Holy bad math batman! You are making a quantitative comparison without actually having quantities. Suppose the average phone call/text message saves 1 mile of driving; the average chance of an accident per 1 mile driven is 1 in 100,000; and the average chance of accident due to taking a call/reading a text is 1 in 10,000. Then by answering a call, one increases the chances of an accident 10x. I have no idea how close to reality those numbers are, but neither do you.
After power was turned back on, I, and a lot of other people, went out and bought a hand-cranked USB charger(also doubles as a flashlight and radio, a handy device to be sure). It doesn't take that much energy to power a cell phone.
Unfortunately, I think a significant level of such individual disaster-preparedness will always be the exception, not the rule.
As for the tower issue, the towers where I was at(Tsukuba, which is about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima) all kept power even after the quake but since so many people were using their phones to either call people or check the news it was almost impossible to get through(the bandwidth of the tower may have very well been degraded as well). A mesh network *might* have been useful there, but it would have had to have enough density to work.
I agree with your hesitation there -- in that scenario, it seems like the presence of a mesh network might make the congestion problem worse.
The wireless networking research community has been working on mesh/ad-hoc networks for over a decade, citing communication in disaster areas as (one of the) main applications. At some point some people started to sort of laugh at it ("oh look, another mesh networking paper!"), because despite all the research it didn't seem to get any closer to reality. My guess would be that the reason why we're seeing it finally being used is because in order to be feasible, you need the density of devices to be above a certain threshold, which means a) it was never going to work in the pre-smartphone era -- with smartphones, you can just download an app to do it, but otherwise you'd pretty much need to spend major $$ to get the necessary number of dedicated devices out there, or else there needs to be wide-scale agreement to implement a specific protocol on all new devices, which was never going to happen because it's not a selling point, b) it won't really work in major natural disasters, because, well in order to maintain the density of devices, a large number of people need to have continuous access to power, which is unlikely if a disaster is so severe that communication infrastructure is offline (I imagine celltowers are less fragile than power lines).
There is of course a fairly high bar for deciding whether something is intended to be used to break the law or not. Often (though not always), emphasizing legal uses in the branding and advertising of an item is sufficient to ensure the bar isn't reached. There is a large amount of legal content available as torrents, and these are used in advertising (e.g.).
Also, the existence of grey areas doesn't invalidate the general principle. RANDOM PROFANE OUTBURST!
I have never heard of civilian sale or use of landmines, so I can't comment on that. As for poisons, they are primarily used for pest control, not killing people.
What's the alternative? Don't go after anyone doing anything illegal, because there might be ways for others to get away with it? Yes, there might be copies of this that are advertised more covertly, and hell, if a stalker is sufficiently motivated they can learn to code and make the software themselves, but part of the point of going after low hanging fruit is that it is also the low hanging fruit for people intending to do something illegal. I for one think it's a good thing if a potential stalker has to work a bit harder to accomplish their goal than going to the play store and searching "stalk my girlfriend".
arresting someone because they produce a product that can be used illegally
There is a difference between "can be used illegally" and "will pretty much only be used illegally". Give me one example of something that is illegal to sell that can't be used legally.
I'm sick of double standards too. I can't cut up strangers, but it's perfectly OK for surgeons? I can't put people I don't like in cages, but it's perfectly OK for the police? I can't lock people in metal tubes and set fire to canisters of jet fuel next to them, but it's perfectly OK for airlines?
What the fuck is wrong with the world that the seller of a tool can be arrested because some customer chooses to use it for nefarious purposes. I sure hope people don't start using cars to commit crimes because I like having a car.
If ever a time comes when cars are designed specifically to be ideal tools for killing, raping, stealing, assaulting, extorting, kidnapping, committing fraud, and/or burglarizing, you can bet your ass that they will be banned, and the few people who use them for travel and not anything illegal will be SOL, as it should be. However, as long as committing a crime is a niche use of cars, you don't have anything to worry about.
Does there have to be a "why"? Can't it be "just because"? If you're going to bring up the collection of cells thing, then all belief and philosophy flies out the window, and "hurting others is bad" just because my neurons fired in such a way as to result in me typing that. But if you don't want to get that self-referential, then explain why it is not possible to live according to "hurting others is bad" on what amounts to a persistent whim. Why can't all truths be lower case?
