Yeah, point B is pretty weak. I guess the point is, it's possibly slightly more difficult for a teacher to just switch jobs than other folks. In California it might not be a big deal at all, but I bet it gets a lot harder the more rural you go. And thus, the protection afforded by a union against wack-ass school board members becomes more important. Pure speculation on my part, and really, not much of one.
Uhhhh... OK, we can agree to remove the Christian Coalition strawman. No problem. How about we replace it with "right-wing Republican fuckheads"? That is a more accurate, albeit inflammatory, description of my target demographic. The Christian Coalition is convenient, however, in that they have attempted to be a highly-organized flock of fuckheads, instead of the usual irregular fuckheads... and thus is a more concise target. But whatever, man, I'm not gonna argue semantics.
By the way, you know why leftists have had a "stranglehold" in education? It's because more educated people tend to be leftists. Or, a corollary, not all Republicans are stupid people, but most stupid people are Republican... which, while I may not be able to quote you a statistic, or a reference, or a strawman blahblahblah, is the single truest thing I have ever heard in my life. Might as well be carved in granite and handed down from Mt. Sinai, far as I'm concerned. So that's where I'm coming from.
And as far as the NEA buying elections, well, that's just funny. Tell me, what evils have befallen the Republic due to the wily and pervasive influence of the NEA? The Trial Lawyers Association, OK, offhand, that's a pretty believable scapegoat, but the NEA... please. I could be quite mistaken about that, granted; I haven't been keeping up with The Limbaugh Letter much these days, so no doubt I'm woefully underinformed and could use a little education...
Beats me if unions are good or bad in the case of teachers, but my counterpoint to yours would be this:
A) Teaching is a very, very political profession. School board elections are notorious for being low-turnout, low-interest. It makes it relatively simple for right-wing wack jobs to get into office (this is/was, in fact, a Christian Coalition political tactic, to "infiltrate" these low-level elected positions and build from there). Once they're in office they could, if not for the teachers unions, do pretty much whatever they like. The union is the most effective tool the teachers have to exert influence back up the chain of command.
B) It's not like teachers can just go get another job. Think about it... if you're a teacher and you get into a scrape with the school officials, where do you go? How many other school districts might there be within a commuting distance? Pretty much, you have to sell your house and move. OK, so that's not so bad, it's a small point, but:
C) At least where I grew up, teaching was a motherfuckin' thankless job. All anyone in my town could do was bitch and piss and moan about how "rich" the teachers were, and how they had it made, and they don't even work all year! If not for the union, the people of my town would've only elected school board members who promised to cut teacher's pay to $12,000/year or something. Now, you think teachers are stupid now - and brother, I hear you and agree - try paying them poverty level wages and see what shakes out of the gene pool.
Thankfully, I live in a place where education is given priority... but you better believe there are vast freakin' swaths of this country where people would LOVE to see teachers get paid minimum wage... and five'll get ya ten, they're the same right-wing wackos who'll grassroots themselves a Christian Coalition school board.
So... the unions maybe do suck and let bad teachers stay in positions where they don't belong, but on the other hand, maybe they do help good teachers stay in bad places. There's always bad employees in any organization... maybe there'd be fewer bad teachers without the unions, and maybe there'd be fewer good teachers, too.
Pure speculation on my part, just based on my experiences...
Yes, it is a weak argument, because many people enjoy Debunking a thing rather than Investigating it. Debunking is the intellectual form of bullying - it is narrow-minded and dull and it does not discover new things. It is a useful tool, don't get me wrong, but as a lifestyle I find it rather lacking.
What I've been reading so far around here is that F&P were twits and they definitely didn't discover cold fusion. Yeah, that's been pretty well established, debunkers... thanks for the heads-up. So now, my question is, did F&P discover anything interesting at all, or were they entirely mistaken or fraudulent about everything? Has anybody else in the poorly-named "cold fusion" field discovered anything of note? If they have, how might this information be disseminated?
Strangely enough, I did. Shame about the flight crew, though. Damnedest thing.
And come to think of it... I've never been sick, either. And I was only faking that car accident injury because I loved my wife. Huh. Maybe I'm... Unbreakable.
I'll be right back - I'm gonna go test that little hypothesis.
