The older I get the more I'm convinced that young people don't have a clue what they are doing;)
Does this mean that they shouldn't be allowed to do it? It is far more harmful to minors to strip them of any freedom and consequent responsibility for their actions than to let them have sex. We are raising a nation of infants--just look at the things people sue each other for. If you have sex when you are too young (assuming it's consentual!), then maybe you learn from a slightly poor decision. Good! Not enough people are allowed to do that.
If you get pregnant or catch something, is that because you had sex? Or is that because those who know how to avoid these things refused to take the responsibility to pass along their knowledge and wisdom?
If society comes down hard on you for being in a porn flick, is that reason to make laws to keep you from doing that, or is that reason to try to fix a broken society?
As the population grows, climate changes, topsoil is washed away and toxified, groundwater is depleted, etc, this will become ever more serious. We will need to use GM higher-yield crops if we want to keep our population growing (as economists demand). There will simply be no way to move away from it. And of course here in the USA it is private corporations who will offer the service of basic survival. "Take away our rights as patent holders, and you will all starve."
But isn't the advertising to some extent what keeps some websites afloat? Even some services?
Yes, I've been wondering about that. There are many good services out there, but most of my favourite information sources take minimal advertising. If advertising keeps them afloat, three things happen:
Information is no longer judged on its quality, but on how popular/well-marketed it is. I'm tired of this country's obsession with car analogies, so how about a beer analogy? The Internet has gone from being thousands of specialty microbrews popularised by word of mouth to a few marketing companies who spend so much telling you their product is beer that you start to believe them.
Advertiser-supported sites have a very hard time presenting impartial information. You can present ads that have nothing to do with the subject matter or you can risk pissing off your source of revenue anytime you're honest.
And of course as Bhutan's government knows, advertisements tend to make people unhappy, simply because so much of marketing is quite explicitly trying to make you feel inadequate, and they're very good at it.
So while it is true that "sell advertising" is a viable market strategy, I'm not sure the bigger advertising-supported Internet is better for people than a smaller, less commercial one.
Since when didn't they? Many of us remember cheering Microsoft on as it took on the evil Apple monopoly and started winning little victories here and there. Of course, the fact that they succeeded might be evidence that Microsoft is more evil, but I don't seriously think that anyone is "the good guys" in this market.
Oddly, looking at the KDE/Gnome wars is sometimes reminiscent of little baby warlordlets who don't really know what they're doing yet but have the same drive to conquor that the big players do.
So any best practice based on statistics and placebo studies is magic? Sure, we don't understand everything. But that will probably always be true. If we can say "I drilled holes in 400 skulls and just pretended to drill holes in another 400, and the cut group had a 20% higher survival rate than the control group" then an understanding of the mechanism is not strictly necessary. Look at all of psychiatry, just for example.
Sure, knowing what's really going on might let us refine the treatment (engineering) or understand patients (science), but knowing that we have an effective treatment even though the model is incomplete/wrong does not make the treatment magic.
Don't confuse effect with explanation.
The problem, of course, comes when you find evidence that does not support your theory, and decide to pretend the evidence doesn't exist. Hmmm, see, even Stonehenge is getting political.
I think you have it backwards. I don't have actual numbers, but my hunch is that >98% of the people out there want to click something in their browser and have something start working magically. They don't want to mess with alternative players. Remember, for most of the world (or at least the USA where we don't really have public education yet) the Internet = the Web = the Web Browser = Microsoft IE = the Computer.
But they still manage to sell that crap they call music. Seems all the contempt they have for their clients is well-founded. It's not like real music is more expensive...
The "wrong book" is in the library in order to fish for enemies of the people. Sort of how Bush was on the ballot to fish for people who should never be allowed to reproduce. Only someone forgot an important detail somewhere along the way.
Yes, my first thought is that it is far too restrictive. Why so much emphasis on incremental improvements to our shortsighted transportation infrastructure when you need only look at Amsterdam to see something infinitely better: a completely clean solution (after a (negligible) manufacturing cost) that would more or less completely solve our obesity-and-health-care disaster, our civic-planning-and-urban-sprawl disaster, and our road rage issues as well.
No, I'm not suggesting that we eliminate cars entirely. But if 5% of our population used a car for trips under 10 miles, it wouldn't matter if they all drove FUVs on longer trips. It would solve a lot more than just our energy problem.
