this is an improper analogy (as i said originally) and
has been carried too far.
The analogy was perfectly fine, and if you were an intellectually honest person you would admit it. Instead, you impotently fear that if you yield any points to the other side that the whole thing will slip from your grasp. And, again you have repeated your misunderstanding of the rhetorical purpose of analogy. One shouldn't carry them anywhere, but draw from the one single point they make. You say "censorware is completely ineffective"? Well so are doorlocks when they are next to a window. Why won't you admit that? Because you being swayed by your emotions (are YOU a chick?) and thus fail to stay rational. As I said in another post, do you think all AI research on computer cognition should cease because it will never work? Please explain how computer cognition could be useful for everything except filtering.
You think I didn't understand the thread? The original question was how to construct a good filter, and you have contributed nothing to that discussion. Saying "can't be done" is not contributing unless you explain why, which you never have. And furthermore, review the thread and you will see where I have repeatedly pointed out just plain dumb mistakes in your reasoning, so I don't know what you are getting so hot about; this is pursuit of the truth, not your-self-esteem-on-trial.
how to have a discussion, 101: if his meaning hinged on your interpretation, he could simply have clarified it with a post. he didn't. So to jump in later with a nitpick seems... well, futile.
It's not for you to decide why someone should be bothered by something, especially if you can't be bothered
to keep your own reasoning straight.
Aren't you jumping in here and attempting to pass judgement on what should and should not bother me, and thereby failing to keep your own reasoning straight all within the confines of one sentence? You truly are not as smart as you think you are.
If you want to get all philosophical, much CS research goes into getting computers to do human-like things like recognizing pictures, and deriving meaning from text. If those are futile causes, then so is porn-filtering. If you don't think they are futile, then shut up. The rest of your hand-wringing is self-serving, smacking of the wishful thinking of one who wants porn to be readily available. Yes, that's a perfectly valid position, I've no problem with it, but it taints your arguments about efficacy.
Actually, security theory provides us a reasonable answer to that question. If the lock presents an intruder with
a significant additional delay or will alert others of her actions at the time of the break-in, it's worth it; otherwise
it isn't.
then, you would agree that the deterent that porn-filtering software provides is also useful? See? That's how you stay on a thread. And, btw, you left out other reasons based on both game and legal theory.
You assume knowledge of your
opponent's thoughts and motives that you can't really support by referencing what he actually wrote. May I suggest
that you use your incipient psychic powers to deduce what I think of your posturing.
ah, you're just a blowhard, and one who's just plain wrong. Go back and read the thread: I only started calling people stupid after I spent time quoting and refuting them and they just repeated the same arguments over again. You on the other hand completely lost track of the matter under discussion and never discussed your incredibly perceptive theories about filtering.
oh, so your parents (where you no doubt live) don't lock the doors because their alarm is so good? and for someone who claims to be smart, you have an awful lot of trouble following the thread of an argument: doesn't putting locks on the door make people want to break in? That was your theory about porn... or can't you remember back to the beginning of your two part argument?
When you call me ugly, you are name-calling. When I call you stupid, I prove it by quoting you.
I thought I already said, I just get annoyed at
shallow arguments with a hidden agenda. But, here you are proposing a new one. Boys seek out pornography because they like pornography, not because they are not supposed to. If we banned pink Barbie clothes, boys would not start seeking it out. It is only a bonus that the flaw in your argument is the same flaw I already pointed out. Criminals break windows to get into your house not because the doors are locked, but because they want to get into the house.
Dear Lord, deliver me and Slashdot from the hordes of morons.
well, my analogy already addressed the point you were making: why lock your doors if it is so easy to break a window? I'm serious, that is not an easy question to answer.
but you give yourself away at the end. You are against censorship, but you try to use the argument that filters don't work to undermine them. But if they really don't work, and you are against them, why do you care? They wouldn't do any good anyway. I think you care about them because you are afraid that they work.
