Woah - hold it right there, this type of political correctness is the antithesis of science.
Whoa yerself. I'm not rejecting the study based on possible non-PC conclusions, I'm rejecting it because it is the same crap we've seen before that always suffers from the same logical fallacies. That annoys me.
The fact that there will be racist and sexist conclusions drawn from this study also annoys me, because it's the Bell Curve all over again -- crap science used to justify an "our preconceived societal prejudices are actually scientifically valid biological innevitabilities" conclusion.
it might actually be true that physically smaller races have slightly lower average intelligence. Has it been proven otherwise? No. Never.
Has it been proven true? No, never. Have people tried? Yes, repeatedly. Have the same mistakes been made resulting in the same self-confirming conclusions? Yes, repeatedly.
As long as we're talking about unproven hypothesis, how about this one: There is an inherent "intelligence" that can be measured as a single numerical value (or small number of values). This has not ever been proven. We don't even know what intelligence is. We know we have it, but like "consciousness" or "creativity" we can't define it in a way that turns it into a physical entity, much less a quantifiable physical entitiy. And so far there is no indication that this is even possible. But this study is predicated on this hypothesis being true.
I don't know why this study seems to offend you so much. It only talks about averages - it does not mean that someone with a small head cannot be intelligent, it's still possible, just less likely on average, if the results are true. (Is your head smaller than average?)
Quite the opposite. I have a large head, though I don't know how large my brain is. I think I'm pretty smart, but I know I'm very good at taking tests -- especially multiple-choice standardized tests. I have no doubt I'd fall on or above whatever curve they drew. I have no personal ego at stake here whatsoever. I'm a smart privileged white male (with a big head) -- these things always come out in my favor, but that doesn't make me less likely to view them as crap.
So why does the study offend me? Because first it is crap, and second because these studies are always commissioned, accepted (despite the flaws) and used by two groups of people:
1) Bureaucrats. Whether in business, education, or government, they want to be able to take a person and give them a single "goodness" value so they can just put everybody into a sort function and pick the top N. Instead of helping every student reach as high as they can, selectively help the "smartest" and let the inherently less smart prepare for blue collar jobs. Do away with annoying and subjective interviews; managers want a quantitative way to pick "the best". Never been proven to be possible, but it doesn't stop them.
2) Racist social conservatives. What looks like social injustice is actually just the natural order of things. Downtrodden minorities aren't really downtrodden, they're just in their natural place as inferiors as determined by our perfect and blind meritocracy. Women aren't discriminated against, they are rightly excluded from demanding jobs because they aren't as capable. These are biological facts that cannot be changed, so there is no point to social programs that attempt to address these issues.
McDaniel is clearly in the Bureaucrat camp, being as he "specializes in the study of intelligence and other predictors of job performance." He also claims, after stating several (unproven) aspects of the intelligence he is testing: "The use of intelligence tests in screening job applicants has substantial economic benefits for organizations." I have no reason to think he is racist or sexist, but I guarantee those who are will glom onto this study and refuse to let go.
It's just the same old bullshit. Oh, so brain size correlates with intelligence. What a wonderful 19th century hypothesis. They've been trying to prove exactly this for centuries. Funny how conclusions predate evidence. But I'm sure they've nailed it this time.
Okay, before I go off on them, we've made advances since then... So apparently we've got a new, rigorous definition of intelligence, that they found a unique way to measure... Wait... it's just the same old standardized tests which use the same circular logic to "prove" they test intelligence. If you take a bunch of intelligence tests and average them, you get a vector that this test maps well to, therefore this test tests intelligence.
In the article, they say that the correlation they observed between brain size and test scores means that intelligence scales with brain size, and that the correlation also proves that the tests actually are measuring intelligence. What kind of nonsense circular reasoning is this? They're begging the question of whether the test scores are truly intelligence tests to prove that brain size correlates with intelligence which proves that the tests measure intelligence...
I like how the professor is quoted as attributing all kinds of benefits to whatever intelligence he believes he is measuring, "smarter people learn quicker", without showing that this is an attribute that his tests actually test.
