Please, I beg you, read the posts before you respond to them. Please read carefully, and more than anything else, please avoid setting up straw men.
By restating my argument and including material that weakens it, you avoid answering my point in your diatribe.
Of course that is harder to do when you cut to essentials.
Here is the pure essence.
1. If you say people need to die to solve the overopulation problem, or, by extention, you say that cures for fatal diseases are a bad thing because of overpopulation, you are preaching but not practicing unless your assertion is read from a suicide note.
Really, it's that simple.
2. A person asserts, in essence, that *other people* should die to solve the overpopulation problem. His solution is to forego breeding--this person has given up on everything but optimizing his enjoyment of his resource-pool over the course of his own lifetime. He has so solutions, seeks none, and is not thinking of any but enjoying a resource-intensive lifestyle that will end with him.
3. A child of someone like this might think about solutions--might in fact combine awareness that solutions are necessary--'daddy said so'--with the educational/material resources needed to find and implement workable solutions.
I also mentioned that this was unlikely, but better than empty, kumbaya-singing, 'bleeding world' rhetoric limed to an ineluctible(SP) subtext that everything from Cancer, to AIDs and Ebola are not really such bad things...provided they happen only to the right people.
That is the essence of what I wrote. At no time did I say, 'be fruitful and multiply.'
Sometimes it's better to try and spread a viewpoint rather than enact it in certain ways. For example, my contribution is that I will not now, nor will I ever have children.
Actually, the previous post has this one dead to rights logically. Both logically, and in terms extrapolated from common sense.
I have heard this argument before from well-fed, well-educated people and it never ceases to make me wonder.
If cancer cures are bad because unanswerable wasting diseases are an indispensable way to turn the planet back into what it was: a garden where the universe, organized to the point of looking at itself, again gives way to infinitely various displays of eating and sh*tting, then going on in the world without producing children is still hypocrisy.
The main fallacy here is concealed information: living at all as a human creates environmental damage with the greatest amounts of it coming from the rich western nations; from industrialized or industrializing nations with little thought for environment preservation (Russia and especially our good trading buddy, China) and third-world nations with primative subsistance agriculture.
The rainforests burn, in part, because western farm subsidies keep the price of food artificially high to support agrobusiness profits--certainly too high for south American campesinos to buy it. This leaves them having to grow it in the most environmentally harmful ways possible.
Thus, the initial logical flaw in attacking methods of keeping people alive as a means of 'saving the planet' is simple hypocrisy unless you kill yourself--or at the very least, move to some place where you can do the least harm by using the least energy and consuming the least food--I personally reccomend certain parts of Bangladesh during a really bad growing year. Essentially, if you live anywhere where you can reccomend environmental mass euthanasia on a computer forum, you have already failed to go anywhere near what you are advocating.
It is also poor in terms of common sense to forego having children because, unlike doomsayer hypocrits, it is unlikely but not inconcievable that a child of such a person might actually try to come up with real, viable solutions and damned near any solution is better than stating, 'everyone but myself should die.'
No one anywhere can argue that easy access for sex offenders is a good thing. No one can argue that missing children should remain missing. So cameras in schools are a really good thing. No one in his right mind can argue against them.
Yeah right.
The problem with transparent access by power or authority to the new security technologies out there is not that they will do good things like preventing crimes like kidnapping and murder or stealing a pack of gum. The problem is that, the ability to not be watched or spied on, or informed on, privacy, is a form of wealth that gives us freedom of thought and action and the technology in question robs us of that wealth.
The extent to which the value of privacy seems lost on Americans today is disturbing.
Privacy is power. Privacy is the ability to make practical use of Games Theory. It is the ability to engage in transactions with both players starting on a level playing field with incomplete information. It allows the individual to act as an individual on so many levels that it is difficult for many people to frame questions about privacy effectively.
Our society is a hierarchy, a heap, with a broad base and a narrow tip and the erosion of privacy destroys freedom of action in the classic slippery-slope scenario where those at the top of the hierarchy have access to information about those below where that information increases their ability to wield power over them. Cameras and software combinations allows people at the top of the heap to gather information automatically, circumventing the provisions of the classic judicial process in which you must actually *DO SOMETHING* to garner the attention of authority, which then investigates and then prosecutes and punishes.
Classically, jurisprudence and enforcement is retroactive in that it only steps in after the fact, allowing free individuals the choice to do things from 'stretching-the-truth,' to commiting actual crimes or not. Modern security technology is working to allow law-enforcement, and other powerful organizations, a greater and greater ability to be *proactive*--providing a scenario where society has access to information which improves its ability to prosecute or to make decisions in a way which works to remove choice from the individual at the same time as it improves the position of those in power as games players.
Technology which is ostensibly there to protect children can also provide evidence in a fraud case, or in a burglary case, or in a drug case, or in a civil matter like a divorce, and there no provisions for any device ostensibly put in place to perform one security task to not be bent to the service of others.
The cameras are put there to keep track of the children and to make sure that a database listing of pedophiles, but cameras you know about prevent more than just access by pedophiles: they prevent you from thinking that you are not watched and they work to prevent any and everything that those who are not watched might want to do. You pretty much sum up the phrase, 'chilling effect,' with this scenario.
In the end, the answer to the real question of these technologies--from the rings of databases that know your bottom line and whether or not an insurer should grant you a policy that might provide medical care that will keep you from dying--is not to be found in engineering, but in literature: It is the substance of the title and central metaphor in Anthony Burgess's, 'A Clockwork Orange.'
The central question is not 'can be breathe easier because, in this one place, pedophiles and missing children will be automatically detected,' but whether or not anyone can meaningfully be said to be an individual in society with the human capacity for choice when, for all intents and purposes, he lives his life handcuffed between an accountant and a policeman.
If you say you weren't writing an ad for them, and they say they weren't paying you, then I suppose I'm wrong and that post looks so much like an ad because you are just that good.:-)
I've got some mod points and when I saw this, I thought at first that I would just mod this thing down, but I don't think that would really address the issue with this post, because it also has all the hallmarks of good copywriting. In other words, it's an advertisement and there are strong arguments to support the conclusion that the poster is a professional copywriter:
1. His grammar and spelling are flawless. 2. It starts out with a story to get your attention. 3. He is very articulate (when was the last time you saw 'viola' ('look here!' in French sans accent mark) 4. The note took time to write and it is very well-structured. 5. The final paragraph addresses arguments against ignoring the information in the ad ('...works as advertised. Support folk...price...') and it contains an exhortation, a 'call-to-action' which is reccomended in copywriting ('Check it out') in addition to a favorable comparison to a well-known, popular product ('I'd take one of these over an iPod any day.').
Now, I can't prove it's an advertisement, but everything about it smells like one. It feels like one, and I personally think that slashdot should not be an unpaid forum for professionally written text advertising. If you think otherwise, post this.
I'd never liked professional copywriting before, but one day, I saw a bit of it on Slashdot that caught my attention. The writer was smart, easy going, articulate, and full of the brown but in the most tasteful way possible.
Now, I think slashdot is a great place to advertise. If you do too, write Cowboy Neal and tell him to solicite copywriting!
You've got to like topics like this, for writers with a sense of humor, they're like early Christmas presents.
First off, you just have to shake your head and say, 'Only in Cali, man... only in Cali.'
Then you have to wonder about the nature of what's happening to the law in this country. The law can be made to fail in a lot of interesting ways. You can have wacko interpretation (e.g., judges who think putting up a shrine to the ten commandments). You can have dishonest implementation (the IRS being discouraged from going after corporations, the tax-cheats with the most money who happen to owe the most money).
The list is long, but some things make it far more intense. The law they're talking about has got to be neither more nor less than the movie industry using its influence to get sweaty and itchy about anyone's taking copywrited images out of a theater no matter how trivial the image may be. It has to be one true mark of people and organizations that have no sense whatsoever of quality.
In some earlier posts, some people were sidetracked by the idea of people's phones ringing during movies and how much they hated that, but had nothing to do with the article. Cellularphones are basically a nuisance. The actual law here seems something else altogether: a weird fusion of idiocy and intrusion.
Sure, there is a minor threat from people who sit in obscure movie theaters with a video camera on a tripod, but cellphones are a laugh here.
