I would only have lost if I play the game that says liars should be ignored. I don't play that game. Many people think that's the right response to trollers. They are wrong. False statements told (in a context other than where they are meant to be recognized as false, like satire), should be countered. Period. I didn't lose a damn thing.
Ignoring trolls is never the right answer. It doesn't matter whether someone is spreading falsehoods deliberately as a joke or because they enjoy lying or because they really believe them - they need to be countered in any case.
Take a look at this monitor and then tell me people don't care about color accuracy.
Are you talking about something available at almost no cost, as you have been touting, or are you talking about something available at a very signifigant cost, like this monitor that costs more than 4,000 dollars.
Also, your comments are contradictory to the earlier claims that people's eyes differ. It cannot be simultaneously true that "You can color calibrate monitors to be accurate across the screen and to a standard." and also be true that people's color receptors don't have the same exact responses as each other.
If my eyes don't have the strongest response peaks at the exact same frequency that yours do, then there is no such thing as "THE" right monitor color calibration that looks best for both of us.
It's about as respectful as calling Chinese, Japanese, and Thai "orientals".
Yeah! Just like calling Asians, Africans, and Caucasians all "humans"? What's up with that!? There's never any need to use a large vague-scope term for any reason. I think all such words should stop being used, like "vehicle" - No! - they're cars, and motorcycles, and trucks.
All words should always be at the smallest possible scope! Are you with me?
This study does not prove that limited numbers in language cause limited numerical thinking. The result would be the same if the cause/effect relationship was the other way around. If a people have limited ability to think numerically, then they are going to develop a language that is similarly limited. Or, there could be a third unspecified cause that both of these things are the effect of.
Basically a correlation does give strong indications there is probably a cause/effect relation occuring (if it's a statistically signifigant correlation), but it says absolutely nothing about what direction that relationship goes. Any one of three possiblities exist:
1 - X causes Y 2 - Y causes X 3 - X and Y are both being caused by Z, so when Z occurs, X and Y both occur together.
If I didn't realize that, then I might end up believing absurd things like owning a shiny car causes someone to be rich, or that being skinny causes people to excercise.
There are two sources of corruption in government that have nothing to do with each other: 1 - government wanting more control, and 2 - corporations wanting to direct that control to their advantage. The various overzealous (allegedly) anti-terrorist measures are all part of #1, not #2.
Doesn't work. Every politician currently in power GOT there using the two-party system. So you can't get them to change the rules that got them there. They are the benefactors of those rules. To carry out the kind of change you are talking about, it cannot happen through peaceful public outcry. The ones in power are in the position where they are best served by igorning that outcry. Besides, the stuff you would need to change is buried deeply in the constitution, such that it would require a very big amendment to change it.
The only way to change it is either a total revolution in which the system is scrapped, or a miracle where the current system is used in its current form to vote in a new third party. They could then be presuaded to change the system, but only if you get to them right away. After a few terms they would become part of the problem.
You are operating under the false impression that the phrase "slippery slope" is equal exactly to the phrase "slippery slope fallacy", such that there are no situtions in which the term should be used for non-fallicious situations. That's just not true. Just like you can have a "dichotomy" without having a "false dichotomy fallacy", you can have a "slippery slope" without a "slippery slope fallacy". "Slippery slope" merely refers to a style of argument. Whether it's a fallacy or not depends on whether the things downslope actually do logically follow from the things upslope or not. (And then in that case it's really just a special case of the generic fallacy of "does not follow".)
If the only way you had ever heard the phrase "slippery slope" used was in reference to the fallacy, I could see how you could get the misconception that that's *ALL* the phrase is ever used for. But it is used in other contexts too.
If you don't want to look like a moron, next time try picking two choices that actually are contrary choices in some way. Choice A and B are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.
If their goal is "lets make a hypothetical statement about a pattern that could happen in the future", then that makes sense - but if the goal is "Let's make a statement about what *did* actually happen", then inserting or deleting items from the list is historical revisionism and should not be tolerated.
If you want to pretend that you honestly believe in thinking for yourself, you can start by admitting there is no such thing as the "slashdot party line". I see far more posts complaining about the alleged party line than posts actually exhibiting it, which proves there's no such thing (other than, perhaps, saying that the slashdot party line is the act of complaining about the slashdot party line.)
Sometimes censorship is a matter of a government telling someone what not to say, and that's bad, but other times it's a case of someone deliberately avoiding saying something that would piss of potential customers, and there is no government involvement at all - that's not quite as bad. The Koran chant in the video game was an example of the latter.
Very true. Very insightful. But here's the difference - people don't delude themselves into thinking that the demarkation of countries are geological features. They do seem to pretend that the demarkation of oceans are.
