My question would be WTF this article is doing on slashdot? This is definitely not news for nerds or stuff that matters. While I'm sure there are NBA fans reading slashdot, this is pretty far away from what this site is supposed to be about.
The pervasiveness of information at your fingertips has caused such a massive and fundamental change to how people live their lives that people are becoming highly skilled in complex activities that take years to master at a younger age than ever seen before in history. And we have conclusive proof of that direct effect in professional sports such as the NBA due to aspiring athletes ability to analyze great athletes of today and the past via websites like Youtube.
That's not news that matters? It's affecting the very fabric of society, with sports as just a readily demonstrable example. That's not nerdy enough for you? This entire change is being fueled by people leveraging technology for uses never even dreamed of before in the history of man.
And now I'm confused. What is news for nerds and news that matters then? I keep seeing the "this isn't news for nerds or news that matters" thread on submitted stories and often I agree. But this one makes me think some people have a fundamental expectation for the kinds of stories they want to see here that is different from mine. So, in all seriousness, could you please explain what, exactly, news for nerds and news that matters is and why this does not qualify?
I actually initially thought it was some sort of loud, powered single-person aquatic vehicle for use in the canals used as a means of trying to scare off birds for some reason. I fully expected to start reading an abstract detailing how these vehicles using a new technology were having an unintended consequence of increasing bird defecation dramatically in tourist-heavy areas or something. After getting a few sentences in, I decided I would have preferred reading that article instead of the real one, so I stopped and checked here to see if I was the only one who immediately leaped to the wrong impression.
Taking advantage of humanity's general fundamental inability to truly comprehend and internalize consequences of statistically foolish behavior is harmless? Or were you under the impression that that was not how bookies and casinos make money?
Honest question though: What IS the cost? Equifax suffered a breach of pretty much the most sensitive possible data you can have leaked, and if this article is correct, the total cost is approaching about $500 million. Had there been no data breach or had the data breach never been made public or had there been no political will to prosecute the company then the cost would have been practically nothing.
Imagine a sort of reverse lottery. If you don't buy a ticket, there is a small chance (and nobody can tell you the exact likelihood) that your reputation will be publicly tarnished and you will be fined millions of dollars. If you buy a ticket, your chance drops drastically (but is never really zero). But the ticket costs thousands of dollars. Would you buy the ticket? What if the ticket is tens of thousands of dollars? What if it's hundreds of thousands of dollars? Is there a point where you will simply refuse to buy the ticket and accept the risk?
I'm not saying these companies are making the right choice. I'm saying that from a purely practical standpoint I understand why someone might make the choice not to invest heavily into fixing security bugs. It's not the same choice I would make, but I seem to be more risk-averse than the average person judging by the choices I have seen people around me make. Still, if you don't understand why someone would make a decision, how do you ever expect to convince them to make a different decision?
Rather than single issue vote in liberals vote with your pocketbook.
Voting with your wallet only works for those who have some extra money left in their wallets. Odd as it may seem, not everyone has extra cash lying around.
The irony being that the entire reason you're not supposed to translate the Quran is to have as few interpreters between God's original word and you as possible. Ideally, the only interpreter should be Mohammed, and that's seen as ok because the entire underpinning of the religion is that he was a holy prophet. Islam was well aware of the problems Christianity had as a result of translating texts from their original language and hoped to avoid it. Seeing people read the Quran as rote recital and understanding none of it must have some people who died 1400 years ago spinning in their graves.
There is a strange cycle in entertainment. I'm willing to bet it has a name, but if it does I don't know what it is. Anyway, the cycle goes like this:
1) New style of delivering entertainment on an existing medium is devised. 2) Style turns out to be very popular and profitable. 3) Competing entertainment sources on the same medium gradually adopt the same style despite originally being from different market fragments. 4) Style becomes so saturated in the market that it drives large segments of the market away from anything resembling that style. 5) Market fragments into new categories of niche interest groups with the new style as just another category or sub-category.
