That isn't a stock picture, and itt's actually giving you extra information that was edited out of the print. The article originally said: "Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage, though they do tend to wake up extremely pissed off".
I think the line about damaged blood vessels and tissues is in regards to the reason why you wanted to freeze the dog/person in the first place -- some fatal injury. They are talking about the medical uses for this technique, and using it to save people who have lost a lot of blood, so that's where I got this impression. The technique itself isn't supposed to damage tissues, but if you resuscitate the person/animal while they still have the big gaping chest wound that would kinda defeat the purpose, so you have to fix that first.
Admittedly I just heard about this, but I'm not so sure this is really that bad.
I mean, it seems like this precedent would only apply if I sold guns with the advertising slogan "Kill your neighbor and loot their corpse with Burke brand firearms!" Versus advertising their use in hunting or self-defense, both legal uses of guns.
Or let's say I sold crowbars (with carbon-fiber grip to match my high-quality pistol grips; buy a matching set, makes a great gift!) with all of the bullet points related to how useful they are for breaking into cars and homes when the owner isn't around. If I claim my crowbars are vastly superior for B&E than any competing crowbar, would it be outrageous to claim that I expect that crowbar to be used for nefarious purposes despite all the legal uses for crowbars?
If that's the difference, then I can't say I find this decision alarming. Grokster advertised their ability to find illegal song downloads. So unlike any other file transfer method which is simply used for illegal transfers, Grokster actually made this one of the main selling points of their product. This defeats the usually quite valid argument that P2P is just a tool with legal and illegal uses -- Grokster decided that their marketing should focus on the illegal.
This kinda strikes me as similar to the situation in, say, head shops. Your glass "tobacco pipe" has plenty of legal uses, and thus they can sell it to you just fine. Mentioning the illegal uses is going to land either you, the customer, or especially you, the store in a heap of trouble.
All of which is to say that I'm not even sure that this case is establishing a precedent that didn't already exist.
SCO at one time claimed the GPL was invalid, and even Unconstitutional. When they expressed this opinion in court, they were basically laughed at. Since then, the "GPL is invalid" claim hasn't shown up in any of their briefs. I think; I'm not tracking the case religiously, but I do remember reading on Groklaw that at one point SCO submitted a revised claims list that no longer included GPL invalid claims (or many of the other things they've tried).
SCO's court case has become ever more narrow. Now the only claim that is still standing is related to IBM continuing to ship AIX after SCO told them to stop because of the copyright infringement that they no longer claim occured.
So this is probably just them reacting to the reality of the GPL being a valid, enforceable license.
Yes, well, SCO's "The GPL is Unenforceable and even, verily, Un-Constitutional and thus Un-American, like Comminuism" theory had its day in court and died and abrupt death as was predicted. They've since dropped all claims that the GPL is invalid.
So they're almost certainly distributing Samba and MySQL in compliance with the GPL.
It is so evil it extends itself into the Fifth and First Ammendments. Don't like that "hippie" commune next door, the "dirty" bookstore or an independent political opponant?
Oh yes, this is simply evil. At least before if they wanted to take your home they had to get you for something else, like drug charges or not paying taxes or some other crime. Now they can take your home for no more reason than that they think some fucking corporation would make better use of it. That is all the pretext they need.
The first, fourth, fifth, eight (fucking scary) ammendments are being gutted right in front of us. That, as far as I'm concerned, leaves the 2nd.
And if it comes to it, we will prove that these rights are inherent and not granted by any government.
not to mention buyer confidence in shelling out any kind of real money for a home.
No kidding. It was already bad enough with property taxes -- which are high enough where I live that people who lost their jobs in the last few years lost their homes -- even though their homes were completely paid off they couldn't pay the taxes.
As much as I despise that batch of losers we call the opposition party, I can find fault in a system that would give the majority more power. Situations where the congressional majority and the president are the same party aren't that uncommon. Weakening compromises by allowing the President to get the majority out of the parts of the compromise they don't like is only going to polarize politics more and further both erode the power of the minority and make instances of compromise more rare.
Yes, I still think it is better than what we have. But I don't like to limit myself to such low expectations.:)
Opt-out is easy. What you do is you send the kids home with a form that says that the school wants to send their child's personal information to the government for keeping in their database. This form has a "yes/no" and a line for a signature. Basically the same as any other permission slip. Then the child returns to school with the signed form. Here is where the magic happens:
If the parents marked "no", then they never collect and send the child's information in the first place.
There is absolutely no reason to keep the name of the child in a government "opt-out" database because the government should not be receiving the child's information to have to compare to the opt-out database.
