I like how you write like poetry... it almost soothes me towards your utter complete lack of references.
Sorry for that. Had to be done. You don't have any valid references to this, so my "miracle fuel" detector is ringing off the hook. Every couple years there is the solution to all of our fuel problems, but it never happens, and then there is ALWAYS the conspiracy angle attached as to why. Which never makes sense since it precludes that the US is the only government in the world, or that the oil companies have replaced The Elders of Zion or Rothchilds, or Monetary Fund, or Council for Foreign Relations, or Illuminati as the secret rulers of the universe.
CNN is not a valid source, nor a source which anyone should take seriously. Sensationalism gets ratings, and this that is what they give us. Cite a peer reviewed journal, or at least a popular science mag (with some respect), at least.
On top of this, destroying vast tracts of desert just for the power is as bad as many of the current nasty environmental coal practices. Just because it doesn't have pretty trees, or is a nice grassland doesn't mean we can destroy it at will, it is also a very complex ecosystem, and in many ways much more fragile than the vegetative eastern regions. The margin for survival in the deserts is MUCH lower.
I'm actually kind of sick of east coast people deciding that that deserts of the west are completely expendable for their own gains, but their native local habitats are not. We're never going to learn.
The only real energy solutions is probably a mixture of "alternative" fuels that don't compete with food crops, solar/wind, tidal, nuclear, and conventional fuels, as the region demands. Centralizing all of our options is a dumb idea, as is putting all our eggs into a single basket. Also a large part of the crisis could be fixed with simple efficiency, and education, as well as better city planning. There is no reason why we don't have roof-top solar panels, and solar heaters on all modern buildings.
with a fully public health system (which I would guess, because nobody knows for sure, is Obama's goal)
Huh? The plan is on the record, and you can read it yourself. Though if by "nobody" you mean people who are too apathetic or brainwashed to get their news/politics from some charismatic radio/TV guy, then you are correct. And yes, this is aimed at the dogmatic left and right.
As someone who is pretty much a socialist (a real one, not what people who do not know what the term actually means brand Obama, a moderate, as), his health care idea is fascist in that he want to mandate that people give their money to large corporations who largely lack oversight or regulation, the same corporations who just received umpteen billion of our dollars (which also was fascist, not socialist) with no oversight or regulation, who were failing due to the same lack of oversight or regulation thanks to the dogmatic right putting ideology above reality.
So, if by public health care you mean we all are forced to give money to large corporations under government mandate, or face government penalties, you are correct. If you meant something sensable, like granting free health care to people (because life and median health is a right as well, and beyond mere money or property), or even an alternative to sociopathic, and overpriced corporations, you are wrong.
Please get your facts straight.
I am a fan of caring for people, AND holding people accountable for their idiocy. I don't see a contradiction, and I am pretty far to the left.
This is all rather silly you can prevent STDs, ALL of them, 100% of the time with simple abstinence. Barring that you can dramatically reduce the risk with simple condoms. Barring that you can reduce the risk with a simple cheap test that your doctor or local Planned Parenthood would be happy to do for a very small fee (maybe even free). And barring this, I'm guessing only having sex with people you actually know and trust is more effective (though the least effective of all of the above, barring messing with children's genitals against their consent).
Probably, 90% of all cases of STDs is wholly the fault of the person who contracted them, this is true for people whose parents messed with their privates, and parents who didn't.
This sounds way too much like a post-hoc justification for silly religious and cultural traditions to me. That would be a wholly different, and more interesting, debate.
Yes, when we are young we might be stupid and have unprotected sex, but that is completely our fault, and the individual bears responsibility for this. Same for not being tested, and having sex after said stupid encounter and spreading your diseases to others. None of this has a damn thing to do with circumcision.
To me it is one of those things, that along with religion, is up to my children to decide when they're old enough to make that choice themselves. If my child really wants to hack off part of themselves to make some God or culture happy, that is their call one they are smart enough to make it.
As for the health benefits, I haven't seen that much. Yes, uncircumcised is harder to clean and slighly more prone to infection/blockage etc... But then again their are billions of people on this planet who are uncircumcised and living happily.
They're all inherently evil, except that google is smart enough to know that a good image counts.
I'm pretty far to the left here, and really dislike most corporations, greed, and economic sociopathy, but I'd say you are wrong there.
There is nothing in the idea or structure of a corporation that makes them innately evil. I doubt your incorporation papers have a hidden sub-clause demanding you be "evil", and I really doubt that many existent corporations set out to do evil. Corporations are morally gray.
