"Third: There's nothing wrong with reading/etc/passwd."
Actually, there is, but for the entirely opposite reason. If you read passwd you'll miss any network based users, such as users authorized over LDAP, kerberos, or others.
getpwent and company, on the other hand, will get you those. As would getent or similar command line utility.
"How do you think these kids develop these paraphilias?"
Obviously not from watching internet porn (which they'd tend to get exposed to far too late to affect the main formation of sexual orientation).
The fact is that what explanations there are are tenous at best. The behaviouristical theory you're suggesting has been shown to be flawed due to its failure to, in that case, explain how a single-instance exposure could result in such deep and through conditioning (paraphilias have been shown to remain without reinforcement, heck they remain even with negative reinforcement). Imprinting has been suggested to solve that theory, but there is little evidence supporting it.
Neurological crosslinking has been suggested, and to even go in to the psychodynamic explanations would be several pages.
Hereditary components have been shown to exist (and there are several rational hereditary arguments to be made for submissive/dominant/sadistic/masochistic sexual orientations), but they would have a hard time to account for the sheer bulk of paraphilias.
In the end, there are a lot of theories, but little in the way of reliable scientific data. Perhaps it's in part genetic, perhaps a lifelong schoolgirl uniform fetish can be formed by a stray neuron firing while watching kids anime before kindergarden, perhaps a foot fetish is formed by the foot being the first thing the kid saw after realizing his mom had no penis (yah, that would be Freud), or any other random chance happening.
One thing most such theories have in common, for any 'real' paraphilias they're formed long before birds and bees talks, long before any excessive exposure to internet porn, and are inscrutable to the extent that you'd have to stick the kids in a box without ever getting exposed to anything to avoid the formation of random fetishes. Of course, that would probably just end up with them getting a box fetish. Not to mention a whole host of other disorders.
So, tellya what, go do some research and come up with a complete theory for the formation of human sexuality, and even better, a reproducible protocol for how to induce vanilla heterosexuality during development. You'd revolutionize the field in question and probably get sainted by the christians.
And no, repressing minorities and making them hide doesn't count as making heterosexuals, it just counts as making a whole lot of people unhappy.
"I think that its probably not that healthy for them to be looking at crazy-ass fetish stuff before they have the necessary experience to put it in context."
Of course, if the teens in question are actually fetishists, they might find vanilla porn approximately as interesting and arousing as a straight male would find gay porn.
"just that you need to take the basic class before you move to the advanced level, you know?"
Unfortunately it's not that simple. While various paraphilias may have an overlap with mainstream sexual orientation and people can have an interest in both, just like bisexuals can have an interest in both sexes, it is by no means a necessity. While some paraphilias may be more 'advanced', and require more education to safely and sanely engage in, vanilla sex may not be the right intro class.
Which makes internet resources, particularly the more serious ones, one of the most important educational tools in avoiding dangerous experimentation or preventing them from falling for various predators.
"On the other hand, music piracy accounted for $12.5 billion in gained income to the listeners."
Not only that, the $12.5 billion were instead spent on other things in the economy. Creating work for people like carpenters, contruction workers, resturant workers, etc. Which in turn means no lost taxes at all (in fact, considering the creative accounting of the entertainment business I'd say it's more likely the piracy resulted in $422 million in gained tax).
So the question is, is the economy better off with more coke snorting music execs, RIAA lawyers, fantasy accountants and boyband promoters, or with the others?
I'll bet the 71,060 who are currently employed instead of the RIAA lawyers would say piracy was a good thing for the economy.
"The US has the advantage that unlike an individual it can just devalue the dollar and pay it all back by running the printing press..."
Mmm, you know, that's been tried before. As a strategy for loan repayment it usually doesnt work that well.
At the first hint of printing presses running to cover US debt, everyone would unload dollars like they were monopoly money, it would become almost impossible for the US or any Americans to borrow any more money, inflation and interest rates would skyrocket. Americans with savings would have to move them out of the country or find them devalued along with everything else.
In the long run it would probably solve the trade deficit, but I suspect that would be one of the most disruptive ways imaginable to solve the problem. Considering the situations in other countries that have gone through hyperinflation one could expect anything from wars with creditor countries to a revolution to ensue.
Actually, yes it is. A trade deficit has to be balanced by currency movements, such as loans or investments. US banks sell mortgage backed securities abroad, Chinese buy US corporations, etc. The investment part isnt really a problem (except, perhaps, for American pride), but the loan part is. If the creditors confidence that they will get their money back is shaken, then they will both demand their money back immediately (if the security is insufficient, such as a house that has fallen in value) and demand higher interest for further loans.
At that point the power of the Fed to set rates becomes more limited; lower them and the US (state and banks) wont be able to borrow, resort to printing money and you get inflation, dollar depreciation and you have to raise interest again.
The trouble is, you're borrowing the dollars which you then trade.
"when everyone else decides they have enough of our dollars."
