For it to make sense, it would have to be the case that Apple had only succeeded with the iPhone in the US. That is patently not the case. The iPhone has been a successful (but not dominant) phone in dozens of markets around the world, including many EU markets.
The notion that only a tiny fraction of phone-users outside the US want a smart phone is just complete rubbish. Blackberries and iPhones are the hottest phones used by UK teens at the moment, for example.
1) Economic benefits of the construction contracts are national 2) Economic benefits of the joining up are part-local, part-national 3) Reduction in oil-dependence for transportation needs are national
These will have to be entirely new lines. HST requires a very different infrastructure from conventional rail. So historical rights-of-way will not be an issue, but there will remain a tension between moving people and moving stuff
'Apple sees a huge profit potential,' says Wiens. 'A hundred dollars per year in incremental revenue on their installed base is a tremendous opportunity.'"
Whatta dumb comment: it implies that none of the current installed base takes their machines into Apple at the moment. The fraction of the installed base who take the back off themselves (or go to a non-Apple place to do it) is going to be small -- I'd guess 5% or lower. Of this fraction, the number who do this and don't have the technical wherewithal and motivation to get the correct screwdriver is going to be small as well -- businesses who do the servicing are clearly going to source the screwdrivers, and keen DIYers are likely to as well.
Ya know, what with Hans Rosling being one of the *world's* foremost thinkers on what it takes to *sustainably* move everyone into the upper-right quadrant on his graph, it would have been helpful if you'd have dug around a bit and found out more about what he has to say before raising the bleedin' obvious point of 2.5 Earths.
Statistics is an analytical skill. Data presentation is much more of a design/aesthetic skill, which is woefully undervalued. (in my opinion)
If you think presentation is a design/aesthetic skill, why on earth are you quoting Tufte above? Tufte treats presentation not as design or aesthetics but as "science" of some sort.
And what better measure of success is there for design/aesthetic skill in presentation than reaching huge audiences and causing them to think, feel and behave differently as a result of what you've said? On this metric, Rosling is one of the most effective presenters of modern times.
I think you're a little bit too much in love with Tufte. The lie factor is based on the following dictum of his: "The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the quantities represented."
To which my response is: "Why?"
Just because Tufte says so, doesn't make it so. In this case, it would require the plotting of life expectancy from zero. What would be the point? Rosling is using the graph to describe changes over time, how countries are bouncing up and down on the y-axis and moving upwards as the wealth of their populations increases. These are concepts that require no precise quantitative reading of the data by the audience to understand, but which will be more difficult to follow if the changes are compressed into two thirds of the graph.
To be honest, I think Tufte's pronouncements on this and many other issues, and the use of concepts like "Lie Factor" are pseudo-science, dressing up his particular view of the world with a sheen of Sciencey-ness that is unjustifiable. Many of his ideas are good, and the rationale behind them is sound, but it ain't the Only Truth, as he makes it appear to be.
Only the kind of fuckin' unempathetic eedjit who's never had to worry about where his next meal is coming from and doesn't recognise this as an extraordinary piece of luck compared with the situation of 99% of humanity throughout history and far too many people in the US today writes this kind of garbage.
If it was that fucking great to be poor -- if you got to receive so many privileges without having to work for them -- then rich people would be giving up their earned income for the plentiful largesse of the state. Funnily enough, those rubbing along on the $250k+ that earns them the major benefit from the Bush tax cut (now perpetuated by the pusillanimous Obama administration) aren't rushing to give up 90% of their income and live on $25k p.a. instead. That's cos they've recognised that life earning that much money is shit shit shit. Shit food, early death, violence, just shit.
