Oh, Chinese are leftist, current US Government is viewed as Right Wing. Silly me!
Hoo boy. A partisan. Guess what? Just because you take somebody's side on one issue (like Google and the DoJ) doesn't mean that you have to take their side on another issue (like Google and China). Yes, shocking -- I know.
My main complaint is in why the government wants this data. I'm less happy with Google after the China bit, but I'm more unhappy with China itself. In case you didn't know, China also claims that censorship of porn and terrorism are their major reasons for filtering the internet. A lot of people don't know that despite being officially atheist, the Chinese government spends just as much time beating the drum of public morality as many openly religious political organizations.
How about addressing problems related to global warming, poverty, war, and pollution - first and foremost?
Welcome, you must be new here! Please direct your inquiries to the ineffectual opposition parties. We're too busy saving America for Americans here! (..you damn hippie.)
You're close but not quite on the money. This has wedge issue written all over it. Much like gay marriage in 2004 (and soon to be gay adoption in 2006), this is an issue to draw out the single-issue conservative voters to the polls. The point isn't necessarily to win this battle, though that'd be feather in the cap of the Republican Party, as it is to have the fight in the first place.
The majority of American's wouldn't support a conservative agenda on the environment, healthcare, and corporate welfare, but they will support an agenda about terrorism and "protection of values." This is known as a "wedge issue." It's designed to drive a wedge between the conflicting loyalties of swing voters to force them to choose between two different positives and to draw out partisans from the woodwork who couldn't care enough to vote about economic policy issues.
Bringing back up net filtering and monitoring gives the Republicans another chance to decry "liberal judicial activism" in a bid to install more pro-executive power, pro-business judges. As a bonus, they get to legislate morality and provide an in for more monitoring of citizens. In case you don't recall, sexual scandals are just about the only scandals that have any traction in the media any more, so the opportunity to catch a current or future politician looking at porn is a great tool for whoever's in power, and it's even better if your opposition consider using that power against your people to be wrong.
This is just a win-win fight for the Republican Party no matter how it plays out.
...wait, I thought censorship was bad and UnAmerican(TM)?
Only if you're some sort of commie liberal! In this post-9/11 world, UnAmerican is anything that criticizes the government, and anything the government does in violation of the Constitution and its amendments is kosher as long as it's to protect Americans from Evil People.
Really, though, who's surprised at this. Their stated agenda here was to invade privacy to bolster a case for overturning a Supreme Court decision that prevents them from invading privacy... for the children, of course. Considering how much this administration has stacked every single non-partisan agency with as many political operatives as possible, it's no real surprise that the DoJ would rule in its own favor.
Hell, even without that, it's no surprise that the DoJ would rule in its own favor. They've never been the most objective of agencies.
Not that I disagree in principle with what you are saying, but some of your examples get a little incoherent.
Screwed LotR? Check. Big fan of Ralph Bakshi's work I take it?
Screwed Tomb Raider? Check. Yeah, they did that before even producing a sequel. Oh, and Eidos beat them to screwing over Tomb Raider via sequels.
Screwed Xmen3? Check. How do you screw over the X-men? No, seriously, how do you screw over any comic book more than Marvel and DC are capable of doing on their own? Which set of X-men do you use? How many times has each one of them died, changed powers, or changed origins? Which author's portrayals and which set of relationships between characters do you use? Is Magneto a good guy or a bad guy? Is Wolverine sane, barely sane, or completely insane this time? X-men 3 had suck written all over it as soon as they hinted that the Dark Phoenix cycle was going to be involved, 'cause the suck was embedded in the source material.
Comic books have consistently sucked since the end of the Silver Age (and did some sucking a good bit before that). I blame the seeming contest between comic book authors to see who can leave the biggest mark on a character once they take over a line by whizzing all over the series. I just stopped letting one of my friends tell me about comic books anymore since it's become too nauseating to think about. I've got better things to care about now than the latest episode of "Who Wants to Rape a Childhood?"
I'm actually heartened by just how much utter and complete bunk was in this study. The "Secret Fridge" ad didn't cause much of a reaction even though everyone remembers it? Maybe that doesn't mean that people don't know their own feelings and instad means that their metrics are completely screwed up. "Secret Fridge" was awesome and is only second in my mind to the "Hidden Bud" commercial.
If this is the state of neuromarketing, then it's going to be a while before we have anything to fear from it.
I know a few marketing folks, and most of them are decent human beings, just like you and me, trying to earn a buck.
So are many used car salesmen. So are many telemarketers. So are many spammers.
What you do to make that buck and how you drain small bits of strangers lives matters more to me than how you treat your friends. The argument of "just trying to make a buck" has never held any water with me since drug dealers, pimps, and lobbyists are all "just trying to make a buck."