What bullshit. And how long until someone uses this study to "prove" that women are less intelligent than men (because on average they are smaller and thus have smaller brains), and that races like Australian aborigines are inferior because they are smaller still? My guess is about... fifteen seconds.
Einstein isn't the exception to the rule. He's the first and most obvious point to show the rule is garbage.
Oh come on. This is the Register. They're hardly luddites; they quite obviously love technology. However they do have a very healthy and rational fear of robots.
One day the rampaging drug bots and the malicious man-trapping cyber-loos will join forces and we'll all be doomed.
You just admitted your viewpoint is too limited to comprehend the issue.
Um, no, I don't think I made myself clear. I, the email user, receive essentially zero spam because of the efforts of my mail server admins. 5000 spams and viruses a day is a pathetically tiny amount compared to what hits our mail servers. The point is that spam gets filtered out without needing blacklists. In other words, maybe blacklists are great, but they clearly aren't necessary to give me, the user, a life almost completely free of spam (and the tiny amount that gets through mozilla filtering has already learned to deal with easily so it doesn't clutter my inbox).
Okay, now that you mention it I remember his tie to the Jedi and being Qui-Gon's mentor. I had assumed he joined Sidious right after that, because I think in AotC they talk about the Jedi who vanished going and starting the clone army.
Is this one of those details that Neal was talking about where you had to watch the Clone Wars to understand? I guess it really isn't important, but I was curious how Palpatine got another apprentice.
That's a good point but -- and I'm speaking beyond my designs for world domination here -- there just aren't enough beautiful exhibitionist women around. No matter what the Internet says.:)
Which still doesn't make sense, because Sidious had Maul in I, and while not part of the story Sidious was obviously still running around getting the whole Clone Wars thing started.
My thought: Yoda was fucking wrong, again. Seriously, Yoda screwed up repeatedly in the prequels. Seems all it takes is a Sith strong enough to cloud his vision and he becomes incompetent. Not to knock the green muppet master. Who hasn't reminded themselves of that sage advice: "Do or do not, there is no try"?
Fine, but the fact is that "invade vs nuke" is a false dichotomy from a strictly true, rigorous standpoint. We can disagree on the efficacy of the other options, but they existed (and were more seriously considered than invasion). That is fact; disagreeing with this makes you wrong.
That's a great anology. My favorite part is your scientific rigor in explaining the shortcomings of the analogy. The thing I want to know is -- can cancer cells eat cookies, or do they just smash them over their face like cookie monster does?
It's systematic bias, which may or may not be deliberately skewed towards Ivy league, but is anyway. One of the metrics USN&WR uses is alumni donations. Rich folk attending private universities tend to donate more, so they get a boost. The rankings aren't utter crap, but it's really hard to say that the #4 is definitively better than the #7 or what have you.
This is similar to how USN&WR ranked Rochester, MN as the best place to live for like five years in a row. One of their metrics was "Doctors per capita", and Rochester has the Mayo Clinic. A hospital that employes 12,000 (not sure how many are doctors, but clearly there are a lot) in a town of 60,000. That and a low crime rate are what put it in the top spot.
This is the kind of shit that makes me want to shout "M Go Blue!" Seriously, they should have pep rallies for the U of M medical center. I'd buy tickets, if they had beer.
Erm, no, you must not have been paying attention...
And my Grandpa was alive at the time as well, and a fantastic source of information about "what it was like", but he wasn't in Truman's cabinet meetings and I doubt yours was either.
in which case the question of whether you have any choice is moot.
Sure, just like I have no choice in whether I have to change my Windows password every three months. That doesn't make it cool.
But those few cases are dwarfed by the enormous benefit and resource-saving RBLs provide.
Okay, but I question how you can actually know how much the RBL is costing you. If an employee sends an email asking for product information from Companies A, B, C, and D, but only gets answers from C and D, is he going to call you up assuming there's a problem or is he going to assume A and B aren't interested? The fact that only people sending email to your users are affected, rather than your users being unable to send email, makes this a more difficult determination. Because you've only had to pick up a telephone occasionally doesn't mean that's the only cost.
Clueful admins are of course the most important thing. But I've had clueful admins tell me the opposite of what you are saying, but I still get essentially zero spam. If clueful admins are the most important thing, and I have a choice in the matter, I'll take the clueful admin with no RBL, thanks.
