Every bit of light that lands on your eyes ends up in your brain. There is no noise filter. You can see something for a split second, without focusing on it, and you will still integrate it into your conception of the world. You can be triggered to action by such things, and you can train yourself to be triggered to action by such things in preconceived ways.
Hell, I can personally glance out a window for a split second, have a short conversation with someone, then pull the image up in my brain like a picture and count objects in it. Now, I trained myself to do that, and I was further trained by professionals during my stint in the military, but it's not that I trained myself to see things that you don't see, it's that I trained my conscious mind to access things that are non-trivial to access but there in every human being.
Your suggestion, that because a person didn't focus their eyes on something on a screen means they didn't see it, it's false. They saw it, and it affected them, and while they might find it beyond their capacities to consciously call it up and rotate it in their minds eye like some people are able to do, that doesn't mean there isn't an ever escalating likelihood that it will spring up and influence a decision based in increased exposure. It will, and it does.
The fact of the matter is, they're not tuning them out because they didn't see them. They're tuning them out because they're intimately familiar to them, and if that intimate familiarity weren't there, they would be more jarring than they are.
Go read any web usability article that mentions the term "banner blindness", and look at the eye-tracking studies. Most web surfers aren't even looking at anything that looks like a banner ad any more. The ineffectiveness of banner ads is also supported by the return on investment (or lack thereof), which is why pay-per-view advertising rapidly turned to pay-per-clickthrough advertising, which in turn has given way to things like Google ads that don't look like banners, display somewhat relevant content, and get far better clickthrough rates than random banners used to.
Just because the ad doesn't make you want to click on it doesn't mean it isn't affecting you. That's not how advertising and propaganda work.
One of the ways they works by creating feelings of familiarity and safety absent any rational reason to feel that way, preconditioning your choices.
It also acts by presenting you with conclusions for questions, so when you're faced with the question and you're in a rush, your brain will rapidly spit out the conclusion without ever thinking critically about the question. The more harried and time poor you are, the more effective that is.
They're not brute force tools. The fact that they've been sold that way to suckers for a number of years and proven ineffective in that capacity doesn't reduce their subtle effectiveness. It actually increases their effectiveness, because it gives you a bunch of misleading data, then leads you to conclude that since they don't work in the "brute force" capacity, they don't work in ANY capacity, making you less cautious and critical than you might otherwise have been.
If you can make people feel good about something they know nothing about and frame your opponents position in a persons mind without the person having any familiarity with your opponent, you can totally own their view of the world, and lead them to conclusions that are based on good logic but bad data.
That is what makes advertising so dangerous to society. It systematically creates insanity among the population.
Used to be, if you wanted your browser consistent with the OS, you could just pick a theme that was designed for that purpose. Now, you have no choice.
Uh, yeah, I refuse to believe that "subliminally affecting you" stuff. I see ads ALL THE DAMN TIME, when I'm driving, or watching TV, or listening to the radio, and let me tell you, I am no more likely to buy their product than before. In fact, plenty of ads are annoying enough that I'm less likely to buy their product. The whole "subliminal" thing strikes me as a giant load of hogwash.
When faced with 10 different choices, and having no data by which to differentiate them, humans choose the familiar. If you've never had a Coke in your life, but you've seen the logo everywhere you go for a decade, when faced with 10 unknown colas and no opportunity to do research, you're most likely to pick the Coke because it feels like a known element even though it isn't.
Yes, but what I'm saying is, people who use Firefox are going to continue using it because of inertia, not because Firefox is a hotbed of innovation. It obviously doesn't suck (or else they'd switch to something else), but neither is it amazing... it's just what they happen to be using.
Firefox won't gain any market share through inertia, but it keeps its market share that way.
I don't know if that's true... personally, I'm already looking for something to replace FF.
When they stopped thinking "Lets make a lean mean browser that people can customize as they wish." and started thinking "Lets make a browser that is pre-customized the way we think the average person would wish.", they started going downhill.
Between the Awfulbar and the gutting of the theme system in the name of OS integration, FF has really gone to shit.
Honestly.. whose brilliant idea was it to screw up the theme system? Used to be, I could use FF and TB on any of my Linux boxes or any of my Windows boxes, and the browser was consistent. That was a valuable feature. Now it's gone, and for what? Everything that was gained could have been realized with a few standard themes.
I just ignore ads, and do so with ease. I never understood the need for an addon to do it, but maybe I'm just really good at ignoring ads or something. Some can be really nasty, but the majority I run into are easily filtered out mentally.
