Actually, this is the part that ticks me off the most about America: thinking that freedom of speech means you can swear at the neighbour's birthday party, or that some company has to carry your drivel.
In reality it's strictly about your relationship with Congress. The actual text of the first amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Basically Congress can make no law forbidding you to be a bigotted douchebag, but a company is not forced to carry your packets anyway. A private company can't violate your freedom of speech, because in respect to them you had none whatsoever in the first place.
In fact, if government forced a company to carry someone's drivel, they'd be essentially violating that company's freedom of press. It would be the government telling them what to print and/or distribute.
And possibly freedom of association too (in forcing them to be associated with some particular asshole or the views thereof), although that one isn't explicitly guaranteed in the USA anyway, only freedom of assembly is.
But false advertising hardly seems to be a way to start a relationship you'll actually enjoy.
For a start there's the aspect that you're essentially starting your relationship with a lie. It's not a way to say "let's trust each other" in the long run. Once you're aware that she lied her ass off to land what she thinks is a prize male, what else is she lying about? It's not even a way to boost confidence, as basically if she was after a generic prize male and not after someone actually matching or anything, you're nothing more than a fungible commodity.
But that's not even the most important part.
The more perverse part is that it's selecting someone whose personality is pretty much guaranteed to not match hers. A guy who's actually into camping and going fishing and traveling to exotic locations, is going to want to actually do that. That's what he's interested in, and that's what makes him happy. But if she really hates those, only put those in to seem more attractive, and is actually into watching soap operas and shopping... that's not going to be all that good a match, is it? At some point down the line it's either going to mean a lot of being alone on weekends for her and whining about how men are so insensitive as to go fishing and leave her alone, while the guy is still doing his activity solo in spite of having been mistakenly thinking that he found a girl to accompany him. Or it's going to mean her freezing her ass off in a tent on some mountain and hating every minute of it, just because she lied about it before. Or various other variants of essentially not being particularly happy with what the other's actual interests are.
On a site designed for matching interests, why not, you know, actually try to actually match interests?
If your interests are shopping for clothes, why not put that down and maybe find a guy who's also into shopping for clothes? Granted, he'll probably be gay, but still...;) Or at least someone who knows up front what he's getting into, and is prepared to resign to that fate.
Essentially, I'm reminded of The Beauty And The Beast. It's apparently actually a story which can cause women to stay in an abusive relationship, because they learned that eventually they'll change the beast. (At least according to one study.) Or even essentially look for the most fashionable beast on the block, because, hey, you can change him later. Except the beast never changes, and nagging him will just get you to see a bit more of the beast part. Usually coming at high speed at you.
In this case she's choosing to attract the kind of person which is pretty much guaranteed not to actually like the real her. It's just fishing for a different kind of beast. And if anyone is thinking that either beast will change, they're still going to have a funny surprise down the road.
Actually, this one goes even one step further and illustrates yet another aspect of what's wrong with vigilantism, namely: harm to innocent bystanders. You know, people who even the vigilante never accused of doing anything wrong.
DDOS-ing a hosted tracker somewhere, essentially can DDOS the whole colocation company. There'll be a bunch of small company servers there, a bunch of kids' blogs, some community page, maybe a couple of Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers, stuff like that. It's not even a hypothetical scenario. The Pirate Bay servers for example, as probably the most famous tracker, were hosted at such a company. And basically then everyone else there is colateral damage, even though they never did anything wrong with those servers.
DDOS-ing enough users of an ISP essentially stuffs the pipe for everyone else too, even if they never torrented even legit stuff. Maybe not completely if it's a major ISP, but still lag them majorly, and if it's essentially a cable ISP trunk that only has the max bandwidth of cable, it's possible to actually cut a whole building or city block in the suburbs off the net.
And that doesn't even have to mean just the inconvenience of living a couple of hours without lolcats or porn or WoW. In the meantime a bunch of people rely on VOIP for their phone. So they could prevent someone from calling an ambulance or the cops. It's not just got the potential to cause a little collateral damage, but actually very disproportionate collateral damage: it could cause a grandma somehwere to die, just so the fuckwits can annoy a file sharer.
To use the earlier sending-assassins-after-shoplifters analogy, it's more like sending someone to torch the whole city block down because they followed a shoplifter to that location. Even by the standards of criminal organizations, it's like torching the whole condominium down because the guy running the grocery store at ground floor didn't pay his protection money. I'm pretty sure even the mafia generally avoided something that disproportionate, if nothing else, because they were trying to not alienate the population all that much. (In fact, quite the contrary, for example Al Capone was running soup kitchens for the poor to whitewash his public image.)
While you raise a good and insightful point, I think I can even one up that, at least for the purpose of the point I was trying to make there. I was reading at one time about some poll about the first amendment, where it turned out that more Americans thought it means they can swear at a neighbour's party, but the government is perfectly allowed to tell them what not to say, than the number who knew what it actually means. So effectively most Americans thought they _don't_ have freedom of speech, and I don't see anyone proposing to revolt over that. So essentially I'm cynical that the Chinese or North Koreans or whatever would revolt over it, if their other needs were satisfied.
Not so sure about that. From what I can gather, most of the anger against the governments in Eastern Europe -- at least after the point where Stalin died and his ham-fisted brutal oppression was replaced by a more "big brother is watching you!" kind of approach -- had to do with shortages, queues to buy just about anything, etc. And to make it seem even worse, an illusion carefully maintained by western propaganda (e.g., Radio Free Europe) that basically the western world is a land of milk and honey where there is no poverty, no problems, everyone is happy, and generally it's freaking rapture on Earth.
