And you have shown no proof it wasn't. Yet the information we do have supports my position quite well: When decision-makers are in receipt of as many as hundreds of thousands of signatures, all backing one specific outcome, the assertion that no such decision maker would take that aggregate mass of opinion into account when determining the ultimate outcome is ludicrous.
No, it was a precise and essentially correct description of the initial condition.
If they do win then by your logic it was petition that made it happen.
Straw man. No one is petitioning sports games, coin flips or other situations where opinion is irrelevant; the petitions in question take aggregated opinions to decision-makers in order to let them know that some number of individuals desire a particular outcome.
In the case of corporations and other entities where public opinion can assert pressure towards a particular outcome, the petition can be the determining factor in achieving the desired result. Particularly with larger petitions, such as those with hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Aside from the fact that the desired outcome happened, do you have any proof that the change.org petitions in any way effected[sic] the outcome?
No. Do you have any proof that they didn't? Also no.
Now stepping beyond proof to what we do know: We know that in every case, the desired outcome was not in place prior to the petition's engagement. We know that getting people and organizations to go back on an action taken, or revise their behavior, is almost uniformly an uphill battle. We know that public opinion also has a significant pressuring effect when the target of those opinions depends upon the public for income, job security, etc. We also know that some of these petitions carry as many as half a million signatures.
Given those facts, what do you think the odds are here? Would you be willing to bet that all change.org petitions where the outcome matched the petition's goals had no effect, as was the thesis of the posts above? I am quite confident that doing so would be a losing bet.
Now what is the percentage of those petitions of the total petitions?
Interesting question. Perhaps you should ask them.
However, would the answer alter the likelihood that some of the petitions that were agitating for the results that were obtained were effective? No, of course not.
Remember even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Irrelevant.
The broken clock is right because conditions match its state twice out of a set of results that are cyclic and are guaranteed to create such a match; that makes it inevitable.
Outcomes that match the desired result of a petition always start from a non-matching condition, and there is no cycle or other process that assures a matching condition would be obtained were the petition not to exist.
Come on, they're claiming it was their petition to the FDA - "Fast track Drug and vaccine research for Ebola Hemorrhagic fever" - that did it?
I think what they're claiming is that the desired outcome was reached and the petition was pushing in that direction. The degree to which any one petition took a lead or decisive role might be unknown, however, any assertion that all those petitions were simply ineffective noise is ludicrous. Clearly, looking at the individual cases, there are some where the petition would have been a very significant form of pressure (to which electing one legislator does not favorably compare.)
Some of these petitions deliver nearly half a million signatures to the decision makers engaged with a specific problem. When the target is a corporation or some other entity that is actually concerned with public opinion, any thesis that the petition is inherently ineffective is about as dubious as anything gets. Particularly in light of the outcomes often going the way the petition was asking for, whereas prior to the petition, these same conditions were not extant (obviously that is why the petitions arise in the first place.)
Slacktivism is for slackers - those who are too lazy to get their butts out of a chair.
Gratuitous, research-free, unjustified name-calling is for the ignorant, the disingenuous and the propagandist. I wonder which of those you represent.
I should also have added: If you actually want to keep a secret, then:
o Tell no one o Don't write it down or otherwise create a record of it anywhere, in any format o Participate in no action that would even hint of it
Because at this point in time, that can actually work where absolutely nothing else will.
Of course, the day they can read your mind with a machine, that path will be closed off as well. There might be as much as a few decades left during which the word "secret" will have much meaning beyond "no one cared enough to bother to find out."
Sorry, but no. The assertion was that putting a file somewhere unusual in the directory tree was an effective means of hiding. In that context:
The "judge" in this case is going to be software, and such things are excellent at discriminating actual jpeg images and text and document files from files filled with random garbage. Likewise at scanning the contents and determining very quickly if anything falls within the designated detection metrics, and dropping the borderline cases into a list for human perusal.
The only tool that can work is encryption that cannot be broken without the key(s.) Of course "effective" has its limits as well; the moment they decide to take you in the back room and apply the classic brute-force key-recovery tools (things like shoving splinters under your fingernails, waterboarding, AC across your genitals and so on), your "unbreakable" encryption is history.
That's what happens when the citizens fail to hold the government to the constitution. You get thugs working for a dictatorship. Welcome to The Homeland.
It is trivial to prove you are spreading disinformation. But I applaud you for following the AC tradition of posting false claims. That'll get you quite a distance with people who don't bother to check such claims. However, it won't work for anyone who takes the time to actually look.