The only reason to use your phone to snap the screen is to be able to go back to the image later so you can say, 'dude...dude... Gigli is the best movie ever! You've gotta check it out.'
Of course, in a state where the motion picture industry can shoot for the moon in asking for rediculous legal extensions (RLE's), proposing or passing a law that specifically encourages overgrown members of the Mickey Mouse club to try a citizen's arrest on someone who could be packing has little liability for the industry, or for the lawmakers (people who, where it not for the enormous influence of Hollywood money, one would suspect of taking three-pipe lunches).
If there is anything really interesting about this story, it is how well it exemplifies one of the great flaws of modern American lawmaking: money and reelection turns politicians into short-sighted whores with no social vision with regard to what the policies in questions can do and at many levels, a good number of the nation's laws (like mandatory sentencing requirements) really do resemble a transaction between one man in a suit and a severely retarted person.
Life would be a lot better for everyone if there were a law on the books allowing lawmakers to be jailed for the consequences of misshapen policies.
If you compare an old system running Win 3.1 and your current system, I'm sure you'll find that the user experience has improved *substantially* over that time.
Interesting that you should mention that. Once, I looked at an old Hitachi laptop, optimized for graphics speed back in the bad old days. In terms of video response, it actually seemed faster than the latest greatest Sony Viao.
Now, I've got to admit that there is no objective measure here without getting up a lot of money for some retro-computing, but the way things seemed in the store that day, the simpler code in the earlier windows system, although nowhere near as as powerful, as the new system, still provided video-response that smoked the newer one.
I'd love to see that kind of response in the computers I find myself using now.
As far as Apple is concerned. Personally, I don't like them for purely personal reasons. I don't think anyone else should dislike them (I don't care) but I'm underimpressed with them. Be that as it may, Apple's eye candy is nice, but can you really call it Apple's?
Apple grabbed a version of BSD and slapped a proprietary GUI on it. It's just an interface, and it doesn't seem to scream onto the screen any more than Windows does.
Yes, it does operate reliably, but the most surprising thing about that is how, in the midst of an amazing technological boom, our expectations have been so skewed by marketing, customer loyalty and compu-ignorance, that we think a company's rectifying problems of N+1 years duration to do what had been par for the course in UNIX is somehow an achievement that goes above and beyond the call of duty.
Moore's law is interesting and the immanent demise of Apple certainly so. However, the most interesting thing for me is how curiosity and greed work together to expand the frontiers in computers and what it's brought about.
True, right now, the yearly, 'we'll-be-helpless-without-faster-computers!' cycle appears to have stopped or slowed down. Big IT buyers seem to have realized that you don't need a machine that could run a weather model to replace a typewriter and that's a real good thing.
But what about software? I could be wrong. I don't do that much with my computer except surfing and writing, but much of what I see makes me wonder where all the really miraculous power of my computer is going.
I've got an operating system that takes up non-trivial space on my harddrive and aside from a constant need to keep up with the virus writers, or dealing with stuff to make Microsoft happy, I'm not seeing the bennies.
You'd think that with all this godawful power, there'd be a little more substance.
Cellular number portability is a great thing. It's one of the few things that allow you to feel warm and fuzzy about the principles of raw capalism.
For the most part, when dealing with small organizations, capitalism works fine--it's what makes a local grocer throw his bad fish away and hire sales people so you don't go to his competition a block down the road. Small-scale Capitalism is just fine for you and me because you have leverage--because every dollar you spend with a company is a vote for that company to exist and the smaller the company, the more your vote counts.
It's only when things get huge that the value of your ability to vote breaks down and remove your leverage, which, under capitalism, is pretty much your entire value as a human being. Number portability gives you back your leverage with a vengeance by removing one of the main impediments to switching. Instead of being just another nameless, faceless cog, number portability makes it possible for you to threaten to be part of a great wave of people who leave one company and go to another one.
Number portability gives you back your value and multiplies it and that is a very, very good thing.
You can see it in the deals that companies are offering. My own carrier, Sprintpcs, has reinstituted the option to have your nights and weekends minutes start at seven PM--returning to what was just standard operating procedure years ago--either as part of a standard plan, or for a nominal fee.
As a long-term customer who has just entered into a contract with them, they've given me nights and weekends starting at eight as part of my contract arrangement as well as a decent rate for service and I am only waiting for my birthday to ask them for an even better deal as a supremely loyal customer who can pay to get out of the contract I've just signed if I see something good enough elsewhere. It's a present I'm going to give myself that only number portability makes possible.
Really, honestly, it's a no-brainer. In the real world, ALL the disincentives to switching carriers in your contract, are more psychological than material: if you hate your carrier so much that you really to company-hop, find an empty jam jar and stick a twenty-dollar bill into it every week--if you can't spare ten to twenty dollars a week, you don't need a cellphone, you need welfare. Do it while thinking about how good it's going to be to never, ever have to give them another dime; think about how good it's going to be to have your choice of new carrier be a vote for them to go out of business and to have them finally act like your vote counts for something.
I love number portablity. I think you should, too.
No matter how the guy was caught, simple or complex, the fact that the story comes up at all opens several interesting cans of worms.
We give ourselves, our populace and our government, a lot of credit. We walk down the street trusting people we wouldn't let drive our cars to make an intelligent decision on who should enjoy personal control over a powerful army and a large nuclear arsenal.
We live under a government made up of mostly of obscure appointed functionaries. During the last election, John Ashcroft was a man so despised by the people who best understood his personality and performance, that his first contribution to U.S. history was losing an election to someone the electorate knew to be deceased. Michael Powell first broke the surface as chairman of the FCC by vociferously supporting measures to further consolidate ownership of America's broadcast media.
We trust faceless strangers to *NOT* use terrorism as an excuse to pass nasty laws that sidestep the principles which define us as a people.
Now, it is perfectly possible to imagine that the person who stole the laptops was the kind of (darwinian) mastermind who *would* log on to someone else's AOL account, using their stolen computer from their home connection and leaving us to ask, 'Hey, why not just turn yourself in...?'
Be that as it may, as some pieces here and elsewhere have shown, at all levels, governments are happy to adapt law and technology to purposes that civil libertarians dislike with good reason. This time it was nothing, but one day, it could very well be something that makes us all wish we could go back to telephones and paper.
The point that started this thread might very well be moot, but unless you are completly satisfied with whom we have in office and whom they have appointed to positions of power most of us are scarcely aware of, you have to wonder what things will be like when things are different.
I know EXACTLY what you mean. I'm deaf and I get sick of all these hearing people who learn sign language WORDS and nothing at all of the grammar or culture that goes with being unable to hear.
At the top of a culture, people laugh, at the bottom, they weep. Reverse the ordering and the only thing different would be the players, IMHO.
Considering the enormous time and effort it takes most people to (mis-) learn even the rudiments of a natural language, given your druthers, would it really please you better to live in a world where no bothered at all?
One thing that has been pointed out by numerous posters is the belief that the final result of the match is the result of one bad move in one of the earlier games.
This is not necessarily meaningful. Either player could have played better or worse in any of the positions that came about in the ensuing games, making the actual match results the stuff of speculation about alternate universes.
Be that as it may, two things stand out about the match. The first is that the computer opponent is actually a commercial program running on commercially available hardware and not on specialized circuitry out of a lab somewhere. This alone is a very good indicator of how far computers have come as chess players. Not too long ago (at least in geological terms), there wasn't a chess program on earth that could win against the like of me. Nowadays, by contrast, commercial desktop hardware combined with shrinkwrapped software are giving a former world-champion a run for his money.
The second point of interest in the final game is Kasparov's choice of defenses.
Kapararov is one of the world's greatest experts on the opening--someone who prepares not just against continuations but against his most likely opponents--and yet, with the game and the match on the line he, chose to not play any of the 'milder' defenses to 1.d4 (for example, trying to reprise the line of the Gruenfeld he played against Karpov in one of their matches) but instead chose to play the black side of the Queen's gambit accepted.
When I was growing up and studying, the queen's gambit accepted was known to offer white good chances to develop a strong initiative based on black's disadvantages in central space and white's rapid development, and venturing the black side of Queen's gambit accepted was considered risky.
Apparently, Kasparov knows something I didn't when I was fifteen (duh).
