I find Americans to be, on balance, very intelligent and well-informed. They tend to hold views similar to those of intelligent, well-informed people of other countries, with two exceptions:
(1) Gun control. Way more smart Americans believe in the right to carry a weapon than smart non-Americans. Most of the rest of the Western world thinks the US is kind of insane on this issue, actually.
(2) Global warming. It is near-universally accepted outside the US that this is happening, and that humankind is responsible. But many smart Americans doubt this.
I resist the urge to inject my own views here because I simply wanted to point this out. It's odd.
Well, what you've got there is an opinion. It may be true or not--my point is simply that it's not proved by this guy's research. This isn't denial, it's the scientific method, where we refrain from leaping to conclusions without supporting evidence.
From the article, all he found is that most of the time Microsoft, Norton, Symantec, and Jasc are mentioned in 60 particular IRC channels, it's in relation to illegally downloading their products.
He didn't look at the vast majority of IRC channels, and of those he did, he didn't consider the vast majority of the traffic within them -- just those four words. Additionally, he failed to observe any distinction between engaging in an illegal activity and simply mentioning it.
This is a bit like visiting the 60 largest train stations, measuring how many times the word "score" is used in relation to illegal activity, and concluding that 99.9% of the world's public transport users are drug trafficking.
Oh man, this has been bugging me for about ten years. It seems that we already have a system with a built-in method of measuring traffic load via the sensors and a way to control that traffic via red-amber-green lights.
What we currently do with this system is impose on it an artificial set of rules that makes the lights change in a way that is smarter than just alternating every X seconds. But no matter how sophisticated we get, the whole approach is flawed in the same way that a spam filter with a fixed, unchanging set of rules grows less and less effective over time.
The article talks about partially "adaptive" traffic lights, but why not go all the way? I say unleash a bunch of totally Darinistic code modules on traffic lights. Have them mutate, and each generation the ones that score well (by reducing the traffic load they can measure) survive while the rest die off.
Clearly in the beginning the code modules would suck, but then you get a traffic system that is genuinely inhumanly efficient, and adapts to changing conditions. Why can't we have that?
This is what I think about every time I sit at an intersection with nobody coming in the other direction. Am I crazy?
Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, it's a trade-off: we want private companies to invest billions of dollars to develop medicines we need, but they'll only do so if there's the potential for profit. If there isn't, capital will flow out of drug companies's R&D budgets and into car manufacturers or something.
Governments that want to make a new life-saving drug available to all, not just those who can afford it, are free to subsidize it. Citizens and governments in wealthy countries who want to make the drugs available to citizens of poor countries can likewise fund it.
It's easy to paint a company as horrible because it wants to charge a lot of money for a life-saving new treatment. But in many cases that treatment wouldn't exist if the company couldn't make money from it.
Okay, a troll is going to get un-modded because I'm posting this, but it needs to be said.
A central component of the War on Terrorism is the battle for the hearts and minds of non-Americans. There are 6 billion people in the world, 96% living outside the USA. A tiny number are willing to kill themselves in order to inflict damage on Americans, but these people only exist because they are fed and sustained by a larger (although still small) number who are angry or deeply mistrustful of the US.
These people matter. If we alienate them, if we feed their numbers, if we give them reason after reason to hate or doubt the US, their numbers will grow.
Many parts of the world are awash with anti-American conspiracy theories. The US attacked itself on Sept 11, for example, in order to invade Iraq and seize its oil. Such madness is fed when it turns out that US did invade Iraq on a false pretext. Now consider: you live in Iran or Indonesia and suddenly your country is blocked from seeing what George Bush is promising to do when he gets back into office.
I can't imagine a single good reason for Bush to block the world from his web site. But I can imagine thousands of already mistrustful people around the world feeding their conspiracy theories over it.
Is their opinion irrelevant? No, quite the opposite. The success or failure of the War on Terrorism depends on bringing these people into the fold. Not shutting them out.
Voting just lends legitimacy to an illegitimate system.
Not voting means elections are decided by people who are not you. If everyone insightful enough to perceive flaws in the electoral system doesn't vote, you get a government elected by the dumbest, most apathetic, least observant, and most single-minded.
If you don't like the system--and sure, there's plenty not to like--then agitate to change it. There are many sensible ways to do this. Abdicating your right to be heard isn't one of them.
