I wonder if movie companies use any science to validate the efficacy of their "solutions", because it seems to me that producing a product worse than the pirates do is...stupid.
Well, let's face it... these aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
I think this is more akin to the way television networks play games with commercials in an attempt to reduce channel switching. Rather than have people type in a generic query to a search engine and choose among the many results (which will often include competitors) they'd like to make search less useful, thereby driving customers directly to individual news sites. I mean, from their perspective it's better if you pick "ABC News" to get your news fix, rather than go to Google first and search everybody else too.
It's a hopeless endeavor from the get-go, but this is the same mindset that thought it could stop filesharing with lawsuits. Stupid and shortsighted, and an utter denial of reality.
The best we can do is use moral suasion [google.vu] to request that people respect our wishes with regards to particular content.
Ha, yeah. I recently purchased a DVD where the opening scene showed a kid snatching a woman's purse and running off, with the voice of doom saying "You wouldn't steal purse would you?" in a ridiculous, nay, pathetic attempt at "moral suasion". I was then subjected to several more unskippable minutes of this asinine lecturing, various legal threats, plus a couple of movie previews and advertisements that I couldn't skip past either. What the hell? So by the time I reached the main feature, I was so irritated (seeing that I'd just paid sixteen bucks for the damn disc) that I pulled the disc from the player and fired up DVD-Shrink. Half an hour later I had a re-authored copy without all the crap, and that's what I watched.
What particularly pleases me is how this could be seen as providing a "good guys" team to stand against EA's often-percieved "bad guys" team, which should be an interesting public dynamic to watch:P
Given the way Blizzard's lawyers treated the bnetd developers, I have to question the "good guy" stance you're attributing to them. They are not good guys, any more than any other major corporation out to protect its "intellectual property".
Well, I think part of it is because you have the option of DSL. Most people I know that have Comcast as their only ISP tend to have issues. When I have called Comcast support, if I don't get the answer I want to hear I just mention the "D"-word and magically they get more cooperative.
The 'enemy' will surely copy your technology. America built the bomb, and its 'enemies' had their own in a matter of months.
That's far too simplistic a view and factually incorrect: the Russians did not build their first atom bomb in months. As it happens, the first successful Russian fission weapon was based upon the American Fatman device dropped on Japan, whose design the Russians acquired through espionage. Even with the advantage conferred by the stolen design, this First Lightning bomb wasn't test-fired until 1949, years after the War's end. Those were years that America had the edge, years that we had peace, years that we didn't have to worry about much of anything, and you can't discount the value of that. That's what investment in military tech does: it buys you time in an unfriendly world.
I might add that while the Russians did rip off the Manhattan project of a lot of crucial information (see Klaus Fuchs), the Russian effort was substantial and impressive in its own right. It actually began well before the end of World War II, when they noticed that American and British scientists had pretty much stopped publishing anything regarding nuclear physics. Besides, nukes aren't that easy to put together, particularly if you're building them to mil spec, and aren't just making an unreliable one-off terrorist type bomb. Furthermore, even if you've stolen an enemy's research, the infrastructure required to produce weapons-grade fuel is neither cheap nor quick to build. That, in itself, takes years.
But sure, if you're fighting an enemy that is at or near technological parity with you, you're correct that a military advantage is at best temporary. When First Lightning was detonated, it put Russia years ahead of American intelligence projections. But remember that that cuts both ways. If your enemy is also making significant investments in that area, you'd best continue your own efforts or you'll quickly find yourself at a disadvantage. That's usually a mistake, and in the nuclear age a fatal one. Also, you gain an advantage by forcing the enemy to divert resources in order to keep up.
That's the history of warfare. It's always been an expensive proposition, even during those intervals between wars that we call "peace", and nothing will change that until either progress comes to a halt, or the human race changes in some fundamental way. Neither is going to happen soon. Concluding that no further investment in maintaining technological superiority is required, simply because the enemy will copy it anyway, is naive at best.
You can't have your cake and eat it. That's a line from the bible. So throw it at religious folk if you want, but it doesn't actually advance your argument except in so far as it hurts theirs.
Sure I can! This is Slashdot, where cake is a commodity item, so lighten up. Besides, what you say might be true if I had actually had an argument. As it happens, I was just trying to make a joke. That I got modded "Insightful" is funny in itself though.
Why does every "end of the U.S. as s superpower" post get modded Insightful? This is about one individual facing censure from a board of idiots, none of whom are representative of the population at large.
