While everyone can be replaced, their premature deaths are still going to be a net loss. All they could have done is lost to us and it will take time to get a replacement. Essentially, this is a human version of the broken window fallacy.
Every single one of those groups is still around and quite free to speak out against the extra taxes that have been set on their favoured products. You'll find that victims of Nazi persecution retained no such rights of appeal.
Sigh. Correlation means one of three things with regard to causation.
So you are telling me that Saturn is somehow connected to the S&P 500? Or that Sunspots are responsible for US GDP? How far are we allowed to take this? How different is this study to the two I've mentioned?
In other words, the study is saying, with actual data and without the childish, misunderstood slogans, the same thing you are - birth month does not cause increased risk of health and education problems.
That is not what the study is saying. The author's of the study claim that it simply means that relatively more winter babies are born to unmarried and less educated mothers. The Wall street journal claims the study has found an explanation for the "lifelong challenges" of winter babies, as did the Slashdot summary. You've claimed something else? What will the tabloid newspapers claim? "Winter babies unhealthy, uneducated, unemployed?" How far do you think they'll go with it? When were you born?
This study has not proved anything. It hasn't even suggested anything. It offers no reasoned explanation for its finding, with even the authors leaving such matters (proms and spring break) to the speculation of the reader. Is this how we do and accept research? Crunching two sets of numbers, finding a 1.2% overall spread in figures and then declaring that people born in winter suffer from a lifelong plight, without even bothering to provide genuine reasoning or enlightenment. Is that ethical? Is it scientific? Is this how we uncover the world?
Showing correlation is required for establishing a causative link between two observations
This is a position which I fundamentally reject. Stephen Hales and Thomas_Young established causative and quantitative links before statistics had even been invented. Correlation is neither a neccessary nor a sufficient condition to establish any relationship between two variables. We cannot understand the world by computing correlation coefficients between data sets. If we continue to rely on them in this way, our understanding of the world will be reduced to the tunnel vision seen in the Slashdot headline; "Winter babies weaker, sicker, poorer, less intelligent".
Theories are about more than finding linear relationships between variables. They are about obtaining a complete and comprehensive understanding of phenomena, on a qualitative and quantitative level. You do not need correlation studies to do this, and you certainly cannot present them as an end result in and of themselves. Yet that's what people do. Take a database, mix it all around, get r=0.2 and a range of 1% and just throw it out in a paper. Let people make whatever they want of it. And they do.
Correlation is not causation, and it is not the modern Oracle of Delphi, revealing great truths. It's more likely to mislead than inform. So why should we trust it now? Read up on Hill's criteria of causation and ask yourself; How many of these (minimal) conditions did the researchers in this study actually establish?
I'll tell you what else jumps out. The near immaculate periodic nature of the graphs. It's really regular. Something tell me this study has a lot more to do with the school cycle than it does with the season babies are born in. So I'm going to go ahead and guess that a lot of these births are nine months after proms or spring breaks or whatnot.
And how may I ask does the month your mother gave birth to you lead to a lifelong plight? If ever their was a classic junk study showing the usual correlation-causation woolly thinking, this is it. Apparently, a lot of unmarried, less educated mothers have more unprotected sex in May (or less in January). Why would this lead you to conclude that being born in winter disadvantages someone. I was born in winter and my mother was married, educated and employed. Has my life been deprived somehow? Do I need extra money or protection or something? Yeah sure, chuck me some money. I'll consider it an idiot tax; like the lottery.
Grammar and spelling mistakes are a symptom of sloppiness, as are poor reasoning, lack of organization, and lack of adequate support..... Intelligent, methodical, and rational people care enough to follow them.
Thank you for giving us our daily dose of prejudice.
Here's the bottom line. Spelling and grammar, while lauded by many, are simply not very important. Knowing where and how to use semi-colons is not, and never has been a useful or laudable skill in all but a handful of professions. Knowing or caring what a participle actually is, is a topic of interest only to a trained linguist. Most people do not, and should not need to know these things. The style rules are essentially followed most rigorously by cowards. People too terrified of breaking rank or decorum and who will willingly and eventually gratefully follow a body of strict order laid down by people who lived over a hundred years ago. These people wrap themselves in knots in their efforts to stay on track and their writing suffers accordingly.
Now, I'm not saying that we should all jst gv up & on ower snnantX and speeln altagather, but there is no point in being anal retentive and insisting that everyone conform their writing and speech to the south eastern standard, as it has been interpreted by people with no real skill other than a love of proving their linguistic superiority over others. This rigid and unbending insistence on "proper" standards is robbing the written english word of the diversity encountered in its spoken form. Every day I hear people where I live uses phrases like, "They'd be (They do be) going to....", yet I have only seen these things actually written down a handful of times in my entire life. I'm sure there are countless other such colloquialisms which are similarly snubbed in "proper english" circles.
Basically, what I am saying is that the collective "style guide" is and always has been a crock. It is an arbitrary and exclusionary set of principles for written english, with no objective or fundamental underpinning in any for of english that is or ever was spoken. The single best modern day wordsmiths can be found "rapping" in popular records in a dialect and with a style of grammar that breaks almost every rule in the style book, yet is unquestionably a more potent and superior form of communication for the purposes it is intended to serve.
