There is also the ethics of saying "we have a quarter million people looking for love in all the wrong places" when it reality it is a dozen people.
Certainly; as I said, false implied endorsement seems clearly unethical. Similarly lying (perhaps by implication) about the source of data seems clearly unethical. But supposing "the online database of pictures of people" clearly said that its pictures came from any and every publicly available online source, I don't see what's wrong with it scraping Facebook's data, morally. Not all publicly available sources seem to meet the same criteria, though. Suppose I went to the public library, got a recent book, scanned it, and posted it online. I'd say my library signup acts as an agreement (perhaps implicit) to respect copyright law with the library's books. I don't see any reasonable implicit agreement in the online case, since Facebook's public data is so incredibly easy to access. If I implicitly agree to something just by visiting a web page, and it doesn't warn me in any way what I'm agreeing to, I could accidentally agree to horrific things, which is just a stupid system of morality.
I have no idea what the law would say about data mining in a case like this, but morally I just don't see the problem.
Yeah, I agree about the original. The second tweet, "we weren't intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment.", did annoy me, though. They certainly were making light of a serious situation--which isn't necessarily bad--and the sensitivity bit is just BS to make him look better.
If the original was intended to provide marketing by provoking a reaction, then it was a rotten thing to do. But I think it's clear the guy had a mild joke in mind with a bunch of Egyptians running outside en masse to buy his new line of shoe and wanted to share a bit of humor.
Newton's laws don't exist, except as abstract mathematical idealizations. They don't model reality except approximately. That wasn't quite your point, but still, one can tie "1+1=2" to reality via counting in a way you can't with Newton's laws. Also, it's not necessarily the case that every living thing dies--perhaps there are some immortal aliens or some such thing; it's a big universe. Still, every living thing I'm aware of will die.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but why exactly is this unethical? The data is publicly available and TFA's screenshot (the real site is apparently/.'d) only says "[Lovely Faces] lists real people, sincerely positing their real data and picture" which is not a lie (modulo marketing exaggeration that everyone seems to be happy glossing over) as these people posted their data to Facebook. Suppose for a moment there was no implication whatsoever that the people listed on Lovely Faces intentionally signed up. In that case, what's wrong with collecting publicly available data and putting it into one site? Is the issue entirely that people expect dating site profiles to have been created by that person, and Lovely Faces doesn't smash that expectation?
Scraping data violates Facebook's Automated Data Collection Terms, though in what way are those binding? I don't have to explicitly agree to anything to view some information, like certain profile's pictures.
I agree it is unethical to take someone's picture, point at it, and say "this person endorses this site" when they actually don't. It doesn't seem unethical to take someone's picture and put it on "the online database of pictures of people". Most people seem to be saying the scraping itself was unethical, while I disagree. I think it's just the implied endorsement.
Hah! Good point. However, the marketing just says "the destroying effect of bacteria is hindered" instead of "destroys bacteria", so they even got that at best only partly right.
On the back of the tube it was stated that, ‘radioactive radiation increases the defenses of teeth and gums... cells are loaded with new life energy, the destroying effect of bacteria is hindered... it gently polishes the dental enamel and turns it white and shiny.'
Yes, you're right, it's definitely 4 chimes. I played around on the piano for a minute and the closest I could come was C, D, B, G (perhaps transposed). If it weren't for Jeopardy! afterward I probably wouldn't watch it either:).
He said "lighter". I was talking about having him possibly having a point about the object getting appreciably less heavy over time due to gravitational field strength changes caused by earth's mass decreasing. This is certainly tangential to the articles which as far as I remember only talked about mass changes, as you suggest.
You're an idiot. The earth weighs about 5.9736×10^24 kg. One billionth of that would be about 6,000,000,000,000,000 kg. We haven't launched even remotely that much into space--it's over 10,000 times the weight of every living person.
If there's some sort of atmospheric leeching or similar effect I don't know about, you might actually have a point, but to say so confidently that launching stuff into space is the cause is just stupid.