It's not contrived. That 33% split is exactly where things would head in an IRV system.
Well, I live in a country that uses IRV for every State and Federal election (Australia), and I can tell you it's just not like that. The two major parties attract around 40% of the primary vote each and the rest is split between many much smaller parties.
I'm not saying IRV is the best system ever invented. But I object to how people point to small imperfections in IRV as reasons to stick with a system that is far inferior to it.
What I find bizarre about criticism of IRV is that it concentrates on a few very mild quirks that only ever arise in odd, carefully constructed hypothetical situations -- like your example where you have three candidates who each attract almost exactly 33.3% of the primary vote. Because IRV only provides small or arguable benefits in these contrived situations, you say it's "no good."
So instead you stick with a voting system that quite clearly has one giant problem: vote-splitting. It is astonishing to me (an Australian) that Americans tolerate a system in which if two candidates support the same ideals, it's more likely that a third, less preferred candidate will win. This isn't a quirk--it's a major defect that frequently affects (even decides!) US Presidential elections.
You're right about Audi, but your explanation here seems pretty unlikely. It requires that:
1. The driver was so profoundly stupid that he drove for 100 miles before realizing he was pressing the accelerator instead of the brake. (That is, this is not like the Audi split-second acceleration.)
2. During that hour, the police never said, "Please check that you are not pressing the accelerator, sir."
3. When the driver eventually managed to stop the car by braking, he failed to realize that when he did so he removed his foot from the accelerator (a position in which, according to your explanation, it had been locked solid for the last hour).
I certainly acknowledge there are stupid drivers out there, but it seems improbable that someone this stupid could have reached adulthood without strangling himself while trying to tie his shoelaces or something.
Even if you're right about the techy audience, though (and I think geeks are far outnumbered by school students), that doesn't explain why I'm seeing the Mozilla/Firefox share steadily increasing at the expense of IE.
I run two web sites, one of which gets 3 million hits per day, neither of which are tech-oriented, and have seen very similar results to W3schools. In January, 7% Firefox/Mozilla and 85% IE. In August, 15% Firefox/Mozilla and 74% IE.
Since when does something need to have a "legitimate reason" to be allowed? Seriously, don't free societies allow everything unless there's a really good reason for prohibiting it? Yet I see several "insightful" posts here arguing that unless this service can justify why it's worthy, it should be banned.
I'm sure advertisers think there's no legitimate reason for Firefox to have pop-up blocking, and Sony thinks there's no legitimate reason for PlayStation owners to have mod chips, and so on.
As for saying death threats "may be going a bit far"... well, yeah.
Hmm, I dunno about that. If players are operating within a system that rewards self-interested behavior over morals, isn't it a little disingenuous to get upset when selfish behavior occurs? I'm not talking about actions that violate fundamental moral principles ("Sure I shot that guy, but he had a dollar"), but about everyday situations such as the one in this topic: Microsoft deciding to favor proprietry protocols over standards.
Then there's the question of what constitutes moral behavior for corporations (an issue dear to my heart). I do agree that recognizing corporations as people has disturbing implications. I don't understand, though, why that "a machine-like human creation... should be held to even higher moral standards than real humans." I can't see the ethical justification for forcing someone (or something) else to comply with a moral code stricter than you're willing to follow yourself. In fact, I think that's a dangerous sentiment.
I tend to believe Milton Friedman's argument that corporations do and should have no further ethical obligation than to pursue profit within legal rules. First there's the social good argument: that corporations end up doing more for society by efficiently pursuing profit than by trying to make the world a better place. Second there's the fact that, as you say, corporations are effectively machines. I don't want society's ethical dilemmas being resolved by machines; ethics is for human beings.
In fact, I think that expecting ethics from corporations is buying into the whole problem where we think they're real people. If they have ethics, then they must be able to hold opinions, right? Even political opinions? So should they be able to publicly express these? Should they vote? Better to stay clear of that whole area and treat them as the machines they are, I feel.
But just to make all that redundant, and to return to my original point: if the system is going to punish moral behavior and reward self-interested behavior, selfishness is impossible to eradicate. You need 100% co-operation between all the players, all the time. We live in an imperfect world, where capitalism rules because it harnesses the power of self-interest and socialism fails because it tries to suppress it. In practical terms, I think society will be improved by fixing the behavioral incentives built into our systems, not by frowning at behavior the systems encourage, but we disapprove of.