Still, Kasparov's choice of opening certainly led to a difficult position requiring an accurate defense after white developed significant pressure on black's central pawn and on the queenside. However, the pressure rapidly dissipated following a set of exchanges that even gave black a short-lived counterattack on white's king position, leading to a position with even material and no real sources of play for either side, hence the draw.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened in a longer match played under a different winning criterion like 'best-of-ten' or 'first to achieve a given score.'
The game was interesting. It resembled a classic game from the thirties with either Saemisch or Maroczy as white. It underlines the strengths of the human mind versus computers.
The annotators of the first game pointed out over and over again, that some of each player's decisions were based on the computer's looking over a few million positions, and 'knowing' that it was safe to play the kind of moves that a human's fears and instincts would have made it very uncomfortable for a human to have played (e.g., the capture of the bishop by the king in the drawn game). Games like the first two show the greatest strengths of computers: superhuman ability in positions involving the calculation of tactical complications.
The current game by contrast grave rise to a position that is possibly the greatest illustration of a human's real strengths: the ability to create closed positions where tactical calculations of severely reduced utility; creating a position where experience and 'instinct' far outweigh calculation.
In the latest game, the computer's playing, 5...a6 created a 'hole,' a 'positional weakness,' and the rest of the game was a matter of exploiting its consequences while simultaneously giving the computer no chance to balance the game neither by winning back material, nor by a compensatory attack against white's position.
To put it another way, the nature of the position allowed white to create and exploit a position where the computer's ability to look at millions of positions per second was essentially useless.
It was clever and precise play on Kasparov's part.
Thank you for the compliment regarding my note despite the spelling error I just found while rereading it... arg!
Despite my utter inability to spell, I ended up being roped into proofreading while doing more or less what you were.
I worked with a group of marketers who did design work, and, because I had made a study of proofreading techniques for another job and to improve my writing they gave me the job. After I saved them some money and more embarrassment, the head of the company said that nothing was to leave the shop until after I had looked it over.
Proofreading has a lot to reccomend it as a job and, I am told, at it's highest levels, basically legal work, it's a very lucrative part-time job--sort of like bartending for articulate introverts.
Mistakes that others make are annoying, but you can't let them get to you too much or you'll hurt yourself. The best Q.C. people I'd ever met were older men and women with sharp eyes and quiet voices who sat in offices that doubled as store rooms and regularly found the unfindable.
If anyone ever offers you the chance to proofread something using the holder/reader method--where one person reads the text aloud (right down to the punctuation) while the other follows the narrative with a line-by-line reading, take it.
It's like zen. The words fill you and you feel a deep conviction that nothing in the world can get by you.
Actually, 'your' is, in the place that you note it, emminently correct.
You see, 'You're' is a contraction of the words, 'you are,' and using it where you suggest would be problematic both in terms of sense and grammar.
By using, 'you're' in that position, you would be saying, 'you are missing the gimme in line... is pure heresy.' This leaves the reader to wonder which of the two instances of the verb 'to be,' the reader should refer to while trying to keep his brains from leaking out of his ears from the strain of trying to make sense of what the writer meant.
On the other hand, 'your' is the English possessive and here it makes sense in that the pronoun refers to something which was done by the person referred to, his act of ommission, which logically belongs to him.
The sentence could thus be rewritten, 'your mistake in missing the gimme in line thirteen...' and it would be absolutely, and insultingly, clear--fully the equivalent of saying, 'they tell me you're a little slow, so I'm going to spell it out for you very carefully...'
Hopefully in your alternate universe, "it's" no longer means "it is" (or "it has"), and your sentence parses correctly.
Interestingly enough, I, too, used to nitpick, even on the verbal stuff. People loved me for it. In fact, I found that nothing bound them to me more tightly than having flaws in their spoken grammar pointed out with a speed normally associated with nature shows featuring vipers and chameleons.
In fact, I could see in their eyes that the love they felt for me only grew as they went 'a-wandering and a-hunting' for the thread of what they were actually trying to say.
I used to do some proofreading for a living and after years of spending time and energy in the pursuit of egregious trivialities and nonsense, I find that in a quick note for which no one is paying me, one truth shines like a beacon in the darkness: I simply don't care.
Your own note, by the way, is perfect. It holds up to Chicago Manual standards. Nevertheless, I think that you should have read my note, not just for simple mechanical faults but for logic.
You might then have caught the flaw in line seven, word sixteen and pointed out that the line would scan better as "...to be functional and not robust enough..." That would have made things much clearer.
Also, as someone who asks another to 'speak by the card' in writen material, your missing the gimme in line thirteen, word fourteen, "three two one," is pure heresy. Microsoft Word can do that without breaking a sweat.
To put it another way, 'Look, I'm sorry. Really, you're good, very good, but we've got a standard here--the editorial staff here has a sense of historic mission that you don't seem to share. Really, I am sorry. The severence package is generous. No. Really, I'm sorry. A week ago, that might have been possible but at this point, there's nothing I can do...'
In a sense, you can call the Bombardier concept vehicle the perfect followup to the segway in the sense that the Bombardier concept vehicle and the Segway are both big sellers in an alternative universe.
In this alternative universe--where mechanical complexity is viewed as the most esthetically pleasing art form--the Segway's problems are completely negated by the fact that it is an expensive, non-functional item.
In quantum anomaly MH-16607G, the fact that the Segway is too complex to be functional and robust enough for it to be a commercial product in our universe is one of it's greatest selling points and, in quantum anomaly MH-16607G, the Bombardier concept vehicle is a brilliant product, available today as an empty shell that opens to reveal a seven-hundred and sixty page bound volume of Rube Goldberg cartoons which give the owner some clue as to how the thing might be made to work decades ahead in the future.
In the America of MH-16607G, the Bombardier concept vehicle outsells the segway three two one.
WIth rental cell phones already providing absolutely untraceable service for obscene callers, this new and useful technology should and without a doubt will open up a new world of possibilities to them.
"Before you wrote your rant, you should have paid attention to the fact that I was responding to the idea of "there's a cure for cancer, so I'll continue to smoke!"
Actually, I did pay attention to what you wrote and the sense in it. In fact, you could say that I gave it all the attention it was due and more.
My point was not that I gave any thought to the idea of your having something against the tobacco company's funding cancer research and if you believe that I did, you might consider re-reading what I wrote.
My point, if I read myself correctly was that the social and medical benefits of having tobacco companies funding anti-cancer research is something that we lose because of attitudes like yours.
In other words, people who feel that they have joined another, superior species for not smoking and the result of that attitude's pervasiveness have led to the consequences which I described in my last post; that is, again, this: the current situation involving tobacco companies is such that they either cannot or from the standpoint of litigation strategy in fact should not fund cancer research and that the consequence of this is, uh, well, less cancer research.
Going on to logic of your last offering, I might point out that it is informed by a weakness in reasoning that is just as bad as the reasoning of smokers who 'breath easier' at the thought of a lessening of their danger of dying of lung cancer.
You see, 'avoiding the consequences so that you can do things you might not otherwise be able to,' is pretty much universally viewed as a good thing except where the great sunny spotlight of self-righteousness shines its beam.
By the reasoning you advocate, birth control must be a really bad thing: it allows you to have sex without its automatically leading to a permanent commitment or avoiding painful and possibly fatal venereal disease.
By the reasoning you advocate, Seat belts and airbags, must be an obscenity: they allow you to travel in a car, at speeds where a sudden stop would pulp an unprotected occupant, and survive an accident should one occur.
By the reasoning you put forth, either every measure that gives freedom from or sooths the pain of life's consequences is wrong or, more likely, you reserve bad reasoning for matters involving smokers and smoking. If that is the case, then what you have done is suspend logic, the most basic tool of reasoning, where it touches upon something you dislike and the results are, to put it charitably, 'less than optimal.'
If you think that being a member of a localized majority alone is justification for self-righteousness and that the consequences of that can be safely ignored, there are certain religions you can join in certain parts of the world that will give you material advantages against members of other religions and against all women.
If you really love yourself loudly and feel it's justified because you don't smoke and that that's enough for you to stop thinking, I believe you would really love life as a convert in some place like the Sudan.
As a final thought in the matter, with regard to your comment about 'acting as if smokers were victims, I would suggest that you read C. Everet Koop's reccomendations with regard to smoking cessation, pay special attention to the part about 'punishing the smoker.'
"I see that there is still no cure for stupidity."
