Why would you even consider running a benchmark program you don't have source code for and cannot compile yourself?
Probably for much the same reason people drive cars they don't personally know how to build? With speedometers they have not personally calibrated?
The ability to inspect every component and rebuild something yourself from the ground up is a great way to establish trust in a product, but not the only way. Most people purchase products from companies without being able to personally recreate those products, and still manage to get through their day just fine with working cars and televisions, even though Toyota and Samsung didn't invite them to tour the manufacturing plant.
Meanwhile, if one of those companies is producing a defective product (like a benchmark that doesn't really benchmark) then that is news, specific news about that company and that product. The news story is not "non-engineers make use of technology they can't personally verify"
If there was a larger proportion of roadspace dedicated for bikes, many, many more people would be riding.
Absolutely. And as proof, we spoke to a bunch of bicycle commuters, who complained about not having proper bike lanes and enough roadspace. Then we realized that they were already biking anyway, and that appeasing their complaints wouldn't represent "many, many more people... riding". So next, we went to speak to some average car commuters, and they said:
"Oh, uh, yeah. The environment, that's important. I'd really love to give up the comfort of my quiet, climate-controlled car, which stores all my cargo and allows me to travel long distances, and my 15 minute commute, in exchange for an hour commute spent working up a sweat and exposed to the elements and noise, carrying all my cargo on my back, but um... there's just not enough space, you see, on the roads. Uh huh. What a shame, can't do that 'cause there's not enough bike lanes. But it's too bad, 'cause I'd love to be getting all that exercise and helping the environment. Definitely."
I rest my case! So when can we expect these new bike lanes? Probably won't take long or cost much, any with such proven benefit, how could anyone say no?
Oil is still cheap, but The *second* oil becomes too expensive, there will be a ton of alternate energy sources available to tap.
I actually agree with almost all of your post, and the mindset you have of "we will deal with change as it comes, with the economy guiding us", but I think this one point is an important correction:
When nuclear power finally does become significantly cheaper than oil power, the switchover will not happen in one second, or even one year. The design, approval, and build time on nuclear plants in the US is around 10 years on the low side. Also, replacing gas stations with power stations will take a while too. But like you, I'm confident that the economy will help us all sort it out together, without any great disaster.
Perhaps the transition time will include more expensive energy and gas prices, and people will be forced to conserve a bit to save money. But that alone is far from catastrophe, and will likely bring efficiency improvements which would stand everyone in good stead when their new power plants come online.
Also, as I understand it, the email is not considered properly privileged communication. If someone infiltrates the office and records the lawyer having a conversation with their client, that's still not evidence admissible in court. But if they subpoena the email server of a client being investigated, I believe those emails to the lawyer saying "Oh crap, I committed the following felonies, you think that's gonna be a problem?" are admissible in court.
IANAL, any actual lawyers able to jump in and correct me here?
Think of your cell phone service, you pay for the company to maintain antennas to talk to YOUR phone. Your friends 2 states away pay for their company to maintain antennas in their towns. The cost is in maintaining the equipment for a given level of usage, not the per call cost.
Emphasis mine. That cell phone service charges you more if you use more minutes, since they have to pay for trunk lines based on capacity. That's one of the ideas being proposed to address the ISP's current problem - give people a 5 Gig plan, with a charge per Gig after that, just like the cell companies do.
they are still thinking client-server. They want Viewers, not Customers... trying to monetize those under-priced DSL customers by selling expensive services found elsewhere on the internet.
But this also has a parallel in traditional telephony - 800 numbers. Recognizing that not all phone customers are created equal, that some are service providers able to pay extra for their incoming calls, the telco offers them a special line that will allow the centralized service provider to foot the bill for calls from its distributed customers.
I don't know which of these models, if either, will occur, but the current system has abstracted the costs of usage away from the customers, who then predictably drove usage way up. Some solution will be found, even if that solution is as crude as continuing to throttle the high usage customers.
Moving to a consumption-based billing model is nothing more than an excuse for the telecommunications providers to extract more money and perform fewer upgrades.
No, it's not. You have plenty of tech-savvy people right here on slashdot asking for that model, wishing for it, volunteering for it. It is not "nothing more than an excuse for the telecommunications providers..." since it's also coming from some customers.
A per-usage model benefits people with low usage. A flat-rate model benefits people with high usage. It would seem that the "fair" thing to do would be to offer both, and let the customers choose. If that actually happened, lots of low-usage people would switch to the plan that ended up costing them $10-20/month, and the ISPs would raise the unlimited plans to $100/month or so to compensate.