When everyone else decides they want their money back because the US, its banks and its citizens start defaulting on their loans you mean. The last weeks trouble at several European banks is a typical example; US banks have sold mortgage backed loans to European banks, which finances American consumption and trade deficit.
Sure, you can try 'printing' the money to repay the foreign debt. I think Germany tried that once upon a time, maybe you could take a look at how well that worked out?
Yep. Passive RFID chips require so little energy that the reader can power them with the current the antenna produces when hit by the EM waves from the reader. Usually this means that you have to hold the chip (card, key, etc) very close to the reciever (against it, the key in the lock, etc).
However, that proximity is only necessary if you use the standard reader. There's nothing stopping someone from getting a standard reader and jacking up the power enough to activate and read the chips from a much greater distance.
Unless you get a tin-foil wallet. And tin-foil pockets. Etc.
"If, on average, men are stronger than women, why shouldn't one say that?"
Because the variance within the groups is larger than the variance between the groups.
As such the claim becomes inaccurate and even nonsensical, as one would expect a whole lot of women to be able to beat it. And a lot of men to fail to beat it. A far more useful claim would be 'even a weakling could beat it'.
As the claim is useless for describing the actual case, one can assume it's intended to either call the weak men women, or to call women weaklings (as in weaker than the weakest man). It's not so far fetched to realize that some will find it insulting.
'I mean, if I say "People hailing from Western Africa have darker skin than those from Western Europe", is there anything wrong with it?'
Yes. Again, the statement is simply inaccurate. Take a look at your sentance, you're actually saying that _everyone_ hailing from Western Africa is darker than everyone hailing from Western Europe. Which, as you probably know, is simply incorrect.
A more valid phrasing would be 'Most West Africans have darker skin than most West Europeans'. If you insist on using simplistic averages, you could even use your original sentance if you throw in an explicit 'on average have darker skin'.
Personally I dont get offended by this type of misuse of generalizations (as they can often be ascribed to the claimants sloppiness or lack of understanding of statistics and/or language), but I do get annoyed by the actual factual errors they convey. And it does piss me off when they're used to deliberately decieve people or to support simplistic and flawed arguments.
"have these scientists not watched a single sci-fi movie."
Apparently they havent watched history movies either.
The appropriate response to someone attempting to predict your behaviour is to feed their prediction algorithm false data (aka, feints, lying, etc). That way _you_ can predict _their_ behaviour, and not only that, you can even _control_ their behaviour.
This isnt something particularly new. This is the same old thing 'but on a computer'. I expect to momentarily see another patent application for the same old thing 'but on the web'.
"we were told that virtualization was going to save us a bunch of money on power."
Sortof. Unfortunately the ease of deployment and price reductions accomplished tend to result in a vast expansion of virtual servers instead. You're likely to end up with as much hardware except it's doing several times more than what it used to.
At least from what I've seen of virtualiztion your bill isnt going to get smaller, you're just going to get more for it. Which isnt too bad anyway.
Cell phones? Cell phones you can still easily do without.
A more valid comparison would be to say it's much like books. Or libraries. Or an education. Saying that internet access isnt important is like saying knowing anything isnt important.
Cell phones are still just mostly a convenient way of communicating when you happen to be away from the internet (altho that may change in the coming merger between cellphone and computer/network tech).
The internet, on the other hand, is a paradigm shift in the dissemination and accessibility of human knowledge, and far, far more important.
"finding some method of advertising the workarounds would be in order."
Of course, advertising the workarounds may quite likely be the best way to get any such workarounds quickly and throughly shut down.
If I were a nefarious government out to block such bypasses I'd simply thank those spammers for the blocklists and auto-blacklist every such proxy (except the ones I was setting up myself to observe who were using them in case I needed to make some examples in the future).
Mass distribution is pointless as a way of censorship avoidance; darknets are the way to go, as you fundamentally have to solve the trust issue.
Dont worry tho, the MAFIAA has put sufficiently strong evolutionary pressure on the technology that various forms of darknet communications will become the norm rather than the exception, which will make monitoring and control of any communications near impossible for anyone anyway. For better or worse.
"IP Multicast is great to stream shows on a scheduled basis."
Once you start using MythTV or other capable PVR application you change your view of 'tuning in'. You simply dont do that anymore, you just mark what you want and treat it as a delayed-scheduled download service. Heck, the next step in that evolution (as storage grows the next order of magnitude) is simply using multiple tuners and pre-recording everything, so you can, in effect, decide what you want to watch post-multicast.
"So, you think there were no traveling minstrels back in the day that were booed off stage or were otherwise "crap" by the contemporary standards of the time?"
Due to the lack of efficient communications, I'd say there were no comprehensive standards of the time, but rather regional long-term music. See folk music.
"Schubert may be a god when compared to, say, John Tesh; but he may also be "crap" when compared to Beethoven."
I really dont see many such comparisons in classical music, nor do I see classical music channels playing only specific 'popular' composers or performers for months or years on end until the point when they suddenly decide to change to some other classical composer and only play that one for a year or two.
