Actually, uhm. No. I tried many times to get into shooters on consoles. I consistently found it stressful and unfun, because it didn't map well. Mouse+keyboard, I'm fine with.
If you're used to console shooters, they'll feel natural to you, but that doesn't mean that they're objectively "more natural".
Me? I got a Wii and suddenly loved console shooters, because I had a pointing device that was actually good at pointing.
Of course. My lawyer has actively encouraged me to understand the law, to understand the technical language used and the reasons for which the technical language exists, and to be able to go handle my own cases when I want to. When I sued MSI for trying to stiff me on a rebate, I didn't have to have my lawyer do it, I just did it myself, because I knew how.
I'm not particularly opposed to the adversarial model of law. It may not be ideal, but I've never seen a credible alternative proposed. I would also point out that "persuasion and charisma" don't necessarily trump logic, reasoning, and evidence. They may have influence, but it's not at all obvious that they automatically win when the evidence is against you.
Your presumption of bad intent in the writing of laws doesn't seem to be particularly supported by evidence. There are sound technical reasons for jargon in any field, because it allows people to streamline communications and write things that are much clearer if you're willing to put in the time to learn that jargon.
Law as a profession is not the problem, and telling lawyers to kill themselves wouldn't fix it if it were.
Thanks, we totally needed more people speaking up for a large pool of unrepentant killers.
You have something better to suggest, you go right ahead and suggest it. In the mean time, all you're doing is promoting legal chicanery which directly leads to people who actually did drive while drunk getting to continue doing it until they kill someone, and possibly after that, too.
Look, if you go around shooting a gun randomly in a city, we don't wait until you hit someone to make you stop. The reason is that at some point, the "presumed dangers" are a well-understood direct relationship between a dangerous thing and the likelihood of harm. If you could demonstrate, say, that there existed a substantial population of people who could drive safely and reliably when drunk, then you would have a case. But! Guess what! There are no such people that anyone has ever found any evidence of. Everyone we know of gets slower and more erratic when drunk.
Arresting reckless drivers is a good thing, yes. We do that too. You can get in trouble for reckless driving without any hint of alcohol involved. However, if you drive while under the influence, we know that you are driving with bad reflexes and bad judgement on such a scale that, even if you appear to drive okay in the absence of sudden events, you have no reasonable expectation of reacting properly if something unexpected happens.
No amount of drunk-driving apologia will change the fact that, yes, drunk drivers really are that dangerous to the rest of us.
(Me? I got off the roads about 6:15 PM and won't be back on them until Sunday if I can possibly manage it.)
I think the point at which I'll stand up and say "I think our system is OK as-is" will be a point at which the recidivism of drunk drivers is under 1%. As long as drunk drivers commonly continue to drive drunk, I do not think the system is OK as-is.
One of the ways to improve that statistic would be to take occasions on which drunk drivers are particularly likely to offend, and catch them.
I'm pretty much of this opinion as well. Obviously, we are not doing nearly enough about drunk driving. Part of that is a lack of effective penalties, but part of it is a lack of effective enforcement.
If there were a documented widespread problem of false arrests for drunk driving, I would be a lot more concerned, but there isn't. I've never heard a story of such a thing that met basic sanity checks for trustworthiness; I've heard a lot of "well, you can't be sure", but I've never heard of, say, someone getting arrested for drunk driving based on tests supporting that accusation, only to later find out that multiple reliable witnesses testified that the person hadn't been drinking any booze. What we hear instead are people who insist that they "only had a couple of drinks" but who tested out as though they'd had a couple more than that.
The argument that "if doing something about drunk driving worked, it wouldn't still be killing people" is a blatantly stupid argument, because what's being described here is not yet being done in a widespread manner -- and furthermore because our penalties and the viability of shady legal defenses are simply not up to the task of keeping people who drive drunk off the fucking roads.
There is a real tradeoff to consider between the level of imposition on our rights or freedoms a given thing offers, and the amount of prevention it offers us. In the case of drunk driving, the proposed imposition is fairly trivial, and the risk from non-enforcement is huge.