But the point is, most people didn't care all that much about democracy or freedoms or such. Most except a few idealists were actually pretty ok with a sort of an implied "covenant" so to speak, that if you don't rock the boat too hard, the secret police will probably leave you alone. If you could give them enough food for their children and a decent life standard -- and maybe stop that propaganda machine, if you're now friends with their government and happy to let it manufacture your shoes and iPods -- I think most people could have lived just as happily without democracy or private initiative at all.
You also have to understand that after Stalin keeping them in line was more based on chilling effect than anything. Stalin's brutal purges and mass executions had been replaced with a more passive-aggressive game, where the government has a dossier on you somewhere, and it's unpredictable when, if or how it will bite you in the arse. Big brother knows if you're drinking with comrade Piotr, who swears at the government lots, and you don't know how you'll be shafted by that... maybe you'll get a one-way all-expenses-paid trip to Siberia, but maybe just your kids will never get promoted past a point, or maybe you'll just never get to travel abroad any more, or maybe nothing at all if you stop it now. That uncertainty actually seems to have worked better than the Pavlovian immediate repression that Stalin used.
The governments there also used agents provocateur big time. The more perverse implication wasn't even that that's how that dossier happens, but basically that you don't know who's one, who can you trust, and how hard a kick in the pants you can expect if you just join the first guy shaking a fist at the beloved president. If comrade Piotr can curse at communism so much and nobody did anything, hmm, maybe he's actually filing a report about your listening to him. It majorly prevented people from getting organized.
In fact it worked so well that even a major, vocal, anti-government critic like Sakharov didn't really need to be silenced. They only "exiled" him to another major and well supplied city, he still had a job, and other than a few "we're still watching you" shows of force by the police, really he was free to shoot his mouth some more. It didn't matter any more. People didn't rally around him anyway. They had been already conditioned that you don't join someone who's that vocal, because either he's an agent provocateur himself, or he's being watched and you don't flock around him like you don't flock in front of the Eye O' Sauron. Better stay out of that kind of spotlight.
My take is basically that if the USA and USSR had gotten over the Cold War (yeah, I know, unlikely) and started trading happily, and letting the Russians manufacture their Nike shoes and laptop batteries, and all, there wouldn't have been any changes at all. There would have been no need for the Glasnost, and no pent up frustration to blow.
I'll tell you what you'd do without him: be just another ignorant plant without a way for your web app to store data on a highly available database cluster (think MySQL can do it? You don't have a clue.)
Is Larry an asshole? Absolutely! Computer industry needs assholes, because nobody else knows what they are doing. And it shows. Especially here on slashdot.
1. Ah, how cute... an idiot who thinks Oracle is the first or last to implement that. That's about as cute as the idiots who think MS invented the GUI. Mommy, can we keep him?
Ever heard of someone called IBM? Yeah, they only invented SQL, have a more standard implementation than Oracle ever had, it does clusters just fine, and it runs on everything from PCs to mainframes. And it shows up in pretty much all industry benchmarks fighting for first place with Oracle for first place.
So, please. If _you_ are too stupid to know there are more alternatives than Oracle and MySQL, it's your shortcoming not mine. _You_ don't have a clue.
2. I'm not sure I even follow your broken logic. His company making a successful product excuses his being an asshole... how?`Even as defenses of amorality go, that's got to be the non sequitur of the year.
If a competent doctor turned out to be Jack The Ripper, would the former excuse the later? How and in what way?
Hurd has been so good in which way? He managed to squeeze a short term spike in profits by basically nuking the R&D budget. Essentially he's been selling the seed corn, to look like he's getting more results fast.
Exactly how would that make him the right guy for Oracle? I'm open to the possibility that that might even be the case, but please explain how. Exactly what of all he's done at HP would tip Oracle off that he's probably the right guy to recruit for the top?
Well, yes, you gotta hand it to Larry. Whether it's using his money to basically bully those criticizing a pal for his defense of overt sexual discrimination (see, eg, http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/06/28/oracles_ceo_cancels_115m_gift_to_harvard/), or rescuing a pal which was likely actually ditched for being an asshole all around and driving employee morale to new lows, it's up to Larry to don his superhero cape and come to the defense of pricks, assholes and bigots everywhere. Making the world safer for well-connected sociopaths and the ol' boys' club, one person at a time. You can practically imagine him flying away from a crime scene, wind blowing in his cape, with starry eyed housewives going, "Thank YOU Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you?";)
1. I believe that it's the law that determines if that's antitrust, not you or me.
But trying to abuse one's dominant position in one market to push into another market is the short and skinny of it.
And it's exactly what Microsoft was convicted of, since you mention MS. The short and skinny of that wasn't just that they're too big and nerds don't like it, but precisely that it actively uses its monopoly to harm competitors. E.g., that it used its de facto monopoly on the desktop to kill Novell DOS as an alternative underlying OS, to protect its position on that market, or to kill Netware when MS was trying to muscle into the browser market. That's what antitrust is about.
_If_ Google has indeed used its dominant position in the search and ad market to down-rank competitors in other markets it's trying to enter, that's _exactly_ what antitrust laws are about. Of course, it's a big if, and it yet has to be proven. But _if_ it did, then it's exactly what antitrust was supposed to prevent in the first place.
2. But somehow it's not ridiculous that you claim to not even have read something, but feel qualified to respond to it? Oh, and instead of addressing what was actually there, you pull an ad hominem fallacy yourself in that tantrum over who's in a position to tell you that and who isn't. Yeah, maybe someone should teach you elementary logic.