"Good cannot be good without the crap to compare it to."
And taste in music is far more varied than what's on MTV, and most composers and artists will produce subsets that are both 'good' and 'crap', depending on the listeners taste, which may or may not overlap with what the next listener thinks is 'good' and 'crap'.
The point is, the huge variance of music taste within the population simply does not lend itself to the business model of the corporate music industry. They want to produce _the_ music that is good _right now_, to maximize their profits, and spreading that out over hundreds of thousands of artists simply isnt as profitable as spreading it out over ten and making sure only those ten get played in the media.
"a perfect example of why government shouldn't interfere in the free market."
Exactly! If the government didn't interfere in the free market with legislation such as 'copyright', this wouldnt be a problem.
Without such government interference, consumers and hardware vendors would simply figure that the whole conditional access crap of cable networks was too much of a pain, dump it, and simply use torrent capable media devices that accessed trackers with the whole worlds media on them. Instead of a paltry selection of what someone else thinks you should want to watch, you'd have the whole library of everything humanity ever made at hand to choose from.
"But Citrix specializes in 'slick' and so we expect there to be interesting changes."
Of course, as Xen is opensource I expect the free software variants of xen management to grow at a fair pace (particularly fuelled by linux vendor interest).
Which rather begs the question; exactly what is Citrix paying $500M for, when they could use Xen for their own purposes anyway?
"Who'll win the race?"
Yeah, well, one thing's for sure; it wont be the stockholders in those companies at least. Virtualization may be a 'hot' segment, but it's rapidly getting extremely competetive. Paying inflated prices giving the web boom/crash a run for its money for companies in a sector that's already seen it's highest profit margins may not be a particularly bright long term investment.
"Wouldn't it be simpler for the telcos to charge per GB delivered in addition to the size of the pipe?"
Sure it would be simpler. And even better, it'd give the local netbourhood thugs a really great business opportunity. Either you pay up to them, or they flood your pipe and you get to pay up to your ISP.
Metered access is not something you want when anyone in the world can make your meter run.
"It's not a bad or good thing, it's just the way it is."
Actually, I'd say it's most certainly a bad thing, and I'd wager it's largely a new phenomenon tied to the exploitative music business of the last century. I suspect it's an unavoidable artifact of heavy marketing of specific genres, targetted advertising and faux cultures. When people get older they get less susceptible to being told what to listen to by the industry (and is thus no longer a profitable segment to exploit), and as the industry isnt providing what they want, you get the age fracture.
"And don't ask me what that current music is"
See what they've done to you? The fact is, there is no 'current' music anymore, that's just a desperately projected last gasp of the corps. Sign on to some music social networking sites and/or emusic and have them build a profile over your taste, and you'll discover hundreds or thousands of new groups you'd never heard of that produce 'new' stuff appropriate for your taste in music.
Monopoly law is always useful for those holding the monopolies. They can get revenue without having to produce a competetive product or service to obtain that revenue.
China realizes this as well as the rest of the WIPO crowd; once you've built up your fortune, the free market will keep chipping away at it unless you either remain competetive or prevent competition. As remaining competetive is hard work, it's much easier to simply create monopoly vehicles to invest in.
I doubt it's a coincidence that it happens as the yuan appreciates and the dollar approaches free-fall. Once the economic equilibrium is restored, China can double-whammy the US with intellectual monopolies to keep any wealth reflux from happening.
Ah, well, they've learned from the best, so it's no big surprise they've gotten a taste for screwing others over.
"The only way to test the models is to test against random multi-decade historical records and check what the models (plural) predict"
Eh, you know, that's not a valid method for testing models. If you do that you only end up with models that perfectly predict historical data. Such tests say nothing about the accuracy of future predictions, especially, and in particular if they attempt to predict changes outside previously gathered data (which, by definition, due to a whole host of changes in everything from industrial particulate matter releases to ecosystem changes means pretty much any dataset apart from the one you've fitted the models against).
By using that method I could have a perl script randomly choosing factors from women hat sizes to the price of beer in Nice and the population of penguins on iceshelves until I get a perfect match with the historical data. With as little data as we have I'd bet I'd be able to churn out several dozens of models that perfectly predict history. None of which will be the least valid for the next year.
Remember last presidential election? Someone spending far too much time looking at stats realized that the outcome of the Washington Redskins home football games accurately predicted the win or loss for the incumbent since 1936. This indicated that the incumbent would lose. Despite being a perfect predictor for more than 70 years, validated against historical data, it turned out to be entirely and utterly useless for predicting the future.
See? Validating against historical records can only _disprove_ a model and theory, it doesnt ever indicate any form of reliability for future predictions. To validate the accuracy for future predictions you need to accurately predict the future, and the more variables you have, the more models you have the more times you need to accurately predict the future before you can ascertain any level of reliability.
Compare with the old scam where some company sends you information accurately predicting the outcome of a game the next weekend, and offering to sell you the book with the method to do those accurate predictions yourself. After three weeks of getting the right prediction you buy the book.
