So the only example in the summary is wrong. And you can tell by reading the summary. Bravo.
They looked at six personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and narcissism) and found that extroversion was not consistently predicted based on email address alone.
The other five traits were not only consistently agreed upon by the participants, but they matched up with user's descriptions of their own personalities.
Apparently by skipping the entire content of the paper you missed the point.
Unfortunately, it's going to take paralyzing fear to drive mankind into space again. The true early geniuses of space exploration and rocketry were people like Tsiolkovsky in Russia and Goddard in America. They laid the theoretical and early experimental groundwork that forms the basis of rocket science. But neither of them ever got any particular support in their lifetime. It wasn't until WWII that anyone got serious about space, and that's only because Von Braun was able to convince Hitler that the V-2 rocket would be an effective terror weapon (which it was not). But the Nazi war machine was able to make the V-2, which stands as perhaps the most impressive feat of science at the time except for the atom bomb.
The war ends and Russia and America swoop in, the Russians taking the physical rockets and plans and some engineers, and the Americans getting Von Braun and the brains of the V-2. Between the end of WWII and the launch of Sputnik, the only reason either nation was interested in "space travel" was their desire to make intercontinental weapons. The coincidence that any missile that could get a warhead to land a thousand miles away could also get a satellite into orbit meant that dreamers within each nation were able to get small pieces of the military budget for such a goal.
The next big break for space exploration came with the launch of Sputnik. Not because Sputnik was a particularly important technological achievement. It wasn't. The race for space only began in earnest because of the hysteria and panic felt in reaction to Sputnik. People were declaring the end of western civilization, the Cold War was being called in favor of the Soviets, and many, many people who were only familiar with the sci-fi term "satellite", which was used to mean entire space stations which were usually capable of dropping atomic weapons on earth, thought that their very lives were at stake. Into this atmosphere stepped the Democrats, led by the Lyndon Johnson, and they created the notion of a "missile gap" and set up congressional hearings to figure out what went wrong. NASA comes out of those hearings, and suddenly America really starts trying to get into space.
I apologize for all of this exposition, but the point that I am trying to make is that fear, and fear alone seems capable of driving mankind to devote the energy and money into getting off of the planet. Perhaps it could be argued that the national shame that America felt after being shown up by the "stupid peasant" communists was also instrumental, but I believe that the palpable fear of nuclear annihilation was more powerful.
After Sputnik II went up in November of 57, Bertrand Russell wrote an article called, "Can Scientific Man Survive?". He said:
If we may judge by the actions of great States, and by the public opinion which support these actions, it is a characteristic of homo sapiens that he is more anxious to kill his enemies than to stay alive himself. I know that almost everybody will repudiate this statement and say that it is a libel on human nature. I should reply that we must judge men by their actions rather than by their professments, and that one of the surest tests of a man's genuine desires is what he thinks it worth while to spend his money on." His critera certainly hold, and it is evident that the great states have virtually no interest in space. And I do not think that will change on any large scale unless it is driven by war or fear. So I doubt that the next 50 years will be that different from the past 40 unless we have another shock like Sputnik.
But at least America had the foresight to STEAL all of Hitler's smartest Nazis. Good thing Werner von Braun (German scientist, Nazi, SS, US Army employee, NASA administrator and all around "salesmen of space") had the foresight to surrender to the Americans: he knew that the Russians would kill him (for using Russian slave labor), and he knew the French would kill him (for using French slave labor). But he also knew that the Americans would use him (for his brain, not his evil deeds).
And it's a good thing someone everyone that "EVERYTHING HITLER EVER DID IS EVIL".
And it's a good thing that America then used Facist scientists to get to the moon. (the US "Saturn Rocket" is a direct decendant of the Nazi "V-2". The Soviet rockets that launched the Soviet space race were also, to a fair degree, based on the Nazi --engineering--, not scientists. (it is true that many, even most US scientists were not facists -- I am not claiming otherwise).
And it's also a good thing that SOMEONE told the world that a Cold War was happening, and that the United States HAD to fight the Soviets, making von Braun's background IRRELEVANT.
I have met Linda Hunt. I have not read her book Operation Paperclip, but I hear it is quite a read. I also hear that America has NO INTEREST in reading Linda Hunt's book. I wonder why?
"If the employer AND the government AND the congressman AND apparently no one else will listen to this boob, maybe, just maybe, his issue ain't that important and he should quit bellyaching.
