What's a post about an EFF initiative doing for EFF? Marketing, and there's nothing wrong with it. I like to hear about what they're up to. I've got the bumper sticker and t-shirt. I never suggested ulterior motives are bad, just prevalent, but there's nothing malicious about people writing about their hobbyhorses.
An alternative or extrinsic reason for doing something, especially when concealed or when differing from the stated or apparent reason.
It seems to me that most EFF posts are about informing people about what the EFF is doing. Marketing is one of the the apparent reasons for running their web site and maintain their blog and publishing press releases. Writing about your "hobbyhorses" doesn't, by itself, qualify, as an ulterior motive. On the other hand, if someone is deliberately hiding their motives from you they are doing so for a reason and it's safe to assume the reason isn't good. If it was, there wouldn't be any need to conceal it.
So there are at least three levels of bad here, the first is the concealment of relevant information concerning the motive for providing information, the second is the presentation of biased information, and the third is that the person or people presenting the information intend harm to the audience. Sometimes the harm is incidental, for example some people have to die to protect the profits of health insurance companies, sometimes it's intentional, like a fraudulent make money fast seminar. But with few exceptions, ulterior motives are really quite bad.
Really? Then what are you doing here? I'd wager 80% of the articles posted here can be ascribed to ulterior motives (marketing and sales, raise corporate profile, call out your competitors,...).
I seriously doubt the number's that high, and even if it were that wouldn't be a good thing.
So sweeping generalizations are always bad, ok?
Actually, they're not. Sweeping generalizations can actually be incredibly useful to the cognitive function of the human brain. It's an important part of our ability to understand the world around us. Inaccurate, inflexible, or unchangeable generalizations are real problems, but generalizations that are accurate are useful.
Except that's exactly why "ulterior motives" matter, it means the person presenting the argument wants the audience to believe something in particular, so because they have ulterior motives they will generally choose to present their audience with the best arguments for their position, and only the worst arguments against. As long as the presenter has ulterior motive, then the presenter has little incentive to address good arguments against their position.
Actually, if Microsoft had settled on some other architecture, people would probably be OS/5 (mostly) or Linux and Microsoft would be an obscure software company that died in the early 90s. The personal computer was IBM's baby, Microsoft hijacked the operating system through good luck, ruthlessness and fraud. Microsoft would never have been able to "settle on some other architecture" without destroying the only reason they're still in business. They rely on the network effect of a billion Windows PCs to keep themselves in business.
According to IMDB both Scott Pilgrim and Watchmen lost about the same amount of money based on box office returns, around $30M each. Watchmen at $100M, however grossed more than 3 times as much as Scott Pilgrim at $31M. I have to say, I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim more, though.
Self-censorship is the best form of censorship. It's even better than having censorship imposed externally because no one can see it. The "letters" are an effective form of censorship because it limits the audience of the movie. Get anything over an "R" and a Hollywood movie can not make it's money back. It won't be shown in most (if not all) of the major theater chains. So you have the carrot of producing inoffensive family fare gets you the largest possible audience, and the stick of doing anything too unusual can stick you with a movie that won't be shown to anyone.
To further impose self-censorship, the Rating Board doesn't tell you what they objected to, they just give you the rating they will apply (with no justification) and let you perform whatever self-censorship you think will please the board until they decide the movie is inoffensive enough to get the rating you requested.
So what we have is a secretive, unelected body of people (who all live in the same general area of California?) who decide what rating a movie will get, and by proxy who will be allowed to see a movie.
If you want to learn more about the ratings board you might like to watch "This Movie is Not Yet Rated".
Please remember I'm talking about capitalism in it's natural state, with no regulations. Your counter-arguments are all predicated on a society that is exactly like one in which capitalism is heavily regulated for the benefit of the people. I have serious doubts those two societies would be similar given sufficient time for the people to adapt to the rules governing the society.