About the DVD movie format: You are correct, of course. I hadn't considered the fact that most people view DVDs using hardwired consoles where the software can't be upgraded without buying a new console. I was considering the way I usually view DVD's, on a computer - in which case the mounting of the filesystem, and the software that renders the movie file on that filesystem are really two totally independant issues. The same hardware could easily read a "DVD+" format by just updating the software. Of course, if that "software" is burned into a firmware chip in a console, then that doesn't work.
If I adjust the constrast, brightness, and gamma on my monitor I am manipulating the colors in the image. It could make single increment differences between colors obvious. Higher precision in displays would be useful, not just during processing.
I still don't agree, since I don't see any scenario in which anyone would *care* about the very, very SMALL loss of precision in the output device. Well, okay - YOU seem to care, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. The fact that every TV set and computer monitor has individual variations is going to account for more of a "wrongness" to the color than only having 8-bit precision will. Tweak the monitor all you want and it will still end up being a few shades "off" from what the original creator of the material intended it to be. Plus, variations in the phosphors will exist even within the same screen. The shade of red you get in the upper-left corner with a pixel of color of RGB:1,0,0 will be different than the one you get in the center of the screen with a pixel of color RGB:1,0,0. I don't think there is any point to putting out the digital signal in a format that is beyond the "margin of error" of the physical analog features of the output device.
Similarly, I have heard people complain about the CD audio standard being bad because it has too many aliased artifacts at the high frequencies. Again, my response there is similar - unless you can make a speaker that works *Amazingly* well, the physical movement of the speaker membrane is going to be more off than that anyway.
The scenario you outlined works for stealing one person's identity, but not for doing it in volume. The other reason online fraudsters don't use it, in addition to having no need, is that they do their work in a bulk fashion, not a case-by-case basis.
But I do concede that for the person trying to get a fake ID to get on a plane, your plan would work.
I don't understand it myself either, but I think the swelling may be a side effect of the localised raised temperature. The high temperature is an attempt to destroy the intruding material by "cooking" the intruder to the point where it's molecules break apart at some weak link. It works very well against biological intruders like flu bugs, since biological molecules tend to only be possible to exist at specific narrow temperature bands. Too cold and they don't flex in the right places to function. Too warm and they break into smaller pieces. Like the molecules in food, they become chemically altered when cooked. Hopefully, chemically altered in such a way that they don't work anymore. Typically all it takes to render a flu bug harmless is to break one single link somewhere. Just a few degrees of a fever can do that. The danger is, of course, that *your* body is also made of fragile biological molecules that will break when they get too warm. But your body can survive the death of several cells, and replace them, the flu bug isn't as good at doing that, so the fever response is an example of a fix that harms you too, but hopefully not as much as it harms the intruder. I suspect the swelling (localized high temperature in the airways) is the same sort of thing.
I'm sorry, was your comment supposed to have been relevant in some way? One half points one way, one half points the other. The decision as to which half should be the "up" and which should be the "down" was arbitrary. We could just as easily have had maps with south on top and north on bottom.
You wouldn't even be able to pronounce some of the couties. Berkshire, Bukinghamshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire.
No fair not accounting for accent, though. I'm from Wisconsin, and most Americans can't pronounce that right either, but that's due to accent differences, not ignorance. To most Americans, "New Orleans" is two words. To hear the locals pronounc it, it's one run-toghther word, something like "Nawlins".
For, example, if an American pronounces the "shire" in Worcestershire like the hobbits' "shire" instead of the "right" pronounciation of "shure", that shouldn't be counted as a mistake.
I had a harder test - the map was TOTALLY blank - meaning it didn't even have any borders drawn on it - just a white sheet (okay, it did have the major geographical features, which helped a lot - it was easier to draw a state in the right places if you had the major river borders to use to anchor one edge of the state.) The object was to draw in and label all the states. (But you didn't have to put Alaska and Hawaii in the right place, you could just mention them off to the side - probably because you can't include them without using a scale that's too far zoomed-out to work with.)
We did have more than 15 minutes, though - but I think that was in recognition that it takes a while to draw all the borders and they will need to be re-erased again and again. Plus, we were only graded on getting things in the right place, not on getting them the right shape, if all the states were amorphous blobs without the right borders, or they ended up bordering the wrong states because of badly drawn borders, you could still get it right if they were in the right position relative to each other. This was because it would be unfair to grade on getting the shape right because that makes it into an art skills test instad of a geography test. Someone could have a good mental picture of what the shape should be but just be really bad at drawing.