Does this also apply to engineers of electronic voting systems?"
Who the hell says that two heads are better than one?
Don't the heads have to COMMUNICATE and SHARE THE SAME GOALS for that to be true?
I am a "navy brat". If you don't know what that means, look it up. I also attend UCSC. If you think you know what that means, I bet you're either a graduate or using some stupid list.
I have a dream in which the military and the hippies in America come together to fight those who are interested ONLY in their own power and money.
I too feel that such speech is dangerous. But I Respect this man more than I repsect my fear.
I believe his story. It sounds very, very true to me. I am not willing to say that it "is" true. But it fits perfectly with my perception of Lockheed Martin and "the military industrial complex". If you think you know what "the military industrial complex" is, please: don't. Listen to Eisenhower's words and then think about what they mean.
"If you ignore the fact that mass producing of Child porn only fuels the interest for more child porn, adding 'fuel' to their proverbial 'fire'."
My problem is the vague and (it seems to me) primarily rhetorical nature of their "adding fuel to their proverbial fire." The existence of child pornography is not the problem, it's the creation of child pornography: if no more child pornography were ever created, how could anyone argue that looking at the existing pictures was wrong? And, since your fire is proverbial, I guess that means that there is no burdern of proof, that you do not have to demonstrate the relationship between the act of viewing child pornography and the exploitive acts of creating it.
So what if we changed tactics. What if instead of simply trying to violently change the nature of a group of human beings who happen to have what we consider to be deviant sexualities, what if we instead tried to nurture that sexuality and help the person create relationships that satisfy their needs without literally exploiting any children?
What if there was a large, government overseen child pornography library that people could get access to provided that they agree to also go in for counseling? What if it was a physical library? What if it was a child porn rehab center? Also, and I'm just going to throw this out here and then dive for cover, when has anyone ever proved that there is something inherently and morally wrong with children and adults engaging in sexual activity? Who's to say that it isn't possible to have a healthy, nurturing sexual relationship between people just because one of the people is less developed? No one says that children can't have friendships, or intellectual relationships. No one claims that ten year olds lack the capacity to enter into student/teacher relationships? And, if they are at a disatvantage because of their inexperience, I could simply reply that they're only inexperienced because everyone is making it hard for them to get experience.
I would much, much rather people acknowledge that they have sexual feelings toward children, and then come together in a productive, and most importantly, SOCIAL series of interactions that do not -have- to involve anyone exploiting anyone else. Obviously, these interactions must be supervised. Then again, in my book almost everyone needs to have some sort of supervison and moral accountability (that's one of the inevitable results of existing in a social context).
I'm not saying that my specific "library of kiddie porn-ia" idea is any good, but my point is this: when we only allow ourselves to think negatively, we commit ourselves to acting based on negative thoughts and premises. How then could we hope to be productive? Maybe sometimes we'll happen to pick a usefully negative approach, but more often we will simply detract, destroy and negate. Instead of attacking people who want to have sex with children, why don't we help them? Instead of getting into a taboo-triggered knee-jerk moral hissy fit, why don't we try to understand one another and treat each other with compassion and respect.
Oh, right. I remember now. Because this is America.
I am endlessly apalled by the blatant and definitively American habbit of treating understanding and empathy as empty gestures that the liberal or the weak of faith and morals stupidly insist on wasting everyone's time with.
And there's an even bigger issue here:
What are the implications of a society being obsessed with justice but sconful of mercy?
It makes me shudder.
Re:Wikipedia Entry for Amazon Connect
on
Amazon Connect
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· Score: 1
As far as I can tell, the page for Amazon Connect just links back to the page for Amazon.com
My problem was the hyperbolic nature of his analogy. Yes, there is a very strong case to be made for remotely tracking (and limiting) the speed of consumer vehicles; speeding kills people. The free distribution of copyrighted songs and movies does not kill people, it hurts profits. Namely the profits of the corporate owners of the copyrights, not necessarily the artists.
"The kind of DRM the customer would be happy with is that which tells you whether your copy is "genuine", but no-one else."
Sure, I'd be fine with that. It would be an interesting way for me to waste my time, especially if it was a feature in itunes. Wouldn't it be delightful to even be able to see how many people downloaded files that -you- originated? Great fun all around.
