Then you'd be a sucker, falling for the very trap that Al Qaida set for you.
There's a reason the laws of war require combatants to dress in an obvious uniform and avoid civilian areas unless unavoidable: because not doing so endangers the lives of civilians. By dressing up like the locals, you cause this kind of mistake.
If these "insurgents" cared about Iraqi people, they would avoid civilian areas and dress in a clearly identifiable uniform. But the "insurgents" don't actually care about civilians. This kind of a mistake is actually good for them. They try to make incidents like this happen on purpose. Why? Because it causes a reaction just like you're having. They are more cynical about PR than the US military. While the US military just tried to bury this video to save face, the insurgents purposely do things to cause things like this to happen so the US military would lose face.
Obviously this was a screwed up situation. The guy who made the call to shoot made a mistake, and people died because of it. But the guys who do have weapons, and do have RPGs, caused that mistake; and they did it on purpose. They have the greater blame.
stem cell research? can't have that. abortion? can't have that. instead of just letting people live their lives, their faith forces them to interfer.
I don't oppose stem cell research or abortion because I'm a Christian, but because I'm an American. I believe every human has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that we need to defend the rights of the weak and those who can't speak for themselves. That includes unborn children.
Think of it this way: if someone from another country comes here and beats his wife, we throw him in jail. Are we "forcing our faith" on him? Is our "faith forcing us to interfere" instead of "just letting him live his life"?
We, as a people, believe that beating your wife is objectively wrong, and we throw you in jail for doing it. Nothing to do with religion. I, as an American, believe it's wrong to murder unborn children, and that people should be jailed for doing it. Nothing to do with my religion.
For many people, these near-death experiences are their primary evidence of the existence of a god and that they have an eternal spirit/soul.
Except, you haven't proven anything. Think of it this way: suppose they scan your brain and find the patterns and chemicals around when you just had a really great, filling, gourmet meal. Then they inject you with some of those chemicals, and you feel fat and happy, just like you had a great gourmet meal. Does that prove that food does not exist?
So, suppose they find the brain that's active when you have a religious experience, or a near-death experience. Then they stimulate the "religious experience" part of your brain, and you feel like God spoke to you. And they give you a drug, and you have a NDE. How is that different?
He didn't hit the kid, he picked him up and tossed him. That usually won't hurt a child unless he trips or slips when he lands, and even if he had accidentally hurt the kid, kids heal fast. As long as the intention was an overwhelming display of power, and not an actual intention to cause harm, I'm a-ok with it. A safer response would have been to simply pick the kid up, hold him at eye level, and explain exactly what will happen the next time.
Bully's respond to overwhelming force, not bullshit "you be nice now" sissy crap. They are counting on that, because they know nobody will do anything to stop them. If someone does actually do something, the quit real quick, because being a bully isn't about taking risks.
That's the strange thing about school. As an adult, if another adult threatens you with violence or intimidation, you respond by appealing to another authority authorized to use more violence (i.e., the police). But somehow, it's cultural for kids to be told not to "tell", and to "solve their own problems." Another option you have as an adult is to move jobs or take a different route to work, which you don't have as a high-schooler. The fact is that high school is screwed up, both culturally and structurally, and is socially a poor preparation for the "real world".
Wikipedia has made it very easy for me simply dismiss only those facts I happen to disagree with.
But of course, that's the same for a newspaper article. I'd posit that as an information source, newspapers contain at least as much "questionable content" as Wikipedia. The only difference is that few people think newspapers are questionable unless they (1) disagree with what it's saying, or (2) are an expert in the subject area.
Did any of the die-hard christians over there ever read the bible (and understood it)? Then no one would even think a split second about universal health care anymore and simply do it because that's the core of all the stuff in that ancient book.
