I read the article, and saw nothing that didn't scream fraud to anybody with more than a dozen functioning brain cells.
Agreed. I found it interesting how the article described different scams with inconsistent amounts of detail. For example, when the article discussed the pet scam thing, it described how an over-paying check would be mailed to a pet owner, with a request that the owner wire the difference to someone else who would be caring for the pet... only (elaborated the article) for the owner to eventually discover that the check was bad, and that they were out the wired money. Compare that description to the article's discussion of the romance scam; the article simply says that the remote love interest would request money for traveling to come see the scam victim, and might become sick or get mugged on the trip and end up needing more money... but in this case the article doesn't spell out that the person in fact never shows up, and that the "sickness" or "mugging" isn't real. To me, the article needn't spell out either scenario to its end, the scams are obvious from their skeletal descriptions; but I find it interesting how in one case the article seems like it's targeting five year olds, and in the other the article seems to presume that readers will fill in the blanks.
... to that wishlist, I'd add "support for bluetooth keyboards", and "usb port, supporting mounting the iphone as a disk and transparently exchanging data with it".
And if the iphone doesn't have the following (and I'm not sure), I'd also add "bluetooth DUN support".
i'm so sick of being told of what i need to be afraid of. no wonder the world is full of pill popping zombies, i just wish these people would fuck off with their end of the world nonesense.
I'm not sure. My (admittedly speculative) point is that it's possible that some critical mass of a population becoming vocally unhappy might spark a wider-spread awareness of -- and resistance to -- whatever issue is at hand; and apathy is a form of unhappiness. This theory would probably apply to situations where the variety of oppression is subtle or non-obvious... e.g. technological or financial oppression, rather than street-level warfare.
Seriously, "Pakistan is more free than the UK"? How else should I respond to that type of statement?
I wasn't trying to suggest support or opposition to parts of your response other than the part I quoted.
people aren't shooting us when we try to change the course of our nations.
Mostly true, the troubling spate of recent tasings aside. Though this won't be a validation of our government's restraint until people engage in protests on a large scale... *then* we can talk about who does or doesn't get shot.
Freedom in the United States or United Kingdom isn't dead until people stop fighting for it and become as apathetic as you sound when you make statements like that.
Consider that reading someone's jaded apathy might be the very thing NEEDED to motivate people to fight. Right now, one of the huge problems is not exhaustion, but complacency... the battle is not yet well joined. For people to choose to fight, they have to believe something is wrong to start with.
To the people here in the U.S. who consider the Bush administration an oppressive theocratic regime, pay attention. This is the sort of thing an ACTUAL oppressive theocratic regime does.
Oh, I see. Either you're shooting people in the street, or you can't be an oppressive theocratic regime. I'm soooooo relieved... I'm going out tonight to celebrate this caring, secular administration we have!!! Yay!
So it's bad when ISPs do this, but OK when Google does it?
Precisely. Just like it's fine when you call your mother and she asks that you help her around the house that weekend by painting the walls, but bad when AT&T spies on that phone call and then contacts you urging you to buy paint products. AT&T is the "carrier"; your mother is the entity with whom you are USING the carrier to communicate. The carrier is getting paid per your contractual arrangement with them.
How [is this an example of the tragedy of privatization]? The fence is the same height today it was when it was a public zoo.
Obviously the tiger evolved, and the zoo budget didn't include studies of the tiger's new superpowers. Same thing happened with the flying squirrel and the electric eel, but in those cases nobody died.
I frequently hear people trot out the spilled coffee case as the quintessential friviolous lawsuit, but it truly isn't. I became well acquainted with this case when my friend studied it during law school, and in the name of dispelling this misperception I'll point out the following facts (in this case cited from the wikipedia page on Liebeck; the stated facts jive well with my recollection of reading the case dockets):
Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin as she sat in the puddle of hot liquid for over 90 seconds, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin.[8] Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. [9] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed.
So point #1: Liebeck didn't suffer something merely inconvenient or trivial... instead, she quite simply had the living shit burned out of her vagina and all surrounding regions. It's probably noteworthy that she was 79 years old at the time, with limited reaction times and limited mobility.