Y'know what I don't get... this is a combat aircraft, but it seems to me that it's amazingly delicate for something that's supposed to be getting shot at. Even with patched-up avionics, the Osprey looks to my untrained eye like it'd be easier to shoot down than, say, a Blackhawk. At least a hawk has the possibility of autorotation - the Osprey looks like it'd drop like a rapidly spinning brick at the first sign of small arms damage. Surely this ain't the case... anyone have any insight into this?
Too true. One of the stewardesses questioned my sanity, and all I could say was, hey, I don't really have a high regard for my own personal safety.
To that end, I also remember the pilot leaning back in his chair and yelling back at me something about some new system glitch, and whether or not I thought it was serious, and I yelled back my standard reply: "(whatever it was)? Hell, that's non-essential, ain't it? Screw the FAA, let's roll! How many people can we possibly kill here?"
But actually, since the "cancellation" of the flight, I knew that all the flights leaving that morning would be *packed* full of grumpy, anxious, sleep-deprived people, many of them with babies. Given the choice between that and a plane all to myself with all the first-class benefits, even a wonky Airbus plane, it wasn't much of a choice. What're the odds, right?
Besides, by that time me and the flight crew were *tight*, man. We were all goin' down together.
Uh... not in the Mile-high Club sense, though.
But if ever there were an opportunity, that would've been it...
I was waiting for a flight on an Airbus one night when they announced that they needed to replace a part, and while it might arrive that night, they told everyone the flight was probably cancelled. Not having anything better to do, and being stuck at the airport anyway, I decided to wait it out.
By the time the plane boarded at 3AM, I was one of only four passengers. Shortly after we boarded, the Airbus computers started having fits. They opened and closed the door to the plane 5 times, went through one shift change of mechanics, pulled away from the gate once, power-cycled twice and finally got the computers working properly at 8AM, exactly 12 hours from when I was originally scheduled to leave and minutes before the flight crew timed out.
The cool thing was, I was the only passenger left at that point. The other three chickened out and decided to go on other flights. I think the pilot would've liked to have done the same thing, actually... he was a little nervous. He told me at one point, after a flap malfunction light came on, that he had a real bad feeling about this flight. They kept asking me what I thought, and my answer was always the same: hey, we're flying light, we don't *need* flaps, right? Let's just go! Haven't they got real long runways in Detroit?
The pilots say they like flying the Airbus, but I dunno. My Win98 machine isn't as buggy as that airplane. You should've heard the mechanics bitching about Airbus computers... I already hate the seats they use, and now I sure don't trust the systems. I try to avoid Airbuses wherever possible these days...
But it sure was a fun being the only passenger on a big jet like that...
What you've got here is an overly-generalized, intolerant opinion that you can try to justify with "facts", but the bottom line is, it's still just your opinion.
I happen to agree with some of it. To generalize, yeah, the porn industry is a depressing, pathetic, disgusting, misogynistic, sad, twisted little universe. Not entirely unlike a lot of government/corporate organizational culture, by the way - some interesting analogies could no doubt be drawn.
However, there is a pretty substantial niche of "good" porn. Fun, healthy, sex-positive, respectful erotica - and I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. It can bring couples closer together, give people creative ideas, or just be a fun turn-on. In fact, I'm sure even good old "bad" porn is used in a positive way by some people... you might have noticed how people aren't all alike, especially when it comes to sex.
But the fact is, you and I are in no position to decide what is or isn't healthy for other people when it comes to sex, and neither is anyone else. It is too personal, intricate and just plain wacky a thing to follow some set of imaginary rules about what is or isn't good.
Personally, I think you had an obligation to your friend to not say anything about what you found on their PC. Unless you're REAL close to this friend, their sex lives are not your business - she asked you to help with her PC, not spy on her husband. She's a victim of your interference. That's my opinion. I'm well aware of the various ethical arguments to be made around this issue... as a geek, I've come up against this same thing many, many times, and there are people who think ratting people out is the right thing to do. Fine by me. Go for it. Me, it's not my style. I say, whatever gets you through the night (as long as, obviously, we're not talking child porn here). I say, it's not up to me to interfere in other people's sex lives.
