It seems I can't add my own tags to posts any more. Instead I get a grey bar with an almost invisible + and - in it, and no way to do anything. Not that I'm currently allowed to post a reply, because of the anal anti-spam system that doesn't take someone's on-going karma into account (i.e., good posters should be allowed to post more, none of this 10 minute time-out thing).
I have a similar problem. The tagging interface works perfectly for me in every way... except that not a single tag I have ever set has ever once shown up on the main page. Apparently my tags are going straight to/dev/null after being accepted by a perfectly functional interface. Care to trade?
What's your point? That science is a process of constant discovery? That science requires proper evidence for something to be accepted?
What element of solar winds isn't accurately modelled by current theory? The solar wind is a lot more complex a charge flow than charge flow in a wire - you get magnetohydrodynamic effects, the particle flows are also partially ballistic, all sorts. EU is an over simplistic model in itself and current models can accurately explain all the observations, while EU cannot.
I believe you have missed my point the same way that the AC has done. Please see this post (in the same thread) for clarification. Nowhere did I talk about the criteria that must be met for something to be accepted as factually true. My view on skepticism (in this post)may also help you to understand my position.
I see this fairly often and I think it's just a brand of cynicism. That is, you read a post and find a very easy objection. At that point you must make one of two choices: either I'm stupid/careless/etc. and really did leave myself open to such an easy objection, or, you have not correctly understood what I was and (importantly) was not saying. For whatever reason most people automatically assume the former case and seem unwilling to consider the latter case. The point of telling you this was not to put you down or to feel like I am more "right" than you, whatever that would mean. I tell you that with the hope that you can recognize this tendency (that many folks here have shown) and become more aware of your own motivations and thought processes. If that happens, then I will have done my good deed for today.
Eyewitnesses are often wrong about what they see. There are lots of studies on it. Asking for actual evidence rather than anecdotal reports isn't really that much to ask before accepting something as true.
Science doesn't just accept something new as being true just because someone says it's so. That's a good thing.
That sounds good and all but I believe you have missed my point. I was not talking about whether or not something should be accepted as true. I was talking about whether or not it is worthy of serious investigation. If many eyewitnesses report something, it's reasonable to say "we don't know, but we will look into it and get back to you about whether this is a previously-unknown phenomenon." That reasonable action is not what generally happens. Instead, what happens is more like "we KNOW that's not possible so we will ignore the many thousands of people who have seen it." When it's something like sprites that were eventually acknowledged anyway, this means that we had to wait longer for no good reason and have missed out on all the data that we could have been gathering during the entire time that it was ignored. That is what my complaint was about.
In many cases, getting the science right is less difficult than getting the science community and the general public to accept your discovery.
And that's a serious problem. Those two should be one and the same. Anytime it is otherwise, what you have is not science but a religion that uses scientific language.
I think the view of what "skepticism" means has a lot to do with this. At one point, skepticism meant something like "we really don't know either way, we should assume nothing, and we should ask questions and investigate before any conclusions are drawn." Now, it means something more like "we will deny this discovery no matter what, even if that means clutching at straws or using flimsy reasoning, until it becomes blatantly smack-you-in-the-face obvious and even then we will acknowledge it only reluctantly and preferably when a lot of other people do so first." This can only lead to stagnation.
The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible". Thus, for a long time they were regarded in a fashion not unlike the way people who experience paranormal phenomena are treated today, that is, relegated to the fringes because they were considered unworthy of serious formal investigation. I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one.
I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints, such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?). The same thing can be found by regarding the solar wind as an electrical current instead of viewing it in mechanical terms. The solar wind is the flow of charged particles from the Sun. "The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms. At some point, the independent thinker realizes that "mainstream" does not represent the pinnacle of human knowledge about which we are most certain, though ideally this would be the case. Rather, it unfortunately tends to represent what is most easily demonstrated to the shallowest and least questioning of minds who are all too easily influenced by the authority or the credentials of the person who is speaking. Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature.
That's a good thing. However, if you set them to private you restrict them to a small hand-picked group. Just the sort of small personally-chosen group that might already know you well enough to be aware of your plans to begin with. So again this location feature seems largely frivolous.
2. On the ground, plans wreck, twitter is one more way to avoid plan-wreckage.
That's what contingency planning is for. For anything important enough that failure would be described as "plan-wreckage," I'd much rather plan properly and take these things into account. That's much better than planning poorly and hoping that some random strangers at Twitter will implement some new app to rescue me from my poor planning. If you disagree with that, I'd like a logically concise, internally consistent, detailed explanation please.