Marketing is not an inherently evil profession, but it has a lot of nasty excesses that involve deceit and forcing yourself into people's lives. Neuromarketing however, has evil written all over it. The whole goal of neuromarketing is to use psychology to figure out how to sell goods and impress brands on people by bypassing the reasoning centers of the brain as much as possible. They want to make sure that you subconsciously need a good that you wouldn't have cared for previously. It's an attempt at circumventing the security protections of conscious thought via "exploits" for the legacy systems in our mind. The goal of neuromarketing is nothing less than mass brainwashing for money.
Plus, how do you propose to have commerce without advertising?
With no advertising at all? You probably couldn't.
However, what most people think of when they say the word "marketing" with a sneer could easily be done without. It would require a change in law since advertising is currently the "local maxima" for the free market. People wouldn't do it if it didn't get results, and the social costs of out of control advertising are externalities that the free market forces businesses not to deal with.
Envision a world of "Pull Advertising," where companies register with information services (like catalogues or the WWW) and customers looking for a good or service go to search for it from information brokers instead of having it shoved in their face. Services would exist for helping people find goods in areas where they are not experts, and with the WWW reviews of goods become available.
No more junk mail of phone solicitations. No more billboards. Shopping plazas that look good instead of being a garish mismatch of "look at me!" storefronts. TV and radio without interruption. Kids that eat healthy instead of jumping up and down screaming for whatever candy, soda, or fast food they saw on their kids cartoon. You'd be able to live your life your own way without frenzied consumer culture dictating to everyone how you should live it instead.
This would require three things: 1) Laws deterring push advertising (like DNC lists, city beautification ordinances, etc.) 2) Efficient goods search services 3) Laws or other forces preventing paid-for preferred placing
This world has several downsides.
The first and foremost is the death of a lot of industries. Take radio, for instance. From a consumer standpoint, a single radio station is a public good. You can't stop people from listening. From a radio station's viewpoint, though, the ears of the listeners is a private good that is sold to advertisers and music companies (which is why a lot of radio sucks). With that market gone, conventional radio vanishes in favor of not-for-profit radio like NPR & college radio and scrambled radio like Sirius & XM.
This brings up the second disadvantage. This world makes certain goods a lot more expensive. TV & radio are once again examples. Many public services get a lot of their revenue from advertising. Public transportation is the most obvious, but school systems and even police departments have signed deals to cover the cost of operations by selling out. This pushes certain goods out of the price range of the poor and means a raise in taxes in some situations.
(On the other hand a lot of goods would become drastically cheaper. Pharmaceutical and food industries spend a massive chunk of their budgets on advertising t
Comedy is a threatening situation that gets the other guy, not you, because he's a putz, and you're not, so you experience the vicarious superiority of having survived the threat. No threat, no sense of superiority, no comedy.
A response to the first guy to respond to you brings up the study that I wanted to bring up that mentions that this is the kind of humor most appreciate by my fellow Americans and by Canadians, but there are other kinds of humor out there.
Humor that comes from reacting to very confusing and wrong stimuli is another type, which is a roundabout way of describing surrealist humor. Here's the joke that some Europeans found most funny:
Q1: "Why do ducks have flat feet?" A1: "To stamp out fires." Q2: "Why do elephants have flat feet?" A2: "To stamp out burning ducks."
Never forget that there's also the *cough* fine art of the pun. Puns are another expression of humor generated by causing your brain to fire in ways that it normally wouldn't. My absolute favorite form of comedy -- escalation humor -- is about taking a situation and making it progressively more and more screwed up and incongruous by adding comments about the situation. Surreal humor is the core of why Monty Python and Douglas Adams are funny.
Also, as an aside, I think you're missing a vital element of humor found in the suffering of others. A lot of comedy can be found in things that are absolutely not the fault of the victim because we can empathize with them not just because we think they deserve it. An example would be the FedEx caveman commercial. The guy is fired for not fulfilling a boss's impossible demands. It's funny because we've all been there to some degree (and because of the surreal nature of the boss requiring something that doesn't yet exist).
Actually, the vast majority of recon sats used during the Cold War used film instead of CCDs and ejected their film cannisters to the earth. Digital remote sensing didn't really start taking off until the Cold War was nearly at an end.
It's just a shift to more of an ad-based revenue stream.
That makes this another fine example of the customer not being the real customer. This is one of the reasons that I hate the word "consumer." It very accurately describes one's real relationship to companies that like to use it.
You are not the one that's always right. You are just the one that consumes the content, and you are a replaceable cog. If we can milk you for money too, then so much the better.