In a way, the logical conclusion for the enforcement of the style guides can their eventually implementation on a computer. The style guides belong more to the realm of capricious, cold and uncaring logic than they ever did to the realm of human communication or expression.
This has already happened. Capcom are leading the trend. Street Fighter 4 came out at 45 euros over here, compared to the usual 60. So did Bionic commando and few other Capcom titles. They sold out in several venues.
That 15 euros/dollars makes all the difference. Right now, buying a video game is still a gamble. You really don't know how much you will like a game or how long it will last. 60 euros is a lot to risk on a game you may only play for six to eight hours or so (Uncharted, I'm looking at you). Sure, you could find the odd 200+ hour gem, but it depends on your taste. It was LittleBigPlanet for me, but you must remember that some people hated that game, as will happen with every major title. A good 60 euro purchase is worth it. A bad one is a serious burn. A 45 euro purchase can still fry you, but really you're only coming away mostly singed.
Goverment shouldn't be allowed to tell me that I'm not allowed to sell at a certain price, marketforces will do that.
Market forces? Is this some kind a a euphemism for monopolies, anti-competitive practices and union busting? Because that's the only context I ever hear it used in.
Wake up. Wake up you and all the other "free market" drones around here. The "Free market" does not, has not and will not ever exist. Period. It is a pipe dream concocted from the ramblings of economists, most of whom were in the employ of powerful groups who would like nothing better than a free hand to do as they please in any sector of the economy or society in general. It is, at best and idealised theoretical utopia, worthy only of consideration as a thought experiment. If that.
In reality, you cannot separate economics from the general deviousness, manipulation, underhandedness and skullduggary that goes on in almost every walk of human life. People game system and companies, especially big companies, will game the system up to and quite often past the point where they can get away with it. In this reality, on this planet Earth, your free market theories are about as applicable as theories of anti-matter.
The big telco's are going to degrade service, cripple and destroy all competition, punitively raise prices and in general wreck the whole internet unless there is strong government regulation in place to prevent them from doing so. Platitudes about the efficiency of private industry and the prices "the market" will bear are just that. Platitudes, carrying no more weight than a dry tissue. History, and indeed recent events, have demonstrated quite conclusively that no major industry can be left to its own devices, ever. It simply does not work. The prime, prime, prime example was the recent financial crash. But there are many other examples across all industries.
The internet is now one of the foundations of our society and we cannot allow it to be held to ransom by a handful of individuals hiding behind corporate veils and pandering economics.
That's impossible. As every Slashdotter knows, there is not even the slightest difference between the two main political parties in the US and voting for either one is a futile and pointless gesture serving only to perpetuate the existing corporate/military/lobbiest complex.
The idea that the Democracts are somehow going to roll back the Republican crackdown on freedoms. Or that President Obama is behaving any differently that McCain would in his place? Absurd I tell you. Absurd.
No, no. It's clear that absolutely nothing has changed in America since the end of the Bush years. Not even a little bit!
Hey. You weren't complaining when region free DVD players stopped honoring the "intellectual property" of the DVD content "owners".
By the way, the players probably use the FFmpeg codecs and not mplayer itself, which lacks any real kind of gui. Speaking of which the FFmpeg codecs are themselves currently sitting under the Damocles sword of intellectual property in the for of the multitude of video codec patents. I doubt there's a single 30 line block of code in there that isn't violating someones patent.
In conclusion, our current IP regime sucks. I for one applaud these hardware makers, particularly in Asia, for cutting this twisted Gordian knot and just loading up their devices will all the features they can download. In my opinion as producers of real tangible goods, they are morally, socially and economically justified in what they have done. If anyone wants to complain, they can just go ahead and make their own, real physical devices and bring them to market.
Two computers can be built using the same hardware, (genetics), can run the same software (astrology)
This just keeps getting better and better! I understand every word in this analogy, but the the whole thing just refuses to makes sense! Are you on the talk show circuit or something?
Wow. Seriously though; some people believe the most ridiculous things. Take this study for instance. Commissioned by "The Wines of Chile". Probably some website or email based survey, distributed by chain mail, with no controls or conditions. The study has literally been designed to grab headlines, nothing more.
And people will just lap it up. Why is it that the only thing needed to gain credence is to say you've done things scientifically? Don't we have better standards for judging the quality of results?
This study, like astrology and whatever the hell the parent poster was raving on about, share one similarity. They are results and methods promoted by and for people who seek mental shortcuts to understanding the world. It's a tempting strategy certainly, but in the long term, you're better off trusting in getting it done right.
This is why astrology is so powerful. If you know any Snake women, (Asian astrology, based on Jupiter), then laugh all you want, but keep an eye out because that girl has it built into her genes to
Wow. You can't buy this level of stupidity. It's a moment which should be truly treasured.
Google have recently made major advances against Microsoft as a whole. Once the fascists and the Bolsheviks are done fighting each other, we'll all have to start worrying about when the victor is going to come after us.
When was the last time you heard of a study where the resutls weren't statistically significant. At this point, I ask whether the property of statistical significance is itself statistically significant.
Ignoring history (or hiding from it) seems to be the basis of these laws.
No. That is not the reason for these laws. The reason for these laws is that the Germans are trying to avoid repeating history.