3. It still remains about you
I appreciate that you think I'm so important, but I must disagree. A legitimate question rooted in a healthy skepticism towards dubious new features does not derive its legitimacy from the person who is asking. That means your third item amounts to one of the more subtle attempts at ad-hominem argumentation that I've seen. You can try that a thousand different ways; you are not going to find one that I don't immediately see through (I wonder whether *you* see what you're doing there and why it's intellectually dishonest, even if unintentionally so). So why not just deal with my question or admit that you don't want to do so? Items 1 and 2 of your post were a step in that direction.
That would be so much easier than all of the bandwagon appeals, ad-hominem argumentation, straw man tactics, and other attempts to be clever that you will see in abundance throughout this thread. They tell me that one of two things is true: either the Slashdot crowd is unusually deceitful, or they don't know very much about argumentation and logical fallacies and believe that these tactics are valid. I think the latter case is more correct.
In the case of Twitter, the only improvement that's happened here is that anyone with a decent browser can access it.
Maybe the cause of your surprise is that you're trivializing things that are actually quite important.
By making Twitter accessible via a web site, the effort required to follow a feed went from (minor, and slightly technical) to (nada). With something like Twitter, which is of only marginal value to most people, I'm guessing that using it needs to have just about zero degree of inconvenience, or else people just won't bother.
If people have such a low desire for something that they will only go for it when all (or nearly all) inconvenience is removed, that potentially tells me two things: 1) the people are lazy or unmotivated so when they say they want something, they do NOT mean they are willing to endure a small amount of effort or inconvenience to obtain it, and 2) Twitter's services were never very valuable to anyone or else near-zero inconvenience would not have been necessary for its explosive growth.
Either 1) is true, or 2) is true, or both of them are true. In all cases, that would mean I am recognizing that this is inherently trivial and would not mean that I am trivializing something that is inherently important.
What you are dealing with in the general public are flighty, fickle persons of the moment. They do not decide for themselves what they want. When they say they want something, they do not mean they are willing to take any and all actions which do not violate their legal/moral/ethical codes in order to obtain it. Instead, they wait for the next biggest thing to appear on the marketing stage and they jump on that bandwagon until the next biggest thing after that shows up. There is no lasting or enduring value for them, nor are there concepts like acting out of principle. Twitter has had some success because it has recognized this as its environment and has tried to adapt to that environment. That is a form of pandering and while I recognize the business case for it, it's also responsible for many of the reasons why I won't use their site and most of the other trendy sites. They are aiming themselves towards a demographic that does not include me.
A race is where people see it and racial divisions are certainly not a universal concept. Closer to a social construct if you ask me.
So we need to accept all of that "it means whatever you think it means" bullshit, merely because words like "race" and "ethnicity" and "nationality" and "religion" and the differences among them are too hard? Really?? How about we instead decide that if someone doesn't have a working understanding of what those terms mean, then perhaps that person is not qualified to speak about them. That's so much better than lowering the standards and this is one area that has a particularly low signal-to-noise ratio.
Tracking location of people you attend a conference with. Sharing a road trip with friends. Treasure hunts. The list goes on.
The problem with all of those scenarios is that there's no good way to limit that information to only the relevant parties. I don't need the world knowing my personal whereabouts because I couldn't be bothered to send an e-mail about the road trip to the handful of people with whom I want to share that information.
Just because you are unable to think of a use case -- or that such use cases are not personally important to you -- does not mean such a use case doesn't exist.
When I don't see a rational reason for a thing, you can pretend like this is about my personal tastes and preferences if that comforts you from the blow of a rational objection, but it's a bit silly. None of your scenarios there have answered my real question. If I want a person to know where I am, I will tell that person (or that group, etc.). If I don't want them to know, I won't tell them. How does an automated system that, once you opt-in, can automatically tell anyone and everyone where you are, fit into this?
Or, who is it out there who feels like "I want this person or this group to know my whereabouts, but I don't want to tell them my whereabouts, oh if only some automated system would do it for me!" Who are those people? That question remains unanswered; thus, this location system is a solution in search of a problem and that's bad when it has potential privacy issues. For any of the scenarios you listed to really answer my question, you'd first have to demonstrate how directly informing your intended audience would be so inadequate that a whole new system must be invented to automate the process. That has not happened.