It how they choose to act which would color them as good or evil, not their very existence. Just like pretty much all human constructs, it exists as a neutral tool, its ultimate ethical/moral value comes from the use of it.
That was TOTALLY justifiable, I mean they were going to turn into commies. And a bunch of people living half the world away choosing a political system different than ours is a REALLY bad thing! It would really hurt America in a terrible, and not at all nebulous way! Those strange Asian people living in a country that most Americans couldn't find on a map turning pinko would cause human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Think of the affront to the American way! Truth, Justice, Apple Pie, and Crappy Action Movies would cease to be, completely!
See also those scary brown people in South America trying to govern themselves in their own way... The nerve.
Rights are not something that exist in nature. They exist only because a large number of people believe they should, and are willing to assert their belief strongly enough to ensure the continued existence of those rights.
Generally I would agree, but I'm feeling feisty and a bit overly-philosophical.
People have the right to choose how their society works, even if their society marginalizes them (and the marginalized think this is how things should be). People need a voice to choose how to their society works. In order for people to choose how to live, they need to able to VOICE this. If a government quashes their voices, then the government does not represent the people.
I think a better example of game-devs not seeing themselves as artists (nor wanting to be) is the lack of style in most games. Most modern games go for a boring gray-brown "realistic" palette, and try for realism as much as possible, and most games, game-play wise, are boring cut-and-paste jobs from previous successful games in their genre, with perhaps a single added gimmick to sell themselves as better than I-XVI in whatever series.
Games as story telling is equally as trite, these days.
In short, there is no real innovation (outside of realistic-style graphics), and without innovation you have no real creativity.
There as some examples that go against this, Like Katamari and the studio who made No More Heroes and Killer 7.
But comparing games to Hollywood (as we are apt to do), we can see this mirrored there. You have your large, pretty, summer blockbusters and romantic comedies, taking the lionshare of the market. With a small niche of David Lynches, and Stanely Kubriks (I would have thrown Tim Burton in there, but he's been doing formulaic crap for awhile now, as well).
Most art is like this in the modern consumer market. Look at music, 90% of it is consumer grade pap, and 10% of it is made by genuine musicians (as artist). Design is in the same space too, with 90% being Ikea/Crate and Barrel crap, and the rest being filled by little botique markets. I could go on.
We have the illusion of things being more "artistic" in the past, because all of the formulaic crap is quickly forgotten, and all we remember is the unique or innovative. Games will be the same way, and already somewhat are. You remember Duke Nukem, but can you remember what was the big Tom Clancy/WWII game of five or six years ago?
Its best not to try to engage the lunatic fringe here, you are never going to change their minds.
Looking at your UID, you probably already know this.
Slashdot, for some stupid reason, has become the home of entrenched libertarian idealists, who think that their ideology is self-evident, and beyond dispute. They, in other words, have perfect faith in it. They also are somewhat blind to history (how well did that Industrial Revolution work for you?), because their ideology trumps reality. I personally think pure, near sociopathic, greed is what drives them, and the whole "freemarket cures all ills, always" crap, and their social Darwinism mumbojumbo is nothing but an ad-hoc rationalization for their own short comings.
Add to this the internal attribution error situation where all poor people are lazy, and all could be filthy rich if "they put their minds to it", whereas if they ever went poor, you know they'd blame socialists, all those ghetto welfare mothers, and big government. But their faith in their shallow, disconnected, ideology blinds them to this.
They really are like your typical middle class America, they all think their rich because they can have a 52" TV, oblivious to the fact that their in the bottom 50% of wealth still, and are still one one or two paychecks from the street.
Sorry for the comment, I really respect your posts, and if/. was feeling like ever giving me mod points again, I would have modded them up.
Do you really, I mean really care about whether they had your slashdot password? Now if they asked about your bank account and/or Social Security number, that might be something else again.
Yes, I do care. I care for two reasons, general principle, and the fact that my postings to Slashdot is a small part of my general online identity, which does matter to me somewhat. Sure/. wouldn't be as bad giving them my Facebook/MySpace passwords, since those have private components, like personal mail, and easy access to my real life friends that allows someone else to impersonate me. With services like Facebook, asking for your password is basically like your employer asking permission to read your private email. This is bad. I don't even think I need to enumerate why, even.
Imagine walking into a job interview, and having to bring all your mail for the last 3 years.
Thats you. I'm only using around 200GB of a 650GB drive from my gaming rig. And while I could downgrade to 256, and it would work, I prefer to always have a 10% buffer of free space. If I collaped the 3 drives I use daily, I would exceed 256GB by a bit, as well. So, different strokes for different folks.