Based on his little diatribe, it seems that he's an antisocial, competitive gamer who has good reflexes and thinks that skill should trump all and that something isn't a good game unless it lets you dominate some other player. His argument is essentially that if a game doesn't cater to his particular gaming desires then it is meant for intellectually / morally inferior gamers. Some of us actually like interacting with other people. Some of us don't exactly have great hand-to-eye coordination but are good at other things. According to him, we shouldn't be allowed to have fun because all games should be made for him and not for us.
Screw him and the high horse he rode in on.
There's a website where table-top game designers and players gather to discuss the theory of gaming -- specifically focused on what makes games fun called The Forge. A lot of what they say there applied quite well to PC and console games as well. In particular, there's a theory of three types of gaming goals that a player typically has. Broadly defined, these are:
Gamism -- The enjoyment of defeating challenges.
Simulationism -- The enjoyment of exploration.
Narrativism -- The enjoyment of stories.
(If you have any interest in table-top gaming, I highly recommend that you read the site's articles section, starting with System Does Matter and the much more long-winded GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory after having some time to think about and digest the first short article. I digress, though...)
Players of games usually have one of these three goals as their primary definition of "fun," though many people can appreciate more than one type. Generally, if you're not getting what you want out of a game (challenges, exploration, or stories), you're not having fun.
MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are primarily focused around exploration with light challenges placed primarily to add difficulty to exploration. Fighting monsters in general is not as much fun as fighting new monsters until you get to high levels. Then the game shifts to cooperative challenge-oriented play once you've already explored most of what the game has to offer in terms of your character, equipment, monsters, and geography. There are skills required to master Level 60 play, but they're very different from the twitch-reflex skills that the author of the article has (and it requires a lot of patience and teamwork to get to these parts of the game). They're strategic skills which he may or may not appreciate.
Anyway, this was a very long way to go just to illustrate my point. There are different goals that gamers can have, and this guy is an arrogant jerk for slamming everyone else for having fun doing things that he doesn't like. There are more than enough games out there that satisfy his style of play, and he should realize that not every game has to be made for him.
Someone mentioned to me several years ago, that nearly all human societies have customs for disposing of dead bodies that would tend to prevent predators from knowing that humans were something to eat.
Well perhaps we all did do this to protect ourselves from predatory species but not all of us fear scavengers. Zoroastrianism has an interesting set of funerary rites that come from their beliefs and setting. Dead bodies are considered horribly unclean due to their belief that death is the work of Evil, so you don't want to bury them in the earth where your food comes from. Fire is a sacred symbol of God, so they do not defile fires with the bodies of the dead. They are not exclusively a coastal culture, so water burial is not viable and would be considered tainting the water and making it unusable.
So you can't bury, submerge, or burn a body. What's left? Well, there's this:
There are, of course, rites of passage and holidays, but the most distinctive ritual of Zoroastrianism is dakhma burial, or burial in the tower of silence. Upon a person's death, the body is washed, and placed on a hard surface. The area is marked by a circle drawn with an iron bar or nail, segregating the dead from the living. Then a dog with a black spot over each eye is brought in to determine if the individual is actually dead. A vase of fire burns fragrant wood and sacred texts are read. Finally, the corpse is carried to the dakhma and corpse-bearers expose it to vultures. When the bones are picked clean and dry, they are placed in the central pit. In the deceased's home, priests pray to the guardian of souls after death. On the third day, there is a ceremony in which charitable contributions on behalf of the dead are announced. On the dawn after the third night, the soul is prepared to cross the Chinvat Bridge.
Zoroastrianism is an unbelievably beautiful religion with truly amazing religious rites that you honestly wouldn't believe didn't come out of some lurid fantasy novel if you didn't read about it in the real world. It is dying out due to the fact that you must be born a member of the religion to practice it, and there is no conversion to it. It will be a great cultural loss when it is gone.
Doesn't matter what the religion or reason. Those who feel powerless, who feel no other recourse is open to them because they're being stepped on and subjugated, will often resort to violence and force.
It's hard to say what the religious beliefs of the leaders of Germany and Italy were because they contradicted themselves so much in word and action. They were certainly Christian in name and used a lot of religious rhetoric, but it's hard to say that they were devout, practicing Christians. It is more likely that they were simply exploiting Christianity in the same manner as all other authoritarians.
Authoritarian and nationalist / xenophobic movements all rely on an ethos of the superiority of the group based on shared (and often inherited) values. Even atheistic movements in the Soviet Union and in China shared these characteristics in their revolutions. The real problem is not religion but the tribal, "pack animal" instincts that are the core of these movements in history. Religion just provides the excuse, but the real malaise is deeper and ultimately is universally human.