Instead, I've received answers to questions I have not asked and some of them have come with smug commentary like yours that seem designed to make me feel foolish for questioning this (good luck with that). I don't think that indicates any malice on your part, but it does indicate that this new move of Twitter's is another "because we can" sort of thing that was never a response to any legitimate need. If it were otherwise, any smugness would be in terms of "it fulfills purpose X, duh, can't you see that?!" instead of this type of response.
Sometimes people like a thing for irrational reasons, because they think it's cool or interesting or because they have bought into the hype. When that's the case and you question the purpose of that thing, it's quite amusing to see the things people will do instead of admitting that either there is no good explanation that makes sense or that such an explanation is unknown to them. It's alright to like frills and frivolous things but when you pretend that there is any significance to them, you find yourself in odd (and defensive) positions like making personal matters out of objective questions.
Explain the popularity of the Jerry Springer show, then.;)
Free airfare to a major city, travel expenses, and other forms of monetary gain, not to mention fame (well, more like infamy) and "being on TV". None of those are available to the average personal-life exhibitionist on Facebook or Twitter.
It took almost an hour of conversation for me to finally say "No thanks". And an another hour to pass before I could say "WTF was I even thinking to consider the offer?"
That's the only proper answer, once the ego-boost of feeling important/famous/"on TV" is removed from the equation. That ego-boost, by the way, is neither needed nor coveted by people who have healthy fulfilling lives.
To be completely honest, however, I'm still haunted by the feeling that I missed out on some fun, public spectacle aside.
I don't think you missed much. I've never once seen a show like Judge Judy and witnessed, say, a divorcee, talking about all the gory details of her failed marriage and thought "wow, I sure wish that were me!"
Let me rephrase your post, if I may presume: "I can't see a use for it, therefore it is not useful. Because so many other people find it useful in spite of this, it is a failing in them."
As I unambiguously indicated, it's not a question of whether it's useful. I never made the argument that marketing is ineffective. That's because it's obviously effective. What I said was that it's effective because it's manipulative and that's the problem that intellectual people who have thought about it have noticed. You are pretending like I was talking about whether the ends are desired (are found to be useful) by some. No, I was talking about whether the ends justify the means and I am of the opinion that they don't. It's possible that you just honestly failed to use your reading comprehension, but to be frank, this looks like a blatant attempt at a straw man technique on your part.
What I don't get is how otherwise seemingly intelligent people are, time and again, surprised by the fact that marketing works.
That's because it works for all of the wrong reasons. It works because people are easy to manipulate and shouldn't be, not because the thing being marketed is inherently a good idea. It's not fun for a reasonably intelligent person to be reminded that so many people who should be capable of making their own decisions will refuse to think for themselves. The worst part is that there's very little you can hope to do about that because the people who refuse to think don't usually see this as a problem.
A second way to answer that, is that "seemingly intelligent" people are usually good with things like logic and reasoning. The manipulation of marketing happens largely on an emotional/irrational level. In fact it often goes against basic logic, like the logic which says that a paid advertisement promoting Company A's products is not a good, unbiased source of information about Company A or its products and business practices.
To make my question more specific: in which of those scenarios would you be disinclined to tell anyone your physical whereabouts and at the same time, would be glad that an automated system did this for you?
Take meetings, for example. I send an e-mail to a group of co-workers saying "we can meet at X place at Y time." Everyone knows the location of X and knows how to get there, so my legitimate concern about location is satisfied. If I am in a meeting room with them, obviously I know where they are at that time. So, why would I need to know where they are before Y time and why would I need to know where they go after the meeting is over? That's the only thing this system could tell me that I didn't already know. Why would I want them knowing this information about me?
What I'm looking for is "ah-ha, this is the necessity that was the mother of this invention." And I'm not finding it, at all. It really just seems to be a way for Twitter to pander to the exhibitionist tendencies of some of its users. You know, the ones who think that making every moment of their personal life a public event is somehow desirable for them and/or somehow interesting for others. It doesn't paint a good picture but it's an explanation that makes sense.
I really cannot understand what everybody's interest in Twitter is. I've used it and read some posts and still cannot understand why it is so popular. Maybe I just "don't get it"?