On top of that, a hard drive is a long term investment, your probably still going to be using that drive a couple years from now, and looking at the trends in software, your going to be using much more of it.
Though I have been balking at picking up a 1TB drive while their insanely cheap, just because I can't quite figure out what to do with it. I have a separate 650GB drive for media/backups, that I like to keep separate from my main file-system, and a 250GB for music and my documents, that I also like to keep away from my main drive.
Though having a TB would make all my childhood dreams come true...
I'm not the only one who have seen results out of it. While the explanations given about it are very unscientifical, science might have simply failed to find a good explanation so far.
This verges on the "god of the gaps" type fallacy, and also begs the question. Before you can find an explanation, you must prove that an effect exists. Not enough people have seen results to actually show that there are any. This is my point, and the point of most of the people replying to your original post.
To say everytime it works is because placebo effect and everytime it doesn't work is because it doesn't work it's too easy.
No one said that it is ONLY the placebo effect that is behind the scene in the (statistically) few cases where it works. If we had a study on the effectiveness for any given treatment on any given condition, and it showed a 100% lack of effect, I would start worrying about the experimental design being terribly flawed.
If I give a homeopathic "insomnia cure" to 10,000 people (a HUGE sample size), there still would be hundreds of cases where the insomnia was cured. The probability of this would be lower than the threshold granted by random chance.
This is all that matters. Is there scientific proof that it works? I really don't care HOW it works.
Another tick against it that if homeopathy is true, it goes against most of what we know about chemistry. I'd generally put a giant, coherent, collection of data that agrees with the facts over one thing that may or may not exist that contradicts these facts. The idea of homeopathy also contradicts many other fields of knowledge, including logic.
The page on wikipedia has a nice blurb about how, if the principle was true, normal water would contain EVERY homeopathic remedy, thanks to the closed nature of the water cycle.
I don't mean to sound hostile. But it does raise a small bit of ire. There is no science saying it works, or how it could possibly work. To me this is more important than whatever someone wants to have faith in.
I am a general fan of the "give them a proxy" idea, or a prepackaged darknet, or such. Sending them guns probably wouldn't work, they seem to be doing a damn good job with mostly peaceful protest actions.
I would rather the US government stay out of it. A lot of the world, justifiably, hates us for meddling, so I'd rather we don't.
I hate to say this, but Twitter is fulfilling an important need now, both for helping the actual protesters (and increasingly revolutionaries) do their thing, and for helping those of us in the West to know whats actually going on there without having to listen to the Iranian governments spin.
I don't think this is as much the US governments fault as many other actions we've done. If we are involved (don't have any proof either way) we're not involved in nearly the same way we were when we messed up the political systems of much of South America and the Middle East. But then again I'm always a fan of spreading unrest.
Last year I got a rather nasty, and persistent, cold. For the sake of being open minded I took some natural remedies, my cold DID go away shortly after. Will this happen again? Who knows. If I did this 100 times, and my cold went away shortly after 90 times, I could say that it might work, for me. If I did this 1000 times, with 100 people, I can come closer to an actual conclusion.
Did you try this on a representational, truly random sample, while controlling your extraneous variables? Did you achieve a certain level of statistical significance? Until you can answer this as "yes" it is merely an anecdotal account, and not worth the pixels its written in.
Last time I sneezed, there was lightening, therefore I am Thor, God of Thunder.
I was trying to be very careful here, since I don't know the facts to any great degree. If this fits the conditions you put on it (unstated rule, etc...), then I agree 100%. If not, then nuance comes into play.
I just accepted it at face value, until further facts come into play. So many people jumped on it as evidence of tyranny, I figured I might as well try to cover the other side, just in case there is legitimacy here (which is the crucial, and unanswered, question).
Still, I was wrong to come down hard on you, and I apologize for that...
An apology on/.? You must be new here....this is either a ploy, or it is the result of a journalists who has been so well programmed that he doesn't even realize he's become part of the problem.
Probably a bit of both, and a small bit of Korean politics, with a dash of/. editor flamebaiting.
Actually the same thing happened after 9/11, though in a simpler, and less important form. The quickest, and most current news was online, on site not related to any of the major media conglomerates. There was a couple pages I kept refreshing every 10 minutes,with news from actual people on the scene, and from other people compiling other first hand information.
This is an extension of this. The web is more timely, and more local than any large news source.
Not quite true, if we arm the hostages, even while pissing off the guards, then this is a good thing
Not saying that the US as a government should be involved, but there is nothing wrong with our citizens being involved. Look at the leftist movements in South America, they all are multi-national/cultural. If you see tyranny, and can do something to stop it, shouldn't you?