While many Slashdotters are indeed in the hardcore libertarian camp, even they must acknowledge the power of mass media and its influence, good and bad, over public opinion. Look at the effect of Hollywood films, from the trivial to the profound. What do you think would happen if blockbuster remakes of films like "Birth of a Nation" or "The Eternal Jew" were allowed to become the major summer hits next year? Are you telling me that the public would rationally choose to reject such racism? I love to believe that, I really would.
Remember what started the whole global warming hysteria? It was that movie(or was it two) about super freezing storms or flood or something. It was a major hit. The Day After Tomorrow, I think. The science had been screaming the results for 40 years and nobody had batted an eyelid. After that summer, everybody was a convert. I am NOT using this as an argument against the reality of human induced climate change. What I am saying is that the media has the ability to very rapidly shift public opinion and temperament on more issues that just this.
There are other examples. The original Birth of a Nation lead to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The China Syndrome, released contemporaneously with the Three Mile Island incident, has halted the expansion of nuclear power generation to this day. Jurassic Park popularised dinosaurs as never before, ultimately forcing creationism to rebrand itself as intelligent design. More recently, that Zeitgeist crock of shit has managed to snare more than a few supposedly educated people, some of them around here.
Movies can literally transform public opinion en-masse in a single summer season. Their largest audience is young impressionable people, the traditional movers of society. They sit and immerse themselves mentally and emotionally in an audio-visual presentation for over an hour. It affects people more deeply than they know. Frankly, I think that the immersion experienced in movies is greater than the immersion in video games or books. This summer people are going to watch a film about the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler. It's more than likely going to be a story about good guys verses evil guys. That's what people are going to take from it, despite the fact that most of the would be assassins were Wehrmacht officers intimately involved in the many Nazi atrocities on the eastern front. The film will become history and the truth will be forgotten.
The sad fact is that if films, or games, or TV shows glorifying the Nazi regime were to be allowed to be shown en masse, not only Germany, but a great many other Western countries would recede into fascism and genocide. And yes, the whole process can be precipitated by one or two films. Just look at what one talk show host like Glenn Beck is able to do to public opinion over one summer season. I don't want to wake up one September to find that my neighbors are all spouting neofascist slogans and marching in fascist bands or whatever other mass movement these films can persuade them to engage in.
Yes, I do think that the German government goes overboard in censorship in many cases, including this one. But you fail to understand the power, influence and history of Nazi imagery, and to say that the Germans are ignorant of that history or somehow hiding it is a profoundly ignorant comment to make.
It's true. The SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss himself. The Nazi's were evil, fanatical and genocidal, but they looked sharp while they were doing it. It wasn't just coincidence. Part of the Nazi's whole propaganda effort was that they looked the part of the leaders of a master race. Couple this with the Nazi mass parades and propaganda rallies, and you have a very persuasive and intimidating regime. Even the Hitler youth, a compulsory organisation for all young boys, had their own tailored uniform.
The proof of just how striking and intimidating these uniforms were can be seen in Hollywoods lasting infatuation with putting them on-screen. Essentially it was the task they were designed for; Visual intimidation. Even fantasy baddies usually have an SS inspired uniform. As I recall, a recent movie Hellboy opens with a Nazi ritual, and while the costumes are outrageous, they are not in fact all that far removed from reality. It's not difficult to imagine an SS officer wearing such a striking getup as he went about executing people and dumping them in mass graves.
This is why I never buy arguments about why dressing well is so important.
So, if the answer was 9.7, and I said that the answer was "above 5 but less than 10", you'd be satisfied with that as the definitive answer on one of the most visited pages on the internet?
In fact, I did a review on a collection of non-superhero comics today and was thoroughly impressed with the kinds of issues people are tackling out there with comic books
The Japanese, and to a lesser extent East Asian, Manga industry has been doing things like this for decades. Issues from the topical to the seemingly unpresentable. Remember the manga guide to statistics. By contrast, the now stagnant meme of superheros has proven itself utterly unable to discuss any topic that does not somehow involve men in leotards fist fighting one another.
The biggest problem with the western comic book industry is that it is not seen as a legitimate medium for adult discouse. It is not seen this way because publishers and writers deliberately market and censor their products for consumption by teenagers with their parents approval. The utter stagnancy of the American comic book industries is a testament to how successful this strategy has been in killing creativity. How many generations of artists have spent their lives drawing comics of characters invented by people 70 years ago?
Comics are a very legitimate medium, and a very powerful one. When the 9-11 commission sought a way to present their mammoth 571 page report to the wider public, they turned to the medium of comic books. Some people had the gall to ridicule them, but it was an incredibly brave and shrewd decision. The graphic novel of the findings is a power educational tool against the inevitable 9-11 conspiracy theorists. It was, all things considered, the single best way to tell the story of that day.
Comics are a medium of human communication. So is cartoon animation. The industrialisation of the comic book and animation industries in the Western world has robbed us of this medium. Because of the paranoia of 1950's American society, and the capitulation of the industry to hysteria like Comics Code Authority, the power of the medium comics, seen daily in newspapers across the country, is unable to be brought to bear in any arguments above the briefest of lengths. We are living with the bad decisions made by people 60 years ago and the effect of industry monopolisation and we are worse off because of it.