Let's not forget that slavery was accepted for a very long time before it was abolished. It's all about societal norms and if all the big corporations were using slaves, then the expectations of whether it's moral to employ slaves might be very different.
They are not mutually exclusive, but in their natural states they don't get along well. Profit is too often made at the expense of freedom. If you don't understand or believe me, you need to learn more history and do some research on company towns, for example. Capitalism, in it's natural state, loves slaves more than employees because they cost less to employ.
Of course, the whole point of the article is that a significant number of employees and investors think the NOK price is going to quickly become "overvalued" for all the bad reasons. Frankly, trading in your 4th place operating system for the 5th place one seems like a poor decision. The decision to use Windows Phone 7 reeks of cronyism.
As far as I understand Glen Beck had a genuine transformation to religion, but it's certainly true that he could be playing up the Christian and the Nutty for his audience. But I strongly suspect at his core, he actually is an Envangelical nut. That's not to say that he believes everything that he says on his shows, just that I'm pretty sure he actually believes that what's he doing is good for the country and lining his pockets is all part and parcel of that. After all, the new "Christian (Republican)" ideology is that God makes good people wealthy and bad people poor. It neatly excuses the people with power from any responsibility for what happens to the poor, and justifies their immense wealth. It's the 21st century version of the order of being.
Apparently Glenn Beck is the real deal when it comes to "Christian crazy". He's one of those born again guys who were killing themselves with drugs and alcohol and then replaced their drug addictions with religion. He really believes some of the crazy ass stuff he spouts. He really believes that the United States was created by God to be the best country in the world and the Constitution is a sacred document handed down by Angels.
He used to be a shock jock radio personality, now he sees it as his sacred duty to convince people by hook or by crook that America is supposed to be a Christian theocracy and it's liberals, progressives and athiests who are responsible for all of the it's problems. To Glenn, this is obvious from his well known fact that America was created by God, and therefore by definition should be better than everywhere else. Obviously (to him) the unbelievers must be source of the problem. Since he knows the way things are supposed to be anything that disagrees with him must be wrong, and is probably evil.
So no, he's not pretending, he really is a crazy maniac from an obscure Mormon cult.
Maybe. I've had some user names that I thought were fairly unique but that other people registered on site I wanted to use. Which leaves me wondering how do they know for sure if the usernames on different sites belong to the same person. My guess is that they don't.
On an abstract level the arguments might be the same, but you have to be careful that you don't abstract away important details. One important detail might be whether there's actually evidence that the the links exist in the first place. Going beyond that, the person who takes a negative action usually takes the blame, and in this case I don't think anyone's arguing that the gunman shouldn't be blamed (his lawyers may argue that he was too crazy to be legally responsible, but that's entirely different). However, that doesn't mean that Palin and friends shouldn't be castigated for their behavior. They're not responsible for his behavior, but they are responsible for their own behavior and it has been reprehensible and it's high time they got called out for their boorish, reckless, and irresponsible actions.
The shooting has merely focused more attention on their behavior. Your question of "who gets the blame when someone does something criminal" is a distraction question formulated by republican spin doctors to make you forget that the actions of many members of the Tea Party and Republicans are worth condemning regardless of whether they result in crimes.
I don't think there's much of a comparison here. We have on one hand the claim sexual innuendo in games (and only in games) leads directly to rape. The counter-factual claim that rapes are on the increase, and concrete evidence that the reporter who wrote the piece knew full well that he what he was writing an utter fabrication.
On the other hand, I've been expecting an Democrat to be murdered for political reasons since the 2008 election campaign. It was obvious that it was going to happen when you have half of the political spectrum calling their opponents terrorists, traitors, and murderers. Eventually somebody is going to believe and then act on those claims. My only question is whether Palin and associates were evil enough to hope that it was Obama who'd get shot, or whether they're stupid enough to think they can act that way and there wouldn't be any consequences.