Also, you can start here for many listings of change,org petitions that achieved their stated purpose. Don't forget to click the "Next" button at the bottom of the page. There are many pages of these beyond the few I took the time to list above.
The petitions on change.org have a significant record of actually working to change the issue at hand. This has not been true for voting for these preselected candidates for some time.
At best, with legislators, your vote might make the difference between candidate A and candidate B. The question whether that difference will result in actual change spans issues from the effect one good legislator can have in the context of five hundred and thirty four others to whether the legislator will vote as desired by their constituents or "compromise", "bargain", "pool", "sell" or "trade" their vote.
Change.org, on the other hand, has been known to exert enough pressure on various parties so as to get the exact changes that were desired. When that happens, the individual's participation was part of the actual leverage for change.
Definitely not the same at all. The political system is almost completely compromised at levels inaccessible to voters. It does not function as advertised.
Yes, you get elect a person from a limited group, one carefully selected for compliance by the corporations and the powerful via their proxies, the political parties.
You may even think it makes a significant difference which candidates you pick. Most often, it makes no difference.
It makes more difference which products you choose to buy. The real trick is figuring out what that difference will be. All corporations aren't as clearly aligned as the Chick-Fil-A leadership, who wear their objectives on their sleeves and so tell you exactly how the influence they exert via the income from customer patronage is actually used.
Other influential corporations with clear alignments include Wal-mart, Google and Apple. Your support of those companies directly furthers their objectives. So you might want to trouble yourself to see what those objectives are.
"The Relief Band" is not a magnetic bracelet. It is an electrical nerve stimulation device. Nerves respond directly to, and communicate with, electricity. That "The Relief Band" could affect the nervous system with its active electrical stimulation is not in any way doubtful, and is not in the same class as copper or magnetic bracelets, which provide no functionality above the level of placebo.
Proposing that earthquakes are caused by invisible pink unicorns who magically run upside down along fault lines within the earth does not get a pass because "we don't have the tools to perform the evaluation."
Until there is observable, consensually experiential evidence, the idea is not science, it is merely an exercise of the imagination.
Also, the idea that there are some objectively real things we don't know does not actually imply that any particular flight of imagination therefore represents one of those things.
In other words, when you have evidence, bring it on, and we'll all be delighted to explore it until we understand it as best we can. Until then, holders of evidence-free ideas should concern themselves with actually finding such evidence and absent that, leave any claims of their idea having any scientific basis in fact at the door.
Science is built entirely upon a very specific method. If you can't follow the method, whatever you're doing isn't science.
Currently, there is great resistance to the idea; it is shocking, really, the capacity some people have to induce themselves to go with an amped-up flow.
You're confusing the lack of ability to locally pick up damage signals within the brain, with the ability of the brain to take a particular pattern of signals and interpret is as signals representing sensory input.
You're right about the lack of nerves; you're completely wrong about feelings.
It is only in the brain that the term sensation, or feeling, even acquires any objective meaning. When you say to yourself, "I felt that in my fingertip", well, no. The signal came from there, but you felt it in your brain -- as a very specific pattern of electrical activity.
If we induce that same pattern in the brain by other means, you will immediately inform us "I felt that in my fingertip" because that's what feelings are -- they are not the sensor, they are not the signal from the sensor, they are the interpretation of the signal from the sensor, and that is brainops and nothing else.
Consequently, there is nothing particularly unlikely about a claim that inducing electrical signals or enough mechanical energy to directly affect the brain's activity might result in feelings.
Because all feelings are in your head. All of them. Everything else is just signaling.
This is no different than other pseudo-scientific new-age placebo-wearables like magnetic bracelets
Pretty sure it is different.
Your wrists, nerves and other fleshy parts don't run on, and don't give a crap about, magnetic fields. They are also non-metallic, so moving magnetic fields don't induce current in them.
If I understand it correctly, the device under discussion here works by inducing new currents into your brain, more or less directly -- and your brain does function by generating and passing electrical impulses around.
So the former is purest homeopathic-class nonsense that does absolutely nothing, while the latter is a device that directly modifies brain activity.
...most possibly not fully legal. Which is of no issue, as it is an agency of the government -- and they define what is lawful, and what is not.
The constitution defines what is permissible to the government, or not, and the government is authorized to create laws only within the limits of those permissions.
Warrantless search is not "lawful government activity" because search without warrant is forbidden to the government. The 4th amendment is very clear in its requirements and its intent. A warrant is required; that warrant in turn can only be issued in the face of probable cause; it must be supported by oath or affirmation; and it must specify the thing or things to be searched for and the place or places to be searched.
