It's the pink-coloured "milk gravy" that makes this truly nauseating.:-6
I mean, really? And you have the nerve to get squeamish about haggis, FFS?!
Never mind the fact that hot dogs are probably as bad (in terms of what they contain) as haggis, if not far worse. Of course, *they* have the advantage of being ludicrously processed to the extent that there's no sign of their origins for ignorance-is-bliss Americans who like to argue about whether ketchup or mustard is the preferred topping for their sausageful of ground-to-atomic-size pigs' lips and assholes...
Pork brains in milk gravy, though? So far ahead of either in the retch-inducing stakes it's not even funny.
This Yahoo!(TM) has been useless irrelevant since 1996--seriously people just put a stake through it's heart.
1996 is a bit of an exaggeration; it only became Yahoo in 1995 and the late 1990s dot-com era was its heyday.
Still, only a bit. For me, they've long felt like a legacy business still stuck in that era, dinosaurs that never really moved on or recovered their status after the dot-com crash and the rapid rise of Google in its immediate aftermath left them in the dust. They're just so... 90s.
Of course, they didn't completely stagnate. They acquired a lot of companies, some of which were successful, but you couldn't help but get the feeling they seemed to survive on inertia, legacy users and the fact they were so big. Now Yahoo's finally run out of steam, worth less than the market value of its non-core assets... I'm actually surprised it's taken that long.
I'm aware that WML wasn't HTML (and indeed, that WAP as a whole effectively replaced everything above the basic transport layer with a stack of its own). Hence working with mobile devices as they were then wasn't just a simple matter of theme switching (and it all became moot quite quickly when the overhyped and underdelivering WAP mostly flopped).
This theme switcher is essentially a continuation of the "mobile version of our site" tactic which became common in the early smartphone era when it became apparent that some sites weren't well-suited to phone use. Yes, I know that post-iPhone smartphones support HTML natively, but a lot of mid-to-late noughties site layouts assumed a large-ish screen and didn't look good on phones.
And still the world believes those people built the pyramids.
The world believes that the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids.
You can argue to what extent the inhabitants of modern-day Egypt are the direct descendants (racially and genetically) of the Ancient Egyptians or not. However, in cultural terms it's quite clearly *not* the same society it was several thousand years ago- having been ruled by the Romans, Christianised then later Islamised. Hence it's meaningless to use either as the direct basis for arguing some point about the other.
This particular plugin was supposed to switch themes based on whether it's a mobile device or not. Putting aside the 1999 mentality of that
1999? Seriously? IIRC back then even regular, non-smart phones were only just starting to become truly mass market, every-man-and-his-dog items, and the mobile Internet- if you can call it that- consisted of a few devices supporting WAP, which was meant to be the next big thing but wasn't. Probably because paying per-minute charges to view an extremely limited few lines of content at a time and having to redesign your entire website to support it didn't appeal to many people.
I think you meant 2009 to 2012, i.e. the point at which smartphones were getting popular enough to warrant mobile-specific versions of sites, but before increasingly disparate screen dimensions and the development of responsive design rendered the concept obsolete.
I'm waiting for the electro-mechanical simulation of the computer simulation of the real world pong simulation of the computer game.
I'm waiting for the officially-licensed juice drink of the electro-mechanical simulation of the computer simulation of the real world pong simulation of the computer game.
It contains real fruit juice!(*)
(*) Ingredients: Water, sugar, artificial sweetener, artificial colours, flavouring, preservatives, acidity regulator, plutonium 238, real fruit juice (1.5%).
Not sure; I don't follow hipsters, but the plaid shirt revival has been pretty mainstream for at least four years now, and while I'm not sure about jeans specifically, the "skinny trousers" thing- generally chinos- seems to already have been and gone at least a couple of years back.
(Ditto "I'm W.G. Grace, motherf****r" beards, which every man and his dog have been sporting for years now, and thick-rimmed glasses which have become a common if not ubiquitous look among mainstream-thinking-they're-hipster female students for quite some time).
In fact, now that I think of it, the modern incarnation of the hipster- before the look went mainstream, but was still quite well-known- must have been around for the better part of a decade now.
I'd have assumed that actual hipsters- who stereotypically hate things as soon as they go mainstream- would have dumped them before that, even if it's the stereotypical "hipster" look.
It's only the businesses that are failing to plan ahead or which are experiencing business problems that have the entire staff there at night consistently. It's more of a sign of flaw in leadership and business operations.
Either that or it's an intentional and cynical attempt to con gullible staff into working longer than expected under the guise of a "crunch", most significantly in the gaming industry.
'Course, it's probably not coincidental that the gaming industry is the one with the highest proportion of relatively young, newly-graduated, gullible (smart but with little life or industry experience) and easily manipulated programmers.
