I didn't call Alberto Gonzales a fascist, or Bush a liar, and I haven't called for Rumsfeld to be fired. (See my earlier point about creating a strawman.)
Why the hell not?
OK, I can understand why Rumsfeld shouldn't be fired, because Bush would appoint his successor, and it's the Bush administration which is the problem, not Rumsfeld specifically.
Let me -- that's a great question. A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.
And, yes, Gonzales is a fascist in that he does the dirty work for a fascist administration. The Bush administration is all about big, authoritarian, central government buttressing and buttressed by relationships to large businesses. They assert repeatedly and publically that they can "legally" lock you up without trial (Jose Padilla), tap your phone without a warrant, torture you, and on, and on...
We have to take care for our sanity as a nation. We've reached the point where the truth sounds like conspiracy theories, and so speaking the truth prompts people to call you a kook. It's not that what you're saying is kooky, it's that the truth is so far-out.
The truth is that the President says he can lock you up without trial, and he has done it to a U.S. citizen detained in the U.S.
The truth is that the President reserves the right to torture you, regardless of international agreements or laws passed by congress.
The truth is that the President says he can tap your phone without a court order.
None of the above is arguable. Bush has made all of these statements publicly (well, the torture thing was in a signing statement).
This isn't what most people mean when they talk about paper & voting machines. What is usually meant is this:
The voter goes into the booth and uses a computer to do their votes, which are tallied electronically. The computer prints out a paper slip which says how the person voted. HOWEVER, that slip is handled one of two ways. Either the voter then carries the paper slip to a ballot box just like they do with hand-done ballots now, or the paper slip appears to the voter behind a piece of glass and is then dumped in a ballot box attached to the computer, without the voter getting access to it.
The idea is that it creates a hard-to-tamper-with backup for the electronic record of votes. Other people care about secret ballots, too (although not enough people considering how much absentee voting and vote-by-mail is done these days) and so the system doesn't provide you with a receipt you can bring to your boss to prove you voted the "right" way.
Generally, people who don't want to get into a device think about the device as it's function. A dishwasher is a machine which washes dishes, and most people won't think very hard about how the motors and pumps and timers work. A car is a machine which takes you and your stuff from here to there, etc. Form follows function, and a car is designed to take you from here to there reasonably safely and comfortably.
The problem is that a computer *isn't* like this, at least not for most people, not yet. A computer may be the machine you use to check your email or browse the web, but that's really not what it *is*. A computer isn't designed to browse the web, it's designed to run software. Some of that software includes web browsers.
I think that's a big part of why people have trouble with computers. They want to know, "why doesn't my computer just *work*?" And the answer is that it's really hard to even say what that means for a computer. It's a general-purpose device. Companies which sell systems sometimes try to package the computer as an appliance with some finite number of functions, but without making the whole thing run off ROM and denying the user the chance to do new fun stuff, it's really not an appliance.
About the time that "Kill Bill" came out, I saw Conan O'Brien interviewing Quentin Tarantino. Two guys, about 40 years old, who are extremely popular and influential in defining pop culture. And *man* were they both geeks, in the bad senses as well as the good. Then I realized, wow, yeah.
As much as we'd like to be able to say that religion and science are compatible, but speak to different areas, it's not always true. Often religions state concrete things about the world, and those things may be incompatible with things supported by science.
In this case, the cardinal is at least sorta right. The belief that today's organisms got the way they are via natural selection is inherently incompatible with the belief that God created them a particular way. One could argue that God wanted kangaroos to be a certain way and so he created kangaroos via a process which involved many intervening life-forms. That gets evolution and intelligent design both, but it isn't natural selection. Natural selection is *inherently* an unguided process and any theory in which a god has a hand in making life the way it is is *inherently* a guided process.
I'm quite disappointed that I can't find the reference, but some time ago I read an article by Stephen J. Gould which said the same thing. The cardinal isn't being radical, he's just clarifying a point which is that the Catholic church's view is that life is the way it is because God wants it that way. You certainly aren't obligated to believe him (I don't).
The difference between talking to someone in the seat next to you and talking to someone on the cell phone is that when you're talking to someone on the cellphone, you're only partly in the car.
There were two expressions that used to be popular to get across the idea of cyberspace. One was "Cyberspace is where your money is right now." The other was "Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the phone." This latter expression is really true. When you're on the phone, at least for any mildly involving conversation, you aren't fully psychologically present. This is why it seems feels so wrong/rude when people in company talk on cellphones. They are making themselves partially absent. Their mind is on the conversation, not on what their eyes are seeing.
I prefer it if a driver's mind is in the car with their body.
"One way that the difference between physics and economics really stands out is how cardinal values play a big role in physics down to the tiniest levels but on the level of the individual economic decision maker, cardinal values do not describe well how decisions are made."