This is what I don't like about the whole phenomena. You take something that has been mainstream technology for about ten years or more, like instant messaging, put an implementation of it on a Web site with some Javascript, market the hell out of it, and now you have a trendy new site. The same process applies to Facebook and Myspace and others.
In the case of Twitter, the only improvement that's happened here is that anyone with a decent browser can access it. The mainstream instant messaging clients failed for various reasons to come up with a single open standard. In fact, they often actively tried to hinder multiple-protocol IM clients. That difference is the only rational reason for the hype attributed to Twitter. The rest is just marketing and trend-following because otherwise there is nothing new and interesting going on.
I think you do "get it" and that's precisely why you don't share the interest in this trend. Of course there's nothing wrong with using a site and enjoying it but jumping on its bandwagon and indulging its hype is another thing entirely. I don't think this is about anything interesting from Twitter, but rather, is about a generation of users who probably don't understand the full implications and potential consequences of disclosing personally identifying information or of turning your day-to-day life into a public spectacle.
Bin Laden will never be captured or killed. He's one hellava resourceful SOB. That, and he has prophet-like status among his twisted followers that will die for him.
A space elevator is probably out of reach right now
There is one objection to the space elevator that I've mentioned here before but never seen anyone seriously address.
The earth is built like a gigantic capacitor. The ionosphere has a relatively strong negative charge, while the ground has a relatively strong positive charge. An insulating layer of dielectric air is between them. It's a leaky self-adjusting capacitor because of lightning. A space elevator would bypass this insulating layer of air, making a direct physical connection between the negative and positive charges. Additionally, I believe that the carbon nanotubes proposed for its construction are electrically conductive, but even if they weren't there is probably more than enough current for electrical breakdown to take place considering that lightning does this to air molecules about three million times a day. What would keep the elevator from instantly vaporizing due to electrical arcing the moment it's installed?
Not as much as you'd think. Apparently once you get up to a certain amount of Karma level you get 15 mod points at a time to play with.
Ironically enough, posting anon to prevent from undoing moderation. I'm not the troll-modder though. I swear.
-dyingtolive
My karma is "Excellent" and has been for a long time now. I've never, ever seen more than five mod points at a time. Please explain this discrepency.
Rationing away spam as "a matter of education" (implying that we could somehow educate 100% of the internet-using population) is just as foolish as arguing that spam exists solely because email is free.
Continuing the analogy to various forms of prohibition, look at cigarette smokers. Cigarettes have remained legal yet the number of people who choose to smoke has steadily and significantly declined since the mid 20th century. Why? Because the dangers of using them have been thoroughly publicised and have become something that everyone knows. I'd like to see something like that happen to spam and the people who financially support it.
And finally, this is unethical because the cost of a single message is -far- less than one cent, similar to how US carriers charge 10 cents or more per text message when it costs them nothing to send.
That's my main problem with it. The "logic" seems to go like this: "well, we couldn't come up with a way to make spammers pay, so instead we'll try to make everyone else pay to prove they're not a spammer." I can't support that.
Another marked troll? Seriously. Yahoo does have mod points today...
That does seem to be the most trendy form of asshattery on Slashdot lately, to just indiscriminately mod down every top-level post that you can as "Troll". There do seem to be enough of them in this discussion that it would take more than one jackass moderator to pull off.
I have never understood the concept. Forget for a moment that spammers don't follow the rules, and generally work pretty hard to circumvent anti-spam measures, how are we all going to implement and maintain good measures on the receiving end?
Ohh... someone like Yahoo will do that for us. Got it. Just pay my monthly dues or licensing fees and then a low $.01 per email and it's all good. Glad this is such a humanitarian effort aimed at cleaning up our interwebs and not a huge cock-up out for profit, because then it would just be unethical...
Also, why should I have to pay a new fee of any sort merely because someone else wants to send spam? The whole problem with spam is that everyone but the spammer has to bear its costs. This only increases the costs that all the rest of us have to bear because of spam. For that reason the ethics of this solution are already questionable despite its presumably good intentions.
The idea is that a Centmail signature attached to a message would automatically reduce the message's spam likelihood; if enough people adopt Centmail, then receivers would be increasingly able to require a Centmail signature on mail, and killfile mail that lacks such a signature.
In theory, great. In practice, I predict it spiraling out of control as different parties try to "get in on the action" and see a chance to turn a profit instead of just giving the money to charity.
