Disclaimer: I'm mostly assuming here that the states will be sensible enough to distinguish between places like amazon and single-person web shops. I would expect the tiny stores to have feasible solutions (possibly through intermediaries a la paypal, but then that's usually true already), but amazon is probably going to have to jump through a lot more hoops.
(This is of course speculation, but while states will certainly want to get all they can from the major stores, I have trouble believing that they'd knowingly make the burden enough to effectively wipe out small businesses, both on general principle and because anything they get from those businesses would effectively be free income for them.)
Having gone through this process for Maryland, DC, and Virginia, I can tell you that the administrative burden this would put on small businesses would be very severe. This alone could probably keep an employee occupied full time for weeks.
But you're assuming that this change in the law is happening in a vacuum, and the states will not in any way respond to the knowledge that businesses will now have to register with all 50 states (or all the ones that collect sales tax, anyway). It's a no-brainer that the easier and faster they make this process, the more money they make off online stores. Once the states realize they could be making millions more by simplifying the process, you'll see the administrative burden lighten up pretty quick.
The business may be on the hook, but that doesn't mean PayPal can't implement a simple automatic click-through system so you basically just need to print out and sign some automatically-generated forms at the end of the year. I'm sure other similar services will implement the same thing. One also suspects the states themselves will be on board to make it as easy as possible to send them money, so I don't see this being much more onerous or difficult than any other business tax.
The only real negative effect for internet businesses is that they've been evading sales tax for years, and now their customers will have to pay more. Which I find personally a little annoying, but I don't really oppose it, it was kind of inevitable -- the only reason this loophole existed in the first place is that online commerce became so big, so fast, that the tax system hadn't yet adjusted to the changing consumer behaviors. Effectively, we've been experiencing a decrease in tax during the past several years while it was easy to purchase anything online tax-free, which was not the case pre-amazon. And decreases are nice for the individual, but the balance had to come out somewhere...
So, the summary clearly has an opinion of this idea, and pokes fun at it by referring to the "rigors of kindergarten," which is deliberately misunderstanding the purpose of the idea in the first place, and doing so in a way that is supposed to make it sound absurd. (I could just as easily mock kindergarten by saying it's to prepare for the "rigors of first grade." Education has to start somewhere, and starting at age 5 is not a universal practice.)
And then on top of this, there are comments on the article making fun of the phrase "rigors of kindergarten" as though it was stated seriously, and somebody is really arguing that kindergarten should be rigorous. So the disingenuous mockery actually succeeded in making something seem foolish a priori, without bothering to engage with what's really going on. That's just fantastic.
Cocoa only works with Objective-C code (see the recent article about them having to port Photoshop from C++ to Objective-C. This should not every happen).
Err, no. Yes, the Cocoa API itself is ObjC, but you can write your program in C++ just fine. It can compile in Objective-C++, so you just do all our own work in C++ and then use different calling syntax for the lines where you call back to Cocoa. The real changes to your code aren't going to be because Cocoa "only works with Objective-C" but because Cocoa is a very different API than Carbon, and thus GUIs are coded very differently. The bulk of the porting process for Photoshop is not (or certainly should not be) porting it all to ObjC, as this would be not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive for a cross-platform app. The real work is that the GUI framework is now completely different.
If your "this should not ever happen" was actually claiming that GUI frameworks should never change so much that apps require significant effort to port, even when the old APIs are essentially decades old... well, then it's no wonder you think Windows has the superior API...
The EULA is not a red herring.... If they decide they are desperate and start suing (not likely any time soon) there are a lot of potential targets.
Oh, come on. That's not just farfetched, it's ridiculous. First of all, the scenario you describe is impossible just because of the issue that they pushed this update out themselves. Even if they did become this "desperate" (because of people illegitimately using their free web browser? Well, whatever), no judge in the world would listen to a suit like that. But, more importantly, the point you really seem to be missing is that this is just a stupid goof on Apple's part. This wasn't an issue of "We only want Safari to run on Apple computers. Oops! We accidentally pushed it out to Windows users who should never have it -- we'd better sue to keep them from using it." It was "We want everyone to run / have access to Safari. Oops! We sent out the wrong EULA that doesn't apply to this group of people."
As GP says, insofar as there is an issue here, it is one of security. The EULA issue serves to slightly reinforce how ridiculous click-through licensing is, but it is not an ominous sign of Apple's legal scheming.
Sigh. Not sure why your reply is so rude. Obviously I have strong feelings about Wikipedia's direction. You can disagree without being insulting.
Can you tell us about some specific cases where Wikipedia lacked information you were looking for, or are you just trolling?
Is there some sort of secret cabal going around trying to damage Wikipedia's reputation by lying about their personal experiences? Is this cabal so large that you immediately assume any criticism comes from it? I was honestly posting my experience. The nicer thing to do here might have been to say "Actually, though there have been a few abuses, these problems aren't nearly as widespread as a lot of people suggest. What sections have you had trouble with?" -- that way you could make your point and gently probe my sincerity without just calling me a liar. And to be honest, I'd be very happy to hear my experiences and other stories are overblown, and the result of a few lone admins combined with the law of large numbers -- but so far I'm more likely to just see additional admins defending the policies as they stand.
However, since you apparently won't believe me without specifics: My first encounter with this was in fact with the well-publicized webcomics section, although (not being an especially involved member of the WP community) I noticed missing/removed information for some time before finding out that this was actually a matter of policy and not just that I didn't remember where to look. Since then, I haven't exactly been keeping a log book in preparation for this question, but off the top of my head I was reading about chess organizations / software a while ago and had some issues finding information I expected to be there, and another time I was checking up on a small-time conservative think tank whose article was evidently up for deletion. Maybe that won't satisfy you. Whatever.
Why do you care what the admins are talking about? Why don't you judge Wikipedia by its content, and not by rumors about what's going on behind the scenes?
That sounds kind of condescending. Especially since I did criticize WP's content, and you called me a liar for it. The reason I care what the admins are talking about is because the things they say are actually implemented as WP policy, which has a negative effect both on the existing state of the encyclopedia and on the future state by damaging the community and discouraging future contributions.
I don't have any real investment in this, except for the utility I've gotten out of the site before and would like to get in the future. I've only made a few contributions myself, mostly small edits to math pages (I cleaned up / corrected a couple of proofs) -- and now I see there is evidently debate over whether proofs should even be allowed. If you are part of the WP community, it would be nice if you could work to correct misperceptions and help fix some of the abuses on the site rather than just arbitrarily questioning the motives of anyone who has had a bad experience.
There's a difference between saying "Information should be cited and with neutral POV" (with which I agree), and "Information should be cited and with neutral POV, so trivia sections are bad" (which seems like a non sequitur). If trivia sections were allowed, but with the same requirements as the rest of the article, I'd have no complaint. Instead I keep seeing useful trivia sections (or no longer seeing them...) with ugly banners saying they shouldn't be there. It just reinforces the growing perception of Wikipedia admins as gatekeepers trying to keep information out rather than in.
trivia are by definition not notable, otherwise they wouldn't be trivia.
Yeah, I've also heard this argument. It conflates the formal definition of "trivia" (i.e. something unimportant) with the actual conventional use of the term (i.e. a small piece of information). I have trouble accepting good faith in those who make this conflation, since it's so self-evident -- if there are two possible meanings of a word, and one of them makes a sentence false by definition, try using the other one. However, assuming you are making this argument in good faith, let me clarify: when people talk about the notability of information in "trivia" sections, they are usually using the latter definition. Since this definition encompasses, just for example, every question/answer ever made on Jeopardy! or Trivial Pursuit, I'd certainly hope there would be a place for that sort of "trivia" on Wikipedia.