By the time they figure out that the "crunch" is a pathological and embedded aspect of that industry, there's a fresh supply of naive graduates willing to take their place for mediocre wages just to follow their dream of working in the games industry.
Okay. Then my point partly aligns (and partly doesn't) with yours- that the "phobia" in "homophobia" *isn't* being used in the medical sense, but as a term meaning more general fear or revulsion. For that reason, it's inaccurate to suggest that "homophobes" have ever- for the most part- been considered mentally ill.
Thus while changing attitudes towards homosexuals- who once *were* considered mentally ill- says something about changing attitudes towards mental illness itself, modern use the term "homophobe" says very little. One might argue (as you apparently do) that it's misuse of a medical term, but it's precisely because that term *is* being misused that it says nothing about mental illness.
(Disclaimer; the comment you're replying to was mine- I meant to post it while I was logged in).
I didn't claim that "homophobia wasn't a real thing".
Are you claiming that you're considered "mentally ill" and in need of treatment in the same way that homosexuals once were as a result of your feelings? If not, then that's the point that was being made.
(Disclaimer; the comment you're replying to was mine- I meant to post it while I was logged in).
Microsoft's conduct in the Windows 10 forced-upgrade affair, privacy issues and in many other areas has been utterly contemptible.
This doesn't change the fact that even beginning to compare this behaviour to the atrocities committed by Daesh is- quite rightly- going to be seen as the cheapest of arguments coming from an utterly insulated, out of touch and borderline sociopathic basement dweller intent on exploiting human tragedy for some navel-gazing argument.
MS win here, because by making yourself sound like (or rather, exposing yourself as) that person, any argument you make is going to be ignored.
My personal feeling that the whole concept of "free will" is purely a matter of philosophical perspective- entirely dependent on how you approach and define certain terms- and as such there can be no meaningful definitive answer as to whether it exists or not.
For example, in asking do "you" (or I) have free will, what are "you" anyway? Do "you" only count as the conscious mind? If so, how can the conscious mind be "free" beyond what the running of the universe dictates, since your conscious mind *is* just another part of that universe. Ultimately, I don't think that whether the universe runs like Newtonian clockwork or with quantum uncertainty is the issue either; in the latter case, "you" don't have control over the uncertainty, and- again- even if you did does that mean that you're somehow external to that process? Of course not.
But that vague discussion of these issues isn't the point I wished to make; rather it's simply that they (and other) issues exist and it's how you approach them- and the assumptions you make when doing so- that define whether "free will" exists or not. In other words, a philosophical construct and as such neither right nor wrong.
this is why they say "not feed the trolls" (here, on Slashdot, this means: "don't reply ACs":P)
Most trolls are ACs, but most ACs aren't trolls; I've been around here long enough to know that. (#) It's not even clear that the AC replying was the same one who made the original comment anyway. Who cares?
Believe me when I say that I've seen enough people posting cod-macho drivel like the original comment where it's clear that at least some of them believe it.
(#) Talking of which, the second AC must be a relative newcomer. I couldn't see it even occurring to an established user to call something in the half-millions a "low ID", regardless of whether that's being used as part of an over-obvious trolling.:-)
Someone just needs to post the Judge's home address and let those users show up at his door.
Internet Tough Guy likes the idea of mob justice when he's comfortably behind his computer and only has to imagine the scenarios where this plays out in his favour.
... there are international laws against all kinds of crap, so why the fuck is there none agains stupid judges who feel their world-view is relevant outside their own country...
The judge is based in Brazil. The block is restricted to WhatsApp's activities within Brazil; nowhere else.
What point are you trying to make?
(Disclaimer; picking fault with apparently half-baked or ill-thought out arguments doesn't mean I agree with the judge's decision. I shouldn't have to explain that in advance, but I know there'll always be at least one halfwit who doesn't understand this.)
You appear to have misunderstood the hipster phenomenon. "Hipsters" in the modern sense aren't really the type of people at the cutting edge of technology, or at least they don't pretend to be that way.
Hipsters are the type of people who made Lomography rich by buying overpriced, overmarketed crappy film cameras bought purely for their imperfect, anti-digital aesthetic. Hipsters are probably the people that started the current vinyl revival, and likely don't care that much about vinyl per se, so much as a twee different-for-the-sake-of-being-different-in-the-same-way-as-everyone-else form of rebellion.
Of course, they're probably just as "digital" as everyone else, if not more; Instagram is essentially that anti-digital aesthetic automated and faked via entirely digital means for the online social media age. However, the pretence is otherwise.
They're the sort of people who probably *would* use paper maps just for the sake of being different. (This says nothing either way about whether paper maps are actually better).