How dare you! The Disney corporation has, for decades, delivered countless hours of mindless, vapid entertainment and proxy childrearing to millions of happy All American Families. We have turned kitsch from a derisible concept, to a mass industry, to the very apex of American cultural achievement. I mean, what kind of monster would object to carpeting bombing our youth with bright eyed, euphoric, singing animals and animated gargoyles? A Communist monster, that's who!
Because he can and he should. What's the point of licensing a character if the licensee could wait for you to die and say "ha ha" and continue using that character?
You know. You're exactly right. It's not fair.
Just the other day, I saw a man building a wall on the outside of someone's house. I thought to myself, that wall is increasing the value of this property and indeed all the properties around it by a considerable amount. Why should that man be satisfied with just one payment. His wall could last forever. Shouldn't his creativity and hard work be rewarded during that time? The owner of that house an others nearby should pay that man a fair licence fee for his work for the rest of his life.
Your argument has further persuaded me that not only should they pay the money to the wall builder, but also to his heirs. After all, they are his family, and he was working for them while he built those walls. True, they didn't lay a brick themselves, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to profit from their father's honest labour till the end of their days. And their heirs in turn should be able to enjoy the benefits. It's their moral right.
When I think how copyright has consistently delivered fresh innovation and content in the form of superheroes like Superman(1938), Batman(1939), and Spiderman(1962), I realise that the joy they ring to millions should mean financial benefit for the children, grandchildren, and great grand children of the authors. Who knows? Maybe with all the money they earn and such solid intellectual property rights, they'll go on to produce other famous superheroes who careers will last longer than most nation states. After all, copyright is the great motivator of new creative content!
The "Late 1930's" date was up on the page from the 8th of March to the 17th of July last year. That's a long time for the page to be wrong. Consider what the first result for "World War 2" was for that period. How many people read that article to find out things like the start date.
My point here is that while the correct start date is well known, an incorrect date was the easiest one to find. Sure, this is an easy case and you can complain about lazy researchers. But when things get more complicated than this simple example, and when the true information is far more difficult to come across, what are going to become the accepted interpretation of the facts, or even the facts themselves? Remember, even this simple error went unmolested for five months.
The article is the summary of a Wikitrip, that much is clear. But there is more to the history of cyrography than it's interpretation in the pages of Wikipedia. Who controls those pages. As another poster mentioned, the article states that modern cryptography begins with Shannon? Why does it do this, while ignoring the Bletchley Park cryptographers and their breaking of the ENIGMA system. It does so because that is where the Wikipedia pages says modern cryptography began. What about other sources, expert opinions? Doesn't matter. Wikipedia is the lowest hanging fruit.
This is really very serious. Not only has our society made reliable sources harder to access, but we've given more prominence to unreliable sources. Well, at least Google has, which is rich considering that they think the internet is a cesspool of misinformation. Yet they value the cesspool over better sources, because they have to. The better sources simply aren't online.
Essentially, Encyclopedia Britannica has the correct idea on how to get correct information; You ask an expert. That might sound elitist, but that's the way it is. Unfortunately, Encyclopedia Britannica won't put that information online, for free. This means, in an increasingly real way, that that information may as well not exist. This doesn't apply to general encyclopedia information. It applies to cold hard facts too.
How we archive our information is at least as important as how be discover it. If all we do is hoard the facts and promote half truths, then what does the truth become?
Part of my research involves reading quite a bit about 17th century science. I've spent a lot of time with these treatises, and have read large parts of them in the original Latin or Italian.
Oh god. Did you happen to read any of them in plain English? Or at least in your own native tongue? It could have helped. You might want to try something like Netwon's Principia for the common reader. You may then at least be able to appreciate exactly what the book is talking about. (Hint: It wasn't the Tychonic system!) That's why I referred you to the tensors book. If you don't understand the equations, then you will not understand any of these books in either their literal or historical contexts.
I was writing quickly and didn't mean that the Principia used a Tychonic system throughout (if anyone read it like that)... I just meant that it assumes it in places, as can be easily demonstrated. Clearly Newton was somewhat ambivalent about various models and used convenient models for computational purposes
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You don't understand Newton's arguments, because if you did, you'd know that he spent quite a bit of time defining inertial reference frames, the laws of motion and circular motion before he even mentioned gravity and the planets. This is important because rotating reference frames, like the heliocentric subset of the Tychonic model, are not inertial frames. Objects in rotating frames do not move according to Newton's laws, and consequently planets will not revolve in ellipses under gravity. To suggest Issac Newton, or anyone who understood his arguments, accepted the Tychonic system is to outright slander them.
As a historian of sorts you know or at least should know exactly why Newton is being ambivalent here. You are grossly distorting his reasons here.
Hmmmm, yes. I especially love the part about how the discovery of stellar aberration by Bradley put paid to the Tychonic model, even though it has nothing to do with helio or geocentricism and is purely due to motions of the telescope. I believe the author must have meant stellar parallax, but I believe that was only first confirmed somwtime around the 1820's. Oops.
And what the Church did to him was censorship and was wrong to those of us who value intellectual freedom. But he didn't play by the rules they set up, and he
Are you for real?