Also, my argument in the grandparent post was not that a Darwinistic system absolves players of any blame for selfish behavior, but rather that selfish behavior is generated by the system, not the faulty morals of the players. That is, I said that just because a player acts selfishly doesn't mean they're bad, and you replied that just because they're selfish doesn't mean they're not bad. So we haven't actually hit a point of disagreement there yet.:)
Like your site btw! I'm always trying to introduce Vegemite to Americans. Hasn't worked once so far.
quantum computing scares me to some extent. Things like PGP encryption and other very sensitive operations could, quite literally overnight, be blown away and dangerously shift power quickly.
But on the plus side, we will finally be able to play Doom 3 on "Ultra High" detail.
Oh, there's a backdoor all right. The government passed a law that made it illegal for companies to spam, but not political parties or charities.
So the Prime Minister is allowed to spam. However, in this case, he hired a company to spam for him -- so it might be illegal. That's why the Opposition is calling for an inquiry.
Here is the original report, by the way -- the one linked to by the Slashdot story just reports what this one said.
And you might be interested to know that this is the company that did the spamming.
That's a really good point. However, when you're talking about the "the dominant player" in general, as opposed to any one player in particular, I think self-interested behavior is simply to be expected. Because that's in large part why they're dominant: they look after their own interests.
So, to use your example, if minor demons competed against each other in Hell to be the Devil, the kinder and more generous demons would likely get beaten out by the more vicious ones. Similarly (ahem), corporations that place society's interests above their own are, unfortunately, usually cleaned up by those who don't, and nations that don't ruthlessly pursue their own interests tend to lose influence to those that do.
It's very rarely in the interests of a dominant entity to engage with a group like the UN. Whether you're talking about international law and the United States, or IT standards and Microsoft, you have the group wanting everyone to play by the same rules and the dominant player wanting to leverage its advantages.
Doesn't mean that Microsoft (or the US) is bad; that's just logical behavior for an entity in a dominant position.
Now I've just drawn a comparison between the US and Microsoft, so I know my karma's shot to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
In British English, groups like corporations are plural; in US English they're singular.
I find Americans to be, on balance, very intelligent and well-informed. They tend to hold views similar to those of intelligent, well-informed people of other countries, with two exceptions:
(1) Gun control. Way more smart Americans believe in the right to carry a weapon than smart non-Americans. Most of the rest of the Western world thinks the US is kind of insane on this issue, actually.
(2) Global warming. It is near-universally accepted outside the US that this is happening, and that humankind is responsible. But many smart Americans doubt this.
I resist the urge to inject my own views here because I simply wanted to point this out. It's odd.
Well, what you've got there is an opinion. It may be true or not--my point is simply that it's not proved by this guy's research. This isn't denial, it's the scientific method, where we refrain from leaping to conclusions without supporting evidence.
From the article, all he found is that most of the time Microsoft, Norton, Symantec, and Jasc are mentioned in 60 particular IRC channels, it's in relation to illegally downloading their products.
He didn't look at the vast majority of IRC channels, and of those he did, he didn't consider the vast majority of the traffic within them -- just those four words. Additionally, he failed to observe any distinction between engaging in an illegal activity and simply mentioning it.
This is a bit like visiting the 60 largest train stations, measuring how many times the word "score" is used in relation to illegal activity, and concluding that 99.9% of the world's public transport users are drug trafficking.
Oh man, this has been bugging me for about ten years. It seems that we already have a system with a built-in method of measuring traffic load via the sensors and a way to control that traffic via red-amber-green lights.
What we currently do with this system is impose on it an artificial set of rules that makes the lights change in a way that is smarter than just alternating every X seconds. But no matter how sophisticated we get, the whole approach is flawed in the same way that a spam filter with a fixed, unchanging set of rules grows less and less effective over time.
The article talks about partially "adaptive" traffic lights, but why not go all the way? I say unleash a bunch of totally Darinistic code modules on traffic lights. Have them mutate, and each generation the ones that score well (by reducing the traffic load they can measure) survive while the rest die off.
Clearly in the beginning the code modules would suck, but then you get a traffic system that is genuinely inhumanly efficient, and adapts to changing conditions. Why can't we have that?
This is what I think about every time I sit at an intersection with nobody coming in the other direction. Am I crazy?
