Riight. A six year trendline that is flat is 'noice on a curve'
Yes, as a matter of fact, when you're looking at the timescales of climate fluctuations (natural or otherwise) six years is a piddling little blink of the eye. There are many other variables at play (and natural upswings/downswings) that may - nay, will definitely - mask the overall trend. Even looking at the last 200 years (still short but much much longer than six years) there is a very definite trend of continually increasing temperatures. (PS if you're going to counter-argue (as many do) that 200 years is too short to tell anything concrete, then that would anihilate the argument that 6 years is long enough.)
Whether or not you 'believe' global warming is happening or is a problem, it's clear that something funny is happening, something that could have devastating consequences and warrants sh*t-loads more research and a good deal of caution.
Hmm... true indeed, good points! (Fortunately as you point out most slashdotters won't think that far;). Actually I do still think it 'has a point' though, even if it is in some ways not a great analogy, it is still fitting in other ways.
But honestly, to say that a circumcision performed wihtin a few weeks of birth could make you withdrawn your whole life is laughable.
I didn't say it caused me to be withdrawn "my whole life", but certainly I've been this way since I was tiny, and it may have become "self-perpetuating" (I won't go into details here).
In any case, I don't see why it is "laughable" to suggest at least that psychological trauma may result from circumcision: It's as if you have proof that it doesn't happen, but you don't --- you just don't know. All you have is an opinion, and without some actual science, it is as valuable/worthless as my opinion, you could be wrong, I could be wrong, neither of us know.
Would you at least acknowledge that it is a possibility that circumcision might result in harmful psychological trauma? Let's say it happens, but happens rarely. E.g. let's say it happens to 1 in 1000 men -- too little to ever pick up any obvious correlations between e.g. depression rates in later life, but enough that it would be a huge problem when you add up the hypothetical number of people affected. If it is, say, 1 in 1000, that's a very serious problem, certainly enough to warrant a ban. Shouldn't more research at least be done? Bottom line is, we don't know.
Actually you've just made an argument for releasing sooner: If the bugs in the patches are caught sooner (because of the 'patch early adopters'), then the corporates will be protected against those exploits because they won't have installed the patches yet and the new improved patch will be out in time for their update schedule.
Those customers have specifically demanded that patches be released on a regular schedule, to ease their own testing and rollout procedures.
Why, are those customers forced to install it as soon as Microsoft releases it? If they wanted to install it later, they are unable to do so? What's stopping them from waiting? That would not only give them the choice, but give them longer to test the patches first. Yeah I can just picture those alleged customers now: "Hey Microsoft, please give us less choice and greater delays, in fact we demand you do so"
As a circumsized-at-birth male I must say that I seem to enjoy sex just fine
Just to clarify, so do I. I don't know what sex would be like if I wasn't circumcised, but frankly I think it's more than intense/pleasurable enough as is, if it were any more so it might even be detrimental to my sex life, if you know what I mean:)
I do tend to agree with you here, that people can be 'convinced' to feel as if they are a victim of something whereas they may never have felt that way until someone told them. It's hard to separate though. I think it makes more sense to query people to whom it has never occurred that their circumcision might have caused problems how happy they are etc., rather than tell people "something terrible happened to you" and then asking.
Is not my anecdotal evidence just as strong? (hint small sample sizes are useless)
If you thought I was trying to provide anecdotal evidence then you completely missed my point. I don't even know one way or the other. But that's the whole point, I don't know, nor do you know, neither of us know, but it seems sensible to me to err on the side of caution when one does not know, and certainly not to err on the side of tradition.
Actually, I've never thought much about it before at all, certainly not enough to have formed an opinion about circumcision, but this thread intrigued me, and I was just busy googling to see if any proper research has been conducted to see if there might be a link between mental health problems and circumcision. (Surely, it seems to me, there must be enough men out there in both categories to at least do simple correlation surveys to start off with.)
So... maybe something else traumatic happened that you still don't know about?
Yes, that's why I said "I don't know of anything else" rather than "Nothing else". You on the other hand have already come to a conclusion that circumcision never has harmful effects, and I'm wondering how you can know that.
Are you seriously telling me that from 1 year of age onward you were sexually inadequate?
No, but all of the other things apply, and as much as you'd like to throw out all of those things listed just because one of them doesn't fit, you can't. I have been very "withdrawn" and depressed for as long as I can remember. My mother says I was extremely quiet and withdrawn even as a baby.
I can't prove it's because of circumcision, but I acknowledge that it is a possibility.
Your reasoning is still flawed though either way, because there are only two possibilities here: (a) that it's not a possibility circumcision can be harmful, or (b) that it is a possibility. Why is it flawed? Because neither (a) nor (b) is an argument for circumcision ---- circumcision is at best neutral and pointless, and at worst harmful. So bottom line, get rid of it.
