I think it seems much more likely that what they want to do is market a device that rewards you for getting in shape, not secretly find your medical records and not let you pay.
Probably something like,
"Hey parents, tired of your kids playing too many video games and getting fat? Well now you can buy this bracelet that they will have to wear or else their xbox won't work and the bracelet will only allow them to play when they are healthy."
Seriously, though. Business is about money. MS isn't going to secretly tap into your medical records to keep you from playing their games. Whatever the reason is for their doing this, you can be sure it is profit motivated, and more than likely something along the lines of what I suggested, and nothing sinister at all.
This is just a side note, and I'm not arguing about wether or not global warming is happening here, I just don't like the methods of the poster:
The point that October was the hottest month on record for Australia is a red herring. October was also the third coldest month on record for the US. A single month tells us nothing about global climate change even when it falls on an extreme. The slashdot mods should have removed this extraneous comment before posting.
I'm going to ask you the same as the parent, what does OS have anything to do with this discussion? MS could very well be patenting some software to market to places like facebook. It might not be interested in using such a structure for marketing the OS at all. This is a very general idea that applies across anything that can be marketed. If you can use social network data to determine who the buying influencers are in a population for a given product (like milk, forget an OS) you can potentially maximize profit by sending them free stuff. That is what this is about. If this works and you could sell your technique to other companies looking to do the same thing (because you have a patent) it could be worth a fortune.
Yes, when the iPhone came out it wasn't just geeks buying it. You are missing the point. The point is, if a company can reliably identify the people who have the most influence on buying decisions of other people and send them free stuff, then they are likely to maximize profits. I was trying to give a simplified example for explanation.
My question is, why are simple linux users at the bottom of the social ladder? Are you saying there is absolutely no chance that movie stars are using linux? I don't see the correlation between social status and linux use. This isn't about who uses what operating system, its about influence in buying decisions over friends, which has absolutely nothing to do with what OS is on your computer. This patent would govern, for instance, looking at which soccer moms are most likely to convince other soccer moms to buy a particular SUV. That is what I'm asking you, where are you getting this claim that linux = bottom of social ladder.
"This will hurt no one and this was just an "article" to have an excuse to bash Microsoft about something. *yawn*"
I mildly agree; forgetting the fact that it is MS however, it might be legitimate to ask how this can be patented when it is already the system that has been in place since the dawn of marketing. (Send free stuff to people who influence buying decisions; product giveaways; etc)
We already have this sort of thing on a macro scale. Gadget magazines are sent free gadgets and many of us make buying decisions based on those gadget magazines. This is just a finer grained version of the same old system.
What scares me about this is that it would create the same kind of frenzied I-want-to-get-as-many-facebook-friends-as-possible-no-matter-if-I-know-them-or-not mentality except with profit motive behind it. The more friends you have, the more MS thinks you are an influential person, the cheaper products are for you. I think that this sort of thing would probably be quickly gamed by many people to the point of being worthless to the marketer.
This is not a challenge, just a clarification question: how exactly do linux users factor into this discussion? It seems to be about using information gleaned from social networks to adjust prices in order to maximize product adoption.
Also, I wouldn't be so certain this wouldn't be popular. If everyone in your social group wants to be like person X and MS can determine this and give something to person X for free that will cost you and the rest of the group $10, I'm not sure so many people would abstain as a protest. Or at least not more than the gain in revenue seen by the scheme.
I think of it like this: when the iPhone came out all the geeks bought them, and then convinced everyone else to buy them. Because of the cult of Apple it wasn't too hard to get tons of geeks to get them and show everyone else how cool it is. On the other hand not as many people were buying Zunes and convincing their non-geeky friends to buy them. What if MS was able to determine the people who had the most influence on their social group's technology buying habits and sent them all free Zunes? It seems like if this could be done accurately it would be an incredibly effective marketing ploy (of course, that is a big IF).
Actually, I found Objective-C to be incredibly enjoyable to code in. Once I became proficient in Cocoa it became much nicer to code in than C++ or Java or other mainstream programming languages.