3. Plus, I never really got the internet troll trope of claiming victory for being too stupid to read and comprehend more than two rows. Your being a scatterbrain isn't a winning condition.
1. I just re-read your message, no, you haven't "explicitly stated" anything of the kind. And while the original may have been a simple omission, and thus excusable, trying to basically rewrite history now is kinda lame.
2. Which in turn is basically just postulating that Google is innocent. As support for Google's innocence -- after all, that's what they're hinting at when they accuse Microsoft of being behind it -- it just becomes a case of the begging the question fallacy, a.k.a., circular logic.
That may well be so, but it's irrelevant for whether it's an ad hominem or not. The key is that what's being attacked is the one saying X, instead of attacking X. While traditionally that did involve attacking a human, technically any other entity that can express an opinion or be stereotyped as holding it, can be attacked via an ad hominem. Even if technically no human is expressly attacked.
E.g., if I were to say, "our IT department is always complaining about users with too many rights breaking their servers, but that's exactly the kind of self-serving rationalization for having more power that I'd expect a corporate IT department to say", it would be an ad-hominem. Because it tries to shift the focus on who or why might say that, instead of whether their claim is true or false. Even if I'm not saying it about any particular human being, but about an entity like the IT department.
It's not a matter of mis-representing anything. The original rape analogy was just that piss-poor, in that it implied that someone convicted for rape is somehow forbidden to in turn file rape charges against someone else.
If you want less debatable examples for what's wrong with that analogy, try:
Joe Horny rapes a woman, gets rightfully sent to jail for it. On the first night he gets raped by his cell mate, let's call him Bubba Big. The original analogy implied that basically Mr Horny can't file rape charges against Mr Big. And, really, why? While you may or may not chuckle at the poetic justice in being given a taste of his own medicine, or even take the OT "an eye for an eye" view, the fact is that it wasn't a part of his sentence, and Mr Big broke the law. Why would he be above prosecution, just because the victim had once been guilty of the same crime? Two wrongs don't make a right.
Actually I'd say it's irrelevant. _If_ Google actually can be proven to manipulate the search results to hide competition, then it _is_ an antitrust violation too, regardless of who accuses them or for what reason.
You seem to add a tu quoque fallacy, a derivative of the larger two wrongs make a right fallacy, as if anything Microsoft did actually made Google less guilty. (Assuming again that actual guilt can be proven.)
Even in your example with the rape, if someone can actually be proven to have committed rape, it doesn't matter if one of the witnesses against him was himself in the past convicted for rape.
Basically as you probably heard it from your mom in school, "but X does it too" is not actually an excuse. Someone else doing a wrong too, doesn't make a right.
Where did I say I was using the one from Contact or anything. Yes, I'm using largely the version you explain there: as long as two hypotheses explain the exact same sets of measured data, go with the less complex one, leave the more complex one for when you actually have some data that the other one can't explain.
In exactly that sense, as long as the String Hypothesis doesn't have at least one testable prediction [b]of its own[/b], that can't be explained by the simpler GR and QM, it freaking fails Occam's Razor.
It doesn't mean it's _false_ and nowhere did I say it's _false_. I said until such time as it makes testable predictions of its own, it's just a _hypothesis_. Different thing from "false".
So basically, what, you made all that fuss to answer to your own strawman?
Actually, it seems to me like we don't call those grand-unified things a proper scientific theory either. As long as there are no testable predictions, and it fails Occam's Razor, it's not a theory, plain and simple. It's a hypothesis.
Yes, there is a name for a theory which hasn't yet been tested: hypothesis.
And really, as someone who's gotten tired of hearing Young Earth Creationists go "well, evolution is just a theory" and having to explain to them "yeah, but theory in science doesn't mean what you think. It means it already made testable predictions and is the best we have"... it's getting annoying to see that a whole bunch of physicists are actually using it exactly as the YECs and conspiracy theorists think: as just an untested and untestable supposition, which may or may not actually hold any water at all.
Yes, I realize that calling it a "theory" is more science-y sounding and good for your funding. But it devalues the whole idea of science for everyone. If we accept that some untested and untestable calculation is just as worthy of being called a "theory" with a straight face as GR or electromagnetism just because it's the pet supposition of some physicist, then basically why wouldn't Behe's pencils-up-the-nose ID idiocies be a "theory" too? I mean Behe _is_ a professor of biochemistry.
Call it the String Hypothesis, and you'd see a lot less complaints, basically.
You're going off the deep end, in a rant in the opposite direction.
Nothing is accomplished by ranting off parodies of your opponent.
I really _wish_ it were a parody.
- the tract is very very real, as TheRaven64 already pointed out
- the accusation that comic books actually turn children into violent juvenile delinquents also was actually very real, and in fact the main thrust of the campaign against them. The muppet mentioned in TFA actually testified before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that comics are the cause for juvenile deninquency, and actually convinced them. The hearing that William Gaines got, and which another poster quoted actually happened before the same Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.
If it helps, remember it was also roughly the same age when America also believed such stupidities as the Domino Effect, or such stupid theories as that the Americans are more creative (measured in patents!) than the Russkies (which didn't have a patent office, actually) because the Americans have more pictures in their children's books. The ideas that basically "monkey see, monkey do" and that pictures somehow have some kind of magical power over the mind of youngsters, were sadly very very real.
Why even politicians believed such things... now that's a good question. Lead water pipes, maybe?;)
- the accusation that video games are making teenagers shoot up the school... well, just listen to Jack Thompson or Joe Lieberman, really. Or at the rhetoric waved around each time some school shooting happened.