The same thing happened (and is sometimes still happening) with reality TV, freemium games, mini series, musicals, etc. The weird part is that it functions very much like a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone jumping on the hot new thing actually makes the hot new thing less hot, less new, and therefore less valuable. I don't think the cable channels meant for things to get this way with all the reality shows. It just sort of happened naturally from them chasing after whatever seemed most profitable and not noticing that other ways of watching TV were becoming bigger competitors because they weren't their traditional competitors (other cable channels).
I originally named mine "Oh, we don't have wifi" simply so I could have an amusingly confused conversation when guests ask "what's your wifi network?" I later named mine "What's wifi?" so I could have an even more confusing "who's on first?" style conversation.
Sorry for the necro. Busy weekend. I actually didn't use any newspapers or news reports. Instead I read through the wikipedia article for an initial overview. It seemed like a pretty straightforward and comprehensive overview of Libertarian philosophy, but no mention of any sort of constitutionality. I was assuming you weren't a left-libertarian, so I didn't understand why the constitution was relevant to your world view. It wasn't until later this weekend when I got to this section that I found any mention at all of the US Constitution. Apparently there's an offshoot in the US that is more correctly described as a US Libertarian Republican that, among other things, espouses strict adherence to the US Constitution. And it's sometimes shortened to Libertarian. You have to admit, Libertarian on its own has a confusing connotation since it describes several conflicting ideologies.
That or Infinifactory. Though I admit that the first thought that popped in my mind when I read "crazy, complex network of conveyor belts" was, "oh, you could scarcely IMAGINE the crazy, complex network of conveyor belts I built in Factorio."
Here's the thing, and I say this as a libertarian.... It's actually in the Constitution! This is a fully legal part of the federal government.
What does the US Constitution have to do with libertarianism? I was under the impression that the concept was "I think public services should be privatized" and not "I think public services should be privatized... unless they were in the constitution."
It's not that I'm saying you don't have a point about the importance of a post office as a public utility. I'm just honestly confused about how people are using the term libertarian.
Having read the novels some years ago, the only part of it that seems like it would make much sense as a movie was the part where The Mule messes up psychohistory. And without all the backstory it just wouldn't be as strong a story.
All I can say is if they do make this into a series I hope they take their time casting The Mule. He was actually one of my favorite characters of the books for some reason I've never been able to identify.
Honest question here: How do you propose being able to use Facebook for people who want to refuse to consent to them collecting their data? Isn't that a bit like telling someone to build a website for you but forbidding them from storing the text you want to display on the pages?
It's much the same with any food or drink. If it's something known to be safe for consumption, don't go to extremes with it and you'll be fine.
If you drink enough water in a short period, it will poison you and you will die. In no way does that mean you should stop drinking water.
If you're someone who likes sour tastes, don't go creating the ultimate sour taste beyond anything ever seen before and expect it to continue to be just as safe as a lemon.
I would prefer my ISP to prioritize gaming traffic ahead of other traffic: Youtube / Netflix / Facebook / bittorrent don't have the same latency requirements as online games.
Wait... If there is enough traffic on the high priority gaming lane couldn't that lead to dropped packets on the low priority lane? Why is that better than slightly degrading the performance of all services until you can support all traffic? Won't you just end up encouraging game developers to stop caring as much about network concerns?
To expand on your "entertainment gets boring" idea, every single medium you listed has inherent limits. And each one developed its own tropes.
The number of radio stations could be unlimited... But the genres of music or voice programs you'll find is very finite. The number of TV channels could be unlimited... But the genres of television shows and movies is very finite. The number of video games could be unlimited... But the genres of games and methods of interacting with the system is finite. The number of web pages could be unlimited... But the categories of content for those pages is finite. Mobile phones are just a twist on web pages, video games, and TV channels rolled into a new medium for delivery to the consumer.
Entertainment will always be limited. It doesn't matter if we give it a new medium. You're still going to eventually get bored because you've seen everything novel the medium has to offer. New genres and new media are always being created, but that process is often slower than the rate that you will exhaust experiencing the existing genres and media you are interested in.
