Standing up for one's moral convictions is now silly?
- If they're silly morals, then yes. - If "standing up" means doing something that makes you feel good, hurts people who weren't involved, and has no affect on the people who were involved, then yes. - If you need to announce on a web site how virtuous you are for your so-called morals, then yes. - If you don't care when people do bad things, but you pretend to care when the news media tells you to care, then yes.
In other words, it seems like you have "standing up for one's moral convictions" confused with shallow media-influenced groupthink, politics, hand wringing, feel-good symbolism, and public self-congratulation.
This is the modern substitute for morals and values that doesn't require actually believing in anything or making any hard choices -- just follow the crowd and say the words the press tells you to say.
Even at 4 frames per second, that's a seriously large amount of data to downlink. Something like 64 times an HDTV signal with images that would tend not to compress as well as FMV.
The article doesn't say what they're using for a downlink.
"One person was killed in a 2-car head-on collision at the corner of 6th Ave. and 7th Street last night between 2 and 3 AM. The victim was a 33-year-old man. The name of the victim has not been identified pending notification of the family. The driver of the other car was taken to a local hospital. His identity has not been released."
Not news:
- Speculation about the accident's cause - Advice to wear seatbelts - Quotes or positions of any advocacy groups for or against any cause. Example: MADD says [the usual thing they say] about the speculated cause of the accident - Any kind of race baiting related to the different races of the police, the drivers, or the people at the hospital. Did the victim die because he was of a different race than the ambulance dispatcher? Channel 5 says no (wink, wink), of course not. - Predictions of the accidents in the future. - Polls about how people feel about car accidents - etc.
Real news tends to be boring. If it seems interesting, that's a sign it might not be news at all, or it may be essentially false. We've seen that on Slashdot. The stories that seem most interesting are most likely to be false.
Sure it is. Look at sports reporting. Look at the police blotter. Good journalism is a recitation of what happened. X person did Y action at Z time in the past. The selection of what events are reported can be bad and is frequently biased, but there's nothing about saying what happened that's bad journalism.
Most of the bad journalism you see is when something else is going on:
- Polls are not news - Predictions of the future are not news - Implications aren't news - Health claims aren't news - Science claims aren't news - Political news is so biased it can't really be considered news any more - News you can use is not news - Human events stories are not news - Profiles of local people are not news - Any report with music is not news
The original post is correct. Science journalism can't be done well unless some revolutionary, unmistakable discovery is made. The first nuclear bomb test is an example of a science news story that could easily be reported correctly. The experiment succeeded.
Some study where 6 rats die instead of the usual 5 is the other extreme.
Implications aren't news, nor are they necessarily true.
If it's true, then directly state it as a conclusion. There's no need to imply. If it "might be" true, then reporting it as news is journalistic malpractice.
Our ancestors wanted to live in a society. Anti-social losers like this whiner were treated at least as bad by our ancestors as this guy was treated. There were certain minimum standards of behavior in adult civilization back then.
Jackass: Stop being a whiny little child and just don't go to Circuit City if you don't like their policies.
Circuit City: Just kick the jackass out of your store and tell him not to come back. Don't arrest him. He just wants attention, like a 4-year-old throwing a fit.
Slashdot editors: Is there any story about a whiny loser you won't highlight? Boo-fricken-hoo, they asked to see his receipt on leaving the store. He wants sympathy for that?
This guy needs his mom to come and spank him to teach him not to throw a tantrum in a store. Grow up for God's sake.
It's a game and Blu-Ray player. I play games and Blu-Rays on it.
You'd care if the company selling you stuff was lying to you, right? No?
I focus on what matters to me. Then I check whether it meets my requirements. I didn't buy it thinking it had feature X and then later find out it didn't. I checked before I bought it.
If any company is guilty of that kind of thing, it's Microsoft, BTW. I don't think people bought their 360 thinking it would crap-out on them. (Nothing against the 360. I may buy one when they have a more reliable one. It has some great exclusive games.)