Television, in addition to carrying on the benefit of radio, shows students the world rather than simply referring to points on a map. Different cultures and environments can be described in full color with fluid video, rather than hoping the student understands a short text description that too often seems absurd due to its foreign context.
Thus helping the economy and overall quality of life. That has been the federal funding model for American academia for decades, and I for one think it's a much better idea than the state trying to get ideas off the ground themselves. Would you really be happier if the government had a "department of 'neat' gaming and 3D devices" hiring engineers and marketers and designers? Making annual product announcements like the Apple Special Event? Or would you rather the government not fund science and engineering research at all, leaving it up to Lockheed Martin and Microsoft to compete with the rest of the world?
I didn't say I have no opinion, I said I didn't care enough to express one, so you didn't think my post was meant as an agreement or disagreement with the rest of your arguments, which I don't feel like getting involved with.
whether society is unfair to approximately 50% if its members
You wouldn't happen to be talking about women when you say "approximately 50% if its members", would you? Careful, someone might take that the wrong way.
Gay people shouldn't need to hide the guy bare-ass in chaps and a cowboy hat, and nothing else, to be respected and have equality before the law. Feminists shouldn't have to hide the bra-burners to have the same rights and opportunities as men.
"Shouldn't have to" is a pretty non-informative statement. Children shouldn't have to die of malaria, but they do. I was telling you what approach I think has the largest chance of neutralizing the venomous effect of radical feminism/Islam/atheism/etc. It's a matter of tone, really. There's not a huge difference between what is meant when one says "feminism isn't about hating men" vs. "I am a feminist, but I don't hate men and the things I fight for are good for both genders", but one of them leads down a rabbit hole of accusations of "no true scotsman" and links to tumblr pages, while the other one has a slightly better chance of getting at least one person to think "hey, maybe I shouldn't be afraid of feminists?" Your claim that it's all men's fault that the term feminism has been poisoned isn't helping, either.
I have, unfortunately, seen enough Internet arguments to know how those things go. Fear and mistrust are too powerful. A single story about someone getting fired over saying "dongle" is worth a thousand people like you arguing what feminism "actually" is and who it's good for. Being a little more proactive about counteracting that effect can't hurt.
This is the problem right here: the term feminist has been poisoned intentionally. Its similar to the right-wing hit job on 'liberal'; the only way to defeat an idea that most people already accept is to reframe and demonize that idea as something objectionable.
I don't care enough to express an opinion on the rest of your post and the debate you're in, but this part strikes me as very false. A conspiracy theory is completely unnecessary to explain the "poisoning" of the term feminism. It's entirely believable that, as radical elements of feminism naturally arose (and they did arise naturally; there's no way in hell that's a false flag operation), both non-feminists and those with actively anti-feminist inclinations lumped those radical elements with the less extreme versions of feminism. That's a story as old as time, same has happened with Islam, atheism, race relations, LGBT issues, etc. People are really bad at ignoring threatening extremes. It's a natural impulse, no deliberate poisoning necessary. As far as I know, the only viable means of fighting this trend is for the more moderate (but still similarly aligned) elements to actively, loudly disavow the radicalization of their views. Defensiveness won't get you anywhere, it'll just legitimize the suspicion surrounding the issue further.
Some people disagree with Israeli policy and hate Jews, ipso facto anyone who disagrees with Israeli policy does so because they hate Jews. Because fuck logic.
It is relevant when the focus is placed on sexism rather than fuckwadism. The use of sexist insults is incidental. You could convince every person on the planet that sexism is bad and they shouldn't be sexist, and people who are trying to be hurtful would still use sexist insults because they're effective.
And I wasn't ridiculing anti-anti-trans sentiment, I was ridiculing the fact that these sort of discussions so often center around a specific set of attributes (LGBTQQIAAP+) that do not reflect the absolute (i.e. non-relative) prevalence of abuse which centers on them. OP's assertion was that anyone who is "different from a straight, cis, white man" is attacked. Well, Gabe Newell is all of those things, but how much bullshit do you suppose he's had to deal with because he's obese? "Straight cis white man" has just become a moniker for "evil" in certain circles, which is why I'm sure OP didn't even give any thought as to how informative/useful/relevant each modifier was to the discussion.