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
When they convinced you that that was true, that was when you became owned.
The military doesn't employ advertising-I-mean-propaganda because it's ineffective. The fact that you believe it's not affecting you is a testament to how effective it is.
They did small scale testing in Northern Europe several years ago, and it was a smashing success. They're planning large scale roll outs near Sydney, Australia. It was front page news on this very site a few years back. Don't ask me for a source, because I have been looking without success for quite some time, but I do know that the technology is sound.
Of course, at the end of the day, all these plans are going to fail to scale out as much as we need. Holland is already seeing it occur with windmills... where they clutter up the landscape, all the good spots are used up, and we're still hungry for more. Any renewable energy system that is terrestrially based is going to be subject to this effect.
Eventually, we're going to have to quit playing around with science experiments and weapons of war, and get serious about building engineering projects that bring power to earth from off world.
Yes, but windmills require wind to be useful, and prevent alternative uses of the land. You could set something like this up anywhere there was sunlight, and still use the land for anything you like, possibly even improving its utility for other purposes.
Or, you can build a giant greenhouse, in the shape of a dome. Leave it open around the bottom rim, and put a hollow tower in the middle, with intakes at the bottom, and with the top uncapped and protruding through the top of the greenhouse.
The solar energy will create a temperature difference between the external air and the internal air, causing air to be drawn in through the bottom edges of the dome and vented through the tube out the top.
All you need to do is stick wind turbines in the tower.
You'd be preventing direct rainfall, but you could harvest and channel the run-off anywhere you wanted. That means, depending on the location, it might be practical to have irrigated farmland underneath your solar generation plant. You could even stick homes in there.
I've thought for a long time that we should be using detonation rather than combustion for power generation. Detonation produces way more power, and it's not hard to find volatile chemicals lying around to use as fuel. Hell, you can make high explosives out of piss. Imagine generating your domestic power and fuel for transportation out of your septic tank... now that's renewable energy.:)
Almost always searching: "Linux " will give me at least 1 or 2 applications that do that. I could in fact replace Linux with KDE, Gnome or XFCE depending on which DE I'm using.
You do understand, of course, that KDE, Gnome, and XFCE are windows managers and not operating systems right?
He was trying to say, he can search for "Gnome " in a search engine just as easily. The difference being, if he finds something interesting, he can use a package manager to install it and get to work.
If he was using, say, Windows, he'd most likely download an install file, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, click 15 different buttons, have his personal information sent to some corporate server, get nagged to buy the upgraded version, download a crack, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, have a rootkit installed, have 10 different pieces of spyware installed, have his personal information sent to some criminals server, be bombarded with pornographic popups, throw his computer out the window, go outside for a cigarette with hands shaking in rage and smash his head off the nearest wall until the endorphins cause him to forget why he was so upset.
I can see this approach being very useful for solving problems that cannot be scientifically tested.
There are some types of problems that take longer than the span of a human lifetime to test.
For these, we use religion and historical social norms.
We can point at them and say, "That system survived 10 generations of man and has not yet destroyed itself.", "That system destroyed itself inside 3 generations without any external pressures that we can see.", "That system survived 50 generations, until it met this system, which destroyed it.", etc.
Which is better than nothing.
I can see this approach being very useful. To my great, great grandchildren. If the system that hosts the approach hasn't already fallen by then.
But it's not going to fill the role of scientific theories and the scientific method. They're the best tool going when they can be brought to bear on the problem.
You head on down to the Capitol building. I'll meet you there.
My ancestors did just that back in 1812, and it worked out pretty well. But you would probably be better off doing it yourself, otherwise your country will end up like Iraq.
This is why your constitution protected your right to bear arms. The rest of the world has spent decades listening to Americans wax lyrical about how and why those rights are needed. If you don't use them now, then everyone who said you were just a bunch of nut jobs spouting empty rhetoric will be proven right.
For someone who makes snide comments about citing sources, your posts sure are empty of anything beyond ad hominem attacks. Got anything useful to contribute, or are you just wasting peoples time?
No, it doesn't. Once you retire, you don't contribute anymore, you become a dependent, and you stay that way till you die. It is these retirement years that are significantly shortened, and they're not paying in at that point, but cashing out.
Nonsense. They may die sooner, but it takes a long, long time to do so. Especially when we're talking about being overweight. Also, in the mean time, those same fat people are using health care much more often than people of normal weight, because they have much more health problems related to being fat.
That's one of those things they use to justify sin taxes. It's not true.
People with unhealthy lifestyles die more rapidly than people with unhealthy lifestyles. Which means they cost much, much less.