Of course, unbeknownst to you, the were starting out with a mailing list of a thousand people, sending half the info that one team would win, the other half that the other team would win, then repeated next week with the ones who got the correct result, dividing into groups of 250 instead. The third week they've sent accurate predictions to 125 suckers who'll buy the book.
The more prediction models you make, the longer you have to verify them all to ensure that any surviving models werent just successful on random chance and shotgun theorizing.
Compare with newtonian physics where the theories were simple in form and easy to test and accurately predicted the outcome of a vast range of experiments. Yet, even after millions or billions of validations of the theory, when stepping out of the 'ordinary' bounds of those tests, the theory was not quite as accurate as even those 'future' predictions would indicate.
What it all comes down to is that current climate models simply cannot be verified as accurate predictors due to flaws in the fabric of reality, such as insufficient time, insufficient numbers of earths, insufficient reliability of underlying data, etc. For what it's worth you might as well use the hat sizes or Redskins and wonder why your model wasnt correct in 50 years, despite using all available test data.
And just to clarify my own position; I think we should quit using fossile fuels immediately, slap a shitload of taxes on their use to encourage as fast transition as possible. I motivate that by the real and verifiable millions of dead through wars and cancers and the horrendous evil following their exploitation rather than the bad science of climate change.
And as for the climate change aspect; dont put all the eggs in the climate model basket, the holes are large and newt
"When the data took a big jump on January 2000, all of the ones, and zeros in the date should have made a normal person suspicious"
Hmmm, suddenly this makes me slightly suspicious of those models that indicate that time as we know it will cease to exist in January 2038.
Personally I dont trust any side in the climate debate further than I could throw a truckload of printed weather data. And what really irritates me is we have a bunch of politicians pretending to be scientists and a bunch of scientists playing politics, when what we need is a bunch of engineers who get to work on solving the actual problem.
If those climate models are so good they can predict exactly what will happen depending on what _warming_ pollutants we release, then they'd be even better at isolating and producing _cooling_ factors. If all the millions dead from everything from wars to cancer attributable to fossile fuels havent gotten people to quit using them yet, I doubt climate change will do it before they run out anyway. And even if we do quit, other massive sources like continental drift potentially causing release of huge CO2 deposits in the future is something we cant do anything about. So get over it, quit the pointless bickering and figure out what to release into the atmosphere to reduce the energy influx instead.
Should we release more particles to generate clouds? Some study have showed that the grounding of air traffic around 9/11 caused a massive change in average temperature difference between day and night, could that indicate that increasing/decreasing plane trails would be good/bad? How about gengeneering better carbon binding crops (which would have added benefits of possibly growing faster)?
Anyone who accepts the idea that human activity can affect the climate in an undesireable way must also accept that that very idea means we can also affect the climate in a desireable way. Perhaps it's time to concentrate on what we can actually do to improve things rather than bitch about what we shouldnt have done.
"I think the largest part of the 'cost' is promotion."
Which is an entirely undesireable artifact of monopoly rights; the money spent on 'promotion' is a total loss to the economy as a whole, it's money the consumers are spending that _should_ go to the production of new music, but is instead spent on something people will go to extreme lengths to avoid.
And that's even before considering how that 'promotion' affects the less promoted artists and composers and the cultural diversity and wealth as a whole.
Personally I wasnt buying _any_ music at all a few years ago. I loathed the overengineered crap getting 'promoted' that was available in stores. Now I've got an emusic subscription, spending about $12 per month on music I find on various social networking sites. I'm spending much less money per track than if I'd bought CD's in stores, but I'm finding more music, and paying more than I have ever done before.
"Also bear in mind that only a small proportion of artists are commercially successful."
What counts as commerically successful? Turning a profit? If you're spending a million to record an album, another million to make videos and commercials and another million on free CD's for every DJ and radio station in the world, then yes, only a few will be commercially successful.
If, on the other hand, you spend less than the price on a cheap used car on the recording, little or nothing on promoting and have no cost of sales, then it's a whole lot easier to be commercially successful (and would be even more so if every radio in the world wasnt paid to play the 'promoted' music).
Turning a profit can be done in two ways. Either you raise the price and increase marketing, which is what a monopoly holder can usually do (and which is what the music industry has been doing for many decades). Or you cut your costs, which is what most companies in free markets have to do.
The RIAA corps have a long way to go before they've cut costs enough to be profitable, or 'commecially successful'. They may have to cut not only the marketing departments, but quit funding videos and MTV, scrap the legal department, limit 'talent scouting' to surfing social networks, cut their funding of politicians and trash the lobbying groups. They'll have to tell radio stations to download or pay for their own copies, they'll have to tell ClearChannel to pay for playlists and they'll have to cut down on the launch parties.
Slashdot Mirror
"Third: There's nothing wrong with reading /etc/passwd."
Actually, there is, but for the entirely opposite reason. If you read passwd you'll miss any network based users, such as users authorized over LDAP, kerberos, or others.
getpwent and company, on the other hand, will get you those. As would getent or similar command line utility.