BTW, I have not taken a position on the question of censorship, publicly financed or privately. I just get annoyed at shallow arguments with a hidden agenda.
I said it was a loose analogy. You made a very common mistake in analyzing analogies: the point of analogy is to illustrate the part of the analogy that works, not to find the flaw. All analogies are flawed: by definition, it is a different situation. If you are an open minded person, you listen to an analogy to help you understand what the other person is saying, and resist the urge to shoot it down and turn it into one more part of the argument. I will also note that you are shifting the grounds of your original objection to my post. And anyway, you're wrong, many people do have the urge to enter other people's houses, the same people that locks are designed for.
obviously you're just set in the opinion that 'censorware serves a purpose' and you can't see outside of that. so
there's no sense in this discussion.
Oh yeah, like this statement applies to me more than it applies to you. You are set in an opinion on one end of the spectrum ("futile") while I am in the moderate middle, believing that filters work as well as they work.
if you look at your subject line and your comment together, you essentially said "futile because it's not foolproof": I think I was entirely justified in tying those two statements together.
so many people consider so many different things obscene that it's really impossible to do this kind of thing,
and that's the real issue.
That's not the real issue. It's the real truth that it's impossible to do perfectly, or to please everyone, but you go too far when you conclude that therefore nothing can be done. As a very loose analogy, it is incredibly easy to break into virtually any suburban house by busting a window. Yet, people still put locks on the doors, because it both sends the message "that's against the rules" and it does deter some number of people.
He didn't say "foolproof" was a requirement, that was an assumption of yours. And, a hybrid solution which entails blocking of certain obvious words, coupled with leaving the terminals in open areas which are likely to be monitored (once again, not "foolproof", but reasonably effective in many cases) would probably be quite workable.
you are right on a few facts, but overall you
failed miserably to make your point or disprove mine.
My suggestion had nothing to do with soot, and the photosynthesis involved in my suggestion is every bit as good as yours, and my solution results in dead trees/fossil fuels/carbon accumulating in the ground while yours does not.
actually, that fact/falsehood does not really qualify as FUD. FUD must have a "risky future" element to it.
And on a related topic, is it true that the energy used to fire a ceramic coffee cup is way more than used to produce a few thousand paper or styrofoam cups, the equivalent in terms of use? Has anyone ever noted that growing treas, making paper, and burying it rather than recylcing is about the only way there is to remove carbon from the atmosphere to forestall alleged global warming?
Your point is ridiculous. Rob is not by definition on-topic, that's just not the meaning of "topic". your point might be that he's entitled, but then so is everyone, he entitled them. My overarching point, clearly made, was that his (and anyone's) comments would be much more interesting and socially accepted if he backed them up with some reasoning, examples, etc.
And from the "why do you keep overreaching" file, nice try getting into your able-to-spell gang:)
apparently
you're more knowledgable, please enlighten us.
apparently, you're just plain stupid: I already did enlighten you. I didn't say slashdot wasn't his site, I said [repeating myself] considere the comments as moderation according to the system that Rob invented. If you wanna run your mouth around the big kids, you're gonna hafta do better than you did.
He uses Slashdot for his views about software, why not politics?
because what he wrote was not "views". It was
Flamebait
Troll
Offtopic
Overrated
and the complaints should be considered as moderation. If he had written something halfway Inciteful, Informative, or even just reasoned, folks would have had a chance to counter argue. But just to get up and shout "Bush sucks" is what Slashdot is not all about.
color blindness isn't really that interesting: all of us see bands of EMF as one color or another, and there are many frequencies we don't see at all. There are a small number of us who can see or distinguish fewer colors than average... so what?
companies think "bigger is better", and in a way, desire to be a monopoly, even though that is
not in society's best interests overall.
that's correct, and very perceptive. Michael Porter (Harvard strategy professor) points out that there are only two ways for a company to be profitable in the long run: to be the lowest cost producer (i.e. the biggest), or to be differentiated, the only one offering particular variants of products, i.e. essentially to be a mini-monopolist to allow for higher prices. Companies pursuing a differentiated strategy generally sell high quality items with strong brandnames.