And the answer to the question you're pondering, but would never ask unprompted, is "no, of course not".
I was in fact wondering whether you had a pair of hamsters in your shorts, but now I know.:) But seriously, I have no clue what you think I'm pondering.
There was no false dichotomy. All those other solutions you prance out infront of us were examined and dismissed as 'not good enough.'
Those solutions were not my idea! Those other solutions were "pranced out" in front of President Truman by his Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff. They were obviously rejected because Truman decided to drop the bomb.
The false dichotomy is how sixty years later the only alternative that is presented is invasion. This is false. Invasion was the least favored option. You're acting like because we didn't choose any of the other options that means they didn't exist, but they did. Now we're told that it was nuke or invade when those were not the only options being seriously considered, which is the definition of false dichotomy.
We had to have unconditional surrender from Japan to inforce the point that they had been defeated, and it was a bad idea to start shit with the United States. The fact that we later let them keep their emperor is beside the point.
Because the fire bombing of Tokyo didn't motivate the idea that it's a bad idea to start shit with the U.S. The idea that only unconditional surrender is really a defeat is nonsense. That's a really shitty way to justify the annihilation of two cities. This "theory of war" sounds more like "theory of WWF"
I understand completely the desire to achieve unconditional surrender. The point is that then the decision is conditional surrender vs. nukes. Not invasion vs. nukes. The traditional binary choice is completely wrong. That is important, because it is more difficult to motivate the actual decision versus the false one.
It is not beside the point that we let them keep their emperor, because that is all they wanted. They knew they were defeated, but couldn't accept a surrender in which their emperor would be tried for war crimes. If we had demanded unconditional surrender but assured them their emperor would not be disgraced, we may even have had the best of both worlds. But instead we made it sound like the Emperor would be tried and executed. So they kept fighting. Then we nuked them. And then McArthur gave them the very thing they wanted. If we had done that from the beginning, then we wouldn't have had to use the bomb, and that is exactly the point.
It's because of ignorance and a willingness to pick on anybody it's popular to pick on. Plus, I'll admit, the French deserve it.:)
But yeah, you're right. In The Great War the French held off the Germans for years, and fed millions of young men into the meat grinder that was trench warfare in order to do it. In WWII, they were fighting Nazi Germany who overnight revolutionized warfare and waltzed across Europe. The only reason Americans can act snooty and superior about the French surrendering to the Wermacht is because we had the Atlantic Ocean protecting us from their panzers. If it hadn't been for the English Channel Britain would have been toast as well. Really, in both cases the only fault you could lay on the French was that they made the mistake of having a really long land border with Germany. If it was the U.S. with a long land border with Germany, the French would be mocking us instead.
I reject utterly the contention that I should somehow be forced to accept anything I don't want to receive
And that means that you will readily accept someone else's decision on what you should and should not receive? You sound to individualistic for that, so I think you are probably missing the implications of these blacklists.
What if you want to receive email from someone, but their block is in the blacklist your ISP uses? Can you call up your ISP and ask them to remove it? Can you get your friend to change their ISP so they are in a non-blacklisted block? In the past, I've seen people whose ISPs would block, for example, the entire University of Michigan. That made it pretty tough to communicate with them.
You are absolutely under no obligation to accept anything. That's why I run a spam filter myself. But letting someone else's often arbitrary judgement control what you do and don't receive is contrary to the personal control that you (and I) want.
Speaking of which, I'm glad I'm not one of your users.
This is the classic false dichotomy that everyone pulls out to support the bombing: It was either invade and take the entire island by force, or use the A-bomb. With that pair of choices, it seems pretty foolish to even question the use of the bomb.
Now, it turns out that there were actually more than just two options, and these were options seriously considered by Truman.
The first option was conditional surrender. The Japanese actually requested conditional surrender, with the main concession they wanted being an at least ceremonial role for their Emperor*. Now, we really wanted unconditional surrender (they -had- started the devastating Pacific War after all), and obviously we were nervous about any conditions that left Japan able to start another war. Whatever specific demands they might have had, though, we don't know for sure because we never asked for clarification.