Amusingly, I wouldn't be replying to a post right now if you took your own advice.
you don't know the whole history of the SIXAXIS/Rumble story
Sure I do.
it's yet another example of how Sony's been tripping over its arrogance over the last two years
That's a fine opinion. I guess I don't care about "arrogance", whether it be imagined or real, lasting two years or more or less. It's a game console. The arrogance is just a bonus. You can have the arrogance I got with mine, BTW, I'm not using it.
You may want to be in love with the company that makes your game console. I don't have that requirement.
they spouted several different stories from technical problems with the unit to claiming it's not a big deal anyway. So yes, you're right, that'll teach them to promote their choices as the best ones, that is when they choose to be dishonest.
You don't know that much about marketing and advertisement, do you? Every advertising and marketing claim can be considered dishonest from some perspective of ultimate purity (or if you are the competition).
They never claimed to have rumble. That would be a straight-up lie.
Why should anyone care why? If you knew why, would your games would be more fun? What's the specific benefit to knowing why? (Everyone knew it was because of the Immersion dispute anyway. I guess knowing that has been making my DVDs have higher resolution and better sound all along. Hmm.)
There actually are several reasons why Sony's been hard to take seriously lately. A bunch of people didn't spontaneously wake up with a craving to hate them.
Got to hate someone, right? You can't, um, just buy or not buy a product based on what it does versus what you want and how much money it costs. Hate is required. Needed.
(It calls us, waking us at night, putting orangish images in our heads with flashes of teeth. We have directed it, but have not tamed it. It is still wild, it is. We must hold it tightly...)
That will teach them to try to promote their choices as the best ones. They won't try that again.
I look forward to the future of marketing slogans you've created. "It's only as good as it is", "We like it, but you should make up your own mind", "Adequate. At least for us.", and so on.
No more hype ever. Not for us. Someone on the net might have a counterpoint, after all.
A developer of a game that's not out yet hopes to release more games in the future on the same platform.
"Hopes" for the distant future of an unproven game franchise aren't really news.
There will be plenty of actual news from the Tokyo Game Show this week. It's no big deal, but there's no need to post this kind of thing unless you're using it to test your internet connection or something.
Telling kids to get better grades misses a lot of the point. How about "be a better person"? Add "how to be a better person" and "why to be a better person" and you have some of what's needed. Getting good grades is OK. But a good person will have opportunity even without them.
Denying kids games doesn't change anything. You want them watching TV instead?
The lesson here is: don't try to be someone's Mom unless you are his Mom.
I wish more people in our society would learn this lesson. I'm old enough to not need a Mom to tell me what to do or not to do. Kids, on the other hand, already have a Mom and don't really need 50 of them.
I think it's more of a problem that 100 people fled the scene...
Yeah. When someone dies nearby, it's usually sensible to crowd around the location he died. Perhaps you could also precisely mimic what he was doing at the time -- eat the food he was eating, smoke the cigarettes, drink the drinks, say the same things to the same people, etc. Right?
People buy the iPod because they like it, and they pay for it themselves; why is this a problem?
Hey! It's a problem because we are the experts, ok? People should ask us what to buy. And we'll suggest some sort of unheard-of niche device, because that's why you asked an expert. Do you need an expert to suggest the most popular device? No. Do you need an expert to configure something that's easy to use? No. We're important. Don't you know that? We know better. We can't look down on the ignorant masses when we acknowledge they made the right choice. So they didn't, no matter how happy they are.
But "bloated" isn't a consumer-focused criticism. I don't know who it's focused on, actually. But normal computer users don't see "bloated".
If they have too little memory, they see their computer going slow. Not just for iTunes, but for everything. It's a consistent user experience. iTunes isn't any slower than any of the rest of their bloated software -- which is probably all of it.
iTunes generally looks good and does what you expect it to. That's what computer users notice.
