And what about all those folks who have gotten killed
for those
Little Green Pieces of Paper and little lumps of metal?
Can't eat 'em.
Here's a news flash: You can trade them for food (or crack, or Nikes).
But I
think some organization's done some good marketing on them...must be a
conspiracy...
Here's another news flash: The importance that
we as a society place on money is not constant. In the past
few decades, it has risen. The annual American
Freshmen Survey shows that "Being very well off
financially" is the number one goal of today's
freshmen, beating out "Raising a family",
"Helping others who are in difficulty",
"Developing a meaningful philosophy of life",
etc. One can only speculate as to the reasons,
but it seems self-evident that being subjected to
a constant din of "buy this, buy that" is more
likely to raise the importance of money than it
is to lower it.
The fact is,
marketers are not all powerful. Their job is to present the idea that
their product presents more value to people than anyone elses.
That's a bit of an oversimplification.
No.
That's a *gross* oversimplification. Marketers
do not just sell products, they sell *lifestyles*.
They create culture. They create needs out of
thin air. And however much they compete with one
another on specific products, one thing that they
all agree on is that consumerism is good, and
more consumerism is better. All of their
product-specific messages may cancel each other
out, but this aggregate message remains: buy as
much as you can afford to buy, and then some.
Even that wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if it were simply shouted on a street corner. But marketers have scads of socio-psychological research (most of which is proprietary) enabling them to communicate the message in the most subtle, manipulative way possible. Most of the money spent on child psychology each year is spent by marketing researchers.
WRT the Nike/murder comment, the people who are
killing for Nikes don't always want the shoes for
themselves. You can buy a lot of crack for the
cost of a good pair of running shoes. (This
doesn't really change the overall point, though,
because if it weren't for aggressive marketing,
they wouldn't be worth nearly as much money).
I, too, played with that number and those triangles.
But did I show anyone? No.
It makes you wonder how many such discoveries are
made each year, only to go unnoticed.
My teachers would
have either not cared or taken credit for themselves.
Or they would have failed to recognize that it was
an important discovery in the first place. That would have been the
case with my high school trigonometry teacher,
who used to stand like a deer in headlights
whenever we'd ask a question not covered in the
text. To her credit, at least she was humble
enough to ask the calculus teacher (who was
brilliant) when she didn't know something.
the state is often specifically exempt from laws
under which you could sue a private entity
Mea culpa, I missed that. But on the other hand,
the state is subject to many regulations that
private entities are not (e.g., public records).
There is also the assumption that the state is
a "higher" power than private interests -- which,
if you look at the way that the law has changed to favor corporations
WRT intellectual property, etc. over the past 100 years, is
debatable.:-)
All this means is that instead of having a few
conglomerates with one voice each, we now have
a few conglomerates with many voices each. The
primary result is not one of competition, it is
one of cooperation and cross-promotion between
co-owned enterprises. This is accomplished by
specializing each news outlet to focus on a specific
topic -- e.g., finance, politics, entertainment,
etc. -- or a specific demographic -- e.g., women, the elderly, Spanish-speaking Americans, etc. -- so that co-owned outlets complement one
another and give the conglomerate voice as much
viewership as possible. Whereas each
conglomeration could get, say, 10% of Americans
to watch their respective news program in the
1970s, today they may be able to get 20% to watch
*some* news programming that they control. (Numbers admittedly pulled out of my ass.)
The internet is not much different. Yes, it is
easier to access alternative, independent news
sources, but most people still access the news
through one of the big corporate providers --
AOL/TW, MSN, etc. Cross-promotion is just as
easily accomplished online as on television, if
not more so, hyperlinks being what they are. Search engines often favor co-owned sites. And
of course, you have inter-media cross-promotion.
Every night, I see at least one "teaser" story on the
evening news that directs me to a website for the
"full story".
Even if Clay's points about TV/cable were on
target, which I don't feel they are, it is
incredibly shallow to look at just one slice of
the media. How many people got their news from
TV in the 1970s compared to today? What about
radio and newspaper? How have they changed? What
might the proliferation of TV news outlets mean
in the context of these changes?
This was definitely the low point in an otherwise
fascinating interview.
If I'm given the
right to make a contract with the school to not mock them, and then
mock them anyway, I'll have the right to break contracts with you.
I'm not sure this qualifies as a contract, if for
no other reason than these kids are (probably)
minors. IANAL.