Really, I wish such things were just a parody of reality. But reality actually is that some people are that freaking stupid, and that eager to have some scape goat for everything wrong today. Whenever that "today" may actually be.
For an idea of how far back it goes... well, let's just say the main accusation that got Socrates executed was that his ideas are a corrupting influence on the youth.
Actually, it seems to me like that kind of idiots has an even bleaker view of it all.
They didn't just think that a violent comic or a violent game just "clearly it has no moral value", but rather that people and especially teenagers will mindlessly do whatever comics/games/tabletop-games/anything tells them to. Let's not forget that the book was called "Seduction Of The Innocent". And really that was the whole thrust. They think that if a 16 year old sees a comic cover where a guy with an axe is holding a woman's severed head, they'll go like mindless zombies and do a verbatim copy of the deed.
Or in more modern days that if some 16 year old spends an hour a day sniping in some FPS, next thing you know he'll climb on the school and snipe people, because he's just that mindless and unable to distinguish between reality and video games. Or that while a 17 year old may be old enough to be trusted to do that sniping (M rating is good enough there, see?) God forbid that he ever sees a boob, 'cause he's not ready for _that_ yet. He'll probably go on some rape spree than ends up with him giving the town council a facial shot. Or, really, dunno what.
And if you thought _that_ is stupid, well, at least one Chick Tract seems to be based on thinking that AD&D actually teaches children to cast real spells. But I digress.
I didn't say "more often than not". I'm just saying that they seem to be more gradual scales than many other diseases. You can put a drop of blood under a microscope and say if it has malaria or not. Either the microbe is there, or there isn't. I'm not a psychiatrist, but it seems to me like with mental conditions the scale isn't that binary. You have to decide if someone is just a little quirky or crosses the border into schizophrenia. And there _were_ cases where professionals disagreed as to whether the border had been crossed or not.
Look, I'm not saying it's not a science or anything. I'm saying that it's obviously hard stuff. It's why those people spend years in college learning their stuff, after all. Right?
Basically I'm just saying I wouldn't trust a lawyer who looked it up on Wikipedia to provide a good psychiatric diagnostic, really.
Let me explain. It's not the court's role to judge that. A bunch of housewives, plumbers, clerks and whoever else couldn't escape jury duty, not only isn't qualified to judge if an article on mental diseases is correct, it's not even their role to do that. They have to listen to some expert testimony and decide strictly based on what they've heard.
Heck, even on Wikipedia basically that's why there's a "[citation needed]" tag. John Doe reading the article should just be pointed to the actual authority which said X or Y or Z.
But anyway, if the judge or the jury or whoever has to decide that expert X is full of it, they basically need a testimony of expert or authority Y which say so. That's how the system works. The prosecution simply failed to provide such a testimony.
It doesn't matter if you simply happen to be right. It matters if you can basically support that as evidence. Not just for Wikipedia. It could be something you heard on the bus, or remember from some sketch you saw on Youtube, or is something your grandfather used to say. It may even be right. What matters is if you can make a proper piece of evidence out of it. Otherwise it's just your personal opinion.
2. Actually, on a more personal opinion note, sight unseen, I would slap the prosecutor with a fish.
Diagnosing illnesses is hard. If you just read a list of symptoms, but don't have the training or the education, well, let's just say you can conclude that you have two dozen terminal diseases right now. Mental illnesses doubly so. Even actual trained psychiatrists often disagree about a diagnostic.
Just judging someone based on a couple of phrases out of context and something you once read on Wikipedia about the DSM IV is something that idiot internet trolls do, not something I expect done in a court of law.
Basically: the moment that prosecutor had to quote anything that had to do with the DSM IV, he should have known he's just not qualified to do it. Even if the information on Wikipedia may (or may not) be correct, he is a lawyer, not a psychiatrist. Reading about it on Wikipedia doesn't make him a mental health expert, just like my reading about Star Trek on Wikipedia doesn't make me a rocket scientist. He should have found a real expert to ask about and introduce him/her as witness.
Well, it occurs to me that I wouldn't really need supersonic speeds or anything, actually. People survive motorcycle trips just fine at, say, 100mph, with just a helmet on. And that's not even particularly fast for a motorcycle.
Thing is, if you sum up the actual average speed for the airplane trip, that is dividing the distance by the total time, including:
- half an hour to an hour driving to the airport (unless you're unfortunate enough to actually live near it. They're loud)
- coming one hour early at the airport, so you can make it through the baroque security checkes in time
- 45 minutes waiting in the airplane because the retards forgot to also pack the luggage (I swear it happened more than once)
- about an hour total time at the other airport, including the waiting for the luggage and all
- driving from the other airport to wherever you actually want to be
etc
then you don't really need ridiculous speed to actually beat the airliner there, if you can go in a straight line and don't deal with road congestions. Thing is, most of the short and medium range flights aren't exactly supersonic either.
I'm pretty sure for example that for a Berlin to Vienna trip, you could actually beat the airlines if you flew in a straight line at 100mph without all those delays. Granted, it's only 325 miles, but that's kinda the point. The jetpack wouldn't be something for when you need to fly from Miami to Seattle, but if you need to do a 300-400 miles trip, and assuming that technology gets to the point where that's possible on a single gas tank, you could actually beat an airline nowadays even on a really tame speed.
Decisions, decisions... bird to the face vs risking a thrombosis in the legs after being packed like that in an airplane... I'll take the bird, if I have the choice;)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is the part that ticks me off the most about America: thinking that freedom of speech means you can swear at the neighbour's birthday party, or that some company has to carry your drivel.