If you can help someone, but don't, your almost as bad as the people who put them in the circumstance in the first place.
And there is the problem, this isn't a factual debate, it is a religious one. At best we can call it philosophical (when does life start?). People are arguing beliefs here, and not actual empirical things.
The same goes with gay marriage, and most of the other "hot button" issues of our time. They are basically the religious against the secularists. The problem is exasperated by the fact that over time both sides of these issues have become entrenched and dogmatic. There is no possible compromise anymore.
The very funny thing about these issues is that they are largely fictional. Most people in America think abortion should be permitted under certain circumstances, and not in others. The clowns on both sides can't rectify this, but by the fact of their loudness they get to decide policy in the end. The fact is, most people don't care, so the ones that care too much get the decision.
There is no disproving either sides premise. The anti-abortion/anti-gay crowd have God on their side, and we all know God knows everything and would never be on the wrong side. The other side (pro-abortion/pro-gay) have the term rights on their side, which boils down to basically have the same power as God.
If you know something, and doubt it, you probably are a moron. If you know something, and don't doubt it, you are a moron.
Sorry for downplaying the phone aspect you originally brought up, its probably because I avoid using phones more than the average person (obnoxious little noisy things), and do most of my communications through electronic means.
Though, as a quick tangent, this brings up something interesting. I can, with my limited technological spidey sense, see VoIP quickly becoming the standard for telecommunications (why have 2+ networks/architectures when one is sufficient), which will throw some serious problems at anyone trying to cache our phone data....I saw a handheld MID that *perfectly* performed speech-to-text in damn near real time and with all the background noise of the convention.
This is interesting. I would have expected some of this technology to trickle down to the consumer level. I've tried using three text-speach widgets in the last couple years (Vista's built in one, OS X's built in one, and Dragon), and they are improvements over what I remember from the late 90's and early 2000's, but still relatively weak. Using Vista's, as a weak example, after 4/5 days of training, it was still limited by its dictionary (try reading Lewis Carrol to it, good time, or worse, random selections of Kant), and other factors.
But, supposing this technology exists, and is more viable than has trickled down to us little people, we're still talking about something insanely complex to do. This technology, is, though, getting much better, I admit.
Is everyone in America going to start speaking in codes? Keep in mind you can eventually break them in context AND by using those codes you are standing out against everyone not using them.
My point was that this system would be futile in stopping "bad guys". And I disagree that you can eventually break them, think of them like a linguistic one-time pad. Lets say I call you weekly, and discuss the normal banalities, then "buying eggs" will never be out of context. Listen to how erratic peoples conversations generally are, especially in the "stuck in traffic" cellphone conversations.
The average person will not have to speak in code, since the average American doesn't care. How much actual outrage have we seen from even our current over-stepping of privacy and fourth amendment protections? Sure, the more liberal spectrum of the media was pissed, and the tech/libertarian/tinfoil hat crowd but no one else cared.
To me, the above is more frightening than the possibility of the government listening to my conversations.
That is a good question. Keywords for one. We can use the same search technology that Google, Yahoo, Wolf, etc. are using too.
Point taken, though is also is nontrivial. They'd have to have some form of learning protocol, like Google, but I'm not entirely sure what the lag between new info, and being processed is for Google, nor how it would actually set about learning. Selecting a list of static keywords would work, but would be somewhat useless.
Don't forget, that the content is not the only valuable part. The DOJ has been working with developers for a long time on figuring out relationships between people from phone records.
I agree on this, and this is somewhat troubling, especially when it goes wrong, like in the latest NSA brouhaha. I'm sure one or two degrees out someone I know knows some undesirable, I'm also sure that this is true for all of us.
Politicians have been voting in tools to provide the "ends" you speak of. That is not a conspiracy, and what remains is to argue whether or not it is effective, required in the first place, and is a slippery slope towards something more nefarious
There is a problem I have with this idea. WE voted for these politicians, we knew what they stood for, so by the definition of our political system we voted for this hypothetical database, and other privacy eating policies. We're democratically choosing tyranny. We always get the government we deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
I like how
you write like
poetry... it
almost soothes me towards
your utter
complete
lack of references.
Sorry for that. Had to be done. You don't have any valid references to this, so my "miracle fuel" detector is ringing off the hook. Every couple years there is the solution to all of our fuel problems, but it never happens, and then there is ALWAYS the conspiracy angle attached as to why. Which never makes sense since it precludes that the US is the only government in the world, or that the oil companies have replaced The Elders of Zion or Rothchilds, or Monetary Fund, or Council for Foreign Relations, or Illuminati as the secret rulers of the universe.
