Depends. Putting religious beliefs on the morality of avoiding death aside for a moment...
If I suffer for 80 years, will technology advance to the point where you can keep me going indefinitely? What if your future self can indulge in centuries of the same sort of eating habits (simulated or real) that you deny yourself today... is that worth struggling for?
Short-term gratification may cut you off from a greater benefit down the road. Who knows what wonders you're missing out on if you live life only for today?
(Besides, gorging your way to an early death does not seem like a way to live happily. What little weight I've gained since college has only made me less and less happy thanks to the variety of minor health issues it has caused. I can't imagine tacking on 700 more lbs and being happy with life.)
The study says that having friends who make unhealthy life choices tends to lead to one making unhealthy life choices. This is not incompatible with the idea that it's your choice, but you seem to make it out like it's nothing more than an excuse -- as if to say that no one is ever influenced by the choices of those around them, and we should never look to the outside for why we make the choices we do.
You dismissed a rigorous study that examined 32 years worth of data about over 12,000 people based on a dogmatic belief that all choices occur in a vacuum and that no one should ever look to their surroundings for why they might be acting the way they do. Did you read the study before giving it a knee-jerk dismissal, or were you too much in a rush to dominate the discussion by trying to get your personal anecdote of "real life experience" in early? Read the study. It's pretty interesting, but you might want to bone up on confidence intervals first.
To summarize, you took the exact same stance of dogma over reason as a young-Earth creationist, a global-warming skeptic, or a flat Earther would. It was your sheer wrongheadedness and your belligerent attitude about it that caused your post to be deservedly marked as Flamebait.
No, the U.S. has been mostly a nation of plenty for a couple hundred years or more. Depending on how you count, that's easily 6-8 generations. Mass obesity has only come in the last generation or so.
Then why did Hoover run on the campaign slogan "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage?"
Remember that this was before the Great Depression. Food didn't start to get really cheap in the US until the last two generations. While starvation was by no means rampant, many of the things we take for granted today were food only enjoyed by the wealthy or for special occasions for much of US history -- chicken was one of those things.
It's the cheap abundance of food (in combination with the changes in processing you've mentioned) that has had a huge impact.
As for sub-Saharan, I'm so sick of textbooks giving examples of sub-Saharan cultures that do this or that.
Yes, because God forbid that the most culturally and genetically diverse subsection of humanity be used in an examination of what is and isn't culturally universal. Dominant majorities only, please!
The reason these cultures get referred to a lot is that they're some of the few cultures left on the planet not significantly changed by contact with the major Abrahamic religions, Confuscianism, or the Indic traditions that have dominated world culture. They give us a window into traditions far more ancient than our own which have survived through isolation.
A woman transported several centuries would change from being desirable to undesirable because of the dynamics of food supply dynamics of the society? Then would a famine ridden society see a 400lb woman as the most beautiful woman they have ever seen?
Actually, there are places today where you could transport such a woman and find them desirable. Mauritania is one such place where wealthy people send their daughters to be fattened to make them more marriage-worthy. After all, they're a desert culture and food resources have been scarce until modern times. (The article does note that tastes are changing, though.)
In addition, a lot of sub-Saharan African cultures are continuing the preference for overweight men and women because of AIDS. AIDS generally causes severe weight loss, and being fat is a sign of probable health. This actually leads some people to seek to gain weight to avoid the stigma.
Now, 400 lbs might be a bit much. But you could certainly drop a 250-300 lbs woman into medieval Europe or earlier and have people assume that she was someone of great wealth. The Greeks and Romans seem not to have prized being overweight, but fertility statues from Stone Age cultures world wide show a preference for larger women.
Essentially, humans will instinctively look for signs of health in breeding. In times of starvation, we look for those who are well-fed. In times of abundance, we look for those that are "fit," but in both cases we are looking for mates who will live long and produce better children. It's just that the easily spotted criteria changes.
I would like to point out that our atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, and that all like on Earth would've probably died long ago from the oven-like temperatures and the fact that all of the Earth's water would be carbonic acid by there.
Then again, who knows? Maybe the carbonic acid'll get transformed into acetic acid, and you'll have a big, old, slow-cooked, vinegar-based sauce barbeque. I can only dream in terror of an entire world that smelled like pulled pork.
Who knew North Carolina would be the end of us all?