Cardinal values are great! Everyone loves cardinal values! And economists do use cardinal values when it's the only way to get meaningful answers (primarily this shows up in expected utility theory).
Economic theory is built largely around ordinal values instead of cardinal not because economists have thought there's any great truth that cardinal isn't appropriate but because:
You can get a lot of results with just ordinality. (Note you can get these same results with cardinality, you just don't always need it.)
Economists like to think of themselves as scientific, which often gets interprested as positivistic, and want to avoid making unfalsifiable assumptions.
So, one of the potential boons of neuroeconomics is what you point out: it can empirically start filling in gaps where economists have been avoiding making assumptions. It's possible that might include starting to use cardinal values where before only ordinal were used. It might even get radical into interpersonal comparison of utility.
Hopefully it won't jsut be a boondoggle.
This work is valuable. The tradition of individual choice in economics has been pretty much based on two approaches until recently. The first approach has largely been one of a bunch of people saying to each other "this seems reasonable doesn't it?" and when enough of them answer "yep", it goes into the theory. The second approach is an attempt to be hardcore scientific and positivist, which basically meant you couldn't put anything in the theory which smacked of knowing how a person felt about anything.
Those two approaches balanced each other out OK, but it obviously leaves things incomplete. Experimental economics in general and neuroeconomics in particular takes things out of that purely thinking-about-it realm and starts to make it empirical. That's mighty cool.
On the other hand, the article was terribly lax in what it considered economics. "Economics" can cover a lot of ground, but reducing it to psychology or cognitive science is counterproductive. Economics is properly about interactions between people, often very large groups of people. Identifying what happens in someone's brain when they think about expected values--or even when they're playing a game with someone else--only tells you about the individual, not the system.
An important part of economics is in describing the individuals, who are usually treated as the "atoms" of an economic system. But economics is more importantly about what happens when you throw a lot of them together, which will still require a lot that you can't get from brainscans.
I had 3 years between finishing my bachelors degree and starting a Ph.D. program. I had a couple jobs and some "off time" (unemployment) during the gap, so I certainly wasn't trading security for education as you are.
Anyway, my experience is that starting grad school is radically different from undergrad for most people, so that it's a big change whether you're going from undergrad or going from the workplace.
The best analogy I can think of for grad school is being a monk. You should get un-used to having disposable time and income. You should get used to spending too much time with the same few people (your classmates, rather than self-selected friends). Time for yourself (exercising, going to a movie) is important, but you likely will think of such activities as serving your studies by oncentrated relaxation.
The idea of programming a game from scratch which is anything like a game you'd buy and play is certainly hard now. When I started (with Basic on an Atari 800), I could find the code for an entire game printed on something like 12 pages of a magazine. Obviously that's not feasible now, not for games which seem like commercial games.
But there are also good tools now which there weren't then. Here's some thoughts, only one of which I've tried.
Neverwinter Nights comes with an extensive toolset to build your own modules. It can be a lot of fun just building a dungeon and putting monsters in it, but you can also do really fancy scripting if you want (the scripting language is C-like, missing some important stuff, but also missing many of the opportunities to screw yourself). There are "wizards" to help put together scripts, which you can then edit. So, a 12-year old who likes the D&D kind of thing can get creative and do coding, while riding the coattails of graphics engine and 3D art which is already done.
I'm sure much the same is true of other games. That's the one I know. I've tried this a little bit with my 7-year old godless daughter. She didn't get into the scripting, but had some fun building a little space where (for instance) two dragons tried to kill each other.
There must be plenty of other possibilities. How about Flash? I haven't done anything with Flash myself, but it seems like fun minigames could be made with that.
Maybe the real way to teach kids about computers is denying them software. (I'm a mean dad.) When I had those early computers, we had games that were kinda fun, but really by far the most fun thing you could do with the computer was one or another kind of hacking. Now, particularly if there's net access, there's a zillion other interesting things to be done.
I should have extended what I was saying above. For the sake of the e-voting discussion all that matters is that I (like many others) distrust this administration tremendously. The specifics of the marketing of the Iraq invasion are part of the cause of this distrust, but we can disagree about that and still agree about this:
Nobody would want a U.S. election in which a large portion of the voters believe there was cheating, particularly not if they believe it's part of a pattern of cheating. Supporters of Bush shouldn't want their candidate elected under a cloud of doubt.
As long as Americans believe that an election can change things, they have a reason to let the system work, even if they disagree strongly with those in power. If there is significant doubt about the legitimacy of elections, then our country will fall apart.
I don't know if people understand just how bad this could get. I was one of many who felt that the 2000 election was a bit fishy, but since it was really close, I could accept that it was effectively decided on a coin-flip. In any case, it was decided, and there was nothing reasonable to be done about it at the time. At least I knew there was another presidential election coming up in 2004.
