I'm not sure I do believe in the economy over time. This disbelief stems from a laundry list of troubles: our current, profligate deficit spending, our burgeoning population, the erosion of the middle class, continued environmental degradation, and the shortsighted under-funding of education. In the long run, I think that intelligent regulation and well-targeted social programs make for a healthier economy than the current mantras of "No taxation, withdraw regulation", and "Billions for defense, but not a penny for welfare leeches".
I've gotten quite cynical of late, as you can tell. Perhaps more so than is justified, and I hope I'm not taking it out on you personally. But if this reform passes, I'm strongly inclined to put my newfound personal savings in European markets. If I believe that liberal principles are a better way to spur economic growth, then I guess it would be a sensible strategy.
"Furthur, his plan is to allow people to "opt-out" of to a certain level and put that money elsewhere. (which I would prefer) I would much rather take a chance with my money than let my government take a chance with it. I mean, your social security is YOUR money. Wouldn't you like to be in control of as much of it as you can?"
Nah.
Frankly, I'm a moron. No, really. Look at my posting history.
I am a moron, and I am surrounded by morons. What's to stop me from making stupid investment decisions with the money now under my control? A lot of people, if given total discretion about how to invest, would make decisions that would leave them with less to live on than if they'd just left the money with the risk-averse folks over at the Social Security Trust.
So the question is, what do we do when I, in a fit of moronhood, screw up my investments to the point that I will end up getting less in SS benefits than I would have under the old plan? There are two options: First, you all can let me starve in the street. This is an undesirable outcome for me and for the people I intend to start mugging for liquor money. Second, you can subsidize my stupidity by guaranteeing that I'll draw at least X in returns from the money in my private account. This is also undesirable, since it allows me to gamble even more dangerously. If I win, I win big. If I lose, the government loses.
The plan being proposed--if I understand correctly--is to spend trillions of dollars every decade, funnel that money into the stock market, and pray that it keeps going up instead of crashing magnificently. If the gamble works (I doubt it will), we get to start reducing SS payouts sometime around 2050. Meanwhile, the folks on Wall Street get paid to manage all this new money, the current stockholders get rich as the flood of new money increases demand for stock, and the government (read: "you and me") gets saddled with $15 trillion in new debt over the next forty years.
The old system--where Social Security goes "broke" in 2042--looks downright idyllic by comparison.
No, it's not a religion. The parallels you point out work pretty well, because religion and open source movements both fall under the category of "social movements", and most social movements have those sorts of things in common.
The religious comparison may be a sore spot for those of us who see religious belief as usually irrational or anti-rational. But many social movements contain elements of anti-rationalism. For example, Communism isn't a religion, but its statements about the workings of history are anti-rational in the extreme.
So the question isn't, "Is Open Source a religion?", but, "Do its proponents base their claims on demonstrable facts, and engage their critics in a constructive way?" Our record may be a bit spotty in that regard. Some of the statements made about software quality and security sound more like received truths than empirically derived fact. But I don't think anti-rationalism is endemic to the cause, which for me is a necessary criterion for participation.
If you assume there are 100M e-mail users in America, that they each spend "a minute" deleting spam in a given month, and that their time is worth $6.50/hr, that's already $130M a year. So huge numbers arise very quickly.
My personal experience would put spam at closer to an hour a month where I deal with spam personally. So if my experience is more representative than yours, the number is likely closer to the $10B range.
But I'm lucky in that most of my spam gets flagged and put in a separate folder. More important, I don't care much about false positives.
If, on the other hand, I was in a position where I had to manually check every piece of flagged mail, then even skimming each of the 3000+ subject lines would take up a good hour or two, roughly tripling the amount of time I spent.
All this ignores the increases in bandwidth and storage capacities needed to handle all that additional traffic, and the time and expertise needed to keep the spam from ever reaching your inbox. Those costs are tacked onto your ISP bill, your tax bill, etc., and also onto the bills of every business which uses the Internet.
It does make me wonder what this guy's legal status would be if he was cleared of the original charge, but there was something unrelated on his hard drive that incriminated him.
I think "if you disagree, just shrug and move on" is also an anti-intellectual position. It strikes me as being a way of silencing debate.
I don't mind giving Bill Gates credit where credit is due. But I find a story like this to be a fascinating starting point for a detailed discussion about the effects of IP law on third world nations. If Gates is trying to do something wonderful for the world (and I don't doubt that he is), he's still in the unenviable position of serving two masters.
