The problem has already been solved by the brain. Although we have all sorts of thoughts going on all the time, we only act on a few of them.
You'll have the problem anew if you come up with machines that interpret mental activity. A mouse and keyboard, after all, need to be acted upon. A machine that takes brainwaves for input is an input device with no such constraints.
How about mental slashdot comment submission.
You hear voices of other commenters in your mind, and you think what you want to say, it automatically appears in the site, and echoes in other commenters' minds.
Just be careful not to think "first post"
Slashdotters tend to frown on that sort of thing.
That'd require a high degree of mental discipline, to the point of being able to control both the content of your thoughts and their timing. That kind of discipline is sorely lacking in the general population, unfortunately. The way I often put it is that most people do not govern their thoughts and view them as a tool like any other; instead, most people are governed by their thoughts and can hardly imagine experiencing life apart from them. I am mostly talking here about when you "think to yourself" in your native language, and the problem with that is that when you experience all of life this way, you lose much of your ability to directly apprehend new realizations and must instead to go through the proxy of symbolic language for everything you experience.
Most people have a constant and endless supply of somewhat random thoughts that continuously pop into and out of their heads and could hardly sustain complete mental silence (i.e. a form of meditation) for even a few seconds, let alone selectively shut out unwanted thoughts with ease to effortlessly emphasize any particular one. This wouldn't be such a problem for relatively simple controls like "move this mouse cursor to the place I am thinking of" but would be a big problem for anyone intending to mentally dictate sentences and paragraphs and complex lines of reasoning without having to constantly make corrections.
What interests me is whether machines that accept this kind of input would lead to this kind of mental discipline becoming more common, as most seem to find no adventure in exploring their capabilities and fine-tuning their minds and therefore would balk at the effort without some externally imposed reason. It's a shame it has to be that way, that many need to have a fire of some kind lit under their asses before they will challenge their own limits. However, I still imagine that a society of more effective and capable thinkers would be radically different from the one that we know today and could only be an improvement. It would definitely be better than the widespread ignorance (of learning how to learn) that, whether you believe they encourage it or not, is definitely politically convenient for the powers-that-be.
I do disagree on that, assessment is about documenting facts about a product. The one delivering the product or service is the one with legal responsibility for being truthful about the product or service. So that is the first place I try to start, since if they make the claim they are required to back it up.
The problem with that is simple. Maybe not to you and definitely not to me, but in the hands of a "bullshit artist," the truth is a very malleable thing. There is plenty of grey area provided by the necessity of interpretation. The example I like to use are those toothpaste companies who say things like "4 out of 5 dentists recommend our brand!" For all I know, they kept gathering groups of five dentists and kept asking them for their recommendations until they finally found a group of five out of which four liked their product. For all I know, they had to ask 200 dentists before they got the numbers they wanted. Yet, technically what they said is completely true, for they made no claims about how this "4 out of 5" figure was obtained. It's technically completely true, yet also completely misleading.
So, trusting the company to give an honest (the truth AND THE WHOLE TRUTH) review on their own products is a situation where the fox is guarding the henhouse. The best way to handle this reality is to just assume this is a terribly biased source and to obtain your information elsewhere. That is precisely how I deal with it, and it has not failed me. I think it's one of those things that, as they say, "works everywhere it's tried."
I get your drift. But for non "high precision" games I like the ease of just being able to put in a disc and play--and skip the hour installing it to my hard drive.
I don't mean this in a bad way, but if installing a game is really that much trouble I think you're doing something wrong. Linux+WINE is generally a more troublesome setup than straight Windows gaming and still isn't nearly enough of a bother to be a deciding factor for me, though I am not remotely a member of the "I just want it to work!" crowd. I like to tinker. Of course, YMMV.
And when you piss off customers and they take their business elsewhere, that's not serving the investors.
And when the vast majority of customers tolerate things that really should piss them off, that's the moment your model breaks. This possibility did occur to you, right?
You now know that you were completely mistaken about both my perspective and my meaning, and I have already answered this, yet still you persist with a regurgitated form of the same faux reasoning. Sigh. You're quite the stubborn bastard. In recognition of your persistence, I'll explain why this is silly, but it's the last time I'm bothering.
It's hard to choose where to begin. Your text:
So because stupid people don't tell a company to fuck off, everyone doesn't? That's very flawed logic, especially since you're on a site where people routinely talk about companies they boycott.
For one thing, the correctness of logic has nothing to do with the Web site you visit. Slashdot is one site. Millions of sites don't mention boycotts at all. I hate to break it to you, but Slashdot is a self-selecting group and does not represent the average person (in many ways it'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't). So, I hope you understand how weak that position really is. If not, look up "anecdotal evidence" sometime and see for yourself how useful it is (hint: it isn't useful).
Now, if you were correct about my logic being flawed, then where are the big business and social changes that effective boycotts would have brought about? Oh, that's right, they aren't happening because we are a tiny minority who act on principle. That we are a tiny minority is what should change, ideally. That means you and I really want the same thing, which is for more people to be more aware that they can vote with their wallets and more willing to do so in a responsible way. However, you completely misinterpreted my initial post. You were dead wrong and now you lack the courage to admit it. You feel a need to save face now that you realize you could have correctly understood me from the beginning, so here we are arguing over nothing. Good job.
Also, the RIAA does work for their customers - their customers are record labels / musicians.
Try taking your observation one level deeper. The RIAA's customers are the record labels. The record labels' customers are everyday people. So the RIAA should serve the labels which serve the people, and thus, indirectly serve the people. That has not been the case. It is not the case because the RIAA can afford lobbyists, the average person cannot, and (here's the key part) the average person isn't bothered enough by the abuses to stop buying music from RIAA labels, as evidenced by the fact that the major labels are still doings lots of business. This brings us back to my original point, that not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets in order to effect meaningful change. A point you continue to deny despite its extreme obviousness.
So what was the purpose of telling me the already well-known fact that the RIAA is composed of its constituent record labels and musicians? Oh, right, you were continuing to argue long after it was evident that you had the wrong idea. Has that worked out for you yet?
Anyway, I'm through with you. Have the last word if you like. I've expended far more patience on you than you are capable of appreciating as it is, so I am done with this particular thread.
The entire purpose of a corporation is to serve customers - if you don't give people a reason to do business with you, they'll go somewhere else. Eventually you'll go bankrupt if you don't give people a reason to business with you and then you no longer have a corporation.
I'd love to know what kind of drugs you're on where you think that people would do business with a company that doesn't give them anything they want at all (ok, well except the government, and that's because it's forced).
I'm not trolling, though I wonder if you are overeager to be trolled...