Besides, this doesn't address the ultimate cause (or depending on viewpoint, the ultimate enabler) of spam. Spam exists for one reason and one reason only: someone, somewhere is willing to buy from spammers or otherwise to give them money. Any solution which doesn't address that has entirely failed to learn why Prohibition didn't stop people from drinking or why the War on Drugs hasn't made illicit substances go away. It doesn't matter how sophisticated or underhanded the spammers are, if no one gives them money anymore they WILL go out of business. This is probably a matter of education, though it's possible that credit card companies could be part of the solution since many of these transactions could not occur without their services.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a similar problem. The tagging interface works perfectly for me in every way ... except that not a single tag I have ever set has ever once shown up on the main page. Apparently my tags are going straight to /dev/null after being accepted by a perfectly functional interface. Care to trade?
What's your point? That science is a process of constant discovery? That science requires proper evidence for something to be accepted? What element of solar winds isn't accurately modelled by current theory? The solar wind is a lot more complex a charge flow than charge flow in a wire - you get magnetohydrodynamic effects, the particle flows are also partially ballistic, all sorts. EU is an over simplistic model in itself and current models can accurately explain all the observations, while EU cannot.
I believe you have missed my point the same way that the AC has done. Please see this post (in the same thread) for clarification. Nowhere did I talk about the criteria that must be met for something to be accepted as factually true. My view on skepticism (in this post)may also help you to understand my position.
I see this fairly often and I think it's just a brand of cynicism. That is, you read a post and find a very easy objection. At that point you must make one of two choices: either I'm stupid/careless/etc. and really did leave myself open to such an easy objection, or, you have not correctly understood what I was and (importantly) was not saying. For whatever reason most people automatically assume the former case and seem unwilling to consider the latter case. The point of telling you this was not to put you down or to feel like I am more "right" than you, whatever that would mean. I tell you that with the hope that you can recognize this tendency (that many folks here have shown) and become more aware of your own motivations and thought processes. If that happens, then I will have done my good deed for today.
Eyewitnesses are often wrong about what they see. There are lots of studies on it. Asking for actual evidence rather than anecdotal reports isn't really that much to ask before accepting something as true.
Science doesn't just accept something new as being true just because someone says it's so. That's a good thing.
That sounds good and all but I believe you have missed my point. I was not talking about whether or not something should be accepted as true. I was talking about whether or not it is worthy of serious investigation. If many eyewitnesses report something, it's reasonable to say "we don't know, but we will look into it and get back to you about whether this is a previously-unknown phenomenon." That reasonable action is not what generally happens. Instead, what happens is more like "we KNOW that's not possible so we will ignore the many thousands of people who have seen it." When it's something like sprites that were eventually acknowledged anyway, this means that we had to wait longer for no good reason and have missed out on all the data that we could have been gathering during the entire time that it was ignored. That is what my complaint was about.
And that's a serious problem. Those two should be one and the same. Anytime it is otherwise, what you have is not science but a religion that uses scientific language.
I think the view of what "skepticism" means has a lot to do with this. At one point, skepticism meant something like "we really don't know either way, we should assume nothing, and we should ask questions and investigate before any conclusions are drawn." Now, it means something more like "we will deny this discovery no matter what, even if that means clutching at straws or using flimsy reasoning, until it becomes blatantly smack-you-in-the-face obvious and even then we will acknowledge it only reluctantly and preferably when a lot of other people do so first." This can only lead to stagnation.
The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible". Thus, for a long time they were regarded in a fashion not unlike the way people who experience paranormal phenomena are treated today, that is, relegated to the fringes because they were considered unworthy of serious formal investigation. I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one.
I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints, such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?). The same thing can be found by regarding the solar wind as an electrical current instead of viewing it in mechanical terms. The solar wind is the flow of charged particles from the Sun. "The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms. At some point, the independent thinker realizes that "mainstream" does not represent the pinnacle of human knowledge about which we are most certain, though ideally this would be the case. Rather, it unfortunately tends to represent what is most easily demonstrated to the shallowest and least questioning of minds who are all too easily influenced by the authority or the credentials of the person who is speaking. Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature.
That's a good thing. However, if you set them to private you restrict them to a small hand-picked group. Just the sort of small personally-chosen group that might already know you well enough to be aware of your plans to begin with. So again this location feature seems largely frivolous.
