While it's practically painless to set up these days, a big argument against WiFi in any business is the type of client you attract.
Remember that you're likely to attract businessy types too busy to do anything but work during lunch, or student/cheap types too cheap to pay for highspeed access themselves (and therefore, unlikely to spend $30 a month on coffee). Is this really the atmosphere you want in your business?
It also depends what type of netcafe you're opening. There are netcafes primarily for gaming, and those primarily for getting a cup of coffee while surfing the net. I've worked in one where people are basically gaming straight up, and the atmosphere is radically different than the local coffee shop.
If you want a social, living coffeeshop, I'd say cut off the internet access. People go to a coffeeshop to relax with friends, listen to jazz, or curl up in a comfy chair with a big book. As much of a netaholic as I am, there has to be a balance somewhere.
Okay. I understand the hatred for portal pages, but the truth is, lots and lots of people like them. Why? Because they can't just "make a local page with RSS feeds".
That would be like taking your car into the mechanic with a transmission problem and having him scoff at you, "Pffft. Go build yourself a new one. Moron."
The large majority of net users don't know what RSS means. They don't know HTML. Web Portals let people click on things and have a familiar feel to them. People only need to know one little address to get to a place where they can find "everything" on the web.
They appear on TNT and USA and the like during shows like Law and Order. Although, you're right in that almost any time I do see something like that, I'm watching with my girlfriend.
But I think my original point still holds up - rarely are ads targetted towards impulse buyers (with the exception of things like: 19.95 for 50 western movies! act now!).
Probably not. A good portion of advertising isn't there so that you have an immediate desire to go out and buy something. When Dunkin Donuts runs ads for their new random beverage, they don't figure that the thousands of people watching the game will go run out and buy a drink *that instant*.
But if you've got to choose between Dunkin Donuts and some place you've never heard of before, being familiar with the "variety" and "quality" of Dunkin Donuts products from their commercials, even if you're not a regular Dunkin customer, you may decide to walk in and grab a coffee there instead of the place across the street.
I mean, Beer ads don't really make me want beer, car ads don't make me want a car... almost any ad I've ever watched hardly makes me want anything (except sex, which seems to be the cardinal rule of good advertising - lots of sex appeal). I'd shut them all off if I could. I never have any intention of buying anything I don't "want". But who knows how the ads influence my purchasing decisions?
[on that note, yeah, it is excessive for tampon commercials to be piped into a house with 3 20-something guys as the only residents.]
"Guns have their place, and having them be common in society isn't such a bad thing."
Yes it is. Crime goes up, and so do accidental deaths. See handgun legislation and results in states (good example: MA).
Moral of the story: having deadly objects around is bad. Saying "people should learn how to use them properly" or suggesting proper gun safety isn't good enough. That's like putting up spikes all over the road and defending their presence with "Well, they wouldn't be dangerous if people would just learn to avoid them!"
Guns are tools made to kill things. We hardly have any reasons to kill things any longer. Hence, we no longer need the tool.
No, it's not forced choice. If it's forced choice, then I can't choose whether or not I want to wager my money, and then end result is that you hand me either $75 or $125 without any interaction on my part.
The difference is either I've been given $100 and given the chance to wager, or given $0 and the chance to wager. I'd be a fool to pass it up in the second condition, and a regular old risk-taker if I choose to wager in the 1st condition.
I pressed "stop", but it posted anyway. That should say:
"Fostering environments where it's okay to tear kids down because they're doing well in school (we've all seen first hand how little teachers and parents actually do to stop this sort of thing) is the worst thing, in my opinion, short of a lack of funding for obvious materials."
Eliminate American Anti-intellectualism. Geeks and nerds, while sometimes socially inept, don't deserve to be bullied for good grades. Fostering environments where it's okay to tear kids down because they're doing well in school (we've all seen first hand how little teachers and parents actually do to stop this sort of thing).
Yeah. I'd say that's the biggest issue. Putting kids in an environment where success means social punishment.
Innocent people die in surgery, too. No one goes around claiming surgery is bad because it kills a very small amount of people and helps a great deal.