Onwards to point #2: the coffee she was served as 180 degrees. It was established during the trial that this temperature is hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns in five seconds, and require skin grafts after 12 seconds. At the time this was the standard temperature at which McDonalds served drive-through-order coffee. McDonald's didn't serve it this hot because they expected people to drink it at that temperature; instead,
[McDonalds] reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that, because those who purchased the coffee typically wanted to drive a distance with the coffee, the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip.
McDonalds knew that the coffee was hotter than people would want to consume; they admitted during trial that this was hotter than was safe to drink. This turned out to be pretty damning to the jury, but it was made worse by the fact that this was by no means the first time a McDonalds customer had been severely injured without any resulting change in the temperature of the coffee served:
documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burnt by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000. [4]
The reason McDonalds didn't change the temperature, even after settling these previous suits, was bean counting. McDonalds only got sued once for every 25 million cups of coffee it served. Doing "the right thing" never entered their calculations; they simply calculated the cost of the suits as a fraction of their take from coffee sales, and in that light deemed the suits nothing more than a financial annoyance.
Lastly, Liebeck didn't initially ask for the money she was ultimately awarded. She only sued when McDonalds refused to give her $20k to cover her medical costs.
I think people are too quick to judge many legal cases, including this particular one.
It wouldn't surprise me if they make a Cloverfield "Vertigo free edition"
That's a great idea. And the studios needn't be involved, it could be done by a single enthusiast with motion-tracking/stabilizing vid software, and distributed on the net. Hope to see it soon.
Was that an errant "like"? Or did you really mean to say that a giant monster is going to befriend two farmers in the middle of Kansas?
Given that it's two farmers in the middle of Kansas, we are of course talking about the biblical sense of liking them. "And then verily did he like them again..."
"Intelligent Design" is a way of claiming the development of the species is/was directed by God without invoking the 'G' word. It still ascribes the development to an external intelligence which designed the system from scratch. Organisms self-selecting beneficial genes is not what they're talking about when they say "Intelligent Design".
Agreed. What the article discusses is -- to put it in search-space terminology -- that the observed evolution was sophisticated enough to incorporate hill-climb refinement, not just completely random mutation as previously supposed by some. This does not end up being a teleological statement, but merely a statement about intermediate-level mechanisms in the evolution process. It means that genes are even more evolved than previously thought.
If this perspective does not make sense to you - simply write yourself out of the target audience and get on with that which is important to you.
You appear to believe that the advice "buy it if you like it, don't buy it if you don't" is all the perspective anyone could want to have. But I take the GP's question to be taking a higher-level view of market-related questions: will enough people buy this machine to make Apple's production of it worthwhile (whether in outright profit or as an image product contributing to a halo effect)? If so, what motivations will these people have to make the purchase? You seem to propose that a large enough group of people will buy this for functional reasons, based on it (a) being smaller and (b) having a long battery life. But the GP points out, quantitatively, that the size savings from (a) don't really enable new usage or new categories of ease, and (b) comes at the cost of disallowing battery swapping. I think the GP has a good case that the "shiny executive toy" view applies.
To me, there's nothing wrong with buying something because it's cute or shiny or symbolizes status. But I wouldn't pretend that the difference in functionality is at all substantial.
Vinyl as a hifi medium is vastly inferior to the 16-bit 44khz CD. This is not a surprise, as sampling theory pretty much dictates this outcome. Vinyl does sound different, essentially because of (a) the imperfections inherent in the stylus/groove mechanism, and (b) the attempt to compensate for some of those imperfections by pre-warming the spectrum while recording to vinyl, followed by further spectrum manipulation during playback. That some people may prefer the end result of these maneuvers in the vinyl pipeline is simply a matter of preference, but this in no way legitimizes the claim that records are a higher fidelity technology than CDs. If a vinyl record is digitized to a CD, the playback of such a CD is indistinguishable from the playback of the original record... even to these vinyl "audiophiles".
You don't seriously think the Intel board sat down and said, "hey let's maliciously fuck-over the OLPC project"?
Your comment might have been intended as humor, but it's currently marked "insightful" so I'm responding to it on that basis (if not for your sake than for the sake of anyone who does think it's insightful).