It always annoyed me that they didn't add in multiple word processing and the ability to say which letters have been guessed. Really, what kind of programmer just stops at a single word hangman solver? I'd feel terrible coding that.
There's no $2000 space (only $2500) and the person who starts each round rotates as the game progresses. Also, I'm remembering the sound as having 3 tones instead of four, but maybe I'm wrong there. Forgive the nitpicks though; your comment was hilarious:).
Maybe; I'd have to find more information than it's worth to strongly agree or disagree. Your link and its comments certainly suggest what you said, but I don't believe their objectivity. Ramsay is easy to hate since he criticizes the "little guy" most people identify with, and so he's easy to misinterpret. I can at least imagine him yelling at someone for something quite similar to this situation (though different, at least in his mind) and his detractors latching on to the similarity and calling him a hypocrite for it all. Or, perhaps he's inconsistent, or a liar--though I have no evidence for either, and in general I give people the benefit of the doubt in the absence of strong evidence.
That link repeatedly misspells "lasagna", misspells "all", and speculates rampantly. My point is a random person's blog post isn't exactly the best source. A hopefully more reputable source gives Ramsay's side,
Then there was the “boil-in-the-bag” fiasco, when it was revealed that one of Ramsay’s restaurants, Foxtrot Oscar, in Chelsea, West London, used preprepared food that was heated and sold with mark-ups of up to 586 per cent. Ramsay tells me that there was pressure on him to apologise publicly. “Apologise for what?” he says, almost spluttering with indignation. “When I was working at the Gavroche all those years ago, the duck terrine wasn’t made there. It was made outside, then brought to the restaurant wrapped in plastic. This is standard practice. What on earth was the fuss about? That doesn’t make the food bad. We were doing wonderful navarins. It really annoyed me.”
It seems Ramsay doesn't see this practice as an imperfection ("We were doing wonderful navarins"). The food was also prepared specifically for Ramsay's restaurants--it's not TV dinner-style food, like your link sounds like it's implying.
I remember, like, 10 years ago rendering took like, forever, you were sittin' there 'is it finished yet?' 'no naw man it's...' now you's like, what?, it's like instant render. Sorry if I geeked out on you....
(I tried to transcribe it precisely; emphasis mine.) He's talking to Intel and apologizing for "geeking out" by discussing rendering times.... Right. He has a clue what he's doing. Yup.
He seems nervous in the video, like he knows he doesn't belong there and has nothing of substance to say. The marketing officer who introduced him has a plastic smile and empty compliments galore. It's really disgusting to watch--I couldn't finish the first video.
I've always read Ramsay as being remarkably self-controlled in his own way. He only screams at people who make mistakes--he's an extreme perfectionist. He thinks it ultimately helps them to hear the truth and lets his anger out at them simultaneously. He also keeps a pretty good clamp on his emotions on some talk shows I've seen (when the host is making food with him and they're just awful in comparison), which is evidently difficult for him.
Also, the correlation is not 1. That is, a self-controlled kid could still end up in a minimum-wage job in their 40's.
Amina Khan, the linked article's author, seems to have lifted those correlation numbers from the study. Suggesting the study didn't deal with causation is itself fallacious unless you've read the study and found the same problem. It's really unsurprising that a journalist reports statistics poorly, but saying the study itself is bad because of that is just cynically wrong.
If you let a little kid play with a loaded gun, it's your fault if something happens, not the gun's user or even designer.
C *is* a loaded gun. Anyone who can manage to use a compiler *should* know that. Not that they do...
I'm sorry, I don't get how your use of my analogy fits. There doesn't seem to be a supervisory "parent" figure to blame when the C programmer generates a pointer bug. I certainly agree C is a metaphorical loaded gun, I just don't see that statement's relevance.
After all, when is the last time you received an executable via email that was not harmful? What about your mom? What about your grandmom? Why is it even possible for those folks to install this stuff?
I have to send and receive executables via email relatively frequently, though my grandma certainly doesn't. IIRC Outlook won't even let you run them, which is probably a good idea.