The problem I see isn't that the EVIL telco companies have TRICKED me into NOT running bit-torrent all day like some do, it's that nobody knows EXACTLY what they're using. I couldn't even guess at my monthly usage, and I do network engineering for a living. No way does the average user know if they need the 100 M plan, the 1 G plan, or the 100 G plan. We would need big bandwidth meters just like the electric meters. Nevermind the original suggestion of per-packet-per-hop-routing-costs - who is going to traceroute to a website and analyze the transit before they decide if it's worth the cost of browsing there? I don't want to get into all that, even if it would save me $20/month. So I'll be happy to stick with my unlimited pricing plan, but the ISPs will have to figure out a way to control the high usage customers.
Ultimately, I agree with your assessment that "the pipes" are not "choked" - it's just a matter of last mile cabling and distribution area equipment getting upgraded, which will probably happen on its own, in time. No new billing models required. If the Gov wanted to make it a big national priority, they could kick in a few $B here and there to subsidize infrastructure upgrades. But even then, as that handoff goes up from 20 Meg to 100 Meg, there will still be torrenters getting pissed that they can't run 100 Meg all day every day, when their ISP sold them a "100 Meg" connection...
They cannot deliver what they have promised you, and you wouldn't have chosen them if they hadn't promised it.
That's why we're stuck in this mess. An ISP in the US cannot provide its customer a solid 20 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, steady and unlimited, for $50/month. They really can't. The few slashdotters here with actual network engineering or consulting experience (like myself), who have shopped for carrier grade network equipment and data circuits (T1, DS3, Metro-Ethernet, MPLS services, any of it), can confirm that for you.
Their promise of unlimited usage for $50/month is like a restaurant promising you unlimited food for $10. If you show up and eat two burgers and three orders of fries, you feel like you got a good deal. If you show up with the entire homeless population of NYC and ask for your "unlimited food", they tell you "sorry, we can't really do that."
It's understandable that you're upset over being promised something they couldn't deliver, but if they had advertised "300 kbps service, really unlimited! Only $60/month!" you would have ignored them and stuck with Comcast/Roadrunner/Verizon. You were promised something not quite right, because most people won't complain about it and nobody would buy it if they told you the truth.
I can see this being interesting to networking, though. A guaranteed route somewhere from any start point sounds pretty cool, even if a bit inefficient.
I'm having trouble seeing it... In addition to the efficiency question, this is all based on starting with a complete knowledge of the topology, then coming up with a clever way to describe the route. Most modern network routing protocols are built to solve the problem of "how do I learn about and react to changes in the topology". The algorithm for actually choosing the routes, once you know the topology, is usually the easy part.
But I certainly could be wrong. It's possible some genius will put this concept together with something else seemingly useless, and together they'll allow us to do something we haven't even tried yet.
So you are saying there is a difference between intentionally causing your customers harm as the motivation of your behaviour and being utterly indifferent to the harm your cause your customers as long as greed is your motivation.
I don't really see it, both are just as evil as each other and should really be treated that way under law.
Count yourself lucky that the world is not as you would have it. I'm sure there's millions of people in this country right now who are indifferent to your life. If even a tenth of them desired to intentionally harm you, your life would be either miserable or over.
There's plenty to complain about and fix in corporate behaviors, but to equate indifference with malice is either madness or foolishness. We should continue to strive for improvement, but to say that 5 is equal to 1, because they're both less than 10, that's simply a mental breakdown on your part.
I don't know about you, but I would define "completely amoral and dispassionate entity who seeks to maximize his profits" as evil...
Then you should count yourself very fortunate, for you have lived a life sheltered from actual evil. I'm sure the victims of genocidal warlords would be quite happy to live under Verizon's reign instead.
Your assertion that Iraq was not invaded for its oil because America isn't profiting from it assumes that the orchestrators of the war are/were in some way competent.
I think you might have just deployed the Chewbacca Offense
1. Accuse opponent of doing something that does not make sense.
2. Point out that your opponent does not make sense.
3. ???
4. Therefore, your opponent is guilty.
Every federal agency should have to periodically justify its existence and some should be abolished. An agency can be outdated or it's functions better done by another agency or the states. Unfortunately the federal government has become a jobs program.
