How do you say "walking"? Do you pronounce it wallking?
How do you say "talking"? Do you pronounce it tallking?
How about these? calm half salmon talk balk would should
"We should cut the salmon in half and talk calmy" is pronounced by most English speakers without a single audible L in it.
Let's face it. English is a screwed up language, and inherently affected by accent and upbringing. And it's full of exceptions and things which make no sense.
Now, tell me how many Brits say "idear"? Do the words "tire" "tower" and "tar" sound any different?
How many Brits essentially can't say "th" and turn it into a V or an F? Because I've certainly heard people say what sounds like "wevver" instead of weather.
So, when we hear a uniform dialect of English in the UK, we might take you seriously. But the reality is, we don't.
The only lies exposed by that fiasco is that of the mortgage applicants lying on their loan-applications. Most of those folks have never been to Wall Street.
Not so. Back in about 2005 or so, I remember reading articles about NINJA mortgages -- No Income, No Job, No Accepted (or No Income, No Job or Assets). At the time I remember thinking it was a stupid idea, and made no sense at all.
The lenders were going on a drunken rampage giving loans to anybody with a pulse. But they knew they were doing this.
But, make no mistake, this wasn't borrowers lying on their applications. This was lenders approving any application which came across their desk, and was known to be a risky investment at the time.
What subsequently happened was that junk debt, (which they knew was junk debt, and was junk debt because they were just giving anybody with a pulse) was then bundled up into derivatives, treated as if it was AAA rated debt, and then sold off onto the market. And then everybody else bought bad US debt, and it trickled throughout the world.
Essentially the US lenders got themselves in deep shit, packaged up that shit as if it was caviar, and then let everybody else deal with the problem.
That, my friend, was Wall Street. And it was more or less theft writ large. They lied about the risk of their securities in order to get other people to buy them.
Basically they sold magic beans to the rest of the world, so that the debt was no longer their problem. When that debt collapsed, it undermined the house of cards which had been built on it.
"High Frequency Theft."
No lies there. In other words, fail.
You don't think the act of skimming money out of the market by making a large number of trades to allow yourself to do arbitrage and exploit the fact that you have direct access to the system is theft?
I think when they do this they more or less inject themselves as a middle man who creates no value, and distorts the market to their own ends. I see HFT as nothing more than institutionalized theft.
They don't 'earn' it, they don't generate value, they just sit in the middle and take the vigorish and act like they're entitled to it. It's just siphoning money out of the economy for their gain.
My person may be anecdotal evidence, but the Economist's article puts more solid statistics behind it.
My problem with the conclusion of the article is that it places the issue at the feet of Socialism. Since they only studied East Germany, they can't really say it was Socialism which caused it, only that in this particular case.
I'm not defending Socialism -- at least, not the form the Soviets were following. But, as you say, the attitude of "it's OK to screw the government" can spill over into a more generalized "it's OK to screw anybody".
I don't dispute that the people who grew up in East Germany were more prone to cheating a little. I do disagree with the conclusion that this was the result of Socialism -- I don't think they had enough to make that claim.
If it was true, I would assume you, and everybody who grew up in such a country would also be prone to cheating.
So, either you're a cheating bastard, or their conclusions are overly broad.;-)
Pick any place with a failed economy, or where the penalties of cheating are outweighed by the rewards, and people will simply cheat. No matter your system of government.
The report, from regulator Ofcom, didn't bother to judge if the filters actually work, however.
Because they don't know, and don't care if they work.
This is just another "oh god, we have to protect teh children" things, and there wasn't evidence to make the choice, so they're sure as heck not collecting evidence as to how well it works. This is purely a "we have to do something" kind of response.
Most of us know these things simply do not work, and end up blocking stuff they shouldn't, and missing stuff.
That most people have no interest in being baby sat by a state sponsored filter comes as no surprise.
But, hey, when you're still considered subjects to an archaic monarchy, that's what you get.
Enron. Bernie Madoff. Asset Backed Paper Commodities. High Frequency Theft.
According to TFA, it does indeed. But far less than Socialism.
Meh. I read the paper as for this specific group of people, coming from a system which was pretty much flawed and unfair, people have decided that "fuck it, why play by the rules" is a perfectly good strategy.
I don't believe that socialism (or capitalism) inherently create more cheating.
I simply believe that once people believe the system is unfair, or the penalty of being a dick is sufficiently small, why bother playing by the rules?
Humans are greedy, self absorbed, and selfish. And any system which favors one set of people over another will lead to people deciding if the system isn't fair, why play by the rules?
I don't give a shit about someone's ads, targeted or not. I'm not interested in them, and I will block them at every chance I get, as well as the ability to collect enough information to target me.
