I will say that the exposing hypocrisy in media is one thing the Daily Show does really well.
It sometimes amazes me in this age of data mining that there is not a database of every statement every major public figure has made on every issue kept by major new organizations. It should be nothing more than a couple minutes of searching to pull up every statement Obama, for example, has made on Iraq, making it ridiculously easy to point out if he changes his message.
The segments where The Daily Show has public figures arguing with previous versions of themselves is good solid journalism that I wish the rest of the media would copy. The rest of it... well, I think it's funny, but I don't know that I'd call it a model for future journalism.
You might not want to tell that to the people shooting the different pistol competitions. We sure consider it a lot of fun.
IDPA, USPSA, IPSC, and Cowboy Action shooting are all very much like video games with real guns. And they are a helluva lot of fun.
You still have to be careful, because a gun is still a dangerous tool. But it's safer than car or dirt bike racing, which both use tools to have a ton of fun.
Sure if you take a little kid, hand him a gun that's too powerful for him to control, and don't tell him how to shoot it right he's not going to enjoy himself. He'll cut his hand on the slide, have the barrel hit him in the face because of recoil, and not be able to hit anything. Similarly, if you just hand a kid a bicycle without teaching him how to ride it he's going to think it's the dumbest thing in the world.
But if you start him out in a caliber he can control and teach him to shoot it properly, he'll enjoy it as much as the 18 million americans who went target shooting for fun last year (http://blog.nssf.org/target-shooting/).
By the time you've hit 12 characters, at current rates you're looking at $1.5 million in computing time to brute force.
For your crazy good password, you're hitting the multi-million dollar threshold at 9 characters. I'm sure most people can remember a couple extra characters of a phrase easier than they can remember to whether it's S3cretP@55w0rd or Secr3tp@ssw0rd!
A dictionary to attack a random phrase of 12 characters or more is too large to be practical. Even at all dictionary words of 12 characters it's getting huge.
So for all practical purposes, with some basic care for the likelihood of someone guessing that your favorite meme is AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs, a memorable passphrase of medium length is secure enough for over 99% of situations, and practically as secure as the 8 character multi-asterisk monstrosities that security experts recommend.
In the end, it's about convincing users to pick something better than "football" or "iloveyou" as their password. Which of these recommendations is more likely to have a practical impact, and which is more likely to end up on a sticky note on someone's monitor?
The thing is, once you've hit 12+ characters in a phrase the special chractera aren't really buying you that much. You gain as much security by making your phrase one word longer as you do adding -;())$&&@@ in the middle of it. Allthatglittersisnotgold will beat dictionary attacks, take weeks to brute force, and be much easier to type. The only point of random characters is to get some of those benefits in an 8 character password.
It's the same question you always face with socialism vs the market - long term or short term suffering?
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if this is becoming a problem that the line owners are already looking at an additional fee for window power to upgrade their network. Or eating the cost, because they're the one profiting by selling this capacity to the wind networks and to users - they've got to deal with not being able to deliver it.
I find it interesting that you ignore web browsing and third party apps, which are pretty much the biggest reasons to get an iphone. Browsing on my father in law's blackberry is *painful* compared to my touch. I won't argue with your specific win/loss analysis much, though (although I'd call mp3 playback a wash).
Of course, this is pretty much exactly what all of the legitimate testing (like anandtech's) found when this whole mess came up.
All phones lose signal when held "wrong." The iPhone 4 loses somewhat more signal than other phones. It's not a crazy end of the world flaw, nor it is a unique flaw, but it is a flaw.
Yes, I love it when a company gets hurt bad enough that thousands of people could lose their jobs in the middle of an economic crisis, all because of a completely phantom problem. Sure put those evil corporations in their place!
I don't particularly love Toyota (I drive one, but their aftermarket support for the Celica has been *nothing* like what they promised the community when it came out), but we need to remember in all this anti-corporatist rage that they're employing real people and doing real good for the economy. Without big companies, only the rich could afford cars. Corporations aren't just a couple fat middle aged men in business suits laughing when they get to kill another old woman due to a design defect, they're everyone they employ as well.
So by all means pillory them when a real problem shows up - everyone needs to be held accountable for their actual mistakes - but this stuck accelerator thing has always stunk of media panic. Just like the last media panic that completely destroyed Audi's brand credibility for no good purpose.
Even if the ECU had a glitch and applied the gas, the brakes are an independent mechanical system. These incidents always required the simultaneous failure of too many different systems for something other than driver error to be the most likely problem.
Indeed. If nerds are so smart, approach social skills like an engineering problem. Once I learned to run social interaction in something like an emulation layer, I was well on my way to faking being generally normal and accepted. There is a life benefit to faking this that in no way hurts your ability to "be yourself."
