Where exactly is this happening? Where I'm from--a planet called "Earth"--the lack of widely-distributed and affordable drugs is a pretty big problem, which is currently being exacerbated in innumerable ways due to globalization, although the pundits claimed--still claim--that the opposite should be true.
It's depressing how many people demand the benefits of civilization, without accepting any of its tradeoffs.
To me, it's somewhat more depressing how many people fail to question if the "tradeoffs" are really necessary in order to get the "benefits." If one industrial process is cheap but pollutes, and another is expensive but clean, it seems obvious to me that in the long term the expensive-but-clean process is probably better.
And let's not even get started on whether or not the "benefits" are actually good for us. A society that kills the environment slowly for the privilege of killing itself slowly is not really one I want to be a part of.
In America, the government is supposed to work thus:
- The Constitution enumerates exactly what the government is allowed to do
- Everything else, the citizens are allowed to do
You have things backwards.
A better explanation, one that does not require fans/writers to base their entire understanding of the Star Wars Universe on literal interpretion of every line in the movies at face value with no context (a la fundamentalist Christians and the Bible) could be that Han was just trying to bullshit Obi-Wan and Luke. It would also explain the "Are you shitting me?" look Obi-Wan gave Han.
I know, I know! It's crazy. Just crazy enough to--oh, nevermind.
I found phone-photos from the Lebanese equivalant of "Joe Sixpack" (let alone aid workers, etc.) during the last Israeli conflict to be quite interesting.
Oh, I see. Because we neglected to mention that democracy would take time and effort in Iraq, you "intellectuals" figured we just expected it to happen.
Well...that, and the complete lack of planning for the possibility that it would not.
You can be pretty much assured that any "hot button" topic will be a veritable mess of crap created by borderline "expert" well-organized editor cliques aggressively pushing POV agendas
GK Chesterton had words to this effect in The Outline of Sanity. The whole point of capitalism's advantage over other economic systems is that consumers and suppliers negotiate for goods and services, none with any concern whatsoever for the common good, but that the common good will benefit anyway. If the common good is not served as a by-product, then you have the need for regulation.
A great example is environmental regulation--there is little or no incentive on the part of corporations not to dump mercury into the river, unless they are forced not to by the government. Neither will they avoid breaking the law by damaging other vendors' equipment if they can get away with it. They can get away with it because the government is being paid off--which is itself more socialist than capitalist.
Chesterton also said that when the capitalists start using socialist tactics and justifications, then Capitalism was dead or dying...I definately see corporate welfare and the blind eye turned to this kind of "competition" between telcos as indicative of such. You are not paying a lower price due to competition, you are paying the same price so that employees of your telco provider can sabotage the other telco provider. This is not the good nor service I want to pay for!
This is a really good argument. This year I started a charity (well, got the ball rolling on 501c(3) status) refurbing old hardware and giving it away to high school students who can't afford puters. They run Ubuntu. Yeah, there are other problems in the ghetto (drugs, violence, absentee fathers) but this project doesn't help with those because it's not meant to. Same with OLPC: it's not really meant to combat starvation or the AIDS epidemic, it's supposed to improve schooling.
These are not targeted at, say, Rwanda, or any other place where someone might end up with a laptop but no food. It's more for places like Brazil, Micronesia, Libya...there are pleny of places that have the food/water/shelter trifecta more or less worked out, whose schoolchildren could really benefit from a cheap computer.
I don't know why this comes up every time OLPC is linked: "Third world countries don't need laptops, they need food." Not everyone in the "third world" is starving by the side of the road. It's incredible to me that people keep saying that, and I wonder if it's the same people.
I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that origionality or quality actually "count" in the grand scheme of things. But that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy your Wii anyway.
Not to be a pedant, but history is littered with non-innovative garbage that nobody wanted to buy. The only question is whether or not Wii actually is good enough to overcome Sony's hype. After all, if innovation and quality were non-issues then we'd still be playing Vectrex.