Search without warrant is completely out by any sane reading of the 4th amendment. Likewise, general fishing expeditions. When you have both going on at the same time, as we do with broad government surveillance of US citizens, the government malfeasance is only that much further into illegal, unauthorized territory.
The constitution is the document that defines and authorizes our government. It lays out some very explicit limits; when the government exceeds those limits, it is operating in a wholly unauthorized manner, no different in any way from any tin-pot third-world dictatorship.
I didn't say, or imply, that it did. As for the rest, it is adolescent fantasy, no more. Those in power are working as a huge team. You aren't going to make even the slightest dent in their operations, the system, or the status quo. Were you to come even close, they'd destroy you in whatever venue(s) they wanted to.
Where are all these expert systems that can be queried in natural language?
They're sitting right here on my computer. I have a deep interest in AI and AI-like things (see the article presently linked in my sig for some of that.) So, among other things, I wrote a natural language parser that is focused on inquiry, coupled to a structured KB system that can store, maintain, generalize, infer, report and mine arbitrary relationships and information under an expert's guidance. Then I stuffed several instances of it full of what I knew about some of the (very few) subjects I understand in depth.
And yes, one could send out inquiries to all at once, and just take the answer(s) back from those systems that report they have one. But it'd take quite a lot of systems to be generally useful, as opposed to specifically useful. There are a lot of areas of specific expertise.
it would be interesting to know if there is a reproducible case. If you had one, you can report it to Apple. They do look at bug reports from users.)
There isn't much evidence they actually fix them in a current product, though. They fix them in a different product that does something else.
They really do a lot of leaving broken stuff behind them, telling you, if you want that fixed, you need to upgrade. Unfortunately, instead of ending up more stable, what you end up is with new bugs and a product that doesn't do what it used to do, which, oddly enough, was what you bought it to do.
I wish someone would force them to fix products they ship until they work as initially described. Sure, that'd slow them down on this breathless rush to upgrade. But would that be a bad thing? I don't think so.
So slow the beast down and actually treat users of old kit like they are valued customers of a luxury brand. Model yourself after Rolls Royce rather than Dell.
Slashdot Mirror
And you have shown no proof it wasn't. Yet the information we do have supports my position quite well: When decision-makers are in receipt of as many as hundreds of thousands of signatures, all backing one specific outcome, the assertion that no such decision maker would take that aggregate mass of opinion into account when determining the ultimate outcome is ludicrous.
No, it was a precise and essentially correct description of the initial condition.
Straw man. No one is petitioning sports games, coin flips or other situations where opinion is irrelevant; the petitions in question take aggregated opinions to decision-makers in order to let them know that some number of individuals desire a particular outcome.
In the case of corporations and other entities where public opinion can assert pressure towards a particular outcome, the petition can be the determining factor in achieving the desired result. Particularly with larger petitions, such as those with hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Contending otherwise is just silly.
lol... you'll have to get in line for that one.
No. Do you have any proof that they didn't? Also no.
Now stepping beyond proof to what we do know: We know that in every case, the desired outcome was not in place prior to the petition's engagement. We know that getting people and organizations to go back on an action taken, or revise their behavior, is almost uniformly an uphill battle. We know that public opinion also has a significant pressuring effect when the target of those opinions depends upon the public for income, job security, etc. We also know that some of these petitions carry as many as half a million signatures.
Given those facts, what do you think the odds are here? Would you be willing to bet that all change.org petitions where the outcome matched the petition's goals had no effect, as was the thesis of the posts above? I am quite confident that doing so would be a losing bet.
Interesting question. Perhaps you should ask them.
However, would the answer alter the likelihood that some of the petitions that were agitating for the results that were obtained were effective? No, of course not.
Irrelevant.
The broken clock is right because conditions match its state twice out of a set of results that are cyclic and are guaranteed to create such a match; that makes it inevitable.
Outcomes that match the desired result of a petition always start from a non-matching condition, and there is no cycle or other process that assures a matching condition would be obtained were the petition not to exist.
I think what they're claiming is that the desired outcome was reached and the petition was pushing in that direction. The degree to which any one petition took a lead or decisive role might be unknown, however, any assertion that all those petitions were simply ineffective noise is ludicrous. Clearly, looking at the individual cases, there are some where the petition would have been a very significant form of pressure (to which electing one legislator does not favorably compare.)