Yeah, I think it's been that way for a long, long time though. I started wondering, when hearing proposals for radical tax simplification which would all but eliminate the IRS (Flat Tax, Fair Tax, whatever you want to call it) - has there ever been a case where a significantly large government agency was either eliminated entirely, or massively downsized? I know of a few that got renamed or re-purposed or re-orged, but not in such a way that their size decreased substantially.
This makes me nervous about advocating any new federal roles or departments, like getting a tattoo - it may seem like a great idea now, but it's permanent. But then, I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of federal agency history, and I may be wrong. Does anyone know of a case where a major agency was downsized or eliminated?
Even if you have a "hack proof" media player, you can still put a mic in front of the speakers, or run a cable from the speaker socket to the mic socket. That's how people copied things before computers made it a lot easier.
Absolutely true, the analog hole will always be there, but we're losing perspective and going around in circles here. Their real goal isn't to make perfectly hack proof DRM, any more that my goal is to have a perfectly impenetrable security barrier around my house. Sure, there are lock picks, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to lock my door. Sure, even if I get a burglar alarm, there are crafty thieves who know how to hack it or bypass it, but that doesn't make it worthless.
The key point is at the end of your sentence - "made it a lot easier". In the olden days, if you wanted to pirate your buddy's 100 album collection, you had to spend 100 hours at a tape deck, and even that made them nervous. Now you click "copy" on the folder and wait a minute or two for the files. The goal of all this DRM crap is to make it difficult enough to copy stuff such that the average consumer won't bother to, and they will just buy their own music.
Of course they don't always succeed at that goal, and of course they make legitimate use cumbersome and frustrating in the process, but to assert that their goal is to make hack proof DRM, and that therefore it's pointless, is either foolish or disingenuous.
We're used to moving an actual thing around to do stuff. The physical reaction into our fingers is very important. The mouse gives a minimum, but the trackpad gives more.
Actually that's one of the things the Wiimote does well, at least when using the Wii proper. Pointing it produces a mouse cursor, and as the cursor travels over each clickable icon, the Wiimote vibrates, giving something of the sense your finger would have traveling over several large embossed buttons. Of course, the pointing device in your hand has to have the vibration capability, so using the Wiimote as the receiver, rather than pointer, sacrifices this advantage.
Yes, the version I saw floating around went: A man will spend $20 to get a $10 item he needs. A woman will spend $10 to get a $20 item she doesn't need.
Yes, EDGE is AT&T's 2.5G network. Slower broadband speed than Sprint & T-Mobile's EVDO-based network.
Which in turn is slower than AT&T's HSPDA 3G network.
Which in turn runs on the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) air interface technology developed by us silly Americans (Qualcomm), while the world was telling us how GSM was the best there is. Meanwhile, EVDO has been around here longer and is deployed much wider, because it doesn't require completely replacing the air interface of the deployed network.
But don't take my word for it. Go to AT&T's website yourself, and check their coverage maps for the "select areas" which have 3G. Then go to Verizon's website and look at their coverage map, which doesn't have a "3G coverage area" option, because CDMA2000/EVDO were already 3G.
Don't get me wrong, it sucks that there's so much nasty carrier lock-in, and I'd love to have the SIM card freedom boasted by those outside the States, but if we're going into pure technicals, CDMA is genius, and it's a good thing we didn't standardize ourselves on GSM like Europe did, else Europe (and Japan) wouldn't have our lovely air interface to use for their 3G networks.
Its a license to pollute. It is the ultimate expression of wealth. You are buying permission to pollute.
I'm extremely skeptical of carbon credits/offsets, and the talk of how we're "building a wonderful new carbon trading economy" irritates me, as it feels like a big "broken window fallacy" scam to me. But you lost me with the bit about permission.
I don't know about you, but I already have "permission to pollute" - if we're defining the emission of carbon dioxide as polluting. Aside from the trivial example of how I personally exhale it, it's not illegal for me to burn all the wood I want in my home fireplace, or for me to buy a Hummer and drive it in a big circle around the city all day, everyday. Sure, it would cost me money, just like these carbon offsets cost people money, but I'm not lacking in "permission".
Beyond your permission issue, I don't see your moral problem with me putting X tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, then taking X tons out. We're not talking about human life here, carrying its own moral weight, where having five babies does not permit me to kill five people. "Putting out CO2" does not have its own moral cost. The only problem with it is that the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere, and has effects on the atmosphere while it's there. If I don't actually cause any of those effects, how have I done something wrong?