When I did that test, in 10th grade, I got everything right except I transposed Vermont and New Hampshire. I knew they were the vertical stripe states west of Maine, but I couldn't remember which was which.
Actually, there is only one ocean. It's just really big, and really strangely shaped, wrapping itself around all the landmasses. If you don't believe me, then I invite you to draw me a dotted line that demarks the difference between, say, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
Of all the things being complained about, the chant was the only one that actually made sense and seemed a legitimate complaint. To you and me it just sounds like random chanting. To someone who speaks the language, it is probably plain as day what it means. It would be just as offensive to a Muslim as playing a fighting game to the sound of a famous psalm would be to a Christian.
The ones that really seemed wrong were the ones based on a country's political predjudices. Like China insisting that Taiwan cannot be called a country on any map, or India insisting that Kashmir cannot be colored as a different color than India on a political color-map. And notice that the solution Microsoft had to take was to change these programs for *everyone* not just for the ones sold in that one country (because it is prohibitievely expensive to just make a special version for sale in one country that is different than the one sold in other countries.) So the end-effect is that the software sold in all countries is the least-common-demoninator that is legal in all countries, and that gets really restrictive, really fast.
Ever looked at a compass? Only half of the needle points north. The other half points south. Which half should be made to be the "head" of the arrow and which should be the "tail" of the arrow was an arbitrary decision.
You're arguing we can't afford something we've already got.
We don't already have 128MB for video memory. By your own claims, it's there for the task of storing and manipulating 3D object primitives, not to fit a bigger framebuffer.
DVDs can't store higher color, it's not supported by the format.
DVD's are just a higher-density data format disc than CD's. The format for the movie files contained *on* those DVD's is a seperate issue from the gigabyte capacity of a DVD filesystem.
I concede that more color resolution (and floating point representation) is useful while performing the calculations to manipulate it, so as not to lose information from cascading errors. But much like the way a Photoshop or Gimp image needs to be many times larger than a JPEG or GIF to store the information about the editing layers, the output format for the final result can be flatter and less precise than the format used to edit the image in memory, and nobody would notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about those 2 continents stuck together called Europe and Asia, shouldn't that just be 1 continent?
Yes. It should be. And Africa is part of that same continent too. North and South America are also just one continent, for the same reason.
It's funny that you thought that would be a sarcastic analogy to make. It is actually perfectly reasonable.
I would only have lost if I play the game that says liars should be ignored. I don't play that game. Many people think that's the right response to trollers. They are wrong. False statements told (in a context other than where they are meant to be recognized as false, like satire), should be countered. Period. I didn't lose a damn thing.
Ignoring trolls is never the right answer. It doesn't matter whether someone is spreading falsehoods deliberately as a joke or because they enjoy lying or because they really believe them - they need to be countered in any case.
Take a look at this monitor and then tell me people don't care about color accuracy.
Are you talking about something available at almost no cost, as you have been touting, or are you talking about something available at a very signifigant cost, like this monitor that costs more than 4,000 dollars.
Also, your comments are contradictory to the earlier claims that people's eyes differ. It cannot be simultaneously true that "You can color calibrate monitors to be accurate across the screen and to a standard." and also be true that people's color receptors don't have the same exact responses as each other.
If my eyes don't have the strongest response peaks at the exact same frequency that yours do, then there is no such thing as "THE" right monitor color calibration that looks best for both of us.
It's about as respectful as calling Chinese, Japanese, and Thai "orientals".
Yeah! Just like calling Asians, Africans, and Caucasians all "humans"? What's up with that!? There's never any need to use a large vague-scope term for any reason. I think all such words should stop being used, like "vehicle" - No! - they're cars, and motorcycles, and trucks.
All words should always be at the smallest possible scope! Are you with me?
This study does not prove that limited numbers in language cause limited numerical thinking. The result would be the same if the cause/effect relationship was the other way around. If a people have limited ability to think numerically, then they are going to develop a language that is similarly limited. Or, there could be a third unspecified cause that both of these things are the effect of.
Basically a correlation does give strong indications there is probably a cause/effect relation occuring (if it's a statistically signifigant correlation), but it says absolutely nothing about what direction that relationship goes. Any one of three possiblities exist:
1 - X causes Y
2 - Y causes X
3 - X and Y are both being caused by Z, so when Z occurs, X and Y both occur together.
If I didn't realize that, then I might end up believing absurd things like owning a shiny car causes someone to be rich, or that being skinny causes people to excercise.
They both represent corporate America.
There are two sources of corruption in government that have nothing to do with each other: 1 - government wanting more control, and 2 - corporations wanting to direct that control to their advantage. The various overzealous (allegedly) anti-terrorist measures are all part of #1, not #2.