The obvious point was that corporations in general are both better represented in government than the people and more powerful in the marketplace than the people. There are, after all, multiple ways of serving or failing to serve people. When the RIAA lobbies for more authoritarian copyright laws that I don't personally want, they are not serving me and they are not serving you. The implied point was that this is not the way things should be. The second implied point was that this wasn't some inevitable consequence of living on planet Earth, but rather, that this shit goes on because we as a large group are too willing to accept it.
Part of the problem is that few average people make any effort to really know with whom they're doing business. The occasional sensationalist story highlighting how badly someone got screwed and by whom is only a partial solution, as it is no substitute for due diligence. As others have pointed out, this has nearly destroyed the effectiveness of "voting with your wallet", because while you may be conscious enough to do this, a quick look around will reveal to you that no one else does. So the bullshit and the abusive practices go on, and will go on as long as they are rewarded with profits. They will end the moment they result in losses; that day, however, is in the future. So like I said, if the people have decided that corporations exist only to serve them, I missed that meeting, and just for you I'll add because their behavior seems to indicate otherwise.
Completely OT: This is why I sold my soul to console gaming and bought an Xbox. If its not an FPS or a RTS I buy it for the White Box of Doom.
There are two things that prevent me from investing in a console. One, I personally think that the mouse is a superior input device when compared to the typical analog joystick found on a console (such as the Xbox360 to name just one of many). I especially feel this way on a game like Halo 3 where headshots matter. The other reason is compatibility and versatility.
The mouse cursor moves as quickly as I can move my hand, and stops moving the instant my hand stops moving. The analog stick feels like I am scrolling towards my intended target. I'll use Fallout 3 as an example. With the mouse, I can be looking away and notice movement at the corner of the screen, and quickly turn the character around, aim directly at the target and fire in one fluid motion, like a reflex. The same game played on an Xbox360 doesn't allow me to react that quickly, because pushing the analog joystick toward the target enemy will scroll the cursor in that direction at a speed that is much slower by comparison.
If you are familiar with Fallout 3, this means I rely much more heavily on VATS (auto-targeting) because playing free-hand is effectively crippled. Even in Halo 3 I often see people take pains to keep their cursor at about head-level, which to do correctly means guessing how far away the enemy wil be when encountered. They do this because they have limited ability to quickly and accurately target a small area and most of the skill involved boils down to working around this. In other words, I draw a distinction between an intentional game mechanic and the shortcomings of a controller.
The other big advantage of PC gaming is compatibility. I don't have to worry about whether a game is only available on certain consoles that I may not have, because chances are there's at least a Windows version of it (that would execute via WINE in my case) if there is not a native Linux version. Additionally, if there is some glaring flaw in the game or some annoying feature, there are often mods and patches that can fix it. While there is such functionality on modern consoles, it's usually in the form of a pushed update that comes from some official channel, leaving you with fewer choices. A patch like the one I linked to earlier is just such an example.
Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?
Well call me Captain Obvious, but I'd say don't subscribe to Verizon. If enough people want it, eventually either Verizon will offer it or they'll go out of business. Either way it's a win for consumers.
Since when did customers (they're not consumers*) decide that the purpose of corporations is to serve them, and any corporation that is unwilling or unable to do so does not deserve their business? I missed that meeting...
* If you like, I'll explain that one. The two terms are not interchangeable unless you're a fan of Newspeak.
I upgraded my Fallout 3 installation yesterday. After patching, the game wouldn't run, returning some fairly obtuse message about import ordinals. So I googled the message, and found out it's because the game now links against a newer version of "Microsoft(R) Games for Windows(TM) Live(TM)" whatever. Note that this wasn't some new patch, it's months old and yet this problem, which must realistically be hitting quite a few users, persists. This isn't something you get via Windows Update either, this is just some obscure 'distributable runtime' crap you should know you need?
So let me repeat that: Super mainstream game on a super mainstream platform (Vista x64), no add-ons, I patch to the latest version and it won't start, nothing is mentioned at the developer's site.
Now I recognize good old Bethesda again. Here's how they'd be able to repro: Fully updated Vista machine, install game from DVD, apply patch, notice it won't fucking run.
I don't normally give much for the 'PC-gaming sucks' choir, but c'mon..
I had the same problem. Only, I run Fallout3 in Linux via WINE and there is apparently no way whatsoever to get xlive.dll to work in WINE. In addition, you do need the latest Fallout3 patches in order to install the expansions. Personally, I found it unacceptable that I would not be able to use any of the expansions merely because someone decided to add functionality that I never asked for, do not need, and will never use.
I found a solution. There is a patch for Fallout3 that removes all Live functionality, and was sufficient to get the game working for me in WINE because it removes the dependency on xlive.dll. I can now use the game with all five expansions (Mothership Zeta was particularly fun). A page describing it can be found here while a direct link to the download is here.
Playing devils advocate here I can sort of see Nvidia's beef.
Their attitude to features and drivers is quite progressive and starts back with the old TNT32 when competing with voodoo. IMHO, we now have a similar situation where ATI is making good performing card at cheap prices yet are not maintaining the robust driver feature set of NVidia.
If a game is having a few glitches with shadows, chances are its with an ATI card.
NVidia's point of difference are their drivers, and I can at least see engineers being a bit miffed.
If they honestly believed that ATI made inferior video hardware, they would feel no need to deliberately sabotage interoperability like this. That's especially true when merely a warning along the lines of "this feature works best with 100% nVidia hardware" would have been sufficient. No, this kind of deliberate and underhanded bullshit is the action of a company that has no confidence in its ability to compete in an open market on a level playing field. Personally I like nVidia's products and I am not eager to see another lawsuit in an already-litigious society. However, I hope they do get sued over this (by either their customers or the government) and I hope they lose big. This kind of shit needs to be made as expensive and unprofitable as possible.
In the real world you don't have unlimited resources. In the real world you can't release an expansion and suddenly introduce new products to replace everything someone owns. Studying in game economics can be useful as an exercise or example of how some economic principles work, but collecting data from MMO's and then trying to use that information to explain how the real world works?
I'll limit the scope of this comment to World of Warcraft as that's the one I have personally played. I would not be surprised if the other MMOs mentioned are similar, I just don't know for certain that they are.
I think the appeal is that it's a true laissez-faire free-market economy. Among those, it's unusual because the game rules effectively prevent any one player or group of players from forming a monopoly and locking out competitors. So I may have the market for healing potions cornered, but there is nothing I can do to prevent you from gaining crafting skills and harvesting herbs and making your own potions and competing with me. Your potions will be just as good as mine, and any herbs you harvest won't be available to me until they respawn, at which point they become available to both of us again.
I can see why this would be interesting to an economist. It incorporates a lot of our notions of what a free market is. In the real world economic freedom is generally considered a desirable thing, at least until players are so free that they can form trusts and otherwise monopolize markets. So in the real world, anti-trust laws and other government regulations provide the necessary restrictions that the game rules provide in the virtual world. If nothing else, it can provide a way to explore the degree to which such regulations are necessary and what happens when they are minimal. Perhaps this is to an economist what the computer simulations are to such scientists as physicists and astronomers. They can use it to model something based on how they think it works in order to refine their ideas of what works and what doesn't.