What you really want is food chock full of fiber that takes a long time to release sugar into the bloodstream. Protein is one way to do this, but high-fiber, whole-grain bread also works. A salad can also be nice if you don't go crazy with the dressing and if you pick good enough greens not to make the flavor and texture become tedious quickly.
Really, the goal is to feel full without consuming a massive amount of calories and to keep your blood sugar levels from spiking up and down (creating feelings of hunger even when you're full).
If you've ever been on a diet, you'll know that the single hardest part of dieting is going out to eat with friends. Friends who aren't dieting will often not respect that you don't want to go eat fast food or BBQ or Mexican or Waffle House or anywhere else where the healthy menu choices are limited to either limp iceberg lettuce salad or going hungry. Those that do, may often grow tired of you limiting the groups' choices on where to go to eat. They may simply start inviting you less or deciding on the location with others before inviting you.
And, yes, these people are kind of jackasses for doing this, but what are you going to do? Cut yourself off from your friends or tell them that it's either the jerks or you? After all, from their point of view, it's you being selfish by telling everyone you won't go let them eat where they'd like to if they're going to be with you. Healthy restaurants are often much more expensive than fast food places and may not have food that your friends like if they're used to eating nothing but the grease and starch that is the staple of the modern American diet.
Let's face it, eating together with people is one of the most common and universal means of socializing for mankind. The people you hang out with will have the same dietary habits you do because those are the places you are used to gathering and the food you are all used to eating. If your friends eat healthy food, you'll be forced to go the healthy places and probably won't gain as much weight. If your friends eat unhealthy food, you'll be forced to go to unhealthy places.
The alternative is simply cutting yourself off from your friends, which only affirms the point of the research.
With an elevator, though, if you get rid of braille and tactile buttons, you've essentially prevented a blind person from reaching the upper floors of the building.
See, now that's a VERY good reason (and one I should've thought about since I had just responded to another thread about the iPhone and the blind). I didn't even think about blindness in connection with an interface that isn't optional.
I was mostly responding to his complaints about that the lack of tactile response and quick feedback in soft-displays and saying that they don't matter for an elevator because elevators don't have good feedback to begin with.
iPhone -- we'll see the verdict regarding this. I, for one, would appreciate a "hang up" button as I tend to push this a million times when I want to hang up... it is nice to have a solid feeling as you wait for the UI to respond. With a softkey, did you really hit it? Did the UI register it? You don't know without watching the screen. I view this as a bit extreme, but we will see if people complain. Buttons have their place when well-implemented.
Can you imagine getting on a "soft-key" elevator? I think it would be cool at first, then really annoying.
Why? Many if not most elevators already don't respond instantly to button presses. Heck, maybe it would stop all those silly people who think that pushing the "door close" button actually does something when the fireman's key isn't inserted.
The only annoyance I can see is the grungy, unattractive appearance of a public touchscreen. It's not like normal buttons are any cleaner, but the backlighting of a touchscreen really shows it.
Why do sight-impaired users need a $600 phone with video-playback and web-browsing capabilities?
Seems like making carriers offer a phone actually targeted to the visually-impaired (maybe with text-to-speech webbrowsing and braille input) would be preferable to trying to force vendors of phones with explicitly visually-oriented features to move to accommodate a user base that would be poorly served by its useful feature/price ratio.
It should be the carriers and not every single kind of phone that should support handicapped users. Otherwise, you're deliberately stepping on innovation for people who can take advantage of a visually-oriented phone in a Harrison Bergeron-esque quest to prevent gadget envy.
The level of pain involved in watching nearly anything live-action that comes on Japanese television cannot be understated. The production values are poor, the actors are utterly talentless, and the content is void of sentience. It's incredibly cringe-worthy to watch. The corniness level of Japanese television can only really be rivaled in American pop culture terms by the TV of the 70s -- especially the game shows, talent shows, comedy shows, and soap operas mentioned in the article.
TV was the worst part of my time in Japan back in 2000.
What's anime have to do with the topic at hand? Anime isn't shown during prime-time hours on TV. Anime in Japan falls into two categories: 1) Kiddie stuff shown in the after-school time slot. 2) Otaku-oriented stuff shown at night on premium channels like WOWOW and direct-to-video stuff.
The stuff they're talking about is all live action: soap operas, comedy shows, game shows, etc., and Japanese live-action television takes Sturgeon's Law to 11.