Um, it's not. Depending on which part of the koran you read, Islam can be sightly polytheistic, and "Allah" came from the name of the "moon god". My first google search yields: this link
Take that with a grain of salt. My workplace blocks that website under the grounds of "Hate Speech." Most sites that support the position that Allah is the ancient Arabic moon deity Ilah all quote from Morey. A few more links down in a Google search for "allah moon deity" reveals this long rebuttal to Morey. Morey's argument doesn't really account for why the Law of Moses is taken as the root basis for Quranic Law (much like English Common Law is the root of US Constitutional Law).
The Lord's Resistance Army is a truly bizarre creolization of fundamentalist Christianity and animistic witchcraft much like voudon and santeria only with a lot more insane brutality mixed in. Christianity's been the excuse used by a lot of brutal warlords in the past, but I'm not sure that I'd blame Christianity for this one because this is a really, really weird offshoot of the religion.
The LRA is truly one of the worst horrors of the modern world, and I think it's a real shame that no one with the military might to do something about them has. I think a large part of the reason for that is the horror and revulsion that most military leaders feel at the thought of having to send their soldiers out to fight against an army of traumatized child conscripts. A war like that could psychologically devastate an entire generation of soldiers, and there's little economic gain to be had for a country for stepping into this mess, so the world just closes its eyes and hopes it will go away on its own. It's an utterly disgusting tragedy that will take decades to end and decades more to heal.
Could someone explain to me why exactly a man in the middle attack is impossible? As far as I can tell, it's only impossible so long as Alice and Bob have a direct connection to each other. If there is a series of hand-offs between various networks in between Alice and Bob, then quantum cryptography can't work since the particles have to be read and interacted with by the first router Alice connects to. So long as you can compromise some device in between Alice and Bob, you've got a man in the middle attack, right?
Explain how the states of the entangled photons is supposed to be preserved between Alice and Bob if they aren't directly connected to one another.
If you're that freaked out by the whole use of al Jazeera as a source on the bribing of Iraqi journalists to run stories, you could try thesesourcesinstead.
Personally, I value al Jazeera as the only news organization willing to post in full the messages of al Qaeda. Without them, I'd never be able to find out what the enemy is actually saying, and I'd only know what our media and government want us to think about them. Publishing newsworthy material is hardly aiding and abetting the enemy. They're just not biased the way you want them to be biased like our own media (which never relays al Qaeda's messages in full).
Rule 1 of effective propaganda is telling the truth. At least most of the time. There is nothing that really beats that, when it comes to convincing people.
The German master of propoganda Goebbels would disagree with you. According to him the truth is the last thing that a proper propogandist needs:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
When the State controls the media, it only speaks what is convenient to itself which is not necessarily the truth. Propoganda is the ultimate enemy of democracy because it changes the will of the people to match that of its elites without regard for what is and isn't fact, which leads straight to my other favorite Goebbels quote:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Sound familiar -- almost like what got us into this mess that he want the propoganda for in the first place? Never forget why democracy failed in Germany and be wary of leaders that openly use propoganda to further "our" ends.
The closest word to what you are looking for in English is "scholar." Typically, the difference between science and other scholarly arts is whether or not something can be tested. Even though logic and deduction can applied to religion and philosophy, people who study them are not considered scientists.
I just thought you might want to know. I understand well the frustration of trying to read and write in a foreign language that you're not fluent in, especially when you turn to a dictionary to look up a word that doesn't map 100% to another word in that language. I do this occasionally with Japanese. The poster who replied to you was being an arrogant jerk for nitpicking that word in attempt to discredit you by impugning your intelligence instead of focusing only on your actual arguments.
What does that mean? does it say somewhere that Islam dictates said moral police?
What he means is that he believes something very strongly and thinks that he's more of an expert about it than you. Rather than prove his point by citing the Quran himself, he has decided to try to force you to prove his point for him in a fit of intellectual laziness.
Israel has its own religious fanatics. The settlers in the West Bank (and formerly in Gaza) are religious fanatics bent on the creation of Greater Israel. Fortunately, the government of Israel is being far less indulgent to the settlers than they have in the past.
For the most part, there are no independent Israeli mass murders because their overwhelmingly powerful army does most of the killing. Their army kills and maims civilians near militant leaders by bombing apartment blocks and shooting missiles at cars on busy streets. The hatred is not one-way, though the despair and desperation that originates in collective punishment and leads people to conclude that blowing themselves up to take others with them is a good idea is truly uniquely Palestinian.
I'm not very fond of either side in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the 3:1 Palestinians:Israelis body count ratio and the overwhelming difference in force strength really does leave Israel looking like the bully in the relationship.
Here's something I don't understand, and I hope that you can explain it to me. If the purpose of the ban on depictions of Mohammed is to prevent idolatry (which is a form of worship), then why would people be upset at an irreverent and teasing depiction? The cartoons are hardly intended to promote the worship of Mohammed, so why is this blasphemy?