I've seen several articles getting their trivia sections removed or "integrated", and I must say it was an improvement.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you another -- I've seen useful trivia sections removed, or poor integration attempts, or ugly banners telling me that the useful information I'm reading shouldn't be there. It is appropriate to apply the same editorial guidelines to trivia sections as to the rest of the article. But there's no reason to make a blanket "discouragement" in cases where it really is the appropriate choice.
Wikipedia has allowed mathematical proofs, for several years. I've found several of them useful, as it sometimes has nice proofs that would otherwise have been troublesome to track down without a more detailed literature search. I know other people who have found them useful as well. The fact that this useful information is now being opposed by some (including, apparently, the submitter) on the basis of "OMG, if we allow proofs, then there might be too many proofs, and then how will we stop it?!" is highly irritating to me. Proofs have been allowed for years without overwhelming the rest of the useful information. Wikipedia has not become a repository for opaque, useless 200-page proofs. Why are we suddenly worried about this? If you're really concerned, just put the proof on a separate page from the main theorem.
I still have never seen a coherent explanation of why Wikipedia is so concerned lately about deleting any material that is unworthy. It has greatly reduced the site's utility to me, and is the reason I use it less and less, and will refuse to contribute to its fund raisers until their deletion policy is substantially revised. The only explanation I've ever seen is a sort of question-begging, "But if we allow non-notable information without deleting it, then there will be non-notable information there!" Yes, so? Here's a nickel, kid, buy yourself a bigger hard drive. If you want to make "non-notable" information appear lower in search results, fine. That's useful. But a lot of information that I find useful is apparently now considered "non-notable" by the Wikipedia admins, and I'd rather there still be some way for me to find that information.
Also, what's with the policy of hassling articles with trivia sections? That seems so arbitrary to me. It's frequently a useful place to collect interesting information about the subject that doesn't fit neatly in earlier sections (and "if it's notable, you should merge it into the main article!" is just silly -- we should awkwardly insert this single notable and interesting factoid into an unrelated earlier section? That just makes it harder to find for those who care, whereas the people reading the earlier section will wonder why the subject jumps around. Trivia sections allow for cleaner editing and easier information searches.) Again, what is the harm in it being there? If you don't care about trivia, you don't have to read the section. And, again, if it bothers you that much, just put it on a separate page.
I'm a little bitter about this whole thing. Wikipedia used to be such a great resource, but lately all I hear is admins talking about ways to block useless information (for certain definitions of "useless"), not about how to actually strengthen the material that's there. Pretty soon, teachers won't have to tell kids not to cite Wikipedia....
This is a good idea and I think it could equally be applied to boosting the numbers of under-represented groups in other areas. For example, proficiency at flying should no longer be a requirement for airline pilots. And surgeons shouldn't have to be good at doing operations. To say otherwise is elitist and divisive.
Okay, I just have to say something here.
Proficiency at flying should certainly not be a requirement to be accepted into flight school. Skill at performing surgery should certainly not be a requirement to be accepted as a pre-med undergraduate.
We aren't talking about giving adults without programming experience jobs as programmers. We are talking about giving highschoolers without extensive experience the chance to gain that experience through higher education, so that when they are proficient at programming they will be qualified for a job that requires that skill.
Saying that a highschooler must have extensive skills in a particular area before they are allowed to go to college in that area is elitist, especially in an educational system where most highschools do not provide the chance for extensive skills in that area to be developed. The fact that you and your friends taught yourself to program in highschool doesn't mean no one who hasn't done that should be allowed into the field.
How am I going to conveniently categorize fanboy comments?! Seriously, did Sony ever think of that?!
Before, pro-Sony would refer to the PS3 as $500, anti- would use $600 (and sometimes $700). How am I supposed to ignore the people I disagree with?!
It's the same thing with Nintendo... back before they announced the price, people would say either $300 or $200 (or sometimes even $150!) depending on who they were rooting for... now... well, I guess they're still more than $300 on eBay, so this still works some of the time:-P
Thank goodness I can still tell how people feel about Microsoft! Especially with the new model coming out...
In this case I think you're mostly correct that only small damage is done to the hypothetical store.
However, ANY discussion of small business protections (or of capitalism in general) that concludes with "If you don't like it, spend as much money as [major multinational corporation]" is using very sketchy reasoning, only one step removed from "If the poor don't like it, let them buy their own senators." If walmart is serious about crushing you, they will outbid you for these ads.
Also, though I think this particular hypothetical situation works out okay, I'm not at all convinced that there are no situations where this would be damaging. Nor am I convinced that this hypothetical situation would be especially ethical on walmart's part just because in my opinion the damage wouldn't be that bad (the cost-benefit tradeoff is also unfortunate: if I'm right, nothing happens, fine. If I'm wrong, trademark abuse just forced a small vendor out of business. Whoops.)...
Saying that "modern society has benefits and calling 17 year olds children is part of modern society, thus calling 17 year olds children is a benefit" is a logical fallacy.
But that's also an oversimplification of what I was saying. I was giving an illustration of one benefit of the way modern society is structured which requires at least some proportion of "adults" with substantially deeper educations and abilities than can be achieved by the vast majority of 13-year-olds -- that is, if the common expected level of education didn't go past seventh grade or so, the Internet wouldn't exist, or at least not in anything near its current form. And it's hard to get around the fact that once someone is out in the world fending mostly for themselves (i.e. "an adult" in common usage), it will be much harder for them to devote themselves to the long-term full-time education and development that would be required to maintain modern technological standards in a society where we really considered a 13-year-old an adult in the same sense as we currently do (say) a 25-year-old.
We do not expect more from from adults now than we did in the past.
You say this in the same paragraph that you mention reading and writing, which I think is inconsistent. Especially since your original post was talking about the past 100,000 years of human history. True, basic literacy is frequently achieved by the age of 13, to varying degrees. For most of the past 100,000 years that is already far more than was expected of adults, so we do expect more in some ways. I would also strongly question your claim that reading and writing is "generally covered" by the age of 13, since there is a noticeable difference between the reading/writing level of the average 13-year-old and the average college, or even high school, graduate (note that I am talking about average here, as it would obviously be ridiculous to say that no 13-year-olds can read at the college level). But to be more pragmatic and concrete: I would challenge you to turn a 13-year-old into a professional-quality automotive engineer. Being generous, perhaps one in a thousand could do it, but this proportion of educated professionals is far too low to keep society functioning at anything near our current technological level. Simplifying the much greater complexity of the typical modern career down to "Adults may have more opportunities to do more" doesn't work. Most people in our society may have the opportunity to do more, but this comes with the inability not to if they want to have a secure long-term career. Our economy needs a certain fraction of people who have had a deeper education than has even been possible for much of history. It is no longer practical in most cases to support a large family with only basic physical labor and hunting ability.
There is also a serious logic flaw in your statement that because we don't have to do something, that means we should not do something.
Well, if that was really the implication I was going for, then sure, but it wasn't. I was responding to the logical flaw in your post: paraphrasing, your post seemed to imply that because we have done something for 100,000 years, we should continue. My point was that the need for survival that required this behavior for most of that time is no longer relevant, so the fact that it was done when necessary is not enough justification to say that we should continue doing it when it's not. For positive reasons why we actually shouldn't keep doing it (as opposed to mere responses to your argument that we should), see the earlier parts of this post.