The second alternative was to wait for the Russians to declare war. The administration was quite sure that Japan would surrender once Russia entered the war. Now, we definitely didn't want the Japanese surrendering to the Russians. Cold War logic was in effect before WWII was over. The bombs were meant to scare not just Japan but Russia as well.
There was a third option, the off-shore demonstration of the A-bombs incredible power, but I consider this the weakest. We only had two bombs, so if the demonstration didn't convince them we'd have to pray the one we had left worked and did the job.
Anyway, the point of this is not to say that the bomb was the wrong decision. The point is that the situation was not as simple as 200,000 people dead in two blasts or millions dead in an invasion. That's just a false dichotomy that makes what is really a horrendous decision to have to make look simple so we can sleep at night.
From Truman's point of view in 1945 it may have been the right choice; now that we know more about the bomb's effects it's less clear. But it was never clear to begin with.
* A concession that, despite the unconditional surrender, McArthur granted them anyway. Ironic, and also a pretty awesome diplomatic move on McArthur's part.
My first thought is: How do they enforce this? Do they just not want you to do it with the curtains open, or do they have cameras?
My second thought was: The difference between Singaporean(?) authoritarianism and my personal brand of authoritarianism is that if I had cameras in everyone's house to determine if they were walking around naked or not, it would be illegal not to walk around naked if you were an attractive woman. Yet another reason why nobody ever votes me dictator for life. *sigh*
No, the Constitution bans "unreasonable" searches, not "every goddamned search".
Yes, and it specifies that "reasonable" means with a warrant issued by a judge specifying what is to be searched and what is to be seized. Warrantless searches that are merely fishing expeditions without probably cause are Unconstitutional.
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Woah - hold it right there, this type of political correctness is the antithesis of science.
Whoa yerself. I'm not rejecting the study based on possible non-PC conclusions, I'm rejecting it because it is the same crap we've seen before that always suffers from the same logical fallacies. That annoys me.
The fact that there will be racist and sexist conclusions drawn from this study also annoys me, because it's the Bell Curve all over again -- crap science used to justify an "our preconceived societal prejudices are actually scientifically valid biological innevitabilities" conclusion.
it might actually be true that physically smaller races have slightly lower average intelligence. Has it been proven otherwise? No. Never.
Has it been proven true? No, never. Have people tried? Yes, repeatedly. Have the same mistakes been made resulting in the same self-confirming conclusions? Yes, repeatedly.
As long as we're talking about unproven hypothesis, how about this one: There is an inherent "intelligence" that can be measured as a single numerical value (or small number of values). This has not ever been proven. We don't even know what intelligence is. We know we have it, but like "consciousness" or "creativity" we can't define it in a way that turns it into a physical entity, much less a quantifiable physical entitiy. And so far there is no indication that this is even possible. But this study is predicated on this hypothesis being true.
I don't know why this study seems to offend you so much. It only talks about averages - it does not mean that someone with a small head cannot be intelligent, it's still possible, just less likely on average, if the results are true. (Is your head smaller than average?)
Quite the opposite. I have a large head, though I don't know how large my brain is. I think I'm pretty smart, but I know I'm very good at taking tests -- especially multiple-choice standardized tests. I have no doubt I'd fall on or above whatever curve they drew. I have no personal ego at stake here whatsoever. I'm a smart privileged white male (with a big head) -- these things always come out in my favor, but that doesn't make me less likely to view them as crap.
So why does the study offend me? Because first it is crap, and second because these studies are always commissioned, accepted (despite the flaws) and used by two groups of people:
1) Bureaucrats. Whether in business, education, or government, they want to be able to take a person and give them a single "goodness" value so they can just put everybody into a sort function and pick the top N. Instead of helping every student reach as high as they can, selectively help the "smartest" and let the inherently less smart prepare for blue collar jobs. Do away with annoying and subjective interviews; managers want a quantitative way to pick "the best". Never been proven to be possible, but it doesn't stop them.
2) Racist social conservatives. What looks like social injustice is actually just the natural order of things. Downtrodden minorities aren't really downtrodden, they're just in their natural place as inferiors as determined by our perfect and blind meritocracy. Women aren't discriminated against, they are rightly excluded from demanding jobs because they aren't as capable. These are biological facts that cannot be changed, so there is no point to social programs that attempt to address these issues.