Would I want to be involved with someone who was a regular porn user? No, not personally - it's one of those basic incompatibilies. Would I want to be in a relationship where my partner felt the need to hide sexual things from me? That's the more relevant question. I sure wouldn't care if my partner liked to look at nekkid pictures every now and then, or sometimes enjoyed "good" erotica, even if they wanted to do it privately. I'm cool with that, as long as I'm not feeling neglected. I mean, c'mon, what's more eye-pleasing than a well-shaped pair of breasts? What's wrong with a fun dirty story from time to time? In my book, not a thing, and if my partner would dump me over it, then I'd consider that a big dope-slap that I should be doing more to help improve her self-esteem, or whatever the issue there is. The alternative (again, generally) is denial and repression, and I don't consider those healthy and desirable tools in a relationship. Of course, another possible alternative is that a couple's sex life is so intensely satisfying that neither partner ever even bothers considering looking at porn... but that itself takes a certain level of knowledge and skill and passion, the likes of which I rarely see in couples, but then again I don't attend church, so maybe I'm missing out.
Anyway... I think your opinion of porn as a cause-and-effect sort of bad deal is exactly the same argument as the violent video games debate, or the heavy-metal-makes-kids-suicidal debate. At any rate, it's a fact that these kinds of hypotheses have not and probably will not ever be conclusively proven either way. I think it's short-sighted and narrowminded for anyone on either side of these debates to come down 100% either way. People are complicated. Life is full of grey areas. Some things are pretty clear, but others aren't. As long as we understand that what works for me may not work for you, and you can have one opinion and I can have another and that's OK, then we should be able to get along just fine...
We're talking about two different things here - damage to property and personal injury. I'm going to be a bumper car mofo when BOTH of those things are reduced to zero, not one of them - just like, I dunno, for example, bumper cars.
I'm saying that a cause-and-effect relationship between increased passenger safety and driver recklessness sounds real dubious to me and ignores a whole lot of variables, just like the Incredible Exploding Death Car question does. Let's phrase that a little more realistically... was I more reckless when I was driving my Volvo, or my Pinto? Neither. In fact, if anything, I was more inclined to drive the Pinto recklessly because it was a POS, but the Volvo was relatively nice. (Shortly after I got rid of the Pinto, a good friend of mine was killed in his new Saturn when it was hit from behind and exploded - odd, that)
I would say it's a cute hypothetical laboratory question, but it's functional usefulness is terribly limited. And if it's used in an attempt to prove that increasing the safety features of a car would only lead to increasing driver craziness, then I'd call bullshit on it - it's hardly a realistic model of complex human behavior in a world full of variables.
Until bumper cars become real, of course, in which case all bets are off.
Of course, being less worried about being injured does not necessarily encourage people to drive in a reckless manner. Auto accidents of any sort are still for the most part remarkably unpleasant experiences, even setting aside all possibilities of physical injury.
One could even argue that the presence of airbags serves as a safety reminder - maybe it makes people think a little more often about accidents, thus encouraging them to drive carefully.
Or maybe people are a little scared of the airbags themselves - even without the Death Spike, I bet there are a lot of people who think they're scary... again encouraging them to drive carefully.
Now, as soon as cars have exterior airbags as well as interior, or some kind of force fields or something, then look out, 'cause it's bumper car time and I intend to be a bumping mofo. But until then, it's an interesting theory, but I don't think in the real world there's much of a cause-and-effect between increasing safety and driver recklessness.
I also saw the pilot through the magic of the internet. It's probably been tweaked since the downloaded version, but still... it does kinda suck. Not horribly, I mean, it's OK if you don't have anything better to do. I'm not actually offended that I spent an hour of my short life watching it. But it doesn't do what I was hoping it would do.
Bottom line - as usual, don't set your expectations too high, and you probably won't be disappointed.
Window-smashers perform a valuable service
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The DeCSS Haiku
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I agree... what Touretzky is doing is the better way to protest. However, we should be careful how we treat the window-smashers. They are not the enemy. In fact, I think they do us a valuable service by defining an endpoint. The window-smashers make us look quite tame and normal by comparison - whereas, if there were no window-smashers, WE would be the extreme radicals. I would argue that we need the window-smashers to push the outside of the envelope.
The flip side of the coin is that, for some people, the sides might become polarized, i.e. if you believe the same stuff those window-smashers believe, then you're practically a window-smasher yourself. I would argue that the people whose worldviews are that narrow are beyond reach anyway, and are just as well ignored. They are the same sort of people who thought Vietnam was a fine idea. Many of them will be slowly converted as the memes disseminate, but many of them won't - these holdouts won't matter.
The people we need to reach are the ones who will listen to a well-reasoned argument, especially one that dismisses the window-smashers. Hey, we don't like those bad, bad window-smashers, either... but listen to this...