If you can measure the inertial difference between being in orbit (freefall) and sitting still, then they are different. But you can't. GR introduces the idea that spacetime is curved by gravitational bodies in order to explain this identity: freefall or an orbit is a straight line in the appropriate space, and there is no acceleration. If there were, you could close your eyes and point to the sun, because you could feel it pulling on you.
That's an approximation. Sitting still with no acceleration means that if I drop my very expensive camera, it will just float next to me, since no force is acting on either of us. But orbits aren't quite like that: if the camera is closer to the thing we're orbiting than I am, then space is curved just a little differently over there, and the camera will follow a slightly different geodesic, meaning that it will wander away eventually (assuming neither I nor my camera weighs anything...). But aside from differential geometry (ie. experiments over large spatial scales) there is no way to measure the difference between being stationary (not accelerating) and being in orbit, so they are the same.
The racism/specism you're complaining about is a major theme of the show, examined from many angles over the years. I would question the intelligence of anyone who, seeing the whole show, managed to read it as "the humans are always right" (although modern-day USA Republicans do this pretty reliably). But the show also does a great job of capturing humans' (and especially military humans') obstinance, myopia, and penchant for recourse to violence---from the point of view of those humans. If each episode ended with a firm moral of "the racists were justly punished" it wouldn't be nearly as realistic or deep. Not only are they showing situational racism realistically, but also the long-term causes and effects of it in a reasonably typical human society.
Different members of the crews learn at different rates, and experience different inner conflicts. I'd be very surprised if anyone watching the show completely took the side of the humans (or the cylons) without some pretty deep introspection. Just because a "moral" isn't explicitly presented and verbalised every ten minutes (as they all are---at great length---in Babylon 5) doesn't mean that it's not there.
Then you're much more considerate than most smokers, but not good enough to please plenty of the rest of us. While it's burning itself out, those of us who are allergic to, or just disgusted by, the smell have to deal with it.
Of course, the same can be said of the stench while it's still hanging out of your mouth. Smokers who never figured out whose job it is to clean up after them aren't the only reason that the rest of us want to see smoking banned---to many of us, the smoke is unbelievably foul-smelling wherever we run into it. How would you like it if I burned my car tires, or built my outhouse, upwind of your backyard barbecue?
My hobby: picking up still-lit cigarettes tossed out of car windows at red lights, and tossing them back in.
Never confuse legal/illegal with right/wrong. See also "civil disobedience".
But be willing to submit to the punishment meted out by the people with the guns, and good luck getting CNN to pay attention to a protest that depends on an informed, educated, politically active electorate (or whatever).
The most important lesson you can get out of school is learning to use your own brain to sort reasonable information from propaganda and wishful thinking. It seems to me that exposing kids directly to the different, um, "opinions", and teaching method and analysis, is a really wonderful idea. If the religious nutcases think that they have a leg to stand on, then they will surely be quite excited to embrace this approach, right?
I wrote up a little more on this a while back, and put it here.
I've heard of planning on ditching your laptop after 4 years or so because a new one will be about 5 times faster. However, there's something beautiful in the notion that even if my old laptop is feeble-minded and geriatric, no matter how useless it is by modern standards, it's still pretty.
I switched to DSL here because I had noticed Comcast doing this.
But here in Boulder it is not based on deep packet inspection or anything sophisticated. It is just a cap on bandwidth, pure and simple. I was downloading large files with scp (data files, mostly, but some music and movies and photos from my own server, but all encrypted). For exactly 30 seconds I would get rates on par with what Comcast advertises, and then they would throttle my connection from 1.5Mb/s to rather less than 256kb/s (I forget the exact number). I wrote a wrapper that would download for a short time and then rest and then resume the download, but they are tracking and averaging in a way that was pretty effective against anything I could think of.
What it looks like is that Comcast runs software that lets you "confirm" its advertised download rates using the common "test your bandwidth" websites, but allows them to avoid having to actually provide that level of service reliably to their paying customers. I believe there's something in their contract about not having to give you what they advertise. I wonder if it would stand up in court. Anyone feel class-actiony?
Qwest DSL in Boulder is much, much faster for long downloads, despite being advertised as slower, as they don't (yet) throttle my downloads after 30 seconds.
Why is it that people who plug equations they don't understand into calculators they don't understand, and then complain about results that they don't understand, get modded up? Is there a "+1 senseless attack" mod tag I'm missing? Maybe it's recent---I'm not too into modern Republican thought.
