I always get a big chuckle when I see publicly disseminated satellite images of land and buildings. The resolutions are relatively poor and give the impression that satellites can give rough photographs of terrain etc but can't see too much.
The reality is that satellite photography can read your watch if it's left outdoors - oh and visible light isn't the half of it.
I still have my TRS-80 Color Computer Model 1 with 16K and a Model 3 with 512K. They still work perfectly. I spent months playing with the programs in those books - BASIC was great.
Those were the good old days when Microsoft weren't a huge pain in the ass, and made some good products.
I'm from Melbourne, Australia (just above the island of Tasmania for those who don't know).
We noticed that our dog and our friend's dogs were acting very strangely for the last couple of days. They've been very anxious and agressive which is very unusual for their breeds. Perhaps they sensed something.
I'm glad to hear that he's saying that he's feeling better, however I think after making such a public thing of his illness, he could at the very least explain his recovery.
Additionally, placing a plug for a cancer specialist seems to tempt us to infer that he has cancer.
Personally, I think Patrick may have some psychological problems (aside from other physological symptoms, which may infact be genuine).
It's somewhat unfortunate that LeGuin's primary concern in her response about the miniseries was regarding the skin colour of the characters. As much as LeGuin is a good writer, it seems a shame that her article shallowly focusses almost completely on casting.
She also entirely avoids her responsibility for having the story rights sold with so little care to ensure that it wouldn't be ruined:
"When I sold the rights to Earthsea a few years ago, my contract gave me the standard status of "consultant"--which means whatever the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. My agency could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as though they genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when planning the film."
Unfortunately, it's not enough to feign surprise and indignation when one sells one's soul to the Devil to find that they have been cheated because they didn't read the fine print. If she could not get a satisfactory agreement, then it was plainly evident that it would not change at some time in the future. She attempts to absolve hereself of responsibility by claiming that she felt that they had the best of intentions, so at the very least, she was extrememly naive. Regardless, the onus to protect the integrity of her writing is upon her. Noone else is responsible for the travesty because she took the money, wished for the best and signed away.
"All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence."
Surely a writer should speak with more substance around interpretations of their work. Aside from ethnicity, I would have liked to see a more meaningful apraisal however bad it might have been. Some good could have come from the miniseries had she had written an thorough rebuttal.
They had better get a massive PR campaign going to get the pennies to identify with combustion related imagery and an igneous lifestyle. Then with a strong television and print campaign, the pennies will be persuaded to spontaneoulsy combust themselves.
Problem solved. Yet another handy hint from the Enron School of Business.
This is the best joke that I've heard all week. A company that owned Netscape and who manged to run it into the ground is planning on bringing out an IE variant browser.
Why don't they just burn money - it would cut out the middle man.
Thanks, please let me know your username and I'll add you to my friends list.
Considering that this site is for "nerds", there's often far too few intellectuals here for my liking.
Re:Lies are the basis of modern life
on
Truth in Advertising?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, there's a lot of grey area. First of all, you fail to take into account subjective statements, such as "it's fantastic". Is that misleading or a lie? Not in and of itself.
Furthermore, when you evaluate information about a particular concept for absolute truth, you're bound to find that some information is just not disclosed. This could be as esoteric as not disclosing the material that your software CD is crafted from, or as important as failing to mention that the software is not compatible with your computer. Each instance could be considered misleading, and each falls into this "grey area". Absolute truth about a concept requires infinite pieces of information, which is just not possible in real life, so we humans (including Marketers) settle for a subset.
Attempting to blur the lines just doesn't work. Most things are not fantastic - dishwashers, television sets, hairdryers - all quite ordinary. There's nothing fantastical whasoever about most general consumer goods. This isn't a new revelation. If something is fantastic, by all means let it's fantastical nature be declared. In this way, if something is fantastic, wonderful, but if not, the person can be quite clearly seen to be a liar or at the very least, easily impressed which is of course not a lie merely but stupid and absurd.
Arguing about the truth or falsehood of a statement "in and of itself" when it refers to nothing specifically whatsoever is the flaw in your arguement here. You are begging the question. It's like asking if a black horse is black. Nothing can be definively said about a series of vague statements precisely because the statements are vague.