Ok, fine. I withdraw the extremely sarcastic bits from my post above.
People do do it without price gouging, and you are allowed to make a profit, just not a ridiculous one.
But if you make any profit, you stand the chance of being accused of price-gouging. Then you have to defend yourself from the accusation. You have to justify your profit as not ridiculous. And there's no standard, so it's all guesswork. It's an additional risk. And God help you if you try to increase your prices to compensate you for that additional risk.
I happen to think legalizing gouging would reduce distribution, not increase it in extraordinary market conditions.
Ok. Economics and history teach us the opposite, but if you genuinely believe that then there's not much else to be said.
To make your example work, let's say that neighbor A is just as likely to hit more people and injure them as neighbor B is to attack future victims.
That was the point. That's why an attack is worse than an accident. That's why attackers need to be stopped. Because accidents are just bad things that happen. Attacks are willful. An attacker will attack again, and he'll try to do an even better job next time.
Fundamentally, I'm getting from the above that you prefer the right to pollute in order to save money over the right to privacy from unwarranted eavesdropping.
My point was the impact of the remedy on freedom. I thought freedom was your interest in preventing the abuse of the wiretaps. Oppressive regimes watch their citizens.
But you want the government to order people around to prevent pollution. Ordering people around is oppressing them directly. You want the government to fine and imprison people who disobey. Oppressing people is worse than watching them, even if watching can be a tool that oppressors use.
And the justification is to prevent bad things from happening based on numbers. And the numbers are based on... something. (Victims of terrorism have actual corpses. They're not numbers extrapolated from some advocacy pamphlet to push a cause.)
Saving money saves lives too, BTW. That's part of the reason everyone goes and spends time at work. They're giving up part of their lives in exchange for money. Taking it from them is taking part of their life. I doubt you've figured this into the numbers.
In fact, if you gave me a small sum of money, I'd gladly double my risk of being killed by a terrorist.
But you're making that decision for everyone, not just for you. You're risking their lives. It's not just an either/or choice, it's a question of responsibility.
Lots of people would risk their lives for the chance to get what they want. People do it all the time because there's a personal payoff on success. It's a different question when you're risking other people. There's a responsibility question -- a question of duty.
Skydiving is a good example. Say I want to skydive. I'm willing to take the risks. Does that mean it's OK for me to strap parachutes on other people and push them out of a plane? (For the sake of the example, it's not against their will. They're willing to do what I say but don't know the risks themselves. Blindfolded fraternity pledges or something like that.) Why isn't that OK? I'm willing to take the risks, why shouldn't I be able to decide to impose those risks on them?
Is it OK for a company to pollute if the management is willing to breathe the resulting air or drink the resulting water? Why not?
Why should someone take all his stored-up vacation days off, buy inventory, rent a truck, drive it to a disaster area, and sell supplies? You won't let him make any money at it. He'll stay home and donate $50 to a relief fund.
Are you going to provide the water filters for the people in the disaster area? Why not? Don't you have any humanity?
So the people in the disaster area will go without the things they need. How is that "humanity"?
And how is it "humanity" to jail someone trucking in relief supplies? He's helping. When you need it, clean water is worth paying for.
Have fun patting yourself on the back for jailing the guy who was helping people not die from tainted water. What a paragon of moral and ethical rectitude you are. I guess it's easy when you don't care about consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Standing up for one's moral convictions is now silly?
- If they're silly morals, then yes.
- If "standing up" means doing something that makes you feel good, hurts people who weren't involved, and has no affect on the people who were involved, then yes.
- If you need to announce on a web site how virtuous you are for your so-called morals, then yes.
- If you don't care when people do bad things, but you pretend to care when the news media tells you to care, then yes.
In other words, it seems like you have "standing up for one's moral convictions" confused with shallow media-influenced groupthink, politics, hand wringing, feel-good symbolism, and public self-congratulation.