I think your assumption about A is incorrect. I think the people who make that kind of money don't do it just for the money, and I think they would continue to work regardless of how much money gets confiscated. They'd do it because they love the game, they love the power, and they love the privileges. Yeah, I'm sure they love the money, too, but I don't think it's as important as competing.
Anyway, in any economic system there will be people who accumulate wealth and power well beyond normal, regardless of whatever tax system is in place. I don't think this redistribution system is such a hot idea either, but at the same time I don't think it would kill the motivation of the powerful. I think it would inspire them to come up with new and creative ways to hide their wealth.
Everyone seems to get their knickers in such a twist about a CD-R tax. I don't get it. Yeah, I know, I know, we all use CD-Rs for plenty of things that don't involve RIAA music, and yeah, a tax for something that doesn't apply to you might be annoying... but on the other hand, we pay taxes for all kinds of things that don't directly benefit us. Your tax dollars support public transit, even if you never ride it. Not a perfect analogy, but close.
But in practical terms, if not entirely logical terms, a CD-R tax could make a lot of sense. I know I'd be thrilled to pay a half-penny per blank if it meant the RIAA would back off and some artists got paid. We're talking chump change here, folks. And if they split it with the movie people, then maybe we could get rid of all these ridiculous and irritating content protection schemes.
Call me crazy, but I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a year in CD-R tax to make the whole copyright issue go away.
Yeah, that was an amazing story. There was a good article about it in Esquire, I think. But I hardly think these guys would've thought twice about their little project if even more people had guns. That's just not the way it works, and if you read up on deviant sociology or psychology, you'll understand why. It's like saying capital punishment is a deterrent... it's not, and it's about as proven as it can be that it's not, but people still make this "common sense" assumption. It seems to make sense on the surface, but once you dig into it, it really doesn't.
Anyway, that incident with the 2 armed and armored pyscho bank robbers wasn't a case where the police needed fully automatic weapons to take them out. I think most gun people would agree that what they needed was more powerful and/or more accurate weapons, not spray-and-pray weapons. The solution here might be to equip police cruisers with shotguns AND rifles with armor-piercing ammunition.
What that has to do with civilian ownership of weapons, I dunno. These guys sure as hell wouldn't have cared who was packing a handgun and who wasn't. The only thing they had to fear was someone with a high-powered hunting rifle, and last I checked, those are still plenty legal and aren't in a whole lot of real danger of being otherwise, so I don't think I'm buying this incident as being indicative of the need for private citizens to own and carry more guns. Call me crazy, but there you go.
Yeah, I can hardly walk down the street these days without being confronted by some teenage thug with an AK-47. And all I've got to protect me is a little wussy concealed Desert Eagle. Damn gun control! How am I supposed to feel safe, goddammit? How? I'm scared!
What an idea! Pay $10 a year for companies to NOT send me stuff!
Hey, guess what - there's a word for that already, and it's called extortion. If that's the way you want to live, then go to Russia... they got plenty of that going on, from what I understand.
... man, I love the old "go to Russia" line.
We don't need no steenkin' role models
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Antitrust
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I don't want to get into a nature v. nurture debate here, but I'd say that geeks don't need role models to become geeks. We're not inspired by role models, we're inspired by tech. And Lego. Er, I mean, tools... tech and tools, that's our inspiration. Any role models are strictly gravy... yeah, Einstein, Feynman, and "Real Genius" are great and all, but I was a geek long before I even heard of them.
And anyway, Einstein and Feynman are timeless. They'll always be cool.
Although I agree that we need more geeks with bongos. You can never have too many geeks with bongos. Inspire and entertain!
I have several musician friends who release a lot of material on CD-R. I'd think that by this point every CD reader should be able to read CD-Rs - there are plenty of legitimate uses, and I'd be real surprised if even Sony would make a decision to stop supporting them. This must just be some funky design flaw with this model's laser.
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Yeah, point B is pretty weak. I guess the point is, it's possibly slightly more difficult for a teacher to just switch jobs than other folks. In California it might not be a big deal at all, but I bet it gets a lot harder the more rural you go. And thus, the protection afforded by a union against wack-ass school board members becomes more important. Pure speculation on my part, and really, not much of one.
