The judge had lawyers from both sides doing the educating. This is a good use of the adversarial system - using people with polar-opposite biases to neutralize bias.
It mostly works. It doesn't always work, but I think this is a case of "It's the worst system, except for all the other ones." You know, the ones where judges simply rule arbitrarily, by fiat...
No one said our justice system is perfectly impartial - it can only ever be an approximation of impartiality. But since we have to settle disputes without resorting to violence, we go to bat with the system we have, hoping that things about it get improved along the way (and working in that direction, too)
He just needs to stop communicating it this way. He's starting to ratchet up the rhetoric to the point where the fight against non-free software resembles a cosmic war.
This is not a good vs. evil zero-sum game, Mr. Stallman. Eliminationist rhetoric has no place in our society.
Speaking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's project for 'semantic web', now called 'deep linking':
My impression is that it's a tough slog, and it's been going for about a decade now. But Tim's been successful in the past, so I would not rule this out as a potential positive outcome, but it's a long haul.
Yes, I suppose inventing HTTP might qualify as a 'past success.'
Obviously it's a joke - Cerf himself has had some successes, or at least un-failures, himself, I hear.
Remember this? Intel lost in this deal already. They are probably quite angry with Nokia for betraying the partnership they had with MeeGo. Intel has a right to criticize their former partner Nokia, and I think it's good that the Intel chief has the balls to do so for what, in the end, will probably turn out to be a terrible decision, one that harmed both Nokia and Intel all just to help Microsoft.
Eh. Not sure if he fits the profile. Schmidt seems to fulfill more of a management and supervisory position to execute what the visionaries - who are not him - want to get done. I think they're going to probably want someone like Jobs who - in addition to Schmidt's manamagent style - has a very clear idea of what he's aiming for, and is often the only one who has that idea sufficiently clearly to effectively direct the organization beneath him
When the wikileaks story first hit the press here in the US, the main reaction I heard from the people I know was "How long does he have to live?"
So many people have expressed a similar thought that I doubt whatever shadowy forces are at play they would be so heavy-handed as to actually kill him. It would be too obvious. In that sense, Assange has played the PR game pretty shrewdly - shielding himself by becoming too prominent to disappear quietly. On the other hand, Huckabee's Palin's power of suggestion might tip someone in that direction - if they can get to Assange.
However - and I used to think differently - ruining his reputation by way of the 'honeypot' tactic sounds like something they might do.
This is pretty thin. It's not clear that Assange could be vulnerable to criminal charges of say, treason, in the US since he is not a citizen of, nor loyal to, the US. WikiLeaks does not have servers in the US. Moreover the 'figures' that the lawyers cites as saying Assange should be executed have no actual authority in the US. They cite Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, neither of whom hold political office and (I'm guessing - and hoping) will not have any official political power in the near future.
This is Assange's own lawyers trying to prevent extradition to Sweden, which has actually filed criminal charges against him. I'm all for what Assange does, but this is exceedingly unlikely to come to pass.
It not only made them feel better but, got rid of the actual physical illness.
I'll go ahead and hypothesize that these are 1) cases where the cause was misdiagnosed - as happens a lot or 2) cases where, whatever the cure was, it wasn't the placebo or positive thinking.
You would have to eliminate all other explanations before scientifically concluding that placebo somehow brought about cure, before drawing a causative link. For instance, in the case of tumor, wild viruses can attack and shrink it without causing other symptoms.
there are many proofs that a placebo can actually get rid of real pain.
I didn't say psychic pain wasn't real pain.
I have had an illness that all the positive thinking in the world wouldn't cure. Believe me, I tried. You know what finally cured it? The right medicine.
Arguably, if it works as well as what modern medicine is doing, is it any more bullshit than that is?
Yes. While I agree that modern medicine is by no means the end of the discussion (it fails a lot, after all) I still believe that the scientific method it at least purports to follow is instrumental for discovering new medicines and applying them safely and effectively.
it's not a lie if you believe it.
I respectfully disagree. The power of positive thinking isn't going to heal a tumor, a scorching case of chlamydia, or schizophrenia. In other words, there is a huge and very meaningful difference between thinking you're feeling better and actually having treated the cause of the pain. It's time that we - collectively, as human beings - put magical thinking aside and start to own up to the fact that we can't simply will away the misfortunes that befall us.