I'm guessing you've never worked on a large product that's released to end-users and has release deadlines that should avoid slipping. Bug triage is exceptionally common on such projects. Nobody fixes every last bug before release, and I've had five year old low-priority bugs that were still on my to-do list when I left the last company I worked on that had such a product.
What you spend your time on is finding and fixing the critical bugs, followed by the high priority bugs, follow by the mediu-- oh, hey wait, someone added new features and there's a host of new bugs to fix. Yay!
I wish I was wrong, but this is how the real world works most of the time. I'm kind of glad to have spent the past few years on internal-use only applications.
Yes, but these were mostly international conflicts. In modern times, we have a much better framework for responding to international conflicts than we do intranational conflicts. See Rwanda for a good example. Rwanda was the result of the Belgians taking two ethnic groups, putting them under one government, and elevating the minority over the majority. The current civil war in Iraq is pretty similar only with a little more even-handedness in the genocide between the Shia and Sunni Arabs.
Personally, I've come to believe that partitioning the state into three regions and letting the people within them have some political space is the only way the conflict's going to end. That solution has it's own problems (Kurdish conflict with Turkey, Shia closeness to Iran, and Sunni closeness to Syria), but if an end to bloodshed is the highest priority, it's the best solution for that particular problem.
Similarly, Afghanistan might've been a stable state decades ago if there were power struggles between its four main ethnic groups. Partitioning is not a good idea for us in this case because it would provide no brake on the Taliban-dominated Pashtun regions, but many of the problems we have there wouldn't have been such a problem if they had been four countries in the first place.
Commerce is *not* a one-way street. When someone buys something, assuming they aren't being pressured at *that* moment, they prefer the good to the money, and the seller prefers the money to the good.
Yes, but what does that have to do with advertising? After all, I generally don't see an ad for a good right where I'm going to buy it. That's a large part of my objection. I don't mind an ad for something in a store that sells it, and I've said so elsewhere. After all, I'm already there to look for similar goods.
My point was that the decision to buy is one-sided because the decision to sell has already long ago been made.
I consider the two areas both implications of the same premise: do people have the right to pressure others to do things they did not ask to be pressured with, but which they may decide they like?
See, now there is a good question. If you'd phrased it that was from the start instead of attempting to be insulting, this discussion might've gone a very different way.
Basically, I'd say that I neither consider it inherently a right nor inherently a crime. I don't think the answer has a universal "yes" or "no" answer. I think that the answer is entirely dependent on context and intent.
This is why I mentioned a distinction between asking out someone you already have a less romantic relationship with and hitting on a stranger. Intent is different because the list of possible motives for hitting on a stranger are inherently more limited by your lack of previous knowledge of them. You generally only want the one material gain from the transaction.
Similarly advertisers only want you for your money and don't care about the effects of their ads on the rest of your life. They don't care if it clutters up a previously pretty neighborhood with garish visual noise. They don't care if it breaks up the flow of the movie you were watching. They don't care if their junk mail fills up landfills. They don't care if they interrupt dinner with a phone call. They don't care if you have to waste time deleting their spam. They don't care about any of this because they don't have to bear these costs.
Some of those products, I have decided would be nice to have, and I have purchased them. I certainly didn't need them, but if needs were all people went by, neither one of us would be on Slashdot right now. Neither would we have computers, or electricity. Hey, the Amish get along without, so they must not be necessities.
Forgive me if I roll my eyes at the prospect that we'd all be churning own butter if not for the brave work of advertising companies.
Also, while I did say things I "need," I more meant things that I already decided that I wanted. I don't *need* to buy the newest Harry Potter book, but suffice it to say that I'm aware it exists in spite of not having been exposed to any ads for it other than a single pre-order sign-up placard in the bookstores I frequent.
That's the sort of thing that doesn't bother me. I'm already in the store looking for books, so why not have a few tasteful ads for books I'll be interested in? On the other hand, I do not sign up for "rewards" cards because I don't want them sending me junk mail. When I decide that I'm in the mood to buy books and that I have enough money to throw around on it, I'll head to the danged store, and no sooner.
I like it when I do not have to go well out of my way to find things that are interesting to me.