This is because for IT types, the focus is on connectivity and uptime and nothing else. This is why many companies are starting to set up IT security departments independent of the IT support staff: You can barely count on the IT guys to install patches, much less track down customer complaints of fraud or compromised systems. To be charitable, most of them are overworked, but that only lends more support to setting up independent departments.
I also find that IT staff typically rely on some basic assumptions that none of them ever test: "Well, we don't know if the IP that attacked us was the guy's computer or a proxy, so it's pointless to go after him." Really? I spent the last couple of months interfacing with Romanian law enforcement and it ended in an arrest. Before that I had to deal with law enforcement agencies from several other countries, analyzing logs and so forth, until we tracked the guy down. I think that while this kind of job is hard, it's a lot less hard than people think (in the end, the guy admitted to providing "services" for several high-profile "clients" who are the subject of their own investigations in their countries. Now they all have to find a new guy to do this work for them--assuming they don't get arrested for something else first).
I really can't say if this because IT guys are as a rule ignorant, or just overworked, or if they just don't care. But the bottomline is that it is possible to go after these ne'er-do-wells, and such cases are more successful than you might think. The key is to send the courtesy e-mail to the ISP's abuse department and then go right on to talking with law enforcement. Language barriers aside, they are much more likely to work with you than you might think--especially if you're telling them "Hey, here's some free evidence."
My roommate makes this argument when I tell him it's his turn to take out the garbage. He makes about half again as much as I do and has a graduate degree where I have an associate's; "What is my time worth? It's obviously more efficient for you to take out the trash because my time is more valuable." The only problem is that money is not the only thing we value, so perhaps the satisfaction of not having to pay for an operating system you do not want to support is worth a few hours' time. Or, in the case of my roommate, reciprocity and fairness are valued, as is the absence of rotting garbage, so he eventually takes it out (with much bitching).
Can you be a bit more explicit? In my limited experience I don't understand how IPv6 is going to make things less complicated for me.
For example, I just set up a small business network for a friend. His 12 or so hosts get private IPs from the DHCP server, but we only leased one public IP from Comcast. In an IPv6 scheme, would I just end up getting several IPs from the ISP? And are they going to charge me more? In the end, it just seems easier to manage non-publicly-routable address space, but like I said I'm not too experienced. Shed some light please?
I see your point regarding self-selection criteria but I'm not sure that invalidates the results (it does limit the hypotheses you can test severely, I admit). Surely anything is worth testing so long as it's never been formally tested, if only because the exact nature of a given relationship can always been characterized more precisely. Example: It's pretty obvious that some people hack for money (extortion schemes and whatnot)--we see them in the news all the time. You can assume from the observed behaviors that these hackers will probably fit a certain profile. But this kind of top-down modeling always has trouble with complex specific forms. It's why you see ballistics problems in physics textbooks that say things like "Assume a point-shaped or spherical cow flying through the atmosphere..." -- the models are robust but less so when you try to account for specifics.
Likewise, I think it's a good idea to test all of this because yes, "Duh," people can make money hacking and it's been happening a lot more lately. How much more? How much money are they making? Is a script kiddie as likely to get approached to do a "job" as a more experienced hacker? Etc. You handle these with a multidisciplinary approach (slight tangent--this is why when Dawkin's "Modern Synthesis" fails to explain forms, we get the morphogenesis crowd coming in to plug the gaps).
There is actually some really interesting work being done in this same area (modeling hackers and so forth) by some of the bioinformatics crowd, but the approaches I've seen so far stress a bottom-up approach (e.g. observe them in chat rooms and on usenet, try to connect new exploit code with this developer or that, etc.). I imagine this would probably meet your requirements for rigor more than what we see in this article.
Their methodology could possibly be flawed, but are you qualified to certify someone else's experimental results? Even very obvious assumptions are technically useless unless you test them at some point. Meaning, you say "Duh," but these assumptions are not really something anyone has put to the test, are they?