You make a good point but I just want to do some 'methodology-nitpicking': These are essentially statistically independent though, i.e. the fact that so many past "oh no moral outrage" cases had no merit doesn't prove that the latest "oh no moral outrage" cases also have no merit - they are different things ('inductive fallacy'). What you can make an argument for, is that people appear to have a tendency to be over-afraid that new things will corrupt the morals of the youth, and that this might be just another example thereof, but it doesn't prove that it is; each new case might genuinely be a problem.
So according to that site every single jewish man must suffer from one or some of: sexual inadequacy, feelings of powerlessness, emotional states similar to rape victims, etc etc due to having been circumsized?
I'm a Jewish man who has suffered from all of those things since I was a small < 1yr baby. Can you prove it wasn't due to my circumcision? I don't know of anything else that traumatic that happened that early in my life.
call for the government to ban a practice that has gone on for centuries
That's a really stupid argument, so anything that has "gone on for centuries" is OK? Slavery went on for centuries, must be OK. Muslim repression of women has gone on for centuries, must be OK. Oh wait, whether or not something has gone on for centuries has absolutely f*-all to do with whether or not it should be banned.
Oh really, so new-born boys are usually given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether or not they want to be circumcised, and are merely making a decision to harm themselves? I hope you realise how silly you just sounded. I think that taking a knife to a new-born by definition is harming others without giving them a choice in the matter, that still falls squarely in a libertarian framework unless you are deliberately trolling for straw-men.
Of the two I'd prefer the first one, because 80% of the people would like to be able to turn on the PC and start using it without any further delay.
And how is a law forcing computers to be sold this way the answer? If most users really did just want to "turn on the PC and start using it", this is already an option for OEMs without requiring a law. OEMs could simply provide a choice, "OS or no OS preinstalled"... the free market is far far better than using laws to force something, in fact, almost by definition if you have to force consumers to buy something it probably wasn't what they would have chosen otherwise.
Geez... when you feel like that, it's generally life's way of subtly hinting that you need to change jobs! If you like coding, there are jobs out there that are much nicer (note smaller companies are often less bureaucratic)
The eternal question about Apple is if they're a software company or a hardware company... and when it comes down to it, I think they'll choose hardware.
But is this a false dilemma? Do they have to choose? Is there any reason they couldn't do both?
And which are they going to have bigger profit margins on - a CD that they sell for $200 or a mac mini at $500?
In the software industry the profit margin for the 'CD' is highly dependent on the volume of sales, the hardware less so, because although the R&D costs may be similarly high, the marginal cost of selling 'one more CD' is very low and it's also far easier to scale manufacturing capacity for CDs and retail boxes than for hardware. The first N CDs you sell cover (initial costs + N * marginal costs), from the (N+1)th CD it's profit, and the overall profit margin just grows larger the more you sell. (This is generally true with hardware too but (a) is much less pronounced and (b) you can hit diseconomies of scale if e.g. demand exceeds production capacity.) Bottom line, "it all depends how much they'd be able to sell".
While I tend to agree with your point, I just have to nitpick a little on the methodology and conclusions. Making predictions in the IT industry really is hard. If you asked 1000 random people in the industry at those points in time in the past to make predictions, they probably would not (on average) have fared any better (20/20 hindsight makes everything look so obviously silly now but a lot of those predictions sounded like they made sense back then). Anyway, in order to determine whether or not Cringely has any "value" as a "predictor" in the industry, one should not be trying to see if the 'majority' of his predictions come true or not, but rather, if the percentage of his predictions that come true are better enough than the average person. E.g. if the average person would have scored, say, 2% hit rate on predictions, and Cringely scored, say, 5%, then it's still "good" in a sense.
Apple makes most of its money--even now, in the heady days of iPod supremacy--by selling computer hardware.
But the market is not some zero-sum game where increasing sales of their software would decrease sales of their hardware. Secondly the implication is that increased software sales wouldn't "make money" - why not? Software in fact scales better than hardware to greater economies of scale because of low marginal costs. Even if their hardware market collapsed completely as software sales grew, they could well make more overall money if OS X on PCs was popular enough.
Aside from that have a blast mocking the planet for it's unfortunate name. What were they thinking?
Might be worth noting that in a British accent, "Uranus" sounds less like like "your anus" and a lot more like "you-ranus", one has to try to 'read it' with an American accent to really 'hear' the pun.
Does Microsoft have good network protocols? Certainly you aren't talking about SMB. (Or does "good" have a different baseline when you're talking about MS products?)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I see, the open source distrubtion is faster, and people accept it more readily
Are you saying that the OpenSource world takes longer than Microsoft to release patches for critical security issues? Because that is patently false.