The best thing is not to try to win THEIR argument.
You're better off not bothering to argue with them at all. They're incorrigible anyway, you can't change their mindset, and you're simply giving them more credibility, more visibility. The best thing to do is to discredit them with others, mitigate their impact, make people aware of the misguided agenda these Creationists have. In truth, all it really takes is education: none of their claims hold up under any semblance of criticality.
Basically what I'm saying is that it might not even be possible for God, if he existed, to completely hide his existence.
That depends upon His level of involvement in our Universe. He's certainly done a damn fine job of hiding Himself so far. If He simply wound up the Universe some billions of years ago, programmed the physical laws to be used in this go 'round, and then let it cut loose in yet another Big Bang just to see how it turned out, we'd never know. Maybe He is trying to evolve a companion worthy of Him. If Earth is the only planet where this is going on, it's pretty obvious that He has a long way to go.
So in your story, the stupid people are the ones who figure out the truth first, and the smart ones are the ones who get it last?:-)
Ha ha, not exactly. In my scenario the stupid ones are the ones that are fed a line with no supporting factual basis and accept it without question. The smart ones are those who, when finally presented with facts that discredit their own life-long skepticism, accept those facts and move on. I don't really believe that God is using faith, or a lack of it, to filter out believers as unworthy, since like you I don't believe in Him. I just use that premise to annoy people that are convinced that they're special and are assured of a place in heaven, even after some thousands of years of not using their heads. Presumably, their God gave them an intelligence greater than any other creature on Earth for a reason, and I'd be surprised if God appreciates people that can't be bothered to use it.
Yes, I've often made that same point to individuals of various faiths. It doesn't seem to make any difference. In their view, humans (especially humans that maintain the proper attitude, i.e. suspension of critical-thinking and blind adherence to a pattern for living laid down by men millennia dead) are, somehow, "special" to God. No matter how many words they throw back at me, I've not had a single one adequately explain what it is that makes us so special. More to the point, why are people who refuse to use the one thing that does make us special, our brain, extra important to God? I mean, Hell, if God wanted us to be dumb as stumps, why give us brains in the first place?
"Why, God made us in his own image! That means we're special to Him!" they cry. So you say, I tell them. Nobody has seen God for some thousands of years so I'd like to know how you know what He looks like. "Why, it's right here in the Bible!" they exclaim, as if offering absolute proof. I know, it doesn't make any sense, and I long ago gave up trying to reason with such people. Their logical faculties have been permanently impaired when it comes to God. Probably because they think of God as being much like themselves, only just really powerful, you know, kind of like the Pope or the President or something. Something they can relate to, something familiar, something not too far from their own round.
Contemplating where the existence of an actual, honest-to-God, Multiverse-spanning Supreme Being would place us simply stretches their minds too far. As comparisons between us and God go, we aren't talking cockroaches here, we aren't even talking bacteria. Subatomic particles, maybe, but even that is giving us too much credit.
At some point the human race is going to have to accept that we are not, and have never been, special to anyone or anything but ourselves. Maybe once we figure that out, we can stop killing each other for no better reason than that we believe in a different deity.
I dunno... I've known some pretty damn smart animals. And some pretty incredibly obtuse humans.
I have a hard time imagining God coming home from a hard day of, well, whatever it is that Gods do and having his pet human come running up to greet him. Me, if I were the sole Supreme Being in the Universe I'd want some decent company. All those billions of years, with nothing for companionship but stupid people? I think I'd kill myself.
Tough. Sometimes we have to read things that we find distasteful: if we can't handle that we shouldn't frequent public forums like Slashdot. I might also point out that some of us also consider science to be something that you don't take lightly, and truly find the anti-intellectual offensive promulgated by Creationists to be just as disturbing as they find Darwinism. Anyone that wants civilization to continue shouldn't take science lightly either. That should be obvious to anyone with even a partially-functioning cerebral cortex, yet there's a significant and growing sector of our society that feels perfectly free to ridicule science, and those who practice it, with even less reason and with much darker purpose.
I'm not a religious person myself, and I've been ridiculed for that on numerous occasions by those same touchy, sensitive people you speak of. You'll pardon me if I'm not terribly concerned about the feelings of people that have no sense of humor about their belief systems: I find them to be the most intolerant, generally unpleasant people to be around. If the hypersensitive religious component of our culture truly wants people like me to spare them any empathy, I have only two words for them: lighten up! It works both ways: their hurt feelings aren't somehow special or more important just because they believe in God.