Nor is there one for an attitude of easygoing superiority based on nothing more than going with the herd and not engaging in a habit.
The idea of tobacco companies investing heavily in anti-cancer research is brilliant but flawed by the reality of the social/legal/political situation.
Basically, with the idea that tobacco companies are the antichrist and, therefore, fair game for anything anyone with an attitude cares to mete out makes thier investment in anti-cancer drugs problematic on multiple levels.
One question you've got to ask is, 'do they still have the money?' The tobacco settlement is milking companies for billions of dollars paid over years with the money going not towards treatment of Tobacco's victims in some identifiable cases but into shoring up state budgets while avoiding the political liabilities of progressive taxation.
The short form of the above:'Don't soak the rich, soak the smokers and the tobacco industry,' with the most egegregious example I know of being New York State's Governor Pataki's actually trying to issue Tobacco Settlement Bonds in addition to the 'health-related' state taxes on cigarettes that double their cost over states that lack such taxes, throw in Mayor Bloomberg's punitive taxation in New York City and you see smokers in New York City buying cigarettes that cost literally more than tripple the cost of cigarettes bought in South Carolina with all the additional revenue from Tobacco sales going tinto the coffers of city and state budgets and with none of it earmarked for the smokers who provide it.
Another problem for investment in anti-cancer research by the tobacco industry is legal liability. With one court having already attempted the controversial measure of essentially denying a tobacco company appeal in a case, not on the merits of the ruling, by demanding that they post a multibillion-dollar bond before the appeal could be filed, the courts have shown that some judges will burn all thought of fairness when it comes to tobacco companies.
With this sort of thing in place, even if tobacco companies have the cash to fund research or, better still, to invest in research for future profits, their doing so would give ammunition to a court system whose judges rule with their attitudes.
Big hint: there is no corporation on earth so compassionate that they would look at a balance sheet and see that every ten dollars invested in research would cost them, say, a million or so in additional successful liability claims from a hostile court system.
So, there you have it. Tobacco companies funding research into cancer cures would be brilliant and more than that, it would be a wonderful argument for the vindication of capitalism, but it's hard to imagine it's happening because the world is full of paradox and hubris and 'attitude.'
I'd like to leave the poster I'm responding to with a couple of thoughts that I hope may shed light on the usefulness and fairness of attitudes.
Smoking is a pleasureable activity engaged in by people who don't like their risk-taking all at once. Think of it as skydiving for the poor.
My favorite smoker of all time is Albert Einstein.
Interesting nits and you picked them well. You obviously possess knowledge of the law.
However, do you dissagree with the broader point or principle that clickakable/shrink-wrap EULAs are a retrograde development in the progress of laws towards a greater fairness or a balancing of the powers of the consumer against the producer?
One thing I think I failed to make as clear as I should have is my belief that EULAs are a trick, a device with a set of parts which lead to a planned conclusion.
Just as a lathe is a device used to shave matter into a desired shape, a EULA, reshapes the provisions of product liability and other laws to reduce the rights of the consumer.
We are living in a genuinely historic time, the age of legal technology. Now that I've said that, I better do some really fancy footwork.
The law and the individual's rights and privileges under it are among the most ancient artifacts of civilization. It is also something which evolves as a society evolves with tending towards egalitarianism in properous western democracies (the heavenly light shines from above on America...), that is, laws that take away freedom of action or that provide one person or group with advantages over others tend to be struck down or superceded by laws that create balance and that protect rights.
In a sense, you could say that some of the most far-reaching and most beautiful laws are the solutions to arguments that arise from logical problems. For example, once we had slavery, the preamble to the constitution cannot have meaning in a country that practices slavery. The argument arose and it was solved by an amendment to the constitution which clarified the argument completely: if all men are created equal, no man can be another's property. Human rights trump property rights. Slavery is illegal and slave-owners are S.O.L with regard to their property rights pertaining to their slaves. That makes sense.
At least that is how it worked in the old days.
Now, in the post-industrial age of television and the megacorporation, lobbying money and a just a smidgen of public stupidity create an opportunity for organizations to create agreements which function as devices to generate a planned result in much the same way that the parts of a transistor radio work together to produce access to the airwaves.
Laws like the ones that make the EULA possible are a technology--not one for establishing socially useful principles, but for circumventing and mutating contract law so that instead of providing a level playing field between buyer and producer, the law provides for the end-user signing away all his rights to legal rememdies by buying a thing and using it.
EULAs do nothing to protect the consumer. Nothing whatsoever. They are the legal equivalent of a booby-trap: you open the box, you open the envelope, you install the software, click on the box and BANG! according to the law, you've agreed to conditions that would have to be insane to agree to under any other circumstances.
If you don't believe this, consider the enormous tire recall of the last year or two and imagine what things would be like if the tire companies involved had had a EULA at their disposal:
'by breaking or cutting the ribbon on these tires, you agree that their purpose is purely decorative and that they have no function and no warranty, explicit or implied for any use but decoration of your vehicle...'
You can't sign away your personal freedom. You can't read a document, sign it, and become an indentured servant with no rights, but you can sign a EULA and let a company do whatever it likes to you with its neglicence.
The EULA is a device to give software makers the ability to treat software buyers like cattle. It is a prime example of how people make laws when they don't give a damn about the society that rises from them.
For the people who wrote those intelligent counterarguments, I have begin by using two words to invoke two related historical precedents in the history of technology.
1. "Sabotage" 2. "Silesia"
The word, 'sabotage' means to destroy something, originally machines, by direct and usually secret action. It is derived from the french version of the wooden shoe or 'Sabot' (say: 'sah-boh').
The situation which led to the establishment of the word was the mechanization of weaving of rich and complex cloth which, before the machines, had once been a cottage industry in France and elsewhere. The French workers, whose livelihoods were taken away by the machines responded by putting their sabot into the machinery to destroy it. It is obvious that the introduction of the weaving machine changed the textile industry at the time caused discomfort and dislocation for people with families to feed both in France and elsewhere.
'Elsewhere,' leads us to the word, 'Silesia,' a region in Germany which had been famous for the cloth produced by its cottage-industrial base. Thousands of families which had been weavers for generations found themselves involved in and trapped by the consequences of an international competition to mechanize the production of cloth for all markets from rich silks to the most common broadcloth.
The Silesian weavers, who could no longer compete in an internationalized trade in cloth, found themselves without money and the result was essentially an industrial famine: people starving because they couldn't make money doing the only thing they knew how to do.
This event was made into a play by the German author Gerhardt Hauptmann, in his play, 'Die Weber' (say: 'dee vay-bur')
One of the respondents to the earlier post mentioned that U.S. housing purchases have increased since the sixties and that wealth is on the rise, but, I believe, this ignores some crucial pieces of information which are to be found in several other words or phrases three of which are most immediately significant.
1. "Marshall Plan." 2. "Globalization." 3. "Concentration of wealth."
The Marshall Plan is one of the most significant initiatives in history. At the end of the second world war, with much of European industry and housing destroyed by the machinery of modern war, the United States lent/gave money to the European nations, friend and enemy alike, so as to reduce the economic factors which cause international unrest.
The first world war saw the rise of the Nazis in Germany after nearly two decades of savage economic dislocation in the wake of the the Great Depression and the subsequent hyperinflation in Germany.
At the end of the first world war our leaders examined the history and saw that The inability of national economies to produce goods and services commensurate with the needs of their populations created a hotbed for ideologies which promised improvement and that the result was hatred and further warfare in the future--the armistace agreements ending both the Franco-Prussian war and World War I, were signed at Versailles.
Instead of the classic cycle of punitive 'reparations' in peace treaties leading to the next war and then the next, the west, and in particular, the United States, supported support for national governments and economies thereby draining the swamp from which sprang historical wildcards like the German Nazis and the Italian Facists.
Another important effect of the Marshall Plan was that with European industry a shambles, and with Western Europe protected by the Aegis of the American Military ('Pax Americana'), 'old Europe,' rebuilt and as it did, it aided the American economy, driving it to heights never before seen in history.
American goods were in worldwide demand and the prosperity of the American worker increased even as his productivity increased with, economists tell us, his real purchasing power rising to a peak in the seventies and then beginning a decline which has been accelerated by the dow
Slashdot Mirror
You were quite unfair to that poster.