It is funny how while Jobs was alive, he was apparently nothing more than a marketing charlatan, but once he was gone, Apple was doomed without his innovative genius.
That's odd, because I recall the mass media generally treating Jobs as a borderline-messiah/genius figure synonymous with Apple when he *was* alive. I also recall a significant number of people making claims that Apple's success was primarily down to marketing even then.
What I don't see is any significant change en masse of those attitudes since he died.
The only thing I noticed- if anything- is that since his death, the fact that Jobs was a borderline sociopathic asshole at a personal level seems to have been more widely-acknowledged by the same mass media, without this fundamentally altering opinion of his work at Apple.
Regardless, there's no contradiction between the fact that much of Apple's success *might* have been down to Jobs being a marketing charlatan, and that he was a genius at such marketing that Apple is suffering from the loss of. Personally, despite my significant dislike of many aspects of Apple, I'd have to say that crediting it all to marketing ignores the fact that while they didn't invent the MP3 player nor the smartphone, they *did* significantly improve and innovate aspects of their design and consumer-friendliness. Marketing was- of course- a major part of their success as well, but not the entirety. And while Jobs was neither the designer nor engineer of those products, he did seem to have a clear vision of where they should be going and how products did- or didn't- work.
It sounds like something Linden Lab would do to let people know that Second Life still exists, apparently.
Until I noticed that it was his "unofficial" headquarters (#), I was surprised that politicians like Sanders were even bothering with something whose cyber-savvy-bandwagon-jumping potential peaked a decade ago and which most people have almost forgotten existed.
Thing is, even then I saw no real evidence that its latest-hot-thing media prominence was matched by the number of people actually using it, no sign that it was remotely mass-market popular in the way that Twitter and Facebook became (or even that MySpace once was). It was something that the media latched on to as the next big thing (with various bandwagon-jumping celebs, etc who wanted to be seen at the cutting edge of the glorious cyber-future in turn associating themselves with it.)
I think this is partly because it fulfilled a vision of what "cyberspace" was expected to become- a combination of the online future and the fulfilment of 90s virtual reality promises (sort of). It was also the sort of thing that lent itself to journalistic pontificating about identity, amusing incidents, et al.
And I think that the media- which wasn't as tech-savvy or clever as it liked to think, particularly back then- was so wrapped up in this and paranoid about missing the boat on the next big thing that they were just a bit too keen to jump on the Second Life bandwagon. At least until it became clear that most people didn't care about it and never would. Not to say that it was unsuccessful, just that it was never going to appeal in the "every man and his dog" way that Facebook did.
Anyway, is the latest incident a publicity stunt? Who knows. At any rate, it smacks more of trolling- a has-been echoing of the infamous "flying penis" stunt of its heyday- than actual Trump supporters. Personally, Second Life is something that would have sounded incredibly cool and desirable to me when I was in my early to mid teens (and even Habitat would have impressed me), but by the time it actually came along it seemed less desirable (as does VR to me now), to the point I've never actually used it.
If people enjoy playing around with their avatars, that's fine for them, but the idea of walking through a boring- and by now, dated-looking- landscape interacting with lifeless uncanny valley mannequin fantasies (that look nothing like the actual people behind them) appeals to me even less than it did ten years ago.
(#) i.e. Nothing to do with him per se, just a bunch of people who were probably using Second Life anyway that happen to be Sanders supporters, I'm assuming.
It's a very old philosophical argument and was made into a major motion trilogy 15 years ago.
There's a fundamental difference between The Matrix and what the "universe itself is a simulation" theories describe.
The premise behind The Matrix was essentially that people who *did* exist in the "real" world were (unknowingly) having their senses replaced with artificial stimuli mimicking a nonexistent world. At a basic philosophical level, this is still effectively virtual reality, differing only in terms of how convincing it is and whether or not the people are aware of what's happening to them.
By contrast- and assuming I've understood them correctly- most versions of the "universe is a simulation" theory (of which DeGrasse Tyson's certainly isn't the first) *don't* assume that we are external to the simulated universe- we are a part of it.
There is no "real" us in the world in which the "universe simulation" is being run- no bodies in a Matrix-like human farm, no "real" brain in a vat being fed artificial stimuli. "We" are just another aspect of the simulation; there is no "real world" us full stop.
FWIW, I haven't read the entire "Simulated reality" article you linked, but from skimming, the "types of simulation" section seems to differentiate the two cases.
You're assuming that they're calling him as an existing customer of Oracle's rather than someone they're wanting to rope in to using Oracle's software in the first place.
Of course, Oracle's business model *is* to get customers using their software, then once they're locked in to and reliant upon that infrastructure, squeeze them for every penny they have with the threat to withdraw their license or ramp up the price horrendously. So if he's in the latter group then, yeah, bad idea.