"How do you think these kids develop these paraphilias?"
Obviously not from watching internet porn (which they'd tend to get exposed to far too late to affect the main formation of sexual orientation).
The fact is that what explanations there are are tenous at best. The behaviouristical theory you're suggesting has been shown to be flawed due to its failure to, in that case, explain how a single-instance exposure could result in such deep and through conditioning (paraphilias have been shown to remain without reinforcement, heck they remain even with negative reinforcement). Imprinting has been suggested to solve that theory, but there is little evidence supporting it.
Neurological crosslinking has been suggested, and to even go in to the psychodynamic explanations would be several pages.
Hereditary components have been shown to exist (and there are several rational hereditary arguments to be made for submissive/dominant/sadistic/masochistic sexual orientations), but they would have a hard time to account for the sheer bulk of paraphilias.
In the end, there are a lot of theories, but little in the way of reliable scientific data. Perhaps it's in part genetic, perhaps a lifelong schoolgirl uniform fetish can be formed by a stray neuron firing while watching kids anime before kindergarden, perhaps a foot fetish is formed by the foot being the first thing the kid saw after realizing his mom had no penis (yah, that would be Freud), or any other random chance happening.
One thing most such theories have in common, for any 'real' paraphilias they're formed long before birds and bees talks, long before any excessive exposure to internet porn, and are inscrutable to the extent that you'd have to stick the kids in a box without ever getting exposed to anything to avoid the formation of random fetishes. Of course, that would probably just end up with them getting a box fetish. Not to mention a whole host of other disorders.
So, tellya what, go do some research and come up with a complete theory for the formation of human sexuality, and even better, a reproducible protocol for how to induce vanilla heterosexuality during development. You'd revolutionize the field in question and probably get sainted by the christians.
And no, repressing minorities and making them hide doesn't count as making heterosexuals, it just counts as making a whole lot of people unhappy.
"I think that its probably not that healthy for them to be looking at crazy-ass fetish stuff before they have the necessary experience to put it in context."
Of course, if the teens in question are actually fetishists, they might find vanilla porn approximately as interesting and arousing as a straight male would find gay porn.
"just that you need to take the basic class before you move to the advanced level, you know?"
Unfortunately it's not that simple. While various paraphilias may have an overlap with mainstream sexual orientation and people can have an interest in both, just like bisexuals can have an interest in both sexes, it is by no means a necessity. While some paraphilias may be more 'advanced', and require more education to safely and sanely engage in, vanilla sex may not be the right intro class.
Which makes internet resources, particularly the more serious ones, one of the most important educational tools in avoiding dangerous experimentation or preventing them from falling for various predators.
You could always claim the monkey was shot resisting arrest.
If they're so far antropomorphized that they're making rude gestures, it's probably time to demonstrate the finer points of law to them.
I mean, obviously, these monkeys need sensitivity training.
"On the other hand, music piracy accounted for $12.5 billion in gained income to the listeners."
Not only that, the $12.5 billion were instead spent on other things in the economy. Creating work for people like carpenters, contruction workers, resturant workers, etc. Which in turn means no lost taxes at all (in fact, considering the creative accounting of the entertainment business I'd say it's more likely the piracy resulted in $422 million in gained tax).
So the question is, is the economy better off with more coke snorting music execs, RIAA lawyers, fantasy accountants and boyband promoters, or with the others?
I'll bet the 71,060 who are currently employed instead of the RIAA lawyers would say piracy was a good thing for the economy.
"The US has the advantage that unlike an individual it can just devalue the dollar and pay it all back by running the printing press..."
Mmm, you know, that's been tried before. As a strategy for loan repayment it usually doesnt work that well.
At the first hint of printing presses running to cover US debt, everyone would unload dollars like they were monopoly money, it would become almost impossible for the US or any Americans to borrow any more money, inflation and interest rates would skyrocket. Americans with savings would have to move them out of the country or find them devalued along with everything else.
In the long run it would probably solve the trade deficit, but I suspect that would be one of the most disruptive ways imaginable to solve the problem. Considering the situations in other countries that have gone through hyperinflation one could expect anything from wars with creditor countries to a revolution to ensue.
"It's NOT a debt."
Actually, yes it is. A trade deficit has to be balanced by currency movements, such as loans or investments. US banks sell mortgage backed securities abroad, Chinese buy US corporations, etc. The investment part isnt really a problem (except, perhaps, for American pride), but the loan part is. If the creditors confidence that they will get their money back is shaken, then they will both demand their money back immediately (if the security is insufficient, such as a house that has fallen in value) and demand higher interest for further loans.
At that point the power of the Fed to set rates becomes more limited; lower them and the US (state and banks) wont be able to borrow, resort to printing money and you get inflation, dollar depreciation and you have to raise interest again.
"As another pointed out, we get to trade dollars"
The trouble is, you're borrowing the dollars which you then trade.
"when everyone else decides they have enough of our dollars."