I'm a "die-hard Christian", and I'm in a right bind when I'm trying to vote. It's as though the parties purposely decided to divide up things that I might actually vote for, so it's always a lesser of two evils. God made the world and, from my perspective, made us stewards. So we have a responsibility to care for the environment. The Bible has a lot to say about the rich and the poor, employers and workers; and it's not in the favor of the rich. I think unions have often gone too far in the wrong direction, but they, along with laws which protect workers are absolutely necessary. I'm in favor of many of the health care proposals Obama put forward, including the public option, no exclusion of pre-existing conditions, and required coverage.
On the other hand, I think overall that big government is not the way to solve things; it causes more problems than it fixes. I can see the dampening effect of socialism on efficiency and creativity where I live here in England, and although I can see the benefits of government-run health-care, overall I'm still not in favor of it. My belief that we should care for the weakest and most helpless in our society makes me want to protect workers and help the poor, but makes me also strongly opposed to the idea of the very weakest, those without a voice, being killed for the convenience of others (abortion).
And of course there are some things, like copyright extensions, DRM, and so on where neither of the major parties vote my way.
At any rate, there are Christians who take try to take their faith into their voting, but it's not really that simple to do. And the the "God bless America" people annoy me too.:-)
I read the original "Goto considered harmful" paper, and most of the reasons cited don't apply in many modern languages.
For example, one reason against using "goto" was that in BASIC, you jumped to a line number. This meant that any statement in the program was potentially a target for goto; writing code with the idea that someone somewhere might jump right into the middle was considered too much cognitive overhead.
In C, however, there are no line numbers; you jump to a label. That means (1) if there's no label, you can be sure no one is going to jump there and (2) if you see a label in the code, you can be pretty sure that there *is* a goto somewhere, and you should do a search to find out where.
I think the problem is that many people coming from languages like BASIC have goto as their main model of branching, which really needs to be un-learned. Use goto for that special exception where the normal branching mechanisms (if, while/for, switch, &c) don't fit the program logic cleanly.
Stuff gets written down with little or no thought so it can be studied later.
I remember being upset at a homework question once when I was a freshman, convinced that the teacher had not covered anything like it in class. In extreme annoyance, I skimmed through my notes, to find the exact template of the problem right there, in my notebook, in my own handwriting. I had written down diagrams, equations, derivations, everything, and it had not registered in the slightest.
That was, however, an exception that proved the rule. Usually writing notes forced me to do enough processing of the lecture that I subsequently rarely needed the notes.
Yeah, we're not going to bother with a typing test. I'm sure you're fine.
It's 100% true that for actual coding, thinking time is by far the limiting factor and typing speed doesn't matter much. However, I've heard the argument that having faster typing speed makes you much more likely to be able to comment your code more fully, and write more detailed e-mails when a long one is required.
I guess what I'm saying is, fast typing isn't required (and I've never seen it on a job interview); but having faster typing would be an asset, and is probably worth investing in.
That said, if you really can do 90WPM, I think you're pretty much fine.:-)
When they started doing pop-ups and float overs, I even tolerated it.
I never understood how marketing people could not make the connection: if I annoy my target market with my image, they will associate my image with annoyance and be less likely to buy.
GMail's ads are not at all intrusive; what's more, they're targeted, so that instead of having a 0.01% probability that I might find any particular ad interesting, there's probably more like a 1% probability. So I actually look at gmail's ads, because there's often something there that I actually want.
That's the best part of marketing: connecting people with a valuable product to people who would find that product really valuable. The worst is trying to push a load of crap on people who don't really need it.
Not to mention kids being sent to school at the age of 4, and spending the next 14 years being "socialized" in a completely unnatural environment: people of exactly the same age, with little opportunity to change who you spend time with, and very little consequences for your actions.
Seriously, when in the rest of your life are you ever in a situation like school? At work, you have people probably ranging at least from 25 to 45, probably more like 25 to 60. In general, people who act like jerks and idiots are fired (or never hired in the first place). If you don't like your job, or the jerks aren't fired for some reason, quit and find another one; you're not stuck with these people.
Socially speaking, school is completely unlike life after school, and is poor preparation for it.
Do you consider everything a potential risk as a default stance?