Please, I beg you, read the posts before you respond to them. Please read carefully, and more than anything else, please avoid setting up straw men.
By restating my argument and including material that weakens it, you avoid answering my point in your diatribe.
Of course that is harder to do when you cut to essentials.
Here is the pure essence.
1. If you say people need to die to solve the overopulation problem, or, by extention, you say that cures for fatal diseases are a bad thing because of overpopulation, you are preaching but not practicing unless your assertion is read from a suicide note.
Really, it's that simple.
2. A person asserts, in essence, that *other people* should die to solve the overpopulation problem. His solution is to forego breeding--this person has given up on everything but optimizing his enjoyment of his resource-pool over the course of his own lifetime. He has so solutions, seeks none, and is not thinking of any but enjoying a resource-intensive lifestyle that will end with him.
3. A child of someone like this might think about solutions--might in fact combine awareness that solutions are necessary--'daddy said so'--with the educational/material resources needed to find and implement workable solutions.
I also mentioned that this was unlikely, but better than empty, kumbaya-singing, 'bleeding world' rhetoric limed to an ineluctible(SP) subtext that everything from Cancer, to AIDs and Ebola are not really such bad things...provided they happen only to the right people.
That is the essence of what I wrote. At no time did I say, 'be fruitful and multiply.'
Sometimes it's better to try and spread a viewpoint rather than enact it in certain ways. For example, my contribution is that I will not now, nor will I ever have children.
Actually, the previous post has this one dead to rights logically. Both logically, and in terms extrapolated from common sense.
I have heard this argument before from well-fed, well-educated people and it never ceases to make me wonder.
If cancer cures are bad because unanswerable wasting diseases are an indispensable way to turn the planet back into what it was: a garden where the universe, organized to the point of looking at itself, again gives way to infinitely various displays of eating and sh*tting, then going on in the world without producing children is still hypocrisy.
The main fallacy here is concealed information: living at all as a human creates environmental damage with the greatest amounts of it coming from the rich western nations; from industrialized or industrializing nations with little thought for environment preservation (Russia and especially our good trading buddy, China) and third-world nations with primative subsistance agriculture.
The rainforests burn, in part, because western farm subsidies keep the price of food artificially high to support agrobusiness profits--certainly too high for south American campesinos to buy it. This leaves them having to grow it in the most environmentally harmful ways possible.
Thus, the initial logical flaw in attacking methods of keeping people alive as a means of 'saving the planet' is simple hypocrisy unless you kill yourself--or at the very least, move to some place where you can do the least harm by using the least energy and consuming the least food--I personally reccomend certain parts of Bangladesh during a really bad growing year. Essentially, if you live anywhere where you can reccomend environmental mass euthanasia on a computer forum, you have already failed to go anywhere near what you are advocating.
It is also poor in terms of common sense to forego having children because, unlike doomsayer hypocrits, it is unlikely but not inconcievable that a child of such a person might actually try to come up with real, viable solutions and damned near any solution is better than stating, 'everyone but myself should die.'
Let's give paranoid fantasy a chance.
No one anywhere can argue that easy access for sex offenders is a good thing. No one can argue that missing children should remain missing. So cameras in schools are a really good thing. No one in his right mind can argue against them.
Yeah right.
The problem with transparent access by power or authority to the new security technologies out there is not that they will do good things like preventing crimes like kidnapping and murder or stealing a pack of gum. The problem is that, the ability to not be watched or spied on, or informed on, privacy, is a form of wealth that gives us freedom of thought and action and the technology in question robs us of that wealth.
The extent to which the value of privacy seems lost on Americans today is disturbing.
Privacy is power. Privacy is the ability to make practical use of Games Theory. It is the ability to engage in transactions with both players starting on a level playing field with incomplete information. It allows the individual to act as an individual on so many levels that it is difficult for many people to frame questions about privacy effectively.
Our society is a hierarchy, a heap, with a broad base and a narrow tip and the erosion of privacy destroys freedom of action in the classic slippery-slope scenario where those at the top of the hierarchy have access to information about those below where that information increases their ability to wield power over them. Cameras and software combinations allows people at the top of the heap to gather information automatically, circumventing the provisions of the classic judicial process in which you must actually *DO SOMETHING* to garner the attention of authority, which then investigates and then prosecutes and punishes.
Classically, jurisprudence and enforcement is retroactive in that it only steps in after the fact, allowing free individuals the choice to do things from 'stretching-the-truth,' to commiting actual crimes or not. Modern security technology is working to allow law-enforcement, and other powerful organizations, a greater and greater ability to be *proactive*--providing a scenario where society has access to information which improves its ability to prosecute or to make decisions in a way which works to remove choice from the individual at the same time as it improves the position of those in power as games players.
Technology which is ostensibly there to protect children can also provide evidence in a fraud case, or in a burglary case, or in a drug case, or in a civil matter like a divorce, and there no provisions for any device ostensibly put in place to perform one security task to not be bent to the service of others.
The cameras are put there to keep track of the children and to make sure that a database listing of pedophiles, but cameras you know about prevent more than just access by pedophiles: they prevent you from thinking that you are not watched and they work to prevent any and everything that those who are not watched might want to do. You pretty much sum up the phrase, 'chilling effect,' with this scenario.
In the end, the answer to the real question of these technologies--from the rings of databases that know your bottom line and whether or not an insurer should grant you a policy that might provide medical care that will keep you from dying--is not to be found in engineering, but in literature: It is the substance of the title and central metaphor in Anthony Burgess's, 'A Clockwork Orange.'
The central question is not 'can be breathe easier because, in this one place, pedophiles and missing children will be automatically detected,' but whether or not anyone can meaningfully be said to be an individual in society with the human capacity for choice when, for all intents and purposes, he lives his life handcuffed between an accountant and a policeman.
Well...
:-)
If you say you weren't writing an ad for them, and they say they weren't paying you, then I suppose I'm wrong and that post looks so much like an ad because you are just that good.
More power to you.
I've got some mod points and when I saw this, I thought at first that I would just mod this thing down, but I don't think that would really address the issue with this post, because it also has all the hallmarks of good copywriting. In other words, it's an advertisement and there are strong arguments to support the conclusion that the poster is a professional copywriter:
1. His grammar and spelling are flawless.
2. It starts out with a story to get your attention.
3. He is very articulate (when was the last time you saw 'viola' ('look here!' in French sans accent mark)
4. The note took time to write and it is very well-structured.
5. The final paragraph addresses arguments against ignoring the information in the ad ('...works as advertised. Support folk...price...') and it contains an exhortation, a 'call-to-action' which is reccomended in copywriting ('Check it out') in addition to a favorable comparison to a well-known, popular product ('I'd take one of these over an iPod any day.').
Now, I can't prove it's an advertisement, but everything about it smells like one. It feels like one, and I personally think that slashdot should not be an unpaid forum for professionally written text advertising. If you think otherwise, post this.
I'd never liked professional copywriting before, but one day, I saw a bit of it on Slashdot that caught my attention. The writer was smart, easy going, articulate, and full of the brown but in the most tasteful way possible.
Now, I think slashdot is a great place to advertise. If you do too, write Cowboy Neal and tell him to solicite copywriting!
You've got to like topics like this, for writers with a sense of humor, they're like early Christmas presents.
First off, you just have to shake your head and say, 'Only in Cali, man... only in Cali.'
Then you have to wonder about the nature of what's happening to the law in this country. The law can be made to fail in a lot of interesting ways. You can have wacko interpretation (e.g., judges who think putting up a shrine to the ten commandments). You can have dishonest implementation (the IRS being discouraged from going after corporations, the tax-cheats with the most money who happen to owe the most money).
The list is long, but some things make it far more intense. The law they're talking about has got to be neither more nor less than the movie industry using its influence to get sweaty and itchy about anyone's taking copywrited images out of a theater no matter how trivial the image may be. It has to be one true mark of people and organizations that have no sense whatsoever of quality.
In some earlier posts, some people were sidetracked by the idea of people's phones ringing during movies and how much they hated that, but had nothing to do with the article. Cellularphones are basically a nuisance. The actual law here seems something else altogether: a weird fusion of idiocy and intrusion.
Sure, there is a minor threat from people who sit in obscure movie theaters with a video camera on a tripod, but cellphones are a laugh here.