The fact that they have given support to something we already "know" is not a valid grounds for critique, so I must assume you are criticizing their actual experimental methodology. But I can't imagine anyone with a background in research criticizing basic experimentation, because anyone with a grounding in empirical methods would see the first stages (top-down data acq, surveys, etc.) as very important in helping you form the initial hypotheses to test with the next round of experiments, even though they don't really tell you very much in terms of hard data.
So in this case they could be setting up to test the MEECES model--how often is "Entrance into Social Group" a motivator compared to the others, and how does it correlate to age, gender, socioeconomic status, education level, skill level...and on and on. This is quite valid, but then perhaps it might be too fine a point for your average IT geek to grasp on the first go-round....Just sayin'.
Eh, if included as part of a larger body of work it could be perfectly valid. Generally speaking this would be data from a "top-down" approach, which you would follow up with a "bottom-up" study (e.g. observe closely what hackers do and say on IRC, for example). Also, nobody really has any hard numbers for "how valid" this kind of study is, so you could also consider it assumption-testing (including assumptions like "this is of questionable validity")...at some point you have to test even the obvious assumptions.
Governments the world over are trying very hard to get data such as the Amazon purchase data and store that in a useful database.
I'm sorry, but can you cite a source where such an attempt to acquire the data has been made? Or are you just betting on the general tendency of governments to try to encroach more and more upon our privacy? I ask because healthy paranoia is one thing, but I think you might be going overboard.
Slashdot Mirror
world-wide distribution at affordable prices
Where exactly is this happening?
Where I'm from--a planet called "Earth"--the lack of widely-distributed and affordable drugs is a pretty big problem, which is currently being exacerbated in innumerable ways due to globalization, although the pundits claimed--still claim--that the opposite should be true.
It's depressing how many people demand the benefits of civilization, without accepting any of its tradeoffs.
To me, it's somewhat more depressing how many people fail to question if the "tradeoffs" are really necessary in order to get the "benefits." If one industrial process is cheap but pollutes, and another is expensive but clean, it seems obvious to me that in the long term the expensive-but-clean process is probably better.
And let's not even get started on whether or not the "benefits" are actually good for us. A society that kills the environment slowly for the privilege of killing itself slowly is not really one I want to be a part of.
Doesn't the content provider make money by selling ad space out of their vast pool of viewers?
Sci-Fi channel continually pushes out absolute garbage. For this reason I am not one of their viewers.
I mean, for every Doctor Who, Farscape, or Firefly we have what seems like fifty Raptor Islands, FFS.
In America, the government is supposed to work thus: - The Constitution enumerates exactly what the government is allowed to do - Everything else, the citizens are allowed to do You have things backwards.
Noo. Were he a criminal, he might have sold the technology to Hizbollah or somesuch without alerting anyone.
A better explanation, one that does not require fans/writers to base their entire understanding of the Star Wars Universe on literal interpretion of every line in the movies at face value with no context (a la fundamentalist Christians and the Bible) could be that Han was just trying to bullshit Obi-Wan and Luke. It would also explain the "Are you shitting me?" look Obi-Wan gave Han.
I know, I know! It's crazy. Just crazy enough to--oh, nevermind.
What "news" will common people report?
I found phone-photos from the Lebanese equivalant of "Joe Sixpack" (let alone aid workers, etc.) during the last Israeli conflict to be quite interesting.
Oh, I see. Because we neglected to mention that democracy would take time and effort in Iraq, you "intellectuals" figured we just expected it to happen.
Well...that, and the complete lack of planning for the possibility that it would not.
On the other hand, there's no reason why reasonable, and productive, goals cannot be met.
I thought you said "it's technically impossible to lose." That does not mean the same thing as above.
You can be pretty much assured that any "hot button" topic will be a veritable mess of crap created by borderline "expert" well-organized editor cliques aggressively pushing POV agendas
Can you provide examples of this in action?
Is it just me, or is this thread so far composed almost entirely of people who, while perhaps lacking any credentials or experience when it comes to hypothesis testing and experimental design, nonetheless feel they are informed enough to critique the experimental technique?