In reality it's strictly about your relationship with Congress. The actual text of the first amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Basically Congress can make no law forbidding you to be a bigotted douchebag, but a company is not forced to carry your packets anyway. A private company can't violate your freedom of speech, because in respect to them you had none whatsoever in the first place.
In fact, if government forced a company to carry someone's drivel, they'd be essentially violating that company's freedom of press. It would be the government telling them what to print and/or distribute.
And possibly freedom of association too (in forcing them to be associated with some particular asshole or the views thereof), although that one isn't explicitly guaranteed in the USA anyway, only freedom of assembly is.
But false advertising hardly seems to be a way to start a relationship you'll actually enjoy.
For a start there's the aspect that you're essentially starting your relationship with a lie. It's not a way to say "let's trust each other" in the long run. Once you're aware that she lied her ass off to land what she thinks is a prize male, what else is she lying about? It's not even a way to boost confidence, as basically if she was after a generic prize male and not after someone actually matching or anything, you're nothing more than a fungible commodity.
But that's not even the most important part.
The more perverse part is that it's selecting someone whose personality is pretty much guaranteed to not match hers. A guy who's actually into camping and going fishing and traveling to exotic locations, is going to want to actually do that. That's what he's interested in, and that's what makes him happy. But if she really hates those, only put those in to seem more attractive, and is actually into watching soap operas and shopping... that's not going to be all that good a match, is it? At some point down the line it's either going to mean a lot of being alone on weekends for her and whining about how men are so insensitive as to go fishing and leave her alone, while the guy is still doing his activity solo in spite of having been mistakenly thinking that he found a girl to accompany him. Or it's going to mean her freezing her ass off in a tent on some mountain and hating every minute of it, just because she lied about it before. Or various other variants of essentially not being particularly happy with what the other's actual interests are.
On a site designed for matching interests, why not, you know, actually try to actually match interests?
If your interests are shopping for clothes, why not put that down and maybe find a guy who's also into shopping for clothes? Granted, he'll probably be gay, but still... ;) Or at least someone who knows up front what he's getting into, and is prepared to resign to that fate.
Essentially, I'm reminded of The Beauty And The Beast. It's apparently actually a story which can cause women to stay in an abusive relationship, because they learned that eventually they'll change the beast. (At least according to one study.) Or even essentially look for the most fashionable beast on the block, because, hey, you can change him later. Except the beast never changes, and nagging him will just get you to see a bit more of the beast part. Usually coming at high speed at you.
In this case she's choosing to attract the kind of person which is pretty much guaranteed not to actually like the real her. It's just fishing for a different kind of beast. And if anyone is thinking that either beast will change, they're still going to have a funny surprise down the road.
I guess a way to summarize my previous post is that this seems to be more like terrorism than just vigilantism.
Actually, this one goes even one step further and illustrates yet another aspect of what's wrong with vigilantism, namely: harm to innocent bystanders. You know, people who even the vigilante never accused of doing anything wrong.
DDOS-ing a hosted tracker somewhere, essentially can DDOS the whole colocation company. There'll be a bunch of small company servers there, a bunch of kids' blogs, some community page, maybe a couple of Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers, stuff like that. It's not even a hypothetical scenario. The Pirate Bay servers for example, as probably the most famous tracker, were hosted at such a company. And basically then everyone else there is colateral damage, even though they never did anything wrong with those servers.
DDOS-ing enough users of an ISP essentially stuffs the pipe for everyone else too, even if they never torrented even legit stuff. Maybe not completely if it's a major ISP, but still lag them majorly, and if it's essentially a cable ISP trunk that only has the max bandwidth of cable, it's possible to actually cut a whole building or city block in the suburbs off the net.
And that doesn't even have to mean just the inconvenience of living a couple of hours without lolcats or porn or WoW. In the meantime a bunch of people rely on VOIP for their phone. So they could prevent someone from calling an ambulance or the cops. It's not just got the potential to cause a little collateral damage, but actually very disproportionate collateral damage: it could cause a grandma somehwere to die, just so the fuckwits can annoy a file sharer.
To use the earlier sending-assassins-after-shoplifters analogy, it's more like sending someone to torch the whole city block down because they followed a shoplifter to that location. Even by the standards of criminal organizations, it's like torching the whole condominium down because the guy running the grocery store at ground floor didn't pay his protection money. I'm pretty sure even the mafia generally avoided something that disproportionate, if nothing else, because they were trying to not alienate the population all that much. (In fact, quite the contrary, for example Al Capone was running soup kitchens for the poor to whitewash his public image.)
Damn, so now if I hear about someone being the Gay Lord of Gayville, it may actually be about the mayor of a town in South Dakota. Spoilsport.
While you raise a good and insightful point, I think I can even one up that, at least for the purpose of the point I was trying to make there. I was reading at one time about some poll about the first amendment, where it turned out that more Americans thought it means they can swear at a neighbour's party, but the government is perfectly allowed to tell them what not to say, than the number who knew what it actually means. So effectively most Americans thought they _don't_ have freedom of speech, and I don't see anyone proposing to revolt over that. So essentially I'm cynical that the Chinese or North Koreans or whatever would revolt over it, if their other needs were satisfied.
Not so sure about that. From what I can gather, most of the anger against the governments in Eastern Europe -- at least after the point where Stalin died and his ham-fisted brutal oppression was replaced by a more "big brother is watching you!" kind of approach -- had to do with shortages, queues to buy just about anything, etc. And to make it seem even worse, an illusion carefully maintained by western propaganda (e.g., Radio Free Europe) that basically the western world is a land of milk and honey where there is no poverty, no problems, everyone is happy, and generally it's freaking rapture on Earth.