You need to get a fucking grip, mate, and see what the real world is like. That 1% of people paying 37% of income tax are doing so because they are richer than fucking Croesus and are, practically speaking, living in a completely different world to the rest of their "fellow" Americans, who have practically no assets to their name, no discretionary income, and virtually no life chances. They are born in poverty, will live in poverty and will die in poverty. But that statistical truth will be ignored while the other statistical truth -- normal distribution -- will throw up enough who do escape to allow people to keep pointing to rags-to-riches stories as endorsements of this setup as "the American way".
bhlowe ably demonstrates that the collective minds of slashdot can indeed come up with something 40 experts have not thought of. Unfortunately, it's something really frickin' dumb, so reinforcing the idea that one Shakespeare outweighs quite a lot of jabbering monkeys
PIRA never wanted to just blow up as many citizens as possible as a primary objective. They mainly wanted to hit hardened targets (army, royalty, politicians) and economic targets (Canary Wharf). They had no interest in attacks causing mass civilian casualties in the thousands or tens of thousands: they had the capability, but it clearly never struck them as a useful action, because they never attempted it. The Birmingham pub bombs were about shutting down all the pubs, not killing in the hundreds, and Omagh was carried out by RIRA. None of this is to condone the violence.
AQ, by contrast, is keen to just kill lots of Westerners: it sees this as a useful action. It has managed deaths in the hundreds several times, and in the thousands once. If it had got its timing right on 9/11, it could quite conceivably have killed 10s or even 100s of thousands.
So Brits (and esp Londoners) accepted the chance of being collateral damage in the fairly frequent but also fairly small and fairly closely targeted PIRA outrages with relative equanimity. They do not feel anywhere near as calm about AQ, b/c AQ is after their blood, literally.
Oooh ooh, I can do a counter-anecdote. My four year old macbook has never crashed on me. By contrast, the new ThinkPad with Win7 I got with work has BSODs about once a month. And the fucking trackpad doesn't consistently work.
Technically true but missing the point that the ECHR was mostly drafted by British lawyers at the instigation of Churchill post-WWII in a never-again spirit. The get outs provided were a quite careful balancing of rights.
Oh gosh, you're right. Words only have a single meaning, and it's the one you say it is. Get your head out of your ass/chemistry textbook and start engaging with the real world, where words take on the meanings that people collectively assign to them over time.
So now you say your logic is not logic but an observation. Previously you said it was logic that I'd failed to understand.
Your alternative explanations are just silly: - In the first example: when the abuser discovers they can make money out of their (vile) hobby, they are quite likely to respond as people have responded throughout history to money, and increase their money-making activities. And thus abuse more children - In the second example: when the abuser gains entry to his circle of friends, he finds validation, acceptance and encouragement. This is likely to encourage him to abuse more children.
I repeat the question I put to you earlier: "Finally, I note your use of the pejorative "people like you" in your final sentence. Are you saying you're one of those other people: the people who don't find child porn disgusting? If that's the case, *why* don't you find child porn disgusting? You know a child has been harmed to make it, after all. Whether watching it causes further harm is irrelevant to that inescapable fact."
I understand your logic. I also understand the flaw in it. People aren't just trading existing child porn. They are creating new child porn and trading it. By permitting the trade to continue, you are sanctioning the continued creation of new child porn and thus new harm to children. In other words, the trade of child porn causes harm to children because the trade can only be served by the creation of child porn, and the creation of child porn involves harming children. All over the world, right now, children are being raped and their agonies being filmed to create child porn, and then that porn is being traded. The supply and the demand are inextricably linked. The question of whether *other children* -- the ones not being filmed, are at lesser risk of being harmed if child porn is not available to consumers is a second-order issue. You would need to adduce quite a bit of evidence to demonstrate what you continue to assert on this second-order issue: that there has been no change in the amount of child abuse since the inception of the internet. You mentioned a bunch of proxy indicators -- none of them is reliably collected on a pan-national basis, and none of them is a direct indicator of harm rates. Any study that was also to compile such figures and was also able to disaggregate confounding factors would be pretty damned impressive. So what's your citation? Particularly given that it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to suggest that the internet facilitates the harming of children (eg by connecting like-minded individuals in different countries). I suppose for the avoidance of doubt I had better state clearly that the hypothesis does not imply that I think the right answer is to ban the internet, since you have a habit of over-reading my intentions.