Well, I suppose what you consider "well out of your way" is where we'd differ. I would *never* sign up for an email newsletter selling me products. I *would* subscribe to an RSS feed that I could check whenever I feel like it. For me the difference is in who initiates the transaction. I want to be the one in charge of when I see ads and not somebody who has a financial incentive to encourage me to spend my money foolishly.
Essentially, I don't consider advice about products from friends in random conversation to be a form of push advertising anymore than I consider being asked out after mutual flirting with a friend to be advertising. In both cases, the situation is intimate, the parties involved are well-known to each other, interest is mutually displayed, and the agenda is not dominated by an entirely material interest.
The opposite of these attributes are all parts of what I find irritating about advertising and about come-ons from strangers. Really, though, I'm stretching to finding the common ground between them. I generally try to think of romance and commerce as distinct things. You may disagree, but I'll go into my reasons a bit more below.
(As an aside, there are ways for strangers to hook up without spamming uninterested parties. Dating sites, speed dating, etc. are ways for people interested in hooking up to meet other people interested in hooking up and to do a little research before trying out a full date with them. That's more analogous to the sort of non-push advertising that I prefer.)
What kind of rule do you want people to adhere to, that eliminates the bad instances and keeps the good?
Any attempt at a relationship though is going to run the risk of bothering someone not interested. That's just part of human nature; love is a two-way street, after all. If you consider that to be a big negative, then you must concede it's at least a necessary evil because there's no other way to know. Commerce is not the same, though.
It is possible to have people buy only things they were already interested in because commerce is usually a mostly one-way relationship. The presence of a business generally indicates a willingness to sell. After all, very few businesses only sell to one customer. Commerce is all about the customer's choice to come seek out and buy. This is a large part of why I see the analogy you're making as a tad stretched.
If you've ever hit on a girl before, you're a hypocrite.
I know you're just trolling, but two points: 1) Trying to start a real relationship is different from asking for money (or sex). 2) Forcing your desperation on a stranger is different from asking to deepen a relationship with a friend.
I don't mind Amazon telling me about things that I might like when I log in. I would mind if they started spontaneously emailing me about these things or if one of their partners that I'd never done business with started doing the same thing.
(Also, having been hit on by strangers I had zero interest in before, I will say that it is a distinctly creepy experience, and I do oppose it in general. I wouldn't want to make someone else feel that way.)
You just can't quote him or play a soundclip without bleeping it. There's all sorts of amusing ways to describe with euphemisms what someone else said.
My favorite is to tell some one "to perform an anatomical impossibility," and there's always "dropped the F-bomb."
Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site.
I would. I'd mind terribly. Putting aside the creepy privacy issues (which would be enough to set me off), I just simply don't like push advertising at all. I don't want my life to interrupted by people interjecting their pleas for me to give them my money for crap I don't need.
I don't like TV ads. I don't like radio ads. I don't like billboards. I don't like fliers on phone poles. I HATE people who stick menus in my apartment door, I HATE telemarketers, and I'd hate spammers too even if they were selling me things I want. I have a habit of stopping doing business with any business that gets too pushy with its advertising (like the people who stick menus in your door), and a spam for something I want is the best way to keep me from ever buying it (at least from that vendor).
The only kind of advertising that I like is the kind where you list a product in some public forum, and I find it when I decide I'm in the market for it. (e.g. Froogle.) Anything that tries to come and find me to tell me how wonderful my life would be if I just bought it is annoying. (And God forbid an ad actually be effective and influence me to do something unwise with my money.) Unless your ad entertains me, go away.
(And yes, I realize that I am on the far end of crotchety about advertising, but that's just my opinion.)
If only one person in a thousand is the type who gets violent at a demonstration, and your demonstration has five-thousand people, your demonstration will probably contain violence.
Heck, and this is true even if the police aren't slipping agitators into your ranks.
Unfortunately, that will only exacerbate all of our other problems from energy use -- namely the carbon footprint of our industry. We should be working on getting carbon back into the ground and not on pulling more out.
What are you, mad? The man clearly said kill two birds with one stone. He's clearly a conservationist working hard to prevent erosion caused by mining.
I suppose you think that willy-nilly throwing as many stones as it takes is a good idea or that we can just toss the same stone over and over again. Remember it's reduce, reuse, recycle -- in that order.
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Depends. Putting religious beliefs on the morality of avoiding death aside for a moment...