What I find impressive about many people, especially scientists with strong religious beliefs, is how they can successfully compartmentalize those beliefs away from the sure knowledge that those beliefs are, to a very high level of certainty, wrong. Of course, it has been said that Man is a rationalizing animal, who requires training to become a rational one.
You can't expect to get 8Mbps 24/7 for that. You know that.
The complaint here, ultimately, is not whether or not we should reasonably expect a certain price/performance level based upon overall industry capabilities. The issue is that Comcast's business practices are opaque, the company makes promises that it doesn't keep, and treats customers in an arbitrary, abusive and confusing manner, with little recourse in case of error. Nobody would be bothered if Comcast offered service "x", for "y" dollars per month... and then delivered "x". In reality though, nobody really knows what Comcast is offering, and whatever it is, that "x" is a moving target.
And you know what? The vast majority of people that subscribe to Comcast would fully expect to get 8 Mbps 24/7 for their $80 a month, because Comcast doesn't tell them otherwise. Comcast doesn't want to come clean and set open policies about performance and bandwidth utilization because then they'll get held to them. They way they're playing it now gives them the freedom to deliver any goddamn service level they want, and if it's not what the customer expects, well, they didn't really promise anything concrete in the first place.
People are legitimately upset with Comcast because they lead potential customers to expect one thing, and then for many of those customers they deliver something quite different.
Yeah, I agree 100%. I'd rather have DSL from SBC, of all companies, than Comcast's 8 meg tier (which is what I have now.) Unfortunately, I'm too far from my existing CO to get more than 1.5 mbit/sec from DSL. Even so, I'm considering taking the performance hit and switching to DSL anyway, and dumping Comcast, because I really disagree with their policies and tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, what? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? No? I thought not.
Still, it's an anti-American post so I'm going to guess it'll end up +5 Insightful in spite of its incoherence.
I wonder if movie companies use any science to validate the efficacy of their "solutions", because it seems to me that producing a product worse than the pirates do is...stupid.
... these aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Well, let's face it
I think this is more akin to the way television networks play games with commercials in an attempt to reduce channel switching. Rather than have people type in a generic query to a search engine and choose among the many results (which will often include competitors) they'd like to make search less useful, thereby driving customers directly to individual news sites. I mean, from their perspective it's better if you pick "ABC News" to get your news fix, rather than go to Google first and search everybody else too.
It's a hopeless endeavor from the get-go, but this is the same mindset that thought it could stop filesharing with lawsuits. Stupid and shortsighted, and an utter denial of reality.
The best we can do is use moral suasion [google.vu] to request that people respect our wishes with regards to particular content.
Ha, yeah. I recently purchased a DVD where the opening scene showed a kid snatching a woman's purse and running off, with the voice of doom saying "You wouldn't steal purse would you?" in a ridiculous, nay, pathetic attempt at "moral suasion". I was then subjected to several more unskippable minutes of this asinine lecturing, various legal threats, plus a couple of movie previews and advertisements that I couldn't skip past either. What the hell? So by the time I reached the main feature, I was so irritated (seeing that I'd just paid sixteen bucks for the damn disc) that I pulled the disc from the player and fired up DVD-Shrink. Half an hour later I had a re-authored copy without all the crap, and that's what I watched.
Idiots.
Stupid by my standards, because I'm the one that wrote the original post. So there.
What particularly pleases me is how this could be seen as providing a "good guys" team to stand against EA's often-percieved "bad guys" team, which should be an interesting public dynamic to watch :P
Given the way Blizzard's lawyers treated the bnetd developers, I have to question the "good guy" stance you're attributing to them. They are not good guys, any more than any other major corporation out to protect its "intellectual property".
It's not rocket surgery.
Ah yes, but it is brain science.
Well, I think part of it is because you have the option of DSL. Most people I know that have Comcast as their only ISP tend to have issues. When I have called Comcast support, if I don't get the answer I want to hear I just mention the "D"-word and magically they get more cooperative.
The 'enemy' will surely copy your technology. America built the bomb, and its 'enemies' had their own in a matter of months.