Ommision can certainly be a lie, but this is also quite easily understood and demonstrated by a person who lies. As I said, there really isn't any grey area as to what a lie is and is not. People are quite fond of pointing to grey areas, but this isn't relevant, and is more a statement about the person's dislike of absolutism, and preference to nihlism and revlativism.
Of course, regardless of all of these attempts at creating grey areas, it's quite simple to deliminate between what is true and what is not. People generally do not wish to make the area between the truth and lies made clear, usually because they benefit in some way by decieving themselves I imagine.
So for instance, by extrapolating from your argument, a murderer may fail to inform a victim of the precise chemical composition of their murder knife, but it is quite clearly understood that someone is being murdered. In the same way, one could perhaps accidentally ommit an obsure piece of information, but the essential action is quite easily understood, particularily by the deciever.
Absolute truth is not required for ethical advertising, merely sufficient truth in which people's intentions are good and their statements are accurate. This would certainly be enough to ask for. Arguing against absolute truth by suggesting that one needs absolute facts is weak attempt reductio ad ridiculum (reduction to the absurd).
Quite commonly people who are fond of lies tell themselves things such as you say to absolve their lie - by blurring the lines, by arguing that nothing is absolute truth etc, etc - all of these things are merely attempts at excusing their self deceit and deceiving of others.
Coming from someone posting as AC, I imagine that the person to blame would be likely you. Your simplistic and morally stunted comments show that you yourself are most likely the lying type that benefits from deceiving people in sales.
You say that you "try and give the most truthful outlook I can" - that just isn't enough. It is certainly not the original posters problem that you seem to struggle with your lack of integrity.
Lies are the basis of modern life
on
Truth in Advertising?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?
It's quite a simple answer - misleading or misrepresenting anything whasoever is falsehood. There's not really any grey area, proposing the existence of such is a socially acceptable way of making the lie pallatable or discusable.
People generally have the common sense to know themselves if they're lying or not, but mainly prefer to not worry about it. The problem is that we live in a societies based on and that thrives on lies. Liars often win in a consumerist culture, because lies are usually selling people their own dumb desires right back to them.
The real issue is whether it is actually acceptable to lie. All politicians without exception lie and muddy the water, advertisers and PR people lie so much perhaps they don't even notice anymore. The alternative is too unpalatable to a mindless and uneducated society who want everyone to do their dirty work for them,
Most Americans would rather think that their army for instance is well equipped with modern and state of the art equipment. We like to think that our governments care about every soldier as we do our friends and family. Regardless of who's in power - the government is not a benevolent father who loves each and every one of us and watches down on us like a proud patriarch.
The reality is that dumb kids lives are cheaper than good equipment (regardless of who you vote for and who's in power). Another dead kid in Iraq isn't really top priority, unlike keeping the Whitehouse furniture and art restored. People don't like to admit that some dumb grunt isn't worth as much as a nice piece of Louis XIV furniture, so people pretend to care when in fact they don't terribly much.
The holy grail of technology is no different - the utopia of consumerist culture is just to tempting to refuse new technology for it's own sake. Nobody wants to know that the latest thing isn't all that good - hell most people don't really have an actual use for their computers as they're lives and work are usually fairly inconquential. We want to eat the dream of technology and time saving devices even though deep down we know that it's all make believe, and we don't really have anything to do with all our saved spare time anyway.
It is a dead language, but it was used for a very long time, and for applied with a great deal of things, so it's very easy to say exactly what you mean often quicker than English, and much more clearly.
New words do get added to Latin however. Apparently there's a department at the Vatican that makes up terms. So for instance "Universal Resource Locator"(URL) is Universale Rerum Locatrumand "Internet" is Internetum.
Even common phrases translate well, so for instance: Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit is "To boldly go where no man has gone before".
The problem is that the translation looses the actual subtle meaning of the word. you could tell an English speaker that the word translates to "scary" - but unheimlich has a finer meaning than just feeling fear.
Slashdot Mirror
I always get a big chuckle when I see publicly disseminated satellite images of land and buildings. The resolutions are relatively poor and give the impression that satellites can give rough photographs of terrain etc but can't see too much.
The reality is that satellite photography can read your watch if it's left outdoors - oh and visible light isn't the half of it.
I still have my TRS-80 Color Computer Model 1 with 16K and a Model 3 with 512K. They still work perfectly. I spent months playing with the programs in those books - BASIC was great.
Those were the good old days when Microsoft weren't a huge pain in the ass, and made some good products.
