If one can't be bothered to observe a distinction between pseudonym and acronym then one can hardly complain about the distinction between acronym and initialism.
Mr O'Leary told the Sun: "Hotels around the world have it, so why wouldn't we?"
Because an airline seat isn't a private hotel room? If I worked at Ryanair, I'd be a little concerned that Mr. O'Leary doesn't seem to understand some of the fundamental distinctions between airplanes and hotel rooms...
I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures.
Yes, the latter was hired to produce the misleading figures, and the former selected, hired and paid for that work. Why exactly does this exonerate GE of responsibility for the images it commissioned and hosts on its site?
I'd really like to hear more about what you meant when you wrote that you "personally believe that racial bias is a natural part of the human psyche".
"Natural" suggests something that isn't contingent upon personal, social, or historical conditions. Yet the entire concept of 'race' emerged under very particular historical and social conditions. So how can a psychological awareness and reaction to racial distinctions be natural if the concept of race itself is demonstrably artificial and historically contingent?
To be clear, I'm not saying that race doesn't exist -- just that it's no more 'natural' than other socially contingent realities like, say, governments and laws. There may very well be a natural human psychological response to the recognition of difference, but it's by no means natural to identify a set of differences as racial rather than simply physical or cultural or national or anything else.
I'm sure people will want this sort of tracking technology, but their reasons for wanting it won't be good ones. "The benefits" of this technology in the shopping mall are new ways of micromarketing products, developing more detailed models of customer behavior, and finding better and better methods for extracting maximum value from shoppers at minimal cost to the marketers and retailers. Coupled with AudioSpotlight technology, ads will soon be beamed to individual consumers... and the only way it will benefit them will be by directing them to waste as little time as possible in charging as much as possible to their credit cards.
Whether people love this technology or not is hardly the point: at issue is the advancement of of panoptic power. I'm not threatened by this so much as I am aggravated that while my recognition as an individual citizen with rights to free expression seems to be diminishing exponentially, my recognition as a walking cash machine for creditors and marketers seems to be growing and intensifying just as much.
Re:That music was terrible
on
Iron Sky Trailer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Couldn't disagree more. It's 21st century film noire: the singer is far less emo than she is neo-jazz-chanteuse, and whoever produced and edited that song to fit the trailer did a fantastic job. Point for point the song matches the story outlined in the trailer, from the staticky faux-40s sound and spare instrumentation in the beginning to the clarity and haunting vocal multitracking in the middle to the concluding line about "see[ing] you again under the iron sky" just before the last shot, the song does its job perfectly. That's a difficult piece of work and it was accomplished brilliantly and professionally.
fMRIs are great: they can reveal where more blood is flowing and which parts of your brain are burning more sugar. Fabulous. But that technology doesn't support claims about being able to tell "what you're thinking." If psychology has taught us anything, it's that people can barely tell what they themselves are thinking most of the time. And even when they are asked to, they must retroactively fabricate their experiences of their changing psychological states into a coherent narrative. Imagine trying to correlate data from an fMRI with a person's necessarily unreliable subjective report of their own thoughts. How would you ever be sure that the person's self report was providing you with accurate data with which to calibrate your magical mind-reading fMRI?
I'd be willing to concede that a machine might be able to take a guess at a subject's affective state, but beyond that, I'd sooner trust a con artist to read minds reliably. The con artist, after all, can engage the person in conversation, judge body language, take note of local cultural cues, and has the ultimate advantage of being a human being who evolved with a specific capacity to judge the subjective states of other human beings.
...there is this deep psycological [sic] connection between blinking lights and technology in our culture. In the old days, computers in movies often had excessive amounts of this. But even today, you see similar things in movies. If the lights are blinking, it must be doing something! I think it addresses some deep need of ours to see some physical changes taking place to explain a computation. Basically, it makes electronics less abstract.