But unless I'm missing a big point here, this isn't what Slyck wants. How would it help him to show us the statistics of what we're doing? Obviously the only reason he is interested in gathering that data is to use it in order to stop people from sharing media, which he will blindly keep trying to do by working himself up to a litigative hissy fit.
"With luck that could stop commercial piracy as much as is possible, but not harm normal customers; at the very least it would let buyers be more informed."
I guess you're assuming some sort of benevolence from file-sharers that I simply do not see. That's not to say that file-sharers are in any way inherently the enemies of the artists whose content they are distributing. But that's a whole other argument, and it's one that is played out here on slashdot often enough without our involvement.
I am sorry to point out that my bubble is still intact, unburst, but:
"Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that most laws against abortion violate a constitutional right to privacy, overturning all state laws outlawing or restricting abortion."
That's the very first sentence of the wikipedia entry on Roe v Wade.
"One way to look at this issue is through an analogy. At present, when you purchase a car there is computer technology in the car that keeps track of your average speed, but that technology is accepted and is viewed as net value add. However, if that technology were to automatically report the fact that you speed to the authorities then people's perspective would change. DRM is the same."
There are two key problems that his analogy brings up. First of all, consumers would obviously resist this hypothetical speed tracking hardware. Perhaps something like this will be implemented some day, perhaps not. But it will surely be fought, and rightly so. Until the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade and we lose our constitutional right to privacy, that is.
But the real difference is that speeding is often an issue of life and death, both for the driver and for everyone else on the road. Piracy isn't even remotely analogous. Even if the industry could prove that piracy is hurting them so much, the "hurt" here is loss of profit. I apologize for not sympathizing with your pain, my rich corporate friend.
"The technology is a part of a balance that is struck with the consumer. The creative community distributes high quality digital content and the consumers accept that they can't randomly and wantonly redistribute that high quality digital content."
As a consumer, I do not accept that I can't randomly and wantonly redistribute their content. He's talking about how he wants things to be, and then he characterizes consumers as agreeing with him. Someone needs a reality check.
Although I do like his use of the word "stuck". Personally, I like to think that a bargain is only good if one side is getting shafted because they lack the legal and legislative resources to stand up for themselves.
""ur", "ppl", and "prolly" are not even -close- to words."
No, actually they're very close to words. Pgfjopt is not even -close- to being a word in English. Prolly could easily be a world, as could ur. Although I must admit that it would be a stretch to get people to use "ppl" as a standard spelling.
But really, would it be all that unreasonable to spell [pipl] (with the l being syllablic) "ppl"? If you pronounce the first p "pee" (as if you were saying your ABCs), the second p as a simple voiceless bilabial stop (maybe aspirated, I'm bad at transcription), make the "l" a syllablic consonant and poof!, you have the correct pronunciation of the word "people". It's just as easy/good/right as saying that you have to figure out that "peo" is pronounced "pee" and that "le" means syllabic l and not "luh" or "lee" or "leh".
While everyone appreciates your snobbery (I personally find it hilarious AND insightful), stupidity has nothing to do with it. It's not as if he's trying to spell things your way and failing.
George Bernard Shaw signed his letters "yrs sincerely," and as far as I can tell, no one ever faulted him for it. But that's because people were stupid back then and didn't notice that "yrs" isn't EVEN CLOSE to being word. I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT HE MEANT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TRANSLATE THIS IDIOT SPEAK FOR ME!?
And I apologize for mocking you, it's just that I resent people who (incorrectly) associate variant conventions of speaking of spelling with intelligence.
No one ever claimed to say that porn is always bad. Your positive experience is certainly allowed for in any reasonable view on the scope of the effects of pornography. If you can demonstrate that your experience is the norm, then you have a legitimate objection. Or, if anyone claimed that your experience never happened, then yes, shout and let it known.
But really now, no one claimed to "tell the tale of ALL".
You have no reason to call the book a pile of shit, nor do you have any reason to call it biased or conservative.
"If the atomic bombs saved even one American life more than conventional warfare would have cost, then they were worthwhile. War is not about accounting for the other side's losses"
"A captain got up, a young captain said: "Goddammit, I'd like to know who the son of a bitch was that took this magnificent airplane, designed to bomb from 23,000 feet and he took it down to 5,000 feet and I lost my wingman. He was shot and killed. ..