Since then I've come to *really* distrust Bush and company. Besides the deceit leading up to Iraq, it seems that the Bush administration has developed a pattern of deciding that their desired policies are more important than legal and constitutional niceties like habeas corpus, trial by jury, the Geneva Conventions, etc. I can completely imagine some members of the administration deciding that "staying the course" is more important than the peculiarities of one election.
Maybe I'm over-reacting and being paranoid, but there are a lot of people like me, people who sat quiet after the 2000 election because they had faith our democracy would handle things eventually.
Now suppose the 2004 election is decided for Bush by state or two which uses a bunch of these voting machines. Then what do I do? Do I take it quietly again, when I've got no way to know if there was cheating?
Again, I'm one of many. Our democracy may not be strong enough to handle 35% of the public believing in a pattern of stolen presidential elections. After all, what do we do if voting can't change things?
"rationality", even as defined by economists, does allow for falsifiability. In social sciences, there's always room for argument, but there's certain things which economists will recognize as irrational.
According to one definition of rationality, a rational person will act to maximize expected utility. That is, when there's some uncertainty about the results of various choices, a person wil act to maximize the expected value of their preference for each of the possible outcomes. There's lots of experiments which can falsify this, and it's been falsified by many of them, and economists are spending a good bit of time arguing about whether (a) the theory is good, but misapplied, (b) the theory is bad, but the best available, or (c) one of several other theories is more useful.
A more universally accepted criterion for rationality is "transitivity". Joe has transitive preferences if, given that Jose prefers A to B, and B to C, then Joe must prefer A to C. (This can be argued in many cases, because maybe Joe prefers A to B some of the time, and B to A other times, but it's something to go on.) There are also experiments which show this to be false for a lot of people a least some of the time, but other experiments show that market discipline tends to push people towards transitivity. So, people are arguing about this still, though less than the expected-utility stuff above.
There's other formal things which go into definitions of rationality, all of which are falsifiable (though it can be difficult). Economists aren't trying to muddy the waters to make things difficult. They're trying to define things in such a way that they are concrete and falsifiable, but also pretty broadly applicable. Otherwise they might wind up saying that anyone who eats haggis is irrational or something.
Most economic theory which takes a stand on individual behavior assumes individuals are "rational". But there's lots of caveats to that. First, "rational" to an economist (or decision theorist) doesn't mean exactly what it would mean in normal conversation. It's close, though. A rational person makes the choice that gives the best expected outcome given the information they have available (more or less).
The big thing which might be different about the formal definition and the vernacular idea of rationality is that the formal definition allows for far-out individual ideas of what's the "best outcome available". So, if a person chooses to drink themselves silly, lose their job and wind up sleeping in the gutter, an economist can't for sure say it's irrational, because it's just possible that's what the person considered the best outcome.
[Then there's all kinds of additional peculiarities about definition(s) (yeah, there are alternate definitions) of rational, particularly when you include uncertainty. Bleah.]
Regardless, you're right that most economists do recognize this is a simplification. That leaves questions about how much is lost in the simplification. Many economists feel that while certain decisions by certain individuals are irrational, models based on rational people work out very well when looking at aggregates (market behavior, for instance). One reason is that they believe markets tend to discipline participants to behave rationally (or make those who behave irrationally irrelevant to aggregate outcomes by bankrupting them early).
And, there is a significant subfield in economics which tries to model "limited rationality" or "bounded rationality". Herb Simon (Nobel Prize-winning economist, decision theorist, and AI pioneer) had the idea of "satisficing", that people tried to get the best outcome to some degree, but settled for something satisfactory at some point rather than keep pushing for the best possible. (Part of the idea, which others have explored, is that it takes time, energy, and resources to figure out which choice is the best, and so it may be a kind of rational behavior to accept less-than-the-best outcome in order to save the decision resources).
There's lots of other bounded rationality ideas as well. A recent neat one applied to game theory is the "quantal response equilibrium", which often has a lot in common with the Nash Equilibrium, but allows for all the players to randomly make mistakes.
Almost all this stuff is different from broad theories of social irrationality, because the above "limited rationality" theories still base their analysis on the individual decision maker, and then derive what happens at a larger level (like the market), while Elliot Wave theory seems to ignore the individual and concentrate on the market as a whole.
I just avoid the rebate process, since I know I'm too flaky to properly take advantage of them. I'm exactly the sort of person they'd love to get buying stuff with a rebate, since I'm bound to lose the rebate slip.
However, my brother recently bought something at Best Buy with a $15 mail-in rebate. The check nicely came back, but with the wrong name on it. How the hell do you fix something like that once they get it wrong?
Padilla was originally detained the same way Hawash was, on a material witness warrant. It's one of those things where I must admit I was originally willing to look the other way, "Hey, they're stretching the purpose of a material witness warant, but these are extreme circumstances."