Aside from the specific choice of language, you really think it's far fetched? If so, then let me spell it out for you: YES, Intel could well have had meetings where they explicitly planned to do things in breach of either the word or spirit of their arrangements with OLPC, aka "maliciously fucking over" their partner. Intel is a for-profit American corporation. Not even outright breaches of contract are off-limits for corporations; they'll do it every time they think it will make them more money than holding to a contract would.
It is far more plausible that Intel planned this all the way up the ladder than that this one salesperson just decided to be a maverick and try to subvert things without any approval from management.
I'd hate to think you're more comfortable hiding behind the posture that technically, nobody at any Intel meetings used the specific words "maliciously fuck-over".
I mean, that's simply ridiculous. Perhaps in some areas of the inner city what you said may be true, but if I ask any 14 year old that I know, he will give that $30 to his older brother / uncle / me and return with $25 worth of alcohol from the corner store.
If your argument is that alcohol is easier to get because of other members of society who are willing to be complicit in its distribution, you're simply supporting the GP's point that societal conspiracies to distribute drugs are effective.
'Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'
Requiring products to use all chip-implemented features in order to avoid such accusations would be idiotic. If Intel puts wifi on every chip, it does not make sense to require a child's Elmo doll using the chip to have a wifi interface exposed.
Great analogy there, bud. Imprisoning people based on their ethnicity is almost exactly the same as causing a minor inconvenience based on behavioral traits.
Just making the point that proportion of population dis-serviced doesn't justify the process. If you have to argue with that point by pointing out the (obvious) difference between incarcerated because you look a certain way vs being searched because you look a certain way, I'll let someone else run with it.
Would you rather they screen those 70,000 people randomly? Or not screen at all?
Assuming we're still talking about this "fear sensing" screening, then not at all would be best.
I don't think anybody ever said this was a magic bullet, but it is certainly a powerful method, and a way to reduce racial profiling.
Powerful... how exactly? In that it exhibits the power of the state? And we're supposed to be glad that they've replaced racial profiling (aka hassling people because of how their skin looks) with hassling people because of what their facial expression is?
That is 1 in 4167 to 1 in 3571 (0.024% to 0.028%) of the total passengers boarding. Hardly "a ton" of passengers being selected.
70,000 passengers is indeed "a ton" (aka lots, a lot, many) passengers inconvenienced. Because they are a tiny fraction of total passengers flying doesn't justify the hassle and the waste, just as the internment of the Japanese in WWII was not justifiable based on the tiny fraction of the population they represented.
If the point is that Britney/Paris/Nicole aren't "real" news compared to actual events in Iraq/Afghanistan/RonPaul then why is Kurt Cobain
The difference in a nutshell: Cobain had talent, Britney has tits.
Nothing wrong with liking tits. But some people object to "artificial hit" music by people with no talent, no matter how bouncy the "artist's" implants.
What do you expect? TV is designed for the lowest common denominator.
It goes beyond that. The lowest-common-denominator theory would be based on the idea that TV is trying to serve some market segment. TV is in fact trying to mold the population to be in line with its own agenda. Its agenda is making money, which in the realm of TV ends up equating to pushing political views, distracting attention from various issues, and making people feel isolated by pretending that nobody in their right mind would care about anything that doesn't happen to be reported upon.
This has been the situation for a long time with TV. The degree to which it has worked is frightening.
The internet -- if not censored or regulated or monopolized to death -- will change that, has been changing that. Stop believing that there IS a "lowest common denominator". Instead, start thinking that there is a nation of citizens who have been duped into sleepwalking, but who are capable of waking up.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I found it interesting how the article described different scams with inconsistent amounts of detail. For example, when the article discussed the pet scam thing, it described how an over-paying check would be mailed to a pet owner, with a request that the owner wire the difference to someone else who would be caring for the pet... only (elaborated the article) for the owner to eventually discover that the check was bad, and that they were out the wired money. Compare that description to the article's discussion of the romance scam; the article simply says that the remote love interest would request money for traveling to come see the scam victim, and might become sick or get mugged on the trip and end up needing more money... but in this case the article doesn't spell out that the person in fact never shows up, and that the "sickness" or "mugging" isn't real. To me, the article needn't spell out either scenario to its end, the scams are obvious from their skeletal descriptions; but I find it interesting how in one case the article seems like it's targeting five year olds, and in the other the article seems to presume that readers will fill in the blanks.