I never really got bullied, though - guess I didn't look intimidated enough. Never understood the kids who wouldn't do any physical activity, though. Even if you're big and clumsy ( like me ) or skinny and short, you get a fair amount of personal benefit from going outside and working your body every once in a while.
Ah, but there is a fair amount of social utility in saying you "did your duty and voted". Is there significantly more to be gained by saying "and I exhaustively researched all of the candidates to determine exactly which one would be the best in all races?" For most, going to the polls grants the majority of feeling and appearance of civic virtue to be obtained, and takes much less investment than actually knowing what you're voting for.
Of course, many people do skip the polls entirely, too...
If voters did even a small bit of independent research, they would find that she was running on the far right during the primary and her strategy would backfire horribly.
However, the chance of your one vote having a significant effect on the outcome of an election, let alone on your future life, is vanishingly small. Therefore there is almost no incentive to take the time and effort to know that candidates are using dishonest strategies.
Now, one could argue that some ideal form of the press could reduce the effort required to become informed, but given that you still only have a one in several thousand (or hundred thousand) chance of influencing an election by voting they could make it practically zero effort to become informed and it would still not make rational sense for you to care.
The thing is, none of these things are going to happen overnight. Even in the worst case scenarios (hundreds of miles of coastland flooded, large areas of arable land gone) it will happen over decades. It will be disruptive, but more in the way that the population shift to southern states in the US since the invention of air conditioning has been disruptive, or the decline and collapse of the American steel industry has been disruptive, than a Katrina-style catastrophe. Food prices could go up (or maybe they're go down? You never know what land could suddenly start getting enough rainfall to become arable instead). People living on the coastline would have to move, but they'd fine new homes inland.
Societies adapt to gradual changes. It's quick changes that cause mass horror.
And in any case, Democracy does nothing to prevent rights from being taken away. That was one of core design requirements in the US government and in most modern systems - to have limitations on what the democratic majority was capable of doing to the minority.
Of course, there's always the final point - that even given that the average predictions are correct, we can/should trust the federal (or world) government to come up with a set of regulations that will solve a planet-wide crisis. I consider this as a fair concern as so far the actions taken even by the governing parties who claim to believe in AGW have so far been a giant exercise in cronyism, inefficiency, and waste that have failed to achieve any of their stated goals while increasing the cost of energy for the average person and making several favored companies richer. The proposed cap and trade scheme promises to do the same.
What concerns me is that currently the only ones who will agree with the basic premise of global warming are the statist left, who see the only solution to be a massive growth of government and drag on the economy. Our current world is built on the availability of cheap energy, you can't just wish that away, and so far no government funded program to produce cheaper energy has done much more than provide subsidies to coal companies.
I think people don't protest because the only people with a legitimate complaint here are the urban kids getting screwed by the drug war. Pretty much anywhere else... what are you complaining about? There are plenty of details to bitch about, to go support a candidate about, to write letters to the editor. But society is still working. We can still get up, do mostly what we want, go home to our families.
It doesn't effect people. For all that we're invading two different countries right now, the monthly casualties are less than the people who die in car accidents in a single state in the same time.
The scale of things just isn't bad enough to make anyone get out the pitchforks.
For 90% of young kids having the whole system open means they're just going to have to search through the start menu to find the games they want to play.
There are plenty of reasons to bring people on step by step to a full system instead of throwing all of it at them at once.
Yep, if a woman's being stalked by her ex I'm sure she has no problem at all having to wait a week for a gun. I'm sure he'll just wait outside. And I'm sure no criminal or gang member ever plans ahead in their weapons purchases (not that they really ever buy from a dealer anyway, since we already have the reasonable gun control of background checks on gun store purchases).
Islam itself is no more particularly a religion or war or peace than most other religious power structures.
The problem is that Islamic countries are currently ass-backwards primitive culturally (from our western perspective) and that includes unnecessary violence.
There have been times when Christianity was as bad or worse -- which isn't justification for the Muslim world's excesses, but makes the Goddamn high horse most westerners get up on when these things come up a little ridiculous. Most of our current peaceful concepts come from the enlightenment - and even our "enlightened" asses managed to have the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and mass firebombings of civilian targets.
Lumping cultural mistakes in with disparaging an entire religion just seems a little parochial to me. Doesn't mean we should allow them to kill the guy, or *not* mock their actions when they decide to act barbarously. But keep some perspective.
That's one big difference - in America, anyone else who is a "honkey" is considered homogenous. This is, culturally, bullshit. It's been a long time since any serious thinker thought the genetic aspects of your race matters for these things. However, your racial culture can be shown to have a huge effect.