But the Bush government has demonstrated with the Padilla case that they're unwlling to just stretch the rules a little in extreme circumstances. They want to ignore the rules entirely. So, in another couple weeks, perhaps Maher Hawash will be whisked away to a military base in some federal judicial district friendly to the administration, never to be heard from again.
At least in Hawash's case he so far: (a) has access to a lawyer, and (b) is being detained with a judge's consent. That's a tiny bit of accountability. For Padilla, the government is refusing any accountability.
Yep, that's the big problem. The "secret" in secret ballot is essential to the voting process. For the kind of voting we all know and (maybe) love, the system should be such that nobody has the ability to give up the secret of how they voted.
Otherwise, you have bosses looking over their employees' shoulders while they vote, people trading buffalo wings and beer for votes, etc.
I'm a stupid user. Even when I'm coding, I like to treat my system as if I'm a stupid user. It's a magic box with a demon inside who does more or less what I tell him to do.
I hate Windows because it's unstable, and I'm not fond of Microsoft's business practices, so I'd love to switch. Ideally, I'd like to switch to some free software *nix. But I don't want to have to think so hard about getting my system up and running. I want to know that most software I want to run will run, without worrying about Wine or such things.
The alternatives are catchnig up, but still it looks like if I drop Windows for my next machine I'll go Mac instead of *nix.
Until today, I'd been amazed that I mostly approved of what we (we being the U.S., mainly, but also its allies in the matter) were doing: Lots of intelligence and criminal investigation work; Isolating Afghanistan; Gathering international agreement that terrorism sucks; Freezing assets. Stuff like that is great.
I've been scared by the rhetoric, though. And I believe the rhetoric is a better example of the Bush administration's real plans. Bush clearly learned a lesson from his father in the Persian Gulf War, which is to issue impossible and non-negotiable demands and pretend you're giving your opponent a chance to concede while you're actually just preparing to attack. Also, remember this war we've been promised doesn't end with the capture or death of Bin Laden, or the overthrow of the Taliban. That's what's most wrong.
My great fear about this war is that we're committing to an "infinite" or "enduring" or what-have-you struggle in which we claim the right to strike into any country which isn't big enough to hit back. Yemen, the Sudan, Pakstan, the Phillipines, and Egypt all are linked to generic "Islamic Terrorists", if not al Qaeda spcifically. And there are many others.
What would be right is to continue to isloate those countries which support terrorism, and to try to handle this atrocity as a crime against humanity, rather than just a strike against the U.S. Pakistan says that the evidence we've shown them is enough to indict. Let's try to get an indictment from the Hague. What should we do? More of what we've done in the last three weeks, and less of tactics which involve making dead people.
How to counter this kind of terrorism? "To fight these bastards you don't need a military attack," said an experienced Israeli commando officer. "You only need to adopt Israel's assassination policy."
Interesting, since previous to that the article points out:
Imad Mughniyeh apparently kills Beirut CIA boss William Buckly in 1984.
So the CIA & Mossad jointly blow up 75 people, including Hizbullah's spiritual leader and Mughniyeh's brother.
And then, in 1992, Isreal blows up the head of Hizbullah (and his wife and children).
So, Mughniyeh blows up 92 people in the Isreali embassy to Argentina.
So, Isreal blows up four more people in Beirut, including another brother of Mughniyeh.
And then the implication is, Mughniyeh blew up (caused to be blown up) 4 planes, 3 buildings and over 5000 people.
Yeah, sounds like Isreal's assassination policy is a sure-fire winner.
> Really, is that any worse than "The Empire Strikes Back"?
...or "Return of the Jedi"?
Star Wars has always been sci-fi space opera fluff--GREAT sci-fi space opera fluff. It's the stuff of cheap, easy teenage male fantasy, with slimy green aliens keeping our women in bondage fetish wear, big explosions, simple farmboys secretly being born to be galactic heros, etc.
"Attack of the Clones" is a perfect title in this tradition.
If we're talking about "should", I'll largely agree with you. Microsoft is in a very unusual situation, and should step a bit more carefully because of that.
The problem is that EFF lawyer Gross isn't making an ethical argument, she's making a legal one. What she's saying is that intermediary-modified content (with the user's consent) is a derivative work, and is therefore illegal (without the publisher's consent). If that argument became effective law through a court case, do you think there would be an exception for stripping ads? Web publishers certainly don't want you stripping ads. How about products like Third Voice (which is apparently dead anyway)?
Filters like the Jesusification could likely survive as parodies, but that's one of the only defenses against charges of creating derivative works (says this nonlawyer). Is the problem really the content modification? What if there was a site I could go to which would read the text of any URL I typed in and add (clearly marked) links to left/right-wing commentary on the topics, otherwise leaving the content, ads and all, untouched? To me, that seems a beneficial use of the web. According to this, that would be copyright violation.