Mathematicians pretty much assume the natural log. Computer scientists often assume log_2. Astronomers and middleschoolers are most comfy surrounded by base 10. The conventions on how all of those are written are very much a local phenomenon (and to avoid further dispute, "local" is defined with an intellectual distance metric, not a spatial one). Hell, an engineer would have gotten momentarily confused that I'd used i rather than j, and a stupid one would have told me I was wrong as well.
I told you something that I think is really beautiful, trying to bring a moment of joy into your drab, wretched lives. But wait, how silly of me! Criticising is far more joyous than understanding. D'oh!
And if the RIAA sues you and you refuse to hand over the money, what do you suppose happens? They aren't the thugs; they aren't so stupid as to do that themselves.
Work towards a government in which corporate lobbyists hold the purse strings.
Fund key government decisionmakers who support laws that you write.
Sue people who break the laws.
If they don't pay, the government will send in people with guns.
Don't you see what's happened here? Corporations have created a mechanism in which they control the monopoly on violence. Gangsters were petty criminals operating outside the law. Corporations work on the same principles as gangs---protecting their source of income and taking care of their own and fuck everyone else---but they were clever enough to take care of the little matter of needing to work around the law.
How many people has the RIAA tried to effectively kill by bankrupting them? How are you supposed to get health care in this country if the RIAA has taken all your money, and possibly any chance you had of getting a job or an education? It could easily be a death sentence.
But there's something much, much bigger than that. The music industry is one of a large group who are building and perpetuating a political system in which for-profit corporations control the government. It's not the only force involved in that, but it's doing its best along with the rest of them, and has tried to silence advocates of a bribe-free government. Look at the harm that that has brought us already, and the harm that it will continue to bring for many decades to come. I'm not equating the direct effects of the RIAA with those of Big Oil or healthcare or the Military industry or mining, logging, and other resource exploitation and processing, manufacturing, etc---how many deaths have they directly caused in order to protect their income? But any corporation that tries to make it easier for a corporation to control the government is indirectly contributing to a society in which there is no governmental interest in protecting individuals.
Al Capone would be astonished at the effectiveness of modern mob techniques.
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Does this mean that they shouldn't be allowed to do it? It is far more harmful to minors to strip them of any freedom and consequent responsibility for their actions than to let them have sex. We are raising a nation of infants--just look at the things people sue each other for. If you have sex when you are too young (assuming it's consentual!), then maybe you learn from a slightly poor decision. Good! Not enough people are allowed to do that.
If you get pregnant or catch something, is that because you had sex? Or is that because those who know how to avoid these things refused to take the responsibility to pass along their knowledge and wisdom?
If society comes down hard on you for being in a porn flick, is that reason to make laws to keep you from doing that, or is that reason to try to fix a broken society?
As the population grows, climate changes, topsoil is washed away and toxified, groundwater is depleted, etc, this will become ever more serious. We will need to use GM higher-yield crops if we want to keep our population growing (as economists demand). There will simply be no way to move away from it. And of course here in the USA it is private corporations who will offer the service of basic survival. "Take away our rights as patent holders, and you will all starve."
Long long ago someone proposed "stomapod" as a fancier-sounding synonym for this.
Yes, I've been wondering about that. There are many good services out there, but most of my favourite information sources take minimal advertising. If advertising keeps them afloat, three things happen:
- Information is no longer judged on its quality, but on how popular/well-marketed it is. I'm tired of this country's obsession with car analogies, so how about a beer analogy? The Internet has gone from being thousands of specialty microbrews popularised by word of mouth to a few marketing companies who spend so much telling you their product is beer that you start to believe them.
- Advertiser-supported sites have a very hard time presenting impartial information. You can present ads that have nothing to do with the subject matter or you can risk pissing off your source of revenue anytime you're honest.
- And of course as Bhutan's government knows, advertisements tend to make people unhappy, simply because so much of marketing is quite explicitly trying to make you feel inadequate, and they're very good at it.
So while it is true that "sell advertising" is a viable market strategy, I'm not sure the bigger advertising-supported Internet is better for people than a smaller, less commercial one.Since when didn't they? Many of us remember cheering Microsoft on as it took on the evil Apple monopoly and started winning little victories here and there. Of course, the fact that they succeeded might be evidence that Microsoft is more evil, but I don't seriously think that anyone is "the good guys" in this market.
Oddly, looking at the KDE/Gnome wars is sometimes reminiscent of little baby warlordlets who don't really know what they're doing yet but have the same drive to conquor that the big players do.