Doesn't work. Every politician currently in power GOT there using the two-party system. So you can't get them to change the rules that got them there. They are the benefactors of those rules. To carry out the kind of change you are talking about, it cannot happen through peaceful public outcry. The ones in power are in the position where they are best served by igorning that outcry. Besides, the stuff you would need to change is buried deeply in the constitution, such that it would require a very big amendment to change it.
The only way to change it is either a total revolution in which the system is scrapped, or a miracle where the current system is used in its current form to vote in a new third party. They could then be presuaded to change the system, but only if you get to them right away. After a few terms they would become part of the problem.
So why do they serve alchohol on the flights? Can't be drunk getting ON the plane, but once you're in the air, then it's okay to become drunk???
your argument is by definition NOT slippery slope
You are operating under the false impression that the phrase "slippery slope" is equal exactly to the phrase "slippery slope fallacy", such that there are no situtions in which the term should be used for non-fallicious situations. That's just not true. Just like you can have a "dichotomy" without having a "false dichotomy fallacy", you can have a "slippery slope" without a "slippery slope fallacy". "Slippery slope" merely refers to a style of argument. Whether it's a fallacy or not depends on whether the things downslope actually do logically follow from the things upslope or not. (And then in that case it's really just a special case of the generic fallacy of "does not follow".)
If the only way you had ever heard the phrase "slippery slope" used was in reference to the fallacy, I could see how you could get the misconception that that's *ALL* the phrase is ever used for. But it is used in other contexts too.
If you don't want to look like a moron, next time try picking two choices that actually are contrary choices in some way. Choice A and B are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.
If their goal is "lets make a hypothetical statement about a pattern that could happen in the future", then that makes sense - but if the goal is "Let's make a statement about what *did* actually happen", then inserting or deleting items from the list is historical revisionism and should not be tolerated.
If you want to pretend that you honestly believe in thinking for yourself, you can start by admitting there is no such thing as the "slashdot party line". I see far more posts complaining about the alleged party line than posts actually exhibiting it, which proves there's no such thing (other than, perhaps, saying that the slashdot party line is the act of complaining about the slashdot party line.)
I'm sorry, I don't speak your strange alein language.
Sometimes censorship is a matter of a government telling someone what not to say, and that's bad, but other times it's a case of someone deliberately avoiding saying something that would piss of potential customers, and there is no government involvement at all - that's not quite as bad. The Koran chant in the video game was an example of the latter.
Very true. Very insightful. But here's the difference - people don't delude themselves into thinking that the demarkation of countries are geological features. They do seem to pretend that the demarkation of oceans are.
About the DVD movie format: You are correct, of course. I hadn't considered the fact that most people view DVDs using hardwired consoles where the software can't be upgraded without buying a new console. I was considering the way I usually view DVD's, on a computer - in which case the mounting of the filesystem, and the software that renders the movie file on that filesystem are really two totally independant issues. The same hardware could easily read a "DVD+" format by just updating the software. Of course, if that "software" is burned into a firmware chip in a console, then that doesn't work.
If I adjust the constrast, brightness, and gamma on my monitor I am manipulating the colors in the image. It could make single increment differences between colors obvious. Higher precision in displays would be useful, not just during processing.
I still don't agree, since I don't see any scenario in which anyone would *care* about the very, very SMALL loss of precision in the output device. Well, okay - YOU seem to care, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. The fact that every TV set and computer monitor has individual variations is going to account for more of a "wrongness" to the color than only having 8-bit precision will. Tweak the monitor all you want and it will still end up being a few shades "off" from what the original creator of the material intended it to be. Plus, variations in the phosphors will exist even within the same screen. The shade of red you get in the upper-left corner with a pixel of color of RGB:1,0,0 will be different than the one you get in the center of the screen with a pixel of color RGB:1,0,0. I don't think there is any point to putting out the digital signal in a format that is beyond the "margin of error" of the physical analog features of the output device.
Similarly, I have heard people complain about the CD audio standard being bad because it has too many aliased artifacts at the high frequencies. Again, my response there is similar - unless you can make a speaker that works *Amazingly* well, the physical movement of the speaker membrane is going to be more off than that anyway.
The scenario you outlined works for stealing one person's identity, but not for doing it in volume. The other reason online fraudsters don't use it, in addition to having no need, is that they do their work in a bulk fashion, not a case-by-case basis.
But I do concede that for the person trying to get a fake ID to get on a plane, your plan would work.