Uhhhh... OK, we can agree to remove the Christian Coalition strawman. No problem. How about we replace it with "right-wing Republican fuckheads"? That is a more accurate, albeit inflammatory, description of my target demographic. The Christian Coalition is convenient, however, in that they have attempted to be a highly-organized flock of fuckheads, instead of the usual irregular fuckheads... and thus is a more concise target. But whatever, man, I'm not gonna argue semantics.
By the way, you know why leftists have had a "stranglehold" in education? It's because more educated people tend to be leftists. Or, a corollary, not all Republicans are stupid people, but most stupid people are Republican... which, while I may not be able to quote you a statistic, or a reference, or a strawman blahblahblah, is the single truest thing I have ever heard in my life. Might as well be carved in granite and handed down from Mt. Sinai, far as I'm concerned. So that's where I'm coming from.
And as far as the NEA buying elections, well, that's just funny. Tell me, what evils have befallen the Republic due to the wily and pervasive influence of the NEA? The Trial Lawyers Association, OK, offhand, that's a pretty believable scapegoat, but the NEA... please. I could be quite mistaken about that, granted; I haven't been keeping up with The Limbaugh Letter much these days, so no doubt I'm woefully underinformed and could use a little education...
Beats me if unions are good or bad in the case of teachers, but my counterpoint to yours would be this:
A) Teaching is a very, very political profession. School board elections are notorious for being low-turnout, low-interest. It makes it relatively simple for right-wing wack jobs to get into office (this is/was, in fact, a Christian Coalition political tactic, to "infiltrate" these low-level elected positions and build from there). Once they're in office they could, if not for the teachers unions, do pretty much whatever they like. The union is the most effective tool the teachers have to exert influence back up the chain of command.
B) It's not like teachers can just go get another job. Think about it... if you're a teacher and you get into a scrape with the school officials, where do you go? How many other school districts might there be within a commuting distance? Pretty much, you have to sell your house and move. OK, so that's not so bad, it's a small point, but:
C) At least where I grew up, teaching was a motherfuckin' thankless job. All anyone in my town could do was bitch and piss and moan about how "rich" the teachers were, and how they had it made, and they don't even work all year! If not for the union, the people of my town would've only elected school board members who promised to cut teacher's pay to $12,000/year or something. Now, you think teachers are stupid now - and brother, I hear you and agree - try paying them poverty level wages and see what shakes out of the gene pool.
Thankfully, I live in a place where education is given priority... but you better believe there are vast freakin' swaths of this country where people would LOVE to see teachers get paid minimum wage... and five'll get ya ten, they're the same right-wing wackos who'll grassroots themselves a Christian Coalition school board.
So... the unions maybe do suck and let bad teachers stay in positions where they don't belong, but on the other hand, maybe they do help good teachers stay in bad places. There's always bad employees in any organization... maybe there'd be fewer bad teachers without the unions, and maybe there'd be fewer good teachers, too.
Pure speculation on my part, just based on my experiences...
Yes, it is a weak argument, because many people enjoy Debunking a thing rather than Investigating it. Debunking is the intellectual form of bullying - it is narrow-minded and dull and it does not discover new things. It is a useful tool, don't get me wrong, but as a lifestyle I find it rather lacking.
What I've been reading so far around here is that F&P were twits and they definitely didn't discover cold fusion. Yeah, that's been pretty well established, debunkers... thanks for the heads-up. So now, my question is, did F&P discover anything interesting at all, or were they entirely mistaken or fraudulent about everything? Has anybody else in the poorly-named "cold fusion" field discovered anything of note? If they have, how might this information be disseminated?
Haven't flown much, have we? That's OK, when you get to be an adult, you will.
Oh, man, that's fuckin' beautiful.
I feel like I'm in on the joke now.
Strangely enough, I did. Shame about the flight crew, though. Damnedest thing.
And come to think of it... I've never been sick, either. And I was only faking that car accident injury because I loved my wife. Huh. Maybe I'm... Unbreakable.
I'll be right back - I'm gonna go test that little hypothesis.
Y'know what I don't get... this is a combat aircraft, but it seems to me that it's amazingly delicate for something that's supposed to be getting shot at. Even with patched-up avionics, the Osprey looks to my untrained eye like it'd be easier to shoot down than, say, a Blackhawk. At least a hawk has the possibility of autorotation - the Osprey looks like it'd drop like a rapidly spinning brick at the first sign of small arms damage. Surely this ain't the case... anyone have any insight into this?