When we talk about the placebo effect, what we are really saying is that, when we are sick, there are usually two causes to our pain that can function independently of one another. The first is the actual, organic cause - which we can't treat simply by adopting certain beliefs or thinking differently. And the second is psychic pain, which we can.
again, I will have to thoroughly second this article:
2010 was a landmark year for Zuckerberg: He watched his net worth surpass that of Steve Jobs and of Rupert Murdoch, while also expanding his online empire to include geo-location services, high-res photo-sharing, and enhanced personalization features, all of which just proved that the redheaded little dickface has really got our number and will always have us lining up and begging for more. Goddammit.
Eh...but it was pretty obviously going to be a success very quickly after starting.. When Facebook expanded to my college, it was about 7 months after the initial launch. In about a month, everyone I knew had an account. It was an amazing rate of adoption.
Capitalization happened later, but I'm pretty sure a successful business plan was built-in from the beginning. Advertising revenues or not there would be some way to monetize the millions of users that were joining..
In the end I'm not sure what's going to pull the average user away from Facebook short of some amazing new features (aside from the lofty goal of privacy, of course.) But I'm not ruling it out.
In other news, the US Embassy called Google's decision to leave mainland China "totally messed up," claimed the widely-acclaimed film The Town "actually kind of sucks balls," and that the animated show "Family Guy" was "actually not all that funny."
It's true that Apple has far more clout on the mobile client-side. But doss this mean they're single-handedly capable of destroying the Internet more than say, Facebook or Google? They're not going to suddenly drop support for, for instance, HTML5 from their browser which is based on an open-source project. As long as Apple's client support remains backwards compatible I don't see them getting the upper hand in determining how the internet is constituted.
Facebook to me is the company to fear. They are a self-contained, self-enclosed island of un-indexable content. I see them becoming an internet vortex, an end-in-itself.
Apple has like 3-7% of the Desktop market. Even limiting the channels for new applications for all of their desktop computers to the App Store is not going to make a dent in the Internet's overall freedom.
Quite frankly I'm not sure how Wu is justifying his opinion. Basically he seems to be saying, "Jobs isn't evil right now, but eventually he will be." But Apple's business, which is not internet-content driven but hardware driven, isn't fundamental enough to the Internet's infrastructure to allow them to exert basic control over the Internet itself. If they did have such control they would be dangerous, but they don't.
Did Greek scientist and polymath Archimedes set fire to an invading Roman fleet using only mirrors and the reflected rays of the sun during the Siege of Syracuse?
Slashdot Mirror
The judge had lawyers from both sides doing the educating. This is a good use of the adversarial system - using people with polar-opposite biases to neutralize bias.
It mostly works. It doesn't always work, but I think this is a case of "It's the worst system, except for all the other ones." You know, the ones where judges simply rule arbitrarily, by fiat...
No one said our justice system is perfectly impartial - it can only ever be an approximation of impartiality. But since we have to settle disputes without resorting to violence, we go to bat with the system we have, hoping that things about it get improved along the way (and working in that direction, too)
He just needs to stop communicating it this way. He's starting to ratchet up the rhetoric to the point where the fight against non-free software resembles a cosmic war.
This is not a good vs. evil zero-sum game, Mr. Stallman. Eliminationist rhetoric has no place in our society.
Better Gandalf than Gadaffi.
Cell phones: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. - Homer J. Simpson (kind of)
As a sidenote, do we really need a separate Wikipedia page for *each* episode of the Simpsons?
You know, Teddy, from Spielberg's underrated but still crappier than usual AI
It's more like the epicenter for pedantry.
Speaking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's project for 'semantic web', now called 'deep linking':
Yes, I suppose inventing HTTP might qualify as a 'past success.'
Obviously it's a joke - Cerf himself has had some successes, or at least un-failures, himself, I hear.
Remember this? Intel lost in this deal already. They are probably quite angry with Nokia for betraying the partnership they had with MeeGo. Intel has a right to criticize their former partner Nokia, and I think it's good that the Intel chief has the balls to do so for what, in the end, will probably turn out to be a terrible decision, one that harmed both Nokia and Intel all just to help Microsoft.
they didn't do an MRI.
Eh. Not sure if he fits the profile. Schmidt seems to fulfill more of a management and supervisory position to execute what the visionaries - who are not him - want to get done. I think they're going to probably want someone like Jobs who - in addition to Schmidt's manamagent style - has a very clear idea of what he's aiming for, and is often the only one who has that idea sufficiently clearly to effectively direct the organization beneath him
I was wondering where John Boehner got that orange hue. It turns out he's been in 1994 this entire time.