"Having a huge commercial entity develop the capacity to place commercial advertising on EVERY page without paying for it DOES matter."
Again, I'll agree that it matters, but I don't believe it matters according to copyright law. The real problem might not be the content addition, but the "huge commercial entity", which implies that appealing o copyright law may be a problem, and that one should try an appeal to antitrust law instead.
I don't like seeing an EFF lawyer arguing for such obnoxious interpretation of copyright law. The argument that any automated modification of web content is creating a derivative work could greatly reduce our freedoms.
As others have pointed out, stripping ads would then also be illegal. So would things like the Jesus filter.
Yes, it should be clear what's from the original page and what's not, but please don't start arguing that web pages are legally inviolable, or we'll all regret it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell not?
OK, I can understand why Rumsfeld shouldn't be fired, because Bush would appoint his successor, and it's the Bush administration which is the problem, not Rumsfeld specifically.
But, yes, Bush is a liar. In 2004, he said:
And, yes, Gonzales is a fascist in that he does the dirty work for a fascist administration. The Bush administration is all about big, authoritarian, central government buttressing and buttressed by relationships to large businesses. They assert repeatedly and publically that they can "legally" lock you up without trial (Jose Padilla), tap your phone without a warrant, torture you, and on, and on...
We have to take care for our sanity as a nation. We've reached the point where the truth sounds like conspiracy theories, and so speaking the truth prompts people to call you a kook. It's not that what you're saying is kooky, it's that the truth is so far-out.
The truth is that the President says he can lock you up without trial, and he has done it to a U.S. citizen detained in the U.S.
The truth is that the President reserves the right to torture you, regardless of international agreements or laws passed by congress.
The truth is that the President says he can tap your phone without a court order.
None of the above is arguable. Bush has made all of these statements publicly (well, the torture thing was in a signing statement).
This isn't what most people mean when they talk about paper & voting machines. What is usually meant is this:
The voter goes into the booth and uses a computer to do their votes, which are tallied electronically. The computer prints out a paper slip which says how the person voted. HOWEVER, that slip is handled one of two ways. Either the voter then carries the paper slip to a ballot box just like they do with hand-done ballots now, or the paper slip appears to the voter behind a piece of glass and is then dumped in a ballot box attached to the computer, without the voter getting access to it.
The idea is that it creates a hard-to-tamper-with backup for the electronic record of votes. Other people care about secret ballots, too (although not enough people considering how much absentee voting and vote-by-mail is done these days) and so the system doesn't provide you with a receipt you can bring to your boss to prove you voted the "right" way.
Generally, people who don't want to get into a device think about the device as it's function. A dishwasher is a machine which washes dishes, and most people won't think very hard about how the motors and pumps and timers work. A car is a machine which takes you and your stuff from here to there, etc. Form follows function, and a car is designed to take you from here to there reasonably safely and comfortably.
The problem is that a computer *isn't* like this, at least not for most people, not yet. A computer may be the machine you use to check your email or browse the web, but that's really not what it *is*. A computer isn't designed to browse the web, it's designed to run software. Some of that software includes web browsers.
I think that's a big part of why people have trouble with computers. They want to know, "why doesn't my computer just *work*?" And the answer is that it's really hard to even say what that means for a computer. It's a general-purpose device. Companies which sell systems sometimes try to package the computer as an appliance with some finite number of functions, but without making the whole thing run off ROM and denying the user the chance to do new fun stuff, it's really not an appliance.
About the time that "Kill Bill" came out, I saw Conan O'Brien interviewing Quentin Tarantino. Two guys, about 40 years old, who are extremely popular and influential in defining pop culture. And *man* were they both geeks, in the bad senses as well as the good. Then I realized, wow, yeah.
As much as we'd like to be able to say that religion and science are compatible, but speak to different areas, it's not always true. Often religions state concrete things about the world, and those things may be incompatible with things supported by science.
In this case, the cardinal is at least sorta right. The belief that today's organisms got the way they are via natural selection is inherently incompatible with the belief that God created them a particular way. One could argue that God wanted kangaroos to be a certain way and so he created kangaroos via a process which involved many intervening life-forms. That gets evolution and intelligent design both, but it isn't natural selection. Natural selection is *inherently* an unguided process and any theory in which a god has a hand in making life the way it is is *inherently* a guided process.
I'm quite disappointed that I can't find the reference, but some time ago I read an article by Stephen J. Gould which said the same thing. The cardinal isn't being radical, he's just clarifying a point which is that the Catholic church's view is that life is the way it is because God wants it that way. You certainly aren't obligated to believe him (I don't).
The difference between talking to someone in the seat next to you and talking to someone on the cell phone is that when you're talking to someone on the cellphone, you're only partly in the car.