Yes, opt-out becomes more difficult when you automatically and without express permission gather information about students en masse, and then try to "un-collect" their information after the fact.
So the simple solution is to not do that. Opt-out is simple, privacy is maintained, and if you opt-out there is no record of you in any database at all.
Instead, they are keeping your information anyway, but in a separate database. That isn't opt-out at all!
So how exactly do you expect an advertiser to show you something you might likely be interested in without knowing what is it you really are interested in?
Oh gee, I don't know. Maybe putting up ads that are related to the web page I'm currently looking at or related to the search I'm currently browsing results for? There is absolutely no need to track what I've done or where I've been; there's no reason that information will necessarily provide relevent information anyway. Just because six months ago I browsed around for fishing rods a lot doesn't mean I give a damn about fishing rods now.
Google doesn't need cookies to show me relevent ads -- they base it off my current search. Penny Arcade doesn't need cookies to show me relevent ads -- they base it off the fact that they are targeted at gamers, so they carry game-related ads. Linuxgames on the other hand has some generic ad server that puts up random crap like ads for WCW. Maybe those ads would be more useful if I let them track my behavior with cookies. Why should I do that though when there is no reason to? I'm browsing Linuxgames.com -- what could I possibly be interested in?
Sorry. Cookies are an invasion of privacy, especially when they are used to track me across sites. I let them for specific cases, but see no reason to allow them in general, especially not so that marketers can then sell that information. And most of all because they don't need to.
I can't wait either. I surely don't remember any advertising when I was using Google.
Ah, perfect example.
Discussing annoying on-line advertising is a subject as old as the web itself. When we used to have these discussions, we'd talk about costs and such as sites become popular, and how to balance making money with not pissing people off. The argument used to go that, hypothetically, one could make advertisements that were not annoying, and make a profit without pissing people off. The best of both worlds!
Then came Google ads, and proved the hypothesis correct. So, as of right now, I have absolutely zero -- ZERO -- tolerance for companies who think the only way to make money is through obnoxious, intrusive advertising. Because they are demonstrably wrong.
I like progress that way. It's like the arguments we used to have about whether programmers could make money from free software. Well, today lots of programmers make money from free software, as do lots of corporations. So, argument closed. Same with ads. You need pop-ups or free content will go away? Wrong. This is not opinion, it is fact. They are wrong.
Doubleclick needs to die. I can only hope that "Please don't block our ads!" is their swan song.
They complain endlessly about the negative "vibes" towards advertising, yet they take no responsibility for creating these "vibes" in the first place. No one had a problem with Internet ads before DoubleClick started tracking people.
This can't be emphasized enough: Doubleclick is the one at fault. Any problem they perceive with ad blocking is a direct consequence of their own actions. They are the ones that made online advertising annoying, intrusive, and invasive of privacy. They are the ones that made everyone hate internet advertising. How many of us first learned how to use/etc/hosts to block doubleclick.net?
It is exactly like them to say it is our fault for not wanting to be annoyed with pop-ups, pop-unders, mouse-dodging javascript widows that pop up fifteen new windows when you manage to close them while simultaneously tracking every single site we ever visit. We all know about Google ads -- ads I've actually clicked on in order to buy product, not just a fake click to throw a website a click-through's worth of revenue. Good behavior gets rewarded. But Doubleclick thinks it is our behavior that needs to change. We should just accept whatever crap they want to foist on us, apparently. Why won't we just bend over?
And as far as "a negative vibe against advertising in general" -- he's goddamn right! Because most advertisers are just like Doubleclick. Advertising is everywhere, and designed to be as obnoxious as possible. Like with television ads, which can be severely annoying and thus causes people to hit the mute -- or record the show and then skip the ads. Just like with those bastards at Doubleclick, Television advertisers have only come up with two ideas on how to fix this:
1) Make the ads even -more- obnoxious and hard to avoid.
2) Chastise us for not wanting to be annoyed.
If you read the TFA, you'll see that he really believes he has purchased our eyeballs. No, you fool, you payed a website to put your ad on their page. I'm under no obligation to look at the thing. You might think I owe you my eyeballs, but I never agreed to be given a headache by a flashing ad that pops up when I leave that page.
Bennie is right about one thing, though: His company's behavior is going to kill internet advertising that tries to grab eyeballs through irritation. I doubt the 'free' internet will end, because Google already has shown how you can make money off advertising and not piss people off. But even if he is right and a substantial portion of the internet is incapable of adapting to a world where the people are in control of what they see, I have only one thing to say:
Good. I hope they die off as quickly as possible. I want some serious Darwin shit to go on here, and I want it to be clear that the ones that will survive are the ones that can make money without pissing me off.