Right... as if someone with knowledge of real world economics could actually be put in a place of authority.
My thought was something like this. Specifically, from the summary:
Our own economy has turned out to be less stable than we'd all assumed.
Well let's see now. We have fiat currency instead of representative currency (an example of which is the gold standard). Furthermore, the way fractional reserve banking in general and the Federal Reserve in particular is set up, there is always more debt built into the system than there are dollars in circulation. That's because debt is attached to money the moment it is created; i.e. for every X dollars in circulation there is always X+Y debt. This system is just not sustainable. How could it ever do anything but ultimately fail? Who are these people who expected it to be a paragon of stability and sustainability?
The real joke, though it's not a funny joke, is that this system as we know it came from the Great Depression. Its purpose was to ensure that such depressions would not happen again. By that I mean, this is how it was sold to the public. Isn't this typical, that an undesirable system that would not otherwise be accepted is proposed during a time of crisis and becomes entrenched? It's not like we have never seen that pattern before...
I posted a negative review of an item, shortly thereafter Newegg emailed me asking to resolve my complaint about the item in exchange for removing the negative review. To their credit, Newegg resolved the issue, but the net result was to artificially alter the reviews of the product.
I don't get it; they resolved the issue, so that you had nothing negative to post in the end. Let's say that instead of posting the negative review, you had contacted them of the problem to see if they would resolve it. If they hadn't, you would have posted the review; if they had, you wouldn't have, since there was no problem. The latter is what happened.
I like the idea of leaving the negative reviews up and attaching the manufacturer's response. My reasoning is simple: shit happens. At some point there will be problems of some kind. That's a given, and a corporation's attempt to cover up this fact of life to give an illusion of perfect products that don't have even a very small percentage of defects looks pretty damned suspicious to me.
What's important to me is when a company is willing to stand by their products and take care of its own mistakes. Do they give the customer a certain benefit of doubt, or do they treat complaining customers as though they don't believe a word they say? Do they make you otherwise jump through hoops? Do they admit fault and take responsibility and take reasonable measures to fix any problems they cause? Is it an uphill battle to get them to do the right thing? These are more important to me than how well they can censor their forums. A negative review that shows me a company bending over backwards to make things right isn't negative to me at all.
It is their site, they are free to publish what they feel on it.
Not so sure about that. If they are misrepresenting the nature of their review site, and further misrepresenting what they're selling by censoring reviews, then that would seem to be a form of fraud. What you are suggesting is that fraud is legally OK if done on the property of the party that perpetrates it. IANAL, but this strikes me as an odd notion.
I'll play a little devil's advocate. Replies indicating that they don't know what that means will be summarily ignored.
If you want a truthful, unbiased assessment of a company or any of its products and services, that company would be the very worst entity to ask. This applies, of course, to any media or forum directly under the control of that company. If people are naive and have not yet learned this from regular advertisements and TV commercials, it's safe to say that they are not going to learn this at all. The only purpose of having a legislature recognize this as illegal fraud would be to protect those people, who refuse to learn a few basic lessons, from themselves. This is true because it is otherwise within their power to realize these things unassisted. If that is so, then government intervention would only coddle and protect the sort of real-world ignorance that really does need a hard lesson or two. In other words, wouldn't it be better to discourage this sort of naive thinking (by letting it run its course if necessary) than to keep providing fertile ground for this sort of fraud and sending the government after everything that grows in this fertile ground?
The problem is that they're not. Stallman wants everyone to think the way he does.
The moment he has gains the ability to force me to think in any particular way, that's the moment I will worry about this.
It is their hate, their fear, and their paranoia which need to go. I don't have a problem with Bradley Kuhn at all because he can be of legal benefit in protecting FOSS; I have a problem with him because he behaves like a rabid rottweiler/human hybrid, who apparently will not rest until everyone else on the planet thinks in exactly the same way he does.
Then he may never have rest. That, however, is his problem. I still don't see why this concerns you, or why it should concern me. Anyone who feels otherwise is free to join the useless controversy that you opine, and that would be their problem as well. This isn't a danger whatsoever until and unless a) we accept more and more authoritarian intervention in our lives and b) someone who acts this way becomes politically powerful under such an authoritarian system to where he can use the force of law to impose his beliefs on unwilling people. Until that day, everyone who gets caught up in this or any other controversy has chosen to do so and I see nothing unfair or unjust about that.
Neither Richard Stallman or Bradley Kuhn can use force to make you to listen to them, nor are they seeking a means of doing so; therefore one fact remains: if you don't like these guys, the worst thing you could ever do to them would be to ignore them. If you do like them, you may appreciate that they are willing to take a stand on issues like this even though they catch a lot of flak for it. Either way, I just don't see what the problem is.
For the moment, let's ignore all the criminal and other misdeeds of big pharma (phony studies "proving" generics are bad, misleading marketing to doctors and politicians including golf trips to St. Andrews, selling pointless medicines for not-serious conditions such as "restless leg", "weak boners", etc.,) and focus on just the patent portion of this.
You can decide to disregard that and pretend that it doesn't matter, but really this tells you quite a lot about with whom you are dealing when your focus is the pharmaceutical companies. More on that in a moment...
Without that 12 year period of patent protection, generic drug companies could usually start making cheaper products almost immediately. There would be no reason for pharmaceutical firms to continue to pump a billion dollars into any drug if it's never going to see its return on investment, so innovation would end. The search for a cure for cancer, or of the many chronic conditions such as lupus, muscular dystrophy, etc., would end because there's no profit to be made even if they succeed.
There is a single glaring flaw in your reasoning. There is one thing that pharmaceutical companies absolutely cannot do and have no hope of ever accomplishing: they cannot make a profit from healthy people. What are in my layman's opinion (I am not a doctor) designer diseases such as the restless leg syndrome that you mention are one of their responses to this dilemma. Advertisements that market prescriptions to the general public when the necessary medicine is supposed to be the doctor's decision are another response to the same dilemma. Likewise, they have no incentive whatsoever to cure anything, even when it is within their power; in fact they have a strong incentive against doing so. They have plenty of incentive to come up with medicines that you might call ongoing treatments, because they guarantee an ongoing source of income.
Anything that remotely smells of this kind of motive doesn't deserve the protection of a government monopoly. So, I really don't see how patents are helping this situation. They seem to be protecting the cash cow more than anything else.