It seems to us that the real offense is in irreverence and not in reverence.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, Chinese are leftist, current US Government is viewed as Right Wing. Silly me!
Hoo boy. A partisan. Guess what? Just because you take somebody's side on one issue (like Google and the DoJ) doesn't mean that you have to take their side on another issue (like Google and China). Yes, shocking -- I know.
My main complaint is in why the government wants this data. I'm less happy with Google after the China bit, but I'm more unhappy with China itself. In case you didn't know, China also claims that censorship of porn and terrorism are their major reasons for filtering the internet. A lot of people don't know that despite being officially atheist, the Chinese government spends just as much time beating the drum of public morality as many openly religious political organizations.
How about addressing problems related to global warming, poverty, war, and pollution - first and foremost?
Welcome, you must be new here!
Please direct your inquiries to the ineffectual opposition parties. We're too busy saving America for Americans here! (..you damn hippie.)
Wow, that post was riddled with typoes.
I really shouldn't post when groggy in the morning.
You're close but not quite on the money. This has wedge issue written all over it. Much like gay marriage in 2004 (and soon to be gay adoption in 2006), this is an issue to draw out the single-issue conservative voters to the polls. The point isn't necessarily to win this battle, though that'd be feather in the cap of the Republican Party, as it is to have the fight in the first place.
The majority of American's wouldn't support a conservative agenda on the environment, healthcare, and corporate welfare, but they will support an agenda about terrorism and "protection of values." This is known as a "wedge issue." It's designed to drive a wedge between the conflicting loyalties of swing voters to force them to choose between two different positives and to draw out partisans from the woodwork who couldn't care enough to vote about economic policy issues.
Bringing back up net filtering and monitoring gives the Republicans another chance to decry "liberal judicial activism" in a bid to install more pro-executive power, pro-business judges. As a bonus, they get to legislate morality and provide an in for more monitoring of citizens. In case you don't recall, sexual scandals are just about the only scandals that have any traction in the media any more, so the opportunity to catch a current or future politician looking at porn is a great tool for whoever's in power, and it's even better if your opposition consider using that power against your people to be wrong.
This is just a win-win fight for the Republican Party no matter how it plays out.
...wait, I thought censorship was bad and UnAmerican(TM)?
Only if you're some sort of commie liberal! In this post-9/11 world, UnAmerican is anything that criticizes the government, and anything the government does in violation of the Constitution and its amendments is kosher as long as it's to protect Americans from Evil People.
Really, though, who's surprised at this. Their stated agenda here was to invade privacy to bolster a case for overturning a Supreme Court decision that prevents them from invading privacy... for the children, of course. Considering how much this administration has stacked every single non-partisan agency with as many political operatives as possible, it's no real surprise that the DoJ would rule in its own favor.
Hell, even without that, it's no surprise that the DoJ would rule in its own favor. They've never been the most objective of agencies.
Not that I disagree in principle with what you are saying, but some of your examples get a little incoherent.
Screwed LotR? Check.
Big fan of Ralph Bakshi's work I take it?
Screwed Tomb Raider? Check.
Yeah, they did that before even producing a sequel. Oh, and Eidos beat them to screwing over Tomb Raider via sequels.
Screwed Xmen3? Check.
How do you screw over the X-men? No, seriously, how do you screw over any comic book more than Marvel and DC are capable of doing on their own? Which set of X-men do you use? How many times has each one of them died, changed powers, or changed origins? Which author's portrayals and which set of relationships between characters do you use? Is Magneto a good guy or a bad guy? Is Wolverine sane, barely sane, or completely insane this time? X-men 3 had suck written all over it as soon as they hinted that the Dark Phoenix cycle was going to be involved, 'cause the suck was embedded in the source material.
Comic books have consistently sucked since the end of the Silver Age (and did some sucking a good bit before that). I blame the seeming contest between comic book authors to see who can leave the biggest mark on a character once they take over a line by whizzing all over the series. I just stopped letting one of my friends tell me about comic books anymore since it's become too nauseating to think about. I've got better things to care about now than the latest episode of "Who Wants to Rape a Childhood?"
I already have one of these. It helps me to live, so I named it a "liver".
Really? You still have one those old things?
I thought that's what a good college education was meant to fix.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest? With a name like that, it could never lose!
I'm actually heartened by just how much utter and complete bunk was in this study. The "Secret Fridge" ad didn't cause much of a reaction even though everyone remembers it? Maybe that doesn't mean that people don't know their own feelings and instad means that their metrics are completely screwed up. "Secret Fridge" was awesome and is only second in my mind to the "Hidden Bud" commercial.
