canada, based on the fact that I spoke English, but they didn't know which I meant. They understood "I'm American" just fine though, as that is their word for someone from the US. That is unlike most other countries in Latin America where the word for "American" is "North-American", and some get offended if you just say "American"...which is ironic, because North-American is still ambiguous if you applied their reasoning.
Dude, it is one of the basic tenets in computer security to not click on links in e-mails that take you to websites where you enter login credentials.
Those kinds of e-mails are known as phishing and spear phishing attacks. They are very common and very dangerous.
Facebook has had no end of security problems. Now with the publicity that they will be sending out e-mails that have a link, wait a few days and see what hits in computer security news.
If you're going to train people to be security conscious, you can't half-ass it. "Don't click on e-mails that take you to websites where you enter login credentials" is most definitely the wrong message. Just because there are lots of phishing e-mails doesn't mean that every such e-mail is phishing, and it actually trains people to start drawing invalid conclusions: "well, this link didn't come by e-mail, so it's ok." Phishing websites can just as easily lead you to a malicious page where you enter your credentials.
What you actually need to be teaching people is to go to the link from the e-mail, grab the ssl certificate and check the the company name, the verifying authority, and the fingerprint. The independently go to the main website where the e-mail claims to be from, in this case Facebook, and see if the signature matches. If it does, you can type in your credentials. There is no half-assing this procedure. Anything short of it is vulnerable to the attacks you are so concerned about.
In your case, you claim, without cause, that a business shouldn't have a say in law that deeply affects it
It is not without cause. A business is made of people, and if these people, individually, want to have a say, I'm all for that. However, the point of "one person one vote" is that they shouldn't have a greater say than I do. I agree with you about the California thing. However, if they don't like the laws their representatives are passing, then they have their say when they individually vote for their opponents. They shouldn't have a say in the law. Nothing about the process is more fair when you only allow the people who own massive amounts of stock in a corporation, enough to help dictate their direction, to have any say.
This law deeply influences their business. However, their business involves networks which are laid out in public land. Who is speaking out for their customers? The people who will suddenly find vonage will start to suck because Time Warner wants to give priority to their own more expensive voip service? Or when all the ISPs start charging vonage more in order to give their packets priority, such that vonage's operating costs go up and put them in a disadvantage against the ISPs own offerings?
Like you said, people don't necessarily know or care that this will affect them. It's the job of the people representing them to know that it does. In this case, it most certainly does.
yet "the public", many whom can't be bothered to vote, should have a say.
Not bothering to vote is the second most important civic duty there is. The first one is to actually do your research, be extremely informed about all the candidates, their position on the issues that matter to you, and their history. That takes a whole lot of work, and people who do the whole, "get out and vote" campaigns are doing a disservice. If you're not extremely, through painstaking months-long research well-informed about all of the candidates, not only the major party ones, then please stay home. This way your vote won't offset the vote of somebody who actually did do their research.
Let's not get hasty here. The US is not a full-blown democracy for a reason. I find the current system, where the political class actually bothers to "negotiate" with the targets of legislation, who I might add are among the few knowledgeable in the area, seems a lot better than a majority vote from a zillion clueless people.
You do realize what you're doing, right? If the people you elect do something without consulting the corporations, they are being undemocratic. If they consult everyone, it's rule of the majority chaos.
Why don't I spell it out using this particular instance? This law is against the ISPs interests. It's supposed to be against their interests. The point is that they are trying to leverage their pipes in a way which is not open and against the general interest of everybody else. That would make the more money, at the cost of everyone else. Consulting with them is like consulting with Richard Stallman before enacting copyright laws: they are an extremely biased group that do not accurately reflect the values of the constituency those politicians are supposed to represent.
(P.S. I was going to say that it's like consulting with NAMBLA on what the age of consent should be, which I think is a far more hilarious analogy, but I didn't want to be accused of pulling the "think of the children" card :).)
Well where's the damn solution? I hate having to change the volume every 7-12 minutes, then 2-5 minutes after that, in an endless cycle. I can't go to sleep at night. I, no lie, TRIED BUYING a TV one month ago with this feature, and the guy at the store had no idea what I was talking about.