If the death penalty really did help people more than it hurt people, it wouldn't be so bad. I mean, it would be possible to stomach the one innocent fatality if a thousand would-be murderers were dissuaded from murdering by the threat of death. But that isn't the case.
Simply saying "innocents die" isn't really fair, because lots of innocents die from lots of things we do as a culture. "Innocents die for no reason" is the part most of us can't stand.
Although the example you cite doesn't actually hold water, since if you give me $100 and I refuse to bet, I've still got 100 bucks. If you give me nothing and I refuse to bet, I've got nothing.
In one case, there's a 50% chance of losing money, in the other, there's a 100% chance of gaining.
Exactly how does one judge the "rehabilitation potential" of a criminal? By the severity of his or her crime?
I've yet, also, to see any published literature to that effect. While I don't doubt that there has been some severe imbalance in anyone who can kill, say, dozens of people, I do doubt that there is some tie to the crime committed and the capacity for "rehabilitation", whatever that entails.
I also feel that, although you're right (people killed never re-enter society), using that measure to judge the effectiveness of the death penalty is... plain silly. By that measure, anything which does what it does is effective. The death penalty also has lots of collateral damage, killing those not guilty (which you bring up, but don't propose a reasonable alternative to, since it still happens) and killing those who are in fact rehabilitated (even though they were deemed "unrehabilitated" in the first place, there's no way to go back and stop it from happening again). Furthermore, even though you might think it impossible to love someone on death row, these people do have families, most of which haven't totally disowned them, and the death is another death with implications of grief and guilt.
So, right, although it's successful at removing people from society, it still has things it doesn't succeed at.
I'd appreciate it if any death penalty advocates could please cite a published work (in a reputable journal) which clearly shows statistical evidence that the death penalty actually acts as a deterrant in the mind of would-be criminals.
As far as I can tell, it's just something that sounds really good. You know, "Criminals will be very scared of being killed for their actions, because normal people are very scared of being killed." From the little I know about the workings of the human mind, most sociopaths don't react to things the same way the rest of us do, and people who cause massive damage on an any scale - economic, physical, emotional - are sociopaths.
Anyway, I'd just appreciate some good evidence for the "deterrant" hypothesis. Then I'll start to believe it might be a good idea.
One of the real reasons Doom3 never took off is because I needed to buy a new computer to use it. And so did everyone else.
Counterstrike runs on crap hardware, and basically, a crap internet connection. You'll get called a lagger, a newbie, and a lamer, but it will work, and you can play, and have fun.
Gameplay is extremely important, but so too is availability.
The real "dupe" is in the price per unit of HL2. Although to the regular consumer, HL2 is around 50 bucks, to the company making the game, HL2 is pennies to produce once they've paid back RnD costs. HL2 units are CDs and booklets, nothing more, and valve can mass produce them like crazy.
Which means ATI can buy lots and lots of them for mucho cheap. And means that your "50 dollar value" game isn't really worth 50 bucks to either company.
But this sort of thing is done all the time. Macys, Filenes, Sears... almost all of them give away free gifts with purchase that cost little to the company but appear valuable to the consumer. Perfume cases, and samples, pretty silver trinkets, or computer games - really all the same. It just happened to bait lots of geeks this time.
Unless, of course, someone exploited the patching mechanism.
If we were living in a world where Microsoft provided patches and people actually downloaded them, we'd probably be in a world of highly "seemless" updating. Microsoft would default enable automatic updates on Mom and Pop boxes or work desktops hooked up to highspeed connections, and exploiting a mechanism used nearly by everyone would be a disaster.
That's the only way it could really increase. I agree.
There certainly is a law against being accessory to a crime, and this is the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling on filesharing.
Gun Makers aren't allowed to market their products as "the best way to murder and maim innocents!" They can market themselves as self-defense, hunting, and a variety of *legal* uses, but not as a way to commit a crime.
I don't really see why this is so complicated. This statement may or may not prove his intent. But if someone can convince a jury that it does, he may be guilty of being accessory to thousands upon thousands of infringements.
Because much of the law is intent in the new ruling on filesharing.