It is true that Apple lets us know what the problem is. I have had cases (see somewhere above) where the rules have been provably arbitrarily applied (the same piece of code in two separate apps: one app is approved, in the other the code--that is also in the approved app--is the reason Apple won't approve the app).
For me the biggest problem is the arbitrariness of the rules as they are applied. For instance, Hewitt (mentioned in the article) has a great library called Three20 for doing a lot of common tasks. I use it in my apps for the photo browser module, since Apple seems to have forgotten to add one to the SDK.
Many of my apps use Three20 as do many in the app store, but ONE of my apps got denied because there is a function in the Three20 library that is never even called by my app or by any other method in the Three20 library that calls some unpublished APIs. Note here the problem: many apps have been approved with the same code that Apple objected to. Because the "laws" aren't applied universally the whole process is made exponentially more frustrating. (Of course I hacked out the problem function from my local version of the Three20 library and successfully resubmitted, but it is stuff like this that drives a developer nuts.)
I think that calling your boss is different than this situation. I agree that the movie store kid calling your boss and complaining about you was a stupid/worthless thing to do. In this case, however, the website admins were calling a school about repeatedly offensive material being sent from the school IP, it just happened to be an employee--it could have easily been a student. Also, when you were complaining in the video store you were acting in your personal life, not your professional one. If you used your company phone line to call the video store clerk the next day and harass them (I know you didn't do this, just hypothetically speaking), then it would have been reasonable for them to call your boss to complain.
What you do at work is as much your employer's business (if not more so) as it is yours. You don't have to work for them and they are giving you money.
Okay, I seem to not have made myself very clear. I'm concerned with justification. The basic idea is:
What do we find "enough evidence" or "justifiability" in our daily lives?
There are many answers to this, but I focus on two:
Authority and witness testimony.
One type of authority is the type that is regularly used in things like news reports. "Person A was at the scene and reported B." Then you might justifiably believe (without other evidence to the contrary) that B happened at the scene.
With testimony, we often use this as verification. Did X happen? Yes. Why? Because 5 people saw it happen and said so.
So four people wrote about the events surrounding Christ. That is witness testimony. The question you have to ask yourself is, "do you believe they were telling the truth?" Because their testimony is no different than other historical witnesses.
The point about Caesar is just a side note. The witnesses writing about Christ claim to have been writing shortly after he died. The earliest known manuscripts of their writing would then come about 100 to 200 years after their death. Is this a problem? I think not. The reason is that we easily believe the documents that speak about the existence of Julius Caesar, only the earliest documents talking about Caesar come much later, like 1000 years after his death. The point here is that we can rule out the time factor as an argument against the witness of the early church writings, so if you want to argue against their witness, you'll have to use other evidence.
So, I'm not even saying you can't use other evidence, just trying to rule out some of the usual inane arguments to set the stage for real debate.
By the way, I don't think science controls nature, it reports on it.
"The fact of the matter is that it is not whether or not an individual knows about a topic that validates it."
This is and isn't true. Each one of us has justification for our beliefs, and for any of us to hold a belief with invalid justification means that we are in a sense, crazy. But that is neither here nor there, the point I'm making is that authority IS a justification for belief. Witness testimony IS a justification for belief. Witness testimony may be the end of our verifiability, for instance, if the murder weapon is destroyed we may have to rely solely on witness testimony. The witness testimony IS the verification. So it may be fuzzily verifiable, but it is verifiable. Similarly, if many witnesses have written about what you might call a "religious" event, your reason for assuming they are lying is simply that you've already decided they are lying, not because you have some other evidence to the contrary. Their testimony IS the verifiability. Your job is to say why you would disbelieve witness testimony. Either they are telling the truth or they aren't, and the general assumption for a disparate group of witnesses telling roughly the same story is that they are probably telling the truth. I say roughly because if they told exactly the same story you might be able to assume that they made it up and are got their stories straight before hand. Regardless of whether you believe them or not, anyway, they are a source of authority on the subject in that they claim to have been their and are reporting on what they saw.