does monopoly hurt itself
the answer to that is essentially "no", but it does depend on the industry. Because monopolies are de facto the biggest producers, they generally have lower costs than any small or competitors. And, because monopolists charge higher prices, they have plenty of cash. So, monopolists are very well positioned to respond to competitive threats by dropping prices to drive competitors out of business (remember when Microsoft sold its Office suite for $99 as a competitive upgrade?), or by buying companies or technologies as they need to. And that's not to mention the strongarm tactics they can use based on customer dependence, bundling, tying, etc.
Monopolists "hurt" themselves by sustaining high prices and profitability which becomes very attractive to potential new competitors. The high prices can make new technologies worth developing: could AMD have justified major investmnts in DRAM chips? Was pouring money into monopoly x86 chips a better idea? Another small way might be, everybody "hates" them and if economic circumstances change (they always do), coustomers collectively try to seek alternatives. But, this is a mild effect as lowered prices usually bring irritated customers back.
some economists worry less about monopolies because in the long run they often become irrelevant, so the harm they do may not be worth fighting too hard. Western Union and Wells Fargo, for example, IBM for a more recent one? Hard to separate though, whether without the anti-trust laws IBM might have continued to dominate the computer industry.
BTW, the benefit of being a monopolist and the harm they simultaneously do to customers and to "society" can be shown quite clearly on a graph of supply and demand. I don't have time at the moment to search, but there must be such a picture on the web, key word "dead weight loss"
I realy gotta run, but the 10% management number... management overhead could be 10% or more overall for a spinoff, but unless operations can be completely consolidated in a merger (i.e. the products of the two companies are identical) then that management overhead does not go away. The "delta" is not 10% is what I meant. Think of it this way: OSes and Office sofware are different lines of business, and right up to the top of the corporation they require management attention. Bill Gates can only put half his attention into OSes because of the time he spends with Office. However, in this case it is worth it because by tying the two products together he can sustain two monopolies with extra high profitability.
and to any moderator still reading, how can my original post at the top of this thread be called "redundant"? it was a very early post and raised important questions not covered by the article nor by anyone else here.
Punishing a monopolist: good idea. But as you point out in your Saab example, don't punish the consumers. Taxes (even if you call them fines) simply raise prices, and that punishes consumers. Raising prices is exactly what a monopolist is already doing. Forcing a monopolist to increase sales by 25% (by slashing prices or paying folks to take them if need be) is probably a better strategy.
wow! very detailed post, thanks for taking the time.
according to conventional business wisdom as taught in business schools today, here's where you've gone astray: monopolies are more profitable corporations, but a good chunk of their profits are considered bad for the economy because it comes from the monopolist decreasing
its production in order to raise prices. Having few customers enjoying the benefits of a product,
and paying more for it, is bad for the economy, antithetical to the point of a free market.
So, while there are legitimate reasons why corporations want to merge and grow (and illegitimate ones like CEO compensation), you need to separate out the monopoly part to get a valid analysis. Microsoft is worth less if they are not a monopoly, and that is why the parts seem to be worth less than the whole, but that extra value was hijacked from the free market so virtually all economists agree they don't deserve it.
The other main reason "bigger is better" for the owners is because of economies of scale and learning curve advantages. The largest producer is the lowest cost producer in most industries, and they can thus earn the highest profits in a competitive market, and that's the main reason to seek out mergers. But, regulators need to be wary that monopolies don't emerge from the consolidation.
Other things you said have less validity. Management overhead at 10% is a pretty high estimate, and disacquisitions do take place, a lot. Buyers of Palm (from 3Com) don't think they are "losing money" on management, and virtually all of the giant conglomerates of the 70s were broken up in the 80s. The economy particularly benefits when investors get to choose narrow product lines to invest in, rather than baskets of unrelated things where some dogs can drag down the average and sap the company's strength.