I'm not sure what Wozniak experienced was a real problem, or merely an issue of differing expectations. He was hitting the "increase speed" button on the cruise control 10 times or more in a row when the speed limit went up on the highway. Eventually, the Prius goes full throttle until it reaches the new target speed. I suppose it's scary, but I think the issue might be with putting the cruise control target speed so much higher than your current speed.
I think the thing to look for is what you expect should happen in that situation. Wozniak wants each press of the increase speed button to increase the acceleration rate instead of jumping to from moderate acceleration to full acceleration at some cut off. It'd probably be a good idea, but I'm not sure that the way it works now is actually defective.
I'm not sure Steve Wozniak's story is relevant. After doing a bit of research, I found another site that paraphrased Wozniak's own (alleged) explanation of the problem that should be linked from the story you linked. It seems his acceleration problem is that if he presses the "go faster" button on the cruise control 10 times (or more) in a row in rapid succession, the car goes faster than he wants it to go.
I'm not sure that's actually unexpected behaviour.
Frankly, I stopped believing it was likely to be an engineering problem when someone did an analysis of all the complaints and showed that the "random" "sudden acceleration" events overwhelmingly happened to the drivers most likely to make driver errors. In other words the distribution was significantly biased towards drivers who were under 25 or over 65.
Of course, it could all be a coincidence, but as far as I understand, it's been independently investigated 3 times, and Toyota has been cleared in all three investigations. Of course, you can always hope for best 4 out of 7, but those odds aren't very good.
I strongly suspect that the Dr. Fuhrman you're quoting is just another con artist. I mean, really, if you eat only fruit and vegetables it will cure herpes, diabetes and lupus?
If his results were real and not fraudulent he should be one of the great heroes of medicine. But it doesn't look like any of his results have been verified in clinical studies.
A small percentage of a large group may or may not be a large number. It depends on how small the percentage is and how large the group is. Of course, I doubt your claim about it being "used to deceive people about the effectiveness of vaccines". After all, suppose the infection rate of a disease were 33% for the unvaccinated and 3% for the vaccinated, then the vaccine is at least preventing 30% of the vaccinated from getting it. It's actually larger than that because preventing primary infections may eliminate entire trees of infection thus preventing some of the unvaccinated and vaccinated from ever being exposed to the disease.
For instance pick your favorite disease based or zombie movie, now imagine what happens if patient 0 is immune to the disease. No outbreak, no zombie apocalypse, no movie because nothing happens, that's one of the frequently unrealized benefits of vaccinations.
I'm not a doctor, but I don't think that's actually true. In fact, there's a not-insignificant chance that had your son gotten vaccinated at six months he might not have developed an allergy to eggs*, in either case, it would likely have been his first exposure to eggs, so most likely he would have been fine. It's the second exposure you have to watch out for, and at 18 months, assuming he was still allergic, his leg would have swollen up large and red, but I have serious doubts that he would be either disabled or dead.
* based on some promising research that the development of allergies may be related to extremely low initial exposure levels.
To reduce allergies, please look into eating more vegetables and fruits
I think it's pretty safe to say that if eating more fruits and vegetables and taking more vitamin D cured your "allergies" they weren't allergies. Many people confuse allergies and intolerances, they're not the same thing. Allergies just don't work that way. The only way diet can improve your allergies is if you stop eating things you're allergic to.
The rest of the stuff you mentioned are good ideas for general health but none of them are actually a replacement for vaccination or a cure for allergies.
Of course, I might be a little biased on this topic since morons spouting the same bullshit have literally try to kill my wife by sneaking things she's allergic to into her meals because they're convinced that allergies aren't real or that a few drops of vitamin D will protect her from the effects.
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What's a post about an EFF initiative doing for EFF? Marketing, and there's nothing wrong with it. I like to hear about what they're up to. I've got the bumper sticker and t-shirt. I never suggested ulterior motives are bad, just prevalent, but there's nothing malicious about people writing about their hobbyhorses.