You want to let them give you targeted ads, fine, no problem. That's your choice.
I trust neither regulators to get this right (because so far their ability to regulate anything technology related is abysmal), nor do I trust the corporations to not try to ignore it.
If they don't have your data, they can't misuse it.
If I have nothing to hide, then what reason do you have to spy on me as if I do? With altruism off the table (I am innocent, remember), the only explanation left is malice.
The corollary to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is that everybody has something to hide.
And the people who spy on you are certainly not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and they care not a whit about your presumed innocence.
From experience; I would be willing to bet that ANYONE living with scarcity threatening day to day living is willing to cheat, lie, con, finagle and it can get so bad that you steal, mug, burgle,injure and could possibly kill, dependent on circumstances.
And, really, the same thing happens on Wall Street.
Capitalism leads to cheating and malfeasance just as well.
The difference is the rich feel entitled to it, and some people think it's the natural order of things.
Economics is actually very much a science! They make empirical studies of the world, and test them to see if they hold up.
No, they make wooly models about how they believe the economy works, perform math which has terrible assumptions and overly huge margins of error, and pass it off as objective fact.
How you interpret economics is dependent on how you want to believe economics works. It is not an objective science in any sense of the word.
And it never has been.
Increasingly, some economists are starting to understand that a lot of their base assumptions are simply wrong.
Economics is a coarse model of human behavior with a zillion simplifying (and axiomatic) assumptions built into it.
How can you say that and yet still buy such devices? It's not like one doesn't have a choice...
And how much crap is installed on Android you can't disable (or know is there) without rooting your phone?
How much crap on Windows phone? I bet you can neither disable nor know it's there.
Your BlackBerry?
So, please, tell us, how are Android, Windows or BlackBerry phones any better? Can you prove none of them has something similar?
I very much doubt you can.
You can choose to not have a device at all, but I have my doubts you can choose a phone which doesn't have similar security holes you know nothing about.
If it is sub-intelligent, then it might meet some definition of "life," but would have no impact on life here.
Oh yeah, what if they're tasty? Some Cerulian maple-bacon pig or something.;-)
But, more importantly, if we find life on another planet (or wherever), of any form, intelligent or not, that in and of itself would have a huge impact on life here even if we couldn't get there.
Because the answer to "is there life anywhere else" will have been answered, and the people who loudly say there is only life on this planet will be proven wrong.
And, if we know there's like here, and then confirm there's life elsewhere... given the size of the universe, you would more or less have to conclude that life is pretty widespread.
Even if it was unintelligent, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would be utterly monumental in a lot of different ways.
To me, I don't think you can overstate just how big of a deal that would be. Because it would be a complete game changer in a lot of ways, and lay rest to the notion that Earth is singularly unique in that regard.
I just don't see such a discovery having 'no impact'. Not even a little.
but I don't think we should rule out the possibility
Not only shouldn't we, we simply can't, because we have no way of knowing.
There is no scientifically valid way to rule out life forms which are unlike our own, because we don't know what they would require or thrive on.
The same as when people say "but why aren't we searching for life which is unlike us", the answer becomes "because we don't know how". There's no basis on which to conclude anything other than "well, we couldn't live there".
At best, we can say a planet is uninhabitable by us, but we really cannot say it is uninhabitable by life we can't even imagine and which is significantly different from what we know.
Anybody who tries to tell you there is no chance of life as we don't know it existing someplace is saying much more than they actually know.
Um, no. There's a reason why you get a BA in Math, not a BS.
Well, I'm going to call BS on that one.
I know numerous people with a BS in Mathematics. In fact, I have one. I've only seen the mathematics department as part of the science department, and I don't know anybody with a BA in mathematics.
If you are claiming mathematics isn't a science, then I'm going to say you're full of it.
You know what's not a science but uses a lot of math? Economics, which is 3 parts ideology and 1 part math.
Or, the low-fi approach... set a timer on your smart phone, or buy a dollar store timer, or just come back in an hour.
As nerdtacular as a dryer which talks to your phone via bluetooth (or whatever) sounds... I'd rather not pay more for my next dryer in order to have this feature. Because for me it's utterly pointless.
There is no real need for this, it's just something which sounds like it might be cool.
It just sounds like technology for the sake of technology, and all "ZOMG, what did people do before the dryer called your phone?".
Slashdot Mirror
OK, smartass.
How do you say "walking"? Do you pronounce it wallking?
How do you say "talking"? Do you pronounce it tallking?
How about these? calm half salmon talk balk would should
"We should cut the salmon in half and talk calmy" is pronounced by most English speakers without a single audible L in it.