Some of these petitions deliver nearly half a million signatures to the decision makers engaged with a specific problem. When the target is a corporation or some other entity that is actually concerned with public opinion, any thesis that the petition is inherently ineffective is about as dubious as anything gets. Particularly in light of the outcomes often going the way the petition was asking for, whereas prior to the petition, these same conditions were not extant (obviously that is why the petitions arise in the first place.)
Gratuitous, research-free, unjustified name-calling is for the ignorant, the disingenuous and the propagandist. I wonder which of those you represent.
Whereas the record of success of voting for legislators in achieving social change is...
Ah, that's right. Near-zero.
I should also have added: If you actually want to keep a secret, then:
o Tell no one
o Don't write it down or otherwise create a record of it anywhere, in any format
o Participate in no action that would even hint of it
Because at this point in time, that can actually work where absolutely nothing else will.
Of course, the day they can read your mind with a machine, that path will be closed off as well. There might be as much as a few decades left during which the word "secret" will have much meaning beyond "no one cared enough to bother to find out."
Sorry, but no. The assertion was that putting a file somewhere unusual in the directory tree was an effective means of hiding. In that context:
The "judge" in this case is going to be software, and such things are excellent at discriminating actual jpeg images and text and document files from files filled with random garbage. Likewise at scanning the contents and determining very quickly if anything falls within the designated detection metrics, and dropping the borderline cases into a list for human perusal.
The only tool that can work is encryption that cannot be broken without the key(s.) Of course "effective" has its limits as well; the moment they decide to take you in the back room and apply the classic brute-force key-recovery tools (things like shoving splinters under your fingernails, waterboarding, AC across your genitals and so on), your "unbreakable" encryption is history.
That's what happens when the citizens fail to hold the government to the constitution. You get thugs working for a dictatorship. Welcome to The Homeland.
It is trivial to prove you are spreading disinformation. But I applaud you for following the AC tradition of posting false claims. That'll get you quite a distance with people who don't bother to check such claims. However, it won't work for anyone who takes the time to actually look.
No, more like these:
o http://www.change.org/p/depart...
o http://www.change.org/p/congre...
o http://www.change.org/p/tell-u...
o http://www.change.org/p/amnest...
o http://www.change.org/p/end-fg...
o http://www.change.org/p/sony-w...
o http://www.change.org/p/gap-in...
o http://www.change.org/p/genera...
o http://www.change.org/p/justic...
o http://www.change.org/p/govern...
o http://www.change.org/p/help-r...
o http://www.change.org/p/food-a...
o http://www.change.org/p/center...
Also, you can start here for many listings of change,org petitions that achieved their stated purpose. Don't forget to click the "Next" button at the bottom of the page. There are many pages of these beyond the few I took the time to list above.
No, voting for candidates isn't like change.org.
The petitions on change.org have a significant record of actually working to change the issue at hand. This has not been true for voting for these preselected candidates for some time.
At best, with legislators, your vote might make the difference between candidate A and candidate B. The question whether that difference will result in actual change spans issues from the effect one good legislator can have in the context of five hundred and thirty four others to whether the legislator will vote as desired by their constituents or "compromise", "bargain", "pool", "sell" or "trade" their vote.
Change.org, on the other hand, has been known to exert enough pressure on various parties so as to get the exact changes that were desired. When that happens, the individual's participation was part of the actual leverage for change.
Definitely not the same at all. The political system is almost completely compromised at levels inaccessible to voters. It does not function as advertised.
Yes, you get elect a person from a limited group, one carefully selected for compliance by the corporations and the powerful via their proxies, the political parties.
You may even think it makes a significant difference which candidates you pick. Most often, it makes no difference.
It makes more difference which products you choose to buy. The real trick is figuring out what that difference will be. All corporations aren't as clearly aligned as the Chick-Fil-A leadership, who wear their objectives on their sleeves and so tell you exactly how the influence they exert via the income from customer patronage is actually used.
Other influential corporations with clear alignments include Wal-mart, Google and Apple. Your support of those companies directly furthers their objectives. So you might want to trouble yourself to see what those objectives are.
"The Relief Band" is not a magnetic bracelet. It is an electrical nerve stimulation device. Nerves respond directly to, and communicate with, electricity. That "The Relief Band" could affect the nervous system with its active electrical stimulation is not in any way doubtful, and is not in the same class as copper or magnetic bracelets, which provide no functionality above the level of placebo.