Finally, while we agree that the MS breakup is a good thing, I think you are filled with too much doom and gloom about the short run. I think you are underestimating the penalty that consumers are paying to Microsoft today. So, while there might be some economic slowdown immediately surrounding Microsoft, it will be more than made up for by the savings experienced by consumers of their products which money becomes available for other uses, and by the investment into competition for Microsoft now that investors feel they have a shot at success. Heck, there will even be a burst of activity from the MS pieces doing new deals with former foes. I would expect a huge boom. The telecommunications boom did emerge overnight, even if there are a small number of customers who experienced problems.
this post is too long and took too long to go back and read in this little window... mea culpa for any errors:) and any disagreements aside, thanks for the thoughtfulness and civility
neither the article nor your post covered the issues I raised... or didn't you read my post?:) "Fines?" is a rhetorical question in the context I in which I used it.
Slashdot Mirror
The analogy was perfectly fine, and if you were an intellectually honest person you would admit it. Instead, you impotently fear that if you yield any points to the other side that the whole thing will slip from your grasp. And, again you have repeated your misunderstanding of the rhetorical purpose of analogy. One shouldn't carry them anywhere, but draw from the one single point they make. You say "censorware is completely ineffective"? Well so are doorlocks when they are next to a window. Why won't you admit that? Because you being swayed by your emotions (are YOU a chick?) and thus fail to stay rational. As I said in another post, do you think all AI research on computer cognition should cease because it will never work? Please explain how computer cognition could be useful for everything except filtering.
You think I didn't understand the thread? The original question was how to construct a good filter, and you have contributed nothing to that discussion. Saying "can't be done" is not contributing unless you explain why, which you never have. And furthermore, review the thread and you will see where I have repeatedly pointed out just plain dumb mistakes in your reasoning, so I don't know what you are getting so hot about; this is pursuit of the truth, not your-self-esteem-on-trial.
how to have a discussion, 101: if his meaning hinged on your interpretation, he could simply have clarified it with a post. he didn't. So to jump in later with a nitpick seems ... well, futile.
It's not for you to decide why someone should be bothered by something, especially if you can't be bothered to keep your own reasoning straight.
Aren't you jumping in here and attempting to pass judgement on what should and should not bother me, and thereby failing to keep your own reasoning straight all within the confines of one sentence? You truly are not as smart as you think you are.
If you want to get all philosophical, much CS research goes into getting computers to do human-like things like recognizing pictures, and deriving meaning from text. If those are futile causes, then so is porn-filtering. If you don't think they are futile, then shut up. The rest of your hand-wringing is self-serving, smacking of the wishful thinking of one who wants porn to be readily available. Yes, that's a perfectly valid position, I've no problem with it, but it taints your arguments about efficacy.
then, you would agree that the deterent that porn-filtering software provides is also useful? See? That's how you stay on a thread. And, btw, you left out other reasons based on both game and legal theory.
You assume knowledge of your opponent's thoughts and motives that you can't really support by referencing what he actually wrote. May I suggest that you use your incipient psychic powers to deduce what I think of your posturing.
ah, you're just a blowhard, and one who's just plain wrong. Go back and read the thread: I only started calling people stupid after I spent time quoting and refuting them and they just repeated the same arguments over again. You on the other hand completely lost track of the matter under discussion and never discussed your incredibly perceptive theories about filtering.
When you call me ugly, you are name-calling. When I call you stupid, I prove it by quoting you.
but that's not the joke. The joke entails a death-defying descent down a mountain road, and the software engineer wants to try it again.
I think you meant to say, "where the derivative of the utility function is zero"
Dear Lord, deliver me and Slashdot from the hordes of morons.
but you give yourself away at the end. You are against censorship, but you try to use the argument that filters don't work to undermine them. But if they really don't work, and you are against them, why do you care? They wouldn't do any good anyway. I think you care about them because you are afraid that they work.