Of course you are correct that my not knowing something to be true does not make it false. I think you are wrong on your next line, however, "What validates it is its capacity to be verified or falsified." Validation does not come from verifiability, a valid argument is one where the conclusion follows from the premises. I can make valid arguments that are completely unverifiable if I just assume crazy unverifiable premises. The validity comes from using valid argument forms to recombine premises and to come up with a conclusion. I think what you are talking about is simply that the truth of something is not determined by whether it is known to be true or not. This is correct, but immaterial to my argument.
The point with E=mc^2 is not that the claim isn't verifiable, but again, the point has to do with justification. Am I justified in believing E=mc^2 even though I haven't read Einstein's paper? I think so. I've been told by authority that I consider reliable that it is true, and the original point of my post stands, this is often enough.
Perhaps I muddied my argument a little when I wrote it. The basic form is this: we believe witness testimony and use it as a verification of truth. We also believe authority. One type of authority is when someone says, "I was there and I saw this." Then based on this testimony we tend to believe that "this" happened "there." Christianity has witness testimony--that is its verification. The argument is necessarily, then, whether the witnesses were telling the truth or not. That is where I think there can be discussion.
You're missing the point. The point is normal people don't learn what the experts know. You COULD try to learn a lot more about the documents that tell us Julius Caesar existed, but you don't. You rely on authority. Furthermore, you believe that a bunch of documents written more than 1000 years after the supposed Julius Caesar died are telling the truth. The point is, why do you believe these documents and refuse to believe that people writing only 100-200 years after an even are telling the truth? What reason do you have to doubt the one and not the other?
Sure I could read a book and learn a lot more about E=MC^2. The point is, most of us don't. In fact, most people aren't scientists. What most of us rely on is exactly the same sort of authority that religion tends ot be based on. You are completely right that science is falsifiable, but I'm not talking about what the scientists do, I'm talking about what normal people actually do in their day to day lives. I am probably never going to learn more about why E=MC^2 because it isn't my field and I don't have time, so I take it purely on authority as do most people.
In other words science often doesn't bother with what "constitutes a valid proof," either. In fact it is necessary for doing science that we allow a comfortable level of uncertainty.
Be careful when you talk about rigorous proof. Almost nothing in science is a rigorous proof. Science is simply philosophical (and not mathematical) induction. In 99.99999% of all cases observed this has held true therefore we believe it to be true. This is not a rigorous proof. Rigorous proof is almost exclusive to the realm of mathematics which proves things beyond a shadow of a doubt. Any "scientist" who believes what he does is proving things has lost the ability to do science since science requires questioning all assumptions, including the previously held results.
Remember that at one time Science said the earth was the center of the universe and there were scientific "proofs" for this. We scientists should NEVER be so arrogant as to think we've figured out what's going on. All we can ever do is come up with a reasonable explanation of currently observed phenomena until a conflicting observation comes up.
Incorrect. Science is necessary hindered by observability. Lack of observability is not a proof of non-existance. For instance, you might believe aliens exist even though we have never observed them. By your reasoning, only the things we can see, touch, feel, taste, etc (including the use of our instruments) exist and nothing else. You then fall prey to all sorts of philosophical problems like how do you know the world behind you exists when you aren't actually observing it?
And yet we continually believe the "questionable testimonies" of people for almost all of our other knowledge. How do you know E=MC^2? Did you figure it out yourself, or did someone in authority tell you it was true? How do we know Abraham Lincoln was a president of the US? Did you see him become president? Or did you rely on the authority of some written documents to tell you that he was? How do we know Julius Caesar was an emperor of Rome? Where you there or are you relying on documents the earliest of which come from around 1000AD? How do you know that person A murdered person B even though you haven't found the murder weapon? Is it because you performed some scientific test to determine it or is it because the bag lady across the street and said she saw him enter the apartment just before it happened and the neighbor said he saw him leave with a bloody knife?
Religion has all the evidence that everything else we rely on has. You simply make the assumption that religion is false and then you are able to deny the testimony of witnesses (by calling them suspect) simply because of your assumption. Remove that assumption and the stories suddenly corroborate much more than is comfortable.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that cmdrTaco?
I think it seems much more likely that what they want to do is market a device that rewards you for getting in shape, not secretly find your medical records and not let you pay.
Probably something like,
"Hey parents, tired of your kids playing too many video games and getting fat? Well now you can buy this bracelet that they will have to wear or else their xbox won't work and the bracelet will only allow them to play when they are healthy."