Riight. A six year trendline that is flat is 'noice on a curve'
Yes, as a matter of fact, when you're looking at the timescales of climate fluctuations (natural or otherwise) six years is a piddling little blink of the eye. There are many other variables at play (and natural upswings/downswings) that may - nay, will definitely - mask the overall trend. Even looking at the last 200 years (still short but much much longer than six years) there is a very definite trend of continually increasing temperatures. (PS if you're going to counter-argue (as many do) that 200 years is too short to tell anything concrete, then that would anihilate the argument that 6 years is long enough.)
Whether or not you 'believe' global warming is happening or is a problem, it's clear that something funny is happening, something that could have devastating consequences and warrants sh*t-loads more research and a good deal of caution.
Hmm ... true indeed, good points! (Fortunately as you point out most slashdotters won't think that far ;). Actually I do still think it 'has a point' though, even if it is in some ways not a great analogy, it is still fitting in other ways.
And it coincides with man's activities on Mars! Aha, more proof!
Great, at least one moderator doesn't know what "noise" on a curve is.
But honestly, to say that a circumcision performed wihtin a few weeks of birth could make you withdrawn your whole life is laughable.
I didn't say it caused me to be withdrawn "my whole life", but certainly I've been this way since I was tiny, and it may have become "self-perpetuating" (I won't go into details here).
In any case, I don't see why it is "laughable" to suggest at least that psychological trauma may result from circumcision: It's as if you have proof that it doesn't happen, but you don't --- you just don't know. All you have is an opinion, and without some actual science, it is as valuable/worthless as my opinion, you could be wrong, I could be wrong, neither of us know.
Would you at least acknowledge that it is a possibility that circumcision might result in harmful psychological trauma? Let's say it happens, but happens rarely. E.g. let's say it happens to 1 in 1000 men -- too little to ever pick up any obvious correlations between e.g. depression rates in later life, but enough that it would be a huge problem when you add up the hypothetical number of people affected. If it is, say, 1 in 1000, that's a very serious problem, certainly enough to warrant a ban. Shouldn't more research at least be done? Bottom line is, we don't know.
Actually you've just made an argument for releasing sooner: If the bugs in the patches are caught sooner (because of the 'patch early adopters'), then the corporates will be protected against those exploits because they won't have installed the patches yet and the new improved patch will be out in time for their update schedule.
Those customers have specifically demanded that patches be released on a regular schedule, to ease their own testing and rollout procedures.
Why, are those customers forced to install it as soon as Microsoft releases it? If they wanted to install it later, they are unable to do so? What's stopping them from waiting? That would not only give them the choice, but give them longer to test the patches first. Yeah I can just picture those alleged customers now: "Hey Microsoft, please give us less choice and greater delays, in fact we demand you do so"
Stop the FUD, thanks.
As a circumsized-at-birth male I must say that I seem to enjoy sex just fine
Just to clarify, so do I. I don't know what sex would be like if I wasn't circumcised, but frankly I think it's more than intense/pleasurable enough as is, if it were any more so it might even be detrimental to my sex life, if you know what I mean :)
I do tend to agree with you here, that people can be 'convinced' to feel as if they are a victim of something whereas they may never have felt that way until someone told them. It's hard to separate though. I think it makes more sense to query people to whom it has never occurred that their circumcision might have caused problems how happy they are etc., rather than tell people "something terrible happened to you" and then asking.
Is not my anecdotal evidence just as strong? (hint small sample sizes are useless)
If you thought I was trying to provide anecdotal evidence then you completely missed my point. I don't even know one way or the other. But that's the whole point, I don't know, nor do you know, neither of us know, but it seems sensible to me to err on the side of caution when one does not know, and certainly not to err on the side of tradition.
Actually, I've never thought much about it before at all, certainly not enough to have formed an opinion about circumcision, but this thread intrigued me, and I was just busy googling to see if any proper research has been conducted to see if there might be a link between mental health problems and circumcision. (Surely, it seems to me, there must be enough men out there in both categories to at least do simple correlation surveys to start off with.)
So... maybe something else traumatic happened that you still don't know about?
Yes, that's why I said "I don't know of anything else" rather than "Nothing else". You on the other hand have already come to a conclusion that circumcision never has harmful effects, and I'm wondering how you can know that.
Are you seriously telling me that from 1 year of age onward you were sexually inadequate?
No, but all of the other things apply, and as much as you'd like to throw out all of those things listed just because one of them doesn't fit, you can't. I have been very "withdrawn" and depressed for as long as I can remember. My mother says I was extremely quiet and withdrawn even as a baby.
I can't prove it's because of circumcision, but I acknowledge that it is a possibility.
Your reasoning is still flawed though either way, because there are only two possibilities here: (a) that it's not a possibility circumcision can be harmful, or (b) that it is a possibility. Why is it flawed? Because neither (a) nor (b) is an argument for circumcision ---- circumcision is at best neutral and pointless, and at worst harmful. So bottom line, get rid of it.
more competitive in completing an assigned task
That sounds like it could be a good thing ... competitive people tend to achieve more in life.