If this is the state of neuromarketing, then it's going to be a while before we have anything to fear from it.
I know a few marketing folks, and most of them are decent human beings, just like you and me, trying to earn a buck.
So are many used car salesmen.
So are many telemarketers.
So are many spammers.
What you do to make that buck and how you drain small bits of strangers lives matters more to me than how you treat your friends. The argument of "just trying to make a buck" has never held any water with me since drug dealers, pimps, and lobbyists are all "just trying to make a buck."
Marketing is not an inherently evil profession, but it has a lot of nasty excesses that involve deceit and forcing yourself into people's lives. Neuromarketing however, has evil written all over it. The whole goal of neuromarketing is to use psychology to figure out how to sell goods and impress brands on people by bypassing the reasoning centers of the brain as much as possible. They want to make sure that you subconsciously need a good that you wouldn't have cared for previously. It's an attempt at circumventing the security protections of conscious thought via "exploits" for the legacy systems in our mind. The goal of neuromarketing is nothing less than mass brainwashing for money.
Plus, how do you propose to have commerce without advertising?
With no advertising at all? You probably couldn't.
However, what most people think of when they say the word "marketing" with a sneer could easily be done without. It would require a change in law since advertising is currently the "local maxima" for the free market. People wouldn't do it if it didn't get results, and the social costs of out of control advertising are externalities that the free market forces businesses not to deal with.
Envision a world of "Pull Advertising," where companies register with information services (like catalogues or the WWW) and customers looking for a good or service go to search for it from information brokers instead of having it shoved in their face. Services would exist for helping people find goods in areas where they are not experts, and with the WWW reviews of goods become available.
No more junk mail of phone solicitations. No more billboards. Shopping plazas that look good instead of being a garish mismatch of "look at me!" storefronts. TV and radio without interruption. Kids that eat healthy instead of jumping up and down screaming for whatever candy, soda, or fast food they saw on their kids cartoon. You'd be able to live your life your own way without frenzied consumer culture dictating to everyone how you should live it instead.
This would require three things:
1) Laws deterring push advertising (like DNC lists, city beautification ordinances, etc.)
2) Efficient goods search services
3) Laws or other forces preventing paid-for preferred placing
This world has several downsides.
The first and foremost is the death of a lot of industries. Take radio, for instance. From a consumer standpoint, a single radio station is a public good. You can't stop people from listening. From a radio station's viewpoint, though, the ears of the listeners is a private good that is sold to advertisers and music companies (which is why a lot of radio sucks). With that market gone, conventional radio vanishes in favor of not-for-profit radio like NPR & college radio and scrambled radio like Sirius & XM.
This brings up the second disadvantage. This world makes certain goods a lot more expensive. TV & radio are once again examples. Many public services get a lot of their revenue from advertising. Public transportation is the most obvious, but school systems and even police departments have signed deals to cover the cost of operations by selling out. This pushes certain goods out of the price range of the poor and means a raise in taxes in some situations.
(On the other hand a lot of goods would become drastically cheaper. Pharmaceutical and food industries spend a massive chunk of their budgets on advertising t
Comedy is a threatening situation that gets the other guy, not you, because he's a putz, and you're not, so you experience the vicarious superiority of having survived the threat. No threat, no sense of superiority, no comedy.
A response to the first guy to respond to you brings up the study that I wanted to bring up that mentions that this is the kind of humor most appreciate by my fellow Americans and by Canadians, but there are other kinds of humor out there.
Humor that comes from reacting to very confusing and wrong stimuli is another type, which is a roundabout way of describing surrealist humor. Here's the joke that some Europeans found most funny:
Q1: "Why do ducks have flat feet?"
A1: "To stamp out fires."
Q2: "Why do elephants have flat feet?"
A2: "To stamp out burning ducks."
Never forget that there's also the *cough* fine art of the pun. Puns are another expression of humor generated by causing your brain to fire in ways that it normally wouldn't. My absolute favorite form of comedy -- escalation humor -- is about taking a situation and making it progressively more and more screwed up and incongruous by adding comments about the situation. Surreal humor is the core of why Monty Python and Douglas Adams are funny.
Also, as an aside, I think you're missing a vital element of humor found in the suffering of others. A lot of comedy can be found in things that are absolutely not the fault of the victim because we can empathize with them not just because we think they deserve it. An example would be the FedEx caveman commercial. The guy is fired for not fulfilling a boss's impossible demands. It's funny because we've all been there to some degree (and because of the surreal nature of the boss requiring something that doesn't yet exist).
Actually, the vast majority of recon sats used during the Cold War used film instead of CCDs and ejected their film cannisters to the earth. Digital remote sensing didn't really start taking off until the Cold War was nearly at an end.
Um. Thank you for... contributing?