For what it's worth, if I have any sort of booze with a meal, I make a point of walking around for a while before even considering driving. Even just one drink. Now that I'm on meds that can interact with alcohol, I simply don't drive if I've had any booze within the last day or so.
No problem. I just get sick of seeing people bashing lawyers without ever having met one.
I know a guy. I refer to him as "my lawyer". He helped me take a bunch of junk faxers to court, as a result of which, I was able to give about $50k or so to random poor people I knew -- you know, stuff like that one month's rent that makes the difference between staying in your place until your new job starts paying or being out on the street and jobless. I've watched him put in insanely long hours helping poor people get the help they need to get away from scumbag debt collectors, advising trannies on how to get their name changes, stuff like that. I've seen him walk away from large amounts of money if he didn't think the job was ethical. And I've seen the six foot Clash poster in his office.
I also know someone who did Family Practice, which is the most nightmarish job in the world. Hello, welcome to a fight between people who were married for ten years. You are the only person in this room who gives a flying fuck what happens to this kid. Your job is to, without actually telling your client to grow the fuck up, cause your client to stop and think whether she actually wants the kids, or just wants to hurt her soon-to-be ex-husband.
It's like mechanics, really. Yeah, everyone's had a run-in with some guy who will just make shit up to charge you hundreds of bucks. But most of us have eventually found the guy who'll fix stuff for free if he can just reach in and do it, spend two hours on the phone tracking down a replacement part that's no longer made, and tell you "you'll need to replace these, but you've got another six months, easy." Blaming all mechanics for the stereotyped bad ones is just sloppy thinking.
It bugs me to see people who think they're super smart and all good with logic and reasoning, and then the moment you hand 'em a stereotype they just run with it. WTF guys.
Most professionals don't start out with a good network of people. Looking for ideas that other people have is as good a way as any to start, and possibly a better one if you want to think outside the box a bit.
That is a line of utter bullshit, and I say that even granting that we're already talking about the typical cesspit of Slashdot comments.
The bad guys are gonna have legal representation. If all the good guys decide that being a lawyer is a bad profession, then only the bad guys are gonna have legal representation, making things a lot worse.
You might as well argue that people who want to program should throw themselves off of bridges, on the grounds that it's programmers that make botnets. Your comment that "in the end they're usually not helping anybody but their own greedy profiteering selves" is, to put it mildly, pulled out of your ass. I know some lawyers. One's a good drinking buddy. I know many people who have had lawyers represent them in a number of ways. Of all of those cases, there's exactly one where I'd say that the lawyers were only helping themselves, and if the psycho bitch in question hadn't been psycho, she wouldn't have picked those lawyers.
Generalizing from the sorts of stories that make the news is really, really, stupid. Your view of lawyers is about as informed as Jack Thompson's view of video gamers.
Heck, I still remember people saying the iPod was doomed to failure. I may even have been one of them. Now I have an iPhone, both the people I live with have iPods, and I have an iPad.
Not even all that hard, I suspect, to replace the keys. They don't need to accept all code signed with the old keys -- only the set of code signed with the old keys that they know they signed, which is a very small number compared to modern storage and computation.
No, not just dialect. Pairs of Shanghai or Mandarin speakers fall back on writing characters to resolve ambiguities in the spoken language. It's not something you'd see several times in a single conversation or anything, but I saw it happen "several" times while living there for a year. Sometimes there's simply no way to tell which of two words is meant without resorting to that.
Same thing happens in English, though more rarely, because most of our homophones aren't easy to confuse in context, but you still see it sometimes. Though we can, of course, just spell it out. Thus, "meet with two Es", rather than writing it down.
Many people with ADHD consistently do better at "hard" things than at "easy" things. I'm a pretty decent programmer, I could do calculus (though not always very well) by about 4th grade... and even now I can't do single-digit arithmetic with complete reliability. Assuming that people who show the pattern I will show on basically any test of my ability in any field I work in are "cheating" is a poor tactic at best.