Let's face it. English is a screwed up language, and inherently affected by accent and upbringing. And it's full of exceptions and things which make no sense.
Now, tell me how many Brits say "idear"? Do the words "tire" "tower" and "tar" sound any different?
How many Brits essentially can't say "th" and turn it into a V or an F? Because I've certainly heard people say what sounds like "wevver" instead of weather.
So, when we hear a uniform dialect of English in the UK, we might take you seriously. But the reality is, we don't.
Not so. Back in about 2005 or so, I remember reading articles about NINJA mortgages -- No Income, No Job, No Accepted (or No Income, No Job or Assets). At the time I remember thinking it was a stupid idea, and made no sense at all.
The lenders were going on a drunken rampage giving loans to anybody with a pulse. But they knew they were doing this.
But, make no mistake, this wasn't borrowers lying on their applications. This was lenders approving any application which came across their desk, and was known to be a risky investment at the time.
What subsequently happened was that junk debt, (which they knew was junk debt, and was junk debt because they were just giving anybody with a pulse) was then bundled up into derivatives, treated as if it was AAA rated debt, and then sold off onto the market. And then everybody else bought bad US debt, and it trickled throughout the world.
Essentially the US lenders got themselves in deep shit, packaged up that shit as if it was caviar, and then let everybody else deal with the problem.
That, my friend, was Wall Street. And it was more or less theft writ large. They lied about the risk of their securities in order to get other people to buy them.
Basically they sold magic beans to the rest of the world, so that the debt was no longer their problem. When that debt collapsed, it undermined the house of cards which had been built on it.
You don't think the act of skimming money out of the market by making a large number of trades to allow yourself to do arbitrage and exploit the fact that you have direct access to the system is theft?
I think when they do this they more or less inject themselves as a middle man who creates no value, and distorts the market to their own ends. I see HFT as nothing more than institutionalized theft.
They don't 'earn' it, they don't generate value, they just sit in the middle and take the vigorish and act like they're entitled to it. It's just siphoning money out of the economy for their gain.
My problem with the conclusion of the article is that it places the issue at the feet of Socialism. Since they only studied East Germany, they can't really say it was Socialism which caused it, only that in this particular case.
I'm not defending Socialism -- at least, not the form the Soviets were following. But, as you say, the attitude of "it's OK to screw the government" can spill over into a more generalized "it's OK to screw anybody".
I don't dispute that the people who grew up in East Germany were more prone to cheating a little. I do disagree with the conclusion that this was the result of Socialism -- I don't think they had enough to make that claim.
If it was true, I would assume you, and everybody who grew up in such a country would also be prone to cheating.
So, either you're a cheating bastard, or their conclusions are overly broad. ;-)
Pick any place with a failed economy, or where the penalties of cheating are outweighed by the rewards, and people will simply cheat. No matter your system of government.
Be that Wall Street, or East Germany.
Because they don't know, and don't care if they work.
This is just another "oh god, we have to protect teh children" things, and there wasn't evidence to make the choice, so they're sure as heck not collecting evidence as to how well it works. This is purely a "we have to do something" kind of response.
Most of us know these things simply do not work, and end up blocking stuff they shouldn't, and missing stuff.
That most people have no interest in being baby sat by a state sponsored filter comes as no surprise.
But, hey, when you're still considered subjects to an archaic monarchy, that's what you get.
Enron. Bernie Madoff. Asset Backed Paper Commodities. High Frequency Theft.
Meh. I read the paper as for this specific group of people, coming from a system which was pretty much flawed and unfair, people have decided that "fuck it, why play by the rules" is a perfectly good strategy.
I don't believe that socialism (or capitalism) inherently create more cheating.
I simply believe that once people believe the system is unfair, or the penalty of being a dick is sufficiently small, why bother playing by the rules?
Humans are greedy, self absorbed, and selfish. And any system which favors one set of people over another will lead to people deciding if the system isn't fair, why play by the rules?
I vote for El SHIELD.
Marvel's Androids of SHIELD?
Breast implants?
So says you.
I don't give a shit about someone's ads, targeted or not. I'm not interested in them, and I will block them at every chance I get, as well as the ability to collect enough information to target me.
You want to let them give you targeted ads, fine, no problem. That's your choice.
I trust neither regulators to get this right (because so far their ability to regulate anything technology related is abysmal), nor do I trust the corporations to not try to ignore it.
If they don't have your data, they can't misuse it.
You and I have different versions of the meaning of "problem".
Page don't load because cloudfront is blocked?
No problem, because I don't care.
I have yet to find a single site I need or can't live without that requires it.
The corollary to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is that everybody has something to hide.