It's just a shift to more of an ad-based revenue stream.
That makes this another fine example of the customer not being the real customer. This is one of the reasons that I hate the word "consumer." It very accurately describes one's real relationship to companies that like to use it.
You are not the one that's always right. You are just the one that consumes the content, and you are a replaceable cog. If we can milk you for money too, then so much the better.
Based on his little diatribe, it seems that he's an antisocial, competitive gamer who has good reflexes and thinks that skill should trump all and that something isn't a good game unless it lets you dominate some other player. His argument is essentially that if a game doesn't cater to his particular gaming desires then it is meant for intellectually / morally inferior gamers. Some of us actually like interacting with other people. Some of us don't exactly have great hand-to-eye coordination but are good at other things. According to him, we shouldn't be allowed to have fun because all games should be made for him and not for us.
Screw him and the high horse he rode in on.
There's a website where table-top game designers and players gather to discuss the theory of gaming -- specifically focused on what makes games fun called The Forge. A lot of what they say there applied quite well to PC and console games as well. In particular, there's a theory of three types of gaming goals that a player typically has. Broadly defined, these are:
(If you have any interest in table-top gaming, I highly recommend that you read the site's articles section, starting with System Does Matter and the much more long-winded GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory after having some time to think about and digest the first short article. I digress, though...)
Players of games usually have one of these three goals as their primary definition of "fun," though many people can appreciate more than one type. Generally, if you're not getting what you want out of a game (challenges, exploration, or stories), you're not having fun.
MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are primarily focused around exploration with light challenges placed primarily to add difficulty to exploration. Fighting monsters in general is not as much fun as fighting new monsters until you get to high levels. Then the game shifts to cooperative challenge-oriented play once you've already explored most of what the game has to offer in terms of your character, equipment, monsters, and geography. There are skills required to master Level 60 play, but they're very different from the twitch-reflex skills that the author of the article has (and it requires a lot of patience and teamwork to get to these parts of the game). They're strategic skills which he may or may not appreciate.
Anyway, this was a very long way to go just to illustrate my point. There are different goals that gamers can have, and this guy is an arrogant jerk for slamming everyone else for having fun doing things that he doesn't like. There are more than enough games out there that satisfy his style of play, and he should realize that not every game has to be made for him.
Someone mentioned to me several years ago, that nearly all human societies have customs for disposing of dead bodies that would tend to prevent predators from knowing that humans were something to eat.
Well perhaps we all did do this to protect ourselves from predatory species but not all of us fear scavengers. Zoroastrianism has an interesting set of funerary rites that come from their beliefs and setting. Dead bodies are considered horribly unclean due to their belief that death is the work of Evil, so you don't want to bury them in the earth where your food comes from. Fire is a sacred symbol of God, so they do not defile fires with the bodies of the dead. They are not exclusively a coastal culture, so water burial is not viable and would be considered tainting the water and making it unusable.
So you can't bury, submerge, or burn a body. What's left? Well, there's this:
The Parsi community in Iran and India are actually under stress from environmental problems right now. They depend on vultures to handle the burial of their dead, but 98% of vultures in Asia have died due to the use of a controversial cattle drug. The Parsi have been forced to install solar collectors on the Towers of Silence to speed the decomposition of the bodies.
Zoroastrianism is an unbelievably beautiful religion with truly amazing religious rites that you honestly wouldn't believe didn't come out of some lurid fantasy novel if you didn't read about it in the real world. It is dying out due to the fact that you must be born a member of the religion to practice it, and there is no conversion to it. It will be a great cultural loss when it is gone.
Doesn't matter what the religion or reason. Those who feel powerless, who feel no other recourse is open to them because they're being stepped on and subjugated, will often resort to violence and force.
It's hard to say what the religious beliefs of the leaders of Germany and Italy were because they contradicted themselves so much in word and action. They were certainly Christian in name and used a lot of religious rhetoric, but it's hard to say that they were devout, practicing Christians. It is more likely that they were simply exploiting Christianity in the same manner as all other authoritarians.
Authoritarian and nationalist / xenophobic movements all rely on an ethos of the superiority of the group based on shared (and often inherited) values. Even atheistic movements in the Soviet Union and in China shared these characteristics in their revolutions. The real problem is not religion but the tribal, "pack animal" instincts that are the core of these movements in history. Religion just provides the excuse, but the real malaise is deeper and ultimately is universally human.
Um, it's not. Depending on which part of the koran you read, Islam can be sightly polytheistic, and "Allah" came from the name of the "moon god". My first google search yields: this link
Take that with a grain of salt. My workplace blocks that website under the grounds of "Hate Speech." Most sites that support the position that Allah is the ancient Arabic moon deity Ilah all quote from Morey. A few more links down in a Google search for "allah moon deity" reveals this long rebuttal to Morey. Morey's argument doesn't really account for why the Law of Moses is taken as the root basis for Quranic Law (much like English Common Law is the root of US Constitutional Law).