I realized after I wrote that sentence that it wasn't very clear. "Potential risk" in normal English means I'm going to be on my guard against it, and possibly take action to avert it (e.g., banning violent video games). That's not what I meant.
Don't think of beliefs as "do believe" or "don't believe"; think of it as a probability plus a confidence.
Right now, if we take proposition A as "Violent video games promote real-life violence", I'd give it a 40% probability, with a 10% confidence level. That is, I think overall they probably don't but they may; and I'm not really sure either way.
The arguments here are generally that one should consider the probability of proposition A much lower, and with a much higher confidence. But the arguments haven't been convincing to me so far, because they are simply about dimissing data that people don't want to believe, that doesn't fit the world as they see it. What I was saying is that if you want me to change my mind, and reduce my probability, I need to see something else (which GGP then provided).
Your arguments make a lot of sense -- I do especially like the cake one.:-)
However, you haven't answered the question. You've merely brought out more logical frameworks which fit the data (some correlation between video game violence and real world violence) into your pre-existing beliefs (video game violence has no net negative effect on normal people). Your explanations and examples are good and logically sound. But the problem is that it's very easy, once you have a logical framework, to keep "tweaking" it to fit the data, or dismiss data that doesn't fit in with the framework.
So let me ask again. Opponents of violence in video games claim that, in addition to being a factor in "triggering" a small number of people who may have triggered on any number of things anyway, violent video games have a net negative effect on average people, making them more tolerant of violence in their every day lives. What kind of study, with what kind of results, would convince you that this statement was true?
What I hear you saying is, "All these studies are BS to begin with, and metastudies make it worse. Therefore, I can dismiss their findings out of hand and continue to believe what I already believe."
I'm not saying video game violence causes real violence. But the vast majority of the posts I see here are not being scientific or truly skeptical, but finding excuses to continue holding their already-held beliefs.
Tell me that you've either 1) looked at this paper and found deeply flawed statistics, 2) looked carefully at at least 2 previous papers and found the statistics "deeply flawed", or 3) read several papers with sound statistics showing no correlation, and maybe I'll think about believing that video game violence does not promote real violence. Until then, I will consider video game violence a potential risk.
I've seen slums in India and I totally agree with you.
You've seen them, but have you lived in them?
I haven't seen them, but in Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, he paints them in a distinctly positive light. The main character is an Australian, at some point forced by circumstances to move into one of the slums. Before moving in he talks to two people from the slums. He realizes later that it was actually an interview: they were there to see if they were going to allow him into their community. Conditions looked delporable on the outside, but everyone lived as a big community, because their lives all depended on each other.
Obviously that's fiction, but it's based on the author's own experience in the slums in Mumbai.
My old phone wasn't hard to use. It's just that the feeling I always got was "clunky". Making icons look 3d doesn't make it easier to use. But it does make the short but frequent act of looking at the icons more "magic" and less "clunky". Making things slide instead of having an arrow or area of the screen isn't easier to use. But it makes looking for the app or scrolling around the screen a little more "magic" and a little less "clunky". All that adds up.
I remember reading about some customer trials a whiskey company did where they discovered that making a fancier bottle actually made the whiskey taste better. On the one hand that seems lame; but since what you're selling is an experience anyway, does it matter how they made that experience better?
Same thing with the iPhone. Aesthetics == magic, which is worth paying for.
In Freakonomics, there's actually a chapter about the economic structure of drug gangs. They found out that the people who actually do the selling on the streets are actually very poorly paid. Much like McDonalds: peons get minimum wage, regional managers make a bucketload, the guys at the top are rolling in it. Except your chances of getting shot at McDonalds are way lower. A lot of the guys the researcher met actually asked him about jobs as janitors at his university -- better pay, better working conditions, and lower chance of getting murdered.
That was only one drug gang, so it might not generalize. But it makes some sense that if McD's can find millions of peons to work for peons, drug cartels can take advantage of the same socio-economic conditions and achieve the same results.
The notion that "anybody can make it in the US if they work hard" is a fairy tale.