So any best practice based on statistics and placebo studies is magic? Sure, we don't understand everything. But that will probably always be true. If we can say "I drilled holes in 400 skulls and just pretended to drill holes in another 400, and the cut group had a 20% higher survival rate than the control group" then an understanding of the mechanism is not strictly necessary. Look at all of psychiatry, just for example.
Sure, knowing what's really going on might let us refine the treatment (engineering) or understand patients (science), but knowing that we have an effective treatment even though the model is incomplete/wrong does not make the treatment magic.
Don't confuse effect with explanation.
The problem, of course, comes when you find evidence that does not support your theory, and decide to pretend the evidence doesn't exist. Hmmm, see, even Stonehenge is getting political.
I think you have it backwards. I don't have actual numbers, but my hunch is that >98% of the people out there want to click something in their browser and have something start working magically. They don't want to mess with alternative players. Remember, for most of the world (or at least the USA where we don't really have public education yet) the Internet = the Web = the Web Browser = Microsoft IE = the Computer.
But they still manage to sell that crap they call music. Seems all the contempt they have for their clients is well-founded. It's not like real music is more expensive...
The "wrong book" is in the library in order to fish for enemies of the people. Sort of how Bush was on the ballot to fish for people who should never be allowed to reproduce. Only someone forgot an important detail somewhere along the way.
Yes, my first thought is that it is far too restrictive. Why so much emphasis on incremental improvements to our shortsighted transportation infrastructure when you need only look at Amsterdam to see something infinitely better: a completely clean solution (after a (negligible) manufacturing cost) that would more or less completely solve our obesity-and-health-care disaster, our civic-planning-and-urban-sprawl disaster, and our road rage issues as well.
No, I'm not suggesting that we eliminate cars entirely. But if 5% of our population used a car for trips under 10 miles, it wouldn't matter if they all drove FUVs on longer trips. It would solve a lot more than just our energy problem.
You've spelled out the difference between the two paths brilliantly.
It's being done: see scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed version, if you will, of wikipedia. Never heard of it? I wonder why not! :)
IANAP, but I think you're wrong:
If you can measure the inertial difference between being in orbit (freefall) and sitting still, then they are different. But you can't. GR introduces the idea that spacetime is curved by gravitational bodies in order to explain this identity: freefall or an orbit is a straight line in the appropriate space, and there is no acceleration. If there were, you could close your eyes and point to the sun, because you could feel it pulling on you.
That's an approximation. Sitting still with no acceleration means that if I drop my very expensive camera, it will just float next to me, since no force is acting on either of us. But orbits aren't quite like that: if the camera is closer to the thing we're orbiting than I am, then space is curved just a little differently over there, and the camera will follow a slightly different geodesic, meaning that it will wander away eventually (assuming neither I nor my camera weighs anything...). But aside from differential geometry (ie. experiments over large spatial scales) there is no way to measure the difference between being stationary (not accelerating) and being in orbit, so they are the same.
The racism/specism you're complaining about is a major theme of the show, examined from many angles over the years. I would question the intelligence of anyone who, seeing the whole show, managed to read it as "the humans are always right" (although modern-day USA Republicans do this pretty reliably). But the show also does a great job of capturing humans' (and especially military humans') obstinance, myopia, and penchant for recourse to violence---from the point of view of those humans. If each episode ended with a firm moral of "the racists were justly punished" it wouldn't be nearly as realistic or deep. Not only are they showing situational racism realistically, but also the long-term causes and effects of it in a reasonably typical human society.
Different members of the crews learn at different rates, and experience different inner conflicts. I'd be very surprised if anyone watching the show completely took the side of the humans (or the cylons) without some pretty deep introspection. Just because a "moral" isn't explicitly presented and verbalised every ten minutes (as they all are---at great length---in Babylon 5) doesn't mean that it's not there.
Then you're much more considerate than most smokers, but not good enough to please plenty of the rest of us. While it's burning itself out, those of us who are allergic to, or just disgusted by, the smell have to deal with it.
Of course, the same can be said of the stench while it's still hanging out of your mouth. Smokers who never figured out whose job it is to clean up after them aren't the only reason that the rest of us want to see smoking banned---to many of us, the smoke is unbelievably foul-smelling wherever we run into it. How would you like it if I burned my car tires, or built my outhouse, upwind of your backyard barbecue?
My hobby: picking up still-lit cigarettes tossed out of car windows at red lights, and tossing them back in.