Now like I said before, I'm not a big prospective buyer of these credits, but for those who are, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the FTC would investigate to prevent them from being defrauded.
Slashdot is moderated largely by hypocritical children who will mod up popular opinion and mod down unpopular posts regardless of accuracy. I predict the slow demise of Slashdot as the comments area, a once fertile land of discussion and intelligent observation becomes a members only arena linux/mac fanboys and video gamers who can't envision anyone else's opinion being right other than theirs. It will be a place where where speaking ill of religion, republicans or windows will be given an automatic +2 informative while speaking ill social web sites, video games, or modding practices will be an auto -2 troll.
You decided this last year? Seriously? I felt this way five years ago. Maybe more. I finally just realized that it's Sturgeon's Law at work: 90% of the comments will be crap (mostly of the varieties you describe) but 10% of them are genuinely interesting, informative, or insightful. So when I've got time to spare, I'll wade through the 90% to get to the 10%. Other times, it's just not worth it. But I don't think slashdot itself has changed that much in this past year, or even the past five.
I was always sympathetic to the idea of bringing liberty to those overseas, but it is clear now that the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones.
Yes, clearly those jews who made individual choices to walk into concentration camps should not have been troubled by the nasty government choices of Britain, Russia, Canada, and the USA. Who were we to wield our government power on that nation of self-governing Germans, thinking we'd be greeted as liberators?
Okay, I'll ease off the sarcasm now. I'm not defending this latest Iraq war in particular, nor attacking Ron Paul (I may yet vote for him, we'll see). But just because the current example is a mess, don't assume that we can turn it into a simple shining universal statement of isolationism - "the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones"
If a truly democratic country elects someone who enacts policies we hate, then yes, it is foolish to send in troops to remove that leader. This will lead to lots of terrible war and killing, and will likely just piss off the citizens of that country more, causing them to elect a leader who opposes us even more.
On the other hand, there are cases where the people of a country are being oppressed by a dictatorship; where their "individual choices" are not being represented. In such a case, external military assistance and liberation is truly a good thing. In addition to the big obvious example of Hitler, see also the French assistance to the British colonists who didn't feel King George III was representing their interests. Maybe Iraq wasn't one of those cases, but it's foolish to claim that those cases never happen, and that "the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones"
I'm glad someone else notices the sports mentality of the arbitrarily polar U.S. party system.
Are you aware of a democratic/parliamentary/republic nation out there whose elections are often a real competition amongst four or more parties? Or one where you're not allowed to belong to the liberal party without proving that you're liberal? Or one where the parties don't really care if they win?
I mean, I'm not saying that this two party system isn't awful, but is it really unique to the US?
Case in point - Halo 3. Ok, so I haven't played it myself, but a perfect 100% score on some sites?
I agree that perfect 100% reviews are pretty extreme, and should be very rare, but when I check Gamerankings, I don't see Halo 3 getting perfects from most of the big semi-respected sites. Okay, yes, Official Xbox Magazine, which we can assume is interested in not just selling ads, but selling Xboxes, gave it a perfect. But Gamespot and IGN both give it a mere 9.5. And the hordes of other reviews are extremely positive, even from the very small sites. You really think there's an elaborate pay-for-ads-for-positive reviews conspiracy that extends to all those sites, or is it possible that Halo 3 got great reviews because it's actually a great game? Maybe you should try playing it before you assume that the reviews are the result of corruption.
Kane and Lynch obviously has a lot of advertising dollars, but if you check Gamerankings on it, you'll see a 6.5 or so across the board. Is it possible that, despite the giant corruption we're all certain is there, that somehow good games are getting good reviews and bad games are getting bad reviews?
To take music as an example, the older I get, the more talented people I see playing for tips in bars and the more manufactured crap I see hitting the charts.
Well, that one's easily explained. "Talented creator" is a poor metric. What matters is whether the music is actually good, and in this case, "good" is determined by the listener, not the creator or the critic. I believe that someone who is pleasing millions of people with music deserves more compensation than someone really talented creating music that only he and his buddies like. Call me a crazy libertarian anarcho-capitalist, but it seems to me that the degree to which other people give you the stuff you want should match the degree to which you give other people the stuff they want.
Re: the charts, I do often wonder if the whole mp3 sharing issue is, not hurting, but skewing the music business. Those groups of people more likely to purchase music ought to find more music that feeds their tastes, while those who only download are left lamenting the fact that their favorite bands don't get the commercial recognition they deserve.