Perhaps parents should try to spend more time with their kids.
I agree with you that legislation is not the
answer. However, nor is the answer as simple
as telling parents to spend more time with their
kids. They aren't being lazy or neglectful
(most of them aren't, anyway); they are simply trying
to live in the modern world. This usually
entails both parents working full-time. A
full-time job nowadays often translates to 50 or
60 hours a week, and suburban sprawl has inflated
commute times beyond reason.
Marketing
propaganda has trained a nation of obedient little
consumers, who believe that we need off-road
vehicles to get to work, that we need a 2,500
square foot home for two adults and two kids,
that it's okay to carry $10,000 in credit card
debt, that we can't step outside unless we're
dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch, that we have to have all
the latest technological gadgets, that we need
a "home theater" system and video library worth as much as two thousand matinee tickets, that
we need to join Oprah's book club and buy books
that we could get for free from the library, that
we need to eat meat three times a day, that we
need to join a health club since we've gotten
fat from eating too much meat and sitting in traffic for three hours a day instead of biking or walking to work,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is what you're up against when you tell
parents to spend more time with their kids. You
have to convince people to consume less, which is
NOT EASY. Everyone naturally wants the best for their
kids, and they believe that the way to achieve
this is by providing material things. However, contrary to popular belief,
there is no correlation between wealth and happiness
once you get above the poverty level. Rich people
worry about money, too, and just like the rest of us, they covet things that they cannot afford.
I guess I've gotten a little bit off topic, so
I won't even go into the ecological reasons for
embracing voluntary simplicity. Suffice it to
say that people are generally well-intentioned,
and they already want to spend more time with
their kids. But time == money, so they cannot
make it happen without major lifestyle adjustments.
Should they make the adjustments? Absolutely.
But it's going to take more than saying, "Hey,
try to spend more time with your kids," to
convince them.
One copy purchased but lent out 1000 times, equaling 999 copies of "lost revenue".
Not to be pedantic, but assuming an average
checkout time of one month, and *zero* days
idle on the shelf, it would take more than 80
years to check out a single book 1000 times.
IANAL (I am not a librarian), but it seems that a
book would have to be replaced every 50 or so
checkouts due to wear and tear.
That's not the point. If I *wanted* to use these
features to block content I found objectionable,
I would not be able to do so. This technology
only presents a satisfactory solution for the
majority. The rest of us are SOL.
I concede that as a private enterprise, Microsoft
does not owe me any consideration. But my
rant was directed at the V-chip, and I think the
FCC *does* owe it to me. It would have been
trivial to come up with a dozen or so categories
of content which could be set independently of
one another. Instead, we have three categories,
but they're all tied together into the same
subjective rating system. The result is that I
cannot block violence without also blocking sex
and profanity, even if I don't have a problem with my kids being exposed to the latter two.
Incidentally, I probably wouldn't use the V-chip
even if my TV had one. My point is simply that
even if it is in principle a good solution, it was
implemented terribly.
What about police / emergency response transmisions?
The other side to this question is the fact that
drivers who use cell phones have the tendency to
inundate 911 with unnecessary calls whenever they
drive by the scene of an accident. This prevents
real emergencies from being handled in a timely
manner. Lives are lost.
Many parents don't want their kids exposed to the violence and sexual
content on video games, and this chip gives them a way to do that.
What if parents don't want their kids exposed to
religious programming? Granted, this is a
non-issue as far as video games are concerned, but
it's one of my pet peeves about V-chip technology.
Sex and violence are not the only things that
people may find objectionable. It seems rather
arbitrary, if not discriminatory, that the only
content that *can* be blocked happens to be the
type of content frowned upon by right-wing
Christians. It might appear that this is a
coincidence, but consider that even the most
restrictive anti-violence settings on the chip
will often fail to block images of a certain man
being crucified.
Copyright law is criminal law, as well as civil.
Hypothetically, someone could be prosecuted
criminally for a copyright violation without the
author having a hand in it (though in the real
world, this would [could?] never happen). IANAL.
Poster A: The problem is that when every country in the world
has passed the DMCA there's nowhere left to go
Poster B: I doubt that'll happen.
Once it gets down to a few, then suddenly freedom of communication
will become a viable competitive factor for nations
I hope you're right, but I fear you're wrong.