His point is that they're not fuckwads because they're "sexist, racist, homopobic, tranphobic", but that they're "sexist, racist, homopobic, tranphobic" because they're fuckwads. Also, I think it's pretty funny that in the list of "teh patriarchy" adjectives, "cis" has become so standard despite referring to about 0.3% of the population. I guess the more victim classes you have, the stronger your case sounds. In which case, here are some other classes you could have used, thank me later: mentally ill, physically ill, young, old, bald, poorly endowed in the genital area, ugly, pretty, skinny, fat, redhead, bucktoothed, swole, hairy, flat-chested, less-than-fluent in the language being used, cross-eyed, far or near sighted, and virgin. And that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could come up with more.
You know what else has the potential to make people feel safer and possibly act recklessly more often? Seatbelts. And car roofs. And the safety catch on a gun. And railings on ledges and stairwells. And literally every other safety feature everywhere that anyone knows about.
People use facebook with the expectation that they are seeing a (reasonably) objective representation of what their friends are trying to express or convey. Facebook is the equivalent of the telephone in a telephone call.
That claim would make sense if people commonly held telephone conversations with hundreds of people simultaneously who say things continuously all day long. There are plenty of forums on the Internet that display information based on simple rules like "most recent post at the top". But as long as you, your family, and just about everyone else in the country are using Facebook instead of one of those forums, then the only thing you're complaining about regarding this story is that they, for once, decided to share the results of one of what has to be hundreds or thousands of similar experiments they've already performed to come up with the IR algorithms they have running now.
"Everyone else is doing it" is a juvenile argument that little kids make to justify behaviors that they shouldn't be engaging in.
Ugh, didn't you disgust yourself while typing that out? There was a lot more to OP's argument than that, as you very well know. And that's on top of the Olympian leap it must have taken to claim that a private company tweaking the information filtering algorithms for their entirely optional leisure service can constitute a violation of personal sovereignty, which is a concept more commonly reserved for discussions on issues like indentured servitude...
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Holy bad math batman! You are making a quantitative comparison without actually having quantities. Suppose the average phone call/text message saves 1 mile of driving; the average chance of an accident per 1 mile driven is 1 in 100,000; and the average chance of accident due to taking a call/reading a text is 1 in 10,000. Then by answering a call, one increases the chances of an accident 10x. I have no idea how close to reality those numbers are, but neither do you.
After power was turned back on, I, and a lot of other people, went out and bought a hand-cranked USB charger(also doubles as a flashlight and radio, a handy device to be sure). It doesn't take that much energy to power a cell phone.
Unfortunately, I think a significant level of such individual disaster-preparedness will always be the exception, not the rule.
As for the tower issue, the towers where I was at(Tsukuba, which is about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima) all kept power even after the quake but since so many people were using their phones to either call people or check the news it was almost impossible to get through(the bandwidth of the tower may have very well been degraded as well). A mesh network *might* have been useful there, but it would have had to have enough density to work.
I agree with your hesitation there -- in that scenario, it seems like the presence of a mesh network might make the congestion problem worse.
The wireless networking research community has been working on mesh/ad-hoc networks for over a decade, citing communication in disaster areas as (one of the) main applications. At some point some people started to sort of laugh at it ("oh look, another mesh networking paper!"), because despite all the research it didn't seem to get any closer to reality. My guess would be that the reason why we're seeing it finally being used is because in order to be feasible, you need the density of devices to be above a certain threshold, which means a) it was never going to work in the pre-smartphone era -- with smartphones, you can just download an app to do it, but otherwise you'd pretty much need to spend major $$ to get the necessary number of dedicated devices out there, or else there needs to be wide-scale agreement to implement a specific protocol on all new devices, which was never going to happen because it's not a selling point, b) it won't really work in major natural disasters, because, well in order to maintain the density of devices, a large number of people need to have continuous access to power, which is unlikely if a disaster is so severe that communication infrastructure is offline (I imagine celltowers are less fragile than power lines).
There is of course a fairly high bar for deciding whether something is intended to be used to break the law or not. Often (though not always), emphasizing legal uses in the branding and advertising of an item is sufficient to ensure the bar isn't reached. There is a large amount of legal content available as torrents, and these are used in advertising (e.g.).