If it doesn't seem grand, it's because you're not thinking grandly.
To do this properly, you need nothing less than a series of revolutions in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and visual processing. I don't think I'm overstating the situation here: Nobody is going to manually add all the semantic hooks needed to properly categorize every e-mail, picture, and video clip. The computer will, therefore, have to be able to draw meaning out of all this information.
If you can tell the computer, "This is a picture of my ex-wife, whom I loathe," the computer should be able to find all the other pictures with her in them. The computer should mark the thing up with metadata about who is in the picture, approximate timeframe and location, what is happening in the picture, etc.
In short, what they're looking for is the holy grail of AI, not Google Desktop 2.0.
Seriously. El Cabri makes an excellent point about the harm that draconian intellectual property laws do to the third world. Some have even gone so far as to argue that propping up those laws is Gates' primary reason for making these donations. After all, if need trumps legal agreement when it comes to lifesaving medicines, why not when it comes to critical software?
But no, you don't want to think at all beyond "Bill Gates donated money to a good cause! Let's worship!" Because you label anyone who wants to think outside your narrow framework a "hater", I think you're being anti-intellectual. The fact that you couldn't come up with a decent word like "misanthrope" only confirms it.
I don't know how much merit these accusations have, but I think they're worthy of discussion.
It's possible to be a member of the armed services before the age of 18. I was. In our society, we have this overall understanding that different rights and responsibilities come at different ages. The drinking age seems to me to be wrongly placed, but I'm willing to listen to any attempts to justify it.
You're making an interesting point. Just about every piece of legislation has necessary moral implications, and was probably written with those aims in mind.
But try this on for size: Every piece of legislation should also have a functional component. For example, even if I'm inclined to believe that welfare recipients are necessarily lazy, undeserving people, I might also hold the belief that, without welfare, the choice for many of those people is between a life of crime and death by starvation. So I might support welfare just because I think that allowing people to get into such desperate circumstances is a burden on society as a whole.
From the article:
"The court in Extreme Associates construed Lawrence broadly, holding that in the wake of Lawrence "public morality is not a legitimate state interest sufficient to justify infringing on adult, private, consentual, sexual conduct, even if that conduct is deemed offensive to the general public's sense of morality."
Which I don't interpret as indicating that "you're not allowed to pass any legislation with moral implications". Rather, in order for the state to rightfully pass a law, it has to have compelling reasons to do so that go beyond "some of us don't like it".
Your entire argument is bogus for one simple reason: We cannot expect rational behavior from a busy, harried electorate when the politicians use corporate money to advertise themselves as something they're not.
For every voter who actually takes the time to figure out the problems arising from corporate influence, there are probably five who can be suckered in by simplistic sales pitches, fraudulent attack ads, and promises the politician has no intention of keeping.
So, if I'm a politician, do I take the high road? Do I work hard, study issues in depth, write rational legislation that fixes serious problems, and make realistic campaign promises? That's what I'd do. But then I'd lose in a landslide to some pompous, self-aggrandizing bastard who tells people what they want to hear, while whoring the political process out to whoever will give him the money he needs to amplify his voice.
Your final point is incoherent. You believe that corporations give money, but don't expect anything in return. You believe that politicians accept money, but don't expect they have to do anything in return. Which brings up the critical point: If nobody expects anything, why are all these checks being written?
Take, for example, the post-9/11 bailout of the airline industry. The taxpayers gave the airlines, what? Fifteen billion dollars? Why? Not to protect jobs, obviously. All the airlines cut tens of thousands of jobs despite the bailout. Not to protect against an interruption of transportation, either. In the end, we taxpayers basically handed a crapload of money to the people who invested in the airline industry. Corporate welfare at its finest. But politicians lied to us, telling us that if we didn't do this the planes would be grounded.
Collectively, we accepted this because the corporations fund the means of communication that matter to most voters. Had there been a real debate over the issues arising from the bailout, said bailout never would have happened.
You seem to believe that the system, as it stands now, is behaving in a basically fair and rational manner. Either you're making serious cash off the status quo, or you're seriously deluded.
Shouldn't matter. If the customer doesn't get all the source, then the vendor is the only one to go to for bugfixes, feature requests, etc. The customer should demand all source, and throw a royal fit if source isn't forthcoming.