CNN is not a valid source, nor a source which anyone should take seriously. Sensationalism gets ratings, and this that is what they give us. Cite a peer reviewed journal, or at least a popular science mag (with some respect), at least.
On top of this, destroying vast tracts of desert just for the power is as bad as many of the current nasty environmental coal practices. Just because it doesn't have pretty trees, or is a nice grassland doesn't mean we can destroy it at will, it is also a very complex ecosystem, and in many ways much more fragile than the vegetative eastern regions. The margin for survival in the deserts is MUCH lower.
I'm actually kind of sick of east coast people deciding that that deserts of the west are completely expendable for their own gains, but their native local habitats are not. We're never going to learn.
The only real energy solutions is probably a mixture of "alternative" fuels that don't compete with food crops, solar/wind, tidal, nuclear, and conventional fuels, as the region demands. Centralizing all of our options is a dumb idea, as is putting all our eggs into a single basket. Also a large part of the crisis could be fixed with simple efficiency, and education, as well as better city planning. There is no reason why we don't have roof-top solar panels, and solar heaters on all modern buildings.
with a fully public health system (which I would guess, because nobody knows for sure, is Obama's goal)
Huh? The plan is on the record, and you can read it yourself. Though if by "nobody" you mean people who are too apathetic or brainwashed to get their news/politics from some charismatic radio/TV guy, then you are correct. And yes, this is aimed at the dogmatic left and right.
As someone who is pretty much a socialist (a real one, not what people who do not know what the term actually means brand Obama, a moderate, as), his health care idea is fascist in that he want to mandate that people give their money to large corporations who largely lack oversight or regulation, the same corporations who just received umpteen billion of our dollars (which also was fascist, not socialist) with no oversight or regulation, who were failing due to the same lack of oversight or regulation thanks to the dogmatic right putting ideology above reality.
So, if by public health care you mean we all are forced to give money to large corporations under government mandate, or face government penalties, you are correct. If you meant something sensable, like granting free health care to people (because life and median health is a right as well, and beyond mere money or property), or even an alternative to sociopathic, and overpriced corporations, you are wrong.
Please get your facts straight.
I am a fan of caring for people, AND holding people accountable for their idiocy. I don't see a contradiction, and I am pretty far to the left.
This is all rather silly you can prevent STDs, ALL of them, 100% of the time with simple abstinence. Barring that you can dramatically reduce the risk with simple condoms. Barring that you can reduce the risk with a simple cheap test that your doctor or local Planned Parenthood would be happy to do for a very small fee (maybe even free). And barring this, I'm guessing only having sex with people you actually know and trust is more effective (though the least effective of all of the above, barring messing with children's genitals against their consent).
Probably, 90% of all cases of STDs is wholly the fault of the person who contracted them, this is true for people whose parents messed with their privates, and parents who didn't.
This sounds way too much like a post-hoc justification for silly religious and cultural traditions to me. That would be a wholly different, and more interesting, debate.
Yes, when we are young we might be stupid and have unprotected sex, but that is completely our fault, and the individual bears responsibility for this. Same for not being tested, and having sex after said stupid encounter and spreading your diseases to others. None of this has a damn thing to do with circumcision.
To me it is one of those things, that along with religion, is up to my children to decide when they're old enough to make that choice themselves. If my child really wants to hack off part of themselves to make some God or culture happy, that is their call one they are smart enough to make it.
As for the health benefits, I haven't seen that much. Yes, uncircumcised is harder to clean and slighly more prone to infection/blockage etc... But then again their are billions of people on this planet who are uncircumcised and living happily.
But he got to base 2...
They're all inherently evil, except that google is smart enough to know that a good image counts.
I'm pretty far to the left here, and really dislike most corporations, greed, and economic sociopathy, but I'd say you are wrong there.
There is nothing in the idea or structure of a corporation that makes them innately evil. I doubt your incorporation papers have a hidden sub-clause demanding you be "evil", and I really doubt that many existent corporations set out to do evil. Corporations are morally gray.
It how they choose to act which would color them as good or evil, not their very existence. Just like pretty much all human constructs, it exists as a neutral tool, its ultimate ethical/moral value comes from the use of it.
Korea?
That was TOTALLY justifiable, I mean they were going to turn into commies. And a bunch of people living half the world away choosing a political system different than ours is a REALLY bad thing! It would really hurt America in a terrible, and not at all nebulous way! Those strange Asian people living in a country that most Americans couldn't find on a map turning pinko would cause human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Think of the affront to the American way! Truth, Justice, Apple Pie, and Crappy Action Movies would cease to be, completely!