Also, the existence of grey areas doesn't invalidate the general principle. RANDOM PROFANE OUTBURST!
I have never heard of civilian sale or use of landmines, so I can't comment on that. As for poisons, they are primarily used for pest control, not killing people.
But providing tools mainly designed for illegal use is itself illegal, so they are going after someone conducting illegal activities.
What's the alternative? Don't go after anyone doing anything illegal, because there might be ways for others to get away with it? Yes, there might be copies of this that are advertised more covertly, and hell, if a stalker is sufficiently motivated they can learn to code and make the software themselves, but part of the point of going after low hanging fruit is that it is also the low hanging fruit for people intending to do something illegal. I for one think it's a good thing if a potential stalker has to work a bit harder to accomplish their goal than going to the play store and searching "stalk my girlfriend".
arresting someone because they produce a product that can be used illegally
There is a difference between "can be used illegally" and "will pretty much only be used illegally". Give me one example of something that is illegal to sell that can't be used legally.
I'm sick of double standards too. I can't cut up strangers, but it's perfectly OK for surgeons? I can't put people I don't like in cages, but it's perfectly OK for the police? I can't lock people in metal tubes and set fire to canisters of jet fuel next to them, but it's perfectly OK for airlines?
What the fuck is wrong with the world that the seller of a tool can be arrested because some customer chooses to use it for nefarious purposes. I sure hope people don't start using cars to commit crimes because I like having a car.
If ever a time comes when cars are designed specifically to be ideal tools for killing, raping, stealing, assaulting, extorting, kidnapping, committing fraud, and/or burglarizing, you can bet your ass that they will be banned, and the few people who use them for travel and not anything illegal will be SOL, as it should be. However, as long as committing a crime is a niche use of cars, you don't have anything to worry about.
That's right up there with the "climate scientists made up global warming to get funding" morons.
Does there have to be a "why"? Can't it be "just because"? If you're going to bring up the collection of cells thing, then all belief and philosophy flies out the window, and "hurting others is bad" just because my neurons fired in such a way as to result in me typing that. But if you don't want to get that self-referential, then explain why it is not possible to live according to "hurting others is bad" on what amounts to a persistent whim. Why can't all truths be lower case?
Middle school physics -- the amount of floating ice does not affect the water level, assuming fixed total mass of water, due to Archimedes' principle.
Television, in addition to carrying on the benefit of radio, shows students the world rather than simply referring to points on a map. Different cultures and environments can be described in full color with fluid video, rather than hoping the student understands a short text description that too often seems absurd due to its foreign context.
Really?
Thus helping the economy and overall quality of life. That has been the federal funding model for American academia for decades, and I for one think it's a much better idea than the state trying to get ideas off the ground themselves. Would you really be happier if the government had a "department of 'neat' gaming and 3D devices" hiring engineers and marketers and designers? Making annual product announcements like the Apple Special Event? Or would you rather the government not fund science and engineering research at all, leaving it up to Lockheed Martin and Microsoft to compete with the rest of the world?
The phrasing is good enough for anyone who isn't an idiot or a pedant, while also being concise. I.e. what a headline should be.
whether society is unfair to approximately 50% if its members
You wouldn't happen to be talking about women when you say "approximately 50% if its members", would you? Careful, someone might take that the wrong way.
Gay people shouldn't need to hide the guy bare-ass in chaps and a cowboy hat, and nothing else, to be respected and have equality before the law. Feminists shouldn't have to hide the bra-burners to have the same rights and opportunities as men.
"Shouldn't have to" is a pretty non-informative statement. Children shouldn't have to die of malaria, but they do. I was telling you what approach I think has the largest chance of neutralizing the venomous effect of radical feminism/Islam/atheism/etc. It's a matter of tone, really. There's not a huge difference between what is meant when one says "feminism isn't about hating men" vs. "I am a feminist, but I don't hate men and the things I fight for are good for both genders", but one of them leads down a rabbit hole of accusations of "no true scotsman" and links to tumblr pages, while the other one has a slightly better chance of getting at least one person to think "hey, maybe I shouldn't be afraid of feminists?" Your claim that it's all men's fault that the term feminism has been poisoned isn't helping, either.