In answer to your last question: of course I'm happy to put people in jail, split up families and spend societies' money on attempting to reduce the quantity of child porn. I don't want to do it merely because I think it's disgusting, but also in order to halt and if possible prevent specific harms to specific children. Obviously, I don't want to send every adult male who's wanked over the sight a 17-year old's nipple on the intarwebs to jail for ever and flog them while they're there, which appears to be the strawman you have in your head of what I want to do, but I would quite like to see the makers of child porn tracked down, removed from their families, which will often include children they are harming, and then put in jail. Why on earth not?
Finally, I note your use of the pejorative "people like you" in your final sentence. Are you saying you're one of those other people: the people who don't find child porn disgusting? If that's the case, *why* don't you find child porn disgusting? You know a child has been harmed to make it, after all. Whether watching it causes further harm is irrelevant to that inescapable fact.
Look what you find: - It's not new research, it's a compilation of existing research - No mention of the methodology used to select studies. And to think that engineers get sniffy about medical research not being properly scientific -- it's impossible to imagine a Cochrane meta-analysis being done this shoddily - The key studies date from ~2001/02! For online shopping! That's just nuts. Even if they were well-conducted, they're obviously well out-of-date and based on what was, then, much more theory than practice. No Ocado, Amazon a fraction of its current size, no online music to speak of, etc.
Hunh? Of course I fuckin' dislike child porn. I loathe it! To make it, children get raped.
You are claiming there is no link between child porn and kids being harmed. Can you explain how you make child porn without harming kids? I think you're so wrapped up in your pseudo-intellectualising that you've lost sight of reality, compassion and humanity. The making of child porn involves raping children. The fact that small children will continue to be raped even if child porn is not made, does not providing a compelling justification for sanctioning more child rape by sanctioning child porn.
Are you really condoning child rape?
On a separate note, if you go back and review my original post, you'll see that I am not arguing that the proposed internet filter in Australia is either the right or the effective action to do to cut down on child porn. I was instead saying that assertions about cause-and-effect should have evidence adduced to them.
I don't know about global famine, but we certainly had famines around the globe in the 20th century. And there were quite a few unfortunate side effects from the green revolution, aka the industrialisation of food production.
If you're going to use a pompous turn of phrase, at least spell it correctly. They can "effect" change, not "affect". The point the poster was making, which seems to have gone swoosh straight over your head, is that if a population doesn't know it's in their interests to effect a particular change, they will be unlikely to do so.
Are you being deliberately fuckwitted? The assertion that you made was that "preventing access to it will not protect Australian families from pedophiles at all". Merely alluding to the fact that pedophiles existed prior to the internet does not constitute evidence to support this assertion. That evidence simply shows that the internet is not a necessity for paedophilia. It doesn't falsify the hypothesis that more paedophilia has occurred in Australia because the ready availability of child porn via the internet has stoked the vile urges of paedophiles. (Note, I am not saying this is the case, merely that it is just as valid a hypothesis as yours.)
I am not saying that your argument is inherently implausible, just that evidence is required. And "history itself" is a teensy bit unspecific.
No, I don't think that. I said 1) You need evidence 2) Absent evidence, it's possible to make a counter-argument. I then demonstrated what a counter-argument might look like. You missed the point, and laid out an inference from what I said that is clearly absurd -- a pointless strawman.
We can debate, fact-free, about which assertion is more likely, but the facts are what matters.
What is undeniable -- what is a fact -- is that to make child porn, requires harming children. What we do about it, is less clear.
I also note, with some unease, that you seem to be arguing that it is preferable for non-Australian children to be harmed than for Australian children to be harmed. I hope that you are being sloppy in your thinking and are not actually being racist in that way.
By the way, you have assumed that the causality is [Thai] child-porn suppliers exist ==> [Australian] consumers use them. In fact, there is an obvious feedback loop -- the more consumers there are, the more suppliers enter the market. And thus the more abuse occurs. You also have failed to address the possibility that using child-porn will stimulate urges, rather than release them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is complete twonk, to put it politely.
For it to make sense, it would have to be the case that Apple had only succeeded with the iPhone in the US. That is patently not the case. The iPhone has been a successful (but not dominant) phone in dozens of markets around the world, including many EU markets.
