The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education works to protect the free speech rights of students across the U.S., with a special focus on public colleges and universities, which are bound by Constitutional mandate to preserve freedom of speech. They are especially in need of donations from people who've already moved on to start their careers, since college students typically don't make that much money.
Actually, if you watch the episode (entitled, "Bender Should Not Be Allowed On Television"), you'll find that the execubot pronounces the phrase with stress on the second "hey", sort of like a sleazy corporate yes-man rather than Fat Albert.
Network President: Greetings, gentlemen. You already know my execubots: Executive Alpha, programmed to like things it has seen before. Executive Alpha: Hey hey hey. Network President: Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule. Executive Beta: (rolls dice) More reality shows! Network President: And Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate Middle America. Executive Gamma: It's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?
That's a problem better dealt with by requiring account creation for any page edit. Accounts aren't any less anonymous than IP addresses, for those with privacy concerns, but the extra step of requiring an account to be created (thus allowing spam accounts to be banned) would make automated spam far more difficult (especially if combined with a good captcha).
It might not be a permanent solution, since eventually someone will probably come up with a way to defeat it, but it'd be far more effective than letting a page get spammed and then semi-protecting it, since all the spammer would have to do to continue spamming would be to pick a different page.
Besides the spam issue, I think required account creation is a good policy for Wikipedia anyway, as it promotes discussion by giving an editor an identity that s/he and other editors can use when discussing page edits and such.
My problem with the reauthorization bill is that the House and Senate both passed versions of the bill that were far more respectful of civil liberties, but when it got into committee, the hard-line elements of the GOP manhandled it and removed many of the provisions that would have protected civil liberties. I mean, the better version of the bill passed the Senate by a voice vote, but that's not what they ultimately tried to send to the President.
They could easily increase the price and still sell all of the consoles they are producing. Thus, they could make more money on the consoles without losing out on any game sales, since the only people buying games are the people who manage to find and buy the console. Then, when supply catches up, they lower the price so that they are still selling out on consoles. Not using that strategy is chiefly a PR move on Microsoft's part.
Your comment may have gotten modded funny, but I'd have given it an insightful, instead. This phenomenon is called arbitrage, and is quite common with heavily-traded commodities. It's not surprising that the same concept would be leveraged for profit here. In this case, Microsoft doesn't raise the price in the retail market because of the PR fiasco related to jacking up the price, while actual supply and demand concerns allow the price in the resale market to be much higher.
Apparently you don't read the WoW forums, as even in such a wretched hive of flame wars and Blizzard-bashing, every thread about Warden gets lambasted and ridiculed by nearly every reply post.
Besides, the article you linked was written by someone with a financial incentive to having Blizzard discontinue using Warden, and even he couldn't find evidence of a breach of privacy, which you would have noticed if you'd read that linked article more carefully.
In other news, Microsoft (MSFT) reported today that they are boosted earnings estimates by 0.00000000047 cents per share for the current quarter. Chief Financial Officer Christopher Liddell indicated that the earnings boost arises from a reduction in expenses made possible by a collaborative effort with the Mozilla Foundation to create a new standard logo for RSS feeds.
The propensity to imitate without necessarily understanding may have allowed outliers who were particularly good at critical thinking (thus enabling them to invent things like spears) to have their inventions propagate quickly throughout the population. In an environment where exceptional individuals pop up from time to time, being good at imitating them could provide a huge advantage over those who observe and, not seeing an immediate reward, don't imitate.
The intimation is that he delivered Ohio in a nefarious manner, and my comment was meant to indicate that Diebold's voting machines had nothing to do with it, since they weren't used. Also, I live in Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland is, though I actually live in a first-ring suburb), and when I voted in 2004 (and, for that matter, 2005), we used punch card ballots. In Ohio, the county boards of election handle the purchase/installation/etc. of voting machines, and the Cuyahoga County BoE says that their shiny new Diebold machines will be ready for use in 2006.