Why should someone try to list this? Who cares, and why?
Of course people from various companies or organizations edit the Wikipedia entries for those organizations. They're likely to be more knowledgeable and more interested in the subject matter than the average contributor. That's normal.
If someone created a Wikipedia page about me, and claimed that I cheated on a Geology paper at Harvard, I would probably edit the page and remove it - seeing as how I never went to Harvard or took Geology. Are you telling me that's unfair or unethical of me? That I should wait patiently for someone else knowledgeable and motivated to go make that correction for me? That principle seems absurd to me.
If the edits they make are untrue, if they're trying to give a falsely positive impression of themselves, then fix it. Correct it. Revert it. The fact that they want to do so is neither surprising nor any worse than if some random third party wanted to post falsely positive (or negative) information about the organization in question. If I'm some random crazy jerk and I decide to vandalize Linus Torvalds' entry to say terrible things about him, how is that better than if he himself edited it to say untrue but positive things about himself? Either way it's just someone posting false information to Wikipedia, and either way you should just correct it to the best of your ability and move on.
There shouldn't be some sort of blanket principle or policy that an organization can't update its own Wikipedia page. I'd imagine there are IBM employees who know more about IBM than you do. I'd expect there are EA employees who know a lot about EA. They should be free to contribute that knowledge. If they're lying, correct their lies like you would anyone else's.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably for much the same reason people drive cars they don't personally know how to build? With speedometers they have not personally calibrated?
The ability to inspect every component and rebuild something yourself from the ground up is a great way to establish trust in a product, but not the only way. Most people purchase products from companies without being able to personally recreate those products, and still manage to get through their day just fine with working cars and televisions, even though Toyota and Samsung didn't invite them to tour the manufacturing plant.
Meanwhile, if one of those companies is producing a defective product (like a benchmark that doesn't really benchmark) then that is news, specific news about that company and that product. The news story is not "non-engineers make use of technology they can't personally verify"
Absolutely. And as proof, we spoke to a bunch of bicycle commuters, who complained about not having proper bike lanes and enough roadspace. Then we realized that they were already biking anyway, and that appeasing their complaints wouldn't represent "many, many more people... riding". So next, we went to speak to some average car commuters, and they said:
"Oh, uh, yeah. The environment, that's important. I'd really love to give up the comfort of my quiet, climate-controlled car, which stores all my cargo and allows me to travel long distances, and my 15 minute commute, in exchange for an hour commute spent working up a sweat and exposed to the elements and noise, carrying all my cargo on my back, but um... there's just not enough space, you see, on the roads. Uh huh. What a shame, can't do that 'cause there's not enough bike lanes. But it's too bad, 'cause I'd love to be getting all that exercise and helping the environment. Definitely."
I rest my case! So when can we expect these new bike lanes? Probably won't take long or cost much, any with such proven benefit, how could anyone say no?
When nuclear power finally does become significantly cheaper than oil power, the switchover will not happen in one second, or even one year. The design, approval, and build time on nuclear plants in the US is around 10 years on the low side. Also, replacing gas stations with power stations will take a while too. But like you, I'm confident that the economy will help us all sort it out together, without any great disaster.
Perhaps the transition time will include more expensive energy and gas prices, and people will be forced to conserve a bit to save money. But that alone is far from catastrophe, and will likely bring efficiency improvements which would stand everyone in good stead when their new power plants come online.
Absolutely true.
Also, as I understand it, the email is not considered properly privileged communication. If someone infiltrates the office and records the lawyer having a conversation with their client, that's still not evidence admissible in court. But if they subpoena the email server of a client being investigated, I believe those emails to the lawyer saying "Oh crap, I committed the following felonies, you think that's gonna be a problem?" are admissible in court.
IANAL, any actual lawyers able to jump in and correct me here?
Emphasis mine. That cell phone service charges you more if you use more minutes, since they have to pay for trunk lines based on capacity. That's one of the ideas being proposed to address the ISP's current problem - give people a 5 Gig plan, with a charge per Gig after that, just like the cell companies do.
But this also has a parallel in traditional telephony - 800 numbers. Recognizing that not all phone customers are created equal, that some are service providers able to pay extra for their incoming calls, the telco offers them a special line that will allow the centralized service provider to foot the bill for calls from its distributed customers.