When everyone else decides they want their money back because the US, its banks and its citizens start defaulting on their loans you mean. The last weeks trouble at several European banks is a typical example; US banks have sold mortgage backed loans to European banks, which finances American consumption and trade deficit.
Sure, you can try 'printing' the money to repay the foreign debt. I think Germany tried that once upon a time, maybe you could take a look at how well that worked out?
"Or did I miss something ?"
Yep. Passive RFID chips require so little energy that the reader can power them with the current the antenna produces when hit by the EM waves from the reader. Usually this means that you have to hold the chip (card, key, etc) very close to the reciever (against it, the key in the lock, etc).
However, that proximity is only necessary if you use the standard reader. There's nothing stopping someone from getting a standard reader and jacking up the power enough to activate and read the chips from a much greater distance.
Unless you get a tin-foil wallet. And tin-foil pockets. Etc.
"If, on average, men are stronger than women, why shouldn't one say that?"
Because the variance within the groups is larger than the variance between the groups.
As such the claim becomes inaccurate and even nonsensical, as one would expect a whole lot of women to be able to beat it. And a lot of men to fail to beat it. A far more useful claim would be 'even a weakling could beat it'.
As the claim is useless for describing the actual case, one can assume it's intended to either call the weak men women, or to call women weaklings (as in weaker than the weakest man). It's not so far fetched to realize that some will find it insulting.
'I mean, if I say "People hailing from Western Africa have darker skin than those from Western Europe", is there anything wrong with it?'
Yes. Again, the statement is simply inaccurate. Take a look at your sentance, you're actually saying that _everyone_ hailing from Western Africa is darker than everyone hailing from Western Europe. Which, as you probably know, is simply incorrect.
A more valid phrasing would be 'Most West Africans have darker skin than most West Europeans'. If you insist on using simplistic averages, you could even use your original sentance if you throw in an explicit 'on average have darker skin'.
Personally I dont get offended by this type of misuse of generalizations (as they can often be ascribed to the claimants sloppiness or lack of understanding of statistics and/or language), but I do get annoyed by the actual factual errors they convey. And it does piss me off when they're used to deliberately decieve people or to support simplistic and flawed arguments.
"have these scientists not watched a single sci-fi movie."
Apparently they havent watched history movies either.
The appropriate response to someone attempting to predict your behaviour is to feed their prediction algorithm false data (aka, feints, lying, etc). That way _you_ can predict _their_ behaviour, and not only that, you can even _control_ their behaviour.
This isnt something particularly new. This is the same old thing 'but on a computer'. I expect to momentarily see another patent application for the same old thing 'but on the web'.
"we were told that virtualization was going to save us a bunch of money on power."
Sortof. Unfortunately the ease of deployment and price reductions accomplished tend to result in a vast expansion of virtual servers instead. You're likely to end up with as much hardware except it's doing several times more than what it used to.
At least from what I've seen of virtualiztion your bill isnt going to get smaller, you're just going to get more for it. Which isnt too bad anyway.
"It's much like cell phones"
Cell phones? Cell phones you can still easily do without.
A more valid comparison would be to say it's much like books. Or libraries. Or an education. Saying that internet access isnt important is like saying knowing anything isnt important.
Cell phones are still just mostly a convenient way of communicating when you happen to be away from the internet (altho that may change in the coming merger between cellphone and computer/network tech).
The internet, on the other hand, is a paradigm shift in the dissemination and accessibility of human knowledge, and far, far more important.
"finding some method of advertising the workarounds would be in order."
Of course, advertising the workarounds may quite likely be the best way to get any such workarounds quickly and throughly shut down.
If I were a nefarious government out to block such bypasses I'd simply thank those spammers for the blocklists and auto-blacklist every such proxy (except the ones I was setting up myself to observe who were using them in case I needed to make some examples in the future).
Mass distribution is pointless as a way of censorship avoidance; darknets are the way to go, as you fundamentally have to solve the trust issue.
Dont worry tho, the MAFIAA has put sufficiently strong evolutionary pressure on the technology that various forms of darknet communications will become the norm rather than the exception, which will make monitoring and control of any communications near impossible for anyone anyway. For better or worse.
"IP Multicast is great to stream shows on a scheduled basis."
Once you start using MythTV or other capable PVR application you change your view of 'tuning in'. You simply dont do that anymore, you just mark what you want and treat it as a delayed-scheduled download service. Heck, the next step in that evolution (as storage grows the next order of magnitude) is simply using multiple tuners and pre-recording everything, so you can, in effect, decide what you want to watch post-multicast.
"So, you think there were no traveling minstrels back in the day that were booed off stage or were otherwise "crap" by the contemporary standards of the time?"
Due to the lack of efficient communications, I'd say there were no comprehensive standards of the time, but rather regional long-term music. See folk music.
"Schubert may be a god when compared to, say, John Tesh; but he may also be "crap" when compared to Beethoven."
I really dont see many such comparisons in classical music, nor do I see classical music channels playing only specific 'popular' composers or performers for months or years on end until the point when they suddenly decide to change to some other classical composer and only play that one for a year or two.