'Course, a really bad idea would be to leave yourself open to that sort of legalised extortion in the first place, especially if you know (as anyone ought to these days) what Oracle's modus operandi is. So if he's in the former group- and sure Oracle don't have any leverage they can use against him- telling them to fuck off is absolutely the most sensible decision.
But I'm not taking it as "axiomatic". As I was saying, highly unusual markets can produce monopolies. Furthermore, free market transactions are well defined: they are transactions that are voluntary and according to conditions entirely set by all participants.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. The point under dispute was whether an entirely laissez-faire free market (that initially met your definition) could end up in a position where it didn't (e.g. a monopoly). You took it as given that "when free markets break down, it is through politics, not market mechanisms", meaning that by definition any such failure could only be ascribed to external interference in that otherwise free market- that is to say, the free market is perfect because the free market is perfect...!
Yes, monopolies can occur under other "highly unusual" conditions, but the question was whether or not they can also arise in an entirely unregulated free market.
Well, look, that's just a testament to your inexperience. Many places have just one set of wires and pipes in the ground, yet give people the option to buy from dozens of suppliers
I'm aware of that. My point was that they still use the same shared infrastructure which either requires external regulation to allow access, or (in an unregulated market) is a weak point with high risk of failure- i.e. falling into the hands of a small number of parties exerting monopolistic or near-monopolistic control and using it as a barrier to entry for competitors.
Good grief. If it wasn't already obviously silly enough, the smiley didn't tip you off that the "Total Recall" comment was a joke, a lighthearted reference to the fact that your example reminded me of that film or "proved" my point?...!
No, it doesn't actually prove anything, and wasn't meant to. It's a fictional movie featuring a three-breasted woman. Lighten up.
That said, I like the fact you accused me of "unrealistic Total Recall scenarios" when you were the one that came up with the "air in a moon colony" example in the first place!
I pointed out that the failures you postulate are not market failures but political failures
Yes, I'm aware that you keep claiming this. If one takes it as axiomatic (or as I see it, dogmatic) that the free market cannot fail on its own- which appears to be the basis of your argument- then *by definition* all such failures must be the fault of political interference.
But since that's essentially the point being argued, this is little more than circular reasoning.
Furthermore, when free markets break down, it is through politics, not market mechanisms.
Again. See above.
And most of those local monopolies are artificial anyway. That is, in most places, you could actually have a choice of suppliers, or even supply yourself, if government hadn't granted an artificial local monopoly to some utility, usually due to political lobbying.
Can't see numerous companies digging up- or being allowed to dig up (either by government or by private landowners) numerous independently-owned water supply routes and sets of pipes just so I can pick and choose one of them.
That is my point: your idea about monopolies is as unrealistic as Total Recall; in real societies, monopolies don't operate that way.
As I said, you were the one who came up with the "unrealistic" example, I just made a tongue-in-cheek comment about a fictional instance of it.
And if your idea of a free market is that it's free because (e.g.) you can move halfway across the country to change supplier, then we've certainly moved out of the bounds of real world usefulness and into intellectual masturbation.
There are many fungible sources of water, electricity, gas, and staple foods.
The infrastructure required to support delivery of many of those things isn't, though. *That* is where the problem lies and where the barriers to entry into a market exist, and where barriers to entry exist they can be leveraged to shut out newcomers.
And even that's assuming that a free market would support (e.g.) many different water suppliers all able to bring their own, independent delivery infrastructure to my house to provide true competition. Of course that's not going to happen, I'm not going to have 100 different suppliers' pipes coming to my house to choose from!
I'm saying that if you were in a situation in which a single party actually is in a position to control an essential good (e.g., air on a lunar colony), you will end up with a bona fide dictatorship of the "lick my boots peasant or suffocate" kind.
It's only the (apparently) dogmatic assumption that a "true" free market can't end up in the same monopolistic position that would differentiate this from an abusive, non-democratic government.
Speaking of the air supply, don't you remember that it was a private company that cut it off in Total Recall?:-)
if that situation ever arose, people would simply break their contracts and the monopolist would lose their property.
I thought you said there were "well-defined penalties" for breaking contracts? How do you know the monopolist will lose their property- doesn't that depend on the terms of the contract and what the company can do to recover it? Who's going to back up the terms of those contracts anyway? The government? If not, what's to stop the company from just doing what they want? Doesn't sound like a free market to me.
With respect, the model of "free market" you're describe is starting to sound like an idealist intellectual abstraction, not something that would- or could- make sense in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
a few more asshats like you and there will be no more AC posting here, it's inevitable
Unlikely, unless Slashdot's new owners take a significantly different approach.