Well, it's a trade-off: we want private companies to invest billions of dollars to develop medicines we need, but they'll only do so if there's the potential for profit. If there isn't, capital will flow out of drug companies's R&D budgets and into car manufacturers or something.
Governments that want to make a new life-saving drug available to all, not just those who can afford it, are free to subsidize it. Citizens and governments in wealthy countries who want to make the drugs available to citizens of poor countries can likewise fund it.
It's easy to paint a company as horrible because it wants to charge a lot of money for a life-saving new treatment. But in many cases that treatment wouldn't exist if the company couldn't make money from it.
Shouldn't that be: "What's going on in the USA?"
Okay, a troll is going to get un-modded because I'm posting this, but it needs to be said.
A central component of the War on Terrorism is the battle for the hearts and minds of non-Americans. There are 6 billion people in the world, 96% living outside the USA. A tiny number are willing to kill themselves in order to inflict damage on Americans, but these people only exist because they are fed and sustained by a larger (although still small) number who are angry or deeply mistrustful of the US.
These people matter. If we alienate them, if we feed their numbers, if we give them reason after reason to hate or doubt the US, their numbers will grow.
Many parts of the world are awash with anti-American conspiracy theories. The US attacked itself on Sept 11, for example, in order to invade Iraq and seize its oil. Such madness is fed when it turns out that US did invade Iraq on a false pretext. Now consider: you live in Iran or Indonesia and suddenly your country is blocked from seeing what George Bush is promising to do when he gets back into office.
I can't imagine a single good reason for Bush to block the world from his web site. But I can imagine thousands of already mistrustful people around the world feeding their conspiracy theories over it.
Is their opinion irrelevant? No, quite the opposite. The success or failure of the War on Terrorism depends on bringing these people into the fold. Not shutting them out.
Not voting means elections are decided by people who are not you. If everyone insightful enough to perceive flaws in the electoral system doesn't vote, you get a government elected by the dumbest, most apathetic, least observant, and most single-minded.
If you don't like the system--and sure, there's plenty not to like--then agitate to change it. There are many sensible ways to do this. Abdicating your right to be heard isn't one of them.
Well, I live in a country that uses IRV for every State and Federal election (Australia), and I can tell you it's just not like that. The two major parties attract around 40% of the primary vote each and the rest is split between many much smaller parties.
I'm not saying IRV is the best system ever invented. But I object to how people point to small imperfections in IRV as reasons to stick with a system that is far inferior to it.
What I find bizarre about criticism of IRV is that it concentrates on a few very mild quirks that only ever arise in odd, carefully constructed hypothetical situations -- like your example where you have three candidates who each attract almost exactly 33.3% of the primary vote. Because IRV only provides small or arguable benefits in these contrived situations, you say it's "no good."
So instead you stick with a voting system that quite clearly has one giant problem: vote-splitting. It is astonishing to me (an Australian) that Americans tolerate a system in which if two candidates support the same ideals, it's more likely that a third, less preferred candidate will win. This isn't a quirk--it's a major defect that frequently affects (even decides!) US Presidential elections.
You're right about Audi, but your explanation here seems pretty unlikely. It requires that:
1. The driver was so profoundly stupid that he drove for 100 miles before realizing he was pressing the accelerator instead of the brake. (That is, this is not like the Audi split-second acceleration.)
2. During that hour, the police never said, "Please check that you are not pressing the accelerator, sir."
3. When the driver eventually managed to stop the car by braking, he failed to realize that when he did so he removed his foot from the accelerator (a position in which, according to your explanation, it had been locked solid for the last hour).
I certainly acknowledge there are stupid drivers out there, but it seems improbable that someone this stupid could have reached adulthood without strangling himself while trying to tie his shoelaces or something.
Thanks. :)
Even if you're right about the techy audience, though (and I think geeks are far outnumbered by school students), that doesn't explain why I'm seeing the Mozilla/Firefox share steadily increasing at the expense of IE.
Heh, no, not "adult".
www.nationstates.net
I run two web sites, one of which gets 3 million hits per day, neither of which are tech-oriented, and have seen very similar results to W3schools. In January, 7% Firefox/Mozilla and 85% IE. In August, 15% Firefox/Mozilla and 74% IE.