But that's rigging the game. If you read about contemporary accounts and understand the arguments on both sides, there was a lot going on there that had nothing to do with science (or science vs. religion)... including a lot of politics, on top of all the intellectual debate.
That's not what was in the trial records. Galileo was condemned and nearly executed based on this theories, not on his relationship with the Pope. You are sugaring over the central issue. Galileo had a very solid argument backup up with observations and reasoning, and the church dismissed it all because it conflicted with their dogma. Dogma. They denied Galileo the philosophical freedom they allowed even their own theologians and threatened to burn him because he stood by the truth. Most of them wouldn't even look into his telescope. Are you trying to suggest these men had honest intellectual integrity during this debate?
It was easy for anyone with two eyes in their head to look through a telescope and see the moons of Jupiter. To see
Slashdot Mirror
There is red, brown, black. One is edible.
While everyone can be replaced, their premature deaths are still going to be a net loss. All they could have done is lost to us and it will take time to get a replacement. Essentially, this is a human version of the broken window fallacy.
Every single one of those groups is still around and quite free to speak out against the extra taxes that have been set on their favoured products. You'll find that victims of Nazi persecution retained no such rights of appeal.
So you are telling me that Saturn is somehow connected to the S&P 500? Or that Sunspots are responsible for US GDP? How far are we allowed to take this? How different is this study to the two I've mentioned?
That is not what the study is saying. The author's of the study claim that it simply means that relatively more winter babies are born to unmarried and less educated mothers. The Wall street journal claims the study has found an explanation for the "lifelong challenges" of winter babies, as did the Slashdot summary. You've claimed something else? What will the tabloid newspapers claim? "Winter babies unhealthy, uneducated, unemployed?" How far do you think they'll go with it? When were you born?
This study has not proved anything. It hasn't even suggested anything. It offers no reasoned explanation for its finding, with even the authors leaving such matters (proms and spring break) to the speculation of the reader. Is this how we do and accept research? Crunching two sets of numbers, finding a 1.2% overall spread in figures and then declaring that people born in winter suffer from a lifelong plight, without even bothering to provide genuine reasoning or enlightenment. Is that ethical? Is it scientific? Is this how we uncover the world?
This is a position which I fundamentally reject. Stephen Hales and Thomas_Young established causative and quantitative links before statistics had even been invented. Correlation is neither a neccessary nor a sufficient condition to establish any relationship between two variables. We cannot understand the world by computing correlation coefficients between data sets. If we continue to rely on them in this way, our understanding of the world will be reduced to the tunnel vision seen in the Slashdot headline; "Winter babies weaker, sicker, poorer, less intelligent".
Theories are about more than finding linear relationships between variables. They are about obtaining a complete and comprehensive understanding of phenomena, on a qualitative and quantitative level. You do not need correlation studies to do this, and you certainly cannot present them as an end result in and of themselves. Yet that's what people do. Take a database, mix it all around, get r=0.2 and a range of 1% and just throw it out in a paper. Let people make whatever they want of it. And they do.
Correlation is not causation, and it is not the modern Oracle of Delphi, revealing great truths. It's more likely to mislead than inform. So why should we trust it now? Read up on Hill's criteria of causation and ask yourself; How many of these (minimal) conditions did the researchers in this study actually establish?
Oh come on. You can come up with a lot better than that.
I'll tell you what else jumps out. The near immaculate periodic nature of the graphs. It's really regular. Something tell me this study has a lot more to do with the school cycle than it does with the season babies are born in. So I'm going to go ahead and guess that a lot of these births are nine months after proms or spring breaks or whatnot.
And how may I ask does the month your mother gave birth to you lead to a lifelong plight? If ever their was a classic junk study showing the usual correlation-causation woolly thinking, this is it. Apparently, a lot of unmarried, less educated mothers have more unprotected sex in May (or less in January). Why would this lead you to conclude that being born in winter disadvantages someone. I was born in winter and my mother was married, educated and employed. Has my life been deprived somehow? Do I need extra money or protection or something? Yeah sure, chuck me some money. I'll consider it an idiot tax; like the lottery.
Correlation is NOT Causation. Correlation proves nothing. Saturn is correlated to the S&P 500 with r=0.88. And don't think there a correlation so profoundly stupid that someone won't publish a "scientific" paper on it.
This research is junk. Correlation studies need to die.
Thank you for giving us our daily dose of prejudice.
Here's the bottom line. Spelling and grammar, while lauded by many, are simply not very important. Knowing where and how to use semi-colons is not, and never has been a useful or laudable skill in all but a handful of professions. Knowing or caring what a participle actually is, is a topic of interest only to a trained linguist. Most people do not, and should not need to know these things. The style rules are essentially followed most rigorously by cowards. People too terrified of breaking rank or decorum and who will willingly and eventually gratefully follow a body of strict order laid down by people who lived over a hundred years ago. These people wrap themselves in knots in their efforts to stay on track and their writing suffers accordingly.
Now, I'm not saying that we should all jst gv up & on ower snnantX and speeln altagather, but there is no point in being anal retentive and insisting that everyone conform their writing and speech to the south eastern standard, as it has been interpreted by people with no real skill other than a love of proving their linguistic superiority over others. This rigid and unbending insistence on "proper" standards is robbing the written english word of the diversity encountered in its spoken form. Every day I hear people where I live uses phrases like, "They'd be (They do be) going to....", yet I have only seen these things actually written down a handful of times in my entire life. I'm sure there are countless other such colloquialisms which are similarly snubbed in "proper english" circles.