I've been waiting for the free market to solve the problem. It hasn't yet.
Why would you ask a TV salesman? Just google for it. Here's a $30 solution that doesn't involve buying a new TV. As for TV's with the feature built-in, just about every manufacturer offers it. Magnavox calls it "Smart Sound", other manufacturers call it different things.
P.S. Technically this law does restrict the freedom of the TV/cable/advertisers, but in the same way that a dairy farmer is restricted in his or her freedom from selling you milk that has been left out in the sun for a week.
Really? The same way? The advertisers are taking money from you with the promise to sell you ads at correct volumes, but giving you loud ads instead, which could put you in the hospital if you listen to it?
Yes, but corporations don't have suffrage.
Their owners, employees, and customers do. Passing law without consulting the target of the law is inherently undemocratic.
So then you need a general referendum, to make sure that the owners, employees, customers of the corporation, as well as everyone else that could be affected, all get a say. Consulting with the corporation is even less democratic than congress alone doing it. At least we've voted them to represent us. The only people who voted on the members of the board for those corporations are the ones who own stock in them.
Ah, but you see, it is. It's the job of the government to do what's in the best interests of its citizens. And it's in our collective best interest to not be annoyed by blaring commercials. Is it a minor issue? Yes. But it's still an issue.
The problem is that there are a lot of citizens and we don't all agree on what's best for us. So when the government "helps" you with this issue, they get in the way of everybody else who doesn't agree with you. So generally speaking, the government should stay out of minor issues. They introduce enough problems with the big ones.
A technological solution to this problem is much preferred. As many others have posted there are tv's which do this automatically. Also, MythTV uses several algorithms to determine when there are ads, so they may be automatically skipped. I wonder if audio volume is one of them. If it is, that just got worse.
Obviously you don't have children. When you spend 2 hours trying to get your kid to sleep, and then turn on your favorite show while you finally have some down time, the last thing you want is Billy Mays waking your kid up before you can mute the TV.
It's not the job of government to help you with that.
There is absolutely no legitimate reason why the US government should be negotiating with AT&T (or Time Warner, or Comcast, etc). None.
Sure there is. The US is a democratic republic.
Yes, but corporations don't have suffrage.
Have you ever heard of The Colors of Space [gutenberg.org] by Marion Zimmer Bradley? I suspect you’d enjoy it.
I had not, but thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely check it out.
If that’s what he was driving at, it’s no different from the difference between my perception of the color blue and the color orange. They just trigger different chemical receptors in my eyes and my brain perceives them as different colours. And who’s even to say that my perception of blue is the same as anyone else’s? We call it the same thing, sure, but what’s to say really?
It is what I was driving at, and you are right. You can't be sure that I perceive blue the same way you perceive blue. However, there are reasons to assume that's the case. When you see someone experiencing the emotion of happiness, you can identify it as happiness because you probably share many of the same physical reactions to it...smiling for example. Basically, we're all human, meaning we share a whole lot of DNA and our brains are wired similarly.
If somebody is experiencing an emotion you don't have, how do they explain that to you? How would you explain happiness to an alien being that has no equivalent emotion? You can't say, "he's smiling." You can perform the physical act of smiling without being happy. You can't say, "I feel good" because that includes other emotional states too...getting a message "feels good" in a completely different way than it feels when you win a game of chess against someone that you have never beaten before. I would be more likely to describe the first as "relaxed" than "happy". Any description of happiness you can come up with is basically either a synonym or a reference to things we all share when we feel happy.
In the case of the original poster, if his neurons fired in such an unusual way during his epileptic seizure such that he experienced an emotional state that just doesn't happen otherwise, what can he use to explain the emotion to someone who has never felt it? He did give you an explanation similar to your color filters explanation...the technical reason is that he was having a brain seizure. That doesn't help you understand what he felt unless you were to have the exact same type of seizure. If it made him feel things that are similar to how you would feel in more common circumstances, that would help, but apparently it wasn't the case, because the experience was sufficiently novel.