Now, the customer may be contractually obligated not to redistribute the source, or use that source as part of a commercial package for resale. I'm not saying "GPL everything". But if some critical system relies on a piece of software that I can't fix, and can't hire anyone but the vendor to fix, then my company is in their hands.
Read again. I wasn't saying that the humans should be judging the "similarity" of the various songs, but simply being asked how much they like them. If this software does what it claims, then I think two songs that are deemed "mathematically similar" should be judged to have similar quality by a lot of people.
You do know that, if you're interested in persuading someone of something, this isn't the best way to start a post, right?
The fact that MENSA dropped the SAT as a means of qualifying simply reiterates my point: The SAT isn't an intelligence test.
"You also neglect the fact that the SAT is a very general and content specific test. You can't guess a student's performance in a specific area of study based on this test. You also can't apply the results of a "standardized" test and apply it to all University academic programs, each university structures its programs a certian way and each professor will tend to have certian biases to certian methods of teaching and form of study required."
No, it doesn't predict any given student's success in a particular field of study. That's the reason for the qualification I stated: The SAT only correlates with academic success in the first year of college. That's the year that most of the students are working on general education requirements, and therefore are taking very similar classes.
Teachers have biases, fine. Teachers have different teaching styles, fine. None of that matters, because when you average over the entire nation, those things tend to average out. The SAT doesn't state, "You scored a 1257, so you should get an A- out of Prof. Bigweller's introductory Anatomy course". It doesn't say that if you scored a 1300, you'll do better than the guy who scored a 1200 and is taking the same classes as you.
You're not fully understanding the fact that this correlation is statistical in nature. If you did understand, you wouldn't point out that some people who beat you on the SAT are doing worse in school than you. The SAT doesn't measure work ethic. The SAT doesn't measure interest in the subjects you see in college. The SAT doesn't measure willingness to suck up to professors. All these things are factors in GPA.
Yet it's still possible for a statement like "Performance on the SAT correlates well with academic success among first year college students" to be true.
I think you're being sexist. But since your simply calling it like you see it, it's unfair to be critical of you just for being honest.
Where I think your problem lies is good old-fashioned "selection bias". Generally, our biases tend to be self-confirming. If I've got this hunch that women are worse drivers, every time I see a woman do something that you think of as "bad driving" it reinforces my theory that women are bad drivers. When men make the same driving errors, I might think of it as "the exception that proves the rule" or use it to support my other theory that there are a lot of bad drivers out there.
Selection bias is everywhere, and it's hardly a mortal sin. But it's important to recognize the limitations inherent in arguing from "personal experience".
It should be noted that standardized tests aren't meant to be a predictor of anything except academic success in the first year of college. They're not intended to measure intelligence. They do what they're designed to do, and seem to be pretty good at it.
I'm with you on giving this app some benefit of the doubt. But calling it successful just because someone claims it picked Norah Jones is statistically invalid. I'll admit she's talented, but we don't know how many other bands it selected that went nowhere, or how many it rejected that would have made it big.
I think the best test would be to take groups of songs that HSS calls "similar" and ask people to rate them. If most people who liked X had a similar response to similar song Y, then they may be onto something.
The biggest worry about this sort of software is that innovative music won't be supported, because HSS only selects stuff that sounds like stuff that's already been a hit.
The author wasn't claiming that every game needed to be reframed into some sort of forced socioeconomic parable. You're right that reviews only seem to focus on graphics and playability, but that's the whole point: Games can and should be evaluated on much more than that.
Is the game trying to make a political statement? How well does it make that statement? Did the game designers give players an immersive plot? Were the characters complex and sympathetic, or one-dimensional and whiny?
If a game is generally agreed to be "a blast to play," wonderful. I might play it for a few hours. But if people agree that it's more than just pretty and fun, that it will haunt and inspire you months after you've put down the controller, then I'll probably want to play through the whole thing.
That's the whole point of his rant: Games can be so much more than pretty, shiny diversions. Game reviews that focus only on graphics and playability are like frat boys who don't want to know anything about a girl beyond "Is she hot?" and "Does she put out?"
I would add that they should care about whether a citizen of their state can interact with their government without having to purchase software from a third party.
So a big question is whether or not the format is open enough to allow for the creation of a real alternative reader and editor.