I'm beginning to think you don't actually know what an ulterior motive is. Here's the definition from wiktionary:
An alternative or extrinsic reason for doing something, especially when concealed or when differing from the stated or apparent reason.
It seems to me that most EFF posts are about informing people about what the EFF is doing. Marketing is one of the the apparent reasons for running their web site and maintain their blog and publishing press releases. Writing about your "hobbyhorses" doesn't, by itself, qualify, as an ulterior motive. On the other hand, if someone is deliberately hiding their motives from you they are doing so for a reason and it's safe to assume the reason isn't good. If it was, there wouldn't be any need to conceal it.
So there are at least three levels of bad here, the first is the concealment of relevant information concerning the motive for providing information, the second is the presentation of biased information, and the third is that the person or people presenting the information intend harm to the audience. Sometimes the harm is incidental, for example some people have to die to protect the profits of health insurance companies, sometimes it's intentional, like a fraudulent make money fast seminar. But with few exceptions, ulterior motives are really quite bad.
Really? Then what are you doing here? I'd wager 80% of the articles posted here can be ascribed to ulterior motives (marketing and sales, raise corporate profile, call out your competitors, ...).
I seriously doubt the number's that high, and even if it were that wouldn't be a good thing.
So sweeping generalizations are always bad, ok?
Actually, they're not. Sweeping generalizations can actually be incredibly useful to the cognitive function of the human brain. It's an important part of our ability to understand the world around us. Inaccurate, inflexible, or unchangeable generalizations are real problems, but generalizations that are accurate are useful.
Except that's exactly why "ulterior motives" matter, it means the person presenting the argument wants the audience to believe something in particular, so because they have ulterior motives they will generally choose to present their audience with the best arguments for their position, and only the worst arguments against. As long as the presenter has ulterior motive, then the presenter has little incentive to address good arguments against their position.
So ulterior motives are bad, ok?
Actually, if Microsoft had settled on some other architecture, people would probably be OS/5 (mostly) or Linux and Microsoft would be an obscure software company that died in the early 90s. The personal computer was IBM's baby, Microsoft hijacked the operating system through good luck, ruthlessness and fraud. Microsoft would never have been able to "settle on some other architecture" without destroying the only reason they're still in business. They rely on the network effect of a billion Windows PCs to keep themselves in business.
I looked them up on IMDB.
According to IMDB both Scott Pilgrim and Watchmen lost about the same amount of money based on box office returns, around $30M each. Watchmen at $100M, however grossed more than 3 times as much as Scott Pilgrim at $31M. I have to say, I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim more, though.
Well, Snakes on a Plane grossed $34M while Watchmen grossed $100M, so a very rough estimate is that about 3 times as many people saw Watchmen.
Self-censorship is the best form of censorship. It's even better than having censorship imposed externally because no one can see it. The "letters" are an effective form of censorship because it limits the audience of the movie. Get anything over an "R" and a Hollywood movie can not make it's money back. It won't be shown in most (if not all) of the major theater chains. So you have the carrot of producing inoffensive family fare gets you the largest possible audience, and the stick of doing anything too unusual can stick you with a movie that won't be shown to anyone.
To further impose self-censorship, the Rating Board doesn't tell you what they objected to, they just give you the rating they will apply (with no justification) and let you perform whatever self-censorship you think will please the board until they decide the movie is inoffensive enough to get the rating you requested.
So what we have is a secretive, unelected body of people (who all live in the same general area of California?) who decide what rating a movie will get, and by proxy who will be allowed to see a movie.
If you want to learn more about the ratings board you might like to watch "This Movie is Not Yet Rated".
Please remember I'm talking about capitalism in it's natural state, with no regulations. Your counter-arguments are all predicated on a society that is exactly like one in which capitalism is heavily regulated for the benefit of the people. I have serious doubts those two societies would be similar given sufficient time for the people to adapt to the rules governing the society.