See also those scary brown people in South America trying to govern themselves in their own way... The nerve.
Rights are not something that exist in nature. They exist only because a large number of people believe they should, and are willing to assert their belief strongly enough to ensure the continued existence of those rights.
Generally I would agree, but I'm feeling feisty and a bit overly-philosophical.
People have the right to choose how their society works, even if their society marginalizes them (and the marginalized think this is how things should be). People need a voice to choose how to their society works. In order for people to choose how to live, they need to able to VOICE this. If a government quashes their voices, then the government does not represent the people.
flamebait, really? Could someone please explain this to me?
I think a better example of game-devs not seeing themselves as artists (nor wanting to be) is the lack of style in most games. Most modern games go for a boring gray-brown "realistic" palette, and try for realism as much as possible, and most games, game-play wise, are boring cut-and-paste jobs from previous successful games in their genre, with perhaps a single added gimmick to sell themselves as better than I-XVI in whatever series.
Games as story telling is equally as trite, these days.
In short, there is no real innovation (outside of realistic-style graphics), and without innovation you have no real creativity.
There as some examples that go against this, Like Katamari and the studio who made No More Heroes and Killer 7.
But comparing games to Hollywood (as we are apt to do), we can see this mirrored there. You have your large, pretty, summer blockbusters and romantic comedies, taking the lionshare of the market. With a small niche of David Lynches, and Stanely Kubriks (I would have thrown Tim Burton in there, but he's been doing formulaic crap for awhile now, as well).
Most art is like this in the modern consumer market. Look at music, 90% of it is consumer grade pap, and 10% of it is made by genuine musicians (as artist). Design is in the same space too, with 90% being Ikea/Crate and Barrel crap, and the rest being filled by little botique markets. I could go on.
We have the illusion of things being more "artistic" in the past, because all of the formulaic crap is quickly forgotten, and all we remember is the unique or innovative. Games will be the same way, and already somewhat are. You remember Duke Nukem, but can you remember what was the big Tom Clancy/WWII game of five or six years ago?
Translation:
1. I bought an item, it was broken, I exchanged it
2. I bought a car that had a built in timer than made it break after 5000 miles.
3. I bought a crappy product, so had to fix it myself.
Its best not to try to engage the lunatic fringe here, you are never going to change their minds.
Looking at your UID, you probably already know this.
Slashdot, for some stupid reason, has become the home of entrenched libertarian idealists, who think that their ideology is self-evident, and beyond dispute. They, in other words, have perfect faith in it. They also are somewhat blind to history (how well did that Industrial Revolution work for you?), because their ideology trumps reality. I personally think pure, near sociopathic, greed is what drives them, and the whole "freemarket cures all ills, always" crap, and their social Darwinism mumbojumbo is nothing but an ad-hoc rationalization for their own short comings.
Add to this the internal attribution error situation where all poor people are lazy, and all could be filthy rich if "they put their minds to it", whereas if they ever went poor, you know they'd blame socialists, all those ghetto welfare mothers, and big government. But their faith in their shallow, disconnected, ideology blinds them to this.
They really are like your typical middle class America, they all think their rich because they can have a 52" TV, oblivious to the fact that their in the bottom 50% of wealth still, and are still one one or two paychecks from the street.
Sorry for the comment, I really respect your posts, and if /. was feeling like ever giving me mod points again, I would have modded them up.
Do you really, I mean really care about whether they had your slashdot password? Now if they asked about your bank account and/or Social Security number, that might be something else again.
Yes, I do care. I care for two reasons, general principle, and the fact that my postings to Slashdot is a small part of my general online identity, which does matter to me somewhat. Sure /. wouldn't be as bad giving them my Facebook/MySpace passwords, since those have private components, like personal mail, and easy access to my real life friends that allows someone else to impersonate me. With services like Facebook, asking for your password is basically like your employer asking permission to read your private email. This is bad. I don't even think I need to enumerate why, even.
Imagine walking into a job interview, and having to bring all your mail for the last 3 years.
And don't forget the main benefit of this, the small chance that Snake Pliskin might turn out to be real.
Quick price check, the drive you linked is $314 for 80GB, on Amazon, I've seen 1TB drives selling for $80 locally. Right now it isn't worth the cost.
Thats you. I'm only using around 200GB of a 650GB drive from my gaming rig. And while I could downgrade to 256, and it would work, I prefer to always have a 10% buffer of free space. If I collaped the 3 drives I use daily, I would exceed 256GB by a bit, as well. So, different strokes for different folks.