Doubleclick and every advertiser like them needs to die. We will make them an evolutionary dead end. And despite all their screaming, once they are gone, buried, and slowly turning into some future generation's gas we'll find out that we never needed them at all.
Microsoft didnt buy ALL of the makers for unix / linux antivirus. They bought a single one.
This is true. But while this makes it practically different than monopolizing oil barrels, I do believe the intent is the same. If MS could buy out all *nix AV makers, do you think they would? I do.
Bashing MS is/. SOP, but that's because tactics like this are MS SOP.
Even a simple majority override for a line veto isn't going to help when the President and the Majority are from the same party. I agree with the parent; it would be too easy for the President to nullify the portions of the bill that were intended to be a compromise. I do think a line item veto would be better than what we have. I however prefer that bills be required to only be on one subject so unrelated riders can't be attached to bills that are guaranteed to pass. The wording of such an Ammendment would be tricky, and in practice would certainly cause a lot of problems riding the edge of what is "related". This is still a more direct way to address the problem, and I think the effect would be the best of the worlds currently under consideration.
I'm not a moral relativist. I believe there is a right and wrong answer. I do not believe that the correct answer is obvious to us flawed humans. I believe that The Bomb is one of these areas where it is not obvious, and never will be. I do not believe that it should be obvious; the dropping of the bomb is a moral dilemna, and I fear for the soul of anyone for whom it is not.
The point is to strive for that correct answer, not to tell your children that you found it with complete assurance.
Maybe you remember an actor with Down's Syndrome and my name? Anyone who actually knows me has recognized me by my style. I went to Michigan if that helps.
The army gets their orders from untrained civilians (in this case). They knew Iraq was a bad idea and being poorly planned, but they took their orders and executed them like good soldiers ought to.
I think that was clear to everyone who was paying attention. The army knew this before us civies did, but enough information came out before the war began that it was clear it would be a cluster fuck.
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
Not just putting it in charge, but when review time came around and the physical evidence of how badly our leaders had and were continuing to use that weapon was clear, the people decided to let them continue. If there had been even the slightest amount of reproach, such as "we will vote you back in if you agree to fire that idiot you have put in charge of the military", I would have some hope, but that would have been too much like admitting to a mistake. And of course I'm to blame for not doing more to make a difference.
Either the US was justified in its actions, or we were not.
Yeah, because all moral decisions can only be either 100% justified or 100% unjustified.
Morality is more complicated than that. That's the whole idea behind the "moral dilemna".
You know, I actually agree with the decision to bomb. But it is the desire to paint the issue as a black and white "nuke or spend millions of lives invading" false dichotomy of stupidly simplistic proportions so we can slap ourselves with the "100% justified" label that pisses me off. The issue is not simple and the moral outcome is not clear and trying to force it to be is foolish.
So we can either idolize Einstein or hate him. We can't accept the moral grey areas that surround practically every difficult decision ever made. It must be black or white. And since we don't want to revile Einstein, we must accept that the bombing was 100% justified. This is exactly the kind of moral non-reasoning that is crippling our ability to make useful decisions.
That's a very good post. Trying to make war simple is to be forced to abstract away relevent information until what you're judging isn't the actual situation.
Now, while we can't prove that Japan wouldn't have won the war if we didn't drop the bomb, I find it highly unlikely.
People tend to forget what stage the war was at when the bomb was dropped. We had already defeated their navy. While many of their factories were intact, they still had very little in the way of war-waging capability. We had a blockade around the island and were conducting uncontested air raids on a daily basis.
With the Japanese navy providing fish homes at the bottom of the ocean, the U.S. naval forces perched off their shores attacking their cities with abandon, and the Russian army barreling down on Japan, I find it highly unlikely that the atom bomb was the deciding factor in Japan's defeat. The only real question is what form that defeat would take and how much it would cost. E.g. extremely painful invasion, conditional surrender, or joint surrender to the U.S. and the Russians.
Of course in the process of defeating Japan many things were done that aren't necessarily any "better" than dropping nukes -- the firebombings done to prove the bomb wasn't necessary come to mind. Similarly the attrocities of Japan are well known and highly disturbing.
The Milgram Studies are very interesting, and everyone should know about them so silly questions like "How could do something like that only because they were ordered to?" don't get asked, and instead useful (but difficult) questions like "How do we prevent power structures like the ones that caused these things to happen from arising?"