I've been here since 2002, and there's pretty much always been racist trolling from ACs; if anything, it seemed to be slightly higher in the past.
Arguably the most stomach-churning food I've ever seen came from the Americans:- Pork brains in milk gravy (More here).
:-6
It's the pink-coloured "milk gravy" that makes this truly nauseating.
I mean, really? And you have the nerve to get squeamish about haggis, FFS?!
Never mind the fact that hot dogs are probably as bad (in terms of what they contain) as haggis, if not far worse. Of course, *they* have the advantage of being ludicrously processed to the extent that there's no sign of their origins for ignorance-is-bliss Americans who like to argue about whether ketchup or mustard is the preferred topping for their sausageful of ground-to-atomic-size pigs' lips and assholes...
Pork brains in milk gravy, though? So far ahead of either in the retch-inducing stakes it's not even funny.
This Yahoo!(TM) has been useless irrelevant since 1996--seriously people just put a stake through it's heart.
1996 is a bit of an exaggeration; it only became Yahoo in 1995 and the late 1990s dot-com era was its heyday.
Still, only a bit. For me, they've long felt like a legacy business still stuck in that era, dinosaurs that never really moved on or recovered their status after the dot-com crash and the rapid rise of Google in its immediate aftermath left them in the dust. They're just so... 90s.
Of course, they didn't completely stagnate. They acquired a lot of companies, some of which were successful, but you couldn't help but get the feeling they seemed to survive on inertia, legacy users and the fact they were so big. Now Yahoo's finally run out of steam, worth less than the market value of its non-core assets... I'm actually surprised it's taken that long.
I'm aware that WML wasn't HTML (and indeed, that WAP as a whole effectively replaced everything above the basic transport layer with a stack of its own). Hence working with mobile devices as they were then wasn't just a simple matter of theme switching (and it all became moot quite quickly when the overhyped and underdelivering WAP mostly flopped).
This theme switcher is essentially a continuation of the "mobile version of our site" tactic which became common in the early smartphone era when it became apparent that some sites weren't well-suited to phone use. Yes, I know that post-iPhone smartphones support HTML natively, but a lot of mid-to-late noughties site layouts assumed a large-ish screen and didn't look good on phones.
That is, it's more 2009 than 1999.
And still the world believes those people built the pyramids.
The world believes that the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids.
You can argue to what extent the inhabitants of modern-day Egypt are the direct descendants (racially and genetically) of the Ancient Egyptians or not. However, in cultural terms it's quite clearly *not* the same society it was several thousand years ago- having been ruled by the Romans, Christianised then later Islamised. Hence it's meaningless to use either as the direct basis for arguing some point about the other.
This particular plugin was supposed to switch themes based on whether it's a mobile device or not. Putting aside the 1999 mentality of that
1999? Seriously? IIRC back then even regular, non-smart phones were only just starting to become truly mass market, every-man-and-his-dog items, and the mobile Internet- if you can call it that- consisted of a few devices supporting WAP, which was meant to be the next big thing but wasn't. Probably because paying per-minute charges to view an extremely limited few lines of content at a time and having to redesign your entire website to support it didn't appeal to many people.
I think you meant 2009 to 2012, i.e. the point at which smartphones were getting popular enough to warrant mobile-specific versions of sites, but before increasingly disparate screen dimensions and the development of responsive design rendered the concept obsolete.
I'm waiting for the electro-mechanical simulation of the computer simulation of the real world pong simulation of the computer game.
I'm waiting for the officially-licensed juice drink of the electro-mechanical simulation of the computer simulation of the real world pong simulation of the computer game.
It contains real fruit juice!(*)
(*) Ingredients: Water, sugar, artificial sweetener, artificial colours, flavouring, preservatives, acidity regulator, plutonium 238, real fruit juice (1.5%).
skinny jeans [and] plaid shirt
Not sure; I don't follow hipsters, but the plaid shirt revival has been pretty mainstream for at least four years now, and while I'm not sure about jeans specifically, the "skinny trousers" thing- generally chinos- seems to already have been and gone at least a couple of years back.
(Ditto "I'm W.G. Grace, motherf****r" beards, which every man and his dog have been sporting for years now, and thick-rimmed glasses which have become a common if not ubiquitous look among mainstream-thinking-they're-hipster female students for quite some time).
In fact, now that I think of it, the modern incarnation of the hipster- before the look went mainstream, but was still quite well-known- must have been around for the better part of a decade now.
I'd have assumed that actual hipsters- who stereotypically hate things as soon as they go mainstream- would have dumped them before that, even if it's the stereotypical "hipster" look.
It's only the businesses that are failing to plan ahead or which are experiencing business problems that have the entire staff there at night consistently. It's more of a sign of flaw in leadership and business operations.