I don't know which of these models, if either, will occur, but the current system has abstracted the costs of usage away from the customers, who then predictably drove usage way up. Some solution will be found, even if that solution is as crude as continuing to throttle the high usage customers.
No, it's not. You have plenty of tech-savvy people right here on slashdot asking for that model, wishing for it, volunteering for it. It is not "nothing more than an excuse for the telecommunications providers..." since it's also coming from some customers.
A per-usage model benefits people with low usage. A flat-rate model benefits people with high usage. It would seem that the "fair" thing to do would be to offer both, and let the customers choose. If that actually happened, lots of low-usage people would switch to the plan that ended up costing them $10-20/month, and the ISPs would raise the unlimited plans to $100/month or so to compensate.
The problem I see isn't that the EVIL telco companies have TRICKED me into NOT running bit-torrent all day like some do, it's that nobody knows EXACTLY what they're using. I couldn't even guess at my monthly usage, and I do network engineering for a living. No way does the average user know if they need the 100 M plan, the 1 G plan, or the 100 G plan. We would need big bandwidth meters just like the electric meters. Nevermind the original suggestion of per-packet-per-hop-routing-costs - who is going to traceroute to a website and analyze the transit before they decide if it's worth the cost of browsing there? I don't want to get into all that, even if it would save me $20/month. So I'll be happy to stick with my unlimited pricing plan, but the ISPs will have to figure out a way to control the high usage customers.
Ultimately, I agree with your assessment that "the pipes" are not "choked" - it's just a matter of last mile cabling and distribution area equipment getting upgraded, which will probably happen on its own, in time. No new billing models required. If the Gov wanted to make it a big national priority, they could kick in a few $B here and there to subsidize infrastructure upgrades. But even then, as that handoff goes up from 20 Meg to 100 Meg, there will still be torrenters getting pissed that they can't run 100 Meg all day every day, when their ISP sold them a "100 Meg" connection...
Do not fear, we'll be considering a "stern-glare counter-offensive" sometime this week.
They cannot deliver what they have promised you, and you wouldn't have chosen them if they hadn't promised it.
That's why we're stuck in this mess. An ISP in the US cannot provide its customer a solid 20 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, steady and unlimited, for $50/month. They really can't. The few slashdotters here with actual network engineering or consulting experience (like myself), who have shopped for carrier grade network equipment and data circuits (T1, DS3, Metro-Ethernet, MPLS services, any of it), can confirm that for you.
Their promise of unlimited usage for $50/month is like a restaurant promising you unlimited food for $10. If you show up and eat two burgers and three orders of fries, you feel like you got a good deal. If you show up with the entire homeless population of NYC and ask for your "unlimited food", they tell you "sorry, we can't really do that."
It's understandable that you're upset over being promised something they couldn't deliver, but if they had advertised "300 kbps service, really unlimited! Only $60/month!" you would have ignored them and stuck with Comcast/Roadrunner/Verizon. You were promised something not quite right, because most people won't complain about it and nobody would buy it if they told you the truth.
I'm having trouble seeing it... In addition to the efficiency question, this is all based on starting with a complete knowledge of the topology, then coming up with a clever way to describe the route. Most modern network routing protocols are built to solve the problem of "how do I learn about and react to changes in the topology". The algorithm for actually choosing the routes, once you know the topology, is usually the easy part.
But I certainly could be wrong. It's possible some genius will put this concept together with something else seemingly useless, and together they'll allow us to do something we haven't even tried yet.
Count yourself lucky that the world is not as you would have it. I'm sure there's millions of people in this country right now who are indifferent to your life. If even a tenth of them desired to intentionally harm you, your life would be either miserable or over.
There's plenty to complain about and fix in corporate behaviors, but to equate indifference with malice is either madness or foolishness. We should continue to strive for improvement, but to say that 5 is equal to 1, because they're both less than 10, that's simply a mental breakdown on your part.
Then you should count yourself very fortunate, for you have lived a life sheltered from actual evil. I'm sure the victims of genocidal warlords would be quite happy to live under Verizon's reign instead.
"I can't document the flaws in study X, but it reminds me of study Y, which has documented flaws. This clearly demonstrates that study X is flawed."
Well played.
I think you might have just deployed the Chewbacca Offense
1. Accuse opponent of doing something that does not make sense.
2. Point out that your opponent does not make sense.
3. ???