Now, don't get me wrong. I dislike Diebold as much as the tin-foil-hat parade does, and I hope that whenever they get a new CEO, he or she is committed to making their voting products openly fair (as in, with a verifiable paper trail and with open source software). But whining about Bush winning in 2004, and then blaming voting machines instead of considering that it may have been legitimate, only turns the debate into a partisan debacle, which hurts the cause instead of helping it.
The most interesting bit from the article (in my opinion):
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Think about it - usually, when an ape wants to obtain food, it only needs to complete a couple of steps to achieve that goal, and the reward is immediate. But with tool-using humans, it may involve sharpening a rock, cutting a big stick, jamming the rock in the end of the stick, and then hunting for food and killing it with the tool. Even if the manufacture of the spear immediately precedes hunting for the animal, the reward is still not instant, and it may even be beneficial to manufacture several spears the day before.
Children see the manufacture of these tools, and the manufacture of the spear becomes the apparent goal, not the killing of the animal. Since the benefit of each step in terms of its effect on the fitness of the tool isn't immediately apparent, it's more advantageous to imitate all of the steps until one gains the higher insight needed to modify the tool's design. There may thus have been a pressure to select for children who were good at imitation when the immediate reward was simply the completion of the task and not the reward that comes from later using the tool.
And when you think about it, nearly everything we do today (aside from fairly passive activities like watching TV, sleeping, taking a dump) doesn't have an immediate reward, yet we usually feel good about completing a task whose actual benefit isn't immediate.
Such ridiculous forms of product placement are likely to cause people to turn against the products being advertised. The best sorts of product placement are the subtle ones, like using GMC or Ford trucks in the big chase scene in your show, or having your main characters eating McDonald's or Wendy's french fries while they talk about tracking down the latest criminal threat.
When advertising seems out of place or contrived ("The Cisco network is defending itself" or the giant Pepsi ad in the middle of the Final Fantasy movie), people may remember it, but they'll remember that it ruined whatever movie or show they were watching at the time. There are reasons why game shows don't put the logo of their sponsor in the show's set anymore (they used to in the '50s): people get tired of being force-fed advertising, and it's more effective to give them a program they'll enjoy and include products only where they belong.
Heck, The Price is Right has been one giant advertising show for decades, and that's because they make the advertising pitch a part of the game. Learn from the people who make advertising work, you brash new ad execs - don't think you can just manhandle the public because you're hip and edgy.
This project is pretty obviously targeted at simply constructing a usable radio telescope for scientists, but the reason the military is funding it is because the research and development done in designing various facets of the telescope have military applications. The military then takes the results of that research and applies it to their own terrestrial or satellite-based devices for actual weaponization.
The military does this all the time. They fund a huge array of projects, many of which don't directly have a production-level deliverable, but which extend science and engineering so that the next funded project can come up with a military-use prototype.
The privacy issues of such a rule are staggering. Suppose the police want to find out who all the pervs are on a city block. They just subpoena the local ISPs to find out who's applied for pr0n access. Not to mention what happens if the ISP gets hacked (electronically or socially) and someone manages to get a copy of the pr0n access list. I suspect a lot of legislators will eventually be exposed for their hairy palms if such a law ever got passed.
His name links to his website, so he still gets the pagerank boost. Beatles-Beatles does the same thing, and ScuttleMonkey the Sock Puppet posts his stories, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I spend so much time not collecting stamps that sometimes it seems more like a job.
What is IS? It is IT.
Aaaaah! You said the word! Suffice to say, 'tis the word the Knights of Ni cannot hear.
Just remember, you can't get very far in life without saying "IS".
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education works to protect the free speech rights of students across the U.S., with a special focus on public colleges and universities, which are bound by Constitutional mandate to preserve freedom of speech. They are especially in need of donations from people who've already moved on to start their careers, since college students typically don't make that much money.