Seriously, though. Business is about money. MS isn't going to secretly tap into your medical records to keep you from playing their games. Whatever the reason is for their doing this, you can be sure it is profit motivated, and more than likely something along the lines of what I suggested, and nothing sinister at all.
This is just a side note, and I'm not arguing about wether or not global warming is happening here, I just don't like the methods of the poster:
The point that October was the hottest month on record for Australia is a red herring. October was also the third coldest month on record for the US. A single month tells us nothing about global climate change even when it falls on an extreme. The slashdot mods should have removed this extraneous comment before posting.
"Sending free stuff to the press isn't purely a thing of gadget and software markets, it's been around for quite a long time before that."
True, I was just giving an example.
I'm going to ask you the same as the parent, what does OS have anything to do with this discussion? MS could very well be patenting some software to market to places like facebook. It might not be interested in using such a structure for marketing the OS at all. This is a very general idea that applies across anything that can be marketed. If you can use social network data to determine who the buying influencers are in a population for a given product (like milk, forget an OS) you can potentially maximize profit by sending them free stuff. That is what this is about. If this works and you could sell your technique to other companies looking to do the same thing (because you have a patent) it could be worth a fortune.
Yes, when the iPhone came out it wasn't just geeks buying it. You are missing the point. The point is, if a company can reliably identify the people who have the most influence on buying decisions of other people and send them free stuff, then they are likely to maximize profits. I was trying to give a simplified example for explanation.
My question is, why are simple linux users at the bottom of the social ladder? Are you saying there is absolutely no chance that movie stars are using linux? I don't see the correlation between social status and linux use. This isn't about who uses what operating system, its about influence in buying decisions over friends, which has absolutely nothing to do with what OS is on your computer. This patent would govern, for instance, looking at which soccer moms are most likely to convince other soccer moms to buy a particular SUV. That is what I'm asking you, where are you getting this claim that linux = bottom of social ladder.
"This will hurt no one and this was just an "article" to have an excuse to bash Microsoft about something. *yawn*"
I mildly agree; forgetting the fact that it is MS however, it might be legitimate to ask how this can be patented when it is already the system that has been in place since the dawn of marketing. (Send free stuff to people who influence buying decisions; product giveaways; etc)
We already have this sort of thing on a macro scale. Gadget magazines are sent free gadgets and many of us make buying decisions based on those gadget magazines. This is just a finer grained version of the same old system.
What scares me about this is that it would create the same kind of frenzied I-want-to-get-as-many-facebook-friends-as-possible-no-matter-if-I-know-them-or-not mentality except with profit motive behind it. The more friends you have, the more MS thinks you are an influential person, the cheaper products are for you. I think that this sort of thing would probably be quickly gamed by many people to the point of being worthless to the marketer.
This is not a challenge, just a clarification question: how exactly do linux users factor into this discussion? It seems to be about using information gleaned from social networks to adjust prices in order to maximize product adoption. Also, I wouldn't be so certain this wouldn't be popular. If everyone in your social group wants to be like person X and MS can determine this and give something to person X for free that will cost you and the rest of the group $10, I'm not sure so many people would abstain as a protest. Or at least not more than the gain in revenue seen by the scheme. I think of it like this: when the iPhone came out all the geeks bought them, and then convinced everyone else to buy them. Because of the cult of Apple it wasn't too hard to get tons of geeks to get them and show everyone else how cool it is. On the other hand not as many people were buying Zunes and convincing their non-geeky friends to buy them. What if MS was able to determine the people who had the most influence on their social group's technology buying habits and sent them all free Zunes? It seems like if this could be done accurately it would be an incredibly effective marketing ploy (of course, that is a big IF).
Actually, I found Objective-C to be incredibly enjoyable to code in. Once I became proficient in Cocoa it became much nicer to code in than C++ or Java or other mainstream programming languages.
It is true that Apple lets us know what the problem is. I have had cases (see somewhere above) where the rules have been provably arbitrarily applied (the same piece of code in two separate apps: one app is approved, in the other the code--that is also in the approved app--is the reason Apple won't approve the app).