There were two expressions that used to be popular to get across the idea of cyberspace. One was "Cyberspace is where your money is right now." The other was "Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the phone." This latter expression is really true. When you're on the phone, at least for any mildly involving conversation, you aren't fully psychologically present. This is why it seems feels so wrong/rude when people in company talk on cellphones. They are making themselves partially absent. Their mind is on the conversation, not on what their eyes are seeing.
I prefer it if a driver's mind is in the car with their body.
- You can get a lot of results with just ordinality. (Note you can get these same results with cardinality, you just don't always need it.)
- Economists like to think of themselves as scientific, which often gets interprested as positivistic, and want to avoid making unfalsifiable assumptions.
So, one of the potential boons of neuroeconomics is what you point out: it can empirically start filling in gaps where economists have been avoiding making assumptions. It's possible that might include starting to use cardinal values where before only ordinal were used. It might even get radical into interpersonal comparison of utility. Hopefully it won't jsut be a boondoggle.This work is valuable. The tradition of individual choice in economics has been pretty much based on two approaches until recently. The first approach has largely been one of a bunch of people saying to each other "this seems reasonable doesn't it?" and when enough of them answer "yep", it goes into the theory. The second approach is an attempt to be hardcore scientific and positivist, which basically meant you couldn't put anything in the theory which smacked of knowing how a person felt about anything.
Those two approaches balanced each other out OK, but it obviously leaves things incomplete. Experimental economics in general and neuroeconomics in particular takes things out of that purely thinking-about-it realm and starts to make it empirical. That's mighty cool.
On the other hand, the article was terribly lax in what it considered economics. "Economics" can cover a lot of ground, but reducing it to psychology or cognitive science is counterproductive. Economics is properly about interactions between people, often very large groups of people. Identifying what happens in someone's brain when they think about expected values--or even when they're playing a game with someone else--only tells you about the individual, not the system.
An important part of economics is in describing the individuals, who are usually treated as the "atoms" of an economic system. But economics is more importantly about what happens when you throw a lot of them together, which will still require a lot that you can't get from brainscans.
I had 3 years between finishing my bachelors degree and starting a Ph.D. program. I had a couple jobs and some "off time" (unemployment) during the gap, so I certainly wasn't trading security for education as you are.
Anyway, my experience is that starting grad school is radically different from undergrad for most people, so that it's a big change whether you're going from undergrad or going from the workplace.
The best analogy I can think of for grad school is being a monk. You should get un-used to having disposable time and income. You should get used to spending too much time with the same few people (your classmates, rather than self-selected friends). Time for yourself (exercising, going to a movie) is important, but you likely will think of such activities as serving your studies by oncentrated relaxation.
"I've tried this a little bit with my 7-year old godless daughter. ..."
It's a joke her dad started. I'm her "godfather" in a way, but a staunch atheist, so he calls me her godlessfather.
The idea of programming a game from scratch which is anything like a game you'd buy and play is certainly hard now. When I started (with Basic on an Atari 800), I could find the code for an entire game printed on something like 12 pages of a magazine. Obviously that's not feasible now, not for games which seem like commercial games.
But there are also good tools now which there weren't then. Here's some thoughts, only one of which I've tried.
Neverwinter Nights comes with an extensive toolset to build your own modules. It can be a lot of fun just building a dungeon and putting monsters in it, but you can also do really fancy scripting if you want (the scripting language is C-like, missing some important stuff, but also missing many of the opportunities to screw yourself). There are "wizards" to help put together scripts, which you can then edit. So, a 12-year old who likes the D&D kind of thing can get creative and do coding, while riding the coattails of graphics engine and 3D art which is already done.
I'm sure much the same is true of other games. That's the one I know. I've tried this a little bit with my 7-year old godless daughter. She didn't get into the scripting, but had some fun building a little space where (for instance) two dragons tried to kill each other.
There must be plenty of other possibilities. How about Flash? I haven't done anything with Flash myself, but it seems like fun minigames could be made with that.
Maybe the real way to teach kids about computers is denying them software. (I'm a mean dad.) When I had those early computers, we had games that were kinda fun, but really by far the most fun thing you could do with the computer was one or another kind of hacking. Now, particularly if there's net access, there's a zillion other interesting things to be done.
Nobody would want a U.S. election in which a large portion of the voters believe there was cheating, particularly not if they believe it's part of a pattern of cheating. Supporters of Bush shouldn't want their candidate elected under a cloud of doubt.
As long as Americans believe that an election can change things, they have a reason to let the system work, even if they disagree strongly with those in power. If there is significant doubt about the legitimacy of elections, then our country will fall apart.
P.S. I tried both your links to no effect.
I don't know if people understand just how bad this could get. I was one of many who felt that the 2000 election was a bit fishy, but since it was really close, I could accept that it was effectively decided on a coin-flip. In any case, it was decided, and there was nothing reasonable to be done about it at the time. At least I knew there was another presidential election coming up in 2004.