If I suffer for 80 years, will technology advance to the point where you can keep me going indefinitely? What if your future self can indulge in centuries of the same sort of eating habits (simulated or real) that you deny yourself today... is that worth struggling for?
Short-term gratification may cut you off from a greater benefit down the road. Who knows what wonders you're missing out on if you live life only for today?
(Besides, gorging your way to an early death does not seem like a way to live happily. What little weight I've gained since college has only made me less and less happy thanks to the variety of minor health issues it has caused. I can't imagine tacking on 700 more lbs and being happy with life.)
The study says that having friends who make unhealthy life choices tends to lead to one making unhealthy life choices. This is not incompatible with the idea that it's your choice, but you seem to make it out like it's nothing more than an excuse -- as if to say that no one is ever influenced by the choices of those around them, and we should never look to the outside for why we make the choices we do.
You dismissed a rigorous study that examined 32 years worth of data about over 12,000 people based on a dogmatic belief that all choices occur in a vacuum and that no one should ever look to their surroundings for why they might be acting the way they do. Did you read the study before giving it a knee-jerk dismissal, or were you too much in a rush to dominate the discussion by trying to get your personal anecdote of "real life experience" in early? Read the study. It's pretty interesting, but you might want to bone up on confidence intervals first.
To summarize, you took the exact same stance of dogma over reason as a young-Earth creationist, a global-warming skeptic, or a flat Earther would. It was your sheer wrongheadedness and your belligerent attitude about it that caused your post to be deservedly marked as Flamebait.
No, the U.S. has been mostly a nation of plenty for a couple hundred years or more. Depending on how you count, that's easily 6-8 generations. Mass obesity has only come in the last generation or so.
Then why did Hoover run on the campaign slogan "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage?"
Remember that this was before the Great Depression. Food didn't start to get really cheap in the US until the last two generations. While starvation was by no means rampant, many of the things we take for granted today were food only enjoyed by the wealthy or for special occasions for much of US history -- chicken was one of those things.
It's the cheap abundance of food (in combination with the changes in processing you've mentioned) that has had a huge impact.
As for sub-Saharan, I'm so sick of textbooks giving examples of sub-Saharan cultures that do this or that.
Yes, because God forbid that the most culturally and genetically diverse subsection of humanity be used in an examination of what is and isn't culturally universal. Dominant majorities only, please!
The reason these cultures get referred to a lot is that they're some of the few cultures left on the planet not significantly changed by contact with the major Abrahamic religions, Confuscianism, or the Indic traditions that have dominated world culture. They give us a window into traditions far more ancient than our own which have survived through isolation.
A woman transported several centuries would change from being desirable to undesirable because of the dynamics of food supply dynamics of the society? Then would a famine ridden society see a 400lb woman as the most beautiful woman they have ever seen?
Actually, there are places today where you could transport such a woman and find them desirable. Mauritania is one such place where wealthy people send their daughters to be fattened to make them more marriage-worthy. After all, they're a desert culture and food resources have been scarce until modern times. (The article does note that tastes are changing, though.)
In addition, a lot of sub-Saharan African cultures are continuing the preference for overweight men and women because of AIDS. AIDS generally causes severe weight loss, and being fat is a sign of probable health. This actually leads some people to seek to gain weight to avoid the stigma.
Now, 400 lbs might be a bit much. But you could certainly drop a 250-300 lbs woman into medieval Europe or earlier and have people assume that she was someone of great wealth. The Greeks and Romans seem not to have prized being overweight, but fertility statues from Stone Age cultures world wide show a preference for larger women.
Essentially, humans will instinctively look for signs of health in breeding. In times of starvation, we look for those who are well-fed. In times of abundance, we look for those that are "fit," but in both cases we are looking for mates who will live long and produce better children. It's just that the easily spotted criteria changes.
I would like to point out that our atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, and that all like on Earth would've probably died long ago from the oven-like temperatures and the fact that all of the Earth's water would be carbonic acid by there.
Then again, who knows? Maybe the carbonic acid'll get transformed into acetic acid, and you'll have a big, old, slow-cooked, vinegar-based sauce barbeque. I can only dream in terror of an entire world that smelled like pulled pork.
Who knew North Carolina would be the end of us all?