I remember several times I have listened to the radio talk show host Clark Howard and heard him say that most ID theft that goes on is a case of someone's paper checkbook being stolen. The implication was that it's a bad idea to carry one around unless you really need to and that a good place to store it at home would be in a safe or other secure location so burglars could not easily obtain it. That would be consistent with what this article is claiming, that mostly it's a low-tech crime involving a compromise of physical security, not digital.
no, proves instead of being dead it's stagnant. Perl 5.x lingers like scent of dead skunk under the porch while the Frankenstein of Perl 6 is still on the mad scientist's table, metaphorically getting body parts sewn on from morgues and cemeteries and hospitals across the globe. Perl 6 is the undead Creeper of programming languages
If the public pays for the research and creation they should have access to the intellectual product for no additional fee. It's silly that it isn't this way now. Of course we can all thank our corrupt congress critters for that.
Look at the reasons given in the summary:
The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US.
Those are all reasons of convenience. There is no principle in them. I don't fault the summary or its author for viewing it this way, as I believe it just reflects where we're at in this superficial society. As you say, there is an overriding reason why any textbooks produced by open funds need to be released with open licenses: because the public is paying the tab and therefore has a right to it. If the publishers don't like that, they can produce and sell goods on their own with no such assistance like almost every other company. This is the outcome that should happen regardless of whether it's convenient or inconvenient for anyone. It sure would be nice if that were more widely appreciated.
Why don't you consider...well... letting him pass?
You do have that option you know. If you are such a fan of driving slow, then just get out of his way. Much cheaper than building a HERF gun. It lets him manage his risks, and you manage yours.
In some states, the left lane is not to be used for traveling and is a passing lane. So if you are not driving faster than the other lane and ten moving over when its clear, you can be ticketed. Frankly, I wish my state did that. Its a very sensible system.
Also, I will note, that the output of a HERF gun, depending on power, distance etc, could actually blind a person. Do you really think its safe or justified to take a chance at blinding someone because you set the power too high on your home made HERF?
Oops just doesn't seem to cut it.
-Steve
You are making the same mistake as another person. That is, you are assuming you know the first thing about me or the situations which cause the musings of mine that you have read.
Sigh. Please see this post and after you read that, consider that you could have known you were making an unfounded assumption before I came along and pointed that out to you. You're welcome.
This then would be more like those states which have enabled conceal-carry gun permits for law-abiding citizens, and as a result have seen violent crime drop significantly.
I've heard stats like these thrown around, but I haven't seen any credible sources. (Not saying that there aren't any, just that I haven't seen them.)
Can you point us at the stats?
You ask me what you should be asking Google.
Not trying to give you a hard time. It's just that to show you the stats, I would first use Google to locate them. Then I would provide you with a URL chosen from the results. The shorter distance between two points would be for you to make this a topic of research. It would also be much more edifying for you than taking my word for anything, because for all you know I could be cherry-picking only the Google results that agree with my position.
But yes, to my knowledge every last state which has enabled such permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime. This is no mystery to anyone who knows a thing or two about human nature, but such knowledge is not terribly popular so of course the media treats this as though there were two equally valid positions. There is a strong lesson here about the media and their need for an "issue". By that I mean, seeing this subject dealt with on a mainstream TV program would give you the impression that there is a debate, that we're not sure yet whether such conceal-carry permits are a good idea. There is in fact no such debate. We know for a fact, with no need for opinions or editorials, that this is an effective way to deter would-be criminals.
That approximately half of the population finds this inconvenient because it interferes with their "guns are pure evil" platform is too bad for them. These are the same people who honestly believe that a criminal who is willing to commit murder would be worried about a weapons charge, so they call for stricter gun control etc. and do not realize that only law-abiding citizens are going to follow such measures. If you are like average people, then right now you are trying to figure out my political leanings. I can tell you that there is nothing political about following the facts wherever they may lead, and if you do some serious reserach into this subject, you will come to the same conclusions.
They are not cowards, but you do have it half right: they are bullies. But like criminals, they are actually narcissists, people with a pathologically-high self-esteem. They think they do have the right to boss other drivers around.
They ARE cowards because they don't normally reveal this sort of aggression unless it's a situation where you would be hard pressed to do anything about it. Like when you're in an automobile, for example. It's amazing how brave they are when they're in a large truck or an SUV. When you are face-to-face, and can physically reach that person, they tend to be much nicer and more courteous. Not genuinely, of course, but suddenly their aggression is much lower. This is true so long as you don't show weakness, because if you should make that mistake, then and only then do they feel brave again.
For quite a while, shrinks have been telling us that bullies are those with a very low self-esteem, who do what they do in order to bolster their self-image. It makes more sense to me (and to this researcher: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=violent-pride [scientificamerican.com]) that this cannot be, as someone with a very low self-esteem lacks the necessary aggressiveness to act as bullies do. The linked article points out that criminals and bullies rate high on tests for narcissism.
Personally I like to borrow a term from Bill Hicks and describe them as "fevered egos." I don't view it in terms of self-esteem, I view it in terms of whether that petty tyrant known as ego is running their show or whether they have the discipline, compassion, insight, and fortitude to overcome it. Because they lack those things, they are the way that they are. This is why they come from a position of weakness. They are aware of that, even if they are not consciously aware of it, so they compensate by doing their damndest to appear strong and intimidating. That it's compensatory means this is not genuine, though if you handle them incorrectly they will try very hard to make it real enough.
Just think about conceal-carry permits and why they have reduced violent crime in every state which has allowed them. The reason why is easy: criminals want helpless victims who say "oh please mr. mugger, don't shoot me, I'll give you anything you want". They do not want to get into shootouts. That's because they are cowards, at heart, no matter how tough they want to act. If they weren't cowards, the possibility of getting into a shootout would not stop them from doing what they want to do and crime rates would remain roughly the same in the aforementioned states or would even get worse due to more gunfights taking place.
The kind of courage that allows you to do something with no regard for risk because it is the right thing to do and absolutely must be done is reserved only for those who truly believe in the nobility and importance of what they do. Firefighters are a perfect example. Criminals and other bullies are naturally excluded from this and must get their living by preying on those who are weaker and willing to submit. That is why they are cowards.
On this note, I should point out that newer cars with ABS, and possibly also EBD, will outbrake any older car with plain-jane "dumb" brakes. Even a very good driver just can't know the exact speed of each wheel and readjust their braking 50-200 times per second, never mind adjust braking power on a per-wheel basis. People use the incredible stopping power of late-model cars to stop suddenly and talk to their friends on the side of the road, putting drivers of older cars at risk - I nearly got in a huge accident that way (and my car can stop VERY quickly for one with "dumb" brakes - I know how to use them), but luckily the oncoming lane was empty and I managed to slide around the offending asshole. I wasn't following too close but the sudden stop was totally unexpected and it caught me off guard. I'm more experienced now and know what to expect of the stupid assholes I'm forced to share the road with.