On top of that, a hard drive is a long term investment, your probably still going to be using that drive a couple years from now, and looking at the trends in software, your going to be using much more of it.
Though I have been balking at picking up a 1TB drive while their insanely cheap, just because I can't quite figure out what to do with it. I have a separate 650GB drive for media/backups, that I like to keep separate from my main file-system, and a 250GB for music and my documents, that I also like to keep away from my main drive.
Though having a TB would make all my childhood dreams come true...
My apartment doesn't have baseboards. :)
I'm not the only one who have seen results out of it. While the explanations given about it are very unscientifical, science might have simply failed to find a good explanation so far.
This verges on the "god of the gaps" type fallacy, and also begs the question. Before you can find an explanation, you must prove that an effect exists. Not enough people have seen results to actually show that there are any. This is my point, and the point of most of the people replying to your original post.
To say everytime it works is because placebo effect and everytime it doesn't work is because it doesn't work it's too easy.
No one said that it is ONLY the placebo effect that is behind the scene in the (statistically) few cases where it works. If we had a study on the effectiveness for any given treatment on any given condition, and it showed a 100% lack of effect, I would start worrying about the experimental design being terribly flawed.
If I give a homeopathic "insomnia cure" to 10,000 people (a HUGE sample size), there still would be hundreds of cases where the insomnia was cured. The probability of this would be lower than the threshold granted by random chance.
This is all that matters. Is there scientific proof that it works? I really don't care HOW it works.
Another tick against it that if homeopathy is true, it goes against most of what we know about chemistry. I'd generally put a giant, coherent, collection of data that agrees with the facts over one thing that may or may not exist that contradicts these facts. The idea of homeopathy also contradicts many other fields of knowledge, including logic.
The page on wikipedia has a nice blurb about how, if the principle was true, normal water would contain EVERY homeopathic remedy, thanks to the closed nature of the water cycle.
I don't mean to sound hostile. But it does raise a small bit of ire. There is no science saying it works, or how it could possibly work. To me this is more important than whatever someone wants to have faith in.
I am a general fan of the "give them a proxy" idea, or a prepackaged darknet, or such. Sending them guns probably wouldn't work, they seem to be doing a damn good job with mostly peaceful protest actions.
I would rather the US government stay out of it. A lot of the world, justifiably, hates us for meddling, so I'd rather we don't.
I hate to say this, but Twitter is fulfilling an important need now, both for helping the actual protesters (and increasingly revolutionaries) do their thing, and for helping those of us in the West to know whats actually going on there without having to listen to the Iranian governments spin.
I don't think this is as much the US governments fault as many other actions we've done. If we are involved (don't have any proof either way) we're not involved in nearly the same way we were when we messed up the political systems of much of South America and the Middle East. But then again I'm always a fan of spreading unrest.
If someone sells you cyanide as a cancer remedy, then they belong in jail for murder.
Which does the patient/victim/corpse a WHOLE lot of good.
Not knowing the specifics, one can never tell.
Last year I got a rather nasty, and persistent, cold. For the sake of being open minded I took some natural remedies, my cold DID go away shortly after. Will this happen again? Who knows. If I did this 100 times, and my cold went away shortly after 90 times, I could say that it might work, for me. If I did this 1000 times, with 100 people, I can come closer to an actual conclusion.
Did you try this on a representational, truly random sample, while controlling your extraneous variables? Did you achieve a certain level of statistical significance? Until you can answer this as "yes" it is merely an anecdotal account, and not worth the pixels its written in.
Last time I sneezed, there was lightening, therefore I am Thor, God of Thunder.
I was trying to be very careful here, since I don't know the facts to any great degree. If this fits the conditions you put on it (unstated rule, etc...), then I agree 100%. If not, then nuance comes into play.
I just accepted it at face value, until further facts come into play. So many people jumped on it as evidence of tyranny, I figured I might as well try to cover the other side, just in case there is legitimacy here (which is the crucial, and unanswered, question).
Still, I was wrong to come down hard on you, and I apologize for that...
An apology on /.? You must be new here. ...this is either a ploy, or it is the result of a journalists who has been so well programmed that he doesn't even realize he's become part of the problem.
Probably a bit of both, and a small bit of Korean politics, with a dash of /. editor flamebaiting.
Actually the same thing happened after 9/11, though in a simpler, and less important form. The quickest, and most current news was online, on site not related to any of the major media conglomerates. There was a couple pages I kept refreshing every 10 minutes,with news from actual people on the scene, and from other people compiling other first hand information.