Combine this with the fact that anyone trying to claim we are not biologically adults once we have hit puberty, is either lying, or seriously confused.
We've adopted the habit in human society of distinguishing between the biological capacity for reproduction, which all animals achieve at some point, and the development and maturity necess
Planes might crash once a week, but thousands of them also land perfectly safely, news however doesn't show that, same with all the other bad stuff that happens.
Right! It's like how the pessimistic news reporters focus on the one bombing a day that discourages everybody...:-P
Seriously, though, I mostly agree -- if someone says you should let your 5-year-old play GTA because you shouldn't shelter them from "reality," I'm terrified by their apparent perception of reality. Something is not more "real" or more closely connected to "reality" because it is violent or obscene. There is plenty of violence and obscenity in reality, but not nearly as much as you'd think if you mostly just watched TV and played GTA. The whole association with the word "reality" and the most gruesome and painful parts of actual reality is a bizarre and skewed view that will not particularly help children cope with or understand the world around them in any healthy way. And sitting your kids in front of the TV on the principle that you shouldn't shelter them from "reality" seems kind of perverse...
For a 100,000 years, humans have reached adulthood at ~13. They have raised children, fought wars and ran nations.... if it takes 18-21 years for current humans to reach adulthood, SOMETHING went seriously wrong.
For 100,000 years, most people have been unable to read or write, and "adulthood" essentially implied that they knew a single trade well (generally whatever their parents did) and/or could kill wild animals, and could more or less keep their family from dying -- and not much more. There is a problem today in that the expectations on children can become too lax, but your implication that something is "seriously wrong" with someone who "takes 18 years" to reach adulthood in our society is ridiculous -- we expect much more of adults now, and it is reasonable to do so. We are not (typically, in the western world, at least not in those segments of the population likely to be posting on slashdot) so close to mere survival that the physical abilities of a 13-year-old boy will make a life-or-death difference for most families, or that a 13-year-old girl should start churning out babies just to ensure the survival of the species.
If you want to say we should teach our children responsibility at an earlier age, great, I agree that's something we should work on. But saying they should be "adults" at 13 just because that's what it has been like for much of history is kind of throwing out the legitimate and positive changes that have been made since then. I'm not into the philosophy that says the future is always better than the past, but the very fact that we're having this conversation from physically separated locations without even knowing each other should suggest that there are some useful aspects to recent changes...
Hmm, I didn't notice this when you posted it, but maybe you'll still see my reply...
Yes, basically I accepted microevolution but not macroevolution. My objection wasn't so much irreducible complexity, though (at least, not by around college age when I'd thought things through more) -- in fact, long before I changed my mind I was pretty disturbed by "creation science" or "intelligent design" or whatever the latest name is, since it was clear to me that the leaders of these movements were being completely unscientific, and were duping a lot of people who didn't know any better by fraudulently claiming authority they didn't have. (I was creationist myself, but didn't claim it was "science" -- it was just what I believed had happened.)
Primarily, I think my error was lack of knowledge, though I'm sure you could point to many logical fallacies that supported the main error -- but my central objection was that evolution is not falsifiable. There were various other smaller issues that I objected to, but less emphatically: no one had ever been able to justify for me the central premise of carbon dating, for example (they still haven't, actually, but having passed the main hurdle of falsifiability I'm willing to largely accept that "on faith").
I think the actual catalyst for changing my mind was probably 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, which is a wonderful site -- it's completely (and, I think, deliberately) non-hostile towards religion in general and creationists in particular, it just clearly states the central evidence for common descent. It gave a lot of evidence, especially the wonderful results from genetic analysis, that I had never heard of before, and that really didn't mesh with my "evolution isn't falsifiable" claims up to that point. If there was an 'aha' moment it came from this site, though it still took a while for me to think things over.
A big thing feeding this whole conflict is that many of the leaders on both sides have completely ascientific agendas. A huge hangup for most creationists is, quite obviously, that they can't reconcile evolution with their understanding of Christianity or the Bible or what have you. Now, most major Christian groups have worked past this (both the [last few] Pope[s] and the Archbishop of Canterbury have explicitly said not just that there's nothing wrong with evolution, but that it is probably substantially true... I don't know if other large denominations have stated it as explicitly, but for the most part they think evolution is fine). In fact, religious objections to evolution are mostly a phenomenon of American fundamentalists and evangelicals, and other closely allied groups. Having been raised evangelical, though, I wasn't even aware that most (global) Christians didn't think the same way.
A huge issue here is: what many creationists need to hear, in order to be more open-minded and objective about the debate, is "Evolution doesn't need to conflict with your faith. You can believe in God and the Bible and still believe in evolution." They might not believe this, at least not the first few times they hear it, but this is a hugely important message to get across. Having come out of this culture, I can assure you that if these people are forced to choose between their faith (which for many of them is the defining aspect of their life) and evolution, there is no choice there. They'd be throwing out their faith, alienating themselves from their friends and their culture and their upbringing, removing the meaning from their lives, and all they'd get in return is abstract agreement with some scientists they'll probably never meet, and many of whom probably still think they're stupid anyway. But of course, all of these things are by no means necessary consequences of belief in evolution.
On the flip side, though, this assurance they need, that belief in evolution need not invalidate their entire lives, is exactly what many advocates of evol
But the (quite small, so far) percentage of people who do have HD TVs also tend to have very large disposable incomes, and to spend a lot of it on media and entertainment, thereby representing a disproportionate chunk of video sales.
I still think the whole thing is stupid and premature, but this isn't necessarily so just because most consumers don't have HD TVs yet -- with income gaps widening a lot of companies have the luxury of being able to completely ignore "most consumers."
That said... I would have to have a pretty damn big disposable income to worry about HD stuff at this point. I'll probably end up going the same route as with CRT monitors -> LCD -- wait until the prices have dropped so much that the next time I go to buy one, the LCDs are roughly the price I was expecting to spend anyway, and then get that instead. (Although technically I still use a CRT... prices have reached that point, but my old monitor still works, so I've never bothered to buy a new one. Yeah, I'm not the kind of consumer marketers dream of...)
"How dare the record companies charge $20 for a CD!* This give me the moral justification to acquire my music with BiTTorrent**."
* Not true. ** Not true, either.
Well, I don't remember seeing single CDs for $20, but for quite a while they were in the $17-18 range, at least at many places I shopped. I never used it as moral justification for downloading the tracks -- it essentially just meant I didn't buy the albums that cost that much, or found cheaper places to buy them (the early days of amazon were very helpful in this regard). But even now I'm skeptical of the GP's claim that "most" physical CDs are not more than $10 -- I mostly buy from iTunes, but when I do get physical CDs they're mostly more than that. Perhaps it is possible to find most CDs for $10 (at least if you ignore shipping charges -- but why would you?), but that's not the same as saying that most CDs are $10 or less... not everyone has easy access to cheap in-person music stores with a wide selection.
I don't think anyone is questioning the basic tenets of macroevolution.... Every time I read a discussion here on/. on the topic, I see about ten comments that say something to the effect of "Evolution is an unimpeachable fact". When I see statements like that I start to wonder if science is taking place anymore.