Either that or it's an intentional and cynical attempt to con gullible staff into working longer than expected under the guise of a "crunch", most significantly in the gaming industry.
'Course, it's probably not coincidental that the gaming industry is the one with the highest proportion of relatively young, newly-graduated, gullible (smart but with little life or industry experience) and easily manipulated programmers.
By the time they figure out that the "crunch" is a pathological and embedded aspect of that industry, there's a fresh supply of naive graduates willing to take their place for mediocre wages just to follow their dream of working in the games industry.
Okay. Then my point partly aligns (and partly doesn't) with yours- that the "phobia" in "homophobia" *isn't* being used in the medical sense, but as a term meaning more general fear or revulsion. For that reason, it's inaccurate to suggest that "homophobes" have ever- for the most part- been considered mentally ill.
Thus while changing attitudes towards homosexuals- who once *were* considered mentally ill- says something about changing attitudes towards mental illness itself, modern use the term "homophobe" says very little. One might argue (as you apparently do) that it's misuse of a medical term, but it's precisely because that term *is* being misused that it says nothing about mental illness.
(Disclaimer; the comment you're replying to was mine- I meant to post it while I was logged in).
How is homophobia not a real thing?
I didn't claim that "homophobia wasn't a real thing".
Are you claiming that you're considered "mentally ill" and in need of treatment in the same way that homosexuals once were as a result of your feelings? If not, then that's the point that was being made.
(Disclaimer; the comment you're replying to was mine- I meant to post it while I was logged in).
Microsoft's conduct in the Windows 10 forced-upgrade affair, privacy issues and in many other areas has been utterly contemptible.
This doesn't change the fact that even beginning to compare this behaviour to the atrocities committed by Daesh is- quite rightly- going to be seen as the cheapest of arguments coming from an utterly insulated, out of touch and borderline sociopathic basement dweller intent on exploiting human tragedy for some navel-gazing argument.
MS win here, because by making yourself sound like (or rather, exposing yourself as) that person, any argument you make is going to be ignored.
The Donald's primary identity is "con man" or "salesman".
"Demagogue".
My personal feeling that the whole concept of "free will" is purely a matter of philosophical perspective- entirely dependent on how you approach and define certain terms- and as such there can be no meaningful definitive answer as to whether it exists or not.
For example, in asking do "you" (or I) have free will, what are "you" anyway? Do "you" only count as the conscious mind? If so, how can the conscious mind be "free" beyond what the running of the universe dictates, since your conscious mind *is* just another part of that universe. Ultimately, I don't think that whether the universe runs like Newtonian clockwork or with quantum uncertainty is the issue either; in the latter case, "you" don't have control over the uncertainty, and- again- even if you did does that mean that you're somehow external to that process? Of course not.
But that vague discussion of these issues isn't the point I wished to make; rather it's simply that they (and other) issues exist and it's how you approach them- and the assumptions you make when doing so- that define whether "free will" exists or not. In other words, a philosophical construct and as such neither right nor wrong.
this is why they say "not feed the trolls" (here, on Slashdot, this means: "don't reply ACs" :P)
Most trolls are ACs, but most ACs aren't trolls; I've been around here long enough to know that. (#) It's not even clear that the AC replying was the same one who made the original comment anyway. Who cares?
:-)
Believe me when I say that I've seen enough people posting cod-macho drivel like the original comment where it's clear that at least some of them believe it.
(#) Talking of which, the second AC must be a relative newcomer. I couldn't see it even occurring to an established user to call something in the half-millions a "low ID", regardless of whether that's being used as part of an over-obvious trolling.
Someone just needs to post the Judge's home address and let those users show up at his door.
Internet Tough Guy likes the idea of mob justice when he's comfortably behind his computer and only has to imagine the scenarios where this plays out in his favour.
... there are international laws against all kinds of crap, so why the fuck is there none agains stupid judges who feel their world-view is relevant outside their own country...
The judge is based in Brazil. The block is restricted to WhatsApp's activities within Brazil; nowhere else.
What point are you trying to make?
(Disclaimer; picking fault with apparently half-baked or ill-thought out arguments doesn't mean I agree with the judge's decision. I shouldn't have to explain that in advance, but I know there'll always be at least one halfwit who doesn't understand this.)
You appear to have misunderstood the hipster phenomenon. "Hipsters" in the modern sense aren't really the type of people at the cutting edge of technology, or at least they don't pretend to be that way.
Hipsters are the type of people who made Lomography rich by buying overpriced, overmarketed crappy film cameras bought purely for their imperfect, anti-digital aesthetic. Hipsters are probably the people that started the current vinyl revival, and likely don't care that much about vinyl per se, so much as a twee different-for-the-sake-of-being-different-in-the-same-way-as-everyone-else form of rebellion.