Unless you're willing to have a class schedule for each biological rhythm and take the time to accurately assess and assign each student based on their biological rhythm, what's the point? If you move all classes later, the early risers are no longer at their optimal learning time. If you split classes to early riser and night owl schedules, you need enough educators for both schedules. And if you split classes once, you'd better be prepared to do it again if a significant population of students is found to have a biological rhythm you don't cover. Else, why did you split classes at all?
My point is, this change would have a cost. And I don't just mean monetary. Would the benefit of adjusting educator schedules around students justify the cost? My initial inclination is telling me no.
they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms
I think I get what you're trying to say, but what you actually said is impossible. If you have a biological rhythm, it's inherent to you and not affected by social concerns or by whether you give in to it or not. If this were not true, then "night owls" could become "early birds" by simply changing their sleep habits. If you have the same biological rhythm as an adult that you had as a child, then that is (by definition) your ADULT biological rhythm and would be so regardless of whether class times had been tailored to your biology or not when you were a child.
That said, I think what you seem to be implying (and correct me of I'm wrong), that children need to be shown early that they can not expect the world to always conform to their biological predispositions and need to figure out how to work around that is one of many good reasons to not change class schedules to suit student biology.
Well then you've hit the nail on the head. Your concern seems to be that as soon as someone sees a buzzword associated with unprovable claims, they dismiss the idea before even examining it. If you were to not use a loaded word and specifically state your hypothesis, critics would have to to directly refute the hypothesis (assuming it is disprovable).
To put it another way, if I start saying that black holes exist due to Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, people will ignore or dismiss me. And rightly so. I didn't say anything useful or disprovable. If enough other people do that within a particular forum, I'd better start stating testable hypotheses or expect to be dismissed out of hand as well.
tl;dr - I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science.
Your implication is that a change in trade policy would help resolve this problem. I vehemently disagree. At best, it would lessen the magnitude. African/Asian nations aren't going to just stop rampant pollution in their manufacturing processes because you put tariffs on their goods. They're just going to TRADE less of them to YOU.
Ultimately you have no leverage over other nations attitudes on pollution other than to somehow try to get their population to a point where they care more about the long term effects of pollution on their health and well being than the short term capital gains. Given that this is still a problem in first world countries, I don't think trade policy is going to do much to affect the issue.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I definitely agree that there are a lot of problems with Google trying to act as the arbiter of trustworthiness. And most of the spitballed ideas have gaping flaws. The way I'd prefer would to handle the topic would be to highlight links with an "alternative source" for the news piece in question if flagged as fake or misleading. Honestly I'd kind of like that feature with any news article with controversial aspects just so I can quickly and easily see how opposing sides cover the topic.
Is that what Google is thinking? Who knows. Probably not. But there are certainly steps short of "you should trust this because we say the source is trustworthy" that a search engine could do that could help combat the inundation of outright fabrications.
Also, it may not be a terrible idea to flag something like theOnion as an untrustworthy news source despite the hilarity that ensues when someone takes one of their stories seriously.:)
>> Nobody is saying that NBC, CNN, or the like are shining bastions of journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately, people ARE saying that. That's the basis of the "credible source" bit in TFA: if story link X is from "Big News" it will be flagged credible but if it's from independent muckraker Y it will be flagged as questionable.
I read the entire article. There is no reference to any source being given preferential treatment on credibility based on whether it's from "Big News" or not. In fact,
a browser-based system controlled by Google could alert users on Facebook’s or Twitter’s websites when they’re seeing or sharing a link deemed to be false or untrustworthy.
The trustworthiness would be evaluated on a link by link basis. So if one story on CNN.com is factually correct, but another has been found to have no basis in fact, the second link could be flagged as untrustworthy. The same can apply to infowars.com on a per-story basis. Again, this is a story about spitballing ideas and even here nobody here has said "source X is always trustworthy".
I think you're making a lot of inferences and assumptions that aren't actually in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
My question would be WTF this article is doing on slashdot? This is definitely not news for nerds or stuff that matters. While I'm sure there are NBA fans reading slashdot, this is pretty far away from what this site is supposed to be about.