McDaniel is clearly in the Bureaucrat camp, being as he "specializes in the study of intelligence and other predictors of job performance." He also claims, after stating several (unproven) aspects of the intelligence he is testing: "The use of intelligence tests in screening job applicants has substantial economic benefits for organizations." I have no reason to think he is racist or sexist, but I guarantee those who are will glom onto this study and refuse to let go.
This has been done
It's just the same old bullshit. Oh, so brain size correlates with intelligence. What a wonderful 19th century hypothesis. They've been trying to prove exactly this for centuries. Funny how conclusions predate evidence. But I'm sure they've nailed it this time.
Okay, before I go off on them, we've made advances since then... So apparently we've got a new, rigorous definition of intelligence, that they found a unique way to measure... Wait... it's just the same old standardized tests which use the same circular logic to "prove" they test intelligence. If you take a bunch of intelligence tests and average them, you get a vector that this test maps well to, therefore this test tests intelligence.
In the article, they say that the correlation they observed between brain size and test scores means that intelligence scales with brain size, and that the correlation also proves that the tests actually are measuring intelligence. What kind of nonsense circular reasoning is this? They're begging the question of whether the test scores are truly intelligence tests to prove that brain size correlates with intelligence which proves that the tests measure intelligence...
I like how the professor is quoted as attributing all kinds of benefits to whatever intelligence he believes he is measuring, "smarter people learn quicker", without showing that this is an attribute that his tests actually test.
What bullshit. And how long until someone uses this study to "prove" that women are less intelligent than men (because on average they are smaller and thus have smaller brains), and that races like Australian aborigines are inferior because they are smaller still? My guess is about... fifteen seconds.
Einstein isn't the exception to the rule. He's the first and most obvious point to show the rule is garbage.
Where's Stephen Gould when you need him?
Oh come on. This is the Register. They're hardly luddites; they quite obviously love technology. However they do have a very healthy and rational fear of robots.
One day the rampaging drug bots and the malicious man-trapping cyber-loos will join forces and we'll all be doomed.
Failed it, you have.
I still get essentially zero spam
You just admitted your viewpoint is too limited to comprehend the issue.
Um, no, I don't think I made myself clear. I, the email user, receive essentially zero spam because of the efforts of my mail server admins. 5000 spams and viruses a day is a pathetically tiny amount compared to what hits our mail servers. The point is that spam gets filtered out without needing blacklists. In other words, maybe blacklists are great, but they clearly aren't necessary to give me, the user, a life almost completely free of spam (and the tiny amount that gets through mozilla filtering has already learned to deal with easily so it doesn't clutter my inbox).
Hope I've done a better job of explaining.
Okay, now that you mention it I remember his tie to the Jedi and being Qui-Gon's mentor. I had assumed he joined Sidious right after that, because I think in AotC they talk about the Jedi who vanished going and starting the clone army.
Is this one of those details that Neal was talking about where you had to watch the Clone Wars to understand? I guess it really isn't important, but I was curious how Palpatine got another apprentice.
That's a good point but -- and I'm speaking beyond my designs for world domination here -- there just aren't enough beautiful exhibitionist women around. No matter what the Internet says. :)
and while not part of the story Sidious was obviously still running around
Shit, I meant Tyranus, Count Dooku or however you spell it. Point is, Palpatine had (at least) two apprentices, and Yoda never saw it coming.
Which still doesn't make sense, because Sidious had Maul in I, and while not part of the story Sidious was obviously still running around getting the whole Clone Wars thing started.
My thought: Yoda was fucking wrong, again. Seriously, Yoda screwed up repeatedly in the prequels. Seems all it takes is a Sith strong enough to cloud his vision and he becomes incompetent. Not to knock the green muppet master. Who hasn't reminded themselves of that sage advice: "Do or do not, there is no try"?
Fine, but the fact is that "invade vs nuke" is a false dichotomy from a strictly true, rigorous standpoint. We can disagree on the efficacy of the other options, but they existed (and were more seriously considered than invasion). That is fact; disagreeing with this makes you wrong.
