He's doing this stuff to make a point. His entire character on the show exists facetiously to prove a point. I'm not going to explain it to you because you should be smart enough to figure it out for yourself. If you're not, then you don't deserve to understand the knowledge he's trying to impart. (See, this is kind of his point...I'm not going to tell you, you have to think for yourself.)
This is particularly unfair when you consider that, even before this dust-up, Americans couldn't use the other nations' toilets anyway. You see, their normal-sized pee tubes would not accommodate our large American junk.
Well, if you're intelligent and you know that humans can't be trusted, then super-intelligent machines should super-know that humans can't be trusted. They'll super-distrust us. And then they'll enslave us.
The only problem is that humans generally don't use all their neurons, a mistake electronic brains will likely not make. The brain referenced in TFA is already smarter than many people I know. (None of you, of course.)
I'm not parsing legalese with my statement. I'm not saying you're incorrect, but if we're interested in doing a close reading of the law in this thread, then we should all reserve judgment before we form an opinion on what happened and wait for the Supreme Court to tell us what to think. No, I'm addressing the moral issue here...I'm saying that it's not right to attack the rank-n-file employees that performed the search with sexual harassment, molestation, etc, and try to brand them for life as pedophiles. Their individual involvement in this would have to meet a fairly high bar before I think that would be a reasonable approach.
That doesn't mean they don't deserve any kind of negative repercussions for doing the search against what should have been their better judgment—but I would be against anything too severe unless there's more to it than what's in TFA. They were not the decision makers, there's no reason to think they had any interest in perpetuating this thing. The point I'm trying to make is that they may have made the wrong decision in participating, but the underlying problem is that they never should have been asked to make this decision in the first place ("search this girl or commit insubordination"). Punishing them severely feels a bit like the decision a pitchfork-wielding mob might come to. -looks around and suddenly realize I'm on the Intar-w3bs, sighs, begins sharpening pitchfork-
By the way, speaking of where responsibility does lie here...when did we give our schools the right to strip search kids? As this case shows, this gets right at the heart of Constitutional protections...are school administrators really equipped to make this kind of call? Shouldn't this kind of thing be left to actual law enforcement professionals, not the school secretary? What exactly are the limits on a school administration as representatives of the government to police a campus? I'm pretty sure it's somewhere on the other side of "strip search for suspected possession of Advil".
Ohhhh...now I see. Your logic goes: pro-gun people must be wrong because allowing people to own guns was used to perpetuate slavery. We all know slavery is bad, so anything that perpetuated it also must be bad. Hence, gun control must be good.
There's like a hundred things wrong with this reasoning, the least of which is that it is a completely myopic interpretation of history. I would set that straight, but it seems Qrlx has already taken care of that with some authority.
I guess the YouTube posters got all cocky when "The River Crab Wears Two Watches" and "Grass Mud Horse" didn't get it blocked...
This is an unfortunate development. For a bit there, it looked like China might be going more open, but I guess the infantilization of their people is more important.:-/
We don't know the secretary's and nurse's situation from this story. They were most likely compelled to do the search in an environment of high suspicion against students perpetuated by the administration. There is no reason to think that there was any sexual motivation for this search in the least.
Having said that, according to workplace law, sexual harassment is defined to have occurred regardless of the events that transpired. The only requirement for sexual harassment to have occurred in an American workplace is that the "victim" reports feeling harassed. Under that definition, this could most definitely be construed as a sexual harassment claim against anyone involved. (Whether it would work or not, and whether this workplace harassment law applies on behalf of the student is a question for a real lawyer, not li'l ol' me. Based on what little I do know about the law, the nurse and/or secretary could claim they were being sexually harassed by being compelled to do the search. Again, don't know where that would lead...)
The meat and potatoes of this case is very, very clear to me, however. Apparently, this school administration thinks it is completely reasonable to young teens to invasive, humiliating searches by school employees based on suspicion of possessing what amounts to SOME ADVIL. Not black tar heroin, crack cocaine, horse tranquilizers, or even marijuana. Did they get the police and let them handle it? Did they call the parents in and consult them, or even question the girl and pull her records? The first thing they did was strip-search her??? This is reasonable how?
From TFA:
The school district does not contest that [the victim] had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant. "Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules," the district said of [the victim] in a brief, "only that she was never caught."