I think you've got a great point here, but when you say that blinking lights address "some deep need of ours" we part company. As you point out, the cultural association between flashing lights and a sense of technological sophistication is due in great part to the decisions made by filmmakers and television broadcasters who thought that audiences would be more impressed if they represented advanced technology with a dazzling visual display rather than a dull static image. Lights don't make technology any less abstract, but they do give audiences the appearance that something must be happening.
If there's any deep psychological need being addressed by extra flashing lights, it's the need to reassure ourselves that the expensive machine we just purchased must be worth its price tag since it looks so much like that cool futuristic computer we saw in the movies.
Word up. I mean, WU, you Anon. Cow..
Truth be told, though, I'm far less horrified by this needless abbreviation than I am by the crude abbreviation of vulnerable to 'vuln.' Just what could possbily inspire one to think, "You know, 'vulnerable' is more or less redundant by the time you get to that 'erable' part."
How vulg. of you. I'd go so far as to say that you must be stup. and laz. to abbrev. that way.
-Since.,
Anthroboy
"Don't think of these microchips that we're implanting in your neck as a 'tracking device'. That's a very ugly term. We prefer to think of them as 'Cookies'!"
The sad part is that it's been common practice to beta-test far more dangerous products than not-ready-for-prime-time cars... I mean, if FDA mandated "clinical-trials" aren't the pharmacological equivalent of beta-tests, what is?
I was watching the TV coverage of this tonight, and they're saying that this is the work of Gates' evil henchman, the man known as "Intellectual Property Ali".
Strange... I agree with etcpasswd's post, but your self-clarification leaves me a little uneasy. Especially the bit about:
For example, what is the advantage (evolutionarily speaking) of Homosexuality? Abortion? I can't think of any. But that does not make them bad things. That does not make them stupid things. HOWEVER, it does make the people who practice those things evolutionary dead-ends (and that is not meant to be an insult...just the simple evolutionary concept that if you don't reproduce, then you are a dead-end).
I guess your argument just seems to me to be an evolutionary teleology, and I would argue that there's not much of a point in evolving if we can't make meaning outside of evolution. It just seems a bit of an unnecessary stretch to justify central heating as an evolutionary tactic when most humans still _doesn't_ have adequate heating (or good nutrition for that matter) and reproduce just fine. (Overpopulation may, in the long run, be humanity's undoing, after all.)
And sure, homosexuality clearly doesn't directly serve evolutionary ends... that is, unless a spattering of genes predisposing people to homosexuality in a population manages to keep our population within reasonable levels. Abortion? I'll probably get flamed for this, but it doesn't seem like an evolutionary setback to develop contraceptive technologies or any other means by which women can be sexually active and select the most advantageous moment to raise children.
But my point is that there are so many better reasons to ground arguments about ethical human behavior that resorting to evolution (or natural law). Whether cloning serves evolutionary ends or not really isn't the point, is it? (Especially since our cloning other species has provided us with valuable scientific knowledge that has improved life for humans...)
Anyway, this is a relatively tiny point of disagreement, seeing as we seem to be agreeing on 99% of the argument. My apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill...
While I agree that cloning is a dumb-ass move, I would hasten to disagree with the "if it's not found in nature we shouldn't do it" argument. That's a line that gets used to justify _every_ political and ethical position: "Homosexuality's not rewarded in nature, so it's not natural, so it's not right!" "Homosexuality happens in nature, so it's natural, so it's right!" "Abortion never happens in animals, so why should we do it?"... Blah blah blah.
The truth is, few human traits appear in nature outside the human species: our degree of symbolic capacity, our dexterity, our level of toolmaking, narration... the list goes on forever. It's for this reason that I tend to cringe when I see arguments that hinge on "looking to nature" as a role model for human behavior.
Besides, isn't the prospect of transforming the Elvis Impersonation business into the Elvis Reincarnation business reason enough to discourage human cloning?
Slashdot Mirror
If one can't be bothered to observe a distinction between pseudonym and acronym then one can hardly complain about the distinction between acronym and initialism.
5) Never - ever use an acronym you'd use with your normal ISP (IP address), this WILL unmask you.
