I think you missed the fact that I was disagreeing with you in the explanation of people's behavior. People have little imagination, and for most people, almost any impulse takes them in the direction of conformity. They can find group identity and ready-made identities on the right or on the left, through worship of corporations or enmity to them. (But you know that already.)
What the corporations are doing is slightly more subtle than just offering an opportunity for conformism. Their reasoning even allows people who distrust corporations to believe that trusting corporations over consumers is the least bad option.
Almost everything is "slightly more sublte" than its outward manifestation. The political results (trusting the untrustworthy) occur on a more mundane level than what I intended to address. They are also effects. The fact that most people are broken and incomplete (conformity being one answer to this problem, or more accurately, a way to hide from it) and therefore derive important parts of their being from external things is the cause. It is, in fact, the cause of causes for every last one of these problems. Complete human beings with enlightenment and wisdom would never find the reasoning you mention to be convincing or tempting. Because they are complete, they would not be suckered into this type of false dichotomy. They would have none of the personal vulnerabilities on which the deception of false ideas is built.
I should explain that a bit more because unfortunately you will not find this in modern education. At one time, various clergy may have understood this (albeit within their terminology) but they have long since abandoned wisdom for the sake of piety and doctrine. That's why they resent, why they don't forgive, why they care about political power, why they don't love other people, why many of their congregation are divorced, etc. At any rate, like other constructs, deception must be built on a foundation. That foundation is made of weaknesses and personal shortcomings that people excuse and dismiss instead of recognizing and correctly addressing.
Most people are completely at the mercy of their thoughts and feelings and thus, their impulses. This means that they are reactive and undisciplined and will respond to various forms of pressure because they are externally motivated. Thus, if they were engines you would say that stress is their fuel. That makes them putty in the hands of masterful manipulators such as modern marketing and public relations practitioners.
The manipulators know how to control those who look to external things for their motivation because they know that this is an accurate definition of suggestibility. It's simple, really. They make a suggestion which creates a thought. The thought creates an emotion which in turn creates an impulse. The impulse leads to an action and that action was the desired outcome all along. The nature of the desired outcome determines the nature of the initial suggestion.
The initial suggestion might be sex, violence, humor, or any number of emotionally charged things commonly seen in advertising. It might be small children so that instinctive maternalistic/paternalistic thoughts and feelings can be exploited to make the associated impulse seem more natural. Nothing is sacred to these people -- hopefully you see how diabolical this really is. The audience believes that their thoughts and emotions were natural reactions to what was presented rather than carefully engineered responses. This denial allows them to believe that the action to which they were led was their own decision. To weak people who gauge the truth of a thing according to its palatability, belief in this mockery of free will is far less frightening than the realization that they are little more than slaves. Thus, the bars of this prison cell are made of fear.
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you're either studying or have studied in University psychology with a major in social studies. If you haven't, then you probably should:P
I'm not a doctor or a psychologist or any other sort of medical practitioner, so you may consider what follows to be my personal opinion.
Several years ago I would have agreed with you. However, I did not need to study psychology for very long to realize that it's incapable of providing the deep meaning and truly satisfying answers that I was after at the time. The medical model is it's most recognizable flaw, because under that model all conditions of mind are divided into the desirable and the undesirable. It naturally follows that the latter category is to be treated or medicated away rather than appreciated and thoroughly understood. If that medical model were the path to true health, then the number of people who take some kind of psychological medication would be decreasing. Instead, it is increasing and at a rate which should make it obvious that we are missing something fundamental. Rather than acknowledge this, the practitioners continue to treat and medicate what they really do not understand. If they did understand, they would know how to cure and prevent. If they had true enlightenment, they would give us a few childishly simple principles instead of many complex explanations.
Likewise while it is not a "hard" science, psychology is limited to those things to which the scientific method can be applied, meaning it necessarily comes from a materialistic bias. What comes with that materialism is scientific positivism, so the dominant mentality is "if we can't describe it with mathematics, it does not exist." Thus, psychology has no choice but to deny the nonphysical and spiritual nature of human beings. Effectively this means that only a small fraction of what a human being actually is could be addressed under its system.
Evidence of what I am saying can be found in the swiftness with which a materialist would dismiss this objection instead of addressing it, and in many cases, the anger or indignation with which they would do so. It's not unlike how the more narrow-minded and insecure religious people respond when you question their doctrine. Science is supposed to be different, except that materialism is one of its few assumptions; like all assumptions, it's a matter of faith. Once faith is invested in the system, only then can objective evidence be gathered under it and conclusions drawn from within it, in accordance with Aristotelian logic and other rules of the system. It's important then to recognize the limitations of that system. Only external physical things which can be subjected to experimentation and logic can be addressed by science. With human beings, that means behavior.
Due to this, psychology's only real use is in manipulating or engineering behavior and at providing elaborate yet superficial explanations for why its manipulations are effective. This is an inventory of knowledge and its pragmatic application, not true understanding. That is also why it leads to more complexity and not to simplicity. Psychologists know in terms of probability the behavioral tendencies of the average person. They have rigorous descriptions of disorders and dis-ease states. They know which effect a given adjustment or pharmaceutical can cause and from experience, they know how to apply them. They know that if you make this adjustment here or apply this pharmaceutical there, you can obtain something closer to the desired outcome. That is what I mean by an inventory of knowledge. Hopefully you can see how external and superficial this really is. It's a shame that the difference between cleverness and true wisdom is not more widely understood.
When psychologists with good intentions attempt to help others, what you end up with is the blind leading the blind. I like to say that if you want to throw someo
Actually, this mentality comes from disenchantment with the legal system that is carefully cultivated by businesses to give themselves a legal leg up on consumers. If you convince people that the legal system is unable to decide consumer complaints justly according to their merits, then logically, there are only two choices: trust the corporations' word on everything or allow them to be torn apart by jealous parasites.
So, if you make people cynical about lawsuits by individuals, people see every consumer complaint as a threat to the production of all the food, services, and cool stuff that we currently enjoy. That is, a threat to capitalism and all we know as good.
Companies are happy to rely the legal system to regulate relations among themselves when they can't get along, of course. Then they gang up on consumers to exclude them from the system because they don't have to rely on lawsuits to hold consumers to their word -- that's what credit reporting services are for.
Frankly, I'd love to see our ridiculous liability system restored to some kind of sanity and credibility. Then corporations will have to face more public responsibility. These days, when a company gets walloped in court for blatant fraud and dishonesty, people don't take it very seriously because business interests make sure there's a steady stream of ridiculous personal injury lawsuits in the news. I have to admit they have a point, but they don't invest billions in cultivating our cynicism just as a public service.
I believe you missed my point. Corporations have such powers as you describe because of this sort of conformity. Like most other potential adversaries, they have no power over you except for what you give to them. The demoralization you describe is part of that power. The mindlessness I described is why we, as a society, have given them so much power. They in turn use that power to exercise undue influence over the legal system and our politicians. If they first tried to do that without the allegiance of the useful idiots, then people would call it by its proper name, a power grab, and would refuse to go along with it.
Those useful idiots are conformists with no real selfhood, no real identity of their own. Their choice is to either embrace this falsehood wholeheartedly or to face the very painful truth of how empty their lives have become. The second choice is the beginning of wisdom but it is not for the faint of heart.
What I was getting at was a general process behind a common way that human beings become compromised. By "compromised" I refer to the fact that most human beings have ideas and beliefs, including strong ones, that are not the result of careful and deliberate evaluation which means that they can only be the result of indoctrination and undue influence. Thus, they are not themselves and they advocate, even passionately, ideas that are not their own because someone else put them there. While they do so, they actually believe that they have made a free choice. There is a saying, "no one is more hopelessly imprisoned than he who falsely believes that he is free."
Lawsuits and the legal system is just one domain to which it applies. What you describe is correct on its level. It's just a departure from how simple the underlying principles really are because you are focusing on effects and not ultimate causes.
I will add one more thing that you may be missing because I sense that you still look at this in terms of victor and victim. The people who run our society and its corporations, who appear to perpetrate this system on everyone else, are even more compromised than those they try to control. Many of them are what you may call "lost" or "too far gone". On some level they are aware of this system and realize that it offers only two choices: take advantage or be taken advantage of. Because they are not strong enough or virtuous enough to correctly deal with this, they decide that "take advantage" is the m
You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves.
that quote gives me a hard-on. nothing better could describe Apple and its defenders.
Or Microsoft and its defenders. Or government when people buy into the lie that safety is more important than freedom. It applies equally to any of these. These apologists become what Lenin referred to as "useful idiots." The fanboys who unconditionally defend the decisions of i.e. Microsoft do so because they like Microsoft and Microsoft made the decision, not because the decision was sound and well-founded. That's why they defend the good and the bad with no regard for whether it's actually defensible. That's also why it's a form of mindlessness.
It's almost a form of worship, though it's a pathological one. This false loyalty is actively encouraged in our society; not by advocacy (in fact it's rarely discussed) but by example. You see it with sports teams, celebrities, institutions, and religions. It's a shame because no one can participate in it without first learning how to lie to themselves. If you ever wonder why so many people are weak, timid, easily distracted, undisciplined, and easily deceived, this is where much of it begins.
It never seems to occur to them that a correct idea can stand on its own merits and does not need a choir to sing its virtues. What I just said there is the very antithesis of the concept of "marketing" and shows how easy it is to find the glaring flaw in it. It's just another form of mindlessness; like all forms of mindlessness, its purpose is to control or at least to influence on the basis of something other than self-evident truth.
An interesting effect is that the more people engage in this sort of maladaptive conformity, the harder it's going to hit them when they later realize that it was wrong. It's a form of inertia. Right or wrong, the more heavily invested you are in an idea the more you are going to resist changing it even when every objective viewpoint shows that you should. It reminds me of that saying, "no matter how far down the wrong path you have travelled, turn back."
You see the bit in the summary/article "Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation..."? This isn't about whining that it sucks. It is about them misleading you about how bad it sucks. By then, you are already nailed to a contract. If you think this is "ok", I have some free time and an ice pick handy...
Thanks for correcting how shortsighted the GP was (if you think that's unfair, feel free to tell me why). You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves. The really strange thing is that most of them have no financial ties or anything like that which would make it merely selfish. The real nature of this is a bit more mysterious.