As a possible indicator, maybe useful. As a definite rule, hell no.
Yes, I know. I have these dictionaries. I have tried to find things on multiple occasions and gotten stumped because I couldn't figure out which subset of the character was officially "the radical" that was being used to index it. And yes, I've used pinyin too. The pinyin section of the dictionary for a syllable might have a dozen or more characters for that syllable, each of which has multiple two-character combinations that give other meanings, so I have to check every character to see whether one of those combinations is the one I'm looking for... It's not a very effective technique. It's doable, but compared to an English dictionary, it's unduly painful.
I have seen people speaking Chinese resort to air-writing characters on multiple occasions.
Or, if they're witty, finger-writing a character on their palm and then showing you their palm. But it's funny because the issue comes up often enough to be instantly recognizable.
Hey, I lived there for a year or so, I can still dream in Chinese. I do have some exposure to this.
Here's the thing. Many characters have a phonetic component. Not all, but many. There's not necessarily any way to tell, looking at a character, which of its components will be phonetic, or if a given component is phonetic, how it's pronounced (some are pronounced a couple of ways). But if you know how something is pronounced, that doesn't give you a clue as to which of many characters it'll be. As a result, if you haven't seen it written, you can't easily guess which of many things starting that way to look up; you can spend quite a while looking through a dictionary, and find a handful of words which might or might not be the one you heard.
Yes, I know. I have several of them. Have you used them much to try to look up unfamiliar words you've heard but not seen written? I've found it pretty difficult. Certainly orders of magnitude harder than doing the same thing in, say, English, where I can usually guess the first few letters of a word in a couple of tries, and I probably get it in one try more than half the time.
I can't find it off the top of my head, but I once read an article about a Chinese intellectual who argued that the ideographs would have to go for China to reach its full potential.
There are oddities of an ideographic language which do pose some difficulties. Even a fluent full-time writer can encounter new words. In an alphabetic language, if you hear a word, you can guess at how it might be spelled to look it up. In a language like Chinese, you usually (but not always) can't guess how it's written well enough to look it up. Then, if you see it written, you may not have any guess as to how it's pronounced, leaving you with the possibility of encountering a word twice in one day without even a clue that they're the same word.
That's a bit of a simplification, as in some cases you can make a pretty good educated guess as to the sound of a word, or look things up by pronunciation. Still, it's an issue, and it's not just an issue for people who learn Chinese as a second language.
Not only am I autistic, I have an autistic friend. I got curious at one point and asked someone who knows us both whether my autististic friend makes eye contact. Apparently she doesn't. I never knew. (And I'd say we go out to lunch or dinner together maybe twice a week, whereupon we chat and/or play with electronic gizmos.)
I've got clinical diagnoses for both autism ("high-functioning") and ADHD (where I'm apparently on the fairly epic fringe). If I understand correctly what people mean by "bragging", I think that's another of the things I don't get. So far as I can tell, all my attempts to assign coherent meaning to words like "proud" or "ashamed" have come up with stuff which is not actually what people mean by these things. There is some kind of concept of people being "better" or "worse" people, apparently, which I simply can't turn into semantic content to evaluate it. It's not even wrong. So I wasn't trying to express superiority or inferiority. Rather, I was addressing the assertion that the hardwired ability to recognize "persons" was of significant survival value, such that lacking it would prevent survival. It is not so. All you need to be able to do is pick them out by thinking about them quickly enough, and "quickly enough" can be on a scale of minutes, not microseconds.
When it comes to, say, predators, it doesn't [b]matter[/b] whether there's a mind. An Eliza-grade AI running claws and teeth will kill you just as dead as a deeply emotional and philosophical panther. So again, the intuitive recognition of mind is irrelevant; what matters is recognition of behavioral patterns. Spotting minds can help with that, but it can also mislead you.