Well, yes, people tend to generalize a lot. But the claim "Life on Earth today descended from a common ancestor" is almost universally accepted by scientists (in general, but especially in biology-related areas). This is the "fact" of evolution, and can be compared (albeit on a very different scale) to the orbit of the planets: it has been going on for as long as we've been watching, and there is a lot of pretty solid evidence (fossil record, DNA analysis, etc.) that it's been going on for very much longer. This is usually what people mean when they say evolution is an unimpeachable fact -- the details, such as the exact timeline, the details of the mechanism, and so on, have been the subject of much debate and revision, but "evolution," that is, that species have evolved into other species, is as close to being demonstrated as is possible without us having actually watched it (in some cases we have watched it, actually, but I don't want to get in that since you can always reject the observed examples on the basis that the distinct "species" can still interbreed with reasonable success -- this isn't really how we define distinct species, usually, but I prefer to avoid semantic arguments entirely).
Similarly, astronomers argue a lot about the precise operation of gravity, but no one is questioning the observation that matter tends to be attracted to other matter, or the ubiquity of elliptic orbits. There's just such consistent evidence for these basic observations that there's not much more to say -- the interesting questions are about exactly how to characterize/quantify the details of the behavior. In evolution, there's such overwhelming evidence that speciation happens, and that life today shares a common ancestor, that there's not much more to say about it -- the real question is how, when, why, and so on.
I hope people don't blindly push evolution like some people blindly push religion.
Many, many people do, of course. Like most large categories of people, most of the individuals are far from experts, and have a lot of significant misunderstandings even about the meaning of their own beliefs. But what we should take away from this isn't that evolution is no better than any other alternatives (judging the view by the people who hold it is always dangerous) -- instead, we should reflect that we, too, are probably ignorant of many very simple concepts, and then try to educate people (including ourselves) as well as we can.
A real April Fool's Day post: "slashdot announced today that they're implementing a heuristic algorithm to detect and screen all duplicate submissions. And they're hiring a proofreader." Hee. It's funny because it's a lie...
Yeah, about your reading comprehension... maybe you noticed that I was just using a term the parent used first?
Err... yes. I understood your point fine. I know you were using a term the parent used, however since he was just saying you shouldn't call people that, whereas you were actually calling him that, I still thought it was needlessly rude.
I thought my point was pretty clear that it's fairly ridiculous to call foul on calling someone ignorant just because they have a different view, when it's obvious that they themselves only hold that view out of ignorance.
Well, except for the fact that here you're saying "ignorant" whereas before you said "gibbering idiot," which is completely and fundamentally different (every human suffers from the former about many topics for the entirety of their lives; most do not suffer from the latter, at least by most reasonable standards) -- with that exception, yes, that point was clear. I disagreed with it. Specifically: I question your claim in this sentence that the poster was only saying you shouldn't call people idiots because of ignorance. As a counterexample to your claim, I submit myself: I think evolution is true, and yet I still think you shouldn't call all creationists idiots, especially in any respect that is not very directly related to evolution.
Maybe you would say that my insistence on at least a modicum of respect for the humanity (if not the correctness) of huge groups of people is still reflective of some sort of ignorance. Oh well...
DNA + "survival of the fittest" = evolution. It's not a theory - it's just a plain consequence of the the tautology "survival of the fittest" and the fact that we're based on a naturally varying chemical hereditory mechanism (DNA). If you don't understand that people who have more children leave more descendents, or that we're based on DNA, then, YES, you are stupid.
People have known for a very long time that people who have more children leave more descendants, and that attributes of the parents were often expressed in their children (even before there was a clear scientific explanation of why). And yet, countless brilliant people over thousands of years didn't really figure out what was going on. In fact, that the degree of speciation observed in nature is completely explainable by those two things is very surprising if you come at it without the benefit of modern scientific knowledge and philosophy. You may recall that this was a pretty big deal when the pieces started falling together, even for people who didn't have any particular objections to the possibility (religious or otherwise). For most of history, correct understanding of or belief in evolution has had zero correlation with intelligence, and to claim that after such a short timespan it now has a 100% correlation is kind of ignoring the culture we live in and the time that fundamental philosophical shifts always take to sink in.
You can say that evolution is true, and you can say that poor acceptance of it is, among other things, a worrying aspect of our educational system, and should be addressed. I'll agree with you there. But that doesn't mean that all, or even most, of the people who reject evolution are stupid (or at least, not any more so than most people who believe in evolution).
And it is disturbing to define intelligence, not by "a modicum of knowledge and rational analysis capability" as you misleadingly say, but by one's conclusions about a single empirical fact, disregarding all other opinions about all other subjects, as well as the means by which the conclusion was reached, the importance attached to it, and so on -- you're just going to throw all that out and reduce it to a single true/false question? That isn't intelligence, or if it is, then the bar is bizarrely and arbitrarily low...
I love when people talk about how arrogant it is to accuse people of being gibbering idiots, and then go on to prove what gibbering idiots they are?
GP: "Being mistaken on topic X doesn't mean someone is a complete idiot in every area of life."
P: "Aha! You claim not to be an idiot, but you must be, because you misapplied a term from topic X!"
This questionable display of reading comprehension (not to mention unnecessary rudeness in actually calling someone a gibbering idiot to their face) is given a pass because the parent reaches the correct conclusion on topic X. Post is modded insightful.
Exactly. For most of my life, even past college, I was a creationist (raised Evangelical). This didn't in any way hinder my ability to think intelligently, or to do lab work for a biotech company, or to ace my science classes, or to graduate from a good school with honors. In most of life, your opinions on the practical origins of life just don't matter very much. Now, one of the places where it does matter is if you're a biologist, or a teacher of biology, or someone who is in a position to legislate on the actions of the former two, so this is a legitimate political conflict. But it's very frustrating when people assume that this one opinion is the only important factor between "intelligent supporter of science" and "superstitious Neanderthal."
Now, eventually, I did change my opinion, and now I'm quite convinced of evolution. But the reason I changed my mind highlights another issue here: I read more about it, and finally found persuasive evidence that answered the objections I'd had for years. I couldn't reconcile that evidence with what I had believed, so I changed my mind.
The thing is, it's not like people had never before tried to argue with me or change my mind. Plenty had, and some had been quite smug about it, too. But no one had actually been able to answer my objections. I would even go so far as to say that I had a better understanding of the scientific method than many of the people who had tried to change my mind, since they often offered very poor or contradictory "scientific evidence," or used simple tautologies and ended up saying "See? It's obvious!" Essentially, I now think they were right, but not because they had any particularly good understanding of the subject, but because they had been taught the right thing and believed it.
Now, most of the time there's nothing wrong with believing what you're taught within reason. Skepticism is healthy, but it can't be applied to literally everything or society couldn't function. But in this case, these people who believed their teachers without really understanding the issue were treating me as stupid for... believing my parents/acquaintances/pastors/whatever without really understanding the issue. Even though I understood more about the issue than they did.
Ultimately, I'm not saying it doesn't matter what people believe. It's largely irrelevant to daily life, but some people are interested in legislating about this issue. And even though the bulk of the population will never be scientific experts, I think more correct impressions are generally preferable to less correct impressions. So in fact, I think people should teach and advocate evolution -- but they need to drop the instant contempt for people who disagree. People who don't believe in evolution are not generally any stupider than people who do. I happen to think they're incorrect, but smart people believe incorrect things all the time, and it's very easy to condemn the belief coming from an environment where all the pressure from an early age is in favor of evolution. Most of the people who believe in one or another form of creationism were raised in environments where the opposite is true. So, if you're trying to advocate or explain evolution, show a little more respect for people who haven't had the exact same life experiences that you do, and be aware that this is not the litmus test of their intelligence (in either direction:-P).