What you really want is food chock full of fiber that takes a long time to release sugar into the bloodstream. Protein is one way to do this, but high-fiber, whole-grain bread also works. A salad can also be nice if you don't go crazy with the dressing and if you pick good enough greens not to make the flavor and texture become tedious quickly.
Really, the goal is to feel full without consuming a massive amount of calories and to keep your blood sugar levels from spiking up and down (creating feelings of hunger even when you're full).
If you've ever been on a diet, you'll know that the single hardest part of dieting is going out to eat with friends. Friends who aren't dieting will often not respect that you don't want to go eat fast food or BBQ or Mexican or Waffle House or anywhere else where the healthy menu choices are limited to either limp iceberg lettuce salad or going hungry. Those that do, may often grow tired of you limiting the groups' choices on where to go to eat. They may simply start inviting you less or deciding on the location with others before inviting you.
And, yes, these people are kind of jackasses for doing this, but what are you going to do? Cut yourself off from your friends or tell them that it's either the jerks or you? After all, from their point of view, it's you being selfish by telling everyone you won't go let them eat where they'd like to if they're going to be with you. Healthy restaurants are often much more expensive than fast food places and may not have food that your friends like if they're used to eating nothing but the grease and starch that is the staple of the modern American diet.
Let's face it, eating together with people is one of the most common and universal means of socializing for mankind. The people you hang out with will have the same dietary habits you do because those are the places you are used to gathering and the food you are all used to eating. If your friends eat healthy food, you'll be forced to go the healthy places and probably won't gain as much weight. If your friends eat unhealthy food, you'll be forced to go to unhealthy places.
The alternative is simply cutting yourself off from your friends, which only affirms the point of the research.
With an elevator, though, if you get rid of braille and tactile buttons, you've essentially prevented a blind person from reaching the upper floors of the building.
See, now that's a VERY good reason (and one I should've thought about since I had just responded to another thread about the iPhone and the blind). I didn't even think about blindness in connection with an interface that isn't optional.
I was mostly responding to his complaints about that the lack of tactile response and quick feedback in soft-displays and saying that they don't matter for an elevator because elevators don't have good feedback to begin with.
iPhone -- we'll see the verdict regarding this. I, for one, would appreciate a "hang up" button as I tend to push this a million times when I want to hang up... it is nice to have a solid feeling as you wait for the UI to respond. With a softkey, did you really hit it? Did the UI register it? You don't know without watching the screen. I view this as a bit extreme, but we will see if people complain. Buttons have their place when well-implemented.
Can you imagine getting on a "soft-key" elevator? I think it would be cool at first, then really annoying.
Why? Many if not most elevators already don't respond instantly to button presses. Heck, maybe it would stop all those silly people who think that pushing the "door close" button actually does something when the fireman's key isn't inserted.
The only annoyance I can see is the grungy, unattractive appearance of a public touchscreen. It's not like normal buttons are any cleaner, but the backlighting of a touchscreen really shows it.
Why do sight-impaired users need a $600 phone with video-playback and web-browsing capabilities?
Seems like making carriers offer a phone actually targeted to the visually-impaired (maybe with text-to-speech webbrowsing and braille input) would be preferable to trying to force vendors of phones with explicitly visually-oriented features to move to accommodate a user base that would be poorly served by its useful feature/price ratio.
It should be the carriers and not every single kind of phone that should support handicapped users. Otherwise, you're deliberately stepping on innovation for people who can take advantage of a visually-oriented phone in a Harrison Bergeron-esque quest to prevent gadget envy.
The level of pain involved in watching nearly anything live-action that comes on Japanese television cannot be understated. The production values are poor, the actors are utterly talentless, and the content is void of sentience. It's incredibly cringe-worthy to watch. The corniness level of Japanese television can only really be rivaled in American pop culture terms by the TV of the 70s -- especially the game shows, talent shows, comedy shows, and soap operas mentioned in the article.
TV was the worst part of my time in Japan back in 2000.
What's anime have to do with the topic at hand? Anime isn't shown during prime-time hours on TV. Anime in Japan falls into two categories:
1) Kiddie stuff shown in the after-school time slot.
2) Otaku-oriented stuff shown at night on premium channels like WOWOW and direct-to-video stuff.
The stuff they're talking about is all live action: soap operas, comedy shows, game shows, etc., and Japanese live-action television takes Sturgeon's Law to 11.