That's what contingency planning is for. For anything important enough that failure would be described as "plan-wreckage," I'd much rather plan properly and take these things into account. That's much better than planning poorly and hoping that some random strangers at Twitter will implement some new app to rescue me from my poor planning. If you disagree with that, I'd like a logically concise, internally consistent, detailed explanation please.
I appreciate that you think I'm so important, but I must disagree. A legitimate question rooted in a healthy skepticism towards dubious new features does not derive its legitimacy from the person who is asking. That means your third item amounts to one of the more subtle attempts at ad-hominem argumentation that I've seen. You can try that a thousand different ways; you are not going to find one that I don't immediately see through (I wonder whether *you* see what you're doing there and why it's intellectually dishonest, even if unintentionally so). So why not just deal with my question or admit that you don't want to do so? Items 1 and 2 of your post were a step in that direction.
That would be so much easier than all of the bandwagon appeals, ad-hominem argumentation, straw man tactics, and other attempts to be clever that you will see in abundance throughout this thread. They tell me that one of two things is true: either the Slashdot crowd is unusually deceitful, or they don't know very much about argumentation and logical fallacies and believe that these tactics are valid. I think the latter case is more correct.
Maybe the cause of your surprise is that you're trivializing things that are actually quite important.
By making Twitter accessible via a web site, the effort required to follow a feed went from (minor, and slightly technical) to (nada). With something like Twitter, which is of only marginal value to most people, I'm guessing that using it needs to have just about zero degree of inconvenience, or else people just won't bother.
If people have such a low desire for something that they will only go for it when all (or nearly all) inconvenience is removed, that potentially tells me two things: 1) the people are lazy or unmotivated so when they say they want something, they do NOT mean they are willing to endure a small amount of effort or inconvenience to obtain it, and 2) Twitter's services were never very valuable to anyone or else near-zero inconvenience would not have been necessary for its explosive growth.
Either 1) is true, or 2) is true, or both of them are true. In all cases, that would mean I am recognizing that this is inherently trivial and would not mean that I am trivializing something that is inherently important.
What you are dealing with in the general public are flighty, fickle persons of the moment. They do not decide for themselves what they want. When they say they want something, they do not mean they are willing to take any and all actions which do not violate their legal/moral/ethical codes in order to obtain it. Instead, they wait for the next biggest thing to appear on the marketing stage and they jump on that bandwagon until the next biggest thing after that shows up. There is no lasting or enduring value for them, nor are there concepts like acting out of principle. Twitter has had some success because it has recognized this as its environment and has tried to adapt to that environment. That is a form of pandering and while I recognize the business case for it, it's also responsible for many of the reasons why I won't use their site and most of the other trendy sites. They are aiming themselves towards a demographic that does not include me.
A race is where people see it and racial divisions are certainly not a universal concept. Closer to a social construct if you ask me.
So we need to accept all of that "it means whatever you think it means" bullshit, merely because words like "race" and "ethnicity" and "nationality" and "religion" and the differences among them are too hard? Really?? How about we instead decide that if someone doesn't have a working understanding of what those terms mean, then perhaps that person is not qualified to speak about them. That's so much better than lowering the standards and this is one area that has a particularly low signal-to-noise ratio.
The problem with all of those scenarios is that there's no good way to limit that information to only the relevant parties. I don't need the world knowing my personal whereabouts because I couldn't be bothered to send an e-mail about the road trip to the handful of people with whom I want to share that information.
When I don't see a rational reason for a thing, you can pretend like this is about my personal tastes and preferences if that comforts you from the blow of a rational objection, but it's a bit silly. None of your scenarios there have answered my real question. If I want a person to know where I am, I will tell that person (or that group, etc.). If I don't want them to know, I won't tell them. How does an automated system that, once you opt-in, can automatically tell anyone and everyone where you are, fit into this?
Or, who is it out there who feels like "I want this person or this group to know my whereabouts, but I don't want to tell them my whereabouts, oh if only some automated system would do it for me!" Who are those people? That question remains unanswered; thus, this location system is a solution in search of a problem and that's bad when it has potential privacy issues. For any of the scenarios you listed to really answer my question, you'd first have to demonstrate how directly informing your intended audience would be so inadequate that a whole new system must be invented to automate the process. That has not happened.