And the people who spy on you are certainly not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and they care not a whit about your presumed innocence.
Oh, I very much doubt I'm anywhere near as successful as that.
Only on weekends or when the wife is out of town.
Seriously though, it's your privacy. Nobody else is gonna protect it for you.
And, really, the same thing happens on Wall Street.
Capitalism leads to cheating and malfeasance just as well.
The difference is the rich feel entitled to it, and some people think it's the natural order of things.
Lucky bastards.
But being able to selectively disable it and block certain sites definitely helps.
You don't need to run the scripts for each of the 15 or so trackers in every page, just the ones which actually are needed.
Admittedly, in a few cases, they've made it more or less impossible to do anything unless you allow the 3rd parties.
In that case, the back button works just fine.
And this is why my browsers have as many privacy extensions as I can find.
AddThis is definitely one of the sites which are blocked.
If you let your browser load all of this crap, you are more or less asking for this garbage.
I don't care about your business model, I'm simply not going to allow your crap to load.
No, they make wooly models about how they believe the economy works, perform math which has terrible assumptions and overly huge margins of error, and pass it off as objective fact.
How you interpret economics is dependent on how you want to believe economics works. It is not an objective science in any sense of the word.
And it never has been.
Increasingly, some economists are starting to understand that a lot of their base assumptions are simply wrong.
Economics is a coarse model of human behavior with a zillion simplifying (and axiomatic) assumptions built into it.
I'm going with "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
Which isn't so much a paranoid delusion, as it is a prevalent sentiment.
And how much crap is installed on Android you can't disable (or know is there) without rooting your phone?
How much crap on Windows phone? I bet you can neither disable nor know it's there.
Your BlackBerry?
So, please, tell us, how are Android, Windows or BlackBerry phones any better? Can you prove none of them has something similar?
I very much doubt you can.
You can choose to not have a device at all, but I have my doubts you can choose a phone which doesn't have similar security holes you know nothing about.
Oh yeah, what if they're tasty? Some Cerulian maple-bacon pig or something. ;-)
But, more importantly, if we find life on another planet (or wherever), of any form, intelligent or not, that in and of itself would have a huge impact on life here even if we couldn't get there.
Because the answer to "is there life anywhere else" will have been answered, and the people who loudly say there is only life on this planet will be proven wrong.
And, if we know there's like here, and then confirm there's life elsewhere ... given the size of the universe, you would more or less have to conclude that life is pretty widespread.
Even if it was unintelligent, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would be utterly monumental in a lot of different ways.
To me, I don't think you can overstate just how big of a deal that would be. Because it would be a complete game changer in a lot of ways, and lay rest to the notion that Earth is singularly unique in that regard.
I just don't see such a discovery having 'no impact'. Not even a little.
Not only shouldn't we, we simply can't, because we have no way of knowing.
There is no scientifically valid way to rule out life forms which are unlike our own, because we don't know what they would require or thrive on.
The same as when people say "but why aren't we searching for life which is unlike us", the answer becomes "because we don't know how". There's no basis on which to conclude anything other than "well, we couldn't live there".
At best, we can say a planet is uninhabitable by us, but we really cannot say it is uninhabitable by life we can't even imagine and which is significantly different from what we know.
Anybody who tries to tell you there is no chance of life as we don't know it existing someplace is saying much more than they actually know.
Except subtraction existed long before we had the concept of negative numbers.
Gronk the caveman knew if he had two deer, and gave one to Grue, he had one deer. He most certainly wasn't adding -1 deer.
Well, I'm going to call BS on that one.
I know numerous people with a BS in Mathematics. In fact, I have one. I've only seen the mathematics department as part of the science department, and I don't know anybody with a BA in mathematics.
If you are claiming mathematics isn't a science, then I'm going to say you're full of it.
You know what's not a science but uses a lot of math? Economics, which is 3 parts ideology and 1 part math.
In what way is String Theory testable or measurable?
As far as I understand, it's complete conjecture, exists outside of anything you could actually test ... and therefore fails the science test.
Or, the low-fi approach ... set a timer on your smart phone, or buy a dollar store timer, or just come back in an hour.
As nerdtacular as a dryer which talks to your phone via bluetooth (or whatever) sounds ... I'd rather not pay more for my next dryer in order to have this feature. Because for me it's utterly pointless.
There is no real need for this, it's just something which sounds like it might be cool.
It just sounds like technology for the sake of technology, and all "ZOMG, what did people do before the dryer called your phone?".
It's a solution in search of a problem.
LOL, WTF are you smoking?
Paranoid, not stupid.
PS -- Fuck you too. :-P
PPS -- I'm not fucking Australian, mate, and definitely not racist.