Organic compounds found in drinking water aquifers above the Marcellus Shale and other shale plays could reflect natural geologic transport processes or contamination from anthropogenic activities, including enhanced natural gas production. Using analyses of organic compounds coupled with inorganic geochemical fingerprinting, estimates of groundwater residence time, and geospatial analyses of shale gas wells and disclosed safety violations, we determined that the dominant source of organic compounds to shallow aquifers was consistent with surface spills of disclosed chemical additives. There was no evidence of association with deeper brines or long-range migration of these compounds to the shallow aquifers (emphasis added). Encouragingly, drinking water sources affected by disclosed surface spills could be targeted for treatment and monitoring to protect public health.
Raise some money and buy a redistributable license to the content. Alternatively, purchase or take over the company.
More generally, I must call out what appears as a contradiction: (1) this content is extremely valuable, (2) I'm not willing to pay anything for it (it should be zero-dollars-free).
"it represents a potential assault by Tesla Motors on the right of vehicle owners to report defects to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's complaint database"
I have a right to drive a car. Which means I have the right not to drive a car, or not to drive one conditionally on some contract.
In other words, a right is not a right if I don't get to decide whether to exercise it. If a person agrees based on some conditions not to exercise a right, there is no "assault on his rights".
It's well known that greedy capitalists like to sleep on beds of Rupees, so India definitely should be scared of those Rupees not getting spent.
After all, even if the only place Rupees can be spent is India, they might get trapped in one of those beds, which would mean that those Indian consumers would essentially be getting iphones without having to pay them back with any real resources (only some bits of paper or electronic bits)... That's tough...
[/end sarcasm]
Yes. Unfortunately, most of the recent bills passed to fight actual slavery (including sex slavery) have been used to fight sex work instead.
With legalized prostitution, it is much easier to help actual trafficking victims escape. This is the real harm of conflating trafficking/slavery with sex work.
As this article titles: The War on Sex Trafficking Is the New War on Drugs. And the results will be just as disastrous, for "perpetrators" and "victims" alike. http://reason.com/archives/201...
Presumably some phones or alternative devices offer such functionality (otherwise, that sounds like a good opportunity). So, if people choose devices that don't have such a button, then it is there choice, just as they choose to carry or not carry various other defense devices.
If you think government is the bad guy that unjustly shook down IBM, Microsoft and others, then it's good that companies have learnt to soften the blow.
If you think government is the good guy, then it sure is easy to capture and sway.
But if your cynical, then you see hints of both worlds. Government is the corrupt bad guy *and* it can be captured to further nefarious ends (such as gaining anti-competitive advantages).
Yes, people discriminate all the time when choose who to associate with. In most cases it's a good thing. You don't want to marry a stupid jerk (rational discrimination) or hire an incompetent employee. Being discriminating is a quality, which is sadly now being confused with being a bigot.
Attempts to legislate irrational discrimination (bigotry such as not hiring perfectly competent workers because of their skin color or gender) may have good intentions, but they make the situation worse (raise the stakes, force association, paints a target on the back of rational discrimination).
The best thing you can do with bigots is avoid them and associate with higher quality folks. That's also why such discrimination by the government is a different matter (it's a monopoly).
I agree. The fact that this is a "settlement" rather than an actual trial in court with a judgement means it's unclear whether any law was broken or whether it's just a game of bullying.
I agree with you that, ideally, a boycott system should catch the problem before you even click on the link.
The same way that lists of domains or url patterns get published for tools like adblock plus, it would be easy to publish lists of domains for a boycott plugin.
Yes, this can be done automatically, and I can think of doing it without even depending on a master list: the first time you click on a link, and the browser sees you the page is no good (either explicitly by pressing a thumbs-down reputation button, or implicitly by detecting ads in the page), then the browser remembers to block this site in the future. Then you could share that list with friends or to the world.
I'm glad for your response, as it is the first one that is supportive. My point didn't seem very controversial (ad blocking is not boycott, it is free-riding; proper boycott could be done easily).
Are we allowed to pretend that without adblocking, the Web is pretty much unuseable?
Define unuseable (for instance: how fast a page needs to load, how good the layout should be, how little bandwidth should be used). I'm sure there are plenty of sites that fit to whatever reasonable definition you provide.
You don't have to like the entire Web, it's not yours. People provide services and either you like them or not. If you don't like them, then don't use them (boycott).
There are plenty of parts of the web that are usable even with ad blocking. People complain that the web was "better in the old days", but there is nothing to prevent those folks from going to ad-free sites and offering their own sites without ads (or with "friendly" ads, whatever that means) too. The Web is not a single monolithic thing, but many different services and communities.