Conformists are looking for security and they may be looking for identity. Of course, this is a position of extreme weakness because a complete person does not derive important things like security and identity from externals. Those things are found from within; the external type makes a mockery of the real article and it always has strings attached. No one offers what you should provide for yourself without also wanting to make you dependent on them. Governments and marketers understand this. So, what I think is going on is that most people are such conformists that they identify with whoever or whatever is prominent, or successful, or mainstream, or well-established, or powerful in the hopes that some of those traits will transfer to them.
The actual nature of the entity, be it a peer group or a company or a government, doesn't seem to matter. What does seem to matter is how large the entity is and how much of a public presence it has, how identifiable it is. This process of conformity is not a conscious choice, because if the person realized that there is a choice in the matter they would never go along with this process. It's more like their failure to find their own security and their own identity creates an inner vacuum that the external world rushes in to fill.
From their point of view, they find themselves expressing feelings that have no rational basis. They often get upset when you question them about it, which should be a dead giveaway that something's not right. It's a hard truth that most human beings operate under this system. No one who really believes in what they say has a reason to get upset when you question them, or disagree with them, or reject what they advocate. They may discuss their belief or they may debate you but there's nothing to get upset about.
There's no reason that any application should expect data to reach the disk without an fsync(), so from that point-of-view ext4 is compliant with all the relevant APIs. However, given that this is a common use-case and that users expect modern filesystems to magically "do the right thing" and avoid data loss [... ]
To me, the real question is: do users have that expectation because it's reasonable and proper that this is the filesystem's job, or, did the failure of multiple application developers give those users a false impression of what is and is not the correct role of a filesystem? The answer to that question determines what action should be taken to remedy the problem. Reference to the agreed-upon specification is the most unbiased way to answer this question because you are dealing with two groups who know (or certainly should know!) that they need to adhere to it in order to avoid these problems.
It should be answered without looking for excuses or fabricating justifications, especially those based on nebulous and mutable things like "user expectations" (which themselves are often based on convenience, not sound system design). Instead, the most simple reasoning can answer that question. One group, the ext4 developers, did adhere to the standard. Another group, consisting of certain application developers, thought that some parts of it weren't important. It's quite clear that the application developers, despite their almost certainly good intentions, have given users a false impression of what is and is not the proper role of a filesystem.
A lot of people seem to want to avoid that conclusion because it doesn't have a "quick fix." That is, in terms of effort alone, it would be much easier to make one change to one filesystem than it would be to correct each application that violates the specification. That's not a good enough justification for rejecting the simple reasoning that quite clearly determines what should happen next. For matters like this that are within its scope, reason is a precious thing -- you should not throw it away so carelessly. If you are willing to abandon things like principles and reason because the conclusions to which they lead you are not the path of least resistance, then some of your most noble qualities are effectively for sale. That's not a solid foundation on which to build much of anything and operating system components (while a mundane example) are no exception.
You cannot live that way and be free of inner conflict, I guarantee it, because for most people there is always a part of you which knows that this is a mistake. That's what inner conflict is, by the way: it's when part of you is "for" something and another part of you is "against" that same thing. It's a terrible condition, widespread though it may be. You may or may not know yourself well enough to understand the causes of inner conflict, but what I said is true whether or not you can fully see the cause-and-effect.
I've already made other comments in this thread about what happens when people refuse to correct a mistake. It becomes entrenched and it sets an undesirable precedent, one which in this case suggests that such things as standards don't really matter. Let's not go down that path. We've seen entities like Microsoft use non-compliance as a weapon; we call it embrace-and-extend. It's an instrument of discord and they use it when discord and disharmony suits their purposes. Isn't Free Software supposed to be better than that? Isn't it supposed to be free of the profit-based control motives that manifest this behavior? Yes? Then why should we replace those profit-based control motives with can't-admit-being-wrong control motives and believe that this is any sort of improvement? If you agree that there is something wrong with that, and that it's no longer tempting when you call things what they are, then let's count this as a lesson learned, support the community's developers who fix their applications, endure a bit of inconvenience while this happens, and get this over with. The right way.
So, in principle, the filesystem could just throw away the data unless the application explicitly calls a fsync ?
This seems to be a slightly bit of...hmmm....stupid ?
From the explanations I received and some reading I've done, I don't think the data is just getting "thrown away" so that isn't really a valid question. The issue seems to be that unless fsync is called, the changes requested by the application may happen in a sequence that is other than what the application programmer expected. The example I saw in this discussion involved first writing data to a file and then renaming it soon afterwards. If I understand this correctly, the application is assuming that the rename cannot possibly happen before the writing of the data is done even though the specification has no such requirement. If the application needs this to happen in the order in which it was requested, it needs to write the data, then call fsync, then rename the file. You could probably fill a library with what I don't know about low-level filesystem details, so please correct me if I have misunderstood this.
The example I found in the Wikipedia entry on ext4 was different. That one involved data loss because the application updates/overwrites an existing file and does not call fsync and then the system crashes. The Wiki article states that this leads to undefined behavior (which, afaik, is correct per the spec). The article also states that a typical result is that the file was set to zero-length in preparation for being overwritten but because of the crash, the new data was never written so it remains zero-length, causing the loss of the old version of the file. Under ext3 you would usually find either the old version of the file or the new version.
What I don't understand and hope that a more knowledgable person could explain is why this can't be done a slightly different way. This is where I can apply reason to come up with something that sounds preferable to me but I simply don't have the background knowledge of filesystems to understand the "why". If the overwrite of the file is delayed, why isn't the truncation of the file to zero-length also delayed? That is, instead of doing it this way:
Step 1: Truncate file length to zero in preparation of overwriting it.
Step 2: Delay the writing of the new data for performance reasons.
Step 3: After the delay has elapsed, actually write the data to the disk.
Why can't it be done this way instead?
Step 1: Delay the truncation of the file length to zero in preparation of overwriting it.
Step 2: Delay the writing of the new data.
Step 3: After the delay has elapsed, set the file length to zero and immediately write the new data, as a single operation if that is possible, or as one operation immediately followed by the other.
That way if there is a crash, you'd still get either the old version or the new one and not a zero-length file where data used to be. The only disadvantage I can see is that this might continue to enable developers to make assumptions that are not found in the standard because the buggy behavior ext4 is now exposing may continue to work. If there's no technical reason why it cannot be done that way, perhaps the bad precedent alone is a good reason to either not handle it this way or to change the spec.
The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?"
They don't. Applications just need to concern themselves with the details of of the APIs they use, and the guarantees those APIs do or don't provide.
The POSIX file APIs specify quite clearly that there is no guarantee that your data is on the disk until you call fsync(). The problem is with applications that assumed they could ignore what the specification said just because it always seemed to work okay on the file systems they tested with.
Thanks for explaining that. In that case, I salute Mr. Tso and others for telling the truth and not caving in to pressure when they are in fact correctly following the specification. Too often people who are correct don't have the fortitude to value that more than immediate convenience, so this is a refreshing thing to see. Perhaps this will become the sort of history with which developers are expected to be familiar.
I imagine it will take a lot of work but at least with Free Software this can be fixed. That's definitely what should happen, anyway. There are sometimes when things just go wrong no matter how correct your effort was; in those cases, it makes sense to just deal with the problem in the most hassle-free manner possible. This, however, is not one of those times. Thinking that you can selectively adhere to a standard and then claim that you are compliant with that standard is just the sort of thing that really should cause problems. Correcting the applications that made faulty assumptions is therefore the right way to deal with this, daunting and inconvenient though that may be.
Removing this delayed-allocation feature from ext4 or placing limits on it that are not required by the POSIX standard is definitely the wrong way to deal with this. To do so would surely invite more of the same. It would only encourage developers to believe that the standards aren't really important, that they'll just be "bailed out" if they fail to implement them. You don't need any sort of programming or system design expertise to understand that, just an understanding of how human beings operate and what they do with precedents that are set.
Disadvantages: You risk data loss with 95% of the apps you use on a daily basis. This will persist until the apps are rewritten to force data commits at appropriate times, but hopefully not frequently enough to eat up all the performance improvements and more.
For those of us who are not so familiar with the data loss issues surrounding EXT4, can someone please explain this? The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?" I.e. if I ask OpenOffice to save a file, it should do that the exact same way whether I ask it to save that file to an ext2 partition, an ext3 partition, a reiserfs partition, etc. What would make ext4 an exception? Isn't abstraction of lower-level filesystem details a good thing?
Perhaps the USA and the UK aren't so different after all.
Well, it seems that our system has more checks and balances than the UK does. We have 50 individual sovereign states that are still willing to flip Washington off every now and then. We have the Supreme Court which has shot down or at least severely constrained many attempts by the Executive and Legislature to violate our founding documents. The Upper House of our Legislature isn't toothless and actually has the power to stop legislation. We also (yeah I couldn't resist) have guns;)
I'm hard pressed to think of what checks and balances remain under the British system. The House of Lords was defanged a long time ago and if the Monarchy ever refused Royal Assent I'm sure that would be end of it as an institution. Hopefully our friends across the pond will wake up before it's too late.....
Those checks and balances are largely useless if most of the population honestly believes in the "safety is more important than freedom" type of fear-mongering. Pragmatically, this means only that those who would like to transform the USA into a totalitarian state just need to be more patient. Or they just need to remain underground.
What do I mean by underground? Look at how long the warrantless-wiretapping was going on, illegally, before it was exposed. Then look at how the Bush administration retroactively granted the telcos immunity from prosecution for assisting this illegal program (if that isn't a violation of "no ex post facto" then it should be). So, how many such illegal activities are happening right now that we don't know about?
It might be tempting to look at the UK and think we're so much better off. That's your ego talking because it wants to feel like a part of something greater than itself, namely, the national ego. But let's say that you are correct, that the USA really is better off than the UK. We're certainly walking down the same path. So, perhaps the UK is a little ahead of us and has already travelled farther down that path. That means that If we don't change soon, the UK is merely providing a vision of our immediate future. How about if we travel a completely different path that doesn't lead to the same destination before we make comparisons? I prefer not to be on a sinking ship at all. I like that much better than wondering whether the ship I'm on is sinking more slowly than the adjacent ships.
You laugh, but this same point was made in the excellent book, The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. In the first chapter, The Power of Incentives: How Seat Belts Kill, he questions whether the additional safety equipment really translates into an overall improvement in safety and demonstrates part of his argument by having us imagine driving a car w/o seat belts and with a sharp metal spike protruding from the steering wheel aimed at your chest. It's hard to deny you would drive very, very carefully in that situation. Safety equipment gives the driver increased confidence to take higher risks.