"Good cannot be good without the crap to compare it to."
And taste in music is far more varied than what's on MTV, and most composers and artists will produce subsets that are both 'good' and 'crap', depending on the listeners taste, which may or may not overlap with what the next listener thinks is 'good' and 'crap'.
The point is, the huge variance of music taste within the population simply does not lend itself to the business model of the corporate music industry. They want to produce _the_ music that is good _right now_, to maximize their profits, and spreading that out over hundreds of thousands of artists simply isnt as profitable as spreading it out over ten and making sure only those ten get played in the media.
The most widely used would probably be last.fm; the audioscrobbler plugin is opensource and available for most music players.
"a perfect example of why government shouldn't interfere in the free market."
Exactly! If the government didn't interfere in the free market with legislation such as 'copyright', this wouldnt be a problem.
Without such government interference, consumers and hardware vendors would simply figure that the whole conditional access crap of cable networks was too much of a pain, dump it, and simply use torrent capable media devices that accessed trackers with the whole worlds media on them. Instead of a paltry selection of what someone else thinks you should want to watch, you'd have the whole library of everything humanity ever made at hand to choose from.
"But Citrix specializes in 'slick' and so we expect there to be interesting changes."
Of course, as Xen is opensource I expect the free software variants of xen management to grow at a fair pace (particularly fuelled by linux vendor interest).
Which rather begs the question; exactly what is Citrix paying $500M for, when they could use Xen for their own purposes anyway?
"Who'll win the race?"
Yeah, well, one thing's for sure; it wont be the stockholders in those companies at least. Virtualization may be a 'hot' segment, but it's rapidly getting extremely competetive. Paying inflated prices giving the web boom/crash a run for its money for companies in a sector that's already seen it's highest profit margins may not be a particularly bright long term investment.
"Wouldn't it be simpler for the telcos to charge per GB delivered in addition to the size of the pipe?"
Sure it would be simpler. And even better, it'd give the local netbourhood thugs a really great business opportunity. Either you pay up to them, or they flood your pipe and you get to pay up to your ISP.
Metered access is not something you want when anyone in the world can make your meter run.
"It's not a bad or good thing, it's just the way it is."
Actually, I'd say it's most certainly a bad thing, and I'd wager it's largely a new phenomenon tied to the exploitative music business of the last century. I suspect it's an unavoidable artifact of heavy marketing of specific genres, targetted advertising and faux cultures. When people get older they get less susceptible to being told what to listen to by the industry (and is thus no longer a profitable segment to exploit), and as the industry isnt providing what they want, you get the age fracture.
"And don't ask me what that current music is"
See what they've done to you? The fact is, there is no 'current' music anymore, that's just a desperately projected last gasp of the corps. Sign on to some music social networking sites and/or emusic and have them build a profile over your taste, and you'll discover hundreds or thousands of new groups you'd never heard of that produce 'new' stuff appropriate for your taste in music.
"And yes IP Law can be useful"
Monopoly law is always useful for those holding the monopolies. They can get revenue without having to produce a competetive product or service to obtain that revenue.
China realizes this as well as the rest of the WIPO crowd; once you've built up your fortune, the free market will keep chipping away at it unless you either remain competetive or prevent competition. As remaining competetive is hard work, it's much easier to simply create monopoly vehicles to invest in.
I doubt it's a coincidence that it happens as the yuan appreciates and the dollar approaches free-fall. Once the economic equilibrium is restored, China can double-whammy the US with intellectual monopolies to keep any wealth reflux from happening.
Ah, well, they've learned from the best, so it's no big surprise they've gotten a taste for screwing others over.
"The only way to test the models is to test against random multi-decade historical records and check what the models (plural) predict"
Eh, you know, that's not a valid method for testing models. If you do that you only end up with models that perfectly predict historical data. Such tests say nothing about the accuracy of future predictions, especially, and in particular if they attempt to predict changes outside previously gathered data (which, by definition, due to a whole host of changes in everything from industrial particulate matter releases to ecosystem changes means pretty much any dataset apart from the one you've fitted the models against).
By using that method I could have a perl script randomly choosing factors from women hat sizes to the price of beer in Nice and the population of penguins on iceshelves until I get a perfect match with the historical data. With as little data as we have I'd bet I'd be able to churn out several dozens of models that perfectly predict history. None of which will be the least valid for the next year.
Remember last presidential election? Someone spending far too much time looking at stats realized that the outcome of the Washington Redskins home football games accurately predicted the win or loss for the incumbent since 1936. This indicated that the incumbent would lose. Despite being a perfect predictor for more than 70 years, validated against historical data, it turned out to be entirely and utterly useless for predicting the future.
See? Validating against historical records can only _disprove_ a model and theory, it doesnt ever indicate any form of reliability for future predictions. To validate the accuracy for future predictions you need to accurately predict the future, and the more variables you have, the more models you have the more times you need to accurately predict the future before you can ascertain any level of reliability.