This is an extension of this. The web is more timely, and more local than any large news source.
Not quite true, if we arm the hostages, even while pissing off the guards, then this is a good thing
Not saying that the US as a government should be involved, but there is nothing wrong with our citizens being involved. Look at the leftist movements in South America, they all are multi-national/cultural. If you see tyranny, and can do something to stop it, shouldn't you?
If you can help someone, but don't, your almost as bad as the people who put them in the circumstance in the first place.
(And back up your decision with facts)
And there is the problem, this isn't a factual debate, it is a religious one. At best we can call it philosophical (when does life start?). People are arguing beliefs here, and not actual empirical things.
The same goes with gay marriage, and most of the other "hot button" issues of our time. They are basically the religious against the secularists. The problem is exasperated by the fact that over time both sides of these issues have become entrenched and dogmatic. There is no possible compromise anymore.
The very funny thing about these issues is that they are largely fictional. Most people in America think abortion should be permitted under certain circumstances, and not in others. The clowns on both sides can't rectify this, but by the fact of their loudness they get to decide policy in the end. The fact is, most people don't care, so the ones that care too much get the decision.
There is no disproving either sides premise. The anti-abortion/anti-gay crowd have God on their side, and we all know God knows everything and would never be on the wrong side. The other side (pro-abortion/pro-gay) have the term rights on their side, which boils down to basically have the same power as God.
If you know something, and doubt it, you probably are a moron.
If you know something, and don't doubt it, you are a moron.
Sorry for downplaying the phone aspect you originally brought up, its probably because I avoid using phones more than the average person (obnoxious little noisy things), and do most of my communications through electronic means.
Though, as a quick tangent, this brings up something interesting. I can, with my limited technological spidey sense, see VoIP quickly becoming the standard for telecommunications (why have 2+ networks/architectures when one is sufficient), which will throw some serious problems at anyone trying to cache our phone data. ...I saw a handheld MID that *perfectly* performed speech-to-text in damn near real time and with all the background noise of the convention.
This is interesting. I would have expected some of this technology to trickle down to the consumer level. I've tried using three text-speach widgets in the last couple years (Vista's built in one, OS X's built in one, and Dragon), and they are improvements over what I remember from the late 90's and early 2000's, but still relatively weak. Using Vista's, as a weak example, after 4/5 days of training, it was still limited by its dictionary (try reading Lewis Carrol to it, good time, or worse, random selections of Kant), and other factors.
But, supposing this technology exists, and is more viable than has trickled down to us little people, we're still talking about something insanely complex to do. This technology, is, though, getting much better, I admit.
Is everyone in America going to start speaking in codes? Keep in mind you can eventually break them in context AND by using those codes you are standing out against everyone not using them.
My point was that this system would be futile in stopping "bad guys". And I disagree that you can eventually break them, think of them like a linguistic one-time pad. Lets say I call you weekly, and discuss the normal banalities, then "buying eggs" will never be out of context. Listen to how erratic peoples conversations generally are, especially in the "stuck in traffic" cellphone conversations.
The average person will not have to speak in code, since the average American doesn't care. How much actual outrage have we seen from even our current over-stepping of privacy and fourth amendment protections? Sure, the more liberal spectrum of the media was pissed, and the tech/libertarian/tinfoil hat crowd but no one else cared.
To me, the above is more frightening than the possibility of the government listening to my conversations.
That is a good question. Keywords for one. We can use the same search technology that Google, Yahoo, Wolf, etc. are using too.
Point taken, though is also is nontrivial. They'd have to have some form of learning protocol, like Google, but I'm not entirely sure what the lag between new info, and being processed is for Google, nor how it would actually set about learning. Selecting a list of static keywords would work, but would be somewhat useless.
Don't forget, that the content is not the only valuable part. The DOJ has been working with developers for a long time on figuring out relationships between people from phone records.
I agree on this, and this is somewhat troubling, especially when it goes wrong, like in the latest NSA brouhaha. I'm sure one or two degrees out someone I know knows some undesirable, I'm also sure that this is true for all of us.
Politicians have been voting in tools to provide the "ends" you speak of. That is not a conspiracy, and what remains is to argue whether or not it is effective, required in the first place, and is a slippery slope towards something more nefarious
There is a problem I have with this idea. WE voted for these politicians, we knew what they stood for, so by the definition of our political system we voted for this hypothetical database, and other privacy eating policies. We're democratically choosing tyranny. We always get the government we deserve.
This isn't justifying it, by any