I have a friend who says he considers seatbelts a performance option. I suspect a lot of drivers think the same (subconsciously).
Seatbelts in and of themselves are a good thing. I've personally walked away from accidents with just a bruise on my shoulder from the seatbelt that surely would have killed or seriously injured me if I were not wearing a seatbelt.
What you describe can be handled in two ways. You can worry about every little incentive and piece of minutia and how they influence the easily influenced. Or... You can realize that there is one single root problem and everything you mentioned or could have mentioned arises from it. We do have this very bad cultural habit of looking at effects and symptoms instead of ultimate causes. One ultimate cause can have thousands of secondary and tertiary effects. Deal with that single ultimate cause and the effects quite naturally take care of themselves. That's the power of this type of awareness.
The ultimate cause for what you describe is really quite simple. These people are externally motivated; thus, they respond to pressure and to outside influences. The problem with that is that the pressure to which they respond is the one which "speaks" to them the loudest or gets their attention most effectively. Most of the time, that's also one of the worst. That is why they are worried about their level of confidence to take risks and it's why the presence of a safety device (an external influence) would change the way that they drive. This is a very easy thing to understand but a challenge to explain, so I'll re-iterate: their ideas of how one should drive come from the sum total of a large number of outside influences and not from their own understanding and experience and honest reasoning, which leaves them weak and vulnerable to this type of aberration.
The antidote to this superficial, outwardly-determined mentality is a firm grasp of right and wrong and a strong desire to enjoy doing what is right. There's a lot of confusion about this, but the fact is that deep down people know very well what is right and wrong. Finding that and working from that inner understanding is real strength, and it's also real protection from many nasty "surprises" that aren't really so unpredictable. Someone who understands this will not tailgate other drivers because bullying other people in order to pressure them into driving the way you want them to drive is selfish and wrong. It's wrong whether or not you fear getting injured in any accident that would result. Cutting people off, weaving in and out of lanes, and otherwise disregarding the other drivers is also wrong, whether you have the world's most perfectly safe vehicle or not. Therefore, to such a person, the idea that the presence of a safety device should alter the way they drive is laughable. It's simple and beautiful and should be self-evident.
Most people feel like victims when they cry "foul" because something went wrong and they fail to see that they have set the stage for most of the things that go wrong in their lives. That again is because they are responding to the millions of outside influences instead of developing and refining and perfecting their own idea of how things should be. A truly random, truly unpredictable disaster that did not require the participation of its "victim" is an incredibly rare thing. It's just that most people live their lives in a haphazard, undisciplined way that prevents them from seeing how simple all of this really is.
The U.K. snooping is probably going to be done with Facebook's support, knowledge, and help...
Possibly. If not, it probably won't take much pressure to make them cave in. They'll be shamed into doing it by a claim that doing otherwise would be unpatriotic or would support the evil terrorists. Or they'll be threatened into doing it by a law that requires it, and won't have the courage to respond to that by refusing to service users in the UK. Some form of manipulative pressure will be used. Most people respond to pressure this way because it appears to relieve the pressure. What they don't know is that anytime you cave in to pressure, the relief is quite temporary -- by doing so, you teach others that this is the way to "reach" you and you invite more of the same. Bullies are cowards but they won't appear that way if you are even more cowardly than they are and are unwilling to take a risk to stand up to them.
Incidentally, I salute the accuracy of the summary:
The measure would get around the inconvenience for the government of not being able to snoop on all UK web traffic.
If that doesn't describe the freedom-destroying mentality, few things can. It never seems to occur to that mentality that the loss of freedom and privacy might be just the sort of destruction that our enemies wish to visit upon us. It makes sense, since they know they stand no real chance of winning a conventional military battle against the very-well-armed Western nations. If they're "street-wise" at all, and to avoid hubris you should always assume that your enemy is, then they have probably realized that they only need to attack us a few times and we will do all of the rest of the work of destroying what is good about our civilization on our own. It will, of course, be in the name of safety and security. When all of this started, I bet the terrorists never imagined it would be so easy -- just scare us a bit and we'll give up all of the things that we used to fight for. This, by the way, is why physical armaments cannot be your only source of strength. If they are, your enemy will merely attack you on a different front. All of this is quite predictable and easy to understand.
Perhaps the USA and the UK aren't so different after all.
Oh? So you are effectively claiming that every vehicle on the road (cars, trucks, etc) in every country has perfectly functioning mirrors with no possibility of honest blind spots? That's quite a claim, I'd like to see the evidence for it.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to do what I do now. I consider the side-view mirrors to be supplements to a proper shoulder check, not substitutes for it. It's convenient to have them there, but you could smash both of my side-view mirrors and it would have no effect on the way I perform a lane change. Though I hope you don't do that, because then my vehicle would look worse and might not pass inspection...
Seriously though, I think you missed my point. Lots of people (I call them "pacers") will make an effort to stay right beside you, sometimes for miles and miles and there's just no reason for it. Even if there were always perfect visibility and even if there were no such things as blind spots, I still consider it an unnecessary hazard to allow these pacers to remain right beside me. If nothing else they are limiting my maneuverability (and their own) and they are doing it for nothing. No one gains anything from it, so they are not even being selfish; they're just being stupid. At all times I like to know my surroundings, especially the vehicles and obstacles that are around me, that way if I need to suddenly make an emergency maneuver I won't hesitate because of such concerns. That's such a basic thing that I am amazed we allow so many people who don't understand this concept to have driver's licenses.
Occasionally things go wrong and there's just nothing you can do. However, most surprises are not really surprises unless you are open to being surprised by them. What I don't appreciate are stupid and unnecessary behaviors by other drivers that seem designed to convert inconveniences into serious threats.
Compulsory big spike in the middle of the steering wheel.
Move it to the rear bumbler and you've got yourself a deal.
I've never, ever understood why some morons insist on driving half a meter behind me, even on otherwise empty roads. The so-called "professional drivers" are the worst of this lot, especially if they're driving a truck or a bus that's guaranteed to not stop as fast as me. Are they simply bloodthirsty, or is there some kind of rational reason for it?
There's a device in these vehicles that keeps records of the speed they've been going. We need to add a radar which keeps track of the distance between a truck and the car on front; if the distance is consistently less than 20 meters - which is far too close in almost any situation, BTW - it should be grounds for compulsory and permanent loss of driving license.
Cue a hundred butthurt truck drivers posting that they are professionals and know what they're doing. And of course they do: they're deliberately and in cold blood endangering my life to shave a half a second off of a few hours journey, since that makes them half a penny more.
That's one thing that seems to never get emphasized. I've been told that I am overreactive because I do not allow people to tailgate me. I will gently tap my brake lights a couple of times to ask them to back off. Then I'll give them a moment to see what they do. If they don't take the hint, I start slowing down until one of two things happens: they realize I'm not going to be a pushover and they back off, or, I match the speed to their following distance since they refuse to match their following distance to the speed. I'm not trying to replace one tyrant with another, so if they get the message and stop tailgating me I will speed up again.
The situation is just as you describe. They are willing to endanger your life because they wish to intimidate you into submitting to them and giving them what they want. That I've been called overreactive for my refusal to accept this amuses me. Considering that they are needlessly endangering me, I think my reaction is quite mild. I respond to them the way that I do because I used to get quite upset about it and have since then decided that there is a better way. Having said that, I really believe that anyone who does things like willfully and needlessly endangering others should be considered "fair game" and has no right to complain about anything that happens to them as a result.
Like most other aberrations, there's a million excuses for this, too. The bottom line is quite simple. Tailgaters are bullies and a wise person does not reward a bully by giving them what they want. Every time you cave in and appease a bully, you are sending the message that their behavior is acceptable and will be rewarded with the result they desire. I think this shit is so widespread because people have largely forgotten these basic things.
We need to raise the bar so that people who have the necessary driving skills can drive. Anyone less is just not capable/qualified. If other countries can do it, we have no excuse to not have it in the US.
We have lots of excuses and that's the whole problem.
This is utter foolishness. Some drive [sic] act more safely than others. The technology tries to help those that drive more poorly, but ultimately it is every drivers responsibility to drive safely.
That's the mistake we keep making. It is perhaps the mistake of mistakes. When people can't (or won't) handle something correctly, we always want to make the task easier for them and we practically never want to increase their skill levels. The result is that weaknesses are coddled and protected instead of exposed and eliminated, with the only limit to this process being the capability of our technology.
There are times when this may be an acceptable trade-off. I don't really think so but I consider it debatable as long as intellectually dishonest practices are absent, such as making up the most absurdly extreme example imaginable and pretendling like that nullifies the generally applicable point. However, I absolutely do not consider this an acceptable trade-off when it comes to driving. Driving is one of the only things you do on a daily basis where your mistake could get someone else killed. If your mistake could only ever harm yourself, I'd say you have the moral right to be as negligent as you please though I would hope that you wouldn't. But because someone else can be harmed by no fault of their own, I submit that the last thing we need to do is make up for a lack of skill with technology when we could instead put those resources towards training programs and other measures that directly remedy the lack of skill.
In my way of looking at things, we need one of two things: drivers who are as skilled as is reasonably possible, or, completely computerized/automated cars that are capable of driving themselves with no human intervention. I'd be satisfied with either one; it's the flawed compromises that I don't like.
There's no reason autopilot wouldn't work for a glider either. Even with the engine out the plane is still generally operable -- without power sufficient to run the autopilot you wouldn't have hydraulics, and it would be a 150 rock, not a 150 ton glider, no matter who was steering the thing.
Now selecting a non-airport landing site, or landing someplace without well-defined runways or approaches is another problem altogether.
But I don't see why we couldn't just have one or two ground-based remote pilots available for emergencies. In the case of a serious failure a senior non-pilot crew member could push a button to enable remote control (hence negating the possibility of a remote attack on the control systems), and someone sitting in a simulator in St. Louis could try to land the plane for them. It's not quite the same has having a pilot actually in the plane, but it's a lot cheaper, and you could have just a handful of very good pilots that actually spend a lot of time doing emergency landings and related training, rather than a bunch of mediocre (and I mean that in a statistical sense, not as a slight to pilots; most people are average) pilots who rarely perform emergency landings.
Speaking of airplanes and emergency situations, there is one thing I never understood about commercial airlines. Why do they not have parachutes aboard for the crew and for each passenger? I realize that a parachute is far from idiot-proof and may take some training to use correctly. But if I am on an airplane and beyond all doubt that plane is going down, I'll take my chances with the parachute whether I've ever used one before or not.