If you kill someone by hitting them with your car, you might get 200 days in jail. If you say outright that you meant to kill them purposefully, that's 50 years.
The only difference there is speech - speech that reveals intent.
If Cohen's intent is to facilitate widescale piracy, then he might be guilty of something. This might prove his intent (or, it might not). That's why this matters.
That's not the case. Mr. Quixly has a right to throw Mr. Shmoe out of his store, just like Contacts has the right to take WhenU advertising off of their server. But Mr. Shmoe can stand just outside the store and hand out any material he wants [he can even get a group of people to walk in front of the entrance of the store, barring entry!], and Mr. Quixly can hardly do a think about it.
That's the parallel. Quixley can't change what happens to his consumers just outside of his stores, because Shmoe has free speech to advertise.
Hey. News. It's legal. You can go to WalMart, and so long as you *aren't on their land*, you're allowed to advertise for whatever you want. Outside the parking lot, put up a big sign for your local deli. Or the KKK. Or the ACLU. Or whatever you'd like.
Since Adware doesn't directly affect the content of the website, there's very little difference. If you wanted to purchase the land around every WalMart for specifically advertising to the group of WalMart visiting consumers, you could do that. That's what Adware does. It does it a little more sneakily - by advertising to visitors of a website usually without the visitor's "approval" - but then, how often do you really approve advertising in the real world?
The ruling makes sense. Adware companies, so long as they are legal, should be able to use data to target ads.
That all being said, I think Adware companies are just about the most awful thing on earth from a consumer's standpoint (if only because they make the internet an awful ugly place). I'm not so sure that adware should be legal in the first place. But if it is, I don't see any problem with these methods. They're smart, and they work. Annoying, but they work.
In 4,5, and 6, Darth Vader was primarily the "bad guy". Sure, he had character, but it was primarily as the foil to the symbolic "light side" of the force that ran as an undercurrent in the rebellion / Luke's story.
By adding 1,2, and 3, Vader really becomes the central figure in the story, but he isn't given adequate plot time in 4 and 5. It's as if the writer of a tragedy changed focus in Acts 4 and 5, and then resumed Darth's story with his "return to the good side" in ep. 6. Darth and Obiwan (aside from the droids) are the only characters present in all 6 films, and Obiwan is only a ghost in 5 and 6. Darth is the only living character to speak in the 6 films, and this makes him central to the story, whether or not you like it.
And I don't like it. The story was good as Good vs. Evil rather than a "Look at how Power Can Corrupt the Good". Darth's story in 1-3, to me, totally shifts the focus of the films. That's why they can't actually be watched in their numerical order. Watching them that way totally screws with your perceptions of Darth in 4-6, and makes the plot seem convoluted and non sequitur. I mean, why should the films switch focus onto Padame's children when Darth Vader, the focus of the first three films, is still alive, kicking, and doing things in the Star Wars universe?
I don't really study neuroanatomy, but most patients with (hopefully repairable) brain damage aren't in need of an entire brain, they're in need of cells that produce specific chemicals. Parkinsons, for instance, is caused by a lack of Dopaminergic Neurons in a small portion towards the back of the brain; the ability to transplant new, fresh neurons may allieviate the symptoms.
A bit of an unfair comparison (because we can easily administer a drug and the injury is not nearly so severe) would be implanting cells that produce Lactase Enzyme for digesting dairy products in people who are lactose intolerant. It's not that the person needs a new stomach, they need a specific chemical which their brain cells are unable to make and we are unable to easily perscribe (dopamine precursors have lots of associated symptoms of their own).
Take for example the word "bank". When you read that word, do you activate either the representation of "Bank", as in, "the place where you deposit currency", or "Bank", as in, "the place where the river's edge meets the land?"
It's both, actually. Both representations activate. So it's not so clear that representations in the brain are context dependant.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's practically painless to set up these days, a big argument against WiFi in any business is the type of client you attract.
Remember that you're likely to attract businessy types too busy to do anything but work during lunch, or student/cheap types too cheap to pay for highspeed access themselves (and therefore, unlikely to spend $30 a month on coffee). Is this really the atmosphere you want in your business?