Once it gets down to a few, they may find that
no one will trade with them, which would be a
pretty strong incentive to adopt the DMCA.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm amazed
and dismayed by the absurdly overconfident,
unscientific, hubristic claims that these
researchers are making. Particularly Friedmann:
"There is no way you could come up with a
non-biological explanation..." "[I]t's
conclusive evidence..." "[N]o reasonable person
can doubt it..." "[T]here can be no other
explanation."
It seems compelling, I'll admit, but it's hardly
conclusive. Friedmann is basically
arguing from ignorance.
blocking that advertising
is nothing but stealing.
I browse with lynx. To me, most ads look like
"[LINK]", or, if they're bright enough to figure
out the ALT tag, "Click Here!". This is not a
deliberate attempt to block advertising, but the
effect is the same. I am getting the content
without "paying" for it, which is, in your words,
"extremely immoral".
You say it's okay to ignore an ad, as long as you
load it. Why should that be? Does the site get
any money if I load the ad? No. They don't get
money unless I click through. Therefore, it is
"extremely immoral" not to click through.
What about the sponsor? Do they get any money
from a click-through? No. They don't get any
money unless I buy something. Therefore, it is
"extremely immoral" to view a web site without
buying something from the sponsor.
But not all sponsors sell things. Some
are just advertising their own content. So now I
have to visit their site and click through all
of *their* banner ads, buying from any sponsor
who has anything to sell, and so on ad infinitum.
Anything less would be "extremely immoral."
Excuse me, I have to go get another job to pay
for my web browsing habit now.
In most places, you can't even walk around nude in
public, which has no significant impact on the public
health other than raising the blood pressure of
prudes. So why are people allowed to smoke in
public? It's an imperfect analogy, I'll admit, and I'm not advocating placing or lifting bans on either.
But it does point out the lack of perspective that
people have on *both* issues (smoking and nudity).
In truth, I vacillate quite a bit on the issue of
smoking bans. Singing and playing guitar do not
cause lung cancer, but as a musician, I cannot
make a living doing the former without risking
the latter. There are simply not enough
smoke-free venues. I don't have a problem with
risks that are *inherent* to what I do --
hearing loss, tendonitis, vocal nodules, carpal
tunnel -- these go with the territory, and I can
take steps to avoid them. But I cannot really
avoid secondhand smoke without giving up my
livelihood.
What if I WANT to share my
files...but not to ShareSniffer users?
What if you wanted to share your files with men,
but not women? Or blacks, but not whites? Or
group A, but not group non-A? You can't. The
closest you can get is to share files with those
who know the password, but not with those who
don't. This has nothing to do with ShareSniffer,
it is just the nature of file-sharing.
Re:Why Some Animals Are More Important
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
Interesting. But what about pigs? Did you know that pigs are just as
smart if not smarter than dogs?
Yeah, but a dog's got personality, and
personality goes a long way. We'd have to be
talking about one charming motherfucking pig.
How so? In fact, I said virtually the same thing:
"This is not to say
that life cannot exist based on some as-yet-unimagined chemistry"
But carbon is a better candidate for a life-search,
simply because it is the only type of life we
know to exist. This means two things: One, if
it exists here, it can probably exist elsewhere
(unlike foobarium-based life, which may or may
not be possible -- looking for it could be a waste of time); and two, if we see it, we are
more likely to recognize it as life. Foobarium-based life could be so far outside our experience that
it would pass right under our noses unnoticed.
None of this is to say that foobarium-based
life doesn't/cannot exist. Nor does it say we
should ignore any non-carbon clues. I'm simply
explaining why carbon gets (and merits) more
attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a news flash: You can trade them for food (or crack, or Nikes).
But I think some organization's done some good marketing on them...must be a conspiracy...
Here's another news flash: The importance that we as a society place on money is not constant. In the past few decades, it has risen. The annual American Freshmen Survey shows that "Being very well off financially" is the number one goal of today's freshmen, beating out "Raising a family", "Helping others who are in difficulty", "Developing a meaningful philosophy of life", etc. One can only speculate as to the reasons, but it seems self-evident that being subjected to a constant din of "buy this, buy that" is more likely to raise the importance of money than it is to lower it.
That's a bit of an oversimplification.
No.
That's a *gross* oversimplification. Marketers do not just sell products, they sell *lifestyles*. They create culture. They create needs out of thin air. And however much they compete with one another on specific products, one thing that they all agree on is that consumerism is good, and more consumerism is better. All of their product-specific messages may cancel each other out, but this aggregate message remains: buy as much as you can afford to buy, and then some.