I'm rather ignorant about aviation so maybe that's a dumb question and I don't realize it. I just can't think of a reason why it's not at least an option, though.
A modern airliner is actually safer than the usual small plane (Cessna etc).
Things would be safer if they required all drivers to be as skilled, trained, responsible as a typical airliner pilot.
But then most drivers would fail, and they would have transport problems. Politicians would lose lots of votes.
The point you raise about safety brought something else to mind. The emphasis the summary placed on speeding really did not sit well with me. Generally speaking, it works this way:
Speeding == a way to generate revenue for the state while talking a good game about safety. Failure to yield, following too closely == two things that receive very little emphasis which cause a hell of a lot more preventable accidents that speeding could ever cause.
A close third would be those people who don't seem to understand the purpose of the passing lane and why they create a hazard for everyone else when they try to monopolize it. Ideally, drivers should have patience for this and value safety above immediate gratification. However, the reality is that if you make it that tempting for people to weave in and out of lanes or to cut right in front of you because there's no other way to get by you, they will do it, count on it. The people who do this should know what situation they are setting up.
Like the summary, I am of course speaking of highways. I think speeding can be an important issue when you're talking about a residental area where there might be pedestrians walking or children playing. The mistake is to think that this must be some sort of universal truth because of such a special case. When you cover a few basics like discouraging tailgaters and not allowing the pacers to hang out in your blind spot, speeding in and of itself is hardly a threat on an open highway. If you don't cover those basics, strictly obeying the speed limit isn't going to do very much for you if something unexpected happens.
"languages change over time and common usage is one agent of change".
That is actually true. In my dad's day, "Straight" meant "honest". In my day, "straight" meant "not stoned on illegal drugs." Today it means "not gay".
True, but that's not the same thing because your example of the meanings of "straight" did not originate with a typo or a failure of basic spelling and grammar. Your example is of a valid transformation of meaning. With "lose" and "loose" there is no transformation of meaning, only the same two original meanings and the use of an incorrect word to express the intended one. For that reason I consider the legitimate-sounding "languages change over time" to be an excuse for laziness in this case. It's generally true that whenever you want to excuse something, you will probably be able to come up with a reason to do so that sounds perfectly valid; that still doesn't make it anything other than an excuse. That's why the sequence of events or how the situation arose in the first place is always an important thing to consider.
Do I think it's a big deal that an extra vowel appears in a word that should not be there, or that a word is missing a second vowel that should be present? No -- that in itself is not harmful. Do I think it's a bad idea to practice the "skill" of making a trivial mistake and covering it up with an excuse? Yes, making a habit of that can be quite harmful and it's just the sort of habit that starts with the small and trivial and then expands. The only reason for doing it is that most people would rather lie to themselves with a rationalization than admit that they made an easy mistake. That's the tyranny of ego. It's not the sort of thing that leads someone to become strong and honest and joyous, so yes, there is something wrong with it. That's why it isn't just a matter of opinion or taste as many would have you believe.
This being the real heart of the matter, that's also why cries of "grammar nazi" are often just cop-outs designed to ridicule or intimidate you into shutting up. Of course that's not always the case. Sometimes people do use grammatical mistakes as a reason to nit-pick, though I think that retaliating with an epithet is one of the least constructive ways to handle that.
I'm surprised the Miller Brewing Company never sued whatever company that made my gas stove; the farthest right hand setting is "lite", that makes the spark that "lites" the stove. Miller has a registered trademark on the word "lite".
I'm not a lawyer so this is just my uninformed opinion. I believe that a trademark only applies for that particular industry. Therefore, it wouldn't be a violation of Miller's trademark to use the word "lite" for a stove, but it would be a violation of trademark to make an alcoholic beverage that used the word.
Knowledge, practice, and experience more than make up for the so-called "decline". Why is it that slashdot's geezers know the difference between "lose" and "loose", and between their, they're, and there? Maybe because they've had more time to read more books and figure out the context of those words' uses?
Because as time passes the general standards for attention to detail and a sense of caring about what you do -- enough to try to do it well -- have eroded. For the example you gave, anytime it comes up I observe that people will call you "grammar nazi" for wanting to do it correctly or they'll produce all kinds of rationalizations. Some of the more sophisticated rationalizations say things like "languages change over time and common usage is one agent of change".
The only part of it that doesn't work is the fact that just realizing that "lose" and "loose" are two different words is actually easier and more intuitive than what they're doing. It's also neater and less ambiguous. Thus, if this is a change of the language and not a mere failure to use it correctly, then this change is heading in the wrong direction. That means that either way, it fails. Seeing that is one of the most simple and effective uses of reason. When it's a pattern of behavior, then tiny insignificant issues like basic grammar can condition you to accept needless failure in more important matters.
That's more or less the nature of lowering standards. The more you do it, the more it demands increasingly involved "explanations" of why it's okay. After a while the explanations can sound convincing, as people don't like the alternative of being told that they failed at something, however minor, and that the failure was a sign of a lack of discipline or a lack of appreciation, however true. In a roundabout way, I also just gave a definition of the ego.
"Its speed is best over thye hundreds of metres," he said. "But beyond 1km you will find that ADSL2+ is actually faster."
Which means that it will do nothing for the people who complain about speed now, either being unable to get broadband or only get a slow link. Actually it will probably make things worse for them as the web designers in "connected" cities decide that they can have high-definition video on their web-site front pages. Many people have to wait five minutes to see the existing flash pages.
If the problem there is infrastructure, it makes me wonder whatever happened to WiMax? Isn't that supposed to address exactly the situation you describe?
One would almost get the impression that we dislike broadband which does not come from a government-regulated monopoly.
What is the role DLS today in the broadband world? Is it merely a bandaid for places with no other options, or something more that I am missing?
Around here, cable internet is absolute crap due to all the students sucking the bandwidth dry. I don't care what they claim to provide speed wise, it was always slow. The connection would also just disappear for over an hour at a time most nights around 10PM. DSL doesn't provide the theoretical rates of cable, but what it does provide is a fixed rate and the phone company, as much as they suck, sucks a lot less than the cable company when it comes to reliability.
You make a good point. I use DSL as well and I generally don't have the problems with unpredictable slowdowns or outright downtime that most of my friends with cable Internet are experiencing. True, they do have higher maximum throughput but I'm satisfied with the speeds I experience and especially with the consistency. Additionally my ISP does not block any ports and does not cap or throttle my connection, which is also nice. I know people often dislike DSL but really, the benefits of a dedicated connection over a shared connection are not to be underestimated.
The few times I had to call technical support really weren't that bad either, especially not for a major telco. The folks I talked to still had the annoying habit of following their "script" too closely and disregarding the fact that I already tried basic obvious things (such as power-cycling the modem/router) before I asked for help. I realize their position and that they feel a need to do that because of the tremendous number of frankly incompetent/ignorant users who will incorrectly perform those basic tasks. However, when it's apparent that I'm at least as knowledgable as the front-line tech support person (whom I generally only call when the issue is on their end and so I cannot solve it myself), I don't consider it unreasonable to expect them to stop making such assumptions. Anyway, I just described front-line tech support in general and did not mean to give the impression that this is unique to my telco.
Management values finding a way to monetize technology. This is NOT evil. It is what EVERY geek does. If geeks focus on technology, they miss the point. Failure to understand that there are levers other than "technically better" is the fauls and failure of the geeks, not the fault of management.
If you (the general you, not parent specifically) are unable to understand that - that would be YOUR fault, not the fault of management.
There's a difference between failing to understand an idea, and rejecting an idea. I'm not suggesting that this describes you, but it's rather arrogant to assume that the only reason why anyone would ever disagree with you is because they don't have as much understanding as you do. Maybe that really is the case but it should be an observation and not an assumption. Certainly in the example you gave, it does sound like the geek you described was simply ignorant and that you have correctly assessed the situation. What I am trying to do here is to show that there are other, potentially more valid reasons for the tendency of geeks to focus on the technology.
I know it's a business reality and I know that for better or worse, it's an important aspect of our culture. Having said that, there ARE people who reject the notion that concerns about money should always have top priority in all cases. Certainly there are times when it must be a primary concern -- if you lack the resources (financial or otherwise), your idea won't get off the ground no matter how good it otherwise is. Many geeks feel this way, though I admit it's more appropriate outside of the realm of business decisions. They focus on the technology because they find an elegance in it that is missing from the day-to-day struggles to make money. There is, of course, a time and a place for that. Possibly the geek you describe simply didn't know how to handle both "spheres".
It is amazing how life is found almost everywhere we look for it. I bet with the right equipment something primitive might even be found in RIAA offices.
None of it will be intelligent life, but I suppose if you look hard enough you might find something. You'll have to ignore many automatons before you have any chance at a search for anything truly living, however.
Ah yeah, the ol' "retraining" argument. That one's always been hilarious to me. Like users "know" Windows either?
They don't. The vast majority of people don't "know" Windows -- they know how to click a few icons, the locations of which they've memorized, so they can launch applications -- usually really generic ones. If you move their icons around suddenly it's "HEY MY OUTLOOK DISAPPEARED" and "I CAN'T FIND THE H DRIVE!" And if you ask them to do anything in Windows beyond opening and using those few applications, they're hopeless.
Thank you for bringing this up. There is another aspect of that which is also part of the user behavior that we see. You could call it a desire for instant gratification.
On Unix-like operating systems, it is much harder for a user to get by and be productive without knowing at least the basics of how the system works. This is quite a blessing and neatly addresses the sort of ignorance that you describe, but it is seldom appreciated. Lazy people can get quite upset when they finally encounter something for which there are no shortcuts. They are often used to finding some "clever" way to circumvent the need to learn something new (and never think about whether just learning the thing would be easier and more straightforward). In Windows we sometimes derisively refer to this as "point-and-drool".
Some people actually seem to derive their sense of self-worth from this incorrect use of cleverness and so they get quite defensive and frothing-at-the-mouth when you suggest that there is something wrong with it. They'll produce all manner of excuses and insults, or they'll use a different tactic and say things like "but everyone can't learn how to be a computer expert!" as though that's what you were asking them to do. Experts do indeed know the basics, but asking someone to learn a few basic things is not nearly the same as asking them to become an expert -- there is no honest reason why they would pretend that this is the case.