I have, unfortunately, seen enough Internet arguments to know how those things go. Fear and mistrust are too powerful. A single story about someone getting fired over saying "dongle" is worth a thousand people like you arguing what feminism "actually" is and who it's good for. Being a little more proactive about counteracting that effect can't hurt.
This is the problem right here: the term feminist has been poisoned intentionally. Its similar to the right-wing hit job on 'liberal'; the only way to defeat an idea that most people already accept is to reframe and demonize that idea as something objectionable.
I don't care enough to express an opinion on the rest of your post and the debate you're in, but this part strikes me as very false. A conspiracy theory is completely unnecessary to explain the "poisoning" of the term feminism. It's entirely believable that, as radical elements of feminism naturally arose (and they did arise naturally; there's no way in hell that's a false flag operation), both non-feminists and those with actively anti-feminist inclinations lumped those radical elements with the less extreme versions of feminism. That's a story as old as time, same has happened with Islam, atheism, race relations, LGBT issues, etc. People are really bad at ignoring threatening extremes. It's a natural impulse, no deliberate poisoning necessary. As far as I know, the only viable means of fighting this trend is for the more moderate (but still similarly aligned) elements to actively, loudly disavow the radicalization of their views. Defensiveness won't get you anywhere, it'll just legitimize the suspicion surrounding the issue further.
Some people disagree with Israeli policy and hate Jews, ipso facto anyone who disagrees with Israeli policy does so because they hate Jews. Because fuck logic.
It is relevant when the focus is placed on sexism rather than fuckwadism. The use of sexist insults is incidental. You could convince every person on the planet that sexism is bad and they shouldn't be sexist, and people who are trying to be hurtful would still use sexist insults because they're effective.
And I wasn't ridiculing anti-anti-trans sentiment, I was ridiculing the fact that these sort of discussions so often center around a specific set of attributes (LGBTQQIAAP+) that do not reflect the absolute (i.e. non-relative) prevalence of abuse which centers on them. OP's assertion was that anyone who is "different from a straight, cis, white man" is attacked. Well, Gabe Newell is all of those things, but how much bullshit do you suppose he's had to deal with because he's obese? "Straight cis white man" has just become a moniker for "evil" in certain circles, which is why I'm sure OP didn't even give any thought as to how informative/useful/relevant each modifier was to the discussion.
His point is that they're not fuckwads because they're "sexist, racist, homopobic, tranphobic", but that they're "sexist, racist, homopobic, tranphobic" because they're fuckwads. Also, I think it's pretty funny that in the list of "teh patriarchy" adjectives, "cis" has become so standard despite referring to about 0.3% of the population. I guess the more victim classes you have, the stronger your case sounds. In which case, here are some other classes you could have used, thank me later: mentally ill, physically ill, young, old, bald, poorly endowed in the genital area, ugly, pretty, skinny, fat, redhead, bucktoothed, swole, hairy, flat-chested, less-than-fluent in the language being used, cross-eyed, far or near sighted, and virgin. And that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could come up with more.
You know what else has the potential to make people feel safer and possibly act recklessly more often? Seatbelts. And car roofs. And the safety catch on a gun. And railings on ledges and stairwells. And literally every other safety feature everywhere that anyone knows about.
People use facebook with the expectation that they are seeing a (reasonably) objective representation of what their friends are trying to express or convey. Facebook is the equivalent of the telephone in a telephone call.
That claim would make sense if people commonly held telephone conversations with hundreds of people simultaneously who say things continuously all day long. There are plenty of forums on the Internet that display information based on simple rules like "most recent post at the top". But as long as you, your family, and just about everyone else in the country are using Facebook instead of one of those forums, then the only thing you're complaining about regarding this story is that they, for once, decided to share the results of one of what has to be hundreds or thousands of similar experiments they've already performed to come up with the IR algorithms they have running now.
"Everyone else is doing it" is a juvenile argument that little kids make to justify behaviors that they shouldn't be engaging in.
Ugh, didn't you disgust yourself while typing that out? There was a lot more to OP's argument than that, as you very well know. And that's on top of the Olympian leap it must have taken to claim that a private company tweaking the information filtering algorithms for their entirely optional leisure service can constitute a violation of personal sovereignty, which is a concept more commonly reserved for discussions on issues like indentured servitude...
So then is product placement in a movie or TV show unethical?