BFD. So was mine, and millions of other grandfathers as well.
That's a great anology. My favorite part is your scientific rigor in explaining the shortcomings of the analogy. The thing I want to know is -- can cancer cells eat cookies, or do they just smash them over their face like cookie monster does?
It's systematic bias, which may or may not be deliberately skewed towards Ivy league, but is anyway. One of the metrics USN&WR uses is alumni donations. Rich folk attending private universities tend to donate more, so they get a boost. The rankings aren't utter crap, but it's really hard to say that the #4 is definitively better than the #7 or what have you.
This is similar to how USN&WR ranked Rochester, MN as the best place to live for like five years in a row. One of their metrics was "Doctors per capita", and Rochester has the Mayo Clinic. A hospital that employes 12,000 (not sure how many are doctors, but clearly there are a lot) in a town of 60,000. That and a low crime rate are what put it in the top spot.
This is the kind of shit that makes me want to shout "M Go Blue!" Seriously, they should have pep rallies for the U of M medical center. I'd buy tickets, if they had beer.
Erm, no, you must not have been paying attention...
And my Grandpa was alive at the time as well, and a fantastic source of information about "what it was like", but he wasn't in Truman's cabinet meetings and I doubt yours was either.
in which case the question of whether you have any choice is moot.
:) But seriously, I have no clue what you think I'm pondering.
Sure, just like I have no choice in whether I have to change my Windows password every three months. That doesn't make it cool.
But those few cases are dwarfed by the enormous benefit and resource-saving RBLs provide.
Okay, but I question how you can actually know how much the RBL is costing you. If an employee sends an email asking for product information from Companies A, B, C, and D, but only gets answers from C and D, is he going to call you up assuming there's a problem or is he going to assume A and B aren't interested? The fact that only people sending email to your users are affected, rather than your users being unable to send email, makes this a more difficult determination. Because you've only had to pick up a telephone occasionally doesn't mean that's the only cost.
Clueful admins are of course the most important thing. But I've had clueful admins tell me the opposite of what you are saying, but I still get essentially zero spam. If clueful admins are the most important thing, and I have a choice in the matter, I'll take the clueful admin with no RBL, thanks.
And the answer to the question you're pondering, but would never ask unprompted, is "no, of course not".
I was in fact wondering whether you had a pair of hamsters in your shorts, but now I know.
There was no false dichotomy. All those other solutions you prance out infront of us were examined and dismissed as 'not good enough.'
Those solutions were not my idea! Those other solutions were "pranced out" in front of President Truman by his Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff. They were obviously rejected because Truman decided to drop the bomb.
The false dichotomy is how sixty years later the only alternative that is presented is invasion. This is false. Invasion was the least favored option. You're acting like because we didn't choose any of the other options that means they didn't exist, but they did. Now we're told that it was nuke or invade when those were not the only options being seriously considered, which is the definition of false dichotomy.
We had to have unconditional surrender from Japan to inforce the point that they had been defeated, and it was a bad idea to start shit with the United States. The fact that we later let them keep their emperor is beside the point.
Because the fire bombing of Tokyo didn't motivate the idea that it's a bad idea to start shit with the U.S. The idea that only unconditional surrender is really a defeat is nonsense. That's a really shitty way to justify the annihilation of two cities. This "theory of war" sounds more like "theory of WWF"
I understand completely the desire to achieve unconditional surrender. The point is that then the decision is conditional surrender vs. nukes. Not invasion vs. nukes. The traditional binary choice is completely wrong. That is important, because it is more difficult to motivate the actual decision versus the false one.
It is not beside the point that we let them keep their emperor, because that is all they wanted. They knew they were defeated, but couldn't accept a surrender in which their emperor would be tried for war crimes. If we had demanded unconditional surrender but assured them their emperor would not be disgraced, we may even have had the best of both worlds. But instead we made it sound like the Emperor would be tried and executed. So they kept fighting. Then we nuked them. And then McArthur gave them the very thing they wanted. If we had done that from the beginning, then we wouldn't have had to use the bomb, and that is exactly the point.
Then dont use a blocklist.