Even that wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if it were simply shouted on a street corner. But marketers have scads of socio-psychological research (most of which is proprietary) enabling them to communicate the message in the most subtle, manipulative way possible. Most of the money spent on child psychology each year is spent by marketing researchers.
WRT the Nike/murder comment, the people who are killing for Nikes don't always want the shoes for themselves. You can buy a lot of crack for the cost of a good pair of running shoes. (This doesn't really change the overall point, though, because if it weren't for aggressive marketing, they wouldn't be worth nearly as much money).
It makes you wonder how many such discoveries are made each year, only to go unnoticed.
My teachers would have either not cared or taken credit for themselves.
Or they would have failed to recognize that it was an important discovery in the first place. That would have been the case with my high school trigonometry teacher, who used to stand like a deer in headlights whenever we'd ask a question not covered in the text. To her credit, at least she was humble enough to ask the calculus teacher (who was brilliant) when she didn't know something.
Mea culpa, I missed that. But on the other hand, the state is subject to many regulations that private entities are not (e.g., public records).
There is also the assumption that the state is a "higher" power than private interests -- which, if you look at the way that the law has changed to favor corporations WRT intellectual property, etc. over the past 100 years, is debatable. :-)
The internet is not much different. Yes, it is easier to access alternative, independent news sources, but most people still access the news through one of the big corporate providers -- AOL/TW, MSN, etc. Cross-promotion is just as easily accomplished online as on television, if not more so, hyperlinks being what they are. Search engines often favor co-owned sites. And of course, you have inter-media cross-promotion. Every night, I see at least one "teaser" story on the evening news that directs me to a website for the "full story".
Even if Clay's points about TV/cable were on target, which I don't feel they are, it is incredibly shallow to look at just one slice of the media. How many people got their news from TV in the 1970s compared to today? What about radio and newspaper? How have they changed? What might the proliferation of TV news outlets mean in the context of these changes?
This was definitely the low point in an otherwise fascinating interview.
I'm not sure this qualifies as a contract, if for no other reason than these kids are (probably) minors. IANAL.
If the state harms you, you can sue the state just as you would a private entity.
I agree with you that legislation is not the answer. However, nor is the answer as simple as telling parents to spend more time with their kids. They aren't being lazy or neglectful (most of them aren't, anyway); they are simply trying to live in the modern world. This usually entails both parents working full-time. A full-time job nowadays often translates to 50 or 60 hours a week, and suburban sprawl has inflated commute times beyond reason.
Marketing propaganda has trained a nation of obedient little consumers, who believe that we need off-road vehicles to get to work, that we need a 2,500 square foot home for two adults and two kids, that it's okay to carry $10,000 in credit card debt, that we can't step outside unless we're dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch, that we have to have all the latest technological gadgets, that we need a "home theater" system and video library worth as much as two thousand matinee tickets, that we need to join Oprah's book club and buy books that we could get for free from the library, that we need to eat meat three times a day, that we need to join a health club since we've gotten fat from eating too much meat and sitting in traffic for three hours a day instead of biking or walking to work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is what you're up against when you tell parents to spend more time with their kids. You have to convince people to consume less, which is NOT EASY. Everyone naturally wants the best for their kids, and they believe that the way to achieve this is by providing material things. However, contrary to popular belief, there is no correlation between wealth and happiness once you get above the poverty level. Rich people worry about money, too, and just like the rest of us, they covet things that they cannot afford.
I guess I've gotten a little bit off topic, so I won't even go into the ecological reasons for embracing voluntary simplicity. Suffice it to say that people are generally well-intentioned, and they already want to spend more time with their kids. But time == money, so they cannot make it happen without major lifestyle adjustments. Should they make the adjustments? Absolutely. But it's going to take more than saying, "Hey, try to spend more time with your kids," to convince them.
Not to be pedantic, but assuming an average checkout time of one month, and *zero* days idle on the shelf, it would take more than 80 years to check out a single book 1000 times. IANAL (I am not a librarian), but it seems that a book would have to be replaced every 50 or so checkouts due to wear and tear.