Non sequitor. First, you're looking at the Constitution of the U.S., not the charter for Harvard University. If you think the preamble indicates citizenship should only be bestowed upon direct descendants of people who were citizens in 1781, go ahead. You'll get no support from outside your little racist clique.
My point is, Harvard doesn't have the same purpose as the United States. It has different founding documents, and the two go about re-evaluating their separate missions in separate ways. If the founders of Harvard expressed that the purpose of the institution was the education of white kids, or the education of their direct descendants, this fact has no relevance today. Those who run the university today doubtless feel different than their forerunners did.
You still haven't directly engaged my main point: Why should the people running Harvard today have to slavishly follow whatever racist rules may have governed it in the past?
You still don't get it. If an obviously illogical argument is made against a point, it does nothing to strengthen the point. If an ad hominem argument is made in response to the point, the point isn't stronger for having survived the argument. Since you claim all the arguments presented thus far fall into one of those categories, claiming them as support for your point is illogical.
If this is the sort of "thinking" we can expect from critics of the so-called "state religion", no wonder you and your ilk have had so little success in toppling it.
Since you want to turn me into your spelling monkey, here's some free grammar advice: Knock off the absurd run-on sentences. Is there some sort of punctuation shortage in your neck of the woods?
Re:Pay close attention to the responses
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 1
You, sir, are an idiot. And--if that really is you up on your website--you're ugly as hell. Maybe your obsession with documenting the ways in which the Jews are trying to screw you over is a product of your inability to get women. You might have even been dumped by a mixed-race woman at some point in your life. But that's just me speculating.
Since you don't seem to have a clear idea of what ad hominem actually means, I thought I'd give you a heartfelt example.
Further, you indicate that a failure by a few bored slashdotters constitutes to come up with a "single logical criticism" is proof of your sweeping generalizations. More likely, it means that most readers are too busy arguing over whether the supposed devaluation of Ivy League degrees is meaningful, and listing off dozens of alternative theories (the vast majority of which have nothing to do with "political correctness") about why it's happening. If you believe your theory describes the overriding reason for this trend, or if you think you've done anything here to justify your theory, you have a rather grandiose view of yourself.
And to put a capstone on this post: It's "blatant," not "blatent". You moron.
Harvard was founded in 1639. Why should the ethnic background of its founders be a guideline to what sort of people apply for it today? Should we still keep blacks out of pro baseball because all the players were white in 1900?
Nor was he necessarily claiming that an application differential was the only factor. He was simply proposing it as a potential factor.
Let's be realistic. Five years is more than enough time to help yourself to your workers' pension fund and set yourself up for life. If at the end of a stint as C*O, you actually need to look for another job, you didn't do your job right.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I do believe in the economy over time. This disbelief stems from a laundry list of troubles: our current, profligate deficit spending, our burgeoning population, the erosion of the middle class, continued environmental degradation, and the shortsighted under-funding of education. In the long run, I think that intelligent regulation and well-targeted social programs make for a healthier economy than the current mantras of "No taxation, withdraw regulation", and "Billions for defense, but not a penny for welfare leeches".
I've gotten quite cynical of late, as you can tell. Perhaps more so than is justified, and I hope I'm not taking it out on you personally. But if this reform passes, I'm strongly inclined to put my newfound personal savings in European markets. If I believe that liberal principles are a better way to spur economic growth, then I guess it would be a sensible strategy.
This doesn't strike me as thrifty advice, given that the guy asking the question has already rejected $45 "cantennas" as cost-ineffective.
Frankly, I'm a moron. No, really. Look at my posting history.
I am a moron, and I am surrounded by morons. What's to stop me from making stupid investment decisions with the money now under my control? A lot of people, if given total discretion about how to invest, would make decisions that would leave them with less to live on than if they'd just left the money with the risk-averse folks over at the Social Security Trust.
So the question is, what do we do when I, in a fit of moronhood, screw up my investments to the point that I will end up getting less in SS benefits than I would have under the old plan? There are two options: First, you all can let me starve in the street. This is an undesirable outcome for me and for the people I intend to start mugging for liquor money. Second, you can subsidize my stupidity by guaranteeing that I'll draw at least X in returns from the money in my private account. This is also undesirable, since it allows me to gamble even more dangerously. If I win, I win big. If I lose, the government loses.