When a user infects their computer with an email attachment, who pays for removal? The user, not the email client vendor or the OS vendor. Perhaps the client or OS could do more (eg. run executable attachments in a low-privilege sandbox, or add an entry in the options menu to enable executable attachment running) but allowing ignorance to be an excuse is a slippery slope that makes it OK for us all to be dumber.
I don't see why blaming the user is automatically negative. If I write some C code with a null pointer bug, is it my fault or Dennis Ritchie's for designing the language to include pointers? I'd say it's mine, and that I'd be a "user" of the C programming language. In this case I think blaming me, the user, is entirely justified. Then again, responsibility is not always clear-cut. If you let a little kid play with a loaded gun, it's your fault if something happens, not the gun's user or even designer.
IMO, if a user runs random executable email attachments, it's they're own fault. Nowadays on Windows they usually have to click past some warning telling them it might not be a good idea, too.
What does programming with VB have to do with anything? VB.NET is pretty respectable nowadays, IMO--at least, C# is, and they're virtually equivalent modulo syntax.
I tend to agree with you that it's the user's own fault if they didn't figure out file extensions and ran random email attachments. But, your wording hurts our case.
Yes, sorry I was ambiguous. I meant Office supports Ecma-376, 2nd edition inasmuch as it pretty much supports the transitional half. Nothing (or very little) seems to support strict.
It's even more confusing than that. Ecma-376 has two editions, the first being rejected by ISO and the second being accepted as ISO/IEC 29500. The first was more or less Microsoft's old proprietary format, and the second includes either "transitional" or "strict" versions. I suppose the Aussie standard means ecma-376, 2nd edition (since it's newer), and either the transitional or strict formats contained therein. In that case, TFA seems to be close to correct--MS Office appears to be one of the only software suites that supports it.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up. (Even though we can't verify that the parent actually invented AutoRun, it's interesting regardless.)
There is also the ethics of saying "we have a quarter million people looking for love in all the wrong places" when it reality it is a dozen people.
Certainly; as I said, false implied endorsement seems clearly unethical. Similarly lying (perhaps by implication) about the source of data seems clearly unethical. But supposing "the online database of pictures of people" clearly said that its pictures came from any and every publicly available online source, I don't see what's wrong with it scraping Facebook's data, morally. Not all publicly available sources seem to meet the same criteria, though. Suppose I went to the public library, got a recent book, scanned it, and posted it online. I'd say my library signup acts as an agreement (perhaps implicit) to respect copyright law with the library's books. I don't see any reasonable implicit agreement in the online case, since Facebook's public data is so incredibly easy to access. If I implicitly agree to something just by visiting a web page, and it doesn't warn me in any way what I'm agreeing to, I could accidentally agree to horrific things, which is just a stupid system of morality.
I have no idea what the law would say about data mining in a case like this, but morally I just don't see the problem.
Yeah, I agree about the original. The second tweet, "we weren't intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment.", did annoy me, though. They certainly were making light of a serious situation--which isn't necessarily bad--and the sensitivity bit is just BS to make him look better.
If the original was intended to provide marketing by provoking a reaction, then it was a rotten thing to do. But I think it's clear the guy had a mild joke in mind with a bunch of Egyptians running outside en masse to buy his new line of shoe and wanted to share a bit of humor.
Newton's laws don't exist, except as abstract mathematical idealizations. They don't model reality except approximately. That wasn't quite your point, but still, one can tie "1+1=2" to reality via counting in a way you can't with Newton's laws. Also, it's not necessarily the case that every living thing dies--perhaps there are some immortal aliens or some such thing; it's a big universe. Still, every living thing I'm aware of will die.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but why exactly is this unethical? The data is publicly available and TFA's screenshot (the real site is apparently /.'d) only says "[Lovely Faces] lists real people, sincerely positing their real data and picture" which is not a lie (modulo marketing exaggeration that everyone seems to be happy glossing over) as these people posted their data to Facebook. Suppose for a moment there was no implication whatsoever that the people listed on Lovely Faces intentionally signed up. In that case, what's wrong with collecting publicly available data and putting it into one site? Is the issue entirely that people expect dating site profiles to have been created by that person, and Lovely Faces doesn't smash that expectation?