My principle is this: I imagine the guy in front of me suddenly hitting an invisible reinforced concrete wall and instantly decelerating to 0.000 mph with no warning. If there is any possibility that I would rear-end him in such an event, then I am following too closely. Incidentally, I do live in a state where rear-ending another vehicle is automatically your fault, and I personally agree with this rule because the guy in front of you has little or no control over how closely you decide to follow him. The guy behind has full control over how closely he follows. The person with the control should bear the responsibility. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the guy behind to ensure that this type of accident does not happen.
I don't think it's a flaw that our system can adapt to new situations. Do you want to be the person who's locked away in a room writing new laws for millions of things that "could" happen?
Not that the system doesn't have it's flaws, but adaptability isn't one of them.
I'm sorry but that's just silly. Do you really need a "person who's locked away in a room writing new laws for millions of things" before you can decide that hey, maybe we don't want the police to plant electronic devices on your property to track your every location at all times without a good reason, and that maybe getting a warrant is the standard way to show that there is a good reason? Seriously, how much foresight does that take?
For that matter... Who has ever read the 4th Amendment and thinks that the authors of it would support this kind of warrantless surveillance of citizens? Do they imagine that the Founders would have said "no, we only mentioned papers and effects, so clearly finding a clever new technological way to warrentlessly surveil people who have not been charged with a crime is A-OK!" I'd like to meet these people, if only to see whether they really exist. No, really, in the media and on the Internet I see opinions that are this asinine and childish but I've never met a real living breathing person who actually felt that way.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem has already been solved by the brain. Although we have all sorts of thoughts going on all the time, we only act on a few of them.
You'll have the problem anew if you come up with machines that interpret mental activity. A mouse and keyboard, after all, need to be acted upon. A machine that takes brainwaves for input is an input device with no such constraints.
How about mental slashdot comment submission. You hear voices of other commenters in your mind, and you think what you want to say, it automatically appears in the site, and echoes in other commenters' minds.
Just be careful not to think "first post"
Slashdotters tend to frown on that sort of thing.
That'd require a high degree of mental discipline, to the point of being able to control both the content of your thoughts and their timing. That kind of discipline is sorely lacking in the general population, unfortunately. The way I often put it is that most people do not govern their thoughts and view them as a tool like any other; instead, most people are governed by their thoughts and can hardly imagine experiencing life apart from them. I am mostly talking here about when you "think to yourself" in your native language, and the problem with that is that when you experience all of life this way, you lose much of your ability to directly apprehend new realizations and must instead to go through the proxy of symbolic language for everything you experience.
Most people have a constant and endless supply of somewhat random thoughts that continuously pop into and out of their heads and could hardly sustain complete mental silence (i.e. a form of meditation) for even a few seconds, let alone selectively shut out unwanted thoughts with ease to effortlessly emphasize any particular one. This wouldn't be such a problem for relatively simple controls like "move this mouse cursor to the place I am thinking of" but would be a big problem for anyone intending to mentally dictate sentences and paragraphs and complex lines of reasoning without having to constantly make corrections.
What interests me is whether machines that accept this kind of input would lead to this kind of mental discipline becoming more common, as most seem to find no adventure in exploring their capabilities and fine-tuning their minds and therefore would balk at the effort without some externally imposed reason. It's a shame it has to be that way, that many need to have a fire of some kind lit under their asses before they will challenge their own limits. However, I still imagine that a society of more effective and capable thinkers would be radically different from the one that we know today and could only be an improvement. It would definitely be better than the widespread ignorance (of learning how to learn) that, whether you believe they encourage it or not, is definitely politically convenient for the powers-that-be.
The problem with that is simple. Maybe not to you and definitely not to me, but in the hands of a "bullshit artist," the truth is a very malleable thing. There is plenty of grey area provided by the necessity of interpretation. The example I like to use are those toothpaste companies who say things like "4 out of 5 dentists recommend our brand!" For all I know, they kept gathering groups of five dentists and kept asking them for their recommendations until they finally found a group of five out of which four liked their product. For all I know, they had to ask 200 dentists before they got the numbers they wanted. Yet, technically what they said is completely true, for they made no claims about how this "4 out of 5" figure was obtained. It's technically completely true, yet also completely misleading.
So, trusting the company to give an honest (the truth AND THE WHOLE TRUTH) review on their own products is a situation where the fox is guarding the henhouse. The best way to handle this reality is to just assume this is a terribly biased source and to obtain your information elsewhere. That is precisely how I deal with it, and it has not failed me. I think it's one of those things that, as they say, "works everywhere it's tried."
I get your drift. But for non "high precision" games I like the ease of just being able to put in a disc and play--and skip the hour installing it to my hard drive.
I don't mean this in a bad way, but if installing a game is really that much trouble I think you're doing something wrong. Linux+WINE is generally a more troublesome setup than straight Windows gaming and still isn't nearly enough of a bother to be a deciding factor for me, though I am not remotely a member of the "I just want it to work!" crowd. I like to tinker. Of course, YMMV.
And when you piss off customers and they take their business elsewhere, that's not serving the investors.
And when the vast majority of customers tolerate things that really should piss them off, that's the moment your model breaks. This possibility did occur to you, right?
It's hard to choose where to begin. Your text:
For one thing, the correctness of logic has nothing to do with the Web site you visit. Slashdot is one site. Millions of sites don't mention boycotts at all. I hate to break it to you, but Slashdot is a self-selecting group and does not represent the average person (in many ways it'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't). So, I hope you understand how weak that position really is. If not, look up "anecdotal evidence" sometime and see for yourself how useful it is (hint: it isn't useful).
Now, if you were correct about my logic being flawed, then where are the big business and social changes that effective boycotts would have brought about? Oh, that's right, they aren't happening because we are a tiny minority who act on principle. That we are a tiny minority is what should change, ideally. That means you and I really want the same thing, which is for more people to be more aware that they can vote with their wallets and more willing to do so in a responsible way. However, you completely misinterpreted my initial post. You were dead wrong and now you lack the courage to admit it. You feel a need to save face now that you realize you could have correctly understood me from the beginning, so here we are arguing over nothing. Good job.
Try taking your observation one level deeper. The RIAA's customers are the record labels. The record labels' customers are everyday people. So the RIAA should serve the labels which serve the people, and thus, indirectly serve the people. That has not been the case. It is not the case because the RIAA can afford lobbyists, the average person cannot, and (here's the key part) the average person isn't bothered enough by the abuses to stop buying music from RIAA labels, as evidenced by the fact that the major labels are still doings lots of business. This brings us back to my original point, that not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets in order to effect meaningful change. A point you continue to deny despite its extreme obviousness.
So what was the purpose of telling me the already well-known fact that the RIAA is composed of its constituent record labels and musicians? Oh, right, you were continuing to argue long after it was evident that you had the wrong idea. Has that worked out for you yet?
Anyway, I'm through with you. Have the last word if you like. I've expended far more patience on you than you are capable of appreciating as it is, so I am done with this particular thread.
Please tell me that you're just trolling. Please?