Of course not. Why do you think they are so against welfare? The last thing they want to have happen is for them to be responsible for the people they lay off in any way. Remember -- if your boss decides he can get himself a nice fat bonus for laying you off and replacing you with 60% cheaper Indian labor, it's your fault. Won't you take responsibility, man?
Personal responsibility my ass. If managers and CEOs actually took responsibility for the consequences of their own actions they'd be spending the rest of their lives paying off the debt they owe.
Thank you. The point of SF isn't to give some 100% accurate representation of what the world will be like in X years. The point is to reflect the world as it is now and the struggles of humanity that have always existed through the lens of some hypothetical future. From this standpoint, "Hard" SF vs "Soft" (if that's what it's called) is really just a stylistic choice.
Sure, there is SF that is just escapism, an "opiate" if you must, but every fictional genre has that. That too is a stylistic choice.
This is no different than an article saying that Fantasy, or Surrealism, or Detective Stories or Giant Robot Anime are just "opiates" when that characterization is completely orthogonal to the genre that is being targeted.
Jet fighters and nuclear weapons a product of NASA? Maybe you always get modslapped because even the simian moderators of/. can tell you have no clue.
You think shuttle launches are like big cash bonfires? How many shuttle-launches worth of ordinance have we been dropping on Iraq? There's something deeply contradictory (and stupid) about complaining about the military applications of NASA tech and then saying NASA is the waste of money when it is dwarfed by the DoD. You think if NASA didn't exist DoD would just abandon all NASA-esque military projects?
Specifically, not all intelligence researchers believe in g
THAT is a totally irrelevant point!
No, it's the ONLY relevent point!
You challenge me to show than researchers changed opinions. I claimed that many of them do not believe in g, the metric which Gould discredited, and didn't well before Mismeasure came along. They didn't have to change opinion, their opinion was already diffenent.
So you show me that the majority opinion in intelligence research is that it is a single, quantifiable, innate and unchangeable entity that happens to also be the average of a random assortment of standardized tests and then your assertion that Gould/me say ALL intelligence researchers are idiots/consprists will hold water.
You once again are taking a statement about some researchers who make a specific logical fallacy and translating that into ALL researchers making some unspecified "stupid errors" to make a straightforward logical argument that is TRUE seem like conspiracy.
Of course Option B, show that the fallacy isn't a fallacy and thus vindicate your position using logic rather than smear tactics doesn't even occur to you. Strawman and ad hominem are your fallacies -- and before you even start, I'm not asserting everyone who criticises Gould does the same! Stop generalizing to create a conspiracy!
For this argument to be true, all intelligence researchers need to be idiots or in a conspiracy.
I don't believe that follows. Yet the flaw in the logic is there regardless. You can't say "this flaw existing implies these people are foolish, therefore the flaw does not exist". It does.
Specifically, not all intelligence researchers believe in g, the "innate general intelligence" of Spearmann and the Bell Curve. There are many other models of intelligence.
They also, in your world view, doesn't have the integrity to acknowledge such a basic error. In their area of science.
You'll notice that in this particular study no attempt whatsoever is made to justify the use of standardized tests to measure intelligence in their paper, it is simply assumed, yet the correlation that results is used by the lead researcher post-facto to argue that standardized tests do measure intelligence. So yes, I do believe some researchers lack integrity. Not everyone makes this error, therfore not every one lacks integrity.
You have twice turned "some" into "all", and you should stop because that is a "worldview" that forces you into the group of foolish researchers rather than those with integrity.
Gould's argument was that all intelligence researchers were idiots or in a conspiracy.
That's not true. He had a dim view of intelligence research, but he held a number of the researchers themselves in high regard. He also considered some of them to be quite forthright (as opposed to conspiratorial). One of the things he studied was how skilled and presumeably honest researchers could make big mistakes such as actually miscalculating results, allowing systematic bias into their measurements, and making logical leaps to support their conclusions. One of the things that sets Gould apart from many such critics is that he also identified this behavior in himself.
I can't comment on the Jensen rebuttle, so have no reason to think it isn't valid. I do know that some of Gould's criticisms of e.g. the Bell Curve are spot on. Assuming that "innate general intelligence" exists as a real physical measureable entity because you can average a bunch of test score vectors and label it g even though there are infinitely many other axes that represent the data equally well is the error that the entire study was based on.
Slashdot Mirror
That isn't a stock picture, and itt's actually giving you extra information that was edited out of the print. The article originally said: "Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage, though they do tend to wake up extremely pissed off".