AOL still makes profit.
So many people have expressed a similar thought that I doubt whatever shadowy forces are at play they would be so heavy-handed as to actually kill him. It would be too obvious. In that sense, Assange has played the PR game pretty shrewdly - shielding himself by becoming too prominent to disappear quietly. On the other hand, Huckabee's Palin's power of suggestion might tip someone in that direction - if they can get to Assange.
However - and I used to think differently - ruining his reputation by way of the 'honeypot' tactic sounds like something they might do.
I did read the articles, but still, my mistake.
This is pretty thin. It's not clear that Assange could be vulnerable to criminal charges of say, treason, in the US since he is not a citizen of, nor loyal to, the US. WikiLeaks does not have servers in the US. Moreover the 'figures' that the lawyers cites as saying Assange should be executed have no actual authority in the US. They cite Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, neither of whom hold political office and (I'm guessing - and hoping) will not have any official political power in the near future.
This is Assange's own lawyers trying to prevent extradition to Sweden, which has actually filed criminal charges against him. I'm all for what Assange does, but this is exceedingly unlikely to come to pass.
I'll go ahead and hypothesize that these are 1) cases where the cause was misdiagnosed - as happens a lot
or 2) cases where, whatever the cure was, it wasn't the placebo or positive thinking.
You would have to eliminate all other explanations before scientifically concluding that placebo somehow brought about cure, before drawing a causative link. For instance, in the case of tumor, wild viruses can attack and shrink it without causing other symptoms.
I didn't say psychic pain wasn't real pain.
I have had an illness that all the positive thinking in the world wouldn't cure. Believe me, I tried. You know what finally cured it? The right medicine.
Yes. While I agree that modern medicine is by no means the end of the discussion (it fails a lot, after all) I still believe that the scientific method it at least purports to follow is instrumental for discovering new medicines and applying them safely and effectively.
I respectfully disagree. The power of positive thinking isn't going to heal a tumor, a scorching case of chlamydia, or schizophrenia. In other words, there is a huge and very meaningful difference between thinking you're feeling better and actually having treated the cause of the pain. It's time that we - collectively, as human beings - put magical thinking aside and start to own up to the fact that we can't simply will away the misfortunes that befall us.
When we talk about the placebo effect, what we are really saying is that, when we are sick, there are usually two causes to our pain that can function independently of one another. The first is the actual, organic cause - which we can't treat simply by adopting certain beliefs or thinking differently. And the second is psychic pain, which we can.
again, I will have to thoroughly second this article:
Eh...but it was pretty obviously going to be a success very quickly after starting.. When Facebook expanded to my college, it was about 7 months after the initial launch. In about a month, everyone I knew had an account. It was an amazing rate of adoption.
Capitalization happened later, but I'm pretty sure a successful business plan was built-in from the beginning. Advertising revenues or not there would be some way to monetize the millions of users that were joining..
In the end I'm not sure what's going to pull the average user away from Facebook short of some amazing new features (aside from the lofty goal of privacy, of course.) But I'm not ruling it out.
In other news, the US Embassy called Google's decision to leave mainland China "totally messed up," claimed the widely-acclaimed film The Town "actually kind of sucks balls," and that the animated show "Family Guy" was "actually not all that funny."
including me.
They just don't happen to have a several hundred million user-large social network to serve as their user database.
It's true that Apple has far more clout on the mobile client-side. But doss this mean they're single-handedly capable of destroying the Internet more than say, Facebook or Google? They're not going to suddenly drop support for, for instance, HTML5 from their browser which is based on an open-source project. As long as Apple's client support remains backwards compatible I don't see them getting the upper hand in determining how the internet is constituted.
Facebook to me is the company to fear. They are a self-contained, self-enclosed island of un-indexable content. I see them becoming an internet vortex, an end-in-itself.
Apple has like 3-7% of the Desktop market. Even limiting the channels for new applications for all of their desktop computers to the App Store is not going to make a dent in the Internet's overall freedom.
Quite frankly I'm not sure how Wu is justifying his opinion. Basically he seems to be saying, "Jobs isn't evil right now, but eventually he will be." But Apple's business, which is not internet-content driven but hardware driven, isn't fundamental enough to the Internet's infrastructure to allow them to exert basic control over the Internet itself. If they did have such control they would be dangerous, but they don't.
No.
The Milky Way is a Nazi!