The plan being proposed--if I understand correctly--is to spend trillions of dollars every decade, funnel that money into the stock market, and pray that it keeps going up instead of crashing magnificently. If the gamble works (I doubt it will), we get to start reducing SS payouts sometime around 2050. Meanwhile, the folks on Wall Street get paid to manage all this new money, the current stockholders get rich as the flood of new money increases demand for stock, and the government (read: "you and me") gets saddled with $15 trillion in new debt over the next forty years.
The old system--where Social Security goes "broke" in 2042--looks downright idyllic by comparison.
So, what? We paid $280 beeeeeellion for a touching photo-op?
No, it's not a religion. The parallels you point out work pretty well, because religion and open source movements both fall under the category of "social movements", and most social movements have those sorts of things in common.
The religious comparison may be a sore spot for those of us who see religious belief as usually irrational or anti-rational. But many social movements contain elements of anti-rationalism. For example, Communism isn't a religion, but its statements about the workings of history are anti-rational in the extreme.
So the question isn't, "Is Open Source a religion?", but, "Do its proponents base their claims on demonstrable facts, and engage their critics in a constructive way?" Our record may be a bit spotty in that regard. Some of the statements made about software quality and security sound more like received truths than empirically derived fact. But I don't think anti-rationalism is endemic to the cause, which for me is a necessary criterion for participation.
If you assume there are 100M e-mail users in America, that they each spend "a minute" deleting spam in a given month, and that their time is worth $6.50/hr, that's already $130M a year. So huge numbers arise very quickly.
My personal experience would put spam at closer to an hour a month where I deal with spam personally. So if my experience is more representative than yours, the number is likely closer to the $10B range.
But I'm lucky in that most of my spam gets flagged and put in a separate folder. More important, I don't care much about false positives.
If, on the other hand, I was in a position where I had to manually check every piece of flagged mail, then even skimming each of the 3000+ subject lines would take up a good hour or two, roughly tripling the amount of time I spent.
All this ignores the increases in bandwidth and storage capacities needed to handle all that additional traffic, and the time and expertise needed to keep the spam from ever reaching your inbox. Those costs are tacked onto your ISP bill, your tax bill, etc., and also onto the bills of every business which uses the Internet.
It does make me wonder what this guy's legal status would be if he was cleared of the original charge, but there was something unrelated on his hard drive that incriminated him.
I think "if you disagree, just shrug and move on" is also an anti-intellectual position. It strikes me as being a way of silencing debate.
I don't mind giving Bill Gates credit where credit is due. But I find a story like this to be a fascinating starting point for a detailed discussion about the effects of IP law on third world nations. If Gates is trying to do something wonderful for the world (and I don't doubt that he is), he's still in the unenviable position of serving two masters.
If it doesn't seem grand, it's because you're not thinking grandly.
To do this properly, you need nothing less than a series of revolutions in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and visual processing. I don't think I'm overstating the situation here: Nobody is going to manually add all the semantic hooks needed to properly categorize every e-mail, picture, and video clip. The computer will, therefore, have to be able to draw meaning out of all this information.
If you can tell the computer, "This is a picture of my ex-wife, whom I loathe," the computer should be able to find all the other pictures with her in them. The computer should mark the thing up with metadata about who is in the picture, approximate timeframe and location, what is happening in the picture, etc.
In short, what they're looking for is the holy grail of AI, not Google Desktop 2.0.
You, sir, are a true anti-intellectual.
Seriously. El Cabri makes an excellent point about the harm that draconian intellectual property laws do to the third world. Some have even gone so far as to argue that propping up those laws is Gates' primary reason for making these donations. After all, if need trumps legal agreement when it comes to lifesaving medicines, why not when it comes to critical software?
But no, you don't want to think at all beyond "Bill Gates donated money to a good cause! Let's worship!" Because you label anyone who wants to think outside your narrow framework a "hater", I think you're being anti-intellectual. The fact that you couldn't come up with a decent word like "misanthrope" only confirms it.
I don't know how much merit these accusations have, but I think they're worthy of discussion.
You're making an interesting point. Just about every piece of legislation has necessary moral implications, and was probably written with those aims in mind.
But try this on for size: Every piece of legislation should also have a functional component. For example, even if I'm inclined to believe that welfare recipients are necessarily lazy, undeserving people, I might also hold the belief that, without welfare, the choice for many of those people is between a life of crime and death by starvation. So I might support welfare just because I think that allowing people to get into such desperate circumstances is a burden on society as a whole.