But the point is, most people didn't care all that much about democracy or freedoms or such. Most except a few idealists were actually pretty ok with a sort of an implied "covenant" so to speak, that if you don't rock the boat too hard, the secret police will probably leave you alone. If you could give them enough food for their children and a decent life standard -- and maybe stop that propaganda machine, if you're now friends with their government and happy to let it manufacture your shoes and iPods -- I think most people could have lived just as happily without democracy or private initiative at all.
You also have to understand that after Stalin keeping them in line was more based on chilling effect than anything. Stalin's brutal purges and mass executions had been replaced with a more passive-aggressive game, where the government has a dossier on you somewhere, and it's unpredictable when, if or how it will bite you in the arse. Big brother knows if you're drinking with comrade Piotr, who swears at the government lots, and you don't know how you'll be shafted by that... maybe you'll get a one-way all-expenses-paid trip to Siberia, but maybe just your kids will never get promoted past a point, or maybe you'll just never get to travel abroad any more, or maybe nothing at all if you stop it now. That uncertainty actually seems to have worked better than the Pavlovian immediate repression that Stalin used.
The governments there also used agents provocateur big time. The more perverse implication wasn't even that that's how that dossier happens, but basically that you don't know who's one, who can you trust, and how hard a kick in the pants you can expect if you just join the first guy shaking a fist at the beloved president. If comrade Piotr can curse at communism so much and nobody did anything, hmm, maybe he's actually filing a report about your listening to him. It majorly prevented people from getting organized.
In fact it worked so well that even a major, vocal, anti-government critic like Sakharov didn't really need to be silenced. They only "exiled" him to another major and well supplied city, he still had a job, and other than a few "we're still watching you" shows of force by the police, really he was free to shoot his mouth some more. It didn't matter any more. People didn't rally around him anyway. They had been already conditioned that you don't join someone who's that vocal, because either he's an agent provocateur himself, or he's being watched and you don't flock around him like you don't flock in front of the Eye O' Sauron. Better stay out of that kind of spotlight.
My take is basically that if the USA and USSR had gotten over the Cold War (yeah, I know, unlikely) and started trading happily, and letting the Russians manufacture their Nike shoes and laptop batteries, and all, there wouldn't have been any changes at all. There would have been no need for the Glasnost, and no pent up frustration to blow.
1. Ah, how cute... an idiot who thinks Oracle is the first or last to implement that. That's about as cute as the idiots who think MS invented the GUI. Mommy, can we keep him?
Ever heard of someone called IBM? Yeah, they only invented SQL, have a more standard implementation than Oracle ever had, it does clusters just fine, and it runs on everything from PCs to mainframes. And it shows up in pretty much all industry benchmarks fighting for first place with Oracle for first place.
So, please. If _you_ are too stupid to know there are more alternatives than Oracle and MySQL, it's your shortcoming not mine. _You_ don't have a clue.
2. I'm not sure I even follow your broken logic. His company making a successful product excuses his being an asshole... how?`Even as defenses of amorality go, that's got to be the non sequitur of the year.
If a competent doctor turned out to be Jack The Ripper, would the former excuse the later? How and in what way?
Hurd has been so good in which way? He managed to squeeze a short term spike in profits by basically nuking the R&D budget. Essentially he's been selling the seed corn, to look like he's getting more results fast.
Exactly how would that make him the right guy for Oracle? I'm open to the possibility that that might even be the case, but please explain how. Exactly what of all he's done at HP would tip Oracle off that he's probably the right guy to recruit for the top?
Well, yes, you gotta hand it to Larry. Whether it's using his money to basically bully those criticizing a pal for his defense of overt sexual discrimination (see, eg, http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/06/28/oracles_ceo_cancels_115m_gift_to_harvard/), or rescuing a pal which was likely actually ditched for being an asshole all around and driving employee morale to new lows, it's up to Larry to don his superhero cape and come to the defense of pricks, assholes and bigots everywhere. Making the world safer for well-connected sociopaths and the ol' boys' club, one person at a time. You can practically imagine him flying away from a crime scene, wind blowing in his cape, with starry eyed housewives going, "Thank YOU Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you?" ;)
Ok, so we can add the troll trope of essentially stomping out and slamming the door. You going for the full set or something?
1. I believe that it's the law that determines if that's antitrust, not you or me.
But trying to abuse one's dominant position in one market to push into another market is the short and skinny of it.
And it's exactly what Microsoft was convicted of, since you mention MS. The short and skinny of that wasn't just that they're too big and nerds don't like it, but precisely that it actively uses its monopoly to harm competitors. E.g., that it used its de facto monopoly on the desktop to kill Novell DOS as an alternative underlying OS, to protect its position on that market, or to kill Netware when MS was trying to muscle into the browser market. That's what antitrust is about.
_If_ Google has indeed used its dominant position in the search and ad market to down-rank competitors in other markets it's trying to enter, that's _exactly_ what antitrust laws are about. Of course, it's a big if, and it yet has to be proven. But _if_ it did, then it's exactly what antitrust was supposed to prevent in the first place.
2. But somehow it's not ridiculous that you claim to not even have read something, but feel qualified to respond to it? Oh, and instead of addressing what was actually there, you pull an ad hominem fallacy yourself in that tantrum over who's in a position to tell you that and who isn't. Yeah, maybe someone should teach you elementary logic.