Too true. One of the stewardesses questioned my sanity, and all I could say was, hey, I don't really have a high regard for my own personal safety.
To that end, I also remember the pilot leaning back in his chair and yelling back at me something about some new system glitch, and whether or not I thought it was serious, and I yelled back my standard reply: "(whatever it was)? Hell, that's non-essential, ain't it? Screw the FAA, let's roll! How many people can we possibly kill here?"
But actually, since the "cancellation" of the flight, I knew that all the flights leaving that morning would be *packed* full of grumpy, anxious, sleep-deprived people, many of them with babies. Given the choice between that and a plane all to myself with all the first-class benefits, even a wonky Airbus plane, it wasn't much of a choice. What're the odds, right?
Besides, by that time me and the flight crew were *tight*, man. We were all goin' down together.
Uh... not in the Mile-high Club sense, though.
But if ever there were an opportunity, that would've been it...
I was waiting for a flight on an Airbus one night when they announced that they needed to replace a part, and while it might arrive that night, they told everyone the flight was probably cancelled. Not having anything better to do, and being stuck at the airport anyway, I decided to wait it out.
By the time the plane boarded at 3AM, I was one of only four passengers. Shortly after we boarded, the Airbus computers started having fits. They opened and closed the door to the plane 5 times, went through one shift change of mechanics, pulled away from the gate once, power-cycled twice and finally got the computers working properly at 8AM, exactly 12 hours from when I was originally scheduled to leave and minutes before the flight crew timed out.
The cool thing was, I was the only passenger left at that point. The other three chickened out and decided to go on other flights. I think the pilot would've liked to have done the same thing, actually... he was a little nervous. He told me at one point, after a flap malfunction light came on, that he had a real bad feeling about this flight. They kept asking me what I thought, and my answer was always the same: hey, we're flying light, we don't *need* flaps, right? Let's just go! Haven't they got real long runways in Detroit?
The pilots say they like flying the Airbus, but I dunno. My Win98 machine isn't as buggy as that airplane. You should've heard the mechanics bitching about Airbus computers... I already hate the seats they use, and now I sure don't trust the systems. I try to avoid Airbuses wherever possible these days...
But it sure was a fun being the only passenger on a big jet like that...
What you've got here is an overly-generalized, intolerant opinion that you can try to justify with "facts", but the bottom line is, it's still just your opinion.
I happen to agree with some of it. To generalize, yeah, the porn industry is a depressing, pathetic, disgusting, misogynistic, sad, twisted little universe. Not entirely unlike a lot of government/corporate organizational culture, by the way - some interesting analogies could no doubt be drawn.
However, there is a pretty substantial niche of "good" porn. Fun, healthy, sex-positive, respectful erotica - and I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. It can bring couples closer together, give people creative ideas, or just be a fun turn-on. In fact, I'm sure even good old "bad" porn is used in a positive way by some people... you might have noticed how people aren't all alike, especially when it comes to sex.
But the fact is, you and I are in no position to decide what is or isn't healthy for other people when it comes to sex, and neither is anyone else. It is too personal, intricate and just plain wacky a thing to follow some set of imaginary rules about what is or isn't good.
Personally, I think you had an obligation to your friend to not say anything about what you found on their PC. Unless you're REAL close to this friend, their sex lives are not your business - she asked you to help with her PC, not spy on her husband. She's a victim of your interference. That's my opinion. I'm well aware of the various ethical arguments to be made around this issue... as a geek, I've come up against this same thing many, many times, and there are people who think ratting people out is the right thing to do. Fine by me. Go for it. Me, it's not my style. I say, whatever gets you through the night (as long as, obviously, we're not talking child porn here). I say, it's not up to me to interfere in other people's sex lives.
Would I want to be involved with someone who was a regular porn user? No, not personally - it's one of those basic incompatibilies. Would I want to be in a relationship where my partner felt the need to hide sexual things from me? That's the more relevant question. I sure wouldn't care if my partner liked to look at nekkid pictures every now and then, or sometimes enjoyed "good" erotica, even if they wanted to do it privately. I'm cool with that, as long as I'm not feeling neglected. I mean, c'mon, what's more eye-pleasing than a well-shaped pair of breasts? What's wrong with a fun dirty story from time to time? In my book, not a thing, and if my partner would dump me over it, then I'd consider that a big dope-slap that I should be doing more to help improve her self-esteem, or whatever the issue there is. The alternative (again, generally) is denial and repression, and I don't consider those healthy and desirable tools in a relationship. Of course, another possible alternative is that a couple's sex life is so intensely satisfying that neither partner ever even bothers considering looking at porn... but that itself takes a certain level of knowledge and skill and passion, the likes of which I rarely see in couples, but then again I don't attend church, so maybe I'm missing out.