Is anyone else scared by this quote? Apparently, the schools expect that students should be compelled to spend the majority of their time in a place where they have to check all of their civil rights at the door. We should not consider a student innocent, even if they have a clear record. Oh yea, they do bad stuff...we know it, we just haven't been able to catch them. According to the same logic, I suppose I could say that there's no real evidence they strip-searched this girl for sexual thrills...but come on, do we really have to catch them doing this kind of thing? Can't we just pin it on them regardless?
Scary, scary, scary. And we trust these people to teach our kids civics?
So...if I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that if we let the government remove our rights to bear arms, we risk becoming slaves?
I think this is a sort of extreme way to make a point, and it doesn't do the pro-gun side you're arguing for any favors to address such an obvious straw man. I don't think we really stand a risk of "becoming slaves" in any kind of literal sense (assuming you're referring to the kind of chattel slavery that was prevalent in early America), but I do take your point in the rhetorical sense.
What is unbelievable is that Americans criticize fundamentalism in Muslim countries but they do not see the bigotry in their own culture.
Really?! It would be unbelievable to me if Americans weren't just as flawed as everyone else in the world. Humans all have the same problems, I think, especially in large numbers.
People generally make distinctions between what they like (subjective) and what is good (objective), but only when they take the time to train their senses to tell the difference.
Example: you might taste a wine and note that the nose has a distinct whiff of pepper and raspberry, and components of fresh cut grass and honey ring distinct and clear as a bell on the palate. This is a very good wine, a wonderful expression of the winemaker's skill, and you ought to recognize that...even if you personally hate pepper, raspberry, fresh cut grass, and honey. So it totally makes sense that you might recognize a wine as good and not want to drink it yourself. There is a difference between appreciation and enjoyment.
This professor's tests have revealed this, and nothing more. It's not that students actually prefer MP3 sizzle, it's that they recognize it and don't know whether it's good or bad. If you train your ear to hear what is most like a live performance, it's *possible* you'd find some kind of distortion effect more pleasing...but you'd still be able to tell which recording is objectively more like the real thing.
So, in a nutshell, the prof's flaw was in testing students with little audio experience, so they were only able to tell him what they think they like based on what they're used to...but not what's actually more like the real thing. Big surprise.
If I suddenly had a need to send something encrypted, but I didn't want it to appear encrypted, I would take the encrypted block and bury it steganographically in an image attached to the email, an image relevant to the innocuous message about Easter dinner that is in the body of the message...like a picture of a ham or something.
In fact, I suspect that most of the innocuous-looking traffic that's flying around the web right now is actually bearing a different encrypted message to the intended recipient as well. How do we know everyone's not already encrypting everything worthy of being encrypted? -X Files music-
Do you honestly want to be in office in a country where your sexual preferences (as long as they are legal) can cost you the job?
There are a lot of ways we could live in a country where this sort of thing doesn't cost you a job in political office. One of those ways is to safeguard your privacy so no one knows.
I don't understand. I loaded the article, read the first three posts, but didn't see a flame, a troll, or a "F1R5TTT p05ttt!11!1!eleven!1!". Where am I?
First, he had to suffer the financial losses from all this p2p stuff, and now that he's publicly admitted to it he's going to have to pay for an expensive legal battle against the RIAA.
I mean, unless the RIAA doesn't go after him. But a high profile music person like him admitting this in a highly public venue? Not prosecuting him would be tantamount to the RIAA admitting their side is not logical & internally consistent...
Right--I get all that. I'm saying in my post that they're basically asking people to put in the same time and effort as wikipedians do with none of the benefits of openness. If you're going to contribute knowledge to something, and wikipedia is an option, and britannica is an option, why would you choose the latter? My other point is that my facetious suggestion would never work for britannica because, if they were ever to get enough participation to dent wikipedia contributions, their editors would overwhelmed.
Seriously, I'm honestly thinking about moving off of Windows completely and onto linux. The only thing I use Windows for is Photoshop work, and I have legitimate access to a legal copy (-gasp-), but only for Windows...this is out of my control. However, if I could get a butt-kicking machine like the one I describe above...linux + some kind of virtualization solution might just be the thing...
My experiences with Macs have been less than fruitful. I don't like the OS—it does too many magical things for my tastes that don't make any kind of sense. Maybe it's the result of growing up in a Windows world, but if I'm going to learn a new agglomeration of random decisions, I'd prefer it to be not just different than MS's, but somewhat more cohesive.