The notion that only a tiny fraction of phone-users outside the US want a smart phone is just complete rubbish. Blackberries and iPhones are the hottest phones used by UK teens at the moment, for example.
This is solved in Europe by having a cell-tower on the train and some labelled quiet carriages
1) Economic benefits of the construction contracts are national
2) Economic benefits of the joining up are part-local, part-national
3) Reduction in oil-dependence for transportation needs are national
These will have to be entirely new lines. HST requires a very different infrastructure from conventional rail. So historical rights-of-way will not be an issue, but there will remain a tension between moving people and moving stuff
'Apple sees a huge profit potential,' says Wiens. 'A hundred dollars per year in incremental revenue on their installed base is a tremendous opportunity.'"
Whatta dumb comment: it implies that none of the current installed base takes their machines into Apple at the moment. The fraction of the installed base who take the back off themselves (or go to a non-Apple place to do it) is going to be small -- I'd guess 5% or lower. Of this fraction, the number who do this and don't have the technical wherewithal and motivation to get the correct screwdriver is going to be small as well -- businesses who do the servicing are clearly going to source the screwdrivers, and keen DIYers are likely to as well.
I don't know why you're talking about smarts, and then beginning by lecturing me about "my President". I'm British.
If you think wealth comes mainly from smarts, not luck, then it's time you took a look at Hans Rosling's videos.
Ya know, what with Hans Rosling being one of the *world's* foremost thinkers on what it takes to *sustainably* move everyone into the upper-right quadrant on his graph, it would have been helpful if you'd have dug around a bit and found out more about what he has to say before raising the bleedin' obvious point of 2.5 Earths.
Statistics is an analytical skill. Data presentation is much more of a design/aesthetic skill, which is woefully undervalued. (in my opinion)
If you think presentation is a design/aesthetic skill, why on earth are you quoting Tufte above? Tufte treats presentation not as design or aesthetics but as "science" of some sort.
And what better measure of success is there for design/aesthetic skill in presentation than reaching huge audiences and causing them to think, feel and behave differently as a result of what you've said? On this metric, Rosling is one of the most effective presenters of modern times.
I think you're a little bit too much in love with Tufte. The lie factor is based on the following dictum of his: "The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the quantities represented."
To which my response is: "Why?"
Just because Tufte says so, doesn't make it so. In this case, it would require the plotting of life expectancy from zero. What would be the point? Rosling is using the graph to describe changes over time, how countries are bouncing up and down on the y-axis and moving upwards as the wealth of their populations increases. These are concepts that require no precise quantitative reading of the data by the audience to understand, but which will be more difficult to follow if the changes are compressed into two thirds of the graph.
To be honest, I think Tufte's pronouncements on this and many other issues, and the use of concepts like "Lie Factor" are pseudo-science, dressing up his particular view of the world with a sheen of Sciencey-ness that is unjustifiable. Many of his ideas are good, and the rationale behind them is sound, but it ain't the Only Truth, as he makes it appear to be.
Only the kind of fuckin' unempathetic eedjit who's never had to worry about where his next meal is coming from and doesn't recognise this as an extraordinary piece of luck compared with the situation of 99% of humanity throughout history and far too many people in the US today writes this kind of garbage.
If it was that fucking great to be poor -- if you got to receive so many privileges without having to work for them -- then rich people would be giving up their earned income for the plentiful largesse of the state. Funnily enough, those rubbing along on the $250k+ that earns them the major benefit from the Bush tax cut (now perpetuated by the pusillanimous Obama administration) aren't rushing to give up 90% of their income and live on $25k p.a. instead. That's cos they've recognised that life earning that much money is shit shit shit. Shit food, early death, violence, just shit.