I don't understand it myself either, but I think the swelling may be a side effect of the localised raised temperature. The high temperature is an attempt to destroy the intruding material by "cooking" the intruder to the point where it's molecules break apart at some weak link. It works very well against biological intruders like flu bugs, since biological molecules tend to only be possible to exist at specific narrow temperature bands. Too cold and they don't flex in the right places to function. Too warm and they break into smaller pieces. Like the molecules in food, they become chemically altered when cooked. Hopefully, chemically altered in such a way that they don't work anymore. Typically all it takes to render a flu bug harmless is to break one single link somewhere. Just a few degrees of a fever can do that. The danger is, of course, that *your* body is also made of fragile biological molecules that will break when they get too warm. But your body can survive the death of several cells, and replace them, the flu bug isn't as good at doing that, so the fever response is an example of a fix that harms you too, but hopefully not as much as it harms the intruder. I suspect the swelling (localized high temperature in the airways) is the same sort of thing.
I'm sorry, was your comment supposed to have been relevant in some way? One half points one way, one half points the other. The decision as to which half should be the "up" and which should be the "down" was arbitrary. We could just as easily have had maps with south on top and north on bottom.
You wouldn't even be able to pronounce some of the couties. Berkshire, Bukinghamshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire.
No fair not accounting for accent, though. I'm from Wisconsin, and most Americans can't pronounce that right either, but that's due to accent differences, not ignorance. To most Americans, "New Orleans" is two words. To hear the locals pronounc it, it's one run-toghther word, something like "Nawlins".
For, example, if an American pronounces the "shire" in Worcestershire like the hobbits' "shire" instead of the "right" pronounciation of "shure", that shouldn't be counted as a mistake.
I had a harder test - the map was TOTALLY blank - meaning it didn't even have any borders drawn on it - just a white sheet (okay, it did have the major geographical features, which helped a lot - it was easier to draw a state in the right places if you had the major river borders to use to anchor one edge of the state.) The object was to draw in and label all the states. (But you didn't have to put Alaska and Hawaii in the right place, you could just mention them off to the side - probably because you can't include them without using a scale that's too far zoomed-out to work with.)
We did have more than 15 minutes, though - but I think that was in recognition that it takes a while to draw all the borders and they will need to be re-erased again and again. Plus, we were only graded on getting things in the right place, not on getting them the right shape, if all the states were amorphous blobs without the right borders, or they ended up bordering the wrong states because of badly drawn borders, you could still get it right if they were in the right position relative to each other. This was because it would be unfair to grade on getting the shape right because that makes it into an art skills test instad of a geography test. Someone could have a good mental picture of what the shape should be but just be really bad at drawing.
When I did that test, in 10th grade, I got everything right except I transposed Vermont and New Hampshire. I knew they were the vertical stripe states west of Maine, but I couldn't remember which was which.
Actually, there is only one ocean. It's just really big, and really strangely shaped, wrapping itself around all the landmasses. If you don't believe me, then I invite you to draw me a dotted line that demarks the difference between, say, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
Of all the things being complained about, the chant was the only one that actually made sense and seemed a legitimate complaint. To you and me it just sounds like random chanting. To someone who speaks the language, it is probably plain as day what it means. It would be just as offensive to a Muslim as playing a fighting game to the sound of a famous psalm would be to a Christian.
The ones that really seemed wrong were the ones based on a country's political predjudices. Like China insisting that Taiwan cannot be called a country on any map, or India insisting that Kashmir cannot be colored as a different color than India on a political color-map. And notice that the solution Microsoft had to take was to change these programs for *everyone* not just for the ones sold in that one country (because it is prohibitievely expensive to just make a special version for sale in one country that is different than the one sold in other countries.) So the end-effect is that the software sold in all countries is the least-common-demoninator that is legal in all countries, and that gets really restrictive, really fast.
Ever looked at a compass? Only half of the needle points north. The other half points south. Which half should be made to be the "head" of the arrow and which should be the "tail" of the arrow was an arbitrary decision.
You're arguing we can't afford something we've already got.
We don't already have 128MB for video memory. By your own claims, it's there for the task of storing and manipulating 3D object primitives, not to fit a bigger framebuffer.
DVDs can't store higher color, it's not supported by the format.
DVD's are just a higher-density data format disc than CD's. The format for the movie files contained *on* those DVD's is a seperate issue from the gigabyte capacity of a DVD filesystem.
I concede that more color resolution (and floating point representation) is useful while performing the calculations to manipulate it, so as not to lose information from cascading errors. But much like the way a Photoshop or Gimp image needs to be many times larger than a JPEG or GIF to store the information about the editing layers, the output format for the final result can be flatter and less precise than the format used to edit the image in memory, and nobody would notice.