3. Plus, I never really got the internet troll trope of claiming victory for being too stupid to read and comprehend more than two rows. Your being a scatterbrain isn't a winning condition.
1. I just re-read your message, no, you haven't "explicitly stated" anything of the kind. And while the original may have been a simple omission, and thus excusable, trying to basically rewrite history now is kinda lame.
2. Which in turn is basically just postulating that Google is innocent. As support for Google's innocence -- after all, that's what they're hinting at when they accuse Microsoft of being behind it -- it just becomes a case of the begging the question fallacy, a.k.a., circular logic.
That may well be so, but it's irrelevant for whether it's an ad hominem or not. The key is that what's being attacked is the one saying X, instead of attacking X. While traditionally that did involve attacking a human, technically any other entity that can express an opinion or be stereotyped as holding it, can be attacked via an ad hominem. Even if technically no human is expressly attacked.
E.g., if I were to say, "our IT department is always complaining about users with too many rights breaking their servers, but that's exactly the kind of self-serving rationalization for having more power that I'd expect a corporate IT department to say", it would be an ad-hominem. Because it tries to shift the focus on who or why might say that, instead of whether their claim is true or false. Even if I'm not saying it about any particular human being, but about an entity like the IT department.
It's not a matter of mis-representing anything. The original rape analogy was just that piss-poor, in that it implied that someone convicted for rape is somehow forbidden to in turn file rape charges against someone else.
If you want less debatable examples for what's wrong with that analogy, try:
Joe Horny rapes a woman, gets rightfully sent to jail for it. On the first night he gets raped by his cell mate, let's call him Bubba Big. The original analogy implied that basically Mr Horny can't file rape charges against Mr Big. And, really, why? While you may or may not chuckle at the poetic justice in being given a taste of his own medicine, or even take the OT "an eye for an eye" view, the fact is that it wasn't a part of his sentence, and Mr Big broke the law. Why would he be above prosecution, just because the victim had once been guilty of the same crime? Two wrongs don't make a right.
Actually I'd say it's irrelevant. _If_ Google actually can be proven to manipulate the search results to hide competition, then it _is_ an antitrust violation too, regardless of who accuses them or for what reason.
What Google seems to be doing is basically an ad hominem circumstantial fallacy, likely in an attempt to hint at the appeal to motive fallacy variety of it.
You seem to add a tu quoque fallacy, a derivative of the larger two wrongs make a right fallacy, as if anything Microsoft did actually made Google less guilty. (Assuming again that actual guilt can be proven.)
Even in your example with the rape, if someone can actually be proven to have committed rape, it doesn't matter if one of the witnesses against him was himself in the past convicted for rape.
Basically as you probably heard it from your mom in school, "but X does it too" is not actually an excuse. Someone else doing a wrong too, doesn't make a right.
Chill out, Pinky.
Where did I say I was using the one from Contact or anything. Yes, I'm using largely the version you explain there: as long as two hypotheses explain the exact same sets of measured data, go with the less complex one, leave the more complex one for when you actually have some data that the other one can't explain.
In exactly that sense, as long as the String Hypothesis doesn't have at least one testable prediction [b]of its own[/b], that can't be explained by the simpler GR and QM, it freaking fails Occam's Razor.
It doesn't mean it's _false_ and nowhere did I say it's _false_. I said until such time as it makes testable predictions of its own, it's just a _hypothesis_. Different thing from "false".
So basically, what, you made all that fuss to answer to your own strawman?
Actually, it seems to me like we don't call those grand-unified things a proper scientific theory either. As long as there are no testable predictions, and it fails Occam's Razor, it's not a theory, plain and simple. It's a hypothesis.
Yes, there is a name for a theory which hasn't yet been tested: hypothesis.
And really, as someone who's gotten tired of hearing Young Earth Creationists go "well, evolution is just a theory" and having to explain to them "yeah, but theory in science doesn't mean what you think. It means it already made testable predictions and is the best we have"... it's getting annoying to see that a whole bunch of physicists are actually using it exactly as the YECs and conspiracy theorists think: as just an untested and untestable supposition, which may or may not actually hold any water at all.
Yes, I realize that calling it a "theory" is more science-y sounding and good for your funding. But it devalues the whole idea of science for everyone. If we accept that some untested and untestable calculation is just as worthy of being called a "theory" with a straight face as GR or electromagnetism just because it's the pet supposition of some physicist, then basically why wouldn't Behe's pencils-up-the-nose ID idiocies be a "theory" too? I mean Behe _is_ a professor of biochemistry.
Call it the String Hypothesis, and you'd see a lot less complaints, basically.
One in a million occurences would happen daily if there were millions of oil rigs out there. There aren't.
I really _wish_ it were a parody.
- the tract is very very real, as TheRaven64 already pointed out
- the accusation that comic books actually turn children into violent juvenile delinquents also was actually very real, and in fact the main thrust of the campaign against them. The muppet mentioned in TFA actually testified before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that comics are the cause for juvenile deninquency, and actually convinced them. The hearing that William Gaines got, and which another poster quoted actually happened before the same Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.
If it helps, remember it was also roughly the same age when America also believed such stupidities as the Domino Effect, or such stupid theories as that the Americans are more creative (measured in patents!) than the Russkies (which didn't have a patent office, actually) because the Americans have more pictures in their children's books. The ideas that basically "monkey see, monkey do" and that pictures somehow have some kind of magical power over the mind of youngsters, were sadly very very real.
Why even politicians believed such things... now that's a good question. Lead water pipes, maybe? ;)
- the accusation that video games are making teenagers shoot up the school... well, just listen to Jack Thompson or Joe Lieberman, really. Or at the rhetoric waved around each time some school shooting happened.