Whom do you know who has worked hard and yet failed to secure a comfortable life for themselves? Millions of immigrants prove you wrong by coming with almost nothing, starting restaurants / laundry shops / convenience stores, and then sending their kids to college to become doctors and lawyers.
Sure, if you want to become filthy rich, you need a lot of breaks: talent (not necessarily the "getting good grades" kind of talent), opportunity, and drive. But I don't know anyone who worked hard at improving their situation who is still poor.
Have you never used an iPhone, or did you win your saving throw against the "magic"? I've had smart phones before, but the iPhone beats them all hands down in every way. The experience of using it always has a slight hint of "wow, this is cool", rather than my previous experience of "wow, this is kind of clunky". Getting and installing quality apps which aren't expensive is easy and reliable.
It's certainly not perfect; not having an "off" button for when it hard-hangs is a big one. (Twice I've had to just let the battery run down on it.) But the "magic" makes me much more inclined to cut the Apple engineers some slack.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.
Statements like this are exactly the point of this experiment. You obviously have some beliefs about religion, and if I gave you a set of new facts, you would interpret them in light of your beliefs, and resist changing them.
The point of these experiments isn't to look at everyone else and say, "Yeah, they're all screwed up." The point is to look at yourself and say, "Do I have beliefs for which I am discarding / reshaping evidence to fit them?" Every human on the face of this planet has the same exact tendency. And that means every atheist, every Liberal, every Republican, every religious person, every man, every woman. And most importantly, that means YOU.
Why is it so strange that, having a completely bizarre and wrong way of thinking in one area (thinking it's OK to use a student laptop to spy on people in their own homes, and punish children for things that they're doing in their own homes), they would have a bizarre and wrong way of thinking in another area (those are obviously drugs)? The two seem very consistent: both sound small-minded, I-know-better-than-you, I-have-a-right-to-interfere-with-your-life, students-are-the-enemy. It doesn't surprise me in the least.
In a way, it's lucky they were so confused. If the administrator hadn't been so totally blind to both the extreme illegality and the total wrongness of spying (causing the swift response of the authorities, and the strong public outrage, respectively), they may never have been found out.
Flip it around: Oh, well if YOU wan the app, then clearly everyone else would and Apple is foolish to remove it.
I get annoyed with the boobie app "spams" as well. If 70% of the people don't care or are for removing them, and 30% are against it (of which only 1% are against enough to sell their iPhone or get something else), then it makes sense for Apple to do that.
Why they don't just make an "Adult" section, I don't know; but in any case, they'll have to live with the results, not me.
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Then you'd be a sucker, falling for the very trap that Al Qaida set for you.
There's a reason the laws of war require combatants to dress in an obvious uniform and avoid civilian areas unless unavoidable: because not doing so endangers the lives of civilians. By dressing up like the locals, you cause this kind of mistake.
If these "insurgents" cared about Iraqi people, they would avoid civilian areas and dress in a clearly identifiable uniform. But the "insurgents" don't actually care about civilians. This kind of a mistake is actually good for them. They try to make incidents like this happen on purpose. Why? Because it causes a reaction just like you're having. They are more cynical about PR than the US military. While the US military just tried to bury this video to save face, the insurgents purposely do things to cause things like this to happen so the US military would lose face.
Obviously this was a screwed up situation. The guy who made the call to shoot made a mistake, and people died because of it. But the guys who do have weapons, and do have RPGs, caused that mistake; and they did it on purpose. They have the greater blame.
I don't oppose stem cell research or abortion because I'm a Christian, but because I'm an American. I believe every human has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that we need to defend the rights of the weak and those who can't speak for themselves. That includes unborn children.
Think of it this way: if someone from another country comes here and beats his wife, we throw him in jail. Are we "forcing our faith" on him? Is our "faith forcing us to interfere" instead of "just letting him live his life"?
We, as a people, believe that beating your wife is objectively wrong, and we throw you in jail for doing it. Nothing to do with religion. I, as an American, believe it's wrong to murder unborn children, and that people should be jailed for doing it. Nothing to do with my religion.