He stood up. "Why are we here? Why are we here? You lost your wingman; it hurts me as much as it does you. I sent him there. And I've been there, I know what it is. But, you lost one wingman, and we destroyed Tokyo.""
Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.
Do you honestly think that wingman's life was worth 100,000 Japanese civilian lives? It is a horrible situation, and the most humane thing to do is to -equate- human life, not tilt the balance one way or another. Each of those deaths was a tragedy, and the more we distance ourselves from that fact, the more we enable ourselves to destroy. It is a disgusting, blinding cycle. Instead, war should be treated as it is: appalling and wrong. It -should- be psychologically hard to kill thousands of people. If we did not make war so easy for ourselves, perhaps we would not go so overboard when it comes to killing.
"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
"LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
I completely agree with you, but I would follow up your point with McNamara's comment about proportionality. McNamara became lost in his own ability to improve our firebombing campaigns, and, in doing so, perhaps fascilitated the deaths of tens of thousands of people that could otherwise have lived, all without changing the ultimate result of the campaign.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
Göring
I am most certainly willing to say that all war is wrong, that alternatives always exist and that they should be pursued with much more energy and commitment than war. I am not saying that --violence-- should never be used. Disgusting as it may be, there are sometimes situations that cannot be solved by anything but power, and sometimes the only power that works is violence. Violence, however, should ALWAYS be minimized. War is one of the worst possible applications of violence.
The whole debate of atom bomb v. land invasion is inherently flawed. In no, I repeat, in NO WAY were those our only two options. There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present. Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option. The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this, given the condition that the emperor stay in power. We of course did not accept this, nuked them, accepted their unconditional surrender, and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway.
The idea of this situation being binary is literally a lie.
To be completely fair, would it not be possible for the stress levels and lack of familiarity with the IQ tests be (I cringe to say) --somewhat-- standard? That is, people with specific training aside (and I do mean actually aside), if taking an IQ test is generally stressful, or, alternatively but equally imporant, generally approached as being pointless for certain people within larger populations, wouldn't the relative IQ scores still be worthwhile? By that I mean that if everyone's score is below their "actual" abilities, is it not possible that there is some regularity to the degree to which most people score below their abilities? This assumes, of course, that an IQ test taken under so-called idea circumstances has any worth.
Having writen it out, it does seem to me that there are too many variables involved. But perhaps not; we are talking about relatively extensive amounts of data (or are we not? again, I defer to the more informed).
"all the so-called inaccurate facts and what not."
I'm not sure how you mean "what not", but I refer to no inaccurate facts. Instead, I was talking about how Moore presents his information, which is often without source or context (such as dates for archival footage, for example).
Perhaps you should actually respond to my comment rather than simply spitting out a stock response for what you imagine I am saying.
While I would agree that it is very wise to note when Moore does and when he does not supply sources, dates for footage, where he got tanslations for speech in other languages, and the like, I completely disagree with your conclusion. It is not entertainment. It is not, in any fair sense, a documentary. There are, despite how people have been pushing to categorize Moore's film, more categories that his films can fall into. Moore maks arguments. Period.
In order to make his argument, Moore draws on facts--appropriately picked out as the strongest ones that fit his case. Moore is often vague in order to make a stroger point than the straight facts will give him (example: in 9/11, Moore is discussing the Saudi presence in American markets with [I'm not sure who]. The man tells Moore that in his estimation, the Saudis control between 6 and 7 percent of the nation's economy, in terms of investments. Moore goes on to say, (paraphrased), "well, if these guys control seven percent..." in his next voice-over.
Moore also employs powerfully emotional footage (Roger and Me, Columbine, and 9/11 all have parts that make me cry) in order to work up the people he's arguing to, thus supplimenting his factual argument.
9/11 is, in essene, an argument for people to vote against Bush in the 2004 election. Fundamentally, that is what Moore wants and what he is using his film to say. Simplifying it down to "entertainment" because it is not a classical documentary does both the film an inustice and also severely impairs your ability to think about the film or the film-maker with any consequence.
Well, you're totally wrong. This guy created a project that would include creative work in both computer science and music (as demanded by his independet area of study). His goal here is not a comment on the reviews, the reviewers, music makers, or music listeners. His goal is was to create a statistical approach to finding elements that, based on how often certain words were used, should combine to make music that the reviewers at Pitchfork would rate highly. Nowhere does he say "good" or "bad".