The entire purpose of a corporation is to serve customers - if you don't give people a reason to do business with you, they'll go somewhere else. Eventually you'll go bankrupt if you don't give people a reason to business with you and then you no longer have a corporation.
I'd love to know what kind of drugs you're on where you think that people would do business with a company that doesn't give them anything they want at all (ok, well except the government, and that's because it's forced).
I'm not trolling, though I wonder if you are overeager to be trolled...
The obvious point was that corporations in general are both better represented in government than the people and more powerful in the marketplace than the people. There are, after all, multiple ways of serving or failing to serve people. When the RIAA lobbies for more authoritarian copyright laws that I don't personally want, they are not serving me and they are not serving you. The implied point was that this is not the way things should be. The second implied point was that this wasn't some inevitable consequence of living on planet Earth, but rather, that this shit goes on because we as a large group are too willing to accept it.
Part of the problem is that few average people make any effort to really know with whom they're doing business. The occasional sensationalist story highlighting how badly someone got screwed and by whom is only a partial solution, as it is no substitute for due diligence. As others have pointed out, this has nearly destroyed the effectiveness of "voting with your wallet", because while you may be conscious enough to do this, a quick look around will reveal to you that no one else does. So the bullshit and the abusive practices go on, and will go on as long as they are rewarded with profits. They will end the moment they result in losses; that day, however, is in the future. So like I said, if the people have decided that corporations exist only to serve them, I missed that meeting, and just for you I'll add because their behavior seems to indicate otherwise.
Hope that clears up your misunderstanding.
Completely OT: This is why I sold my soul to console gaming and bought an Xbox. If its not an FPS or a RTS I buy it for the White Box of Doom.
There are two things that prevent me from investing in a console. One, I personally think that the mouse is a superior input device when compared to the typical analog joystick found on a console (such as the Xbox360 to name just one of many). I especially feel this way on a game like Halo 3 where headshots matter. The other reason is compatibility and versatility.
The mouse cursor moves as quickly as I can move my hand, and stops moving the instant my hand stops moving. The analog stick feels like I am scrolling towards my intended target. I'll use Fallout 3 as an example. With the mouse, I can be looking away and notice movement at the corner of the screen, and quickly turn the character around, aim directly at the target and fire in one fluid motion, like a reflex. The same game played on an Xbox360 doesn't allow me to react that quickly, because pushing the analog joystick toward the target enemy will scroll the cursor in that direction at a speed that is much slower by comparison.
If you are familiar with Fallout 3, this means I rely much more heavily on VATS (auto-targeting) because playing free-hand is effectively crippled. Even in Halo 3 I often see people take pains to keep their cursor at about head-level, which to do correctly means guessing how far away the enemy wil be when encountered. They do this because they have limited ability to quickly and accurately target a small area and most of the skill involved boils down to working around this. In other words, I draw a distinction between an intentional game mechanic and the shortcomings of a controller.
The other big advantage of PC gaming is compatibility. I don't have to worry about whether a game is only available on certain consoles that I may not have, because chances are there's at least a Windows version of it (that would execute via WINE in my case) if there is not a native Linux version. Additionally, if there is some glaring flaw in the game or some annoying feature, there are often mods and patches that can fix it. While there is such functionality on modern consoles, it's usually in the form of a pushed update that comes from some official channel, leaving you with fewer choices. A patch like the one I linked to earlier is just such an example.
Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?
Well call me Captain Obvious, but I'd say don't subscribe to Verizon. If enough people want it, eventually either Verizon will offer it or they'll go out of business. Either way it's a win for consumers.
Since when did customers (they're not consumers*) decide that the purpose of corporations is to serve them, and any corporation that is unwilling or unable to do so does not deserve their business? I missed that meeting...
* If you like, I'll explain that one. The two terms are not interchangeable unless you're a fan of Newspeak.
I upgraded my Fallout 3 installation yesterday. After patching, the game wouldn't run, returning some fairly obtuse message about import ordinals. So I googled the message, and found out it's because the game now links against a newer version of "Microsoft(R) Games for Windows(TM) Live(TM)" whatever. Note that this wasn't some new patch, it's months old and yet this problem, which must realistically be hitting quite a few users, persists. This isn't something you get via Windows Update either, this is just some obscure 'distributable runtime' crap you should know you need?
So let me repeat that: Super mainstream game on a super mainstream platform (Vista x64), no add-ons, I patch to the latest version and it won't start, nothing is mentioned at the developer's site.
Now I recognize good old Bethesda again. Here's how they'd be able to repro: Fully updated Vista machine, install game from DVD, apply patch, notice it won't fucking run.
I don't normally give much for the 'PC-gaming sucks' choir, but c'mon..
I had the same problem. Only, I run Fallout3 in Linux via WINE and there is apparently no way whatsoever to get xlive.dll to work in WINE. In addition, you do need the latest Fallout3 patches in order to install the expansions. Personally, I found it unacceptable that I would not be able to use any of the expansions merely because someone decided to add functionality that I never asked for, do not need, and will never use.
I found a solution. There is a patch for Fallout3 that removes all Live functionality, and was sufficient to get the game working for me in WINE because it removes the dependency on xlive.dll. I can now use the game with all five expansions (Mothership Zeta was particularly fun). A page describing it can be found here while a direct link to the download is here.
Playing devils advocate here I can sort of see Nvidia's beef. Their attitude to features and drivers is quite progressive and starts back with the old TNT32 when competing with voodoo. IMHO, we now have a similar situation where ATI is making good performing card at cheap prices yet are not maintaining the robust driver feature set of NVidia. If a game is having a few glitches with shadows, chances are its with an ATI card. NVidia's point of difference are their drivers, and I can at least see engineers being a bit miffed.
If they honestly believed that ATI made inferior video hardware, they would feel no need to deliberately sabotage interoperability like this. That's especially true when merely a warning along the lines of "this feature works best with 100% nVidia hardware" would have been sufficient. No, this kind of deliberate and underhanded bullshit is the action of a company that has no confidence in its ability to compete in an open market on a level playing field. Personally I like nVidia's products and I am not eager to see another lawsuit in an already-litigious society. However, I hope they do get sued over this (by either their customers or the government) and I hope they lose big. This kind of shit needs to be made as expensive and unprofitable as possible.
In the real world you don't have unlimited resources. In the real world you can't release an expansion and suddenly introduce new products to replace everything someone owns. Studying in game economics can be useful as an exercise or example of how some economic principles work, but collecting data from MMO's and then trying to use that information to explain how the real world works?
I'll limit the scope of this comment to World of Warcraft as that's the one I have personally played. I would not be surprised if the other MMOs mentioned are similar, I just don't know for certain that they are.