The only reason to use your phone to snap the screen is to be able to go back to the image later so you can say, 'dude...dude... Gigli is the best movie ever! You've gotta check it out.'
Of course, in a state where the motion picture industry can shoot for the moon in asking for rediculous legal extensions (RLE's), proposing or passing a law that specifically encourages overgrown members of the Mickey Mouse club to try a citizen's arrest on someone who could be packing has little liability for the industry, or for the lawmakers (people who, where it not for the enormous influence of Hollywood money, one would suspect of taking three-pipe lunches).
If there is anything really interesting about this story, it is how well it exemplifies one of the great flaws of modern American lawmaking: money and reelection turns politicians into short-sighted whores with no social vision with regard to what the policies in questions can do and at many levels, a good number of the nation's laws (like mandatory sentencing requirements) really do resemble a transaction between one man in a suit and a severely retarted person.
Life would be a lot better for everyone if there were a law on the books allowing lawmakers to be jailed for the consequences of misshapen policies.
Were it only so...
Interesting that you should mention that. Once, I looked at an old Hitachi laptop, optimized for graphics speed back in the bad old days. In terms of video response, it actually seemed faster than the latest greatest Sony Viao.
Now, I've got to admit that there is no objective measure here without getting up a lot of money for some retro-computing, but the way things seemed in the store that day, the simpler code in the earlier windows system, although nowhere near as as powerful, as the new system, still provided video-response that smoked the newer one.
I'd love to see that kind of response in the computers I find myself using now.
As far as Apple is concerned. Personally, I don't like them for purely personal reasons. I don't think anyone else should dislike them (I don't care) but I'm underimpressed with them. Be that as it may, Apple's eye candy is nice, but can you really call it Apple's?
Apple grabbed a version of BSD and slapped a proprietary GUI on it. It's just an interface, and it doesn't seem to scream onto the screen any more than Windows does.
Yes, it does operate reliably, but the most surprising thing about that is how, in the midst of an amazing technological boom, our expectations have been so skewed by marketing, customer loyalty and compu-ignorance, that we think a company's rectifying problems of N+1 years duration to do what had been par for the course in UNIX is somehow an achievement that goes above and beyond the call of duty.
Moore's law is interesting and the immanent demise of Apple certainly so. However, the most interesting thing for me is how curiosity and greed work together to expand the frontiers in computers and what it's brought about.
True, right now, the yearly, 'we'll-be-helpless-without-faster-computers!' cycle appears to have stopped or slowed down. Big IT buyers seem to have realized that you don't need a machine that could run a weather model to replace a typewriter and that's a real good thing.
But what about software? I could be wrong. I don't do that much with my computer except surfing and writing, but much of what I see makes me wonder where all the really miraculous power of my computer is going.
I've got an operating system that takes up non-trivial space on my harddrive and aside from a constant need to keep up with the virus writers, or dealing with stuff to make Microsoft happy, I'm not seeing the bennies.
You'd think that with all this godawful power, there'd be a little more substance.
Cellular number portability is a great thing. It's one of the few things that allow you to feel warm and fuzzy about the principles of raw capalism.
For the most part, when dealing with small organizations, capitalism works fine--it's what makes a local grocer throw his bad fish away and hire sales people so you don't go to his competition a block down the road. Small-scale Capitalism is just fine for you and me because you have leverage--because every dollar you spend with a company is a vote for that company to exist and the smaller the company, the more your vote counts.
It's only when things get huge that the value of your ability to vote breaks down and remove your leverage, which, under capitalism, is pretty much your entire value as a human being. Number portability gives you back your leverage with a vengeance by removing one of the main impediments to switching. Instead of being just another nameless, faceless cog, number portability makes it possible for you to threaten to be part of a great wave of people who leave one company and go to another one.
Number portability gives you back your value and multiplies it and that is a very, very good thing.
You can see it in the deals that companies are offering. My own carrier, Sprintpcs, has reinstituted the option to have your nights and weekends minutes start at seven PM--returning to what was just standard operating procedure years ago--either as part of a standard plan, or for a nominal fee.
As a long-term customer who has just entered into a contract with them, they've given me nights and weekends starting at eight as part of my contract arrangement as well as a decent rate for service and I am only waiting for my birthday to ask them for an even better deal as a supremely loyal customer who can pay to get out of the contract I've just signed if I see something good enough elsewhere. It's a present I'm going to give myself that only number portability makes possible.
Really, honestly, it's a no-brainer. In the real world, ALL the disincentives to switching carriers in your contract, are more psychological than material: if you hate your carrier so much that you really to company-hop, find an empty jam jar and stick a twenty-dollar bill into it every week--if you can't spare ten to twenty dollars a week, you don't need a cellphone, you need welfare. Do it while thinking about how good it's going to be to never, ever have to give them another dime; think about how good it's going to be to have your choice of new carrier be a vote for them to go out of business and to have them finally act like your vote counts for something.
I love number portablity. I think you should, too.
No matter how the guy was caught, simple or complex, the fact that the story comes up at all opens several interesting cans of worms.
We give ourselves, our populace and our government, a lot of credit. We walk down the street trusting people we wouldn't let drive our cars to make an intelligent decision on who should enjoy personal control over a powerful army and a large nuclear arsenal.
We live under a government made up of mostly of obscure appointed functionaries. During the last election, John Ashcroft was a man so despised by the people who best understood his personality and performance, that his first contribution to U.S. history was losing an election to someone the electorate knew to be deceased. Michael Powell first broke the surface as chairman of the FCC by vociferously supporting measures to further consolidate ownership of America's broadcast media.
We trust faceless strangers to *NOT* use terrorism as an excuse to pass nasty laws that sidestep the principles which define us as a people.
Now, it is perfectly possible to imagine that the person who stole the laptops was the kind of (darwinian) mastermind who *would* log on to someone else's AOL account, using their stolen computer from their home connection and leaving us to ask, 'Hey, why not just turn yourself in...?'
Be that as it may, as some pieces here and elsewhere have shown, at all levels, governments are happy to adapt law and technology to purposes that civil libertarians dislike with good reason. This time it was nothing, but one day, it could very well be something that makes us all wish we could go back to telephones and paper.
The point that started this thread might very well be moot, but unless you are completly satisfied with whom we have in office and whom they have appointed to positions of power most of us are scarcely aware of, you have to wonder what things will be like when things are different.
I know EXACTLY what you mean. I'm deaf and I get sick of all these hearing people who learn sign language WORDS and nothing at all of the grammar or culture that goes with being unable to hear.
At the top of a culture, people laugh, at the bottom, they weep. Reverse the ordering and the only thing different would be the players, IMHO.
Considering the enormous time and effort it takes most people to (mis-) learn even the rudiments of a natural language, given your druthers, would it really please you better to live in a world where no bothered at all?
One thing that has been pointed out by numerous posters is the belief that the final result of the match is the result of one bad move in one of the earlier games.
This is not necessarily meaningful. Either player could have played better or worse in any of the positions that came about in the ensuing games, making the actual match results the stuff of speculation about alternate universes.
Be that as it may, two things stand out about the match. The first is that the computer opponent is actually a commercial program running on commercially available hardware and not on specialized circuitry out of a lab somewhere. This alone is a very good indicator of how far computers have come as chess players. Not too long ago (at least in geological terms), there wasn't a chess program on earth that could win against the like of me. Nowadays, by contrast, commercial desktop hardware combined with shrinkwrapped software are giving a former world-champion a run for his money.
The second point of interest in the final game is Kasparov's choice of defenses.
Kapararov is one of the world's greatest experts on the opening--someone who prepares not just against continuations but against his most likely opponents--and yet, with the game and the match on the line he, chose to not play any of the 'milder' defenses to 1.d4 (for example, trying to reprise the line of the Gruenfeld he played against Karpov in one of their matches) but instead chose to play the black side of the Queen's gambit accepted.
When I was growing up and studying, the queen's gambit accepted was known to offer white good chances to develop a strong initiative based on black's disadvantages in central space and white's rapid development, and venturing the black side of Queen's gambit accepted was considered risky.
Apparently, Kasparov knows something I didn't when I was fifteen (duh).