Here's what I don't understand about Britannica's position: if they want good information submitted by the masses for their editors to review, why don't they just get it from wikipedia? That content was written and submitted by the masses. It's freely available for them to use. Why set up a site and have us masses make two submissions? Just go get it and review away.
Oh wait, that probably won't work because Britannica doesn't want the info to be open and freely available to everyone...only paying customers deserve information, and Britannica gets to decide how much its worth and who it should be available to.
I think I can sum up the issue to Britannica: ur doin it rong.
Maybe most tasks are not disk IO-bound—but when the few that are burn 95%+ of the time you sit at your computer waiting, that makes TFA relevant.
I do a lot of heavy post-processing in Photoshop (thank god I'm not into video). I need a 64-bit machine that will allow me to start with 8GB of available RAM and has an on-board SS disk cache. They've already started doing this with laptops. Wouldn't it be great if when you shut down your machine, it automatically rebooted and ripped the memory image of your freshly booted machine into a SS cache? Next time you poke the power button, in a few seconds it could rip the image bit-for-bit into RAM and you're ready to start computin'.
And it would be awesome if I could designate parts of the HD to cache as well. I would like to use a RAM disk, but Photoshop requires its swap file be placed on the same drive as the application itself...so why not just make the SS cache transparent via the OS? Any files experiencing heavy load get cached automatically in SS, like this Photoshop swap file, the Windows swap file, etc.
I expected these motherboards the day came the first 8GB CompactFlash cards were released. What's taking so long???
Check this out: "Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future." [a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse-gov/">source].
It's official—it's no longer necessary to capitalize the word internet.
If you're going to grammar-nazi yourself, do it all the way. It's "oughtta", short for "ought to," not "outta", short for "out of".
Now allow me to troll-bait-label myself. By making two mistakes and calling yourself only on the lesser one, it's obviously a brilliant troll for a pedant like me. I lose.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Talk about -whoosh-.
He's doing this stuff to make a point. His entire character on the show exists facetiously to prove a point. I'm not going to explain it to you because you should be smart enough to figure it out for yourself. If you're not, then you don't deserve to understand the knowledge he's trying to impart. (See, this is kind of his point...I'm not going to tell you, you have to think for yourself.)
This is particularly unfair when you consider that, even before this dust-up, Americans couldn't use the other nations' toilets anyway. You see, their normal-sized pee tubes would not accommodate our large American junk.
Had to be done, sorry. :-]
Of course they put people in cotton swabs. Cotton is quite fibrous, there's no other way to get it nice and soft. It puts the cotton in the basket.
Well, if you're intelligent and you know that humans can't be trusted, then super-intelligent machines should super-know that humans can't be trusted. They'll super-distrust us. And then they'll enslave us. The only problem is that humans generally don't use all their neurons, a mistake electronic brains will likely not make. The brain referenced in TFA is already smarter than many people I know. (None of you, of course.)
I'm not parsing legalese with my statement. I'm not saying you're incorrect, but if we're interested in doing a close reading of the law in this thread, then we should all reserve judgment before we form an opinion on what happened and wait for the Supreme Court to tell us what to think. No, I'm addressing the moral issue here...I'm saying that it's not right to attack the rank-n-file employees that performed the search with sexual harassment, molestation, etc, and try to brand them for life as pedophiles. Their individual involvement in this would have to meet a fairly high bar before I think that would be a reasonable approach.
That doesn't mean they don't deserve any kind of negative repercussions for doing the search against what should have been their better judgment—but I would be against anything too severe unless there's more to it than what's in TFA. They were not the decision makers, there's no reason to think they had any interest in perpetuating this thing. The point I'm trying to make is that they may have made the wrong decision in participating, but the underlying problem is that they never should have been asked to make this decision in the first place ("search this girl or commit insubordination"). Punishing them severely feels a bit like the decision a pitchfork-wielding mob might come to. -looks around and suddenly realize I'm on the Intar-w3bs, sighs, begins sharpening pitchfork-
By the way, speaking of where responsibility does lie here...when did we give our schools the right to strip search kids? As this case shows, this gets right at the heart of Constitutional protections...are school administrators really equipped to make this kind of call? Shouldn't this kind of thing be left to actual law enforcement professionals, not the school secretary? What exactly are the limits on a school administration as representatives of the government to police a campus? I'm pretty sure it's somewhere on the other side of "strip search for suspected possession of Advil".