Proposing that earthquakes are caused by invisible pink unicorns who magically run upside down along fault lines within the earth does not get a pass because "we don't have the tools to perform the evaluation."
Until there is observable, consensually experiential evidence, the idea is not science, it is merely an exercise of the imagination.
Also, the idea that there are some objectively real things we don't know does not actually imply that any particular flight of imagination therefore represents one of those things.
In other words, when you have evidence, bring it on, and we'll all be delighted to explore it until we understand it as best we can. Until then, holders of evidence-free ideas should concern themselves with actually finding such evidence and absent that, leave any claims of their idea having any scientific basis in fact at the door.
Science is built entirely upon a very specific method. If you can't follow the method, whatever you're doing isn't science.
Currently, there is great resistance to the idea; it is shocking, really, the capacity some people have to induce themselves to go with an amped-up flow.
A lady and I gave that a go. Results were entirely meh.
Still wrong.
You're confusing the lack of ability to locally pick up damage signals within the brain, with the ability of the brain to take a particular pattern of signals and interpret is as signals representing sensory input.
You're right about the lack of nerves; you're completely wrong about feelings.
It is only in the brain that the term sensation, or feeling, even acquires any objective meaning. When you say to yourself, "I felt that in my fingertip", well, no. The signal came from there, but you felt it in your brain -- as a very specific pattern of electrical activity.
If we induce that same pattern in the brain by other means, you will immediately inform us "I felt that in my fingertip" because that's what feelings are -- they are not the sensor, they are not the signal from the sensor, they are the interpretation of the signal from the sensor, and that is brainops and nothing else.
Consequently, there is nothing particularly unlikely about a claim that inducing electrical signals or enough mechanical energy to directly affect the brain's activity might result in feelings.
Because all feelings are in your head. All of them. Everything else is just signaling.
Pretty sure it is different.
Your wrists, nerves and other fleshy parts don't run on, and don't give a crap about, magnetic fields. They are also non-metallic, so moving magnetic fields don't induce current in them.
If I understand it correctly, the device under discussion here works by inducing new currents into your brain, more or less directly -- and your brain does function by generating and passing electrical impulses around.
So the former is purest homeopathic-class nonsense that does absolutely nothing, while the latter is a device that directly modifies brain activity.
Going to go with "definitely different."
The constitution defines what is permissible to the government, or not, and the government is authorized to create laws only within the limits of those permissions.
Warrantless search is not "lawful government activity" because search without warrant is forbidden to the government. The 4th amendment is very clear in its requirements and its intent. A warrant is required; that warrant in turn can only be issued in the face of probable cause; it must be supported by oath or affirmation; and it must specify the thing or things to be searched for and the place or places to be searched.
Search without warrant is completely out by any sane reading of the 4th amendment. Likewise, general fishing expeditions. When you have both going on at the same time, as we do with broad government surveillance of US citizens, the government malfeasance is only that much further into illegal, unauthorized territory.
The constitution is the document that defines and authorizes our government. It lays out some very explicit limits; when the government exceeds those limits, it is operating in a wholly unauthorized manner, no different in any way from any tin-pot third-world dictatorship.
I didn't say, or imply, that it did. As for the rest, it is adolescent fantasy, no more. Those in power are working as a huge team. You aren't going to make even the slightest dent in their operations, the system, or the status quo. Were you to come even close, they'd destroy you in whatever venue(s) they wanted to.
They're sitting right here on my computer. I have a deep interest in AI and AI-like things (see the article presently linked in my sig for some of that.) So, among other things, I wrote a natural language parser that is focused on inquiry, coupled to a structured KB system that can store, maintain, generalize, infer, report and mine arbitrary relationships and information under an expert's guidance. Then I stuffed several instances of it full of what I knew about some of the (very few) subjects I understand in depth.
And yes, one could send out inquiries to all at once, and just take the answer(s) back from those systems that report they have one. But it'd take quite a lot of systems to be generally useful, as opposed to specifically useful. There are a lot of areas of specific expertise.
There isn't much evidence they actually fix them in a current product, though. They fix them in a different product that does something else.
They really do a lot of leaving broken stuff behind them, telling you, if you want that fixed, you need to upgrade. Unfortunately, instead of ending up more stable, what you end up is with new bugs and a product that doesn't do what it used to do, which, oddly enough, was what you bought it to do.
I wish someone would force them to fix products they ship until they work as initially described. Sure, that'd slow them down on this breathless rush to upgrade. But would that be a bad thing? I don't think so.
If only I could make you president of Apple. :)