ASAP, scuba, laser, Nabisco, Esso, ISP, HTTP, USB, PDF, CYA... Who knew acronyms were so dangerous?
Mr O'Leary told the Sun: "Hotels around the world have it, so why wouldn't we?"
Because an airline seat isn't a private hotel room? If I worked at Ryanair, I'd be a little concerned that Mr. O'Leary doesn't seem to understand some of the fundamental distinctions between airplanes and hotel rooms...
Dammit, I should have never trusted that e-mail client.
I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures.
Yes, the latter was hired to produce the misleading figures, and the former selected, hired and paid for that work. Why exactly does this exonerate GE of responsibility for the images it commissioned and hosts on its site?
I'd really like to hear more about what you meant when you wrote that you "personally believe that racial bias is a natural part of the human psyche".
"Natural" suggests something that isn't contingent upon personal, social, or historical conditions. Yet the entire concept of 'race' emerged under very particular historical and social conditions. So how can a psychological awareness and reaction to racial distinctions be natural if the concept of race itself is demonstrably artificial and historically contingent?
To be clear, I'm not saying that race doesn't exist -- just that it's no more 'natural' than other socially contingent realities like, say, governments and laws. There may very well be a natural human psychological response to the recognition of difference, but it's by no means natural to identify a set of differences as racial rather than simply physical or cultural or national or anything else.
Right, and adjust my health insurance premiums accordingly to take my risky diet into account...
I'm sure people will want this sort of tracking technology, but their reasons for wanting it won't be good ones. "The benefits" of this technology in the shopping mall are new ways of micromarketing products, developing more detailed models of customer behavior, and finding better and better methods for extracting maximum value from shoppers at minimal cost to the marketers and retailers. Coupled with AudioSpotlight technology, ads will soon be beamed to individual consumers... and the only way it will benefit them will be by directing them to waste as little time as possible in charging as much as possible to their credit cards. Whether people love this technology or not is hardly the point: at issue is the advancement of of panoptic power. I'm not threatened by this so much as I am aggravated that while my recognition as an individual citizen with rights to free expression seems to be diminishing exponentially, my recognition as a walking cash machine for creditors and marketers seems to be growing and intensifying just as much.
Couldn't disagree more. It's 21st century film noire: the singer is far less emo than she is neo-jazz-chanteuse, and whoever produced and edited that song to fit the trailer did a fantastic job. Point for point the song matches the story outlined in the trailer, from the staticky faux-40s sound and spare instrumentation in the beginning to the clarity and haunting vocal multitracking in the middle to the concluding line about "see[ing] you again under the iron sky" just before the last shot, the song does its job perfectly. That's a difficult piece of work and it was accomplished brilliantly and professionally.
fMRIs are great: they can reveal where more blood is flowing and which parts of your brain are burning more sugar. Fabulous. But that technology doesn't support claims about being able to tell "what you're thinking." If psychology has taught us anything, it's that people can barely tell what they themselves are thinking most of the time. And even when they are asked to, they must retroactively fabricate their experiences of their changing psychological states into a coherent narrative. Imagine trying to correlate data from an fMRI with a person's necessarily unreliable subjective report of their own thoughts. How would you ever be sure that the person's self report was providing you with accurate data with which to calibrate your magical mind-reading fMRI?
I'd be willing to concede that a machine might be able to take a guess at a subject's affective state, but beyond that, I'd sooner trust a con artist to read minds reliably. The con artist, after all, can engage the person in conversation, judge body language, take note of local cultural cues, and has the ultimate advantage of being a human being who evolved with a specific capacity to judge the subjective states of other human beings.
And it's worth noting that even this prediction hasn't proved out. To suggest otherwise is pretty darned classist IMHO...