For me the biggest problem is the arbitrariness of the rules as they are applied. For instance, Hewitt (mentioned in the article) has a great library called Three20 for doing a lot of common tasks. I use it in my apps for the photo browser module, since Apple seems to have forgotten to add one to the SDK.
Many of my apps use Three20 as do many in the app store, but ONE of my apps got denied because there is a function in the Three20 library that is never even called by my app or by any other method in the Three20 library that calls some unpublished APIs. Note here the problem: many apps have been approved with the same code that Apple objected to. Because the "laws" aren't applied universally the whole process is made exponentially more frustrating. (Of course I hacked out the problem function from my local version of the Three20 library and successfully resubmitted, but it is stuff like this that drives a developer nuts.)
I think that calling your boss is different than this situation. I agree that the movie store kid calling your boss and complaining about you was a stupid/worthless thing to do. In this case, however, the website admins were calling a school about repeatedly offensive material being sent from the school IP, it just happened to be an employee--it could have easily been a student. Also, when you were complaining in the video store you were acting in your personal life, not your professional one. If you used your company phone line to call the video store clerk the next day and harass them (I know you didn't do this, just hypothetically speaking), then it would have been reasonable for them to call your boss to complain.
What you do at work is as much your employer's business (if not more so) as it is yours. You don't have to work for them and they are giving you money.
Okay, I seem to not have made myself very clear. I'm concerned with justification. The basic idea is:
What do we find "enough evidence" or "justifiability" in our daily lives?
There are many answers to this, but I focus on two:
Authority and witness testimony.
One type of authority is the type that is regularly used in things like news reports. "Person A was at the scene and reported B." Then you might justifiably believe (without other evidence to the contrary) that B happened at the scene.
With testimony, we often use this as verification. Did X happen? Yes. Why? Because 5 people saw it happen and said so.
So four people wrote about the events surrounding Christ. That is witness testimony. The question you have to ask yourself is, "do you believe they were telling the truth?" Because their testimony is no different than other historical witnesses.
The point about Caesar is just a side note. The witnesses writing about Christ claim to have been writing shortly after he died. The earliest known manuscripts of their writing would then come about 100 to 200 years after their death. Is this a problem? I think not. The reason is that we easily believe the documents that speak about the existence of Julius Caesar, only the earliest documents talking about Caesar come much later, like 1000 years after his death. The point here is that we can rule out the time factor as an argument against the witness of the early church writings, so if you want to argue against their witness, you'll have to use other evidence.
So, I'm not even saying you can't use other evidence, just trying to rule out some of the usual inane arguments to set the stage for real debate.
By the way, I don't think science controls nature, it reports on it.
"The fact of the matter is that it is not whether or not an individual knows about a topic that validates it."
This is and isn't true. Each one of us has justification for our beliefs, and for any of us to hold a belief with invalid justification means that we are in a sense, crazy. But that is neither here nor there, the point I'm making is that authority IS a justification for belief. Witness testimony IS a justification for belief. Witness testimony may be the end of our verifiability, for instance, if the murder weapon is destroyed we may have to rely solely on witness testimony. The witness testimony IS the verification. So it may be fuzzily verifiable, but it is verifiable. Similarly, if many witnesses have written about what you might call a "religious" event, your reason for assuming they are lying is simply that you've already decided they are lying, not because you have some other evidence to the contrary. Their testimony IS the verifiability. Your job is to say why you would disbelieve witness testimony. Either they are telling the truth or they aren't, and the general assumption for a disparate group of witnesses telling roughly the same story is that they are probably telling the truth. I say roughly because if they told exactly the same story you might be able to assume that they made it up and are got their stories straight before hand. Regardless of whether you believe them or not, anyway, they are a source of authority on the subject in that they claim to have been their and are reporting on what they saw.
Of course you are correct that my not knowing something to be true does not make it false. I think you are wrong on your next line, however, "What validates it is its capacity to be verified or falsified." Validation does not come from verifiability, a valid argument is one where the conclusion follows from the premises. I can make valid arguments that are completely unverifiable if I just assume crazy unverifiable premises. The validity comes from using valid argument forms to recombine premises and to come up with a conclusion. I think what you are talking about is simply that the truth of something is not determined by whether it is known to be true or not. This is correct, but immaterial to my argument.