Of course, they're probably just as "digital" as everyone else, if not more; Instagram is essentially that anti-digital aesthetic automated and faked via entirely digital means for the online social media age. However, the pretence is otherwise.
They're the sort of people who probably *would* use paper maps just for the sake of being different. (This says nothing either way about whether paper maps are actually better).
It is funny how while Jobs was alive, he was apparently nothing more than a marketing charlatan, but once he was gone, Apple was doomed without his innovative genius.
That's odd, because I recall the mass media generally treating Jobs as a borderline-messiah/genius figure synonymous with Apple when he *was* alive. I also recall a significant number of people making claims that Apple's success was primarily down to marketing even then.
What I don't see is any significant change en masse of those attitudes since he died.
The only thing I noticed- if anything- is that since his death, the fact that Jobs was a borderline sociopathic asshole at a personal level seems to have been more widely-acknowledged by the same mass media, without this fundamentally altering opinion of his work at Apple.
Regardless, there's no contradiction between the fact that much of Apple's success *might* have been down to Jobs being a marketing charlatan, and that he was a genius at such marketing that Apple is suffering from the loss of. Personally, despite my significant dislike of many aspects of Apple, I'd have to say that crediting it all to marketing ignores the fact that while they didn't invent the MP3 player nor the smartphone, they *did* significantly improve and innovate aspects of their design and consumer-friendliness. Marketing was- of course- a major part of their success as well, but not the entirety. And while Jobs was neither the designer nor engineer of those products, he did seem to have a clear vision of where they should be going and how products did- or didn't- work.
It sounds like something Linden Lab would do to let people know that Second Life still exists, apparently.
Until I noticed that it was his "unofficial" headquarters (#), I was surprised that politicians like Sanders were even bothering with something whose cyber-savvy-bandwagon-jumping potential peaked a decade ago and which most people have almost forgotten existed.
Thing is, even then I saw no real evidence that its latest-hot-thing media prominence was matched by the number of people actually using it, no sign that it was remotely mass-market popular in the way that Twitter and Facebook became (or even that MySpace once was). It was something that the media latched on to as the next big thing (with various bandwagon-jumping celebs, etc who wanted to be seen at the cutting edge of the glorious cyber-future in turn associating themselves with it.)
I think this is partly because it fulfilled a vision of what "cyberspace" was expected to become- a combination of the online future and the fulfilment of 90s virtual reality promises (sort of). It was also the sort of thing that lent itself to journalistic pontificating about identity, amusing incidents, et al.
And I think that the media- which wasn't as tech-savvy or clever as it liked to think, particularly back then- was so wrapped up in this and paranoid about missing the boat on the next big thing that they were just a bit too keen to jump on the Second Life bandwagon. At least until it became clear that most people didn't care about it and never would. Not to say that it was unsuccessful, just that it was never going to appeal in the "every man and his dog" way that Facebook did.
Anyway, is the latest incident a publicity stunt? Who knows. At any rate, it smacks more of trolling- a has-been echoing of the infamous "flying penis" stunt of its heyday- than actual Trump supporters. Personally, Second Life is something that would have sounded incredibly cool and desirable to me when I was in my early to mid teens (and even Habitat would have impressed me), but by the time it actually came along it seemed less desirable (as does VR to me now), to the point I've never actually used it.
If people enjoy playing around with their avatars, that's fine for them, but the idea of walking through a boring- and by now, dated-looking- landscape interacting with lifeless uncanny valley mannequin fantasies (that look nothing like the actual people behind them) appeals to me even less than it did ten years ago.
(#) i.e. Nothing to do with him per se, just a bunch of people who were probably using Second Life anyway that happen to be Sanders supporters, I'm assuming.
It's a very old philosophical argument and was made into a major motion trilogy 15 years ago.
There's a fundamental difference between The Matrix and what the "universe itself is a simulation" theories describe.
The premise behind The Matrix was essentially that people who *did* exist in the "real" world were (unknowingly) having their senses replaced with artificial stimuli mimicking a nonexistent world. At a basic philosophical level, this is still effectively virtual reality, differing only in terms of how convincing it is and whether or not the people are aware of what's happening to them.
By contrast- and assuming I've understood them correctly- most versions of the "universe is a simulation" theory (of which DeGrasse Tyson's certainly isn't the first) *don't* assume that we are external to the simulated universe- we are a part of it.
There is no "real" us in the world in which the "universe simulation" is being run- no bodies in a Matrix-like human farm, no "real" brain in a vat being fed artificial stimuli. "We" are just another aspect of the simulation; there is no "real world" us full stop.
FWIW, I haven't read the entire "Simulated reality" article you linked, but from skimming, the "types of simulation" section seems to differentiate the two cases.