That's far too simplistic a view and factually incorrect: the Russians did not build their first atom bomb in months. As it happens, the first successful Russian fission weapon was based upon the American Fatman device dropped on Japan, whose design the Russians acquired through espionage. Even with the advantage conferred by the stolen design, this First Lightning bomb wasn't test-fired until 1949, years after the War's end. Those were years that America had the edge, years that we had peace, years that we didn't have to worry about much of anything, and you can't discount the value of that. That's what investment in military tech does: it buys you time in an unfriendly world.
I might add that while the Russians did rip off the Manhattan project of a lot of crucial information (see Klaus Fuchs), the Russian effort was substantial and impressive in its own right. It actually began well before the end of World War II, when they noticed that American and British scientists had pretty much stopped publishing anything regarding nuclear physics. Besides, nukes aren't that easy to put together, particularly if you're building them to mil spec, and aren't just making an unreliable one-off terrorist type bomb. Furthermore, even if you've stolen an enemy's research, the infrastructure required to produce weapons-grade fuel is neither cheap nor quick to build. That, in itself, takes years.
But sure, if you're fighting an enemy that is at or near technological parity with you, you're correct that a military advantage is at best temporary. When First Lightning was detonated, it put Russia years ahead of American intelligence projections. But remember that that cuts both ways. If your enemy is also making significant investments in that area, you'd best continue your own efforts or you'll quickly find yourself at a disadvantage. That's usually a mistake, and in the nuclear age a fatal one. Also, you gain an advantage by forcing the enemy to divert resources in order to keep up.
That's the history of warfare. It's always been an expensive proposition, even during those intervals between wars that we call "peace", and nothing will change that until either progress comes to a halt, or the human race changes in some fundamental way. Neither is going to happen soon. Concluding that no further investment in maintaining technological superiority is required, simply because the enemy will copy it anyway, is naive at best.
{sigh} in the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn ... "It's a JOKE, son!"
You can't have your cake and eat it. That's a line from the bible. So throw it at religious folk if you want, but it doesn't actually advance your argument except in so far as it hurts theirs.
Sure I can! This is Slashdot, where cake is a commodity item, so lighten up. Besides, what you say might be true if I had actually had an argument. As it happens, I was just trying to make a joke. That I got modded "Insightful" is funny in itself though.
Why does every "end of the U.S. as s superpower" post get modded Insightful? This is about one individual facing censure from a board of idiots, none of whom are representative of the population at large.
The best thing is not to try to win THEIR argument.
You're better off not bothering to argue with them at all. They're incorrigible anyway, you can't change their mindset, and you're simply giving them more credibility, more visibility. The best thing to do is to discredit them with others, mitigate their impact, make people aware of the misguided agenda these Creationists have. In truth, all it really takes is education: none of their claims hold up under any semblance of criticality.
But for socializing small children and other simple sociopaths, religion isn't the worst tool out there.
... but on the other hand, electric shocks work almost as well.
Perhaps
True ... many animal species eat their young. I, for one, am glad that people don't do that.
Just because you haven't heard of any doesn't mean they aren't there.
It does if you believe they aren't there.
Basically what I'm saying is that it might not even be possible for God, if he existed, to completely hide his existence.
:-)
That depends upon His level of involvement in our Universe. He's certainly done a damn fine job of hiding Himself so far. If He simply wound up the Universe some billions of years ago, programmed the physical laws to be used in this go 'round, and then let it cut loose in yet another Big Bang just to see how it turned out, we'd never know. Maybe He is trying to evolve a companion worthy of Him. If Earth is the only planet where this is going on, it's pretty obvious that He has a long way to go.
So in your story, the stupid people are the ones who figure out the truth first, and the smart ones are the ones who get it last?
Ha ha, not exactly. In my scenario the stupid ones are the ones that are fed a line with no supporting factual basis and accept it without question. The smart ones are those who, when finally presented with facts that discredit their own life-long skepticism, accept those facts and move on. I don't really believe that God is using faith, or a lack of it, to filter out believers as unworthy, since like you I don't believe in Him. I just use that premise to annoy people that are convinced that they're special and are assured of a place in heaven, even after some thousands of years of not using their heads. Presumably, their God gave them an intelligence greater than any other creature on Earth for a reason, and I'd be surprised if God appreciates people that can't be bothered to use it.
Yes, I've often made that same point to individuals of various faiths. It doesn't seem to make any difference. In their view, humans (especially humans that maintain the proper attitude, i.e. suspension of critical-thinking and blind adherence to a pattern for living laid down by men millennia dead) are, somehow, "special" to God. No matter how many words they throw back at me, I've not had a single one adequately explain what it is that makes us so special. More to the point, why are people who refuse to use the one thing that does make us special, our brain, extra important to God? I mean, Hell, if God wanted us to be dumb as stumps, why give us brains in the first place?