The pervasiveness of information at your fingertips has caused such a massive and fundamental change to how people live their lives that people are becoming highly skilled in complex activities that take years to master at a younger age than ever seen before in history. And we have conclusive proof of that direct effect in professional sports such as the NBA due to aspiring athletes ability to analyze great athletes of today and the past via websites like Youtube.
That's not news that matters? It's affecting the very fabric of society, with sports as just a readily demonstrable example. That's not nerdy enough for you? This entire change is being fueled by people leveraging technology for uses never even dreamed of before in the history of man.
And now I'm confused. What is news for nerds and news that matters then? I keep seeing the "this isn't news for nerds or news that matters" thread on submitted stories and often I agree. But this one makes me think some people have a fundamental expectation for the kinds of stories they want to see here that is different from mine. So, in all seriousness, could you please explain what, exactly, news for nerds and news that matters is and why this does not qualify?
I actually initially thought it was some sort of loud, powered single-person aquatic vehicle for use in the canals used as a means of trying to scare off birds for some reason. I fully expected to start reading an abstract detailing how these vehicles using a new technology were having an unintended consequence of increasing bird defecation dramatically in tourist-heavy areas or something. After getting a few sentences in, I decided I would have preferred reading that article instead of the real one, so I stopped and checked here to see if I was the only one who immediately leaped to the wrong impression.
Taking advantage of humanity's general fundamental inability to truly comprehend and internalize consequences of statistically foolish behavior is harmless? Or were you under the impression that that was not how bookies and casinos make money?
Honest question though: What IS the cost? Equifax suffered a breach of pretty much the most sensitive possible data you can have leaked, and if this article is correct, the total cost is approaching about $500 million. Had there been no data breach or had the data breach never been made public or had there been no political will to prosecute the company then the cost would have been practically nothing.
Imagine a sort of reverse lottery. If you don't buy a ticket, there is a small chance (and nobody can tell you the exact likelihood) that your reputation will be publicly tarnished and you will be fined millions of dollars. If you buy a ticket, your chance drops drastically (but is never really zero). But the ticket costs thousands of dollars. Would you buy the ticket? What if the ticket is tens of thousands of dollars? What if it's hundreds of thousands of dollars? Is there a point where you will simply refuse to buy the ticket and accept the risk?
I'm not saying these companies are making the right choice. I'm saying that from a purely practical standpoint I understand why someone might make the choice not to invest heavily into fixing security bugs. It's not the same choice I would make, but I seem to be more risk-averse than the average person judging by the choices I have seen people around me make. Still, if you don't understand why someone would make a decision, how do you ever expect to convince them to make a different decision?
Rather than single issue vote in liberals vote with your pocketbook.
Voting with your wallet only works for those who have some extra money left in their wallets. Odd as it may seem, not everyone has extra cash lying around.
The irony being that the entire reason you're not supposed to translate the Quran is to have as few interpreters between God's original word and you as possible. Ideally, the only interpreter should be Mohammed, and that's seen as ok because the entire underpinning of the religion is that he was a holy prophet. Islam was well aware of the problems Christianity had as a result of translating texts from their original language and hoped to avoid it. Seeing people read the Quran as rote recital and understanding none of it must have some people who died 1400 years ago spinning in their graves.
There is a strange cycle in entertainment. I'm willing to bet it has a name, but if it does I don't know what it is. Anyway, the cycle goes like this:
1) New style of delivering entertainment on an existing medium is devised.
2) Style turns out to be very popular and profitable.
3) Competing entertainment sources on the same medium gradually adopt the same style despite originally being from different market fragments.
4) Style becomes so saturated in the market that it drives large segments of the market away from anything resembling that style.
5) Market fragments into new categories of niche interest groups with the new style as just another category or sub-category.