I'm autistic. I don't seem to have the automatic distinction between things with minds and things without minds. In fact, I can occasionally forget that other people have minds, briefly. For instance, a couple of days ago, I was pinching Beloved Spouse's cheeks, and I suddenly got fascinated with how the various components of the face are connected and deform each other. I started messing with this. Suddenly it occurred to me: There is a person experiencing this, and it may not be a preferred experience. But there you have it; for a good four or five seconds, I had completely forgotten that my spouse was a sapient creature. While staring directly at said spouse's face.
I can't think of an occasion on which this has been any kind of survival problem. (My spouse is very forgiving.)
I suspect that it's useful to get this stuff automatically, but it also produces all sorts of strange buggy behavior when we find things that trigger the "that's people" grey matter but which aren't actually people.
I don't think it's rational for you to accuse me of being delusional. Since I'm arguing against "net neutrality", I am by definition "part of the anti-net neutrality forces". Since I am telling you exactly what I am concerned with, the only way I could be deluded about this would be if I were totally wrong about what my arguments or interests were, and that seems pretty unlikely.
I want the ability to block unwanted traffic. I ran a small ISP for a while (heck, technically I still have a few people using my server for their internet stuff), and we block a LOT of traffic. We use two or three blacklists for spammers, we have a local blacklist, we greylist... And you know what? It was a popular feature. People did occasionally want to be outside the filters... often, they'd ask for this, thinking they wanted it, then a week later tell us to put the filters back on their stream.
That's us, a network provider, blocking traffic because we know that if we don't block it, we can't provide good service.
That said, I do agree that there's a serious issue with phrasing it well enough that people in Congress can understand, because if they don't understand it, the law we'll get will be a Bad Thing.
You're telling me that the people who thought the DMCA would improve my life as a writer and programmer ought to be in charge of my life as a network admin. I'm telling you that's batshit insane.
Once I've decided that traffic is unwanted, can my ISP block it for me, or do I still have to block it myself? If they block it for me, aren't they no longer net-neutral?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, uhm. No. I tried many times to get into shooters on consoles. I consistently found it stressful and unfun, because it didn't map well. Mouse+keyboard, I'm fine with.
If you're used to console shooters, they'll feel natural to you, but that doesn't mean that they're objectively "more natural".
Me? I got a Wii and suddenly loved console shooters, because I had a pointing device that was actually good at pointing.
Of course. My lawyer has actively encouraged me to understand the law, to understand the technical language used and the reasons for which the technical language exists, and to be able to go handle my own cases when I want to. When I sued MSI for trying to stiff me on a rebate, I didn't have to have my lawyer do it, I just did it myself, because I knew how.
I'm not particularly opposed to the adversarial model of law. It may not be ideal, but I've never seen a credible alternative proposed. I would also point out that "persuasion and charisma" don't necessarily trump logic, reasoning, and evidence. They may have influence, but it's not at all obvious that they automatically win when the evidence is against you.
Your presumption of bad intent in the writing of laws doesn't seem to be particularly supported by evidence. There are sound technical reasons for jargon in any field, because it allows people to streamline communications and write things that are much clearer if you're willing to put in the time to learn that jargon.
Law as a profession is not the problem, and telling lawyers to kill themselves wouldn't fix it if it were.
Thanks, we totally needed more people speaking up for a large pool of unrepentant killers.
You have something better to suggest, you go right ahead and suggest it. In the mean time, all you're doing is promoting legal chicanery which directly leads to people who actually did drive while drunk getting to continue doing it until they kill someone, and possibly after that, too.
No.
Look, if you go around shooting a gun randomly in a city, we don't wait until you hit someone to make you stop. The reason is that at some point, the "presumed dangers" are a well-understood direct relationship between a dangerous thing and the likelihood of harm. If you could demonstrate, say, that there existed a substantial population of people who could drive safely and reliably when drunk, then you would have a case. But! Guess what! There are no such people that anyone has ever found any evidence of. Everyone we know of gets slower and more erratic when drunk.