The Lord's Resistance Army is a truly bizarre creolization of fundamentalist Christianity and animistic witchcraft much like voudon and santeria only with a lot more insane brutality mixed in. Christianity's been the excuse used by a lot of brutal warlords in the past, but I'm not sure that I'd blame Christianity for this one because this is a really, really weird offshoot of the religion.
The LRA is truly one of the worst horrors of the modern world, and I think it's a real shame that no one with the military might to do something about them has. I think a large part of the reason for that is the horror and revulsion that most military leaders feel at the thought of having to send their soldiers out to fight against an army of traumatized child conscripts. A war like that could psychologically devastate an entire generation of soldiers, and there's little economic gain to be had for a country for stepping into this mess, so the world just closes its eyes and hopes it will go away on its own. It's an utterly disgusting tragedy that will take decades to end and decades more to heal.
Could someone explain to me why exactly a man in the middle attack is impossible? As far as I can tell, it's only impossible so long as Alice and Bob have a direct connection to each other. If there is a series of hand-offs between various networks in between Alice and Bob, then quantum cryptography can't work since the particles have to be read and interacted with by the first router Alice connects to. So long as you can compromise some device in between Alice and Bob, you've got a man in the middle attack, right?
Explain how the states of the entangled photons is supposed to be preserved between Alice and Bob if they aren't directly connected to one another.
If you're that freaked out by the whole use of al Jazeera as a source on the bribing of Iraqi journalists to run stories, you could try these sources instead.
Personally, I value al Jazeera as the only news organization willing to post in full the messages of al Qaeda. Without them, I'd never be able to find out what the enemy is actually saying, and I'd only know what our media and government want us to think about them. Publishing newsworthy material is hardly aiding and abetting the enemy. They're just not biased the way you want them to be biased like our own media (which never relays al Qaeda's messages in full).
Rule 1 of effective propaganda is telling the truth. At least most of the time. There is nothing that really beats that, when it comes to convincing people.
The German master of propoganda Goebbels would disagree with you. According to him the truth is the last thing that a proper propogandist needs:
When the State controls the media, it only speaks what is convenient to itself which is not necessarily the truth. Propoganda is the ultimate enemy of democracy because it changes the will of the people to match that of its elites without regard for what is and isn't fact, which leads straight to my other favorite Goebbels quote:
Sound familiar -- almost like what got us into this mess that he want the propoganda for in the first place? Never forget why democracy failed in Germany and be wary of leaders that openly use propoganda to further "our" ends.
Scientists in the ways of religion.
The closest word to what you are looking for in English is "scholar." Typically, the difference between science and other scholarly arts is whether or not something can be tested. Even though logic and deduction can applied to religion and philosophy, people who study them are not considered scientists.
I just thought you might want to know. I understand well the frustration of trying to read and write in a foreign language that you're not fluent in, especially when you turn to a dictionary to look up a word that doesn't map 100% to another word in that language. I do this occasionally with Japanese. The poster who replied to you was being an arrogant jerk for nitpicking that word in attempt to discredit you by impugning your intelligence instead of focusing only on your actual arguments.
What does that mean? does it say somewhere that Islam dictates said moral police?
What he means is that he believes something very strongly and thinks that he's more of an expert about it than you. Rather than prove his point by citing the Quran himself, he has decided to try to force you to prove his point for him in a fit of intellectual laziness.
Israel has its own religious fanatics. The settlers in the West Bank (and formerly in Gaza) are religious fanatics bent on the creation of Greater Israel. Fortunately, the government of Israel is being far less indulgent to the settlers than they have in the past.
For the most part, there are no independent Israeli mass murders because their overwhelmingly powerful army does most of the killing. Their army kills and maims civilians near militant leaders by bombing apartment blocks and shooting missiles at cars on busy streets. The hatred is not one-way, though the despair and desperation that originates in collective punishment and leads people to conclude that blowing themselves up to take others with them is a good idea is truly uniquely Palestinian.
I'm not very fond of either side in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the 3:1 Palestinians:Israelis body count ratio and the overwhelming difference in force strength really does leave Israel looking like the bully in the relationship.
Here's something I don't understand, and I hope that you can explain it to me. If the purpose of the ban on depictions of Mohammed is to prevent idolatry (which is a form of worship), then why would people be upset at an irreverent and teasing depiction? The cartoons are hardly intended to promote the worship of Mohammed, so why is this blasphemy?
It seems to us that the real offense is in irreverence and not in reverence.