As I was suggesting above, make a proper "boycott" plugin and only go to sites that you like. You can even customize what you like (whether it has commenting, tracking, advertising, bad content, a newsletter popup, too slow, bad layout, bad editorial policy, bad content, or whatever reputation rules float your boat). If you find parts of the web un-usable, then don't use them.
Do you think that the cost of visiting the sites with ads should include slowing down page loads and getting infected with malware?
A question is not an argument. But if I read between the lines, you're implying that you don't like the costs (slowness, risk of foreign javascript, etc) compared the benefits. That's fine, then choose to boycott those websites.
That means you should avoid them, just like you avoid restaurants that don't offer a worthwhile trade-off in your view. Boycott is a perfectly valid choice and I encourage it.
Just don't pretend that getting the benefits while dodging the costs is "boycott", when it is free-riding.
Ad blocking is not boycott, it is free-riding: using the service (getting the benefits) and refusing to pay (accepting the costs). I'm surprised there is no browser plugin to implement proper boycott.
Boycott (properly understood) means that instead of blocking the ads and still displaying the content, the browser would block the content from loading as soon as an undesirable ad or tracker is detected.
It could even annotate links to sites with such "bad" advertising reputation so the user wouldn't click on them.
Search engines would soon learn to penalize such sites in search engine results, to improve customer satisfaction.
With such a reputation system to implement proper boycott, no consumer is coerced, no consumer sees unwanted ads, and no site owner is or feels cheated.
Of course, in reality, consumers like to get more for less (as normal human beings do) and ad blockers offer a convenient way of having the content and not pay for it. Let's just not pretend that ad blocking is honorable, or that it is analogous to boycott.
Changing who pays does not change the equation.
If it takes more resources or more valuable resources to turn garbage into something useful again, then it may not be worth doing. Prices and profits/losses tell you something important.
In this case, I would look at existing subsidies that make the problem worse: for instance, free/subsidized garbage collection (if people don't pay for someone to accept and handle their trash, they will generate more trash), or subsidized landfills (if landfills pollute their neighbors and it is not controlled, then there is an externalities argument).
I read the paper and it is ok (nothing groundbreaking) on the technical side. But I was shocked to see broad conclusion of political or economic nature that were not supported by any argumentation in the paper.
In particular, the first sentence of the conclusion: "The Internet’s principal revenue model leads to misaligned incentives between users, advertisers, and content providers, essentially creating a race to the bottom."
I guess we'll just take your opinion for it.
Last week's EconTalk was on water and it discusses the current usage, production structure and the resulting shortages in California.
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...
Mines seem to qualify as "fully autonomous weapons". Once activated, they will kill indiscriminately.
I doubt that we'll arrive at a categorical distinction for "fully autonomous weapons".
I have concerns about such laws mandating kill switches too. But if manufacturers offer the feature and let customers opt-in, I'd think some reasonable trade-off can be achieved.
Monopoly on what? Ebooks? Books? Written content? Information? Entertainment? Leisure provider?
Anything can be defined as a monopoly if it is scoped narrowly enough. Apple has a monopoly on iphones. Yet it is under great competitive pressure from substitutes.
Amazon is in the same boat (plenty of competitive pressure) and consumers don't seem to be fleeing away from the supposed monopolistic abuse (higher prices and limiting supplies, according to textbooks).
If you are interested in the history of antitrust, see Dominick Armentano for a critical review of efficacy of government improving on market competition.
I agree. Not only is it easier than ever to publish, Kindle Unlimited is just one more option. So if you are a noticeable author, you can still publish on hardcover/paperback/Kindle and escape the fixed-pie game of Kindle Unlimited.
I don't know how many people buy one book every month, but Kindle Unlimited is probably more revenue from an average person. If anything it sounds dangerous for readers, more than authors, as it could be like paying for the gym you don't end up visiting often...
The above explanations for mondegreens seem very consistent with the recent understanding of neuroscience.
All perception of the world requires inference, as the signals coming into the brain are ambiguous, conflicting and noisy.
For instance, the brain tries to reconstruct a stable 3 dimensional perception of the world from constantly moving and imperfect 2 dimensional projections.
An increasing number of studies show that the low-level processing in the brain is surprisingly similar to Bayesian inference.
In particular, it demonstrably relies on priors learnt from the environment (for example, vertical lines should be interpreted as corresponding to longer distances than horizontal ones) and by fusing sources of information (for example, the ambiguous local motion detected in one part of the image is reconciled with other ambiguous local motions into a perceived motion of objects).
For anyone interested, I'd recommend some material by Stanislas Dehaene.