To me this all boils down to one idea: how can you reasonably expect to always obtain a good result when you use what you do not remotely understand? I know of no aspect of OS design or "easy-to-use" marketing that changes the nature of this question. Many people pretend otherwise, but only because they know it's what lazy people want to hear and thus, they will be rewarded for saying it -- either with increased software sales or with the approval of strangers. This is known as catering to your weakness and it can only make you weaker still. The entire Microsoft "empire" seems built on this premise and I believe that is why it will always have security problems. Security is one of the ultimate tests and will quickly determine whether you are found wanting.
Admitting that you are lazy and that this has led you to make unreasonable demands, such as using what you don't understand and expecting that nothing will go wrong, is difficult. There's the difficulty of admitting that you were wrong, which implies admitting that you are not the victim that you imagined yourself to be when you thought that a lack of training or those "evil hackers" were the source of your problems. Then there's the fact that you cannot see your own laziness without also desiring to change it, which is an issue because if you were inclined to discover and address your own shortcomings instead of waiting for a failure to point them out, you would not have been lazy in the first place. You would have done whatever you had to do (within reason, of course) to obtain whatever understanding you needed. This kind of self-evaluation is rare because it is not for the faint of heart.
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I think you missed the fact that I was disagreeing with you in the explanation of people's behavior. People have little imagination, and for most people, almost any impulse takes them in the direction of conformity. They can find group identity and ready-made identities on the right or on the left, through worship of corporations or enmity to them. (But you know that already.)
What the corporations are doing is slightly more subtle than just offering an opportunity for conformism. Their reasoning even allows people who distrust corporations to believe that trusting corporations over consumers is the least bad option.
Almost everything is "slightly more sublte" than its outward manifestation. The political results (trusting the untrustworthy) occur on a more mundane level than what I intended to address. They are also effects. The fact that most people are broken and incomplete (conformity being one answer to this problem, or more accurately, a way to hide from it) and therefore derive important parts of their being from external things is the cause. It is, in fact, the cause of causes for every last one of these problems. Complete human beings with enlightenment and wisdom would never find the reasoning you mention to be convincing or tempting. Because they are complete, they would not be suckered into this type of false dichotomy. They would have none of the personal vulnerabilities on which the deception of false ideas is built.
I should explain that a bit more because unfortunately you will not find this in modern education. At one time, various clergy may have understood this (albeit within their terminology) but they have long since abandoned wisdom for the sake of piety and doctrine. That's why they resent, why they don't forgive, why they care about political power, why they don't love other people, why many of their congregation are divorced, etc. At any rate, like other constructs, deception must be built on a foundation. That foundation is made of weaknesses and personal shortcomings that people excuse and dismiss instead of recognizing and correctly addressing.
Most people are completely at the mercy of their thoughts and feelings and thus, their impulses. This means that they are reactive and undisciplined and will respond to various forms of pressure because they are externally motivated. Thus, if they were engines you would say that stress is their fuel. That makes them putty in the hands of masterful manipulators such as modern marketing and public relations practitioners.
The manipulators know how to control those who look to external things for their motivation because they know that this is an accurate definition of suggestibility. It's simple, really. They make a suggestion which creates a thought. The thought creates an emotion which in turn creates an impulse. The impulse leads to an action and that action was the desired outcome all along. The nature of the desired outcome determines the nature of the initial suggestion.
The initial suggestion might be sex, violence, humor, or any number of emotionally charged things commonly seen in advertising. It might be small children so that instinctive maternalistic/paternalistic thoughts and feelings can be exploited to make the associated impulse seem more natural. Nothing is sacred to these people -- hopefully you see how diabolical this really is. The audience believes that their thoughts and emotions were natural reactions to what was presented rather than carefully engineered responses. This denial allows them to believe that the action to which they were led was their own decision. To weak people who gauge the truth of a thing according to its palatability, belief in this mockery of free will is far less frightening than the realization that they are little more than slaves. Thus, the bars of this prison cell are made of fear.
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you're either studying or have studied in University psychology with a major in social studies. If you haven't, then you probably should :P
I'm not a doctor or a psychologist or any other sort of medical practitioner, so you may consider what follows to be my personal opinion.
Several years ago I would have agreed with you. However, I did not need to study psychology for very long to realize that it's incapable of providing the deep meaning and truly satisfying answers that I was after at the time. The medical model is it's most recognizable flaw, because under that model all conditions of mind are divided into the desirable and the undesirable. It naturally follows that the latter category is to be treated or medicated away rather than appreciated and thoroughly understood. If that medical model were the path to true health, then the number of people who take some kind of psychological medication would be decreasing. Instead, it is increasing and at a rate which should make it obvious that we are missing something fundamental. Rather than acknowledge this, the practitioners continue to treat and medicate what they really do not understand. If they did understand, they would know how to cure and prevent. If they had true enlightenment, they would give us a few childishly simple principles instead of many complex explanations.
Likewise while it is not a "hard" science, psychology is limited to those things to which the scientific method can be applied, meaning it necessarily comes from a materialistic bias. What comes with that materialism is scientific positivism, so the dominant mentality is "if we can't describe it with mathematics, it does not exist." Thus, psychology has no choice but to deny the nonphysical and spiritual nature of human beings. Effectively this means that only a small fraction of what a human being actually is could be addressed under its system.
Evidence of what I am saying can be found in the swiftness with which a materialist would dismiss this objection instead of addressing it, and in many cases, the anger or indignation with which they would do so. It's not unlike how the more narrow-minded and insecure religious people respond when you question their doctrine. Science is supposed to be different, except that materialism is one of its few assumptions; like all assumptions, it's a matter of faith. Once faith is invested in the system, only then can objective evidence be gathered under it and conclusions drawn from within it, in accordance with Aristotelian logic and other rules of the system. It's important then to recognize the limitations of that system. Only external physical things which can be subjected to experimentation and logic can be addressed by science. With human beings, that means behavior.
Due to this, psychology's only real use is in manipulating or engineering behavior and at providing elaborate yet superficial explanations for why its manipulations are effective. This is an inventory of knowledge and its pragmatic application, not true understanding. That is also why it leads to more complexity and not to simplicity. Psychologists know in terms of probability the behavioral tendencies of the average person. They have rigorous descriptions of disorders and dis-ease states. They know which effect a given adjustment or pharmaceutical can cause and from experience, they know how to apply them. They know that if you make this adjustment here or apply this pharmaceutical there, you can obtain something closer to the desired outcome. That is what I mean by an inventory of knowledge. Hopefully you can see how external and superficial this really is. It's a shame that the difference between cleverness and true wisdom is not more widely understood.
When psychologists with good intentions attempt to help others, what you end up with is the blind leading the blind. I like to say that if you want to throw someo
Actually, this mentality comes from disenchantment with the legal system that is carefully cultivated by businesses to give themselves a legal leg up on consumers. If you convince people that the legal system is unable to decide consumer complaints justly according to their merits, then logically, there are only two choices: trust the corporations' word on everything or allow them to be torn apart by jealous parasites.
So, if you make people cynical about lawsuits by individuals, people see every consumer complaint as a threat to the production of all the food, services, and cool stuff that we currently enjoy. That is, a threat to capitalism and all we know as good.
Companies are happy to rely the legal system to regulate relations among themselves when they can't get along, of course. Then they gang up on consumers to exclude them from the system because they don't have to rely on lawsuits to hold consumers to their word -- that's what credit reporting services are for.
Frankly, I'd love to see our ridiculous liability system restored to some kind of sanity and credibility. Then corporations will have to face more public responsibility. These days, when a company gets walloped in court for blatant fraud and dishonesty, people don't take it very seriously because business interests make sure there's a steady stream of ridiculous personal injury lawsuits in the news. I have to admit they have a point, but they don't invest billions in cultivating our cynicism just as a public service.
I believe you missed my point. Corporations have such powers as you describe because of this sort of conformity. Like most other potential adversaries, they have no power over you except for what you give to them. The demoralization you describe is part of that power. The mindlessness I described is why we, as a society, have given them so much power. They in turn use that power to exercise undue influence over the legal system and our politicians. If they first tried to do that without the allegiance of the useful idiots, then people would call it by its proper name, a power grab, and would refuse to go along with it.
Those useful idiots are conformists with no real selfhood, no real identity of their own. Their choice is to either embrace this falsehood wholeheartedly or to face the very painful truth of how empty their lives have become. The second choice is the beginning of wisdom but it is not for the faint of heart.
What I was getting at was a general process behind a common way that human beings become compromised. By "compromised" I refer to the fact that most human beings have ideas and beliefs, including strong ones, that are not the result of careful and deliberate evaluation which means that they can only be the result of indoctrination and undue influence. Thus, they are not themselves and they advocate, even passionately, ideas that are not their own because someone else put them there. While they do so, they actually believe that they have made a free choice. There is a saying, "no one is more hopelessly imprisoned than he who falsely believes that he is free."
Lawsuits and the legal system is just one domain to which it applies. What you describe is correct on its level. It's just a departure from how simple the underlying principles really are because you are focusing on effects and not ultimate causes.
I will add one more thing that you may be missing because I sense that you still look at this in terms of victor and victim. The people who run our society and its corporations, who appear to perpetrate this system on everyone else, are even more compromised than those they try to control. Many of them are what you may call "lost" or "too far gone". On some level they are aware of this system and realize that it offers only two choices: take advantage or be taken advantage of. Because they are not strong enough or virtuous enough to correctly deal with this, they decide that "take advantage" is the m
You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves.
that quote gives me a hard-on. nothing better could describe Apple and its defenders.
Or Microsoft and its defenders. Or government when people buy into the lie that safety is more important than freedom. It applies equally to any of these. These apologists become what Lenin referred to as "useful idiots." The fanboys who unconditionally defend the decisions of i.e. Microsoft do so because they like Microsoft and Microsoft made the decision, not because the decision was sound and well-founded. That's why they defend the good and the bad with no regard for whether it's actually defensible. That's also why it's a form of mindlessness.
It's almost a form of worship, though it's a pathological one. This false loyalty is actively encouraged in our society; not by advocacy (in fact it's rarely discussed) but by example. You see it with sports teams, celebrities, institutions, and religions. It's a shame because no one can participate in it without first learning how to lie to themselves. If you ever wonder why so many people are weak, timid, easily distracted, undisciplined, and easily deceived, this is where much of it begins.