From the article:
Which I don't interpret as indicating that "you're not allowed to pass any legislation with moral implications". Rather, in order for the state to rightfully pass a law, it has to have compelling reasons to do so that go beyond "some of us don't like it".
I don't know. Does that make sense?
Your entire argument is bogus for one simple reason: We cannot expect rational behavior from a busy, harried electorate when the politicians use corporate money to advertise themselves as something they're not.
For every voter who actually takes the time to figure out the problems arising from corporate influence, there are probably five who can be suckered in by simplistic sales pitches, fraudulent attack ads, and promises the politician has no intention of keeping.
So, if I'm a politician, do I take the high road? Do I work hard, study issues in depth, write rational legislation that fixes serious problems, and make realistic campaign promises? That's what I'd do. But then I'd lose in a landslide to some pompous, self-aggrandizing bastard who tells people what they want to hear, while whoring the political process out to whoever will give him the money he needs to amplify his voice.
Your final point is incoherent. You believe that corporations give money, but don't expect anything in return. You believe that politicians accept money, but don't expect they have to do anything in return. Which brings up the critical point: If nobody expects anything, why are all these checks being written?
Take, for example, the post-9/11 bailout of the airline industry. The taxpayers gave the airlines, what? Fifteen billion dollars? Why? Not to protect jobs, obviously. All the airlines cut tens of thousands of jobs despite the bailout. Not to protect against an interruption of transportation, either. In the end, we taxpayers basically handed a crapload of money to the people who invested in the airline industry. Corporate welfare at its finest. But politicians lied to us, telling us that if we didn't do this the planes would be grounded.
Collectively, we accepted this because the corporations fund the means of communication that matter to most voters. Had there been a real debate over the issues arising from the bailout, said bailout never would have happened.
You seem to believe that the system, as it stands now, is behaving in a basically fair and rational manner. Either you're making serious cash off the status quo, or you're seriously deluded.
Shouldn't matter. If the customer doesn't get all the source, then the vendor is the only one to go to for bugfixes, feature requests, etc. The customer should demand all source, and throw a royal fit if source isn't forthcoming.
Now, the customer may be contractually obligated not to redistribute the source, or use that source as part of a commercial package for resale. I'm not saying "GPL everything". But if some critical system relies on a piece of software that I can't fix, and can't hire anyone but the vendor to fix, then my company is in their hands.
Read again. I wasn't saying that the humans should be judging the "similarity" of the various songs, but simply being asked how much they like them. If this software does what it claims, then I think two songs that are deemed "mathematically similar" should be judged to have similar quality by a lot of people.
The fact that MENSA dropped the SAT as a means of qualifying simply reiterates my point: The SAT isn't an intelligence test.
No, it doesn't predict any given student's success in a particular field of study. That's the reason for the qualification I stated: The SAT only correlates with academic success in the first year of college. That's the year that most of the students are working on general education requirements, and therefore are taking very similar classes.
Teachers have biases, fine. Teachers have different teaching styles, fine. None of that matters, because when you average over the entire nation, those things tend to average out. The SAT doesn't state, "You scored a 1257, so you should get an A- out of Prof. Bigweller's introductory Anatomy course". It doesn't say that if you scored a 1300, you'll do better than the guy who scored a 1200 and is taking the same classes as you.
You're not fully understanding the fact that this correlation is statistical in nature. If you did understand, you wouldn't point out that some people who beat you on the SAT are doing worse in school than you. The SAT doesn't measure work ethic. The SAT doesn't measure interest in the subjects you see in college. The SAT doesn't measure willingness to suck up to professors. All these things are factors in GPA.
Yet it's still possible for a statement like "Performance on the SAT correlates well with academic success among first year college students" to be true.
I think you're being sexist. But since your simply calling it like you see it, it's unfair to be critical of you just for being honest.
Where I think your problem lies is good old-fashioned "selection bias". Generally, our biases tend to be self-confirming. If I've got this hunch that women are worse drivers, every time I see a woman do something that you think of as "bad driving" it reinforces my theory that women are bad drivers. When men make the same driving errors, I might think of it as "the exception that proves the rule" or use it to support my other theory that there are a lot of bad drivers out there.
Selection bias is everywhere, and it's hardly a mortal sin. But it's important to recognize the limitations inherent in arguing from "personal experience".