4. Therefore, your opponent is guilty.
Yeah, I think it's been that way for a long, long time though. I started wondering, when hearing proposals for radical tax simplification which would all but eliminate the IRS (Flat Tax, Fair Tax, whatever you want to call it) - has there ever been a case where a significantly large government agency was either eliminated entirely, or massively downsized? I know of a few that got renamed or re-purposed or re-orged, but not in such a way that their size decreased substantially.
This makes me nervous about advocating any new federal roles or departments, like getting a tattoo - it may seem like a great idea now, but it's permanent. But then, I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of federal agency history, and I may be wrong. Does anyone know of a case where a major agency was downsized or eliminated?
Absolutely true, the analog hole will always be there, but we're losing perspective and going around in circles here. Their real goal isn't to make perfectly hack proof DRM, any more that my goal is to have a perfectly impenetrable security barrier around my house. Sure, there are lock picks, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to lock my door. Sure, even if I get a burglar alarm, there are crafty thieves who know how to hack it or bypass it, but that doesn't make it worthless.
The key point is at the end of your sentence - "made it a lot easier". In the olden days, if you wanted to pirate your buddy's 100 album collection, you had to spend 100 hours at a tape deck, and even that made them nervous. Now you click "copy" on the folder and wait a minute or two for the files. The goal of all this DRM crap is to make it difficult enough to copy stuff such that the average consumer won't bother to, and they will just buy their own music.
Of course they don't always succeed at that goal, and of course they make legitimate use cumbersome and frustrating in the process, but to assert that their goal is to make hack proof DRM, and that therefore it's pointless, is either foolish or disingenuous.
Actually that's one of the things the Wiimote does well, at least when using the Wii proper. Pointing it produces a mouse cursor, and as the cursor travels over each clickable icon, the Wiimote vibrates, giving something of the sense your finger would have traveling over several large embossed buttons. Of course, the pointing device in your hand has to have the vibration capability, so using the Wiimote as the receiver, rather than pointer, sacrifices this advantage.
Yes, the version I saw floating around went:
A man will spend $20 to get a $10 item he needs.
A woman will spend $10 to get a $20 item she doesn't need.
Which in turn runs on the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) air interface technology developed by us silly Americans (Qualcomm), while the world was telling us how GSM was the best there is. Meanwhile, EVDO has been around here longer and is deployed much wider, because it doesn't require completely replacing the air interface of the deployed network.
But don't take my word for it. Go to AT&T's website yourself, and check their coverage maps for the "select areas" which have 3G. Then go to Verizon's website and look at their coverage map, which doesn't have a "3G coverage area" option, because CDMA2000/EVDO were already 3G.
Don't get me wrong, it sucks that there's so much nasty carrier lock-in, and I'd love to have the SIM card freedom boasted by those outside the States, but if we're going into pure technicals, CDMA is genius, and it's a good thing we didn't standardize ourselves on GSM like Europe did, else Europe (and Japan) wouldn't have our lovely air interface to use for their 3G networks.
I'm extremely skeptical of carbon credits/offsets, and the talk of how we're "building a wonderful new carbon trading economy" irritates me, as it feels like a big "broken window fallacy" scam to me. But you lost me with the bit about permission.
I don't know about you, but I already have "permission to pollute" - if we're defining the emission of carbon dioxide as polluting. Aside from the trivial example of how I personally exhale it, it's not illegal for me to burn all the wood I want in my home fireplace, or for me to buy a Hummer and drive it in a big circle around the city all day, everyday. Sure, it would cost me money, just like these carbon offsets cost people money, but I'm not lacking in "permission".
Beyond your permission issue, I don't see your moral problem with me putting X tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, then taking X tons out. We're not talking about human life here, carrying its own moral weight, where having five babies does not permit me to kill five people. "Putting out CO2" does not have its own moral cost. The only problem with it is that the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere, and has effects on the atmosphere while it's there. If I don't actually cause any of those effects, how have I done something wrong?
Now like I said before, I'm not a big prospective buyer of these credits, but for those who are, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the FTC would investigate to prevent them from being defrauded.
You decided this last year? Seriously? I felt this way five years ago. Maybe more. I finally just realized that it's Sturgeon's Law at work: 90% of the comments will be crap (mostly of the varieties you describe) but 10% of them are genuinely interesting, informative, or insightful. So when I've got time to spare, I'll wade through the 90% to get to the 10%. Other times, it's just not worth it. But I don't think slashdot itself has changed that much in this past year, or even the past five.