It also depends what type of netcafe you're opening. There are netcafes primarily for gaming, and those primarily for getting a cup of coffee while surfing the net. I've worked in one where people are basically gaming straight up, and the atmosphere is radically different than the local coffee shop.
If you want a social, living coffeeshop, I'd say cut off the internet access. People go to a coffeeshop to relax with friends, listen to jazz, or curl up in a comfy chair with a big book. As much of a netaholic as I am, there has to be a balance somewhere.
Okay. I understand the hatred for portal pages, but the truth is, lots and lots of people like them. Why? Because they can't just "make a local page with RSS feeds".
That would be like taking your car into the mechanic with a transmission problem and having him scoff at you, "Pffft. Go build yourself a new one. Moron."
The large majority of net users don't know what RSS means. They don't know HTML. Web Portals let people click on things and have a familiar feel to them. People only need to know one little address to get to a place where they can find "everything" on the web.
They appear on TNT and USA and the like during shows like Law and Order. Although, you're right in that almost any time I do see something like that, I'm watching with my girlfriend.
But I think my original point still holds up - rarely are ads targetted towards impulse buyers (with the exception of things like: 19.95 for 50 western movies! act now!).
Probably not. A good portion of advertising isn't there so that you have an immediate desire to go out and buy something. When Dunkin Donuts runs ads for their new random beverage, they don't figure that the thousands of people watching the game will go run out and buy a drink *that instant*.
But if you've got to choose between Dunkin Donuts and some place you've never heard of before, being familiar with the "variety" and "quality" of Dunkin Donuts products from their commercials, even if you're not a regular Dunkin customer, you may decide to walk in and grab a coffee there instead of the place across the street.
I mean, Beer ads don't really make me want beer, car ads don't make me want a car... almost any ad I've ever watched hardly makes me want anything (except sex, which seems to be the cardinal rule of good advertising - lots of sex appeal). I'd shut them all off if I could. I never have any intention of buying anything I don't "want". But who knows how the ads influence my purchasing decisions?
[on that note, yeah, it is excessive for tampon commercials to be piped into a house with 3 20-something guys as the only residents.]
"Guns have their place, and having them be common in society isn't such a bad thing."
Yes it is. Crime goes up, and so do accidental deaths. See handgun legislation and results in states (good example: MA).
Moral of the story: having deadly objects around is bad. Saying "people should learn how to use them properly" or suggesting proper gun safety isn't good enough. That's like putting up spikes all over the road and defending their presence with "Well, they wouldn't be dangerous if people would just learn to avoid them!"
Guns are tools made to kill things. We hardly have any reasons to kill things any longer. Hence, we no longer need the tool.
No, it's not forced choice. If it's forced choice, then I can't choose whether or not I want to wager my money, and then end result is that you hand me either $75 or $125 without any interaction on my part.
The difference is either I've been given $100 and given the chance to wager, or given $0 and the chance to wager. I'd be a fool to pass it up in the second condition, and a regular old risk-taker if I choose to wager in the 1st condition.
I pressed "stop", but it posted anyway. That should say:
"Fostering environments where it's okay to tear kids down because they're doing well in school (we've all seen first hand how little teachers and parents actually do to stop this sort of thing) is the worst thing, in my opinion, short of a lack of funding for obvious materials."
Eliminate American Anti-intellectualism. Geeks and nerds, while sometimes socially inept, don't deserve to be bullied for good grades. Fostering environments where it's okay to tear kids down because they're doing well in school (we've all seen first hand how little teachers and parents actually do to stop this sort of thing).
Yeah. I'd say that's the biggest issue. Putting kids in an environment where success means social punishment.
Innocent people die in surgery, too. No one goes around claiming surgery is bad because it kills a very small amount of people and helps a great deal.
If the death penalty really did help people more than it hurt people, it wouldn't be so bad. I mean, it would be possible to stomach the one innocent fatality if a thousand would-be murderers were dissuaded from murdering by the threat of death. But that isn't the case.