This is the modern substitute for morals and values that doesn't require actually believing in anything or making any hard choices -- just follow the crowd and say the words the press tells you to say.
probably a satellite dish
Yeah. That's not a lot of detail there.
It's like someone asked how the worldwide cellular phone network worked an you pointed to the little antenna on top of the phone.
Even at 4 frames per second, that's a seriously large amount of data to downlink. Something like 64 times an HDTV signal with images that would tend not to compress as well as FMV.
The article doesn't say what they're using for a downlink.
This is news:
"One person was killed in a 2-car head-on collision at the corner of 6th Ave. and 7th Street last night between 2 and 3 AM. The victim was a 33-year-old man. The name of the victim has not been identified pending notification of the family. The driver of the other car was taken to a local hospital. His identity has not been released."
Not news:
- Speculation about the accident's cause
- Advice to wear seatbelts
- Quotes or positions of any advocacy groups for or against any cause. Example: MADD says [the usual thing they say] about the speculated cause of the accident
- Any kind of race baiting related to the different races of the police, the drivers, or the people at the hospital. Did the victim die because he was of a different race than the ambulance dispatcher? Channel 5 says no (wink, wink), of course not.
- Predictions of the accidents in the future.
- Polls about how people feel about car accidents
- etc.
Real news tends to be boring. If it seems interesting, that's a sign it might not be news at all, or it may be essentially false. We've seen that on Slashdot. The stories that seem most interesting are most likely to be false.
Sure it is. Look at sports reporting. Look at the police blotter. Good journalism is a recitation of what happened. X person did Y action at Z time in the past. The selection of what events are reported can be bad and is frequently biased, but there's nothing about saying what happened that's bad journalism.
Most of the bad journalism you see is when something else is going on:
- Polls are not news
- Predictions of the future are not news
- Implications aren't news
- Health claims aren't news
- Science claims aren't news
- Political news is so biased it can't really be considered news any more
- News you can use is not news
- Human events stories are not news
- Profiles of local people are not news
- Any report with music is not news
The original post is correct. Science journalism can't be done well unless some revolutionary, unmistakable discovery is made. The first nuclear bomb test is an example of a science news story that could easily be reported correctly. The experiment succeeded.
Some study where 6 rats die instead of the usual 5 is the other extreme.
Implications aren't news, nor are they necessarily true.
If it's true, then directly state it as a conclusion. There's no need to imply. If it "might be" true, then reporting it as news is journalistic malpractice.
They have to keep fighting the greatest threat to civil liberties in world history: the Boy Scouts.
Who is this "Konath" person?
Our ancestors wanted to live in a society. Anti-social losers like this whiner were treated at least as bad by our ancestors as this guy was treated. There were certain minimum standards of behavior in adult civilization back then.
Jackass: Stop being a whiny little child and just don't go to Circuit City if you don't like their policies.
Circuit City: Just kick the jackass out of your store and tell him not to come back. Don't arrest him. He just wants attention, like a 4-year-old throwing a fit.
Slashdot editors: Is there any story about a whiny loser you won't highlight? Boo-fricken-hoo, they asked to see his receipt on leaving the store. He wants sympathy for that?
This guy needs his mom to come and spank him to teach him not to throw a tantrum in a store. Grow up for God's sake.
I think this should be from the "I DON'T want my MTV" dept.
you purchased it as an investment.
It's a game and Blu-Ray player. I play games and Blu-Rays on it.
You'd care if the company selling you stuff was lying to you, right? No?
I focus on what matters to me. Then I check whether it meets my requirements. I didn't buy it thinking it had feature X and then later find out it didn't. I checked before I bought it.
If any company is guilty of that kind of thing, it's Microsoft, BTW. I don't think people bought their 360 thinking it would crap-out on them. (Nothing against the 360. I may buy one when they have a more reliable one. It has some great exclusive games.)
Amusingly, I wouldn't be replying to a post right now if you took your own advice.