I concede that as a private enterprise, Microsoft does not owe me any consideration. But my rant was directed at the V-chip, and I think the FCC *does* owe it to me. It would have been trivial to come up with a dozen or so categories of content which could be set independently of one another. Instead, we have three categories, but they're all tied together into the same subjective rating system. The result is that I cannot block violence without also blocking sex and profanity, even if I don't have a problem with my kids being exposed to the latter two.
Incidentally, I probably wouldn't use the V-chip even if my TV had one. My point is simply that even if it is in principle a good solution, it was implemented terribly.
Until you have to mow the lawn... :-)
The other side to this question is the fact that drivers who use cell phones have the tendency to inundate 911 with unnecessary calls whenever they drive by the scene of an accident. This prevents real emergencies from being handled in a timely manner. Lives are lost.
Tyranny of the majority.
What if parents don't want their kids exposed to religious programming? Granted, this is a non-issue as far as video games are concerned, but it's one of my pet peeves about V-chip technology. Sex and violence are not the only things that people may find objectionable. It seems rather arbitrary, if not discriminatory, that the only content that *can* be blocked happens to be the type of content frowned upon by right-wing Christians. It might appear that this is a coincidence, but consider that even the most restrictive anti-violence settings on the chip will often fail to block images of a certain man being crucified.
Copyright law is criminal law, as well as civil. Hypothetically, someone could be prosecuted criminally for a copyright violation without the author having a hand in it (though in the real world, this would [could?] never happen). IANAL.
Hardly. It's more like driving so fast that you miss the scenery -- but you get to your destination that much more quickly.
From the article: "Van Gogh was in Auvers for the last 70 days before his death on July 29, 1890, and made 70 paintings during that period."
Poster B: I doubt that'll happen. Once it gets down to a few, then suddenly freedom of communication will become a viable competitive factor for nations
I hope you're right, but I fear you're wrong. Once it gets down to a few, they may find that no one will trade with them, which would be a pretty strong incentive to adopt the DMCA.
It seems compelling, I'll admit, but it's hardly conclusive. Friedmann is basically arguing from ignorance.
I browse with lynx. To me, most ads look like "[LINK]", or, if they're bright enough to figure out the ALT tag, "Click Here!". This is not a deliberate attempt to block advertising, but the effect is the same. I am getting the content without "paying" for it, which is, in your words, "extremely immoral".
You say it's okay to ignore an ad, as long as you load it. Why should that be? Does the site get any money if I load the ad? No. They don't get money unless I click through. Therefore, it is "extremely immoral" not to click through.
What about the sponsor? Do they get any money from a click-through? No. They don't get any money unless I buy something. Therefore, it is "extremely immoral" to view a web site without buying something from the sponsor.
But not all sponsors sell things. Some are just advertising their own content. So now I have to visit their site and click through all of *their* banner ads, buying from any sponsor who has anything to sell, and so on ad infinitum. Anything less would be "extremely immoral."
Excuse me, I have to go get another job to pay for my web browsing habit now.
In truth, I vacillate quite a bit on the issue of smoking bans. Singing and playing guitar do not cause lung cancer, but as a musician, I cannot make a living doing the former without risking the latter. There are simply not enough smoke-free venues. I don't have a problem with risks that are *inherent* to what I do -- hearing loss, tendonitis, vocal nodules, carpal tunnel -- these go with the territory, and I can take steps to avoid them. But I cannot really avoid secondhand smoke without giving up my livelihood.
What if you wanted to share your files with men, but not women? Or blacks, but not whites? Or group A, but not group non-A? You can't. The closest you can get is to share files with those who know the password, but not with those who don't. This has nothing to do with ShareSniffer, it is just the nature of file-sharing.
Yeah, but a dog's got personality, and personality goes a long way. We'd have to be talking about one charming motherfucking pig.
There are about 40,000 people playing online turn-based games at this very moment, at Yahoo! alone.
How so? In fact, I said virtually the same thing: "This is not to say that life cannot exist based on some as-yet-unimagined chemistry"
But carbon is a better candidate for a life-search, simply because it is the only type of life we know to exist. This means two things: One, if it exists here, it can probably exist elsewhere (unlike foobarium-based life, which may or may not be possible -- looking for it could be a waste of time); and two, if we see it, we are more likely to recognize it as life. Foobarium-based life could be so far outside our experience that it would pass right under our noses unnoticed.
None of this is to say that foobarium-based life doesn't/cannot exist. Nor does it say we should ignore any non-carbon clues. I'm simply explaining why carbon gets (and merits) more attention.