Scraping data violates Facebook's Automated Data Collection Terms, though in what way are those binding? I don't have to explicitly agree to anything to view some information, like certain profile's pictures.
I agree it is unethical to take someone's picture, point at it, and say "this person endorses this site" when they actually don't. It doesn't seem unethical to take someone's picture and put it on "the online database of pictures of people". Most people seem to be saying the scraping itself was unethical, while I disagree. I think it's just the implied endorsement.
Ah a pedantic asshole.. Here taste your own medicine.
Ellipses have three dots. :)
Hah! Good point. However, the marketing just says "the destroying effect of bacteria is hindered" instead of "destroys bacteria", so they even got that at best only partly right.
Hah! I agree, C, E flat, B flat, G. It's strange that we both got the E flat wrong. I was remembering it more or less in major instead of minor.
On the back of the tube it was stated that, ‘radioactive radiation increases the defenses of teeth and gums... cells are loaded with new life energy, the destroying effect of bacteria is hindered... it gently polishes the dental enamel and turns it white and shiny.'
This is why I hate the marketing department.
Yes, you're right, it's definitely 4 chimes. I played around on the piano for a minute and the closest I could come was C, D, B, G (perhaps transposed). If it weren't for Jeopardy! afterward I probably wouldn't watch it either :).
He said "lighter". I was talking about having him possibly having a point about the object getting appreciably less heavy over time due to gravitational field strength changes caused by earth's mass decreasing. This is certainly tangential to the articles which as far as I remember only talked about mass changes, as you suggest.
You're an idiot. The earth weighs about 5.9736×10^24 kg. One billionth of that would be about 6,000,000,000,000,000 kg. We haven't launched even remotely that much into space--it's over 10,000 times the weight of every living person.
If there's some sort of atmospheric leeching or similar effect I don't know about, you might actually have a point, but to say so confidently that launching stuff into space is the cause is just stupid.
It always annoyed me that they didn't add in multiple word processing and the ability to say which letters have been guessed. Really, what kind of programmer just stops at a single word hangman solver? I'd feel terrible coding that.
There's no $2000 space (only $2500) and the person who starts each round rotates as the game progresses. Also, I'm remembering the sound as having 3 tones instead of four, but maybe I'm wrong there. Forgive the nitpicks though; your comment was hilarious :).
It's amazing how often Google Suggest has "X wiki" in the list. Typing in "jon stewart", "jon stewart wiki" is the 7th suggestion for me.
Maybe; I'd have to find more information than it's worth to strongly agree or disagree. Your link and its comments certainly suggest what you said, but I don't believe their objectivity. Ramsay is easy to hate since he criticizes the "little guy" most people identify with, and so he's easy to misinterpret. I can at least imagine him yelling at someone for something quite similar to this situation (though different, at least in his mind) and his detractors latching on to the similarity and calling him a hypocrite for it all. Or, perhaps he's inconsistent, or a liar--though I have no evidence for either, and in general I give people the benefit of the doubt in the absence of strong evidence.
Then there was the “boil-in-the-bag” fiasco, when it was revealed that one of Ramsay’s restaurants, Foxtrot Oscar, in Chelsea, West London, used preprepared food that was heated and sold with mark-ups of up to 586 per cent. Ramsay tells me that there was pressure on him to apologise publicly. “Apologise for what?” he says, almost spluttering with indignation. “When I was working at the Gavroche all those years ago, the duck terrine wasn’t made there. It was made outside, then brought to the restaurant wrapped in plastic. This is standard practice. What on earth was the fuss about? That doesn’t make the food bad. We were doing wonderful navarins. It really annoyed me.”