It should be noted that standardized tests aren't meant to be a predictor of anything except academic success in the first year of college. They're not intended to measure intelligence. They do what they're designed to do, and seem to be pretty good at it.
I'm with you on giving this app some benefit of the doubt. But calling it successful just because someone claims it picked Norah Jones is statistically invalid. I'll admit she's talented, but we don't know how many other bands it selected that went nowhere, or how many it rejected that would have made it big.
I think the best test would be to take groups of songs that HSS calls "similar" and ask people to rate them. If most people who liked X had a similar response to similar song Y, then they may be onto something.
The biggest worry about this sort of software is that innovative music won't be supported, because HSS only selects stuff that sounds like stuff that's already been a hit.
The author wasn't claiming that every game needed to be reframed into some sort of forced socioeconomic parable. You're right that reviews only seem to focus on graphics and playability, but that's the whole point: Games can and should be evaluated on much more than that.
Is the game trying to make a political statement? How well does it make that statement? Did the game designers give players an immersive plot? Were the characters complex and sympathetic, or one-dimensional and whiny?
If a game is generally agreed to be "a blast to play," wonderful. I might play it for a few hours. But if people agree that it's more than just pretty and fun, that it will haunt and inspire you months after you've put down the controller, then I'll probably want to play through the whole thing.
That's the whole point of his rant: Games can be so much more than pretty, shiny diversions. Game reviews that focus only on graphics and playability are like frat boys who don't want to know anything about a girl beyond "Is she hot?" and "Does she put out?"
I would add that they should care about whether a citizen of their state can interact with their government without having to purchase software from a third party.
So a big question is whether or not the format is open enough to allow for the creation of a real alternative reader and editor.
Non sequitor. First, you're looking at the Constitution of the U.S., not the charter for Harvard University. If you think the preamble indicates citizenship should only be bestowed upon direct descendants of people who were citizens in 1781, go ahead. You'll get no support from outside your little racist clique.
My point is, Harvard doesn't have the same purpose as the United States. It has different founding documents, and the two go about re-evaluating their separate missions in separate ways. If the founders of Harvard expressed that the purpose of the institution was the education of white kids, or the education of their direct descendants, this fact has no relevance today. Those who run the university today doubtless feel different than their forerunners did.
You still haven't directly engaged my main point: Why should the people running Harvard today have to slavishly follow whatever racist rules may have governed it in the past?
You still don't get it. If an obviously illogical argument is made against a point, it does nothing to strengthen the point. If an ad hominem argument is made in response to the point, the point isn't stronger for having survived the argument. Since you claim all the arguments presented thus far fall into one of those categories, claiming them as support for your point is illogical.
If this is the sort of "thinking" we can expect from critics of the so-called "state religion", no wonder you and your ilk have had so little success in toppling it.
Since you want to turn me into your spelling monkey, here's some free grammar advice: Knock off the absurd run-on sentences. Is there some sort of punctuation shortage in your neck of the woods?
You, sir, are an idiot. And--if that really is you up on your website--you're ugly as hell. Maybe your obsession with documenting the ways in which the Jews are trying to screw you over is a product of your inability to get women. You might have even been dumped by a mixed-race woman at some point in your life. But that's just me speculating.
Since you don't seem to have a clear idea of what ad hominem actually means, I thought I'd give you a heartfelt example.
Further, you indicate that a failure by a few bored slashdotters constitutes to come up with a "single logical criticism" is proof of your sweeping generalizations. More likely, it means that most readers are too busy arguing over whether the supposed devaluation of Ivy League degrees is meaningful, and listing off dozens of alternative theories (the vast majority of which have nothing to do with "political correctness") about why it's happening. If you believe your theory describes the overriding reason for this trend, or if you think you've done anything here to justify your theory, you have a rather grandiose view of yourself.
And to put a capstone on this post: It's "blatant," not "blatent". You moron.
Harvard was founded in 1639. Why should the ethnic background of its founders be a guideline to what sort of people apply for it today? Should we still keep blacks out of pro baseball because all the players were white in 1900?
Nor was he necessarily claiming that an application differential was the only factor. He was simply proposing it as a potential factor.
Let's be realistic. Five years is more than enough time to help yourself to your workers' pension fund and set yourself up for life. If at the end of a stint as C*O, you actually need to look for another job, you didn't do your job right.