... to that wishlist, I'd add "support for bluetooth keyboards", and "usb port, supporting mounting the iphone as a disk and transparently exchanging data with it". And if the iphone doesn't have the following (and I'm not sure), I'd also add "bluetooth DUN support".
You must be new here.
-Seth
Crap, now I'm afraid of pill-popping zombies...
I'm not sure. My (admittedly speculative) point is that it's possible that some critical mass of a population becoming vocally unhappy might spark a wider-spread awareness of -- and resistance to -- whatever issue is at hand; and apathy is a form of unhappiness. This theory would probably apply to situations where the variety of oppression is subtle or non-obvious... e.g. technological or financial oppression, rather than street-level warfare.
I wasn't trying to suggest support or opposition to parts of your response other than the part I quoted.
Mostly true, the troubling spate of recent tasings aside. Though this won't be a validation of our government's restraint until people engage in protests on a large scale... *then* we can talk about who does or doesn't get shot.
Consider that reading someone's jaded apathy might be the very thing NEEDED to motivate people to fight. Right now, one of the huge problems is not exhaustion, but complacency... the battle is not yet well joined. For people to choose to fight, they have to believe something is wrong to start with.
Oh, I see. Either you're shooting people in the street, or you can't be an oppressive theocratic regime. I'm soooooo relieved... I'm going out tonight to celebrate this caring, secular administration we have!!! Yay!
Precisely. Just like it's fine when you call your mother and she asks that you help her around the house that weekend by painting the walls, but bad when AT&T spies on that phone call and then contacts you urging you to buy paint products. AT&T is the "carrier"; your mother is the entity with whom you are USING the carrier to communicate. The carrier is getting paid per your contractual arrangement with them.
Because it might be harder to get laid?
Nope, that job was taken. (Sorry, couldn't resist... nothing against her or Bill. :)
Obviously the tiger evolved, and the zoo budget didn't include studies of the tiger's new superpowers. Same thing happened with the flying squirrel and the electric eel, but in those cases nobody died.
Onwards to point #2: the coffee she was served as 180 degrees. It was established during the trial that this temperature is hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns in five seconds, and require skin grafts after 12 seconds. At the time this was the standard temperature at which McDonalds served drive-through-order coffee. McDonald's didn't serve it this hot because they expected people to drink it at that temperature; instead,
McDonalds knew that the coffee was hotter than people would want to consume; they admitted during trial that this was hotter than was safe to drink. This turned out to be pretty damning to the jury, but it was made worse by the fact that this was by no means the first time a McDonalds customer had been severely injured without any resulting change in the temperature of the coffee served: The reason McDonalds didn't change the temperature, even after settling these previous suits, was bean counting. McDonalds only got sued once for every 25 million cups of coffee it served. Doing "the right thing" never entered their calculations; they simply calculated the cost of the suits as a fraction of their take from coffee sales, and in that light deemed the suits nothing more than a financial annoyance.Lastly, Liebeck didn't initially ask for the money she was ultimately awarded. She only sued when McDonalds refused to give her $20k to cover her medical costs.
I think people are too quick to judge many legal cases, including this particular one.
That's a great idea. And the studios needn't be involved, it could be done by a single enthusiast with motion-tracking/stabilizing vid software, and distributed on the net. Hope to see it soon.
Given that it's two farmers in the middle of Kansas, we are of course talking about the biblical sense of liking them. "And then verily did he like them again..."
Agreed. What the article discusses is -- to put it in search-space terminology -- that the observed evolution was sophisticated enough to incorporate hill-climb refinement, not just completely random mutation as previously supposed by some. This does not end up being a teleological statement, but merely a statement about intermediate-level mechanisms in the evolution process. It means that genes are even more evolved than previously thought.