I think the appeal is that it's a true laissez-faire free-market economy. Among those, it's unusual because the game rules effectively prevent any one player or group of players from forming a monopoly and locking out competitors. So I may have the market for healing potions cornered, but there is nothing I can do to prevent you from gaining crafting skills and harvesting herbs and making your own potions and competing with me. Your potions will be just as good as mine, and any herbs you harvest won't be available to me until they respawn, at which point they become available to both of us again.
I can see why this would be interesting to an economist. It incorporates a lot of our notions of what a free market is. In the real world economic freedom is generally considered a desirable thing, at least until players are so free that they can form trusts and otherwise monopolize markets. So in the real world, anti-trust laws and other government regulations provide the necessary restrictions that the game rules provide in the virtual world. If nothing else, it can provide a way to explore the degree to which such regulations are necessary and what happens when they are minimal. Perhaps this is to an economist what the computer simulations are to such scientists as physicists and astronomers. They can use it to model something based on how they think it works in order to refine their ideas of what works and what doesn't.
Right... as if someone with knowledge of real world economics could actually be put in a place of authority.
My thought was something like this. Specifically, from the summary:
Well let's see now. We have fiat currency instead of representative currency (an example of which is the gold standard). Furthermore, the way fractional reserve banking in general and the Federal Reserve in particular is set up, there is always more debt built into the system than there are dollars in circulation. That's because debt is attached to money the moment it is created; i.e. for every X dollars in circulation there is always X+Y debt. This system is just not sustainable. How could it ever do anything but ultimately fail? Who are these people who expected it to be a paragon of stability and sustainability?
The real joke, though it's not a funny joke, is that this system as we know it came from the Great Depression. Its purpose was to ensure that such depressions would not happen again. By that I mean, this is how it was sold to the public. Isn't this typical, that an undesirable system that would not otherwise be accepted is proposed during a time of crisis and becomes entrenched? It's not like we have never seen that pattern before...
I don't get it; they resolved the issue, so that you had nothing negative to post in the end. Let's say that instead of posting the negative review, you had contacted them of the problem to see if they would resolve it. If they hadn't, you would have posted the review; if they had, you wouldn't have, since there was no problem. The latter is what happened.
I like the idea of leaving the negative reviews up and attaching the manufacturer's response. My reasoning is simple: shit happens. At some point there will be problems of some kind. That's a given, and a corporation's attempt to cover up this fact of life to give an illusion of perfect products that don't have even a very small percentage of defects looks pretty damned suspicious to me.
What's important to me is when a company is willing to stand by their products and take care of its own mistakes. Do they give the customer a certain benefit of doubt, or do they treat complaining customers as though they don't believe a word they say? Do they make you otherwise jump through hoops? Do they admit fault and take responsibility and take reasonable measures to fix any problems they cause? Is it an uphill battle to get them to do the right thing? These are more important to me than how well they can censor their forums. A negative review that shows me a company bending over backwards to make things right isn't negative to me at all.
It is their site, they are free to publish what they feel on it.
Not so sure about that. If they are misrepresenting the nature of their review site, and further misrepresenting what they're selling by censoring reviews, then that would seem to be a form of fraud. What you are suggesting is that fraud is legally OK if done on the property of the party that perpetrates it. IANAL, but this strikes me as an odd notion.
I'll play a little devil's advocate. Replies indicating that they don't know what that means will be summarily ignored.
If you want a truthful, unbiased assessment of a company or any of its products and services, that company would be the very worst entity to ask. This applies, of course, to any media or forum directly under the control of that company. If people are naive and have not yet learned this from regular advertisements and TV commercials, it's safe to say that they are not going to learn this at all. The only purpose of having a legislature recognize this as illegal fraud would be to protect those people, who refuse to learn a few basic lessons, from themselves. This is true because it is otherwise within their power to realize these things unassisted. If that is so, then government intervention would only coddle and protect the sort of real-world ignorance that really does need a hard lesson or two. In other words, wouldn't it be better to discourage this sort of naive thinking (by letting it run its course if necessary) than to keep providing fertile ground for this sort of fraud and sending the government after everything that grows in this fertile ground?
The moment he has gains the ability to force me to think in any particular way, that's the moment I will worry about this.
Then he may never have rest. That, however, is his problem. I still don't see why this concerns you, or why it should concern me. Anyone who feels otherwise is free to join the useless controversy that you opine, and that would be their problem as well. This isn't a danger whatsoever until and unless a) we accept more and more authoritarian intervention in our lives and b) someone who acts this way becomes politically powerful under such an authoritarian system to where he can use the force of law to impose his beliefs on unwilling people. Until that day, everyone who gets caught up in this or any other controversy has chosen to do so and I see nothing unfair or unjust about that.
Neither Richard Stallman or Bradley Kuhn can use force to make you to listen to them, nor are they seeking a means of doing so; therefore one fact remains: if you don't like these guys, the worst thing you could ever do to them would be to ignore them. If you do like them, you may appreciate that they are willing to take a stand on issues like this even though they catch a lot of flak for it. Either way, I just don't see what the problem is.
You can decide to disregard that and pretend that it doesn't matter, but really this tells you quite a lot about with whom you are dealing when your focus is the pharmaceutical companies. More on that in a moment...
There is a single glaring flaw in your reasoning. There is one thing that pharmaceutical companies absolutely cannot do and have no hope of ever accomplishing: they cannot make a profit from healthy people. What are in my layman's opinion (I am not a doctor) designer diseases such as the restless leg syndrome that you mention are one of their responses to this dilemma. Advertisements that market prescriptions to the general public when the necessary medicine is supposed to be the doctor's decision are another response to the same dilemma. Likewise, they have no incentive whatsoever to cure anything, even when it is within their power; in fact they have a strong incentive against doing so. They have plenty of incentive to come up with medicines that you might call ongoing treatments, because they guarantee an ongoing source of income.
Anything that remotely smells of this kind of motive doesn't deserve the protection of a government monopoly. So, I really don't see how patents are helping this situation. They seem to be protecting the cash cow more than anything else.
I remember several times I have listened to the radio talk show host Clark Howard and heard him say that most ID theft that goes on is a case of someone's paper checkbook being stolen. The implication was that it's a bad idea to carry one around unless you really need to and that a good place to store it at home would be in a safe or other secure location so burglars could not easily obtain it. That would be consistent with what this article is claiming, that mostly it's a low-tech crime involving a compromise of physical security, not digital.
no, proves instead of being dead it's stagnant. Perl 5.x lingers like scent of dead skunk under the porch while the Frankenstein of Perl 6 is still on the mad scientist's table, metaphorically getting body parts sewn on from morgues and cemeteries and hospitals across the globe. Perl 6 is the undead Creeper of programming languages
Where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
If the public pays for the research and creation they should have access to the intellectual product for no additional fee. It's silly that it isn't this way now. Of course we can all thank our corrupt congress critters for that.