Since then I've come to *really* distrust Bush and company. Besides the deceit leading up to Iraq, it seems that the Bush administration has developed a pattern of deciding that their desired policies are more important than legal and constitutional niceties like habeas corpus, trial by jury, the Geneva Conventions, etc. I can completely imagine some members of the administration deciding that "staying the course" is more important than the peculiarities of one election.
Maybe I'm over-reacting and being paranoid, but there are a lot of people like me, people who sat quiet after the 2000 election because they had faith our democracy would handle things eventually.
Now suppose the 2004 election is decided for Bush by state or two which uses a bunch of these voting machines. Then what do I do? Do I take it quietly again, when I've got no way to know if there was cheating?
Again, I'm one of many. Our democracy may not be strong enough to handle 35% of the public believing in a pattern of stolen presidential elections. After all, what do we do if voting can't change things?
According to one definition of rationality, a rational person will act to maximize expected utility. That is, when there's some uncertainty about the results of various choices, a person wil act to maximize the expected value of their preference for each of the possible outcomes. There's lots of experiments which can falsify this, and it's been falsified by many of them, and economists are spending a good bit of time arguing about whether (a) the theory is good, but misapplied, (b) the theory is bad, but the best available, or (c) one of several other theories is more useful.
A more universally accepted criterion for rationality is "transitivity". Joe has transitive preferences if, given that Jose prefers A to B, and B to C, then Joe must prefer A to C. (This can be argued in many cases, because maybe Joe prefers A to B some of the time, and B to A other times, but it's something to go on.) There are also experiments which show this to be false for a lot of people a least some of the time, but other experiments show that market discipline tends to push people towards transitivity. So, people are arguing about this still, though less than the expected-utility stuff above.
There's other formal things which go into definitions of rationality, all of which are falsifiable (though it can be difficult). Economists aren't trying to muddy the waters to make things difficult. They're trying to define things in such a way that they are concrete and falsifiable, but also pretty broadly applicable. Otherwise they might wind up saying that anyone who eats haggis is irrational or something.
The big thing which might be different about the formal definition and the vernacular idea of rationality is that the formal definition allows for far-out individual ideas of what's the "best outcome available". So, if a person chooses to drink themselves silly, lose their job and wind up sleeping in the gutter, an economist can't for sure say it's irrational, because it's just possible that's what the person considered the best outcome.
[Then there's all kinds of additional peculiarities about definition(s) (yeah, there are alternate definitions) of rational, particularly when you include uncertainty. Bleah.] Regardless, you're right that most economists do recognize this is a simplification. That leaves questions about how much is lost in the simplification. Many economists feel that while certain decisions by certain individuals are irrational, models based on rational people work out very well when looking at aggregates (market behavior, for instance). One reason is that they believe markets tend to discipline participants to behave rationally (or make those who behave irrationally irrelevant to aggregate outcomes by bankrupting them early).
And, there is a significant subfield in economics which tries to model "limited rationality" or "bounded rationality". Herb Simon (Nobel Prize-winning economist, decision theorist, and AI pioneer) had the idea of "satisficing", that people tried to get the best outcome to some degree, but settled for something satisfactory at some point rather than keep pushing for the best possible. (Part of the idea, which others have explored, is that it takes time, energy, and resources to figure out which choice is the best, and so it may be a kind of rational behavior to accept less-than-the-best outcome in order to save the decision resources).
There's lots of other bounded rationality ideas as well. A recent neat one applied to game theory is the "quantal response equilibrium", which often has a lot in common with the Nash Equilibrium, but allows for all the players to randomly make mistakes.
Almost all this stuff is different from broad theories of social irrationality, because the above "limited rationality" theories still base their analysis on the individual decision maker, and then derive what happens at a larger level (like the market), while Elliot Wave theory seems to ignore the individual and concentrate on the market as a whole.
I just avoid the rebate process, since I know I'm too flaky to properly take advantage of them. I'm exactly the sort of person they'd love to get buying stuff with a rebate, since I'm bound to lose the rebate slip.
However, my brother recently bought something at Best Buy with a $15 mail-in rebate. The check nicely came back, but with the wrong name on it. How the hell do you fix something like that once they get it wrong?
Padilla was originally detained the same way Hawash was, on a material witness warrant. It's one of those things where I must admit I was originally willing to look the other way, "Hey, they're stretching the purpose of a material witness warant, but these are extreme circumstances."
But the Bush government has demonstrated with the Padilla case that they're unwlling to just stretch the rules a little in extreme circumstances. They want to ignore the rules entirely. So, in another couple weeks, perhaps Maher Hawash will be whisked away to a military base in some federal judicial district friendly to the administration, never to be heard from again.