"Why, God made us in his own image! That means we're special to Him!" they cry. So you say, I tell them. Nobody has seen God for some thousands of years so I'd like to know how you know what He looks like. "Why, it's right here in the Bible!" they exclaim, as if offering absolute proof. I know, it doesn't make any sense, and I long ago gave up trying to reason with such people. Their logical faculties have been permanently impaired when it comes to God. Probably because they think of God as being much like themselves, only just really powerful, you know, kind of like the Pope or the President or something. Something they can relate to, something familiar, something not too far from their own round.
Contemplating where the existence of an actual, honest-to-God, Multiverse-spanning Supreme Being would place us simply stretches their minds too far. As comparisons between us and God go, we aren't talking cockroaches here, we aren't even talking bacteria. Subatomic particles, maybe, but even that is giving us too much credit.
At some point the human race is going to have to accept that we are not, and have never been, special to anyone or anything but ourselves. Maybe once we figure that out, we can stop killing each other for no better reason than that we believe in a different deity.
I dunno ... I've known some pretty damn smart animals. And some pretty incredibly obtuse humans.
I have a hard time imagining God coming home from a hard day of, well, whatever it is that Gods do and having his pet human come running up to greet him. Me, if I were the sole Supreme Being in the Universe I'd want some decent company. All those billions of years, with nothing for companionship but stupid people? I think I'd kill myself.
Tough. Sometimes we have to read things that we find distasteful: if we can't handle that we shouldn't frequent public forums like Slashdot. I might also point out that some of us also consider science to be something that you don't take lightly, and truly find the anti-intellectual offensive promulgated by Creationists to be just as disturbing as they find Darwinism. Anyone that wants civilization to continue shouldn't take science lightly either. That should be obvious to anyone with even a partially-functioning cerebral cortex, yet there's a significant and growing sector of our society that feels perfectly free to ridicule science, and those who practice it, with even less reason and with much darker purpose.
I'm not a religious person myself, and I've been ridiculed for that on numerous occasions by those same touchy, sensitive people you speak of. You'll pardon me if I'm not terribly concerned about the feelings of people that have no sense of humor about their belief systems: I find them to be the most intolerant, generally unpleasant people to be around. If the hypersensitive religious component of our culture truly wants people like me to spare them any empathy, I have only two words for them: lighten up! It works both ways: their hurt feelings aren't somehow special or more important just because they believe in God.
What I find impressive about many people, especially scientists with strong religious beliefs, is how they can successfully compartmentalize those beliefs away from the sure knowledge that those beliefs are, to a very high level of certainty, wrong. Of course, it has been said that Man is a rationalizing animal, who requires training to become a rational one.
Apparently there's a Creationist with mod points loose on Slashdot ... I just got modded down. Oh well.
Glad to be of service.
You can't expect to get 8Mbps 24/7 for that. You know that.
... and then delivered "x". In reality though, nobody really knows what Comcast is offering, and whatever it is, that "x" is a moving target.
The complaint here, ultimately, is not whether or not we should reasonably expect a certain price/performance level based upon overall industry capabilities. The issue is that Comcast's business practices are opaque, the company makes promises that it doesn't keep, and treats customers in an arbitrary, abusive and confusing manner, with little recourse in case of error. Nobody would be bothered if Comcast offered service "x", for "y" dollars per month
And you know what? The vast majority of people that subscribe to Comcast would fully expect to get 8 Mbps 24/7 for their $80 a month, because Comcast doesn't tell them otherwise. Comcast doesn't want to come clean and set open policies about performance and bandwidth utilization because then they'll get held to them. They way they're playing it now gives them the freedom to deliver any goddamn service level they want, and if it's not what the customer expects, well, they didn't really promise anything concrete in the first place.
People are legitimately upset with Comcast because they lead potential customers to expect one thing, and then for many of those customers they deliver something quite different.
There are less dickish ways of doing this.
Yeah, I agree 100%. I'd rather have DSL from SBC, of all companies, than Comcast's 8 meg tier (which is what I have now.) Unfortunately, I'm too far from my existing CO to get more than 1.5 mbit/sec from DSL. Even so, I'm considering taking the performance hit and switching to DSL anyway, and dumping Comcast, because I really disagree with their policies and tactics.