I'm from Melbourne, Australia (just above the island of Tasmania for those who don't know).
We noticed that our dog and our friend's dogs were acting very strangely for the last couple of days. They've been very anxious and agressive which is very unusual for their breeds. Perhaps they sensed something.
hehehe - I should have known.
A similar phenomena used to occur in my room as a teenager. Perhaps the two occurances are somehow connected.
I'm glad to hear that he's saying that he's feeling better, however I think after making such a public thing of his illness, he could at the very least explain his recovery.
Additionally, placing a plug for a cancer specialist seems to tempt us to infer that he has cancer.
Personally, I think Patrick may have some psychological problems (aside from other physological symptoms, which may infact be genuine).
It should be made possible to mark articles such as this one as "Flamebait".
So it appears that Language (Greek - semantikos) has purchased Truth (Latin - veritas).
Fox News has wisely already made the adjustment.
It's somewhat unfortunate that LeGuin's primary concern in her response about the miniseries was regarding the skin colour of the characters. As much as LeGuin is a good writer, it seems a shame that her article shallowly focusses almost completely on casting.
She also entirely avoids her responsibility for having the story rights sold with so little care to ensure that it wouldn't be ruined:
"When I sold the rights to Earthsea a few years ago, my contract gave me the standard status of "consultant"--which means whatever the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. My agency could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as though they genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when planning the film."
Unfortunately, it's not enough to feign surprise and indignation when one sells one's soul to the Devil to find that they have been cheated because they didn't read the fine print. If she could not get a satisfactory agreement, then it was plainly evident that it would not change at some time in the future. She attempts to absolve hereself of responsibility by claiming that she felt that they had the best of intentions, so at the very least, she was extrememly naive. Regardless, the onus to protect the integrity of her writing is upon her. Noone else is responsible for the travesty because she took the money, wished for the best and signed away.
"All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence."
Surely a writer should speak with more substance around interpretations of their work. Aside from ethnicity, I would have liked to see a more meaningful apraisal however bad it might have been. Some good could have come from the miniseries had she had written an thorough rebuttal.
In other news 100 percent of all percentages are 25 percent subjective. The remaining 76 percent are conjecture and personal speculation.
They had better get a massive PR campaign going to get the pennies to identify with combustion related imagery and an igneous lifestyle. Then with a strong television and print campaign, the pennies will be persuaded to spontaneoulsy combust themselves.
Problem solved. Yet another handy hint from the Enron School of Business.
Ahhh - once again Slashdot is recycling. thanks for pointing it out Daniil.
This is the best joke that I've heard all week. A company that owned Netscape and who manged to run it into the ground is planning on bringing out an IE variant browser.
Why don't they just burn money - it would cut out the middle man.
Interesting that the article ommitted the fact that Alan Turing was gay and committed suicide because he was persecuted by the Bristish government.
No Ada Lovelace either. Oh, and to all those who voted for Linus - seriously, you guys need to learn a bit more about computing.
A technically superficial article for the most part, it really didn't seem to understand what it purports to.
Thanks, please let me know your username and I'll add you to my friends list.
Considering that this site is for "nerds", there's often far too few intellectuals here for my liking.
Actually, there's a lot of grey area. First of all, you fail to take into account subjective statements, such as "it's fantastic". Is that misleading or a lie? Not in and of itself.
Furthermore, when you evaluate information about a particular concept for absolute truth, you're bound to find that some information is just not disclosed. This could be as esoteric as not disclosing the material that your software CD is crafted from, or as important as failing to mention that the software is not compatible with your computer. Each instance could be considered misleading, and each falls into this "grey area". Absolute truth about a concept requires infinite pieces of information, which is just not possible in real life, so we humans (including Marketers) settle for a subset.
Attempting to blur the lines just doesn't work. Most things are not fantastic - dishwashers, television sets, hairdryers - all quite ordinary. There's nothing fantastical whasoever about most general consumer goods. This isn't a new revelation. If something is fantastic, by all means let it's fantastical nature be declared. In this way, if something is fantastic, wonderful, but if not, the person can be quite clearly seen to be a liar or at the very least, easily impressed which is of course not a lie merely but stupid and absurd.
Arguing about the truth or falsehood of a statement "in and of itself" when it refers to nothing specifically whatsoever is the flaw in your arguement here. You are begging the question. It's like asking if a black horse is black. Nothing can be definively said about a series of vague statements precisely because the statements are vague.