I like pie.
you don't know the whole history of the SIXAXIS/Rumble story
Sure I do.
it's yet another example of how Sony's been tripping over its arrogance over the last two years
That's a fine opinion. I guess I don't care about "arrogance", whether it be imagined or real, lasting two years or more or less. It's a game console. The arrogance is just a bonus. You can have the arrogance I got with mine, BTW, I'm not using it.
You may want to be in love with the company that makes your game console. I don't have that requirement.
they spouted several different stories from technical problems with the unit to claiming it's not a big deal anyway. So yes, you're right, that'll teach them to promote their choices as the best ones, that is when they choose to be dishonest.
You don't know that much about marketing and advertisement, do you? Every advertising and marketing claim can be considered dishonest from some perspective of ultimate purity (or if you are the competition).
They never claimed to have rumble. That would be a straight-up lie.
Why should anyone care why? If you knew why, would your games would be more fun? What's the specific benefit to knowing why? (Everyone knew it was because of the Immersion dispute anyway. I guess knowing that has been making my DVDs have higher resolution and better sound all along. Hmm.)
There actually are several reasons why Sony's been hard to take seriously lately. A bunch of people didn't spontaneously wake up with a craving to hate them.
Got to hate someone, right? You can't, um, just buy or not buy a product based on what it does versus what you want and how much money it costs. Hate is required. Needed.
(It calls us, waking us at night, putting orangish images in our heads with flashes of teeth. We have directed it, but have not tamed it. It is still wild, it is. We must hold it tightly...)
Way to go. What a zinger! You really zinged them.
That will teach them to try to promote their choices as the best ones. They won't try that again.
I look forward to the future of marketing slogans you've created. "It's only as good as it is", "We like it, but you should make up your own mind", "Adequate. At least for us.", and so on.
No more hype ever. Not for us. Someone on the net might have a counterpoint, after all.
(This post makes me feel British.)
A developer of a game that's not out yet hopes to release more games in the future on the same platform.
"Hopes" for the distant future of an unproven game franchise aren't really news.
There will be plenty of actual news from the Tokyo Game Show this week. It's no big deal, but there's no need to post this kind of thing unless you're using it to test your internet connection or something.
Sounds like the "village" is the problem.
Telling kids to get better grades misses a lot of the point. How about "be a better person"? Add "how to be a better person" and "why to be a better person" and you have some of what's needed. Getting good grades is OK. But a good person will have opportunity even without them.
Denying kids games doesn't change anything. You want them watching TV instead?
Translation:
Hey, all you Moms out there: you're mostly all bad Moms. Everyone else: your Mom was a mostly bad Mom.
This guy says so.
Anonymous bureaucrats and silly busybody store clerks aren't a village. Extended family and neighbors -- maybe.
The lesson here is: don't try to be someone's Mom unless you are his Mom.
I wish more people in our society would learn this lesson. I'm old enough to not need a Mom to tell me what to do or not to do. Kids, on the other hand, already have a Mom and don't really need 50 of them.
I think it's more of a problem that 100 people fled the scene...
Yeah. When someone dies nearby, it's usually sensible to crowd around the location he died. Perhaps you could also precisely mimic what he was doing at the time -- eat the food he was eating, smoke the cigarettes, drink the drinks, say the same things to the same people, etc. Right?
It works fine out of the box. It works exactly the way Apple intended it to work.
If you want to use it in a way it's not designed to be used, then don't be surprised if it doesn't "work out of the box" for that.
My efforts to use my iPod as a waffle-iron have met with little success so far.
People buy the iPod because they like it, and they pay for it themselves; why is this a problem?
Hey! It's a problem because we are the experts, ok? People should ask us what to buy. And we'll suggest some sort of unheard-of niche device, because that's why you asked an expert. Do you need an expert to suggest the most popular device? No. Do you need an expert to configure something that's easy to use? No. We're important. Don't you know that? We know better. We can't look down on the ignorant masses when we acknowledge they made the right choice. So they didn't, no matter how happy they are.