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I'm mostly assuming here that the states will be sensible enough to distinguish between places like amazon and single-person web shops. I would expect the tiny stores to have feasible solutions (possibly through intermediaries a la paypal, but then that's usually true already), but amazon is probably going to have to jump through a lot more hoops.
(This is of course speculation, but while states will certainly want to get all they can from the major stores, I have trouble believing that they'd knowingly make the burden enough to effectively wipe out small businesses, both on general principle and because anything they get from those businesses would effectively be free income for them.)
Having gone through this process for Maryland, DC, and Virginia, I can tell you that the administrative burden this would put on small businesses would be very severe. This alone could probably keep an employee occupied full time for weeks.
But you're assuming that this change in the law is happening in a vacuum, and the states will not in any way respond to the knowledge that businesses will now have to register with all 50 states (or all the ones that collect sales tax, anyway). It's a no-brainer that the easier and faster they make this process, the more money they make off online stores. Once the states realize they could be making millions more by simplifying the process, you'll see the administrative burden lighten up pretty quick.
The business may be on the hook, but that doesn't mean PayPal can't implement a simple automatic click-through system so you basically just need to print out and sign some automatically-generated forms at the end of the year. I'm sure other similar services will implement the same thing. One also suspects the states themselves will be on board to make it as easy as possible to send them money, so I don't see this being much more onerous or difficult than any other business tax.
The only real negative effect for internet businesses is that they've been evading sales tax for years, and now their customers will have to pay more. Which I find personally a little annoying, but I don't really oppose it, it was kind of inevitable -- the only reason this loophole existed in the first place is that online commerce became so big, so fast, that the tax system hadn't yet adjusted to the changing consumer behaviors. Effectively, we've been experiencing a decrease in tax during the past several years while it was easy to purchase anything online tax-free, which was not the case pre-amazon. And decreases are nice for the individual, but the balance had to come out somewhere...
So, the summary clearly has an opinion of this idea, and pokes fun at it by referring to the "rigors of kindergarten," which is deliberately misunderstanding the purpose of the idea in the first place, and doing so in a way that is supposed to make it sound absurd. (I could just as easily mock kindergarten by saying it's to prepare for the "rigors of first grade." Education has to start somewhere, and starting at age 5 is not a universal practice.)
And then on top of this, there are comments on the article making fun of the phrase "rigors of kindergarten" as though it was stated seriously, and somebody is really arguing that kindergarten should be rigorous. So the disingenuous mockery actually succeeded in making something seem foolish a priori, without bothering to engage with what's really going on. That's just fantastic.
Cocoa only works with Objective-C code (see the recent article about them having to port Photoshop from C++ to Objective-C. This should not every happen).
Err, no. Yes, the Cocoa API itself is ObjC, but you can write your program in C++ just fine. It can compile in Objective-C++, so you just do all our own work in C++ and then use different calling syntax for the lines where you call back to Cocoa. The real changes to your code aren't going to be because Cocoa "only works with Objective-C" but because Cocoa is a very different API than Carbon, and thus GUIs are coded very differently. The bulk of the porting process for Photoshop is not (or certainly should not be) porting it all to ObjC, as this would be not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive for a cross-platform app. The real work is that the GUI framework is now completely different.
If your "this should not ever happen" was actually claiming that GUI frameworks should never change so much that apps require significant effort to port, even when the old APIs are essentially decades old... well, then it's no wonder you think Windows has the superior API...
The EULA is not a red herring. ... If they decide they are desperate and start suing (not likely any time soon) there are a lot of potential targets.
Oh, come on. That's not just farfetched, it's ridiculous. First of all, the scenario you describe is impossible just because of the issue that they pushed this update out themselves. Even if they did become this "desperate" (because of people illegitimately using their free web browser? Well, whatever), no judge in the world would listen to a suit like that. But, more importantly, the point you really seem to be missing is that this is just a stupid goof on Apple's part. This wasn't an issue of "We only want Safari to run on Apple computers. Oops! We accidentally pushed it out to Windows users who should never have it -- we'd better sue to keep them from using it." It was "We want everyone to run / have access to Safari. Oops! We sent out the wrong EULA that doesn't apply to this group of people."
As GP says, insofar as there is an issue here, it is one of security. The EULA issue serves to slightly reinforce how ridiculous click-through licensing is, but it is not an ominous sign of Apple's legal scheming.
Sigh. Not sure why your reply is so rude. Obviously I have strong feelings about Wikipedia's direction. You can disagree without being insulting.
Can you tell us about some specific cases where Wikipedia lacked information you were looking for, or are you just trolling?
Is there some sort of secret cabal going around trying to damage Wikipedia's reputation by lying about their personal experiences? Is this cabal so large that you immediately assume any criticism comes from it? I was honestly posting my experience. The nicer thing to do here might have been to say "Actually, though there have been a few abuses, these problems aren't nearly as widespread as a lot of people suggest. What sections have you had trouble with?" -- that way you could make your point and gently probe my sincerity without just calling me a liar. And to be honest, I'd be very happy to hear my experiences and other stories are overblown, and the result of a few lone admins combined with the law of large numbers -- but so far I'm more likely to just see additional admins defending the policies as they stand.
However, since you apparently won't believe me without specifics: My first encounter with this was in fact with the well-publicized webcomics section, although (not being an especially involved member of the WP community) I noticed missing/removed information for some time before finding out that this was actually a matter of policy and not just that I didn't remember where to look. Since then, I haven't exactly been keeping a log book in preparation for this question, but off the top of my head I was reading about chess organizations / software a while ago and had some issues finding information I expected to be there, and another time I was checking up on a small-time conservative think tank whose article was evidently up for deletion. Maybe that won't satisfy you. Whatever.
Why do you care what the admins are talking about? Why don't you judge Wikipedia by its content, and not by rumors about what's going on behind the scenes?
That sounds kind of condescending. Especially since I did criticize WP's content, and you called me a liar for it. The reason I care what the admins are talking about is because the things they say are actually implemented as WP policy, which has a negative effect both on the existing state of the encyclopedia and on the future state by damaging the community and discouraging future contributions.
I don't have any real investment in this, except for the utility I've gotten out of the site before and would like to get in the future. I've only made a few contributions myself, mostly small edits to math pages (I cleaned up / corrected a couple of proofs) -- and now I see there is evidently debate over whether proofs should even be allowed. If you are part of the WP community, it would be nice if you could work to correct misperceptions and help fix some of the abuses on the site rather than just arbitrarily questioning the motives of anyone who has had a bad experience.
There's a difference between saying "Information should be cited and with neutral POV" (with which I agree), and "Information should be cited and with neutral POV, so trivia sections are bad" (which seems like a non sequitur). If trivia sections were allowed, but with the same requirements as the rest of the article, I'd have no complaint. Instead I keep seeing useful trivia sections (or no longer seeing them...) with ugly banners saying they shouldn't be there. It just reinforces the growing perception of Wikipedia admins as gatekeepers trying to keep information out rather than in.
trivia are by definition not notable, otherwise they wouldn't be trivia.
Yeah, I've also heard this argument. It conflates the formal definition of "trivia" (i.e. something unimportant) with the actual conventional use of the term (i.e. a small piece of information). I have trouble accepting good faith in those who make this conflation, since it's so self-evident -- if there are two possible meanings of a word, and one of them makes a sentence false by definition, try using the other one. However, assuming you are making this argument in good faith, let me clarify: when people talk about the notability of information in "trivia" sections, they are usually using the latter definition. Since this definition encompasses, just for example, every question/answer ever made on Jeopardy! or Trivial Pursuit, I'd certainly hope there would be a place for that sort of "trivia" on Wikipedia.