Ohhhh...now I see. Your logic goes: pro-gun people must be wrong because allowing people to own guns was used to perpetuate slavery. We all know slavery is bad, so anything that perpetuated it also must be bad. Hence, gun control must be good.
There's like a hundred things wrong with this reasoning, the least of which is that it is a completely myopic interpretation of history. I would set that straight, but it seems Qrlx has already taken care of that with some authority.
I guess the YouTube posters got all cocky when "The River Crab Wears Two Watches" and "Grass Mud Horse" didn't get it blocked...
This is an unfortunate development. For a bit there, it looked like China might be going more open, but I guess the infantilization of their people is more important. :-/
We don't know the secretary's and nurse's situation from this story. They were most likely compelled to do the search in an environment of high suspicion against students perpetuated by the administration. There is no reason to think that there was any sexual motivation for this search in the least.
Having said that, according to workplace law, sexual harassment is defined to have occurred regardless of the events that transpired. The only requirement for sexual harassment to have occurred in an American workplace is that the "victim" reports feeling harassed. Under that definition, this could most definitely be construed as a sexual harassment claim against anyone involved. (Whether it would work or not, and whether this workplace harassment law applies on behalf of the student is a question for a real lawyer, not li'l ol' me. Based on what little I do know about the law, the nurse and/or secretary could claim they were being sexually harassed by being compelled to do the search. Again, don't know where that would lead...)
The meat and potatoes of this case is very, very clear to me, however. Apparently, this school administration thinks it is completely reasonable to young teens to invasive, humiliating searches by school employees based on suspicion of possessing what amounts to SOME ADVIL . Not black tar heroin, crack cocaine, horse tranquilizers, or even marijuana. Did they get the police and let them handle it? Did they call the parents in and consult them, or even question the girl and pull her records? The first thing they did was strip-search her??? This is reasonable how?
From TFA:
Is anyone else scared by this quote? Apparently, the schools expect that students should be compelled to spend the majority of their time in a place where they have to check all of their civil rights at the door. We should not consider a student innocent, even if they have a clear record. Oh yea, they do bad stuff...we know it, we just haven't been able to catch them. According to the same logic, I suppose I could say that there's no real evidence they strip-searched this girl for sexual thrills...but come on, do we really have to catch them doing this kind of thing? Can't we just pin it on them regardless?
Scary, scary, scary. And we trust these people to teach our kids civics?
So...if I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that if we let the government remove our rights to bear arms, we risk becoming slaves?
I think this is a sort of extreme way to make a point, and it doesn't do the pro-gun side you're arguing for any favors to address such an obvious straw man. I don't think we really stand a risk of "becoming slaves" in any kind of literal sense (assuming you're referring to the kind of chattel slavery that was prevalent in early America), but I do take your point in the rhetorical sense.
Really?! It would be unbelievable to me if Americans weren't just as flawed as everyone else in the world. Humans all have the same problems, I think, especially in large numbers.
I thought the Dover thing put this issue of evolution in school to rest. Read a concise (though admittedly incomplete) definition of science and how it applies to various "arguments" against evolution.
People generally make distinctions between what they like (subjective) and what is good (objective), but only when they take the time to train their senses to tell the difference.
Example: you might taste a wine and note that the nose has a distinct whiff of pepper and raspberry, and components of fresh cut grass and honey ring distinct and clear as a bell on the palate. This is a very good wine, a wonderful expression of the winemaker's skill, and you ought to recognize that...even if you personally hate pepper, raspberry, fresh cut grass, and honey. So it totally makes sense that you might recognize a wine as good and not want to drink it yourself. There is a difference between appreciation and enjoyment.
This professor's tests have revealed this, and nothing more. It's not that students actually prefer MP3 sizzle, it's that they recognize it and don't know whether it's good or bad. If you train your ear to hear what is most like a live performance, it's *possible* you'd find some kind of distortion effect more pleasing...but you'd still be able to tell which recording is objectively more like the real thing.
So, in a nutshell, the prof's flaw was in testing students with little audio experience, so they were only able to tell him what they think they like based on what they're used to...but not what's actually more like the real thing. Big surprise.
If I suddenly had a need to send something encrypted, but I didn't want it to appear encrypted, I would take the encrypted block and bury it steganographically in an image attached to the email, an image relevant to the innocuous message about Easter dinner that is in the body of the message...like a picture of a ham or something.