Ommision can certainly be a lie, but this is also quite easily understood and demonstrated by a person who lies. As I said, there really isn't any grey area as to what a lie is and is not. People are quite fond of pointing to grey areas, but this isn't relevant, and is more a statement about the person's dislike of absolutism, and preference to nihlism and revlativism.
Of course, regardless of all of these attempts at creating grey areas, it's quite simple to deliminate between what is true and what is not. People generally do not wish to make the area between the truth and lies made clear, usually because they benefit in some way by decieving themselves I imagine.
So for instance, by extrapolating from your argument, a murderer may fail to inform a victim of the precise chemical composition of their murder knife, but it is quite clearly understood that someone is being murdered. In the same way, one could perhaps accidentally ommit an obsure piece of information, but the essential action is quite easily understood, particularily by the deciever.
Absolute truth is not required for ethical advertising, merely sufficient truth in which people's intentions are good and their statements are accurate. This would certainly be enough to ask for. Arguing against absolute truth by suggesting that one needs absolute facts is weak attempt reductio ad ridiculum (reduction to the absurd).
Quite commonly people who are fond of lies tell themselves things such as you say to absolve their lie - by blurring the lines, by arguing that nothing is absolute truth etc, etc - all of these things are merely attempts at excusing their self deceit and deceiving of others.
Right on brother - the revolution will not be televised.
Coming from someone posting as AC, I imagine that the person to blame would be likely you. Your simplistic and morally stunted comments show that you yourself are most likely the lying type that benefits from deceiving people in sales.
You say that you "try and give the most truthful outlook I can" - that just isn't enough. It is certainly not the original posters problem that you seem to struggle with your lack of integrity.
When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?
It's quite a simple answer - misleading or misrepresenting anything whasoever is falsehood. There's not really any grey area, proposing the existence of such is a socially acceptable way of making the lie pallatable or discusable.
People generally have the common sense to know themselves if they're lying or not, but mainly prefer to not worry about it. The problem is that we live in a societies based on and that thrives on lies. Liars often win in a consumerist culture, because lies are usually selling people their own dumb desires right back to them.
The real issue is whether it is actually acceptable to lie. All politicians without exception lie and muddy the water, advertisers and PR people lie so much perhaps they don't even notice anymore. The alternative is too unpalatable to a mindless and uneducated society who want everyone to do their dirty work for them,
Most Americans would rather think that their army for instance is well equipped with modern and state of the art equipment. We like to think that our governments care about every soldier as we do our friends and family. Regardless of who's in power - the government is not a benevolent father who loves each and every one of us and watches down on us like a proud patriarch.
The reality is that dumb kids lives are cheaper than good equipment (regardless of who you vote for and who's in power). Another dead kid in Iraq isn't really top priority, unlike keeping the Whitehouse furniture and art restored. People don't like to admit that some dumb grunt isn't worth as much as a nice piece of Louis XIV furniture, so people pretend to care when in fact they don't terribly much.
The holy grail of technology is no different - the utopia of consumerist culture is just to tempting to refuse new technology for it's own sake. Nobody wants to know that the latest thing isn't all that good - hell most people don't really have an actual use for their computers as they're lives and work are usually fairly inconquential. We want to eat the dream of technology and time saving devices even though deep down we know that it's all make believe, and we don't really have anything to do with all our saved spare time anyway.
Can you translate "to boldly split infinitives no man has ever split before", however? :-)
hehehe - that sounds much more difficult.
Stalin gave much the same consequences as Hitler, definately.
hehehe - I looked it up and apparently "Henry Jay Heimlich" was the American inventor of the heimlich maneuver.
It is a dead language, but it was used for a very long time, and for applied with a great deal of things, so it's very easy to say exactly what you mean often quicker than English, and much more clearly.
New words do get added to Latin however. Apparently there's a department at the Vatican that makes up terms. So for instance "Universal Resource Locator"(URL) is Universale Rerum Locatrumand "Internet" is Internetum.
Even common phrases translate well, so for instance: Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit is "To boldly go where no man has gone before".
Will be? Mate, we're already here.
The problem is that the translation looses the actual subtle meaning of the word. you could tell an English speaker that the word translates to "scary" - but unheimlich has a finer meaning than just feeling fear.