Also, as an aside, if you do live in a part of america that is 96% white, it is very likely that your average income and crime compare relatively well to Sweden's. This is because most high crime areas in the US are confined to ethnic melting-pot style cities, and only the poorest ten or so states actually have lower per capita income than Sweden.
The story is missing the part where scandinavians living in the US not only significantly outperform the US average but also their cousins still living back home.
They also have similar crime rates vis a vis scandinavia.
It would seem that there are significant benefits to Scandinavian culture, regardless of what government they're living under. Blaming the government for these benefits or faults (with the possible exception of the drug war, as that is a very direct example of state action) seems simplistic to me.
Yes, they decimated some manufacturing - but reduced prices overall. There are local portions of the US that have gotten worse in the last fifty years, but overall the standard of living and buying power of the average person has continued to skyrocket.
We are richer and by a larger margin. We have outsourced our shitty jobs because we can do other things better. Yes, it sucks for the minority of people who worked in those industries who have not been able to transfer their skills to a new field. It may or may not have military implications down the line (although as our GDP and military are still several times larger than our next nearest competitor, it's not an immediate concern).
Also... the US *still* has the largest manufacturing industry in the world.
Stop trying to turn the unfortunate stories of a few areas into a national trend. Look at the data. Specific industries (Steel, for example) have moved on, but others have taken their place in different parts of the country.
Removing trade barriers has increased our wealth, as well as increasing the wealth of other countries by an even larger margin. It has also tied us so closely economically with countries that are ideologically different from us that we are unlikely to see a war with them until the current economic structure collapses. Protecting a few industries to stop Detroit from happening may look good in the short term, but in the long run it hurts everyone but Detroit.
Slashdot Mirror
I will say that the exposing hypocrisy in media is one thing the Daily Show does really well.
It sometimes amazes me in this age of data mining that there is not a database of every statement every major public figure has made on every issue kept by major new organizations. It should be nothing more than a couple minutes of searching to pull up every statement Obama, for example, has made on Iraq, making it ridiculously easy to point out if he changes his message.
The segments where The Daily Show has public figures arguing with previous versions of themselves is good solid journalism that I wish the rest of the media would copy. The rest of it... well, I think it's funny, but I don't know that I'd call it a model for future journalism.
You might not want to tell that to the people shooting the different pistol competitions. We sure consider it a lot of fun.
IDPA, USPSA, IPSC, and Cowboy Action shooting are all very much like video games with real guns. And they are a helluva lot of fun.
You still have to be careful, because a gun is still a dangerous tool. But it's safer than car or dirt bike racing, which both use tools to have a ton of fun.
Sure if you take a little kid, hand him a gun that's too powerful for him to control, and don't tell him how to shoot it right he's not going to enjoy himself. He'll cut his hand on the slide, have the barrel hit him in the face because of recoil, and not be able to hit anything. Similarly, if you just hand a kid a bicycle without teaching him how to ride it he's going to think it's the dumbest thing in the world.
But if you start him out in a caliber he can control and teach him to shoot it properly, he'll enjoy it as much as the 18 million americans who went target shooting for fun last year (http://blog.nssf.org/target-shooting/).
Yes, but... we're talking about normal passwords, not whatever they use to protect against a nuclear launch.
See this article:
http://news.electricalchemy.net/2009/10/password-cracking-in-cloud-part-5.html
By the time you've hit 12 characters, at current rates you're looking at $1.5 million in computing time to brute force.
For your crazy good password, you're hitting the multi-million dollar threshold at 9 characters. I'm sure most people can remember a couple extra characters of a phrase easier than they can remember to whether it's S3cretP@55w0rd or Secr3tp@ssw0rd!
A dictionary to attack a random phrase of 12 characters or more is too large to be practical. Even at all dictionary words of 12 characters it's getting huge.
So for all practical purposes, with some basic care for the likelihood of someone guessing that your favorite meme is AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs, a memorable passphrase of medium length is secure enough for over 99% of situations, and practically as secure as the 8 character multi-asterisk monstrosities that security experts recommend.
In the end, it's about convincing users to pick something better than "football" or "iloveyou" as their password. Which of these recommendations is more likely to have a practical impact, and which is more likely to end up on a sticky note on someone's monitor?
The thing is, once you've hit 12+ characters in a phrase the special chractera aren't really buying you that much. You gain as much security by making your phrase one word longer as you do adding -;())$&&@@ in the middle of it. Allthatglittersisnotgold will beat dictionary attacks, take weeks to brute force, and be much easier to type. The only point of random characters is to get some of those benefits in an 8 character password.