It never seems to occur to them that a correct idea can stand on its own merits and does not need a choir to sing its virtues. What I just said there is the very antithesis of the concept of "marketing" and shows how easy it is to find the glaring flaw in it. It's just another form of mindlessness; like all forms of mindlessness, its purpose is to control or at least to influence on the basis of something other than self-evident truth.
An interesting effect is that the more people engage in this sort of maladaptive conformity, the harder it's going to hit them when they later realize that it was wrong. It's a form of inertia. Right or wrong, the more heavily invested you are in an idea the more you are going to resist changing it even when every objective viewpoint shows that you should. It reminds me of that saying, "no matter how far down the wrong path you have travelled, turn back."
You see the bit in the summary/article "Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation..."? This isn't about whining that it sucks. It is about them misleading you about how bad it sucks. By then, you are already nailed to a contract. If you think this is "ok", I have some free time and an ice pick handy...
Thanks for correcting how shortsighted the GP was (if you think that's unfair, feel free to tell me why). You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves. The really strange thing is that most of them have no financial ties or anything like that which would make it merely selfish. The real nature of this is a bit more mysterious.
Conformists are looking for security and they may be looking for identity. Of course, this is a position of extreme weakness because a complete person does not derive important things like security and identity from externals. Those things are found from within; the external type makes a mockery of the real article and it always has strings attached. No one offers what you should provide for yourself without also wanting to make you dependent on them. Governments and marketers understand this. So, what I think is going on is that most people are such conformists that they identify with whoever or whatever is prominent, or successful, or mainstream, or well-established, or powerful in the hopes that some of those traits will transfer to them.
The actual nature of the entity, be it a peer group or a company or a government, doesn't seem to matter. What does seem to matter is how large the entity is and how much of a public presence it has, how identifiable it is. This process of conformity is not a conscious choice, because if the person realized that there is a choice in the matter they would never go along with this process. It's more like their failure to find their own security and their own identity creates an inner vacuum that the external world rushes in to fill.
From their point of view, they find themselves expressing feelings that have no rational basis. They often get upset when you question them about it, which should be a dead giveaway that something's not right. It's a hard truth that most human beings operate under this system. No one who really believes in what they say has a reason to get upset when you question them, or disagree with them, or reject what they advocate. They may discuss their belief or they may debate you but there's nothing to get upset about.
To me, the real question is: do users have that expectation because it's reasonable and proper that this is the filesystem's job, or, did the failure of multiple application developers give those users a false impression of what is and is not the correct role of a filesystem? The answer to that question determines what action should be taken to remedy the problem. Reference to the agreed-upon specification is the most unbiased way to answer this question because you are dealing with two groups who know (or certainly should know!) that they need to adhere to it in order to avoid these problems.
It should be answered without looking for excuses or fabricating justifications, especially those based on nebulous and mutable things like "user expectations" (which themselves are often based on convenience, not sound system design). Instead, the most simple reasoning can answer that question. One group, the ext4 developers, did adhere to the standard. Another group, consisting of certain application developers, thought that some parts of it weren't important. It's quite clear that the application developers, despite their almost certainly good intentions, have given users a false impression of what is and is not the proper role of a filesystem.
A lot of people seem to want to avoid that conclusion because it doesn't have a "quick fix." That is, in terms of effort alone, it would be much easier to make one change to one filesystem than it would be to correct each application that violates the specification. That's not a good enough justification for rejecting the simple reasoning that quite clearly determines what should happen next. For matters like this that are within its scope, reason is a precious thing -- you should not throw it away so carelessly. If you are willing to abandon things like principles and reason because the conclusions to which they lead you are not the path of least resistance, then some of your most noble qualities are effectively for sale. That's not a solid foundation on which to build much of anything and operating system components (while a mundane example) are no exception.
You cannot live that way and be free of inner conflict, I guarantee it, because for most people there is always a part of you which knows that this is a mistake. That's what inner conflict is, by the way: it's when part of you is "for" something and another part of you is "against" that same thing. It's a terrible condition, widespread though it may be. You may or may not know yourself well enough to understand the causes of inner conflict, but what I said is true whether or not you can fully see the cause-and-effect.
I've already made other comments in this thread about what happens when people refuse to correct a mistake. It becomes entrenched and it sets an undesirable precedent, one which in this case suggests that such things as standards don't really matter. Let's not go down that path. We've seen entities like Microsoft use non-compliance as a weapon; we call it embrace-and-extend. It's an instrument of discord and they use it when discord and disharmony suits their purposes. Isn't Free Software supposed to be better than that? Isn't it supposed to be free of the profit-based control motives that manifest this behavior? Yes? Then why should we replace those profit-based control motives with can't-admit-being-wrong control motives and believe that this is any sort of improvement? If you agree that there is something wrong with that, and that it's no longer tempting when you call things what they are, then let's count this as a lesson learned, support the community's developers who fix their applications, endure a bit of inconvenience while this happens, and get this over with. The right way.
From the explanations I received and some reading I've done, I don't think the data is just getting "thrown away" so that isn't really a valid question. The issue seems to be that unless fsync is called, the changes requested by the application may happen in a sequence that is other than what the application programmer expected. The example I saw in this discussion involved first writing data to a file and then renaming it soon afterwards. If I understand this correctly, the application is assuming that the rename cannot possibly happen before the writing of the data is done even though the specification has no such requirement. If the application needs this to happen in the order in which it was requested, it needs to write the data, then call fsync, then rename the file. You could probably fill a library with what I don't know about low-level filesystem details, so please correct me if I have misunderstood this.
The example I found in the Wikipedia entry on ext4 was different. That one involved data loss because the application updates/overwrites an existing file and does not call fsync and then the system crashes. The Wiki article states that this leads to undefined behavior (which, afaik, is correct per the spec). The article also states that a typical result is that the file was set to zero-length in preparation for being overwritten but because of the crash, the new data was never written so it remains zero-length, causing the loss of the old version of the file. Under ext3 you would usually find either the old version of the file or the new version.
What I don't understand and hope that a more knowledgable person could explain is why this can't be done a slightly different way. This is where I can apply reason to come up with something that sounds preferable to me but I simply don't have the background knowledge of filesystems to understand the "why". If the overwrite of the file is delayed, why isn't the truncation of the file to zero-length also delayed? That is, instead of doing it this way:
Step 1: Truncate file length to zero in preparation of overwriting it.
Step 2: Delay the writing of the new data for performance reasons.
Step 3: After the delay has elapsed, actually write the data to the disk.
Why can't it be done this way instead?
Step 1: Delay the truncation of the file length to zero in preparation of overwriting it.
Step 2: Delay the writing of the new data.
Step 3: After the delay has elapsed, set the file length to zero and immediately write the new data, as a single operation if that is possible, or as one operation immediately followed by the other.
That way if there is a crash, you'd still get either the old version or the new one and not a zero-length file where data used to be. The only disadvantage I can see is that this might continue to enable developers to make assumptions that are not found in the standard because the buggy behavior ext4 is now exposing may continue to work. If there's no technical reason why it cannot be done that way, perhaps the bad precedent alone is a good reason to either not handle it this way or to change the spec.
The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?"
They don't. Applications just need to concern themselves with the details of of the APIs they use, and the guarantees those APIs do or don't provide.
The POSIX file APIs specify quite clearly that there is no guarantee that your data is on the disk until you call fsync(). The problem is with applications that assumed they could ignore what the specification said just because it always seemed to work okay on the file systems they tested with.
Thanks for explaining that. In that case, I salute Mr. Tso and others for telling the truth and not caving in to pressure when they are in fact correctly following the specification. Too often people who are correct don't have the fortitude to value that more than immediate convenience, so this is a refreshing thing to see. Perhaps this will become the sort of history with which developers are expected to be familiar.
I imagine it will take a lot of work but at least with Free Software this can be fixed. That's definitely what should happen, anyway. There are sometimes when things just go wrong no matter how correct your effort was; in those cases, it makes sense to just deal with the problem in the most hassle-free manner possible. This, however, is not one of those times. Thinking that you can selectively adhere to a standard and then claim that you are compliant with that standard is just the sort of thing that really should cause problems. Correcting the applications that made faulty assumptions is therefore the right way to deal with this, daunting and inconvenient though that may be.
Removing this delayed-allocation feature from ext4 or placing limits on it that are not required by the POSIX standard is definitely the wrong way to deal with this. To do so would surely invite more of the same. It would only encourage developers to believe that the standards aren't really important, that they'll just be "bailed out" if they fail to implement them. You don't need any sort of programming or system design expertise to understand that, just an understanding of how human beings operate and what they do with precedents that are set.
For those of us who are not so familiar with the data loss issues surrounding EXT4, can someone please explain this? The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?" I.e. if I ask OpenOffice to save a file, it should do that the exact same way whether I ask it to save that file to an ext2 partition, an ext3 partition, a reiserfs partition, etc. What would make ext4 an exception? Isn't abstraction of lower-level filesystem details a good thing?
Perhaps the USA and the UK aren't so different after all.
Well, it seems that our system has more checks and balances than the UK does. We have 50 individual sovereign states that are still willing to flip Washington off every now and then. We have the Supreme Court which has shot down or at least severely constrained many attempts by the Executive and Legislature to violate our founding documents. The Upper House of our Legislature isn't toothless and actually has the power to stop legislation. We also (yeah I couldn't resist) have guns ;)
I'm hard pressed to think of what checks and balances remain under the British system. The House of Lords was defanged a long time ago and if the Monarchy ever refused Royal Assent I'm sure that would be end of it as an institution. Hopefully our friends across the pond will wake up before it's too late.....
Those checks and balances are largely useless if most of the population honestly believes in the "safety is more important than freedom" type of fear-mongering. Pragmatically, this means only that those who would like to transform the USA into a totalitarian state just need to be more patient. Or they just need to remain underground.
What do I mean by underground? Look at how long the warrantless-wiretapping was going on, illegally, before it was exposed. Then look at how the Bush administration retroactively granted the telcos immunity from prosecution for assisting this illegal program (if that isn't a violation of "no ex post facto" then it should be). So, how many such illegal activities are happening right now that we don't know about?
It might be tempting to look at the UK and think we're so much better off. That's your ego talking because it wants to feel like a part of something greater than itself, namely, the national ego. But let's say that you are correct, that the USA really is better off than the UK. We're certainly walking down the same path. So, perhaps the UK is a little ahead of us and has already travelled farther down that path. That means that If we don't change soon, the UK is merely providing a vision of our immediate future. How about if we travel a completely different path that doesn't lead to the same destination before we make comparisons? I prefer not to be on a sinking ship at all. I like that much better than wondering whether the ship I'm on is sinking more slowly than the adjacent ships.