Simply saying "innocents die" isn't really fair, because lots of innocents die from lots of things we do as a culture. "Innocents die for no reason" is the part most of us can't stand.
Although the example you cite doesn't actually hold water, since if you give me $100 and I refuse to bet, I've still got 100 bucks. If you give me nothing and I refuse to bet, I've got nothing.
In one case, there's a 50% chance of losing money, in the other, there's a 100% chance of gaining.
Exactly how does one judge the "rehabilitation potential" of a criminal? By the severity of his or her crime?
I've yet, also, to see any published literature to that effect. While I don't doubt that there has been some severe imbalance in anyone who can kill, say, dozens of people, I do doubt that there is some tie to the crime committed and the capacity for "rehabilitation", whatever that entails.
I also feel that, although you're right (people killed never re-enter society), using that measure to judge the effectiveness of the death penalty is... plain silly. By that measure, anything which does what it does is effective. The death penalty also has lots of collateral damage, killing those not guilty (which you bring up, but don't propose a reasonable alternative to, since it still happens) and killing those who are in fact rehabilitated (even though they were deemed "unrehabilitated" in the first place, there's no way to go back and stop it from happening again). Furthermore, even though you might think it impossible to love someone on death row, these people do have families, most of which haven't totally disowned them, and the death is another death with implications of grief and guilt.
So, right, although it's successful at removing people from society, it still has things it doesn't succeed at.
I'd appreciate it if any death penalty advocates could please cite a published work (in a reputable journal) which clearly shows statistical evidence that the death penalty actually acts as a deterrant in the mind of would-be criminals.
As far as I can tell, it's just something that sounds really good. You know, "Criminals will be very scared of being killed for their actions, because normal people are very scared of being killed." From the little I know about the workings of the human mind, most sociopaths don't react to things the same way the rest of us do, and people who cause massive damage on an any scale - economic, physical, emotional - are sociopaths.
Anyway, I'd just appreciate some good evidence for the "deterrant" hypothesis. Then I'll start to believe it might be a good idea.
One of the real reasons Doom3 never took off is because I needed to buy a new computer to use it. And so did everyone else.
Counterstrike runs on crap hardware, and basically, a crap internet connection. You'll get called a lagger, a newbie, and a lamer, but it will work, and you can play, and have fun.
Gameplay is extremely important, but so too is availability.
This is marketing. Plain and simple.
The real "dupe" is in the price per unit of HL2. Although to the regular consumer, HL2 is around 50 bucks, to the company making the game, HL2 is pennies to produce once they've paid back RnD costs. HL2 units are CDs and booklets, nothing more, and valve can mass produce them like crazy.
Which means ATI can buy lots and lots of them for mucho cheap. And means that your "50 dollar value" game isn't really worth 50 bucks to either company.
But this sort of thing is done all the time. Macys, Filenes, Sears... almost all of them give away free gifts with purchase that cost little to the company but appear valuable to the consumer. Perfume cases, and samples, pretty silver trinkets, or computer games - really all the same. It just happened to bait lots of geeks this time.
Unless, of course, someone exploited the patching mechanism.
If we were living in a world where Microsoft provided patches and people actually downloaded them, we'd probably be in a world of highly "seemless" updating. Microsoft would default enable automatic updates on Mom and Pop boxes or work desktops hooked up to highspeed connections, and exploiting a mechanism used nearly by everyone would be a disaster.
That's the only way it could really increase. I agree.
There certainly is a law against being accessory to a crime, and this is the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling on filesharing.
Gun Makers aren't allowed to market their products as "the best way to murder and maim innocents!" They can market themselves as self-defense, hunting, and a variety of *legal* uses, but not as a way to commit a crime.
I don't really see why this is so complicated. This statement may or may not prove his intent. But if someone can convince a jury that it does, he may be guilty of being accessory to thousands upon thousands of infringements.
Because much of the law is intent in the new ruling on filesharing.
If you kill someone by hitting them with your car, you might get 200 days in jail. If you say outright that you meant to kill them purposefully, that's 50 years.
The only difference there is speech - speech that reveals intent.