Instead, I've received answers to questions I have not asked and some of them have come with smug commentary like yours that seem designed to make me feel foolish for questioning this (good luck with that). I don't think that indicates any malice on your part, but it does indicate that this new move of Twitter's is another "because we can" sort of thing that was never a response to any legitimate need. If it were otherwise, any smugness would be in terms of "it fulfills purpose X, duh, can't you see that?!" instead of this type of response.
Sometimes people like a thing for irrational reasons, because they think it's cool or interesting or because they have bought into the hype. When that's the case and you question the purpose of that thing, it's quite amusing to see the things people will do instead of admitting that either there is no good explanation that makes sense or that such an explanation is unknown to them. It's alright to like frills and frivolous things but when you pretend that there is any significance to them, you find yourself in odd (and defensive) positions like making personal matters out of objective questions.
Free airfare to a major city, travel expenses, and other forms of monetary gain, not to mention fame (well, more like infamy) and "being on TV". None of those are available to the average personal-life exhibitionist on Facebook or Twitter.
That's the only proper answer, once the ego-boost of feeling important/famous/"on TV" is removed from the equation. That ego-boost, by the way, is neither needed nor coveted by people who have healthy fulfilling lives.
I don't think you missed much. I've never once seen a show like Judge Judy and witnessed, say, a divorcee, talking about all the gory details of her failed marriage and thought "wow, I sure wish that were me!"
Let me rephrase your post, if I may presume: "I can't see a use for it, therefore it is not useful. Because so many other people find it useful in spite of this, it is a failing in them."
As I unambiguously indicated, it's not a question of whether it's useful. I never made the argument that marketing is ineffective. That's because it's obviously effective. What I said was that it's effective because it's manipulative and that's the problem that intellectual people who have thought about it have noticed. You are pretending like I was talking about whether the ends are desired (are found to be useful) by some. No, I was talking about whether the ends justify the means and I am of the opinion that they don't. It's possible that you just honestly failed to use your reading comprehension, but to be frank, this looks like a blatant attempt at a straw man technique on your part.
What I don't get is how otherwise seemingly intelligent people are, time and again, surprised by the fact that marketing works.
That's because it works for all of the wrong reasons. It works because people are easy to manipulate and shouldn't be, not because the thing being marketed is inherently a good idea. It's not fun for a reasonably intelligent person to be reminded that so many people who should be capable of making their own decisions will refuse to think for themselves. The worst part is that there's very little you can hope to do about that because the people who refuse to think don't usually see this as a problem.
A second way to answer that, is that "seemingly intelligent" people are usually good with things like logic and reasoning. The manipulation of marketing happens largely on an emotional/irrational level. In fact it often goes against basic logic, like the logic which says that a paid advertisement promoting Company A's products is not a good, unbiased source of information about Company A or its products and business practices.
flash mobs, protests, meetings etc.
To make my question more specific: in which of those scenarios would you be disinclined to tell anyone your physical whereabouts and at the same time, would be glad that an automated system did this for you?
Take meetings, for example. I send an e-mail to a group of co-workers saying "we can meet at X place at Y time." Everyone knows the location of X and knows how to get there, so my legitimate concern about location is satisfied. If I am in a meeting room with them, obviously I know where they are at that time. So, why would I need to know where they are before Y time and why would I need to know where they go after the meeting is over? That's the only thing this system could tell me that I didn't already know. Why would I want them knowing this information about me?
What I'm looking for is "ah-ha, this is the necessity that was the mother of this invention." And I'm not finding it, at all. It really just seems to be a way for Twitter to pander to the exhibitionist tendencies of some of its users. You know, the ones who think that making every moment of their personal life a public event is somehow desirable for them and/or somehow interesting for others. It doesn't paint a good picture but it's an explanation that makes sense.
I really cannot understand what everybody's interest in Twitter is. I've used it and read some posts and still cannot understand why it is so popular. Maybe I just "don't get it"?
This is what I don't like about the whole phenomena. You take something that has been mainstream technology for about ten years or more, like instant messaging, put an implementation of it on a Web site with some Javascript, market the hell out of it, and now you have a trendy new site. The same process applies to Facebook and Myspace and others.
In the case of Twitter, the only improvement that's happened here is that anyone with a decent browser can access it. The mainstream instant messaging clients failed for various reasons to come up with a single open standard. In fact, they often actively tried to hinder multiple-protocol IM clients. That difference is the only rational reason for the hype attributed to Twitter. The rest is just marketing and trend-following because otherwise there is nothing new and interesting going on.