BTW, I have not taken a position on the question of censorship, publicly financed or privately. I just get annoyed at shallow arguments with a hidden agenda.
obviously you're just set in the opinion that 'censorware serves a purpose' and you can't see outside of that. so there's no sense in this discussion.
Oh yeah, like this statement applies to me more than it applies to you. You are set in an opinion on one end of the spectrum ("futile") while I am in the moderate middle, believing that filters work as well as they work.
so many people consider so many different things obscene that it's really impossible to do this kind of thing, and that's the real issue.
That's not the real issue. It's the real truth that it's impossible to do perfectly, or to please everyone, but you go too far when you conclude that therefore nothing can be done. As a very loose analogy, it is incredibly easy to break into virtually any suburban house by busting a window. Yet, people still put locks on the doors, because it both sends the message "that's against the rules" and it does deter some number of people.
He didn't say "foolproof" was a requirement, that was an assumption of yours. And, a hybrid solution which entails blocking of certain obvious words, coupled with leaving the terminals in open areas which are likely to be monitored (once again, not "foolproof", but reasonably effective in many cases) would probably be quite workable.
and young trees accumulate carbon mass more quickly than old trees do.
you are right on a few facts, but overall you failed miserably to make your point or disprove mine. My suggestion had nothing to do with soot, and the photosynthesis involved in my suggestion is every bit as good as yours, and my solution results in dead trees/fossil fuels/carbon accumulating in the ground while yours does not.
And on a related topic, is it true that the energy used to fire a ceramic coffee cup is way more than used to produce a few thousand paper or styrofoam cups, the equivalent in terms of use? Has anyone ever noted that growing treas, making paper, and burying it rather than recylcing is about the only way there is to remove carbon from the atmosphere to forestall alleged global warming?
And from the "why do you keep overreaching" file, nice try getting into your able-to-spell gang :)
apparently, you're just plain stupid: I already did enlighten you. I didn't say slashdot wasn't his site, I said [repeating myself] considere the comments as moderation according to the system that Rob invented. If you wanna run your mouth around the big kids, you're gonna hafta do better than you did.
you might think he's a rotten person, but since he's winning and shows all signs of eventually winning... by what measure is he a rotten candidate?
:) that was a good one. you should have been modded up :)
because what he wrote was not "views". It was
- Flamebait
- Troll
- Offtopic
- Overrated
and the complaints should be considered as moderation. If he had written something halfway Inciteful, Informative, or even just reasoned, folks would have had a chance to counter argue. But just to get up and shout "Bush sucks" is what Slashdot is not all about.color blindness isn't really that interesting: all of us see bands of EMF as one color or another, and there are many frequencies we don't see at all. There are a small number of us who can see or distinguish fewer colors than average... so what?
but you did put that ironic little je ne sais quoi shrug in the last line, that's what makes haiku work.
that's correct, and very perceptive. Michael Porter (Harvard strategy professor) points out that there are only two ways for a company to be profitable in the long run: to be the lowest cost producer (i.e. the biggest), or to be differentiated, the only one offering particular variants of products, i.e. essentially to be a mini-monopolist to allow for higher prices. Companies pursuing a differentiated strategy generally sell high quality items with strong brandnames.
does monopoly hurt itself
the answer to that is essentially "no", but it does depend on the industry. Because monopolies are de facto the biggest producers, they generally have lower costs than any small or competitors. And, because monopolists charge higher prices, they have plenty of cash. So, monopolists are very well positioned to respond to competitive threats by dropping prices to drive competitors out of business (remember when Microsoft sold its Office suite for $99 as a competitive upgrade?), or by buying companies or technologies as they need to. And that's not to mention the strongarm tactics they can use based on customer dependence, bundling, tying, etc.