Yes, clearly those jews who made individual choices to walk into concentration camps should not have been troubled by the nasty government choices of Britain, Russia, Canada, and the USA. Who were we to wield our government power on that nation of self-governing Germans, thinking we'd be greeted as liberators?
Okay, I'll ease off the sarcasm now. I'm not defending this latest Iraq war in particular, nor attacking Ron Paul (I may yet vote for him, we'll see). But just because the current example is a mess, don't assume that we can turn it into a simple shining universal statement of isolationism - "the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones"
If a truly democratic country elects someone who enacts policies we hate, then yes, it is foolish to send in troops to remove that leader. This will lead to lots of terrible war and killing, and will likely just piss off the citizens of that country more, causing them to elect a leader who opposes us even more.
On the other hand, there are cases where the people of a country are being oppressed by a dictatorship; where their "individual choices" are not being represented. In such a case, external military assistance and liberation is truly a good thing. In addition to the big obvious example of Hitler, see also the French assistance to the British colonists who didn't feel King George III was representing their interests. Maybe Iraq wasn't one of those cases, but it's foolish to claim that those cases never happen, and that "the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones"
Are you aware of a democratic/parliamentary/republic nation out there whose elections are often a real competition amongst four or more parties? Or one where you're not allowed to belong to the liberal party without proving that you're liberal? Or one where the parties don't really care if they win?
I mean, I'm not saying that this two party system isn't awful, but is it really unique to the US?
I agree that perfect 100% reviews are pretty extreme, and should be very rare, but when I check Gamerankings, I don't see Halo 3 getting perfects from most of the big semi-respected sites. Okay, yes, Official Xbox Magazine, which we can assume is interested in not just selling ads, but selling Xboxes, gave it a perfect. But Gamespot and IGN both give it a mere 9.5. And the hordes of other reviews are extremely positive, even from the very small sites. You really think there's an elaborate pay-for-ads-for-positive reviews conspiracy that extends to all those sites, or is it possible that Halo 3 got great reviews because it's actually a great game? Maybe you should try playing it before you assume that the reviews are the result of corruption.
Kane and Lynch obviously has a lot of advertising dollars, but if you check Gamerankings on it, you'll see a 6.5 or so across the board. Is it possible that, despite the giant corruption we're all certain is there, that somehow good games are getting good reviews and bad games are getting bad reviews?
Well, that one's easily explained. "Talented creator" is a poor metric. What matters is whether the music is actually good, and in this case, "good" is determined by the listener, not the creator or the critic. I believe that someone who is pleasing millions of people with music deserves more compensation than someone really talented creating music that only he and his buddies like. Call me a crazy libertarian anarcho-capitalist, but it seems to me that the degree to which other people give you the stuff you want should match the degree to which you give other people the stuff they want.
Re: the charts, I do often wonder if the whole mp3 sharing issue is, not hurting, but skewing the music business. Those groups of people more likely to purchase music ought to find more music that feeds their tastes, while those who only download are left lamenting the fact that their favorite bands don't get the commercial recognition they deserve.
Just a thought.
Why should someone try to list this? Who cares, and why?
Of course people from various companies or organizations edit the Wikipedia entries for those organizations. They're likely to be more knowledgeable and more interested in the subject matter than the average contributor. That's normal.
If someone created a Wikipedia page about me, and claimed that I cheated on a Geology paper at Harvard, I would probably edit the page and remove it - seeing as how I never went to Harvard or took Geology. Are you telling me that's unfair or unethical of me? That I should wait patiently for someone else knowledgeable and motivated to go make that correction for me? That principle seems absurd to me.
If the edits they make are untrue, if they're trying to give a falsely positive impression of themselves, then fix it. Correct it. Revert it. The fact that they want to do so is neither surprising nor any worse than if some random third party wanted to post falsely positive (or negative) information about the organization in question. If I'm some random crazy jerk and I decide to vandalize Linus Torvalds' entry to say terrible things about him, how is that better than if he himself edited it to say untrue but positive things about himself? Either way it's just someone posting false information to Wikipedia, and either way you should just correct it to the best of your ability and move on.
There shouldn't be some sort of blanket principle or policy that an organization can't update its own Wikipedia page. I'd imagine there are IBM employees who know more about IBM than you do. I'd expect there are EA employees who know a lot about EA. They should be free to contribute that knowledge. If they're lying, correct their lies like you would anyone else's.