GK Chesterton had words to this effect in The Outline of Sanity. The whole point of capitalism's advantage over other economic systems is that consumers and suppliers negotiate for goods and services, none with any concern whatsoever for the common good, but that the common good will benefit anyway. If the common good is not served as a by-product, then you have the need for regulation.
A great example is environmental regulation--there is little or no incentive on the part of corporations not to dump mercury into the river, unless they are forced not to by the government. Neither will they avoid breaking the law by damaging other vendors' equipment if they can get away with it. They can get away with it because the government is being paid off--which is itself more socialist than capitalist.
Chesterton also said that when the capitalists start using socialist tactics and justifications, then Capitalism was dead or dying...I definately see corporate welfare and the blind eye turned to this kind of "competition" between telcos as indicative of such. You are not paying a lower price due to competition, you are paying the same price so that employees of your telco provider can sabotage the other telco provider. This is not the good nor service I want to pay for!
I find your conspiracy theories interesting, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
This is a really good argument. This year I started a charity (well, got the ball rolling on 501c(3) status) refurbing old hardware and giving it away to high school students who can't afford puters. They run Ubuntu. Yeah, there are other problems in the ghetto (drugs, violence, absentee fathers) but this project doesn't help with those because it's not meant to. Same with OLPC: it's not really meant to combat starvation or the AIDS epidemic, it's supposed to improve schooling.
No, they're not.
These are not targeted at, say, Rwanda, or any other place where someone might end up with a laptop but no food. It's more for places like Brazil, Micronesia, Libya...there are pleny of places that have the food/water/shelter trifecta more or less worked out, whose schoolchildren could really benefit from a cheap computer.
I don't know why this comes up every time OLPC is linked: "Third world countries don't need laptops, they need food." Not everyone in the "third world" is starving by the side of the road. It's incredible to me that people keep saying that, and I wonder if it's the same people.
I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that origionality or quality actually "count" in the grand scheme of things. But that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy your Wii anyway.
Not to be a pedant, but history is littered with non-innovative garbage that nobody wanted to buy. The only question is whether or not Wii actually is good enough to overcome Sony's hype. After all, if innovation and quality were non-issues then we'd still be playing Vectrex.
Of course I couldn't live without the PS3 and call myself a gamer, so I will own one exentually. It's just a matter of getting quality releases.
It's one thing to enjoy games, but...no offense, this "Of course I just had to get one" line sounds childish.
Pfft, my roommate has one of those since he can't get his Linksys appliance to work and won't let me in to troubleshoot it!
The reaction is always "clean up and forget".
This is because for IT types, the focus is on connectivity and uptime and nothing else.
This is why many companies are starting to set up IT security departments independent of the IT support staff: You can barely count on the IT guys to install patches, much less track down customer complaints of fraud or compromised systems. To be charitable, most of them are overworked, but that only lends more support to setting up independent departments.
I also find that IT staff typically rely on some basic assumptions that none of them ever test: "Well, we don't know if the IP that attacked us was the guy's computer or a proxy, so it's pointless to go after him." Really? I spent the last couple of months interfacing with Romanian law enforcement and it ended in an arrest. Before that I had to deal with law enforcement agencies from several other countries, analyzing logs and so forth, until we tracked the guy down. I think that while this kind of job is hard, it's a lot less hard than people think (in the end, the guy admitted to providing "services" for several high-profile "clients" who are the subject of their own investigations in their countries. Now they all have to find a new guy to do this work for them--assuming they don't get arrested for something else first).
I really can't say if this because IT guys are as a rule ignorant, or just overworked, or if they just don't care. But the bottomline is that it is possible to go after these ne'er-do-wells, and such cases are more successful than you might think. The key is to send the courtesy e-mail to the ISP's abuse department and then go right on to talking with law enforcement. Language barriers aside, they are much more likely to work with you than you might think--especially if you're telling them "Hey, here's some free evidence."