Slashdot Mirror
So the only example in the summary is wrong. And you can tell by reading the summary. Bravo.
They looked at six personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and narcissism) and found that extroversion was not consistently predicted based on email address alone.
The other five traits were not only consistently agreed upon by the participants, but they matched up with user's descriptions of their own personalities.
Apparently by skipping the entire content of the paper you missed the point.
Bravo.
The war ends and Russia and America swoop in, the Russians taking the physical rockets and plans and some engineers, and the Americans getting Von Braun and the brains of the V-2. Between the end of WWII and the launch of Sputnik, the only reason either nation was interested in "space travel" was their desire to make intercontinental weapons. The coincidence that any missile that could get a warhead to land a thousand miles away could also get a satellite into orbit meant that dreamers within each nation were able to get small pieces of the military budget for such a goal.
The next big break for space exploration came with the launch of Sputnik. Not because Sputnik was a particularly important technological achievement. It wasn't. The race for space only began in earnest because of the hysteria and panic felt in reaction to Sputnik. People were declaring the end of western civilization, the Cold War was being called in favor of the Soviets, and many, many people who were only familiar with the sci-fi term "satellite", which was used to mean entire space stations which were usually capable of dropping atomic weapons on earth, thought that their very lives were at stake. Into this atmosphere stepped the Democrats, led by the Lyndon Johnson, and they created the notion of a "missile gap" and set up congressional hearings to figure out what went wrong. NASA comes out of those hearings, and suddenly America really starts trying to get into space.
I apologize for all of this exposition, but the point that I am trying to make is that fear, and fear alone seems capable of driving mankind to devote the energy and money into getting off of the planet. Perhaps it could be argued that the national shame that America felt after being shown up by the "stupid peasant" communists was also instrumental, but I believe that the palpable fear of nuclear annihilation was more powerful.
After Sputnik II went up in November of 57, Bertrand Russell wrote an article called, "Can Scientific Man Survive?". He said: If we may judge by the actions of great States, and by the public opinion which support these actions, it is a characteristic of homo sapiens that he is more anxious to kill his enemies than to stay alive himself. I know that almost everybody will repudiate this statement and say that it is a libel on human nature. I should reply that we must judge men by their actions rather than by their professments, and that one of the surest tests of a man's genuine desires is what he thinks it worth while to spend his money on." His critera certainly hold, and it is evident that the great states have virtually no interest in space. And I do not think that will change on any large scale unless it is driven by war or fear. So I doubt that the next 50 years will be that different from the past 40 unless we have another shock like Sputnik.
It's called a rockoon, and it's been used since the earliest days of the space race.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/rockoon.htm
I personally Doubt your arguments for a single reasons:
You did not create an account, and you are not holding yourself Personally Responsible for your words.
But at least America had the foresight to STEAL all of Hitler's smartest Nazis. Good thing Werner von Braun (German scientist, Nazi, SS, US Army employee, NASA administrator and all around "salesmen of space") had the foresight to surrender to the Americans: he knew that the Russians would kill him (for using Russian slave labor), and he knew the French would kill him (for using French slave labor). But he also knew that the Americans would use him (for his brain, not his evil deeds).
And it's a good thing someone everyone that "EVERYTHING HITLER EVER DID IS EVIL".
And it's a good thing that America then used Facist scientists to get to the moon. (the US "Saturn Rocket" is a direct decendant of the Nazi "V-2". The Soviet rockets that launched the Soviet space race were also, to a fair degree, based on the Nazi --engineering--, not scientists. (it is true that many, even most US scientists were not facists -- I am not claiming otherwise).
And it's also a good thing that SOMEONE told the world that a Cold War was happening, and that the United States HAD to fight the Soviets, making von Braun's background IRRELEVANT.
I have met Linda Hunt. I have not read her book Operation Paperclip, but I hear it is quite a read. I also hear that America has NO INTEREST in reading Linda Hunt's book. I wonder why?
" If the employer AND the government AND the congressman AND apparently no one else will listen to this boob, maybe, just maybe, his issue ain't that important and he should quit bellyaching.
Does this also apply to engineers of electronic voting systems?"
Who the hell says that two heads are better than one?
Don't the heads have to COMMUNICATE and SHARE THE SAME GOALS for that to be true?
Otherwise you're a schizophrenic hydra.
In my "humble opinion".