Anyway... I think your opinion of porn as a cause-and-effect sort of bad deal is exactly the same argument as the violent video games debate, or the heavy-metal-makes-kids-suicidal debate. At any rate, it's a fact that these kinds of hypotheses have not and probably will not ever be conclusively proven either way. I think it's short-sighted and narrowminded for anyone on either side of these debates to come down 100% either way. People are complicated. Life is full of grey areas. Some things are pretty clear, but others aren't. As long as we understand that what works for me may not work for you, and you can have one opinion and I can have another and that's OK, then we should be able to get along just fine...
We're talking about two different things here - damage to property and personal injury. I'm going to be a bumper car mofo when BOTH of those things are reduced to zero, not one of them - just like, I dunno, for example, bumper cars.
I'm saying that a cause-and-effect relationship between increased passenger safety and driver recklessness sounds real dubious to me and ignores a whole lot of variables, just like the Incredible Exploding Death Car question does. Let's phrase that a little more realistically... was I more reckless when I was driving my Volvo, or my Pinto? Neither. In fact, if anything, I was more inclined to drive the Pinto recklessly because it was a POS, but the Volvo was relatively nice. (Shortly after I got rid of the Pinto, a good friend of mine was killed in his new Saturn when it was hit from behind and exploded - odd, that)
I would say it's a cute hypothetical laboratory question, but it's functional usefulness is terribly limited. And if it's used in an attempt to prove that increasing the safety features of a car would only lead to increasing driver craziness, then I'd call bullshit on it - it's hardly a realistic model of complex human behavior in a world full of variables.
Until bumper cars become real, of course, in which case all bets are off.
Of course, being less worried about being injured does not necessarily encourage people to drive in a reckless manner. Auto accidents of any sort are still for the most part remarkably unpleasant experiences, even setting aside all possibilities of physical injury.
One could even argue that the presence of airbags serves as a safety reminder - maybe it makes people think a little more often about accidents, thus encouraging them to drive carefully.
Or maybe people are a little scared of the airbags themselves - even without the Death Spike, I bet there are a lot of people who think they're scary... again encouraging them to drive carefully.
Now, as soon as cars have exterior airbags as well as interior, or some kind of force fields or something, then look out, 'cause it's bumper car time and I intend to be a bumping mofo. But until then, it's an interesting theory, but I don't think in the real world there's much of a cause-and-effect between increasing safety and driver recklessness.
1. Yeah, right.
2. Holy shit, you're almost completely ignorant on this topic.
3. Uh-huh.
4. Uh-huh again. Sources? What does the local temperature of Greenland during one apparently relatively brief period prove?
5. Now that's an interesting story. Thanks for the info.
Finally, keep watching the skies for the black helicopters.
I also saw the pilot through the magic of the internet. It's probably been tweaked since the downloaded version, but still... it does kinda suck. Not horribly, I mean, it's OK if you don't have anything better to do. I'm not actually offended that I spent an hour of my short life watching it. But it doesn't do what I was hoping it would do.
Bottom line - as usual, don't set your expectations too high, and you probably won't be disappointed.
I agree... what Touretzky is doing is the better way to protest. However, we should be careful how we treat the window-smashers. They are not the enemy. In fact, I think they do us a valuable service by defining an endpoint. The window-smashers make us look quite tame and normal by comparison - whereas, if there were no window-smashers, WE would be the extreme radicals. I would argue that we need the window-smashers to push the outside of the envelope.
The flip side of the coin is that, for some people, the sides might become polarized, i.e. if you believe the same stuff those window-smashers believe, then you're practically a window-smasher yourself. I would argue that the people whose worldviews are that narrow are beyond reach anyway, and are just as well ignored. They are the same sort of people who thought Vietnam was a fine idea. Many of them will be slowly converted as the memes disseminate, but many of them won't - these holdouts won't matter.
The people we need to reach are the ones who will listen to a well-reasoned argument, especially one that dismisses the window-smashers. Hey, we don't like those bad, bad window-smashers, either... but listen to this...