It's about ISPs who use blocklists. Pay attention.
It's because of ignorance and a willingness to pick on anybody it's popular to pick on. Plus, I'll admit, the French deserve it. :)
But yeah, you're right. In The Great War the French held off the Germans for years, and fed millions of young men into the meat grinder that was trench warfare in order to do it. In WWII, they were fighting Nazi Germany who overnight revolutionized warfare and waltzed across Europe. The only reason Americans can act snooty and superior about the French surrendering to the Wermacht is because we had the Atlantic Ocean protecting us from their panzers. If it hadn't been for the English Channel Britain would have been toast as well. Really, in both cases the only fault you could lay on the French was that they made the mistake of having a really long land border with Germany. If it was the U.S. with a long land border with Germany, the French would be mocking us instead.
The fact that there's sqealing about the effect shows that they work.
Um, no.
The fact that there's squealing about the effect from non-spammers shows that they don't work.
I reject utterly the contention that I should somehow be forced to accept anything I don't want to receive
And that means that you will readily accept someone else's decision on what you should and should not receive? You sound to individualistic for that, so I think you are probably missing the implications of these blacklists.
What if you want to receive email from someone, but their block is in the blacklist your ISP uses? Can you call up your ISP and ask them to remove it? Can you get your friend to change their ISP so they are in a non-blacklisted block? In the past, I've seen people whose ISPs would block, for example, the entire University of Michigan. That made it pretty tough to communicate with them.
You are absolutely under no obligation to accept anything. That's why I run a spam filter myself. But letting someone else's often arbitrary judgement control what you do and don't receive is contrary to the personal control that you (and I) want.
Speaking of which, I'm glad I'm not one of your users.
This is the classic false dichotomy that everyone pulls out to support the bombing: It was either invade and take the entire island by force, or use the A-bomb. With that pair of choices, it seems pretty foolish to even question the use of the bomb.
Now, it turns out that there were actually more than just two options, and these were options seriously considered by Truman.
The first option was conditional surrender. The Japanese actually requested conditional surrender, with the main concession they wanted being an at least ceremonial role for their Emperor*. Now, we really wanted unconditional surrender (they -had- started the devastating Pacific War after all), and obviously we were nervous about any conditions that left Japan able to start another war. Whatever specific demands they might have had, though, we don't know for sure because we never asked for clarification.
The second alternative was to wait for the Russians to declare war. The administration was quite sure that Japan would surrender once Russia entered the war. Now, we definitely didn't want the Japanese surrendering to the Russians. Cold War logic was in effect before WWII was over. The bombs were meant to scare not just Japan but Russia as well.
There was a third option, the off-shore demonstration of the A-bombs incredible power, but I consider this the weakest. We only had two bombs, so if the demonstration didn't convince them we'd have to pray the one we had left worked and did the job.
Anyway, the point of this is not to say that the bomb was the wrong decision. The point is that the situation was not as simple as 200,000 people dead in two blasts or millions dead in an invasion. That's just a false dichotomy that makes what is really a horrendous decision to have to make look simple so we can sleep at night.
From Truman's point of view in 1945 it may have been the right choice; now that we know more about the bomb's effects it's less clear. But it was never clear to begin with.
* A concession that, despite the unconditional surrender, McArthur granted them anyway. Ironic, and also a pretty awesome diplomatic move on McArthur's part.
Of course, how damn amusing would it be if their P2P was used to share...illegal copies of MS products?
What do you mean, "if"?
Walk around your house naked: another $1,136.
My first thought is: How do they enforce this? Do they just not want you to do it with the curtains open, or do they have cameras?
My second thought was: The difference between Singaporean(?) authoritarianism and my personal brand of authoritarianism is that if I had cameras in everyone's house to determine if they were walking around naked or not, it would be illegal not to walk around naked if you were an attractive woman. Yet another reason why nobody ever votes me dictator for life. *sigh*
No, the Constitution bans "unreasonable" searches, not "every goddamned search".
Yes, and it specifies that "reasonable" means with a warrant issued by a judge specifying what is to be searched and what is to be seized. Warrantless searches that are merely fishing expeditions without probably cause are Unconstitutional.