I've seen several articles getting their trivia sections removed or "integrated", and I must say it was an improvement.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you another -- I've seen useful trivia sections removed, or poor integration attempts, or ugly banners telling me that the useful information I'm reading shouldn't be there. It is appropriate to apply the same editorial guidelines to trivia sections as to the rest of the article. But there's no reason to make a blanket "discouragement" in cases where it really is the appropriate choice.
Wikipedia has allowed mathematical proofs, for several years. I've found several of them useful, as it sometimes has nice proofs that would otherwise have been troublesome to track down without a more detailed literature search. I know other people who have found them useful as well. The fact that this useful information is now being opposed by some (including, apparently, the submitter) on the basis of "OMG, if we allow proofs, then there might be too many proofs, and then how will we stop it?!" is highly irritating to me. Proofs have been allowed for years without overwhelming the rest of the useful information. Wikipedia has not become a repository for opaque, useless 200-page proofs. Why are we suddenly worried about this? If you're really concerned, just put the proof on a separate page from the main theorem.
I still have never seen a coherent explanation of why Wikipedia is so concerned lately about deleting any material that is unworthy. It has greatly reduced the site's utility to me, and is the reason I use it less and less, and will refuse to contribute to its fund raisers until their deletion policy is substantially revised. The only explanation I've ever seen is a sort of question-begging, "But if we allow non-notable information without deleting it, then there will be non-notable information there!" Yes, so? Here's a nickel, kid, buy yourself a bigger hard drive. If you want to make "non-notable" information appear lower in search results, fine. That's useful. But a lot of information that I find useful is apparently now considered "non-notable" by the Wikipedia admins, and I'd rather there still be some way for me to find that information.
Also, what's with the policy of hassling articles with trivia sections? That seems so arbitrary to me. It's frequently a useful place to collect interesting information about the subject that doesn't fit neatly in earlier sections (and "if it's notable, you should merge it into the main article!" is just silly -- we should awkwardly insert this single notable and interesting factoid into an unrelated earlier section? That just makes it harder to find for those who care, whereas the people reading the earlier section will wonder why the subject jumps around. Trivia sections allow for cleaner editing and easier information searches.) Again, what is the harm in it being there? If you don't care about trivia, you don't have to read the section. And, again, if it bothers you that much, just put it on a separate page.
I'm a little bitter about this whole thing. Wikipedia used to be such a great resource, but lately all I hear is admins talking about ways to block useless information (for certain definitions of "useless"), not about how to actually strengthen the material that's there. Pretty soon, teachers won't have to tell kids not to cite Wikipedia....
This is a good idea and I think it could equally be applied to boosting the numbers of under-represented groups in other areas. For example, proficiency at flying should no longer be a requirement for airline pilots. And surgeons shouldn't have to be good at doing operations. To say otherwise is elitist and divisive.
Okay, I just have to say something here.
Proficiency at flying should certainly not be a requirement to be accepted into flight school. Skill at performing surgery should certainly not be a requirement to be accepted as a pre-med undergraduate.
We aren't talking about giving adults without programming experience jobs as programmers. We are talking about giving highschoolers without extensive experience the chance to gain that experience through higher education, so that when they are proficient at programming they will be qualified for a job that requires that skill.
Saying that a highschooler must have extensive skills in a particular area before they are allowed to go to college in that area is elitist, especially in an educational system where most highschools do not provide the chance for extensive skills in that area to be developed. The fact that you and your friends taught yourself to program in highschool doesn't mean no one who hasn't done that should be allowed into the field.
How am I going to conveniently categorize fanboy comments?! Seriously, did Sony ever think of that?!
Before, pro-Sony would refer to the PS3 as $500, anti- would use $600 (and sometimes $700). How am I supposed to ignore the people I disagree with?!
It's the same thing with Nintendo... back before they announced the price, people would say either $300 or $200 (or sometimes even $150!) depending on who they were rooting for... now... well, I guess they're still more than $300 on eBay, so this still works some of the time :-P
Thank goodness I can still tell how people feel about Microsoft! Especially with the new model coming out...
If you don't like it, pay google for advertising.
In this case I think you're mostly correct that only small damage is done to the hypothetical store.
However, ANY discussion of small business protections (or of capitalism in general) that concludes with "If you don't like it, spend as much money as [major multinational corporation]" is using very sketchy reasoning, only one step removed from "If the poor don't like it, let them buy their own senators." If walmart is serious about crushing you, they will outbid you for these ads.
Also, though I think this particular hypothetical situation works out okay, I'm not at all convinced that there are no situations where this would be damaging. Nor am I convinced that this hypothetical situation would be especially ethical on walmart's part just because in my opinion the damage wouldn't be that bad (the cost-benefit tradeoff is also unfortunate: if I'm right, nothing happens, fine. If I'm wrong, trademark abuse just forced a small vendor out of business. Whoops.)...
Saying that "modern society has benefits and calling 17 year olds children is part of modern society, thus calling 17 year olds children is a benefit" is a logical fallacy.
But that's also an oversimplification of what I was saying. I was giving an illustration of one benefit of the way modern society is structured which requires at least some proportion of "adults" with substantially deeper educations and abilities than can be achieved by the vast majority of 13-year-olds -- that is, if the common expected level of education didn't go past seventh grade or so, the Internet wouldn't exist, or at least not in anything near its current form. And it's hard to get around the fact that once someone is out in the world fending mostly for themselves (i.e. "an adult" in common usage), it will be much harder for them to devote themselves to the long-term full-time education and development that would be required to maintain modern technological standards in a society where we really considered a 13-year-old an adult in the same sense as we currently do (say) a 25-year-old.
We do not expect more from from adults now than we did in the past.
You say this in the same paragraph that you mention reading and writing, which I think is inconsistent. Especially since your original post was talking about the past 100,000 years of human history. True, basic literacy is frequently achieved by the age of 13, to varying degrees. For most of the past 100,000 years that is already far more than was expected of adults, so we do expect more in some ways. I would also strongly question your claim that reading and writing is "generally covered" by the age of 13, since there is a noticeable difference between the reading/writing level of the average 13-year-old and the average college, or even high school, graduate (note that I am talking about average here, as it would obviously be ridiculous to say that no 13-year-olds can read at the college level). But to be more pragmatic and concrete: I would challenge you to turn a 13-year-old into a professional-quality automotive engineer. Being generous, perhaps one in a thousand could do it, but this proportion of educated professionals is far too low to keep society functioning at anything near our current technological level. Simplifying the much greater complexity of the typical modern career down to "Adults may have more opportunities to do more" doesn't work. Most people in our society may have the opportunity to do more, but this comes with the inability not to if they want to have a secure long-term career. Our economy needs a certain fraction of people who have had a deeper education than has even been possible for much of history. It is no longer practical in most cases to support a large family with only basic physical labor and hunting ability.
There is also a serious logic flaw in your statement that because we don't have to do something, that means we should not do something.
Well, if that was really the implication I was going for, then sure, but it wasn't. I was responding to the logical flaw in your post: paraphrasing, your post seemed to imply that because we have done something for 100,000 years, we should continue. My point was that the need for survival that required this behavior for most of that time is no longer relevant, so the fact that it was done when necessary is not enough justification to say that we should continue doing it when it's not. For positive reasons why we actually shouldn't keep doing it (as opposed to mere responses to your argument that we should), see the earlier parts of this post.