Arresting reckless drivers is a good thing, yes. We do that too. You can get in trouble for reckless driving without any hint of alcohol involved. However, if you drive while under the influence, we know that you are driving with bad reflexes and bad judgement on such a scale that, even if you appear to drive okay in the absence of sudden events, you have no reasonable expectation of reacting properly if something unexpected happens.
No amount of drunk-driving apologia will change the fact that, yes, drunk drivers really are that dangerous to the rest of us.
(Me? I got off the roads about 6:15 PM and won't be back on them until Sunday if I can possibly manage it.)
I think the point at which I'll stand up and say "I think our system is OK as-is" will be a point at which the recidivism of drunk drivers is under 1%. As long as drunk drivers commonly continue to drive drunk, I do not think the system is OK as-is.
One of the ways to improve that statistic would be to take occasions on which drunk drivers are particularly likely to offend, and catch them.
I'm pretty much of this opinion as well. Obviously, we are not doing nearly enough about drunk driving. Part of that is a lack of effective penalties, but part of it is a lack of effective enforcement.
If there were a documented widespread problem of false arrests for drunk driving, I would be a lot more concerned, but there isn't. I've never heard a story of such a thing that met basic sanity checks for trustworthiness; I've heard a lot of "well, you can't be sure", but I've never heard of, say, someone getting arrested for drunk driving based on tests supporting that accusation, only to later find out that multiple reliable witnesses testified that the person hadn't been drinking any booze. What we hear instead are people who insist that they "only had a couple of drinks" but who tested out as though they'd had a couple more than that.
The argument that "if doing something about drunk driving worked, it wouldn't still be killing people" is a blatantly stupid argument, because what's being described here is not yet being done in a widespread manner -- and furthermore because our penalties and the viability of shady legal defenses are simply not up to the task of keeping people who drive drunk off the fucking roads.
There is a real tradeoff to consider between the level of imposition on our rights or freedoms a given thing offers, and the amount of prevention it offers us. In the case of drunk driving, the proposed imposition is fairly trivial, and the risk from non-enforcement is huge.
For what it's worth, if I have any sort of booze with a meal, I make a point of walking around for a while before even considering driving. Even just one drink. Now that I'm on meds that can interact with alcohol, I simply don't drive if I've had any booze within the last day or so.
No problem. I just get sick of seeing people bashing lawyers without ever having met one.
I know a guy. I refer to him as "my lawyer". He helped me take a bunch of junk faxers to court, as a result of which, I was able to give about $50k or so to random poor people I knew -- you know, stuff like that one month's rent that makes the difference between staying in your place until your new job starts paying or being out on the street and jobless. I've watched him put in insanely long hours helping poor people get the help they need to get away from scumbag debt collectors, advising trannies on how to get their name changes, stuff like that. I've seen him walk away from large amounts of money if he didn't think the job was ethical. And I've seen the six foot Clash poster in his office.
I also know someone who did Family Practice, which is the most nightmarish job in the world. Hello, welcome to a fight between people who were married for ten years. You are the only person in this room who gives a flying fuck what happens to this kid. Your job is to, without actually telling your client to grow the fuck up, cause your client to stop and think whether she actually wants the kids, or just wants to hurt her soon-to-be ex-husband.
It's like mechanics, really. Yeah, everyone's had a run-in with some guy who will just make shit up to charge you hundreds of bucks. But most of us have eventually found the guy who'll fix stuff for free if he can just reach in and do it, spend two hours on the phone tracking down a replacement part that's no longer made, and tell you "you'll need to replace these, but you've got another six months, easy." Blaming all mechanics for the stereotyped bad ones is just sloppy thinking.
It bugs me to see people who think they're super smart and all good with logic and reasoning, and then the moment you hand 'em a stereotype they just run with it. WTF guys.
Most professionals don't start out with a good network of people. Looking for ideas that other people have is as good a way as any to start, and possibly a better one if you want to think outside the box a bit.
That is a line of utter bullshit, and I say that even granting that we're already talking about the typical cesspit of Slashdot comments.