Actually, if you watch the episode (entitled, "Bender Should Not Be Allowed On Television"), you'll find that the execubot pronounces the phrase with stress on the second "hey", sort of like a sleazy corporate yes-man rather than Fat Albert.
Network President: Greetings, gentlemen. You already know my execubots: Executive Alpha, programmed to like things it has seen before.
Executive Alpha: Hey hey hey.
Network President: Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule.
Executive Beta: (rolls dice) More reality shows!
Network President: And Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate Middle America.
Executive Gamma: It's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?
That's a problem better dealt with by requiring account creation for any page edit. Accounts aren't any less anonymous than IP addresses, for those with privacy concerns, but the extra step of requiring an account to be created (thus allowing spam accounts to be banned) would make automated spam far more difficult (especially if combined with a good captcha).
It might not be a permanent solution, since eventually someone will probably come up with a way to defeat it, but it'd be far more effective than letting a page get spammed and then semi-protecting it, since all the spammer would have to do to continue spamming would be to pick a different page.
Besides the spam issue, I think required account creation is a good policy for Wikipedia anyway, as it promotes discussion by giving an editor an identity that s/he and other editors can use when discussing page edits and such.
My problem with the reauthorization bill is that the House and Senate both passed versions of the bill that were far more respectful of civil liberties, but when it got into committee, the hard-line elements of the GOP manhandled it and removed many of the provisions that would have protected civil liberties. I mean, the better version of the bill passed the Senate by a voice vote, but that's not what they ultimately tried to send to the President.
So what? Hitler failed to take over all of Europe in the 1940s, but pretty much everyone agrees that we're better off.
They could easily increase the price and still sell all of the consoles they are producing. Thus, they could make more money on the consoles without losing out on any game sales, since the only people buying games are the people who manage to find and buy the console. Then, when supply catches up, they lower the price so that they are still selling out on consoles. Not using that strategy is chiefly a PR move on Microsoft's part.
Your comment may have gotten modded funny, but I'd have given it an insightful, instead. This phenomenon is called arbitrage, and is quite common with heavily-traded commodities. It's not surprising that the same concept would be leveraged for profit here. In this case, Microsoft doesn't raise the price in the retail market because of the PR fiasco related to jacking up the price, while actual supply and demand concerns allow the price in the resale market to be much higher.
"Man, that Leonardo is such a stud... but does he really have to paint me while he's naked?"
Apparently you don't read the WoW forums, as even in such a wretched hive of flame wars and Blizzard-bashing, every thread about Warden gets lambasted and ridiculed by nearly every reply post.
Besides, the article you linked was written by someone with a financial incentive to having Blizzard discontinue using Warden, and even he couldn't find evidence of a breach of privacy, which you would have noticed if you'd read that linked article more carefully.
In other news, Microsoft (MSFT) reported today that they are boosted earnings estimates by 0.00000000047 cents per share for the current quarter. Chief Financial Officer Christopher Liddell indicated that the earnings boost arises from a reduction in expenses made possible by a collaborative effort with the Mozilla Foundation to create a new standard logo for RSS feeds.
Also, less than 3 errors/article compared to about 4 errors/article gives us more than 33% more errors/article Wikipedia.
That's the sort of conclusion best made possible when your results are only given with one significant digit.
the fans of their respective products and characters are the winners in this settlement
Amazingly enough, that's probably actually true for once. Hooray for the consumer.
Although I'm sure the lawyers got their pound of flesh, too.
The propensity to imitate without necessarily understanding may have allowed outliers who were particularly good at critical thinking (thus enabling them to invent things like spears) to have their inventions propagate quickly throughout the population. In an environment where exceptional individuals pop up from time to time, being good at imitating them could provide a huge advantage over those who observe and, not seeing an immediate reward, don't imitate.