The people who lingers in the system for many years are the ones who drive up costs.
You agree that propaganda is a serious issue, and the best you can come up with for a response to this serious issue is for people to deal with it on a personal and individual level, even though the evidence shows that they will be overwhelmed, which is why people engage in the practice in the first place?
I don't agree. I think propaganda and advertising and swearing and lying and empty emotive rhetoric are the means by which a democratic society is subverted, and if they are not dealt with systematically, they will inevitably be a vehicle to bring the entire system crashing down.
I also think if I could create an infrastructure that allowed those who agree with me to co-operate and be advantaged by their common ideals, they would be rendered so effective as to make your existing system seem like the primitive machinations of feudal lords and unwilling serfs.
My approach to solving this problem would be to create an engineered language which is devoid of emotive terminology and multiple interpretations. Think 1984.
After this language existed, I would make it mandatory for all citizens to be educated in it, in the same way we currently mandate that citizens must learn math.
Then, I would isolate certain sectors of mass communication that must communicate using only this language. Such things as laws, advertising, political speech. For example, it should be impossible for a marketing person to use this language to make you buy a lemon because they convinced you it was "Sexy", or for a politician to make you vote for a bill you don't understand because it makes you "Patriotic".
I wouldn't make any efforts to squash other languages out of existence, but rather have them exist in parallel to the engineered language, leaving ample means for people to communicate with each other in an artistic and evocative fashion through appropriate channels.
After this was concluded, it would still be possible for individuals to break the rules given sufficient justification, but people would not have to wander the world constantly bombarded with propaganda in a systematic fashion the way they do now as though it was no big deal.
I could expand on this for hours on end, dealing with edge cases till the cows come home, but that's the general idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Every bit of light that lands on your eyes ends up in your brain. There is no noise filter. You can see something for a split second, without focusing on it, and you will still integrate it into your conception of the world. You can be triggered to action by such things, and you can train yourself to be triggered to action by such things in preconceived ways.
Hell, I can personally glance out a window for a split second, have a short conversation with someone, then pull the image up in my brain like a picture and count objects in it. Now, I trained myself to do that, and I was further trained by professionals during my stint in the military, but it's not that I trained myself to see things that you don't see, it's that I trained my conscious mind to access things that are non-trivial to access but there in every human being.
Your suggestion, that because a person didn't focus their eyes on something on a screen means they didn't see it, it's false. They saw it, and it affected them, and while they might find it beyond their capacities to consciously call it up and rotate it in their minds eye like some people are able to do, that doesn't mean there isn't an ever escalating likelihood that it will spring up and influence a decision based in increased exposure. It will, and it does.
The fact of the matter is, they're not tuning them out because they didn't see them. They're tuning them out because they're intimately familiar to them, and if that intimate familiarity weren't there, they would be more jarring than they are.
If it hasn't been sprayed through a pile of burning rotten vegetation from Scotland, it's shite.
They prevent building anything that would disrupt airflow across the terrain.
Go read any web usability article that mentions the term "banner blindness", and look at the eye-tracking studies. Most web surfers aren't even looking at anything that looks like a banner ad any more. The ineffectiveness of banner ads is also supported by the return on investment (or lack thereof), which is why pay-per-view advertising rapidly turned to pay-per-clickthrough advertising, which in turn has given way to things like Google ads that don't look like banners, display somewhat relevant content, and get far better clickthrough rates than random banners used to.
Just because the ad doesn't make you want to click on it doesn't mean it isn't affecting you. That's not how advertising and propaganda work.
One of the ways they works by creating feelings of familiarity and safety absent any rational reason to feel that way, preconditioning your choices.
It also acts by presenting you with conclusions for questions, so when you're faced with the question and you're in a rush, your brain will rapidly spit out the conclusion without ever thinking critically about the question. The more harried and time poor you are, the more effective that is.
They're not brute force tools. The fact that they've been sold that way to suckers for a number of years and proven ineffective in that capacity doesn't reduce their subtle effectiveness. It actually increases their effectiveness, because it gives you a bunch of misleading data, then leads you to conclude that since they don't work in the "brute force" capacity, they don't work in ANY capacity, making you less cautious and critical than you might otherwise have been.
If you can make people feel good about something they know nothing about and frame your opponents position in a persons mind without the person having any familiarity with your opponent, you can totally own their view of the world, and lead them to conclusions that are based on good logic but bad data.
That is what makes advertising so dangerous to society. It systematically creates insanity among the population.
The theme system was gutted. You can't make your browser look the same across multiple platforms even if you want to.