I think the line about damaged blood vessels and tissues is in regards to the reason why you wanted to freeze the dog/person in the first place -- some fatal injury. They are talking about the medical uses for this technique, and using it to save people who have lost a lot of blood, so that's where I got this impression. The technique itself isn't supposed to damage tissues, but if you resuscitate the person/animal while they still have the big gaping chest wound that would kinda defeat the purpose, so you have to fix that first.
But yeah, definitely need a better story.
Admittedly I just heard about this, but I'm not so sure this is really that bad.
I mean, it seems like this precedent would only apply if I sold guns with the advertising slogan "Kill your neighbor and loot their corpse with Burke brand firearms!" Versus advertising their use in hunting or self-defense, both legal uses of guns.
Or let's say I sold crowbars (with carbon-fiber grip to match my high-quality pistol grips; buy a matching set, makes a great gift!) with all of the bullet points related to how useful they are for breaking into cars and homes when the owner isn't around. If I claim my crowbars are vastly superior for B&E than any competing crowbar, would it be outrageous to claim that I expect that crowbar to be used for nefarious purposes despite all the legal uses for crowbars?
If that's the difference, then I can't say I find this decision alarming. Grokster advertised their ability to find illegal song downloads. So unlike any other file transfer method which is simply used for illegal transfers, Grokster actually made this one of the main selling points of their product. This defeats the usually quite valid argument that P2P is just a tool with legal and illegal uses -- Grokster decided that their marketing should focus on the illegal.
This kinda strikes me as similar to the situation in, say, head shops. Your glass "tobacco pipe" has plenty of legal uses, and thus they can sell it to you just fine. Mentioning the illegal uses is going to land either you, the customer, or especially you, the store in a heap of trouble.
All of which is to say that I'm not even sure that this case is establishing a precedent that didn't already exist.
SCO at one time claimed the GPL was invalid, and even Unconstitutional. When they expressed this opinion in court, they were basically laughed at. Since then, the "GPL is invalid" claim hasn't shown up in any of their briefs. I think; I'm not tracking the case religiously, but I do remember reading on Groklaw that at one point SCO submitted a revised claims list that no longer included GPL invalid claims (or many of the other things they've tried).
SCO's court case has become ever more narrow. Now the only claim that is still standing is related to IBM continuing to ship AIX after SCO told them to stop because of the copyright infringement that they no longer claim occured.
So this is probably just them reacting to the reality of the GPL being a valid, enforceable license.
Yes, well, SCO's "The GPL is Unenforceable and even, verily, Un-Constitutional and thus Un-American, like Comminuism" theory had its day in court and died and abrupt death as was predicted. They've since dropped all claims that the GPL is invalid.
So they're almost certainly distributing Samba and MySQL in compliance with the GPL.
It is so evil it extends itself into the Fifth and First Ammendments. Don't like that "hippie" commune next door, the "dirty" bookstore or an independent political opponant?
Oh yes, this is simply evil. At least before if they wanted to take your home they had to get you for something else, like drug charges or not paying taxes or some other crime. Now they can take your home for no more reason than that they think some fucking corporation would make better use of it. That is all the pretext they need.
The first, fourth, fifth, eight (fucking scary) ammendments are being gutted right in front of us. That, as far as I'm concerned, leaves the 2nd.
And if it comes to it, we will prove that these rights are inherent and not granted by any government.
not to mention buyer confidence in shelling out any kind of real money for a home.
No kidding. It was already bad enough with property taxes -- which are high enough where I live that people who lost their jobs in the last few years lost their homes -- even though their homes were completely paid off they couldn't pay the taxes.
As much as I despise that batch of losers we call the opposition party, I can find fault in a system that would give the majority more power. Situations where the congressional majority and the president are the same party aren't that uncommon. Weakening compromises by allowing the President to get the majority out of the parts of the compromise they don't like is only going to polarize politics more and further both erode the power of the minority and make instances of compromise more rare.
:)
Yes, I still think it is better than what we have. But I don't like to limit myself to such low expectations.
Opt-out is easy. What you do is you send the kids home with a form that says that the school wants to send their child's personal information to the government for keeping in their database. This form has a "yes/no" and a line for a signature. Basically the same as any other permission slip. Then the child returns to school with the signed form. Here is where the magic happens:
If the parents marked "no", then they never collect and send the child's information in the first place.
There is absolutely no reason to keep the name of the child in a government "opt-out" database because the government should not be receiving the child's information to have to compare to the opt-out database.