You're assuming that they're calling him as an existing customer of Oracle's rather than someone they're wanting to rope in to using Oracle's software in the first place.
Of course, Oracle's business model *is* to get customers using their software, then once they're locked in to and reliant upon that infrastructure, squeeze them for every penny they have with the threat to withdraw their license or ramp up the price horrendously. So if he's in the latter group then, yeah, bad idea.
'Course, a really bad idea would be to leave yourself open to that sort of legalised extortion in the first place, especially if you know (as anyone ought to these days) what Oracle's modus operandi is. So if he's in the former group- and sure Oracle don't have any leverage they can use against him- telling them to fuck off is absolutely the most sensible decision.
But I'm not taking it as "axiomatic". As I was saying, highly unusual markets can produce monopolies. Furthermore, free market transactions are well defined: they are transactions that are voluntary and according to conditions entirely set by all participants.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. The point under dispute was whether an entirely laissez-faire free market (that initially met your definition) could end up in a position where it didn't (e.g. a monopoly). You took it as given that "when free markets break down, it is through politics, not market mechanisms", meaning that by definition any such failure could only be ascribed to external interference in that otherwise free market- that is to say, the free market is perfect because the free market is perfect...!
Yes, monopolies can occur under other "highly unusual" conditions, but the question was whether or not they can also arise in an entirely unregulated free market.
Well, look, that's just a testament to your inexperience. Many places have just one set of wires and pipes in the ground, yet give people the option to buy from dozens of suppliers
I'm aware of that. My point was that they still use the same shared infrastructure which either requires external regulation to allow access, or (in an unregulated market) is a weak point with high risk of failure- i.e. falling into the hands of a small number of parties exerting monopolistic or near-monopolistic control and using it as a barrier to entry for competitors.
No, it doesn't actually prove anything, and wasn't meant to. It's a fictional movie featuring a three-breasted woman. Lighten up.
That said, I like the fact you accused me of "unrealistic Total Recall scenarios" when you were the one that came up with the "air in a moon colony" example in the first place!
I pointed out that the failures you postulate are not market failures but political failures
Yes, I'm aware that you keep claiming this. If one takes it as axiomatic (or as I see it, dogmatic) that the free market cannot fail on its own- which appears to be the basis of your argument- then *by definition* all such failures must be the fault of political interference.
But since that's essentially the point being argued, this is little more than circular reasoning.
Furthermore, when free markets break down, it is through politics, not market mechanisms.
Again. See above.
And most of those local monopolies are artificial anyway. That is, in most places, you could actually have a choice of suppliers, or even supply yourself, if government hadn't granted an artificial local monopoly to some utility, usually due to political lobbying.
Can't see numerous companies digging up- or being allowed to dig up (either by government or by private landowners) numerous independently-owned water supply routes and sets of pipes just so I can pick and choose one of them.
That is my point: your idea about monopolies is as unrealistic as Total Recall; in real societies, monopolies don't operate that way.
As I said, you were the one who came up with the "unrealistic" example, I just made a tongue-in-cheek comment about a fictional instance of it.
And if your idea of a free market is that it's free because (e.g.) you can move halfway across the country to change supplier, then we've certainly moved out of the bounds of real world usefulness and into intellectual masturbation.
There are many fungible sources of water, electricity, gas, and staple foods.
The infrastructure required to support delivery of many of those things isn't, though. *That* is where the problem lies and where the barriers to entry into a market exist, and where barriers to entry exist they can be leveraged to shut out newcomers.
And even that's assuming that a free market would support (e.g.) many different water suppliers all able to bring their own, independent delivery infrastructure to my house to provide true competition. Of course that's not going to happen, I'm not going to have 100 different suppliers' pipes coming to my house to choose from!
I'm saying that if you were in a situation in which a single party actually is in a position to control an essential good (e.g., air on a lunar colony), you will end up with a bona fide dictatorship of the "lick my boots peasant or suffocate" kind.
It's only the (apparently) dogmatic assumption that a "true" free market can't end up in the same monopolistic position that would differentiate this from an abusive, non-democratic government.
:-)
Speaking of the air supply, don't you remember that it was a private company that cut it off in Total Recall?
if that situation ever arose, people would simply break their contracts and the monopolist would lose their property.
I thought you said there were "well-defined penalties" for breaking contracts? How do you know the monopolist will lose their property- doesn't that depend on the terms of the contract and what the company can do to recover it? Who's going to back up the terms of those contracts anyway? The government? If not, what's to stop the company from just doing what they want? Doesn't sound like a free market to me.
With respect, the model of "free market" you're describe is starting to sound like an idealist intellectual abstraction, not something that would- or could- make sense in the real world.