Except, you haven't proven anything. Think of it this way: suppose they scan your brain and find the patterns and chemicals around when you just had a really great, filling, gourmet meal. Then they inject you with some of those chemicals, and you feel fat and happy, just like you had a great gourmet meal. Does that prove that food does not exist?
So, suppose they find the brain that's active when you have a religious experience, or a near-death experience. Then they stimulate the "religious experience" part of your brain, and you feel like God spoke to you. And they give you a drug, and you have a NDE. How is that different?
That's the strange thing about school. As an adult, if another adult threatens you with violence or intimidation, you respond by appealing to another authority authorized to use more violence (i.e., the police). But somehow, it's cultural for kids to be told not to "tell", and to "solve their own problems." Another option you have as an adult is to move jobs or take a different route to work, which you don't have as a high-schooler. The fact is that high school is screwed up, both culturally and structurally, and is socially a poor preparation for the "real world".
But of course, that's the same for a newspaper article. I'd posit that as an information source, newspapers contain at least as much "questionable content" as Wikipedia. The only difference is that few people think newspapers are questionable unless they (1) disagree with what it's saying, or (2) are an expert in the subject area.
I'm a "die-hard Christian", and I'm in a right bind when I'm trying to vote. It's as though the parties purposely decided to divide up things that I might actually vote for, so it's always a lesser of two evils. God made the world and, from my perspective, made us stewards. So we have a responsibility to care for the environment. The Bible has a lot to say about the rich and the poor, employers and workers; and it's not in the favor of the rich. I think unions have often gone too far in the wrong direction, but they, along with laws which protect workers are absolutely necessary. I'm in favor of many of the health care proposals Obama put forward, including the public option, no exclusion of pre-existing conditions, and required coverage.
On the other hand, I think overall that big government is not the way to solve things; it causes more problems than it fixes. I can see the dampening effect of socialism on efficiency and creativity where I live here in England, and although I can see the benefits of government-run health-care, overall I'm still not in favor of it. My belief that we should care for the weakest and most helpless in our society makes me want to protect workers and help the poor, but makes me also strongly opposed to the idea of the very weakest, those without a voice, being killed for the convenience of others (abortion).
And of course there are some things, like copyright extensions, DRM, and so on where neither of the major parties vote my way.
At any rate, there are Christians who take try to take their faith into their voting, but it's not really that simple to do. And the the "God bless America" people annoy me too. :-)
From their perspective, the number of lives lost due to poor health care is completely dwarfed by the lives lost due to abortion.
I read the original "Goto considered harmful" paper, and most of the reasons cited don't apply in many modern languages.
For example, one reason against using "goto" was that in BASIC, you jumped to a line number. This meant that any statement in the program was potentially a target for goto; writing code with the idea that someone somewhere might jump right into the middle was considered too much cognitive overhead.
In C, however, there are no line numbers; you jump to a label. That means (1) if there's no label, you can be sure no one is going to jump there and (2) if you see a label in the code, you can be pretty sure that there *is* a goto somewhere, and you should do a search to find out where.
I think the problem is that many people coming from languages like BASIC have goto as their main model of branching, which really needs to be un-learned. Use goto for that special exception where the normal branching mechanisms (if, while/for, switch, &c) don't fit the program logic cleanly.
I remember being upset at a homework question once when I was a freshman, convinced that the teacher had not covered anything like it in class. In extreme annoyance, I skimmed through my notes, to find the exact template of the problem right there, in my notebook, in my own handwriting. I had written down diagrams, equations, derivations, everything, and it had not registered in the slightest.
That was, however, an exception that proved the rule. Usually writing notes forced me to do enough processing of the lecture that I subsequently rarely needed the notes.
It's 100% true that for actual coding, thinking time is by far the limiting factor and typing speed doesn't matter much. However, I've heard the argument that having faster typing speed makes you much more likely to be able to comment your code more fully, and write more detailed e-mails when a long one is required.