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2008/05/14/firefox-3-themes/
Used to be, if you wanted your browser consistent with the OS, you could just pick a theme that was designed for that purpose. Now, you have no choice.
Uh, yeah, I refuse to believe that "subliminally affecting you" stuff. I see ads ALL THE DAMN TIME, when I'm driving, or watching TV, or listening to the radio, and let me tell you, I am no more likely to buy their product than before. In fact, plenty of ads are annoying enough that I'm less likely to buy their product. The whole "subliminal" thing strikes me as a giant load of hogwash.
When faced with 10 different choices, and having no data by which to differentiate them, humans choose the familiar. If you've never had a Coke in your life, but you've seen the logo everywhere you go for a decade, when faced with 10 unknown colas and no opportunity to do research, you're most likely to pick the Coke because it feels like a known element even though it isn't.
No one is immune to that. Including you.
Yes, but what I'm saying is, people who use Firefox are going to continue using it because of inertia, not because Firefox is a hotbed of innovation. It obviously doesn't suck (or else they'd switch to something else), but neither is it amazing... it's just what they happen to be using.
Firefox won't gain any market share through inertia, but it keeps its market share that way.
I don't know if that's true... personally, I'm already looking for something to replace FF.
When they stopped thinking "Lets make a lean mean browser that people can customize as they wish." and started thinking "Lets make a browser that is pre-customized the way we think the average person would wish.", they started going downhill.
Between the Awfulbar and the gutting of the theme system in the name of OS integration, FF has really gone to shit.
Honestly.. whose brilliant idea was it to screw up the theme system? Used to be, I could use FF and TB on any of my Linux boxes or any of my Windows boxes, and the browser was consistent. That was a valuable feature. Now it's gone, and for what? Everything that was gained could have been realized with a few standard themes.
I just ignore ads, and do so with ease. I never understood the need for an addon to do it, but maybe I'm just really good at ignoring ads or something. Some can be really nasty, but the majority I run into are easily filtered out mentally.
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
When they convinced you that that was true, that was when you became owned.
The military doesn't employ advertising-I-mean-propaganda because it's ineffective. The fact that you believe it's not affecting you is a testament to how effective it is.
They did small scale testing in Northern Europe several years ago, and it was a smashing success. They're planning large scale roll outs near Sydney, Australia. It was front page news on this very site a few years back. Don't ask me for a source, because I have been looking without success for quite some time, but I do know that the technology is sound.
Of course, at the end of the day, all these plans are going to fail to scale out as much as we need. Holland is already seeing it occur with windmills... where they clutter up the landscape, all the good spots are used up, and we're still hungry for more. Any renewable energy system that is terrestrially based is going to be subject to this effect.
Eventually, we're going to have to quit playing around with science experiments and weapons of war, and get serious about building engineering projects that bring power to earth from off world.
Yes, but windmills require wind to be useful, and prevent alternative uses of the land. You could set something like this up anywhere there was sunlight, and still use the land for anything you like, possibly even improving its utility for other purposes.
Or, you can build a giant greenhouse, in the shape of a dome. Leave it open around the bottom rim, and put a hollow tower in the middle, with intakes at the bottom, and with the top uncapped and protruding through the top of the greenhouse.
The solar energy will create a temperature difference between the external air and the internal air, causing air to be drawn in through the bottom edges of the dome and vented through the tube out the top.
All you need to do is stick wind turbines in the tower.
You'd be preventing direct rainfall, but you could harvest and channel the run-off anywhere you wanted. That means, depending on the location, it might be practical to have irrigated farmland underneath your solar generation plant. You could even stick homes in there.
Beating the dead horse that is Fox News aside...
:)
I've thought for a long time that we should be using detonation rather than combustion for power generation. Detonation produces way more power, and it's not hard to find volatile chemicals lying around to use as fuel. Hell, you can make high explosives out of piss. Imagine generating your domestic power and fuel for transportation out of your septic tank... now that's renewable energy.
The Quasiturbine seems like a promising approach.
Anyone know of any other engine designs that harness detonation to generate torque instead of simple thrust?
Talk about printing your own money.
This is like paying the city to give your driveway a name, so you can brag about what a blue blood you are for having your own street.
I guess OpenOffice.org doesn't matter either then...
Almost always searching: "Linux " will give me at least 1 or 2 applications that do that. I could in fact replace Linux with KDE, Gnome or XFCE depending on which DE I'm using.
You do understand, of course, that KDE, Gnome, and XFCE are windows managers and not operating systems right?