You need to get a fucking grip, mate, and see what the real world is like. That 1% of people paying 37% of income tax are doing so because they are richer than fucking Croesus and are, practically speaking, living in a completely different world to the rest of their "fellow" Americans, who have practically no assets to their name, no discretionary income, and virtually no life chances. They are born in poverty, will live in poverty and will die in poverty. But that statistical truth will be ignored while the other statistical truth -- normal distribution -- will throw up enough who do escape to allow people to keep pointing to rags-to-riches stories as endorsements of this setup as "the American way".
bhlowe ably demonstrates that the collective minds of slashdot can indeed come up with something 40 experts have not thought of. Unfortunately, it's something really frickin' dumb, so reinforcing the idea that one Shakespeare outweighs quite a lot of jabbering monkeys
PIRA never wanted to just blow up as many citizens as possible as a primary objective. They mainly wanted to hit hardened targets (army, royalty, politicians) and economic targets (Canary Wharf). They had no interest in attacks causing mass civilian casualties in the thousands or tens of thousands: they had the capability, but it clearly never struck them as a useful action, because they never attempted it. The Birmingham pub bombs were about shutting down all the pubs, not killing in the hundreds, and Omagh was carried out by RIRA. None of this is to condone the violence.
AQ, by contrast, is keen to just kill lots of Westerners: it sees this as a useful action. It has managed deaths in the hundreds several times, and in the thousands once. If it had got its timing right on 9/11, it could quite conceivably have killed 10s or even 100s of thousands.
So Brits (and esp Londoners) accepted the chance of being collateral damage in the fairly frequent but also fairly small and fairly closely targeted PIRA outrages with relative equanimity. They do not feel anywhere near as calm about AQ, b/c AQ is after their blood, literally.
Oooh ooh, I can do a counter-anecdote. My four year old macbook has never crashed on me. By contrast, the new ThinkPad with Win7 I got with work has BSODs about once a month. And the fucking trackpad doesn't consistently work.
Technically true but missing the point that the ECHR was mostly drafted by British lawyers at the instigation of Churchill post-WWII in a never-again spirit. The get outs provided were a quite careful balancing of rights.
Erm. Bags are already checked for depressurisation triggers, and I think other triggers too.
Oh gosh, you're right. Words only have a single meaning, and it's the one you say it is. Get your head out of your ass/chemistry textbook and start engaging with the real world, where words take on the meanings that people collectively assign to them over time.
So now you say your logic is not logic but an observation. Previously you said it was logic that I'd failed to understand.
Your alternative explanations are just silly:
- In the first example: when the abuser discovers they can make money out of their (vile) hobby, they are quite likely to respond as people have responded throughout history to money, and increase their money-making activities. And thus abuse more children
- In the second example: when the abuser gains entry to his circle of friends, he finds validation, acceptance and encouragement. This is likely to encourage him to abuse more children.
I repeat the question I put to you earlier:
"Finally, I note your use of the pejorative "people like you" in your final sentence. Are you saying you're one of those other people: the people who don't find child porn disgusting? If that's the case, *why* don't you find child porn disgusting? You know a child has been harmed to make it, after all. Whether watching it causes further harm is irrelevant to that inescapable fact."
Are you going to duck it again?
Rather than simply citing Friedman (or the Laffer curve), can you point to some evidence that his assertions hold water?
I understand your logic. I also understand the flaw in it. People aren't just trading existing child porn. They are creating new child porn and trading it. By permitting the trade to continue, you are sanctioning the continued creation of new child porn and thus new harm to children. In other words, the trade of child porn causes harm to children because the trade can only be served by the creation of child porn, and the creation of child porn involves harming children. All over the world, right now, children are being raped and their agonies being filmed to create child porn, and then that porn is being traded. The supply and the demand are inextricably linked. The question of whether *other children* -- the ones not being filmed, are at lesser risk of being harmed if child porn is not available to consumers is a second-order issue. You would need to adduce quite a bit of evidence to demonstrate what you continue to assert on this second-order issue: that there has been no change in the amount of child abuse since the inception of the internet. You mentioned a bunch of proxy indicators -- none of them is reliably collected on a pan-national basis, and none of them is a direct indicator of harm rates. Any study that was also to compile such figures and was also able to disaggregate confounding factors would be pretty damned impressive. So what's your citation? Particularly given that it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to suggest that the internet facilitates the harming of children (eg by connecting like-minded individuals in different countries). I suppose for the avoidance of doubt I had better state clearly that the hypothesis does not imply that I think the right answer is to ban the internet, since you have a habit of over-reading my intentions.