Look at the reasons given in the summary:
Those are all reasons of convenience. There is no principle in them. I don't fault the summary or its author for viewing it this way, as I believe it just reflects where we're at in this superficial society. As you say, there is an overriding reason why any textbooks produced by open funds need to be released with open licenses: because the public is paying the tab and therefore has a right to it. If the publishers don't like that, they can produce and sell goods on their own with no such assistance like almost every other company. This is the outcome that should happen regardless of whether it's convenient or inconvenient for anyone. It sure would be nice if that were more widely appreciated.
Why don't you consider...well... letting him pass?
You do have that option you know. If you are such a fan of driving slow, then just get out of his way. Much cheaper than building a HERF gun. It lets him manage his risks, and you manage yours.
In some states, the left lane is not to be used for traveling and is a passing lane. So if you are not driving faster than the other lane and ten moving over when its clear, you can be ticketed. Frankly, I wish my state did that. Its a very sensible system.
Also, I will note, that the output of a HERF gun, depending on power, distance etc, could actually blind a person. Do you really think its safe or justified to take a chance at blinding someone because you set the power too high on your home made HERF?
Oops just doesn't seem to cut it.
-Steve
You are making the same mistake as another person. That is, you are assuming you know the first thing about me or the situations which cause the musings of mine that you have read.
Sigh. Please see this post and after you read that, consider that you could have known you were making an unfounded assumption before I came along and pointed that out to you. You're welcome.
I've heard stats like these thrown around, but I haven't seen any credible sources. (Not saying that there aren't any, just that I haven't seen them.)
Can you point us at the stats?
You ask me what you should be asking Google.
Not trying to give you a hard time. It's just that to show you the stats, I would first use Google to locate them. Then I would provide you with a URL chosen from the results. The shorter distance between two points would be for you to make this a topic of research. It would also be much more edifying for you than taking my word for anything, because for all you know I could be cherry-picking only the Google results that agree with my position.
But yes, to my knowledge every last state which has enabled such permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime. This is no mystery to anyone who knows a thing or two about human nature, but such knowledge is not terribly popular so of course the media treats this as though there were two equally valid positions. There is a strong lesson here about the media and their need for an "issue". By that I mean, seeing this subject dealt with on a mainstream TV program would give you the impression that there is a debate, that we're not sure yet whether such conceal-carry permits are a good idea. There is in fact no such debate. We know for a fact, with no need for opinions or editorials, that this is an effective way to deter would-be criminals.
That approximately half of the population finds this inconvenient because it interferes with their "guns are pure evil" platform is too bad for them. These are the same people who honestly believe that a criminal who is willing to commit murder would be worried about a weapons charge, so they call for stricter gun control etc. and do not realize that only law-abiding citizens are going to follow such measures. If you are like average people, then right now you are trying to figure out my political leanings. I can tell you that there is nothing political about following the facts wherever they may lead, and if you do some serious reserach into this subject, you will come to the same conclusions.
They ARE cowards because they don't normally reveal this sort of aggression unless it's a situation where you would be hard pressed to do anything about it. Like when you're in an automobile, for example. It's amazing how brave they are when they're in a large truck or an SUV. When you are face-to-face, and can physically reach that person, they tend to be much nicer and more courteous. Not genuinely, of course, but suddenly their aggression is much lower. This is true so long as you don't show weakness, because if you should make that mistake, then and only then do they feel brave again.
Personally I like to borrow a term from Bill Hicks and describe them as "fevered egos." I don't view it in terms of self-esteem, I view it in terms of whether that petty tyrant known as ego is running their show or whether they have the discipline, compassion, insight, and fortitude to overcome it. Because they lack those things, they are the way that they are. This is why they come from a position of weakness. They are aware of that, even if they are not consciously aware of it, so they compensate by doing their damndest to appear strong and intimidating. That it's compensatory means this is not genuine, though if you handle them incorrectly they will try very hard to make it real enough.
Just think about conceal-carry permits and why they have reduced violent crime in every state which has allowed them. The reason why is easy: criminals want helpless victims who say "oh please mr. mugger, don't shoot me, I'll give you anything you want". They do not want to get into shootouts. That's because they are cowards, at heart, no matter how tough they want to act. If they weren't cowards, the possibility of getting into a shootout would not stop them from doing what they want to do and crime rates would remain roughly the same in the aforementioned states or would even get worse due to more gunfights taking place.
The kind of courage that allows you to do something with no regard for risk because it is the right thing to do and absolutely must be done is reserved only for those who truly believe in the nobility and importance of what they do. Firefighters are a perfect example. Criminals and other bullies are naturally excluded from this and must get their living by preying on those who are weaker and willing to submit. That is why they are cowards.
On this note, I should point out that newer cars with ABS, and possibly also EBD, will outbrake any older car with plain-jane "dumb" brakes. Even a very good driver just can't know the exact speed of each wheel and readjust their braking 50-200 times per second, never mind adjust braking power on a per-wheel basis. People use the incredible stopping power of late-model cars to stop suddenly and talk to their friends on the side of the road, putting drivers of older cars at risk - I nearly got in a huge accident that way (and my car can stop VERY quickly for one with "dumb" brakes - I know how to use them), but luckily the oncoming lane was empty and I managed to slide around the offending asshole. I wasn't following too close but the sudden stop was totally unexpected and it caught me off guard. I'm more experienced now and know what to expect of the stupid assholes I'm forced to share the road with.
My principle is this: I imagine the guy in front of me suddenly hitting an invisible reinforced concrete wall and instantly decelerating to 0.000 mph with no warning. If there is any possibility that I would rear-end him in such an event, then I am following too closely. Incidentally, I do live in a state where rear-ending another vehicle is automatically your fault, and I personally agree with this rule because the guy in front of you has little or no control over how closely you decide to follow him. The guy behind has full control over how closely he follows. The person with the control should bear the responsibility. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the guy behind to ensure that this type of accident does not happen.
I don't think it's a flaw that our system can adapt to new situations. Do you want to be the person who's locked away in a room writing new laws for millions of things that "could" happen? Not that the system doesn't have it's flaws, but adaptability isn't one of them.
I'm sorry but that's just silly. Do you really need a "person who's locked away in a room writing new laws for millions of things" before you can decide that hey, maybe we don't want the police to plant electronic devices on your property to track your every location at all times without a good reason, and that maybe getting a warrant is the standard way to show that there is a good reason? Seriously, how much foresight does that take?
... Who has ever read the 4th Amendment and thinks that the authors of it would support this kind of warrantless surveillance of citizens? Do they imagine that the Founders would have said "no, we only mentioned papers and effects, so clearly finding a clever new technological way to warrentlessly surveil people who have not been charged with a crime is A-OK!" I'd like to meet these people, if only to see whether they really exist. No, really, in the media and on the Internet I see opinions that are this asinine and childish but I've never met a real living breathing person who actually felt that way.
For that matter