You laugh, but this same point was made in the excellent book, The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. In the first chapter, The Power of Incentives: How Seat Belts Kill, he questions whether the additional safety equipment really translates into an overall improvement in safety and demonstrates part of his argument by having us imagine driving a car w/o seat belts and with a sharp metal spike protruding from the steering wheel aimed at your chest. It's hard to deny you would drive very, very carefully in that situation. Safety equipment gives the driver increased confidence to take higher risks. I have a friend who says he considers seatbelts a performance option. I suspect a lot of drivers think the same (subconsciously).
Seatbelts in and of themselves are a good thing. I've personally walked away from accidents with just a bruise on my shoulder from the seatbelt that surely would have killed or seriously injured me if I were not wearing a seatbelt.
... You can realize that there is one single root problem and everything you mentioned or could have mentioned arises from it. We do have this very bad cultural habit of looking at effects and symptoms instead of ultimate causes. One ultimate cause can have thousands of secondary and tertiary effects. Deal with that single ultimate cause and the effects quite naturally take care of themselves. That's the power of this type of awareness.
What you describe can be handled in two ways. You can worry about every little incentive and piece of minutia and how they influence the easily influenced. Or
The ultimate cause for what you describe is really quite simple. These people are externally motivated; thus, they respond to pressure and to outside influences. The problem with that is that the pressure to which they respond is the one which "speaks" to them the loudest or gets their attention most effectively. Most of the time, that's also one of the worst. That is why they are worried about their level of confidence to take risks and it's why the presence of a safety device (an external influence) would change the way that they drive. This is a very easy thing to understand but a challenge to explain, so I'll re-iterate: their ideas of how one should drive come from the sum total of a large number of outside influences and not from their own understanding and experience and honest reasoning, which leaves them weak and vulnerable to this type of aberration.
The antidote to this superficial, outwardly-determined mentality is a firm grasp of right and wrong and a strong desire to enjoy doing what is right. There's a lot of confusion about this, but the fact is that deep down people know very well what is right and wrong. Finding that and working from that inner understanding is real strength, and it's also real protection from many nasty "surprises" that aren't really so unpredictable. Someone who understands this will not tailgate other drivers because bullying other people in order to pressure them into driving the way you want them to drive is selfish and wrong. It's wrong whether or not you fear getting injured in any accident that would result. Cutting people off, weaving in and out of lanes, and otherwise disregarding the other drivers is also wrong, whether you have the world's most perfectly safe vehicle or not. Therefore, to such a person, the idea that the presence of a safety device should alter the way they drive is laughable. It's simple and beautiful and should be self-evident.
Most people feel like victims when they cry "foul" because something went wrong and they fail to see that they have set the stage for most of the things that go wrong in their lives. That again is because they are responding to the millions of outside influences instead of developing and refining and perfecting their own idea of how things should be. A truly random, truly unpredictable disaster that did not require the participation of its "victim" is an incredibly rare thing. It's just that most people live their lives in a haphazard, undisciplined way that prevents them from seeing how simple all of this really is.
The U.K. snooping is probably going to be done with Facebook's support, knowledge, and help...
Possibly. If not, it probably won't take much pressure to make them cave in. They'll be shamed into doing it by a claim that doing otherwise would be unpatriotic or would support the evil terrorists. Or they'll be threatened into doing it by a law that requires it, and won't have the courage to respond to that by refusing to service users in the UK. Some form of manipulative pressure will be used. Most people respond to pressure this way because it appears to relieve the pressure. What they don't know is that anytime you cave in to pressure, the relief is quite temporary -- by doing so, you teach others that this is the way to "reach" you and you invite more of the same. Bullies are cowards but they won't appear that way if you are even more cowardly than they are and are unwilling to take a risk to stand up to them.
Incidentally, I salute the accuracy of the summary:
If that doesn't describe the freedom-destroying mentality, few things can. It never seems to occur to that mentality that the loss of freedom and privacy might be just the sort of destruction that our enemies wish to visit upon us. It makes sense, since they know they stand no real chance of winning a conventional military battle against the very-well-armed Western nations. If they're "street-wise" at all, and to avoid hubris you should always assume that your enemy is, then they have probably realized that they only need to attack us a few times and we will do all of the rest of the work of destroying what is good about our civilization on our own. It will, of course, be in the name of safety and security. When all of this started, I bet the terrorists never imagined it would be so easy -- just scare us a bit and we'll give up all of the things that we used to fight for. This, by the way, is why physical armaments cannot be your only source of strength. If they are, your enemy will merely attack you on a different front. All of this is quite predictable and easy to understand.
Perhaps the USA and the UK aren't so different after all.
There is no such thing as the BLIND SPOT!!!!!!!
adjust your mirrors PROPERLY!
Oh? So you are effectively claiming that every vehicle on the road (cars, trucks, etc) in every country has perfectly functioning mirrors with no possibility of honest blind spots? That's quite a claim, I'd like to see the evidence for it.
...
Meanwhile, I'll continue to do what I do now. I consider the side-view mirrors to be supplements to a proper shoulder check, not substitutes for it. It's convenient to have them there, but you could smash both of my side-view mirrors and it would have no effect on the way I perform a lane change. Though I hope you don't do that, because then my vehicle would look worse and might not pass inspection
Seriously though, I think you missed my point. Lots of people (I call them "pacers") will make an effort to stay right beside you, sometimes for miles and miles and there's just no reason for it. Even if there were always perfect visibility and even if there were no such things as blind spots, I still consider it an unnecessary hazard to allow these pacers to remain right beside me. If nothing else they are limiting my maneuverability (and their own) and they are doing it for nothing. No one gains anything from it, so they are not even being selfish; they're just being stupid. At all times I like to know my surroundings, especially the vehicles and obstacles that are around me, that way if I need to suddenly make an emergency maneuver I won't hesitate because of such concerns. That's such a basic thing that I am amazed we allow so many people who don't understand this concept to have driver's licenses.
Occasionally things go wrong and there's just nothing you can do. However, most surprises are not really surprises unless you are open to being surprised by them. What I don't appreciate are stupid and unnecessary behaviors by other drivers that seem designed to convert inconveniences into serious threats.
Move it to the rear bumbler and you've got yourself a deal.
I've never, ever understood why some morons insist on driving half a meter behind me, even on otherwise empty roads. The so-called "professional drivers" are the worst of this lot, especially if they're driving a truck or a bus that's guaranteed to not stop as fast as me. Are they simply bloodthirsty, or is there some kind of rational reason for it?
There's a device in these vehicles that keeps records of the speed they've been going. We need to add a radar which keeps track of the distance between a truck and the car on front; if the distance is consistently less than 20 meters - which is far too close in almost any situation, BTW - it should be grounds for compulsory and permanent loss of driving license.
Cue a hundred butthurt truck drivers posting that they are professionals and know what they're doing. And of course they do: they're deliberately and in cold blood endangering my life to shave a half a second off of a few hours journey, since that makes them half a penny more.
That's one thing that seems to never get emphasized. I've been told that I am overreactive because I do not allow people to tailgate me. I will gently tap my brake lights a couple of times to ask them to back off. Then I'll give them a moment to see what they do. If they don't take the hint, I start slowing down until one of two things happens: they realize I'm not going to be a pushover and they back off, or, I match the speed to their following distance since they refuse to match their following distance to the speed. I'm not trying to replace one tyrant with another, so if they get the message and stop tailgating me I will speed up again.
The situation is just as you describe. They are willing to endanger your life because they wish to intimidate you into submitting to them and giving them what they want. That I've been called overreactive for my refusal to accept this amuses me. Considering that they are needlessly endangering me, I think my reaction is quite mild. I respond to them the way that I do because I used to get quite upset about it and have since then decided that there is a better way. Having said that, I really believe that anyone who does things like willfully and needlessly endangering others should be considered "fair game" and has no right to complain about anything that happens to them as a result.
Like most other aberrations, there's a million excuses for this, too. The bottom line is quite simple. Tailgaters are bullies and a wise person does not reward a bully by giving them what they want. Every time you cave in and appease a bully, you are sending the message that their behavior is acceptable and will be rewarded with the result they desire. I think this shit is so widespread because people have largely forgotten these basic things.
We have lots of excuses and that's the whole problem.
That's the mistake we keep making. It is perhaps the mistake of mistakes. When people can't (or won't) handle something correctly, we always want to make the task easier for them and we practically never want to increase their skill levels. The result is that weaknesses are coddled and protected instead of exposed and eliminated, with the only limit to this process being the capability of our technology.
There are times when this may be an acceptable trade-off. I don't really think so but I consider it debatable as long as intellectually dishonest practices are absent, such as making up the most absurdly extreme example imaginable and pretendling like that nullifies the generally applicable point. However, I absolutely do not consider this an acceptable trade-off when it comes to driving. Driving is one of the only things you do on a daily basis where your mistake could get someone else killed. If your mistake could only ever harm yourself, I'd say you have the moral right to be as negligent as you please though I would hope that you wouldn't. But because someone else can be harmed by no fault of their own, I submit that the last thing we need to do is make up for a lack of skill with technology when we could instead put those resources towards training programs and other measures that directly remedy the lack of skill.
In my way of looking at things, we need one of two things: drivers who are as skilled as is reasonably possible, or, completely computerized/automated cars that are capable of driving themselves with no human intervention. I'd be satisfied with either one; it's the flawed compromises that I don't like.
There's no reason autopilot wouldn't work for a glider either. Even with the engine out the plane is still generally operable -- without power sufficient to run the autopilot you wouldn't have hydraulics, and it would be a 150 rock, not a 150 ton glider, no matter who was steering the thing. Now selecting a non-airport landing site, or landing someplace without well-defined runways or approaches is another problem altogether. But I don't see why we couldn't just have one or two ground-based remote pilots available for emergencies. In the case of a serious failure a senior non-pilot crew member could push a button to enable remote control (hence negating the possibility of a remote attack on the control systems), and someone sitting in a simulator in St. Louis could try to land the plane for them. It's not quite the same has having a pilot actually in the plane, but it's a lot cheaper, and you could have just a handful of very good pilots that actually spend a lot of time doing emergency landings and related training, rather than a bunch of mediocre (and I mean that in a statistical sense, not as a slight to pilots; most people are average) pilots who rarely perform emergency landings.