I'm guessing you've never worked on a large product that's released to end-users and has release deadlines that should avoid slipping. Bug triage is exceptionally common on such projects. Nobody fixes every last bug before release, and I've had five year old low-priority bugs that were still on my to-do list when I left the last company I worked on that had such a product.
What you spend your time on is finding and fixing the critical bugs, followed by the high priority bugs, follow by the mediu-- oh, hey wait, someone added new features and there's a host of new bugs to fix. Yay!
I wish I was wrong, but this is how the real world works most of the time. I'm kind of glad to have spent the past few years on internal-use only applications.
Yes, but these were mostly international conflicts. In modern times, we have a much better framework for responding to international conflicts than we do intranational conflicts. See Rwanda for a good example. Rwanda was the result of the Belgians taking two ethnic groups, putting them under one government, and elevating the minority over the majority. The current civil war in Iraq is pretty similar only with a little more even-handedness in the genocide between the Shia and Sunni Arabs.
Personally, I've come to believe that partitioning the state into three regions and letting the people within them have some political space is the only way the conflict's going to end. That solution has it's own problems (Kurdish conflict with Turkey, Shia closeness to Iran, and Sunni closeness to Syria), but if an end to bloodshed is the highest priority, it's the best solution for that particular problem.
Similarly, Afghanistan might've been a stable state decades ago if there were power struggles between its four main ethnic groups. Partitioning is not a good idea for us in this case because it would provide no brake on the Taliban-dominated Pashtun regions, but many of the problems we have there wouldn't have been such a problem if they had been four countries in the first place.
Commerce is *not* a one-way street. When someone buys something, assuming they aren't being pressured at *that* moment, they prefer the good to the money, and the seller prefers the money to the good.
Yes, but what does that have to do with advertising? After all, I generally don't see an ad for a good right where I'm going to buy it. That's a large part of my objection. I don't mind an ad for something in a store that sells it, and I've said so elsewhere. After all, I'm already there to look for similar goods.
My point was that the decision to buy is one-sided because the decision to sell has already long ago been made.
I consider the two areas both implications of the same premise: do people have the right to pressure others to do things they did not ask to be pressured with, but which they may decide they like?
See, now there is a good question. If you'd phrased it that was from the start instead of attempting to be insulting, this discussion might've gone a very different way.
Basically, I'd say that I neither consider it inherently a right nor inherently a crime. I don't think the answer has a universal "yes" or "no" answer. I think that the answer is entirely dependent on context and intent.
This is why I mentioned a distinction between asking out someone you already have a less romantic relationship with and hitting on a stranger. Intent is different because the list of possible motives for hitting on a stranger are inherently more limited by your lack of previous knowledge of them. You generally only want the one material gain from the transaction.
Similarly advertisers only want you for your money and don't care about the effects of their ads on the rest of your life. They don't care if it clutters up a previously pretty neighborhood with garish visual noise. They don't care if it breaks up the flow of the movie you were watching. They don't care if their junk mail fills up landfills. They don't care if they interrupt dinner with a phone call. They don't care if you have to waste time deleting their spam. They don't care about any of this because they don't have to bear these costs.
That difference in intent matters to me.
Some of those products, I have decided would be nice to have, and I have purchased them. I certainly didn't need them, but if needs were all people went by, neither one of us would be on Slashdot right now. Neither would we have computers, or electricity. Hey, the Amish get along without, so they must not be necessities.
Forgive me if I roll my eyes at the prospect that we'd all be churning own butter if not for the brave work of advertising companies.
Also, while I did say things I "need," I more meant things that I already decided that I wanted. I don't *need* to buy the newest Harry Potter book, but suffice it to say that I'm aware it exists in spite of not having been exposed to any ads for it other than a single pre-order sign-up placard in the bookstores I frequent.
That's the sort of thing that doesn't bother me. I'm already in the store looking for books, so why not have a few tasteful ads for books I'll be interested in? On the other hand, I do not sign up for "rewards" cards because I don't want them sending me junk mail. When I decide that I'm in the mood to buy books and that I have enough money to throw around on it, I'll head to the danged store, and no sooner.
I like it when I do not have to go well out of my way to find things that are interesting to me.
Well, I suppose what you consider "well out of your way" is where we'd differ. I would *never* sign up for an email newsletter selling me products. I *would* subscribe to an RSS feed that I could check whenever I feel like it. For me the difference is in who initiates the transaction. I want to be the one in charge of when I see ads and not somebody who has a financial incentive to encourage me to spend my money foolishly.