The bad guys are gonna have legal representation. If all the good guys decide that being a lawyer is a bad profession, then only the bad guys are gonna have legal representation, making things a lot worse.
You might as well argue that people who want to program should throw themselves off of bridges, on the grounds that it's programmers that make botnets. Your comment that "in the end they're usually not helping anybody but their own greedy profiteering selves" is, to put it mildly, pulled out of your ass. I know some lawyers. One's a good drinking buddy. I know many people who have had lawyers represent them in a number of ways. Of all of those cases, there's exactly one where I'd say that the lawyers were only helping themselves, and if the psycho bitch in question hadn't been psycho, she wouldn't have picked those lawyers.
Generalizing from the sorts of stories that make the news is really, really, stupid. Your view of lawyers is about as informed as Jack Thompson's view of video gamers.
Heck, I still remember people saying the iPod was doomed to failure. I may even have been one of them. Now I have an iPhone, both the people I live with have iPods, and I have an iPad.
Not even all that hard, I suspect, to replace the keys. They don't need to accept all code signed with the old keys -- only the set of code signed with the old keys that they know they signed, which is a very small number compared to modern storage and computation.
No, not just dialect. Pairs of Shanghai or Mandarin speakers fall back on writing characters to resolve ambiguities in the spoken language. It's not something you'd see several times in a single conversation or anything, but I saw it happen "several" times while living there for a year. Sometimes there's simply no way to tell which of two words is meant without resorting to that.
Same thing happens in English, though more rarely, because most of our homophones aren't easy to confuse in context, but you still see it sometimes. Though we can, of course, just spell it out. Thus, "meet with two Es", rather than writing it down.
Many people with ADHD consistently do better at "hard" things than at "easy" things. I'm a pretty decent programmer, I could do calculus (though not always very well) by about 4th grade... and even now I can't do single-digit arithmetic with complete reliability. Assuming that people who show the pattern I will show on basically any test of my ability in any field I work in are "cheating" is a poor tactic at best.
As a possible indicator, maybe useful. As a definite rule, hell no.
Yes, I know. I have these dictionaries. I have tried to find things on multiple occasions and gotten stumped because I couldn't figure out which subset of the character was officially "the radical" that was being used to index it. And yes, I've used pinyin too. The pinyin section of the dictionary for a syllable might have a dozen or more characters for that syllable, each of which has multiple two-character combinations that give other meanings, so I have to check every character to see whether one of those combinations is the one I'm looking for... It's not a very effective technique. It's doable, but compared to an English dictionary, it's unduly painful.
I have seen people speaking Chinese resort to air-writing characters on multiple occasions.
Or, if they're witty, finger-writing a character on their palm and then showing you their palm. But it's funny because the issue comes up often enough to be instantly recognizable.
Hey, I lived there for a year or so, I can still dream in Chinese. I do have some exposure to this.
Here's the thing. Many characters have a phonetic component. Not all, but many. There's not necessarily any way to tell, looking at a character, which of its components will be phonetic, or if a given component is phonetic, how it's pronounced (some are pronounced a couple of ways). But if you know how something is pronounced, that doesn't give you a clue as to which of many characters it'll be. As a result, if you haven't seen it written, you can't easily guess which of many things starting that way to look up; you can spend quite a while looking through a dictionary, and find a handful of words which might or might not be the one you heard.
Yes, I know. I have several of them. Have you used them much to try to look up unfamiliar words you've heard but not seen written? I've found it pretty difficult. Certainly orders of magnitude harder than doing the same thing in, say, English, where I can usually guess the first few letters of a word in a couple of tries, and I probably get it in one try more than half the time.
I can't find it off the top of my head, but I once read an article about a Chinese intellectual who argued that the ideographs would have to go for China to reach its full potential.
There are oddities of an ideographic language which do pose some difficulties. Even a fluent full-time writer can encounter new words. In an alphabetic language, if you hear a word, you can guess at how it might be spelled to look it up. In a language like Chinese, you usually (but not always) can't guess how it's written well enough to look it up. Then, if you see it written, you may not have any guess as to how it's pronounced, leaving you with the possibility of encountering a word twice in one day without even a clue that they're the same word.