You make a good point but I just want to do some 'methodology-nitpicking': These are essentially statistically independent though, i.e. the fact that so many past "oh no moral outrage" cases had no merit doesn't prove that the latest "oh no moral outrage" cases also have no merit - they are different things ('inductive fallacy'). What you can make an argument for, is that people appear to have a tendency to be over-afraid that new things will corrupt the morals of the youth, and that this might be just another example thereof, but it doesn't prove that it is; each new case might genuinely be a problem.
So according to that site every single jewish man must suffer from one or some of: sexual inadequacy, feelings of powerlessness, emotional states similar to rape victims, etc etc due to having been circumsized?
I'm a Jewish man who has suffered from all of those things since I was a small < 1yr baby. Can you prove it wasn't due to my circumcision? I don't know of anything else that traumatic that happened that early in my life.
call for the government to ban a practice that has gone on for centuries
That's a really stupid argument, so anything that has "gone on for centuries" is OK? Slavery went on for centuries, must be OK. Muslim repression of women has gone on for centuries, must be OK. Oh wait, whether or not something has gone on for centuries has absolutely f*-all to do with whether or not it should be banned.
Oh really, so new-born boys are usually given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether or not they want to be circumcised, and are merely making a decision to harm themselves? I hope you realise how silly you just sounded. I think that taking a knife to a new-born by definition is harming others without giving them a choice in the matter, that still falls squarely in a libertarian framework unless you are deliberately trolling for straw-men.
Of the two I'd prefer the first one, because 80% of the people would like to be able to turn on the PC and start using it without any further delay.
And how is a law forcing computers to be sold this way the answer? If most users really did just want to "turn on the PC and start using it", this is already an option for OEMs without requiring a law. OEMs could simply provide a choice, "OS or no OS preinstalled" ... the free market is far far better than using laws to force something, in fact, almost by definition if you have to force consumers to buy something it probably wasn't what they would have chosen otherwise.
Nice to decide that *someone else's job* is crappy and they *they* shouldn't mind losing it ... so long as it's not your job, right?
(I agree with you on the efficiency point though.)
Geez ... when you feel like that, it's generally life's way of subtly hinting that you need to change jobs! If you like coding, there are jobs out there that are much nicer (note smaller companies are often less bureaucratic)
The eternal question about Apple is if they're a software company or a hardware company ... and when it comes down to it, I think they'll choose hardware.
But is this a false dilemma? Do they have to choose? Is there any reason they couldn't do both?
And which are they going to have bigger profit margins on - a CD that they sell for $200 or a mac mini at $500?
In the software industry the profit margin for the 'CD' is highly dependent on the volume of sales, the hardware less so, because although the R&D costs may be similarly high, the marginal cost of selling 'one more CD' is very low and it's also far easier to scale manufacturing capacity for CDs and retail boxes than for hardware. The first N CDs you sell cover (initial costs + N * marginal costs), from the (N+1)th CD it's profit, and the overall profit margin just grows larger the more you sell. (This is generally true with hardware too but (a) is much less pronounced and (b) you can hit diseconomies of scale if e.g. demand exceeds production capacity.) Bottom line, "it all depends how much they'd be able to sell".
While I tend to agree with your point, I just have to nitpick a little on the methodology and conclusions. Making predictions in the IT industry really is hard. If you asked 1000 random people in the industry at those points in time in the past to make predictions, they probably would not (on average) have fared any better (20/20 hindsight makes everything look so obviously silly now but a lot of those predictions sounded like they made sense back then). Anyway, in order to determine whether or not Cringely has any "value" as a "predictor" in the industry, one should not be trying to see if the 'majority' of his predictions come true or not, but rather, if the percentage of his predictions that come true are better enough than the average person. E.g. if the average person would have scored, say, 2% hit rate on predictions, and Cringely scored, say, 5%, then it's still "good" in a sense.
Apple makes most of its money--even now, in the heady days of iPod supremacy--by selling computer hardware.
But the market is not some zero-sum game where increasing sales of their software would decrease sales of their hardware. Secondly the implication is that increased software sales wouldn't "make money" - why not? Software in fact scales better than hardware to greater economies of scale because of low marginal costs. Even if their hardware market collapsed completely as software sales grew, they could well make more overall money if OS X on PCs was popular enough.
Maybe they weren't expecting it to make it back :)
Aside from that have a blast mocking the planet for it's unfortunate name. What were they thinking?
Might be worth noting that in a British accent, "Uranus" sounds less like like "your anus" and a lot more like "you-ranus", one has to try to 'read it' with an American accent to really 'hear' the pun.
and when the protocols are good
Does Microsoft have good network protocols? Certainly you aren't talking about SMB. (Or does "good" have a different baseline when you're talking about MS products?)