I am a "navy brat". If you don't know what that means, look it up. I also attend UCSC. If you think you know what that means, I bet you're either a graduate or using some stupid list.
I have a dream in which the military and the hippies in America come together to fight those who are interested ONLY in their own power and money.
I too feel that such speech is dangerous. But I Respect this man more than I repsect my fear.
I believe his story. It sounds very, very true to me. I am not willing to say that it "is" true. But it fits perfectly with my perception of Lockheed Martin and "the military industrial complex". If you think you know what "the military industrial complex" is, please: don't. Listen to Eisenhower's words and then think about what they mean.
Please don't kill me.
"If you ignore the fact that mass producing of Child porn only fuels the interest for more child porn, adding 'fuel' to their proverbial 'fire'."
My problem is the vague and (it seems to me) primarily rhetorical nature of their "adding fuel to their proverbial fire." The existence of child pornography is not the problem, it's the creation of child pornography: if no more child pornography were ever created, how could anyone argue that looking at the existing pictures was wrong? And, since your fire is proverbial, I guess that means that there is no burdern of proof, that you do not have to demonstrate the relationship between the act of viewing child pornography and the exploitive acts of creating it.
So what if we changed tactics. What if instead of simply trying to violently change the nature of a group of human beings who happen to have what we consider to be deviant sexualities, what if we instead tried to nurture that sexuality and help the person create relationships that satisfy their needs without literally exploiting any children?
What if there was a large, government overseen child pornography library that people could get access to provided that they agree to also go in for counseling? What if it was a physical library? What if it was a child porn rehab center? Also, and I'm just going to throw this out here and then dive for cover, when has anyone ever proved that there is something inherently and morally wrong with children and adults engaging in sexual activity? Who's to say that it isn't possible to have a healthy, nurturing sexual relationship between people just because one of the people is less developed? No one says that children can't have friendships, or intellectual relationships. No one claims that ten year olds lack the capacity to enter into student/teacher relationships? And, if they are at a disatvantage because of their inexperience, I could simply reply that they're only inexperienced because everyone is making it hard for them to get experience.
I would much, much rather people acknowledge that they have sexual feelings toward children, and then come together in a productive, and most importantly, SOCIAL series of interactions that do not -have- to involve anyone exploiting anyone else. Obviously, these interactions must be supervised. Then again, in my book almost everyone needs to have some sort of supervison and moral accountability (that's one of the inevitable results of existing in a social context).
I'm not saying that my specific "library of kiddie porn-ia" idea is any good, but my point is this: when we only allow ourselves to think negatively, we commit ourselves to acting based on negative thoughts and premises. How then could we hope to be productive? Maybe sometimes we'll happen to pick a usefully negative approach, but more often we will simply detract, destroy and negate. Instead of attacking people who want to have sex with children, why don't we help them? Instead of getting into a taboo-triggered knee-jerk moral hissy fit, why don't we try to understand one another and treat each other with compassion and respect.
Oh, right. I remember now. Because this is America.
I am endlessly apalled by the blatant and definitively American habbit of treating understanding and empathy as empty gestures that the liberal or the weak of faith and morals stupidly insist on wasting everyone's time with.
And there's an even bigger issue here:
What are the implications of a society being obsessed with justice but sconful of mercy?
It makes me shudder.
As far as I can tell, the page for Amazon Connect just links back to the page for Amazon.com
Try again?
My problem was the hyperbolic nature of his analogy. Yes, there is a very strong case to be made for remotely tracking (and limiting) the speed of consumer vehicles; speeding kills people. The free distribution of copyrighted songs and movies does not kill people, it hurts profits. Namely the profits of the corporate owners of the copyrights, not necessarily the artists.
"The kind of DRM the customer would be happy with is that which tells you whether your copy is "genuine", but no-one else."
Sure, I'd be fine with that. It would be an interesting way for me to waste my time, especially if it was a feature in itunes. Wouldn't it be delightful to even be able to see how many people downloaded files that -you- originated? Great fun all around.
But unless I'm missing a big point here, this isn't what Slyck wants. How would it help him to show us the statistics of what we're doing? Obviously the only reason he is interested in gathering that data is to use it in order to stop people from sharing media, which he will blindly keep trying to do by working himself up to a litigative hissy fit.
"With luck that could stop commercial piracy as much as is possible, but not harm normal customers; at the very least it would let buyers be more informed."