Combine this with the fact that anyone trying to claim we are not biologically adults once we have hit puberty, is either lying, or seriously confused.
We've adopted the habit in human society of distinguishing between the biological capacity for reproduction, which all animals achieve at some point, and the development and maturity necess
Planes might crash once a week, but thousands of them also land perfectly safely, news however doesn't show that, same with all the other bad stuff that happens.
Right! It's like how the pessimistic news reporters focus on the one bombing a day that discourages everybody... :-P
Seriously, though, I mostly agree -- if someone says you should let your 5-year-old play GTA because you shouldn't shelter them from "reality," I'm terrified by their apparent perception of reality. Something is not more "real" or more closely connected to "reality" because it is violent or obscene. There is plenty of violence and obscenity in reality, but not nearly as much as you'd think if you mostly just watched TV and played GTA. The whole association with the word "reality" and the most gruesome and painful parts of actual reality is a bizarre and skewed view that will not particularly help children cope with or understand the world around them in any healthy way. And sitting your kids in front of the TV on the principle that you shouldn't shelter them from "reality" seems kind of perverse...
For a 100,000 years, humans have reached adulthood at ~13. They have raised children, fought wars and ran nations. ... if it takes 18-21 years for current humans to reach adulthood, SOMETHING went seriously wrong.
For 100,000 years, most people have been unable to read or write, and "adulthood" essentially implied that they knew a single trade well (generally whatever their parents did) and/or could kill wild animals, and could more or less keep their family from dying -- and not much more. There is a problem today in that the expectations on children can become too lax, but your implication that something is "seriously wrong" with someone who "takes 18 years" to reach adulthood in our society is ridiculous -- we expect much more of adults now, and it is reasonable to do so. We are not (typically, in the western world, at least not in those segments of the population likely to be posting on slashdot) so close to mere survival that the physical abilities of a 13-year-old boy will make a life-or-death difference for most families, or that a 13-year-old girl should start churning out babies just to ensure the survival of the species.
If you want to say we should teach our children responsibility at an earlier age, great, I agree that's something we should work on. But saying they should be "adults" at 13 just because that's what it has been like for much of history is kind of throwing out the legitimate and positive changes that have been made since then. I'm not into the philosophy that says the future is always better than the past, but the very fact that we're having this conversation from physically separated locations without even knowing each other should suggest that there are some useful aspects to recent changes...
Hmm, I didn't notice this when you posted it, but maybe you'll still see my reply...
Yes, basically I accepted microevolution but not macroevolution. My objection wasn't so much irreducible complexity, though (at least, not by around college age when I'd thought things through more) -- in fact, long before I changed my mind I was pretty disturbed by "creation science" or "intelligent design" or whatever the latest name is, since it was clear to me that the leaders of these movements were being completely unscientific, and were duping a lot of people who didn't know any better by fraudulently claiming authority they didn't have. (I was creationist myself, but didn't claim it was "science" -- it was just what I believed had happened.)
Primarily, I think my error was lack of knowledge, though I'm sure you could point to many logical fallacies that supported the main error -- but my central objection was that evolution is not falsifiable. There were various other smaller issues that I objected to, but less emphatically: no one had ever been able to justify for me the central premise of carbon dating, for example (they still haven't, actually, but having passed the main hurdle of falsifiability I'm willing to largely accept that "on faith").
I think the actual catalyst for changing my mind was probably 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, which is a wonderful site -- it's completely (and, I think, deliberately) non-hostile towards religion in general and creationists in particular, it just clearly states the central evidence for common descent. It gave a lot of evidence, especially the wonderful results from genetic analysis, that I had never heard of before, and that really didn't mesh with my "evolution isn't falsifiable" claims up to that point. If there was an 'aha' moment it came from this site, though it still took a while for me to think things over.
A big thing feeding this whole conflict is that many of the leaders on both sides have completely ascientific agendas. A huge hangup for most creationists is, quite obviously, that they can't reconcile evolution with their understanding of Christianity or the Bible or what have you. Now, most major Christian groups have worked past this (both the [last few] Pope[s] and the Archbishop of Canterbury have explicitly said not just that there's nothing wrong with evolution, but that it is probably substantially true... I don't know if other large denominations have stated it as explicitly, but for the most part they think evolution is fine). In fact, religious objections to evolution are mostly a phenomenon of American fundamentalists and evangelicals, and other closely allied groups. Having been raised evangelical, though, I wasn't even aware that most (global) Christians didn't think the same way.
A huge issue here is: what many creationists need to hear, in order to be more open-minded and objective about the debate, is "Evolution doesn't need to conflict with your faith. You can believe in God and the Bible and still believe in evolution." They might not believe this, at least not the first few times they hear it, but this is a hugely important message to get across. Having come out of this culture, I can assure you that if these people are forced to choose between their faith (which for many of them is the defining aspect of their life) and evolution, there is no choice there. They'd be throwing out their faith, alienating themselves from their friends and their culture and their upbringing, removing the meaning from their lives, and all they'd get in return is abstract agreement with some scientists they'll probably never meet, and many of whom probably still think they're stupid anyway. But of course, all of these things are by no means necessary consequences of belief in evolution.
On the flip side, though, this assurance they need, that belief in evolution need not invalidate their entire lives, is exactly what many advocates of evol
But the (quite small, so far) percentage of people who do have HD TVs also tend to have very large disposable incomes, and to spend a lot of it on media and entertainment, thereby representing a disproportionate chunk of video sales.
I still think the whole thing is stupid and premature, but this isn't necessarily so just because most consumers don't have HD TVs yet -- with income gaps widening a lot of companies have the luxury of being able to completely ignore "most consumers."
That said... I would have to have a pretty damn big disposable income to worry about HD stuff at this point. I'll probably end up going the same route as with CRT monitors -> LCD -- wait until the prices have dropped so much that the next time I go to buy one, the LCDs are roughly the price I was expecting to spend anyway, and then get that instead. (Although technically I still use a CRT... prices have reached that point, but my old monitor still works, so I've never bothered to buy a new one. Yeah, I'm not the kind of consumer marketers dream of...)
"How dare the record companies charge $20 for a CD!* This give me the moral justification to acquire my music with BiTTorrent**." * Not true. ** Not true, either.
Well, I don't remember seeing single CDs for $20, but for quite a while they were in the $17-18 range, at least at many places I shopped. I never used it as moral justification for downloading the tracks -- it essentially just meant I didn't buy the albums that cost that much, or found cheaper places to buy them (the early days of amazon were very helpful in this regard). But even now I'm skeptical of the GP's claim that "most" physical CDs are not more than $10 -- I mostly buy from iTunes, but when I do get physical CDs they're mostly more than that. Perhaps it is possible to find most CDs for $10 (at least if you ignore shipping charges -- but why would you?), but that's not the same as saying that most CDs are $10 or less... not everyone has easy access to cheap in-person music stores with a wide selection.
I don't think anyone is questioning the basic tenets of macroevolution. ... Every time I read a discussion here on /. on the topic, I see about ten comments that say something to the effect of "Evolution is an unimpeachable fact". When I see statements like that I start to wonder if science is taking place anymore.