Basically, what I am saying is that the collective "style guide" is and always has been a crock. It is an arbitrary and exclusionary set of principles for written english, with no objective or fundamental underpinning in any for of english that is or ever was spoken. The single best modern day wordsmiths can be found "rapping" in popular records in a dialect and with a style of grammar that breaks almost every rule in the style book, yet is unquestionably a more potent and superior form of communication for the purposes it is intended to serve.
In a way, the logical conclusion for the enforcement of the style guides can their eventually implementation on a computer. The style guides belong more to the realm of capricious, cold and uncaring logic than they ever did to the realm of human communication or expression.
Sit down my son.
This has already happened. Capcom are leading the trend. Street Fighter 4 came out at 45 euros over here, compared to the usual 60. So did Bionic commando and few other Capcom titles. They sold out in several venues.
That 15 euros/dollars makes all the difference. Right now, buying a video game is still a gamble. You really don't know how much you will like a game or how long it will last. 60 euros is a lot to risk on a game you may only play for six to eight hours or so (Uncharted, I'm looking at you). Sure, you could find the odd 200+ hour gem, but it depends on your taste. It was LittleBigPlanet for me, but you must remember that some people hated that game, as will happen with every major title. A good 60 euro purchase is worth it. A bad one is a serious burn. A 45 euro purchase can still fry you, but really you're only coming away mostly singed.
Market forces? Is this some kind a a euphemism for monopolies, anti-competitive practices and union busting? Because that's the only context I ever hear it used in.
Wake up. Wake up you and all the other "free market" drones around here. The "Free market" does not, has not and will not ever exist. Period. It is a pipe dream concocted from the ramblings of economists, most of whom were in the employ of powerful groups who would like nothing better than a free hand to do as they please in any sector of the economy or society in general. It is, at best and idealised theoretical utopia, worthy only of consideration as a thought experiment. If that.
In reality, you cannot separate economics from the general deviousness, manipulation, underhandedness and skullduggary that goes on in almost every walk of human life. People game system and companies, especially big companies, will game the system up to and quite often past the point where they can get away with it. In this reality, on this planet Earth, your free market theories are about as applicable as theories of anti-matter.
The big telco's are going to degrade service, cripple and destroy all competition, punitively raise prices and in general wreck the whole internet unless there is strong government regulation in place to prevent them from doing so. Platitudes about the efficiency of private industry and the prices "the market" will bear are just that. Platitudes, carrying no more weight than a dry tissue. History, and indeed recent events, have demonstrated quite conclusively that no major industry can be left to its own devices, ever . It simply does not work. The prime, prime, prime example was the recent financial crash. But there are many other examples across all industries.
The internet is now one of the foundations of our society and we cannot allow it to be held to ransom by a handful of individuals hiding behind corporate veils and pandering economics.
That's impossible. As every Slashdotter knows, there is not even the slightest difference between the two main political parties in the US and voting for either one is a futile and pointless gesture serving only to perpetuate the existing corporate/military/lobbiest complex.
The idea that the Democracts are somehow going to roll back the Republican crackdown on freedoms. Or that President Obama is behaving any differently that McCain would in his place? Absurd I tell you. Absurd.
No, no. It's clear that absolutely nothing has changed in America since the end of the Bush years. Not even a little bit!
Hey. You weren't complaining when region free DVD players stopped honoring the "intellectual property" of the DVD content "owners".
By the way, the players probably use the FFmpeg codecs and not mplayer itself, which lacks any real kind of gui. Speaking of which the FFmpeg codecs are themselves currently sitting under the Damocles sword of intellectual property in the for of the multitude of video codec patents. I doubt there's a single 30 line block of code in there that isn't violating someones patent.
In conclusion, our current IP regime sucks. I for one applaud these hardware makers, particularly in Asia, for cutting this twisted Gordian knot and just loading up their devices will all the features they can download. In my opinion as producers of real tangible goods, they are morally, socially and economically justified in what they have done. If anyone wants to complain, they can just go ahead and make their own, real physical devices and bring them to market.
This just keeps getting better and better! I understand every word in this analogy, but the the whole thing just refuses to makes sense! Are you on the talk show circuit or something?
Wow. Seriously though; some people believe the most ridiculous things. Take this study for instance. Commissioned by "The Wines of Chile". Probably some website or email based survey, distributed by chain mail, with no controls or conditions. The study has literally been designed to grab headlines, nothing more.
And people will just lap it up. Why is it that the only thing needed to gain credence is to say you've done things scientifically? Don't we have better standards for judging the quality of results?
This study, like astrology and whatever the hell the parent poster was raving on about, share one similarity. They are results and methods promoted by and for people who seek mental shortcuts to understanding the world. It's a tempting strategy certainly, but in the long term, you're better off trusting in getting it done right.
Wow. You can't buy this level of stupidity. It's a moment which should be truly treasured.
Google have recently made major advances against Microsoft as a whole. Once the fascists and the Bolsheviks are done fighting each other, we'll all have to start worrying about when the victor is going to come after us.