I guess what I'm saying is, fast typing isn't required (and I've never seen it on a job interview); but having faster typing would be an asset, and is probably worth investing in.
That said, if you really can do 90WPM, I think you're pretty much fine. :-)
I never understood how marketing people could not make the connection: if I annoy my target market with my image, they will associate my image with annoyance and be less likely to buy.
GMail's ads are not at all intrusive; what's more, they're targeted, so that instead of having a 0.01% probability that I might find any particular ad interesting, there's probably more like a 1% probability. So I actually look at gmail's ads, because there's often something there that I actually want.
That's the best part of marketing: connecting people with a valuable product to people who would find that product really valuable. The worst is trying to push a load of crap on people who don't really need it.
Not to mention kids being sent to school at the age of 4, and spending the next 14 years being "socialized" in a completely unnatural environment: people of exactly the same age, with little opportunity to change who you spend time with, and very little consequences for your actions.
Seriously, when in the rest of your life are you ever in a situation like school? At work, you have people probably ranging at least from 25 to 45, probably more like 25 to 60. In general, people who act like jerks and idiots are fired (or never hired in the first place). If you don't like your job, or the jerks aren't fired for some reason, quit and find another one; you're not stuck with these people.
Socially speaking, school is completely unlike life after school, and is poor preparation for it.
I realized after I wrote that sentence that it wasn't very clear. "Potential risk" in normal English means I'm going to be on my guard against it, and possibly take action to avert it (e.g., banning violent video games). That's not what I meant.
Don't think of beliefs as "do believe" or "don't believe"; think of it as a probability plus a confidence.
Right now, if we take proposition A as "Violent video games promote real-life violence", I'd give it a 40% probability, with a 10% confidence level. That is, I think overall they probably don't but they may; and I'm not really sure either way.
The arguments here are generally that one should consider the probability of proposition A much lower, and with a much higher confidence. But the arguments haven't been convincing to me so far, because they are simply about dimissing data that people don't want to believe, that doesn't fit the world as they see it. What I was saying is that if you want me to change my mind, and reduce my probability, I need to see something else (which GGP then provided).
Your arguments make a lot of sense -- I do especially like the cake one. :-)
However, you haven't answered the question. You've merely brought out more logical frameworks which fit the data (some correlation between video game violence and real world violence) into your pre-existing beliefs (video game violence has no net negative effect on normal people). Your explanations and examples are good and logically sound. But the problem is that it's very easy, once you have a logical framework, to keep "tweaking" it to fit the data, or dismiss data that doesn't fit in with the framework.
So let me ask again. Opponents of violence in video games claim that, in addition to being a factor in "triggering" a small number of people who may have triggered on any number of things anyway, violent video games have a net negative effect on average people, making them more tolerant of violence in their every day lives. What kind of study, with what kind of results, would convince you that this statement was true?
What I hear you saying is, "All these studies are BS to begin with, and metastudies make it worse. Therefore, I can dismiss their findings out of hand and continue to believe what I already believe."
I'm not saying video game violence causes real violence. But the vast majority of the posts I see here are not being scientific or truly skeptical, but finding excuses to continue holding their already-held beliefs.
Tell me that you've either 1) looked at this paper and found deeply flawed statistics, 2) looked carefully at at least 2 previous papers and found the statistics "deeply flawed", or 3) read several papers with sound statistics showing no correlation, and maybe I'll think about believing that video game violence does not promote real violence. Until then, I will consider video game violence a potential risk.
I don't necessarily disagree with this; however, the skeptic in me wonders: what evidence would convince you otherwise?
If you can't think of a test or set of evidence that would falsify your belief, then it's an article of faith, not rational belief.
You've seen them, but have you lived in them?
I haven't seen them, but in Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, he paints them in a distinctly positive light. The main character is an Australian, at some point forced by circumstances to move into one of the slums. Before moving in he talks to two people from the slums. He realizes later that it was actually an interview: they were there to see if they were going to allow him into their community. Conditions looked delporable on the outside, but everyone lived as a big community, because their lives all depended on each other.