...there is this deep psycological [sic] connection between blinking lights and technology in our culture. In the old days, computers in movies often had excessive amounts of this. But even today, you see similar things in movies. If the lights are blinking, it must be doing something! I think it addresses some deep need of ours to see some physical changes taking place to explain a computation. Basically, it makes electronics less abstract.I think you've got a great point here, but when you say that blinking lights address "some deep need of ours" we part company. As you point out, the cultural association between flashing lights and a sense of technological sophistication is due in great part to the decisions made by filmmakers and television broadcasters who thought that audiences would be more impressed if they represented advanced technology with a dazzling visual display rather than a dull static image. Lights don't make technology any less abstract, but they do give audiences the appearance that something must be happening.
If there's any deep psychological need being addressed by extra flashing lights, it's the need to reassure ourselves that the expensive machine we just purchased must be worth its price tag since it looks so much like that cool futuristic computer we saw in the movies.
Word up. I mean, WU, you Anon. Cow.. Truth be told, though, I'm far less horrified by this needless abbreviation than I am by the crude abbreviation of vulnerable to 'vuln.' Just what could possbily inspire one to think, "You know, 'vulnerable' is more or less redundant by the time you get to that 'erable' part." How vulg. of you. I'd go so far as to say that you must be stup. and laz. to abbrev. that way. -Since., Anthroboy
"Don't think of these microchips that we're implanting in your neck as a 'tracking device'. That's a very ugly term. We prefer to think of them as 'Cookies'!"
The sad part is that it's been common practice to beta-test far more dangerous products than not-ready-for-prime-time cars... I mean, if FDA mandated "clinical-trials" aren't the pharmacological equivalent of beta-tests, what is?
I was watching the TV coverage of this tonight, and they're saying that this is the work of Gates' evil henchman, the man known as "Intellectual Property Ali".
For example, what is the advantage (evolutionarily speaking) of Homosexuality? Abortion? I can't think of any. But that does not make them bad things. That does not make them stupid things. HOWEVER, it does make the people who practice those things evolutionary dead-ends (and that is not meant to be an insult...just the simple evolutionary concept that if you don't reproduce, then you are a dead-end).
I guess your argument just seems to me to be an evolutionary teleology, and I would argue that there's not much of a point in evolving if we can't make meaning outside of evolution. It just seems a bit of an unnecessary stretch to justify central heating as an evolutionary tactic when most humans still _doesn't_ have adequate heating (or good nutrition for that matter) and reproduce just fine. (Overpopulation may, in the long run, be humanity's undoing, after all.)
And sure, homosexuality clearly doesn't directly serve evolutionary ends... that is, unless a spattering of genes predisposing people to homosexuality in a population manages to keep our population within reasonable levels. Abortion? I'll probably get flamed for this, but it doesn't seem like an evolutionary setback to develop contraceptive technologies or any other means by which women can be sexually active and select the most advantageous moment to raise children.
But my point is that there are so many better reasons to ground arguments about ethical human behavior that resorting to evolution (or natural law). Whether cloning serves evolutionary ends or not really isn't the point, is it? (Especially since our cloning other species has provided us with valuable scientific knowledge that has improved life for humans...)
Anyway, this is a relatively tiny point of disagreement, seeing as we seem to be agreeing on 99% of the argument. My apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill...
While I agree that cloning is a dumb-ass move, I would hasten to disagree with the "if it's not found in nature we shouldn't do it" argument. That's a line that gets used to justify _every_ political and ethical position: "Homosexuality's not rewarded in nature, so it's not natural, so it's not right!" "Homosexuality happens in nature, so it's natural, so it's right!" "Abortion never happens in animals, so why should we do it?" ... Blah blah blah.
The truth is, few human traits appear in nature outside the human species: our degree of symbolic capacity, our dexterity, our level of toolmaking, narration... the list goes on forever. It's for this reason that I tend to cringe when I see arguments that hinge on "looking to nature" as a role model for human behavior.
Besides, isn't the prospect of transforming the Elvis Impersonation business into the Elvis Reincarnation business reason enough to discourage human cloning?
Yeah. Besides, comparing these disks to handicapped people is an insult to all the crippled men and women who can, unlike these albums, reproduce...