Well, yes, people tend to generalize a lot. But the claim "Life on Earth today descended from a common ancestor" is almost universally accepted by scientists (in general, but especially in biology-related areas). This is the "fact" of evolution, and can be compared (albeit on a very different scale) to the orbit of the planets: it has been going on for as long as we've been watching, and there is a lot of pretty solid evidence (fossil record, DNA analysis, etc.) that it's been going on for very much longer. This is usually what people mean when they say evolution is an unimpeachable fact -- the details, such as the exact timeline, the details of the mechanism, and so on, have been the subject of much debate and revision, but "evolution," that is, that species have evolved into other species, is as close to being demonstrated as is possible without us having actually watched it (in some cases we have watched it, actually, but I don't want to get in that since you can always reject the observed examples on the basis that the distinct "species" can still interbreed with reasonable success -- this isn't really how we define distinct species, usually, but I prefer to avoid semantic arguments entirely).
Similarly, astronomers argue a lot about the precise operation of gravity, but no one is questioning the observation that matter tends to be attracted to other matter, or the ubiquity of elliptic orbits. There's just such consistent evidence for these basic observations that there's not much more to say -- the interesting questions are about exactly how to characterize/quantify the details of the behavior. In evolution, there's such overwhelming evidence that speciation happens, and that life today shares a common ancestor, that there's not much more to say about it -- the real question is how, when, why, and so on.
I hope people don't blindly push evolution like some people blindly push religion.
Many, many people do, of course. Like most large categories of people, most of the individuals are far from experts, and have a lot of significant misunderstandings even about the meaning of their own beliefs. But what we should take away from this isn't that evolution is no better than any other alternatives (judging the view by the people who hold it is always dangerous) -- instead, we should reflect that we, too, are probably ignorant of many very simple concepts, and then try to educate people (including ourselves) as well as we can.
A real April Fool's Day post: "slashdot announced today that they're implementing a heuristic algorithm to detect and screen all duplicate submissions. And they're hiring a proofreader." Hee. It's funny because it's a lie...
Prove I haven't already :-D
Yeah, about your reading comprehension... maybe you noticed that I was just using a term the parent used first?
Err... yes. I understood your point fine. I know you were using a term the parent used, however since he was just saying you shouldn't call people that, whereas you were actually calling him that, I still thought it was needlessly rude.
I thought my point was pretty clear that it's fairly ridiculous to call foul on calling someone ignorant just because they have a different view, when it's obvious that they themselves only hold that view out of ignorance.
Well, except for the fact that here you're saying "ignorant" whereas before you said "gibbering idiot," which is completely and fundamentally different (every human suffers from the former about many topics for the entirety of their lives; most do not suffer from the latter, at least by most reasonable standards) -- with that exception, yes, that point was clear. I disagreed with it. Specifically: I question your claim in this sentence that the poster was only saying you shouldn't call people idiots because of ignorance. As a counterexample to your claim, I submit myself: I think evolution is true, and yet I still think you shouldn't call all creationists idiots, especially in any respect that is not very directly related to evolution.
Maybe you would say that my insistence on at least a modicum of respect for the humanity (if not the correctness) of huge groups of people is still reflective of some sort of ignorance. Oh well...
DNA + "survival of the fittest" = evolution. It's not a theory - it's just a plain consequence of the the tautology "survival of the fittest" and the fact that we're based on a naturally varying chemical hereditory mechanism (DNA). If you don't understand that people who have more children leave more descendents, or that we're based on DNA, then, YES, you are stupid.
People have known for a very long time that people who have more children leave more descendants, and that attributes of the parents were often expressed in their children (even before there was a clear scientific explanation of why). And yet, countless brilliant people over thousands of years didn't really figure out what was going on. In fact, that the degree of speciation observed in nature is completely explainable by those two things is very surprising if you come at it without the benefit of modern scientific knowledge and philosophy. You may recall that this was a pretty big deal when the pieces started falling together, even for people who didn't have any particular objections to the possibility (religious or otherwise). For most of history, correct understanding of or belief in evolution has had zero correlation with intelligence, and to claim that after such a short timespan it now has a 100% correlation is kind of ignoring the culture we live in and the time that fundamental philosophical shifts always take to sink in.
You can say that evolution is true, and you can say that poor acceptance of it is, among other things, a worrying aspect of our educational system, and should be addressed. I'll agree with you there. But that doesn't mean that all, or even most, of the people who reject evolution are stupid (or at least, not any more so than most people who believe in evolution).
And it is disturbing to define intelligence, not by "a modicum of knowledge and rational analysis capability" as you misleadingly say, but by one's conclusions about a single empirical fact, disregarding all other opinions about all other subjects, as well as the means by which the conclusion was reached, the importance attached to it, and so on -- you're just going to throw all that out and reduce it to a single true/false question? That isn't intelligence, or if it is, then the bar is bizarrely and arbitrarily low...
I love when people talk about how arrogant it is to accuse people of being gibbering idiots, and then go on to prove what gibbering idiots they are?
GP: "Being mistaken on topic X doesn't mean someone is a complete idiot in every area of life."
P: "Aha! You claim not to be an idiot, but you must be, because you misapplied a term from topic X!"
This questionable display of reading comprehension (not to mention unnecessary rudeness in actually calling someone a gibbering idiot to their face) is given a pass because the parent reaches the correct conclusion on topic X. Post is modded insightful.
*Sigh*...
Exactly. For most of my life, even past college, I was a creationist (raised Evangelical). This didn't in any way hinder my ability to think intelligently, or to do lab work for a biotech company, or to ace my science classes, or to graduate from a good school with honors. In most of life, your opinions on the practical origins of life just don't matter very much. Now, one of the places where it does matter is if you're a biologist, or a teacher of biology, or someone who is in a position to legislate on the actions of the former two, so this is a legitimate political conflict. But it's very frustrating when people assume that this one opinion is the only important factor between "intelligent supporter of science" and "superstitious Neanderthal."
Now, eventually, I did change my opinion, and now I'm quite convinced of evolution. But the reason I changed my mind highlights another issue here: I read more about it, and finally found persuasive evidence that answered the objections I'd had for years. I couldn't reconcile that evidence with what I had believed, so I changed my mind.
The thing is, it's not like people had never before tried to argue with me or change my mind. Plenty had, and some had been quite smug about it, too. But no one had actually been able to answer my objections. I would even go so far as to say that I had a better understanding of the scientific method than many of the people who had tried to change my mind, since they often offered very poor or contradictory "scientific evidence," or used simple tautologies and ended up saying "See? It's obvious!" Essentially, I now think they were right, but not because they had any particularly good understanding of the subject, but because they had been taught the right thing and believed it.
Now, most of the time there's nothing wrong with believing what you're taught within reason. Skepticism is healthy, but it can't be applied to literally everything or society couldn't function. But in this case, these people who believed their teachers without really understanding the issue were treating me as stupid for... believing my parents/acquaintances/pastors/whatever without really understanding the issue. Even though I understood more about the issue than they did.
Ultimately, I'm not saying it doesn't matter what people believe. It's largely irrelevant to daily life, but some people are interested in legislating about this issue. And even though the bulk of the population will never be scientific experts, I think more correct impressions are generally preferable to less correct impressions. So in fact, I think people should teach and advocate evolution -- but they need to drop the instant contempt for people who disagree. People who don't believe in evolution are not generally any stupider than people who do. I happen to think they're incorrect, but smart people believe incorrect things all the time, and it's very easy to condemn the belief coming from an environment where all the pressure from an early age is in favor of evolution. Most of the people who believe in one or another form of creationism were raised in environments where the opposite is true. So, if you're trying to advocate or explain evolution, show a little more respect for people who haven't had the exact same life experiences that you do, and be aware that this is not the litmus test of their intelligence (in either direction :-P).
My favorite comic on this subject.