Since when does something need to have a "legitimate reason" to be allowed? Seriously, don't free societies allow everything unless there's a really good reason for prohibiting it? Yet I see several "insightful" posts here arguing that unless this service can justify why it's worthy, it should be banned.
I'm sure advertisers think there's no legitimate reason for Firefox to have pop-up blocking, and Sony thinks there's no legitimate reason for PlayStation owners to have mod chips, and so on.
As for saying death threats "may be going a bit far"... well, yeah.
Hmm, I dunno about that. If players are operating within a system that rewards self-interested behavior over morals, isn't it a little disingenuous to get upset when selfish behavior occurs? I'm not talking about actions that violate fundamental moral principles ("Sure I shot that guy, but he had a dollar"), but about everyday situations such as the one in this topic: Microsoft deciding to favor proprietry protocols over standards.
Then there's the question of what constitutes moral behavior for corporations (an issue dear to my heart). I do agree that recognizing corporations as people has disturbing implications. I don't understand, though, why that "a machine-like human creation... should be held to even higher moral standards than real humans." I can't see the ethical justification for forcing someone (or something) else to comply with a moral code stricter than you're willing to follow yourself. In fact, I think that's a dangerous sentiment.
I tend to believe Milton Friedman's argument that corporations do and should have no further ethical obligation than to pursue profit within legal rules. First there's the social good argument: that corporations end up doing more for society by efficiently pursuing profit than by trying to make the world a better place. Second there's the fact that, as you say, corporations are effectively machines. I don't want society's ethical dilemmas being resolved by machines; ethics is for human beings.
In fact, I think that expecting ethics from corporations is buying into the whole problem where we think they're real people. If they have ethics, then they must be able to hold opinions, right? Even political opinions? So should they be able to publicly express these? Should they vote? Better to stay clear of that whole area and treat them as the machines they are, I feel.
But just to make all that redundant, and to return to my original point: if the system is going to punish moral behavior and reward self-interested behavior, selfishness is impossible to eradicate. You need 100% co-operation between all the players, all the time. We live in an imperfect world, where capitalism rules because it harnesses the power of self-interest and socialism fails because it tries to suppress it. In practical terms, I think society will be improved by fixing the behavioral incentives built into our systems, not by frowning at behavior the systems encourage, but we disapprove of.
Also, my argument in the grandparent post was not that a Darwinistic system absolves players of any blame for selfish behavior, but rather that selfish behavior is generated by the system, not the faulty morals of the players. That is, I said that just because a player acts selfishly doesn't mean they're bad, and you replied that just because they're selfish doesn't mean they're not bad. So we haven't actually hit a point of disagreement there yet. :)
Like your site btw! I'm always trying to introduce Vegemite to Americans. Hasn't worked once so far.
But on the plus side, we will finally be able to play Doom 3 on "Ultra High" detail.
Yep: political leaders who don't spam us.
Oh, there's a backdoor all right. The government passed a law that made it illegal for companies to spam, but not political parties or charities.
So the Prime Minister is allowed to spam. However, in this case, he hired a company to spam for him -- so it might be illegal. That's why the Opposition is calling for an inquiry.
Here is the original report, by the way -- the one linked to by the Slashdot story just reports what this one said.
And you might be interested to know that this is the company that did the spamming.
Yep -- NationStates.
How long do you think he spent in front of the mirror practicing that?
That's a really good point. However, when you're talking about the "the dominant player" in general, as opposed to any one player in particular, I think self-interested behavior is simply to be expected. Because that's in large part why they're dominant: they look after their own interests.
So, to use your example, if minor demons competed against each other in Hell to be the Devil, the kinder and more generous demons would likely get beaten out by the more vicious ones. Similarly (ahem), corporations that place society's interests above their own are, unfortunately, usually cleaned up by those who don't, and nations that don't ruthlessly pursue their own interests tend to lose influence to those that do.
It's very rarely in the interests of a dominant entity to engage with a group like the UN. Whether you're talking about international law and the United States, or IT standards and Microsoft, you have the group wanting everyone to play by the same rules and the dominant player wanting to leverage its advantages.
Doesn't mean that Microsoft (or the US) is bad; that's just logical behavior for an entity in a dominant position.
Now I've just drawn a comparison between the US and Microsoft, so I know my karma's shot to hell.
I wish you had. I was at that movie too and couldn't see a thing with you standing in front of me.