The same thing happened (and is sometimes still happening) with reality TV, freemium games, mini series, musicals, etc. The weird part is that it functions very much like a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone jumping on the hot new thing actually makes the hot new thing less hot, less new, and therefore less valuable. I don't think the cable channels meant for things to get this way with all the reality shows. It just sort of happened naturally from them chasing after whatever seemed most profitable and not noticing that other ways of watching TV were becoming bigger competitors because they weren't their traditional competitors (other cable channels).
I originally named mine "Oh, we don't have wifi" simply so I could have an amusingly confused conversation when guests ask "what's your wifi network?" I later named mine "What's wifi?" so I could have an even more confusing "who's on first?" style conversation.
Yes, I am kind of a dick.
Sorry for the necro. Busy weekend. I actually didn't use any newspapers or news reports. Instead I read through the wikipedia article for an initial overview. It seemed like a pretty straightforward and comprehensive overview of Libertarian philosophy, but no mention of any sort of constitutionality. I was assuming you weren't a left-libertarian, so I didn't understand why the constitution was relevant to your world view. It wasn't until later this weekend when I got to this section that I found any mention at all of the US Constitution. Apparently there's an offshoot in the US that is more correctly described as a US Libertarian Republican that, among other things, espouses strict adherence to the US Constitution. And it's sometimes shortened to Libertarian. You have to admit, Libertarian on its own has a confusing connotation since it describes several conflicting ideologies.
That or Infinifactory. Though I admit that the first thought that popped in my mind when I read "crazy, complex network of conveyor belts" was, "oh, you could scarcely IMAGINE the crazy, complex network of conveyor belts I built in Factorio."
Here's the thing, and I say this as a libertarian. ... It's actually in the Constitution! This is a fully legal part of the federal government.
What does the US Constitution have to do with libertarianism? I was under the impression that the concept was "I think public services should be privatized" and not "I think public services should be privatized... unless they were in the constitution."
It's not that I'm saying you don't have a point about the importance of a post office as a public utility. I'm just honestly confused about how people are using the term libertarian.
Having read the novels some years ago, the only part of it that seems like it would make much sense as a movie was the part where The Mule messes up psychohistory. And without all the backstory it just wouldn't be as strong a story.
All I can say is if they do make this into a series I hope they take their time casting The Mule. He was actually one of my favorite characters of the books for some reason I've never been able to identify.
Honest question here: How do you propose being able to use Facebook for people who want to refuse to consent to them collecting their data? Isn't that a bit like telling someone to build a website for you but forbidding them from storing the text you want to display on the pages?
It's much the same with any food or drink. If it's something known to be safe for consumption, don't go to extremes with it and you'll be fine.
If you drink enough water in a short period, it will poison you and you will die. In no way does that mean you should stop drinking water.
If you're someone who likes sour tastes, don't go creating the ultimate sour taste beyond anything ever seen before and expect it to continue to be just as safe as a lemon.
I would prefer my ISP to prioritize gaming traffic ahead of other traffic: Youtube / Netflix / Facebook / bittorrent don't have the same latency requirements as online games.
Wait... If there is enough traffic on the high priority gaming lane couldn't that lead to dropped packets on the low priority lane? Why is that better than slightly degrading the performance of all services until you can support all traffic? Won't you just end up encouraging game developers to stop caring as much about network concerns?
To expand on your "entertainment gets boring" idea, every single medium you listed has inherent limits. And each one developed its own tropes.
The number of radio stations could be unlimited... But the genres of music or voice programs you'll find is very finite.
The number of TV channels could be unlimited... But the genres of television shows and movies is very finite.
The number of video games could be unlimited... But the genres of games and methods of interacting with the system is finite.
The number of web pages could be unlimited... But the categories of content for those pages is finite.
Mobile phones are just a twist on web pages, video games, and TV channels rolled into a new medium for delivery to the consumer.
Entertainment will always be limited. It doesn't matter if we give it a new medium. You're still going to eventually get bored because you've seen everything novel the medium has to offer. New genres and new media are always being created, but that process is often slower than the rate that you will exhaust experiencing the existing genres and media you are interested in.