My roommate makes this argument when I tell him it's his turn to take out the garbage. He makes about half again as much as I do and has a graduate degree where I have an associate's; "What is my time worth? It's obviously more efficient for you to take out the trash because my time is more valuable." The only problem is that money is not the only thing we value, so perhaps the satisfaction of not having to pay for an operating system you do not want to support is worth a few hours' time. Or, in the case of my roommate, reciprocity and fairness are valued, as is the absence of rotting garbage, so he eventually takes it out (with much bitching).
They claim to be funding all these fantastic ideas, but none of them ever work except in a limited capacity.
:)
Like that internet boondoggle?
I keed, I keed
Can you be a bit more explicit? In my limited experience I don't understand how IPv6 is going to make things less complicated for me.
For example, I just set up a small business network for a friend. His 12 or so hosts get private IPs from the DHCP server, but we only leased one public IP from Comcast. In an IPv6 scheme, would I just end up getting several IPs from the ISP? And are they going to charge me more? In the end, it just seems easier to manage non-publicly-routable address space, but like I said I'm not too experienced. Shed some light please?
I see your point regarding self-selection criteria but I'm not sure that invalidates the results (it does limit the hypotheses you can test severely, I admit). Surely anything is worth testing so long as it's never been formally tested, if only because the exact nature of a given relationship can always been characterized more precisely. Example: It's pretty obvious that some people hack for money (extortion schemes and whatnot)--we see them in the news all the time. You can assume from the observed behaviors that these hackers will probably fit a certain profile. But this kind of top-down modeling always has trouble with complex specific forms. It's why you see ballistics problems in physics textbooks that say things like "Assume a point-shaped or spherical cow flying through the atmosphere..." -- the models are robust but less so when you try to account for specifics.
Likewise, I think it's a good idea to test all of this because yes, "Duh," people can make money hacking and it's been happening a lot more lately. How much more? How much money are they making? Is a script kiddie as likely to get approached to do a "job" as a more experienced hacker? Etc. You handle these with a multidisciplinary approach (slight tangent--this is why when Dawkin's "Modern Synthesis" fails to explain forms, we get the morphogenesis crowd coming in to plug the gaps).
There is actually some really interesting work being done in this same area (modeling hackers and so forth) by some of the bioinformatics crowd, but the approaches I've seen so far stress a bottom-up approach (e.g. observe them in chat rooms and on usenet, try to connect new exploit code with this developer or that, etc.). I imagine this would probably meet your requirements for rigor more than what we see in this article.
Their methodology could possibly be flawed, but are you qualified to certify someone else's experimental results? Even very obvious assumptions are technically useless unless you test them at some point. Meaning, you say "Duh," but these assumptions are not really something anyone has put to the test, are they? The fact that they have given support to something we already "know" is not a valid grounds for critique, so I must assume you are criticizing their actual experimental methodology. But I can't imagine anyone with a background in research criticizing basic experimentation, because anyone with a grounding in empirical methods would see the first stages (top-down data acq, surveys, etc.) as very important in helping you form the initial hypotheses to test with the next round of experiments, even though they don't really tell you very much in terms of hard data. So in this case they could be setting up to test the MEECES model--how often is "Entrance into Social Group" a motivator compared to the others, and how does it correlate to age, gender, socioeconomic status, education level, skill level...and on and on. This is quite valid, but then perhaps it might be too fine a point for your average IT geek to grasp on the first go-round. ...Just sayin'.
Eh, if included as part of a larger body of work it could be perfectly valid. Generally speaking this would be data from a "top-down" approach, which you would follow up with a "bottom-up" study (e.g. observe closely what hackers do and say on IRC, for example). Also, nobody really has any hard numbers for "how valid" this kind of study is, so you could also consider it assumption-testing (including assumptions like "this is of questionable validity")...at some point you have to test even the obvious assumptions.
Governments the world over are trying very hard to get data such as the Amazon purchase data and store that in a useful database.
I'm sorry, but can you cite a source where such an attempt to acquire the data has been made? Or are you just betting on the general tendency of governments to try to encroach more and more upon our privacy? I ask because healthy paranoia is one thing, but I think you might be going overboard.