Never confuse legal/illegal with right/wrong. See also "civil disobedience".
But be willing to submit to the punishment meted out by the people with the guns, and good luck getting CNN to pay attention to a protest that depends on an informed, educated, politically active electorate (or whatever).
I'm sick of same-sex corporations mating with each other. It's wrong, it's paganism, it's not what we believe in!
Hmmm. From now on, no more corporations telling each other to "bend over"?
Dunno.
Is anything more than a theory? How do you know?
The most important lesson you can get out of school is learning to use your own brain to sort reasonable information from propaganda and wishful thinking. It seems to me that exposing kids directly to the different, um, "opinions", and teaching method and analysis, is a really wonderful idea. If the religious nutcases think that they have a leg to stand on, then they will surely be quite excited to embrace this approach, right?
I wrote up a little more on this a while back, and put it here.
Good analogy! MacBooks fly much further than ThinkPads if you get them spinning like a frisbee.
I've heard of planning on ditching your laptop after 4 years or so because a new one will be about 5 times faster. However, there's something beautiful in the notion that even if my old laptop is feeble-minded and geriatric, no matter how useless it is by modern standards, it's still pretty.
Perhaps it should consider a career in politics.
I switched to DSL here because I had noticed Comcast doing this.
But here in Boulder it is not based on deep packet inspection or anything sophisticated. It is just a cap on bandwidth, pure and simple. I was downloading large files with scp (data files, mostly, but some music and movies and photos from my own server, but all encrypted). For exactly 30 seconds I would get rates on par with what Comcast advertises, and then they would throttle my connection from 1.5Mb/s to rather less than 256kb/s (I forget the exact number). I wrote a wrapper that would download for a short time and then rest and then resume the download, but they are tracking and averaging in a way that was pretty effective against anything I could think of.
What it looks like is that Comcast runs software that lets you "confirm" its advertised download rates using the common "test your bandwidth" websites, but allows them to avoid having to actually provide that level of service reliably to their paying customers. I believe there's something in their contract about not having to give you what they advertise. I wonder if it would stand up in court. Anyone feel class-actiony?
Qwest DSL in Boulder is much, much faster for long downloads, despite being advertised as slower, as they don't (yet) throttle my downloads after 30 seconds.
Why is it that people who plug equations they don't understand into calculators they don't understand, and then complain about results that they don't understand, get modded up? Is there a "+1 senseless attack" mod tag I'm missing? Maybe it's recent---I'm not too into modern Republican thought.
Mathematicians pretty much assume the natural log. Computer scientists often assume log_2. Astronomers and middleschoolers are most comfy surrounded by base 10. The conventions on how all of those are written are very much a local phenomenon (and to avoid further dispute, "local" is defined with an intellectual distance metric, not a spatial one). Hell, an engineer would have gotten momentarily confused that I'd used i rather than j, and a stupid one would have told me I was wrong as well.
I told you something that I think is really beautiful, trying to bring a moment of joy into your drab, wretched lives. But wait, how silly of me! Criticising is far more joyous than understanding. D'oh!
Try using the natural log.
You guys are all nuts. I find it much easier to remember log(-1)/sqrt(-1). A little more accurate, too.
Don't you see what's happened here? Corporations have created a mechanism in which they control the monopoly on violence. Gangsters were petty criminals operating outside the law. Corporations work on the same principles as gangs---protecting their source of income and taking care of their own and fuck everyone else---but they were clever enough to take care of the little matter of needing to work around the law.
Get some yourself.
How many people did Al Capone kill?
How many people has the RIAA tried to effectively kill by bankrupting them? How are you supposed to get health care in this country if the RIAA has taken all your money, and possibly any chance you had of getting a job or an education? It could easily be a death sentence.
But there's something much, much bigger than that. The music industry is one of a large group who are building and perpetuating a political system in which for-profit corporations control the government. It's not the only force involved in that, but it's doing its best along with the rest of them, and has tried to silence advocates of a bribe-free government. Look at the harm that that has brought us already, and the harm that it will continue to bring for many decades to come. I'm not equating the direct effects of the RIAA with those of Big Oil or healthcare or the Military industry or mining, logging, and other resource exploitation and processing, manufacturing, etc---how many deaths have they directly caused in order to protect their income? But any corporation that tries to make it easier for a corporation to control the government is indirectly contributing to a society in which there is no governmental interest in protecting individuals.
Al Capone would be astonished at the effectiveness of modern mob techniques.