When was the last time you heard of a study where the resutls weren't statistically significant. At this point, I ask whether the property of statistical significance is itself statistically significant.
No. That is not the reason for these laws. The reason for these laws is that the Germans are trying to avoid repeating history.
While many Slashdotters are indeed in the hardcore libertarian camp, even they must acknowledge the power of mass media and its influence, good and bad, over public opinion. Look at the effect of Hollywood films, from the trivial to the profound. What do you think would happen if blockbuster remakes of films like "Birth of a Nation" or "The Eternal Jew" were allowed to become the major summer hits next year? Are you telling me that the public would rationally choose to reject such racism? I love to believe that, I really would.
Remember what started the whole global warming hysteria? It was that movie(or was it two) about super freezing storms or flood or something. It was a major hit. The Day After Tomorrow, I think. The science had been screaming the results for 40 years and nobody had batted an eyelid. After that summer, everybody was a convert. I am NOT using this as an argument against the reality of human induced climate change. What I am saying is that the media has the ability to very rapidly shift public opinion and temperament on more issues that just this.
There are other examples. The original Birth of a Nation lead to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The China Syndrome, released contemporaneously with the Three Mile Island incident, has halted the expansion of nuclear power generation to this day. Jurassic Park popularised dinosaurs as never before, ultimately forcing creationism to rebrand itself as intelligent design. More recently, that Zeitgeist crock of shit has managed to snare more than a few supposedly educated people, some of them around here.
Movies can literally transform public opinion en-masse in a single summer season. Their largest audience is young impressionable people, the traditional movers of society. They sit and immerse themselves mentally and emotionally in an audio-visual presentation for over an hour. It affects people more deeply than they know. Frankly, I think that the immersion experienced in movies is greater than the immersion in video games or books. This summer people are going to watch a film about the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler. It's more than likely going to be a story about good guys verses evil guys. That's what people are going to take from it, despite the fact that most of the would be assassins were Wehrmacht officers intimately involved in the many Nazi atrocities on the eastern front. The film will become history and the truth will be forgotten.
The sad fact is that if films, or games, or TV shows glorifying the Nazi regime were to be allowed to be shown en masse, not only Germany, but a great many other Western countries would recede into fascism and genocide. And yes, the whole process can be precipitated by one or two films. Just look at what one talk show host like Glenn Beck is able to do to public opinion over one summer season. I don't want to wake up one September to find that my neighbors are all spouting neofascist slogans and marching in fascist bands or whatever other mass movement these films can persuade them to engage in.
Yes, I do think that the German government goes overboard in censorship in many cases, including this one. But you fail to understand the power, influence and history of Nazi imagery, and to say that the Germans are ignorant of that history or somehow hiding it is a profoundly ignorant comment to make.
It's true. The SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss himself. The Nazi's were evil, fanatical and genocidal, but they looked sharp while they were doing it. It wasn't just coincidence. Part of the Nazi's whole propaganda effort was that they looked the part of the leaders of a master race. Couple this with the Nazi mass parades and propaganda rallies, and you have a very persuasive and intimidating regime. Even the Hitler youth, a compulsory organisation for all young boys, had their own tailored uniform.
The proof of just how striking and intimidating these uniforms were can be seen in Hollywoods lasting infatuation with putting them on-screen. Essentially it was the task they were designed for; Visual intimidation. Even fantasy baddies usually have an SS inspired uniform. As I recall, a recent movie Hellboy opens with a Nazi ritual, and while the costumes are outrageous, they are not in fact all that far removed from reality. It's not difficult to imagine an SS officer wearing such a striking getup as he went about executing people and dumping them in mass graves.
This is why I never buy arguments about why dressing well is so important.
You are if you made the owner look like a FOOL!! You're gonna fry.
So, if the answer was 9.7, and I said that the answer was "above 5 but less than 10", you'd be satisfied with that as the definitive answer on one of the most visited pages on the internet?
The Japanese, and to a lesser extent East Asian, Manga industry has been doing things like this for decades. Issues from the topical to the seemingly unpresentable. Remember the manga guide to statistics. By contrast, the now stagnant meme of superheros has proven itself utterly unable to discuss any topic that does not somehow involve men in leotards fist fighting one another.
The biggest problem with the western comic book industry is that it is not seen as a legitimate medium for adult discouse. It is not seen this way because publishers and writers deliberately market and censor their products for consumption by teenagers with their parents approval. The utter stagnancy of the American comic book industries is a testament to how successful this strategy has been in killing creativity. How many generations of artists have spent their lives drawing comics of characters invented by people 70 years ago?
Comics are a very legitimate medium, and a very powerful one. When the 9-11 commission sought a way to present their mammoth 571 page report to the wider public, they turned to the medium of comic books. Some people had the gall to ridicule them, but it was an incredibly brave and shrewd decision. The graphic novel of the findings is a power educational tool against the inevitable 9-11 conspiracy theorists. It was, all things considered, the single best way to tell the story of that day.
Comics are a medium of human communication. So is cartoon animation. The industrialisation of the comic book and animation industries in the Western world has robbed us of this medium. Because of the paranoia of 1950's American society, and the capitulation of the industry to hysteria like Comics Code Authority, the power of the medium comics, seen daily in newspapers across the country, is unable to be brought to bear in any arguments above the briefest of lengths. We are living with the bad decisions made by people 60 years ago and the effect of industry monopolisation and we are worse off because of it.