I can't believe you even asked.
iTunes IS bloated.
But "bloated" isn't a consumer-focused criticism. I don't know who it's focused on, actually. But normal computer users don't see "bloated".
If they have too little memory, they see their computer going slow. Not just for iTunes, but for everything. It's a consistent user experience. iTunes isn't any slower than any of the rest of their bloated software -- which is probably all of it.
iTunes generally looks good and does what you expect it to. That's what computer users notice.
Ok, fine. I withdraw the extremely sarcastic bits from my post above.
People do do it without price gouging, and you are allowed to make a profit, just not a ridiculous one.
But if you make any profit, you stand the chance of being accused of price-gouging. Then you have to defend yourself from the accusation. You have to justify your profit as not ridiculous. And there's no standard, so it's all guesswork. It's an additional risk. And God help you if you try to increase your prices to compensate you for that additional risk.
I happen to think legalizing gouging would reduce distribution, not increase it in extraordinary market conditions.
Ok. Economics and history teach us the opposite, but if you genuinely believe that then there's not much else to be said.
To make your example work, let's say that neighbor A is just as likely to hit more people and injure them as neighbor B is to attack future victims.
... something. (Victims of terrorism have actual corpses. They're not numbers extrapolated from some advocacy pamphlet to push a cause.)
That was the point. That's why an attack is worse than an accident. That's why attackers need to be stopped. Because accidents are just bad things that happen. Attacks are willful. An attacker will attack again, and he'll try to do an even better job next time.
Fundamentally, I'm getting from the above that you prefer the right to pollute in order to save money over the right to privacy from unwarranted eavesdropping.
My point was the impact of the remedy on freedom. I thought freedom was your interest in preventing the abuse of the wiretaps. Oppressive regimes watch their citizens.
But you want the government to order people around to prevent pollution. Ordering people around is oppressing them directly. You want the government to fine and imprison people who disobey. Oppressing people is worse than watching them, even if watching can be a tool that oppressors use.
And the justification is to prevent bad things from happening based on numbers. And the numbers are based on
Saving money saves lives too, BTW. That's part of the reason everyone goes and spends time at work. They're giving up part of their lives in exchange for money. Taking it from them is taking part of their life. I doubt you've figured this into the numbers.
In fact, if you gave me a small sum of money, I'd gladly double my risk of being killed by a terrorist.
But you're making that decision for everyone, not just for you. You're risking their lives. It's not just an either/or choice, it's a question of responsibility.
Lots of people would risk their lives for the chance to get what they want. People do it all the time because there's a personal payoff on success. It's a different question when you're risking other people. There's a responsibility question -- a question of duty.
Skydiving is a good example. Say I want to skydive. I'm willing to take the risks. Does that mean it's OK for me to strap parachutes on other people and push them out of a plane? (For the sake of the example, it's not against their will. They're willing to do what I say but don't know the risks themselves. Blindfolded fraternity pledges or something like that.) Why isn't that OK? I'm willing to take the risks, why shouldn't I be able to decide to impose those risks on them?
Is it OK for a company to pollute if the management is willing to breathe the resulting air or drink the resulting water? Why not?
Unless they have some humanity.
Do you want people to have clean water or not?
Why should someone take all his stored-up vacation days off, buy inventory, rent a truck, drive it to a disaster area, and sell supplies? You won't let him make any money at it. He'll stay home and donate $50 to a relief fund.
Are you going to provide the water filters for the people in the disaster area? Why not? Don't you have any humanity?
So the people in the disaster area will go without the things they need. How is that "humanity"?
And how is it "humanity" to jail someone trucking in relief supplies? He's helping. When you need it, clean water is worth paying for.
Have fun patting yourself on the back for jailing the guy who was helping people not die from tainted water. What a paragon of moral and ethical rectitude you are. I guess it's easy when you don't care about consequences.