Yes, opt-out becomes more difficult when you automatically and without express permission gather information about students en masse, and then try to "un-collect" their information after the fact.
So the simple solution is to not do that. Opt-out is simple, privacy is maintained, and if you opt-out there is no record of you in any database at all.
Instead, they are keeping your information anyway, but in a separate database. That isn't opt-out at all!
So how exactly do you expect an advertiser to show you something you might likely be interested in without knowing what is it you really are interested in?
Oh gee, I don't know. Maybe putting up ads that are related to the web page I'm currently looking at or related to the search I'm currently browsing results for? There is absolutely no need to track what I've done or where I've been; there's no reason that information will necessarily provide relevent information anyway. Just because six months ago I browsed around for fishing rods a lot doesn't mean I give a damn about fishing rods now.
Google doesn't need cookies to show me relevent ads -- they base it off my current search. Penny Arcade doesn't need cookies to show me relevent ads -- they base it off the fact that they are targeted at gamers, so they carry game-related ads. Linuxgames on the other hand has some generic ad server that puts up random crap like ads for WCW. Maybe those ads would be more useful if I let them track my behavior with cookies. Why should I do that though when there is no reason to? I'm browsing Linuxgames.com -- what could I possibly be interested in?
Sorry. Cookies are an invasion of privacy, especially when they are used to track me across sites. I let them for specific cases, but see no reason to allow them in general, especially not so that marketers can then sell that information. And most of all because they don't need to.
Ah, so you weren't being sarcastic, then? It's so hard to tell. ;) Anyway, I pine for ad-free web as well.
I can't wait either. I surely don't remember any advertising when I was using Google.
Ah, perfect example.
Discussing annoying on-line advertising is a subject as old as the web itself. When we used to have these discussions, we'd talk about costs and such as sites become popular, and how to balance making money with not pissing people off. The argument used to go that, hypothetically, one could make advertisements that were not annoying, and make a profit without pissing people off. The best of both worlds!
Then came Google ads, and proved the hypothesis correct. So, as of right now, I have absolutely zero -- ZERO -- tolerance for companies who think the only way to make money is through obnoxious, intrusive advertising. Because they are demonstrably wrong.
I like progress that way. It's like the arguments we used to have about whether programmers could make money from free software. Well, today lots of programmers make money from free software, as do lots of corporations. So, argument closed. Same with ads. You need pop-ups or free content will go away? Wrong. This is not opinion, it is fact. They are wrong.
Doubleclick needs to die. I can only hope that "Please don't block our ads!" is their swan song.
They complain endlessly about the negative "vibes" towards advertising, yet they take no responsibility for creating these "vibes" in the first place. No one had a problem with Internet ads before DoubleClick started tracking people.
/etc/hosts to block doubleclick.net?
This can't be emphasized enough: Doubleclick is the one at fault. Any problem they perceive with ad blocking is a direct consequence of their own actions. They are the ones that made online advertising annoying, intrusive, and invasive of privacy. They are the ones that made everyone hate internet advertising. How many of us first learned how to use
It is exactly like them to say it is our fault for not wanting to be annoyed with pop-ups, pop-unders, mouse-dodging javascript widows that pop up fifteen new windows when you manage to close them while simultaneously tracking every single site we ever visit. We all know about Google ads -- ads I've actually clicked on in order to buy product, not just a fake click to throw a website a click-through's worth of revenue. Good behavior gets rewarded. But Doubleclick thinks it is our behavior that needs to change. We should just accept whatever crap they want to foist on us, apparently. Why won't we just bend over?
And as far as "a negative vibe against advertising in general" -- he's goddamn right! Because most advertisers are just like Doubleclick. Advertising is everywhere, and designed to be as obnoxious as possible. Like with television ads, which can be severely annoying and thus causes people to hit the mute -- or record the show and then skip the ads. Just like with those bastards at Doubleclick, Television advertisers have only come up with two ideas on how to fix this:
1) Make the ads even -more- obnoxious and hard to avoid.
2) Chastise us for not wanting to be annoyed.
If you read the TFA, you'll see that he really believes he has purchased our eyeballs. No, you fool, you payed a website to put your ad on their page. I'm under no obligation to look at the thing. You might think I owe you my eyeballs, but I never agreed to be given a headache by a flashing ad that pops up when I leave that page.
Bennie is right about one thing, though: His company's behavior is going to kill internet advertising that tries to grab eyeballs through irritation. I doubt the 'free' internet will end, because Google already has shown how you can make money off advertising and not piss people off. But even if he is right and a substantial portion of the internet is incapable of adapting to a world where the people are in control of what they see, I have only one thing to say:
Good. I hope they die off as quickly as possible. I want some serious Darwin shit to go on here, and I want it to be clear that the ones that will survive are the ones that can make money without pissing me off.