Still, Kasparov's choice of opening certainly led to a difficult position requiring an accurate defense after white developed significant pressure on black's central pawn and on the queenside. However, the pressure rapidly dissipated following a set of exchanges that even gave black a short-lived counterattack on white's king position, leading to a position with even material and no real sources of play for either side, hence the draw.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened in a longer match played under a different winning criterion like 'best-of-ten' or 'first to achieve a given score.'
The game was interesting. It resembled a classic game from the thirties with either Saemisch or Maroczy as white. It underlines the strengths of the human mind versus computers.
The annotators of the first game pointed out over and over again, that some of each player's decisions were based on the computer's looking over a few million positions, and 'knowing' that it was safe to play the kind of moves that a human's fears and instincts would have made it very uncomfortable for a human to have played (e.g., the capture of the bishop by the king in the drawn game). Games like the first two show the greatest strengths of computers: superhuman ability in positions involving the calculation of tactical complications.
The current game by contrast grave rise to a position that is possibly the greatest illustration of a human's real strengths: the ability to create closed positions where tactical calculations of severely reduced utility; creating a position where experience and 'instinct' far outweigh calculation.
In the latest game, the computer's playing, 5...a6 created a 'hole,' a 'positional weakness,' and the rest of the game was a matter of exploiting its consequences while simultaneously giving the computer no chance to balance the game neither by winning back material, nor by a compensatory attack against white's position.
To put it another way, the nature of the position allowed white to create and exploit a position where the computer's ability to look at millions of positions per second was essentially useless.
It was clever and precise play on Kasparov's part.
Thank you for the compliment regarding my note despite the spelling error I just found while rereading it... arg!
Despite my utter inability to spell, I ended up being roped into proofreading while doing more or less what you were.
I worked with a group of marketers who did design work, and, because I had made a study of proofreading techniques for another job and to improve my writing they gave me the job. After I saved them some money and more embarrassment, the head of the company said that nothing was to leave the shop until after I had looked it over.
Proofreading has a lot to reccomend it as a job and, I am told, at it's highest levels, basically legal work, it's a very lucrative part-time job--sort of like bartending for articulate introverts.
Mistakes that others make are annoying, but you can't let them get to you too much or you'll hurt yourself. The best Q.C. people I'd ever met were older men and women with sharp eyes and quiet voices who sat in offices that doubled as store rooms and regularly found the unfindable.
If anyone ever offers you the chance to proofread something using the holder/reader method--where one person reads the text aloud (right down to the punctuation) while the other follows the narrative with a line-by-line reading, take it.
It's like zen. The words fill you and you feel a deep conviction that nothing in the world can get by you.
Actually, 'your' is, in the place that you note it, emminently correct.
You see, 'You're' is a contraction of the words, 'you are,' and using it where you suggest would be problematic both in terms of sense and grammar.
By using, 'you're' in that position, you would be saying, 'you are missing the gimme in line... is pure heresy.' This leaves the reader to wonder which of the two instances of the verb 'to be,' the reader should refer to while trying to keep his brains from leaking out of his ears from the strain of trying to make sense of what the writer meant.
On the other hand, 'your' is the English possessive and here it makes sense in that the pronoun refers to something which was done by the person referred to, his act of ommission, which logically belongs to him.
The sentence could thus be rewritten, 'your mistake in missing the gimme in line thirteen...' and it would be absolutely, and insultingly, clear--fully the equivalent of saying, 'they tell me you're a little slow, so I'm going to spell it out for you very carefully...'
God, I feel pedantic now!
Interestingly enough, I, too, used to nitpick, even on the verbal stuff. People loved me for it. In fact, I found that nothing bound them to me more tightly than having flaws in their spoken grammar pointed out with a speed normally associated with nature shows featuring vipers and chameleons.
In fact, I could see in their eyes that the love they felt for me only grew as they went 'a-wandering and a-hunting' for the thread of what they were actually trying to say.
I used to do some proofreading for a living and after years of spending time and energy in the pursuit of egregious trivialities and nonsense, I find that in a quick note for which no one is paying me, one truth shines like a beacon in the darkness: I simply don't care.
Your own note, by the way, is perfect. It holds up to Chicago Manual standards. Nevertheless, I think that you should have read my note, not just for simple mechanical faults but for logic.
You might then have caught the flaw in line seven, word sixteen and pointed out that the line would scan better as "...to be functional and not robust enough..." That would have made things much clearer.
Also, as someone who asks another to 'speak by the card' in writen material, your missing the gimme in line thirteen, word fourteen, "three two one," is pure heresy. Microsoft Word can do that without breaking a sweat.
To put it another way, 'Look, I'm sorry. Really, you're good, very good, but we've got a standard here--the editorial staff here has a sense of historic mission that you don't seem to share. Really, I am sorry. The severence package is generous. No. Really, I'm sorry. A week ago, that might have been possible but at this point, there's nothing I can do...'
A stolen UAV prototype!
you kinda wonder who and why.
It doesn't get weirder.
In a sense, you can call the Bombardier concept vehicle the perfect followup to the segway in the sense that the Bombardier concept vehicle and the Segway are both big sellers in an alternative universe.
In this alternative universe--where mechanical complexity is viewed as the most esthetically pleasing art form--the Segway's problems are completely negated by the fact that it is an expensive, non-functional item.
In quantum anomaly MH-16607G, the fact that the Segway is too complex to be functional and robust enough for it to be a commercial product in our universe is one of it's greatest selling points and, in quantum anomaly MH-16607G, the Bombardier concept vehicle is a brilliant product, available today as an empty shell that opens to reveal a seven-hundred and sixty page bound volume of Rube Goldberg cartoons which give the owner some clue as to how the thing might be made to work decades ahead in the future.
In the America of MH-16607G, the Bombardier concept vehicle outsells the segway three two one.
WIth rental cell phones already providing absolutely untraceable service for obscene callers, this new and useful technology should and without a doubt will open up a new world of possibilities to them.
Whee!
"Before you wrote your rant, you should have paid attention to the fact that I was responding to the idea of "there's a cure for cancer, so I'll continue to smoke!"
Actually, I did pay attention to what you wrote and the sense in it. In fact, you could say that I gave it all the attention it was due and more.
My point was not that I gave any thought to the idea of your having something against the tobacco company's funding cancer research and if you believe that I did, you might consider re-reading what I wrote.
My point, if I read myself correctly was that the social and medical benefits of having tobacco companies funding anti-cancer research is something that we lose because of attitudes like yours.
In other words, people who feel that they have joined another, superior species for not smoking and the result of that attitude's pervasiveness have led to the consequences which I described in my last post; that is, again, this: the current situation involving tobacco companies is such that they either cannot or from the standpoint of litigation strategy in fact should not fund cancer research and that the consequence of this is, uh, well, less cancer research.
Going on to logic of your last offering, I might point out that it is informed by a weakness in reasoning that is just as bad as the reasoning of smokers who 'breath easier' at the thought of a lessening of their danger of dying of lung cancer.
You see, 'avoiding the consequences so that you can do things you might not otherwise be able to,' is pretty much universally viewed as a good thing except where the great sunny spotlight of self-righteousness shines its beam.
By the reasoning you advocate, birth control must be a really bad thing: it allows you to have sex without its automatically leading to a permanent commitment or avoiding painful and possibly fatal venereal disease.
By the reasoning you advocate, Seat belts and airbags, must be an obscenity: they allow you to travel in a car, at speeds where a sudden stop would pulp an unprotected occupant, and survive an accident should one occur.
By the reasoning you put forth, either every measure that gives freedom from or sooths the pain of life's consequences is wrong or, more likely, you reserve bad reasoning for matters involving smokers and smoking. If that is the case, then what you have done is suspend logic, the most basic tool of reasoning, where it touches upon something you dislike and the results are, to put it charitably, 'less than optimal.'
If you think that being a member of a localized majority alone is justification for self-righteousness and that the consequences of that can be safely ignored, there are certain religions you can join in certain parts of the world that will give you material advantages against members of other religions and against all women.
If you really love yourself loudly and feel it's justified because you don't smoke and that that's enough for you to stop thinking, I believe you would really love life as a convert in some place like the Sudan.
As a final thought in the matter, with regard to your comment about 'acting as if smokers were victims, I would suggest that you read C. Everet Koop's reccomendations with regard to smoking cessation, pay special attention to the part about 'punishing the smoker.'
Have a nice day.
"I see that there is still no cure for stupidity."