Slashdot Mirror
PNAS
Organic compounds found in drinking water aquifers above the Marcellus Shale and other shale plays could reflect natural geologic transport processes or contamination from anthropogenic activities, including enhanced natural gas production. Using analyses of organic compounds coupled with inorganic geochemical fingerprinting, estimates of groundwater residence time, and geospatial analyses of shale gas wells and disclosed safety violations, we determined that the dominant source of organic compounds to shallow aquifers was consistent with surface spills of disclosed chemical additives. There was no evidence of association with deeper brines or long-range migration of these compounds to the shallow aquifers (emphasis added). Encouragingly, drinking water sources affected by disclosed surface spills could be targeted for treatment and monitoring to protect public health.
Raise some money and buy a redistributable license to the content. Alternatively, purchase or take over the company.
More generally, I must call out what appears as a contradiction: (1) this content is extremely valuable, (2) I'm not willing to pay anything for it (it should be zero-dollars-free).
"it represents a potential assault by Tesla Motors on the right of vehicle owners to report defects to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's complaint database"
I have a right to drive a car. Which means I have the right not to drive a car, or not to drive one conditionally on some contract.
In other words, a right is not a right if I don't get to decide whether to exercise it. If a person agrees based on some conditions not to exercise a right, there is no "assault on his rights".
It's well known that greedy capitalists like to sleep on beds of Rupees, so India definitely should be scared of those Rupees not getting spent.
After all, even if the only place Rupees can be spent is India, they might get trapped in one of those beds, which would mean that those Indian consumers would essentially be getting iphones without having to pay them back with any real resources (only some bits of paper or electronic bits)... That's tough...
[/end sarcasm]
Yes. Unfortunately, most of the recent bills passed to fight actual slavery (including sex slavery) have been used to fight sex work instead.
With legalized prostitution, it is much easier to help actual trafficking victims escape. This is the real harm of conflating trafficking/slavery with sex work.
As this article titles: The War on Sex Trafficking Is the New War on Drugs. And the results will be just as disastrous, for "perpetrators" and "victims" alike.
http://reason.com/archives/201...
Presumably some phones or alternative devices offer such functionality (otherwise, that sounds like a good opportunity). So, if people choose devices that don't have such a button, then it is there choice, just as they choose to carry or not carry various other defense devices.
If you think government is the bad guy that unjustly shook down IBM, Microsoft and others, then it's good that companies have learnt to soften the blow.
If you think government is the good guy, then it sure is easy to capture and sway.
But if your cynical, then you see hints of both worlds. Government is the corrupt bad guy *and* it can be captured to further nefarious ends (such as gaining anti-competitive advantages).
Yes, people discriminate all the time when choose who to associate with. In most cases it's a good thing. You don't want to marry a stupid jerk (rational discrimination) or hire an incompetent employee. Being discriminating is a quality, which is sadly now being confused with being a bigot.
Attempts to legislate irrational discrimination (bigotry such as not hiring perfectly competent workers because of their skin color or gender) may have good intentions, but they make the situation worse (raise the stakes, force association, paints a target on the back of rational discrimination).
The best thing you can do with bigots is avoid them and associate with higher quality folks. That's also why such discrimination by the government is a different matter (it's a monopoly).
That's not how politics work. There are simply too many incentives towards complexity and obfuscation, fuzziness and discretion.
I agree. The fact that this is a "settlement" rather than an actual trial in court with a judgement means it's unclear whether any law was broken or whether it's just a game of bullying.
I agree with you that, ideally, a boycott system should catch the problem before you even click on the link.
The same way that lists of domains or url patterns get published for tools like adblock plus, it would be easy to publish lists of domains for a boycott plugin.
Yes, this can be done automatically, and I can think of doing it without even depending on a master list: the first time you click on a link, and the browser sees you the page is no good (either explicitly by pressing a thumbs-down reputation button, or implicitly by detecting ads in the page), then the browser remembers to block this site in the future. Then you could share that list with friends or to the world.
I'm glad for your response, as it is the first one that is supportive. My point didn't seem very controversial (ad blocking is not boycott, it is free-riding; proper boycott could be done easily).
Are we allowed to pretend that without adblocking, the Web is pretty much unuseable?
Define unuseable (for instance: how fast a page needs to load, how good the layout should be, how little bandwidth should be used). I'm sure there are plenty of sites that fit to whatever reasonable definition you provide.
You don't have to like the entire Web, it's not yours. People provide services and either you like them or not. If you don't like them, then don't use them (boycott).
There are plenty of parts of the web that are usable even with ad blocking. People complain that the web was "better in the old days", but there is nothing to prevent those folks from going to ad-free sites and offering their own sites without ads (or with "friendly" ads, whatever that means) too. The Web is not a single monolithic thing, but many different services and communities.