Obviously that's fiction, but it's based on the author's own experience in the slums in Mumbai.
My old phone wasn't hard to use. It's just that the feeling I always got was "clunky". Making icons look 3d doesn't make it easier to use. But it does make the short but frequent act of looking at the icons more "magic" and less "clunky". Making things slide instead of having an arrow or area of the screen isn't easier to use. But it makes looking for the app or scrolling around the screen a little more "magic" and a little less "clunky". All that adds up.
I remember reading about some customer trials a whiskey company did where they discovered that making a fancier bottle actually made the whiskey taste better. On the one hand that seems lame; but since what you're selling is an experience anyway, does it matter how they made that experience better?
Same thing with the iPhone. Aesthetics == magic, which is worth paying for.
In Freakonomics, there's actually a chapter about the economic structure of drug gangs. They found out that the people who actually do the selling on the streets are actually very poorly paid. Much like McDonalds: peons get minimum wage, regional managers make a bucketload, the guys at the top are rolling in it. Except your chances of getting shot at McDonalds are way lower. A lot of the guys the researcher met actually asked him about jobs as janitors at his university -- better pay, better working conditions, and lower chance of getting murdered.
That was only one drug gang, so it might not generalize. But it makes some sense that if McD's can find millions of peons to work for peons, drug cartels can take advantage of the same socio-economic conditions and achieve the same results.
Whom do you know who has worked hard and yet failed to secure a comfortable life for themselves? Millions of immigrants prove you wrong by coming with almost nothing, starting restaurants / laundry shops / convenience stores, and then sending their kids to college to become doctors and lawyers.
Sure, if you want to become filthy rich, you need a lot of breaks: talent (not necessarily the "getting good grades" kind of talent), opportunity, and drive. But I don't know anyone who worked hard at improving their situation who is still poor.
Have you never used an iPhone, or did you win your saving throw against the "magic"? I've had smart phones before, but the iPhone beats them all hands down in every way. The experience of using it always has a slight hint of "wow, this is cool", rather than my previous experience of "wow, this is kind of clunky". Getting and installing quality apps which aren't expensive is easy and reliable.
It's certainly not perfect; not having an "off" button for when it hard-hangs is a big one. (Twice I've had to just let the battery run down on it.) But the "magic" makes me much more inclined to cut the Apple engineers some slack.
Statements like this are exactly the point of this experiment. You obviously have some beliefs about religion, and if I gave you a set of new facts, you would interpret them in light of your beliefs, and resist changing them.
The point of these experiments isn't to look at everyone else and say, "Yeah, they're all screwed up." The point is to look at yourself and say, "Do I have beliefs for which I am discarding / reshaping evidence to fit them?" Every human on the face of this planet has the same exact tendency. And that means every atheist, every Liberal, every Republican, every religious person, every man, every woman. And most importantly, that means YOU.
Why is it so strange that, having a completely bizarre and wrong way of thinking in one area (thinking it's OK to use a student laptop to spy on people in their own homes, and punish children for things that they're doing in their own homes), they would have a bizarre and wrong way of thinking in another area (those are obviously drugs)? The two seem very consistent: both sound small-minded, I-know-better-than-you, I-have-a-right-to-interfere-with-your-life, students-are-the-enemy. It doesn't surprise me in the least.
In a way, it's lucky they were so confused. If the administrator hadn't been so totally blind to both the extreme illegality and the total wrongness of spying (causing the swift response of the authorities, and the strong public outrage, respectively), they may never have been found out.
Flip it around: Oh, well if YOU wan the app, then clearly everyone else would and Apple is foolish to remove it.
I get annoyed with the boobie app "spams" as well. If 70% of the people don't care or are for removing them, and 30% are against it (of which only 1% are against enough to sell their iPhone or get something else), then it makes sense for Apple to do that.
Why they don't just make an "Adult" section, I don't know; but in any case, they'll have to live with the results, not me.
But this makes you just a little bit less evil. :-)