It's the same question you always face with socialism vs the market - long term or short term suffering?
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if this is becoming a problem that the line owners are already looking at an additional fee for window power to upgrade their network. Or eating the cost, because they're the one profiting by selling this capacity to the wind networks and to users - they've got to deal with not being able to deliver it.
I find it interesting that you ignore web browsing and third party apps, which are pretty much the biggest reasons to get an iphone. Browsing on my father in law's blackberry is *painful* compared to my touch. I won't argue with your specific win/loss analysis much, though (although I'd call mp3 playback a wash).
Of course, this is pretty much exactly what all of the legitimate testing (like anandtech's) found when this whole mess came up.
All phones lose signal when held "wrong." The iPhone 4 loses somewhat more signal than other phones. It's not a crazy end of the world flaw, nor it is a unique flaw, but it is a flaw.
Yes, I love it when a company gets hurt bad enough that thousands of people could lose their jobs in the middle of an economic crisis, all because of a completely phantom problem. Sure put those evil corporations in their place!
I don't particularly love Toyota (I drive one, but their aftermarket support for the Celica has been *nothing* like what they promised the community when it came out), but we need to remember in all this anti-corporatist rage that they're employing real people and doing real good for the economy. Without big companies, only the rich could afford cars. Corporations aren't just a couple fat middle aged men in business suits laughing when they get to kill another old woman due to a design defect, they're everyone they employ as well.
So by all means pillory them when a real problem shows up - everyone needs to be held accountable for their actual mistakes - but this stuck accelerator thing has always stunk of media panic. Just like the last media panic that completely destroyed Audi's brand credibility for no good purpose.
Even if the ECU had a glitch and applied the gas, the brakes are an independent mechanical system. These incidents always required the simultaneous failure of too many different systems for something other than driver error to be the most likely problem.
Indeed. If nerds are so smart, approach social skills like an engineering problem. Once I learned to run social interaction in something like an emulation layer, I was well on my way to faking being generally normal and accepted. There is a life benefit to faking this that in no way hurts your ability to "be yourself."
I never really got bullied, though - guess I didn't look intimidated enough. Never understood the kids who wouldn't do any physical activity, though. Even if you're big and clumsy ( like me ) or skinny and short, you get a fair amount of personal benefit from going outside and working your body every once in a while.
Affirmative action for white dudes! Where can I sign up?
Ah, but there is a fair amount of social utility in saying you "did your duty and voted". Is there significantly more to be gained by saying "and I exhaustively researched all of the candidates to determine exactly which one would be the best in all races?" For most, going to the polls grants the majority of feeling and appearance of civic virtue to be obtained, and takes much less investment than actually knowing what you're voting for.
Of course, many people do skip the polls entirely, too...
The real problem is rational ignorance.
If voters did even a small bit of independent research, they would find that she was running on the far right during the primary and her strategy would backfire horribly.
However, the chance of your one vote having a significant effect on the outcome of an election, let alone on your future life, is vanishingly small. Therefore there is almost no incentive to take the time and effort to know that candidates are using dishonest strategies.
Now, one could argue that some ideal form of the press could reduce the effort required to become informed, but given that you still only have a one in several thousand (or hundred thousand) chance of influencing an election by voting they could make it practically zero effort to become informed and it would still not make rational sense for you to care.
The thing is, none of these things are going to happen overnight. Even in the worst case scenarios (hundreds of miles of coastland flooded, large areas of arable land gone) it will happen over decades. It will be disruptive, but more in the way that the population shift to southern states in the US since the invention of air conditioning has been disruptive, or the decline and collapse of the American steel industry has been disruptive, than a Katrina-style catastrophe. Food prices could go up (or maybe they're go down? You never know what land could suddenly start getting enough rainfall to become arable instead). People living on the coastline would have to move, but they'd fine new homes inland.
Societies adapt to gradual changes. It's quick changes that cause mass horror.
And in any case, Democracy does nothing to prevent rights from being taken away. That was one of core design requirements in the US government and in most modern systems - to have limitations on what the democratic majority was capable of doing to the minority.
Of course, there's always the final point - that even given that the average predictions are correct, we can/should trust the federal (or world) government to come up with a set of regulations that will solve a planet-wide crisis. I consider this as a fair concern as so far the actions taken even by the governing parties who claim to believe in AGW have so far been a giant exercise in cronyism, inefficiency, and waste that have failed to achieve any of their stated goals while increasing the cost of energy for the average person and making several favored companies richer. The proposed cap and trade scheme promises to do the same.