Let's not forget that slavery was accepted for a very long time before it was abolished. It's all about societal norms and if all the big corporations were using slaves, then the expectations of whether it's moral to employ slaves might be very different.
They are not mutually exclusive, but in their natural states they don't get along well. Profit is too often made at the expense of freedom. If you don't understand or believe me, you need to learn more history and do some research on company towns, for example. Capitalism, in it's natural state, loves slaves more than employees because they cost less to employ.
I'm pretty sure you mean fourth tier phone OS, you forgot RIM and Blackberries.
Of course, the whole point of the article is that a significant number of employees and investors think the NOK price is going to quickly become "overvalued" for all the bad reasons. Frankly, trading in your 4th place operating system for the 5th place one seems like a poor decision. The decision to use Windows Phone 7 reeks of cronyism.
As far as I understand Glen Beck had a genuine transformation to religion, but it's certainly true that he could be playing up the Christian and the Nutty for his audience. But I strongly suspect at his core, he actually is an Envangelical nut. That's not to say that he believes everything that he says on his shows, just that I'm pretty sure he actually believes that what's he doing is good for the country and lining his pockets is all part and parcel of that. After all, the new "Christian (Republican)" ideology is that God makes good people wealthy and bad people poor. It neatly excuses the people with power from any responsibility for what happens to the poor, and justifies their immense wealth. It's the 21st century version of the order of being.
Apparently Glenn Beck is the real deal when it comes to "Christian crazy". He's one of those born again guys who were killing themselves with drugs and alcohol and then replaced their drug addictions with religion. He really believes some of the crazy ass stuff he spouts. He really believes that the United States was created by God to be the best country in the world and the Constitution is a sacred document handed down by Angels.
He used to be a shock jock radio personality, now he sees it as his sacred duty to convince people by hook or by crook that America is supposed to be a Christian theocracy and it's liberals, progressives and athiests who are responsible for all of the it's problems. To Glenn, this is obvious from his well known fact that America was created by God, and therefore by definition should be better than everywhere else. Obviously (to him) the unbelievers must be source of the problem. Since he knows the way things are supposed to be anything that disagrees with him must be wrong, and is probably evil.
So no, he's not pretending, he really is a crazy maniac from an obscure Mormon cult.
Oh, the *AA's have future plans... They just all involve busty hookers, cocaine, and rolling around on large piles of money.
Maybe. I've had some user names that I thought were fairly unique but that other people registered on site I wanted to use. Which leaves me wondering how do they know for sure if the usernames on different sites belong to the same person. My guess is that they don't.
On an abstract level the arguments might be the same, but you have to be careful that you don't abstract away important details. One important detail might be whether there's actually evidence that the the links exist in the first place. Going beyond that, the person who takes a negative action usually takes the blame, and in this case I don't think anyone's arguing that the gunman shouldn't be blamed (his lawyers may argue that he was too crazy to be legally responsible, but that's entirely different). However, that doesn't mean that Palin and friends shouldn't be castigated for their behavior. They're not responsible for his behavior, but they are responsible for their own behavior and it has been reprehensible and it's high time they got called out for their boorish, reckless, and irresponsible actions.
The shooting has merely focused more attention on their behavior. Your question of "who gets the blame when someone does something criminal" is a distraction question formulated by republican spin doctors to make you forget that the actions of many members of the Tea Party and Republicans are worth condemning regardless of whether they result in crimes.
I don't think there's much of a comparison here. We have on one hand the claim sexual innuendo in games (and only in games) leads directly to rape. The counter-factual claim that rapes are on the increase, and concrete evidence that the reporter who wrote the piece knew full well that he what he was writing an utter fabrication.