In fact, I suspect that most of the innocuous-looking traffic that's flying around the web right now is actually bearing a different encrypted message to the intended recipient as well. How do we know everyone's not already encrypting everything worthy of being encrypted? -X Files music-
Why did you bother to note that they were "Flemish" prostitutes? It's creepy enough without that extra random little detail...
There are a lot of ways we could live in a country where this sort of thing doesn't cost you a job in political office. One of those ways is to safeguard your privacy so no one knows.
I don't understand. I loaded the article, read the first three posts, but didn't see a flame, a troll, or a "F1R5TTT p05ttt!11!1!eleven!1!". Where am I?
I feel really bad for Lars.
First, he had to suffer the financial losses from all this p2p stuff, and now that he's publicly admitted to it he's going to have to pay for an expensive legal battle against the RIAA.
I mean, unless the RIAA doesn't go after him. But a high profile music person like him admitting this in a highly public venue? Not prosecuting him would be tantamount to the RIAA admitting their side is not logical & internally consistent...
-checking to see if I'm on slashdot- Yup...it's the right domain name...
This f1r5t ps0t!!!11!!111 is spot-on. It's informative, useful, well-written and well thought-out. It surprised me so much I peed a little.
Why don't they teach the arm to fire a gun instead? Seems much easier to let the machines do the killing than the saving...
Right--I get all that. I'm saying in my post that they're basically asking people to put in the same time and effort as wikipedians do with none of the benefits of openness. If you're going to contribute knowledge to something, and wikipedia is an option, and britannica is an option, why would you choose the latter? My other point is that my facetious suggestion would never work for britannica because, if they were ever to get enough participation to dent wikipedia contributions, their editors would overwhelmed.
Never used a Mac before...I'm scared.
Seriously, I'm honestly thinking about moving off of Windows completely and onto linux. The only thing I use Windows for is Photoshop work, and I have legitimate access to a legal copy (-gasp-), but only for Windows...this is out of my control. However, if I could get a butt-kicking machine like the one I describe above...linux + some kind of virtualization solution might just be the thing...
My experiences with Macs have been less than fruitful. I don't like the OS—it does too many magical things for my tastes that don't make any kind of sense. Maybe it's the result of growing up in a Windows world, but if I'm going to learn a new agglomeration of random decisions, I'd prefer it to be not just different than MS's, but somewhat more cohesive.
Here's what I don't understand about Britannica's position: if they want good information submitted by the masses for their editors to review, why don't they just get it from wikipedia? That content was written and submitted by the masses. It's freely available for them to use. Why set up a site and have us masses make two submissions? Just go get it and review away.
Oh wait, that probably won't work because Britannica doesn't want the info to be open and freely available to everyone...only paying customers deserve information, and Britannica gets to decide how much its worth and who it should be available to.
I think I can sum up the issue to Britannica: ur doin it rong.
Maybe most tasks are not disk IO-bound—but when the few that are burn 95%+ of the time you sit at your computer waiting, that makes TFA relevant.
I do a lot of heavy post-processing in Photoshop (thank god I'm not into video). I need a 64-bit machine that will allow me to start with 8GB of available RAM and has an on-board SS disk cache. They've already started doing this with laptops. Wouldn't it be great if when you shut down your machine, it automatically rebooted and ripped the memory image of your freshly booted machine into a SS cache? Next time you poke the power button, in a few seconds it could rip the image bit-for-bit into RAM and you're ready to start computin'.
And it would be awesome if I could designate parts of the HD to cache as well. I would like to use a RAM disk, but Photoshop requires its swap file be placed on the same drive as the application itself...so why not just make the SS cache transparent via the OS? Any files experiencing heavy load get cached automatically in SS, like this Photoshop swap file, the Windows swap file, etc.
I expected these motherboards the day came the first 8GB CompactFlash cards were released. What's taking so long???
What's not yet official—doing away with the opening bracket on anchor tags. -sigh- source
Check this out: "Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future." [a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse-gov/">source].
It's official—it's no longer necessary to capitalize the word internet.
If you're going to grammar-nazi yourself, do it all the way. It's "oughtta", short for "ought to," not "outta", short for "out of".
Now allow me to troll-bait-label myself. By making two mistakes and calling yourself only on the lesser one, it's obviously a brilliant troll for a pedant like me. I lose.