I think you do "get it" and that's precisely why you don't share the interest in this trend. Of course there's nothing wrong with using a site and enjoying it but jumping on its bandwagon and indulging its hype is another thing entirely. I don't think this is about anything interesting from Twitter, but rather, is about a generation of users who probably don't understand the full implications and potential consequences of disclosing personally identifying information or of turning your day-to-day life into a public spectacle.
... because random strangers really need to know your physical whereabouts.
What need does this fulfill?
Why is it shocking? Is it ... counter-intuitive for you?
Bin Laden will never be captured or killed. He's one hellava resourceful SOB. That, and he has prophet-like status among his twisted followers that will die for him.
He makes a fine Emmanuel Goldstein.
Because it is always the other party's fault, no matter what the problem is, when it started, or who started it.
If only each person who said "that other party is to blame" would instead say "the two-party duopoly is to blame" we might actually have real reform.
There is one objection to the space elevator that I've mentioned here before but never seen anyone seriously address.
The earth is built like a gigantic capacitor. The ionosphere has a relatively strong negative charge, while the ground has a relatively strong positive charge. An insulating layer of dielectric air is between them. It's a leaky self-adjusting capacitor because of lightning. A space elevator would bypass this insulating layer of air, making a direct physical connection between the negative and positive charges. Additionally, I believe that the carbon nanotubes proposed for its construction are electrically conductive, but even if they weren't there is probably more than enough current for electrical breakdown to take place considering that lightning does this to air molecules about three million times a day. What would keep the elevator from instantly vaporizing due to electrical arcing the moment it's installed?
Not as much as you'd think. Apparently once you get up to a certain amount of Karma level you get 15 mod points at a time to play with. Ironically enough, posting anon to prevent from undoing moderation. I'm not the troll-modder though. I swear. -dyingtolive
My karma is "Excellent" and has been for a long time now. I've never, ever seen more than five mod points at a time. Please explain this discrepency.
Continuing the analogy to various forms of prohibition, look at cigarette smokers. Cigarettes have remained legal yet the number of people who choose to smoke has steadily and significantly declined since the mid 20th century. Why? Because the dangers of using them have been thoroughly publicised and have become something that everyone knows. I'd like to see something like that happen to spam and the people who financially support it.
That's my main problem with it. The "logic" seems to go like this: "well, we couldn't come up with a way to make spammers pay, so instead we'll try to make everyone else pay to prove they're not a spammer." I can't support that.
Another marked troll? Seriously. Yahoo does have mod points today...
That does seem to be the most trendy form of asshattery on Slashdot lately, to just indiscriminately mod down every top-level post that you can as "Troll". There do seem to be enough of them in this discussion that it would take more than one jackass moderator to pull off.
I have never understood the concept. Forget for a moment that spammers don't follow the rules, and generally work pretty hard to circumvent anti-spam measures, how are we all going to implement and maintain good measures on the receiving end? Ohh... someone like Yahoo will do that for us. Got it. Just pay my monthly dues or licensing fees and then a low $.01 per email and it's all good. Glad this is such a humanitarian effort aimed at cleaning up our interwebs and not a huge cock-up out for profit, because then it would just be unethical...
Also, why should I have to pay a new fee of any sort merely because someone else wants to send spam? The whole problem with spam is that everyone but the spammer has to bear its costs. This only increases the costs that all the rest of us have to bear because of spam. For that reason the ethics of this solution are already questionable despite its presumably good intentions.
The idea is that a Centmail signature attached to a message would automatically reduce the message's spam likelihood; if enough people adopt Centmail, then receivers would be increasingly able to require a Centmail signature on mail, and killfile mail that lacks such a signature. In theory, great. In practice, I predict it spiraling out of control as different parties try to "get in on the action" and see a chance to turn a profit instead of just giving the money to charity.
Besides, this doesn't address the ultimate cause (or depending on viewpoint, the ultimate enabler) of spam. Spam exists for one reason and one reason only: someone, somewhere is willing to buy from spammers or otherwise to give them money. Any solution which doesn't address that has entirely failed to learn why Prohibition didn't stop people from drinking or why the War on Drugs hasn't made illicit substances go away. It doesn't matter how sophisticated or underhanded the spammers are, if no one gives them money anymore they WILL go out of business. This is probably a matter of education, though it's possible that credit card companies could be part of the solution since many of these transactions could not occur without their services.