He was trying to say, he can search for "Gnome " in a search engine just as easily. The difference being, if he finds something interesting, he can use a package manager to install it and get to work.
If he was using, say, Windows, he'd most likely download an install file, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, click 15 different buttons, have his personal information sent to some corporate server, get nagged to buy the upgraded version, download a crack, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, have a rootkit installed, have 10 different pieces of spyware installed, have his personal information sent to some criminals server, be bombarded with pornographic popups, throw his computer out the window, go outside for a cigarette with hands shaking in rage and smash his head off the nearest wall until the endorphins cause him to forget why he was so upset.
I can see this approach being very useful for solving problems that cannot be scientifically tested.
There are some types of problems that take longer than the span of a human lifetime to test.
For these, we use religion and historical social norms.
We can point at them and say, "That system survived 10 generations of man and has not yet destroyed itself.", "That system destroyed itself inside 3 generations without any external pressures that we can see.", "That system survived 50 generations, until it met this system, which destroyed it.", etc.
Which is better than nothing.
I can see this approach being very useful. To my great, great grandchildren. If the system that hosts the approach hasn't already fallen by then.
But it's not going to fill the role of scientific theories and the scientific method. They're the best tool going when they can be brought to bear on the problem.
You head on down to the Capitol building. I'll meet you there.
My ancestors did just that back in 1812, and it worked out pretty well. But you would probably be better off doing it yourself, otherwise your country will end up like Iraq.
This is why your constitution protected your right to bear arms. The rest of the world has spent decades listening to Americans wax lyrical about how and why those rights are needed. If you don't use them now, then everyone who said you were just a bunch of nut jobs spouting empty rhetoric will be proven right.
For someone who makes snide comments about citing sources, your posts sure are empty of anything beyond ad hominem attacks. Got anything useful to contribute, or are you just wasting peoples time?
No, it doesn't. Once you retire, you don't contribute anymore, you become a dependent, and you stay that way till you die. It is these retirement years that are significantly shortened, and they're not paying in at that point, but cashing out.
Please provide a source for your assertion. You won't, but I had to ask so we could see you were fabricating your assertion from thin air.
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029&ct=1
There, now don't you feel stupid?
Nonsense. They may die sooner, but it takes a long, long time to do so. Especially when we're talking about being overweight. Also, in the mean time, those same fat people are using health care much more often than people of normal weight, because they have much more health problems related to being fat.
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029&ct=1
http://www.diet-blog.com/archives/2008/02/07/obese_people_have_lower_health_costs.php
http://ethxblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/help-your-country-smoke-drink-and-die.html
http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200701220003
The facts do not support your statement. The fact is, obese people who smoke cost society less.
That's one of those things they use to justify sin taxes. It's not true. People with unhealthy lifestyles die more rapidly than people with unhealthy lifestyles. Which means they cost much, much less. The people who lingers in the system for many years are the ones who drive up costs.
You agree that propaganda is a serious issue, and the best you can come up with for a response to this serious issue is for people to deal with it on a personal and individual level, even though the evidence shows that they will be overwhelmed, which is why people engage in the practice in the first place?
I don't agree. I think propaganda and advertising and swearing and lying and empty emotive rhetoric are the means by which a democratic society is subverted, and if they are not dealt with systematically, they will inevitably be a vehicle to bring the entire system crashing down.
I also think if I could create an infrastructure that allowed those who agree with me to co-operate and be advantaged by their common ideals, they would be rendered so effective as to make your existing system seem like the primitive machinations of feudal lords and unwilling serfs.
I intend to find out.
My approach to solving this problem would be to create an engineered language which is devoid of emotive terminology and multiple interpretations. Think 1984.
After this language existed, I would make it mandatory for all citizens to be educated in it, in the same way we currently mandate that citizens must learn math.
Then, I would isolate certain sectors of mass communication that must communicate using only this language. Such things as laws, advertising, political speech. For example, it should be impossible for a marketing person to use this language to make you buy a lemon because they convinced you it was "Sexy", or for a politician to make you vote for a bill you don't understand because it makes you "Patriotic".
I wouldn't make any efforts to squash other languages out of existence, but rather have them exist in parallel to the engineered language, leaving ample means for people to communicate with each other in an artistic and evocative fashion through appropriate channels.
After this was concluded, it would still be possible for individuals to break the rules given sufficient justification, but people would not have to wander the world constantly bombarded with propaganda in a systematic fashion the way they do now as though it was no big deal.
I could expand on this for hours on end, dealing with edge cases till the cows come home, but that's the general idea.