Monopolists "hurt" themselves by sustaining high prices and profitability which becomes very attractive to potential new competitors. The high prices can make new technologies worth developing: could AMD have justified major investmnts in DRAM chips? Was pouring money into monopoly x86 chips a better idea? Another small way might be, everybody "hates" them and if economic circumstances change (they always do), coustomers collectively try to seek alternatives. But, this is a mild effect as lowered prices usually bring irritated customers back.
some economists worry less about monopolies because in the long run they often become irrelevant, so the harm they do may not be worth fighting too hard. Western Union and Wells Fargo, for example, IBM for a more recent one? Hard to separate though, whether without the anti-trust laws IBM might have continued to dominate the computer industry.
BTW, the benefit of being a monopolist and the harm they simultaneously do to customers and to "society" can be shown quite clearly on a graph of supply and demand. I don't have time at the moment to search, but there must be such a picture on the web, key word "dead weight loss"
I realy gotta run, but the 10% management number... management overhead could be 10% or more overall for a spinoff, but unless operations can be completely consolidated in a merger (i.e. the products of the two companies are identical) then that management overhead does not go away. The "delta" is not 10% is what I meant. Think of it this way: OSes and Office sofware are different lines of business, and right up to the top of the corporation they require management attention. Bill Gates can only put half his attention into OSes because of the time he spends with Office. However, in this case it is worth it because by tying the two products together he can sustain two monopolies with extra high profitability.
and to any moderator still reading, how can my original post at the top of this thread be called "redundant"? it was a very early post and raised important questions not covered by the article nor by anyone else here.
Punishing a monopolist: good idea. But as you point out in your Saab example, don't punish the consumers. Taxes (even if you call them fines) simply raise prices, and that punishes consumers. Raising prices is exactly what a monopolist is already doing. Forcing a monopolist to increase sales by 25% (by slashing prices or paying folks to take them if need be) is probably a better strategy.
according to conventional business wisdom as taught in business schools today, here's where you've gone astray: monopolies are more profitable corporations, but a good chunk of their profits are considered bad for the economy because it comes from the monopolist decreasing its production in order to raise prices. Having few customers enjoying the benefits of a product, and paying more for it, is bad for the economy, antithetical to the point of a free market.
So, while there are legitimate reasons why corporations want to merge and grow (and illegitimate ones like CEO compensation), you need to separate out the monopoly part to get a valid analysis. Microsoft is worth less if they are not a monopoly, and that is why the parts seem to be worth less than the whole, but that extra value was hijacked from the free market so virtually all economists agree they don't deserve it.
The other main reason "bigger is better" for the owners is because of economies of scale and learning curve advantages. The largest producer is the lowest cost producer in most industries, and they can thus earn the highest profits in a competitive market, and that's the main reason to seek out mergers. But, regulators need to be wary that monopolies don't emerge from the consolidation.
Other things you said have less validity. Management overhead at 10% is a pretty high estimate, and disacquisitions do take place, a lot. Buyers of Palm (from 3Com) don't think they are "losing money" on management, and virtually all of the giant conglomerates of the 70s were broken up in the 80s. The economy particularly benefits when investors get to choose narrow product lines to invest in, rather than baskets of unrelated things where some dogs can drag down the average and sap the company's strength.
Finally, while we agree that the MS breakup is a good thing, I think you are filled with too much doom and gloom about the short run. I think you are underestimating the penalty that consumers are paying to Microsoft today. So, while there might be some economic slowdown immediately surrounding Microsoft, it will be more than made up for by the savings experienced by consumers of their products which money becomes available for other uses, and by the investment into competition for Microsoft now that investors feel they have a shot at success. Heck, there will even be a burst of activity from the MS pieces doing new deals with former foes. I would expect a huge boom. The telecommunications boom did emerge overnight, even if there are a small number of customers who experienced problems.
this post is too long and took too long to go back and read in this little window ... mea culpa for any errors :) and any disagreements aside, thanks for the thoughtfulness and civility
neither the article nor your post covered the issues I raised... or didn't you read my post? :) "Fines?" is a rhetorical question in the context I in which I used it.