At least in Hawash's case he so far: (a) has access to a lawyer, and (b) is being detained with a judge's consent. That's a tiny bit of accountability. For Padilla, the government is refusing any accountability.
Yep, that's the big problem. The "secret" in secret ballot is essential to the voting process. For the kind of voting we all know and (maybe) love, the system should be such that nobody has the ability to give up the secret of how they voted.
Otherwise, you have bosses looking over their employees' shoulders while they vote, people trading buffalo wings and beer for votes, etc.
Hm, I'd always pictured her as being white, but I guess that doesn't matter...
Susan Calvin was my all-time favorite Asimov character. It'll be a shame to see her played down to play up an action-hero.
I'm a stupid user. Even when I'm coding, I like to treat my system as if I'm a stupid user. It's a magic box with a demon inside who does more or less what I tell him to do.
I hate Windows because it's unstable, and I'm not fond of Microsoft's business practices, so I'd love to switch. Ideally, I'd like to switch to some free software *nix. But I don't want to have to think so hard about getting my system up and running. I want to know that most software I want to run will run, without worrying about Wine or such things.
The alternatives are catchnig up, but still it looks like if I drop Windows for my next machine I'll go Mac instead of *nix.
Until today, I'd been amazed that I mostly approved of what we (we being the U.S., mainly, but also its allies in the matter) were doing: Lots of intelligence and criminal investigation work; Isolating Afghanistan; Gathering international agreement that terrorism sucks; Freezing assets. Stuff like that is great.
I've been scared by the rhetoric, though. And I believe the rhetoric is a better example of the Bush administration's real plans. Bush clearly learned a lesson from his father in the Persian Gulf War, which is to issue impossible and non-negotiable demands and pretend you're giving your opponent a chance to concede while you're actually just preparing to attack. Also, remember this war we've been promised doesn't end with the capture or death of Bin Laden, or the overthrow of the Taliban. That's what's most wrong.
My great fear about this war is that we're committing to an "infinite" or "enduring" or what-have-you struggle in which we claim the right to strike into any country which isn't big enough to hit back. Yemen, the Sudan, Pakstan, the Phillipines, and Egypt all are linked to generic "Islamic Terrorists", if not al Qaeda spcifically. And there are many others.
What would be right is to continue to isloate those countries which support terrorism, and to try to handle this atrocity as a crime against humanity, rather than just a strike against the U.S. Pakistan says that the evidence we've shown them is enough to indict. Let's try to get an indictment from the Hague. What should we do? More of what we've done in the last three weeks, and less of tactics which involve making dead people.
- Imad Mughniyeh apparently kills Beirut CIA boss William Buckly in 1984.
- So the CIA & Mossad jointly blow up 75 people, including Hizbullah's spiritual leader and Mughniyeh's brother.
- And then, in 1992, Isreal blows up the head of Hizbullah (and his wife and children).
- So, Mughniyeh blows up 92 people in the Isreali embassy to Argentina.
- So, Isreal blows up four more people in Beirut, including another brother of Mughniyeh.
- And then the implication is, Mughniyeh blew up (caused to be blown up) 4 planes, 3 buildings and over 5000 people.
Yeah, sounds like Isreal's assassination policy is a sure-fire winner.Star Wars has always been sci-fi space opera fluff--GREAT sci-fi space opera fluff. It's the stuff of cheap, easy teenage male fantasy, with slimy green aliens keeping our women in bondage fetish wear, big explosions, simple farmboys secretly being born to be galactic heros, etc.
"Attack of the Clones" is a perfect title in this tradition.
The problem is that EFF lawyer Gross isn't making an ethical argument, she's making a legal one. What she's saying is that intermediary-modified content (with the user's consent) is a derivative work, and is therefore illegal (without the publisher's consent). If that argument became effective law through a court case, do you think there would be an exception for stripping ads? Web publishers certainly don't want you stripping ads. How about products like Third Voice (which is apparently dead anyway)?
Filters like the Jesusification could likely survive as parodies, but that's one of the only defenses against charges of creating derivative works (says this nonlawyer). Is the problem really the content modification? What if there was a site I could go to which would read the text of any URL I typed in and add (clearly marked) links to left/right-wing commentary on the topics, otherwise leaving the content, ads and all, untouched? To me, that seems a beneficial use of the web. According to this, that would be copyright violation.
"Having a huge commercial entity develop the capacity to place commercial advertising on EVERY page without paying for it DOES matter."
Again, I'll agree that it matters, but I don't believe it matters according to copyright law. The real problem might not be the content addition, but the "huge commercial entity", which implies that appealing o copyright law may be a problem, and that one should try an appeal to antitrust law instead.
As others have pointed out, stripping ads would then also be illegal. So would things like the Jesus filter.
Yes, it should be clear what's from the original page and what's not, but please don't start arguing that web pages are legally inviolable, or we'll all regret it.