I guess you're assuming some sort of benevolence from file-sharers that I simply do not see. That's not to say that file-sharers are in any way inherently the enemies of the artists whose content they are distributing. But that's a whole other argument, and it's one that is played out here on slashdot often enough without our involvement.
I am sorry to point out that my bubble is still intact, unburst, but:
"Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that most laws against abortion violate a constitutional right to privacy, overturning all state laws outlawing or restricting abortion."
That's the very first sentence of the wikipedia entry on Roe v Wade.
"One way to look at this issue is through an analogy. At present, when you purchase a car there is computer technology in the car that keeps track of your average speed, but that technology is accepted and is viewed as net value add. However, if that technology were to automatically report the fact that you speed to the authorities then people's perspective would change. DRM is the same."
There are two key problems that his analogy brings up. First of all, consumers would obviously resist this hypothetical speed tracking hardware. Perhaps something like this will be implemented some day, perhaps not. But it will surely be fought, and rightly so. Until the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade and we lose our constitutional right to privacy, that is.
But the real difference is that speeding is often an issue of life and death, both for the driver and for everyone else on the road. Piracy isn't even remotely analogous. Even if the industry could prove that piracy is hurting them so much, the "hurt" here is loss of profit. I apologize for not sympathizing with your pain, my rich corporate friend.
"The technology is a part of a balance that is struck with the consumer. The creative community distributes high quality digital content and the consumers accept that they can't randomly and wantonly redistribute that high quality digital content."
As a consumer, I do not accept that I can't randomly and wantonly redistribute their content. He's talking about how he wants things to be, and then he characterizes consumers as agreeing with him. Someone needs a reality check.
Although I do like his use of the word "stuck". Personally, I like to think that a bargain is only good if one side is getting shafted because they lack the legal and legislative resources to stand up for themselves.
""ur", "ppl", and "prolly" are not even -close- to words."
No, actually they're very close to words. Pgfjopt is not even -close- to being a word in English. Prolly could easily be a world, as could ur. Although I must admit that it would be a stretch to get people to use "ppl" as a standard spelling.
But really, would it be all that unreasonable to spell [pipl] (with the l being syllablic) "ppl"? If you pronounce the first p "pee" (as if you were saying your ABCs), the second p as a simple voiceless bilabial stop (maybe aspirated, I'm bad at transcription), make the "l" a syllablic consonant and poof!, you have the correct pronunciation of the word "people". It's just as easy/good/right as saying that you have to figure out that "peo" is pronounced "pee" and that "le" means syllabic l and not "luh" or "lee" or "leh".
While everyone appreciates your snobbery (I personally find it hilarious AND insightful), stupidity has nothing to do with it. It's not as if he's trying to spell things your way and failing.
George Bernard Shaw signed his letters "yrs sincerely," and as far as I can tell, no one ever faulted him for it. But that's because people were stupid back then and didn't notice that "yrs" isn't EVEN CLOSE to being word. I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT HE MEANT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TRANSLATE THIS IDIOT SPEAK FOR ME!?
And I apologize for mocking you, it's just that I resent people who (incorrectly) associate variant conventions of speaking of spelling with intelligence.
No one ever claimed to say that porn is always bad. Your positive experience is certainly allowed for in any reasonable view on the scope of the effects of pornography. If you can demonstrate that your experience is the norm, then you have a legitimate objection. Or, if anyone claimed that your experience never happened, then yes, shout and let it known.
But really now, no one claimed to "tell the tale of ALL".
You have no reason to call the book a pile of shit, nor do you have any reason to call it biased or conservative.
Seriously man. Calm down.
"If the atomic bombs saved even one American life more than conventional warfare would have cost, then they were worthwhile. War is not about accounting for the other side's losses"
.
"A captain got up, a young captain said: "Goddammit, I'd like to know who the son of a bitch was that took this magnificent airplane, designed to bomb from 23,000 feet and he took it down to 5,000 feet and I lost my wingman. He was shot and killed. .
He stood up. "Why are we here? Why are we here? You lost your wingman; it hurts me as much as it does you. I sent him there. And I've been there, I know what it is. But, you lost one wingman, and we destroyed Tokyo.""
Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.