Doubleclick and every advertiser like them needs to die. We will make them an evolutionary dead end. And despite all their screaming, once they are gone, buried, and slowly turning into some future generation's gas we'll find out that we never needed them at all.
Microsoft didnt buy ALL of the makers for unix / linux antivirus. They bought a single one.
/. SOP, but that's because tactics like this are MS SOP.
This is true. But while this makes it practically different than monopolizing oil barrels, I do believe the intent is the same. If MS could buy out all *nix AV makers, do you think they would? I do.
Bashing MS is
Even a simple majority override for a line veto isn't going to help when the President and the Majority are from the same party. I agree with the parent; it would be too easy for the President to nullify the portions of the bill that were intended to be a compromise. I do think a line item veto would be better than what we have. I however prefer that bills be required to only be on one subject so unrelated riders can't be attached to bills that are guaranteed to pass. The wording of such an Ammendment would be tricky, and in practice would certainly cause a lot of problems riding the edge of what is "related". This is still a more direct way to address the problem, and I think the effect would be the best of the worlds currently under consideration.
I'm not a moral relativist. I believe there is a right and wrong answer. I do not believe that the correct answer is obvious to us flawed humans. I believe that The Bomb is one of these areas where it is not obvious, and never will be. I do not believe that it should be obvious; the dropping of the bomb is a moral dilemna, and I fear for the soul of anyone for whom it is not.
The point is to strive for that correct answer, not to tell your children that you found it with complete assurance.
Maybe you remember an actor with Down's Syndrome and my name? Anyone who actually knows me has recognized me by my style. I went to Michigan if that helps.
The army gets their orders from untrained civilians (in this case). They knew Iraq was a bad idea and being poorly planned, but they took their orders and executed them like good soldiers ought to.
I think that was clear to everyone who was paying attention. The army knew this before us civies did, but enough information came out before the war began that it was clear it would be a cluster fuck.
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
Not just putting it in charge, but when review time came around and the physical evidence of how badly our leaders had and were continuing to use that weapon was clear, the people decided to let them continue. If there had been even the slightest amount of reproach, such as "we will vote you back in if you agree to fire that idiot you have put in charge of the military", I would have some hope, but that would have been too much like admitting to a mistake. And of course I'm to blame for not doing more to make a difference.
Either the US was justified in its actions, or we were not.
Yeah, because all moral decisions can only be either 100% justified or 100% unjustified.
Morality is more complicated than that. That's the whole idea behind the "moral dilemna".
You know, I actually agree with the decision to bomb. But it is the desire to paint the issue as a black and white "nuke or spend millions of lives invading" false dichotomy of stupidly simplistic proportions so we can slap ourselves with the "100% justified" label that pisses me off. The issue is not simple and the moral outcome is not clear and trying to force it to be is foolish.
So we can either idolize Einstein or hate him. We can't accept the moral grey areas that surround practically every difficult decision ever made. It must be black or white. And since we don't want to revile Einstein, we must accept that the bombing was 100% justified. This is exactly the kind of moral non-reasoning that is crippling our ability to make useful decisions.
It must stop.
That's a very good post. Trying to make war simple is to be forced to abstract away relevent information until what you're judging isn't the actual situation.
Now, while we can't prove that Japan wouldn't have won the war if we didn't drop the bomb, I find it highly unlikely.
People tend to forget what stage the war was at when the bomb was dropped. We had already defeated their navy. While many of their factories were intact, they still had very little in the way of war-waging capability. We had a blockade around the island and were conducting uncontested air raids on a daily basis.
With the Japanese navy providing fish homes at the bottom of the ocean, the U.S. naval forces perched off their shores attacking their cities with abandon, and the Russian army barreling down on Japan, I find it highly unlikely that the atom bomb was the deciding factor in Japan's defeat. The only real question is what form that defeat would take and how much it would cost. E.g. extremely painful invasion, conditional surrender, or joint surrender to the U.S. and the Russians.
Of course in the process of defeating Japan many things were done that aren't necessarily any "better" than dropping nukes -- the firebombings done to prove the bomb wasn't necessary come to mind. Similarly the attrocities of Japan are well known and highly disturbing.
The Milgram Studies are very interesting, and everyone should know about them so silly questions like "How could do something like that only because they were ordered to?" don't get asked, and instead useful (but difficult) questions like "How do we prevent power structures like the ones that caused these things to happen from arising?"