In answer to your last question: of course I'm happy to put people in jail, split up families and spend societies' money on attempting to reduce the quantity of child porn. I don't want to do it merely because I think it's disgusting, but also in order to halt and if possible prevent specific harms to specific children. Obviously, I don't want to send every adult male who's wanked over the sight a 17-year old's nipple on the intarwebs to jail for ever and flog them while they're there, which appears to be the strawman you have in your head of what I want to do, but I would quite like to see the makers of child porn tracked down, removed from their families, which will often include children they are harming, and then put in jail. Why on earth not?
Finally, I note your use of the pejorative "people like you" in your final sentence. Are you saying you're one of those other people: the people who don't find child porn disgusting? If that's the case, *why* don't you find child porn disgusting? You know a child has been harmed to make it, after all. Whether watching it causes further harm is irrelevant to that inescapable fact.
That was a crap press release about a crappy study. Study is here:
http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm
Look what you find:
- It's not new research, it's a compilation of existing research
- No mention of the methodology used to select studies. And to think that engineers get sniffy about medical research not being properly scientific -- it's impossible to imagine a Cochrane meta-analysis being done this shoddily
- The key studies date from ~2001/02! For online shopping! That's just nuts. Even if they were well-conducted, they're obviously well out-of-date and based on what was, then, much more theory than practice. No Ocado, Amazon a fraction of its current size, no online music to speak of, etc.
Crap crap crap
Hunh? Of course I fuckin' dislike child porn. I loathe it! To make it, children get raped.
You are claiming there is no link between child porn and kids being harmed. Can you explain how you make child porn without harming kids? I think you're so wrapped up in your pseudo-intellectualising that you've lost sight of reality, compassion and humanity. The making of child porn involves raping children. The fact that small children will continue to be raped even if child porn is not made, does not providing a compelling justification for sanctioning more child rape by sanctioning child porn.
Are you really condoning child rape?
On a separate note, if you go back and review my original post, you'll see that I am not arguing that the proposed internet filter in Australia is either the right or the effective action to do to cut down on child porn. I was instead saying that assertions about cause-and-effect should have evidence adduced to them.
I don't know about global famine, but we certainly had famines around the globe in the 20th century. And there were quite a few unfortunate side effects from the green revolution, aka the industrialisation of food production.
If you're going to use a pompous turn of phrase, at least spell it correctly. They can "effect" change, not "affect". The point the poster was making, which seems to have gone swoosh straight over your head, is that if a population doesn't know it's in their interests to effect a particular change, they will be unlikely to do so.
Are you being deliberately fuckwitted? The assertion that you made was that "preventing access to it will not protect Australian families from pedophiles at all". Merely alluding to the fact that pedophiles existed prior to the internet does not constitute evidence to support this assertion. That evidence simply shows that the internet is not a necessity for paedophilia. It doesn't falsify the hypothesis that more paedophilia has occurred in Australia because the ready availability of child porn via the internet has stoked the vile urges of paedophiles. (Note, I am not saying this is the case, merely that it is just as valid a hypothesis as yours.)
I am not saying that your argument is inherently implausible, just that evidence is required. And "history itself" is a teensy bit unspecific.
No, I don't think that. I said
1) You need evidence
2) Absent evidence, it's possible to make a counter-argument. I then demonstrated what a counter-argument might look like.
You missed the point, and laid out an inference from what I said that is clearly absurd -- a pointless strawman.
We can debate, fact-free, about which assertion is more likely, but the facts are what matters.
What is undeniable -- what is a fact -- is that to make child porn, requires harming children. What we do about it, is less clear.
I also note, with some unease, that you seem to be arguing that it is preferable for non-Australian children to be harmed than for Australian children to be harmed. I hope that you are being sloppy in your thinking and are not actually being racist in that way.
By the way, you have assumed that the causality is [Thai] child-porn suppliers exist ==> [Australian] consumers use them. In fact, there is an obvious feedback loop -- the more consumers there are, the more suppliers enter the market. And thus the more abuse occurs. You also have failed to address the possibility that using child-porn will stimulate urges, rather than release them.