Compare with the old scam where some company sends you information accurately predicting the outcome of a game the next weekend, and offering to sell you the book with the method to do those accurate predictions yourself. After three weeks of getting the right prediction you buy the book.
Of course, unbeknownst to you, the were starting out with a mailing list of a thousand people, sending half the info that one team would win, the other half that the other team would win, then repeated next week with the ones who got the correct result, dividing into groups of 250 instead. The third week they've sent accurate predictions to 125 suckers who'll buy the book.
The more prediction models you make, the longer you have to verify them all to ensure that any surviving models werent just successful on random chance and shotgun theorizing.
Compare with newtonian physics where the theories were simple in form and easy to test and accurately predicted the outcome of a vast range of experiments. Yet, even after millions or billions of validations of the theory, when stepping out of the 'ordinary' bounds of those tests, the theory was not quite as accurate as even those 'future' predictions would indicate.
What it all comes down to is that current climate models simply cannot be verified as accurate predictors due to flaws in the fabric of reality, such as insufficient time, insufficient numbers of earths, insufficient reliability of underlying data, etc. For what it's worth you might as well use the hat sizes or Redskins and wonder why your model wasnt correct in 50 years, despite using all available test data.
And just to clarify my own position; I think we should quit using fossile fuels immediately, slap a shitload of taxes on their use to encourage as fast transition as possible. I motivate that by the real and verifiable millions of dead through wars and cancers and the horrendous evil following their exploitation rather than the bad science of climate change.
And as for the climate change aspect; dont put all the eggs in the climate model basket, the holes are large and newt
"When the data took a big jump on January 2000, all of the ones, and zeros in the date should have made a normal person suspicious"
Hmmm, suddenly this makes me slightly suspicious of those models that indicate that time as we know it will cease to exist in January 2038.
Personally I dont trust any side in the climate debate further than I could throw a truckload of printed weather data. And what really irritates me is we have a bunch of politicians pretending to be scientists and a bunch of scientists playing politics, when what we need is a bunch of engineers who get to work on solving the actual problem.
If those climate models are so good they can predict exactly what will happen depending on what _warming_ pollutants we release, then they'd be even better at isolating and producing _cooling_ factors. If all the millions dead from everything from wars to cancer attributable to fossile fuels havent gotten people to quit using them yet, I doubt climate change will do it before they run out anyway. And even if we do quit, other massive sources like continental drift potentially causing release of huge CO2 deposits in the future is something we cant do anything about. So get over it, quit the pointless bickering and figure out what to release into the atmosphere to reduce the energy influx instead.
Should we release more particles to generate clouds? Some study have showed that the grounding of air traffic around 9/11 caused a massive change in average temperature difference between day and night, could that indicate that increasing/decreasing plane trails would be good/bad? How about gengeneering better carbon binding crops (which would have added benefits of possibly growing faster)?
Anyone who accepts the idea that human activity can affect the climate in an undesireable way must also accept that that very idea means we can also affect the climate in a desireable way. Perhaps it's time to concentrate on what we can actually do to improve things rather than bitch about what we shouldnt have done.
"I think the largest part of the 'cost' is promotion."
Which is an entirely undesireable artifact of monopoly rights; the money spent on 'promotion' is a total loss to the economy as a whole, it's money the consumers are spending that _should_ go to the production of new music, but is instead spent on something people will go to extreme lengths to avoid.
And that's even before considering how that 'promotion' affects the less promoted artists and composers and the cultural diversity and wealth as a whole.
Personally I wasnt buying _any_ music at all a few years ago. I loathed the overengineered crap getting 'promoted' that was available in stores. Now I've got an emusic subscription, spending about $12 per month on music I find on various social networking sites. I'm spending much less money per track than if I'd bought CD's in stores, but I'm finding more music, and paying more than I have ever done before.
"Also bear in mind that only a small proportion of artists are commercially successful."
What counts as commerically successful? Turning a profit? If you're spending a million to record an album, another million to make videos and commercials and another million on free CD's for every DJ and radio station in the world, then yes, only a few will be commercially successful.
If, on the other hand, you spend less than the price on a cheap used car on the recording, little or nothing on promoting and have no cost of sales, then it's a whole lot easier to be commercially successful (and would be even more so if every radio in the world wasnt paid to play the 'promoted' music).
Turning a profit can be done in two ways. Either you raise the price and increase marketing, which is what a monopoly holder can usually do (and which is what the music industry has been doing for many decades). Or you cut your costs, which is what most companies in free markets have to do.
The RIAA corps have a long way to go before they've cut costs enough to be profitable, or 'commecially successful'. They may have to cut not only the marketing departments, but quit funding videos and MTV, scrap the legal department, limit 'talent scouting' to surfing social networks, cut their funding of politicians and trash the lobbying groups. They'll have to tell radio stations to download or pay for their own copies, they'll have to tell ClearChannel to pay for playlists and they'll have to cut down on the launch parties.
Heck, they may even have to cut the coke habit.