Nor is there one for an attitude of easygoing superiority based on nothing more than going with the herd and not engaging in a habit.
The idea of tobacco companies investing heavily in anti-cancer research is brilliant but flawed by the reality of the social/legal/political situation.
Basically, with the idea that tobacco companies are the antichrist and, therefore, fair game for anything anyone with an attitude cares to mete out makes thier investment in anti-cancer drugs problematic on multiple levels.
One question you've got to ask is, 'do they still have the money?' The tobacco settlement is milking companies for billions of dollars paid over years with the money going not towards treatment of Tobacco's victims in some identifiable cases but into shoring up state budgets while avoiding the political liabilities of progressive taxation.
The short form of the above:'Don't soak the rich, soak the smokers and the tobacco industry,' with the most egegregious example I know of being New York State's Governor Pataki's actually trying to issue Tobacco Settlement Bonds in addition to the 'health-related' state taxes on cigarettes that double their cost over states that lack such taxes, throw in Mayor Bloomberg's punitive taxation in New York City and you see smokers in New York City buying cigarettes that cost literally more than tripple the cost of cigarettes bought in South Carolina with all the additional revenue from Tobacco sales going tinto the coffers of city and state budgets and with none of it earmarked for the smokers who provide it.
Another problem for investment in anti-cancer research by the tobacco industry is legal liability. With one court having already attempted the controversial measure of essentially denying a tobacco company appeal in a case, not on the merits of the ruling, by demanding that they post a multibillion-dollar bond before the appeal could be filed, the courts have shown that some judges will burn all thought of fairness when it comes to tobacco companies.
With this sort of thing in place, even if tobacco companies have the cash to fund research or, better still, to invest in research for future profits, their doing so would give ammunition to a court system whose judges rule with their attitudes.
Big hint: there is no corporation on earth so compassionate that they would look at a balance sheet and see that every ten dollars invested in research would cost them, say, a million or so in additional successful liability claims from a hostile court system.
So, there you have it. Tobacco companies funding research into cancer cures would be brilliant and more than that, it would be a wonderful argument for the vindication of capitalism, but it's hard to imagine it's happening because the world is full of paradox and hubris and 'attitude.'
I'd like to leave the poster I'm responding to with a couple of thoughts that I hope may shed light on the usefulness and fairness of attitudes.
Smoking is a pleasureable activity engaged in by people who don't like their risk-taking all at once. Think of it as skydiving for the poor.
My favorite smoker of all time is Albert Einstein.
Something tells me that laxative sales in Redmond have just plummeted!
Interesting nits and you picked them well. You obviously possess knowledge of the law.
However, do you dissagree with the broader point or principle that clickakable/shrink-wrap EULAs are a retrograde development in the progress of laws towards a greater fairness or a balancing of the powers of the consumer against the producer?
One thing I think I failed to make as clear as I should have is my belief that EULAs are a trick, a device with a set of parts which lead to a planned conclusion.
Just as a lathe is a device used to shave matter into a desired shape, a EULA, reshapes the provisions of product liability and other laws to reduce the rights of the consumer.
Any thoughts.
We are living in a genuinely historic time, the age of legal technology. Now that I've said that, I better do some really fancy footwork.
The law and the individual's rights and privileges under it are among the most ancient artifacts of civilization. It is also something which evolves as a society evolves with tending towards egalitarianism in properous western democracies (the heavenly light shines from above on America...), that is, laws that take away freedom of action or that provide one person or group with advantages over others tend to be struck down or superceded by laws that create balance and that protect rights.
In a sense, you could say that some of the most far-reaching and most beautiful laws are the solutions to arguments that arise from logical problems. For example, once we had slavery, the preamble to the constitution cannot have meaning in a country that practices slavery. The argument arose and it was solved by an amendment to the constitution which clarified the argument completely: if all men are created equal, no man can be another's property. Human rights trump property rights. Slavery is illegal and slave-owners are S.O.L with regard to their property rights pertaining to their slaves. That makes sense.
At least that is how it worked in the old days.
Now, in the post-industrial age of television and the megacorporation, lobbying money and a just a smidgen of public stupidity create an opportunity for organizations to create agreements which function as devices to generate a planned result in much the same way that the parts of a transistor radio work together to produce access to the airwaves.
Laws like the ones that make the EULA possible are a technology--not one for establishing socially useful principles, but for circumventing and mutating contract law so that instead of providing a level playing field between buyer and producer, the law provides for the end-user signing away all his rights to legal rememdies by buying a thing and using it.
EULAs do nothing to protect the consumer. Nothing whatsoever. They are the legal equivalent of a booby-trap: you open the box, you open the envelope, you install the software, click on the box and BANG! according to the law, you've agreed to conditions that would have to be insane to agree to under any other circumstances.
If you don't believe this, consider the enormous tire recall of the last year or two and imagine what things would be like if the tire companies involved had had a EULA at their disposal:
'by breaking or cutting the ribbon on these tires, you agree that their purpose is purely decorative and that they have no function and no warranty, explicit or implied for any use but decoration of your vehicle...'
You can't sign away your personal freedom. You can't read a document, sign it, and become an indentured servant with no rights, but you can sign a EULA and let a company do whatever it likes to you with its neglicence.
The EULA is a device to give software makers the ability to treat software buyers like cattle. It is a prime example of how people make laws when they don't give a damn about the society that rises from them.
For the people who wrote those intelligent counterarguments, I have begin by using two words to invoke two related historical precedents in the history of technology.
1. "Sabotage"
2. "Silesia"
The word, 'sabotage' means to destroy something, originally machines, by direct and usually secret action. It is derived from the french version of the wooden shoe or 'Sabot' (say: 'sah-boh').
The situation which led to the establishment of the word was the mechanization of weaving of rich and complex cloth which, before the machines, had once been a cottage industry in France and elsewhere. The French workers, whose livelihoods were taken away by the machines responded by putting their sabot into the machinery to destroy it. It is obvious that the introduction of the weaving machine changed the textile industry at the time caused discomfort and dislocation for people with families to feed both in France and elsewhere.
'Elsewhere,' leads us to the word, 'Silesia,' a region in Germany which had been famous for the cloth produced by its cottage-industrial base. Thousands of families which had been weavers for generations found themselves involved in and trapped by the consequences of an international competition to mechanize the production of cloth for all markets from rich silks to the most common broadcloth.
The Silesian weavers, who could no longer compete in an internationalized trade in cloth, found themselves without money and the result was essentially an industrial famine: people starving because they couldn't make money doing the only thing they knew how to do.
This event was made into a play by the German author Gerhardt Hauptmann, in his play, 'Die Weber' (say: 'dee vay-bur')
One of the respondents to the earlier post mentioned that U.S. housing purchases have increased since the sixties and that wealth is on the rise, but, I believe, this ignores some crucial pieces of information which are to be found in several other words or phrases three of which are most immediately significant.
1. "Marshall Plan."
2. "Globalization."
3. "Concentration of wealth."
The Marshall Plan is one of the most significant initiatives in history. At the end of the second world war, with much of European industry and housing destroyed by the machinery of modern war, the United States lent/gave money to the European nations, friend and enemy alike, so as to reduce the economic factors which cause international unrest.
The first world war saw the rise of the Nazis in Germany after nearly two decades of savage economic dislocation in the wake of the the Great Depression and the subsequent hyperinflation in Germany.
At the end of the first world war our leaders examined the history and saw that The inability of national economies to produce goods and services commensurate with the needs of their populations created a hotbed for ideologies which promised improvement and that the result was hatred and further warfare in the future--the armistace agreements ending both the Franco-Prussian war and World War I, were signed at Versailles.
Instead of the classic cycle of punitive 'reparations' in peace treaties leading to the next war and then the next, the west, and in particular, the United States, supported support for national governments and economies thereby draining the swamp from which sprang historical wildcards like the German Nazis and the Italian Facists.
Another important effect of the Marshall Plan was that with European industry a shambles, and with Western Europe protected by the Aegis of the American Military ('Pax Americana'), 'old Europe,' rebuilt and as it did, it aided the American economy, driving it to heights never before seen in history.
American goods were in worldwide demand and the prosperity of the American worker increased even as his productivity increased with, economists tell us, his real purchasing power rising to a peak in the seventies and then beginning a decline which has been accelerated by the dow