The intimation is that he delivered Ohio in a nefarious manner, and my comment was meant to indicate that Diebold's voting machines had nothing to do with it, since they weren't used. Also, I live in Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland is, though I actually live in a first-ring suburb), and when I voted in 2004 (and, for that matter, 2005), we used punch card ballots. In Ohio, the county boards of election handle the purchase/installation/etc. of voting machines, and the Cuyahoga County BoE says that their shiny new Diebold machines will be ready for use in 2006.
Now, don't get me wrong. I dislike Diebold as much as the tin-foil-hat parade does, and I hope that whenever they get a new CEO, he or she is committed to making their voting products openly fair (as in, with a verifiable paper trail and with open source software). But whining about Bush winning in 2004, and then blaming voting machines instead of considering that it may have been legitimate, only turns the debate into a partisan debacle, which hurts the cause instead of helping it.
Think about it - usually, when an ape wants to obtain food, it only needs to complete a couple of steps to achieve that goal, and the reward is immediate. But with tool-using humans, it may involve sharpening a rock, cutting a big stick, jamming the rock in the end of the stick, and then hunting for food and killing it with the tool. Even if the manufacture of the spear immediately precedes hunting for the animal, the reward is still not instant, and it may even be beneficial to manufacture several spears the day before.
Children see the manufacture of these tools, and the manufacture of the spear becomes the apparent goal, not the killing of the animal. Since the benefit of each step in terms of its effect on the fitness of the tool isn't immediately apparent, it's more advantageous to imitate all of the steps until one gains the higher insight needed to modify the tool's design. There may thus have been a pressure to select for children who were good at imitation when the immediate reward was simply the completion of the task and not the reward that comes from later using the tool.
And when you think about it, nearly everything we do today (aside from fairly passive activities like watching TV, sleeping, taking a dump) doesn't have an immediate reward, yet we usually feel good about completing a task whose actual benefit isn't immediate.
Considering that Ohio didn't use Diebold machines in 2004, that must have been a neat trick.
And the corollary: never make an irreversible change unless all of the reversible changes have been tried and ruled out.
Such ridiculous forms of product placement are likely to cause people to turn against the products being advertised. The best sorts of product placement are the subtle ones, like using GMC or Ford trucks in the big chase scene in your show, or having your main characters eating McDonald's or Wendy's french fries while they talk about tracking down the latest criminal threat.
When advertising seems out of place or contrived ("The Cisco network is defending itself" or the giant Pepsi ad in the middle of the Final Fantasy movie), people may remember it, but they'll remember that it ruined whatever movie or show they were watching at the time. There are reasons why game shows don't put the logo of their sponsor in the show's set anymore (they used to in the '50s): people get tired of being force-fed advertising, and it's more effective to give them a program they'll enjoy and include products only where they belong.
Heck, The Price is Right has been one giant advertising show for decades, and that's because they make the advertising pitch a part of the game. Learn from the people who make advertising work, you brash new ad execs - don't think you can just manhandle the public because you're hip and edgy.
This project is pretty obviously targeted at simply constructing a usable radio telescope for scientists, but the reason the military is funding it is because the research and development done in designing various facets of the telescope have military applications. The military then takes the results of that research and applies it to their own terrestrial or satellite-based devices for actual weaponization.
The military does this all the time. They fund a huge array of projects, many of which don't directly have a production-level deliverable, but which extend science and engineering so that the next funded project can come up with a military-use prototype.
I wonder - is one of them a sock puppet of the other, or is ScuttleMonkey just getting kickbacks from the Beatles guy?
The privacy issues of such a rule are staggering. Suppose the police want to find out who all the pervs are on a city block. They just subpoena the local ISPs to find out who's applied for pr0n access. Not to mention what happens if the ISP gets hacked (electronically or socially) and someone manages to get a copy of the pr0n access list. I suspect a lot of legislators will eventually be exposed for their hairy palms if such a law ever got passed.
His name links to his website, so he still gets the pagerank boost. Beatles-Beatles does the same thing, and ScuttleMonkey the Sock Puppet posts his stories, too.