On the other hand, I've been expecting an Democrat to be murdered for political reasons since the 2008 election campaign. It was obvious that it was going to happen when you have half of the political spectrum calling their opponents terrorists, traitors, and murderers. Eventually somebody is going to believe and then act on those claims. My only question is whether Palin and associates were evil enough to hope that it was Obama who'd get shot, or whether they're stupid enough to think they can act that way and there wouldn't be any consequences.
I'm not sure what Wozniak experienced was a real problem, or merely an issue of differing expectations. He was hitting the "increase speed" button on the cruise control 10 times or more in a row when the speed limit went up on the highway. Eventually, the Prius goes full throttle until it reaches the new target speed. I suppose it's scary, but I think the issue might be with putting the cruise control target speed so much higher than your current speed.
I think the thing to look for is what you expect should happen in that situation. Wozniak wants each press of the increase speed button to increase the acceleration rate instead of jumping to from moderate acceleration to full acceleration at some cut off. It'd probably be a good idea, but I'm not sure that the way it works now is actually defective.
I'm not sure Steve Wozniak's story is relevant. After doing a bit of research, I found another site that paraphrased Wozniak's own (alleged) explanation of the problem that should be linked from the story you linked. It seems his acceleration problem is that if he presses the "go faster" button on the cruise control 10 times (or more) in a row in rapid succession, the car goes faster than he wants it to go.
I'm not sure that's actually unexpected behaviour.
Frankly, I stopped believing it was likely to be an engineering problem when someone did an analysis of all the complaints and showed that the "random" "sudden acceleration" events overwhelmingly happened to the drivers most likely to make driver errors. In other words the distribution was significantly biased towards drivers who were under 25 or over 65.
Of course, it could all be a coincidence, but as far as I understand, it's been independently investigated 3 times, and Toyota has been cleared in all three investigations. Of course, you can always hope for best 4 out of 7, but those odds aren't very good.
I strongly suspect that the Dr. Fuhrman you're quoting is just another con artist. I mean, really, if you eat only fruit and vegetables it will cure herpes, diabetes and lupus?
If his results were real and not fraudulent he should be one of the great heroes of medicine. But it doesn't look like any of his results have been verified in clinical studies.
A small percentage of a large group may or may not be a large number. It depends on how small the percentage is and how large the group is. Of course, I doubt your claim about it being "used to deceive people about the effectiveness of vaccines". After all, suppose the infection rate of a disease were 33% for the unvaccinated and 3% for the vaccinated, then the vaccine is at least preventing 30% of the vaccinated from getting it. It's actually larger than that because preventing primary infections may eliminate entire trees of infection thus preventing some of the unvaccinated and vaccinated from ever being exposed to the disease.
For instance pick your favorite disease based or zombie movie, now imagine what happens if patient 0 is immune to the disease. No outbreak, no zombie apocalypse, no movie because nothing happens, that's one of the frequently unrealized benefits of vaccinations.
I'm not a doctor, but I don't think that's actually true. In fact, there's a not-insignificant chance that had your son gotten vaccinated at six months he might not have developed an allergy to eggs*, in either case, it would likely have been his first exposure to eggs, so most likely he would have been fine. It's the second exposure you have to watch out for, and at 18 months, assuming he was still allergic, his leg would have swollen up large and red, but I have serious doubts that he would be either disabled or dead.
* based on some promising research that the development of allergies may be related to extremely low initial exposure levels.
To reduce allergies, please look into eating more vegetables and fruits
I think it's pretty safe to say that if eating more fruits and vegetables and taking more vitamin D cured your "allergies" they weren't allergies. Many people confuse allergies and intolerances, they're not the same thing. Allergies just don't work that way. The only way diet can improve your allergies is if you stop eating things you're allergic to.
The rest of the stuff you mentioned are good ideas for general health but none of them are actually a replacement for vaccination or a cure for allergies.
Of course, I might be a little biased on this topic since morons spouting the same bullshit have literally try to kill my wife by sneaking things she's allergic to into her meals because they're convinced that allergies aren't real or that a few drops of vitamin D will protect her from the effects.