Of course not. Why do you think they are so against welfare? The last thing they want to have happen is for them to be responsible for the people they lay off in any way. Remember -- if your boss decides he can get himself a nice fat bonus for laying you off and replacing you with 60% cheaper Indian labor, it's your fault. Won't you take responsibility, man?
Personal responsibility my ass. If managers and CEOs actually took responsibility for the consequences of their own actions they'd be spending the rest of their lives paying off the debt they owe.
Thank you. The point of SF isn't to give some 100% accurate representation of what the world will be like in X years. The point is to reflect the world as it is now and the struggles of humanity that have always existed through the lens of some hypothetical future. From this standpoint, "Hard" SF vs "Soft" (if that's what it's called) is really just a stylistic choice.
Sure, there is SF that is just escapism, an "opiate" if you must, but every fictional genre has that. That too is a stylistic choice.
This is no different than an article saying that Fantasy, or Surrealism, or Detective Stories or Giant Robot Anime are just "opiates" when that characterization is completely orthogonal to the genre that is being targeted.
Jet fighters and nuclear weapons a product of NASA? Maybe you always get modslapped because even the simian moderators of /. can tell you have no clue.
You think shuttle launches are like big cash bonfires? How many shuttle-launches worth of ordinance have we been dropping on Iraq? There's something deeply contradictory (and stupid) about complaining about the military applications of NASA tech and then saying NASA is the waste of money when it is dwarfed by the DoD. You think if NASA didn't exist DoD would just abandon all NASA-esque military projects?
I saw some Doom 3 porn once.
Or at least, I think I did. There was lots of moaning, but I couldn't really see anything.
*ba-dum ching!*
Specifically, not all intelligence researchers believe in g
THAT is a totally irrelevant point!
No, it's the ONLY relevent point!
You challenge me to show than researchers changed opinions. I claimed that many of them do not believe in g, the metric which Gould discredited, and didn't well before Mismeasure came along. They didn't have to change opinion, their opinion was already diffenent.
So you show me that the majority opinion in intelligence research is that it is a single, quantifiable, innate and unchangeable entity that happens to also be the average of a random assortment of standardized tests and then your assertion that Gould/me say ALL intelligence researchers are idiots/consprists will hold water.
You once again are taking a statement about some researchers who make a specific logical fallacy and translating that into ALL researchers making some unspecified "stupid errors" to make a straightforward logical argument that is TRUE seem like conspiracy.
Of course Option B, show that the fallacy isn't a fallacy and thus vindicate your position using logic rather than smear tactics doesn't even occur to you. Strawman and ad hominem are your fallacies -- and before you even start, I'm not asserting everyone who criticises Gould does the same! Stop generalizing to create a conspiracy!
For this argument to be true, all intelligence researchers need to be idiots or in a conspiracy.
I don't believe that follows. Yet the flaw in the logic is there regardless. You can't say "this flaw existing implies these people are foolish, therefore the flaw does not exist". It does.
Specifically, not all intelligence researchers believe in g, the "innate general intelligence" of Spearmann and the Bell Curve. There are many other models of intelligence.
They also, in your world view, doesn't have the integrity to acknowledge such a basic error. In their area of science.
You'll notice that in this particular study no attempt whatsoever is made to justify the use of standardized tests to measure intelligence in their paper, it is simply assumed, yet the correlation that results is used by the lead researcher post-facto to argue that standardized tests do measure intelligence. So yes, I do believe some researchers lack integrity. Not everyone makes this error, therfore not every one lacks integrity.
You have twice turned "some" into "all", and you should stop because that is a "worldview" that forces you into the group of foolish researchers rather than those with integrity.
Gould's argument was that all intelligence researchers were idiots or in a conspiracy.
That's not true. He had a dim view of intelligence research, but he held a number of the researchers themselves in high regard. He also considered some of them to be quite forthright (as opposed to conspiratorial). One of the things he studied was how skilled and presumeably honest researchers could make big mistakes such as actually miscalculating results, allowing systematic bias into their measurements, and making logical leaps to support their conclusions. One of the things that sets Gould apart from many such critics is that he also identified this behavior in himself.
I can't comment on the Jensen rebuttle, so have no reason to think it isn't valid. I do know that some of Gould's criticisms of e.g. the Bell Curve are spot on. Assuming that "innate general intelligence" exists as a real physical measureable entity because you can average a bunch of test score vectors and label it g even though there are infinitely many other axes that represent the data equally well is the error that the entire study was based on.