Do you honestly think that wingman's life was worth 100,000 Japanese civilian lives? It is a horrible situation, and the most humane thing to do is to -equate- human life, not tilt the balance one way or another. Each of those deaths was a tragedy, and the more we distance ourselves from that fact, the more we enable ourselves to destroy. It is a disgusting, blinding cycle. Instead, war should be treated as it is: appalling and wrong. It -should- be psychologically hard to kill thousands of people. If we did not make war so easy for ourselves, perhaps we would not go so overboard when it comes to killing.
"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
"LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
These quotes come from Robert McNamara in Errol Morris' film The Fog of War. (More quotes can be found on the wikiquote page: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War)
I completely agree with you, but I would follow up your point with McNamara's comment about proportionality. McNamara became lost in his own ability to improve our firebombing campaigns, and, in doing so, perhaps fascilitated the deaths of tens of thousands of people that could otherwise have lived, all without changing the ultimate result of the campaign.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
Göring
I am most certainly willing to say that all war is wrong, that alternatives always exist and that they should be pursued with much more energy and commitment than war. I am not saying that --violence-- should never be used. Disgusting as it may be, there are sometimes situations that cannot be solved by anything but power, and sometimes the only power that works is violence. Violence, however, should ALWAYS be minimized. War is one of the worst possible applications of violence.
The whole debate of atom bomb v. land invasion is inherently flawed. In no, I repeat, in NO WAY were those our only two options. There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present. Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option. The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this, given the condition that the emperor stay in power. We of course did not accept this, nuked them, accepted their unconditional surrender, and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway.
The idea of this situation being binary is literally a lie.
To be completely fair, would it not be possible for the stress levels and lack of familiarity with the IQ tests be (I cringe to say) --somewhat-- standard? That is, people with specific training aside (and I do mean actually aside), if taking an IQ test is generally stressful, or, alternatively but equally imporant, generally approached as being pointless for certain people within larger populations, wouldn't the relative IQ scores still be worthwhile? By that I mean that if everyone's score is below their "actual" abilities, is it not possible that there is some regularity to the degree to which most people score below their abilities? This assumes, of course, that an IQ test taken under so-called idea circumstances has any worth.
Having writen it out, it does seem to me that there are too many variables involved. But perhaps not; we are talking about relatively extensive amounts of data (or are we not? again, I defer to the more informed).
"Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina"
NOT
Linguist Damian Zanette
"all the so-called inaccurate facts and what not."
I'm not sure how you mean "what not", but I refer to no inaccurate facts. Instead, I was talking about how Moore presents his information, which is often without source or context (such as dates for archival footage, for example).
Perhaps you should actually respond to my comment rather than simply spitting out a stock response for what you imagine I am saying.
While I would agree that it is very wise to note when Moore does and when he does not supply sources, dates for footage, where he got tanslations for speech in other languages, and the like, I completely disagree with your conclusion. It is not entertainment. It is not, in any fair sense, a documentary. There are, despite how people have been pushing to categorize Moore's film, more categories that his films can fall into. Moore maks arguments. Period.
In order to make his argument, Moore draws on facts--appropriately picked out as the strongest ones that fit his case. Moore is often vague in order to make a stroger point than the straight facts will give him (example: in 9/11, Moore is discussing the Saudi presence in American markets with [I'm not sure who]. The man tells Moore that in his estimation, the Saudis control between 6 and 7 percent of the nation's economy, in terms of investments. Moore goes on to say, (paraphrased), "well, if these guys control seven percent..." in his next voice-over.
Moore also employs powerfully emotional footage (Roger and Me, Columbine, and 9/11 all have parts that make me cry) in order to work up the people he's arguing to, thus supplimenting his factual argument.
9/11 is, in essene, an argument for people to vote against Bush in the 2004 election. Fundamentally, that is what Moore wants and what he is using his film to say. Simplifying it down to "entertainment" because it is not a classical documentary does both the film an inustice and also severely impairs your ability to think about the film or the film-maker with any consequence.
Well, you're totally wrong. This guy created a project that would include creative work in both computer science and music (as demanded by his independet area of study). His goal here is not a comment on the reviews, the reviewers, music makers, or music listeners. His goal is was to create a statistical approach to finding elements that, based on how often certain words were used, should combine to make music that the reviewers at Pitchfork would rate highly. Nowhere does he say "good" or "bad".
they used Buckminster Fuller's map. he made the first (and only, i belive) map to show the earth without any distortion of the continents.
its all cut up and the things are in odd places, but thats cool that they used his map.
no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it hurts...so...much