That's my take on it, anyway. Dissenters?
I think your assumption about A is incorrect. I think the people who make that kind of money don't do it just for the money, and I think they would continue to work regardless of how much money gets confiscated. They'd do it because they love the game, they love the power, and they love the privileges. Yeah, I'm sure they love the money, too, but I don't think it's as important as competing.
Anyway, in any economic system there will be people who accumulate wealth and power well beyond normal, regardless of whatever tax system is in place. I don't think this redistribution system is such a hot idea either, but at the same time I don't think it would kill the motivation of the powerful. I think it would inspire them to come up with new and creative ways to hide their wealth.
Everyone seems to get their knickers in such a twist about a CD-R tax. I don't get it. Yeah, I know, I know, we all use CD-Rs for plenty of things that don't involve RIAA music, and yeah, a tax for something that doesn't apply to you might be annoying... but on the other hand, we pay taxes for all kinds of things that don't directly benefit us. Your tax dollars support public transit, even if you never ride it. Not a perfect analogy, but close.
But in practical terms, if not entirely logical terms, a CD-R tax could make a lot of sense. I know I'd be thrilled to pay a half-penny per blank if it meant the RIAA would back off and some artists got paid. We're talking chump change here, folks. And if they split it with the movie people, then maybe we could get rid of all these ridiculous and irritating content protection schemes.
Call me crazy, but I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a year in CD-R tax to make the whole copyright issue go away.
PS: I've also made little microcontroller "pets" whose LEDs simulate breathing rhythms. It has a cool, soothing energy about it.
Hey, this sounds interesting. Do you have pictures and/or schematics on a website?
Yeah, that was an amazing story. There was a good article about it in Esquire, I think. But I hardly think these guys would've thought twice about their little project if even more people had guns. That's just not the way it works, and if you read up on deviant sociology or psychology, you'll understand why. It's like saying capital punishment is a deterrent... it's not, and it's about as proven as it can be that it's not, but people still make this "common sense" assumption. It seems to make sense on the surface, but once you dig into it, it really doesn't.
Anyway, that incident with the 2 armed and armored pyscho bank robbers wasn't a case where the police needed fully automatic weapons to take them out. I think most gun people would agree that what they needed was more powerful and/or more accurate weapons, not spray-and-pray weapons. The solution here might be to equip police cruisers with shotguns AND rifles with armor-piercing ammunition.
What that has to do with civilian ownership of weapons, I dunno. These guys sure as hell wouldn't have cared who was packing a handgun and who wasn't. The only thing they had to fear was someone with a high-powered hunting rifle, and last I checked, those are still plenty legal and aren't in a whole lot of real danger of being otherwise, so I don't think I'm buying this incident as being indicative of the need for private citizens to own and carry more guns. Call me crazy, but there you go.
My bad. Sorry. It sounded to me like you were proposing, essentially, a direct $10 fee to not receive junk mail.
We do need an organization like the EFF, ACLU or NRA, only dedicated to these things. I wonder if there is one already?
Yeah, I can hardly walk down the street these days without being confronted by some teenage thug with an AK-47. And all I've got to protect me is a little wussy concealed Desert Eagle. Damn gun control! How am I supposed to feel safe, goddammit? How? I'm scared!
What an idea! Pay $10 a year for companies to NOT send me stuff!
Hey, guess what - there's a word for that already, and it's called extortion. If that's the way you want to live, then go to Russia... they got plenty of that going on, from what I understand.
... man, I love the old "go to Russia" line.
I don't want to get into a nature v. nurture debate here, but I'd say that geeks don't need role models to become geeks. We're not inspired by role models, we're inspired by tech. And Lego. Er, I mean, tools... tech and tools, that's our inspiration. Any role models are strictly gravy... yeah, Einstein, Feynman, and "Real Genius" are great and all, but I was a geek long before I even heard of them.
And anyway, Einstein and Feynman are timeless. They'll always be cool.
Although I agree that we need more geeks with bongos. You can never have too many geeks with bongos. Inspire and entertain!
I have several musician friends who release a lot of material on CD-R. I'd think that by this point every CD reader should be able to read CD-Rs - there are plenty of legitimate uses, and I'd be real surprised if even Sony would make a decision to stop supporting them. This must just be some funky design flaw with this model's laser.