What concerns me is that currently the only ones who will agree with the basic premise of global warming are the statist left, who see the only solution to be a massive growth of government and drag on the economy. Our current world is built on the availability of cheap energy, you can't just wish that away, and so far no government funded program to produce cheaper energy has done much more than provide subsidies to coal companies.
I think people don't protest because the only people with a legitimate complaint here are the urban kids getting screwed by the drug war. Pretty much anywhere else... what are you complaining about? There are plenty of details to bitch about, to go support a candidate about, to write letters to the editor. But society is still working. We can still get up, do mostly what we want, go home to our families.
It doesn't effect people. For all that we're invading two different countries right now, the monthly casualties are less than the people who die in car accidents in a single state in the same time.
The scale of things just isn't bad enough to make anyone get out the pitchforks.
Umm, no? He realizes that while he likes his tattoos not everyone shares his opinions?
I think my cock is awesome but I don't show up for a job interview in crotchless chaps.
Honestly, though, if her ankles are that bad does the tattoo make her look any worse? No specific offense intended to your niece.
I've always had a rule that I personally can't get a tattoo until I look good with my shirt off... yeah, I'm still waiting.
Not updating their flagship browser for 5 years is still a pretty big mistake, if not quite of the same magnitude.
For 90% of young kids having the whole system open means they're just going to have to search through the start menu to find the games they want to play.
There are plenty of reasons to bring people on step by step to a full system instead of throwing all of it at them at once.
Yep, if a woman's being stalked by her ex I'm sure she has no problem at all having to wait a week for a gun. I'm sure he'll just wait outside. And I'm sure no criminal or gang member ever plans ahead in their weapons purchases (not that they really ever buy from a dealer anyway, since we already have the reasonable gun control of background checks on gun store purchases).
Islam itself is no more particularly a religion or war or peace than most other religious power structures.
The problem is that Islamic countries are currently ass-backwards primitive culturally (from our western perspective) and that includes unnecessary violence.
There have been times when Christianity was as bad or worse -- which isn't justification for the Muslim world's excesses, but makes the Goddamn high horse most westerners get up on when these things come up a little ridiculous. Most of our current peaceful concepts come from the enlightenment - and even our "enlightened" asses managed to have the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and mass firebombings of civilian targets.
But no, let's mock the people's religion because their culture says you should kill people who offend you deeply. Not like we would ever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_Siege do anything http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/assassinations remotely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X#Assassination like http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/11/that-other-war that. We're fucking civilized.
Lumping cultural mistakes in with disparaging an entire religion just seems a little parochial to me. Doesn't mean we should allow them to kill the guy, or *not* mock their actions when they decide to act barbarously. But keep some perspective.
That's one big difference - in America, anyone else who is a "honkey" is considered homogenous. This is, culturally, bullshit. It's been a long time since any serious thinker thought the genetic aspects of your race matters for these things. However, your racial culture can be shown to have a huge effect.
Also, as an aside, if you do live in a part of america that is 96% white, it is very likely that your average income and crime compare relatively well to Sweden's. This is because most high crime areas in the US are confined to ethnic melting-pot style cities, and only the poorest ten or so states actually have lower per capita income than Sweden.
The story is missing the part where scandinavians living in the US not only significantly outperform the US average but also their cousins still living back home.
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/01/dynamic-america-poor-europe.html
They also have similar crime rates vis a vis scandinavia.
It would seem that there are significant benefits to Scandinavian culture, regardless of what government they're living under. Blaming the government for these benefits or faults (with the possible exception of the drug war, as that is a very direct example of state action) seems simplistic to me.
Yes, they decimated some manufacturing - but reduced prices overall. There are local portions of the US that have gotten worse in the last fifty years, but overall the standard of living and buying power of the average person has continued to skyrocket.
We are richer and by a larger margin. We have outsourced our shitty jobs because we can do other things better. Yes, it sucks for the minority of people who worked in those industries who have not been able to transfer their skills to a new field. It may or may not have military implications down the line (although as our GDP and military are still several times larger than our next nearest competitor, it's not an immediate concern).
Also... the US *still* has the largest manufacturing industry in the world.
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/09/23/top-manufacturing-countries-in-2007/
Stop trying to turn the unfortunate stories of a few areas into a national trend. Look at the data. Specific industries (Steel, for example) have moved on, but others have taken their place in different parts of the country.
Removing trade barriers has increased our wealth, as well as increasing the wealth of other countries by an even larger margin. It has also tied us so closely economically with countries that are ideologically different from us that we are unlikely to see a war with them until the current economic structure collapses. Protecting a few industries to stop Detroit from happening may look good in the short term, but in the long run it hurts everyone but Detroit.