Unless you're willing to have a class schedule for each biological rhythm and take the time to accurately assess and assign each student based on their biological rhythm, what's the point? If you move all classes later, the early risers are no longer at their optimal learning time. If you split classes to early riser and night owl schedules, you need enough educators for both schedules. And if you split classes once, you'd better be prepared to do it again if a significant population of students is found to have a biological rhythm you don't cover. Else, why did you split classes at all?
My point is, this change would have a cost. And I don't just mean monetary. Would the benefit of adjusting educator schedules around students justify the cost? My initial inclination is telling me no.
they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms
I think I get what you're trying to say, but what you actually said is impossible. If you have a biological rhythm, it's inherent to you and not affected by social concerns or by whether you give in to it or not. If this were not true, then "night owls" could become "early birds" by simply changing their sleep habits. If you have the same biological rhythm as an adult that you had as a child, then that is (by definition) your ADULT biological rhythm and would be so regardless of whether class times had been tailored to your biology or not when you were a child.
That said, I think what you seem to be implying (and correct me of I'm wrong), that children need to be shown early that they can not expect the world to always conform to their biological predispositions and need to figure out how to work around that is one of many good reasons to not change class schedules to suit student biology.
But I've only had a brief glance at it, and I'm not a scientician.
That's ok. I'm pretty sure nobody else is either.
Well then you've hit the nail on the head. Your concern seems to be that as soon as someone sees a buzzword associated with unprovable claims, they dismiss the idea before even examining it. If you were to not use a loaded word and specifically state your hypothesis, critics would have to to directly refute the hypothesis (assuming it is disprovable).
To put it another way, if I start saying that black holes exist due to Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, people will ignore or dismiss me. And rightly so. I didn't say anything useful or disprovable. If enough other people do that within a particular forum, I'd better start stating testable hypotheses or expect to be dismissed out of hand as well.
tl;dr - I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science.
This isn't VR. This is AR.
You mean like Google Glass? Man, that's so 2014.
Your implication is that a change in trade policy would help resolve this problem. I vehemently disagree. At best, it would lessen the magnitude. African/Asian nations aren't going to just stop rampant pollution in their manufacturing processes because you put tariffs on their goods. They're just going to TRADE less of them to YOU.
Ultimately you have no leverage over other nations attitudes on pollution other than to somehow try to get their population to a point where they care more about the long term effects of pollution on their health and well being than the short term capital gains. Given that this is still a problem in first world countries, I don't think trade policy is going to do much to affect the issue.
Also, in Soviet Russia, block chains you.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I definitely agree that there are a lot of problems with Google trying to act as the arbiter of trustworthiness. And most of the spitballed ideas have gaping flaws. The way I'd prefer would to handle the topic would be to highlight links with an "alternative source" for the news piece in question if flagged as fake or misleading. Honestly I'd kind of like that feature with any news article with controversial aspects just so I can quickly and easily see how opposing sides cover the topic.
Is that what Google is thinking? Who knows. Probably not. But there are certainly steps short of "you should trust this because we say the source is trustworthy" that a search engine could do that could help combat the inundation of outright fabrications.
Also, it may not be a terrible idea to flag something like theOnion as an untrustworthy news source despite the hilarity that ensues when someone takes one of their stories seriously. :)
>> Nobody is saying that NBC, CNN, or the like are shining bastions of journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately, people ARE saying that. That's the basis of the "credible source" bit in TFA: if story link X is from "Big News" it will be flagged credible but if it's from independent muckraker Y it will be flagged as questionable.
I read the entire article. There is no reference to any source being given preferential treatment on credibility based on whether it's from "Big News" or not. In fact,
a browser-based system controlled by Google could alert users on Facebook’s or Twitter’s websites when they’re seeing or sharing a link deemed to be false or untrustworthy.
The trustworthiness would be evaluated on a link by link basis. So if one story on CNN.com is factually correct, but another has been found to have no basis in fact, the second link could be flagged as untrustworthy. The same can apply to infowars.com on a per-story basis. Again, this is a story about spitballing ideas and even here nobody here has said "source X is always trustworthy".
I think you're making a lot of inferences and assumptions that aren't actually in the article.