It seems Ramsay doesn't see this practice as an imperfection ("We were doing wonderful navarins"). The food was also prepared specifically for Ramsay's restaurants--it's not TV dinner-style food, like your link sounds like it's implying.
I remember, like, 10 years ago rendering took like, forever, you were sittin' there 'is it finished yet?' 'no naw man it's...' now you's like, what?, it's like instant render. Sorry if I geeked out on you....
(I tried to transcribe it precisely; emphasis mine.) He's talking to Intel and apologizing for "geeking out" by discussing rendering times.... Right. He has a clue what he's doing. Yup.
He seems nervous in the video, like he knows he doesn't belong there and has nothing of substance to say. The marketing officer who introduced him has a plastic smile and empty compliments galore. It's really disgusting to watch--I couldn't finish the first video.
I've always read Ramsay as being remarkably self-controlled in his own way. He only screams at people who make mistakes--he's an extreme perfectionist. He thinks it ultimately helps them to hear the truth and lets his anger out at them simultaneously. He also keeps a pretty good clamp on his emotions on some talk shows I've seen (when the host is making food with him and they're just awful in comparison), which is evidently difficult for him.
Also, the correlation is not 1. That is, a self-controlled kid could still end up in a minimum-wage job in their 40's.
Amina Khan, the linked article's author, seems to have lifted those correlation numbers from the study. Suggesting the study didn't deal with causation is itself fallacious unless you've read the study and found the same problem. It's really unsurprising that a journalist reports statistics poorly, but saying the study itself is bad because of that is just cynically wrong.
If you let a little kid play with a loaded gun, it's your fault if something happens, not the gun's user or even designer.
C *is* a loaded gun. Anyone who can manage to use a compiler *should* know that. Not that they do...
I'm sorry, I don't get how your use of my analogy fits. There doesn't seem to be a supervisory "parent" figure to blame when the C programmer generates a pointer bug. I certainly agree C is a metaphorical loaded gun, I just don't see that statement's relevance.
After all, when is the last time you received an executable via email that was not harmful? What about your mom? What about your grandmom? Why is it even possible for those folks to install this stuff?
I have to send and receive executables via email relatively frequently, though my grandma certainly doesn't. IIRC Outlook won't even let you run them, which is probably a good idea.
When a user infects their computer with an email attachment, who pays for removal? The user, not the email client vendor or the OS vendor. Perhaps the client or OS could do more (eg. run executable attachments in a low-privilege sandbox, or add an entry in the options menu to enable executable attachment running) but allowing ignorance to be an excuse is a slippery slope that makes it OK for us all to be dumber.
You're blaming the user? Really?
I don't see why blaming the user is automatically negative. If I write some C code with a null pointer bug, is it my fault or Dennis Ritchie's for designing the language to include pointers? I'd say it's mine, and that I'd be a "user" of the C programming language. In this case I think blaming me, the user, is entirely justified. Then again, responsibility is not always clear-cut. If you let a little kid play with a loaded gun, it's your fault if something happens, not the gun's user or even designer.
IMO, if a user runs random executable email attachments, it's they're own fault. Nowadays on Windows they usually have to click past some warning telling them it might not be a good idea, too.
What does programming with VB have to do with anything? VB.NET is pretty respectable nowadays, IMO--at least, C# is, and they're virtually equivalent modulo syntax.
I tend to agree with you that it's the user's own fault if they didn't figure out file extensions and ran random email attachments. But, your wording hurts our case.
Yes, sorry I was ambiguous. I meant Office supports Ecma-376, 2nd edition inasmuch as it pretty much supports the transitional half. Nothing (or very little) seems to support strict.
It's even more confusing than that. Ecma-376 has two editions, the first being rejected by ISO and the second being accepted as ISO/IEC 29500. The first was more or less Microsoft's old proprietary format, and the second includes either "transitional" or "strict" versions. I suppose the Aussie standard means ecma-376, 2nd edition (since it's newer), and either the transitional or strict formats contained therein. In that case, TFA seems to be close to correct--MS Office appears to be one of the only software suites that supports it.