Really, I wish such things were just a parody of reality. But reality actually is that some people are that freaking stupid, and that eager to have some scape goat for everything wrong today. Whenever that "today" may actually be.
For an idea of how far back it goes... well, let's just say the main accusation that got Socrates executed was that his ideas are a corrupting influence on the youth.
Actually, it seems to me like that kind of idiots has an even bleaker view of it all.
They didn't just think that a violent comic or a violent game just "clearly it has no moral value", but rather that people and especially teenagers will mindlessly do whatever comics/games/tabletop-games/anything tells them to. Let's not forget that the book was called "Seduction Of The Innocent". And really that was the whole thrust. They think that if a 16 year old sees a comic cover where a guy with an axe is holding a woman's severed head, they'll go like mindless zombies and do a verbatim copy of the deed.
Or in more modern days that if some 16 year old spends an hour a day sniping in some FPS, next thing you know he'll climb on the school and snipe people, because he's just that mindless and unable to distinguish between reality and video games. Or that while a 17 year old may be old enough to be trusted to do that sniping (M rating is good enough there, see?) God forbid that he ever sees a boob, 'cause he's not ready for _that_ yet. He'll probably go on some rape spree than ends up with him giving the town council a facial shot. Or, really, dunno what.
And if you thought _that_ is stupid, well, at least one Chick Tract seems to be based on thinking that AD&D actually teaches children to cast real spells. But I digress.
I didn't say "more often than not". I'm just saying that they seem to be more gradual scales than many other diseases. You can put a drop of blood under a microscope and say if it has malaria or not. Either the microbe is there, or there isn't. I'm not a psychiatrist, but it seems to me like with mental conditions the scale isn't that binary. You have to decide if someone is just a little quirky or crosses the border into schizophrenia. And there _were_ cases where professionals disagreed as to whether the border had been crossed or not.
Look, I'm not saying it's not a science or anything. I'm saying that it's obviously hard stuff. It's why those people spend years in college learning their stuff, after all. Right?
Basically I'm just saying I wouldn't trust a lawyer who looked it up on Wikipedia to provide a good psychiatric diagnostic, really.
1. Actually, it probably doesn't matter.
Let me explain. It's not the court's role to judge that. A bunch of housewives, plumbers, clerks and whoever else couldn't escape jury duty, not only isn't qualified to judge if an article on mental diseases is correct, it's not even their role to do that. They have to listen to some expert testimony and decide strictly based on what they've heard.
Heck, even on Wikipedia basically that's why there's a "[citation needed]" tag. John Doe reading the article should just be pointed to the actual authority which said X or Y or Z.
But anyway, if the judge or the jury or whoever has to decide that expert X is full of it, they basically need a testimony of expert or authority Y which say so. That's how the system works. The prosecution simply failed to provide such a testimony.
It doesn't matter if you simply happen to be right. It matters if you can basically support that as evidence. Not just for Wikipedia. It could be something you heard on the bus, or remember from some sketch you saw on Youtube, or is something your grandfather used to say. It may even be right. What matters is if you can make a proper piece of evidence out of it. Otherwise it's just your personal opinion.
2. Actually, on a more personal opinion note, sight unseen, I would slap the prosecutor with a fish.
Diagnosing illnesses is hard. If you just read a list of symptoms, but don't have the training or the education, well, let's just say you can conclude that you have two dozen terminal diseases right now. Mental illnesses doubly so. Even actual trained psychiatrists often disagree about a diagnostic.
Just judging someone based on a couple of phrases out of context and something you once read on Wikipedia about the DSM IV is something that idiot internet trolls do, not something I expect done in a court of law.
Basically: the moment that prosecutor had to quote anything that had to do with the DSM IV, he should have known he's just not qualified to do it. Even if the information on Wikipedia may (or may not) be correct, he is a lawyer, not a psychiatrist. Reading about it on Wikipedia doesn't make him a mental health expert, just like my reading about Star Trek on Wikipedia doesn't make me a rocket scientist. He should have found a real expert to ask about and introduce him/her as witness.
Well, it occurs to me that I wouldn't really need supersonic speeds or anything, actually. People survive motorcycle trips just fine at, say, 100mph, with just a helmet on. And that's not even particularly fast for a motorcycle.
Thing is, if you sum up the actual average speed for the airplane trip, that is dividing the distance by the total time, including:
- half an hour to an hour driving to the airport (unless you're unfortunate enough to actually live near it. They're loud)
- coming one hour early at the airport, so you can make it through the baroque security checkes in time
- 45 minutes waiting in the airplane because the retards forgot to also pack the luggage (I swear it happened more than once)
- about an hour total time at the other airport, including the waiting for the luggage and all
- driving from the other airport to wherever you actually want to be
etc
then you don't really need ridiculous speed to actually beat the airliner there, if you can go in a straight line and don't deal with road congestions. Thing is, most of the short and medium range flights aren't exactly supersonic either.
I'm pretty sure for example that for a Berlin to Vienna trip, you could actually beat the airlines if you flew in a straight line at 100mph without all those delays. Granted, it's only 325 miles, but that's kinda the point. The jetpack wouldn't be something for when you need to fly from Miami to Seattle, but if you need to do a 300-400 miles trip, and assuming that technology gets to the point where that's possible on a single gas tank, you could actually beat an airline nowadays even on a really tame speed.
Decisions, decisions... bird to the face vs risking a thrombosis in the legs after being packed like that in an airplane... I'll take the bird, if I have the choice ;)