Essentially, I don't consider advice about products from friends in random conversation to be a form of push advertising anymore than I consider being asked out after mutual flirting with a friend to be advertising. In both cases, the situation is intimate, the parties involved are well-known to each other, interest is mutually displayed, and the agenda is not dominated by an entirely material interest.
The opposite of these attributes are all parts of what I find irritating about advertising and about come-ons from strangers. Really, though, I'm stretching to finding the common ground between them. I generally try to think of romance and commerce as distinct things. You may disagree, but I'll go into my reasons a bit more below.
(As an aside, there are ways for strangers to hook up without spamming uninterested parties. Dating sites, speed dating, etc. are ways for people interested in hooking up to meet other people interested in hooking up and to do a little research before trying out a full date with them. That's more analogous to the sort of non-push advertising that I prefer.)
What kind of rule do you want people to adhere to, that eliminates the bad instances and keeps the good?
Any attempt at a relationship though is going to run the risk of bothering someone not interested. That's just part of human nature; love is a two-way street, after all. If you consider that to be a big negative, then you must concede it's at least a necessary evil because there's no other way to know. Commerce is not the same, though.
It is possible to have people buy only things they were already interested in because commerce is usually a mostly one-way relationship. The presence of a business generally indicates a willingness to sell. After all, very few businesses only sell to one customer. Commerce is all about the customer's choice to come seek out and buy. This is a large part of why I see the analogy you're making as a tad stretched.
If you've ever hit on a girl before, you're a hypocrite.
I know you're just trolling, but two points:
1) Trying to start a real relationship is different from asking for money (or sex).
2) Forcing your desperation on a stranger is different from asking to deepen a relationship with a friend.
I don't mind Amazon telling me about things that I might like when I log in. I would mind if they started spontaneously emailing me about these things or if one of their partners that I'd never done business with started doing the same thing.
(Also, having been hit on by strangers I had zero interest in before, I will say that it is a distinctly creepy experience, and I do oppose it in general. I wouldn't want to make someone else feel that way.)
You just can't quote him or play a soundclip without bleeping it. There's all sorts of amusing ways to describe with euphemisms what someone else said.
My favorite is to tell some one "to perform an anatomical impossibility," and there's always "dropped the F-bomb."
Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site.
I would. I'd mind terribly. Putting aside the creepy privacy issues (which would be enough to set me off), I just simply don't like push advertising at all. I don't want my life to interrupted by people interjecting their pleas for me to give them my money for crap I don't need.
I don't like TV ads. I don't like radio ads. I don't like billboards. I don't like fliers on phone poles. I HATE people who stick menus in my apartment door, I HATE telemarketers, and I'd hate spammers too even if they were selling me things I want. I have a habit of stopping doing business with any business that gets too pushy with its advertising (like the people who stick menus in your door), and a spam for something I want is the best way to keep me from ever buying it (at least from that vendor).
The only kind of advertising that I like is the kind where you list a product in some public forum, and I find it when I decide I'm in the market for it. (e.g. Froogle.) Anything that tries to come and find me to tell me how wonderful my life would be if I just bought it is annoying. (And God forbid an ad actually be effective and influence me to do something unwise with my money.) Unless your ad entertains me, go away.
(And yes, I realize that I am on the far end of crotchety about advertising, but that's just my opinion.)
If only one person in a thousand is the type who gets violent at a demonstration, and your demonstration has five-thousand people, your demonstration will probably contain violence.
Heck, and this is true even if the police aren't slipping agitators into your ranks.
Nothing gives a person ethics like being well paid for it.
Yes, because that has held to be so true in the arena of smokable drugs.
Unfortunately, that will only exacerbate all of our other problems from energy use -- namely the carbon footprint of our industry.
We should be working on getting carbon back into the ground and not on pulling more out.
What are you, mad? The man clearly said kill two birds with one stone.
He's clearly a conservationist working hard to prevent erosion caused by mining.
I suppose you think that willy-nilly throwing as many stones as it takes is a good idea or that we can just toss the same stone over and over again. Remember it's reduce, reuse, recycle -- in that order.
So, out of curiosity, what was the point of bringing it up in the first place then?