How dare you! The Disney corporation has, for decades, delivered countless hours of mindless, vapid entertainment and proxy childrearing to millions of happy All American Families. We have turned kitsch from a derisible concept, to a mass industry, to the very apex of American cultural achievement. I mean, what kind of monster would object to carpeting bombing our youth with bright eyed, euphoric, singing animals and animated gargoyles? A Communist monster, that's who!
You know. You're exactly right. It's not fair.
Just the other day, I saw a man building a wall on the outside of someone's house. I thought to myself, that wall is increasing the value of this property and indeed all the properties around it by a considerable amount. Why should that man be satisfied with just one payment. His wall could last forever. Shouldn't his creativity and hard work be rewarded during that time? The owner of that house an others nearby should pay that man a fair licence fee for his work for the rest of his life.
Your argument has further persuaded me that not only should they pay the money to the wall builder, but also to his heirs. After all, they are his family, and he was working for them while he built those walls. True, they didn't lay a brick themselves, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to profit from their father's honest labour till the end of their days. And their heirs in turn should be able to enjoy the benefits. It's their moral right.
When I think how copyright has consistently delivered fresh innovation and content in the form of superheroes like Superman(1938), Batman(1939), and Spiderman(1962), I realise that the joy they ring to millions should mean financial benefit for the children, grandchildren, and great grand children of the authors. Who knows? Maybe with all the money they earn and such solid intellectual property rights, they'll go on to produce other famous superheroes who careers will last longer than most nation states. After all, copyright is the great motivator of new creative content!
The "Late 1930's" date was up on the page from the 8th of March to the 17th of July last year. That's a long time for the page to be wrong. Consider what the first result for "World War 2" was for that period. How many people read that article to find out things like the start date.
My point here is that while the correct start date is well known, an incorrect date was the easiest one to find. Sure, this is an easy case and you can complain about lazy researchers. But when things get more complicated than this simple example, and when the true information is far more difficult to come across, what are going to become the accepted interpretation of the facts, or even the facts themselves? Remember, even this simple error went unmolested for five months.
The article is the summary of a Wikitrip, that much is clear. But there is more to the history of cyrography than it's interpretation in the pages of Wikipedia. Who controls those pages. As another poster mentioned, the article states that modern cryptography begins with Shannon? Why does it do this, while ignoring the Bletchley Park cryptographers and their breaking of the ENIGMA system. It does so because that is where the Wikipedia pages says modern cryptography began. What about other sources, expert opinions? Doesn't matter. Wikipedia is the lowest hanging fruit.
This is really very serious. Not only has our society made reliable sources harder to access, but we've given more prominence to unreliable sources. Well, at least Google has, which is rich considering that they think the internet is a cesspool of misinformation. Yet they value the cesspool over better sources, because they have to. The better sources simply aren't online.
Essentially, Encyclopedia Britannica has the correct idea on how to get correct information; You ask an expert. That might sound elitist, but that's the way it is. Unfortunately, Encyclopedia Britannica won't put that information online, for free. This means, in an increasingly real way, that that information may as well not exist. This doesn't apply to general encyclopedia information. It applies to cold hard facts too.
How we archive our information is at least as important as how be discover it. If all we do is hoard the facts and promote half truths, then what does the truth become?
Oh god. Did you happen to read any of them in plain English? Or at least in your own native tongue? It could have helped. You might want to try something like Netwon's Principia for the common reader. You may then at least be able to appreciate exactly what the book is talking about. (Hint: It wasn't the Tychonic system!) That's why I referred you to the tensors book. If you don't understand the equations, then you will not understand any of these books in either their literal or historical contexts.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You don't understand Newton's arguments, because if you did, you'd know that he spent quite a bit of time defining inertial reference frames, the laws of motion and circular motion before he even mentioned gravity and the planets. This is important because rotating reference frames, like the heliocentric subset of the Tychonic model, are not inertial frames. Objects in rotating frames do not move according to Newton's laws, and consequently planets will not revolve in ellipses under gravity. To suggest Issac Newton, or anyone who understood his arguments, accepted the Tychonic system is to outright slander them.
As a historian of sorts you know or at least should know exactly why Newton is being ambivalent here. You are grossly distorting his reasons here.
Hmmmm, yes. I especially love the part about how the discovery of stellar aberration by Bradley put paid to the Tychonic model, even though it has nothing to do with helio or geocentricism and is purely due to motions of the telescope. I believe the author must have meant stellar parallax, but I believe that was only first confirmed somwtime around the 1820's. Oops.
Are you for real?
That's not what was in the trial records. Galileo was condemned and nearly executed based on this theories, not on his relationship with the Pope. You are sugaring over the central issue. Galileo had a very solid argument backup up with observations and reasoning, and the church dismissed it all because it conflicted with their dogma. Dogma. They denied Galileo the philosophical freedom they allowed even their own theologians and threatened to burn him because he stood by the truth. Most of them wouldn't even look into his telescope. Are you trying to suggest these men had honest intellectual integrity during this debate?
It was easy for anyone with two eyes in their head to look through a telescope and see the moons of Jupiter. To see