That's a bit of a simplification, as in some cases you can make a pretty good educated guess as to the sound of a word, or look things up by pronunciation. Still, it's an issue, and it's not just an issue for people who learn Chinese as a second language.
I think that's probably the case for most people.
Not only am I autistic, I have an autistic friend. I got curious at one point and asked someone who knows us both whether my autististic friend makes eye contact. Apparently she doesn't. I never knew. (And I'd say we go out to lunch or dinner together maybe twice a week, whereupon we chat and/or play with electronic gizmos.)
I've got clinical diagnoses for both autism ("high-functioning") and ADHD (where I'm apparently on the fairly epic fringe). If I understand correctly what people mean by "bragging", I think that's another of the things I don't get. So far as I can tell, all my attempts to assign coherent meaning to words like "proud" or "ashamed" have come up with stuff which is not actually what people mean by these things. There is some kind of concept of people being "better" or "worse" people, apparently, which I simply can't turn into semantic content to evaluate it. It's not even wrong. So I wasn't trying to express superiority or inferiority. Rather, I was addressing the assertion that the hardwired ability to recognize "persons" was of significant survival value, such that lacking it would prevent survival. It is not so. All you need to be able to do is pick them out by thinking about them quickly enough, and "quickly enough" can be on a scale of minutes, not microseconds.
When it comes to, say, predators, it doesn't [b]matter[/b] whether there's a mind. An Eliza-grade AI running claws and teeth will kill you just as dead as a deeply emotional and philosophical panther. So again, the intuitive recognition of mind is irrelevant; what matters is recognition of behavioral patterns. Spotting minds can help with that, but it can also mislead you.
Discourage people from getting fired or going to work for a competitor.
I'm autistic. I don't seem to have the automatic distinction between things with minds and things without minds. In fact, I can occasionally forget that other people have minds, briefly. For instance, a couple of days ago, I was pinching Beloved Spouse's cheeks, and I suddenly got fascinated with how the various components of the face are connected and deform each other. I started messing with this. Suddenly it occurred to me: There is a person experiencing this, and it may not be a preferred experience. But there you have it; for a good four or five seconds, I had completely forgotten that my spouse was a sapient creature. While staring directly at said spouse's face.
I can't think of an occasion on which this has been any kind of survival problem. (My spouse is very forgiving.)
I suspect that it's useful to get this stuff automatically, but it also produces all sorts of strange buggy behavior when we find things that trigger the "that's people" grey matter but which aren't actually people.
Non-DDoS traffic to site "A" should not cost more than going to site "B".
What if I just want to block site "A" entirely? What if I'm looking at traffic from them? What about malware, which isn't DDoS?
I don't think it's rational for you to accuse me of being delusional. Since I'm arguing against "net neutrality", I am by definition "part of the anti-net neutrality forces". Since I am telling you exactly what I am concerned with, the only way I could be deluded about this would be if I were totally wrong about what my arguments or interests were, and that seems pretty unlikely.
I want the ability to block unwanted traffic. I ran a small ISP for a while (heck, technically I still have a few people using my server for their internet stuff), and we block a LOT of traffic. We use two or three blacklists for spammers, we have a local blacklist, we greylist... And you know what? It was a popular feature. People did occasionally want to be outside the filters... often, they'd ask for this, thinking they wanted it, then a week later tell us to put the filters back on their stream.
That's us, a network provider, blocking traffic because we know that if we don't block it, we can't provide good service.
That said, I do agree that there's a serious issue with phrasing it well enough that people in Congress can understand, because if they don't understand it, the law we'll get will be a Bad Thing.
You're telling me that the people who thought the DMCA would improve my life as a writer and programmer ought to be in charge of my life as a network admin. I'm telling you that's batshit insane.
Once I've decided that traffic is unwanted, can my ISP block it for me, or do I still have to block it myself? If they block it for me, aren't they no longer net-neutral?