You appear to believe that the advice "buy it if you like it, don't buy it if you don't" is all the perspective anyone could want to have. But I take the GP's question to be taking a higher-level view of market-related questions: will enough people buy this machine to make Apple's production of it worthwhile (whether in outright profit or as an image product contributing to a halo effect)? If so, what motivations will these people have to make the purchase? You seem to propose that a large enough group of people will buy this for functional reasons, based on it (a) being smaller and (b) having a long battery life. But the GP points out, quantitatively, that the size savings from (a) don't really enable new usage or new categories of ease, and (b) comes at the cost of disallowing battery swapping. I think the GP has a good case that the "shiny executive toy" view applies.
To me, there's nothing wrong with buying something because it's cute or shiny or symbolizes status. But I wouldn't pretend that the difference in functionality is at all substantial.
Vinyl as a hifi medium is vastly inferior to the 16-bit 44khz CD. This is not a surprise, as sampling theory pretty much dictates this outcome. Vinyl does sound different, essentially because of (a) the imperfections inherent in the stylus/groove mechanism, and (b) the attempt to compensate for some of those imperfections by pre-warming the spectrum while recording to vinyl, followed by further spectrum manipulation during playback. That some people may prefer the end result of these maneuvers in the vinyl pipeline is simply a matter of preference, but this in no way legitimizes the claim that records are a higher fidelity technology than CDs. If a vinyl record is digitized to a CD, the playback of such a CD is indistinguishable from the playback of the original record... even to these vinyl "audiophiles".
Your comment might have been intended as humor, but it's currently marked "insightful" so I'm responding to it on that basis (if not for your sake than for the sake of anyone who does think it's insightful).
Aside from the specific choice of language, you really think it's far fetched? If so, then let me spell it out for you: YES, Intel could well have had meetings where they explicitly planned to do things in breach of either the word or spirit of their arrangements with OLPC, aka "maliciously fucking over" their partner. Intel is a for-profit American corporation. Not even outright breaches of contract are off-limits for corporations; they'll do it every time they think it will make them more money than holding to a contract would.
It is far more plausible that Intel planned this all the way up the ladder than that this one salesperson just decided to be a maverick and try to subvert things without any approval from management.
I'd hate to think you're more comfortable hiding behind the posture that technically, nobody at any Intel meetings used the specific words "maliciously fuck-over".
If your argument is that alcohol is easier to get because of other members of society who are willing to be complicit in its distribution, you're simply supporting the GP's point that societal conspiracies to distribute drugs are effective.
Requiring products to use all chip-implemented features in order to avoid such accusations would be idiotic. If Intel puts wifi on every chip, it does not make sense to require a child's Elmo doll using the chip to have a wifi interface exposed.
Just making the point that proportion of population dis-serviced doesn't justify the process. If you have to argue with that point by pointing out the (obvious) difference between incarcerated because you look a certain way vs being searched because you look a certain way, I'll let someone else run with it.
Would you rather they screen those 70,000 people randomly? Or not screen at all?
Assuming we're still talking about this "fear sensing" screening, then not at all would be best.
I don't think anybody ever said this was a magic bullet, but it is certainly a powerful method, and a way to reduce racial profiling.
Powerful... how exactly? In that it exhibits the power of the state? And we're supposed to be glad that they've replaced racial profiling (aka hassling people because of how their skin looks) with hassling people because of what their facial expression is?
70,000 passengers is indeed "a ton" (aka lots, a lot, many) passengers inconvenienced. Because they are a tiny fraction of total passengers flying doesn't justify the hassle and the waste, just as the internment of the Japanese in WWII was not justifiable based on the tiny fraction of the population they represented.
The difference in a nutshell: Cobain had talent, Britney has tits.
Nothing wrong with liking tits. But some people object to "artificial hit" music by people with no talent, no matter how bouncy the "artist's" implants.
It goes beyond that. The lowest-common-denominator theory would be based on the idea that TV is trying to serve some market segment. TV is in fact trying to mold the population to be in line with its own agenda. Its agenda is making money, which in the realm of TV ends up equating to pushing political views, distracting attention from various issues, and making people feel isolated by pretending that nobody in their right mind would care about anything that doesn't happen to be reported upon.
This has been the situation for a long time with TV. The degree to which it has worked is frightening.
The internet -- if not censored or regulated or monopolized to death -- will change that, has been changing that. Stop believing that there IS a "lowest common denominator". Instead, start thinking that there is a nation of citizens who have been duped into sleepwalking, but who are capable of waking up.