Speaking of airplanes and emergency situations, there is one thing I never understood about commercial airlines. Why do they not have parachutes aboard for the crew and for each passenger? I realize that a parachute is far from idiot-proof and may take some training to use correctly. But if I am on an airplane and beyond all doubt that plane is going down, I'll take my chances with the parachute whether I've ever used one before or not.
I'm rather ignorant about aviation so maybe that's a dumb question and I don't realize it. I just can't think of a reason why it's not at least an option, though.
A modern airliner is actually safer than the usual small plane (Cessna etc). Things would be safer if they required all drivers to be as skilled, trained, responsible as a typical airliner pilot. But then most drivers would fail, and they would have transport problems. Politicians would lose lots of votes.
The point you raise about safety brought something else to mind. The emphasis the summary placed on speeding really did not sit well with me. Generally speaking, it works this way:
Speeding == a way to generate revenue for the state while talking a good game about safety. Failure to yield, following too closely == two things that receive very little emphasis which cause a hell of a lot more preventable accidents that speeding could ever cause.
A close third would be those people who don't seem to understand the purpose of the passing lane and why they create a hazard for everyone else when they try to monopolize it. Ideally, drivers should have patience for this and value safety above immediate gratification. However, the reality is that if you make it that tempting for people to weave in and out of lanes or to cut right in front of you because there's no other way to get by you, they will do it, count on it. The people who do this should know what situation they are setting up.
Like the summary, I am of course speaking of highways. I think speeding can be an important issue when you're talking about a residental area where there might be pedestrians walking or children playing. The mistake is to think that this must be some sort of universal truth because of such a special case. When you cover a few basics like discouraging tailgaters and not allowing the pacers to hang out in your blind spot, speeding in and of itself is hardly a threat on an open highway. If you don't cover those basics, strictly obeying the speed limit isn't going to do very much for you if something unexpected happens.
True, but that's not the same thing because your example of the meanings of "straight" did not originate with a typo or a failure of basic spelling and grammar. Your example is of a valid transformation of meaning. With "lose" and "loose" there is no transformation of meaning, only the same two original meanings and the use of an incorrect word to express the intended one. For that reason I consider the legitimate-sounding "languages change over time" to be an excuse for laziness in this case. It's generally true that whenever you want to excuse something, you will probably be able to come up with a reason to do so that sounds perfectly valid; that still doesn't make it anything other than an excuse. That's why the sequence of events or how the situation arose in the first place is always an important thing to consider.
Do I think it's a big deal that an extra vowel appears in a word that should not be there, or that a word is missing a second vowel that should be present? No -- that in itself is not harmful. Do I think it's a bad idea to practice the "skill" of making a trivial mistake and covering it up with an excuse? Yes, making a habit of that can be quite harmful and it's just the sort of habit that starts with the small and trivial and then expands. The only reason for doing it is that most people would rather lie to themselves with a rationalization than admit that they made an easy mistake. That's the tyranny of ego. It's not the sort of thing that leads someone to become strong and honest and joyous, so yes, there is something wrong with it. That's why it isn't just a matter of opinion or taste as many would have you believe.
This being the real heart of the matter, that's also why cries of "grammar nazi" are often just cop-outs designed to ridicule or intimidate you into shutting up. Of course that's not always the case. Sometimes people do use grammatical mistakes as a reason to nit-pick, though I think that retaliating with an epithet is one of the least constructive ways to handle that.
I'm not a lawyer so this is just my uninformed opinion. I believe that a trademark only applies for that particular industry. Therefore, it wouldn't be a violation of Miller's trademark to use the word "lite" for a stove, but it would be a violation of trademark to make an alcoholic beverage that used the word.
Because as time passes the general standards for attention to detail and a sense of caring about what you do -- enough to try to do it well -- have eroded. For the example you gave, anytime it comes up I observe that people will call you "grammar nazi" for wanting to do it correctly or they'll produce all kinds of rationalizations. Some of the more sophisticated rationalizations say things like "languages change over time and common usage is one agent of change".
The only part of it that doesn't work is the fact that just realizing that "lose" and "loose" are two different words is actually easier and more intuitive than what they're doing. It's also neater and less ambiguous. Thus, if this is a change of the language and not a mere failure to use it correctly, then this change is heading in the wrong direction. That means that either way, it fails. Seeing that is one of the most simple and effective uses of reason. When it's a pattern of behavior, then tiny insignificant issues like basic grammar can condition you to accept needless failure in more important matters.
That's more or less the nature of lowering standards. The more you do it, the more it demands increasingly involved "explanations" of why it's okay. After a while the explanations can sound convincing, as people don't like the alternative of being told that they failed at something, however minor, and that the failure was a sign of a lack of discipline or a lack of appreciation, however true. In a roundabout way, I also just gave a definition of the ego.
From TFA
"Its speed is best over thye hundreds of metres," he said. "But beyond 1km you will find that ADSL2+ is actually faster."
Which means that it will do nothing for the people who complain about speed now, either being unable to get broadband or only get a slow link. Actually it will probably make things worse for them as the web designers in "connected" cities decide that they can have high-definition video on their web-site front pages. Many people have to wait five minutes to see the existing flash pages.
If the problem there is infrastructure, it makes me wonder whatever happened to WiMax? Isn't that supposed to address exactly the situation you describe?
One would almost get the impression that we dislike broadband which does not come from a government-regulated monopoly.
What is the role DLS today in the broadband world? Is it merely a bandaid for places with no other options, or something more that I am missing?
Around here, cable internet is absolute crap due to all the students sucking the bandwidth dry. I don't care what they claim to provide speed wise, it was always slow. The connection would also just disappear for over an hour at a time most nights around 10PM. DSL doesn't provide the theoretical rates of cable, but what it does provide is a fixed rate and the phone company, as much as they suck, sucks a lot less than the cable company when it comes to reliability.
You make a good point. I use DSL as well and I generally don't have the problems with unpredictable slowdowns or outright downtime that most of my friends with cable Internet are experiencing. True, they do have higher maximum throughput but I'm satisfied with the speeds I experience and especially with the consistency. Additionally my ISP does not block any ports and does not cap or throttle my connection, which is also nice. I know people often dislike DSL but really, the benefits of a dedicated connection over a shared connection are not to be underestimated.
The few times I had to call technical support really weren't that bad either, especially not for a major telco. The folks I talked to still had the annoying habit of following their "script" too closely and disregarding the fact that I already tried basic obvious things (such as power-cycling the modem/router) before I asked for help. I realize their position and that they feel a need to do that because of the tremendous number of frankly incompetent/ignorant users who will incorrectly perform those basic tasks. However, when it's apparent that I'm at least as knowledgable as the front-line tech support person (whom I generally only call when the issue is on their end and so I cannot solve it myself), I don't consider it unreasonable to expect them to stop making such assumptions. Anyway, I just described front-line tech support in general and did not mean to give the impression that this is unique to my telco.
There's a difference between failing to understand an idea, and rejecting an idea. I'm not suggesting that this describes you, but it's rather arrogant to assume that the only reason why anyone would ever disagree with you is because they don't have as much understanding as you do. Maybe that really is the case but it should be an observation and not an assumption. Certainly in the example you gave, it does sound like the geek you described was simply ignorant and that you have correctly assessed the situation. What I am trying to do here is to show that there are other, potentially more valid reasons for the tendency of geeks to focus on the technology.
I know it's a business reality and I know that for better or worse, it's an important aspect of our culture. Having said that, there ARE people who reject the notion that concerns about money should always have top priority in all cases. Certainly there are times when it must be a primary concern -- if you lack the resources (financial or otherwise), your idea won't get off the ground no matter how good it otherwise is. Many geeks feel this way, though I admit it's more appropriate outside of the realm of business decisions. They focus on the technology because they find an elegance in it that is missing from the day-to-day struggles to make money. There is, of course, a time and a place for that. Possibly the geek you describe simply didn't know how to handle both "spheres".
None of it will be intelligent life, but I suppose if you look hard enough you might find something. You'll have to ignore many automatons before you have any chance at a search for anything truly living, however.
Thank you for bringing this up. There is another aspect of that which is also part of the user behavior that we see. You could call it a desire for instant gratification.
On Unix-like operating systems, it is much harder for a user to get by and be productive without knowing at least the basics of how the system works. This is quite a blessing and neatly addresses the sort of ignorance that you describe, but it is seldom appreciated. Lazy people can get quite upset when they finally encounter something for which there are no shortcuts. They are often used to finding some "clever" way to circumvent the need to learn something new (and never think about whether just learning the thing would be easier and more straightforward). In Windows we sometimes derisively refer to this as "point-and-drool".
Some people actually seem to derive their sense of self-worth from this incorrect use of cleverness and so they get quite defensive and frothing-at-the-mouth when you suggest that there is something wrong with it. They'll produce all manner of excuses and insults, or they'll use a different tactic and say things like "but everyone can't learn how to be a computer expert!" as though that's what you were asking them to do. Experts do indeed know the basics, but asking someone to learn a few basic things is not nearly the same as asking them to become an expert -- there is no honest reason why they would pretend that this is the case.
To me this all boils down to one idea: how can you reasonably expect to always obtain a good result when you use what you do not remotely understand? I know of no aspect of OS design or "easy-to-use" marketing that changes the nature of this question. Many people pretend otherwise, but only because they know it's what lazy people want to hear and thus, they will be rewarded for saying it -- either with increased software sales or with the approval of strangers. This is known as catering to your weakness and it can only make you weaker still. The entire Microsoft "empire" seems built on this premise and I believe that is why it will always have security problems. Security is one of the ultimate tests and will quickly determine whether you are found wanting.
Admitting that you are lazy and that this has led you to make unreasonable demands, such as using what you don't understand and expecting that nothing will go wrong, is difficult. There's the difficulty of admitting that you were wrong, which implies admitting that you are not the victim that you imagined yourself to be when you thought that a lack of training or those "evil hackers" were the source of your problems. Then there's the fact that you cannot see your own laziness without also desiring to change it, which is an issue because if you were inclined to discover and address your own shortcomings instead of waiting for a failure to point them out, you would not have been lazy in the first place. You would have done whatever you had to do (within reason, of course) to obtain whatever understanding you needed. This kind of self-evaluation is rare because it is not for the faint of heart.