If Cohen's intent is to facilitate widescale piracy, then he might be guilty of something. This might prove his intent (or, it might not). That's why this matters.
That's not the case. Mr. Quixly has a right to throw Mr. Shmoe out of his store, just like Contacts has the right to take WhenU advertising off of their server. But Mr. Shmoe can stand just outside the store and hand out any material he wants [he can even get a group of people to walk in front of the entrance of the store, barring entry!], and Mr. Quixly can hardly do a think about it.
That's the parallel. Quixley can't change what happens to his consumers just outside of his stores, because Shmoe has free speech to advertise.
Hey. News. It's legal. You can go to WalMart, and so long as you *aren't on their land*, you're allowed to advertise for whatever you want. Outside the parking lot, put up a big sign for your local deli. Or the KKK. Or the ACLU. Or whatever you'd like.
Since Adware doesn't directly affect the content of the website, there's very little difference. If you wanted to purchase the land around every WalMart for specifically advertising to the group of WalMart visiting consumers, you could do that. That's what Adware does. It does it a little more sneakily - by advertising to visitors of a website usually without the visitor's "approval" - but then, how often do you really approve advertising in the real world?
The ruling makes sense. Adware companies, so long as they are legal, should be able to use data to target ads.
That all being said, I think Adware companies are just about the most awful thing on earth from a consumer's standpoint (if only because they make the internet an awful ugly place). I'm not so sure that adware should be legal in the first place. But if it is, I don't see any problem with these methods. They're smart, and they work. Annoying, but they work.
Wait. You read Snow Crash and you say that isn't apocalyptic? [or at least, as you say, Dystopian?].
Society in Snow Crash is totally different and essentially collapsed in comparison to present day.
Stephenson has always been like this, for the most part.
The real difference is character development.
In 4,5, and 6, Darth Vader was primarily the "bad guy". Sure, he had character, but it was primarily as the foil to the symbolic "light side" of the force that ran as an undercurrent in the rebellion / Luke's story.
By adding 1,2, and 3, Vader really becomes the central figure in the story, but he isn't given adequate plot time in 4 and 5. It's as if the writer of a tragedy changed focus in Acts 4 and 5, and then resumed Darth's story with his "return to the good side" in ep. 6. Darth and Obiwan (aside from the droids) are the only characters present in all 6 films, and Obiwan is only a ghost in 5 and 6. Darth is the only living character to speak in the 6 films, and this makes him central to the story, whether or not you like it.
And I don't like it. The story was good as Good vs. Evil rather than a "Look at how Power Can Corrupt the Good". Darth's story in 1-3, to me, totally shifts the focus of the films. That's why they can't actually be watched in their numerical order. Watching them that way totally screws with your perceptions of Darth in 4-6, and makes the plot seem convoluted and non sequitur. I mean, why should the films switch focus onto Padame's children when Darth Vader, the focus of the first three films, is still alive, kicking, and doing things in the Star Wars universe?
I don't really study neuroanatomy, but most patients with (hopefully repairable) brain damage aren't in need of an entire brain, they're in need of cells that produce specific chemicals. Parkinsons, for instance, is caused by a lack of Dopaminergic Neurons in a small portion towards the back of the brain; the ability to transplant new, fresh neurons may allieviate the symptoms.
A bit of an unfair comparison (because we can easily administer a drug and the injury is not nearly so severe) would be implanting cells that produce Lactase Enzyme for digesting dairy products in people who are lactose intolerant. It's not that the person needs a new stomach, they need a specific chemical which their brain cells are unable to make and we are unable to easily perscribe (dopamine precursors have lots of associated symptoms of their own).
Huh?
One point of running studies with more than one N is to attempt to generalize to the sample population.
Those 29 people are representative of some group that has statistically meaningful differences after exposure to Oxytocin.
Not mental pictures. PET activations.
"John went to the bank to exchange some money."
Take for example the word "bank". When you read that word, do you activate either the representation of "Bank", as in, "the place where you deposit currency", or "Bank", as in, "the place where the river's edge meets the land?"
It's both, actually. Both representations activate. So it's not so clear that representations in the brain are context dependant.