The point with E=mc^2 is not that the claim isn't verifiable, but again, the point has to do with justification. Am I justified in believing E=mc^2 even though I haven't read Einstein's paper? I think so. I've been told by authority that I consider reliable that it is true, and the original point of my post stands, this is often enough.
Perhaps I muddied my argument a little when I wrote it. The basic form is this: we believe witness testimony and use it as a verification of truth. We also believe authority. One type of authority is when someone says, "I was there and I saw this." Then based on this testimony we tend to believe that "this" happened "there." Christianity has witness testimony--that is its verification. The argument is necessarily, then, whether the witnesses were telling the truth or not. That is where I think there can be discussion.
You're missing the point. The point is normal people don't learn what the experts know. You COULD try to learn a lot more about the documents that tell us Julius Caesar existed, but you don't. You rely on authority. Furthermore, you believe that a bunch of documents written more than 1000 years after the supposed Julius Caesar died are telling the truth. The point is, why do you believe these documents and refuse to believe that people writing only 100-200 years after an even are telling the truth? What reason do you have to doubt the one and not the other?
Sure I could read a book and learn a lot more about E=MC^2. The point is, most of us don't. In fact, most people aren't scientists. What most of us rely on is exactly the same sort of authority that religion tends ot be based on. You are completely right that science is falsifiable, but I'm not talking about what the scientists do, I'm talking about what normal people actually do in their day to day lives. I am probably never going to learn more about why E=MC^2 because it isn't my field and I don't have time, so I take it purely on authority as do most people.
In other words science often doesn't bother with what "constitutes a valid proof," either. In fact it is necessary for doing science that we allow a comfortable level of uncertainty.
From Wikipedia:
Church membership in 2007 was 1.147 billion people,[207] increasing from the 1950 figure of 437 million[208] and the 1970 figure of 654 million.[209]
Definitely leaving in droves.
And hey, I'm not Roman Catholic, but get your facts straight.
Sweet deal. I'll be checking that out, thanks.
In droves, huh? Reference, please?
Be careful when you talk about rigorous proof. Almost nothing in science is a rigorous proof. Science is simply philosophical (and not mathematical) induction. In 99.99999% of all cases observed this has held true therefore we believe it to be true. This is not a rigorous proof. Rigorous proof is almost exclusive to the realm of mathematics which proves things beyond a shadow of a doubt. Any "scientist" who believes what he does is proving things has lost the ability to do science since science requires questioning all assumptions, including the previously held results.
Remember that at one time Science said the earth was the center of the universe and there were scientific "proofs" for this. We scientists should NEVER be so arrogant as to think we've figured out what's going on. All we can ever do is come up with a reasonable explanation of currently observed phenomena until a conflicting observation comes up.
Incorrect. Science is necessary hindered by observability. Lack of observability is not a proof of non-existance. For instance, you might believe aliens exist even though we have never observed them. By your reasoning, only the things we can see, touch, feel, taste, etc (including the use of our instruments) exist and nothing else. You then fall prey to all sorts of philosophical problems like how do you know the world behind you exists when you aren't actually observing it?
And yet we continually believe the "questionable testimonies" of people for almost all of our other knowledge. How do you know E=MC^2? Did you figure it out yourself, or did someone in authority tell you it was true? How do we know Abraham Lincoln was a president of the US? Did you see him become president? Or did you rely on the authority of some written documents to tell you that he was? How do we know Julius Caesar was an emperor of Rome? Where you there or are you relying on documents the earliest of which come from around 1000AD? How do you know that person A murdered person B even though you haven't found the murder weapon? Is it because you performed some scientific test to determine it or is it because the bag lady across the street and said she saw him enter the apartment just before it happened and the neighbor said he saw him leave with a bloody knife?
Religion has all the evidence that everything else we rely on has. You simply make the assumption that religion is false and then you are able to deny the testimony of witnesses (by calling them suspect) simply because of your assumption. Remove that assumption and the stories suddenly corroborate much more than is comfortable.