As I was suggesting above, make a proper "boycott" plugin and only go to sites that you like. You can even customize what you like (whether it has commenting, tracking, advertising, bad content, a newsletter popup, too slow, bad layout, bad editorial policy, bad content, or whatever reputation rules float your boat). If you find parts of the web un-usable, then don't use them.
Darn. Slashdot logged me out. I posted the parent comment.
Do you think that the cost of visiting the sites with ads should include slowing down page loads and getting infected with malware?
A question is not an argument. But if I read between the lines, you're implying that you don't like the costs (slowness, risk of foreign javascript, etc) compared the benefits. That's fine, then choose to boycott those websites.
That means you should avoid them, just like you avoid restaurants that don't offer a worthwhile trade-off in your view. Boycott is a perfectly valid choice and I encourage it.
Just don't pretend that getting the benefits while dodging the costs is "boycott", when it is free-riding.
Ad blocking is not boycott, it is free-riding: using the service (getting the benefits) and refusing to pay (accepting the costs). I'm surprised there is no browser plugin to implement proper boycott.
Boycott (properly understood) means that instead of blocking the ads and still displaying the content, the browser would block the content from loading as soon as an undesirable ad or tracker is detected.
It could even annotate links to sites with such "bad" advertising reputation so the user wouldn't click on them.
Search engines would soon learn to penalize such sites in search engine results, to improve customer satisfaction.
With such a reputation system to implement proper boycott, no consumer is coerced, no consumer sees unwanted ads, and no site owner is or feels cheated.
Of course, in reality, consumers like to get more for less (as normal human beings do) and ad blockers offer a convenient way of having the content and not pay for it. Let's just not pretend that ad blocking is honorable, or that it is analogous to boycott.
Donald Shoup wrote a book on parking and its effects. In cities, lots of cars are circling for parking spots...
Changing who pays does not change the equation.
If it takes more resources or more valuable resources to turn garbage into something useful again, then it may not be worth doing. Prices and profits/losses tell you something important.
In this case, I would look at existing subsidies that make the problem worse: for instance, free/subsidized garbage collection (if people don't pay for someone to accept and handle their trash, they will generate more trash), or subsidized landfills (if landfills pollute their neighbors and it is not controlled, then there is an externalities argument).
I read the paper and it is ok (nothing groundbreaking) on the technical side. But I was shocked to see broad conclusion of political or economic nature that were not supported by any argumentation in the paper.
In particular, the first sentence of the conclusion: "The Internet’s principal revenue model leads to misaligned incentives between users, advertisers, and content providers, essentially creating a race to the bottom."
I guess we'll just take your opinion for it.
Last week's EconTalk was on water and it discusses the current usage, production structure and the resulting shortages in California. http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...
Mines seem to qualify as "fully autonomous weapons". Once activated, they will kill indiscriminately.
I doubt that we'll arrive at a categorical distinction for "fully autonomous weapons".
There is an ironic typo in the op which tells you a lot about such municipal "competitors": "We will provide a premium tax service".
I have concerns about such laws mandating kill switches too. But if manufacturers offer the feature and let customers opt-in, I'd think some reasonable trade-off can be achieved.
Monopoly on what?
Ebooks? Books? Written content? Information? Entertainment? Leisure provider?
Anything can be defined as a monopoly if it is scoped narrowly enough. Apple has a monopoly on iphones. Yet it is under great competitive pressure from substitutes.
Amazon is in the same boat (plenty of competitive pressure) and consumers don't seem to be fleeing away from the supposed monopolistic abuse (higher prices and limiting supplies, according to textbooks).
If you are interested in the history of antitrust, see Dominick Armentano for a critical review of efficacy of government improving on market competition.
I agree. Not only is it easier than ever to publish, Kindle Unlimited is just one more option. So if you are a noticeable author, you can still publish on hardcover/paperback/Kindle and escape the fixed-pie game of Kindle Unlimited.
I don't know how many people buy one book every month, but Kindle Unlimited is probably more revenue from an average person. If anything it sounds dangerous for readers, more than authors, as it could be like paying for the gym you don't end up visiting often...
The above explanations for mondegreens seem very consistent with the recent understanding of neuroscience.
All perception of the world requires inference, as the signals coming into the brain are ambiguous, conflicting and noisy.
For instance, the brain tries to reconstruct a stable 3 dimensional perception of the world from constantly moving and imperfect 2 dimensional projections.
An increasing number of studies show that the low-level processing in the brain is surprisingly similar to Bayesian inference. In particular, it demonstrably relies on priors learnt from the environment (for example, vertical lines should be interpreted as corresponding to longer distances than horizontal ones) and by fusing sources of information (for example, the ambiguous local motion detected in one part of the image is reconciled with other ambiguous local motions into a perceived motion of objects).
For anyone interested, I'd recommend some material by Stanislas Dehaene.